Your particular situation, 3 POS terminals at $800 each falls FAR short of "enterprise" scale software, which is the subject of this article.
Where does "startup" or "mom and pop" turn into "enterprise"? How about 400 terminals? Sound reasonable?
Let's also figure you'll get a 40% discount on the software buying 400 licenses. Now we're talking about $192,000 for 400 licenses.
Maybe now it makes sense to pay an internal person $50-100/hour to improve it to meet your needs? Even at the high end of that range, you can spend almost 2000 man-hours adapting the open source package to your needs before you've spent as much as the proprietary version.
Also mentioned in the article and elsewhere in these comments, a number of small, nimble companies are springing up, adding value to the free software and customizing it for their clients. Faced with a potential sale of $192,000 to a proprietary vendor, perhaps some small company can offer you their add-ons to the open source package and save you a lot of money.
Maybe? Maybe not? Perhaps not today, but what about in the near future?
Remember, the subject here is about the (apparant) decline in licensing of proprietary enterprise software. It's a trend.... which means, at least in some people's opinions, we starting to see it happen already in some software and it might be a growing trend. Maybe?
Maybe you are right, that the proprietary apps are so much better, and are likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. In the very small business arena (eg, Robin and me, as well as you), where Quickbooks rules supreme (yeah, we use it too), you are probably very right. The example you site is quite correct.
But the numbers are entirely different when you start talking about "enterprise" scale deployments.
Not long ago, Microsoft launched a big PR effort, touting the superiority of proprietary software development, and specifically windows over linux. Why? Because with Microsoft, you get a 3 year road map. A single entity is in control of where the technology is headed and where it'll be in a few years. They implied that open source development has no control, no known future. FUD, emphasis on the "U" for Uncertainty.
Turns out, Longhorn is very late and lacking in many of the interesting new features that were promised. The 3 year road map turned out, in reality, to be more wishful thinking and vapor than some dependable scheduled release of upcoming technologies. The supposed advantage of depending on proprietary, rather than risking business plans on the uncertain future of linux and free software, turned out to be just empty promises.
THAT is why plenty of people should be "picking" on Microsoft. They made promises. They spread FUD, specificly claiming their future was reliable because they made dependable promises while the competition generally did not.
If there's a public backlash and negative PR, well, they deserve it. If they gave everyone unrealistic expectations, that was their own doing. Absent their history of bashing linux for lacking their 3 year planning, I might buy into your assertion that they deserve a break and a little understanding for falling short of overly ambitious plans. But their prior conduct, spreading FUD... not just by word of mouth, but with massive advertising dollars, acusing their competition of not having solid plans for the future, casts their failure to meet their own plans in an entirely different light.
The truth is they consistently fail to meet their own goals. Yet some people STILL buy into the "nobody is managing open source future development, so it's unpredictable and has uncertain future". When will these gullible people finally realize Microsoft regularly over promises and under delivers, that their supposedly superior planning is just a big sham?
Maybe, if instead of giving them a break, we all instead continue to reinforce Microsoft's the well-deserved reputation for vaporous plans and late delivery, it'll put the damper on their hypocritical FUD ?
People are obviously trying to tell us something - plain HTML has to go!
(and here's the best part...)
Newer, more compliant browsers, will in time not support the older tags and code
If this comes to pass in the next 10 years, I'm probably not the only one who's going to be really upset.
Only recently, I added the DOCTYPE definition to all my nearly 400 web pages. It looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Many of these pages were written years ago, some as far back as 10 years. HTML was simple, and as long as you didn't make excessive use of the netscape only tags (like tables), everything was fine.
Somewhere along the way, it was announced all pages should begin with a
<html>
tag. This was supposed to make things extensible, somehow.
They changed their minds. Now its DOCTYPE. Ok, fine. I modified hundreds of pages and ran they all through a script to validate them all... and fixed lots of minor little things.
But damnit, this whole DOCTYPE definition and html validation is for some reason. And in my world view, it's so that I can know my markup fully conforms to the standards and not browser specific features or bugs. Why bother? Sure, being platform neutral is nice. But the real benefit to an author like me is so that I know the pages will continue to work with little or no maintainence into the distant future. Well, html-wise. Content updates are another matter.
If HTML 4.01 transitional stops being supported by browsers in the next 10 years, and especially if the standards-pushing folks have anything to do with it's accelerated obsolescence.... aside from cursing and swearing, it'll utterly destroy and trust and confidence I may have in the standards process.
So that's basically my little rant. If standards are going to mean anything, and we've all (or mostly) gone to the trouble to put these damn DOCTYPE specs on every single page supposedly so different standards can co-exist... anyone pushing some "new" standard who wants my buy-in better not do anything to diminish the value of all the time and work I've invested in previously published standards.
It's a matter of trust and confidence. Why would I trust in the stability of w3c new standards if support for html 4.01 away?
Shutting down their websites, only to have them flee, change identies, and relaunch similar operations elsewhere is hardly "bringing the hammer down".
Now, seizing their bank accounts, property or other valuable assets would be a start.
Throwing them in jail would be "bringing the hammer down".
you should be happy you might actually start getting less spam.
Until their ability to flee and relaunch their spamming operation elsewhere is diminished, it's just too soon to be even remotely optimistic.
Now, if the court ordered their assets frozen, AND their money was actually located and held, that'd be something to get optimistic about. Anything short of that and you can be pretty sure they're already on the run, money safely hidden away, ready to start up again elsewhere.
..... might reveal this to be an easier way of filling the state's coffers, through lawsuits.
I hear there's also lots of easy money to be made in persuing people who have monetary judgements against them by the courts, but skip flee, disappear, change identies, and presumably set up shop again to continue their misguided deeds.
Now if only I could remember who those helpful folks were with this hot easy-money tip?
unheard-of bands can gain popularity and make money off their music. They won't need a label, other than iTMS, and the RIAA will go down the tubes real quick.
Especially if songs from popular but unsigned artists sell for, say, 50 or 60 cents instead of $1.00.
It won't take many hits to drive down consumer price expectations... and that spells doom for the big labels with their heavy weight spending practices.
Might not work out this way... pricing might be similar or slightly less, but Apple (and maybe, just maybe the artists) are going to reap the enormous profits that the big labels take.
But it won't really be the end of the labels until Apple starts to invest/finance upstart bands. The real trick will be to do it efficiently without the gross overspending that the big labels do today.
AMD on the other hand has always started out chips on the enthusiast / enterprise
s/always/recently/
Clearly, you've just not been around very long, or not paying attention, or have only short-term memory.
It's only been in recent years that AMD has bested Intel, performance-wise. For many, many years, AMD could release a new chip with good performance similar and then Intel would beat them with another new chip.
There's a long, long history of AMD selling their chips at approximately half the price. Certainly through all of the 90's (486, pentium 1/2/3), AMD chips were substantially cheaper than buying Intel.
During much of this time, AMD's chips also had a strong reputation to run very hot. Intel had a reputation for running cool and being easy to overclock. It was Intel that introduced the multiplier locks to prevent overclocking, which apparantly became quite a problem outside the USA where unscrupulous companies would sand down the tops of the chips (back then they were usually ceramic on top) and print a faster speed and resell them as such.
It wasn't even all that long ago when the infamous celeron 300A, which was multiplier locked, could overclock to 450 MHz (then, nearly the fastest chip they sold) by overclocking the front side bus by 50%. At the time, AMD's chips were far behind, and they were running hot with very little overclocking margin, just to try closing the substantial perforance gap.
Even back in the early Pentium days, even before AMD came out with a comperable chip, the 90 MHz pentium appeared in a new, smaller geometry process that made it run about as cool as the 486 66's.
Intel has indeed been in the lead, technologically, for a very long time... ever since they stopped licensing IP from Intel. For a bit of really ancient history, long ago, some large well known companies had a strong policy of never using any components that were not available from a second source. AMD's business model 20+ years ago was to license designs and be that second source.
Even a number of articles mention how the tables have turned recently, and speculate whether Intel will regain the honor of top performance.
I'm not affiliated with Intel, and in fact the PC I'm using to write this comment runs an AMD chip. When I upgrade, it'll probably be AMD again. Recently, AMD appears to have made some really smart architectual decisions that have put them in the lead, technology-wise.
But to believe such has always been the case, or even been a trend that's anything more than recent, is to ignore or be utterly ignorant of the very long history of Intel dominating the PC / x86 market with the best chips.
And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports?
Maybe some customers still do use them, and they add very little extra cost?
They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world,
Where does this 75% number come from? Is it made up?
Most likely, a small but significant number of people own peripherals with serial or parallel interface, and keep them around between computer upgrades.
why are they even included as standard on ALL boards?
More likely than not, the motherboard manufacturers have done some real research to determine if customers really need these port and removing them would hurt sales. Since ALL board (actually, a few don't) include these ports, seems quite likely they know something you don't.
I am damn glad Mac's have eliminated all the old hardware ports that don't play nice.
You have a misconception that the persence of parallel and serial ports somehow interferes with the rest of the machine. They don't. It's not like ISA bus, which would slow down other peripherals.
.
I can tell you that I happen to be one of those few who still uses these ports. For example, it's only very recently that JTAG download dongles have been made for USB. And just try to find on that works in Linux. (the Segger J-Link, turns out, has a buggy enumeration algorithm that happens to be tolerated in windows, but linux won't even initialize).
Another common use for the parallel port is legacy copy protection dongles. Lots of specialty software STILL ships with these (though locking to an ethernet mac address is also common).
For servers, serial ports are commonly used for a console to manage the machine without a monitor attached.
But in the mainstream, the serial ports are probably kept around for external modems. Hard to believe? Well, still about half of Americans on-line use dialup. A good number probably have internal modems, but it doesn't take more than a few percent keeping their external modems around to close out a meaningful chunk of the market for a new motherboard than can't use the old modem.
It seems like a waste to buy a board with all the built-in stuff (and probably pay extra for it)
Not really.
The fallacy is that these extra peripherals cost extra. They don't, really. The price you pay is determined by, more than any other factor, the economy of mass producing exactly the same product for such a large market.
Especially in the chipset, those extra transistors come almost for free. It would cost MORE to make another version of the chips with a different configuration. Likewise, even with the same chips, it would cost MORE to make additional models without the extra connectors. There is tremendous savings in manufacturing only one model (or relatively few). Distribution and retail sales also saves costs only having to deal with fewer distinct models.
So just don't use those extra bell and whistles. But don't imagine they're costing you anything extra. The PC motherboard market is extremely competitive, and many companies and individuals shop primarily for the lowest price. If there was an easy way, such as making a different model without some parts, to achieve a lower price, you better believe the manufacturers would do it in a heartbeat.
And there are plenty of budget motherboards. If they could save even a small amount taking off more features, they certainly would. Because they haven't, you can have high confidence those extras aren't actually costing you anything extra.... in the reality of today's manufacturing, distribution and retail marketplace.
I use linux, but my girlfriend's computer has Windows.
We installed norton anti-virus, and it really has sucked the life out of her machine. We upped the memory to 1G (was 512M) and that helped, but it's still noticably slow.
I've looked for anti-virus overhead and slowdown benchmarks or reviews, but it just doesn't seem to be out there. All the comparisions I can find appear to be more a "look, this one has a shiney box in the store and a slick gui when you install". Blah.
Lots of others have posted what we learned the hard way. Norton is a resource hog. But what is better? Seen several comments about AVG. Should we switch? Sounds a lot cheaper than another gig of memory and a cpu/motherboard upgrade.
Is there a really good (and honest) comparision of the resources and cpu cycles each of these anti-virus products takes up? If you know of any, please reply with links.
Thanks.
By the way, she's really pretty knowledgable and for years went without any anti-virus software and didn't have any (visible) infections. She uses mozilla (since long before firefox) and never IE, and she knows email attachments you weren't expecting are hazardous, even if they appear to know from someone you know. Our home network is behind a debian-based firewall running minimal services. So, for a long time she went without any infections.
Still, one virus got by. It was probably there for a while and I eventually noticed occasional traffic in the firewall's logs. It didn't have any visible effect on her machine and only made very light, very infrequent communication (to a site that was shut down). It appears to have been an attempt to harvest/steal game registration keys.
Many others have posted here that they are careful and don't need anti-virus software on windows. Well, I used to think that, since she was indeed quite careful and went for many years (since the mid 90's) without any problems. But if you don't run a virus scan (or firewall), something like this one she got could be hanging out indefinitely (until you eventually have to reinstall windows for one reason or another), and you'd never know it.
Also, one final gripe about Norton. It likes to make a lot of noise every time it detects a virus in an incoming email. Maybe there's a way to shut it off, but it wasn't apparant. For years, we've used spamassassin on our little server and it tagged most viruses as spam. And she simply disregarded any others. But with Norton, its pops got to be really annoying. I finally had to install ClamAV on our server to filter out the viruses so she would have that annoying popup every morning.
Blah. What a pain in the ass the windows world is, and I don't even use it.
Maybe Linux will be similar someday if it gets popular, but for that to happen, it's going to take widespread adoption of really stupid software that lets users easily run executables (with system access, not in a sandbox). At least for now, pretty much all linux apps at least try to have some reasonable security. How stupid is it to simply allow executables?
I'm not sure how this is less than what any other graphics vendor is offering.
It's not.
But it IS considerably less than what most casual observers have misunderstood the project to be. The parent post raved about how "every last little bit will be open to us to tweak and examine".
By reassuring yourself "we're still more open than any other vendor", you don't see grossly inaccurate expectations many readers have of your project.
I happen to be one of those few hardware hackers, not really your target market, who could and would buy the FPGA-based board for the sake of fiddling. Yeah, I know it's going to be several hundred. But so was Xilinx's BaseX (linux version), and I might end up buying the full one for larger device support.
But saddly, looks like the source won't be available. Kinda negates any reason to buy the FPGA version. If you do publish the source, I'll probably buy one to fiddle with.
But it is true, there are very few hardware hackers who can do FPGA work. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably keep the source proprietary to maximize chances of commercial investment. But I would try to clear up misunderstanding about the true scope and character of the project and what specifically "open" means in terms of this card.
Everything , every last little bit will be open to us to tweak and examin.
Maybe. If you read the mail list archives, it seems unlikely they will release their verilog code.
There is much talk about accepting community code under LGPL and merging it with unreleased proprietary code... that may someday be released if the community makes a large monetary investment.
Don't believe me? Read their mail list archives. This strategy shines through over and over again. Their "open" focus is a fully documented register set, not fully GPL released "hackable" design. There's even a mimi flamefest between on the project leads and someone who really wants to see more focus on making the hackage FPGA prototypes more of a goal for the project.
Then we could all be able to get a lovely cheap open piece of hardware
Perhaps, but the "cheap" part is a long way off in ASIC land. And recently, VIA and XGI have made very cheap chips with some openness. So there's already strong competition for the cheap chip market.
that by its very being will be fully supported in the OSS world.
If you read through the mail list archives for the project, you'll see that they've determined that even the 3S1500 is too small for even low performance 3D graphics.
They're currently envisioning a 3S4000, which is at least a couple hundred dollars in modest quantity.
Google's success in the late 90's, a time when most people were still on slow dialup, was partly due to a clean, low-bandwidth, fast responding site free of heavy graphical ads that made all the others painful to use.
Yes, better search results were also a big factor, but the speedy, low-bandwidth response was also a big deal.
we really don't have enough information as of yet....
Especially if you don't read the paper, which fully describes this algorithm, both in rigorous mathematical terms, and with quite a bit of explanitory text.
Yes, this is a good thing. It might result in wiping out search engine spam, maybe. If the "search engine optimizers" don't find creative ways to cheat.
Let's not get overly optimistic about what this is going to do for the web... such as:
By developing this tool, Google is helping to clean the Internet up and enable it to become the massive source of pure information it has such potential to be.
What exactly is "pure information" anyway?
Consider my little website. Lots of pages about how to design electronic stuff. But we sell components that support those activities, so it's not 100% "pure", is it? You could consider all those pages as a giant ad for the stuff on the store section of the site. But most people would consider my pages on the more informational side (and the vast majority really are).
About once every 2 or 3 weeks, I get a call from one of these search engine optimiztion companies. Not sure if it's the same couple companies... I usually just say "no" and ask to be on their do-not-call list. They're mostly a bunch of slimey people and probably don't honour such requests.
But sometimes, the idea is tempting. I resist because I believe it's unethical, and ultimately a bad long-term investment. Still, to anyone selling via the web, even a tiny little 2-person company like me, the sales pitch is quite compelling. Pay some fee, traffic goes up, more sales, increase in revenue offsets the cost for the SEO's work. Maybe it's not so bad if they don't stupe to cheating.
Still, I resist because I know it's not a black and white distinction. It's a fuzzy line between the obviously good techniques (improving site structure, rewording page titles, etc) and the obviously bad (cloaked pages). I also just don't trust them.
But even the distinction between "pure information" and "spam" is fuzzy. I'd like to think I'm leaning towards the "pure information" side, but we do indeed sell products. It wasn't always that way... in the mid-90's, the site was smaller and hosted at a university and no products were sold. I had several people begging me to sell them a few of the parts needed for a project. Eventually, a friend started selling some stuff (prices were high, service poor), and so I took it over. Satisfaction with the site has improved dramatically since then!
Still, it's a fuzzy area between pure information and purely commercial, or advertising or spam.
I can tell you it's a lot more work crafting really good web pages than just writing a check to a seedy SEO company. But if these ranking algorithms really do improve to perfection, the response is probably going to be more and more pages appearing in that gray region. Increasing sales can pay for a lot of man hours to author more material that's compelling for visitors and truely does help them to solve their products (especially if they buy the described products).
So, in a best case scenario, these algoriths reaching perfection (seems unlikely) is probably going to lead to a lot more very good content, but content that revolves around pitching products (eg, infomercials), and not "pure information".
I just finished reading the paper. All these questios are pretty well answered by the text. To save you and others the trouble of reading it, I'm gonna take a stab at these. Feel free to actually read the paper and tell me if I misunderstood.
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank?
It attempts to detect clusters of pages which have few inbound links, which also propagating "trust" scores to all other sites by using their linking structure. For sites that have many inbound links (high scroring in pagerank), the authors claim this modification tends to classify spam and reputable sites differently.
Will the owners of the pages / sites deemed to fall within the set of trusted seed sites get any money for all their hard work (i.e. hand-maintaining pages of links)?
No.
However, they will get better search engine visibility, which is quite valuable.
What if such an owner decides to link to a page of commercial or spam links - will they get any money from the owner of the linked site?
The paper suggests using only highly reputable organizations with long-term stability for the seed pages. Government organizations, universities, very well known companies.
The analysis in the paper is based on a per-site graph, not per-page, by the way. They lacked the resources to try these computations on such a large data set.
Is this a possible method of abuse?
Presumably, the small set of seed pages/sites will need to be monitored by staff employed by the search engine company. If one of the trusted seed sites "went bad", they would need to be removed from the list.
Will that cool poster of links between websites now become 3D to give trusted links more prominence?
1. Linux still isn't ready for prime time zero hassle common user usage.
Niether is Microsoft Windows. Ask almost anyone who uses Windows. It's a hassle.
The issues you mention are installation. Few people could do a full windows install, including all vendor supplied device drivers.
The actual truth is BOTH systems are far beyond the capabilities of average, unsophisticated users, or anything other than casual day-to-day usage of common applications.
3. Windows will not be killed. Not going to happen. We will have competition indefinitely.
If you call 90% Microsoft market share with exclusionary back-room deals at all major computer manufacturers so that virtually no PCs ship with competitors products... then yet, looks like it's gonna be that way for some time. I just wouldn't call it "competition". "Monopoly" might be a much better word.
Actually, my little project pre-dates the PJB-100 (ok, mine's not a nicely packaged comsumer toy like that, but it was earlier), and even mine wasn't the first commercially available hard-drive player (that wasn't a PC in a trunk).
There was another one, whose name I don't quite recall, which was truely the first hard drive player.... became available around the time I was starting my second design (the one you see now). It was an in-dash car player, selling for approx $1100.
Yes, the product is probably snake oil, at least against modern p2p protocols using strong hashes.
But I still don't see how only a collision attack can be utilized? Maybe I missed something? Remember the quote "a collision attack finds two messages with the same hash, but the attacker can't pick what the hash will be".
Quoting...
With something like bittorrent, you're probably not going to be able to change the publically served hash in the torrent file along with that hash that the peers are aware of, so your only option is to find a collision.
Since the hash is already known to the clients, what good will a collision attack do, where you discover two messages that happen to have the same hash, but you have no control over what that hash will be? Your chances are only 2^-160 (eg, zero) that it'll be the same hash that the client requires to accept your message instead of the original one.
If the attacker could control the original file before the hashes are published, at least in theory, perhaps a collision could be used to create both the original and a matching duplicate. But the reality of p2p piracy is that all the files are encoded by the pirates using lossy compression, where even tiny changes the encoder or its settings produce vastly different binary output.
I'm still trying to understand how a collision technique, where the attacker has on control over what the hash will be, can be useful for injecting bogus data into a bittorrent or a similar modern p2p network?
They feed it to a computation cluster and eventually out comes another file which has the same hash.
This is a "preimage" attack, which is very different and much harder than a "collision" attack (the subject of that paper). Also, the paper's collision attack is against MD5, not SHA1 (as used in bittorrent).
Remember that those 2^69 "operations" (each many CPU cycles) are for a SHA1 "collision" attack. A "preimage" attack that would be necessary to inject corrupt data into a p2p network using SHA1 (such as Bittorrent) is much harder and has not been discovered and published.
Q: What is a collision attack and a preimage attack? A: A preimage attack would enable someone to find an input message that causes a hash function to produce a particular output. In contrast, a collision attack finds two messages with the same hash, but the attacker can't pick what the hash will be. The attacks announced at CRYPTO 2004 are collision attacks, not preimage attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Where does "startup" or "mom and pop" turn into "enterprise"? How about 400 terminals? Sound reasonable?
Let's also figure you'll get a 40% discount on the software buying 400 licenses. Now we're talking about $192,000 for 400 licenses.
Maybe now it makes sense to pay an internal person $50-100/hour to improve it to meet your needs? Even at the high end of that range, you can spend almost 2000 man-hours adapting the open source package to your needs before you've spent as much as the proprietary version.
Also mentioned in the article and elsewhere in these comments, a number of small, nimble companies are springing up, adding value to the free software and customizing it for their clients. Faced with a potential sale of $192,000 to a proprietary vendor, perhaps some small company can offer you their add-ons to the open source package and save you a lot of money.
Maybe? Maybe not? Perhaps not today, but what about in the near future?
Remember, the subject here is about the (apparant) decline in licensing of proprietary enterprise software. It's a trend.... which means, at least in some people's opinions, we starting to see it happen already in some software and it might be a growing trend. Maybe?
Maybe you are right, that the proprietary apps are so much better, and are likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. In the very small business arena (eg, Robin and me, as well as you), where Quickbooks rules supreme (yeah, we use it too), you are probably very right. The example you site is quite correct.
But the numbers are entirely different when you start talking about "enterprise" scale deployments.
Not long ago, Microsoft launched a big PR effort, touting the superiority of proprietary software development, and specifically windows over linux. Why? Because with Microsoft, you get a 3 year road map. A single entity is in control of where the technology is headed and where it'll be in a few years. They implied that open source development has no control, no known future. FUD, emphasis on the "U" for Uncertainty.
Turns out, Longhorn is very late and lacking in many of the interesting new features that were promised. The 3 year road map turned out, in reality, to be more wishful thinking and vapor than some dependable scheduled release of upcoming technologies. The supposed advantage of depending on proprietary, rather than risking business plans on the uncertain future of linux and free software, turned out to be just empty promises.
THAT is why plenty of people should be "picking" on Microsoft. They made promises. They spread FUD, specificly claiming their future was reliable because they made dependable promises while the competition generally did not.
If there's a public backlash and negative PR, well, they deserve it. If they gave everyone unrealistic expectations, that was their own doing. Absent their history of bashing linux for lacking their 3 year planning, I might buy into your assertion that they deserve a break and a little understanding for falling short of overly ambitious plans. But their prior conduct, spreading FUD... not just by word of mouth, but with massive advertising dollars, acusing their competition of not having solid plans for the future, casts their failure to meet their own plans in an entirely different light.
The truth is they consistently fail to meet their own goals. Yet some people STILL buy into the "nobody is managing open source future development, so it's unpredictable and has uncertain future". When will these gullible people finally realize Microsoft regularly over promises and under delivers, that their supposedly superior planning is just a big sham?
Maybe, if instead of giving them a break, we all instead continue to reinforce Microsoft's the well-deserved reputation for vaporous plans and late delivery, it'll put the damper on their hypocritical FUD ?
(and here's the best part...)
Newer, more compliant browsers, will in time not support the older tags and code
If this comes to pass in the next 10 years, I'm probably not the only one who's going to be really upset.
Only recently, I added the DOCTYPE definition to all my nearly 400 web pages. It looks like this:
Many of these pages were written years ago, some as far back as 10 years. HTML was simple, and as long as you didn't make excessive use of the netscape only tags (like tables), everything was fine.
Somewhere along the way, it was announced all pages should begin with a
tag. This was supposed to make things extensible, somehow.They changed their minds. Now its DOCTYPE. Ok, fine. I modified hundreds of pages and ran they all through a script to validate them all... and fixed lots of minor little things.
But damnit, this whole DOCTYPE definition and html validation is for some reason. And in my world view, it's so that I can know my markup fully conforms to the standards and not browser specific features or bugs. Why bother? Sure, being platform neutral is nice. But the real benefit to an author like me is so that I know the pages will continue to work with little or no maintainence into the distant future. Well, html-wise. Content updates are another matter.
If HTML 4.01 transitional stops being supported by browsers in the next 10 years, and especially if the standards-pushing folks have anything to do with it's accelerated obsolescence.... aside from cursing and swearing, it'll utterly destroy and trust and confidence I may have in the standards process.
So that's basically my little rant. If standards are going to mean anything, and we've all (or mostly) gone to the trouble to put these damn DOCTYPE specs on every single page supposedly so different standards can co-exist... anyone pushing some "new" standard who wants my buy-in better not do anything to diminish the value of all the time and work I've invested in previously published standards.
It's a matter of trust and confidence. Why would I trust in the stability of w3c new standards if support for html 4.01 away?
Now, seizing their bank accounts, property or other valuable assets would be a start.
Throwing them in jail would be "bringing the hammer down".
you should be happy you might actually start getting less spam.
Until their ability to flee and relaunch their spamming operation elsewhere is diminished, it's just too soon to be even remotely optimistic.
Now, if the court ordered their assets frozen, AND their money was actually located and held, that'd be something to get optimistic about. Anything short of that and you can be pretty sure they're already on the run, money safely hidden away, ready to start up again elsewhere.
I hear there's also lots of easy money to be made in persuing people who have monetary judgements against them by the courts, but skip flee, disappear, change identies, and presumably set up shop again to continue their misguided deeds.
Now if only I could remember who those helpful folks were with this hot easy-money tip?
Especially if songs from popular but unsigned artists sell for, say, 50 or 60 cents instead of $1.00.
It won't take many hits to drive down consumer price expectations... and that spells doom for the big labels with their heavy weight spending practices.
Might not work out this way... pricing might be similar or slightly less, but Apple (and maybe, just maybe the artists) are going to reap the enormous profits that the big labels take.
But it won't really be the end of the labels until Apple starts to invest/finance upstart bands. The real trick will be to do it efficiently without the gross overspending that the big labels do today.
s/always/recently/
Clearly, you've just not been around very long, or not paying attention, or have only short-term memory.
It's only been in recent years that AMD has bested Intel, performance-wise. For many, many years, AMD could release a new chip with good performance similar and then Intel would beat them with another new chip.
There's a long, long history of AMD selling their chips at approximately half the price. Certainly through all of the 90's (486, pentium 1/2/3), AMD chips were substantially cheaper than buying Intel.
During much of this time, AMD's chips also had a strong reputation to run very hot. Intel had a reputation for running cool and being easy to overclock. It was Intel that introduced the multiplier locks to prevent overclocking, which apparantly became quite a problem outside the USA where unscrupulous companies would sand down the tops of the chips (back then they were usually ceramic on top) and print a faster speed and resell them as such.
It wasn't even all that long ago when the infamous celeron 300A, which was multiplier locked, could overclock to 450 MHz (then, nearly the fastest chip they sold) by overclocking the front side bus by 50%. At the time, AMD's chips were far behind, and they were running hot with very little overclocking margin, just to try closing the substantial perforance gap.
Even back in the early Pentium days, even before AMD came out with a comperable chip, the 90 MHz pentium appeared in a new, smaller geometry process that made it run about as cool as the 486 66's.
Intel has indeed been in the lead, technologically, for a very long time... ever since they stopped licensing IP from Intel. For a bit of really ancient history, long ago, some large well known companies had a strong policy of never using any components that were not available from a second source. AMD's business model 20+ years ago was to license designs and be that second source.
Even a number of articles mention how the tables have turned recently, and speculate whether Intel will regain the honor of top performance.
I'm not affiliated with Intel, and in fact the PC I'm using to write this comment runs an AMD chip. When I upgrade, it'll probably be AMD again. Recently, AMD appears to have made some really smart architectual decisions that have put them in the lead, technology-wise.
But to believe such has always been the case, or even been a trend that's anything more than recent, is to ignore or be utterly ignorant of the very long history of Intel dominating the PC / x86 market with the best chips.
Maybe some customers still do use them, and they add very little extra cost?
They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world,
Where does this 75% number come from? Is it made up?
Most likely, a small but significant number of people own peripherals with serial or parallel interface, and keep them around between computer upgrades.
why are they even included as standard on ALL boards?
More likely than not, the motherboard manufacturers have done some real research to determine if customers really need these port and removing them would hurt sales. Since ALL board (actually, a few don't) include these ports, seems quite likely they know something you don't.
I am damn glad Mac's have eliminated all the old hardware ports that don't play nice.
You have a misconception that the persence of parallel and serial ports somehow interferes with the rest of the machine. They don't. It's not like ISA bus, which would slow down other peripherals.
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I can tell you that I happen to be one of those few who still uses these ports. For example, it's only very recently that JTAG download dongles have been made for USB. And just try to find on that works in Linux. (the Segger J-Link, turns out, has a buggy enumeration algorithm that happens to be tolerated in windows, but linux won't even initialize).
Another common use for the parallel port is legacy copy protection dongles. Lots of specialty software STILL ships with these (though locking to an ethernet mac address is also common).
For servers, serial ports are commonly used for a console to manage the machine without a monitor attached.
But in the mainstream, the serial ports are probably kept around for external modems. Hard to believe? Well, still about half of Americans on-line use dialup. A good number probably have internal modems, but it doesn't take more than a few percent keeping their external modems around to close out a meaningful chunk of the market for a new motherboard than can't use the old modem.
Not really.
The fallacy is that these extra peripherals cost extra. They don't, really. The price you pay is determined by, more than any other factor, the economy of mass producing exactly the same product for such a large market.
Especially in the chipset, those extra transistors come almost for free. It would cost MORE to make another version of the chips with a different configuration. Likewise, even with the same chips, it would cost MORE to make additional models without the extra connectors. There is tremendous savings in manufacturing only one model (or relatively few). Distribution and retail sales also saves costs only having to deal with fewer distinct models.
So just don't use those extra bell and whistles. But don't imagine they're costing you anything extra. The PC motherboard market is extremely competitive, and many companies and individuals shop primarily for the lowest price. If there was an easy way, such as making a different model without some parts, to achieve a lower price, you better believe the manufacturers would do it in a heartbeat.
And there are plenty of budget motherboards. If they could save even a small amount taking off more features, they certainly would. Because they haven't, you can have high confidence those extras aren't actually costing you anything extra.... in the reality of today's manufacturing, distribution and retail marketplace.
I use linux, but my girlfriend's computer has Windows. We installed norton anti-virus, and it really has sucked the life out of her machine. We upped the memory to 1G (was 512M) and that helped, but it's still noticably slow. I've looked for anti-virus overhead and slowdown benchmarks or reviews, but it just doesn't seem to be out there. All the comparisions I can find appear to be more a "look, this one has a shiney box in the store and a slick gui when you install". Blah. Lots of others have posted what we learned the hard way. Norton is a resource hog. But what is better? Seen several comments about AVG. Should we switch? Sounds a lot cheaper than another gig of memory and a cpu/motherboard upgrade. Is there a really good (and honest) comparision of the resources and cpu cycles each of these anti-virus products takes up? If you know of any, please reply with links. Thanks. By the way, she's really pretty knowledgable and for years went without any anti-virus software and didn't have any (visible) infections. She uses mozilla (since long before firefox) and never IE, and she knows email attachments you weren't expecting are hazardous, even if they appear to know from someone you know. Our home network is behind a debian-based firewall running minimal services. So, for a long time she went without any infections. Still, one virus got by. It was probably there for a while and I eventually noticed occasional traffic in the firewall's logs. It didn't have any visible effect on her machine and only made very light, very infrequent communication (to a site that was shut down). It appears to have been an attempt to harvest/steal game registration keys. Many others have posted here that they are careful and don't need anti-virus software on windows. Well, I used to think that, since she was indeed quite careful and went for many years (since the mid 90's) without any problems. But if you don't run a virus scan (or firewall), something like this one she got could be hanging out indefinitely (until you eventually have to reinstall windows for one reason or another), and you'd never know it. Also, one final gripe about Norton. It likes to make a lot of noise every time it detects a virus in an incoming email. Maybe there's a way to shut it off, but it wasn't apparant. For years, we've used spamassassin on our little server and it tagged most viruses as spam. And she simply disregarded any others. But with Norton, its pops got to be really annoying. I finally had to install ClamAV on our server to filter out the viruses so she would have that annoying popup every morning. Blah. What a pain in the ass the windows world is, and I don't even use it. Maybe Linux will be similar someday if it gets popular, but for that to happen, it's going to take widespread adoption of really stupid software that lets users easily run executables (with system access, not in a sandbox). At least for now, pretty much all linux apps at least try to have some reasonable security. How stupid is it to simply allow executables?
It's not.
But it IS considerably less than what most casual observers have misunderstood the project to be. The parent post raved about how "every last little bit will be open to us to tweak and examine".
By reassuring yourself "we're still more open than any other vendor", you don't see grossly inaccurate expectations many readers have of your project.
I happen to be one of those few hardware hackers, not really your target market, who could and would buy the FPGA-based board for the sake of fiddling. Yeah, I know it's going to be several hundred. But so was Xilinx's BaseX (linux version), and I might end up buying the full one for larger device support.
But saddly, looks like the source won't be available. Kinda negates any reason to buy the FPGA version. If you do publish the source, I'll probably buy one to fiddle with.
But it is true, there are very few hardware hackers who can do FPGA work. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably keep the source proprietary to maximize chances of commercial investment. But I would try to clear up misunderstanding about the true scope and character of the project and what specifically "open" means in terms of this card.
Maybe. If you read the mail list archives, it seems unlikely they will release their verilog code.
There is much talk about accepting community code under LGPL and merging it with unreleased proprietary code... that may someday be released if the community makes a large monetary investment.
Don't believe me? Read their mail list archives. This strategy shines through over and over again. Their "open" focus is a fully documented register set, not fully GPL released "hackable" design. There's even a mimi flamefest between on the project leads and someone who really wants to see more focus on making the hackage FPGA prototypes more of a goal for the project.
Then we could all be able to get a lovely cheap open piece of hardware
Perhaps, but the "cheap" part is a long way off in ASIC land. And recently, VIA and XGI have made very cheap chips with some openness. So there's already strong competition for the cheap chip market.
that by its very being will be fully supported in the OSS world.
This might happen... maybe?
If you read through the mail list archives for the project, you'll see that they've determined that even the 3S1500 is too small for even low performance 3D graphics.
They're currently envisioning a 3S4000, which is at least a couple hundred dollars in modest quantity.
or somebody on internet2 keeps clicking reload, for that next firefox update.
Yes, better search results were also a big factor, but the speedy, low-bandwidth response was also a big deal.
Especially if you don't read the paper, which fully describes this algorithm, both in rigorous mathematical terms, and with quite a bit of explanitory text.
Let's not get overly optimistic about what this is going to do for the web... such as:
By developing this tool, Google is helping to clean the Internet up and enable it to become the massive source of pure information it has such potential to be.
What exactly is "pure information" anyway?
Consider my little website. Lots of pages about how to design electronic stuff. But we sell components that support those activities, so it's not 100% "pure", is it? You could consider all those pages as a giant ad for the stuff on the store section of the site. But most people would consider my pages on the more informational side (and the vast majority really are).
About once every 2 or 3 weeks, I get a call from one of these search engine optimiztion companies. Not sure if it's the same couple companies... I usually just say "no" and ask to be on their do-not-call list. They're mostly a bunch of slimey people and probably don't honour such requests.
But sometimes, the idea is tempting. I resist because I believe it's unethical, and ultimately a bad long-term investment. Still, to anyone selling via the web, even a tiny little 2-person company like me, the sales pitch is quite compelling. Pay some fee, traffic goes up, more sales, increase in revenue offsets the cost for the SEO's work. Maybe it's not so bad if they don't stupe to cheating.
Still, I resist because I know it's not a black and white distinction. It's a fuzzy line between the obviously good techniques (improving site structure, rewording page titles, etc) and the obviously bad (cloaked pages). I also just don't trust them.
But even the distinction between "pure information" and "spam" is fuzzy. I'd like to think I'm leaning towards the "pure information" side, but we do indeed sell products. It wasn't always that way... in the mid-90's, the site was smaller and hosted at a university and no products were sold. I had several people begging me to sell them a few of the parts needed for a project. Eventually, a friend started selling some stuff (prices were high, service poor), and so I took it over. Satisfaction with the site has improved dramatically since then!
Still, it's a fuzzy area between pure information and purely commercial, or advertising or spam.
I can tell you it's a lot more work crafting really good web pages than just writing a check to a seedy SEO company. But if these ranking algorithms really do improve to perfection, the response is probably going to be more and more pages appearing in that gray region. Increasing sales can pay for a lot of man hours to author more material that's compelling for visitors and truely does help them to solve their products (especially if they buy the described products).
So, in a best case scenario, these algoriths reaching perfection (seems unlikely) is probably going to lead to a lot more very good content, but content that revolves around pitching products (eg, infomercials), and not "pure information".
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank?
It attempts to detect clusters of pages which have few inbound links, which also propagating "trust" scores to all other sites by using their linking structure. For sites that have many inbound links (high scroring in pagerank), the authors claim this modification tends to classify spam and reputable sites differently.
Will the owners of the pages / sites deemed to fall within the set of trusted seed sites get any money for all their hard work (i.e. hand-maintaining pages of links)?
No.
However, they will get better search engine visibility, which is quite valuable.
What if such an owner decides to link to a page of commercial or spam links - will they get any money from the owner of the linked site?
The paper suggests using only highly reputable organizations with long-term stability for the seed pages. Government organizations, universities, very well known companies.
The analysis in the paper is based on a per-site graph, not per-page, by the way. They lacked the resources to try these computations on such a large data set.
Is this a possible method of abuse?
Presumably, the small set of seed pages/sites will need to be monitored by staff employed by the search engine company. If one of the trusted seed sites "went bad", they would need to be removed from the list.
Will that cool poster of links between websites now become 3D to give trusted links more prominence?
Probably not.
To people who care about money above all else.
Niether is Microsoft Windows. Ask almost anyone who uses Windows. It's a hassle.
The issues you mention are installation. Few people could do a full windows install, including all vendor supplied device drivers.
The actual truth is BOTH systems are far beyond the capabilities of average, unsophisticated users, or anything other than casual day-to-day usage of common applications.
3. Windows will not be killed. Not going to happen. We will have competition indefinitely.
If you call 90% Microsoft market share with exclusionary back-room deals at all major computer manufacturers so that virtually no PCs ship with competitors products... then yet, looks like it's gonna be that way for some time. I just wouldn't call it "competition". "Monopoly" might be a much better word.
There was another one, whose name I don't quite recall, which was truely the first hard drive player.... became available around the time I was starting my second design (the one you see now). It was an in-dash car player, selling for approx $1100.
What else would you expect from articles paid for by AMD?
But I still don't see how only a collision attack can be utilized? Maybe I missed something? Remember the quote "a collision attack finds two messages with the same hash, but the attacker can't pick what the hash will be".
Quoting...
Since the hash is already known to the clients, what good will a collision attack do, where you discover two messages that happen to have the same hash, but you have no control over what that hash will be? Your chances are only 2^-160 (eg, zero) that it'll be the same hash that the client requires to accept your message instead of the original one.
If the attacker could control the original file before the hashes are published, at least in theory, perhaps a collision could be used to create both the original and a matching duplicate. But the reality of p2p piracy is that all the files are encoded by the pirates using lossy compression, where even tiny changes the encoder or its settings produce vastly different binary output.
I'm still trying to understand how a collision technique, where the attacker has on control over what the hash will be, can be useful for injecting bogus data into a bittorrent or a similar modern p2p network?
This is a "preimage" attack, which is very different and much harder than a "collision" attack (the subject of that paper). Also, the paper's collision attack is against MD5, not SHA1 (as used in bittorrent).
See this earlier post for details and a link to much more info.
Quoting from the linked page: