I thought that whole line of storefront retail was dead, along with video rental. Hollywood Video went bankrupt a few months ago, and liquidated; all stores closed. Blockbuster went into bankruptcy in September. They have enough interim financing to keep the retail stores open through the holiday season, but most stores will probably close next year. Almost all the little guys in video rental gave up years ago, of course.
What have the game guys got that the video guys don't have?
Another computer type who thinks "3D printing" is magic. It's not.
The technology is over 20 years old now. It has become better, and you can now get plastics with some structural strength. But it's very slow. It takes hours to make simple parts.
You can make plastic parts for about 100x the cost of making them in quantity by injection molding. Making simple brackets this way isn't
cost-effective. When you look at the design of the "Mendel" RepRap machine, the few parts that are actually made with RepRap could be made by injection molding, probably for about $5 a set in quantities of a few thousand. Most of the machine is electronics, motors, steel shafts, and belts, none of which RepRap can make.
The big advances in making stuff are for flat stock.
Laser cutting cuts flat parts fast, and there are no cutting tools to wear out. Plasma cutters do a similar job for metal and thicker materials. The newer models cut an edge clean enough that bicycle sprockets can be made on them. Water jet cutters cut cleaner, but the abrasive they use is expensive and the resulting slurry has to be disposed of.
I have a TechShop membership, and access to all these tools. They have a good stereolithography machine and a 3D scanner. Those are used mostly by design firm people making prototypes. They also have three laser cutters, which are busy about twelve hours a day, rapidly cutting flat parts from wood and plastic. The laser cutter is really easy to use, and very popular for artwork. The plasma cutter isn't used as much; it was built from a kit, and has some problems which are being slowly fixed. No water jet cutter yet. Maybe soon.
Because making one-off flat parts is now fast and easy, there's a tendency to design things to be made out of flat sections that can be laser-cut. That seems to be the way work really gets done today.
TechShop also has both manual and CNC milling machines. Those are used regularly to cut meal, but design, planning, programming, work-holding, setup, and use are much more complex than with the laser cutter.
Blender doesn't require installation. Just download the standalone tarball (or more likely a ZIP archive) and unpack it somewhere.
That's a response to the fuckup with the Windows installer. Blender.org used to recommend the Windows installer. Now, they write "ANOTHER NOTE: The preferred way for installing Blender is the.zip. When installing as administrator still creates problems for non-administrator users."
(That last sentence isn't even a sentence.) Downloading the.zip file and unpacking it does provide a single-user install, after which the start menu icon and file association have to be set manually. It's the sort of thing the command-line crowd thinks is good enough.
On the Linux side, there's the message "NOTE: 64bit build for Linux currently broken. Will be re-uploaded when fixed."
Cant ... find .. menus
on
Blender 3D 2.49
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I strongly suggest that you do check out the 2.5 betas. They are awesome.
They would be a lot more awesome if the Blender 2.5 installer worked. The installer, on a reasonably secure Windows system, installs Blender in directories such that only Adminstrator users can use it. If launched by another user, the program opens, with a nice 3D window and the default 3D cube, but no menu bar, because the menu bar files have the wrong protections. This yields a very frustrating user interface, because there are still some controls that work. Enough that you suspect that you just don't understand the new UI. You can drag and spin the cube, so clearly the program is working, right? But how do you open a file?
See Blender 2.5 Bug Tracker item #24472. Amusingly, this bug has been reported for Linux and Windows.
I wonder if Google Instant will soon compound this problem. Once you're apt to see a tidbit of a result and quickly click through, that would be quite the prime target for this type of attack.
Google Suggest (the command-completion part of Google Instant) already had a major spam problem. Google Suggest isn't driven by page rankings; it's driven by Google Trends, which was updated every few minutes. So, generating a large number of search requests in a short period could push a request to the top entries on Google Trends. That would make it appear as a suggestion in Google Suggest, driving further traffic to that search. I've seen a small mattress store at the top of Google Trends. This approach to spamming could give a site a huge traffic spike for about 45 minutes or so.
Google now seems to be updating Trends more slowly, to provide more averaging over time. This makes it harder to pull off that attack.
They really need to create a ranking system for logged in Google users so people can vote down spammy links.
Won't work. The spammy links come and go too fast. Mean lifetime of a phishing site is a few days. Since most are created automatically, dealing with the problem manually will always be struggling to catch up.
Take a look at our list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams. That's from PhishTank data, which is updated manually. The list is ordered by how long the site has been on the list. At the top are the usual suspects, with phishing pages up for as long as a year. Towards the bottom, note that seven sites were added this week, and nineteen came off the list in the last week. That level of churn is about normal.
Note that this list is only for "major" sites, ones in Open Directory. Those are legit sites who've been abused by phishers. There are tens of thousands of purposed-built phishing sites on junk domains. Those used to churn really fast in the "domain tasting" days, but with that hole plugged, there's been a little improvement. Now the phishing sites buy hosting with stolen credit card numbers and operate the site until the credit card processing system detects fraud and the hosting service shuts the site down.
Actually, US labor laws are reasonably good. But enforcement was gutted years ago. For several years, the NLRB couldn't function because of vacancies; Bush woudn't appoint anybody who wasn't anti-labor. That problem has been solved, the NLRB has a quorum again, and it's back in business.
This is an important decision, because it means that union organizing on Facebook is more likely to work.
Incidentally, if you're in the game industry, check out The Animation Guild, which represents computer graphics people at Disney, ILM, Dreamworks, etc.
Here's where WePay got the contractual language which allows them to "discard your account". They seem to have copied their terms of service from a non-financial site:
WePay TOS (2010):
You agree that WePay, in its sole discretion, for any or no reason, and without penalty, may suspend or terminate your Account (or any part thereof) or your use of the WePay Services and remove and discard all or any part of your Account at any time. WePay may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the WePay Services, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of Your access to the WePay Services or any Account you may have or portion thereof may be effected without prior notice, and you agree that WePay will not be liable to you or any third party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive or illegal activity may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies WePay may have at law or in equity.
ClickPass (2008):
You agree that Clickpass, in its sole discretion and for any or no reason, may terminate any member or customer account (or any part thereof) you may have at the Clickpass Service or your use of the Clickpass Service, and remove and discard all or any part of your account, at any time. Clickpass may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the Clickpass Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Clickpass Service or any account you may have or portion thereof may be effected without prior notice, and you agree that Clickpass shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive, or illegal activity that may be grounds for termination of your use of the Clickpass Service may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies Clickpass may have at law or in equity.
CampassCompass TOS: (2008) You agree that CampusCompass, in its sole discretion and for any or no reason, may terminate any account (or any part thereof) you may have with CampusCompass or use of the Service and remove and discard all or any part of your account, at any time. CampusCompass may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service or any account you may have or portion thereof may be affected without prior notice, and you agree that CampusCompass will not be liable to you or any third-party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive, or illegal activity that may be grounds for termination of your use of the Service may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies CampusCompass may have at law or in equity.
For the other two services, an "account" is just a login and some files. But with WePay, an "account" has money in it. And WePay can "discard" it any time they want to, given this language. That's worse than PayPal.
The "search engine optimization" community is waking up to the fact that Google "reselling" is over. The October 27th merger of "Google Places" into Google web search wasn't about
"places". It was about "businesses". Google is pulling third-party revenue in-house. Google is squeezing out "made for AdWords" sites, "directories", and other intermediaries that are just forwarding clicks. Search for "London hotels" or "DVD player", and notice how far down you have to go to see an organic search result. If you want to advertise a product that's found by search, you now talk to Google directly.
This will put a big dent in the "search engine optimization" industry. We'll see many junk sites going under, too.
Bing, having copied Google in this within days, is doing roughly the same thing.
The guys in China are getting hit by this, but they're just collateral damage of a major policy change.
If it weren't for Linux, Windows would cost $300 or so per seat.
The year of the Linux desktop probably should have been 1999. Windows 95 was too flaky, Windows 2000 was too corporate, and Windows XP was late. But the Linux crowd blew it. They had a second chance in the Vista era, and another chance in subnotebooks. Both were blown.
Someone discovered a neat hack - they can store a phishing page in Google Storage, and link to it from Google Sites. Google's abuse system doesn't comprehend that you can leverage an attack through Google Storage, so there's no way to get that phishing page taken down.
(The basic problem is that if you offer free hosting or URL redirection, and don't validate your users, you will be used to host attacks. "TinyURL" is good at catching this. "bit.ly", not so much. "t35.com" (free hosting) works hard to kick the phishers off manually, but their abuse guy gets a week or two behind at times. "piczo.com" (blog hosting for teenage girls) doesn't seem to try very hard, and phishing pages stay live there for months. We track this automatically, so we get to watch the major sites throw out the trash. Major sites that don't automate phishing and hostile code detection, constantly reading the PhishTank and APWG lists to see if one of their pages made the list, get pwned regularly.)
The problems with PayPal are well known. PayPal should be regulated as a bank in the US, so customers have recourse to banking regulators when PayPal is holding the customer's money against the customer's will.
Not that PayPal's competitors are better. WePay got press by putting a block of ice with money inside in front of the PayPal conference. But they have miserable customer terms, like PayPal:
You may not transfer or assign any rights or obligations you have under this Agreement without WePay's prior written consent. WePay reserves the right to transfer or assign this Agreement or any right or obligation under this Agreement at any time. That's backwards, since they have your money, and you don't have their money.
You agree that WePay, in its sole discretion, for any or no reason, and without penalty, may suspend or terminate your Account (or any part thereof) or your use of the WePay Services and remove and discard all or any part of your Account at any time. Discard your account? With your money in it? That's what they're saying. Banks have to immediately refund your money if they close your account.
IN NO EVENT SHALL WEPAY, its EMPLOYEES OR SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR LOST PROFITS OR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH OUR WEBSITE, OUR SERVICES, OR THIS AGREEMENT (HOWEVER ARISING, INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), UNLESS OTHERWISE REQUIRED BY LAW. Banks can't get away with that.
WePay reserves the right to change, modify, add, or remove portions of this Agreement (each, a "change") at any time by posting notification to the WePay website or otherwise communicating the notification to you. That's out of line for a bank-like service.
Any Claim between you and us shall be resolved, upon the election of either you or us, by binding arbitration. So you can't sue them. Banks have been in trouble for that, even for credit cards, where you owe them money. Remember, WePay is a depository institution - they hold your money. You never owe them money.
As for having a "brick and mortar" location, when I run WePay.com through SiteTruth, it reports the address of a house in San Jose. That's the address they gave the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as their place of business.
I'd thought of this a few months ago, after reading the detailed report on the 2010 flash crash. Speed of light lag wasn't quite an issue, but it was close. Stocks are mostly traded in New York, while options are traded in Chicago. Round trip time between the two is at least 7ms. That's exploitable. Lag isn't just for video gamers any more.
Unfortunately, this isn't a joke. There is now special purpose hardware for high frequency trading. General purpose computers aren't fast enough for high frequency trading. This 1U device contains FPGAs, and custom trading algorithms are written in Matlab, compiled into Verilog, and loaded into the FPGAs.
The major networks seem to be backing away from putting TV shows on the Internet. Last year, 90% of broadcast shows appeared on line, at least for a while. This year, not so much. Episodes go up and down on no clear schedule, and the lag between broadcast and online availability has increased. "The CW" just doubled their commercial density for their online episodes. (Right around that time, their broadcast market share fell below Univision.)
The producer of "Modern Family" wants that show offline. He's whining because he thinks more people would watch it from a broadcast source if they couldn't get it over the Internet. (Probably not; CBS tried that with "Gossip Girl", and it didn't help broadcast ratings.) His problem is that pay and clout in Hollywood is tied to broadcast ratings. Downloads, even with ads, don't count.
This is Slashdot. There are many self styled experts here. Some know what they're talking about. Many do not. Tread with care.
Right.
You have some things going for you here. First, your problem is controlling water and sewerage plants. Those don't need to be connected to external systems. In contrast, power grid control systems do, because there are financial systems which interconnect to the operational systems.
(Read PJM 101 to get a sense of what that's like for the nation's biggest power grid.)
Second, your system isn't that big. You probably have only one control center. The problems of securing a system with one control center and a hierarchical structure have been worked out. Distributed systems are much tougher.
Third, you're doing a new system, and can do it right. The big problems are with legacy systems that have built-in security holes.
Fourth, help is available. Sandia has a center for SCADA security, funded by DOE and Homeland Security.
Finally, if there's trouble, it will probably involve an employee. That's been the case in existing incidents. Make sure that there's no one person with the keys to everything.
What's really going on in solar is that big US companies with real manufacturing expertise are moving in.
Dow Chemical is about to release solar shingles. "About to release" means "passed UL certification last week" and "volume shipments in 2011". Solar enthusiasts have blithered about solar shingles for a decade, but Dow actually solved all the real world problems, like the roof not leaking, the interconnect system being safe, and the installation being do-able by a typical roofer.
General Eletric is now active in solar. They make not only panels, but major parts you need to really get things done, like megawatt-sized inverters.
This is where the action is. Solar is a heavy-manufacturing business, and it's the companies with experience in running big factories that are now taking over.
Again, we have some minor bit of progress in materials science being touted as a big breakthrough. They haven't fabricated anything but a hexagonal membrane, which has been done before. They're not even able to make a small prototype device. From that, it's a huge jump to "Imagine a house with windows made of this kind of material, which, combined with a solar roof, would cut its electricity costs significantly. This is pretty exciting.".
There are lots of other solar cell technologies which are much further along and still don't yield useful products. Nanosolar, a hype-based solar panel company, comes to mind. The enthusiasm for thin-film solar has decreased since ordinary solar cells became cheaper, and thin-film cells got stuck at half the efficiency of regular ones. This is turning into a manufacturing problem, not a technology one. "We grow every year with double revenue and almost double capacity. At end of the year, we will have 1.8 gigawatts of capacity and will have grown from 4,000 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 11,000." - Fang Pen, JA Solar, Shanghai.
Conductive plastic isn't a big deal. Conductive plastics are commercially available. The foam in which ICs are packed is conductive.
This is Los Alamos and Brookhaven, the old atomic labs, struggling to avoid more downsizing.
The Ivy League is the worst. Getting into MIT is hard, but so is going to MIT. (Despite this, if you get into MIT, you have a 90% chance of graduating.) Getting into the Ivy League schools is hard, but then you can make contacts and coast on academics. George Bush Jr. went to Yale and Harvard, after all.
(I went to Stanford, in CS, in the 1980s. The education was at best mediocre.)
They're still selling that thing? I thought Apple had given up on rackmount servers years ago.
It could be worse. Google has a server offering.
Google is still advertising their 1U server, the Google Search Appliance (Mini version).
Although, since that page has a date of 2005, the product may not have been updated in a while.
Google, of course, doesn't do support. Here's their FAQ on support:
Is phone support available? The Google Mini is supported through an online-only model. Our support team is available via e-mail, and is more than happy to help you with any support that you need while deploying or maintaining the Google Mini.
What if something goes wrong with the Mini hardware?
If there is a problem with the hardware while you are covered under a support plan, Google will send out a new Google Mini via overnight mail."
"What happens after 2 years of technical support and warranty? The Google Mini comes with a perpetual license so you can continue using the Google Mini for as long as you like even if you choose not to purchase a new Google Mini after 2 years. However, it is generally recommended that you upgrade your hardware as we often come out with new hardware releases within the same period. Also, in some organizations, which can include your own, compliance may require IT administrators to keep their hardware and servers under warranty and technical support. Please contact us at mini-sales@google.com for potential upgrade paths for existing customers. "
That's right, their approach to support is that you're supposed to replace your rackmount server every two years.
Nor was that thing cheap. It's priced from $3,793.95 to $9,498.95, depending on how many documents you want to index.
If pages load slow, it's very seldom because their HTML has too much white space.
Most page load delays today come from waits for loads from third-party sites. Usually ads, of course. Or because they're doing something in Javascript that's eating time in the browser.
Now, rewriting the page to remove ads - that would really speed things up. Or just replace all images from ad sites.
The server still reads the image from the ad site, so the ad site thinks it delivered the image, but there's no need to ship it down the last mile to the user.
Various people have already identified material there from the Food Network, Martha Stewart Whole Living, NPR...
Someone should run Cook's Source through TurnItIn, which has a comprehensive plagiarism search.
They just got hit on by the Los Angeles Times and Publisher's Weekly. Advertisers are reported to have canceled. One article reads "How to Kill Your Magazine".
There's potential for a great Facebook app here - the Dump-O-Meter. This would monitor messages to and from someone you're in a relationship with. Tally the positive and negative adjectives, and the response timing. If you send to your SO, how long does it take to get a response, and vice versa? How has that response time changed over time?
Collect this data for a large number of users, and observe when the "In a relationship" status changes. Dump the data into a machine learning algorithm like a support vector machine and build a predictive model. To analyze messages, repurpose a spam filter program.
Provide the user with warning messages when the predictor says the risk of being dumped is climbing. Attach ads for flowers, candy, travel, etc.
Generate revenue by selling lists of people just dumped to dating services.
I tried viewing the Capital One auto loans page with a program on one of my web sites which fetches and displays pages, refusing all cookies and removing all Flash, JavaScript, etc. The browser string sent is "SiteTruth.com site rating system"; it's not pretending to be a browser. This, of course, is a diagnostic service we run to see pages as our web crawler sees them. The only state information the site receives is the IP address, which is not changing. On successive tries, I received:
2.10%
3.10%
2.30%
3.10%
3.50% (in smaller type)
2.30%
So the rate returned is randomized.
I would question the legality of advertising random numbers as interest rates.
require an RTLS abort which is probably unsurvivable
It's certainly untried. There's never been a successful post-launch Shuttle abort. On three occasions, there have been shutdowns on the pad after engine start. STS-51F did an abort to orbit after an unexpected shutdown of one main engine. But that's a near-normal flight diverted to a lower orbit. The Challenger disaster was the closest to a situation when an RTLS might have been attempted, but the vehicle damage was too great to even try.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that whole line of storefront retail was dead, along with video rental. Hollywood Video went bankrupt a few months ago, and liquidated; all stores closed. Blockbuster went into bankruptcy in September. They have enough interim financing to keep the retail stores open through the holiday season, but most stores will probably close next year. Almost all the little guys in video rental gave up years ago, of course.
What have the game guys got that the video guys don't have?
Another computer type who thinks "3D printing" is magic. It's not.
The technology is over 20 years old now. It has become better, and you can now get plastics with some structural strength. But it's very slow. It takes hours to make simple parts. You can make plastic parts for about 100x the cost of making them in quantity by injection molding. Making simple brackets this way isn't cost-effective. When you look at the design of the "Mendel" RepRap machine, the few parts that are actually made with RepRap could be made by injection molding, probably for about $5 a set in quantities of a few thousand. Most of the machine is electronics, motors, steel shafts, and belts, none of which RepRap can make.
The big advances in making stuff are for flat stock. Laser cutting cuts flat parts fast, and there are no cutting tools to wear out. Plasma cutters do a similar job for metal and thicker materials. The newer models cut an edge clean enough that bicycle sprockets can be made on them. Water jet cutters cut cleaner, but the abrasive they use is expensive and the resulting slurry has to be disposed of.
I have a TechShop membership, and access to all these tools. They have a good stereolithography machine and a 3D scanner. Those are used mostly by design firm people making prototypes. They also have three laser cutters, which are busy about twelve hours a day, rapidly cutting flat parts from wood and plastic. The laser cutter is really easy to use, and very popular for artwork. The plasma cutter isn't used as much; it was built from a kit, and has some problems which are being slowly fixed. No water jet cutter yet. Maybe soon.
Because making one-off flat parts is now fast and easy, there's a tendency to design things to be made out of flat sections that can be laser-cut. That seems to be the way work really gets done today.
TechShop also has both manual and CNC milling machines. Those are used regularly to cut meal, but design, planning, programming, work-holding, setup, and use are much more complex than with the laser cutter.
Blender doesn't require installation. Just download the standalone tarball (or more likely a ZIP archive) and unpack it somewhere.
That's a response to the fuckup with the Windows installer. Blender.org used to recommend the Windows installer. Now, they write "ANOTHER NOTE: The preferred way for installing Blender is the .zip. When installing as administrator still creates problems for non-administrator users."
(That last sentence isn't even a sentence.) Downloading the .zip file and unpacking it does provide a single-user install, after which the start menu icon and file association have to be set manually. It's the sort of thing the command-line crowd thinks is good enough.
On the Linux side, there's the message "NOTE: 64bit build for Linux currently broken. Will be re-uploaded when fixed."
The last Blender developers meeting reports that there are "too many 'Blender doesn't start' bugs.". Er, yes.
I strongly suggest that you do check out the 2.5 betas. They are awesome.
They would be a lot more awesome if the Blender 2.5 installer worked. The installer, on a reasonably secure Windows system, installs Blender in directories such that only Adminstrator users can use it. If launched by another user, the program opens, with a nice 3D window and the default 3D cube, but no menu bar, because the menu bar files have the wrong protections. This yields a very frustrating user interface, because there are still some controls that work. Enough that you suspect that you just don't understand the new UI. You can drag and spin the cube, so clearly the program is working, right? But how do you open a file?
See Blender 2.5 Bug Tracker item #24472. Amusingly, this bug has been reported for Linux and Windows.
I wonder if Google Instant will soon compound this problem. Once you're apt to see a tidbit of a result and quickly click through, that would be quite the prime target for this type of attack.
Google Suggest (the command-completion part of Google Instant) already had a major spam problem. Google Suggest isn't driven by page rankings; it's driven by Google Trends, which was updated every few minutes. So, generating a large number of search requests in a short period could push a request to the top entries on Google Trends. That would make it appear as a suggestion in Google Suggest, driving further traffic to that search. I've seen a small mattress store at the top of Google Trends. This approach to spamming could give a site a huge traffic spike for about 45 minutes or so.
Google now seems to be updating Trends more slowly, to provide more averaging over time. This makes it harder to pull off that attack.
They really need to create a ranking system for logged in Google users so people can vote down spammy links.
Won't work. The spammy links come and go too fast. Mean lifetime of a phishing site is a few days. Since most are created automatically, dealing with the problem manually will always be struggling to catch up.
Take a look at our list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams. That's from PhishTank data, which is updated manually. The list is ordered by how long the site has been on the list. At the top are the usual suspects, with phishing pages up for as long as a year. Towards the bottom, note that seven sites were added this week, and nineteen came off the list in the last week. That level of churn is about normal.
Note that this list is only for "major" sites, ones in Open Directory. Those are legit sites who've been abused by phishers. There are tens of thousands of purposed-built phishing sites on junk domains. Those used to churn really fast in the "domain tasting" days, but with that hole plugged, there's been a little improvement. Now the phishing sites buy hosting with stolen credit card numbers and operate the site until the credit card processing system detects fraud and the hosting service shuts the site down.
Actually, US labor laws are reasonably good. But enforcement was gutted years ago. For several years, the NLRB couldn't function because of vacancies; Bush woudn't appoint anybody who wasn't anti-labor. That problem has been solved, the NLRB has a quorum again, and it's back in business.
This is an important decision, because it means that union organizing on Facebook is more likely to work.
Incidentally, if you're in the game industry, check out The Animation Guild, which represents computer graphics people at Disney, ILM, Dreamworks, etc.
Here's where WePay got the contractual language which allows them to "discard your account". They seem to have copied their terms of service from a non-financial site:
WePay TOS (2010):
You agree that WePay, in its sole discretion, for any or no reason, and without penalty, may suspend or terminate your Account (or any part thereof) or your use of the WePay Services and remove and discard all or any part of your Account at any time. WePay may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the WePay Services, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of Your access to the WePay Services or any Account you may have or portion thereof may be effected without prior notice, and you agree that WePay will not be liable to you or any third party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive or illegal activity may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies WePay may have at law or in equity.
ClickPass (2008):
You agree that Clickpass, in its sole discretion and for any or no reason, may terminate any member or customer account (or any part thereof) you may have at the Clickpass Service or your use of the Clickpass Service, and remove and discard all or any part of your account, at any time. Clickpass may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the Clickpass Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Clickpass Service or any account you may have or portion thereof may be effected without prior notice, and you agree that Clickpass shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive, or illegal activity that may be grounds for termination of your use of the Clickpass Service may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies Clickpass may have at law or in equity.
CampassCompass TOS: (2008)
You agree that CampusCompass, in its sole discretion and for any or no reason, may terminate any account (or any part thereof) you may have with CampusCompass or use of the Service and remove and discard all or any part of your account, at any time. CampusCompass may also in its sole discretion and at any time discontinue providing access to the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service or any account you may have or portion thereof may be affected without prior notice, and you agree that CampusCompass will not be liable to you or any third-party for any such termination. Any suspected fraudulent, abusive, or illegal activity that may be grounds for termination of your use of the Service may be referred to appropriate law enforcement authorities. These remedies are in addition to any other remedies CampusCompass may have at law or in equity.
For the other two services, an "account" is just a login and some files. But with WePay, an "account" has money in it. And WePay can "discard" it any time they want to, given this language. That's worse than PayPal.
The "search engine optimization" community is waking up to the fact that Google "reselling" is over. The October 27th merger of "Google Places" into Google web search wasn't about "places". It was about "businesses". Google is pulling third-party revenue in-house. Google is squeezing out "made for AdWords" sites, "directories", and other intermediaries that are just forwarding clicks. Search for "London hotels" or "DVD player", and notice how far down you have to go to see an organic search result. If you want to advertise a product that's found by search, you now talk to Google directly.
This will put a big dent in the "search engine optimization" industry. We'll see many junk sites going under, too.
Bing, having copied Google in this within days, is doing roughly the same thing.
The guys in China are getting hit by this, but they're just collateral damage of a major policy change.
If it weren't for Linux, Windows would cost $300 or so per seat.
The year of the Linux desktop probably should have been 1999. Windows 95 was too flaky, Windows 2000 was too corporate, and Windows XP was late. But the Linux crowd blew it. They had a second chance in the Vista era, and another chance in subnotebooks. Both were blown.
I've been trying to get Google to fix this phishing page for months.
Someone discovered a neat hack - they can store a phishing page in Google Storage, and link to it from Google Sites. Google's abuse system doesn't comprehend that you can leverage an attack through Google Storage, so there's no way to get that phishing page taken down.
(The basic problem is that if you offer free hosting or URL redirection, and don't validate your users, you will be used to host attacks. "TinyURL" is good at catching this. "bit.ly", not so much. "t35.com" (free hosting) works hard to kick the phishers off manually, but their abuse guy gets a week or two behind at times. "piczo.com" (blog hosting for teenage girls) doesn't seem to try very hard, and phishing pages stay live there for months. We track this automatically, so we get to watch the major sites throw out the trash. Major sites that don't automate phishing and hostile code detection, constantly reading the PhishTank and APWG lists to see if one of their pages made the list, get pwned regularly.)
The problems with PayPal are well known. PayPal should be regulated as a bank in the US, so customers have recourse to banking regulators when PayPal is holding the customer's money against the customer's will.
Not that PayPal's competitors are better. WePay got press by putting a block of ice with money inside in front of the PayPal conference. But they have miserable customer terms, like PayPal:
As for having a "brick and mortar" location, when I run WePay.com through SiteTruth, it reports the address of a house in San Jose. That's the address they gave the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as their place of business.
I'd thought of this a few months ago, after reading the detailed report on the 2010 flash crash. Speed of light lag wasn't quite an issue, but it was close. Stocks are mostly traded in New York, while options are traded in Chicago. Round trip time between the two is at least 7ms. That's exploitable. Lag isn't just for video gamers any more.
Unfortunately, this isn't a joke. There is now special purpose hardware for high frequency trading. General purpose computers aren't fast enough for high frequency trading. This 1U device contains FPGAs, and custom trading algorithms are written in Matlab, compiled into Verilog, and loaded into the FPGAs.
Vendors are advertising "8 microsecond average latency, wire to application". Not milliseconds, microseconds.
The major networks seem to be backing away from putting TV shows on the Internet. Last year, 90% of broadcast shows appeared on line, at least for a while. This year, not so much. Episodes go up and down on no clear schedule, and the lag between broadcast and online availability has increased. "The CW" just doubled their commercial density for their online episodes. (Right around that time, their broadcast market share fell below Univision.)
The producer of "Modern Family" wants that show offline. He's whining because he thinks more people would watch it from a broadcast source if they couldn't get it over the Internet. (Probably not; CBS tried that with "Gossip Girl", and it didn't help broadcast ratings.) His problem is that pay and clout in Hollywood is tied to broadcast ratings. Downloads, even with ads, don't count.
This is Slashdot. There are many self styled experts here. Some know what they're talking about. Many do not. Tread with care.
Right.
You have some things going for you here. First, your problem is controlling water and sewerage plants. Those don't need to be connected to external systems. In contrast, power grid control systems do, because there are financial systems which interconnect to the operational systems. (Read PJM 101 to get a sense of what that's like for the nation's biggest power grid.)
Second, your system isn't that big. You probably have only one control center. The problems of securing a system with one control center and a hierarchical structure have been worked out. Distributed systems are much tougher.
Third, you're doing a new system, and can do it right. The big problems are with legacy systems that have built-in security holes.
Fourth, help is available. Sandia has a center for SCADA security, funded by DOE and Homeland Security.
Finally, if there's trouble, it will probably involve an employee. That's been the case in existing incidents. Make sure that there's no one person with the keys to everything.
What's really going on in solar is that big US companies with real manufacturing expertise are moving in.
This is where the action is. Solar is a heavy-manufacturing business, and it's the companies with experience in running big factories that are now taking over.
Again, we have some minor bit of progress in materials science being touted as a big breakthrough. They haven't fabricated anything but a hexagonal membrane, which has been done before. They're not even able to make a small prototype device. From that, it's a huge jump to "Imagine a house with windows made of this kind of material, which, combined with a solar roof, would cut its electricity costs significantly. This is pretty exciting.". There are lots of other solar cell technologies which are much further along and still don't yield useful products. Nanosolar, a hype-based solar panel company, comes to mind. The enthusiasm for thin-film solar has decreased since ordinary solar cells became cheaper, and thin-film cells got stuck at half the efficiency of regular ones. This is turning into a manufacturing problem, not a technology one. "We grow every year with double revenue and almost double capacity. At end of the year, we will have 1.8 gigawatts of capacity and will have grown from 4,000 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 11,000." - Fang Pen, JA Solar, Shanghai.
Conductive plastic isn't a big deal. Conductive plastics are commercially available. The foam in which ICs are packed is conductive.
This is Los Alamos and Brookhaven, the old atomic labs, struggling to avoid more downsizing.
The Ivy League is the worst. Getting into MIT is hard, but so is going to MIT. (Despite this, if you get into MIT, you have a 90% chance of graduating.) Getting into the Ivy League schools is hard, but then you can make contacts and coast on academics. George Bush Jr. went to Yale and Harvard, after all.
(I went to Stanford, in CS, in the 1980s. The education was at best mediocre.)
They're still selling that thing? I thought Apple had given up on rackmount servers years ago.
It could be worse. Google has a server offering. Google is still advertising their 1U server, the Google Search Appliance (Mini version). Although, since that page has a date of 2005, the product may not have been updated in a while.
Google, of course, doesn't do support. Here's their FAQ on support:
The Google Mini is supported through an online-only model. Our support team is available via e-mail, and is more than happy to help you with any support that you need while deploying or maintaining the Google Mini.
If there is a problem with the hardware while you are covered under a support plan, Google will send out a new Google Mini via overnight mail."
The Google Mini comes with a perpetual license so you can continue using the Google Mini for as long as you like even if you choose not to purchase a new Google Mini after 2 years. However, it is generally recommended that you upgrade your hardware as we often come out with new hardware releases within the same period. Also, in some organizations, which can include your own, compliance may require IT administrators to keep their hardware and servers under warranty and technical support. Please contact us at mini-sales@google.com for potential upgrade paths for existing customers. "
That's right, their approach to support is that you're supposed to replace your rackmount server every two years.
Nor was that thing cheap. It's priced from $3,793.95 to $9,498.95, depending on how many documents you want to index.
If pages load slow, it's very seldom because their HTML has too much white space.
Most page load delays today come from waits for loads from third-party sites. Usually ads, of course. Or because they're doing something in Javascript that's eating time in the browser.
Now, rewriting the page to remove ads - that would really speed things up. Or just replace all images from ad sites. The server still reads the image from the ad site, so the ad site thinks it delivered the image, but there's no need to ship it down the last mile to the user.
Various people have already identified material there from the Food Network, Martha Stewart Whole Living, NPR...
Someone should run Cook's Source through TurnItIn, which has a comprehensive plagiarism search.
They just got hit on by the Los Angeles Times and Publisher's Weekly. Advertisers are reported to have canceled. One article reads "How to Kill Your Magazine".
There's potential for a great Facebook app here - the Dump-O-Meter. This would monitor messages to and from someone you're in a relationship with. Tally the positive and negative adjectives, and the response timing. If you send to your SO, how long does it take to get a response, and vice versa? How has that response time changed over time?
Collect this data for a large number of users, and observe when the "In a relationship" status changes. Dump the data into a machine learning algorithm like a support vector machine and build a predictive model. To analyze messages, repurpose a spam filter program.
Provide the user with warning messages when the predictor says the risk of being dumped is climbing. Attach ads for flowers, candy, travel, etc.
Generate revenue by selling lists of people just dumped to dating services.
I tried viewing the Capital One auto loans page with a program on one of my web sites which fetches and displays pages, refusing all cookies and removing all Flash, JavaScript, etc. The browser string sent is "SiteTruth.com site rating system"; it's not pretending to be a browser. This, of course, is a diagnostic service we run to see pages as our web crawler sees them. The only state information the site receives is the IP address, which is not changing. On successive tries, I received:
So the rate returned is randomized.
I would question the legality of advertising random numbers as interest rates.
If the enemy is willing to tell you their plans, pay attention.
require an RTLS abort which is probably unsurvivable
It's certainly untried. There's never been a successful post-launch Shuttle abort. On three occasions, there have been shutdowns on the pad after engine start. STS-51F did an abort to orbit after an unexpected shutdown of one main engine. But that's a near-normal flight diverted to a lower orbit. The Challenger disaster was the closest to a situation when an RTLS might have been attempted, but the vehicle damage was too great to even try.