DiDio said that in some cases, the discounts could be as high as 50 percent.
The surprising thing is that this still results in a surprisingly high profit margin: say on a $100 sale they have an 85% profit margin, that means that the product cost them $15. If you cut the price to $50, then the profit margin is ($50-$15)/$50= 70%.
Now granted, that's a 70% slice of a smaller pie, but they're still nowhere near losing money on a 50% price cut. They'd have to drop the price by 70% to get to a 50% profit margin. ( the profit margin drops almost asymptotically as you approach $15)
There is still, however, the question of whether these price cuts fit within the DOJ consent decree. I too would like to see an opinion on that question.
My immediate reaction was that this person who brought down the net using his research tool should not have been using a production network.
RTFA: (from the globe artice)
The crisis had nothing to do with the particular software the researcher was using . . . . . . The large volume of data the researcher was uploading happened to be the last drop that made the network overflow.
The essential problem was that the network was (almost) overloaded. The data from the researcher was simply enough to complete the overload.. This probably either caused an overload in a fixed-sized table (oops) or it caused a router/switch to run out of memory. This caused the data loop. Shutting down the segment with the data loop caused a large chunk of dataflow to be re-routed along a secondary path --- overloading that path. "and they caused two more, and they caused two more and so on , and so on....".
For all we know, this researcher could have been doing an FTP transfer (but my {blind} guess is that he was doing some sort of multi-system collaberative computing). His problem was that he put a bit more load onto an already groaning network, and broke it's back{bone}.
Now, as to preventing research work on a 'production' system: this is a teaching (read research) hospital. Research and production work go hand in hand.
From reading the article, it appears that the reason why they're adding a second parallel network isn't because they want redundant connections. It's because they need the extra bandwidth (and knew that they needed it before this happened).
In fact, on Oct. 1, hospital officials had approved a consultant's plan to overhaul the network - just not quite in time. ''Now,'' he said, ''we're going to do it faster.''
In a sentence, preventing research on a production network would have been a PHB reaction. The only way that that sort of reaction would have had the required effect would have been to apply bandwidth/connectivity quotas to everybody on the campus. (which would have placed extra load on the routers which would, of course, have made the underlying problem worse, which......)
So what this ruling means is that the DVD-CCA shysters (and hopefully maybe MPAA and RIAA) will be having to travel to where the offending server is geographically located in order to sue someone?
Either where the server is located, or where the person using the server to post the data is located would probably work.
As for hosting in Baghdad, Yeah, right.. They're allready threatening to bomb your city into oblivion to mollify the oil companies, and now you're gonna get the MPAA pissed at you too???
Talk about cruising for a bruising... (Or would that be cruising for a Cruising?)
whatever...
people tend to choose security on the principle that only criminals have something to hide...
This is close to the principle behind the support for most restrictions on civil rights -- be it liberty restrictions ("against criminals and terrorists only"), Jim Crow laws ("against blacks only"), Hitler's Neurenberg laws ("Against Jews only"), or Israel's security laws ("Against Palistinians only").
These laws are always against a subgroup that is unpopular and easily identifiable as "not me". It's always easy to get the public to support the supression of "Someone Else's rights". Unfortunately, once the tools and structures of supression are in place, it's easy enough to turn them against more and more people until everybody's rights are effectively infringed.
(Jim Crow laws -> McCarthyism, Nurenburg laws -> Gestapo supression of the German people generally, etc.)
It's hard to estimate costs, but I think that you've overestimated the lifetime support costs of the Open Source product. If you've got a stable product, there's likely to be less and less that you're changing in it over time. The 1/10 FTE might be appropriate for the first couple of years, but it's likely to drop over time. Following most lists costs me well under 4 Hours/week.
There's also the costs of supporting a discontinued commercial product (mentioned in another post). Consider the recent announcement that Microsoft would be stopping all support for win 95 this year, and win/98 in 2004. That's about a 6 year lifetime for a product with probably the largest user community in software history. How much will it cost these companies to get their support now?
My guess is that future support for the proprietary products will decrease in quality over time (but for the same price) to the point where it may be necessary to replace the product with a newer one (at very large cost).
...and get a message from the firewall saying that this site is forbidden by a rating check.
If your french isn't that bad, try using babelfish to translate the link to french ( or see if babelfish will then translate it's french translation back to english!) Right click on the link in slashdot and copy the link address then paste that in the bablefish 'translate this URL' box.
"Should you or your co-workers be captured or killed, we will deny all knowledge of you or this communication. Good luck, Jim."
Freedom of the press is a lynchpin requirement for a real democracy.
If you think of a country as a meta-creature, the press are its senses. When the senses of a creature only report what someone wants those senses to report, this is tantamount to delusion.
How much would you trust a delusional state with access to the largest arsenals (Nuclear and otherwise) that this planet has ever known?
I think the original babel translation was "Russia and White Russia", which I thought would be confusing to many North Americans (including me). In afterthought (I.e. 20 seconds after I posted it) I realized that a better way to say it would have been "some Former soviet States".
The survery claims to asked questions relating to state monopolies. But did they ask about monopolies in general?
Adam Smith supposedly said that big business is effectively the same as big government. His 'Free Market' refered to a free market of multiple small businesses.
I think we're talking things like DECSS/DMCA issues -- supression of decryption/encryption programs and research papers. Also the post-9/11 unwillingness/inability of the press to criticize Bush Jr..
Remember, as well, the lambasting that Bill Moyer took for his comments on the Hijackers (( and I fully agree with him on that one -- As much as I may disagree with them, I'm not going to call someone who's willing to die for what he believes in a coward.. Misled and stupid, yes.. but not a coward)).
There were also things like the censorship of anti-WTO protests and protestors in Seattle. The US is far from a fully 'free press' state.
There is also the issue of 'directed' press... Things like various networks pushing the 'popularity' of sister companies' movies as news or supressing news that might make their parent companies look bad. Many companies have gotten so big that, when they start to push for censorship of the press, it's almost as bad as having the government do so.
Babelfished and then cleaned up that last post: (but I don't speak German)
The United States stood at 17 in a world-wide index of the journalist organization "reporter without borders" [press release].
"serious restrictions on the freedom of the press" were registered however on each continent, communicated the [rights organization] on Wednesday in Berlin. Among the 20 countries with the "roughest offences" were European countries former Soviet republics, African, asiatic and Latin American states. Italy was the worst European candidate with a rank 40. Germany fared quite well in the rankings. European Union hopeful Turkey placed 99'th.
They use the Earth's surface to fish? Now that is a technological breakthrough worth discussing...
Well, they ban logging on lakes....
Back in 1993, the BC government was under a lot of pressure over their decision to allow logging in most of Clayoquot sound (one the last large areas of relatively pristine old-growth forest). In the midst of the public protests, they found a way to add thousands of acres to the preserved area: They banned logging on Kennedy lake. Now, I'm not talking about logging the shores of the lake, I'm talking about logging the surface of the lake. They then added the surface of the lake to their 'protected areas' statistics.
Not much difference between 'decommissioned' and 'abandoned'.
For me, 'abandoned' implies a sense of emptiness. In this case, Gimli (and especially 32L) was far from empty, even though it was clearly no longer intended to be used as a runway.
Degrees F quickly disappeared because (I assume) of TV weather forecasts.
I think it's because C makes more sense for most people. 0C is where ice forms, and 100C is where water boils.
0F is where salt becomes about as useful as as sand, but that doesn't really matter to most people. 100F as is 212F (but in a different way).
MPH has gone because of car speedos but I think you would get blank looks if you asked a mechanic or tyre installer about pressure in Kpa.
Almost the same thing here in Canada. Air pumps are almost randomly in KPA and/or PSI with conversion tables nearby. I still think in PSI.
Having gone through school during the 'big conversion', I can pretty much think in either metric or English. Younger Canadians are mostly locked down to metric, these days.
Acres for land makes sense. 99% of all the land doled out in the former colonies was done under the Imperial system. If you've got an acre of land, it's pretty silly to describe it as 2.47 hectares.
For most human purposes, metres and yards are pretty much the same. but an 8 foot 2x4 still needs to be replaced with an 8 foot 2x4 -- no matter how you measure it. New houses, on the other hand, are all built in metric (makes it fun for the lumber stores).
When going through a conversion, you pretty much learn some quick conversion estimates:
1foot =~ 30cm;
1Metre=~~ 1yard; and miles->KM @ 1->1.6 is reasonably estimated at 2->3.
Degrees C =~ 2DegreesF for small increments, but the 5/9 ratio is exact (or 10/18) so it's not that big a computational expense.
Um, I live in the US and I've never heard of an "URG". Do you mean erg, by chance?
No. URG. An URG is the sound you get from a pilot when fuel requirements are calculated in kilogram but loaded in pounds resulting in a flame-out halfway through the flight. (actually, the quote was "oh, F___", but I'm going to take some artistic license here)
This was the Gimli Glider , which didn't crash, but did run out of fuel and had to make a dead stick landing on the abandoned RCAFB Gimli.
It was decomissioned, not abandoned. In this case, Gimli had 32L and 32R. 32R was still being used as a civilian runway, but 32L (where the Gimli Glider landed) had been converted to -- and was being used as a racing facility.
("being used", here referring to the fact that it was "Family race day" for the local racing club... the runway was stock full of people... Talk about a photo op!).
The reason why the plane landed on top of an actively used drag strip was that by the time they got close enough to realize what was going on there, they didn't have the spare airspeed/ altitude/ attention span to divert a few hundred feet to the right. On the bright side, though... having landed in the middle of an amateur race fest, there were literally hundreds of hand-held fire extinguishers available to help fight the (relatively small) fire that broke out as the plane skidded to a halt (hydraulic fluid?).
Read the link . It's an entirely worth your time. (at least, it was for me!)
OK, why is this site a.org? It is obviously a for-profit site.
Probably because rops.com is already taken and not worth buying on the secondhand market.
then the user would never have to enter a root password.
and what, prey tell, would be the difference between this, and having them run as root?
I think that we're essentially running into the security VS simplicity wall. If you want a really secure system, you're going to have to give up some of the simplicity -- and vice versa. Of course, RedHat has it's little consolehelper utility that asks you for the root password before running stuff that needs root prives. That way, at least, the user doesn't have to log out and log back in as root and it's pretty seamless. That's as close as I'd like to get to a root login for most systems (as long as the program does some work to ensure that it's taking it's input from the keyboard, not some [trojan] pipe).
A user who really really really didn't want a root password, could always set it to (cringe) blank, or "password" (with the obligatory warnings, of course).
I had an alternative version of that story. During a bus strike, I got a ride from a Chinese woman. It was about a 1/2 hour drive, and I spent most of that ride trying to help her with her english pronounciation. Near the end of the trip, I finally got her able to pronounce the R's reliably correct.
When I congratulated her, she said:
"But if I speak like that, my Chinese friends won't be able to understand me!"
In the article, it says:
Nearly all Linux systems and many other Unix systems come with Apache installed and often by fault enabled.
Although I presume that they meant to say 'by default enabled', I (like many others) feel that it is an error to have most facilities enabled by default. Thus the default is IMHO a fault.
I would much rather have various facilities disabled by default, with easily-accessible tools which enable those facilities (and give appropriate security warnings). Manufacturers, like sun, who ship machines with everything and their dogs enabled should be hung by their toes and beaten mercilessly with burnt-out '286s.
The standard defence that most of these systems ship to sites with well-traind sysadmins who know what to disable is silly. If a site has well-trained sysadmins, then they should know how to enable the required facilities. Sites without well trained sysadmins probably don't have good security, either, and most desparately need to have all of those holes covered when the system ships.
For admins who care more about getting a system running easily than they do about security, vendors like sun could have a program (named 'goahead-shootme') that enables all facilities just like the old (de)fault had it. Better yet, of course, would be a simple menu-driven / GUI program that allowed you to turn on/of various facilites and daemons (and possibly even provided an explanation of why). -- Bastille Linux comes to mind...
Slashdot Mirror
The surprising thing is that this still results in a surprisingly high profit margin: say on a $100 sale they have an 85% profit margin, that means that the product cost them $15. If you cut the price to $50, then the profit margin is ($50-$15)/$50= 70%.
Now granted, that's a 70% slice of a smaller pie, but they're still nowhere near losing money on a 50% price cut. They'd have to drop the price by 70% to get to a 50% profit margin. ( the profit margin drops almost asymptotically as you approach $15)
There is still, however, the question of whether these price cuts fit within the DOJ consent decree. I too would like to see an opinion on that question.
RTFA: (from the globe artice)
The essential problem was that the network was (almost) overloaded. The data from the researcher was simply enough to complete the overload.. This probably either caused an overload in a fixed-sized table (oops) or it caused a router/switch to run out of memory. This caused the data loop. Shutting down the segment with the data loop caused a large chunk of dataflow to be re-routed along a secondary path --- overloading that path. "and they caused two more, and they caused two more and so on , and so on....".For all we know, this researcher could have been doing an FTP transfer (but my {blind} guess is that he was doing some sort of multi-system collaberative computing). His problem was that he put a bit more load onto an already groaning network, and broke it's back{bone}.
Now, as to preventing research work on a 'production' system: this is a teaching (read research) hospital. Research and production work go hand in hand. From reading the article, it appears that the reason why they're adding a second parallel network isn't because they want redundant connections. It's because they need the extra bandwidth (and knew that they needed it before this happened).
In a sentence, preventing research on a production network would have been a PHB reaction. The only way that that sort of reaction would have had the required effect would have been to apply bandwidth/connectivity quotas to everybody on the campus. (which would have placed extra load on the routers which would, of course, have made the underlying problem worse, which......)Either where the server is located, or where the person using the server to post the data is located would probably work.
As for hosting in Baghdad, Yeah, right.. They're allready threatening to bomb your city into oblivion to mollify the oil companies, and now you're gonna get the MPAA pissed at you too???
Talk about cruising for a bruising... (Or would that be cruising for a Cruising?)
whatever...
Does anyone know which shuttle's engines will be tested?
Er, um, the one that they mounted in the testbed????
This is close to the principle behind the support for most restrictions on civil rights -- be it liberty restrictions ("against criminals and terrorists only"), Jim Crow laws ("against blacks only"), Hitler's Neurenberg laws ("Against Jews only"), or Israel's security laws ("Against Palistinians only").
These laws are always against a subgroup that is unpopular and easily identifiable as "not me". It's always easy to get the public to support the supression of "Someone Else's rights". Unfortunately, once the tools and structures of supression are in place, it's easy enough to turn them against more and more people until everybody's rights are effectively infringed.
(Jim Crow laws -> McCarthyism, Nurenburg laws -> Gestapo supression of the German people generally, etc.)
There's also the costs of supporting a discontinued commercial product (mentioned in another post). Consider the recent announcement that Microsoft would be stopping all support for win 95 this year, and win/98 in 2004. That's about a 6 year lifetime for a product with probably the largest user community in software history. How much will it cost these companies to get their support now?
My guess is that future support for the proprietary products will decrease in quality over time (but for the same price) to the point where it may be necessary to replace the product with a newer one (at very large cost).
If your french isn't that bad, try using babelfish to translate the link to french ( or see if babelfish will then translate it's french translation back to english!) Right click on the link in slashdot and copy the link address then paste that in the bablefish 'translate this URL' box.
"Should you or your co-workers be captured or killed, we will deny all knowledge of you or this communication. Good luck, Jim."
How much would you trust a delusional state with access to the largest arsenals (Nuclear and otherwise) that this planet has ever known?
I think the original babel translation was "Russia and White Russia", which I thought would be confusing to many North Americans (including me). In afterthought (I.e. 20 seconds after I posted it) I realized that a better way to say it would have been "some Former soviet States".
I did a cleanup of the babelfish translation (as good as I could with my near non-existant knowledge of german). If you're viewing the full set of replies, you can try following this link. It should be faster (jumps to an anchor in the current page).
Adam Smith supposedly said that big business is effectively the same as big government. His 'Free Market' refered to a free market of multiple small businesses.
Remember, as well, the lambasting that Bill Moyer took for his comments on the Hijackers (( and I fully agree with him on that one -- As much as I may disagree with them, I'm not going to call someone who's willing to die for what he believes in a coward.. Misled and stupid, yes.. but not a coward)).
There were also things like the censorship of anti-WTO protests and protestors in Seattle. The US is far from a fully 'free press' state.
There is also the issue of 'directed' press... Things like various networks pushing the 'popularity' of sister companies' movies as news or supressing news that might make their parent companies look bad. Many companies have gotten so big that, when they start to push for censorship of the press, it's almost as bad as having the government do so.
Babelfished and then cleaned up that last post: (but I don't speak German)
The United States stood at 17 in a world-wide index of the journalist organization "reporter without borders" [press release]. "serious restrictions on the freedom of the press" were registered however on each continent, communicated the [rights organization] on Wednesday in Berlin. Among the 20 countries with the "roughest offences" were European countries former Soviet republics, African, asiatic and Latin American states. Italy was the worst European candidate with a rank 40. Germany fared quite well in the rankings. European Union hopeful Turkey placed 99'th.
Well, they ban logging on lakes....
Back in 1993, the BC government was under a lot of pressure over their decision to allow logging in most of Clayoquot sound (one the last large areas of relatively pristine old-growth forest). In the midst of the public protests, they found a way to add thousands of acres to the preserved area: They banned logging on Kennedy lake. Now, I'm not talking about logging the shores of the lake, I'm talking about logging the surface of the lake. They then added the surface of the lake to their 'protected areas' statistics.
For me, 'abandoned' implies a sense of emptiness. In this case, Gimli (and especially 32L) was far from empty, even though it was clearly no longer intended to be used as a runway.
I think it's because C makes more sense for most people. 0C is where ice forms, and 100C is where water boils.
0F is where salt becomes about as useful as as sand, but that doesn't really matter to most people. 100F as is 212F (but in a different way).
MPH has gone because of car speedos but I think you would get blank looks if you asked a mechanic or tyre installer about pressure in Kpa.
Almost the same thing here in Canada. Air pumps are almost randomly in KPA and/or PSI with conversion tables nearby. I still think in PSI.
Having gone through school during the 'big conversion', I can pretty much think in either metric or English. Younger Canadians are mostly locked down to metric, these days.
Acres for land makes sense. 99% of all the land doled out in the former colonies was done under the Imperial system. If you've got an acre of land, it's pretty silly to describe it as 2.47 hectares.
For most human purposes, metres and yards are pretty much the same. but an 8 foot 2x4 still needs to be replaced with an 8 foot 2x4 -- no matter how you measure it. New houses, on the other hand, are all built in metric (makes it fun for the lumber stores).
When going through a conversion, you pretty much learn some quick conversion estimates:
1foot =~ 30cm;
1Metre=~~ 1yard;
and miles->KM @ 1->1.6 is reasonably estimated at 2->3.
Degrees C =~ 2DegreesF for small increments, but the 5/9 ratio is exact (or 10/18) so it's not that big a computational expense.
No. URG. An URG is the sound you get from a pilot when fuel requirements are calculated in kilogram but loaded in pounds resulting in a flame-out halfway through the flight. (actually, the quote was "oh, F___", but I'm going to take some artistic license here)
It's a measurement of surprise*fear.
It was decomissioned, not abandoned. In this case, Gimli had 32L and 32R. 32R was still being used as a civilian runway, but 32L (where the Gimli Glider landed) had been converted to -- and was being used as a racing facility.
("being used", here referring to the fact that it was "Family race day" for the local racing club... the runway was stock full of people... Talk about a photo op!).
The reason why the plane landed on top of an actively used drag strip was that by the time they got close enough to realize what was going on there, they didn't have the spare airspeed/ altitude/ attention span to divert a few hundred feet to the right. On the bright side, though... having landed in the middle of an amateur race fest, there were literally hundreds of hand-held fire extinguishers available to help fight the (relatively small) fire that broke out as the plane skidded to a halt (hydraulic fluid?).
Read the link . It's an entirely worth your time. (at least, it was for me!)
It doesn't have to be Kosher. You're not eating it, you're just, uhm, putting it directly into your body...
But you're not eating it!
OK, why is this site a .org? It is obviously a for-profit site.
Probably because rops.com is already taken and not worth buying on the secondhand market.
and what, prey tell, would be the difference between this, and having them run as root?
I think that we're essentially running into the security VS simplicity wall. If you want a really secure system, you're going to have to give up some of the simplicity -- and vice versa. Of course, RedHat has it's little consolehelper utility that asks you for the root password before running stuff that needs root prives. That way, at least, the user doesn't have to log out and log back in as root and it's pretty seamless. That's as close as I'd like to get to a root login for most systems (as long as the program does some work to ensure that it's taking it's input from the keyboard, not some [trojan] pipe).
A user who really really really didn't want a root password, could always set it to (cringe) blank, or "password" (with the obligatory warnings, of course).
When I congratulated her, she said:
All that work for nothing....Nearly all Linux systems and many other Unix systems come with Apache installed and often by fault enabled.
Although I presume that they meant to say 'by default enabled', I (like many others) feel that it is an error to have most facilities enabled by default. Thus the default is IMHO a fault.
I would much rather have various facilities disabled by default, with easily-accessible tools which enable those facilities (and give appropriate security warnings). Manufacturers, like sun, who ship machines with everything and their dogs enabled should be hung by their toes and beaten mercilessly with burnt-out '286s.
The standard defence that most of these systems ship to sites with well-traind sysadmins who know what to disable is silly. If a site has well-trained sysadmins, then they should know how to enable the required facilities. Sites without well trained sysadmins probably don't have good security, either, and most desparately need to have all of those holes covered when the system ships.
For admins who care more about getting a system running easily than they do about security, vendors like sun could have a program (named 'goahead-shootme') that enables all facilities just like the old (de)fault had it. Better yet, of course, would be a simple menu-driven / GUI program that allowed you to turn on/of various facilites and daemons (and possibly even provided an explanation of why). -- Bastille Linux comes to mind...
(On the bright side, petswarehouse is currently slashdotted).
25 * * * *
_____________
runs the start-seti program hourly (start-seti checks for duplicates before going further)
start-seti:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~samuel/seti
if ! ps auxw | grep setiathome | grep --quiet -v grep
then
./setiathome -graphics -email -nice 20 >> seti.log
fi_____________________
Note that standard error is not redirected. If something goes wrong, stderr output gets mailed to me by cron.
If seti@home starts with BOINC auto-loading programs, I'd be inclined to run this under a sandbox account (if I run it at all).