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Comment Re:cheaper perhaps (Score 1) 150

Check out this map for an idea of minimum safe frost depths across the country, plenty of populated places are well below 4', and even those that are close to 4' probably have competing uses for that space just below the frost line. Then again with a horizontal bore cable layer it doesn't really matter whether it's 2' or 8' deep, the impact at the surface is all in the weight of the machine and the footprint of its treads.

Comment Re:You mean keep talking but don't make changes (Score 1) 144

my internet bill has not increased since 1999 and my service is 7 times faster than it was in 1999

So? As you can see from graph 4 on this page wholesale bandwidth prices fell 700% in 5 years, you're 3 fold below that drop in price which is only possible because the last mile is a minimally competitive market (oligopoly).

Comment Wikipedia the vector (Score 1) 61

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

  • Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
  • Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
  • Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
  • Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
  • This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

Comment Re:Office Space (Score 4, Insightful) 204

You don't have to be a tech wiz to manage an IT department. In fact my bosses boss is a business degree guy who managed malls before being thrust into IT management (he had run his own skunkworks IT group at a previous employer because their central IT was so horrible, new CEO came in, got wind of what he was doing and promoted him to CIO). What he DOES do is listen to both the business people AND his technical people. He won't force a solution that doesn't work for both sides and he won't promise anything to the business that we technically can't deliver. He's by far the best IT manager I've ever worked under. My direct supervisor is technical, and I'm a technical manager, but the guys running the show don't have to be tech guys for things to run correctly, they need to be good managers.

Comment Re:The measurements in question: (Score 2) 142

I never worry about going home, my array has plenty of spare capacity to handle rebuilds, we schedule the technician when it's convenient to us, not when it's convenient for them or the array. When you have guard space for at least 4 disk failures (out of a few hundred) you deal with replacements in a less urgent manner than a traditional small RAID5 array in a standalone server. Within ~30 minutes of a failure or a predictive failure my arrays are back to 100% resiliency with slightly less guard space. It's one of many reasons why I only buy wide striped arrays.

Comment Re:The measurements in question: (Score 1) 142

Those 5 SMART stats match up exactly with what I habitually look at on the job monitoring lots of RAID arrays' drives

Really? At my job I get notified that the array is ejecting a drive based on whatever parameters the OEM uses, it's already started the rebuild to spare space on the remaining drives, and a ticket has been dispatched to have a technician bring a replacement drive. If it's a predictive fail it generally doesn't notify until the rebuild has completed as it can generally use the "failing" drive as the source of the rebuild. Are you doing operations for a web scale company or something?

Comment Re:What is under the hood? (Score 1) 102

PostgreSQL lacks a lot of features needed to compete with Oracle, things like online index rebuilds and multiple active instances for HA are critical for many businesses where the option to take down the database or a table for maintenance isn't acceptable. Even MS SQL hasn't really been a competitor for many of these mission critical installs until SQL 2012 where finally MS is at near feature parity with Oracle, but they've stuffed up their licensing enough that there's now little incentive to move given all the costs associated with changing anything in such environments.

Comment Re:Legalities (Score 1) 301

Well, it's going to depend on the use as to whether a release is needed, news organizations are generally given very broad latitude in their use of likeness so long as the use is deemed in the public interest, even if the use is commercial. Now, is a random youtube poster who is obtaining recordings under open records laws going to be given the same treatment, that's probably unknowable until it's fully litigated, but unless the persons postings are deemed in the public interest it's unlikely they will receive the same limited immunity.

Comment Re:Repeat with me (Score 1) 127

In cryptography old is good as long as the cypher strength is still sufficient to thwart expected attacks. The only weakness in EMV I'm aware of is a man in the middle attack against chip-n-pin where you can send a pin not required signal to the terminal if you can get between the card and the terminal. Since most US banks will be doing chip and signature, not chip and pin that's moot. If you're aware of another attack on EMV then please enlighten me.

Comment Re:Submit the request! (Score 2) 231

Within a country it's easy to accomplish, all you do is require all ISPs offering service within the country to require it, and if you tie the license to an x.500 cert and use 802.1x at all end user access points then you can effectively require that users within that country are not anonymous. The downfall of the plan is that it's the Internet, a connection of networks ruled only by the protocols that are used to establish communications, so if you expect to be able to track an IP in Moscow to an individual, good luck with that unless you work for the FSB.

Comment Re:Good grief... (Score 1) 59

The fact that it is only nine fold is pretty impressive, really.

Agreed! The fact that a 1950's two stroke without emissions controls is only 9x higher on VOCs than an average 2007 highly engineered engine with ~$2000 worth of emissions control equipment and another $1000 or so worth of electronics to minimize emissions production is pretty amazing.

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