So to make the a long story short, tapes are great, if you still have a working reader for it 30 years down the road:)
I didn't say it was completely foolproof;)
Besides, how many 30 year old hard disks can you still plug in and access directly today? (I say that, SCSI has been around for nearly 20 years now...)
No. If you really want security, you 3-way mirror it across three separate bays with separate power supplies, preferably supplied by separate PDUs which are in turn on separate phases/UPSen. Preferably using some sort of disk technology which allows multiple paths to the disk - be it fibre channel, SSA or whatever.
Backup is offsite - either by a bunch of tapes or by replicating live. If you go the live replication route, you still want some sort of offline storage in case of data loss caused by human error or software bug (in which case the data loss would be immediately replicated to your backup site - hence the offline storage).
Before you berate me with "Nah, tape is crap" - it is if you use DAT. But I'm talking about LTO3 or even the recently-ratified LTO4, which is fast and designed to last 20-30 years, and keeping them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.
That's beginning to sound like a reasonably secure system. Of course, it's also beginning to sound like a reasonably expensive system.
The best is something like what Xiotech implements, we do virtual RAID10 across all our spindles and it makes sure that no data and redundancy block are in the same drive bay
IBM have been able to do something similar with SSA (no, I don't mean SAS or SATA - it's a proprietary IBM technology) for some years now with AIX - at least as far back as AIX 4.
DirectX isn't just graphics. It's sound, network play and a whole bunch of other stuff besides. OpenGL, OTOH, is just graphics.
I suspect there may also be some free lunches flying about in the background. A game which is heavily dependent on DirectX is likely to be "exclusive to PC and XBox!!11oneone" - great for marketing the XBox.
RAID 1+0 is the way to go for redundancy. Unless you're unlucky enough to lose both drives in one of the pairs making up the array, you can survive more than one drive failing.
It's also the way to go for speed - your controller doesn't have to calculate the parity bits for every write operation (yes I know the parity sum is simple - that doesn't stop it from adding a bottleneck).
RAID5 is most useful where:
1. You desperately need the space. AND 2. You can't afford the drives (or, for that matter, power/larger RAID controller) required to acheive the same space in RAID 1+0.
Wouldn't do much good in this case unless the data is downloaded using something like BitTorrent - because you still know who's providing the data (the BBC), who's downloading it (customer A, B and C) and that there is a lot of data.
You seem to be confused. Microsoft don't sell laptops. Your complaint is with the PC hardware vendors that won't sell you a laptop without Windows.
Are those the same PC hardware vendors which Microsoft has systematically browbeaten into offering Windows? The ones which (at least until recently) were almost to a man terrified of offering you something with any OS other than Windows lest some Terrible Beat of Redmond descent upon them?
Things are changing - Dell's recent foray into Linux systems demonstrates that - but to imagine that the Windows monopoly is entirely down to PC hardware vendors simultaneously, independently deciding to ship Windows and nothing else is pure folly.
This is just it. I find it fantastically funny that their bankrolling SCO may come around and bite them on the bum, and they've hardly been a friend to Linux, but overall it would be a shame for that to happen when they've given a fair bit up as open source.
Saying all Microsoft has ever done well is marketing and fending off competition is setting an example for not ridiculing them? I believe he's just being sarcastic.
Certainly in terms of "stuff which they invented", he's on the nail. While they're good at taking existing products and running with them, real innovation is relatively unusual out of Redmond.
However, Microsoft's success I think demonstrates rather nicely that marketing and fending off competition are perhaps more important than great software engineering.
Have you ever used XP or 2000? It's not "shitty". It's certainly not the best thing ever, but it sure as fuck beats using Linux for a desktop machine. Please note that I ran Linux as my only OS from 1997 through 2002 and then went back and haven't returned.
Yes. In fact, I'm responsible for system management for a number of them.
I'll happily accept that XP and 2000 are miles ahead of '9x.
The main problems I have are:
1. Their lack of respect for established, published standards. Linux and Mac OS X can both be fairly easily configured to authenticate against LDAP out of the box - Windows requires that you use a Windows domain (either NT4-style or AD). (Yes, I know AD is in essence LDAP+Kerberos+proprietary addons. Please point me at a third-party functioning implementation if it's so standard. Shouldn't be that hard - it's only existed since Windows 2000).
2. Their cavalier attitude to logging issues. Practically every Unix system I've ever seen could log almost everything that happens on the system in an absurd level of detail. Windows, on the other hand, has the Event Log which isn't even very widely used by Microsoft software, let alone third-party apps. Have you any idea how much easier it is to troubleshoot a system when there are logs available?
Doubtless I could think of a few more, but those are the most obvious that spring to mind.
Sorry, but that's beautiful poetic justice. While Sun have some nice technology, they've never really been too keen on Linux eating into their Unix marketshare.
The only problem is that if Sun did not exist, I think the open source community would be compelled to invent Sun.
For years, us geeks on/. have been very wary of DRM. Mainly because many implementations depend on being able to regularly phone home - and if "home" ceases to exist (or, for that matter, continues to exist but decides it's not taking any more calls, as in this case), all the media you've paid good money for essentially evaporates.
But as long as that's a theoretical problem, one that's never been known to happen - it's one which won't get taken seriously by the masses who actually buy this stuff. Now, however, there's a concrete example. "Do not buy this, all your music and video can suddenly stop working for no immediately apparent reason and you won't have any comeback whatsoever".
On a side note, I wonder how long I'd last in the real world if I sold physical products which could, if I so desired, evaporate overnight with no prior warning and the purchaser having done nothing wrong? And then I started making them evaporate?
By saying "all you're doing is moving the crime around", I don't see any real difference between saying that and saying "We either shouldn't bother with police or we need them to be so pervasive that there are at least 2 on every street corner".
Some of the crime will move. Some of it won't happen at all - and it's that bit that the police are interested in.
In the UK, things are a little different. We already know that a handheld breathalyser isn't foolproof - what it provides is enough evidence to arrest someone and take them down to the police station.
Once there, a number of other, more accurate testing systems are available - be it urine, blood or a more sophisticated breath test. It's the evidence taken at the police station which gets you convicted - and to ensure that you can't get clever with "I refuse to let you take a urine sample", we've made it illegal to refuse, with penalties identical to if you had given a sample and it showed you to be over the limit. I don't know if anyone's ever demanded the source code, but even if they did get it they'd then have to prove that there was a problem with both the breathalyser and the more sophisticated test at the police station.
I'm surprised that the US - the "land of the free" - will take someone to court over a simple handheld breathalyser.
Bear in mind that I'm in the UK. I don't know how similar US laws are.
That's what laws such as "driving without due care and attention", "reckless driving", "dangerous driving" and "causing death by dangerous driving" exist for.
But we still have offences such as "drink driving" and "driving using a handheld mobile phone". The reason is that it is generally agreed that driving while drunk or using a mobile phone is a bad idea, and these laws allow two things:
1. Get the person off the road as soon as their driving becomes mildly concerning, rather than waiting until they do something really stupid. 2. Make the court case a lot easier. It's a lot easier to prove "Person had a blood alcohol level of X, which exceeds the legal limit of Y" than it is to prove "Person was driving erratically (but we have no evidence to prove this either way)", and is likely to result in a stronger sentence.
Even with a Unix-based OS, there's something to be said for separating processes between virtual systems.
It improves security - an exploit leaves one virtual server (and hence one service) vulnerable, not everything.
It improves reliability - a service which is known to have knock-on effects if it screws up can have those knock-on effects limited to just one virtual server.
It also makes scaling individual services and migrating between hardware far easier - if you haven't yet had to go down the SAN route, upgrading a file server is as simple as adding extra disk to the virtual machine, and if the physical host it's on doesn't have the space, migrating the VM first without impacting other services.
The biggest drawback is that you then have to administer a number of virtual hosts rather than just one or two physical ones. But that's what God invented cfengine for.
I consider it to be absurd because I expect a high level of support every time I call - I don't like calling a company over and over until I get the answer I want.
I'd like that as well. But I live in the real world - you can't realistically expect them to dedicate the same level of care to a PC which they sold for £250, netting a total profit of £25, as a server which they sold for £2500 with a profit margin of £1000. They've got to pay these people somehow.
Certainly true with desktop support from practically any tier 1 OEM.
However, Dell's server support is a different kettle of fish entirely. Certainly in the UK, as soon as they know you're calling about a server with a support contract they connect you straight to a call centre in Ireland which is staffed by people with at least a modicum of intelligence and the ability to speak English clearly. Probably because there's more money in servers, and more to be lost by pissing off the bloke who's almost certainly spent the last 2 hours diagnosing the fault and knows full well it's hardware, thank you very much.
Once someone has the power to execute arbitary code on your system, then it is arguably only a matter of time before they can do what they please on it. Which is precisely why you don't use the same OpenBSD box for your firewall as you do for giving users a shell account on a Unix box.
Noah did not really have two of every species on the ark (I guess somebody calculated that the ark would not have been able to hold all of them), rather he had two of each "type". For example a pair of wolves would stand in for their species as well as dogs, dingos and coyotes, etc.
Do they explain how you get from wolf to chihuahua without some sort of evolution, either directed (as in selective breeding) or natural?
News to me. In the recent past, I've used CentOS, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo and every one of them has suggested separate partitions. Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu make this particularly easy by using LVM, Debian offers LVM as an option and Gentoo... well, Gentoo is just Gentoo.
Ah, right. I suppose good stud dogs can be quite valuable and being able to get puppies that they've biologically fathered long after they're past it could be pretty valuable.
On a side note, do you know if anyone's ever tried to cross a papillon with a great dane?
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So to make the a long story short, tapes are great, if you still have a working reader for it 30 years down the road :)
;)
I didn't say it was completely foolproof
Besides, how many 30 year old hard disks can you still plug in and access directly today? (I say that, SCSI has been around for nearly 20 years now...)
No. If you really want security, you 3-way mirror it across three separate bays with separate power supplies, preferably supplied by separate PDUs which are in turn on separate phases/UPSen. Preferably using some sort of disk technology which allows multiple paths to the disk - be it fibre channel, SSA or whatever.
Backup is offsite - either by a bunch of tapes or by replicating live. If you go the live replication route, you still want some sort of offline storage in case of data loss caused by human error or software bug (in which case the data loss would be immediately replicated to your backup site - hence the offline storage).
Before you berate me with "Nah, tape is crap" - it is if you use DAT. But I'm talking about LTO3 or even the recently-ratified LTO4, which is fast and designed to last 20-30 years, and keeping them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.
That's beginning to sound like a reasonably secure system. Of course, it's also beginning to sound like a reasonably expensive system.
The best is something like what Xiotech implements, we do virtual RAID10 across all our spindles and it makes sure that no data and redundancy block are in the same drive bay
IBM have been able to do something similar with SSA (no, I don't mean SAS or SATA - it's a proprietary IBM technology) for some years now with AIX - at least as far back as AIX 4.
DirectX isn't just graphics. It's sound, network play and a whole bunch of other stuff besides. OpenGL, OTOH, is just graphics.
I suspect there may also be some free lunches flying about in the background. A game which is heavily dependent on DirectX is likely to be "exclusive to PC and XBox!!11oneone" - great for marketing the XBox.
RAID 1+0 is the way to go for redundancy. Unless you're unlucky enough to lose both drives in one of the pairs making up the array, you can survive more than one drive failing.
It's also the way to go for speed - your controller doesn't have to calculate the parity bits for every write operation (yes I know the parity sum is simple - that doesn't stop it from adding a bottleneck).
RAID5 is most useful where:
1. You desperately need the space.
AND
2. You can't afford the drives (or, for that matter, power/larger RAID controller) required to acheive the same space in RAID 1+0.
Wouldn't do much good in this case unless the data is downloaded using something like BitTorrent - because you still know who's providing the data (the BBC), who's downloading it (customer A, B and C) and that there is a lot of data.
The content really isn't important.
You seem to be confused. Microsoft don't sell laptops. Your complaint is with the PC hardware vendors that won't sell you a laptop without Windows.
Are those the same PC hardware vendors which Microsoft has systematically browbeaten into offering Windows? The ones which (at least until recently) were almost to a man terrified of offering you something with any OS other than Windows lest some Terrible Beat of Redmond descent upon them?
Things are changing - Dell's recent foray into Linux systems demonstrates that - but to imagine that the Windows monopoly is entirely down to PC hardware vendors simultaneously, independently deciding to ship Windows and nothing else is pure folly.
This is just it. I find it fantastically funny that their bankrolling SCO may come around and bite them on the bum, and they've hardly been a friend to Linux, but overall it would be a shame for that to happen when they've given a fair bit up as open source.
Saying all Microsoft has ever done well is marketing and fending off competition is setting an example for not ridiculing them? I believe he's just being sarcastic.
Certainly in terms of "stuff which they invented", he's on the nail. While they're good at taking existing products and running with them, real innovation is relatively unusual out of Redmond.
However, Microsoft's success I think demonstrates rather nicely that marketing and fending off competition are perhaps more important than great software engineering.
Have you ever used XP or 2000? It's not "shitty". It's certainly not the best thing ever, but it sure as fuck beats using Linux for a desktop machine. Please note that I ran Linux as my only OS from 1997 through 2002 and then went back and haven't returned.
Yes. In fact, I'm responsible for system management for a number of them.
I'll happily accept that XP and 2000 are miles ahead of '9x.
The main problems I have are:
1. Their lack of respect for established, published standards. Linux and Mac OS X can both be fairly easily configured to authenticate against LDAP out of the box - Windows requires that you use a Windows domain (either NT4-style or AD). (Yes, I know AD is in essence LDAP+Kerberos+proprietary addons. Please point me at a third-party functioning implementation if it's so standard. Shouldn't be that hard - it's only existed since Windows 2000).
2. Their cavalier attitude to logging issues. Practically every Unix system I've ever seen could log almost everything that happens on the system in an absurd level of detail. Windows, on the other hand, has the Event Log which isn't even very widely used by Microsoft software, let alone third-party apps. Have you any idea how much easier it is to troubleshoot a system when there are logs available?
Doubtless I could think of a few more, but those are the most obvious that spring to mind.
HA HA HA HA!!!
Sorry, but that's beautiful poetic justice. While Sun have some nice technology, they've never really been too keen on Linux eating into their Unix marketshare.
The only problem is that if Sun did not exist, I think the open source community would be compelled to invent Sun.
For years, us geeks on /. have been very wary of DRM. Mainly because many implementations depend on being able to regularly phone home - and if "home" ceases to exist (or, for that matter, continues to exist but decides it's not taking any more calls, as in this case), all the media you've paid good money for essentially evaporates.
But as long as that's a theoretical problem, one that's never been known to happen - it's one which won't get taken seriously by the masses who actually buy this stuff. Now, however, there's a concrete example. "Do not buy this, all your music and video can suddenly stop working for no immediately apparent reason and you won't have any comeback whatsoever".
On a side note, I wonder how long I'd last in the real world if I sold physical products which could, if I so desired, evaporate overnight with no prior warning and the purchaser having done nothing wrong? And then I started making them evaporate?
By saying "all you're doing is moving the crime around", I don't see any real difference between saying that and saying "We either shouldn't bother with police or we need them to be so pervasive that there are at least 2 on every street corner".
Some of the crime will move. Some of it won't happen at all - and it's that bit that the police are interested in.
In the UK, things are a little different. We already know that a handheld breathalyser isn't foolproof - what it provides is enough evidence to arrest someone and take them down to the police station.
Once there, a number of other, more accurate testing systems are available - be it urine, blood or a more sophisticated breath test. It's the evidence taken at the police station which gets you convicted - and to ensure that you can't get clever with "I refuse to let you take a urine sample", we've made it illegal to refuse, with penalties identical to if you had given a sample and it showed you to be over the limit. I don't know if anyone's ever demanded the source code, but even if they did get it they'd then have to prove that there was a problem with both the breathalyser and the more sophisticated test at the police station.
I'm surprised that the US - the "land of the free" - will take someone to court over a simple handheld breathalyser.
That would probably get you the source code within 5 days.
Or quicker, if the arrest warrant is used against the CEO quicker.
Bear in mind that I'm in the UK. I don't know how similar US laws are.
That's what laws such as "driving without due care and attention", "reckless driving", "dangerous driving" and "causing death by dangerous driving" exist for.
But we still have offences such as "drink driving" and "driving using a handheld mobile phone". The reason is that it is generally agreed that driving while drunk or using a mobile phone is a bad idea, and these laws allow two things:
1. Get the person off the road as soon as their driving becomes mildly concerning, rather than waiting until they do something really stupid.
2. Make the court case a lot easier. It's a lot easier to prove "Person had a blood alcohol level of X, which exceeds the legal limit of Y" than it is to prove "Person was driving erratically (but we have no evidence to prove this either way)", and is likely to result in a stronger sentence.
Even with a Unix-based OS, there's something to be said for separating processes between virtual systems.
It improves security - an exploit leaves one virtual server (and hence one service) vulnerable, not everything.
It improves reliability - a service which is known to have knock-on effects if it screws up can have those knock-on effects limited to just one virtual server.
It also makes scaling individual services and migrating between hardware far easier - if you haven't yet had to go down the SAN route, upgrading a file server is as simple as adding extra disk to the virtual machine, and if the physical host it's on doesn't have the space, migrating the VM first without impacting other services.
The biggest drawback is that you then have to administer a number of virtual hosts rather than just one or two physical ones. But that's what God invented cfengine for.
I consider it to be absurd because I expect a high level of support every time I call - I don't like calling a company over and over until I get the answer I want.
I'd like that as well. But I live in the real world - you can't realistically expect them to dedicate the same level of care to a PC which they sold for £250, netting a total profit of £25, as a server which they sold for £2500 with a profit margin of £1000. They've got to pay these people somehow.
Certainly true with desktop support from practically any tier 1 OEM.
However, Dell's server support is a different kettle of fish entirely. Certainly in the UK, as soon as they know you're calling about a server with a support contract they connect you straight to a call centre in Ireland which is staffed by people with at least a modicum of intelligence and the ability to speak English clearly. Probably because there's more money in servers, and more to be lost by pissing off the bloke who's almost certainly spent the last 2 hours diagnosing the fault and knows full well it's hardware, thank you very much.
Let's be reasonable about this for a moment.
Once someone has the power to execute arbitary code on your system, then it is arguably only a matter of time before they can do what they please on it. Which is precisely why you don't use the same OpenBSD box for your firewall as you do for giving users a shell account on a Unix box.
Noah did not really have two of every species on the ark (I guess somebody calculated that the ark would not have been able to hold all of them), rather he had two of each "type". For example a pair of wolves would stand in for their species as well as dogs, dingos and coyotes, etc.
Do they explain how you get from wolf to chihuahua without some sort of evolution, either directed (as in selective breeding) or natural?
News to me. In the recent past, I've used CentOS, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo and every one of them has suggested separate partitions. Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu make this particularly easy by using LVM, Debian offers LVM as an option and Gentoo... well, Gentoo is just Gentoo.
Seriously. Many have recommended mounting filesystems with the "noatime" parameter if you don't need to know atime for many years now,
Really? You do know that the company now owns H. Samuel?
Ah, right. I suppose good stud dogs can be quite valuable and being able to get puppies that they've biologically fathered long after they're past it could be pretty valuable.
On a side note, do you know if anyone's ever tried to cross a papillon with a great dane?