if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person.
I tend to pick up languages fairly easily, so one time I tried to learn Chinese. All I learned from the experience is that my brain doesn't do tonal languages. At all.
as someone who runs a "cluster" of few dozen servers and several sites as big or bigger than slashdot, I can tell you this amazon is very very expensive
That would be because you are trying to take service that is not designed for your use case and shoehorn it into your use case. True, you could use EC2 as a web host, but that is not what it's designed for since your computing needs are static.
To get value out of the Elastic Compute Cloud, you need to have elastic computing needs. Let's say one of your super-huge websites gets a traffic spike of 3X on the first day of every month. For your data center solution, you would need to spec infrastructure to meet your peak volumes. But your peak volume happens only once per month. For the rest of the month, 2/3 of your infrastructure is idling. This is a colossal waste of resources, and EC2 could save you money.
Or how about another great use of EC2: the cold spare. I host my apartment rental business website on a cheapie webhost that is prone to experience downtime 2-3 times per year (Dreamhost). Despite Dreamhost being notoriously flaky, I can achieve respectable uptimes because whenever Dreamhost bites the dust, my website automatically fails over to EC2. With EC2, I only pay while I'm using it, but just having it there allows me to get away with using a $5/mo webhost for a business website.
For what you get, EC2 is dirt cheap. When my website goes down, I need it back up ASAP, and with EC2, I can automatically fail over in under 5 minutes, and it only costs me $0.10/hr while my cold spare is in use. An entire year's worth of respectable availability costs me less than a Starbucks coffee. Now that is value.
Your points regarding "Joe's" outright lies and inaccuracies born of his daydreams are to my experience very common among the self employed. They see the most successful among their business acquaintances, and see that as a realistic goal... if only were the local/state/government to stop regulating/taxing them at whatever level they're currently regulated/taxed.
How many self-employed people do you actually know? I am self-employed, and I attend meeting at my local Chamber of Commerce, and local Apartment Owners Association, so I have met hundreds of self-employed people.
Personally, I do not recall meeting even one self-employed person who complained about an inability to achieve their business goals due to excessive regulation or taxes. I have had countless conversations and attended countless presentations about regulatory compliance, and these types of organizations are great in that capacity. They allow like-minded businesspeople to combine efforts and help each other out.
That said, there are very real effects of excessive taxation and excessive regulation. There are certain jurisdictions where I refuse to do business because the local governments make it less profitable. For instance, I would never purchase a building in NJ or MA or MD or CA because it's just too much of a headache for me. This is why apartments in those states cost way more than in states next door.
Taking this to the macro level, the United States has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world (second only to Japan). If you are an international corporation, are you going to set up shop in the US and employ US workers if you have to pay high US corporate taxes? Probably not, unless it is absolutely necessary.
There are politicians who complain about US firms shipping jobs overseas while simultaneously ensuring that corporate tax burdens remain excessive. What they don't realize, is that they could induce a lot of business activity into the US if they simply lowered corporate income taxes to be in line with the rest of the world, to take the tax code out of the business decision regarding where to operate.
If that's what you call daydreaming, that's fine. Personally, I think it's just educating those who don't realize that there are undesirable consequences to excessive regulation and taxation. We all have to pay the price in terms of jobs getting shipped overseas, and higher cost of goods and services paid locally. Hopefully others will see the humor in the fact that the very people whose jobs are getting shipped overseas are calling for more of the failed policies that caused the offshoring to occur. Ahh, but people do like to listen to a pleasant-sounding voice.
I've already come to terms with the fact that Obama is going to tax the ever-loving hell out of me (yes, I am part of the unlucky 5%). I'll be smiling, however, when people like you realize that you're next. Obama's writing checks that "the wealthy" simply can't cash.
You should guard against corrupted files in your backup, which could propagate through your snapshots by running rsync with the -c flag (compares files by a hash of their contents instead of just size and timestamp).
My backup server is an old P3 machine. I wonder if it could even hash all of my files before the next day's snapshot got kicked off?:)
I'm surprised you have only 3GB to backup, My digital photo's alone are 29GB and I'm not a big photographer. The size of each of my snapshots is 162 GB.
I know some people who store the RAW file for every photo that they take. I delete what I don't want. So far, I haven't regretted my decision, but maybe some day I will, and maybe then I'll spring for lightroom or something.
It's 3GB compressed, by the way. I have no idea where I'd find 162GB of data that I want to back up. High def (ahem) home movies, perhaps?
it should be an activity that is always running in the back ground without requiring an Admin or cron job to fire it off...
I agree with you that that ought to be an option. Perhaps some low-priority process that slowly and continuously scrubs the arrays.
I guess the idea of a cronjob that kicks off this process is that it's a balance between early detection of a failed disk, and subjecting your disks to excessive, (perhaps) unnecessary usage.
Anyhow, as I said in a different post, the monthly scrub of all arrays is the default behavior in Debian. You'd have to intentionally disable it to be unprotected.
No method is foolproof, especially when it's bound to be boring as hell, and you've got an inevitable human factor. You get lazy moving the tapes offsite, you put off fixing a dead drive because there are 4 others, you wipe your main partition upgrading your distro and forget that your CRON rsync script uses the handy --delete flag, and BOOM wipes out your backup.
Jesus Christ, you must be one unlucky soul. Do you live your entire life in a worst-case scenario?
The system that I use for data storage is as follows:
2TB NAS that uses a scrubbed (if you don't know what that means, look it up) Linux Software RAID
Anything important goes into a directory hierarchy that is backed up automatically via rsnapshot (in other words, one botched snapshot isn't going to leave me up a creek without a backup.
Each week, my rsnapshot directory is automatically encrypted (and thus compressed) with gpg and uploaded to Amazon S3. My rsnapshot directory currently occupies about 3GB of space after gpg's automatic compression.
The 5th oldest backup in S3 is automatically deleted.
When I think of it, I burn my rsnapshot directory to DVD and my wife takes it into her office and leaves it there.
This system may not be foolproof (what is?), but it is pretty frickin' safe, and costs me roughly $3 or $4 per month. Not too shabby for what I would consider to be a fairly robust backup system for a home user.
I suppose the biggest challenge is deciding what goes into rsnapshot. If my RAID array suffered a massive failure, I would definitely lose data. But this is mostly video content, and really, if I lose my mythtv shows, it is not exactly as catastrophic as if I lost, say, my quickbooks data.
There are a lot of things that keep me awake at night, but loss of important data is not one of them.
My understanding, is that the RAID scrubbing attempts to read and verify the checksum of every sector of every physical partition in your array. Any read that fails gets the block recomputed, rewritten, and reread. If that fails, then the disk is marked as failed and is removed from the array.
Just an FYI, the default behavior in Debian is to scrub all of your software RAID arrays monthly via a cronjob that comes with the mdadm package (see the checkarray script).
I wouldn't be surprised if other distros do something similar.
If she knows the real scammers' identity, she could simply let all calls from numbers she doesn't recognize go to voicemail. The voicemail message can say something to the effect of
Thank you for calling grandma. If you are calling to complain about a car warranty solicitation that you received, you have the wrong number. Please hang up and call them directly at (XXX-YYY-ZZZZ) or file a complaint with your state's insurance regulator. All others may leave a message at the tone.
Even if I could buy a PC at $300-$400 less than a MacBook, even with all the features (or a little more), I won't get what I really want: A computer with OSX, UNIX, and able to run anything on the planet.
I have used laptops for approximately 15 years, many of which with small children in the house. None of those laptops had "magsafe", and I am yet to destroy a laptop via a trip over a power cord. This is the classic solution in search of a problem.
Apple customers give the product 1.5 out of 5 stars. Hardly worth paying the Mac Tax over.
Never mind that the reviewer explicitly ignores that the Dell cost $500 less. Never mind that the reviewer explicitly refuses to consider PCs with better specs than the Mac, yet are cheaper.
Here's what it boils down to: If I am patient, I can buy the PC I want for about $650 (which I did for my wife earlier this year (Dell Vostro 1500, if memory serves on the model number)), while if I am patient, I can buy the Mac I want for $1300.
Want to know why people keep saying macs are expensive? It's because macs are expensive. Many people consider them to be good values for the money due to OS X, etc., but the fact still remains, if I were to go out and buy a PC, it would set me back $650, and if I were going to go out and buy a mac, it would set me back $1300. I don't know how to make it more clear than that.
A duress-key that wipes data is no good. Any serious investigation will take a complete copy of the data as the first step, so wiping does you no good at all.
Hopefully as encryption becomes more ubiquitous, we'll see more options than the current paradigm of "store the key alongside the data, but protect it with a (typically weak) passphrase". Why is it that the key has to be stored alongside the data, or on any type of generic storage medium (hard disk, thumb drive, etc.) at all?
Why not store the key on some type of tamper-resistant specialized hardware device that if fed the correct credentials will cough up the key, but if fed a panic credential will wipe the key? Such a device could be designed so that it would be too costly to clone it or obtain the key via other means.
The problem with sex offenders is that no matter what kind of rehab/psych treatments the offender gets, they do not change their sexual preferences.
You have kids. What do you tell them when one gets pissed at the another and starts beating the shit out of him? No doubt something along the lines of, "Blahdy blah blah OK to feel upset at other people blah blah blah NOT OK to act on your feelings by hitting them blah blah blah go run around outside for a while to blow off some steam." The point being, we humans have all kinds of feelings/preferences/whatever, but we also have morals that tell us right from wrong. Those morals that differentiate right from wrong apply to actions, not thoughts.
I don't know about you, but I am a red-blooded heterosexual male. Every summer when I look at those new hires who are fresh out of college, so they have no idea that it's unprofessional to come to work with exposed thongs, etc., believe me, every hormone in my body is telling me to hit on them. I do not, however, act on those feelings, because I'm married, and that would be wrong. So why is it so much to ask that pedophiles not act upon their morally wrong feelings?
For most, I believe it is not too much to ask, and they control their actions successfully.
I'm Canadian and I definitely wouldn't classify our health care system as a "failed idea."
The fact that you have a website specifically dedicated to wait times for medical treatments due to rationing of health care is all the proof I need your system is an abject failure.
It's not perfect, but I bet most Canadians would agree that it's far better than the system you have.
I'll ask the Canadians who come to US hospitals for surgeries because if they stayed in Canada, they would die on a waiting list. You shouldn't be cheering for us to adopt your system. If we do, where will you go for medical treatment?
For me personally it's a pain in the butt to get Debian up to date with the things I need on there, which is trivial in CentOS. We're talking about latest versions of things like Python (Etch still ships with 2.4.x) and so on. Not impossible, just time consuming.
I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but Python 2.5 is present in Debian Etch--it's just not the default version.
I hope you didn't waste a lot of time on this one, because apt-get install python2.5 was all that was needed.
She failed to communicate her expectations to the students, and then whined when the students did not meet those expectations. Apparently she did this year after year after year, so she learns slowly, to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person.
I tend to pick up languages fairly easily, so one time I tried to learn Chinese. All I learned from the experience is that my brain doesn't do tonal languages. At all.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just found in TFA where it says that the plugin routes you through a Chinese proxy.
I can't imagine this open proxy will last long.
Does this plugin actually proxy your web browsing through a Chinese host? Or does it just randomly mess with your requests?
Kind of reminds me of apt-gentoo.
as someone who runs a "cluster" of few dozen servers and several sites as big or bigger than slashdot, I can tell you this amazon is very very expensive
That would be because you are trying to take service that is not designed for your use case and shoehorn it into your use case. True, you could use EC2 as a web host, but that is not what it's designed for since your computing needs are static.
To get value out of the Elastic Compute Cloud, you need to have elastic computing needs. Let's say one of your super-huge websites gets a traffic spike of 3X on the first day of every month. For your data center solution, you would need to spec infrastructure to meet your peak volumes. But your peak volume happens only once per month. For the rest of the month, 2/3 of your infrastructure is idling. This is a colossal waste of resources, and EC2 could save you money.
Or how about another great use of EC2: the cold spare. I host my apartment rental business website on a cheapie webhost that is prone to experience downtime 2-3 times per year (Dreamhost). Despite Dreamhost being notoriously flaky, I can achieve respectable uptimes because whenever Dreamhost bites the dust, my website automatically fails over to EC2. With EC2, I only pay while I'm using it, but just having it there allows me to get away with using a $5/mo webhost for a business website.
For what you get, EC2 is dirt cheap. When my website goes down, I need it back up ASAP, and with EC2, I can automatically fail over in under 5 minutes, and it only costs me $0.10/hr while my cold spare is in use. An entire year's worth of respectable availability costs me less than a Starbucks coffee. Now that is value.
Your points regarding "Joe's" outright lies and inaccuracies born of his daydreams are to my experience very common among the self employed. They see the most successful among their business acquaintances, and see that as a realistic goal... if only were the local/state/government to stop regulating/taxing them at whatever level they're currently regulated/taxed.
How many self-employed people do you actually know? I am self-employed, and I attend meeting at my local Chamber of Commerce, and local Apartment Owners Association, so I have met hundreds of self-employed people.
Personally, I do not recall meeting even one self-employed person who complained about an inability to achieve their business goals due to excessive regulation or taxes. I have had countless conversations and attended countless presentations about regulatory compliance, and these types of organizations are great in that capacity. They allow like-minded businesspeople to combine efforts and help each other out.
That said, there are very real effects of excessive taxation and excessive regulation. There are certain jurisdictions where I refuse to do business because the local governments make it less profitable. For instance, I would never purchase a building in NJ or MA or MD or CA because it's just too much of a headache for me. This is why apartments in those states cost way more than in states next door.
Taking this to the macro level, the United States has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world (second only to Japan). If you are an international corporation, are you going to set up shop in the US and employ US workers if you have to pay high US corporate taxes? Probably not, unless it is absolutely necessary.
There are politicians who complain about US firms shipping jobs overseas while simultaneously ensuring that corporate tax burdens remain excessive. What they don't realize, is that they could induce a lot of business activity into the US if they simply lowered corporate income taxes to be in line with the rest of the world, to take the tax code out of the business decision regarding where to operate.
If that's what you call daydreaming, that's fine. Personally, I think it's just educating those who don't realize that there are undesirable consequences to excessive regulation and taxation. We all have to pay the price in terms of jobs getting shipped overseas, and higher cost of goods and services paid locally. Hopefully others will see the humor in the fact that the very people whose jobs are getting shipped overseas are calling for more of the failed policies that caused the offshoring to occur. Ahh, but people do like to listen to a pleasant-sounding voice.
I've already come to terms with the fact that Obama is going to tax the ever-loving hell out of me (yes, I am part of the unlucky 5%). I'll be smiling, however, when people like you realize that you're next. Obama's writing checks that "the wealthy" simply can't cash.
For normal instances, Windows is 25% more expensive then Linux/UNIX, and for high CPU instances 50% it is 50% more expensive.
Desktop-computer sellers should learn something from that...
Ummm.. Did you read the summary?
Microsoft is releasing a competing platform next week. Do you really think that Amazon got a great deal on their Windows licensing?
Apples, meet Oranges.
You should guard against corrupted files in your backup, which could propagate through your snapshots by running rsync with the -c flag (compares files by a hash of their contents instead of just size and timestamp).
My backup server is an old P3 machine. I wonder if it could even hash all of my files before the next day's snapshot got kicked off? :)
I'm surprised you have only 3GB to backup, My digital photo's alone are 29GB and I'm not a big photographer. The size of each of my snapshots is 162 GB.
I know some people who store the RAW file for every photo that they take. I delete what I don't want. So far, I haven't regretted my decision, but maybe some day I will, and maybe then I'll spring for lightroom or something.
It's 3GB compressed, by the way. I have no idea where I'd find 162GB of data that I want to back up. High def (ahem) home movies, perhaps?
it should be an activity that is always running in the back ground without requiring an Admin or cron job to fire it off...
I agree with you that that ought to be an option. Perhaps some low-priority process that slowly and continuously scrubs the arrays.
I guess the idea of a cronjob that kicks off this process is that it's a balance between early detection of a failed disk, and subjecting your disks to excessive, (perhaps) unnecessary usage.
Anyhow, as I said in a different post, the monthly scrub of all arrays is the default behavior in Debian. You'd have to intentionally disable it to be unprotected.
No method is foolproof, especially when it's bound to be boring as hell, and you've got an inevitable human factor. You get lazy moving the tapes offsite, you put off fixing a dead drive because there are 4 others, you wipe your main partition upgrading your distro and forget that your CRON rsync script uses the handy --delete flag, and BOOM wipes out your backup.
Jesus Christ, you must be one unlucky soul. Do you live your entire life in a worst-case scenario?
The system that I use for data storage is as follows:
This system may not be foolproof (what is?), but it is pretty frickin' safe, and costs me roughly $3 or $4 per month. Not too shabby for what I would consider to be a fairly robust backup system for a home user.
I suppose the biggest challenge is deciding what goes into rsnapshot. If my RAID array suffered a massive failure, I would definitely lose data. But this is mostly video content, and really, if I lose my mythtv shows, it is not exactly as catastrophic as if I lost, say, my quickbooks data.
There are a lot of things that keep me awake at night, but loss of important data is not one of them.
My understanding, is that the RAID scrubbing attempts to read and verify the checksum of every sector of every physical partition in your array. Any read that fails gets the block recomputed, rewritten, and reread. If that fails, then the disk is marked as failed and is removed from the array.
Just an FYI, the default behavior in Debian is to scrub all of your software RAID arrays monthly via a cronjob that comes with the mdadm package (see the checkarray script).
I wouldn't be surprised if other distros do something similar.
If she knows the real scammers' identity, she could simply let all calls from numbers she doesn't recognize go to voicemail. The voicemail message can say something to the effect of
Thank you for calling grandma. If you are calling to complain about a car warranty solicitation that you received, you have the wrong number. Please hang up and call them directly at (XXX-YYY-ZZZZ) or file a complaint with your state's insurance regulator. All others may leave a message at the tone.
Hopefully that will help.
Even if I could buy a PC at $300-$400 less than a MacBook, even with all the features (or a little more), I won't get what I really want: A computer with OSX, UNIX, and able to run anything on the planet.
Windows XP + vmware and/or cygwin.
I have used laptops for approximately 15 years, many of which with small children in the house. None of those laptops had "magsafe", and I am yet to destroy a laptop via a trip over a power cord. This is the classic solution in search of a problem.
Apple customers give the product 1.5 out of 5 stars. Hardly worth paying the Mac Tax over.
Never mind that the reviewer explicitly ignores that the Dell cost $500 less. Never mind that the reviewer explicitly refuses to consider PCs with better specs than the Mac, yet are cheaper.
Here's what it boils down to: If I am patient, I can buy the PC I want for about $650 (which I did for my wife earlier this year (Dell Vostro 1500, if memory serves on the model number)), while if I am patient, I can buy the Mac I want for $1300.
Want to know why people keep saying macs are expensive? It's because macs are expensive. Many people consider them to be good values for the money due to OS X, etc., but the fact still remains, if I were to go out and buy a PC, it would set me back $650, and if I were going to go out and buy a mac, it would set me back $1300. I don't know how to make it more clear than that.
Ahh, so once she finally divulged her expectations the students magically performed better.
Your solicitor could then submit a sworn affidavit saying he had seen evidence that revealing the key would incriminate you in an unconnected case.
Prosecutor: OK, I'll grant immunity from that evidence ever being used against you. Now give me the fucking key.
A duress-key that wipes data is no good. Any serious investigation will take a complete copy of the data as the first step, so wiping does you no good at all.
Hopefully as encryption becomes more ubiquitous, we'll see more options than the current paradigm of "store the key alongside the data, but protect it with a (typically weak) passphrase". Why is it that the key has to be stored alongside the data, or on any type of generic storage medium (hard disk, thumb drive, etc.) at all?
Why not store the key on some type of tamper-resistant specialized hardware device that if fed the correct credentials will cough up the key, but if fed a panic credential will wipe the key? Such a device could be designed so that it would be too costly to clone it or obtain the key via other means.
The problem with sex offenders is that no matter what kind of rehab/psych treatments the offender gets, they do not change their sexual preferences.
You have kids. What do you tell them when one gets pissed at the another and starts beating the shit out of him? No doubt something along the lines of, "Blahdy blah blah OK to feel upset at other people blah blah blah NOT OK to act on your feelings by hitting them blah blah blah go run around outside for a while to blow off some steam." The point being, we humans have all kinds of feelings/preferences/whatever, but we also have morals that tell us right from wrong. Those morals that differentiate right from wrong apply to actions, not thoughts.
I don't know about you, but I am a red-blooded heterosexual male. Every summer when I look at those new hires who are fresh out of college, so they have no idea that it's unprofessional to come to work with exposed thongs, etc., believe me, every hormone in my body is telling me to hit on them. I do not, however, act on those feelings, because I'm married, and that would be wrong. So why is it so much to ask that pedophiles not act upon their morally wrong feelings?
For most, I believe it is not too much to ask, and they control their actions successfully.
I'm Canadian and I definitely wouldn't classify our health care system as a "failed idea."
The fact that you have a website specifically dedicated to wait times for medical treatments due to rationing of health care is all the proof I need your system is an abject failure.
It's not perfect, but I bet most Canadians would agree that it's far better than the system you have.
I'll ask the Canadians who come to US hospitals for surgeries because if they stayed in Canada, they would die on a waiting list. You shouldn't be cheering for us to adopt your system. If we do, where will you go for medical treatment?
Now im out of college, unable to get insurance of any kind, and suffering from excruciating pain
You give up too easily.
All I saw you do is whine on an internet forum. If that makes you feel any better, more power to you.
For me personally it's a pain in the butt to get Debian up to date with the things I need on there, which is trivial in CentOS. We're talking about latest versions of things like Python (Etch still ships with 2.4.x) and so on. Not impossible, just time consuming.
I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but Python 2.5 is present in Debian Etch--it's just not the default version.
I hope you didn't waste a lot of time on this one, because apt-get install python2.5 was all that was needed.
Good luck!
This is a big deal for those of us with old or unusual hardware that can't boot from a CD or memory stick or through netbios/PXE.
How much old, unusual hardware do you have sitting around that doesn't already have Debian on it? Is there some reason you need to reinstall the OS?
Every single Debian release comes with upgrade instructions. Or were you absent the day they taught apt-get dist-upgrade?
If your site has non-English speakers, they are going to have more difficulty grokking the nuance of your challenge than a computer will.
she was a damn good teacher.
I seriously doubt that.
She failed to communicate her expectations to the students, and then whined when the students did not meet those expectations. Apparently she did this year after year after year, so she learns slowly, to boot.