Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).
It has been a while but as I recall Digital Signal Processing is very floating-point intensive. It really is a specialized application so as far as I know whenever posible a DSP is used instead of a general CPU. I seem to recall that DSPs have special shift register capabilities (like 1024 bits) for example. Maybe someone else here can elaborate.
Also search google for info on FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). As I recal the idea is any sound wave can be represented by a sum of different sine waves and a Fourier transform is applied to the input sound to get a set of sine functions which produce the sound. (I think that's what happens but again maybe someone else can explain things a bit more clearly.)
However, what is 20 million dollars to a company 'worth' maybe 10,000 times that or so....
It's still 20 million dollars. Ask any investor what he'd think about his company losing 20 million dollars for not catching a bug like what happened in that post.
From the article: And so the secret unlock code during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.
Did anyone else notices those are the letter O and not the number zero? No I'm not kidding. Try searching the page for 6 zeros. Those are letter "oh"s.
Not everyone's favourite editor can be configured to treat tabs the right way. Probably true. I'm pretty sure elvis, vim and, Emacs can do this. I'm not sure about others.
Code that makes sense indented with tabs shown as 2 spaces might look bad or wrong when someone changes it.
Yes, that happens. I think that's about the same as when people use different width terminals. I do think the different tab width is more of a problem though because some comments will be tabbed after a line of code and then the next line of just comments lines up via tabs with the previous comment. Then again for comments I don't think it's too confusing when things don't line up.
I guess it does let you avoid agreeing on what size of indent to use but I am not sure that is a good thing.
I think allowing for user defined flexability is really important when working on code shared by many people. Personally I addopted the Linux kernel standard a few years ago. I've worked on code with 8 or more levels of indenting with 2 space indenting where it can be difficult to line up what closes where. 8 spaces are much easier to see at a glance but I'd like to respect that other people prefer another visual layout. I don't think using spaces allows that to happen without an editor that understands the language and can let you edit it in a way that looks differently than the actual file is laid out.
PS: the JWZ link was interesting. Both arguments have fair points so we end up with individual preferences.:^)
None of this to say Python's usage is bad. I love Python. I love that there is no possibility of getting mislead by incorrectly-indented code, as happens sometimes in C.
I have mod points but I have to point out that I work on code that half a dozen others have worked on and sometimes I find code that looks like the indenting is the same but one developer used a tab and one used spaces. This shows up when you changes the tab spacing but otherwise the code appears on the screen at the same indent level but the compiler will notice the difference. (Or it would if this is a language that cares about whitespace.)
PS: I think I've managed to convince the people I work with to use tabs for indenting so we can all work on the code with different tab widths if we like.
I don't think computer science needs those foolish names and unit changes to ensure complexity in the units. It is not a commercial game.
I just figured it was easier to say "1k" than "1024" and I can't bother to remember "1048576" so it's just "1M".
I seem to recall reading (in The Art by Knuth I think but may be wrong) a suggestion that 1024 be noted by "kk", 1000 by "k", 1048576 by "MM" and, 1000000 by "M".
I think it might be a nice idea but it's still easier to say "one k" than "one k k".
Anyone driving a vehicle which is sufficiently loud (e.g. cycle with loud pipes) to prevent others from hearing the quieter vehicles should be subjected to immediate confiscation of their sonic assault weapon.
Loud pipes safe lives. The reason those pipes (on motor bikes) are so loud is often because the other drivers on the road might not see you (on your bike) but hopefully they will hear you and watch out to not hit you.
Most collisions (note: not "accidents") that involve a motorcycle and where the rider of the bike was not at fault involve a driver who failed to see or notice the bike.
In fact as I recall the most common incident like this is where the motorcycle is traveling straight through an intersection and the other driver makes a left turn crossing the motorbike's path and hitting the bike. The cycle is on-coming traffic and right in front of the other driver but the driver just doesn't notice the bike.
All that said and I will admit I still don't like loud stereos that rattle the change in my cup-holder while I'm waiting for a light. Be polite, turn it down at the light.
No, in all seriousness one of the reasons I don't use a windows on my home machine is it doesn't have a free compiler included with it (or even on a second "tools" CD.)
I'm sure I'm not really the target audience with MS Windows but I think it's worth pointing that if it came with a compiler I'd be much more impressed. And while I'm dreaming add perl and bash and pipes and elvis... Oh I see where this is going.
I don't think I'm looking for *nix clone. I just want a system that lets me get work done. I mean virutal desktops are huge for those of us who have to task switch a lot.
This topic is funny because I'm not fond of listening to people at work taking their personal calls at work. Mostly it's because I don't want to here about co-worker's wife's manager's beef with soap in the ladies room (I'm not making that up.)
That said I do have a messaging program open on my desktop all the time (unless I really don't want to be interrupted). We use it within the office but I also have outside contacts (read: friends) on the list. They know it's my work account and we keep away from idle chatter. But the point is we also use it for asking each other quick questions.
If I'm not sure about a setting / language / software / etc I'll spend 5-10 minutes looking and then I think "I'm busy and this is taking time away from something else. Who do I know who works with X?" So I'll send a quick message "do you happen to know Y about X?". If so it saved my looking up the answer. If not I keep looking. It works both ways and saves us both time in the long run.
I know people in my office might think I use it for personal messages and occasionally that happens (eg agreeing on where to meet after work). I understand that point of view but I still think it's working out well. Just yesterday someone I work with had a question, he spent a couple hours looking for an answer. I asked someone on my list and got an answer back. I spent 10 minutes explaining the problem to someone. Our admin likely saved a couple hours of banging his head against a wall.
The real problem is ultimately the use of C, and the real solution is not to use a new CPU or add instructions, but to use a language without C's quirks.
Is the problem the C language or is it that people write code that doesn't check it's input well enough?
The man page for gets() (from Slackware 9.1) reads:
Never use gets(). Because it is impossible to tell with out knowing the data in advance how many characters gets() will read, and because gets() will continue to store characters past the end of the buffer, it is extremely dangerous to use. It has been used to break computer security. Use fgets() instead.
It's true people write buggy code. Look at PHP. I think it checks bounds on arrays (actually I think they behave like hash tables or list objects but that's beside the point.) Have you never heard of a security bug in something written in PHP?
Is a bug that lets people run arbitrary commands on your webserver less dangerious than a bug that allows them to run arbitrary executable code? Do you keep wget, gcc and as on your webserver?
Some languages make it eaiser to check input (eg regexes in perl) but it's still possible to let something through.
Why don't the personnel committes just toss out the ones that aren't readable by children?
I could be mistaken but IIRC the U of Calgary (it could depend on department) does not pass reviews which are threatening or offensive, etc to the actuall instructors. Also reviews were done with a few weeks left in the course so final grades were not decided and the instructors don't see the reviews until grades are finalized for the term.
Some of the reviews also asked for a student ID number which was supposed to be used to determine the student was actually in the course. (We could sometimes see a line, etc where the page was to be torn after verification.)
i remember using something on an as/400. if you pressed help you got help on the page. help again and you got general help on help. help a third time and you got detailed help on help. help a fourth time and you got (in the standard location at the bottom of the screen) a red message reading "you are beyond help."
i took it to mean "you have gone beyond the help system" a lady i worked with took it to be rather offensive.
using a cache can possibly give you really bad performance if things in your code happen to occupy the same cache line in say an often repeated loop.
Not to say you'll get worse performace by using a cache but rather to say it won't be as amazingly fast as you might guess. Though I suppose if your memory got one address and sent back several words they it's _possible_ because you'd have to send a couple requests.
I'm getting too theoretical here. Cache predictions can get really complex and hard. It depends on your application and the code and the compiler and the hardware and maybe phase of the moon too.
The initial boot time to load the kernel seems to have massively dropped although I could be imagining that.
Funny you mention that. I've been thinking of using a watch to see if was imagining things. It sometimes takes me longer to get an IP via DHCP then it does to boot up.:^) I don't start much more than ssh at boot though. (Linux 2.6, Slackware 9.1, runlevel 3)
If you had a larger cache than program code and memory requirements (and I guess I/O buffers) then you _could_ get everthing into a CPU level cache. That said caches are typically much smaller than the actuall RAM size so to fit the memory contents into cache a hashing algorithm is used. (eg use some of the bits from the memory address to index into the cache.)
Because of the hashing you might still get collisions, it depends, but when you get a collision then the "old" contents already in the cache have to be written back to memory or disk (if they are different then the original copy aka "dirty") or they could just be written over. This is why using a cache can possibly give you really bad performance if things in your code happen to occupy the same cache line in say an often repeated loop. (They keep bumping each other out of cache.)
Your idea leads to another interesting idea; what if the OS got it's own chunk of fast memory that the CPU could access quickly, possibly on a second bus. This relates to the LinuxBIOS project and something called a Harvard architecture (first link I found).
I was really upset when I first tried to get ethernet working on my nForce 220 board. It used to run fine for a bit then the whole system would hang for 3 to 10 seconds especially if the network was active. I said I'd never buy another nVidia product if I could help it. I put in some realtek card and was on the net in 10 minutes with no problems since.
That said I appreciate the fact that nVidia is supporting Linux. If they were not then I'd really have to buy different hardware. The only thing I'd really like is to not have to recompile the module every time I recomiple the kernel (which I do quite frequently of late as I'm working on in-kernel code). If I could link the nVidia module into bzImage I'd be really happy.
PS: 1) yes "experimental" module versioning is on 2) yes maybe I'm just missing something.
No once blocked they will leave it blocked. Why do I need access to it ? Surely I can just use Comcast smpt servers.
True. I first learned of ISPs blocking outgoing port 25 when someone couldn't reach the mail server my company provided for our clients. It took me a while until I figured it out. Afterwards I realized it makes sense but it's still a bit of a piss off. The client had no idea they needed to use special outgoing servers. I had no idea. Sure dropping port 25 traffic is somewhat common now (my tale is from 2001) but just last month I helped another company figure out the port was blocked.
Maybe have your filters reject the connection or have a program that speaks some SMTP but returns an error message instead. Don't just drop the packets.
I wonder if I'm just special but I've kept my (nameless?) osx mail client in training mode since last June and it still flags my cron outputs as junk but not email with 'viagra' in the subject line.
The program allows me to specify message with 'viagra' in the subject line go into the trash folder but I'd like a way to hint that anything with 'viagra' should be caught by the junk filter. (Note the junk filter and the defined rules are separate AFAIK.)
As someone who added BitPass to a site a couple weeks ago. I found it confusing at first because I didn't find any docs on how the system works or what the 'earner' configuration options were. I think (hope?) this is because the sytem is still 'beta' though. After sorting that out it was dead easy. (I installed the PHP gateway script.)
If there ends up being a difficult part installing the PHP gateway I expect it would be keeping your content outside of your htdocs directory. Keep in mind there are concerns with mass hosting such as one user's PHP scripts reading another's content even if it is outside of the htdocs directory.
As an aside I've written patches to linux and apache to prevent files being readable by other users to deal with just this issue.
I've been cleaning up and found a copy of Wired dated March 1997. The cover reads:
"PUSH! Kiss your browser goodbye:... Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well, forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance."
I gave up paying attention to stuff like this a while ago.
I wrote patches to the linux kernel and apache to allow all PHP and CGI requests to run as the owner of the file being requested. Actually the UID changes for each request, even static pages. So long as a stat() can be done it should work. This means the files don't have to be readable by the webserver.
The system stores the user ID on a stack and returns to the webserver user ID when the request has been served so no forking or set-uid files are needed. (Yes root needs to configure permissions at boot time or at least before switching users will work.)
I was explaining the system to someone at work (where we look after several webservers used by different people). When asked weather I intended to install this on the work servers. My reply was no, if it were my company I would definitely consider it but I did not want to saddle the next admin after me with the job of keeping a custom kernel patch in line with future releases.
That said I say if you think you might be interested in operating systems then doing some reading and eventually playing with kernel code can be a valuable experience. (I also wrote the first result from the above google search. The second link is the more current version.)
-Chad
PS: the DES binaries sound like a neat project. for that mater so does mounting over http.
He contacted the FBI, and they didn't know what he was talking about. Perhaps he should keep trying, but due to the nature of the attack, I'm not sure the FBI could help if they wanted to - there's no way to track who is responsible for the attacks, so there's nobody to prosecute for a crime.
Just as an aside Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg was an interesting read that details trouble he had trying to get law enforment involved in a computer hacking investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).
It has been a while but as I recall Digital Signal Processing is very floating-point intensive. It really is a specialized application so as far as I know whenever posible a DSP is used instead of a general CPU. I seem to recall that DSPs have special shift register capabilities (like 1024 bits) for example. Maybe someone else here can elaborate.
Also search google for info on FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). As I recal the idea is any sound wave can be represented by a sum of different sine waves and a Fourier transform is applied to the input sound to get a set of sine functions which produce the sound. (I think that's what happens but again maybe someone else can explain things a bit more clearly.)
However, what is 20 million dollars to a company 'worth' maybe 10,000 times that or so....
It's still 20 million dollars. Ask any investor what he'd think about his company losing 20 million dollars for not catching a bug like what happened in that post.
From the article: And so the secret unlock code during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.
Did anyone else notices those are the letter O and not the number zero? No I'm not kidding. Try searching the page for 6 zeros. Those are letter "oh"s.
Not everyone's favourite editor can be configured to treat tabs the right way.
:^)
Probably true. I'm pretty sure elvis, vim and, Emacs can do this. I'm not sure about others.
Code that makes sense indented with tabs shown as 2 spaces might look bad or wrong when someone changes it.
Yes, that happens. I think that's about the same as when people use different width terminals. I do think the different tab width is more of a problem though because some comments will be tabbed after a line of code and then the next line of just comments lines up via tabs with the previous comment. Then again for comments I don't think it's too confusing when things don't line up.
I guess it does let you avoid agreeing on what size of indent to use but I am not sure that is a good thing.
I think allowing for user defined flexability is really important when working on code shared by many people. Personally I addopted the Linux kernel standard a few years ago. I've worked on code with 8 or more levels of indenting with 2 space indenting where it can be difficult to line up what closes where. 8 spaces are much easier to see at a glance but I'd like to respect that other people prefer another visual layout. I don't think using spaces allows that to happen without an editor that understands the language and can let you edit it in a way that looks differently than the actual file is laid out.
PS: the JWZ link was interesting. Both arguments have fair points so we end up with individual preferences.
None of this to say Python's usage is bad. I love Python. I love that there is no possibility of getting mislead by incorrectly-indented code, as happens sometimes in C.
I have mod points but I have to point out that I work on code that half a dozen others have worked on and sometimes I find code that looks like the indenting is the same but one developer used a tab and one used spaces. This shows up when you changes the tab spacing but otherwise the code appears on the screen at the same indent level but the compiler will notice the difference. (Or it would if this is a language that cares about whitespace.)
PS: I think I've managed to convince the people I work with to use tabs for indenting so we can all work on the code with different tab widths if we like.
I don't think computer science needs those foolish names and unit changes to ensure complexity in the units. It is not a commercial game.
I just figured it was easier to say "1k" than "1024" and I can't bother to remember "1048576" so it's just "1M".
I seem to recall reading (in The Art by Knuth I think but may be wrong) a suggestion that 1024 be noted by "kk", 1000 by "k", 1048576 by "MM" and, 1000000 by "M".
I think it might be a nice idea but it's still easier to say "one k" than "one k k".
Anyone driving a vehicle which is sufficiently loud (e.g. cycle with loud pipes) to prevent others from hearing the quieter vehicles should be subjected to immediate confiscation of their sonic assault weapon.
Loud pipes safe lives. The reason those pipes (on motor bikes) are so loud is often because the other drivers on the road might not see you (on your bike) but hopefully they will hear you and watch out to not hit you.
Most collisions (note: not "accidents") that involve a motorcycle and where the rider of the bike was not at fault involve a driver who failed to see or notice the bike.
In fact as I recall the most common incident like this is where the motorcycle is traveling straight through an intersection and the other driver makes a left turn crossing the motorbike's path and hitting the bike. The cycle is on-coming traffic and right in front of the other driver but the driver just doesn't notice the bike.
All that said and I will admit I still don't like loud stereos that rattle the change in my cup-holder while I'm waiting for a light. Be polite, turn it down at the light.
I thought I might be the only one thinking Root Mean Square.
No, in all seriousness one of the reasons I don't use a windows on my home machine is it doesn't have a free compiler included with it (or even on a second "tools" CD.)
... Oh I see where this is going.
I'm sure I'm not really the target audience with MS Windows but I think it's worth pointing that if it came with a compiler I'd be much more impressed. And while I'm dreaming add perl and bash and pipes and elvis
I don't think I'm looking for *nix clone. I just want a system that lets me get work done. I mean virutal desktops are huge for those of us who have to task switch a lot.
This topic is funny because I'm not fond of listening to people at work taking their personal calls at work. Mostly it's because I don't want to here about co-worker's wife's manager's beef with soap in the ladies room (I'm not making that up.)
That said I do have a messaging program open on my desktop all the time (unless I really don't want to be interrupted). We use it within the office but I also have outside contacts (read: friends) on the list. They know it's my work account and we keep away from idle chatter. But the point is we also use it for asking each other quick questions.
If I'm not sure about a setting / language / software / etc I'll spend 5-10 minutes looking and then I think "I'm busy and this is taking time away from something else. Who do I know who works with X?" So I'll send a quick message "do you happen to know Y about X?". If so it saved my looking up the answer. If not I keep looking. It works both ways and saves us both time in the long run.
I know people in my office might think I use it for personal messages and occasionally that happens (eg agreeing on where to meet after work). I understand that point of view but I still think it's working out well. Just yesterday someone I work with had a question, he spent a couple hours looking for an answer. I asked someone on my list and got an answer back. I spent 10 minutes explaining the problem to someone. Our admin likely saved a couple hours of banging his head against a wall.
Is the problem the C language or is it that people write code that doesn't check it's input well enough?
The man page for gets() (from Slackware 9.1) reads:
It's true people write buggy code. Look at PHP. I think it checks bounds on arrays (actually I think they behave like hash tables or list objects but that's beside the point.) Have you never heard of a security bug in something written in PHP?
Is a bug that lets people run arbitrary commands on your webserver less dangerious than a bug that allows them to run arbitrary executable code? Do you keep wget, gcc and as on your webserver?
Some languages make it eaiser to check input (eg regexes in perl) but it's still possible to let something through.
Why don't the personnel committes just toss out the ones that aren't readable by children?
I could be mistaken but IIRC the U of Calgary (it could depend on department) does not pass reviews which are threatening or offensive, etc to the actuall instructors. Also reviews were done with a few weeks left in the course so final grades were not decided and the instructors don't see the reviews until grades are finalized for the term.
Some of the reviews also asked for a student ID number which was supposed to be used to determine the student was actually in the course. (We could sometimes see a line, etc where the page was to be torn after verification.)
i remember using something on an as/400. if you pressed help you got help on the page. help again and you got general help on help. help a third time and you got detailed help on help. help a fourth time and you got (in the standard location at the bottom of the screen) a red message reading "you are beyond help."
i took it to mean "you have gone beyond the help system" a lady i worked with took it to be rather offensive.
using a cache can possibly give you really bad performance if things in your code happen to occupy the same cache line in say an often repeated loop.
Not to say you'll get worse performace by using a cache but rather to say it won't be as amazingly fast as you might guess. Though I suppose if your memory got one address and sent back several words they it's _possible_ because you'd have to send a couple requests.
I'm getting too theoretical here. Cache predictions can get really complex and hard. It depends on your application and the code and the compiler and the hardware and maybe phase of the moon too.
The initial boot time to load the kernel seems to have massively dropped although I could be imagining that.
:^) I don't start much more than ssh at boot though. (Linux 2.6, Slackware 9.1, runlevel 3)
Funny you mention that. I've been thinking of using a watch to see if was imagining things. It sometimes takes me longer to get an IP via DHCP then it does to boot up.
If you had a larger cache than program code and memory requirements (and I guess I/O buffers) then you _could_ get everthing into a CPU level cache. That said caches are typically much smaller than the actuall RAM size so to fit the memory contents into cache a hashing algorithm is used. (eg use some of the bits from the memory address to index into the cache.)
Because of the hashing you might still get collisions, it depends, but when you get a collision then the "old" contents already in the cache have to be written back to memory or disk (if they are different then the original copy aka "dirty") or they could just be written over. This is why using a cache can possibly give you really bad performance if things in your code happen to occupy the same cache line in say an often repeated loop. (They keep bumping each other out of cache.)
Your idea leads to another interesting idea; what if the OS got it's own chunk of fast memory that the CPU could access quickly, possibly on a second bus. This relates to the LinuxBIOS project and something called a Harvard architecture (first link I found).
I was really upset when I first tried to get ethernet working on my nForce 220 board. It used to run fine for a bit then the whole system would hang for 3 to 10 seconds especially if the network was active. I said I'd never buy another nVidia product if I could help it. I put in some realtek card and was on the net in 10 minutes with no problems since.
That said I appreciate the fact that nVidia is supporting Linux. If they were not then I'd really have to buy different hardware. The only thing I'd really like is to not have to recompile the module every time I recomiple the kernel (which I do quite frequently of late as I'm working on in-kernel code). If I could link the nVidia module into bzImage I'd be really happy.
PS: 1) yes "experimental" module versioning is on 2) yes maybe I'm just missing something.
No once blocked they will leave it blocked. Why do I need access to it ? Surely I can just use Comcast smpt servers.
True. I first learned of ISPs blocking outgoing port 25 when someone couldn't reach the mail server my company provided for our clients. It took me a while until I figured it out. Afterwards I realized it makes sense but it's still a bit of a piss off. The client had no idea they needed to use special outgoing servers. I had no idea. Sure dropping port 25 traffic is somewhat common now (my tale is from 2001) but just last month I helped another company figure out the port was blocked.
Maybe have your filters reject the connection or have a program that speaks some SMTP but returns an error message instead. Don't just drop the packets.
I wonder if I'm just special but I've kept my (nameless?) osx mail client in training mode since last June and it still flags my cron outputs as junk but not email with 'viagra' in the subject line.
The program allows me to specify message with 'viagra' in the subject line go into the trash folder but I'd like a way to hint that anything with 'viagra' should be caught by the junk filter. (Note the junk filter and the defined rules are separate AFAIK.)
IIRC 3DES is not exactly encrypting with DES 3 times. Instead it is Encrypt with key 1, Decrypt with key 2 then Encrypt with key 1 again.
This is opposed to Encrypting with key1, then key2, then key3. Or I suppose with key1 three times.
As an aside Cliff Stoll mentioned creating a dictionary of crypt()s in The Cuckoo's Egg back in 1989.
As someone who added BitPass to a site a couple weeks ago. I found it confusing at first because I didn't find any docs on how the system works or what the 'earner' configuration options were. I think (hope?) this is because the sytem is still 'beta' though. After sorting that out it was dead easy. (I installed the PHP gateway script.)
If there ends up being a difficult part installing the PHP gateway I expect it would be keeping your content outside of your htdocs directory. Keep in mind there are concerns with mass hosting such as one user's PHP scripts reading another's content even if it is outside of the htdocs directory.
As an aside I've written patches to linux and apache to prevent files being readable by other users to deal with just this issue.
I've been cleaning up and found a copy of Wired dated March 1997. The cover reads:
... Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well, forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance."
"PUSH! Kiss your browser goodbye:
I gave up paying attention to stuff like this a while ago.
An excellent point.
I wrote patches to the linux kernel and apache to allow all PHP and CGI requests to run as the owner of the file being requested. Actually the UID changes for each request, even static pages. So long as a stat() can be done it should work. This means the files don't have to be readable by the webserver.
The system stores the user ID on a stack and returns to the webserver user ID when the request has been served so no forking or set-uid files are needed. (Yes root needs to configure permissions at boot time or at least before switching users will work.)
I was explaining the system to someone at work (where we look after several webservers used by different people). When asked weather I intended to install this on the work servers. My reply was no, if it were my company I would definitely consider it but I did not want to saddle the next admin after me with the job of keeping a custom kernel patch in line with future releases.
That said I say if you think you might be interested in operating systems then doing some reading and eventually playing with kernel code can be a valuable experience. (I also wrote the first result from the above google search. The second link is the more current version.)
-Chad
PS: the DES binaries sound like a neat project. for that mater so does mounting over http.
This of course begs the question: if they can sell DVDs profitably in India for the equivilant for $6 US, why are we paying $29 for the same thing.
No actually it doesn't. It may however have raised the question in your mind.
I try not to nit-pick but this one bugs me. Granted it is now generally considered common usage.
He contacted the FBI, and they didn't know what he was talking about. Perhaps he should keep trying, but due to the nature of the attack, I'm not sure the FBI could help if they wanted to - there's no way to track who is responsible for the attacks, so there's nobody to prosecute for a crime.
Just as an aside Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg was an interesting read that details trouble he had trying to get law enforment involved in a computer hacking investigation.