The first terabyte system *I* saw was a 12" reel of inch-wide digital write-once paper tape, from Creo. The drive was about the size of a conventional tape-drive (i.e. refrigerator-sized, in those days). The drive cost about $250K, and each tape reel was about $10K (as opposed to typical magtape at $25/reel.)
Somebody else at the same trade show had a video-cassette-based jukebox that could be expanded to about 6 TB if you used enough bays and enough tapes. Times change:-)
Backing up on hard drives. Copying files.
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Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 2
Any media you have will eventually die. Get used to it. Plan for it.
IDE disk drives are amazingly cheap, and getting cheaper. So use mirroring and removable-drive drawers. 100GB of space costs about $100, if you don't mind slower IDE drives. So get a couple of those removable-drive drawers (~$25 for the mounting, and $12 for extra drawers), and an extra IDE controller if you need it, and copy all your files to it. Stick a copy of the important stuff on the shelf (or in your safety deposit box) and do it again. Pick your favorite flavor of RAID or mirroring - for small systems, it's much easier to be wasteful and do complete mirrors; for larger systems it's much more efficient to do RAID, so that WHEN you lose one of your drives, you can recover. As long as Cheap Disk Drives keep exceeding Moore's Law for price/capacity, you keep winning, and the removable drawers mean you can easily pop the new bigger drives in and out. And always make sure to copy all your old files to the new drives before the old drives become unusable - tapes and removable-media disks are the worst offenders. Got any 8" floppy drives?
Use Backup Software, and Back Up To New Machines when you upgrade.The two big reasons that data gets lost are failing hardware (addressed by mirroring) and accidental/deliberate erasure/updating/scribbling. Use backup software to deal with that, preferably some kind of software that doesn't use proprietary data formats. Journaling file systems can be really good places to put things, if you're on an open operating system. Backups are another excellent use of Cheap Disk Drives in Drawers.
Avoid File System Format Dependence by CopyingIt's nice to keep backup media in well-documented file system formats, but it's also critical when you get computers with new file system formats to copy your old backup data to the new computers
Data formats are the hard part - Use Open Standards Whenever Possible. Keep all of your software installation disks, however obsolete. MSWord is evil - too much complexity, too little documentation, too little compatibility. HTML is great, because it's human-readable and easily parsed, and it's a content description language (or was in the past), not a black-marks-on-paper description language. Graphics formats - If you can use open-source standards without major differences in compression, use them, because you can also store format descriptions and conversion software. And be sure to label stuff so you know what it is - README files as well as on the outside of the media.
This isn't stupidity about bandwidth use - that's what causes policies against servers. This is about the $40-50 monthly subscription, and making sure people don't just use wireless instead of buying cable modem. That's as much money as they're getting for a low-end cable tv subscriber - selling you cable modem lets them double their revenue for not much extra cost, and they want to maximize the number of people who buy it.
Policies against running servers on your cable modem interfere with early adopters, preventing the innovation that might find the killer apps that get lots of people to buy service -- that's suicidally clueless, and pretty common. Policies against wireless are because they can't tell roaming visitors from non-innovative late-adopters who are mooching off their neighbor's paid service rahter than buying their own. Instead, the cable companies need to encourage innovation, perhaps by setting up a tunnel server system so that roamers can easily access the net, either for a small fee or with better service for roamers who are cable subscribers than for non-subscribers (e.g. limit bandwidth to 28kbps for non-subscribers so they can still do email and light surfing, with unlimited for cable subscribers so they can do cool broadband apps.)
I didn't say it's not their policy - different cable franchises make different policies, but most of them are suicidally clueless. But it's still totally backwards.
The company shouldn't mind unmonitored open-access use by strangers, because that's not adding significant bandwidth and (more importantly) reducing their number of subscribers, any more than they mind visitors coming to your house and watching cable TV. What they should mind is using your wireless (or wired) access so that your neighbors mooch off your service instead of buying their own, just as they'd mind if you ran a TV cable from your splitter to your neighbor's apartment. The intermediate level - a houseful of college students sharing access - is pretty much equivalent to the houseful of college students sharing the TV in the living room . It'd be nice for the cable company if they could charge more for large households, but it's unrealistic, and besides, this way they're more likely to upsell on the movie channels. (When I lived in Ithaca, you had to buy cable service to get decent TV reception - otherwise there was just one UHF station in Syracuse that bounced over the hill - but HBO didn't cost too much extra so lots of people bought it.)
The cable company doesn't care if you're using wireless vs. ethernet to connect your machines in your house (though some of them want to charge you extra for using multiple computers.) You're paying your $40-50 for that. They don't care if visitors to your house plug into your LAN, and they shouldn't care if visitors use your wireless (but sometimes they do.) What they do, and SHOULD, care about is if you're using wireless or wire to share service with your neighbor, and only one of you is paying instead of both, just as they'd care if you were running a splitter to share TV service with your neighbor. The difference that wireless makes is that it's much easier to have visitors and freeloading neighbors than if you had to run wires, so they're more likely to lose that sale to your neighbor.
The problem is that they can't tell the roaming visitor from the freeloading full-time neighbor, so they treat both of them as Eeeevil Cable Thieves instead of either realizing that offering friendly 802.11 service for visitors makes you more likely to buy broadband (either theirs or DSL) (so they should encourage it), or finding a way to charge $5/month for roamer service and get extra revenue from these new customers as long as they can tell a full-timer (who they can hope to get $40/month from) from a light user.
It's a continuation of the industry-dominant policy of suicidal cluelessness. A few of the cable companies get it, and let you offer servers at home, which encourages you to use broadband, but most don't.
Your managers aren't totally clueless - they want to be able to use software that has someone commercially supporting it, who can be expected to continue to produce new versions that do what the market needs, and who can be paid to fix bugs - because there _will_ be bugs, and because security bugs are one of the worst kinds, and because unless you're in the security-software business, you're not the best people to be fixing that kind of software - you're in the widget business or the somethingware business.
That's fine. There are people who do commercial support for open source. Hire them and pay them! Cygnus Support was the classic business following this model, and they've been bought by Red Hat, so get support contracts from Red Hat. Or SuSe, or a few other similar companies. You get the software you want, with a source license, and you get someone to fix stuff for you for your money. Works just fine.
If the Sourceforge folks are getting blocked by CensorshipInc., do they have grounds for a lawsuit for things like restraint of trade or libel? It's one thing to block them for "hacker tools", a category which some lameoid censorware products do, but blocking them for MP3s sounds blatantly negligent at best.
There was a story a couple years ago about a couple of spammers getting murdered in New Jersey or somewhere like that. I don't know if anyone was ever caught, but apparently they were running stock scams and the suspicion was that some of their victims didn't appreciate it. But that just means that most spammers learn not to mess with the Russian Mafia.
Our good old boy here doesn't seem to have that problem - he's not scamming most of his customers, unless they're dumb enough to believe that he's actually got permission from 80 million email recipients who are really interested in the junk they're selling. He's just providing services to people who are doing the scamming. (I have heard of one spammer getting busted for fraud for claiming that his email lists were valid suckers who wanted to receive advertising, and that would certainly be an interesting legal approach to take to shut down the worst offenders, but most of them would switch over to claiming that they were just selling lists of valid addresses.)
If you look at the date on the web page, it's April 2001. Linux 2.2.x was just fine back then:-)
They're also asymmetric, not half-duplex
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P2P Streaming Radio
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· Score: 1
Half-duplex means you're only able to transmit or receive, but not able to do both at once. Ethernets work that way. DSL doesn't - lots of DSL and cable-modem services are asymmetric, which means that you get more bandwidth downstream than upstream, but you really can use both directions at once if your equipment supports it, which most does. You might be connecting your PC to your DSL modem using a 10mbps Ethernet in half-duplex mode, but both pieces of equipment have enough buffering that they can still keep the DSL pipe full. It's more likely that what's slowing your download speed is that if you hog the upstream with uploads, you're not leaving enough room for ACKs to the sites you're downloading from. In particular, you can send data to the DSL faster than it can actually transmit, so you can clog up its buffers (either in the ADSL modem itself, or more likely in one of the upstream ATM trunks that you're sharing on the way to the upstream router.) If you want to play with prioritization, you can reduce this effect a bit by keeping your ftp/http transmits a bit below your upstream bandwidth limits (if you know them - sometimes the bottleneck is farther upstream, though in DSL that's more an issue for downstream.)
You're incorrect about modems. They're 56kbps downstream (if you're lucky, which you seldom are) and 28.8 or 33.6kbps upstream - they're just different speeds in the two directions. Lots of DSL service is also asymmetric - fast downstream, slower upstream.
The reason your download speed drops when you're doing lots of upspeed is usually because either you're interfering with upstream TCP ACKs (which slows down your downstream), or you're running out of CPU or some memory buffer or other resource your drivers are using (which shouldn't happen at such as slow speed, but could.)
FAQ:Not a Disk Drive Spec - A Development Envir...
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Eclipse 2.0 Released
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· Score: 2
I'm sorry, but when you refer to some "IDE 2.0 Has Been Released" that sounds a lot more like it's a new standards version for the IDE disk drives than like an Integrated Development Environment. Here's the FAQ but you should still say what general category of thing you're talking about....
Who's asking you to get it certified? Do they know what that means, or whether there are actually products with certifications that make sense for your environment? Do you work for some kind of government organization that has formal requirements for it (and if so can you negotiate a waiver in return for using appropriate protections)? Or do you work for private industry that can make intelligent decisions on your own (in which case get your management to blow away your Info Security folks and tell them to go provide useful protection rather than getting in the way of real work)? Or do you work for some corporation that does military contracting and therefore has bureaucratic rules to follow (that's probably the hardest version to fix, and may depend on whether you can argue that your site is separate.)
"NSA Type 1" encryption means "some proprietary chip from the NSA that relies on obscurity as one of its security techniques, and unavailability to the general public as another." Unless you're working on an appropriate government project with a comsec account, *you* can't have one of the chips. According to the data sheet, depending on the keys you've got installed, it's either handled as
Unclassified Key or without Key - Controlled Cryptographic Item (CCI)
With Secret Key - SECRET item.
There's really no need for this sort of thing - 3DES or AES are strong enough to keep the NSA and KGB out if you use good keys and don't mishandle them.
In addition to the "Various bands with Clapton", the variations on CSNY and Jefferson Airplane/Starship were pretty influential. White Rabbit still gets played. CSNY did harmony and bridged some of the folk/rock/country, and there are an amazing number of San Francisco scene albums that have Crosby in the background, as well as Jerry Garcia.
OK, they're not exactly Rock&Roll, and there were other people who also played Reggae, and I'm mainly a Deadhead, and the Beatles had more overall influence, but you really can't leave out Bob Marley and the Wailers. They brought Reggae out to the world and turned on a generation of people to their part of Caribbean music, brought communication between their culture and the outside world, had serious political messages and uniqueness when much of the music business was turning into photocopied prefab pablum, and of course, tragically died too young.
Cellphones already work badly inside many buildings, so people who need pagers and cellphones for life-threatening emergencies don't just have problems in electrically-shielded theaters, they have problems in lots of buildings with too much metal. Pagers put up with this kind of restriction better than cell phones; people who have cellphones work around the problem by stepping outside and YELLING A LOT SO THE OTHER PEOPLE CAN HEAR THEM, AND SHIELDING THAT MAKES MORE PEOPLE YELL MORE OFTEN IS JUST A BAD IDEA....
The active part here is the metal, not the wood, which is just for decoration. Maybe you young folks don't remember "panelling" from the 70s, but if this technology takes off here, it won't be some clean natural-looking Japanese aesthetics, it'll be cheap-plastic-looking fake wood. Might as well stick to straight metal.
If you're trying to get maximum bang for the chip buck, and willing to custom-build boards (which people often are for multi-million-dollar highly-custom machines), digital signal processor chips often have rocking performance for dumb fast applications. For instance, the TI TMS320C6713 can do up to 1800 MFLOPS at 225MHz (probably only 1350 double-precision), while most general-purpose CPUs do less than one MFLOPS per megahertz, and have a reasonable amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. You won't be running off-the-shelf Beowulf on them, but it's not hard to build them into PCI boards or multi-processor PCI boards that you can feed data from a conventional CPU, and they come with compilers and usually other programming environments.
The money isn't coming from the commercial power production interests in the government - they don't do explosions (except in countries like Iraq where it helps oil prices, or occasionally dynamite explosions for echolocation to find underground oil.) It's coming from the people who *do* like explosions. Always has. Some of it's tactical nukes, some of it's strategic nukes, some of it's "when do we have to replace our current warheads?", some of it's "how small/large/well-aimed a bomb can we make?". Bush is heavily involved with the military-industrial complex, but the Labs have been working on this kind of thing for several years, expanding their groups of people who simulate blowing stuff up since they can't do much actual testing. Some of them like explosions because they like blowing stuff up, while others of them like explosions because what else does a nuclear-weapons physicist do in today's market?
For $99, you usually get a new motherboard _with_ the AMD CPU that takes PC133 memory (or for similar prices, you can get faster systems that require new memory.) I can't see spending the money (and the driver installation time, and the headaches when I'm running Linux as opposed to WinME) for specialized hardware that only accelerates videos when I could make *everything* go faster for a lot less work. I'll grant you the video-out issue (though my AGP-1 el cheapo Trident card has it), but if you've got a 233 MHz PII like my home desktop and want to play movies, you've probably been wanting a better video card anyway just for still pictures and text.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody else at the same trade show had a video-cassette-based jukebox that could be expanded to about 6 TB if you used enough bays and enough tapes. Times change :-)
IDE disk drives are amazingly cheap, and getting cheaper. So use mirroring and removable-drive drawers. 100GB of space costs about $100, if you don't mind slower IDE drives. So get a couple of those removable-drive drawers (~$25 for the mounting, and $12 for extra drawers), and an extra IDE controller if you need it, and copy all your files to it. Stick a copy of the important stuff on the shelf (or in your safety deposit box) and do it again. Pick your favorite flavor of RAID or mirroring - for small systems, it's much easier to be wasteful and do complete mirrors; for larger systems it's much more efficient to do RAID, so that WHEN you lose one of your drives, you can recover. As long as Cheap Disk Drives keep exceeding Moore's Law for price/capacity, you keep winning, and the removable drawers mean you can easily pop the new bigger drives in and out. And always make sure to copy all your old files to the new drives before the old drives become unusable - tapes and removable-media disks are the worst offenders. Got any 8" floppy drives?
Use Backup Software, and Back Up To New Machines when you upgrade.The two big reasons that data gets lost are failing hardware (addressed by mirroring) and accidental/deliberate erasure/updating/scribbling. Use backup software to deal with that, preferably some kind of software that doesn't use proprietary data formats. Journaling file systems can be really good places to put things, if you're on an open operating system. Backups are another excellent use of Cheap Disk Drives in Drawers.
Avoid File System Format Dependence by CopyingIt's nice to keep backup media in well-documented file system formats, but it's also critical when you get computers with new file system formats to copy your old backup data to the new computers
Data formats are the hard part - Use Open Standards Whenever Possible. Keep all of your software installation disks, however obsolete. MSWord is evil - too much complexity, too little documentation, too little compatibility. HTML is great, because it's human-readable and easily parsed, and it's a content description language (or was in the past), not a black-marks-on-paper description language. Graphics formats - If you can use open-source standards without major differences in compression, use them, because you can also store format descriptions and conversion software. And be sure to label stuff so you know what it is - README files as well as on the outside of the media.
Policies against running servers on your cable modem interfere with early adopters, preventing the innovation that might find the killer apps that get lots of people to buy service -- that's suicidally clueless, and pretty common. Policies against wireless are because they can't tell roaming visitors from non-innovative late-adopters who are mooching off their neighbor's paid service rahter than buying their own. Instead, the cable companies need to encourage innovation, perhaps by setting up a tunnel server system so that roamers can easily access the net, either for a small fee or with better service for roamers who are cable subscribers than for non-subscribers (e.g. limit bandwidth to 28kbps for non-subscribers so they can still do email and light surfing, with unlimited for cable subscribers so they can do cool broadband apps.)
The company shouldn't mind unmonitored open-access use by strangers, because that's not adding significant bandwidth and (more importantly) reducing their number of subscribers, any more than they mind visitors coming to your house and watching cable TV. What they should mind is using your wireless (or wired) access so that your neighbors mooch off your service instead of buying their own, just as they'd mind if you ran a TV cable from your splitter to your neighbor's apartment. The intermediate level - a houseful of college students sharing access - is pretty much equivalent to the houseful of college students sharing the TV in the living room . It'd be nice for the cable company if they could charge more for large households, but it's unrealistic, and besides, this way they're more likely to upsell on the movie channels. (When I lived in Ithaca, you had to buy cable service to get decent TV reception - otherwise there was just one UHF station in Syracuse that bounced over the hill - but HBO didn't cost too much extra so lots of people bought it.)
The problem is that they can't tell the roaming visitor from the freeloading full-time neighbor, so they treat both of them as Eeeevil Cable Thieves instead of either realizing that offering friendly 802.11 service for visitors makes you more likely to buy broadband (either theirs or DSL) (so they should encourage it), or finding a way to charge $5/month for roamer service and get extra revenue from these new customers as long as they can tell a full-timer (who they can hope to get $40/month from) from a light user.
It's a continuation of the industry-dominant policy of suicidal cluelessness. A few of the cable companies get it, and let you offer servers at home, which encourages you to use broadband, but most don't.
Remember Xenix ? It was a Unix-like OS that ran on 8086s and maybe 286s. No reason to abuse Linus's trademark when they've got one of their own...
That's fine. There are people who do commercial support for open source. Hire them and pay them! Cygnus Support was the classic business following this model, and they've been bought by Red Hat, so get support contracts from Red Hat. Or SuSe, or a few other similar companies. You get the software you want, with a source license, and you get someone to fix stuff for you for your money. Works just fine.
If the Sourceforge folks are getting blocked by CensorshipInc., do they have grounds for a lawsuit for things like restraint of trade or libel? It's one thing to block them for "hacker tools", a category which some lameoid censorware products do, but blocking them for MP3s sounds blatantly negligent at best.
Our good old boy here doesn't seem to have that problem - he's not scamming most of his customers, unless they're dumb enough to believe that he's actually got permission from 80 million email recipients who are really interested in the junk they're selling. He's just providing services to people who are doing the scamming. (I have heard of one spammer getting busted for fraud for claiming that his email lists were valid suckers who wanted to receive advertising, and that would certainly be an interesting legal approach to take to shut down the worst offenders, but most of them would switch over to claiming that they were just selling lists of valid addresses.)
If you look at the date on the web page, it's April 2001. Linux 2.2.x was just fine back then :-)
Half-duplex means you're only able to transmit or receive, but not able to do both at once. Ethernets work that way. DSL doesn't - lots of DSL and cable-modem services are asymmetric, which means that you get more bandwidth downstream than upstream, but you really can use both directions at once if your equipment supports it, which most does. You might be connecting your PC to your DSL modem using a 10mbps Ethernet in half-duplex mode, but both pieces of equipment have enough buffering that they can still keep the DSL pipe full. It's more likely that what's slowing your download speed is that if you hog the upstream with uploads, you're not leaving enough room for ACKs to the sites you're downloading from. In particular, you can send data to the DSL faster than it can actually transmit, so you can clog up its buffers (either in the ADSL modem itself, or more likely in one of the upstream ATM trunks that you're sharing on the way to the upstream router.) If you want to play with prioritization, you can reduce this effect a bit by keeping your ftp/http transmits a bit below your upstream bandwidth limits (if you know them - sometimes the bottleneck is farther upstream, though in DSL that's more an issue for downstream.)
The reason your download speed drops when you're doing lots of upspeed is usually because either you're interfering with upstream TCP ACKs (which slows down your downstream), or you're running out of CPU or some memory buffer or other resource your drivers are using (which shouldn't happen at such as slow speed, but could.)
I'm sorry, but when you refer to some "IDE 2.0 Has Been Released" that sounds a lot more like it's a new standards version for the IDE disk drives than like an Integrated Development Environment. Here's the FAQ but you should still say what general category of thing you're talking about....
Who's asking you to get it certified? Do they know what that means, or whether there are actually products with certifications that make sense for your environment? Do you work for some kind of government organization that has formal requirements for it (and if so can you negotiate a waiver in return for using appropriate protections)? Or do you work for private industry that can make intelligent decisions on your own (in which case get your management to blow away your Info Security folks and tell them to go provide useful protection rather than getting in the way of real work)? Or do you work for some corporation that does military contracting and therefore has bureaucratic rules to follow (that's probably the hardest version to fix, and may depend on whether you can argue that your site is separate.)
Or just one of those carrier pigeons with clay tablets...?
There's really no need for this sort of thing - 3DES or AES are strong enough to keep the NSA and KGB out if you use good keys and don't mishandle them.
So is anybody organizing tunnel hacking at DefCon ?
Also, the URL you gave failed, though there was a Google cache.
A nasty little dwarf throws a stone knife at you and misses...
And Carlos Santana just keeps rockin' along.
OK, they're not exactly Rock&Roll, and there were other people who also played Reggae, and I'm mainly a Deadhead, and the Beatles had more overall influence, but you really can't leave out Bob Marley and the Wailers. They brought Reggae out to the world and turned on a generation of people to their part of Caribbean music, brought communication between their culture and the outside world, had serious political messages and uniqueness when much of the music business was turning into photocopied prefab pablum, and of course, tragically died too young.
Cellphones already work badly inside many buildings, so people who need pagers and cellphones for life-threatening emergencies don't just have problems in electrically-shielded theaters, they have problems in lots of buildings with too much metal. Pagers put up with this kind of restriction better than cell phones; people who have cellphones work around the problem by stepping outside and YELLING A LOT SO THE OTHER PEOPLE CAN HEAR THEM, AND SHIELDING THAT MAKES MORE PEOPLE YELL MORE OFTEN IS JUST A BAD IDEA....
The active part here is the metal, not the wood, which is just for decoration. Maybe you young folks don't remember "panelling" from the 70s, but if this technology takes off here, it won't be some clean natural-looking Japanese aesthetics, it'll be cheap-plastic-looking fake wood. Might as well stick to straight metal.
If you're trying to get maximum bang for the chip buck, and willing to custom-build boards (which people often are for multi-million-dollar highly-custom machines), digital signal processor chips often have rocking performance for dumb fast applications. For instance, the TI TMS320C6713 can do up to 1800 MFLOPS at 225MHz (probably only 1350 double-precision), while most general-purpose CPUs do less than one MFLOPS per megahertz, and have a reasonable amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. You won't be running off-the-shelf Beowulf on them, but it's not hard to build them into PCI boards or multi-processor PCI boards that you can feed data from a conventional CPU, and they come with compilers and usually other programming environments.
The money isn't coming from the commercial power production interests in the government - they don't do explosions (except in countries like Iraq where it helps oil prices, or occasionally dynamite explosions for echolocation to find underground oil.) It's coming from the people who *do* like explosions. Always has. Some of it's tactical nukes, some of it's strategic nukes, some of it's "when do we have to replace our current warheads?", some of it's "how small/large/well-aimed a bomb can we make?". Bush is heavily involved with the military-industrial complex, but the Labs have been working on this kind of thing for several years, expanding their groups of people who simulate blowing stuff up since they can't do much actual testing. Some of them like explosions because they like blowing stuff up, while others of them like explosions because what else does a nuclear-weapons physicist do in today's market?
For $99, you usually get a new motherboard _with_ the AMD CPU that takes PC133 memory (or for similar prices, you can get faster systems that require new memory.) I can't see spending the money (and the driver installation time, and the headaches when I'm running Linux as opposed to WinME) for specialized hardware that only accelerates videos when I could make *everything* go faster for a lot less work. I'll grant you the video-out issue (though my AGP-1 el cheapo Trident card has it), but if you've got a 233 MHz PII like my home desktop and want to play movies, you've probably been wanting a better video card anyway just for still pictures and text.