1-100 Years of Liquid Helium vs. 1600 years
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Halving Half Lives
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· Score: 1
Alpha and Beta emissions are easy enough to shield. If this method actually works, you can store it for a mere hundred years instead of a couple of thousand years before it's sufficiently decayed that it's less dangerous, with much lower risks of eventual leakage, forgotten locations, etc. If they find they can get the radiation down in 1-2 years, that's almost certainly a big big win, but it's not clear whether storing it for 100 years in liquid helium is that much more reliable than storing it in a salt mine for 1600 years.
Gamma and Neutron emitters are a much different problem - Plutonium isotopes and their decay products, for instance, are a risk here, and even the alpha decay from most of the plutoniums is long enough that this technique is unlikely to help enough (e.g. 2000 years of liquid helium might be hard to maintain.)
There's way too much waste
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Halving Half Lives
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· Score: 4, Informative
There are lots of different kinds of nuclear waste - the worst excesses are things like uranium mines and the US's Hanford Washington and Rocky Flats compounds, plus wherever the Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons development work was done, with huge volumes of fairly high-level waste and even huger volumes of low-level waste. Leave aside the risks of rocket failure, we simply don't have the payload capacity to haul significant quantities of it into Earth orbit, much less out of the gravity well to take it on a sundive.
I don't have an Apple sticker on my Windows laptop, but the wallpaper is the old Happy Mac logo, and I suppose I could add one of the Apple stickers that came with my iPod. The home desktop either does or does not have penguins on the wallpaper depending on which OS I booted.
I used to work for The Bell System, back before divestiture, but this is my own opinion, not that of Theodore Vail or his successors...
It's not just the land-line telco monopoly that blocked development of radio-based telephony to rural areas - it was also the radio monopolies. (Roosevelt got lots of credit for trust-busting, but in reality he locked up quasi-monopoly control over huge parts of US industry in ways that have plagued us ever since. And the telco and radio-licensing monopolies got along quite well, thank you, because it let them avoid having to compete with each other.) It's not clear when effective radio telephony would have been developed - it was obviously easier after we got computer technology, but there are things that could have been built back in vacuum-tube days that never occurred to anybody because there wasn't an application for them, and the limited ham-radio market wasn't enough to bring costs down.
You might have ended up with rural communities on the equivalent of huge party lines or CB radio with phone patches, which would have been socially _different_ from telco service - but that could have been ok.
You clearly don't understand the Tier 1 longhaul ISP market. In the US, there are about 2 dozen major providers, including some telcos and many non-telcos, who form what passes for a backbone, and then a lot more Tier 2 providers who are still big enough to sell your little ISP a T3. The backbone ISP bandwidth market has been in free-fall for years - prices keep dropping, and nobody really knows what a megabit of bandwidth is worth but it hasn't hit bottom yet.
On the other hand, most ISPs aren't supporting features like QoS or Multicast between carriers, though they might pass the packet markings around transparently. On your home broadband connection, you'd probably like VOIP to get highest priority, most traffic to get middle priority, and BitTorrent to get lowest priority. It's hard to make that work well without some end-to-end coordination (though you've probably noticed that Skype works fine without it, as long as you're not stomping it with BitTorrent or other large downloads.)
The main thing the telcos are really trying to sell is TV service - either FTTH or newer DSL flavors support enough bandwidth for about 15 Mbps of TV plus whatever Internet bandwidth you've got today, but a telco central office won't *begin* to have enough bandwidth to handle 10,000 users of unicast TV at once, and even a multicast downlink only supports so many channels per telco office (e.g. about 100 channels of HDTV on a GigE, or split that with regular-def TV.)
If you want to choose ISPs based on price alone, you're stuck with whatever service terms the lowest-priced-ISP-of-the-week offers. If you're within DSL range of your telco in the US, you've got hundreds of choices of ISPs, but only one is the cheapest, and it's probably a 3-month-promo deal offered by the telco. So what? If you want better service, there are lots of alternatives that don't cost more than a few bucks more. And if you want a static IP address, the telco probably *isn't* one of the cheapest dozen choices.
If you're not in DSL range, it's a different game, of course - cable modem companies are pretty aggressively clueless, and most places only have one choice, though some of them wholesale service to other ISPs. Maybe you've got cellphone data service for a reasonable price. Of you can buy a T1 line from a bunch of different ISPs, though that'll cost you more.
Most of the US has far more than two broadband providers.
Usually there's only one cable TV company, and usually they're the only ones who sell cable modem service on it, though sometimes they're more open than that, and sometimes RCN or another overbuilder put in a second cable system. (In much of the country, the telco is trying to get into the wired-TV business, as well as reselling satellite TV, and that's what's really driving much of this debate, other than political opportunism by carpetbaggers like MoveOn*.) Most US cable modem service has never been open - they went paranoid about users running servers from home for reasons that weren't very good then and make less sense now. And cable TV service was largely deployed on a town-by-town basis, driven by issues of what town councilman's brother got the installation or repaving contracts rather than by deep understanding of the futures of telecommunication, so the current large aggregators were buying a really random collection of stuff and most of them still understand pay-per-view much better than they understand the Internet.
Usually there's only one wireline telco, but that doesn't mean there's only one source of Internet broadband service using those wires. Most of the telcos will sell service in at least three forms:
Layer 1 - Dry copper, which a company like Covad or New Edge rents, runs DSLAMs on, and sells connections to multiple ISPs as well as their own internet access.
Layer 2 - Telco-provided DSLAM with ATM PVC across a concentrator network to an ISP-provider router, potentially to hundreds of different ISPs. Sometimes they insist on selling phone service along with ADSL, sometimes they'll sell naked DSL.
Layer 3 - Telco provides DSLAM with ATM PVC to a router which they run (either running it directly or farmed out to a single partner ISP.)
Layer 3.5 - PPoE to an ISP over Layer 3 service instead of over native ATM, or sometimes other router-based aggregation approaches.
I use Layer 2 service, through my ISP Sonic.net - not only do they offer static IP addresses, but they don't have any annoying contractual terms against running servers from home, using multiple home PCs, sharing wireless with people, or much of anything except of course banning spamming. I don't think they currently support TOS or DSCP or other QoS markings to allow me to prioritize voice (or de-prioritize BitTorrent, which is what I really need from QoS), but it would be nice if they did. Speakeasy is a better-known national ISP with similar service terms, but there are lots of others, some wide open like Sonic and Speakeasy, others as paranoid and anti-user as the cable companies.
* I really like MoveOn, and I think George Bush is a Chaotic Evil threat to America's freedom and traditional values, but this time they were not only wrong, but pretty clueless about the technologies they were ranting about. That's not to say that several telco honchos weren't also either clueless about the technologies or at least unwilling to talk to the public about what they were actually selling rather than about the regulatory environment in which they were selling it, or that usually clueful netheads like Dave Isenberg weren't saying boneheaded things when they should have known better, but MoveOn was way out of their league here.
Wtf is up with all the food analogies? It's probably the hash brownies affecting the discussion - Xen isn't baked yet, but I am...
Seriously, though, VMWare works well enough to support lots of production environments, and Xen doesn't, and therefore Xen loses unless you're doing one of the things it supports reliably. And Xen only supports open-source clients that you've Xena-fied, or owner-modified closed-source clients, while VMWare apparently supports almost anything. If you want to run Windows as a client, you need VMWare as a server.
The original poster was saying that "Look, they're just a couple of computer software companies, they ought to be able to get along with each other." Your post is an example of why this might not be true:-)
We know that GNU's Not Unix, and Gnu Hasn't Been Unix for Over 20 Years (GHNBUFO20Y), though of course Unix these days mostly _is_ the community effort, regardless of whose compiler or kernel is used. For instance, I tend to use X-Windows/Linux most of the time, and vi instead of emacs, though fairly often inside a Bourne-clone shell on Xterm, which makes it BSD/GNU/X/X/Linux, unless you want to contend that using GCC to compile the vi source makes it BSD/GNU/GNU/X+GNU/X+GNU/Linux+GNU. If I liked csh, that'd be BSD/BSD/X/X/Linux. I'd really prefer ksh to bash, but which would make it BSD/UNIX/X/X/Linux, or pedantically BSD+GNU/UNIX+GNU/X+GNU/X+GNU/Linux+GNU if you insist on the compiler taking credit. Then of course there's the problems of kernels being built with different GCCs than application layers, which probably makes it BSD+GNU'/GNU'/X+GNU'/Linux+GNU.
Now, why was it that the Virtualization people are getting into arguments about different layers again?
Part of Nigeria's problem is that the government there has been notoriously corrupt in itself - the part about the classic 419 scam that's hard to believe is not that Random-Corrupt-Official has $43million in stolen money to move, it's just that he'd be stupid enough to write to random people on the internet to help him move it instead of hiring professionals. If there's racism involved in the 419 business, it's the belief that white westerners are stupid enough to fall for it - a belief that's unfortunately too often supported by the facts, which is why 419 is a big business.
Sure, TCP's a lot of work, especially for 10Gbps - it's keeping track of sequence numbers, ACKing packets, detecting lost packets and retransmitting, checking timing to know the expected RTT, things like that. But you don't need to do TCP to get the benefits of IP. UDP is a lot less work - basically it's a protocol identifier layer and some optional checksumming. You could even skip the UDP layer and run the application as a protocol over raw IP, saving a few bytes at the expense of cluttering up the IP protocol numbering space.
But IP is very little work for the average host - there's some initial handshaking to find out which network connector to use and what MAC address to put on the Ethernet packets, and if you're using a protocol stack there's a handoff from the Ethernet handler to the IP handler. Routers may have to do a lot of work deciding where to route packets, but hosts usually just slap a MAC address on each packet and hand it out the single Ethernet port. You're not going to waste much time, and in return you get several benefits
Your application is routable, so you can use it from anywhere on the Internet.
If you've got a big campus LAN, and want to put the server somewhere across campus, you're free to use routers instead of being required to use VLANs.
You can still use VLANs if you prefer.
You can use a single Ethernet port on your client machines if you need to.
Sniffers and similar network tools will have an easier time telling you what's on your net.
Sure, the Industrial Revolution has meant that city people often didn't get much exercise, but for most of history, most people got lots of exercise, whether they were dirt-farmers or hunter-gatherers. If average people got fat, it wasn't lack of exercise - maybe an older farmer could get his kids or farmhands to do more of the work, and a prosperous farmer had enough calories that his body's hunter-gatherer feast-and-famine biology could convert it to fat, and people who could afford riding horses might not always walk, but there was still lots of physical labor to do.
Sure, fast food isn't great, but it's hardly the only problem the boomers and their kids face. Television makes people far more sedentary and less social, both of which are serious problems. I don't know that it makes people more gullible or not; it may just be an efficient search mechanism to find out what they're most gullible about:-) I was born in the 50s, and my parents were relatively conservative so it was a while before we got a TV, and even longer before we got UHF and color TV, so we missed a lot of the more kid-oriented programs but still found lots of ways to be couch potatoes. Now, of course, if I want to waste time staring at a tube, it's usually the Internet, which is at least social even though it's still not exercise...
Grain farmers had much different conditions than herding societies, and both were different from hunter-gatherers. Anybody who's nomadic is going to be getting exercise, and exposure to more kinds of diseases (therefore developing resistance), and is likely to have lower population concentrations than pre-industrial grain-farmers who stay in one place and grow enough calories to feed large families and support villages and armies. That doesn't mean that herders don't get into fights (they're just usually smaller ones and animal-thieving instead of big wars between rich rulers over land.) That also doesn't mean that serfs and other dirt-farmers don't get lots of exercise, though it may be different varieties of it.
My great*6-grandfather lived to be over 100, in Massachusetts in the ~1700s. His family were mostly English and/or German immigrants who did farming of some sort. It wasn't common, but it wasn't rare either, at least for people who didn't get killed by plagues or wars or accidents or doctors or starvation or childbirth or infant mortality.
Other than games, there's probably nothing she needs to run on Windows that needs network connectivity. (Obviously Windows's updates and her anti-virus software need to run and use the network, but you should set them up to do that automatically, because she's the type for whom that makes sense.) There may be a few things like Photoshop if she's a professional, or Turbotax and equivalents, and you may need to be Administrator to install a few of these. But she certainly doesn't need to run a browser under Windows except for Windows's own administration - so set up IE's permissions so it's only willing to talk to Microsoft.com, and let her dual-boot over to Linux for her regular browser use, music playing, etc. If she can run games under Wine, even better, though I realize not all of them can work that way.
Lots of software requires Admin rights for installing - most of it doesn't actually need them for running once the software's installed. I run my home WinXP machine with multiple logins - my login doesn't have admin rights, but root's does. 90% of the time this is ok, though there's some software that doesn't grok multiple logins - I had to do a lot of haggling with iTunes to deal with my music vs. root's music, and I've had a screensaver/wallpaper manager that insisted on changing _everybody's_ wallpaper and screensaver instead of just mine.
My wife's login does have admin rights, because she got tired of haggling with Windows every time she wanted to install things, but she's the computer science major and probably safer at Windows issues than I am - and other than browsers, the important application that runs on that machine is Turbotax, which she's in charge of.
Sure, there are worse places to get warez, but the type of people who crack into a site to get a place to store warez are _not_ the types of sources you'd want to trust.
Many business network connections are made of vanilla parts - a web server, Pix or Checkpoint firewall, a VPN appliance for employees to connect from home, mostly static web pages or decorative Flash navigation. Pretty boring, and not much point in breaking in unless you want somewhere to run a zombie server or you're a skr1p7 k1dd13 who still thinks scribbing on websites is way 1337 k3wl. At most there's a pre-packaged e-commerce server that lets you order things with credit cards, but you could have gotten the credit card numbers from professionals, or if you're a professional carder you could have run a pr0n site and ripped off anybody who fell for your "age verification" trap.
But the more interesting networks for a cracker are usually at least semi-custom - they may have some standard components, but maybe they're arranged in some customized combination, or there's a bunch of dynamic-html scripting that wasn't written quite right so there are exploits to look for Maybe it's the database hooks you can feed malicious SQL, or maybe there's something else in there.
I agree that unless you're a security researcher of some kind, you probably don't need a source of new cracker tools - but if you're running a customized production site, you do need to know what's being used to attack you, so you can block against it, whether it's your own company or whether it's a type of service you're providing to multiple customers.
I used to have a lab with a DSL like and a couple of quasi-honeypot machines on it. The Win95 (or was it Win98?) machine was never bothered; the RedHat 6 machine kept getting brutally attacked every week so after a few rebuilds I named it "kenny". Now, the Windows machine was partly not bothered because it wasn't doing anything interesting enough to be very vulnerable - there wasn't a web or FTP server, it wasn't sharing any disks or printers, I usually used Netscape browsers instead of IE, and if you did break in all you'd get for your trouble was a Windows machine. I had another Linux box on the network that was always running a scrolling tcpdump (AFAIK nobody ever bothered it - I had fewer services installed on it because it only had 500MB disk), and could see a variety of interesting traffic.
One week I saw it sending lots of pings to a university in Sweden. I checked with the admin there, who said it looked like my machine had been infected with Stacheldraht DDOS client and was reporting back to an infected machine at his site, and told me how to clean it up.
Another week the pings were to Washington University in St. Louis. I forget whether their machine had attacked mine or mine had attacked theirs, but either way it seemed appropriate since they'd probably used wuftpd to break in to my machine. Cleaned it up again.
Another week I did a "find" looking for something under root's home directory, and found a whole ~/.something directory I didn't recognize. I did an "ls", which couldn't find that directory - they'd replaced/bin/ls, but forgot to update the date stamp on the file, and also forgot to update the date stamp on/bin/ps. "ps" was hacked to not report the processes they were running from their hidden ~/.whatever directory - but "ls" wasn't hacked to hide things in/proc:-). So I cleaned up their semi-clever little rootkit.
After I cleaned up one of the latter two attacks, their next act was an "rm -rf/" on poor Kenny. Stupid thugs; at least they could have tried something interesting.
It doesn't sound like what _my_ parents would have done, but it does sound a lot like what minimally-computer-literate parents might have done, especially if they were upgrading a Win98/WinME machine to XP as opposed to, say, buying a barebones machine with no OS on it and building it from scratch. I've got a cousin who's a really bright history teacher, but she had trouble figuring out how to do things on the Internet with her school-provided Macintosh back in the mid-90s, and depended on other teachers to help set the thing up. At least it wasn't a PC, where there's some excuse for it being difficult.
I was really annoyed to have to buy a full-price copy of XP when my mother-in-law's computer needed to be cleaned up a few years back, but there didn't seem to be any point in trying to reinstall WinME, especially when she'd lost her install disk and I'd have to bring mine over from home on my next trip - I didn't want to mess with any licensing-police issues, and it was especially insulting because WinME hadn't fixed any of the problems Win98SE or Win98 had on my machines so I felt Bill Gates had ripped me off. At least XP let us run her machine in non-administrator mode so she'd have more trouble getting new spyware.
If they're running a new enough version of Windows to care about the problem, but are afraid of reinstalling all their software, they probably aren't the type of people to do good backups, but their system should support external USB drives. So they should go spend $100-150 to get an external hard drive, drag&drop all their data onto it, and see if there's a good backup program that'll do something useful with installed programs (any recommendations?).
*Then* they can think about doing a Windows key update or if necessary reinstalling.
As far as I can tell from the article, there never were formal charges filed - just threats, and the "crime" he was being charged with changed every time he was asked, especially the charge under the non-existent "new law" about photographing police with cell phones. That didn't mean they didn't have to write something on the forms when they stuck him in the can, but they didn't formally file charges or arraign him, probably didn't even schedule an arraignment. Basically, the cops lied a lot. The "You're lucky there wasn't a supervisor on duty, so we could just let you go" was also a partial lie - if there'd been a supervisor on duty, the cop would have had to do more formal charges and paperwork for the supervisor, or else the supervisor would have thrown out the arrest right away. My experience with police lying is that they do back each other up, and in most cases a supervisor would have let the arrest continue, so the guy really was lucky, but he might have gotten a good supervisor who didn't want to put up with it (or didn't want to do the extra paperwork), which would have been better.
19" racks are your friends. Most standard equipment fits in them, if you buy the right shelves, and having one makes it easier to convince your bosses to let you buy rack-mountable servers. Moore's Law means that they'll be a lot faster and cheaper than the three servers you have now, with much bigger disk drives. I'm assuming your UPSs are the el-cheapo type that support desktop PCs - put them on the bottom shelf of your rack because they're heavy and might leak, and make sure that whatever else you do, your DHCP and DNS servers are on a UPS - you may want to get a spare laptop to run those services separately from your other servers.
Since you don't have enough space, you'll need to deal with front&back access issues - if you're not in earthquake country, you probably should get a rack with wheels on the bottom (out here you'd need to bolt your racks to the floor or walls, so that means getting racks with no doors on them.) Metro shelves are also nice, but if you've got any significant amount of rack equipment (routers, etc.) real racks are a better choice.
Depending on how badly you lost the political infighting, I'll second the recommendation that you don't want to have to work in the server closet - they're usually noisy, hot, and often badly lit. Get a basic desk for the closet, so you've got some junk-storage drawers, and run VNC or equivalent on your servers so you can spend 98% of your administrative time at a regular desk where you can interact with your coworkers, and only hang out in the server room when you want to be uninterrupted or are playing your own political games.
I built a 200-square-foot lab about 10 years ago - Plan A was to spend $300 at the local furniture store for some Metro shelves and a couple hundred dollars more for a couple of good sturdy tables. Unfortunately, the Corporate Real Estate Gods decided that we had to go through a Corporate Furniture Consultant, and also get racks that bolted to the floor. I found it annoying that the Furniture Consultants called their product "Workstations", but since we ended up having to pay $900 per seat for the desks and got the PCs that went on them for $500/seat, the desks won the title of "workstation". And since we had to do lots of bureaucracy to get our racks purchased and installed, we got two of them, which was quite useful after a couple of years. Later we recycled a table from some former conference room, because we really did need a basic table.
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Gamma and Neutron emitters are a much different problem - Plutonium isotopes and their decay products, for instance, are a risk here, and even the alpha decay from most of the plutoniums is long enough that this technique is unlikely to help enough (e.g. 2000 years of liquid helium might be hard to maintain.)
There are lots of different kinds of nuclear waste - the worst excesses are things like uranium mines and the US's Hanford Washington and Rocky Flats compounds, plus wherever the Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons development work was done, with huge volumes of fairly high-level waste and even huger volumes of low-level waste. Leave aside the risks of rocket failure, we simply don't have the payload capacity to haul significant quantities of it into Earth orbit, much less out of the gravity well to take it on a sundive.
I don't have an Apple sticker on my Windows laptop, but the wallpaper is the old Happy Mac logo, and I suppose I could add one of the Apple stickers that came with my iPod. The home desktop either does or does not have penguins on the wallpaper depending on which OS I booted.
It's not just the land-line telco monopoly that blocked development of radio-based telephony to rural areas - it was also the radio monopolies. (Roosevelt got lots of credit for trust-busting, but in reality he locked up quasi-monopoly control over huge parts of US industry in ways that have plagued us ever since. And the telco and radio-licensing monopolies got along quite well, thank you, because it let them avoid having to compete with each other.) It's not clear when effective radio telephony would have been developed - it was obviously easier after we got computer technology, but there are things that could have been built back in vacuum-tube days that never occurred to anybody because there wasn't an application for them, and the limited ham-radio market wasn't enough to bring costs down.
You might have ended up with rural communities on the equivalent of huge party lines or CB radio with phone patches, which would have been socially _different_ from telco service - but that could have been ok.
On the other hand, most ISPs aren't supporting features like QoS or Multicast between carriers, though they might pass the packet markings around transparently. On your home broadband connection, you'd probably like VOIP to get highest priority, most traffic to get middle priority, and BitTorrent to get lowest priority. It's hard to make that work well without some end-to-end coordination (though you've probably noticed that Skype works fine without it, as long as you're not stomping it with BitTorrent or other large downloads.)
The main thing the telcos are really trying to sell is TV service - either FTTH or newer DSL flavors support enough bandwidth for about 15 Mbps of TV plus whatever Internet bandwidth you've got today, but a telco central office won't *begin* to have enough bandwidth to handle 10,000 users of unicast TV at once, and even a multicast downlink only supports so many channels per telco office (e.g. about 100 channels of HDTV on a GigE, or split that with regular-def TV.)
If you're not in DSL range, it's a different game, of course - cable modem companies are pretty aggressively clueless, and most places only have one choice, though some of them wholesale service to other ISPs. Maybe you've got cellphone data service for a reasonable price. Of you can buy a T1 line from a bunch of different ISPs, though that'll cost you more.
Usually there's only one cable TV company, and usually they're the only ones who sell cable modem service on it, though sometimes they're more open than that, and sometimes RCN or another overbuilder put in a second cable system. (In much of the country, the telco is trying to get into the wired-TV business, as well as reselling satellite TV, and that's what's really driving much of this debate, other than political opportunism by carpetbaggers like MoveOn*.) Most US cable modem service has never been open - they went paranoid about users running servers from home for reasons that weren't very good then and make less sense now. And cable TV service was largely deployed on a town-by-town basis, driven by issues of what town councilman's brother got the installation or repaving contracts rather than by deep understanding of the futures of telecommunication, so the current large aggregators were buying a really random collection of stuff and most of them still understand pay-per-view much better than they understand the Internet.
Usually there's only one wireline telco, but that doesn't mean there's only one source of Internet broadband service using those wires. Most of the telcos will sell service in at least three forms:
- Layer 1 - Dry copper, which a company like Covad or New Edge rents, runs DSLAMs on, and sells connections to multiple ISPs as well as their own internet access.
- Layer 2 - Telco-provided DSLAM with ATM PVC across a concentrator network to an ISP-provider router, potentially to hundreds of different ISPs. Sometimes they insist on selling phone service along with ADSL, sometimes they'll sell naked DSL.
- Layer 3 - Telco provides DSLAM with ATM PVC to a router which they run (either running it directly or farmed out to a single partner ISP.)
- Layer 3.5 - PPoE to an ISP over Layer 3 service instead of over native ATM, or sometimes other router-based aggregation approaches.
I use Layer 2 service, through my ISP Sonic.net - not only do they offer static IP addresses, but they don't have any annoying contractual terms against running servers from home, using multiple home PCs, sharing wireless with people, or much of anything except of course banning spamming. I don't think they currently support TOS or DSCP or other QoS markings to allow me to prioritize voice (or de-prioritize BitTorrent, which is what I really need from QoS), but it would be nice if they did. Speakeasy is a better-known national ISP with similar service terms, but there are lots of others, some wide open like Sonic and Speakeasy, others as paranoid and anti-user as the cable companies.* I really like MoveOn, and I think George Bush is a Chaotic Evil threat to America's freedom and traditional values, but this time they were not only wrong, but pretty clueless about the technologies they were ranting about. That's not to say that several telco honchos weren't also either clueless about the technologies or at least unwilling to talk to the public about what they were actually selling rather than about the regulatory environment in which they were selling it, or that usually clueful netheads like Dave Isenberg weren't saying boneheaded things when they should have known better, but MoveOn was way out of their league here.
Seriously, though, VMWare works well enough to support lots of production environments, and Xen doesn't, and therefore Xen loses unless you're doing one of the things it supports reliably. And Xen only supports open-source clients that you've Xena-fied, or owner-modified closed-source clients, while VMWare apparently supports almost anything. If you want to run Windows as a client, you need VMWare as a server.
We know that GNU's Not Unix, and Gnu Hasn't Been Unix for Over 20 Years (GHNBUFO20Y), though of course Unix these days mostly _is_ the community effort, regardless of whose compiler or kernel is used. For instance, I tend to use X-Windows/Linux most of the time, and vi instead of emacs, though fairly often inside a Bourne-clone shell on Xterm, which makes it BSD/GNU/X/X/Linux, unless you want to contend that using GCC to compile the vi source makes it BSD/GNU/GNU/X+GNU/X+GNU/Linux+GNU. If I liked csh, that'd be BSD/BSD/X/X/Linux. I'd really prefer ksh to bash, but which would make it BSD/UNIX/X/X/Linux, or pedantically BSD+GNU/UNIX+GNU/X+GNU/X+GNU/Linux+GNU if you insist on the compiler taking credit. Then of course there's the problems of kernels being built with different GCCs than application layers, which probably makes it BSD+GNU'/GNU'/X+GNU'/Linux+GNU.
Now, why was it that the Virtualization people are getting into arguments about different layers again?
Part of Nigeria's problem is that the government there has been notoriously corrupt in itself - the part about the classic 419 scam that's hard to believe is not that Random-Corrupt-Official has $43million in stolen money to move, it's just that he'd be stupid enough to write to random people on the internet to help him move it instead of hiring professionals. If there's racism involved in the 419 business, it's the belief that white westerners are stupid enough to fall for it - a belief that's unfortunately too often supported by the facts, which is why 419 is a big business.
But IP is very little work for the average host - there's some initial handshaking to find out which network connector to use and what MAC address to put on the Ethernet packets, and if you're using a protocol stack there's a handoff from the Ethernet handler to the IP handler. Routers may have to do a lot of work deciding where to route packets, but hosts usually just slap a MAC address on each packet and hand it out the single Ethernet port. You're not going to waste much time, and in return you get several benefits
Sure, the Industrial Revolution has meant that city people often didn't get much exercise, but for most of history, most people got lots of exercise, whether they were dirt-farmers or hunter-gatherers. If average people got fat, it wasn't lack of exercise - maybe an older farmer could get his kids or farmhands to do more of the work, and a prosperous farmer had enough calories that his body's hunter-gatherer feast-and-famine biology could convert it to fat, and people who could afford riding horses might not always walk, but there was still lots of physical labor to do.
Sure, fast food isn't great, but it's hardly the only problem the boomers and their kids face. Television makes people far more sedentary and less social, both of which are serious problems. I don't know that it makes people more gullible or not; it may just be an efficient search mechanism to find out what they're most gullible about :-) I was born in the 50s, and my parents were relatively conservative so it was a while before we got a TV, and even longer before we got UHF and color TV, so we missed a lot of the more kid-oriented programs but still found lots of ways to be couch potatoes. Now, of course, if I want to waste time staring at a tube, it's usually the Internet, which is at least social even though it's still not exercise...
Grain farmers had much different conditions than herding societies, and both were different from hunter-gatherers. Anybody who's nomadic is going to be getting exercise, and exposure to more kinds of diseases (therefore developing resistance), and is likely to have lower population concentrations than pre-industrial grain-farmers who stay in one place and grow enough calories to feed large families and support villages and armies. That doesn't mean that herders don't get into fights (they're just usually smaller ones and animal-thieving instead of big wars between rich rulers over land.) That also doesn't mean that serfs and other dirt-farmers don't get lots of exercise, though it may be different varieties of it.
My great*6-grandfather lived to be over 100, in Massachusetts in the ~1700s. His family were mostly English and/or German immigrants who did farming of some sort. It wasn't common, but it wasn't rare either, at least for people who didn't get killed by plagues or wars or accidents or doctors or starvation or childbirth or infant mortality.
That's what they told me it was - that's why I got on this ship along with all the other telephone sanitizers...
Other than games, there's probably nothing she needs to run on Windows that needs network connectivity. (Obviously Windows's updates and her anti-virus software need to run and use the network, but you should set them up to do that automatically, because she's the type for whom that makes sense.) There may be a few things like Photoshop if she's a professional, or Turbotax and equivalents, and you may need to be Administrator to install a few of these. But she certainly doesn't need to run a browser under Windows except for Windows's own administration - so set up IE's permissions so it's only willing to talk to Microsoft.com, and let her dual-boot over to Linux for her regular browser use, music playing, etc. If she can run games under Wine, even better, though I realize not all of them can work that way.
My wife's login does have admin rights, because she got tired of haggling with Windows every time she wanted to install things, but she's the computer science major and probably safer at Windows issues than I am - and other than browsers, the important application that runs on that machine is Turbotax, which she's in charge of.
Sure, there are worse places to get warez, but the type of people who crack into a site to get a place to store warez are _not_ the types of sources you'd want to trust.
But the more interesting networks for a cracker are usually at least semi-custom - they may have some standard components, but maybe they're arranged in some customized combination, or there's a bunch of dynamic-html scripting that wasn't written quite right so there are exploits to look for Maybe it's the database hooks you can feed malicious SQL, or maybe there's something else in there.
I agree that unless you're a security researcher of some kind, you probably don't need a source of new cracker tools - but if you're running a customized production site, you do need to know what's being used to attack you, so you can block against it, whether it's your own company or whether it's a type of service you're providing to multiple customers.
I was really annoyed to have to buy a full-price copy of XP when my mother-in-law's computer needed to be cleaned up a few years back, but there didn't seem to be any point in trying to reinstall WinME, especially when she'd lost her install disk and I'd have to bring mine over from home on my next trip - I didn't want to mess with any licensing-police issues, and it was especially insulting because WinME hadn't fixed any of the problems Win98SE or Win98 had on my machines so I felt Bill Gates had ripped me off. At least XP let us run her machine in non-administrator mode so she'd have more trouble getting new spyware.
*Then* they can think about doing a Windows key update or if necessary reinstalling.
As far as I can tell from the article, there never were formal charges filed - just threats, and the "crime" he was being charged with changed every time he was asked, especially the charge under the non-existent "new law" about photographing police with cell phones. That didn't mean they didn't have to write something on the forms when they stuck him in the can, but they didn't formally file charges or arraign him, probably didn't even schedule an arraignment. Basically, the cops lied a lot. The "You're lucky there wasn't a supervisor on duty, so we could just let you go" was also a partial lie - if there'd been a supervisor on duty, the cop would have had to do more formal charges and paperwork for the supervisor, or else the supervisor would have thrown out the arrest right away. My experience with police lying is that they do back each other up, and in most cases a supervisor would have let the arrest continue, so the guy really was lucky, but he might have gotten a good supervisor who didn't want to put up with it (or didn't want to do the extra paperwork), which would have been better.
Since you don't have enough space, you'll need to deal with front&back access issues - if you're not in earthquake country, you probably should get a rack with wheels on the bottom (out here you'd need to bolt your racks to the floor or walls, so that means getting racks with no doors on them.) Metro shelves are also nice, but if you've got any significant amount of rack equipment (routers, etc.) real racks are a better choice.
Depending on how badly you lost the political infighting, I'll second the recommendation that you don't want to have to work in the server closet - they're usually noisy, hot, and often badly lit. Get a basic desk for the closet, so you've got some junk-storage drawers, and run VNC or equivalent on your servers so you can spend 98% of your administrative time at a regular desk where you can interact with your coworkers, and only hang out in the server room when you want to be uninterrupted or are playing your own political games.
I built a 200-square-foot lab about 10 years ago - Plan A was to spend $300 at the local furniture store for some Metro shelves and a couple hundred dollars more for a couple of good sturdy tables. Unfortunately, the Corporate Real Estate Gods decided that we had to go through a Corporate Furniture Consultant, and also get racks that bolted to the floor. I found it annoying that the Furniture Consultants called their product "Workstations", but since we ended up having to pay $900 per seat for the desks and got the PCs that went on them for $500/seat, the desks won the title of "workstation". And since we had to do lots of bureaucracy to get our racks purchased and installed, we got two of them, which was quite useful after a couple of years. Later we recycled a table from some former conference room, because we really did need a basic table.