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User: rickb928

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  1. Re:Tools make it easier to accomplish tasks. on Can Students Have Too Much Tech? · · Score: 1

    I take it you have never heard of proper secured accounts, reasonably obscure passwords, and well managed file system rights.

    People who think the command-line shell is somehow a magical escape from all limitations are a blight.

  2. Re:This is not new. on Can Students Have Too Much Tech? · · Score: 2

    Having bad teachers means paying taxes.

    What WAS your point with that?

  3. Re: What's the point? on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    Even if they had push apps, the value proposition isn't there any more.

  4. Re: Positive pressure? on Why ATM Bombs May Be Coming Soon To the United States · · Score: 1

    These ATMs are in steel or concrete booths. Without A/C they are ovens. Even when covered. Add the electronics and the heat up a lot.

    If you don't live in Phoenix stop pretending you do. If you do, you should know better.

  5. Re: What's the point? on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    BES 1x doesn't do our corporate apps.

    The corporate VPN already does secure connections fine. Just a new client.

    And people want tablets that are not worth trying to shoehorn into BES.

    Oh, and it's all cheaper.

  6. Re: Big on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    It's on my phone as an app, and Exchange wasn't specified.

  7. Re: Big on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    if your compdoor fired you because you accessed their Exchange server on your phone, they are doing it wrong.

  8. Re: What's the point? on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    Then come to work here. That's our plan.

  9. Re:LOL ... what? on Mozilla Dusts Off Old Servers, Lights Up Tor Relays · · Score: 1

    You had me at Mozilla

  10. Re: track record on US Air Force Selects Boeing 747-8 To Replace Air Force One · · Score: 1

    That's pretty much the normal air flight experience today on U.S. carriers. I'm sore for more than a day after a 6 hour flight.

  11. Re: What's the point? on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 1

    The plan where I work is to roll out first IOS and then Android apps to securely run corporate email, calendar, etc (?) Over the VPN. Then kill the BES servers.

    Security is a very big deal here. That's why the mobile apps are taking so long to be finished. BES is no longer worth the money, and we all want to use our own phone anyways.

  12. Re: Big on Microsoft Launches Outlook For Android and iOS · · Score: 0

    It's called Google Inbox, and it Sorts. Based. On. Categories.

  13. Re: Positive pressure? on Why ATM Bombs May Be Coming Soon To the United States · · Score: 1

    Around here it gets to 121â occasionally. An ATM in an enclosure doesn't have much of chance without active cooling.

    If it has a sun exposure, expect internal temps of 160-180â. My car gets that hot.

  14. Re: Power Costs on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    And if you send a tech, not the local admin, all the numbers change.

  15. Re:Service call? on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 2

    Yes we have, if the array is installed in your backup corporate PKI server, in a shielded and locked cage with video, electrostatic, and laser monitoring and alarms. And the keys to the cage are in another state. And it requires EVP approval to deliver the keys to the authorized tech for a flight to the DR site to change a failed drive.

    A real world example. You would recognize the name of this corporation in the first three letters. They take their corporate security very seriously, so much so that bumping into the cage earned you a visit from armed security, an escort out, and full debriefing until they were satisfied you would never take the cart with the stuck caster again...

  16. Re:Ignores how disks often fail on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    This from an NEC white paper in 2008:

    "A recent academic study [1] of 1.5 million HDDs in the NetApp database over a 32 month period found that 8.5% of SATA disks develop silent corruption. Some disk arrays run a background process to verify that the data and RAID parity match, a process which can catch these kinds of errors. However, the study also found that 13% of the errors are missed by the background verification process. When you put those statistics together, you find on average that 1 in 90 SATA drives will experience silent data corruption not caught by the background verification process. So when those data blocks are read, the data returned to the application would be corrupt, but nobody would know. For a RAID-5 (4+P) configuration at 930 GB usable per 1 TB SATA drive, that calculates to an undetected error for every 67 TB of data, or 15 errors for every petabyte of data. If a system were constantly reading all that data at 200 MB/sec, it would encounter an error in less than 100 hours."

    Sometimes, I just want to weep.

  17. Re:4 years??? on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    4 years was my recommendation for disk replacements from about 198 onwards. Some arrays had drives >8 years old, but if failure was not tolerated, 4 years was enough.

    Mind you, if the customer specified IDE drives, I warned them that failure was inevitable. SCSI 10K drives, I would still swap but that was for five-nines.

    And those stupid IDE RAID cards, well, that's too cheap. We are no longer talking reliable. Let someone else have that business.

  18. Re:Power Costs on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    It seems that one assumption in the study is predictable or consistent failure rates or timing. This would make sense if the drives were all the same make/model/manufacturing dates, but if not, well, then the model changes and they would be needing more intelligence to deal with unpredictable failure rates and having to spin up cold spares at different rates, predicting failure.

    Which all makes a world of sense to me. When I hovered over Raid 5 arrays with cold spares, especially in NetWare servers where 'device deactivated due to non-media defect' errors were not uncommon, I would add spares to save on windshield time to swap them out. Not all customers were comfortable going to the supply locker, grabbing a drive tray, and swapping out the tray with the flashing red light.

  19. Re:Power Costs on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    (you can't virtualize the actual disks)

  20. Re:Power Costs on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 2

    Sometimes the data is worth more than the power costs.

  21. Re: Positive pressure? on Why ATM Bombs May Be Coming Soon To the United States · · Score: 2

    The electronics do, and the compartment doesn't isolate them. No, it does not.

  22. Re: Positive pressure? on Why ATM Bombs May Be Coming Soon To the United States · · Score: 1

    Where I live, in the summer it gets to 115Â. Pumping in air will need a bigger A/C unit. Not worth it.

  23. Re: Whose encryption? on EFF Unveils Plan For Ending Mass Surveillance · · Score: 1

    I'm not comfortable using a version that was abandoned.

  24. Re:poor cops have it so hard on Justice Department: Default Encryption Has Created a 'Zone of Lawlessness' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A. The Internet permits people to organize faster than the oppressors can react to prevent it.

    B. The Internet permits people to discover like-minded others. They will find each other offline if necessary, putting to death the lie that 'everyone is happy'.

    C. Encryption will at least complicate the oppressors' surveillance.

    So denying access at least serves the oppressors. And denying access is the foundation of efforts against child pr0n and other 'undesirable' activities.

  25. Whose encryption? on EFF Unveils Plan For Ending Mass Surveillance · · Score: 2

    I'm guessing Bitlocker is not useful for encrypting my data sufficiently to keep the government(s) out of it.

    And the Truecrypt substitutes are all marginally trustworthy, as well as not quite so fully functional.

    Not many good alternatives here.