My wife once found a sign in a store that used both "everyday" and "every day" and used them both correctly. She was so pleased, because 95% of the signs she sees with "everyday" on them get it wrong.
Log files are typically very structured low-entropy data. With random natural-language text you seldom get better than 3 or 4 to 1 lossless compression. Image compression can do better, but that's typically already been done to get the JPG/PNG/GIF/etc., and it's typically lossy, and of course video compression is much better because most of an image doesn't change much from frame to frame. But in this case they're trying to OCR the data, so much of that image compressibility has already been replaced (because you're using one byte to represent the letter instead of a bunch of bytes representing black marks on white paper.)
Internet gambling without taxation was their main target market. And they failed for pretty much the usual reasons startups fail - not clear enough business plans to back up the amazing coolness, personality differences between the founders and between the main investors, not enough cash to keep going long enough for the income stream to materialize, brilliant young rocket scientists without enough solid business experience....
A typical book is in the range of 1-2MB of text, assuming you're representing actual letters, as opposed to scanned images of the text, and ignoring illustrations, pictures, etc. So if there are about 130 million books, that's about 200TB to store them uncompressed, maybe 50TB compressed. If you've got multiple versions that are almost identical (e.g. Third Printing from Paperback Publisher B has a different copyright page than First printing from Hardback Publisher A, and maybe a different cover page illustration and blurbs on the back cover), then the different versions add a percent or two.)
As correlation, Wikipedia says the Library of Congress has about 20 million books (in a collection of 100 million things), and The InterWebs say that the Library of Congress is about 20TB (not clear if that's just books or not.) So that says 130 million books would be about 130TB uncompressed; it fits on the back of the same envelope.
So for about $5000 of computer equipment, your town or school could have its own copy of The Library, with All The Books. So far, The Internet Archive has digitized about a million books - you could probably fit that onto 1-2 BlueRay disks.
The real problem with the Hindenberg fire was the painted cloth outsides catching fire. The Hydrogen made a nice POOF and losing it helped the ship fall, but if you had a fire like that in a helium-filled Zep, it'd fail just about as fast.
If reCAPTCHA's too easily breakable, then Bad Guys will figure out how, and will start exploiting sites that use reCAPTCHA for protection.
So we need to know how vulnerable it is, and the reCAPTCHA folks need to figure out how to fix it. It's an arms race, always has been, probably always will be.
There are lots of reasons Federal Employees might store images.
Some of them get stored as evidence in case they actually do see something that looks like a weapon. (Duh! You think they'd build a system that *couldn't* do that?)
Some of them get stored by Federal Employees who like millimeter-resolution pictures of hot naked chicks. (Just because they're Feds doesn't mean everything they do at work is strictly an official job function. And hey, you're reading Slashdot instead of working, and so am I:-)
Some of them get stored by underpaid Federal Employees who are supplementing their rent-a-cop salaries by selling pornography at more commercial prices.
They're almost certainly saving some of the images for quality control and training.
They may be saving some images of suspicious people or politically interesting people for whatever reasons, and just because they've told us that the images are anonymous doesn't mean there's any reason to assume they're telling the truth, given that we're talking about them getting caught lying about whether they can store the images or not.
Yes, 40C is usually above room temperature. "X-temperature superconductors" only work when colder than "X", not hotter.
Even a 40F superconductor would be great - refrigerator-temperature superconductivity is a lot more useful than liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconductivity, which is much more useful than the original liquid-helium-temperature stuff.
For some of them it's PCI, and that may actually be the bigger driver by now. Either way, it's the perceived threat of auditors rather than actual operational need:-)
He wants to know what prices other people's IT departments charge their users, because he thinks he's way out of line even for that. Costs are a whole nother game entirely - lots of people aren't clear about what their costs are...
There's a big difference between TCO to the company and whatever price the IT department charges *your* department for service. IT department prices are typically based on historical costs that don't necessarily represent the Moore's Law equivalent precipitous drop in disk space costs, and are often based on gold-brick engineering practices and specialized applications.
For instance, if you're running a high-end database or an Exchange server that's supporting the whole company, it needs to have a blazingly fast SAN array from EMC or somebody, and instead of using $50 1TB SATA drives, it's using $300 15000rpm 300-Gb SAS drives with SSD accelerators and uber-fancy controllers, built into a framework that lets them do maximum IOPS and live no-performance-hit backups. On the other hand, if you're trying to back up desktop data in case of laptop failures, or provide shared file storage where people can retrieve dull bureaucratic standards documents, performance isn't critical, price and volume are, so you want a big slow cheap Network Attached Storage device packed full of TB SATA drives, with a bit of RAID to deal with the occasional drive failure, and still some kind of backup system or maybe a tape-loading robot (if tapes are still even cost-effective.) And it's not uncommon for IT departments to charge you for the former, even if you'd rather have the latter.
I'm dealing with a variant on this problem right now, for a network management application. The servers and storage in the data center are designed for blazing speed, but the application I'm trying to support is customers who want to archive all their network event data for a couple of years to make Sarbanes and Oxley and their friends happy, so I need fast servers for today's data, maybe something medium-speed for a week's data (but SATA's probably enough), and 98% of my data will never be looked at again but the rules want it online, not in a box of tapes.
Unfortunately, my company is sufficiently large and bureaucratic that equipment standards are often made by people who don't know the applications:-) The bureaucrats like SAN arrays because they're blazingly fast, and because they're easy to administer, back up, plan for storage growth, etc. And $8000/TB is really just fine if your idea of "huge" storage is a TB or two.
I've got an application that needs to do a bit of fast-IOPS logging (so the overpriced SAS drives and SAN array are fine), but needs lots of bulk storage that doesn't need blazing fast access, but does need to be on disks as opposed to tape. I probably need 10TB to start with, growing to 20+ as we get more customers.
It's obviously a job for NAS - Network Attached Storage, the kind of stuff Netapp used to sell (presumably still does), which wraps a certain amount of framework around the big cheap drives, so you still get the operational benefits and manageability, at a cost that's maybe twice what the cheap raw drives cost. Lacking that, I'd been thinking about stuffing a server full of 2TB drives, but our IT folks not only don't like that because they don't have the manageability and easy upgrades, but they only allow little 300GB SAS drives (not even the new 600GB), and only support 2.5" drives, not 3.5", because that's more cost-effective or something. Sigh.
I've got "Precise" in quotes because I'm skeptical that you can ever get really good predictions about the future, or even the present, especially from users. But if you try, it's going to take you a while, and you'll be spending loaded-engineer-salary time and harassed-user time trying to get predictions that the users will tell you are guesses. Meanwhile, you do need to get some disks online, and it's going to take you a while to accumulate tracking data. I'm in that kind of situation now - until there's enough disk and users on the system to get a really good model of users, we won't really know, so we're aiming high.
Yes, I mean Celsius. Absolute 0 is -273C, aka 0C is 273K, so 313K is 40C. Superconductors need to be kept *colder* than their magic temperature - below that they've got zero resistance, above it they've got resistance. (That's ignoring other magnetic effects, current limits, etc.) Room temperature superconductors are pretty much the Holy Grail of that business.
So yes, the UK is almost always cooler than 40C - they can even keep beer at room temperature. 40C is fucking hot, it doesn't get that hot in Brooklyn, it's Africa hot, but it's not sauna hot or spontaneous human combustion hot. India would still need to do some refrigeration (or keep it underground, as someone else pointed out), but it's cheap air-conditioner refrigeration, not liquid-nitrogen or liquid-helium refrigeration.
313K is 40C. So this stuff ought to behave just fine in the UK, but only part of the year in India:-) Even in temperate climates, you'd have to be careful not to leave it out in the sun, so again it should be fine in the UK...
Lawsuits are a lot cheaper if you're doing the work yourself and not paying a lawyer. They could fly somewhere if they're in a hurry, but driving a camper is probably cheaper and gives you a place to stay, and for the most part they can pick and choose targets for convenience.
And they can keep winning lawsuits because they keep annoying towns or cops into violating their civil rights or people into punching them or whatever. And if people wise up and stop doing that, the Phelpsies just think of new ways to piss people off.
I don't think they seriously believe what they say, though they may very well hate gays and enjoy antagonizing whoever's fun to offend. I think they're deliberate trolls, doing this because they like the attention and get to sue anybody who interferes with their freedom of speech. It doesn't take any dissociation from reality; they're just effective sociopaths who've got a profitable gig going.
You're still treating them as if they mean what they say. They don't really care - they're just looking for the most offensive positions they can find, because that gets them the most publicity and the most antagonism they can use to generate lawsuits.
This kind of gig works a lot better when there's a First Amendment protecting free speech; in the Old Days they would have had to actually lead mobs of followers so they could steal the houses of the witches/Jews/blacks/gypsies/etc.
I think they know very well that they're trolls - just because they're sociopaths doesn't mean they don't have some insight into what they're doing. It's possible that they're trolls who actually do hate gay people, as opposed to merely finding them convenient targets, but they're in the Professional Trolling Business, making money by having towns ban them and people assault them and suing.
Remember a few years back when the KKK held a rally in Simi Valley? A friend of mine was on the city council at the time. The Klansters weren't locals, they were from out of town, and they were *very* disappointed that the town didn't forbid them to march, and didn't let the counter-protesters try to beat them up, because their real objective was to get banned and have a lawsuit they could easily win.
If I understood Hawking's "Brief History of Time" correctly, which I certainly won't guarantee, and if I'm remembering it correctly N years later, which is also dubious, having a one-dimensional timeline doesn't guarantee having a beginning. Spacetime might be a closed set, including Time 0, or might be an open set, including all times above 0 but not actually including Time 0 itself. So there might not have been a beginning, even if there's asymptotically close to having been one.
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They were just too hopped up on the caffeine to get it right the first time, and then something shiny went by.
My wife once found a sign in a store that used both "everyday" and "every day" and used them both correctly. She was so pleased, because 95% of the signs she sees with "everyday" on them get it wrong.
Log files are typically very structured low-entropy data. With random natural-language text you seldom get better than 3 or 4 to 1 lossless compression. Image compression can do better, but that's typically already been done to get the JPG/PNG/GIF/etc., and it's typically lossy, and of course video compression is much better because most of an image doesn't change much from frame to frame. But in this case they're trying to OCR the data, so much of that image compressibility has already been replaced (because you're using one byte to represent the letter instead of a bunch of bytes representing black marks on white paper.)
Internet gambling without taxation was their main target market. And they failed for pretty much the usual reasons startups fail - not clear enough business plans to back up the amazing coolness, personality differences between the founders and between the main investors, not enough cash to keep going long enough for the income stream to materialize, brilliant young rocket scientists without enough solid business experience....
When I first used it, the distribution fit on half a 3.5" floppy drive. It's rather larger than that now...
Hey, your PC's generating too much heat anyway, might as well use it?
Yes, it was pretty ugly, but easy to find the link and look at the article..
A typical book is in the range of 1-2MB of text, assuming you're representing actual letters, as opposed to scanned images of the text, and ignoring illustrations, pictures, etc. So if there are about 130 million books, that's about 200TB to store them uncompressed, maybe 50TB compressed. If you've got multiple versions that are almost identical (e.g. Third Printing from Paperback Publisher B has a different copyright page than First printing from Hardback Publisher A, and maybe a different cover page illustration and blurbs on the back cover), then the different versions add a percent or two.)
As correlation, Wikipedia says the Library of Congress has about 20 million books (in a collection of 100 million things), and The InterWebs say that the Library of Congress is about 20TB (not clear if that's just books or not.) So that says 130 million books would be about 130TB uncompressed; it fits on the back of the same envelope.
So for about $5000 of computer equipment, your town or school could have its own copy of The Library, with All The Books.
So far, The Internet Archive has digitized about a million books - you could probably fit that onto 1-2 BlueRay disks.
The real problem with the Hindenberg fire was the painted cloth outsides catching fire. The Hydrogen made a nice POOF and losing it helped the ship fall, but if you had a fire like that in a helium-filled Zep, it'd fail just about as fast.
If reCAPTCHA's too easily breakable, then Bad Guys will figure out how, and will start exploiting sites that use reCAPTCHA for protection.
So we need to know how vulnerable it is, and the reCAPTCHA folks need to figure out how to fix it. It's an arms race, always has been, probably always will be.
Dude, if you're getting old enough to need reading glasses, just get them....
There are some really bad CAPTCHAs out there - recapcha is one of the more human-readable ones, but sometimes just magnification isn't enough.
There are lots of reasons Federal Employees might store images.
Yes, 40C is usually above room temperature. "X-temperature superconductors" only work when colder than "X", not hotter.
Even a 40F superconductor would be great - refrigerator-temperature superconductivity is a lot more useful than liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconductivity, which is much more useful than the original liquid-helium-temperature stuff.
For some of them it's PCI, and that may actually be the bigger driver by now. Either way, it's the perceived threat of auditors rather than actual operational need :-)
He wants to know what prices other people's IT departments charge their users, because he thinks he's way out of line even for that. Costs are a whole nother game entirely - lots of people aren't clear about what their costs are...
There's a big difference between TCO to the company and whatever price the IT department charges *your* department for service. IT department prices are typically based on historical costs that don't necessarily represent the Moore's Law equivalent precipitous drop in disk space costs, and are often based on gold-brick engineering practices and specialized applications.
For instance, if you're running a high-end database or an Exchange server that's supporting the whole company, it needs to have a blazingly fast SAN array from EMC or somebody, and instead of using $50 1TB SATA drives, it's using $300 15000rpm 300-Gb SAS drives with SSD accelerators and uber-fancy controllers, built into a framework that lets them do maximum IOPS and live no-performance-hit backups. On the other hand, if you're trying to back up desktop data in case of laptop failures, or provide shared file storage where people can retrieve dull bureaucratic standards documents, performance isn't critical, price and volume are, so you want a big slow cheap Network Attached Storage device packed full of TB SATA drives, with a bit of RAID to deal with the occasional drive failure, and still some kind of backup system or maybe a tape-loading robot (if tapes are still even cost-effective.)
And it's not uncommon for IT departments to charge you for the former, even if you'd rather have the latter.
I'm dealing with a variant on this problem right now, for a network management application. The servers and storage in the data center are designed for blazing speed, but the application I'm trying to support is customers who want to archive all their network event data for a couple of years to make Sarbanes and Oxley and their friends happy, so I need fast servers for today's data, maybe something medium-speed for a week's data (but SATA's probably enough), and 98% of my data will never be looked at again but the rules want it online, not in a box of tapes.
Unfortunately, my company is sufficiently large and bureaucratic that equipment standards are often made by people who don't know the applications :-) The bureaucrats like SAN arrays because they're blazingly fast, and because they're easy to administer, back up, plan for storage growth, etc. And $8000/TB is really just fine if your idea of "huge" storage is a TB or two.
I've got an application that needs to do a bit of fast-IOPS logging (so the overpriced SAS drives and SAN array are fine), but needs lots of bulk storage that doesn't need blazing fast access, but does need to be on disks as opposed to tape. I probably need 10TB to start with, growing to 20+ as we get more customers.
It's obviously a job for NAS - Network Attached Storage, the kind of stuff Netapp used to sell (presumably still does), which wraps a certain amount of framework around the big cheap drives, so you still get the operational benefits and manageability, at a cost that's maybe twice what the cheap raw drives cost. Lacking that, I'd been thinking about stuffing a server full of 2TB drives, but our IT folks not only don't like that because they don't have the manageability and easy upgrades, but they only allow little 300GB SAS drives (not even the new 600GB), and only support 2.5" drives, not 3.5", because that's more cost-effective or something. Sigh.
I've got "Precise" in quotes because I'm skeptical that you can ever get really good predictions about the future, or even the present, especially from users. But if you try, it's going to take you a while, and you'll be spending loaded-engineer-salary time and harassed-user time trying to get predictions that the users will tell you are guesses. Meanwhile, you do need to get some disks online, and it's going to take you a while to accumulate tracking data. I'm in that kind of situation now - until there's enough disk and users on the system to get a really good model of users, we won't really know, so we're aiming high.
Yes, I mean Celsius. Absolute 0 is -273C, aka 0C is 273K, so 313K is 40C. Superconductors need to be kept *colder* than their magic temperature - below that they've got zero resistance, above it they've got resistance. (That's ignoring other magnetic effects, current limits, etc.) Room temperature superconductors are pretty much the Holy Grail of that business.
So yes, the UK is almost always cooler than 40C - they can even keep beer at room temperature. 40C is fucking hot, it doesn't get that hot in Brooklyn, it's Africa hot, but it's not sauna hot or spontaneous human combustion hot. India would still need to do some refrigeration (or keep it underground, as someone else pointed out), but it's cheap air-conditioner refrigeration, not liquid-nitrogen or liquid-helium refrigeration.
313K is 40C. So this stuff ought to behave just fine in the UK, but only part of the year in India :-) Even in temperate climates, you'd have to be careful not to leave it out in the sun, so again it should be fine in the UK...
Lawsuits are a lot cheaper if you're doing the work yourself and not paying a lawyer. They could fly somewhere if they're in a hurry, but driving a camper is probably cheaper and gives you a place to stay, and for the most part they can pick and choose targets for convenience.
And they can keep winning lawsuits because they keep annoying towns or cops into violating their civil rights or people into punching them or whatever. And if people wise up and stop doing that, the Phelpsies just think of new ways to piss people off.
I don't think they seriously believe what they say, though they may very well hate gays and enjoy antagonizing whoever's fun to offend. I think they're deliberate trolls, doing this because they like the attention and get to sue anybody who interferes with their freedom of speech. It doesn't take any dissociation from reality; they're just effective sociopaths who've got a profitable gig going.
You're still treating them as if they mean what they say. They don't really care - they're just looking for the most offensive positions they can find, because that gets them the most publicity and the most antagonism they can use to generate lawsuits.
This kind of gig works a lot better when there's a First Amendment protecting free speech; in the Old Days they would have had to actually lead mobs of followers so they could steal the houses of the witches/Jews/blacks/gypsies/etc.
I think they know very well that they're trolls - just because they're sociopaths doesn't mean they don't have some insight into what they're doing. It's possible that they're trolls who actually do hate gay people, as opposed to merely finding them convenient targets, but they're in the Professional Trolling Business, making money by having towns ban them and people assault them and suing.
Remember a few years back when the KKK held a rally in Simi Valley? A friend of mine was on the city council at the time. The Klansters weren't locals, they were from out of town, and they were *very* disappointed that the town didn't forbid them to march, and didn't let the counter-protesters try to beat them up, because their real objective was to get banned and have a lawsuit they could easily win.
If I understood Hawking's "Brief History of Time" correctly, which I certainly won't guarantee, and if I'm remembering it correctly N years later, which is also dubious, having a one-dimensional timeline doesn't guarantee having a beginning. Spacetime might be a closed set, including Time 0, or might be an open set, including all times above 0 but not actually including Time 0 itself. So there might not have been a beginning, even if there's asymptotically close to having been one.