WinZip was an unbelievably profitable business. Check out it's net profit margin. In 2004, WinZip made a profit of $15.5 million on $24.9 million in revenue. That's a 62.4% net profit margin. In 2003, WinZip made a profit of $16.2 million on revenues of $25.3 million. That's 64.2% profit! By comparison, Jasc had profit margins of only 6.8% in 2002 and 10.3% in 2003.
You can find plenty of examples either way on this. iPod/iTunes was beat to market by essentially everyone, and they absolutely revolutionized the MP3 player industry, making people pay premium prices for what used to be commodity hardware. On the other hand, take a look at WinZip. WinZip got to market with its core functionality -- zipping/unzupping in a GUI environment -- and approximately nothing else. This would not have been difficult functionality to implement, considering the actually zipping/unzipping was originally handled by pkzip, which had to be present for winzip to function. Regardless, they got the lion's share of the market by being the first there with a product which worked and was targetted at non-technical users being introduced to the whole new "online" thing back in the early 90s. They're also *obscenely* profitable -- something like 60% of sales, even today when their products' core feature is built into Windows.
For whoever modded this dystopian sci-fi Insightful, consider: what prevents this series of mutations from happening *right now*? Or, for that matter, any other "one bacteria anywhere develops inconvinient gene, world ends" scenario? Like, say, "anthrax goes SuperSeiyan, spreads to entire world in matter of minutes, you can't breathe without taking in a big dose of lethal poison"?
You botched your conversion. 1 Balmer = 6 car/quarter. Back to the drawing board, materials scientists, and make it snappy before you're f"#$ing killed.
There is not too much subjective about the statement "some US troops sexually abused prisoners in Iraq". Thats a fact. Here's another: "the US military found out about it before the press did, through a whistleblower, and immediately started investigating and preparing charges, and as a result some of the culprits are now doing hard time". Unfortunately, the pictures for Truth #2 don't sell nearly so many papers.
Why be evil. Start small: do a CS101 assignment, like "implement a Tetris clone", in Lisp. Now compare ease of development to the same program implemented in Java or your favorite flavor of C. Did Lisp really help you solve the challengs in making your Tetris clone? Now, extend your Tetris clone to accomodate two players on one keyboard. Then, extend it to network play. Where in this equation is Lisp helping you? Probably only as much as "Its your favorite hammer" and game programming suddenly looks like a nail, if you squint at it a little bit.
As an off-and-on contributor to an OSS game (Megamek, a client-server implementation of the Battletech boardgame), I question the notion that having ideas is the bottleneck. Everyone has an idea for a great game. Ideas are cheap. Budding game designers are a dime a dozen. Budding 2D/3D artists who are willing to work man-years for nothing... there's your bottleneck. We're lucky on my project: graphical expectations are pretty close to nill, and we can get away with 2D sprites and no animation. That is, well, not the case for most of what the general public thinks of as games. Forget being the next HL/FFXII -- is it reasonable to expect a ragtag band of artists distributed across the globe to make even the next Mario 1 with a consistent, appealing art direction? A lot of people do art for fun, but after you get done drawing one pose of Random RPG Skeleton #4235 drawing the 2nd, 3rd, 4th... 105th poses is just work. Its also work that is very difficult to split with other people -- supposing that there were a team implementing an original game idea for a Japanese-style RPG, what happens when your lead character artist just vanishes into the mist that is the Internet? Can you have somebody just come in, say "Alright, I like this character design and can just make a few tweaks to it, and then do the same character in another hundred sprites, while making new characters that share the same common artistic sensibility"?
Add to this the fact that most successful OSS software a) scratches an itch for the developer, b) will be used for years and c) is useful in a pre-finished state. Games, well, 0 for 3. I once got an assignment at work to do some genetic algorithm stuff and, having that as the context, made a Java framework to do the work in and GPLed the framework. But I'll never say "Dang, I really need to play My Dream Game". A project needs continuity in both users and developers or it will end up like the 99.9% of game projects on sourceforge that die before reaching pre-alpha. But its a catch-22, how do you hook in users to play the game (for development periods lasting months or years) before it has any fun gameplay? The most fun games, the ones that are fun enough for people to fork over money to play, typically are used and discarded in a matter of weeks! Then there is the completition feature. Think of Apache, Linux, or Mozilla a couple of years ago. Were they as feature-rich as they were today? No. But Apache gave you a functional web server, Linux was a functional OS, and Mozilla a functional browser. A 20% completed web server will serve web pages. A 20% complete game will *suck* (don't believe me? Spend an hour looking around sourceforge.). It probably won't even show the promise that will sucker folks in to stay the long haul getting it to 100%.
If you have $4,500 for a computer you almost certainly have $10,000 for a computer, and part of the reason you are buying the computer is to show off your lavish and ultimately pointless expenditure of resources. If you were actually concerned just with good performance for your money, you could have gotten a $1,500 off-the-shelf Dell or put something together for somewhere in the low $1,000-1,400 range, which is the point at which the marginal-performance-improvement-per-dollar curve starts to plummet.
Hello, McFly?! If I'm expecting emails from my bank, I'll be putting them on my safelist anyway!
And then you have customers like my mother, who a) is sufficiently behind the times enough to think "Hello, McFly?!" is an edgy reference from a hip new movie b) uses email and keeps bugging me to show her how to do banking online since I rave about the convinience and c) will learn what a "safelist" is the day I sprout wings and fly. Do you want to take a bet at how many AOL customers resemble my mother versus how many resemble you?
This is exactly true. Take using iTunes.jp versus iTunes.us for downloading your favorite MC Hammer track (hey, it was a sound of my childhood, alright?). Its 200 yen in Japan (lets see, about $1.80) versus 99 cents. If you want to buy things in the other direction... sorry, you can't! The Japanese record labels either do not sell on iTunes (hello, Sony) or do, but haven't worked out how to get their pound of flesh from the American market yet.
DVD region codings work the same way, mainly because natural markets for a particular disk (say, English speakers for a disc with only English) do not line up well with actual markets for the disc (the Hong Kong market, the American market, etc). Simultaneous worldwide releases are a recent phenomena which remains relatively uncommon, and leakage around that release can hurt buzz or the important "first week sales" which determines how much your retail channel stocks your product and how much you end up selling. See Stardock's blog about GalCivII for an example of why thats important for a game developer -- I assume the rest of the content industry also worries about it. Suppose you're the guy in charge of international distribution for 24 DVDs, which are Hot Stuff in Japan right now. You know the American, English-only version of Season Five is going to be out six months before the Japanese version makes it over. The number of 24 viewers in Japan who speak enough English to understand "Tell me where the bomb is or I will shoot you!" is non-trivial and the number of 30-something housewives who wouldn't care of Keifer Sutherland were speaking Farsi is legion. You don't want to cut your Japanese licensor off at the knees by letting your product leak to his core market early, or else next time around he'll stiff you on the terms of the distribution deal.
Textbook manufacturers, who don't really worry about piracy, per-se, are really worried that the books they sell to Hong Kong pre-meds for cheap, cheap, cheap are being imported by American pre-meds who pay $100 more for the same book (except with less u's -- darn British spellings). See all the kvetching campus bookstores do every year that they're losing their monopoly to the Internet? Now you know why -- one very minor part of the cartel distribution for academic literature started competing very successfully with the main branch of the cartel.
All the self-congratulatory "I'm different than the masses who shop at Walmart. I value quality. I have refined tastes." is getting a little thick around here. I bear no ill-will in my heart for folks who bought their gym shoes at some specialty shop instead of buying them for 10% less at Walmart. You can laugh at the quality of Walmart shoes, although I regularly had them last over a year without noticeable performance problems (this is probably because all kids shoes are made in the same Chinese factories and the thing you pay for is the brand value -- people act like Walmart alone killed the US textile industry, when essentially *nobody* does any sort of commodity fabrication in the US). You can also laugh at the quality of their Wonderbread or whatnot, although personally I'm unable to distinguish it from the "local chain store" Wonderbread. I also find it relatively difficult to distinguish a Walmart Vlassic pickle from a Jewel Vlassic pickle... Oh yeah, except for that one thing... WALMART IS CHEAPER. My father was a small businessman whose income gyrated radically on a year-to-year basis, and some years my family was significantly below the poverty line. And you know what? There's a certain attraction in cutting your food bills by 10% and your clothing bills by *lots*. Do I have a really strong desire to go to Walmart as a working professional? No, not so much, the difference between a $60 bill at the grocery shop and $65 bill at the grocery shop is meaningless to me. But it wasn't once, and it isn't currently to a lot of people.
Incidentally, the whole "Walmart economic death spiral" is a bit oversold. If you operate a retail business, Walmart dropping a store next to you is not so fun. If you work at a retail business, you might well end up working at the Walmart. If you do neither, the only economic impact Walmart has on you is changing what bag your Wonderbread comes in (and, oh, saving you money).
Know your worth on the market. My school has a department-wide salary survey, so I knew the median for a CS graduate was $55k and thats the number I had in my head during the job search. I eventually took a job with a much lower salary abroad but which came with a compensation package which makes my take-home pay pretty competitive to that ("free housing, we pay all your taxes" has a way of adding up pretty fast). At $25k in the US, assuming you've got any level of programming/technical skills you are getting almost unbelievably exploited. I used to work in data entry -- your job responsibilities are "get paper from fax machine, hit three keys to open up new record in database, type what you see without making too many errors, repeat for 8 hours" -- and my salary would have been about $26k annualized, and that was in Illinois (the company drew mainly workers from two reasonable-to-live-in Chicago suburbs).
Yeah. Chloe is apparently the only person in the office who knows the proper syntax for the all-powerful "cross-reference" operator. And she's hampered by incompetent upper management who, in all the years between the series, never thought to say "Hey, Chloe, cross-reference Los Angeles and upcoming terrorist attack", which would solve most seasons in three minutes or less.
I think Jack tells Tony to keep Chloe in reserve so he can play the hero more.
The manned flights are for sophisticated situations, but there's another less obvious point. PUshing to get people out there, will develop new technologies in life support that can be used for many other industries both in space, and here at home. Even if we develop great technologies to live in a colony on the moon, or on Mars, we can use those same technologies to extend our stay here on this planet. Since we're doing a good job of burning this one up that cannot support the numbers of people we have.
OK, here's how this goes: supposing you believe that Earth is overpopulated, and I don't, then is the space program *ever* going to be an efficient method of alleviating that overpopulation? We pay, what, a couple million dollars to put a single digit number of people into Earth orbit for two weeks. How many multiples of the GDP of the planet would it take to migrate a couple million to Mars (not settle them there, just *get* them there), even if we decreased launch costs by a factor of a thousand?
And lets talk about technological advancement. Yep, I suppose you could use "space age technology" to make better hermetically sealed structures, Tang, microwaves, really cool pillows, or what have you. But all of these technologies were developed right here, on earth. There is no necessity after you have a space-pillow to blast the pillow into orbit (at a cost of like $10,000 per pillow) to verify "Hmm, yep, this pillow gives you the best sleep you will ever have in zero gravity. You'll wake up refreshed and ready to do your observations of how spiders react to prolonged weightlessness in the morning. Science and humanity salute you. Lets have a Tang to celebrate." You could take NASA's entire budget and just rename it the "Civilian and Military R&D Slush Fund" and it would be much more efficient, as it wouldn't continue wasting money on one of their big line-items: getting stuff out of the atmosphere.
No, they're definately in there. Some quick Googling (heck, one name is in TFA) finds them pretty quick. I was kind of suprised that I could access the site from a foreign IP, as its pretty routine nowadays to limit that (I can't get my own credit reports without using a US based proxy, presumably because they were worried about fraud, and I had a devil of a time reading Dubya's campaign site during the 2004 election) for sensitive sites. Now, generally when we're talking about, say, e-mail delivery I'm 100% in favor of non-discrimination at the institutional level... but could you folks in Flordia strongly consider doing something about this if you start getting a lot of accesses from, say, *.ru?
I wrote a research paper on Japanese responses to terrorism a couple of years ago. Here's what I remember from it. No warranty that any of the following is correct but, hey, do you get that warranty from Wiki?
* The major failure with the attack was the lack of time to develop a good dispersal mechanism, as the attack plan was moved ahead of schedule because of the cult's impression that the authorities were going to act on them imminently. They had this impression on the basis of penetration of Japanese military and police sources. They eventually settled on liquid in bags getting poked with umbrella tips.
* The "specific targets" at Matsumoto were judicial magistrates whom the cult thought had a hand in the investigation against them. Seven died in that attack, incidentally.
* Aum was fricking scary with the amount of resources they had at their disposal. I remember a $300 million chemical weapons factory (operating completely above-board in Japan in broad daylight, just another chemical factory, had all its permits), and them staging a parachute raid on a JSDF facility using turncoat JSDF forces. Sounds like a bad anime, I know.
I wouldn't be sanguine about this. If you can get weapons grade sarin you can certainly develop a delivery system for it. Its not trivial but, hey, $300 million dollars has a certain way of making non-trivial problems seem a whole lot less daunting. We lucked out in a major way, in that with everything designed right for the attack (high-profile target with hundreds of thousands of people in an enclosed space) the cult made multiple errors (impure toxin, dispersal surface area the size of an umbrella puncture, etc) which minimized the casualties. There were other lucky incidents, too -- two Japanese station attendants soaked up the chemical in one car with newspapers, sealed it in plastic, and took it to the station room (I don't know if they had any idea that they were dealing with anything worse than a liquid mess, but both of them died for their troubles, which many people from exposure to that portion of the attack).
And, incidentally, remember the anthrax attack on the US and how the postal system and much of the East Coast essentially *shut down* with less casualties? Its difficult to overstate how much of the Japanese economy/government/everything is dependent on Tokyo and how dependent Tokyo is on their mass transit system. If you hit one car in Tokyo's inner loop with a lethal nerve agent tomorrow and then followed it up with a successful strike once a week for, oh, I don't know, two weeks? Three? That would be about as effective at causing economic damage in Japan as driving an airplane into a tall building of your choice in New York City.
Now THAT would be an interesting premise for a cyberpunk short story. "Got a new quantum prime sieve. Tears down the hardest ICE in a matter of nanos. What you got?" "The best Starcraft AI ever." "I'm not a fan of the old school." "Hmm... in that case, a steganographic algorithm so powerful it can hide fourty-five terabytes in your rand() seed?" "Oh, that sounds good" "6D Pong, default settings?" "Your algorithmical distinctiveness will be added to my own."
Precisely what value does YouTube provide to the equation "Internet full of amusing videos = great material for low-budget cable shows = profit!" Because I'm thinking thats "Well, none, really. They just lucked out and found someone even more inclined to spend money stupidly than they are. But eventually the suckers will find another supplier or figure out that they, like the rest of the net, can get their content for free."
Ah, for pity's sake, give Poland back their namespace. They're such a nice, inoffensive country. If you had to squat on somebody, could you make it.fr? Granted, we'd eventually come to their aid, too, but we'd drag our heels a bit and lord it over them for the next fifty years while they constantly said "Oh, we had them on the ropes and then you Yanks had to come mess up our master plan".
As a confirmed Java programmer (who is entering this contest anyhow, to broaden my horizons a bit), this argument always sounds like "There is nothing wrong with juggling chainsaws as long as you're man enough to handle it. If an arm gets chopped off, its because you were weak". No, its just that juggling chainsaws is inherently a *bad idea*. So is managing pointers by yourself unless you absolutely, positively have to. Yes, you may be the first programmer EVER who is man enough to handle 100% of his pointers 100% of the time. You might also end up without an arm.
Here's what I'm thinking: take a data structure which is well-understood, easy to implement, and boring as mud. Like, say, a hash-table with collisions resolved by linking. Everybody saw that back in sophomore CS right? And everybody knows with even a cursory inspection that a hash table offers constant-time performance on lookups and o(maximum size of table) time on reading out, right? Except when it doesn't. Malicious choice of data for feeding into a hash table can severely degrade performance, and we wouldn't want that, so we're going to be extraordinarily conscientious engineers and salt our hash function so that a malicious user can't cause our program to have worst-case performance.
I think, with creative use of bad programming, you could corrupt either the salt or the calculation of the hash function in such a way as to guarantee that for a target OS the hash-table performance would degrade into worst-case. So if you took your borked hash table, and used it to implement an associative array, the fairly trivial read in stdin, increment fields in associative array, sort array in order code could be made to perform at average time complexity in non-targetted OSes and worst-case time complexity in your target OS. Assuming you pick an O(n log n) sort algorithm, if you manage to "accidentally" make each of those n's actually polynomial complexity (heck, n^2 even) the computer should essentially blow up on non-trivial data sets. Its late in the evening and I haven't thought through this very much, but one way would be to use utsname's sysname thing as part of your "random data" to make the salt. That sounds a little obvious though. Maybe there's some obscure function somewhere for getting dates or times or something that I can exploit format of the returned data to reveal the difference between OSes, as that would be a lot harder to detect ("oh, seeding a hash function with a date and some magic numbers, nothing wrong with that").
Anybody got any ideas or corrections to share? Its been a while since I've taken data structures, and I've got essentially no ideas for obscure functions revealing system differences to exploit (C isn't my bag).
Grandparent was probably talking about, e.g., Linux distributions. When my workplace asked me to set up a dozen boxes with OSS content management programs so we could demo them to folks, I got my RedHat distributions from BitTorrent. Later in the ISMS audit the existence of Azureus (sp?) on my computer caused problems.
Slashdot Mirror
From the indispensable A Shareware Life blog.
You can find plenty of examples either way on this. iPod/iTunes was beat to market by essentially everyone, and they absolutely revolutionized the MP3 player industry, making people pay premium prices for what used to be commodity hardware. On the other hand, take a look at WinZip. WinZip got to market with its core functionality -- zipping/unzupping in a GUI environment -- and approximately nothing else. This would not have been difficult functionality to implement, considering the actually zipping/unzipping was originally handled by pkzip, which had to be present for winzip to function. Regardless, they got the lion's share of the market by being the first there with a product which worked and was targetted at non-technical users being introduced to the whole new "online" thing back in the early 90s. They're also *obscenely* profitable -- something like 60% of sales, even today when their products' core feature is built into Windows.
For whoever modded this dystopian sci-fi Insightful, consider: what prevents this series of mutations from happening *right now*? Or, for that matter, any other "one bacteria anywhere develops inconvinient gene, world ends" scenario? Like, say, "anthrax goes SuperSeiyan, spreads to entire world in matter of minutes, you can't breathe without taking in a big dose of lethal poison"?
You botched your conversion. 1 Balmer = 6 car/quarter. Back to the drawing board, materials scientists, and make it snappy before you're f"#$ing killed.
There is not too much subjective about the statement "some US troops sexually abused prisoners in Iraq". Thats a fact. Here's another: "the US military found out about it before the press did, through a whistleblower, and immediately started investigating and preparing charges, and as a result some of the culprits are now doing hard time". Unfortunately, the pictures for Truth #2 don't sell nearly so many papers.
We're going to leave that up to my good friend Lawyer McShyster.
Why be evil. Start small: do a CS101 assignment, like "implement a Tetris clone", in Lisp. Now compare ease of development to the same program implemented in Java or your favorite flavor of C. Did Lisp really help you solve the challengs in making your Tetris clone? Now, extend your Tetris clone to accomodate two players on one keyboard. Then, extend it to network play. Where in this equation is Lisp helping you? Probably only as much as "Its your favorite hammer" and game programming suddenly looks like a nail, if you squint at it a little bit.
Add to this the fact that most successful OSS software a) scratches an itch for the developer, b) will be used for years and c) is useful in a pre-finished state. Games, well, 0 for 3. I once got an assignment at work to do some genetic algorithm stuff and, having that as the context, made a Java framework to do the work in and GPLed the framework. But I'll never say "Dang, I really need to play My Dream Game". A project needs continuity in both users and developers or it will end up like the 99.9% of game projects on sourceforge that die before reaching pre-alpha. But its a catch-22, how do you hook in users to play the game (for development periods lasting months or years) before it has any fun gameplay? The most fun games, the ones that are fun enough for people to fork over money to play, typically are used and discarded in a matter of weeks! Then there is the completition feature. Think of Apache, Linux, or Mozilla a couple of years ago. Were they as feature-rich as they were today? No. But Apache gave you a functional web server, Linux was a functional OS, and Mozilla a functional browser. A 20% completed web server will serve web pages. A 20% complete game will *suck* (don't believe me? Spend an hour looking around sourceforge.). It probably won't even show the promise that will sucker folks in to stay the long haul getting it to 100%.
Yes, but at least they'll be fastened securely. Nothing to ruin your day like scissors bouncing around your spleen.
If you have $4,500 for a computer you almost certainly have $10,000 for a computer, and part of the reason you are buying the computer is to show off your lavish and ultimately pointless expenditure of resources. If you were actually concerned just with good performance for your money, you could have gotten a $1,500 off-the-shelf Dell or put something together for somewhere in the low $1,000-1,400 range, which is the point at which the marginal-performance-improvement-per-dollar curve starts to plummet.
And then you have customers like my mother, who a) is sufficiently behind the times enough to think "Hello, McFly?!" is an edgy reference from a hip new movie b) uses email and keeps bugging me to show her how to do banking online since I rave about the convinience and c) will learn what a "safelist" is the day I sprout wings and fly. Do you want to take a bet at how many AOL customers resemble my mother versus how many resemble you?
DVD region codings work the same way, mainly because natural markets for a particular disk (say, English speakers for a disc with only English) do not line up well with actual markets for the disc (the Hong Kong market, the American market, etc). Simultaneous worldwide releases are a recent phenomena which remains relatively uncommon, and leakage around that release can hurt buzz or the important "first week sales" which determines how much your retail channel stocks your product and how much you end up selling. See Stardock's blog about GalCivII for an example of why thats important for a game developer -- I assume the rest of the content industry also worries about it. Suppose you're the guy in charge of international distribution for 24 DVDs, which are Hot Stuff in Japan right now. You know the American, English-only version of Season Five is going to be out six months before the Japanese version makes it over. The number of 24 viewers in Japan who speak enough English to understand "Tell me where the bomb is or I will shoot you!" is non-trivial and the number of 30-something housewives who wouldn't care of Keifer Sutherland were speaking Farsi is legion. You don't want to cut your Japanese licensor off at the knees by letting your product leak to his core market early, or else next time around he'll stiff you on the terms of the distribution deal.
Textbook manufacturers, who don't really worry about piracy, per-se, are really worried that the books they sell to Hong Kong pre-meds for cheap, cheap, cheap are being imported by American pre-meds who pay $100 more for the same book (except with less u's -- darn British spellings). See all the kvetching campus bookstores do every year that they're losing their monopoly to the Internet? Now you know why -- one very minor part of the cartel distribution for academic literature started competing very successfully with the main branch of the cartel.
Incidentally, the whole "Walmart economic death spiral" is a bit oversold. If you operate a retail business, Walmart dropping a store next to you is not so fun. If you work at a retail business, you might well end up working at the Walmart. If you do neither, the only economic impact Walmart has on you is changing what bag your Wonderbread comes in (and, oh, saving you money).
Know your worth on the market. My school has a department-wide salary survey, so I knew the median for a CS graduate was $55k and thats the number I had in my head during the job search. I eventually took a job with a much lower salary abroad but which came with a compensation package which makes my take-home pay pretty competitive to that ("free housing, we pay all your taxes" has a way of adding up pretty fast). At $25k in the US, assuming you've got any level of programming/technical skills you are getting almost unbelievably exploited. I used to work in data entry -- your job responsibilities are "get paper from fax machine, hit three keys to open up new record in database, type what you see without making too many errors, repeat for 8 hours" -- and my salary would have been about $26k annualized, and that was in Illinois (the company drew mainly workers from two reasonable-to-live-in Chicago suburbs).
I think Jack tells Tony to keep Chloe in reserve so he can play the hero more.
OK, here's how this goes: supposing you believe that Earth is overpopulated, and I don't, then is the space program *ever* going to be an efficient method of alleviating that overpopulation? We pay, what, a couple million dollars to put a single digit number of people into Earth orbit for two weeks. How many multiples of the GDP of the planet would it take to migrate a couple million to Mars (not settle them there, just *get* them there), even if we decreased launch costs by a factor of a thousand?
And lets talk about technological advancement. Yep, I suppose you could use "space age technology" to make better hermetically sealed structures, Tang, microwaves, really cool pillows, or what have you. But all of these technologies were developed right here, on earth. There is no necessity after you have a space-pillow to blast the pillow into orbit (at a cost of like $10,000 per pillow) to verify "Hmm, yep, this pillow gives you the best sleep you will ever have in zero gravity. You'll wake up refreshed and ready to do your observations of how spiders react to prolonged weightlessness in the morning. Science and humanity salute you. Lets have a Tang to celebrate." You could take NASA's entire budget and just rename it the "Civilian and Military R&D Slush Fund" and it would be much more efficient, as it wouldn't continue wasting money on one of their big line-items: getting stuff out of the atmosphere.
If you had a couple of billion dollars to throw around you'd also be forgiven that minor incident with the sand trap.
No, they're definately in there. Some quick Googling (heck, one name is in TFA) finds them pretty quick. I was kind of suprised that I could access the site from a foreign IP, as its pretty routine nowadays to limit that (I can't get my own credit reports without using a US based proxy, presumably because they were worried about fraud, and I had a devil of a time reading Dubya's campaign site during the 2004 election) for sensitive sites. Now, generally when we're talking about, say, e-mail delivery I'm 100% in favor of non-discrimination at the institutional level... but could you folks in Flordia strongly consider doing something about this if you start getting a lot of accesses from, say, *.ru?
* The major failure with the attack was the lack of time to develop a good dispersal mechanism, as the attack plan was moved ahead of schedule because of the cult's impression that the authorities were going to act on them imminently. They had this impression on the basis of penetration of Japanese military and police sources. They eventually settled on liquid in bags getting poked with umbrella tips.
* The "specific targets" at Matsumoto were judicial magistrates whom the cult thought had a hand in the investigation against them. Seven died in that attack, incidentally.
* Aum was fricking scary with the amount of resources they had at their disposal. I remember a $300 million chemical weapons factory (operating completely above-board in Japan in broad daylight, just another chemical factory, had all its permits), and them staging a parachute raid on a JSDF facility using turncoat JSDF forces. Sounds like a bad anime, I know.
I wouldn't be sanguine about this. If you can get weapons grade sarin you can certainly develop a delivery system for it. Its not trivial but, hey, $300 million dollars has a certain way of making non-trivial problems seem a whole lot less daunting. We lucked out in a major way, in that with everything designed right for the attack (high-profile target with hundreds of thousands of people in an enclosed space) the cult made multiple errors (impure toxin, dispersal surface area the size of an umbrella puncture, etc) which minimized the casualties. There were other lucky incidents, too -- two Japanese station attendants soaked up the chemical in one car with newspapers, sealed it in plastic, and took it to the station room (I don't know if they had any idea that they were dealing with anything worse than a liquid mess, but both of them died for their troubles, which many people from exposure to that portion of the attack).
And, incidentally, remember the anthrax attack on the US and how the postal system and much of the East Coast essentially *shut down* with less casualties? Its difficult to overstate how much of the Japanese economy/government/everything is dependent on Tokyo and how dependent Tokyo is on their mass transit system. If you hit one car in Tokyo's inner loop with a lethal nerve agent tomorrow and then followed it up with a successful strike once a week for, oh, I don't know, two weeks? Three? That would be about as effective at causing economic damage in Japan as driving an airplane into a tall building of your choice in New York City.
Now THAT would be an interesting premise for a cyberpunk short story. "Got a new quantum prime sieve. Tears down the hardest ICE in a matter of nanos. What you got?" "The best Starcraft AI ever." "I'm not a fan of the old school." "Hmm... in that case, a steganographic algorithm so powerful it can hide fourty-five terabytes in your rand() seed?" "Oh, that sounds good" "6D Pong, default settings?" "Your algorithmical distinctiveness will be added to my own."
Precisely what value does YouTube provide to the equation "Internet full of amusing videos = great material for low-budget cable shows = profit!" Because I'm thinking thats "Well, none, really. They just lucked out and found someone even more inclined to spend money stupidly than they are. But eventually the suckers will find another supplier or figure out that they, like the rest of the net, can get their content for free."
Ah, for pity's sake, give Poland back their namespace. They're such a nice, inoffensive country. If you had to squat on somebody, could you make it .fr? Granted, we'd eventually come to their aid, too, but we'd drag our heels a bit and lord it over them for the next fifty years while they constantly said "Oh, we had them on the ropes and then you Yanks had to come mess up our master plan".
As a confirmed Java programmer (who is entering this contest anyhow, to broaden my horizons a bit), this argument always sounds like "There is nothing wrong with juggling chainsaws as long as you're man enough to handle it. If an arm gets chopped off, its because you were weak". No, its just that juggling chainsaws is inherently a *bad idea*. So is managing pointers by yourself unless you absolutely, positively have to. Yes, you may be the first programmer EVER who is man enough to handle 100% of his pointers 100% of the time. You might also end up without an arm.
I think, with creative use of bad programming, you could corrupt either the salt or the calculation of the hash function in such a way as to guarantee that for a target OS the hash-table performance would degrade into worst-case. So if you took your borked hash table, and used it to implement an associative array, the fairly trivial read in stdin, increment fields in associative array, sort array in order code could be made to perform at average time complexity in non-targetted OSes and worst-case time complexity in your target OS. Assuming you pick an O(n log n) sort algorithm, if you manage to "accidentally" make each of those n's actually polynomial complexity (heck, n^2 even) the computer should essentially blow up on non-trivial data sets. Its late in the evening and I haven't thought through this very much, but one way would be to use utsname's sysname thing as part of your "random data" to make the salt. That sounds a little obvious though. Maybe there's some obscure function somewhere for getting dates or times or something that I can exploit format of the returned data to reveal the difference between OSes, as that would be a lot harder to detect ("oh, seeding a hash function with a date and some magic numbers, nothing wrong with that").
Anybody got any ideas or corrections to share? Its been a while since I've taken data structures, and I've got essentially no ideas for obscure functions revealing system differences to exploit (C isn't my bag).
Grandparent was probably talking about, e.g., Linux distributions. When my workplace asked me to set up a dozen boxes with OSS content management programs so we could demo them to folks, I got my RedHat distributions from BitTorrent. Later in the ISMS audit the existence of Azureus (sp?) on my computer caused problems.