Hmmm, I have been out to the security arena for a while but aren't passwords individually hashed? There shouldn't be a single crack to the entire database.
Nope. Think about it as a statistical thing. There's an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to something the cracker hasn't tried yet
Statistically speaking this should read that there is an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to any other password the cracker hasn't tried yet. The population of passwords the cracker is about to try depends on the defined duration of "about to" as well as the number of guesses the cracker is allowed per interval. Only if these two criteria split the untried passwords into equal populations will there be equal probabilities. This of course disregards the already attempted password population.
The best knob to turn in any reasonable password policy is limiting the number of guesses per minute. Even using 4 digit numeric pin type passwords with no change policy can be secure if proper limiting factors are put in place.
So what is the difference between airing an episode of Friends with commercials via network TV and airing an episode of Friends with commercials via the web. I can only think of two things: 1) there are more aggregate costs related to airing on network TV, and 2) which living room display people look at to watch the program.
There is nothing special about network broadcast TV besides the limits of the underlying technology and the nostalgia. Scientists did not conceive of the idea of a limited selection of channels and then proceed to develop the technology to bring such a conception to life. Likewise the business models emerged after and within the constraints of the technology were developed.
The success of Friends had nothing to do with the underlying technology. People widely recognize the broadcast networks as places to go for [arguably] quality content and so were more likely to tune in to watch Friends. If TiVo, Apple TV, Miro or some other competitor establishes itself as the set-top box of the future, there is nothing preventing NBC, CBS, ABC or any other distribution network from collecting content and leveraging their recognition and band strength from establishing a virtual channel to the same effect.
There are already companies that are establishing virtual channels on the Internet. Some are publishing content through TiVo today; although their content is not currently being displayed alongside broadcast or cable channel's in the channel guides. If TiVo promoted one of these virtual channels up into the channel guide, people would not know the difference. The only real difference would be the channel's reputation and its underlying costs--remember that reputations change over time [think of Fox from its inception].
So getting back to content and production costs . . . costs have nothing to do with prices. The market dictates the prices and the producers and distributors deal with the costs. If there is a TV program that according to marketing does not meet the hurdle rate for traditional network television it will not be made. But if there are alternative lower cost channels the program may be produced for the alternative channel. When a production on the lower cost channel garners the same viewership as they would have on a "main stream" channel, the ad revenues will be the same; the only difference will be the revenue split will generate much more profits via the lower cost channel.
This may all sound so pie in the sky, but look at real world examples of the Fox network or any number of cable channels. Fox demonstrated that a new product can challenge the traditional networks for mindshare, and cable channels demonstrated how to leverage their cost advantages to take on different risks with programs.
You are right that this is all about monetizing content. Where you are wrong is that the current rents being collected across the mainstream industry will persist into the future. As more efficient methods of production and distribution are accepted by the population, some people in the current media industry will be squeezed out of the process. This will enable producers to take bigger risks, but will also create larger rewards with less dilution of the profits. At some point producers who are able to reach reasonably sized audiences at lower costs will be more profitable and the industry will once again shift.
I am not against charging for programs, but I think it will occur at the opposite end of the industry than from you suggest. Specialty content with small but devout audiences will be able to change direct fees long before the higher cost mainstream productions. If mainstream media is profitable with current cost models, they have the potential of being more profitable with a lower cost model. This is the crux of my argument.
You are forgetting about the other side of the equation. You say that content cannot remain freely available because the cost of production is too high. Maybe the traditional model of controlling distribution created an artificial scarcity of resources [access to content] that cannot survive on the Internet. Maybe the costs of production are too high necessitated by the competition for limited distribution. With unlimited distribution producers might have to realign their budget to more effectively hit their audience in a meaningful and profitable way.
There are many examples of quality content that is distributed for free on the Internet that generates sufficient income for the producers. I think that when everything settles The Brothers Chaps will be recognized as having pioneered the new paradigm. They were really the first true independent entertainment content providers on the Internet with a sustainable business model--which appears to grow stronger every year.
You also claim that this shift will kill TiVo. I think TiVo is actually uniquely positioned to take advantage of this sort of change. TiVo is already able to pull content from producers on the Internet. All they need is a search and rank back-end that keeps its customers happy with content they want to watch from producers across the Internet. TiVo's ultimate competition will not be cable or satellite providers, but software projects like Miro. If TiVo is able to save people time searching for things they want to watch and present the content in an easy way people will likely still be willing to pay five or ten dollars a month for the convenience. The advantage TiVo has over Miro is its wide acceptance and a direct connection to the television set.
In the end it will not be media corporations who decide the future. It is simply too easy to create new many-to-many distribution models for content. And just like TV competes with books for timeshare from people, the Internet competes with TV. There are no artificial limits on the Internet that give media moguls the power to dictate the future. It will be consumers and citizens deciding the most appropriate ways to fill our days with useless entertainment.
And how can one not be impressed with how consistent Microsoft Office is across all its applications. Things that stand out in my mind are its handing of color pallets, windowing paradigm, dialogue boxes, cut/paste semantics, embedded object management and file handling.
Try these tasks in both MS-Office and OpenOffice:
- Configure a corporate color pallet so that each application logically defaults to using the colors appropriately and are easily available from the tool bars.
- Open two documents of each type. Then close one of each type using the X box in the upper right corner. Re-open and display each pair of document types so that both of a common type are visible at the same time.
- Draw a simple diagram in the word processor, then the spread sheet, then the presentation software, and final the drawing tool. Copy and paste the various drawing between the applications.
- Create a folder with a sample document of each application type. Copy the folder with all the document inside. Edit each type of document in the new folder. Then open each document in the old folder with the documents side by side to visually compare the contents.
Once you have done this, come back here and post how much better MS-Office really is.
I am not pushing an agenda, just explaining the market forces at play. I personally prefer to do all my processing locally, although it would be great if Blender did all its rendering in the cloud.
Having said that there are time when it absolutely makes sense to do word processing on central servers. Collaborative contract drafting and negotiation would be much better done centrally rather than have all the random back and forth mismatched version rigmarole. Centralized processing is about more than just the computing power or efficiency. Any time tightly integrated collaboration is more important than absolute control, a centralized model makes sense.
But over-all, I think we would probably agree that pushing everything to the cloud is a bad idea. I personally think we need to maintain a healthy balance between centralized and personal computing to prevent any one company from being able to leverage the consolidation for market control.
Anybody with a reasonable knowledge of statistics will tell you that it is always better to aggregate partially used resources into a central shared pool. Mainframes are highly efficient but the companies that sold and supported mainframes spent too much time thinking of ways to extract higher revenues out of customers instead of making better products. Eventually the inefficiency of dealing with bunches of small computers was less than the profit margins on mainframes. Now software on these "bunches of computers" is robust enough to re-centralize, but without the single vendor demanding exorbitantly high fees.
The next question will be how mobility affects this equation. Will the need for centralized computing continue due to the need for low power consuming micro-portable devices? Or will the need for disconnected or functionality push the logic out to self meshing autonomous computing devices?
You are right! Only a fool would mess around with Linux for a DVR. Linux is clearly not capable of such tasks. You should stop wasting your time and just get a TiVo.
Let's also not forgot the capital cost of the pipe or the labor cost contracting the installation. I'll give you 8 miles of pipe over rocky terrain from the nearest fresh water county source instead of trying to finance a 200 mile pipe for me. I guess I'll have to sign some soft of agreement with the other land owners as well.
Being you think you can do it cheaper maybe this is an arbitrage opportunity for you to bundle any solution of your choosing and sell me water.
In reality for this particular situation, I think the best bet would be to spend the $1500 for one of these units and add another $5000 for the solar cells and battery. That is unless you can deliver it to the location cheaper.
Not all situations are equal. The scientific energy costs are irrelevant if there are other commercial, political or physical barriers.
Backfired??? Hmmm, thousands of people are going to be using their software, some for the first time, and might find sufficient value to pay for an upgrade. Do you remember how Microsoft established a foot hold into [strangle hold onto] the market? These guys are bright. I think they realized it was a no lose marketing ploy.
I am perplexed by MySQL. I installed it on a server 9 months ago for a new project I was tinkering with. Paying jobs kept me from doing much more than getting MySQL up and running. Last month I noticed my server was straining under a heavy load. I figured I had finally pushed the server beyond its limits doing multi-site hosting with Apache and Postgres, multi-site mail serving with Postfix and Courier POP/IMAP [backended into Postgres], running video security software, and being a general collect all project server. It wasn't a big deal being there are no critical customer services running so I wasn't too concerned even when SSH was non-responsive. When I got console access I was shocked to find MySQL, which had no databases and no connections [blocked via iptables], was consuming tons of memory and cpu. Arrgh! I killed MySQL, the server recovered and everything else it humming without a problem.
My only explination is that MySQL is like a petrol engine in that it will seize up if run too long without a proper load.:)
Your comments are less about lawyers than about law makers--many of whom do not even posses law degrees much less a basic understanding of existing laws, principals of fairness or the fundamental underpinnings of the United States of America.
=== We're sorry, but this e-mail message isn't compatible with your operating system and/or mouse pad. Please try again on a computer with the following:
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I remember when Microsoft advertised no more UAEs [Unrecoverable Application Errors http://support.microsoft.com/kb/75490%5D. They accomplished this by renaming UAEs to GPFs, more commonly known as BSODs.
Actually, being intuitive is only one measure of an application's over-all usability. Sometime too heavy of a focus on being intuitive can interfere with an application's usability or in extreme cases suitability for accomplishing a task.
I found the Fit-PC to be the best and easiest solution for this sort of thing. It consumes less than 5watts, has 2 100meg interfaces, dual boots Ubuntu and Gentoo, and is very hack friendly. I turned off video, send syslog to may vhost, turned off my hard drive and throttled down my CPU and am now consuming a bit over two watts. It runs like a champ, consumes almost now power and it is so good to be able to have the flexibility of a full Unix-like box again.
The problem with raising the price is that the unit cost of energy remains the same no matter how it is used. Using price to control behavior hits some segments of society disproportionately hard without having much impact on overall usage. I think the few successful uses of price establish tiered pricing schedules where the unit price increases as consumption increases past the pricing bands. The problem with this model, however, is that as soon as you establish a tiered system individuals and organization with the most political power tend to negotiate the best pricing.
I personally think the cheapest and most effective solution would be to install non-functioning solar panels on every residential roof. That's right, non-functioning solar panel. All you really need is an elevated metal panel to act as a raised radiant barrier. This would likely reduce the peak need by 30%. Under roof radiant barriers can reduce loads by up to 10%. Elevating such a barrier above the roof allows most of the passing heat to easily exhaust improving effectiveness a few times over. Think of is as having trees shade your entire house--very effective with less side effects.
The reason why the entrenched oil industry is uninterested in alternative energy is because with oil they control the supply chain. Many alternative forms of energy are difficult to control. Without this firm grip of control on the industry any investment will ultimately lead to a net loss for these powerful few and a chaotic reorganization for all others in the energy industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, I have been out to the security arena for a while but aren't passwords individually hashed? There shouldn't be a single crack to the entire database.
Nope. Think about it as a statistical thing. There's an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to something the cracker hasn't tried yet
Statistically speaking this should read that there is an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to any other password the cracker hasn't tried yet. The population of passwords the cracker is about to try depends on the defined duration of "about to" as well as the number of guesses the cracker is allowed per interval. Only if these two criteria split the untried passwords into equal populations will there be equal probabilities. This of course disregards the already attempted password population.
The best knob to turn in any reasonable password policy is limiting the number of guesses per minute. Even using 4 digit numeric pin type passwords with no change policy can be secure if proper limiting factors are put in place.
So what is the difference between airing an episode of Friends with commercials via network TV and airing an episode of Friends with commercials via the web. I can only think of two things: 1) there are more aggregate costs related to airing on network TV, and 2) which living room display people look at to watch the program.
There is nothing special about network broadcast TV besides the limits of the underlying technology and the nostalgia. Scientists did not conceive of the idea of a limited selection of channels and then proceed to develop the technology to bring such a conception to life. Likewise the business models emerged after and within the constraints of the technology were developed.
The success of Friends had nothing to do with the underlying technology. People widely recognize the broadcast networks as places to go for [arguably] quality content and so were more likely to tune in to watch Friends. If TiVo, Apple TV, Miro or some other competitor establishes itself as the set-top box of the future, there is nothing preventing NBC, CBS, ABC or any other distribution network from collecting content and leveraging their recognition and band strength from establishing a virtual channel to the same effect.
There are already companies that are establishing virtual channels on the Internet. Some are publishing content through TiVo today; although their content is not currently being displayed alongside broadcast or cable channel's in the channel guides. If TiVo promoted one of these virtual channels up into the channel guide, people would not know the difference. The only real difference would be the channel's reputation and its underlying costs--remember that reputations change over time [think of Fox from its inception].
So getting back to content and production costs . . . costs have nothing to do with prices. The market dictates the prices and the producers and distributors deal with the costs. If there is a TV program that according to marketing does not meet the hurdle rate for traditional network television it will not be made. But if there are alternative lower cost channels the program may be produced for the alternative channel. When a production on the lower cost channel garners the same viewership as they would have on a "main stream" channel, the ad revenues will be the same; the only difference will be the revenue split will generate much more profits via the lower cost channel.
This may all sound so pie in the sky, but look at real world examples of the Fox network or any number of cable channels. Fox demonstrated that a new product can challenge the traditional networks for mindshare, and cable channels demonstrated how to leverage their cost advantages to take on different risks with programs.
You are right that this is all about monetizing content. Where you are wrong is that the current rents being collected across the mainstream industry will persist into the future. As more efficient methods of production and distribution are accepted by the population, some people in the current media industry will be squeezed out of the process. This will enable producers to take bigger risks, but will also create larger rewards with less dilution of the profits. At some point producers who are able to reach reasonably sized audiences at lower costs will be more profitable and the industry will once again shift.
I am not against charging for programs, but I think it will occur at the opposite end of the industry than from you suggest. Specialty content with small but devout audiences will be able to change direct fees long before the higher cost mainstream productions. If mainstream media is profitable with current cost models, they have the potential of being more profitable with a lower cost model. This is the crux of my argument.
You are forgetting about the other side of the equation. You say that content cannot remain freely available because the cost of production is too high. Maybe the traditional model of controlling distribution created an artificial scarcity of resources [access to content] that cannot survive on the Internet. Maybe the costs of production are too high necessitated by the competition for limited distribution. With unlimited distribution producers might have to realign their budget to more effectively hit their audience in a meaningful and profitable way.
There are many examples of quality content that is distributed for free on the Internet that generates sufficient income for the producers. I think that when everything settles The Brothers Chaps will be recognized as having pioneered the new paradigm. They were really the first true independent entertainment content providers on the Internet with a sustainable business model--which appears to grow stronger every year.
You also claim that this shift will kill TiVo. I think TiVo is actually uniquely positioned to take advantage of this sort of change. TiVo is already able to pull content from producers on the Internet. All they need is a search and rank back-end that keeps its customers happy with content they want to watch from producers across the Internet. TiVo's ultimate competition will not be cable or satellite providers, but software projects like Miro. If TiVo is able to save people time searching for things they want to watch and present the content in an easy way people will likely still be willing to pay five or ten dollars a month for the convenience. The advantage TiVo has over Miro is its wide acceptance and a direct connection to the television set.
In the end it will not be media corporations who decide the future. It is simply too easy to create new many-to-many distribution models for content. And just like TV competes with books for timeshare from people, the Internet competes with TV. There are no artificial limits on the Internet that give media moguls the power to dictate the future. It will be consumers and citizens deciding the most appropriate ways to fill our days with useless entertainment.
And how can one not be impressed with how consistent Microsoft Office is across all its applications. Things that stand out in my mind are its handing of color pallets, windowing paradigm, dialogue boxes, cut/paste semantics, embedded object management and file handling.
Try these tasks in both MS-Office and OpenOffice:
- Configure a corporate color pallet so that each application logically defaults to using the colors appropriately and are easily available from the tool bars.
- Open two documents of each type. Then close one of each type using the X box in the upper right corner. Re-open and display each pair of document types so that both of a common type are visible at the same time.
- Draw a simple diagram in the word processor, then the spread sheet, then the presentation software, and final the drawing tool. Copy and paste the various drawing between the applications.
- Create a folder with a sample document of each application type. Copy the folder with all the document inside. Edit each type of document in the new folder. Then open each document in the old folder with the documents side by side to visually compare the contents.
Once you have done this, come back here and post how much better MS-Office really is.
Yes, but only if your total professional expenses are more than 2% of your annual income otherwise you are just sending the $200.
I am not pushing an agenda, just explaining the market forces at play. I personally prefer to do all my processing locally, although it would be great if Blender did all its rendering in the cloud.
Having said that there are time when it absolutely makes sense to do word processing on central servers. Collaborative contract drafting and negotiation would be much better done centrally rather than have all the random back and forth mismatched version rigmarole. Centralized processing is about more than just the computing power or efficiency. Any time tightly integrated collaboration is more important than absolute control, a centralized model makes sense.
But over-all, I think we would probably agree that pushing everything to the cloud is a bad idea. I personally think we need to maintain a healthy balance between centralized and personal computing to prevent any one company from being able to leverage the consolidation for market control.
Anybody with a reasonable knowledge of statistics will tell you that it is always better to aggregate partially used resources into a central shared pool. Mainframes are highly efficient but the companies that sold and supported mainframes spent too much time thinking of ways to extract higher revenues out of customers instead of making better products. Eventually the inefficiency of dealing with bunches of small computers was less than the profit margins on mainframes. Now software on these "bunches of computers" is robust enough to re-centralize, but without the single vendor demanding exorbitantly high fees.
The next question will be how mobility affects this equation. Will the need for centralized computing continue due to the need for low power consuming micro-portable devices? Or will the need for disconnected or functionality push the logic out to self meshing autonomous computing devices?
Exactly!
You are right! Only a fool would mess around with Linux for a DVR. Linux is clearly not capable of such tasks. You should stop wasting your time and just get a TiVo.
Let's also not forgot the capital cost of the pipe or the labor cost contracting the installation. I'll give you 8 miles of pipe over rocky terrain from the nearest fresh water county source instead of trying to finance a 200 mile pipe for me. I guess I'll have to sign some soft of agreement with the other land owners as well.
Being you think you can do it cheaper maybe this is an arbitrage opportunity for you to bundle any solution of your choosing and sell me water.
In reality for this particular situation, I think the best bet would be to spend the $1500 for one of these units and add another $5000 for the solar cells and battery. That is unless you can deliver it to the location cheaper.
Not all situations are equal. The scientific energy costs are irrelevant if there are other commercial, political or physical barriers.
Let's not forget the energy cost of pumping seawater 200 miles inland and 600 feet above sea level to my house.
It seems others disagree with you about 2TB SSD systems.
http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-500/
Ironically, these devices are less than an order of magnitude more than the Sun storage.
Backfired??? Hmmm, thousands of people are going to be using their software, some for the first time, and might find sufficient value to pay for an upgrade. Do you remember how Microsoft established a foot hold into [strangle hold onto] the market? These guys are bright. I think they realized it was a no lose marketing ploy.
I am perplexed by MySQL. I installed it on a server 9 months ago for a new project I was tinkering with. Paying jobs kept me from doing much more than getting MySQL up and running. Last month I noticed my server was straining under a heavy load. I figured I had finally pushed the server beyond its limits doing multi-site hosting with Apache and Postgres, multi-site mail serving with Postfix and Courier POP/IMAP [backended into Postgres], running video security software, and being a general collect all project server. It wasn't a big deal being there are no critical customer services running so I wasn't too concerned even when SSH was non-responsive. When I got console access I was shocked to find MySQL, which had no databases and no connections [blocked via iptables], was consuming tons of memory and cpu. Arrgh! I killed MySQL, the server recovered and everything else it humming without a problem.
My only explination is that MySQL is like a petrol engine in that it will seize up if run too long without a proper load. :)
Your comments are less about lawyers than about law makers--many of whom do not even posses law degrees much less a basic understanding of existing laws, principals of fairness or the fundamental underpinnings of the United States of America.
I sent the DNC a complaint email--contents below:
===
We're sorry, but this e-mail message isn't compatible with your
operating system and/or mouse pad. Please try again on a
computer with the following:
Compatible operating systems:
QNX, Irix, BSD, Linux, Multix, or an Amiga running ShapeShifter running
A/UX or any Intel Mac running SheepShaver running A/UX.
Compatible email clients:
elm, pine, balsa, alpine, or mutt
At first I thought your post was tongue-n-cheek until I read some of your other posts.
Thunderbird uses the mbox format to store e-mail, which is a lowest common denominator (ie: flat file).
Here are a couple of super-duper-secret links, but shhh, don't share these with anybody else.
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+mbox
- or -
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+thunderbird
By the way, where do I sign up to Astroturf? I could really use the extra money.
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.barackobama.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:02 GMT
Server: PWS/1.3.22
X-Px: ht dal-btn-n15
ETag: "74ea62-af3-48b339d1"
Content-Length: 1220
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:01:37 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1446
Expires: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:08 GMT
Connection: close
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.johnmccain.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 106909
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.johnmccain.com/Home.htm
Last-Modified: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:41 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"18c861ab137c91:280"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:59 GMT
Connection: close
You can also try: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
Most signs point to the fact that McCain hates Linux, not Obama.
I remember when Microsoft advertised no more UAEs [Unrecoverable Application Errors http://support.microsoft.com/kb/75490%5D. They accomplished this by renaming UAEs to GPFs, more commonly known as BSODs.
Actually, being intuitive is only one measure of an application's over-all usability. Sometime too heavy of a focus on being intuitive can interfere with an application's usability or in extreme cases suitability for accomplishing a task.
I found the Fit-PC to be the best and easiest solution for this sort of thing. It consumes less than 5watts, has 2 100meg interfaces, dual boots Ubuntu and Gentoo, and is very hack friendly. I turned off video, send syslog to may vhost, turned off my hard drive and throttled down my CPU and am now consuming a bit over two watts. It runs like a champ, consumes almost now power and it is so good to be able to have the flexibility of a full Unix-like box again.
The problem with raising the price is that the unit cost of energy remains the same no matter how it is used. Using price to control behavior hits some segments of society disproportionately hard without having much impact on overall usage. I think the few successful uses of price establish tiered pricing schedules where the unit price increases as consumption increases past the pricing bands. The problem with this model, however, is that as soon as you establish a tiered system individuals and organization with the most political power tend to negotiate the best pricing.
I personally think the cheapest and most effective solution would be to install non-functioning solar panels on every residential roof. That's right, non-functioning solar panel. All you really need is an elevated metal panel to act as a raised radiant barrier. This would likely reduce the peak need by 30%. Under roof radiant barriers can reduce loads by up to 10%. Elevating such a barrier above the roof allows most of the passing heat to easily exhaust improving effectiveness a few times over. Think of is as having trees shade your entire house--very effective with less side effects.
The reason why the entrenched oil industry is uninterested in alternative energy is because with oil they control the supply chain. Many alternative forms of energy are difficult to control. Without this firm grip of control on the industry any investment will ultimately lead to a net loss for these powerful few and a chaotic reorganization for all others in the energy industry.