In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.
Should be possible though. It's quite amazing to see how much bit-errors can actually be concealed, meaning there must be some degree of redundant information in there.
For a while, especially in broadcast media, there's been a desire for wavelet-based coding instead, which doesn't seem to improve compression much, but improve error-concealing such that missing information causes blurring rather than blocking, which is much more lenient on the human eye.
I don't know about the US legal system, but here the law explicitly focuses on "intent". It's not a crime to whack someone over the head with a 40-foot pole by accident, it might be if due to negligence, it certainly is if intentional.
In this case, the stated and reasonable intent was not to circumvent copy-protection. AFAIU, the hack by itself cannot even be used to break copy protection. It's merely a way to build and run your homebrew games on your own hardware. If that isn't already covered by fair-use, it certainly should be.
At work, we are 4 sysadmins (two dedicated, two time-shared with other tasks) working in a number of systems. To mitigate this particular problem, we've setup an infrastructure comprised of Kerberos, LDAP and AFS with sudo for privilege escalation.
The intention is to manage the risk of unintentional mistakes causing problems, as well as some degree of traceability when problems occur. No single admin knows all systems, so one may by mistake cause conflicting configs in unknown systems, but in those cases, you can pretty quickly determine who did it, and roughly what was did by examining logs. Enables the shame-factor, education, and acceptably quick recovery.
The highly critical functions runs in an isolated system, upgrades to both code and config are version controlled (as is the bulk of the config of every individual service), further improving traceability, with the praxis to only do updates to those systems in with at least two admins present in order to avoid mistakes and ensure everyone keeps well familiar with those systems.
However, it's very important to note that all of this is intended to improve maintainability, NOT security. All four admins have individual physical access, so any one of us could naturally while doing onsite jobs, perform an "upgrade-reboot", and sneak in init=/bin/bash on any system and do whatever without logging. In the end, you pretty much have to trust your co-workers, or pay in both money and flexibility for a non-centralized organisation.
It's the only way to build REAL security, make everything but the keys open, and use peer-collaboration to ensure algorithmic correctness. (The latter part turns out to be important, judging by the recent Sony blunder.)
When put in the mobile context, it also means shorter battery life.
It also provides incentive for hardware makers to keep focusing on performance rather than other qualities. It's to the point of the hardware literally catching on fire, killing people.
Sure, if you sit with your laptop in your lap, it's smart to make sure it gets properly ventilated, but WHY SHOULD THE USER HAVE TO CARE? Had software systems remained efficient, hardware manufacturers would soon had to differentiate themselves on other qualities such as cool and quiet, case-design or other things users actually value.
Hard-drives aren't really as slow as people think. The problem is that mechanical hard-drives is slow on seeking, but if seeking can be eliminated, you can quite easily saturate your CPU on even a moderately complex calculation.
For example, what if a tourist walked by, enjoyed some other part of the scenery and took a picture of his wife and kids to put up on Picasa, with her lingerie just happening to appear in the background? Sue the tourist?
If taken with a GPS-active device, crawlers may still find the image, and put it on a map, linking the image back to this woman.
We live in a world where everything is getting more and connected. I'm not sure we can put that cat back in the bag again.
And that is a crime? I've been under the impression that that level of civil disobedience is more or less constitutionally protected in most democratic regimes?
That is, police can drive you away, but unless you use violence or threats, you cannot really be prosecuted?
Remember, the DDos-sources aren't really doing anything to the other visitors of the site or to the site itself. They are merely coordinatedly using the public services offered by the site, to the point of resource-exhaustion on the site. It's akin to forming a very long and slow-moving line in front of the office waiting to be served, and newcomers are expected to also wait in line, or give up.
But the second you start attacking them and doing damage, you have crossed the line and deserve to be thrown in jail.
If there is permanent damage done to the site, yes, it's clearly vandalism in the worst form, and clearly punishable by law in any country.
A DDoS however, is more akin to a blockade, which occasionally happens in real world too. Even here there are variations of course, from the absolutely peaceful standing passively in the way, to the outright aggressive.
If the DDoS is performed by botnet's it's clearly equivalent of bearing arms, which sometimes leads to individual prosecution. The same should go for the botnet-driven DDoS.
If the DDoS is performed by regular users, using nothing but their own connections to "block the entrance", it's clearly equivalent of passively standing in the way, which may be countered by dispersion-tactics, but hardly ever lead to actual prosecution in a democratic regime.
There were charges of rape, but they're dropped. There are remaining charges of molestation, though, but it's rather unusual for arrest-warrants to be issued for a crime of that grade.
Are you seriously using the RJ45 as an example of good design? Sure, I agree on the evil of symmetrical contacts, (concentric contacts excepted of course), but I fully believe that the design of the RJ45 was aiming for the destruction of man kind.
Have you ever tried untangling an aging RJ-45 installation? Cables get crossed a little here and there, and the connector have barbs, effectively preventing any chance of getting it out. And of course someone in a hurry pulled a life-critical fiber-patch through it all.
The design of the RJ-45 is the most insidious ever. I'll take USB any day over RJ 45, thank you.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax.
Unfortunately, IMAX also has it's problems with 3D-tv. Especially that in the very wide FOV, when you move your eyes focus, the binocular focus doesn't change (of course). I'm afraid many of us are going to keep getting headaches for a while.
Much of the online-privacy debate is about online advertisement. I agree there's many reasons for concern regarding privacy issues, but targeted advertisement?
If anything, I consider targeted advertisement the only acceptable form of advertisement, as opposed to regular "blanket" advertising where you bomb anyone and everyone with your message hoping to get.01% hit-rate. I strongly dislike websites spamming the me blindly with messages I really don't care about, but I have nothing against the sometimes helpful contextual "links" that GMail "offers". Especially, they're not designed to steal attention, as opposed to many "message bombing" forms of advertisement.
I guess the two extremes on the scale would be spam "do you want a guaranteed 35% penis enlargment?" vs. targeted job offerings "did you know at is available, and you qualify for the position?".
On the one hand you pound your brain to exhaustion with messages you hate and do not care about, and on the other hand you have a site with ONLY information that interests you (even if it DOES have as a goal to sell you something).
Slashdot Mirror
Are you supposed to broadcast your donkey porn to the neighbor in the open?
Why not? Public Service is good.
In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.
Should be possible though. It's quite amazing to see how much bit-errors can actually be concealed, meaning there must be some degree of redundant information in there.
For a while, especially in broadcast media, there's been a desire for wavelet-based coding instead, which doesn't seem to improve compression much, but improve error-concealing such that missing information causes blurring rather than blocking, which is much more lenient on the human eye.
I don't know about the US legal system, but here the law explicitly focuses on "intent". It's not a crime to whack someone over the head with a 40-foot pole by accident, it might be if due to negligence, it certainly is if intentional.
In this case, the stated and reasonable intent was not to circumvent copy-protection. AFAIU, the hack by itself cannot even be used to break copy protection. It's merely a way to build and run your homebrew games on your own hardware. If that isn't already covered by fair-use, it certainly should be.
At work, we are 4 sysadmins (two dedicated, two time-shared with other tasks) working in a number of systems. To mitigate this particular problem, we've setup an infrastructure comprised of Kerberos, LDAP and AFS with sudo for privilege escalation.
The intention is to manage the risk of unintentional mistakes causing problems, as well as some degree of traceability when problems occur. No single admin knows all systems, so one may by mistake cause conflicting configs in unknown systems, but in those cases, you can pretty quickly determine who did it, and roughly what was did by examining logs. Enables the shame-factor, education, and acceptably quick recovery.
The highly critical functions runs in an isolated system, upgrades to both code and config are version controlled (as is the bulk of the config of every individual service), further improving traceability, with the praxis to only do updates to those systems in with at least two admins present in order to avoid mistakes and ensure everyone keeps well familiar with those systems.
However, it's very important to note that all of this is intended to improve maintainability, NOT security. All four admins have individual physical access, so any one of us could naturally while doing onsite jobs, perform an "upgrade-reboot", and sneak in init=/bin/bash on any system and do whatever without logging. In the end, you pretty much have to trust your co-workers, or pay in both money and flexibility for a non-centralized organisation.
What about reading, if not TFA, at least the description?
The problem-description explicitly mentions dual-admin cases like the nuke, and deems it not appropriate for all admin-tasks.
"Do you want to reset user X:es password? Please bring 4 more admins."
Obviously the writer of the question knows of multiple-confirm-schemes and asks for other solutions.
Thank you. Was about to post it myself.
It's the only way to build REAL security, make everything but the keys open, and use peer-collaboration to ensure algorithmic correctness. (The latter part turns out to be important, judging by the recent Sony blunder.)
It does, since something needs to counter the increasing sluggishness of software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
When put in the mobile context, it also means shorter battery life.
It also provides incentive for hardware makers to keep focusing on performance rather than other qualities. It's to the point of the hardware literally catching on fire, killing people.
Sure, if you sit with your laptop in your lap, it's smart to make sure it gets properly ventilated, but WHY SHOULD THE USER HAVE TO CARE? Had software systems remained efficient, hardware manufacturers would soon had to differentiate themselves on other qualities such as cool and quiet, case-design or other things users actually value.
From the title, I expected something completely different.
Hard-drives aren't really as slow as people think. The problem is that mechanical hard-drives is slow on seeking, but if seeking can be eliminated, you can quite easily saturate your CPU on even a moderately complex calculation.
Case of point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQw7c-PliB4
Shades of gray are always difficult.
For example, what if a tourist walked by, enjoyed some other part of the scenery and took a picture of his wife and kids to put up on Picasa, with her lingerie just happening to appear in the background? Sue the tourist?
If taken with a GPS-active device, crawlers may still find the image, and put it on a map, linking the image back to this woman.
We live in a world where everything is getting more and connected. I'm not sure we can put that cat back in the bag again.
And that is a crime? I've been under the impression that that level of civil disobedience is more or less constitutionally protected in most democratic regimes?
That is, police can drive you away, but unless you use violence or threats, you cannot really be prosecuted?
Remember, the DDos-sources aren't really doing anything to the other visitors of the site or to the site itself. They are merely coordinatedly using the public services offered by the site, to the point of resource-exhaustion on the site. It's akin to forming a very long and slow-moving line in front of the office waiting to be served, and newcomers are expected to also wait in line, or give up.
But the second you start attacking them and doing damage, you have crossed the line and deserve to be thrown in jail.
If there is permanent damage done to the site, yes, it's clearly vandalism in the worst form, and clearly punishable by law in any country.
A DDoS however, is more akin to a blockade, which occasionally happens in real world too. Even here there are variations of course, from the absolutely peaceful standing passively in the way, to the outright aggressive.
If the DDoS is performed by botnet's it's clearly equivalent of bearing arms, which sometimes leads to individual prosecution. The same should go for the botnet-driven DDoS.
If the DDoS is performed by regular users, using nothing but their own connections to "block the entrance", it's clearly equivalent of passively standing in the way, which may be countered by dispersion-tactics, but hardly ever lead to actual prosecution in a democratic regime.
There were charges of rape, but they're dropped. There are remaining charges of molestation, though, but it's rather unusual for arrest-warrants to be issued for a crime of that grade.
Or simply publish checksums.
Seriously, who comes up with those naming schemes?
The guy who pays for it.
Are you seriously using the RJ45 as an example of good design? Sure, I agree on the evil of symmetrical contacts, (concentric contacts excepted of course), but I fully believe that the design of the RJ45 was aiming for the destruction of man kind.
Have you ever tried untangling an aging RJ-45 installation? Cables get crossed a little here and there, and the connector have barbs, effectively preventing any chance of getting it out. And of course someone in a hurry pulled a life-critical fiber-patch through it all.
The design of the RJ-45 is the most insidious ever. I'll take USB any day over RJ 45, thank you.
I know one. Specialising in supporting Sharepoint. It's shamelessly profitable business.
Well, to be fair, it worked for for other Mafias.
Except, if you use it non-windows, not every major game that comes out longer supports your PC.
With only two processing units, you'd have no CENTRAL processing unit, duh!
I think that copyright law needs some serious work
There, fixed that for you.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax.
Unfortunately, IMAX also has it's problems with 3D-tv. Especially that in the very wide FOV, when you move your eyes focus, the binocular focus doesn't change (of course). I'm afraid many of us are going to keep getting headaches for a while.
Much of the online-privacy debate is about online advertisement. I agree there's many reasons for concern regarding privacy issues, but targeted advertisement?
If anything, I consider targeted advertisement the only acceptable form of advertisement, as opposed to regular "blanket" advertising where you bomb anyone and everyone with your message hoping to get .01% hit-rate. I strongly dislike websites spamming the me blindly with messages I really don't care about, but I have nothing against the sometimes helpful contextual "links" that GMail "offers". Especially, they're not designed to steal attention, as opposed to many "message bombing" forms of advertisement.
I guess the two extremes on the scale would be spam "do you want a guaranteed 35% penis enlargment?" vs. targeted job offerings "did you know at is available, and you qualify for the position?".
On the one hand you pound your brain to exhaustion with messages you hate and do not care about, and on the other hand you have a site with ONLY information that interests you (even if it DOES have as a goal to sell you something).
The problem is that deep coverage is difficult, close to impossible, if would-be whistleblowers can not legally protect their sources.
Sure, immunity to slander anyone and anything referring to an unnamed source is also a problem. As usual, what's need is to find a golden balance.