Actually, how long before they offer a discount if you opt into a "direct handoff" network? When you return a movie, instead of shipping it back to netflix, you print out a label for the next member and slap it on the mailer.
Sure, there's a ton of problems, but it could cut their overhead by up to 60%: they spend half as much on postage and the disks are in flight for one day instead of two each transaction. The savings aren't so much in postage as in inventory reduction: for a popular movie that stays out two days at a time, you cut the postal overhead from 50% to 33%.
I went to work straight out of high school and spent several years at a few places. My work was interesting, hard-core stuff: migrating accounting data between different systems, reverse engineering network protocols, and working in large-scale IM bots. I made good money and held my own with top-flight people.
I still prefer to hire people with degrees because it means they can stick with something for four years, which is a hard trait to come by in tech. Also, I tend to do advanced stuff, and having a broad theoretical background helps with that.
That said, one could easily do all that by having a resume full of long-ish stints doing many interesting things. Unfortunately, it's hard to get into those positions without a degree... I got a few jobs, but eventually decided that it was a good idea to do college to grease the skids. Instead of CS, I studied math and linguistics, and loved it. It was a fun, relaxing time, great for meeting girls, and generally made me a better-rounded person.
Wait, what expansion pack contains Chile? I've been playing Illuminati for a while, and that game sounds plausible, but I've not seen those cards before...
I see many people publish papers on a new method that does 1% better than preexisting methods. If that 1% is from 95% to 96% accuracy, it's actually a 20% improvement in error rates! I know this sounds like an example from "How to Lie With Statistics," but it is the correct way to look at this sort of problem.
It's like n-9s uptime. Each nine in your reliability score costs geometrically more than the last; the same sort of thing holds for the scores measured in ML training.
If he patented it, he'd have to release it into the public domain after 17 years, which was a while ago. If it's a trade secret, he can keep it forever!
FWIW, Aimster never had any problems with AOL*. We've had many more problems with libfaim/libpurple, which are the open source implementations of OSCAR. In particular, AOL has engaged an authentication arms race, repeatedly making it harder to legally log in to AIM. The newest technique (https submission) looked like it was pretty much the death knell for independent OSCAR implementations. It's really difficult to RE, and allowed them freedom to use bigger, more trademarkable shared secrets. (Copyright has exceptions for compatibility purposes; trademark, not so much)
AOL has always had at least a partial open network, in the form of TOC. Surprisingly, they have kept it open for all these years, despite the early pessimism of many people (myself chief among them). This latest opening is an interesting move, and probably hints at new market realities in IM. It's good to see the space changing, especially in a continuing push towards openness.
Sadly, it means that all my contract work for reverse engineering OSCAR (etc) just dried up =)
* Aimster didn't actually use AOL for anything; they just had a data extracting proxy that sat between the user and the IM network, so they could show presence info in their custom UI. I actually worked there for a short while, and extended that proxy to support ICQ, amongst other things. (It was a terribly-run company, which is why I quit after only a few months. If they _had_ used AIM for the file transfers, as I was suggesting, they likely wouldn't have had nearly the legal trouble they did. And, any case against them would also amount to an equal case against AOL, which makes for an interesting set of motivations...)
It's sad that this came out the way it did, but kudos to Think Secret for taking the cyanide pill for us. At trial, this case could have resulted in a terrible outcome. If Apple had won in court, it would have set a harmful precedent: you must reveal sources. By agreeing to some (probably less-than-ideal) conditions, Think Secret and their legal team has saved us all from that precedent. Thank you!
I agree that they'll likely be forged, but it won't be as simple as you make it out to be. Smartcards are usually just crypto processors. That is, they don't just emit a sequence of data, but instead respond to a challenge with a unique hash of that challenge.
It gets even better when you consider that Sun's smaller Opteron kit starts at about 2k$/node. So, if you need more than a few months' processing, you can just buy the boxes and build the infrastructure for about the same cost.
I suspect the real selling points are: - Sun's service is probably straightforward for app developers. - The hardware is essentially "infinite." - "Oh, you need a month's worth of processing done by next Monday? We'll have it done Saturday night, if you'd like to pick it up then, ma'am." - Two words: volume pricing.
But, I have a hunch that the real point is marketing. "Oh, you need a 1,000 node grid? We happen to have expertise in building just such a thing. Here, give this information to your apps people, let them try it out, see if they like it. We can install just this setup for you here, if you'd like."
why hasn't competition between lenders and between credit reporters sorted this out already?
You'd need real competition, in a real free-ish market for that. Sadly, neither of these are really free markets anymore.
Credit reports are handled by under five companies. This makes sense, as you want to minimize the amount of actual work you have to do when you want to check someone's credit. Unfortunately, it creates an oligopoloy. This is, in my humble opinion, the single worst market for the people. With a truly open market, egregious abuse is handled by the market. In a monopoly, the government is willing to step in to push gently against egregious abuse. But with an oligopoly, the goverment doesn't want to step in, yet there isn't really enough of a market to eliminate people. So, you can effectively collude without communicating directly: you only have to watch the market's reactions to other people, and use that as a gauge for your own moves. If everyone plays this right, each will take turns pushing the envelope, testing a little bit further.
It's a brilliant use of a non-obvious information channel.
Lenders are increasingly in the same sort of environment: you have a lot of little banks and credit unions left, but the majority of the market is locked up in these giant new interstate banks. They don't have quite as tight a hold as an oligopoly would, but it's damned close. People put up with the absurd fees at their bank in large part because they know that, no matter what bank they go to, they're going to get screwwed about equally.
Personally, i do all my banking with credit unions. The people are nicer, the rates are better, the fees are reasonable, and, at the end of the year, if any money was made, i get a few bucks of it thrown into my account. Which i move into my "share" account: the savings account that determines how much of the credit union i own.
From what I've read, you need to enter a URL that someone has already del.icio.us'd. It then walks out along the people who have tagged that URL, finding other URLs you might find interesting.
It's, uh, not all that ground-breaking, really. Kinda useful if it works, though. It couldn't be more than a thousand lines of (perl or python) code, including a rudimentary scoring mechanism.
I was actually rolling that very process over in my mind as I wrote my original comment. Since my post was mostly pointing at the slashdot editorship, I decided not to run with it. I'm glad someone brought it up, though, since it could be a good discussion. I'm ignorant here, so I'd love to see some decent old-fashioned slashdot discussion*.
It's a neat idea, but I too have doubts about how much energy you can shove into a magnet and get back out. It does raise a pretty fun question: how efficient is the process of creating a given magnet, and how efficient can you make it? Just think of the ramifications research here could have for the fridge magnet industry and their power bills!
* No, I'm not new here. This is actually my really high-numbered account, since I lost my 5-digit account's password. Back in my day, hot grits was new and funny!
Good point, there is an ambiguity there. However, I stand by my reading of it.
100% isn't a barrier if it's a relative increase, as you correctly point out. It is a barrier if you're talking about absolute efficiency. By talking about it as a barrier, the author almost certainly intends for us to read it as "100+% absolute efficiency."
I'd be happy to be corrected by anyone affiliated with the posted site, but until then, I strongly believe that they're talking about a motor that's more than 100% efficient. Which, given a few caveats as discussed in this thread, is accepted as impossible by mainstream science.
1. It's a motor, not a generator. It sounds like it could be a neat motor, but it's still not a generator.
2. "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier."
That's right folks! It's perpetual motion machine!
So, this is about a motor that makes claims that are pretty universally accepted to be impossible. The poster, of course, is affiliated with the site hosting the page, so he really should have read the article the same way I did. Even if he didn't, maybe ScuttleMonkey should have.
I would be more annoyed, but this fits ScuttleMonkey's past science articles. Could someone send him a few pop-sci introduction texts, so we can stop having the Electric Universe, perpetual motion, and other fringe theories on the frontpage as science?
Awesome, some jackass got into their db and changed the title slightly:
$ wget 'http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=3513 99' -O - | grep title
<title>Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air<script>window.location="http://goatse.ca/" </script> - Japan's Leading International News Network</title>
Bands who care about their fans? They'll last forever.
The minimal-talent N*Sync guys made a lot more in their short career than the guys at the pub have made in 20 years of skillfully playing traditional Celtic.
I agree with you, but there's a serious economic reality at work here: everybody knows N*Sync ("Bye bye bye," argh!), while most people couldn't tell you what style the other people were performing.
Apple has open sourced the thing, and is apparently hoping all the unix kids will take a look.
I've been poking around at Apple's Open Source page and fail to see launchd, SystemStartup, or anything else thereabouts. Does anybody have a URL for this, or know of the specifics of getting the source? It looks like promising technology, and I'd love to get my hands on a copy to play with. I would also hate to think that we're being strung along with promises of an Open system that turns out to be only partially open (like the recent KHTML/Safari issue).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not one line of code from now will still be in it
But it will still be SCO's IP!
Actually, how long before they offer a discount if you opt into a "direct handoff" network? When you return a movie, instead of shipping it back to netflix, you print out a label for the next member and slap it on the mailer.
Sure, there's a ton of problems, but it could cut their overhead by up to 60%: they spend half as much on postage and the disks are in flight for one day instead of two each transaction. The savings aren't so much in postage as in inventory reduction: for a popular movie that stays out two days at a time, you cut the postal overhead from 50% to 33%.
What, and ruin a good thing?
I went to work straight out of high school and spent several years at a few places. My work was interesting, hard-core stuff: migrating accounting data between different systems, reverse engineering network protocols, and working in large-scale IM bots. I made good money and held my own with top-flight people.
I still prefer to hire people with degrees because it means they can stick with something for four years, which is a hard trait to come by in tech. Also, I tend to do advanced stuff, and having a broad theoretical background helps with that.
That said, one could easily do all that by having a resume full of long-ish stints doing many interesting things. Unfortunately, it's hard to get into those positions without a degree... I got a few jobs, but eventually decided that it was a good idea to do college to grease the skids. Instead of CS, I studied math and linguistics, and loved it. It was a fun, relaxing time, great for meeting girls, and generally made me a better-rounded person.
Wait, what expansion pack contains Chile? I've been playing Illuminati for a while, and that game sounds plausible, but I've not seen those cards before...
It's like n-9s uptime. Each nine in your reliability score costs geometrically more than the last; the same sort of thing holds for the scores measured in ML training.
If he patented it, he'd have to release it into the public domain after 17 years, which was a while ago. If it's a trade secret, he can keep it forever!
FWIW, Aimster never had any problems with AOL*. We've had many more problems with libfaim/libpurple, which are the open source implementations of OSCAR. In particular, AOL has engaged an authentication arms race, repeatedly making it harder to legally log in to AIM. The newest technique (https submission) looked like it was pretty much the death knell for independent OSCAR implementations. It's really difficult to RE, and allowed them freedom to use bigger, more trademarkable shared secrets. (Copyright has exceptions for compatibility purposes; trademark, not so much)
AOL has always had at least a partial open network, in the form of TOC. Surprisingly, they have kept it open for all these years, despite the early pessimism of many people (myself chief among them). This latest opening is an interesting move, and probably hints at new market realities in IM. It's good to see the space changing, especially in a continuing push towards openness.
Sadly, it means that all my contract work for reverse engineering OSCAR (etc) just dried up =)
* Aimster didn't actually use AOL for anything; they just had a data extracting proxy that sat between the user and the IM network, so they could show presence info in their custom UI. I actually worked there for a short while, and extended that proxy to support ICQ, amongst other things. (It was a terribly-run company, which is why I quit after only a few months. If they _had_ used AIM for the file transfers, as I was suggesting, they likely wouldn't have had nearly the legal trouble they did. And, any case against them would also amount to an equal case against AOL, which makes for an interesting set of motivations...)
The solution is obvious and simple: you put the smiley-face lens cover on the plane's laser, or maybe the shamrock.
(Go buy a 5$ laser pointer at Walgreen's if you don't know what I'm talking about...)
It's sad that this came out the way it did, but kudos to Think Secret for taking the cyanide pill for us. At trial, this case could have resulted in a terrible outcome. If Apple had won in court, it would have set a harmful precedent: you must reveal sources. By agreeing to some (probably less-than-ideal) conditions, Think Secret and their legal team has saved us all from that precedent. Thank you!
I agree that they'll likely be forged, but it won't be as simple as you make it out to be. Smartcards are usually just crypto processors. That is, they don't just emit a sequence of data, but instead respond to a challenge with a unique hash of that challenge.
It gets even better when you consider that Sun's smaller Opteron kit starts at about 2k$/node. So, if you need more than a few months' processing, you can just buy the boxes and build the infrastructure for about the same cost.
I suspect the real selling points are:
- Sun's service is probably straightforward for app developers.
- The hardware is essentially "infinite."
- "Oh, you need a month's worth of processing done by next Monday? We'll have it done Saturday night, if you'd like to pick it up then, ma'am."
- Two words: volume pricing.
But, I have a hunch that the real point is marketing. "Oh, you need a 1,000 node grid? We happen to have expertise in building just such a thing. Here, give this information to your apps people, let them try it out, see if they like it. We can install just this setup for you here, if you'd like."
why hasn't competition between lenders and between credit reporters sorted this out already?
You'd need real competition, in a real free-ish market for that. Sadly, neither of these are really free markets anymore.
Credit reports are handled by under five companies. This makes sense, as you want to minimize the amount of actual work you have to do when you want to check someone's credit. Unfortunately, it creates an oligopoloy. This is, in my humble opinion, the single worst market for the people. With a truly open market, egregious abuse is handled by the market. In a monopoly, the government is willing to step in to push gently against egregious abuse. But with an oligopoly, the goverment doesn't want to step in, yet there isn't really enough of a market to eliminate people. So, you can effectively collude without communicating directly: you only have to watch the market's reactions to other people, and use that as a gauge for your own moves. If everyone plays this right, each will take turns pushing the envelope, testing a little bit further.
It's a brilliant use of a non-obvious information channel.
Lenders are increasingly in the same sort of environment: you have a lot of little banks and credit unions left, but the majority of the market is locked up in these giant new interstate banks. They don't have quite as tight a hold as an oligopoly would, but it's damned close. People put up with the absurd fees at their bank in large part because they know that, no matter what bank they go to, they're going to get screwwed about equally.
Personally, i do all my banking with credit unions. The people are nicer, the rates are better, the fees are reasonable, and, at the end of the year, if any money was made, i get a few bucks of it thrown into my account. Which i move into my "share" account: the savings account that determines how much of the credit union i own.
From what I've read, you need to enter a URL that someone has already del.icio.us'd. It then walks out along the people who have tagged that URL, finding other URLs you might find interesting.
It's, uh, not all that ground-breaking, really. Kinda useful if it works, though. It couldn't be more than a thousand lines of (perl or python) code, including a rudimentary scoring mechanism.
I was actually rolling that very process over in my mind as I wrote my original comment. Since my post was mostly pointing at the slashdot editorship, I decided not to run with it. I'm glad someone brought it up, though, since it could be a good discussion. I'm ignorant here, so I'd love to see some decent old-fashioned slashdot discussion*.
It's a neat idea, but I too have doubts about how much energy you can shove into a magnet and get back out. It does raise a pretty fun question: how efficient is the process of creating a given magnet, and how efficient can you make it? Just think of the ramifications research here could have for the fridge magnet industry and their power bills!
* No, I'm not new here. This is actually my really high-numbered account, since I lost my 5-digit account's password. Back in my day, hot grits was new and funny!
Good point, there is an ambiguity there. However, I stand by my reading of it.
100% isn't a barrier if it's a relative increase, as you correctly point out. It is a barrier if you're talking about absolute efficiency. By talking about it as a barrier, the author almost certainly intends for us to read it as "100+% absolute efficiency."
I'd be happy to be corrected by anyone affiliated with the posted site, but until then, I strongly believe that they're talking about a motor that's more than 100% efficient. Which, given a few caveats as discussed in this thread, is accepted as impossible by mainstream science.
From TFA:
1. It's a motor, not a generator. It sounds like it could be a neat motor, but it's still not a generator.
2. "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier."
That's right folks! It's perpetual motion machine!
So, this is about a motor that makes claims that are pretty universally accepted to be impossible. The poster, of course, is affiliated with the site hosting the page, so he really should have read the article the same way I did. Even if he didn't, maybe ScuttleMonkey should have.
I would be more annoyed, but this fits ScuttleMonkey's past science articles. Could someone send him a few pop-sci introduction texts, so we can stop having the Electric Universe, perpetual motion, and other fringe theories on the frontpage as science?
Awesome, some jackass got into their db and changed the title slightly:
3 99' -O - | grep title
$ wget 'http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=351
<title>Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air<script>window.location="http://goatse.ca/" </script> - Japan's Leading International News Network</title>
Bands who care only about money won't last.
Bands who care about their fans? They'll last forever.
The minimal-talent N*Sync guys made a lot more in their short career than the guys at the pub have made in 20 years of skillfully playing traditional Celtic.
I agree with you, but there's a serious economic reality at work here: everybody knows N*Sync ("Bye bye bye," argh!), while most people couldn't tell you what style the other people were performing.
There's a new study to be published next week showing that only one quarter of all studies are overblown, including this one.
it'll be a lot easier to use up those invites.
Unless, of course, hotmail doesn't like gmail's SPF records =)
This was discovered by multiple people months ago, as evidenced by this full-disclosure thread, with a followup by another discoverer of the same exploit.
Ah, excellent. Thanks for the info!
Apple has open sourced the thing, and is apparently hoping all the unix kids will take a look.
I've been poking around at Apple's Open Source page and fail to see launchd, SystemStartup, or anything else thereabouts. Does anybody have a URL for this, or know of the specifics of getting the source? It looks like promising technology, and I'd love to get my hands on a copy to play with. I would also hate to think that we're being strung along with promises of an Open system that turns out to be only partially open (like the recent KHTML/Safari issue).