Several points made in the article give me the impression that the capabilities of the database are not as powerful as claimed.
First are the statistics on pornography sites. Yes, most sites just harvest material from public sources and redistribute it. However, how exactly were they able to determine how many images are stored on membership pages? Porn sites are notoriously pay per view services. Useful statistics on the volume of data a porn site will hold will simply not be available unless memberships were purchased on every single site. I don't care if they said they dont' care how much it costs, I know for a fact they're not purchasing memberships on 20,000 porn sites each day.:)
How do they claim they can archive EVERY newsgroup on USENET? No newsserver serves EVERY newsgroup, as its a distributed network. Most of them offer 98% of the groups, but they'd be hard pressed to have EVERY single one of them.
Then there's the discussion about "hackers", followed immediately about information about bomb building, lock picking, and credit card numbers.
I'm also somewhat unsure what good a list of "unissued credit card numbers" would accomplish. If its unissued, then its useless, right? IT WON'T WORK. Here's an unissued credit card number: 4204 4502 5092 2942
There. I GUARANTEE you that NOBODY has this number. Its "unissued". Now I'm a hacker! Oh goody!:) I'm also unsure how someone would "generate" the address of cardholders. That would be information contained in a database which would have to be "obtained". Its not information that is obtained within the number itself. As for "robbing" ATM machines. I'll give you 3 good ways to do it. Shouldersurf someone's PIN number, mug them, then drain their account, use a sledgehammer and blowtorch to extract the cash from the machine, or wait until someone draws some cash from it, and just steal it from them. I wouldn't consider any of these ways to be smart, but I certainly don't know of any other way to do it. Nor do I expect there to be any reliable information out there that would express such possibilities.
How is steganography considered to be the 3rd biggest threat? According to this article, its more dangerous than nuclear weapons. All it is is a form of encryption. I suppose if I can't read a message of yours its less dangerous than if I CAN read a message, but it turns out to be the wrong message. forget the fact that I shouldn't be reading your messages anyways. If someone wanted to send a message detailing an assassination attempt, its unlikely anyone would obtain it until after the deed had been attempted.
Now.. lets examine some lines of FUD:
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs, notes Whitelaw.
Security experts are seriously worried about the threat of attacks on airport flight management computers, power systems, and hospital equipment, let alone stock markets such as Nasdaq.
Anyone notice a pattern here? Sounds like this is the same techniques that antivirus vendors spew out in an attempt to get people to buy their products. Your computers are just CRAWLING with viruses and you'll most likely die if you don't use our product. True, the above lines were a tad more subtle, but the issue is the same.
I would rather companies that are intent on keeping their technology secret make it harder (physically) to extract rather than resorting to legal tactics. I personally believe that everyone has the right to reverse engineer anything they want to, but nobody said that the company creating the product has to make it easy.
There is a drawback though. The more complex the circutry becomes, the harder it will be to debug problems in the circuits and this will lead to longer production cycles which will give the feared competition a leg up anyways. Always a tradeoff.
What The World Really Needs is a $250 firewall box that runs Linux
This reminds me of something. I was at the First Saturday sidewalk sale in Dallas the previous weekend and two guys approached me trying to peddle their firewall system which would *gasp* allow me to run more than one computer off my high speed internet connection. For a very brief moment I was amazed by such a possibility, until I remembered that I was already doing this.
But wait, THEIR firewall might be far superiour to mine, so I should probably review their product before dismissing it outright. Reading over the single sheet brochure they provided me, the first thing I noticed was that it would support up to 10 computers. This was the first hurdle. I informed them that I am currently running 12 computers on my network, so their product would limit me in that regard.
But no fear, they told me that it would most likely handle more than 10 computers on a network, but the average consumer never used that many on a home network, so it didn't make sense to test it for more than that. Well, I suppose he had a point, except that the "average consumer" usually doesn't do their computer shopping at parking lots in downtown Dallas at 1 in the morning from people who are selling used computer equipment off the back of their trucks. But I digress.
So I questioned further, in case there were features which I hadn't discovered yet that I absolutely needed. I asked how many internet ip addresses I could get. 1
ONE
Not 16 like I have now, but ONE. I ran some figures through my head, trying to figure out how I could run all my servers off of a single ip address. Ah HA. the solution, its so simple. IPCHAINS supports port forwarding. No problem. But wait. Problem. Their firewall doesn't. Well, it might, but the ever vigilant salesmen weren't aware of that feature.
At this point I was really grasping for straws, trying to find any reason why I should just dismiss them like AOL'ers who were trying to convince a guy with a T3 that he should switch to AOL with a dialup because its a better internet. No, I don't have a T3, I was just attempting to be funny. Feel free not to laugh, I don't care.
Ok. I thought proudly of my linux box at home with its two network cards that does everything and then some that their box does. Cost me $30 my box did, and that included both PCI network cards. But here's the kicker. I had to put my system together myself. I had to install the operating system. I had to configure ipfwadm (still using 2.0.35) ALL BY MYSELF WITH NO HELP FROM ANYONE (unless you consider reading man pages and howto's to be help).
They, however, install the product FOR YOU, so you don't have to do it. I'm sure they charge a fair price for the trouble, however, I didn't ask. I might have laughed too loudly, and milk might have come out of my nose, and that would just be too embarrasing.
Ok.. Just in an attempt to stay on topic... I was referring to the price of the firewall. It wouldn't need to cost $250 unless it was EXTREMELY tiny and didn't use a standard MB. I suppose that would be worth something, but I don't personally find space to be much of an issue.
You said it yourself, games drive the hardware. The only problem with games is, they're all the same nowadays, and I don't really feel like playing 100 different games that more or less resemble quake.
Whats truely sad about all this is that I am a gamer in heart. I grew up playing games. When I was younger, the one thing I wanted to do when I got older was to be a game programmer. I spent many MANY long days learning programming for the sole purpose of following this dream.
Now I want practically nothing to do with it. Perhaps others feel the same way. We WOULD keep upgrading if our need for the latest and greatest was more focused. I, however, at this point spend a lot of time scavenging. Low end pentium systems are practically being given away now and they have quite a bit of life in them as linux systems. I've got my whole house populated with workstations for less than the cost of one new computer.
About the only reason I'd consider a system over 200 mhz would be for playback of the more processor intensive video clips (divx, etc), however since there isn't linux support for them yet, and since mpeg's work just fine under linux.
There.. I just talked myself out of an upgrade yet again. The economy as we know it will collapse in upon itself now. You can all blame me.:)
"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that
somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their
heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody
else's life."
Perhaps you should read that again. It has nothing to do with the internet, it has to do with the responsibility of people. The point being, if children were raised properly, and supervised properly while they were in their formitive years, the internet wouldn't turn a child's heart dark, nor would anything else.
However, when the internet is used as a babysitter for children who's parents aren't interested in making the time to actually raise them, then the chances are increasingly good they're going to turn out screwed up, whether its the internet that does it, TV, gangs, or whatever else the current media crisis is.
Because IRC has encryption support does not mean that the network will be drawn to its knees. Fact of the matter, most people probably won't even use it. And thats ok. Many conversations don't need to be encrypted, but it would be nice to have the option available if I wanted it.
Encrypted options will probably only be used by about 5% of the users, so there won't be any significant toll on the network.
I know this might seem extreme. I haven't had any problems with my ISP before, but I've had problems with other companies (internet based ones included) that "misplaced" checks or forgot that I paid the bill or whatnot. Of course, it may take a month just to get a canceled check back, and even then, you still gotta fuss with them.
I have become somewhat pragmatic in my approach. I quit using checks alltogether (and credit cards for the same reason). Instead, I spend 2 hours once a month paying all my bills. I simply drive to the business establishments and pay my bills locally in cash and get a receipt.
I however am lucky that I am within driving distance of everywhere I need to pay bills to. This might not be the case for everyone, but most places the option is available to you.
Once you have a written reciept in hand, usually signed by someone at the company, a person who physically took the cash from you, its REALLY easy to dispute claims that you haven't paid your bill, especially when you have the ability to go walk in there yourself. Difficult to put someone on hold when they're standing in front of you.
I use one ISP for my actual connection. I use another for the newsserver account. I had paid in person (with money order) for a year's subscription, and had gotten a signed receipt for the transaction. I had previously paid for this service with bank drafts, but had closed that account due to excessive balance problems.
Anyways, a few days later I get an email claiming that I had not paid for the account yet, and that their attempts to draft my bank had failed (for obvious reasons). Of course, having the reciept in hand, I simply wrote them a terse reply informing them that I had paid the bill already and had subtly implied that their attempts to draft my bank without my permission bordered on attempted theft.
Server logs can tell you a variety of things, but I don't necessarily think they're useful for marketing purposes except for the owner of the server, and not so much for advertising. I run a small site that gets about 100 unique visitors a day and about 25 regulars.
Using the logs and parseing out the data, I can determine that almost all of the people who visit my site stick around for a little while, but don't come back later. At least, thats what the logs say. I can also see the referring site, which tells me where any advertising should be focused on, as well as if someone actually clicked on a link or entered the URL straight (or from bookmarks) which would indicate if a user has visited before.
Of course, any user using a dialup connection will probably have a different host/ip the next time they visit, and the logs will still show them as a separate user. AOL's proxy is especially bad as the host will change EVERY TIME the user makes another hit on the site, which makes it very difficult to track.
Cookies and user accounts would be much more useful to determine exactly how many visitors you have and how many of them visit frequently. However, I still believe that this information really is only useful to the server operator and not to someone looking to advertise on the site.
Marketing as it stands should probably be a trial and error operation. Spend some money and see what happens. When I ran a business several years ago I tried advertising in a variety of different places. Ads for computer sales got practically no response from a computer magazine but got a LOT of response from a simple 4 line classified ad in the newspaper. Sometimes you just have to throw some money around and see what you get back. Yes, there is some risk, and yes, you will probably lose some money before finding a medium that works well for you, but thats the name of the game.
-Restil
Haven't you ever heard of hobbies? Those are the sorts of things people do during their free time because they enjoy them. Some of us may enjoy reading slashdot over and over and over again. Or hacking the linux kernel, or coding a new GUI, or playing quake, or designing a new e-theme, or even *gasp* spending time OFF of the computer for a while.
This guy decided to convert an old Atari system to a portable unit. Nothing he did by doing this caused me any direct or indirect grief, so I can't possibly think of any reason why he shouldn't do it.
Others may say he's wasting his talent on a useless project. Certainly, the potential use for a portable game system that is 20 years old might be limited, but all effort put towards these types of projects is experience toward other types of projects. This is a person who thinks up neat things. The next neat thing he thinks up and builds might a revolutionary PDA which nobody will consider wasted talent.
I'm sure he's quite content with his life the way it is.:)
And the reason they were willing to to even consider them in the first place was because they forgot to send a "group photo".:)
Also, they were not accepted because everyone got stoned, but because they stood up for themselves, plotted, and executed revenge against the bullies on campus.
Sites are grouped into categories known as Authorities and hubs. A hub points to lots of different pages (yahoo for instance). An authority has lots of different places pointing to it.
Where the ranking comes into play is dependant on how good the hub or authority is. A hub is good (better than others) if it points to a number of good authorities. Likewise, an authority is good if it is linked to by a number of good hubs. Yes, this is a recursive process, and yes, it takes a number of passes to get the ranking to level out.
If a pr0n site wanted to exploit google to get a higher ranking, they would first need to create a LOT of dummy sites to link to it, and all those dummy sites would need to be found by google's robot.
However, just having a large number of dummy sites linking to the pr0n site is not sufficent. Those dummy sites would also have to link to a large number of other GOOD authority sites (on pr0n or whatever).
Now, throw another wrench into the works. Google doesn't search only on keywords ON the site itself, but on the sites that refer to it, and the other way around. Thats why if you search for "more evil than satan himself" you end up with microsoft as a prominant result, even though the words evil and satan probably don't appear anywhere on microsoft's website (although maybe they should).
This way, if you were searching for pages about a certain topic, but the pages themselves don't actaully use the words you're looking for, you will still find that page as long as there are good hubs out there that refer to that page and use your search terms in close proximity to the links.
Now, if a hub points to a large number of authorities on a specific topic, words relevent to those topic will then become viable search terms to find the hub when searching, as the hub would also be a good source of information, even if it doesn't list the specific search terms. All of this affects the "ranking"
So, for a dummy hub to get a high ranking, it would need to point to a large number of high ranking authority pr0n sites (which would anti-productive when what you're trying to do is advertise your own site). This would raise the hub rating for certain terms (specific to pr0n sites), and therefore raise the bar on the site you're trying to promote.
Of course, trying to get a pr0n site to come up on a search for "teen" or even "sex" is not easy because while a pr0n site is generally fly by night, there are many legitamate sites which have been around for several years and have built themselves into the web structure well and therefore get catagorized correctly.
An mp3 encoded at 128kbps for the 1000 year song
would be 526 terabytes. This may seem large now, but I would imagine that by the time the song is done recording, hundreds of terabytes will be considered inadaquate to hold even the most simple microsoft application.
For those of you burning that on CDs, thats approximately 809170 CDs. This is a pile of CD's that would stack about a mile and a half.
If the RIAA has sued everyone into oblivion and is still using regular CD audio at the time (this is not all that unreasonable) and they intend to sell each CD for $15 apiece.....
That would be 9710040 CDs for a grand total of $145,650,600.
Assuming a 2% annual inflation rate, in today's dollars that would be 36 cents. Not bad for a song thats 1000 years long.:)
I have some issues with my.mp3.com, napster and the like. Maybe they're legal, and maybe they're not. But the simple fact is, if they ARE legal, they're walking a very fine line and you WILL invite lawsuits, and being so close to the edge, it doesnt' take much more than a simple personal opinion to rule one way or the other. And the consequences are so dire if you lose.
The biggest problem with these lawsuits are that they're setting precedent. They're establishing that what was once perhaps on the edge of legality, has now crossed over and will start bring other less questionable activities into the spotlight.
Imagine if napster loses. We will now have a precedent that trading copyrighted music is illegal, or maybe just music by certain companies. Who knows, but now someone will get an itch and go after people running gnutella servers. Since gnutella doesn't run a centralized server, anyone who searches for a song will go through MANY servers to find it, each server passing the information along. It could potentially be stated that EACH of those servers, even those not serving anything, are equivalant in scope to napster. Someday
someone will set up shop on a university network with a packetsniffer, bust hundreds of people, and make an example out of them.
We don't want this to drift into generic file trading as well. Because you can trade files other than mp3's on gnutella and if gnutella is declared illegal, where will they go next?
Ultima Underworld's engine was the equivalent of the doom engine with the ability to look up and down. It ran decently on a 386, but only half the screen was used for the display.
This may be a bit off topic, but it does fall into the windows vs. linux debate as far as ease of use is considered.
An aquantaince of mine is starting an online e-commerce site and decided to use win2k over linux since "its a naturally graphical envionment and therefore he can use it, whereas he simply CAN'T use anything with a text interface". Of course, linux has GUI capabilities, but lets assume for a moment that it didn't.
For an entire month, he spent every spare waking moment trying to get several e-commerce packages working on win2k, spending many hundreds of dollars in the process and spending many hours on phone with tech support. He even got so desparate he came to my house and banged on my door at 3 am screaming for help because he couldn't get it working (I couldn't either for that matter, but I wasnt' foolish enough to spend a month trying).
What I find somewhat depressing in this regard is he had also obtained a linux based e-commerce package, managed to install redhat all by himself and install the software and get it working without ANY problems, but chose instead to run win2k because he didn't know enough about linux and didn't want to spend the time learning it.
I find it quite humorous that he could have learned quite a lot in those 30 days. I really think this is the mentality that pervades many people in a position to choose between the two.
Pity.
Tis a shame that one downside of the internet is that the average lamer is protected from what would get him beaten to a pulp in real life by the same actions.
Whats truely sad is, when I was the age that most of these idiots probably are, I don't recall knowing anyone that would need to resort to such action to entertain their pathetic lives. Those of us who didn't fit in generally found other more rewarding activities to participate in. Trolling certainly wasn't among them.
Remember though, if more companies develop under the open source philosophy, then IP becomes a moot point. We don't care who you are or what you know, we just need your computers.
Even if they are paranoid, eventually they're going to release something. By then, if someone has gone to the trouble of taping together the shreaded document, it'll be too late to do much about it.
If such a system was used for weather forcasting, by the time any useful information could be extracted from the bits and pieces the information would be days past its usefulness.
In general, distributed networking will come in handy for someone who needs LOTS of cpu cycles VERY quickly for a VERY short period of time. Other options exist if they have several months to work on it.
This brings up something I hadn't thought of. If paying for distributed CPU cycles becomes the norm, and every appliance you ever buy eventually has a powerful computer+internet connection, you could feasibly get those appliances for free.
Imagine walking into your average Best Buy and EVERY applince there is free. Buy(for free) whatever you want, the only condition is that you hook it up and use it. The internet connection will be free and you will never notice the use of the appliance as the computer inside it is horribly wasted anyways.
No down payment, no monthly fees, all electricity, phone bills, and internet bills paid for. Just make sure its hooked up.
This sure would keep the economists shaking their heads in agony.:)
From about 10 to 3 years ago, I had a cell phone, pager, and I wandered the earth content that someone could always reach me, and I could always call them right back from the comfort of whereever I happened to be at the time. Cell phones were, while not rare, hadn't exactly diluted into the peon class yet.
Now everyone, and I mean EVERYONE has a cell phone, and a pager, and all of them have tons of nifty options and cost practically nothing, and gosh by golly its just so damn cool.
I don't have one anymore. Or a pager. I've come to somewhat despise the fact that more people seem to have cell phones these days than watches.
I've come to learn that I don't NEED to be reached when I'm out shopping for 30 minutes. Nothing really seems to be THAT important. More importantly, I don't usually WANT to be reached when I'm not working. Thats MY time people. If you need me for something, just send me an email. Just as easy as a phone call, and I'll get to it when I have some time to kill.
When I first got a cell phone, I used it primarily for business related reasons, and the ocassional 30 second "hey I'll be home at 5" kind of deal. Sometime when you're bored, find someone talking on a cell phone (shouldn't be too hard) and eavesdrop. 9 times out of 10, they're probably in the middle of a 30 minute conversation about pointless gossip that really wasn't so cruicial that it needed to be discussed while the cell phone customer was picking out maxi pads in the grocery store (I would recommend hanging out in a different aisle tho)
Remember when cell phones didn't have a "style"? They were built the way they were to be the most space efficient. Now they're designer brands.
In any event, I've been without a cell phone for 2 years now. in all that time, I can't recall any time where it would have come in handy.
Ok.. Now linking is illegal if the subject matter being linked to is illegal or if the subject being linked doesn't want to be linked to.
Here's what you do.
Grab a large number of domains. Set up numerous webservers with all the domains. Set up LOTS of webpages. LOTS of them. Get lots of geocities accounts and accounts on every free webserver you can. Set up numerous pages on all these sites and make sure you have a lot of links to them that will be discovered and followed. Don't forget copyright notices on each page that linking to these sites is expressely prohibited and copying of the material on any of these pages is expressely prohibited.
Then wait a few months so the search engines will find all of them.
Now go on google and find your pages being linked, along with *gasp* a COPY OF YOUR PAGE HOSTED ON GOOGLE!!!! (cached pages in case you don't get it)
Find this extremely revolting and have a laywer draw up a form letter for you to send ceise and desist orders for EACH page in violation. Dont' forget the other search engines as well, as they're also illegally linking to you.
Wait a few days, or however many days you gave the engines to remove those links. Check all of them again. If any of them are still there, then they have willfully defied your order and you are now justified in suing for excessive damages.
And precedent has already been set to allow this. It no longer seems so horribly silly anymore.
But the judge in that case might actually have some degree of common sense and realize that the search engines can't be held responsible for every link on their site. This will have the effect of creating a precedent where linking IS permitted, even against the wishes of those who do not want it.
Of course, someone else will have to do this. I don't have the time.:)
Linux, and the utilities that accompany it have been almost completely developed based solely on the selfish needs or desires of the various developers. The developers were coding projects that scratched their own personal itch. What made these projects so damn useful to the rest of the world was the fact that the projects were opened to the rest of us to do with as we please.
Certainly, some things are developed for the issue of inflating the ego of the programmer, so be it.
Talent is not a community property. The owner of that talent may do with it what he or she wishes.
I design a robot that has a feature which is designed to kill (a pistol such as this has).
I design an AI for this robot and assign certain guidelines by which it must follow. The AI is programmed to evolve.
One of the guidelines is that the robot cannot kill innocent people.
The AI evolves and develops the ability to circumvent its guideline and kill innocent people.
The robot goes out and murders several thousand innocent people before anyone is able to stop it.
To what degree am I liable?
Murder? Unlikely. I pulled no trigger, I had no target, no motive.
Manslaughter? Possibly. If I drive a car while drunk, I am intentionally endangering people's lives, while not having any intention of killing anyone. However, I specifically design the robot so it will NOT recklessly endanger innocent lives. The robot just had other plans.
Negligence seems more likely. Gun manufacturers have been sued on this point I believe, even though the responsibility isn't really with them. The robot is a tool I created, and the robot went out and killed people. It very well could be said that I am responsible for it, regardless of what happens, since I created it and programmed it.
Lets take a slightly alternitive scenario. The ram inside the robot had a single bit error which caused the evolution (and this can somehow be proved). Can the company that creates the ram be held liable? I would think not. Yet again, its a crazy world we live in.
I have been playing around with wine and the latest releases work VERY well with office. Running word, you cannot tell you're not sitting on a windows box. Excel also works great with a few minor cosmetic problems. Powerpoint still needs a bit of work, but its getting REALLY close.
If wine becomes 100% effective for Office, then there may ben no real reason to hold out for a port, which probably won't occur anytime in the near future anyways.
BTW, this was tested with office 97, not 2k. I haven't tried it with 2k yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Several points made in the article give me the impression that the capabilities of the database are not as powerful as claimed.
:)
:) I'm also unsure how someone would "generate" the address of cardholders. That would be information contained in a database which would have to be "obtained". Its not information that is obtained within the number itself. As for "robbing" ATM machines. I'll give you 3 good ways to do it. Shouldersurf someone's PIN number, mug them, then drain their account, use a sledgehammer and blowtorch to extract the cash from the machine, or wait until someone draws some cash from it, and just steal it from them. I wouldn't consider any of these ways to be smart, but I certainly don't know of any other way to do it. Nor do I expect there to be any reliable information out there that would express such possibilities.
First are the statistics on pornography sites. Yes, most sites just harvest material from public sources and redistribute it. However, how exactly were they able to determine how many images are stored on membership pages? Porn sites are notoriously pay per view services. Useful statistics on the volume of data a porn site will hold will simply not be available unless memberships were purchased on every single site. I don't care if they said they dont' care how much it costs, I know for a fact they're not purchasing memberships on 20,000 porn sites each day.
How do they claim they can archive EVERY newsgroup on USENET? No newsserver serves EVERY newsgroup, as its a distributed network. Most of them offer 98% of the groups, but they'd be hard pressed to have EVERY single one of them.
Then there's the discussion about "hackers", followed immediately about information about bomb building, lock picking, and credit card numbers.
I'm also somewhat unsure what good a list of "unissued credit card numbers" would accomplish. If its unissued, then its useless, right? IT WON'T WORK. Here's an unissued credit card number: 4204 4502 5092 2942
There. I GUARANTEE you that NOBODY has this number. Its "unissued". Now I'm a hacker! Oh goody!
How is steganography considered to be the 3rd biggest threat? According to this article, its more dangerous than nuclear weapons. All it is is a form of encryption. I suppose if I can't read a message of yours its less dangerous than if I CAN read a message, but it turns out to be the wrong message. forget the fact that I shouldn't be reading your messages anyways. If someone wanted to send a message detailing an assassination attempt, its unlikely anyone would obtain it until after the deed had been attempted.
Now.. lets examine some lines of FUD:
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs, notes Whitelaw.
Security experts are seriously worried about the threat of attacks on airport flight management computers, power systems, and hospital equipment, let alone stock markets such as Nasdaq.
Anyone notice a pattern here? Sounds like this is the same techniques that antivirus vendors spew out in an attempt to get people to buy their products. Your computers are just CRAWLING with viruses and you'll most likely die if you don't use our product. True, the above lines were a tad more subtle, but the issue is the same.
oh well.. something to think about
-Restil
I would rather companies that are intent on keeping their technology secret make it harder (physically) to extract rather than resorting to legal tactics. I personally believe that everyone has the right to reverse engineer anything they want to, but nobody said that the company creating the product has to make it easy.
There is a drawback though. The more complex the circutry becomes, the harder it will be to debug problems in the circuits and this will lead to longer production cycles which will give the feared competition a leg up anyways. Always a tradeoff.
-Restil
What The World Really Needs is a $250 firewall box that runs Linux
This reminds me of something. I was at the First Saturday sidewalk sale in Dallas the previous weekend and two guys approached me trying to peddle their firewall system which would *gasp* allow me to run more than one computer off my high speed internet connection. For a very brief moment I was amazed by such a possibility, until I remembered that I was already doing this.
But wait, THEIR firewall might be far superiour to mine, so I should probably review their product before dismissing it outright. Reading over the single sheet brochure they provided me, the first thing I noticed was that it would support up to 10 computers. This was the first hurdle. I informed them that I am currently running 12 computers on my network, so their product would limit me in that regard.
But no fear, they told me that it would most likely handle more than 10 computers on a network, but the average consumer never used that many on a home network, so it didn't make sense to test it for more than that. Well, I suppose he had a point, except that the "average consumer" usually doesn't do their computer shopping at parking lots in downtown Dallas at 1 in the morning from people who are selling used computer equipment off the back of their trucks. But I digress.
So I questioned further, in case there were features which I hadn't discovered yet that I absolutely needed. I asked how many internet ip addresses I could get. 1
ONE
Not 16 like I have now, but ONE. I ran some figures through my head, trying to figure out how I could run all my servers off of a single ip address. Ah HA. the solution, its so simple. IPCHAINS supports port forwarding. No problem. But wait. Problem. Their firewall doesn't. Well, it might, but the ever vigilant salesmen weren't aware of that feature.
At this point I was really grasping for straws, trying to find any reason why I should just dismiss them like AOL'ers who were trying to convince a guy with a T3 that he should switch to AOL with a dialup because its a better internet. No, I don't have a T3, I was just attempting to be funny. Feel free not to laugh, I don't care.
Ok. I thought proudly of my linux box at home with its two network cards that does everything and then some that their box does. Cost me $30 my box did, and that included both PCI network cards. But here's the kicker. I had to put my system together myself. I had to install the operating system. I had to configure ipfwadm (still using 2.0.35) ALL BY MYSELF WITH NO HELP FROM ANYONE (unless you consider reading man pages and howto's to be help).
They, however, install the product FOR YOU, so you don't have to do it. I'm sure they charge a fair price for the trouble, however, I didn't ask. I might have laughed too loudly, and milk might have come out of my nose, and that would just be too embarrasing.
Ok.. Just in an attempt to stay on topic... I was referring to the price of the firewall. It wouldn't need to cost $250 unless it was EXTREMELY tiny and didn't use a standard MB. I suppose that would be worth something, but I don't personally find space to be much of an issue.
-Restil
You said it yourself, games drive the hardware. The only problem with games is, they're all the same nowadays, and I don't really feel like playing 100 different games that more or less resemble quake.
:)
Whats truely sad about all this is that I am a gamer in heart. I grew up playing games. When I was younger, the one thing I wanted to do when I got older was to be a game programmer. I spent many MANY long days learning programming for the sole purpose of following this dream.
Now I want practically nothing to do with it. Perhaps others feel the same way. We WOULD keep upgrading if our need for the latest and greatest was more focused. I, however, at this point spend a lot of time scavenging. Low end pentium systems are practically being given away now and they have quite a bit of life in them as linux systems. I've got my whole house populated with workstations for less than the cost of one new computer.
About the only reason I'd consider a system over 200 mhz would be for playback of the more processor intensive video clips (divx, etc), however since there isn't linux support for them yet, and since mpeg's work just fine under linux.
There.. I just talked myself out of an upgrade yet again. The economy as we know it will collapse in upon itself now. You can all blame me.
-Restil
"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that
somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their
heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody
else's life."
Perhaps you should read that again. It has nothing to do with the internet, it has to do with the responsibility of people. The point being, if children were raised properly, and supervised properly while they were in their formitive years, the internet wouldn't turn a child's heart dark, nor would anything else.
However, when the internet is used as a babysitter for children who's parents aren't interested in making the time to actually raise them, then the chances are increasingly good they're going to turn out screwed up, whether its the internet that does it, TV, gangs, or whatever else the current media crisis is.
-Restil
I won't use napster now for free as it doesn't provide a service I require. But thats just me.
-Restil
Because IRC has encryption support does not mean that the network will be drawn to its knees. Fact of the matter, most people probably won't even use it. And thats ok. Many conversations don't need to be encrypted, but it would be nice to have the option available if I wanted it.
Encrypted options will probably only be used by about 5% of the users, so there won't be any significant toll on the network.
-Restil
I know this might seem extreme. I haven't had any problems with my ISP before, but I've had problems with other companies (internet based ones included) that "misplaced" checks or forgot that I paid the bill or whatnot. Of course, it may take a month just to get a canceled check back, and even then, you still gotta fuss with them.
:)
I have become somewhat pragmatic in my approach. I quit using checks alltogether (and credit cards for the same reason). Instead, I spend 2 hours once a month paying all my bills. I simply drive to the business establishments and pay my bills locally in cash and get a receipt.
I however am lucky that I am within driving distance of everywhere I need to pay bills to. This might not be the case for everyone, but most places the option is available to you.
Once you have a written reciept in hand, usually signed by someone at the company, a person who physically took the cash from you, its REALLY easy to dispute claims that you haven't paid your bill, especially when you have the ability to go walk in there yourself. Difficult to put someone on hold when they're standing in front of you.
I use one ISP for my actual connection. I use another for the newsserver account. I had paid in person (with money order) for a year's subscription, and had gotten a signed receipt for the transaction. I had previously paid for this service with bank drafts, but had closed that account due to excessive balance problems.
Anyways, a few days later I get an email claiming that I had not paid for the account yet, and that their attempts to draft my bank had failed (for obvious reasons). Of course, having the reciept in hand, I simply wrote them a terse reply informing them that I had paid the bill already and had subtly implied that their attempts to draft my bank without my permission bordered on attempted theft.
They promptly apologized and went away.
-Restil
Server logs can tell you a variety of things, but I don't necessarily think they're useful for marketing purposes except for the owner of the server, and not so much for advertising. I run a small site that gets about 100 unique visitors a day and about 25 regulars. Using the logs and parseing out the data, I can determine that almost all of the people who visit my site stick around for a little while, but don't come back later. At least, thats what the logs say. I can also see the referring site, which tells me where any advertising should be focused on, as well as if someone actually clicked on a link or entered the URL straight (or from bookmarks) which would indicate if a user has visited before. Of course, any user using a dialup connection will probably have a different host/ip the next time they visit, and the logs will still show them as a separate user. AOL's proxy is especially bad as the host will change EVERY TIME the user makes another hit on the site, which makes it very difficult to track. Cookies and user accounts would be much more useful to determine exactly how many visitors you have and how many of them visit frequently. However, I still believe that this information really is only useful to the server operator and not to someone looking to advertise on the site. Marketing as it stands should probably be a trial and error operation. Spend some money and see what happens. When I ran a business several years ago I tried advertising in a variety of different places. Ads for computer sales got practically no response from a computer magazine but got a LOT of response from a simple 4 line classified ad in the newspaper. Sometimes you just have to throw some money around and see what you get back. Yes, there is some risk, and yes, you will probably lose some money before finding a medium that works well for you, but thats the name of the game. -Restil
Haven't you ever heard of hobbies? Those are the sorts of things people do during their free time because they enjoy them. Some of us may enjoy reading slashdot over and over and over again. Or hacking the linux kernel, or coding a new GUI, or playing quake, or designing a new e-theme, or even *gasp* spending time OFF of the computer for a while.
:)
This guy decided to convert an old Atari system to a portable unit. Nothing he did by doing this caused me any direct or indirect grief, so I can't possibly think of any reason why he shouldn't do it.
Others may say he's wasting his talent on a useless project. Certainly, the potential use for a portable game system that is 20 years old might be limited, but all effort put towards these types of projects is experience toward other types of projects. This is a person who thinks up neat things. The next neat thing he thinks up and builds might a revolutionary PDA which nobody will consider wasted talent.
I'm sure he's quite content with his life the way it is.
-Restil
And the reason they were willing to to even consider them in the first place was because they forgot to send a "group photo". :)
Also, they were not accepted because everyone got stoned, but because they stood up for themselves, plotted, and executed revenge against the bullies on campus.
-Restil
I dont' recall saying he was a friend. :)
-Restil
That is only part of the way it works.
Sites are grouped into categories known as Authorities and hubs. A hub points to lots of different pages (yahoo for instance). An authority has lots of different places pointing to it.
Where the ranking comes into play is dependant on how good the hub or authority is. A hub is good (better than others) if it points to a number of good authorities. Likewise, an authority is good if it is linked to by a number of good hubs. Yes, this is a recursive process, and yes, it takes a number of passes to get the ranking to level out.
If a pr0n site wanted to exploit google to get a higher ranking, they would first need to create a LOT of dummy sites to link to it, and all those dummy sites would need to be found by google's robot.
However, just having a large number of dummy sites linking to the pr0n site is not sufficent. Those dummy sites would also have to link to a large number of other GOOD authority sites (on pr0n or whatever).
Now, throw another wrench into the works. Google doesn't search only on keywords ON the site itself, but on the sites that refer to it, and the other way around. Thats why if you search for "more evil than satan himself" you end up with microsoft as a prominant result, even though the words evil and satan probably don't appear anywhere on microsoft's website (although maybe they should).
This way, if you were searching for pages about a certain topic, but the pages themselves don't actaully use the words you're looking for, you will still find that page as long as there are good hubs out there that refer to that page and use your search terms in close proximity to the links.
Now, if a hub points to a large number of authorities on a specific topic, words relevent to those topic will then become viable search terms to find the hub when searching, as the hub would also be a good source of information, even if it doesn't list the specific search terms. All of this affects the "ranking"
So, for a dummy hub to get a high ranking, it would need to point to a large number of high ranking authority pr0n sites (which would anti-productive when what you're trying to do is advertise your own site). This would raise the hub rating for certain terms (specific to pr0n sites), and therefore raise the bar on the site you're trying to promote.
Of course, trying to get a pr0n site to come up on a search for "teen" or even "sex" is not easy because while a pr0n site is generally fly by night, there are many legitamate sites which have been around for several years and have built themselves into the web structure well and therefore get catagorized correctly.
-Restil
Just for kicks.....
:)
An mp3 encoded at 128kbps for the 1000 year song
would be 526 terabytes. This may seem large now, but I would imagine that by the time the song is done recording, hundreds of terabytes will be considered inadaquate to hold even the most simple microsoft application.
For those of you burning that on CDs, thats approximately 809170 CDs. This is a pile of CD's that would stack about a mile and a half.
If the RIAA has sued everyone into oblivion and is still using regular CD audio at the time (this is not all that unreasonable) and they intend to sell each CD for $15 apiece.....
That would be 9710040 CDs for a grand total of $145,650,600.
Assuming a 2% annual inflation rate, in today's dollars that would be 36 cents. Not bad for a song thats 1000 years long.
oh well. Time to go to bed now.
-Restil
I have some issues with my.mp3.com, napster and the like. Maybe they're legal, and maybe they're not. But the simple fact is, if they ARE legal, they're walking a very fine line and you WILL invite lawsuits, and being so close to the edge, it doesnt' take much more than a simple personal opinion to rule one way or the other. And the consequences are so dire if you lose.
The biggest problem with these lawsuits are that they're setting precedent. They're establishing that what was once perhaps on the edge of legality, has now crossed over and will start bring other less questionable activities into the spotlight.
Imagine if napster loses. We will now have a precedent that trading copyrighted music is illegal, or maybe just music by certain companies. Who knows, but now someone will get an itch and go after people running gnutella servers. Since gnutella doesn't run a centralized server, anyone who searches for a song will go through MANY servers to find it, each server passing the information along. It could potentially be stated that EACH of those servers, even those not serving anything, are equivalant in scope to napster. Someday
someone will set up shop on a university network with a packetsniffer, bust hundreds of people, and make an example out of them.
We don't want this to drift into generic file trading as well. Because you can trade files other than mp3's on gnutella and if gnutella is declared illegal, where will they go next?
-Restil
Origin you mean.
Ultima Underworld's engine was the equivalent of the doom engine with the ability to look up and down. It ran decently on a 386, but only half the screen was used for the display.
-Restil
This may be a bit off topic, but it does fall into the windows vs. linux debate as far as ease of use is considered.
An aquantaince of mine is starting an online e-commerce site and decided to use win2k over linux since "its a naturally graphical envionment and therefore he can use it, whereas he simply CAN'T use anything with a text interface". Of course, linux has GUI capabilities, but lets assume for a moment that it didn't.
For an entire month, he spent every spare waking moment trying to get several e-commerce packages working on win2k, spending many hundreds of dollars in the process and spending many hours on phone with tech support. He even got so desparate he came to my house and banged on my door at 3 am screaming for help because he couldn't get it working (I couldn't either for that matter, but I wasnt' foolish enough to spend a month trying).
What I find somewhat depressing in this regard is he had also obtained a linux based e-commerce package, managed to install redhat all by himself and install the software and get it working without ANY problems, but chose instead to run win2k because he didn't know enough about linux and didn't want to spend the time learning it.
I find it quite humorous that he could have learned quite a lot in those 30 days. I really think this is the mentality that pervades many people in a position to choose between the two.
Pity.
-Restil
Don't they have anything better to do?
Obviously not.
Tis a shame that one downside of the internet is that the average lamer is protected from what would get him beaten to a pulp in real life by the same actions.
Whats truely sad is, when I was the age that most of these idiots probably are, I don't recall knowing anyone that would need to resort to such action to entertain their pathetic lives. Those of us who didn't fit in generally found other more rewarding activities to participate in. Trolling certainly wasn't among them.
-Restil
Remember though, if more companies develop under the open source philosophy, then IP becomes a moot point. We don't care who you are or what you know, we just need your computers.
Even if they are paranoid, eventually they're going to release something. By then, if someone has gone to the trouble of taping together the shreaded document, it'll be too late to do much about it.
If such a system was used for weather forcasting, by the time any useful information could be extracted from the bits and pieces the information would be days past its usefulness.
In general, distributed networking will come in handy for someone who needs LOTS of cpu cycles VERY quickly for a VERY short period of time. Other options exist if they have several months to work on it.
-Restil
This brings up something I hadn't thought of. If paying for distributed CPU cycles becomes the norm, and every appliance you ever buy eventually has a powerful computer+internet connection, you could feasibly get those appliances for free.
:)
Imagine walking into your average Best Buy and EVERY applince there is free. Buy(for free) whatever you want, the only condition is that you hook it up and use it. The internet connection will be free and you will never notice the use of the appliance as the computer inside it is horribly wasted anyways.
No down payment, no monthly fees, all electricity, phone bills, and internet bills paid for. Just make sure its hooked up.
This sure would keep the economists shaking their heads in agony.
-Restil
From about 10 to 3 years ago, I had a cell phone, pager, and I wandered the earth content that someone could always reach me, and I could always call them right back from the comfort of whereever I happened to be at the time. Cell phones were, while not rare, hadn't exactly diluted into the peon class yet.
Now everyone, and I mean EVERYONE has a cell phone, and a pager, and all of them have tons of nifty options and cost practically nothing, and gosh by golly its just so damn cool.
I don't have one anymore. Or a pager. I've come to somewhat despise the fact that more people seem to have cell phones these days than watches.
I've come to learn that I don't NEED to be reached when I'm out shopping for 30 minutes. Nothing really seems to be THAT important. More importantly, I don't usually WANT to be reached when I'm not working. Thats MY time people. If you need me for something, just send me an email. Just as easy as a phone call, and I'll get to it when I have some time to kill.
When I first got a cell phone, I used it primarily for business related reasons, and the ocassional 30 second "hey I'll be home at 5" kind of deal. Sometime when you're bored, find someone talking on a cell phone (shouldn't be too hard) and eavesdrop. 9 times out of 10, they're probably in the middle of a 30 minute conversation about pointless gossip that really wasn't so cruicial that it needed to be discussed while the cell phone customer was picking out maxi pads in the grocery store (I would recommend hanging out in a different aisle tho)
Remember when cell phones didn't have a "style"? They were built the way they were to be the most space efficient. Now they're designer brands.
In any event, I've been without a cell phone for 2 years now. in all that time, I can't recall any time where it would have come in handy.
-Restil
Ok.. Now linking is illegal if the subject matter being linked to is illegal or if the subject being linked doesn't want to be linked to.
:)
Here's what you do.
Grab a large number of domains. Set up numerous webservers with all the domains. Set up LOTS of webpages. LOTS of them. Get lots of geocities accounts and accounts on every free webserver you can. Set up numerous pages on all these sites and make sure you have a lot of links to them that will be discovered and followed. Don't forget copyright notices on each page that linking to these sites is expressely prohibited and copying of the material on any of these pages is expressely prohibited.
Then wait a few months so the search engines will find all of them.
Now go on google and find your pages being linked, along with *gasp* a COPY OF YOUR PAGE HOSTED ON GOOGLE!!!! (cached pages in case you don't get it)
Find this extremely revolting and have a laywer draw up a form letter for you to send ceise and desist orders for EACH page in violation. Dont' forget the other search engines as well, as they're also illegally linking to you.
Wait a few days, or however many days you gave the engines to remove those links. Check all of them again. If any of them are still there, then they have willfully defied your order and you are now justified in suing for excessive damages.
And precedent has already been set to allow this. It no longer seems so horribly silly anymore.
But the judge in that case might actually have some degree of common sense and realize that the search engines can't be held responsible for every link on their site. This will have the effect of creating a precedent where linking IS permitted, even against the wishes of those who do not want it.
Of course, someone else will have to do this. I don't have the time.
-Restil
Linux, and the utilities that accompany it have been almost completely developed based solely on the selfish needs or desires of the various developers. The developers were coding projects that scratched their own personal itch. What made these projects so damn useful to the rest of the world was the fact that the projects were opened to the rest of us to do with as we please.
Certainly, some things are developed for the issue of inflating the ego of the programmer, so be it.
Talent is not a community property. The owner of that talent may do with it what he or she wishes.
-Restil
Just an intersting legal challenge.
I design a robot that has a feature which is designed to kill (a pistol such as this has).
I design an AI for this robot and assign certain guidelines by which it must follow. The AI is programmed to evolve.
One of the guidelines is that the robot cannot kill innocent people.
The AI evolves and develops the ability to circumvent its guideline and kill innocent people.
The robot goes out and murders several thousand innocent people before anyone is able to stop it.
To what degree am I liable?
Murder? Unlikely. I pulled no trigger, I had no target, no motive.
Manslaughter? Possibly. If I drive a car while drunk, I am intentionally endangering people's lives, while not having any intention of killing anyone. However, I specifically design the robot so it will NOT recklessly endanger innocent lives. The robot just had other plans.
Negligence seems more likely. Gun manufacturers have been sued on this point I believe, even though the responsibility isn't really with them. The robot is a tool I created, and the robot went out and killed people. It very well could be said that I am responsible for it, regardless of what happens, since I created it and programmed it.
Lets take a slightly alternitive scenario. The ram inside the robot had a single bit error which caused the evolution (and this can somehow be proved). Can the company that creates the ram be held liable? I would think not. Yet again, its a crazy world we live in.
With that thought... I go to bed. Later.
-Restil
I have been playing around with wine and the latest releases work VERY well with office. Running word, you cannot tell you're not sitting on a windows box. Excel also works great with a few minor cosmetic problems. Powerpoint still needs a bit of work, but its getting REALLY close.
If wine becomes 100% effective for Office, then there may ben no real reason to hold out for a port, which probably won't occur anytime in the near future anyways.
BTW, this was tested with office 97, not 2k. I haven't tried it with 2k yet.
-Restil