At: $124,000 per secret.
In one hour I can crack 60 of those.
That's $7.4million worth of secrets each hour.
In a day I can crack 24 of those.
That's $178,560,000 worth in a day.
At your prices, the machine pays for itself in a little over a day.
The key to your problem is that $200 million is not $2e11 - it's $2e8
By my calculations, a $200 million machine could pay for itself in 3 years, if each secret was worth $126.
When I started at my current employer, I received a nice plain employment agreement. It was good. I signed it.
Then they wanted to change my conditions, which was also good, because it mean more money, so they gave me a new contract to sign.
It has an ambiguous clause in it regarding IP ownership. I corrected it, signed the new version, and sent it in. Everyone around me was saying "You can't do that."
Oh yes I can. I don't think they ever read my version. I don't really care - I know that what I signed gives them the rights to anything done on their time or their equipment. That's it.
One could make a case that MS knew they were a monopoly by the very fact that they could create these licensing agreements (and other similar tactics).
The very fact that they were in a position to say "We are Microsoft, you will do what we say, or we won't sell you Windows" means they were exerting the monopoly powers. You can't exert them unless you are a monopoly...
I'm not sure if such an argument will hold, but acting as a monopoly, certainly strengthen the argument that they were a monopoly (and knew it).
It's all a matter of learning how to manage your customers.
Once you know how how they think, it becomes possible to convince them that their idea isn't going to fly.
My customers care about risk + reputation. If I can show them that doing the project the way they want is going to put them in a high risk situation, where they're going to look like idiots, then they won't do it.
I'd like them to listen to me more.
I'd like to be able to tell them that it isn't going to fly without having to spend 3 days preparing a discussion paper.
But when they have stupid ideas, I can usually get them to change them.
In fact it works exactly the opposite of the way you suggest. If I didn't ahve this attitude then I'd be out of a job.
The customer's ideas are not deliverable. After failing to deliver a number projects, and wasting millions of dollars, I'd be gone.
I have to be able to provide my customers with real value, and to do that, I need to tell them when they have bad ideas.
I consider myself a professional. I'm not hired to turn stupid ideas into a non-functioning reality.
If you want to keep the geeks happy, then expect and allow them to be professional.
When my customers come and say "we want you to do this, and you should do it like that, and just do it as fast as you can without worrying about the future", I say "no". It's not worth my time to slave away on your project when I know that it's not going to work, and in 3 months time you're going to come back and complain to me that I just wasted your money.
I know more about the tech than my customers, I know what will/won't work. If they don't respect my advice on those matters then my job satisfaction goes way down low, and that becomes my manager's problem to deal with. If this person wants to be a good boss, then they need to prevent that from happening.
This.tar file contains both the source code you'll need and a sample data file that can be used to develop and test your program. It also contains a README file with details about the code and data, as well as links to the site where you can download the full set of 900,000 web pages on which to run your program.
The 57 meg is enough to get you started.
Once you have something going you can download the rest of the data, or get it on CD.
I'll probably download the 57 meg and look at it, and if a great idea hits me, I'll get them to send me the CDs containing the 900k pages.
Re:Mandrake8.1 ships with both 2.4 and 2.2
on
2.4, The Kernel of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
if you need all the fancy stuff use 2.4 but if you want stability use 2.2.
Yeah, cause Linus was joking when he said that even numbers were "stable".
2.4 is a supposedly stable tree.
It's supposed to be Odd versions have fancy (ie experimental) stuff, use at own risk, Even versions are stable and suitable for real usage.
So using 2.4 on a server and then complaining that it isn't stable enough is silly IMHO
Then Linus should stop saying that the even versions are stable.
The surest sign that the Rational Unified Process doesn't (automatically) lead to good software is the fact that Rose gets worse and worse with each release.
Either they're not using the RUP to produce it (in which case, why not?) or they are using RUP, and still produce crap.
>> The interesting thing is that Microsoft made plenty of stupid mistakes >> too, but since they were powered by monopoly profits in OSes (and earlier >> on by licences for BASIC in ROMs), they could afford to wait out their >> mistakes and just keep throwing money at the problems until they >> straightened them out.
> I believe the key to Microsoft's success is knowing when to let go of > a bad idea. Such as MS Bob, MS Chat and various others. It is when you > still believe in a product which doesn't make money that you fail.
What worked for microsoft was to enter a market, take control of it, and
then find new markets to take on.
When they got big enough they did that in parallel.
They started with BASIC, then MS-DOS, and then tried to maintain control of the OS
(with Windows) at the same time as writing applications to take on people like
Lotus. They they went for the server market, the database market, etc.
They can afford to kill of stupid/failing products because they have a number
of revenue sources.
Borland screwed up all their markets, and manage to scrape through with a set
of development tools.
Lotus lost on the apps, but managed to hold on to Notes long enough to get
bought out.
Netscape lost the broswer war, and got sold off for spare parts (NetCenter and
Enterprise Server).
If you're only competing in one market, then you have to get it right pretty
much every time (Oracle). If you let the ball down you will end up loosing
your market, and getting bought out (Informix).
MS didn't win because they had a monopoly, they won because they used their
monopoly (both for power and resources) to allow then to diversify into and
market they wanted.
Actually, you're potentially wrong.
Unfortunately EFA seems to be trying to scare people with mis-information. Which is very bad. This law sucks enough already, there's no need to pretend it's worse.
The list you provide is for "Adult Themes". It is possible to publish material about adult themes and still have that material decalred suitable for children, but it has to be done discreetly.
The real problems are these:
The determination of classifications is based on a majority vote of a minority group.
The people voting are not netizens - ie Outsiders are policing our space.
The vote is based on a code and not a law. The code can change if they like.
There is no requirement for the censo^h^h^h^h^h classifiers to vote from an objective position.
The classifications are not always predicatable.
The classifications of items have on a number of occasions changed based on public pressure.
The law requires that citizens be able to predict that which is unpredicatable.
Certain topics are rated RC - "Refused Classification". Promoting drug use will get you an RC. Such material is illegal.
Basically, anything you do might be illegal, because your email might get archived somewhere, and then the Classification Board might vote it as an R (or X or RC) rating.
It could well be that sites promoting the legalisation of cannabis will be considered to be promoting drug use, and therefore are RC rated.
Or maybe that would just be overt adult themes, and therefore be R rated.
But you could be lucky and get it rated MA.
Who knows? How many people want to risk it?
What about a site like dancesafe. That's arguably promoting drug use. You could certainly find a group of people to sit on a board and declare it so.
If you don't want your kids to see it, then don't let them loose on the internet.
Re:What makes a good IDE, aka: Netbeans is real cl
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
I guess it depends on who you are writing for.
I'm looking for a good RAD tool to write front-ends to enterprise systems (crappy configuration screens, data-entry etc).
JSP is fine if I can do everything I need in HTML, but edit-masks, and input validation is pretty minimal there, so for a number of screens, it just isn't sensible.
We used to do a lot of powerbuilder, but (1) It sucks rocks. (2) No one really expects to see Sybase keep throwing money into it.
That basically leaves Delphi/C++/VB/Java.
I'd like to do it in Java but I need something to throw together nice screen easily.
My users all work in one or two buildings in Australia - they don't need internationalisation, and they sure as hell don't want to pay me to put it in.
Something that lets me drop some controls on a screen, validate the input and then send it off to a server/database gets my tick.
Kawa: A nice, relatively clean IDE, syntax highlighting, add-on modules for stuff like EJB/servlet debugging and nice things like that. It may have a different name these days, I tried it over a year ago for a while
Tek-Tools made Kawa.
They sold it to Allaire (for $9 mill!).
Hypocritical bastard politicians - more concerned about the tax drain and Big Business than people's quality of life.
Umm, yeah, whatever.
Do you actually think that the green senators give a flying fsck about big business?
I contend that they actually are concerned about the citizens.
Compulsive gambling is a serious problem, and online gambling makes it even easier.
I'd love to see pokies thrown out of the pubs, but it ain't gonna happen.
Rolling back the clock on gambling is too costly (both economically and politically) for polititians to stomach, but they can stop new avenues from opening up.
That's the same reason pot is illegal, but tobacco is legal. There's no feasible way to ban tobacco, but keeping pot down is relatively successful. It doesn't make much sense, but it's the only "workable" option right now.
This will simply be a waste of time for all involved,
I very much doubt that.
and won't really stop online gambling
That's true.
"paypal & western union, and bank wire" generally require you to have the money up front. Credit card gambling allows you to run up masses of debts at casinos that potentially have no regulation.
Stopping people from being able to go home, logon and loose thousands of dollars on their credit card, will have an impact and is certainly not a waste of time.
Gambling is a problem, it is ruining people's lives, and a government has a responsibility to protect people - including protecting them from themselves.
Is this person has worked somewhere before, talk to their references. If they say nice things, not too bad. If they say they'd like to work with them again, even better. Don't forget to ask what their last 6 months were like
The other important rule is that it's just as much about what they don't say.
A lot of people won't want to dump on people in a reference, so they offer some fluff, but not much else.
If the reference says:
MagikSlinger was employeed at Comments'R'Us for 10 months. He fulfilled his responsibilities, and left of his own free will.
Then you probably don't want to hire him.
Sure, he did the job, and he wasn't fired, but there's no mention of him adding value, and no recommendation to hire. If that's the best the empoyer could offer, then he wasn't a great employee.
I once saw a reference for an IT guy, that basically said
I would recommend Bob for any position he was qualified.
Which bascially means, "nice guy, works well, worth hiring but don't expect him to bring in any skills, except those you see on his resume. If he can do what you want, then go for it, but if not, don't expect him to pick it up."
Since I know the person that wrote it, I'm pretty sure that's what was meant.
Talk to the references (don't rely on the prepared piece) and ask them everything. If they're reluctant to answer something, then you've probably found the weakness.
Then here comes Eazel, which thinks it has the time and money to both make a free product and sell the value-
added services. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this business model?
As was pointed out on a TV show I saw recently, most of the "New economy" businesses, (in which I include Eazel), worked in a similar, stupid way.
They would have two products/services.
One of them, they would excel at, but give away free.
The other, they were (sometimes) OK at, and charged for.
It's a model that can work sometimes, but not often.
Take Deja for example.
Core competancy: Usenet archives/posting.
Money making: Crappy web-store on the side.
Result: Failure.
Eazel
Core competancy: Desktop/UI devlopment.
Money making: Some services on the side.
Result: Failure.
The model has some sucess - Yahoo! has done OK so far, but so far it has been an exception not the rule.
--
Re:Well, I guess it didn't work out as I had hoped
on
Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
·
· Score: 2
Why would anyone buy out Eazel?
You made it clear yourself: it is GPL
Eazel probably has large debts. If RedHat was to buy them, then they'd have to carry those debts. If they let Eazel go bankrupt, the debts go away, and RedHat can just pick up the code.
it'd be nice to have the original dedicated developers too
They still can, if Eazel goes under then these people are out of work. 90% of them are in it because they believe in it, if another company offers them a job working on Nautilus, they'll take it.
I suspect this is always going to be true for companies producing free software.
A software company has 3 assets:
The software
The people
The ideas.
In the free software world most of those are going to be free for the taking after a company goes under.
The software is under a free licence, so another company can pick it up free. The only thing that the company still holds is the copyright, and even then, they might not if they accept outside contributions.
The people usually care more about the code than the company, and will move onto another company if they get to keep working on it.
The ideas are usually in the heads of the people or in the code. The rest of them tend to be quite public anyway.
The reaulity is, if you're trying to build a company around free sfotware, then you need to remain extra careful to remain solvent, because there's not a lot of reason for someone to bail you out.
they never got far enough to test their business plan.
The business plan starts the day the business starts.
If their plan lacked any consideration of the first year(s), or if didn't carry them through to profitability, then the plan was a failure.
In this case, it failed. Miserably.
Which is not to say the founders were "wrong/stupid", but that the plan didn't work out. Conditions weren't favourable, the market didn't eventuate, whatever.
The Eazel plan failed, that doesn't mean services are a bad plan.
Slashdot Mirror
At: $124,000 per secret.
In one hour I can crack 60 of those.
That's $7.4million worth of secrets each hour.
In a day I can crack 24 of those.
That's $178,560,000 worth in a day.
At your prices, the machine pays for itself in a little over a day.
The key to your problem is that $200 million is not $2e11 - it's $2e8
By my calculations, a $200 million machine could pay for itself in 3 years, if each secret was worth $126.
I'm poor - but I'm not that poor.
Agreed.
When I started at my current employer, I received a nice plain employment agreement. It was good. I signed it.
Then they wanted to change my conditions, which was also good, because it mean more money, so they gave me a new contract to sign.
It has an ambiguous clause in it regarding IP ownership. I corrected it, signed the new version, and sent it in.
Everyone around me was saying "You can't do that."
Oh yes I can.
I don't think they ever read my version.
I don't really care - I know that what I signed gives them the rights to anything done on their time or their equipment.
That's it.
The very fact that they were in a position to say "We are Microsoft, you will do what we say, or we won't sell you Windows" means they were exerting the monopoly powers.
You can't exert them unless you are a monopoly...
I'm not sure if such an argument will hold, but acting as a monopoly, certainly strengthen the argument that they were a monopoly (and knew it).
It's all a matter of learning how to manage your customers.
Once you know how how they think, it becomes possible to convince them that their idea isn't going to fly.
My customers care about risk + reputation. If I can show them that doing the project the way they want is going to put them in a high risk situation, where they're going to look like idiots, then they won't do it.
I'd like them to listen to me more.
I'd like to be able to tell them that it isn't going to fly without having to spend 3 days preparing a discussion paper.
But when they have stupid ideas, I can usually get them to change them.
In fact it works exactly the opposite of the way you suggest. If I didn't ahve this attitude then I'd be out of a job.
The customer's ideas are not deliverable. After failing to deliver a number projects, and wasting millions of dollars, I'd be gone.
I have to be able to provide my customers with real value, and to do that, I need to tell them when they have bad ideas.
If you want to keep the geeks happy, then expect and allow them to be professional.
When my customers come and say "we want you to do this, and you should do it like that, and just do it as fast as you can without worrying about the future", I say "no". It's not worth my time to slave away on your project when I know that it's not going to work, and in 3 months time you're going to come back and complain to me that I just wasted your money.
I know more about the tech than my customers, I know what will/won't work. If they don't respect my advice on those matters then my job satisfaction goes way down low, and that becomes my manager's problem to deal with. If this person wants to be a good boss, then they need to prevent that from happening.
It doesn't.
The 57 meg is enough to get you started. Once you have something going you can download the rest of the data, or get it on CD.I'll probably download the 57 meg and look at it, and if a great idea hits me, I'll get them to send me the CDs containing the 900k pages.
Yeah, cause Linus was joking when he said that even numbers were "stable".
2.4 is a supposedly stable tree.
It's supposed to be Odd versions have fancy (ie experimental) stuff, use at own risk, Even versions are stable and suitable for real usage.
So using 2.4 on a server and then complaining that it isn't stable enough is silly IMHO
Then Linus should stop saying that the even versions are stable.
Insert obligatory *BSD advert here
You're obviously not familiar with Sybase then.
The surest sign that the Rational Unified Process doesn't (automatically) lead to good software is the fact that Rose gets worse and worse with each release.
Either they're not using the RUP to produce it (in which case, why not?) or they are using RUP, and still produce crap.
>> too, but since they were powered by monopoly profits in OSes (and earlier
>> on by licences for BASIC in ROMs), they could afford to wait out their
>> mistakes and just keep throwing money at the problems until they
>> straightened them out.
> I believe the key to Microsoft's success is knowing when to let go of
> a bad idea. Such as MS Bob, MS Chat and various others. It is when you
> still believe in a product which doesn't make money that you fail.
What worked for microsoft was to enter a market, take control of it, and then find new markets to take on.
When they got big enough they did that in parallel.
They started with BASIC, then MS-DOS, and then tried to maintain control of the OS (with Windows) at the same time as writing applications to take on people like Lotus. They they went for the server market, the database market, etc.
They can afford to kill of stupid/failing products because they have a number of revenue sources.
Borland screwed up all their markets, and manage to scrape through with a set of development tools.
Lotus lost on the apps, but managed to hold on to Notes long enough to get bought out.
Netscape lost the broswer war, and got sold off for spare parts (NetCenter and Enterprise Server).
If you're only competing in one market, then you have to get it right pretty much every time (Oracle). If you let the ball down you will end up loosing your market, and getting bought out (Informix).
MS didn't win because they had a monopoly, they won because they used their monopoly (both for power and resources) to allow then to diversify into and market they wanted.
The democrats have completely lost their way.
The greens actually have a clue about the world.
The democrats have become nothing more than a tool for Natasha Stott Despoja's ego.
Unfortunately EFA seems to be trying to scare people with mis-information. Which is very bad. This law sucks enough already, there's no need to pretend it's worse.
The list you provide is for "Adult Themes". It is possible to publish material about adult themes and still have that material decalred suitable for children, but it has to be done discreetly.
The real problems are these:
Basically, anything you do might be illegal, because your email might get archived somewhere, and then the Classification Board might vote it as an R (or X or RC) rating.
It could well be that sites promoting the legalisation of cannabis will be considered to be promoting drug use, and therefore are RC rated.
Or maybe that would just be overt adult themes, and therefore be R rated.
But you could be lucky and get it rated MA.
Who knows? How many people want to risk it?
What about a site like dancesafe. That's arguably promoting drug use. You could certainly find a group of people to sit on a board and declare it so.
If you don't want your kids to see it, then don't let them loose on the internet.
I'm looking for a good RAD tool to write front-ends to enterprise systems (crappy configuration screens, data-entry etc).
JSP is fine if I can do everything I need in HTML, but edit-masks, and input validation is pretty minimal there, so for a number of screens, it just isn't sensible.
We used to do a lot of powerbuilder, but (1) It sucks rocks. (2) No one really expects to see Sybase keep throwing money into it.
That basically leaves Delphi/C++/VB/Java.
I'd like to do it in Java but I need something to throw together nice screen easily.
My users all work in one or two buildings in Australia - they don't need internationalisation, and they sure as hell don't want to pay me to put it in.
Something that lets me drop some controls on a screen, validate the input and then send it off to a server/database gets my tick.
Tek-Tools made Kawa.
They sold it to Allaire (for $9 mill!).
Macromedia bought^H^H^H merged with Alliare.
Macromedia killed off Kawa.
The tek-tools version of Kawa was quite nice, by all reports it was destroyed somewhere between Allaire + Macromedia.
undermine copyright laws - write a song and sing it to a friend for free
I like.
>tk if you use cPython
Sorry, but Tk isn't those things.
For one thing, it's about as far from portable as you can get.
--
To quote a certain Larry Wall:
You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?:-)
--Larry Wall in <7349@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Totally ripped from http://use.perl.org/quotes.txt
--
--
Umm, yeah, whatever.
Do you actually think that the green senators give a flying fsck about big business?
I contend that they actually are concerned about the citizens.
Compulsive gambling is a serious problem, and online gambling makes it even easier.
I'd love to see pokies thrown out of the pubs, but it ain't gonna happen.
Rolling back the clock on gambling is too costly (both economically and politically) for polititians to stomach, but they can stop new avenues from opening up.
That's the same reason pot is illegal, but tobacco is legal. There's no feasible way to ban tobacco, but keeping pot down is relatively successful. It doesn't make much sense, but it's the only "workable" option right now.
--
I very much doubt that.
and won't really stop online gambling
That's true.
"paypal & western union, and bank wire" generally require you to have the money up front. Credit card gambling allows you to run up masses of debts at casinos that potentially have no regulation.
Stopping people from being able to go home, logon and loose thousands of dollars on their credit card, will have an impact and is certainly not a waste of time.
Gambling is a problem, it is ruining people's lives, and a government has a responsibility to protect people - including protecting them from themselves.
--
As well he should be.
Personal software should be easy to use. If it's hard to make GNUcash work, then GNUcash has a problem.
--
The other important rule is that it's just as much about what they don't say.
A lot of people won't want to dump on people in a reference, so they offer some fluff, but not much else.
Then you probably don't want to hire him.If the reference says:
Sure, he did the job, and he wasn't fired, but there's no mention of him adding value, and no recommendation to hire. If that's the best the empoyer could offer, then he wasn't a great employee.
I once saw a reference for an IT guy, that basically said
Which bascially means, "nice guy, works well, worth hiring but don't expect him to bring in any skills, except those you see on his resume. If he can do what you want, then go for it, but if not, don't expect him to pick it up."Since I know the person that wrote it, I'm pretty sure that's what was meant.
Talk to the references (don't rely on the prepared piece) and ask them everything. If they're reluctant to answer something, then you've probably found the weakness.
--
As was pointed out on a TV show I saw recently, most of the "New economy" businesses, (in which I include Eazel), worked in a similar, stupid way.
They would have two products/services.
One of them, they would excel at, but give away free.
The other, they were (sometimes) OK at, and charged for.
It's a model that can work sometimes, but not often.
Take Deja for example.
Core competancy: Usenet archives/posting.
Money making: Crappy web-store on the side.
Result: Failure.
Eazel
Core competancy: Desktop/UI devlopment.
Money making: Some services on the side.
Result: Failure.
The model has some sucess - Yahoo! has done OK so far, but so far it has been an exception not the rule.
--
You made it clear yourself:
it is GPL
Eazel probably has large debts. If RedHat was to buy them, then they'd have to carry those debts. If they let Eazel go bankrupt, the debts go away, and RedHat can just pick up the code.
it'd be nice to have the original dedicated developers too
They still can, if Eazel goes under then these people are out of work. 90% of them are in it because they believe in it, if another company offers them a job working on Nautilus, they'll take it.
I suspect this is always going to be true for companies producing free software.
A software company has 3 assets:
In the free software world most of those are going to be free for the taking after a company goes under.
The reaulity is, if you're trying to build a company around free sfotware, then you need to remain extra careful to remain solvent, because there's not a lot of reason for someone to bail you out.
--
The business plan starts the day the business starts.
If their plan lacked any consideration of the first year(s), or if didn't carry them through to profitability, then the plan was a failure.
In this case, it failed. Miserably.
Which is not to say the founders were "wrong/stupid", but that the plan didn't work out. Conditions weren't favourable, the market didn't eventuate, whatever.
The Eazel plan failed, that doesn't mean services are a bad plan.
--