Larry Wall & Cults

[Chuck Dillon]

abridgement of
civil liberties (as in the Patriot Act and the Gitmo gulag),

[...] How many U.S. citizens have been victimized?

That's the problem -- we have *no* way of finding out, because part of
the Patriot Act is a gag rule that prevents the public from knowing how
it's used. It *may* be a small number, and we'd all like to think that
it is, but we really don't know.

How many dead U.S. citizens does it take to justify that
victimization? Both numbers are quire small.

Here there's a lot of room to disagree -- it's a tragedy when U.S.
citizens are killed, but it's an even greater tragedy when the entirety
of the U.S. loses its freedoms in the name of "security".

That's intrinsically what the political process is all about. One has
to maintain confidence in the process. That requires that there be two
strong adversarial voices on *all* matters. Be it going to war, the
patriot act, abortion law or whatever.

If we went into Iraq and didn't hear dissension or if they passed the
patriot act and we didn't hear dissension then I would be worried. But
the process is healthy. It's how we identify a point of agreement in
the gray areas.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," as Benjamin Franklin said.
The Patriot Act takes away our liberty in the name of temporary safety.
We need better security than we had pre-9/11, certainly, but we can get
it with a much lower cost to our personal liberty than has come with the
Patriot Act. We *don't* need secret police investigations, secret
courts, and secret detentions for secret reasons.

It's easy to say we *don't* need but not so easy to demonstrate. You
don't even offer a hand wave attempt at articulating an alternative.
In the political world everything is subject to debate. Taking the war
to the middle east, increasing policing powers, increasing intelligence
capabilities... But in the real world there is a huge threat and
action must be taken.

Granting of any power to police is a compromise of personal liberty. A
cost/benefit analysis is needed to determine how much such power is
justifiable. Given the known presence of individuals in country that
are organized and willing to carry out crimes on massive scales most
folks think that for the time being the patriot act is justified.

-- ced

 

[jmfbahciv]

abridgement of
civil liberties (as in the Patriot Act and the Gitmo gulag),

[...] How many U.S. citizens have been victimized?

That's the problem -- we have *no* way of finding out, because part of
the Patriot Act is a gag rule that prevents the public from knowing how
it's used. It *may* be a small number, and we'd all like to think that
it is, but we really don't know.

How many dead U.S. citizens does it take to justify that
victimization? Both numbers are quire small.

Here there's a lot of room to disagree -- it's a tragedy when U.S.
citizens are killed, but it's an even greater tragedy when the entirety
of the U.S. loses its freedoms in the name of "security".

Okay, that's it! Tell me what freedoms you have lost. Be specific.
No sound bytes and no rhetoric parroting allowed.

I really want to know. People keep saying this but never say which
freedoms have been lost.

<snip quote>

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
%

That's over *20* months!!

I bet we can measure the youngster's age by the uptimes he boasts.

The Yahoo! server farm ran to very long uptimes last time I had
any details. The reason being that they commission a machine, add it to
the farm and leave it running until it is replaced two or three years
later.

Sure. But regular users of such computing services never get an
uptime report. Hell, they have no idea how many systems their
own webbit has used, let alone all the code that was executed
to paint that pretty picture on their TTY screen.

I bet, if we start asking, we might even get some bizarre
definitions of uptime.

I do know that the defintion of CPU runtime is disappearing.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

+---------------
| As you may know XP is not particularly good as a server.
....
| I would go for some Unix implementation (perhaps free-BSD)
| As a workstation XP seems OK.
| I hear a lot of complaints about XP's stability.
| Since I have not administered a XP network, yet, I cant comment on that.
| But in my personal experience it is a stable system.
| I frequently let my computer run 24 hrs. a day for more than a month
| without a need to reboot. So for me it is adequate.
+---------------

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
%

That's over *20* months!!

I bet we can measure the youngster's age by the uptimes he boasts.

-Rob

p.s. I remember the time back in the early 70's (at Emory Univ.) when
we called DEC Field Service to complain that our PDP-10 had an uptime
of over a year. Why were we complaining? Well, that meant that DEC Field
Service had failed to perform scheduled preventive maintenance (which
usually involved at least one power cycle)... ;-}

One? Had to be two. FS was supposed to use their service pack
as the system disk, not the customers!!! I believe that was
true even in 1970. The dangers of smushing bits was too great.

But with a PM you had to do a cold start. All the disks had to be
spun down, filters changed, and they had to spin for an ungodly long
time after the filter change before heads could be enabled again. This
was to bring all the dust that was let loose in the process into the new
filters before heads went to fly over the platters again.

That's why there was always two boots; one for FS to bring up thier
service pack to run diags; the other one was when the system was
handed back to the customer.

Also power supplies had to be checked for the dreaded capacitor
problems. Tape drives also had these. This was industry-wide
problems; and news from a few burned UPS'es the last couple of
months tell me that the capacitor problems are still with us.

It was a real accomplishment when we in 1988 could do a full
PM (Prime gear) without shutting down the system. All disks were
mirrored, and all power duplicated, so we shut down half of the
hardware and did PM on that; and took the other half next week.

That's exactly what JMF's and TW's implementation of SMP gave
the customer. Not only that but a catastrophic hardware failure
no longer brought down the whole system. What was really amusing
to me is that TW and JMF had no idea what they'ld created. The
first time I told them that a system would never ever have
to be rebooted, I grew two heads. OTOH, it was impossible
to convince FS that a PM didn't have to be a system-wide PM.

I don't think we ever got that change permutated throughout the
org.

SMD filters were used at a quite high rate; even inside well
filtered rooms. ISTR 6 months was a pretty long interval between PM's.

Our FS liked to have PMs done weekly and then a major PM done monthly.
I never had time to learn exactly what the procedures were. They
were documented and laid out but I don't know what happened to
that info.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[Marco Parrone]

justifiable. Given the known presence of individuals in country that
are organized and willing to carry out crimes on massive scales most

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Nothing fits better this description more than armies and governments.

Open your eyes, _they_ are the criminals.

Anarchy Is Order.

--
Trenitalia censoring online!
Autistici/Inventati under attack!

-. .-----. .-----. ---------- .--.
#| o======|#####| o======|#####| |# #| .--. |##|
---. .------------. .------------. |----+####+-----+##+--+##|
o)o ) ( (o)o(o)o(o)o ) ( (o)o(o)o(o)o ) |###aAAb###aAAb###aAAb###|
= http://www.autistici.org/ai/trenitalia =-|--(doob)-(doob)-(doob)--#
o )) ( o )) ( o )) ( o )) ( o )) `uu' `uu' `uu'

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Wasn't the idea behind ISO/OSI that there should be One Network for
everybody, instead of today's lot of interconnected nets?

interconnection and interoperability happen at both a protocol level
and a operational level .... being able to have both independence
and interoperability offers huge amount of advantages.

i don't know what the original idea was .... however, my impression of
looking at what it became .... was that it sprang up from telco
point-to-point copper wire orientation. iso/osi even precludes LANs.

the work on high speed protocol ... which would go directly from
level4/transport layer to LAN/MAC interface ... was precluded in ISO
standards organizations because it didn't conform to OSI model for
two reasons

1) it skipped the OSI level4/level3 transport/network interface and
was therefor precluded in ISO standards bodies

2) it went directly to the LAN/MAC interface .... LAN/MAC interface
is not allowed for in the OSI model ... so therefor intefacing to
LAN/MAC interface would be violation of OSI model

.... the sort of third reason was that it would also incorporate
internetworking layer within its functionality .... also a violation
of the OSI model.

misc. past comments
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

It was an upgrade from 56k. The first versions of NSFnet was not
really scalable either; noone knew quite how to design a erally
scalable network, so that came as we went.

we had a project that i called HSDT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

for high-speed data transport ... to differentiate from a lot of stuff
at the time that was communication oriented ... and had real T1 (in
some cases clear-channel T1 w/o the 193rd bit) and higher speed
connections. It had an operational backbone ... and we weren't allowed
to directly bid NSFNET1 .... although my wife went to the director of
NSF and got a technical audit. The technical audit summary said
something to the effect that what we had running was at least five
years ahead of all NSFNET1 bid submissions to build something new.

one of the other nagging issues was that all links on the internal
network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

had to be encrypted. at the time, not only were there not a whole lot
of boxes that supported full T1 and higher speed links ... but there
also weren't a whole lot of boxes that support full T1 and higher
speed encryption.

a joke a like to tell ... which occured possibly two years before the
NSFNET1 RFP announcement ... was about a posting defining "high-speed"
..... earlier tellings:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#33b High Speed Data Transport (HSDT)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#69 oddly portable machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#45 IBM's Workplace OS (Was: .. Pink)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#59 SR 15,15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#12 network history

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

But with a PM you had to do a cold start. All the disks had to be
spun down, filters changed, and they had to spin for an ungodly long
time after the filter change before heads could be enabled
again. This was to bring all the dust that was let loose in the
process into the new filters before heads went to fly over the
platters again.

Also power supplies had to be checked for the dreaded capacitor
problems. Tape drives also had these. This was industry-wide
problems; and news from a few burned UPS'es the last couple of
months tell me that the capacitor problems are still with us.

It was a real accomplishment when we in 1988 could do a full PM
(Prime gear) without shutting down the system. All disks were
mirrored, and all power duplicated, so we shut down half of the
hardware and did PM on that; and took the other half next week.

SMD filters were used at a quite high rate; even inside well
filtered rooms. ISTR 6 months was a pretty long interval between
PM's.

360s, 370s, etc differentiated between smp ... which was either
symmetrical multiprocessing or shared memory (multi-)processing
.... and loosely-coupled multiprocessing (clusters).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

in the 70s, my wife did stint in POK responsible for loosely-coupled
multiprocessing architecture and came up with peer-coupled shared
data
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#shareddata

also in the 70s, i had done a re-org of the virtual memory
infrastructure for vm/cms. part of it was released as something called
discontiguous shared memory ... and other pieces of it was released
as part of the resource manager having to do with page migration
(moving virtual pages between different backing store devices).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#mmap
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#adcon

in the mid-70s, one of the vm/cms timesharing service bureaus
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare

was starting to offer 7x24 service to customers around the world; one
of the issues was being able to still schedule PM .... when there
was never a time that there wasn't anybody using the system. they
had already providing support for loosely-coupled, similar to
HONE
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

for scallability & load balancing. what they did in the mid-70s was to
expand the "page migration" ... to include all control blocks ... so
that processes could be migrated off one processor complex (in a
loosely-coupled environment) to a different processor complex ... so
a processor complex could be taken offline for PM.

in the late '80s, we started the high availability, cluster multiprocessing
project:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

of course the airline res system had been doing similar things on 360s
starting in the 60s.

totally random references to airline res systems, tpf, acp, and/or pars:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#29 Mainframes & Unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#17 Old Computers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#100 Why won't the AS/400 die? Or, It's 1999 why do I have to learn how to use
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#103 IBM 9020 computers used by FAA (was Re: EPO stories (was: HELP IT'S HOT!!!!!))
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#136a checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#152 Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#20 How many Megaflops and when?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#61 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#65 oddly portable machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#60 Disincentives for MVS & future of MVS systems programmers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#21 Competitors to SABRE? Big Iron
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#22 Is a VAX a mainframe?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#20 Competitors to SABRE?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#26 Disk caching and file systems. Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#37 John Mashey's greatest hits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#69 Block oriented I/O over IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#2 Block oriented I/O over IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#35 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#45 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#46 The Alpha/IA64 Hybrid
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#47 The Alpha/IA64 Hybrid
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#49 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#17 I hate Compaq
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#0 TSS/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#3 News IBM loses supercomputer crown
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#9 IBM Doesn't Make Small MP's Anymore
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#2 Computers in Science Fiction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#3 Why are Mainframe Computers really still in use at all?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#12 Why did OSI fail compared with TCP-IP?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#43 IBM doing anything for 50th Anniv?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#63 Hercules and System/390 - do we need it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#83 HONE
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#83 Summary: Robots of Doom
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#67 Tweaking old computers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#29 why does wait state exist?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#28 TPF
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#58 AMP vs SMP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#48 InfiniBand Group Sharply, Evenly Divided
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#30 diffence between itanium and alpha
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#67 unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#30 One Processor is bad?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#32 One Processor is bad?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#37 Lisp Machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#2 Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#3 Ping: Anne & Lynn Wheeler
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#47 What makes a mainframe a mainframe?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#45 Saturation Design Point
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#24 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on 7 Apr 2004
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#49 Mainframe not a good architecture for interactive workloads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#50 Mainframe not a good architecture for interactive workloads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#6 Mainframe not a good architecture for interactive workloads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#7 Mainframe not a good architecture for interactive workloads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#35 Computer-oriented license plates
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#44 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#58 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#14 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters

 

[Morten Reistad]

[snipp Rush Limbaugh's's talks show mentioned]

Oh! Taste in talk shows.

Ah, then I have deplorable tastes in your opinion. I find Rush
greatly entertaining; but wouldn't use him as a data point.

I wish the left could dig up someone as entertaining as Rush.

I listen to them for data about how the rabble is thinking
and the logic they use to form their opinions. I also
watch those religious cable TV shows to gather the same kinds
of information; note that I can only manage to listen to these
about 10 minutes and not more than once/year. I also listen
to Rushie to see what kinds of lies that half of the world is
listening to. I watch CSPAN who never cut out for commericals,
don't edit too much, and tend to leave the mike on after the
meetings break up. '

With most of these you miss the point if you listen for content
at all. The media IS the message. And you are the product, to
be entertained enough so you can be sold to advertisers.

A lack of focus on world politics has been a characteristica of the
US presidents since Eisenhower. Bush is not special, he just got
the mess in his lap and had to deal with it; just as Nixon inherited
the Vietnam war.

Well, your Bush-hater campaign is working beyond all your
expectations. One day, you will have to live it.

-- mrr

 

[Morten Reistad]

we had a project that i called HSDT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

for high-speed data transport ... to differentiate from a lot of stuff
at the time that was communication oriented ... and had real T1 (in
some cases clear-channel T1 w/o the 193rd bit) and higher speed
connections. It had an operational backbone ... and we weren't allowed
to directly bid NSFNET1 .... although my wife went to the director of
NSF and got a technical audit. The technical audit summary said
something to the effect that what we had running was at least five
years ahead of all NSFNET1 bid submissions to build something new.

In 1987 T1's(or E1's in this end of the pond) were pretty normal;
T3's was state of the art. But it is not very difficult to design
interfaces that shift the data into memory; and 1987'is cumputers
could handle a few hundred megabit worth of data pipe without too
much trouble; but you needed direct DMA access, not some of the
then standard busses or channels.

IBM always designed stellar hardware for such things; what was
normally needed was the software. To see what Cisco got away with
regarding lousy hardware (GS-series) is astonishing.

There was a large job to be done to handle routing and network
management issues. BGP4 didn't come out until 1994, nor did
a decent OSPF or SNMP.

one of the other nagging issues was that all links on the internal
network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

had to be encrypted. at the time, not only were there not a whole lot
of boxes that supported full T1 and higher speed links ... but there
also weren't a whole lot of boxes that support full T1 and higher
speed encryption.

If you could do it hardware-assisted you could do T1s in 1987; but
in software you would have had large problems.

a joke a like to tell ... which occured possibly two years before the
NSFNET1 RFP announcement ... was about a posting defining "high-speed"
.... earlier tellings:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#33b High Speed Data Transport (HSDT)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#69 oddly portable machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#45 IBM's Workplace OS (Was: .. Pink)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#59 SR 15,15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#12 network history

-- mrr

 

[Alan Balmer]

[...]

Don't you dittoheads ever get your facts right?

What's a "dittohead"? Are you trying to convey a personal insult of
some kind? Please let me know, so I can call you a name, too.

A "dittohead" is someone who regularly listens to and agrees with Rush
Limbaugh (popular conservative U.S. radio talk show host). It is a
tradition that callers on his show (at least those that agree with
him) start their call with something like "Country redneck dittos to
you, Rush," or "Hey, Rush, blues-pickin' Cajun dittos" before
launching into the subject of their call. It is intended to be an
insult implying the "dittoheads" don't have any thoughts of their own,
but merely are told what to think (probably by Rush), and do so. The
"dittoheads" have embraced the moniker but not the implication, seeing
the insult as an act of desperation attacking the person (ad hominem)
rather than addressing the issues.

Ah, I see. Under the circumstances, that last observation may be
correct, especially when extended to those who cover their lack of
knowledge by accusing others of not having their facts right.

I have seen most of a TV interview with Mr. Limbaugh, when he was in
the news for prescription drug abuse, and I have heard him on the
radio briefly a couple of times. I find it distasteful and switch to
Tony Snow <G>.

 

[Morten Reistad]

360s, 370s, etc differentiated between smp ... which was either

smD the TLA that represents a washing-machine size disk. Mountable.
^ Made impressive head crashes from time to time.

But I won't interfere with this lovely thread drift with lots
of relevant facts.

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

In 1987 T1's(or E1's in this end of the pond) were pretty normal;
T3's was state of the art. But it is not very difficult to design
interfaces that shift the data into memory; and 1987'is cumputers
could handle a few hundred megabit worth of data pipe without too
much trouble; but you needed direct DMA access, not some of the
then standard busses or channels.

IBM always designed stellar hardware for such things; what was
normally needed was the software. To see what Cisco got away with
regarding lousy hardware (GS-series) is astonishing.

There was a large job to be done to handle routing and network
management issues. BGP4 didn't come out until 1994, nor did
a decent OSPF or SNMP.

even in mid-80s .... t1/e1 ... the only (ibm) support was the really
old 2701 and the special zirpel card in the Series/1 that had been
done for FSD.

in fall 1986, there was a technology project out of la gaude that was
looking at a T1 card for the 37xx ... however, the communication
division wasn't really planning on T1 until at least 1991. They had
done a customer survey. since ibm (mainframe) didn't have any T1
support ... they looked at customers that were using 37xx "fat pipe"
support that allowed ganging of multiple 56kbit into single logical
unit. they plotted the number of ganged 56kbit links that customers
had installed .... 2-56kbit links, 3-56kbit links, 4-56kbit links,
5-56kbit links. However, they found no customers with more than five
gnaged 56kbit links in a single fat-pipe. Based on that they weren't
projecting any (mainframe) T1 useage before 1991.

what they didn't appear to realize was that the (us) tariffs at the
time had cross-over where five or six 56kbit links were about the same
price as a single T1. so what was happening ... customers that hit
five or six 56kbit links ... were making transition directly to T1 and
then using non-IBM hardware to drive the link (which didn't show up on
the communication divisions 37xx high-speed communication
survey). hsdt easily identified at least 200 customers with T1
operation (using non-ibm hardware support) at the time the
communication division wasn't projecting any mainframe T1 support
before 1991.

because of the lack of T1 support (other than the really old 2701 and
the fairly expensive zirple-series/1 offering) ... was one of the
reasons that the NSFNET1 response went with (essentially) a pbx
multiplexor on the point-to-point telco T1 links ... with the actual
computer links running 440kbits/cards with the pc/rt 440kbit/sec cards.

hsdt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

had several full-blown T1 links since the early 80s ... and was
working with a project for a full-blown ISA 16-bit T1 card ... with
some neat crypto tricks.

I think it was supercomputing 1990 (or 1991?) in austin where they
were demo'ing T3 links to offsite locations.

 

[Nick Landsberg]

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02,

0.00

%

That's over *20* months!!

I bet we can measure the youngster's age by the uptimes he boasts.

The Yahoo! server farm ran to very long uptimes last time I had
any details. The reason being that they commission a machine, add it to
the farm and leave it running until it is replaced two or three years
later.

Sure. But regular users of such computing services never get an
uptime report. Hell, they have no idea how many systems their
own webbit has used, let alone all the code that was executed
to paint that pretty picture on their TTY screen.

I bet, if we start asking, we might even get some bizarre
definitions of uptime.

Well, there are lies, damn lies and statistics, don't
you know?

I have absolutely no idea of the size of Yahoo's "server
farm," but let's assume that it's roughly 100 servers
to make the arithmetic easier. Let's further assume
that the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is roughly
2000 hours (about 3 months, or about 90 days).

Given these numbers (which are not real, I remind you,
just made up), it is likely that on any given day
one of those servers suffers some kind of failure.
However, one can argue, quite legitimately, that
the service which Yahoo! provides is still "up and
running." 1% of the users may not be able to access
their mail for a few hours, for example, but the Yahoo! is
still running.

I do know that the defintion of CPU runtime is disappearing.

Not everywhere, Steve. There are still shops
which do measure CPU time for transactions
and base their sizing computations on that.
The better ones actually start from the requirements
and derive the CPU budget, Disk I/O budget, Lan budget, etc.
for each transaction based on that!

(Examples: "Hmmm... an in-memory dbms access takes about 150 usec,
my dbms schema requires 12 reads for this query. That's
1.8 msec. My CPU budget is 750 usec. Maybe I should
redesign something here?" ... or ... "Hmm... my CPU
budget is 3 ms. for this transaction, and I'm constrained
to use a particular XML parser. Time to measure. Whoops,
parsing takes around 6 ms for the average message on
my box. Maybe we shouldn't be using this particular
parser just because it's cheap? Or maybe we throw
more hardware at the problem and bid twice the number
of servers if we can't find a better XML parser.")

 

[Jeff Shannon]

Okay, that's it! Tell me what freedoms you have lost. Be specific.
No sound bytes and no rhetoric parroting allowed.

I really want to know. People keep saying this but never say which
freedoms have been lost.

I've lost the freedom to read whatever books I want, without the
government snooping over my shoulder.

I've lost what little was left of the freedom to presume that the
government isn't listening to my phone calls and scanning my email.
(This particular freedom has been being eroded for decades, but the
Patriot Act is pretty much the final nail in the coffin.)

I've lost the freedom from the assumption that, if I read certain books
and speak of believing in certain principles, I'm not necessarily going
to act in a criminal manner to further those principles. (If I loudly
proclaim that the government is horribly wrong, and I also happen to buy
a copy of something like, say, The Anarchist's Cookbook... I'm now
liable to be perceived by the government as a terrorist, and thus be
subject to arrest and imprisonment with no charges being filed and no
access to legal recourse. It doesn't matter whether the government can
*prove* that I planned anything, or even if I can prove that I have no
such plans -- there's no opportunity for me to offer or dispute evidence.)

I have a good friend who's a (European) immigrant. It is now legal for
the government to detain her for any length of time they so desire,
without giving any reason more definite than "suspected involvement in
terrorism" -- and with *no* need to provide any evidence to back that
claim. Whether it's been done or not is irrelevant -- she's very much
aware of the feeling that, despite the fact that she's been living and
working in the US for most of her adult life, the mere fact that she's
not "American" makes her immediately suspect, and potentially subject to
being "disappeared". Trusting to the goodwill and honesty of the
government to *not* use its authority is, to say the least, not exactly
heartening.

Most importantly, I've lost the freedom to live my life *without*
feeling quite so much like Big Brother is just waiting for me to make a
mistake, so that the rest of the US can be "saved" from terrorism.

(I've said my piece, but I don't expect we're likely to ever reach an
agreement. So, especially considering that I don't feel that
comp.lang.* is really an appropriate place for political discussion, I
won't be commenting further in this subthread.)

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

It's easy to say we *don't* need but not so easy to demonstrate.
You don't even offer a hand wave attempt at articulating an
alternative. In the political world everything is subject to
debate. Taking the war to the middle east, increasing policing
powers, increasing intelligence capabilities... But in the real
world there is a huge threat and action must be taken.

Must it? I am not claiming that it must not, but that the matter
deserves more thought than a panic reaction. The very first thing
to settle should be the objectives. Then the means and costs of
achieving such can be considered.

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

Well, your Bush-hater campaign is working beyond all your
expectations. One day, you will have to live it.

But the point is that most people neither love nor hate Bush.
They hate his misguided and thoughtless actions. The comics love
him, as he provides so many ridiculous quotes. The wealthy love
him, as he transfers taxes from them to the middle class and the
poor. Bin Laden loves him, as he provides manna for his rabble
rousing. The NRA loves him, as he blocks any renewal of gun
laws. Halliburton loves him.

OH, fuckmeverymuch. I am in Mass. We do have some
experience of a Kerry administration. For those you who don't,
watch how he runs his campaign. He will run the country in the
same manner.

No, you have experience of a Senate career. The famous war votes
show that he is responsible, since he voted for a bill that
provided for financing, and against a modified bill that simply
ran up the deficit. At the time very few knew that the alleged
Sadamian sins were largely pipe dreams, that the hunt for the 9/11
perpetrators was to be discarded, and that no preparation for the
results was to be made. His major error was in placing some trust
in the Bush administration. The post Viet Nam episodes show that
he has a functioning conscience. Some people learn from their
mistakes.

Bush is a much different thing. With him you had experience of a
Governorship in a state that almost totally emasculates the power
of a Governor, apart from the ability to sign death warrants and
deny mercy. We have seen the ugly result of giving him some
power, as I partially enumerated above.
.... snip adhominem garbage ...

Things can be worse..a lot worse.

True. But those candidates aren't running for President this time.

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

A lack of focus on world politics has been a characteristica of
the US presidents since Eisenhower. Bush is not special, he just
got the mess in his lap and had to deal with it; just as Nixon
inherited the Vietnam war.

That is understandable considering the relative sizes of the US
GDP and the rest of the world (until recently), the isolationist
ethic between the wars, and such things as the world attitude that
Spain was much more then the US could bite off in 1898. Wilson,
Roosevelt (both), Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, Nixon are
among the counter-examples. Even Reagan, while a sad example of
domestic policy, did fairly well in the foreign affairs
department. Elephants do not need to pay too much attention to
the surrounding fauna.

However Bush is demonstrably poor. He ignored the warnings from
the CIA, FBI, outgoing Clinton administration about imminent
attacks. He was focused on attacking Saddam and Iraq from the
first, and perverted 9/11 into that at the earliest opportunity.
He has offended many more than most of his predecessors. I will
say that he seems to have learned the names of some foreign
leaders since being elected.

 

[John Thingstad]

I really want to know. People keep saying this but never say which
freedoms have been lost.

Since this is somewhat related to computer programming and AI I will reply.

The US has started a initiative to integrate all information about people
in the USA into a central database.

This includes confidential information like your medical files. Think what
you say to your psychologist is confidential? Think again. Being paranoid
can be enough to get a "red flag".
They will have access to all your credit records and will monitor all your
travels in and out of the country.
If you buy flowers on the apposite side of town they can deduce that you
have a lover and
use this as a means of distortion. (Edgar A. Hoover style)

Initially this was just supposed to be used to monitor terrorist like
behaviour
but now the FBI and CIA are also seeing the power of such a system.

The main challenge in computing is sieving through the amount of data.
Politically it is to pressure the foreign governments to wave their
privacy protection acts and allow unlimited access to information to a
foreign power.

Don't know what you think of this but it scares the hell out of me!

 

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

Well, there are lies, damn lies and statistics, don't
you know?

I have absolutely no idea of the size of Yahoo's "server
farm," but let's assume that it's roughly 100 servers
to make the arithmetic easier. Let's further assume
that the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is roughly
2000 hours (about 3 months, or about 90 days).

Given these numbers (which are not real, I remind you,
just made up), it is likely that on any given day
one of those servers suffers some kind of failure.
However, one can argue, quite legitimately, that
the service which Yahoo! provides is still "up and
running." 1% of the users may not be able to access
their mail for a few hours, for example, but the Yahoo! is
still running.

Erm in this case the farm is a search engine service, if one of
the machines goes down then the searching gets a bit slower for everyone.
At any rate the report from inside Yahoo! was that they considered it
normal for a machine to run uninterrupted for a couple of years and
then get replaced.

Not everywhere, Steve. There are still shops

That's /BAH you're responding to there