Why does connecting the PS3 to the network require the TV to be connected to the network too? Can't the PS3's TV output be connected to the TV's signal input?
"The PS3 media server project" is a UPnP/DLNA media server originally designed to stream media to PS3s (hence the name). In this case, somebody apparently has the TV directly connecting to the media server software running on their computer, skipping the need for some sort of streamer box.
So would it be acceptable if I -- I mean, some anonymous philanthropist -- commissioned brainless test-tube babies?
We usually want to prevent it (or at least detect it in time for a relatively early termination, rather than a "Give birth to ghastly alien baby, watch it die" scenario, which is the alternative); but the fact that anencephaly occurs from time to time in humans suggests that there might actually be a (comparatively) accessible mechanism for inducing it artificially in an early-stage embryo.
I can't imagine anybody, ever, getting a signoff from the IRB do to it with humans; but it'd be interesting to know if doing this with animal fetuses might be more economically viable than doing 'pure' tissue cultures. Animals are, after all, pretty well adapted to growing tissue when provided with food, and anecephalic animals aren't exactly capable of suffering. I wonder how long you can keep one growing on life support...
Sounds like going back to the days of infrared communications on phones. I'm not sure how this is better or worse than QR codes, except perhaps that you can cram more data into the stream.
Worse. From their site:
"ByteLight’s software provides a low-cost way for pushing hyper-targeted digital content to shoppers and associates within a retail store. With sub-meter accuracy and sub-second latency – ByteLight redefines mobile marketing and workflow management. "
Whatever its technical merits or faults, this concept is an abominable spawn of data-mining marketing scum. At least IR was a (painfully limited) data transport layer that was nominally in the user's service.
Ah, but he's a not-fucking-idiot with a brood of hungry shareholders (more than a few still deep in the hole from the IPO) to appease. Many a destructive action has appeared proximately logical under those conditions...
If your protocol can't cope with someone snooping on the traffic without beeing compromised, it should probably not be used...
Is a snoop-proof protocol even possible in theory if you only have a simplex connection to work with? According to their obnoxious and buzzword-heavy site, this communication method of theirs is one-way only. The blinkenlight blinks, the phone camera decodes. That rules out most, possibly all, of the actually-secure mechanisms for providing a safe channel over an insecure link.
"I honestly wonder if these politicians are really ignorant, or if they *get* all the issues and just play politics to try and manage the country."
I'd be inclined to suspect that most of them aren't actually that clueless; but that there isn't exactly a nice prize waiting for anybody dumb enough to be honest.
The "Hey, if you think the job market is fucking you over now, just wait a few years, and you'll see what a real fucking is like!" speech isn't going to go well, at all, on the more populist side of things; while the "Remember when we at least pretended that welfare was a stopgap measure designed to get people back to work, and support the relatively few tragic edge cases who were incapable of working? Well, that was pretty adorable; but the percentage of the population whose earning power is less than their minimal subsistence is just going to keep going up, for unyielding structural reasons that we can't write off as 'dependency culture' or 'laziness' for the forseeable future." chat is going to go over downright badly among the small-government types.
If there were a story that was both happy and plausible, I have no doubt that somebody's handlers would have boiled it down into slogans and painted it on somebody's campaign by now.
The transmit power limits and some of the Part 15 stuff was what I had in mind. You aren't allowed to just out-shout other people, and you have to tolerate the noise that they make. That keeps the playing field reasonably level, while still allowing people to do more or less whatever they want.
Were it not for power limits, the bands would likely be flooded into uselessness; but the restrictions required to keep things in order are really pretty minimal, substantially less, in practice, than the unpleasantness of dealing with stuff on many of the licensed bands.
Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.
I suspect that they didn't exactly make heroic efforts for ATI/AMD customers; but my understanding is that their GPU requirement(Nvidia only, GTX 650 or higher) corresponds to the introduction of "NVENC", an feature that provides on-chip hardware encoding to h.264, with access to the framebuffer. If you want low-latency streaming, you more or less need something similar to that capability (grabbing the finished frame back over PCIe and encoding it on the CPU definitely isn't going to help your latency)...
This is not to say that ATI/AMD doesn't have similar features that could be pulled together to make it work (I haven't checked); but they are taking advantage of a fairly specific feature of some of their chipsets, not just running a generic driver that checks PCI IDs against a whitelist.
Now, what I don't understand is what, exactly, I gain from being able to stream games across my LAN. If I'm that close to my computer, why would I be playing on a 5 inch screen, not a 27 inch one?
The thing about indie bookstores is largely irrelevant. Choosing to give a speech about 'good jobs that pay good wages in durable industries' in a fulfillment sweatshop that will continue to use expendable temps only so long as robots can't economically handle irregularly shaped packages is... perhaps a bad sign...
Even before that effect kicks in, it isn't exactly rocket surgery for "cheap expendable subcontractors" to become "ODMs", then "Competitors", and finally "Eating your lunch".
Especially in markets that are heavily commodified, or heading in that direction (good thing switching and telco doesn't have a fuckton of seats concerned mostly by per-port cost or anything, Alcatel...) if you hire somebody else to have a 'core competence' in manufacturing, you end up having 'core competence' in little more than writing setup guides and inflating prices.
By handling more of the backend work, it presumably increases the risk that some good-at-games, not so good at scaling web backends, indies will crop up, and increases the risk that more 'doesn't even pretend to put Zynga-level work into their 'games', just doubles down on the evil' developers/spammers will take advantage of the increased ease of use to slash-and-burn what remains of user trust and willingness to pay even faster than Zynga was doing so, and with less up front investment and personal risk.
Zynga is a horrible schlock merchant, so having actually good games creep in would do them no favors (especially if those actually good games are directly beholden to Facebook, and so House Zuckerberg makes money if they succeed); but they've also made nontrivial investments in backend expertise to support their ever-shifting lineup of high-peak-traffic games. If cynical crap peddlers can enter the market with near-zero costs upfront, people just as evil, and twice as hungry, as Zynga will probably start gnawing on the bottom edge of the market.
If the firmware had been proprietary and in-house (either their house or the contractor's) they wouldn't have been in violation; but 3rd-party proprietary components would have played out in almost exactly the same way.
This isn't going to make it easier to convince companies to adopt the GPL. It's not necessarily accurate, since Fantec clearly didn't exercise due diligence with their third-party software, but that's what a lot of upper management is going to hear.
I don't doubt the theoretical potential for this to be FUDed; but it isn't as though Fantec would have been any better off if their shoddy firmware contractor had been out of compliance with code under any other licence... Somehow, the fact that you can get your ass handed to you for violating software licenses seems to be Super Scary when it's OSS; but just part of doing business when it's proprietary; but it's the same principle at work either way.
I imagine that the comparatively strict board size limit forces you to use the densest NAND packages to achieve reasonable capacities, and also limits the number of independent NAND chips you can have running in parallel behind your controller chip, so you may have to use faster NAND than some of the physically larger drives.
Aside from that, and maybe a couple of extra PCB layers, I think that it's mostly a question of volume.
I don't think that anybody has defined a special, application-specific, 'flash slot'; but pretty much all the non SATA/SAS drives (that you'd see in a server, things like this eMMC chip not so much) are just PCIe cards, and those are common enough, and often not otherwise occupied.
It is true, though, that servers specifically built around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of PCIe cards in are markedly less common than ones build around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of HDDs in (and I don't think I've ever seen a server system built around the notion of using miniPCIe SSDs; that would be brutally expensive; but those things are only about the size of a DIMM, so even a 1U could accommodate pretty alarming capacity without using a proprietary form factor or socket...)
It's really the 'trivial honesty check' bit that surprises me. I have no reason to expect that they'd care much, at least a few years out, about the details of her alleged PhD process; but I would have expected exploitation of a nearly automatic honesty test. Even if they are otherwise competent (if anything, especially if they are otherwise competent, since they'll probably be better liars), liars are a rather dangerous breed. I would have (naively) assumed that trivial fact checking, even of facts that aren't themselves of much importance, would be nearly ubiquitous as a truth assay.
Just curious, what's your personal/professional background in knowing all this?
Nothing professional, just some hobbyist fiddling with 3d printers, a bunch of background reading spurred by frustration over comparatively lousy results compared to injection molded parts, and a good, wholesome, upstanding, fondness for testing to destruction.
I certainly shouldn't be treated as any sort of real authority; but it's something that interests me, and I've poked at it at the dilettante level.
I agree with your general sentiment, that the marketing puff piece is a marketing puff piece, and larded with nonsense; but it is worth noting that this is an eMMC part, not a chip destined to do the behind-the-scenes work in a SATA or PCIe SSD (though Samsung presumably has a design that exploits the same flash cells with a different interface either available or in the pipeline); which very strongly suggests that it's aimed at mobile devices.
Compared to proper computers, even the latest mobiles tend to be pretty stingy on the RAM (both in terms of how much gets baked onto the board, and in terms of how aggressively mobile OSes take apparently-idle tasks out back and shoot them), so 'multitasking' can, plausibly, mean a workload that involves lots of re-loading applications from nonvolatile storage because the OS killed them.
It doesn't make the PR puff any less puffy; but expected eMMC use cases can't reasonably assume that 16GB of RAM is cheap as dirt and 64 bit addressing is a feature you can't even avoid buying; because neither is remotely true, poor bastards.
You missed the point--he's saying that root access might one day no longer be necessary, not that it'll become impossible to root an Android device.
It sounds like Android is busy reinventing the wheel. "Root", in ye-olde-user-account-whose-powers-are-above-all-others-and-limitless, is something that (at least optionally), UNIXlikes have been picking away at (precisely because it is a big, gaping, unbelievably-non-granular, security problem) for years. You've got your conceptually simple mechanisms like OpenBSD security levels (once you elevate, suitably marked files are immutable, period, until the system is brought down) and your fairly-seriously-hairy; but powerful, mechanisms like SELinux and TrustedBSD.
I certainly wouldn't trust any plan where some other, no doubt benevolent, entity would take up rootly duties so that I needn't worry my little head about them; but the capabilities of a classic Linux root are really a pretty awkward fit with Android's own set of access controls and security concerns.
This is true; but their style seems to be (with the exception of Google TV devices, and anything 'Google+' has touched; because 'Social' is the leprosy of the internet...) the soft-sell. There is, presumably, a good bit of value in the ads displayed in Gmail inboxes; but they still let you use IMAP if you feel like it (they just know that most people won't, since the web interface is more convenient, and the option keeps the whiners happy).
Google obviously has every interest in steering you toward their offerings whenever possible; but it's relatively rare that they do so by technical fiat, rather than by default, with the knowledge that if the default doesn't suck people don't touch it.
The same things are true of the stuff they don't bother to lock down, though. They certainly don't give a damn (outside of informal comments from certain of their developers that can be informative and helpful for not-immediately-obvious things like 'how do I boot a standard Linux distro on the ARM Chromebook?' ); but they seem content to make the 'get yourself in complex trouble' button not visible by default, except on Google TV devices.
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Why does connecting the PS3 to the network require the TV to be connected to the network too? Can't the PS3's TV output be connected to the TV's signal input?
"The PS3 media server project" is a UPnP/DLNA media server originally designed to stream media to PS3s (hence the name). In this case, somebody apparently has the TV directly connecting to the media server software running on their computer, skipping the need for some sort of streamer box.
So would it be acceptable if I -- I mean, some anonymous philanthropist -- commissioned brainless test-tube babies?
We usually want to prevent it (or at least detect it in time for a relatively early termination, rather than a "Give birth to ghastly alien baby, watch it die" scenario, which is the alternative); but the fact that anencephaly occurs from time to time in humans suggests that there might actually be a (comparatively) accessible mechanism for inducing it artificially in an early-stage embryo.
I can't imagine anybody, ever, getting a signoff from the IRB do to it with humans; but it'd be interesting to know if doing this with animal fetuses might be more economically viable than doing 'pure' tissue cultures. Animals are, after all, pretty well adapted to growing tissue when provided with food, and anecephalic animals aren't exactly capable of suffering. I wonder how long you can keep one growing on life support...
Sounds like going back to the days of infrared communications on phones. I'm not sure how this is better or worse than QR codes, except perhaps that you can cram more data into the stream.
Worse. From their site:
"ByteLight’s software provides a low-cost way for pushing hyper-targeted digital content to shoppers and associates within a retail store. With sub-meter accuracy and sub-second latency – ByteLight redefines mobile marketing and workflow management. "
Whatever its technical merits or faults, this concept is an abominable spawn of data-mining marketing scum. At least IR was a (painfully limited) data transport layer that was nominally in the user's service.
Zuckerberg isn't a fucking idiot
Ah, but he's a not-fucking-idiot with a brood of hungry shareholders (more than a few still deep in the hole from the IPO) to appease. Many a destructive action has appeared proximately logical under those conditions...
If your protocol can't cope with someone snooping on the traffic without beeing compromised, it should probably not be used...
Is a snoop-proof protocol even possible in theory if you only have a simplex connection to work with? According to their obnoxious and buzzword-heavy site, this communication method of theirs is one-way only. The blinkenlight blinks, the phone camera decodes. That rules out most, possibly all, of the actually-secure mechanisms for providing a safe channel over an insecure link.
Seriously, other than making personal computing become something from communist russia, what is the benefit of this?
Wait, isn't that considered to be feature enough?
"I honestly wonder if these politicians are really ignorant, or if they *get* all the issues and just play politics to try and manage the country."
I'd be inclined to suspect that most of them aren't actually that clueless; but that there isn't exactly a nice prize waiting for anybody dumb enough to be honest.
The "Hey, if you think the job market is fucking you over now, just wait a few years, and you'll see what a real fucking is like!" speech isn't going to go well, at all, on the more populist side of things; while the "Remember when we at least pretended that welfare was a stopgap measure designed to get people back to work, and support the relatively few tragic edge cases who were incapable of working? Well, that was pretty adorable; but the percentage of the population whose earning power is less than their minimal subsistence is just going to keep going up, for unyielding structural reasons that we can't write off as 'dependency culture' or 'laziness' for the forseeable future." chat is going to go over downright badly among the small-government types.
If there were a story that was both happy and plausible, I have no doubt that somebody's handlers would have boiled it down into slogans and painted it on somebody's campaign by now.
The transmit power limits and some of the Part 15 stuff was what I had in mind. You aren't allowed to just out-shout other people, and you have to tolerate the noise that they make. That keeps the playing field reasonably level, while still allowing people to do more or less whatever they want.
Were it not for power limits, the bands would likely be flooded into uselessness; but the restrictions required to keep things in order are really pretty minimal, substantially less, in practice, than the unpleasantness of dealing with stuff on many of the licensed bands.
last thing we need is a weaponized FCC "enforcing fairness."
You do realize that we already have exactly that for the ISM band, and it's sort of been a gigantic fucking success?
Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.
I suspect that they didn't exactly make heroic efforts for ATI/AMD customers; but my understanding is that their GPU requirement(Nvidia only, GTX 650 or higher) corresponds to the introduction of "NVENC", an feature that provides on-chip hardware encoding to h.264, with access to the framebuffer. If you want low-latency streaming, you more or less need something similar to that capability (grabbing the finished frame back over PCIe and encoding it on the CPU definitely isn't going to help your latency)...
This is not to say that ATI/AMD doesn't have similar features that could be pulled together to make it work (I haven't checked); but they are taking advantage of a fairly specific feature of some of their chipsets, not just running a generic driver that checks PCI IDs against a whitelist.
Now, what I don't understand is what, exactly, I gain from being able to stream games across my LAN. If I'm that close to my computer, why would I be playing on a 5 inch screen, not a 27 inch one?
The thing about indie bookstores is largely irrelevant. Choosing to give a speech about 'good jobs that pay good wages in durable industries' in a fulfillment sweatshop that will continue to use expendable temps only so long as robots can't economically handle irregularly shaped packages is... perhaps a bad sign...
Even before that effect kicks in, it isn't exactly rocket surgery for "cheap expendable subcontractors" to become "ODMs", then "Competitors", and finally "Eating your lunch".
Especially in markets that are heavily commodified, or heading in that direction (good thing switching and telco doesn't have a fuckton of seats concerned mostly by per-port cost or anything, Alcatel...) if you hire somebody else to have a 'core competence' in manufacturing, you end up having 'core competence' in little more than writing setup guides and inflating prices.
I'd assume that it's bad for Zynga in two ways:
By handling more of the backend work, it presumably increases the risk that some good-at-games, not so good at scaling web backends, indies will crop up, and increases the risk that more 'doesn't even pretend to put Zynga-level work into their 'games', just doubles down on the evil' developers/spammers will take advantage of the increased ease of use to slash-and-burn what remains of user trust and willingness to pay even faster than Zynga was doing so, and with less up front investment and personal risk.
Zynga is a horrible schlock merchant, so having actually good games creep in would do them no favors (especially if those actually good games are directly beholden to Facebook, and so House Zuckerberg makes money if they succeed); but they've also made nontrivial investments in backend expertise to support their ever-shifting lineup of high-peak-traffic games. If cynical crap peddlers can enter the market with near-zero costs upfront, people just as evil, and twice as hungry, as Zynga will probably start gnawing on the bottom edge of the market.
If the firmware had been proprietary and in-house (either their house or the contractor's) they wouldn't have been in violation; but 3rd-party proprietary components would have played out in almost exactly the same way.
This isn't going to make it easier to convince companies to adopt the GPL. It's not necessarily accurate, since Fantec clearly didn't exercise due diligence with their third-party software, but that's what a lot of upper management is going to hear.
I don't doubt the theoretical potential for this to be FUDed; but it isn't as though Fantec would have been any better off if their shoddy firmware contractor had been out of compliance with code under any other licence... Somehow, the fact that you can get your ass handed to you for violating software licenses seems to be Super Scary when it's OSS; but just part of doing business when it's proprietary; but it's the same principle at work either way.
Another year another multi-100s GB optical disc announced. So is this one going to actually come to market this time?
Will there be any optical drives left in the wild by the time such a beast makes it out of the lab?
I imagine that the comparatively strict board size limit forces you to use the densest NAND packages to achieve reasonable capacities, and also limits the number of independent NAND chips you can have running in parallel behind your controller chip, so you may have to use faster NAND than some of the physically larger drives.
Aside from that, and maybe a couple of extra PCB layers, I think that it's mostly a question of volume.
I don't think that anybody has defined a special, application-specific, 'flash slot'; but pretty much all the non SATA/SAS drives (that you'd see in a server, things like this eMMC chip not so much) are just PCIe cards, and those are common enough, and often not otherwise occupied.
It is true, though, that servers specifically built around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of PCIe cards in are markedly less common than ones build around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of HDDs in (and I don't think I've ever seen a server system built around the notion of using miniPCIe SSDs; that would be brutally expensive; but those things are only about the size of a DIMM, so even a 1U could accommodate pretty alarming capacity without using a proprietary form factor or socket...)
It's really the 'trivial honesty check' bit that surprises me. I have no reason to expect that they'd care much, at least a few years out, about the details of her alleged PhD process; but I would have expected exploitation of a nearly automatic honesty test. Even if they are otherwise competent (if anything, especially if they are otherwise competent, since they'll probably be better liars), liars are a rather dangerous breed. I would have (naively) assumed that trivial fact checking, even of facts that aren't themselves of much importance, would be nearly ubiquitous as a truth assay.
Just curious, what's your personal/professional background in knowing all this?
Nothing professional, just some hobbyist fiddling with 3d printers, a bunch of background reading spurred by frustration over comparatively lousy results compared to injection molded parts, and a good, wholesome, upstanding, fondness for testing to destruction.
I certainly shouldn't be treated as any sort of real authority; but it's something that interests me, and I've poked at it at the dilettante level.
I agree with your general sentiment, that the marketing puff piece is a marketing puff piece, and larded with nonsense; but it is worth noting that this is an eMMC part, not a chip destined to do the behind-the-scenes work in a SATA or PCIe SSD (though Samsung presumably has a design that exploits the same flash cells with a different interface either available or in the pipeline); which very strongly suggests that it's aimed at mobile devices.
Compared to proper computers, even the latest mobiles tend to be pretty stingy on the RAM (both in terms of how much gets baked onto the board, and in terms of how aggressively mobile OSes take apparently-idle tasks out back and shoot them), so 'multitasking' can, plausibly, mean a workload that involves lots of re-loading applications from nonvolatile storage because the OS killed them.
It doesn't make the PR puff any less puffy; but expected eMMC use cases can't reasonably assume that 16GB of RAM is cheap as dirt and 64 bit addressing is a feature you can't even avoid buying; because neither is remotely true, poor bastards.
At least 1?
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You missed the point--he's saying that root access might one day no longer be necessary, not that it'll become impossible to root an Android device.
It sounds like Android is busy reinventing the wheel. "Root", in ye-olde-user-account-whose-powers-are-above-all-others-and-limitless, is something that (at least optionally), UNIXlikes have been picking away at (precisely because it is a big, gaping, unbelievably-non-granular, security problem) for years. You've got your conceptually simple mechanisms like OpenBSD security levels (once you elevate, suitably marked files are immutable, period, until the system is brought down) and your fairly-seriously-hairy; but powerful, mechanisms like SELinux and TrustedBSD.
I certainly wouldn't trust any plan where some other, no doubt benevolent, entity would take up rootly duties so that I needn't worry my little head about them; but the capabilities of a classic Linux root are really a pretty awkward fit with Android's own set of access controls and security concerns.
This is true; but their style seems to be (with the exception of Google TV devices, and anything 'Google+' has touched; because 'Social' is the leprosy of the internet...) the soft-sell. There is, presumably, a good bit of value in the ads displayed in Gmail inboxes; but they still let you use IMAP if you feel like it (they just know that most people won't, since the web interface is more convenient, and the option keeps the whiners happy).
Google obviously has every interest in steering you toward their offerings whenever possible; but it's relatively rare that they do so by technical fiat, rather than by default, with the knowledge that if the default doesn't suck people don't touch it.
The same things are true of the stuff they don't bother to lock down, though. They certainly don't give a damn (outside of informal comments from certain of their developers that can be informative and helpful for not-immediately-obvious things like 'how do I boot a standard Linux distro on the ARM Chromebook?' ); but they seem content to make the 'get yourself in complex trouble' button not visible by default, except on Google TV devices.