On the VPS service I use, we occasionally get blocked...
Full STOP.
Occasionally? Apparently you either:
A. Are a spammer, or B. Are completely clueless
VPS is rapidly becoming *the* most popular hosting method used by non bot herder spammers. The hosting is terribly cheap, often free for the first month, and the spammer doesn't have to worry about acquiring IP space as in days past because it's provided by the VPS hosting firm, thus, no more problems getting more and more netblocks from ARIN once the current set is scorched by local blocklists at receivers and by dnsbls. And the customer vetting at VPS providers seems to be almost non-existent.
Accepting mail at this point in the decade is all about the reputation of the sender. Ask any mail admin worth his salt if he trusts email coming from a VPS cluster. An intrinsic quality of being a trustworthy sender is having clue. If you're trying to send from a VPS cluster this means you have no clue, and thus cannot be trusted.
Sorry pal. In a fair world a mail server on a VPS cluster shouldn't be discriminated against any more than a bare metal mail server inside AT&T's core mail services data center. But it's not a fair world, because spammers have ruined it. Running a mail sending host from a VPS cluster makes you look far more like a spammer than an AT&T.
Get it yet? Pull out your wallet and get some real hosting with a company with a real reputation. Build your own box and colo up with a respectable ISP. THEN, if you get listed by a dnsbl, you have a legit gripe. Assuming you're NOT a spammer, that is.
BTW, exactly whose VPS service are you using. That alone may shed much light on why you're getting listed. I've got quite a number of VPS providers in my local block list due to tons of showshoe emission. I wonder if you're using one of them.
* Excepting Godaddy who is fucking insane. Those assholes filter *URL's pointing to a PBL'd IP that are embedded in a message*!!! Worse, they dont tell you. Had fun learning that.
That's interesting, considering GoDaddy hosts a number of spammers on their VPS service. It'd be really interesting to know if they've filtered an email with one of their own IP addresses in it due to the reason you mention. It wouldn't surprise me. They probably have.
I'm hardly an idiot. If I could find an open source software package capable of doing what I require, I would have gone that way a long time ago. As it stands, I have to use a proprietary software package that does not allow me to weight the incoming emails based of *any* RBL's. I can only refuse the connection based on the RBL's.
You're kidding right? What (where) is your skill set? Build a Linux or FreeBSD smart host box with Postfix and SpamAssassin. Then relay the scrubbed mail stream to your current mail server. You can block outright based on dnsbl hits within Postfix, or you can score based on dnsbl hits in SpamAssassin.
If you're currently running Exchange, all you have to do is tell Postfix to relay all inbound mail to the IP address of your Exch server. For example, in main.cf you'd have:
relayhost = 10.3.2.1
To get Postfix to accept mail for your users, you can either have Postfix poll your AD server for valid user addresses, or you can just manually type them into a relay_recipients file, if you're a small organization, say 100 users or less. The manual thing gets really tedious for larger user counts.
It's a fantastic anti spam solution. If you're not a sysadmin type and don't know anything about dns and changing MX IPs in your dns server or getting your provider to do it, you may not want to take this plunge. You've got to have some decent networking background, including configuring dns entries on your authoritative server.
Your parent is right. There does exist a set of clueless people who straight filter based on RBL's like SORBS. Sure, filter your home mail server any way you want, but the *second* you have third-party people using your system (or the second you run the mail server for a business), you should be outright fired for filtering based solely on something like SORBS.
I figure if there is a real problem, that I will get a support call from a customer and I can act accordingly
That is because I dont waste my time calling you. I call your boss and your sales department. If you really are running a business mail server and filtering based on SORBS, you are basically clueless and I'll gain nothing talking to you Your sales staff though, I'm sure they'd be happy to know you are blocking my customers inquiries into your companies products. And I'm probably also sure that if you are the type who filters like that, they probably have a bunch of other issues with the way you run their systems and this just might be the straw that broke the camels back.
I disagree. Here's why:
The vast majority of these cases are caused by small business "email admins" or contractors who have no clue how to setup a mail server. And I'm not talking the host (machine) itself, but all the DNS magic that makes a mail server a legitimate mail server. Mismatched rDNS, hosting the mail server behind a dynamic IP xDSL line and using wildcard dynamic DNS to make the MX record work (i.e. inbound email delivery), etc, etc. All of these things will often cause one to end up on a dnsbl, and rightly so. Then they bitch about it. Getting listed because of something like this should be a cluestick to the guy running the listed system that he needs to make some changes to come into compliance with community standards. This is one of the main benefits of dnsbls. Spammers get caught, and those with misconfigured systems get a wake up call.
There are community standards one *must* meet when setting up and outbound mail server, lest one be listed in dnsbls or flagged by other spam countermeasures.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case nowadays that blackhole lists ( or whatever they're called ) are used mainly as a factor in weighing scores in Bayesian methods of filtering spam, rather than just blocking email outright? In other words, the usage is still widespread, not for direct blocking, but for helping a program decide if its spam or not?
If so, this would let more spam through spam filters, really.
It depends on the individual mail admin or organization. Some outright block on a dnsbl hit, some use it for scoring in their fav content filtering daemon. On my 'vanity' MX that hosts my personal domain, I block outright based on dnsbl hits. However, I'm pretty selective in the dnsbls that I use, and yes, SORBS is among the 6 or so I have configured. I've only seen one "false positive" in 3 years or so of using SORBS, and that's because Playboy's "send this pic to a friend" feature has apparently caused too many complaints over the years, resulting in a listing of the sending IPs at Playboy's contractor, rsys.com or something like that.
Dual GPU solutions are so pointless, a waste of money for little performance gain, that doesn't even work in some games.
This wasn't always the case, although back then the marketing term GPU hadn't been invented yet. I have a pair of 12MB 3Dfx branded Voodoo2 cards (post STB acquisition), and they doubled the performance of every game I played. There was no overhead loss of any kind. The performance scaling was performed almost entirely in hardware, with little driver support needed. Remember all the benchmarks at Anand Tech et al that showed perfect 2x scaling for the Voodoo2 SLI setup?
The main reason for this is that geometry processing was still mostly handled by the host CPU back then. Once geometry was moved into the graphics chip (GPU), the original scan line interleave became impossible. Or, I should say, to do so would require idling one GPU's geometry unit altogether, and only utilizing its raster units. The main advantage of a GPU *IS* the build in geometry unit--everything on one chip, shorter communications paths, greater bandwidth between units and memory, etc.
Does anyone remember the Obsidian Alchemy cards? They put Voodoo2 SLI on a single board. In addition to this 'consumer' card, they had a military/government product which paired 4 of these boards into a Pentium II system for a total of 8 Voodoo2s. All of them were daisy chained together, and had external genlock/framelock F connectors to drive synchronized scene output on a set of 4 displays for flight/battle tank/ship/helicopter simulations. They also had the ability to drive a single display at 2048x1536, IIRC, with full 8x FSAA, albeit at 16bpp.
My point, after all that text above, is that graphics is, and always has been, extremely parallel in nature. If the consumer market truly demands scalable graphics, from the standpoint of slapping more and more cards in a system and getting linear scalability, then the GPU 'industry' is going to have to go back to the scan line interleave model and put geometry processing back on the host CPU. This will require a driver and pipeline rewrite across the industry, as all the APIs (DirectX and OpenGL) have been built up since around 1998 for integrated GPUs.
The reason we're where we are is chip production cost. It's cost, cost, cost. Manufacturers need to minimize the number of unique chips they produce due to cost. That's why what I write below will likely never happen...
The other 'option' is for the GPU guys to make 2 separate chips, such as Intergraph and 3Dlabs did back in the day, and 3Dfx did with their final product, the Voodoo5 series. They had a dedicated geometry chip, and dedicated raster chips, decoupling them, vs the nVidia design, so as to allow multiple raster chips for greater performance. (Back then the APIs and the games were still primarily pixel bound, not geometry bound). This was done, albeit, on one board.
However, it would be possible, and possibly very advantageous, to create one board with a geometry chip, and a board with the raster chips, with custom cabled interconnects between the cards, that could handle extremely high bandwidth. In essence, we're taking the old SLI model, but offloading the geometry from the host CPU to a dedicated chip, just like we do today, but we're decoupling the raster function from the geometry at the physical hardware level. Today it's all on the single chip.
Geometry processing isn't inherently parallel in nature. It is mostly serial, defining the 3D scene, one polygon after another, and they must be in order, lest the scene be corrupted. This is why current "SLI" schemes fail to deliver anywhere close to linear speedup. They expend more host CPU resources crunching driver code trying to divvy up the geometry load between two GPUs than they do actually dividing the total graphics processing load across two GPUs--both geometry and raster.
A product based on the above architecture would kick the dog shit out of any "SLI" solution on the market t
I always used to be able to spot foreigners by their misuse of "an" in front of words beginning with hard consonants. Now stupid Americans who think it makes them look cool are adopting this shitty overseas grammar butchery of American English...
We all mastered a, an, and the in 3rd or 4th grade. If not, we didn't proceed to the next grade in school. Why, for the love of Pete, are thousands upon thousands of very educated and intelligent U.S. people all of a sudden forgetting these rules which they have used for all of their adult lives?
Is this a more subtle version of ultra-liberal American TV and radio 'journalists' adopting British accents, in the hope it will somehow give them credibility they haven't actually earned?
More fantastic examples of proper usage of the article 'an':
"Dad, can I have an bicycle for my birthday?" "That's not an lion, that's an kangaroo." "Hay, let's fly an jetliner into an skyscraper and an Pentagon!"
Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here. -- Slow Poke
It's almost guaranteed that they are talking virtual servers as well as some bare metal. Rackspace is talking about the 50,000 web servers that *THEY* manage--i.e. managed services. This figure likely doesn't include the thousands of rented colo machines which their customers manage themselves. The latter was Rackspace's first business model, a pure colo. It wasn't until relatively recently that they started offering managed services. It may very very turn out that the 50,000 server figure is the entire sum total of physical servers on their network.
Well, they were the first to port Linux to a serious parallel architecture. Still not many vendors that will support a 512-core and 1-kernel system...
It was 512 Itanium2 *sockets* per kernel, 1024 cores per kernel with the dual core Itanium2. You shorted SGI by 512 cores/system.;)
And word has it they'd build 1024 socket/2048 core systems upon special request. I don't know if they ever sold an Altix configured this way. I do know it is possible, and (was) available.
Only one of the survey respondents is closely tracking its IPv4 address usage, saying that it needs 130,000 new IPv4 addresses every three years.
Only spammers go through IP space at this rate, which brings up a very good point in the v6 vs v4 debate. That point is that there are dozens of "reserved"/8 IPv4 networks that have never been assigned/used and there are tons of "scorched earth" networks and netblocks that no one wants because spammers have caused them to be universally blacklisted in DNSBLs or firewalled by many entities (ISPs, Corps, EDUs, etc).
Many have known for a very long time that we don't need more address space. We need to make more judicious use of what we already have. But, then again, Internet Protocol and the net itself are American inventions. And it's the American way to throw out something perfectly good for something marginally better, simply because we're tired of having to properly maintain what we already have. Sad sad sad...
Then there's always the money trail. ARIN will bring in more revenue if they have more address space to 'lease'. Greed is a far more significant aspect of IPv6 deployment than most people realize. Yes, gasp!, there is greed in ARIN. They are not, nor have they ever been, a neutral organization.
Specter will be 80 years old come the 2010 election. At that point he'll be 18 years past SS retirement age. He is completely ineffective as a Senator. He's been nothing but a puppet for years since his mind fell apart long ago. He should have retired long ago and given younger blood a chance to represent the state. He damn well should have retired this week instead of switching parties. This musical chairs act should tip off the entire state that he's merely power hungry and cares nothing about doing the work of his constituents. I'd vote against him because of the party switch, were I a Pennsylvanian.
80 years old and switching parties merely to hang onto his job. He's got plenty of money. It's all about maintaining his "power". He needs to go. I hope the folks of the state come to their senses and boot this old fart out in 2010 regardless of party affiliation.
Most people buy computers one at a time, but Google thinks on a very different scale. Jimmy Clidaras revealed that the core of the company's data centers are composed of standard 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers each, with many containers in each data center.
Mainstream servers with x86 processors were the only option, he added. "Ten years ago...it was clear the only way to make (search) work as free product was to run on relatively cheap hardware. You can't run it on a mainframe. The margins just don't work out," he said.
I think Google may be selling themselves short. Once you start building standardized data centers in shipping containers with singular hookups between the container and the outside world, you've stopped building individual rack-mounted machines. Instead, you've begun building a much larger machine with thousands of networked components. In effect, Google is building the mainframes of the 21st century. No longer are we talking about dozens of mainboards hooked up via multi-gigabit backplanes. We're talking about complete computing elements wired up via a self-contained, high speed network with a combined computing power that far exceeds anything currently identified as a mainframe.
The industry needs to stop thinking of these systems as portable data centers, and start recognizing them for what they are: Incredibly advanced machines with massive, distributed computing power. And since high-end computing has been headed toward multiprocessing for some time now, the market is ripe for these sorts of solutions. It's not a "cloud". It's the new mainframe.
Insightful my ass. The packaging of a bunch of networked servers doesn't change the computing paradigm my friend. And sticking a UPS inside the rack chassis of each server doesn't make these 'special' or very much unique. These are merely optimizations of the same old crap people have been doing in colos for years. All Google has done is tweak the packaging and deployment logistics because of the scale they require.
This is not a mainframe and never will be. Are you saying we need to redefine the term mainframe? You should probably study up on the current definition first.
Mainframes are still alive and well. There just aren't as many of them currently deployed as in days of yore because there are many new applications today that run better, for many reasons, on decentralized systems, such as Google search. Go to any central bank HQ datacenter and you'll find good old IBM mainframes. Same with MasterCard, maybe VISA, any grocery store or retail mart (Walmart/Target/JCPenney/etc). Nearly all still run core business operations on IBM or Fujitsu or Hitachi mainframes. Some have converted to big Unix boxen over the years. Even though newer Unix boxen don't run CICS or Cobol, they're used in exactly the same way, and it all runs on one centralized box. Today, most of these entities run a duplicate recovery system, classic mainframes and the big Unix systems, at a duplicate site, using some pretty sophisticated communications and synchronization protocols. The processing model is the same, but redundancy is in vogue, and probably pretty wise.
The single most significant characteristic of a "mainframe" is "centralization". There is no way around this. Once you decentralize a work flow with a distributed node architecture, you're no longer in "mainframe" territory. No matter how powerful the aggregate set of nodes is, it will never be a "mainframe" because of the decentralization.
Pick yourself a different buzzword for these massive distributed systems that make your crotch tingle. They are not and never will be "mainframes" kid.
This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.
Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.
SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.
It's been pretty well documented what killed the RISC workstation market: competition from COTS PCs. First the Pentium Pro and Windows NT 4.0 came along offering great capability for a 1/3rd the cost of RISC, then the specialized 3D card companies offering x86 Windows drivers for their cards, such as Intergraph, 3D Labs, etc. Further COTS competition caused 3Dlabs to acquire Intergraph's graphics card business, and the nVidia and ATI forced 3Dlabs out of the desktop graphics space.
I'll agree with you 100% on SGI's inability to run a lean ship. I think it basically boils down to the fact that most of their key customers need capabilities that they're no longer willing to pay for, because there are so many cheap cluster solutions out there. SGI employs a sizable cadre of true computer scientists, we're talking Ph.D.s, in order to be able to support system integration and application optimization and tuning for customers like NASA, SARA, et al. I don't thing they've ever priced those "services" properly, instead throwing in this support as a "value add" in order to win big system contracts. They've consistently undercut themselves for fear of losing the big bids to IBM, who also has a sizable cadre of Ph.D. engineers. This is a sad situation, because SGI is and has always been a fantastic company with leading edge products and people. Those x86 irons in the fire around 99/2000 really really hurt them, and was a terrible move. Trimming down and eliminating everything but the HPC systems, storage, software and integration is what has saved them--not that they're 100% stable at this time or will be in the future. Lots of competition out there...
You're dead wrong on your 'mature market' analysis. Building the unique widget and licensing it out is what builds a mature market, not the other way around. You're also wrong WRT to NUMALink. It would never have been what Infiniband is, because Infiniband is inferior technology. Infiniband is inferior *because* SGI wouldn't whore out NUMALink. NUMALink is the single biggest differentiator SGI has. It's the only system interconnect that supports hardware cache coherency across the entire machine, up to 2,048 cores. Infiniband is merely a fast cluster interconnect. There is a single aspect in which Infiniband 'beats' NUMALink, and that's cost. In every other way it's inferior. You're analysis is off WRT InfiniteReality as well. SGI went to nVidia and ATI because their COTS GPU silicon was speeding away from SGI's proprietary ASICs. In fact, at one point, the InfiniteReality Engine name was retained for the first generation of graphics pipes based on COTS GPUs. SGI was the creator of dedicated 3D graphics silicon, but the general desktop computing market evolved into 3D applications (games) and thus economy of scale turned SGI into a minor producer of specialized 3D chips. It was a
The dance between malware writers and the security experts seeking to thwart them continues ever on.
Yeah, except this exploit method allows the defenders to pretty easily slam the dance partner to the floor.
Simple defeat method:
BIOS coders write in a checksum routine that runs at system initialization time. The routine checks the board maker's original (i.e. known good) BIOS file size on the flash device against the current used spaced on the device upon every boot. If the checksum routine finds that the used space on the flash device has changed, set off bright red alarms and noises. Obviously this is a *per rev* size, so each new BIOS update offered by the board maker will include the proper size check and checksum code. Thus, flashing your mobo with an update having a different file size won't set off the alarms, but unauthorized changes to the used space on the flash chip will set off the alarms.
To defeat this countermeasure, the exploit coder is actually going to have to rewrite part of the original BIOS to defeat the checksum process along with burning their own extra code in the empty space.
This seems like pretty simple stuff. The problem would be non-l337 mobo owners who ignore the alarm for a myriad of stupid reasons, as with many lusers who ignore problems on their PC until it's 'too late'. For the rest of us, this should be a sufficient countermeasure.
Sun doesn't have the right mix of people, products, ideas, or a strategy to survive moving forward. Like Texas Instruments, Wang, CDC, and other great computer companies of yesteryear, Sun is going to become extinct, one way or another. SPARC is fundamentally dead, and by entering talks with IBM they are finally admitting so.
Sun has no constant steady revenue stream ala IBM with services or HP with printers. The lack of a steady revenue stream is what has caused Sun's misfortunes since the dot com bubble burst.
Others have speculated on what IBM would get out of this acquisition, but most here seems focused on software because you're software geeks. I tell you now that IBM has little interest in Sun's software from a strategic standpoint. There is no revenue in it. IBM is an earnings driven company, NOT a FOSS vs MS company. I'm sure IBM would like to see a day when MS only has 50% or less of the desktop and apps, but that's NOT a strategic goal of IBM's, because there is no money to be made in such an effort.
If IBM is actually considering acquiring Sun, it is for a few key reasons, none software related:
1. IBM finally kills SPARC as a competing platform in the US allowing potential for POWER sales to grow slightly. (Fujitsu and Siemens will likely still market SPARC in East Asia/Pacific and Europe)
2. IBM gets StorageTek in the acquisition, eliminating their main competitor in the enterprise tape business, obtaining a near monopoly in the process. Granted tape isn't nearly as popular as an archival and recovery medium as it once was, but it's stilled required, especially in very large environments where DTD backup then to DVD-R isn't practical. Margins in the enterprise tape business are very high.
3. IBM will obtain Sun's service contracts and immediately new customers. Obviously there is likely current customer overlap between the companies, but IBM will still pick up some new clients. When the current Sun service contracts expire, IBM will likely sign all those customers to new IBM Global Services contracts. Services contracts are IBM's single largest profit center and have been for a number of years.
4. IBM will obtain Suns' IP portfolio and patents. Although it may not generate much revenue in the short term, ZFS and RAID-Z are attractive to IBM for obvious reasons.
5. AFAIK, Sun and HP currently dominate the Telco market, Sun in the central offices with its NEBS servers and both Sun and HP in the datacenter for call logging, billing, other databases, etc. IBM does currently have NEBS servers, but their penetration is relatively small. Acquiring Sun gets IBM more penetration into the central offices and possibly more penetration in the Telco datacenters.
In summary, if IBM has an appetite for acquiring Sun, it is due to increased revenue potential in the hardware and services sectors, and has little or nothing to do with a software strategy. IBM has little interest in sectors that don't make money, and making a big FOSS desktop push isn't going to gain them substantial services revenue. It would however increase developer head count and thus costs.
These days, even Sennheiser's low end is "good enough" for the non-snob audiophile
Snob is part of the definition of Audiophile. There is no way around it. To progress beyond "enthusiast" to "audiophile" or, as I like much better, "golden ear", one must become a snob. The key reason is money. There are no poor audiophiles. All 'audiophile' gear, electronics or otherwise, is horribly expensive, prohibitively so, but for the rich.
That's hardly pocket change to a corporation like Hitachi.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hardly pocket change". That phrasing and choice of words sounds like you think Hitachi will bleed over $31M. $31M *IS* pocket change, chump change, insignificant, to Hitachi. They're a multi $billion worldwide conglomerate. They can raid the petty cash shoebox to the pay this fine. Now, the panel division may be setup as a separate LLC. I don't know. If it is, then the LLC would have to pay the fine, not the parent Hitachi. $31M would probably be more than petty cash to the LLC panel subsidiary, however I doubt it will have a substantial material impact on their yearly return.
The Japanese electronics manufacturer has just agreed to pay....
How come when companies break the law they get to "agree" on the punishment?
It's called a "negotiated settlement". This happens more often than not in corporate cases. The company says to the DOJ "we did wrong, we'll agree to X as a remedy". The DOJ counters with another/different/degree remedy, then they haggle until they reach an agreement on a remedy acceptable to both sides. The DOJ says to the judge in the case "this agreement is acceptable to us and serves the interests of the people". Everyone, including the judge, then signs on the dotted line and the case is over. No trial, no jury, no verdict, no sentencing.
There are many reasons why this happens. Probably the single biggest reason is that trials for these types of cases take f-o-r-e-v-e-r and cost both sides tremendous resources that are better utilized elsewhere. The DOJ has a finite number of lawyers and staff, and it serves them much better to settle corporate cases like this than take them to trial. They just don't have the resources to try every one of these cases. At least, this is my understanding of the situation.
One advantage to the companies is lower negative press exposure. Trials generate lots of bad press, settlements a single headline or two in a single week. Three weeks from now most will have forgotten this Hitachi thing. If there was a trial over this, the mud on Hitachi would stick in people's minds much much longer, ala Microsoft.
In a few years you will see China overtake the 'West' in the utilization of 'space' and the West will never be able to regain their prominence in that area. This is because the West does not have the one thing that is needed in order to maintain long tern projects of this magnitude. The West does not have continuous governments.
Hmmm... the F-22 Raptor, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, or ATF, started life in about 1986 IIRC. The first prototype flew in the early '90s and the first production unit flew in 2002. And we're still building them. Magnitude? $138 million each? Tens of $Billions spent on the fleet by the time we're done.
Free does a very good job these days, and no matter how you look at it you always need a compliment of utilities anyway (e.g., Spybot S&D 1.6.2, Ad-Aware 2008 (the latest version is unstable), Windows Defender, and AV such as AVG 8).
Need? Need? You can't be serious. If you are, then you're uneducated, uninformed, and likely, most importantly, *unsafe* in your online habits.
After I talked him into ordering DSL, my 71 year old father has been running vanilla W2K SP4 with auto updates, FireFox and Thunderbird since 2004 (Mozilla suite at first) without an infection of any kind. No viri no malware no adware. I created his account as a standard user. I gave him a list of attachments to NEVER-open-delete-the-email-immediately. I educated him. I remoted in to do all updates. After some time, I modded his account to Power User so he could accomplish FireFox and T-Bird updates. I still remote in to execute MS auto-updates.
Still viri/malware/adware free. He surfs the web, does email, and Google Earth. There has never been an anti virus, security, or anti malware software installed on the machine. He's not a technical guy at all. But he has mountains of common sense, I taught him well, and he listened and took my teachings to heart. 71 years old, first PC at age 67. No a/v software, and still virus free. Think about that a minute.
I personally haven't used anti virus software since the late '90s on my Winders machines. And there's no need for it on my *nix boxen.
An intelligent and properly educated individual avoids infection, negating the need for 'shields' and 'scanners'.
I wasn't being a smart ass at all. Is there any reason why one should assume Windows Mobile is any more secure than Microsoft's desktop or server OS offerings, which have abysmal security track records?
That sort of duopoly exists in Canada and the US, European countries have a competitive telecom market, think again.
Really? Name all of the broadband providers in France, and which ones are independently owned and operated. BTW, France != "European countries". I named France, and France only. You retort/defend with all of Europe. Defend France only please.
I am no expert on broadband in France, but the only broadband providers I do know of are:
A. France Telecom, aka Orange B. Local government/citizen owned providers, what we'd call a "co-op" here in the states, but many of these are also run by Orange.
If there is an actual competitive broadband market in France, please educate me. Please name the dozens of privately owned and operated broadband providers across France.
There's actually a very good reason for those questions. Of course it's not to find terrorists by hoping that they answer yes to the question when crossing the border.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists. Just like Al Capone, if you can't catch them for their crime, get them on a technicality.
It's that simple.
I think it has more to do with obscure laws passed since 9/11, than catching one on a technicality. If you answer those questions with the opposite of the truth, each lie on that form gets you like 15 years or something, *in addition to* any other crime you're convicted of. And even if they can't convict you on a *real* charge, if they can verify a lie on that form, boom, 15 years per. If *I* was writing A/T laws, I'd sure as heck write something like this. Makes it a whole lot easier to put bad players behind bars than actually convicting on conspiracy charges.
Show me the "competitve market" in Ontario. Please leave the Rogers/hBell wholesalers and resellers, and show me the competition.
Primus in select area's that is not on Bell equipment? MSNi in Windsor not on Bell equipment? nexicom in petorborough not on Bell equipment?
This competition is in isolated communities that the masses have no access to. Now explain the competition in Quebec to me please. Where should Videotron users move to again?
Whith whom should they speak to with their wallet?
I will be very surprised if the french language media even picks up on this.
Quebec isn't even aware of the copyright fight that went on. A couple of obscure articles that came out a month AFTER the re-election.
Think they will know about this?
Quebec will push for its own CRTC saying its good for the people, have no coverage, and not tell the people stuff like this will happen. They have been pushing for their own CRTC for years now.
There is close to zero awareness of these things in Quebec french media and french population.
Will Quebecor put out a press release saying what it wants to do in their media? heh
speak with your wallet? Change telco? Let me know when you found an alternative...
This is what happens under Socialism. I find it fitting that you're now suffering from the same policies you champion so dearly. French ISPs suck, French Canadian ISPs suck. What's the common thread? France is Socialist, Quebec is Socialist. Both are dominated by French culture. Most French speakers (1st or 2nd language) are Socialists.
Don't get me wrong. I don't hate the French. I think it's every American's duty to liberate some every couple of generations.
Slashdot Mirror
On the VPS service I use, we occasionally get blocked...
Full STOP.
Occasionally? Apparently you either:
A. Are a spammer, or
B. Are completely clueless
VPS is rapidly becoming *the* most popular hosting method used by non bot herder spammers. The hosting is terribly cheap, often free for the first month, and the spammer doesn't have to worry about acquiring IP space as in days past because it's provided by the VPS hosting firm, thus, no more problems getting more and more netblocks from ARIN once the current set is scorched by local blocklists at receivers and by dnsbls. And the customer vetting at VPS providers seems to be almost non-existent.
Accepting mail at this point in the decade is all about the reputation of the sender. Ask any mail admin worth his salt if he trusts email coming from a VPS cluster. An intrinsic quality of being a trustworthy sender is having clue. If you're trying to send from a VPS cluster this means you have no clue, and thus cannot be trusted.
Sorry pal. In a fair world a mail server on a VPS cluster shouldn't be discriminated against any more than a bare metal mail server inside AT&T's core mail services data center. But it's not a fair world, because spammers have ruined it. Running a mail sending host from a VPS cluster makes you look far more like a spammer than an AT&T.
Get it yet? Pull out your wallet and get some real hosting with a company with a real reputation. Build your own box and colo up with a respectable ISP. THEN, if you get listed by a dnsbl, you have a legit gripe. Assuming you're NOT a spammer, that is.
BTW, exactly whose VPS service are you using. That alone may shed much light on why you're getting listed. I've got quite a number of VPS providers in my local block list due to tons of showshoe emission. I wonder if you're using one of them.
* Excepting Godaddy who is fucking insane. Those assholes filter *URL's pointing to a PBL'd IP that are embedded in a message*!!! Worse, they dont tell you. Had fun learning that.
That's interesting, considering GoDaddy hosts a number of spammers on their VPS service. It'd be really interesting to know if they've filtered an email with one of their own IP addresses in it due to the reason you mention. It wouldn't surprise me. They probably have.
I'm hardly an idiot. If I could find an open source software package capable of doing what I require, I would have gone that way a long time ago. As it stands, I have to use a proprietary software package that does not allow me to weight the incoming emails based of *any* RBL's. I can only refuse the connection based on the RBL's.
You're kidding right? What (where) is your skill set? Build a Linux or FreeBSD smart host box with Postfix and SpamAssassin. Then relay the scrubbed mail stream to your current mail server. You can block outright based on dnsbl hits within Postfix, or you can score based on dnsbl hits in SpamAssassin.
Here's a decent head start:
http://www.debian.org/
http://wiki.debian.org/Postfix
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/spam.htm
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DnsBlocklists
If you're currently running Exchange, all you have to do is tell Postfix to relay all inbound mail to the IP address of your Exch server. For example, in main.cf you'd have:
relayhost = 10.3.2.1
To get Postfix to accept mail for your users, you can either have Postfix poll your AD server for valid user addresses, or you can just manually type them into a relay_recipients file, if you're a small organization, say 100 users or less. The manual thing gets really tedious for larger user counts.
It's a fantastic anti spam solution. If you're not a sysadmin type and don't know anything about dns and changing MX IPs in your dns server or getting your provider to do it, you may not want to take this plunge. You've got to have some decent networking background, including configuring dns entries on your authoritative server.
Your parent is right. There does exist a set of clueless people who straight filter based on RBL's like SORBS. Sure, filter your home mail server any way you want, but the *second* you have third-party people using your system (or the second you run the mail server for a business), you should be outright fired for filtering based solely on something like SORBS.
That is because I dont waste my time calling you. I call your boss and your sales department. If you really are running a business mail server and filtering based on SORBS, you are basically clueless and I'll gain nothing talking to you Your sales staff though, I'm sure they'd be happy to know you are blocking my customers inquiries into your companies products. And I'm probably also sure that if you are the type who filters like that, they probably have a bunch of other issues with the way you run their systems and this just might be the straw that broke the camels back.
I disagree. Here's why:
The vast majority of these cases are caused by small business "email admins" or contractors who have no clue how to setup a mail server. And I'm not talking the host (machine) itself, but all the DNS magic that makes a mail server a legitimate mail server. Mismatched rDNS, hosting the mail server behind a dynamic IP xDSL line and using wildcard dynamic DNS to make the MX record work (i.e. inbound email delivery), etc, etc. All of these things will often cause one to end up on a dnsbl, and rightly so. Then they bitch about it. Getting listed because of something like this should be a cluestick to the guy running the listed system that he needs to make some changes to come into compliance with community standards. This is one of the main benefits of dnsbls. Spammers get caught, and those with misconfigured systems get a wake up call.
There are community standards one *must* meet when setting up and outbound mail server, lest one be listed in dnsbls or flagged by other spam countermeasures.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case nowadays that blackhole lists ( or whatever they're called ) are used mainly as a factor in weighing scores in Bayesian methods of filtering spam, rather than just blocking email outright? In other words, the usage is still widespread, not for direct blocking, but for helping a program decide if its spam or not?
If so, this would let more spam through spam filters, really.
It depends on the individual mail admin or organization. Some outright block on a dnsbl hit, some use it for scoring in their fav content filtering daemon. On my 'vanity' MX that hosts my personal domain, I block outright based on dnsbl hits. However, I'm pretty selective in the dnsbls that I use, and yes, SORBS is among the 6 or so I have configured. I've only seen one "false positive" in 3 years or so of using SORBS, and that's because Playboy's "send this pic to a friend" feature has apparently caused too many complaints over the years, resulting in a listing of the sending IPs at Playboy's contractor, rsys.com or something like that.
Dual GPU solutions are so pointless, a waste of money for little performance gain, that doesn't even work in some games.
This wasn't always the case, although back then the marketing term GPU hadn't been invented yet. I have a pair of 12MB 3Dfx branded Voodoo2 cards (post STB acquisition), and they doubled the performance of every game I played. There was no overhead loss of any kind. The performance scaling was performed almost entirely in hardware, with little driver support needed. Remember all the benchmarks at Anand Tech et al that showed perfect 2x scaling for the Voodoo2 SLI setup?
The main reason for this is that geometry processing was still mostly handled by the host CPU back then. Once geometry was moved into the graphics chip (GPU), the original scan line interleave became impossible. Or, I should say, to do so would require idling one GPU's geometry unit altogether, and only utilizing its raster units. The main advantage of a GPU *IS* the build in geometry unit--everything on one chip, shorter communications paths, greater bandwidth between units and memory, etc.
Does anyone remember the Obsidian Alchemy cards? They put Voodoo2 SLI on a single board. In addition to this 'consumer' card, they had a military/government product which paired 4 of these boards into a Pentium II system for a total of 8 Voodoo2s. All of them were daisy chained together, and had external genlock/framelock F connectors to drive synchronized scene output on a set of 4 displays for flight/battle tank/ship/helicopter simulations. They also had the ability to drive a single display at 2048x1536, IIRC, with full 8x FSAA, albeit at 16bpp.
My point, after all that text above, is that graphics is, and always has been, extremely parallel in nature. If the consumer market truly demands scalable graphics, from the standpoint of slapping more and more cards in a system and getting linear scalability, then the GPU 'industry' is going to have to go back to the scan line interleave model and put geometry processing back on the host CPU. This will require a driver and pipeline rewrite across the industry, as all the APIs (DirectX and OpenGL) have been built up since around 1998 for integrated GPUs.
The reason we're where we are is chip production cost. It's cost, cost, cost. Manufacturers need to minimize the number of unique chips they produce due to cost. That's why what I write below will likely never happen...
The other 'option' is for the GPU guys to make 2 separate chips, such as Intergraph and 3Dlabs did back in the day, and 3Dfx did with their final product, the Voodoo5 series. They had a dedicated geometry chip, and dedicated raster chips, decoupling them, vs the nVidia design, so as to allow multiple raster chips for greater performance. (Back then the APIs and the games were still primarily pixel bound, not geometry bound). This was done, albeit, on one board.
However, it would be possible, and possibly very advantageous, to create one board with a geometry chip, and a board with the raster chips, with custom cabled interconnects between the cards, that could handle extremely high bandwidth. In essence, we're taking the old SLI model, but offloading the geometry from the host CPU to a dedicated chip, just like we do today, but we're decoupling the raster function from the geometry at the physical hardware level. Today it's all on the single chip.
Geometry processing isn't inherently parallel in nature. It is mostly serial, defining the 3D scene, one polygon after another, and they must be in order, lest the scene be corrupted. This is why current "SLI" schemes fail to deliver anywhere close to linear speedup. They expend more host CPU resources crunching driver code trying to divvy up the geometry load between two GPUs than they do actually dividing the total graphics processing load across two GPUs--both geometry and raster.
A product based on the above architecture would kick the dog shit out of any "SLI" solution on the market t
an current
I always used to be able to spot foreigners by their misuse of "an" in front of words beginning with hard consonants. Now stupid Americans who think it makes them look cool are adopting this shitty overseas grammar butchery of American English...
We all mastered a, an, and the in 3rd or 4th grade. If not, we didn't proceed to the next grade in school. Why, for the love of Pete, are thousands upon thousands of very educated and intelligent U.S. people all of a sudden forgetting these rules which they have used for all of their adult lives?
Is this a more subtle version of ultra-liberal American TV and radio 'journalists' adopting British accents, in the hope it will somehow give them credibility they haven't actually earned?
More fantastic examples of proper usage of the article 'an':
"Dad, can I have an bicycle for my birthday?"
"That's not an lion, that's an kangaroo."
"Hay, let's fly an jetliner into an skyscraper and an Pentagon!"
Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here.
--
Slow Poke
It's almost guaranteed that they are talking virtual servers as well as some bare metal. Rackspace is talking about the 50,000 web servers that *THEY* manage--i.e. managed services. This figure likely doesn't include the thousands of rented colo machines which their customers manage themselves. The latter was Rackspace's first business model, a pure colo. It wasn't until relatively recently that they started offering managed services. It may very very turn out that the 50,000 server figure is the entire sum total of physical servers on their network.
Well, they were the first to port Linux to a serious parallel architecture. Still not many vendors that will support a 512-core and 1-kernel system...
It was 512 Itanium2 *sockets* per kernel, 1024 cores per kernel with the dual core Itanium2. You shorted SGI by 512 cores/system. ;)
And word has it they'd build 1024 socket/2048 core systems upon special request. I don't know if they ever sold an Altix configured this way. I do know it is possible, and (was) available.
Only one of the survey respondents is closely tracking its IPv4 address usage, saying that it needs 130,000 new IPv4 addresses every three years.
Only spammers go through IP space at this rate, which brings up a very good point in the v6 vs v4 debate. That point is that there are dozens of "reserved" /8 IPv4 networks that have never been assigned/used and there are tons of "scorched earth" networks and netblocks that no one wants because spammers have caused them to be universally blacklisted in DNSBLs or firewalled by many entities (ISPs, Corps, EDUs, etc).
Many have known for a very long time that we don't need more address space. We need to make more judicious use of what we already have. But, then again, Internet Protocol and the net itself are American inventions. And it's the American way to throw out something perfectly good for something marginally better, simply because we're tired of having to properly maintain what we already have. Sad sad sad...
Then there's always the money trail. ARIN will bring in more revenue if they have more address space to 'lease'. Greed is a far more significant aspect of IPv6 deployment than most people realize. Yes, gasp!, there is greed in ARIN. They are not, nor have they ever been, a neutral organization.
Specter will be 80 years old come the 2010 election. At that point he'll be 18 years past SS retirement age. He is completely ineffective as a Senator. He's been nothing but a puppet for years since his mind fell apart long ago. He should have retired long ago and given younger blood a chance to represent the state. He damn well should have retired this week instead of switching parties. This musical chairs act should tip off the entire state that he's merely power hungry and cares nothing about doing the work of his constituents. I'd vote against him because of the party switch, were I a Pennsylvanian.
80 years old and switching parties merely to hang onto his job. He's got plenty of money. It's all about maintaining his "power". He needs to go. I hope the folks of the state come to their senses and boot this old fart out in 2010 regardless of party affiliation.
I think Google may be selling themselves short. Once you start building standardized data centers in shipping containers with singular hookups between the container and the outside world, you've stopped building individual rack-mounted machines. Instead, you've begun building a much larger machine with thousands of networked components. In effect, Google is building the mainframes of the 21st century. No longer are we talking about dozens of mainboards hooked up via multi-gigabit backplanes. We're talking about complete computing elements wired up via a self-contained, high speed network with a combined computing power that far exceeds anything currently identified as a mainframe.
The industry needs to stop thinking of these systems as portable data centers, and start recognizing them for what they are: Incredibly advanced machines with massive, distributed computing power. And since high-end computing has been headed toward multiprocessing for some time now, the market is ripe for these sorts of solutions. It's not a "cloud". It's the new mainframe.
Insightful my ass. The packaging of a bunch of networked servers doesn't change the computing paradigm my friend. And sticking a UPS inside the rack chassis of each server doesn't make these 'special' or very much unique. These are merely optimizations of the same old crap people have been doing in colos for years. All Google has done is tweak the packaging and deployment logistics because of the scale they require.
This is not a mainframe and never will be. Are you saying we need to redefine the term mainframe? You should probably study up on the current definition first.
Mainframes are still alive and well. There just aren't as many of them currently deployed as in days of yore because there are many new applications today that run better, for many reasons, on decentralized systems, such as Google search. Go to any central bank HQ datacenter and you'll find good old IBM mainframes. Same with MasterCard, maybe VISA, any grocery store or retail mart (Walmart/Target/JCPenney/etc). Nearly all still run core business operations on IBM or Fujitsu or Hitachi mainframes. Some have converted to big Unix boxen over the years. Even though newer Unix boxen don't run CICS or Cobol, they're used in exactly the same way, and it all runs on one centralized box. Today, most of these entities run a duplicate recovery system, classic mainframes and the big Unix systems, at a duplicate site, using some pretty sophisticated communications and synchronization protocols. The processing model is the same, but redundancy is in vogue, and probably pretty wise.
The single most significant characteristic of a "mainframe" is "centralization". There is no way around this. Once you decentralize a work flow with a distributed node architecture, you're no longer in "mainframe" territory. No matter how powerful the aggregate set of nodes is, it will never be a "mainframe" because of the decentralization.
Pick yourself a different buzzword for these massive distributed systems that make your crotch tingle. They are not and never will be "mainframes" kid.
This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.
Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.
SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.
It's been pretty well documented what killed the RISC workstation market: competition from COTS PCs. First the Pentium Pro and Windows NT 4.0 came along offering great capability for a 1/3rd the cost of RISC, then the specialized 3D card companies offering x86 Windows drivers for their cards, such as Intergraph, 3D Labs, etc. Further COTS competition caused 3Dlabs to acquire Intergraph's graphics card business, and the nVidia and ATI forced 3Dlabs out of the desktop graphics space.
I'll agree with you 100% on SGI's inability to run a lean ship. I think it basically boils down to the fact that most of their key customers need capabilities that they're no longer willing to pay for, because there are so many cheap cluster solutions out there. SGI employs a sizable cadre of true computer scientists, we're talking Ph.D.s, in order to be able to support system integration and application optimization and tuning for customers like NASA, SARA, et al. I don't thing they've ever priced those "services" properly, instead throwing in this support as a "value add" in order to win big system contracts. They've consistently undercut themselves for fear of losing the big bids to IBM, who also has a sizable cadre of Ph.D. engineers. This is a sad situation, because SGI is and has always been a fantastic company with leading edge products and people. Those x86 irons in the fire around 99/2000 really really hurt them, and was a terrible move. Trimming down and eliminating everything but the HPC systems, storage, software and integration is what has saved them--not that they're 100% stable at this time or will be in the future. Lots of competition out there...
You're dead wrong on your 'mature market' analysis. Building the unique widget and licensing it out is what builds a mature market, not the other way around. You're also wrong WRT to NUMALink. It would never have been what Infiniband is, because Infiniband is inferior technology. Infiniband is inferior *because* SGI wouldn't whore out NUMALink. NUMALink is the single biggest differentiator SGI has. It's the only system interconnect that supports hardware cache coherency across the entire machine, up to 2,048 cores. Infiniband is merely a fast cluster interconnect. There is a single aspect in which Infiniband 'beats' NUMALink, and that's cost. In every other way it's inferior. You're analysis is off WRT InfiniteReality as well. SGI went to nVidia and ATI because their COTS GPU silicon was speeding away from SGI's proprietary ASICs. In fact, at one point, the InfiniteReality Engine name was retained for the first generation of graphics pipes based on COTS GPUs. SGI was the creator of dedicated 3D graphics silicon, but the general desktop computing market evolved into 3D applications (games) and thus economy of scale turned SGI into a minor producer of specialized 3D chips. It was a
The dance between malware writers and the security experts seeking to thwart them continues ever on.
Yeah, except this exploit method allows the defenders to pretty easily slam the dance partner to the floor.
Simple defeat method:
BIOS coders write in a checksum routine that runs at system initialization time. The routine checks the board maker's original (i.e. known good) BIOS file size on the flash device against the current used spaced on the device upon every boot. If the checksum routine finds that the used space on the flash device has changed, set off bright red alarms and noises. Obviously this is a *per rev* size, so each new BIOS update offered by the board maker will include the proper size check and checksum code. Thus, flashing your mobo with an update having a different file size won't set off the alarms, but unauthorized changes to the used space on the flash chip will set off the alarms.
To defeat this countermeasure, the exploit coder is actually going to have to rewrite part of the original BIOS to defeat the checksum process along with burning their own extra code in the empty space.
This seems like pretty simple stuff. The problem would be non-l337 mobo owners who ignore the alarm for a myriad of stupid reasons, as with many lusers who ignore problems on their PC until it's 'too late'. For the rest of us, this should be a sufficient countermeasure.
Sun doesn't have the right mix of people, products, ideas, or a strategy to survive moving forward. Like Texas Instruments, Wang, CDC, and other great computer companies of yesteryear, Sun is going to become extinct, one way or another. SPARC is fundamentally dead, and by entering talks with IBM they are finally admitting so.
Sun has no constant steady revenue stream ala IBM with services or HP with printers. The lack of a steady revenue stream is what has caused Sun's misfortunes since the dot com bubble burst.
Others have speculated on what IBM would get out of this acquisition, but most here seems focused on software because you're software geeks. I tell you now that IBM has little interest in Sun's software from a strategic standpoint. There is no revenue in it. IBM is an earnings driven company, NOT a FOSS vs MS company. I'm sure IBM would like to see a day when MS only has 50% or less of the desktop and apps, but that's NOT a strategic goal of IBM's, because there is no money to be made in such an effort.
If IBM is actually considering acquiring Sun, it is for a few key reasons, none software related:
1. IBM finally kills SPARC as a competing platform in the US allowing potential for POWER sales to grow slightly. (Fujitsu and Siemens will likely still market SPARC in East Asia/Pacific and Europe)
2. IBM gets StorageTek in the acquisition, eliminating their main competitor in the enterprise tape business, obtaining a near monopoly in the process. Granted tape isn't nearly as popular as an archival and recovery medium as it once was, but it's stilled required, especially in very large environments where DTD backup then to DVD-R isn't practical. Margins in the enterprise tape business are very high.
3. IBM will obtain Sun's service contracts and immediately new customers. Obviously there is likely current customer overlap between the companies, but IBM will still pick up some new clients. When the current Sun service contracts expire, IBM will likely sign all those customers to new IBM Global Services contracts. Services contracts are IBM's single largest profit center and have been for a number of years.
4. IBM will obtain Suns' IP portfolio and patents. Although it may not generate much revenue in the short term, ZFS and RAID-Z are attractive to IBM for obvious reasons.
5. AFAIK, Sun and HP currently dominate the Telco market, Sun in the central offices with its NEBS servers and both Sun and HP in the datacenter for call logging, billing, other databases, etc. IBM does currently have NEBS servers, but their penetration is relatively small. Acquiring Sun gets IBM more penetration into the central offices and possibly more penetration in the Telco datacenters.
In summary, if IBM has an appetite for acquiring Sun, it is due to increased revenue potential in the hardware and services sectors, and has little or nothing to do with a software strategy. IBM has little interest in sectors that don't make money, and making a big FOSS desktop push isn't going to gain them substantial services revenue. It would however increase developer head count and thus costs.
These days, even Sennheiser's low end is "good enough" for the non-snob audiophile
Snob is part of the definition of Audiophile. There is no way around it. To progress beyond "enthusiast" to "audiophile" or, as I like much better, "golden ear", one must become a snob. The key reason is money. There are no poor audiophiles. All 'audiophile' gear, electronics or otherwise, is horribly expensive, prohibitively so, but for the rich.
That's hardly pocket change to a corporation like Hitachi.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hardly pocket change". That phrasing and choice of words sounds like you think Hitachi will bleed over $31M. $31M *IS* pocket change, chump change, insignificant, to Hitachi. They're a multi $billion worldwide conglomerate. They can raid the petty cash shoebox to the pay this fine. Now, the panel division may be setup as a separate LLC. I don't know. If it is, then the LLC would have to pay the fine, not the parent Hitachi. $31M would probably be more than petty cash to the LLC panel subsidiary, however I doubt it will have a substantial material impact on their yearly return.
How come when companies break the law they get to "agree" on the punishment?
It's called a "negotiated settlement". This happens more often than not in corporate cases. The company says to the DOJ "we did wrong, we'll agree to X as a remedy". The DOJ counters with another/different/degree remedy, then they haggle until they reach an agreement on a remedy acceptable to both sides. The DOJ says to the judge in the case "this agreement is acceptable to us and serves the interests of the people". Everyone, including the judge, then signs on the dotted line and the case is over. No trial, no jury, no verdict, no sentencing.
There are many reasons why this happens. Probably the single biggest reason is that trials for these types of cases take f-o-r-e-v-e-r and cost both sides tremendous resources that are better utilized elsewhere. The DOJ has a finite number of lawyers and staff, and it serves them much better to settle corporate cases like this than take them to trial. They just don't have the resources to try every one of these cases. At least, this is my understanding of the situation.
One advantage to the companies is lower negative press exposure. Trials generate lots of bad press, settlements a single headline or two in a single week. Three weeks from now most will have forgotten this Hitachi thing. If there was a trial over this, the mud on Hitachi would stick in people's minds much much longer, ala Microsoft.
In a few years you will see China overtake the 'West' in the utilization of 'space' and the West will never be able to regain their prominence in that area. This is because the West does not have the one thing that is needed in order to maintain long tern projects of this magnitude. The West does not have continuous governments.
Hmmm... the F-22 Raptor, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, or ATF, started life in about 1986 IIRC. The first prototype flew in the early '90s and the first production unit flew in 2002. And we're still building them. Magnitude? $138 million each? Tens of $Billions spent on the fleet by the time we're done.
You were saying?
Free does a very good job these days, and no matter how you look at it you always need a compliment of utilities anyway (e.g., Spybot S&D 1.6.2, Ad-Aware 2008 (the latest version is unstable), Windows Defender, and AV such as AVG 8).
Need? Need? You can't be serious. If you are, then you're uneducated, uninformed, and likely, most importantly, *unsafe* in your online habits.
After I talked him into ordering DSL, my 71 year old father has been running vanilla W2K SP4 with auto updates, FireFox and Thunderbird since 2004 (Mozilla suite at first) without an infection of any kind. No viri no malware no adware. I created his account as a standard user. I gave him a list of attachments to NEVER-open-delete-the-email-immediately. I educated him. I remoted in to do all updates. After some time, I modded his account to Power User so he could accomplish FireFox and T-Bird updates. I still remote in to execute MS auto-updates.
Still viri/malware/adware free. He surfs the web, does email, and Google Earth. There has never been an anti virus, security, or anti malware software installed on the machine. He's not a technical guy at all. But he has mountains of common sense, I taught him well, and he listened and took my teachings to heart. 71 years old, first PC at age 67. No a/v software, and still virus free. Think about that a minute.
I personally haven't used anti virus software since the late '90s on my Winders machines. And there's no need for it on my *nix boxen.
An intelligent and properly educated individual avoids infection, negating the need for 'shields' and 'scanners'.
If you P2P you're just asking for it, aren't ya?
I wasn't being a smart ass at all. Is there any reason why one should assume Windows Mobile is any more secure than Microsoft's desktop or server OS offerings, which have abysmal security track records?
and I'd never own one because of lack of openness (my definition of "open" may differ as I'm a Windows Mobile fan)
By "open" you mean you want malware pop-ups on your phone too?
That sort of duopoly exists in Canada and the US, European countries have a competitive telecom market, think again.
Really? Name all of the broadband providers in France, and which ones are independently owned and operated. BTW, France != "European countries". I named France, and France only. You retort/defend with all of Europe. Defend France only please.
I am no expert on broadband in France, but the only broadband providers I do know of are:
A. France Telecom, aka Orange
B. Local government/citizen owned providers, what we'd call a "co-op" here in the states, but many of these are also run by Orange.
If there is an actual competitive broadband market in France, please educate me. Please name the dozens of privately owned and operated broadband providers across France.
I always wondered about the point of those things
There's actually a very good reason for those questions. Of course it's not to find terrorists by hoping that they answer yes to the question when crossing the border.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists. Just like Al Capone, if you can't catch them for their crime, get them on a technicality.
It's that simple.
I think it has more to do with obscure laws passed since 9/11, than catching one on a technicality. If you answer those questions with the opposite of the truth, each lie on that form gets you like 15 years or something, *in addition to* any other crime you're convicted of. And even if they can't convict you on a *real* charge, if they can verify a lie on that form, boom, 15 years per. If *I* was writing A/T laws, I'd sure as heck write something like this. Makes it a whole lot easier to put bad players behind bars than actually convicting on conspiracy charges.
Alternatives? Where. Show me. Explain to me.
There is NO alternatives in Quebec.
Show me the "competitve market" in Ontario. Please leave the Rogers/hBell wholesalers and resellers, and show me the competition.
Primus in select area's that is not on Bell equipment? MSNi in Windsor not on Bell equipment?
nexicom in petorborough not on Bell equipment?
This competition is in isolated communities that the masses have no access to. Now explain the competition in Quebec to me please. Where should Videotron users move to again?
Whith whom should they speak to with their wallet?
I will be very surprised if the french language media even picks up on this.
Quebec isn't even aware of the copyright fight that went on. A couple of obscure articles that came out a month AFTER the re-election.
Think they will know about this?
Quebec will push for its own CRTC saying its good for the people, have no coverage, and not tell the people stuff like this will happen. They have been pushing for their own CRTC for years now.
There is close to zero awareness of these things in Quebec french media and french population.
Will Quebecor put out a press release saying what it wants to do in their media? heh
speak with your wallet? Change telco? Let me know when you found an alternative...
This is what happens under Socialism. I find it fitting that you're now suffering from the same policies you champion so dearly. French ISPs suck, French Canadian ISPs suck. What's the common thread? France is Socialist, Quebec is Socialist. Both are dominated by French culture. Most French speakers (1st or 2nd language) are Socialists.
Don't get me wrong. I don't hate the French. I think it's every American's duty to liberate some every couple of generations.