ZFS is a game changer in the storage industry. While people are buying $250,000 NetApp installations, the exact same hardware, performance and connectivity will go for $5000 of high-end hardware and a couple of hours work with ZFS. $250,000 will easily buy you a Petabyte worth of redundant ZFS storage. Even the reasons you would otherwise buy NetApp or another proprietary storage solution (compression, de-duplication, checksums) is all implemented by ZFS.
NetApp recently lost their patents based on prior art (they basically ripped off somebody's paper and put in a patent for it), appealed it of course and now they are trying to squeeze the last money out of small shops before they get the smack down from the patent office. This is a very similar case to the Caldera/SCO cases.
And it's pretty much standard too - just invest as much as you can in your future projects and you won't have to pay taxes or anything on it. I used to work at a company (.com startup) that did the same thing. Every year they invested a rough $2 million (net profit) in the development team (4 people) - eventually the development team became their own company so they just shifted funds back and forth (here you go 2 mil. to build this application, here you go 2 mil. for rent) - the developers kept the same desks, computers etc. I believe they off-shored a healthy profit as well.
That's why I always pay by credit card from a reputable bank. You just dispute the payment and they cancel it for you. Some vendors have disputed my disputes after a quick call they have always refunded bad charges. Cash is so outdated and easy to lose.
These days however, clients are about as fast as their servers (if not faster) and servers have thousands of requests to handle. Most recent clients should be able to handle it. However, I wish that more developers also developed a site that would still work without JS however for simpler clients. There are simple ways to do that, to submit information, just use standard forms and AJAX those up. Same goes for menu's - they should be workable without a mouse (no 'hover' functionality) and use CSS instead of JS (where JS can add effects). At least more developers shy away from Flash to develop those extra's.
Actually, if a developer would develop their site to be usable for blind people, then we would be a great deal further (as those blind people can't see what JS does).
Yes, the US, where the 20th century was riddled with SUPREME court cases (not just shot down in lower courts) around religious freedom, lifestyle choices and institutionalized discrimination. The 21st century isn't much better but seems to revolve more around resisting innovation while considering human rights and the constitution ancient history, out of date or just quaint.
I mean, since the market has been deregulated, there must be some competitors in the market that can offer you cable besides whatever you have now. That's the point of the free market, to allow competitors to offer better service and have people choose which offering they want to take - there should be no state-subsidized monopoly on either cable or internet providers.
You could also use another type of TV provider: IPTV, Satellite - they should all have something in their commercial range that allows you to get your content and convert it back to analog.
And again I have to point out, MOST =/= ALL, Microsoft's version of 'Open' =/= Open.
Just read their EULA's - Only for use as a reference, can't make your own implementation, you can't sue them if you read the source code and find out they use your patents. If they sue you for the same reason (patents) and you counterclaim with your own, your license ends right there.
All Apple laptop power bricks have not a 3-pin kettle cord but the smaller (unpolarised C7) 2-pin cord and that has historically stayed the same. The great thing (historically) about Apple's power bricks is that within a certain era they all use the same connectors regardless of model. I have a bunch of iBook's, PowerBook's (PowerPC) and they all come with the same connector meaning I can have a power cord laying around in each of my couches and they will all charge. The same with their newer MagSafe connectors, they all work the same from 13" MacBook to 17" MacBook Pro regardless of build.
Dell on the other hand seems to have a different power plug requirement for just about any model in their arsenal with historically some really, really bad designs (like the one where the plug had 2 wire pins which so easily got bent and broke off that I ended up soldering a couple of laptops to their power bricks). The latest power brick from a Toshiba computer that I had to install uses a kettle-cord plug and the power brick alone weighed 3 lb, it was the hugest power brick I've ever seen. Even a Mac Mini has a smaller power brick.
And as the people in Iraq showed, you don't need to be all that advanced to get an uprising to succeed. You got one of the most powerful armies of the world (in firepower and advanced weaponry) against a bunch of sheepherders with busted AK-47's and they can 'improve' any type of explosive and a cell phone to take out a battalion of armored humvee's.
The worst thing is that neither pounds nor kilograms make sense IN SPACE! Both oxygen in water is measured in volume (gallon, liter, m^3) in the first place not in weight. Right now both the oxygen and water weigh around 0 lb (although there is some influence from the gravity of the nearby planet and moon but that's irrelevant).
They waited so long because a committee will probably have to look into it at the end of the period. If they can say: look, we're building it but we're a bit late because the , it looks better than saying, we've been spending your money over the past couple of months but have nothing to show for it.
$100/semester? That's cheap. I work at a University and I'm involved with some of the decisions that go on at the border:
Implementation of firewall (hasn't been one until this year), bandwidth shaper and intrusion detection: Syslog server + syslog license upgrade (not kidding): $50,000/year, $2000/year support contract 2 Cisco 6500 chassis with 10Gig modules: $60,000, $5000/year support contract Redundant IBM IDS: $100,000, $10,000/year support contract Redundant Traffic shaper upgrade: $20,000 5 consultants for 3 years: ~$2,000,000 Taking away time with meetings from 15 other employees because the contractors don't know what they're doing: ~$500,000 in lost time Having the existing network team do the planning, communication, testing and implementation from scratch in 2 months: infuriating Noticing that some of the vendors haven't actually tested their equipment in real life with 10GigE and multiple mult-gigabit Internet, Internet2 and MAN connections and thus coming short in processing capacity: even more infuriating Noticing that everything you just bought are just Linux/Unix-flavor boxes with Xeon processors and mostly open source software: priceless
The NRA and other gunslingers fight those laws because they consider the constitution to be absolute. The constitution grants US citizens the right to have weapons to protect themselves against forces both foreign and domestic. The police forces active either local, state or federal are some of those forces which could easily become a military force against citizens as has happened in many other 3rd world countries and they have fully automatic armor-piercing weapons.
Also, citizens should be able to protect their cultural heritage and art forms through whatever form they believe is best. What would have happened to many cultures if Rembrandt or da Vinci burned their paintings after a person paid them to view it? Or what would the Sixtine Chapel be if nobody was allowed to view it because they couldn't find the copyright owners after a few years? What good would a Gutenberg Bible be if he had encrypted the words and gave decryption keys on small self-destructing papers to only those who paid him a yearly fee?
There is a lot more to torrents and so-called 'pirating' (also known as copyright infringement, not a crime in most of the developed world) and the Pirate Bay than just getting free stuff on expense of the authors, many authors have long since lost royalties on those works and all royalties are pure profit for whomever bought the original publisher out.
The appropriate title of this debacle would be: ClimateGate, brought to you by Fox and Friends.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
Well, I think after a couple of months of successful business they would have at least skeleton papers on most common subjects. All you need is to rewrite that skeleton which is about an hour work for a decent sized paper.
You might remember a couple of years ago that there were a bunch of news stories about schools submitting papers to an online service to check for plagiarism (and students subsequently suing for copyright) so I doubt they would just be selling copies of pre-written essays. They might even use the same service to check their papers against it so they can guarantee a certain level of service.
This is a service for simple high school and college papers. I doubt they are up to par to be doing your PhD thesis.
Even before the Microsoft trial there was software out there that replaced the Microsoft Explorer engine which resulted in a really nifty desktop environment. I forgot the name of the software but I believe it has disappeared since. The problem was stability of course since not all API's that MSHTML provides are openly available and thus could not be implemented. Heck, we made Windows 95 through 98 work with the DR-DOS kernel resulting in a very fast and stable system. If you ever tried OS/2 Merlin, you know that it was possible to get a Win32 system working without IE. Most technical users knew Microsoft was lying since they knew where Windows came from and what it was based on.
Really, you need a gigabit network and transfer files over it using AFP and/or NFS and/or SMB. First of all HIPAA requires you to encrypt your hard drives which most researchers won't do (it's too difficult). Then you also got the problem what happens if the researchers (or somebody else) leaves with the data.
Solaris and by extension Nexenta have really good solutions for this. You can DIY a 40TB RAIDZ2 system for well under $18,000. If you use desktop SATA drives (which I wouldn't recommend but ZFS keeps it safe) for your data you can press that cost to $10 or $12k.
I work in the same environment as you (neuroimaging, large datasets), feel free to contact me privately for more info.
The problem is that most of the mom-and-pop shows use PayPal which many people have been bitten by and pressures people highly into getting a credit card with them and give them their bank account information at the same time. Recently, more shops have been getting Google Checkout which I and a lot of other people prefer. The problem for some remains that both PayPal and Google requires logins and keeps track of your payments whether you want it or not.
Another issue is that a lot of those shops if they are using any branding at all have really bad branding jobs. They really look like a scam since logo's and text will be wrong and outdated, the browser will alert that there is text, images or *ugh* scripts and forms that are NOT encrypted while on the payment site.
A good payment provider can transparently provide a secure, branded payment without tripping browser safeguards and without requiring arbitrary logins. The problem is that many developers don't know how to find them or use them. And PayPal are scammers themselves, nobody should trust them to begin with.
The interconnect will be 6Gbit/s and the highest interconnects I've seen commercially used are bonded 4 * 10Gbit/s (40Gbit/s) mainly for redundancy and latency. At 50MB/s (400Mbit/s) you'll need at least 100 of them to fill the bandwidth - enterprise SSD's don't sell for $200/32GB, try $2000.
The thing with Microsoft is that nothing you create based on their 'technologies' can truly be open. The Shared Source license is likewise not a very 'open' or 'free' (both in speech and in beer) license. The problem with Microsoft is that they have used their financial and patent weight against open source in the past and will probably continue doing so. If Microsoft really want, they can revoke all their permissions and promises at any point in time and all projects based on the Shared Source License would become closed.
What Microsoft needs to do to become open as you say is to support existing open initiatives (which SourceForge is a part of) and license the building blocks of their software (.NET/Mono) and patents more permissively. A truly good initiative would be to donate their patents in a legally binding trust fund (none of the 'we promise we won't unless it benefits us') that isn't managed by them and truly make their software more open.
Examples: Active Directory: It's basically LDAP + Kerberos, please remove the proprietary shill around it so it's easier to use clients that are not Windows (for a good example: Apple Open Directory) SMB: We have reverse engineered it for a while. It's simple, just open it or give the specs to the Samba team and stop changing crap between Windows versions so it keeps working..NET: Mono is an open implementation but is always behind. Open it up and release the patents on it so we can actually use Mono without fear of having it pulled within a couple of years. POSIX: Just do it right, you can keep Windows closed.
You're never safe. SSL was not supposed to be a proof of identity. It's merely an encryption standard to encrypt traffic. Back in the day, we had to manually add the CA's for each company we did trust so if something changed then we would get warned (very similar to how SSH works)
There's a solution for that too, I've seen them I believe in France and in Switzerland (in mountainous areas) there's a sign with 2 or 3 speed limits. One is for cars in good visibility, one is for cars when it's foggy, one is for trucks. They also have arrows on the road that show how far you can see, if you can't see further than 2 or 3 lines you're suggested to use the second speed limit.
Here in the US however I have lived in the mountainous areas as well and some turns are quite dangerous but the speed limits stay the same (45). However there is a piece of straight road in the middle of the national park where the road dips and the speed limit drops to 35 on top of the hill, if you let yourself roll you can achieve 55 or even 65 but at the bottom of the hill is the local constable. In the US there are two reasons for speed limits: 1) ticket revenue, 2) liability. The liability makes the speed limit so low in some places that unless you're an oversized truck with a manufactured house on your trailer in a snow storm you're going way too slow in just about any condition.
It is the freakin' Middle East, everybody has guns. I see this comment and other versions of it posted around here and other forums by guys with a pretty recent UID. Could there be some spreading of misinformation going on from the powers-that-be that don't want this video out?
This whole thing stinks badly. There have been mistakes before and the footage has usually been released, people accepted it, people apologized, people got punished and moved on. There seems to be a media blackout around this event and a lot of nationalistic propaganda being spread around the subject.
It may be socially unacceptable (at this moment in history) but it's not legally wrong. Back in the day (before the Internet or mass communications) it was fairly acceptable for somebody to overhear conversations and then gossip about it to the town. Several religious organizations likewise like overheard conversations about moral wrongdoing to be reported to them and some might even encourage casual snooping or plain wiretapping (Scientology). These days the town is the world but it's no different.
Slashdot Mirror
ZFS is a game changer in the storage industry. While people are buying $250,000 NetApp installations, the exact same hardware, performance and connectivity will go for $5000 of high-end hardware and a couple of hours work with ZFS. $250,000 will easily buy you a Petabyte worth of redundant ZFS storage. Even the reasons you would otherwise buy NetApp or another proprietary storage solution (compression, de-duplication, checksums) is all implemented by ZFS.
NetApp recently lost their patents based on prior art (they basically ripped off somebody's paper and put in a patent for it), appealed it of course and now they are trying to squeeze the last money out of small shops before they get the smack down from the patent office. This is a very similar case to the Caldera/SCO cases.
And it's pretty much standard too - just invest as much as you can in your future projects and you won't have to pay taxes or anything on it. I used to work at a company (.com startup) that did the same thing. Every year they invested a rough $2 million (net profit) in the development team (4 people) - eventually the development team became their own company so they just shifted funds back and forth (here you go 2 mil. to build this application, here you go 2 mil. for rent) - the developers kept the same desks, computers etc. I believe they off-shored a healthy profit as well.
That's why I always pay by credit card from a reputable bank. You just dispute the payment and they cancel it for you. Some vendors have disputed my disputes after a quick call they have always refunded bad charges. Cash is so outdated and easy to lose.
These days however, clients are about as fast as their servers (if not faster) and servers have thousands of requests to handle. Most recent clients should be able to handle it. However, I wish that more developers also developed a site that would still work without JS however for simpler clients. There are simple ways to do that, to submit information, just use standard forms and AJAX those up. Same goes for menu's - they should be workable without a mouse (no 'hover' functionality) and use CSS instead of JS (where JS can add effects). At least more developers shy away from Flash to develop those extra's.
Actually, if a developer would develop their site to be usable for blind people, then we would be a great deal further (as those blind people can't see what JS does).
Yes, the US, where the 20th century was riddled with SUPREME court cases (not just shot down in lower courts) around religious freedom, lifestyle choices and institutionalized discrimination. The 21st century isn't much better but seems to revolve more around resisting innovation while considering human rights and the constitution ancient history, out of date or just quaint.
I mean, since the market has been deregulated, there must be some competitors in the market that can offer you cable besides whatever you have now. That's the point of the free market, to allow competitors to offer better service and have people choose which offering they want to take - there should be no state-subsidized monopoly on either cable or internet providers.
You could also use another type of TV provider: IPTV, Satellite - they should all have something in their commercial range that allows you to get your content and convert it back to analog.
And again I have to point out, MOST =/= ALL, Microsoft's version of 'Open' =/= Open.
Just read their EULA's - Only for use as a reference, can't make your own implementation, you can't sue them if you read the source code and find out they use your patents. If they sue you for the same reason (patents) and you counterclaim with your own, your license ends right there.
All Apple laptop power bricks have not a 3-pin kettle cord but the smaller (unpolarised C7) 2-pin cord and that has historically stayed the same. The great thing (historically) about Apple's power bricks is that within a certain era they all use the same connectors regardless of model. I have a bunch of iBook's, PowerBook's (PowerPC) and they all come with the same connector meaning I can have a power cord laying around in each of my couches and they will all charge. The same with their newer MagSafe connectors, they all work the same from 13" MacBook to 17" MacBook Pro regardless of build.
Dell on the other hand seems to have a different power plug requirement for just about any model in their arsenal with historically some really, really bad designs (like the one where the plug had 2 wire pins which so easily got bent and broke off that I ended up soldering a couple of laptops to their power bricks). The latest power brick from a Toshiba computer that I had to install uses a kettle-cord plug and the power brick alone weighed 3 lb, it was the hugest power brick I've ever seen. Even a Mac Mini has a smaller power brick.
And as the people in Iraq showed, you don't need to be all that advanced to get an uprising to succeed. You got one of the most powerful armies of the world (in firepower and advanced weaponry) against a bunch of sheepherders with busted AK-47's and they can 'improve' any type of explosive and a cell phone to take out a battalion of armored humvee's.
The worst thing is that neither pounds nor kilograms make sense IN SPACE! Both oxygen in water is measured in volume (gallon, liter, m^3) in the first place not in weight. Right now both the oxygen and water weigh around 0 lb (although there is some influence from the gravity of the nearby planet and moon but that's irrelevant).
They waited so long because a committee will probably have to look into it at the end of the period. If they can say: look, we're building it but we're a bit late because the , it looks better than saying, we've been spending your money over the past couple of months but have nothing to show for it.
$100/semester? That's cheap. I work at a University and I'm involved with some of the decisions that go on at the border:
Implementation of firewall (hasn't been one until this year), bandwidth shaper and intrusion detection:
Syslog server + syslog license upgrade (not kidding): $50,000/year, $2000/year support contract
2 Cisco 6500 chassis with 10Gig modules: $60,000, $5000/year support contract
Redundant IBM IDS: $100,000, $10,000/year support contract
Redundant Traffic shaper upgrade: $20,000
5 consultants for 3 years: ~$2,000,000
Taking away time with meetings from 15 other employees because the contractors don't know what they're doing: ~$500,000 in lost time
Having the existing network team do the planning, communication, testing and implementation from scratch in 2 months: infuriating
Noticing that some of the vendors haven't actually tested their equipment in real life with 10GigE and multiple mult-gigabit Internet, Internet2 and MAN connections and thus coming short in processing capacity: even more infuriating
Noticing that everything you just bought are just Linux/Unix-flavor boxes with Xeon processors and mostly open source software: priceless
The NRA and other gunslingers fight those laws because they consider the constitution to be absolute. The constitution grants US citizens the right to have weapons to protect themselves against forces both foreign and domestic. The police forces active either local, state or federal are some of those forces which could easily become a military force against citizens as has happened in many other 3rd world countries and they have fully automatic armor-piercing weapons.
Also, citizens should be able to protect their cultural heritage and art forms through whatever form they believe is best. What would have happened to many cultures if Rembrandt or da Vinci burned their paintings after a person paid them to view it? Or what would the Sixtine Chapel be if nobody was allowed to view it because they couldn't find the copyright owners after a few years? What good would a Gutenberg Bible be if he had encrypted the words and gave decryption keys on small self-destructing papers to only those who paid him a yearly fee?
There is a lot more to torrents and so-called 'pirating' (also known as copyright infringement, not a crime in most of the developed world) and the Pirate Bay than just getting free stuff on expense of the authors, many authors have long since lost royalties on those works and all royalties are pure profit for whomever bought the original publisher out.
The appropriate title of this debacle would be: ClimateGate, brought to you by Fox and Friends.
Well, I think after a couple of months of successful business they would have at least skeleton papers on most common subjects. All you need is to rewrite that skeleton which is about an hour work for a decent sized paper.
You might remember a couple of years ago that there were a bunch of news stories about schools submitting papers to an online service to check for plagiarism (and students subsequently suing for copyright) so I doubt they would just be selling copies of pre-written essays. They might even use the same service to check their papers against it so they can guarantee a certain level of service.
This is a service for simple high school and college papers. I doubt they are up to par to be doing your PhD thesis.
Even before the Microsoft trial there was software out there that replaced the Microsoft Explorer engine which resulted in a really nifty desktop environment. I forgot the name of the software but I believe it has disappeared since. The problem was stability of course since not all API's that MSHTML provides are openly available and thus could not be implemented. Heck, we made Windows 95 through 98 work with the DR-DOS kernel resulting in a very fast and stable system. If you ever tried OS/2 Merlin, you know that it was possible to get a Win32 system working without IE. Most technical users knew Microsoft was lying since they knew where Windows came from and what it was based on.
Really, you need a gigabit network and transfer files over it using AFP and/or NFS and/or SMB. First of all HIPAA requires you to encrypt your hard drives which most researchers won't do (it's too difficult). Then you also got the problem what happens if the researchers (or somebody else) leaves with the data.
Solaris and by extension Nexenta have really good solutions for this. You can DIY a 40TB RAIDZ2 system for well under $18,000. If you use desktop SATA drives (which I wouldn't recommend but ZFS keeps it safe) for your data you can press that cost to $10 or $12k.
I work in the same environment as you (neuroimaging, large datasets), feel free to contact me privately for more info.
The problem is that most of the mom-and-pop shows use PayPal which many people have been bitten by and pressures people highly into getting a credit card with them and give them their bank account information at the same time. Recently, more shops have been getting Google Checkout which I and a lot of other people prefer. The problem for some remains that both PayPal and Google requires logins and keeps track of your payments whether you want it or not.
Another issue is that a lot of those shops if they are using any branding at all have really bad branding jobs. They really look like a scam since logo's and text will be wrong and outdated, the browser will alert that there is text, images or *ugh* scripts and forms that are NOT encrypted while on the payment site.
A good payment provider can transparently provide a secure, branded payment without tripping browser safeguards and without requiring arbitrary logins. The problem is that many developers don't know how to find them or use them. And PayPal are scammers themselves, nobody should trust them to begin with.
Does the U.S. really want to be like China or Iran
"Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too," Lieberman
The interconnect will be 6Gbit/s and the highest interconnects I've seen commercially used are bonded 4 * 10Gbit/s (40Gbit/s) mainly for redundancy and latency. At 50MB/s (400Mbit/s) you'll need at least 100 of them to fill the bandwidth - enterprise SSD's don't sell for $200/32GB, try $2000.
The thing with Microsoft is that nothing you create based on their 'technologies' can truly be open. The Shared Source license is likewise not a very 'open' or 'free' (both in speech and in beer) license. The problem with Microsoft is that they have used their financial and patent weight against open source in the past and will probably continue doing so. If Microsoft really want, they can revoke all their permissions and promises at any point in time and all projects based on the Shared Source License would become closed.
What Microsoft needs to do to become open as you say is to support existing open initiatives (which SourceForge is a part of) and license the building blocks of their software (.NET/Mono) and patents more permissively. A truly good initiative would be to donate their patents in a legally binding trust fund (none of the 'we promise we won't unless it benefits us') that isn't managed by them and truly make their software more open.
Examples: .NET: Mono is an open implementation but is always behind. Open it up and release the patents on it so we can actually use Mono without fear of having it pulled within a couple of years.
Active Directory: It's basically LDAP + Kerberos, please remove the proprietary shill around it so it's easier to use clients that are not Windows (for a good example: Apple Open Directory)
SMB: We have reverse engineered it for a while. It's simple, just open it or give the specs to the Samba team and stop changing crap between Windows versions so it keeps working.
POSIX: Just do it right, you can keep Windows closed.
You're never safe. SSL was not supposed to be a proof of identity. It's merely an encryption standard to encrypt traffic. Back in the day, we had to manually add the CA's for each company we did trust so if something changed then we would get warned (very similar to how SSH works)
There's a solution for that too, I've seen them I believe in France and in Switzerland (in mountainous areas) there's a sign with 2 or 3 speed limits. One is for cars in good visibility, one is for cars when it's foggy, one is for trucks. They also have arrows on the road that show how far you can see, if you can't see further than 2 or 3 lines you're suggested to use the second speed limit.
Here in the US however I have lived in the mountainous areas as well and some turns are quite dangerous but the speed limits stay the same (45). However there is a piece of straight road in the middle of the national park where the road dips and the speed limit drops to 35 on top of the hill, if you let yourself roll you can achieve 55 or even 65 but at the bottom of the hill is the local constable. In the US there are two reasons for speed limits: 1) ticket revenue, 2) liability. The liability makes the speed limit so low in some places that unless you're an oversized truck with a manufactured house on your trailer in a snow storm you're going way too slow in just about any condition.
It is the freakin' Middle East, everybody has guns. I see this comment and other versions of it posted around here and other forums by guys with a pretty recent UID. Could there be some spreading of misinformation going on from the powers-that-be that don't want this video out?
This whole thing stinks badly. There have been mistakes before and the footage has usually been released, people accepted it, people apologized, people got punished and moved on. There seems to be a media blackout around this event and a lot of nationalistic propaganda being spread around the subject.
It may be socially unacceptable (at this moment in history) but it's not legally wrong. Back in the day (before the Internet or mass communications) it was fairly acceptable for somebody to overhear conversations and then gossip about it to the town. Several religious organizations likewise like overheard conversations about moral wrongdoing to be reported to them and some might even encourage casual snooping or plain wiretapping (Scientology). These days the town is the world but it's no different.