Our absent-minded friend Joe has just got a Speedpass enabled watch. The poor guy sees John when waiting for his fast food at the drive-thru. He waves his hand and suddenly realises 10 Big Mac Combos are coming.....
The usual practice of US govt is to grant permission for the export in a case by case basis. e.g. if for weather forecast/ banking => okay, ICBM design => no,no.
I have got a feeling that they want to get away with the supercomputing export control this time (for military use ???). Their proposed use is so general that it makes control impossible. Take an example of another "tier 3" export control region: Hong Kong. I remember that in 1999, Hong Kong Government granted a permission to buy a supercomputer (16 CPU 19.2 GFLOPS peak) for weather forecasting. The standard practice is the supercomputer must be hosted in a heavily secured room in the observatory, and the observatory must hold a list for personel who can have acess to the computer. Also, the local US embassy has the right to inspect the premise and gears for irregularities...
Hong Kong as a major weather forecast hub in Asia will have to crank out a weather report each day. The chance to "sell" the spare CPU time out is pretty remote. But, still, US govt takes a lot of precautions. For a general purpose supercomputer distributed so widely like this and with many so-called "out-sourced contracts", do you think US govt can keep an eye on it effectively? BTW, in most cases, IT in Indian does not need supercomputer. But, their ICBM and advanced fighter (LCA) project will definitely need supercomputer in urgent....
Please don't be antagonistic whenever someone is mentioning anything about China. (In fact, China, India and Pakistan all are the major victims, according to CNN).
We are talking about microeconomic here when refering to these rubbish problem. That's some dodge rubblish collectors in developed world somehow sell these rubblish to some dodge rubblish "recycler" in the developing world. We are not talking about act of government here.
China, in the province or central govt level, tried hard to block dangerous waste eg, medical ones from importing. I remember Philipine also tried. Here is a list from Greenpeace that docuemented some of the high profile smuggling attempts blocked by China in 1993-97.
The key is always the people. Unlike medical waste that usu rots when arrived, these computer waste usually looks "clean". The workers (even the local authorities) underestimate the danger. The current situation is far far from satisfactory.
CNN has a more detailed article regarding this. China, India and Pakistan are main destination for the rubblish.
The situation is quite frightening. Consequently, the groundwater (near Guiyu, China) is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 18 miles away, the report said. These "high tech" waste is especially hazardous to these poor workers. Medical waste (eg used bandage) usually smells and look nasty, everyone know they are dirty. Villagers usually have no clue toxic heavy metal will leak to groundwater, burning the plastic will generate very toxic smoke... before too late.
Probably, it is now to add a "prepaid" waste recycling fee to new computers....
In fact, it's difficult to determine a legitimate reason that an end-user would need to use a boot floppy on a development network.
It makes sense to separate the network into a production and development subsystems... I wish my system admin is as cool as you.
However, I have some serious doubt whether we can eliminate the need of boot floppy in a development network altogether. Say, you are playing around with RTLinux or other kernel hacks for your project, you just leave with 2 options: 1) using boot floppy (boot CD, zip etc) 2) write that directly to harddrive
Let's forget about bad intentions first. Option 2 needs more attention from sysadmin. (A careless student may overwrite the original linux kernel with his hack... you may need to wipe the the development machine clean before Friday....)
Re:What about security???
on
Understanding NFS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I agree securing NFS is a hard problem in a hostile environment. Basically, NFS is wide open if you managed to root one machine. A group of my friends at university used to boot machines using linux bootdisk. Then, mimics other guys UID, IP etc to fool the NFS server. If you gain root after login, a clue-up sysadmin should be able to track you down... Boot floppy is the killer here. Well, you can say the computer guys should disable floppy booting option in BIOS. But, they cannot really do much as some student need to boot with floppy occasionally (we are in CSE).
Simple tricks no longer works when we switched to something more secure, AFS , in our case.... It is way more advanced than NFS. For example, as a normal user, I can authorise only a few trusted person to have access to one of my designated subdir.
yeah they ripped me off... (Score:3) by millenium68 on Friday February 22, @01:41PM (#3048827) [Alter Relationship] (User #550864 Info) I bought a bunch of their stock
What do you really mean: a) they ripped you off.... so you bought a bunch of their stock b) they ripped you off.... because you have bought a bunch of their stock c) both d) neither e) all too familiar... CowboyNeal!!!
Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement;-)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
First of all, I'll have to say that I have no experience with either the weather forecasting or the telecommunication industry. But, I just find the number weird.
About 70 launch sites would be needed to cover the continental United States. So there would have to be more than 51,000 launches a year at an annual cost is about $15 million.
That means they will release about 140 ballons each day. Firstly, I doubt whether only 140 sites will be sufficient to cover the entire continental America. Even if that's possible, it will mean that the transmission power will be quite strong. Commnunication engineers usually talk about the reuse of comm channals. What will be the implication of this?
On the other hand, $15M/70 launch sites approx equals $210000/yr/site. It seems to be a reasonable budget for reasonably large ground based relay tower.... I really cannot see the advantage for the alternative approach.
Sure, CNN.com is blocked & so is BBC.co.uk. No, NYT.com & BBCWORLD.com aren't blocked. So yes, I also don't understand the logic behind the specific blocks themselves That's just another ironic thing. The Chinese Communist Party already looks more like Captalist Party. Bear in mind, the Great Firewall of China is a dual purpose technology: stop people from accessing information. But, at the same time, stop conservatives from finding excuse to block the internet altogether.
The real issue is that the majority of people (in this case, internet users) themselves are not interested to actually access this information. That isn't too surprising to me. Put that this way, how often does an American (or British or French or Japanese or whoever), will read news (newspaper or website) originated outside his/her own home country?
The censorship nowadays is not really that bad. Their official news broadcast (usually) covers most the important world headlines. Of course, the emphasize is different. I don't think you will be too interested in whether the Chinese will get a medal in Winter Olympic, or vice versa. No worries, people know where to get information whenever they need. (It was quite clear that they got US-Sino military plane collision event well before official broadcast. Guess what had happened.)
Starting with something simpler, eg theme, is a reasonable idea to me. Believe it or not, trivia like why paste is Ctrl-V in one program but Ctrl-Y in another have stopped many people from migrating away from Windows.
But, in the longer term, they really need to enable the basic components to talk to each other. Clipboard is an obvious target. Linux won't boom on desktop before something equivalent to OLE has been fully implemented and *widely* accepted by all the different camps involved.
The article forgets to mention one of the most stunning weapon in the intelligence world: suitcase nuclear bomb.
Finally, something makes Duke Nukem real!!!
There is two more thing you got to watch out when playing around with different colour spaces.
First of all, your CRT (LCD, printer or whatever) has a pretty limited colour gamut . In the other words, the colour in the real world and math eqn are richer than the display. When the colour that you want is not present, the display device will map it to something else. So watch out, esp for the the very "rich" colours.
The other thing is, if you are programming using C/C++, please double check your castings. Quite likely, your RGB is in uchar, your CIELAB needs floating point calculation somewhere through the calculations. Ample room for careless mistakes.
The size of a thumbnail equals to the size of the fingernail on your thumb. That's 15x15 mm in my case.:-)
While thumb size do vary, I don't think anybody may have a thumb as big as a 17" monitor, which effectively rule out the use of "99% thumbnail" for hi res wallpaper.
From the original article,
>>protection first to make sure you can't. You will >>also have no access to the CSS portion of the MPEG >>decoder, but you can decode raw MPEG-4. Direct >>access to the Dolby subsystem is also denied. >>Anything dealing with region locks are also >>restricted.
I wonder if Sony will restrict us to access those *powerful* video processing hardware. No one seems to have verified the claim that PS2 can be converted to a missile controller.:-)
Garbage in, Garbage out. Geeks need to have a balanced diet.
As illustrated by legendary PhD student Mike Slackenerny , a balanced diet consists of four main food groups (anyway, where is my beer???):
Sugar food
Caffeinated food
Fat food
Free food!!!
The slashdotted recipe seems to have too much junk. I think most of us can survive on Coke/coffee, taco/potato chips and instant noodle;-) Who need fruit, vegetable or milk?
(Well, straightly speaking, these are refering to postgrad students. But, I think the scope can be extended a bit.)
A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed. Just similar to magic show, we all know it is a hoax. How to uncover the ground truth is the interesting part right now.
This is just my wild guess. The voltage reading looks really dubious to me. I suspect that the system consists of 4 lead-acid battery connected in series and connected to an external power sources.
48.9/4 => 12.2 (voltage before)
51.2/4 => 12.8 (voltage after)
These figures are typical for lead acid for such a charging regime.
He may hide the external power connection through non-cable charging solution (e.g. IPT: inductive power transfer). Probably the only truth in this article is that cheater is (was) an electrical engineer.
I have checked my copy Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy -- Chapter 3:
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the DVD zoning and global domination plans have been on display in your local RIAA office in Alpha Centauri for n f*cking years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
btw, did anyone release a Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy for PDA? It feels my imagination of the guide book.
According to the price for Photoshop 6.0 (Traditional Chinese) is HK$5000 (US$640), mainly targeted for the richer Hongkong and Taiwan market, whereas the Simplified Chinese version is HK$4250 (US$525).
As a business, Adobe needs to have a decent profit margin. The greatest problem is the accountants are quite misleading. If they treat these "peripheral" market as the bonus to the sale, in order to justify the localisation, they only need to sell about US$1million / $600 => about 1700 copies. I am quite sure they can do that even now. No matter what you said about piracy in Asia, some companies will always buy legitimate copies. For the regions that I am more familar with (Hongkong and Taiwan): all the major TV/radio stations/newspapers already use legitmate software. Just their purchase order will make the Adobe breakeven in the localisation project. They have got quite a margin to cut the price to US$50 that attract more customer.
Of course, the accountant may suggest the other way round. If they insist to include the original software development cost as well, their project can never breakeven. (MS did that for Office2000: Chinese Version costs US$500 in Hongkong whereas that's US$319 in Amazon).
The second accounting practice is plainly stupid. Some sector of a market really cannot pay that much. If you want to squeeze the last dollar out of customer's pockets,
you need to looking at the video game console market:
PS2 worths $500 in Day 1. Only those who are more affluent will buy it (Price = hardware + development cost + profit).
Eventually, say when it is 4yo, the price may drop to about $100 with 2 free games. Only cheap ass like me will buy that (Price = hardware + profit).
In this way, everyone is happy. I don't know why software vendors cannot understand that.
The "once-off" vs "subscription based" software model is not too different from the "flat monthly rate" vs "traffic volume related" pricing scheme for internet connections.
Many not-too-heavy internet users may actually be better off if they choose traffic volume related scheme. However, the uncertainty (what if my bf/gf/partner/children/dog/etc downloaded 30GB of mp3...) usually drive them to the not that suitable flat rate scheme. Software subscription is just similar.
ESR's analysis makes good economic sense and this , in general, is good for the non open-source software community. But, good ideas does not necessary lead to success, esp if we ignores the human factor.
A much more attractive pricing scheme would be an automatic transfer of catagory if the accumlated subscription fee is larger than a certain amount.
This hybrid scheme would be a great help for a lot of specialised software vendor (eg Adobe). Take Adobe Distiller as an example, many PHB are hesitant to authorise the purchase order for this type of software as they do not know whether it is really useful for their office. On the other hand, a job-by-job subscription scheme is also bad as the IT budget if too many staff are interested in that software. I believe the proposed hybrid pricing scheme would be a good balance.
When I was a freshman taking intro to cs, they used one of these programs and got few false positives.
I would like to talk about this from another angle. When I was tutoring an introductory programming paper 2 years again, we also used something similar to detect for cheating. The "normal" programs were sent to TAs (us) with the "cheating" ones sent to the lecturers.
The greatest problem that we encountered was false negative. False positive can deal with easily by human. False negative is way harder as the copied programs may be distributed to different markers.
A false negative is not hard to generated. A brunch of students in my class created a pattern of useless code that worked quite well against computer:
example: (say lim_a and lim_b must > 0, and do_something() is the hard part of the assignment)
Of course, rather than c==c, they uses some less obvious "must-true" conditions. I discovered one of these when I did the marking and identified a a few more similar cases unnoticed previously.... These are even tough for human to identify. You may think the code is clumsy initially. But, if you will score a complete match if you compare a pair of those programs side-by-side.
I agree that is nothing we can do if someone determines to cheat (esp. for those who are hiring others to do the assignment for them). We just try to make to playground a bit fairer for everyone.
Yes, once certified and licensed it is fully legal to drive on any road that is rated for it?s weight (all major roads and highways) and height (10?6?). The design of MaxiMog is just absurd. The company claims that it is a EXPEDITION vehicle. For a loaded weight (vehicle+trailer) of about 30,000, you can go nowhere. Do they consider a trip from say LA to SF an expedition????
downloading linux isos from mirror.ac.uk I am sure I will get my butt severely kicked by my net admin if I tried to download a Linux iso from outside. Mirroring is the king here.
Due to the very small pipe that we've got (we are amongst the bottom of internet bandwidth scale throughout major universities in Asia-Pacific according to the now dysfunction Asian weekly survey last year), we cannot afford to download anything big. We are in CSE/EEE. In a dept with about 700 person, only 2-3 staff member are authorised to download something as big as an iso. All the others need to use the internal mirror.
Student needs to pay from their own account for using internet (NZ$0.4/MB). Staff and PhD students has "unlimited" internet access (ie, you will get cut off if *monthly* download > 100MB). It is much less than ideal. But, we somehow survive.;-)
Oh yes, you are right... Wrong conversion factor... 55k Gy should be 55000 Gy or 5500000 cGy. It is way off the LD50 chart in the quoted FAS chart (on the dangerous side), which suggests that a dose of > 1000 cGy is almost certainly lethal. It just makes the figure even more impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine:
:-)
Our absent-minded friend Joe has just got a Speedpass enabled watch. The poor guy sees John when waiting for his fast food at the drive-thru.
He waves his hand and suddenly realises 10 Big Mac Combos are coming.....
So don't send this to me as birthday gift
The usual practice of US govt is to grant permission for the export in a case by case basis. e.g. if for weather forecast/ banking => okay,
ICBM design => no,no.
I have got a feeling that they want to get away with the supercomputing export control this time (for military use ???). Their proposed use is so general that it makes control impossible. Take an example of another "tier 3" export control region: Hong Kong. I remember that in 1999, Hong Kong Government granted a permission to buy a supercomputer (16 CPU 19.2 GFLOPS peak) for weather forecasting. The standard practice is the supercomputer must be hosted in a heavily secured room in the observatory, and the observatory must hold a list for personel who can have acess to the computer. Also, the local US embassy has the right to inspect the premise and gears for irregularities...
Hong Kong as a major weather forecast hub in Asia will have to crank out a weather report each day. The chance to "sell" the spare CPU time out is pretty remote. But, still, US govt takes a lot of precautions. For a general purpose supercomputer distributed so widely like this and with many so-called "out-sourced contracts", do you think US govt can keep an eye on it effectively? BTW, in most cases, IT in Indian does not need supercomputer. But, their ICBM and advanced fighter (LCA) project will definitely need supercomputer in urgent....
Please don't be antagonistic whenever someone is mentioning anything about China. (In fact, China, India and Pakistan all are the major victims, according to CNN).
We are talking about microeconomic here when refering to these rubbish problem. That's some dodge rubblish collectors in developed world somehow sell these rubblish to some dodge rubblish "recycler" in the developing world. We are not talking about act of government here.
China, in the province or central govt level, tried hard to block dangerous waste eg, medical ones from importing. I remember Philipine also tried. Here is a list from Greenpeace that docuemented some of the high profile smuggling attempts blocked by China in 1993-97.
The key is always the people. Unlike medical waste that usu rots when arrived, these computer waste usually looks "clean". The workers (even the local authorities) underestimate the danger. The current situation is far far from satisfactory.
CNN has a more detailed article regarding this. China, India and Pakistan are main destination for the rubblish.
The situation is quite frightening. Consequently, the groundwater (near Guiyu, China) is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 18 miles away, the report said.
These "high tech" waste is especially hazardous to these poor workers. Medical waste (eg used bandage) usually smells and look nasty, everyone know they are dirty. Villagers usually have no clue toxic heavy metal will leak to groundwater, burning the plastic will generate very toxic smoke... before too late.
Probably, it is now to add a "prepaid" waste recycling fee to new computers....
In fact, it's difficult to determine a legitimate reason that an end-user would need to use a boot floppy on a development network.
It makes sense to separate the network into a production and development subsystems... I wish my system admin is as cool as you.
However, I have some serious doubt whether we can eliminate the need of boot floppy in a development network altogether. Say, you are playing around with RTLinux or other kernel hacks for your project, you just leave with 2 options:
1) using boot floppy (boot CD, zip etc)
2) write that directly to harddrive
Let's forget about bad intentions first. Option 2 needs more attention from sysadmin. (A careless student may overwrite the original linux kernel with his hack... you may need to wipe the the development machine clean before Friday....)
I agree securing NFS is a hard problem in a hostile environment. Basically, NFS is wide open if you managed to root one machine. A group of my friends at university used to boot machines using linux bootdisk. Then, mimics other guys UID, IP etc to fool the NFS server. If you gain root after login, a clue-up sysadmin should be able to track you down... Boot floppy is the killer here. Well, you can say the computer guys should disable floppy booting option in BIOS. But, they cannot really do much as some student need to boot with floppy occasionally (we are in CSE).
Simple tricks no longer works when we switched to something more secure, AFS , in our case.... It is way more advanced than NFS. For example, as a normal user, I can authorise only a few trusted person to have access to one of my designated subdir.
yeah they ripped me off... (Score:3)
by millenium68 on Friday February 22, @01:41PM (#3048827) [Alter Relationship]
(User #550864 Info) I bought a bunch of their stock
What do you really mean:
a) they ripped you off.... so you bought a bunch of their stock
b) they ripped you off.... because you have bought a bunch of their stock
c) both
d) neither
e) all too familiar... CowboyNeal!!!
Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement ;-)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
First of all, I'll have to say that I have no experience with either the weather forecasting or the telecommunication industry. But, I just find the number weird.
About 70 launch sites would be needed to cover the continental United States.
So there would have to be more than 51,000 launches a year at an annual cost is about $15 million.
That means they will release about 140 ballons each day. Firstly, I doubt whether only 140 sites will be sufficient to cover the entire continental America. Even if that's possible, it will mean that the transmission power will be quite strong. Commnunication engineers usually talk about the reuse of comm channals. What will be the implication of this?
On the other hand, $15M/70 launch sites approx equals $210000/yr/site. It seems to be a reasonable budget for reasonably large ground based relay tower.... I really cannot see the advantage for the alternative approach.
Sure, CNN.com is blocked & so is BBC.co.uk. No, NYT.com & BBCWORLD.com aren't blocked. So yes, I also don't understand the logic behind the specific blocks themselves
That's just another ironic thing. The Chinese Communist Party already looks more like Captalist Party. Bear in mind, the Great Firewall of China is a dual purpose technology: stop people from accessing information. But, at the same time, stop conservatives from finding excuse to block the internet altogether.
The real issue is that the majority of people (in this case, internet users) themselves are not interested to actually access this information.
That isn't too surprising to me. Put that this way, how often does an American (or British or French or Japanese or whoever), will read news (newspaper or website) originated outside his/her own home country?
The censorship nowadays is not really that bad. Their official news broadcast (usually) covers most the important world headlines. Of course, the emphasize is different. I don't think you will be too interested in whether the Chinese will get a medal in Winter Olympic, or vice versa. No worries, people know where to get information whenever they need. (It was quite clear that they got US-Sino military plane collision event well before official broadcast. Guess what had happened.)
Starting with something simpler, eg theme, is a reasonable idea to me. Believe it or not, trivia like why paste is Ctrl-V in one program but Ctrl-Y in another have stopped many people from migrating away from Windows.
But, in the longer term, they really need to enable the basic components to talk to each other. Clipboard is an obvious target. Linux won't boom on desktop before something equivalent to OLE has been fully implemented and *widely* accepted by all the different camps involved.
The article forgets to mention one of the most stunning weapon in the intelligence world: suitcase nuclear bomb.
Finally, something makes Duke Nukem real!!!
There is two more thing you got to watch out when playing around with different colour spaces.
First of all, your CRT (LCD, printer or whatever) has a pretty limited colour gamut . In the other words, the colour in the real world and math eqn are richer than the display. When the colour that you want is not present, the display device will map it to something else. So watch out, esp for the the very "rich" colours.
The other thing is, if you are programming using C/C++, please double check your castings. Quite likely, your RGB is in uchar, your CIELAB needs floating point calculation somewhere through the calculations. Ample room for careless mistakes.
The size of a thumbnail equals to the size of the fingernail on your thumb. That's 15x15 mm in my case. :-)
While thumb size do vary, I don't think anybody may have a thumb as big as a 17" monitor, which effectively rule out the use of "99% thumbnail" for hi res wallpaper.
From the original article, :-)
>>protection first to make sure you can't. You will >>also have no access to the CSS portion of the MPEG >>decoder, but you can decode raw MPEG-4. Direct >>access to the Dolby subsystem is also denied. >>Anything dealing with region locks are also >>restricted.
I wonder if Sony will restrict us to access those *powerful* video processing hardware. No one seems to have verified the claim that PS2 can be converted to a missile controller.
As illustrated by legendary PhD student Mike Slackenerny , a balanced diet consists of four main food groups (anyway, where is my beer???):
Sugar food
Caffeinated food
Fat food
Free food!!! ;-) Who need fruit, vegetable or milk?
The slashdotted recipe seems to have too much junk. I think most of us can survive on Coke/coffee, taco/potato chips and instant noodle
(Well, straightly speaking, these are refering to postgrad students. But, I think the scope can be extended a bit.)
Without extraordinary good proof, the three laws of
;-)
thermodynamics are accepted as the truth in the science community.
See how some graduate students extend its possible use
to the heaven and hell.
A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed.
Just similar to magic show, we all know it is a hoax. How to uncover the ground truth is the interesting part right now.
This is just my wild guess. The voltage reading looks really dubious to me. I suspect that the system consists of 4 lead-acid battery connected in series and connected to an external power sources.
48.9/4 => 12.2 (voltage before)
51.2/4 => 12.8 (voltage after)
These figures are typical for lead acid for such a charging regime.
He may hide the external power connection through non-cable charging solution (e.g. IPT: inductive power transfer). Probably the only truth in this article is that cheater is (was) an electrical engineer.
I have checked my copy Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy -- Chapter 3:
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the DVD zoning and global domination plans have been on display in your local RIAA office in Alpha Centauri for n f*cking years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
btw, did anyone release a Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy for PDA? It feels my imagination of the guide book.
According to the price for Photoshop 6.0 (Traditional Chinese) is HK$5000 (US$640), mainly targeted for the richer Hongkong and Taiwan market, whereas the Simplified Chinese version is HK$4250 (US$525).
As a business, Adobe needs to have a decent profit margin. The greatest problem is the accountants are quite misleading. If they treat these "peripheral" market as the bonus to the sale, in order to justify the localisation, they only need to sell about US$1million / $600 => about 1700 copies. I am quite sure they can do that even now. No matter what you said about piracy in Asia, some companies will always buy legitimate copies. For the regions that I am more familar with (Hongkong and Taiwan): all the major TV/radio stations/newspapers already use legitmate software. Just their purchase order will make the Adobe breakeven in the localisation project. They have got quite a margin to cut the price to US$50 that attract more customer.
Of course, the accountant may suggest the other way round. If they insist to include the original software development cost as well, their project can never breakeven. (MS did that for Office2000: Chinese Version costs US$500 in Hongkong whereas that's US$319 in Amazon).
The second accounting practice is plainly stupid. Some sector of a market really cannot pay that much. If you want to squeeze the last dollar out of customer's pockets,
you need to looking at the video game console market:
PS2 worths $500 in Day 1. Only those who are more affluent will buy it (Price = hardware + development cost + profit).
Eventually, say when it is 4yo, the price may drop to about $100 with 2 free games. Only cheap ass like me will buy that (Price = hardware + profit).
In this way, everyone is happy. I don't know why software vendors cannot understand that.
The "once-off" vs "subscription based" software model is not too different from the "flat monthly rate" vs "traffic volume related" pricing scheme for internet connections.
Many not-too-heavy internet users may actually be better off if they choose traffic volume related scheme. However, the uncertainty (what if my bf/gf/partner/children/dog/etc downloaded 30GB of mp3...) usually drive them to the not that suitable flat rate scheme. Software subscription is just similar.
ESR's analysis makes good economic sense and this , in general, is good for the non open-source software community. But, good ideas does not necessary lead to success, esp if we ignores the human factor.
A much more attractive pricing scheme would be an automatic transfer of catagory if the accumlated subscription fee is larger than a certain amount.
This hybrid scheme would be a great help for a lot of specialised software vendor (eg Adobe). Take Adobe Distiller as an example, many PHB are hesitant to authorise the purchase order for this type of software as they do not know whether it is really useful for their office. On the other hand, a job-by-job subscription scheme is also bad as the IT budget if too many staff are interested in that software. I believe the proposed hybrid pricing scheme would be a good balance.
When I was a freshman taking intro to cs, they used one of these programs and got few false positives.
I would like to talk about this from another angle. When I was tutoring an introductory programming paper 2 years again, we also used something similar to detect for cheating. The "normal" programs were sent to TAs (us) with the "cheating" ones sent to the lecturers.
The greatest problem that we encountered was false negative. False positive can deal with easily by human. False negative is way harder as the copied programs may be distributed to different markers.
A false negative is not hard to generated. A brunch of students in my class created a pattern of useless code that worked quite well against computer:
example: (say lim_a and lim_b must > 0, and do_something() is the hard part of the assignment)
if(a > lim_a){
do_something();
}
becomes
if(b > lim_b && c==c){
if(b > 0) do_something();
}
Of course, rather than c==c, they uses some less obvious "must-true" conditions. I discovered one of these when I did the marking and identified a a few more similar cases unnoticed previously.... These are even tough for human to identify. You may think the code is clumsy initially. But, if you will score a complete match if you compare a pair of those programs side-by-side.
I agree that is nothing we can do if someone determines to cheat (esp. for those who are hiring others to do the assignment for them). We just try to make to playground a bit fairer for everyone.
From their FAQ, IS IT LEGAL TO DRIVE IN THE USA?
Yes, once certified and licensed it is fully legal to drive on any road that is rated for it?s weight (all major roads and highways) and height (10?6?).
The design of MaxiMog is just absurd. The company claims that it is a EXPEDITION vehicle. For a loaded weight (vehicle+trailer) of about 30,000, you can go nowhere. Do they consider a trip from say LA to SF an expedition????
I am sure I will get my butt severely kicked by my net admin if I tried to download a Linux iso from outside. Mirroring is the king here.
Due to the very small pipe that we've got (we are amongst the bottom of internet bandwidth scale throughout major universities in Asia-Pacific according to the now dysfunction Asian weekly survey last year), we cannot afford to download anything big. We are in CSE/EEE. In a dept with about 700 person, only 2-3 staff member are authorised to download something as big as an iso. All the others need to use the internal mirror.
Student needs to pay from their own account for using internet (NZ$0.4/MB). Staff and PhD students has "unlimited" internet access (ie, you will get cut off if *monthly* download > 100MB). It is much less than ideal. But, we somehow survive. ;-)
Oh yes, you are right... Wrong conversion factor... 55k Gy should be 55000 Gy or 5500000 cGy. It is way off the LD50 chart in the quoted FAS chart (on the dangerous side), which suggests that a dose of > 1000 cGy is almost certainly lethal. It just makes the figure even more impressive.