A 4 TB slowish seagate hard disk can be had for about $160ish if you look around. Five of them are $750. An inexpensive bod tower such as a TowerRAID 4 Bay eSATA RAID runs about $150. Get two of them.
Total cost is around $1100 and the solution is expandable .
>. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities
Oh really? So you know *all* the principle entities of Mt. Gox? You know just where they were storing/investing that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ? You know the names of the independent accounting agency that oversaw that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ?
You know none of that and very little else.
Why who ever would have thought that when you give have a f!@kig BILLION dollars to a more than less anonymous source(s) by anonymous means and with no oversight - why who every would have thought that maybe - just maybe - someone would be tempted to just walk the hell away with Half a BILLION??
You know who didn't think that way? Some chump wanna-be geeks with too much disposable income and too little common sense.
>What gives you the right to say 'Bitcoin was designed as a vehicle to steal' ?
I'm guessing that it has something to do with the fact that you are giving your hard-earned money to an unknown source to be looked over by unknown people by unknown means???
Hey but that's just me - please feel free to send me any extra money that you have and I'll be sure to protect it for you and even give you a return on your investment when the price goes up! Hey - whata deal
>If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected.
Not really. In our universe the smallest known particle (that we now know of) is (I think) a quark. Let's say that the programmers live in a universe which is more "information dense" and thus has a pleathora of smaller particles than quarks (really I think this must be pretty much a requirement for a parent universe - one in which the programmers live). So now the programmers have several orders of magnitude (or perhaps many more) of possible storage which they can use to simulate every particle we can perceive or be affected by. Let's say that the simulation was designed to run for a million years and that we are the center of the simulation (certainty there must be a finite timeframe) then the parent universe "computing machine" only (heh) has to simulate quarks, photons, neutrinos - whatever in a million year volume of "our space". Thus the amount of memory needed in the parent universe is indeed finite and, if the parent universe were indeed more "information rich" than our own such a simulation certainkly would be in the relm of possibility for the beings living within it.
>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:
- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.
- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?
- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.
I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.
A couple of thoughts come to mind: one is what the nature of the simulation (if we accept the simulation argument for a moment ) tell us about the nature of the programmers? Certainly we know that, considering the tens of millions killed in our various recent world wars as well as the millions of innocent children who starve to death every year, that the whatever the "programmers" of our universe are, they have no more consideration for us as we would for various cultures of bacteria killed off to test a new antibiotic. I wonder what else we could infer about the "programmers" simply by observing our own world.
Secondly I wonder if it would be somehow possible for the beings inside the simulation to "hack" the simulation itself somewhat how a computer virus in our machines can cause unexpected/unwanted/unplanned for behaviors in our computer systems. What would you have to do to corrupt and possibly take over the program running the simulation of our universe?
Even were we to imagine some technology and technology advanced civilization capable of simulating an entire world, the minds within them, and anything that such minds can perceive and be affected by (i.e. we can perceive and be affected by atoms, electrons, quarks, etc but we can not perceive or be affected by an atom or particle say 100 million light years away) - even if we postulate such an enormous computing capacity - the capacity has to be finite. Even were the "computer" running the simulation the size of a world or a star or a galaxy, it is still a finite thing. Thus the simulation (the amount of our universe which we can perceive) must be "digitized" somehow - it can not go on forever and must break down at extremely small scales. So there must be a smallest "distance" or "time unit" and things like that in the universe in which we live. If we lived in a universe where the physics was "analog" or "fractal" (for want of a better word) where regardless of how small a time period we look at (or a distance or an energy unit) there can always be something smaller this would entirely disprove the simulation(I think) theory as the capacity of the computing machine needed to create such a universe would be infinite leaving no room for the "programmers". In our universe we do live with a physics which has smallest possible units of distance, time and energy which does not prove or disprove the simulation theory but does give one something to think about.
FWIW - I actually come here to read the stories. I find most of the comments these past 5 years or so to be not usually worth the effort:( I have always come here for interesting tech news however the past several years have seen me come a LOT less often due to the deteriorating quality of the main page submissions as well as the lack of insight in the majority of the comments.
What they gave you - believe it or not - was Ibuprofen IV. Morphine will not take away the pain of kidney stones (it's that bad!) but massive ibuprofen takes the pain away in a really short time. Been there done (and screamed) that.
.... with far too much time on their hands and far too little psychological stability to completely ruin a forum for thousands. I think many, if not most of us, have seen that happen - one bad apple and all that. Add in the social media awareness of P.R. firms (or special interest groups) who will hire paid commenters to astro-turf a particular point of view and you have a recipe for mass incommunication.
I welcome restrictions on who can comment and what someone can say such that we raise the signal to noise ratio and tone down the inanity, the crazy and the spam. I think we have left the era of unrestricted speech in much the same way that we once left the era of unrestricted radio communications. Just as we once started licensing in order to make use of the airwaves for everyone, we now have to monitor and moderate in such as way so as outlandish ideas ideas will not be restricted but outlandish people will be.
The above is the best, most easily implemented and workable solution of any of the responses that I have seen so far. I've done the above myself and it works extremely well. It generally takes only a few hours to port over and it all can be done online. I highly recommend that you implement this as the solution.
I have to agree with the above. Put your communications skills to work and go to the manager who told you this and politely ask for some concrete things you can do to improve as well as some past examples of where he believes you went wrong. Slashdot isn't going to (can't) help you with those things.
If in the hopefully unlikely chance your manager is not able to provide concrete examples of mistakes and ways to improve then you are being screwed over and that last "criticism" was actually a heads up for you that your next performance review and eventually your job is in jeopardy (been there and got the pink slip) . In such a case start networking around the company and see if you land a position with a different manager asap.
I agree. The problem is NOT that someone is DDOSing you. The problem is that you have "diagnosed" an occasionally slow internet connection as a DDOS attack without any expertise in the area to make such a determination. This is akin to so many of my clients telling me that they have a virus because their computer is running slow (when it almost inevitably turns out to be something else).
At any rate what you need to know is that you will NEVER be able to properly diagnose the issue on a venue like/. The medium just does not lend itself to that.
What you need to do is hire a good consultant with networking experience to go over your system and correctly diagnose what the problem is. Yes it will cost you a couple hundred dollars to do that. Or you could live with the problem if it isn't worth that much money to you. Those are really your only sensible choices.
I must also add - one should question why none of the literally tens of thousands of users during the four month Beta fell ill to the mysterious IOS7 induced "nausea". This "illness" only appeared shortly after the product was actually released.
The "IOS 7 is making me sick" campaign is a brilliant example of social advertising engineering by a competitor. I began seeing the "sick" posts in various Apple related forums about a week ago and noticed them immediately because of their unusual (imho) wording. Now it's gone to/. and the Guardian apparently. Bravo M$oft or Samsung (or whomever) ! Someone in marketing should get a raise for this.
In the meantime, no Guardian reporter (or anyone else it appears) appears to question why IOS 7 is apparently responsible for a rash of nausea yet we have no epidemic of people vomiting while playing video games.
It's probably true that "IT is not a revenue generator" per se. On the other hand it's pretty damn hard to generate revenue these days without spreadsheets, accounting systems, printers, a LAN, email....
My thoughts exactly! The person doing the interviewing has essentially zero interview skills - this is the very first/. video that I have ever watched. From the lack of quality content it likely will be my last. An extremely fascinating guest completely wasted by a high-school level interviewer.
...because personally I would have given up after reading half of the utterly useless comments here.
This is what you need to do and it will work: Find a highly reputable P.R. firm that deals with SEO. I'm not talking about the kind of SEO "specialist" that you find on Craigslist - I'm talking about the kind that handles Fortune 500 businesses. The P.R. firm will begin creating sensible blogs in your name having something to do with an interest of yours or possibly a business. The will create Facebook pages, Google+ pages, Twitter tweets as well. The P.R. firm will also create articles about you and/or your business which will appear on a variety of small sites . The will link everything together through a variety of sites that they own. The Blogs and P.R. releases and everything else will change the page rank so that your good press will appear way above the bad foreign sites that concern you.
All the above will probably cost you between 5 and 10K at the very least but it will solve the problem. You will have to decide if the expense is justified - you could well consider it a tax deductible expense if the P.R. company concentrates on a business of yours.
A related note. - in the heyday of Slashdot what I suggested would have been one of the very first comments and the most highly rated. It speaks to where the readership has fallen to today that you have had to sift through dozens of useless comments talking about lawsuits, freedom of speech , trademarking your name (wtf!) and even a couple of misogynists raging about "teh wimmen":(
That guy in china you referred to who stabbed 20 people..... all of them survived. Sadly not so much Lanza'a gun assault. Guns ARE the problem. No one "needs" and AR-15 semi except police, military and mass murderers.
1. Lack of an actual vehicle to take 10 people let alone 80K people to Mars
2. Lack of a support infrastructure to support 80K people on Mars
3. Lack of any actual technology to extract air water and food for 80K people on mars.
However I am sure that Mr. Musk will have all the above minor nits worked out in the next 11 years by which time he'll be recruiting for the Tau Ceti mission no doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
A 4 TB slowish seagate hard disk can be had for about $160ish if you look around. Five of them are $750. An inexpensive bod tower such as a TowerRAID 4 Bay eSATA RAID runs about $150. Get two of them.
Total cost is around $1100 and the solution is expandable .
>. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities
Oh really? So you know *all* the principle entities of Mt. Gox? You know just where they were storing/investing that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ? You know the names of the independent accounting agency that oversaw that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ?
You know none of that and very little else.
Why who ever would have thought that when you give have a f!@kig BILLION dollars to a more than less anonymous source(s) by anonymous means and with no oversight - why who every would have thought that maybe - just maybe - someone would be tempted to just walk the hell away with Half a BILLION??
You know who didn't think that way? Some chump wanna-be geeks with too much disposable income and too little common sense.
>What gives you the right to say 'Bitcoin was designed as a vehicle to steal' ?
I'm guessing that it has something to do with the fact that you are giving your hard-earned money to an unknown source to be looked over by unknown people by unknown means???
Hey but that's just me - please feel free to send me any extra money that you have and I'll be sure to protect it for you and even give you a return on your investment when the price goes up! Hey - whata deal
>Another indication that we are in a simulation is that quantum physics shows us that wave functions collapse when we observe them....
I just wanted to say that whole paragraph was frankly brilliant. Especially the part about the side-channel attack via observer effects.
>If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected.
Not really. In our universe the smallest known particle (that we now know of) is (I think) a quark. Let's say that the programmers live in a universe which is more "information dense" and thus has a pleathora of smaller particles than quarks (really I think this must be pretty much a requirement for a parent universe - one in which the programmers live). So now the programmers have several orders of magnitude (or perhaps many more) of possible storage which they can use to simulate every particle we can perceive or be affected by. Let's say that the simulation was designed to run for a million years and that we are the center of the simulation (certainty there must be a finite timeframe) then the parent universe "computing machine" only (heh) has to simulate quarks, photons, neutrinos - whatever in a million year volume of "our space". Thus the amount of memory needed in the parent universe is indeed finite and, if the parent universe were indeed more "information rich" than our own such a simulation certainkly would be in the relm of possibility for the beings living within it.
>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:
- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.
- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?
- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.
I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.
A couple of thoughts come to mind: one is what the nature of the simulation (if we accept the simulation argument for a moment ) tell us about the nature of the programmers? Certainly we know that, considering the tens of millions killed in our various recent world wars as well as the millions of innocent children who starve to death every year, that the whatever the "programmers" of our universe are, they have no more consideration for us as we would for various cultures of bacteria killed off to test a new antibiotic. I wonder what else we could infer about the "programmers" simply by observing our own world.
Secondly I wonder if it would be somehow possible for the beings inside the simulation to "hack" the simulation itself somewhat how a computer virus in our machines can cause unexpected/unwanted/unplanned for behaviors in our computer systems. What would you have to do to corrupt and possibly take over the program running the simulation of our universe?
Even were we to imagine some technology and technology advanced civilization capable of simulating an entire world, the minds within them, and anything that such minds can perceive and be affected by (i.e. we can perceive and be affected by atoms, electrons, quarks, etc but we can not perceive or be affected by an atom or particle say 100 million light years away) - even if we postulate such an enormous computing capacity - the capacity has to be finite. Even were the "computer" running the simulation the size of a world or a star or a galaxy, it is still a finite thing. Thus the simulation (the amount of our universe which we can perceive) must be "digitized" somehow - it can not go on forever and must break down at extremely small scales. So there must be a smallest "distance" or "time unit" and things like that in the universe in which we live. If we lived in a universe where the physics was "analog" or "fractal" (for want of a better word) where regardless of how small a time period we look at (or a distance or an energy unit) there can always be something smaller this would entirely disprove the simulation(I think) theory as the capacity of the computing machine needed to create such a universe would be infinite leaving no room for the "programmers". In our universe we do live with a physics which has smallest possible units of distance, time and energy which does not prove or disprove the simulation theory but does give one something to think about.
FWIW - I actually come here to read the stories. I find most of the comments these past 5 years or so to be not usually worth the effort :(
I have always come here for interesting tech news however the past several years have seen me come a LOT less often due to the deteriorating quality of the main page submissions as well as the lack of insight in the majority of the comments.
What they gave you - believe it or not - was Ibuprofen IV. Morphine will not take away the pain of kidney stones (it's that bad!) but massive ibuprofen takes the pain away in a really short time. Been there done (and screamed) that.
Penn and teller are most definitely NOT a reputable source. They are an "infotainment" show.
.... with far too much time on their hands and far too little psychological stability to completely ruin a forum for thousands. I think many, if not most of us, have seen that happen - one bad apple and all that. Add in the social media awareness of P.R. firms (or special interest groups) who will hire paid commenters to astro-turf a particular point of view and you have a recipe for mass incommunication.
I welcome restrictions on who can comment and what someone can say such that we raise the signal to noise ratio and tone down the inanity, the crazy and the spam. I think we have left the era of unrestricted speech in much the same way that we once left the era of unrestricted radio communications. Just as we once started licensing in order to make use of the airwaves for everyone, we now have to monitor and moderate in such as way so as outlandish ideas ideas will not be restricted but outlandish people will be.
The above is the best, most easily implemented and workable solution of any of the responses that I have seen so far. I've done the above myself and it works extremely well. It generally takes only a few hours to port over and it all can be done online. I highly recommend that you implement this as the solution.
I have to agree with the above. Put your communications skills to work and go to the manager who told you this and politely ask for some concrete things you can do to improve as well as some past examples of where he believes you went wrong. Slashdot isn't going to (can't) help you with those things.
If in the hopefully unlikely chance your manager is not able to provide concrete examples of mistakes and ways to improve then you are being screwed over and that last "criticism" was actually a heads up for you that your next performance review and eventually your job is in jeopardy (been there and got the pink slip) . In such a case start networking around the company and see if you land a position with a different manager asap.
I agree.
/. The medium just does not lend itself to that.
The problem is NOT that someone is DDOSing you.
The problem is that you have "diagnosed" an occasionally slow internet connection as a DDOS attack without any expertise in the area to make such a determination.
This is akin to so many of my clients telling me that they have a virus because their computer is running slow (when it almost inevitably turns out to be something else).
At any rate what you need to know is that you will NEVER be able to properly diagnose the issue on a venue like
What you need to do is hire a good consultant with networking experience to go over your system and correctly diagnose what the problem is. Yes it will cost you a couple hundred dollars to do that. Or you could live with the problem if it isn't worth that much money to you. Those are really your only sensible choices.
I must also add - one should question why none of the literally tens of thousands of users during the four month Beta fell ill to the mysterious IOS7 induced "nausea". This "illness" only appeared shortly after the product was actually released.
The "IOS 7 is making me sick" campaign is a brilliant example of social advertising engineering by a competitor. I began seeing the "sick" posts in various Apple related forums about a week ago and noticed them immediately because of their unusual (imho) wording. Now it's gone to /. and the Guardian apparently. Bravo M$oft or Samsung (or whomever) ! Someone in marketing should get a raise for this.
In the meantime, no Guardian reporter (or anyone else it appears) appears to question why IOS 7 is apparently responsible for a rash of nausea yet we have no epidemic of people vomiting while playing video games.
It's probably true that "IT is not a revenue generator" per se. ....
On the other hand it's pretty damn hard to generate revenue these days without spreadsheets, accounting systems, printers, a LAN, email
My thoughts exactly! The person doing the interviewing has essentially zero interview skills - this is the very first /. video that I have ever watched. From the lack of quality content it likely will be my last. An extremely fascinating guest completely wasted by a high-school level interviewer.
Alpine
...because personally I would have given up after reading half of the utterly useless comments here.
:(
This is what you need to do and it will work:
Find a highly reputable P.R. firm that deals with SEO. I'm not talking about the kind of SEO "specialist" that you find on Craigslist - I'm talking about the kind that handles Fortune 500 businesses. The P.R. firm will begin creating sensible blogs in your name having something to do with an interest of yours or possibly a business. The will create Facebook pages, Google+ pages, Twitter tweets as well. The P.R. firm will also create articles about you and/or your business which will appear on a variety of small sites . The will link everything together through a variety of sites that they own. The Blogs and P.R. releases and everything else will change the page rank so that your good press will appear way above the bad foreign sites that concern you.
All the above will probably cost you between 5 and 10K at the very least but it will solve the problem. You will have to decide if the expense is justified - you could well consider it a tax deductible expense if the P.R. company concentrates on a business of yours.
A related note. - in the heyday of Slashdot what I suggested would have been one of the very first comments and the most highly rated. It speaks to where the readership has fallen to today that you have had to sift through dozens of useless comments talking about lawsuits, freedom of speech , trademarking your name (wtf!) and even a couple of misogynists raging about "teh wimmen"
"At 15 degrees Right Ascension, Tau Ceti is a little far off the solar system plane for an exploratory trip just now"
.... so YOU'RE the guy who came up with making the Kessel run in only 12 parsecs.
Ahhhh
Worst at-home tech support ever...
That guy in china you referred to who stabbed 20 people ..... all of them survived. Sadly not so much Lanza'a gun assault.
Guns ARE the problem. No one "needs" and AR-15 semi except police, military and mass murderers.
1. Lack of an actual vehicle to take 10 people let alone 80K people to Mars
2. Lack of a support infrastructure to support 80K people on Mars
3. Lack of any actual technology to extract air water and food for 80K people on mars.
However I am sure that Mr. Musk will have all the above minor nits worked out in the next 11 years by which time he'll be recruiting for the Tau Ceti mission no doubt.