Your genetic makeup defines your perception of time?
Hmm. So, dogs should be hungry after they eat, and not hungry before, or something?
To the extent that your dna is composed of atoms that are subject to entropy, sure, your sense of time as sequential is derived from your dna.
To the extent that your dna makes you small enough that relativistic distances aren't involved in getting signals around your nervous system, sure.
As far as paranoia goes, have you actually seen UFOs? Non-terrestrial intelligent beings? Have they abducted you and done bad things to you?
I won't argue that there are not immortal beings. I also won't argue that there are not evil immortal beings. But I won't agree with the idea that all immortal beings are evil and/or inimical to the human race. Or even most.
Our current mass techniques of raising animals for food are a serious aberration, and a reflection of a lot of individuals giving in to avarice, not the end product of evolution. And evolution tends to work against entropy, FWIW.
Microsoft should be fined an equivalent of the cost of all the unrequested commercial mail being transmitted on the internet, and should be required to pay everyone who has to delete more than twenty such mails a week for the time lost to the deletion process.
Microsoft should be required to pay every user whose bank account has been compromised the money lost.
And that's just for starters.
Sure, twitter's coding is bad, but the problem is made much worse by Microsoft's shoddy implementations of prototypes and turning the prototypes into de-facto standards well before the tech was ready.
Perhaps it is not genetics that is the problem, but the limits of the imposed illusion of time?
I am familiar with a number of SF novels that interpret the whole religion/aliens question as if we were cattle, and I toyed with the idea for a while, but it has since lost its fascination. Paranoia, like the illusion of time, is limited in its usefulness.
Heh. Well, depending on just where that byte is, yeah, even one byte could be obvious, especially for long messages.
Choosing the files for the message could also be obvious.
Of course, as you point out, for long messages this mixes steganography with cryptography, and the question of how the list of offsets is stored and transferred becomes important and subject to attack. Also, the method of choosing and mapping the offsets could result in a rather weak code.
But I think that's true of all steganography, whether the method of recovering the message is physically stored somewhere or not. (I don't think that variable recovery methods are excluded from the field of steganography?)
I'm actually okay with the practice, as long as it's not the market's 800 pound gorilla doing it.
Still, I'm wondering whether you claim actual, first-hand knowledge of this, or whether you are repeating what others have said.
Or, from the phrasing you use, whether you understood my post.
I know a lot of people seem to be working from the assumption that any re-enabled functionality that actually works must have been disabled strictly for marketing purposes.
And that assumption makes it hard to explain to them that there are other, valid reasons, including managing the costs of testing and scrapping.
Market leaders have certain responsibilities that non-leaders do not. If they fail to assume those responsibilities, they are showing that they are more interested in today's profit margins than the health of tomorrow's market.
As so many have replied to the identical assertion further up the thread,
AMD (and many others) are disabling functions that don't meet test.
You enable the function and get lucky that it works well enough for your purposes. This is different from INTEL selling you a chip that they know meets spec.
What INTEL is doing is artificially propping the price of the i7 up. And that when they don't need the profits.
I'll add a bit of non-redundant information for you.
AMD et. al. do not test every chip. (Nor does INTEL.) That costs way too much.
They use statistical testing. If they find one chip in a batch that is bad, the whole batch is sent to the recycling bin. If they find one chip in the batch that doesn't meet spec, they do some more sampling to make sure the batch is not likely to be bad, then mark the whole batch with the lower spec. And/or they disable functions. (Disabling functions to make the chip warranteeable is cheaper than testing, yes.)
So, what is happening in the AMD et. al. case is that AMD is actually pushing the price down by not testing.
If AMD tried to do this selling an upgrade trick with their downgraded parts without testing, well, they'd have to be ready to lose a lot of the upgrade fees to handling bad part returns and data damage claims.
... 2. You have a choice of paying $300 for a processor that should only cost $200. 3. You have a choice of paying $300 for a processor that should only cost $200.
If INTEL were some poor back-water underdog CPU manufacturer unable to turn a profit, this might be an acceptable temporary tactic to meet market prices and move towards profitability.
If INTEL were selling you some sort of service in addition to turning the function on (support contracts, or such, but what do end-users need supported for this?) this might be acceptable as a way to pay for said hypothetical service.
(Hmm. They send out an engineer to test the RAM or something?)
If INTEL were not determined to turn their near-monopoly of the (desktop/workstation) CPU into a monopoly, and were not determined to push that monopoly into the server market, with chips that burn at least an order of magnitude more energy than they should for the amount of work they do (and far more energy than necessary for the applications areas they are marketing to), there would be less negative reaction to this.
This is just evidence that the i7 is overpriced.
(I think it's overrated, too, but that's a topic for a different thread.)
The link I posted had all the unnecessary paramters stripped. The parameter(s) that stood out the most was (were) (a) parameter(s) for FireFox. (I don't remember how many parameters were FireFox related.)
There was at least one parameter that specified the encoding as Unicode, and I removed that one too. Removing that might have induced more or less sensitivity to my posting the query from Japan.
Come to think of it, the URL tends to automatically re-write to google.co.jp when posting from here, and I changed that to google.com . That could have been what moved things?
Or, should I say, typical lack of reading the friendly article.
The only significant restriction imposed, entirely reasonable to most eyes then, was to say that the module itself could not be sold as-is, only as part of a larger work.
Segmented pointers? Trying to work on addresses as if they were unsigned integers so the addressing math is clear?
How do you do a rotate (instead of a shift) in C, especially standard C?
How do you know for sure that you're toggling the most significant non-sign bit of a signed integer?
Etc.
You can get close to the hardware in C, yes, but only if you deliberately throw away portability.
Untangling the portability issues (among many others) generally takes you down to the assembly language level, even in C. Therefore, C is not sufficiently low-level.
I keep wishing I could get my old Microchroma 68 over here from the States so my kids could play with monitor debug ROM and hand-assembled code, but even that is not quite as hands-on as the 8080 (Altair? Imsai?) box we put together in high school industrial electronics.
Of course, making a toggle-switch interface for the Microchroma 68 wouldn't be too hard.
Dang. Now I want to run down to Nihonbashi, visit Marutsu Parts and some of the other places down there, and bring back some modern stuff, PIC or Arduino/ATMEL or low frequency ARM, or, hey, sometimes they even have S08 or ColdFire, although that is a bit more expensive.
Of course, what I really want to do is get my kids to help me wire-wrap an LS/VLS implementation of the 6809. Make it fully static, so you can hand-clock it instead of software single-step, bring the registers out in LEDs and 7-segment hex displays. Toggle switches, of course. That would allow me to teach the whole hardware stack on an architecture that can handle high-level stuff, as well.
I suppose I'd want to do something about the 16 bit addresses so I could handle Kanji, or even Unicode. But building a 6809 superset with instructions that load three or four byte addresses into the index registers wouldn't be too much more work. (Paged memory management is cheap, but indexing into an array larger than 64KB becomes difficult without large addresses. Then again, teaching the kids how to break what should be a simple indexed load into bank calculation plus indexed load is also useful programming experience.)
The big problem, of course is the paper tape or punched cards. I mean, the old tape or floppy disk drives are fun, and can still be hand-built if you really want to, but if you really want to get a feel of the connection between data and digital encoding, there is nothing more in-your-face than seeing the actual bits there as holes in paper.
Don't ask me what I'm going to do to earn a living while I'm having all this fun with the kids.
Well, if you use the soldered-in flash as the OS drive, you shouldn't need to worry about lost data? Maybe?
Also, although I don't agree with what I'm saying here, there is a target device here that many people will consider disposable. Specifically, if the motherboard dies, remove your micro-SD card and buy a new cheap tablet for lost than the cost of repair.
Except that you and I will use our toaster oven to reflow the SSD and/or remove it, perhaps.
Well, from all that you've said to this point, what you describe is not all that unusual in most people.
There is a matter of degree, of course, which you have implied is above what you perceive as normal.
The longer I live, the more normal I discover myself to be. YMMV, of course.
Not to imply that it was all in my head or that it is all in your head. I have an approach (set of approaches) to many problems that is different from most people's approaches. If I try to work around that, I usually spend way too much time spinning my wheels, generating smoke, generally not getting useful work done. After I do things my way, I generally figure out how to do things the other guy's way, although it is often not necessary to do so.
And I find that most people get all hung up on the assumption that their way is the standard, or ought to be. The recognition that my way is not does seem to set me apart. It sounds like you have that recognition. (But then again, there are definitely times I wish everyone else would just do things my way, but a few moments' reflection reminds me that I would assume they would have as much trouble doing things my way as I have doing things their way.
Emotions? Same thing. We describe our feelings differently, and we spend a lot of time covering up what we assume others would find unacceptable. But when we accept what we feel and think about where the emotions lead, we discover that, for instance, love is not a passion at all.
Oh, and the feeling like one is an alien -- that can be a useful dodge at times, if you don't let it get the better of you too often.
Uhm, considering the charges in the civil suit, which is progressing, yes, there was criminal intent, even if the feds turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps no malevalent intent in the policy itself, but criminal intent in the policy, in the implementation and in the execution.
The policy changes (you'll have to read the friendly article and click some friendly links) correct the criminal element in the policy. (At absolute minimum, criminally negligent policy, but the way I read the descriptions of the original policy, implementation, and execution, there was evidence of intent to observe without permission, as well.)
Some of the links:
current policy and school district official statements, etc.
initial responses, general and to parents, on the school district's website. Form your own opinions.
school district website, on which there is now a link to the updated and the districts official response to the charges being dopped/not pressed.
The news items that led there are linked on the original friendly article.
The only way they can correct the implementation is to make the installation of remote desktop (I assume it's just Apple Remote Desktop) optional, and give the students the password to the admin account and instructions on how to activate it themselves, along with clear instruction that failure to activate won't affect their grades, etc.
No, I'm not sure even that is enough. There would need to be a pilot LED and a local log, and independent auditing of the software that activates and monitors the camera. Although, if the students are informed, they don't need pink duct tape, a towel (erm, thick towel, double folded) over the closed, powered down laptop should do the trick.
To fix the execution issues, at least a few teachers and at least one principal must be required to attend classes on protecting students' privacy and losing a year or two of tenure, at bare minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
Just not the point they think they have.
Your genetic makeup defines your perception of time?
Hmm. So, dogs should be hungry after they eat, and not hungry before, or something?
To the extent that your dna is composed of atoms that are subject to entropy, sure, your sense of time as sequential is derived from your dna.
To the extent that your dna makes you small enough that relativistic distances aren't involved in getting signals around your nervous system, sure.
As far as paranoia goes, have you actually seen UFOs? Non-terrestrial intelligent beings? Have they abducted you and done bad things to you?
I won't argue that there are not immortal beings. I also won't argue that there are not evil immortal beings. But I won't agree with the idea that all immortal beings are evil and/or inimical to the human race. Or even most.
Our current mass techniques of raising animals for food are a serious aberration, and a reflection of a lot of individuals giving in to avarice, not the end product of evolution. And evolution tends to work against entropy, FWIW.
Hmm.
Do you have what we in Texas call a drivers' license?
If you do, do you remember, in your first year or so of driving any stupid mistakes you made just because of your lack of experience?
Do you have you own home server exposed to the 'net? Have you scanned it with the vulnerability scanners available?
And so forth, without even trying to approach the damping effect on free speech that you are suggesting.
That was not a security flaw. That was an opportunity.
Likewise the security of Microsoft OSses.
Microsoft should be fined an equivalent of the cost of all the unrequested commercial mail being transmitted on the internet, and should be required to pay everyone who has to delete more than twenty such mails a week for the time lost to the deletion process.
Microsoft should be required to pay every user whose bank account has been compromised the money lost.
And that's just for starters.
Sure, twitter's coding is bad, but the problem is made much worse by Microsoft's shoddy implementations of prototypes and turning the prototypes into de-facto standards well before the tech was ready.
Just because you and I have our heads pointed in different directions doesn't mean the earth isn't flat
locally.
Perhaps it is not genetics that is the problem, but the limits of the imposed illusion of time?
I am familiar with a number of SF novels that interpret the whole religion/aliens question as if we were cattle, and I toyed with the idea for a while, but it has since lost its fascination. Paranoia, like the illusion of time, is limited in its usefulness.
I mean, who wants to believe that $enemy_of_choice is so far advanced beyond us?
What (sometimes, sort of) surprises me is that no one seems to be seeing this as evidence of, erm, angels?
Changing one byte per file is detectable?
Heh. Well, depending on just where that byte is, yeah, even one byte could be obvious, especially for long messages.
Choosing the files for the message could also be obvious.
Of course, as you point out, for long messages this mixes steganography with cryptography, and the question of how the list of offsets is stored and transferred becomes important and subject to attack. Also, the method of choosing and mapping the offsets could result in a rather weak code.
But I think that's true of all steganography, whether the method of recovering the message is physically stored somewhere or not. (I don't think that variable recovery methods are excluded from the field of steganography?)
So, the lesson here is that you don't want to have to carry around large amounts of contraband data.
Carry short messages that can be reconstructed from carefully chosen contents of multiple normal files.
An overly simplified implimentation is, for a ten word message, ten files. Ten offest numbers for the key.
(Hmm. One contraband image. 150,000 files. Ouch.)
nt;
Advanced steganography is indistinguishable from propoganda.
Here's one for you:
Would INTEL go out of business if they failed to sell i7s as i5s?
Overpricing is not strictly evil if the company doing it doesn't effectively control the market.
Let's try another thought experiment with you.
What happens when AMD goes bankrupt and ceases operations because INTEL has sucked all the profits up with all their market engineering?
Two points I was trying to make in one post:
(1) This is different from disabling functions because the test sample produced parts that failed to meet certain tests.
(2) This is not something a market leader should do.
It's probably not something non-leaders should do, either, your too-sophisticated thought experiment not-withstanding, but that would be their choice.
Market leaders have more limited options in what they do. Otherwise, the market cannot be kept free. (Another of your false assumptions.)
I'm actually okay with the practice, as long as it's not the market's 800 pound gorilla doing it.
Still, I'm wondering whether you claim actual, first-hand knowledge of this, or whether you are repeating what others have said.
Or, from the phrasing you use, whether you understood my post.
I know a lot of people seem to be working from the assumption that any re-enabled functionality that actually works must have been disabled strictly for marketing purposes.
And that assumption makes it hard to explain to them that there are other, valid reasons, including managing the costs of testing and scrapping.
Market leaders have certain responsibilities that non-leaders do not. If they fail to assume those responsibilities, they are showing that they are more interested in today's profit margins than the health of tomorrow's market.
As so many have replied to the identical assertion further up the thread,
AMD (and many others) are disabling functions that don't meet test.
You enable the function and get lucky that it works well enough for your purposes. This is different from INTEL selling you a chip that they know meets spec.
What INTEL is doing is artificially propping the price of the i7 up. And that when they don't need the profits.
I'll add a bit of non-redundant information for you.
AMD et. al. do not test every chip. (Nor does INTEL.) That costs way too much.
They use statistical testing. If they find one chip in a batch that is bad, the whole batch is sent to the recycling bin. If they find one chip in the batch that doesn't meet spec, they do some more sampling to make sure the batch is not likely to be bad, then mark the whole batch with the lower spec. And/or they disable functions. (Disabling functions to make the chip warranteeable is cheaper than testing, yes.)
So, what is happening in the AMD et. al. case is that AMD is actually pushing the price down by not testing.
If AMD tried to do this selling an upgrade trick with their downgraded parts without testing, well, they'd have to be ready to lose a lot of the upgrade fees to handling bad part returns and data damage claims.
Does that help you see the difference?
Let me help you out here a bit:
If INTEL were some poor back-water underdog CPU manufacturer unable to turn a profit, this might be an acceptable temporary tactic to meet market prices and move towards profitability.
If INTEL were selling you some sort of service in addition to turning the function on (support contracts, or such, but what do end-users need supported for this?) this might be acceptable as a way to pay for said hypothetical service.
(Hmm. They send out an engineer to test the RAM or something?)
If INTEL were not determined to turn their near-monopoly of the (desktop/workstation) CPU into a monopoly, and were not determined to push that monopoly into the server market, with chips that burn at least an order of magnitude more energy than they should for the amount of work they do (and far more energy than necessary for the applications areas they are marketing to), there would be less negative reaction to this.
This is just evidence that the i7 is overpriced.
(I think it's overrated, too, but that's a topic for a different thread.)
The link I posted had all the unnecessary paramters stripped. The parameter(s) that stood out the most was (were) (a) parameter(s) for FireFox. (I don't remember how many parameters were FireFox related.)
There was at least one parameter that specified the encoding as Unicode, and I removed that one too. Removing that might have induced more or less sensitivity to my posting the query from Japan.
Come to think of it, the URL tends to automatically re-write to google.co.jp when posting from here, and I changed that to google.com . That could have been what moved things?
google "sun rpc license"
(Interesting that the parameters for firefox brought the one on Apple's site up before the one on Microsoft's.)
Or, should I say, typical lack of reading the friendly article.
Not even close.
Segmented pointers? Trying to work on addresses as if they were unsigned integers so the addressing math is clear?
How do you do a rotate (instead of a shift) in C, especially standard C?
How do you know for sure that you're toggling the most significant non-sign bit of a signed integer?
Etc.
You can get close to the hardware in C, yes, but only if you deliberately throw away portability.
Untangling the portability issues (among many others) generally takes you down to the assembly language level, even in C. Therefore, C is not sufficiently low-level.
I keep wishing I could get my old Microchroma 68 over here from the States so my kids could play with monitor debug ROM and hand-assembled code, but even that is not quite as hands-on as the 8080 (Altair? Imsai?) box we put together in high school industrial electronics.
Of course, making a toggle-switch interface for the Microchroma 68 wouldn't be too hard.
Dang. Now I want to run down to Nihonbashi, visit Marutsu Parts and some of the other places down there, and bring back some modern stuff, PIC or Arduino/ATMEL or low frequency ARM, or, hey, sometimes they even have S08 or ColdFire, although that is a bit more expensive.
Of course, what I really want to do is get my kids to help me wire-wrap an LS/VLS implementation of the 6809. Make it fully static, so you can hand-clock it instead of software single-step, bring the registers out in LEDs and 7-segment hex displays. Toggle switches, of course. That would allow me to teach the whole hardware stack on an architecture that can handle high-level stuff, as well.
I suppose I'd want to do something about the 16 bit addresses so I could handle Kanji, or even Unicode. But building a 6809 superset with instructions that load three or four byte addresses into the index registers wouldn't be too much more work. (Paged memory management is cheap, but indexing into an array larger than 64KB becomes difficult without large addresses. Then again, teaching the kids how to break what should be a simple indexed load into bank calculation plus indexed load is also useful programming experience.)
The big problem, of course is the paper tape or punched cards. I mean, the old tape or floppy disk drives are fun, and can still be hand-built if you really want to, but if you really want to get a feel of the connection between data and digital encoding, there is nothing more in-your-face than seeing the actual bits there as holes in paper.
Don't ask me what I'm going to do to earn a living while I'm having all this fun with the kids.
Yeah. The guys who gravitate to management positions because they are better at handwaving than ... ...
uhm
doing actual work.
(Yeah, that's what I mean.)
Well, if you use the soldered-in flash as the OS drive, you shouldn't need to worry about lost data? Maybe?
Also, although I don't agree with what I'm saying here, there is a target device here that many people will consider disposable. Specifically, if the motherboard dies, remove your micro-SD card and buy a new cheap tablet for lost than the cost of repair.
Except that you and I will use our toaster oven to reflow the SSD and/or remove it, perhaps.
Well, from all that you've said to this point, what you describe is not all that unusual in most people.
There is a matter of degree, of course, which you have implied is above what you perceive as normal.
The longer I live, the more normal I discover myself to be. YMMV, of course.
Not to imply that it was all in my head or that it is all in your head. I have an approach (set of approaches) to many problems that is different from most people's approaches. If I try to work around that, I usually spend way too much time spinning my wheels, generating smoke, generally not getting useful work done. After I do things my way, I generally figure out how to do things the other guy's way, although it is often not necessary to do so.
And I find that most people get all hung up on the assumption that their way is the standard, or ought to be. The recognition that my way is not does seem to set me apart. It sounds like you have that recognition. (But then again, there are definitely times I wish everyone else would just do things my way, but a few moments' reflection reminds me that I would assume they would have as much trouble doing things my way as I have doing things their way.
Emotions? Same thing. We describe our feelings differently, and we spend a lot of time covering up what we assume others would find unacceptable. But when we accept what we feel and think about where the emotions lead, we discover that, for instance, love is not a passion at all.
Oh, and the feeling like one is an alien -- that can be a useful dodge at times, if you don't let it get the better of you too often.
Okay, okay, I'll quit preaching now.
Uhm, considering the charges in the civil suit, which is progressing, yes, there was criminal intent, even if the feds turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps no malevalent intent in the policy itself, but criminal intent in the policy, in the implementation and in the execution.
The policy changes (you'll have to read the friendly article and click some friendly links) correct the criminal element in the policy. (At absolute minimum, criminally negligent policy, but the way I read the descriptions of the original policy, implementation, and execution, there was evidence of intent to observe without permission, as well.)
Some of the links:
current policy and school district official statements, etc.
initial responses, general and to parents, on the school district's website. Form your own opinions.
school district website, on which there is now a link to the updated and the districts official response to the charges being dopped/not pressed.
The news items that led there are linked on the original friendly article.
The only way they can correct the implementation is to make the installation of remote desktop (I assume it's just Apple Remote Desktop) optional, and give the students the password to the admin account and instructions on how to activate it themselves, along with clear instruction that failure to activate won't affect their grades, etc.
No, I'm not sure even that is enough. There would need to be a pilot LED and a local log, and independent auditing of the software that activates and monitors the camera. Although, if the students are informed, they don't need pink duct tape, a towel (erm, thick towel, double folded) over the closed, powered down laptop should do the trick.
To fix the execution issues, at least a few teachers and at least one principal must be required to attend classes on protecting students' privacy and losing a year or two of tenure, at bare minimum.
Etc.