That may be what he did; I don't know. In my old NetWare days, I disliked adding another disk spindle because it adds to the brittleness. But with a SAN, I suppose there is so much redundancy built in that the likelihood of failure is near zero.

We are putting in a new SAN now, and that sort of replication is supposed to be something we can do. However all I hear from the guys involved with the project is a lot of angst that we picked the wrong vendor. There have been a TON of "oh by the way"'s that make us want to reverse our decision to buy from them. Had they told us these things before we wrote the check, we never would have bought from them. We would probably junk the whole project and just start fresh next year if it weren't for the political fallout.

But as bad as it is, they do have command-line tools that you can use from an SSH session. Undercover. ;-)

Humor is pain, purposely inflicted, when everyone understands it's a joke. Obviously, there is an element of the recipients point of view. If everyone recognizes that the pain was not meant to be taken seriously, then the joke is funny. However, there are some personality types that enjoy inflicting pain and then try to pass it off as 'hey, I was just making a joke'.

So, not all "jokes" are funny. It is a question of whether the intent was hateful. Sorry I had not gotten that explanation to you earlier.

OK - you win. I'm completely convinced that GNNA style posts* are appropriate and normal for Slashdot. Congratulations, you've truly made Slashdot a better place with your behaviour and your defense of your behaviour.

*off-topic posts with the intent to ridicule.

I said that the .sig in question WAS POSTED to the thread, not that it is A POSTING to the thread.

This is a distinction without a difference. You read the .sig as a part of the entire thread. You lobbed in a comment about murder. Damn_registrars (and myself) thought WTF?

And the fact that it was posted to the thread is undeniable. It's a given. Everyone here accepts it as true.

You state unequivocally that "Everyone here accepts it as true." I don't accept it as true. I think a lot of people would refuse that as false.

It is normal to gloss over a person's .sig, because it is almost never relevant to the thread. Slashdot has a huge number of threads. Looks like the current message count is thirty two million plus. I would be willing to bet that less than 10,000 messages actually had meaningful content related to the user's .sig. Ignoring the .sig as content is normal. (because really, it is 99.9995% identity and 0.0005% applicable content to the posting of the moment).

But heck, I'll even defer to the community.

Care to put the question to a Slashdot poll?

Slashdot .sig contents:
* part of the thread
* identifying information outside the thread
* All your contents are belong to Cowboy Neal

Obviously, it is your site. I put the odds of you running such a poll at 1:15 against. If you lose, well... I'll just say that you seem to put a very high value on not losing. If you win, all you would get is an apology from me for stating that you should consider the .sig to be external to threads. That's an awful big "lose" for a minor "win".

And the fact that it was posted to the thread is undeniable. It's a given.

Really? The database record for message ID 32047104 has the text of damn_registrar's .sig in it? Do ANY of the database records that make up the thread have anyone's .sig them? Did damn_registrars have a checkbox next to "No Karma Bonus" that says "Don't attach .sig"?

Do you think people edit their profiles per thread to include or exclude their .sig from the thread? Do you think people change their profiles per thread to include a relevant .sig on every thread?

My point is that in the real practice of people posting to this site, the .sig isn't a choice per thread, nor is it in the message store as such.

I do disagree with you that attacks on a person due to the identity they choose are valid tangents to discourse.

It appears that you don't know the difference between a joke and a sneer. Do you want to know? I could explain it if you want, and weren't purposefully obstinate.

I understand that you claim that a .sig is a posting to a thread. I disagree. A .sig is a part of a user's identity, just the same as the user ID is.

Just because your user ID is "pudge", does that open up the topic of fatso jokes? I think no, because the topic of discussion was the hypothetical situation required to get the northern states to secede from the union.

Your personal identity (the identifier you choose) is in fact personal, and attacks against it are personal. Personal attacks are (at best) off-topic, and at worst debase the attacker and victim.

Sneers based on identity, are 1) cruel, 2) stupid, 3) off-topic in the extreme. They would be personal attacks that only served an evil interest in inflicting pain.

What would that say about me? I think the answer would be horrifying to face.

The other part that makes a .sig "not a posting to this thread, but rather a part of personal identity" is that the .sig is fluid. I remember one time I was trying out a different .sig. A week earlier, I had managed a clever wrap-up that tied itself to my (previous) .sig. Went back to the thread, and my clever tie-in to liberty was completely dumb because the new .sig was a handy way to remember how to not mis-spell "definitely". One simple example of foolishness taught me to not consider the .sig as a part of the message. It is fluid and can change. Trying to tie a thread to a .sig is a mistake. Threads are un-alterable and (should) stick to the Subject. .sigs are alterable and (most all the time) apropos of nothing in the thread.

I do have sympathy to the frustration that builds when people pick on other people. I do see that people pick on you, a lot. Heck, I did it by pointing out that the murder tangent was off-topic.

But you don't help your status as someone-to-needle by insisting that you are irrefutably correct with every posting. That just invites more needling.

And it really doesn't help when you go off on a tangent about murder based on someone's chosen personal identity.

Next time you go to hit the Submit button on a reply, read the lines of text underneath "Important stuff". You violated the first two.

The proper place for personal attacks based on a person's .sig or username or email address is your personal JE. Trying to divert the topic of discussion to something off-topic doesn't give credence to you or your argument.

Which is more important? The discussion started under "Hypothetical" or the personal attack based on a participant's .sig?

I only visit /. about once every couple of weeks now, so I didn't read the story of Brandon until tonight. I do see that, in the public school system, boys being boys are deemed a failure. Certainly, the system will reap what it sows as it discourages boys from being happy.

The story about the teacher who was pushed beyond his limits was extremely sad. My youngest step-son went to prison for twelve years for crimes he did not do; but, at one point he was pushed beyond his limit of self-control, and that failure was spun into (so-called) evidence. (Boy would I ever rejoice if his step-mom and bio-dad died in a fire - but I digress).

What is obvious in both the Brandon example and the Peter Harvey example is a massive failure in leadership. The teacher, Peter Harvey, should not have had to put up with the abuse. President Truman said "the buck stops here". Did Mr. Harvey's boss ever say that? Did any of Brandon's teachers ever say that? No, they shifted the blame away from themselves, and chose to let wounds fester.

I think this is the new, modern age.

Part of it is based on big media: blame sells. There is a lot of money to be made pointing at (public personae) foibles. As the world gets more personal (more interconnected), blame can become a real worry at the individual level. Hell, I helped write an email-retention policy, and the local newspaper jumped on the news that someone might sue us for it. The (elected) District Attorney is far more worried about the number of bad guys he threw in prison instead of whether his oath of justice is being served. He won't get good press for doing the right thing, if it means an accused goes free.

Another part of it is greedy lawyers with greedy clients. Deep pockets are a gold mine. Some times it is just cheaper to settle than to prove that innocent little Johnny wasn't so innocent and deserved the punishment his teacher meted out. The buck should stop with Johnny's parents (the true failures in this equation); but instead the administration will buckle and the teachers will be told to suck it up.

Part of it is Government. (BTW, I'm a part of government). It's been said that Government is The Anti-Business, and that is really true. Businesses want customers, government doesn't* (every time the Police are called, somehow society failed). Business need to run at a profit or they are shut down. Governments should be non-profit and if the losses are too great, can instead levy taxes. Businesses can choose to go into an under-served market. Governments are required by law to serve. (Example: if enough new restaurants open, the Government is forced to hire more inspectors - the Government cannot tell the restaurant it cannot open because the restaurateur can sue. Same story for growing populations and sewer, water, fire, schools, etc). If a businesses employees are rude, the business loses money. If a government employee is rude, wait - wasn't that the norm? You, the client, are a burden after all....

My point is that in a business, The Buck Stops at whatever level it needs to**. If the customer service rep needs to be fired, that can happen. In Government, it might take a Grand Jury to convene. Absent criminal charges, certainly the unlawful termination lawyers are going to flock like vultures on carrion. Whole person-years can be spent passing the buck, trying to cut it smaller so that only an insignificant piece sticks.

I don't know squat about Star Trek canon.

Does The Prime Directive come with prison penalties? If that is the case, then I would give the nod to The Federation. But I don't see that happening.

If I had to bet which would make to space first, I'd bet on the Klingons. The buck stops with the Klingon who f****d up. In the Federation, James T Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru by cheating. That buck went into the shredder like so many in the new, modern age do.

Progress is made by the guy that claims the buck, even if he fails. The guy that passes the buck never helped anything progress.

*OK - Government shouldn't, but if it grows the empire, then job security grows too.
**Hmmm - Goldman-Sachs: business or government? Certainly a business with govt. protection.

Pudge, you should know better than to consider a .sig to be a part of the discussion. If he changes his .sig (as slashcode does allow) to "Secretly, Kermit The Frog loves Miss Piggy", your commentary about murder is incomprehensible. You should know that, you helped write the code.

I've been on Multiply for a while now, since the migration of The Circle. I'm reasonably impressed. It hasn't been perfect, but it really has been pretty good. I spend more time there than I do Facebook. Though Facebook has the draw of more popularity. I would like it if my high-school friends found Multiply instead of Facebook.

Thank you for the link - that was an interesting paper. I did like the point he made about the theory of evolution being presented as a single package, when in fact it is two ideas: biology and philosophy. He makes a pretty good argument that Christians ought to be able to embrace the biological science and discard the philosophical propaganda.

dang it, have an error: "power down those blades for power savings" should be "power down the empty blades for power savings". Where's the 'edit my post button'?

It is one of those things that once you start using it, the benefits become apparent.

Here are some:

1) One application on one machine. No more wondering if application X has somehow messed up application Y. The writers of the software probably developed the application in a clean environment, and this lets you run it in a clean environment. Gets rid of vendor finger-pointing, too.

2) One application on one machine. If application X fouls the nest, you can reboot it and know that you are not also terminating applications Y, Z, A, and B.

3) Machine portability. The drivers in a VM guest are generic -and- uniform. Nothing inside the (guest) machine changes if you move the machine from a host with an Intel NIC to a host with a Broadcom NIC. The benefit here is that when hardware fails (and it will), it is pretty quick and easy to assign the boot disk to a different host, and boot the machine up. Think 10 - 30 minutes (per machine) to recover from a burned up power supply*.

4) Machine portability. There are some solutions that let you auto-fail-over to a new host when the guest stops responding. That burned up power supply could now be a two minute outage and NO emergency notification call.

5) Machine portability. Platespin lets you auto-migrate machines on a schedule to a few blades at night, power down those blades for power savings, and then power them up a little before business hours and migrate back. In a large data center, the electricity savings is enough to make it worth it.

6) Machine flexibility. Does application X not need much in the way of processing power? With the VM manager software, assign it one CPU and 256 MB RAM. Later find out that wasn't enough? Up the specs and reboot.

7) Reboot speed. In paravirtualized environments, the OS is already loaded in the host VM, so the guest VM just links and loads. I've seen entire machine reboots that take 16 seconds.

Along these lines, an anecdote from my life: How to add RAM to a server so nobody notices: virtualize

Hope this helps explain why some people are such a fan of virtualization.

*This is really a benefit that comes from disconnecting the machine from its disks, but VM and SAN go exceptionally well together.