I haven't turned on a TV set in over a year. Yet I haven't missed an episode of southpark, Startrek Voyager, Dark Angel, the Dune miniseries, and anything else I cared to watch. I watched it all on my computer. My... interactive TV.. if you would. Granted, its not the medium that the future version is hyped to be. Its not as convienent as Tivo for the average consumer, although for me it fits right into my regular tasks so I notice no inconvienence on my part. And yes, its probably not 100% legal.
However, I can tell you that there are NO technical limitations WHATSOEVER that prevent this type of interaction. The laws of the marketplace, copyright laws, marketing and advertising issues are the reasons why interactive TV over broadband hasn't taken off yet. Its NOT for lack of interest. But it will have to compete with a television set for convienence of use, and with cable in pricing.
Also, remember that this does not have to be STREAMING media. You need not limit the quality of your playback to the lowest common denominator. Let your customers download the program they wish to watch. Harddrives as a reusable storage method are quite reasonably priced. Once downloaded, the customer can watch it whenever he/she wants and can keep it as long as they can store it. Don't be sneaky trying to force individual payments for each download. Just charge a flat monthly fee for the service.
Will there be blatent piracy? Certainly. There is now. Nothing will change except that you might be able to sell me a service that I'm currently getting for free because you don't offer it. The technologies will emerge regardless of what you choose to do about them. You have a choice here, you can ride the wave when it comes in or get caught in a wake and drown. Napster is as popular as it is not because people want to steal money from artists (yes, I know the argument about that), and not all of them are just looking for freebies. It exists because the music industry refused to implement such a service early on when they could have had a lot more control over its use and revenue possibilities. Instead they chose to hold onto their old ideals and they completely missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
And so the internet grows on. And its not growing any slower. Just because the hype has died down does NOT mean that its leveling out. Hype isn't always the best form of motivation anyways. Internet stocks didn't crash because the an internet based economy is a flawed concept. They crashed because the companies behind those stocks were based mostly on hype. They weren't created to develop services, they were created to keep the hype alive. When the hype died down, the investors tarried, the stock market slumped and everyone suddenly got nervous and got out. As a result, the linux stocks took a bit of a beating, not because they were conceptual hype (although some were/are), but because a lot of their revenue was from other dot.com companies that WERE based on hype and therefore some of their market ceased to exist.
And don't forget. The web != the internet. They are certainly related, but all the web really is is a single internet based service. The internet is 3 times older than the web. Services have "peaked" before and all but died out, to be replaced by something more interactive, useful and/or visually pleasing. The internet itself still grows on. My interactive TV has NO involvement whatsoever with the "web" and its unlikely that it ever will.
Is that the chances that YOU personally will get hit by one of the satellites is about 1.5 trillion to 1. You're much more likely to win the lottery.....even if you DON'T buy a ticket.:)
I didn't even bother looking at the prices for NEW machines, but the harddrives and network cards are WAY overpriced, old OR new. I can't see how they can possibly justify $60 for a 1 gig drive or $50 for a 500 meg or $20 for a 10 mbps network card when you can buy them BRAND NEW in the STORE with warranty and everything for half that price.
Of course, if they're actually selling stuff at those prices, more power to them. I should switch my line of work. I can make a 10 fold markup on some of the products they're selling and still undercut them.
I had an acer aspire too. At least mine was a genuine intel chip, but I had a ton of other problems. The CDROM in mine quit after about 6 months too. Half the pci cards I used in that machine wouldn't work. Those that did worked marginally well. I had a capture card that was too much for the machine to handle as a P133 but my trusty P60 here handled it just fine. There were plenty of other strange software glitches as well. Some of them I guess I could attribute to the fact that it ran windows, but some were just STRANGE.
In fact, every proprietary system I've bought has had problems. Nothing so major that the average consumer would probably notice, but I tend to overtweak my hardware and software, not to mention running the systems 24/7 and these problems show up slowly over a period of time. however, I still have a clone 386 system put together in late 89 AND ITS STILL RUNNING FINE! even though I probably haven't powered down the thing more than 30 times since I got it.
At some point, celestial bodies in space will fall OUTSIDE the jurisdiction of any nation on Earth. For this reason, at some point, claims can be made by anyone. A physical presence on an asteriod isn't really required to make a claim on it. The issue is the ability to DEFEND the claim once it has been made. If I decide I like your asteriod, nobody but you will be able to stop me from using it for myself.
Don't think for a minute that massive wars won't be fought over such things. Think how many wars there have been in the United states since it was colonized for the sole purpose of establishing that it really DID belong to the United States. Certainly, the colonists from the 15th century and beyond were certainly not the first ones here, but that didn't stop them from taking it as their own.
And why do collectors collect everything under the sun in mint condition and keep all boxes, manuals, reciepts, etc? If that supposiviely is so they'll still have value later as collectors items, then it would make sense to conclude that someday in the future they might want to sell it for all that money its "worth".
Its possible he's hit a snag in his life and needs a lot of money. Or maybe he's looking for a down payment on a house and has no funds available because all his life he's spent every spare penny on video games. Maybe he's looking at his priorities and is deciding that its time to let this childhood fetish go and get on with his life,
while he can still profit from it. From the way the auction is going, it looks like his plan is succeeding well. Still, I'm curious how much he actually wants for it, considering the reserve hasn't been met yet.:)
dshield.org, a new service designed to analyze firewall logs to look for suspicious activity, submitted its own firewall logs for analysis. To their great surprise, they appeared to be the subject of a giant DOS attack that lasted for 24 hours, as out of nowwhere, nearly 700,000 computers around the world accessed the website.
Due to the enourmous hits, the site was frequently unavailable for legitimate users. Officials suspect foul play, but have been unable to determine a motive for the unprecedented attack. "This is precisely the reason we developed this system; to expose the origins of potential attackers and allow the user to take appropriate action". When asked if it was possible they were simply the victim of the feared "slashdot effect", those allegations were denied. "As soon as our bandwidth returned to normal, we checked out this slashdot.org but saw no mention of the site anywhere on the front page. We checked the logs and found only one refrence from slashdot.org. Although it appears right before the attack began, we are certain that this is only a coincedence.
And one of them had to go out of his way to get himself killed by one. I work at a business that makes extensive use of conveyor belts. Despite explicit training and constant employee review on how to operate those belts safely, people still manage to injure themselves in sometimes permanant cosmetic ways. Someone once got accidently caught in the drive machinery, so they installed metal guards over any machinery that could be dangerous and forbid ANY employees from opening them. They do it anyways.
Nobody is clueless about that, its just some people are stupid. And due to stupidity, people sometimes die. I wouldn't get too worked up on it being the robot's fault. The robot didn't kill anyone. Those people killed themselves and they has nobody else to blame for it.
I know there was a rumor that R2D2 was going to be fully compuerized and Kenny Baker would no longer have a part, but if I recall correctly that rumor was debunked. Perhaps ZDNET is privy to some information I have overlooked. Or perhaps they didn't get the rumor update.
Specifically the problem is 2 clients behind firewalls such that neither can be used as a server, so they cannot communicate with each other directly. They COULD have their traffic relayed through an indirect server that is open to the internet, but that means that the relay needs to be able to handle that bandwidth as well.
I'm not well versed on the internals of TCP/IP, but I believe that when a connection is established, the ip and port information are written to some type of internal table and used from then on for further data transfers across that socket.
Consider if both clients initiated a connection with the relay to open the connection. Once the connection is opened, the IP information in the internal table will be modified on both clients to the IP address/port of the NAT machine of the other client. At this point, both clients will be connected to each other but neither of them is a server. And the connecting relay only needs to pass enough traffic to initiate the connection, thereby keeping it readily available.
I'm allowed to run any servers I want on my own network. I can host any file I want, I can use as much bandwidth as I want (up to the physical limits of 1.544 down and 768kbps up...mileage may vary at times, after all, it IS adsl). I'm free to abuse the network as much as I feel like it and my ISP will not only not say anything about it, they probably won't even care.
Want to know why? I shopped around. I found an ISP that was willing to provide to me unlimited, unrestrained access and I made sure they really meant it before I signed up. I also get 16 static ip addresses and the ability to host my own domain as a result, all within the confines of my own network.
I get all of this for a grand total of $300 a month. (including all phone company charges)
If you pay less than that amount a month, you should expect some type of restriction as a result as the isp cannot afford to offer you a low rate service and at the same time assume you're going to use 100% of your bandwidth at all times. If you DO that, you're abusing the system.
Guess what, when cable modems came out and thousands of people were serving mp3's and god knows what else to the world, and cable modem services became practically unusable as a result, the company did the only thing it could do. It chopped the upstream rate to a pathetic 128kbps and restricted ALL servers of all kinds. You
brought it upon yourself, don't complain about it.
The cost is still in line with what you would pay the isp+phone company for a dialup connection.
This is the real cost of piracy. The authors/artists/software companies are not the real victims, nor are the consumers that must pay "higher prices" for their software. Those effects are negligable. The real victims are the innocent users of high speed connections who have had to have their inexpensive lines horribly crippled in an effort to protect the isp.
In case you really do need it, you can pay a few bucks more and get a less restricted cable or dsl connection. This may not necessarily be on the front page, but no business is gonna scoff at extra money for legitimate use. The abusers won't go for it so the option is still available. And if you have the cash, get a T1. Of course, its hard to justify a T1 for residential use, but 5 years ago, you had T1 and dialup and nothing in between. How did you survive back then? Not that I'm saying we should revert back, but in spirit of this US holiday, be thankful for what you have.
Storage of MP3's is prohibited. They don't seem interested in playing around with legalspeak in trying to validate some mp3's while prohibiting others. They just forbit them all. And they're perfectly in the right to do it, and personally I don't understand why this even made it on the front page.
Copyright issues aside, mp3's take up a lot of space and occupy a lot of bandwidth. Hosting services are tying to offer a service to a large number of customers for the legitimate hosting of webpages that needs more space or more bandwidth than the average user can provide themselves. They are not designed to handle the excessive amount of bandwidth that is consumed by anyone who manages to find the mp3's. Porn has a similar effect, which is why it is probably prohibited as well, as well as the fact that it brings upon itself a plethora of legal problems too.
Do they have to notify you? no. You were notified when you read the Terms of Service before you signed up. You DID read the terms of service, right?
mp3.com and I would imagine other similar services are available for the legitimate hosting of mp3's and probably cost less than your current hosting provider, if thats the service you actually require.
There are several conflicting ancient economic rules that come into play with the internet. Rules that must be revised to work to the economic benefit of all.
First of all, we have the issue of free service. Everyone who browses the internet expects to do so for free or for a single low flat rate for their isp. They have come to expect this, and I doubt the internet would have taken off if they were charged for every website they wanted to view. I don't want to pay for my information.
To offer this information, it will cost somebody at least something. At the lower end, the isp of the provider can provide a low volume website, but the cost of providing the information will increase with its popularity and size. Information wants to be free, but not for those who provide it.
There has to be a constant, scalable source of revenue to cover the cost of providing the information or service. There are two major possibilities here. Sell the eyeballs of your viewers, or charge the viewers to view the information.
Advertising on the internet might work or it might not. There's a catch 22 in play here. Until the massive bulk of consumers use the internet, ads won't be as lucrative a source of revenue as advertising on the radio or TV are since a lot more people spend a lot more time watching TV then they do on the internet. And even those who DO spend a lot of time on the internet do so engaged in activities that do not subject them to a steady stream of advertising.
The biggest problem with advertising is the fact that while more and more of the people in the world are going online, the original core group of users were of a slightly different breed. The type, for all practical purposes, who don't pay much attention to ads, and spend as much time as possible trying to avoid having to view them at all (Junkbuster and the like come into play here).
On the internet advertising is also subjected to a recursive downward spiral where you end up advertising pages for the sole purpose of selling advertising. When you watch a commercial on TV, they're usually selling a meatspace product. They're not trying to sell you on another service for the sole purpose of throwing advertising on you. The obvious exception to this is when they advertise previews to upcoming shows, but self promotion is always a valid exception. Most TV networks don't make a point of advertising shows on other networks.
On the internet, I might run a website that gains 100% of its revenue from advertising. How will I bring users to my website? I might sell an ad on yahoo since I know there's a big potential audience there. Yahoo of course, gains most, if not all, of their revenue from advertising (at least until now:). If I end up posting ads for yahoo.com, all we ever do is trade the same money back and forth. Until the ads make it to a website that brings in a significant amount of its revenue from the wallets of its viewers, there is no money in the internet economy.
What this means is, E-commerce is essential for the survival of the internet as it is currently constructed. However, what if I want to provide information to the world at large and not have to pester my viewers with ads, but at the same time, not charge them any money?
This brings up a second point. Information that I serve is mine. I provide it to the world, but *I* want to be the one serving it so I get credit for it. AT least, this is the general perception. However, I can't afford any more than a dsl line without some type of revenue stream. Bandwidth gets cheaper the closer to the backbone you get, but you have to be able to purchase a LOT of bandwidth to get it that cheap.
However, say there was a bandwidth repository between me and the backbone, like at my isp. A huge cache for all of the websites and other files that transfer between the customer websites and viewers on the other end. Whenever a single static file is transfered more than a few times, the cache will pick it up and save it. From that point on, any incoming requests will stop at the isp and be served from the cache instead. If a site is extremely popular, the isp, with its much cheaper, much larger link to the internet will be the one serving all the content and the puny link to the actual website will only be used for initial transfers. Of course, keeping just one level of cache would be inefficient. If a site is REALLY popular, then it could be bumped even closer to the backbone and get served from that point. It could also work in the other direction. If a large number of people on a network access a specific website, then a local cache could store the website data locally to serve to the local users, since its much cheaper to transfer data on a local network than over the internet. This is the biggest issue with napster and college campuses. Its an order of magnitude cheaper to install more bandwidth on campus than it is to utilize the internet feed. If napster only traded files amongst users on the local network and then only went out to the internet if the requested file couldn't be found on any of the 10,000+ local systems.
However, intellectual property laws come into play here. I don't want anyone mirroring my information because I can't sell banner ads to distribute it. Of course, I can't sell banner ads anyway, but thats not really the point. This mentality ends up stalling the whole process.
Yes, I know this wouldn't work for dynamic pages. however, try something. Pick a website, especially an extremely flashy one. Point wget at it and download all the content on the main page. Then do something to form a dynamic change and repeat the process. How much of the data has actually changed? Webpage code itself is relatively small compared to the size of the images, java applets, and banner ads.:) But if content could be transfered a minimum amount of hops, the cost for that content will drop significantly, as well as increasing the speed by which everyone can access it.
This will increase the base cost to the provider of the information or service, as you are now purchasing not only an internet connection, but also cache space. However, as you well know, its much cheaper to purchase something once than to pay for something constantly. In addition, if you can cut down your required bandwidth by 80% because most of your content need not transfer over your expensive pipe and can instead transfer over the pipe of your isp, which only costs them half as much due to their ability to purchase a much larger pipe and get a better data rate for the dollar. Not to mention the fact that the price drops even more the next jump upstream. Its not unreasonable to cut your bandwidth costs down to 10-20% of what would be needed if you served everything from your own system through your own internet feed.
The third issue is that more and more people expect a large quantity of their services to be performed for free or very little. Cell phones are free. There are free computers, free internet access, free long distance. SOMEBODY has to pay for all of this. In the end, its going to be the corporations that end up selling us products and inevitably paying our salaries. Thats how economy works. And if they're going to give away all this stuff for free, they're going to need to have more accurate marketing data so they get a better return on their investment. While I don't feel they should be automatically provided with this information without my permission, I don't feel like its too far out of line to request such information in exchange for an otherwise free product so they can push products my way that I would otherwise be interested in purchasing anyways.
So understand the perspective. We want unlimited privacy, with no intrusion into our lives whatsoever. No cookies, no anonymous tracking, no personal tracking. We don't want any random spam, no targeted advertising (still spam), no banner ads, no targeted banner ads, we want our internet service free or very low cost, with lots of extra services, but nobody calling us to sell us anything. At some point, something is going to have to give. Figure out where you want it to be. Either you're going to have to tell someone that you're a 30 year old male who has an interest in reading about cars, or you're going to have to pay yahoo money so you can do it.
-Restil
(sorry for the extended, pointless rant):)
I commented on this issue the first time it was posted. I will do so again. I think what he did was completely legal, yet I can still see how what he did was somewhat suspicious.
The very fact that he got his equipment back in short order shows that not only is he not a suspect, the FBI realizes he has no involement and no evidence that will be of any use to them. This lends to me the belief that they might actually have a clue about what they're doing. The immediate sieze of "evidence" is unfortunately necessary at times because data can be eliminated in the blink of an eye.
I will say again, a violated website is a crime scene. You're perfectly welcome to gawk at a crime scene along with all the other rubberneckers hoping to get a glimpse at whatever the cause of the commotion is. However, if you cross over the yellow tape and start peeking around in things, law enforcement might be forced to make some premature assumptions about your motives. Viewing a cracked website wouldn't bring you any undue suspicion, but when you start digging into the details, well, you never know who might be casually watching you.
You can blame the script kiddies. If it weren't for the numerous cracked websites with such dubious causes displayed... if it weren't for the massive DDOS's against such popular, yet fundamentally useless websites... if it weren't for the constant barrage of random portscans, we wouldn't have to worry about the FBI busting in on someone who was expressing some innocent curiosity.
These attacks will continue until at least a significant number of brainless dorks are caught and given a substantial punishment. Of course, this is easier said than done. The great majority of attacks are not direct, but done through innocent third parties who are the unfortunate owners of unsecured servers. To track these people down, the FBI has to track through the log files of each of the servers in between. I dare say, if the FBI were to casually call me up and ask if I minded if they came over and searched through all my computers I would kindly hang up on them. Obtaining a warrant and seizing the equipment is really their only option in cases such as these. It might suck if you had no direct involvement or were just looking around, but just accept the fact that its gonna happen. Keep your systems secure so you don't get cracked, and keep your nose out of a crime scene unless you are authorized to be there.
And no, I'm not trampling on anyone's rights. I agree that making a script that demonstrates a security hole needs to remain legal, and is the best way to assure that these holes get fixed. However, you have to realize that people WILL abuse these scripts. There will be people that don't and won't patch their software even if they DO know about security holes. What can we do about this? I have no idea. Since having their systems violated doesn't seem to concern some people, how about an increasing number of law enforcement intrusions? Maybe if everytime someone sets up a new box, a week later they get raided by the FBI and get all their eqiupment confiscated, they'll take security more seriously.
Law enforcemnt is very much an "after the fact" operation. They don't concern themselves at all with how to protect yourself beforehand, they only care about catching the criminals afterwards. And any legislation they propose will not be to protect the innocent but to make the act of catching the criminals easier. From their standpoint, I don't doubt that their motives are sincere, even if the end result is that we end up with less rights than we do before.
So please be careful. If you're not among the criminally inclined, attempt to avoid presenting yourself as such.
I despise Child Pornography as much as the next person. However, consider the following. If you have your closet pedophile, would you rather he A: look at pictures, whack off, and get it out of his system, or B: go find a child, violate him/her, and get it out of his system.
In case A, this person could otherwise be a functional, safe member of society. He has a problem and he has found a way to deal with it without hurting anyone in the process. He can't go to a psycologist about it anymore, because doctor/patient confidentiality in such cases isn't very solid. I could tell my doctor that I murdered 10 people and he couldnt' say anything about it. But if I tell him I touched a child he HAS to report it.
The REAL issue here isn't regarding actual porn but benign pictures of minors that aren't in any way involved in sexual situations, but someone PERCEIVES them to be sexual and a braindead judge agrees. Its not too hard in today's society of the easily offended that someone could look at a picture of a girl in a bikini and find it offending. To make matters worse, it doesn't even have to be a minor.
I really do think that selling hardware at a loss to recoop the cost through service CAN work. Its worked wonders for the cellphone industry. The only problem is, the service is inadaquate. With every other person picking up a high speed internet account from somewhere, dialup accounts (while still VERY prevelant) will be old dinosaurs in 3-5 years. Then again, so will the I-Openers, but the contracts will still last that long.
However, the phone company gave me a dsl modem when I ordered the service. I'm sure that the cost is included in my monthly payment, but there were NO setup charges of any kind, so the charge is effectively invisible. I'm sure the phone companies aren't losing money by this model, and they sure don't seem to be showing any signs of cutting back on offering dsl service.
The I-Opener should have had this built in. Dialup OR dsl, or LAN access. Then sell the internet service with it as planned, but sell dsl service instead of dialup where dsl is available. I guarantee the cost increase wouldn't have been significant, but people are buying up dsl as fast as they can get it, so they wouldn't have chosen a dead market. Sure, in 5 years time, dsl might be in the process of getting replaced by something even more sexy, but at least the IOpener would have served a useful purpose for that length of time and the customers will probably still be using them up to that point and would be happy to purchase whatever they offer next.
You CAN'T plan a long term service option on current technology only. You MUST look to the future and plan for what will be coming in 3 months, 6 months, a year, 3 years. DSL isn't new. Its been available in some areas for well over 3 years and has been talked about for many years before that. Yet Netpliance ignores it even though its an emerging market.
Please note that this applies equally well to cable.
Imagine. A relatively idiotproof box, with built in cable and dsl support, built in hub, (at least enough to daisychain it to another hub), phone connection that can work with either regular dialup service or dsl service. Make it slick and sexy and, most importantly, make sure, whatever price you sell it at, make sure its CHEAPER than the lowest cost PC you can currently purchase. You might get ripped by a few people who only want to install linux on it, but 99% of your customers will be happy to get it for the service and you will succeed. Hmmmmm... I might have to consider this.:)
If all your office software (Operating systems, productivity software, etc) is free, the license is owned by you, or you specificaly contracted someone to use that software (not an off the shelf product), then chances are good that you will have no problems, even with a raid, which is highly unlikely.
The biggest issue with WinXX operating systems is the ability and somewhat necessesity to install a copy of the software on every machine that is required to use it. If I want to be able to edit a word document on any system, I need to install Word/Office on every system, even if 99.999% of the time I will only be using it on one computer. Unless I want to go through with the hassle of installing/deleting the software every time I plan to use it I am technically in violation.
If you're using a workstation/server based model, such as using exported X displays on a linux system, then you install the software once on the server and even if the software has a limited site license, that license will be enforced by the software itself. It doesn't matter how many different places I can access the software from, if I only use it from one or two locations at a time, I simply purchase a license for that many simultanious instances of the program and the problem is solved. I get the flexibility, the software company gets fairly compensated.
Another issue is there is a TON of software for windows while off the shelf products for linux and other UNIX based operatins systems are rare. Sometimes this is used as a negative, but in this case its quite positive to avoid copyright infringement issues. If I'm running linux on 100% of my systems, unless I'm running wine, vmware or some other emulator, I can safely say that I'm not running ANY software that works on a microsoft operating system. This almost eliminates the possibility of piracy, accidental or otherwise. Even linux software that is not free is usually distributed free for personal use or under some type of temporary trial license. For instance, Realserver for Linux, which costs a HUGE chunk of cash for a large operation, is free to use for less than 25 simultanious connections.
One last reason for using a unix based OS is that your employees are less likely to bring stuff from home to run on "their" computer. You won't be affected by the next Melissa VBS "virus". Consider this.
-Restil
I could fit a lot more than 10,000 CPU's in the space of 2 basketball courts. The connecting circuity must be immense. Or maybe its the cooling system that takes up so much space.:)
Contrary to popular belief, minesweeper is not that difficult of a game to solve, but only after you have found your first mine. Up until that point, you HAVE to guess. the game, however, does not draw the board until after your first move, as your first move will ALWAYS be safe. However, unless your first move hits a spot that has no mines surrounding it, your next move will HAVE to be a lucky guess. However, once you have reached a certain point, like after successfully rooting out about 5 mines, the solution becomes pretty much a linear problem based upon the number of grids on the board.
There are a few "traps" however. Ones I have learned to avoid by always cleaning out the corners first on a large board. If I die, I want it to happen in the first few seconds and not on the last grid I'm trying to clear.
Encryption, as far as I've been able to deduce, does not allow for this strategy. While I know that it might take 2^56/2 average brute force comparisons to extract a DES key, there is no plateau I know of, say at 2^10 comparisons where I can safely say that the problem becomes a linear problem rather than an exponential one.
Take for instance a 10x10 minesweeper board. If I simply wanted to brute force out a solution, I have 2^100 possibilities (yes, this makes encryption look tame by comparison). However, we can break this problem down significantly without even knowing any tricks. Take a board. Guess at a grid. If the grid is clear, we go onto the next one, if the grid is occupied by a mine, we will know this instantly as well. This problem still has 2^100 possibilities IF the game restarts each time you die and you get a fresh board. HOWEVER, if the board remains the same, you have only 200 possibilities total and you will have the board complete. I can't do this with encryption. I can't guess at each bit of a key indifidualally to determine if it is right or wrong. If I could, then DES could be solved with no more than 112 instructions. And even 128 bit encryption would take no more than 256 iterations.
But minesweeper isn't that difficult. There are very few boards (especially on the 10x10 grid) that can't be solved with a predicable algorithm. While it is not possible to know with certainty if EACH grid location is definitely a mine or definitely not a mine, you are about 99% likely to know at least ONE of them at any one time, after the initial 2-3 guesses. This is better than we have for encryption, but still falls short of the rule as we need to be 100% sure for ANY board.
Encryption does not suffer. Even if for an encryption scheme with 2^N possibilities, I would be able to determine an absolute solution in less than 2^(N/10) possibilities, for DES this would be about 32 possibilities, the problem can be made more complex simply by increasing the bitsize of the key. A key with 1024 bits would, with this method, require 2^102 possibilities which is still out of the range of today's computers, or even tomorrow's.
First off, I don't for one second think you did anything illegal regarding this. Nor do I think you did anything wrong. However, You should consider the fact that if you hang around tampering with a fresh crime scene, its JUST POSSIBLE that someone is taking notes and you might get targeted as a suspect.
From what it sounds like, the FBI's actions were simply an act of evidence gathering, not necessarily singling you out as a suspect. However, your actions were sufficient to warrant "probable cause" to obtain a warrant, and once that happens, you're pretty much screwed. They can pretty much do or take anything they want until a trial comes up (and we all know how long "hacking" trials can take)
Do I think this is fair, no I most certainly do not. Do I think you could have avoided all this? Yes, I do.
Hasn't anyone ever told you people there is no money to be made with open source software? There's NO way you can make a living at it. Why would anyone want to PAY money to someone for something they could just download for free.
After you've crossed the bankrupcy point of no return, it doesn't really much matter how large of a bill you rack up, as you'll never be able to apy it anyways. If you're gonna be ruined, might as well pound it in good. After all, theres always the slim chance you might win in the end, therefore making the whole problem go away.
Still, I think its sad that laws have to be fought in this way. A court can basically nullify a law, but its a gamble as if the court upholds it, you stand to lose BIG TIME.
Personally, I'm wondering if this whole battle is really the right fight. DVD's are really nothing special. They're a more compact form of CD, but the issue isn't really the storage mechanism, but the encryption. Eliminate the encryption, and the DMCA has no place.
Of course, the MPAA and the DVD consortium control the content distribution of all the major motion picture companies and its highly unlikely that they will conform to distribute movies on any format that is not sanctioned by the MPAA.
I'm wondering if a transition won't soon take place. CGI is getting better all the time. Eventually it may be possible to create movies with no real actors at all. Of course, live acting will always have a place, even if only in voiceovers, but the cost of the actors is a significant percentage of a movie's production cost. As for CGI, as better software is developed, hopefully some of this might be developed under a GPL type license, and CPU speed increases, CGI will become more capabale and less expensive. It could very well happen that blockbuster motion pictures could be produced for 1-2% of their current cost, which means that production companies other than those covered by the MPAA might get a leg up.
IF this happens, and the MPAA were to lose some of their clout, they would lose some of thier monopolistic control over the type of media we have available. They wouldn't be able to license out their encoding technology, nor would they NEED to sue someone to "protect" it.
Some type of sensors will be needed for the case of coming to a sudden stop. In reality, when a person is running, and they try to stop quickly, they are forced to brake their movement due to the fact that momentum will keep them going if they don't. It doesn't take much, but nobody can come to a sudden stop. However, in the ball, nobody would actually be moving, the ball would. So if someone suddenly stops, which WOULD be possible since you're not really moving, the ball would keep going, UNLESS it was somehow able to sense that the person had stopped running and brake the movement. This MIGHT not be too difficult. As the person moves around in the ball, they will never move more than a few degrees away from the center of the berings. Anytime they try to, the ball will simply roll to compensate, simulating movement. If someone suddenly stops, they will move beyond that few degree margin and the ball, sensing a force centered on a spot that is too far from the center of the berings will engage brakes to slow the ball down and readjust it. There will probably be a few balancing issues to work out, but no more than someone would have in real life after a few beers.:)
Imagine if you would, a worldwide distributed effort to model the entire world. Every building, every house, every road, tree, sign. Every interior setting complete to the finest detail the particular author is willing to code.
Yes, I realize this would be a huge project. Yes, I realize the quake engines probably wouldn't be able to handle it. Yes, I realize that nobody owns a HD large enough to hold all the data. Yes, I realize that it would take a LONG time, even if over 100,000 people participated.
I still think it would be a cool idea tho. I could expand on this idea further, but I'm going to stop now.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've started doing the same thing. :)
You can see some of them on my webcam at
http://alignment.net
-Restil
I haven't turned on a TV set in over a year. Yet I haven't missed an episode of southpark, Startrek Voyager, Dark Angel, the Dune miniseries, and anything else I cared to watch. I watched it all on my computer. My... interactive TV.. if you would. Granted, its not the medium that the future version is hyped to be. Its not as convienent as Tivo for the average consumer, although for me it fits right into my regular tasks so I notice no inconvienence on my part. And yes, its probably not 100% legal.
However, I can tell you that there are NO technical limitations WHATSOEVER that prevent this type of interaction. The laws of the marketplace, copyright laws, marketing and advertising issues are the reasons why interactive TV over broadband hasn't taken off yet. Its NOT for lack of interest. But it will have to compete with a television set for convienence of use, and with cable in pricing.
Also, remember that this does not have to be STREAMING media. You need not limit the quality of your playback to the lowest common denominator. Let your customers download the program they wish to watch. Harddrives as a reusable storage method are quite reasonably priced. Once downloaded, the customer can watch it whenever he/she wants and can keep it as long as they can store it. Don't be sneaky trying to force individual payments for each download. Just charge a flat monthly fee for the service.
Will there be blatent piracy? Certainly. There is now. Nothing will change except that you might be able to sell me a service that I'm currently getting for free because you don't offer it. The technologies will emerge regardless of what you choose to do about them. You have a choice here, you can ride the wave when it comes in or get caught in a wake and drown. Napster is as popular as it is not because people want to steal money from artists (yes, I know the argument about that), and not all of them are just looking for freebies. It exists because the music industry refused to implement such a service early on when they could have had a lot more control over its use and revenue possibilities. Instead they chose to hold onto their old ideals and they completely missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
And so the internet grows on. And its not growing any slower. Just because the hype has died down does NOT mean that its leveling out. Hype isn't always the best form of motivation anyways. Internet stocks didn't crash because the an internet based economy is a flawed concept. They crashed because the companies behind those stocks were based mostly on hype. They weren't created to develop services, they were created to keep the hype alive. When the hype died down, the investors tarried, the stock market slumped and everyone suddenly got nervous and got out. As a result, the linux stocks took a bit of a beating, not because they were conceptual hype (although some were/are), but because a lot of their revenue was from other dot.com companies that WERE based on hype and therefore some of their market ceased to exist.
And don't forget. The web != the internet. They are certainly related, but all the web really is is a single internet based service. The internet is 3 times older than the web. Services have "peaked" before and all but died out, to be replaced by something more interactive, useful and/or visually pleasing. The internet itself still grows on. My interactive TV has NO involvement whatsoever with the "web" and its unlikely that it ever will.
-Restil
Is that the chances that YOU personally will get hit by one of the satellites is about 1.5 trillion to 1. You're much more likely to win the lottery.....even if you DON'T buy a ticket. :)
-Restil
I didn't even bother looking at the prices for NEW machines, but the harddrives and network cards are WAY overpriced, old OR new. I can't see how they can possibly justify $60 for a 1 gig drive or $50 for a 500 meg or $20 for a 10 mbps network card when you can buy them BRAND NEW in the STORE with warranty and everything for half that price.
Of course, if they're actually selling stuff at those prices, more power to them. I should switch my line of work. I can make a 10 fold markup on some of the products they're selling and still undercut them.
-Restil
I had an acer aspire too. At least mine was a genuine intel chip, but I had a ton of other problems. The CDROM in mine quit after about 6 months too. Half the pci cards I used in that machine wouldn't work. Those that did worked marginally well. I had a capture card that was too much for the machine to handle as a P133 but my trusty P60 here handled it just fine. There were plenty of other strange software glitches as well. Some of them I guess I could attribute to the fact that it ran windows, but some were just STRANGE.
In fact, every proprietary system I've bought has had problems. Nothing so major that the average consumer would probably notice, but I tend to overtweak my hardware and software, not to mention running the systems 24/7 and these problems show up slowly over a period of time. however, I still have a clone 386 system put together in late 89 AND ITS STILL RUNNING FINE! even though I probably haven't powered down the thing more than 30 times since I got it.
-Restil
At some point, celestial bodies in space will fall OUTSIDE the jurisdiction of any nation on Earth. For this reason, at some point, claims can be made by anyone. A physical presence on an asteriod isn't really required to make a claim on it. The issue is the ability to DEFEND the claim once it has been made. If I decide I like your asteriod, nobody but you will be able to stop me from using it for myself.
Don't think for a minute that massive wars won't be fought over such things. Think how many wars there have been in the United states since it was colonized for the sole purpose of establishing that it really DID belong to the United States. Certainly, the colonists from the 15th century and beyond were certainly not the first ones here, but that didn't stop them from taking it as their own.
-Restil
And why do collectors collect everything under the sun in mint condition and keep all boxes, manuals, reciepts, etc? If that supposiviely is so they'll still have value later as collectors items, then it would make sense to conclude that someday in the future they might want to sell it for all that money its "worth".
:)
Its possible he's hit a snag in his life and needs a lot of money. Or maybe he's looking for a down payment on a house and has no funds available because all his life he's spent every spare penny on video games. Maybe he's looking at his priorities and is deciding that its time to let this childhood fetish go and get on with his life,
while he can still profit from it. From the way the auction is going, it looks like his plan is succeeding well. Still, I'm curious how much he actually wants for it, considering the reserve hasn't been met yet.
-Restil
November 28, 2000:
dshield.org, a new service designed to analyze firewall logs to look for suspicious activity, submitted its own firewall logs for analysis. To their great surprise, they appeared to be the subject of a giant DOS attack that lasted for 24 hours, as out of nowwhere, nearly 700,000 computers around the world accessed the website.
Due to the enourmous hits, the site was frequently unavailable for legitimate users. Officials suspect foul play, but have been unable to determine a motive for the unprecedented attack. "This is precisely the reason we developed this system; to expose the origins of potential attackers and allow the user to take appropriate action". When asked if it was possible they were simply the victim of the feared "slashdot effect", those allegations were denied. "As soon as our bandwidth returned to normal, we checked out this slashdot.org but saw no mention of the site anywhere on the front page. We checked the logs and found only one refrence from slashdot.org. Although it appears right before the attack began, we are certain that this is only a coincedence.
:)
-Restil
And one of them had to go out of his way to get himself killed by one. I work at a business that makes extensive use of conveyor belts. Despite explicit training and constant employee review on how to operate those belts safely, people still manage to injure themselves in sometimes permanant cosmetic ways. Someone once got accidently caught in the drive machinery, so they installed metal guards over any machinery that could be dangerous and forbid ANY employees from opening them. They do it anyways.
Nobody is clueless about that, its just some people are stupid. And due to stupidity, people sometimes die. I wouldn't get too worked up on it being the robot's fault. The robot didn't kill anyone. Those people killed themselves and they has nobody else to blame for it.
-Restil
I know there was a rumor that R2D2 was going to be fully compuerized and Kenny Baker would no longer have a part, but if I recall correctly that rumor was debunked. Perhaps ZDNET is privy to some information I have overlooked. Or perhaps they didn't get the rumor update.
-Restil
Specifically the problem is 2 clients behind firewalls such that neither can be used as a server, so they cannot communicate with each other directly. They COULD have their traffic relayed through an indirect server that is open to the internet, but that means that the relay needs to be able to handle that bandwidth as well.
I'm not well versed on the internals of TCP/IP, but I believe that when a connection is established, the ip and port information are written to some type of internal table and used from then on for further data transfers across that socket.
Consider if both clients initiated a connection with the relay to open the connection. Once the connection is opened, the IP information in the internal table will be modified on both clients to the IP address/port of the NAT machine of the other client. At this point, both clients will be connected to each other but neither of them is a server. And the connecting relay only needs to pass enough traffic to initiate the connection, thereby keeping it readily available.
-Restil
I'm allowed to run any servers I want on my own network. I can host any file I want, I can use as much bandwidth as I want (up to the physical limits of 1.544 down and 768kbps up...mileage may vary at times, after all, it IS adsl). I'm free to abuse the network as much as I feel like it and my ISP will not only not say anything about it, they probably won't even care.
Want to know why? I shopped around. I found an ISP that was willing to provide to me unlimited, unrestrained access and I made sure they really meant it before I signed up. I also get 16 static ip addresses and the ability to host my own domain as a result, all within the confines of my own network.
I get all of this for a grand total of $300 a month. (including all phone company charges)
If you pay less than that amount a month, you should expect some type of restriction as a result as the isp cannot afford to offer you a low rate service and at the same time assume you're going to use 100% of your bandwidth at all times. If you DO that, you're abusing the system.
Guess what, when cable modems came out and thousands of people were serving mp3's and god knows what else to the world, and cable modem services became practically unusable as a result, the company did the only thing it could do. It chopped the upstream rate to a pathetic 128kbps and restricted ALL servers of all kinds. You
brought it upon yourself, don't complain about it.
The cost is still in line with what you would pay the isp+phone company for a dialup connection.
This is the real cost of piracy. The authors/artists/software companies are not the real victims, nor are the consumers that must pay "higher prices" for their software. Those effects are negligable. The real victims are the innocent users of high speed connections who have had to have their inexpensive lines horribly crippled in an effort to protect the isp.
In case you really do need it, you can pay a few bucks more and get a less restricted cable or dsl connection. This may not necessarily be on the front page, but no business is gonna scoff at extra money for legitimate use. The abusers won't go for it so the option is still available. And if you have the cash, get a T1. Of course, its hard to justify a T1 for residential use, but 5 years ago, you had T1 and dialup and nothing in between. How did you survive back then? Not that I'm saying we should revert back, but in spirit of this US holiday, be thankful for what you have.
-Restil
Storage of MP3's is prohibited. They don't seem interested in playing around with legalspeak in trying to validate some mp3's while prohibiting others. They just forbit them all. And they're perfectly in the right to do it, and personally I don't understand why this even made it on the front page.
Copyright issues aside, mp3's take up a lot of space and occupy a lot of bandwidth. Hosting services are tying to offer a service to a large number of customers for the legitimate hosting of webpages that needs more space or more bandwidth than the average user can provide themselves. They are not designed to handle the excessive amount of bandwidth that is consumed by anyone who manages to find the mp3's. Porn has a similar effect, which is why it is probably prohibited as well, as well as the fact that it brings upon itself a plethora of legal problems too.
Do they have to notify you? no. You were notified when you read the Terms of Service before you signed up. You DID read the terms of service, right?
mp3.com and I would imagine other similar services are available for the legitimate hosting of mp3's and probably cost less than your current hosting provider, if thats the service you actually require.
-Restil
There are several conflicting ancient economic rules that come into play with the internet. Rules that must be revised to work to the economic benefit of all.
:). If I end up posting ads for yahoo.com, all we ever do is trade the same money back and forth. Until the ads make it to a website that brings in a significant amount of its revenue from the wallets of its viewers, there is no money in the internet economy.
:) But if content could be transfered a minimum amount of hops, the cost for that content will drop significantly, as well as increasing the speed by which everyone can access it.
:)
First of all, we have the issue of free service. Everyone who browses the internet expects to do so for free or for a single low flat rate for their isp. They have come to expect this, and I doubt the internet would have taken off if they were charged for every website they wanted to view. I don't want to pay for my information.
To offer this information, it will cost somebody at least something. At the lower end, the isp of the provider can provide a low volume website, but the cost of providing the information will increase with its popularity and size. Information wants to be free, but not for those who provide it.
There has to be a constant, scalable source of revenue to cover the cost of providing the information or service. There are two major possibilities here. Sell the eyeballs of your viewers, or charge the viewers to view the information.
Advertising on the internet might work or it might not. There's a catch 22 in play here. Until the massive bulk of consumers use the internet, ads won't be as lucrative a source of revenue as advertising on the radio or TV are since a lot more people spend a lot more time watching TV then they do on the internet. And even those who DO spend a lot of time on the internet do so engaged in activities that do not subject them to a steady stream of advertising.
The biggest problem with advertising is the fact that while more and more of the people in the world are going online, the original core group of users were of a slightly different breed. The type, for all practical purposes, who don't pay much attention to ads, and spend as much time as possible trying to avoid having to view them at all (Junkbuster and the like come into play here).
On the internet advertising is also subjected to a recursive downward spiral where you end up advertising pages for the sole purpose of selling advertising. When you watch a commercial on TV, they're usually selling a meatspace product. They're not trying to sell you on another service for the sole purpose of throwing advertising on you. The obvious exception to this is when they advertise previews to upcoming shows, but self promotion is always a valid exception. Most TV networks don't make a point of advertising shows on other networks.
On the internet, I might run a website that gains 100% of its revenue from advertising. How will I bring users to my website? I might sell an ad on yahoo since I know there's a big potential audience there. Yahoo of course, gains most, if not all, of their revenue from advertising (at least until now
What this means is, E-commerce is essential for the survival of the internet as it is currently constructed. However, what if I want to provide information to the world at large and not have to pester my viewers with ads, but at the same time, not charge them any money?
This brings up a second point. Information that I serve is mine. I provide it to the world, but *I* want to be the one serving it so I get credit for it. AT least, this is the general perception. However, I can't afford any more than a dsl line without some type of revenue stream. Bandwidth gets cheaper the closer to the backbone you get, but you have to be able to purchase a LOT of bandwidth to get it that cheap.
However, say there was a bandwidth repository between me and the backbone, like at my isp. A huge cache for all of the websites and other files that transfer between the customer websites and viewers on the other end. Whenever a single static file is transfered more than a few times, the cache will pick it up and save it. From that point on, any incoming requests will stop at the isp and be served from the cache instead. If a site is extremely popular, the isp, with its much cheaper, much larger link to the internet will be the one serving all the content and the puny link to the actual website will only be used for initial transfers. Of course, keeping just one level of cache would be inefficient. If a site is REALLY popular, then it could be bumped even closer to the backbone and get served from that point. It could also work in the other direction. If a large number of people on a network access a specific website, then a local cache could store the website data locally to serve to the local users, since its much cheaper to transfer data on a local network than over the internet. This is the biggest issue with napster and college campuses. Its an order of magnitude cheaper to install more bandwidth on campus than it is to utilize the internet feed. If napster only traded files amongst users on the local network and then only went out to the internet if the requested file couldn't be found on any of the 10,000+ local systems.
However, intellectual property laws come into play here. I don't want anyone mirroring my information because I can't sell banner ads to distribute it. Of course, I can't sell banner ads anyway, but thats not really the point. This mentality ends up stalling the whole process.
Yes, I know this wouldn't work for dynamic pages. however, try something. Pick a website, especially an extremely flashy one. Point wget at it and download all the content on the main page. Then do something to form a dynamic change and repeat the process. How much of the data has actually changed? Webpage code itself is relatively small compared to the size of the images, java applets, and banner ads.
This will increase the base cost to the provider of the information or service, as you are now purchasing not only an internet connection, but also cache space. However, as you well know, its much cheaper to purchase something once than to pay for something constantly. In addition, if you can cut down your required bandwidth by 80% because most of your content need not transfer over your expensive pipe and can instead transfer over the pipe of your isp, which only costs them half as much due to their ability to purchase a much larger pipe and get a better data rate for the dollar. Not to mention the fact that the price drops even more the next jump upstream. Its not unreasonable to cut your bandwidth costs down to 10-20% of what would be needed if you served everything from your own system through your own internet feed.
The third issue is that more and more people expect a large quantity of their services to be performed for free or very little. Cell phones are free. There are free computers, free internet access, free long distance. SOMEBODY has to pay for all of this. In the end, its going to be the corporations that end up selling us products and inevitably paying our salaries. Thats how economy works. And if they're going to give away all this stuff for free, they're going to need to have more accurate marketing data so they get a better return on their investment. While I don't feel they should be automatically provided with this information without my permission, I don't feel like its too far out of line to request such information in exchange for an otherwise free product so they can push products my way that I would otherwise be interested in purchasing anyways.
So understand the perspective. We want unlimited privacy, with no intrusion into our lives whatsoever. No cookies, no anonymous tracking, no personal tracking. We don't want any random spam, no targeted advertising (still spam), no banner ads, no targeted banner ads, we want our internet service free or very low cost, with lots of extra services, but nobody calling us to sell us anything. At some point, something is going to have to give. Figure out where you want it to be. Either you're going to have to tell someone that you're a 30 year old male who has an interest in reading about cars, or you're going to have to pay yahoo money so you can do it.
-Restil
(sorry for the extended, pointless rant)
I commented on this issue the first time it was posted. I will do so again. I think what he did was completely legal, yet I can still see how what he did was somewhat suspicious.
The very fact that he got his equipment back in short order shows that not only is he not a suspect, the FBI realizes he has no involement and no evidence that will be of any use to them. This lends to me the belief that they might actually have a clue about what they're doing. The immediate sieze of "evidence" is unfortunately necessary at times because data can be eliminated in the blink of an eye.
I will say again, a violated website is a crime scene. You're perfectly welcome to gawk at a crime scene along with all the other rubberneckers hoping to get a glimpse at whatever the cause of the commotion is. However, if you cross over the yellow tape and start peeking around in things, law enforcement might be forced to make some premature assumptions about your motives. Viewing a cracked website wouldn't bring you any undue suspicion, but when you start digging into the details, well, you never know who might be casually watching you.
You can blame the script kiddies. If it weren't for the numerous cracked websites with such dubious causes displayed... if it weren't for the massive DDOS's against such popular, yet fundamentally useless websites... if it weren't for the constant barrage of random portscans, we wouldn't have to worry about the FBI busting in on someone who was expressing some innocent curiosity.
These attacks will continue until at least a significant number of brainless dorks are caught and given a substantial punishment. Of course, this is easier said than done. The great majority of attacks are not direct, but done through innocent third parties who are the unfortunate owners of unsecured servers. To track these people down, the FBI has to track through the log files of each of the servers in between. I dare say, if the FBI were to casually call me up and ask if I minded if they came over and searched through all my computers I would kindly hang up on them. Obtaining a warrant and seizing the equipment is really their only option in cases such as these. It might suck if you had no direct involvement or were just looking around, but just accept the fact that its gonna happen. Keep your systems secure so you don't get cracked, and keep your nose out of a crime scene unless you are authorized to be there.
And no, I'm not trampling on anyone's rights. I agree that making a script that demonstrates a security hole needs to remain legal, and is the best way to assure that these holes get fixed. However, you have to realize that people WILL abuse these scripts. There will be people that don't and won't patch their software even if they DO know about security holes. What can we do about this? I have no idea. Since having their systems violated doesn't seem to concern some people, how about an increasing number of law enforcement intrusions? Maybe if everytime someone sets up a new box, a week later they get raided by the FBI and get all their eqiupment confiscated, they'll take security more seriously.
Law enforcemnt is very much an "after the fact" operation. They don't concern themselves at all with how to protect yourself beforehand, they only care about catching the criminals afterwards. And any legislation they propose will not be to protect the innocent but to make the act of catching the criminals easier. From their standpoint, I don't doubt that their motives are sincere, even if the end result is that we end up with less rights than we do before.
So please be careful. If you're not among the criminally inclined, attempt to avoid presenting yourself as such.
-Restil
I despise Child Pornography as much as the next person. However, consider the following. If you have your closet pedophile, would you rather he A: look at pictures, whack off, and get it out of his system, or B: go find a child, violate him/her, and get it out of his system.
In case A, this person could otherwise be a functional, safe member of society. He has a problem and he has found a way to deal with it without hurting anyone in the process. He can't go to a psycologist about it anymore, because doctor/patient confidentiality in such cases isn't very solid. I could tell my doctor that I murdered 10 people and he couldnt' say anything about it. But if I tell him I touched a child he HAS to report it.
The REAL issue here isn't regarding actual porn but benign pictures of minors that aren't in any way involved in sexual situations, but someone PERCEIVES them to be sexual and a braindead judge agrees. Its not too hard in today's society of the easily offended that someone could look at a picture of a girl in a bikini and find it offending. To make matters worse, it doesn't even have to be a minor.
-Restil
I really do think that selling hardware at a loss to recoop the cost through service CAN work. Its worked wonders for the cellphone industry. The only problem is, the service is inadaquate. With every other person picking up a high speed internet account from somewhere, dialup accounts (while still VERY prevelant) will be old dinosaurs in 3-5 years. Then again, so will the I-Openers, but the contracts will still last that long.
:)
However, the phone company gave me a dsl modem when I ordered the service. I'm sure that the cost is included in my monthly payment, but there were NO setup charges of any kind, so the charge is effectively invisible. I'm sure the phone companies aren't losing money by this model, and they sure don't seem to be showing any signs of cutting back on offering dsl service.
The I-Opener should have had this built in. Dialup OR dsl, or LAN access. Then sell the internet service with it as planned, but sell dsl service instead of dialup where dsl is available. I guarantee the cost increase wouldn't have been significant, but people are buying up dsl as fast as they can get it, so they wouldn't have chosen a dead market. Sure, in 5 years time, dsl might be in the process of getting replaced by something even more sexy, but at least the IOpener would have served a useful purpose for that length of time and the customers will probably still be using them up to that point and would be happy to purchase whatever they offer next.
You CAN'T plan a long term service option on current technology only. You MUST look to the future and plan for what will be coming in 3 months, 6 months, a year, 3 years. DSL isn't new. Its been available in some areas for well over 3 years and has been talked about for many years before that. Yet Netpliance ignores it even though its an emerging market.
Please note that this applies equally well to cable.
Imagine. A relatively idiotproof box, with built in cable and dsl support, built in hub, (at least enough to daisychain it to another hub), phone connection that can work with either regular dialup service or dsl service. Make it slick and sexy and, most importantly, make sure, whatever price you sell it at, make sure its CHEAPER than the lowest cost PC you can currently purchase. You might get ripped by a few people who only want to install linux on it, but 99% of your customers will be happy to get it for the service and you will succeed. Hmmmmm... I might have to consider this.
-Restil
If all your office software (Operating systems, productivity software, etc) is free, the license is owned by you, or you specificaly contracted someone to use that software (not an off the shelf product), then chances are good that you will have no problems, even with a raid, which is highly unlikely. The biggest issue with WinXX operating systems is the ability and somewhat necessesity to install a copy of the software on every machine that is required to use it. If I want to be able to edit a word document on any system, I need to install Word/Office on every system, even if 99.999% of the time I will only be using it on one computer. Unless I want to go through with the hassle of installing/deleting the software every time I plan to use it I am technically in violation. If you're using a workstation/server based model, such as using exported X displays on a linux system, then you install the software once on the server and even if the software has a limited site license, that license will be enforced by the software itself. It doesn't matter how many different places I can access the software from, if I only use it from one or two locations at a time, I simply purchase a license for that many simultanious instances of the program and the problem is solved. I get the flexibility, the software company gets fairly compensated. Another issue is there is a TON of software for windows while off the shelf products for linux and other UNIX based operatins systems are rare. Sometimes this is used as a negative, but in this case its quite positive to avoid copyright infringement issues. If I'm running linux on 100% of my systems, unless I'm running wine, vmware or some other emulator, I can safely say that I'm not running ANY software that works on a microsoft operating system. This almost eliminates the possibility of piracy, accidental or otherwise. Even linux software that is not free is usually distributed free for personal use or under some type of temporary trial license. For instance, Realserver for Linux, which costs a HUGE chunk of cash for a large operation, is free to use for less than 25 simultanious connections. One last reason for using a unix based OS is that your employees are less likely to bring stuff from home to run on "their" computer. You won't be affected by the next Melissa VBS "virus". Consider this. -Restil
I could fit a lot more than 10,000 CPU's in the space of 2 basketball courts. The connecting circuity must be immense. Or maybe its the cooling system that takes up so much space. :)
Contrary to popular belief, minesweeper is not that difficult of a game to solve, but only after you have found your first mine. Up until that point, you HAVE to guess. the game, however, does not draw the board until after your first move, as your first move will ALWAYS be safe. However, unless your first move hits a spot that has no mines surrounding it, your next move will HAVE to be a lucky guess. However, once you have reached a certain point, like after successfully rooting out about 5 mines, the solution becomes pretty much a linear problem based upon the number of grids on the board.
There are a few "traps" however. Ones I have learned to avoid by always cleaning out the corners first on a large board. If I die, I want it to happen in the first few seconds and not on the last grid I'm trying to clear.
Encryption, as far as I've been able to deduce, does not allow for this strategy. While I know that it might take 2^56/2 average brute force comparisons to extract a DES key, there is no plateau I know of, say at 2^10 comparisons where I can safely say that the problem becomes a linear problem rather than an exponential one.
Take for instance a 10x10 minesweeper board. If I simply wanted to brute force out a solution, I have 2^100 possibilities (yes, this makes encryption look tame by comparison). However, we can break this problem down significantly without even knowing any tricks. Take a board. Guess at a grid. If the grid is clear, we go onto the next one, if the grid is occupied by a mine, we will know this instantly as well. This problem still has 2^100 possibilities IF the game restarts each time you die and you get a fresh board. HOWEVER, if the board remains the same, you have only 200 possibilities total and you will have the board complete. I can't do this with encryption. I can't guess at each bit of a key indifidualally to determine if it is right or wrong. If I could, then DES could be solved with no more than 112 instructions. And even 128 bit encryption would take no more than 256 iterations.
But minesweeper isn't that difficult. There are very few boards (especially on the 10x10 grid) that can't be solved with a predicable algorithm. While it is not possible to know with certainty if EACH grid location is definitely a mine or definitely not a mine, you are about 99% likely to know at least ONE of them at any one time, after the initial 2-3 guesses. This is better than we have for encryption, but still falls short of the rule as we need to be 100% sure for ANY board.
Encryption does not suffer. Even if for an encryption scheme with 2^N possibilities, I would be able to determine an absolute solution in less than 2^(N/10) possibilities, for DES this would be about 32 possibilities, the problem can be made more complex simply by increasing the bitsize of the key. A key with 1024 bits would, with this method, require 2^102 possibilities which is still out of the range of today's computers, or even tomorrow's.
-Restil
First off, I don't for one second think you did anything illegal regarding this. Nor do I think you did anything wrong. However, You should consider the fact that if you hang around tampering with a fresh crime scene, its JUST POSSIBLE that someone is taking notes and you might get targeted as a suspect.
From what it sounds like, the FBI's actions were simply an act of evidence gathering, not necessarily singling you out as a suspect. However, your actions were sufficient to warrant "probable cause" to obtain a warrant, and once that happens, you're pretty much screwed. They can pretty much do or take anything they want until a trial comes up (and we all know how long "hacking" trials can take)
Do I think this is fair, no I most certainly do not. Do I think you could have avoided all this? Yes, I do.
-Restil
Hasn't anyone ever told you people there is no money to be made with open source software? There's NO way you can make a living at it. Why would anyone want to PAY money to someone for something they could just download for free.
Hmmmm...
:)
-Restil
After you've crossed the bankrupcy point of no return, it doesn't really much matter how large of a bill you rack up, as you'll never be able to apy it anyways. If you're gonna be ruined, might as well pound it in good. After all, theres always the slim chance you might win in the end, therefore making the whole problem go away.
Still, I think its sad that laws have to be fought in this way. A court can basically nullify a law, but its a gamble as if the court upholds it, you stand to lose BIG TIME.
Personally, I'm wondering if this whole battle is really the right fight. DVD's are really nothing special. They're a more compact form of CD, but the issue isn't really the storage mechanism, but the encryption. Eliminate the encryption, and the DMCA has no place.
Of course, the MPAA and the DVD consortium control the content distribution of all the major motion picture companies and its highly unlikely that they will conform to distribute movies on any format that is not sanctioned by the MPAA.
I'm wondering if a transition won't soon take place. CGI is getting better all the time. Eventually it may be possible to create movies with no real actors at all. Of course, live acting will always have a place, even if only in voiceovers, but the cost of the actors is a significant percentage of a movie's production cost. As for CGI, as better software is developed, hopefully some of this might be developed under a GPL type license, and CPU speed increases, CGI will become more capabale and less expensive. It could very well happen that blockbuster motion pictures could be produced for 1-2% of their current cost, which means that production companies other than those covered by the MPAA might get a leg up.
IF this happens, and the MPAA were to lose some of their clout, they would lose some of thier monopolistic control over the type of media we have available. They wouldn't be able to license out their encoding technology, nor would they NEED to sue someone to "protect" it.
-Restil
Some type of sensors will be needed for the case of coming to a sudden stop. In reality, when a person is running, and they try to stop quickly, they are forced to brake their movement due to the fact that momentum will keep them going if they don't. It doesn't take much, but nobody can come to a sudden stop. However, in the ball, nobody would actually be moving, the ball would. So if someone suddenly stops, which WOULD be possible since you're not really moving, the ball would keep going, UNLESS it was somehow able to sense that the person had stopped running and brake the movement. This MIGHT not be too difficult. As the person moves around in the ball, they will never move more than a few degrees away from the center of the berings. Anytime they try to, the ball will simply roll to compensate, simulating movement. If someone suddenly stops, they will move beyond that few degree margin and the ball, sensing a force centered on a spot that is too far from the center of the berings will engage brakes to slow the ball down and readjust it. There will probably be a few balancing issues to work out, but no more than someone would have in real life after a few beers. :)
-Restil
Imagine if you would, a worldwide distributed effort to model the entire world. Every building, every house, every road, tree, sign. Every interior setting complete to the finest detail the particular author is willing to code.
:)
Yes, I realize this would be a huge project. Yes, I realize the quake engines probably wouldn't be able to handle it. Yes, I realize that nobody owns a HD large enough to hold all the data. Yes, I realize that it would take a LONG time, even if over 100,000 people participated.
I still think it would be a cool idea tho. I could expand on this idea further, but I'm going to stop now.
-Restil