most ISPs don't want a "consumer" user to operate a server.
I don't think so. I'd say major, national/international ISP don't like it. Smaller, local ISPs usually don't care about servers, but are explicit about usage caps.
I just checked the AUP of 3 of my local ISPs. All of them explicitly permit servers of legal material, and have explicit ul/dl caps, with the cost per GB over those caps.
if skimping on building maintenance for a year or two can keep the company afloat long enough to start becoming a success, why not do it? Sure, there's a cost associated, but if it makes sense, it should be done.
I think that's the point he's trying to make.
If your company is saying "we're doing fine", but skimping on long-term maintenence, it's a good warning sign that something is NOT fine. It doesn't mean the company is doomed.
Another one I've noticed -- the water cooler. When the company stops getting water delivered, and starts refilling them with tap water, brush up your resume.
You know, painful as it is to those who pay the price, one can make the argument that this trend will, in the long run, help to minimize the economic disparities between the "developed" countries and the "third world."
What these corporations seem to have forgot is that privelege goes hand in hand with responsiblity.... Globalisation is a nice idea, but not when it only serves as a tool to cheat.
Most globalized corps would laugh at you for that statement. By the time they have enough assets to move all resources out of the country (and thereby remove their tax liability, etc), they don't care.
Once globalized, the interest is in bottom line and profit. Nothing more.
Mrs. Sweeney's page has pictures of two of her 'star students', along with their names.
Their policy documents online >> student records >> legal show that that is a release of personally identifiable information. Just their names would be fine, or just their photos, but as it sits, unless she has the proper paperwork showing that it is a proper release of information, she is breaking at least state law and her district's policy.
[having worked with my own local school district in the past, they require all web pages to be screened to make sure that (1) only a first name shows up on the web page, and (2) no student can be tied to a photo.]
I didn't see that fact listed on the Microsoft site.
Sure it is. I've only had time to go through the IDC report, but it shows a 2:1 hardware requirement, and that windows downtime per server is over twice as high. Also, they apperently hired completely inept administrators for their Linux systems, as evidenced by the ratio of outsourced work.
Observe these quote: It is important to clarify that, in this study, IDC evaluated TCO, as
opposed to ROI. Also Linux
environments averaged 314 users per server, whereas Microsoft
averaged 168. When comparing costs, we assumed the costs of
1.87 Microsoft servers for every one Linux server. That right there should say something. 1.87 Windows servers to do the same work as 1 Linux server.
Go throgh the IDC report. Look at the stats for 'outsourcing'. Notice that when they had relatively low TCO costs on Linux, the had high staff costs and low outsourcing.
Then note how when they had high TCO costs, they also had a relatively huge amount of work outsourced, and small staff costs.
The only useful table in the whole thing is Table 3, which is where I get the numbers from.
In the 'Web' category (web host serving, where interesting stats would be their pages served) they spent 1/3 more than the microsofies, since they had to hire Real Geeks. They also outsourced nearly the same amount of work, and found that Linux was better in TCO.
In the 'Networking" category (keeping machines connected), they spent 4x the cost in software, and over 36x the cost in outsourcing. What do they state as their conclusion? As far as network management software goes, "purchased management software and application software costs for Linux far
exceeded software costs for Windows." (emphasis mine) My company doesn't have to outsource or pay a small fortune for network management software. The report doesn't say what software is being paid for, but it obviously is the wrong one.
Next the 'File' category (FTP, NFS, and excluding NAS). They spent almost 200x the cost on outsourcing for linux. They spent much less on hardware, software, and downtime. But they had to pay large amounts for both staffing and training, probably to extract the knowledge from the firms that they outsourced to. Do they really need to outsource setting up FTP servers and NFS shares? If they do, what are their admins doing?
Here's a good quote:
Taking a closer
look at the data, IDC can state that, despite the vast improvements of
Windows 2000 over Windows NT, the downtime associated with
Linux servers is considerably less -- often well less than half the
downtime that users experience with Windows 2000. They then note that fewer machines were needed for the Linux machines, and that the reason the downtime cost for linux is so high is that it supported so many users. Obviously, a little bit of redundant hardware would have nearly eliminated the cost.
'Security'. Again, this quote of their methodology reveals a lot: This study
considers those situations in which users add applications to standard
server configurations for security-related functions but excludes
comparisons [between the systems] in which the manufacturer installs the application software. When discussing which commercial packages they choose, they said Commercial, enterprise operating systems are
the preferred avenue for security software... Although there are many open source security packages
available for Linux, few commercial security solutions exist for the
Linux server platform.Translation: There's a bunch of good, free stuff out there, but we weren't allowed to use it.
So I guess that if I had to use their constraints, MS is cheaper. If EVERYTHING has to be from a commercial source, you're going to get screwed. Getting screwed by one company is generally cheaper than getting screwed by a dozen companies. But we didn't need a report to find that out.
But I do find it very interesting that MS dosn't show off Return On Investment (ROI) results between the two.
paid for by the state... on the condition that she spend a certain number of years working in hospitals serving low-income neighborhoods. It worked out really well for her. Has anyone else ever encountered this?
I've seen it for several diciplines in state-sponsored schools, nursing and teaching being the most common from my view.
Basically if the state has a long-term need, it's cheaper for them to fund a student and get an agreement from the student to help with the need, than to hire existing professionals. It also decreases future need, so it's a big win for the state.
I'm sorry, but you're really going to have to provide some hard figures to back up that claim.
Here are a few figures. Most of them are comments on the direct cost (costs to block and clean up), only a few discuss the indirect costs (network congestion, bandwidth waste and expenses, accidentally lost messages, cost of personal time, frustration, etc.)
SUMMARY OF STATISTICS BELOW -- 40% of spam management [corporate costs] are over 90,000,000,000, lost business estimated at 30,000,000,000, identity theft and successful spam scams range from several hundred million dollars to tens of billions of dollars, individual spam managemnt time, effort, and resources globally is estimated at between 100 and 200 billion USD. Combined total so far, 15-40% of the national debt, each year [depending on cost of successful scams and identity theft]. Nobody dares estimate additional damages, such as slowed-down network responses for everything else. Nor do they discuss the added infrastructure that has been purchaced by everybody from telcos and cable companies to ISPs to Universities to corporations, for handling support calls, developing in-house solutions to spam problems, educating users, and other indirect costs. [Have you ever considered the costs of training seminars, in terms of paychecks for all attendees? What about building costs, phone lines, computers, networks, desks, security, cubicles, and paychecks for all the AOL, MCI, and other companies just because of all the 'what do I do with all this spam' calls?]
Case study: Company of roughly 500 employees, roughly a half-million dollars each year, and climbing.
NYT article "the economic cost is $874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account, which multiplied by 100 million such workers amounts to about $87 billion for the United States."... "In total, corporations will spend $120 million this year on antispam systems, Ferris Research said. (Or $635 million, if one would rather listen to Radicati.)"
[Corporate cost, almost $90 BILLION USD this year.]... "Yet for one of the largest Internet backbone carriers, MCI, the spam explosion has more indirect costs. MCI receives a half-million complaints a month that its network is being used to transmit spam"... "
Indeed, the biggest single cost to the company is unpaid bills from the spammers it evicts. 'Spammers know they are going to be kicked off, so they won't pay their first few months' bill,' said Craig Silliman, the legal director for MCI's network and facilities operation. 'By the time you catch them, they turn into a significant net loss.'"... "America Online now simply discards nearly 80 percent of the 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent a day to addresses at AOL.com"... "A cost that is hard to measure is the losses from e-mail users defrauded by spammers. One rapidly growing category of e-mail fraud is what is known as phishing, in which e-mail messages purporting to be from a big company ask for credit card and bank information. When credit card numbers are stolen, account holders face the time and bother of putting things right, though most banks do not hold them responsible for losses. But if the spammer buys computer equipment from a Web site with a stolen number, the seller suffers a loss, perhaps never knowing it was an indirect victim of spam."... "False positives have become so extensive that the research firms, which have spent so much time assessing the cost of spam and the need for spam filters, now have a new research topic. "We have a report coming out in the next two weeks," said David Ferris, who runs the research company bearing his name. "We think companie
Unsolicited commercial messages are streamed at you constantly, billboards, tv, radio etc etc....To warrant JAIL TIME? Really now, I think this crowd needs a little perspective.
No, YOU need a little perspective.
Personally, I get nearly 200 spam messages daily. I know people who get spam into the thousands. He is costing me, and my associates, a *LOT* of resources.
Bandwidth -- That junk mail, more specifically all the images in the email, take bandwidth. About 20K per message. Multiply by trillions (quadrillions?) of spam each year. Multiply by the number of hops that messages must go through, from my ISP, through my shared T1 where I pay per megabyte. Hint -- It's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
Direct Time & money -- Thanks to my business, I can't run a spam filter, for fear of it catching stupid people's email. I've tried it, but I just can't configure SA such that it blocks the spam and doesn't block the idiots who have open relay ports, speak in ALL CAPS, and include a few URLs in their messages. I spend probably a few hours each week on spam, which costs my company a lot of money. Repeat for millions of internet users. I've heard the cost here in the 13 or 14-figure dollars per year.
Indirect money -- I think just about everybody has deleted a legitamate message when culling out the spam. How many important messages have been accidentally deleted? How much money has this cost? Nobody knows.
I have no problem with the ads you mentioned (billboards, TV, radio, junk mail, etc.) Why not? Because the person who sends it pays all the cost. The net cost of sending a trillion spam is nothing; it costs more to collect and maintain the list of names. The cost of putting up a billboard is several thousand bucks. The cost of a radio ad (locally, in a fairly popular show) was $15,000 for a series of 15-second spots, to run for two months. The cost of a TV ad is similarly priced, I'm sure. My company has sent out mass mailings to its customers, and and that also costs us thousands of dollars. I've seen checks cut to the post office for thousands of dollars in postage.
The difference is clear. Traditional ads cost the advertiser. The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
These people are essentially embezzeling money from every corporation and individual who has email. You don't think that deserves jail time?
I don't recall what the brand was, I clipped off the annoying tag when I bought it. It $99 at the store, though, and what I would look for in any bag I get in the future. (if this one ever broke)
Externally it looks somewhat like a black courier's pouch. The outer layer is water resistant mesh that feels like coarse canvas (but isn't) with a fold-over top, and padding. It is all bound with two heavy mesh/cloth strips and metal clips. Shoulder straps are made out of the same mesh material, and it stays close to my body, even when I run. The bottom has a big rubberized surface with two plastic bars for feet. All the seams have three independant rows of stitches, and the inner-most row on one side is just starting to rip out after 4 years of constant use.
The front opens to a good collection of holders (one big and two small elastic mesh compartments, pen slots, big velcro'ed over padded bag, and little pockets, which I store my HP48 in, along with assorted pens, pencils, palm, and laser pointer. The back has a velcro-closed slot for holding papers and such.
On the inside, it has a divider. The inside of the bag is padded again (beyond the outer covering), and the padded divider has velcro on 3 sides which allows you to fit half of the compartment to your laptop, the other half to whatever else. I can comfortably fit the laptop, a projector, all needed cables, and a binder inside.
The worst drop it has seen was with (the company's) projector and (my) laptop inside. It hit at a sharp angle and a loud thud, but nothing inside seems to have noticed. It has survived several smaller drops, without incident.
I wish I could recall the brand of the bag, but I can tell you that it is what I would look for in a bag. Extra-thick shell, multiple layers of padding, and all metal clips and zippers.
[T]his is not an adaptation of Asimov's I, Robot, but rather Asimov's The Caves of Steel.... Oh, hell, who knows what they doing. I'll wager that the end product bears no resemblence to anything Asimovian.
After looking at what is supposed to be in the movie, you are clearly right. Probably they'll do the same for it as others have done to LOTR and Tolkien, and other countless epic worlds.
The movies are good, as far as movies go, but to people who have read and loved the entire collection of Tolkien's world (or any similar ruined production), are forced to ask if the director even bother to read the books. If so, did they take the time to read the Silmarillion or The History of Middle Earth, or Forgotton Tales or any of the other writings of that world? In LOTR, I feel that the director and script-writers just searched the books for names, maps, and some good quotes. They completely disregarded the (fairly comprehensive) world that was built.
I think it will unfortunately be the same here. The directors will probably never take the time to understand the worlds that Isaac made, just consult some well-read people about bits and pieces that make a good (=profitable) movie.
I can imagine them recycling some names and places, and pulling in a few dozen quotes. But otherwise, I am pessimistically expecting a new, unique story, that Asimov would ask "Was that supposed to be from my books?"
Do these accelerated services really deliver as advertized? I can seem them compressing text/html...
The HTTP standard encourages compression already. You probably don't realize that all major web servers attempt to use whatever compression the browser supports, and that all major browers support compressed pages. Look at your HTTP headers for that. But that's not where these systems gain their speed. Once you're in HTTP 1.1, the only bottlenecks are the transfer of images and off-site data requiring connections to ad servers and the like.
... but what about images and other compressed files? There is no way they are going to get any noticable improvement in speed with 95% of the bits downloaded.
They generally perform a lossy compression on images to accomplish their performance improvements. Additionally, they use some proxies and caching, but anybody who cares already uses such things.
If you notice on the ads, they show people opening web pages. Look closely and you'll notice that their 'web page' is really an image that is one screen wide and several screens tall. Of course you'll notice improvement when that has a lossy compression run on it.
Why not just move to another OS? Maybe BSD, or GNU/Linux, or even the semi-functioning HURD. (okay, not the hurd, networking is still dead.) You could even go to the Dark Side of the *nix word and go with SCO's unixware.
The point is, suing them just costs you a lot of money, but you still have to live with them. Moving to another OS means you can ignore all their antitrust garbage, and stop throwing money into their already-fat Microsoft Wallet (TM).
"Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has called Longhorn the biggest Microsoft release of the decade and bigger than Windows 95."
Bigger in what way?
Size? The new OS requires more GB of space?
Memory? The new OS is the biggest in terms of memory, 1GB recommended?
Bloat? The new OS is extremely overweight, and therefore biggest?
Budget? The new OS had the biggest budget of any release?
I mean, they already introduced variants into their source code of WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN and WIN32_EXTRA_LEAN, what will it be for Longhorn? WIN32_EXTRABIG?
I love my ISP. They will contact me if I do cross the boundary, but otherwise, say nothing.
They don't seem to care when I go several weeks in a row right next to that limit, either.
Their policy is simple -- You can use up to the bandwith your account type allows. The basic $19/month package has 3 GB/week, add 1 GB/week (4 GB/month) for $10. They give static IP address and no arbitrary server restrictions.
In their newsgroup discussions, they explain that because there are so many people who pay for big chunks of bandwidth and don't use it, they can provide the whole enchalada without problems. If more people started using all their bandwidth, then they'd have to lower the limits, but with all the homes and businesses and colo connections that consume only a tiny bit of the bandwidth they pay for, they don't anticipate it as a problem. Their stats show an aggregate of about 3 empty 45Mb/DS3 lines even at the peak use.
If the idea is to promote the arts and sciences, I can think of nothing more deleterious to that process than the idea of granting "ownership" of bits and pieces of the arts and sciences to individuals just because they thought of them first.
Really? In most production worlds, the time between patentable prototype and a finished product with enough profit to repay development costs is several years.
The patent system still works great for manufacturing processes and goods, which is what it was desinged for. 2-3 years for idea refinement, 5-10 years of production to recoup initial investment, remaining time of the 20 year protection as profit to reward your work. For good manufacturing ideas / products, the patented process will still be valuable after the 20 years, the patent owner and idea creater will have made some profit (that's the incentive it uses to promote the arts and sciences) and the rest of the world will be given access to the 20-year-old (but still good) idea.
Now SOFTWARE patents and patents in hi-tech areas are a problem. The problem is not their existance, but their scope and duration. Usually the problem is that the patent lasts longer than the usefulness of the product, or that because of the rate of change in technology, the novel idea becomes a common practice before the patent is ever assigned. When the software patent finally goes through, it will have been taught to millions of college students, and will be in use by a few dozen startups. When you patent a particular process, the side effect is that it wipes out a huge portion of closely related work. If it becomes profitable for the company, it will stop within months as new and better ideas are developed. It becomes a minefield in the arts and sciences, since the idea and related research has to wait 20 years (death in hi-tech) before being picked up again.
Patents on manufacturing processes and products = good for sciences.
SOFTWARE patents = placing minefield in sciences, at present. A few changes to scope and duration could probably fix that, though.
Before that you used to say "render me with [phong|gouraud|flat] shading" and the whole thing looked uniform.
Shaders programs let you do cool things like features [e.g. skin, roughness to things, etc...]
I am a 3D coder guy, and your description is grossly accurate. Allow me to be more accurate.:-)
In 3D graphics, models are composed of vertex sets (all the edges) and fragments (pieces of the model). For performance reasons, you want to keep all the models on the video card, and not re-transmit them through the system bus every frame.
Example: a walking person.
In a "vertex soup" system, you would have to carefully move every single vertex, every frame, then upload that to the video card, and let the video card rasterize the model (=convert it from points into a picture). This is not very practical.
Fragmenting your model into pieces (torso, shoulder, upper-arm, joint, forearm, etc.) lets you keep all the pieces on the video card and move the different pieces around, much like a jointed wooden doll. Keeping it on the video card means you don't have to spend a long time waiting for the data to be transferred to/from the CPU, so you can see a *huge* speed improvement.
Now lets say you want to modify the model, maybe to make the joints look beter.
Without shaders, you would have to modify a bunch of points on the model, then transmit it back up to the video card, then render it, every frame. That is very slow, but easier to transmit a small portion, like a joint, every frame than it is to do the entire model.
Shaders try to help you keep the model on the video card. Rather than modifying and re-transmitting a model fragment, you send a shader program and give it instructions every frame.
What they can do
Vertex shaders let you modify :
vertex transformations (moving points around),
normal transformation (changing what direction is 'forward'),
texture coordinate changes (changing where the artwork on the model sits),
lighting changes
coloring changes
Fragment shaders let you modify:
Stuff that takes place between vertex points, such as surface smoothing,
Textures (changing the artwork that is wrapped around the points),
Texture application (changing how the artwork is wrapped),
depth cueing (fog or vanashing into the distance),
You can do an awful lot with those shaders, much more than the few things you mentioned. Some of the big things right now are hair/fur, grass/sand/dirt on terrain, and perturbed surfaces.
But there are a lot of things shaders cannot do. They only operate in specific places in the graphics pipeline. They must be small and operate within very tiny time and space requirements. They have limits on execution control (no looping). They have very limited input, and output can't effectively be re-used in other places.
What I don't get is why didn't they just make the GPU a generic RISC with say 32/32 registers [ALU/FPU] and a set of instructions that fast graphics would require [say saturated X bpp operations, fast division, etc...]
That way you have a processor you can just upload code to.
Shaders need to be very small and run very quickly, since they may be run in the hardware hundreds of millions of times each second. One of the biggest complaints I hear about shader languages is that you can't loop, and you can't do more general programming on the GPU. But shaders have to live within very tight rules. They function as a slow pit-stop or detour within a VERY high-speed rendering pipeline.
But lets just think about it; Let's briefly consider the GeForce4 Ti 4800. It has an advertized performance of 136 million verts/sec and 1.23 Trillion ops/sec. If they had only a single pipeline, it would ne
Like so many bits of American cuisine, price and convenience are often considered more important than quality and flavor. Just take a look at the contents of the average American supermarket.
And my personal favorite -- Artificial Imitation Bacon-Flavored Bits.
Violence is cowardice. Cowardice is beating up people who are merely disagreeing. Cowardice is pulling a gun on someone because you disagree.
In the context of that Mohandas Gandhi quote, violence != cowardace. The quote is from a situation where the only choices are to fight an oppressor, or to submit to demands that force you to give up your identity to an oppressor. Fortunately, most of us aren't in that situation. The closest analogy to their situation is being a victom of rape or another serious crime.
In that situation, cowardace meant having your religion taken from you and another forced on you, having no representation by a usurping government, being forced into military service against your own people, and so on.
Also in that situation, violence meant taking a stand and throwing down your oppressors.
And if that really was the only choice in a situation (like it is in rape or other crimes) I would agree with Gandhi -- Keep your identity, even if it means fighting for it.
they pre-emptively tear gassed students at the CU - CSU football game to prevent a riot.... they cited the riots that had happened every year for the previous 5 years.
CSU? What do you expect at Counter-Strike University?
I have a healthy balanced life trying to get my graduate degree and keeping my girlfriend.
Okay, let's look at that.
Balanced life -- you do other stuff than play video games from the school bell to midnight, and probably don't spend every waking moment of the weekend playing games. I've known people who do.
doing well at school, graduate degree -- Again, unusual.
girlfriend -- The violent ones usually don't have this.
So, I must be some kind of huge statistical deviation then.
You aren't the type I worry about. I worry about the type who are already agressive, and then start playing voilent games.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked the AUP of 3 of my local ISPs. All of them explicitly permit servers of legal material, and have explicit ul/dl caps, with the cost per GB over those caps.
If your company is saying "we're doing fine", but skimping on long-term maintenence, it's a good warning sign that something is NOT fine. It doesn't mean the company is doomed.
Another one I've noticed -- the water cooler. When the company stops getting water delivered, and starts refilling them with tap water, brush up your resume.
Mrs. Sweeney's page has pictures of two of her 'star students', along with their names.
Their policy documents online >> student records >> legal show that that is a release of personally identifiable information. Just their names would be fine, or just their photos, but as it sits, unless she has the proper paperwork showing that it is a proper release of information, she is breaking at least state law and her district's policy.
[having worked with my own local school district in the past, they require all web pages to be screened to make sure that (1) only a first name shows up on the web page, and (2) no student can be tied to a photo.]
In fact, those photos with their first names could stop them from receiving federal funding for improper use of directory information.
Observe these quote: It is important to clarify that, in this study, IDC evaluated TCO, as opposed to ROI. Also Linux environments averaged 314 users per server, whereas Microsoft averaged 168. When comparing costs, we assumed the costs of 1.87 Microsoft servers for every one Linux server. That right there should say something. 1.87 Windows servers to do the same work as 1 Linux server.
Go throgh the IDC report. Look at the stats for 'outsourcing'. Notice that when they had relatively low TCO costs on Linux, the had high staff costs and low outsourcing.
Then note how when they had high TCO costs, they also had a relatively huge amount of work outsourced, and small staff costs.
The only useful table in the whole thing is Table 3, which is where I get the numbers from.
In the 'Web' category (web host serving, where interesting stats would be their pages served) they spent 1/3 more than the microsofies, since they had to hire Real Geeks. They also outsourced nearly the same amount of work, and found that Linux was better in TCO.
In the 'Networking" category (keeping machines connected), they spent 4x the cost in software, and over 36x the cost in outsourcing. What do they state as their conclusion? As far as network management software goes, " purchased management software and application software costs for Linux far exceeded software costs for Windows." (emphasis mine) My company doesn't have to outsource or pay a small fortune for network management software. The report doesn't say what software is being paid for, but it obviously is the wrong one.
Next the 'File' category (FTP, NFS, and excluding NAS). They spent almost 200x the cost on outsourcing for linux. They spent much less on hardware, software, and downtime. But they had to pay large amounts for both staffing and training, probably to extract the knowledge from the firms that they outsourced to. Do they really need to outsource setting up FTP servers and NFS shares? If they do, what are their admins doing?
Here's a good quote: Taking a closer look at the data, IDC can state that, despite the vast improvements of Windows 2000 over Windows NT, the downtime associated with Linux servers is considerably less -- often well less than half the downtime that users experience with Windows 2000. They then note that fewer machines were needed for the Linux machines, and that the reason the downtime cost for linux is so high is that it supported so many users. Obviously, a little bit of redundant hardware would have nearly eliminated the cost.
'Security'. Again, this quote of their methodology reveals a lot: This study considers those situations in which users add applications to standard server configurations for security-related functions but excludes comparisons [between the systems] in which the manufacturer installs the application software. When discussing which commercial packages they choose, they said Commercial, enterprise operating systems are the preferred avenue for security software ... Although there are many open source security packages
available for Linux, few commercial security solutions exist for the
Linux server platform. Translation: There's a bunch of good, free stuff out there, but we weren't allowed to use it.
So I guess that if I had to use their constraints, MS is cheaper. If EVERYTHING has to be from a commercial source, you're going to get screwed. Getting screwed by one company is generally cheaper than getting screwed by a dozen companies. But we didn't need a report to find that out.
But I do find it very interesting that MS dosn't show off Return On Investment (ROI) results between the two.
frob
Basically if the state has a long-term need, it's cheaper for them to fund a student and get an agreement from the student to help with the need, than to hire existing professionals. It also decreases future need, so it's a big win for the state.
Here are a few figures. Most of them are comments on the direct cost (costs to block and clean up), only a few discuss the indirect costs (network congestion, bandwidth waste and expenses, accidentally lost messages, cost of personal time, frustration, etc.)
US National Debt, as of today -- $6,915,186,083,875.25.
SUMMARY OF STATISTICS BELOW -- 40% of spam management [corporate costs] are over 90,000,000,000, lost business estimated at 30,000,000,000, identity theft and successful spam scams range from several hundred million dollars to tens of billions of dollars, individual spam managemnt time, effort, and resources globally is estimated at between 100 and 200 billion USD. Combined total so far, 15-40% of the national debt, each year [depending on cost of successful scams and identity theft]. Nobody dares estimate additional damages, such as slowed-down network responses for everything else. Nor do they discuss the added infrastructure that has been purchaced by everybody from telcos and cable companies to ISPs to Universities to corporations, for handling support calls, developing in-house solutions to spam problems, educating users, and other indirect costs. [Have you ever considered the costs of training seminars, in terms of paychecks for all attendees? What about building costs, phone lines, computers, networks, desks, security, cubicles, and paychecks for all the AOL, MCI, and other companies just because of all the 'what do I do with all this spam' calls?]
Case study: Company of roughly 500 employees, roughly a half-million dollars each year, and climbing.
NYT article "the economic cost is $874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account, which multiplied by 100 million such workers amounts to about $87 billion for the United States." ... "In total, corporations will spend $120 million this year on antispam systems, Ferris Research said. (Or $635 million, if one would rather listen to Radicati.)"
[Corporate cost, almost $90 BILLION USD this year.] ... "Yet for one of the largest Internet backbone carriers, MCI, the spam explosion has more indirect costs. MCI receives a half-million complaints a month that its network is being used to transmit spam" ... "
Indeed, the biggest single cost to the company is unpaid bills from the spammers it evicts. 'Spammers know they are going to be kicked off, so they won't pay their first few months' bill,' said Craig Silliman, the legal director for MCI's network and facilities operation. 'By the time you catch them, they turn into a significant net loss.'" ... "America Online now simply discards nearly 80 percent of the 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent a day to addresses at AOL.com" ... "A cost that is hard to measure is the losses from e-mail users defrauded by spammers. One rapidly growing category of e-mail fraud is what is known as phishing, in which e-mail messages purporting to be from a big company ask for credit card and bank information. When credit card numbers are stolen, account holders face the time and bother of putting things right, though most banks do not hold them responsible for losses. But if the spammer buys computer equipment from a Web site with a stolen number, the seller suffers a loss, perhaps never knowing it was an indirect victim of spam." ... "False positives have become so extensive that the research firms, which have spent so much time assessing the cost of spam and the need for spam filters, now have a new research topic. "We have a report coming out in the next two weeks," said David Ferris, who runs the research company bearing his name. "We think companie
Personally, I get nearly 200 spam messages daily. I know people who get spam into the thousands. He is costing me, and my associates, a *LOT* of resources.
- Bandwidth -- That junk mail, more specifically all the images in the email, take bandwidth. About 20K per message. Multiply by trillions (quadrillions?) of spam each year. Multiply by the number of hops that messages must go through, from my ISP, through my shared T1 where I pay per megabyte. Hint -- It's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
- Direct Time & money -- Thanks to my business, I can't run a spam filter, for fear of it catching stupid people's email. I've tried it, but I just can't configure SA such that it blocks the spam and doesn't block the idiots who have open relay ports, speak in ALL CAPS, and include a few URLs in their messages. I spend probably a few hours each week on spam, which costs my company a lot of money. Repeat for millions of internet users. I've heard the cost here in the 13 or 14-figure dollars per year.
- Indirect money -- I think just about everybody has deleted a legitamate message when culling out the spam. How many important messages have been accidentally deleted? How much money has this cost? Nobody knows.
I have no problem with the ads you mentioned (billboards, TV, radio, junk mail, etc.) Why not? Because the person who sends it pays all the cost. The net cost of sending a trillion spam is nothing; it costs more to collect and maintain the list of names. The cost of putting up a billboard is several thousand bucks. The cost of a radio ad (locally, in a fairly popular show) was $15,000 for a series of 15-second spots, to run for two months. The cost of a TV ad is similarly priced, I'm sure. My company has sent out mass mailings to its customers, and and that also costs us thousands of dollars. I've seen checks cut to the post office for thousands of dollars in postage.The difference is clear. Traditional ads cost the advertiser. The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
These people are essentially embezzeling money from every corporation and individual who has email. You don't think that deserves jail time?
Externally it looks somewhat like a black courier's pouch. The outer layer is water resistant mesh that feels like coarse canvas (but isn't) with a fold-over top, and padding. It is all bound with two heavy mesh/cloth strips and metal clips. Shoulder straps are made out of the same mesh material, and it stays close to my body, even when I run. The bottom has a big rubberized surface with two plastic bars for feet. All the seams have three independant rows of stitches, and the inner-most row on one side is just starting to rip out after 4 years of constant use.
The front opens to a good collection of holders (one big and two small elastic mesh compartments, pen slots, big velcro'ed over padded bag, and little pockets, which I store my HP48 in, along with assorted pens, pencils, palm, and laser pointer. The back has a velcro-closed slot for holding papers and such.
On the inside, it has a divider. The inside of the bag is padded again (beyond the outer covering), and the padded divider has velcro on 3 sides which allows you to fit half of the compartment to your laptop, the other half to whatever else. I can comfortably fit the laptop, a projector, all needed cables, and a binder inside.
The worst drop it has seen was with (the company's) projector and (my) laptop inside. It hit at a sharp angle and a loud thud, but nothing inside seems to have noticed. It has survived several smaller drops, without incident.
I wish I could recall the brand of the bag, but I can tell you that it is what I would look for in a bag. Extra-thick shell, multiple layers of padding, and all metal clips and zippers.
frob
After looking at what is supposed to be in the movie, you are clearly right. Probably they'll do the same for it as others have done to LOTR and Tolkien, and other countless epic worlds.
The movies are good, as far as movies go, but to people who have read and loved the entire collection of Tolkien's world (or any similar ruined production), are forced to ask if the director even bother to read the books. If so, did they take the time to read the Silmarillion or The History of Middle Earth, or Forgotton Tales or any of the other writings of that world? In LOTR, I feel that the director and script-writers just searched the books for names, maps, and some good quotes. They completely disregarded the (fairly comprehensive) world that was built.
I think it will unfortunately be the same here. The directors will probably never take the time to understand the worlds that Isaac made, just consult some well-read people about bits and pieces that make a good (=profitable) movie.
I can imagine them recycling some names and places, and pulling in a few dozen quotes. But otherwise, I am pessimistically expecting a new, unique story, that Asimov would ask "Was that supposed to be from my books?"
frob
[Will the editors please figure out how to use ispell, or any similar tool? Thank you.]
If you notice on the ads, they show people opening web pages. Look closely and you'll notice that their 'web page' is really an image that is one screen wide and several screens tall. Of course you'll notice improvement when that has a lossy compression run on it.
The point is, suing them just costs you a lot of money, but you still have to live with them. Moving to another OS means you can ignore all their antitrust garbage, and stop throwing money into their already-fat Microsoft Wallet (TM).
frob
- Size? The new OS requires more GB of space?
- Memory? The new OS is the biggest in terms of memory, 1GB recommended?
- Bloat? The new OS is extremely overweight, and therefore biggest?
- Budget? The new OS had the biggest budget of any release?
I mean, they already introduced variants into their source code of WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN and WIN32_EXTRA_LEAN, what will it be for Longhorn? WIN32_EXTRABIG?Their policy is simple -- You can use up to the bandwith your account type allows. The basic $19/month package has 3 GB/week, add 1 GB/week (4 GB/month) for $10. They give static IP address and no arbitrary server restrictions.
In their newsgroup discussions, they explain that because there are so many people who pay for big chunks of bandwidth and don't use it, they can provide the whole enchalada without problems. If more people started using all their bandwidth, then they'd have to lower the limits, but with all the homes and businesses and colo connections that consume only a tiny bit of the bandwidth they pay for, they don't anticipate it as a problem. Their stats show an aggregate of about 3 empty 45Mb/DS3 lines even at the peak use.
xmission is great.
The patent system still works great for manufacturing processes and goods, which is what it was desinged for. 2-3 years for idea refinement, 5-10 years of production to recoup initial investment, remaining time of the 20 year protection as profit to reward your work. For good manufacturing ideas / products, the patented process will still be valuable after the 20 years, the patent owner and idea creater will have made some profit (that's the incentive it uses to promote the arts and sciences) and the rest of the world will be given access to the 20-year-old (but still good) idea.
Now SOFTWARE patents and patents in hi-tech areas are a problem. The problem is not their existance, but their scope and duration. Usually the problem is that the patent lasts longer than the usefulness of the product, or that because of the rate of change in technology, the novel idea becomes a common practice before the patent is ever assigned. When the software patent finally goes through, it will have been taught to millions of college students, and will be in use by a few dozen startups. When you patent a particular process, the side effect is that it wipes out a huge portion of closely related work. If it becomes profitable for the company, it will stop within months as new and better ideas are developed. It becomes a minefield in the arts and sciences, since the idea and related research has to wait 20 years (death in hi-tech) before being picked up again.
Patents on manufacturing processes and products = good for sciences.
SOFTWARE patents = placing minefield in sciences, at present. A few changes to scope and duration could probably fix that, though.
I think it was called "Microsoft's New Focus On Security".
I am a 3D coder guy, and your description is grossly accurate. Allow me to be more accurate. :-)
In 3D graphics, models are composed of vertex sets (all the edges) and fragments (pieces of the model). For performance reasons, you want to keep all the models on the video card, and not re-transmit them through the system bus every frame.
Example: a walking person.
In a "vertex soup" system, you would have to carefully move every single vertex, every frame, then upload that to the video card, and let the video card rasterize the model (=convert it from points into a picture). This is not very practical.
Fragmenting your model into pieces (torso, shoulder, upper-arm, joint, forearm, etc.) lets you keep all the pieces on the video card and move the different pieces around, much like a jointed wooden doll. Keeping it on the video card means you don't have to spend a long time waiting for the data to be transferred to/from the CPU, so you can see a *huge* speed improvement.
Now lets say you want to modify the model, maybe to make the joints look beter.
Without shaders, you would have to modify a bunch of points on the model, then transmit it back up to the video card, then render it, every frame. That is very slow, but easier to transmit a small portion, like a joint, every frame than it is to do the entire model.
Shaders try to help you keep the model on the video card. Rather than modifying and re-transmitting a model fragment, you send a shader program and give it instructions every frame.
What they can do
Vertex shaders let you modify :
Fragment shaders let you modify:
You can do an awful lot with those shaders, much more than the few things you mentioned. Some of the big things right now are hair/fur, grass/sand/dirt on terrain, and perturbed surfaces.
But there are a lot of things shaders cannot do. They only operate in specific places in the graphics pipeline. They must be small and operate within very tiny time and space requirements. They have limits on execution control (no looping). They have very limited input, and output can't effectively be re-used in other places.
Shaders need to be very small and run very quickly, since they may be run in the hardware hundreds of millions of times each second. One of the biggest complaints I hear about shader languages is that you can't loop, and you can't do more general programming on the GPU. But shaders have to live within very tight rules. They function as a slow pit-stop or detour within a VERY high-speed rendering pipeline.
But lets just think about it; Let's briefly consider the GeForce4 Ti 4800. It has an advertized performance of 136 million verts/sec and 1.23 Trillion ops/sec. If they had only a single pipeline, it would ne
And my personal favorite -- Artificial Imitation Bacon-Flavored Bits.
In the context of that Mohandas Gandhi quote, violence != cowardace. The quote is from a situation where the only choices are to fight an oppressor, or to submit to demands that force you to give up your identity to an oppressor. Fortunately, most of us aren't in that situation. The closest analogy to their situation is being a victom of rape or another serious crime.
In that situation, cowardace meant having your religion taken from you and another forced on you, having no representation by a usurping government, being forced into military service against your own people, and so on.
Also in that situation, violence meant taking a stand and throwing down your oppressors.
And if that really was the only choice in a situation (like it is in rape or other crimes) I would agree with Gandhi -- Keep your identity, even if it means fighting for it.
frob
- Balanced life -- you do other stuff than play video games from the school bell to midnight, and probably don't spend every waking moment of the weekend playing games. I've known people who do.
- doing well at school, graduate degree -- Again, unusual.
- girlfriend -- The violent ones usually don't have this.
You aren't the type I worry about. I worry about the type who are already agressive, and then start playing voilent games.