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The point is that everything made with that production platform cannot be run on any other OS.

Five or even three years ago, you'd be correct.

But not anymore.

First this, Ars Linux Powered Scope

And now a self guiding bullet. Next thing you know they will scale the XM 25 down to fifty caliber rounds that explode at set at the time of fire distances.

It seems you can be compelled to reveal your passwords in the US if they're looking for evidence they already know to exist rather than information they may not know about.

The much better Ars Technica summary article says that yes, 30m for 10Gbps, but 1Gbps over 70m. Gigabit DSL would be a game changer.

Oh that DMCA was issued by Cyveillance - the incompetent company Hollywood and music labels hired for policing P&P by string matching filenames and then carpet bombing service providers with DMCA requests, even though the content was not infringing at all. I bet they simply crawled Github for Qualcomm copyright notices, something that is often left in source code, even though it was relicensed long time ago already. Unfortunately, their bot is not that smart.

Some references:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

etc.

These bozos are known and someone at Qualcomm should get fired for hiring them. This is going to backfire at Qualcomm in a spectacular way, IMO.

Re 'Actually a very dangerous route this is taking - thought control (if you THINK that, you are...) and modeled prediction of events based on secret procedures"
"IRS policy that targeted political groups also aimed at open source projects" (July 3 2014)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
So a person codes in the freedom of their basement, free time and uploads quality code to the world for free.
Slowly self radicalizing? A cult like mascot and forming deeper emotional links to incompatible European views on intellectual property.
At university? Talks to the press? Goes to European Open Source conferences?
Would that make any code contributor a freedom fighter to be watched?
Thats a lot of new funding for some gov or mil budget and a flood of new informants to turn.
Does they live in a state with a farm? Tack on some nice Ag-gag findings. (agricultural anti-whistleblower laws, gag: prevent speech)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
State got a mil base, site, camp? Pass the details onto base security.

If you read up on the IeSF, it becomes much more clear what is going on.

-The IeSF is a South Korean organization; it is not Finnish. Ok, technically, it has a number of "member nations," but it is dominated by South Koreans. This tournament in Finland was a local qualifier for a larger international tournament. The local (Finnish) tournament organizers protested against the male-only rule, but couldn't convince the IeSF to relent until the media backlash started.

-The people who run the the IeSF aren't young male hormonal gamers. They are, by and large, middle-aged male executives at media and marketing companies. Their ultimate goal is to become the equivalent of the International Olympic Committee of e-sports, so that their companies can commercialize e-sports in the same way the Olympics were commercialized. However, they haven't been all that successful yet - they don't control any big-name tournaments in any of the games that I follow.

-As I mentioned already, the guys making the rules are older Koreans. I'll quote an interesting anecdote I saw on Ars Technica's comments:

Koreans can be remarkably thoughtlessly sexist (and racist, etc) without thinking about the broader implications. This is highly visible every time you park a car in a modern shopping center - there are reserved spots for women. The parking lanes (marked in pink) are wider and closer to the entrances. These aren't parking spots for expectant mothers or women with small children. These are parking spots for all women, with forethought that they're doing women a favor because they can't park cars as well as men. Westerners see this kind of thing and are instantly offended by the blatant sexism. A Korean will be confused as to why you don't see that women are obviously better off this way.

Wasn't there a recent issue with no poaching employee agreements... and doesn't this do the same?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Top down the political class knows where its re election cash is flowing from and why.
You are seeking capitalism, entrepreneurship and a vibrant local telco sector.
Think about your local laws and community broadband.
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
Structural separation will ensure any local, state or national provider can offer its network down to homes without been shut out by any one regional monopoly.

Show me why I should even care about such trivial nonsense. I don't need perfection, and I can't see why anyone would.

Ars Technica had an article a few years back exactly on this subject. It's three pages long, but it's a nice read for someone who says something like you do.

Aperture won't currently run in Yosemite. Aperture will be updated to run under Yosemite but that's the last update it's going to get.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

Ars Technica just published an article demonstrating the activities that irresponsible people (the author) do with this technology: link

After reading this article and watching the video, TFA of the arstechnica article is a douche.

Who is he doing a favor for, by reviewing this relatively new, novel technology in a thoroughly irresponsible manner.

Does the mfg recommend deploying from a small yard that appears to be boxed in by a myriad of power lines?

Does the mfg recommend flying the drone over private property without prior authorization? Over public property? Over or near highways or roads?

The mfg should be demanding their device be returned from TFA nimrod and be shouting from rooftops that they under no circumstances condone the type of use exhibited by TFA nimrod. Otherwise, the mfg may increasingly face draconian legislation far more difficult to work under than a more 'voluntary' benevolent approach.

The problem the FAA is currently faced with is that hobbyists aren't flying within a field, AMA or otherwise, but rather exceeding 400 ft, flying over populated areas and highways, and flying into controlled airspace. The only new restriction that the FAA is proposing is removing FPV flying from the domain of "model aircraft", which limits the pilots ability to perform these unsafe activities.

Ars Technica just published an article demonstrating the activities that irresponsible people (the author) do with this technology: link

I doubt it is just "a few idiots". The access to these devices has increased to the point where many people can now gain access to them, particularly those who don't give much thought to their actions. Ars Technica got their hands on a DJI Phantom and IMMEDIATELY flew above 400 ft, over other people's property, over crowded areas, over highways, and in dangerous areas (near power lines, etc): link.

The FAA agrees with you and you still retain the ability to fly the craft as a hobbyist, but you must do so below 400 ft and within line of sight (not using FPV). You must not operate the craft for money, nor as a part of a business.

The problem is that when people take their quad out to a park and fly it using FPV, they often go above 400 ft, fly over other people's property, fly over crowded areas, fly over highways, and fly in dangerous areas (near power lines, etc). This isn't a "few bad apples" either, this is the glut of FPV users.

Ars Technica got their hands on a DJI Phantom and IMMEDIATELY did the things I mentioned and wrote about it: link

Some emboldened quad users have been more than willing to put others at risk and fly their aircraft in the landing path of airports. In 2013 an Alitalia pilot identified a quad in the flight path at JFK International Airport, coming within 200 ft of the airplane on it's descent: link

The Supremes weren't as clear as they wanted, hence the lawsuit by Fox against Dish over Hopper the next day.

More than that, Google is buying Twitch.tv. Adding these new features matches both Twitch.tv's video quality and viewer donation feature. This makes perfect sense if they are planning to buy them and partner more closely.

Hopefully they won't make the same mistake again by trying to link all Twitch.tv users to a Google+ account and generally break things.

It amazes me that you subscribe to the idea that a local desktop hard drive crash wiped out all email for a high-ranking IRS official... and that the IRS is essentially shrugging at any notion of ineptitude. Clearly you know fuck all about tech.

I thought so too, but when you read the Ars Technica article on what a clusterfuck the IRS IT system is, It becomes a little more believable.

According to the most recent contributions, MS doesn't even show up. So MS only contributed enough to Linux to make sure that their product would work. I still don't consider that a major contribution.

I currently subscribe to a variant of this climate change theory. (Natural, not anthropogenic.)

My variant is that all, or almost all the civilizations the aliens know about formed around red dwarf stars. It's nice and stable there for very long periods of time. We're only stable here by luck - and our big moon helps some.

It shows how little you know about red dwarfs. There are some big problems with life on a red dwarf. 1. The damm things are rather cold as stars go. So to get the kind of heat that's needed for liquid water, you've got to be pretty close to the parent star... and that has two major consequences. The first is tidal locking which means the same face is facing the start constantly. The more serious problem is proximity.... At that distance the solar wind is so dense it would overwhelm what would be a nearly non existent magnetic field. (because of the slow rotation from part 1). The planet's atmosphere would literally be blown away by the highly ionized solar wind.

I understand that but in the case of it being Google who has a tendency not to make their technology, like Android, forkable. It's a one way street with them and I wouldn't trust any security implementation blessed by them. If it were Red Hat or even Microsoft I'd trust it more.

At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

Exploiting bug in Supermicro hardware is as easy as connecting to port 49152.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

http://blog.cari.net/carisirt-...

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/New...

Some workloads perform much better on an FPGA, notably, realtime encoding/compression of HD H.264 video. I know because I've worked on such a broadcast quality encoder [currently being used by some major distribution outlets]. While you're right that it's harder to program an FPGA [in particular, validate the design], the performance gains can be huge. In particular, calculating motion vectors gets a win.

Note that H.264 DCT's are integer ones. And, with Intel's hybrid/onchip implementation, the FPGA logic could have access to the CPU's SIMD FP hardware. With Intel's hafnium and trigate technologies, adding the FPGA won't consume that much additional power.

Also note the benefits for search in an article just published today: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

At least according to Ars this is much less. It's just about killing specific kind of SW patents. Crucially, it still allows patents that "improve the functioning of the computer itself".

. Whatever happened to G.W. Bush's Exchange server backups and recovery? That was a priority with a budget if I recall correctly.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

It truly baffles me to no end when people use the wrongs of the past to somehow justify the wrongs of today.

So I guess we just say F' it and let our elected officials get away with whatever they want. Justice was overrated anyways.

Conspiracy theory, much? Really? This is the U.S. Federal Government we're discussing and the taxpayer is kind of a legacy concern of theirs. No one was considering preserving anything on that particular hard disk, and presumably another part of the government I.T. dept. was responsible for backing up the emails, (and another part of the government was responsible for a verifiable audit trail, ...and at some point the hard disk did what hard disks due in such circumstances), while yet another department merely wanted to re-use the %$#!@! hard disk.

Because of the gravity of the situation, someone did track all that down and there you have it. ...p.s. This is Slashdot and it is full of admins just doing their job to pay their rent. I'm not saying the situation is Kosher, but just so long as we can all agree on what is exactly Kosher well then, fine; otherwise everything is anyone's guess.

P.S. Whatever happened to G.W. Bush's Exchange server backups and recovery? That was a priority with a budget if I recall correctly.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

.
Has Adobe said anything substantial regarding how they are going to address their cloud downtime problem?

Yes the public court news is getting fun too:
"Microsoft challenges US gov’t warrant to access overseas customer data"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

Sorry, a congressman beat you to the joke...

What about where the emails were sent? The emails that were "lost" were sent to the White House, the Department of Justice (Lerner sent other emails that we know of trying to coordinate with DOJ to try to drum up prosecutions of Tea Party groups) and the FEC to try to target any alleged political speech. Each of these departments should have independent backups and records on each of the recipient's computers.

A member of the House has already sent a request to the NSA for any metadata it may have on Lerner's emails. Hopefully this will help track down any "lost" emails and who the recipients were.

Then read more... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/... There were lots of cluster projects, but they all went away.

The Republican bill that would remove ISPs from FCC regulation would allow states to regulate. It would make rent seeking a lot more difficult for ISPs.

Not bloody likely. States are already busy shutting down competition for the incumbent ISPs.

There's been more money to be made with Objective-C than most other languages these last few years.

Really? I thought most developers weren't making any money on any of the mobile platforms. Here's an article that states that 60% of iOS developers don't break even:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

I'm not trying to be offensive here, but I assume that you do not know too much about modern cryptography. Correctly applied, it is secure. Really secure. Successful attacks target the system that uses the cryptography, not the cryptography itself. Random number generators are a nice target. Systems running vulnerable software are nice targets. Targeting modern cryptography itself is usually a futile endeavour.

Languages can be learned. It may take a bunch of linguists a couple of years to get somewhere if the language is odd enough, but it is doable.

Proprietary, undocumented protocols and file formats exist. People who reverse engineer them and write their own compatible implementations also exist. I have done that kind of thing a few times myself.

Proprietary protocols and the like are basically what is commonly referred to as security through obscurity. This is considered a bad thing.

On the other hand, we have modern cryptography. Properly implemented, that stuff is incredibly secure. Even if you have a bunch of linguists or mathematicians, they won't break it in a few years or even a few hundred years, likely. The situation is not really comparable to WW2 era ciphers at all. We have left those far behind.

Sure, it is possible but we will have some incredible, mathematical breakthrough with regards to integer factorization, but it doesn't seem likely to happen suddenly. Usually, the state of the art advances at a slower pace. Even quantum computers will still leave us with working symmetric cryptography and (somewhat more unwieldy and less studied) asymmetric cryptography intact.

One time pads are commonly cited as the holy grail, but they miss the point and are difficult to employ, even today. Cryptographic systems are not broken by attacking the cryptography. They are broken by circumventing it. To use a one time pad, you first have to generate it. For that you need a true RNG, or it will be no better than a regular stream cipher. If your randomness is bad, you will be vulnerable and there exist interesting attacks that could subvert commonly deployed sources of entropy, such as Intel's RdRand instruction.

The second problem is exchanging the one time pad securely. How are you going to do that? Snail mail? It could get intercepted. Besides, if you have a way to securely share a secret with the person you are communicating with, you could just share a 256bit ChaCha20 or AES key and be done with it. The practical gain in security a one time pad would provide over those would be negligible.

It would only be breached if the enemy got access to the machine used to send the messages. And nothing is going to survive that.

There is a nice property good, modern cryptographic systems provide, which is called "perfect forward secrecy". It guarantees that communications that took place before an attacker gained access to the secret keys of a peer will still remain secure after the fact. I suppose you could achieve something similar by securely zeroing out the used parts of your one time pad, but then you get into the messy affair of how to securely delete data.

Got a link because the article

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Basically duplicates Slashdot (which of course duplicates itself often).

Actually from Ars technica, the site you listed as a citation, they waited 8 years before doing anything, not that they spent 8 years trying to convince her to change it.

IKEA waits 8 years, then shuts down IKEAhackers site with trademark claim

From TFA: "While the announcement came from Leahy, sources close to the negotiations all pointed to Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as the one who really killed the bill."

So yes, yes Reid is the individual person who kept it from the senate floor. And you're right, it is nice there's a powerful figure for us to blame. Fucking troll.

yeah, this is what I thought they were doing. As big as verizon and comcast's data centers are, there's no way that they colo all of the data of all the content that netflix hosts. Not with the advantage of virtualized servers is allowing for caching and peering so that everyone, coming from different providers can still get the same content. That's not to mention that all the mentions of the deals between comcast and netflix mentioned direct peering, not colocation. http://arstechnica.com/busines... "News of a paid peering deal comes two days after a traceroute showed that the two companies were exchanging traffic with each other directly."

I currently subscribe to a variant of this climate change theory. (Natural, not anthropogenic.)

My variant is that all, or almost all the civilizations the aliens know about formed around red dwarf stars. It's nice and stable there for very long periods of time. We're only stable here by luck - and our big moon helps some.

Another fun thing to think about: If you look at our system as a whole, from a very long distance, we look like we're still a pre-multicellular world. Sure, there's free oxygen and water (Earth), but there's lots of iron still to be oxidized (Mars), and lots of free CO2 (Mars and Venus). I imagine there are a lot of pre-multicellular worlds (like Mars IMHO) orbiting yellow stars, so we don't stand out. (But for our radio transmissions.)

Actually, according to Netflix's response to Verizon, they offered Verizon co-located boxes, but Verizon declined... "The letter criticized Verizon for not joining Netflix's Open Connect peering and caching program, which lets ISPs connect directly to Netflix or bring Netflix storage boxes into their own networks in order to improve quality." http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Charged Aaron Swartz with "MAC Address Spoofing"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://archive.org/stream/UsaV...

My question is what other modern tools do admins have for identifying malicious users to restrict access to open networks if automatic MAC address spoofing becomes commonplace?

So why the heck can't they show his face in a story about facial recognition? Why the picture of a train? That has nothing to do with facial recognition! For all we know he has some incredibly unique face or maybe a tattoo across his forehead.

There's 2 links in the summary - not to mention plenty of other articles about this exact story - the second one includes a photo.

Why a train? Probably because it was about a robbery that occurred on a train, but why are you asking that here when you could ask the author?

..but only Google Play supports that, not third-party app stores. I haven't looked into other app stores, and now it's less likely I will.

With the pushing back on Samzung/Tizen, and new Google Silver program, Google seems to be trying to tighten up. The fact that growing Android with more chipsets has a side effect of making Google Play more central to the experience will make some Mountain View folks very happy.

..but only Google Play supports that, not third-party app stores. I haven't looked into other app stores, and now it's less likely I will.

With the pushing back on Samzung/Tizen, and new Google Silver program, Google seems to be trying to tighten up. The fact that growing Android with more chipsets has a side effect of making Google Play more central to the experience will make some Mountain View folks very happy.

"Nationalize" ... whatever.

How is it what we have all that different from nationalized net access when 99% of users are locked into one of three major providers who then use that money to buy legislation and ordinances which favor them making even more money.

In the choice between a monopoly or nationalization, nationalization is a no brainer, because out of it might spring real competition as a GP poster pointed out, by leasing the pipes to any and all ISP wannabes. In contrast, monopolization leads to fat profits at users' expense, poor service, and crappy laws and it can never ever get better. Obviously, a free market would be better than either the other two, but we have a free market in net services like N. Korea has a free and open society.

Secondly -- exactly who invested in the network? I know I saw a recent article about cable companies taking Federal money to build out their networks and then claiming those lines aren't covered by common carrier rules --- a corollary to "socialize losses, privatize profits" would thus be "socialize expenses, privatize profits." I did find this about Comcast using $40m of public funds to build itself an office building Philly:

http://newslanc.com/2014/01/16...

Also how these assholes are making competition illegal: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Or what about the fact that to lay all this wire, they are using public utility rights of way. If they aren't going to be a public utility they should have no right to use that right of way -- it's a kind of robbery of the commons -- a robbery of every American.

Until these monopolies start actually using their own money for stuff, the whole cry for the investors shit is just that, fetid stinking steaming shit. Cry a river of it. Then go swimming.

I doubt it's high on Microsoft's priority list. Your earlier example shows a saving of a few hundred megabytes out of 8 GB, and RAM is really cheap.

I should point out that in my example, the memory pressure at the time was quite low. Had I pushed the memory pressure higher, the amount of compressed memory would also have been quite a bit higher.

RAM may be cheap, but there are still physical limits that can be hit on any given board or system before you reach the theoretical limits. I'm posting this on a 2009 iMac right now, and it has a maximum RAM configuration of 8GB (which is also how much RAM is installed). No matter how cheap RAM gets, this system can't accommodate any more.

Considering Mavericks was a free upgrade, installing it was like going up to 12GB of RAM or more -- for free. I don't have any metrics in front of me of the useful theoretical maximum compressed memory storage, I can only assume that it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of about (Installed RAM - 1GB)*2 at best (or in my case, 14GB. The 1GB is to ensure space is reserved for wired memory, which can't be swapped or compressed). I suspect it will be a bit less, depending on how compressible your data is (the algorithm used is optimized for a 2:1 compression ratio, however not all pages will be compressible to this degree; my understanding is that if a pair of pages can't be compressed into a single page, the compression routine stops for that pair of pages).

Note that as memory compression sits between the point where the OS identifies that it may need to evict old pages and the point where the pages are physically swapped to disk, the pages written to disk are also compressed (unless they were incompressible in the first place). This will roughly halve the amount of data that needs to be written to swap, meaning that the slowest operations of the paging to disk procedure is roughly halved in time as well.

As Windows machines swap as well, being able to halve the time required to read data from and write data to disk would be a huge boost. Being able to get a few million extra pages without the need to swap is an even bigger performance boost. I'll point out this ArsTechnica article on Apple's Compressed Memory subsystem -- note in particular the second graphic which shows a system under much heavier memory pressure, where a machine with 16GB of RAM has over 8GB compressed, and only 26.5MB (not a typo!) of data swapped to disk. That's a lot of data that didn't need to be written to a page file.

Yaz

Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Reading the link you posted above, it seems like a bit of a non-factual load of waffle. Nvidia deny paying, Ubisoft deny being paid, and the only sources mentioned are anonymous speculators we have no way of knowing are not just a few paid ATI shills.

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Wow, another example of amazing journalism here.

Some guy moaning about Crysis having loads of detailing that is only used in the DirectX11 game. He give loads of examples of this, then posts a summary page of wild speculation with no sources quoted other than his own imagination. He never asks any of the companies involved, he just posts a bunch of stuff about why this might be the case.

I have another possible suggestion as to why this was the case: Crytek like making stuff look overly detailed and include graphics detailing that means their games continue to max out graphics cards long after they are released. They always make they games playable on the budget cards if you crank the detailing down, but they also like catering to people who buy a new graphics card then go back and play a few oldies that they had to crank the detail down on previously. Crytek also probably also quite like their games being used in hardware reviews because their games hammer the hardware.

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Ok, congratulations on actually posting an article that was real journalism, with quote sources and not just made up of the authors own conjecture.

The issue here though seems to be that there was an optimisation, moving from x87 to SSE that they did not do on a bunch of legacy code. Instead they rewrote it from scratch, which took slightly longer to use SSE.

This was not them intentionally doing something to hobble a competitor, this was them not doing anything to help them quickly. That is very different.

They did however ultimately fix it:

"PhysX SDK 3.0 was released in May 2011 and represented a significant rewrite of the SDK, bringing improvements such as more efficient multithreading and a unified code base for all supported platforms"

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

There is a massive difference here, Intel's were intentionally hobbling the code their complier created based on finding a competing vendor name in the product string. They did not say "wait for version 3" like the PhysX case, they just did something then just sat their tight lipped until it went to court and they were forced to change it.

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

As I said earlier, Nvidia made the all important change to use SSE when running PhysX on the CPU without the FTC being involved.

Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

so how exactly is that not Nvidias doing??

Nvidia is evil and plays dirty. They dont want your games to be good, they want them to be fast on Nvidia, any means necessary. They use "means to be played" program to lure developers in, pay them off and hijack their games to further nvidias goal.

For example how come Watch Dogs, a console title build from the grounds up with AMD GPU/CPU optimizations to run good on both current gen consoles, is crippled on PC when played on AMD hardware? How does this shit happen?

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

Really, apart from the soundbites given by evangelicals such as Cook, how many actual pieces of malware have slipped through the Play Store? Yes, installing random software from the net can be quite harmful, I guess that is given (there have been attacks on jailbroken iPhones as well). Personally, I like to have the ability to choose (yay for HumbleBundle), but I can see the point of the walled garden. Then again, Apple App Store is no panacea, as was proven quite recently.

And you think this will cripple anything _but_ the Windows Store? The Windows Store is a joke. Microsoft themselves treat it as a joke, offering a $100 bounty for uploading shovelware. As with Microsoft bribing people to use Bing, Microsoft couldn't say "we can't compete on value" any louder.