In practice, I suspect that the 'after due process' part includes "Will this piss off millions of our customers?"; but it is my understanding that revocation can be confined to just preventing the driver from being part of any 'trusted' zone in the PMP(which, in the case of the GPU, would pretty much break playback of material that requires the presence of a PMP entirely, since the GPU driver is both highly privileged and responsible for HDCP output handling; but it wouldn't break non-PMP graphics stuff).
A substantial percentage of the world's cheap-ass 'wireless' tat is 2.4GHz, because it is generally usable without a license and the silicon needed to implement it is heavily commodified. I don't know of anything specifically designed for the purpose; but a Goodwill's worth of nasty old cordless phones and ghastly analog video blasters would probably fit the bill...
Part of the appeal of RIM was that you knew governments weren't out there stealing secrets sent across your network. I understand that India has a legitimate security need to be able to wiretap communications and so on. But this isn't going to 'help' RIM. This takes away the only major competitive advantage they had, which was that using RIM meant you knew no one in the indian government was going to steal your work and sell it to someone else (which is a serious concern in india).
If anything, this just levels the playing field. And that's bad for RIM, because they aren't competitive.
I suspect that it will help them more than being kicked out of the country, though it certainly won't improve their product in any absolute sense...
It also seems like some of the problems described are a result of a badly designed support-chat system, or a properly designed one with bad policies in place, attempting to shoehorn the phone-based workflow into a rather different environment.
Sure, if I call you, you need to confirm some sort of account/service tag/serial number/customer ID/something because I might be calling you from just about any phone number and automated phone mechanisms are a pretty painful way of entering anything nontrivial. But if I'm starting a text chat over the internet, you can just have a form that requests that information before setting up the chat(and hey, why not send me directly to the right subsection of your support apparatus based on the answers I provide, just for fun?) and then not waste everybody's time by having me re-type it unless there is some specific point of confusion/uncertainty/disagreement with the database.
Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.
Obviously, none of this is the poor support guy's fault, it isn't his system; but a chat-support system that is more painful than a phone support system, despite vastly greater ancillary capabilities, is just plain broken.
Given that neither Sony nor Nintendo, for fairly obvious reasons, use DirectX on the console side, (and both, to the best of my understanding, use something that is mostly OpenGL-ish) there is already a pretty substantial base of games that have non-DirectX ports, even before you count the various iDevice and Android applications.
Because it is pretty standard(if somewhat unfortunate for quality) for big name titles to get a console port, or start out as a console game and get an (often shoddy) PC port, a lot of the game engine and middleware guys(Unreal, Gambryo, id Tech, etc, etc.) already support multi-platform porting. This doesn't do much to change games that are now fossilized/abandoned/in IP ownership purgatory; but it does suggest that current and upcoming games, in many cases, could be shoved out to an additional platform if there were a perceived market for it.
It's an "I'm not in this for your revolution, I expect to be well paid." thing. Since multi-console and console/PC releases are extremely common, and even some OSX stuff shows up now and again, the middleware guys haven't had the option to go DirectX only for some time now. On the other hand, since we have the middleware guys, who justify their existence by insulating(at least to the degree possible) the game developers from the underlying platforms, it may actually be less likely that OpenGL games show up on Windows, since the middleware makes it less burdensome to have a DirectX and OpenGL release version...)
Unlikely in their Linux driver and I'm not sure how the 'Protected Media Path' is doing in Win7; but in Vista's PMP implementation a driver bug of this flavor(especially in the GPU, since that needs to enforce OPM restrictions) could theoretically lead to cryptographic revocation of the driver...
"If a trusted component in the PE becomes compromised, after due process it will be revoked. However, Microsoft provides a renewal mechanism to install a newer trusted version of the component when one becomes available."
In Linux, I don't think that this bug gives you an greater control than root would ordinarily have through/dev/mem, it's just a major issue because only root is supposed to have that, and even they are generally advised not to mess with it.
an OS that won't run on any hardware it was developed for! The programmatic equivalent of locking your keys in your car.
Not that I'm exactly sanguine about WebOS's chances; but 'the hardware it was developed for' is sufficiently banal that(crypto lockdowns excepted) finding other targets shouldn't be that difficult. The OS doesn't require any particularly notable button layout(the phones did have hard keys, to make typing more pleasant; but a servicable soft keyboard was added for the tablet, and the only other requirement is a single 'back-to-home-screen' button).
It does kind of suck for owners of the current hardware(me included); but there isn't anything that would make WebOS look/feel problematic on most devices that presently ship with Android, assuming the right SoC.
There is arguably a difference between 'doesn't make sense' and 'will be relatively easy to evade'.
Most worker protection legislation suffers from the basic problem that there are just so many innocent-sounding reasons to get rid of someone for reasons wholly unrelated to any legally protected trait.
Whistleblowers, assorted wage/salary/time-worked accounting shenanigans, occupational hazards, harassment, and virtually anything else all fall into that category.
Trouble is, unless you've got a bold plan to achieve an enormous restructuring of the economy (at least to the point where the labor market is a seller's market, perhaps even to the point where most people aren't 'employees'(and no, the 'oh, he's an "independent contractor" because those are cheaper than employees, he just resembles an employee in all other ways'/permatemp doesn't count)), the condition of employees in your economy will be one of the greatest determinants of the welfare(and even the day-to-day freedom) of most of the population.
That makes ignoring the problem a bit... unpalatable.
I would argue that their right to personal privacy is given up when they decide to broadcast information on a public international communications network. Social networks is the worlds largest experiment in removing the safety labels on devices.
my 2c.
If the information were publicly broadcast, I wouldn't need to ask you for your credentials in order to access it, would I? Unless I'm much mistaken, the bill doesn't protect you from being axed for those public pictures of you sucking a skull bong(which can be accessed without login, or with an arbitrary set of credentials), it just prevents me from demanding your access credentials.
The trouble with shorting is that you have to be confident about both the equilibrium state and the trajectory...
Predicting that Facebook is presently hilariously over-valued is easy(and likely correct); but predicting how fast shareholders will give up holding on to hope and/or hype is a great deal trickier.
Probably that, when dealing with GPU-limited things like framerates in a moderately intensive OpenGL application, a substantial portion of your performance is going to come down to the togetherness between your application and the GPU vendor's drivers, so working with said vendors might help...
Does it make a difference if the device is wide open because nobody closed all the doors (east) or because someone opened a backdoor (west)?
In practice, it almost certainly does: Vulnerabilities are exploitable by anybody who knows about them and cares to do so. That is a fairly long list of the world's spook shops, spammers, questionably socialized teenagers, and so forth. Law enforcement backdoors(unless they are also badly implemented and vulnerable) are exploitable by the law enforcement of your given jurisdiction. Not wildly comforting; but it is a shorter list...
You would hardly call me a friend of CALEA and its analogs; but surveillance-under-color-of-law does have the advantage, from a security perspective, of essentially making the local feds users, rather than attackers, of the system. If they already get what they want, they have no incentive to weaken the security mechanisms in order to get what they want(and, indeed, if they want exclusivity, they have an interest in keeping their competitors out). It doesn't help the little people on the end of the wire all that much, of course.
True enough. On the plus side, I've found that my tolerance for niggling unrealism goes way up when my character is suitably ridiculous. And the 'iron chef' build with all iron armor(except for chef's hat) and dual combat spoons arguably qualifies(if it doesn't, try using fire breath and 'if you can't stand the heat...' based cliches more, or playing while intoxicated). The 'peasants are revolting' build (nothing but the starting rags and a 2-handed agricultural implement) is more challenging; but similarly unconstrained by petty realism...
True. Unfortunately, 'looks right' lands you straight on the tender mercy of the whiny bastards who play your games...
As one such, something I've found myself running into is that sometimes more detail makes me more aware of the remaining missing details.
I've been bitten hard a couple of times by this while playing Skyrim lately. A couple of examples: Unlike Oblivion and earlier where all water was still, water now has a 'current' associated with it, so you behave more realistically if you try to cross a swift-flowing river or the like, or drop an object into one. Unfortunately, the 'current' value assignment isn't very granular, so you are constantly running into situations where your intuition expects the flow to change in response to an obstacle or bit of terrain and it just... doesn't. Having no current at all was even less realistic; but you got over it quickly. Now that you have current, every deviation from your intuitions about fluid dynamics just smacks you in the face.
The improved weapon animation detail seems to have suffered a similar fate. They are much more visceral and kinetic this time around; but that makes the fact that the animations for a given weapon type(eg. all one-handed swords, all warhammers, etc.) are the same, despite the in-game weights of items within a given type varying 50-300%. They are markedly less stiff and anemic than prior animations; but that just makes watching a character handle a weight '9' sword and a weight '16' sword exactly identically weirder(and let's not even start on how different sorts of targets should probably result in more and less elastic collisions...)
What I find disconcerting is not so much that peoples' systems break from time to time, that's to be expected; but that a single party's breakage can occasionally trigger such notable oscillations. That suggests that either the market is loaded with actors programmatically chasing one another off cliffs like lemmings on amphetamines(which actually don't do that; but they've somehow become symbolic of it), or that there is sufficiently substantial consolidation, relative to trading volume, that there are actors involved with enough money to single-handedly perturb substantial chunks of market by mistake...
In a situation without hair-trigger herd behavior, and with a large number of (comparatively) small actors, individual system errors simply wouldn't have the magnitude needed to cause more than a ripple(and possibly bankruptcy for whoever made them; but so it goes).
So you're saying if you pushed the elevator button and got no response (no light, nothing) you wouldn't push it again? You would just stand there with your dick in your hand hoping that the press registered?
If I ran the risk of possibly buying a thousand shares of facebook stock every time I pressed the button, I'd start to give the 'dick in hand' strategy some serious consideration...
If it can't be done with today's supply of commodified physically-small-but-high-resolution displays and cheap accelerometers, we might as well just give up and wait for Snow Crash's computers that paint directly on our retinas with lasers...
Please, please... We prefer to refer to them as 'low information voters' and treat them as our most valued customers, second only to the assorted interests who provide us with the money needed to buy their votes. No need to be rude.
I've heard of Todd Braver before. He has done some interesting work on how digital devices are "rotting" our brains.
Not sure I agree with this detour into creepy eugenics territory though.
Anybody who isn't actively pretending that everything we've observed in several thousand years of animal selective breeding(along with more recent statistical and genetic work on heritability of various things) somehow magically doesn't have implications is arguably already there...
It only really gets 'creepy' when you start planning 'eugenic unions of superior types' or fire up the ovens.
Somebody should probably tell Nvidia that a driver that enables arbitrary memory read/write could probably be used as a DRM circumvention mechanism if targeted at a 'protected' program rather than the kernel. That might actually get them to fix it...
Slashdot Mirror
No way could they get agreement on blackjack and hookers from the general assembly...
In practice, I suspect that the 'after due process' part includes "Will this piss off millions of our customers?"; but it is my understanding that revocation can be confined to just preventing the driver from being part of any 'trusted' zone in the PMP(which, in the case of the GPU, would pretty much break playback of material that requires the presence of a PMP entirely, since the GPU driver is both highly privileged and responsible for HDCP output handling; but it wouldn't break non-PMP graphics stuff).
A substantial percentage of the world's cheap-ass 'wireless' tat is 2.4GHz, because it is generally usable without a license and the silicon needed to implement it is heavily commodified. I don't know of anything specifically designed for the purpose; but a Goodwill's worth of nasty old cordless phones and ghastly analog video blasters would probably fit the bill...
Part of the appeal of RIM was that you knew governments weren't out there stealing secrets sent across your network. I understand that India has a legitimate security need to be able to wiretap communications and so on. But this isn't going to 'help' RIM. This takes away the only major competitive advantage they had, which was that using RIM meant you knew no one in the indian government was going to steal your work and sell it to someone else (which is a serious concern in india).
If anything, this just levels the playing field. And that's bad for RIM, because they aren't competitive.
I suspect that it will help them more than being kicked out of the country, though it certainly won't improve their product in any absolute sense...
It also seems like some of the problems described are a result of a badly designed support-chat system, or a properly designed one with bad policies in place, attempting to shoehorn the phone-based workflow into a rather different environment.
Sure, if I call you, you need to confirm some sort of account/service tag/serial number/customer ID/something because I might be calling you from just about any phone number and automated phone mechanisms are a pretty painful way of entering anything nontrivial. But if I'm starting a text chat over the internet, you can just have a form that requests that information before setting up the chat(and hey, why not send me directly to the right subsection of your support apparatus based on the answers I provide, just for fun?) and then not waste everybody's time by having me re-type it unless there is some specific point of confusion/uncertainty/disagreement with the database.
Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.
Obviously, none of this is the poor support guy's fault, it isn't his system; but a chat-support system that is more painful than a phone support system, despite vastly greater ancillary capabilities, is just plain broken.
Given that neither Sony nor Nintendo, for fairly obvious reasons, use DirectX on the console side, (and both, to the best of my understanding, use something that is mostly OpenGL-ish) there is already a pretty substantial base of games that have non-DirectX ports, even before you count the various iDevice and Android applications.
Because it is pretty standard(if somewhat unfortunate for quality) for big name titles to get a console port, or start out as a console game and get an (often shoddy) PC port, a lot of the game engine and middleware guys(Unreal, Gambryo, id Tech, etc, etc.) already support multi-platform porting. This doesn't do much to change games that are now fossilized/abandoned/in IP ownership purgatory; but it does suggest that current and upcoming games, in many cases, could be shoved out to an additional platform if there were a perceived market for it.
It's an "I'm not in this for your revolution, I expect to be well paid." thing. Since multi-console and console/PC releases are extremely common, and even some OSX stuff shows up now and again, the middleware guys haven't had the option to go DirectX only for some time now. On the other hand, since we have the middleware guys, who justify their existence by insulating(at least to the degree possible) the game developers from the underlying platforms, it may actually be less likely that OpenGL games show up on Windows, since the middleware makes it less burdensome to have a DirectX and OpenGL release version...)
Unlikely in their Linux driver and I'm not sure how the 'Protected Media Path' is doing in Win7; but in Vista's PMP implementation a driver bug of this flavor(especially in the GPU, since that needs to enforce OPM restrictions) could theoretically lead to cryptographic revocation of the driver...
"If a trusted component in the PE becomes compromised, after due process it will be revoked. However, Microsoft provides a renewal mechanism to install a newer trusted version of the component when one becomes available."
In Linux, I don't think that this bug gives you an greater control than root would ordinarily have through /dev/mem, it's just a major issue because only root is supposed to have that, and even they are generally advised not to mess with it.
an OS that won't run on any hardware it was developed for! The programmatic equivalent of locking your keys in your car.
Not that I'm exactly sanguine about WebOS's chances; but 'the hardware it was developed for' is sufficiently banal that(crypto lockdowns excepted) finding other targets shouldn't be that difficult. The OS doesn't require any particularly notable button layout(the phones did have hard keys, to make typing more pleasant; but a servicable soft keyboard was added for the tablet, and the only other requirement is a single 'back-to-home-screen' button).
It does kind of suck for owners of the current hardware(me included); but there isn't anything that would make WebOS look/feel problematic on most devices that presently ship with Android, assuming the right SoC.
This feature is by design.
There is arguably a difference between 'doesn't make sense' and 'will be relatively easy to evade'.
Most worker protection legislation suffers from the basic problem that there are just so many innocent-sounding reasons to get rid of someone for reasons wholly unrelated to any legally protected trait.
Whistleblowers, assorted wage/salary/time-worked accounting shenanigans, occupational hazards, harassment, and virtually anything else all fall into that category.
Trouble is, unless you've got a bold plan to achieve an enormous restructuring of the economy (at least to the point where the labor market is a seller's market, perhaps even to the point where most people aren't 'employees'(and no, the 'oh, he's an "independent contractor" because those are cheaper than employees, he just resembles an employee in all other ways'/permatemp doesn't count)), the condition of employees in your economy will be one of the greatest determinants of the welfare(and even the day-to-day freedom) of most of the population.
That makes ignoring the problem a bit... unpalatable.
I would argue that their right to personal privacy is given up when they decide to broadcast information on a public international communications network.
Social networks is the worlds largest experiment in removing the safety labels on devices.
my 2c.
If the information were publicly broadcast, I wouldn't need to ask you for your credentials in order to access it, would I? Unless I'm much mistaken, the bill doesn't protect you from being axed for those public pictures of you sucking a skull bong(which can be accessed without login, or with an arbitrary set of credentials), it just prevents me from demanding your access credentials.
The trouble with shorting is that you have to be confident about both the equilibrium state and the trajectory...
Predicting that Facebook is presently hilariously over-valued is easy(and likely correct); but predicting how fast shareholders will give up holding on to hope and/or hype is a great deal trickier.
Probably that, when dealing with GPU-limited things like framerates in a moderately intensive OpenGL application, a substantial portion of your performance is going to come down to the togetherness between your application and the GPU vendor's drivers, so working with said vendors might help...
Does it make a difference if the device is wide open because nobody closed all the doors (east) or because someone opened a backdoor (west)?
In practice, it almost certainly does: Vulnerabilities are exploitable by anybody who knows about them and cares to do so. That is a fairly long list of the world's spook shops, spammers, questionably socialized teenagers, and so forth. Law enforcement backdoors(unless they are also badly implemented and vulnerable) are exploitable by the law enforcement of your given jurisdiction. Not wildly comforting; but it is a shorter list...
You would hardly call me a friend of CALEA and its analogs; but surveillance-under-color-of-law does have the advantage, from a security perspective, of essentially making the local feds users, rather than attackers, of the system. If they already get what they want, they have no incentive to weaken the security mechanisms in order to get what they want(and, indeed, if they want exclusivity, they have an interest in keeping their competitors out). It doesn't help the little people on the end of the wire all that much, of course.
True enough. On the plus side, I've found that my tolerance for niggling unrealism goes way up when my character is suitably ridiculous. And the 'iron chef' build with all iron armor(except for chef's hat) and dual combat spoons arguably qualifies(if it doesn't, try using fire breath and 'if you can't stand the heat...' based cliches more, or playing while intoxicated). The 'peasants are revolting' build (nothing but the starting rags and a 2-handed agricultural implement) is more challenging; but similarly unconstrained by petty realism...
True. Unfortunately, 'looks right' lands you straight on the tender mercy of the whiny bastards who play your games...
As one such, something I've found myself running into is that sometimes more detail makes me more aware of the remaining missing details.
I've been bitten hard a couple of times by this while playing Skyrim lately. A couple of examples: Unlike Oblivion and earlier where all water was still, water now has a 'current' associated with it, so you behave more realistically if you try to cross a swift-flowing river or the like, or drop an object into one. Unfortunately, the 'current' value assignment isn't very granular, so you are constantly running into situations where your intuition expects the flow to change in response to an obstacle or bit of terrain and it just... doesn't. Having no current at all was even less realistic; but you got over it quickly. Now that you have current, every deviation from your intuitions about fluid dynamics just smacks you in the face.
The improved weapon animation detail seems to have suffered a similar fate. They are much more visceral and kinetic this time around; but that makes the fact that the animations for a given weapon type(eg. all one-handed swords, all warhammers, etc.) are the same, despite the in-game weights of items within a given type varying 50-300%. They are markedly less stiff and anemic than prior animations; but that just makes watching a character handle a weight '9' sword and a weight '16' sword exactly identically weirder(and let's not even start on how different sorts of targets should probably result in more and less elastic collisions...)
What I find disconcerting is not so much that peoples' systems break from time to time, that's to be expected; but that a single party's breakage can occasionally trigger such notable oscillations. That suggests that either the market is loaded with actors programmatically chasing one another off cliffs like lemmings on amphetamines(which actually don't do that; but they've somehow become symbolic of it), or that there is sufficiently substantial consolidation, relative to trading volume, that there are actors involved with enough money to single-handedly perturb substantial chunks of market by mistake...
In a situation without hair-trigger herd behavior, and with a large number of (comparatively) small actors, individual system errors simply wouldn't have the magnitude needed to cause more than a ripple(and possibly bankruptcy for whoever made them; but so it goes).
So you're saying if you pushed the elevator button and got no response (no light, nothing) you wouldn't push it again? You would just stand there with your dick in your hand hoping that the press registered?
If I ran the risk of possibly buying a thousand shares of facebook stock every time I pressed the button, I'd start to give the 'dick in hand' strategy some serious consideration...
Who else isn't surprised that demand for a more effective reality-attenuator remains robust?
If it can't be done with today's supply of commodified physically-small-but-high-resolution displays and cheap accelerometers, we might as well just give up and wait for Snow Crash's computers that paint directly on our retinas with lasers...
Please, please... We prefer to refer to them as 'low information voters' and treat them as our most valued customers, second only to the assorted interests who provide us with the money needed to buy their votes. No need to be rude.
I've heard of Todd Braver before. He has done some interesting work on how digital devices are "rotting" our brains.
Not sure I agree with this detour into creepy eugenics territory though.
Anybody who isn't actively pretending that everything we've observed in several thousand years of animal selective breeding(along with more recent statistical and genetic work on heritability of various things) somehow magically doesn't have implications is arguably already there...
It only really gets 'creepy' when you start planning 'eugenic unions of superior types' or fire up the ovens.
It sounds like you are looking for (roughly) what they call 'executive function'. Also frontal cortex, according to the present state of the research.
Somebody should probably tell Nvidia that a driver that enables arbitrary memory read/write could probably be used as a DRM circumvention mechanism if targeted at a 'protected' program rather than the kernel. That might actually get them to fix it...
They've released Windows 8 Service Pack 2 already?