Well, 99.95% of the infected machines on the botnet are an identifiable variant of Windows, with 0.05% listed as "other". I'm okay with writing off the 35 machines which are not known Win* variants. It's pretty safe to say that the Windows OS is clearly the problem.
So, if there is "infringing" IP in Linux, is there a liklihood that similar infringements have been made in Apple's code?
Really, I'm not trolling. It sounds like Ballmer is saying that MS has so much of the system tied up in IP that effectively everybody who writes an OS which can interact with MS software is infringing. Does Apple have cross licensing?
FWIW, that's the answer I put down in High School (in MD) on a pop quiz (for which I did not do the reading). Of course the teacher asked the question - it was an oral quiz - and then made the comment "heck, if you don't know, just put down Smith" with a straight face. Bastard. Actually, he was a nice guy, and a very good teacher - and I will always remember the name John Smith.
Although I have not strolled the markets abroad where bootlegs are more plenitful than water, I still have a hard time believing that Terrorists are using this as a significant cashflow mechanism. Mafia, yes, terrorists, no. I think there are higher margins to be had further up the illgeal lists (drug and weapons traffiking, for example), and state sponsorship.
Yes, but those could be easily repaired, if at the expense of a mini-snowstorm in that part of the tape. DVDs that don't read are useless, and even minor scratches and imperfections can render a user-recorded disc unplayable in many machines.
FTFA if piracy is indeed a breeding ground for money laundering and terrorist operations...
Huh, I wasn't aware that piracy was actually used as a legitimate front for laundering money - and since it isn't a legitimate business, why not just nab the money launderers on IP infringement charges? I'm also suprised that terrorists are the ones making money by selling infringing media to support their attacks on the western world - it seems that most of the cash in piracy is the simple loss of revenue through supression of sales of new material.
I just got an improv everywhere flash: The manager should get to gether with 20 friends or so, and give them large, colored tickets. Have them queue up 15 minutes before the store opens, and open one door ten minutes early, asking for "anyone with a PS3 ticket, please come to the front of the line." Then again, that might not be very safe (but the video would probably make a bundle of ad revenue on youtube).
As for towing the cars...that's the way I would treat all of my customers waiting to spend their money in my store. Not.
The problem is that they don't switch from memorization of the basics to problem solving at points where humans can grasp concepts. I'm convinced that the reliance of memorization tests is simple economics - it's difficult and expensive to grade tests which require the application of critical thinking. Real people have to grade the tests, and it takes too long. You can't feed bubble sheets into a machine and have it spit out the answers. First, there is often more than one "correct" answer (though there may be a most efficient answer). Second, getting most of the problem correct and missing a "simple" portion means zero credit. In a times situation, this can significantly understate the ability of all but the most confident test takers.
It all goes back to that same question we all asked in school: "is the final going to be cumulative." In advanced classes, that means remembering how to apply the basics in a more complex framework. We don't require compound knowledge of the average student, so it isn't taught. Of course, as I approach 40 and look around at my peers, I'm increasingly convinced that a large percentage of the population is generally incapable of anything more than the most basic problem solving, and most of those cannot be taught critical thought.
Maybe he'a planning on taking the 15GB movie and running it through a 2:1 lossless compressor twice? Heck, with an 8 pass, you could get it down to 60MB, and...oh, right.;-)
While it's inexcusable that they spent $4B and got such a poor product, I can see how the regs and data partitioning could make the specs for such a system very difficult to implement in a user friendly way. There are a lot of safeguards for medical data that need to be in place by law, and a new set of regs in the middle of development (I don't know that this happened), along with the 50 different state law sets must have created quite the nightmare.
To respond, I used the typical drive data for the drive box (8x4.66w, according to the seagate spec sheet), and my server is a low power model that spends most of its time at idle.
In the dead of winter, electric heat pumps are effectively resistance heaters. This is particularly true in my case, as I have one of the three coils activate when the outside temp drops below 34F in order to keep the register temperatures between 95 and 110F at all times (so it "feels" warm, just like gas). The average efficiency of a real heat pump is about 2.3 (HSPF/3.4=COP for heating), and most heat pumps only do about 7.8-8.1 HSPF. As the temp drops, the efficiency drops, and below about 28-30, you may as well fire up the electric stove.
In the summer, which is very temperate here in the moutnains, you get the SEER rating as the COP for cooling (again divide by 3.4 to get a watts out-for-watts in conversion), so at 13 SEER (again, avg perf.) I pay a 25-30% penalty for heat I dump into the space which then has to be transferred to the outdoors. Hence the 1.25 factor on the summer heat.
Actually, 6-7c/kw is free market in my part of Virginia, where we have lots of coal (from WV). (Nothing says fuck the environment with CO2 loading like burning C for electricity!) And, yes, it is cheap, relatively speaking. So cheap that I bypassed gas in favor of electric when I converted from oil - last winter gas was on a one-for-one footing with electric resistance heat in price, with my old oil furnace and propane clocking in at closer to 2x the resistance rates.
I'm a pretty cheap bastard, so I'm actually looking at trying to change the server setup (and the whole equipment rack, which has a pair of Tivos, a router, a second dedicated media server, and about 4 dozen power bricks) to try and minimize the energy usage. I'm remodeling the space this winter, and hope to sneak in some new gear to help drop the power a bit. Even I'll admit that dumping power into the space isn't the most efficient way to heat it, as there is no control, but it isn't the dead-sink that it is sometimes portrayed to be.
Yes, that's really what they call the benchmark tests, though it stands for "Standards Of Learning". They are terrific at determining how much "trivia" (for lack of a better term) can be memorized by children, and regurgitated on a test. It's gotten so bad that SOL preparation takes up a substantial portion of the learning year. I have a colleague who moved here from NY around the middle of last year, and his kids nearly flunked several of their subjects. The reason was SOL based teaching - much of it is Virginia-history specific, apparently, and having spent 4-6 years in New York schools (which, apparently, are not part of the Great State of Virginia) did not know the minutiae taught here in order to pass the standard learning tests. This year they're doing great, having had the opportunity to memorize the appropriate facts from day one. This is not the kind of learning that will benefit these kids when they enter the real world.
But mom uses Ford gasoline to drive to church and back, and Chevy isn't licensed to provide compatibility with Ford gasoline. They think they've gotten it to work, but there's not been a real review of the system, and Ford might still manage to win in a patent dispute.
You wouldn't want mom to miss bible study...would you?
For anyone sufing this low in the thread, even as recently as 25 years ago it was pretty standard that all long distance calls were 25c/minute - in 1980ish dollars. You can see today what "everybody playing on a level field" has brought in terms of services costs. That's what dereg in the LD market did - one standard, many players. I pay the "outrageous" rate of 4c/minute, but I have no minimums and no service fees, so my LD runs me about $2/mo. I'd prefer to see some real standardization in the cell coverage market - then we might get some better rural coverage, as we wouldn't need three vendors on every metropolitan tower just to cover the handsets used.
In the peak oil theorists minds, that counts as zero oil. You see, the US is a consumer of oil, so any deposits found here don't count (ignore the fact that locally produced oil will reduce the net imports and pressure on global demand).
Besides, it "only" holds two years of oil for the US. Can you imagine what would happen to world oil prices if the US became not just totally self-sufficient, but an actual surplus provider for two contiguous years? Can you say "under a dollar a gallon?" and "I hope the middle east has polished up all the tourism brochures?" I knew you could.
You guys must live in amazingly temperate zones, or perhaps really hot ones, where every watt of power used in your house has to be pulled back out by a cooling unit. I have an 8 drive tower and a server. Presuming that the drives get exercized regularly, I'm pulling about 75 watts, on average and with inefficiencies, maybe (maybe) 150w at the 120v outlet. So here I am at about $7 a month. Except, of course, that the unit operates in my basement, which I generally have to add heat to in order to make livable. So for about 1/3 of the year, it's actually close to zero net watts, as it reduces my heating bill. Now, in the fall/winter, I'll call it 50%, since I usually need heat at night (I'm in the mountains). Summertime, there may be a (very) small penalty for A/C, but again - this is space without solar gain, so it does not generally drive the cooling cycles.
A perfectly efficient conversion might save me ($3.75/mo x 3 mo (x1.25 for A/C)) Summer + ($3.75/2 x 5 mo day - $3.75/2 x 5mo night(x0.3 for heat pump efficiency) Fall/Spring + (-$3.75 x 4 mo(*0.5 for heat pump efficiency)) Winter = $19.69 per year. Now, that sounds great, but I'll need two power supplies to do that since I have two boxes, and they have to be at perfect efficiency. If I use a 15% tvm and a five year payback period, I'll have (an extra) $34.50 to spend on a 100% efficient supply over a 50% efficient one - and that's just to break even vs investing that cash. And I'm really being kind here, becuase my basement does not have enough ductwork for the heat pump (used to be old oil hydronic), so I have to supplement with electric resistance, which would make the scenerio above an infinite payback.
(a) was it every funded, in any way (say, to begin with) with taxpayer money? 'Cause return on seed money should be extremely lucrative. (b) you don't know that I'm not from Australia (c) Okay, so I'm not from Australia; Austrailian taxpayers should get some money back - I'm just asking for them.
(Doens't the US give Aus any money each year...can I work that angle too?;-)
We really don't need 6B people in this world, and there are already too few predators for humans.
Besides, with Katrina, most people knew it was bad and knew it was coming...and still didn't leave for a safer place. Our money would be far better spent building lodging for the poor in places where natural disasters are far more rare. Note: I said poor, because the rich have the money to rebuild by themselves, and to build suffuciently sturdy buildings to withstand resonable events. If they're too stupid to build that way, or too foolish to leave in an exceptional event, see the first sentense in my reply.
I want my tax dollars paid back, with interest, then. If the government supported any part of the research, it only follows that the government funders (aka taxpyers) should reap the rewards.
The interesting part is that it's partial scarsity. Some things have almost zero value, while everything else retains its normal value. Imaging what would happen if, say, a precious resource taking a great deal of effort to produce - say cotton - could suddenly be created with 1/100 the labor? Nobody would make cotton, right? Or would those people with the tools to make it cheaply produce it for everyone else, at commodity prices? In some ways, the cotton gin did this. The cotton market did not collapse, it merely evolved. Any modern widget might be the same way.
When reproduction costs are near zero, the number of different bulk items goes down because the return only justifies a certain smaller intellectual effort/cost. What happens then is a new industry springs up - offering higher priced "custom" items - ones which are specifically tailered to meet the original buyer's requirements. Software and music are two examples of this happening, and OSS is probably the best comparison. Anyone can copy the generic application for free, but if you pay to have a particular application created which exactly matches the needs of your business, you pay the entire cost of development. Customization is the new value.
Peak oil theorists always seem to assume that we will never find new reserves, or that new techniques for extracting and refining existing sources will never improve. When gasoline is $10/gallon, there's a lot of processing that can be done between the ground and your fuel tank. When will gasoline be $10/gallon? Who knows, but it was unfathomable that gas would go over $1 when I was a kid, and just a decade ago, a brand new 2200SF home around Washington DC was "expensive" at $250,000. Everything adjusts - that's what the market system is about. If gas were to drop to below $1/gal for 2-3 years, I have no doubt that the Prius and Insight would be back to niche status, and there would be a 750HP, 11,000lb 10 seat Suburban that no Chevy dealer could keep on their lot. If gas climbs back to $3, hybrids will continue to do well.
There are a lot of things other than gas which depend on oil prices, but nearly all of them are subject to market forces. My house used to be heated by oil (and at a whopping 45% efficiency, no less). When I switched, I went to all electric (heat pump), because natural gas was expensive. I get electricity primarily from coal, with a small amount from hydroelectric and nuclear (though secondary sources).
From the graph of production, it appears that there is a real increase in production beyond the peak-oil peak. That doesn't mean we're in the clear, but a little less panic can go a long way.
There was a time when NASA.com and Whitehouse.com were pornographic in nature. I never saw either (really), and only found out about nasa.com when my father said he'd tried to find my page at nasa.gov and was greeted by a site having nothing to do with spaceflight. (Actually my mother related the story, and was laughing pretty hard about the gaffe)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, 99.95% of the infected machines on the botnet are an identifiable variant of Windows, with 0.05% listed as "other". I'm okay with writing off the 35 machines which are not known Win* variants. It's pretty safe to say that the Windows OS is clearly the problem.
I'm sorry, but the terms "Penis Enlargement" and "Excellent Graphics" were situated a bit too close together in that summary for my liking.
So, if there is "infringing" IP in Linux, is there a liklihood that similar infringements have been made in Apple's code?
Really, I'm not trolling. It sounds like Ballmer is saying that MS has so much of the system tied up in IP that effectively everybody who writes an OS which can interact with MS software is infringing. Does Apple have cross licensing?
FWIW, that's the answer I put down in High School (in MD) on a pop quiz (for which I did not do the reading). Of course the teacher asked the question - it was an oral quiz - and then made the comment "heck, if you don't know, just put down Smith" with a straight face. Bastard. Actually, he was a nice guy, and a very good teacher - and I will always remember the name John Smith.
Although I have not strolled the markets abroad where bootlegs are more plenitful than water, I still have a hard time believing that Terrorists are using this as a significant cashflow mechanism. Mafia, yes, terrorists, no. I think there are higher margins to be had further up the illgeal lists (drug and weapons traffiking, for example), and state sponsorship.
Yes, but those could be easily repaired, if at the expense of a mini-snowstorm in that part of the tape. DVDs that don't read are useless, and even minor scratches and imperfections can render a user-recorded disc unplayable in many machines.
FTFA if piracy is indeed a breeding ground for money laundering and terrorist operations...
Huh, I wasn't aware that piracy was actually used as a legitimate front for laundering money - and since it isn't a legitimate business, why not just nab the money launderers on IP infringement charges? I'm also suprised that terrorists are the ones making money by selling infringing media to support their attacks on the western world - it seems that most of the cash in piracy is the simple loss of revenue through supression of sales of new material.
Sounds like a full helping of FUD.
I just got an improv everywhere flash: The manager should get to gether with 20 friends or so, and give them large, colored tickets. Have them queue up 15 minutes before the store opens, and open one door ten minutes early, asking for "anyone with a PS3 ticket, please come to the front of the line." Then again, that might not be very safe (but the video would probably make a bundle of ad revenue on youtube).
As for towing the cars...that's the way I would treat all of my customers waiting to spend their money in my store. Not.
The problem is that they don't switch from memorization of the basics to problem solving at points where humans can grasp concepts. I'm convinced that the reliance of memorization tests is simple economics - it's difficult and expensive to grade tests which require the application of critical thinking. Real people have to grade the tests, and it takes too long. You can't feed bubble sheets into a machine and have it spit out the answers. First, there is often more than one "correct" answer (though there may be a most efficient answer). Second, getting most of the problem correct and missing a "simple" portion means zero credit. In a times situation, this can significantly understate the ability of all but the most confident test takers.
It all goes back to that same question we all asked in school: "is the final going to be cumulative." In advanced classes, that means remembering how to apply the basics in a more complex framework. We don't require compound knowledge of the average student, so it isn't taught. Of course, as I approach 40 and look around at my peers, I'm increasingly convinced that a large percentage of the population is generally incapable of anything more than the most basic problem solving, and most of those cannot be taught critical thought.
Maybe he'a planning on taking the 15GB movie and running it through a 2:1 lossless compressor twice? Heck, with an 8 pass, you could get it down to 60MB, and...oh, right. ;-)
state & federal regulators
While it's inexcusable that they spent $4B and got such a poor product, I can see how the regs and data partitioning could make the specs for such a system very difficult to implement in a user friendly way. There are a lot of safeguards for medical data that need to be in place by law, and a new set of regs in the middle of development (I don't know that this happened), along with the 50 different state law sets must have created quite the nightmare.
Oh, come on. When was the last time the name of the founder of Jamestown came up in casual conversation (that did not involve a Disney movie)?
;-)
Management, you say? Well, that settles it - we all know that there's are no critical thinking in management.
To respond, I used the typical drive data for the drive box (8x4.66w, according to the seagate spec sheet), and my server is a low power model that spends most of its time at idle.
In the dead of winter, electric heat pumps are effectively resistance heaters. This is particularly true in my case, as I have one of the three coils activate when the outside temp drops below 34F in order to keep the register temperatures between 95 and 110F at all times (so it "feels" warm, just like gas). The average efficiency of a real heat pump is about 2.3 (HSPF/3.4=COP for heating), and most heat pumps only do about 7.8-8.1 HSPF. As the temp drops, the efficiency drops, and below about 28-30, you may as well fire up the electric stove.
In the summer, which is very temperate here in the moutnains, you get the SEER rating as the COP for cooling (again divide by 3.4 to get a watts out-for-watts in conversion), so at 13 SEER (again, avg perf.) I pay a 25-30% penalty for heat I dump into the space which then has to be transferred to the outdoors. Hence the 1.25 factor on the summer heat.
Actually, 6-7c/kw is free market in my part of Virginia, where we have lots of coal (from WV). (Nothing says fuck the environment with CO2 loading like burning C for electricity!) And, yes, it is cheap, relatively speaking. So cheap that I bypassed gas in favor of electric when I converted from oil - last winter gas was on a one-for-one footing with electric resistance heat in price, with my old oil furnace and propane clocking in at closer to 2x the resistance rates.
I'm a pretty cheap bastard, so I'm actually looking at trying to change the server setup (and the whole equipment rack, which has a pair of Tivos, a router, a second dedicated media server, and about 4 dozen power bricks) to try and minimize the energy usage. I'm remodeling the space this winter, and hope to sneak in some new gear to help drop the power a bit. Even I'll admit that dumping power into the space isn't the most efficient way to heat it, as there is no control, but it isn't the dead-sink that it is sometimes portrayed to be.
Yes, that's really what they call the benchmark tests, though it stands for "Standards Of Learning". They are terrific at determining how much "trivia" (for lack of a better term) can be memorized by children, and regurgitated on a test. It's gotten so bad that SOL preparation takes up a substantial portion of the learning year. I have a colleague who moved here from NY around the middle of last year, and his kids nearly flunked several of their subjects. The reason was SOL based teaching - much of it is Virginia-history specific, apparently, and having spent 4-6 years in New York schools (which, apparently, are not part of the Great State of Virginia) did not know the minutiae taught here in order to pass the standard learning tests. This year they're doing great, having had the opportunity to memorize the appropriate facts from day one. This is not the kind of learning that will benefit these kids when they enter the real world.
But mom uses Ford gasoline to drive to church and back, and Chevy isn't licensed to provide compatibility with Ford gasoline. They think they've gotten it to work, but there's not been a real review of the system, and Ford might still manage to win in a patent dispute.
You wouldn't want mom to miss bible study...would you?
For anyone sufing this low in the thread, even as recently as 25 years ago it was pretty standard that all long distance calls were 25c/minute - in 1980ish dollars. You can see today what "everybody playing on a level field" has brought in terms of services costs. That's what dereg in the LD market did - one standard, many players. I pay the "outrageous" rate of 4c/minute, but I have no minimums and no service fees, so my LD runs me about $2/mo. I'd prefer to see some real standardization in the cell coverage market - then we might get some better rural coverage, as we wouldn't need three vendors on every metropolitan tower just to cover the handsets used.
In the peak oil theorists minds, that counts as zero oil. You see, the US is a consumer of oil, so any deposits found here don't count (ignore the fact that locally produced oil will reduce the net imports and pressure on global demand).
Besides, it "only" holds two years of oil for the US. Can you imagine what would happen to world oil prices if the US became not just totally self-sufficient, but an actual surplus provider for two contiguous years? Can you say "under a dollar a gallon?" and "I hope the middle east has polished up all the tourism brochures?" I knew you could.
You guys must live in amazingly temperate zones, or perhaps really hot ones, where every watt of power used in your house has to be pulled back out by a cooling unit. I have an 8 drive tower and a server. Presuming that the drives get exercized regularly, I'm pulling about 75 watts, on average and with inefficiencies, maybe (maybe) 150w at the 120v outlet. So here I am at about $7 a month. Except, of course, that the unit operates in my basement, which I generally have to add heat to in order to make livable. So for about 1/3 of the year, it's actually close to zero net watts, as it reduces my heating bill. Now, in the fall/winter, I'll call it 50%, since I usually need heat at night (I'm in the mountains). Summertime, there may be a (very) small penalty for A/C, but again - this is space without solar gain, so it does not generally drive the cooling cycles.
A perfectly efficient conversion might save me ($3.75/mo x 3 mo (x1.25 for A/C)) Summer + ($3.75/2 x 5 mo day - $3.75/2 x 5mo night(x0.3 for heat pump efficiency) Fall/Spring + (-$3.75 x 4 mo(*0.5 for heat pump efficiency)) Winter = $19.69 per year. Now, that sounds great, but I'll need two power supplies to do that since I have two boxes, and they have to be at perfect efficiency. If I use a 15% tvm and a five year payback period, I'll have (an extra) $34.50 to spend on a 100% efficient supply over a 50% efficient one - and that's just to break even vs investing that cash. And I'm really being kind here, becuase my basement does not have enough ductwork for the heat pump (used to be old oil hydronic), so I have to supplement with electric resistance, which would make the scenerio above an infinite payback.
Just smile and wave.
(a) was it every funded, in any way (say, to begin with) with taxpayer money? 'Cause return on seed money should be extremely lucrative.
;-)
(b) you don't know that I'm not from Australia
(c) Okay, so I'm not from Australia; Austrailian taxpayers should get some money back - I'm just asking for them.
(Doens't the US give Aus any money each year...can I work that angle too?
We really don't need 6B people in this world, and there are already too few predators for humans.
Besides, with Katrina, most people knew it was bad and knew it was coming...and still didn't leave for a safer place. Our money would be far better spent building lodging for the poor in places where natural disasters are far more rare. Note: I said poor, because the rich have the money to rebuild by themselves, and to build suffuciently sturdy buildings to withstand resonable events. If they're too stupid to build that way, or too foolish to leave in an exceptional event, see the first sentense in my reply.
I want my tax dollars paid back, with interest, then. If the government supported any part of the research, it only follows that the government funders (aka taxpyers) should reap the rewards.
The interesting part is that it's partial scarsity. Some things have almost zero value, while everything else retains its normal value. Imaging what would happen if, say, a precious resource taking a great deal of effort to produce - say cotton - could suddenly be created with 1/100 the labor? Nobody would make cotton, right? Or would those people with the tools to make it cheaply produce it for everyone else, at commodity prices? In some ways, the cotton gin did this. The cotton market did not collapse, it merely evolved. Any modern widget might be the same way.
When reproduction costs are near zero, the number of different bulk items goes down because the return only justifies a certain smaller intellectual effort/cost. What happens then is a new industry springs up - offering higher priced "custom" items - ones which are specifically tailered to meet the original buyer's requirements. Software and music are two examples of this happening, and OSS is probably the best comparison. Anyone can copy the generic application for free, but if you pay to have a particular application created which exactly matches the needs of your business, you pay the entire cost of development. Customization is the new value.
Peak oil theorists always seem to assume that we will never find new reserves, or that new techniques for extracting and refining existing sources will never improve. When gasoline is $10/gallon, there's a lot of processing that can be done between the ground and your fuel tank. When will gasoline be $10/gallon? Who knows, but it was unfathomable that gas would go over $1 when I was a kid, and just a decade ago, a brand new 2200SF home around Washington DC was "expensive" at $250,000. Everything adjusts - that's what the market system is about. If gas were to drop to below $1/gal for 2-3 years, I have no doubt that the Prius and Insight would be back to niche status, and there would be a 750HP, 11,000lb 10 seat Suburban that no Chevy dealer could keep on their lot. If gas climbs back to $3, hybrids will continue to do well.
There are a lot of things other than gas which depend on oil prices, but nearly all of them are subject to market forces. My house used to be heated by oil (and at a whopping 45% efficiency, no less). When I switched, I went to all electric (heat pump), because natural gas was expensive. I get electricity primarily from coal, with a small amount from hydroelectric and nuclear (though secondary sources).
From the graph of production, it appears that there is a real increase in production beyond the peak-oil peak. That doesn't mean we're in the clear, but a little less panic can go a long way.
There was a time when NASA.com and Whitehouse.com were pornographic in nature. I never saw either (really), and only found out about nasa.com when my father said he'd tried to find my page at nasa.gov and was greeted by a site having nothing to do with spaceflight. (Actually my mother related the story, and was laughing pretty hard about the gaffe)