Not true. You can get eMachines at fry's for aroud 299 bucks (or the 3 I got for 375, with a 75 dollar rebate, NO ISP contract, plain old rebate) without any form of ISP contract. Add a 80 buck 17inch monitor and you have a nice system. I bought one for my girlfriend. And then a few more.
You can easily build a 1TB fileserver (P3 1GHZ, or Athlon, 1gig of ram, etc etc) for 3-4 grand, using quailty IBM drives. None of that Maxtor garbage. Its probably closer to 4 grand with the ibm drivers, and closer to 3 with Maxtor drives.
If you have followed tech stocks for the last year you may have noticed that NASDAQ hasnt been delisting hardly anyone. Egghead.coms stock was below around 9 months, and only reason it is delisted now is because it went bankrupt. Same with dozens of other stocks that should of been delisted many months ago. Some even a year ago. I dont really think they are following delisting guidelines anymore because of the economy, they want to give companies I chance.
Well, I wasnt talking about operating cost. I was talking about revenue. True operating cost are the same if they are up or down. However, they still could of saved money. Because loss of revenues, also means that lower net loss on the proceeds (selling below cost, all that kind of stuff) of those revenues. This is beyond the cash burn rate for a half a day. If I had cash burn rates from the companies we could come up with an ever better estimate that talks about about operating cost and whatnot. However though, I still stand by the revenue is a good metric of losses, because operating cost comes from money gained through sales (revenue), either that or VC money still in the bank, or credit, but still. So you would not add operating cost on top of that revenue figure to come up with estimated amount of financial damage, because you probably be accounting for it twice.
Thats not what I am say. I am saying the figure can no where equal 1.3billion or more for half a day of down time. I addressed those additional cost, and said even if they were considered, the figure would not equal 1.3billion. The purpose of the analysis was to go over loss of revenues, not total business loss. Even if all cost were able to be accounted for, the figure in no way would equal 1.3billion for half a day. Even if you take in to consideration electricity and employees (half a day of employees for all these companies is only at most a couple mil, IF THAT). Anyway, the point was to show their is no way a figure of 1.3billion could be considered, when revenue for those companies (which PAYS for those other expenditures) is not even close to that figure. The 6 months revenue of these companies is only slightly over the half day loss figures. Once again, that revenue pays for the cost of operations, so I think just analyzing revenue figures is a good measure real losses. Their is some critical thinking for you.
Lets look at the figures of damage supposedly caused by Mafiaboy and see if he deserves a rewards, not a prison sentance. The estimated figure of damage was 1.3Billion combined from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon. Lets first look at revenue and losses of these companies. They dont make any profit, which is what will be my point. This information has been culled from finance.yahoo.com (Interesting how yhoo's profile on finance.yahoo.com is more flavorly and flattering then any other stocks).
Yahoo (per http://biz.yahoo.com/p/y/yhoo.html )
"For the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues decreased 28% to $362.4 million.
"Net loss totaled $60 million vs. an income of $120.9 million."
Ok. So in the first six months of this year they only had revenue of 362.4 million, and had a Net Loss of 60 million. Devide 60 million by (365/2/2, or 91.25, a figure for a half a day of revenue) and you get $657,534 dollars of Losses they did not have because their site was down. So in this case Yahoo loss 3.97 million in revenues, which would of resulted in $657,534 of losses. So Mafiaboy saved Yahoo $657,534 in all reality.
eBay (per http://biz.yahoo.com/p/e/ebay.html )
"For the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues rose 82% to $335 million."
"Net income totaled $45.7 million, up from $9.2 million."
Ok. So eBay is making a profit. So revenue losses in ebays case is very similar to yahoo at $3.67 million. And actually profit losses are $500,822. So their is real loss associated with his attack. $500,822 dollars in eBay's case (if at all, because in reality, the auctions still went on, and eBay still collected all their fees).
"For the the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues increased 19% to $1.37 billion"
"Net loss before acct. change fell 37% to $392 million."
Amazon has a significantly higher revenue then eBay and Yahoo as we see. So revenue loss for that half day would be 15million. Net loss Amazon.com was saved from that 15 million, $4.3million.
Summary
Adding up the total half day losses of revenue for all the companies equals $22.64 million in loss revenue. Of that $4.96 million would of been losses, and only $500,822 thousand would be profit. So the net amount of money it could be considered that Mafiaboy saved these three companies is 4.45million dollars. If you add up the half year revenues of these companies it was only around 2 billion. And thats for HALF A YEAR. Amazon.com accounting for most of that. No way Mafiaboy caused 1.3 billion in damage, not matter how you look at it. I know their is more then revenue, such as employees over time and whatnot. But still looking at the figures 23 million of damage at best (because no one can say these companies actually ended up loosing sales, and in eBays case, it probably did not have much of a effect if any), or looking at it from another viewpoint, you could say Mafiaboy saved these companies over 4 million dollars.
PS. Dont take this as an approval of Mafiaboys actions. What he did was wrong, no matter what way you look at it.
I know, they dont even bring in any profits in the first place.In fact, by being offline for half a day, I think Mafiaboy saved them millions if anything. The combined quarterly revenues of those companys doesnt even equal that figure.
Do you call that sentance a slap on the wrist. Thats a rediculous statement. That sentance if overly harsh at best. 8 months in what is basically Jail for teenagers, and 1 year probation? Thats a pretty harsh sentance. Things like this dont make retribution for what hackers did, and in the case of teenagers like Mafiaboy, they only hurt the potential of what a smart young computer nerd could end up becoming, because he was thrown in jail. I personally think all hackers should only be on probation (WITH computer access), or in country club prisons, or forced to work for the government or something of that nature. To incarcirate a hacker is stupid, and puts them in the same ranks as murderers and drug dealers.
Peter Shipley did that in San Fransisco and found smaling like 2500 access points. The only way this will ever be fixed is if companies realize that you cannot depend on protocol level security. WEP is not the answer. Tunneled SSL, or some sort of VPN end to end security is the only way to protect your connect.
Who would of thought that was a news worthy item. I mean, a web based login interface, which firewalls you out if you dont have a working login and password. Completely innovative! In a wireless sense, this is called a Captive (or Active, I myself am not clear on the differences) portal. I cant believe they made a press release out of that, and that it took them 40 hours to make!!
Myrinet is not cheap. If you look at their prices, 16 cards, and a 16 port hub, will set you back around 30grand. Assuming dual proc systems, thats only a 32 processor node.:P It however has killer bandwith (254MegaBYTES/second (1.96Gbps), and extremely low latency makes me drool). The klat (i think thats what it was) cluster that used the genetic algorithm to design the network, and a 3-4 cheap nics in each machine, and wirespeed switches, was a pretty good idea. Semi low cost (20 dollar nics, and the switch), and the speed rivalled gigabit solutions, for ALOT lower cost.
It is true that hardware is only a fraction of the cost. There is staff cost, building cost (it takes quite a few man hours to build a hundreds to thousands of machines), support contracts, etc.. I agree. You still got to admit IBM or whoever wins the contract is still making a pretty nice profit. Otherwise they would not be in the business. I still wager that you can get the hardware done, and pay Scylld (Donald Becker's company) to do software and support, and whatever cost and do it cheaper than IBM will sell it to you.
Ya, Fairlight releases game iso's in the warez scene. Pretty much the #1 Game ISO releaser in the warez scene. I know many Fairlight people. Although im sure they are different people than are in the demo division.
Oh boy, I loved Cubic. In fact, even when Windows 95 came out, I didnt feel like upgrading, and stayed in dos for the longest time, and had the computer in my room running Cubic playing mods the entire time. Someone port it to linux. It cant be that hard.
$53 million for a cluster to provide that power is dramatically less then it would cost from a vector outfit like Tera, NCR, Fujitsu, SGI, Cray, etc. etc. However, you can get more bang for the buck. I priced building a cluster, with gigabit switches and all that, for 13 teraflops around 8 months ago, to be around 20-25 million. Prices on processors have dramatically dropped since then. Like mentioned on a previous post, use cheaper processors, Itaniums dont have the price/performance ratio a Athlon 1.4GHZ, or a Intel P3 would have. Sometimes using the newest technology isnt always worth it.
You seemed to be slightly confused about how such clusters work. Linux is more than just a good choice, it is the definitive best choice in the supercomputing industry for clusters. If you ever goto the SuperComputing conferences, you would notice how there are many dozens of cluster companies, and they all use linux. Clustering is what supercomputing is all about now.
Linux does not need to efficiently utilize 1300+ itanium processors. This isnt a singular machine, it's a cluster. The linux kernel needs to be able to handle its individual node (consiting of a couple processors or so) efficiently, not all the processors. The distribution and parallelization is handled by other software, such as message passing interfaces like MPI. To be honest, linux is tested on many clusters with this many processors and whatnot, and it has been customized and hardened for use in large magnatude clusters. But like I said, it really isnt a kernel thing, its the other software in the package that controls distribution of processing payloads to the individual nodes.
Building an operating system for scracth is just a bad idea for something like this. They are not exactly something that can be built a couple weeks.Look at all the other OS projects out there besides Linux. Even with a few dozen constributors, alot of been years in the making, and are not any where near the level of linux, or an OS that could be used in such a fashion. Basically, it would take a very long time to build an OS from scratch that would do all the things necessary, and have the stability requirements for such a project.
HD prices are now around.30 cents a meg. I bought a Quantum 40GIG UltraATA100 7200RPM AS40 drive (very very nice drive, quite, and FAST, rivals the IBM 75GXPs to be the best IDE drives) for $129 at Frys (they had them for 124 a week later). At $129 for 40gigs, thats.30 cents a meg about, or $2.03 dollars to store what you can store on a cd for 30 cents. It is just a choice you gotta make. Cheaper or convience.
There was a company at linux world that had had a reporting tool that did just this. They were across from the Zeus booth and some remote windows access software company. Between them and the bordland pavallion. I forgot what they were called though, sorry. If i think of it, ill make another post.
How long ago was Chips and Dips? I used to read it as well, then this site became Slashdot. I used to read every single comment from every article for the first while, then it got popular, and well, you know what has happened to the comment section. Rob, do you have any stats from Chips and Dips archived? I am curious as to how many of us Chips and Dips readers there was.
I thought.info was supposed to be ran by the Tucows OpenSRS registry, according to http://www.opensrs.org/gtld.shtml. If this is the case, who is Afilias, and what do they have to do with.info? Are they just a tucows reseller?
Id like to know where you can get both Mediaone and @home. I have never heard of such things. Getting two cable companies i the same place that both offer cable modem (In Portland,Ore you used to have a choice between Paragon and TCI, but no longer). Also, doubling up cable modems should work with two cable modems for the same company. Friend does it with his. The limit on your cable modem are at the router. Thus two of them, should almost double your speed. At least upload speed, since upload is typically capped way below download. My friend is on the same NODE as me, and thus same router, and we have both got 1Meg a second at the same time. Thus, if I had two, i could of maybe got that 2megs by my self. I wouldnt get a second cable or DSL for the downstream, my downstream is fine, but for the limited upstream. I used to have a limit of 125KiloBYTES up, but now @Home is limiting it to 16KiloBYTES max by the end of January.
What are you talking about. It would take 11 T1's running at 100% (192KiloBYTES/sec) to get that kind of speed. Not a couple. I also have hit 1megaBYTE with my cable modem, and my friend has hit that much UPSTREAM with it uncapped.
"Anyone with this kind of bandwidth has to keep it pretty saturated to pay for it. I'm a heavy downloader, but I *never* *never* *never* max out the 330k/s theoretical limit on my cablemodem. "
First of all. Thats not alot of bandwith, thats about 1/3rd of a T3, a T3 is nothing now days. My local ISP has a OC12. OC48s are not uncommon, particular at universities and datacenters. Even OC192s. OC48 is only around 150K a month, affordable for places that need the bandwith like Yahoo or whatever. T3 is around 20-30K now days. T1 you can even get below 1K a month. And obviously you are not a heavy downloader, I get way more than that all the time. I get 500K from fast sites like Real.com, Mp3.com, Adobe.com, Microsoft.com,etc..
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. You can get eMachines at fry's for aroud 299 bucks (or the 3 I got for 375, with a 75 dollar rebate, NO ISP contract, plain old rebate) without any form of ISP contract. Add a 80 buck 17inch monitor and you have a nice system. I bought one for my girlfriend. And then a few more.
You can easily build a 1TB fileserver (P3 1GHZ, or Athlon, 1gig of ram, etc etc) for 3-4 grand, using quailty IBM drives. None of that Maxtor garbage. Its probably closer to 4 grand with the ibm drivers, and closer to 3 with Maxtor drives.
If you have followed tech stocks for the last year you may have noticed that NASDAQ hasnt been delisting hardly anyone. Egghead.coms stock was below around 9 months, and only reason it is delisted now is because it went bankrupt. Same with dozens of other stocks that should of been delisted many months ago. Some even a year ago. I dont really think they are following delisting guidelines anymore because of the economy, they want to give companies I chance.
Well, I wasnt talking about operating cost. I was talking about revenue. True operating cost are the same if they are up or down. However, they still could of saved money. Because loss of revenues, also means that lower net loss on the proceeds (selling below cost, all that kind of stuff) of those revenues. This is beyond the cash burn rate for a half a day. If I had cash burn rates from the companies we could come up with an ever better estimate that talks about about operating cost and whatnot. However though, I still stand by the revenue is a good metric of losses, because operating cost comes from money gained through sales (revenue), either that or VC money still in the bank, or credit, but still. So you would not add operating cost on top of that revenue figure to come up with estimated amount of financial damage, because you probably be accounting for it twice.
Thats not what I am say. I am saying the figure can no where equal 1.3billion or more for half a day of down time. I addressed those additional cost, and said even if they were considered, the figure would not equal 1.3billion. The purpose of the analysis was to go over loss of revenues, not total business loss. Even if all cost were able to be accounted for, the figure in no way would equal 1.3billion for half a day. Even if you take in to consideration electricity and employees (half a day of employees for all these companies is only at most a couple mil, IF THAT). Anyway, the point was to show their is no way a figure of 1.3billion could be considered, when revenue for those companies (which PAYS for those other expenditures) is not even close to that figure. The 6 months revenue of these companies is only slightly over the half day loss figures. Once again, that revenue pays for the cost of operations, so I think just analyzing revenue figures is a good measure real losses. Their is some critical thinking for you.
Lets look at the figures of damage supposedly caused by Mafiaboy and see if he deserves a rewards, not a prison sentance. The estimated figure of damage was 1.3Billion combined from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon. Lets first look at revenue and losses of these companies. They dont make any profit, which is what will be my point. This information has been culled from finance.yahoo.com (Interesting how yhoo's profile on finance.yahoo.com is more flavorly and flattering then any other stocks).
Yahoo (per http://biz.yahoo.com/p/y/yhoo.html )
"For the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues decreased 28% to $362.4 million.
"Net loss totaled $60 million vs. an income of $120.9 million."
Ok. So in the first six months of this year they only had revenue of 362.4 million, and had a Net Loss of 60 million. Devide 60 million by (365/2/2, or 91.25, a figure for a half a day of revenue) and you get $657,534 dollars of Losses they did not have because their site was down. So in this case Yahoo loss 3.97 million in revenues, which would of resulted in $657,534 of losses. So Mafiaboy saved Yahoo $657,534 in all reality.
eBay (per http://biz.yahoo.com/p/e/ebay.html )
"For the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues rose 82% to $335 million."
"Net income totaled $45.7 million, up from $9.2 million."
Ok. So eBay is making a profit. So revenue losses in ebays case is very similar to yahoo at $3.67 million. And actually profit losses are $500,822. So their is real loss associated with his attack. $500,822 dollars in eBay's case (if at all, because in reality, the auctions still went on, and eBay still collected all their fees).
Amazon.com (per http://biz.yahoo.com/p/a/amzn.html )
"For the the six months ended 6/30/01, revenues increased 19% to $1.37 billion"
"Net loss before acct. change fell 37% to $392 million."
Amazon has a significantly higher revenue then eBay and Yahoo as we see. So revenue loss for that half day would be 15million. Net loss Amazon.com was saved from that 15 million, $4.3million.
Summary
Adding up the total half day losses of revenue for all the companies equals $22.64 million in loss revenue. Of that $4.96 million would of been losses, and only $500,822 thousand would be profit. So the net amount of money it could be considered that Mafiaboy saved these three companies is 4.45million dollars. If you add up the half year revenues of these companies it was only around 2 billion. And thats for HALF A YEAR. Amazon.com accounting for most of that. No way Mafiaboy caused 1.3 billion in damage, not matter how you look at it. I know their is more then revenue, such as employees over time and whatnot. But still looking at the figures 23 million of damage at best (because no one can say these companies actually ended up loosing sales, and in eBays case, it probably did not have much of a effect if any), or looking at it from another viewpoint, you could say Mafiaboy saved these companies over 4 million dollars.
PS. Dont take this as an approval of Mafiaboys actions. What he did was wrong, no matter what way you look at it.
I know, they dont even bring in any profits in the first place.In fact, by being offline for half a day, I think Mafiaboy saved them millions if anything. The combined quarterly revenues of those companys doesnt even equal that figure.
Do you call that sentance a slap on the wrist. Thats a rediculous statement. That sentance if overly harsh at best. 8 months in what is basically Jail for teenagers, and 1 year probation? Thats a pretty harsh sentance. Things like this dont make retribution for what hackers did, and in the case of teenagers like Mafiaboy, they only hurt the potential of what a smart young computer nerd could end up becoming, because he was thrown in jail. I personally think all hackers should only be on probation (WITH computer access), or in country club prisons, or forced to work for the government or something of that nature. To incarcirate a hacker is stupid, and puts them in the same ranks as murderers and drug dealers.
Peter Shipley did that in San Fransisco and found smaling like 2500 access points. The only way this will ever be fixed is if companies realize that you cannot depend on protocol level security. WEP is not the answer. Tunneled SSL, or some sort of VPN end to end security is the only way to protect your connect.
This weeks issue of network world has an article on UWB as well. You can read it online atc us .html
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0827specialfo
Who would of thought that was a news worthy item. I mean, a web based login interface, which firewalls you out if you dont have a working login and password. Completely innovative! In a wireless sense, this is called a Captive (or Active, I myself am not clear on the differences) portal. I cant believe they made a press release out of that, and that it took them 40 hours to make!!
Myrinet is not cheap. If you look at their prices, 16 cards, and a 16 port hub, will set you back around 30grand. Assuming dual proc systems, thats only a 32 processor node. :P It however has killer bandwith (254MegaBYTES/second (1.96Gbps), and extremely low latency makes me drool). The klat (i think thats what it was) cluster that used the genetic algorithm to design the network, and a 3-4 cheap nics in each machine, and wirespeed switches, was a pretty good idea. Semi low cost (20 dollar nics, and the switch), and the speed rivalled gigabit solutions, for ALOT lower cost.
It is true that hardware is only a fraction of the cost. There is staff cost, building cost (it takes quite a few man hours to build a hundreds to thousands of machines), support contracts, etc.. I agree. You still got to admit IBM or whoever wins the contract is still making a pretty nice profit. Otherwise they would not be in the business. I still wager that you can get the hardware done, and pay Scylld (Donald Becker's company) to do software and support, and whatever cost and do it cheaper than IBM will sell it to you.
Ya, Fairlight releases game iso's in the warez scene. Pretty much the #1 Game ISO releaser in the warez scene. I know many Fairlight people. Although im sure they are different people than are in the demo division.
Oh boy, I loved Cubic. In fact, even when Windows 95 came out, I didnt feel like upgrading, and stayed in dos for the longest time, and had the computer in my room running Cubic playing mods the entire time. Someone port it to linux. It cant be that hard.
$53 million for a cluster to provide that power is dramatically less then it would cost from a vector outfit like Tera, NCR, Fujitsu, SGI, Cray, etc. etc. However, you can get more bang for the buck. I priced building a cluster, with gigabit switches and all that, for 13 teraflops around 8 months ago, to be around 20-25 million. Prices on processors have dramatically dropped since then. Like mentioned on a previous post, use cheaper processors, Itaniums dont have the price/performance ratio a Athlon 1.4GHZ, or a Intel P3 would have. Sometimes using the newest technology isnt always worth it.
You seemed to be slightly confused about how such clusters work. Linux is more than just a good choice, it is the definitive best choice in the supercomputing industry for clusters. If you ever goto the SuperComputing conferences, you would notice how there are many dozens of cluster companies, and they all use linux. Clustering is what supercomputing is all about now.
Linux does not need to efficiently utilize 1300+ itanium processors. This isnt a singular machine, it's a cluster. The linux kernel needs to be able to handle its individual node (consiting of a couple processors or so) efficiently, not all the processors. The distribution and parallelization is handled by other software, such as message passing interfaces like MPI. To be honest, linux is tested on many clusters with this many processors and whatnot, and it has been customized and hardened for use in large magnatude clusters. But like I said, it really isnt a kernel thing, its the other software in the package that controls distribution of processing payloads to the individual nodes.
Building an operating system for scracth is just a bad idea for something like this. They are not exactly something that can be built a couple weeks.Look at all the other OS projects out there besides Linux. Even with a few dozen constributors, alot of been years in the making, and are not any where near the level of linux, or an OS that could be used in such a fashion. Basically, it would take a very long time to build an OS from scratch that would do all the things necessary, and have the stability requirements for such a project.
HD prices are now around .30 cents a meg. I bought a Quantum 40GIG UltraATA100 7200RPM AS40 drive (very very nice drive, quite, and FAST, rivals the IBM 75GXPs to be the best IDE drives) for $129 at Frys (they had them for 124 a week later). At $129 for 40gigs, thats .30 cents a meg about, or $2.03 dollars to store what you can store on a cd for 30 cents. It is just a choice you gotta make. Cheaper or convience.
There was a company at linux world that had had a reporting tool that did just this. They were across from the Zeus booth and some remote windows access software company. Between them and the bordland pavallion. I forgot what they were called though, sorry. If i think of it, ill make another post.
How long ago was Chips and Dips? I used to read it as well, then this site became Slashdot. I used to read every single comment from every article for the first while, then it got popular, and well, you know what has happened to the comment section. Rob, do you have any stats from Chips and Dips archived? I am curious as to how many of us Chips and Dips readers there was.
I thought .info was supposed to be ran by the Tucows OpenSRS registry, according to http://www.opensrs.org/gtld.shtml. If this is the case, who is Afilias, and what do they have to do with .info? Are they just a tucows reseller?
Id like to know where you can get both Mediaone and @home. I have never heard of such things. Getting two cable companies i the same place that both offer cable modem (In Portland,Ore you used to have a choice between Paragon and TCI, but no longer). Also, doubling up cable modems should work with two cable modems for the same company. Friend does it with his. The limit on your cable modem are at the router. Thus two of them, should almost double your speed. At least upload speed, since upload is typically capped way below download. My friend is on the same NODE as me, and thus same router, and we have both got 1Meg a second at the same time. Thus, if I had two, i could of maybe got that 2megs by my self. I wouldnt get a second cable or DSL for the downstream, my downstream is fine, but for the limited upstream. I used to have a limit of 125KiloBYTES up, but now @Home is limiting it to 16KiloBYTES max by the end of January.
What are you talking about. It would take 11 T1's running at 100% (192KiloBYTES/sec) to get that kind of speed. Not a couple. I also have hit 1megaBYTE with my cable modem, and my friend has hit that much UPSTREAM with it uncapped.
"Anyone with this kind of bandwidth has to keep it pretty saturated to pay for it. I'm a heavy downloader, but I *never* *never* *never* max out the 330k/s theoretical limit on my cablemodem. "
First of all. Thats not alot of bandwith, thats about 1/3rd of a T3, a T3 is nothing now days. My local ISP has a OC12. OC48s are not uncommon, particular at universities and datacenters. Even OC192s. OC48 is only around 150K a month, affordable for places that need the bandwith like Yahoo or whatever. T3 is around 20-30K now days. T1 you can even get below 1K a month. And obviously you are not a heavy downloader, I get way more than that all the time. I get 500K from fast sites like Real.com, Mp3.com, Adobe.com, Microsoft.com,etc..
He probably means megaBYTES. Ives seen alot of computers on universitys transfer at upwards of 12megs a second. Thats BYTEs, not bit.
Not sure to be honest, but according to another insider that posted in this forum, it was a HP 3000 server running NT and IIS.