> newsgroups are different than a P2P seeding system. There wasn't really a peer so much that your ISP and some other odies (bodies?)
You didn't have to use your ISP's servers, just like you don't have to use their DNS. People routinely used other news servers, and nerds often ran their own. Of course using your ISP's local servers tends to be faster and more efficient than some server on a far-away network.
Until shortly before NNTP mostly died, most ISPs didn't want liability from choosing to carry specific news groups, so they didn't choose - they carried all of the official ones, and most of alt.
> Gee, sarcasm.
Half sarcasm, and moderated +5 Informative. I work with engineers born in the 1990s. It's not uncommon for such people to invent something, not knowing it was commonly used in the 1980s.
If you haven't noticed it in tech, you've surely noticed it in policy discussions - people argue, predicting what the effect of trying policy X might be, apparently unaware that policy X has already been tried many times in many places. I'd guess that close to 50% of political posts are people predicting the past.
"Business decision" meaning "we decided we don't want to go out of business". 600+ Gbps was enough to cause real stress on Akamai's network, so that their customers, who pay the bills, started to be affected. Increasing their costs while reducing their revenue due to losing customers is a recipe for Akamai to go bankrupt.
If Kreb's had been paying Akamai a retainer they would have some responsibility to provide services to him, if they were able to do so. They have no responsibility to put themselves out of business on a charity case.
You're right that you shouldn't log in using the admin password to read email. You also shouldn't log in to the admin account, using the admin password, in order to install aoftware.
People leave your organization. If you have groups of people logging to the admin account, using the admin password, the guy who got fired yesterday probably still has the admin password. It's stored on Joe Schmoe's mobile device too, which just got hacked.
Instead, Joe should log in as Joe. The logs will show that Joe logged in, not "somebody logged in as admin", and when Joe gets fired you can simply disable Joe's account. Initially, he has just the standard permissions to do his daily work. For privileged tasks, he should use sudo or similar, not log out and then log in again as "admin", using a password shared amongst every body in the department.
Repeat after me "sharing passwords is bad." Sharing ADMINISTRATIVE passwords is extra bad. Switching ROLES from unprivileged to privileged should not mean changing IDENTITIES from "Bob" to "somebody who has the admin password, might be anyone in the department."
Ideally, there should be no "admin password". Individual people should have their own passwords, each with appropriate privileges, via groups if your organization has more than about a dozen people.
So then we have the question of the most secure way to store your individual passwords.
If you can still find an old-school "personal organizer" with no wifi, that provides security from network attacks. Then you need physical security to ensure the device doesn't get stolen - lock the door, lock at least one desk drawer, etc.
What I do personally is I use a very simple, non-networked, password vault script. The script uses AES or Twofish to encrypt a plain text file (notepad). A simple batch file can run GPG to do the encryption and decryption. The file is never opened in a feature-rich, macro-capable word processor like Microsoft Word, it's decrypted into simple text editor. Just to be sure I don't overwrite my access.gpg file with garbage by entering the master password incorrectly, my script checks the password entered against a SALTED SHA-2 hash before it does anything else.
> articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world.
That's a wonderful idea. We'd need a new protocol for distributing these "articles". We could call it Network News Transfer Protocol or something. You could tag your article according to categories andsubcategories, and people could subscribe to these different news groups. We could use ssl/tls for authentication of peers.
It probably wouldn't take too long to develop such a protocol; I bet we could have it done by 1986.
> My dad hates Obama, and calls him a communist. That is, of course, absurd. > Calling Trump a Nazi is equally absurd
Both are incorrect, one is utterly cuckoo.
Obama is the leader of the Democrat party this year. Also this year, Bernie Sanders was a serious contender to succede Obama as head of the Democrats (and the country). The ideology of the Democrat party, led by Obama, is similar to the ideology of Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders says Bernie Sanders is a Communist, the country's best-known Communist. Obama might not exactly *be* a communist, but he's on the same team as the leading US Communist. Further, Obama has written that he made it a point to hang out with Communists and learn from them. He's quoted notable Communists. Obama may not technically be a Communist, but he likes them, he quotes them, and he leads the party that nearly nominated a Communist president.
On the other side, Hitler killed 12 million people. Trump played reality TV star during a campaign.
One comparison is slightly incorrect. The other is completely insane.
If your servers are Linux, you're probably using the CLI, a text console. In that case, just enable the serial console. Grub can use the serial console too. The BIOS can use the serial console on some motherboards. "Screen" is one handy way to connect to the serial console.
If your servers don't have serial ports, you can get a cable that is USB on both ends. It's basically two back-to-back USB/serial adapters.
If you Windows on your servers because you like to click on pretty pictures, that's a bit more difficult. If the machine boots fine, Windows powershell may work over a serial console, but if it's booted up fine you'd probably just use RDP over the network.
True. When there were four or five candidates vying for the Republican nomination, all beat Clinton in head-to-head polling, except Trump. The primary voters chose the candidate who may be worse than Clinton.
I sure would like to see a good president again. I don't even care too much whether it's a good Democrat or a good Republican. Kennedy or Reagan, either would be a huge improvement over this year's choices and the last few presidents. For younger people, the best president of their lifetime is a guy who simply didn't do much, gpod or bad. A president who spent most of his time chasing women and trying to cover up his womanizing. Sad.
It has USB over Lightning, so you COULD attach a micro SD reader, internal or stuck to the case.
If you wanted to be even more hackish, it shouldn't be hard to find some SPI pins. You can interface micro SD cards with four SPI pins plus power and ground. This guy provided root in the software in order to make the OS used the micro SD for whatever you choose.
You brought up many different topics that might be interesting to discuss. Sometimes on Slashdot we also discuss spyware embedded in mainstream software, anti-poaching agreements, and Obama's green slush fund. The topic of the post you replied to was the claim that major pharma companies are making extremely high profits. That claim is false. Their profits are lower than many other industries, including the tech companies most of us work for.
You listed the profit margins for Apple, Google, and Oracle, comparing them to Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mylan, Did you not notice that the *all* of the tech companies had higher profits than *any* of the medical? Other than the single unprofitable company on the list, Amazon.
> By this argument, Google and Apple should go into real estate, which has truly insane profit margins.
Over the last ten years, the median sales price per square foot has gone from $140 to $148, an increase of 6% in ten years. Less than 1% isn't what I call "truly insane profit".
I most often grab something quickly from Best Buy, Walmart, or Fry's. It would cost me money to delay.
When one of our laptops dies, I'm paying someone to work, but they don't have a proper computer work on. Until we get them a new machine, they are stuck on whatever POS is in closet. It's probably in the closet because it's half broken.
So I grab something that looks like it'll work from the closest store, boot it to be sure it's not completely defective, then run the Linux install script and they can get back to work. 95% of the time, that works fine.
One time, Walmart was the quickest store, so I grabbed a laptop there, took it back to the office, and booted it. Wifi didn't work. Windows said it didn't have the driver for the wifi card. The web site of the laptop manufacturer didn't have a wifi driver for that version of Windows. I tried the manufactuer of the wireless card - no driver for that version of Windows. Windows Update? Nope, probably a million of that laptop sold at Walmart, with a wifi card that does not work with the preloaded Windows. Well that's stupid. Screw it, we use wired ethernet anyway. I pop in a CentOS install disk and 30 minutes later she's up and running - with wifi. CentOS included a driver that "just works"; apparently no driver existed for the preloaded, current version of Windows.
More specifically, they *applied* to patent a particular way of reinforcing a paper bag made of white recycled paper, and a particular type of self-retracting handle that falls down into the bag, made of twisted paper.
Bleached recycled paper tends to be weak, so that's why reinforcement would be good.
I don't know whether the patent will ever issue. If it does, it will probably be narrowed in scope first. The usual process is that the applicant writes the initial application to be as broad as they think they might get away with, then it's made more specific as needed to actually get approved.
Right now, today, Valeant looks to be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Many, many drug companies have run out of money when they didn't get a "hit" for a few years, and been acquired by competitors. Google "pharmaceutical acquisitions" and look at the numbers for any of the acquired companies for the year before the acquisition. Many that had to sell out were having rough times. (Some weren't, of course).
> 1) Spend more on marketing and management than research,
Name ANY big company in ANY industry that doesn't spend more on the combination of both marketing and administration than they do on pure research. In pharma the three are about equal, roughly 15% for each.
That's a very unusual metric by which to measure the profit on an investment. Yes, you're right, pharmaceutical companies do tend to employ higher skill/pay/productivity workers than fast food or assembly line companies do, on average. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
The normal way to measure gain/profit is as a percentage of the amount invested, often then adjusted for risk/volatility. Jeff Bezos could spend $2 billion dollars to develop and market a new drug, or he could spend that $2 billion developing and marketing a new mobile device, or developing and marketing some software. In ANY case, he would anticipate a profit of about 10%-12%, on average. Developing
and marketing medicine is not more profitable than developing and marketing other types of products. If it WAS especially profitable, most of the billionaires, and the largest companies, would do it.
Btw that $2 billion number to develop a new medicine and get it FDA approved in the US isn't an arbitrary example - that's how much it actually costs.
On a somewhat different topic: > And every business goes through a rough spell or has a bad product, just look at the big three auto makers.
And some industries and companies have far more variation, dry spells and good years, than others. General Mills is pretty consistent, Apple hopes the new iphone is a hit, Exxon swings up and down daily with the price of gas. Since you can invest in multiple projects or multiple companies, it's possible to offset your risks. Because literally every business has volatility, you can do a bit of math and find the formula for risk-adjusted return. That is, you can say "a 50% chance of making 20% has the same value as a 75% chance of making 10%". That's called risk-adjusted return. (Profit minus risk, basically.) The risk-adjusted return of pharma is right in line with every other industry. Which is why greedy bastards like Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos aren't all starting new pharma companies - they can get the same or better profit vs risk in other endeavors.
I'm sure you can find some *good* reasons to bitch about this. Power usage will be increased by about 2-3 watts while something is actively downloading. If someone is downloading constantly 8 hours per day, that's about $1 per year power cost.
Slashdot Mirror
> newsgroups are different than a P2P seeding system. There wasn't really a peer so much that your ISP and some other odies (bodies?)
You didn't have to use your ISP's servers, just like you don't have to use their DNS. People routinely used other news servers, and nerds often ran their own. Of course using your ISP's local servers tends to be faster and more efficient than some server on a far-away network.
Until shortly before NNTP mostly died, most ISPs didn't want liability from choosing to carry specific news groups, so they didn't choose - they carried all of the official ones, and most of alt.
> Gee, sarcasm.
Half sarcasm, and moderated +5 Informative. I work with engineers born in the 1990s. It's not uncommon for such people to invent something, not knowing it was commonly used in the 1980s.
If you haven't noticed it in tech, you've surely noticed it in policy discussions - people argue, predicting what the effect of trying policy X might be, apparently unaware that policy X has already been tried many times in many places. I'd guess that close to 50% of political posts are people predicting the past.
"Business decision" meaning "we decided we don't want to go out of business". 600+ Gbps was enough to cause real stress on Akamai's network, so that their customers, who pay the bills, started to be affected. Increasing their costs while reducing their revenue due to losing customers is a recipe for Akamai to go bankrupt.
If Kreb's had been paying Akamai a retainer they would have some responsibility to provide services to him, if they were able to do so. They have no responsibility to put themselves out of business on a charity case.
> If everything was done via email, so would twitter.
If I had a trunk, I'd be an elephant*. I do not in fact have a trunk, and I'm not an elephant. Twitter is not an email listserv.
* I started to say "if Hill had a dick, she'd be Bill", but somehow that analogy just doesn't work the same when talking to you. :)
You're right that you shouldn't log in using the admin password to read email. You also shouldn't log in to the admin account, using the admin password, in order to install aoftware.
People leave your organization. If you have groups of people logging to the admin account, using the admin password, the guy who got fired yesterday probably still has the admin password. It's stored on Joe Schmoe's mobile device too, which just got hacked.
Instead, Joe should log in as Joe. The logs will show that Joe logged in, not "somebody logged in as admin", and when Joe gets fired you can simply disable Joe's account. Initially, he has just the standard permissions to do his daily work. For privileged tasks, he should use sudo or similar, not log out and then log in again as "admin", using a password shared amongst every body in the department.
Repeat after me "sharing passwords is bad." Sharing ADMINISTRATIVE passwords is extra bad. Switching ROLES from unprivileged to privileged should not mean changing IDENTITIES from "Bob" to "somebody who has the admin password, might be anyone in the department."
>> they seem to have everything else wrong
Well they did get *one* other thing right. TFS says:
using a circular 115-degree lens
Genius. I would have tried a triangle lens, or perhaps square.
Ideally, there should be no "admin password". Individual people should have their own passwords, each with appropriate privileges, via groups if your organization has more than about a dozen people.
So then we have the question of the most secure way to store your individual passwords.
If you can still find an old-school "personal organizer" with no wifi, that provides security from network attacks. Then you need physical security to ensure the device doesn't get stolen - lock the door, lock at least one desk drawer, etc.
What I do personally is I use a very simple, non-networked, password vault script. The script uses AES or Twofish to encrypt a plain text file (notepad). A simple batch file can run GPG to do the encryption and decryption. The file is never opened in a feature-rich, macro-capable word processor like Microsoft Word, it's decrypted into simple text editor. Just to be sure I don't overwrite my access.gpg file with garbage by entering the master password incorrectly, my script checks the password entered against a SALTED SHA-2 hash before it does anything else.
> articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world.
That's a wonderful idea. We'd need a new protocol for distributing these "articles". We could call it Network News Transfer Protocol or something. You could tag your article according to categories andsubcategories, and people could subscribe to these different news groups. We could use ssl/tls for authentication of peers.
It probably wouldn't take too long to develop such a protocol; I bet we could have it done by 1986.
I was referring to two different options. USB over Lightning is one option.
As another, more hackish option the board surely has some SPI pins.
That said, because it is software-defined AND you have root, *perhaps* you could do SPI over Lightning. That's not what I was suggesting, though.
> My dad hates Obama, and calls him a communist. That is, of course, absurd.
> Calling Trump a Nazi is equally absurd
Both are incorrect, one is utterly cuckoo.
Obama is the leader of the Democrat party this year.
Also this year, Bernie Sanders was a serious contender to succede Obama as head of the Democrats (and the country).
The ideology of the Democrat party, led by Obama, is similar to the ideology of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders says Bernie Sanders is a Communist, the country's best-known Communist.
Obama might not exactly *be* a communist, but he's on the same team as the leading US Communist.
Further, Obama has written that he made it a point to hang out with Communists and learn from them. He's quoted notable Communists.
Obama may not technically be a Communist, but he likes them, he quotes them, and he leads the party that nearly nominated a Communist president.
On the other side, Hitler killed 12 million people. Trump played reality TV star during a campaign.
One comparison is slightly incorrect. The other is completely insane.
If your servers are Linux, you're probably using the CLI, a text console. In that case, just enable the serial console. Grub can use the serial console too. The BIOS can use the serial console on some motherboards. "Screen" is one handy way to connect to the serial console.
If your servers don't have serial ports, you can get a cable that is USB on both ends. It's basically two back-to-back USB/serial adapters.
If you Windows on your servers because you like to click on pretty pictures, that's a bit more difficult. If the machine boots fine, Windows powershell may work over a serial console, but if it's booted up fine you'd probably just use RDP over the network.
A folding case and USB keyboard is $8 (designed for tablet use).
https://www.amazon.com/SANOXY-...
Instead of putting a tablet in that case, you can put a small monitor in there. Liliput is a well-known brand that sells monitors from 7-12" or so.
True. When there were four or five candidates vying for the Republican nomination, all beat Clinton in head-to-head polling, except Trump. The primary voters chose the candidate who may be worse than Clinton.
I sure would like to see a good president again. I don't even care too much whether it's a good Democrat or a good Republican. Kennedy or Reagan, either would be a huge improvement over this year's choices and the last few presidents. For younger people, the best president of their lifetime is a guy who simply didn't do much, gpod or bad. A president who spent most of his time chasing women and trying to cover up his womanizing. Sad.
> They get credit from the true evil in this world
They a Capital One card?
Maybe it was Russians, maybe it was Bernians. Since we don't know which, let's use a term which includes both - communists.
Maybe Trump's company didn't use the lowest bidder on all of their IT projects.
It has USB over Lightning, so you COULD attach a micro SD reader, internal or stuck to the case.
If you wanted to be even more hackish, it shouldn't be hard to find some SPI pins. You can interface micro SD cards with four SPI pins plus power and ground. This guy provided root in the software in order to make the OS used the micro SD for whatever you choose.
You brought up many different topics that might be interesting to discuss. Sometimes on Slashdot we also discuss spyware embedded in mainstream software, anti-poaching agreements, and Obama's green slush fund. The topic of the post you replied to was the claim that major pharma companies are making extremely high profits. That claim is false. Their profits are lower than many other industries, including the tech companies most of us work for.
You listed the profit margins for Apple, Google, and Oracle, comparing them to Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mylan, Did you not notice that the *all* of the tech companies had higher profits than *any* of the medical? Other than the single unprofitable company on the list, Amazon.
> By this argument, Google and Apple should go into real estate, which has truly insane profit margins.
Over the last ten years, the median sales price per square foot has gone from $140 to $148, an increase of 6% in ten years. Less than 1% isn't what I call "truly insane profit".
> Nah, your way sounds much more cost effective and efficient.
Yeah, about 100% more cost effective. Here's the cost of your suggestion
Dell's cheapest "business" laptop: $680
Next-day support, 3-year: $350
Salary, taxes & benefits, 1 bus. day: $900
Hot spare / replacement laptop: $680
Total: $2,610
Walmart:
Laptop: $500
Replacement $500 (future) - 3 years interest = $375
1 hour salary: $125
Total cost: $1000
The total cost of your suggestion is 160% higher.
I most often grab something quickly from Best Buy, Walmart, or Fry's. It would cost me money to delay.
When one of our laptops dies, I'm paying someone to work, but they don't have a proper computer work on. Until we get them a new machine, they are stuck on whatever POS is in closet. It's probably in the closet because it's half broken.
So I grab something that looks like it'll work from the closest store, boot it to be sure it's not completely defective, then run the Linux install script and they can get back to work. 95% of the time, that works fine.
One time, Walmart was the quickest store, so I grabbed a laptop there, took it back to the office, and booted it. Wifi didn't work. Windows said it didn't have the driver for the wifi card. The web site of the laptop manufacturer didn't have a wifi driver for that version of Windows. I tried the manufactuer of the wireless card - no driver for that version of Windows. Windows Update? Nope, probably a million of that laptop sold at Walmart, with a wifi card that does not work with the preloaded Windows. Well that's stupid. Screw it, we use wired ethernet anyway. I pop in a CentOS install disk and 30 minutes later she's up and running - with wifi. CentOS included a driver that "just works"; apparently no driver existed for the preloaded, current version of Windows.
> except, reinforcing a paper bag with paper around the handle attachment
The reinforcement isn't around the handle. The singificant patent claims are:
a) a particular type of reinforcement (extra paper cut to a certain shape in glued in a certain way)
AND
b) a particular type of twisted paper handle which slides down into the bag when not in use.
More specifically, they *applied* to patent a particular way of reinforcing a paper bag made of white recycled paper, and a particular type of self-retracting handle that falls down into the bag, made of twisted paper.
Bleached recycled paper tends to be weak, so that's why reinforcement would be good.
I don't know whether the patent will ever issue. If it does, it will probably be narrowed in scope first. The usual process is that the applicant writes the initial application to be as broad as they think they might get away with, then it's made more specific as needed to actually get approved.
Right now, today, Valeant looks to be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Many, many drug companies have run out of money when they didn't get a "hit" for a few years, and been acquired by competitors. Google "pharmaceutical acquisitions" and look at the numbers for any of the acquired companies for the year before the acquisition. Many that had to sell out were having rough times. (Some weren't, of course).
> 1) Spend more on marketing and management than research,
Name ANY big company in ANY industry that doesn't spend more on the combination of both marketing and administration than they do on pure research. In pharma the three are about equal, roughly 15% for each.
That's a very unusual metric by which to measure the profit on an investment. Yes, you're right, pharmaceutical companies do tend to employ higher skill/pay/productivity workers than fast food or assembly line companies do, on average. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
The normal way to measure gain/profit is as a percentage of the amount invested, often then adjusted for risk/volatility. Jeff Bezos could spend $2 billion dollars to develop and market a new drug, or he could spend that $2 billion developing and marketing a new mobile device, or developing and marketing some software. In ANY case, he would anticipate a profit of about 10%-12%, on average. Developing
and marketing medicine is not more profitable than developing and marketing other types of products. If it WAS especially profitable, most of the billionaires, and the largest companies, would do it.
Btw that $2 billion number to develop a new medicine and get it FDA approved in the US isn't an arbitrary example - that's how much it actually costs.
On a somewhat different topic:
> And every business goes through a rough spell or has a bad product, just look at the big three auto makers.
And some industries and companies have far more variation, dry spells and good years, than others. General Mills is pretty consistent, Apple hopes the new iphone is a hit, Exxon swings up and down daily with the price of gas. Since you can invest in multiple projects or multiple companies, it's possible to offset your risks. Because literally every business has volatility, you can do a bit of math and find the formula for risk-adjusted return. That is, you can say "a 50% chance of making 20% has the same value as a 75% chance of making 10%". That's called risk-adjusted return. (Profit minus risk, basically.) The risk-adjusted return of pharma is right in line with every other industry. Which is why greedy bastards like Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos aren't all starting new pharma companies - they can get the same or better profit vs risk in other endeavors.
I'm sure you can find some *good* reasons to bitch about this. Power usage will be increased by about 2-3 watts while something is actively downloading. If someone is downloading constantly 8 hours per day, that's about $1 per year power cost.