If it can be fixed through manual configuration changes, why can't a patch make those same configuration changes?
The configuration change is enabling server certificate validation. If the network is set up for this, all is well: just like SSL, the server demanding the credentials from the client connecting to the network has a certificate, which the client can verify before attempting to authenticate. Spoofing becomes effectively impossible without access to a suitably signed cert.
However, if the authentication server is not set up to use a certificate, or is set up to use a certificate not signed by one of the CAs in the client's list of trusted authorities, enabling server certificate validation will cause the client to freak out and never attempt to authenticate (since validation will, correctly, fail.)
The navy does have a railgun R&D program, presumably because their support vessels are that big (and, if the power supply demands can be met, magnetic accelerators can do things that chemical propellants can't).
It's just that the smaller you try to make the system, the more likely it is that some asshole is going to point out that you are carrying a 50kg power supply with multiple-seconds-between-pulses charge times to provide the same amount of energy (assuming a 100% efficient coilgun) that is provided by a single 5.56mm cartridge...
From all the money they earned with Henrietta's intellectual property, I mean.
Neither the family nor the researcher who cultured the cell line made any money on it (through 'IP' licensing means, I assume having "I cultured an immortal cell line of extraordinary utility" on your CV doesn't exactly hurt a scientist's career...)
I'm not surprised that Qualcomm are being dicks about driver source(though I would assume that they have some haha-nominally-GPL-compliant shim for interacting with the Linux kernel, like Nvidia does); but the lack of a factory image seems very weird indeed.
Do they somehow think that anybody who wants to steal their precious secrets (and has the resources to actually be a threat), is going to be stopped by the need to buy a $200 consumer electronics widget and crack it open? If the device is shipping, the driver binaries and firmware blobs are shipping with it, in millions of units. They aren't going to stay secret long against anybody who cares.
How? Neither the Hack A Day article nor the design notes mention "3d" or "printing," and the fact that it's a gauss gun implies that metal is pretty central to the design... which can't be 3d printed at this point in time.
It's doubly sensationalist because Gauss guns (and railguns, though this isn't one) are both technologies beset by the 'If I had a source of nearly-unlimited current with a rise time of ~0, and a supply of superconducting magnets (or, for railguns, unobtanium rails with heroic resistance to welding/resistive heating damage), I could totally fuck you up!' problem.
If you handwave the electrical issues, magnetic accelerators are all kinds of scary. If you don't, you'd be lucky to cram the power supply for anything actually dangerous into a single support vehicle...
"Is it dumb to make a 'not very good' 100% Office suite for Android? Yes, very dumb. Will MS feel the pain of this stupidity? Nope, they'll profit even more from it."
I'm not sure I made this aspect of my argument sufficiently clear: "100% Office" is something that even Microsoft only has one of: Office version whatever on Windows. Office for OSX differs in a number of respects, even Office on Windows RT, which is almost entirely a straight port of 'real' Office is missing a few things unless they've finally finished it. They simply don't have an Office-compatible 'Office' for Metro/WinRT, or for OSX, or for Android. Best case, they probably offer the not-office products that are least likely to horribly mutilate documents produced by Office, or to produce documents that are horribly mangled when opened in Office. That's certainly good; but it's a much thinner advantage over the third parties.
That's what seems potentially troubled about MS's crippling game: If they can't sell you on Windows, they don't actually have an 'upsell' for their crippled version. They just have a crippled version, handicapped by strategic considerations, fighting against 3rd party products that are as good as their sellers can make them(or are crippled cheap/demo versions of 'real' versions that are also available for the platform.)
I can understand that Microsoft doesn't want to leave Windows RT even deader in the water than it already is (presumably this is why their Android application point-blank doesn't support tablets, only phones); but it strikes me that they might be overplaying their hand.
The market for office suites that are identical to Office is quite large, quite lucrative; but also has very high barriers to entry. Even Microsoft has shown limited ability (at least within a useful timeframe) to rebuild such a beast (notably, they had to drag all of Windows Desktop mode, and the supporting libraries, into the otherwise all-Metro Windows RT to support Office, even then lacking some features, because they have no 'metro' Office suite.)
Unfortunately for them, while the market for somewhat-compatible-with-Office office suites isn't nearly as lucrative, it's substantially more competitive, with comparatively low barriers to entry and some competent players.
Microsoft seems to be playing with crippling their offerings of a somewhat-compatible-with-Office software package as though they were working from the position of strength provided by selling a 100% Office office suite. Which, outside of Windows proper, they don't do, and may not even be able to do. That seems like it isn't going to work out exactly as planned...
If you don't want any of that fancy "color" nonsense that the kids are talking about these days, you can get transflective displays limited only by the fact that people do want that fancy color nonsense which has largely consigned black and white LCDs to the very low end and TI-83s...
A pity the XO-1's screen tech never saw broader adoption. Serviceable color with the backlight on, beautiful, crisp, B/W with ambient light only(looks almost as 'paper-like' as e-ink; but with TFT refresh rates).
Maybe some webmasters would be interested to hear that Comcast is exploring a plan to produce unauthorized derivative works, based on their pages, to hawk media products (not a few of which are from companies in the same ownership structure)... Isn't that the sort of plan that would be approximately a zillion counts of copyright infringement, trademark violation, and who knows what else if it were proposed by anybody other than a hegemonic corporation?
I can't seem to find any useful population-level surveys of lead exposure in the classical world; but Vitruvius does mention the health effects seen in in lead-workers:
"10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:—if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome.
11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste."
The degree to which the recognized the toxic effects doesn't seem to have stopped them from using lead pipes or lead acetate; but it was apparently recognized as an occupational hazard.
If anything makes a toxic heavy metal better and safer, it's definitely intense combustion that ensures good downrange dispersal of oxide dust and/or aerosols!
If the recent reports that they can search a substantial percentage of the planet's internet activity; but not their own mailserver are accurate, I'd be inclined to go with "Apparently not".
"Hey, you, geek. We've got cash, huge fucking computers, and it's totally legal* to hack whoever you want. You in?"
I'm inclined to guess that, between the people who love toys or have mortgages and the people who think that the NSA is A-OK(tm), they aren't too worried(plus, if your area of expertise or interest is something related to data mining, the NSA might count as honest work compared to, say, Facebook)...
Carriers are sitting ducks without a battle group. I doubt the Chinese are worried over this at all.
Even with a battle group, Japan and China are, what, ~800 kilometers apart (and the islands that Japan and China have special togetherness problems about are roughly equidistant); is anyone feeling lucky against the number of anti-ship missiles that you could launch, from shore or from land-based aircraft?
Yeah, well, treaties enforced by the U.S. don't really allow "offensive capability."
Do you think that the US would have the slightest interest in enforcing them? Anything short of strategic nuclear weapons could be brushed off with a 'my, my, Japan's coast guard is looking so robust lately!' unless the US actually has a continued interest in disarming Japan.
I don't understand why you would even want to replace them. Mechanical switches are the best thing available in terms of providing input with tactile feedback. The only reason to use anything else is cost or space constraints.
Scanning 7pt text at 200dpi with consumer level scanner technology and you're complaining about scan errors. Really?
These 'errors' are substantially worse than ordinary scanner suckitude or lossy-compression legovision: JBIG2's pixel-block matching creates the potential for a block containing one character to be mis-identified and replaced with a block containing a different character.
The replaced character will be exactly as legible as text elsewhere on the page, just entirely incorrect.
If it were just the scan quality being lousy, or somebody turning, say, JPEG compression up to the point of pain, mangled characters would be obviously mangled. Not as good as being legible; but the issue is obvious. In this case, the errors will look as good as the rest of the document.
"On the other hand, Qualcomm is probably saying 8-cores is stupid, because they don't have one on the market. Wait to hear what they say when they come up with one."
I certainly wouldn't rule out an eventual 8-core from Qualcomm, at which point their assertion will silently disappear and nobody will ever admit on the record that it had ever been made; but I'd also be inclined to trust Qualcomm if we include the implicit '8 cores is stupid given current process and power constraints and mobile workloads'.
Qualcomm, with their emphasis on tight radio integration into SoCs, makes ARM chips pretty much exclusively for severely power constrained (and not much less severely thermal constrained) devices, whose OSes tend to be pretty brutal about things like background processes, to save power, and whose most compute-intensive functions (mostly related to slinging video) tend to be fobbed off to dedicated hardware, also to save power. That's not really an environment where you'd expect good scaling as the number of CPUs increases. Nor is it an environment where you'd particularly expect your customers to pay more for extra cores that won't make their products much faster.
For ARM Ltd. themselves, or for companies implementing their designs more or less verbatim, there is a stronger incentive to look into bigger chips: ARM wants some server marketshare (or at least some pressure on Intel's margins), and anybody buying cores that are slower per-thread almost certainly has a compute problem that can be parallelized. In that case, since on-die interconnects are easier and faster than board-level ones, there's a much stronger case to be made for cramming as many CPUs onto a die as your process will allow. Though, even here, ARM has been forced to make concessions(notably releasing the A12, a less-thirsty A15 variant, and offering the big.LITTLE scheme to compensate for the A15's power issues at low load). Plus, with verbatim implementation licenses being (comparatively) cheap, you've got an arms race between companies like Samsung and relative unknowns like Mediatek, who are cheap, cheap, cheap and willing to offer all sorts of (sometimes questionably useful; but marketable) configurations.
Dramatic, action-packed. Bold and original in its presentation of breaking the fourth wall as a political act. 'Audience participation' element perhaps too intense for some.
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If it can be fixed through manual configuration changes, why can't a patch make those same configuration changes?
The configuration change is enabling server certificate validation. If the network is set up for this, all is well: just like SSL, the server demanding the credentials from the client connecting to the network has a certificate, which the client can verify before attempting to authenticate. Spoofing becomes effectively impossible without access to a suitably signed cert.
However, if the authentication server is not set up to use a certificate, or is set up to use a certificate not signed by one of the CAs in the client's list of trusted authorities, enabling server certificate validation will cause the client to freak out and never attempt to authenticate (since validation will, correctly, fail.)
The navy does have a railgun R&D program, presumably because their support vessels are that big (and, if the power supply demands can be met, magnetic accelerators can do things that chemical propellants can't).
It's just that the smaller you try to make the system, the more likely it is that some asshole is going to point out that you are carrying a 50kg power supply with multiple-seconds-between-pulses charge times to provide the same amount of energy (assuming a 100% efficient coilgun) that is provided by a single 5.56mm cartridge...
In which case, it's the tablet to boot right now; because that's currently an unsolved problem...
From all the money they earned with Henrietta's intellectual property, I mean.
Neither the family nor the researcher who cultured the cell line made any money on it (through 'IP' licensing means, I assume having "I cultured an immortal cell line of extraordinary utility" on your CV doesn't exactly hurt a scientist's career...)
I'm not surprised that Qualcomm are being dicks about driver source(though I would assume that they have some haha-nominally-GPL-compliant shim for interacting with the Linux kernel, like Nvidia does); but the lack of a factory image seems very weird indeed.
Do they somehow think that anybody who wants to steal their precious secrets (and has the resources to actually be a threat), is going to be stopped by the need to buy a $200 consumer electronics widget and crack it open? If the device is shipping, the driver binaries and firmware blobs are shipping with it, in millions of units. They aren't going to stay secret long against anybody who cares.
"Adding to the 3-D printed gun/rifle controversy"
How? Neither the Hack A Day article nor the design notes mention "3d" or "printing," and the fact that it's a gauss gun implies that metal is pretty central to the design... which can't be 3d printed at this point in time.
It's doubly sensationalist because Gauss guns (and railguns, though this isn't one) are both technologies beset by the 'If I had a source of nearly-unlimited current with a rise time of ~0, and a supply of superconducting magnets (or, for railguns, unobtanium rails with heroic resistance to welding/resistive heating damage), I could totally fuck you up!' problem.
If you handwave the electrical issues, magnetic accelerators are all kinds of scary. If you don't, you'd be lucky to cram the power supply for anything actually dangerous into a single support vehicle...
Does having an ARP Cache mean that my switch is a highly sophisticated social animal?
You sound like a natural customer for the ingenious nutrient/parasite recycling system they call the Pig Toilet!
"Is it dumb to make a 'not very good' 100% Office suite for Android? Yes, very dumb. Will MS feel the pain of this stupidity? Nope, they'll profit even more from it."
I'm not sure I made this aspect of my argument sufficiently clear: "100% Office" is something that even Microsoft only has one of: Office version whatever on Windows. Office for OSX differs in a number of respects, even Office on Windows RT, which is almost entirely a straight port of 'real' Office is missing a few things unless they've finally finished it. They simply don't have an Office-compatible 'Office' for Metro/WinRT, or for OSX, or for Android. Best case, they probably offer the not-office products that are least likely to horribly mutilate documents produced by Office, or to produce documents that are horribly mangled when opened in Office. That's certainly good; but it's a much thinner advantage over the third parties.
That's what seems potentially troubled about MS's crippling game: If they can't sell you on Windows, they don't actually have an 'upsell' for their crippled version. They just have a crippled version, handicapped by strategic considerations, fighting against 3rd party products that are as good as their sellers can make them(or are crippled cheap/demo versions of 'real' versions that are also available for the platform.)
I can understand that Microsoft doesn't want to leave Windows RT even deader in the water than it already is (presumably this is why their Android application point-blank doesn't support tablets, only phones); but it strikes me that they might be overplaying their hand.
The market for office suites that are identical to Office is quite large, quite lucrative; but also has very high barriers to entry. Even Microsoft has shown limited ability (at least within a useful timeframe) to rebuild such a beast (notably, they had to drag all of Windows Desktop mode, and the supporting libraries, into the otherwise all-Metro Windows RT to support Office, even then lacking some features, because they have no 'metro' Office suite.)
Unfortunately for them, while the market for somewhat-compatible-with-Office office suites isn't nearly as lucrative, it's substantially more competitive, with comparatively low barriers to entry and some competent players.
Microsoft seems to be playing with crippling their offerings of a somewhat-compatible-with-Office software package as though they were working from the position of strength provided by selling a 100% Office office suite. Which, outside of Windows proper, they don't do, and may not even be able to do. That seems like it isn't going to work out exactly as planned...
If you don't want any of that fancy "color" nonsense that the kids are talking about these days, you can get transflective displays limited only by the fact that people do want that fancy color nonsense which has largely consigned black and white LCDs to the very low end and TI-83s...
A pity the XO-1's screen tech never saw broader adoption. Serviceable color with the backlight on, beautiful, crisp, B/W with ambient light only(looks almost as 'paper-like' as e-ink; but with TFT refresh rates).
Maybe some webmasters would be interested to hear that Comcast is exploring a plan to produce unauthorized derivative works, based on their pages, to hawk media products (not a few of which are from companies in the same ownership structure)... Isn't that the sort of plan that would be approximately a zillion counts of copyright infringement, trademark violation, and who knows what else if it were proposed by anybody other than a hegemonic corporation?
I can't seem to find any useful population-level surveys of lead exposure in the classical world; but Vitruvius does mention the health effects seen in in lead-workers:
"10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:—if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome.
11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste."
(Pages 246-47 of the Project Gutenberg edition.)
The degree to which the recognized the toxic effects doesn't seem to have stopped them from using lead pipes or lead acetate; but it was apparently recognized as an occupational hazard.
Plus, it's pyrophoric, unlike boring old lead.
If anything makes a toxic heavy metal better and safer, it's definitely intense combustion that ensures good downrange dispersal of oxide dust and/or aerosols!
Ironically enough, Tom Lehrer was actually an NSA mathematician, in the mid '50s; before doing the work for which he became better known...
The NSA does introspection?
If the recent reports that they can search a substantial percentage of the planet's internet activity; but not their own mailserver are accurate, I'd be inclined to go with "Apparently not".
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun."
"Hey, you, geek. We've got cash, huge fucking computers, and it's totally legal* to hack whoever you want. You in?"
I'm inclined to guess that, between the people who love toys or have mortgages and the people who think that the NSA is A-OK(tm), they aren't too worried(plus, if your area of expertise or interest is something related to data mining, the NSA might count as honest work compared to, say, Facebook)...
"I'd buy that for a doller!"
Step right up!. A time-tested restorer of vitality.
Carriers are sitting ducks without a battle group. I doubt the Chinese are worried over this at all.
Even with a battle group, Japan and China are, what, ~800 kilometers apart (and the islands that Japan and China have special togetherness problems about are roughly equidistant); is anyone feeling lucky against the number of anti-ship missiles that you could launch, from shore or from land-based aircraft?
Yeah, well, treaties enforced by the U.S. don't really allow "offensive capability."
Do you think that the US would have the slightest interest in enforcing them? Anything short of strategic nuclear weapons could be brushed off with a 'my, my, Japan's coast guard is looking so robust lately!' unless the US actually has a continued interest in disarming Japan.
I don't understand why you would even want to replace them. Mechanical switches are the best thing available in terms of providing input with tactile feedback. The only reason to use anything else is cost or space constraints.
Scanning 7pt text at 200dpi with consumer level scanner technology and you're complaining about scan errors. Really?
These 'errors' are substantially worse than ordinary scanner suckitude or lossy-compression legovision: JBIG2's pixel-block matching creates the potential for a block containing one character to be mis-identified and replaced with a block containing a different character.
The replaced character will be exactly as legible as text elsewhere on the page, just entirely incorrect.
If it were just the scan quality being lousy, or somebody turning, say, JPEG compression up to the point of pain, mangled characters would be obviously mangled. Not as good as being legible; but the issue is obvious. In this case, the errors will look as good as the rest of the document.
"On the other hand, Qualcomm is probably saying 8-cores is stupid, because they don't have one on the market. Wait to hear what they say when they come up with one."
I certainly wouldn't rule out an eventual 8-core from Qualcomm, at which point their assertion will silently disappear and nobody will ever admit on the record that it had ever been made; but I'd also be inclined to trust Qualcomm if we include the implicit '8 cores is stupid given current process and power constraints and mobile workloads'.
Qualcomm, with their emphasis on tight radio integration into SoCs, makes ARM chips pretty much exclusively for severely power constrained (and not much less severely thermal constrained) devices, whose OSes tend to be pretty brutal about things like background processes, to save power, and whose most compute-intensive functions (mostly related to slinging video) tend to be fobbed off to dedicated hardware, also to save power. That's not really an environment where you'd expect good scaling as the number of CPUs increases. Nor is it an environment where you'd particularly expect your customers to pay more for extra cores that won't make their products much faster.
For ARM Ltd. themselves, or for companies implementing their designs more or less verbatim, there is a stronger incentive to look into bigger chips: ARM wants some server marketshare (or at least some pressure on Intel's margins), and anybody buying cores that are slower per-thread almost certainly has a compute problem that can be parallelized. In that case, since on-die interconnects are easier and faster than board-level ones, there's a much stronger case to be made for cramming as many CPUs onto a die as your process will allow. Though, even here, ARM has been forced to make concessions(notably releasing the A12, a less-thirsty A15 variant, and offering the big.LITTLE scheme to compensate for the A15's power issues at low load). Plus, with verbatim implementation licenses being (comparatively) cheap, you've got an arms race between companies like Samsung and relative unknowns like Mediatek, who are cheap, cheap, cheap and willing to offer all sorts of (sometimes questionably useful; but marketable) configurations.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Dramatic, action-packed. Bold and original in its presentation of breaking the fourth wall as a political act. 'Audience participation' element perhaps too intense for some.