I suspect that in their opinion they won't think they're gathering too much info till they need petabytes or exabytes of storage, if you know what I mean.
So, any bright sparks know how to create a way to give them enough info so that they stop asking us for info?
Clicking on something or making an HTTP access to something doesn't make it a legal contract. Tons of people click I agree coz they want to update their PC.
Mine are closer to "always wrong", that's why they need me and I have a job:). If they were always right the only reason for a consultant would be to shift blame (which does happen, but those jobs usually aren't nice).
While they are wrong, customers should be treated with courtesy and respect as far as possible - like guests in your house (it's hard when they're stubborn idiots and have outstayed their welcome...).
But I don't see the big deal. Aren't there plenty of alternatives to Best Buy? Is Best Buy really cheaper or better after all that?
Think about it, if they give you so much hassle while you are _buying_ their stuff, how would you expect to be treated when you have problems with their stuff?
They still can have new games and they should before the old stuff gets "real old". But what they need is a new game that enhances the "network effects"- more and more players playing the "same game".
So it has to be compatible with the existing game. e.g. even if it's a new world with different rules etc, the players can be migrated between them, (and probably communicate with each other between worlds - pick the right cost- heck link the "Ether resistance" to the CPU/bandwidth usage if you want) e.g. wormhole/teleport or whatever. Let them retain their attributes and some of their stuff (you could force them to leave behind some items- can't take everything back in the old world).
If you want you could even force them to spend X gp/credits/USD/items etc to travel between the worlds. Or make it a quest or something. Come up with a story.
Maybe some things become transformed into other things during the transfer (greater risk/chance of arbitrage opportunities if you do that).
If lots of players move to the new world, then you can retask/reassign the resources for the old world for the new world.
It is better for you to risk cannibalizing your old game than for SOMEONE ELSE to cannibalize yours.
Perhaps I totally don't get it coz I'm not an MMORPG player or designer. But I don't see why my idea is any worse than frustrating their _developers_. Good developers/artists want to see their work become reality, bad ones are relieved if it never does:).
Cancel stuff enough times and they'll make a new game - for a competitor.
"Perhaps you would like to tell me what single application is run on 95% of the world's UNIX/Linux boxes that becomes a similar point of attack for a UNIX worm?"
Actually the worms are mainly exploiting human ignorance and stupidity not Windows or MS stuff.
It's a _fact_ that MANY windows users were actually willing to _unzip_ a password encrypted worm and then run it, means that the corresponding apps for Linux could be: tar, gunzip and make. Anyway, most Linux and *BSD systems have sshd running, and openssh has not had such a great track record itself.
Heck, an obfuscated perl script that does something clever in addition to spreading itself would work too.
Most people are ignorant of these sort of things and you can't expect them not to be. And there's plenty of stupid people around too.
Most other popular O/Ses would be JUST as vulnerable to the same users given similar functionality. Lock up users in a green screen and they won't use the PC much and so there'll be "fewer probs", "fortunately" Gnome,KDE etc are working hard to bring MS style stuff to Linux. If Linux Desktop is ready AND accepted by the masses, the masses will not disappoint us - there'll be tons of Linux trojans spreading the net. Think about it - once "Greeting Cards", "Cool Screensavers", "Animated Cartoons" and their ilk run on Linux, and users get used to running "Fun/Cool" stuff, guess what will happen.
So far most popular operating systems by default run programs with the full privileges of the controlling user. If they by default ran programs with restricted privileges then things would be harder. On my present system, IE runs as a separate user with fewer privileges than the normal user account I use for other stuff. This way it is harder for an exploit in IE to affect the rest of my system. You can partition things from each other in Windows and Linux, but it is not as seamless and not part of the default configuration. Good luck doing it in a way that allows Joe Average to easily get things done and still not shoot his foot.
Of course there'll still be people who'd be easily tricked into running the program with full privileges. These people need an operating system that allows them to easily rollback to various savepoints. Every time _they_ (and not the O/S) manually launch an unrecognized app and say "Yes I want to do this", a savepoint is made. This doesn't have to be slow. This is actually possible - since these people often don't need gigabytes of space, so a 250GB HDD should be fine for them for quite some time. Every 3 months or 500 power cycles or when they run low on space, they send the system in for servicing by a pro, who cleans stuff out, removes no longer needed snapshots and so on.
Of course someone has to figure out how to stop a trojan run by the user from corrupting the disk at a low level. And it still doesn't stop the trojan from affecting OTHER systems before the rollback happens.
" highly recommends against the use of raw partitions unless you just can't stand the 2-3% performance hit."
3%? Wow that's real low. With filesystem based storage you can more easily and cheaply upgrade/migrate the DB to something 20-50% faster in a year or two. How'd you do that if you use raw partitions? You'd be very expensively locked in.
There are time proven good reasons for all those layers of abstraction. Rewriting half or more of those layers of abstraction (which you'd probably need to in the end) not forgetting the bugs, sounds like a crappy idea technically.
Now I really really wonder why _anybody_ _nowadays_ would actually use raw partitions at all. Maybe in the distant past where the O/S and hardware sucked, but now?
Why does the RAC thingy require raw partitions? Anything special other than Oracle making it so?
There really isn't much stopping you from using multiple RAID arrays when you have a "large server with several different disk systems available". With the upcoming tablespace support you can more easily put different tables on different RAID arrays.
Why should code be added to DB software to split a table over multiple disks?
The Oracle bunch have their reasons for reimplementing in their database what the various O/S and hardware people do. But it is counterproductive for the Postgresql team to do the same. They are better off putting effort in what really makes a technical difference (rather than what makes a nice bullet point in a brochure).
Given the changes in hardware and operating systems, trying to duplicate the efforts of the O/S or hardware vendors is like premature optimization. If stuff improves or changes you get left behind - or you end up kludging stuff to keep up.
For example - if you were using raw partitions striped over multiple disks, then one day you find a need to migrate stuff over to something else it's a pain. Whereas if it's just files, almost everything supports files, and will continue to support files.
Naturally people like Oracle will be happy to provide you with expensive services and tools to help you.
I daresay you'd only get 5-10% improvement (if at all) in speed if the DB does things directly. In contrast you can more easily and cheaply upgrade to something more than 5-10% faster in 1 years time if you maintain the layers of abstraction between the DB and everything else.
Am I wrong or would carrying a piece of green or red transparent film help? That way red or green could look black/darker to you whilst letting the other colours through.
Once you have a certain density it just takes an "event", and then traffic will slow. An "event" could be someone just braking a bit too much, or doing something that causes someone else to slow down dramatically. Once that happens you get a wave of slowed down vehicles propagating down the highway. Without a high enough density, the "event" can be avoided or may not even affect other vehicles significantly.
The worst are events that cause chokepoints. Then you end up with the "hourglass" effect. Lots of near stationary particles all waiting for their turn for free flow.
Heck just 3)6)10) will get rid of 90% of traffic, you and me included;). Voila - no traffic jams. Be careful what you wish/ask for.
Seriously. I dunno about you, but in my experience nearly every driver is an idiot at least once in a few months. It only takes 1 idiotic action to screw up traffic for 20 to 10000 cars (depending on the idiocy of the act).
If everyone were highly skilled and knowledgeable drivers, concentrating 100% on driving, and equiped with top notch well maintained vehicles, I bet the traffic densities and average speeds could go up very significantly.
Of course it helps if you get rid of the drivers who are _consistently_ incompetent, or driving cars that just aren't reliable or can't achieve the average _desired_ speed...
Hey if bosses are flexible about the time you arrive to work that'll help to. Then we'll only have probs if _everyone_ held a 9am meeting on the same day.
It's not the inconvenience of car pooling etc that stops people from driving their cars. It's more like the "insurance" problem - you drive your own car "just in case" stuff happens and you need independent transport you can rely on. Taxis can help, but where I live they're not that reliable - they often refuse to pick you if you're going somewhere that's jammed, or there just aren't enough taxis around... Maybe we could do what Singapore does - reduce the number of private cars (the COE/license to own a car can cost more than the car itself and expires after a few years) so the taxis can go everywhere, but there are other factors - even in S'pore at certain times there aren't enough taxis around, and the buses and trains don't go everywhere...
You're smoothening out the wave, but it does delay traffic flow. Your proposed method is fine for very long roads with few intersections, but not so good in places with lots of intersections, because it means fewer cars will make it through the intersection - which means slower average traffic speed and people taking longer to reach their destinations. For roads with lots of traffic lights, it's better if people accelerate at reasonable pace in lock-step but they must not overfill the road and block the intersection. By accelerating at a reasonable pace - I mean taking into account safety considerations - the mildly stupid/careless pedestrians. Nevermind about the darwin award nominees. In some intersections here, they have started putting countdown displays indicating the number of seconds the traffic lights have before they change - e.g. from red to green, from green to yellow, from yellow to red. This is very useful - it is easier for people to not overfill a road, and at the same time not _underfill_ a road.
I doubt there is a single correct solution. Even if there is one, not everyone drives the same, nor can they, nor can they be expected to. After all it is a public road for diverse members of the public, not an race track with professional racers.
Fuel consumption isn't a big issue. Most people with cars earn significantly more than their fuel bill - otherwise they shouldn't have cars. I also forsee that trying to maintain consistent speeds, smooth acceleration/deceleration to save fuel would become less important when cars with regenerative braking become more common. Right now, most vehicles brake by converting kinetic energy to waste heat. To me this is one of the main reasons why an electric/hybrid car is more efficient than conventional cars in practice - it's all because of regenerative braking. For the same amount of money, they're all about as efficient in converting fuel to motion, it's just what happens when you slow down. If you had a way to add decent regenerative braking to a conventional car (even better - bus), you'd improve efficiency significantly.
I'm not sure if gasoline fuel cell cars would be more efficient.
The best place to get a response when reporting a security bug is on Bugtraq.:).
I've tried the "wait for vendor to fix it" method before, and the result was they fixed it in the next major release after a _long_ time, and customers who wanted the prob fixed had to pay to upgrade.
Yes but: "Are the same coders who coded the old Netscape writing firefox?"
It's like sendmail and BIND - with mostly the same bunch of people doing the rewrite the quality didn't improve that much (sure there are some improvements, but overall ).
It's ironic that the people who download high quality mp3s for free are willing to pay for crappy midi for their phones.
That's mainly because of an artificial scarcity. Once more and more phones allow free copying/uploading/downloading of ringtones the phones will just be "yet another" mp3 player. and the ringtones will just be "yet another" mp3.
I don't see many good reasons for a genuine _security_ product to _require_ ActiveX and scripting.
That requirement should give you a clue about whether it really is a security product or not.
I've seen this and I'll take my chances with keeping windows secure on my own thank you (with a little help from some *BSD firewalls etc).
Is the "security" product much better than the stuff it's supposed to protect? Is better enough to be worth paying for? Remember you'd have one more thing to keep patched - and it is likely the firewall runs as a privileged process and so firewall bugs could lead to attackers taking over the machine _via_ the firewall.
Something like this happened recently to ISS personal "firewall" and "IPS" products. Go look up the "witty" worm.
If possible keep your firewall separate from your machine. So what if your el-cheapo USD40 hardware firewall gets exploited - you are less likely to lose any personal and irreplaceable data (e.g. holiday/baby photos etc).
Which is why I think that certain types of drugs should be prohibited by law to the general population.
Go ask an addict of one of those drugs - NOTHING else matters, but the next hit. Sure you could keep giving drugs to them so they have a semblance of function, but their brains have been _damaged_.
I wonder what they'd pick if you give them a choice between getting the drug and the next high, and then after that _death_ vs not getting the drug forever.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that in their opinion they won't think they're gathering too much info till they need petabytes or exabytes of storage, if you know what I mean.
So, any bright sparks know how to create a way to give them enough info so that they stop asking us for info?
Clicking on something or making an HTTP access to something doesn't make it a legal contract. Tons of people click I agree coz they want to update their PC.
Of course customers aren't "always right".
:). If they were always right the only reason for a consultant would be to shift blame (which does happen, but those jobs usually aren't nice).
Mine are closer to "always wrong", that's why they need me and I have a job
While they are wrong, customers should be treated with courtesy and respect as far as possible - like guests in your house (it's hard when they're stubborn idiots and have outstayed their welcome...).
But I don't see the big deal. Aren't there plenty of alternatives to Best Buy? Is Best Buy really cheaper or better after all that?
Think about it, if they give you so much hassle while you are _buying_ their stuff, how would you expect to be treated when you have problems with their stuff?
Doh.
They still can have new games and they should before the old stuff gets "real old". But what they need is a new game that enhances the "network effects"- more and more players playing the "same game".
:).
So it has to be compatible with the existing game. e.g. even if it's a new world with different rules etc, the players can be migrated between them, (and probably communicate with each other between worlds - pick the right cost- heck link the "Ether resistance" to the CPU/bandwidth usage if you want) e.g. wormhole/teleport or whatever. Let them retain their attributes and some of their stuff (you could force them to leave behind some items- can't take everything back in the old world).
If you want you could even force them to spend X gp/credits/USD/items etc to travel between the worlds. Or make it a quest or something. Come up with a story.
Maybe some things become transformed into other things during the transfer (greater risk/chance of arbitrage opportunities if you do that).
If lots of players move to the new world, then you can retask/reassign the resources for the old world for the new world.
It is better for you to risk cannibalizing your old game than for SOMEONE ELSE to cannibalize yours.
Perhaps I totally don't get it coz I'm not an MMORPG player or designer. But I don't see why my idea is any worse than frustrating their _developers_. Good developers/artists want to see their work become reality, bad ones are relieved if it never does
Cancel stuff enough times and they'll make a new game - for a competitor.
"Perhaps you would like to tell me what single application is run on 95% of the world's UNIX/Linux boxes that becomes a similar point of attack for a UNIX worm?"
Actually the worms are mainly exploiting human ignorance and stupidity not Windows or MS stuff.
It's a _fact_ that MANY windows users were actually willing to _unzip_ a password encrypted worm and then run it, means that the corresponding apps for Linux could be: tar, gunzip and make. Anyway, most Linux and *BSD systems have sshd running, and openssh has not had such a great track record itself.
Heck, an obfuscated perl script that does something clever in addition to spreading itself would work too.
Most people are ignorant of these sort of things and you can't expect them not to be. And there's plenty of stupid people around too.
Most other popular O/Ses would be JUST as vulnerable to the same users given similar functionality. Lock up users in a green screen and they won't use the PC much and so there'll be "fewer probs", "fortunately" Gnome,KDE etc are working hard to bring MS style stuff to Linux. If Linux Desktop is ready AND accepted by the masses, the masses will not disappoint us - there'll be tons of Linux trojans spreading the net. Think about it - once "Greeting Cards", "Cool Screensavers", "Animated Cartoons" and their ilk run on Linux, and users get used to running "Fun/Cool" stuff, guess what will happen.
So far most popular operating systems by default run programs with the full privileges of the controlling user. If they by default ran programs with restricted privileges then things would be harder. On my present system, IE runs as a separate user with fewer privileges than the normal user account I use for other stuff. This way it is harder for an exploit in IE to affect the rest of my system. You can partition things from each other in Windows and Linux, but it is not as seamless and not part of the default configuration. Good luck doing it in a way that allows Joe Average to easily get things done and still not shoot his foot.
Of course there'll still be people who'd be easily tricked into running the program with full privileges. These people need an operating system that allows them to easily rollback to various savepoints. Every time _they_ (and not the O/S) manually launch an unrecognized app and say "Yes I want to do this", a savepoint is made. This doesn't have to be slow. This is actually possible - since these people often don't need gigabytes of space, so a 250GB HDD should be fine for them for quite some time. Every 3 months or 500 power cycles or when they run low on space, they send the system in for servicing by a pro, who cleans stuff out, removes no longer needed snapshots and so on.
Of course someone has to figure out how to stop a trojan run by the user from corrupting the disk at a low level. And it still doesn't stop the trojan from affecting OTHER systems before the rollback happens.
That's assuming people actually read AND if they do, they actually read the version numbers.
Bullshit:
http://www.usabaseball.com/olympic_history.html
Cuba is pretty good at baseball for such a small country - two olympic golds. Japan isn't half bad either.
Graphics chips and blitters can help.
" highly recommends against the use of raw partitions unless you just can't stand the 2-3% performance hit."
3%? Wow that's real low. With filesystem based storage you can more easily and cheaply upgrade/migrate the DB to something 20-50% faster in a year or two. How'd you do that if you use raw partitions? You'd be very expensively locked in.
There are time proven good reasons for all those layers of abstraction. Rewriting half or more of those layers of abstraction (which you'd probably need to in the end) not forgetting the bugs, sounds like a crappy idea technically.
Now I really really wonder why _anybody_ _nowadays_ would actually use raw partitions at all. Maybe in the distant past where the O/S and hardware sucked, but now?
Why does the RAC thingy require raw partitions? Anything special other than Oracle making it so?
Sorry couldn't stop myself ;)
There really isn't much stopping you from using multiple RAID arrays when you have a "large server with several different disk systems available". With the upcoming tablespace support you can more easily put different tables on different RAID arrays.
Why should code be added to DB software to split a table over multiple disks?
The Oracle bunch have their reasons for reimplementing in their database what the various O/S and hardware people do. But it is counterproductive for the Postgresql team to do the same. They are better off putting effort in what really makes a technical difference (rather than what makes a nice bullet point in a brochure).
Given the changes in hardware and operating systems, trying to duplicate the efforts of the O/S or hardware vendors is like premature optimization. If stuff improves or changes you get left behind - or you end up kludging stuff to keep up.
For example - if you were using raw partitions striped over multiple disks, then one day you find a need to migrate stuff over to something else it's a pain. Whereas if it's just files, almost everything supports files, and will continue to support files.
Naturally people like Oracle will be happy to provide you with expensive services and tools to help you.
I daresay you'd only get 5-10% improvement (if at all) in speed if the DB does things directly. In contrast you can more easily and cheaply upgrade to something more than 5-10% faster in 1 years time if you maintain the layers of abstraction between the DB and everything else.
Am I wrong or would carrying a piece of green or red transparent film help? That way red or green could look black/darker to you whilst letting the other colours through.
Once you have a certain density it just takes an "event", and then traffic will slow. An "event" could be someone just braking a bit too much, or doing something that causes someone else to slow down dramatically. Once that happens you get a wave of slowed down vehicles propagating down the highway. Without a high enough density, the "event" can be avoided or may not even affect other vehicles significantly.
The worst are events that cause chokepoints. Then you end up with the "hourglass" effect. Lots of near stationary particles all waiting for their turn for free flow.
Heck just 3)6)10) will get rid of 90% of traffic, you and me included ;). Voila - no traffic jams. Be careful what you wish/ask for.
Seriously. I dunno about you, but in my experience nearly every driver is an idiot at least once in a few months. It only takes 1 idiotic action to screw up traffic for 20 to 10000 cars (depending on the idiocy of the act).
If everyone were highly skilled and knowledgeable drivers, concentrating 100% on driving, and equiped with top notch well maintained vehicles, I bet the traffic densities and average speeds could go up very significantly.
Of course it helps if you get rid of the drivers who are _consistently_ incompetent, or driving cars that just aren't reliable or can't achieve the average _desired_ speed...
"If people staggered the time they leave work"
Hey if bosses are flexible about the time you arrive to work that'll help to. Then we'll only have probs if _everyone_ held a 9am meeting on the same day.
It's not the inconvenience of car pooling etc that stops people from driving their cars. It's more like the "insurance" problem - you drive your own car "just in case" stuff happens and you need independent transport you can rely on. Taxis can help, but where I live they're not that reliable - they often refuse to pick you if you're going somewhere that's jammed, or there just aren't enough taxis around... Maybe we could do what Singapore does - reduce the number of private cars (the COE/license to own a car can cost more than the car itself and expires after a few years) so the taxis can go everywhere, but there are other factors - even in S'pore at certain times there aren't enough taxis around, and the buses and trains don't go everywhere...
You're smoothening out the wave, but it does delay traffic flow. Your proposed method is fine for very long roads with few intersections, but not so good in places with lots of intersections, because it means fewer cars will make it through the intersection - which means slower average traffic speed and people taking longer to reach their destinations. For roads with lots of traffic lights, it's better if people accelerate at reasonable pace in lock-step but they must not overfill the road and block the intersection. By accelerating at a reasonable pace - I mean taking into account safety considerations - the mildly stupid/careless pedestrians. Nevermind about the darwin award nominees. In some intersections here, they have started putting countdown displays indicating the number of seconds the traffic lights have before they change - e.g. from red to green, from green to yellow, from yellow to red. This is very useful - it is easier for people to not overfill a road, and at the same time not _underfill_ a road.
I doubt there is a single correct solution. Even if there is one, not everyone drives the same, nor can they, nor can they be expected to. After all it is a public road for diverse members of the public, not an race track with professional racers.
Fuel consumption isn't a big issue. Most people with cars earn significantly more than their fuel bill - otherwise they shouldn't have cars. I also forsee that trying to maintain consistent speeds, smooth acceleration/deceleration to save fuel would become less important when cars with regenerative braking become more common. Right now, most vehicles brake by converting kinetic energy to waste heat. To me this is one of the main reasons why an electric/hybrid car is more efficient than conventional cars in practice - it's all because of regenerative braking. For the same amount of money, they're all about as efficient in converting fuel to motion, it's just what happens when you slow down. If you had a way to add decent regenerative braking to a conventional car (even better - bus), you'd improve efficiency significantly.
I'm not sure if gasoline fuel cell cars would be more efficient.
Well Traffic jams definitely are to do with halting... Often they're caused by halting problems too :).
The best place to get a response when reporting a security bug is on Bugtraq. :).
I've tried the "wait for vendor to fix it" method before, and the result was they fixed it in the next major release after a _long_ time, and customers who wanted the prob fixed had to pay to upgrade.
Yes but: "Are the same coders who coded the old Netscape writing firefox?"
It's like sendmail and BIND - with mostly the same bunch of people doing the rewrite the quality didn't improve that much (sure there are some improvements, but overall ).
Yah I think it's gay.
The main problem is not so much the cars are broken.
At any point of time almost all cars on the road have problems, usually the problems aren't fatal/critical.
And often the reason why the cars on the road have problems is not mainly because of the car maker but because of the car owner/operator.
Then there are the people who go around vandalizing cars.
It's ironic that the people who download high quality mp3s for free are willing to pay for crappy midi for their phones.
That's mainly because of an artificial scarcity. Once more and more phones allow free copying/uploading/downloading of ringtones the phones will just be "yet another" mp3 player. and the ringtones will just be "yet another" mp3.
And I wonder how much people will pay.
If there's a signature, the Bank/Issuer loses (unless they can somehow pin it on the Merchant).
If there's no signature, the Merchant loses.
Dunno why people are so afraid of using credit cards online. Much safer for the buyer than most other payment schemes.
I don't see many good reasons for a genuine _security_ product to _require_ ActiveX and scripting.
That requirement should give you a clue about whether it really is a security product or not.
I've seen this and I'll take my chances with keeping windows secure on my own thank you (with a little help from some *BSD firewalls etc).
Is the "security" product much better than the stuff it's supposed to protect? Is better enough to be worth paying for? Remember you'd have one more thing to keep patched - and it is likely the firewall runs as a privileged process and so firewall bugs could lead to attackers taking over the machine _via_ the firewall.
Something like this happened recently to ISS personal "firewall" and "IPS" products. Go look up the "witty" worm.
If possible keep your firewall separate from your machine. So what if your el-cheapo USD40 hardware firewall gets exploited - you are less likely to lose any personal and irreplaceable data (e.g. holiday/baby photos etc).
Which is why I think that certain types of drugs should be prohibited by law to the general population.
Go ask an addict of one of those drugs - NOTHING else matters, but the next hit. Sure you could keep giving drugs to them so they have a semblance of function, but their brains have been _damaged_.
I wonder what they'd pick if you give them a choice between getting the drug and the next high, and then after that _death_ vs not getting the drug forever.
Well how about music from spam?