I wasn't saying a phone would cause an explosion --- I was rebutting the parent by saying that if such a thing could happen, a mast 40' away still wouldn't, because of...
The distance between a network transmitter at the top of a 40 foot pole, vs. the distance between the phone in your hand/pocket at the nozzle of the pump.
Of course, the position on this curve changes depending on your environment.
On a brand-new machine, you're on the far right, so this is unnoticeable. "Not worth the effort".
On a P-90, you're on the far left - your loading time just fell from 2 hours to 1:45. "Still not good enough".
On a P2-300, Mozilla has just become useable. That 10% was important.
Usage patterns are also relevant - if you have a 60-tab bookmark (like a previous poster), then shaving 10% off the loading time for each tab is a massive saving.
I expect that a number of users will find this speed increase useful.
I have two absolutely ancient dot matrix printers that I used with my Amiga, 15 years ago! I dug them out a few months back, plugged them into my Dell laptop, installed the drivers (standard with Windows, amazingly), and they still printed.
They were still on the original ribbons, too!
By contrast, every inkjet I've ever owned since has packed up within 2 years, and got through ink cartridges at a stupid rate.
For printing out plain text, you really can't beat an inkjet. And you really know you're printing with that amazing noise!
...I'm hitting in academia is, indeed, that "it's all been done before". The number of times that I've run across a paper from 1997 a week after coming up with some incredible idea, and finding that it's done it, but better, in amazing.
The thing about academia, of course, is that you have to make an original contribution...
This was essentially vertical software that many banks use. The cost came from the fact that they had to employ their own engineers to do everything; the vendor's engineers were doing work for dozens of companies. It just doesn't pan out. The advantage of the software being more tailored doesn't equal the cost of the internal maintenance and the fact that you miss out on the rest of the world.
It's not much of a leap to consider the ability to run software to be a feature of an OS; in this respect, the NT branch of Windows was clearly missing features compared to 9x.
However, 9x was missing security, NTFS...
So, which branch do you go for? That's the problem with forking.
I thought the title 'forking commercial software' explained it.
The software was commercial; the bank was offered a contract for maintenance which they decided was too expensive, so they took the version they'd bought (which I infer came with the source) and maintained it themselves.
Of course, they didn't have the maintenance contract, so no source for the evolving commercial version or outside maintenance. Divergence occurred, so they couldn't migrate back, which caused the problem.
They thought it would be cheaper to do the maintenance themselves; this was a bad call. Forking it cost them much, much more in the long run, but for very different reasons to FLOSS projects forking or commercial software forking outside the company.
... that commercial software forks too. Remember when lots of software wouldn't run on the NT branch of Windows?
This article has lots of comments about commercial software switching to a new version with different features, causing a dilemma - Winamp 3 is a prime example.
The only difference that FLOSS provides is that (a) the teams can trade code easily, often without permission, and certainly without managerial overrulings, which allows feature migration and (b) if you're stuck, you have the option to do it yourself.
It's foolish to say that commercial products are tied to a market; they're not. They're tied to a vendor. That vendor's profits are tied to a whole load of customers. If you're one customer, you don't have nearly the power you think you do, particularly when you consider shareholders.
My PhD supervisor once worked at Schroders Bank. They didn't want to pay 20% of installed cost per year for an information system, so they decided to maintain it themselves.
Bad idea.
Cut to a few years later. Their own maintenance has rocketed the cost well beyond 60% of installed cost per year. Even worse, the forking has meant that there is no upgrade path to the latest commercial version, causing the system to be an absolute millstone - and no way out.
It's a problem in the enterprise market, where custom software gets built, as well as in Open Source software.
No BIOS on the Mac of course... but it's got wide Open Firmware.
Not applicable! Think about it!
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2
Most brute-force and dictionary approaches aren't performed on the live system.
Typically the password file is stolen, or the algorithm discovered, or some other means is applied to get a local copy of the system to work on at the cracker's leisure.
Therefore, it doesn't matter if the system stops you from having more than 3 tries or not - it won't actually slow down a cracker, but it will piss off users who have to remember 10 passwords anyway, and might need 5 tries to pick the right one.
The first time I saw the trailer for Fellowship, I remarked that every single character was perfectly cast - you could name them just from a second of footage. Aragorn in particular; amazing.
But then, they did put a lot of effort into the casting process (curiously with the exception of Viggo Mortensen as I recall - that was serendipity!)
Slashdot Mirror
A few weeks ago, a service station in Chelsea was 1.09 per litre.
At the moment there's one in Blackpool that's even more than that, and people are paying so he won't lower his prices.
It's getting really, really silly. My daily commute costs me 5 in petrol alone!
I wasn't saying a phone would cause an explosion --- I was rebutting the parent by saying that if such a thing could happen, a mast 40' away still wouldn't, because of ...
the inverse square law.
Wrong end of the stick.
The distance between a network transmitter at the top of a 40 foot pole, vs. the distance between the phone in your hand/pocket at the nozzle of the pump.
Think about it.
Toyota say that the hybrid battery is supposed to be isolated if the airbag activates. So it's fuss over nothing.
A simple way of putting it. The cost-benefit is different.
Nobody copied vinyl, whereas people "photocopy" MP3s freely.
My supervisor simply refuses to attend any conferences in the States, and I feel similarly. Why go through the hassle?
It's a real damper for academia. Canada may well capitalise on this - the American academics don't have far to go.
(Particularly when you can get a week all-inclusive at a European sunspot conference for less than the flights to New York...)
This only applies if you've owned it for more than 2 years (last time I checked).
Carrying it through yourself you have an allowance (which is more than the shipped import allowance), but it's no more than 200 IIRC.
Of course, the position on this curve changes depending on your environment.
On a brand-new machine, you're on the far right, so this is unnoticeable. "Not worth the effort".
On a P-90, you're on the far left - your loading time just fell from 2 hours to 1:45. "Still not good enough".
On a P2-300, Mozilla has just become useable. That 10% was important.
Usage patterns are also relevant - if you have a 60-tab bookmark (like a previous poster), then shaving 10% off the loading time for each tab is a massive saving.
I expect that a number of users will find this speed increase useful.
Or should that be dot-matrices?
.
I have two absolutely ancient dot matrix printers that I used with my Amiga, 15 years ago! I dug them out a few months back, plugged them into my Dell laptop, installed the drivers (standard with Windows, amazingly), and they still printed
They were still on the original ribbons, too!
By contrast, every inkjet I've ever owned since has packed up within 2 years, and got through ink cartridges at a stupid rate.
For printing out plain text, you really can't beat an inkjet. And you really know you're printing with that amazing noise!
...I'm hitting in academia is, indeed, that "it's all been done before". The number of times that I've run across a paper from 1997 a week after coming up with some incredible idea, and finding that it's done it, but better, in amazing.
The thing about academia, of course, is that you have to make an original contribution...
Stanford are going to hate us - direct linking to a 600K PostScript in the article.
Don't click on it unless you actually plan on taking the time to READ it!
... "the more I practice, the luckier I get".
I think that holds true in a lot of situations - running a company, playing sport, or writing code.
I live in the UK. That's why I don't find it funny.
While it can be nice to feel safe in city centres, it's bloody annoying being watched constantly.
The government had planned to implement toll charges on every road by tracking every car. You'd be charged more on busy roads at peak times.
That's incredible privacy invasion. Bastards.
It's really not - the UK has the highest incidence of CCTV cameras in the world.
It's a Gnome mail, calendar and contacts suite, very similar to Outlook on Windows.
Of course, you could have visited Google and done some work yourself.
That was terrible. Go and stand in the corner!
This was essentially vertical software that many banks use.
The cost came from the fact that they had to employ their own engineers to do everything; the vendor's engineers were doing work for dozens of companies.
It just doesn't pan out.
The advantage of the software being more tailored doesn't equal the cost of the internal maintenance and the fact that you miss out on the rest of the world.
It's not much of a leap to consider the ability to run software to be a feature of an OS; in this respect, the NT branch of Windows was clearly missing features compared to 9x.
However, 9x was missing security, NTFS...
So, which branch do you go for? That's the problem with forking.
What's your point?
I thought the title 'forking commercial software' explained it.
The software was commercial; the bank was offered a contract for maintenance which they decided was too expensive, so they took the version they'd bought (which I infer came with the source) and maintained it themselves.
Of course, they didn't have the maintenance contract, so no source for the evolving commercial version or outside maintenance. Divergence occurred, so they couldn't migrate back, which caused the problem.
They thought it would be cheaper to do the maintenance themselves; this was a bad call. Forking it cost them much, much more in the long run, but for very different reasons to FLOSS projects forking or commercial software forking outside the company.
... that commercial software forks too. Remember when lots of software wouldn't run on the NT branch of Windows?
This article has lots of comments about commercial software switching to a new version with different features, causing a dilemma - Winamp 3 is a prime example.
The only difference that FLOSS provides is that
(a) the teams can trade code easily, often without permission, and certainly without managerial overrulings, which allows feature migration
and
(b) if you're stuck, you have the option to do it yourself.
It's foolish to say that commercial products are tied to a market; they're not. They're tied to a vendor. That vendor's profits are tied to a whole load of customers. If you're one customer, you don't have nearly the power you think you do, particularly when you consider shareholders.
My PhD supervisor once worked at Schroders Bank. They didn't want to pay 20% of installed cost per year for an information system, so they decided to maintain it themselves.
Bad idea.
Cut to a few years later. Their own maintenance has rocketed the cost well beyond 60% of installed cost per year.
Even worse, the forking has meant that there is no upgrade path to the latest commercial version, causing the system to be an absolute millstone - and no way out.
It's a problem in the enterprise market, where custom software gets built, as well as in Open Source software.
No BIOS on the Mac of course... but it's got wide Open Firmware.
Most brute-force and dictionary approaches aren't performed on the live system.
Typically the password file is stolen, or the algorithm discovered, or some other means is applied to get a local copy of the system to work on at the cracker's leisure.
Therefore, it doesn't matter if the system stops you from having more than 3 tries or not - it won't actually slow down a cracker, but it will piss off users who have to remember 10 passwords anyway, and might need 5 tries to pick the right one.
The first time I saw the trailer for Fellowship, I remarked that every single character was perfectly cast - you could name them just from a second of footage. Aragorn in particular; amazing.
But then, they did put a lot of effort into the casting process (curiously with the exception of Viggo Mortensen as I recall - that was serendipity!)