what on earth were 1700 people supposed to do for ipix? NASA probably uses less people to put the space shuttle in orbit.
If you and you skeleton team were doign all the work, what were the other 1695 people doing?
no matter how good the idea if you can't control cash burn rate you're going to go bankrupt. At $100k for salary and bennies and office space per person, that's $170 million/year in labor expenses.
Sounds to me like 100 people is probably a reasonable size given the realistic revenue of a company like ipix.
We use a separate sync server with lots of
disk space and then do nightly dumps over nfs
to this box. This server is located in a
separate building with ethernet between the
systems.
Every night on our servers, a script runs and
dumps the local filesystems at an appropriate
level. We then gzip the dump and store it on
the dump server. Since each file is uniquely
named, we can store old dumps as long as disk
space permits. In our case this is about 1 week
of old dumps.
The scripts are trivial to write (think dump |
gzip >>/nfs/mount/on/remote/server. For a
while we used to dump between remote locations
and move the data via rsync but it takes forever.
local ethernet is a huge plus for moving gigabytes
of data nightly.
for more important data like our cvs repository,
we snapshot it hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly
as well as tarring it up hourly and daily. This
means we have like 15 entire copies of our CVS
tree. It's probably overkill but it helps a lot
come panic time.
You can easily add 400gb of disk space to a
regular pc for about $1200. In our case we do
it all in less than 100. The other nice thing
about doing this is that we have instantaneous
access to our dumps and can access them much
quicker than tape.
In a perfect world I'd also like to back up
the data to tape as well, but haven't yet done
so. I suppose if we wanted to be extra safe we
could also mirror the drives on the sync server
or rotate the data between physical disks so that
it would take multiple failures to lose the
backup data.
I used to work for a seriously underfunded
pbs tv station in ohio. When I went to our
broadcast engineering facility for the first
time, I noticed a 19" rackmount pc with a
20" box fan(like the kind you put in windows
on a hot day) laying down on top of the computer.
I noticed it was on and asked if I should put
fan back in its upright position. The engineers
all wigged out and said that it was like that
for a reason - all that airflow just barely kept
the old cranky proprietary z-80 based broadcast
system in working order. without it, it would
overheat instantly.
>For multiple file downloads, we can get a max
>of around 1984kbp/s (that is if we download
> around 3-4 files or we download from the
> telecom company's test server.)
An E1 connection is 2.048 mbit/s. 1984 kbit/sec
is 1.9375 mbit/sec. 1.9375/2.048 = 94.60%
utilization. Since that 2.048 mbit/sec is the
raw, layer 2 wire speed of the connection
and the 1984kbit/sec is the speed of a
layer 3/4 tcp/ftp transfer you're probably doing
even better than 94.60% since you are not counting
the overhead of TCP/IP and packet sizes.
Also, note that your ISP is only guaranteeing
you E1 speed over the link from you to them. After
that all bets are off. The only valid data
transfers would be from your LAN to theirs and
even then they should be done so that disk
issues aren't skewing the results.
This is what I usually do:
Inside ftp)
ftp> get bigfilename.tar.gz/dev/null
note transfer speed
repeat exactly the same transfer. This should
make sure the remote file is now in disk cache
and should be served to you without any disk
accesses.
ftp> get bigfilename.tar.gz/dev/null
now note the transfer speed here. It might be
a bit higher.
As you've also seen, single transfers won't max
out the connection. If you can run multiple
simultaneous tests and sum teh results you will
probably see slightly higher results.
That being said, I dont' think you have much to
worry about if you are getting 1984kbit/sec over
a 2.048 mbit/sec E1.
If it were me, I'd be running MRTG on the snmp
stats of your router so that you can see exactly
the amount of bandwidth being used. go to
www.mrtg.org, download, compile, install and
sit back. note that mrtg will report direct byte
counts so that you'll get a consistent layer 2
data transfer number rather than mixing layers.
They've got all the remote-power and remote
serial-console stuff you can imagine. We have
three of their DS-9 serial-console --> ethernet
boxes and about 5 of their RPC series power strips.
The power strips can be controlled via a serial
line to one of their serial console boxes or
directly over the ethernet.
This stuff is the reason that I now work from
home instead of commuting 50 miles each way.
We're using electricmail. My boss found them
when our company had first started and we were too
small to bother with the hassle of running our
own mail system. They've had some reliability
quirks over the last year or so that we have
been using them but all in all it's not
too bad. I think we pay about $100 a month for
pop, imap and webmail. they also aggressively
spam filter and their support people are sharp
and easy to get a hold of. I'd recommend you
check them out. ElectricMail
I'm just a reasonably satisfied customer, not an
employee, director, controlling person, yadda
yadda yadda.
It may not be that bad in all countries. the
United Kingdom has a special program for
"shortage occupations" that allows for quick,
almost guaranteed work permits with a minimum
of paperwork required and no hoops for your
employer-to-be to work through, epsecially
the dreaded "proof of no available local or
EU citizens to take the job."
To give you some idea of how much the situation
has changed in the uk recently, I was told that
if I applied for a job with a local government
agency as a plain-jane sysadmin that they would
sponsor my work permit. That's pretty amazing
in my book - local governments usually want to
hire their own residents, not some guy from
across the pond.
I don't have the link handy, but your can find
lots of info at expat essentials
(expat-essentials.com or.co.uk) or by searching
google for "dfee work permit scheme" or
"dfee work permit shortage occupation"
FWIW, I'm staying in the USA now. Go to
homefair.com and run the salary and relocations
calculators to figure out the cost of living:
It's perversely high in europe and IT salaries
are insanely low. You had best be prepared for
financial culture shock.
This product sounds like a specialized version of
the SiliconTCP Product that InterProphet has
been developing for a couple years now. Bill and
Lynne Jolitz of 386BSD fame started InterProphet.
Their model was a full TCP/IP stack in silison
on an ethernet card. These folks sound like
they've gone a bit further up the OSI layer and
actually put HTTP requests together.
It's an interesting idea (Interprophet.com had
some benchmark showing their stuff to use 1/10
the processing power) but I personally have my
doubts about an http-specific accelerator.
I've not heard much out of Interprophet lately. Any ideas what the Jolitzes and crew are up to?
The freemasons figured out the solution to
the scientology lawyer problem a long time
ago. When there secret stuff leaks out, they
have an ages old policy.
Didn't Andy Grove write a book called "only
the paranoid survive"? I guess the paranoia
is over and pride is calling the shots:
to wit:
1.) dual RDRAM channels? RDRAM? McFly? Hello?
RDRAM is dead. I don't care if it's the same
price as SDRAM. Nobody in their right mind
is going to commit to rambus based PC's. Intel
and rambus tried to force a new standard down
the collecive throat of the industry. Just
like the old IBM and the microchannel it has
failed. Just like IBM of old this attempt
will come back to haunt it for a long time.
2.) No SMP? You must be kidding. Intel's SMP
architecture was the only thing separating
it from AMD. Now intel is producing chips
that are incapable of SMP? puh-leeze. Does
the word scalability mean anything to these
people? If pentium iv ships with any less
than 4-way SMP it will be a critical error.
3.) More cpu instructions? How many instructions
does the ia32 architecture support now? 500?
And what are these new instructions going to
buy me? VR on ebay? come on. If I want high
performnce 3d i'm going to buy a video card
not a franken-cpu. Intel is going off the
deep end with their bizarre and shallow
marketing. Maybe they can sell these chips
to the 10 people on their Web Outfitter
service. A sucker is born every minute but
they aren't the consumers of high performance
CPUS.
In the end we have intel, formerly one of the most
entrepreneurial and forward thinking companies
of our generation being replaced by a prideful
monopolist that believes the market will buy
anything that it produces.
Intel has the most aggressive competition of
the last 15 years to deal with and they are
doing little more than putting their heads in
the sand. I predict they will lose 20-40% of
their market share withing three years if mistakes
like this one (and the mistakes-in-waiting of
the ia-64) come to pass.
AMD and Transmeta are going to use
this fiasco to pierce intel's armor.
how many OEMs will they be able to steal away?
Do you think Dell and compaq want to sell
high performance computers with no SMP support
and overpriced RDRAM? They know the market will
not forgive them if they try.
Intel might be king of the hill today but
in the end goliath is about to be cut down
with his own tools.
Where have you gone Andy Grove? your ship
is sinking.
rural internet access is a pain. However,
if you can get creative and use some solutions
to your benefit you might have a chance. Most
of these ideas are off the top of my head but
a lot of them depend on how big your pocketbooks
are. If you don't mind spending the money then
it is possible. whether it's worth it is
another story completely.
1.) wireless. I'm talking some sort of line
of sight. microwave will cost a couple grand
but sometimes you can lease it. It's a line
of sight deal so you might need a tower.
2.) have friends in town? You could piggyback
on their cheap broadband line by installing
a NAT box (linux of course) and sharing the
cable/dsl line. Once you have the IP access
get a 56kb or t1 line from your friend's home
to yours. A point to point 1.5mbit line in
the same LATA usually costs about $200 a month
plus $10 - $20 per mile. throw in a pair of
used cisco 2501's from ebay and you have your
own WAN for about $1500. It's expensive but
it will sure look good on a resume.
3.) Use a point-to-point DSL line and combine it
with #2. Here in uswest land you can get a
DSL line from point to point. Make one end
your house and the other end your IP service
and you might be in business. On the other
hand I think this stuff goes through the
CO too so distance might still be a concertn.
on the plus side it's 1/4 the cost of a t1.
bottom line is that this stuff tends to be
expensive. Living in the country has its
rewards sometime but being on the technological
bleeding edge ain't one of them. Do you have
anyone nearby who could help shoulder the
cost? one you've got a connection out in the
sticks I'm sure you will be the envy of your
neighbors (at least until the cable company
strings line anyhow and then you're the proud
owner of a white elephant WAN.)
- So in our opinion TUX is a new and unique class - of webserver, there is no prior art implementin - such kind of 'HTTP stack' and 'abstract object - cache' approach. It's i believe a completely - new approach to webserving. Please read this - comment too, which (i hope) further explains - the in-kernel issue:
Maybe I'm paranoid, but "new and unqiue" and "prior art" in the same sentence mean patent filing to me.
Are there plans to see patent protection for TUX? As I recall, the RTLinux folks got a patent for RTLInux's prioritization stuff.
Is a patent in the works?
Regardless, TUX is an interesting idea and I hope to try it out soon.
My credit union, The Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union, has had an electronic bill pay service for years now. Right now they are totally web-based and it rocks. You wouldn't think it but these folks are on the absolute cutting edge of technology. Since most vendors still end up wanting a check anyhow, PSECU will send one. Once it clears my account (note that the funds aren't taken out until the merchant cashes the check rather than when I write it) PSECU digitizes it and scans it for viewing via their web site. Similarly they now upload monthly statements as pdf files for viewing. So basically I can see the physical check (front and back) and see my statement.
PSECU also has auto-pay and a list of merchant addresses about 10000 miles long. I love these folks. I've had an account with them since I turned 18 and I will never in a million years move to another financial institution. Hell I sent an email to them yesterday at lunch and before I left for the day I had a personal response from their CEO. They are the bomb. Nine years of flawless service.
Here are some of their services:
on-line bill pay on-line visa statements on-line loan application with 1 hour approval. 128 bit SSL 24x7 banking funds transfer pretty much every other bank service too.
So anyhow, I heartily recommend you find a credit union. You'll save the gouging at the ATM and will probably save a point or two in your car or mortgage loan. Just because they are low profile non-profits doesn't mean they aren't kicking the ass of every commercial bank in sight.
I love these folks so much that even though I now live in Las Vegas I still use a bank 2000 miles away. Just like on the web, for this credit union distance is really menaingless.
John D. Rockefeller's only comment regarding the forcible breakup of the standard oil trust:
"Buy Standard Oil"
And he was right. The breakup into 5 or 6 companies (nearly every major oil company to this day) made standard oil stockholders much more money than owning the whole.
Having worked for a company that had more lawyers on its staff than legitimate employees I must say this is true. ie we'll ask for 5x but will settle in a heartbeat for X.
The weird thing about this announcement is timing. Wasn't there just an announcement this morning about a big cash infusion over at caldera?
Why bother selling off big chunks of the company at a huge discount to raise chump change (33+ million or so) when you have to know that you are about to settle and get a windfall? What's going on in Orem, Uncle Ray?
Sounds to me that their CFO needs to find out what the litigators are up to.
I'm sure the micros~1 lawyers were eager to settle this one. Just think of all the possibly incriminating documents that won't see the light of day now.
The micros~1 folks really got the better deal on this one. Let's not forget that the $1.6 billion was subject to treble damages should the anti-trust case been proven. $5 billion is a lot of money, even for bill & co. A hit like that would cause spasms on wall street.
vegas is anonymous. nobody is from here. there is precious little sense of community. Culture is essentially non-existent.
crime is somewhat higher than national averages.
it attracts losers who figure they'll make six figures as a dealer or waitress. they won't.
Salaries are about equivalent to pittsburgh but the tax base is much lower. Housing costs are about equivalent.
Las vegas, being a very new city, has a decent infrastructure. I'm writing this on via my cable modem. The phone company is hounding me to try their DSL. It's $50 a month for an analog phone line and DSL with internet service here. pretty decent. high bandwidth 'net connections are available from multiple sources. there are several oc-12 and higher 'net links crisscrossing the desert. Sprint, the local phone company, is marginally competent. t1 provisioning time for us has been about 2-3 weeks.
For me it only took about 1 month to realize it attracts total losers. Personally I live on the extreme northwest side of town in a massive master planned 'community' that is somewhat out of the twilight zone.
Having bailed out of pittsburgh after living there for 25 of my 26 years I know a bit or two about the whole tri-state area.
Pittsburgh's problems are:
1.) the weather just plain sucks. Try parking 1/2 mile from the office and then having to walk through snow and slush ten inches deep.
2.) The universities, while world class, do little in the way of public relations. Town and gown are two vastly different worlds.
3.) Pittsburgh virtually shuts down at 5:00 PM on friday. 24 hour anything is unheard of.
4.) The taxes are insanely high. There is a 2.8% flat state income tax. A 7% sales tax in allegheny county. My hometown had a 1.45% local income tax. Property taxes are among the highest in the country.
5.) old people control everything. Someone else mentioned that allegheny county is #2 in old people as a percentage of population. Not only does this make meeting people bad, it also infuses old people with political power. Between the old people and the luddite unions it's hopeless.
6.) This is not an entrepreneurial place. Business is big here. Alcoa, us steel, mellon bank, etc. are all 100000 years old and hold court here. There are a few post-cmu startups floating around now (transarc, FORE) but they are rare.
7.) It's just a blue-collar kind of town. This place is full of pittsburghers! They worked in the mills! They went on strike! They hate the boss! They love the union shop steward! They drink IC light or rolling rock at the bar and then go to the steelers game on sunday. this is pittsburgh society.
anyhow, for what it's worth I moved to Las Vegas. It's not a perfect geek city (not enough of us here) but it's got some pluses
- It's warm. 65 degrees on christmas day
- It's 24x7. Wanna go eat at 5am? no problem.
- The women are everywhere. It's vegas fer chrissakes. the truly desperate can pay legally.
- It's about the lowest tax state ever. No city state income taxes. minimum other stuff. Gotta love gambling
- bars open 24x7! no weird pittsburgh alcohol laws!
I could go on and on and on but I won't.
bottom line:
birds of a feather flock together. Geeks leave pittsburgh because all their geek friends left. They left because it's old, cold, corrupt, bankrupt, boring, and stagnant.
About six months I interviewed for a position doing this exact same thing for Highmark Blue Cross/blue Shield in Pittsburgh. Although the job didn't work out (I decided to relocate to hot and sunny Las Vegas) I still remember a few tidbits about the process:
1.) Highmark was going to be making medical records online and available to healthcare providers. The highmark folks also said their were federal regs requiring a PKI solution.
2.) Highmark was looking at implementing an Entrust or similar solution where they would be there own certificate authority. My thoughts were that this was unneccessary and they could have implemented the solution much faster by using an already-existing certificate authority (I really only looked at Verisign, but there are now tons of others) PKI costs $$$ but an ounce of security now is worth a pound of legal settlements for improper disclosure later.
3.) PKI solves a lot of user authentication problems. Being able to revoke certificates means you can survive compromised certificates. It's also great for authenticating users, since the certificate can be used for digital signatures. That helps higmark since they are an insurance company and they want an audit trail to prove that payments were agreed to or paid for. Once you've digitally signed something you also can't say it never happened.
PKI Is expensive. It's cutting-edge. It's hard to implement. But from what I saw it looked like the way to go.
Of course, any system is only as secure as people make it. Highmark was talking about using solaris and an oracle backend database. Coupled with enough diligent adminstration it seemed like a good start. The problem with insurance records, medical records, and large sums of cash being electronically transferred is that good isn't enough.
The liability issues of releasing patient medical records are pretty severe. I'm surprised to hear that the original poster is the only one raising concerns. If it were my company I'd fire the entire implementation team for even considering a basic user/password authentication scheme. It doesn't scale well, and is vulnerable to all manner of attacks.
When it comes to the most confidential information about YOU it makes sense to err on the side of paranoia. Do you really want some script kiddie browsing through your medical records to see those blood test results for HIV antibodies or that trip to the psychologist 15 years ago? If ever there was something thatneeded a long, careful and well planned out security infrastructure surely it is this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's america's wang. Must have big balls too.
--chuck
Just saw this today - EMC is now gearing
2 00 2.html
up to sell a betterfastercheaper ATA (aka IDE)
based disk frame - capable of up to a petabyte
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/132134_04-29-
--chuck
what on earth were 1700 people supposed to
do for ipix? NASA probably uses less people
to put the space shuttle in orbit.
If you and you skeleton team were doign all the
work, what were the other 1695 people doing?
no matter how good the idea if you can't control
cash burn rate you're going to go bankrupt. At
$100k for salary and bennies and office space
per person, that's $170 million/year in labor
expenses.
Sounds to me like 100 people is probably a
reasonable size given the realistic revenue
of a company like ipix.
We use a separate sync server with lots of
/nfs/mount/on/remote/server. For a
disk space and then do nightly dumps over nfs
to this box. This server is located in a
separate building with ethernet between the
systems.
Every night on our servers, a script runs and
dumps the local filesystems at an appropriate
level. We then gzip the dump and store it on
the dump server. Since each file is uniquely
named, we can store old dumps as long as disk
space permits. In our case this is about 1 week
of old dumps.
The scripts are trivial to write (think dump |
gzip >>
while we used to dump between remote locations
and move the data via rsync but it takes forever.
local ethernet is a huge plus for moving gigabytes
of data nightly.
for more important data like our cvs repository,
we snapshot it hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly
as well as tarring it up hourly and daily. This
means we have like 15 entire copies of our CVS
tree. It's probably overkill but it helps a lot
come panic time.
You can easily add 400gb of disk space to a
regular pc for about $1200. In our case we do
it all in less than 100. The other nice thing
about doing this is that we have instantaneous
access to our dumps and can access them much
quicker than tape.
In a perfect world I'd also like to back up
the data to tape as well, but haven't yet done
so. I suppose if we wanted to be extra safe we
could also mirror the drives on the sync server
or rotate the data between physical disks so that
it would take multiple failures to lose the
backup data.
--chuck
Must be something about those z-80's.
I used to work for a seriously underfunded
pbs tv station in ohio. When I went to our
broadcast engineering facility for the first
time, I noticed a 19" rackmount pc with a
20" box fan(like the kind you put in windows
on a hot day) laying down on top of the computer.
I noticed it was on and asked if I should put
fan back in its upright position. The engineers
all wigged out and said that it was like that
for a reason - all that airflow just barely kept
the old cranky proprietary z-80 based broadcast
system in working order. without it, it would
overheat instantly.
I guess things never really change.
--chuck
>For multiple file downloads, we can get a max
/dev/null
/dev/null
>of around 1984kbp/s (that is if we download
> around 3-4 files or we download from the
> telecom company's test server.)
An E1 connection is 2.048 mbit/s. 1984 kbit/sec
is 1.9375 mbit/sec. 1.9375/2.048 = 94.60%
utilization. Since that 2.048 mbit/sec is the
raw, layer 2 wire speed of the connection
and the 1984kbit/sec is the speed of a
layer 3/4 tcp/ftp transfer you're probably doing
even better than 94.60% since you are not counting
the overhead of TCP/IP and packet sizes.
Also, note that your ISP is only guaranteeing
you E1 speed over the link from you to them. After
that all bets are off. The only valid data
transfers would be from your LAN to theirs and
even then they should be done so that disk
issues aren't skewing the results.
This is what I usually do:
Inside ftp)
ftp> get bigfilename.tar.gz
note transfer speed
repeat exactly the same transfer. This should
make sure the remote file is now in disk cache
and should be served to you without any disk
accesses.
ftp> get bigfilename.tar.gz
now note the transfer speed here. It might be
a bit higher.
As you've also seen, single transfers won't max
out the connection. If you can run multiple
simultaneous tests and sum teh results you will
probably see slightly higher results.
That being said, I dont' think you have much to
worry about if you are getting 1984kbit/sec over
a 2.048 mbit/sec E1.
If it were me, I'd be running MRTG on the snmp
stats of your router so that you can see exactly
the amount of bandwidth being used. go to
www.mrtg.org, download, compile, install and
sit back. note that mrtg will report direct byte
counts so that you'll get a consistent layer 2
data transfer number rather than mixing layers.
Just go to www.baytech.net and lust.
They've got all the remote-power and remote
serial-console stuff you can imagine. We have
three of their DS-9 serial-console --> ethernet
boxes and about 5 of their RPC series power strips.
The power strips can be controlled via a serial
line to one of their serial console boxes or
directly over the ethernet.
This stuff is the reason that I now work from
home instead of commuting 50 miles each way.
--chuck
We're using electricmail. My boss found them
when our company had first started and we were too
small to bother with the hassle of running our
own mail system. They've had some reliability
quirks over the last year or so that we have
been using them but all in all it's not
too bad. I think we pay about $100 a month for
pop, imap and webmail. they also aggressively
spam filter and their support people are sharp
and easy to get a hold of. I'd recommend you
check them out. ElectricMail
I'm just a reasonably satisfied customer, not an
employee, director, controlling person, yadda
yadda yadda.
--chuck
It may not be that bad in all countries. the
.co.uk) or by searching
United Kingdom has a special program for
"shortage occupations" that allows for quick,
almost guaranteed work permits with a minimum
of paperwork required and no hoops for your
employer-to-be to work through, epsecially
the dreaded "proof of no available local or
EU citizens to take the job."
To give you some idea of how much the situation
has changed in the uk recently, I was told that
if I applied for a job with a local government
agency as a plain-jane sysadmin that they would
sponsor my work permit. That's pretty amazing
in my book - local governments usually want to
hire their own residents, not some guy from
across the pond.
I don't have the link handy, but your can find
lots of info at expat essentials
(expat-essentials.com or
google for "dfee work permit scheme" or
"dfee work permit shortage occupation"
FWIW, I'm staying in the USA now. Go to
homefair.com and run the salary and relocations
calculators to figure out the cost of living:
It's perversely high in europe and IT salaries
are insanely low. You had best be prepared for
financial culture shock.
--chuck
I know it's not quite what the poster had in
mind but here's a start.
Fidelity investments makes turbotax for the web
available for FREE to anyone who links from their
site, whether you're a customer of theirs or not.
if you'd like to do your 2000 US Federal (and state if needed) for free, then check out
fidelity's tax link:
http://web300.fidelity.com/qttw/bookmark.jhtml
Saved me about $30 this year.
--chuck
This product sounds like a specialized version of
the SiliconTCP Product that InterProphet has
been developing for a couple years now. Bill and
Lynne Jolitz of 386BSD fame started InterProphet.
Their model was a full TCP/IP stack in silison
on an ethernet card. These folks sound like
they've gone a bit further up the OSI layer and
actually put HTTP requests together.
It's an interesting idea (Interprophet.com had
some benchmark showing their stuff to use 1/10
the processing power) but I personally have my
doubts about an http-specific accelerator.
I've not heard much out of Interprophet lately. Any ideas what the Jolitzes and crew are up to?
--chuck
The freemasons figured out the solution to
the scientology lawyer problem a long time
ago. When there secret stuff leaks out, they
have an ages old policy.
"Never Explain. Never Complain."
--chuck
Resting on your laurels always catches up
with you.
GM and Ford made a lot of money in the 1970's
making gas guzzling cars.
Then the hondas and toyotas arrived.
You know the rest of the story.
I believe Kibo already partitioned the net
(well USENET) already into three hierarchies
when he was elected Leader of the Net on April 1
199(2,3,4,5)
Non-Bozo (by far the smallest percentage)
Bozo (big chunk)
MegaBozo (biggest chunk)
--chuck
I'm really surprised about this pentium 4 chip.
Didn't Andy Grove write a book called "only
the paranoid survive"? I guess the paranoia
is over and pride is calling the shots:
to wit:
1.) dual RDRAM channels? RDRAM? McFly? Hello?
RDRAM is dead. I don't care if it's the same
price as SDRAM. Nobody in their right mind
is going to commit to rambus based PC's. Intel
and rambus tried to force a new standard down
the collecive throat of the industry. Just
like the old IBM and the microchannel it has
failed. Just like IBM of old this attempt
will come back to haunt it for a long time.
2.) No SMP? You must be kidding. Intel's SMP
architecture was the only thing separating
it from AMD. Now intel is producing chips
that are incapable of SMP? puh-leeze. Does
the word scalability mean anything to these
people? If pentium iv ships with any less
than 4-way SMP it will be a critical error.
3.) More cpu instructions? How many instructions
does the ia32 architecture support now? 500?
And what are these new instructions going to
buy me? VR on ebay? come on. If I want high
performnce 3d i'm going to buy a video card
not a franken-cpu. Intel is going off the
deep end with their bizarre and shallow
marketing. Maybe they can sell these chips
to the 10 people on their Web Outfitter
service. A sucker is born every minute but
they aren't the consumers of high performance
CPUS.
In the end we have intel, formerly one of the most
entrepreneurial and forward thinking companies
of our generation being replaced by a prideful
monopolist that believes the market will buy
anything that it produces.
Intel has the most aggressive competition of
the last 15 years to deal with and they are
doing little more than putting their heads in
the sand. I predict they will lose 20-40% of
their market share withing three years if mistakes
like this one (and the mistakes-in-waiting of
the ia-64) come to pass.
AMD and Transmeta are going to use
this fiasco to pierce intel's armor.
how many OEMs will they be able to steal away?
Do you think Dell and compaq want to sell
high performance computers with no SMP support
and overpriced RDRAM? They know the market will
not forgive them if they try.
Intel might be king of the hill today but
in the end goliath is about to be cut down
with his own tools.
Where have you gone Andy Grove? your ship
is sinking.
--chuck
rural internet access is a pain. However,
if you can get creative and use some solutions
to your benefit you might have a chance. Most
of these ideas are off the top of my head but
a lot of them depend on how big your pocketbooks
are. If you don't mind spending the money then
it is possible. whether it's worth it is
another story completely.
1.) wireless. I'm talking some sort of line
of sight. microwave will cost a couple grand
but sometimes you can lease it. It's a line
of sight deal so you might need a tower.
2.) have friends in town? You could piggyback
on their cheap broadband line by installing
a NAT box (linux of course) and sharing the
cable/dsl line. Once you have the IP access
get a 56kb or t1 line from your friend's home
to yours. A point to point 1.5mbit line in
the same LATA usually costs about $200 a month
plus $10 - $20 per mile. throw in a pair of
used cisco 2501's from ebay and you have your
own WAN for about $1500. It's expensive but
it will sure look good on a resume.
3.) Use a point-to-point DSL line and combine it
with #2. Here in uswest land you can get a
DSL line from point to point. Make one end
your house and the other end your IP service
and you might be in business. On the other
hand I think this stuff goes through the
CO too so distance might still be a concertn.
on the plus side it's 1/4 the cost of a t1.
bottom line is that this stuff tends to be
expensive. Living in the country has its
rewards sometime but being on the technological
bleeding edge ain't one of them. Do you have
anyone nearby who could help shoulder the
cost? one you've got a connection out in the
sticks I'm sure you will be the envy of your
neighbors (at least until the cable company
strings line anyhow and then you're the proud
owner of a white elephant WAN.)
good luck.
--chuck
In the second LW article, ingo writes:
- So in our opinion TUX is a new and unique class
- of webserver, there is no prior art implementin
- such kind of 'HTTP stack' and 'abstract object
- cache' approach. It's i believe a completely
- new approach to webserving. Please read this
- comment too, which (i hope) further explains
- the in-kernel issue:
Maybe I'm paranoid, but "new and unqiue"
and "prior art" in the same sentence mean
patent filing to me.
Are there plans to see patent protection for
TUX? As I recall, the RTLinux folks got a
patent for RTLInux's prioritization stuff.
Is a patent in the works?
Regardless, TUX is an interesting idea and I hope
to try it out soon.
--chuck
My credit union, The Pennsylvania State Employees
Credit Union, has had an electronic bill pay
service for years now. Right now they are totally
web-based and it rocks. You wouldn't think it but
these folks are on the absolute cutting edge of
technology. Since most vendors still end up
wanting a check anyhow, PSECU will send one. Once
it clears my account (note that the funds aren't
taken out until the merchant cashes the check
rather than when I write it) PSECU digitizes it
and scans it for viewing via their web site.
Similarly they now upload monthly statements as
pdf files for viewing. So basically I can see
the physical check (front and back) and see my
statement.
PSECU also has auto-pay and a list of merchant
addresses about 10000 miles long. I love these
folks. I've had an account with them since I
turned 18 and I will never in a million years move
to another financial institution. Hell I sent an
email to them yesterday at lunch and before I left
for the day I had a personal response from their
CEO. They are the bomb. Nine years of flawless
service.
Here are some of their services:
on-line bill pay
on-line visa statements
on-line loan application with 1 hour approval.
128 bit SSL 24x7 banking
funds transfer
pretty much every other bank service too.
So anyhow, I heartily recommend you find a credit
union. You'll save the gouging at the ATM and will
probably save a point or two in your car or
mortgage loan. Just because they are low profile
non-profits doesn't mean they aren't kicking the
ass of every commercial bank in sight.
I love these folks so much that even though I
now live in Las Vegas I still use a bank 2000
miles away. Just like on the web, for this
credit union distance is really menaingless.
These folks get it.
--chuck
John D. Rockefeller's only comment
regarding the forcible breakup of the
standard oil trust:
"Buy Standard Oil"
And he was right. The breakup into 5 or 6
companies (nearly every major oil company
to this day) made standard oil stockholders
much more money than owning the whole.
Those Baby Bills might do the same.
--chuck
Having worked for a company that had more
lawyers on its staff than legitimate employees
I must say this is true. ie we'll ask for
5x but will settle in a heartbeat for X.
The weird thing about this announcement is
timing. Wasn't there just an announcement this
morning about a big cash infusion over at caldera?
Why bother selling off big chunks of the company
at a huge discount to raise chump change (33+
million or so) when you have to know that you
are about to settle and get a windfall? What's going on in Orem, Uncle Ray?
Sounds to me that their CFO needs to find out what
the litigators are up to.
I'm sure the micros~1 lawyers were eager to settle
this one. Just think of all the possibly
incriminating documents that won't see the light
of day now.
The micros~1 folks really got the better deal on
this one. Let's not forget that the $1.6 billion
was subject to treble damages should the anti-trust case been proven. $5 billion is a
lot of money, even for bill & co. A hit like that
would cause spasms on wall street.
--chuck
vegas is anonymous. nobody is from here. there
is precious little sense of community. Culture
is essentially non-existent.
crime is somewhat higher than national averages.
it attracts losers who figure they'll make
six figures as a dealer or waitress. they won't.
Salaries are about equivalent to pittsburgh but
the tax base is much lower. Housing costs are
about equivalent.
Las vegas, being a very new city, has a decent
infrastructure. I'm writing this on via my
cable modem. The phone company is hounding me to
try their DSL. It's $50 a month for an analog
phone line and DSL with internet service here.
pretty decent. high bandwidth 'net connections
are available from multiple sources. there are
several oc-12 and higher 'net links crisscrossing
the desert. Sprint, the local phone company, is
marginally competent. t1 provisioning time for
us has been about 2-3 weeks.
For me it only took about 1 month to realize
it attracts total losers. Personally I live on
the extreme northwest side of town in a massive
master planned 'community' that is somewhat out
of the twilight zone.
--chuck
Having bailed out of pittsburgh after living there
for 25 of my 26 years I know a bit or two about
the whole tri-state area.
Pittsburgh's problems are:
1.) the weather just plain sucks. Try parking
1/2 mile from the office and then having to walk through snow and slush ten inches deep.
2.) The universities, while world class, do little
in the way of public relations. Town and gown are
two vastly different worlds.
3.) Pittsburgh virtually shuts down at 5:00 PM
on friday. 24 hour anything is unheard of.
4.) The taxes are insanely high. There is a
2.8% flat state income tax. A 7% sales tax
in allegheny county. My hometown had a 1.45%
local income tax. Property taxes are among the
highest in the country.
5.) old people control everything. Someone else
mentioned that allegheny county is #2 in old
people as a percentage of population. Not only
does this make meeting people bad, it also infuses
old people with political power. Between the
old people and the luddite unions it's hopeless.
6.) This is not an entrepreneurial place. Business
is big here. Alcoa, us steel, mellon bank, etc.
are all 100000 years old and hold court here. There are a few post-cmu startups floating
around now (transarc, FORE) but they are rare.
7.) It's just a blue-collar kind of town. This
place is full of pittsburghers! They worked in
the mills! They went on strike! They hate the
boss! They love the union shop steward! They
drink IC light or rolling rock at the bar and
then go to the steelers game on sunday. this is
pittsburgh society.
anyhow, for what it's worth I moved to Las Vegas.
It's not a perfect geek city (not enough of us
here) but it's got some pluses
- It's warm. 65 degrees on christmas day
- It's 24x7. Wanna go eat at 5am? no problem.
- The women are everywhere. It's vegas fer
chrissakes. the truly desperate can pay legally.
- It's about the lowest tax state ever. No city
state income taxes. minimum other stuff. Gotta
love gambling
- bars open 24x7! no weird pittsburgh alcohol laws!
I could go on and on and on but I won't.
bottom line:
birds of a feather flock together. Geeks leave
pittsburgh because all their geek friends left.
They left because it's old, cold, corrupt, bankrupt, boring, and stagnant.
--chuck
About six months I interviewed for a position doing this exact same thing for Highmark Blue Cross/blue Shield in Pittsburgh. Although the
job didn't work out (I decided to relocate to hot and sunny Las Vegas) I still remember a few tidbits about the process:
1.) Highmark was going to be making medical records online and available to healthcare providers. The highmark folks also said their were federal regs requiring a PKI solution.
2.) Highmark was looking at implementing an Entrust or similar solution where they would be there own certificate authority. My thoughts were that this was unneccessary and they could have implemented the solution much faster by using an already-existing certificate authority (I really only looked at Verisign, but there are now tons of others) PKI costs $$$ but an ounce of security now is worth a pound of legal settlements for improper disclosure later.
3.) PKI solves a lot of user authentication problems. Being able to revoke certificates means you can survive compromised certificates. It's also great for authenticating users, since the certificate can be used for digital signatures. That helps higmark since they are an insurance company and they want an audit trail to prove that payments were agreed to or paid for. Once you've digitally signed something you also can't say it never happened.
PKI Is expensive. It's cutting-edge. It's hard to implement. But from what I saw it looked like the way to go.
Of course, any system is only as secure as people make it. Highmark was talking about using solaris and an oracle backend database. Coupled with enough diligent adminstration it seemed like a good start. The problem with insurance records, medical records, and large sums of cash being electronically transferred is that good isn't enough.
The liability issues of releasing patient medical records are pretty severe. I'm surprised to hear that the original poster is the only one raising concerns. If it were my company I'd fire the entire implementation team for even considering a basic user/password authentication scheme. It doesn't scale well, and is vulnerable to all manner of attacks.
When it comes to the most confidential information about YOU it makes sense to err on the side of paranoia. Do you really want some script kiddie browsing through your medical records to see those blood test results for HIV antibodies or that trip to the psychologist 15 years ago? If ever there was something thatneeded a long, careful and well planned out security infrastructure surely it is this.
--chuck