Most transactions that are legitimate involve large numbers of small batches of outgoing data and larger amounts of incoming data (using realaudio, downloading useful software, reading slashdot). Transactions that are frowned upon (eg. sending out images (our job, as a company, is to make pictures)) involve lots of data going out. So the solution I came up with was to throttle data going out to 3K/s for the entire company (50-60 people). (Mail and incoming http is through a server or proxy so isn't counted in this.) Everyone seems happy now.
This isn't something that will work for most people but for those in the situation that the items of value are rather large (many megs) it seems to work well. Of course someone can keep an ftp connection open for many hours but (1) everyone would rapidly notice if someone does this excessively and (2) outside work hours (8am-8pm approx.) all IP traffic from individuals to the oustide world is throttled to 0K/s.
There's no point being 100% secure - people can hook up an external drive to their PC or even photograph images on their screen using a digital camera.
--
I'm a bit surprised. As will be seen from the replies this story gets a gag order really riles people. I would have thought that the moment any information about this got out everyone who cares about these things would have got to hear about it. How come someone didn't let slip what was going on? How come nobody posted anonymously to slashdot when it all started? Can a gag order served on people who have an interest in not keeping quiet be more succesful than a national lab's attempts to keep details about nuclear weapons secret?
--
Many years ago when the Linux version number was less than one (approx 0.99) there was a rather cool user file system - a filesystem that ran in user space. It was easy to add custom file systems and the source came with an example for entering tarred archives exactly as you ask. Another neat example were symbolic links that were *executed* rather than followed. So 'ln -s "echo hi" hello' followed by 'cat hello' would give 'hi'. Another example was mounting the entire ftp world so you could just 'cd/ftp/ftp.slashdot.org' or whatever. It was fun to play with.
--
Why has this been posted to Slashdot? This question is meant to be in a more philosophical vein rather than just a rhetorical 'why do they keep posting this shit?'. It's a very minor violation of the GPL that could easily be cleared up. It's obviously not intentional. By posting this story it is trivially obvious that the net effect is to cause a slew of flames to be sent to Compaq pissing them off. Was this the desired intention of the Slashdot editors? It's clearly not a very enlightening story in its own right seeing as it's identical (barring a s/xxxx/Compaq/) to many other stories.
And please please please can we have a separate GPL violation category so I can filter out these stories.
A guy with no legs! That's the one! Damn - you don't know the title either:-( Time to consult rec.arts.sf.writen! (One of the few good newsgroups left IMHO)
PS I've read 'Have Spacesuit Will Travel'. I'd forgotten about that but it's not the actual one I'm after.
--
When I first learnt Smalltalk I felt it was mind-expanding. That was around 1985. I haven't ever used it (I'm strictly C/C++/assembler). But it doesn't matter - the act of learning it (and learning how the underlying virtual machine works) changed the way I thought about programming forever. I can recommend learning it to everyone.
--
The first science fiction story I read was about a young kid who won a competition that allowed him to ask for a spaceflight as prize. That was probably around 1975. After all these years it's finally come true! Of course the original author couldn't have guessed just how tacky a show it would be in the year 2000. Now I'd love to reread this book. Can anyone ID it for me? I think it may have been written by AC Clarke. Did he write such a book? I vaguely remember that the prize was actually a trip anywhere in the world and the prizegivers were actually surprised the kid chose a space station. Ring any bells with anyone?
Anyway...it's a great thing this is happening. Anything that gets interest in spaceflight means we might actually catch up with where science fiction writers expected us to be by now.
--
I tried to buy some porn the other day at the local bookshop. But guess what - people look at you when you pick it up off the shelf - like everyone in the store! It's worse - when you go and pay you actually have to interact with another human! It's even worse - they remember who you are and the next time you go shopping there and your wife comes along it's very embarassing. I think there must be some kind of multinational corporation conspiracy thing going on with the retailers in cahoots with the publishers in order to track me. Scary stuff.
--
I'm not sure about at 6 years old but starting at about 10 (or maybe earlier) I'd suggest gcc. I guess when I was a kid we had BASIC but I was doing assembler within 6 months of BASIC so if this kid really is into maths at 5, C before 10 should be a breeze. You need a nice easy API though - I'd have gone crazy if I had to use X or Win32 directly at that age. I feel like programming has become harder and harder over the years as the brain cells die off. Start 'em young!
Before 10 (maybe 6 but I certainly would have had trouble at that age) I'd suggest Logo. There are a few free implementations for X out there. It's a nice clean language with much of the power of Lisp and it's dead easy to produce pretty graphics.
The trend - as we see with Napster, et. al. - is for information to become less valuable
Hmmm...Interesting. We are moving into an age when information is becoming a more and more important commodity (at least I think so). But you're arguing that information is becoming less valuable. I wonder what the net result of both these forces is going to be!
--
How do you tax a company's profits when a company's profits will eventually be nothing but encrypted bits stored in a virtual bank?
Some virtual money will get traded for physical goods. Most won't. Food, cars, whisky - this stuff is trivial compared to what information will be worth. Already a large part of my personal property consists of books, CDs, movies, applications and video games. The cost of these is far greater than the cost of the physical items to play them. Companies like Sony sell games consoles at a loss because they make a profit on the less tangible things like the games.
--
I beg to differ. The taxman won't be able to tax you for information. We are moving into an economy where information is playing a larger and larger role. Software, email spam lists, money in virtual bank accounts - these are all forms of information that are worth something and can't be taxed easily. Chocolate bars and property taxes only cover a small percentage of all finance. As time goes on more and more such 'virtual' items will play an important part in the economy. Large corporations will have assets that are largely bits making them hard to tax. Governments will try to recoup their losses by taxing tangible goods more but that can't work for long. Either we will end up in a police state where someone attempts to moniitor every transaction or taxation will dwindle.
It's interesting to note a company like Nothing Real (their product is the digital compositing system Shake) who are avoiding taxes by failing to deliver any tangible goods. They won't even deliver paper manuals for their software. If a bunch of companies decide to trade with each other in this manner how can they possibly be taxed.
--
Installing English (Germany) Language Pack...
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
Cool...it seems the Germans are speaking English now and that Netscape 6 has support for their dialect.
--
Given that recent moons have been named after 2000 year old fictional characters I guess we'll have to wait until about 4000 AD before we see moons like Troi and Seven of Nine. Ho hum. --
Hmmm...maybe I didn't make myself 100% clear. Not *all* of my complaints were about MS compatibility although I didn't clearly separate those out from my other complaints. And I should have added. I really wanted to use a non-MS product to present a paper (at SIGGRAPH actually) but the StarOffice fonts are dismal. I don't think it's just the lack of anti-aliasing in X - they look blockier than the usual X stuff. I really couldn't use SO for a presentation that might actually have people in the audience. --
and even quantum computers will take a LONG time to be able to handle modern key sizes.
Actually I think you'll find that if quantum computers ever come to be (which I personally doubt) you'll find that the algorithms take a time proportional to the key size - ie. they won't take a long time.
Specifically, there is no quantum algorithm for solving even one of the NP-complete problems
Nobody knows whether such algorithms exist. Someone might find one tomorrow. I think you needed to say 'yet'. --
I tried to work on a simple letter created in Word recently using SO. A simple letter with about 3 paragraphs and nothing fancy. It was unusable - the cursor kept being 3 or 4 characters out from where the text was actually getting inserted. I tried creating a presentation in SO,a really simple one, but things kept changing every time I saved and reloaded it. And in both cases the fonts looked so yucky it hurt my eyes. I tried reading in a presentation from PowerPoint into SO. It was 90Mb long (lots of pictures). On a 64Mb Windows machine it plays fine. It completely locked up a 128Mb Linux box because it went into heavy duty swap. Let's hope GPLing gets some things fixed but right now I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider using SO for anything but the most trivial tasks. (I'm using SO5.1a BTW FWIW) And please can people break this monolith into bite sized chunks. I don't want to load up every sinlge other application as well as a Windows-look-alike desktop thingy every time I edit a document. And please, can it not look *exactly* like a Microsoft application - it makes me feel a bit dirty to use it. Can't a program have its own look and feel? --
Wish we suffered from the Santa Barbara effect. The San Francisco effect, on the other hand, is not so pleasant. Cold in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The obvious question is: "Was it like this before the city was built?" --
No. I've only been doing this for a few months. In the last month the amount of spam I receive at work has doubled. It's being sent to the email address I used to have about 2 years ago - our company changed name then. I have not used that address in 2 years. So suddenly, after 2 years, my address got onto a spam list! So it seems that it takes along time for mailing lists to be passed around. --
Whenever I sign up for any kind of service I generate a random 32 bit integer. This is the email address I use to sign up. For example for slashdot I use (4 more than 0x7ff00000)@sigfpe.com. I have a little database that maps these integers to the service I signed up for. If I receive spam on one of these addresses (1) I can remove the address from my/etc/aliases and
(2) I know how the spammer got my email address. If the email address was given to a service that promises not to give out addresses I'll know exactly who to blame.
Basically I can track the spammers like doing cookies in reverse. Even if you don't have access to your mail server you can use 'plus' userids at many ISPs although that isn't quite as powerful. Of course I don't want to feel like I'm just a number and that's why the addresses all start with 0x7ff (geek joke - think about it!:-) --
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...my doctor says steroids can be really dangerous. He says Bruce Willis was on them and look what happened to his hair.
--
Most transactions that are legitimate involve large numbers of small batches of outgoing data and larger amounts of incoming data (using realaudio, downloading useful software, reading slashdot). Transactions that are frowned upon (eg. sending out images (our job, as a company, is to make pictures)) involve lots of data going out. So the solution I came up with was to throttle data going out to 3K/s for the entire company (50-60 people). (Mail and incoming http is through a server or proxy so isn't counted in this.) Everyone seems happy now. This isn't something that will work for most people but for those in the situation that the items of value are rather large (many megs) it seems to work well. Of course someone can keep an ftp connection open for many hours but (1) everyone would rapidly notice if someone does this excessively and (2) outside work hours (8am-8pm approx.) all IP traffic from individuals to the oustide world is throttled to 0K/s. There's no point being 100% secure - people can hook up an external drive to their PC or even photograph images on their screen using a digital camera.
--
I'm a bit surprised. As will be seen from the replies this story gets a gag order really riles people. I would have thought that the moment any information about this got out everyone who cares about these things would have got to hear about it. How come someone didn't let slip what was going on? How come nobody posted anonymously to slashdot when it all started? Can a gag order served on people who have an interest in not keeping quiet be more succesful than a national lab's attempts to keep details about nuclear weapons secret?
--
Hmmm...I wonder how long before the simulated characters decide that they're bored and run a virtual sim of their own...
--
Many years ago when the Linux version number was less than one (approx 0.99) there was a rather cool user file system - a filesystem that ran in user space. It was easy to add custom file systems and the source came with an example for entering tarred archives exactly as you ask. Another neat example were symbolic links that were *executed* rather than followed. So 'ln -s "echo hi" hello' followed by 'cat hello' would give 'hi'. Another example was mounting the entire ftp world so you could just 'cd /ftp/ftp.slashdot.org' or whatever. It was fun to play with.
--
And please please please can we have a separate GPL violation category so I can filter out these stories.
--A guy with no legs! That's the one! Damn - you don't know the title either :-( Time to consult rec.arts.sf.writen! (One of the few good newsgroups left IMHO)
PS I've read 'Have Spacesuit Will Travel'. I'd forgotten about that but it's not the actual one I'm after.
--
When I first learnt Smalltalk I felt it was mind-expanding. That was around 1985. I haven't ever used it (I'm strictly C/C++/assembler). But it doesn't matter - the act of learning it (and learning how the underlying virtual machine works) changed the way I thought about programming forever. I can recommend learning it to everyone.
--
The first science fiction story I read was about a young kid who won a competition that allowed him to ask for a spaceflight as prize. That was probably around 1975. After all these years it's finally come true! Of course the original author couldn't have guessed just how tacky a show it would be in the year 2000. Now I'd love to reread this book. Can anyone ID it for me? I think it may have been written by AC Clarke. Did he write such a book? I vaguely remember that the prize was actually a trip anywhere in the world and the prizegivers were actually surprised the kid chose a space station. Ring any bells with anyone? Anyway...it's a great thing this is happening. Anything that gets interest in spaceflight means we might actually catch up with where science fiction writers expected us to be by now.
--
I tried to buy some porn the other day at the local bookshop. But guess what - people look at you when you pick it up off the shelf - like everyone in the store! It's worse - when you go and pay you actually have to interact with another human! It's even worse - they remember who you are and the next time you go shopping there and your wife comes along it's very embarassing. I think there must be some kind of multinational corporation conspiracy thing going on with the retailers in cahoots with the publishers in order to track me. Scary stuff.
--
I'm not sure about at 6 years old but starting at about 10 (or maybe earlier) I'd suggest gcc. I guess when I was a kid we had BASIC but I was doing assembler within 6 months of BASIC so if this kid really is into maths at 5, C before 10 should be a breeze. You need a nice easy API though - I'd have gone crazy if I had to use X or Win32 directly at that age. I feel like programming has become harder and harder over the years as the brain cells die off. Start 'em young!
Before 10 (maybe 6 but I certainly would have had trouble at that age) I'd suggest Logo. There are a few free implementations for X out there. It's a nice clean language with much of the power of Lisp and it's dead easy to produce pretty graphics.
----
Hmmm...Interesting. We are moving into an age when information is becoming a more and more important commodity (at least I think so). But you're arguing that information is becoming less valuable. I wonder what the net result of both these forces is going to be!
--
How do you tax a company's profits when a company's profits will eventually be nothing but encrypted bits stored in a virtual bank? Some virtual money will get traded for physical goods. Most won't. Food, cars, whisky - this stuff is trivial compared to what information will be worth. Already a large part of my personal property consists of books, CDs, movies, applications and video games. The cost of these is far greater than the cost of the physical items to play them. Companies like Sony sell games consoles at a loss because they make a profit on the less tangible things like the games.
--
I beg to differ. The taxman won't be able to tax you for information. We are moving into an economy where information is playing a larger and larger role. Software, email spam lists, money in virtual bank accounts - these are all forms of information that are worth something and can't be taxed easily. Chocolate bars and property taxes only cover a small percentage of all finance. As time goes on more and more such 'virtual' items will play an important part in the economy. Large corporations will have assets that are largely bits making them hard to tax. Governments will try to recoup their losses by taxing tangible goods more but that can't work for long. Either we will end up in a police state where someone attempts to moniitor every transaction or taxation will dwindle. It's interesting to note a company like Nothing Real (their product is the digital compositing system Shake) who are avoiding taxes by failing to deliver any tangible goods. They won't even deliver paper manuals for their software. If a bunch of companies decide to trade with each other in this manner how can they possibly be taxed.
--
Cool...it seems the Germans are speaking English now and that Netscape 6 has support for their dialect.
--
You mean there is a version of Gnome that *is* stable?
--
Given that recent moons have been named after 2000 year old fictional characters I guess we'll have to wait until about 4000 AD before we see moons like Troi and Seven of Nine. Ho hum.
--
Hmmm...maybe I didn't make myself 100% clear. Not *all* of my complaints were about MS compatibility although I didn't clearly separate those out from my other complaints. And I should have added. I really wanted to use a non-MS product to present a paper (at SIGGRAPH actually) but the StarOffice fonts are dismal. I don't think it's just the lack of anti-aliasing in X - they look blockier than the usual X stuff. I really couldn't use SO for a presentation that might actually have people in the audience.
--
--
I tried to work on a simple letter created in Word recently using SO. A simple letter with about 3 paragraphs and nothing fancy. It was unusable - the cursor kept being 3 or 4 characters out from where the text was actually getting inserted. I tried creating a presentation in SO,a really simple one, but things kept changing every time I saved and reloaded it. And in both cases the fonts looked so yucky it hurt my eyes. I tried reading in a presentation from PowerPoint into SO. It was 90Mb long (lots of pictures). On a 64Mb Windows machine it plays fine. It completely locked up a 128Mb Linux box because it went into heavy duty swap. Let's hope GPLing gets some things fixed but right now I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider using SO for anything but the most trivial tasks. (I'm using SO5.1a BTW FWIW) And please can people break this monolith into bite sized chunks. I don't want to load up every sinlge other application as well as a Windows-look-alike desktop thingy every time I edit a document. And please, can it not look *exactly* like a Microsoft application - it makes me feel a bit dirty to use it. Can't a program have its own look and feel?
--
Wish we suffered from the Santa Barbara effect. The San Francisco effect, on the other hand, is not so pleasant. Cold in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The obvious question is: "Was it like this before the city was built?"
--
No. I've only been doing this for a few months. In the last month the amount of spam I receive at work has doubled. It's being sent to the email address I used to have about 2 years ago - our company changed name then. I have not used that address in 2 years. So suddenly, after 2 years, my address got onto a spam list! So it seems that it takes along time for mailing lists to be passed around.
--
You're vaguely in the right direction. My domain name is a clue! Think ieeefp.
--
(2) I know how the spammer got my email address. If the email address was given to a service that promises not to give out addresses I'll know exactly who to blame.
Basically I can track the spammers like doing cookies in reverse. Even if you don't have access to your mail server you can use 'plus' userids at many ISPs although that isn't quite as powerful. Of course I don't want to feel like I'm just a number and that's why the addresses all start with 0x7ff (geek joke - think about it!--