The article is laden with sickly quotes about how "we're so sorry we never knew it was bad" but I want to respond to this in particular:
they mistakenly believed they were entitled to download music over the Internet because they had paid $29.99 for software that gives them access to online file-sharing services
I'm sure there will be plenty of threads here along the lines of: "$29.99 for all you can download... come on.... an "honor roll" student thought that a legit deal?" Please just consider this:
For $10/mo I just signed up for an RIAA-free emusic account , and in the first 30 minutes downloaded this $230 CD boxed set in MP3 format - free of DRM and ready to play wherever I want. I also snagged all the George Carlin CDs just because they were top downloads, but I'm also having fun perusing their classical music selections.
While I am hopelessly out of touch with the popular music scene, having not purchased a CD in over three years, I will admit that the stuff on emusic is not the kind of thing I would otherwise have picked up in a CD store. But I am VERY satisfied with what they have.. whatever latent urge I once had to go out and buy a CD has been completely erased.
So give the girl a break. She may come off as an idiot, but let's not pretend that $29.99 is a lot to pay for a few gigs of zeroes and ones.
<plug>PS If you have an emusic account please check out my product for a great way to listen to your songs!</plug>
He and several friends created a start up, and within a few years, all were shut out of the company, and the investors walked away with the prefered stock.
This is called liquidation preference and is part of any serious startup financing. The deal is that regardless of whether the company succeeds, when it is ultimately sold, the guys who put in the money (for preferred stock) get their money out first. Then the common shareholders (founders' sweat equity, employee stock options, warrants etc) together with the preferred shareholders split whatever's left.
So if pop's company had been worth a lot, he'd have made a lot. So simple. If it was worth as much, or less than the $$$ that went in, he gets zip beyond the salary he made to that point.
Sorry, that's business. Would *you* invest in a startup knowing that the founders could shut it down tomorrow and walk away with the dough? Doesn't exactly give them the right incentive, does it now?
Yes, such an apt comparison! I can't tell you how irritated I am with alcoholics harvesting my personal information from web sites and mailing lists - why should spammers suffer a harsher penalty? Thanks for pointing out our hypocrisy. Gosh, do I feel bad for the spammers now.
No, what it means is that finally we can have comfortable silk boxers which we can wear for more than fifteen days at a stretch before they develop holes around the ass/scrotal regions from all the scratching. Finally, we'll be able to get a "leg up" on the Japanese with our superior silk technology.
Also, what makes you think that an out-of-work sysadmin or programmer would be qualified?
IMHO a lot of technologies stagnate for lack of "cross-pollination". Let me explain: would I expect a unix programmer to understand the process of glass making? No. Not any more than I'd expect the man operating the blow molding machine to understand the intricacies of select(). But I'm sure that the two of them working together, each contributing deep knowledge in their specific field, could come up with solutions that neither could ever have imagined on his own.
I can see why you say it's dead field though, and honestly I do sympathize with the management's position - you either cut what you can or just close the doors. Once business stabilizes though, process engineering becomes important again.
During this internet craze, I think a lot of techies have lost touch with the amazing techniques that we develop for designing and manufacturing all the physical things around us.
If you're an out of work geek, consider looking into the "old smoke-stack" industries for places where you could apply your software skills in helping companies improve margins through better automation and more efficient processes.
How is it "evil" to publish a list of IP addresses that match a listing criteria?
I will tell you precisely why, and these points are almost never brought up by the usual SPEWWS critics:
1) Those listing criteria are not publicly specified - only a small group of network admins, and readers of NANAE, who are familiar with SPEWS understand their method. The vast majority of admins using these blacklists are people who are just desperate to stop spam so they install tool XYZ without realizing the implications. SPEWS feeds on this desperation to get their foot in the door - it's not until someone finds that a ton of their legitimate mail is being blocked due to deliberate "collateral damage" that they realize they need to ask their administrator to stop using SPEWS (or whitelist the hapless victim with whom they're trying to communicate).
2) SPEWS keeps logs which are not deailed and often downright inaccurate.
3) SPEWS does not provide a way for spam filters to differentiate between real spammers and collateral damage. It's all listed the same.
There is a reason why civilized countries have laws against libel/slander, and SPEWS walks a *very* thin line.
Has anyone stopped to think that maybe it's not spammers who are doing this? I hate spam with a passion, but words cannot describe my pleasure in seeing these blacklists, especially SPEWS, shut down. They are pure evil in their methods, and largely ineffective against spam while causing massive inconvenience for ISPs and legitimate users of the network.
All of these centralized blacklists have made so many enemies in their history that any finger pointing is simply laughable. They have made powerful enemies, including the large ISPs who happen to be the only ones that in a position to stem these attacks. This is not your normal DDOS: it is not only the originators of the DDOS, but the very network itself that wants them destroyed!
The solution here is simply to have CPUs sleep, i.e. run with reduced speed, or no clock at all after a few uS idle time until the next interrupt. Most chips are quite capable of switching to much lower clock speeds on the fly, but for some reason this technique is only really used in laptops. It only takes a microsecond to change speed, so there is absolutely no user-perceptible impact.
Also it is MUCH easier that doing a full "suspend" (powering down PCI cards and peripherals) because you don't have to reinitialize all that stuff when you wake up.
I do. Not only does it make me feel really smart to use some of those words that I learned on the SAT-preparation flash cards, but I also saved several characters by not having to type out "that feeling you get when the assmunches who just stuffed your mail server full of.pif files get their just deserts."
Not "desserts" - that would be like ice cream. I don't want the vir0rs to get any ice cream. Only their just deserts. So there's another great word for you! Acutally two words - I just coined vir0rs as well.
Am I the only one who's a little bummed that this virus may have been stopped dead in it's tracks here? I mean, my inbox got slammed with crap just like everyone else's, but because nearly all of my systems are running relativelysecureoperating systems, I've just kinda chuckle each time another dozen mesages shows up automatically routed to my "Junk/virii" folder.
It is pure, gleeful schadenfeude for me to think of all the hapless PHBs and MSCSE CIOs who are finally being given a little hint as to just how vulnerable they've left their companies. In the short term yes, many people will be inconvenienced and possibly some critical systems knocked out. But these hapless companies and also the public sector will eventually be forced to learn, and that's ultimately a good thing for all of us.
The day columbia came down, I was talking to a friend of mine and for some reason it occurred to me (trying to cheer her up) to say "at least they pulled off a sucessful mission up to that point". It was just my way of trying to see the silver lining (and I still feel that way), but she glared at me like I was the most callous prick in the world.
Sorry, but mankind will never achieve anything in space if we're not willing to sacrifice lives and money to get there. I salute the brave men and women with the courage and the talent to go, especially these Brazilians who have the balls to keep trying these dangerous satellite launches under a new space program.
Minus some prop. stuff? That's a bit of an understatement, dontcha think?
It's just the kernel plus a few things standard utilities - i.e. the bare minimum they're required to make available. *None* of their own userland software is available, same as Tivo.
Unfortunately, the code droids seem to think that there's something magical about being at Stratum 2 instead of Stratum 3 or Stratum 4;
If you're running a large network where clock synchronization is important, you are MUCH better off running your own time server than having you clients talk to someone else's, regardless of stratum. Otherwise the amount of jitter with all your NTP clients going longer distances to fetch the time will actually result in less consistent times overall.
They probably would be liable. What surprised me was that the article made no mention of the financial impact of the flood... are the guys who run the network so far removed from the guys who pay the bills that they have no idea, or do the universities get such sweet deals on bandwidth that it doesn't matter?
I mean, we're talking 150+ Mbps here, for months on end. That's $15K/mo in bandwidth, assuming they have a really good deal and pay only $100/Mbps/mo.
If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree......Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.
Get off your high horse, dude. It is NOT that hard to get started. With a good introductory book and a CPLD/FPGA demo board something like this, it is quite possible for someone who has never done logic design to get up to speed and crank out a few simple working designs after a couple weeks of study.
I don't think the parent post was suggesting that learning how to make a high-speed, silicon-ready design is as easy as learning a new programming language, but there is a lot you can learn and do with VHDL on the way there.
Based on little more than what I found in that book, I was able to implement my first chip, which is currently shipping in the SLIMP3 network music player. Managed to fit the design in a small XC95144XL CPLD, which handles memory buffering, DMA transfer, IR capture, and serializing of data to feed to an audio decoder.
It starts with the most basic building logic building block and boolean algebra, and moves step by step from there to a basic CPU. Very well organized and easy to follow, with excellent examples.
Please DO NOT start with the Xilinx Foundataion kit and the examples therein. It will not make any sense. Actually it'll make even LESS sense to you if you have any software background at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, just configure your browser to ignore the standard tag. That's why I used it. :)
let's not pretend that $29.99 is a lot to pay for a few gigs of zeroes and ones
let's not pretend that $29.99 is too little to pay for a few gigs of zeroes and ones
The article is laden with sickly quotes about how "we're so sorry we never knew it was bad" but I want to respond to this in particular:
they mistakenly believed they were entitled to download music over the Internet because they had paid $29.99 for software that gives them access to online file-sharing services
I'm sure there will be plenty of threads here along the lines of: "$29.99 for all you can download... come on.... an "honor roll" student thought that a legit deal?" Please just consider this:
For $10/mo I just signed up for an RIAA-free emusic account , and in the first 30 minutes downloaded this $230 CD boxed set in MP3 format - free of DRM and ready to play wherever I want. I also snagged all the George Carlin CDs just because they were top downloads, but I'm also having fun perusing their classical music selections.
While I am hopelessly out of touch with the popular music scene, having not purchased a CD in over three years, I will admit that the stuff on emusic is not the kind of thing I would otherwise have picked up in a CD store. But I am VERY satisfied with what they have.. whatever latent urge I once had to go out and buy a CD has been completely erased.
So give the girl a break. She may come off as an idiot, but let's not pretend that $29.99 is a lot to pay for a few gigs of zeroes and ones.
<plug>PS If you have an emusic account please check out my product for a great way to listen to your songs!</plug>
He and several friends created a start up, and within a few years, all were shut out of the company, and the investors walked away with the prefered stock.
This is called liquidation preference and is part of any serious startup financing. The deal is that regardless of whether the company succeeds, when it is ultimately sold, the guys who put in the money (for preferred stock) get their money out first. Then the common shareholders (founders' sweat equity, employee stock options, warrants etc) together with the preferred shareholders split whatever's left.
So if pop's company had been worth a lot, he'd have made a lot. So simple. If it was worth as much, or less than the $$$ that went in, he gets zip beyond the salary he made to that point.
Sorry, that's business. Would *you* invest in a startup knowing that the founders could shut it down tomorrow and walk away with the dough? Doesn't exactly give them the right incentive, does it now?
Yes, such an apt comparison! I can't tell you how irritated I am with alcoholics harvesting my personal information from web sites and mailing lists - why should spammers suffer a harsher penalty? Thanks for pointing out our hypocrisy. Gosh, do I feel bad for the spammers now.
"We've got you by the short hairs now."
So now I have to wear this tin hat and shave my balls? Christ, Linux is not improving my odds with the ladies. Maybe I should get a mac now.
No, what it means is that finally we can have comfortable silk boxers which we can wear for more than fifteen days at a stretch before they develop holes around the ass/scrotal regions from all the scratching. Finally, we'll be able to get a "leg up" on the Japanese with our superior silk technology.
Also, what makes you think that an out-of-work sysadmin or programmer would be qualified?
IMHO a lot of technologies stagnate for lack of "cross-pollination". Let me explain: would I expect a unix programmer to understand the process of glass making? No. Not any more than I'd expect the man operating the blow molding machine to understand the intricacies of select(). But I'm sure that the two of them working together, each contributing deep knowledge in their specific field, could come up with solutions that neither could ever have imagined on his own.
I can see why you say it's dead field though, and honestly I do sympathize with the management's position - you either cut what you can or just close the doors. Once business stabilizes though, process engineering becomes important again.
During this internet craze, I think a lot of techies have lost touch with the amazing techniques that we develop for designing and manufacturing all the physical things around us.
If you're an out of work geek, consider looking into the "old smoke-stack" industries for places where you could apply your software skills in helping companies improve margins through better automation and more efficient processes.
If you can point me to a working mirror of their web site, and the incident database, I can give all kinds of supporting links.
In the mean time, feel free to dig through these.
How is it "evil" to publish a list of IP addresses that match a listing criteria?
I will tell you precisely why, and these points are almost never brought up by the usual SPEWWS critics:
1) Those listing criteria are not publicly specified - only a small group of network admins, and readers of NANAE, who are familiar with SPEWS understand their method. The vast majority of admins using these blacklists are people who are just desperate to stop spam so they install tool XYZ without realizing the implications. SPEWS feeds on this desperation to get their foot in the door - it's not until someone finds that a ton of their legitimate mail is being blocked due to deliberate "collateral damage" that they realize they need to ask their administrator to stop using SPEWS (or whitelist the hapless victim with whom they're trying to communicate).
2) SPEWS keeps logs which are not deailed and often downright inaccurate.
3) SPEWS does not provide a way for spam filters to differentiate between real spammers and collateral damage. It's all listed the same.
There is a reason why civilized countries have laws against libel/slander, and SPEWS walks a *very* thin line.
Apparently spammers aren't going to sit by...
Has anyone stopped to think that maybe it's not spammers who are doing this? I hate spam with a passion, but words cannot describe my pleasure in seeing these blacklists, especially SPEWS, shut down. They are pure evil in their methods, and largely ineffective against spam while causing massive inconvenience for ISPs and legitimate users of the network.
All of these centralized blacklists have made so many enemies in their history that any finger pointing is simply laughable. They have made powerful enemies, including the large ISPs who happen to be the only ones that in a position to stem these attacks. This is not your normal DDOS: it is not only the originators of the DDOS, but the very network itself that wants them destroyed!
The solution here is simply to have CPUs sleep, i.e. run with reduced speed, or no clock at all after a few uS idle time until the next interrupt. Most chips are quite capable of switching to much lower clock speeds on the fly, but for some reason this technique is only really used in laptops. It only takes a microsecond to change speed, so there is absolutely no user-perceptible impact.
Also it is MUCH easier that doing a full "suspend" (powering down PCI cards and peripherals) because you don't have to reinitialize all that stuff when you wake up.
Even organisms which reproduce asexually can mutate. Witness the /. crowd!
Sweet! It support Roman numerals! I wonder what else...
Yes, herr spelling nazi, but you missed all of these:
Better luck next time!
Admit it.
.pif files get their just deserts."
I do. Not only does it make me feel really smart to use some of those words that I learned on the SAT-preparation flash cards, but I also saved several characters by not having to type out "that feeling you get when the assmunches who just stuffed your mail server full of
Not "desserts" - that would be like ice cream. I don't want the vir0rs to get any ice cream. Only their just deserts. So there's another great word for you! Acutally two words - I just coined vir0rs as well.
Am I the only one who's a little bummed that this virus may have been stopped dead in it's tracks here? I mean, my inbox got slammed with crap just like everyone else's, but because nearly all of my systems are running relatively secure operating systems, I've just kinda chuckle each time another dozen mesages shows up automatically routed to my "Junk/virii" folder.
It is pure, gleeful schadenfeude for me to think of all the hapless PHBs and MSCSE CIOs who are finally being given a little hint as to just how vulnerable they've left their companies. In the short term yes, many people will be inconvenienced and possibly some critical systems knocked out. But these hapless companies and also the public sector will eventually be forced to learn, and that's ultimately a good thing for all of us.
The day columbia came down, I was talking to a friend of mine and for some reason it occurred to me (trying to cheer her up) to say "at least they pulled off a sucessful mission up to that point". It was just my way of trying to see the silver lining (and I still feel that way), but she glared at me like I was the most callous prick in the world.
Sorry, but mankind will never achieve anything in space if we're not willing to sacrifice lives and money to get there. I salute the brave men and women with the courage and the talent to go, especially these Brazilians who have the balls to keep trying these dangerous satellite launches under a new space program.
Minus some prop. stuff? That's a bit of an understatement, dontcha think?
It's just the kernel plus a few things standard utilities - i.e. the bare minimum they're required to make available. *None* of their own userland software is available, same as Tivo.
Unfortunately, the code droids seem to think that there's something magical about being at Stratum 2 instead of Stratum 3 or Stratum 4;
If you're running a large network where clock synchronization is important, you are MUCH better off running your own time server than having you clients talk to someone else's, regardless of stratum. Otherwise the amount of jitter with all your NTP clients going longer distances to fetch the time will actually result in less consistent times overall.
They probably would be liable. What surprised me was that the article made no mention of the financial impact of the flood... are the guys who run the network so far removed from the guys who pay the bills that they have no idea, or do the universities get such sweet deals on bandwidth that it doesn't matter?
I mean, we're talking 150+ Mbps here, for months on end. That's $15K/mo in bandwidth, assuming they have a really good deal and pay only $100/Mbps/mo.
Yes, the CPLD can be reprogrammed over ethernet, through the microcontroller, but this is not a feature we've needed to use in the field.
If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree. .....Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.
Get off your high horse, dude. It is NOT that hard to get started. With a good introductory book and a CPLD/FPGA demo board something like this, it is quite possible for someone who has never done logic design to get up to speed and crank out a few simple working designs after a couple weeks of study.
I don't think the parent post was suggesting that learning how to make a high-speed, silicon-ready design is as easy as learning a new programming language, but there is a lot you can learn and do with VHDL on the way there.
I have quite a few books on VHDL and logic design and this one is absolutely the best book for a beginner:
Fundamentals of Digital Logic Design with VHDL
Based on little more than what I found in that book, I was able to implement my first chip, which is currently shipping in the SLIMP3 network music player. Managed to fit the design in a small XC95144XL CPLD, which handles memory buffering, DMA transfer, IR capture, and serializing of data to feed to an audio decoder.
It starts with the most basic building logic building block and boolean algebra, and moves step by step from there to a basic CPU. Very well organized and easy to follow, with excellent examples.
Please DO NOT start with the Xilinx Foundataion kit and the examples therein. It will not make any sense. Actually it'll make even LESS sense to you if you have any software background at all.