Some "obsolete" but workable IBM AS/400 units are sold very cheaply. I know of at least one enterprising geek who filled a basement with AS/400s that he bought with a price negotiated by the pound. They all run, what he does with them I don't know, I'd hate to see his electric bill.
(IBM Servers sold by the pound =anagram> 'Short-lived!' presumed by snob. So dry: rubbish developments.) [almost never get any +1 when I include an anagram, I wonder why...:) ]
Sony is making an upskirt converter? Oh. Sorry, misread that.
I guess I was thinking about Sony's prior gaffe; a videocamera's infrared night-vision feature that when used in daylight rendered thin clothing as transparent.
(Infrared Upskirt Converter =anagram> Trick run: render of privates, Or it transferred pink curve)
http://www.iqd.com/Hoshin_Def.htm: Total Quality Management is a structured system for satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by integrating the business environment, continuous improvement, and breakthroughs with development, improvement, and maintenance cycles while changing organizational culture.
What this means is, it's an adaptive process. You can't expect perfection initially, but you push through 'improvements' and 'refinements' as you find flaws. You then write off the past, sometimes irresponsibly, and say 'we were just learning then, we're doing better now and will continue to get better.'
Mattel will certainly use this opportunity to make CyberPatrol even more uncrackable, or so they think. If they're TQM, they don't care about what happened in the past, but they'll keep up appearances by sticking it to the little guys who put out the "old" CPHack.
(Total Quality Management =anagram> Mentally name-tag it 'quota.')
By Moore's Law, the complexity of CPUs will match that of the human mind by 2030.
This presumes that we're comparing a transistor or flipflop with a neuron. While some may find that to be a suitable core component to compare, let's consider the comparison.
How about the complexity of DNA, and of the whole genome that is able to reproduce a new unique yet derivative brain? How about the millions of cis- and trans- distortions along a single protein molecular chain?
How about the human's brain's ability to remap itself to learn new skills, to form abstractions, to pattern-match at any orientation with extremely poor signal-to-noise, to re-route functions in case of damage?
The CPU has a long way to go, before it matches the complexity of the human mind. Comparing the transistor-count of the Intel Pentium III, and a few truckloads of kidney beans, will give you the same number, but not the same result.
(Transistor versus Neuron =anagram> Assertion turns overruns.)
who the hell had the time to count that there were "399 bad words and 128 crude gestures"?
The same kind of person who finds out that the word "Duke" is said 124 times during the oldies tune, "Duke of Earl."
I'm sure the censors know every *blip*in' potential hotspot in the movie. That's what they're paid to do. They likely have a spreadsheet with the SMPTE time code for every middle-finger or reference to scat in the movie.
Same goes for people who numb their minds with the trivia knowledge of how many home-runs some batter performs every season, though I'm sure *that* will get a reaction out of some people.
(How many Dukes of Earl does it take... =anagram> OK, OK, and somewhat easily refuted.)
Somehow, limiting people's access to information is supposed to be justifiable retaliation against someone limiting people's access to information?
(Censorship begat censorship. =anagram> So, proscribing the cheapness. So, inspects abhorring speech. Echo angriness! Bitch! Oppress!)
Introductions are in order...
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 2
When I first heard of these devices being used in Japan, it was shortly after the Tamagotchi craze. It was just another extension to that concept; something to do while taking the commuter trains.
People here have been saying it's incredibly lame, because they can't see why someone would run into new people all the time, or why they couldn't just say "Hi" to new people without prompting.
While I can't say how reasonable the argument is, or how popular the pagers really were, it sounded more plausible when it considered the differences in society. The Japanese society is more closed-lipped about a lot of things. They prefer to be introduced than to offer a greeting on their own. And commuter trains put you near LOTS of new people daily without much incentive to talk to any of them.
These have too many shortcomings to work effectively in any USA venue; women are very dis-incented to talking to any strange man when not around friends, men with these items would appear geek not chic (sorry, Katz), nobody commutes with strangers here, and nobody believes in computerized matchmaking.
(Introductions are in order... =anagram> Nice it is, or, or, or redundant.)
The Bench, as a community, needs flexible community standards. While I feel that the creators do have the right to retain some of the control over their "property," I think that letting visitors moderate/vote their opinions of the resulting set of comics is a great way to raise the overall quality, without making it draconian or losing sight of the "participation" aspect of the project.
If it had a "top ten this week" gallery, I'd visit regularly.
As it is, I couldn't help but submit my own attempt at humor.
(All good things in Moderation? =anagram> Handiest old monitoring goal.)
Tongue in cheek: If SlashDot were running on Windows 2000, all seven hundred copies of the following article would be coalesced into a single copy:
Misleading headline on Slashdot! (Score:2, Informative) by Various (dont.spam.me.I.cant.run.spam.filters.myself@somed omain.com) on Thu 02 Mar 08:53AM EST (#69) (User Info) http://winblows.sucks/
It seems to me that this is another example of the Slashdot Editors getting carried away again; I mean, clearly they didn't read the original article or check their facts.
The original article states that this is an automatic process, and finds identical file copies as candidates for symbolic linking plus copy-on-write.
Now, all we need is a semantic copy detector.
(Single Instance Store saves space on Slashdot! =anagram> Cheapness: so overloading tactless nastiness.)
I recall a week-long strip of Berkley Breathed's Bloom County cartoon, where Opus the Penguin got addicted to a virtual reality home shopping network. He found that if he just points at an item he sees in the unwieldy goggles, it's ordered and delivered. "I think I just bought a forklift."
I wish I had a copy of it to scan, but it's in one of the anthologies, I'm sure.
Given that Bloom County stopped running before Bezos conceived of Amazon.com, and given that the patent on the waterbed was denied due to Robert Heinlein's depictions in novels, may we not consider this a form of prior art?
Although it appears people are confusing the group that got the award (developers), and the people who are charging for access to docs (USB-IF), perhaps it's time to split the Beanie Awards concept in twain.
Slashdot Beanie Awards For laudable service to fellow geeks.
Slashdot Weenie Awards For all the FUD-spewing, patent abusing sorts.
(Slashdot Weenie Awards =anagram> So, what ideals answered?)
The original Fantasia didn't do very well in the box office initially. The concept was quite foreign, and the artwork (especially Rite of Spring) was controversial. Releasing now, in an IMAX distribution, it's doing well... for an IMAX distribution. It's peanuts compared to the 35mm Dolby or THX screens market.
I watched this on the Paramount Famous Players IMAX screen, in one of the Toronto area "Playdium" theaters. The theater was far from packed, but I enjoyed the show.
I give it a 7, on a [1-10] scale. If I purchased a copy, I'd skip DVD (never accept lossy compression on something as poor as NTSC) and go for laserdisc or whatever HDTV is available then.
The graininess of the 1940s Sorcerer's Apprentice piece on the IMAX screen was quite apparent. I'm quite surprised they didn't work harder on it to clean it up for large screens. Much of the coloration is fairly simple; some pixel filters already do such cleanup quite nicely, without disturbing the line art outlines.
Drove past a large tentlike structure a bit north of LAX, in Los Angeles, with Fantasia 2000 banners on it.
Apparently, from what my LA friend explained, Disney couldn't get the show time on the local IMAX screens, so they built their own theater for the duration of the show. The land is planned for an unrelated building project next year, but in the meantime, they're making the most of it.
Welcome, MyAmazonNickName. You're pre-registered on sothebys.amazon.com. Please accept our Conditions of Sale and you'll be ready to bid. (If you're not MyAmazonNickName, click here.)
Just a reminder, Microsoft runs each Business Unit already as a separate business, trust or anti-trust. The HBU (hardware biz unit) has none of the issues that WOBU (windows office biz unit) has, or that the OS BUs have.
The hardware guys are accustomed to making products that are expensive to revise, can't be patched in the field, and need to run under fairly rigorous use without crashing.
When a product can be released patched, from a business perspective, why shouldn't it be released and patched?
(MS Hardware is not MS Software =anagram> Oh wow! Drat! Mainframe's stress)
In the interest of OpenSource, or the geek's right to reverse-engineer closed processes, I am posting my theories on the slashdot submission queue process:
if $article{title} =~/quake|linux|mp3/ || $article{body} =~/(msft|microsoft|riaa|patent) suck/ { post(%article); }
Am I missing something?
(freedom of regular expression =anagram> so, exposing referred formulae)
This seems to be a case of traditional boilerplate story forms used by the journalists. Such a story would look like:
A major computer attack happened
when (today). It has attacked notable victim machines (yahoo). What is unusual about this attack is, unusal feature (indirect distributed source). This attack specifically uses code for vector os type (*nix). It is triggered by vector transmission method (daemon install). Due to the nature of this code, the attacks of this form cannot come from other familiar os types (win, mac).
It's not journalism to then state the speculation that OTHER potential code could do exactly the same thing on the other familiar OS types. Editors would possibly see it as a liability to state it; Dan Rather doesn't explain HOW to improve a weapon. Such speculation is punditry and analysis. Of COURSE it's true that Windows and MacOS and BeOS and PalmOS and anything else can be compromised. It just takes a change to the virus/trojan mechanisms.
"Virus" is an apt analogy. It depends on a specific sort of host. You don't catch the flu from your cat, but there are viral infections that specialize on either species. You can catch some diseases inter-species, but it requires the two species to have something in common which the virus can exploit.
When I travel, I don't have a dialup ISP. Instead, if I have any serious need to check email, I stop at a Kinko's photocopy center. They have rented Windows and Mac terminals with Internet access. Expensive to surf, but easy to telnet into my shell ISP and use PINE.
There's more rental spots out there, if you know where to look. I saw fax slots and sit-down web/email kiosks in Chicago Midway a couple weeks ago.
A request-for-proposal I noticed on eLance.com is indicative of the unsavory taste I get in my mouth whenever discussing domain registrations.
Inviting bids to create an application to run reports of WHOIS/internic directory by the expiration date. In other words, list the domains expiring in the next X number of days. User should be able to input the number of days in a field. A second report should run to check the above expiring domains to see if they are available to register. These available names should be listed by.com,.net or.org. Need user-friendly front end and documentation for a non-technical person to perform this function.
I'm not sure whether there's sufficient information on WHOIS to perform this task meaningfully. This requestor may be making a new service to "remind" people that their domain is up for renewal, perhaps to offer a lower price on the renewal than their last registrar, but I have a feeling it's more to find names to scalp.
(Opportunistic domain thieves =anagram> and this viperous competition =anagram> a victim proposition, enthused.)
When I first tried the signal9.com ConSeal firewall product for a WinNT machine, I was happy to see that it had a learning mode to get the basic ruleset down, and then a locked mode where it behaved the way firewalls should. The basic rules could then be tweaked, if new needs arose.
What I figure the NEXT step would be, is smart firewalls. Two features come to mind instantly, but I'm sure there's others.
Keep a list of the last
N source addresses, and the port they tried to touch.
If a single source tries more than P ports that are already firewalled off, ban that source completely for a few minutes.
If a single untrusted source tries to ping with large packets, or with fragments, etc., ban that source completely, too.
ICMP/ping and other probes are useful. I ping slashdot.org sometimes just to see if my DNS is working. (Microsoft.com no longer accepts even utilitarian pings.) This smarter compromise approach will make script-kiddie attacks much more difficult, or much slower. I would wager that it would make more sophisticated cracks difficult, too, because most heavy cracks start with simpler probes.
Irony versus Coincidence (-1 Offtopic -1 Pedantic)
on
Want More Geek Chicks?
·
· Score: 2
i ro ny - n. * The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. * An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. * Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
co in ci dence - n. * The state or fact of occupying the same relative position or area in space. * A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.
Newscasters and college students are quite likely to overuse irony when they mean coincidence (or poignance).
Isn't itironic that Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology terrorism campaign ended because his typewritten manifesto was circulated over the Internet? Isn't it a heck of a coincidence that it was his brother who turned him in?
The international LEGO Group was established in 1932 and is one of the worlds largest toy manufactorers, employing about 10,000 people in 50 companies in 30 countries. Did you know...
4.9152 cm3 is the volume of an 8-stud LEGO brick. It measures 9.6 x 32 x 16 mm.
Thousands of a mm - that's the tolerance of accuracy at the LEGO mould factories.
102,981,500 are how many different ways there are to combine six 8-stud bricks of the same colour. If you haven't that much time, you can take three 8-stud bricks - same colour - and fit them together in 1,060 ways. Two 8-stud bricks - still the same colour - can be put together in 24 ways.
203,000,000,000 (203 billion) LEGO elements or thereabouts - were moulded between 1949 and the end of 1998. Of these, 6.5 billion are eight-stud bricks. And 2.3 billion Mini figures have been moulded, decorated and assembled since 1978.
("O, 'LEGO bricks' is plural" =anagram> "Erg, I'll use 'pair o' blocks'.")
Slashdot Mirror
Some "obsolete" but workable IBM AS/400 units are sold very cheaply. I know of at least one enterprising geek who filled a basement with AS/400s that he bought with a price negotiated by the pound . They all run, what he does with them I don't know, I'd hate to see his electric bill.
(IBM Servers sold by the pound =anagram>'Short-lived!' presumed by snob.
So dry: rubbish developments.)
[almost never get any +1 when I include an anagram, I wonder why...
Sony is making an upskirt converter?
Oh. Sorry, misread that.
I guess I was thinking about Sony's prior gaffe; a videocamera's infrared night-vision feature that when used in daylight rendered thin clothing as transparent.
(Infrared Upskirt Converter =anagram>Trick run: render of privates,
Or it transferred pink curve)
Total Quality Management is a structured system for satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by integrating the business environment, continuous improvement, and breakthroughs with development, improvement, and maintenance cycles while changing organizational culture.
What this means is, it's an adaptive process. You can't expect perfection initially, but you push through 'improvements' and 'refinements' as you find flaws. You then write off the past, sometimes irresponsibly, and say 'we were just learning then, we're doing better now and will continue to get better.'
Mattel will certainly use this opportunity to make CyberPatrol even more uncrackable, or so they think. If they're TQM, they don't care about what happened in the past, but they'll keep up appearances by sticking it to the little guys who put out the "old" CPHack.
(Total Quality Management =anagram>Mentally name-tag it 'quota.')
This presumes that we're comparing a transistor or flipflop with a neuron. While some may find that to be a suitable core component to compare, let's consider the comparison.
How about the complexity of DNA, and of the whole genome that is able to reproduce a new unique yet derivative brain? How about the millions of cis- and trans- distortions along a single protein molecular chain?
How about the human's brain's ability to remap itself to learn new skills, to form abstractions, to pattern-match at any orientation with extremely poor signal-to-noise, to re-route functions in case of damage?
The CPU has a long way to go, before it matches the complexity of the human mind. Comparing the transistor-count of the Intel Pentium III, and a few truckloads of kidney beans, will give you the same number, but not the same result.
(Transistor versus Neuron =anagram>Assertion turns overruns.)
The same kind of person who finds out that the word "Duke" is said 124 times during the oldies tune, "Duke of Earl."
I'm sure the censors know every *blip*in' potential hotspot in the movie. That's what they're paid to do. They likely have a spreadsheet with the SMPTE time code for every middle-finger or reference to scat in the movie.
Same goes for people who numb their minds with the trivia knowledge of how many home-runs some batter performs every season, though I'm sure *that* will get a reaction out of some people.
(How many Dukes of Earl does it take... =anagram>OK, OK, and somewhat easily refuted.)
Somehow, limiting people's access to information is supposed to be justifiable retaliation against someone limiting people's access to information?
(Censorship begat censorship. =anagram>So, proscribing the cheapness.
So, inspects abhorring speech.
Echo angriness! Bitch! Oppress!)
When I first heard of these devices being used in Japan, it was shortly after the Tamagotchi craze. It was just another extension to that concept; something to do while taking the commuter trains.
People here have been saying it's incredibly lame, because they can't see why someone would run into new people all the time, or why they couldn't just say "Hi" to new people without prompting.
While I can't say how reasonable the argument is, or how popular the pagers really were, it sounded more plausible when it considered the differences in society. The Japanese society is more closed-lipped about a lot of things. They prefer to be introduced than to offer a greeting on their own. And commuter trains put you near LOTS of new people daily without much incentive to talk to any of them.
These have too many shortcomings to work effectively in any USA venue; women are very dis-incented to talking to any strange man when not around friends, men with these items would appear geek not chic (sorry, Katz), nobody commutes with strangers here, and nobody believes in computerized matchmaking.
(Introductions are in order... =anagram> Nice it is, or, or, or redundant.)At the risk of hubris, here was my strip: Strip #430
The Bench, as a community, needs flexible community standards. While I feel that the creators do have the right to retain some of the control over their "property," I think that letting visitors moderate/vote their opinions of the resulting set of comics is a great way to raise the overall quality, without making it draconian or losing sight of the "participation" aspect of the project.
If it had a "top ten this week" gallery, I'd visit regularly.
As it is, I couldn't help but submit my own attempt at humor.
(All good things in Moderation? =anagram> Handiest old monitoring goal.)Tongue in cheek:
If SlashDot were running on Windows 2000, all seven hundred copies of the following article would be coalesced into a single copy:
by Various (dont.spam.me.I.cant.run.spam.filters.myself@some
(User Info) http://winblows.sucks/
It seems to me that this is another example of the Slashdot Editors getting carried away again; I mean, clearly they didn't read the original article or check their facts.
The original article states that this is an automatic process, and finds identical file copies as candidates for symbolic linking plus copy-on-write.
Now, all we need is a semantic copy detector.
(Single Instance Store saves space on Slashdot! =anagram> Cheapness: so overloading tactless nastiness.)I recall a week-long strip of Berkley Breathed's Bloom County cartoon, where Opus the Penguin got addicted to a virtual reality home shopping network. He found that if he just points at an item he sees in the unwieldy goggles, it's ordered and delivered. "I think I just bought a forklift."
I wish I had a copy of it to scan, but it's in one of the anthologies, I'm sure.
Given that Bloom County stopped running before Bezos conceived of Amazon.com, and given that the patent on the waterbed was denied due to Robert Heinlein's depictions in novels, may we not consider this a form of prior art?
Although it appears people are confusing the group that got the award (developers), and the people who are charging for access to docs (USB-IF), perhaps it's time to split the Beanie Awards concept in twain.
- Slashdot Beanie Awards
- Slashdot Weenie Awards
(Slashdot Weenie Awards =anagram> So, what ideals answered?)For laudable service to fellow geeks.
For all the FUD-spewing, patent abusing sorts.
The original Fantasia didn't do very well in the box office initially. The concept was quite foreign, and the artwork (especially Rite of Spring) was controversial. Releasing now, in an IMAX distribution, it's doing well... for an IMAX distribution. It's peanuts compared to the 35mm Dolby or THX screens market.
I watched this on the Paramount Famous Players IMAX screen, in one of the Toronto area "Playdium" theaters. The theater was far from packed, but I enjoyed the show.
I give it a 7, on a [1-10] scale. If I purchased a copy, I'd skip DVD (never accept lossy compression on something as poor as NTSC) and go for laserdisc or whatever HDTV is available then.
The graininess of the 1940s Sorcerer's Apprentice piece on the IMAX screen was quite apparent. I'm quite surprised they didn't work harder on it to clean it up for large screens. Much of the coloration is fairly simple; some pixel filters already do such cleanup quite nicely, without disturbing the line art outlines.
Drove past a large tentlike structure a bit north of LAX, in Los Angeles, with Fantasia 2000 banners on it.
Apparently, from what my LA friend explained, Disney couldn't get the show time on the local IMAX screens, so they built their own theater for the duration of the show. The land is planned for an unrelated building project next year, but in the meantime, they're making the most of it.
Welcome, MyAmazonNickName. You're pre-registered on sothebys.amazon.com. Please accept our Conditions of Sale and you'll be ready to bid. (If you're not MyAmazonNickName, click here.)
Just a reminder, Microsoft runs each Business Unit already as a separate business, trust or anti-trust. The HBU (hardware biz unit) has none of the issues that WOBU (windows office biz unit) has, or that the OS BUs have.
The hardware guys are accustomed to making products that are expensive to revise, can't be patched in the field, and need to run under fairly rigorous use without crashing.
When a product can be released patched, from a business perspective, why shouldn't it be released and patched?
(MS Hardware is not MS Software =anagram> Oh wow! Drat! Mainframe's stress)In the interest of OpenSource, or the geek's right to reverse-engineer closed processes, I am posting my theories on the slashdot submission queue process:
$article{body} =~
{
post(%article);
}
Am I missing something?
(freedom of regular expression =anagram> so, exposing referred formulae)This seems to be a case of traditional boilerplate story forms used by the journalists. Such a story would look like:
It's not journalism to then state the speculation that OTHER potential code could do exactly the same thing on the other familiar OS types. Editors would possibly see it as a liability to state it; Dan Rather doesn't explain HOW to improve a weapon. Such speculation is punditry and analysis. Of COURSE it's true that Windows and MacOS and BeOS and PalmOS and anything else can be compromised. It just takes a change to the virus/trojan mechanisms.
"Virus" is an apt analogy. It depends on a specific sort of host. You don't catch the flu from your cat, but there are viral infections that specialize on either species. You can catch some diseases inter-species, but it requires the two species to have something in common which the virus can exploit.
When I travel, I don't have a dialup ISP. Instead, if I have any serious need to check email, I stop at a Kinko's photocopy center. They have rented Windows and Mac terminals with Internet access. Expensive to surf, but easy to telnet into my shell ISP and use PINE.
There's more rental spots out there, if you know where to look. I saw fax slots and sit-down web/email kiosks in Chicago Midway a couple weeks ago.
A request-for-proposal I noticed on eLance.com is indicative of the unsavory taste I get in my mouth whenever discussing domain registrations.
I'm not sure whether there's sufficient information on WHOIS to perform this task meaningfully. This requestor may be making a new service to "remind" people that their domain is up for renewal, perhaps to offer a lower price on the renewal than their last registrar, but I have a feeling it's more to find names to scalp.
(Opportunistic domain thieves =anagram> and this viperous competition =anagram> a victim proposition, enthused.)When I first tried the signal9.com ConSeal firewall product for a WinNT machine, I was happy to see that it had a learning mode to get the basic ruleset down, and then a locked mode where it behaved the way firewalls should. The basic rules could then be tweaked, if new needs arose.
What I figure the NEXT step would be, is smart firewalls. Two features come to mind instantly, but I'm sure there's others.
ICMP/ping and other probes are useful. I ping slashdot.org sometimes just to see if my DNS is working. (Microsoft.com no longer accepts even utilitarian pings.) This smarter compromise approach will make script-kiddie attacks much more difficult, or much slower. I would wager that it would make more sophisticated cracks difficult, too, because most heavy cracks start with simpler probes.
i ro ny - n.
* The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
* An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
* Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
co in ci dence - n.
* The state or fact of occupying the same relative position or area in space.
* A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.
Newscasters and college students are quite likely to overuse irony when they mean coincidence (or poignance).
Isn't it ironic that Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology terrorism campaign ended because his typewritten manifesto was circulated over the Internet? Isn't it a heck of a coincidence that it was his brother who turned him in?
'irony versus coincidence' =anagram> 'rude nice/icy conversions' =anagram> 'see concurrency division' =anagram> 'idiocy concerns universe'Of course, 'karma' is more a slashdot thang, than a SuSE thang, but I had to play with my scrabble tiles again.
Karma Chameleon- =anagrams>
Re: Product Announcement- Damnations, geek up this opportunity.
Re: RIAA suit- Pirate punishments not OK to paid guy.
Re: Cigar, Clinton, 'nuff saidOther useless trivia from LEGO.com's website:
- The international LEGO Group was established in 1932 and is one of the worlds largest toy manufactorers, employing about 10,000 people in 50 companies in 30 countries. Did you know...
("O, 'LEGO bricks' is plural" =anagram> "Erg, I'll use 'pair o' blocks'.")4.9152 cm3 is the volume of an 8-stud LEGO brick. It measures 9.6 x 32 x 16 mm.
Thousands of a mm - that's the tolerance of accuracy at the LEGO mould factories.
102,981,500 are how many different ways there are to combine six 8-stud bricks of the same colour. If you haven't that much time, you can take three 8-stud bricks - same colour - and fit them together in 1,060 ways. Two 8-stud bricks - still the same colour - can be put together in 24 ways.
203,000,000,000 (203 billion) LEGO elements or thereabouts - were moulded between 1949 and the end of 1998. Of these, 6.5 billion are eight-stud bricks. And 2.3 billion Mini figures have been moulded, decorated and assembled since 1978.