God, thats such a damn waste:( At least donate it to a local university or something for CCNA prospectives.
You're missing the whole point of this. Having these products in circulation is extremely detrimental to Cisco. Not just in terms of lost sales, but also that people will be calling in for tech support, attempting to get warranty replacements, putting it up on eBay, etc. Even if you donate it to a charitable cause it is costing them real money in a direct sense, and also tarnishing the brand and pissing off their legitimate dealers.
The product absolutely should be destroyed and the people responsible should bear the full pain of that loss. The only other remedy I could think of that might make sense would be to return the hardware to Cisco so that it can be either refurbished or destroyed at their discretion. I guess it would depend on whether the goods ultimately get classified as stolen vs fraudulently manufactured.
I rather doubt that much of this equipment is truly "counterfeit", at least in the usual sense of a cloned design such as the iClone. Rather, what happens is that the contract manufacturer will buy extra parts and make more units than Cisco actually ordered, and then those units go out the back door after hours. They might have illegitimate serial numbers or might be missing the authenticity stickers on some internal chips, but they are otherwise identical.
It's a very difficult problem to manage unless you have trusted people overseeing the entire manufacturing operation. The amount of gross margin in Cisco gear makes this activity extremely profitable.
The reason the security is so poor is because the banks don't give a s**t. It's the _merchants_ that are liable for fraud, even though it's almost entirely the fault of the banks! They banks only have to make it just good enough that it's easier for the merchants to take credit cards than cash - even after the exorbitant ($0.25 + 2.5%) processing fees that they charge just to move the bits around.
The powers that be LOVE us using credit cards. They can track us, and they can dupe the feeble-minded among us into spending our way into a lifetime of indentured servitude.
The failure of our government to (re-)introduce a $1000 bill, in spite of massive inflation, is a deliberate scheme to make it impractical for us to use untraceable funds for any substantial purchase. And it has nothing to do with tracking terrorists or drug money, it's just to keep tabs on and control over the law abiding populous.
...and be prepared to hire telecommuters, even in other countries. All of our software guys at Slim Devices (now Logitech) found us through our open source projects, and to this day every one of the telecommutes. The stratum of talent you gain access to when you are reaching the people who are so excited about the technology that they'll work on it on their own time.... unbelievable - forget about Monster.com, this is the way to do it!
I take it you've never actually owned the house you're living in, much less paid a property tax bill (rent on your parents' basement does not count).
Some things are just not for sale. What if all women were required to put a price on themselves? What about irreplaceable antiques and jewelry? Should we just be taxed on all our assets to the tune of whatever we're able to pay (if we can even pay it) to keep someone else from taking them?
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
That's insane. We're not talking about pork bellies here, a house (like a copyrighted work) is a unique thing that has all kinds of values that are difficult to estimate and may be valued differently from one person to another. Am I expected to entertain a bidding war with any might-be buyer in order to keep my house, until the point where I can't afford the property taxes?
Or am I supposed to declare a value that no person in their right mind would pay, and suck it up and pay the taxes? Even then, anyone wealthy enough (or not in their right mind) could simply seize my home if they fancied it.
And how do you figure out the optimal capacity to install anyway? To me 7 Tbits does not sounds like much to link two whole countries. Surely there is some point of diminishing returns, but why not more than this?
In theory, A shouldn't accept any routes from C for IP addresses not owned by C.
If you already know whose IP address are whose, then what do you need the routing protocol for in the first place? BGP inherently depends on the honor system - that is the crux of the problem. There is no "in theory" where this is really solved (yet).
That it was accidental makes more sense anyhow - which is more probable, that there are a bunch of network wizards in Pakistan with state-of-the-art equipment decided to take out Youtube, or that a handful of overworked and undereducated network technicians in Pakistan were told by management that they had to block Youtube immediately, and in their haste their blocked route accidentally leaked to the outside world? I would say the latter, especially considering that they stopped advertising the route soon after they began getting a lot of complaints.
It matters not. You can do whatever you want within your borders, but the moment you start fucking up the rest of the internet is the moment that the rest of the internet needs to SHUT YOU OFF. If you're going to do something as retarded as this in your own network, you'd better be damn sure it doesn't leak out, and you should be severely punished if it does.
This needs to entail serious repercussions to discourage them or anyone else from trying things like this in the future. I'd say for a start, take the whole god damned country offline for a week and see if the King gets the point then.
Sometimes I struggle understanding double standards on/.
There is more than one person posting here.
So ripping off a stock photo is Bad and this guy did good by pushing for his rights and winning.
Yes. And more importantly, without a lawyer. IMHO that alone makes it a respectable achievement, regardless of how I might feel about this particular law.
But pirating copyright music via p2p etc is OK because nobody got hurt right.
Not the same thing. This company used his images for profit. What would have been analogous to file sharing might be if the defendant had photocopied the image, put it on his wall for his own personal enjoyment, and given some copies to friends for the same purpose.
Conversely, there does not seem to be much sympathy for people who _sell_ pirated songs or attempt to use them for some purely commercial purpose.
Justice was served, and you got the shysters to pony up 11 times what they would have paid if they'd just purchased the photos in the first place.
People like to dis the "IANAL" posters here, but I have found that a little bit of amateur legal knowledge, even stuff picked up from Judge Judy and the intarweb, can take you a long way in life. At a minimum you should know the basics of how contracts are enforced, what kind of evidence is acceptable in court, and how not to piss of a judge. Common sense will get you most of the way, but you need to know just a bit about the lingo and the process.
DSL oversubscription is just one hop up the line, as opposed to cable, where it is oversubscribed from end to end. Not much difference, really.
Actually there is one very important difference: with cable, each customer is connected _directly_ to the shared medium, so it is possible for a single user to saturate it (this is GOOD as long as the protocols allows the link to be shared fairly). With DSL this is not possible because the uplink from the DSLAM (100+Mbps) is much faster than an individual line to a subscriber (2-6Mbps). It would take many subscribers all downloading at the same time to saturate that link, and it might never happen if the link is faster than the peak actual usage of the sum of all subscribers.
I'd still take cable over DSL because even though I am contending directly for bandwidth with other users, my speed would still much faster 99% of the time. Less deterministic maybe, but who cares as long as it's faster? Unfortunately neither is available to me, but I have a long-range 802.11 link which works OK.
As a side note, people seem to be really confused about what it means to be "oversubscribed". It doesn't mean "there isnt enough bandwidth for everybody". It means that there is some ratio > 1 of total last-mile bandwidth to total uplink bandwidth. Just as the main breaker in your house might have a 100A main breaker, but if you add up all the individual breakers you might have 300A or more. There's nothing wrong with it and you will always have enough power provided that the main breaker is larger than the _peak_ load. Really it's meaningless to complain about oversubscription per se - that is the right thing to do and will happen no matter what. The issue is just how much bandwidth is available to a given user at a given time and there is no "right" answer for what an oversubscription ratio should be. Depends on the type of network, the needs of the users, budget etc. It's not a right/wrong question.
Everyone knows Cayman banks launder money, but my understanding is that at least in the case of US clients, only the client himself is actually breaking the law in his own country by not reporting those offshore assets. Did the leaked info actually incriminate a _client_ of the bank? Because the bank may in fact be confident enough that they themselves are operating legally within Swiss and or Cayman law that they don't care, or are even happy to have the exposure.
Actually you're wrong. Cisco makes their own ASICs for their AP's, or at least they did in late 90's early 2000's when I supported their wireless division
You're saying I'm wrong but admitting that your information is ten years out of date. A LOT has happened since then. The whole industry has consolidated and everything is now driven by the consumer AP market. Encryption is now done in hardware even in the cheapest g/n chipsets. These is NO reason to do custom silicon to support any of the features offered by "enterprise" APs.
Enterprise hardware does not use general-purpose CPUs, it uses special-purpose ASICs
Actually they don't - take a look in a high-end AP some time. "Enterprise" wireless systems use the same, or often older generation, of wireless technology that is in consumer access points. Competition in the consumer AP market is what drives all the incredible price/performance in wireless technology, and I assure you nobody is going to spend the tens of millions to do a custom spin of one of those chipsets for the relatively small high-end market. Those products sell on branding, special software features, and support contracts, not silicon performance. And as far as the CPU/memory etc, these are going to be much LESS specialized in a high-end system than in a consumer AP. Low-cost APs use highly integrated ARM or MIPs-based SOCs that are designed for sub $20 BOM cost. A higher-end system, however, is not bound by BOM costs and might have four times the memory and a more general purpose processor capable of running more software.
Routers and switches are a different story, and those DO use ASICs and FPGAs. The high-end models of these have to deliver a totally different hardware feature set than consumer equipment, and unlike wireless technology, the bleeding edge tends to be developed for the highest priced products before trickling down.
They can only announce sales when they've been sold to an actual customer.
Not true. The terms you're looking for are "sold in" vs "sold out". Sometimes "sold out" can be very difficult to know with any precision, because of the time it takes retailers to reorder and variance in their stocking levels. "sold in" (meaning goods went into the channel) is when the revenue is recognized, because the channel _is_ the customer, from the manufacturers perspective.
Of course Apple also has their own retail stores and in that case, yes the inventory is still "theirs" until it is sold to the end user. However in that case there is no channel to speak of so a sale is just a sale.
Okay, so to make sure I understand this -- neutral is called neutral because it's tied to ground?
Not really. It's called neutral because there are two phases (two hots) in a household electrical system, and neutral is the voltage that is half way between them. Or generally, the "vector sum" of the AC voltages. I am oversimplifying here - your home is technically a "split single phase", and there are also three phase systems.
It is no coincidence that neutral voltage is usually 0VDC, but this is not actually what makes it "neutral". You could actually have an AC system where neutral is some other voltage, or is not referenced to anything at all. For example, a typical portable generator will have two 120V outputs of opposing phase, sharing a neutral. You could connect loads to it and they would be powered just fine, but that neutral is not going to be at ground unless you make it so, usually by connecting the chassis of the generator to ground (which you are required to do by code).
So if some idiot were to stand on the ground and grab the neutral wire, no ill would befall him, because it's already grounded?
Assuming no wiring fault, yes this is probably safe. However, there will be some voltage on the wire depending how much it is loaded.
The next stupid question is, why do you need a neutral wire at all? Why not just "hot" and "ground?"
Certainly you can power something with just those two wires. But you would have limited safety mechanisms because your neutral and ground are one and the same, and you would also introduce a whole bunch of new safety problems. See upthread.
A full treatment of AC power systems is far beyond the scope of what I have time to explain in a Slashdot post. There is great deal of info in wikipedia though. A lot of this will seem weird and counterintuitive at first, but once you grok it you will find that household wiring is actually a very clever and elegant system. Another interesting subject to check out, which will really make clear the distinction between neutral and ground, is the GFCI.
There are two kinds of hard problems in programming: problems that are hard because they require ingenuity and deep thought, and problems that are hard because they require weeks of unraveling someone else's garbage.
There are some horrible programmers out there and I have on many occasions been tasked with cleaning up their messes. In your situation I would suggest either a) try to figure out if it would take less time for you to implement it in a clean and maintainable way or b) find someone else you can hire who knows the code base or at least is more familiar with the specific problem.
If you can't do a or b then you're screwed. In that situation, personally, I would either quit, ask for a different project, or print out the whole source code and sit back with a pen and start studying and commenting - one of the few tasks for which I still prefer dead trees.
Can somebody versed in AC explain why this is so? If the neutral and ground are tied together don't they have to be at the same potential by definition?
By definition of what? Wire has resistance, and the more load you put on a wire, the more the voltage on one end will differ from the other.
But the main issue from a safety standpoint is wiring faults. Neutral and hot could be swapped (a common mistake by DIYers). You also have the possibility of neutral being disconnected (or having a loose connection) at the source - in this situation the voltage on the neutral wire will be pulled up by the loads on the line towards the "hot" wire. The load would not be getting any current so it would appear that the circuit is dead, but both the neutral and the hot would actually be hot!
Unlike neutral, the ground wire carries no current under non-fault circumstances. Its only purpose is to carry a fault current to ground and to keep everything in a household at the same potential.
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The deceased may simply request this by filling out the appropriate section on his 27B(stroke)6 form.
Throwing away something that can be used is the very definition of waste.
I didn't say it's not a waste. I said you're missing the point.
God, thats such a damn waste :( At least donate it to a local university or something for CCNA prospectives.
You're missing the whole point of this. Having these products in circulation is extremely detrimental to Cisco. Not just in terms of lost sales, but also that people will be calling in for tech support, attempting to get warranty replacements, putting it up on eBay, etc. Even if you donate it to a charitable cause it is costing them real money in a direct sense, and also tarnishing the brand and pissing off their legitimate dealers.
The product absolutely should be destroyed and the people responsible should bear the full pain of that loss. The only other remedy I could think of that might make sense would be to return the hardware to Cisco so that it can be either refurbished or destroyed at their discretion. I guess it would depend on whether the goods ultimately get classified as stolen vs fraudulently manufactured.
I rather doubt that much of this equipment is truly "counterfeit", at least in the usual sense of a cloned design such as the iClone. Rather, what happens is that the contract manufacturer will buy extra parts and make more units than Cisco actually ordered, and then those units go out the back door after hours. They might have illegitimate serial numbers or might be missing the authenticity stickers on some internal chips, but they are otherwise identical.
It's a very difficult problem to manage unless you have trusted people overseeing the entire manufacturing operation. The amount of gross margin in Cisco gear makes this activity extremely profitable.
The reason the security is so poor is because the banks don't give a s**t. It's the _merchants_ that are liable for fraud, even though it's almost entirely the fault of the banks! They banks only have to make it just good enough that it's easier for the merchants to take credit cards than cash - even after the exorbitant ($0.25 + 2.5%) processing fees that they charge just to move the bits around.
The powers that be LOVE us using credit cards. They can track us, and they can dupe the feeble-minded among us into spending our way into a lifetime of indentured servitude.
The failure of our government to (re-)introduce a $1000 bill, in spite of massive inflation, is a deliberate scheme to make it impractical for us to use untraceable funds for any substantial purchase. And it has nothing to do with tracking terrorists or drug money, it's just to keep tabs on and control over the law abiding populous.
...and be prepared to hire telecommuters, even in other countries. All of our software guys at Slim Devices (now Logitech) found us through our open source projects, and to this day every one of the telecommutes. The stratum of talent you gain access to when you are reaching the people who are so excited about the technology that they'll work on it on their own time.... unbelievable - forget about Monster.com, this is the way to do it!
I take it you've never actually owned the house you're living in, much less paid a property tax bill (rent on your parents' basement does not count).
Some things are just not for sale. What if all women were required to put a price on themselves? What about irreplaceable antiques and jewelry? Should we just be taxed on all our assets to the tune of whatever we're able to pay (if we can even pay it) to keep someone else from taking them?
You're either nuts or IHBT.
if I were as lucky and clairevoyant as you, I could think of a million simpler ways to make that.kind of dough.
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
That's insane. We're not talking about pork bellies here, a house (like a copyrighted work) is a unique thing that has all kinds of values that are difficult to estimate and may be valued differently from one person to another. Am I expected to entertain a bidding war with any might-be buyer in order to keep my house, until the point where I can't afford the property taxes?
Or am I supposed to declare a value that no person in their right mind would pay, and suck it up and pay the taxes? Even then, anyone wealthy enough (or not in their right mind) could simply seize my home if they fancied it.
Ridiculous idea.
Yes, drive their stock up! That'll teach 'em.
in such a cable?
And how do you figure out the optimal capacity to install anyway? To me 7 Tbits does not sounds like much to link two whole countries. Surely there is some point of diminishing returns, but why not more than this?
In theory, A shouldn't accept any routes from C for IP addresses not owned by C.
If you already know whose IP address are whose, then what do you need the routing protocol for in the first place? BGP inherently depends on the honor system - that is the crux of the problem. There is no "in theory" where this is really solved (yet).
That it was accidental makes more sense anyhow - which is more probable, that there are a bunch of network wizards in Pakistan with state-of-the-art equipment decided to take out Youtube, or that a handful of overworked and undereducated network technicians in Pakistan were told by management that they had to block Youtube immediately, and in their haste their blocked route accidentally leaked to the outside world? I would say the latter, especially considering that they stopped advertising the route soon after they began getting a lot of complaints.
It matters not. You can do whatever you want within your borders, but the moment you start fucking up the rest of the internet is the moment that the rest of the internet needs to SHUT YOU OFF. If you're going to do something as retarded as this in your own network, you'd better be damn sure it doesn't leak out, and you should be severely punished if it does.
This needs to entail serious repercussions to discourage them or anyone else from trying things like this in the future. I'd say for a start, take the whole god damned country offline for a week and see if the King gets the point then.
Sometimes I struggle understanding double standards on /.
There is more than one person posting here.
So ripping off a stock photo is Bad and this guy did good by pushing for his rights and winning.
Yes. And more importantly, without a lawyer. IMHO that alone makes it a respectable achievement, regardless of how I might feel about this particular law.
But pirating copyright music via p2p etc is OK because nobody got hurt right.
Not the same thing. This company used his images for profit. What would have been analogous to file sharing might be if the defendant had photocopied the image, put it on his wall for his own personal enjoyment, and given some copies to friends for the same purpose.
Conversely, there does not seem to be much sympathy for people who _sell_ pirated songs or attempt to use them for some purely commercial purpose.
Justice was served, and you got the shysters to pony up 11 times what they would have paid if they'd just purchased the photos in the first place.
People like to dis the "IANAL" posters here, but I have found that a little bit of amateur legal knowledge, even stuff picked up from Judge Judy and the intarweb, can take you a long way in life. At a minimum you should know the basics of how contracts are enforced, what kind of evidence is acceptable in court, and how not to piss of a judge. Common sense will get you most of the way, but you need to know just a bit about the lingo and the process.
DSL oversubscription is just one hop up the line, as opposed to cable, where it is oversubscribed from end to end. Not much difference, really.
Actually there is one very important difference: with cable, each customer is connected _directly_ to the shared medium, so it is possible for a single user to saturate it (this is GOOD as long as the protocols allows the link to be shared fairly). With DSL this is not possible because the uplink from the DSLAM (100+Mbps) is much faster than an individual line to a subscriber (2-6Mbps). It would take many subscribers all downloading at the same time to saturate that link, and it might never happen if the link is faster than the peak actual usage of the sum of all subscribers.
I'd still take cable over DSL because even though I am contending directly for bandwidth with other users, my speed would still much faster 99% of the time. Less deterministic maybe, but who cares as long as it's faster? Unfortunately neither is available to me, but I have a long-range 802.11 link which works OK.
As a side note, people seem to be really confused about what it means to be "oversubscribed". It doesn't mean "there isnt enough bandwidth for everybody". It means that there is some ratio > 1 of total last-mile bandwidth to total uplink bandwidth. Just as the main breaker in your house might have a 100A main breaker, but if you add up all the individual breakers you might have 300A or more. There's nothing wrong with it and you will always have enough power provided that the main breaker is larger than the _peak_ load. Really it's meaningless to complain about oversubscription per se - that is the right thing to do and will happen no matter what. The issue is just how much bandwidth is available to a given user at a given time and there is no "right" answer for what an oversubscription ratio should be. Depends on the type of network, the needs of the users, budget etc. It's not a right/wrong question.
Everyone knows Cayman banks launder money, but my understanding is that at least in the case of US clients, only the client himself is actually breaking the law in his own country by not reporting those offshore assets. Did the leaked info actually incriminate a _client_ of the bank? Because the bank may in fact be confident enough that they themselves are operating legally within Swiss and or Cayman law that they don't care, or are even happy to have the exposure.
Actually you're wrong. Cisco makes their own ASICs for their AP's, or at least they did in late 90's early 2000's when I supported their wireless division
You're saying I'm wrong but admitting that your information is ten years out of date. A LOT has happened since then. The whole industry has consolidated and everything is now driven by the consumer AP market. Encryption is now done in hardware even in the cheapest g/n chipsets. These is NO reason to do custom silicon to support any of the features offered by "enterprise" APs.
Enterprise hardware does not use general-purpose CPUs, it uses special-purpose ASICs
Actually they don't - take a look in a high-end AP some time. "Enterprise" wireless systems use the same, or often older generation, of wireless technology that is in consumer access points. Competition in the consumer AP market is what drives all the incredible price/performance in wireless technology, and I assure you nobody is going to spend the tens of millions to do a custom spin of one of those chipsets for the relatively small high-end market. Those products sell on branding, special software features, and support contracts, not silicon performance. And as far as the CPU/memory etc, these are going to be much LESS specialized in a high-end system than in a consumer AP. Low-cost APs use highly integrated ARM or MIPs-based SOCs that are designed for sub $20 BOM cost. A higher-end system, however, is not bound by BOM costs and might have four times the memory and a more general purpose processor capable of running more software.
Routers and switches are a different story, and those DO use ASICs and FPGAs. The high-end models of these have to deliver a totally different hardware feature set than consumer equipment, and unlike wireless technology, the bleeding edge tends to be developed for the highest priced products before trickling down.
They can only announce sales when they've been sold to an actual customer.
Not true. The terms you're looking for are "sold in" vs "sold out". Sometimes "sold out" can be very difficult to know with any precision, because of the time it takes retailers to reorder and variance in their stocking levels. "sold in" (meaning goods went into the channel) is when the revenue is recognized, because the channel _is_ the customer, from the manufacturers perspective.
Of course Apple also has their own retail stores and in that case, yes the inventory is still "theirs" until it is sold to the end user. However in that case there is no channel to speak of so a sale is just a sale.
The top of an organization is not the place for anyone with a clue about technology. It is the realm of pure politics, and it's worst of all in IT.
Not everything is a duality.
Ah, so really there are two kinds of things: those which are dualities and those which are not?
Okay, so to make sure I understand this -- neutral is called neutral because it's tied to ground?
Not really. It's called neutral because there are two phases (two hots) in a household electrical system, and neutral is the voltage that is half way between them. Or generally, the "vector sum" of the AC voltages. I am oversimplifying here - your home is technically a "split single phase", and there are also three phase systems.
It is no coincidence that neutral voltage is usually 0VDC, but this is not actually what makes it "neutral". You could actually have an AC system where neutral is some other voltage, or is not referenced to anything at all. For example, a typical portable generator will have two 120V outputs of opposing phase, sharing a neutral. You could connect loads to it and they would be powered just fine, but that neutral is not going to be at ground unless you make it so, usually by connecting the chassis of the generator to ground (which you are required to do by code).
So if some idiot were to stand on the ground and grab the neutral wire, no ill would befall him, because it's already grounded?
Assuming no wiring fault, yes this is probably safe. However, there will be some voltage on the wire depending how much it is loaded.
The next stupid question is, why do you need a neutral wire at all? Why not just "hot" and "ground?"
Certainly you can power something with just those two wires. But you would have limited safety mechanisms because your neutral and ground are one and the same, and you would also introduce a whole bunch of new safety problems. See upthread.
A full treatment of AC power systems is far beyond the scope of what I have time to explain in a Slashdot post. There is great deal of info in wikipedia though. A lot of this will seem weird and counterintuitive at first, but once you grok it you will find that household wiring is actually a very clever and elegant system. Another interesting subject to check out, which will really make clear the distinction between neutral and ground, is the GFCI.
There are two kinds of hard problems in programming: problems that are hard because they require ingenuity and deep thought, and problems that are hard because they require weeks of unraveling someone else's garbage.
There are some horrible programmers out there and I have on many occasions been tasked with cleaning up their messes. In your situation I would suggest either a) try to figure out if it would take less time for you to implement it in a clean and maintainable way or b) find someone else you can hire who knows the code base or at least is more familiar with the specific problem.
If you can't do a or b then you're screwed. In that situation, personally, I would either quit, ask for a different project, or print out the whole source code and sit back with a pen and start studying and commenting - one of the few tasks for which I still prefer dead trees.
Can somebody versed in AC explain why this is so? If the neutral and ground are tied together don't they have to be at the same potential by definition?
By definition of what? Wire has resistance, and the more load you put on a wire, the more the voltage on one end will differ from the other.
But the main issue from a safety standpoint is wiring faults. Neutral and hot could be swapped (a common mistake by DIYers). You also have the possibility of neutral being disconnected (or having a loose connection) at the source - in this situation the voltage on the neutral wire will be pulled up by the loads on the line towards the "hot" wire. The load would not be getting any current so it would appear that the circuit is dead, but both the neutral and the hot would actually be hot!
Unlike neutral, the ground wire carries no current under non-fault circumstances. Its only purpose is to carry a fault current to ground and to keep everything in a household at the same potential.