I don't know about you, but I got over 10 years worth of hardcore computer experience, some of it paid, some of it educational, and some of it gaming - on machines that didn't have 233MHz in TOTAL - two machines at 1MHz apiece, a 4.77MHz machine that I only had part time access to, a 16MHz machine of my own that I loved, and a 40MHz machine that I later upgraded to 133MHz. Got a four year degree in software engineering at a university in the process, as well as working my first real paid job as a newbie software engineer and newbie network admin. I learned to program in like six different languages (Pascal, C, Basic, Assembler, pseudo SQL (dBase / Foxpro) dabbled a bit with Fortran, COBOL, Ada), learned to network computers via ARCnet, Ethernet for Novell Netware (several versions), learned the concepts of structured programming, several software design methodologies, concepts behind computer graphics, audio, user interface design, and played about 5000 hours of games - all on machines that didn't have 233MHz or 64M of RAM if you added up the processor speeds and memory of every machine I had through that entire decade, and all on machines with 640x480 or less of resolution (most of them had much less) - and no Windows 2000.
If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to play the latest games and run the latest software, then a 233MHz box with 64M of RAM isn't going to cut it. If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to experience and learn 'computer science' aka operating systems, networking, database, programming languages and software development theory, then 233MHz with 64M and an 8M video card and 14" SVGA CRT is ~plenty~ of horsepower. And probably free, too. Computer science isn't all surfing the web, Instant Messenger, MP3z and Doom III. I'd wager that about 80% of all the software engineering knowledge on the planet could be learned and used on a monochrome (amber or green) display. There is a world of difference between keeping a kid busy on a Windows XP machine with multimedia and the Internet, and teaching him the fundamentals of computer science.
Approach it from this perspective and the actual OS is a lot less important, all things considered. Load "*",8,1
I agree with you on the hassle of broken hardware though - maybe what they need to do is have the kids amass like a ton of machines, go through each one and break it down into components (video cards, hard drives, sound cards, memory, keep the case/ps/mobo/cpu as complete units, etc), catalog it, build a few test boxes to pop the different components into to sort the working parts from the broken parts. Actually, the nice thing about older hardware is that the points of failure are real easy to identify : dead hard drives don't respond, power supplies that don't power up a box, CPUs with dead fans - anything else would probably be ok (most of the time) and have them build their own boxes from the parts boxes, hand picking parts. That way, they learn how to trouble shoot their own machine and will be able to identify issues in the future and fix them, not be intimidated and be comfortable going in to fix (or upgrade) their box in the future. Walk them through installing the OS a few times with different OS's and a wipe/reinstall won't intimidate them either.
You think $50 for a blue disk is expensive, wait until you burn your first coaster. No - wait until you burn your second coaster in a row. It happened with CDs, it happened with DVDs, and it is going to happen with these.
That said - remember this is first generation pricing and it will come down as volume goes up. Just a year ago dual layer DVDs were $10 apiece, and now they are what, down to $1 or $2? Heck, the first CD I ever burned cost about $7 and now they are ten cents apiece.
When the drives cost $100 and the media costs less than a buck apiece, these things are going to be all the rage.
Unfortunately, nobody will lend us $400,000 for 30 years at 0% interest.
Breaking it down using round numbers, $400,000 at 7% means you pay ($400,000 x.07 / 12) = $2,333 the first month in interest, plus about $167 towards principal for $2,500 principal + interest. Add in PMI (mortgage insurance, because we put less than 20% down), another.5 % for the year is $2000 for the year, or $166 per month. Now we are up to $2,666 or thereabouts. Add in yearly taxes on a $400k house at $2 per $100 (an actual rate taken from a normal city) and you get about another $8,000 a year / 12 = ~$700 a month in taxes for a total of $3,300 a month. Kick in insurance (flood, home owners, etc) for maybe $2,400 a year ($200 a month) and you are right at the $3,500 a month marker.
That's not precisely $4k a month, but pretty close. From what I have seen in the past two or three decades, a realistic expectation is that the check you have to write each month just for your house is about 1% of the borrowed value (the check includes escrow for taxes, insurance, PMI, etc) plus or minus. It is a rough number, but a pretty good rule of thumb (and easy to use for quick calculations, like the one I used) - $200,000 house will run you $2k a month, $350,000 house will run you $3,500 a month, etc. You can break this rule using crazy loans or by putting a crazy amount down, but it all comes out in the wash.
Shit I would be happy with a single family, stand alone home that I could afford to buy. Something with two or three bedrooms (the master bedroom having its own full bathroom too) and a garage to park a car in, keep some toys in.
Around here that starts at around $400,000, which means a $4,000 a month mortgage payment (PITA) - I don't even take home $4,000 a month, much less have that much to pay each month on a house.
After that - sure thing, secret passage behind the bookcase that opens when you flip up Mozart's head and flip a switch, with a pole to slide down.
Brute force is such an unrefined method, as I so eloquently pointed out above. Cracking encryption via brute force is something line an O(2^n) order computation time. Need it to take forever, just add 20 more bits. But what if Google had access to hundreds, even thousands of Software Engineering PhD's and between them they were able to come up with a more efficient algorithm? They wouldn't need a million desktop machines to hack DES or whatever - a new approach that cracks encryption in O(n^2) would bring even the most 'uncrackable' encryption to its knees. This falls under the 'work smarter, not harder' theorum.
Lucky for us, Google doesn't have an unlimited bankroll and didn't hire every PhD walking the West Coast last year. Oh, wait...
It took a bunch of lamer '1337 Crew' guys (just kidding - it was the EFF) less than one day to crack 56 bit DES encryption, seven years ago. Given that, knowing the horsepower of their machine (100,000 distributed machines in a fashion similar to SETI, circa 1999 hardware meaning 300MHz Pentium II machines with 64M of PC-100 memory over 50/50 dialup/cablemodems, on the average) and how encryption works you can actually calculate roughly how fast a given network cluster will work, using some pretty straightforward math.
3.0GHz Dual CPU machines with haul-ass memory interconnects and 2M of onboard cache can crunch raw numbers about... 20x faster than the average machine of that era. Figure Google could field 200,000 servers easy without breaking a sweat (some estimates are as high as 400,000 worldwide) - lets say on the high side they have a server farm 4x as large as the EFF had lined up back in the day, each one crunching number 20x as fast - that is 80x the horsepower of the original EFF run that took 23 hours. By my math, that is breaking 56 bit in 17 minutes.
Lets say, just for fun, that the GoogleBar had a quiet troj that let them distribute a number crunch that uses an unused computers CPU in short spurts. Figure one hundred million 3GHz P4's on the planet, all of them downloading it (real conservative estimate, not!) gives another 10,000x the horsepower used by the EFF in 1999. Now we are up to somewhere in the 10,080x range of horsepower used by the EFF in 1999, cracking 56 bit DES in what, 8 seconds?
Double that for each additional bit, on the average, gives 8*2^(n-56) seconds for that n-bit long DES. Pretty simple math. 256-bit DES cracked in 8 seconds * 2^(200) = 1.285550435e+61 seconds = 4.076453689e+53 years. Fuck me. I was doing pretty good right up until I said 'Pretty simple math.'
Like I was saying - use 1024-bit DES encryption and Google could NEVER EVER crack your encrypted files. EVER! (Unless / until they come up with a better algorithm than brute force.)
I wouldn't bother encrypting it. All encryption can be broken if you have enough CPU horsepower to throw at it for a brute force attack - and if there is one thing that Google has, it is enough CPU horsepower. Heck, for all you know there is a troj in their Google Toolbar / Google Local Search (or whatever it is that all the sheeple install) that lets them farm out the RSA brute force hax to what - about half the computers on the planet?
If you don't want the world (or the highest bidder, or the US Government) to know about it, don't upload it to the Google free hard drive space.
Most people don't do sudden stuff like suddenly pay off ~$6,500 of their credit card debt in one payment.
Chyea, right. $1,600 a month is on the low side for my household bills Visa card and I pay it off each month. The bill I paid last month was over $11.5k (Christmas, tuition, downpayment on a car on top of my regular bills) and I paid it off with a check. Then again I have been doing it for years, and for me that is business as usual.
Maybe they trigger on unusual behavior, like folks that make minimum payments forever on their card, with the balance slowly growing over years on several cards, all of a sudden sending in a big chunk of money (which IMHO $6,500 isn't - there are days I wear that much in jewelry - hell there are some days I have that much on me in cash) sets of some flags.
Point 1 in your post has merit, but the last thing on a suicidal person's mind is trying to maintain his credit rating (point 2 in your post.)
What it boils down to, though, is KGB Big-Brother'ism. Big time. Ask yourself - do you genuinely feel safe saying 'unpatriotic' things, even in your own home? In Soviet Russia, free speech owned YOU! (and now, for a limited time only, in the USA too.) I feel like one of the little Jewish kids in Poland (1941) that watched the first few waves of people taken away, sort of hiding in the shadows and thankful that I didn't get taken away too. Wondering what was happening, and if everything was going to be ok. I'm a little too young to remember - how'd that work out the first time?
I think the interesting part, the part that should be inspiring a whole new perspective on the topic - is the bit about DNA and the government working hard at developing the ability to identify someone realtime simply by being in their vicinity (ie. close enough to get a sample of spit or hair.) They don't need to embed you with RFID or some other 'unique' identifier - you already have one, but it takes a few days to run the look-up. As soon as this is a real-time identification (which is what RFID gives them, in theory) - bingo! Mark of the Beast.
There was a story a few days ago about a guy that was a potential suspect of some crime he didn't commit, so he voluntarily gave a DNA sample, proving his innocence. He went on his merry way, a free man. This was several years ago A few years later someone in his neighborhood got raped. He was identified a potential perp so he was brought downtown, where he refused to give a sample for DNA analysis against the evidence from the rape. Government looked it up and used his old sample / DNA, decided it was a match and now he is in jail. Which is good, because a bad guy went to jail, but when you start thinking about the long term potential for that technology and what it means in the context of the 'Mark of the Beast' discussion.
The other part was just me joking around, getting my point across in an 'in-context' kind of manner. (Well that, or my followers are very upset with you right now.)
You are pretty close. Actually I was talking about being able to identify a unique person via DNA when I wrote that business about 'mark of the beast' in Revelations. Once 'they' get that ability in near-real-time (ie, on the spot) - you guys are screwed.
It is always funny to watch how you young people misinterpret what I wrote in that book.
The good news is, it basically runs on vodka. The bad news is, it only likes the really good stuff.
100cc worth of the lab grade methanol it uses (why couldn't they have made it run on ethanol, which is so much better for the environment (and your belly)) is about a buck or two, if I recall correctly.
I've done it - it kicks ass. Newly deployable nodes as fast as you can add the hardware, highly scalable and the overhead is negligible. Actually I should probably call dibs on VMware Beowulf Clusters simply because I already have it set up to demo (or run, if you have clusterable applications to run.)
If the An-225 is the monster with like 10 rows of tires under the center of mass, three engines on each side and a tail that looks like a massively wide letter H - yea, I think it was on the back of one of those - and if I recall correctly I saw one of those fly (without the shuttle on the back.) I will have to dig up the photo album, I think I saw it up pretty close too before it flew (the one that flew, w/o the piggy-backed shuttle.)
It was over a decade ago, so details are pretty fuzzy. Unless I wasn't supposed to see these things in 1993, in which case I am making this all up.
The note in your sig is pretty cool - I actually had a chance to see the Soviet Space Shuttle back in 1993, from a fairly close distance (static display, riding piggy back on the back of a jumbo jet, as I recall.) I didn't fully appreciate what I was seeing, but given that I got my hands on a MiG31 (ok, I touched it with one hand) and a MiG29, saw the Hind and Hokum fly, and had a few minutes to stare into the ginormous engines of a MiG25... I was working on sensory overload so I can probably be forgiven.
I think I still have a picture around here somewhere. It was September 1993, as I recall, and there was a bit of a coup in the air. I only wish I had played a bigger part, and had taken more pictures. No joke.
In the first quarter of 2005, the national homeownership rate was over 68 percent nation wide. Google it.
For vanilla 1040EZ filers, there's no real reason to go - unless they totally had no clue about the EIC (which I didn't), or maybe there was some abstraction in the tax law that would work in their favor in a strong way :
Case in point - doing a little 1099 work, I used my car occasionally on business. Not enough to warrant getting a business car, but enough to warrant keeping track of the mileage and writing off the 37.5c per mile, or whatever. A few years ago I leased a new car in July, drove it about 800 miles round trip on one business trip, other than that I used it for regular life. Simple,.375 x 800 = $300 deduction, ya?
No. Seems that since my normal job was only a mile away and I only drove the car 1600 miles from July to December including that business trip, half the total miles put on the leased vehicle were business miles and thus I could write off half the total cost of leasing the vehicle, including the $3,000 up front lease fees, $600 in insurance, six months of payments at $300 a month... $2,700 worth of business expenses (half of $5,400) for that 800 mile business trip. That's a LOT better than the $300 I would have written off for mileage - because they knew about a loophole that I had no clue existed. Given the 33% tax bracket (for 1099, including the extra FICA or whatever) those extra $2,400 came out of, the $300 total I paid them to do my return was a pretty good investment on my part.
That's just one example - it doesn't take too many $800 increases in the amount I get back on my tax return to justify spending an hour with a professional.
Just a thought. Walk them through doing their taxes, then let them go to HRB. If they get more back after fees they can let HRB do their taxes. If not, tell Block no thanks and they don't even have to pay - just walk out. That's how I have been doing it and I have walked away with more cash in my pocket ever since I started.
Actually 17% would work right about perfect as a flat tax, given zero deductions. Totally flat tax. Seventeen percent. Starting at the first dollar.
Yes people go all crazy with deductions for children, married vs single, standard deduction, graduated tax rates, all that jazz - but boil it all down and look at the real taxes you paid (assuming you had a real income, not on the bottom or top 3% of the scale making zero or millions) and I will bet that you paid somewhere in the very tight range of 16% to 18%, averaged across the last three years. You are doing it right, most of us are doing it right, and a hard flat 17% would bring all the fringers (guys making hundreds of thousands yet somehow escaping paying anything substantial) back into the game.
Not to mention it would make tax prep a total no brainer. No more loopholes, no more free rides, and no more 'book keeping errors / slight of hand' with the accounting.
Don't fear-monger and don't blow shit out of proportion just to make your point. If you do that then the terrorists have already won. Yes, there is a fee associated with doing their taxes, and there is a fee to get their 'instant refund' - but you saying that they are 'charging 500% on that refund' is just sensationalizing the event.
Charging 500% means charging $500 on a $100 refund - that is not what is happening here. They (and by proxy, you) are using voodoo math to come up with scary numbers but hiding the details of what you are doing. Here's the real deal:
Let us use some simple numbers, to bring some reality to the table: Poor person has an income of $40,000 for the year and had $10,000 taken out of their pay check over the year. They obviously 'overpaid' their taxes and are getting a refund. Say their real tax bill after exemptions is $5,000. They are going to get $5,000 back. Take their W2 papers to H&R Block to have a simple 1040EZ cranked out. That is one form, HRB charges (lets pretend) $50 to do that one. They do have a bank account, and want to file electronic filing (this may be required to do the 'instant refund'). This is one form, HRB charges another $50 to do that one. They want their 'instant refund' - this is yet another form, and HRB charges $50 to do that one, and charges them 1% of their refund in 'interest' on the loan (this is $100.)
Net fees and interest = $250 to get their taxes done and walk out with $4,750 in cash in their hand. IRS refund comes back in 7 days because they electronically filed it on a Friday (refunds are electronically dispersed on Fridays, best of my knowledge.) Fees + interest of $250 on $5,000 is 5%. That is the real math, and it doesn't look too sleazy (considering it includes Tax Prep.) $250 worth of fees and interest on a $5,000 'loan' for 7 days comes out to an APR of 260% interest - which is really scary. Add in (and charge for) a few more forms (such as the one poor people use to get the earned income credit), use more real numbers so they are only getting back $2,500 so the fee : refund ratio goes up and all of a sudden the $300 dollar charge to process their taxes and front them the $2,200 in cash looks like 500% in interest. Which is bogus, plain and simple.
Yes I went to HRB this year to do my taxes, after I had already done them once by hand. Cost me $200, and their calculation netted me $500 more than when I did it myself. Having it e-filed and going into my checking account, and no I didn't get the 'instant refund' - but if I really really needed the $3,500 right then that day and couldn't have waited another two weeks, would it have been worth another $100 to walk out with cash? Yea, and the 'interest' would have been 3%, not some made up magic math 500%.
Another fun tidbit of information - you can walk into HRB, have them do your taxes front to back, tell you all the tricks they are using and watch them go through it step by step and if you don't like their numbers (or fees, or whatever) you can walk out for free. No charge - but you don't get any of their paperwork. Have a good memory? You can walk in, watch them do it on TaxCut or whatever, walk out for free and go home and do the exact same refund using any number of cheap tax prep packages. Same refund, if you paid attention to whatever they did, and you don't have to pay their fees. The only thing you give up is having them stand by your side if the auditors come pay you a visit on that return.
I think they are clowns for blowing their corporate taxes, and I agree with you that going with the 'instant refund' is a real stupid idea, but that doesn't mean we need to resort to twisting the numbers or blowing things out of proportion to make them 'scary' and 'evil'. That's what the MebiByte fuckers did with hard drive space, and we all know how much I hate them.
If you want to do some REAL math, let a bunch of people do their own income taxes, particularly those with more than two forms, then walk into HR
I think by "real world" he means working at a company, after you get out of school. And he is 100% correct on the matter. More than half the employees at my company can't even change the background image on their desktop, and double clicking on the clock brings up a helpful reminder that they aren't allowed to change the time or date on their computer either. Every URL they hit in their browser is logged and audited. Somehow manage to get MSN/IM installed and running it is grounds for termination. And these aren't just the end user clowns either, but the infrastructure and development staff and their management.
It doesn't bother me much, though, mainly because I belong to the other half:p
I'm offended, only because I do have one at home - a Cray XMP class. Well parts of one anyways.
That said, my ops center at home consists of an array of four PowerEdge 400sc machines on a GigE backbone, roughly four 2.8GHz HyperThreaded P4s, 6G RAM and 1.3T of drive space spread between them. Throw in an older PowerEdge 500sc and two laptops (one hard wired to the net, one wireless) and that's a pretty good idea of what I have under the hood.
I run WinXP on all the current hardware, Win2000 on the older machines, and SuSE Linux 10 in a VMware session on one of the machines that gets left on all the time. Ironically, I spend most of my time in the Linux VM, at least when I'm talking to the outside world. And yes, I have clustered them (Beowulf nodes running on Linux VMs on the four faster machines, runs the Skyvase rendering in under three seconds.)
And when the best tech guys I know talk about their home 'system' we both know they aren't talking about a single computer either.
The Alpinist is a sharp looking watch - I wear a stainless Rolex Submariner and love it (couldn't imagine wearing anything else) but it was a gift. Would I drop ~$3,500 on a watch for myself... not so sure. I'd like to think so, but if the Alpinist is anywhere as nice as it looks online and is 1/10th the price - it would be a hard choice to make.
That said, I recommend a Swiss automatic to the OP. If he can carry it well and afford it, a Sub will be a life-long companion wherever he goes because a. it will last forever, and b. at $3,500 he isn't likely to leave it somewhere it can get stolen or broken. I actually asked the shop-owner if I needed to baby mine when I got it, for fear of damaging it - he explained that the amount of force required to scratch the crystal was easily enough to blow my arm off. He was right - five years later and nary a scratch.
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I don't know about you, but I got over 10 years worth of hardcore computer experience, some of it paid, some of it educational, and some of it gaming - on machines that didn't have 233MHz in TOTAL - two machines at 1MHz apiece, a 4.77MHz machine that I only had part time access to, a 16MHz machine of my own that I loved, and a 40MHz machine that I later upgraded to 133MHz. Got a four year degree in software engineering at a university in the process, as well as working my first real paid job as a newbie software engineer and newbie network admin. I learned to program in like six different languages (Pascal, C, Basic, Assembler, pseudo SQL (dBase / Foxpro) dabbled a bit with Fortran, COBOL, Ada), learned to network computers via ARCnet, Ethernet for Novell Netware (several versions), learned the concepts of structured programming, several software design methodologies, concepts behind computer graphics, audio, user interface design, and played about 5000 hours of games - all on machines that didn't have 233MHz or 64M of RAM if you added up the processor speeds and memory of every machine I had through that entire decade, and all on machines with 640x480 or less of resolution (most of them had much less) - and no Windows 2000.
If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to play the latest games and run the latest software, then a 233MHz box with 64M of RAM isn't going to cut it.
If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to experience and learn 'computer science' aka operating systems, networking, database, programming languages and software development theory, then 233MHz with 64M and an 8M video card and 14" SVGA CRT is ~plenty~ of horsepower. And probably free, too. Computer science isn't all surfing the web, Instant Messenger, MP3z and Doom III. I'd wager that about 80% of all the software engineering knowledge on the planet could be learned and used on a monochrome (amber or green) display. There is a world of difference between keeping a kid busy on a Windows XP machine with multimedia and the Internet, and teaching him the fundamentals of computer science.
Approach it from this perspective and the actual OS is a lot less important, all things considered.
Load "*",8,1
I agree with you on the hassle of broken hardware though - maybe what they need to do is have the kids amass like a ton of machines, go through each one and break it down into components (video cards, hard drives, sound cards, memory, keep the case/ps/mobo/cpu as complete units, etc), catalog it, build a few test boxes to pop the different components into to sort the working parts from the broken parts. Actually, the nice thing about older hardware is that the points of failure are real easy to identify : dead hard drives don't respond, power supplies that don't power up a box, CPUs with dead fans - anything else would probably be ok (most of the time) and have them build their own boxes from the parts boxes, hand picking parts. That way, they learn how to trouble shoot their own machine and will be able to identify issues in the future and fix them, not be intimidated and be comfortable going in to fix (or upgrade) their box in the future. Walk them through installing the OS a few times with different OS's and a wipe/reinstall won't intimidate them either.
You think $50 for a blue disk is expensive, wait until you burn your first coaster.
No - wait until you burn your second coaster in a row. It happened with CDs, it happened with DVDs, and it is going to happen with these.
That said - remember this is first generation pricing and it will come down as volume goes up. Just a year ago dual layer DVDs were $10 apiece, and now they are what, down to $1 or $2? Heck, the first CD I ever burned cost about $7 and now they are ten cents apiece.
When the drives cost $100 and the media costs less than a buck apiece, these things are going to be all the rage.
Unfortunately, nobody will lend us $400,000 for 30 years at 0% interest.
.07 / 12) = $2,333 the first month in interest, plus about $167 towards principal for $2,500 principal + interest. Add in PMI (mortgage insurance, because we put less than 20% down), another .5 % for the year is $2000 for the year, or $166 per month. Now we are up to $2,666 or thereabouts. Add in yearly taxes on a $400k house at $2 per $100 (an actual rate taken from a normal city) and you get about another $8,000 a year / 12 = ~$700 a month in taxes for a total of $3,300 a month. Kick in insurance (flood, home owners, etc) for maybe $2,400 a year ($200 a month) and you are right at the $3,500 a month marker.
Breaking it down using round numbers, $400,000 at 7% means you pay ($400,000 x
That's not precisely $4k a month, but pretty close. From what I have seen in the past two or three decades, a realistic expectation is that the check you have to write each month just for your house is about 1% of the borrowed value (the check includes escrow for taxes, insurance, PMI, etc) plus or minus. It is a rough number, but a pretty good rule of thumb (and easy to use for quick calculations, like the one I used) - $200,000 house will run you $2k a month, $350,000 house will run you $3,500 a month, etc. You can break this rule using crazy loans or by putting a crazy amount down, but it all comes out in the wash.
You really don't want to go there.
Shit I would be happy with a single family, stand alone home that I could afford to buy.
Something with two or three bedrooms (the master bedroom having its own full bathroom too) and a garage to park a car in, keep some toys in.
Around here that starts at around $400,000, which means a $4,000 a month mortgage payment (PITA) - I don't even take home $4,000 a month, much less have that much to pay each month on a house.
After that - sure thing, secret passage behind the bookcase that opens when you flip up Mozart's head and flip a switch, with a pole to slide down.
Here's a thought : post the spec's of your machine so we have something to baseline.
Brute force is such an unrefined method, as I so eloquently pointed out above.
...
Cracking encryption via brute force is something line an O(2^n) order computation time. Need it to take forever, just add 20 more bits.
But what if Google had access to hundreds, even thousands of Software Engineering PhD's and between them they were able to come up with a more efficient algorithm? They wouldn't need a million desktop machines to hack DES or whatever - a new approach that cracks encryption in O(n^2) would bring even the most 'uncrackable' encryption to its knees. This falls under the 'work smarter, not harder' theorum.
Lucky for us, Google doesn't have an unlimited bankroll and didn't hire every PhD walking the West Coast last year.
Oh, wait
Yea, I'm clueless.
... 20x faster than the average machine of that era. Figure Google could field 200,000 servers easy without breaking a sweat (some estimates are as high as 400,000 worldwide) - lets say on the high side they have a server farm 4x as large as the EFF had lined up back in the day, each one crunching number 20x as fast - that is 80x the horsepower of the original EFF run that took 23 hours. By my math, that is breaking 56 bit in 17 minutes.
It took a bunch of lamer '1337 Crew' guys (just kidding - it was the EFF) less than one day to crack 56 bit DES encryption, seven years ago.
Given that, knowing the horsepower of their machine (100,000 distributed machines in a fashion similar to SETI, circa 1999 hardware meaning 300MHz Pentium II machines with 64M of PC-100 memory over 50/50 dialup/cablemodems, on the average) and how encryption works you can actually calculate roughly how fast a given network cluster will work, using some pretty straightforward math.
3.0GHz Dual CPU machines with haul-ass memory interconnects and 2M of onboard cache can crunch raw numbers about
Lets say, just for fun, that the GoogleBar had a quiet troj that let them distribute a number crunch that uses an unused computers CPU in short spurts. Figure one hundred million 3GHz P4's on the planet, all of them downloading it (real conservative estimate, not!) gives another 10,000x the horsepower used by the EFF in 1999. Now we are up to somewhere in the 10,080x range of horsepower used by the EFF in 1999, cracking 56 bit DES in what, 8 seconds?
Double that for each additional bit, on the average, gives 8*2^(n-56) seconds for that n-bit long DES. Pretty simple math.
256-bit DES cracked in 8 seconds * 2^(200) = 1.285550435e+61 seconds = 4.076453689e+53 years. Fuck me.
I was doing pretty good right up until I said 'Pretty simple math.'
Like I was saying - use 1024-bit DES encryption and Google could NEVER EVER crack your encrypted files. EVER!
(Unless / until they come up with a better algorithm than brute force.)
I wouldn't bother encrypting it. All encryption can be broken if you have enough CPU horsepower to throw at it for a brute force attack - and if there is one thing that Google has, it is enough CPU horsepower. Heck, for all you know there is a troj in their Google Toolbar / Google Local Search (or whatever it is that all the sheeple install) that lets them farm out the RSA brute force hax to what - about half the computers on the planet?
If you don't want the world (or the highest bidder, or the US Government) to know about it, don't upload it to the Google free hard drive space.
Most people don't do sudden stuff like suddenly pay off ~$6,500 of their credit card debt in one payment.
Chyea, right.
$1,600 a month is on the low side for my household bills Visa card and I pay it off each month.
The bill I paid last month was over $11.5k (Christmas, tuition, downpayment on a car on top of my regular bills) and I paid it off with a check.
Then again I have been doing it for years, and for me that is business as usual.
Maybe they trigger on unusual behavior, like folks that make minimum payments forever on their card, with the balance slowly growing over years on several cards, all of a sudden sending in a big chunk of money (which IMHO $6,500 isn't - there are days I wear that much in jewelry - hell there are some days I have that much on me in cash) sets of some flags.
Point 1 in your post has merit, but the last thing on a suicidal person's mind is trying to maintain his credit rating (point 2 in your post.)
What it boils down to, though, is KGB Big-Brother'ism. Big time.
Ask yourself - do you genuinely feel safe saying 'unpatriotic' things, even in your own home?
In Soviet Russia, free speech owned YOU! (and now, for a limited time only, in the USA too.)
I feel like one of the little Jewish kids in Poland (1941) that watched the first few waves of people taken away, sort of hiding in the shadows and thankful that I didn't get taken away too. Wondering what was happening, and if everything was going to be ok. I'm a little too young to remember - how'd that work out the first time?
I can see this, actually ... because the last thing a suicide bomber wants is a bad credit history.
I think the interesting part, the part that should be inspiring a whole new perspective on the topic - is the bit about DNA and the government working hard at developing the ability to identify someone realtime simply by being in their vicinity (ie. close enough to get a sample of spit or hair.) They don't need to embed you with RFID or some other 'unique' identifier - you already have one, but it takes a few days to run the look-up. As soon as this is a real-time identification (which is what RFID gives them, in theory) - bingo! Mark of the Beast.
There was a story a few days ago about a guy that was a potential suspect of some crime he didn't commit, so he voluntarily gave a DNA sample, proving his innocence. He went on his merry way, a free man. This was several years ago
A few years later someone in his neighborhood got raped. He was identified a potential perp so he was brought downtown, where he refused to give a sample for DNA analysis against the evidence from the rape. Government looked it up and used his old sample / DNA, decided it was a match and now he is in jail. Which is good, because a bad guy went to jail, but when you start thinking about the long term potential for that technology and what it means in the context of the 'Mark of the Beast' discussion.
The other part was just me joking around, getting my point across in an 'in-context' kind of manner.
(Well that, or my followers are very upset with you right now.)
You are pretty close.
Actually I was talking about being able to identify a unique person via DNA when I wrote that business about 'mark of the beast' in Revelations.
Once 'they' get that ability in near-real-time (ie, on the spot) - you guys are screwed.
It is always funny to watch how you young people misinterpret what I wrote in that book.
The good news is, it basically runs on vodka.
The bad news is, it only likes the really good stuff.
100cc worth of the lab grade methanol it uses (why couldn't they have made it run on ethanol, which is so much better for the environment (and your belly)) is about a buck or two, if I recall correctly.
Apache co-founder and CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf says that programming should be opened out to non-developers.
Dude - if you want code that sucks major dick, just do what every other major corporation does and farm it out to India.
I've done it - it kicks ass.
Newly deployable nodes as fast as you can add the hardware, highly scalable and the overhead is negligible.
Actually I should probably call dibs on VMware Beowulf Clusters simply because I already have it set up to demo (or run, if you have clusterable applications to run.)
$echo 'dibs on VMware Beowulf Clusters...'
If the An-225 is the monster with like 10 rows of tires under the center of mass, three engines on each side and a tail that looks like a massively wide letter H - yea, I think it was on the back of one of those - and if I recall correctly I saw one of those fly (without the shuttle on the back.) I will have to dig up the photo album, I think I saw it up pretty close too before it flew (the one that flew, w/o the piggy-backed shuttle.)
It was over a decade ago, so details are pretty fuzzy.
Unless I wasn't supposed to see these things in 1993, in which case I am making this all up.
No, actually I was joking.
... I was working on sensory overload so I can probably be forgiven.
The note in your sig is pretty cool - I actually had a chance to see the Soviet Space Shuttle back in 1993, from a fairly close distance (static display, riding piggy back on the back of a jumbo jet, as I recall.) I didn't fully appreciate what I was seeing, but given that I got my hands on a MiG31 (ok, I touched it with one hand) and a MiG29, saw the Hind and Hokum fly, and had a few minutes to stare into the ginormous engines of a MiG25
I think I still have a picture around here somewhere. It was September 1993, as I recall, and there was a bit of a coup in the air.
I only wish I had played a bigger part, and had taken more pictures. No joke.
In the first quarter of 2005, the national homeownership rate was over 68 percent nation wide. Google it.
.375 x 800 = $300 deduction, ya?
... $2,700 worth of business expenses (half of $5,400) for that 800 mile business trip. That's a LOT better than the $300 I would have written off for mileage - because they knew about a loophole that I had no clue existed. Given the 33% tax bracket (for 1099, including the extra FICA or whatever) those extra $2,400 came out of, the $300 total I paid them to do my return was a pretty good investment on my part.
For vanilla 1040EZ filers, there's no real reason to go - unless they totally had no clue about the EIC (which I didn't), or maybe there was some abstraction in the tax law that would work in their favor in a strong way :
Case in point - doing a little 1099 work, I used my car occasionally on business. Not enough to warrant getting a business car, but enough to warrant keeping track of the mileage and writing off the 37.5c per mile, or whatever. A few years ago I leased a new car in July, drove it about 800 miles round trip on one business trip, other than that I used it for regular life. Simple,
No. Seems that since my normal job was only a mile away and I only drove the car 1600 miles from July to December including that business trip, half the total miles put on the leased vehicle were business miles and thus I could write off half the total cost of leasing the vehicle, including the $3,000 up front lease fees, $600 in insurance, six months of payments at $300 a month
That's just one example - it doesn't take too many $800 increases in the amount I get back on my tax return to justify spending an hour with a professional.
Just a thought. Walk them through doing their taxes, then let them go to HRB. If they get more back after fees they can let HRB do their taxes. If not, tell Block no thanks and they don't even have to pay - just walk out. That's how I have been doing it and I have walked away with more cash in my pocket ever since I started.
Actually 17% would work right about perfect as a flat tax, given zero deductions.
Totally flat tax. Seventeen percent. Starting at the first dollar.
Yes people go all crazy with deductions for children, married vs single, standard deduction, graduated tax rates, all that jazz - but boil it all down and look at the real taxes you paid (assuming you had a real income, not on the bottom or top 3% of the scale making zero or millions) and I will bet that you paid somewhere in the very tight range of 16% to 18%, averaged across the last three years. You are doing it right, most of us are doing it right, and a hard flat 17% would bring all the fringers (guys making hundreds of thousands yet somehow escaping paying anything substantial) back into the game.
Not to mention it would make tax prep a total no brainer. No more loopholes, no more free rides, and no more 'book keeping errors / slight of hand' with the accounting.
Don't fear-monger and don't blow shit out of proportion just to make your point. If you do that then the terrorists have already won.
:
Yes, there is a fee associated with doing their taxes, and there is a fee to get their 'instant refund' - but you saying that they are 'charging 500% on that refund' is just sensationalizing the event.
Charging 500% means charging $500 on a $100 refund - that is not what is happening here.
They (and by proxy, you) are using voodoo math to come up with scary numbers but hiding the details of what you are doing. Here's the real deal:
Let us use some simple numbers, to bring some reality to the table
Poor person has an income of $40,000 for the year and had $10,000 taken out of their pay check over the year. They obviously 'overpaid' their taxes and are getting a refund.
Say their real tax bill after exemptions is $5,000. They are going to get $5,000 back.
Take their W2 papers to H&R Block to have a simple 1040EZ cranked out. That is one form, HRB charges (lets pretend) $50 to do that one.
They do have a bank account, and want to file electronic filing (this may be required to do the 'instant refund'). This is one form, HRB charges another $50 to do that one.
They want their 'instant refund' - this is yet another form, and HRB charges $50 to do that one, and charges them 1% of their refund in 'interest' on the loan (this is $100.)
Net fees and interest = $250 to get their taxes done and walk out with $4,750 in cash in their hand.
IRS refund comes back in 7 days because they electronically filed it on a Friday (refunds are electronically dispersed on Fridays, best of my knowledge.)
Fees + interest of $250 on $5,000 is 5%. That is the real math, and it doesn't look too sleazy (considering it includes Tax Prep.)
$250 worth of fees and interest on a $5,000 'loan' for 7 days comes out to an APR of 260% interest - which is really scary. Add in (and charge for) a few more forms (such as the one poor people use to get the earned income credit), use more real numbers so they are only getting back $2,500 so the fee : refund ratio goes up and all of a sudden the $300 dollar charge to process their taxes and front them the $2,200 in cash looks like 500% in interest. Which is bogus, plain and simple.
Yes I went to HRB this year to do my taxes, after I had already done them once by hand. Cost me $200, and their calculation netted me $500 more than when I did it myself. Having it e-filed and going into my checking account, and no I didn't get the 'instant refund' - but if I really really needed the $3,500 right then that day and couldn't have waited another two weeks, would it have been worth another $100 to walk out with cash? Yea, and the 'interest' would have been 3%, not some made up magic math 500%.
Another fun tidbit of information - you can walk into HRB, have them do your taxes front to back, tell you all the tricks they are using and watch them go through it step by step and if you don't like their numbers (or fees, or whatever) you can walk out for free. No charge - but you don't get any of their paperwork. Have a good memory? You can walk in, watch them do it on TaxCut or whatever, walk out for free and go home and do the exact same refund using any number of cheap tax prep packages. Same refund, if you paid attention to whatever they did, and you don't have to pay their fees. The only thing you give up is having them stand by your side if the auditors come pay you a visit on that return.
I think they are clowns for blowing their corporate taxes, and I agree with you that going with the 'instant refund' is a real stupid idea, but that doesn't mean we need to resort to twisting the numbers or blowing things out of proportion to make them 'scary' and 'evil'. That's what the MebiByte fuckers did with hard drive space, and we all know how much I hate them.
If you want to do some REAL math, let a bunch of people do their own income taxes, particularly those with more than two forms, then walk into HR
I think by "real world" he means working at a company, after you get out of school.
:p
And he is 100% correct on the matter. More than half the employees at my company can't even change the background image on their desktop, and double clicking on the clock brings up a helpful reminder that they aren't allowed to change the time or date on their computer either. Every URL they hit in their browser is logged and audited. Somehow manage to get MSN/IM installed and running it is grounds for termination. And these aren't just the end user clowns either, but the infrastructure and development staff and their management.
It doesn't bother me much, though, mainly because I belong to the other half
I'm offended, only because I do have one at home - a Cray XMP class.
Well parts of one anyways.
That said, my ops center at home consists of an array of four PowerEdge 400sc machines on a GigE backbone, roughly four 2.8GHz HyperThreaded P4s, 6G RAM and 1.3T of drive space spread between them. Throw in an older PowerEdge 500sc and two laptops (one hard wired to the net, one wireless) and that's a pretty good idea of what I have under the hood.
I run WinXP on all the current hardware, Win2000 on the older machines, and SuSE Linux 10 in a VMware session on one of the machines that gets left on all the time. Ironically, I spend most of my time in the Linux VM, at least when I'm talking to the outside world. And yes, I have clustered them (Beowulf nodes running on Linux VMs on the four faster machines, runs the Skyvase rendering in under three seconds.)
And when the best tech guys I know talk about their home 'system' we both know they aren't talking about a single computer either.
Ooh ooh - tell us some of the stories!
The Alpinist is a sharp looking watch - I wear a stainless Rolex Submariner and love it (couldn't imagine wearing anything else) but it was a gift. ... not so sure. I'd like to think so, but if the Alpinist is anywhere as nice as it looks online and is 1/10th the price - it would be a hard choice to make.
Would I drop ~$3,500 on a watch for myself
That said, I recommend a Swiss automatic to the OP. If he can carry it well and afford it, a Sub will be a life-long companion wherever he goes because a. it will last forever, and b. at $3,500 he isn't likely to leave it somewhere it can get stolen or broken. I actually asked the shop-owner if I needed to baby mine when I got it, for fear of damaging it - he explained that the amount of force required to scratch the crystal was easily enough to blow my arm off. He was right - five years later and nary a scratch.