Many people have brought up the SECURITY question here, myself included. But the issue is SAFETY.
SECURITY asks, will the lock keep out intruders? SAFETY asks, will the lock allow personnel to pass quickly in the event of an emergency?
SECURITY asks, will the window resist breaking in an intrusion attempt? SAFETY asks, will the window resist breaking if accidently impacted? Can the window be used as an egress in an emergency? If the window breaks, will the fractured glass cause injury?
SECURITY asks, can intruders compromise the ships navigation or control systems? SAFETY asks, will failure or compromise of the navigation or control systems have a negative impact on life or property?
SECURITY asks, does the system have permission to perform task A while being restricted from performing task B? SAFETY asks, are the navigation or control systems able to the specified job in the specified manner?
SECURITY asks, how will access be controlled in the event of a system failure or compromise? SAFETY asks, how will catastrophic failure be prevented in the event of a single system failure or compromise?
Hopefully, these questions will give you an idea of the kinds of questions a computer systems safety panel would be responsible for answering. Security is concerned with authority, which is NOT the question here. Safety is concerned with protecting the life and health of personnel and the physical integrity of assets.
That being said, Michael should go back and revise the headline to read "Computer SAFETY Criteria."
It's been pointed out that ships whose absolute-position navigation systems (GPS, LORAN, radar, etc.) conk out depend on dead reckoning: determining position based on speed and initial course.
It occured to me that this is the way software purchased are too often made: rather than determining exactly what is needed, purchases are based on what's already there and how fast development has proceeded. It seems like people buy the newest version not because they need it, but because it's available. Most users I know would be doing just fine with Word 97, (heck, most of them would do great with WordPerfect 6 for DOS) but they have upgraded to Word 2000 then Word XP because it's there. (I used to use WP6/DOS extensively, and it NEVER crashed on me.)
If Microsoft spent more effort making Word 2000 and Windows 98 more stable than succumbing to feature creep, the world would be a better place.
If people wouldn't upgrade for the sake of upgrading, they could demand that future software versions be compatible with older versions: a document in Word XP should be openable in Word 1.0.
In the future, if not the present, internet security for shipboard computers WILL be an issue.
You can expect that navigation systems will at some point receive updated charts or Notices to Mariners via the Internet.
You can expect that navigators will receive up-to-the-minute, detailed reports about harbors they are about to enter.
You can expect that shipboard control systems will interface with shipboard navigation systems, which by reason of the aforementioned scenarios, will effectively have a traceable data connection to the PC whose monitor you are staring at right now.
What is necessary are firewalls: 1) between the satellite-uplink internet connection (duh, of course they have this, they'd be stupid if they didn't); 2) a packet-inspecting firewall between the LAN that has full internet access and the navigation system allowing only those packets pertaining to navigation to pass; and 3) a packet-inspecting firewall between navigation and control systems.
The navigation system may be allowed limited access to the internet, perhaps only to certain sites. The control system should have NO access to the internet; rather, it should only be able to communicate with the navigation system.
Of course, I say all this with NO expertise and NO experience in shipboard IT infrastructure.
No legal action possible until violation occurs
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
IANAL so this is only from my observation:
Several posters have pointed out that obfuscation is a violation of GPL, or at least the spirit of the GPL.
Unfortunately, until your company actually releases a product based on obfuscated GPL code (commits a violation), you can't take legal action in the courts; you can only get a GPL-friendly lawyer to send nasty cease-and-desist letters. In other words, you can't stop it until it's too late. And if you do sue, the copyright holder (the creator of the GPL code which was borrowed) will probably have to be named as a plaintiff, as the violation was commited against HIS copyright, or possibly the FSF as a plaintiff's representative yadda yadda yadda. YOU probably will not be able to file suit as a plaintiff directly, unless somehow you can do it as a representative of the party claiming loss. If you do nothing else, inform the writer(s) of the original code of your company's intentions.
Some newer, energy-efficient fluorescents operate at frequencies >60Hz, and have long-decay phosphor coatings effectively eliminating the "on-off" effect.
(A fluorescent lamp operates by an electric arc which vaporizes and excites mercury in an otherwise near-vacuum; the mercury gas emits light in the ultraviolet spectrum. The ultraviolet light excites a fluorescent coating which in turn emits light in the visible spectrum. Different colors of fluorescent lamps are made by introducing different materials into the fluorescent coating.)
LED's, on the other hand, lacking a fluorescent material, have very steep attack and decay slopes, allowing them to respond (flicker) at very high rates.
P.S. -- "Fluorescent" means to become excited by light in one spectrum and emit it in another spectrum. A more precise word would probably be "photoluminescent." Neon and LED's are types of "electroluminescent" lamps -- light is emitted when the material is excited by electricity. Incandescent is "thermoluminescent" -- light is emitted when the material becomes thermally excited (hot). A fluorescent lamp is a combination of electroluminescent and photoluminescent technologies.
P.P.S. -- I like to make up big words. It makes me sound smart.
Similar to anti-glare screens, you may be able to use a security screen which completely blocks off-axis viewing (I assume it would also block off-axis light sources).
I have seen (or rather "not seen") these used at Passport Control when entering the U.S. at the Miami International Airport. To the traveler passing through Passport Control, the computer screen appears totally black. To the Passport Control Agent, (I assume) the screen is perfectly readable.
I also seem to recall having seen these advertised in a Linux Journal at one time, but I don't recall the manufacturer.
Business customers and certain assets of @Work, the business services arm of @Home, have been acquired by Vancouver, WA, based New Edge Networks, and will be merged with their resale arm, TransEdge.
IPv6 is backward compatible. I believe what you meant to say is that IPv4 is not forward compatible: in order to make IPv6 work, all routers have to be IPv6 compatible.
What's standing in the way is that a large number of routers are not upgradeable to IPv6, and the cost of replacing would be greater than the return on investment.
Let's say that you replace an existing IPv4 router with an IPv6 router costing 3000USD. Labor and downtime costs during the replacement will probably range a couple thousand more USD. So you're looking at 5000USD. In order to justify the investment, you must realize at least 5000USD (plus interest) profit from sales of IPv6 bandwidth over the life of the router. You won't sell IPv6 bandwidth until there is a definite need; with all the various "patches" out there (DHCP, NAT, Dynamic DNS, etc.) it may be quite a while before IPv6 is needed. You may find that IPv6 is not needed until AFTER the MTBF of the router!
Bandwidth providers are waiting for the need. However, I think it would be wise when installing new or replacement hardware, to replace it with IPv6 capable products.
If you can't do that, it's a waste of money, and wasting money is no way to do business.
On a side note, there are only 16^12 MAC addresses available. When will we run out of these?;-)
Completely off-topic: I've seen only one forward-compatible technology: WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/etc. Save something in WP10, you'll be able to read it in WP6 (minus some formatting, but you'll be able to read it, with most of the formatting intact). I may be wrong, but I believe this was designed when Borland owned the product. Kudos to Borland! "Backwards compatible" implies that current technology is compatible with legacy formats and protocols. "Forwards compatible" implies that current technology will be compatible with future formats and protocols, is designed to be expandable, and designed to tolerate unknown features.
Or, for that matter, the Windows desktop properties dialog box which, when the screen is set to 640x480 and large fonts, is larger than the screen so you can't see to click on the buttons... or, in some cases, see the fields where you change the resolution and font sizes. Of course, these values can't be changed in a text file, and finding them in the registry is like looking for pi in the output of/dev/random.
It's fine if your application returns numeric error codes. It makes the code a bit simpler so say "if x does y, error=2" than "if x does y, error='user is an idiot'".
HOWEVER, your program should also have an error handling routine and an error database. So, if the program returns error code 2, the error handler looks it up in the database and returns to the user "Error code=2. User is an idiot."
Even better would be to list possible solutions to the error! ("Possible cause: User doesn't know his head from a hole in the ground. Suggested solution: Buy a clue.")
Well, I don't know anything about the history of Russian/Soviet computing. However, I was over there last summer, and found a computer store which had state-of-the-art peripherals for sale, right alongside a bootleg copy of Windows 2000. In a bookstore, I found (and bought) a Russian translation of Olaf Kirch's Linux Network Administrator's Guide (aka, The NAG). The text was Russian but the examples were all in the default language of Linux, English.
The products in the computer store were selling for about the same as in America given the exchange rate at the time (except for the Win2K which was ~USD13). When you consider that the average Russian salary is USD2000-3000/yr, you aren't going to find many Russians online, at least not at home. Businesses seem to be fairly up-to-date as far as technology goes, aside from the mom-and-pop shops. Broadband internet access seems to be more myth than reality there.
Some of posts here said that they were a couple generations behind because they were just copying American technology. Appears they're catching up.
...when you get two simultaneous disk failures on a RAID-5 array. In other words, the data was toast. Happened to one of my clients around a month ago. Thankfully, they monitor their backups, making sure every one is good and taking action if a backup fails. They lost only one day's worth of work.
I know people who slack off when it comes to backups, because they've got redundant drives, after all. They seem to believe that they never accidently delete files, and it's not that much work to recreate those quarterly reports. They don't realize just how much work they do on their computers, and how hard it is to retrieve that thought that came to them as they were typing up that letter to their congressmen.
Just today, one of my clients had an IDE drive on a RAID-0/1 array fail. The controller (two channels, four drives) misreported which drive it was. Now, it only shows one drive in a four drive array as being a member. Here's hoping a new controller which will arrive tomorrow will allow us to rescue the data.
No, they don't have a backup for ~100GB of data. Fools. I guess they've got a few spare months kicking around to recreate several hundred thousand pages of digital documents.
A RAID array is great for performance gains. In a production environment, it'll guarantee uptime while a bad drive is replaced or until the system can be taken offline. Don't trust a RAID controller that puts two IDE drives on the same channel; sometimes, a failed drive will prevent the system from being able to access the "good" drive on the same channel, bringing down your system. If reliablilty and uptime are important and can be measured in $$$, don't even THINK about IDE RAID solutions. The increased support costs for IDE are more than the increased hardware costs for SCSI.
I see a number of posts extolling the virtues of using hard drives as backup media:
*Fast!
*Cheap!
*Easy!
Unfortunately,
*Reliable!
isn't something you're going to get. Also, when you consider that you may want to be able to restore something that was deleted, say 6 months or a year ago, your media costs begin to outweigh your equipment costs. Also, a hard drive is going to be physically larger than a tape holding the same amount of data, requiring more expensive off-site storage. You do take your backups offsite, don't you? What about a flood, fire, or (gasp) terrorist attack? What about a break-in?
Another reason to not depend solely on hard drives for backup: the shelf-life of a tape is much longer than a hard drive. Fifty years from now, you'll still be able to read today's backup on tape, but the mechanics of a HDD used for backup (even if it hasn't been used) may be all goobered up rendering the drive DEAD. I won't go into handling considerations, except to tell you what you know already: hard drives are fragile.
That said, I like the idea of setting up a mirror server which updates from the master server, then running the backup on the mirror server. This'll increase your window and reduce the load on the master server.
Lastly, make sure you understand the difference between full, incremental, and differential backups. Use them to your advantage to balance price, speed, load, and storage (where you're gonna store your tapes) considerations.
Appears to me that they've realized that they can charge more to increase profits. What they want to know is at what price point (as price is increased) will the revenues lost to unhappy customers outweigh the increased revenues from remaining customers?
So Telia figures that Swedish customers are getting a great deal. Too good of a deal, because customers elsewhere in the world pay more. Doesn't this tell you that we in other countries are getting soaked, that it really DOESN'T cost them $44.95USD to provide me with broadbad; that they could be charging $30USD and still make a profit?
That's $44.95USD for 1024kd/256ku for AT&T Broadband cable I'm paying.
It's about time the Google implemented a system to automatically mirror or cache every page linked to on Slashdot (as soon as the link appears) so we have some place to go when the original site gets slashdotted.
C'mon, you weren't sold 1024K bandwidth, you were sold 1024K speed.
When an ISP sells you a service, they are selling it not based on how much you use it, but on how fast your connectivity is. Unfortunately, people are confused because speed and bandwidth use the same numbers.
To use an analogy, think of the freeway. It has a speed of 70 MPH. If you go on the freeway, most of the time you will be able to go 70 MPH. You've paid taxes to drive one car 70 MPH on the freeway, and you're happy. You can't drive two cars 70 MPH on the freeway; that's probably illegal. The freeway's bandwidth, on the other hand, might be 1000 cars per hour at 70 MPH. When you exceed 1000 cars per hour, the speed drops below 70 MPH.
It must be remembered that medieval armour was designed to stop swords and arrows, not bullets. This is how it could be made so light: just thick enough to stop the threat of the day but not so thick as to be heavy and cumbersome. Medieval armour would be useless today.
(I use here the British spelling 'armour' because that type of personal protection wasn't used much in America's history. Besides, I think it looks cooler.)
So does this mean I can sue Kwikset because some idiot took a chainsaw to the side of my house, sawed their way in and stole the watermelon out of my fridge?
After all, the package the lock was sold in implied it would make my house more secure.
Maybe I should sue Poulan because their chainsaw didn't have a warning label that said "use on house walls may cause personal injury due to possible presence of live electrical cabling." I'll bet that would've stopped the burglar.
Noooo....... I've got a better idea...... I'll sue the farmer that grew the watermelon. After all, he created an "attractive nuisance." And there's laws against that.
What about Whirlpool? My fridge doesn't have a factory-installed alarm system. How am I supposed to keep my watermelons secure? Let's sue the pants off of Factory Specification Parts!!
Method of referencing disparate or related content through the use of textual redirects whereby such references are accessed by manual entry of said redirect into browser's address or location bar.
Good point. If two people view the same content on the same image-producing device (be it paper, a TV screen, monitor, stereo speaker, etc.) does that constitute TWO copies?
How about if you hook up four speakers to your stereo system (where two speakers carry the "left" image and two carry the "right" image)? Do you need to pay RIAA, et al for two copies... er, licenses to use the content? What if one set of speakers is in another room? Heaven forbid you should wire in an extra set without sending a gratuity to the radio station.
There was a time when cable companies tried to charge extra if you put a second TV on the same cable line in your own home. Maybe some still do. I don't watch TV, so this doesn't bother me.
This all sounds to me like they are trying to narrow your rights to view to not just within your home, but to within a certain room of your home.
A Monopoly &r game says on the box, "For 2 to 6 players." (Or is it 2 to 8?) When I was a kid, if we wanted more than 6 players, someone would get a bottle cap or a screw or maybe a coin to use as an extra piece.
If the Media Gestapo has their way, I'll have to buy another copy of Monopoly.
This is assuming, of course, that if your root partition is on/dev/hda, you don't mind reinstalling everything. It's sort of an OS suicide command.
Using random data as opposed to zeroes is more secure because writing zeroes may leave a readable residual magnetic signature on the media whereas random data tends to obscure the mag sig.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people have brought up the SECURITY question here, myself included. But the issue is SAFETY.
SECURITY asks, will the lock keep out intruders?
SAFETY asks, will the lock allow personnel to pass quickly in the event of an emergency?
SECURITY asks, will the window resist breaking in an intrusion attempt?
SAFETY asks, will the window resist breaking if accidently impacted? Can the window be used as an egress in an emergency? If the window breaks, will the fractured glass cause injury?
SECURITY asks, can intruders compromise the ships navigation or control systems?
SAFETY asks, will failure or compromise of the navigation or control systems have a negative impact on life or property?
SECURITY asks, does the system have permission to perform task A while being restricted from performing task B?
SAFETY asks, are the navigation or control systems able to the specified job in the specified manner?
SECURITY asks, how will access be controlled in the event of a system failure or compromise?
SAFETY asks, how will catastrophic failure be prevented in the event of a single system failure or compromise?
Hopefully, these questions will give you an idea of the kinds of questions a computer systems safety panel would be responsible for answering. Security is concerned with authority, which is NOT the question here. Safety is concerned with protecting the life and health of personnel and the physical integrity of assets.
That being said, Michael should go back and revise the headline to read "Computer SAFETY Criteria."
It's been pointed out that ships whose absolute-position navigation systems (GPS, LORAN, radar, etc.) conk out depend on dead reckoning: determining position based on speed and initial course.
It occured to me that this is the way software purchased are too often made: rather than determining exactly what is needed, purchases are based on what's already there and how fast development has proceeded. It seems like people buy the newest version not because they need it, but because it's available. Most users I know would be doing just fine with Word 97, (heck, most of them would do great with WordPerfect 6 for DOS) but they have upgraded to Word 2000 then Word XP because it's there. (I used to use WP6/DOS extensively, and it NEVER crashed on me.)
If Microsoft spent more effort making Word 2000 and Windows 98 more stable than succumbing to feature creep, the world would be a better place.
If people wouldn't upgrade for the sake of upgrading, they could demand that future software versions be compatible with older versions: a document in Word XP should be openable in Word 1.0.
In the future, if not the present, internet security for shipboard computers WILL be an issue.
You can expect that navigation systems will at some point receive updated charts or Notices to Mariners via the Internet.
You can expect that navigators will receive up-to-the-minute, detailed reports about harbors they are about to enter.
You can expect that shipboard control systems will interface with shipboard navigation systems, which by reason of the aforementioned scenarios, will effectively have a traceable data connection to the PC whose monitor you are staring at right now.
What is necessary are firewalls: 1) between the satellite-uplink internet connection (duh, of course they have this, they'd be stupid if they didn't); 2) a packet-inspecting firewall between the LAN that has full internet access and the navigation system allowing only those packets pertaining to navigation to pass; and 3) a packet-inspecting firewall between navigation and control systems.
The navigation system may be allowed limited access to the internet, perhaps only to certain sites. The control system should have NO access to the internet; rather, it should only be able to communicate with the navigation system.
Of course, I say all this with NO expertise and NO experience in shipboard IT infrastructure.
IANAL so this is only from my observation:
Several posters have pointed out that obfuscation is a violation of GPL, or at least the spirit of the GPL.
Unfortunately, until your company actually releases a product based on obfuscated GPL code (commits a violation), you can't take legal action in the courts; you can only get a GPL-friendly lawyer to send nasty cease-and-desist letters.
In other words, you can't stop it until it's too late. And if you do sue, the copyright holder (the creator of the GPL code which was borrowed) will probably have to be named as a plaintiff, as the violation was commited against HIS copyright, or possibly the FSF as a plaintiff's representative yadda yadda yadda. YOU probably will not be able to file suit as a plaintiff directly, unless somehow you can do it as a representative of the party claiming loss.
If you do nothing else, inform the writer(s) of the original code of your company's intentions.
Some newer, energy-efficient fluorescents operate at frequencies >60Hz, and have long-decay phosphor coatings effectively eliminating the "on-off" effect.
(A fluorescent lamp operates by an electric arc which vaporizes and excites mercury in an otherwise near-vacuum; the mercury gas emits light in the ultraviolet spectrum. The ultraviolet light excites a fluorescent coating which in turn emits light in the visible spectrum. Different colors of fluorescent lamps are made by introducing different materials into the fluorescent coating.)
LED's, on the other hand, lacking a fluorescent material, have very steep attack and decay slopes, allowing them to respond (flicker) at very high rates.
P.S. -- "Fluorescent" means to become excited by light in one spectrum and emit it in another spectrum. A more precise word would probably be "photoluminescent." Neon and LED's are types of "electroluminescent" lamps -- light is emitted when the material is excited by electricity. Incandescent is "thermoluminescent" -- light is emitted when the material becomes thermally excited (hot). A fluorescent lamp is a combination of electroluminescent and photoluminescent technologies.
P.P.S. -- I like to make up big words. It makes me sound smart.
Similar to anti-glare screens, you may be able to use a security screen which completely blocks off-axis viewing (I assume it would also block off-axis light sources).
I have seen (or rather "not seen") these used at Passport Control when entering the U.S. at the Miami International Airport. To the traveler passing through Passport Control, the computer screen appears totally black. To the Passport Control Agent, (I assume) the screen is perfectly readable.
I also seem to recall having seen these advertised in a Linux Journal at one time, but I don't recall the manufacturer.
Business customers and certain assets of @Work, the business services arm of @Home, have been acquired by Vancouver, WA, based New Edge Networks, and will be merged with their resale arm, TransEdge.
IPv6 is backward compatible. I believe what you meant to say is that IPv4 is not forward compatible: in order to make IPv6 work, all routers have to be IPv6 compatible.
;-)
What's standing in the way is that a large number of routers are not upgradeable to IPv6, and the cost of replacing would be greater than the return on investment.
Let's say that you replace an existing IPv4 router with an IPv6 router costing 3000USD. Labor and downtime costs during the replacement will probably range a couple thousand more USD. So you're looking at 5000USD. In order to justify the investment, you must realize at least 5000USD (plus interest) profit from sales of IPv6 bandwidth over the life of the router. You won't sell IPv6 bandwidth until there is a definite need; with all the various "patches" out there (DHCP, NAT, Dynamic DNS, etc.) it may be quite a while before IPv6 is needed. You may find that IPv6 is not needed until AFTER the MTBF of the router!
Bandwidth providers are waiting for the need. However, I think it would be wise when installing new or replacement hardware, to replace it with IPv6 capable products.
If you can't do that, it's a waste of money, and wasting money is no way to do business.
On a side note, there are only 16^12 MAC addresses available. When will we run out of these?
Completely off-topic: I've seen only one forward-compatible technology: WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/etc. Save something in WP10, you'll be able to read it in WP6 (minus some formatting, but you'll be able to read it, with most of the formatting intact). I may be wrong, but I believe this was designed when Borland owned the product. Kudos to Borland! "Backwards compatible" implies that current technology is compatible with legacy formats and protocols. "Forwards compatible" implies that current technology will be compatible with future formats and protocols, is designed to be expandable, and designed to tolerate unknown features.
So far, this is the only post I've seen that actually answers the original question. Go back and read it again, you idiots.
here ya go:
)
You forgot a close-paren up there.
You're welcome.
Or, for that matter, the Windows desktop properties dialog box which, when the screen is set to 640x480 and large fonts, is larger than the screen so you can't see to click on the buttons... or, in some cases, see the fields where you change the resolution and font sizes. Of course, these values can't be changed in a text file, and finding them in the registry is like looking for pi in the output of /dev/random.
It's fine if your application returns numeric error codes. It makes the code a bit simpler so say "if x does y, error=2" than "if x does y, error='user is an idiot'".
HOWEVER, your program should also have an error handling routine and an error database. So, if the program returns error code 2, the error handler looks it up in the database and returns to the user "Error code=2. User is an idiot."
Even better would be to list possible solutions to the error! ("Possible cause: User doesn't know his head from a hole in the ground. Suggested solution: Buy a clue.")
Well, I don't know anything about the history of Russian/Soviet computing. However, I was over there last summer, and found a computer store which had state-of-the-art peripherals for sale, right alongside a bootleg copy of Windows 2000. In a bookstore, I found (and bought) a Russian translation of Olaf Kirch's Linux Network Administrator's Guide (aka, The NAG). The text was Russian but the examples were all in the default language of Linux, English.
The products in the computer store were selling for about the same as in America given the exchange rate at the time (except for the Win2K which was ~USD13). When you consider that the average Russian salary is USD2000-3000/yr, you aren't going to find many Russians online, at least not at home. Businesses seem to be fairly up-to-date as far as technology goes, aside from the mom-and-pop shops. Broadband internet access seems to be more myth than reality there.
Some of posts here said that they were a couple generations behind because they were just copying American technology. Appears they're catching up.
...when you get two simultaneous disk failures on a RAID-5 array. In other words, the data was toast. Happened to one of my clients around a month ago. Thankfully, they monitor their backups, making sure every one is good and taking action if a backup fails. They lost only one day's worth of work.
I know people who slack off when it comes to backups, because they've got redundant drives, after all. They seem to believe that they never accidently delete files, and it's not that much work to recreate those quarterly reports. They don't realize just how much work they do on their computers, and how hard it is to retrieve that thought that came to them as they were typing up that letter to their congressmen.
Just today, one of my clients had an IDE drive on a RAID-0/1 array fail. The controller (two channels, four drives) misreported which drive it was. Now, it only shows one drive in a four drive array as being a member. Here's hoping a new controller which will arrive tomorrow will allow us to rescue the data.
No, they don't have a backup for ~100GB of data. Fools. I guess they've got a few spare months kicking around to recreate several hundred thousand pages of digital documents.
A RAID array is great for performance gains. In a production environment, it'll guarantee uptime while a bad drive is replaced or until the system can be taken offline. Don't trust a RAID controller that puts two IDE drives on the same channel; sometimes, a failed drive will prevent the system from being able to access the "good" drive on the same channel, bringing down your system. If reliablilty and uptime are important and can be measured in $$$, don't even THINK about IDE RAID solutions. The increased support costs for IDE are more than the increased hardware costs for SCSI.
I see a number of posts extolling the virtues of using hard drives as backup media:
*Fast!
*Cheap!
*Easy!
Unfortunately,
*Reliable!
isn't something you're going to get. Also, when you consider that you may want to be able to restore something that was deleted, say 6 months or a year ago, your media costs begin to outweigh your equipment costs. Also, a hard drive is going to be physically larger than a tape holding the same amount of data, requiring more expensive off-site storage. You do take your backups offsite, don't you? What about a flood, fire, or (gasp) terrorist attack? What about a break-in?
Another reason to not depend solely on hard drives for backup: the shelf-life of a tape is much longer than a hard drive. Fifty years from now, you'll still be able to read today's backup on tape, but the mechanics of a HDD used for backup (even if it hasn't been used) may be all goobered up rendering the drive DEAD. I won't go into handling considerations, except to tell you what you know already: hard drives are fragile.
That said, I like the idea of setting up a mirror server which updates from the master server, then running the backup on the mirror server. This'll increase your window and reduce the load on the master server.
Lastly, make sure you understand the difference between full, incremental, and differential backups. Use them to your advantage to balance price, speed, load, and storage (where you're gonna store your tapes) considerations.
Appears to me that they've realized that they can charge more to increase profits. What they want to know is at what price point (as price is increased) will the revenues lost to unhappy customers outweigh the increased revenues from remaining customers?
So Telia figures that Swedish customers are getting a great deal. Too good of a deal, because customers elsewhere in the world pay more. Doesn't this tell you that we in other countries are getting soaked, that it really DOESN'T cost them $44.95USD to provide me with broadbad; that they could be charging $30USD and still make a profit?
That's $44.95USD for 1024kd/256ku for AT&T Broadband cable I'm paying.
It's about time the Google implemented a system to automatically mirror or cache every page linked to on Slashdot (as soon as the link appears) so we have some place to go when the original site gets slashdotted.
Now what would really be cool is a web browser that autormatically corrects spelling errors on Slashdot. :-P
C'mon, you weren't sold 1024K bandwidth, you were sold 1024K speed.
When an ISP sells you a service, they are selling it not based on how much you use it, but on how fast your connectivity is. Unfortunately, people are confused because speed and bandwidth use the same numbers.
To use an analogy, think of the freeway. It has a speed of 70 MPH. If you go on the freeway, most of the time you will be able to go 70 MPH. You've paid taxes to drive one car 70 MPH on the freeway, and you're happy. You can't drive two cars 70 MPH on the freeway; that's probably illegal. The freeway's bandwidth, on the other hand, might be 1000 cars per hour at 70 MPH. When you exceed 1000 cars per hour, the speed drops below 70 MPH.
It must be remembered that medieval armour was designed to stop swords and arrows, not bullets. This is how it could be made so light: just thick enough to stop the threat of the day but not so thick as to be heavy and cumbersome. Medieval armour would be useless today.
(I use here the British spelling 'armour' because that type of personal protection wasn't used much in America's history. Besides, I think it looks cooler.)
#include
main()
{
for(;;)
{
printf ("Hello World!\n");
}
}
Surely there's a security hole here somewhere. Give us enough time, we'll find it.
So does this mean I can sue Kwikset because some idiot took a chainsaw to the side of my house, sawed their way in and stole the watermelon out of my fridge?
After all, the package the lock was sold in implied it would make my house more secure.
Maybe I should sue Poulan because their chainsaw didn't have a warning label that said "use on house walls may cause personal injury due to possible presence of live electrical cabling." I'll bet that would've stopped the burglar.
Noooo....... I've got a better idea...... I'll sue the farmer that grew the watermelon. After all, he created an "attractive nuisance." And there's laws against that.
What about Whirlpool? My fridge doesn't have a factory-installed alarm system. How am I supposed to keep my watermelons secure? Let's sue the pants off of Factory Specification Parts!!
Method of referencing disparate or related content through the use of textual redirects whereby such references are accessed by manual entry of said redirect into browser's address or location bar.
Good point. If two people view the same content on the same image-producing device (be it paper, a TV screen, monitor, stereo speaker, etc.) does that constitute TWO copies?
How about if you hook up four speakers to your stereo system (where two speakers carry the "left" image and two carry the "right" image)? Do you need to pay RIAA, et al for two copies... er, licenses to use the content? What if one set of speakers is in another room? Heaven forbid you should wire in an extra set without sending a gratuity to the radio station.
There was a time when cable companies tried to charge extra if you put a second TV on the same cable line in your own home. Maybe some still do. I don't watch TV, so this doesn't bother me.
This all sounds to me like they are trying to narrow your rights to view to not just within your home, but to within a certain room of your home.
A Monopoly &r game says on the box, "For 2 to 6 players." (Or is it 2 to 8?) When I was a kid, if we wanted more than 6 players, someone would get a bottle cap or a screw or maybe a coin to use as an extra piece.
If the Media Gestapo has their way, I'll have to buy another copy of Monopoly.
I find the following command useful:
/dev/hda, you don't mind reinstalling everything. It's sort of an OS suicide command.
# dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
This is assuming, of course, that if your root partition is on
Using random data as opposed to zeroes is more secure because writing zeroes may leave a readable residual magnetic signature on the media whereas random data tends to obscure the mag sig.