Several of the root servers do not have any redundancy.
Having multiple root servers IS the redundancy - originally, and to some extent even now. Big-time redundancy within each one is just (really strong) suspenders to supplement the belt.
A non-redundant root server is still useful - even if perhaps not always up and/or not capable of drinking as large a firehose of requests as some giant, geographically-diverse, multiple-cluster. All it takes is one response from one server to get your nameserver's search started.
Even nukes can't stop it! Or at least they shouldn't, since the internet was originally designed to run as a communications network in the event of a nuclear attack.
And the primary design feature that enabled that was removed during the rise of the ISPs.
The early internet was a NET. Redundant links everywhere. Routers all potentially knew the whole topology and could find a connection if it existed.
As the net went commercial that caused a table explosion in the routers. So BGP replaced RIP and things became less robust. Usable routes became a subset of all possible routes. Within the backbone there was still a lot of redundancy - but it wasn't quite up to the former "find a path if it exists" level.
Meanwhile, the typical host went from being something ad-hock connected to sever neighbors to being something connected solely to a single ISP - typically by a single link. The big guys might have redundant paths into their ISP's Network Operations Center. But if something took out the NOC (and often there was only one - or only one of some critical component) you were hosed. Ditto if something corrupted their databases. Even with redundant links there would only be a few, perhaps going through several single-points-of-failure - and if fully redundant still allowing a double-failure to take you down. The little guys would typically have one line (say DSL) to one box. Cut the line or crash the box - or the typically two links from it to the NOC - and you're hosed.
(Perhaps you have a dialup-backup for your DSL. Did YOU configure it to come up automagically if your main link goes down? Is it on the same phone line with the DSL? If not, does it take a different path to the central office? Or is it right up the same cable bundle on the same poles next to the same road full of the same drunk drivers or in the same underground cable running past the same backhoe...)
So the internet evolved from a nuclear-strike-survivable net to a less-robust net rooting a bunch of trees. Oops!
(And that's just for routing the packets once you've GOT the IP number. Translating names to IP numbers is a whole separate can of worms: It's what the root servers are about - which is why there are so many of them, most of them are clusters, and some are clusters that are geographically diverse. You only need to hit ONE operational root server to get started on your translation - if your answer isn't cached somewhere between you and the root, and the list is small enough to keep handy on every machine that wants to do its own nameservice.)
That is how the DMCA works. The point is that it holds the carrier (in this case, Youtube) harmless as long as they comply. Generally, the carrier of the alleged copyrighted works will comply and give the "owner" an opportunity to fight it. The point is, you can fight it, and should within the law.
Meanwhile, if I understand the safe harbor provision correctly, here's how you mitigate damages:
- Viacom has sent a takedown notice, under oath, that your material is under their copyright and used without permission.
- ISP has taken it down (one of two ways they're in the clear).
- You send a notice to the ISP, also under oath, that you actually have adequate rights to post it (in this case as the owner of the full copyright) and please put it back up now.
- The ISP puts it back up and sends a notice to Viacom that they believe the takedown notice was in error (the OTHER way they're in the clear).
If your ISP puts it back up your damage has been greatly reduced compared to taking on Viacom directly (and/or through the courts) and waiting for that to work out. (When assessing damages courts expect you to try any damage-mitigating recourse first, rather than letting things go in order to run up a big bill for your opposition, and won't award the additional damage you took after your failure to take the quick path.)
If your ISP DOESN'T put it back up then THEY may be on the hook to YOU, from then on, because they failed to perform on their own duty when they didn't have to keep your stuff down to stay in the safe harbor.
Given that you're their customer and Viacom is an interloper, they'll probably want to keep you happy and tell Viacom to take a hike. Give them a legal leg to stand on and they'll likely be more than happy to pogo-dance with you.
After you're back up you may have less to sue Viacom for. But the remainder will probably be more than worth it - if only to cause Viacom more damage than they caused you. Meanwhile your stuff is back up, your ISP is out of the loop and doing the job they were paid for, and it's all between you and Viacom.
IANAL so I could be wrong. But if you really own the copyright on a work wrongly taken down by a media-company's takedown spam I don't see any downside to telling your ISP, under oath, that it should go back up.
The boilerplate for a takedown notice seems to say they're swearing, under penalty of perjury, not just to the ownership of the copyright on the named work but that the posted content is the work over which they claim copyright.
If they're cranking these notices out by the hundreds of thousands without actually checking, that's negligent. The falsehood makes it perjury. Perjury is criminal. Doing it as a business practice would amount to attempting to profit from repeated criminal acts as a policy.
I wonder if this could be construed to constitute a "continuing criminal enterprise" and/or make them subject to RICO penalties?
... many, many things kill cancer in mice but don't in humans-- mice have significantly different molecular machinery than we do re: cancer prevention...
Which is probably why they tested with human cancers implanted in mice.
(No doubt using suitably hacked mice that would not fight off the transplanted human cancer - and in a suitably controlled study, in case they were able to make some attempt, so their own anti-cancer/anti-transplant action could be largely sorted out from the drug's action.)
The apparent mechanism of the drug's action is dependent solely on the machinery of the cancer cell, not that of its surroundings. The mice are just a convenient support medium, not part of the machinery that kills the cancer.
They conducted a study in which people were asked to access their own bank accounts on computers and networks controlled by the experimenters (where they could then hack the site presentation and record the subjects' actions).
Nobody with a CLUE about online security would participate in such a study.
As for the two groups who were not using accounts set up for the purpose: They would be unfamiliar with the account settings, have no personal stake in the results, and could be expected to try to bull through anything seen as a "bug" in order to perform the assigned task.
Unless explicitly informed that this was a test of the security features and that refusing to log in if suspicious was an option they would be expected to breeze past the login to get to the meat of the transaction - even if they wouldn't do so if this were their own account in their own normal life. Yet such an instruction would alert them at login time, biasing the test in another fashion. (Meanwhile, "behave securely" doesn't cut it for such a notice. Indeed, it would give them more to distract them during the experiment.)
If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)
Did you read the paper? The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness. This group did just as badly as the others.
IMHO there is a more fundamental flaw in the study - and any study of this type: Selection bias.
They conducted a study in which people were asked to access their own bank accounts on computers and networks controlled by the experimenters (where they could then hack the site presentation and record the subjects' actions).
Nobody with a CLUE about online security would participate in such a study. (Think about it for a minute: Would YOU "participate" in such an "experiment", using YOUR own actual bank account and access code?)
So their pool of experimental subjects was drawn from the clueless subset of the population.
I'm not at all surprised by the results. (Except perhaps that two actually refused to enter their codes when the security image was not correct.)
So basically what we're talking about here is crackpot versus crackpots.
Ad Homenim. You lose.
Just think about it: Many people would consider a Slashdot poster to be a crackpot. (Especially if he has strong beliefs about something like the unsuitability of the massively-market-accepted mainstream OS, for instance.)
Does this mean such a poster should be unable to exercise free speech when his postings annoy an organization with significant funds and political connections?
You DID see the Sluggy Freelance iSophagus thread, didn't you? (Where the sleepy main character mistakes his roommate's new "iPodling" for a vitamin pill and gets it stuck in his throat.)
(It's mixed with a couple other subplots so read forward for a total of 10 episodes to get it all.)
My iPod uses journalled HFS+, so partial writes are just reverted. iPods tied to Windows boxes, however, use FAT32 so that the Windows user can use it as a generic mass storage device.
Also: iPods start out life with HFS+ and reformat themselves as FAT32 the first time you plug them into a PC. Then there's no way back short of wiping and reinstalling them.
Or at least that's the story I got from the documentation a few months back when our company celebrated a good quarter by giving us all iPods. Which they had preloaded with a little video promo about the company's quarter. Which their vender had loaded into them using PCs. Converting them all to FAT32. B-(
Which turned out to be not all that bad a deal, since the iPod tools avaliable for Linux needed them preconverted to FAT32. B-)(
The ACLU fought against this exact kind of move in California - the use of paper ballots vs the use of electronic ballots - because according to them, electronic ballots are "twice as accurate" and the use of paper ballots would disenfranchise voters.
Alameda County's interim solution last election:
- Paper ballots of a fill-in-the-circle, reader-swallows-it-into-ballot-box system. (Don't recall the brand.)
- One leftover Diebold touchscreen machine per polling place for use by the handicapped.
The bulk of the voting has a paper trail for recounts, and the hypothetically cheat-prone Diebold touchscreen machine only has a few of the votes to be goofed around with.
It's the square of the clock speed; it comes from some math in second- or third-year Electrical Engineering.
Unfortunately it may be a bit late for this. Modern ICs have such small features, and electrons are such large, fuzzy objects, that leakage current has become large. In the generation being used for current designs it amounts to half the power consumption. Leakage doesn't change with speed - or even if the clocks are actually stopped! You have to turn the power completely off to to some chunk of the chip if you want to reduce it.
Unless/until chip manufacturers find a way to reduce leakage again and deploy processes using it, power benefits from slowing clock speeds are likely to be too small to be of interest.
It is a good idea; in fact it's such a good idea that people have been thinking about ways to try and implement it in datacenters for a while.
Actually the networking industry DOES do it that way. SPower supply to many routers (such as ALL the ones some major companies make) and other networking gear is redundant 48V DC - a standard for networking equipment dating from the days of relays. (Line powered units have extra line powered supplies to make the 48 DC.)
Not only that, but often the boxes don't have a per-box 48-to-whatever supply. Instead each blade requiring other voltages has its own switching regulators.
(This isn't just for efficiency - it's also for redundancy. A box power supply is a single point of failure for the box. Give each card its own supply running directly from the redundant power busses and if one fails all the other cards in the box keep working - meaning only the lines to that card are in trouble, not everything hooked to the box. You have to pull a card with a failing component to replace it anyhow - so if you want to cover the lines to it in case of card failure you need other redundancy anyhow. So single points of failure on a card are OK.)
Power requirements on modern ASICs, networking processors, and RAMs are getting higher, operating voltages lower (for better speed-power products) forcing higher currents, and switching DC-DC converter/regulators are getting more efficient. These days it actually makes sense to add an additional regulator near a major load so the power can cross a few inches of the PC board at a higher voltage and lower current, to avoid heating and voltage droop in the layer of copper that carries it. You're starting to see that in PC motherboards, too.
Running power over tiny 24 gauge wires is very inefficient too. Try again.
At 48 volts you can push significant wattage through tens of feet of four 24-gauge conductors in two-conductor parallel and still be far ahead of wall-warts. (This is what the telephone companies do to power your POTS phone from a central office miles away - except they're going farther and only use half as many conductors.)
What gauge do you think the wires in their coils are, and how much is wrapped around the core to form the transformer? Then there's the eddy current losses, core hysteresis, and (when present) the rotten efficiency of their regulators (which are often class-A, burning off the extra voltage (times the load current) as heat.)
Any bets on whether the losses in just the thin wire from a wall-wart to its load - at maybe 3 to 12 volts - dissipates more power than a similar length of 2-paralleled 24-gauge CatWhatever running at 48?
"Could someone make an open source product that works with Exchange?"
No need to work with exchange. Just need to replace exchange and do the job for the organisation that exchange does.
And get busted for cracking the IT department?
I was under the impression that the author was not in a position to change the server-side and migrate the whole company's critical infrastructure to some other solution. Instead he, as an individual contributor, needs a client on Linux that operates with the company-mandated server and scheduling infrastructure.
The existence of other solutions that interoperate with Linux clients is no more relevant to him than the existence of 50Hz power to run 50Hz-only appliances in some other locations would be to someone with a 50Hz appliance in a 60Hz utility's service area.
He is HERE. The company MANDATES mail and scheduling be done via an Exchange server. Any Linux solution needs to interoperate with the Exchange server or he's locked out of mail and meeting scheduling. Period.
= = = =
I feel his pain: Though our company provides linux desktops to the engineers:
- scheduling is via a commercial calendering system (with no Linux OR other-unix client and a web-interface client replacement for non-Windows platforms that is seriously crippled. (For starters, email (->pager) notification of upcoming meetings is done by the client, not the server, and I lost the functionality when they revved the server and the vendor provided no unix-of-ANY-flavor client for the new version.)
- documentation on the projects is mandated to be in Microsoft's.doc format and uses features that break when it's edited by the version of OOo that IT installed and supports.
- bugtracking was moved from bugzilla to another proprietary system a couple product cycles ago. (At least that one is usable, though it is a massive pain, misconfigured for our department's needs, and feature-poor.)
Much as I'd like to talk the company into sanity on these issues (especially since we're a prime target for targeted-corporate-espionage malware infection) I just don't have the pull.
(Fortunately our mail is on pop and smtp servers.)
The Open Source Community rather quickly got SMB support in its file systems, and that was closed like Exchange was.
No it wasn't. SMB was a published standard.
Really? I was under the impression that Samba was written BEFORE it was opened, by reverse-engineering the protocol from packet capture of the transactions. And that the "published standard" came later.
Of course, there is not a bright line, for instance, Bell Labs back in the day did a lot of research without view to practicability. Bell Labs is famed for being the source of an awful lot of really awesome stuff, too.
Bell Labs was an artifact of an attempt to scam government regulation.
AT&T was allowed, as part of its monopoly grant by the Fed, to set telephone rates so they made about 6% on all the money they spent on building the system. That included research on how to do telephony better.
So they set up Bell Labs to spend money on research with some tenuous connection to telephony. For every dollar they spent they could effectively bill phone users $1.06 and add six cents to the bottom line.
So Bell Labs did all sorts of research - not just applied research, but basic research - though always with some plausible telephony connection, of course.
And the hysterical thing about it is that, as a scam, it was a total failure. It turns out that basic research comes up with LOTS of useful stuff - just not necessarily something you could anticipate before you start and explain to the PHBs to justify the expense. From year one (until a recent point far post-disvestiture when some Boston Business School types finally looted it by scrapping the research projects for short-term profitability) Bell Labs research made more for the company (in process savings, licensing fees, and the like) than it cost them.
But financially it was still a win of cosmic proportions - both for its owners and for humanity.
Basic research is REALLY good stuff economically. It's just that you can't say what the benefits will be until you actually make the discoveries...
If it really was so easy to make sugar from cellulose we wouldn't use sugarcane and other plants to get the sugar and go the big cellulose producers - like trees - instead.
There are lots of molecules besides sucrose in the class "sugar". Industrial-grade cracked cellulose suitable for feeding microbes may be a far cry from the composition and purity requirements to sell it for human consumption.
Not to mention that you don't get to call it "sugar" unless it came from a cane or a beet.
More likely economic. It takes a lot of waste cellulose, which is pretty light and bulky. That produced in farming is separated at the farm - and has uses there. Transporting it, processing it through several steps, etc. may end up being non-competitive with pumping oil out of the ground - at least until the price rises and stays up due to resouce depletion - something not due for a few centuries by current estimates.
(Note: Don't look at "reserves" when estimating when oil will run out. Those are the particular reserves explored for and "proven", and they're always about "30 years". Once you've got 30 years worth proven it makes no sense to spend current money exploring and proving more.)
However, if these new final steps work out they may change the economics. Especially if they can be packaged conveniently for use on a farm (which IS an industrial operation these days). Then the farm can dump the chaff into the gadget and pump out tanker trucks of fuel to sell and/or use locally. (Diesel engines can burn just about any flammable liquid their injectors can be set up to handle, so additional refining shouldn't be necessary for local use.)
The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
That's easy: Add xylene. (Either in a batch, or by incubating it with the sort of bacteria that hang out in the guts of termites.)
This cracks the cellulose back into starch.
Cracking starch to sugar is similarly trival. (Either add acid or feed it to certain microbes.)
Once you've got sugar, getting to ethanol is a previously-solved problem (as is getting it to "something more like gasoline or diesel fuel" if the other bioprocesses work out on an industrial scale.)
Of course if you are willing to go with METHanol, just heat the cellulose, in a centuries-old industrial process. (That's why they call it "wood alcohol", after all.)
Yep- oh wait- Leninism and Maoism != communism, in fact had very little to do with communism other than window dressing.
Yes, nobody ever tried "true marxism".
But nobody ever tried "true capatalism" either.
And "true Christainity". And "true Islam". And "true whatever" for a very large list.
You can't judge an ideology by what it promises. You must go by what it mutates into when people actually attempt to implement its prescriptions.
After a number of trials the various socialist forms have mostly mutated into totalitarianisms of various sorts, with the main exceptions being cooperative businesses built by warping the corporate model by making the customers the shareholders.
Meanwhile, capitalism, even as it warps into mercantilsit and other monopolist tendencies, tends to feed, clothe, house, entertain, and empower its players better than just about anything else.
Which is not surprising, since free-market systems reward and empower those who produce, while socialist systems explicitly punish production and reward consumption - leading their industries to function badly and requiring coercive power to make them function at all.
You misunderstand how the system works - and is SUPPOSED to work.
- Incorporation sets up a barrier between corporate debts and the investors' personal resources, so that investors can invest with confidence that nothing more than what they invested is at risk. This barrier may only be "pierced" if the investor and company engaged in a criminal conspiracy and the investment was part of it.
- Corporate officers are responsible for keeping the corporation running inside the rules and maximizing profit to the investors.
- Governments are responsible for:
- adjusting the rules so that maximizing profit while operating within them also "does no harm" at a social level,
- enforcing the rules, and
- negotiating trade terms with other governments so that their own corporations', investors', and citizens' interests are protected. (This includes their citizens' interest in the human rights of people in other countries.)
In this case the government is actually doing its proper job: Defending the citizens' interest in human rights abroad, adjusting the corporate rules so government-mandated corporate profit-maximizing does no harm, and doing whatever international diplomacy is necessary to achieve these ends where US companies' operations in other countries are involved.
As for punishing investors for corporate misbehavior: It's already in the system. Punishing the corporation itself reduces the value of the investors' stock. This gives investors the incentive (when they have enough control to make a difference) to pressure and/or replace the corporate officers to keep them from breaking the rules. It also encourages them to pull their investment out of companies that do harm (thus reducing the stock price, which hurts the officers in their personal finances and reduces the resources they can use in the future) and move it to others that do only good (increasing their officers' rewards and corporate operational resources).
Meanwhile, corporate officers that break the rules and get caught are personally liable for criminal prosecution. If they stay within the rules they are still liable for ouster and other downsides driven by the board and/or stockholders when their actions jeopardize the bottom line - with its government-mandated ties to not rewarding evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Several of the root servers do not have any redundancy.
Having multiple root servers IS the redundancy - originally, and to some extent even now. Big-time redundancy within each one is just (really strong) suspenders to supplement the belt.
A non-redundant root server is still useful - even if perhaps not always up and/or not capable of drinking as large a firehose of requests as some giant, geographically-diverse, multiple-cluster. All it takes is one response from one server to get your nameserver's search started.
Even nukes can't stop it! Or at least they shouldn't, since the internet was originally designed to run as a communications network in the event of a nuclear attack.
And the primary design feature that enabled that was removed during the rise of the ISPs.
The early internet was a NET. Redundant links everywhere. Routers all potentially knew the whole topology and could find a connection if it existed.
As the net went commercial that caused a table explosion in the routers. So BGP replaced RIP and things became less robust. Usable routes became a subset of all possible routes. Within the backbone there was still a lot of redundancy - but it wasn't quite up to the former "find a path if it exists" level.
Meanwhile, the typical host went from being something ad-hock connected to sever neighbors to being something connected solely to a single ISP - typically by a single link. The big guys might have redundant paths into their ISP's Network Operations Center. But if something took out the NOC (and often there was only one - or only one of some critical component) you were hosed. Ditto if something corrupted their databases. Even with redundant links there would only be a few, perhaps going through several single-points-of-failure - and if fully redundant still allowing a double-failure to take you down. The little guys would typically have one line (say DSL) to one box. Cut the line or crash the box - or the typically two links from it to the NOC - and you're hosed.
(Perhaps you have a dialup-backup for your DSL. Did YOU configure it to come up automagically if your main link goes down? Is it on the same phone line with the DSL? If not, does it take a different path to the central office? Or is it right up the same cable bundle on the same poles next to the same road full of the same drunk drivers or in the same underground cable running past the same backhoe...)
So the internet evolved from a nuclear-strike-survivable net to a less-robust net rooting a bunch of trees. Oops!
(And that's just for routing the packets once you've GOT the IP number. Translating names to IP numbers is a whole separate can of worms: It's what the root servers are about - which is why there are so many of them, most of them are clusters, and some are clusters that are geographically diverse. You only need to hit ONE operational root server to get started on your translation - if your answer isn't cached somewhere between you and the root, and the list is small enough to keep handy on every machine that wants to do its own nameservice.)
That is how the DMCA works. The point is that it holds the carrier (in this case, Youtube) harmless as long as they comply. Generally, the carrier of the alleged copyrighted works will comply and give the "owner" an opportunity to fight it. The point is, you can fight it, and should within the law.
Meanwhile, if I understand the safe harbor provision correctly, here's how you mitigate damages:
- Viacom has sent a takedown notice, under oath, that your material is under their copyright and used without permission.
- ISP has taken it down (one of two ways they're in the clear).
- You send a notice to the ISP, also under oath, that you actually have adequate rights to post it (in this case as the owner of the full copyright) and please put it back up now.
- The ISP puts it back up and sends a notice to Viacom that they believe the takedown notice was in error (the OTHER way they're in the clear).
If your ISP puts it back up your damage has been greatly reduced compared to taking on Viacom directly (and/or through the courts) and waiting for that to work out. (When assessing damages courts expect you to try any damage-mitigating recourse first, rather than letting things go in order to run up a big bill for your opposition, and won't award the additional damage you took after your failure to take the quick path.)
If your ISP DOESN'T put it back up then THEY may be on the hook to YOU, from then on, because they failed to perform on their own duty when they didn't have to keep your stuff down to stay in the safe harbor.
Given that you're their customer and Viacom is an interloper, they'll probably want to keep you happy and tell Viacom to take a hike. Give them a legal leg to stand on and they'll likely be more than happy to pogo-dance with you.
After you're back up you may have less to sue Viacom for. But the remainder will probably be more than worth it - if only to cause Viacom more damage than they caused you. Meanwhile your stuff is back up, your ISP is out of the loop and doing the job they were paid for, and it's all between you and Viacom.
IANAL so I could be wrong. But if you really own the copyright on a work wrongly taken down by a media-company's takedown spam I don't see any downside to telling your ISP, under oath, that it should go back up.
The boilerplate for a takedown notice seems to say they're swearing, under penalty of perjury, not just to the ownership of the copyright on the named work but that the posted content is the work over which they claim copyright.
If they're cranking these notices out by the hundreds of thousands without actually checking, that's negligent. The falsehood makes it perjury. Perjury is criminal. Doing it as a business practice would amount to attempting to profit from repeated criminal acts as a policy.
I wonder if this could be construed to constitute a "continuing criminal enterprise" and/or make them subject to RICO penalties?
... many, many things kill cancer in mice but don't in humans-- mice have significantly different molecular machinery than we do re: cancer prevention...
Which is probably why they tested with human cancers implanted in mice.
(No doubt using suitably hacked mice that would not fight off the transplanted human cancer - and in a suitably controlled study, in case they were able to make some attempt, so their own anti-cancer/anti-transplant action could be largely sorted out from the drug's action.)
The apparent mechanism of the drug's action is dependent solely on the machinery of the cancer cell, not that of its surroundings. The mice are just a convenient support medium, not part of the machinery that kills the cancer.
In fact there is at least one system call where Linus deliberately diverged from POSIX, which, according to him, specifies a broken behavior.
As for the two groups who were not using accounts set up for the purpose...
Make that "who were using accounts set up for the experiment rather than their own"
They conducted a study in which people were asked to access their own bank accounts on computers and networks controlled by the experimenters (where they could then hack the site presentation and record the subjects' actions).
Nobody with a CLUE about online security would participate in such a study.
As for the two groups who were not using accounts set up for the purpose: They would be unfamiliar with the account settings, have no personal stake in the results, and could be expected to try to bull through anything seen as a "bug" in order to perform the assigned task.
Unless explicitly informed that this was a test of the security features and that refusing to log in if suspicious was an option they would be expected to breeze past the login to get to the meat of the transaction - even if they wouldn't do so if this were their own account in their own normal life. Yet such an instruction would alert them at login time, biasing the test in another fashion. (Meanwhile, "behave securely" doesn't cut it for such a notice. Indeed, it would give them more to distract them during the experiment.)
If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)
Did you read the paper? The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness. This group did just as badly as the others.
IMHO there is a more fundamental flaw in the study - and any study of this type: Selection bias.
They conducted a study in which people were asked to access their own bank accounts on computers and networks controlled by the experimenters (where they could then hack the site presentation and record the subjects' actions).
Nobody with a CLUE about online security would participate in such a study. (Think about it for a minute: Would YOU "participate" in such an "experiment", using YOUR own actual bank account and access code?)
So their pool of experimental subjects was drawn from the clueless subset of the population.
I'm not at all surprised by the results. (Except perhaps that two actually refused to enter their codes when the security image was not correct.)
So basically what we're talking about here is crackpot versus crackpots.
Ad Homenim. You lose.
Just think about it: Many people would consider a Slashdot poster to be a crackpot. (Especially if he has strong beliefs about something like the unsuitability of the massively-market-accepted mainstream OS, for instance.)
Does this mean such a poster should be unable to exercise free speech when his postings annoy an organization with significant funds and political connections?
Responding to your sig...
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
You DID see the Sluggy Freelance iSophagus thread, didn't you? (Where the sleepy main character mistakes his roommate's new "iPodling" for a vitamin pill and gets it stuck in his throat.)
(It's mixed with a couple other subplots so read forward for a total of 10 episodes to get it all.)
My iPod uses journalled HFS+, so partial writes are just reverted. iPods tied to Windows boxes, however, use FAT32 so that the Windows user can use it as a generic mass storage device.
Also: iPods start out life with HFS+ and reformat themselves as FAT32 the first time you plug them into a PC. Then there's no way back short of wiping and reinstalling them.
Or at least that's the story I got from the documentation a few months back when our company celebrated a good quarter by giving us all iPods. Which they had preloaded with a little video promo about the company's quarter. Which their vender had loaded into them using PCs. Converting them all to FAT32. B-(
Which turned out to be not all that bad a deal, since the iPod tools avaliable for Linux needed them preconverted to FAT32. B-)(
The ACLU fought against this exact kind of move in California - the use of paper ballots vs the use of electronic ballots - because according to them, electronic ballots are "twice as accurate" and the use of paper ballots would disenfranchise voters.
Alameda County's interim solution last election:
- Paper ballots of a fill-in-the-circle, reader-swallows-it-into-ballot-box system. (Don't recall the brand.)
- One leftover Diebold touchscreen machine per polling place for use by the handicapped.
The bulk of the voting has a paper trail for recounts, and the hypothetically cheat-prone Diebold touchscreen machine only has a few of the votes to be goofed around with.
It's the square of the clock speed; it comes from some math in second- or third-year Electrical Engineering.
Unfortunately it may be a bit late for this. Modern ICs have such small features, and electrons are such large, fuzzy objects, that leakage current has become large. In the generation being used for current designs it amounts to half the power consumption. Leakage doesn't change with speed - or even if the clocks are actually stopped! You have to turn the power completely off to to some chunk of the chip if you want to reduce it.
Unless/until chip manufacturers find a way to reduce leakage again and deploy processes using it, power benefits from slowing clock speeds are likely to be too small to be of interest.
It is a good idea; in fact it's such a good idea that people have been thinking about ways to try and implement it in datacenters for a while.
Actually the networking industry DOES do it that way. SPower supply to many routers (such as ALL the ones some major companies make) and other networking gear is redundant 48V DC - a standard for networking equipment dating from the days of relays. (Line powered units have extra line powered supplies to make the 48 DC.)
Not only that, but often the boxes don't have a per-box 48-to-whatever supply. Instead each blade requiring other voltages has its own switching regulators.
(This isn't just for efficiency - it's also for redundancy. A box power supply is a single point of failure for the box. Give each card its own supply running directly from the redundant power busses and if one fails all the other cards in the box keep working - meaning only the lines to that card are in trouble, not everything hooked to the box. You have to pull a card with a failing component to replace it anyhow - so if you want to cover the lines to it in case of card failure you need other redundancy anyhow. So single points of failure on a card are OK.)
Power requirements on modern ASICs, networking processors, and RAMs are getting higher, operating voltages lower (for better speed-power products) forcing higher currents, and switching DC-DC converter/regulators are getting more efficient. These days it actually makes sense to add an additional regulator near a major load so the power can cross a few inches of the PC board at a higher voltage and lower current, to avoid heating and voltage droop in the layer of copper that carries it. You're starting to see that in PC motherboards, too.
Running power over tiny 24 gauge wires is very inefficient too. Try again.
At 48 volts you can push significant wattage through tens of feet of four 24-gauge conductors in two-conductor parallel and still be far ahead of wall-warts. (This is what the telephone companies do to power your POTS phone from a central office miles away - except they're going farther and only use half as many conductors.)
What gauge do you think the wires in their coils are, and how much is wrapped around the core to form the transformer? Then there's the eddy current losses, core hysteresis, and (when present) the rotten efficiency of their regulators (which are often class-A, burning off the extra voltage (times the load current) as heat.)
Any bets on whether the losses in just the thin wire from a wall-wart to its load - at maybe 3 to 12 volts - dissipates more power than a similar length of 2-paralleled 24-gauge CatWhatever running at 48?
"Could someone make an open source product that works with Exchange?"
.doc format and uses features that break when it's edited by the version of OOo that IT installed and supports.
No need to work with exchange. Just need to replace exchange and do the job for the organisation that exchange does.
And get busted for cracking the IT department?
I was under the impression that the author was not in a position to change the server-side and migrate the whole company's critical infrastructure to some other solution. Instead he, as an individual contributor, needs a client on Linux that operates with the company-mandated server and scheduling infrastructure.
The existence of other solutions that interoperate with Linux clients is no more relevant to him than the existence of 50Hz power to run 50Hz-only appliances in some other locations would be to someone with a 50Hz appliance in a 60Hz utility's service area.
He is HERE. The company MANDATES mail and scheduling be done via an Exchange server. Any Linux solution needs to interoperate with the Exchange server or he's locked out of mail and meeting scheduling. Period.
= = = =
I feel his pain: Though our company provides linux desktops to the engineers:
- scheduling is via a commercial calendering system (with no Linux OR other-unix client and a web-interface client replacement for non-Windows platforms that is seriously crippled. (For starters, email (->pager) notification of upcoming meetings is done by the client, not the server, and I lost the functionality when they revved the server and the vendor provided no unix-of-ANY-flavor client for the new version.)
- documentation on the projects is mandated to be in Microsoft's
- bugtracking was moved from bugzilla to another proprietary system a couple product cycles ago. (At least that one is usable, though it is a massive pain, misconfigured for our department's needs, and feature-poor.)
Much as I'd like to talk the company into sanity on these issues (especially since we're a prime target for targeted-corporate-espionage malware infection) I just don't have the pull.
(Fortunately our mail is on pop and smtp servers.)
The Open Source Community rather quickly got SMB support in its file systems, and that was closed like Exchange was.
No it wasn't. SMB was a published standard.
Really? I was under the impression that Samba was written BEFORE it was opened, by reverse-engineering the protocol from packet capture of the transactions. And that the "published standard" came later.
Am I confused?
Of course, there is not a bright line, for instance, Bell Labs back in the day did a lot of research without view to practicability. Bell Labs is famed for being the source of an awful lot of really awesome stuff, too.
Bell Labs was an artifact of an attempt to scam government regulation.
AT&T was allowed, as part of its monopoly grant by the Fed, to set telephone rates so they made about 6% on all the money they spent on building the system. That included research on how to do telephony better.
So they set up Bell Labs to spend money on research with some tenuous connection to telephony. For every dollar they spent they could effectively bill phone users $1.06 and add six cents to the bottom line.
So Bell Labs did all sorts of research - not just applied research, but basic research - though always with some plausible telephony connection, of course.
And the hysterical thing about it is that, as a scam, it was a total failure. It turns out that basic research comes up with LOTS of useful stuff - just not necessarily something you could anticipate before you start and explain to the PHBs to justify the expense. From year one (until a recent point far post-disvestiture when some Boston Business School types finally looted it by scrapping the research projects for short-term profitability) Bell Labs research made more for the company (in process savings, licensing fees, and the like) than it cost them.
But financially it was still a win of cosmic proportions - both for its owners and for humanity.
Basic research is REALLY good stuff economically. It's just that you can't say what the benefits will be until you actually make the discoveries...
If it really was so easy to make sugar from cellulose we wouldn't use sugarcane and other plants to get the sugar and go the big cellulose producers - like trees - instead.
There are lots of molecules besides sucrose in the class "sugar". Industrial-grade cracked cellulose suitable for feeding microbes may be a far cry from the composition and purity requirements to sell it for human consumption.
Not to mention that you don't get to call it "sugar" unless it came from a cane or a beet.
More likely economic. It takes a lot of waste cellulose, which is pretty light and bulky. That produced in farming is separated at the farm - and has uses there. Transporting it, processing it through several steps, etc. may end up being non-competitive with pumping oil out of the ground - at least until the price rises and stays up due to resouce depletion - something not due for a few centuries by current estimates.
(Note: Don't look at "reserves" when estimating when oil will run out. Those are the particular reserves explored for and "proven", and they're always about "30 years". Once you've got 30 years worth proven it makes no sense to spend current money exploring and proving more.)
However, if these new final steps work out they may change the economics. Especially if they can be packaged conveniently for use on a farm (which IS an industrial operation these days). Then the farm can dump the chaff into the gadget and pump out tanker trucks of fuel to sell and/or use locally. (Diesel engines can burn just about any flammable liquid their injectors can be set up to handle, so additional refining shouldn't be necessary for local use.)
The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
That's easy: Add xylene. (Either in a batch, or by incubating it with the sort of bacteria that hang out in the guts of termites.)
This cracks the cellulose back into starch.
Cracking starch to sugar is similarly trival. (Either add acid or feed it to certain microbes.)
Once you've got sugar, getting to ethanol is a previously-solved problem (as is getting it to "something more like gasoline or diesel fuel" if the other bioprocesses work out on an industrial scale.)
Of course if you are willing to go with METHanol, just heat the cellulose, in a centuries-old industrial process. (That's why they call it "wood alcohol", after all.)
Yep- oh wait- Leninism and Maoism != communism, in fact had very little to do with communism other than window dressing.
Yes, nobody ever tried "true marxism".
But nobody ever tried "true capatalism" either.
And "true Christainity". And "true Islam". And "true whatever" for a very large list.
You can't judge an ideology by what it promises. You must go by what it mutates into when people actually attempt to implement its prescriptions.
After a number of trials the various socialist forms have mostly mutated into totalitarianisms of various sorts, with the main exceptions being cooperative businesses built by warping the corporate model by making the customers the shareholders.
Meanwhile, capitalism, even as it warps into mercantilsit and other monopolist tendencies, tends to feed, clothe, house, entertain, and empower its players better than just about anything else.
Which is not surprising, since free-market systems reward and empower those who produce, while socialist systems explicitly punish production and reward consumption - leading their industries to function badly and requiring coercive power to make them function at all.
You misunderstand how the system works - and is SUPPOSED to work.
- Incorporation sets up a barrier between corporate debts and the investors' personal resources, so that investors can invest with confidence that nothing more than what they invested is at risk. This barrier may only be "pierced" if the investor and company engaged in a criminal conspiracy and the investment was part of it.
- Corporate officers are responsible for keeping the corporation running inside the rules and maximizing profit to the investors.
- Governments are responsible for:
- adjusting the rules so that maximizing profit while operating within them also "does no harm" at a social level,
- enforcing the rules, and
- negotiating trade terms with other governments so that their own corporations', investors', and citizens' interests are protected. (This includes their citizens' interest in the human rights of people in other countries.)
In this case the government is actually doing its proper job: Defending the citizens' interest in human rights abroad, adjusting the corporate rules so government-mandated corporate profit-maximizing does no harm, and doing whatever international diplomacy is necessary to achieve these ends where US companies' operations in other countries are involved.
As for punishing investors for corporate misbehavior: It's already in the system. Punishing the corporation itself reduces the value of the investors' stock. This gives investors the incentive (when they have enough control to make a difference) to pressure and/or replace the corporate officers to keep them from breaking the rules. It also encourages them to pull their investment out of companies that do harm (thus reducing the stock price, which hurts the officers in their personal finances and reduces the resources they can use in the future) and move it to others that do only good (increasing their officers' rewards and corporate operational resources).
Meanwhile, corporate officers that break the rules and get caught are personally liable for criminal prosecution. If they stay within the rules they are still liable for ouster and other downsides driven by the board and/or stockholders when their actions jeopardize the bottom line - with its government-mandated ties to not rewarding evil.
Is the HST in the same orbit as the satellite that China recently blew up?
Correct question: "Is any of the debris from the satellite China blew up now in an orbit that intersects the HST's?"