The history of why the car dealership system exists as it does is actually quite interesting. Back in the day, car dealerships were the good guy underdogs, and car manufacturers were pretty much the devil. The "Planet Money" podcast has a great episode on this:
Basically explains why buying a car in general sucks (consistently ranked as one of the worst consumer experiences), and why there isn't a "new car supermaket" where you can browse & buy cars from multiple manufacturers.
the whole iphone dev system is interesting in that it is an attempt to finally invert the usual "blacklisted software" security system that has so often been the rule. rather than the busted concept of allowing all software to run, and then chasing down 'bad' ones with antivirus programs, rootkit detectors, spyware removers etc, they're moving to a whitelist. default deny, selective approve, with revocation.
just as any sane firewall is set up. (it would be nuts to set up a firewall to default allow all ports, and then start selectively blocking them only once an exploit that uses it becomes apparent, but then you have today's software security model doing just that.) forcing devs to buy a cert means they have somewhat of a point of authentication and also a hook to revoke all of a dev's apps if they fail to toe the line by releasing a virus, trojan, phish etc. Or "something that reduces apple's revenue";)
I believe leopard has the (currently unused) capability to do this built in as well. looks like the iphone is going to be a bit of a testbed for the concept. this kind of thing is only possible really with a "brand new" os where you can start from day 1 with no backward compatibility problems. it's also the reason you're not allowed to run interpreters like java or javascript... else Sun would get a valid cert to load the java interpreter, which in turn could run anything on the planet bypassing the "run only whitelist code" concept.
I can't say i agree with such "mandatory*" restrictions on a computing device I purchased, but as a matter of security philosophy it really is quite interesting.
*well, mandatory if you want to run snazzy new SDK apps. they really should set up an "unsupported, you may be SORRY!!" class of signature that would let you run, at your own risk, anything from that signature.
Here are the answers. Before you ask: yes, his answers were checked by both PR and security people.
Warning, he will sound like a robotic overlord because his management folks don't understand how much this site's visitors value a genuine personal tone. So deal and try to extract the meaning on your own.
How do we prevent "mission creep" (Score:5, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius (137)
ANSWER:
A very good question. It's a complex issue, but bottom line is that we won't need new laws to be able to fly and fight in cyberspace. The DoD's role in protecting cyberspace is governed by domestic and international law to the same extent as its activities in other domains. Other U.S. agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the FBI, have important and, in many cases, leading roles to play.
Existing laws are fine. theres like a million of them. If there's a problem, we will hook up with Legal over in DOJ and the FBI, just like we do for everything else. It's not Different if it's Just On The Internet Now.
Attacks on the US and its Allies by China (Score:5, Interesting) by Yahma (1004476)
ANSWER:
Yes, there are lots of news reports on that, but I'm sure you can appreciate the fact that there are other branches of the U.S. government that must answer your foreign policy questions. I can tell you that securing cyberspace is difficult and requires a coordinated and focused effort from our entire society - federal government, state and local governments, the private sector and the American people. The Air Force is working to improve our ability to respond to cyber attacks, reduce the potential damage from such events, and to reduce our vulnerability to such attacks.
You can't honestly expect me to start slinging mud at other governments. that's what you elect politicians for. We're just trying to keep our computing house clean, and be ready if a mission calls for something all hackery.
Accept, Retain, Solicit good people? (Score:5, Interesting) by Lally Singh (3427)
ANSWER:
I believe even the most unlikely candidate, when working for a cause bigger than himself, turns out to be a most loyal ally. Young men and women come into the military for any number of reasons - education, health care, etc. - but end up staying because they believe what they're doing matters. We know money doesn't create loyalty--a sense of purpose does. We'll take what they have to offer, and in turn they might be surprised by what they get back. It's not just our military members either, it's all those who partner with us . . . academia and private industry, our civilians and contractors, too. In the cyber command, there is a purpose and sense of urgency to be ready. You can bet that we leverage all the expertise out there to help us do our job.
I know that a lot of folks think hax0ring is way anti military/establishment/uniform. But many times you can get real quality people from unexpected places. We can't pay the big bucks usually but we find that lots of people will do it anyway because they want the pride that comes with Protecting the Motherland. Lots of people work in nonprofits for less pay because they believe in the mission, too.
Older recruits? (Score:5, Interesting) by rolfwind (528248)
ANSWER:
As I work alongside today's Airmen, many with very specialized skill sets in great demand outside the Air Force, I find them to be incredibly well trained and up-to-speed on current technologies. We bring them in from a general practitioner level and take them to expert level in reasonable time... and well before retirement age indeed! We train them with specific technical skills as well as overarching abilities required to lead in today's environment. You're right in that we couldn't compete in the cyber world without the experts in the civilian industries who give us the technology in the first place, provide the architectu
(bear with me for a moment here) My computer/car/walkman don't play 8-Track tapes. Knowing this limitation of the 8-Track Tape format, I don't buy any 8-Tracks, at any price. I don't fault the manufacturers of 8 Track tapes or units for this.
So, if you know that iTMS downloads don't meet your needs and are not compatible with whatever mp3 player you want, why did you buy anything from iTMS?
The restrictions and usefulness of what you get for 99 cents are clearly and unambiguously disclosed before purchase. The terms are good enough for a great many people. There's really no need for PlayFair.
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point? Really, why even bother?
this is actually a point Steve Jobs made to the music industry execs (according to an interview with Jobs online somewhere, I forget where). He told them that any DRM is basically useless, anything that can be encoded can be cracked. they told him to piss off, a year or so later he came back when all their drm schemes were cracked and he said "See?!" Then they listened.
so apple put in a bare minimum protection scheme, but more importantly made the terms so loose that nobody really wants to or needs to crack it. the restrictions are pretty insignificant (can't burn the same playlist more than 10x.... but change it slightly and keep going. But who's going to burn the same playlist that many times anyway?). the whole setup basically a fig leaf so that the industry can *feel* protected while raking in the bucks.
the real protection here is the easy terms that don't stop you from doing what you want to. iTMS is excellent competition to Kazaa & crew: faster, better, more reliable, decently tagged, good catalog, cheap. Apple got tired of waiting for the industry to figure out how to do it right, and did it for them.
content will be an issue for these video devices. with music, you have folks with large cd collections with a rip-time of a few minutes per cd. apple added the itunes music service so theres more ways to get stuff to put on the iPod. And most people *like* listening to their favorite songs multiple times, and you can do that while doing something else.
but what will you put on your "video pod" ? ripping a dvd takes a lot of time and disk space, and there's no movie I like so much that I want to carry it around with me all the time and watch it over and over again. You could trawl the net for tv episodes, but there's really no legal way to get them, they're encoded in a bazillion different codec combos and most importantly, how many times will anybody watch the same Seinfeld episode?
I guess the new wave of tv season->dvds is a potential source, but whereas you can listen to music at work or walking down the street or whenever, watching TV is not as workable.
I'm sure there'll be a few thousand folks who will buy a bigger, heavier, expensive unslick brick with crap battery life for the sake of showing their friends movie trailers... over and over again.
now, when you get the Itunes Video Service going, and I can easily download a set of seinfeld episodes quickly, cheaply and reliably encoded, then... well then still maybe not. there are some hurdles to cross before anything like this "kills" the ipod, or even challenges mp3 players as a whole.
we are fast approaching the day when we can dispense with the traditional engineering/comp sci stepping stones and skip straight to a degree in Modern Geek.
Next year: "Role Playing Dice Combinatorics" and "Galaxy-Class Starship Design and Trivia"
This man is being arrested because he refused to work for free.
not entirely correct. he *offered* to create and run the site as a free service years ago, in exchange for the publicity it would bring him. the sherriff's office agreed. 3 years later, the web site is on all the police cars & letterhead, is used for email and has become an integral part of the department.
Now, he's *backcharging* the department $300,000 for work he originally agreed to do for free. That number does not appear to be solely bandwidth costs, but seems to include other new and surprising charges. The department didn't go for the "altered bargain" right away, and rather than the obvious expedient of simply turning over the site contents/domain to them to maintain on their own bandwidth, he pulled the plug as a bargaining tactic.
so lets see:
he hooked the department on a free service
gained the desired publicity over it
*then* decided it was never free and is now worth $300,000
then pulled the plug during negotiations
sounds slimy to say the least. it's generally a bad idea to play evil hardball with attorneys general, because it really doesn't cost them anything to fight back.
it's not really surprising. if you follow what SCO has actually been doing *in the courts*, you find that they haven't really attacked linux at all, but rather contracts with business partners. but whenever they speak to the press, they always claim that it's "suing linux." Even their two recent "linux user" lawsuits are not about linux, but about SCO Unix licensing contracts. That's why Google wasn't a target, they have never been a SCO customer or licensee.
there's no real reason for them to always spin every action as "bringing pain to linux and linux users." They could have proceeded with all their lawsuits (and any "stock value boosting tactics") without all the public rhetoric that is actually damaging one of their own operations.
it was only a matter of time before a link was made public, this whole campaign seems to have been intentionally twisted in a way that previous Halloween documents indicated Microsoft should proceed (attack the IP, attack the GPL).
I think that the rationale is this: while this 43 year old man thought he was targetting a few people, the target actually turned out to be against the 911 system (via an admittedly small DDOS), which serves *everyone* in the area. by tying up lines, police and firefighters, anyone who had a real emergency at that time was also a victim of this attack. there are only so many emergency personnel resources available to the system.
There are many aspects of Java that mean you can't guarantee a response within a certain timeframe. Garbage collection, for example... there isn't necessarily a 1:1 instruction translation of the JVM's bytecode, and therefor you can't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a certain operation will get done in a certain amount of time.
you can get real-time behavior out of an interpreted system, if both the interpreter and underlying operating system are designed for it. For Java, GC and instruction translation just have to have that as a design goal. As a matter of fact: here's some information on real time Java:
"With the recently released Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ), developed through the Java Community Process by the Real-Time Expert Group, the real-time embedded software developer will be able to use the Java programming language in applications where predictable/hard real-time behavior is a must."
that being said, java probably would run too slowly for most applications on a 20 mhz cpu. But being interpreted or having GC are orthogonal issues to real-timeness.
this is slightly OT, but "real-time" in engineering circles does not mean "really fast." it means that there is a guaranteed response from the system within an specified actual time frame.
i.e. I need a real-time OS & software stack if my rocket control algorithm needs the data from, say, a serial port altimiter within the next 20 milliseconds or else. if you cant get the data within the specified timeframe then the results are useless. the system will not accept requests that it cannot "guarantee" to fulfil from a system resource standpoint. (you have to watch your multitasking, swapping and other kernel-level tasks to achieve this)
so you could have a 20 mhz "real-time" system, as long as it's response was guaranteed by the OS within parameters for what you are doing (and you would program with those guaranteed response times in mind.) Conversely, a 20 Ghz system may not qualify for real time, if the OS pre-empts your rocket control task and decides to swap for a few milliseconds too long, or context switches to another thread just when you needed to adjust a control surface...
when you hear about people hacking linux for real-time work, they are not making it go faster (though that's always nice), they're making it work predictable.
the problem with microsoft is not their keeping changes secret or closed, but the raw fact that they can pre-install their JVM on 90% of the world's computers by rolling it into windows update.
all microsoft has to do is roll out a GPLd but incompatible jvm to kill the whole show. Lets imagine... "Microsoft J++" with direct hooks to msvcrt.dll, mfcxx.dll and mdac 2.8. Just use these functions to decrease your time to market by 9 months... at the cost of not being able to run your "java" app on any platform that does not have microsoft dlls installed.
according to the article, the terms are guaranteed support for 10 years, or 2x to 5x the purchase price of the licenses will be paid as penalty.
Since Oracle has already stated that their only purpose in buying PeopleSoft is to kill the product (along with the JD Edwards software that PeopleSoft has just acquired), this is what's known as a "poison pill." Oracle would either have to do full support and updates (negating the whole point of the acquisition), or face massive lawsuits/fines by contract.
this also has the effect of de-FUDing the issue for customers who may be leery of buying new PeopleSoft/JDE product if there's a death sentence on it. pretty much a brilliant move.
Given that the ERP software market would go from around 4 players down to two (oracle vs sap) if this goes down, the deal has drawn antitrust flak.
You see, the simple fact is, alcohol is expensive. And the great thing about alcohol is, the more you drink of it, the less you care about it.
this illustrates a fundamental difference I've noticed between America where "Alcohol is Evil and Massively Banned, Go Get a Keg of Cheap Stuff" and Europe where the drinking age is like 7, and generally isn't perceived as a social problem.
You say you are drinking alcohol, and it doesn't matter what kind because the point is to get "smashed." In most places I've been to in Europe folks would say they are drinking beer, and the point is to drink something they like. You can go to a nice restauraunt and have a single glass of nice wine because it goes well with the meal, and nobody'll look at you wondering when you are going to "get drunk and go ape."
I used to not drink alcohol at all "on principle," until I realized how silly I was being. Now I drink whatever I like, and still never get "drunk."
If you run out of the stuff worth drinking, stop! It's ok if not everybody gets "loaded."
why can't they just double check their code? for the same reason cooperative multitasking went out of style: humans.
theoretically a coop multitasking operating system is much more efficient than pre-emptive multitasking. coop multitasking systems (like Mac OS pre X and Novell Netware) require each application to voluntarily give up the CPU when appropriate. That means that every app gets the entire cpu to itself, yielding better cache performance and allowing the app to continue a thread until a good time to stop came along (like, waiting for input or disk or whatever). Unfortunately, that means all programs must be perfect, a bug in any one of the running programs will bring down the entire OS like a house of cards. Or if you didn't release resources just right, your app would appear to hog the entire system and it would LOOK like you crashed everything.
Most programmers are not perfect.
Thus the rise in pre-emptive multitasking, where app programmers no longer get to decide when to give up the cpu, the operating system yanks your thread based on timeslices or some other mechanism outside the apps control. this means your various caches no longer have the "right" data most of the time, and maybe your thread gets yanked 1 instruction short of what would have been a better stopping place (maybe the next cycle was for a well-timed disk access). Some advanced chip features like memory streaming for SIMD ops also get trampled by pre-emptive multitasking, meaning you can no longer prefetch large chunks of data since threading out stops all your streams (this is a problem for Altivec programming.)
But on the whole, by acknowledging that programmers are not perfect (it only takes one bad one to ruin your system), and moving to the "wrong" solution of pre-empt multitasking, we get vastly improved stability and perceived performance. This is also why "wrong" solutions like hardware overflow protection are needed.
A scientist would say you are right, but an engineer would say you are wrong.
When you buy a CD or DVD, you're not buying the music, you're buying a plastic circle and a license to view/hear the contents of that circle. If your plastic circle eats it and becomes unusable for some reason, you still possess a license to the content
eh, that's not how the industry execs see it. you are not buying a plastic circle, or a license, but only what they are willing to sell you: namely the *specific* plastic item in your hand that you forked cash over for. When you buy a book you are not buying paper, or a license to read it, but a single instance combination of both. If your book gets eaten by your cat, or simply rots of its own accord, you cannot go back to the store and get a new free copy.*
If the book later becomes available as a searchable PDF you have no automatic rights to that either: it's a separate product entirely. You also don't get free rights to the movie version of the book. Just like buying a ticket to a film doesn't grant you a "license" to come back tomorrow and see it again; you got what you came for, now get out.
*(You could try and claim a "manufacturing defect" angle for backups, but then you are dealing with a different case entirely. if the content providers decide to replace obviously defective merchandise you will have problems pursuing legal self-backup mechanisms).
I agree with your arguments but you have to take their points of view more seriously in order to make an impact.
don't keep tiffs if you are using a digital camera. Keep the RAW images instead (you ARE shooting RAW, right?). Since the RAW files are typically losslessly compressed, and you can always regenerate TIFFs or other formats from those there's no need to waste disk space.
the RAW files are the digital equivalent to negatives... always keep them because as RAW converter software improves you might be able to squeeze extra quality out at a later date (using the embedded factory color calibration information on some RAW files is something I hope we can get soon).
OK, we believe you. 300 gigabyte databases are beyond today's technological limits.
. You really think they can build a computer that'll handle 300 million real time connections?
OK, we believe you. real-time two way circuit switched audio systems to every household in america (aka "the phone system") is beyond today's technology. And nevermind real-time data connections to 2^32 internationally interconnected computer systems across (aka the Internet). totally impossible.
one friend of mine applied to a job that was so perfectly suited to his experience it was eerie. the job description was basically his resume (in a somewhat specialized field too).
He applied via the boards and heard nothing. Applied again because damn, if he wasn't worth a callback on THIS opportunity, the universe is essentially... wrong. Three times, still nothing. Emailed direct, called on the phone, and FINALLY got an interview. He aced it of course and they hired him. But you know what? even though they reposted the job 2 or 3 times (and he re-applied every time they did) when he came in for the interview they had never heard of him before.
99% applications from monster, careerbuilder and all their kind go straight to/dev/null. hiring managers get too many and delete without looking. the rest pass some minimal "highlight the buzzwords in red" match, then get dumped because no intelligence was actually applied to keeping them.
out of 200+ carefully selected applications over the past 6 months to carefully selected postings where I was definitely qualified, I have gotten 3 callbacks from headhunters, and zero from actual employers. Zero.
I use all the tricks. custom resume, custom cover letter, choose carefully, etc. It doesn't matter. When this article cites statistics like "monster has a 3.6% hire rate, compared to 70% hire rate through referrals" I believe it because I've lived it.
So post your resume, but don't expect anything to come of it. spend more time on your personal networking.
actually, you still need to broaden your view a bit. When your tax dollars "pay for roads," they are actually being given to a private construction company that does all the work. your tax dollars -> directly into a corporate pocket.
the same happens when a school is built, but we do have a crossover since after the infrastructure is built by a private party, it is generally maintained (teacher salaries, etc) by the state. Cable/Phone/Etc services are another hybrid area, since the state maintains order by heavily regulating the digging of ditches and stringing of wires across the land. So the difference between "public" and "private" dollars is not quite so clear cut as you think.
in any case, if farmers don't get help paying electricity & phone service via appropriate taxes, the farmers will simply get the money by selling milk at $4 a gallon. either way, you are going to pay. by restricting it to a cable tax, the poor folks who don't have or want cable don't have to pay for it with their glass of milk.
highly federated "everybody pay for themselves" states do exist of course. In some of those places the people who "have" must also have enough to pay for bulletproof car windows and gated community security systems. I think our way is not too bad.
Yup, you might consider it narrow minded, but thats my viewpoint.
I'm guessing you are also against paying for any roads you personally don't use, or education for people you might never meet. If you have to look at it from a pure self-interest standpoint, consider that "your" roads exist only because people you never met helped you pay for them.
your fifty cent gasoline tax certainly doesn't pay for your section of the interstate, and when somebody you never met gets elected as your Governor, he thankfully didn't get schooled solely on the basis of the $1000 in sales tax you paid last year.
in any society there is no choice but to broaden your view, if you think about it.
sure, and then your CD burner doesn't work. or your scanner doesn't scan. there are LOTS of end user programs out there that assume and require that you run with Admin priviledges.
That being said, having IE download and run executables remains risky even if you are not admin: a trojan/backdoor can just as easily run from your home directory or your own "Startup Items" folder.
the intrepid attacker can then run all manner of other exploits/social engineering once he has a local irc zombie. Of course, the sad truth is that none of this is necessary. Just send a plain zipped virus.exe and lots of people WILL run it.
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The history of why the car dealership system exists as it does is actually quite interesting. Back in the day, car dealerships were the good guy underdogs, and car manufacturers were pretty much the devil. The "Planet Money" podcast has a great episode on this:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why-buying-a-car-is-so-awful
Basically explains why buying a car in general sucks (consistently ranked as one of the worst consumer experiences), and why there isn't a "new car supermaket" where you can browse & buy cars from multiple manufacturers.
the whole iphone dev system is interesting in that it is an attempt to finally invert the usual "blacklisted software" security system that has so often been the rule. rather than the busted concept of allowing all software to run, and then chasing down 'bad' ones with antivirus programs, rootkit detectors, spyware removers etc, they're moving to a whitelist. default deny, selective approve, with revocation.
;)
just as any sane firewall is set up. (it would be nuts to set up a firewall to default allow all ports, and then start selectively blocking them only once an exploit that uses it becomes apparent, but then you have today's software security model doing just that.) forcing devs to buy a cert means they have somewhat of a point of authentication and also a hook to revoke all of a dev's apps if they fail to toe the line by releasing a virus, trojan, phish etc. Or "something that reduces apple's revenue"
I believe leopard has the (currently unused) capability to do this built in as well. looks like the iphone is going to be a bit of a testbed for the concept. this kind of thing is only possible really with a "brand new" os where you can start from day 1 with no backward compatibility problems. it's also the reason you're not allowed to run interpreters like java or javascript... else Sun would get a valid cert to load the java interpreter, which in turn could run anything on the planet bypassing the "run only whitelist code" concept.
I can't say i agree with such "mandatory*" restrictions on a computing device I purchased, but as a matter of security philosophy it really is quite interesting.
*well, mandatory if you want to run snazzy new SDK apps. they really should set up an "unsupported, you may be SORRY!!" class of signature that would let you run, at your own risk, anything from that signature.
Here are the answers. Before you ask: yes, his answers were checked by both PR and security people.
Warning, he will sound like a robotic overlord because his management folks don't understand how much this site's visitors value a genuine personal tone. So deal and try to extract the meaning on your own.
How do we prevent "mission creep" (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jeremiah Cornelius (137)
ANSWER:
A very good question. It's a complex issue, but bottom line is that we won't need new laws to be able to fly and fight in cyberspace. The DoD's role in protecting cyberspace is governed by domestic and international law to the same extent as its activities in other domains. Other U.S. agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the FBI, have important and, in many cases, leading roles to play.
Existing laws are fine. theres like a million of them. If there's a problem, we will hook up with Legal over in DOJ and the FBI, just like we do for everything else. It's not Different if it's Just On The Internet Now.
Attacks on the US and its Allies by China (Score:5, Interesting)
by Yahma (1004476)
ANSWER:
Yes, there are lots of news reports on that, but I'm sure you can appreciate the fact that there are other branches of the U.S. government that must answer your foreign policy questions. I can tell you that securing cyberspace is difficult and requires a coordinated and focused effort from our entire society - federal government, state and local governments, the private sector and the American people. The Air Force is working to improve our ability to respond to cyber attacks, reduce the potential damage from such events, and to reduce our vulnerability to such attacks.
You can't honestly expect me to start slinging mud at other governments. that's what you elect politicians for. We're just trying to keep our computing house clean, and be ready if a mission calls for something all hackery.
Accept, Retain, Solicit good people? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Lally Singh (3427)
ANSWER:
I believe even the most unlikely candidate, when working for a cause bigger than himself, turns out to be a most loyal ally. Young men and women come into the military for any number of reasons - education, health care, etc. - but end up staying because they believe what they're doing matters. We know money doesn't create loyalty--a sense of purpose does. We'll take what they have to offer, and in turn they might be surprised by what they get back. It's not just our military members either, it's all those who partner with us . . . academia and private industry, our civilians and contractors, too. In the cyber command, there is a purpose and sense of urgency to be ready. You can bet that we leverage all the expertise out there to help us do our job.
I know that a lot of folks think hax0ring is way anti military/establishment/uniform. But many times you can get real quality people from unexpected places. We can't pay the big bucks usually but we find that lots of people will do it anyway because they want the pride that comes with Protecting the Motherland. Lots of people work in nonprofits for less pay because they believe in the mission, too.
Older recruits? (Score:5, Interesting)
... and well before retirement age indeed! We train them with specific technical skills as well as overarching abilities required to lead in today's environment. You're right in that we couldn't compete in the cyber world without the experts in the civilian industries who give us the technology in the first place, provide the architectu
by rolfwind (528248)
ANSWER:
As I work alongside today's Airmen, many with very specialized skill sets in great demand outside the Air Force, I find them to be incredibly well trained and up-to-speed on current technologies. We bring them in from a general practitioner level and take them to expert level in reasonable time
(bear with me for a moment here) My computer/car/walkman don't play 8-Track tapes. Knowing this limitation of the 8-Track Tape format, I don't buy any 8-Tracks, at any price. I don't fault the manufacturers of 8 Track tapes or units for this.
So, if you know that iTMS downloads don't meet your needs and are not compatible with whatever mp3 player you want, why did you buy anything from iTMS?
The restrictions and usefulness of what you get for 99 cents are clearly and unambiguously disclosed before purchase. The terms are good enough for a great many people. There's really no need for PlayFair.
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point? Really, why even bother?
this is actually a point Steve Jobs made to the music industry execs (according to an interview with Jobs online somewhere, I forget where). He told them that any DRM is basically useless, anything that can be encoded can be cracked. they told him to piss off, a year or so later he came back when all their drm schemes were cracked and he said "See?!" Then they listened.
so apple put in a bare minimum protection scheme, but more importantly made the terms so loose that nobody really wants to or needs to crack it. the restrictions are pretty insignificant (can't burn the same playlist more than 10x.... but change it slightly and keep going. But who's going to burn the same playlist that many times anyway?). the whole setup basically a fig leaf so that the industry can *feel* protected while raking in the bucks.
the real protection here is the easy terms that don't stop you from doing what you want to. iTMS is excellent competition to Kazaa & crew: faster, better, more reliable, decently tagged, good catalog, cheap. Apple got tired of waiting for the industry to figure out how to do it right, and did it for them.
so what exactly is your problem with iTunes?
content will be an issue for these video devices. with music, you have folks with large cd collections with a rip-time of a few minutes per cd. apple added the itunes music service so theres more ways to get stuff to put on the iPod. And most people *like* listening to their favorite songs multiple times, and you can do that while doing something else.
but what will you put on your "video pod" ? ripping a dvd takes a lot of time and disk space, and there's no movie I like so much that I want to carry it around with me all the time and watch it over and over again. You could trawl the net for tv episodes, but there's really no legal way to get them, they're encoded in a bazillion different codec combos and most importantly, how many times will anybody watch the same Seinfeld episode?
I guess the new wave of tv season->dvds is a potential source, but whereas you can listen to music at work or walking down the street or whenever, watching TV is not as workable.
I'm sure there'll be a few thousand folks who will buy a bigger, heavier, expensive unslick brick with crap battery life for the sake of showing their friends movie trailers... over and over again.
now, when you get the Itunes Video Service going, and I can easily download a set of seinfeld episodes quickly, cheaply and reliably encoded, then... well then still maybe not. there are some hurdles to cross before anything like this "kills" the ipod, or even challenges mp3 players as a whole.
we are fast approaching the day when we can dispense with the traditional engineering/comp sci stepping stones and skip straight to a degree in Modern Geek.
Next year: "Role Playing Dice Combinatorics" and "Galaxy-Class Starship Design and Trivia"
not entirely correct. he *offered* to create and run the site as a free service years ago, in exchange for the publicity it would bring him. the sherriff's office agreed. 3 years later, the web site is on all the police cars & letterhead, is used for email and has become an integral part of the department.
Now, he's *backcharging* the department $300,000 for work he originally agreed to do for free. That number does not appear to be solely bandwidth costs, but seems to include other new and surprising charges. The department didn't go for the "altered bargain" right away, and rather than the obvious expedient of simply turning over the site contents/domain to them to maintain on their own bandwidth, he pulled the plug as a bargaining tactic.
so lets see:
sounds slimy to say the least. it's generally a bad idea to play evil hardball with attorneys general, because it really doesn't cost them anything to fight back.
it's not really surprising. if you follow what SCO has actually been doing *in the courts*, you find that they haven't really attacked linux at all, but rather contracts with business partners. but whenever they speak to the press, they always claim that it's "suing linux." Even their two recent "linux user" lawsuits are not about linux, but about SCO Unix licensing contracts. That's why Google wasn't a target, they have never been a SCO customer or licensee.
there's no real reason for them to always spin every action as "bringing pain to linux and linux users." They could have proceeded with all their lawsuits (and any "stock value boosting tactics") without all the public rhetoric that is actually damaging one of their own operations.
it was only a matter of time before a link was made public, this whole campaign seems to have been intentionally twisted in a way that previous Halloween documents indicated Microsoft should proceed (attack the IP, attack the GPL).
I think that the rationale is this: while this 43 year old man thought he was targetting a few people, the target actually turned out to be against the 911 system (via an admittedly small DDOS), which serves *everyone* in the area. by tying up lines, police and firefighters, anyone who had a real emergency at that time was also a victim of this attack. there are only so many emergency personnel resources available to the system.
There are many aspects of Java that mean you can't guarantee a response within a certain timeframe. Garbage collection, for example ... there isn't necessarily a 1:1 instruction translation of the JVM's bytecode, and therefor you can't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a certain operation will get done in a certain amount of time.
you can get real-time behavior out of an interpreted system, if both the interpreter and underlying operating system are designed for it. For Java, GC and instruction translation just have to have that as a design goal. As a matter of fact: here's some information on real time Java:
"With the recently released Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ), developed through the Java Community Process by the Real-Time Expert Group, the real-time embedded software developer will be able to use the Java programming language in applications where predictable/hard real-time behavior is a must."
that being said, java probably would run too slowly for most applications on a 20 mhz cpu. But being interpreted or having GC are orthogonal issues to real-timeness.
this is slightly OT, but "real-time" in engineering circles does not mean "really fast." it means that there is a guaranteed response from the system within an specified actual time frame.
i.e. I need a real-time OS & software stack if my rocket control algorithm needs the data from, say, a serial port altimiter within the next 20 milliseconds or else. if you cant get the data within the specified timeframe then the results are useless. the system will not accept requests that it cannot "guarantee" to fulfil from a system resource standpoint. (you have to watch your multitasking, swapping and other kernel-level tasks to achieve this)
so you could have a 20 mhz "real-time" system, as long as it's response was guaranteed by the OS within parameters for what you are doing (and you would program with those guaranteed response times in mind.) Conversely, a 20 Ghz system may not qualify for real time, if the OS pre-empts your rocket control task and decides to swap for a few milliseconds too long, or context switches to another thread just when you needed to adjust a control surface...
when you hear about people hacking linux for real-time work, they are not making it go faster (though that's always nice), they're making it work predictable.
the problem with microsoft is not their keeping changes secret or closed, but the raw fact that they can pre-install their JVM on 90% of the world's computers by rolling it into windows update.
all microsoft has to do is roll out a GPLd but incompatible jvm to kill the whole show. Lets imagine... "Microsoft J++" with direct hooks to msvcrt.dll, mfcxx.dll and mdac 2.8. Just use these functions to decrease your time to market by 9 months... at the cost of not being able to run your "java" app on any platform that does not have microsoft dlls installed.
think about it.
according to the article, the terms are guaranteed support for 10 years, or 2x to 5x the purchase price of the licenses will be paid as penalty.
Since Oracle has already stated that their only purpose in buying PeopleSoft is to kill the product (along with the JD Edwards software that PeopleSoft has just acquired), this is what's known as a "poison pill." Oracle would either have to do full support and updates (negating the whole point of the acquisition), or face massive lawsuits/fines by contract.
this also has the effect of de-FUDing the issue for customers who may be leery of buying new PeopleSoft/JDE product if there's a death sentence on it. pretty much a brilliant move.
Given that the ERP software market would go from around 4 players down to two (oracle vs sap) if this goes down, the deal has drawn antitrust flak.
You see, the simple fact is, alcohol is expensive. And the great thing about alcohol is, the more you drink of it, the less you care about it.
this illustrates a fundamental difference I've noticed between America where "Alcohol is Evil and Massively Banned, Go Get a Keg of Cheap Stuff" and Europe where the drinking age is like 7, and generally isn't perceived as a social problem.
You say you are drinking alcohol, and it doesn't matter what kind because the point is to get "smashed." In most places I've been to in Europe folks would say they are drinking beer, and the point is to drink something they like. You can go to a nice restauraunt and have a single glass of nice wine because it goes well with the meal, and nobody'll look at you wondering when you are going to "get drunk and go ape."
I used to not drink alcohol at all "on principle," until I realized how silly I was being. Now I drink whatever I like, and still never get "drunk."
If you run out of the stuff worth drinking, stop! It's ok if not everybody gets "loaded."
why can't they just double check their code?
for the same reason cooperative multitasking went out of style: humans.
theoretically a coop multitasking operating system is much more efficient than pre-emptive multitasking. coop multitasking systems (like Mac OS pre X and Novell Netware) require each application to voluntarily give up the CPU when appropriate. That means that every app gets the entire cpu to itself, yielding better cache performance and allowing the app to continue a thread until a good time to stop came along (like, waiting for input or disk or whatever). Unfortunately, that means all programs must be perfect, a bug in any one of the running programs will bring down the entire OS like a house of cards. Or if you didn't release resources just right, your app would appear to hog the entire system and it would LOOK like you crashed everything.
Most programmers are not perfect.
Thus the rise in pre-emptive multitasking, where app programmers no longer get to decide when to give up the cpu, the operating system yanks your thread based on timeslices or some other mechanism outside the apps control. this means your various caches no longer have the "right" data most of the time, and maybe your thread gets yanked 1 instruction short of what would have been a better stopping place (maybe the next cycle was for a well-timed disk access). Some advanced chip features like memory streaming for SIMD ops also get trampled by pre-emptive multitasking, meaning you can no longer prefetch large chunks of data since threading out stops all your streams (this is a problem for Altivec programming.)
But on the whole, by acknowledging that programmers are not perfect (it only takes one bad one to ruin your system), and moving to the "wrong" solution of pre-empt multitasking, we get vastly improved stability and perceived performance. This is also why "wrong" solutions like hardware overflow protection are needed.
A scientist would say you are right, but an engineer would say you are wrong.
additionally, over-aggressive ad-blocking will eventually lead to even more sites going pay-only.
this is not a value judgement on the morals of ad-blocking your favorite ad-supported sites, just noting a natural consequence of it.
When you buy a CD or DVD, you're not buying the music, you're buying a plastic circle and a license to view/hear the contents of that circle. If your plastic circle eats it and becomes unusable for some reason, you still possess a license to the content
eh, that's not how the industry execs see it. you are not buying a plastic circle, or a license, but only what they are willing to sell you: namely the *specific* plastic item in your hand that you forked cash over for. When you buy a book you are not buying paper, or a license to read it, but a single instance combination of both. If your book gets eaten by your cat, or simply rots of its own accord, you cannot go back to the store and get a new free copy.*
If the book later becomes available as a searchable PDF you have no automatic rights to that either: it's a separate product entirely. You also don't get free rights to the movie version of the book. Just like buying a ticket to a film doesn't grant you a "license" to come back tomorrow and see it again; you got what you came for, now get out.
*(You could try and claim a "manufacturing defect" angle for backups, but then you are dealing with a different case entirely. if the content providers decide to replace obviously defective merchandise you will have problems pursuing legal self-backup mechanisms).
I agree with your arguments but you have to take their points of view more seriously in order to make an impact.
don't keep tiffs if you are using a digital camera. Keep the RAW images instead (you ARE shooting RAW, right?). Since the RAW files are typically losslessly compressed, and you can always regenerate TIFFs or other formats from those there's no need to waste disk space.
the RAW files are the digital equivalent to negatives... always keep them because as RAW converter software improves you might be able to squeeze extra quality out at a later date (using the embedded factory color calibration information on some RAW files is something I hope we can get soon).
300 gigabytes is nothing to sneeze at.
OK, we believe you. 300 gigabyte databases are beyond today's technological limits.
. You really think they can build a computer that'll handle 300 million real time connections?
OK, we believe you. real-time two way circuit switched audio systems to every household in america (aka "the phone system") is beyond today's technology. And nevermind real-time data connections to 2^32 internationally interconnected computer systems across (aka the Internet). totally impossible.
Maybe in "the next few decades," you figure?
one friend of mine applied to a job that was so perfectly suited to his experience it was eerie. the job description was basically his resume (in a somewhat specialized field too).
/dev/null. hiring managers get too many and delete without looking. the rest pass some minimal "highlight the buzzwords in red" match, then get dumped because no intelligence was actually applied to keeping them.
He applied via the boards and heard nothing. Applied again because damn, if he wasn't worth a callback on THIS opportunity, the universe is essentially... wrong. Three times, still nothing. Emailed direct, called on the phone, and FINALLY got an interview. He aced it of course and they hired him. But you know what? even though they reposted the job 2 or 3 times (and he re-applied every time they did) when he came in for the interview they had never heard of him before.
99% applications from monster, careerbuilder and all their kind go straight to
out of 200+ carefully selected applications over the past 6 months to carefully selected postings where I was definitely qualified, I have gotten 3 callbacks from headhunters, and zero from actual employers. Zero.
I use all the tricks. custom resume, custom cover letter, choose carefully, etc. It doesn't matter. When this article cites statistics like "monster has a 3.6% hire rate, compared to 70% hire rate through referrals" I believe it because I've lived it.
So post your resume, but don't expect anything to come of it. spend more time on your personal networking.
actually, you still need to broaden your view a bit. When your tax dollars "pay for roads," they are actually being given to a private construction company that does all the work. your tax dollars -> directly into a corporate pocket.
the same happens when a school is built, but we do have a crossover since after the infrastructure is built by a private party, it is generally maintained (teacher salaries, etc) by the state. Cable/Phone/Etc services are another hybrid area, since the state maintains order by heavily regulating the digging of ditches and stringing of wires across the land. So the difference between "public" and "private" dollars is not quite so clear cut as you think.
in any case, if farmers don't get help paying electricity & phone service via appropriate taxes, the farmers will simply get the money by selling milk at $4 a gallon. either way, you are going to pay. by restricting it to a cable tax, the poor folks who don't have or want cable don't have to pay for it with their glass of milk.
highly federated "everybody pay for themselves" states do exist of course. In some of those places the people who "have" must also have enough to pay for bulletproof car windows and gated community security systems. I think our way is not too bad.
Yup, you might consider it narrow minded, but thats my viewpoint.
I'm guessing you are also against paying for any roads you personally don't use, or education for people you might never meet. If you have to look at it from a pure self-interest standpoint, consider that "your" roads exist only because people you never met helped you pay for them.
your fifty cent gasoline tax certainly doesn't pay for your section of the interstate, and when somebody you never met gets elected as your Governor, he thankfully didn't get schooled solely on the basis of the $1000 in sales tax you paid last year.
in any society there is no choice but to broaden your view, if you think about it.
sure, and then your CD burner doesn't work. or your scanner doesn't scan. there are LOTS of end user programs out there that assume and require that you run with Admin priviledges.
That being said, having IE download and run executables remains risky even if you are not admin: a trojan/backdoor can just as easily run from your home directory or your own "Startup Items" folder.
the intrepid attacker can then run all manner of other exploits/social engineering once he has a local irc zombie. Of course, the sad truth is that none of this is necessary. Just send a plain zipped virus.exe and lots of people WILL run it.
Very little appears on the WB that doesn't make me wish I hadn't bought my nice TV.
I always didn't think that enough negatives wouldn't not work. weren't you not flaming, or just unsupporting the decision??
(j/k, I do totally agree with you. I think).