Like an ID for a database record, the name should be unique, mean nothing out of context, and used only to look up a description of all the information you are trying to encode in it. What happens if the warranty info changes? What happens if you assign the wrong machine, move where it is located, or change some other fungible property (either through upgrades, or simply because you encoded the wrong info?). You don't want to have to go through machine renaming exercises, updating dns entries, etc. or have to live with the degredation of your naming convention.

I have no idea if its still there, but the American History Museum in DC had an Information Age exhibit that was there for at least 8 years... started with an exhibit where you could speak over the actual wire Bell used for his first phone, through pieces of eniac, other huge bohemoth computers, an Enigma (cipher machine from WWII), A TRS-80 Model 1, An Apple I, through modern computers, and ending ith HDTV exhibit (before HDTV was commonly available). I loved that exhibit.

If the author is smart enough to write about 'a gifted computer security expert', why does the video of the tektrakys require a plugin from Microsoft?

This is a common phenomenon to *all* creative endeavors - it is hard to be creative on demand.

You need to figure out what rituals encourage creativity. For me, I need to sit down at my desk first thing in the morning, check all my mail, check slashdot, etc. while drinking a cup of coffee. Ten minutes, tops, and I have removed every distraction that otherwise keeps me off of what I need to do. I quit every app that makes my dock bounce, turn off my cell phone, etc. I need a clear path to the Zone.

For your immediate problem, if you don't already have something specific to work on, I would say:

1) Pick up a book on some language you do not know. Ruby, Erlang, Scala, Groovy, etc. There are great titles at PragmaticBookshelf.com for all of them.

2) install everything you need on your computer, and disconnect from the net.

3) Find a quiet environment.

4) Learn.

Once you think you are out of your block, take your learning to a coffee shop. This is a great place to be able to retain focus when you need to, but also a place of great distraction (people watching, art on walls, coffee smells), when you need to take your brain out of gear for a minute.

If you don't have anything specific to work on, pick up a copy of Best of Ruby Quiz and start working through the problems. Musicians practice scales, marshall artists practice kadas, painters practice perspective... you should practice solving small problems.

Why does it become "difficult if not impossible to find the original file"? Have you ever used configuration management tools like CVS or Subversion?

I have personally worked on a project that has a cvs repository going back to 1996, with every changed tracked across millions of lines of source code. I'm sure there are slashdotters who will have projects where 1996 might be the halfway point in their project history (as well as slashdotters born in 1996, but thats another story).

these problems have been solved. The problem is identifying it as a problem in need of a solution in the first place.

Next time replace 4999 of those hours with some white out and a photocopier

I'm sorry, but for something to be considered 'industry changing', we should consider the first instance of an app with that capability... for IT is the app that truly 'changed the industry' to the point where it spawned imitators that may be more successful.

By that standard, Visicalc, PageMaker, and MacWord absolutely need to be on this list.

1993, At Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. My company was building an early version of a ticket-selling ATM... you could get your tickets for the park from the machine. Several afternoons I was there doing maintenance on the machines - as people were leaving, the park closing, etc. When we would do maintenance, we would turn the monitors around so we could see them from 'inside' the machine, where we were sitting (in the hot summer weather, inside a small ticket booth with a couple of computers). It looked remarkably like a garbage can when you did that.

As I was sitting there debugging problems, people would throw paper, gum, and yes, once even a half-eaten ice cream cone through the hole the monitor left. It would land squarely in my lap. One group of kids even discovered I was in there and thought it was 'funny' to throw stuff at me.

There is a lot of good advice in the other posts, but so many are laden with other people's baggage filling in your missing data. Let me condense it for you to a real solution

I have set up high availability systems that are currently handling 18TB traffic a month, with many millions of page views, with systems that you can literally unplug the server handling the load and have a hiccup of less than a second. And I have done this with 2 servers.

Your 1000 visitors a day is something one server could handle the traffic for, as long as we aren't talking something boutique like streaming live HD video. But that is only half your problem - you want to be able to survive a catastrophie on that machine (someone accidentally kicking the power cord, etc).

First, I would suggest you do not want to handle this hardware yourself. I have worked with ServerBeach and RimuHosting, and would gladly recommend either for this setup. You can handle everything else though.

Second, you want two machines, pretty much anything in ServerBeach's category 3 will handle what you need.

Third, you need them in a particular configuration:

1) You want them each to have a publicly available IP (the references the box), then you want a floating IP between them (that will be the IP your web address uses). More about that IP later.

2) You want the two machines to have a second network card, and have a private network between them. (used for heartbeat and disk replication - see below)

3) you want to set up HALinux and DRBD.

HALinux is a software solution that will run on both boxes. One box is your 'primary' and the other is 'secondary'. The secondary box watches the primary one, and if the primary one fails for any reason, the secondary one takes over for it. It does this by pinging it as often as you specify (perhaps multiple times a second), and if it doesn't answer, it takes over its IP address. You see, that floating IP address I mentioned earlier resolves to the first machine, but the second machine can take it over (for this to work, they have to be on the same router). The downtime here is less than a second.

So that is all well and good, but the second machine needs to be able to run just like the first one. This is where drbd comes in.

DRBD is like Raid mirroring, but for two hard drives in separate machines. Everything written to one hard drive must also be written to the second for the write to be successful. Over a prigate Gig-e network, in my testing, the drives suffer about a 22-25% performance hit. All data - the database, the deployed applications, even the config files for all my services sit on this shared drive. If the first machine fails, the second machine has all the data it needs to take over the job.

I have set up exactly this setup more than once. And despite everyone here laughing at your "1000 users" figure, high availability isn't about scalability - your 1000 users might be worrying about something so important this setup is peanuts to them compared to the lost time if you have to spend 15 minutes jerking around with a server problem. I enjoy working on these systems because I can fix problems outside of a crisis mode, since there is always a machine ready to go.

If you'd like help with this, or if you'd even like someone to set it up and host it for you, I'd be happy to help. (dbock at codesherpas dot com)

Don't spend your money on purchasing 2-6 servers... seriously - look into what 2 decent machines in this setup will cost at ServerBeach, and also think how much easier this will be if they handle all the physical stuff for you. The configuration details are something you can handle yourself, and it is not that hard if you are comfortable at a command line prompt.

This won't be news to the slashdot crowd, but can be a useful thought to stick in someone's head when/if you hear them have that "anti-capitalist" attitude.

"Open source isn't anti-capitalist, it is anti-monopolist, but I can understand how big companies marketing efforts have made it easy to confuse the two. I can show you hundreds upon hundreds of commerical companies from (1-2 person shops to hundreds of employees) making money with open source software, and I can show you conferences and training events that generate millions of dollars of revenue, all based on open-source software. Food is a great analogy - even though recipes are freely available and you can grow your own, restaurants still make a lot of money cooking and serving food. Source code is just a recipe - it does nothing until a professional 'prepares and serves' it for you."

Yes, the analogies are tortured, but can bring someone who believes the first statement closer to the truth. Learn to parrot that back without a religious-sealot-like gleem in your eye, and you can help persuade the world.

The article was missing perhaps the only thing this crowd would care about:

  31Â24'16.68"N

  24Â22'40.83"W

Is that the one my wife failed to live up to when we got married?

Think about the advances in tech and medicine that you have seen in your lifetime. Now think what your kid will see. It might seem like sci-fi, but it is attainable sci-fi. Compared to the cost of having the kid in the first place, or the cost of any lifelong medical treatment that might be prevented, the costs of banking are cheap. I did it for my triplets.

some people have posted that is it reasonable for someone to be able to audit the source code looking for flaws?

Depending on the language, it would be trivial to use tools like lint, pmd, and findbugs to do some static analysis of the source code. ANY code base that wasn't built with those tools is likely to find a zillion bounds problems, swallwed exceptions, resource allocation problems, and other common boneheaded mistakes. A good developer could apply those tools in less than a day.

they might not find a particular 'smoking gun' problem, but if they find a *bunch* of problems, that would be enough to imply substandard quality and be a factor in the judgement of the case.

If I were a commercial company that built such tools, I would be seeking out this defendant for a chance to use them. Bound to be a huge publicity coup.