IANAL but AIUI there is at least a legal theory in some places that if you violate the agreement you agreed to when getting permission to use a computer system you do not have permission to use that computer system and hence you are guilty of accessing that computer system illegally.
AIUI eve does not allow open real money trading (some people do it anyway but there is a risk of bans if caught) but you can buy (it seems you can now buy them directly, afaict you used to have to buy a game time code and then convert it) what is known as a "pilot license extension" (plex for short) which can be sold within the game (and then used by someone else to extend their subscription or to buy a few other premium services). This allows someone to calculate a monetary price for each item by
(value of item in isk on the ingame market) / (value of plex in isk on the ingame market) * (price of plex in dollars)
So if someone was "stinking rich and batshit crazy" they could spend a load of money on plex, sell those plex on the ingame market and use the isk from that sale to buy a ship but its equally possible (and probablly far more likely given that this guy was able to call in a massive alliance when he got into trouble) that he earned the isk to buy the ship through activities in the game.
It's one thing to write a regulation into law, it's another thing to actually make it have an impact on the ground. To do that requires finding inspectors who will not take bribes and are not intimidated by threats.
So what happens in the business world when you can't get Windows 7 machines anymore. Ahhhhhhhhhh.
OEM versions of windows 8 pro come with downgrade rights to windows 7 and vista. If you want to downgrade further then volume licenses let you do that. I would expect the OEMs to offer buisness machines with Windows 7 drivers for as long as a significant proprortion of customers want windows 7 (just like they did for XP)
For new screwups the soloution would be to just reject the push and let the developer sort it out.
For existing screwups it's not so easy. One of the characteristics of hash-based dvcs systems like git is that they make it REALLY painful to change history. You could generate new commits and blacklist the old ones but doing so would tip off all users of the repository that something was up and those users would still have their copies of the original commits.
And $21M is but a drop in the water for the US entertainment industry
Serious question, what exactly does the $21M represent?
Is the $21M the total ammount that the antiguans can charge for copied content? or is it the ammount the US media companies would have charged for equivilent content?
Which one it is seriously changes how much pain they can inflict on the US entertainment industry.
It really depends on what you mean by a "good network connection", how much data you have to move and how many items of storage media (not nessacerally tape) you can fill in paralell.
Lets assume
You have 3TB of data You fill/empty your drive at 1 gigabit per second (number plucked from wikipedia and rounded) Your network between sites is 100 megabit per second.
It takes 24000 seconds to put the data on the drive and another 24000 seconds to copy it off again at the destination. In comparision it would take 240000 seconds to move the data over the network.
So that gives us 192000 seconds (over 2 days) to disconnect the drive, move it to the other site and reconnect it and beat the network transfer.
OTOH if you have a gigabit network connection then yes it seems the fill/empty time is going to make physical media lose if you only do one drive at a time (and you actually need to fill/empty rather than just moving the drive).
It would be nice to live in a world where I had a server on a gigabit network connection with unlimited traffic and every machine I touched also had a gigabit network connection with unlimited traffic back to that server.
Back in the real world I don't have that luxury, end user ports on the university network are only 100 megabit and my cable connection at home is even slower so when I need to use large files on multiple computers it's faster to carry an external hard drive arround than to try and use the network.
I guess I could carry a laptop arround and setup a network connection directly with the machine I wanted to use the file on but that is a lot bulikier and more hassle than just plugging in an external hard drive.
That sort of thing worked in the win9x era when everyone had autorun enabled and there was little lockdown of systems. Nowadays it's going to mean your device can't be used with all the locked down desktops found in corporations and educational institutions.
Access to the local keyboard monitor and mouse is not the same as access to the inside of the computer. Many computers have lockable cases and even if they don't physically opening the computer is far more likely to arouse suspicion than merely doing something at the keyboard.
I don't know for sure but I strongly suspect/. UIDs are 32-bit integers (they are too big to be 16 bit integers and 24-bit integers are unusual). How long they will take to overflow depends on how many new users join but frankly I suspect the site will be gone for other reasons long before they overflow.
Some applications need to represent times before 1970 (for example dates of birth*) Some applications need to work with time differences. Some applications use negative numbers to represent errors.
Unsigned 32-bit unix time values may be useful as a quick fix in some specific scenarios where a field in a data structure is fixed size, where it is accepted that the code processing that field will need to be updated and where it is known that dates before 1970 will not be needed but attempts to use them as a general soloution are likely to break a lot of existing code.
* Yes there are a handful of people alive whose date of birth cannot be represented by signed 32-bit unix time but it's a sufficiently rare case that most application developers probablly dont care.
The problem is not so much the OS, as you say most systems will be running 64-bit operating systems and even 32-bit operating systems will likely find a soloution (like was done for large file support). The problem is the applications which have the assumption of 32-bit unix time built in.
You might say "just recompile for 64-bit" but that assumes that
1: you have the source 2: the source is not full of assumptions that make rebuilding for 64-bit impractical 3: the source actually stores the time in variables of type time_t or long and not variables of type int or type int32_t. 4: the data files the program stores on-disk do not include timestamps in unix format in fixed size fields.
For what proportion of applications do you belive all four of those assmptions will hold.
For example I have an application that uses a case insensitive collation. Afaict postgresql does not support this. There are ways to implement the same functionality (create an index on the uppercased version of the columns value) but it would mean changing every query that hits the columns in question.
For new stuff I will definately be choosing postgresql over mysql though.
P.S. does anyone know of a tool that can be used to design postgresql database schemas and export create/update scripts? (like mysql workbench does for mysql)
My guess is he is taking a lot of small payments where fixed fees drive up the overal percentage considerablly.
There is a new "micropayments" option that purports to offer far more reasonable fees for small transactions but their website doesn't make it clear if credit card transactions are covered or not and it's only for domestic payments within the US, EU or AU.
Absolute humidity is how much moisture there is in the air total relative humdity is how much moisture there is in the air compared to the ammount it can hold at that temperature. When you heat your house with a sealed heating system (heating with an open fire is more complex because there is water in the combustion prducts) the absolute humidity stays the same but the relative humidity drops.
And relative humidity not absolute humidity is what we generally care about.
I've got the distinct impression that most power cuts are a result of problems with the distribution wiring (especially if the local distribution wiring is overhead) on a fairly local level (in britan the 6.6KV, 11KV stuff and the 240/400V low voltage stuff, not sure what typical voltages are for similar systems in america). Afaict the 33KV and up stuff has much greater clearances and is on much strudier supports so it's rarely affected by bad weather even if it's routed overhead (which it usualy is because putting it underground is very expensive).
Though frankly for a datacenter power reliability is probablly not top of the priority list since they can easilly put generators in place. Having reliable and independent communications links and a lot probability of weather that will close the roads (it's hard to fix stuff if you can't get trucks in and out) is probablly more important.
If a small company trys to get free peering with a tier 1 the tier 1 will laugh at them and suggest transit or possiblly paid peering. If a small company buys transit service from the teir 1 then the small company will pay for all traffic regardless of whether it is going to/from another customer of the same tier 1.
Peering is a game of mutual benefit. Two companies agree to exchange traffic because despite being rivals they believe the exchange will benefit both sides. If either side belives they are not benefiting from the agreement then the peering arrangement may be terminated.
Due to the way internet routing works the receiving peer tends to bear most of the cost of moving data around geograpically. As such many networks are reluctant to free-peer with "outbound-heavy" networks. It sounds like cogent is very conent-heavy (because they provide an upstream to sites like google) and france telecom thinks that cogent are getting more benefit from the peering agreement than they are and as such France Telecom wants cogent to pay for upgrades to the peering link.
Just blackhole the packets!
Advertising a route for packets and then deliberately black holing them is a breach of the trust on which internet routing is based and is going to make you really unpopular really fast. If you aren't prepared to provide someone with a route for packets to a given prefix you dpn't advertise it to them.
P.S. what always surprises me is that a network built on largely ad-hoc agreements between competitors works as well as it does.
AIUI while the browser plugin is by far the most common use of the sandboxing and hence the most common way to exploit flaws in the sandboxing the sandboxing itself is a core feature of the java platform.
Some of those that are purely development boards may not worry about it but anything that is going to be sold as an end user product and where the company cares about the possibilty of lawsuits in the west* will need to pass FCC and CE RFI requirements (note: the requirements have two levels, one for "domestic" and one for "commercial", afaict manufacturers only have to comply with the "commercial" requirements provided they put a couple of lines of warnings about possible interference in a domestic environment in the manual).
AIUI the RFI is kept down through a combination of careful PCB design, slew rate/drive strength control and avoiding having too much high speed stuff on the board at all. Still it can be a close shave sometimes, the rpf were put in a tight spot after their distributors decided that given the volume and demographics of the preorders it was too risky to try and claim it was not an end user product. Fortunately they got the board to pass with only minor firmware tweaks.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL but AIUI there is at least a legal theory in some places that if you violate the agreement you agreed to when getting permission to use a computer system you do not have permission to use that computer system and hence you are guilty of accessing that computer system illegally.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/08/20/1423242/kutztown-students-get-felony-charges
AIUI eve does not allow open real money trading (some people do it anyway but there is a risk of bans if caught) but you can buy (it seems you can now buy them directly, afaict you used to have to buy a game time code and then convert it) what is known as a "pilot license extension" (plex for short) which can be sold within the game (and then used by someone else to extend their subscription or to buy a few other premium services). This allows someone to calculate a monetary price for each item by
(value of item in isk on the ingame market) / (value of plex in isk on the ingame market) * (price of plex in dollars)
So if someone was "stinking rich and batshit crazy" they could spend a load of money on plex, sell those plex on the ingame market and use the isk from that sale to buy a ship but its equally possible (and probablly far more likely given that this guy was able to call in a massive alliance when he got into trouble) that he earned the isk to buy the ship through activities in the game.
It's one thing to write a regulation into law, it's another thing to actually make it have an impact on the ground. To do that requires finding inspectors who will not take bribes and are not intimidated by threats.
So what happens in the business world when you can't get Windows 7 machines anymore. Ahhhhhhhhhh.
OEM versions of windows 8 pro come with downgrade rights to windows 7 and vista. If you want to downgrade further then volume licenses let you do that. I would expect the OEMs to offer buisness machines with Windows 7 drivers for as long as a significant proprortion of customers want windows 7 (just like they did for XP)
For new screwups the soloution would be to just reject the push and let the developer sort it out.
For existing screwups it's not so easy. One of the characteristics of hash-based dvcs systems like git is that they make it REALLY painful to change history. You could generate new commits and blacklist the old ones but doing so would tip off all users of the repository that something was up and those users would still have their copies of the original commits.
So finding a dual-core that can't run four threads is becoming difficult.
They are trivial to find, they are just marketed under Intel's lower end brands "celeron" and "pentium".
And $21M is but a drop in the water for the US entertainment industry
Serious question, what exactly does the $21M represent?
Is the $21M the total ammount that the antiguans can charge for copied content? or is it the ammount the US media companies would have charged for equivilent content?
Which one it is seriously changes how much pain they can inflict on the US entertainment industry.
It really depends on what you mean by a "good network connection", how much data you have to move and how many items of storage media (not nessacerally tape) you can fill in paralell.
Lets assume
You have 3TB of data
You fill/empty your drive at 1 gigabit per second (number plucked from wikipedia and rounded)
Your network between sites is 100 megabit per second.
It takes 24000 seconds to put the data on the drive and another 24000 seconds to copy it off again at the destination. In comparision it would take 240000 seconds to move the data over the network.
So that gives us 192000 seconds (over 2 days) to disconnect the drive, move it to the other site and reconnect it and beat the network transfer.
OTOH if you have a gigabit network connection then yes it seems the fill/empty time is going to make physical media lose if you only do one drive at a time (and you actually need to fill/empty rather than just moving the drive).
It would be nice to live in a world where I had a server on a gigabit network connection with unlimited traffic and every machine I touched also had a gigabit network connection with unlimited traffic back to that server.
Back in the real world I don't have that luxury, end user ports on the university network are only 100 megabit and my cable connection at home is even slower so when I need to use large files on multiple computers it's faster to carry an external hard drive arround than to try and use the network.
I guess I could carry a laptop arround and setup a network connection directly with the machine I wanted to use the file on but that is a lot bulikier and more hassle than just plugging in an external hard drive.
That sort of thing worked in the win9x era when everyone had autorun enabled and there was little lockdown of systems. Nowadays it's going to mean your device can't be used with all the locked down desktops found in corporations and educational institutions.
Access to the local keyboard monitor and mouse is not the same as access to the inside of the computer. Many computers have lockable cases and even if they don't physically opening the computer is far more likely to arouse suspicion than merely doing something at the keyboard.
I don't know for sure but I strongly suspect /. UIDs are 32-bit integers (they are too big to be 16 bit integers and 24-bit integers are unusual). How long they will take to overflow depends on how many new users join but frankly I suspect the site will be gone for other reasons long before they overflow.
32-bit linux systems use 32-bit time_t.
But as I mention at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3399939&cid=42657319 the real problem is not so much the OS (most systems will probablly be running a 64-bit OS within the next decade) but the applications.
Ages before 1970?
Some applications need to represent times before 1970 (for example dates of birth*)
Some applications need to work with time differences.
Some applications use negative numbers to represent errors.
Unsigned 32-bit unix time values may be useful as a quick fix in some specific scenarios where a field in a data structure is fixed size, where it is accepted that the code processing that field will need to be updated and where it is known that dates before 1970 will not be needed but attempts to use them as a general soloution are likely to break a lot of existing code.
* Yes there are a handful of people alive whose date of birth cannot be represented by signed 32-bit unix time but it's a sufficiently rare case that most application developers probablly dont care.
The problem is not so much the OS, as you say most systems will be running 64-bit operating systems and even 32-bit operating systems will likely find a soloution (like was done for large file support). The problem is the applications which have the assumption of 32-bit unix time built in.
You might say "just recompile for 64-bit" but that assumes that
1: you have the source
2: the source is not full of assumptions that make rebuilding for 64-bit impractical
3: the source actually stores the time in variables of type time_t or long and not variables of type int or type int32_t.
4: the data files the program stores on-disk do not include timestamps in unix format in fixed size fields.
For what proportion of applications do you belive all four of those assmptions will hold.
Unfortunately it's not that simple.
For example I have an application that uses a case insensitive collation. Afaict postgresql does not support this. There are ways to implement the same functionality (create an index on the uppercased version of the columns value) but it would mean changing every query that hits the columns in question.
For new stuff I will definately be choosing postgresql over mysql though.
P.S. does anyone know of a tool that can be used to design postgresql database schemas and export create/update scripts? (like mysql workbench does for mysql)
My guess is he is taking a lot of small payments where fixed fees drive up the overal percentage considerablly.
There is a new "micropayments" option that purports to offer far more reasonable fees for small transactions but their website doesn't make it clear if credit card transactions are covered or not and it's only for domestic payments within the US, EU or AU.
Absolute humidity is how much moisture there is in the air total relative humdity is how much moisture there is in the air compared to the ammount it can hold at that temperature. When you heat your house with a sealed heating system (heating with an open fire is more complex because there is water in the combustion prducts) the absolute humidity stays the same but the relative humidity drops.
And relative humidity not absolute humidity is what we generally care about.
No it should have said low probability.
Note to self: posting in the early hours of the morning isn't the worlds best idea...
lot probability
That should have said low priority.
I've got the distinct impression that most power cuts are a result of problems with the distribution wiring (especially if the local distribution wiring is overhead) on a fairly local level (in britan the 6.6KV, 11KV stuff and the 240/400V low voltage stuff, not sure what typical voltages are for similar systems in america). Afaict the 33KV and up stuff has much greater clearances and is on much strudier supports so it's rarely affected by bad weather even if it's routed overhead (which it usualy is because putting it underground is very expensive).
Though frankly for a datacenter power reliability is probablly not top of the priority list since they can easilly put generators in place. Having reliable and independent communications links and a lot probability of weather that will close the roads (it's hard to fix stuff if you can't get trucks in and out) is probablly more important.
If a small company trys to get free peering with a tier 1 the tier 1 will laugh at them and suggest transit or possiblly paid peering. If a small company buys transit service from the teir 1 then the small company will pay for all traffic regardless of whether it is going to/from another customer of the same tier 1.
Peering dispute? Why?
Peering is a game of mutual benefit. Two companies agree to exchange traffic because despite being rivals they believe the exchange will benefit both sides. If either side belives they are not benefiting from the agreement then the peering arrangement may be terminated.
Due to the way internet routing works the receiving peer tends to bear most of the cost of moving data around geograpically. As such many networks are reluctant to free-peer with "outbound-heavy" networks. It sounds like cogent is very conent-heavy (because they provide an upstream to sites like google) and france telecom thinks that cogent are getting more benefit from the peering agreement than they are and as such France Telecom wants cogent to pay for upgrades to the peering link.
Just blackhole the packets!
Advertising a route for packets and then deliberately black holing them is a breach of the trust on which internet routing is based and is going to make you really unpopular really fast. If you aren't prepared to provide someone with a route for packets to a given prefix you dpn't advertise it to them.
P.S. what always surprises me is that a network built on largely ad-hoc agreements between competitors works as well as it does.
AIUI while the browser plugin is by far the most common use of the sandboxing and hence the most common way to exploit flaws in the sandboxing the sandboxing itself is a core feature of the java platform.
Some of those that are purely development boards may not worry about it but anything that is going to be sold as an end user product and where the company cares about the possibilty of lawsuits in the west* will need to pass FCC and CE RFI requirements (note: the requirements have two levels, one for "domestic" and one for "commercial", afaict manufacturers only have to comply with the "commercial" requirements provided they put a couple of lines of warnings about possible interference in a domestic environment in the manual).
AIUI the RFI is kept down through a combination of careful PCB design, slew rate/drive strength control and avoiding having too much high speed stuff on the board at all. Still it can be a close shave sometimes, the rpf were put in a tight spot after their distributors decided that given the volume and demographics of the preorders it was too risky to try and claim it was not an end user product. Fortunately they got the board to pass with only minor firmware tweaks.
* Some chinese vendors simply don't give a fuck :(