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Pretty clever... At least we know how they will fund the service:-)
I don't know how likely this is to be real, but it would certainly explain alot.
If Microsoft truly were funding this fiasco with the proported $100 Million (so far), then the strategy is not that of a pathetic dying company trying to hang on to some form of life.
Everyone asks what Darl and crew could possibly be looking for with this pathetic business strategy. Everyone wonders what SCO could possibly have up its sleeve that might pay off in the end.
Assuming this memo is real, SCO's strategy isn't to win at all... Tin foil hat on, the strategy would be pretty obvious:
Hang on as long as possible.Try to make companies think twice about moving their systems to Linux. Sue potential users, muddy the legal waters, so that others stop to think before implementing Linux-based solutions, for fear of having to answer to shareholders. In short, to sew as much fear, uncertainty and doubt as possible on the demand side.
Make life as miserable as possible for large Linux backers. Dig deep into the vaults of old code and IP, and dredge up as much potentially questionable material as possible. AIX, Dynix, Novell IPX - It doesn't really matter what it is or if you can win, just make things uncomfortable as possible for as long as possible. Make these companies spend time and focus on lawsuits, away from core business needs.
... And for a few hundred million in investment, Microsoft buys itself some time. This gives its marketing and sales force a big talking point, while its development groups try to play catch-up, and lawyers try to devise IP tactics to block opensource interoperability with MS products.
No wonder SCO would be talking to Microsoft marketing as their next cash cow. All in all, a pretty clever Microsoft strategy, if true. You can also bet that if SCO can hold out for what Microsoft deems 'long enough,' that it'll be a strategy to be repeated, as long as US courts are willing to play along.
Prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen, the man in front of you is a murderer. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he has an addiction to pronographic material. Further, we will show that his predeliction is toward young women, where he has a history of replaying television scenes that show young women in lewd and unseemly situations.
Further, we will show that he was not - as he normally is on Wednesday evenings - watching reruns of Baywatch; that he was not watching television at all... Until a time after the murder was committed.
Do not be deluded by the defenses arguments here. They will argue that there is not physical evidence of the crime. We will show that the accused has in the past watched episides of CSI that showed tactics a crime lab might use to collect such evidence. Do not be persuaded that the accused was - as he says - actually having a date. We will produce experts that will show - based on the bizarre nuances of his television and entertainment viewing habits - that he is unfit for intimate human relations, that he is likely to avoid uncomfortable situations like those found on a 'first date' - That he is likely to wish to 'fast-forward' to more comfortable scenes.
Finaly we will prove that the man you see here did, indeed find himelf in a situation he would have found uncormfortable. So uncomfortable that we will show you hundreds of records where he skipped similar scenes in his watching records. So uncomfortable that that the violence he thrives upon in his television fantasies became reality..."
Cecil and Dale really are doing a great job with this project. For some hardware this works 'right out of the box'. There is also an active forum on their website website
Between this site and MythTV's, it's really not bad to set up a working system fast.
Perhaps what's even better is that because knoppmyth is based on Knoppix (and thus on Debian) , it allows you to apt-get update to upgrade (most) of your software as needed. What isn't updated with an apt-get gets updated with Cecil and Dale' upgrade scripts as new versions come out (without touching your data). The only thing that I could think of that would make this cooler is for them to put together an apt repository on their own to track the project's changes.
With recent improvement in L.E.D., it came back on the car manufacturers' menu. Automakers used it as chimsels -- or the high mounted tail light. The reason: L.E.D. illuminates about 200 milliseconds faster than a normal light bulb. Says the G.M authorities, "It does not sound like much but it equals a full car length at 65 m.p.h." This ability to light up faster means more notice to the following driver. The other plus points for L.E.D. is it is not fuse-prone, it lasts longer, it uses only 20 per cent of the electricity used by a normal bulb. It emits less heat.
... I knew I had seen this elsewhere, but googled it here here
Yes, but don't forget that there are still issues using SIP across NAT gateways/firewalls.
On the plus side, even though the Grandstream phones have had some flakiness issues, Grandstream has been very responsive, releasing firmware updates regularly.
They also seem to be committed to working with open source projects like Asterisk, perhaps even supporting Asterisk's IAX protocol - a replacement for SIP that DOES work (and work well) behind/across a NAT firewall.
In any case, anyone interested in this stuff really should mosy over to Asterisk's website (asterisk.org). A lot of progress is being made putting together a very powerful open-source PBX system.
It's funny that this topic comes up occasionally. Let me tell you a (true) story.
About a decade ago, I was working for a medium-sized computer retailer. I had just joined the technical services group, and work was brisk.
This group was responsible for providing technical support both for internal systems, and for fulfilling external customer support contracts.
This was back in the time when there was still some money to be made selling hardware in a retail environment, but when margins were already starting to fall. It was pretty obvious to everyone that the happy days of Porsche-driving salespersons was coming to a close.
This company had the answer half-right in that they saw computer services as a way to stretch their profit margins on their computer sales. More importantly, though, they saw professional services as a way to get into customers that they would normally have no access to.
Where they still had blinders on, though, was that they were at their root a retail sales organization. Everything revolved around the salesperson's ability to close the sale. If that meant that services - either basic configuration or detailed consulting and programming - had to be provided at a cut rate, that was fine as long as the company closed the hardware sale.
The problem was that the services group had their own P&L and budget. Worse, we didn't get credit for the hardware sale in any form. Add to this, our ability to charge-back our services costs (especially when they were discounted), was minimal. But our compensation was based on our P&L.
We were able to offset this for a while by selling services contracts somewhat outside of the regular retail sales chain, but soon even that was being eaten away when the company brought in dedicated sales people to sell support contracts under a different group.
What all this meant was that we were all working 60+ hour weeks with less and less pay.
So we started to plan.
The manager of the group started delaying the close of most of the support and development contracts 'in the pipe,' at the same time that the services support sales group was doing a great job of selling contracts. He also rented office space and convinced the rest of us in the group that things were not going to get better staying with the company. We could do better on our own.
On July 5th (yes, the timing was deliberate), he had a meeting with the management of the company, where he handed them letters of resignation for the entire group. We had also coordinated our mass resignation with the resignation of the person responsible for supporting the POS system for the company.
So now this company had NO technical support people, a large number of signed support contracts, and a large number of hardware sales contingent on cut-rate support and installation. They had already purchased much of the inventory for these sales, and faced a cash-crunch if they were unable to make the delivery.
We offered them a way out.
All they had to do was transfer all of the previously-sold contracts to us... We would take them over, essentially without compensation, but with the ability to renew the contracts under the new company. All the contracts in the pipe would be 're-sold' to the new company, so that we had an instant source of income. Additionally, we would be available to help the old company's corporate sales division continue to close higher-end customers, in return for ongoing access to their customer list.
So...
It's almost 10 years later, and our original parent company has long-since dive-bombed, folded, and dissolved into oblivion.
If you walk into the front door of our office, you'll probably notice the one out-of-place piece of art in our otherwise utilitarian-geek environs... It's a sculpture of a golden goose that used to sit on the CEO's desk at our old employer.
True, but you could also send a burst of traceroute packets (udp or tcp timeouts) to all the routers in the route at the same time that you perform an iteration of the attack.
Then you could (somewhat) compensate for latency with each iteration.
Not necessarily elegant or foolproof, but I think possible... I wonder how much varience/latency (noise) you can reasonably account for before the exploit breaks down (or becomes too time-consuming to be worthwhile...)?
Hmmm... Considering that it took all of 10 minutes to spread worldwide, and peak expansion was at the 3 minute mark, I don't think it would have made much difference.
One interesting thing to note is that many Cisco routers hung once the UDP traffic hit a threshold. Though this obviously didn't slow the speed of the spread of the worm, I wonder how this might have affected the saturation.
As mentioned in the report, the saturation of this worm was less than the saturation of Code Red, mostly because of local bandwidth limits - In part because many routes were closed due to router failure.
What is scary is how this again 'ups the ante.' Thinking from the standpoint of a paranoid security person:
This is certainly not the only exploit available on machines in the wild
This worm shows that an attack can be initiated and concluded before human beings can reasonably respond.
This worm shows the limitations of a too rapid expansion.
This worm shows flaws in the random number generator algorythm used to generate addresses for new infections.
This worm showed a number of weak points in Western computer infrastructures. This is targeting information.
This worm was a good 'first experiment' for similar high-speed attacks.
Likewise:
War between the US and Iraq is likely close.
War between the US and North Korea is a strong possibility.
Even if not done as a direct attack originating from a hostile power, there are computer-savy people who might see this aggression as a justification or trigger for other action.
As others have mentioned, It is not terribly far-fetched that there are 'smarter' worms in the wild... perhaps waiting for something like this type of rapid expansion worm to act as a trigger.
I would make sure that your backups are current over the coming few months, and that you have contingency plans to handle Internet instability.
As a paranoid, I have to think that this could get ugly...
Hmmm... I seem to remember an interview with the writer of 'Fast Food Nation' about these guys.
Turns out that this company already sells to the fast food chains:
Beef flavor for hamburgers: The beef is so processed by the time that the company is done with it, they need to 'add flavor back in'. Guess how?
Fries flavor: Yes, you have sale and sugar, but did you know that McD's also adds 'beef flavor' to the fries? There was a lawsuit about this a while back when they were using 'real beaf', unbeknowst to many Hindi customers. Gues what they use now?
There was a lot more 'stuff' and discussion about how this food is processed before it ends up in your burger bun. Though I haven't bought the book (yet), I haven't been back to a McDonalds since, either...
Yes... The report earlier this morning on NPR mentioned that a tile had dislodged on launch, and struck a wing. There was supposedly no serious damage at the time.
CNN is speculating that damage might have been to an airfoil...
Very sad. My heart goes out to these people's families...
Saw an interesting article on someone in an an astronomy lab using the 3-ware cards to setup striped (Raid0-software) array of Raid5 arrays.
I thought this was an interesting idea: use the Raid5 3-Ware cards and get your fault-tolerance, but get the speed and size improvements provided by striping...
The Grays have renegged on their abduction quota agreement, and are abducting many more people than before. Most of these are returned, after being implanted with a device which allows the grays to have total control over their thoughts and actions. Approximately 40% of Americans now carry one of these devices, which are impossible to remove without killing the host.
... Definately explains the results of the last US election!
No... cruft infiltrates the world, along with it's henchmen 'bloat' and 'backwards-compatibility.'
This stuff's just plain hard... No wonder no one gets it 'right' (is there such a thing here?)! Ah well, back on my high horse to go tilt at windmills...:-P
Really, cutting your hours in half may not be a bad idea. If management gets in a tizzy about your not being at the office, you've had time to start looking for another job. If they fire you, you now have unemployment benefits -- Something they were obviously trying to avoid paying in the first place.
It is completely obvious that the management of this company -- aside from being incompetent -- also does not have the best interest of their employees in mind. Their lack of loyalty to you all but deserves a corresponding reaction in kind.
... Mind you, my reaction would be COMPLETELY different if your management staff had taken a principled stand and taken a pay cut first. Then they would have some moral ground to ask you to do the same. In this instance, it sounds more that they are prepping their golden parachutes. Sounds like a good time for you to bail. Even better is to force their hand... Just make sure you have good references other than this company:-)
I don't know if any of you out there use/have need for WAN (T1/E1/DS0) cards, but support for Linux at Sangoma is absolutely phenominal.
Not only is the Linux driver developer (Nanad Corbin) an active developer for many network and WAN-related projects, but when you call for support, you often get to talk to him. All the better, bugfixes are usually out within days, and requests for features actually get implemented!
The product is a little more expensive than some alternatives, but really -- I can't rave about these guys enough...
Hmmm... I see your point, and even agree with you to some extent. I can't tell you how often we go into a customer site and cringe at the state of their systems.
...BUT, It certainly doesn't help when vendors fail to provide reasonably secure software, provide buggy updates that wreak havoc on installed OS's, or provide patently inaccurate information. If you follow the security lists, you see it every day (check out the recent thread on vuln-dev regarding MSSQL extended procedures, registry key access and SQL services user levels... Or the TWO buffer/heap overflow issues in IIS two weeks ago)... Yes, we as system admins HAVE to do a better job of keeping ahead of the curve, of requiring and using best practices, of designing our systems to reduce and manage threats.
...BUT there still has to be some way to give vendors a financial incentive to clean up their act. Unfortunately, many IS personnel at many companies (and most managers) simply do not have the knowledge or - unfortunately - the interest to put secure practices in place. That's a big generalization, but I can tell you that of the hundred(s?) of customers I have dealt with, maybe 5 have been willing to do 'whatever it takes' to reduce their exposure to what I'd call reasonable levels. We usually end up with a compromise that is less than ideal. Still, you have to pick your battles, and many people just don't see the downside of an 'unconfirmed possibility' of being cracked. I'm not sure I completely agree with Bruce that the way out is to get the insurance companies involved, but it does make some sense: Get a third party in the mix whose financial well-being relies in your NOT getting cracked.
The problem I see as a result is a new emphasis on things like security certifications... expensive programs that force open-source products and small companies with great products but limited budgets out of the mix. I really don't know what the answer is, and I expect things to get much worse before it gets better. I think, though, that Bruce is on the right track in looking for a way to give all parties a financial incentive to take electronic security seriously.
Here is another article from ScienceNews (great layman's magazine for a weekly overview of interesting science research)...
This discusses the possibility of tiny black holes created by high-energy collisions (discussed in a previous Slashdot), which the researches hypothesize happens regularly in our upper atmosphere (bit of a stretch). It also discusses a novel theory as to why gravity is so significantly weaker than other local forces -- That unlike other forces, gravity acts through all the 'extra' dimensions hypothesized in super-string theory.
One of the more interesting things about the article is that it shows that with recent developments (the new Large Hadron Collider, etc.) scientists are beginning to reach a point where they can start to prove or disprove parts of super-string theory... Interesting stuff indeed!
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Pretty clever... At least we know how they will fund the service :-)
I don't know how likely this is to be real, but it would certainly explain alot.
If Microsoft truly were funding this fiasco with the proported $100 Million (so far), then the strategy is not that of a pathetic dying company trying to hang on to some form of life.
Everyone asks what Darl and crew could possibly be looking for with this pathetic business strategy. Everyone wonders what SCO could possibly have up its sleeve that might pay off in the end.
Assuming this memo is real, SCO's strategy isn't to win at all... Tin foil hat on, the strategy would be pretty obvious:
No wonder SCO would be talking to Microsoft marketing as their next cash cow. All in all, a pretty clever Microsoft strategy, if true. You can also bet that if SCO can hold out for what Microsoft deems 'long enough,' that it'll be a strategy to be repeated, as long as US courts are willing to play along.
Pretty smart.
Prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen, the man in front of you is a murderer. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he has an addiction to pronographic material. Further, we will show that his predeliction is toward young women, where he has a history of replaying television scenes that show young women in lewd and unseemly situations.
Further, we will show that he was not - as he normally is on Wednesday evenings - watching reruns of Baywatch; that he was not watching television at all... Until a time after the murder was committed.
Do not be deluded by the defenses arguments here. They will argue that there is not physical evidence of the crime. We will show that the accused has in the past watched episides of CSI that showed tactics a crime lab might use to collect such evidence. Do not be persuaded that the accused was - as he says - actually having a date. We will produce experts that will show - based on the bizarre nuances of his television and entertainment viewing habits - that he is unfit for intimate human relations, that he is likely to avoid uncomfortable situations like those found on a 'first date' - That he is likely to wish to 'fast-forward' to more comfortable scenes.
Finaly we will prove that the man you see here did, indeed find himelf in a situation he would have found uncormfortable. So uncomfortable that we will show you hundreds of records where he skipped similar scenes in his watching records. So uncomfortable that that the violence he thrives upon in his television fantasies became reality..."
Cecil and Dale really are doing a great job with this project. For some hardware this works 'right out of the box'. There is also an active forum on their website website
Between this site and MythTV's, it's really not bad to set up a working system fast.
Perhaps what's even better is that because knoppmyth is based on Knoppix (and thus on Debian) , it allows you to apt-get update to upgrade (most) of your software as needed. What isn't updated with an apt-get gets updated with Cecil and Dale' upgrade scripts as new versions come out (without touching your data). The only thing that I could think of that would make this cooler is for them to put together an apt repository on their own to track the project's changes.
Anyway... Do check it out.
--JP
Yes, but don't forget that there are still issues using SIP across NAT gateways/firewalls.
On the plus side, even though the Grandstream phones have had some flakiness issues, Grandstream has been very responsive, releasing firmware updates regularly.
They also seem to be committed to working with open source projects like Asterisk, perhaps even supporting Asterisk's IAX protocol - a replacement for SIP that DOES work (and work well) behind/across a NAT firewall.
In any case, anyone interested in this stuff really should mosy over to Asterisk's website (asterisk.org). A lot of progress is being made putting together a very powerful open-source PBX system.
Ugh... Why is it you only have mod points when the most interesting subject is something like 'Natalie Portman rulz' :-P
Nice work, Simon...
It's funny that this topic comes up occasionally. Let me tell you a (true) story.
About a decade ago, I was working for a medium-sized computer retailer. I had just joined the technical services group, and work was brisk.
This group was responsible for providing technical support both for internal systems, and for fulfilling external customer support contracts.
This was back in the time when there was still some money to be made selling hardware in a retail environment, but when margins were already starting to fall. It was pretty obvious to everyone that the happy days of Porsche-driving salespersons was coming to a close.
This company had the answer half-right in that they saw computer services as a way to stretch their profit margins on their computer sales. More importantly, though, they saw professional services as a way to get into customers that they would normally have no access to.
Where they still had blinders on, though, was that they were at their root a retail sales organization. Everything revolved around the salesperson's ability to close the sale. If that meant that services - either basic configuration or detailed consulting and programming - had to be provided at a cut rate, that was fine as long as the company closed the hardware sale.
The problem was that the services group had their own P&L and budget. Worse, we didn't get credit for the hardware sale in any form. Add to this, our ability to charge-back our services costs (especially when they were discounted), was minimal. But our compensation was based on our P&L.
We were able to offset this for a while by selling services contracts somewhat outside of the regular retail sales chain, but soon even that was being eaten away when the company brought in dedicated sales people to sell support contracts under a different group.
What all this meant was that we were all working 60+ hour weeks with less and less pay.
So we started to plan.
The manager of the group started delaying the close of most of the support and development contracts 'in the pipe,' at the same time that the services support sales group was doing a great job of selling contracts. He also rented office space and convinced the rest of us in the group that things were not going to get better staying with the company. We could do better on our own.
On July 5th (yes, the timing was deliberate), he had a meeting with the management of the company, where he handed them letters of resignation for the entire group. We had also coordinated our mass resignation with the resignation of the person responsible for supporting the POS system for the company.
So now this company had NO technical support people, a large number of signed support contracts, and a large number of hardware sales contingent on cut-rate support and installation. They had already purchased much of the inventory for these sales, and faced a cash-crunch if they were unable to make the delivery.
We offered them a way out.
All they had to do was transfer all of the previously-sold contracts to us... We would take them over, essentially without compensation, but with the ability to renew the contracts under the new company. All the contracts in the pipe would be 're-sold' to the new company, so that we had an instant source of income. Additionally, we would be available to help the old company's corporate sales division continue to close higher-end customers, in return for ongoing access to their customer list.
So...
It's almost 10 years later, and our original parent company has long-since dive-bombed, folded, and dissolved into oblivion.
If you walk into the front door of our office, you'll probably notice the one out-of-place piece of art in our otherwise utilitarian-geek environs... It's a sculpture of a golden goose that used to sit on the CEO's desk at our old employer.
Sometimes things DO work out right.
Then you could (somewhat) compensate for latency with each iteration.
Not necessarily elegant or foolproof, but I think possible... I wonder how much varience/latency (noise) you can reasonably account for before the exploit breaks down (or becomes too time-consuming to be worthwhile...)?
Either the article grabs a fresh Slashdot page periodically, or they JUST put it up.
Guess somethimes there is fresh info on Slashdot ;-P
One interesting thing to note is that many Cisco routers hung once the UDP traffic hit a threshold. Though this obviously didn't slow the speed of the spread of the worm, I wonder how this might have affected the saturation.
As mentioned in the report, the saturation of this worm was less than the saturation of Code Red, mostly because of local bandwidth limits - In part because many routes were closed due to router failure.
What is scary is how this again 'ups the ante.' Thinking from the standpoint of a paranoid security person:
This is certainly not the only exploit available on machines in the wild
This worm shows that an attack can be initiated and concluded before human beings can reasonably respond.
This worm shows the limitations of a too rapid expansion.
This worm shows flaws in the random number generator algorythm used to generate addresses for new infections.
This worm showed a number of weak points in Western computer infrastructures. This is targeting information.
This worm was a good 'first experiment' for similar high-speed attacks.
Likewise:
War between the US and Iraq is likely close.
War between the US and North Korea is a strong possibility.
Even if not done as a direct attack originating from a hostile power, there are computer-savy people who might see this aggression as a justification or trigger for other action.
As others have mentioned, It is not terribly far-fetched that there are 'smarter' worms in the wild... perhaps waiting for something like this type of rapid expansion worm to act as a trigger.
I would make sure that your backups are current over the coming few months, and that you have contingency plans to handle Internet instability.
As a paranoid, I have to think that this could get ugly...
Turns out that this company already sells to the fast food chains:
Beef flavor for hamburgers: The beef is so processed by the time that the company is done with it, they need to 'add flavor back in'. Guess how?
Fries flavor: Yes, you have sale and sugar, but did you know that McD's also adds 'beef flavor' to the fries? There was a lawsuit about this a while back when they were using 'real beaf', unbeknowst to many Hindi customers. Gues what they use now?
There was a lot more 'stuff' and discussion about how this food is processed before it ends up in your burger bun. Though I haven't bought the book (yet), I haven't been back to a McDonalds since, either...
CNN is speculating that damage might have been to an airfoil...
Very sad. My heart goes out to these people's families...
Ahah!
Gotta be them nasty North Koreans!
You might be interested in this, then...
Saw an interesting article on someone in an an astronomy lab using the 3-ware cards to setup striped (Raid0-software) array of Raid5 arrays.
I thought this was an interesting idea: use the Raid5 3-Ware cards and get your fault-tolerance, but get the speed and size improvements provided by striping...
Check it out: http://home.fnal.gov/~yocum/storageServerTechnical Note.html
I especially love this little tidbit:
The Grays have renegged on their abduction quota agreement, and are abducting many more people than before. Most of these are returned, after being implanted with a device which allows the grays to have total control over their thoughts and actions. Approximately 40% of Americans now carry one of these devices, which are impossible to remove without killing the host.
Try man rpm or man find... or use emacs or vi :-)
No... cruft infiltrates the world, along with it's henchmen 'bloat' and 'backwards-compatibility.'
This stuff's just plain hard... No wonder no one gets it 'right' (is there such a thing here?)! Ah well, back on my high horse to go tilt at windmills... :-P
Too bad there are so many of them :-(
Now if we could just find a way to make a difference...
Really, cutting your hours in half may not be a bad idea. If management gets in a tizzy about your not being at the office, you've had time to start looking for another job. If they fire you, you now have unemployment benefits -- Something they were obviously trying to avoid paying in the first place.
It is completely obvious that the management of this company -- aside from being incompetent -- also does not have the best interest of their employees in mind. Their lack of loyalty to you all but deserves a corresponding reaction in kind.
Not only is the Linux driver developer (Nanad Corbin) an active developer for many network and WAN-related projects, but when you call for support, you often get to talk to him. All the better, bugfixes are usually out within days, and requests for features actually get implemented!
The product is a little more expensive than some alternatives, but really -- I can't rave about these guys enough...
The problem I see as a result is a new emphasis on things like security certifications... expensive programs that force open-source products and small companies with great products but limited budgets out of the mix. I really don't know what the answer is, and I expect things to get much worse before it gets better. I think, though, that Bruce is on the right track in looking for a way to give all parties a financial incentive to take electronic security seriously.
This discusses the possibility of tiny black holes created by high-energy collisions (discussed in a previous Slashdot), which the researches hypothesize happens regularly in our upper atmosphere (bit of a stretch). It also discusses a novel theory as to why gravity is so significantly weaker than other local forces -- That unlike other forces, gravity acts through all the 'extra' dimensions hypothesized in super-string theory.
One of the more interesting things about the article is that it shows that with recent developments (the new Large Hadron Collider, etc.) scientists are beginning to reach a point where they can start to prove or disprove parts of super-string theory... Interesting stuff indeed!
I read your arguments... very well reasoned. I even agree with your point on bundling new features into the operating system (albeit reluctantly).
If you really don't mind, I would be happy to send these along as the results of a 'discussion with friends in the field.'
I do hope you Brits are have a chance to comment on the EU case, and can make these statements yourself!
Another one to try is Normalize It alows you to adjust volumes across different types of input files (.wav, mp3, etc...)