If I wanted my passwords stored on a computer, then I might as well do away with them completely.
But assuming I did want to to store my passwords on a computer, I'd want them on my computer.
And if for some reason, I wanted to store them with a third party, I wouldn't want the storage to be a single sourced service.
And if was willing to accept a single sourced service, I still wouldn't want that source to be Microsoft.
And assuming you get past all of the above, you still need to convince the vendor that it's good for them too - and you'll need to convince a lot of them to make it worth while.
The kind of people who are concerned about employees spending less than 100% of their time in thrall to the company are the same kind that are most sensitive to the bottom line.
In light of the new policy, the workplace is now less hospitable than it had been, and you are entiled to compensation for the removal of this benefit. Pointing this out (and hinting that you aren't the only one who feels that way) will get them to rethink the policy.
What bothers me when I see those posts... no offense... is the strange... and wrong... emphasizing on speed.
Why are so many people claiming C is faster than C++ or Objective C?
This is simply wrong. Why should anyone use C to write a time critical loop when the same time critical loop is in C++ just as fast? Looping over an array of ints or floats and doing some math has nothing to do with OO... and a OO Program doing that is just the same as a C or fortran program.
for (int i =0; imax;i++)
sum += val[i];
This is the same in C/pascal/C++/Java/Delphi/Modula2!!!
And in fortran: DO i 0,max
sum = sum + val(i);
Thats also exactly the same!!!...
Most people make the claim that C is faster based on the emperical evidence.
I think that if you actually benchmarked those snippets of code, you would be surprised at the results. C compilers often can make optimizations that C++ compilers can not. Fortan compilers can do even better. (and often do)
For example;
for (i=0; i < max;i++)
array1[i] += array2[i];
can compile to dramtically different code in C and C++ (thanks mainly to the possibility of operator overloading)
Cray fortran actually reduces that to a single instruction which runs vectorized. About 64 times faster than the C equivilant.
But IMO the reason C code is generally faster than C++ is more subtle. In general, a programmer is able to estimate fairly accurately how long a piece of C code will take. In C when you see "a++" you can be pretty sure that's going to be only a few instructions of assembly. In C++ you can't really be sure - maybe someone overloaded the '++' operator, maybe a is a complex data type and incrementing it will access the disk. Or maybe it's just a plain int, and will run the same speed as the C version. You can't really tell at a glance.
Normal LEDs have been improving rapidily. The best commercially availble are 30 lumens per watt. (You can get those in a lightwave 4000 flashlight)
Cree has developed laboratory prototypes of white LEDs that have achieved 65 lumens per watt in industry standard packages and 74 lumens per watt in special packages. Worse than fluorescent, but not by much.
Come on... that Canter & Siegel green-card-lottery spam-scam wasn't the first spam by a long-shot... maybe the first spam to get written up the print media.
If one defines "spam" as "excessive unwanted messages" then I'd have to go with Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple as the earliest recorded anti-spam effort in a print medium. People broadcasting obnoxious messages predates "the print media" - hell it pre-dates printing.
UU carries 50% of the US's total Internet traffic and 90% of its e-mail.
Interesting if true. The best source I've seen claims that UUnet is responsible for about 11% of the internets traffic, and only about 9% of the worlds email.
Anyone know of a reliable way to determine the real numbers?
If someone were to do this with reasonably high quality (say a 300-400MB DivX file for a single 40-60 minute episode, $25 or so per "season"), I might start watching TV again.
Farscape was estimated at $3,000,000 an episode. Even if you ignore the production and distribution costs of the media, you're still looking at more like $75 for 26 episode season if you're going to try and cover the production costs. If you include all the failed shows too (or if you prefer, think of it as factoring in the risk of failure) the cost is not surprisingly higher than the current cost of a DVD boxed set.
Broadcast televison (and to a lessor extent cable) is still one of the most cost effective way to distribute video.
The article indicates that the 'researchers' spent two days collecting information.
Only two days of research is a lame attempt at a research project.
For all we know, those responsible could alternate source every other week, thus invalidating this 'insightful' conclusion.
From my own research, spam volume varies by time of day, day of the week, and day of the month. To see it though, required months of data, because the random variance is very large. I've observed changes of more than 5 in the number of spams per day.
But even if you assume Sophos is off by a factor of 5, their data suggests that US based servers are still the leading source of spam.
What's to stop the From:, To:, and Cc: fields from being spoofed (like a lot of viruses do)?
Little point in spoofing the To: or Cc: headers, but yes, spammers could spoof the From: (and the envelope from) quite easily.
They can. They are. And what's worse, spammers don't have to do it perfectly - they can send each spam "from" thousands of people and see which ones get through. Keeping a list of from-to pairs is just as easy as keeping a list of to addresses.
This can be fixed by digitally signing email, but if you prefer a quick fix that works with the existing legacy, then use the From: plus the IP address. (for a slightly better but more complex approach, you can group all outbound IPs for an ISP together.) It's possible to spoof an IP address, but it's several orders of magnitude more difficult than spoof just the From:
In fact, even in today's legal climate I doubt it will survive the priliminary hearing. If the RIAA had any legitimate cause they [had] the right to bring action. They also had the right to settle, as did anyone they brought action against.
If you lend someone ten bucks, they say they can't pay, you sue them, and you both agree to settle the matter for a fiver there is no extortion.
In this case though, they're accusing you of stealing $10, they threaten to sue you sue you for $250,000 and offer to settle for $1000.
If you're innocent, your choices are;
Pay them the $1,000.
Pay a lawyer $10,000 and waste a year of your life fighting the case.
Sure if you're guilty it's a generous offer on their part. But if you're innocent, it's extortion.
It might be legal extortion, but it's still extortion.
Also his relationship with Lois, man of steel and woman of kleenex, need I avoid the details of that intiment relationship should they decide to have children?;)
You don't need to avoid it, but there's little reason to post it here - a link should be enough.
It's an interesting variation on the general concept of "sender risks", but a little lacking on implementation details.
I note the paper describes the inherent imbalance of value assignment for the email between sender and receiver, but nowhere can I find a mention of difficulty of evaluating the value of the receiver to the sender.
I.e. the sender risks losing an escrow payment, but the receiver doesn't risk anything. You've addressed the asymmetry of knowledge, but not of risk.
Also it doesn't seem to account for the cost of making decisions. If the sender must make a decision for each email, that greatly increases their cost over and above the cost implied in the transaction/escow payment itself. This might seem unimportant, but if the increase in value is less than the increase in cost, you haven't really gained.
One benefit to having email is the ability to post information anonymously in order to avoid possible repercussions.
"Sender risks" doesn't prevent anonymous email.
The paper is short on implementation details anyway. Lots of hand waving over how exactly you make and guarantee the "escrow" payment, so just do some more hand waving and say that the escrow payment is made anonymously.
Of all the processors out there, yes the x86 is common but it has to be one of the WORST instruction sets...
It only seems that way because you haven't been exposed to the really wretched ones.
There were processors that had only one word of stack, processors that needed special instructions to cross page boundaries, that had only two registers, that couldn't add or subtract (forget multiply and divide), and even processors that didn't have linear instruction sequences (the program counter was a LFSRs).
The whole x86 family even as far back as the 4040 has a much better instruction set than many of the (now thankfully dead) processors.
It's a clever idea (even if nobody has actually done it yet) but I think Captchas will always be ahead in the arms race.
Cut and paste my Captchas? Ok, I'll embed it in a java program. Screen capture? I'll make it dependant on the web-site you're visiting. (which of these objects starts with the same letter as the third letter of my website?)
In the end though, the best a captchas can do is prove there's a human somewhere in the loop. A spammer (or anyone else for that matter) could hire real people to answer them. Automate the non-captcha part of the signup, and you could generate several hundred accounts per hour.
Is this just a minor side effect of a basically beneficial system...
I challenge the implicit assumption that patents are basically beneficial.
... that will simply work itself out as the patents are challenged? Or does this have to be fought?
The are other options; we could learn to live with the consequences instead of fighting it. Or we could try to mitigate the damage, or reduce the quantity of stupid patents.
I favor mitigation in the form of a law which prevents patents from applying to anything which is downloadable. I'd also support a requirement that patents be "easy to read and understand" so they could be invalidated if you could prove they were not.
I think it's common sense that if you're a defendant and found not guilty that you shouldn't have to pay. Frankly, I'm surprised something like this doesn't exist already. Perhaps if the plaintiff had to pay ALL court costs if he/she lost there would be fewer nonsensical lawsuits.
I agree in principle, but the winner should only get a standard fee for their time. For example, $50 per hour, with the number of hours being estimated by the judge. Otherwise, people might hire thousands of lawyers just to hurt the other guy if they win.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the people living in England, France, China, Japan, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Comoros, The Philippines, Cyprus, Antigua, Nicaragua, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Germany, Serbia, Cuba, Belize, Peru, Lesotho, Hungary, Barbados, Mali, Ecuador, Chile, Romania, Gabon, Mauritania, Greece, Laos, Seychelles, Korea, Tanzania, Russia, Argentina, Tunisia, Yemen, Georgia, Denmark, Fiji, Croatia, Thailand, Sweden, Jamaica, Australia, Malta, Uganda, Iceland, Cambodia, Namibia, Barbuda, Guatemala, Myanmar, Maldives, Austria, Burundi, Finland, Poland, Ghana, Norway, Congo, Dominica, Somalia, Egypt, Benin, Uruguay, Palau, Congo, East Timor, Slovakia, Sudan, Rwanda, Tuvalu, Latvia, Mauritius, Yugoslavia, Suriname, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Iran, Oman, The Bahamas, Iraq, Portugal, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Zambia, Vietnam, Cameroon, Canada, Mozambique, Malawi, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gambia, Bhutan, Vanuatu, Turkey, Taiwan, Brazil, Afghanistan, Madagascar, Turkmenistan, Guyana, Mexico, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Andorra, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Chad, Tajikistan, Grenada, Morocco, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Togo, Guinea, The Netherlands, Paraguay, Armenia, Slovenia, The Czech Republic, Honduras, India, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Swaziland, Ukraine, Kiribati, Angola, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Liberia, Zaire, Spain, Bosnia, Monaco, Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Belgium, Singapore, Albania, Micronesia, Nauru, Eritrea, El Salvador, Belarus, Panama, Nepal, Libya, Samoa, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Bahrain, Algeria, Burma, Kenya, Tonga, Qatar, Indonesia, Jordan, Lithuania, and the other countries of the world.
-- this is not a
The entire concept is flawed from the get-go.
If I wanted my passwords stored on a computer, then I might as well do away with them completely.
But assuming I did want to to store my passwords on a computer, I'd want them on my computer.
And if for some reason, I wanted to store them with a third party, I wouldn't want the storage to be a single sourced service.
And if was willing to accept a single sourced service, I still wouldn't want that source to be Microsoft.
And assuming you get past all of the above, you still need to convince the vendor that it's good for them too - and you'll need to convince a lot of them to make it worth while.
-- this is not a
Hello? It's not very easy to imagine a site that's willing let a third party handle customer information for free.
Most companies aren't even willing to tell you how many customers they have, much less let you collect personal information about them.
-- this is not a
If this really was a good idea, then there's no reason you couldn't do it under a second or even lower tier domain.
I'd certainly trust randomdomain.approved-mailservers.spamhaus.org a lot more than randomdomain.mail
They should have spent the $45,000 fee on something useful - like legos.
-- this is not a
I've often thought that processors should take the clock and divide it by 16 as the first step, just so the Mhrzt can be 16 times higher.
.sig
Later they could remove the divide by 16 and claim to have an internal "clock multiplier" and charge extra for the part.
-- this is not a
The kind of people who are concerned about employees spending less than 100% of their time in thrall to the company are the same kind that are most sensitive to the bottom line.
.sig
In light of the new policy, the workplace is now less hospitable than it had been, and you are entiled to compensation for the removal of this benefit. Pointing this out (and hinting that you aren't the only one who feels that way) will get them to rethink the policy.
-- this is not a
Most people make the claim that C is faster based on the emperical evidence.
I think that if you actually benchmarked those snippets of code, you would be surprised at the results. C compilers often can make optimizations that C++ compilers can not. Fortan compilers can do even better. (and often do)
For example;
for (i=0; i < max;i++)
array1[i] += array2[i];
can compile to dramtically different code in C and C++ (thanks mainly to the possibility of operator overloading)
Cray fortran actually reduces that to a single instruction which runs vectorized. About 64 times faster than the C equivilant.
But IMO the reason C code is generally faster than C++ is more subtle.
In general, a programmer is able to estimate fairly accurately how long a piece of C code will take.
In C when you see "a++" you can be pretty sure that's going to be only a few instructions of assembly.
In C++ you can't really be sure - maybe someone overloaded the '++' operator, maybe a is a complex data type and incrementing it will access the disk. Or maybe it's just a plain int, and will run the same speed as the C version.
You can't really tell at a glance.
I guess some posts just never go out of style;
.sig
Lumens/Watt Light Source
14.5 60W Incandescent A19 Bulb, softwhite (standard bulb)
17.5 100W Incandescent A19 Bulb, softwhite
17.5 Tungsten Halogen Single-End SUPER-Q Frosted Finish D.C. Bay 100Watt
60 150W single ended compact metal halide lamp
64 250W mogul based metal halide lamp, clear
84 32W, 48" MOL, T8 OCTRON fluorescent lamp,
100 Sylvania 18 watt low pressure sodium
115 1000W dual arc-tube high pressure sodium lamp, clear
150 90W low pressure sodium lamp, clear
(Data mostly from Sylvania's web site)
Normal LEDs have been improving rapidily.
The best commercially availble are 30 lumens per watt.
(You can get those in a lightwave 4000 flashlight)
Cree has developed laboratory prototypes of white LEDs that have achieved 65 lumens per watt in industry standard packages and 74 lumens per watt in special packages. Worse than fluorescent, but not by much.
Don Klipstein's Lighting Info Site is one of the better information sources IMO.
-- this is not a
If one defines "spam" as "excessive unwanted messages" then I'd have to go with Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple as the earliest recorded anti-spam effort in a print medium.
People broadcasting obnoxious messages predates "the print media" - hell it pre-dates printing.
-- this is not a
Interesting if true.
The best source I've seen claims that UUnet is responsible for about 11% of the internets traffic, and only about 9% of the worlds email.
Anyone know of a reliable way to determine the real numbers?
-- this is not a
Farscape was estimated at $3,000,000 an episode.
Even if you ignore the production and distribution costs of the media, you're still looking at more like $75 for 26 episode season if you're going to try and cover the production costs.
If you include all the failed shows too (or if you prefer, think of it as factoring in the risk of failure) the cost is not surprisingly higher than the current cost of a DVD boxed set.
Broadcast televison (and to a lessor extent cable) is still one of the most cost effective way to distribute video.
-- this is not a
approved by who?
-- this is not a
From my own research, spam volume varies by time of day, day of the week, and day of the month.
To see it though, required months of data, because the random variance is very large.
I've observed changes of more than 5 in the number of spams per day.
But even if you assume Sophos is off by a factor of 5, their data suggests that US based servers are still the leading source of spam.
-- this is not a
According to the article, 30% of the spam comes from trojaned boxes sending through their owners ISPs.
-- this is not a
Little point in spoofing the To: or Cc: headers, but yes, spammers could spoof the From: (and the envelope from) quite easily.
They can. They are. And what's worse, spammers don't have to do it perfectly -
they can send each spam "from" thousands of people and see which ones get through.
Keeping a list of from-to pairs is just as easy as keeping a list of to addresses.
This can be fixed by digitally signing email, but if you prefer a quick fix that works with the existing legacy,
then use the From: plus the IP address.
(for a slightly better but more complex approach, you can group all outbound IPs for an ISP together.)
It's possible to spoof an IP address, but it's several orders of magnitude more difficult than spoof just the From:
-- this is not a
In this case though, they're accusing you of stealing $10, they threaten to sue you sue you for $250,000 and offer to settle for $1000.
If you're innocent, your choices are;
Pay them the $1,000.
Pay a lawyer $10,000 and waste a year of your life fighting the case.
Sure if you're guilty it's a generous offer on their part.
But if you're innocent, it's extortion.
It might be legal extortion, but it's still extortion.
-- this is not a
You don't need to avoid it, but there's little reason to post it here - a link should be enough.
-- this is not a
It's an interesting variation on the general concept of "sender risks", but a little lacking on implementation details.
.sig
I note the paper describes the inherent imbalance of value assignment for the email between sender and receiver,
but nowhere can I find a mention of difficulty of evaluating the value of the receiver to the sender.
I.e. the sender risks losing an escrow payment, but the receiver doesn't risk anything.
You've addressed the asymmetry of knowledge, but not of risk.
Also it doesn't seem to account for the cost of making decisions. If the sender must make a decision for each email, that greatly increases their cost over and above the cost implied in the transaction/escow payment itself. This might seem unimportant, but if the increase in value is less than the increase in cost, you haven't really gained.
-- this is not a
"Sender risks" doesn't prevent anonymous email.
The paper is short on implementation details anyway.
Lots of hand waving over how exactly you make and guarantee the "escrow" payment,
so just do some more hand waving and say that the escrow payment is made anonymously.
-- this is not a
It only seems that way because you haven't been exposed to the really wretched ones.
There were processors that had only one word of stack, processors that needed special instructions to cross page boundaries, that had only two registers, that couldn't add or subtract (forget multiply and divide), and even processors that didn't have linear instruction sequences (the program counter was a LFSRs).
The whole x86 family even as far back as the 4040 has a much better instruction set than many of the (now thankfully dead) processors.
-- this is not a
It's a clever idea (even if nobody has actually done it yet) but I think Captchas will always be ahead in the arms race.
.sig
Cut and paste my Captchas? Ok, I'll embed it in a java program.
Screen capture? I'll make it dependant on the web-site you're visiting.
(which of these objects starts with the same letter as the third letter of my website?)
In the end though, the best a captchas can do is prove there's a human somewhere in the loop.
A spammer (or anyone else for that matter) could hire real people to answer them.
Automate the non-captcha part of the signup, and you could generate several hundred accounts per hour.
-- this is not a
I challenge the implicit assumption that patents are basically beneficial.
The are other options; we could learn to live with the consequences instead of fighting it.
Or we could try to mitigate the damage, or reduce the quantity of stupid patents.
I favor mitigation in the form of a law which prevents patents from applying to anything which is downloadable.
I'd also support a requirement that patents be "easy to read and understand" so they could be invalidated if you could prove they were not.
-- this is not a
Why? Because a single tube about the size of a paper towel roll can have every map known to man.
.sig
Imagine you're a GI and your chopper gets shot down somewhere you didn't plan on being.
Are you going to have the right map with you?
-- this is not a
I agree in principle, but the winner should only get a standard fee for their time.
For example, $50 per hour, with the number of hours being estimated by the judge.
Otherwise, people might hire thousands of lawyers just to hurt the other guy if they win.
-- this is not a
There's a big difference between "A computer programmed to
The first is a real world device, the second isn't.
You can't convert it from cyberspace to meatspace "by extension".
Used to be, if you could download it, then you couldn't patent it.
I'm in favor of a law that says that explicitly.
-- this is not a