And on what are you basing your 10,000 - 100,000 figure? The fact that you bought a game?
The "Linux Game Market" for any given game is the set of people who are all of the following:
Run Linux as a desktop
Are interested in games
Are willing to put non-free software on their free Linux system
Have some $ to spend on a game
Think pirating software is wrong.
Think YOUR game is worth spending $ on.
How many people is that really?
The Linux market may be the same size as the Mac market, but the vast majority of Macs are desktop machines owned by individuals. I would bet that the vast majority of Linux systems are not - many of them probably don't even have a GUI running or a monitor or mouse attached.
I think the QWERTY thing may be urban myth, but the other point in this post is much more salient.
If you don't have the 2=abc... mapping, you completely break all the "1-800-IM2-DUMB" phone numbers as well as all the interactive systems that let you spell out someone's name to get their extension.
Maybe it's because our huge, dedicated QA group (it's about 4x the number of developers) tests the hell out of the software every time, before it's allowed out the door. In any project around the POS system, the QA phase is the longest part.
Or maybe it's because the software was carefully architected by some very smart people to perform reliably and robustly on (by today's standards) seriously underpowered hardware.
Or maybe because it's just votes, not money. As far as I'm concerned, it's disgusting.
Absolutely. I don't want to hear about power failures or glitches causing problems. I work for a major quick service restaurant chain, on the cash register software. ("QSR" is polite for "fast food.") You can stand there all day turning those things on and off, and, aside from wasting a lot of time, you don't lose anything. Power it off, power it back on, you're back at the same place in the same order as you were before the power cycle.
Why can't our voting machines work as well as 20-year-old cash register software?
But there still has to be *some* packaging between China and the target company, or you just receive a container full of broken iPods. You could maybe pack them in tighter, but all that packaging would have to be discarded, which is almost certainly more costly than shipping the final packaging from China. I suppose you could have some sort of trays that hold them, but then the trays would have to be returned to China to be reloaded. Also probably expensive.
I have no idea what your situation is. I'm sorry if you're having a rough time of it.
I'm glad that you've found a way to save some money while satisfying your transportation needs.
My only point was that you may not, in fact, be doing the air polution in your area a favor by running your little 2-cycle motor. I don't know what kind of car you have or what kind of condition it is in. If it is old enough, or in sufficiently bad disrepair, the polution situation may be better off with your bike.
I understand (based on some of your comments) that, due to what appears to be a high dedication to and concern with environmental issues, this may be a hard thing for you to accept. It may be just one more thing to wear your down as you go through your day.
But none of this has anything to do with your disability, your income level, your age, gender, race, politics, environmentalism or any other irrelevent demographic information.
This is about basic science and automotive engineering.
I hope the road through life becomes easier for you.
Based on everything I've read, you put more polution in the air. Modern cars are very, very, very clean - at least, American ones are. A new car has literally thousands of dollars of emission control equipment that makes that happen.
Around here, weed wackers typically are two-cycle engines, so they take an oil-gas mix. The oil burns off directly into polution. By contrast, the hydrocarbons that your car's motor put off are converted by various processes into primarily carbon monoxide and water. That's why you see a stream of water coming out of so many car's tail pipes.
I have no idea where in the world you live. It may be your local vehicles dump tons of polution into the air. But if you're in the US, and you have a modern (say, 1990 or later) car, and it's in fully functioning order, your bike polutes more.
I'm not going to argue that it's all very economical, or that you've kept some stuff out of the landfill. (Although, to be fair, if you'd left it in the alley behind a house in Chicago, it wouldn't have gone in the landfill either - it would have been used, fixed, or sold for scrap.) But don't go around patting yourself on the back for preventing polution. It just isn't so - unless your car is old or a real junker.
According to a May, 2004 edition of Utility Federal Technology Opportunities, an obscure trade newsletter, EEStor claims to make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries. Specifically, the product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours. (For battery geeks: "The technology is basically a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric," UFTO says.) No hazardous or dangerous materials are used in manufacturing the ceramic-based unit, which means it qualifies as what Silicon Valley types call "cleantech."
Driving around on the back of a weed-eater does not reduce polution.
Those things are terrible poluters compared to a modern automobile. I'm at work so I'm not going to go searching for firm citations, but I did google one quote:
A gasoline powered weed eater operated for one hour is even worse [than a lawn mower] as it generates pollution equivalent to driving a car for sixty hours.
There's only one card number at a given time per register, to pull. And it's hidden in an obscure file on a box that isn't remotely accessible by any rational mechanism. We're just keeping the kid running the register from committing a specific type of fraud, not some enterprise-wide customer fraud detection thing.
You make a good point. Visa standards say that SHA-1 in this fashion is OK, but they want companies to move to a later version. Our next version of the software will be SHA-512.
By the way, credit card numbers are not strictly 16 digit numbers.
American Express cards are 15 digits.
Debit cards range in length (in my reference file) from 11 to 19 digits, and the same issuing bank may not always use the same length.
The maximum field size is 19.
It occurs to me that the seemingly random discretionary data might have made our hash more secure rather than less....
I work for a major merchant in the US. We take just a ton of credit cards, and have ongoing Visa PCI/CISP discussions.
For those who don't know, the magnetic track on a credit card actually has three tracks worth of data. Tracks 1 and 2 both have the account number; track 1 also has your name and perhaps some other stuff. I'm more familiar with track 2.
Track 2 has the card number, the expiration date, and something called "discretionary data." The discretionary data, so far as I can ascertain, is defined by the issuing bank or organization, and has no (publicly documented) inherent meaning - except "we'll cut your balls off if you store this for any period of time."
You can get away with storing the entire track worth of data if you're doing offline approvals, but once you get the approval, you had better ditch the discretionary stuff.
We do some fraud detection in the POS system with a SHA-1 hash of the card data. As you all (should) know, this is a non-reversible hash. We're so paranoid about the discretionary data that we only even calculate the hash of the card number and expiration date - we don't even include the discretionary data in our hash calculations!
I was in Orange County, CA for work. Round-trip ticket had been purchased maybe a week in advance. I got done early and wanted to get home, so I got on an earlier flight. Boarding pass had a bunch of printed SSSS on it. I got patted down and my carry-on searched. (I didn't have any checked luggage.)
I flew from Chicago O'Hare to Fargo, ND November or December of last year with a couple coworkers. We all made our own travel reservations, but there's only so many flights from Chicago to Fargo, so we were all on the same plane. One of us got his bag thoroughly searched (on the trip back, I think) but it was full of electronics and gagetry and probably looked crazy on the X-Ray machine. The other one got there and found a package of utility knife blades in his coat pocket. They had passed thru security completely undetected.
I was in Orange County, CA for work. Round-trip ticket had been purchased maybe a week in advance. I got done early and wanted to get home, so I got on an earlier flight. Boarding pass had a bunch of printed SSSS on it. I got patted down and my carry-on searched. (I didn't have any checked luggage.)
I flew from Chicago O'Hare to Fargo, ND November or December of last year with a couple coworkers. We all made our own travel reservations, but there's only so many flights from Chicago to Fargo, so we were all on the same plane. One of us got his bag thoroughly searched (on the trip back, I think) but it was full of electronics and gagetry and probably looked crazy on the X-Ray machine. The other one got there and found a package of utility knife blades in his coat pocket. They had passed thru security completely undetected.
I think he probably threw them away before the return trip, or put them in his checked bag - no sense tempting fate.
No kidding. There's a table on our wing where unwanted food (leftovers from lunchtime meetings, etc.) gets dropped off. I stood and watched one day; 3 half large pizzas lasted about 6 minutes. Healthy stuff takes a bit longer - salad never really fully goes, and fruit may take the rest of the day.
Occasionally one of the suits at work quotes some study we probably paid big bucks to see of theirs.
I uniformly think one of two things:
We paid for this crap? It should be obvious to any brain-damaged chimp that is true.
We paid for this crap? It should be obvious to any brain-damaged chimp that is absurd.
Occasionally, seemingly thru random chance (via the many monkeys at typewriters method, I assume) they seem to get something right, but it's usually #2.
I would say that they are merely making speech (spoken word) and press (written word) equivalently protected. That doesn't mean that a reporter (the press) gets to interfere in criminal investigations (break laws) as part of their protected nature.
No question, a reporter should be able to report on an event (the raid) after it occurs. It's the interference with the actions of law enforcement (the phone calls prior to the raid) that I cannot understand how you believe is protected (or how it is different than criminal conspiracy.)
Peculiar. Their address is in Canada, but (and this is the number on their web site) area code 309 is in central Illinois. (Peoria, Bloomington, and surrounding areas.)
The reporters could probably (and arguably should) be charged with interference with an ongoing investigation. The right to a free press is (in my understanding) a right to write, for public consumption. It is not a right to take any random action in order to obtain facts for said writing.
If I have been assigned to write a story about the psychological condition of an executioner, am I justified in grabbing someone and "executing" them in the furtherance of my story? Of course not; it's both illegal and wrong.
It would, in my opinion, be one thing if they had been tipped off by this anonymous source, sat on it until the raids had actually happened, then used the information in their stories. Instead, they took the information they got, and contacted the targets of the raids in advance. Absurd.
Reporters are not magic special people. They should abide by the same laws and rules of reasonable conduct as the rest of us.
I love the comment about "all about debugging programs" in the summary and article. If that's what these colleges are teaching as CS - programming and debugging - then CS has changed a lot in the last 16 years since I graduated. I had classes in algorithms, operating systems, various sorts of math I don't even remember, AI, networking theory, and more.
And freakin' robots? Kids were playing with robots in grade school 20 years go (Logo anyone?) - this sounds way too similar to me to belong in college level classes.
Real CS is hard. WTF would you want to increase enrollment in intro classes unless the whole program is a joke? There aren't going to be (I hope) any fun robots in the next class when the people who can't hack it hopefully get weeded out. Why not just weed them out up front?
I'm amused that the same mechanism that was originally used to implement C++ (a precompiler that, in that case, generated C code) is now being used with C++ as the "low-level" language with a readily-available compiler.
Surely some of you remember cfront? Generated some truly bloated, completely unreadable stuff, but humans weren't supposed to read its output - cc was.
Absolutely I agree with you. They want to know who is downloading their data sheets so they can follow up with them and try to sell them chips.
I get vendor phone calls regularly after I register and download something. Once I explain that I wanted the white paper (or whatever) for background research, and that there is no chance of my buying anything, they go away.
They sound disappointed (I work for a really, really big company that just about everyone on the planet knows) but they go away.
And if they get hacked, and someone finds out where I work, and the mailing address, phone # and email for where I work, I don't particularly care.
To me, this is irrelevent. There is nothing private or personal about the fact of my existence or of my home or work address, or my work phone number. Hundreds or thousands of companies have that information about me (and about you, unless you live in a cave) and it doesn't provide anything useful with regard to any of your points.
Likewise with my email address. I don't give my main one out all the time, but that's just because I want to minimize the spam to there, not because I think something truly bad is going to happen to me.
Theo certainly can't claim that his email or snailmail addresses are secret or private; they're out on the openbsd web site.
This isn't about whether the developers could have gotten the data sheets 8 years ago and should have saved them or not. It's about whether it's reasonable to ask for the information they're asking before providing that information. I think it it.
Asking for name/address/affiliation is reasonable, because, for most of the history of technology, the "personal" information they want is exactly what you would have had to provide to get the data sheets.
It isn't like it's private, super-secret stuff; you can get most of the info for Theo off the openbsd web site, including name, address, email, and company affiliation.
Slashdot Mirror
And on what are you basing your 10,000 - 100,000 figure? The fact that you bought a game?
The "Linux Game Market" for any given game is the set of people who are all of the following:
How many people is that really?
The Linux market may be the same size as the Mac market, but the vast majority of Macs are desktop machines owned by individuals. I would bet that the vast majority of Linux systems are not - many of them probably don't even have a GUI running or a monitor or mouse attached.
If you don't have the 2=abc... mapping, you completely break all the "1-800-IM2-DUMB" phone numbers as well as all the interactive systems that let you spell out someone's name to get their extension.
Maybe it's because our huge, dedicated QA group (it's about 4x the number of developers) tests the hell out of the software every time, before it's allowed out the door. In any project around the POS system, the QA phase is the longest part.
Or maybe it's because the software was carefully architected by some very smart people to perform reliably and robustly on (by today's standards) seriously underpowered hardware.
Or maybe because it's just votes, not money. As far as I'm concerned, it's disgusting.
Why can't our voting machines work as well as 20-year-old cash register software?
But there still has to be *some* packaging between China and the target company, or you just receive a container full of broken iPods. You could maybe pack them in tighter, but all that packaging would have to be discarded, which is almost certainly more costly than shipping the final packaging from China.
I suppose you could have some sort of trays that hold them, but then the trays would have to be returned to China to be reloaded. Also probably expensive.
pair-a-noyd,
I have no idea what your situation is. I'm sorry if you're having a rough time of it.
I'm glad that you've found a way to save some money while satisfying your transportation needs.
My only point was that you may not, in fact, be doing the air polution in your area a favor by running your little 2-cycle motor. I don't know what kind of car you have or what kind of condition it is in. If it is old enough, or in sufficiently bad disrepair, the polution situation may be better off with your bike.
I understand (based on some of your comments) that, due to what appears to be a high dedication to and concern with environmental issues, this may be a hard thing for you to accept. It may be just one more thing to wear your down as you go through your day.
But none of this has anything to do with your disability, your income level, your age, gender, race, politics, environmentalism or any other irrelevent demographic information.
This is about basic science and automotive engineering.
I hope the road through life becomes easier for you.
Around here, weed wackers typically are two-cycle engines, so they take an oil-gas mix. The oil burns off directly into polution. By contrast, the hydrocarbons that your car's motor put off are converted by various processes into primarily carbon monoxide and water. That's why you see a stream of water coming out of so many car's tail pipes.
I have no idea where in the world you live. It may be your local vehicles dump tons of polution into the air. But if you're in the US, and you have a modern (say, 1990 or later) car, and it's in fully functioning order, your bike polutes more.
I'm not going to argue that it's all very economical, or that you've kept some stuff out of the landfill. (Although, to be fair, if you'd left it in the alley behind a house in Chicago, it wouldn't have gone in the landfill either - it would have been used, fixed, or sold for scrap.) But don't go around patting yourself on the back for preventing polution. It just isn't so - unless your car is old or a real junker.
From the BW article:
Business Week link
I don't pretend to understand the "battery geek" stuff, but I bet someone here does...
Driving around on the back of a weed-eater does not reduce polution.
Those things are terrible poluters compared to a modern automobile. I'm at work so I'm not going to go searching for firm citations, but I did google one quote:
(http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/johnson/hort/arThere's only one card number at a given time per register, to pull. And it's hidden in an obscure file on a box that isn't remotely accessible by any rational mechanism. We're just keeping the kid running the register from committing a specific type of fraud, not some enterprise-wide customer fraud detection thing.
You make a good point. Visa standards say that SHA-1 in this fashion is OK, but they want companies to move to a later version. Our next version of the software will be SHA-512.
By the way, credit card numbers are not strictly 16 digit numbers.
It occurs to me that the seemingly random discretionary data might have made our hash more secure rather than less....
I work for a major merchant in the US. We take just a ton of credit cards, and have ongoing Visa PCI/CISP discussions.
For those who don't know, the magnetic track on a credit card actually has three tracks worth of data. Tracks 1 and 2 both have the account number; track 1 also has your name and perhaps some other stuff. I'm more familiar with track 2.
Track 2 has the card number, the expiration date, and something called "discretionary data." The discretionary data, so far as I can ascertain, is defined by the issuing bank or organization, and has no (publicly documented) inherent meaning - except "we'll cut your balls off if you store this for any period of time."
You can get away with storing the entire track worth of data if you're doing offline approvals, but once you get the approval, you had better ditch the discretionary stuff.
We do some fraud detection in the POS system with a SHA-1 hash of the card data. As you all (should) know, this is a non-reversible hash. We're so paranoid about the discretionary data that we only even calculate the hash of the card number and expiration date - we don't even include the discretionary data in our hash calculations!
I was in Orange County, CA for work. Round-trip ticket had been purchased maybe a week in advance. I got done early and wanted to get home, so I got on an earlier flight. Boarding pass had a bunch of printed SSSS on it. I got patted down and my carry-on searched. (I didn't have any checked luggage.)
I flew from Chicago O'Hare to Fargo, ND November or December of last year with a couple coworkers. We all made our own travel reservations, but there's only so many flights from Chicago to Fargo, so we were all on the same plane. One of us got his bag thoroughly searched (on the trip back, I think) but it was full of electronics and gagetry and probably looked crazy on the X-Ray machine. The other one got there and found a package of utility knife blades in his coat pocket. They had passed thru security completely undetected.
I was in Orange County, CA for work. Round-trip ticket had been purchased maybe a week in advance. I got done early and wanted to get home, so I got on an earlier flight. Boarding pass had a bunch of printed SSSS on it. I got patted down and my carry-on searched. (I didn't have any checked luggage.)
I flew from Chicago O'Hare to Fargo, ND November or December of last year with a couple coworkers. We all made our own travel reservations, but there's only so many flights from Chicago to Fargo, so we were all on the same plane. One of us got his bag thoroughly searched (on the trip back, I think) but it was full of electronics and gagetry and probably looked crazy on the X-Ray machine. The other one got there and found a package of utility knife blades in his coat pocket. They had passed thru security completely undetected.
I think he probably threw them away before the return trip, or put them in his checked bag - no sense tempting fate.
No kidding. There's a table on our wing where unwanted food (leftovers from lunchtime meetings, etc.) gets dropped off. I stood and watched one day; 3 half large pizzas lasted about 6 minutes. Healthy stuff takes a bit longer - salad never really fully goes, and fruit may take the rest of the day.
Occasionally one of the suits at work quotes some study we probably paid big bucks to see of theirs.
I uniformly think one of two things:
Occasionally, seemingly thru random chance (via the many monkeys at typewriters method, I assume) they seem to get something right, but it's usually #2.
No question, a reporter should be able to report on an event (the raid) after it occurs. It's the interference with the actions of law enforcement (the phone calls prior to the raid) that I cannot understand how you believe is protected (or how it is different than criminal conspiracy.)
Peculiar. Their address is in Canada, but (and this is the number on their web site) area code 309 is in central Illinois. (Peoria, Bloomington, and surrounding areas.)
The reporters could probably (and arguably should) be charged with interference with an ongoing investigation. The right to a free press is (in my understanding) a right to write, for public consumption. It is not a right to take any random action in order to obtain facts for said writing.
If I have been assigned to write a story about the psychological condition of an executioner, am I justified in grabbing someone and "executing" them in the furtherance of my story? Of course not; it's both illegal and wrong.
It would, in my opinion, be one thing if they had been tipped off by this anonymous source, sat on it until the raids had actually happened, then used the information in their stories. Instead, they took the information they got, and contacted the targets of the raids in advance. Absurd.
Reporters are not magic special people. They should abide by the same laws and rules of reasonable conduct as the rest of us.
Do you work for McDonald's? That's a really good description of McDonald's USA situation (except the 10% is really more like 1%.)
And freakin' robots? Kids were playing with robots in grade school 20 years go (Logo anyone?) - this sounds way too similar to me to belong in college level classes.
Real CS is hard. WTF would you want to increase enrollment in intro classes unless the whole program is a joke? There aren't going to be (I hope) any fun robots in the next class when the people who can't hack it hopefully get weeded out. Why not just weed them out up front?
I'm amused that the same mechanism that was originally used to implement C++ (a precompiler that, in that case, generated C code) is now being used with C++ as the "low-level" language with a readily-available compiler.
Surely some of you remember cfront? Generated some truly bloated, completely unreadable stuff, but humans weren't supposed to read its output - cc was.
I get vendor phone calls regularly after I register and download something. Once I explain that I wanted the white paper (or whatever) for background research, and that there is no chance of my buying anything, they go away.
They sound disappointed (I work for a really, really big company that just about everyone on the planet knows) but they go away.
And if they get hacked, and someone finds out where I work, and the mailing address, phone # and email for where I work, I don't particularly care.
Likewise with my email address. I don't give my main one out all the time, but that's just because I want to minimize the spam to there, not because I think something truly bad is going to happen to me.
Theo certainly can't claim that his email or snailmail addresses are secret or private; they're out on the openbsd web site.
Asking for name/address/affiliation is reasonable, because, for most of the history of technology, the "personal" information they want is exactly what you would have had to provide to get the data sheets.
It isn't like it's private, super-secret stuff; you can get most of the info for Theo off the openbsd web site, including name, address, email, and company affiliation.