By 2005 the city had accumulated $1.4 billion in missed pension fund payments. They didn't have that $1.4 billion so had to borrow it through the issuance of bonds (aka promise of payment.) That is nothing like having $1.4 billion in assets and then borrowing against it. The city literally did not have the $1.4 billion. That was also before the recession so you dont get to cite it as the reason for Detroits problems. Full stop.
Secondly, there arent hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around wallstreet. There arent even hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around the entire planet.
Thirdly, you are an idiot if you think that I would support that Quantitative Easing shit.
You see someone that argues that Detroits problems is the overly strong union influence, and just assume that someone against a strong influence of labor on governments would naturally be for this quantitative easing shit, right?
Yeah.. sorry pal.. you are repeatedly wrong. Wrong about Detroit's problems, wrong about Detroits Pensions, wrong about the amount of money on wallstreet, and wrong about what I support and do not support.
When will you admit that strong, well backed arguments begin with research rather than declarations. You don't pick a cause and then find a problem.. you pick a problem and then find the cause.
I have absolutely nothing against private unions, and my only beef with public unions is that legislators are allowed to negotiate with the money of far-off-in-the-future tax payers. It should be illegal, as in taxation without representation start-a-revolution-illegal. All public pensions should be funded immediately with no promises at all about future benefits, because such promises can only be kept by unrepresented future people.
I have a big beef with the FED. The FED should be abolished as unconstitutional. oh, and BTW, the FED is not "the feds" -- the FED is not a government entity... hell, its not even owned by the FED like the USPS is. You should have at least known that before going off about quantitative easing.
If those pensions were fully funded, then they would not be considered a debt that the city owes.
You have been lied to. Detroits pension funds are valued at $5 billion right now. The unfunded estimate is another $3.4 billion that the city currently owes. Thats only 60% funded no matter how you slice it.
Those that claim that Detroit had a 100% funded pension system in place were doing creative accounting, such as adding in future payments from the city as if they were real, and ignoring the method previous payments had to be made.
Not only will the city not be making the future payments that would make the funds solvent, this city specifically is notorious for not making them. In 1991 the public unions had to go to court to force the city to pay money into the funds. Fast forward past a long string of other pension funding issues, in 2005 the city had to borrow $1.4 billion to catch up on payments to the funds. The city was then on the hook for that $1.4 billion plus interest on top of the continuing problem of not being able to make payments.
Guess when those "100% funded" calculations are from? Right after the city borrowed that $1.4 billion to precisely meet its unfunded obligations. Thats creative accounting, and the people that told you that it was 100% funded were cherry picking the start year also. The city still owed that $1.4 billion which it didnt have, so now instead of the funds not getting that $1.4 billion.. the pension funds wont get $3.4 billion. Amazing how stuff works in reality.
Then don't use 8 letter passwords. 11 random alphanumerics at 180e9 tries per second is 62^11/180e9/(60*60*24) = 3345 days
..1600 days next year, 800 days the year after, 400 days the year after that,...
Not to mention that we are talking about a 25 GPU's rig. I'm quite certain that some botnet owners have access to a hundred thousand decent GPU's, and a million not-so-decent GPU's. Welcome to reality.
The USPS wouldnt actually be in the red if it werent for the stupid rules congress imposed on them a few years back where they are the only federal entity that has to have 100% retirement funds paid for
They would indeed still be in the red.. the negative outlook would just be hidden as "a future problem" -- If you have a $50 billion dollar liability, but you dont have $50 billion dollars, then you are by every rational sense "in the red."
The USPS workers will emerge from this far more healthy than anyone else in the public sector.
Aside from this obvious partisan bullshit you just spewed, your argument is essentially "the USPS is the only entity required to actually act in a responsible manner with regard to pensions - thats unfair to the USPS!"
No, its not unfair. What is unfair is the fact that many other public sector workers are likely to get fucked out of their pensions. Detroit isnt the first city to declare bankruptcy because of their growing pension problem. The list is growing, and within 10 years it will be hundreds of cities (its already dozens.)
Wake the fuck up. Public sector unions never should have been able to negotiate pension deals that werent based on the immediate funding of them. The public sector workers of Detroit, in concert with the local officials, were trying to steal from future (often too young to vote, or not even born yet) tax payers when they negotiated their packages 20+ years ago.
Now onto your partisan bullshit. You are claiming that Detroit is a conservative city? Really? There is no city in the world that has more influential unions. Detroit is a union city, ruined by union policies.
Ok. That is fast. Still - there are two md5 hashes with a salt added - so it would likely take 52 minutes - although I think you could call that a distinction without a difference.
Dont forget that since the users account name isnt part of the salt (or so I presume, given the bad hashing practice already noted by others), then every accounts hash can be attacked simultaneously. Thats 26 or 52 minutes to crack the password of every single account.
You know why these signs get put up? Because someone living in the area has a hard-on about the speeding on the road, but the police are not willing to enforce the speed limit there. This person petitions the local city council, mayor, etc and as a compromise and to shut the person up, they put up the sign.
For an 8 character alphanumeric with a few symbols, thats about 48 bits of entropy, which equates to 1564 seconds (26 minutes) to try every single possible input. Since you used a 128-bit hash on 48 bits of entropy, the odds are very very very good that only one single input will result in the stored MD5 hash.
Thus the attack knows precisely what the original password was in only 26 minutes, which fits the definition of "reversing" the hash in no more than 26 minutes.
The cluster can try 180 billion combinations per second against the widely used MD5 algorithm
Realize that an 8 character password is only about 48 bits of entropy, so if you find a key that hashes to that 128-bit MD5 hash code then its almost certain that that is in fact the password and not just a random collision. I am appalled at the horrible password "protection" practice in use today. In the 1980's we knew better and didnt store the entire god damned hash.
The problem is that Apple's lineup doesn't update as frequently as ***every competitor combined***, so people like to bitch nine months after launch that an Apple computer is overpriced.
No, the problem is that the price doesnt update as frequently as every other competitor.
You are arguing a straw man right now. Nobody complained that Apple doesnt update their Air feature set more frequently. The complaint continues to be that Apple will try to sell this ultrabook at the current price well beyond the point where competitors have much nicer solutions at much lower prices.
The proof is quite simple:
If you purchased an 11.6" Macbook Air 30 days ago, it cost you $1100 but what was inside was a 1.7ghz i5-3317U, 128GB SSD, 4GB DDR3, with a 1366x768 display.
These specific features are common in ultrabooks, but for the same money you can have an upgrade:
It is (or should be) well known that signs like these are a lie. All my life I have seen these "speed limit enforced by aircraft" signs, which tells me that there is no speed enforcement on that road at all.
If there was actual speed enforcement on the road, they wouldn't jeopardize the revenue stream by putting up signs.
he NSA has a portfolio of affairs, abuses of power, criminal behavior, tax fraud, drug abuse, etc. on every member of the government.
I would like to believe that there are at least a couple members of government for which a portfolio containing that sort of data would be empty. The idea that of the hundreds of congressmen and senators, that none of them at all have avoided committing these serious violations of the law just doesnt seem reasonable. Its reasonable to suppose that most of them are guilty of serious violations of the law, but not all of them.
I don't know how these parallella boards work, but hopefully they would be a bit more versatile.
There is almost no chance that a $100 board can be designed to have a memory interface that can keep 64 cores well fed at this point in time. They have almost certainly chosen low latency cache model over high bandwidth cache model due to this, so this product will probably only perform well on highly computational problems that dont require much memory - in other words none of the problems that GPU's struggle with will likely be any better on it.
32 bits is small enough that an offline attack with a stolen password file will succeed.
Offline attacks will always succeed because the search space is smaller than you think. 8 character alphanumeric with a few symbols is about 48 bits of entropy supplied by the user. A 25 GPU setup has been clocked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second, so about a 4467 second upper limit to the time it takes to try 100% of the possibilities.
I use 512 bit SHA2 with a 256 bit hashed salt and have had zero issues.
A 25 GPU setup has been benchmarked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second.
How long are these passwords? 8 characters, with uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and a few symbols? yeah.. thats search space is about 2^48 in size. it is irrelevant that you used a 256-bit hash in that regard.
Upper bound on brute forcing an 8-character SHA hashed password is 4467 seconds. The problem is that there will be exactly 1 result after the entire 8-character brute force because you used a 256-bit hash, and that 1 result will be the exact password of the user.. making every single place that the user used the password vulnerable.
Which is going to have fewer collisions and which will take longer to brute-force?
Except that when someone brute forces that 512 bit hash, the they know the exact password because the password wasnt anywhere near as long as the damn 64 byte hash.
That then leads to every place that the user used the password being vulnerable. In other words, you did not do the user a favor by using the 512 bit hash. You instead fucked the user over by using a 512 bit hash because the only thing you did was slow the attacker down. You didnt do due diligence to prevent the attacker from knowing the password.
Yes, 2^512 is a big number. Guess what? Nobody is using passwords that effectively utilize that space. In practice for the case of 8 byte passwords, the search space is only about 48 bits in size (uppercase, lowercase, numeric, a few symbols) not the 512 that you are jizzing over. A 25 GPU setup has been benchmarked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second. Thats an upper limit of 4467 seconds to brute force a password.
Hash collisions is a SECURITY FEATURE. You want that brute force to produce millions or billions of collisions, so that the users actual password is still unknown.
No, what did Detroit in was spending more than they could afford, and particularly by stealing from its future generations to fund the profligacy of 30 years previous to now.
Thats part of what did Detroit in, but Detroit actually demonstrates the result of a trifecta of structural problems. No other city that I am aware of declared war on the middle class (a city income tax, highest property taxes in the region, and so on) the way that Detroit did, leading to an exodus of the middle class resulting in a rapidly dwindling tax base.
It is easily argued as well that LZW was non-obvious since its an extension of a 1978 compression method yet wasn't considered by anybody until 1984. People often confuse "simple" which the Welch enhancement to LZ78 was, with "obvious" which the Welch enhancement to LZ78 was not (it was not obviously an enhancement.)
Given the number of compression patents handed out during the period, it is quite clear that there was aggressive competition with regards to compression technology and anything "obvious" was immediately picked up on (ex: LZ77 vs LZ78.. the LZ78 enhancement of using a preinitialized dictionary was obvious, and no surprise came less than a year after LZ77)
Its not just licensing. The reason that most things use these older compression algorithms is that they are very near optimal for the memory requirements that they demand. If you want your data format to be decompressible on an embedded device with 1 meg of memory then clearly the decompression algorithm cant demand a 2 megabyte entropy model in practice.
Lots of compressors are much better than ZIP (with regard to compressed file size), and in fact lots are also much better than RAR which the pirate community so often uses. Nobody is using any of the top 10 methodologies.
The best compressor for raw bitmaps is currently PAQ8PX which is benchmarked at 1.0392 bits per byte while WINRAR and WINZIP are benchmarked at 1.5194 b/B and 2.4185 b/B respectively. To be clear what I am saying here, that PAQ8PX offers the same level of improvement over WINRAR than WINRAR offers over WINZIP yet still people mainly use ZIP, rarely RAR, and never PAQ.
If you have ever played with the PAQ family of compressors.. they are dog slow (less than 1 megabyte per second) and use lots of memory (often a gigabyte or more of memory.)
There's an easy example of this happening in recent history, where Unisys' assertion of the LZW patent as it applied to GIF spurred the development of the far superior PNG format.
The flaw here is that PNG didnt use any new algorithms. PNG was superior in that is allowed more than just 8-bit images, and supported alpha channels, but PNG simply used the same DEFLATE (LZ77 + Huffman) compression algorithm as already well known and implemented in PKZIP v2.0 archives.
Nope, that;s capitalism all right. Benefits in a capitalist system accrue to the minority who own the capital.
You are incorrect sir. The benefits accrue to everyone involved. You are misinterpreting growing capital base as a benefit. Benefits are goods and services, not currency.
A simple example is the washing machine.
216 years ago (1797) the common person had to wash their own clothes using a device called a washboard, and it literally took hours of hard manual labor to get clothing clean. At that same time, people with large amounts of capital did not have to wash their own clothes, instead they paid others to do it for them.
155 years ago (1858) the first rotary washing machine was invented and patented.
139 years ago (1874) the first in-home washing machine was invented and patented.
115 years ago (1908) the first electric powered fully automatic washing machine was invented and patented.
Fast forward to today, and basically nobody in the United States performs hours of manual labor in order to have clean clothes. Even at its most expensive where a person pays $1.25 per load of laundry, thats only a trade-off of minutes of even minimum wage labor.
The benefits of capitalism were not felt by the rich man, men that haven't had to spend hours scrubbing their own clothes for over 200 years, but instead the benefits are felt by everyone such that no man at all now has to spend hours scrubbing their clothes.
Money is a means of trading labor. Our poor get more value for their labor today than they have ever gotten in the past and that my friend is the proof that refutes the notion that our poor are getting poorer, as well as proof that the concentration of capital is actually good, for it was men seeking large concentrations of capital that brought us things like the washing machine, the telephone, heating and air conditioning, automobiles, widespread food availability, the computer, textiles, cures for diseases, and so on and on.
The real benefits are the ever increasing supply of goods and services that continually become more and more affordable, never the piles of capital that only put men on the cutting edge. The march forward continues, and everyone benefits.
Ah yes, because somebody who entices another to do wrong and benefits it must be excused in the name of free enterprise.
Thats exactly what the public employee did. They enticed a private entity to do wrong, using public money, for the purposes of furthering their own career and perhaps enrich their cousin.
its not rational to blame the receiver of the money because they didn't have control over the destiny of the money. Wanting money is not illegal. You must blame those in control, or else you are just apologizing and making excuses for them.
("entices another to do wrong" indeed... those poor public servants, so gullible and idiotic they are, that they just cannot be blamed for what they did)
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Are you shitting me?
By 2005 the city had accumulated $1.4 billion in missed pension fund payments. They didn't have that $1.4 billion so had to borrow it through the issuance of bonds (aka promise of payment.) That is nothing like having $1.4 billion in assets and then borrowing against it. The city literally did not have the $1.4 billion. That was also before the recession so you dont get to cite it as the reason for Detroits problems. Full stop.
Secondly, there arent hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around wallstreet. There arent even hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around the entire planet.
Thirdly, you are an idiot if you think that I would support that Quantitative Easing shit.
You see someone that argues that Detroits problems is the overly strong union influence, and just assume that someone against a strong influence of labor on governments would naturally be for this quantitative easing shit, right?
Yeah.. sorry pal.. you are repeatedly wrong. Wrong about Detroit's problems, wrong about Detroits Pensions, wrong about the amount of money on wallstreet, and wrong about what I support and do not support.
When will you admit that strong, well backed arguments begin with research rather than declarations. You don't pick a cause and then find a problem.. you pick a problem and then find the cause.
I have absolutely nothing against private unions, and my only beef with public unions is that legislators are allowed to negotiate with the money of far-off-in-the-future tax payers. It should be illegal, as in taxation without representation start-a-revolution-illegal. All public pensions should be funded immediately with no promises at all about future benefits, because such promises can only be kept by unrepresented future people.
I have a big beef with the FED. The FED should be abolished as unconstitutional. oh, and BTW, the FED is not "the feds" -- the FED is not a government entity... hell, its not even owned by the FED like the USPS is. You should have at least known that before going off about quantitative easing.
If those pensions were fully funded, then they would not be considered a debt that the city owes.
You have been lied to. Detroits pension funds are valued at $5 billion right now. The unfunded estimate is another $3.4 billion that the city currently owes. Thats only 60% funded no matter how you slice it.
Those that claim that Detroit had a 100% funded pension system in place were doing creative accounting, such as adding in future payments from the city as if they were real, and ignoring the method previous payments had to be made.
Not only will the city not be making the future payments that would make the funds solvent, this city specifically is notorious for not making them. In 1991 the public unions had to go to court to force the city to pay money into the funds. Fast forward past a long string of other pension funding issues, in 2005 the city had to borrow $1.4 billion to catch up on payments to the funds. The city was then on the hook for that $1.4 billion plus interest on top of the continuing problem of not being able to make payments.
Guess when those "100% funded" calculations are from? Right after the city borrowed that $1.4 billion to precisely meet its unfunded obligations. Thats creative accounting, and the people that told you that it was 100% funded were cherry picking the start year also. The city still owed that $1.4 billion which it didnt have, so now instead of the funds not getting that $1.4 billion.. the pension funds wont get $3.4 billion. Amazing how stuff works in reality.
Then don't use 8 letter passwords. 11 random alphanumerics at 180e9 tries per second is 62^11/180e9/(60*60*24) = 3345 days
Not to mention that we are talking about a 25 GPU's rig. I'm quite certain that some botnet owners have access to a hundred thousand decent GPU's, and a million not-so-decent GPU's. Welcome to reality.
The USPS wouldnt actually be in the red if it werent for the stupid rules congress imposed on them a few years back where they are the only federal entity that has to have 100% retirement funds paid for
They would indeed still be in the red.. the negative outlook would just be hidden as "a future problem" -- If you have a $50 billion dollar liability, but you dont have $50 billion dollars, then you are by every rational sense "in the red."
The USPS workers will emerge from this far more healthy than anyone else in the public sector.
Aside from this obvious partisan bullshit you just spewed, your argument is essentially "the USPS is the only entity required to actually act in a responsible manner with regard to pensions - thats unfair to the USPS!"
No, its not unfair. What is unfair is the fact that many other public sector workers are likely to get fucked out of their pensions. Detroit isnt the first city to declare bankruptcy because of their growing pension problem. The list is growing, and within 10 years it will be hundreds of cities (its already dozens.)
Wake the fuck up. Public sector unions never should have been able to negotiate pension deals that werent based on the immediate funding of them. The public sector workers of Detroit, in concert with the local officials, were trying to steal from future (often too young to vote, or not even born yet) tax payers when they negotiated their packages 20+ years ago.
Now onto your partisan bullshit. You are claiming that Detroit is a conservative city? Really? There is no city in the world that has more influential unions. Detroit is a union city, ruined by union policies.
Ok. That is fast. Still - there are two md5 hashes with a salt added - so it would likely take 52 minutes - although I think you could call that a distinction without a difference.
Dont forget that since the users account name isnt part of the salt (or so I presume, given the bad hashing practice already noted by others), then every accounts hash can be attacked simultaneously. Thats 26 or 52 minutes to crack the password of every single account.
To expand further on this, it is a violation of CWE-257 to store a much wider hash than the passwords entropy.
"The storage of passwords in a recoverable format makes them subject to password reuse attacks by malicious users."
Storing a 128-bit hash of a typical password, due to their much lower entropy, is in fact storing it in a recoverable format.
Yes, police never lie.
You know why these signs get put up? Because someone living in the area has a hard-on about the speeding on the road, but the police are not willing to enforce the speed limit there. This person petitions the local city council, mayor, etc and as a compromise and to shut the person up, they put up the sign.
How do you reverse an MD5 hash if it is not?
You try all possible inputs at a rate of 180 billion combinations per second.
For an 8 character alphanumeric with a few symbols, thats about 48 bits of entropy, which equates to 1564 seconds (26 minutes) to try every single possible input. Since you used a 128-bit hash on 48 bits of entropy, the odds are very very very good that only one single input will result in the stored MD5 hash.
Thus the attack knows precisely what the original password was in only 26 minutes, which fits the definition of "reversing" the hash in no more than 26 minutes.
Indeed...
Here is a 25 GPU cluster that can go after MD5 hashes.
The cluster can try 180 billion combinations per second against the widely used MD5 algorithm
Realize that an 8 character password is only about 48 bits of entropy, so if you find a key that hashes to that 128-bit MD5 hash code then its almost certain that that is in fact the password and not just a random collision. I am appalled at the horrible password "protection" practice in use today. In the 1980's we knew better and didnt store the entire god damned hash.
Smart people?
The problem is that Apple's lineup doesn't update as frequently as ***every competitor combined***, so people like to bitch nine months after launch that an Apple computer is overpriced.
No, the problem is that the price doesnt update as frequently as every other competitor.
You are arguing a straw man right now. Nobody complained that Apple doesnt update their Air feature set more frequently. The complaint continues to be that Apple will try to sell this ultrabook at the current price well beyond the point where competitors have much nicer solutions at much lower prices.
The proof is quite simple:
If you purchased an 11.6" Macbook Air 30 days ago, it cost you $1100 but what was inside was a 1.7ghz i5-3317U, 128GB SSD, 4GB DDR3, with a 1366x768 display.
These specific features are common in ultrabooks, but for the same money you can have an upgrade:
Same price (little lower actually), 1.7ghz i5-3317U, 128GB SSD, 4GB DDR3, 11.6" 1920x1080 touch screen, convertible.
How about a faster CPU too, 1.8ghz i5-3337U, 128GB SSD, 4GB DDR3, 11.6" 1920x1080 touch screen, convertible.
Wow, its $100 cheaper!, 1.8ghz i5-3337U, 128GB SSD, 8GB DDR3, 11.6" 1920x1080 touch screen, convertible.
The Apple Premium remained in full effect for ultrabook shoppers last month, and will be again be in full effect a month from now too.
It is (or should be) well known that signs like these are a lie. All my life I have seen these "speed limit enforced by aircraft" signs, which tells me that there is no speed enforcement on that road at all.
If there was actual speed enforcement on the road, they wouldn't jeopardize the revenue stream by putting up signs.
he NSA has a portfolio of affairs, abuses of power, criminal behavior, tax fraud, drug abuse, etc. on every member of the government.
I would like to believe that there are at least a couple members of government for which a portfolio containing that sort of data would be empty. The idea that of the hundreds of congressmen and senators, that none of them at all have avoided committing these serious violations of the law just doesnt seem reasonable. Its reasonable to suppose that most of them are guilty of serious violations of the law, but not all of them.
I don't know how these parallella boards work, but hopefully they would be a bit more versatile.
There is almost no chance that a $100 board can be designed to have a memory interface that can keep 64 cores well fed at this point in time. They have almost certainly chosen low latency cache model over high bandwidth cache model due to this, so this product will probably only perform well on highly computational problems that dont require much memory - in other words none of the problems that GPU's struggle with will likely be any better on it.
32 bits is small enough that an offline attack with a stolen password file will succeed.
Offline attacks will always succeed because the search space is smaller than you think. 8 character alphanumeric with a few symbols is about 48 bits of entropy supplied by the user. A 25 GPU setup has been clocked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second, so about a 4467 second upper limit to the time it takes to try 100% of the possibilities.
I use 512 bit SHA2 with a 256 bit hashed salt and have had zero issues.
A 25 GPU setup has been benchmarked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second.
How long are these passwords? 8 characters, with uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and a few symbols? yeah.. thats search space is about 2^48 in size. it is irrelevant that you used a 256-bit hash in that regard.
Upper bound on brute forcing an 8-character SHA hashed password is 4467 seconds. The problem is that there will be exactly 1 result after the entire 8-character brute force because you used a 256-bit hash, and that 1 result will be the exact password of the user.. making every single place that the user used the password vulnerable.
Which is going to have fewer collisions and which will take longer to brute-force?
Except that when someone brute forces that 512 bit hash, the they know the exact password because the password wasnt anywhere near as long as the damn 64 byte hash.
That then leads to every place that the user used the password being vulnerable. In other words, you did not do the user a favor by using the 512 bit hash. You instead fucked the user over by using a 512 bit hash because the only thing you did was slow the attacker down. You didnt do due diligence to prevent the attacker from knowing the password.
Yes, 2^512 is a big number. Guess what? Nobody is using passwords that effectively utilize that space. In practice for the case of 8 byte passwords, the search space is only about 48 bits in size (uppercase, lowercase, numeric, a few symbols) not the 512 that you are jizzing over. A 25 GPU setup has been benchmarked at 63 billion SHA hashes per second. Thats an upper limit of 4467 seconds to brute force a password.
Hash collisions is a SECURITY FEATURE. You want that brute force to produce millions or billions of collisions, so that the users actual password is still unknown.
No, what did Detroit in was spending more than they could afford, and particularly by stealing from its future generations to fund the profligacy of 30 years previous to now.
Thats part of what did Detroit in, but Detroit actually demonstrates the result of a trifecta of structural problems. No other city that I am aware of declared war on the middle class (a city income tax, highest property taxes in the region, and so on) the way that Detroit did, leading to an exodus of the middle class resulting in a rapidly dwindling tax base.
It is easily argued as well that LZW was non-obvious since its an extension of a 1978 compression method yet wasn't considered by anybody until 1984. People often confuse "simple" which the Welch enhancement to LZ78 was, with "obvious" which the Welch enhancement to LZ78 was not (it was not obviously an enhancement.)
.. the LZ78 enhancement of using a preinitialized dictionary was obvious, and no surprise came less than a year after LZ77)
Given the number of compression patents handed out during the period, it is quite clear that there was aggressive competition with regards to compression technology and anything "obvious" was immediately picked up on (ex: LZ77 vs LZ78
Its not just licensing. The reason that most things use these older compression algorithms is that they are very near optimal for the memory requirements that they demand. If you want your data format to be decompressible on an embedded device with 1 meg of memory then clearly the decompression algorithm cant demand a 2 megabyte entropy model in practice.
Lots of compressors are much better than ZIP (with regard to compressed file size), and in fact lots are also much better than RAR which the pirate community so often uses. Nobody is using any of the top 10 methodologies.
The best compressor for raw bitmaps is currently PAQ8PX which is benchmarked at 1.0392 bits per byte while WINRAR and WINZIP are benchmarked at 1.5194 b/B and 2.4185 b/B respectively. To be clear what I am saying here, that PAQ8PX offers the same level of improvement over WINRAR than WINRAR offers over WINZIP yet still people mainly use ZIP, rarely RAR, and never PAQ.
If you have ever played with the PAQ family of compressors.. they are dog slow (less than 1 megabyte per second) and use lots of memory (often a gigabyte or more of memory.)
There's an easy example of this happening in recent history, where Unisys' assertion of the LZW patent as it applied to GIF spurred the development of the far superior PNG format.
The flaw here is that PNG didnt use any new algorithms. PNG was superior in that is allowed more than just 8-bit images, and supported alpha channels, but PNG simply used the same DEFLATE (LZ77 + Huffman) compression algorithm as already well known and implemented in PKZIP v2.0 archives.
Nope, that;s capitalism all right. Benefits in a capitalist system accrue to the minority who own the capital.
You are incorrect sir. The benefits accrue to everyone involved. You are misinterpreting growing capital base as a benefit. Benefits are goods and services, not currency.
A simple example is the washing machine.
216 years ago (1797) the common person had to wash their own clothes using a device called a washboard, and it literally took hours of hard manual labor to get clothing clean. At that same time, people with large amounts of capital did not have to wash their own clothes, instead they paid others to do it for them.
155 years ago (1858) the first rotary washing machine was invented and patented.
139 years ago (1874) the first in-home washing machine was invented and patented.
115 years ago (1908) the first electric powered fully automatic washing machine was invented and patented.
Fast forward to today, and basically nobody in the United States performs hours of manual labor in order to have clean clothes. Even at its most expensive where a person pays $1.25 per load of laundry, thats only a trade-off of minutes of even minimum wage labor.
The benefits of capitalism were not felt by the rich man, men that haven't had to spend hours scrubbing their own clothes for over 200 years, but instead the benefits are felt by everyone such that no man at all now has to spend hours scrubbing their clothes.
Money is a means of trading labor. Our poor get more value for their labor today than they have ever gotten in the past and that my friend is the proof that refutes the notion that our poor are getting poorer, as well as proof that the concentration of capital is actually good, for it was men seeking large concentrations of capital that brought us things like the washing machine, the telephone, heating and air conditioning, automobiles, widespread food availability, the computer, textiles, cures for diseases, and so on and on.
The real benefits are the ever increasing supply of goods and services that continually become more and more affordable, never the piles of capital that only put men on the cutting edge. The march forward continues, and everyone benefits.
Ah yes, because somebody who entices another to do wrong and benefits it must be excused in the name of free enterprise.
Thats exactly what the public employee did. They enticed a private entity to do wrong, using public money, for the purposes of furthering their own career and perhaps enrich their cousin.
its not rational to blame the receiver of the money because they didn't have control over the destiny of the money. Wanting money is not illegal. You must blame those in control, or else you are just apologizing and making excuses for them.
("entices another to do wrong" indeed... those poor public servants, so gullible and idiotic they are, that they just cannot be blamed for what they did)
Without the cameras they can then claim that all of the students attended...