"You've generated 140,000 charges, thats more than your normal volume."
Hmm... Would you expect a store to want to deliberately shut down its systems because it is getting too much business? I mean what if slashdot had given them a posting about some great new product they had, or cnn.com, or any large media outlet. Can you really expect a merchant to build in a shutdown to its system on the extremely small chance that some hacker is going to use their site as a testbed, and potentially lose millions of dollars in sales? I do not think you can really blame the system here, for either its lack of foresight, or lets say they did forsee this scenario, or its unwillingness to refuse lots of orders. The article was kind of sparse on details but I am guessing this was an all at once kind of transaction, and even if there was some kind of alert sounded, that by the time anyone realized what was going on, the transactions would have taken place already. The passwords, while a little on the weak side, did contain a mixture of letters and numbers, and I am going to go under the assumption that the number was randomly generated. I dont think you can really place much blame on the merchant here- Could their security have been made stronger? Yes. Would stronger security have even prevented the event? Maybe.
You guys and your fancy software, and newfangled electronic contraptions. He is obviously looking for a binary abacus!
http://www.jimloy.com/arith/abacus.htm
Hey, I too have been interested in this idea. Last week I started a project on Sourceforge. I have not had much time to spend on making a pretty site yet, but you can check the project out at http://eduonline.sourforge.net I think it would be great if we bounced some ideas off of each other.
Maybe I am not so good at math, but my high school teachers had about 4 classes a day, x 40 minutes per class = 160 minutes teaching time. Oh but they have to grade tests, yes. Ok so once a week (average one test per month x 4 classes) you run a scantron through a reader, and read some essay questions. mebbe math teachers have to look over some math problems. You work 180 days out of the year in the classroom. the rest is gravy. Yeah, you have to be morally responsible. Yes, you are even expected to know how to use a computer, and check the history to see what website's the kids are using. I dont know. I am not buying the hype. Like any profession, do not be a teacher if you do not generally enjoy teaching and watching children develop. Its not like you sit there and watch these kid's every move to see if they are beaten. Like I can walk and chew gum, you can also do several things at the same time. I think teaching is one of the most rewarding jobs out there, and also one of the cushiest (no bosses down your neck, no deadlines, your own space and freedom to use your own methods, ability to take a class off by showing an 'educational' video, lots of off time). I dont know. I think it is pretty sweet to be a teacher. -k
Ok. You have a 'bundle of money.' Put it to use. Install a solar energy system in your home. Take out your old inefficient fossil fuel burner, and put in a geothermal heat system. Buy a hybrid car (the new Honda Civic's allow you to have a hybrid that looks normal.) Put in a compost heap and compost your biodegradable trash. Install a water recycler that will clean your waste water to use for watering your lawn, cleaning your car, etc. If you have money left over, Donate it to one of these groups. However taking these steps in your home will ensure that your home has almost zero environmental impact for YEARS to come. -k
I agree, but there are better way to word things, and I think he was a little off base. Calling it "bullshit" is not going to help anything, and you are right- slashdot is a community, so as long as the sites inspire meaningful commentary, does it matter if the editors overstated an article a little bit?
I am guessing you do not own a laptop. If you did, I think you would appreciate the difficulty of upgrading most of these systems. I can not speak for dell models, but I can tell you that on compaq's, the internals are very difficult to access, and upgrading anything other than ram is NOT easy, and could qualify as a hack. The fact that the site is slashdotted already is a testament to the fact there is interest among the readership, and that the article is a worthwhile read. The content is free. If you do not like it, do not read it. -k
No one said ANYTHING about 1 trillion triangles being pushed out. This is pure micro-operations were talking about. I will bet you cant even add 1.0 + 1.0 a trillion times on this new processor. Triangles need to go down the graphics pipeline, and there are three points on a triangle. Since this is a processor, and not a GPU, the processing time will have to be divided up among all the application's functions. Not even a hype crazed marketing exec. would try and claim a trillion triangles per second.
The only thing I ever used a floppy for was for a startup disk back when I was using the win9x family. I think bootable CD-ROM's have really helped kick the floppy to the curb, as well as windows 2000/XP, using NTFS, which makes those boot floppies pretty much useless anyway, (unless of course you are smart and have your mp3 type data on a fat32 partition). I imagine a few bucks could be shaved off the price of PC's if we could finally get the floppy monkey off of our backs, as well as freeing up valuable motherboard space to put new features on. -k
if you read the text of the patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=6401075&OS=6401075&R S=6401075
There is actually some "unique" material in there. Their system claims that it can take an ad of any given format, reformat the ad, and then automatically redistribute(redisplay) the ad in whatever format the site requires. I am not too familiar with ad systems, but this seems unique to me. Sample usage: a politician scans a flyer (the limit of their technical knowlege) and then hands it off to this company, who then can on the fly reformat it and display it on a variety of publication's sites.
Also remember, if someone else can replicate it "clean room" style, then the patent has no effect. IE, if you lock 10 guys in a room w/out ever having seen such a system and tell them to make one, they can use that and NOT be in violation of the patent. Patent law also protects everyone from patents that are "easily recreated by people skilled in the area." Hence, if any programmer or team of programmers can reproduce this system without having seen it, you cant patent it. -K
well, I think you are confusing Bandwidth to the internet with intra-lan bandwidth. They have gigabit speeds to connect to each other with, but not to the outside world.
It is not that difficult to secure a server running the above services. By the time you find a vendor/ Value Added Reseller that will fit your needs, you can educate yourself on how to secure the thing, as well as ensure that you are getting something that fits your needs. Knowledge of security is imperative these days, regardless of whether you decide to build this server or not.
SUNY recieved $350 million to some extent through IBM to build a nanoelectronics facility (IE Chip facility) at its CESTM building. The physics department at SUNY has much of its research going on there, and IBM also has a huge facility about an hour south along the NYS thruway. RPI is also located in the area, although I do not know what they have going on there as far as nanotech type stuff. Also, being in the capital means you get to benefit from all the government spending in the area, with interstates pouring out of the city to every major regional destination. Albany used to be a huge manufacturing area, but after big industry left, so did alot of people, making the cost of living dirt cheap in many areas-- $750 for a 3 bedroom apartment/month, for example. Really an almost ideal place to be. I wouldnt be surprised if it becomes a huge high tech city in the next 10 years or so.
http://www.albany.edu/tree-tops/cat/press/pataki _v ision.html (yeah I used to go there) -k
Ikea sells great chairs to park yourself in front of the TV. Theyre low to the ground, so they will most likely satisfy youre penchant for the floor, bendie, they have arms that make convenient soda/beer holders (or if you are really intense, the bottom wood rail can also be used. Trust me on this one. I have spent many many hours playing Gran Turismo 3 in this chair, and its near perfect.
LInk:
http://www.ikea-usa.com/product_presentation/show. asp?productnumber=00010027&type=III&id=453,415
What they are trying to do is seperate people who let some virus loose in the wild that gets out of control, as opposed to someone who coordinates a DDOS attack over a series of months. It is an analog to the difference between degrees of murder. A pissed off employee that blows machines up in anger will be treated differently than some guy spending months infecting or penetrating machines in order to launch some large scale attack. This could actually protect Script Kiddies (if you see that as a good thing) because they would have pretty much a zero on the level of sophistication scale. -k
I am assuming by "rural," you are saying that there is no existing cable infastructure, and as such the cable company will be useless. I think you have two options here, either rely on satellite for "broadband" or, seriously think about implementing a large scale wireless network using authentication schemes to access the network. Any place that can recieve radio signals, (IE 99.9% of the populaion) can be hooked in. There are many areas around the nation that have set up community nets this way, fairly inexpensively. -k
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldnt they just block traffic to the domain? Why bother with the IP address?
"You've generated 140,000 charges, thats more than your normal volume."
Hmm... Would you expect a store to want to deliberately shut down its systems because it is getting too much business? I mean what if slashdot had given them a posting about some great new product they had, or cnn.com, or any large media outlet. Can you really expect a merchant to build in a shutdown to its system on the extremely small chance that some hacker is going to use their site as a testbed, and potentially lose millions of dollars in sales? I do not think you can really blame the system here, for either its lack of foresight, or lets say they did forsee this scenario, or its unwillingness to refuse lots of orders. The article was kind of sparse on details but I am guessing this was an all at once kind of transaction, and even if there was some kind of alert sounded, that by the time anyone realized what was going on, the transactions would have taken place already. The passwords, while a little on the weak side, did contain a mixture of letters and numbers, and I am going to go under the assumption that the number was randomly generated. I dont think you can really place much blame on the merchant here- Could their security have been made stronger? Yes. Would stronger security have even prevented the event? Maybe.
You guys and your fancy software, and newfangled electronic contraptions. He is obviously looking for a binary abacus! http://www.jimloy.com/arith/abacus.htm
well, not for nothing, but you also can't say that the failure was not due to elves or car key gnomes.
Hey, I too have been interested in this idea. Last week I started a project on Sourceforge. I have not had much time to spend on making a pretty site yet, but you can check the project out at http://eduonline.sourforge.net I think it would be great if we bounced some ideas off of each other.
Maybe I am not so good at math, but my high school teachers had about 4 classes a day, x 40 minutes per class = 160 minutes teaching time. Oh but they have to grade tests, yes. Ok so once a week (average one test per month x 4 classes) you run a scantron through a reader, and read some essay questions. mebbe math teachers have to look over some math problems. You work 180 days out of the year in the classroom. the rest is gravy. Yeah, you have to be morally responsible. Yes, you are even expected to know how to use a computer, and check the history to see what website's the kids are using. I dont know. I am not buying the hype. Like any profession, do not be a teacher if you do not generally enjoy teaching and watching children develop. Its not like you sit there and watch these kid's every move to see if they are beaten. Like I can walk and chew gum, you can also do several things at the same time. I think teaching is one of the most rewarding jobs out there, and also one of the cushiest (no bosses down your neck, no deadlines, your own space and freedom to use your own methods, ability to take a class off by showing an 'educational' video, lots of off time). I dont know. I think it is pretty sweet to be a teacher.
-k
only in the case where the word 'god' is the first word in a sentence.
-k
TASTES GREAT! (emacs users)
LESS FILLING! (vi users)
Ok. You have a 'bundle of money.' Put it to use. Install a solar energy system in your home. Take out your old inefficient fossil fuel burner, and put in a geothermal heat system. Buy a hybrid car (the new Honda Civic's allow you to have a hybrid that looks normal.) Put in a compost heap and compost your biodegradable trash. Install a water recycler that will clean your waste water to use for watering your lawn, cleaning your car, etc. If you have money left over, Donate it to one of these groups. However taking these steps in your home will ensure that your home has almost zero environmental impact for YEARS to come.
-k
I agree, but there are better way to word things, and I think he was a little off base. Calling it "bullshit" is not going to help anything, and you are right- slashdot is a community, so as long as the sites inspire meaningful commentary, does it matter if the editors overstated an article a little bit?
I am guessing you do not own a laptop. If you did, I think you would appreciate the difficulty of upgrading most of these systems. I can not speak for dell models, but I can tell you that on compaq's, the internals are very difficult to access, and upgrading anything other than ram is NOT easy, and could qualify as a hack. The fact that the site is slashdotted already is a testament to the fact there is interest among the readership, and that the article is a worthwhile read. The content is free. If you do not like it, do not read it.
-k
No one said ANYTHING about 1 trillion triangles being pushed out. This is pure micro-operations were talking about. I will bet you cant even add 1.0 + 1.0 a trillion times on this new processor. Triangles need to go down the graphics pipeline, and there are three points on a triangle. Since this is a processor, and not a GPU, the processing time will have to be divided up among all the application's functions. Not even a hype crazed marketing exec. would try and claim a trillion triangles per second.
The only thing I ever used a floppy for was for a startup disk back when I was using the win9x family. I think bootable CD-ROM's have really helped kick the floppy to the curb, as well as windows 2000/XP, using NTFS, which makes those boot floppies pretty much useless anyway, (unless of course you are smart and have your mp3 type data on a fat32 partition). I imagine a few bucks could be shaved off the price of PC's if we could finally get the floppy monkey off of our backs, as well as freeing up valuable motherboard space to put new features on.
-k
I was not aware that Amazon won that, but I guess as your legal team budget approaches the US defense budget, anything is possible.
if you read the text of the patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=6401075&OS=6401075&R S=6401075
There is actually some "unique" material in there. Their system claims that it can take an ad of any given format, reformat the ad, and then automatically redistribute(redisplay) the ad in whatever format the site requires. I am not too familiar with ad systems, but this seems unique to me. Sample usage: a politician scans a flyer (the limit of their technical knowlege) and then hands it off to this company, who then can on the fly reformat it and display it on a variety of publication's sites.
Also remember, if someone else can replicate it "clean room" style, then the patent has no effect. IE, if you lock 10 guys in a room w/out ever having seen such a system and tell them to make one, they can use that and NOT be in violation of the patent. Patent law also protects everyone from patents that are "easily recreated by people skilled in the area." Hence, if any programmer or team of programmers can reproduce this system without having seen it, you cant patent it.
-K
seems like a no-brainer. download cygwin, and then you can run emacs in windows.
Call me what you want, its been down all day- here is a google cache of the site...
Y C: www.qedata.se/e_js_n-cdrom.htm+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:UaTCrUMQit
-k
well, I think you are confusing Bandwidth to the internet with intra-lan bandwidth. They have gigabit speeds to connect to each other with, but not to the outside world.
It is not that difficult to secure a server running the above services. By the time you find a vendor/ Value Added Reseller that will fit your needs, you can educate yourself on how to secure the thing, as well as ensure that you are getting something that fits your needs. Knowledge of security is imperative these days, regardless of whether you decide to build this server or not.
SUNY recieved $350 million to some extent through IBM to build a nanoelectronics facility (IE Chip facility) at its CESTM building. The physics department at SUNY has much of its research going on there, and IBM also has a huge facility about an hour south along the NYS thruway. RPI is also located in the area, although I do not know what they have going on there as far as nanotech type stuff. Also, being in the capital means you get to benefit from all the government spending in the area, with interstates pouring out of the city to every major regional destination. Albany used to be a huge manufacturing area, but after big industry left, so did alot of people, making the cost of living dirt cheap in many areas-- $750 for a 3 bedroom apartment/month, for example. Really an almost ideal place to be. I wouldnt be surprised if it becomes a huge high tech city in the next 10 years or so.
i _v ision.html
http://www.albany.edu/tree-tops/cat/press/patak
(yeah I used to go there)
-k
Ikea sells great chairs to park yourself in front of the TV. Theyre low to the ground, so they will most likely satisfy youre penchant for the floor, bendie, they have arms that make convenient soda/beer holders (or if you are really intense, the bottom wood rail can also be used. Trust me on this one. I have spent many many hours playing Gran Turismo 3 in this chair, and its near perfect. LInk: http://www.ikea-usa.com/product_presentation/show. asp?productnumber=00010027&type=III&id=453,415
What they are trying to do is seperate people who let some virus loose in the wild that gets out of control, as opposed to someone who coordinates a DDOS attack over a series of months. It is an analog to the difference between degrees of murder. A pissed off employee that blows machines up in anger will be treated differently than some guy spending months infecting or penetrating machines in order to launch some large scale attack. This could actually protect Script Kiddies (if you see that as a good thing) because they would have pretty much a zero on the level of sophistication scale.
-k
I am assuming by "rural," you are saying that there is no existing cable infastructure, and as such the cable company will be useless. I think you have two options here, either rely on satellite for "broadband" or, seriously think about implementing a large scale wireless network using authentication schemes to access the network. Any place that can recieve radio signals, (IE 99.9% of the populaion) can be hooked in. There are many areas around the nation that have set up community nets this way, fairly inexpensively.
-k
I looked around for an OfficeSpace script, but I couldnt find one... Does anyone know where to find it??
-k
Oh, and I suppose next theyre going to tell us Beer kills brain cells.
-K