Online storage, that's the only option. The only way to really back up RAID is another RAID.
Tape is a horrible option. A 400GB tape drive would easily cost you more than an entire redundant RAID and you'd still be dealing with multiple media and the possibility of a tape you don't know is bad until you go back to restore it. Forget tape...there is literally never a situation where a hard drive (or even a pair of hard drives) isn't more economical and just as reliable.
Optical media is better, but I wouldn't even consider it until we have 500GB multiple-layer holographic discs made with gold or some other stable material instead of the cheap coatings that most CDs and DVDs use that get bitrot. So forget optical media...although I'll admit that if someone made a sanely priced 300CD jukebox then that would be a good option.
It's all about mirroring your RAID. It's not as hard as it sounds. First, since filesystems all suck at telling the difference between mission-critical unique data and MP3 files or browser caches, you have to divide up your RAID by backup priority before you do anything else. I have \DATA (which is actual real data, documents, email and so forth) then \MEDIA (which is copies of CDs and DVDs, yes it would be a pain to re-rip but in theory not as unique and irreplaceable as real data) and \JUNK (mainly video render and capture files that I'm currently processing or reencoding so this is stuff I can easily get back).
Chances are if you have or are getting a RAID, you'll be freeing up a lot of formerly important hard drives. Guess what? You don't need them in your computer now, that's what the RAID is for. TAke the 200GB drive out of your PC and replace it with spare 60GB. Get a cheap USB enclosure for the 200GB drive. Now, it's a backup device. Backup you RAID, starting with the real \DATA (what's a lifetime of email and documents take up, 10GB tops?). Then copy over whatever \MEDIA fits, starting with photos first and then MP3s and movies last. IF you run out of room, that's fine. Got another spare drive lying around? Copy a 2nd copy of \DATA. then whatever \MEDIA didn't fit on the first drive.
Label the drives and contents and put them in a cool, dry, safe place (firebox or safe in your closet for example, don't forget some silicon packets inside to absorb moisture). Now you are "backed up". Check in on the drives every now and then, or keep adding to the collection with additional old unused drives. I guarantee that in the even your RAID fails completely, you'll find at least your \DATA. Even if one or even multiple old drives failed, data recovery from a single drive is a piece of cake for recovery companies. RAID reconstruction? Not so much.
Of course, the only way to truly sleep well at night is to have two identical RAID at two physically different locations connected with a nice connection running rsync at least daily. That's what I do, because my sleep is worth that. Barring nuclear attack simultanously in Houston and Sacramento, I'm pretty sure my data's going to be around as long as we are still using hard drives.
So my advice is to spend that $150 on ten cheap USB enclosures and then rummage through your old drive drawer or get whatever's a bargain of the day and start with that while you save up for the dual RAID setup.
I'll give you credit for your lowish user ID but this seems like a fairly one-sided, trollish comment. I've never had any Infrant lockup on me. The worst I've ever had was a weird glitch where browsing a particular folder would cause an hourglass in Windows but browse find on a Mac. Tranfer speed, especially with jumbo frames, is exceptional. NFS support? Ah well since I only use SMB or AFP I can't comment on that but even if they dropped NFS support completely it would still be the best NAS solution out there.
Reality check, all RAIDs lose drives. Adaptec, 3ware, Promise...every RAID card I've ever had will have the occasional flipped bit or phase of the moon that causes it to fail a drive. There almost always nothing wrong with the drive but RAID controllers are not built to be forgiving. It does give me heartburn while I'm nervously watching the three hour rebuilt, I'll grant you that.
Whitebox solutions are worthless in a business setting. Yeah, great fine for a five-person startup where one guy can take ownership and make it his baby and deal with the inevitable fingerpointing between this, that and the other. Business want "black box" solutions. I don't care what's inside as long as data goes in and data comes out. I suppose you'd poo-poo MythTV as being hacked-up Linux too? Infrant made AFP support as simple as checking a box on a webpage and that's all the CGI coding I care about. Hand me a MythTV-style RAID solution that I can just boot to the CD and have it work and I'd be more than happy to give it a try.
Infrant (wow, just checked their website and it looks like they were bought by NetGear) created their own version of RAID that specifically addresses the issue of capacity and expansion. It's a nice transitional blend from RAID-1 to RAID-5 and does offer the ability to increase the total capacity (albeit with a lot of drive swapping).
Buy an Infrant RAID with the two biggest drives you can afford. Let's say two 750GB drives or whatever's on sale that week. It starts out acting as RAID-1 with the drives mirroring. So you have 750GB of "safe" storage. Now you add another 750GB drive. Okay, now you have 1500GB of storage with one of the drives acting as parity drive (RAID-5). Add a fourth drive and how you have 2250GB of "safe" storage. Now you come back and just replace one of the original 750GB drives witha 1TB drive. Do you get extra capacity? No...not initially. But the drive is fully formatted and integrated as X-RAID. What this means is that eventually after you have piecemeal or onesie-twosie upgraded all four drives, suddenly the X-RAID resizes itself to match the capacity of the new drives with no transfer or downtime. So in theory if you wanted to upgrade your RAID, buy four 1TB drives, swap them out one at a time (letting each one rebuilt the array) and then at the end you'll have 3TB RAID isntead of the old 2250GB RAID and all the data intact.
I have three ReadyNAS units and love them to death. They are a little fussy about drive temperatures (I guess that's a good things but, I may get like 40 emails during the course of the day about it and it's not like I'll drive home from work to turn up the A/C in my house). My only sadness is that Infrant doesn't have a higher capacity unit than four drives (oh please oh please, eight drives with a RAID-6 type protective hotspare in one nice rack-mountable unit would be my ultimate dream).
The reality is that the MPAA is reacting to the fact that the court system handed a victory to Kalidiscope, who were sued by the controllers of the DVD format for copying DVDs to hard drives. What made this particular case interesting is that Kalidiscope had actually applied, paid for, and been granted a DVD decryption license (ie like what DVD player manufacturers get). Kalidiscope took this license and used it to decode DVDs and then store them on a custom RAID system (ie, locked up and not accessible via conventional means...so there was no danger of legal rips leaking onto the Internet). This allowed them to sell home theater systems to rich sports stars starting at $12K and going upwards of $100K. The DVD format controllers realized that their contract didn't explicitly prevent this so they changed it and then tried to sue Kalidiscope for infringement. Great guys. The only company to actally pay money and try to do legally what DeCSS and DVDXCopy and a million others were doing illegally...and you sue them.
Well, the courts handed Kalidiscope a victory and said pretty much that there was no violation of the license by what Kalidiscope was doing. So basically, either they have to stop selling DVD decryption or they have to accept that within a closed system, whatever is decrypted is covered by the license.
Andd....so now...having lost that battle...the MPAA sees the writing on the wall and is magnanimously deciding that what was forced on them was what they actually wanted to do "for the customers". The reality is that they have not giving up on the holy grail of per-view pricing and the idea of someday doing away with content possession so that everything is pay-per-view...they are just putting that goal aside and instead going to be milking the device makers first. First sell them expensive DVD ripping licenses to companies like Dell or Panasonic, so that those companies can create DVD jukeboxes without the silliness of Sony's 300 DVD spinning wheel o' media...then after they have gotten consumers to forget entirely about the fair use and first sale rights inherit to physical media...gradually start shifting to on-demand content available from the same system.
3) Profit.
Oh well...if I have to be damned by the content industry's grip on movies and television shows...I'd much rather be able to buy mass produced DVD jukebox/rippers at Wal-Mart for $30 than having to cobble together some legally questionable MythTV box myself.
Amen, not to mention that I've been recording 12+ hour streches for years...all it took was getting a laptop with a firewire in an WinDV. It's never been film capacity that's the problem. Battery is a little harder but....I'm never just holding a camera for 12 hours in my hand. Which means I'll be using a tripod. Which means I'll have time to setup. Which means I can run and tape down an extension cord from the outlets that 99% of all places have somewhere to run the buffer or power washer.
I would buy this thing in a hearbeat except for Sony's current hardon for 1080i, which is crap. I don't want it on a PS3 and I don't want it on a camcorder. I'm done with interlacing. My current camcorders are all progressive scan (even though a miserable 480p) but I've never been happier or had better looking video. If someone can make a 720p version of this then I'll take a look.
Now you are making up completely different arguments to cover the fact that you don't know what you are talking about.
Who the hell was talking about public conversations? This is about doctors, priests or lawyers THE PROFESSION not the people. If a doctor is at a cocktail party, he's not a doctor, he's a guy at a cocktail party. In fact, it's pretty damn rude to be talking to doctors about possible treatments when they are clearly off duty and not interested in performing their professional duties (I hope you have at least that much sense of etiquette). Ditto for third parties being present who are not the profession described above. Ditto for sending post cards or posting your legal discussion on a public billboard or do other things to alter the original argument of doctors, priests and lawyers being legally/professionally obligated to keep their information confidential.
I guess it escapes you that despite the fact that television dramas are fictional, the lazy writers are scanning the morning paper for ideas and none of what I said doesn't stem from actual court cases. Slashdot alone has covered its share of legal conundrums or legal travesties. And you even prove my point with your closing statement. Everything I email to my lawyer is confidential and no court can compell my lawyer to turn over the contents of my emails to be used against me. But you are right, someone could subpeona my ISP for copies of my IMAP folder or any cached messages on their mail server. And that is why I believe someday enough Foley-type incidents get Congress critters worried about nebulous nerds out there that know all their secrets, and we will see some kind of law mandating that computer professionals keep what they know confidential, too.
Absolutely they do...why didn't you mention lawyers? Lawyers and doctors are both governed by by law and codes of professional conduct. Ever hear of HIPAA? Not only are doctors bound to keep everything about your medical history private, but everyone else in the chain of command has the same obligation or that law is broken and fines, liability, etc. ensure.
Not to mention, doctors and lawyers are only essentially allowed to practice on the approval of their professional association, and I have little doubt that a doctor or lawyer would be allowed to keep his license if he broke confidentiality. Priests are more nebulous, I'll agree, because there's not really any centralized professional organization that regulates them. But it's not been a hard test for courts to figure out if someone is seriously functioning as a spiritual advisor or just moking it by claiming to be a priest of the Order of the Stewed Tomato. The courts have held time and time again that people have a right to talk freely about any matter, even criminal ones, with a religious counselor and not have that subject to legal liability.
I'll also up your "reasonable expectation of privacy" arguement with spousal privaledge. A spouse does have a right other people cannot...they cannot be forced to testify against their husband or wife. Really, you seem to think that any time I talk alone with someone I should have an expectation of privacy, and yes that is true...but we are not talking about that. We are talking about legally defined privacy. If I tell the janitor in private about something, the courts can order him to repeat what I said in court against me. Not so for my spouse, doctor, lawyer or priest. So in that regard, they do have rights normal people do not because they perform functions that normal people do not...and those functions have been judged consistantly to be more important than prosecuting crimes.
Yes, there are exceptions...if a lawyer participates in the crime, the protection is broken. If the doctor thinks the person is a threat to himself or others, he has to report it. But hell, go watch a few Law & Order reruns...bottom line is, people need to be able to get advice without fear of reprocusion or reprisal and that will, I believe, one day extend to computer professionals as well.
I've said it before but I'll say it again: Professionals working in the computer industry should be given the same requirement/protection as doctors, lawyers and priests. This is a two-way sword and yes, it will cut both ways for society but there will come a day that the people realize it is necessary.
Consider the wave of horror that would sweep through corporate America if IT "whistleblowers" started reporting Enron-style tactics to the press. It brings to mind the scene in fight club where Brad Pitt's character and a bunch of lowly caterers hog-tie a rich fat-cat politician and tell him that the lowly people he is talking about are all around him and literally guard him while he sleeps. I once stumbled across an Excel sheet while I was cleaning up a sloppy group directory that outlined the cost savings of eliminating my contract. What if I had decided to alter the conclusion? There have been posts about how there's too much volume of information, why would some IT worker care? I'd bet dollars to pesos that every single person who has held admin rights to a significant data volume has tried a search on his or her name at least once. As many have pointed out...it is an impossibility to demand IT be able to protect and secure all data, even lost or destroyed material, without giving them access to that data. Therefore, the only solution is a legal one. Doctors cannot betray their patient's medical privacy, lawyers cannot betray their attorney-client privaledge and priests are not supposed to reveal their confessions. Likewise, a computer profession should not be allowed to unilaterally reveal the contents of the data he's charged with managing. The various trade-offs to society for the exceptions to the rule and a matter for the courts.
Consider also the well-known fear that companies and or individuals have in seeking help. No company wants to admit they were broken into, or have that matter become public. So instead they often times hide that fact (although California passed a law making notification a requirement) or fail to seek out advice when it matters and it isn't too late to fix. As computers get more and more interconnected and gain more and more importance, we may find that it is necessary to give shield to the people charged with maintaining them so that people don't avoid getting "treatment" for fear that suddenly everything they've said or done online may show up one day and bite them in the Foley.
Okay, Mr. "I-was-peeing-in-the-UNIX pool-before-you-were-out-of-diapers" can you tell me how many people you know who regularly carry around the following itmes: two screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a wirestripper, a wiresnip, a bottle opener, a hole punch, a knife, and scissors. Now, how many people do you know who carry around a Leatherman or a Swiss Army knife? Maybe there is a place for a bundle of tools which are basic and general enough to get most jobs done even if they aren't "the best" at any particular job? I mean, I hate having to rotate the whole off-center tool to turn a screw but, it sure beats a trip home to find a philips screwdriver.
Tools are meant to be specific and single-purpose. The best screwdriver is a screwdriver, not a hammer too. So yes, I agree that if I was writing a tool, the last thing I should be doing is letting feature-creep run the show. But an "application" is not a "tool" and comparing Word to pico/nano is just stupid. Comparing GMail to pine is just plain stupid. Tell me, how do view images in pine again? Or use rich text formatting? Or view PDF files without any external applications? Or notice that the person I was emailing is online so I can just send an instant message instead? Maybe pine is a tool for viewing plain text and GMail is an application of communication features in addition to just viewing plain text. Maybe there's people who want want that. You know, I'd be willing to bet dollars to pesos there are more people who use GMail today than are using pine.
So, you go right ahead and lug around your giant toolbox of specific perfect tools so when someone asks you to open a pickle jar you'll be able to use the 5" pipe wrench that you've never used before and probably will never need again. I'll tap the lid with the back of a butter knife or whatever else is handy and just get the job done.
I'll admit that the concepts behind AJAX excite the hell out of me. It's really something when you think about the fact that...it's really nothing new so much as, a theory that finally has some real practical applications and examples. Everyone I think has always known that...the worst thing about the web is the idea that you'll be in the middle of a process, like filling out a financial form, or managing a shopping cart of items, whatever and then be interrupted by a need to click a link. How many of us will be filling something out, not understand it, and see a Help link and for a brief second worry that when you click it, you won't get a nice friendly popup but get whisked away to some help page and have to start the whole damn thing over? (raises hand) That's the kind of ugliness that breaks things like webmail or shopping carts or financial forms. I can't tell you how many times I cussed a blue streak because I accidentally lost focus from the mail field in Hotmail, hit backspace meaning to erase a word and ended up back in the inbox where, thank you dynamic pages, pressing forward takes me to a new empty compose mail window.
Now obviously, that's the programmers fault...webmail should never throw anything away regardless of the user clicking Back and Forward on their browser. And I think that's the theory behind the AJAX effect. Really, back and forward are supposed to be the last things I'll ever hit. In fact, Google Maps I believe has to go through considerable kludges to even have entries show up in the Back and Forward browser list...and I can tell you there are plenty of times I wish I could go "Back" to my previous map location but instead, got taken back to the original empty Direction page I started at. So, if AJAX is done right...everything I ever need to click is right there. And that's what have been valuable since Windows was born. A poorly written web application/interface is like having to use Calc.exe Notepad.exe Paint.exe and CharMap.exe to make a document instead of WinWord.exe doing it all in one place.
In fact, I'm a little upset the whole stampede behind AJAX apparently caught so many developers and programmers napping. I've been hiring PHP/MySQL programmer for years now but, I start asking questions like... can't we have it so when someone clicks this header it just drops down a propigated list of choices instead of having to pop them up in a window or regenerate the page? And they stare at me like I'm asking for the moon or wanting an entire database of 400 items preloaded on the page before it renders. The guys with "AJAX" on their resume are...well they apparently know what that buzzword is worth and have their hands full writing the next Flicr or Digg or whatever.
And I'm one of them. I've had an idea for a web-based application but...because it involves just so darn much data, I've been having it developed as a template/macroset in Word because I can piggyback on the already present features like AutoText and Toolbars to provide an interface and packaged output. Now, I'm excited that I can have something just as dynamic and immediately accessible, but available on any platform and any location and without relying on software I don't control (I've already found two critical bugs in AutoText that Microsoft has admitted are bugs present since Word 2000, cannot be fixed by any option/registry setting, and will hopefully be fixed in the next version but possibly the one after that...oh gee thanks). So I want to start my own wildfire by creating something that would make a wonderful application, but have ability to distribute that application to thousands and tens of thousands of users as easily as sharing a link. That's amazing. That's why it's a wildfire. I just wish the store wasn't sold out of all the matches.
So...wait you are saying that it's a good thing to allow mosquitos to live unchecked (thus spreading malaria) because it avoids producing DDT-resistant mosquitos? Sorry to be blunt but, that's perhaps one of the dumbest things I've heard. That's like saying we should have banned penicillin because it would have been better to let bacterial infections run unchecked (thus spreading god-only-knows-what) to avoid creating resistant bacteria. Well, yes, we do have a growing crisis with bateria that are resistant to everything we can throw at them. But to argue that we should have let millions of people die so that we could only postpone, not win, the war is absurd.
You treat the disease with the best tools you have at the time. When they are no longer effective, you hope you have developed stronger tools. I will totally buy the argument that today DDT is ineffective or that it has been historically overused. The same can be said for penicillin. Today it's virtually ineffective, and that's probably because it was handed out like candy for infections that the human body was well able to tolerate.
It's one thing to put DDT in a category of good versus evil because it has benefits but also serious side effect. I mean, if we were talking thalidamide here, then the good just does not outweight the bad. But I haven't seen any evidence about what exactly was "bad" about DDT...and I certainly don't think your argument about resistance qualifies.
Regarding the climate website, I'm more than willing to admit that the issue is hotly contested, seeing as how you can't throw a rock without hitting a "climate expert". But you can't fake history, and the fact is that the scientific community has been handing us apocolyptical predictions for the last hfifty and that the media has been more than happy to sensationalize the issues for ratings (bird flu anyone?). I still laugh when I watch movies/shows from the 60's and early 70's where most of the plotlines deal with global overpopulation and the fact that in a mere 10 or 20 years, there won't be enough room for people to live, enough food to eat, or enough water to drink. And 10 or 20 years from now, we will probably be living in desperate fear of the next Chicken Little, maybe Martian flu or self-aware robots.
Many of you may scoff at Michael Crichton (or worse, judge him based on the horrible movies that his books become) but you cannot deny that the man takes the time to do real, intensive research when he writes about topic X. His are just about the only works of fiction that have bibliographies longer than many works of fact.
His latest novel, State of Fear, is a perfect example. He takes apart the fearmongering and psuedoscience behind manbearpig...er...global warming, and shows it for what it really is: attention-whoring scientists playing Chicken Little to get the grants that pays their salaries.
DDT is one example of how policies are based on sound bites and not science. Pick any perspective: moral, cost/benefit, safety...the DDT ban was a horrible failure. To quote a section from the novel:
"Banning DDT." "Argueably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitos and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere neat as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it." "But DDT was a carcinogen." "No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban." "It was unsafe." "Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years in one experiment. After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."
Okay, now the fun part that makes the above passage of "fiction" so scary...the footnotes:
1) Some people put the number closer to 30 million deaths. 2) Full discussion of DDT in Wildavshy, 1994, pp. 55-80 3) Sweeny Committee, 25 April 1972, "DDT is not a carcinogentic hazard to man." Ruckelshaus banned it two months later, saying, DDT "poses a carcinogenic risk" to man. He never read the Sweeney report. 4) Hayes, 1969 5) John Noble Wilford, "Deaths from DDT Successor Stir Concern," New York Times, 21 August 1970, p. 1
However, there is a more sinister side to the story. I can't find any reference at the moment, but I remember finding a website that claimed that DuPont had engineered the DDT ban because they held a patent on DDT and it was about to expire. They also held patents on several DDR replacements. So, with a little bit of lobbying and media frenzy, DuPont was able to ban the use of the cheapest and most effective product, in favor of enriching their own pockets.
And even worse than allowing millions of people to die for profit? DuPont did it again in the 80's when their patent on freon was due to expire. A little more lobbying and media frenzy, and freon was banned and replaced by numerous patented and nowhere near as effective DuPont products. And, millions of people (mostly in Africa and other poor nations) have died from food poisoning or starvation due to the high cost of preserving and transporting perishables under the new freon-free world regieme.
Call me a kook but...read the book. The gift you receive for your $8.99 is your ability to sleep at night knowing that global warming is just about the last thing you need to worry about.
Patents are something that you would be an idiot to cheap out on. Patent searches are important not just to find out if what you are trying to patent has already been patented because 99% of the time, no kidding, it has. You can't find anyone who makes the damn thing, or anyone who's ever written about it, but if it's technology-related, then you're going to find that five years ago someone with deep pockets fired the patent shotgun at everything related to your idea. The real important to patent searches is that they can help you find specific claims that can coexist with all of the other patents out there. By avoiding the landmines you find in other patents, you can figure out something that is a real "gotcha" moment that qualifies as novel and non-obvious to the patent office.
Each patent is really a bunch of little patents called claims. Patenting something like one-click shopping may have dozens of claims related to the interface, the backend processing, the operation, etc. The more claims you have, the more likely that you patent will infringe and the claims will be reject. The fewer claims you make, the more worthless your patent as someone can easily engineer around it. Given the cost of a patent from a reputable source ($8000-$15000 as high as $50000 depending on number of claims) why bother if you only want to patent something trivial?
If you are cheap, but want some level of protection, get a patent pending. You typically draw up some diagrams and descriptions, then pay between $500-$1500 to have a patent mill or patent lawyer file a provisional patent. This gives you the ability to boldly put "Patent Pending" on your documentation and it gives you a reservation in the patent line. Then you go out, market your idea and hope that a) anyone who thinks of stealing will be discouraged by the risk that your patent is granted and you come back and screw them or b) the money you make marketting your idea can pay for the costs to get the real patent filed.
If you are willing to invest the money, then spend a good amount to get a thorough patent search by someone who's actually there at the USPTO and can go through everything they have, not just what as been digitized. With some legal analysis and comparision of the existing claims to your idea, you can figure out what is missing and concentrate your patent on that.
-JoeShmoe .
You can do some google searches, or pay one of those patent mills $99 to run basically the same type of keyword search but that's really not going to give you much of a guide. The patent doesn't generally matter, it's the claims. If you are trying to get a utility patent on a widget, it's worth thinking...how can someone
RDP is old and busted, ICA is the new hotness. RDP is basically like pcAnywhere or VNC...it relies heavily on sending bitmaps back and forth of screen changes (not always, but with the foofy windowing effects of even certain business applications, it's increasingly become the standard case). It must also operate in a separate session window that floats above the user's actual desktop. Cut and paste is sloppy, file transfer is kludgy, and data shuffles back and forth on the RDP connection in a manner than it horribly inefficient. For example, a document on the server being printed on the client must go from the server to the client, be rendered in the client's application, tranferred to the spooler on the server, then transmitted back to the port on the client. That's four trips for essentially the same data.
ICA operates at a much lower level, compressing bitmaps and sending windowing commands, which allows most of the heavy lifting to be done on the client. You can run an ICA application on their own right from the user's desktop (IE, no sessions...ICA looks just like a local application, including OLE, drag-n-drop, etc). Drives and even COM or USB devices are automatically mapped. Bandwidth use is much, much lower and much, much more efficient.
Citrix essentially invented the technology behind RDP and ICA. It was really a pretty simple hack. Microsoft, fearing that they would be left behind if enterprise users started jumping into thin client technology, licensed RDP from Citrix back in Windows NT 4.0 days (Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition was a separate, stand-alone product that had so many licensing hurdles imposed by Citrix it was almost unusable). Citrix knew that Microsoft could essentially recreate what they had done (and probably do it better) so they happily agreed to take it up the butt and give Microsoft favorable licensing terms...which you can see only continue to lean more in Microsoft's favor as they progressed to 2000 Server and 2003 Server. Besides, Citrix had already moved on to using ICA so as far as they were concerned Microsoft could have RDP. Citrix did, however, negotiate several conditions, like the 256-color limitation, no COM port mapping, etc, and they earn royalties for each Terminal Service license (which is why you need to pay additionally to use TS even if you have enough client licenses). On the other hand, Microsoft has gotten more and more features shoehorned for free into Terminal Services, which makes Citrix less and less attractive for the money.
Windows XP only allows one RDP connection (really two since remote assitance can work simultaneously with the user currently logged in) not because of something Citrix said, but because Microsoft doesn't want to undercut sales of their own server product. If you could run five RDP sessions of Office from a $299 copy of XP, why the hell would you pay $899 for a five-user edition of Windows 2003 server?
So that's like, what, ten or twelve tops? It's still on preorder everywhere I've visited.
In all seriousness...how can this even be possible as a lawsuit. I think someone didn't refresh their browser and saw a joke news story from April 1st.
MPEG2 and all MPEG related standards are "owned" by MPEG LA, who licenses the technology. It would be one thing if Microsoft deployed a product with MPEG2 playback capabilities without paying the license, but then where is Lucent in all this? Is this some crappy dredge up of a vague compression scheme like Unisys pulled?
If so, why Microsoft? There's about a billion DVD players out in the market right now that would be infringing on this patent. Maybe the patent is only related to MPEG2 and networks? Whoops...a billion PCs out there that would be targets. Isn't Lucent in the middle of being bought by some French company? Does it make any sense to begin some protracted NTP vs Blackberry type war in the middle of that? ite The whole article amounts to two lines on some website I've never heard of so...I'm calling it a belated April Fool's...the April Fool being CowboyNeal.
How about one thing Explorer can't even do as well as File Manager from Windows 3.1?
GIVE ME AN F-ING OPTION TO ALWAYS MOVE READONLY/SYSTEM FILES WITHOUT CONFIRMATION
I have seriously broken hardware in a fit of rage because I started a massive 120GB move operation before going off to bed, only to wake up the next morning and find it stopped two minutes in because it ran into an f-ing "thumbs.db" file.
I have been bitching about that since Windows 95 when they removed the confirmation options menu from File Manager. The sick thing is that there's probably some old registry entry that could do this, but it's never been found. I can't believe I'm the only person that gets so pissed off about it. How hard would it be for Microsoft to update the Copy/Move progress dialog to include checkboxes for all the options? Right-click, Cut, right-click, Paste, check off "include read-only" "include system" "continue on error", done. As it stands now, I end up having to open a shell prompt so I can use a XCOPY/E/C followed by DEL/S batch command. Infuriating.
The problem with the portable players, at least both of the Sony models I owned, is that they are not much bigger than the actual size of the MiniDisc. Trivial force or not, there are spring involved and when metal fatigue sets in, things start going wrong. If the door doesn't return to the precise closed position, the pins inside the unit aren't going to catch the latch to open and you'll end up trying to insert a disc with the cover closed.
I should have clarified that the problem with getting bent or catching happens on the eject not the insert. When you open the MZ-R55 for example, the player is simultaneously lifting and partially ejecting the MiniDisc in one coordinated motion. But the disc is barely raised higher than the lip or the player, and if you are zoned out or move too quickly, that little flap just loves to catch on the lip and get bent outward. Once it's been bent out, you either have to remove it or face the fact that it's now more likely it will catch again and again.
Perhaps the colored Sony discs that I used for the bulk of my collection are particularly prone to this problem, I don't know. Thankfully, the attractive hard cases that hold the MiniDiscs do such a good job that I wasn't particularly scared of removing the errant disc cover.
Okay, I have close to 400 MiniDiscs, so let me tell you why I bought into MD wholeheartedly:
1) CDs suck. There's a reason why we stopped using 5-1/4" floppies. 5" media is just too large. It doesn't fit in your hand. It doesn't fit in your pocket. Carrying a large number of them is about as fun as lugging around a coffee can. 2) CD player with optical out + MD with optical in = perfect sounding copy of a CD in a compact, sturdy package. 3) Human beings covet. They want pretty shiny objects they can hold and line up like conquests on a shelf. While some might argue their directory listing is just as sexy...it's more likely to make eyes glaze over than pop out. 4) It's nice to be able to loan someone part of your collection or make that mix tape without handing them a $300 player (remotely authorizing their computer is again, vastly unsexy as a gift) 5) My high-end MD in 1997 looked better and was smaller than any other audio player, and that includes that newfangled Rio thing that had just come out. 6) Boy, did I love being able to record long classroom lectures without losing key parts while my classmates swapped tapes.
That said, this is the year 2006 and this guy has to be a complete idiot for not realizing that the MD has an incredibly superior replacement:
FLASH MEDIA.
Your average SD card or even CF card makes an MD look like a brick. MDs are not as indestructable as this yahoo would lead you to believe. The door eventually gets flukey just like 3-1/2" floppies did. I mean, it's a moving part and (especially on compact players) takes a lot of force to slide back and forth. Once the door is bent or starts catching, you end up either removing it and fearing that you've essentially rendered the point of having a media caddy useless, or losing your $1-2 investment.
Flash media, meanwhile, is ROCK SOLID. For crying out loud, someone shot a bullet through one and still pulled off the data it. And, MD will never win awards for access times. MD was fine for a linear activity like playing a CD, but jumping tracks is also just like a CD...you wait. The only thing Sony could be doing with Hi-MD is switch to a packet-based system...which is going to be murder on fussy drive mechanics.
Yes, flash media is expensive. But you can fit the equivalent of 8 or 9 MDs on a $35 flash card. True, a 1GB MD costs a lot less but this is the same song as Zip, or Jaz or SyJet or any other removable media. And how well have they worked out? A few years from now, a 1GB removeable media will seem as antiquated as a floppy disc. Meanwhile, flash capacities will continue to grow.
The only missing part of the equation is larger selection of players where you can remove the flash media. This is how they all started out (Rio etc) and honestly, I don't know why they have fallen out of favor. It adds maybe a few dollars to the price of a couple hundred dollar player. It can do the exact same magic, but with the all the advantages I described in the above MD praise.
So I think this guy needs to wake up and smell the present. I still think my 400 MDs look pretty as hell, and evey now and then I'll relax somewhere with my faithful Sony. And if I ever need to record 300 minutes of speaking, it's still the only thing I use. But the music that's on those 400MDs is now held on a portable hard drive and whenever I have a need to share it, I just copy it over to a USB thumbdrive. If I was still a Sony guy, it would be a MemoryStick. Maybe someday Apple will decide to bless a certain form of flash media like Sony has with the PSP but until then, my target platform is still the laptop.
So, while I can appreciate the romance involved in the MD, it's over. There are smaller, faster, sturdier and ($/MB) cheaper options. He can tilt against windmills if he wants to but, I'm ready to look forward to 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flash devices.
The accusation was: "you can't even spell sentence". If that were the case, I would have spelled it wrong in both places. So if his premise is wrong we can safely say everything else is just as wrong and the Troll moderation is well-deserved.
Okay, I'm going to pull unrank here and officially ban the use of ".Net" unless you offset it with quotes like I just did. I just got a headache trying to process the above post. Am I the only one who sees a period and immediately thinks "end of sentance" and doesn't notice it's being tacked in front of the word "Net"?
Call it dotNet, please. Or ".Net" works. I find it completely microsoft (adj, to make decisions based on marketing factors instead of technical ones, and then still end up with unmarketable garbage anyway) that they make the name ".Net" the new campaign slogan, yet you can't have any filename starting with ".Net" in any of their operating systems! (Well, not through Explorer anyway.)
So no more sentences about. Net that confuse people, because even though the period in. Net is not where I just put it, mentally I think everyone ends up processing it that way and it's just plain irritating.
If you look at the textmode setup screen, you can see there's a 256MB USB key present (244MB storage device). Later after the GUI is booted, you can see under Disk Drives there's a Generic USB storage disk.
I'm willing to bet that what's happening here it that he's managed to copy the NT bootloader onto the USB drive and then boot to it. Booting to USB devices is, I believe, something that Apple supports. I know it's supported by every current BIOS so why should the next generation EFI have fewer features? Maybe if you plug in a bootable USB device, the EFI will boot it instead of the MBR on the primary disk drive...or more likely there's a hotkey to boot to USB devices like how holding "C" I think forces a boot to CD-ROM.
Anyway, the sneaky part is that booting to CD-ROM or USB kicks in all sorts of helpful things. Booting to most CD-ROMs (El Torito spec) creates a fake "A:" drive with the contents of the bootsector binary file. Ironically, you can't acccess the CD-ROM itself unless that bootsector loads a CD-ROM driver. Booting to USB drives, I would guess, creates Int 13 or 80h or whatver it's called...basically BIOS-compatible addressing for drives. This is how funky SCSI or RAID controllers can create drives that you can see in DOS, which has no idea how to access a 32-bit PCI device.
So my theory is that the Mac creates a C: drive and loads the NT installer kernal, at which point the installer loads the right driver to see the IDE drivers (or perhaps he loads the appropriate textmode driver for the actual disk controller). Once the kernal can see the drive, it can put the pointer in the BOOT.INI and format and partition it. Then, the USB drive becomes the boot drive (has BOOT.INI, NTLDR, etc) and the internal IDE drive becomes the system drive (\WINDOWS directory, pagefile, etc).
There are people who know how to boot the NT kernal from USB keys and even read-only media like CD-ROMs. I wonder if anyone has tried using a WinXP embedded bootable CD on an Intel Mac (like BartPE or the official Microsoft recovery one. It's a clever idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the magic step. As a bonus, using the BIOS emulation provided by USB burning would probably bypass all of the trusted computing components since they are not DOS compatible.
Still, talk about making a sow's ear out of a silk purse!
-JoeShmoe .
Re:Deleting is deleting, period...judge should get
on
Deleting Files is a Crime?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Except what is his employer's data and what are his own personal thoughts? Taking their leads on properties and going "hey, I should call my friend and have him buy land near XYZ" is a lot different than "hey, I should send my friend a copy of confidential employer report".
The company is alleging that the only proof that the guy violated his contract was on their laptop. Well what if the guy had put the data on his own computer? Would the company then be entitled to it? If he destroyed the data on his own personal computer, would that also be a crime?
This whole idiotic ruling creates a legal catch-22. You are an employee given access to confidential information. Suddenly you are no longer an employee. So, if you keep that information, you could be found to "gaining access to information that you do not have permission to access" and be guilty of computer fraud under the statues. NOW, if you destroy the information so that you cannot be found guilty of having access, you can be charged with "hacking or tampering with information you did not have permission to access" and be guilty of computer fraud under the statues. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Er, I guess I missed the opening line that it was already decided 3-0 and for exactly the wrong reasons. I thought the rest was the prosecution argument.
Hopefully this gets appealed to the Supreme Court because file deletion, I belive, is going to be one of the key legal issues for future generations for the reasons I mentioned.
I wonder what these judges have in their own Recycle Bins at home.
Slashdot Mirror
Online storage, that's the only option. The only way to really back up RAID is another RAID.
Tape is a horrible option. A 400GB tape drive would easily cost you more than an entire redundant RAID and you'd still be dealing with multiple media and the possibility of a tape you don't know is bad until you go back to restore it. Forget tape...there is literally never a situation where a hard drive (or even a pair of hard drives) isn't more economical and just as reliable.
Optical media is better, but I wouldn't even consider it until we have 500GB multiple-layer holographic discs made with gold or some other stable material instead of the cheap coatings that most CDs and DVDs use that get bitrot. So forget optical media...although I'll admit that if someone made a sanely priced 300CD jukebox then that would be a good option.
It's all about mirroring your RAID. It's not as hard as it sounds. First, since filesystems all suck at telling the difference between mission-critical unique data and MP3 files or browser caches, you have to divide up your RAID by backup priority before you do anything else. I have \DATA (which is actual real data, documents, email and so forth) then \MEDIA (which is copies of CDs and DVDs, yes it would be a pain to re-rip but in theory not as unique and irreplaceable as real data) and \JUNK (mainly video render and capture files that I'm currently processing or reencoding so this is stuff I can easily get back).
Chances are if you have or are getting a RAID, you'll be freeing up a lot of formerly important hard drives. Guess what? You don't need them in your computer now, that's what the RAID is for. TAke the 200GB drive out of your PC and replace it with spare 60GB. Get a cheap USB enclosure for the 200GB drive. Now, it's a backup device. Backup you RAID, starting with the real \DATA (what's a lifetime of email and documents take up, 10GB tops?). Then copy over whatever \MEDIA fits, starting with photos first and then MP3s and movies last. IF you run out of room, that's fine. Got another spare drive lying around? Copy a 2nd copy of \DATA. then whatever \MEDIA didn't fit on the first drive.
Label the drives and contents and put them in a cool, dry, safe place (firebox or safe in your closet for example, don't forget some silicon packets inside to absorb moisture). Now you are "backed up". Check in on the drives every now and then, or keep adding to the collection with additional old unused drives. I guarantee that in the even your RAID fails completely, you'll find at least your \DATA. Even if one or even multiple old drives failed, data recovery from a single drive is a piece of cake for recovery companies. RAID reconstruction? Not so much.
Of course, the only way to truly sleep well at night is to have two identical RAID at two physically different locations connected with a nice connection running rsync at least daily. That's what I do, because my sleep is worth that. Barring nuclear attack simultanously in Houston and Sacramento, I'm pretty sure my data's going to be around as long as we are still using hard drives.
So my advice is to spend that $150 on ten cheap USB enclosures and then rummage through your old drive drawer or get whatever's a bargain of the day and start with that while you save up for the dual RAID setup.
-JoeShmoe
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I'll give you credit for your lowish user ID but this seems like a fairly one-sided, trollish comment. I've never had any Infrant lockup on me. The worst I've ever had was a weird glitch where browsing a particular folder would cause an hourglass in Windows but browse find on a Mac. Tranfer speed, especially with jumbo frames, is exceptional. NFS support? Ah well since I only use SMB or AFP I can't comment on that but even if they dropped NFS support completely it would still be the best NAS solution out there.
Reality check, all RAIDs lose drives. Adaptec, 3ware, Promise...every RAID card I've ever had will have the occasional flipped bit or phase of the moon that causes it to fail a drive. There almost always nothing wrong with the drive but RAID controllers are not built to be forgiving. It does give me heartburn while I'm nervously watching the three hour rebuilt, I'll grant you that.
Whitebox solutions are worthless in a business setting. Yeah, great fine for a five-person startup where one guy can take ownership and make it his baby and deal with the inevitable fingerpointing between this, that and the other. Business want "black box" solutions. I don't care what's inside as long as data goes in and data comes out. I suppose you'd poo-poo MythTV as being hacked-up Linux too? Infrant made AFP support as simple as checking a box on a webpage and that's all the CGI coding I care about. Hand me a MythTV-style RAID solution that I can just boot to the CD and have it work and I'd be more than happy to give it a try.
-JoeShmoe
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Infrant (wow, just checked their website and it looks like they were bought by NetGear) created their own version of RAID that specifically addresses the issue of capacity and expansion. It's a nice transitional blend from RAID-1 to RAID-5 and does offer the ability to increase the total capacity (albeit with a lot of drive swapping).
p hp?name=About%20X-RAID
Buy an Infrant RAID with the two biggest drives you can afford. Let's say two 750GB drives or whatever's on sale that week. It starts out acting as RAID-1 with the drives mirroring. So you have 750GB of "safe" storage. Now you add another 750GB drive. Okay, now you have 1500GB of storage with one of the drives acting as parity drive (RAID-5). Add a fourth drive and how you have 2250GB of "safe" storage. Now you come back and just replace one of the original 750GB drives witha 1TB drive. Do you get extra capacity? No...not initially. But the drive is fully formatted and integrated as X-RAID. What this means is that eventually after you have piecemeal or onesie-twosie upgraded all four drives, suddenly the X-RAID resizes itself to match the capacity of the new drives with no transfer or downtime. So in theory if you wanted to upgrade your RAID, buy four 1TB drives, swap them out one at a time (letting each one rebuilt the array) and then at the end you'll have 3TB RAID isntead of the old 2250GB RAID and all the data intact.
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.
I have three ReadyNAS units and love them to death. They are a little fussy about drive temperatures (I guess that's a good things but, I may get like 40 emails during the course of the day about it and it's not like I'll drive home from work to turn up the A/C in my house). My only sadness is that Infrant doesn't have a higher capacity unit than four drives (oh please oh please, eight drives with a RAID-6 type protective hotspare in one nice rack-mountable unit would be my ultimate dream).
-JoeShmoe
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"Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies" - Demitri Martin
Maybe DRM is the herpes of pop culture.
-JoeShmoe
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The reality is that the MPAA is reacting to the fact that the court system handed a victory to Kalidiscope, who were sued by the controllers of the DVD format for copying DVDs to hard drives. What made this particular case interesting is that Kalidiscope had actually applied, paid for, and been granted a DVD decryption license (ie like what DVD player manufacturers get). Kalidiscope took this license and used it to decode DVDs and then store them on a custom RAID system (ie, locked up and not accessible via conventional means...so there was no danger of legal rips leaking onto the Internet). This allowed them to sell home theater systems to rich sports stars starting at $12K and going upwards of $100K. The DVD format controllers realized that their contract didn't explicitly prevent this so they changed it and then tried to sue Kalidiscope for infringement. Great guys. The only company to actally pay money and try to do legally what DeCSS and DVDXCopy and a million others were doing illegally...and you sue them.
Well, the courts handed Kalidiscope a victory and said pretty much that there was no violation of the license by what Kalidiscope was doing. So basically, either they have to stop selling DVD decryption or they have to accept that within a closed system, whatever is decrypted is covered by the license.
Andd....so now...having lost that battle...the MPAA sees the writing on the wall and is magnanimously deciding that what was forced on them was what they actually wanted to do "for the customers". The reality is that they have not giving up on the holy grail of per-view pricing and the idea of someday doing away with content possession so that everything is pay-per-view...they are just putting that goal aside and instead going to be milking the device makers first. First sell them expensive DVD ripping licenses to companies like Dell or Panasonic, so that those companies can create DVD jukeboxes without the silliness of Sony's 300 DVD spinning wheel o' media...then after they have gotten consumers to forget entirely about the fair use and first sale rights inherit to physical media...gradually start shifting to on-demand content available from the same system.
3) Profit.
Oh well...if I have to be damned by the content industry's grip on movies and television shows...I'd much rather be able to buy mass produced DVD jukebox/rippers at Wal-Mart for $30 than having to cobble together some legally questionable MythTV box myself.
- JoeShmoe
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Amen, not to mention that I've been recording 12+ hour streches for years...all it took was getting a laptop with a firewire in an WinDV. It's never been film capacity that's the problem. Battery is a little harder but....I'm never just holding a camera for 12 hours in my hand. Which means I'll be using a tripod. Which means I'll have time to setup. Which means I can run and tape down an extension cord from the outlets that 99% of all places have somewhere to run the buffer or power washer.
I would buy this thing in a hearbeat except for Sony's current hardon for 1080i, which is crap. I don't want it on a PS3 and I don't want it on a camcorder. I'm done with interlacing. My current camcorders are all progressive scan (even though a miserable 480p) but I've never been happier or had better looking video. If someone can make a 720p version of this then I'll take a look.
- JoeShmoe
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Now you are making up completely different arguments to cover the fact that you don't know what you are talking about.
Who the hell was talking about public conversations? This is about doctors, priests or lawyers THE PROFESSION not the people. If a doctor is at a cocktail party, he's not a doctor, he's a guy at a cocktail party. In fact, it's pretty damn rude to be talking to doctors about possible treatments when they are clearly off duty and not interested in performing their professional duties (I hope you have at least that much sense of etiquette). Ditto for third parties being present who are not the profession described above. Ditto for sending post cards or posting your legal discussion on a public billboard or do other things to alter the original argument of doctors, priests and lawyers being legally/professionally obligated to keep their information confidential.
I guess it escapes you that despite the fact that television dramas are fictional, the lazy writers are scanning the morning paper for ideas and none of what I said doesn't stem from actual court cases. Slashdot alone has covered its share of legal conundrums or legal travesties. And you even prove my point with your closing statement. Everything I email to my lawyer is confidential and no court can compell my lawyer to turn over the contents of my emails to be used against me. But you are right, someone could subpeona my ISP for copies of my IMAP folder or any cached messages on their mail server. And that is why I believe someday enough Foley-type incidents get Congress critters worried about nebulous nerds out there that know all their secrets, and we will see some kind of law mandating that computer professionals keep what they know confidential, too.
-JoeShmoe
Absolutely they do...why didn't you mention lawyers? Lawyers and doctors are both governed by by law and codes of professional conduct. Ever hear of HIPAA? Not only are doctors bound to keep everything about your medical history private, but everyone else in the chain of command has the same obligation or that law is broken and fines, liability, etc. ensure.
Not to mention, doctors and lawyers are only essentially allowed to practice on the approval of their professional association, and I have little doubt that a doctor or lawyer would be allowed to keep his license if he broke confidentiality. Priests are more nebulous, I'll agree, because there's not really any centralized professional organization that regulates them. But it's not been a hard test for courts to figure out if someone is seriously functioning as a spiritual advisor or just moking it by claiming to be a priest of the Order of the Stewed Tomato. The courts have held time and time again that people have a right to talk freely about any matter, even criminal ones, with a religious counselor and not have that subject to legal liability.
I'll also up your "reasonable expectation of privacy" arguement with spousal privaledge. A spouse does have a right other people cannot...they cannot be forced to testify against their husband or wife. Really, you seem to think that any time I talk alone with someone I should have an expectation of privacy, and yes that is true...but we are not talking about that. We are talking about legally defined privacy. If I tell the janitor in private about something, the courts can order him to repeat what I said in court against me. Not so for my spouse, doctor, lawyer or priest. So in that regard, they do have rights normal people do not because they perform functions that normal people do not...and those functions have been judged consistantly to be more important than prosecuting crimes.
Yes, there are exceptions...if a lawyer participates in the crime, the protection is broken. If the doctor thinks the person is a threat to himself or others, he has to report it. But hell, go watch a few Law & Order reruns...bottom line is, people need to be able to get advice without fear of reprocusion or reprisal and that will, I believe, one day extend to computer professionals as well.
-JoeShmoe
I've said it before but I'll say it again: Professionals working in the computer industry should be given the same requirement/protection as doctors, lawyers and priests. This is a two-way sword and yes, it will cut both ways for society but there will come a day that the people realize it is necessary.
Consider the wave of horror that would sweep through corporate America if IT "whistleblowers" started reporting Enron-style tactics to the press. It brings to mind the scene in fight club where Brad Pitt's character and a bunch of lowly caterers hog-tie a rich fat-cat politician and tell him that the lowly people he is talking about are all around him and literally guard him while he sleeps. I once stumbled across an Excel sheet while I was cleaning up a sloppy group directory that outlined the cost savings of eliminating my contract. What if I had decided to alter the conclusion? There have been posts about how there's too much volume of information, why would some IT worker care? I'd bet dollars to pesos that every single person who has held admin rights to a significant data volume has tried a search on his or her name at least once. As many have pointed out...it is an impossibility to demand IT be able to protect and secure all data, even lost or destroyed material, without giving them access to that data. Therefore, the only solution is a legal one. Doctors cannot betray their patient's medical privacy, lawyers cannot betray their attorney-client privaledge and priests are not supposed to reveal their confessions. Likewise, a computer profession should not be allowed to unilaterally reveal the contents of the data he's charged with managing. The various trade-offs to society for the exceptions to the rule and a matter for the courts.
Consider also the well-known fear that companies and or individuals have in seeking help. No company wants to admit they were broken into, or have that matter become public. So instead they often times hide that fact (although California passed a law making notification a requirement) or fail to seek out advice when it matters and it isn't too late to fix. As computers get more and more interconnected and gain more and more importance, we may find that it is necessary to give shield to the people charged with maintaining them so that people don't avoid getting "treatment" for fear that suddenly everything they've said or done online may show up one day and bite them in the Foley.
-JoeShmoe
Okay, Mr. "I-was-peeing-in-the-UNIX pool-before-you-were-out-of-diapers" can you tell me how many people you know who regularly carry around the following itmes: two screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a wirestripper, a wiresnip, a bottle opener, a hole punch, a knife, and scissors. Now, how many people do you know who carry around a Leatherman or a Swiss Army knife? Maybe there is a place for a bundle of tools which are basic and general enough to get most jobs done even if they aren't "the best" at any particular job? I mean, I hate having to rotate the whole off-center tool to turn a screw but, it sure beats a trip home to find a philips screwdriver.
Tools are meant to be specific and single-purpose. The best screwdriver is a screwdriver, not a hammer too. So yes, I agree that if I was writing a tool, the last thing I should be doing is letting feature-creep run the show. But an "application" is not a "tool" and comparing Word to pico/nano is just stupid. Comparing GMail to pine is just plain stupid. Tell me, how do view images in pine again? Or use rich text formatting? Or view PDF files without any external applications? Or notice that the person I was emailing is online so I can just send an instant message instead? Maybe pine is a tool for viewing plain text and GMail is an application of communication features in addition to just viewing plain text. Maybe there's people who want want that. You know, I'd be willing to bet dollars to pesos there are more people who use GMail today than are using pine.
So, you go right ahead and lug around your giant toolbox of specific perfect tools so when someone asks you to open a pickle jar you'll be able to use the 5" pipe wrench that you've never used before and probably will never need again. I'll tap the lid with the back of a butter knife or whatever else is handy and just get the job done.
- Joeshmoe
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I'll admit that the concepts behind AJAX excite the hell out of me. It's really something when you think about the fact that...it's really nothing new so much as, a theory that finally has some real practical applications and examples. Everyone I think has always known that...the worst thing about the web is the idea that you'll be in the middle of a process, like filling out a financial form, or managing a shopping cart of items, whatever and then be interrupted by a need to click a link. How many of us will be filling something out, not understand it, and see a Help link and for a brief second worry that when you click it, you won't get a nice friendly popup but get whisked away to some help page and have to start the whole damn thing over? (raises hand) That's the kind of ugliness that breaks things like webmail or shopping carts or financial forms. I can't tell you how many times I cussed a blue streak because I accidentally lost focus from the mail field in Hotmail, hit backspace meaning to erase a word and ended up back in the inbox where, thank you dynamic pages, pressing forward takes me to a new empty compose mail window.
Now obviously, that's the programmers fault...webmail should never throw anything away regardless of the user clicking Back and Forward on their browser. And I think that's the theory behind the AJAX effect. Really, back and forward are supposed to be the last things I'll ever hit. In fact, Google Maps I believe has to go through considerable kludges to even have entries show up in the Back and Forward browser list...and I can tell you there are plenty of times I wish I could go "Back" to my previous map location but instead, got taken back to the original empty Direction page I started at. So, if AJAX is done right...everything I ever need to click is right there. And that's what have been valuable since Windows was born. A poorly written web application/interface is like having to use Calc.exe Notepad.exe Paint.exe and CharMap.exe to make a document instead of WinWord.exe doing it all in one place.
In fact, I'm a little upset the whole stampede behind AJAX apparently caught so many developers and programmers napping. I've been hiring PHP/MySQL programmer for years now but, I start asking questions like... can't we have it so when someone clicks this header it just drops down a propigated list of choices instead of having to pop them up in a window or regenerate the page? And they stare at me like I'm asking for the moon or wanting an entire database of 400 items preloaded on the page before it renders. The guys with "AJAX" on their resume are...well they apparently know what that buzzword is worth and have their hands full writing the next Flicr or Digg or whatever.
And I'm one of them. I've had an idea for a web-based application but...because it involves just so darn much data, I've been having it developed as a template/macroset in Word because I can piggyback on the already present features like AutoText and Toolbars to provide an interface and packaged output. Now, I'm excited that I can have something just as dynamic and immediately accessible, but available on any platform and any location and without relying on software I don't control (I've already found two critical bugs in AutoText that Microsoft has admitted are bugs present since Word 2000, cannot be fixed by any option/registry setting, and will hopefully be fixed in the next version but possibly the one after that...oh gee thanks). So I want to start my own wildfire by creating something that would make a wonderful application, but have ability to distribute that application to thousands and tens of thousands of users as easily as sharing a link. That's amazing. That's why it's a wildfire. I just wish the store wasn't sold out of all the matches.
- JoeShmoe
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So...wait you are saying that it's a good thing to allow mosquitos to live unchecked (thus spreading malaria) because it avoids producing DDT-resistant mosquitos? Sorry to be blunt but, that's perhaps one of the dumbest things I've heard. That's like saying we should have banned penicillin because it would have been better to let bacterial infections run unchecked (thus spreading god-only-knows-what) to avoid creating resistant bacteria. Well, yes, we do have a growing crisis with bateria that are resistant to everything we can throw at them. But to argue that we should have let millions of people die so that we could only postpone, not win, the war is absurd.
You treat the disease with the best tools you have at the time. When they are no longer effective, you hope you have developed stronger tools. I will totally buy the argument that today DDT is ineffective or that it has been historically overused. The same can be said for penicillin. Today it's virtually ineffective, and that's probably because it was handed out like candy for infections that the human body was well able to tolerate.
It's one thing to put DDT in a category of good versus evil because it has benefits but also serious side effect. I mean, if we were talking thalidamide here, then the good just does not outweight the bad. But I haven't seen any evidence about what exactly was "bad" about DDT...and I certainly don't think your argument about resistance qualifies.
Regarding the climate website, I'm more than willing to admit that the issue is hotly contested, seeing as how you can't throw a rock without hitting a "climate expert". But you can't fake history, and the fact is that the scientific community has been handing us apocolyptical predictions for the last hfifty and that the media has been more than happy to sensationalize the issues for ratings (bird flu anyone?). I still laugh when I watch movies/shows from the 60's and early 70's where most of the plotlines deal with global overpopulation and the fact that in a mere 10 or 20 years, there won't be enough room for people to live, enough food to eat, or enough water to drink. And 10 or 20 years from now, we will probably be living in desperate fear of the next Chicken Little, maybe Martian flu or self-aware robots.
-JoeShmoe
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Many of you may scoff at Michael Crichton (or worse, judge him based on the horrible movies that his books become) but you cannot deny that the man takes the time to do real, intensive research when he writes about topic X. His are just about the only works of fiction that have bibliographies longer than many works of fact.
His latest novel, State of Fear, is a perfect example. He takes apart the fearmongering and psuedoscience behind manbearpig...er...global warming, and shows it for what it really is: attention-whoring scientists playing Chicken Little to get the grants that pays their salaries.
DDT is one example of how policies are based on sound bites and not science. Pick any perspective: moral, cost/benefit, safety...the DDT ban was a horrible failure. To quote a section from the novel:
"Banning DDT."
"Argueably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitos and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere neat as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it."
"But DDT was a carcinogen."
"No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban."
"It was unsafe."
"Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years in one experiment. After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."
Okay, now the fun part that makes the above passage of "fiction" so scary...the footnotes:
1) Some people put the number closer to 30 million deaths.
2) Full discussion of DDT in Wildavshy, 1994, pp. 55-80
3) Sweeny Committee, 25 April 1972, "DDT is not a carcinogentic hazard to man." Ruckelshaus banned it two months later, saying, DDT "poses a carcinogenic risk" to man. He never read the Sweeney report.
4) Hayes, 1969
5) John Noble Wilford, "Deaths from DDT Successor Stir Concern," New York Times, 21 August 1970, p. 1
However, there is a more sinister side to the story. I can't find any reference at the moment, but I remember finding a website that claimed that DuPont had engineered the DDT ban because they held a patent on DDT and it was about to expire. They also held patents on several DDR replacements. So, with a little bit of lobbying and media frenzy, DuPont was able to ban the use of the cheapest and most effective product, in favor of enriching their own pockets.
And even worse than allowing millions of people to die for profit? DuPont did it again in the 80's when their patent on freon was due to expire. A little more lobbying and media frenzy, and freon was banned and replaced by numerous patented and nowhere near as effective DuPont products. And, millions of people (mostly in Africa and other poor nations) have died from food poisoning or starvation due to the high cost of preserving and transporting perishables under the new freon-free world regieme.
Call me a kook but...read the book. The gift you receive for your $8.99 is your ability to sleep at night knowing that global warming is just about the last thing you need to worry about.
-JoeShmoe
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Patents are something that you would be an idiot to cheap out on. Patent searches are important not just to find out if what you are trying to patent has already been patented because 99% of the time, no kidding, it has. You can't find anyone who makes the damn thing, or anyone who's ever written about it, but if it's technology-related, then you're going to find that five years ago someone with deep pockets fired the patent shotgun at everything related to your idea. The real important to patent searches is that they can help you find specific claims that can coexist with all of the other patents out there. By avoiding the landmines you find in other patents, you can figure out something that is a real "gotcha" moment that qualifies as novel and non-obvious to the patent office.
Each patent is really a bunch of little patents called claims. Patenting something like one-click shopping may have dozens of claims related to the interface, the backend processing, the operation, etc. The more claims you have, the more likely that you patent will infringe and the claims will be reject. The fewer claims you make, the more worthless your patent as someone can easily engineer around it. Given the cost of a patent from a reputable source ($8000-$15000 as high as $50000 depending on number of claims) why bother if you only want to patent something trivial?
If you are cheap, but want some level of protection, get a patent pending. You typically draw up some diagrams and descriptions, then pay between $500-$1500 to have a patent mill or patent lawyer file a provisional patent. This gives you the ability to boldly put "Patent Pending" on your documentation and it gives you a reservation in the patent line. Then you go out, market your idea and hope that a) anyone who thinks of stealing will be discouraged by the risk that your patent is granted and you come back and screw them or b) the money you make marketting your idea can pay for the costs to get the real patent filed.
If you are willing to invest the money, then spend a good amount to get a thorough patent search by someone who's actually there at the USPTO and can go through everything they have, not just what as been digitized. With some legal analysis and comparision of the existing claims to your idea, you can figure out what is missing and concentrate your patent on that.
-JoeShmoe
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You can do some google searches, or pay one of those patent mills $99 to run basically the same type of keyword search but that's really not going to give you much of a guide. The patent doesn't generally matter, it's the claims. If you are trying to get a utility patent on a widget, it's worth thinking...how can someone
No, not quite.
RDP is old and busted, ICA is the new hotness. RDP is basically like pcAnywhere or VNC...it relies heavily on sending bitmaps back and forth of screen changes (not always, but with the foofy windowing effects of even certain business applications, it's increasingly become the standard case). It must also operate in a separate session window that floats above the user's actual desktop. Cut and paste is sloppy, file transfer is kludgy, and data shuffles back and forth on the RDP connection in a manner than it horribly inefficient. For example, a document on the server being printed on the client must go from the server to the client, be rendered in the client's application, tranferred to the spooler on the server, then transmitted back to the port on the client. That's four trips for essentially the same data.
ICA operates at a much lower level, compressing bitmaps and sending windowing commands, which allows most of the heavy lifting to be done on the client. You can run an ICA application on their own right from the user's desktop (IE, no sessions...ICA looks just like a local application, including OLE, drag-n-drop, etc). Drives and even COM or USB devices are automatically mapped. Bandwidth use is much, much lower and much, much more efficient.
Citrix essentially invented the technology behind RDP and ICA. It was really a pretty simple hack. Microsoft, fearing that they would be left behind if enterprise users started jumping into thin client technology, licensed RDP from Citrix back in Windows NT 4.0 days (Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition was a separate, stand-alone product that had so many licensing hurdles imposed by Citrix it was almost unusable). Citrix knew that Microsoft could essentially recreate what they had done (and probably do it better) so they happily agreed to take it up the butt and give Microsoft favorable licensing terms...which you can see only continue to lean more in Microsoft's favor as they progressed to 2000 Server and 2003 Server. Besides, Citrix had already moved on to using ICA so as far as they were concerned Microsoft could have RDP. Citrix did, however, negotiate several conditions, like the 256-color limitation, no COM port mapping, etc, and they earn royalties for each Terminal Service license (which is why you need to pay additionally to use TS even if you have enough client licenses). On the other hand, Microsoft has gotten more and more features shoehorned for free into Terminal Services, which makes Citrix less and less attractive for the money.
Windows XP only allows one RDP connection (really two since remote assitance can work simultaneously with the user currently logged in) not because of something Citrix said, but because Microsoft doesn't want to undercut sales of their own server product. If you could run five RDP sessions of Office from a $299 copy of XP, why the hell would you pay $899 for a five-user edition of Windows 2003 server?
-JoeShmoe
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So that's like, what, ten or twelve tops? It's still on preorder everywhere I've visited.
In all seriousness...how can this even be possible as a lawsuit. I think someone didn't refresh their browser and saw a joke news story from April 1st.
MPEG2 and all MPEG related standards are "owned" by MPEG LA, who licenses the technology. It would be one thing if Microsoft deployed a product with MPEG2 playback capabilities without paying the license, but then where is Lucent in all this? Is this some crappy dredge up of a vague compression scheme like Unisys pulled?
If so, why Microsoft? There's about a billion DVD players out in the market right now that would be infringing on this patent. Maybe the patent is only related to MPEG2 and networks? Whoops...a billion PCs out there that would be targets. Isn't Lucent in the middle of being bought by some French company? Does it make any sense to begin some protracted NTP vs Blackberry type war in the middle of that?
ite
The whole article amounts to two lines on some website I've never heard of so...I'm calling it a belated April Fool's...the April Fool being CowboyNeal.
-JoeShmoe
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How about one thing Explorer can't even do as well as File Manager from Windows 3.1?
/E /C followed by DEL /S batch command. Infuriating.
GIVE ME AN F-ING OPTION TO ALWAYS MOVE READONLY/SYSTEM FILES WITHOUT CONFIRMATION
I have seriously broken hardware in a fit of rage because I started a massive 120GB move operation before going off to bed, only to wake up the next morning and find it stopped two minutes in because it ran into an f-ing "thumbs.db" file.
I have been bitching about that since Windows 95 when they removed the confirmation options menu from File Manager. The sick thing is that there's probably some old registry entry that could do this, but it's never been found. I can't believe I'm the only person that gets so pissed off about it. How hard would it be for Microsoft to update the Copy/Move progress dialog to include checkboxes for all the options? Right-click, Cut, right-click, Paste, check off "include read-only" "include system" "continue on error", done. As it stands now, I end up having to open a shell prompt so I can use a XCOPY
-JoeShmoe
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The problem with the portable players, at least both of the Sony models I owned, is that they are not much bigger than the actual size of the MiniDisc. Trivial force or not, there are spring involved and when metal fatigue sets in, things start going wrong. If the door doesn't return to the precise closed position, the pins inside the unit aren't going to catch the latch to open and you'll end up trying to insert a disc with the cover closed.
I should have clarified that the problem with getting bent or catching happens on the eject not the insert. When you open the MZ-R55 for example, the player is simultaneously lifting and partially ejecting the MiniDisc in one coordinated motion. But the disc is barely raised higher than the lip or the player, and if you are zoned out or move too quickly, that little flap just loves to catch on the lip and get bent outward. Once it's been bent out, you either have to remove it or face the fact that it's now more likely it will catch again and again.
Perhaps the colored Sony discs that I used for the bulk of my collection are particularly prone to this problem, I don't know. Thankfully, the attractive hard cases that hold the MiniDiscs do such a good job that I wasn't particularly scared of removing the errant disc cover.
-JoeShmoe
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Okay, I have close to 400 MiniDiscs, so let me tell you why I bought into MD wholeheartedly:
1) CDs suck. There's a reason why we stopped using 5-1/4" floppies. 5" media is just too large. It doesn't fit in your hand. It doesn't fit in your pocket. Carrying a large number of them is about as fun as lugging around a coffee can.
2) CD player with optical out + MD with optical in = perfect sounding copy of a CD in a compact, sturdy package.
3) Human beings covet. They want pretty shiny objects they can hold and line up like conquests on a shelf. While some might argue their directory listing is just as sexy...it's more likely to make eyes glaze over than pop out.
4) It's nice to be able to loan someone part of your collection or make that mix tape without handing them a $300 player (remotely authorizing their computer is again, vastly unsexy as a gift)
5) My high-end MD in 1997 looked better and was smaller than any other audio player, and that includes that newfangled Rio thing that had just come out.
6) Boy, did I love being able to record long classroom lectures without losing key parts while my classmates swapped tapes.
That said, this is the year 2006 and this guy has to be a complete idiot for not realizing that the MD has an incredibly superior replacement:
FLASH MEDIA.
Your average SD card or even CF card makes an MD look like a brick. MDs are not as indestructable as this yahoo would lead you to believe. The door eventually gets flukey just like 3-1/2" floppies did. I mean, it's a moving part and (especially on compact players) takes a lot of force to slide back and forth. Once the door is bent or starts catching, you end up either removing it and fearing that you've essentially rendered the point of having a media caddy useless, or losing your $1-2 investment.
Flash media, meanwhile, is ROCK SOLID. For crying out loud, someone shot a bullet through one and still pulled off the data it. And, MD will never win awards for access times. MD was fine for a linear activity like playing a CD, but jumping tracks is also just like a CD...you wait. The only thing Sony could be doing with Hi-MD is switch to a packet-based system...which is going to be murder on fussy drive mechanics.
Yes, flash media is expensive. But you can fit the equivalent of 8 or 9 MDs on a $35 flash card. True, a 1GB MD costs a lot less but this is the same song as Zip, or Jaz or SyJet or any other removable media. And how well have they worked out? A few years from now, a 1GB removeable media will seem as antiquated as a floppy disc. Meanwhile, flash capacities will continue to grow.
The only missing part of the equation is larger selection of players where you can remove the flash media. This is how they all started out (Rio etc) and honestly, I don't know why they have fallen out of favor. It adds maybe a few dollars to the price of a couple hundred dollar player. It can do the exact same magic, but with the all the advantages I described in the above MD praise.
So I think this guy needs to wake up and smell the present. I still think my 400 MDs look pretty as hell, and evey now and then I'll relax somewhere with my faithful Sony. And if I ever need to record 300 minutes of speaking, it's still the only thing I use. But the music that's on those 400MDs is now held on a portable hard drive and whenever I have a need to share it, I just copy it over to a USB thumbdrive. If I was still a Sony guy, it would be a MemoryStick. Maybe someday Apple will decide to bless a certain form of flash media like Sony has with the PSP but until then, my target platform is still the laptop.
So, while I can appreciate the romance involved in the MD, it's over. There are smaller, faster, sturdier and ($/MB) cheaper options. He can tilt against windmills if he wants to but, I'm ready to look forward to 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flash devices.
-JoeShmoe
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The accusation was: "you can't even spell sentence". If that were the case, I would have spelled it wrong in both places. So if his premise is wrong we can safely say everything else is just as wrong and the Troll moderation is well-deserved.
-JoeShmoe
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Me: So no more sentences
You: Considering you can't even spell "sentence"
Riiiiiiiight.
-JoeShmoe
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Okay, I'm going to pull unrank here and officially ban the use of ".Net" unless you offset it with quotes like I just did. I just got a headache trying to process the above post. Am I the only one who sees a period and immediately thinks "end of sentance" and doesn't notice it's being tacked in front of the word "Net"?
Call it dotNet, please. Or ".Net" works. I find it completely microsoft (adj, to make decisions based on marketing factors instead of technical ones, and then still end up with unmarketable garbage anyway) that they make the name ".Net" the new campaign slogan, yet you can't have any filename starting with ".Net" in any of their operating systems! (Well, not through Explorer anyway.)
So no more sentences about. Net that confuse people, because even though the period in. Net is not where I just put it, mentally I think everyone ends up processing it that way and it's just plain irritating.
-JoeShmoe
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If you look at the textmode setup screen, you can see there's a 256MB USB key present (244MB storage device). Later after the GUI is booted, you can see under Disk Drives there's a Generic USB storage disk.
I'm willing to bet that what's happening here it that he's managed to copy the NT bootloader onto the USB drive and then boot to it. Booting to USB devices is, I believe, something that Apple supports. I know it's supported by every current BIOS so why should the next generation EFI have fewer features? Maybe if you plug in a bootable USB device, the EFI will boot it instead of the MBR on the primary disk drive...or more likely there's a hotkey to boot to USB devices like how holding "C" I think forces a boot to CD-ROM.
Anyway, the sneaky part is that booting to CD-ROM or USB kicks in all sorts of helpful things. Booting to most CD-ROMs (El Torito spec) creates a fake "A:" drive with the contents of the bootsector binary file. Ironically, you can't acccess the CD-ROM itself unless that bootsector loads a CD-ROM driver. Booting to USB drives, I would guess, creates Int 13 or 80h or whatver it's called...basically BIOS-compatible addressing for drives. This is how funky SCSI or RAID controllers can create drives that you can see in DOS, which has no idea how to access a 32-bit PCI device.
So my theory is that the Mac creates a C: drive and loads the NT installer kernal, at which point the installer loads the right driver to see the IDE drivers (or perhaps he loads the appropriate textmode driver for the actual disk controller). Once the kernal can see the drive, it can put the pointer in the BOOT.INI and format and partition it. Then, the USB drive becomes the boot drive (has BOOT.INI, NTLDR, etc) and the internal IDE drive becomes the system drive (\WINDOWS directory, pagefile, etc).
There are people who know how to boot the NT kernal from USB keys and even read-only media like CD-ROMs. I wonder if anyone has tried using a WinXP embedded bootable CD on an Intel Mac (like BartPE or the official Microsoft recovery one. It's a clever idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the magic step. As a bonus, using the BIOS emulation provided by USB burning would probably bypass all of the trusted computing components since they are not DOS compatible.
Still, talk about making a sow's ear out of a silk purse!
-JoeShmoe
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Except what is his employer's data and what are his own personal thoughts? Taking their leads on properties and going "hey, I should call my friend and have him buy land near XYZ" is a lot different than "hey, I should send my friend a copy of confidential employer report".
The company is alleging that the only proof that the guy violated his contract was on their laptop. Well what if the guy had put the data on his own computer? Would the company then be entitled to it? If he destroyed the data on his own personal computer, would that also be a crime?
This whole idiotic ruling creates a legal catch-22. You are an employee given access to confidential information. Suddenly you are no longer an employee. So, if you keep that information, you could be found to "gaining access to information that you do not have permission to access" and be guilty of computer fraud under the statues. NOW, if you destroy the information so that you cannot be found guilty of having access, you can be charged with "hacking or tampering with information you did not have permission to access" and be guilty of computer fraud under the statues. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
-JoeShmoe
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Er, I guess I missed the opening line that it was already decided 3-0 and for exactly the wrong reasons. I thought the rest was the prosecution argument.
Hopefully this gets appealed to the Supreme Court because file deletion, I belive, is going to be one of the key legal issues for future generations for the reasons I mentioned.
I wonder what these judges have in their own Recycle Bins at home.
-JoeShmoe
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