Probably betting that they can score some IE6 marketshare that might otherwise turn into IE9/10 marketshare by telling risk-averse microsoftie corporate admins that, while they aren't Microsoft, they are your best chance if you still want to cling to XP after MS hangs you out to dry.
I'm assuming that the job will not be a plum assignment on the Chrome team; but it isn't necessarily an illogical strategy.
That was the great thing about 20th century Europe: brilliant enough to invent all kinds of neat stuff, theoretical and applied; but dumb enough to fight two nigh-apocalyptic meatgrinder wars of unprecedented brutality for reasons somewhere between 'kind of silly' and 'so baffling that historians have made entire careers out of them', thus driving much of said brilliance to the US!
It'd be pretty sociopathic to suggest as a deliberate talent-recruitment strategy; but as an accidental side effect it served us pretty well.
"But it won't work with my ten-year-old $thing!" is the reason so many new products get bogged down before launch.
It isn't really Sony's problem to chase down every last bug with every last shit headset on the market; but implementing not-totally-fucked support for the USB Audio Device Class is one of those things that an OS not mired in the stone age is sort of expected to be able to handle.
Similarly, implementing support for Bluetooth 1.0/1.1 headset/handsfree profile and newer Bluetooth A2DP headsets is not exactly rocket surgery by the standards of shipping an operating system.
Again, supporting every last device means running up against some seriously fucked up firmware; but not even supporting your own-branded devices? Pure laziness.
I can't say that I'd blame them in this case: At least in US universities, there are major textbook 'peaks' (and, at least for the fall term, they usually occur while the weather is still good enough for people to be outside, other terms possible, depending on climate and seasonal variation). A plan that involves zipping a bunch of well laden quadcopters across the quad during high use periods just seems to be asking for trouble without commensurate advantage.
(Extra credit for having a unit enter that neat failure mode where stability is lost, due to hardware fault or firmware fuckup; but at least some rotors remain powered as it whips off in some poorly chosen direction...)
The headline is somewhat sensational. There is a pretty wide gulf between an abstract and rather arbitrary metric and a practical vulnerability. This is kinda the security equivalent of pixel peeping, a fun mathematical exercise at best and pissing contest at worst, but ultimately not all that important.
I am definitely not a statistician; but there may be applications other than crypto and security-related randomization that break (or, rather worse, provide beautifully plausible wrong results) in the presence of a flawed RNG.
So, if I understand this argument correctly, the only evidence that I would have standing to challenge would be evidence provided directly by me? Isn't virtually all evidence '3rd party' in that it's collected by somebody else, often from something that the suspect doesn't themselves own?
Oh, certainly. As I said, that looked like a very sensible 2003 build (and, aside from now being spoiled by multiple cores and more than 4GB of RAM, probably one that you could use today without active pain). The grandparent post posited a 'high end workstation'.
Newer Broadcom (802.11ac router SoCs, possibly some of their late 802.11n stuff) are going ARM as well. I don't know what the reasons are. For about a zillion routers in the field, though, including the venerable WRT-54G which made 'it runs linux fine' into a particularly useful feature, it's still MIPS at present.
Not only that; but if you try, the bootloader will reward you for your loyalty by spitting "This is a Unix system. I know this" onto the serial debug interface.
And, while it would have been a good price/performance buy, that 2003-era workstation was hardly 'high end'. Dual socket was sufficiently painfully expensive that multicore CPUs were a fine development indeed; but if you wanted 'high end', a couple of Xeons or Athlon MPs could be making a dreadful howling noise under your desk in 2003.
In either case, the main stumbling block to 'openness' (from the perspective of people who don't have the cash to implement a core and get it fabbed, or even buy a run of a pre-cooked design, and don't want to enjoy the pleasures and efficiencies of implementing their CPU in an FPGA) isn't really the CPU ISA; but the fact that the SoCs you can actually buy tend to be coupled with GPUs that make Nvidia look like a model of transparency and AMD a model of driver-writing competence.
If memory serves, the rPi's SoC depends on a fairly massive binary blob driver and a 'VideoCore 4' GPU thing that is right up to Broadcom's usual standards for openness in documentation, which is presumably what the grandparent poster doesn't like.
Most of the punchier ARM options aren't a whole lot better (though some of them are somewhat less weird). Certainly, given that Imagination Technologies is already a supplier of GPU architectures to ARM licencees (and occasionally Intel), I'd assume that any MIPS SoCs you end up being able to buy will be approximately as bad as the ARM scene, maybe a bit worse.
Now, if you do want to bake your own CPU, MIPS64 is probably a better option (though don't they still have a few patented instructions? I vaguely remember some flap concerning the legal status of that Chinese MIPS-and-national-pride CPU a few years back...)
If the cores themselves are merely 'competitive' with A15s, probably not. I'm sure that there is some special application out there that needs minimal CPU power and 64TB of RAM; but if the things do 32 bit address spaces with 40-bit PAE(or whatever the equivalent acronym is for MIPS), that covers your just-under-4-usable-Gigabytes SoC configuration, and would also cover fairly large interconnected systems, for applications that have lots of lightweight processes (which would be the only thing you'd use a swarm of these things for, given the limited per-core performance).
Poor people do do a lot of the grunt work of habitat destruction, though, whether it be slash 'n burn agriculture or illegal logging.
It isn't the guy who earns less in a year than a teak shower seat costs (and at Lowes, we aren't talking the luxury stuff here) who is 'responsible' for the illegal timber market in any serious way, he couldn't afford to drive the destruction of much of anything.
However, if he were incrementally less poor and powerless, he'd probably be a much more useful ally for protection, or at least exploitation with an eye to long-term value maximization, rather than a convenient pawn for smash and grab extraction.
Is that the border between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, by any chance? I read about that in one of Jared Diamond's books.
The policy of having a brutal dictator who considers the country his fiefdom and applies a shoot-to-kill anti-deforestation policy has few virtues; but the contrast along that particular border does illustrate one of them...
Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
That's what confused me about this piece: I don't think that I've ever heard anybody sell one of the various 'new, improved, not-dreadful, biomass heat/power device' ideas as being about CO2 emission. It's (1) generally the case that biomass is treated as 'carbon neutral' for accounting purposes, since its fuels all pulled their carbon out of the air, mostly within a few decades or less (indeed, some first-world burning of sawdust and other low-quality woody stuff in otherwise fairly conventional power plants is treated a 'green') and (2) it's common knowledge that desperately poor people simply don't have the capability to liberate much carbon. Really, with our material culture as it is, 'poverty' and 'can't afford fossil fuels in more than negligible quantities' are practically synonyms.
However, poor people do tend to source the biomass that they can afford from places that really can't take it (whether it be some ecologically fascinating and delicate patch of rainforest, or a fairly banal chunk of woodland that just can't supply charcoal for the two million slum dwellers who live nearby without turning into bare dirt and washing away). and their reliance on low-tech burning technology produces some truly brutal pulmonary and related mortality from particulate matter and incomplete combustion soot, generally in ill-ventilated housing, around which women and children spend too much time, in addition to overall poor efficiency.
You'd have to be really dumb to sell just about any intervention targeted at the bottom billion as a serious measure against atmospheric CO2 levels, they are just too poor to be responsible for much; but there are a lot of issues with their fuel sourcing and use that can plausibly be improved for not much money.
That the consumer is always so proactive with updates that they'll upgrade their router the instant a fix is released.......NOT.
"A quick Google for the “xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide” string turns up only a single Russian forum post from a few years ago, which notes that this is an “interesting line” inside the/bin/webs binary. I’d have to agree."
Even if they do, it sounds like they'll be almost four years late.
There was no anonymity or general audience in the original - and supposedly professional - channel of communication between the scientist and the latter's website representative. Just because something happens over the internet as opposed to IRL doesn't magically make it alright or unimportant.
What I have to wonder is where the Scientific American flack was during the implicit "If your job involves some sort of communication Do Not make your employer look like an idiot on the internet" training that's sort of common knowledge at this point.
Horrible people are a dime a dozen; but the ones that know how to dress themselves sometimes also learn to keep their mouths shut in situations where it would be trivial for what they said to come back and bite them somewhere painful.
Do tell us about the 'damage to this country' that he's caused. Maybe something about how the NSA has preserved safety and freedom, if you have anything.
I've heard it alleged that they stopped OMG like 50! terrorist plots; but that number always seems to disappear into a miasma of nonsense if pushed.
My understanding is that suicides tend to be unhelpful organ sources (sometimes poisoned/overdosed, or killed by asphyxiation, frequently not discovered promptly, etc.) I don't know how homicides stack up: swiftly-discovered headshot victims are probably gold(albeit gold that may not be in the donor registry or with next of kin that are easy to get ahold of for consent if needed), victims of messier trauma, or ones whose bodies are unavailable because of delayed discovery or use as evidence for police purposes are probably useless.
What you really want is young, healthy, adrenaline-crazed, motorcycle riders. Nothing says 'accidental altruist' quite like an otherwise healthy young guy with absurdly fatal cranial trauma, a few peripheral bruises and scrapes, and an otherwise perfect body.
Unlike copyright (which creates an ownership right/control in the given work regardless of how it was obtained), DRM only makes attacking the DRMed system legally problematic. It provides no protection whatsoever if the same data are obtained by other channels, and is legally in the same (uncertain in the US, somewhere between 'leaky' and 'sunk' in the UK) boat as conventional personal data encryption for protecting media seized directly by the feds. In the UK, the RIPA allows them to compel you to disclose the key, in the US there seems to be some indecision as to whether the key is covered by the 5th amendment or not(and, if it is, whether forcing the suspect to unlock the encrypted volume upon request; but allowing them to keep the key secret, suffices to protect the 5th amendment interest in the key).
You don't really need 'default-deny' in the DRM sense to achieve that, just a simple, trademark-law-backed seal of approval (which, indeed, Nintendo had, and slapped on more than few totally shit titles, so long as the vendors thereof were participating in their licensing program... not unlike the notorious dogs for the Atari 2600 that were first-party releases, and thus would have cut like a neutrino through any default-deny policy built into the 2600...)
For any console in the pre-networking period (defined, for these purposes, as the 'pre-networking-being-something-that-was-normal-for-consoles', obviously computer interconnects across sites go back well before consoles existed), it's not like a game was going to jump out and do a drive-by install on you. You needed to hit the shelf and buy the thing for it to be a risk(if anything, the 10NES simply reduced reliability of unlicensed, and occasionally of licensed, games).
It wasn't really until computers with persistent state (which had something of a sneakernet virus problem) and eventually internet connections (which had and continue to have a raging malware problem) were 'default deny' as a technical policy actually provides the user with any gains not trivially provided by trademarks.
Slashdot Mirror
Just let XP finally die...
Probably betting that they can score some IE6 marketshare that might otherwise turn into IE9/10 marketshare by telling risk-averse microsoftie corporate admins that, while they aren't Microsoft, they are your best chance if you still want to cling to XP after MS hangs you out to dry. I'm assuming that the job will not be a plum assignment on the Chrome team; but it isn't necessarily an illogical strategy.
That was the great thing about 20th century Europe: brilliant enough to invent all kinds of neat stuff, theoretical and applied; but dumb enough to fight two nigh-apocalyptic meatgrinder wars of unprecedented brutality for reasons somewhere between 'kind of silly' and 'so baffling that historians have made entire careers out of them', thus driving much of said brilliance to the US! It'd be pretty sociopathic to suggest as a deliberate talent-recruitment strategy; but as an accidental side effect it served us pretty well.
"But it won't work with my ten-year-old $thing!" is the reason so many new products get bogged down before launch.
It isn't really Sony's problem to chase down every last bug with every last shit headset on the market; but implementing not-totally-fucked support for the USB Audio Device Class is one of those things that an OS not mired in the stone age is sort of expected to be able to handle.
Similarly, implementing support for Bluetooth 1.0/1.1 headset/handsfree profile and newer Bluetooth A2DP headsets is not exactly rocket surgery by the standards of shipping an operating system.
Again, supporting every last device means running up against some seriously fucked up firmware; but not even supporting your own-branded devices? Pure laziness.
Oh for the days when our German scientists where better than their German scientists. Truly a golden age for American Innovation.
If you dislike tedious hand-assembly of models, you could always build a scaled-down Mi-26 clone just by starting with an ordinary small helicopter...
I can't say that I'd blame them in this case: At least in US universities, there are major textbook 'peaks' (and, at least for the fall term, they usually occur while the weather is still good enough for people to be outside, other terms possible, depending on climate and seasonal variation). A plan that involves zipping a bunch of well laden quadcopters across the quad during high use periods just seems to be asking for trouble without commensurate advantage.
(Extra credit for having a unit enter that neat failure mode where stability is lost, due to hardware fault or firmware fuckup; but at least some rotors remain powered as it whips off in some poorly chosen direction...)
The headline is somewhat sensational. There is a pretty wide gulf between an abstract and rather arbitrary metric and a practical vulnerability. This is kinda the security equivalent of pixel peeping, a fun mathematical exercise at best and pissing contest at worst, but ultimately not all that important.
I am definitely not a statistician; but there may be applications other than crypto and security-related randomization that break (or, rather worse, provide beautifully plausible wrong results) in the presence of a flawed RNG.
So, if I understand this argument correctly, the only evidence that I would have standing to challenge would be evidence provided directly by me? Isn't virtually all evidence '3rd party' in that it's collected by somebody else, often from something that the suspect doesn't themselves own?
Oh, certainly. As I said, that looked like a very sensible 2003 build (and, aside from now being spoiled by multiple cores and more than 4GB of RAM, probably one that you could use today without active pain). The grandparent post posited a 'high end workstation'.
Newer Broadcom (802.11ac router SoCs, possibly some of their late 802.11n stuff) are going ARM as well. I don't know what the reasons are. For about a zillion routers in the field, though, including the venerable WRT-54G which made 'it runs linux fine' into a particularly useful feature, it's still MIPS at present.
Can it run IRIX?
Not only that; but if you try, the bootloader will reward you for your loyalty by spitting "This is a Unix system. I know this" onto the serial debug interface.
And, while it would have been a good price/performance buy, that 2003-era workstation was hardly 'high end'. Dual socket was sufficiently painfully expensive that multicore CPUs were a fine development indeed; but if you wanted 'high end', a couple of Xeons or Athlon MPs could be making a dreadful howling noise under your desk in 2003.
In either case, the main stumbling block to 'openness' (from the perspective of people who don't have the cash to implement a core and get it fabbed, or even buy a run of a pre-cooked design, and don't want to enjoy the pleasures and efficiencies of implementing their CPU in an FPGA) isn't really the CPU ISA; but the fact that the SoCs you can actually buy tend to be coupled with GPUs that make Nvidia look like a model of transparency and AMD a model of driver-writing competence.
If memory serves, the rPi's SoC depends on a fairly massive binary blob driver and a 'VideoCore 4' GPU thing that is right up to Broadcom's usual standards for openness in documentation, which is presumably what the grandparent poster doesn't like.
Most of the punchier ARM options aren't a whole lot better (though some of them are somewhat less weird). Certainly, given that Imagination Technologies is already a supplier of GPU architectures to ARM licencees (and occasionally Intel), I'd assume that any MIPS SoCs you end up being able to buy will be approximately as bad as the ARM scene, maybe a bit worse.
Now, if you do want to bake your own CPU, MIPS64 is probably a better option (though don't they still have a few patented instructions? I vaguely remember some flap concerning the legal status of that Chinese MIPS-and-national-pride CPU a few years back...)
That's a bit dated, isn't it?
If the cores themselves are merely 'competitive' with A15s, probably not. I'm sure that there is some special application out there that needs minimal CPU power and 64TB of RAM; but if the things do 32 bit address spaces with 40-bit PAE(or whatever the equivalent acronym is for MIPS), that covers your just-under-4-usable-Gigabytes SoC configuration, and would also cover fairly large interconnected systems, for applications that have lots of lightweight processes (which would be the only thing you'd use a swarm of these things for, given the limited per-core performance).
Poor people do do a lot of the grunt work of habitat destruction, though, whether it be slash 'n burn agriculture or illegal logging.
It isn't the guy who earns less in a year than a teak shower seat costs (and at Lowes, we aren't talking the luxury stuff here) who is 'responsible' for the illegal timber market in any serious way, he couldn't afford to drive the destruction of much of anything.
However, if he were incrementally less poor and powerless, he'd probably be a much more useful ally for protection, or at least exploitation with an eye to long-term value maximization, rather than a convenient pawn for smash and grab extraction.
Is that the border between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, by any chance? I read about that in one of Jared Diamond's books.
The policy of having a brutal dictator who considers the country his fiefdom and applies a shoot-to-kill anti-deforestation policy has few virtues; but the contrast along that particular border does illustrate one of them...
Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
That's what confused me about this piece: I don't think that I've ever heard anybody sell one of the various 'new, improved, not-dreadful, biomass heat/power device' ideas as being about CO2 emission. It's (1) generally the case that biomass is treated as 'carbon neutral' for accounting purposes, since its fuels all pulled their carbon out of the air, mostly within a few decades or less (indeed, some first-world burning of sawdust and other low-quality woody stuff in otherwise fairly conventional power plants is treated a 'green') and (2) it's common knowledge that desperately poor people simply don't have the capability to liberate much carbon. Really, with our material culture as it is, 'poverty' and 'can't afford fossil fuels in more than negligible quantities' are practically synonyms.
However, poor people do tend to source the biomass that they can afford from places that really can't take it (whether it be some ecologically fascinating and delicate patch of rainforest, or a fairly banal chunk of woodland that just can't supply charcoal for the two million slum dwellers who live nearby without turning into bare dirt and washing away). and their reliance on low-tech burning technology produces some truly brutal pulmonary and related mortality from particulate matter and incomplete combustion soot, generally in ill-ventilated housing, around which women and children spend too much time, in addition to overall poor efficiency.
You'd have to be really dumb to sell just about any intervention targeted at the bottom billion as a serious measure against atmospheric CO2 levels, they are just too poor to be responsible for much; but there are a lot of issues with their fuel sourcing and use that can plausibly be improved for not much money.
That the consumer is always so proactive with updates that they'll upgrade their router the instant a fix is released.......NOT.
"A quick Google for the “xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide” string turns up only a single Russian forum post from a few years ago, which notes that this is an “interesting line” inside the /bin/webs binary. I’d have to agree."
Even if they do, it sounds like they'll be almost four years late.
There was no anonymity or general audience in the original - and supposedly professional - channel of communication between the scientist and the latter's website representative. Just because something happens over the internet as opposed to IRL doesn't magically make it alright or unimportant.
What I have to wonder is where the Scientific American flack was during the implicit "If your job involves some sort of communication Do Not make your employer look like an idiot on the internet" training that's sort of common knowledge at this point.
Horrible people are a dime a dozen; but the ones that know how to dress themselves sometimes also learn to keep their mouths shut in situations where it would be trivial for what they said to come back and bite them somewhere painful.
Do tell us about the 'damage to this country' that he's caused. Maybe something about how the NSA has preserved safety and freedom, if you have anything.
I've heard it alleged that they stopped OMG like 50! terrorist plots; but that number always seems to disappear into a miasma of nonsense if pushed.
You got anything good?
I bet it it helps keep HDD manufacturers in the black...
Clearly, we need to keep patriots away from the CIA, they might get the wrong idea about the sorts of good work that we do in the world...
My understanding is that suicides tend to be unhelpful organ sources (sometimes poisoned/overdosed, or killed by asphyxiation, frequently not discovered promptly, etc.) I don't know how homicides stack up: swiftly-discovered headshot victims are probably gold(albeit gold that may not be in the donor registry or with next of kin that are easy to get ahold of for consent if needed), victims of messier trauma, or ones whose bodies are unavailable because of delayed discovery or use as evidence for police purposes are probably useless.
What you really want is young, healthy, adrenaline-crazed, motorcycle riders. Nothing says 'accidental altruist' quite like an otherwise healthy young guy with absurdly fatal cranial trauma, a few peripheral bruises and scrapes, and an otherwise perfect body.
Unlike copyright (which creates an ownership right/control in the given work regardless of how it was obtained), DRM only makes attacking the DRMed system legally problematic. It provides no protection whatsoever if the same data are obtained by other channels, and is legally in the same (uncertain in the US, somewhere between 'leaky' and 'sunk' in the UK) boat as conventional personal data encryption for protecting media seized directly by the feds. In the UK, the RIPA allows them to compel you to disclose the key, in the US there seems to be some indecision as to whether the key is covered by the 5th amendment or not(and, if it is, whether forcing the suspect to unlock the encrypted volume upon request; but allowing them to keep the key secret, suffices to protect the 5th amendment interest in the key).
You don't really need 'default-deny' in the DRM sense to achieve that, just a simple, trademark-law-backed seal of approval (which, indeed, Nintendo had, and slapped on more than few totally shit titles, so long as the vendors thereof were participating in their licensing program... not unlike the notorious dogs for the Atari 2600 that were first-party releases, and thus would have cut like a neutrino through any default-deny policy built into the 2600...)
For any console in the pre-networking period (defined, for these purposes, as the 'pre-networking-being-something-that-was-normal-for-consoles', obviously computer interconnects across sites go back well before consoles existed), it's not like a game was going to jump out and do a drive-by install on you. You needed to hit the shelf and buy the thing for it to be a risk(if anything, the 10NES simply reduced reliability of unlicensed, and occasionally of licensed, games).
It wasn't really until computers with persistent state (which had something of a sneakernet virus problem) and eventually internet connections (which had and continue to have a raging malware problem) were 'default deny' as a technical policy actually provides the user with any gains not trivially provided by trademarks.