While nothing's 100% certain, history suggests that efforts like this might have difficulty achieving success.
There have been a number of fairly spectacular failures in this arena. Consider, for example:
Taligent. This was an Apple-HP-IBM joint venture aimed at developing operating system software. Four years passed, and much money was spent. Much hype was produced, but I don't think they ever shipped a product.
Kaleida. This was an Apple-IBM joint venture aimed at developing (yep!) operating system software. No product resulted.
OS/2. This one's a little different since a product (and, for that matter, a pretty good one) resulted. But pride-of-ownership and internal competition issues killed the product anyway.
Software development successes seem to start with a small team who understand the position and purpose of the product. Once that's achieved, then the team can scale up. I'd be concerned that the three companies behind this announcement are likely to have difficulty assembling an appropriately small and well-focused core team.
People despise copy restrictions. Copy restrictions make it a little more difficult for the amateur thief. They make it lots more difficult for people who want to pay for music but use it in ways that "feel" fair but that don't line up exactly with a narrow-minded view of those in charge of "rights management."
Paying for music isn't scary. Pay-per-use or pay-per-download is scary because it's not predictable. So long as the pricing is below some threshold of pain (I'm guessing $15/month but I'm no expert), I suspect that folks will be largely willing to "pay the music bill" rather than simply trade among themselves. I suspect that some system of royalty allocation could be worked out based on number of downloads that would split the monthly fee among the various players.
For heaven's sake! Music is an expressive medium - that's why people want to share it! So the for-pay services need to take advantage of that. Just last night I burned an 18-track CD that consists of a mix of music I enjoy. If I were able to upload my playlist to the aforementioned service, a few of my friends might wind up downloading the files and burning the same CD (particularly if the client software made that easy). Artists (and labels) would get paid for their efforts. And it's enabling me to do something I really can't do right now: share a mix CD with friends without the vague nagging feeling that I'm doing some wrong to the very artists whose music I enjoy. I'd pay for that, though I'd still want it to be flat rate.
Where's the revenue growth to be found? Ancillary services beyond the basic download-some-music flat-rate service are one option. Flat-rate models will support periodic price increases if the perceived value is there: I'm unlikely to gripe too much if the service goes from $15/month to $17/month in a year's time if I'm finding it valuable.
Sure, there's risk involved in doing this. But I'm not sure it's a big risk: the industry really needs to take the leap of faith and understand that when nearly all of the music-listening public thinks that digital rights management, endless restrictions, damaged media, etc. are a bad idea, perhaps they really need to try something new that provides a mutual benefit.
The SecurID tokens work pretty well; they represent a nice balance of security and ease of use for the inexperienced user. The server software is a hulking piece of difficult-to-manage bloatware (it was when I last used it two years ago, in any case), but it's generally being installed and used by experienced folks.
The cards themselves have some tamperproofing that protects them from casual disassembly, but it doesn't look like something that's designed to withstand a determined attack. I think it'd be much harder, though, to access the internals of the card in a way that wouldn't leave obvious visible evidence of tampering--I'm guessing this was the design goal, not total tamperproofing.
The algorithm used by the cards isn't something that RSA publishes, but it's been out in the open for a while now.
The cards are each preloaded with a secret key, which is also loaded onto the SecurID server that does the authentication. Without the secret key, the algorithm doesn't do you that much good so long as it isn't easily possible to derive the secret key from a sequence of the displayed number. The jury is still out as to whether this is possible. But assuming there aren't obvious holes in the algorithm, one has to obtain the keying material from the server (where it's presumably closely guarded) or from the physical token itself. Doing the latter would require theft of the token or tampering in a way that would be obvious to the user.
I'll let others speak to the technical issues about the difficulty/cost of sending rogue command messages to a scientific satellite.
I would note, however, that the simplest attack on a system like this (unencrypted or reliant on fixed keys) involves social engineering or the outright corruption of staff who know the details of the protocol and command structure. Do you think there's a chance someone who understands how to command the satellite might part with the information for $100,000? How about $50K? $25K? In any of these cases, the engineering effort required to reverse-engineer the information is likely to be lots more time-consuming and costly than simply bribing someone to give you the information you want.
When you're just trying to guard against the '7337 hax0rs working from home, you can pretty much focus your attention on technical avenues of attack and maybe some basic social engineering, but when considering a determined and well-funded adversary, it's important to take (management buzzword alert!) an integrated, enterprise-wide view of the problem.
One thing to keep in mind when self-assessing your job performance is that technical skills and ability are only a part of the performance picture.
Since so much of the IT field is really skill-based (either you can do something or you can't), it becomes easy to overlook the importance of one's relationship with others in the workplace. I think that's one of the biggest failings of academic computer science programs, in fact: the emphasis is so tightly focused on technical performance (and individual technical performance, no less) that it becomes too easy to overlook the importance of being able to effectively work with a whole range of other people.
There's nothing in your note that suggests this is a particular problem for you. But it's worth bearing in mind in any case, for your future career success most assuredly depends on your ability to forge and maintain solid working relationships with your peers. And it's worth asking: are there things you could do differently to minimize the "resentment" effect on others of things (like your age) over which you have no control? I'm not trying to excuse age discrimination (in fact, it's one of the factors that led me to leave a job myself about six years ago), but it's definitely worth realizing early on that differences in age, education, experience, style, mannerisms, etc. all have an effect on people's ability to work together--and that the person who can find a way to work well with a wide variety of others is likely to enjoy success far beyond that which can be achieved by technical prowess alone.
I've noticed one thing curiously missing from the discussion surrounding digital rights management. What are, in the industry's eyes, the rights of the consumer? Everything I've seen about digital rights management suggests that the only rights being protected are those of the content owners. I think it would be fascinating to see a direct answer from the industry in response to this question.
One would expect, that DRM would bring significant new opportunities for the consumer; lower prices, perhaps, or the ability to share content with friends in a limited and fair way.
The DRM proposals I've seen thus far don't provide any new abilities for the consumer, though, and are therefore destined for failure since they represent a downgrade from current abilities at the same (or higher) prices. As the market continues to vote with its money for non-restricted media, I'd expect that the attempts to distort the actions of the market through legislation will become ever-increasingly shrill.
I've wondered the same thing: does Microsoft have any liability here? I'm sure their end-user license agreements contain lots of language absolving them of any responsibility whatsoever, but what about the damages to the innocent bystanders who aren't party to the click-wrap license? My suspicion is that there's no way they could be successfully sued for this, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings to see someone try.
Well, it's definitely a bad move for the consumer, but it's pretty clear that the consumer hasn't been an especially high priority in the broadband industry for a while now. It's fairly telling when the cable companies are the customer service leaders.
I think occasional massive hiccups like this (and the Northpoint DSL debacle that preceded it) are part of the price of an unregulated industry. We'd see this same kind of brinksmanship and the same sort of politically or financially motivated service outages from our telephone service providers were it not for regulations mandating a scheme of interconnection and settlement fees. But does anyone really want that same sort of regulatory scheme for broadband? I might change my mind later, but it seems like the occasional outage like this one might be the lesser of two pretty big evils.
Hmmm. I'm just expecting Apple to issue a press release soon that says something to the effect of, "in retrospect, perhaps we shouldn't have subcontracted the installation script to RIAA after all."
The Corvallis development operation was shut down in the early 1990s (1993?); development was moved to Singapore and then essentially shelved until 1997. In late 1997, high-end calculator development was started up again in Australia; they released a few high-end calculators (most recently the HP49). So the demise of the Australian development shop most likely means that high-end calculator development at HP has stopped.
Argh. To follow up on my own post...the last paragraph should read:
Now I run into occasions where the user interface for the operating system (never mind the underlying application) seems sluggish on a Pocket PC that's based on a 206 MHz StrongARM 32-bit processor. While I wouldn't want to roll back the clock on hardware performance, I hope that the art of writing fast, lean code doesn't become an unintended victim of progress.
Sorry about that. I did use the "Preview" button but missed my error in the proofreading.
The current state of affairs is emblematic of a larger shift in the software industry that's been ongoing for a while.
It might surprise many people to know that HP's most recent calculator offering, the HP49G, uses a 4 MHz Saturn processor. This is a 4-bit (yes, 4-bit) processor that was originally introduced (at a blazing 0.64 MHz) to support the HP71B calculator in 1984.
A friend of mine showed me his HP28C calculator in 1987. This was the first of the HP calculators to support symbolic manipulation of expressions; I remember being impressed not only at the power of the calculator but the careful thought that had gone into its design of its user interface. I didn't learn until much later that this was all being done using a processor that was underpowered even by the standards of the day.
It turned out that a lot of the power was due to the work of a team assembled by Bill Wickes, then a physics professor at the University of Maryland. He'd purchased an earlier calculator, the HP41C, and had discovered a bug that allowed him access to the calculator's machine code. It didn't take long for folks to become conversant in this "synthetic programming," which allowed people to do things with the HP41C that the calculator's designers never intended.
HP was first and foremost an engineering organization at that point, so they hired him (the fact that the DMCA didn't yet exist also prevented them from suing him into oblivion) to design the next generation of calculators, which included the HP28C, HP28S, and the HP48 series. Development stopped in the mid 1990s for a while, but the current Australia-based group led by Jean-Yves Avenard and Gerald Squelart have continued to develop miraculously functional software for surprisingly limited hardware.
The capabilities of modern hardware have advanced so quickly that it's much easier to miss the beauty of small, quick, functional code. It's easier to write big, bloated code--and let the hardware make up for the resulting inefficiency.
Now I run into occasions where the user interface for the operating system (never mind the underlying application) on a Pocket PC that's based on a 206 MHz StrongARM 32-bit processor. While I wouldn't want to roll back the clock on hardware performance, I hope that the art of writing fast, lean code doesn't become an unintended victim of progress.
Passport really isn't an application on your desktop machine, but MSN Messenger (which requires Passport) is. Messenger is a really irritating application in its own right. And it's actually even more irritating if you have signed up for Passport using a Hotmail account, since it feels compelled to notify you of waiting email at Hotmail every eight microseconds--and it's essentially impossible to keep Microsoft from spamming you with "special offers" that you must know about right away.
You can, however, uninstall it!
Have a look at the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf
Then change the line that reads:
msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7
to
msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,,7
Then go to the Control Panel, choose Add/Remove Programs, then select the "Windows components" tag. You'll note that "Windows Messenger" now appears at the bottom of the list; just remove it, and Windows/MSN Messenger will bother you no more.
Re:Why is everyone lawsuit happy in the US?
on
TV Networks Sue ReplayTV
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Tivo unit is evil, it is yet another of those clueless dotcom scams where you buy something and then have to pay a monthly fee to make it work. Like AOL the designers look for sneaky opportunities to bombard you with ads.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. TiVo's model isn't that different from that of Replay. Replay chooses to bundle the service fee with the price of the unit. You can either pay $10/month with TiVo or $250 on a one-time basis. Both Replay and TiVo have actively looked for opportunities for advertising dollars, but neither one is bombarding people with advertisements. In TiVo's case, this takes the form of some sponsored content that you have to go looking for; while they're definitely attempting to make it convenient to find material from their partners, it's NOT pushed on you in an AOL-like manner. I've got a really low tolerance for gratuituous spam, and TiVo doesn't even show up on my radar screen of annoyances. It's a good product (as is Replay) and was clearly designed with the consumer's interests first and foremost.
I'd trade a lot of errors from open source software for a few errors from closed-source any day.
While it might well be true that open source programmers are a bit more sloppy in error checking, I've found it's far more likely that the closed source counterparts will handle errors in an inscrutable way.
Case in point: I installed some antivirus software yesterday. As it turned out, I was missing a subtle but important network mapping. With an open source package, I'd probably have figured the problem out pretty quickly from the error messages. As it was, though, I was faced with the error message: "An installation error occurred. [OK]". That's it; I got no further help at all. While it's not universally true, I suppose, it's very rare to get such useless messages from open source software!
While I agree that the PS2 isn't going to be a general-purpose computing platform in the same sense that your desktop machine is, please keep in mind that consumer electronics/entertainment hardware quite likely represents the next battleground for "mindshare".
Even if the initial implementations are kind of silly, I'm really pleased to see open source software reaching the embedded device market. It becomes a lot harder, for example, to force a completely one-sided "digital rights management" scheme on consumers when there exists more than one viable platform choice for the consumer.
If I had one piece of advice to add, it would be that your ability to forge professional relationships is of the greatest importance. I think a during the early part of their careers, a lot of technical folks think that sheer technical ability matters most. It's necessary, of course, but not sufficient; even the most technical of senior-level jobs depends on the ability to communicate effectively and build consensus.
In short: focus on the people skills and rely on your natural curiosity to keep you sharp from an engineering standpoint.
I don't see a lot of benefit for consumers here. And, much as the music industry in particular would like to ignore this fact, it's consumers that will define the success and failure of a new content packaging such as this one.
Every successful format in recent memory has offered some compelling benefit. CDs were smaller, more durable, and sounded better (to most people) than the LPs and tapes they replaced. DVDs offered compelling benefits over and above those offered by videotapes and laserdiscs.
But a new format that's aimed at providing a vehicle for content owners to increase profits without providing a single tangible benefit for the consumer isn't at all likely to succeed. Digital rights management doesn't provide the consumer any benefit right now.
That's not to say that DRM is fundmentally a bad idea: I suspect that many among us would actually use a system that allows us to unlock specific songs rather than paying for an entire CD, for example. But the music industry has yet to learn that the relationship with the consumer is truly a give-and-take relationship; if we're to accept a new format or some sort of DRM scheme, there has to be a set of benefits that make it worthwhile.
I think the industry is beginning to realize this, actually. The attempt to buy legislation like the SSSCA represents an admission that a free marketplace isn't going to adopt new technologies if the benefits are completely one-sided. So long as these hamhanded attempts at market manipulation fail, there will be little choice but to deliver better value in exchange for the better control that they'd like to have.
Pohlmann led the design teams for Intel's 8086, 80286 and 960 processors.
I conclude from this that there's a 2-to-1 chance that the resulting optical bus will actually be a hybrid optical-copper bus in which half of the bits for any given operation traverse each bus.:)
While I think this paper is very interesting research, I don't think it necessarily follows that a key generator for WPA is right around the corner. While I don't have any inside knowledge, I'll bet that the "confirmation code" you get back is somehow derived from a digital signature of the activation key; the WPA code would simply verify it against a well-known public key. Coming up with a key generator would seem to require access to the private key (or a very large brute-force attack). This isn't to say that WPA can be bypassed, of course--only that generating the same keys Microsoft does is quite possibly going to be very hard. Of course, if it isn't based on digital signatures, the key generator probably really is just around the corner.
A couple of years ago, I attempted to get DSL into my home. I'm about 6,000 feet from the CO, but the copper line is put onto a fiber connection in a box across the street from my house (perhaps 500 feet away). So, Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) told me I couldn't get DSL. I continued to push them. Finally they admitted that I could most likely get DSL service, but there would be a charge involved; they'd pass the request on to their engineering organization for study. In two weeks, they called back.
"Hello, Mr. Wherry?"
"Yes?"
"This is Ms. ___ with Bell Atlantic; I'm calling with the results of our engineering study."
"Terrific! What's it going to cost to get DSL?"
"$967,000 - would you like us to go ahead?"
Believe it or not, she asked the question as if there was a chance I might say, "sure, just put it on my bill." Since they didn't seem to have the option to pay in four easy installments of $250,000 each, I declined.
In retrospect, I should have realized that any answer that required an engineering study was probably an answer I didn't really want. I wonder, though: would my purchase of just under $1M worth of equipment have meant that all of my neighbors would then be able to get the service for $49.95?
I subsequently ordered high-speed data service from the local cable TV monopoly--and am pretty pleased with the results. They're shockingly incompetent as a cable TV provider, but their cable modem service has worked surprisingly well.
If I'm reading the article correctly (and if the author of the article has the facts correct), I think the issue here is not the additional digits but the ability to unambiguously determine whether or not a call is a flat-rate local call.
I live in the Washington, DC area, and we have ten-digit dialing for all local calls. While it's always possible to use 11-digit dialing (1+NXX+xxx-xxxx) for all calls, the ability to dial a call without the leading '1' means that that the call is some variety of local call. The conversion to universal 10-digit dialing (and allowing phone number starting with '1') will make it very difficult to determine the class of a particular call without a lookup of some sort.
...that U.S. immigration law contributed, in an ever-so-tiny way, to the rise of spam on the Internet; our illustrious friends Canter and Siegel ("the green card lawyers") sent what is, to my knowledge, the first Usenet spam, in April 1994.
I've watched this story unfold with interest, because it really represents a pretty stark contrast with the way that a company like TiVo is handling the hacker community. TiVo's taken the attitude, "hack away, but don't break our revenue model." Digital Convergence seems to believe that legal blustering is the path to success.
I can't help but wonder: has Digital Convergence stopped to think about the early adopters who really drive the spread of new technology? Since the benefits of their scanner aren't immediately obvious, I think that Digital Convergence, whether they realize it or not, is dependent on these early adopters. And these are the very same people that are (1) going to find out about the license shenanigans and legal blustering and (2) be really irritated by it.
The saying, "don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind. I think Digital Convergence is about to learn what happens when you ignore this sage advice.
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There have been a number of fairly spectacular failures in this arena. Consider, for example:
Software development successes seem to start with a small team who understand the position and purpose of the product. Once that's achieved, then the team can scale up. I'd be concerned that the three companies behind this announcement are likely to have difficulty assembling an appropriately small and well-focused core team.
The industry needs to understand a few things.
- People despise copy restrictions. Copy restrictions make it a little more difficult for the amateur thief. They make it lots more difficult for people who want to pay for music but use it in ways that "feel" fair but that don't line up exactly with a narrow-minded view of those in charge of "rights management."
- Paying for music isn't scary. Pay-per-use or pay-per-download is scary because it's not predictable. So long as the pricing is below some threshold of pain (I'm guessing $15/month but I'm no expert), I suspect that folks will be largely willing to "pay the music bill" rather than simply trade among themselves. I suspect that some system of royalty allocation could be worked out based on number of downloads that would split the monthly fee among the various players.
- For heaven's sake! Music is an expressive medium - that's why people want to share it! So the for-pay services need to take advantage of that. Just last night I burned an 18-track CD that consists of a mix of music I enjoy. If I were able to upload my playlist to the aforementioned service, a few of my friends might wind up downloading the files and burning the same CD (particularly if the client software made that easy). Artists (and labels) would get paid for their efforts. And it's enabling me to do something I really can't do right now: share a mix CD with friends without the vague nagging feeling that I'm doing some wrong to the very artists whose music I enjoy. I'd pay for that, though I'd still want it to be flat rate.
- Where's the revenue growth to be found? Ancillary services beyond the basic download-some-music flat-rate service are one option. Flat-rate models will support periodic price increases if the perceived value is there: I'm unlikely to gripe too much if the service goes from $15/month to $17/month in a year's time if I'm finding it valuable.
Sure, there's risk involved in doing this. But I'm not sure it's a big risk: the industry really needs to take the leap of faith and understand that when nearly all of the music-listening public thinks that digital rights management, endless restrictions, damaged media, etc. are a bad idea, perhaps they really need to try something new that provides a mutual benefit.The SecurID tokens work pretty well; they represent a nice balance of security and ease of use for the inexperienced user. The server software is a hulking piece of difficult-to-manage bloatware (it was when I last used it two years ago, in any case), but it's generally being installed and used by experienced folks.
The cards themselves have some tamperproofing that protects them from casual disassembly, but it doesn't look like something that's designed to withstand a determined attack. I think it'd be much harder, though, to access the internals of the card in a way that wouldn't leave obvious visible evidence of tampering--I'm guessing this was the design goal, not total tamperproofing.
The algorithm used by the cards isn't something that RSA publishes, but it's been out in the open for a while now.
The cards are each preloaded with a secret key, which is also loaded onto the SecurID server that does the authentication. Without the secret key, the algorithm doesn't do you that much good so long as it isn't easily possible to derive the secret key from a sequence of the displayed number. The jury is still out as to whether this is possible. But assuming there aren't obvious holes in the algorithm, one has to obtain the keying material from the server (where it's presumably closely guarded) or from the physical token itself. Doing the latter would require theft of the token or tampering in a way that would be obvious to the user.
I'll let others speak to the technical issues about the difficulty/cost of sending rogue command messages to a scientific satellite.
I would note, however, that the simplest attack on a system like this (unencrypted or reliant on fixed keys) involves social engineering or the outright corruption of staff who know the details of the protocol and command structure. Do you think there's a chance someone who understands how to command the satellite might part with the information for $100,000? How about $50K? $25K? In any of these cases, the engineering effort required to reverse-engineer the information is likely to be lots more time-consuming and costly than simply bribing someone to give you the information you want.
When you're just trying to guard against the '7337 hax0rs working from home, you can pretty much focus your attention on technical avenues of attack and maybe some basic social engineering, but when considering a determined and well-funded adversary, it's important to take (management buzzword alert!) an integrated, enterprise-wide view of the problem.
Does anyone else see the resemblance between the RIAA companies and the telephone company in the days of old (or, if you'd rather, Verizon today)?
"We don't care because we don't have to. We're RIAA." (with apologies to SNL...)
One thing to keep in mind when self-assessing your job performance is that technical skills and ability are only a part of the performance picture.
Since so much of the IT field is really skill-based (either you can do something or you can't), it becomes easy to overlook the importance of one's relationship with others in the workplace. I think that's one of the biggest failings of academic computer science programs, in fact: the emphasis is so tightly focused on technical performance (and individual technical performance, no less) that it becomes too easy to overlook the importance of being able to effectively work with a whole range of other people.
There's nothing in your note that suggests this is a particular problem for you. But it's worth bearing in mind in any case, for your future career success most assuredly depends on your ability to forge and maintain solid working relationships with your peers. And it's worth asking: are there things you could do differently to minimize the "resentment" effect on others of things (like your age) over which you have no control? I'm not trying to excuse age discrimination (in fact, it's one of the factors that led me to leave a job myself about six years ago), but it's definitely worth realizing early on that differences in age, education, experience, style, mannerisms, etc. all have an effect on people's ability to work together--and that the person who can find a way to work well with a wide variety of others is likely to enjoy success far beyond that which can be achieved by technical prowess alone.
I've noticed one thing curiously missing from the discussion surrounding digital rights management. What are, in the industry's eyes, the rights of the consumer? Everything I've seen about digital rights management suggests that the only rights being protected are those of the content owners. I think it would be fascinating to see a direct answer from the industry in response to this question.
One would expect, that DRM would bring significant new opportunities for the consumer; lower prices, perhaps, or the ability to share content with friends in a limited and fair way.
The DRM proposals I've seen thus far don't provide any new abilities for the consumer, though, and are therefore destined for failure since they represent a downgrade from current abilities at the same (or higher) prices. As the market continues to vote with its money for non-restricted media, I'd expect that the attempts to distort the actions of the market through legislation will become ever-increasingly shrill.
I've wondered the same thing: does Microsoft have any liability here? I'm sure their end-user license agreements contain lots of language absolving them of any responsibility whatsoever, but what about the damages to the innocent bystanders who aren't party to the click-wrap license? My suspicion is that there's no way they could be successfully sued for this, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings to see someone try.
Well, it's definitely a bad move for the consumer, but it's pretty clear that the consumer hasn't been an especially high priority in the broadband industry for a while now. It's fairly telling when the cable companies are the customer service leaders.
I think occasional massive hiccups like this (and the Northpoint DSL debacle that preceded it) are part of the price of an unregulated industry. We'd see this same kind of brinksmanship and the same sort of politically or financially motivated service outages from our telephone service providers were it not for regulations mandating a scheme of interconnection and settlement fees. But does anyone really want that same sort of regulatory scheme for broadband? I might change my mind later, but it seems like the occasional outage like this one might be the lesser of two pretty big evils.
Hmmm. I'm just expecting Apple to issue a press release soon that says something to the effect of, "in retrospect, perhaps we shouldn't have subcontracted the installation script to RIAA after all."
The Corvallis development operation was shut down in the early 1990s (1993?); development was moved to Singapore and then essentially shelved until 1997. In late 1997, high-end calculator development was started up again in Australia; they released a few high-end calculators (most recently the HP49). So the demise of the Australian development shop most likely means that high-end calculator development at HP has stopped.
Sorry about that. I did use the "Preview" button but missed my error in the proofreading.
The current state of affairs is emblematic of a larger shift in the software industry that's been ongoing for a while.
It might surprise many people to know that HP's most recent calculator offering, the HP49G, uses a 4 MHz Saturn processor. This is a 4-bit (yes, 4-bit) processor that was originally introduced (at a blazing 0.64 MHz) to support the HP71B calculator in 1984.
A friend of mine showed me his HP28C calculator in 1987. This was the first of the HP calculators to support symbolic manipulation of expressions; I remember being impressed not only at the power of the calculator but the careful thought that had gone into its design of its user interface. I didn't learn until much later that this was all being done using a processor that was underpowered even by the standards of the day.
It turned out that a lot of the power was due to the work of a team assembled by Bill Wickes, then a physics professor at the University of Maryland. He'd purchased an earlier calculator, the HP41C, and had discovered a bug that allowed him access to the calculator's machine code. It didn't take long for folks to become conversant in this "synthetic programming," which allowed people to do things with the HP41C that the calculator's designers never intended.
HP was first and foremost an engineering organization at that point, so they hired him (the fact that the DMCA didn't yet exist also prevented them from suing him into oblivion) to design the next generation of calculators, which included the HP28C, HP28S, and the HP48 series. Development stopped in the mid 1990s for a while, but the current Australia-based group led by Jean-Yves Avenard and Gerald Squelart have continued to develop miraculously functional software for surprisingly limited hardware.
The capabilities of modern hardware have advanced so quickly that it's much easier to miss the beauty of small, quick, functional code. It's easier to write big, bloated code--and let the hardware make up for the resulting inefficiency.
Now I run into occasions where the user interface for the operating system (never mind the underlying application) on a Pocket PC that's based on a 206 MHz StrongARM 32-bit processor. While I wouldn't want to roll back the clock on hardware performance, I hope that the art of writing fast, lean code doesn't become an unintended victim of progress.
Passport really isn't an application on your desktop machine, but MSN Messenger (which requires Passport) is. Messenger is a really irritating application in its own right. And it's actually even more irritating if you have signed up for Passport using a Hotmail account, since it feels compelled to notify you of waiting email at Hotmail every eight microseconds--and it's essentially impossible to keep Microsoft from spamming you with "special offers" that you must know about right away.
You can, however, uninstall it!
Have a look at the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf
Then change the line that reads:
msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7
to
msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,,7
Then go to the Control Panel, choose Add/Remove Programs, then select the "Windows components" tag. You'll note that "Windows Messenger" now appears at the bottom of the list; just remove it, and Windows/MSN Messenger will bother you no more.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. TiVo's model isn't that different from that of Replay. Replay chooses to bundle the service fee with the price of the unit. You can either pay $10/month with TiVo or $250 on a one-time basis. Both Replay and TiVo have actively looked for opportunities for advertising dollars, but neither one is bombarding people with advertisements. In TiVo's case, this takes the form of some sponsored content that you have to go looking for; while they're definitely attempting to make it convenient to find material from their partners, it's NOT pushed on you in an AOL-like manner. I've got a really low tolerance for gratuituous spam, and TiVo doesn't even show up on my radar screen of annoyances. It's a good product (as is Replay) and was clearly designed with the consumer's interests first and foremost.
I'd trade a lot of errors from open source software for a few errors from closed-source any day.
While it might well be true that open source programmers are a bit more sloppy in error checking, I've found it's far more likely that the closed source counterparts will handle errors in an inscrutable way.
Case in point: I installed some antivirus software yesterday. As it turned out, I was missing a subtle but important network mapping. With an open source package, I'd probably have figured the problem out pretty quickly from the error messages. As it was, though, I was faced with the error message: "An installation error occurred. [OK]". That's it; I got no further help at all. While it's not universally true, I suppose, it's very rare to get such useless messages from open source software!
While I agree that the PS2 isn't going to be a general-purpose computing platform in the same sense that your desktop machine is, please keep in mind that consumer electronics/entertainment hardware quite likely represents the next battleground for "mindshare".
Even if the initial implementations are kind of silly, I'm really pleased to see open source software reaching the embedded device market. It becomes a lot harder, for example, to force a completely one-sided "digital rights management" scheme on consumers when there exists more than one viable platform choice for the consumer.
This is all sage advice.
If I had one piece of advice to add, it would be that your ability to forge professional relationships is of the greatest importance. I think a during the early part of their careers, a lot of technical folks think that sheer technical ability matters most. It's necessary, of course, but not sufficient; even the most technical of senior-level jobs depends on the ability to communicate effectively and build consensus.
In short: focus on the people skills and rely on your natural curiosity to keep you sharp from an engineering standpoint.
I don't see a lot of benefit for consumers here. And, much as the music industry in particular would like to ignore this fact, it's consumers that will define the success and failure of a new content packaging such as this one.
Every successful format in recent memory has offered some compelling benefit. CDs were smaller, more durable, and sounded better (to most people) than the LPs and tapes they replaced. DVDs offered compelling benefits over and above those offered by videotapes and laserdiscs.
But a new format that's aimed at providing a vehicle for content owners to increase profits without providing a single tangible benefit for the consumer isn't at all likely to succeed. Digital rights management doesn't provide the consumer any benefit right now.
That's not to say that DRM is fundmentally a bad idea: I suspect that many among us would actually use a system that allows us to unlock specific songs rather than paying for an entire CD, for example. But the music industry has yet to learn that the relationship with the consumer is truly a give-and-take relationship; if we're to accept a new format or some sort of DRM scheme, there has to be a set of benefits that make it worthwhile.
I think the industry is beginning to realize this, actually. The attempt to buy legislation like the SSSCA represents an admission that a free marketplace isn't going to adopt new technologies if the benefits are completely one-sided. So long as these hamhanded attempts at market manipulation fail, there will be little choice but to deliver better value in exchange for the better control that they'd like to have.
While I think this paper is very interesting research, I don't think it necessarily follows that a key generator for WPA is right around the corner. While I don't have any inside knowledge, I'll bet that the "confirmation code" you get back is somehow derived from a digital signature of the activation key; the WPA code would simply verify it against a well-known public key. Coming up with a key generator would seem to require access to the private key (or a very large brute-force attack). This isn't to say that WPA can be bypassed, of course--only that generating the same keys Microsoft does is quite possibly going to be very hard. Of course, if it isn't based on digital signatures, the key generator probably really is just around the corner.
"Hello, Mr. Wherry?"
"Yes?"
"This is Ms. ___ with Bell Atlantic; I'm calling with the results of our engineering study."
"Terrific! What's it going to cost to get DSL?"
"$967,000 - would you like us to go ahead?"
Believe it or not, she asked the question as if there was a chance I might say, "sure, just put it on my bill." Since they didn't seem to have the option to pay in four easy installments of $250,000 each, I declined.
In retrospect, I should have realized that any answer that required an engineering study was probably an answer I didn't really want. I wonder, though: would my purchase of just under $1M worth of equipment have meant that all of my neighbors would then be able to get the service for $49.95?
I subsequently ordered high-speed data service from the local cable TV monopoly--and am pretty pleased with the results. They're shockingly incompetent as a cable TV provider, but their cable modem service has worked surprisingly well.
I live in the Washington, DC area, and we have ten-digit dialing for all local calls. While it's always possible to use 11-digit dialing (1+NXX+xxx-xxxx) for all calls, the ability to dial a call without the leading '1' means that that the call is some variety of local call. The conversion to universal 10-digit dialing (and allowing phone number starting with '1') will make it very difficult to determine the class of a particular call without a lookup of some sort.
...that U.S. immigration law contributed, in an ever-so-tiny way, to the rise of spam on the Internet; our illustrious friends Canter and Siegel ("the green card lawyers") sent what is, to my knowledge, the first Usenet spam, in April 1994.
I can't help but wonder: has Digital Convergence stopped to think about the early adopters who really drive the spread of new technology? Since the benefits of their scanner aren't immediately obvious, I think that Digital Convergence, whether they realize it or not, is dependent on these early adopters. And these are the very same people that are (1) going to find out about the license shenanigans and legal blustering and (2) be really irritated by it.
The saying, "don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind. I think Digital Convergence is about to learn what happens when you ignore this sage advice.
Phil