The heart of the problem is that a social contract is subject to change at the whim of _society_. If you build your business model, in this case advertising revenue, on the presumption that the behavoiur of society will continue unchanged, you had better be prepared to be light on your feet when and if that behaviour changes.
Whining at society that they're not honouring some unwritten rule by changing their behaviour for their own benefit just proves that you haven't really thought out the long term implications.
In this case, the long term effect is that both parties lose out if the model fails completely. If online advertising is blocked to such an extent that it is no longer feasible to run a website, a good many excellent websites could disappear.
The reality is that long before that happens new models for getting paid advertising into content will be developed and so the merry dance will continue unless we reach some sort of equilibrium state where the advertisers put out their information in a way that is acceptable to the majority of people, or it is technically unfeasable for the majority of people to do anything about it.
Well, The guy is 94th in the all time list on Distributed.net for the rc5 project.
He submitted 16,026,654 blocks.
According to the distributed.net docs 1 block is at least 268,435,456 keys and could be as much as 8,589,934,592.
Depending on how the data is transferred to and from the distributed.net servers this can come out at some really big numbers.
Say the client sent the results back to the central server for each key tested, and that the result for 1 key could be transferred as a single byte. The total comes to at least 537,765,271,830,528 bytes!!
I'm sure that the guys at distributed.net have a much more efficient way of passing the data around, but the numbers could still be pretty big.
Slashdot Mirror
The heart of the problem is that a social contract is subject to change at the whim of _society_. If you build your business model, in this case advertising revenue, on the presumption that the behavoiur of society will continue unchanged, you had better be prepared to be light on your feet when and if that behaviour changes.
Whining at society that they're not honouring some unwritten rule by changing their behaviour for their own benefit just proves that you haven't really thought out the long term implications.
In this case, the long term effect is that both parties lose out if the model fails completely. If online advertising is blocked to such an extent that it is no longer feasible to run a website, a good many excellent websites could disappear.
The reality is that long before that happens new models for getting paid advertising into content will be developed and so the merry dance will continue unless we reach some sort of equilibrium state where the advertisers put out their information in a way that is acceptable to the majority of people, or it is technically unfeasable for the majority of people to do anything about it.
"in fact one standard Job Interview question I ask is to put the LZW algorithm on the whiteboard"
Heh!
I bet your janitor was the inspiration for good will hunting.
Well, The guy is 94th in the all time list on Distributed.net for the rc5 project. He submitted 16,026,654 blocks. According to the distributed.net docs 1 block is at least 268,435,456 keys and could be as much as 8,589,934,592. Depending on how the data is transferred to and from the distributed.net servers this can come out at some really big numbers. Say the client sent the results back to the central server for each key tested, and that the result for 1 key could be transferred as a single byte. The total comes to at least 537,765,271,830,528 bytes!! I'm sure that the guys at distributed.net have a much more efficient way of passing the data around, but the numbers could still be pretty big.