Robbing data centers makes about as much sense as robbing the postman -- a lot of effort for an unknown return, in fact even more effort, since you have to recover data off the servers, reverse-engineer DB schemas and data storage methods, etc. Worthwhile for known data, but a lot of effort to merely obtain a DB of shoe sizes or orthodontic records or something, especially when there's already an existing global marketplace in stolen credit card info and other identity theft details.
I think the only real reason to hit this would be for industrial espionage or some other cloak-and-dagger business.
The hardware can't have a ton of resale value, unless there's some pipeline sending stolen servers to Russia/China/Mexico, as the machines are likely generally 1+ years old and there's not a ton of business customers looking to buy used servers off the back of a truck (are there?).
I've always thought that the "military grade" security surrounding most DCs was a joke and for PR purposes only. Banks are seldom robbed successfully, and you can walk right in, why does a data center need 8 biometric data points, a smart card and an access code to get into a room with caged & locked equipment?
This is much more about toothless regulation and, most important, a cable industry that sees "open standards" as a Bataan Death March towards loss of control. They see the huge benefit from providing a closed solution that allows them have end-end control over every aspect of TV watching.
What happens when you have a combo STB that does both cablecard for "normal" TV but allows program downloads from the internet (ie, some future "tv channel" streaming feed standard)? It doesn't take consumers too long to realize that they can cancel the TV part without losing anything.
This has to have happened already, but what's the outcome?
What happens when the cops raid your house by mistake and you zap a couple of them? Do you get charged with murder, or do you get a pass because the cops fucked up and guys with guns kicking in your door to rob you looks about like cops with guns kicking in your doors, or at least in the 5 seconds you have to grab your piece and open fire?
You laugh, but the military is kind of like the porn industry is with the internet. If they could prove conclusively that sucking on black dildos improved battlefield performance, they'd do it (and you'd see them for sale on AR15.com).
Cafepress has a pretty lame attitude towards infringement as well and it looks like they nailed a bunch of people making critical items about MoveOn as well, based on demands from MoveOn.Org.
I think its pretty priceless that an organization that would normally be highly critical of laws protecting corporate speech is hiding behind them.
Of course the "best" option is to stop pretending that Ticketmaster, the venues, the artists and the brokers aren't colluding to drive up prices.
TM doesn't care who buys its tickets as long as it gets a service fee per ticket, and the greater the demand for tickets the more likely they can sell the crappy tickets left over to the public. The artists and venues like the shortages as they can use their ability to get/reserve tickets at cost or for free and then turn them over to brokers at better than face value. The brokers love shortages as they then corner the market with the "good" tickets they get from the venues and the artists.
I actually think that the artists and venues are the real enemies, with the brokers just being middle men, as they are the ones most likely to manipulate the market since they have the earliest access to the tickets.
Your actual problem though isn't non-transferable tickets, its living in Southern California.
I'd modify the non-transferability thing this way to make it a tad more flexible.
1) As many as 4 tickets can be bought under one ID and that person/ID MUST attend the event. The other 1-3 tickets must be presented at the SAME TIME for admittance with the ticket linked the ID. This solves the problem every ticket needing an ID, kids, etc.
2) Tickets can be transferred between IDs/owners up to two times, but both parties must do this in person at the venue ticket office while presenting IDs. This allows for the "Oh shit, I can't go" phenomenon but makes it cumbersome and impractical for scalpers.
I thought that Apple and SGI should have merged at one time. It no longer makes sense, but at the time (say, 2000 or before) both were clear leaders in graphics and visualization. It would have been very interesting to have a common software platform from true desktop to true datacenter.
The party is kind of over now, as Apple has decided they are a consumer electronics company and not a computer company and Sun is less interested than they used to be in the desktop-type workstation market (at least from a hardware perspective, Java kind of keeps them there in a software basis).
Since I never read the linked Slashvertisements, I don't know for sure, but what do you want to bet that it has a cablecard slot and does not do real-time HD video compression?
If it did, I would agree heartily that its a very interesting device simply for that reason and probably worth buying.
...and fortunately I just turned 40, so I can actually half-sort-of claim to be old, too.
I took a job at a small business consultancy and found myself IMMEDIATELY pressured to work for free after hours (returning emails, looking over proposals, as well as some miscellaneous work that had to be done after hours like reboots). Most of the pressure of course came from the principals, who have the most to gain from "extra" work.
I pushed back immediately, not answering phone calls or email after 5, when asked when I would look at something not related to on-site client work, I'd schedule time during the day to do it vs. doing it at home after hours.
Strangely enough, the only place where one of the principals complained was about daycare pickups when my wife was out of town! He actually had the gall to ask me what I would do if a client site was down or having problems and I had to pickup my kid -- I told him "Easy question -- I don't even have to think about it. My son comes first, every time." He kept it up, suggesting I should have a "backup" plan with friends or neighbors in case I had to work, and I just told him to "Put any further suggestions about my child's welfare in writing along with any repercussions should I fail to follow them."
I'm not sure such a written letter would have done much for me, but I can only imagine how it might have gone over should a situation have ever reached court or had I filed for unemployment claiming I had been terminated without cause.
But since then, nothings happened and both principals have been pretty conscientious about work/life balance. In fact in my last performance review, I made the point explicitly that the job lacked the compensation or advancement to merit becoming a 60 hour a week job and they pretty much agreed with me.
I just think it pays to work hard during the day and then ignore them after hours.
Heh, XP will run at least as fast on a 350Mhz PII as 10.4 runs on my CPU-upgraded Blue & White G3 (1 Ghz G4 CPU).
I wish it was possible to specify a CPU in VMWare to get a feel for what running a given OS would be like; it'd be fun to actually try XP on a 386, although I'm not sure the 386 ever supported the RAM necessary to make it actually happen.
I have a blue and white G3 that has a 1Ghz G4 upgrade chip in it. I wonder if the installer will look at the CPU itself or the actual model of the machine. System Profiler shows a 1Ghz CPU and a G3 machine.
I finally gave it a try, also thinking it'd be a PITA. As it turns out, most sites with Javascript don't need it for most functions and its also quite illuminating how many sites inject third-party site javascript without saying anything.
It's not required that you participate in modern life, either, but its damn hard to do it without access to credit. And I'm not talking about dumbshit consumer debt wasted on dining out, clothes, big-screen TVs and look-at-me cars; I'm talking about renting a car or a hotel room, buying a house/condo, hell, even getting a *job* often requires a credit check and one that comes back with "no credit history" will surely raise red flags.
I haven't personally had a problem with the credit system -- I pay my bills on time and my ONLY debt is my house. However, I also don't think that the credit "system" is anything more fair than a casino where the house controls the odds and sets the minimum bid.
It goes deeper than that. Companies you have credit with will extend you more credit than you think you have (often in the form of higher limits) not just because they like you, but because it can actually lower your credit score by making you more "at risk" for being in debt because you have access to credit.
This helps, say, your credit card issuer because you'll get fewer or less lucrative offers to switch to other cards because you are higher risk, but it also means you might pay a higher interest rate on things you DO want to buy on credit (like a car).
If you can freeze your credit, credit issuers can't silently over-credit you and drive up your cost of credit at the same time.
IMHO, the credit "industry" is a major racket which only appears to be a marketplace; the customers of the credit reporting clearinghouses are the lenders, and the lenders benefit from lower credit ratings and scores by being able to charge higher interest rates. The credit clearinghouses have ZERO incentive to have accurate records, fair correction policies or transparent scoring algorithms; their customer, the lenders, benefit from consumer-unfriendly policies through both higher interest rates and lender-leaning policies that treat borrowers suspiciously.
I don't know, but I've often speculated that the mortgage crisis, which is actually a bad-lending-policy crisis, happened because some renegade lenders figured out several years ago that the clearinghouses were manipulating data against consumers grossly enough that a market was being denied credit generally unfairly. Of course this blossomed into a get-rich-quick real estate bubble, but the technical origins were in our "traditional" credit markets being lender-skewed by the reporting agencies and non-traditional lenders exploiting this gap.
I'd like to see MUCH greater regulation of the reporting agencies, including mandating transparency of records (eg, I get access to everything you share/sell about me in whatever format you package it in), record freezing, banning scoring (force lenders to make decisions based on actual borrowing and payment histories) or at least making the scoring process totally transparent and subject to regulation (ie, queries alone can't lower your score, scoring only based on borrwing and payment histories), requiring a simpler challenge process with the burden of proof greatly shifted to lenders (eg, electronic-only records not in consumers favor MUST be removed if challenges, lenders must provide non-electronic proof of discrepencies, etc).
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for.
Its just amazing how little control we have over our credit dossiers and how much influence it has over many details of life. You can get caught raping a 10 year old and win a million dollar settlement if the cop who arrests you even THINKS about smacking you, yet even if you're the best credit consumer in the world you can get dicked over by the credit reporting agencies with only the weakest of "rights" available to you.
Just how hard is iTunes activation, anyway and how much backend does it REALLY require?
It kind of smells like sending some packet with the user, the SIM data, and whatever else they collect, nicely encrypted, to AT&T and AT&T then allowing the phone to work on their network.
Visual voicemail seems harder, if only because you have to keep track of the mailbox usage state to keep the display in sync (which may be simpler than I think, if all the commands have to go through iphone anyway).
I thought I'd read those were built to withstand re-entry without vaporizing or breaking open. I seem to recall Danger-Will-Robinson arm-waving paranoia about these thermal generators the last time NASA sent one up, but the NASA boys being basically on top of it and packaging them in a way that wasn't a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
It was put that way to frustrate pedantic asshats like you.
Everyone else in the world knows what the fuck "PC-types speeds" means.
Robbing data centers makes about as much sense as robbing the postman -- a lot of effort for an unknown return, in fact even more effort, since you have to recover data off the servers, reverse-engineer DB schemas and data storage methods, etc. Worthwhile for known data, but a lot of effort to merely obtain a DB of shoe sizes or orthodontic records or something, especially when there's already an existing global marketplace in stolen credit card info and other identity theft details.
I think the only real reason to hit this would be for industrial espionage or some other cloak-and-dagger business.
The hardware can't have a ton of resale value, unless there's some pipeline sending stolen servers to Russia/China/Mexico, as the machines are likely generally 1+ years old and there's not a ton of business customers looking to buy used servers off the back of a truck (are there?).
I've always thought that the "military grade" security surrounding most DCs was a joke and for PR purposes only. Banks are seldom robbed successfully, and you can walk right in, why does a data center need 8 biometric data points, a smart card and an access code to get into a room with caged & locked equipment?
Apple would make it super cool, but unusable, like the UI on iTunes.
This is much more about toothless regulation and, most important, a cable industry that sees "open standards" as a Bataan Death March towards loss of control. They see the huge benefit from providing a closed solution that allows them have end-end control over every aspect of TV watching.
What happens when you have a combo STB that does both cablecard for "normal" TV but allows program downloads from the internet (ie, some future "tv channel" streaming feed standard)? It doesn't take consumers too long to realize that they can cancel the TV part without losing anything.
This has to have happened already, but what's the outcome?
What happens when the cops raid your house by mistake and you zap a couple of them? Do you get charged with murder, or do you get a pass because the cops fucked up and guys with guns kicking in your door to rob you looks about like cops with guns kicking in your doors, or at least in the 5 seconds you have to grab your piece and open fire?
You laugh, but the military is kind of like the porn industry is with the internet. If they could prove conclusively that sucking on black dildos improved battlefield performance, they'd do it (and you'd see them for sale on AR15.com).
Cafepress has a pretty lame attitude towards infringement as well and it looks like they nailed a bunch of people making critical items about MoveOn as well, based on demands from MoveOn.Org.
I think its pretty priceless that an organization that would normally be highly critical of laws protecting corporate speech is hiding behind them.
Of course the "best" option is to stop pretending that Ticketmaster, the venues, the artists and the brokers aren't colluding to drive up prices.
TM doesn't care who buys its tickets as long as it gets a service fee per ticket, and the greater the demand for tickets the more likely they can sell the crappy tickets left over to the public. The artists and venues like the shortages as they can use their ability to get/reserve tickets at cost or for free and then turn them over to brokers at better than face value. The brokers love shortages as they then corner the market with the "good" tickets they get from the venues and the artists.
I actually think that the artists and venues are the real enemies, with the brokers just being middle men, as they are the ones most likely to manipulate the market since they have the earliest access to the tickets.
Your actual problem though isn't non-transferable tickets, its living in Southern California.
I'd modify the non-transferability thing this way to make it a tad more flexible.
1) As many as 4 tickets can be bought under one ID and that person/ID MUST attend the event. The other 1-3 tickets must be presented at the SAME TIME for admittance with the ticket linked the ID. This solves the problem every ticket needing an ID, kids, etc.
2) Tickets can be transferred between IDs/owners up to two times, but both parties must do this in person at the venue ticket office while presenting IDs. This allows for the "Oh shit, I can't go" phenomenon but makes it cumbersome and impractical for scalpers.
Great video, much better than the BS on the listed site.
Why not youtube, though?
D) They're both run by megalomaniacal zealots.
I thought that Apple and SGI should have merged at one time. It no longer makes sense, but at the time (say, 2000 or before) both were clear leaders in graphics and visualization. It would have been very interesting to have a common software platform from true desktop to true datacenter.
The party is kind of over now, as Apple has decided they are a consumer electronics company and not a computer company and Sun is less interested than they used to be in the desktop-type workstation market (at least from a hardware perspective, Java kind of keeps them there in a software basis).
Any business with a sales arm does this. It promotes product sales and extra service hours.
I've had it fail RAM that passed on another system, only to find out the motherboard was actually bad.
And then there's the run time problem, I don't trust any no-problems results for runs less than at least 12 hours.
I wonder if you could clone the raw disk and boot it within VMWare and debug from there.
Since I never read the linked Slashvertisements, I don't know for sure, but what do you want to bet that it has a cablecard slot and does not do real-time HD video compression?
If it did, I would agree heartily that its a very interesting device simply for that reason and probably worth buying.
...and fortunately I just turned 40, so I can actually half-sort-of claim to be old, too.
I took a job at a small business consultancy and found myself IMMEDIATELY pressured to work for free after hours (returning emails, looking over proposals, as well as some miscellaneous work that had to be done after hours like reboots). Most of the pressure of course came from the principals, who have the most to gain from "extra" work.
I pushed back immediately, not answering phone calls or email after 5, when asked when I would look at something not related to on-site client work, I'd schedule time during the day to do it vs. doing it at home after hours.
Strangely enough, the only place where one of the principals complained was about daycare pickups when my wife was out of town! He actually had the gall to ask me what I would do if a client site was down or having problems and I had to pickup my kid -- I told him "Easy question -- I don't even have to think about it. My son comes first, every time." He kept it up, suggesting I should have a "backup" plan with friends or neighbors in case I had to work, and I just told him to "Put any further suggestions about my child's welfare in writing along with any repercussions should I fail to follow them."
I'm not sure such a written letter would have done much for me, but I can only imagine how it might have gone over should a situation have ever reached court or had I filed for unemployment claiming I had been terminated without cause.
But since then, nothings happened and both principals have been pretty conscientious about work/life balance. In fact in my last performance review, I made the point explicitly that the job lacked the compensation or advancement to merit becoming a 60 hour a week job and they pretty much agreed with me.
I just think it pays to work hard during the day and then ignore them after hours.
Heh, XP will run at least as fast on a 350Mhz PII as 10.4 runs on my CPU-upgraded Blue & White G3 (1 Ghz G4 CPU).
I wish it was possible to specify a CPU in VMWare to get a feel for what running a given OS would be like; it'd be fun to actually try XP on a 386, although I'm not sure the 386 ever supported the RAM necessary to make it actually happen.
I have a blue and white G3 that has a 1Ghz G4 upgrade chip in it. I wonder if the installer will look at the CPU itself or the actual model of the machine. System Profiler shows a 1Ghz CPU and a G3 machine.
I finally gave it a try, also thinking it'd be a PITA. As it turns out, most sites with Javascript don't need it for most functions and its also quite illuminating how many sites inject third-party site javascript without saying anything.
I would pay money for IMAP, even if it meant doing the premium hosting option.
Is IMAP such a horrific resource hog?
It is not required that you borrow money.
It's not required that you participate in modern life, either, but its damn hard to do it without access to credit. And I'm not talking about dumbshit consumer debt wasted on dining out, clothes, big-screen TVs and look-at-me cars; I'm talking about renting a car or a hotel room, buying a house/condo, hell, even getting a *job* often requires a credit check and one that comes back with "no credit history" will surely raise red flags.
I haven't personally had a problem with the credit system -- I pay my bills on time and my ONLY debt is my house. However, I also don't think that the credit "system" is anything more fair than a casino where the house controls the odds and sets the minimum bid.
It goes deeper than that. Companies you have credit with will extend you more credit than you think you have (often in the form of higher limits) not just because they like you, but because it can actually lower your credit score by making you more "at risk" for being in debt because you have access to credit.
This helps, say, your credit card issuer because you'll get fewer or less lucrative offers to switch to other cards because you are higher risk, but it also means you might pay a higher interest rate on things you DO want to buy on credit (like a car).
If you can freeze your credit, credit issuers can't silently over-credit you and drive up your cost of credit at the same time.
IMHO, the credit "industry" is a major racket which only appears to be a marketplace; the customers of the credit reporting clearinghouses are the lenders, and the lenders benefit from lower credit ratings and scores by being able to charge higher interest rates. The credit clearinghouses have ZERO incentive to have accurate records, fair correction policies or transparent scoring algorithms; their customer, the lenders, benefit from consumer-unfriendly policies through both higher interest rates and lender-leaning policies that treat borrowers suspiciously.
I don't know, but I've often speculated that the mortgage crisis, which is actually a bad-lending-policy crisis, happened because some renegade lenders figured out several years ago that the clearinghouses were manipulating data against consumers grossly enough that a market was being denied credit generally unfairly. Of course this blossomed into a get-rich-quick real estate bubble, but the technical origins were in our "traditional" credit markets being lender-skewed by the reporting agencies and non-traditional lenders exploiting this gap.
I'd like to see MUCH greater regulation of the reporting agencies, including mandating transparency of records (eg, I get access to everything you share/sell about me in whatever format you package it in), record freezing, banning scoring (force lenders to make decisions based on actual borrowing and payment histories) or at least making the scoring process totally transparent and subject to regulation (ie, queries alone can't lower your score, scoring only based on borrwing and payment histories), requiring a simpler challenge process with the burden of proof greatly shifted to lenders (eg, electronic-only records not in consumers favor MUST be removed if challenges, lenders must provide non-electronic proof of discrepencies, etc).
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for.
Its just amazing how little control we have over our credit dossiers and how much influence it has over many details of life. You can get caught raping a 10 year old and win a million dollar settlement if the cop who arrests you even THINKS about smacking you, yet even if you're the best credit consumer in the world you can get dicked over by the credit reporting agencies with only the weakest of "rights" available to you.
Just how hard is iTunes activation, anyway and how much backend does it REALLY require?
It kind of smells like sending some packet with the user, the SIM data, and whatever else they collect, nicely encrypted, to AT&T and AT&T then allowing the phone to work on their network.
Visual voicemail seems harder, if only because you have to keep track of the mailbox usage state to keep the display in sync (which may be simpler than I think, if all the commands have to go through iphone anyway).
"Shit breaks" isn't exactly a very good analysis of the potential failure modes for a plutonium thermal generator.
I thought I'd read those were built to withstand re-entry without vaporizing or breaking open. I seem to recall Danger-Will-Robinson arm-waving paranoia about these thermal generators the last time NASA sent one up, but the NASA boys being basically on top of it and packaging them in a way that wasn't a threat.