They did this at Rutgers (University of NJ) back during the Napster craze. They didn't check the traffic or anything. If you broke their arbitrary download quota they cut you off for a week.
I don't see why anyone (rational) would have a problem with that. It wasn't a tiny quota, and they had crazy fast downloads. Whole campus was on a fiber backbone.
The thing that pisses me off is that they decided to pick specifically on "copyrighted materials" instead of just dropping a quota on everyone. If you're a student can you store unlimited stuff on their servers as long as it's NOT copyrighted?
The same argument can be made of the relative insecurity of packet data on a WIFI network. Even encrypted, the network is insecure because packet headers are all so similar that the encryption scheme has to be ludicrous to even slow down a determined snoop.
Solution: Virtual Private networking. If the whole transport layer is encrypted then the packets (or pr0n) slide by without anyone being the wiser.
Unless they start running some kind of statistical analysis and stepping on everyone who seems like he is PROBABLY running a file sharing client, their control of the network won't really matter.
No need for dd; its easy enough to write a script that will write 1's to your drive forever, or until the stylus on your drive melts.
I think the underlying issue is that all too often no one takes these kinds of precautions, or no one thinks to take them with a drive that's "Dead". Had a client send me a "dead" drive (awful clicking screeching noise, you know, dead.) Slapped it into an oven for a minute to loosen up the lubricants inside, and was able to write about 60% of the data off it before it crapped out for good.
The way many people take security, I think it's all to the good to tell them to toss a drive in a fire for an hour or so, just to make sure that the data is really gone. Half these jokers think DELETE actually removes information from the drive.
Memory Scalability: Not having your operating system load 95% of everything it MIGHT need EVERY time it boots up. Meaning, of course, that you can SCALE your memory requirements to the hardware you are using.
I can set up a FUNCTIONAL Linux firewall on an original pentium (90mhz). You can't set up a functional M$ anything on a box that small, unless you want to run MSDOS batch scripts. Fricking XP has a MINIMUM memory requirement of 128megs. That's inex-fricking-scuseable.
The code I write for myself is the cleanest stuff in the universe. I get freaky about extra lines or lines that look "ugly" or inelegant.
Now when I'm at work I toss out functional, ugly code. Doesn't work quite as well, but 90% of the users will never know that. I'll write catch statements for the most obvious errors, but I don't sit and brood about what some hypothetical idiot might want to do with the code. If there are enough people who hit an error there, I patch it, and move on with my life.
By and large, high production commercial code is sloppy. There isn't any profit to be made in making it pretty or elegant, and we all know how (for a random example) MICROSOFT feels about profit.
Open source is just the opposite; if you're not making any money on it, you're doing it for your own personal satisfaction, and I think most people find it more satisfying to have clean baddass code, rather than sloppy junk code. Heh. Especially when your NAME is on it, and the SOURCE is available.
Lets ignore all the security issues for a moment. Let's just imagine that MS finally makes something truly secure, and no one is going to be hacking your phone or PDA.
The primary issues then become functionality and memory footprint. In terms of low cost buying power, you can't beat linux. In terms of memory scalability, you can't beat linux.
Add in stability, and the reality of security, and it seems wierd that anyone would go another direction.
If you are running 50 instances of NT Server on a single box, how many NT licenses do you need?
Answer: 1 to do the work and 9,999 to satisfy the arcane liscensing requirements.
Blizzard, a company who released the cinematics for it's last game on DivX, as well as releasing a Windows/Mac/Wine compatible game on one disk, is hardly the evil empire. I can think of a million better targets for your bashing without using the other half of my brain.
I know this is flamebait, but I think the place for windows IS on the desktop. The only time I ever oppose it is on the grounds of cost.
On the other hand, a Windows Server? What kind of moron would put up a windows server? Desktop fine, but that desktop had best connect to a Linux Router, then a Linux Server, protected by a Linux Firewall. That is unless you LIKE viruses and downtime.
I've got a client who called me up at 9:00am on Saturday wanting me to go down and patch up their MSSQL Server 2000 server to keep their precious precious data safe. It was a real pleasure to say, "Safe? Don't worry, your 150000 dollars worth of MS junk is safe behind the Linux firewall I put together out of a spare computer I found in a basement storeroom."
The gas mileage of cars will continue to improve by 1 mile per gallon for 100000 years, or until SUV's become fuel efficient, or until hell freezes over.
Sounds good to me. Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to have too much money.
Experience shows that useless wastes of money stay around for one of two reasons: 1).5% of the people who did it profited in some way. 2) It became a fad, and common sense vanished.
Comparisons to gambling and the stock market (Same thing?)don't hold true because it is possible to win in either of those situations.
Not ALL things in the stock market decline in value (recent years to the contrary) and the odds of winning a game of blackjack stay the same, no matter how long you play.
Depending on how fast things decay (goooo entropy!) even if you buffed yourself up and dedicated your life to mugging people and selling their junk, you'd still be fighting a losing battle on profit.
Though the gambling comparison does hold true in one respect: without a constant supply of suckers, entropy is gonna catch up with Entropia real quick
These things end up being self-policing. People who get beat up band together and take out the big guys. If they don't the game is so unbalanced that it'll probably fold soon enough anyway, with no loss to anyone.
Okay the game is called "Project Entropia" You pay real money for game equipment which DEGRADES.
Sounds about like the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Who the hell would want to play that? I've got disposable income sure, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna walk down the street strewing dollar bills in my wake.
Windows has filed lawsuits to prevent people from transferring liscenses (albiet only corporations so far).
M$'s position is that you are leasing the software for your own use, and that, as you have no real rights to it, you have no right to transfer your usage priviledges to anyone else.
Fiber optic is massively efficent, but if I shine a flashlight into it in seatle, they aren't gonna see a light in silicon valley, even IF there were no splices or connectors (Which, I assure you, there are). Hence they need signal amplifiers, and routing stations and technicians and hordes of other expensive crap to make all this line functional.
Tens of billions is probably on the high side for what it would cost to get it running, but to keep it running? Cheap.
M$ refuses to even release the windows API's, for fear someone might steal their intellectual property. Do you really think that they'll accept the open source liscensing which would require them to release source code? This isn't BSD here.
Man I stopped playing that when they nerfed the unholy avengers. Those things used to rock.
Also, a lot of the really cool items were only possesable by x number of people, so if you hit a death trap there was no way for you to recoup all the stuff other than eternally wandering around killing the same stuff over and over, hoping against hope that the drop would go your way.
Blea.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggy" until you find a rock.
1) Politicians only care about rich people because you need a lot of money to get elected.
2) The mass transit analogy doesn't hold because mass transit costs a fortune to build and operate, while copy protection can be broken by someone who's still living in his parents basement.
3) The disease isn't capitalism, the disease is campaign finance. It can be cured.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggy" until you find a rock.
I flawlessly copy protected a CD just a second ago. I took what was on it, and multiplied it by a 2056 bit prime number. Lets see those pinko p2p people rip that! And if they do, I'll change the number to 4128 bits! One song per CD! 50 CD Sets!
Hahahahahaha!
We'll make special CD players that only play things with that random number on them! If you want to buy a new CD, you'll have to buy a new CD player as well! I'll be rich!
And no more of this "radio" thing! These "wideband" pirates cost us 10000000000 dollars a minute. Little green men in Alpha Centauri are listening to our music for FREE! And making as many copies as they want! This has got to stop!
And CD retailers with their flimsy "anti-theft" devices are doing hardly anything to keep unscrupulous "meat-space" thieves from literally WALKING away with our merchandise. From now on, all our intellectual properties will be kept in giant steel vaults with mandatory cavity searches on the way in AND out.
Blah blah blah.
At this point, I hate the RIA and Hollywood so much that I'll work 50 hour weeks for no money just to break their crappy protection. Die you greedy bastards! 100 million dollar opening weekends not enough for you?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice Doggy" until you find a rock.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no silly!
They're an advertising firm.
Now I have yet ANOTHER good reason to push MySQL over MSSQL Server.
Time to start forgetting all the VB I had to learn.
They did this at Rutgers (University of NJ) back during the Napster craze. They didn't check the traffic or anything. If you broke their arbitrary download quota they cut you off for a week.
I don't see why anyone (rational) would have a problem with that. It wasn't a tiny quota, and they had crazy fast downloads. Whole campus was on a fiber backbone.
The thing that pisses me off is that they decided to pick specifically on "copyrighted materials" instead of just dropping a quota on everyone. If you're a student can you store unlimited stuff on their servers as long as it's NOT copyrighted?
The same argument can be made of the relative insecurity of packet data on a WIFI network. Even encrypted, the network is insecure because packet headers are all so similar that the encryption scheme has to be ludicrous to even slow down a determined snoop.
Solution: Virtual Private networking. If the whole transport layer is encrypted then the packets (or pr0n) slide by without anyone being the wiser.
Unless they start running some kind of statistical analysis and stepping on everyone who seems like he is PROBABLY running a file sharing client, their control of the network won't really matter.
Man, I LIKE the text only boot up. Whenever they add a fancy GUI functionality is lost, or at least hidden.
No need for dd; its easy enough to write a script that will write 1's to your drive forever, or until the stylus on your drive melts.
I think the underlying issue is that all too often no one takes these kinds of precautions, or no one thinks to take them with a drive that's "Dead". Had a client send me a "dead" drive (awful clicking screeching noise, you know, dead.) Slapped it into an oven for a minute to loosen up the lubricants inside, and was able to write about 60% of the data off it before it crapped out for good.
The way many people take security, I think it's all to the good to tell them to toss a drive in a fire for an hour or so, just to make sure that the data is really gone. Half these jokers think DELETE actually removes information from the drive.
Memory Scalability: Not having your operating system load 95% of everything it MIGHT need EVERY time it boots up. Meaning, of course, that you can SCALE your memory requirements to the hardware you are using.
I can set up a FUNCTIONAL Linux firewall on an original pentium (90mhz). You can't set up a functional M$ anything on a box that small, unless you want to run MSDOS batch scripts. Fricking XP has a MINIMUM memory requirement of 128megs. That's inex-fricking-scuseable.
The code I write for myself is the cleanest stuff in the universe. I get freaky about extra lines or lines that look "ugly" or inelegant.
.024 euros.
Now when I'm at work I toss out functional, ugly code. Doesn't work quite as well, but 90% of the users will never know that. I'll write catch statements for the most obvious errors, but I don't sit and brood about what some hypothetical idiot might want to do with the code. If there are enough people who hit an error there, I patch it, and move on with my life.
By and large, high production commercial code is sloppy. There isn't any profit to be made in making it pretty or elegant, and we all know how (for a random example) MICROSOFT feels about profit.
Open source is just the opposite; if you're not making any money on it, you're doing it for your own personal satisfaction, and I think most people find it more satisfying to have clean baddass code, rather than sloppy junk code. Heh. Especially when your NAME is on it, and the SOURCE is available.
Just my
Lets ignore all the security issues for a moment. Let's just imagine that MS finally makes something truly secure, and no one is going to be hacking your phone or PDA.
The primary issues then become functionality and memory footprint. In terms of low cost buying power, you can't beat linux. In terms of memory scalability, you can't beat linux.
Add in stability, and the reality of security, and it seems wierd that anyone would go another direction.
If you are running 50 instances of NT Server on a single box, how many NT licenses do you need? Answer: 1 to do the work and 9,999 to satisfy the arcane liscensing requirements.
Blizzard, a company who released the cinematics for it's last game on DivX, as well as releasing a Windows/Mac/Wine compatible game on one disk, is hardly the evil empire. I can think of a million better targets for your bashing without using the other half of my brain.
I know this is flamebait, but I think the place for windows IS on the desktop. The only time I ever oppose it is on the grounds of cost.
On the other hand, a Windows Server? What kind of moron would put up a windows server? Desktop fine, but that desktop had best connect to a Linux Router, then a Linux Server, protected by a Linux Firewall. That is unless you LIKE viruses and downtime.
I've got a client who called me up at 9:00am on Saturday wanting me to go down and patch up their MSSQL Server 2000 server to keep their precious precious data safe. It was a real pleasure to say, "Safe? Don't worry, your 150000 dollars worth of MS junk is safe behind the Linux firewall I put together out of a spare computer I found in a basement storeroom."
Puppy's Law:
The gas mileage of cars will continue to improve by 1 mile per gallon for 100000 years, or until SUV's become fuel efficient, or until hell freezes over.
My bet's on hell.
Sounds good to me. Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to have too much money.
.5% of the people who did it profited in some way. 2) It became a fad, and common sense vanished.
Experience shows that useless wastes of money stay around for one of two reasons: 1)
Comparisons to gambling and the stock market (Same thing?)don't hold true because it is possible to win in either of those situations.
Not ALL things in the stock market decline in value (recent years to the contrary) and the odds of winning a game of blackjack stay the same, no matter how long you play.
Depending on how fast things decay (goooo entropy!) even if you buffed yourself up and dedicated your life to mugging people and selling their junk, you'd still be fighting a losing battle on profit.
Though the gambling comparison does hold true in one respect: without a constant supply of suckers, entropy is gonna catch up with Entropia real quick
These things end up being self-policing. People who get beat up band together and take out the big guys. If they don't the game is so unbalanced that it'll probably fold soon enough anyway, with no loss to anyone.
Okay the game is called "Project Entropia"
You pay real money for game equipment which DEGRADES.
Sounds about like the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Who the hell would want to play that? I've got disposable income sure, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna walk down the street strewing dollar bills in my wake.
Entropy indeed.
Windows has filed lawsuits to prevent people from transferring liscenses (albiet only corporations so far).
M$'s position is that you are leasing the software for your own use, and that, as you have no real rights to it, you have no right to transfer your usage priviledges to anyone else.
Wire is inert if it's not attached to anything.
Fiber optic is massively efficent, but if I shine a flashlight into it in seatle, they aren't gonna see a light in silicon valley, even IF there were no splices or connectors (Which, I assure you, there are). Hence they need signal amplifiers, and routing stations and technicians and hordes of other expensive crap to make all this line functional.
Tens of billions is probably on the high side for what it would cost to get it running, but to keep it running? Cheap.
M$ refuses to even release the windows API's, for fear someone might steal their intellectual property. Do you really think that they'll accept the open source liscensing which would require them to release source code? This isn't BSD here.
No way.
These BBS things sound cool as hell!
Ummmm....
How do I switch my cable modem to "dial up" mode?
I just lied to them. How the hell are they going to know?
Oh yea, and if any radio shack people are reading this, my address is:
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington DC, 20500
Man I stopped playing that when they nerfed the unholy avengers. Those things used to rock.
Also, a lot of the really cool items were only possesable by x number of people, so if you hit a death trap there was no way for you to recoup all the stuff other than eternally wandering around killing the same stuff over and over, hoping against hope that the drop would go your way.
Blea.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggy" until you find a rock.
1) Politicians only care about rich people because you need a lot of money to get elected.
2) The mass transit analogy doesn't hold because mass transit costs a fortune to build and operate, while copy protection can be broken by someone who's still living in his parents basement.
3) The disease isn't capitalism, the disease is campaign finance. It can be cured.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggy" until you find a rock.
No really? Its not going to work?
I flawlessly copy protected a CD just a second ago. I took what was on it, and multiplied it by a 2056 bit prime number. Lets see those pinko p2p people rip that! And if they do, I'll change the number to 4128 bits! One song per CD! 50 CD Sets!
Hahahahahaha!
We'll make special CD players that only play things with that random number on them! If you want to buy a new CD, you'll have to buy a new CD player as well! I'll be rich!
And no more of this "radio" thing! These "wideband" pirates cost us 10000000000 dollars a minute. Little green men in Alpha Centauri are listening to our music for FREE! And making as many copies as they want! This has got to stop!
And CD retailers with their flimsy "anti-theft" devices are doing hardly anything to keep unscrupulous "meat-space" thieves from literally WALKING away with our merchandise. From now on, all our intellectual properties will be kept in giant steel vaults with mandatory cavity searches on the way in AND out.
Blah blah blah.
At this point, I hate the RIA and Hollywood so much that I'll work 50 hour weeks for no money just to break their crappy protection. Die you greedy bastards! 100 million dollar opening weekends not enough for you?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice Doggy" until you find a rock.