Virus authors need to realize that it's not all just in fun.
I don't think virus authors are the point. It's easy to make obvious statements about how childish and irresponsible this guy is, but it's not like he invented worms. There were possible and probable before he sat down to code this one. So if people die in the hospital the blame rests with the people who administer the networks, the machines and the hospital. And Microsoft. It's their responsibility.
I think the people who write these things serve a useful purpose in strengthening security - like eating dirt when you're young helps you build your immune system.
Im into these fools for about 100 shares. On the short side.
I hope you sold at $14.50! Anyway, I think there's not much upside on the stock, they've played as many jokers as are in the deck and there's little they can wheel out to support the stock. It's all down hill from here.
But it's not there to authenticate a user; it's just there to authenticate that the email address is actually live rather than a bogus one like nobody@example.invalid
I think an email address or user is the same thing. And it would have the same effect, since all emails would be responded to regardless of if they hit a valid email address or not. The spammer would get results saying everyone they sent a mail to read their mail.
autoresponding is a possible problem.
That would just be more of the same, treated the same way as the original mail, making the spammer's problem worse.
I'm not so sure that this would really work. For one thing, the fact that many spammers already encourage people to download a link in the form of an invisible gif to track live email addresses suggests that the bandwidth problem might be less of an issue than he thinks.
Not so, very few people respond (a small fraction of a percent), so their bandwisth is low.
Equally important, a lot of spamming is done by contract spammers, not directly by the people being advertized, and I'm not convinced that the contract spammers would really care that much about their clients' web-sites being hammered.
And how long do you think that contract smapper would stay in work if their clients' servers get hammered? You kill thier source of income you kill the spammer.
Anyone notice that SCO's stock slipped another 11% today? heh.
And short interest (the amount of stock that has been shorted) is up to 391,000 for July up from 271,000 for June and 31,000 for May. That represents 5% of the stock on issue.
It searches for '(c) Copyright Microsoft Corporation'.
Re:What about the postscript desktop?
on
OpenGL 1.5
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But that's a really big deal! It means that all of the bitmaps representing your windows and other screen objects are in your graphic card's RAM, and moving a window in OS X doesn't require computing of any pixels at all on the CPU.
Actually, that's due to the fact that the bits are in your computer's RAM. Quartz double buffers all drawing so that it doesn't flash and looks smooth. Because of this no redrawing has to be done when part of a window is revealed. On the other hand, resizing means that the buffer has to be reallocated and redrawn.
Re:What about the postscript desktop?
on
OpenGL 1.5
·
· Score: 1
The Quartz engine (the 'postscript desktop") is used largely to create the contents of the windows. OpenGL, at this stage, is used to paint the windows onto the screen, after they've been rendered by Quartz (or Quickdraw in some cases). OpenGL gets more hardware support than Quartz rendering. A fully OpenGL desktop might leverage more of the hardware so that it becomes more of a "wrapper" for GL, but I don't think it's that simple. Maintaining the rendering quality of Quartz may mean OpenGL isn't up to scratch in many places.
Have you ever wondered why accountants exist and why they sometimes get paid heaps of money? Because things like costing and pricing can be difficult to calculate, especially for a large corporation. So the short answer is get yourself an accountant or some accounting advice.
The long answer is fixed costs + variable costs + margin = price. Fixed costs are things like rent, depreciation on the hardware, your salary, etc. Anything that doesn't really change according to how much you supply, or doesn't get used up in your supply. Divide this figure per unit of supply. Variable costs are whatever it costs you per unit of supply. And margin is how much profit you want to make.
I wish someone would get a clue and provide downloads of TV shows. It's not like you can't record them for free on your VCR on any given day, and a reasonable sized MPEG isn't exactly DVD quality. If they charged a couple of bucks per episode or even cheaper I'd download them in a second. How is it different to paying for and downloading music?
I personally thinking seriously of selling my TV. I really hate catching commercials that insult my intelligence (low as it is, but ads are even dumber) and the homogenous, conservative crap that gets fed to me via the tube.
Oh my god, someone that argues pleasantly and without slander? Am I still on slashdot?
For some reason, I'm in a good mood today. Don't worry it won't last.
But, costs aside, you may have a point - iTunes could be a great resource for accessing any music you could ever want, and crack the market wide open for the benefit of all but another poster made the point about the signal to noise ratio. iTunes may be inundated with not-so-great bands making the service hard to use and I know Apple care about usability and perceived quality. It's a fantastic opportunity if Apple play their cards right.
Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air.
Indeed. But this whole discussion is based on thin air figures if we're talking about how Apple would actually cost it.
The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.
A little story: I used to work for an investment bank. They had a tricky database optimisation problem and no time or budget to get a programmer (me) to do it. It was a 12 Gig database, so I said: buy another 12 Gig of memory and plop it in the server, allocate it as cache and your database will rush (reporting database, practically no updates). They told me it was impossible because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year! (This was only a couple of years ago) Why? Becuase the IT department factored in the cost of "support" for all hardware they sold. Go figure.
Exactly. This is what happens in an efficient (global) economy. A product becomes popular (computer technology) it becomes a commodity and gets cheaper, margins shrink and you look to save on costs.
The solution isn't to weep and wail and whinge, but to innovate. That's how the US got where it is in the first place. But you should understand it never stops. Free your mind and get rich!
I don't think it's that simple. You need a lot more infrastructure than just enclosures. You need somewhere to store the systems, power, cooling, someone to manage them, redundancy, especially if you're going to use IDE drives. And you've also got to contribute to the head office costs. It all adds up.
Even if you multiply that by 10, which is not unreasonable, it's only about $200K for their current load. But then you've got to consider return on capital. They need to make money on their investment, say at least 10%, probably more like 20%. So they need to make say $30K. With depreciation (33% a year) and gross margins of about 30%, they probably need to sell somewhere around 15% of their catalog each year to make a modest profit. Maybe double that to pay off the R&D on developing the shop in the first place.
The question then is can they sell 15-30% of songs from "all-comers" each year? I doubt it.
What are the chances apple will accept them though?
This is a good point. There would be labour overhead and storage costs for each album. Even if they fully automate the submission process, can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?
What Apple might do is have a sales cut-off for artists, and maybe labels too. Sell a certain amount within a certain time or get kicked.
Why is length such an important factor. I can imagine it might impinge on 30 minute songs (Orbital's The Box 28:22), but a cutoff at 7 minutes (which Soon is) seems a bit much. Are 7 Meg files such a strain?
I wonder. Superficially, this looks like a knock-off of iTunes (a poor one) and it basically pushes the Microsoft hegemony. Could Microsoft be behind this in some way? I can imagine MS would do anything to get its DRM out there.
Can someone explain to me why My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album on buymusic.com hasn't got "Soon" on it? It's a fantasic track. Maybe that's the reason. iTunes has it though.
Yes, I did notice that after I posted, but if he doesn't want to use Flash he'll have limited support, unless he insists that everybody install SVG.
He didn't actually say what sort of interactivity he wanted, but if it's anything more complex than that can be delivered using JavaScript, then he'll most probably be going back to a server for data, which makes his requirement for no server-side a bit meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll have to read my comment again assuming I understand that you sold short, and you'll see that it still makes sense.
Virus authors need to realize that it's not all just in fun.
I don't think virus authors are the point. It's easy to make obvious statements about how childish and irresponsible this guy is, but it's not like he invented worms. There were possible and probable before he sat down to code this one. So if people die in the hospital the blame rests with the people who administer the networks, the machines and the hospital. And Microsoft. It's their responsibility.
I think the people who write these things serve a useful purpose in strengthening security - like eating dirt when you're young helps you build your immune system.
Im into these fools for about 100 shares. On the short side.
I hope you sold at $14.50! Anyway, I think there's not much upside on the stock, they've played as many jokers as are in the deck and there's little they can wheel out to support the stock. It's all down hill from here.
But it's not there to authenticate a user; it's just there to authenticate that the email address is actually live rather than a bogus one like nobody@example.invalid
I think an email address or user is the same thing. And it would have the same effect, since all emails would be responded to regardless of if they hit a valid email address or not. The spammer would get results saying everyone they sent a mail to read their mail.
autoresponding is a possible problem.
That would just be more of the same, treated the same way as the original mail, making the spammer's problem worse.
I'm not so sure that this would really work. For one thing, the fact that many spammers already encourage people to download a link in the form of an invisible gif to track live email addresses suggests that the bandwidth problem might be less of an issue than he thinks.
Not so, very few people respond (a small fraction of a percent), so their bandwisth is low.
Equally important, a lot of spamming is done by contract spammers, not directly by the people being advertized, and I'm not convinced that the contract spammers would really care that much about their clients' web-sites being hammered.
And how long do you think that contract smapper would stay in work if their clients' servers get hammered? You kill thier source of income you kill the spammer.
Anyone notice that SCO's stock slipped another 11% today? heh.
And short interest (the amount of stock that has been shorted) is up to 391,000 for July up from 271,000 for June and 31,000 for May. That represents 5% of the stock on issue.
Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising.
You are not all square... you have to pay for the IP you stole. End of story.
Fuck, it's Darl McBride, posting on Slashdot!
I'd like to know exactly how it does this.
It searches for '(c) Copyright Microsoft Corporation'.
But that's a really big deal! It means that all of the bitmaps representing your windows and other screen objects are in your graphic card's RAM, and moving a window in OS X doesn't require computing of any pixels at all on the CPU.
Actually, that's due to the fact that the bits are in your computer's RAM. Quartz double buffers all drawing so that it doesn't flash and looks smooth. Because of this no redrawing has to be done when part of a window is revealed. On the other hand, resizing means that the buffer has to be reallocated and redrawn.
The Quartz engine (the 'postscript desktop") is used largely to create the contents of the windows. OpenGL, at this stage, is used to paint the windows onto the screen, after they've been rendered by Quartz (or Quickdraw in some cases). OpenGL gets more hardware support than Quartz rendering. A fully OpenGL desktop might leverage more of the hardware so that it becomes more of a "wrapper" for GL, but I don't think it's that simple. Maintaining the rendering quality of Quartz may mean OpenGL isn't up to scratch in many places.
Have you ever wondered why accountants exist and why they sometimes get paid heaps of money? Because things like costing and pricing can be difficult to calculate, especially for a large corporation. So the short answer is get yourself an accountant or some accounting advice.
The long answer is fixed costs + variable costs + margin = price. Fixed costs are things like rent, depreciation on the hardware, your salary, etc. Anything that doesn't really change according to how much you supply, or doesn't get used up in your supply. Divide this figure per unit of supply. Variable costs are whatever it costs you per unit of supply. And margin is how much profit you want to make.
BTW, IANAA.
I wish someone would get a clue and provide downloads of TV shows. It's not like you can't record them for free on your VCR on any given day, and a reasonable sized MPEG isn't exactly DVD quality. If they charged a couple of bucks per episode or even cheaper I'd download them in a second. How is it different to paying for and downloading music?
I personally thinking seriously of selling my TV. I really hate catching commercials that insult my intelligence (low as it is, but ads are even dumber) and the homogenous, conservative crap that gets fed to me via the tube.
... use a name like "fuck_you_greedy_riaa_cunts@kazaa"
It might work...
Oh my god, someone that argues pleasantly and without slander? Am I still on slashdot?
For some reason, I'm in a good mood today. Don't worry it won't last.
But, costs aside, you may have a point - iTunes could be a great resource for accessing any music you could ever want, and crack the market wide open for the benefit of all but another poster made the point about the signal to noise ratio. iTunes may be inundated with not-so-great bands making the service hard to use and I know Apple care about usability and perceived quality. It's a fantastic opportunity if Apple play their cards right.
Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me
Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air.
Indeed. But this whole discussion is based on thin air figures if we're talking about how Apple would actually cost it.
The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.
A little story: I used to work for an investment bank. They had a tricky database optimisation problem and no time or budget to get a programmer (me) to do it. It was a 12 Gig database, so I said: buy another 12 Gig of memory and plop it in the server, allocate it as cache and your database will rush (reporting database, practically no updates). They told me it was impossible because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year! (This was only a couple of years ago) Why? Becuase the IT department factored in the cost of "support" for all hardware they sold. Go figure.
Exactly. This is what happens in an efficient (global) economy. A product becomes popular (computer technology) it becomes a commodity and gets cheaper, margins shrink and you look to save on costs.
The solution isn't to weep and wail and whinge, but to innovate. That's how the US got where it is in the first place. But you should understand it never stops. Free your mind and get rich!
That works out to about $6,500 for 100k albums
I don't think it's that simple. You need a lot more infrastructure than just enclosures. You need somewhere to store the systems, power, cooling, someone to manage them, redundancy, especially if you're going to use IDE drives. And you've also got to contribute to the head office costs. It all adds up.
Even if you multiply that by 10, which is not unreasonable, it's only about $200K for their current load. But then you've got to consider return on capital. They need to make money on their investment, say at least 10%, probably more like 20%. So they need to make say $30K. With depreciation (33% a year) and gross margins of about 30%, they probably need to sell somewhere around 15% of their catalog each year to make a modest profit. Maybe double that to pay off the R&D on developing the shop in the first place.
The question then is can they sell 15-30% of songs from "all-comers" each year? I doubt it.
Their pitch: downloading music illegally will make you fat, your skin pale and spotty, and your social and love life wither on the vine...
Fuck! It's true!
You can even fuck my girlfriend sometimes (again, good exercise).
Well, I can confirm that wanking sure as hell doesn't work.
Maybe a moderation system is in order?
I can see my tracks getting modded -1, Troll
What are the chances apple will accept them though?
This is a good point. There would be labour overhead and storage costs for each album. Even if they fully automate the submission process, can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?
What Apple might do is have a sales cut-off for artists, and maybe labels too. Sell a certain amount within a certain time or get kicked.
Why is length such an important factor. I can imagine it might impinge on 30 minute songs (Orbital's The Box 28:22), but a cutoff at 7 minutes (which Soon is) seems a bit much. Are 7 Meg files such a strain?
I wonder. Superficially, this looks like a knock-off of iTunes (a poor one) and it basically pushes the Microsoft hegemony. Could Microsoft be behind this in some way? I can imagine MS would do anything to get its DRM out there.
Can someone explain to me why My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album on buymusic.com hasn't got "Soon" on it? It's a fantasic track. Maybe that's the reason. iTunes has it though.
Yes, I did notice that after I posted, but if he doesn't want to use Flash he'll have limited support, unless he insists that everybody install SVG.
He didn't actually say what sort of interactivity he wanted, but if it's anything more complex than that can be delivered using JavaScript, then he'll most probably be going back to a server for data, which makes his requirement for no server-side a bit meaningless.