Master the jargon and then rip it appart. Embrace, extend...
I have to mow the lawn and a bunch of other 'opportunities for growth' this weekend. I think I'm going to 'realign' a few trees in the yard it's getting crouded.. etc etc.
It's a great way to point out the absurdity without confronting it.
Re:The problem goes right down to the SSL layer
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Why Phishing Works
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That's absolute nonsense. The current scheme is impossible to tell someone how to use. Remember.. you can't use URLs if you allow unicode hostnames and even without unicode, it's way too easy to make url's that look legitimate.
One of the better ways we tell people is the SSL lock icon. SSL Certificates are hard for a phishing site to get and they rarely bother. But when we're talking about a phishing site there isn't one. At all. Unless the site puts one on their page. You have to tell people to look for something that isn't there. You say it should be there but that isn't there when they browse normally, only when they visit their bank's web site. This is insane.
Look at the lock number the browser displays. Less than 3 isn't a bank.
That is an explanation that works. The red/green thing is going to be much *more* confusing since there will be tons of false positives and/or false negatives.
The evil geek destroying barbie clones have made me die a little inside forcing me to see my slashdot look like this.
One day of this is about 23.5 hours too many.
Re:The problem goes right down to the SSL layer
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Why Phishing Works
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· Score: 1
The browser developers gave a lot of thought to this, and defaulted to the simplest scheme possible.
Obviously they haven't put enough though into it.
A system that's riddled with false positives is almost as bad as none at all. You act as if there is some magical technology that can auto-detect "Good" and "Bad". How do you auto-detect if chase-manhatten.com is a phishing web site? By the SSL cert? Nope.. you can get them. By the fact that it's close to another companie's name but isn't quite right? That's not really practical or even correct. It could be someone's legitimate web site.
If we teach people to check the SSL number and look for a 5 on all banks and large companies they can easily spot the fraud. A 2 site isn't at all close. If you look at my list, forging above a 2 would be impractical.
The red/green thing just seems way to simplistic and limited to properly solve the problem.
Re:The problem goes right down to the SSL layer
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Why Phishing Works
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The point is if you go to "Best Buy's" web site and it sais it's a small business.. it's probably not the right site.
We have a 1 year old daughter and going to the movies is simply not realistic. I would pay twice as much to buy movies the week they were released in the theaters rather than try to arrange for babysitting. Basically all that advertising for the release is wasted on me because until it's released on DVD they aren't getting any money from me.
Movie theaters are going away. There are trade offs watching a movie at home but at this point I far prefer it. My sound is good, my screen is big and sharp. My equipment keeps getting better and my local theaters seem to get crappier every time I go. If things keep heading in this direction it's only a matter of time before the theaters lose their hold on new releases.
The problem goes right down to the SSL layer
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Why Phishing Works
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· Score: 5, Insightful
SSL Certificates don't have to be signed. You can create X509 self signed certs no problem. Web browsers just don't like them and pop up all kinds of warnings.
They should tier SSL certs and make the higher level ones more difficult and time consuming to get: 0 None 1 Self Signed 2 Small business 3 Mid-sized business 4 Large business 5 Financial Institution
Browsers should display a lock with a number explaining what encryption a site used (even when none is used) and could explain the rank when the icon is moused over. Then people always would have a place to look to check the rank before deciding if they should punch information in.
The original SSL design was a good first step but it is definitely showing it's age today.
For Anti-Phishing to work it needs a UI with support right down into the SSL layer.
Currently it's next to impossible to diferentiate things on the web. It's the great equalizer, and as we are finding, it makes things *too* equal. You are on equal footing with a bank when trying to convince people to enter finantial information. We need a bit more structure, a few more checks and balances.
This is one of those great examples why anti-competitive markets are a bad idea. Anyone should be able to buy any wireless phone and hook it up to any wireless network.
Standards are the backbone of competition and they keep consumer options open.
Europe understood this and built a standards based system that works great. Here in the US, they allowed the companies to innovate freely including allowing providers to create "exclusive" phones and design in artificial barriers that wouldn't allow you to take your "Sprint" branded Sanyo phone and use it on a Verizon network, regardless of weather the phone was capable. This is a purely anti-competitive move and is illegal under US law. I'm surprised these companies are getting away with it.
The contract system they use is also anti-competitive. It's a way for companies to charge different prices to different people (incentives for switching from competitors, etc) and make the prices confusing enough to make comparison shopping difficult. Imagine if the grocery store you shopped at required long-term food buying plans and different prices for you if you bought more stuff. Part of competing fairly is everyone gets the same prices. We seem to have forgotten that.
A macro keyboard is a descent defense but realistically I doubt it would be hard to programmatically inject keystrokes to a program running under WINE and there would be no way for that program to detect that they weren't coming from hardware. Sending the right keystrokes in the right order can do some basically useful stuff and Blizzard would consider this botting. A clever way to get around the warden and bot but not undetectable.
The problem with Blizzard's stance on this issue is that they have created a game with some mindless repetitive tasks that beg to be automated. Realistically, they beg to be eliminated entirely since a computer program assigning you fake, easily automated, mundane repetitive tasks isn't good for anyone. Most of WoW is not this way, however. Most of it's parts are interesting and immersive and those are the parts people find fun. Nobody is going to bot their way through an 5+ person instance run (well, almost nobody.)
Blizzard has drawn a hard line on botting but the problem with any line is there are gray areas and the mundane easily automated tasks (like grinding up a weapon skill at L60) that are so wildly easy to automate as to be trivial. Sitting in one place pushing button 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. gets old after about 1000 repetitions. It would even be easy to create a macro keyboard that would fully automate this activity beginning to end. It wouldn't in any realistic way be "botting" but Blizzard would probably ban you.
Blizzard needs to fix WoW. Pull the mundane easily automated crap out. I'm level 60 and never used a crossbow, don't make shoot 100,000 arrows at rats in the tram to level the damn skill.. it's mundane, repetitive, and I don't want to do it. Ramp that skill up much much faster to the point where it's maybe a little weak but I can use it in regular combat and you eliminate the mundane easily automated task issue. They should also allow you to assign one of your characters to a task and log out and have the game essentially fake the thing for a while (fishing, farming mobs, etc). That short circuits a lot of the desire for botting and allows them to control the negative aspects of it (the characters "botting" could appear differently or not at all in-game.)
As a society we should consider making it illegal to ban the automation of easily automated mundane tasks. Do we really want humans to be forced to sit at a keyboard hitting the same 3 keys in the same order for hours and hours? Blizzards stance on this simply shouldn't be allowed. If Blizzard notices a player standing in the same place doing the same thing for hours the thought on their side shouldn't be "Ban this guy!" it should be "How do we eliminate the desire for automating this task?"
$2500 won't buy you CRAP for serious server storage.
My array is decent. I wouldn't put this array production at a company for maintainability reasons (only I would know how to fix it if it broke) but the technology is sound and with some software work and support it would probably be appropriate for a corperate environment. I can read from the array at about 130 MB/s and write to it at about 100 MB/s locally and, because it's raid 6, it can sustain 2 drive failures without data loss. I'm sure the max I/O's per second will be less than half of what it could be with the same number of faster drives but it's hardly slow. The gigabit network and the network clients are the bottleneck in most cases.
I spent $5,100 just on drives and only got 720GB of RAID5 15K RPM storage, this doesn't include the server or RAID controller.
There are very expensive drives out there and usually, buying them is a bad idea.
I'm sure those 15K RPM drives have faster transfer rates than the drives I used and can handle many more IOs per second, especially when pushed to high queue depths, but for an email server with the number of users mentioned I'd say 8-16 large 7200 RPM large SATA drives would work just fine. Most people make the mistake of assuming if they want a fast array they need fast drives. If you want an array to give quick responses under the load of a large number of simultanious users, more spindles does a lot more than faster drives.
The added benefit of using a large number of slower drives is huge capacity. This matches up well with storing large ammounts of email since most of the older email will be infrequently accessed.
To support a much larger server you are looking at 10's of thousands.
Generally cost per megabyte increases as the size of your array increases but if you design one well, tens of thousands (implying more than 20k) is spending too much. My array has 1.7TB usable. A more conventional setup involving a name brand server with a hardware raid controler would undoubtedly cost more but I suspect one could be found for far less than $20k.
Publishing documents interally isn't exactly unheard of. Most business documents aren't private.
Also, how is sending a link different from emailing the actual document? Anyone who receives an attachment can forward the document just as they could forward a link. The one thing it does enable is a password protected sharing site where, while everyone who has a link to a document can access it, they still need to log in and that access is logged.
Create a file share with a folder for each user only writable by them and accessible through a web server by everyone. Encourage users to put documents that they would share with others in that folder. They can then browse it with their web browser and copy and paste a link to someone. This has the added benefit of being able to update the document and since everyone just has the link, they see the current version whenever they open the document.
This soultion also lets people IM documents back and forth instantly skipping email entirely.
The disadvantage is that older versions aren't preserved forever. This, however, is directly related to space usage and if space efficiency is what you are going for this is a good thing.
In the end, you should probably just suck it up and expand your storage. 420gb is tiny. I just upgraded my home storage from a 450GB RAID5 array to a 2TB RAID6 array for about $2500. Forget having tons of people waste time and money sorting through emails and just find a reasonably priced way give them plenty of space.
Purposfully degrading the quality or blocking certain network trafic to hinder a competitor's ability to compete with you is clear cut anti-competitve behavior and illegal in the US. This type of underhanded "cheating" to make your service look better by making someone elses look worse must be wildly tempting for a company that both provides connectivity and competes with others to provide services on top of that connectivity but no ammount of tempation makes it any less illegal.
Any Comcast employee asked to do something that would cause this better make damn sure they document who asked them and why to make sure when the FTC comes knocking and the fingers point at you, you have a way to point the finger at someone else.
And stop it! Compete by serving the customers needs as best you can, not by hindering others ability to do the same.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
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AMD Subpoenas Skype
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Doing things to hurt your competition's chances in the marketplace other than making your product better is anti-competitive and illegal in the US.
Intel and Skype could both be perfectly happy with this arangement and it's still illegal. It runs along the same lines as if airlines got together and price-fixed. Both companies may be happy but it doesn't make it any less illegal.
Inactivity is part of the problem but modern studies seem to point at changes in our food supply and eating habits that are mostly to blame. Sugar intake is dramatically high as well as our intake of highly refined "bad" carbohydrates that wreak havoc with children's (and adult's) blood sugar systems. Portions have also increased. As the cost of the food itself becomes less significant in the cost of preparing a meal we've tended to super-size everything.
The real zinger, and I suspect part of the motivation behind their lashing out at video games, is that part of the problem, the transition away from balanced foods to ones high in sugar and carbohydrates was largely a result of following doctors advice. "Low Fat" is the label you'll find on these types of food which is precisely the thing that doctors were recommending. This isn't entirely their fault. The food industries create obviously unhealthy foods and market them under that label trying to imply they are healthy.
There has been this huge backlash against video games ever since doctors started blaming them for childhood obesity (because they didn't want to face the real reasons) and parents started blaming them for badly behaved kids (because they didn't want to face the real reasons). Gaming is an easy scapegoat and punching bag but if you look at it carefully, it's usually great for those who play.
Good games teach mental agility, strategic thinking, problem solving, and some even teach some light programming skills (macros in the old QuakeWorld and in WoW). There are twitchy games like fighting games that aren't necessarily that good for your brain but even they have evolved the complexity that requires strategic thought to be good at them.
Just like with any artistic media though, parents need to re-enforce positive messages and discourage negative ones. The problem is many parents treat games as these foreign alien things that it's not their job to have any interaction with. It's kinda like dropping your kid in front of pay-per-view and not paying any attention to what movies they choose to watch. Not a great idea.
Parents need to sit their butts down, pick up the controller, and beat some monsters with their kids. And when the game's plot starts moving into pushing drugs and slaughtering police.. they need to express disgust. It's a rare teachable moment, and if you aren't there, they aren't learning your values, they are learning lord of the flies style.
Parents with badly behaved kids need to understand that if the "real rules" are fair and consistent, kids will follow them. They also need to understand that the real rules aren't what you say they are, they are what you enforce. For example, saying "turn that off in 15 minutes or I'll take it away for a week" and then saying it again in half an hour means the real rule is "Ignore them and we do what we want" and every time you do that you reinforce that rule. Pay attention to what the real rules are and make sure they are fair and consistent. With games, making them fair usually means not making the end of play time based. "15 minutes then shut it off" is rarely fair except for the most twitchy stateless games. Most parents don't bother to understand the games their kids are playing enough to set realistic rules. Setting an arbitrary time like that in a game where it's not appropriate is not fair. If a kid's been working towards something for 2 hours and has 5 minutes left until they achieve a goal, coming in and pulling the plug is cruel. It's like walking into a room where kids are building something and stomping all over it, destroying it, and kicking them out. To be fair you often have to understand the game and that's more work than parents often want to do. "You can play until this map is done." "Go straight to a save point right now without doing anything else." "You have 5 minutes, tell the rest of the party to find a replacement, kill the next boss, then hearth." Those are all much more appropriate rules and will help children feel respected and understood. Monitoring that they aren't abusing those rules is harder than looking at your watch every time a commercial comes on though so parents often don't bother.
That said.. exercise is important for kids too, especially young ones, so don't let them hide in the basement playing games every day either. A little moderation is warrented.
"Rationally," when faced with high demand we'd build bigger roads and raise the price of driving.
I agree 100% that raising the price of driving when the cost increases is the right thing to do. The cost of something should reflect it's actual cost so that people make appropriate tradeoff decisions.
A gas tax is usually the most efficient and effective way to do this, not tolls though. Tolls usually unfairly peanalize people who drive on large roads that are more efficient to maintain than smaller ones because you can't efficiently toll small roads. It encourages people to move traffic off of highways and on to roads that are more expensve to maintain which is a bad thing. Gas tax also has the side benefit of encouraging people to drive more efficient vehicles which is usually considered a good thing.
So. My suggestion is double the gas tax and allocate the extra money exclusively to building roads.
They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs).
So if I understand this right.. you are advocate letting our transportation infrastructure get clogged to the point where people's employment oportunities suffer as a result thus removing from them their best choice for a job or house? On that point you're fighting to make peoples lives worse.
Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.
People don't chose to drive long distances to work because it's fun. That is a hard choice and people make it because it's the best one open to them. You are esentially saying that you know what's better for them than they do. That is fascist. By not building roads to capacity, we endanger and worsen the lives of everyone who has to drive on them. The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life. Americans are great at self-flagellatin.
as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested
We haven't expanded roads when they get congested for 30 years now. We expand them when people's ability to time-shift to aleviate congestion breaks down and you end up with huge traffic jams that last many hours. People don't even understand what a properly sized road is anymore. They think of a road well past proper load, all the way to completely saturated yet still moving allong quickly as properly sized. It isn't.
The problem with your position is that you are fighting to make peoples lives worse. As with all people who work towards that goal.. I hope you fail.
It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion.
This is nonsense. When is the last time your boss said you didn't need to go to work because traffic was going to be bad? People time-shift their travel to accomidate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it. The idea that increasing capacity to meet demand can't work is rediculous. I don't know how it crept into our society but it needs to be stamped out.. It's runing our roads and forcing everyone to drive on radically undersized dangerous highways.
The idea that more time invested yields more rewards and more power is very much a reflection of the real world. In fact, I find most of WoW's design has strong analogies in the real world.
At first, I absolutely hated the idea that more time invested trumped more skill. It was unfair and frustrating. Most of my online play had been in the form of the various Unreal Tournament style games and the idea that I'd be competing with people who had better weapons and armor and abilities simply by having gotten there first infuriated me.
The key here.. and I can't stress this enough.. is that more time invested trumps skill *to a point*. Yes.. there will be the odd player who powered their way to a level 80 epic weapon but in general, how good you are at the game is very much determined by how well you understand it.
In real life, you could be a really great programmer but if you haven't finished third grade yet you won't be doing senior developer work yet. By the same token, once you've gained a solid education in how to run your character (often times through repetitive annoying tasks) it's all about how you plan and invest your time as to what kind of rewards you get and at that point it's more about skill than it is about time invested.
I first pushed a single character to level 60, never bothering to start an alt. I pushed at 60 for a while and then started working on some other characters. Suddenly I found myself in a low level instance with a group that was a bit underpowered and was absolutely tearing the place up. I asked around and everyone there was very experienced. That's when it hit me... my hatred of the inequalities of being low and ill-equipped blinded me to the fact that it wasn't level but understanding and strategy that made the difference as to how good you were. I recently found myself in an end game instance with a group of brand new L60's and it drove the point home. They were all over the place, consistently using bad strategy and it was slow and hard and very wipe prone.
Albert Einstein accomplished far more in the field of physics by himself during off-time as a patent clerk than a 40-man raid of so-so physicists ever would.
But here's where the author gets it exactly backwards. Einstein wasn't born a L60 physicist, he had to learn it and he learned it very well gaining a lot of respect along the way. He wasn't a patent clerk doing physics, he was a physicist working an unrelated day-job waiting for a good physics job to open up. He came up with his theories and he didn't just post them on his door and walk away.. he gathered a 40 man raid group and had them try out his ideas and test and think and experiment and put them up against the toughest of problems and see if they held up. Einstein, the father of the nuclear age, never worked on the Manhattan project, and never designed a power plant. It was his ability to come up with an idea and communicate it to others and to get them working on it too that made his work so powerful. The same skills are needed to be good at WoW.
The author also objects to big rewards only coming from large groups. To that I'd respond that figuring out how to get a rogue to perform at optimal efficiency against a monster is a FAR FAR easier problem to understanding how to get 40 people in 8 different classes to perform at optimal efficiency. This is why 40 man raids are hard. This is why 40 man raids deserve better loot. It's because it's a far harder problem to solve. Yes, coordination is an added obstacle but that's not all. The strategy involved is much more complicated as well.
I'll also point out that using a great strategy if you are self employed will make far less money than if a 40 person company all follows a great strategy. That reflects reality very well.
The article also mentions the honor system and it's crack like nature. To that I'd point out that the real word has crack too. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you need to get addicted to it.
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that essentially disproves the second law of thermodynamcis. The fact that people attack it from a practicality standpoint is silly. It's obviously meant to be a thought experiment not a practical design.
Let me propose a second thought experiment... I'll call it a Garland engine (because I don't know who thought of it before me, although I'm sure someone has.) Place one molecule of an ion inside a very small container with a special design. The container has a wall down the middle and 2 one way doggy doors in it. one door will only allow travel in one direction, the other will only allow travel in the other. Rap a loop of wire around one door and wrap it backwards around the other door. Cascade that wire across millions of these devices.
Of course.. if you could create a 1 way molecular doggy door you could use that to generate pressure differences so that concept has probably been "proven" impossible but I seriously doubt it actually is.
Perpetual motion machines are impossible. The reaction is almost automatic. It's proven. It's scientific law. It's been proven unquestioningly impossible to do.
Really!? When?
Even if it were possible to prove something impossible, we haven't done it here. Now.. I'm not defending the article, it's certainly BS.. but the idea that the universe is not a closed loop system, the idea that once energy enters one of it's forms it cannot possibly take any other form ever under any circumstance, I would think, would meet with a little more thought, a little more scrutiny than just flat out immediate acceptance from everyone everywhere.
Even in the world of Sci-Fi where time travel, consciousness swapping and instantaneous travel over long distances are nauseatingly regular plot elements, they never dare to imagine things not needing a centralized power source. What is so horribly wrong with assuming that heat energy, just like all other forms of energy, could be convertible into a useful form. (For those who's minds immediately jump to engines and fire and steam and "we've been doing this for years".. I'm talking about heat as a source for energy, not a heat difference which is what all currently known heat based power technologies require, totally 100% completely different things. I'm talking about pulling the heat out of something and turning that heat energy into another useful form like electricity.)
People often point to the second law of thermodynamics as "proof" that heat is impossible to gather energy from, but this law no more proves that than the law of gravity proves that heavier than air objects can't fly. Just because things heavier than air "tend" to fall, doesn't mean we can't carefully construct things that reliably don't. I imagine that if birds didn't exist smacking the possibility in our face constantly, we'd still assume it was impossible to fly. I, for one, think it is possible to turn heat into energy.
So. What if it were possible...
Imagine if you will, a chip, shaped similar to a CPU. This chip had some network of atomic scale contructions that could somehow turn heat into electricity inside it. The removal of heat energy from the chip would manifest itself as cold (a lack of heat energy) and so when power was drawn from it, it would get cold. The more power was drawn from it, the colder it would get (within design limits). Play with the idea... I do. It's fun. The implications are wild.
There needs to be a new little diagram called 'The Open Source Era'. It would start with the programmer throwing the 'Biz Guy' out the window. Then he'd put up a wall labled 'Skinning' between him and the 'Designer' and the 'Interaction Dude' and going back to work.
The idea that someone somewhere needs to approve of the hardware I buy before it can play content is anti-freedom, it's anti-competitive, and it's anti-consumer. The idea that a content provider can control whether I am able to save or time-shift content is evil. They should never have that power. It should be illegal for them to.
Don't buy any content protected this way. Remember good old DIVX (the Circuit City crypled DVD format, not the video compression standard). It died. This should too. I doubt it will but it surely should and I will recommend to everyone I know to not buy anything protected this way.
We need to fight this insanity of the content producers. They are looking to have us pay for the infrastructure they are using to broadcast to us (internet, cable, or sattelite) and pay for the content and then let them have complete control how we are allowed to use it. These people see treading on our fair use rigths as a way to have slightly higher profit margins and are doing everything in their power to make it happen. We need to start pushing to take back our fair use rights, make it illegal do deny us them, and start stripping away their free and clear copyright entitlements they've been so used to expaning.
If we could only remove our politicians motivation to do what the RIAA/MPAA wanted we'd probably be rid of this problem here in the US already.
Slashdot Mirror
Master the jargon and then rip it appart. Embrace, extend...
I have to mow the lawn and a bunch of other 'opportunities for growth' this weekend. I think I'm going to 'realign' a few trees in the yard it's getting crouded.. etc etc.
It's a great way to point out the absurdity without confronting it.
That's absolute nonsense. The current scheme is impossible to tell someone how to use. Remember.. you can't use URLs if you allow unicode hostnames and even without unicode, it's way too easy to make url's that look legitimate.
One of the better ways we tell people is the SSL lock icon. SSL Certificates are hard for a phishing site to get and they rarely bother. But when we're talking about a phishing site there isn't one. At all. Unless the site puts one on their page. You have to tell people to look for something that isn't there. You say it should be there but that isn't there when they browse normally, only when they visit their bank's web site. This is insane.
Look at the lock number the browser displays. Less than 3 isn't a bank.
That is an explanation that works. The red/green thing is going to be much *more* confusing since there will be tons of false positives and/or false negatives.
The evil geek destroying barbie clones have made me die a little inside forcing me to see my slashdot look like this.
One day of this is about 23.5 hours too many.
The browser developers gave a lot of thought to this, and defaulted to the simplest scheme possible.
Obviously they haven't put enough though into it.
A system that's riddled with false positives is almost as bad as none at all. You act as if there is some magical technology that can auto-detect "Good" and "Bad". How do you auto-detect if chase-manhatten.com is a phishing web site? By the SSL cert? Nope.. you can get them. By the fact that it's close to another companie's name but isn't quite right? That's not really practical or even correct. It could be someone's legitimate web site.
If we teach people to check the SSL number and look for a 5 on all banks and large companies they can easily spot the fraud. A 2 site isn't at all close. If you look at my list, forging above a 2 would be impractical.
The red/green thing just seems way to simplistic and limited to properly solve the problem.
The point is if you go to "Best Buy's" web site and it sais it's a small business.. it's probably not the right site.
We have a 1 year old daughter and going to the movies is simply not realistic. I would pay twice as much to buy movies the week they were released in the theaters rather than try to arrange for babysitting. Basically all that advertising for the release is wasted on me because until it's released on DVD they aren't getting any money from me.
Movie theaters are going away. There are trade offs watching a movie at home but at this point I far prefer it. My sound is good, my screen is big and sharp. My equipment keeps getting better and my local theaters seem to get crappier every time I go. If things keep heading in this direction it's only a matter of time before the theaters lose their hold on new releases.
For Anti-Phishing to work it needs a UI with support right down into the SSL layer.
Currently it's next to impossible to diferentiate things on the web. It's the great equalizer, and as we are finding, it makes things *too* equal. You are on equal footing with a bank when trying to convince people to enter finantial information. We need a bit more structure, a few more checks and balances.
This is one of those great examples why anti-competitive markets are a bad idea. Anyone should be able to buy any wireless phone and hook it up to any wireless network.
Standards are the backbone of competition and they keep consumer options open.
Europe understood this and built a standards based system that works great. Here in the US, they allowed the companies to innovate freely including allowing providers to create "exclusive" phones and design in artificial barriers that wouldn't allow you to take your "Sprint" branded Sanyo phone and use it on a Verizon network, regardless of weather the phone was capable. This is a purely anti-competitive move and is illegal under US law. I'm surprised these companies are getting away with it.
The contract system they use is also anti-competitive. It's a way for companies to charge different prices to different people (incentives for switching from competitors, etc) and make the prices confusing enough to make comparison shopping difficult. Imagine if the grocery store you shopped at required long-term food buying plans and different prices for you if you bought more stuff. Part of competing fairly is everyone gets the same prices. We seem to have forgotten that.
A macro keyboard is a descent defense but realistically I doubt it would be hard to programmatically inject keystrokes to a program running under WINE and there would be no way for that program to detect that they weren't coming from hardware. Sending the right keystrokes in the right order can do some basically useful stuff and Blizzard would consider this botting. A clever way to get around the warden and bot but not undetectable.
The problem with Blizzard's stance on this issue is that they have created a game with some mindless repetitive tasks that beg to be automated. Realistically, they beg to be eliminated entirely since a computer program assigning you fake, easily automated, mundane repetitive tasks isn't good for anyone. Most of WoW is not this way, however. Most of it's parts are interesting and immersive and those are the parts people find fun. Nobody is going to bot their way through an 5+ person instance run (well, almost nobody.)
Blizzard has drawn a hard line on botting but the problem with any line is there are gray areas and the mundane easily automated tasks (like grinding up a weapon skill at L60) that are so wildly easy to automate as to be trivial. Sitting in one place pushing button 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. gets old after about 1000 repetitions. It would even be easy to create a macro keyboard that would fully automate this activity beginning to end. It wouldn't in any realistic way be "botting" but Blizzard would probably ban you.
Blizzard needs to fix WoW. Pull the mundane easily automated crap out. I'm level 60 and never used a crossbow, don't make shoot 100,000 arrows at rats in the tram to level the damn skill.. it's mundane, repetitive, and I don't want to do it. Ramp that skill up much much faster to the point where it's maybe a little weak but I can use it in regular combat and you eliminate the mundane easily automated task issue. They should also allow you to assign one of your characters to a task and log out and have the game essentially fake the thing for a while (fishing, farming mobs, etc). That short circuits a lot of the desire for botting and allows them to control the negative aspects of it (the characters "botting" could appear differently or not at all in-game.)
As a society we should consider making it illegal to ban the automation of easily automated mundane tasks. Do we really want humans to be forced to sit at a keyboard hitting the same 3 keys in the same order for hours and hours? Blizzards stance on this simply shouldn't be allowed. If Blizzard notices a player standing in the same place doing the same thing for hours the thought on their side shouldn't be "Ban this guy!" it should be "How do we eliminate the desire for automating this task?"
The solution I suggest neither causes nor solves the problem you bring up.
$2500 won't buy you CRAP for serious server storage.
l icWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=1764600
My array is decent. I wouldn't put this array production at a company for maintainability reasons (only I would know how to fix it if it broke) but the technology is sound and with some software work and support it would probably be appropriate for a corperate environment. I can read from the array at about 130 MB/s and write to it at about 100 MB/s locally and, because it's raid 6, it can sustain 2 drive failures without data loss. I'm sure the max I/O's per second will be less than half of what it could be with the same number of faster drives but it's hardly slow. The gigabit network and the network clients are the bottleneck in most cases.
If you want to see the hardware I used, here it is:
https://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/Pub
I use Linux's software raid. It took a little work outside of the normal Fedora setup to make it work the way I wanted it to but other than that it was pretty straightforward.
I spent $5,100 just on drives and only got 720GB of RAID5 15K RPM storage, this doesn't include the server or RAID controller.
There are very expensive drives out there and usually, buying them is a bad idea.
I'm sure those 15K RPM drives have faster transfer rates than the drives I used and can handle many more IOs per second, especially when pushed to high queue depths, but for an email server with the number of users mentioned I'd say 8-16 large 7200 RPM large SATA drives would work just fine. Most people make the mistake of assuming if they want a fast array they need fast drives. If you want an array to give quick responses under the load of a large number of simultanious users, more spindles does a lot more than faster drives.
The added benefit of using a large number of slower drives is huge capacity. This matches up well with storing large ammounts of email since most of the older email will be infrequently accessed.
To support a much larger server you are looking at 10's of thousands.
Generally cost per megabyte increases as the size of your array increases but if you design one well, tens of thousands (implying more than 20k) is spending too much. My array has 1.7TB usable. A more conventional setup involving a name brand server with a hardware raid controler would undoubtedly cost more but I suspect one could be found for far less than $20k.
Publishing documents interally isn't exactly unheard of. Most business documents aren't private.
Also, how is sending a link different from emailing the actual document? Anyone who receives an attachment can forward the document just as they could forward a link. The one thing it does enable is a password protected sharing site where, while everyone who has a link to a document can access it, they still need to log in and that access is logged.
Create a file share with a folder for each user only writable by them and accessible through a web server by everyone. Encourage users to put documents that they would share with others in that folder. They can then browse it with their web browser and copy and paste a link to someone. This has the added benefit of being able to update the document and since everyone just has the link, they see the current version whenever they open the document.
This soultion also lets people IM documents back and forth instantly skipping email entirely.
The disadvantage is that older versions aren't preserved forever. This, however, is directly related to space usage and if space efficiency is what you are going for this is a good thing.
In the end, you should probably just suck it up and expand your storage. 420gb is tiny. I just upgraded my home storage from a 450GB RAID5 array to a 2TB RAID6 array for about $2500. Forget having tons of people waste time and money sorting through emails and just find a reasonably priced way give them plenty of space.
Purposfully degrading the quality or blocking certain network trafic to hinder a competitor's ability to compete with you is clear cut anti-competitve behavior and illegal in the US. This type of underhanded "cheating" to make your service look better by making someone elses look worse must be wildly tempting for a company that both provides connectivity and competes with others to provide services on top of that connectivity but no ammount of tempation makes it any less illegal.
Any Comcast employee asked to do something that would cause this better make damn sure they document who asked them and why to make sure when the FTC comes knocking and the fingers point at you, you have a way to point the finger at someone else.
And stop it! Compete by serving the customers needs as best you can, not by hindering others ability to do the same.
Doing things to hurt your competition's chances in the marketplace other than making your product better is anti-competitive and illegal in the US.
Intel and Skype could both be perfectly happy with this arangement and it's still illegal. It runs along the same lines as if airlines got together and price-fixed. Both companies may be happy but it doesn't make it any less illegal.
Inactivity is part of the problem but modern studies seem to point at changes in our food supply and eating habits that are mostly to blame. Sugar intake is dramatically high as well as our intake of highly refined "bad" carbohydrates that wreak havoc with children's (and adult's) blood sugar systems. Portions have also increased. As the cost of the food itself becomes less significant in the cost of preparing a meal we've tended to super-size everything.
The real zinger, and I suspect part of the motivation behind their lashing out at video games, is that part of the problem, the transition away from balanced foods to ones high in sugar and carbohydrates was largely a result of following doctors advice. "Low Fat" is the label you'll find on these types of food which is precisely the thing that doctors were recommending. This isn't entirely their fault. The food industries create obviously unhealthy foods and market them under that label trying to imply they are healthy.
There has been this huge backlash against video games ever since doctors started blaming them for childhood obesity (because they didn't want to face the real reasons) and parents started blaming them for badly behaved kids (because they didn't want to face the real reasons). Gaming is an easy scapegoat and punching bag but if you look at it carefully, it's usually great for those who play.
Good games teach mental agility, strategic thinking, problem solving, and some even teach some light programming skills (macros in the old QuakeWorld and in WoW). There are twitchy games like fighting games that aren't necessarily that good for your brain but even they have evolved the complexity that requires strategic thought to be good at them.
Just like with any artistic media though, parents need to re-enforce positive messages and discourage negative ones. The problem is many parents treat games as these foreign alien things that it's not their job to have any interaction with. It's kinda like dropping your kid in front of pay-per-view and not paying any attention to what movies they choose to watch. Not a great idea.
Parents need to sit their butts down, pick up the controller, and beat some monsters with their kids. And when the game's plot starts moving into pushing drugs and slaughtering police.. they need to express disgust. It's a rare teachable moment, and if you aren't there, they aren't learning your values, they are learning lord of the flies style.
Parents with badly behaved kids need to understand that if the "real rules" are fair and consistent, kids will follow them. They also need to understand that the real rules aren't what you say they are, they are what you enforce. For example, saying "turn that off in 15 minutes or I'll take it away for a week" and then saying it again in half an hour means the real rule is "Ignore them and we do what we want" and every time you do that you reinforce that rule. Pay attention to what the real rules are and make sure they are fair and consistent. With games, making them fair usually means not making the end of play time based. "15 minutes then shut it off" is rarely fair except for the most twitchy stateless games. Most parents don't bother to understand the games their kids are playing enough to set realistic rules. Setting an arbitrary time like that in a game where it's not appropriate is not fair. If a kid's been working towards something for 2 hours and has 5 minutes left until they achieve a goal, coming in and pulling the plug is cruel. It's like walking into a room where kids are building something and stomping all over it, destroying it, and kicking them out. To be fair you often have to understand the game and that's more work than parents often want to do. "You can play until this map is done." "Go straight to a save point right now without doing anything else." "You have 5 minutes, tell the rest of the party to find a replacement, kill the next boss, then hearth." Those are all much more appropriate rules and will help children feel respected and understood. Monitoring that they aren't abusing those rules is harder than looking at your watch every time a commercial comes on though so parents often don't bother.
That said.. exercise is important for kids too, especially young ones, so don't let them hide in the basement playing games every day either. A little moderation is warrented.
"Rationally," when faced with high demand we'd build bigger roads and raise the price of driving.
I agree 100% that raising the price of driving when the cost increases is the right thing to do. The cost of something should reflect it's actual cost so that people make appropriate tradeoff decisions.
A gas tax is usually the most efficient and effective way to do this, not tolls though. Tolls usually unfairly peanalize people who drive on large roads that are more efficient to maintain than smaller ones because you can't efficiently toll small roads. It encourages people to move traffic off of highways and on to roads that are more expensve to maintain which is a bad thing. Gas tax also has the side benefit of encouraging people to drive more efficient vehicles which is usually considered a good thing.
So. My suggestion is double the gas tax and allocate the extra money exclusively to building roads.
They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs).
So if I understand this right.. you are advocate letting our transportation infrastructure get clogged to the point where people's employment oportunities suffer as a result thus removing from them their best choice for a job or house? On that point you're fighting to make peoples lives worse.
Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.
People don't chose to drive long distances to work because it's fun. That is a hard choice and people make it because it's the best one open to them. You are esentially saying that you know what's better for them than they do. That is fascist. By not building roads to capacity, we endanger and worsen the lives of everyone who has to drive on them. The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life. Americans are great at self-flagellatin.
as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested
We haven't expanded roads when they get congested for 30 years now. We expand them when people's ability to time-shift to aleviate congestion breaks down and you end up with huge traffic jams that last many hours. People don't even understand what a properly sized road is anymore. They think of a road well past proper load, all the way to completely saturated yet still moving allong quickly as properly sized. It isn't.
The problem with your position is that you are fighting to make peoples lives worse. As with all people who work towards that goal.. I hope you fail.
It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion.
This is nonsense. When is the last time your boss said you didn't need to go to work because traffic was going to be bad? People time-shift their travel to accomidate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it. The idea that increasing capacity to meet demand can't work is rediculous. I don't know how it crept into our society but it needs to be stamped out.. It's runing our roads and forcing everyone to drive on radically undersized dangerous highways.
The idea that more time invested yields more rewards and more power is very much a reflection of the real world. In fact, I find most of WoW's design has strong analogies in the real world.
At first, I absolutely hated the idea that more time invested trumped more skill. It was unfair and frustrating. Most of my online play had been in the form of the various Unreal Tournament style games and the idea that I'd be competing with people who had better weapons and armor and abilities simply by having gotten there first infuriated me.
The key here.. and I can't stress this enough.. is that more time invested trumps skill *to a point*. Yes.. there will be the odd player who powered their way to a level 80 epic weapon but in general, how good you are at the game is very much determined by how well you understand it.
In real life, you could be a really great programmer but if you haven't finished third grade yet you won't be doing senior developer work yet. By the same token, once you've gained a solid education in how to run your character (often times through repetitive annoying tasks) it's all about how you plan and invest your time as to what kind of rewards you get and at that point it's more about skill than it is about time invested.
I first pushed a single character to level 60, never bothering to start an alt. I pushed at 60 for a while and then started working on some other characters. Suddenly I found myself in a low level instance with a group that was a bit underpowered and was absolutely tearing the place up. I asked around and everyone there was very experienced. That's when it hit me... my hatred of the inequalities of being low and ill-equipped blinded me to the fact that it wasn't level but understanding and strategy that made the difference as to how good you were. I recently found myself in an end game instance with a group of brand new L60's and it drove the point home. They were all over the place, consistently using bad strategy and it was slow and hard and very wipe prone.
Albert Einstein accomplished far more in the field of physics by himself during off-time as a patent clerk than a 40-man raid of so-so physicists ever would.
But here's where the author gets it exactly backwards. Einstein wasn't born a L60 physicist, he had to learn it and he learned it very well gaining a lot of respect along the way. He wasn't a patent clerk doing physics, he was a physicist working an unrelated day-job waiting for a good physics job to open up. He came up with his theories and he didn't just post them on his door and walk away.. he gathered a 40 man raid group and had them try out his ideas and test and think and experiment and put them up against the toughest of problems and see if they held up. Einstein, the father of the nuclear age, never worked on the Manhattan project, and never designed a power plant. It was his ability to come up with an idea and communicate it to others and to get them working on it too that made his work so powerful. The same skills are needed to be good at WoW.
The author also objects to big rewards only coming from large groups. To that I'd respond that figuring out how to get a rogue to perform at optimal efficiency against a monster is a FAR FAR easier problem to understanding how to get 40 people in 8 different classes to perform at optimal efficiency. This is why 40 man raids are hard. This is why 40 man raids deserve better loot. It's because it's a far harder problem to solve. Yes, coordination is an added obstacle but that's not all. The strategy involved is much more complicated as well.
I'll also point out that using a great strategy if you are self employed will make far less money than if a 40 person company all follows a great strategy. That reflects reality very well.
The article also mentions the honor system and it's crack like nature. To that I'd point out that the real word has crack too. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you need to get addicted to it.
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that essentially disproves the second law of thermodynamcis. The fact that people attack it from a practicality standpoint is silly. It's obviously meant to be a thought experiment not a practical design.
Let me propose a second thought experiment... I'll call it a Garland engine (because I don't know who thought of it before me, although I'm sure someone has.) Place one molecule of an ion inside a very small container with a special design. The container has a wall down the middle and 2 one way doggy doors in it. one door will only allow travel in one direction, the other will only allow travel in the other. Rap a loop of wire around one door and wrap it backwards around the other door. Cascade that wire across millions of these devices.
Of course.. if you could create a 1 way molecular doggy door you could use that to generate pressure differences so that concept has probably been "proven" impossible but I seriously doubt it actually is.
Perpetual motion machines are impossible. The reaction is almost automatic. It's proven. It's scientific law. It's been proven unquestioningly impossible to do.
Really!? When?
Even if it were possible to prove something impossible, we haven't done it here. Now.. I'm not defending the article, it's certainly BS.. but the idea that the universe is not a closed loop system, the idea that once energy enters one of it's forms it cannot possibly take any other form ever under any circumstance, I would think, would meet with a little more thought, a little more scrutiny than just flat out immediate acceptance from everyone everywhere.
Even in the world of Sci-Fi where time travel, consciousness swapping and instantaneous travel over long distances are nauseatingly regular plot elements, they never dare to imagine things not needing a centralized power source. What is so horribly wrong with assuming that heat energy, just like all other forms of energy, could be convertible into a useful form. (For those who's minds immediately jump to engines and fire and steam and "we've been doing this for years".. I'm talking about heat as a source for energy, not a heat difference which is what all currently known heat based power technologies require, totally 100% completely different things. I'm talking about pulling the heat out of something and turning that heat energy into another useful form like electricity.)
People often point to the second law of thermodynamics as "proof" that heat is impossible to gather energy from, but this law no more proves that than the law of gravity proves that heavier than air objects can't fly. Just because things heavier than air "tend" to fall, doesn't mean we can't carefully construct things that reliably don't. I imagine that if birds didn't exist smacking the possibility in our face constantly, we'd still assume it was impossible to fly. I, for one, think it is possible to turn heat into energy.
So. What if it were possible...
Imagine if you will, a chip, shaped similar to a CPU. This chip had some network of atomic scale contructions that could somehow turn heat into electricity inside it. The removal of heat energy from the chip would manifest itself as cold (a lack of heat energy) and so when power was drawn from it, it would get cold. The more power was drawn from it, the colder it would get (within design limits). Play with the idea... I do. It's fun. The implications are wild.
There needs to be a new little diagram called 'The Open Source Era'. It would start with the programmer throwing the 'Biz Guy' out the window. Then he'd put up a wall labled 'Skinning' between him and the 'Designer' and the 'Interaction Dude' and going back to work.
The idea that someone somewhere needs to approve of the hardware I buy before it can play content is anti-freedom, it's anti-competitive, and it's anti-consumer. The idea that a content provider can control whether I am able to save or time-shift content is evil. They should never have that power. It should be illegal for them to.
Don't buy any content protected this way. Remember good old DIVX (the Circuit City crypled DVD format, not the video compression standard). It died. This should too. I doubt it will but it surely should and I will recommend to everyone I know to not buy anything protected this way.
We need to fight this insanity of the content producers. They are looking to have us pay for the infrastructure they are using to broadcast to us (internet, cable, or sattelite) and pay for the content and then let them have complete control how we are allowed to use it. These people see treading on our fair use rigths as a way to have slightly higher profit margins and are doing everything in their power to make it happen. We need to start pushing to take back our fair use rights, make it illegal do deny us them, and start stripping away their free and clear copyright entitlements they've been so used to expaning.
If we could only remove our politicians motivation to do what the RIAA/MPAA wanted we'd probably be rid of this problem here in the US already.