Every so often you see a company succumb to consultantitis. It breaks out in a rash of consultants. Mostly they are management consultants from one of the Big 4, but every so often you might find yourself in a gig like this, bought in to make a technical decision that the MBAs don't feel qualified to make. One big clue you are in this situation is when native managers are being squeezed out to give offices to all the consultants.
First, any company that does this is on the way down. Make sure you get paid on time. You might give serious thought to shorting their stock too.
Second, the reason that consultantitis happens is that every management consultant will automatically include more work for himself and his colleagues in his recommendations if it looks halfway reasonable. They also inculcate a feeling of FUD amongst native management, who feel that they cannot make a decision unless it has been blessed by a an all-knowing consultant.
So if you find yourself in this situation scope out the local power structure carefully. The guy who is theoretically in charge of what you are doing may well be a puppet controlled by his consultant (think Grima Wormtongue).
Once you know who really takes the decisions you can act accordingly.
Good question. Reading between the lines of the Cambridge Display Technology web site, it seems that colour purity and stability have been the big stumbling blocks so far. CDT have demoed small displays in the past, but I don't know how stable they were.
Polymers tend to degrade with exposure to light, especially UV. In a display UV is not generally a problem but obviously light in general is.
I'd recommend IDE RAID over SCSI RAID. There are a number of hardware IDE RAID cards on the market, and it works out much cheaper.
Reasons why people prefer SCSI:
SCSI is built for hot swapping. But you can get IDE drive holders with the extra circuitry for not very much. (Beware: hot swap hardware does not imply hot swap software. But your RAID card should sort that out).
SCSI drives are better made (at least sometimes). But so what? These things are going in a RAID array. If one fails you pull it and plug in another. If this still bothers you then configure RAID 1 with 3-way duplication instead of 2-way. It will still be cheaper than SCSI, especially after you add in the cost of the replacement drive you have to keep on hand.
SCSI drives are faster. But IDE isn't that much behind. Again, you can configure 3 or 4 way striping for RAID 0 instead of just 2 way. This helps on data throughput but not latency.
Avoid cheap IDE RAID cards: they are often just conventional IDE cards with software RAID drivers. Take a look at the 3ware cards instead. And see if you can get Serial ATA cards and drives to cut down on the ribbon cables.
BTW, if you do the sums then you will find that the most cost effective backup solution per gigabyte for media only (never mind buying the tape streamer) is a collection of IDE drives.
A big part of the problem is that pseudo-science is reported in exactly the same way as real science. Once you take out the background detail and give it to a reader with vague memories of high school science there is nothing to distinguish, for example, healing cancer by radiotherapy and healing it by waving lumps of quartz around.
The solution is not to improve science reporting, its to stop pseudo-science reporting from masquerading as hard evidence. How? Perhaps there should be a legal presumption in factual reporting that readers are likely to trust what they are reading and act on it. Therefore journalists owe their readers a duty of care, and if they misreport the facts to the readers detriment (e.g. by praising some quack treatment) then they should be liable.
My advice (time travel jokes about Buy Microsoft apart):
Its bad now, and its going to carry on being bad for about the next two years. Then it gets better. And it carries on getting better. Hang in there kid.
PS, the trick with girls is Stop Trying Too Hard. But I don't think your ready to hear that yet.
The cards can only hold a maximum of $107, but the card readers probably don't have a limit.
Huh? It doesn't work like that. The readers are just communications devices. All the security is on the cards.
Its a bit like saying that on a mainframe system the security is in the mainframe not the terminals, so just crack the terminals. It doesn't make sense.
If they have an Tracking ID on the card, why don't they build a centralized database to keep track of card record?
Yup. At the very least each card will have a unique public key, and you can use that to track transactions made using that card.
For those who afraid being tracked, can have several cards in your hands
Again, yup. Of course they might require that individual cards be registered to an owner (for your security and convenience of course), in which case they can spot such things.
Which brings up Operation Ore, the FBI child-porn bust that yielded the thousands of credit card numbers that had been used to access a commercial child porn operation. Police forces around the world are still working their way through the list, and Visa are rumoured to have hundreds of thousands more numbers used to access other sites. Visa apparently has a pro-active operation to identify child porn sites that charge through Visa. Since they have hold of both ends of the string tying the two together is a trivial operation for them.
Since these cards can be used for e-commerce and similar fund transfers its likely that the law enforcement people are going to want to keep track of them. Operation Ore would not have been possible if the original website had been using anonymous cybercash in any form. Terrorism is also a likely target, although the logistics of moving tens of thousands of dollars (al-Qaida seems to have made typically $20,000 investment in proposed operations) in lumps of $100 is problematical. And of course there is drug dealing, although again the $100 limit seems a bit small for practical use.
But such controls are not a done deal. The law enforcers will want them, but the banking people may not because it means extra checks and data storage on something that they want to keep cheap and lightweight. Its like those pay-per-use cellphones: you can have a totally anonymous phone account just by paying cash. The phone companies could in theory demand to see ID before selling you one, but they really don't want the bother.
Hmmm. Betcha we will see such phones with interfaces to these cards. You can pay for the phone use with them, and then you can also transfer cash to a similarly equipped phone.
These things have been around for a while. They depend on two things:
1: Secure chip cards.
2: Public key cryptography. This post assumes you know the basic concepts.
IIRC the protocol works (roughly) like this.
Card 1 says "I am a genuine card. Here is my public key and a certificate for that key issued by the bank."
Card 2 says "I accept your certificate. I am also a genuine card. Here is my public key and certificate."
Card 1 says "I have decremented my cash register by $5. Please increment your cash register by $5. Signed: Card 1."
Card 2 says "OK."
This transfers $5 from card 1 to card 2.
Step 3 is the critical one. If that message gets lost then the $5 is lost as well. Of course a real protocol will include nonces and resends so that a single lost bit won't destroy your money.
This has applications beyond just replacing cash. People have been looking for a way of making small transactions over the net for years. These cards are potentially it. Plug a card reader into your USB port, put a similar one on a server somewhere, and you can purchase information off the server, paying by the page if you want. Conventional credit card transactions have high fixed costs. The costs on these cards are very low.
(Actually the server will probably have a PCI card with a high-speed, high-capacity version of the chip. But the principle is the same).
On security, PKC is the easy bit. Securing chip cards is much harder. If you can spoof a card into accepting messages from something other than a real card then you can forge money untraceably. To do this you either have to extract the private key from a card or find some other way to increment its cash register. Both of these need tamper-proof cards. The techniques for doing this are too many to go into here, but you need to worry about power supply signalling information about the processes going on in the cards, and random errors induced by putting the card in a microwave oven (no, I'm not kidding) giving information away too, in addition to raw physical attacks like stripping off the plastic and using very fine patch leads.
The biggest weakness is that any card is potentially an entry point to destabilise the entire system. I suspect this is the real reason for the $107 limit: cracking a single card would give you as an individual considerable wealth, but moving that wealth into the rest of the financial system by (e.g.) depositing it at a bank would show up in odd deposit patterns long before you could "forge" enough money to destabilise the economy. Also the individual who does this has every incentive to keep it quiet: not only has s/he committed a crime, but everyone in the know is a potential blackmailer.
Of course someone might find an easy crack and publish it. This is probably the worst case scenario. The only solution is to recall the cards and go back to cash until the problem can be sorted out. Again, the card limit helps put an upper limit on the cost of this.
Paul.
Re:What about ad-hoc cash transfers?
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
Many years ago (about 1994 to be precise) I got interested in doing microtransactions over the Internet. It didn't get anywhere, but I learned a lot about Mondex, which I think was the predecessor to this device.
(1) What if the babysitter comes to my house and I owe $4.50. Do we both go to the nearest ATM to transfer onto our cards? Will I have a card swipe in my house (most probably not).
Either of you can have a device about the size of a pocket calculator (and it may double as one) that can take money off one card and transfer it to another. This is clumsier than handing over $5, but probably not as clumsy as making sure that you have $4.50 in change. Future wallets should have this kind of functionality built in, and in theory you could beam the cash via IR, although if the link drops at exactly the wrong moment then the cash can be lost. I'm going to make a separate post about how the system works: look for that.
(2) The joke about lap dances someone made before my post actually rings true. How does one pay for these kinds of impromptu needs? How do I loan a friend $1 to get a bottle of pop? Do I give them my card to borrow? Would I give them my wallet? Maybe lap dancers will have card swipes strapped on... somewhere... for easy payment.
Lap dancing houses will probably use house chips, similar to casinos. The biggest problem will be tipping buskers and similar things. I think coins are going to be around for a while yet.
(3) What about counting your cash? Simply, how do you know how much is on your card without going to an ATM to get a readout?
Either use the transfer gizmo I mentioned earlier, or a single-use keyfob gizmo which is smaller. Future wallets will probably have this kind of functionality built in.
(4) How do you give the kids a few dollars to shop or grab a bite? How do you give them one dollar to grab candy before the movie starts? Do you give them the entire card? Again, do you give your entire wallet / purse for a need like this?
See above.
(5) If a card gets snapped in half, then what? When a paper bill is ripped, a taped one is still legal tender. What about cards?
The money is held in a chip in the card. As long as the chip survives it should be possible to retrieve the money. However if the chip is separated from the card contacts then its going to be hard, and I suspect that the designers will have included anti-tampering devices in the card.
(6) Can someone run a bulk demagnetizer over my card and financially wipe me out? This is a serious concern, folks.
No. First, its a chip card not a mag stripe (although it may carry a mag stripe for use in older credit card readers). Second, there is a difference between its use as a cash-holding card and its use as a credit/debit card. If you lose or destroy the card you only lose the money that was held on the card at the time. The rest is still in your bank account, and you just get a new card from the bank.
This will be (almost) no better for absorbing heat than conventional matt black.
Say conventional black paint reflects 1% of the radiation. This stuff reflects, say, 0.1%. If you are building optical instruments then that is a 90% decrease in ambient reflections from internal surfaces, which is really useful.
But if you are interested in harvesting energy then the absorbancy has gone up from 99% to 99.9%, which is an increase of just 0.9% over what we had before. Gee.
they don't want to sit on the phone with the VP's yelling at them for being over their emergency change numbers
VP: Why are 20% of your changes for emergencies?
Sysadmin: Because you won't buy us [X].
This is your chance to send any message to senior management that you want, and have them listen to it. Dilbert cartoons notwithstanding, senior management are generally pretty smart guys. They may not know the difference between bash and sh, but thats != stupid. They put those metrics in place for a reason. If the limits are being exceeded then they want to know why. Not because they enjoy hitting people on the head but because they want to fix it. And if the way to fix it is to spend some money then you have a ready-made business case.
The standard method for defending oneself from patent lawsuits is to have a patent portfolio to threaten the other guy with.
The open source movement has no such portfolio (attempts have been made to put together a couple of dozen patents, but this is trivial compared to portfolios of hundreds or thousands). However we do have a large body of valuable IPR in the shape of our source code. We can threaten to withdraw that. Any large company should be very frightened by the threat to stop it using Linux or other open source software from tomorrow.
Every open source license should contain a clause along the following lines:
This license will automatically be terminated if you attempt to restrict the distribution or use of any "Open Source" software by enforcing patents that cover technology used in the "Open Source" software. "Open Source" software means any software licensed under terms which automatically permit the licensee to distribute the source code of the software to third parties.
A license terminated in this manner will be restored if you publicly repudiate your claim to any patent rights embodied in any open source software.
While what you say is almost trivially true, it doesn't help solve the problem. Suppose the Court decides that corporations don't have free speech rights, as you argue, and hence Congress can pass laws limiting what "corporations" say.
So now an employee of a corporation is asked a question about the corporation by a reporter. The employee says something that, if said by the "corporation", would be illegal (e.g. "My employer has always respected the human rights of our workers" when that is demonstrably untrue). What happens? If the corporation is punished then (in effect) the shareholders are being fined because an individual employee has exercised his/er right to free speech. Hardly just, and also likely to cause a chilling effect on the free speech of employees fearing for their future employment prospects.
If opinions are "commercial" speech then it becomes very difficult for you to express an opinion on any company in which you have an interest, especially if that interest is positive. It will be considered to be "advertising". This makes inroads into the free speech of individuals by affecting what they are allowed to say on certain topics, and will also have a chilling effect because of the broad legislation under which such speech could be prosecuted.
The alternative is that companies will be able to say anything outside of "advertisements" without fear of being prosecuted. I don't see this as a problem.
If they lie, someone else can tell the truth. Provided that the company isn't paying for coverage (a good definition of advertising) then access for the little guy isn't the problem.
If you have access to your company web server logs, take a look at who has been accessing your "Investors information" pages recently. It might give you a hint as to the identity of the buyer.
Remember that a takeover can be a time of hope and opportunity. They want your company for a reason. Maybe its to snuff it out, but thats actually fairly rare. If they really want the technology then the technology people can expect job security, with the opportunity for promotion and pay rises. Technology companies real value is generally in the heads of the people who are making it. Without that all the IPR in the world is so much scrap paper. Your purchaser almost certainly knows this.
Paul.
Ignore TCO, go for flexibility and freedom
on
Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 5, Insightful
TCO arguments are pretty much a waste of time. The answer depends a lot on the assumptions you make about the future (e.g. cost of Linux sysadmins vs Windows licenses in a few years). The real killer argument for OSS in business is freedom: the freedom to run your business the way you want to, rather than the way the vendor wants you to.
Freedom from surprise audits (and associated fees)
Freedom to change your support supplier, or even do support in-house if you want to. With closed-source software, if you don't like the quality and level of support offered by the vendor (or their authorised suppliers), you can lump it.
Freedom to carry on using an obsolete version because you don't want to upgrade. I've seen projects doing intensive development on top of a database for which support had been withdrawn by the vendor. Not fun, and a major risk factor for big projects. Particularly when the obsolete binary also ties you to obsolete hardware.
Freedom for your staff to install a new copy without having to get a purchase order authorised.
Freedom from having to track all those proof-of-purchase pieces of paper.
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
The traditional media industries are not going to like this one little bit. At present Acacia is going after what they call "low hanging fruit", because in cases like this its often the bigger legal budget that wins. Once Acacia has some money and precedents under its belt it can tackle the bigger boys.
It seems to me that the fruit higher up should see how this is going to go. If they don't hang together they will assuredly all hang separately.
I remember Sun workstation "pizza boxes" with disks that suffered from stiction. The IT support people would pick the whole pizza box up a couple of inches and drop it. This unstuck the disks.
Yes, but the average consumer doesn't give half a damn. Many of them don't know what a codec is, let alone differant bitrates.
True, but irrelevant. Like any new technology this will affect Joe Sixpack in one of two ways:
It will provide Joe with capabilities that were not previously available.
It will enable manufacturers to provide existing capabilities more cheaply
In this case bitrate peeling enables the production of lower quality but smaller recordings in a particularly quick and efficient manner that also does not create an extra layer of compression artifacts. Put another way, you can fit more music of a given quality into a given capacity by using Ogg Vorbis, and faster, than by decoding and re-encoding a bunch of MP3s. These are the features that matter to Joe, and the marketing department is quite capable of explaining them to him.
My wife and I visited Paris about 3 years ago. We went to the base of the tower three times trying to find a time when the queues were reasonable. No way. Expect to queue for an hour or two just to get inside. Then again to take the lift from the second deck to the top.
But yes, it is much bigger in person than in the pictures. Its just vast.
First, uncapping your modem is not merely in violation of your ISP contract, it is "theft of service", and legally its treated just the same as any other kind of theft.
The article says that the methods used to identify the perpetrators are "unknown". In fact its very simple. You ask the modem via SNMP what its speed is, and it tells you.
So these people got "over 100Mbits" speed limits on their modems. I'm paying £25/month for 0.5 Mbit. So if that were increased by a factor of 200 then it would cost $5,000/month. Multiply by 23 people and you have a problem worthy of the FBI's time. Particularly since it only required search, seizure and some very minor forensics (like identifying the uncapping software on the seized computers).
So overall I think these people got what they deserved.
Slashdot Mirror
Every so often you see a company succumb to consultantitis. It breaks out in a rash of consultants. Mostly they are management consultants from one of the Big 4, but every so often you might find yourself in a gig like this, bought in to make a technical decision that the MBAs don't feel qualified to make. One big clue you are in this situation is when native managers are being squeezed out to give offices to all the consultants.
First, any company that does this is on the way down. Make sure you get paid on time. You might give serious thought to shorting their stock too.
Second, the reason that consultantitis happens is that every management consultant will automatically include more work for himself and his colleagues in his recommendations if it looks halfway reasonable. They also inculcate a feeling of FUD amongst native management, who feel that they cannot make a decision unless it has been blessed by a an all-knowing consultant.
So if you find yourself in this situation scope out the local power structure carefully. The guy who is theoretically in charge of what you are doing may well be a puppet controlled by his consultant (think Grima Wormtongue).
Once you know who really takes the decisions you can act accordingly.
Paul.
Then you can pick your least favourite one while waiting.
Paul.
Polymers tend to degrade with exposure to light, especially UV. In a display UV is not generally a problem but obviously light in general is.
Paul.
Reasons why people prefer SCSI:
Avoid cheap IDE RAID cards: they are often just conventional IDE cards with software RAID drivers. Take a look at the 3ware cards instead. And see if you can get Serial ATA cards and drives to cut down on the ribbon cables.
BTW, if you do the sums then you will find that the most cost effective backup solution per gigabyte for media only (never mind buying the tape streamer) is a collection of IDE drives.
Paul.
The solution is not to improve science reporting, its to stop pseudo-science reporting from masquerading as hard evidence. How? Perhaps there should be a legal presumption in factual reporting that readers are likely to trust what they are reading and act on it. Therefore journalists owe their readers a duty of care, and if they misreport the facts to the readers detriment (e.g. by praising some quack treatment) then they should be liable.
Paul.
Its bad now, and its going to carry on being bad for about the next two years. Then it gets better. And it carries on getting better. Hang in there kid.
PS, the trick with girls is Stop Trying Too Hard. But I don't think your ready to hear that yet.
Paul.
Huh? It doesn't work like that. The readers are just communications devices. All the security is on the cards.
Its a bit like saying that on a mainframe system the security is in the mainframe not the terminals, so just crack the terminals. It doesn't make sense.
Paul.
Yup. At the very least each card will have a unique public key, and you can use that to track transactions made using that card.
For those who afraid being tracked, can have several cards in your hands
Again, yup. Of course they might require that individual cards be registered to an owner (for your security and convenience of course), in which case they can spot such things.
Which brings up Operation Ore, the FBI child-porn bust that yielded the thousands of credit card numbers that had been used to access a commercial child porn operation. Police forces around the world are still working their way through the list, and Visa are rumoured to have hundreds of thousands more numbers used to access other sites. Visa apparently has a pro-active operation to identify child porn sites that charge through Visa. Since they have hold of both ends of the string tying the two together is a trivial operation for them.
Since these cards can be used for e-commerce and similar fund transfers its likely that the law enforcement people are going to want to keep track of them. Operation Ore would not have been possible if the original website had been using anonymous cybercash in any form. Terrorism is also a likely target, although the logistics of moving tens of thousands of dollars (al-Qaida seems to have made typically $20,000 investment in proposed operations) in lumps of $100 is problematical. And of course there is drug dealing, although again the $100 limit seems a bit small for practical use.
But such controls are not a done deal. The law enforcers will want them, but the banking people may not because it means extra checks and data storage on something that they want to keep cheap and lightweight. Its like those pay-per-use cellphones: you can have a totally anonymous phone account just by paying cash. The phone companies could in theory demand to see ID before selling you one, but they really don't want the bother.
Hmmm. Betcha we will see such phones with interfaces to these cards. You can pay for the phone use with them, and then you can also transfer cash to a similarly equipped phone.
Paul.
1: Secure chip cards.
2: Public key cryptography. This post assumes you know the basic concepts.
IIRC the protocol works (roughly) like this.
- Card 1 says "I am a genuine card. Here is my public key and a certificate for that key issued by the bank."
- Card 2 says "I accept your certificate. I am also a genuine card. Here is my public key and certificate."
- Card 1 says "I have decremented my cash register by $5. Please increment your cash register by $5. Signed: Card 1."
- Card 2 says "OK."
This transfers $5 from card 1 to card 2.Step 3 is the critical one. If that message gets lost then the $5 is lost as well. Of course a real protocol will include nonces and resends so that a single lost bit won't destroy your money.
This has applications beyond just replacing cash. People have been looking for a way of making small transactions over the net for years. These cards are potentially it. Plug a card reader into your USB port, put a similar one on a server somewhere, and you can purchase information off the server, paying by the page if you want. Conventional credit card transactions have high fixed costs. The costs on these cards are very low.
(Actually the server will probably have a PCI card with a high-speed, high-capacity version of the chip. But the principle is the same).
On security, PKC is the easy bit. Securing chip cards is much harder. If you can spoof a card into accepting messages from something other than a real card then you can forge money untraceably. To do this you either have to extract the private key from a card or find some other way to increment its cash register. Both of these need tamper-proof cards. The techniques for doing this are too many to go into here, but you need to worry about power supply signalling information about the processes going on in the cards, and random errors induced by putting the card in a microwave oven (no, I'm not kidding) giving information away too, in addition to raw physical attacks like stripping off the plastic and using very fine patch leads.
The biggest weakness is that any card is potentially an entry point to destabilise the entire system. I suspect this is the real reason for the $107 limit: cracking a single card would give you as an individual considerable wealth, but moving that wealth into the rest of the financial system by (e.g.) depositing it at a bank would show up in odd deposit patterns long before you could "forge" enough money to destabilise the economy. Also the individual who does this has every incentive to keep it quiet: not only has s/he committed a crime, but everyone in the know is a potential blackmailer.
Of course someone might find an easy crack and publish it. This is probably the worst case scenario. The only solution is to recall the cards and go back to cash until the problem can be sorted out. Again, the card limit helps put an upper limit on the cost of this.
Paul.
(1) What if the babysitter comes to my house and I owe $4.50. Do we both go to the nearest ATM to transfer onto our cards? Will I have a card swipe in my house (most probably not).
Either of you can have a device about the size of a pocket calculator (and it may double as one) that can take money off one card and transfer it to another. This is clumsier than handing over $5, but probably not as clumsy as making sure that you have $4.50 in change. Future wallets should have this kind of functionality built in, and in theory you could beam the cash via IR, although if the link drops at exactly the wrong moment then the cash can be lost. I'm going to make a separate post about how the system works: look for that.
(2) The joke about lap dances someone made before my post actually rings true. How does one pay for these kinds of impromptu needs? How do I loan a friend $1 to get a bottle of pop? Do I give them my card to borrow? Would I give them my wallet? Maybe lap dancers will have card swipes strapped on ... somewhere ... for easy payment.
Lap dancing houses will probably use house chips, similar to casinos. The biggest problem will be tipping buskers and similar things. I think coins are going to be around for a while yet.
(3) What about counting your cash? Simply, how do you know how much is on your card without going to an ATM to get a readout?
Either use the transfer gizmo I mentioned earlier, or a single-use keyfob gizmo which is smaller. Future wallets will probably have this kind of functionality built in.
(4) How do you give the kids a few dollars to shop or grab a bite? How do you give them one dollar to grab candy before the movie starts? Do you give them the entire card? Again, do you give your entire wallet / purse for a need like this?
See above.
(5) If a card gets snapped in half, then what? When a paper bill is ripped, a taped one is still legal tender. What about cards?
The money is held in a chip in the card. As long as the chip survives it should be possible to retrieve the money. However if the chip is separated from the card contacts then its going to be hard, and I suspect that the designers will have included anti-tampering devices in the card.
(6) Can someone run a bulk demagnetizer over my card and financially wipe me out? This is a serious concern, folks.
No. First, its a chip card not a mag stripe (although it may carry a mag stripe for use in older credit card readers). Second, there is a difference between its use as a cash-holding card and its use as a credit/debit card. If you lose or destroy the card you only lose the money that was held on the card at the time. The rest is still in your bank account, and you just get a new card from the bank.
Paul.
If you are interested in extracting useful energy then its the total amount absorbed that is important.
Learn to understand the numbers, and you can avoid learning an awful lot that ain't so.
Paul.
Paul.
Say conventional black paint reflects 1% of the radiation. This stuff reflects, say, 0.1%. If you are building optical instruments then that is a 90% decrease in ambient reflections from internal surfaces, which is really useful.
But if you are interested in harvesting energy then the absorbancy has gone up from 99% to 99.9%, which is an increase of just 0.9% over what we had before. Gee.
Paul.
Famous perhaps, but why "infamous"?
Is it because he is not on Our Side this time?
Paul.
VP: Why are 20% of your changes for emergencies?
Sysadmin: Because you won't buy us [X].
This is your chance to send any message to senior management that you want, and have them listen to it. Dilbert cartoons notwithstanding, senior management are generally pretty smart guys. They may not know the difference between bash and sh, but thats != stupid. They put those metrics in place for a reason. If the limits are being exceeded then they want to know why. Not because they enjoy hitting people on the head but because they want to fix it. And if the way to fix it is to spend some money then you have a ready-made business case.
Paul.
The open source movement has no such portfolio (attempts have been made to put together a couple of dozen patents, but this is trivial compared to portfolios of hundreds or thousands). However we do have a large body of valuable IPR in the shape of our source code. We can threaten to withdraw that. Any large company should be very frightened by the threat to stop it using Linux or other open source software from tomorrow.
Every open source license should contain a clause along the following lines:
That should make them think twice.
Paul.
So now an employee of a corporation is asked a question about the corporation by a reporter. The employee says something that, if said by the "corporation", would be illegal (e.g. "My employer has always respected the human rights of our workers" when that is demonstrably untrue). What happens? If the corporation is punished then (in effect) the shareholders are being fined because an individual employee has exercised his/er right to free speech. Hardly just, and also likely to cause a chilling effect on the free speech of employees fearing for their future employment prospects.
Paul.
The alternative is that companies will be able to say anything outside of "advertisements" without fear of being prosecuted. I don't see this as a problem. If they lie, someone else can tell the truth. Provided that the company isn't paying for coverage (a good definition of advertising) then access for the little guy isn't the problem.
Paul.
Remember that a takeover can be a time of hope and opportunity. They want your company for a reason. Maybe its to snuff it out, but thats actually fairly rare. If they really want the technology then the technology people can expect job security, with the opportunity for promotion and pay rises. Technology companies real value is generally in the heads of the people who are making it. Without that all the IPR in the world is so much scrap paper. Your purchaser almost certainly knows this.
Paul.
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
It seems to me that the fruit higher up should see how this is going to go. If they don't hang together they will assuredly all hang separately.
Paul.
Paul.
True, but irrelevant. Like any new technology this will affect Joe Sixpack in one of two ways:
In this case bitrate peeling enables the production of lower quality but smaller recordings in a particularly quick and efficient manner that also does not create an extra layer of compression artifacts. Put another way, you can fit more music of a given quality into a given capacity by using Ogg Vorbis, and faster, than by decoding and re-encoding a bunch of MP3s. These are the features that matter to Joe, and the marketing department is quite capable of explaining them to him.
Paul.
But yes, it is much bigger in person than in the pictures. Its just vast.
Paul.
The article says that the methods used to identify the perpetrators are "unknown". In fact its very simple. You ask the modem via SNMP what its speed is, and it tells you.
So these people got "over 100Mbits" speed limits on their modems. I'm paying £25/month for 0.5 Mbit. So if that were increased by a factor of 200 then it would cost $5,000/month. Multiply by 23 people and you have a problem worthy of the FBI's time. Particularly since it only required search, seizure and some very minor forensics (like identifying the uncapping software on the seized computers).
So overall I think these people got what they deserved.
Paul.