Sorry, I really didn't mean that as any sort of personal attack - Just that I see the WSJ used in almost every
conversation on this topic as an example of the viability of making the transition from dead-tree to online,
which (as I pointed out) counts as something of an outlier in the data.
I even agree with you in spirit - Murdoch sees the WSJ-online doing fairly well, and wonders why he can't have
that for the rest of his empire. Of course, he misses the point entirely, in the WSJ actually has worthwhile
content - Primarily because, since buying it, Murdoch has left it alone.
The rest of NewsCorp's
world suffers from the very feature that makes it so successful - Infotainment only works well when you have 120
channels with nothing on; When you can click away to get endless content anywhere in the spectrum from scientific
journals to animated fart-jokes, you'd damned well better provide either real information or real
entertainment, not a weak hybrid of both lacking in the redeeming qualities of either.
But I do apologize if you took my previous post as dickery... No vitriol intended (at least, none directed
toward you).
The Wall Street Journal is doing fine with a paywall, so it may take some convincing.
The WSJ counts as one of those papers that has relatively unique content that people will pay for.
Using them as an "example" of viability I would consider no less dishonest than considering Radiohead an example of
how to make online music distribution work. Both have the ability to "make" it, largely due to preexisting
fame, not because they've hit on the perfect distribution model - I would go so far as to say they've managed
to succeed in online distribution despite flaws in their model, do to their overall desirability.
Now, extending the analogy a bit... Local Band X can follow the same distribution model and make a few
bucks, primarily because they have no real overhead beyond hosting costs - Local Band X, however, works 9-5
and then plays the clubs on weekends because they love doing it, not because they seriously expect to retire
off it. For print newspapers, they have a drastically different model. They have to pay reporters, editors,
production staff, and maintain some fairly expensive printing equipment.
I honestly don't know if print news can make it in the online world (and the online world has all but
guaranteed that they can no longer make it in the print-only world). I suspect within the next ten years, we'll
see the death of the independent press, leaving only news-as-infotainment and (partially) publicly-funded news
such as the BBC or NPR.
And that right there should have given you your answer.
Think about what you've written for a minute... Google's crawler doesn't have actual accounts at every paysite on
the web - Those sites have access rules to allow search engines (but not you) to retrieve for-pay content.
Can you now think of a way you might use that information to your benefit, rather than complaining that Google
shows you more than you see in the abstract?
They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!
Historically, pirates (in the 1600s US/Caribbean/Europe trade route sense) observed a fairly strict code of conduct which included
reimbursing investors their fair share; widows/orphans got their ex-father's share, and generally they did a lot less killing than
their reputation suggested.
It sounds like modern pirates appear to follow fairly similar rules, which makes for some interesting cognitive dissonance in those
who romanticize the old-school version but demonize the Somali version.
I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site.
Simple - they have zero interest in letting someone else get between them and their market.
The only real "power" Craig has comes from the size of his userbase, and he knows that. If Company-X starts offering
"Craigslist, now with Fleem(tm)", and somehow grows to serve a significant portion of the Craigslist user
base, that gives Company-X power over Craigslist itself - They could potentially fork away on their own, rather than
as a middle-man, and leave Craigslist itself a ghosttown.
As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same
time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate). If for no more reason than petulantly
insisting his users get the interface he wants, he has the option of making it as hard as possible for third
parties to change that.
In the case of Excel, I can literally double-click the icon, count "one, two, three," and I have a blank spreadsheet.
Just on a whim, I just tried the same experiment on my current machine (older), running Office 97, without the Office Startup
running (if you haven't explicitly disabled that, consider your numbers meaningless - It amounts to opening a new window of a running
program).
<Click>... And I started to count "One, two, three...":
O(and half of an "n")... <Excel pops up>.
Yeah, thanks. I'll keep XP and my ancient but fully functional version of Office 97 until Billy-G starts offering BJs from Megan Fox in
exchange for downgrading to the latest piece of crap.
Carnot efficiency is defined by the efficiency of a reversible heat engine operating between the given temperatures;
"Heat engine" != direct thermoelectric conversion (whether via quantum dots or just plain ol' Peltier junctions).
The Carnot limit simply doesn't apply to direct conversion, and AFAIK, no theoretical limit to near-100% efficiency
(minus entropy) exists for the latter.
In modern systems the water isn't boiling, but it will take a long time before everything has
been converted to lower temperature systems.
Not to say that lower-temp systems don't exist (I can see the appeal in single-building residential
systems in particular), but I'd point out that virtually all non-residential
heating loops don't actually carry water they carry steam (at least on the efferent lines).
They do so for the simple reason that steam-at-100C carries 3-5x the energy of water-at-100C (depending on
the return temperature, of course) and also has a lower thermal conductivity (so lower unintentional
losses on the way).
Additionally, using a steam to water conversion has the bonus that you don't actually need any explicit
pumps - Valves in the line ensure that the steam pushes itself out via high-pressure, and the phase change
causes low pressure on the return side. You really couldn't ask for a more convenient arrangement.
So I would certainly say that it will take a long time to get people to switch over, since doing so makes
the system drastically less efficient, more complicated, and less reliable as a whole.
I'd probably build out a router based on an Atom CPU and boot off a CF card with an ATA to CF adapter. You should be
able to get excellent performance in the 30-50W range.
My current NAT box has an Epia CL with 1GB RAM and no HDD (boots from a CD to a stripped down Knoppix loaded into memory with
a UnionFS - Like Damn Small Linux but I added back in a good number of features and remastered it). Draws right around 30W
once the CD spins down.
So yeah, not too shabby, but personally I consider the Wattage tradeoff worth the massively increased functionality vs a
standalone broadband router (how many do you know that support SSH tunnels or can act as an FTP/web site in a pinch?). For
most people without a true 100+ MBit connection or higher-end geekly needs, I usually suggest they buy the cheapest
piece of crap they can find.
But so will an old Aptiva salvaged from the dumpster.
Agreed, but keep in mind that you pay for more than just the hardware itself... If you can only
salvage an old P4, its power consumption from the first year alone would probably have paid for
just building a lightweight mini-ITX box dedicated to the task.
IMO, one of the biggest reasons to recommend a crappy LinkSys or similar comes from the
fact that they use 5-15W total.
Well, why not? It only takes about fifteen minutes and will handle his traffic with ease on a five-year-old commodity pc.
Even if you buy hardware just for the purpose, you still save a fortune compared to getting a "real" router from the likes
of Cisco (and yes, Cisco (et al) have "low"-end routers in the $150-$300 range - I've had the "pleasure" of using them,
and can't recommend them for anything more important than holding down papers in a light breeze).
You only save money with a dedicated router at the very bottom of the barrel*. If you have a crappy 15MBit residential broadband connection, the $19.95 Linksys special will do you just fine. If you need more, you need more - But that doesn't
mean you need to jump right to a $2000 SonicWall just to get a tenth of the features you'd get from rolling your own Linux box.
[*] - And of course once you start getting into "real" network infrastructure, you have no choice... If you need 48 isolated
gigabit segments with effective QOS and several overlaid VLANs, get yourself a real ProCurve router or similar.
IANAL, and certainly not a Japanese one, but I have to wonder what they would actually charge him with.
Arguably, since he denies writing the program, he violated the real author's copyright (though I would think that
only the actual author could pursue legal action in that case).
Other than that... The closest US analogy I can think of would involve some variety of "theft of service" (or facilitating the same),
somewhat like selling software to uncap your cable modem. But that doesn't really seem to fit, since the
software only limits the end user's use of what they already have, not their use of content provided by the
OEM companies. I can't even see it as facilitating copyright violation, unless Japanese law explicitly has a fair-use idea
of "You can do this ten times before it counts"... Otherwise, what makes ten views okay but eleven a violation?
As the parent poster mentions, however, I don't really suppose any of this matters. Off to the gallows with this
scofflaw! Hmm, does "interfering with corporate profitability" count as a capital punishment yet?
Apparently the official answer is: No they shouldn't.
You and several others have made some excellent points, but all missed the "real" story here.
The police know the charges won't stick, most likely the DA will write them off the second it hits his desk.
But these self-important assholes got to stick a rich and powerful man in a cage for a few hours. This may have
included such wonderfully fun activities as a strip/cavity search, fingerprinting (that ink comes right out of $4000
cashmere suits, we promise), a parasite dusting, and getting to hang out with the cream of society in a 10x10 cell.
They don't care whether or not the charges stick, they've already "gotten theirs" against this uppity prick who didn't
immediately comply with their demands. It only surprises me that they didn't tase him in the process.
what would stop someone from driving to AZ, NV or Oregon and buy a TV from another state?
Same reason that most cars sold in the US pass CA emissions regs (the toughest in the country) - It costs less
to manufacture to meet CA's rules than to support two (or more) separate products.
California has enough economic pull to basically force their standards on the entire country. So they don't
worry about people driving to a neighboring state, because the neighboring states will have the exact same
energy-efficient models. And personally, I thank them for that (though their stance on passenger diesels
just makes me scratch my head).
And what's next, TV police vans, like the UK has?
Don't go getting all paranoid... No one will send the energy enforcement goons around to collect your TVs and 2-stroke lawnmowers
and 100W incandescent bulbs. Those things all have finite lifespans, and eventually you'll have to replace them of your own
free will. For that matter, in most cases* the environmental cost of replacing something before it breaks, exceeds the savings
of replacing it early - So they wouldn't even want you to run out and get a new TV. But next time you do, hey, lookit
that, your electric bill went down by a few bucks a month.
* for larger appliances like furnaces and refrigerators, you may do well to replace it if over 10 years old regardless of
whether or not it still works, but that only applies to a very small number of large-draw devices.
Trying to save the planet by reducing energy usage is like trying to save a river by not drinking.
Half true, but you ignore one important historical fact...
From the early 1900s until the 1960s, "energy" cost a pittance and no one worried about emissions. You can see the
consequences of this in home designs from that period - They leak like a sieve because, well, "just burn more oil".
Older heating systems (including wood) have insane particulate outputs, simply because no one cared. If
you compare almost identical houses built in the 60s vs the 80s (and not substantially renovated since), you'll
find that the former has literally 2-3 times the HVAC costs of the latter.
Thus the DoE's big push to get people to do those energy saving renovations... Get better insulation, get
better HVAC systems, get double-glazed low-E windows, and they'll pay people to do this because it literally
pays itself back to the US economy within a year or two (it also pays itself back to the homeowner, but most people
can't afford to blow $10k on replacing all their windows without some sort of incentive).
We need to start rolling out more sensible power generation facilities.
I agree with you completely that we desperately need to solve our dirty and nonrenewable generation issues... But
these form two sides of the same coin. If we can at least hold our energy use constant for 20 years, we can slowly replace
older capacity with cleaner sources. If we keep using more and more and more, we might add in renewable capacity but we'll
just end up keeping 80YO coal plants online despite the "improvements".
Nothing wrong with pruning your your orchard for a better harvest next year, but don't ignore the existing low-hanging fruit you
already have.
Although I agree with you completely in that regard, I also consider basic conservation and recycling more a matter
of simple common sense than "just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic".
Yes, too many humans exist; Eventually, we will discover how much we depend on a terrifyingly small number of sources
of phosphate for fertilizer, and have a massive die-off due to global famine. Until then, however, we don't need
to suffer for want of energy or various recyclable metals.
This month's SciAm
(unfortunately that link doesn't have the full article - I'd recommend picking up this month's issue for that alone, if
you have any interest in renewable energy) has a nice breakdown of how we can realistically satisfy the world's
energy demands using 100% renewable and zero-emission sources. It gives some eye-opening numbers that one the one hand
make even a staunch fan of renewables wonder if we can really do it, while at the same time throwing down a gauntlet in
that we won't get there with our current half-assed approach.
Yet another way to increase the density of server farms... Useful if you must grow your servers in Manhattan,
a waste of money otherwise.
Among the many great things the internet has brought us (*cough*porn*cough*), "location-independence" ranks pretty high
up there. Your servers don't need to all fit in one cargo container that runs so hot it requires LN cooling. For
all it matters, you could put them in a single line of half-racks on a mountain ridge, cooled naturally by the wind (with
some care to keep them rain-free, of course).
I thought we'd learned our lesson in that regard when tests last year by MS and Intel (not to mention Google's truly
inspiring data center designs) showed a substantial payoff by letting servers run hotter and less densely packed. Silly me.
It's hard to imagine a spec for this software that wouldn't be at least a bit
suspicious, so you can hardly blame them for looking into the programmers.
Totally non-suspicious Spec - I want a program that can generate hypothetical
quarterly yield reports based on historical or speculative data, for marketing
purposes.
Just about every 401k I've ever signed up for has given me forms that look exactly
like that - Basically, "If you had gotten in here and retired here, you'd have made 22.3%
per year!".
That said, the real issue here appears to involve destruction of evidence - Which at the
very least counts as a crime in itself, and strongly suggests these guys had more
involvement than they let on. You don't commit a crime yourself to cover up for someone else
without one hell of a good reason; in this case, either Madoff offering them the world
to help him look better, or more likely, hiding the fact that they knew more than they
claimed all along.
And realistically, I can say as a programmer who has helped a company extract meaningful
reports from its disaster of a DB (nothing of such a sensitive nature, just for internal
inventory management purposes), I can very comfortably say that you simply can't do it without
a solid low-level understanding of how things really work - Not just "we buy and sell widgets,
track the sales records and do the math", but down to the level of personally questioning some of the
handlers and counters to explain discrepancies. "So we started the year with 5000 widgets, bought another
5000, sold 7000, and ended up with 6000?" "Oh, well the vendor changed UoMs mid-year and we didn't
know who to tell".
Not always true, but not relevant to the discussion.
The same is true for not saying anything when you witness a crime being committed. It's called obstruction.
In the US, with the exception of a very small number of situations where child safety presents an issue, you never have an obligation to report knowledge of a crime unless issued a relevant subpoena.
Now, if you in some way profit from the crime in question (arguably relevant here, but I'd call it a stretch), or outright lie to police or a court, you (may) have committed crimes of your own. But not volunteering unsolicited evidence of a crime does not constitute "obstruction of justice".
So, CYA: leave the company as soon as you can. Assume you WILL be held accountable in the future.
So to protect himself from the fictional crime of not reporting a crime, you would recommend he run away and do his best Sgt. Schultz impersonation? Priceless.
Pretending the words don't mean what everyone reading them knows they mean is the wrong approach.
I can't prove it, obviously, but I sincerely did not read the statement as meaning anything sexual until I saw others
describe it as such.
I took it no differently than a sarcastic, "So, do you often accept candy from strangers, or do you
drive around offering it to them" - Though re-reading that, I suppose you could call that a sexual reference as well.
So to phrase it more bluntly, "do you have a secret death wish, or do you intend to lure me out to kill me?".
Re:Dynamic Relational: change it, DON'T toss it
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure what you mean by "flat".
By "flat", I mean that you've solved the problem of flexibility by reducing your DB to nothing more than a
collection of unrelated binary blobs, each with a completely arbitrary meaning and not necessarily
bearing any actual relation to one another - No different than storing a collection of binary blobs in RAM (or in
individual files for that matter), "indexed" by address.
I didn't preclude indexes or joins.
How do you join against a field that contains data that requires context-dependent unpacking? Sure, you can still use the DB for
easily working with other fields, but once you start using data with a dynamic interpretation, you've effectively
made it off-limits to any server-side manipulation - Thus removing virtually every benefit of using a RDBMS in the first place.
How about some example scenarios to explore.
I've had the "pleasure" of working with an MS-SQL DB "extended" something like you suggest. They used XML inside various
fields, which could and sometimes did contain base64 zipped files, which could and sometimes did contain XML plaintext files (because
the original fields had slowly grown much too long to work with directly), which could and sometimes did contain base64 image
data (I could go on, no joke) - And while I had to deal with this mess, the original creators would get mad at me every
time I pointed out that their latest minor update to the core app had trashed an assortment of previously working features.
Try setting up a filtered view when you need to run some-but-not-all fields through three passes of two different imported DLL decoders.
What I'd like to know is does this thing work with autorun disabled?
You use virtually all forensic tools like this on an offline system - Meaning that you most likely boot to
it, and it inspects the HDD in read-only mode.
Actually using this on a live, running system just begs to have any findings thrown out on grounds of tampering
with the evidence... "So, you use this little USB stick on a lot of machines, Officer? Did any of those machines
have a virus? Congratulations, you didn't find child porn, you instsalled it!".
Re:Dynamic Relational: change it, DON'T toss it
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
RDBMS can be built that have a very dynamic flavor to them. For example, treat each row as a map (associative array). Non-existent columns in any given row are treated as Null/empty instead of an error. Perhaps tables can also be created just by inserting a row into the (new) target table. No need for explicit schema management.
Aaaaaaaand, congratulations, you've described "fixing" the problem of schema flexibility by using an RDBMS as a non-relational flat hashed memory storage area, with at least three layers of indirection (not even counting underlying complexity of the DB engine itself).
Aside from why the hell you would ever do this in favor of, y'know, just using a flat block of real memory (since you've given the application the fun task of memory management below what the OS usually handles, with all the overhead of
framing each read or write as an SQL query)... Well, no. I have no aside, just what I've written.
Sorry, I'll grant that you have a clever solution to a problem, but a far more effective solution would throw away the problem itself and not try to frame everything in terms of DBM - Kinda like Amazon did.
The problem with techies, they need to learn to think like a businessman.
Not if you want them to remain good at their jobs. We (techies) need to have a good grasp of reality,
rather than an overdose of self-delusion, to do what we do well.
Businessmen will sell you REITs; Techies sell businessmen software that lets them justify gambling the world's economy on REITs.
Which one do you want on your side?
Maybe the answer is robots.txt; but that is not what you tell a billionaire if he asks you.
If your boss, correct - You simply tell him "Yes sir, we'll fix that ASAP". If not your boss... You take
great pleasure in telling him where to stick his opinions on "fair use".
Slashdot Mirror
But thanks anyway for the dickery.
Sorry, I really didn't mean that as any sort of personal attack - Just that I see the WSJ used in almost every conversation on this topic as an example of the viability of making the transition from dead-tree to online, which (as I pointed out) counts as something of an outlier in the data.
I even agree with you in spirit - Murdoch sees the WSJ-online doing fairly well, and wonders why he can't have that for the rest of his empire. Of course, he misses the point entirely, in the WSJ actually has worthwhile content - Primarily because, since buying it, Murdoch has left it alone.
The rest of NewsCorp's world suffers from the very feature that makes it so successful - Infotainment only works well when you have 120 channels with nothing on; When you can click away to get endless content anywhere in the spectrum from scientific journals to animated fart-jokes, you'd damned well better provide either real information or real entertainment, not a weak hybrid of both lacking in the redeeming qualities of either.
But I do apologize if you took my previous post as dickery... No vitriol intended (at least, none directed toward you).
The Wall Street Journal is doing fine with a paywall, so it may take some convincing.
The WSJ counts as one of those papers that has relatively unique content that people will pay for.
Using them as an "example" of viability I would consider no less dishonest than considering Radiohead an example of how to make online music distribution work. Both have the ability to "make" it, largely due to preexisting fame, not because they've hit on the perfect distribution model - I would go so far as to say they've managed to succeed in online distribution despite flaws in their model, do to their overall desirability.
Now, extending the analogy a bit... Local Band X can follow the same distribution model and make a few bucks, primarily because they have no real overhead beyond hosting costs - Local Band X, however, works 9-5 and then plays the clubs on weekends because they love doing it, not because they seriously expect to retire off it. For print newspapers, they have a drastically different model. They have to pay reporters, editors, production staff, and maintain some fairly expensive printing equipment.
I honestly don't know if print news can make it in the online world (and the online world has all but guaranteed that they can no longer make it in the print-only world). I suspect within the next ten years, we'll see the death of the independent press, leaving only news-as-infotainment and (partially) publicly-funded news such as the BBC or NPR.
Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
And that right there should have given you your answer.
Think about what you've written for a minute... Google's crawler doesn't have actual accounts at every paysite on the web - Those sites have access rules to allow search engines (but not you) to retrieve for-pay content.
Can you now think of a way you might use that information to your benefit, rather than complaining that Google shows you more than you see in the abstract?
They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!
Historically, pirates (in the 1600s US/Caribbean/Europe trade route sense) observed a fairly strict code of conduct which included reimbursing investors their fair share; widows/orphans got their ex-father's share, and generally they did a lot less killing than their reputation suggested.
It sounds like modern pirates appear to follow fairly similar rules, which makes for some interesting cognitive dissonance in those who romanticize the old-school version but demonize the Somali version.
I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site.
Simple - they have zero interest in letting someone else get between them and their market.
The only real "power" Craig has comes from the size of his userbase, and he knows that. If Company-X starts offering "Craigslist, now with Fleem(tm)", and somehow grows to serve a significant portion of the Craigslist user base, that gives Company-X power over Craigslist itself - They could potentially fork away on their own, rather than as a middle-man, and leave Craigslist itself a ghosttown.
As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate). If for no more reason than petulantly insisting his users get the interface he wants, he has the option of making it as hard as possible for third parties to change that.
In the case of Excel, I can literally double-click the icon, count "one, two, three," and I have a blank spreadsheet.
Just on a whim, I just tried the same experiment on my current machine (older), running Office 97, without the Office Startup running (if you haven't explicitly disabled that, consider your numbers meaningless - It amounts to opening a new window of a running program).
<Click>... And I started to count "One, two, three...":
O(and half of an "n")... <Excel pops up>.
Yeah, thanks. I'll keep XP and my ancient but fully functional version of Office 97 until Billy-G starts offering BJs from Megan Fox in exchange for downgrading to the latest piece of crap.
Carnot efficiency is defined by the efficiency of a reversible heat engine operating between the given temperatures;
"Heat engine" != direct thermoelectric conversion (whether via quantum dots or just plain ol' Peltier junctions).
The Carnot limit simply doesn't apply to direct conversion, and AFAIK, no theoretical limit to near-100% efficiency (minus entropy) exists for the latter.
In modern systems the water isn't boiling, but it will take a long time before everything has been converted to lower temperature systems.
Not to say that lower-temp systems don't exist (I can see the appeal in single-building residential systems in particular), but I'd point out that virtually all non-residential heating loops don't actually carry water they carry steam (at least on the efferent lines). They do so for the simple reason that steam-at-100C carries 3-5x the energy of water-at-100C (depending on the return temperature, of course) and also has a lower thermal conductivity (so lower unintentional losses on the way).
Additionally, using a steam to water conversion has the bonus that you don't actually need any explicit pumps - Valves in the line ensure that the steam pushes itself out via high-pressure, and the phase change causes low pressure on the return side. You really couldn't ask for a more convenient arrangement.
So I would certainly say that it will take a long time to get people to switch over, since doing so makes the system drastically less efficient, more complicated, and less reliable as a whole.
It's not that difficult. Depending on the design of clamp, there are a few methods:
4) Keep a bolt-cutter in the car... Or an angle-grinder, or a sawzall with a metal cutting blade, or even just a good hacksaw.
I'd probably build out a router based on an Atom CPU and boot off a CF card with an ATA to CF adapter. You should be able to get excellent performance in the 30-50W range.
My current NAT box has an Epia CL with 1GB RAM and no HDD (boots from a CD to a stripped down Knoppix loaded into memory with a UnionFS - Like Damn Small Linux but I added back in a good number of features and remastered it). Draws right around 30W once the CD spins down.
So yeah, not too shabby, but personally I consider the Wattage tradeoff worth the massively increased functionality vs a standalone broadband router (how many do you know that support SSH tunnels or can act as an FTP/web site in a pinch?). For most people without a true 100+ MBit connection or higher-end geekly needs, I usually suggest they buy the cheapest piece of crap they can find.
But so will an old Aptiva salvaged from the dumpster.
Agreed, but keep in mind that you pay for more than just the hardware itself... If you can only salvage an old P4, its power consumption from the first year alone would probably have paid for just building a lightweight mini-ITX box dedicated to the task.
IMO, one of the biggest reasons to recommend a crappy LinkSys or similar comes from the fact that they use 5-15W total.
Well, why not? It only takes about fifteen minutes and will handle his traffic with ease on a five-year-old commodity pc.
Even if you buy hardware just for the purpose, you still save a fortune compared to getting a "real" router from the likes of Cisco (and yes, Cisco (et al) have "low"-end routers in the $150-$300 range - I've had the "pleasure" of using them, and can't recommend them for anything more important than holding down papers in a light breeze).
You only save money with a dedicated router at the very bottom of the barrel*. If you have a crappy 15MBit residential broadband connection, the $19.95 Linksys special will do you just fine. If you need more, you need more - But that doesn't mean you need to jump right to a $2000 SonicWall just to get a tenth of the features you'd get from rolling your own Linux box.
[*] - And of course once you start getting into "real" network infrastructure, you have no choice... If you need 48 isolated gigabit segments with effective QOS and several overlaid VLANs, get yourself a real ProCurve router or similar.
IANAL, and certainly not a Japanese one, but I have to wonder what they would actually charge him with.
Arguably, since he denies writing the program, he violated the real author's copyright (though I would think that only the actual author could pursue legal action in that case).
Other than that... The closest US analogy I can think of would involve some variety of "theft of service" (or facilitating the same), somewhat like selling software to uncap your cable modem. But that doesn't really seem to fit, since the software only limits the end user's use of what they already have, not their use of content provided by the OEM companies. I can't even see it as facilitating copyright violation, unless Japanese law explicitly has a fair-use idea of "You can do this ten times before it counts"... Otherwise, what makes ten views okay but eleven a violation?
As the parent poster mentions, however, I don't really suppose any of this matters. Off to the gallows with this scofflaw! Hmm, does "interfering with corporate profitability" count as a capital punishment yet?
Apparently the official answer is: No they shouldn't.
You and several others have made some excellent points, but all missed the "real" story here.
The police know the charges won't stick, most likely the DA will write them off the second it hits his desk.
But these self-important assholes got to stick a rich and powerful man in a cage for a few hours. This may have included such wonderfully fun activities as a strip/cavity search, fingerprinting (that ink comes right out of $4000 cashmere suits, we promise), a parasite dusting, and getting to hang out with the cream of society in a 10x10 cell.
They don't care whether or not the charges stick, they've already "gotten theirs" against this uppity prick who didn't immediately comply with their demands. It only surprises me that they didn't tase him in the process.
what would stop someone from driving to AZ, NV or Oregon and buy a TV from another state?
Same reason that most cars sold in the US pass CA emissions regs (the toughest in the country) - It costs less to manufacture to meet CA's rules than to support two (or more) separate products.
California has enough economic pull to basically force their standards on the entire country. So they don't worry about people driving to a neighboring state, because the neighboring states will have the exact same energy-efficient models. And personally, I thank them for that (though their stance on passenger diesels just makes me scratch my head).
And what's next, TV police vans, like the UK has?
Don't go getting all paranoid... No one will send the energy enforcement goons around to collect your TVs and 2-stroke lawnmowers and 100W incandescent bulbs. Those things all have finite lifespans, and eventually you'll have to replace them of your own free will. For that matter, in most cases* the environmental cost of replacing something before it breaks, exceeds the savings of replacing it early - So they wouldn't even want you to run out and get a new TV. But next time you do, hey, lookit that, your electric bill went down by a few bucks a month.
* for larger appliances like furnaces and refrigerators, you may do well to replace it if over 10 years old regardless of whether or not it still works, but that only applies to a very small number of large-draw devices.
Trying to save the planet by reducing energy usage is like trying to save a river by not drinking.
Half true, but you ignore one important historical fact...
From the early 1900s until the 1960s, "energy" cost a pittance and no one worried about emissions. You can see the consequences of this in home designs from that period - They leak like a sieve because, well, "just burn more oil". Older heating systems (including wood) have insane particulate outputs, simply because no one cared. If you compare almost identical houses built in the 60s vs the 80s (and not substantially renovated since), you'll find that the former has literally 2-3 times the HVAC costs of the latter.
Thus the DoE's big push to get people to do those energy saving renovations... Get better insulation, get better HVAC systems, get double-glazed low-E windows, and they'll pay people to do this because it literally pays itself back to the US economy within a year or two (it also pays itself back to the homeowner, but most people can't afford to blow $10k on replacing all their windows without some sort of incentive).
We need to start rolling out more sensible power generation facilities.
I agree with you completely that we desperately need to solve our dirty and nonrenewable generation issues... But these form two sides of the same coin. If we can at least hold our energy use constant for 20 years, we can slowly replace older capacity with cleaner sources. If we keep using more and more and more, we might add in renewable capacity but we'll just end up keeping 80YO coal plants online despite the "improvements".
Nothing wrong with pruning your your orchard for a better harvest next year, but don't ignore the existing low-hanging fruit you already have.
The disease is overpopulation
Although I agree with you completely in that regard, I also consider basic conservation and recycling more a matter of simple common sense than "just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic".
Yes, too many humans exist; Eventually, we will discover how much we depend on a terrifyingly small number of sources of phosphate for fertilizer, and have a massive die-off due to global famine. Until then, however, we don't need to suffer for want of energy or various recyclable metals.
This month's SciAm (unfortunately that link doesn't have the full article - I'd recommend picking up this month's issue for that alone, if you have any interest in renewable energy) has a nice breakdown of how we can realistically satisfy the world's energy demands using 100% renewable and zero-emission sources. It gives some eye-opening numbers that one the one hand make even a staunch fan of renewables wonder if we can really do it, while at the same time throwing down a gauntlet in that we won't get there with our current half-assed approach.
Yet another way to increase the density of server farms... Useful if you must grow your servers in Manhattan, a waste of money otherwise.
Among the many great things the internet has brought us (*cough*porn*cough*), "location-independence" ranks pretty high up there. Your servers don't need to all fit in one cargo container that runs so hot it requires LN cooling. For all it matters, you could put them in a single line of half-racks on a mountain ridge, cooled naturally by the wind (with some care to keep them rain-free, of course).
I thought we'd learned our lesson in that regard when tests last year by MS and Intel (not to mention Google's truly inspiring data center designs) showed a substantial payoff by letting servers run hotter and less densely packed. Silly me.
It's hard to imagine a spec for this software that wouldn't be at least a bit suspicious, so you can hardly blame them for looking into the programmers.
Totally non-suspicious Spec - I want a program that can generate hypothetical quarterly yield reports based on historical or speculative data, for marketing purposes.
Just about every 401k I've ever signed up for has given me forms that look exactly like that - Basically, "If you had gotten in here and retired here, you'd have made 22.3% per year!".
That said, the real issue here appears to involve destruction of evidence - Which at the very least counts as a crime in itself, and strongly suggests these guys had more involvement than they let on. You don't commit a crime yourself to cover up for someone else without one hell of a good reason; in this case, either Madoff offering them the world to help him look better, or more likely, hiding the fact that they knew more than they claimed all along.
And realistically, I can say as a programmer who has helped a company extract meaningful reports from its disaster of a DB (nothing of such a sensitive nature, just for internal inventory management purposes), I can very comfortably say that you simply can't do it without a solid low-level understanding of how things really work - Not just "we buy and sell widgets, track the sales records and do the math", but down to the level of personally questioning some of the handlers and counters to explain discrepancies. "So we started the year with 5000 widgets, bought another 5000, sold 7000, and ended up with 6000?" "Oh, well the vendor changed UoMs mid-year and we didn't know who to tell".
Wow, tons of armchair lawyers in this thread.
Note: IANAL.
Unfortunately ignorance of the law is no defense.
Not always true, but not relevant to the discussion.
The same is true for not saying anything when you witness a crime being committed. It's called obstruction.
In the US, with the exception of a very small number of situations where child safety presents an issue, you never have an obligation to report knowledge of a crime unless issued a relevant subpoena.
Now, if you in some way profit from the crime in question (arguably relevant here, but I'd call it a stretch), or outright lie to police or a court, you (may) have committed crimes of your own. But not volunteering unsolicited evidence of a crime does not constitute "obstruction of justice".
So, CYA: leave the company as soon as you can. Assume you WILL be held accountable in the future.
So to protect himself from the fictional crime of not reporting a crime, you would recommend he run away and do his best Sgt. Schultz impersonation? Priceless.
Pretending the words don't mean what everyone reading them knows they mean is the wrong approach.
I can't prove it, obviously, but I sincerely did not read the statement as meaning anything sexual until I saw others describe it as such.
I took it no differently than a sarcastic, "So, do you often accept candy from strangers, or do you drive around offering it to them" - Though re-reading that, I suppose you could call that a sexual reference as well.
So to phrase it more bluntly, "do you have a secret death wish, or do you intend to lure me out to kill me?".
I'm not sure what you mean by "flat".
By "flat", I mean that you've solved the problem of flexibility by reducing your DB to nothing more than a collection of unrelated binary blobs, each with a completely arbitrary meaning and not necessarily bearing any actual relation to one another - No different than storing a collection of binary blobs in RAM (or in individual files for that matter), "indexed" by address.
I didn't preclude indexes or joins.
How do you join against a field that contains data that requires context-dependent unpacking? Sure, you can still use the DB for easily working with other fields, but once you start using data with a dynamic interpretation, you've effectively made it off-limits to any server-side manipulation - Thus removing virtually every benefit of using a RDBMS in the first place.
How about some example scenarios to explore.
I've had the "pleasure" of working with an MS-SQL DB "extended" something like you suggest. They used XML inside various fields, which could and sometimes did contain base64 zipped files, which could and sometimes did contain XML plaintext files (because the original fields had slowly grown much too long to work with directly), which could and sometimes did contain base64 image data (I could go on, no joke) - And while I had to deal with this mess, the original creators would get mad at me every time I pointed out that their latest minor update to the core app had trashed an assortment of previously working features.
Try setting up a filtered view when you need to run some-but-not-all fields through three passes of two different imported DLL decoders.
What I'd like to know is does this thing work with autorun disabled?
You use virtually all forensic tools like this on an offline system - Meaning that you most likely boot to it, and it inspects the HDD in read-only mode.
Actually using this on a live, running system just begs to have any findings thrown out on grounds of tampering with the evidence... "So, you use this little USB stick on a lot of machines, Officer? Did any of those machines have a virus? Congratulations, you didn't find child porn, you instsalled it!".
RDBMS can be built that have a very dynamic flavor to them. For example, treat each row as a map (associative array). Non-existent columns in any given row are treated as Null/empty instead of an error. Perhaps tables can also be created just by inserting a row into the (new) target table. No need for explicit schema management.
Aaaaaaaand, congratulations, you've described "fixing" the problem of schema flexibility by using an RDBMS as a non-relational flat hashed memory storage area, with at least three layers of indirection (not even counting underlying complexity of the DB engine itself).
Aside from why the hell you would ever do this in favor of, y'know, just using a flat block of real memory (since you've given the application the fun task of memory management below what the OS usually handles, with all the overhead of framing each read or write as an SQL query)... Well, no. I have no aside, just what I've written.
Sorry, I'll grant that you have a clever solution to a problem, but a far more effective solution would throw away the problem itself and not try to frame everything in terms of DBM - Kinda like Amazon did.
The problem with techies, they need to learn to think like a businessman.
Not if you want them to remain good at their jobs. We (techies) need to have a good grasp of reality, rather than an overdose of self-delusion, to do what we do well.
Businessmen will sell you REITs; Techies sell businessmen software that lets them justify gambling the world's economy on REITs. Which one do you want on your side?
Maybe the answer is robots.txt; but that is not what you tell a billionaire if he asks you.
If your boss, correct - You simply tell him "Yes sir, we'll fix that ASAP". If not your boss... You take great pleasure in telling him where to stick his opinions on "fair use".