Sorry, but the CDP is just a stupid knee-jerk reaction. It's not just the impact on employees, which can obviously be quite severe for a large corporation. The ripple from a corporate implosion affects absolutely everything in both the geographic and economic spheres inhabited by the company.
1) Employees are flat out of work, so that's fewer happy consumers in the local economy. Service industries leave. Housing prices plummet. Tax revenues collapse. Small cities have been "lost" when this sort of thing happens.
2) Whatever products or services were provided by the ex-corporation are lost. If you're lucky, there are alternate providers, but they are almost certainly not prepared to take up all the slack, so all the related industries have to pay more for a newly scarce resource.
For a large company like CA, this is a potentially massive impact, and for what? Just so you can go to bed with a satisfied smirk? I want corporate accountability for the execs, but a CDP would be broad collective- (possibly even self-) punishment. It's called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
Better to treat these events like any other industrial disaster. There is a certain amount of loss that is not recoverable, although insurance might alleviate some of it. There are jobs and infrastructure that should be salvaged or replaced, not simply pushed into the slag heap. If/when liability is assigned to execs, they should lose their license to operate businesses over a certain size.
The article complains about how the Legend stats completely dwarf the rest of the data in a linear graph. Doesn't this dataset just beg for a logarithmic presentation? This is like compairing populations of countries or any number of other scenarios where power laws apply.
Anyhow, the absurd comparisons of random untrustworthy data sources and the poor presentation just shows that this guy needs a good statistics teacher to whack him upside the head. I'm going to go read some Tufte.
So, I should be humbly satisfied after I break even on my large investment in time and brainsweat? I don't think that would fly. People need more incentive to persue risky goals.
Yeah, you're pretty much 100% right on this. He was at the right place at the right time, but that time is past. It seems to me that Mockapetris thinks every problem has a DNS solution. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A few years back, Mockapetris was the nominal CIO at my company for about six months. He was completely, utterly useless, and did nothing I could perceive to earn his paycheck. I concluded that we had hired him strictly for name recognition while we were building our business reputation. He faded away quietly, which was a simple blessing.
I looked at the Tango website, and I have one major concern with its design. It has a road clearance of only 4 inches! In the American Northeast, that means that during pothole season (approx. six months out of the year), the Tango will quickly morph from a car into a sled. I drive a non-SUV station wagon. When I see a 4 inch pothole, I hardly blink. Even with the modest visibility that a normal car provides, I have (luckily) dodged many potholes that would eat the Tango for breakfast. But in a Tango you are pretty low to the ground, so good luck seeing the hazards before it's too late.
It looks like the Tango was designed to compete in drag races with other electric cars, rather than to supply practical commuter transportation. A lot of their marketing material seems to emphasize this aspect of the car's design.
RTFA, please, instead of spouting completely unfounded theories.
It explains exactly how he was caught. AOL looked at the datestamps in the file that the Secret Service showed them, then correlated that with database access logs and determined whose computer was using the database at the time. It was so easy that it's clear this crook never expected to be caught. But, AOL would never have noticed this activity if nobody had asked them to look. Apparently, they did not monitor database usage in any way before this happened. Maybe now they will.
It would not surprise me at all if the alarm bells didn't start ringing as soon as the DB ground to a halt while it was returning 92000000 rows.
I seriously doubt AOL's DBMS would "grind to a halt" doing a straightforward query of any scale.
It's not so much about the submitter as it is about the (theoretically more savvy) person who approved the article. I'm sure lots of stupid submissions come in every day, many referring to underpowered web servers. Clearly, most of them don't make the grade, but this one slipped through, and that is sad because the summary set off alarm bells in my head before I got through the first sentence. It also didn't take me very long to consider the possibility that this submission was made with malicious intent.
Somebody in a position of authority at SlashDot must assume the responsibility for saving these hapless twits (or victims) from themselves. The SlashDot authority that approved this submission should be reprimanded.
Of course, I think this just proves the point that PlayFair/Hymn is primarily for those who want to purchase music from ITMS and use it on non-iTunes players. Buying from AllOfMP3 would be far less expensive.
"With this kind of method, messages cannot be intercepted without detection, meaning transmission is always safe."
How about if I said, "With this kind of armored vehicle, passengers cannot be intercepted without detection, meaning transport is always safe." Now, the fallacy should be a bit easier to spot.
The passengers are not really safe at all, in fact they might be D.O.A., or maybe they just got interrogated along the way, or perhaps they were replaced by pod replicants. Whatever, if they were carrying sensitive information, you cannot "save" them or the information they were carrying, i.e. you cannot prevent a compromise of the data, just by proving that the vehicle was intercepted. At best you can say, "better call off the invasion, they're probably onto us now."
Re:Survival Research Labs
on
Robosaurus
·
· Score: 1
"why slashdot doesnt follow their stories is a mystery."
Not much of a mystery, really. They haven't updated their site since 2001, and it contains many malfunctioning links. The coolest thing on their site, the "Flame Tornado" was never actually run due to lack of a safe test arena (or maybe the Darwin principle kicked in, or maybe it didn't and we will simply never find their bodies).
Playfair retrieves the player ID and uses that to decrypt the songs. If you have cleverly squirreled this information away, playfair still works just fine, at least on files that were purchased before the update.
A point that nobody else has made as far as I can tell, is that iTMS songs are tied to your iPod and/or your PC, and when your iPod and/or your PC goes away, I assume your songs vanish along with it. Now, this could happen because your iPod is stolen, or broken, or simply surpassed by superior technology. What then?
If I follow the argument of all the people supporting Apple's right to restrict my use of iTMS songs, then I'm out of luck. Essentially, my "lease" has expired and it's time to renew it (with more $$$) on some new device.
But I didn't purchase a lease, did I? So I don't think that's a very reasonable bargain. The vast majority of my MP3 music is ripped from CD's I own, but I find iTMS convenient and I think my fair use rights allow me to do more with my purchased songs than Apple would have me believe. I suspect the songs will remain interesting long after my iPod ceases to be, and I definitely think I should be able to keep enjoying them. I should be able to archive them and retrieve and play them for the rest of my life on the hardware of my choice. To me, that means archiving without encryption.
FairPlay makes this possible, and as long as I don't start exporting decrypted files, I'm on pretty solid ground, and essentially invisible to Apple in any case.
"It's not a problem unless you submit a pretty massive number of bogus results."
As the folks at dnet.com found out the hard way, it's a whole lot easier to post a massive number of bogus results if you don't care about the accuracy of your results. There was a dnet scammer posting junk just to get his name to the top of the list of contributors. His rate of results "production" was limited only by his network bandwidth to the dnet server. This necessitated some changes in dnet that anybody contemplating anonymous distributed computing must consider.
1. Always maintain the source of individual results throughout the entire calculation. You never know when you will have to go back and remove a subset when you find out they are bogus. Same goes for which version of the software they used, in case you find out you screwed up.
2. Arrange for a small but guaranteed amount of duplication in the task subsets that you distribute, then compare the results of the duplicated tasks. Then when the bogus stuff turns up, you'll be able to flush it (see point 1).
Soooo, does this mean we are (in essence) taking all the wires that the cables companies have strung by eminent domain? Not that I'm opposed to nationalizing infrastructure, but I think we ought to pay them something for their trouble. Oh wait, I've already paid for that wire ten times over with my skyrocketing cable bill.
I agree, the microwave crack was the only thing that made me snicker here.
So, why can't we use our mod-points on the original story? That way, we could save folks the trouble of clicking the "read more" button. If it says "Troll" on the mod rating, then just skip it.
I'm a Comcast subscriber and a supporter of DShield, so I have a pretty good idea of the problems at Comcast and I'm glad to see Comcast getting more aggressive about stomping infected machines.
However, SenderBase says Yahoo's 6 MTA's are all in the top 10 senders of e-mail. Only XO Communications and thehdhd.com out-send them. thehdhd.com (at #6) seems to be openly dedicated to producing spam.
So, when will Yahoo clean up its act? Is it even possible for them to take the same kind of stance that Comcast is?
What's the point of exploring space if we don't go there?
OK, what's the point of exploring the inside of a volcano, or the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of the sun if we don't go there? Humans are fragile, but our curiosity is strong, and the knowledge we gain is useful.
The rest of your argument seems to be based on the principle of "manifest destiny". This is not necessarily a good thing.
If you need to keep changing your filter, the spammers have already won.
Nonsense, if you [need to] keep changing your filter, the spammers need to keep changing their tricks, too. At worst, this situation is a stalemate. When you get to the point where you no longer try to avoid the spam, then the spammers have won.
In an unrestricted e-mail world, this will simply remain as a little competive ecosystem. Plenty of lesser spammers will be caught by your existing filters, just like your body rejects the old germs you've already been exposed to. Sometimes, new germs come along and trigger a fresh immune reaction, and you need a little time to adjust, but at least you don't have to actively fend off every existing bug all the time. And your experience with a new germ can be input for a vaccine that will protect others in advance. Your (or somebody else's) experience with new spam tricks has the same potential communal benefit. The spam filters are improved, the updates are broadcast, and you might never notice the uptick in the ongoing state of spam warfare.
What's the big deal with plasma TV's? Well, for one thing when I stand in front of my plasma, I don't cast a shadow. When I watch my plasma with the morning sun at full glare, I can still see it. What's more, my plasma will never go out of alignment, and it doesn't need a carefully placed reflective screen (which *does* take up space), nor does it need to be focused. And the 1000 hr bulb life on a typical projection system makes you think twice about whether the show you are watching is really worth it.
Projection TV's are nice when you actually *want* a 100" display, but plasmas are a far better solution for the sub-100" requirements of most rooms.
Absolutely, I plan to change as soon as the portability is a reality. I'm currently stuck with AT&T Wireless, which has terrible coverage in many parts of my town. As soon as possible, I plan to dump them in favor of Verizon.
Actually, "Chi Rho" would be written as "X P", *not* "X r".
In old illustrated religious manuscripts, e.g. The Book of Kells, you will see pages with elaborate decorations around this particular pair of letters. Why? Because Chi Rho was an abbreviation for (the first two letters of) the word, "Christ".
When I read that they had changed the name, I thought it was the start of just another religious debate.
I must agree with all those folks complaining about the snippy zingers in/. articles recently. Please read the article *carefully* before you post a summary, and try to be more objective, "Michael".
The hospital was already in the process of overhauling their network with the help of a consultant. Now they're going to accelerate that work (doh!).
NOWHERE does it say they're going to build a "duplicate" network! They're going to add twice the amount of wire, but that's the only real detail cited, and that's hardly enough information to justify the petty jab.
Slightly off-topic, but Unreal Tournament 2003 simulates the same sort of physics when you die. Your body becomes a "ragdoll" and the maps provide many (otherwise inexplicable) pits full of crisscrossing bars and fan blades for your hapless corpse to fall through.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the CDP is just a stupid knee-jerk reaction. It's not just the impact on employees, which can obviously be quite severe for a large corporation. The ripple from a corporate implosion affects absolutely everything in both the geographic and economic spheres inhabited by the company.
1) Employees are flat out of work, so that's fewer happy consumers in the local economy. Service industries leave. Housing prices plummet. Tax revenues collapse. Small cities have been "lost" when this sort of thing happens.
2) Whatever products or services were provided by the ex-corporation are lost. If you're lucky, there are alternate providers, but they are almost certainly not prepared to take up all the slack, so all the related industries have to pay more for a newly scarce resource.
For a large company like CA, this is a potentially massive impact, and for what? Just so you can go to bed with a satisfied smirk? I want corporate accountability for the execs, but a CDP would be broad collective- (possibly even self-) punishment. It's called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
Better to treat these events like any other industrial disaster. There is a certain amount of loss that is not recoverable, although insurance might alleviate some of it. There are jobs and infrastructure that should be salvaged or replaced, not simply pushed into the slag heap. If/when liability is assigned to execs, they should lose their license to operate businesses over a certain size.
The article complains about how the Legend stats completely dwarf the rest of the data in a linear graph. Doesn't this dataset just beg for a logarithmic presentation? This is like compairing populations of countries or any number of other scenarios where power laws apply.
Anyhow, the absurd comparisons of random untrustworthy data sources and the poor presentation just shows that this guy needs a good statistics teacher to whack him upside the head. I'm going to go read some Tufte.
So, I should be humbly satisfied after I break even on my large investment in time and brainsweat? I don't think that would fly. People need more incentive to persue risky goals.
Yeah, you're pretty much 100% right on this. He was at the right place at the right time, but that time is past. It seems to me that Mockapetris thinks every problem has a DNS solution. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A few years back, Mockapetris was the nominal CIO at my company for about six months. He was completely, utterly useless, and did nothing I could perceive to earn his paycheck. I concluded that we had hired him strictly for name recognition while we were building our business reputation. He faded away quietly, which was a simple blessing.
I looked at the Tango website, and I have one major concern with its design. It has a road clearance of only 4 inches! In the American Northeast, that means that during pothole season (approx. six months out of the year), the Tango will quickly morph from a car into a sled. I drive a non-SUV station wagon. When I see a 4 inch pothole, I hardly blink. Even with the modest visibility that a normal car provides, I have (luckily) dodged many potholes that would eat the Tango for breakfast. But in a Tango you are pretty low to the ground, so good luck seeing the hazards before it's too late.
It looks like the Tango was designed to compete in drag races with other electric cars, rather than to supply practical commuter transportation. A lot of their marketing material seems to emphasize this aspect of the car's design.
It explains exactly how he was caught. AOL looked at the datestamps in the file that the Secret Service showed them, then correlated that with database access logs and determined whose computer was using the database at the time. It was so easy that it's clear this crook never expected to be caught. But, AOL would never have noticed this activity if nobody had asked them to look. Apparently, they did not monitor database usage in any way before this happened. Maybe now they will.
I seriously doubt AOL's DBMS would "grind to a halt" doing a straightforward query of any scale.
It's not so much about the submitter as it is about the (theoretically more savvy) person who approved the article. I'm sure lots of stupid submissions come in every day, many referring to underpowered web servers. Clearly, most of them don't make the grade, but this one slipped through, and that is sad because the summary set off alarm bells in my head before I got through the first sentence. It also didn't take me very long to consider the possibility that this submission was made with malicious intent.
Somebody in a position of authority at SlashDot must assume the responsibility for saving these hapless twits (or victims) from themselves. The SlashDot authority that approved this submission should be reprimanded.
If you get tired of waiting for flying cars, try some "life extending" organic almond butter from the good Dr. Moller.
"show me a site where I can legally download major-label music WITHOUT DRM"
How about this: AllOfMP3
Of course, I think this just proves the point that PlayFair/Hymn is primarily for those who want to purchase music from ITMS and use it on non-iTunes players. Buying from AllOfMP3 would be far less expensive.
"With this kind of method, messages cannot be intercepted without detection, meaning transmission is always safe."
How about if I said, "With this kind of armored vehicle, passengers cannot be intercepted without detection, meaning transport is always safe." Now, the fallacy should be a bit easier to spot.
The passengers are not really safe at all, in fact they might be D.O.A., or maybe they just got interrogated along the way, or perhaps they were replaced by pod replicants. Whatever, if they were carrying sensitive information, you cannot "save" them or the information they were carrying, i.e. you cannot prevent a compromise of the data, just by proving that the vehicle was intercepted. At best you can say, "better call off the invasion, they're probably onto us now."
"why slashdot doesnt follow their stories is a mystery."
Not much of a mystery, really. They haven't updated their site since 2001, and it contains many malfunctioning links. The coolest thing on their site, the "Flame Tornado" was never actually run due to lack of a safe test arena (or maybe the Darwin principle kicked in, or maybe it didn't and we will simply never find their bodies).
Playfair retrieves the player ID and uses that to decrypt the songs. If you have cleverly squirreled this information away, playfair still works just fine, at least on files that were purchased before the update.
A point that nobody else has made as far as I can tell, is that iTMS songs are tied to your iPod and/or your PC, and when your iPod and/or your PC goes away, I assume your songs vanish along with it. Now, this could happen because your iPod is stolen, or broken, or simply surpassed by superior technology. What then?
If I follow the argument of all the people supporting Apple's right to restrict my use of iTMS songs, then I'm out of luck. Essentially, my "lease" has expired and it's time to renew it (with more $$$) on some new device.
But I didn't purchase a lease, did I? So I don't think that's a very reasonable bargain. The vast majority of my MP3 music is ripped from CD's I own, but I find iTMS convenient and I think my fair use rights allow me to do more with my purchased songs than Apple would have me believe. I suspect the songs will remain interesting long after my iPod ceases to be, and I definitely think I should be able to keep enjoying them. I should be able to archive them and retrieve and play them for the rest of my life on the hardware of my choice. To me, that means archiving without encryption.
FairPlay makes this possible, and as long as I don't start exporting decrypted files, I'm on pretty solid ground, and essentially invisible to Apple in any case.
"It's not a problem unless you submit a pretty massive number of bogus results."
As the folks at dnet.com found out the hard way, it's a whole lot easier to post a massive number of bogus results if you don't care about the accuracy of your results. There was a dnet scammer posting junk just to get his name to the top of the list of contributors. His rate of results "production" was limited only by his network bandwidth to the dnet server. This necessitated some changes in dnet that anybody contemplating anonymous distributed computing must consider.
1. Always maintain the source of individual results throughout the entire calculation. You never know when you will have to go back and remove a subset when you find out they are bogus. Same goes for which version of the software they used, in case you find out you screwed up.
2. Arrange for a small but guaranteed amount of duplication in the task subsets that you distribute, then compare the results of the duplicated tasks. Then when the bogus stuff turns up, you'll be able to flush it (see point 1).
What blatant marketing BS! But this link works better.
Soooo, does this mean we are (in essence) taking all the wires that the cables companies have strung by eminent domain? Not that I'm opposed to nationalizing infrastructure, but I think we ought to pay them something for their trouble. Oh wait, I've already paid for that wire ten times over with my skyrocketing cable bill.
I agree, the microwave crack was the only thing that made me snicker here.
So, why can't we use our mod-points on the original story? That way, we could save folks the trouble of clicking the "read more" button. If it says "Troll" on the mod rating, then just skip it.
I'm a Comcast subscriber and a supporter of DShield, so I have a pretty good idea of the problems at Comcast and I'm glad to see Comcast getting more aggressive about stomping infected machines.
However, SenderBase says Yahoo's 6 MTA's are all in the top 10 senders of e-mail. Only XO Communications and thehdhd.com out-send them. thehdhd.com (at #6) seems to be openly dedicated to producing spam.
So, when will Yahoo clean up its act? Is it even possible for them to take the same kind of stance that Comcast is?
What's the point of exploring space if we don't go there?
OK, what's the point of exploring the inside of a volcano, or the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of the sun if we don't go there? Humans are fragile, but our curiosity is strong, and the knowledge we gain is useful.
The rest of your argument seems to be based on the principle of "manifest destiny". This is not necessarily a good thing.
If you need to keep changing your filter, the spammers have already won.
Nonsense, if you [need to] keep changing your filter, the spammers need to keep changing their tricks, too. At worst, this situation is a stalemate. When you get to the point where you no longer try to avoid the spam, then the spammers have won.
In an unrestricted e-mail world, this will simply remain as a little competive ecosystem. Plenty of lesser spammers will be caught by your existing filters, just like your body rejects the old germs you've already been exposed to. Sometimes, new germs come along and trigger a fresh immune reaction, and you need a little time to adjust, but at least you don't have to actively fend off every existing bug all the time. And your experience with a new germ can be input for a vaccine that will protect others in advance. Your (or somebody else's) experience with new spam tricks has the same potential communal benefit. The spam filters are improved, the updates are broadcast, and you might never notice the uptick in the ongoing state of spam warfare.
What's the big deal with plasma TV's? Well, for one thing when I stand in front of my plasma, I don't cast a shadow. When I watch my plasma with the morning sun at full glare, I can still see it. What's more, my plasma will never go out of alignment, and it doesn't need a carefully placed reflective screen (which *does* take up space), nor does it need to be focused. And the 1000 hr bulb life on a typical projection system makes you think twice about whether the show you are watching is really worth it.
Projection TV's are nice when you actually *want* a 100" display, but plasmas are a far better solution for the sub-100" requirements of most rooms.
Absolutely, I plan to change as soon as the portability is a reality. I'm currently stuck with AT&T Wireless, which has terrible coverage in many parts of my town. As soon as possible, I plan to dump them in favor of Verizon.
Actually, "Chi Rho" would be written as "X P", *not* "X r".
In old illustrated religious manuscripts, e.g. The Book of Kells, you will see pages with elaborate decorations around this particular pair of letters. Why? Because Chi Rho was an abbreviation for (the first two letters of) the word, "Christ".
When I read that they had changed the name, I thought it was the start of just another religious debate.
I must agree with all those folks complaining about the snippy zingers in /. articles recently. Please read the article *carefully* before you post a summary, and try to be more objective, "Michael".
The hospital was already in the process of overhauling their network with the help of a consultant. Now they're going to accelerate that work (doh!).
NOWHERE does it say they're going to build a "duplicate" network! They're going to add twice the amount of wire, but that's the only real detail cited, and that's hardly enough information to justify the petty jab.
Slightly off-topic, but Unreal Tournament 2003 simulates the same sort of physics when you die. Your body becomes a "ragdoll" and the maps provide many (otherwise inexplicable) pits full of crisscrossing bars and fan blades for your hapless corpse to fall through.