Posts by Justin 14 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
that the mere fact of serving your prison term is what reforms you. Therefore if you have time to serve and haven't served it, then by definition you aren't reformed. But once you have served your time you are, again by definition, reformed.
That's a crazy argument.
It's not the actual time itself that reforms you, in my opinion it's more likely to be the fact that you have been sentenced to xx years in prison that does the reforming.
Once you actually go to prison, my understanding of the stats is that you are more likely to come out a hardened, repeat offender, than you are to come out as a reformed person.
Virtualisation is way overrated. And often costs significantly more than discrete hardware with a decrease in reliability.
Take my environment for example.
I work for a (non-UK) government department.
Our Sun servers are outsourced.
Our maintenance costs for a T5220 is something like 3k/month for the server, plus 2k/month for each solaris zone (virtual server). Therefore for a piece of kit with 3 VMs on it costs 9k/month, which is made up of 3k/month for the 'global zone' (the administration zone that only our outsourcers have access to) plus 2k/month for each of the VMs.
Previous to using VMs, it cost a flat 3k/month for each server. Therefore having 3 physical servers cost 9k/month.
Now of course, if we have physical hardware failure we have lost 3 zones, what was once 3 physical servers, for the same cost.
Whie you might say that there is more flexibility, in that there is the ability to assign unused resources from one zone to another, while in theory there is, it costs $$ to get the resources assigned. First, someone has to prove we need resources moved from zone A to zone B (say 20 man-hours), then they've got to convince their management to send a request to the outsourcer to move the resources. Then it's got to go through change control (another 5-10 man-hours of various people's time), then the outsourcer, 4 weeks later, charges 4k+ to type a few commands on the command line to move the resources...
From an administrators point of view, manageing 10 VMs is exactly the same as managing 10 physical servers that aren't VMed. It still takes the same amount of time to ssh to a VM, check logs/restart an app server/truss processes/configure something/deploy something as it does to ssh to a physical server. I can definitely tell you that labour costs of system admins managing a server, whether it is physical or virtual, are far greater than labour costs in asset management or data centre costs. And with the virtualisatoin hype, management (on advice of the outsourcers of course) are going to create shedloads of VMs, costing more $$$ than having a few physical servers.
Using VMs also increases complexity and other maintenance costs. Does this new patch work in a VM? Do we have to keep VMs patched? How much does it cost to verify the software/patch that works fine on a bare-metal server also works within a VM on the same hardware?
What about tracking down problems? What is the real physical interface traffic is coming into/out of because in the VM we only have visibility to the virtual interface? How does it complicate our routing tables on the server to ensure that data leaving VM A has a source IP address of A while traffic leaving VM B has source of B, rather than each one randomly picking a physical interface to transmit out from?
Virtualisation just increases costs and decreases reliability.
1) Sean Connery with Keira Knightley as assistant/granddaughter
2) Patricia Routledge
3) Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) with Rhona Mitra as sidekick
4) Lena Headey with Kate Beckinsale as sidekick
5) The Kumars (pick one as the doctor, the rest as sidekicks!)
6) Rowan Atkinson with Dylan Moran as sidekick
I've always thought that mic's and camera's built into computers should have a "physical" on/off switch, not a "soft" on/off switch.
Hijacking a computers camera/mic has been around for a long time. Trojan software has been available for years that does this, this is merely a new vector for an old hack.
AC wrote: "On the other hand, if they are studying criminology, why should their marks be significantly affected by their inability to spell - it would be different if they were studying English Language."
Are you crazy?
I don't care how well an English major can spell.
I am way more concerned over the grammar and spelling ability of someone who could be submitting expert reports in criminal cases that may be relied upon in securing a conviction/dismissal or deciding on a sentence.
Law is one of those fields that requires absolute precision in expert testimony/reports.
"It's kind of like the French legal code, "You ARE Guilty Until YOU Prove You Are Innocent"."
No offense, but that is NOT the French Legal Code. It is from the Napoleonic code, which while the basis of the French civil law system, is not THE system.
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence#Differences_between_legal_systems (I know I know, wikipedia is not particularly accurate, but it was convienient to use as a source for something I alreay believe to be correct):
"In France, article 9 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, of constitutional value, says "Everyone is supposed innocent until having been declared guilty." and the preliminary article of the code of criminal procedure says "any suspected or prosecuted person is presumed to be innocent until their guilt has been established". The jurors' oath reiterates this assertion."
"- Employees should be allowed access to the database, and means to contest its content, with reasonable proof. " written By Anonymous Coward,Posted Sunday 11th May 2008 23:11 GMT .
Hmm, so it is ok to require "reasonable proof" to remove data from the database, a database which has no proof requirements at all in which to enter said data?
From the article:
>> Kristin Kvigne, assistant director of Interpol’s Trafficking in Human Beings unit,
>> said in a statement. "Our duty as law enforcement officers is to
>> protect children and we believe this appeal, codenamed Operation IDent,
>> will help us do that."
Their duty is to protect children? Does that mean that they don't protect adults?
I thought their duty was to enforce the laws of the land, not to protect a particular segment of society. Or have I misunderstood their duties?
My biggest concern over SaaS is in regards to data integrity.
Data more than ever is the critical component of any business.
Do you want your critical data, the thing that makes an organisation what it is, hosted by a potential competitor?
If you are a software development house, do you really want your source code, architecture documents, design documents, hosted by say IBM providing this SaaS servcice? Or Microsoft, or Google?
If you are a finance website, say Forbes or similiar, do you want a competitor having access to your propriety data, say Google (finance.google.com) or Yahoo (finance.yahoo.com) to have your data hosted on their servers where they can mine it for themselves? Or even inject bogus data in to ruin your forecasts etc?
Do you want your internal emails being available for an external organisation to search for 'juicy' tidbits to sell off to competitors or even the media?
Even if the external SaaS providers do not use the data directly to sell on, maybe they use it for gathering statistical analysis. Perhaps Nielsen starts providing SaaS services and using the data stored to provide its statistical analysis, which it sells for a profit, thus earning money from you twice. Once from the subscription model, then again by selling results of mining your data.
It just makes no commercial sense to me to hand over your core business data to another organisation.
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