Comment ZFS or Reed-Solomon (Score 1) 257
Use ZFS if you are in OpenSolaris/FreeBSD land, or use a Reed-Solomon tool - a GPL implementation of mine was Slashdotted 2 years ago, here: http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/rsbep.html
Comment Re:How Could they (Score 1) 11
Sorry mate, you're wrong. You can happily get unsecured content from any place you like, store it on your server and then serve it to anyone you please over HTTPS - from your *own* servers. This is what Google does when you click on "show me the cached content". Do you really think that the summaries written under the search results are obtained in real-time from the original servers and "woven" into your results the moment you search? No, the content IS scanned daily by Googlebots and stored in Google's machines - they are already serving the query RESULTS from their own servers, and this is what I am talking about - simply returning the RESULTS over HTTPS - whether you'll click on them and proceed over HTTP would then be your own choice.
Regardless, some Slashdot moderator closed this thread - I can't for the life of me understand why, I think it's a valid question, and one many tech people would love to talk about...
Comment Re:How Could they (Score 1) 11
I insist: we are talking about what they are *already* displaying in their result pages... why not serve it over HTTPS?
I would understand performance issues, but I doubt they would pose a significant problem for Google... they do the same with GMail every day for millions of subscribers.
Comment Oh, this thread just disappeared from Firehose... (Score 1) 11
Must have touched a nerve ... :-)
What's next, black suits at my door?
(cowers in fear)
Comment Re:How Could they (Score 1) 11
We are only talking about the queries and the search results here... these ARE Google's content. They could be served over HTTPS, and then it would be the user's choice - whether to proceed and view a result over unsecured HTTP or fire up Tor...
Comment Re:Worked for me (Score 1) 11
It just redirects me to a non-HTTPS version...
Submission + - Why isn't Google allowing searches over HTTPS? 11
ttsiod writes: I don't know why I've never thought about this before, but... why isn't Google offering its search engine over HTTPS?
Try it, you'll get nothing.
Google for it, 8 hits! What?!?...
It's true that privacy advocates have a point when they claim that Google is in a position to store personal search queries, but it seems
to me that we should be far more worried about ... "regimes" inspecting our queries while they travel from router to router, or our ISPs (who actually *know* who we are) gathering each and every search we have ever made, since it travels in plain, human-readable cleartext. Should I be worried if I live behind the Big Firewall and my browser sends a bad packet? Why don't we have an option (like we do in GMail) to use HTTPS and have only one thing to worry about, that is Google giving the records itself?
I know that HTTPS places a lot more load on CPUs and networks, but clearly this would not be much of an issue for Google's amazing armies of machines ...
What do you think?
I know that HTTPS places a lot more load on CPUs and networks, but clearly this would not be much of an issue for Google's amazing armies of machines
What do you think?
Comment If you use ZFS, don't forget --inplace (Score 2, Insightful) 272
I also use rsync and OpenSolaris/ZFS to keep daily backups.
BUT - important:
If the content is made of big files that change slightly each day (e.g. VMWARE/VirtualBox disk images), make sure you also use "--inplace" when you do the rsync, so that you take advantage of the copy-on-write semantics of ZFS. For example, I am using rsync to back up a VMWARE server to an OpenSolaris/ZFS fileserver, where the virtual disks are huge "vmdk" files - in the order of 10GB each. These huge files change only a little each day (less than 1%) - rsync would indeed realize this and only copy over the network the parts that changed, but it would store completely new copies in the backup server for each day! (I am assuming here that you would ZFS-snapshot each day). If instead you use the --inplace option of rsync, rsync will not only send the blocks that changed, but it will also only write the blocks that changed - thus, your ZFS will be able to host many years' worth of daily snapshots of these "vmdk", a truly marvelous thing, if you think about it...
Submission + - Con Colivas BFS faster at video encoding by 70%
An anonymous reader writes: Quoting from this: As an x264 developer, I have no position on the whole debate over BFS/CFS (nor am I a kernel hacker), but a friend of mine recently ran this set of tests with BFS vs CFS that still doesn't make any sense to me and suggests some sort of serious suboptimality in the existing scheduler.... Executive summary: On a quad core machine, Con's BFS scheduler encodes x264 video with speed gains up to 70% (compared to the existing Linux scheduler)!
Submission + - Simple, portable physics simulations (softlab.ntua.gr)
ttsiod writes: "I want to 'lure' my nephews/nieces towards Science and Engineering (to whatever extent that's possible, in the age of consoles). To that end, I have coded simple physics simulations, like falling snow, exploding fireworks, and 1D/2D wave simulations. My efforts are here, in the form of portable SDL mini-programs (GPL code, compileable under Windows, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS/X and basically every OS with GCC and SDL). Try them out, and do offer any suggestions on other programs that can trigger scientific interest in young minds... Myself, I am teaching them Python, so that they can code "fireworks" on their own..."
Submission + - Windows backups with rsync and Volume Shadow Copy (softlab.ntua.gr)
ttsiod writes: "I wanted a free backup strategy for my Windows boxes, that would utilize only open-source and Microsoft tools. I also wanted it to (a) be fast and hassle-free (b) be executed automatically (e.g. on a daily basis) (c) allow instantly accessible history for as many days/weeks/months as storage permits, with only the modified and new files actually reserving space on the backup device
(d) work just fine with open files (registry hive, SQL server data, Outlook mailboxes, etc)
(e) use cheap hardware. I searched for something like this and found many solutions that had some of the desired features... but none that had them all... so I decided to improvise. Enjoy!"
Submission + - Coding software-only real-time 3D renderers (softlab.ntua.gr)
ttsiod writes: "I know we live in the age of GPUs with billions of transistors;
but I really
enjoy coding software-only real-time 3D renderers, just for the heck of it... I am not the only one
who appreciates the freedom that comes from not being tied to
graphics chips... Give me a PutPixel(x,y,color) and
I am set! And in the coming age of architectures with 32 cores or more
(like Larabee),
software rendering might come back with a vengeance..."
Submission + - Optimal remote Linux backups with rsync over Samba (googlepages.com)
ttsiod writes: "What would you do if you had to automatically backup a remote Linux box (e.g. your web server), and all you had locally was Windows machines? How about this: (1) automatically expanding local storage space, (2) transmissions of differences only, (3) automatic scheduling, (4) local storage of differences only, (5) secure and compressed transfer of remote data and (6) instant filesystem navigation inside daily snapshot images. I covered all these requirements using open source tools, and I now locally backup our 3GB remote server in less than 2min! The steps I followed are documented here."
Submission + - Perfect remote backups with open source tools (googlepages.com) 1
ttsiod writes: "What would you do if you had to automatically backup a remote UNIX machine, and all you had locally was Windows servers? You could do many things, but here are some attributes of what I call "The perfect remote backup": automatically expanding local storage space, transmissions of differences only (incremental), automatic scheduling, storing of differences only (differential), compressible and secure transfer of remote data and instant navigation inside (snapshot) images of the server. I covered all these requirements using open source tools, and now I locally backup our 3GB remote server in less than 2min! There's one or two things in the process that are definitely worth reading about. The article is here."
Submission + - FreeBSD: the best server OS
rbgrn writes: Linux in all it's various forms have been a staple of the server operating system market for years. While Linux is fully capable of providing a high quality server platform, outside of academic environments, FreeBSD is often times overlooked as being a mature, reliable and easy to use OS. This article goes over some of the virtues of the system and takes a look at it from a pragmatic, organizational perspective.
