I'm just wondering how well Steam is going to work. Valve felt they got the shaft from Sierra, so they design this content distribution network to eliminate the middle-man (big corporate publishers). Smart move. But wait, what exactly is the advantage to the small developer and the consumer?
Well, dial-up users are still going to have to go through regular retail channels, which means the product has to be published by a big corporation that has the resources to print the CDs. What publisher is going to step on board when they don't know for certain which distribution method the majority of consumers will choose? An uncertain return on investment compared to traditional content delivery. Uh oh, that's going to be a problem.
Small-time developers can sign up and distribute their stuff through Steam. Therefore Valve is now the "middle-man". Who pays for the bandwidth? How exactly is this an advantage to third-party developers over publishers?
So I see on my Steam games menu the first ever product delivered through Steam, a Counter-Strike single-player game. The price? $40 US. Uh oh. That's what I paid for the complete HL Platinum Edition on 4 CDs. How exactly is Steam an advantage for the consumer?
No surprises here. Consider it the cost of protectionism. An industry that constitutes a small part of the GDP lobbies hard, and the governments protect. It only works in the very short term, and neither the industry nor "jobs" are protected.
Protecting the Status Quo 50% Overrated 50% Redundant
In general I see my job to automate everything I can. Repetitive work is what computers are good at, get them to do it for you. The sysadmin will still be required to oversee it.
Exactly, and that's what makes the difference between a real sysadmin, and some guy who took CS classes and got some certs because he thought the money was good. Sure you can buy some software license at $300/server to automate task 'x', but if you've got a clue, you can save your boss the money and write a script. Bonus points if the target system is open and flexible. Just make sure you test it thoroughly, and oh yeah, let him know how much money you saved.;o)
A 2.4GHz Opteron would be more than fast enough for me. What I'm looking forward to is the ability take advantage of the bandwidth available to, say, DDR PC4200 RAM. Seems like we've stalled at 200MHz (PC3200).
Yeah, but it's such a pain in the ass to find the right size CPU shim to hold a pot, and to top it off, you've got to find the right angle so the pot handle fits inside the case. Plus we all know how Intel cheated on the benchmarks by using Grade A jumbo eggs when measuring their competitor's products. Don't even get me started on the whole fine print thing with "hard-boiled" and "soft-boiled". Never trust a benchmark!
This is a bit scary considering all of these drives were supposedly formatted and sold for surplus by major companies (although few of us actually use the multiple formatting standards of the DoD)
This one sentence explains it all. You can format it a thousand times, but the data will still be intact. Formatting (as the term applies to modern OSes) just clears out the areas of the disk that contain entries pointing to the actual blocks of data, unless it's low-level formatting, (which I
don't recommend you do).
That's sad. Professional techs don't know the difference. I understood this the difference when I was a child, so I guess it's true that "professional" only means "I get paid". The correct procedure is to overwrite every bit of data on the disk, multiple times. Nine times, twelve times if you're really paranoid. No special software needed if you've got Unix/BSD/Linux around.
He's definitely not a moron, and he brings up a good point. If I can get a guaranteed minimum of 10 years out of a CD-R or DVD-R, I will consider it. The problem with CD-Rs is that they are relatively low capacity, which makes for a logistics problem when archiving them. DVD recordables are a possibility.
The discs are prone to damage when handled on a daily basis, but are much less so when recorded and stored. Of course, in ten years there will be the cost associated with the next generation of reliable storage, and all the work involved in transferring or converting the data.:o(
Anyone offering flat rate, unlimited-for-fixed-price (all you can eat) takes on a risk. This is obvious for anyone with basic understanding of economy. The same happened with unlimited internet access - marketing made assumptions about usage patterns that turned out wrong.
Wow, I wonder how long before this wisdom is applied to universal healthcare, flat-rate water usage, averaged electricity billing, and municipal garbage collection. I wouldn't use the term "risk", I'd use the term "sure thing". If price-rationing is such a bad thing, then how do the alternatives look: Quantity-rationing or time-rationing... Sans price competition.
BUT it is a good thing, this means that no one can, ACCIDENTLY go onto a child porn site.
Think again. There's no magic formula that reads image files and makes a 100% accurate determination that it contains child porn. In fact, without out the required legal statement, there is no way to actually determine the age of the subject. Top that with the fact that HTTP != the Internet, and you've got a case of censorship that hasn't fixed anything. It's a completely wasted effort.
can't they, like, just buy a big hard drive and stuff?
Here's the problem with this: The longer the stuff is retained, the more expensive it gets to hold on to it. IT is usually a very low budget priority to government agencies, so it's going to be hard to purchase high-reliabilitly mass storage devices every couple of years. Since the goal is permanent archival, cheap, high-cap ATAPI fixed disks are going to be the
last thing you want to store the stuff on. The other issue is that the user of the mailbox has complete control over the contents, so retaining everything is going to be really difficult to do, and accidental deletion will be a very credible alibi.
There are rumblings about FOI and permanent archival among my Governmental Overlords, so I'm thinking hard about potential solutions to the problem. Trust me, it's very complicated issue, more so than I care to illustrate here (especially considering my habit of rambling on).
The simplest solution is responsibility. If it's official policy, it's on dead-trees and filed away.
Also, one forgets that cells have been evolving against this possiblity for billions of years. If a "Gray Ooze" were possible it would very likely have appeared on its own.
I agree that the possibility of accidentally creating something dangerous is probably low (e.g. a genetically engineered mushroom that suddenly mutates into a human-killing fungus). However, I don't think the evolutionary argument has sway in all possible examples, because the danger involves creating something with specific functions not guided by evolution, an entirely custom-built microorganism for example.
There are two ways were I can possibly see that genetic engineering is potentially dangerous. The first is the chance that a genetically engineered microorganism that isn't dangerous to life on earth produces a byproduct that we didn't expect, which is dangerous to life. I highly doubt this would turn into catastrophe, since it's likely to be caught in the lab early on.
The other possible danger is that some lab is contracted to produce an intentially harmful microorganism or virus. Just because it hasn't evolved yet doesn't mean it isn't possible to piece together something incredibly dangerous and nearly impossible counter. Evolution doesn't appear to cover all possible avenues, it only appears to cover those possible in the amount of time allowed before there is a major change to the environment. That said, the geological record appears to show lots of "false starts" that were cut short by earth-wide catastrophes. IAANB (biologist) so perhaps I'm missing the big picture.
Anyway, my point is thus: We're far from the utopian promise of the future, and it will remain so because there is no single idea of perfection. War exists because one people want to force their political and social ideals on another people, even if there is no direct benefit for doing so. Against that backdrop, we've got biological weapons that look like the perfect WMD in a lab (chemical weapons and nukes don't reproduce when deployed, so they're less efficient), but turn out to be duds (luckily) when deployed. Imagine a virus which is airborne like the flu, destroys the immune system like HIV AIDS, can be spread by contact like a rhinovirus, but can be manufactured and stored almost indefinitely - unlike bacterial biological weapons. Assuming those traits aren't mutually exclusive, some agency, at some point, is likely to fund the research.
Funny you should mention that. I wonder how much of it is actually illegal copies of porno material. And how much of it is just plain illegal porn (US-wise). Copyright infringement is rampant in the pron industry. Wonder why they aren't losing business?
I can understand your concern, but what this doesn't tell us is the relative risk. These substances aren't present in a vacuum; There's are plenty of other things in your home that may present a greater threat to your children's lives, but that is beyond the scope of the article. For example, what would you use to clean the PC, and how dangerous is repeated exposure to that?
Just like with the asbestos hype, I think this would only be dangerous to those who had repeated, long-term exposure to it (asbestos is perfectly safe when it isn't particulate and airborne). I think the two greatest risk groups for exposure would be those that work where it is manufactured (or used), and those that work in large data centers.
Something interesting to research: Speaking of plastics manufacturing, does anyone know what is added to bulk plastic pellets (the "raw material" used in injection molding) to prevent water contamination? Think about the health risks of that!
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of companies out there that demand high availability (also the gov't)
Ha ha ha! I work for the government. Trust me, they'd have to be able to recognize quality before they could demand it. You wouldn't believe some of the things I have to deal with. High availability? Maybe at federal agencies with better funding and the need to handle a large volume of data.
One million? Is that all? Considering that the infection rate for all variants these mailer worms was near 90 per cent for Windows machines... How many tens of millions of machines does that work out to? What if one of those mailer worms had a payload that was purposefully designed to do damage, or breech security? How would you protect your network from it. Switch off the mail server? Cut off access to the Internet?
What if the author of the worm had a design goal - Say, to circumvent security and copy the entire source tree of a popular forthcoming game, delaying its release by another year. Not that this ever happened.
I'd say that social engineering worms are superior to every other type of malware, no matter how elegantly written past viruses/worms may have been. Why bother with rewriting partition tables, privilege elevation exploits, or VB scripts that take over Outlook, when the user will willingly run the code based on a one sentence message from some stranger? If you had told me this 10 years ago, I would have laughed at the prospect that gullibility and ease-of-use would be the two greatest threats to computer security. Amazing.
Sasser may have generated the most complaints for lazy [and/or clueless] admins, but these mailer worms are the biggest headache for me. Unlike Sasser (we have no cases of it), the social engineering ploy is going to continue to be effective until e-mail as we know it changes. Sender authentication + SMTP would fix both spam and virus problems, unfortunately at a great cost in convenience to users. Considering that almost everyone I know receives 90 per cent spam/viruses in their inboxes every day, that inconvenience is looking more trivial every year.
1. Get a bunch of your attorney buddies to make a pseudo-corporation for holding IP. 2. Convince a large group of penniless patent holders that their IP is worthless, buy patents at bargain prices. 3. Wait until 11th hour of patent term. 4. Sue the hell out of everyone directly or indirectly related to the patent.
(even people that the original patent holder merely said "hello" to). 5. If you scare up enough out-of-court settlements for a fraction of those cases: Profit!
How about some respected economists? I think the discussion needs some objectivity. You ask only a small portion of the business world, and they're likely going set themselves up to profit later. Not that there's anything inherently evil about that, but the conflict of interest should be obvious.
But maybe this is just my kneejerk reaction. It certainly would be helpful to ask a cross-section of the business what things surrounding patents currently hurt them.
WHO CARES? They can have so many patents that they have to start holding them in their asscracks. Exhibit 1: IBM, the Little Linux guy's friend on Slashdot.
Yeah, they may not enforce them, but the problem is the IP firms that buy the patents in the 11th hour and do bulk lawsuits hoping to hit gold. From there it hurts other business, and costs taxpayers money when it hits the courts. That's the problem.
Please don't make that comparision. IBM has patents on things like GMR technology, not things like rubbing your stomach while clicking on a link on Amazon.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor should you have any reasonable expectation of safety, since your civil rights don't apply in other areas as well.
It's not like anyone needed any leads. Heck, myg0t had it hosted on their site for a while.
I'm just wondering how well Steam is going to work. Valve felt they got the shaft from Sierra, so they design this content distribution network to eliminate the middle-man (big corporate publishers). Smart move. But wait, what exactly is the advantage to the small developer and the consumer?
Well, dial-up users are still going to have to go through regular retail channels, which means the product has to be published by a big corporation that has the resources to print the CDs. What publisher is going to step on board when they don't know for certain which distribution method the majority of consumers will choose? An uncertain return on investment compared to traditional content delivery. Uh oh, that's going to be a problem.
Small-time developers can sign up and distribute their stuff through Steam. Therefore Valve is now the "middle-man". Who pays for the bandwidth? How exactly is this an advantage to third-party developers over publishers?
So I see on my Steam games menu the first ever product delivered through Steam, a Counter-Strike single-player game. The price? $40 US. Uh oh. That's what I paid for the complete HL Platinum Edition on 4 CDs. How exactly is Steam an advantage for the consumer?
No surprises here. Consider it the cost of protectionism. An industry that constitutes a small part of the GDP lobbies hard, and the governments protect. It only works in the very short term, and neither the industry nor "jobs" are protected.
Protecting the Status Quo
50% Overrated
50% Redundant
Total Score: -1 (Dumb)
A 2.4GHz Opteron would be more than fast enough for me. What I'm looking forward to is the ability take advantage of the bandwidth available to, say, DDR PC4200 RAM. Seems like we've stalled at 200MHz (PC3200).
Yeah, but it's such a pain in the ass to find the right size CPU shim to hold a pot, and to top it off, you've got to find the right angle so the pot handle fits inside the case. Plus we all know how Intel cheated on the benchmarks by using Grade A jumbo eggs when measuring their competitor's products. Don't even get me started on the whole fine print thing with "hard-boiled" and "soft-boiled". Never trust a benchmark!
He's definitely not a moron, and he brings up a good point. If I can get a guaranteed minimum of 10 years out of a CD-R or DVD-R, I will consider it. The problem with CD-Rs is that they are relatively low capacity, which makes for a logistics problem when archiving them. DVD recordables are a possibility.
:o(
The discs are prone to damage when handled on a daily basis, but are much less so when recorded and stored. Of course, in ten years there will be the cost associated with the next generation of reliable storage, and all the work involved in transferring or converting the data.
Anyone offering flat rate, unlimited-for-fixed-price (all you can eat) takes on a risk. This is obvious for anyone with basic understanding of economy. The same happened with unlimited internet access - marketing made assumptions about usage patterns that turned out wrong.
Funny you should mention that. I wonder how much of it is actually illegal copies of porno material. And how much of it is just plain illegal porn (US-wise). Copyright infringement is rampant in the pron industry. Wonder why they aren't losing business?
I can understand your concern, but what this doesn't tell us is the relative risk. These substances aren't present in a vacuum; There's are plenty of other things in your home that may present a greater threat to your children's lives, but that is beyond the scope of the article. For example, what would you use to clean the PC, and how dangerous is repeated exposure to that?
Just like with the asbestos hype, I think this would only be dangerous to those who had repeated, long-term exposure to it (asbestos is perfectly safe when it isn't particulate and airborne). I think the two greatest risk groups for exposure would be those that work where it is manufactured (or used), and those that work in large data centers.
Something interesting to research: Speaking of plastics manufacturing, does anyone know what is added to bulk plastic pellets (the "raw material" used in injection molding) to prevent water contamination? Think about the health risks of that!
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of companies out there that demand high availability (also the gov't)
Ha ha ha! I work for the government. Trust me, they'd have to be able to recognize quality before they could demand it. You wouldn't believe some of the things I have to deal with. High availability? Maybe at federal agencies with better funding and the need to handle a large volume of data.
If you live in the US, and those were traditional paper checks, you have legal recourse. If those transactions were EFTs, you're out of luck.
One million? Is that all? Considering that the infection rate for all variants these mailer worms was near 90 per cent for Windows machines... How many tens of millions of machines does that work out to? What if one of those mailer worms had a payload that was purposefully designed to do damage, or breech security? How would you protect your network from it. Switch off the mail server? Cut off access to the Internet?
What if the author of the worm had a design goal - Say, to circumvent security and copy the entire source tree of a popular forthcoming game, delaying its release by another year. Not that this ever happened.
I'd say that social engineering worms are superior to every other type of malware, no matter how elegantly written past viruses/worms may have been. Why bother with rewriting partition tables, privilege elevation exploits, or VB scripts that take over Outlook, when the user will willingly run the code based on a one sentence message from some stranger? If you had told me this 10 years ago, I would have laughed at the prospect that gullibility and ease-of-use would be the two greatest threats to computer security. Amazing.
Sasser may have generated the most complaints for lazy [and/or clueless] admins, but these mailer worms are the biggest headache for me. Unlike Sasser (we have no cases of it), the social engineering ploy is going to continue to be effective until e-mail as we know it changes. Sender authentication + SMTP would fix both spam and virus problems, unfortunately at a great cost in convenience to users. Considering that almost everyone I know receives 90 per cent spam/viruses in their inboxes every day, that inconvenience is looking more trivial every year.
Gee, if the validity of the patent is subject to the conditions of some faddish word, that looks like a sure sign that it was trivial to begin with.
Or...
1. Get a bunch of your attorney buddies to make a pseudo-corporation for holding IP.
2. Convince a large group of penniless patent holders that their IP is worthless, buy patents at bargain prices.
3. Wait until 11th hour of patent term.
4. Sue the hell out of everyone directly or indirectly related to the patent.
(even people that the original patent holder merely said "hello" to).
5. If you scare up enough out-of-court settlements for a fraction of those cases: Profit!
Who else should they ask?
How about some respected economists? I think the discussion needs some objectivity. You ask only a small portion of the business world, and they're likely going set themselves up to profit later. Not that there's anything inherently evil about that, but the conflict of interest should be obvious.
But maybe this is just my kneejerk reaction. It certainly would be helpful to ask a cross-section of the business what things surrounding patents currently hurt them.
They can have so many patents that they have to start holding them in their asscracks. Exhibit 1: IBM, the Little Linux guy's friend on Slashdot.