That is exactly why I envision this working. It is Pavlovian-esque, subliminal, always present, and there is a direct link between action and consequence.
Normally when you speed nothing bad happens. You don't generally get stopped, you don't generally get a ticket. With a single punishment for every 300 times you do something, there is a disconnect.
With the light trick it happens every time. By trying to go faster you are forced to wait out the light so you get where you are going later than you would have had you driven the speed limit. Every time. Which sucks. So you learn. Fast.
People slow down in town without those pesky (and expensive) tickets, cops are free to go do real police work catching bad guys, damn - I think this is brilliant. Sure beats getting a $100 photo-radar ticket in the mail.
Network throughput is measured in megaBits per second. Hard drive throughput is measured in megaBytes per second.
Yes 40 is less than 100, until we factor in the 8:1 advantage that bytes have over bits. Then all of a sudden we are looking at 320Mb/s vs 100Mb/s and by upgrading to a GigE pipe you move the bottleneck to the hard drive and your entire system moves data over the network three times as fast.
If you are only getting read speeds of 8 megabytes per second sustained, yes it may be time to upgrade. Perhaps check to make sure the drive and controller are set to DMA instead of PIO.
Even crap consumer grade current generation drives it boring single drive configurations are capable of read speeds of 30M/s on the low end and 60M/s on the high end. Shell out $500 for a RAID-0 SATA array (two drives) and you will get sustained read throughput of roughly 100MB/s with a low of about 50MB/s.
No actually this is pretty much exactly the issue at hand. Honest throughput on good 100Mb NICs is roughly about 10 megs a second, and from my research honest throughput on good GigaNICs is about 100 megs a second (really closer to 94M/s but still...) What this does is move the bottleneck from the network back to the hard drive.
Really doesn't make a difference on files less than 10 megs in size, but when you start moving around the nine 2G files that make up a virtual machine (VMware) so you can burn them to DVD all of a sudden you are looking at a 3x increase in throughput (my drives can read at about 35M/s, can write at about 30M/s so my throughput would be capped at 30M/s) means moving these files in 10 minutes instead of half an hour - lets say I am already looking into GigE for the house.
You are right, hard drives can't move the data fast enough to take advantage of the entire pipe - but since hard drives are 3x faster than 100Mb network hardware (and the new SATA RAID setups (which I don't have (yet)) have been clocked at about 8x faster than 100Mb/s network throughput) you will see a significant increase in things that are network limited.
GigE won't make your network 10x faster in reality, but if you spend a lot of time waiting on network transfers of massive files it will make it 3x (to 8x) faster. It really won't help anything that doesn't already saturate the pipe (ie : VOIP, surfing the net, ping times, latency, network games, streaming DVD quality audio or video.)
I'm guessing they analyzed the HTML post call to the site and had one of their script monkeys write something to automate it and parse the returning values. It was a cool hack that delivered an amazing business advantage, right up until they got caught.
But yea, every physical site I have ever been / done work for I have had back end access. It generally isn't worth going unless I have access to the bare metal. Anything that can be gleaned through the interface some other guy has written - he already knows. If you are going to learn something new you have to access the data directly. If this other company had hired the guy that developed the internal workings of the system after the first company laid him off... now he could have done some seriously freaky stuff.
In light of that, I'm surprised there isn't more of that happening - go in and figure out who the key guys in development or IT are and just hire them for $20k a year more than they are making. Put them to good use on internal projects, let them hack their old system, or simply send them on a two year European vacation - regardless, best case is the competitor can't continue either developing their core product or can't continue to operate their datacenter.
Honestly how many guys would it take losing from your IT or development staff to render the company useless, even if they weren't hacking their way back in?
I have the wireless (with ball) version of this mouse and absolutely love it. One other thing that you didn't mention is that the thumb button on this mouse is perfectly under the thumb when the hand is at rest on the mouse, unlike my Microsoft 5 button mouse (which requires that I bring my thumb up an inch above where it is when the hand is relaxing at rest on the mouse.) It seems like a little thing, and it probably is - but add up a bunch of little things and that is what makes a really nice mouse.
Jesus, write a script kiddie toy to use the existing front end to interrogate the back end once a minute for ten months? What the hell is that?
If you are going to hack, HACK. Hook up directly to the database back end and write some SQL to extract all the data at once and have it spit out nice neat reports summarizing the data. Run it once a day at most.
Somehow I think this guy was showing off to his boss the first week like some newbie - probably said 'hey check this out' the first day when showing it to him without thinking through the long term ramifications... and it snowballed from there as some sort of clandestine 'upper-management wants to be a hacker' way. Then again it worked and helped them on the business side in a massive way so I guess it wasn't completely stupid. Except for getting caught, of course, hammering on the system day and night for 10 months and leaving an audit trail as long as your arm.
Bah! Train him. Become his best buddy. He is going to need a friend here as he is a stranger in a strange land. Take him out to experience fine American food. Introduce him to tequila. Lots and lots of tequila. While the tequila is flowing teach him 'drinking games' and insure that he will blow a.20 BAC. Make sure he gets home safe and sound by sitting in the passenger seat navigating while he drives home. Navigate him past all the friendly police officers.
Nothing says loving like a DWI. God forbid the cops find a baggie of mariwa... maryjuan... mauriwan... shit. God forbid the cops find cocaine in his jacket pocket when they pat him down. Those pesky foreigners and their drugs. Welcome to PMITA prison.
Only way to make it even funnier is you being totally sober at the time.
A union? Bah! I'm sure management will listen to Reason.
(Some of you think I'm goofy. The rest of you have read Snow Crash one too many times.)
Real might be more appealing without the SPYWARE.
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
I don't know whether or not they are still passing out RealPlayer that is simply infested with spyware, but I do know that Google on realplayer and spyware comes up with 22,800 hits. Twenty three thousand instances of people discussing realplayer and spyware in the same breath is enough for me to catch a clue, skip that shit.
Wonder if being associated with SPYWARE has anything to do with their decline in marketshare...
Jamiguet said : Wearing headphones in the West Midlands is asking fro trouble.
Ok if that wasn't a Freudian slip, I don't know what is. Nowhere in the article did it say the muggers were black.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but shhh! we are supposed to be subtle when we are not being politically correct. Didn't you get the memo?
You don't kill somebody for a $300 toy. You kill somebody because he is a bad person. He isn't really a bad person until he comes up and identifies himself as a bad person by trying to mug you for your $300 toy.
Concealed carry classes suggest that if you are going to carry, be prepared to be proactive and think through these sort of things. iPod-jacker demands your 'pod, you take it off your belt and toss it on the ground between you and him. When it reaches for it you pull out your gun and you start pulling the trigger until he stops moving. Try not to get blood on your 'pod in the process.
A little solid footing for the tazer croud: A tazer can do about three different things, all of which are intended to see you off to live and enjoy another day.
1. Display of force - in addition to the two prongs that transmit electricity to the bad guy, there are two other prongs that point at each other on the front of the unit. Push the button when the tazer isn't connected to someone and the charge builds up and arc's across these two prongs. Makes a fairly loud snap crackle pop noise and a pretty blue spark. If you do this you are letting the 'bad guy' know you are about to zap him and maybe he will run away.
2. If that didn't work (it would work on me - see ya) you can zap someone with it - turn it on and try to tag them with it. Hurts like hell and the involuntary reaction is to pull away from you. Pretty much like getting touched with the end of a cigarette. This isn't going to drop somebody.
3. If that didn't work you can try to drop the 'bad guy' with it. This requires putting the two prongs to his flesh on his body core (neck or chest) for roughly 5 seconds. Imagine taking the head of a rattlesnake with two fangs sticking out the front and jabbing it into someone's chest or neck and keeping it connected for a full 5 seconds while they are flailing and trying to get you off of them. Same thing. Zapping someone for a quick ping on the arm isn't going to do it. 5 seconds, on the core.
The reason this works when cops do it is because there are two other copy holding you down while the third one calmly zaps you in the neck or chest for a 5 count or until you stop moving. Or until he feels like stopping.
Yes, a tazer can render someone physically invalid for a while, but it isn't an instant thing and it isn't an easy thing to do. It is more of a psychological weapon than anything, as in 'yea I want your iPod but there are easier iPods to steal than from Mr Psychotic Electrocute-my-ass here.'
I wonder if the whole 'mug people with white earplugs' thing is a problem in Texas. I'm guessing not, what with the whole 'concealed carry' thing they have down there.
Well it is one way to separate the true hackers that can point to their Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons hardbound manual : Dieties and Demigods (first release) and show you stats, pictures, a historical overiew and what her STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON and CHA really were... and those that can't.
To everybody else Frigging is a slang derivative of the word Fucking, used in a semi-polite manner - in the same manner that you might use Farking. It is generally accepted replacement when the need for a verb or an adjective arises.
A while back (2 decades or so ago) there was a Harry Wang in the phone book of Oxnard California.
I just checked the white pages for all of California, seems the phone book is literally filled with Harry Wangs.
Oh I dunno, I am fairly hot for someone with a Greek letter / Physics symbol as a middle name - Zeta. Ain't nothing wrong with that... except maybe someone needs to call Michael Douglas and tell him give it a rest, leave some for the rest of us.
He is talking real estate for his employees to live in. A house, a regular ol' stand alone house that a family can live in (ie, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom with a 1 or 2 car garage, like 2000sf with a little yard) is going to cost more than a HALF A FUCKING MILLION DOLLARS. Lots more, probably closer to $600k or more. $300 to $400 per square foot for stand alone housing built in the 40's with aluminum wiring and all the crap materials they used in the 40's.
You almost forgot: They suck on the freeway, worst damn drivers I have ever seen. Their communist government proudly denies you the right to own a firearm or protect your home. They categorize white people - it isn't like other parts of the country where white people are white people... no, they gotta label you Jew or Irish or Italian or Greek or French or something. Insane taxes. Double plus insane real estate prices... $385k for a 780 square foot 'condo' that consists of two rooms and a convertable couch / bed built in 1870? Their 'beach' consists of a rocky shoreline that ends up in nasty polluted water a few degrees above freezing. No two roads in the entire state are parallel, they must have put down roads before the straight line was invented.
Anybody that thinks that Austin is a heavy tech employer center needs to do a Monster search on Austin, then compare the results to a Monster Search on Boston. Seems there are about 10 or so major employers in Austin (Dell, IBM, Compaq, TI, a few others) and once your resume has been sent to these ten HR departments your tech search is done. Takes less than a day.
Every computer guy in Austin has a job, for sure : waiting tables downtown at the nice resturants. May I suggest a nice Merlot to go with your steak, and perhaps recommend a nice two tier client server system with an Oracle back end, powered by Cisco to protect the DMZ and a front end consisting of.JSPs running on WebSphere.
Don't get me wrong, I love Texas - but God forbid you try and find a job there.
At first I read this as 'Maybe programs will suck no longer!" Good luck with that one, given the direction of the current corporate development climate. Probably applies to programming also, same reason.
The US government loses money as a drug dealer. The most profitable 'job' on the planet is dealing drugs and the US government is losing money doing it. That pretty much sums it up.
I love my country, would happily kill in all sorts of violent manner any foreigners that try to harm my country - but that doesn't make the current (or any recent) administration angels. They are a hell of a lot less corrupt than other country governments but they are still a corrupt bunch of thieving losers.
And part of the reason tracks had to be relayed in the South is that the North Army pulled up rails, heated them on a fire and twisted them around trees - in effect destroying the South's ability to travel. Good tactic (it worked) but afterwards it sort-of needed to be fixed.
If I was going to trust all of this computer standards stuff to anybody it would be either PARC, IBM, or a combination of the two. PARC did a pretty good job, who funded them, Xerox?
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That is exactly why I envision this working. It is Pavlovian-esque, subliminal, always present, and there is a direct link between action and consequence.
Normally when you speed nothing bad happens. You don't generally get stopped, you don't generally get a ticket. With a single punishment for every 300 times you do something, there is a disconnect.
With the light trick it happens every time. By trying to go faster you are forced to wait out the light so you get where you are going later than you would have had you driven the speed limit. Every time. Which sucks. So you learn. Fast.
People slow down in town without those pesky (and expensive) tickets, cops are free to go do real police work catching bad guys, damn - I think this is brilliant. Sure beats getting a $100 photo-radar ticket in the mail.
Network throughput is measured in megaBits per second.
Hard drive throughput is measured in megaBytes per second.
Yes 40 is less than 100, until we factor in the 8:1 advantage that bytes have over bits. Then all of a sudden we are looking at 320Mb/s vs 100Mb/s and by upgrading to a GigE pipe you move the bottleneck to the hard drive and your entire system moves data over the network three times as fast.
If you are only getting read speeds of 8 megabytes per second sustained, yes it may be time to upgrade. Perhaps check to make sure the drive and controller are set to DMA instead of PIO.
Even crap consumer grade current generation drives it boring single drive configurations are capable of read speeds of 30M/s on the low end and 60M/s on the high end. Shell out $500 for a RAID-0 SATA array (two drives) and you will get sustained read throughput of roughly 100MB/s with a low of about 50MB/s.
http://www.tomshardware.com
He was using hard drive math.
Lets just say that my file server at home is named Avagadro.
That's not Yotta Bytes, but it's still a Lotta Bytes.
No actually this is pretty much exactly the issue at hand. Honest throughput on good 100Mb NICs is roughly about 10 megs a second, and from my research honest throughput on good GigaNICs is about 100 megs a second (really closer to 94M/s but still...) What this does is move the bottleneck from the network back to the hard drive.
Really doesn't make a difference on files less than 10 megs in size, but when you start moving around the nine 2G files that make up a virtual machine (VMware) so you can burn them to DVD all of a sudden you are looking at a 3x increase in throughput (my drives can read at about 35M/s, can write at about 30M/s so my throughput would be capped at 30M/s) means moving these files in 10 minutes instead of half an hour - lets say I am already looking into GigE for the house.
You are right, hard drives can't move the data fast enough to take advantage of the entire pipe - but since hard drives are 3x faster than 100Mb network hardware (and the new SATA RAID setups (which I don't have (yet)) have been clocked at about 8x faster than 100Mb/s network throughput) you will see a significant increase in things that are network limited.
GigE won't make your network 10x faster in reality, but if you spend a lot of time waiting on network transfers of massive files it will make it 3x (to 8x) faster. It really won't help anything that doesn't already saturate the pipe (ie : VOIP, surfing the net, ping times, latency, network games, streaming DVD quality audio or video.)
I'm guessing they analyzed the HTML post call to the site and had one of their script monkeys write something to automate it and parse the returning values. It was a cool hack that delivered an amazing business advantage, right up until they got caught.
... now he could have done some seriously freaky stuff.
But yea, every physical site I have ever been / done work for I have had back end access. It generally isn't worth going unless I have access to the bare metal. Anything that can be gleaned through the interface some other guy has written - he already knows. If you are going to learn something new you have to access the data directly. If this other company had hired the guy that developed the internal workings of the system after the first company laid him off
In light of that, I'm surprised there isn't more of that happening - go in and figure out who the key guys in development or IT are and just hire them for $20k a year more than they are making. Put them to good use on internal projects, let them hack their old system, or simply send them on a two year European vacation - regardless, best case is the competitor can't continue either developing their core product or can't continue to operate their datacenter.
Honestly how many guys would it take losing from your IT or development staff to render the company useless, even if they weren't hacking their way back in?
I have the wireless (with ball) version of this mouse and absolutely love it. One other thing that you didn't mention is that the thumb button on this mouse is perfectly under the thumb when the hand is at rest on the mouse, unlike my Microsoft 5 button mouse (which requires that I bring my thumb up an inch above where it is when the hand is relaxing at rest on the mouse.) It seems like a little thing, and it probably is - but add up a bunch of little things and that is what makes a really nice mouse.
Jesus, write a script kiddie toy to use the existing front end to interrogate the back end once a minute for ten months? What the hell is that?
... and it snowballed from there as some sort of clandestine 'upper-management wants to be a hacker' way. Then again it worked and helped them on the business side in a massive way so I guess it wasn't completely stupid. Except for getting caught, of course, hammering on the system day and night for 10 months and leaving an audit trail as long as your arm.
If you are going to hack, HACK. Hook up directly to the database back end and write some SQL to extract all the data at once and have it spit out nice neat reports summarizing the data. Run it once a day at most.
Somehow I think this guy was showing off to his boss the first week like some newbie - probably said 'hey check this out' the first day when showing it to him without thinking through the long term ramifications
Bah! .20 BAC.
Train him.
Become his best buddy. He is going to need a friend here as he is a stranger in a strange land.
Take him out to experience fine American food.
Introduce him to tequila. Lots and lots of tequila.
While the tequila is flowing teach him 'drinking games' and insure that he will blow a
Make sure he gets home safe and sound by sitting in the passenger seat navigating while he drives home. Navigate him past all the friendly police officers.
Nothing says loving like a DWI. God forbid the cops find a baggie of mariwa... maryjuan... mauriwan... shit. God forbid the cops find cocaine in his jacket pocket when they pat him down. Those pesky foreigners and their drugs. Welcome to PMITA prison.
Only way to make it even funnier is you being totally sober at the time.
If you are going to dream, dream big.
A union? Bah!
I'm sure management will listen to Reason.
(Some of you think I'm goofy. The rest of you have read Snow Crash one too many times.)
I don't know whether or not they are still passing out RealPlayer that is simply infested with spyware, but I do know that Google on realplayer and spyware comes up with 22,800 hits. Twenty three thousand instances of people discussing realplayer and spyware in the same breath is enough for me to catch a clue, skip that shit.
Wonder if being associated with SPYWARE has anything to do with their decline in marketshare...
Jamiguet said : Wearing headphones in the West Midlands is asking fro trouble.
Ok if that wasn't a Freudian slip, I don't know what is. Nowhere in the article did it say the muggers were black.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but shhh! we are supposed to be subtle when we are not being politically correct. Didn't you get the memo?
You don't kill somebody for a $300 toy.
You kill somebody because he is a bad person. He isn't really a bad person until he comes up and identifies himself as a bad person by trying to mug you for your $300 toy.
Concealed carry classes suggest that if you are going to carry, be prepared to be proactive and think through these sort of things. iPod-jacker demands your 'pod, you take it off your belt and toss it on the ground between you and him. When it reaches for it you pull out your gun and you start pulling the trigger until he stops moving. Try not to get blood on your 'pod in the process.
It's really pretty simple. And very effective.
I don't think that pepper spray is necessary - I'm sure most people would listen to Reason.
A little solid footing for the tazer croud :
A tazer can do about three different things, all of which are intended to see you off to live and enjoy another day.
1. Display of force - in addition to the two prongs that transmit electricity to the bad guy, there are two other prongs that point at each other on the front of the unit. Push the button when the tazer isn't connected to someone and the charge builds up and arc's across these two prongs. Makes a fairly loud snap crackle pop noise and a pretty blue spark. If you do this you are letting the 'bad guy' know you are about to zap him and maybe he will run away.
2. If that didn't work (it would work on me - see ya) you can zap someone with it - turn it on and try to tag them with it. Hurts like hell and the involuntary reaction is to pull away from you. Pretty much like getting touched with the end of a cigarette. This isn't going to drop somebody.
3. If that didn't work you can try to drop the 'bad guy' with it. This requires putting the two prongs to his flesh on his body core (neck or chest) for roughly 5 seconds. Imagine taking the head of a rattlesnake with two fangs sticking out the front and jabbing it into someone's chest or neck and keeping it connected for a full 5 seconds while they are flailing and trying to get you off of them. Same thing. Zapping someone for a quick ping on the arm isn't going to do it. 5 seconds, on the core.
The reason this works when cops do it is because there are two other copy holding you down while the third one calmly zaps you in the neck or chest for a 5 count or until you stop moving. Or until he feels like stopping.
Yes, a tazer can render someone physically invalid for a while, but it isn't an instant thing and it isn't an easy thing to do. It is more of a psychological weapon than anything, as in 'yea I want your iPod but there are easier iPods to steal than from Mr Psychotic Electrocute-my-ass here.'
I wonder if the whole 'mug people with white earplugs' thing is a problem in Texas. I'm guessing not, what with the whole 'concealed carry' thing they have down there.
Well it is one way to separate the true hackers that can point to their Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons hardbound manual : Dieties and Demigods (first release) and show you stats, pictures, a historical overiew and what her STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON and CHA really were ... and those that can't.
To everybody else Frigging is a slang derivative of the word Fucking, used in a semi-polite manner - in the same manner that you might use Farking. It is generally accepted replacement when the need for a verb or an adjective arises.
A while back (2 decades or so ago) there was a Harry Wang in the phone book of Oxnard California.
I just checked the white pages for all of California, seems the phone book is literally filled with Harry Wangs.
White pages for Harry Wang in CA
Oh I dunno, I am fairly hot for someone with a Greek letter / Physics symbol as a middle name - Zeta. ... except maybe someone needs to call Michael Douglas and tell him give it a rest, leave some for the rest of us.
Ain't nothing wrong with that
He is talking real estate for his employees to live in. A house, a regular ol' stand alone house that a family can live in (ie, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom with a 1 or 2 car garage, like 2000sf with a little yard) is going to cost more than a HALF A FUCKING MILLION DOLLARS. Lots more, probably closer to $600k or more. $300 to $400 per square foot for stand alone housing built in the 40's with aluminum wiring and all the crap materials they used in the 40's.
You almost forgot : ... no, they gotta label you Jew or Irish or Italian or Greek or French or something. ... $385k for a 780 square foot 'condo' that consists of two rooms and a convertable couch / bed built in 1870?
They suck on the freeway, worst damn drivers I have ever seen.
Their communist government proudly denies you the right to own a firearm or protect your home.
They categorize white people - it isn't like other parts of the country where white people are white people
Insane taxes.
Double plus insane real estate prices
Their 'beach' consists of a rocky shoreline that ends up in nasty polluted water a few degrees above freezing.
No two roads in the entire state are parallel, they must have put down roads before the straight line was invented.
I could probably go on, but I won't.
Anybody that thinks that Austin is a heavy tech employer center needs to do a Monster search on Austin, then compare the results to a Monster Search on Boston. Seems there are about 10 or so major employers in Austin (Dell, IBM, Compaq, TI, a few others) and once your resume has been sent to these ten HR departments your tech search is done. Takes less than a day.
.JSPs running on WebSphere.
Every computer guy in Austin has a job, for sure : waiting tables downtown at the nice resturants. May I suggest a nice Merlot to go with your steak, and perhaps recommend a nice two tier client server system with an Oracle back end, powered by Cisco to protect the DMZ and a front end consisting of
Don't get me wrong, I love Texas - but God forbid you try and find a job there.
Maybe programming will suck no longer!
At first I read this as 'Maybe programs will suck no longer!"
Good luck with that one, given the direction of the current corporate development climate.
Probably applies to programming also, same reason.
-The Brain: The single most powerful computer that I will never be able to upgrade.
You can't upgrade it but you can overclock it.
The US government loses money as a drug dealer. The most profitable 'job' on the planet is dealing drugs and the US government is losing money doing it. That pretty much sums it up.
I love my country, would happily kill in all sorts of violent manner any foreigners that try to harm my country - but that doesn't make the current (or any recent) administration angels. They are a hell of a lot less corrupt than other country governments but they are still a corrupt bunch of thieving losers.
And part of the reason tracks had to be relayed in the South is that the North Army pulled up rails, heated them on a fire and twisted them around trees - in effect destroying the South's ability to travel. Good tactic (it worked) but afterwards it sort-of needed to be fixed.
If I was going to trust all of this computer standards stuff to anybody it would be either PARC, IBM, or a combination of the two. PARC did a pretty good job, who funded them, Xerox?