Mr Anonymous said: As for 'anti-competitive', what's that even mean? No one has a problem if Pepsi offers a lower price to a vendor in exchange for an agreement from the vendor to stop selling Coke products. But when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal?
Note that he's claimed that "No one has a problem" with paying
a vendor to not sell a product.
My former boss did: he was a small-town conservative and regarded that as an attempt to bribe him to
do something nether he nor his customers wanted to do. So whenever
the pop or chip company drivers tried it, he'd throw them out of the
store for 30 days, and post a sign on the racks saying why.
You can imagine the consternation every time a new driver took
over the route and trid to bribe Jack (;-))
The error here is saying "there exists no person who disapproves of X",
when the true statement is "some people disaprove of X".
And, of course, "when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal" is very close to the definition of a monopoly.
Logically, it might be stated "for any undesirable behavior X, which is dealt with by a free market but which is not ina monopoly, X is illegal when done by a monopolist."
I was actually joking about making it an
exercise for the reader, but if
you wanted to build such a system, you
would take, as I said,
cryptographic checksums of individual paragraphs,
and for each store a list of original source,
if public/known, and of all the uses seen.
Of course, you would first have to filter out all
paragraphs which were properly cited, before doing
the comparison, lest every student who quotes
an authority is deemd to be plagarizing the
authority's words (;-))
--dave
ps: once upon a time I worked for a company that
did did just that, for a hardware-assisted fast search machine.
Sv-Manowar wrote: I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it
The company would be better off keeping signatures, such as
cryptographic checksums of individual paragraphs. The details
are left as an exercise for the reader (:-))
This very same record-keeping problem affect them:
some jurisdictions require records to be kept, others
prohibit keeping them, and all funding organizations require
they produce circulation and billing records.
As a result, all the library software companies
keep transaction records until the book is returned or,
if lost or damaged, paid for.
As soon as the transaction closes, however, the
personally identifying information is discarded, and only the
usage information is kept, for later analysis.
Consider this a hint to the authors of free/open
ISP management software.
I can't guarantee you will have a big enough disk in your old
machine, but if you buy a new disk for linux or mount the
old one onto a friend's linux laptop, you can use an ordinary
find script to remove all the binaries and libraries on the
disk, making room for either a new partition or more space for
data in the old directories.
An experiment several years back gave me almost 40% more
space on Windows 98.
You won't hear about this in the U.S.: you'd need
to read European or Canadian newspapers
<infinite calmness mode>
Canada has massive forests on its west coast,
and lower lumber prices there than in the U.S.
or elsewhere in Canada.
The U.S. has placed a very large tariff on
west-coast lumber, whose effect is to bring its price
up to the U.S. norm, thus protecting the U.S. industry.
However, NAFTA was supposed to make the U.S. and
Canada compete with each other, and lower tariff and
non-tariff barriers to competition. And sure enough,
all the NAFTA tribunals have ruled in favor of Canada.
Nevertheless, the U.S. applies a new tariff as
each previous one is ruled illegal. The current
(Conservative, meaning vaguely republican) Canadian government has now
officially given up, and states it will no longer fight for free trade
in at least softwood lumber.
</infinite calmness mode>
This is seriously oversimplified, but the situation is
really really unpleasant, with the government
threatening to apply extra
tariffs to companies which don't consent to letting
the government give up...
Hey! wrote: I think Canada will be surprised to learn that they gave up their sovereignty when they joined NAFTA
Surprised? Not at all. Disappointed, you
understand: say "softwood lumber" to
a Candian if you want them to start
swearing uncontrollably in a public place (;-))
Surprised? Naot at all. Disappointed, you
understand: say "softwood lumber" to
a Candian if you want them to start
swearing uncontrollably in a public place (;-))
Ocne upon a time in a town in Belgium, instead of striking, the
bus drivers and collectors taped over their fare
boxes as soon as they got on the road. Bus service
was free! The customers were pleased!
The company was not: they weren't making any money, but
they were paying for all the gasoline and maintenance...
So it is now supposedly illegal to refuse to collect fares in
that country (;-))
The example was just that, an example to explain what Paul was
saying. 1/10 of a second is an easy value to do back-of-the-envelope
calculations with (;-))
Paul has found
that numerous root and.com servers have reached the
knee in the curve, and are therefor substantially slowed
by overloads. Instead of taking mere milliseconds, they can be arbitrarily
slow under load.
This means that they need to engage in some capacity planning
to discover what additional hardware they neeed. This is good
for me, as I'm a capacity planner (;-))
When working with response time instead of
%CPU, the curve is quite different from
what one normally sees.
It starts off level, at some number of
milliseconds (mostly the round-trip time)
and stays that way until the load hits 100%,
then increases rapidly and without bound.
For example, if a lookup takes 1/10 second,
it will continue to take 1/10 second until
there are 10 requests per cpu per second.
After that a queue builds up, and the
requests are delayed. Brutally.
At a mere 100 requests/second, the delay is
10 seconds, instead of one tenth.
Now imagine that at the huge loads the DNS servers
typically handle.
When someone says "they've hit the knee of the curve",
he really means "they're about to fall in the toilet" (;-))
Ask the managing partners for indemnification, so
that if and when the firm is sued by its ex-customers,
the firm assumes the responsibility for not
doing the due diligence you proposed, and and agrees to
pay the costs of your defense.
Money speaks to a CPA. Mind you, they may then
consider a cost reduction equal to your salary
a good thing, so have a new job lined up!
My account lives on a fileserver, and is served
to any number of machines, complete with all its
customizations.
My laptop syncs with it via unison, so I can
detach myself from the server when needed.
So: don't try to twist Windows into doing something
it wasn't designed to do. Instead, use Unix and get
a system that has worked the way you wanted for a good
thirty years.
--dave
This is called "the wheel of reincarnation"
on
The Future of Computing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The Foley and van Dam classic, "Fundamentals of Interactive
Computer Graphics" cites Myer and Sutherland's description
of adding more intelligence to graphics processors until
they become the equivalent of CPUs, at which point they
repeatedly find themselves slower than mass-production CPUs
and are turned back into simple devices driven by fast
external CPUs once more (;-))
--dave
The full article -- it's legit
on
Virus Jumps to RFID
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There is a PDF and also a complete discussion at
http://www.rfidvirus.org/virus.html,
breifly outlining "Replication Using Self-Referential Queries"
and "Replication Using Quines".
For example, Database systems usually offer a way to obtain the currently running queries for system administration purposes. However, these functions return queries as an normal string, which makes it possible to store them in the database, thereby replicating the query.
We have developed two versions of the virus, one that is contained in a single query, and one the requires multiple queries. The virus using a single query requires less features from the database, but cannot carry SQL code as a payload. The virus using multiple queries requires a database that supports this, but it does allow SQL code as a payload.
Details on the virus using self-referential queries can be found athttp://www.rfidvirus.org/exploits/sql_self/index .html
It's necessary but not sufficient: a legal bill of sale
is arguably sufficient, and I notice that when shaking down^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h auditing customers the BSA
requires a bill of sale.
Exactly the same thing was done using the
ancient "cookie monster" program
on Multics, long before Unix was even
a gleam in T&R's eye.
The perpetrator created a user-ring instance
of a user (a virtual-machine-like process), loaded in
the cookie mosnter, then loaded the command
interpreter and handed the result to an
unsuspecting user, my boss.
He searchrd high and low, never suspecting
the program that kept saying "Want cookie!"
was down below the shell.
You might consider a new tax and massively increasing the deficit
a "hard turn to the right", but it's an unusual one, as it takes
one well past the
normal right ("conservatism") into the weird and wonderful
world of the neo-conservatives and the "Reform" party.
Alternatively it might be considered a strong turn to the left,
as it goes right past the Liberals and NDP to the... weird
and wonderful world of the neo-liberals and the Reform party.
Whichever you way you consider this, though, it was immensely
unpopular with Canadians, who tagged the PM Lyin' Brian and
showed him the door, along with what had been a perfectly good
political party (;-().
many moons ago I was on a fast-text-search project,
which used a pre-jit interpreted language (one of
Per Brinch Hanson's), and had almost no assembler
or native code whatsoever.
It was fast because it used fast hardware,
a custom AMD bit-slice processor. We mixed
medium-slow code for the boring bits and
a read of a custom device for the time-critical
part.
EonBlueTooL wrote: I really do have a hard time believing that. If its a niched program you have a specific audience. Photoshop being a great example, not everyone wants it. [...] Downloading music on the other hand is a different story. EVERYONE wants music, and EVERYONE can download it easily.
Ours was a compeditor to Lotus 1-2-3, and everyone indeed wanted
it.
I argue that to computer users, software was and is more desirable than computer-played music. Everyone who owns a computer needs and/or
wants it, and copying it is easier than copying
music. Therfor, it follows that our previous
exprience with software is predictive
of our ongoing experience of music.
By the way, we saw this twice before in the computer world: once with
Apple ][ and CP/M non-copyable disks, and again with IBM PCs
and dongles.
I'm in the middle of trying to post the following to
the Huffington Post, but it seems not to be able to see
this particular Hilary Rosen posting...
we may have a link to a very new article.
I suspect that the RIAA members are just
re-living the tempest in a teapot we had in
the software businesses: we used to ship
programs with all sorts of expensive
copy protection devices.
One of my employers then shipped their
product without protection and saw
no difference whatsoever in the rate
of copying. So they dropped the
"dongle", and saved precious dollars by
doing so.
Now my publisher and others are doing the
same thing with electronic copies of their
books, with similar good results.
I expect we'll see the same with both
music and movies. Commercial copiers will
be dealt with by the courts, and individuals
will be so minor a problems as to be
ignored.
--dave
Re:This is both correctly directed and misdirected
on
Protesting Apple's DRM
·
· Score: 0
The companies who make up the RIAA don't generally have stores
themselves. Instead, they sell through quasi-independent dealers,
or through Apple, in part to avoid being subject to sucg inconvenient
things as customer complaints, protests or boycotts.
One therefor aims one's protests toward the people who are
the agents for the DRM'd music, and whose profits are directly
affected by public picketing.
This looks insane, but actually resolves
rather easily.
To oversimplify,
libraries keep
statistical information, so they can get their
grants for books loaned per year,
retain patron loan information until the book is either returned or paid for, and then
destroy the link from book to patron.
This is so common that all the
vendors of library circulations systems
"enforce" it in software, citing the
need to use precious disk space for current records.
In at least one case, we made
it surprisingly difficult to reconstruct old
patron-book links from backups.
Consider this a word to the wise
authors of ISP record-keeping systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr Anonymous said: As for 'anti-competitive', what's that even mean? No one has a problem if Pepsi offers a lower price to a vendor in exchange for an agreement from the vendor to stop selling Coke products. But when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal?
Note that he's claimed that "No one has a problem" with paying a vendor to not sell a product.
My former boss did: he was a small-town conservative and regarded that as an attempt to bribe him to do something nether he nor his customers wanted to do. So whenever the pop or chip company drivers tried it, he'd throw them out of the store for 30 days, and post a sign on the racks saying why. You can imagine the consternation every time a new driver took over the route and trid to bribe Jack (;-))
The error here is saying "there exists no person who disapproves of X", when the true statement is "some people disaprove of X".
And, of course, "when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal" is very close to the definition of a monopoly. Logically, it might be stated "for any undesirable behavior X, which is dealt with by a free market but which is not ina monopoly, X is illegal when done by a monopolist."
Etc, etc, ad nauseam...
--dave
I was actually joking about making it an exercise for the reader, but if you wanted to build such a system, you would take, as I said, cryptographic checksums of individual paragraphs, and for each store a list of original source, if public/known, and of all the uses seen.
Of course, you would first have to filter out all paragraphs which were properly cited, before doing the comparison, lest every student who quotes an authority is deemd to be plagarizing the authority's words (;-))
--dave
ps: once upon a time I worked for a company that did did just that, for a hardware-assisted fast search machine.
Sv-Manowar wrote: I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it
The company would be better off keeping signatures, such as cryptographic checksums of individual paragraphs. The details are left as an exercise for the reader (:-))
--dave
This very same record-keeping problem affect them: some jurisdictions require records to be kept, others prohibit keeping them, and all funding organizations require they produce circulation and billing records.
As a result, all the library software companies keep transaction records until the book is returned or, if lost or damaged, paid for.
As soon as the transaction closes, however, the personally identifying information is discarded, and only the usage information is kept, for later analysis.
Consider this a hint to the authors of free/open ISP management software.
--dave
I can't guarantee you will have a big enough disk in your old machine, but if you buy a new disk for linux or mount the old one onto a friend's linux laptop, you can use an ordinary find script to remove all the binaries and libraries on the disk, making room for either a new partition or more space for data in the old directories.
An experiment several years back gave me almost 40% more space on Windows 98.
--dave
You won't hear about this in the U.S.: you'd need to read European or Canadian newspapers
<infinite calmness mode>
Canada has massive forests on its west coast, and lower lumber prices there than in the U.S. or elsewhere in Canada.
The U.S. has placed a very large tariff on west-coast lumber, whose effect is to bring its price up to the U.S. norm, thus protecting the U.S. industry.
However, NAFTA was supposed to make the U.S. and Canada compete with each other, and lower tariff and non-tariff barriers to competition. And sure enough, all the NAFTA tribunals have ruled in favor of Canada.
Nevertheless, the U.S. applies a new tariff as each previous one is ruled illegal. The current (Conservative, meaning vaguely republican) Canadian government has now officially given up, and states it will no longer fight for free trade in at least softwood lumber.
</infinite calmness mode>
This is seriously oversimplified, but the situation is really really unpleasant, with the government threatening to apply extra tariffs to companies which don't consent to letting the government give up...
Hey! wrote: I think Canada will be surprised to learn that they gave up their sovereignty when they joined NAFTA
Surprised? Not at all. Disappointed, you understand: say "softwood lumber" to a Candian if you want them to start swearing uncontrollably in a public place (;-))
--dave
Surprised? Naot at all. Disappointed, you understand: say "softwood lumber" to a Candian if you want them to start swearing uncontrollably in a public place (;-))
--dave
Ocne upon a time in a town in Belgium, instead of striking, the bus drivers and collectors taped over their fare boxes as soon as they got on the road. Bus service was free! The customers were pleased!
The company was not: they weren't making any money, but they were paying for all the gasoline and maintenance... So it is now supposedly illegal to refuse to collect fares in that country (;-))
--dave
From Canada, and certainly from publiations from Britain and Europe, it certainly appears that the terrorists have terrified the "United States".
That doesn't necessarily mean my american cousins, but it certainly does mean the government and press...
I fear more than the terrorist are laughing: friends and enemies both have lost respect for the US. Not a good thing.
--dave
Paul has found that numerous root and .com servers have reached the
knee in the curve, and are therefor substantially slowed
by overloads. Instead of taking mere milliseconds, they can be arbitrarily
slow under load.
This means that they need to engage in some capacity planning to discover what additional hardware they neeed. This is good for me, as I'm a capacity planner (;-))
--dave c-b
When working with response time instead of %CPU, the curve is quite different from what one normally sees.
It starts off level, at some number of milliseconds (mostly the round-trip time) and stays that way until the load hits 100%, then increases rapidly and without bound.
For example, if a lookup takes 1/10 second, it will continue to take 1/10 second until there are 10 requests per cpu per second.
After that a queue builds up, and the requests are delayed. Brutally. At a mere 100 requests/second, the delay is 10 seconds, instead of one tenth.
Now imagine that at the huge loads the DNS servers typically handle.
When someone says "they've hit the knee of the curve", he really means "they're about to fall in the toilet" (;-))
--dave
Ask the managing partners for indemnification, so that if and when the firm is sued by its ex-customers, the firm assumes the responsibility for not doing the due diligence you proposed, and and agrees to pay the costs of your defense.
Money speaks to a CPA. Mind you, they may then consider a cost reduction equal to your salary a good thing, so have a new job lined up!
--dave
My account lives on a fileserver, and is served to any number of machines, complete with all its customizations.
My laptop syncs with it via unison, so I can detach myself from the server when needed.
So: don't try to twist Windows into doing something it wasn't designed to do. Instead, use Unix and get a system that has worked the way you wanted for a good thirty years.
--dave
The Foley and van Dam classic, "Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics" cites Myer and Sutherland's description of adding more intelligence to graphics processors until they become the equivalent of CPUs, at which point they repeatedly find themselves slower than mass-production CPUs and are turned back into simple devices driven by fast external CPUs once more (;-))
--dave
There is a PDF and also a complete discussion at http://www.rfidvirus.org/virus.html, breifly outlining "Replication Using Self-Referential Queries" and "Replication Using Quines".
For example,
Database systems usually offer a way to obtain the currently running queries for system administration purposes. However, these functions return queries as an normal string, which makes it possible to store them in the database, thereby replicating the query.
We have developed two versions of the virus, one that is contained in a single query, and one the requires multiple queries. The virus using a single query requires less features from the database, but cannot carry SQL code as a payload. The virus using multiple queries requires a database that supports this, but it does allow SQL code as a payload.
Details on the virus using self-referential queries can be found athttp://www.rfidvirus.org/exploits/sql_self/index .html
--dave
Exactly the same thing was done using the ancient "cookie monster" program on Multics, long before Unix was even a gleam in T&R's eye.
The perpetrator created a user-ring instance of a user (a virtual-machine-like process), loaded in the cookie mosnter, then loaded the command interpreter and handed the result to an unsuspecting user, my boss.
He searchrd high and low, never suspecting the program that kept saying "Want cookie!" was down below the shell.
--dave
You might consider a new tax and massively increasing the deficit a "hard turn to the right", but it's an unusual one, as it takes one well past the normal right ("conservatism") into the weird and wonderful world of the neo-conservatives and the "Reform" party.
Alternatively it might be considered a strong turn to the left, as it goes right past the Liberals and NDP to the... weird and wonderful world of the neo-liberals and the Reform party.
Whichever you way you consider this, though, it was immensely unpopular with Canadians, who tagged the PM Lyin' Brian and showed him the door, along with what had been a perfectly good political party (;-().
--dave
Very much so!
many moons ago I was on a fast-text-search project, which used a pre-jit interpreted language (one of Per Brinch Hanson's), and had almost no assembler or native code whatsoever.
It was fast because it used fast hardware, a custom AMD bit-slice processor. We mixed medium-slow code for the boring bits and a read of a custom device for the time-critical part.
--dave
EonBlueTooL wrote: I really do have a hard time believing that. If its a niched program you have a specific audience. Photoshop being a great example, not everyone wants it. [...] Downloading music on the other hand is a different story. EVERYONE wants music, and EVERYONE can download it easily.
Ours was a compeditor to Lotus 1-2-3, and everyone indeed wanted it.
I argue that to computer users, software was and is more desirable than computer-played music. Everyone who owns a computer needs and/or wants it, and copying it is easier than copying music. Therfor, it follows that our previous exprience with software is predictive of our ongoing experience of music.
By the way, we saw this twice before in the computer world: once with Apple ][ and CP/M non-copyable disks, and again with IBM PCs and dongles.
--dave
I suspect that the RIAA members are just re-living the tempest in a teapot we had in the software businesses: we used to ship programs with all sorts of expensive copy protection devices.
One of my employers then shipped their product without protection and saw no difference whatsoever in the rate of copying. So they dropped the "dongle", and saved precious dollars by doing so.
Now my publisher and others are doing the same thing with electronic copies of their books, with similar good results.
I expect we'll see the same with both music and movies. Commercial copiers will be dealt with by the courts, and individuals will be so minor a problems as to be ignored.
--dave
One therefor aims one's protests toward the people who are the agents for the DRM'd music, and whose profits are directly affected by public picketing.
--dave
--dave
This looks insane, but actually resolves rather easily.
To oversimplify, libraries keep statistical information, so they can get their grants for books loaned per year, retain patron loan information until the book is either returned or paid for, and then destroy the link from book to patron.
This is so common that all the vendors of library circulations systems "enforce" it in software, citing the need to use precious disk space for current records.
In at least one case, we made it surprisingly difficult to reconstruct old patron-book links from backups.
Consider this a word to the wise authors of ISP record-keeping systems.
--dave