Also, nobody know what specific deals Amazon is getting with their suppliers. I don't know about IHS iSuppli (got a link?), but most of the time when I see these breakdowns of how much things cost, they are going based on prices for single units, or small runs. When you're selling millions of units, the price gets severely reduced. Assuming This is the article you refer to, I have serious doubts about their prices. For one thing, they rate the WLAN at $4.50, but you can easily get USB WLAN dongles from Alibaba for $4.50 a piece. I'm sure that Amazon could get a much better deal on such a similar product. Not only that, they price the touchscreen at $87, but you can easily buy a complete tablet with a similar screen for about the same price.
Then don't buy it, or call/email the maker of said product and let them know that you would like to try out their product. Maybe if they get enough requests for a demo they will create one. Maybe you can find an alternative product that you can buy, or that does have a demo version. Pirating just gives them ammunition for reasons why the internet should be locked down. If instead you just opt to not use the product, they really have nobody to blame but themselves for low sales. And there probably aren't too many apps that most people couldn't just get by without. Maybe something like AutoCad or SolidWorks if you really do operate professionally in a field where they are pretty much required, but then, that's a decision you have made about what your job is, and you should be comfortable paying for the correct tools.
Who thinks that this will be about as successful as AllAdvantage or NetZero? The kind of people who are savvy enough to install and use this VPN are the same people who would be savvy enough to be able to get it to work without displaying the ads. Just simply running it in a VM and them tunneling all your network traffic through the VM such that you never have to see the ads is probably enough for most people. There will be others who will figure out how to connect to the VPN directly without even using the supplied client software.
The Raspberry Pi has made me realize that computers have just gotten too cheap and ubiquitous for us to ever get to a situation where we can't easily and cheaply a general purpose computer. Sure maybe our phones tablets and even desktops will be severely locked down to the point where only approved software can be run. But that doesn't mean we wont have access to general purpose computers. For 90% of my tasks I don't need to have a general purpose computer and if it offered me the ability to not worry about viruses, malware, or even needing to manually update software, then I would use that computer and have a second general purpose computer for the remaining tasks.
We make compromises for accuracy all the time in computation. The use of floating point numbers is one such case. Simple numbers such as 0.1 can't even be accurately represented in binary floating point but we use binary floating point over decimal floating point for many tasks simply because it runs faster, and the answers it gives us is "close enough"
Also, it's 48% for all the trials they did. The probability of getting heads when flipping a coin is 50% as well, but if you flip it 100 times, that doesn't mean that you'll end up with exactly 50 heads and 50 tails. All it means is that as you approach infinite trials the probabilty of getting heads tends towards 50%. So, depending on the number of trials they did, 48% is actually close enough to 50 that you can be assured that the algorithm is working just fine.
And at a wonderful 8 MB/s write time, it will take over 2 hours to fill the thing. That's the best case scenario. It will probably take longer. Write times on these USB flash drives are atrocious.
Yeah, for any appreciable amount of data, it's going to be quite time consuming to transfer the data. It's not unheard of to run a website off a 10 Mbit line, but transferring 50 GB over a 10 Mbit line is going to take over 113 hours. So if you have to backup 50 GB a day, it's impossible. If you have a 100 mbps line, you're down to 11 hours of saturating your line, just to transfer out the 50 GB of data. Unless your data center has some kind of peering agreement with Amazon where they can give you a really fast unmetered line, I don't really see this working out all that well.
I think the stakes are way too high. The system can either support anonymous transactions, XOR it can verify that you actually have as much money as it says you do on the card. If it's truly anonymous, then there's no record of money changing hands. However, if there is no record of transactions, then the only source of how much money you have on the card is contained within the card. This is fine for things like transit passes, and photocopy machines, because it isn't worth the thief's time to scam the system for free rides on the bus. But when you can effectively create real cash out of thin air, then that is just too much incentive for people to defraud the system. If there is a way to double-spend cash, then it would probably be trivial to move up to triple-spend or million-spend. Cash works just fine for anonymous transactions, and we have enough trouble with people counterfeiting that. If they figure out how to counterfeit digital bits, then the digital money will be indistinguishable from the real deal.
Also, the only criteria I have for deciding who to vote for is by watching a video about the app. I don't get to download and try out the app, so I don't know if it will even run well on my phone. Also, I'm not all "everything should be open source for ever and always" but it seems to me that something like this which is handling monetary transactions on my phone should either be open source, or under heavy government scrutiny. We shouldn't just let anybody put together some closed source app and claim it's doing everything right, especially going by the wonderful screen shots provided. Some of the apps look like they were developed by high school kids.
I'm sure that if you send the data slow enough, that it wouldn't even show up as a blip on their radar. 50 GB is nothing compared to the amount of data that goes over their networks. Granted, it would be braindead simple to make a completely segregated user login system from the systems which actually handle the game servers, and to make that system very secure, by only have it doing 1 simple thing, but they probably didn't do that.
You could just go the extra mile and create a whole website that your target wouldn't want to be affiliated with. Then go create "accounts" for those people you are targeting.
This is what Virtual Machines are great at. Have a specific VM that you only use for your banking and other high security sites. Have another VM that you use for browsing dodgy sites that have a high likelyhood of carrying viruses, and have a third one that you use for everyday browsing. Wipe the "bank" VM and start over from a known good state every time if you want. Sure there's probably ways to break out of the VM, but I don't think most hackers have gotten that sophisticated yet, as there are too many easier ways to get money.
I've heard the Nigerian prince scam is designed to be quite unbelievable because they don't want to waste their time with people who have any kind of common sense. It's too hard to get money from people with common sense. I think the same goes for this type of scam. Target enough people and you'll eventually fall upon somebody who watches kiddie porn. And that person will be easy to get money out of, because they'd rather pay money than face the other consequences.
A restaurant web site works best when it's the 1990s era web site. A single page with the address, a map, the phone number, and hours of operation. Another web page linked from the first that shows their menu. That's all a restaurant needs. It's amazing how many restaurants and other businesses can't even be bother to post their hours of operation on their website, or put their phone number in an easy to find location, preferably on the front page.
It would be nice if there was a way you could display the TV screen on your tablet when controlling it, with your tablet. Entirely possible with today's technology.
Not to mention that you only have 5 fingers, so the odds of pressing 6 keys at the same time is rather low. There aren't many games out there that don't require a mouse, and certainly not any FPS, MMOs or RTS games.
Don't think I've ever seen a desktop computer with 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM. By the time 1 GHz CPUs came on the scene, most people had probably about 1 GB of RAM, possibly 512 MB. The last computer I had with 128 MB of RAM was a PII-266. Actually it originally had 64 MB of RAM and I upgraded to 256, but that was the last computer I had in that range. 128 MB doesn't get you very far these days. I had a Nokia phone with 128 MB of RAM and it would often crash the browser with out of memory errors if I loaded up the wrong page. Loading a Slashdot article would do it just about every time. It's probably enough memory to do most phone operations, except browse the web, which is a major shortcoming in these days. Also, very disappointed this phone doesn't have GPS. That phone I linked to had amazing GPS reception. Way better than I've had on any "smart" phone.
Very much agree. They could have just as easily built the same service using proprietary software. Their licenses may have cost more, but would probably completely eclipsed by the cost of paying their employees anyway.
Another reason you don't see HDD robots is because up until a few years ago, the connectors for hard disks were extremely non-standard. It was only very recently that they fixed the problem with the hard drives all having power and data connectors in random configurations. Thanks to this we now have those "toaster" type devices where you can just pop in a standard hard drive and have it connected to USB. The remaining problem with having a HDD robot is that nobody has built a rackmount case where the drives are universally accessible. They all have them hidden behind some proprietary non-standard locking mechanism. I'm sure there's some company out there with some kind of HDD robot so that they don't have to spend people down to switch hard drives in their giant storage arrays. Perhaps Google.
I really don't know what the editors were thinking when they posted this. There is no constructive conversation that can come from this question. Perhaps it should be migrated to SuperUser
One small correction. Horses were bred to run. In the link I posted, another answer states that one major reason that many animals can't outrun humans is because it's "contrived" There aren't many natural reasons why an animal would want to run for 26 miles straight without even stopping to take a break. Predators other than man can't think far enough into the future to bother with hunting a single prey animal for 2 days. Horses can pretty good by themselves, but the ones that have been bred by humans can run because we have selected them to be great runners over many thousands of years.
Convenient time to schedule maintenance. Right at the end of the petition deadline. Also, who's running this server. This isn't 1970. There's no need to bring a server down for maintenance. At least not for a prolonged period of time. At most it should be down for the amount of time it takes to reboot the server. A proper web site should have 2 or 3 load balanced machines anyway, so the site never has to be completely down.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, nobody know what specific deals Amazon is getting with their suppliers. I don't know about IHS iSuppli (got a link?), but most of the time when I see these breakdowns of how much things cost, they are going based on prices for single units, or small runs. When you're selling millions of units, the price gets severely reduced. Assuming This is the article you refer to, I have serious doubts about their prices. For one thing, they rate the WLAN at $4.50, but you can easily get USB WLAN dongles from Alibaba for $4.50 a piece. I'm sure that Amazon could get a much better deal on such a similar product. Not only that, they price the touchscreen at $87, but you can easily buy a complete tablet with a similar screen for about the same price.
Then don't buy it, or call/email the maker of said product and let them know that you would like to try out their product. Maybe if they get enough requests for a demo they will create one. Maybe you can find an alternative product that you can buy, or that does have a demo version. Pirating just gives them ammunition for reasons why the internet should be locked down. If instead you just opt to not use the product, they really have nobody to blame but themselves for low sales. And there probably aren't too many apps that most people couldn't just get by without. Maybe something like AutoCad or SolidWorks if you really do operate professionally in a field where they are pretty much required, but then, that's a decision you have made about what your job is, and you should be comfortable paying for the correct tools.
Who thinks that this will be about as successful as AllAdvantage or NetZero? The kind of people who are savvy enough to install and use this VPN are the same people who would be savvy enough to be able to get it to work without displaying the ads. Just simply running it in a VM and them tunneling all your network traffic through the VM such that you never have to see the ads is probably enough for most people. There will be others who will figure out how to connect to the VPN directly without even using the supplied client software.
The Raspberry Pi has made me realize that computers have just gotten too cheap and ubiquitous for us to ever get to a situation where we can't easily and cheaply a general purpose computer. Sure maybe our phones tablets and even desktops will be severely locked down to the point where only approved software can be run. But that doesn't mean we wont have access to general purpose computers. For 90% of my tasks I don't need to have a general purpose computer and if it offered me the ability to not worry about viruses, malware, or even needing to manually update software, then I would use that computer and have a second general purpose computer for the remaining tasks.
We make compromises for accuracy all the time in computation. The use of floating point numbers is one such case. Simple numbers such as 0.1 can't even be accurately represented in binary floating point but we use binary floating point over decimal floating point for many tasks simply because it runs faster, and the answers it gives us is "close enough"
Also, it's 48% for all the trials they did. The probability of getting heads when flipping a coin is 50% as well, but if you flip it 100 times, that doesn't mean that you'll end up with exactly 50 heads and 50 tails. All it means is that as you approach infinite trials the probabilty of getting heads tends towards 50%. So, depending on the number of trials they did, 48% is actually close enough to 50 that you can be assured that the algorithm is working just fine.
And at a wonderful 8 MB/s write time, it will take over 2 hours to fill the thing. That's the best case scenario. It will probably take longer. Write times on these USB flash drives are atrocious.
Yeah, for any appreciable amount of data, it's going to be quite time consuming to transfer the data. It's not unheard of to run a website off a 10 Mbit line, but transferring 50 GB over a 10 Mbit line is going to take over 113 hours. So if you have to backup 50 GB a day, it's impossible. If you have a 100 mbps line, you're down to 11 hours of saturating your line, just to transfer out the 50 GB of data. Unless your data center has some kind of peering agreement with Amazon where they can give you a really fast unmetered line, I don't really see this working out all that well.
I think the stakes are way too high. The system can either support anonymous transactions, XOR it can verify that you actually have as much money as it says you do on the card. If it's truly anonymous, then there's no record of money changing hands. However, if there is no record of transactions, then the only source of how much money you have on the card is contained within the card. This is fine for things like transit passes, and photocopy machines, because it isn't worth the thief's time to scam the system for free rides on the bus. But when you can effectively create real cash out of thin air, then that is just too much incentive for people to defraud the system. If there is a way to double-spend cash, then it would probably be trivial to move up to triple-spend or million-spend. Cash works just fine for anonymous transactions, and we have enough trouble with people counterfeiting that. If they figure out how to counterfeit digital bits, then the digital money will be indistinguishable from the real deal.
Also, the only criteria I have for deciding who to vote for is by watching a video about the app. I don't get to download and try out the app, so I don't know if it will even run well on my phone. Also, I'm not all "everything should be open source for ever and always" but it seems to me that something like this which is handling monetary transactions on my phone should either be open source, or under heavy government scrutiny. We shouldn't just let anybody put together some closed source app and claim it's doing everything right, especially going by the wonderful screen shots provided. Some of the apps look like they were developed by high school kids.
I'm sure that if you send the data slow enough, that it wouldn't even show up as a blip on their radar. 50 GB is nothing compared to the amount of data that goes over their networks. Granted, it would be braindead simple to make a completely segregated user login system from the systems which actually handle the game servers, and to make that system very secure, by only have it doing 1 simple thing, but they probably didn't do that.
You could just go the extra mile and create a whole website that your target wouldn't want to be affiliated with. Then go create "accounts" for those people you are targeting.
This is what Virtual Machines are great at. Have a specific VM that you only use for your banking and other high security sites. Have another VM that you use for browsing dodgy sites that have a high likelyhood of carrying viruses, and have a third one that you use for everyday browsing. Wipe the "bank" VM and start over from a known good state every time if you want. Sure there's probably ways to break out of the VM, but I don't think most hackers have gotten that sophisticated yet, as there are too many easier ways to get money.
I've heard the Nigerian prince scam is designed to be quite unbelievable because they don't want to waste their time with people who have any kind of common sense. It's too hard to get money from people with common sense. I think the same goes for this type of scam. Target enough people and you'll eventually fall upon somebody who watches kiddie porn. And that person will be easy to get money out of, because they'd rather pay money than face the other consequences.
A restaurant web site works best when it's the 1990s era web site. A single page with the address, a map, the phone number, and hours of operation. Another web page linked from the first that shows their menu. That's all a restaurant needs. It's amazing how many restaurants and other businesses can't even be bother to post their hours of operation on their website, or put their phone number in an easy to find location, preferably on the front page.
It would be nice if there was a way you could display the TV screen on your tablet when controlling it, with your tablet. Entirely possible with today's technology.
Not to mention that you only have 5 fingers, so the odds of pressing 6 keys at the same time is rather low. There aren't many games out there that don't require a mouse, and certainly not any FPS, MMOs or RTS games.
Don't think I've ever seen a desktop computer with 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM. By the time 1 GHz CPUs came on the scene, most people had probably about 1 GB of RAM, possibly 512 MB. The last computer I had with 128 MB of RAM was a PII-266. Actually it originally had 64 MB of RAM and I upgraded to 256, but that was the last computer I had in that range. 128 MB doesn't get you very far these days. I had a Nokia phone with 128 MB of RAM and it would often crash the browser with out of memory errors if I loaded up the wrong page. Loading a Slashdot article would do it just about every time. It's probably enough memory to do most phone operations, except browse the web, which is a major shortcoming in these days. Also, very disappointed this phone doesn't have GPS. That phone I linked to had amazing GPS reception. Way better than I've had on any "smart" phone.
Everybody knows that when a bull charges you, you should punch him in the stomach. Hard to get the timing right, but when you do, it works every time.
Very much agree. They could have just as easily built the same service using proprietary software. Their licenses may have cost more, but would probably completely eclipsed by the cost of paying their employees anyway.
Another reason you don't see HDD robots is because up until a few years ago, the connectors for hard disks were extremely non-standard. It was only very recently that they fixed the problem with the hard drives all having power and data connectors in random configurations. Thanks to this we now have those "toaster" type devices where you can just pop in a standard hard drive and have it connected to USB. The remaining problem with having a HDD robot is that nobody has built a rackmount case where the drives are universally accessible. They all have them hidden behind some proprietary non-standard locking mechanism. I'm sure there's some company out there with some kind of HDD robot so that they don't have to spend people down to switch hard drives in their giant storage arrays. Perhaps Google.
Sending the only copy out in the mail for someone else to recover seems like a recipe for disaster.
I really don't know what the editors were thinking when they posted this. There is no constructive conversation that can come from this question. Perhaps it should be migrated to SuperUser
One small correction. Horses were bred to run. In the link I posted, another answer states that one major reason that many animals can't outrun humans is because it's "contrived" There aren't many natural reasons why an animal would want to run for 26 miles straight without even stopping to take a break. Predators other than man can't think far enough into the future to bother with hunting a single prey animal for 2 days. Horses can pretty good by themselves, but the ones that have been bred by humans can run because we have selected them to be great runners over many thousands of years.
Convenient time to schedule maintenance. Right at the end of the petition deadline. Also, who's running this server. This isn't 1970. There's no need to bring a server down for maintenance. At least not for a prolonged period of time. At most it should be down for the amount of time it takes to reboot the server. A proper web site should have 2 or 3 load balanced machines anyway, so the site never has to be completely down.