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Comment Re:The bigger question is: (Score 1) 591

I'm having a really hard time coming up with a case where I'd ever recommend that people disable signature checks. That aside, your example is limited to one distribution. That isn't a good sample of the general Linux server install base, and the recommendation of one company certainly doesn't represent the actual behavior of most admins, even those using that distro. Care to provide a better citation?

Comment Re:The bigger question is: (Score 2, Interesting) 591

Not that it matters... people usually just disable GPG checking or force install, when the signature check fails. Or they don't bother to check the "signature that's essentially 'impossible' to fake" before installing the tarball, anyways.

Care to cite your source for that? I work for a company with a very large base of customers running various distros (mostly Ubuntu and Debian), and this is not the behavior I see at all.

Comment Re:DCU (Score 1) 359

Now DFCU, 'splain to me again why you closed down the Alpharetta branch??!!!

Heh, you reminded me of the fact that Navy Federal Credit Union finally opened a shiny new branch at Crabapple awhile back... shortly after I moved to New Jersey. Awesome timing!

Comment Why, oh why? (Score 4, Interesting) 401

Is there a good technical reason for 32-bit Windows 7 not supporting more than 4 GB of RAM, period? PAE has been in use for a long time now, and while you can't have a single process that exceeds 3 GB in Linux (tunable, I'm given to understand, can also be a 2 GB per process limit in some installations), you can definitely go past 4 GB of total system memory. Windows Server 2008 Enterprise supports 64 GB per 32-bit system...

Comment Re:Last time I run a parallel program... (Score 4, Insightful) 206

Given you statement, why would you link to a document entitled Reevaluating Amdahl's Law? Did you even read what you linked to? Here's an excerpt:

Our work to date shows that it is not an insurmountable task to extract very high efficiency from a massively-parallel ensemble, for the reasons presented here. We feel that it is important for the computing research community to overcome the "mental block" against massive parallelism imposed by a misuse of Amdahl's speedup formula; speedup should be measured by scaling the problem to the number of processors, not fixing problem size. We expect to extend our success to a broader range of applications and even larger values for N.

Linux

Submission + - Linode Turns 7, Announces Big RAM Increase (linode.com)

palegray.net writes: "For anyone interested in hosting, Linode turns seven today and has announced an impressive RAM increase across all plans (512 MB at the low end, 20 GB on the high end). There's an ongoing discussion of the announcement over at Hacker News for those interested. As a disclaimer, I have worked for Linode for a little over a year now, but I was a very happy customer for five years. For Slashdotters who already have a Linode, you'll need to issue a reboot to use the new memory; sorry about ruining your uptime ;)."

Comment As a consumer... (Score 3, Interesting) 147

I care about speed, but I also care about transfer caps. Note that I'm not saying we should legislate this (I'm about to pay for "business class" service without a cap), but I'm saying 250 GB a month doesn't cut it for me. I transfer large disk images (server backups, even compressed, they're big) several times per month , move virtual machine images around on a routine basis, use streaming video services in lieu of television, streaming audio on top of that, etc. The list goes on, and my #1 concern isn't the transfer speed anymore. It's the transfer cap.

Comment Re:We just need legislation (Score 2, Insightful) 220

It should have been illegal for my credit card company to even give the information.

You know, I've got a story on this topic. A couple of months ago I bought a piece of furniture (Ikea, got a nice dresser for a nice price). Upon unpacking it, I discovered it was broken. Given that the store is 60 miles away, I waited awhile before taking it back for an exchange. My wife and I finally made it out to Philadelphia with the broken item in tow, only to realize that while my wife thought she had the receipt on her, she didn't.

Their official return/exchange policy requires a receipt, but they were able to look up the transaction by credit card number. Thus, I received a replacement dresser 15 minutes later, and has happily on my way. I'm perfectly fine with them having my credit card information.

If fraudulent transactions occur on one of my accounts (and I have been though that, three times in fact), I simply dispute the charges and submit an affidavit on the matter. Boom, I get my money back. To be perfectly frank, I don't see any value whatsoever in what you're proposing, and it seems to ring all too much of "sky is falling" cries over something that is a solved problem.

IT

Submission + - Your IT Infrastructure: A House of Cards (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Deep End's Paul Venezia takes up a topic many IT pros face: 'When you've attached enough Band-Aids to the corpus that it's more bandage than not, isn't it time to start over?' The constant need to apply temporary fixes that end up becoming permanent are fast pushing many IT infrastructures beyond repair. Much of the blame falls on the products IT has to deal with. 'As processors have become faster and RAM cheaper, the software vendors have opted to dress up new versions in eye candy and limited-use features rather than concentrate on the foundation of the application. To their credit, code that was written to run on a Pentium-II 300MHz CPU will fly on modern hardware, but that code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries. Yes, it might function on modern hardware, but not without more than a few Band-Aids to attach it to modern operating systems,' Venezia writes. And yet breaking this 'vicious cycle of bad ideas and worse implementations' by wiping the slate clean is no easy task. Especially when the need for kludges isn't apparent until the software is in the process of being implemented. 'Generally it's too late to change course at that point.'"

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