SF is criminally stupid, that's all there is to it. They've wasted taxpayer money over a case that should never have been brought.
Their own employees and contractors caused a ton of downtime trying to get control of the network. If they'd left things alone there wouldn't have been any downtime.
Not to mention they violated they guy's constitutional rights over something that could have been resolved amicably within 24 to 72 hours.
Instead, they acted like a totalitarian regime and threw the guy in jail to break his will to resist.
It's the people in charge of SF that should be prosecuted not this guy.
Did he act like a damn jerk? You Bettcha! Did the city act like Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in 1936-1938? Heck yeah!
Anyone in IT should be worried about ending up like this guy if they anger the SF city government in any way, this could be one heck of a bad precedent.
This is a situation where this is definitely a major overreaction and at the same time volcanic ash is absolutely hazardous to aircraft.
Volcanic ash can foul the turbine blades, cause the engines to overheat, melt and turn into glass making repairs highly impractical and can cause the engines to flame out repeatedly. It can also clog pitot tubes resulting in loss of the instruments, can damage the environmental control systems and when it comes into contact with the windshield can cause severe damage dangerously limiting visibility. The airframe can also suffer some damage, although in most past cases this was not severe and the airframes could be repaired and placed back into service.
There have been several incidents where aircraft unknowingly flew into volcanic ash clouds and had all engines flame out, fortunately in those documented cases the aircraft were able to glide out of the ash cloud and eventually restart their engines and land safely, however the engines had to be replaced, which is very expensive.
As long as you have enough altitude and can glide out of the ash plume and restart the engines there is a very high probability that it will be a survivable event.
If you can avoid the cloud you're completely safe, the key problem is you don't know where the ash is until you fly into it, since it can't be detected on radar or other instruments currently available on passenger aircraft.
Had a system to track volcanic ash been developed to make information available to the crews in the cockpit in real time this wouldn't be a problem.
The other major problem is economics, most airlines prefer to use the established North Atlantic air routes to save money on fuel costs and reduce flying time, even though alternate routes may already exist, or could be established, that would go around the ash cloud.
Finally there's a good deal of politics in all of this which doesn't really make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint.
These look like professionally done asian counterfeits to me. It's quite likely organized criminals are involved since it took a lot of resources to custom print the boxes and labels, and make the foam HSFs and fake cpus.
This isn't something the average joe or jane can do in his or her grandma's basement, you've got to have access to professional printing equipment at the very least.
Chances are a substantial number of real CPUs were stolen and replaced with these fakes.
Ladies and Gents please stop unfairly attacking Widenius, as TheRaven64 already mentioned, he absolutely positively did not get $1 billion for mysql he got about $16.6 million in 2008 which is nowhere near $1 billion. [ source wikipedia with 2 other sources providing confirmation ]
The whole company was bought for $1 billion and a very small portion, reportedly about 12% or less of that went to Widenius and the other mysql founder.
And keep in mind transactions like this are rarely done in cash and there are many strings attached to any stock they may have received in the deal.
Because of this Widenius cannot buy mysql back from Sun or Oracle for $1 billion because he never got $1 billion and it is highly unlikely he could raise $1 billion to buy it back.
It is obvious that the sale of mysql to Oracle would have major anti-trust implications no matter what side of the argument you're on.
You may dislike Widenius and mysql and you're free to dislike them all you want but the fact is the entire community would be affected by the purchase if it goes through.
Oracle could turn mysql into crippleware, they may go after all the users, they could kill it or do any number of things which would not be good for the community. Even if you forked mysql Oracle could shut you down any time since they already own all kinds of patents and the underlying engine.
Like it or not, millions of websites and users depend on mysql one way or the other and migrating them all to prostgresql or any other DB would be a huge undertaking, especially if it's a forced migration.
If the purchase goes through I would like to see mysql sold to an independent 3rd party or spun off so that Oracle does not end up with a virtual monopoly in that sector.
A monopoly is not good for anyone.
Note that I'm in no way advocating mysql should be given back to Widenius or anyone else, just that it become completely independent and receive a fair and reasonable license to use Oracle's engine and mutually cross-license the patents and other IP to resolve the justified anti-trust and monopoly concerns.
The LPDs are not aircraft carriers nor do they resemble the British carriers, such as the Invincible class.
You were probably thinking of the Tarawa class LHAs and Wasp class LHDs, which do outwardly resemble the Invincible class carriers, however they also have a well deck for landing craft which the British ships do not.
The LHAs and LHDs are primarily designed for amphibious landing operations, their primary mission is to deliver a USMC battalion to shore and support the Marines in combat operations.
The British Invincible-class carriers are light aircraft carriers whose primary mission is to operate Sea Harrier fixed wing V/STOL aircraft and helicopters.
While the US ships operate the AV-8B ( the US version of the Harrier ), V-22 Ospreys and helicopters they are not light aircraft carriers.
The Tarawa class ships are almost twice as big ( about 38,900 tons ) as the British carriers (by displacement) and the Wasps ( about 40,500 tons ) have about twice the displacement of Invincible-class ( about 20,700 tons ).
The Nimitz class super carriers are entirely in a class of their own. The newest Nimitz class carriers displace more than 103,000 tons and can operate up to 90 fixed wing non-V/STOL aircraft ( vs. about 20 aircraft including Harriers and helicopters for the British carriers ).
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources which require a heck of a lot of energy to mine and produce.
All those resources are best used elsewhere, where it is more efficient.
Nothing beats nuclear power at providing base generating capacity.
Let's get some hydro in there too, hydro is a dirty word nowadays, which is insane. It's more green than all the "fashionable green technologies".
Give me an all of above approach please!!!
And don't forget we need to return to the moon and start mining Helium 3 now();
We can actually do it fairly inexpensively by using Burt Rutan's White Knight Two vehicle or an improved version thereof.
It only costs a few million to fly White Knight Two to altitude, launch small payloads into orbit and then perform in-orbit assembly, while a traditional rocket launch can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars or even into the billions.
It's far less costly and less risky to have frequent smaller launches, perhaps with an unmanned version of the launch vehicle and build up from there.
Once the orbiting vehicle is fully assembled we can send the crew up.
This isn't just about the CPU, it's about overall system performance.
Despite improvements in CPU performance, memory and IO performance is lagging behind.
A modern SATA drive delivers about 90MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
Some RAID controllers can do about 600-800MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
An average AM2 ( K10 core 65nm ) gets about 34,849MB/sec L1, 12,169MB/sec L2, 6371MB/sec L3, 2,741MB/sec DDR2-800 5-5-5-12.
Obviously Opterons scale a lot better since they each have an onboard memory controller and additional HT links which greatly increases bandwidth as you add more CPUs. However adding more cores on the same die which have to share a single memory controller can cause starvation.
Another major issue is software parallelization, writing parallel code is still a difficult problem. If your software doesn't parallelize well it doesn't matter if you have 8, 16 or even 32cores on a single die.
If you had an equal number of CPU cores and memory controllers you could achieve much better performance, however your relatively very slow storage subsystems would still be a major bottleneck.
Haven't these people heard of the base load? I mean c'mon.
I'm all for renewable energy and I have personally used 100% CFLs, LEDs and energy saving devices for many years, but it will require a tremendous amount of resources to build enough wind turbines to power the entire planet. These resources have to come from somewhere and a heck of a lot of pollution will be generated mining the required resources, producing hundreds of thousands of turbines, installing them and building a new electrical grid to support them. Besides the wind doesn't always blow when you need it to. Building an energy storage system to support the wind turbines will greatly increase their environmental footprint.
This is totally bogus. It makes no sense to go 100% wind when there are arguably more efficient ways to produce energy.
Nuclear and natural gas are much better choices for the base load until fusion comes along.
I wanna see an all of the above approach. I want nuclear and natural gas for the base load and solar, wind, hydro, tidal and other sources supplementing energy production where it makes sense.
I respect the environment within reason, but screw the birds and the fish, we need all kinds of clean energy ( solar, wind, hydro,... ) and we need it now!
I do want a power plant in my back yard! And I want the water turned back on in California! Forget the fish, we have jobs to save and people to feed, unless the environmental nuts would rather get all their food from China, the world's number 2 polluter ( competing for the #1 spot ), along with a heavy dose of lead and lots of other toxins.
--
unix_geek_512
I believe in the death penalty for spammers and tyrants around the world and of course world peace!
SatanicPuppy and I are in general agreement, however I would go a step further and would suggest a multi-layered approach.
0. install steel conduit to protect your high value ( Fiber ) and mission critical cables.
1. use poison liberally.
2. use lots of traps.
3. eliminate the food supply.
4. repair any holes in the buildings with steel mesh and concrete.
5. invest in steel trash cans ( indoors and outdoors ) that lock and dispose of trash before the end of business every day so that no trash is left in the buildings overnight.
6. store no food in the buildings. This will require employee training.
7. install heavy duty stainless steel gates on all your drains.
8. Owls are better than cats, although they may make a mess, but it will be outside.
9. Cats are likely much more trouble than they are worth, especially in a server room where they could easily cause thousands of dollars of damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Why isn't there a +20 Insightful on slashdot?
This post deserves it in my humble opinion.
SF is criminally stupid, that's all there is to it. They've wasted taxpayer money over a case that should never have been brought.
Their own employees and contractors caused a ton of downtime trying to get control of the network. If they'd left things alone there wouldn't have been any downtime.
Not to mention they violated they guy's constitutional rights over something that could have been resolved amicably within 24 to 72 hours.
Instead, they acted like a totalitarian regime and threw the guy in jail to break his will to resist.
It's the people in charge of SF that should be prosecuted not this guy.
Did he act like a damn jerk? You Bettcha! Did the city act like Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in 1936-1938? Heck yeah!
Anyone in IT should be worried about ending up like this guy if they anger the SF city government in any way, this could be one heck of a bad precedent.
Semper Fi Comrades
This is a situation where this is definitely a major overreaction and at the same time volcanic ash is absolutely hazardous to aircraft.
Volcanic ash can foul the turbine blades, cause the engines to overheat, melt and turn into glass making repairs highly impractical and can cause the engines to flame out repeatedly. It can also clog pitot tubes resulting in loss of the instruments, can damage the environmental control systems and when it comes into contact with the windshield can cause severe damage dangerously limiting visibility. The airframe can also suffer some damage, although in most past cases this was not severe and the airframes could be repaired and placed back into service.
There have been several incidents where aircraft unknowingly flew into volcanic ash clouds and had all engines flame out, fortunately in those documented cases the aircraft were able to glide out of the ash cloud and eventually restart their engines and land safely, however the engines had to be replaced, which is very expensive.
As long as you have enough altitude and can glide out of the ash plume and restart the engines there is a very high probability that it will be a survivable event.
If you can avoid the cloud you're completely safe, the key problem is you don't know where the ash is until you fly into it, since it can't be detected on radar or other instruments currently available on passenger aircraft.
Had a system to track volcanic ash been developed to make information available to the crews in the cockpit in real time this wouldn't be a problem.
The other major problem is economics, most airlines prefer to use the established North Atlantic air routes to save money on fuel costs and reduce flying time, even though alternate routes may already exist, or could be established, that would go around the ash cloud.
Finally there's a good deal of politics in all of this which doesn't really make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint.
This is a great idea provided the area is geologically stable and there is little risk of flooding.
Dispersing data centers over wide geographical areas is also advisable.
They're not defective or old Core2Duos CPUs at all, they're pieces of metal disguised as cpus. They won't work as CPUs.
Someone went to all this trouble to approximate the weigh of an actual boxed CPU.
--dport 22 -i DROP
Use a high SSH port and allow logins from two static IPs -j DROP everything else.
Hire me to fix the rest ;)
These look like professionally done asian counterfeits to me. It's quite likely organized criminals are involved since it took a lot of resources to custom print the boxes and labels, and make the foam HSFs and fake cpus.
This isn't something the average joe or jane can do in his or her grandma's basement, you've got to have access to professional printing equipment at the very least.
Chances are a substantial number of real CPUs were stolen and replaced with these fakes.
Send me some drives and I'll be happy to retain my logs for 2 years ;)
You'll have to buy up all the drives on the market in the process.
Q. Can You Trust Chinese Computer Equipment?
A. Heck no!
If it doesn't blow up and set your whole machine room on fire, it's almost guaranteed to come trojaned straight from the factory.
When will we learn?
Ladies and Gents please stop unfairly attacking Widenius, as TheRaven64 already mentioned, he absolutely positively did not get $1 billion for mysql he got about $16.6 million in 2008 which is nowhere near $1 billion. [ source wikipedia with 2 other sources providing confirmation ]
The whole company was bought for $1 billion and a very small portion, reportedly about 12% or less of that went to Widenius and the other mysql founder.
And keep in mind transactions like this are rarely done in cash and there are many strings attached to any stock they may have received in the deal.
Because of this Widenius cannot buy mysql back from Sun or Oracle for $1 billion because he never got $1 billion and it is highly unlikely he could raise $1 billion to buy it back.
It is obvious that the sale of mysql to Oracle would have major anti-trust implications no matter what side of the argument you're on.
You may dislike Widenius and mysql and you're free to dislike them all you want but the fact is the entire community would be affected by the purchase if it goes through.
Oracle could turn mysql into crippleware, they may go after all the users, they could kill it or do any number of things which would not be good for the community. Even if you forked mysql Oracle could shut you down any time since they already own all kinds of patents and the underlying engine.
Like it or not, millions of websites and users depend on mysql one way or the other and migrating them all to prostgresql or any other DB would be a huge undertaking, especially if it's a forced migration.
If the purchase goes through I would like to see mysql sold to an independent 3rd party or spun off so that Oracle does not end up with a virtual monopoly in that sector.
A monopoly is not good for anyone.
Note that I'm in no way advocating mysql should be given back to Widenius or anyone else, just that it become completely independent and receive a fair and reasonable license to use Oracle's engine and mutually cross-license the patents and other IP to resolve the justified anti-trust and monopoly concerns.
That's pretty fair don't you think?
Why aren't they using the new TI OMAP3530 @720MHz? That should give them an advantage over the older OMAP3430 @600MHz.
How does one participate in the study?
That CIO should be tarred and feathered and hung upside down on the steps of the Capitol no pun intended.
Since it's 2009 and we want to be nice and politically correct we'll give him or her a medical exam first.
The LPDs are not aircraft carriers nor do they resemble the British carriers, such as the Invincible class.
You were probably thinking of the Tarawa class LHAs and Wasp class LHDs, which do outwardly resemble the Invincible class carriers, however they also have a well deck for landing craft which the British ships do not.
The LHAs and LHDs are primarily designed for amphibious landing operations, their primary mission is to deliver a USMC battalion to shore and support the Marines in combat operations.
The British Invincible-class carriers are light aircraft carriers whose primary mission is to operate Sea Harrier fixed wing V/STOL aircraft and helicopters.
While the US ships operate the AV-8B ( the US version of the Harrier ), V-22 Ospreys and helicopters they are not light aircraft carriers.
The Tarawa class ships are almost twice as big ( about 38,900 tons ) as the British carriers (by displacement) and the Wasps ( about 40,500 tons ) have about twice the displacement of Invincible-class ( about 20,700 tons ).
The Nimitz class super carriers are entirely in a class of their own. The newest Nimitz class carriers displace more than 103,000 tons and can operate up to 90 fixed wing non-V/STOL aircraft ( vs. about 20 aircraft including Harriers and helicopters for the British carriers ).
28502 matches for John.
147 matches for George.
Something tells me John was a popular name.
I thought St. George was the patron saint.
We need more nuclear power.
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources which require a heck of a lot of energy to mine and produce.
All those resources are best used elsewhere, where it is more efficient.
Nothing beats nuclear power at providing base generating capacity.
Let's get some hydro in there too, hydro is a dirty word nowadays, which is insane. It's more green than all the "fashionable green technologies".
Give me an all of above approach please!!!
And don't forget we need to return to the moon and start mining Helium 3 now();
Use an arduino clone.
http://www.arduino.cc/
Check out the Rock Bottom Freeduino Kit @ http://wulfden/ ( dot ) org/TheShoppe/freeduino/rbfk.shtml
Link has been edited to prevent the site from getting slashdotted.
Oblivion is not an MMO but it implements a fairly elegant solution to this problem.
You're allowed to fast travel between all the major cities right off the bat and other explored locations once they have been discovered.
You can also acquire a horse and ride around.
I think we do need to colonize space ASAP.
We can actually do it fairly inexpensively by using Burt Rutan's White Knight Two vehicle or an improved version thereof.
It only costs a few million to fly White Knight Two to altitude, launch small payloads into orbit and then perform in-orbit assembly, while a traditional rocket launch can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars or even into the billions.
It's far less costly and less risky to have frequent smaller launches, perhaps with an unmanned version of the launch vehicle and build up from there.
Once the orbiting vehicle is fully assembled we can send the crew up.
The Pegasus has already proved this concept.
Other carrier vehicles would work as well.
Burt Rutan has the answer!
Launch payloads from a White Knight Two++ vehicle and assemble in orbit.
It's not rocket science!
This isn't just about the CPU, it's about overall system performance.
Despite improvements in CPU performance, memory and IO performance is lagging behind.
A modern SATA drive delivers about 90MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
Some RAID controllers can do about 600-800MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
An average AM2 ( K10 core 65nm ) gets about 34,849MB/sec L1, 12,169MB/sec L2, 6371MB/sec L3, 2,741MB/sec DDR2-800 5-5-5-12.
Obviously Opterons scale a lot better since they each have an onboard memory controller and additional HT links which greatly increases bandwidth as you add more CPUs. However adding more cores on the same die which have to share a single memory controller can cause starvation.
Another major issue is software parallelization, writing parallel code is still a difficult problem. If your software doesn't parallelize well it doesn't matter if you have 8, 16 or even 32cores on a single die.
If you had an equal number of CPU cores and memory controllers you could achieve much better performance, however your relatively very slow storage subsystems would still be a major bottleneck.
Haven't these people heard of the base load? I mean c'mon.
I'm all for renewable energy and I have personally used 100% CFLs, LEDs and energy saving devices for many years, but it will require a tremendous amount of resources to build enough wind turbines to power the entire planet. These resources have to come from somewhere and a heck of a lot of pollution will be generated mining the required resources, producing hundreds of thousands of turbines, installing them and building a new electrical grid to support them. Besides the wind doesn't always blow when you need it to. Building an energy storage system to support the wind turbines will greatly increase their environmental footprint.
This is totally bogus. It makes no sense to go 100% wind when there are arguably more efficient ways to produce energy.
Nuclear and natural gas are much better choices for the base load until fusion comes along.
I wanna see an all of the above approach. I want nuclear and natural gas for the base load and solar, wind, hydro, tidal and other sources supplementing energy production where it makes sense.
I respect the environment within reason, but screw the birds and the fish, we need all kinds of clean energy ( solar, wind, hydro, ... ) and we need it now!
I do want a power plant in my back yard! And I want the water turned back on in California! Forget the fish, we have jobs to save and people to feed, unless the environmental nuts would rather get all their food from China, the world's number 2 polluter ( competing for the #1 spot ), along with a heavy dose of lead and lots of other toxins.
--
unix_geek_512
I believe in the death penalty for spammers and tyrants around the world and of course world peace!
Miss Congeniality
The console looks quite nice, I'd love to get one but the website is horrid.
It's flash and IMHO it looks terrible with very poor functionality.
What were you arrested for?
What geographical area?
SatanicPuppy and I are in general agreement, however I would go a step further and would suggest a multi-layered approach.
0. install steel conduit to protect your high value ( Fiber ) and mission critical cables.
1. use poison liberally.
2. use lots of traps.
3. eliminate the food supply.
4. repair any holes in the buildings with steel mesh and concrete.
5. invest in steel trash cans ( indoors and outdoors ) that lock and dispose of trash before the end of business every day so that no trash is left in the buildings overnight.
6. store no food in the buildings. This will require employee training.
7. install heavy duty stainless steel gates on all your drains.
8. Owls are better than cats, although they may make a mess, but it will be outside.
9. Cats are likely much more trouble than they are worth, especially in a server room where they could easily cause thousands of dollars of damage.
10. Hire http://www.vexconinc.com/ [ vexconinc.com ] from Dirty Jobs ;)
11. Buy some WowWee Rovio robots to patrol each of the buildings and record the video on a Linux DVR for later analysis. http://www.amazon.com/WowWee-Rovio-Enabled-Robotic-WebCam/dp/B001CQLGD6/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1234488032&sr=8-1 [ amazon.com ]
12. Balsam fir oil from the tree Abies balsamea is an EPA approved non-toxic rodent repellent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pest_control#Repellents [ wikipedia.org ]
13. Acacia polyacantha subsp. campylacantha root emits chemical compounds that repel animals including crocodiles, snakes and rats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pest_control#Repellents [ wikipedia.org ]
Good luck :)