My rule of thumb is that 1Gb of data transfer is good for around 10,000 page views.
If you're looking at a wholesale price for a 20Gb per month account of being around $500 to $1000, then that's $25 to $50 per Gb would be about a quarter of a cent to half a cent per page.
Hands up, I bought from a local store simply because the spam gave me an idea for a Christmas present.
Could be an interesting twist on guerrilla marketing.. send out completely fake spams to generate interest in a product. Nothing to blacklist or complain to a host about because it's all a fabrication. Hmmm.
In the UK, Radio Shack traded as "Tandy" and for many years they insisted on asking for the customer's name and address for any purchase, even if paying cash.
Well, one day (this must have been 1989) I went in and bought something minor and the shop assistant asked for my name and address. Well, I knew darned well what they wanted it for, because I was getting three Tandy catalogues all with different variations of my name and address so I told him "no".
He said: "But you have to give me your name and address."
"Why?"
"Because I can't sell you this without it."
"Rubbish. You just want to put me on your mailing list."
Well, the argument proceeded and he wouldn't sell me the stuff and frankly REALLY pissed me off big time.
This was a bad move, because in the UK you're not allowed to collect personal information to store on a computer system without a) making it clear an b) registering that you are going to do so.
I checked Intertan's (Tandy's parent company) registrations details. It turned out that they hadn't registered properly. BIG mistake number 2.
So, I complained to the Data Protection Registrar that I believed that Intertan were breaking the law. They tried to contact Intertan. Intertan refused to talk to them. BIG mistake number 3.
Eventually this escalated and finally Intertan caved in and stopped asking. Well at least for a couple of years. I stopped shopping there in the end. Mind you, so did everyone else and they shut down:)
What are the qualifications/skills of the "independent" verifier? MCSE? Code monkey? Nick the Pig?
The sort-of-precursor to the CC, the DOD-5200.28-STD (Orange Book) specified exactly who needed to be in the testing team. For "Division C" (Windows NT 4.0 is rated C2):
10.1.1 Personnel
The security testing team shall consist of at least two individuals with bachelor degrees in Computer Science or the equivalent. Team members shall be able to follow test plans prepared by the system developer and suggest additions, shall be familiar with the "flaw hypothesis" or equivalent security testing methodology, and shall have assembly level programming experience. Before testing begins, the team members shall have functional knowledge of, and shall have completed the system developer's internals course for, the system being evaluated.
10.1.2 Testing
The team shall have "hands-on" involvement in an independent run of the tests used by the system developer. The team shall independently design and implement at least five system-specific tests in an attempt to circumvent the security mechanisms of the system. The elapsed time devoted to testing shall be at least one month and need not exceed three months. There shall be no fewer than twenty hands-on hours spent carrying out system developer-defined tests and test team-defined tests.
For higher security classifications, the qualifications of the testing team get higher. For Division A you need at least one individual with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or the equivalent and at least two individuals with masters' degrees in Computer Science or equivalent.
So, Safety Cap's point is well made - the method of testing and the personnel carrying it out is just as important as the technical criteria.
We too have had a failure rate of over 50% on 10Gb Fujitsu HDs about 18 months old fitted to our early Compaq DeskPro EXDs. Compaq have a BS firmware fix that doesn't work. We insisted that Compaq give us replacements for ALL the HDs, which they did, but they won't admit to the problem.
If you've got a installation of more than a couple of these HDs you'll *know* about the failure rate. If not, then the 10Gb unit is part MPG3102AT dated early 2001 - if you have one of these replace it NOW. I guess that MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT are faulty too.
There's an interesting thread here. But trust me, if you have a home PC with one of these units in, replace it right now.
The T&Cs say you must not: M. Monitor or copy any Content by using any manual process, or any robot, spider, or other automatic device, without first obtaining American Airlines' prior written consent.. This means that you can't visit the site to read it, surely since that involves monitoring the site with a manual process (i.e. reading it).
Or how about the fact that you must not: O. Take any action that will or could impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our site infrastructure. So no posting on Slashdot either!
Shaun the Sheep (from A Close Shave is a huge cultural icon in the UK, even more so that Gromit. In five hundred years time when archaeologists dig through the remains of our era, they'll clearly come to the conclusion that the plethora of Shaunie socks, toys, character bags, ornaments, mouse mats etc are part of some religious thing.
Umm maybe that's just my confession that all of these items currently exist in my household. Plus a single solitary Gromit.
9/11 proved that news services collapse under heavy load, something that was repeated only a few weeks later with the Queen's air disaster. This series of diary articles might refresh your memory.
Being a Brit, the BBC was the first place I turned to for news and basically the whole thing ground to a halt and that was despite the BBC News outfit having upgraded systems substantially to cope with the 2001 UK General Election. Both the UK and US mirror were swamped and basically stopped working. Interestingly the US Mirror site was in New York, not far from the WTC, and despite the fact the power was lost in the entire area, the servers kept going for several days on backup generators until those generators died due to the dust.
It tended to be the second-tier news service like Ananova that could cope, simply because in times of crisis people will always turn to familiar names first.. the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN etc.
I seem to remember that the low-graphics option came after 9/11, but it's only a partial solution to the problem.. several times since then the BBC have switched to low-graphics but there haven't been any events of the magnitude of 9/11 since then.
Look at it this way.. lets say the US has 50 million office workers with access to the Internet (a pure guesstimate) and they all try to access the same news sites within a window of 30 minutes. On 9/11 people were trying to download videos of the attacks so they could understand what was going on - don't forget that those now familiar images we all know now were completely unthinkable. This combination of huge numbers of users and very high demand for streaming video is almost impossible to keep up with.
In short, on 9/11 the web let us down and the only people who knew what was going on were those with access to televisions. The world has not moved on that much in the past 12 months, so basically the same thing will happen all over again if (God forbid) the same thing happens all over again..
When I used to work with DEC kit, some of the old Systime engineers (Systime had its butt sued off by DEC for stealing its intellectual property) said that they had an option for some of their kit called a "Christmas Tree".
Basically, the Christmas Tree just interfaced with the minicomputer and gave it some impressive flashing lights so the budget holders knew where the money had gone. I guess it was just a series of lights wires to the RS232 interfaces. That will have been about 20 years ago!
According to the Orange Book, the now-slightly-obsolete DoD certification, Windows NT 4.0 is secure enough to get a C2 Certification.
Now, before we all laugh and say "doesn't it show that the certifications are stupid?" consider this.. maybe the certification system does work, and all those other certified products are equally flaky. I've got a list of some TCSEC-certified systems here and frankly it's a pretty unappealing set of OSes. If there were as many Unicos systems (rated B1) out there as there were Windows, I betcha they'd find holes in it soon enough. The fundamental problem with any popular OS is that there will be thousands of hackers and wannabees probing away at it. I don't think there are many people reverse engineering CA-ACF2 MVS in their bedrooms.
I think the motto should be: "Security Through Obscurity" - perhaps all those horrid proprietry OSes did have a point after all.
Aww heck I hadn't realised Nimda was a year old.. maybe it's not a coincidence that Slapper is gearing up a huge P2P Apache-based worm for something.. maybe today?
Where did I put my hard hard? I think I might be needing it.
Well I guess spam comes in different size tins sometimes, and with different labels so you can tell the spam apart. I like Hot and Spicy Spam. Mmmm.
Of course, the 1% of non-spam that accidentally gets filtered out is just collateral damage (except it's normally something really important like a tin of processed peas or something).
I play an RPG called Canon at Evernight Games - a few months ago one of our most respected players passed away in Real Life.
It's a strange thing.. when you play RPGs you're used to the idea of people dying and then coming back. Real Life isn't quite like that, unless you believe in Buddhism. There's a sense of loss, but of that person as a game character, not as a real human, and it often comes as a huge shock to remember that these are flesh-and-blood mortals.
Of course, its also rare that you find if someone has died.. sometimes people go away and you're often left wondering why. It's only the most prominent players who you tend to find out about when they pass away. sigh.
Windows NT and VMS do actually share a common heritage (see here.)
I ran VMS systems for years and it's a lot less friendly the *nix, but it's a hugely stable and coherent OS. In four years of running VAXes I had *two* occassions where the thing crashed unexpectedly, and both times Digital took away the dump tapes for analysis because they treated system crashes seriously.
In the business I work in, we use OpenVMS on Alphas to run our warehouse system. It's a solid, reliable and very dull OS which is exactly what we want.
And for security, OpenVMS is a DoD certified C2 product, with a variant (called SEVMS) which is certified B1. I have a list here which includes current-ish product links.
Look, the VMS vs Unix argument has been raging since 1978 when the VAX-11/780 came out. The fact that both these OSes are decades old means that they're both strong OSes and have a lot of life in them yet.
..umm so it's not exactly hot-off-the-press is it? This was first raised two weeks ago, but hell it's a good enough story to read again;)
Check out the Super Happy Fun Slander Corner for a more ummm colorful discussion of this stupidity.. it's always a laugh to see failing dotcoms engaged in a death struggle:)
"The splendid Internet along with grasps, the electronic mail immediately holds above transmits."
It's fantastic isn't it?
Seriously though, this is one helluva big market, but I thought the Chinese had sold their souls to Microsoft and Chairman Gates with his Little Red
copy of "Business @ The Speed of Shite"?
You're darned right. I've seen it a couple of times and frankly it makes 2001 look like a shallow no-brainer of a movie. Still, perhaps the Hollywood version could explain the Russian one, and then I can watch the Russian one again and at least have half a clue as to what's going on!:)
I normally dislike Conservatives, but the fact the the Conservative peers in the House of Lords were determined not to let the amendment pass in any form reaffirms my faith in the political system. Well, for the next 5 minutes anyway.:)
How long until it gets abused? Well, probably about 5 seconds in my opinion. Look, I have to real objection to anti-terrorist or anti-organised-crime bodies such as MI5, MI6 or Special Branch having this sort of access - Echelon has been doing this for a while anyway, it's just a logical extension of those powers for intelligence services.
HOWEVER.. for everyone else it's a snooper's charter. For example, just why does the local council need access to my traffic records? Do I have something to hide from them.. well YES as an active participant in local democracy I sometimes find myself at odds with people in power. Do I want them (for instance) to collect the email addresses of people I correspond with and build up a list of everybody who's a member of the same political party as I am? Nope - that information is highly confidential. Do I want them to probe the URLs I'm looking at when I'm maintaining political websites or sites that are critical of the administration? Nope - remember, sometimes the password is either encoded into the URL, or the raw URL itself can often bypass authentication.
That's just an example of legitimate political activity that will potentially come under scrutiny by corrupt people in local government.. and believe me, there are plenty of those about.
To an extent, I trust MI5 and other bodies because I'm not a terrorist or drug smuggler, but do I trust all those other bodies that will be able to snoop on me? Absolutely not.. this WILL be abused, but don't count on the perpatrators ever being brough to justice.
I might just change by name to Winston Smith and get it over with.
On the flipside of the cute animals/mobile phone issue is another story being run by the BBC about how extraction of the mineral coltan in the Congo is endangering local wildlife - see this story. Coltan is used in pinhead capacitors.
Just a reminder I guess that new technology often impacts on the environment in unexpected ways, especially when novel components are used. What's more worrying is that your mobile phone may have helped fund warlords in Africa to continue a bitter civil war. The technology doesn't seem quite so cool now, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're looking at a wholesale price for a 20Gb per month account of being around $500 to $1000, then that's $25 to $50 per Gb would be about a quarter of a cent to half a cent per page.
Well, in my case Yahoo's Google results give me about 11% of my traffic, with MSN (i.e. Inktomi at 5%).
Could be an interesting twist on guerrilla marketing.. send out completely fake spams to generate interest in a product. Nothing to blacklist or complain to a host about because it's all a fabrication. Hmmm.
Well, one day (this must have been 1989) I went in and bought something minor and the shop assistant asked for my name and address. Well, I knew darned well what they wanted it for, because I was getting three Tandy catalogues all with different variations of my name and address so I told him "no".
He said: "But you have to give me your name and address."
"Why?"
"Because I can't sell you this without it."
"Rubbish. You just want to put me on your mailing list."
Well, the argument proceeded and he wouldn't sell me the stuff and frankly REALLY pissed me off big time.
This was a bad move, because in the UK you're not allowed to collect personal information to store on a computer system without a) making it clear an b) registering that you are going to do so.
I checked Intertan's (Tandy's parent company) registrations details. It turned out that they hadn't registered properly. BIG mistake number 2.
So, I complained to the Data Protection Registrar that I believed that Intertan were breaking the law. They tried to contact Intertan. Intertan refused to talk to them. BIG mistake number 3.
Eventually this escalated and finally Intertan caved in and stopped asking. Well at least for a couple of years. I stopped shopping there in the end. Mind you, so did everyone else and they shut down :)
The sort-of-precursor to the CC, the DOD-5200.28-STD (Orange Book) specified exactly who needed to be in the testing team. For "Division C" (Windows NT 4.0 is rated C2):
For higher security classifications, the qualifications of the testing team get higher. For Division A you need at least one individual with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or the equivalent and at least two individuals with masters' degrees in Computer Science or equivalent.So, Safety Cap's point is well made - the method of testing and the personnel carrying it out is just as important as the technical criteria.
If you've got a installation of more than a couple of these HDs you'll *know* about the failure rate. If not, then the 10Gb unit is part MPG3102AT dated early 2001 - if you have one of these replace it NOW. I guess that MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT are faulty too.
There's an interesting thread here. But trust me, if you have a home PC with one of these units in, replace it right now.
Or how about the fact that you must not: O. Take any action that will or could impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our site infrastructure. So no posting on Slashdot either!
Umm maybe that's just my confession that all of these items currently exist in my household. Plus a single solitary Gromit.
One.. two.. three.. baaaah!
Being a Brit, the BBC was the first place I turned to for news and basically the whole thing ground to a halt and that was despite the BBC News outfit having upgraded systems substantially to cope with the 2001 UK General Election. Both the UK and US mirror were swamped and basically stopped working. Interestingly the US Mirror site was in New York, not far from the WTC, and despite the fact the power was lost in the entire area, the servers kept going for several days on backup generators until those generators died due to the dust.
It tended to be the second-tier news service like Ananova that could cope, simply because in times of crisis people will always turn to familiar names first.. the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN etc.
I seem to remember that the low-graphics option came after 9/11, but it's only a partial solution to the problem.. several times since then the BBC have switched to low-graphics but there haven't been any events of the magnitude of 9/11 since then.
Look at it this way.. lets say the US has 50 million office workers with access to the Internet (a pure guesstimate) and they all try to access the same news sites within a window of 30 minutes. On 9/11 people were trying to download videos of the attacks so they could understand what was going on - don't forget that those now familiar images we all know now were completely unthinkable. This combination of huge numbers of users and very high demand for streaming video is almost impossible to keep up with.
In short, on 9/11 the web let us down and the only people who knew what was going on were those with access to televisions. The world has not moved on that much in the past 12 months, so basically the same thing will happen all over again if (God forbid) the same thing happens all over again..
Basically, the Christmas Tree just interfaced with the minicomputer and gave it some impressive flashing lights so the budget holders knew where the money had gone. I guess it was just a series of lights wires to the RS232 interfaces. That will have been about 20 years ago!
Now, before we all laugh and say "doesn't it show that the certifications are stupid?" consider this.. maybe the certification system does work, and all those other certified products are equally flaky. I've got a list of some TCSEC-certified systems here and frankly it's a pretty unappealing set of OSes. If there were as many Unicos systems (rated B1) out there as there were Windows, I betcha they'd find holes in it soon enough. The fundamental problem with any popular OS is that there will be thousands of hackers and wannabees probing away at it. I don't think there are many people reverse engineering CA-ACF2 MVS in their bedrooms.
I think the motto should be: "Security Through Obscurity" - perhaps all those horrid proprietry OSes did have a point after all.
Where did I put my hard hard? I think I might be needing it.
Of course, the 1% of non-spam that accidentally gets filtered out is just collateral damage (except it's normally something really important like a tin of processed peas or something).
I'm going to sit down now and take some more HGH.
Several sites are running 9/11 front pages, notable Yahoo and Amazon.com. Some sites aren't, such as Google, some are more subtle such as Alltheweb.
Personally, I like the /. black banner. I suggest you click on it.
Also check out the Todd M Beamer Foundation. Make sure you have your credit card handy.
It's a strange thing.. when you play RPGs you're used to the idea of people dying and then coming back. Real Life isn't quite like that, unless you believe in Buddhism. There's a sense of loss, but of that person as a game character, not as a real human, and it often comes as a huge shock to remember that these are flesh-and-blood mortals.
Of course, its also rare that you find if someone has died.. sometimes people go away and you're often left wondering why. It's only the most prominent players who you tend to find out about when they pass away. sigh.
I ran VMS systems for years and it's a lot less friendly the *nix, but it's a hugely stable and coherent OS. In four years of running VAXes I had *two* occassions where the thing crashed unexpectedly, and both times Digital took away the dump tapes for analysis because they treated system crashes seriously.
In the business I work in, we use OpenVMS on Alphas to run our warehouse system. It's a solid, reliable and very dull OS which is exactly what we want.
And for security, OpenVMS is a DoD certified C2 product, with a variant (called SEVMS) which is certified B1. I have a list here which includes current-ish product links.
Look, the VMS vs Unix argument has been raging since 1978 when the VAX-11/780 came out. The fact that both these OSes are decades old means that they're both strong OSes and have a lot of life in them yet.
When you run out.. just used a printed out copy of a Microsoft EULA!
"Essentially, they allow you to take control of any window on your desktop".. sounds like it's straight out of Microsoft's new EULAs.
Check out the Super Happy Fun Slander Corner for a more ummm colorful discussion of this stupidity.. it's always a laugh to see failing dotcoms engaged in a death struggle :)
The best keyboard I ever used was on a TeleVideo 9220 terminal, a really nice piece of work..
Ahhh bliss.. sadly the keyboard only worked on a TV9220 and frankly there's more to computing these days than VT220 compatible terminals :)
It's fantastic isn't it?
Seriously though, this is one helluva big market, but I thought the Chinese had sold their souls to Microsoft and Chairman Gates with his Little Red copy of "Business @ The Speed of Shite"?
You're darned right. I've seen it a couple of times and frankly it makes 2001 look like a shallow no-brainer of a movie. Still, perhaps the Hollywood version could explain the Russian one, and then I can watch the Russian one again and at least have half a clue as to what's going on! :)
I normally dislike Conservatives, but the fact the the Conservative peers in the House of Lords were determined not to let the amendment pass in any form reaffirms my faith in the political system. Well, for the next 5 minutes anyway. :)
HOWEVER.. for everyone else it's a snooper's charter. For example, just why does the local council need access to my traffic records? Do I have something to hide from them.. well YES as an active participant in local democracy I sometimes find myself at odds with people in power. Do I want them (for instance) to collect the email addresses of people I correspond with and build up a list of everybody who's a member of the same political party as I am? Nope - that information is highly confidential. Do I want them to probe the URLs I'm looking at when I'm maintaining political websites or sites that are critical of the administration? Nope - remember, sometimes the password is either encoded into the URL, or the raw URL itself can often bypass authentication.
That's just an example of legitimate political activity that will potentially come under scrutiny by corrupt people in local government.. and believe me, there are plenty of those about.
To an extent, I trust MI5 and other bodies because I'm not a terrorist or drug smuggler, but do I trust all those other bodies that will be able to snoop on me? Absolutely not.. this WILL be abused, but don't count on the perpatrators ever being brough to justice.
I might just change by name to Winston Smith and get it over with.
Just a reminder I guess that new technology often impacts on the environment in unexpected ways, especially when novel components are used. What's more worrying is that your mobile phone may have helped fund warlords in Africa to continue a bitter civil war. The technology doesn't seem quite so cool now, does it?