At the micro level, it's lost in the noise, but at large scale, the interest they [paypal, google, or whoever] collect on money they hold temporarily really adds up.
Google already knows how to play that game: Take their AdSense program, where people put google-powered ads on their own web sites, and get paid per click. Your account gets credited immediately, but you don't get money from google until about 30 days after the end of a month where your total balance goes over $100. All they have to do is collect cash from the advertisers before they show their ads, and they end up keeping the money for a minimum of 30-60 days before they have to pay it back out again. Depending how you invest that, you could probably get at least a 3-5% return on the money you're holding, which at any given time is about two months' gross revenue of AdSense. For the math impaired, 3-5% of Really Really Big is Really Big. 5% of a billion is 50 million, 5% of 10 million is half a million. And so forth.
Definitely not their main business, but not a bad sideline either.
Gentoo is the only distribution that I can think of off the top of my head with its own independent (not tar.gz/tar.bz/tar.bz2) package management system that takes from the project's servers.
The FreeBSD Ports collection does a similar thing as well, where each end user downloads directly from their server. FreeBSD Packages, however, like those found on the install CDs, do not download the source from the server.
Counting unique users of a package is really hard unless there's some kind of built-in phone-home function that can't be disabled, or is required to make the program work.
"Personally, if I heard a legend about 7 temples, and the 7th temple was not only already discovered standing on land, but also one of the most photographed temples in India, then I'd be inclined to believe the other 6 temples existed, wouldn't you? Call me wacky..."
Or, perhaps they made up a story to impress the Western Dummies... "Gee, they like this temple so much, let's tell them we've got 6 more just like it under the sea..."
Just because there is one real temple doesn't mean that there are 6 more just because they have a story that says so.
Does anyone else find it interesting that the article says:
"The discovery was made on 1 April by a joint team of divers from the Indian National Institute of Oceanography and the Scientific Exploration Society based in Dorset."
Sounds like it might have been a joke that the BBC picked up on about 10 days late...
For computer companies to make a profit, they currently have to make chips at almost 99%+ effeciency, so that they throw away very few chips per silicon wafer.
I hate to nitpick, but you really should check your stats before spouting them off like that. A chip manufacturer making something like a P3/P4 or Athlon chip with those kind of yields would own the world by now. Nobody making big (by area) chips these days has yields anywhere near that high. Even 90% is doing good. They often range much lower than that, 80% and worse even, but because of the high price of the good ones that they sell, they still barely make a profit. The way the Intels and AMDs keep on going is by selling a lot of them, not by making much of a profit on each one. For DRAM memory, yields are often around 50%. So don't assume that they need to get 99+% yield to make a profit. There are a lot more variables in that equation that they can and do work with.
Isn't this the same old stuff we would expect to hear from MS? It sounds like it's just business as usual still. Someone points out that MS should feel responsable for the negligence they show in preventing errors (not to mention any negligence or undue delay in fixing them), and then MS just basically hands out excuses and changes the topic.
Anyone who knows that they're a market leader does have a responsability to see that their stuff isn't going to be the cause of the next great Internet collapse. MS is quickly becoming the leader in getting their bugs exploited, and with so much market penetration, we really could be facing quite a disaster when a better worm comes along.
Does anyone out there work for some other big company with lots of market share? What type of responsability do they assume for the security of their products?
the fact that you can't afford something doesn't in the least give you the right to steal it.
I agree with you completely here, but...
If you can't afford a Mercedes, you don't get a Mercedes. One copy per customer, please. The law is funny that way, but that's how the legal system and business look at it - someone using a product w/o paying for it is a 'lost sale', lost $$$, not
lost # of users, market penetration, circulation, etc. The law equates intangibles with physical units, just as if someone took a Mercedes
from a car dealer w/o paying for it is a $$$ 'loss' to the car dealer
There's a very significant difference between this example and the software piracy we're talking about here.
Say I have a friend who buys a Mercedes, or someone in my company owns a Mercedes, and I really like it. So I build myself a car that looks just like it, inside and out. I use all my own resources, and pay for everything. And I end up with a car that looks just like the Mercedes.
This is very different from stealing a Mercedes from the dealership. First, the dealership lost something. The copy cost them nothing. Copying a mercedes still might be questionable or illegal based on copyright or patent law, but it is very different from stealing a car.
Illegally duplicating software is more like making a lookalike of the Mercedes. I pay for my network bandwidth to get the bits, I pay for my cd-burner and the cd-r I burn the bits onto. I have used all my own resources. The only thing that potentially could be viewed as "stolen", in the same sense as car theft, is the intellectual property.
And, if we believe what other comments have said about companies that think they are selling "CDs with software on it" and not "licenses to use software provided to you on a CD", then they have sold you the property that you made a copy of, or allowed someone else to make a copy of.
Again, I agree with you that not being able to afford something is no excuse to steal it, but I do believe that there should be ways to obtain things that you cannot afford but have a legitimate need for. This is the premise upon which charitable organizations and humanitarian aid societies are based. People need things, and they can't always afford them.
I'm not trying to say that software is something we need like we need food, shelter, or clothing. But if I want to get a job that pays enough to support my family, I might need some software to allow me to do that. It is awfully hard to learn how to use a piece of software without actually using it.
There are many of us whose livelyhoods rely on using software of one kind or another. And how many people that have jobs that primarily involve using software that comes in MS Office can actually afford a copy of their own? So how many people who want a job using something like MS Office, or AutoCAD, or [name your favorite expensive software suite] can actually afford to get the software so they can learn how to use it?
It is not good to break the law, but our society needs to continue to work toward finding ways to fulfill everyone's needs. The programmer who writes MS Office needs to make a living, just like the secretary that uses MS Office needs to make a living. Right now our culture is quite biased towards protecting the rights of the corporations that create and sell/license software, and has not done much to work with those organizations to improve the situations of those who need money much more than the corporations do.
The most important thing that I haven't seen mentioned directly yet is that the RAM for a router isn't even the same type of stuff as for your PC. RAMs aren't all the same, the only necessary common factor is that they are Random Access Memories.
Routers (and other high-speed devices, even the Pentium4) use SRAM (Static RAM), which is much faster, but also much more expensive (for several reasons) than PC RAM. Plain old cheap-as-dirt PC RAM is SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM), and it is slower, but good enough for most applications, and much cheaper.
The other problem with adding much more memory to routers is that it isn't just the size of the memory that matters, its the bandwidth of the pipe between the processor and the RAM. Even if I had 40GB of RAM in my router, I could only use about 256MB-1GB of it, because it would take so long to read the rest of it. The packet would already be gone by the time I found where I was supposed to send it.
1) It increases the number of wires by 4 per 48. It however lessens the trouble involved if a module fails - apparently you've never had the joy of unplugging, keeping track of, and re-plugging in 48 Cat-5 cables in a hurry. It's not fun. An increase of time in the beginning far outweighs the risks of the increase of time in an outage. I can show you pictures of rats nests and tell you horror stories all day about this.
It increases the number of wires by 8 per 48 (see below), and yes, we've had module failures before, and I have moved 48 cat-5 cables in a hurry. These module failures are so rare that its not even worth the extra time at the beginning to try and make it easier.
2) The standard Cat-5e configuration still only uses 4 wires. The Telco panels are wired as such. For each Telco harmonica you get 12 ports - quite dense enough.
It uses 4 wires when running at 100Mbit, but like I mentioned before, when we go to gigabit over these cat5e cables, we'll need all 8, since the gigabit over copper products we're looking at use all 8 wires in the cable.
3) There's nothing that says that gig won't be supported over telco, just like there's still no set-in-stone standard for gig over cat-5. Nothing even says that cat-5e is going to be required.
Every product on the market that I've seen requires cat5e for its higher standards, and I've never seen a patch panel/telco combination that claims to be able to support the high requirements of gigabit over copper.
Now maybe you would have done it differently, and that's fine. Our needs are different from yours, and our criteria for judgement of our options are probably quite different as well. What we chose to do has worked out very well for us, and we're very happy with the way that things are set up. If you're still not satisfied, perhaps we should just agree to disagree....
I was one of the few 'lucky' people who had to run it, and no, we didn't run it thorough a 2ft high crawl space. It is even worse than that.
In case you couldn't tell from the pics, this is all in self contained racks. The large majority of the wiring is in 9 standard-sized racks, or about 7ft tall * 3ft deep * 2 ft wide * 9 racks = 378 cubic feet for about 5 miles (25,000 ft) of cable plus all the PCs and switches.
As a generous estimate, that leaves 100 cubic feet for cables and ventilation. That says the every cubic foot of open space is filled with an average of 250 linear feet.
Doing a BS in CS here at the Univeristy of Utah, I thought they kept a good balance between allowing collaborative learning and preventing cheating. The general policy in most of my classes was this:
You can work with other people while thinking out your solution, even to the point of working out some very high level pseudo-code together.
When it comes time to write the code (or other solution), it better be your own.
It made it very easy to check for people who had copied and modified code, or worked from the same printout. If you feed it examples in the book or from the lectures along with the submitted solutions, you can also find out who worked independently from a common starting point.
After completing the program there, I can say that it definitely did create an environment where students could learn from each other without having to worry about being accused of cheating. We frequently left our collaborative discussions with a much greater understanding that if we would have simply done the assignment alone, and that type of learning is something a school should allow, foster, and encourage.
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At the micro level, it's lost in the noise, but at large scale, the interest they [paypal, google, or whoever] collect on money they hold temporarily really adds up.
Google already knows how to play that game: Take their AdSense program, where people put google-powered ads on their own web sites, and get paid per click. Your account gets credited immediately, but you don't get money from google until about 30 days after the end of a month where your total balance goes over $100. All they have to do is collect cash from the advertisers before they show their ads, and they end up keeping the money for a minimum of 30-60 days before they have to pay it back out again. Depending how you invest that, you could probably get at least a 3-5% return on the money you're holding, which at any given time is about two months' gross revenue of AdSense. For the math impaired, 3-5% of Really Really Big is Really Big. 5% of a billion is 50 million, 5% of 10 million is half a million. And so forth.
Definitely not their main business, but not a bad sideline either.
Mac
The FreeBSD Ports collection does a similar thing as well, where each end user downloads directly from their server. FreeBSD Packages, however, like those found on the install CDs, do not download the source from the server.
Counting unique users of a package is really hard unless there's some kind of built-in phone-home function that can't be disabled, or is required to make the program work.
Or, perhaps they made up a story to impress the Western Dummies... "Gee, they like this temple so much, let's tell them we've got 6 more just like it under the sea..."
Just because there is one real temple doesn't mean that there are 6 more just because they have a story that says so.
Mac
Does anyone else find it interesting that the article says:
"The discovery was made on 1 April by a joint team of divers from the Indian National Institute of Oceanography and the Scientific Exploration Society based in Dorset."
Sounds like it might have been a joke that the BBC picked up on about 10 days late...
Mac
I hate to nitpick, but you really should check your stats before spouting them off like that. A chip manufacturer making something like a P3/P4 or Athlon chip with those kind of yields would own the world by now. Nobody making big (by area) chips these days has yields anywhere near that high. Even 90% is doing good. They often range much lower than that, 80% and worse even, but because of the high price of the good ones that they sell, they still barely make a profit. The way the Intels and AMDs keep on going is by selling a lot of them, not by making much of a profit on each one. For DRAM memory, yields are often around 50%. So don't assume that they need to get 99+% yield to make a profit. There are a lot more variables in that equation that they can and do work with.
Mac
Anyone who knows that they're a market leader does have a responsability to see that their stuff isn't going to be the cause of the next great Internet collapse. MS is quickly becoming the leader in getting their bugs exploited, and with so much market penetration, we really could be facing quite a disaster when a better worm comes along.
Does anyone out there work for some other big company with lots of market share? What type of responsability do they assume for the security of their products?
Mac
I agree with you completely here, but ...
If you can't afford a Mercedes, you don't get a Mercedes. One copy per customer, please. The law is funny that way, but that's how the legal system and business look at it - someone using a product w/o paying for it is a 'lost sale', lost $$$, not lost # of users, market penetration, circulation, etc. The law equates intangibles with physical units, just as if someone took a Mercedes from a car dealer w/o paying for it is a $$$ 'loss' to the car dealer
There's a very significant difference between this example and the software piracy we're talking about here.
Say I have a friend who buys a Mercedes, or someone in my company owns a Mercedes, and I really like it. So I build myself a car that looks just like it, inside and out. I use all my own resources, and pay for everything. And I end up with a car that looks just like the Mercedes.
This is very different from stealing a Mercedes from the dealership. First, the dealership lost something. The copy cost them nothing. Copying a mercedes still might be questionable or illegal based on copyright or patent law, but it is very different from stealing a car.
Illegally duplicating software is more like making a lookalike of the Mercedes. I pay for my network bandwidth to get the bits, I pay for my cd-burner and the cd-r I burn the bits onto. I have used all my own resources. The only thing that potentially could be viewed as "stolen", in the same sense as car theft, is the intellectual property.
And, if we believe what other comments have said about companies that think they are selling "CDs with software on it" and not "licenses to use software provided to you on a CD", then they have sold you the property that you made a copy of, or allowed someone else to make a copy of.
Again, I agree with you that not being able to afford something is no excuse to steal it, but I do believe that there should be ways to obtain things that you cannot afford but have a legitimate need for. This is the premise upon which charitable organizations and humanitarian aid societies are based. People need things, and they can't always afford them.
I'm not trying to say that software is something we need like we need food, shelter, or clothing. But if I want to get a job that pays enough to support my family, I might need some software to allow me to do that. It is awfully hard to learn how to use a piece of software without actually using it.
There are many of us whose livelyhoods rely on using software of one kind or another. And how many people that have jobs that primarily involve using software that comes in MS Office can actually afford a copy of their own? So how many people who want a job using something like MS Office, or AutoCAD, or [name your favorite expensive software suite] can actually afford to get the software so they can learn how to use it?
It is not good to break the law, but our society needs to continue to work toward finding ways to fulfill everyone's needs. The programmer who writes MS Office needs to make a living, just like the secretary that uses MS Office needs to make a living. Right now our culture is quite biased towards protecting the rights of the corporations that create and sell/license software, and has not done much to work with those organizations to improve the situations of those who need money much more than the corporations do.
Mac
The most important thing that I haven't seen mentioned directly yet is that the RAM for a router isn't even the same type of stuff as for your PC. RAMs aren't all the same, the only necessary common factor is that they are Random Access Memories.
Routers (and other high-speed devices, even the Pentium4) use SRAM (Static RAM), which is much faster, but also much more expensive (for several reasons) than PC RAM. Plain old cheap-as-dirt PC RAM is SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM), and it is slower, but good enough for most applications, and much cheaper.
The other problem with adding much more memory to routers is that it isn't just the size of the memory that matters, its the bandwidth of the pipe between the processor and the RAM. Even if I had 40GB of RAM in my router, I could only use about 256MB-1GB of it, because it would take so long to read the rest of it. The packet would already be gone by the time I found where I was supposed to send it.
Mac
It increases the number of wires by 8 per 48 (see below), and yes, we've had module failures before, and I have moved 48 cat-5 cables in a hurry. These module failures are so rare that its not even worth the extra time at the beginning to try and make it easier.
2) The standard Cat-5e configuration still only uses 4 wires. The Telco panels are wired as such. For each Telco harmonica you get 12 ports - quite dense enough.
It uses 4 wires when running at 100Mbit, but like I mentioned before, when we go to gigabit over these cat5e cables, we'll need all 8, since the gigabit over copper products we're looking at use all 8 wires in the cable.
3) There's nothing that says that gig won't be supported over telco, just like there's still no set-in-stone standard for gig over cat-5. Nothing even says that cat-5e is going to be required.
Every product on the market that I've seen requires cat5e for its higher standards, and I've never seen a patch panel/telco combination that claims to be able to support the high requirements of gigabit over copper.
Now maybe you would have done it differently, and that's fine. Our needs are different from yours, and our criteria for judgement of our options are probably quite different as well. What we chose to do has worked out very well for us, and we're very happy with the way that things are set up. If you're still not satisfied, perhaps we should just agree to disagree....
Mac
- Then we'd have to go to a patch panel, and then the ciscos, which greatly increases the number of wires and the time it takes to run them.
- The telco connectors aren't as dense enough to be worth it... 8 wires per cat5, 50 wires per telco, so we'd only consolidate 6 wires at a time.
- We eventually want to run gigabit over copper with these cat5e wires, and if we put them into telco connectors, we can't do that.
Does that answer your question?Mac
Every wire (~1000 of them) on both ends, then the endpoints get recorded in a database.
And anyone who moves a wire without properly documenting it gets shot! ;)
Mac
I was one of the few 'lucky' people who had to run it, and no, we didn't run it thorough a 2ft high crawl space. It is even worse than that.
In case you couldn't tell from the pics, this is all in self contained racks. The large majority of the wiring is in 9 standard-sized racks, or about 7ft tall * 3ft deep * 2 ft wide * 9 racks = 378 cubic feet for about 5 miles (25,000 ft) of cable plus all the PCs and switches.
As a generous estimate, that leaves 100 cubic feet for cables and ventilation. That says the every cubic foot of open space is filled with an average of 250 linear feet.
Needless to say, it was not fun.
Mac
- You can work with other people while thinking out your solution, even to the point of working out some very high level pseudo-code together.
- When it comes time to write the code (or other solution), it better be your own.
When I was a TA for an introductory class, we used a program out of Berkeley called MOSS (Measure Of Software Similarity) to check for cheaters.It made it very easy to check for people who had copied and modified code, or worked from the same printout. If you feed it examples in the book or from the lectures along with the submitted solutions, you can also find out who worked independently from a common starting point.
After completing the program there, I can say that it definitely did create an environment where students could learn from each other without having to worry about being accused of cheating. We frequently left our collaborative discussions with a much greater understanding that if we would have simply done the assignment alone, and that type of learning is something a school should allow, foster, and encourage.