Are you really suggesting that without advertising Ford wouldn't be able to sell a single car or truck?
I'de be willing to bet that Ford sales would be cut in half for each year if they didn't advertise. What I'm suggesting is that the m(b)illions they invest in advertizing is done for a good reason. The company message, placed in the media, has a positive effect on their bottom line. That is a testiment to the reach of that media.
I think it'd be a lot less than a 50% cut, but there is a potentional point of contention here - I'm counting only the Ford ads run directly by the company. I think local dealer advertising is far more effective, simply because people who don't need a car won't run out and spend $20K just because they saw an ad and those that are in the market will be checking the local places to see who's cheapest.
Nature has a way of surprising us - after all, who thought that we'd find life forms which could survive in nuclear waste, extremely toxic chemical environments or extremely high temperature environments? It's not much of a stretch to imagine something like existing anaerobic bacteria with greater radiation tolerance...
Why do they pay this kind of money to advertise? Because they know that the message has influence. Consider this: (1)Ford Motor Company recieved $66.15 in sales for every $1.00 they spent on ads in 1998. (2)Anheuser-Busch recieved $17.83 in sales for every $1.00 they spent on ads in 1998. (3)Dell Computer recieved $54.68 in sales for every $1.00 they spent on ads in 1998. (4)Microsoft recieved $23.68 in sales for every $1.00 they spent on ads in 1998. (5)Time Warner recieved $19.686in sales for every $1.00 they spent on ads in 1998.
You're assuming that all of these companies would have sold nothing without advertising. Are you really suggesting that without advertising Ford wouldn't be able to sell a single car or truck?
I've yet to see NSI follow any sort of pattern with our requests. Some changes are accepted the first time and go through quickly. Other times I've had to resend the [binary-identical] request 20 or 30 times before NSI's robot decides that it is really a valid request and then waited for an insanely long period of time for a trivial database update[1]. The bottom line is that we try never to do domain updates of any sort without planning for a month's delay. [1] Forget the usual/. "My Linux PC could do better" mantra. In NSI's case, I'm starting to wonder if my Visor would be faster...
I just posted about this in response to another post. Basically, McDonalds had never been warned about coffee being too hot; they had something like 1 in 20,000,000 people complain it was too hot. As far as the burns go, McDonald was well within the normal range for coffee preparation according to many sources.
The problem is that people don't think about their actions and don't take responsibility. It's not as if the drive-through worker dumped the coffee on her. The woman in question was the passenger in a motionless car, she got the coffee, placed it between her legs, pulled the lid off and only noticed it was hot when she then spilled it. That's being a klutz, not a victim.
We've debunked the coffee lawsuit every time someone's brought up a trial lawyer's "Why suing is good" page like the one you linked. Do note that the people you quote make a living on personal injury lawsuits, one of the most notorious areas of lawsuit abuse. This is like quoting the KKK in a story about the NAACP...
Read the alt.drugs.caffeine FAQ. McDonald's was not unusual in the temperature used to prepare their coffe.
Remember also that the person who order the hot coffee did not have it spilled on them by a McDonald's employee. The woman in question was the passenger in a stopped car who place it between her legs, took the lid off and then spilled it. An intelligent person might have noticed "Gee, this coffee isn't cold" and been careful.
The 700 previous times looks very impressive until you actually do some math. Those 700 cases were over a 10 year period. Even assuming each of the 25,000 McDonalds restaurants sold only 10 cups of a coffee a day, for every single person who had a problem, 1.3 million people did not! This is not the sign of a killer product...
(Note also that your average McDonalds probably sells the 10 cups/day I used in 15 minutes during the breakfast rush, making the real accident rate significantly lower. )
I'd be amazed if they didn't have a similar number of little kids poking each other with forks, people slipping on ice and the countless other things that happen when you're serving millions of people on a daily basis.
The phrase is "common carrier." The phone company doesn't filter your calls, even to the 1-900-PERVERT numbers because they'd then have to go to court to explain why they didn't block other offensive content.
ISPs face the same dilemna. They don't want to have approve all content ("Hey Marv, do you think these teenagers are legal?") and controlling only some content leaves them open to charges that anything not disapproved must have been approved.
One who wasn't raised by the TV? Not all kids flee mental activity and lose attention after 30 seconds. I suspect that many programmers were probably noted for concentrating on a single activity (e.g. reading, Legos, C64/Apple IIe level computers) for hours when they were younger. When it comes to 8-hour coding binges, this is good practice...
Check out patent #5,253,341. TechSearch LLC (a group of lawyers which buys patents so they can sue the bejeezus out of everyone else) claims this covers the retrieval and display of graphical and/or audio data from remote servers, which seems to include the entire web.
It looks like the usual scam - there's enough prior art to sink this if it was ever fought but they're hoping people will find it cheaper to pay the $80,000 protection money they're asking than the legal fees to fight it. The letter their lawyers sent listed several large companies that are being sued and asserted that many other companies have already paid for licenses.
I think the whole industry is starting to be challenged by those lusers. Outside of suing the US Patent Office for negligence, I think we need something like John Walker's PATO, where software companies could pool their resources to defend against these leeches.
To avoid the current mess of campaign finance regulation and the 1st Ammendment, why not switch to a full-disclosure system? Candidates are free to take money in any quantity from anyone (which satisfies the free-speech concern) but are required to provide it to some group (the FEC or another government agency, news media consortium, etc) which will maintain the information in a public format.
All of the admin stuff is passworded. You end up with the same issues you have on a regular linux box - e.g. do you trust your network enough to use telnet?
What kind of server is running to service all of these thin clients?
Given that this is Sun we're talking about, so I have a feeling the answer is "Sun Enterprise $BIGNUM". You really want something with a lot of extra memory capacity as each client is going to need a fair chunk of memory. The server will be expensive but the total will probably compare pretty well with the cost of a lab full of PCs and a small server, particularly when you count the high cost of maintaining PCs exposed to vandals^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents.
I agree with your post, except for your comments on virus prevention. Virus scanners are a fundamentally incomplete solution. Choice of an operating system does matter, but not for obscurity reasons. OpenBSD is secure because it has been designed (and verified) to be that way; it is not secure because it is "unusual". And if one has a secure platform, one should be able to run untrusted binaries (provided they are not run by a privileged user such as root).
Actually, I would recommend all of the measures listed, not just any one - a virus scanner is useful, if only for detecting sources of suspect software.
We're in agreement about operating system choice - I meant that OpenBSD is unusual because a great deal of time has been spent making it secure. The fact that OpenBSD doesn't have as many people attempting to build attacks is just a handy side benefit. I should have stated that better in my original post.
As far as untrusted binaries goes, I agree provided you have quotas setup properly, all interesting software is not user-modifiable (permissions & things like immutable) and that you minimize work done as root (which many people are lax about).
Another point about trusted code is that you want to get things like updates directly from the authors. Some people set up otherwise reasonable security & then install code off of the big archive sites without even testing a checksum. Ideally everything on your system would come with a digitally signed cryptographic hash for the archive.
It's an easy matter (for someone who can write a device driver!) to make a module that will encrypt and decrypt packets as they go in and out of the ethernet interface. Why would you want to build something like this into hardware, particularly when the user requirements aren't known ahead of time?
Speed. IPSec can encrypt all traffic and, on a high speed link, the protocol overhead could easily be higher than a server's application overhead. Remember that Intel's gotten very interested in creating internet server farms, precisely the type of area where this is most useful.
Finally, any algorithm implemented in silicon is unlikely to be peer-reviewed.
That's probably why Intel chose to implement standard, peer-reviewed algorithm:
Performance offload support for IETF IPSec standard mandated cryptographic algorithms Support for SHA1-HMAC, MD5-HMACs, DES, and 3DES
If it's used for IPSec, its output can be compared to that of another IPSec implementation. If it's at a lower level, there's nothing preventing someone from hooking up a packet analyzer to their LAN (which, if you're paranoid at this level, you should be doing anyway - do you trust your crypto supplier more than Intel?).
3DES is considered a safe conservative choice for strong encryption. IPSec is a reviewed protocol. MD5 and SHA-1 are also safe choices.
That bug might affect the actual security of the protocol making the device completely worthless. Or it might just affect what devices you could connect to, making the product useful in a very limited way. AHA! you say the solution is to make the hardware upgradable by burning a new program into a flash RAM. Well, why can't a virus do the same thing, except strip out all encryption totally?
Why couldn't the same attacks could be launched against your existing system? It'd probably be easier to trojan your encryption system's libraries than get write-access to an EPROM's memory address. Besides, this is easily solved by using virus scanners, unusual operating systems (how many OpenBSD viruses are there?) and not running untrusted binaries.
Of course, it would have been better to put some public-key system on the chip and require updates to be signed with an Intel secret key. Still, if you're worried about attacks at that level you'd be insane to use regular hardware in any case.
Why does that require religion? Quite a few atheists have come to hold similar views. If there were races nearby that are significantly more advanced than humankind, there should be some evidence of their existance, even if it was just something like radio emissions (the Earth currently pu. If such evidence doesn't exist, we are probably either alone or among the most advanced. (Of course, it is possible that there's a good reason no evidence exists - hiding from someone nasty or [to us] magical technology, for example. Not that likely but possible.)
Without evidence proving otherwise any rational individual must at least entertain the possibility that we are alone. Denial of this seems rather akin to the religious belief you detest so much...
According to their website, 50% of their 1997 revenues and more of 1998s were spent fighting this case:
Lastly, (and it *REALLY* pains us to say this) we need cash to pay the lawyers. Legal defense ate about 25% of our revenue the first year, and for 1997 it was over 50%. 1998 was even worse. If you'd like to send some cash which will be used ONLY for the defense of our domain name, you can send a check payable to:
Philip L. Dubois Attorney Trust Account (include a note that it's for the clue.com case)
and mail it to: Philip L. Dubois 2305 Broadway Boulder, CO 80304
$2 each from a good portion of slashdot.org readers would probably reduce that trend.
On a wider note, maybe Rob should add a billing page to slashdot.org where you could use a credit card to donate to a good cause.
Have you had problems with anything in particular? I've had no problem compiling any of the things I've needed on our Qube2 (e.g. PHP, MySQL, ntop, sysmon, scanlogd, newer apaches, IMAP c-client, etc).
The interesting question for/.ers is should Cobalt be viewed as a company that supports the OpenSource philosophy? Despite porting Linux to use MIPS, as far as I'm aware, they have not contributed their port back into mainstream (correct me if I'm mistaken).
First, there's nothing that prevents you from connecting multiple AirPorts to a switch similar to the way some companies will have a 10 or 100Mb segment for a single room or department with only single a connection to a switch to save money.
Second, I'd bet that the majority of small businesses and homes do not have switched Ethernet - 10Mb unswitched is fast enough for file/print sharing and internet access and it's not like a small business has a shortage of things to spend money on. The AirPort works extremely well for these people as they're also among the least likely to have full-time IT staffers and so the "No Wiring Required" part benefits them considerably more than a large company which already has people to string wires and probably wired the entire building years back in any case. The base station also has IP sharing built in and supports both Ethernet and modem connections for the same reason - it doesn't cause problems for people who do have dedicated IT staff and is extremely handy for those that do not.
Third, it's huge for portable users. Even places with switched 100Mb Ethernet may have a wireless setup for people using laptops heavily. For them, 11Mb versus the more common 2Mb is a huge win.
According to Apple's FAQ, the Airport has 40-bit encryption built in, which should stop casual attacks. If your security requirements are more rigourous, you need to be using strong encryption software in any case.
If you find a product written in Acucobol (a very high number of packages in that field are written in COBOL), do remember that they have a portable bytecode system similar to what Sun later did with Java and that Acucorp has supported Linux for years. If the vendor doesn't directly support Linux, you could probably buy any version of their software and the Acucobol-GT runtime for Linux and be up and running.
The FPU performance will be much better than the G3 (which was geared for integer performance). AltiVec can provide anywhere from 100%-2400% speedups for many operations. From what I've read, the technology and the development tools make it much easier for a developer to use AltiVec than something like MMX. The rumors have it that Apple's been using AltiVec in OS X to speed up not just the graphics things but even stuff like the TCP/IP stack. The developer feedback that I've seen suggests that this is very definitely more than just a graphics accelerator.
Llama would have gotten my business if they'd been abe to create an account in under a week or respond to email at all. I don't know if they still have the policy of not responding to any email to any of the addresses listed on their website but that's what happened when I tried...
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Nature has a way of surprising us - after all, who thought that we'd find life forms which could survive in nuclear waste, extremely toxic chemical environments or extremely high temperature environments? It's not much of a stretch to imagine something like existing anaerobic bacteria with greater radiation tolerance...
I've yet to see NSI follow any sort of pattern with our requests. Some changes are accepted the first time and go through quickly. Other times I've had to resend the [binary-identical] request 20 or 30 times before NSI's robot decides that it is really a valid request and then waited for an insanely long period of time for a trivial database update[1]. The bottom line is that we try never to do domain updates of any sort without planning for a month's delay. [1] Forget the usual /. "My Linux PC could do better" mantra. In NSI's case, I'm starting to wonder if my Visor would be faster...
The problem is that people don't think about their actions and don't take responsibility. It's not as if the drive-through worker dumped the coffee on her. The woman in question was the passenger in a motionless car, she got the coffee, placed it between her legs, pulled the lid off and only noticed it was hot when she then spilled it. That's being a klutz, not a victim.
Read the alt.drugs.caffeine FAQ. McDonald's was not unusual in the temperature used to prepare their coffe.
Remember also that the person who order the hot coffee did not have it spilled on them by a McDonald's employee. The woman in question was the passenger in a stopped car who place it between her legs, took the lid off and then spilled it. An intelligent person might have noticed "Gee, this coffee isn't cold" and been careful.
The 700 previous times looks very impressive until you actually do some math. Those 700 cases were over a 10 year period. Even assuming each of the 25,000 McDonalds restaurants sold only 10 cups of a coffee a day, for every single person who had a problem, 1.3 million people did not! This is not the sign of a killer product...
(Note also that your average McDonalds probably sells the 10 cups/day I used in 15 minutes during the breakfast rush, making the real accident rate significantly lower. )
I'd be amazed if they didn't have a similar number of little kids poking each other with forks, people slipping on ice and the countless other things that happen when you're serving millions of people on a daily basis.
The phrase is "common carrier." The phone company doesn't filter your calls, even to the 1-900-PERVERT numbers because they'd then have to go to court to explain why they didn't block other offensive content.
ISPs face the same dilemna. They don't want to have approve all content ("Hey Marv, do you think these teenagers are legal?") and controlling only some content leaves them open to charges that anything not disapproved must have been approved.
It looks like the usual scam - there's enough prior art to sink this if it was ever fought but they're hoping people will find it cheaper to pay the $80,000 protection money they're asking than the legal fees to fight it. The letter their lawyers sent listed several large companies that are being sued and asserted that many other companies have already paid for licenses.
I think the whole industry is starting to be challenged by those lusers. Outside of suing the US Patent Office for negligence, I think we need something like John Walker's PATO, where software companies could pool their resources to defend against these leeches.
To avoid the current mess of campaign finance regulation and the 1st Ammendment, why not switch to a full-disclosure system? Candidates are free to take money in any quantity from anyone (which satisfies the free-speech concern) but are required to provide it to some group (the FEC or another government agency, news media consortium, etc) which will maintain the information in a public format.
All of the admin stuff is passworded. You end up with the same issues you have on a regular linux box - e.g. do you trust your network enough to use telnet?
Ever see someone light an old VW engine block? With enough heat to start it, magnesium burns quite nicely even solid in an alloy...
We're in agreement about operating system choice - I meant that OpenBSD is unusual because a great deal of time has been spent making it secure. The fact that OpenBSD doesn't have as many people attempting to build attacks is just a handy side benefit. I should have stated that better in my original post.
As far as untrusted binaries goes, I agree provided you have quotas setup properly, all interesting software is not user-modifiable (permissions & things like immutable) and that you minimize work done as root (which many people are lax about).
Another point about trusted code is that you want to get things like updates directly from the authors. Some people set up otherwise reasonable security & then install code off of the big archive sites without even testing a checksum. Ideally everything on your system would come with a digitally signed cryptographic hash for the archive.
Performance offload support for IETF IPSec standard mandated cryptographic algorithms
Support for SHA1-HMAC, MD5-HMACs, DES, and 3DES
If it's used for IPSec, its output can be compared to that of another IPSec implementation. If it's at a lower level, there's nothing preventing someone from hooking up a packet analyzer to their LAN (which, if you're paranoid at this level, you should be doing anyway - do you trust your crypto supplier more than Intel?).
3DES is considered a safe conservative choice for strong encryption. IPSec is a reviewed protocol. MD5 and SHA-1 are also safe choices.
Why couldn't the same attacks could be launched against your existing system? It'd probably be easier to trojan your encryption system's libraries than get write-access to an EPROM's memory address. Besides, this is easily solved by using virus scanners, unusual operating systems (how many OpenBSD viruses are there?) and not running untrusted binaries.
Of course, it would have been better to put some public-key system on the chip and require updates to be signed with an Intel secret key. Still, if you're worried about attacks at that level you'd be insane to use regular hardware in any case.
Without evidence proving otherwise any rational individual must at least entertain the possibility that we are alone. Denial of this seems rather akin to the religious belief you detest so much...
On a wider note, maybe Rob should add a billing page to slashdot.org where you could use a credit card to donate to a good cause.
Have you had problems with anything in particular? I've had no problem compiling any of the things I've needed on our Qube2 (e.g. PHP, MySQL, ntop, sysmon, scanlogd, newer apaches, IMAP c-client, etc).
First, there's nothing that prevents you from connecting multiple AirPorts to a switch similar to the way some companies will have a 10 or 100Mb segment for a single room or department with only single a connection to a switch to save money.
Second, I'd bet that the majority of small businesses and homes do not have switched Ethernet - 10Mb unswitched is fast enough for file/print sharing and internet access and it's not like a small business has a shortage of things to spend money on. The AirPort works extremely well for these people as they're also among the least likely to have full-time IT staffers and so the "No Wiring Required" part benefits them considerably more than a large company which already has people to string wires and probably wired the entire building years back in any case. The base station also has IP sharing built in and supports both Ethernet and modem connections for the same reason - it doesn't cause problems for people who do have dedicated IT staff and is extremely handy for those that do not.
Third, it's huge for portable users. Even places with switched 100Mb Ethernet may have a wireless setup for people using laptops heavily. For them, 11Mb versus the more common 2Mb is a huge win.
According to Apple's FAQ, the Airport has 40-bit encryption built in, which should stop casual attacks. If your security requirements are more rigourous, you need to be using strong encryption software in any case.
If you find a product written in Acucobol (a very high number of packages in that field are written in COBOL), do remember that they have a portable bytecode system similar to what Sun later did with Java and that Acucorp has supported Linux for years. If the vendor doesn't directly support Linux, you could probably buy any version of their software and the Acucobol-GT runtime for Linux and be up and running.
The FPU performance will be much better than the G3 (which was geared for integer performance).
AltiVec can provide anywhere from 100%-2400% speedups for many operations. From what I've read, the technology and the development tools make it much easier for a developer to use AltiVec than something like MMX. The rumors have it that Apple's been using AltiVec in OS X to speed up not just the graphics things but even stuff like the TCP/IP stack. The developer feedback that I've seen suggests that this is very definitely more than just a graphics accelerator.
My boss just asked me to install rc5des on all of the machines here. I've got no choice but to boost my keyrates...
Llama would have gotten my business if they'd been abe to create an account in under a week or respond to email at all. I don't know if they still have the policy of not responding to any email to any of the addresses listed on their website but that's what happened when I tried...