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Archaeologists Find 2,400-Year-Old Soup 108

Posted by samzenpus
from the your-dinner-is-cold dept.

Comment: Re:By the Way - this insane versioning bent (Score 2, Insightful) 79

by Sophacles (#28870861) Attached to: Debian Decides To Adopt Time-Based Release Freezes

The debian page itself lists releases by number and code name. So does Mac OS X, of course they are all referred to by code name too, leopard, tiger, etc. The Windows world has it easy, Windows 7 comes after windows 95, as per standard numbering schemes. Don't forget that in number based versioning schemes 2.1 is different than 2.10, and that 2.1 is before 2.9, which in turn is before 2.10. In debian of course you could just replace codenames with stable, testing and unstable and be done with it.


+ - They found the tapes, but not the data->

Submitted by Sophacles
Sophacles (24240) writes "So it looks like the celebration over the found Apollo tapes was a bit premature. The tapes were recycled, and boring satellite data is on them now. It's not all bad news however, NASA has decided to contract a video enhancement company to go over the old broadcasts and enhance them as much as possible."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:No governance required. (Score 1) 150

by Sophacles (#28545125) Attached to: The Hysteria of the Cyber-Warriors

I can think of a couple of reasons its a government issue.

* The government has computers on the internet. If our taxpayer money is being spent on government security, it might as well go to benefit infrastructure as well.

* In the last couple of years there has been a major increase in how comfortable "normal" people are with doing business on the internet, with potential negative impact gaining greatly.

* People are starting to take notice at how little security has been designed into a lot of critical infrastructure. For instance I work in the power grid space, and the "security" there is scary bad.

* There is a new administration, meaning different priorities. This idea has been talked about for years, now with a new boss things are gonna "change".[1]

There are probably other reasons too. I personally think it is long overdue. I think there may be some over-hype to it lately, because the * i didnt do is: The media decided they need something new for us to fear.

1. No position regarding our president is implied by my irony quotes, i just wanted to note that this may qualify as change.

Comment: No, you will never have to worry about this. (Score 2, Insightful) 717

by Sophacles (#28339081) Attached to: Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel

These roads are rural. Not in the city. Lots of people seem to think this will make life dangerous for people, or cause more expense in maintenance since the cars will wear them out faster, and on and on. Seems to me one major point is being missed: My driveway probably sees more traffic/day than these roads, and I don't even own a car. There are lots of roads out in rural farm country that are used for 2 reasons:

1. Shortcut when the weather is nice, since these roads don't get plowed anyway. Those taking the shortcut are driving pickup trucks, no exceptions.

2. Tractors, combines, and similar heavy equipment. They go from field to field on these back roads. It prevents farmers from having to drive over each others' crops to get to uncontigous fields. It also reduces the impact on fields, allowing for minimal driving over them (surprisingly important when it comes to field yield).

Neither of the above really requires a paved road. Stop acting like it's the end of the world. Ever since I got to know some farmers, and how this works, I've been wondering why a lot of roads are paved in the first place.

Comment: Re:Yeah, it's the end of the world (Score 1) 717

by Sophacles (#28338815) Attached to: Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel

So in most rural places, there are plenty of roads which never get plowed no matter what. These roads just aren't used in the winter because they only exist to begin with for the purpose of having heavy farm machinery move around between farm and fields. Other uses, such as farmer bob taking the backroad shortcut to town, just aren't considered important. Those roads shouldn't be paved at my (taxpayer) expense to begin with.

My g/f grew up on a farm, they have 2 approaches across the fields. One is paved, one is not. When the county was paving roads the family was given a choice about which to pave. (20something years ago) and that is proably the way it will remain for at least the next decade. When I asked if they wanted the other road paved, and why the county didn't pave more of the gravel I got the usual "stupid city boy" treatment. From that I gathered that for such rural roads, no one who will ever need to use them actually cares much.

Comment: Re:You Seem to Forget a Generation (Score 1) 405

by Sophacles (#27846287) Attached to: Let Big Brother Hawk Anti-Virus Software

Your grandparents' info hangs out on computers. SSN, CC, etc all live in some computer system somewhere. Further that info is accessible by other, virus prone computers. These computers are in the hands of bankers and merchants and whatnot, not your grandparents. So whether or not grandma does online bill-pay, she still benefits from a higher level of computer security.

Conversely since they won't be paying the tax, I demand that their info is put on less secure systems since: 1. security is not cheap, and 2. I will not shoulder the cost of freeloading old people.

Comment: Re:The other other side of net neutrality (Score 1) 159

by Sophacles (#27763467) Attached to: Bandwidth Fines Bad, But Not Net Neutrality Issue

I have NEVER heard any net neutrality argument against using proper QoS to manage limited bandwidth. I expect a competent Network Operations Admin at an ISP to implement some sort of priority queuing. What I should NOT expect from an ISP is for them to launch a man-in-the-middle Denial of Service against me, when I pay for a service that I expect to actually use.

I used to get it all the time. Many people decided that what we were doing was morally the same as Comcast. Im actually shocked at your stance, not you specifically, just in my experience there are not a lot of people who are willing to think reasonably about it (its become a modern day vi/emacs). As for man-in-the-middle, how do you feel about us doing transparent squid caching for our metro-e sites?

As a side rant, our biggest problems came when game companies would convince the users that we were blocking ports and other evil things to the games' traffic, even though we could show graphs saying that the user's traffic past our routers was just fine.

I applaud your company for doing the right thing. You listened to your customers. Your company came to a reasonable compromise which made your customers happy, and made for a more efficient use of a limited resource. As a bonus, it probably bought you a good bit of loyalty from happy customers, who will spread the word about your service, never a bad thing. One of my colleagues once told a customer,

No matter how much bandwidth you guys throw in your small office, it won't keep the problem from growing. It won't keep your office users from using up the extra bandwidth you throw their way. The best thing you guys can do with a limited amount of resource is to use the bandwidth you have, but use it more efficiently.

    We did a bit of Linux 'tc' shaping for that customer. After a bit of testing, and a few tweaks, their boss was much, much happier. He probably saved quite a bit of money, instead of wasting it on a bigger pipe for roughly a dozen users.

tc is a beautiful thing, or if you're a bsd type, altq/dummynet. I cant imagine networking without it anymore.

Comment: The other other side of net neutrality (Score 4, Insightful) 159

by Sophacles (#27760073) Attached to: Bandwidth Fines Bad, But Not Net Neutrality Issue

These discussions always seem to ignore one part of the equation. Specifically net neutrality stops GOOD QoS too. I worked at a small ISP. Over-selling capacity is strictly necessary in most cases where staying in business is a priority*. Most of the time no one notices. During certain peak hours however, everyone noticed. We received many complaints about voip and game quality.

Our solution was to implement packet inspection and QoS. What we did was identify VOIP packets, and give them a very high priority. Same with game packets. A few others too, like syns and acks are very cheap, so we gave them high priority too (because it does matter and will enhance the end user experience)**. We also identified video from youtube, cnn, etc (all places where there are BUFFERING players). With those video sites we lowered priority after the first .5MB since buffering is intended to make jitter irrelevant. We did NOT slow video down, we just made introduced latency sometimes so gamers and voipers got a better experience.

After doing that, our customers complained much less frequently, and many thanked us for getting more bandwidth.

Essentially, bandwidth should be measured on 2 axis, Throughput and Latency. Some apps dont need much bandwidth when they have low latency (voip), others don't suffer from latency as long as throughput is good (torrents). Most cries I see for net-neutrality ignore this. I find it sad because I would not mind my isp guaranteeing low latency for voip and games and high throughput for downloads (if i would be a pal and let them add a 100ms delay here and there).

I know that a lot of the issue hinges around the above being used to double charge, and other evil tactics, however legislating away the good because of potential for evil seems plain silly. Perhaps some sort of middle ground could one day be reached, in which destination filtering/prioritizing is strictly off limits, but content type filtering can be allowed as long as overall throughput remains at the rate sold. (not necessarily a good solution, just a talking point).

*This refers to places where the infrastructure is not well built up, and metro-e is not available.

** DNS at highest priority is surprisingly important. The day we did this speed related call dropped a large percent, and stayed dropped.
