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Comment State level identification (Score 1) 59

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Comment Eh? (Score 4, Interesting) 67

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

Comment Re:If you live by the cloud... (Score 1) 82

If you have important files that live only on your computer - especially if they only reside on one computer, then you're an even bigger fool and deserve what you get.

For the most part, cloud providers do a much better job than individual people do. Putting it on Google's servers is generally safer than keeping it only on your own computer.

Also, have you ever tried to back up a Windows host? It's ridiculously complicated! Sure, there are plenty of "easy" solutions, but does that back up SQL Server? That fancy accounting package you spent $4000 for? Where *does* it keep those files?

I found this out recently when I upgraded a hard drive and reloaded the OS onto the new drive. Why would you think it would be so danged difficult to get Quickbooks client files transfered to a new hard drive?

hahahaha

Comment Re:Space is hard (Score 1) 32

>SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right

They didn't, though. There is a HUGE difference between test flights and production flights.

Falcon 1 scheduled several test flights. This where test flights, designed as such, and carrying accordingly mass-simulators, broken satellites, or a bloody wheel of cheese. Their first few failed, which was expected, and not a concern, as this are test flights. Then they reached orbit succesfully, and so they went into production. Their next flight was a production flight, and worked flawlessly too.

Then Falcon 9 came, which worked flawlessly on their first flight, and flew flawlessly for 5 straight years. They had ONE in-flight failure with 1.1, then absolutely none since FT. So 8 years of flawless launches, almost 200 of them too.

Comment Re:Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score 3, Interesting) 32

Virgin Orbit offers expensive, inconvenient, unreliable launches.

For instance, Electron costs *half* of what a LauncherOne will cost you, and RocketLab is more reliable, has more launches under their belt, and offers a fantastic truly customer-oriented system.

The supposed advantages of air-launch aren't such. First of all, it's for the most part a lie. "It's just a plane, so we can launch anywhere". Well, except you do need pretty much all facilities except for a launch tower at your airport. And you need authorizations from everyone, from the FAA to the airport itself, local authorities, etc. Launching from another country? Even more bureaucracy. And it'll only be ok if it's a NATO country and the US gives the Ok for it (because ITAR). So all of those advantages evaporate fairly quickly.

If you want cheaper, and your orbit allows it, you can get on a SpaceX ridesharing mission. Anywhere from 300k to around 2 to 3 million for the max payload capacity that LauncherOne can handle. And you're launching on the most reliable rocket in history.

The problem with their last launch is a fundamental flaw, not necessarily on design, but on how they do things. Their processes are horrible. Sure, they aren't the same company as Virgin Galactic now, but they used to be, and they obviously inherited the same culture.

VO was already not very appealing, but now there are even more options, and more are coming. VO hasn't gone the way of Astra yet for the same reason BO isn't out of business: A big ego with big pockets behind it.

Comment Re:I don't understand why anyone is working on thi (Score 1) 40

Generally, I agree with your sentiment, but also "letting them get away with it" is a bad precedent. We've already seen similar efforts from microsoft, and from other manufacturers. Apple isn't the first, nor will be the last, to try and lock down a platform.

Breaking whatever BS protection they throw at it and doing what you want with the platform is exercising your right to use your own stuff however the hell you want. It's like the US flying over what China claims as the South China Sea. Basically, use it or lose it.

Comment Re:It's "Crew 6", not 6 crew. (Score 1) 45

That is correct. The first mission to carry humans for NASA wasn't a production mission, and so it was called Demo-2 (after Demo-1, which did everything but without people onboard). After that, Crew 1 through 6. So it's the 7th mission *for NASA*. In addition, they also flew Axiom 1 and Inspiration 4.

So, 1 manned demo mission, 6 missions for NASA in the main contract, "Crew" series, 1 for Axiom, 1 private, for a grand total of 9 missions with crew onboard so far.

Comment Re:Economics not Physics (Score 1) 306

Intel's not lagging behind much; it just looks that way because Samsung and TSMC define their feature sizes differently.

Their 10nm process is comparable to Intel's 14nm process, etc.

Both will run out of steam at about the same point -- Intel's 5nm, and Samsung/TSMC's 3nm, will likely be the last process shrink.

Comment Re:Stop Writing Bloatware (Score 1) 306

There are libraries, and then there are libraries. Some libraries, like BLAS, are written by very good programmers who are expert in their domain, avoid common pitfalls (or evolved to avoid them after several development cycles) and have optimized the hell out of the implementation. Other libraries, like almost every javascript framework in existence, are poorly written, horribly slow, and full of bugs (but may provide hard-to-get capabilities). Code re-use is kind of like email implementation -- it seems like it should be straightforward, but it totally isn't. Doing it right requires care and experience.

Comment Re:Do users care? (Score 2) 245

Most average users of linux want a system that...

You think you can speak for "most average users"? Because you certainly don't speak for me. I'm a professional Linux developer of 20+ years experience (starting with Red Hat Linux 5.0) and things like systemd are a big deal for me! I'm a programmer and systems admin/engineer.

That said, although I have been somewhat slow to adopt systemd, I'm starting to get used to it and I'm actually starting to like it. Things that used to require hackish software like xinetd are really easy to rewrite under systemd. Barely a simple config file and a tad of Google pounding and... it's done. So much simpler than reinventing everything a la messy, 300 line init scripts in bash.

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