I'm inclined to wonder if their 'tile-based rendering' scheme for cleverly throwing away work that doesn't actually have to be done is more driver-based than some of the competing GPU vendor's schemes, making them rather touchy about opening that.
It could also just be that they have some sort of inertial paranoia thing going on as a company; but it certainly seems like it might have had to be something good if Intel, Chipzilla himself, couldn't wring decent drivers out of them for their GMA500-based parts.
That isn't exactly a spat on the debian mailing lists over firmware-linux-nonfree, that's a potentially huge design win that ended up sucking fairly hard wherever it showed its miserable face...
As much as saying so makes me suspect that I may have only a shriveled hatred core where my sense of wonder is supposed to be, the Getaway specials program looks like a superb example of why we don't have the space shuttle anymore... An essentially PR-driven program of giving away chunks of wildly expensive orbital lift capacity without any scientific or technological justification because there apparently wasn't anything more sensible to do with it.
I certainly wouldn't bet my life-critical systems, or zillion-dollar defense-contractor-welfare-vehicle, on something banged together from ordinary parts; but it would be wholly unsurprising for it to mostly work, as long as it is watchdogged properly and the soldering isn't so dire that thermal stresses crack it immediately...
There isn't that much radiation in low orbit and microcontrollers don't exactly take very long to reboot.
The FDA has its pros and cons; but the real kicker, to my mind, is the purely rent-seeking customs/trademark enforcement of restrictions on even drugs that are FDA approved in the US, and prescribed by licensed physicians, that are imported from countries where they sell for less.
I'm all for fraud being illegal(either people filling gelcaps with floor sweepings and rat poison and selling it as the real deal, or people selling generics as name brands); but the fact that that our 'free trade for me but not for thee' system means that customs can come down on you like a ton of bricks for importing legally purchased, genuine goods, that are legal in the US, and selling them without misrepresentation because the manufacturer doesn't like that is absolutely insupportable.
There are definitely some seriously skeezy and almost-certainly-fraudulent 'canadian pharmacies' and assorted pill-mills on the internet; but(living in the northern US), there is a fairly visible trend of people simply driving over the border, in person, and walking into the same retail pharmacies that the natives of the savage northlands use, and getting prescriptions filled. If you are on enough expensive drugs, apparently the trip more than pays for itself. I'm doubting that this particular practice is a terrifying cesspool of fraud. More broadly, the fact that even totally legitimate imports are restricted tends to leave the market open for pure fraud, since all the import operations are legally troubled, the 'legitimate' operators that provide the chemical they say they do have a hard time competing with the pure scammers, who are much more dangerous; but also have better margins.
Well, Sandvine is the big name in DPI tech, though there are others. Googling 'Lawful Intercept capability' brings up a fair list of vendors, pretty much everybody who sells networking gear, along with a few specialists.
Empirically speaking, there would appear to be a lot of competent techies who are either actively authoritarian or very good at the yuppie Nuremberg defense; because this stuff doesn't build itself, and it doesn't get built by throwing jackbooted morons at the problem...
Team Intellectual Property has done their level best to lump all classes of 'products that they don't like' into a homogenous category of wickedness.
One would think that a meaningful distinction could be drawn between the following categories:
1. Fakes: Capsules full of god-knows-what fraudulently labelled as being something else and sold as such.
2. Counterfeits: Generic drugs (or non-OEM compatible FRUs, in situations like ink cartridges) fraudulently sold as being the name-brand good.
3. Unauthorized resale: Authentic goods being sold in some manner that makes the manufacturer a sad, sad, panda.
4. Authorized distribution: Authentic goods being sold as the manufacturer wanted.
Unfortunately for everyone, except for the blatantly self-interested parties, there has been a concerted effort to muddle the genuinely pernicious and dangerous class 1, and the possibly safe but definitely fraudulent, as in class 2, with the merely-cuts-into-profits-from-price-discrimination-between-countries of class 3.
Thus, while ICE will attempt to hunt you down if you are shipping in boxes of sugar pills labelled as some drug, or generic printer cartridges stamped "HP", they will also bust you for importing authentic Rolexes, legally purchased outside the US, if the trademark holder doesn't want you selling them in the US, despite them being 100% genuine product, with no theft or fraud in the distribution chain...
Eh, it really isn't that hard: just adjust the prices of doing the things you talk about, and the available income of the person making the choice, and it all falls into place. Secondary cases would include people on long-term maintenance drugs and people who are looking to score some of the more interesting anesthetics. Unless you are reasonably well insured, even some fairly prosaic drugs can be painfully expensive through official channels, and getting a doctor to have a look, have a chat, and write the prescription also quite pricey.(You do, of course, also have the people who are, for whatever reason, hellbent on ignoring medical advice concerning side-effects and contraindications and getting the drug anyway)
As for quality, the major distinction to worry about(and, this one probably isn't always trivial to judge) is 'black market or grey market?' Drug makers have extremely strong price discrimination in place, and the US is pretty much always on the high end. 100%-genuine-chemically-identical-and-blessed-by-Pfizer-but-only-for-snow-mexico can easily be vastly cheaper than otherwise identical product stamped for sale in the US.
Given that Intel's mobile graphics strategy has simply been 'license the same stuff from PowerVR as most of the ARM licencees that don't have an in-house design' there doesn't seem to be anything obviously uncompetitive about it.
They aren't going to pull any design wins on the strength of their GPU; because it's the same damn GPU as a number of others; but they also aren't going to be put out in the cold by it...
The world's supply of truly dreadful webcams also seems to be drying up a bit. USB Video Class came too late, and is still rather 'creatively' interpreted in some quarters; but even cheap crap and laptop-integrated webcams of the past few years commonly purport to hew to standard, and often aren't actually lying...
My suspicion would be that Microsoft doesn't much care about what Slashdoters think about Skype(though they do run an awful lot of banner ads here, so maybe we should feel valued...); but that they(likely correctly) wanted to maintain a marketing separation between 'Skype', which has a very strong brand as a cheap-n-consumery chat setup with some low cost and reasonably functional POTS add-ons and whatever iteration of 'Live Communications Server' or 'Microsoft Voice Foundation for SharePoint Server' or similar product will end up incorporating the core technology in Active Directory-integrated and definitely not cheap-n-consumery form.
The matter isn't quite as urgent(because there isn't an obvious strong contender in danger of eating Skype's lunch); but Microsoft's stance on email has been fairly similar: 'Hotmail' did, eventually become 'Windows Live Mail'(some of the time); but you never, ever see any marketing link between 'Exchange' or 'Outlook' and 'Hotmail' or 'Windows Live Mail'(they even killed 'Outlook Express' as the name for their free-and-lousy consumer mail client).
It remains to be seen how much their competitors will allow them to continue doing this; but it looks to me like Microsoft has a distinct aversion to drawing too-close a tie between 'consumer' and 'enterprise' products.
Since the donor vessel was stripped down to nothing but a protien structure is there any reason a non-human vein couldn't be donated? Cattle are slaughtered in bulk for instance, I don't see why a protien structure from one of those couldn't be used.
There could be slight differences in protein structure that would be immunologically tricky. It could also just be that(while certainly complex) the paperwork for implanting human-derived material on an experimental basis is much better defined and less risky than the paperwork for heading down to the local slaughterhouse and harvesting some donor material.
Certainly, for high-value organs that are presently in very short supply, there would be a strong incentive to develop some sort of non cadaver source(whether it be animals, 3d-printed scaffolds, or whatever); but I imagine that, in the short term, if you want it to Just Work and don't necessarily need it to scale immediately, cadaver tissue is easiest.
However, it is entirely possible that their house counsel takes a slightly different view of their obligations under CALEA than some Swede with an LLC in Luxembourg and a p2p network...
Re:I don't like the sound of this.
on
AMD and ARM Team Up
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· Score: 4, Informative
Modules intended for DRM purposes are commonly limited to those purposes because running extra code, especially code from random untrusted people, makes your DRM more vulnerable. In this case, AMD seems to be incorporating ARM's "Trustzone" stuff. That does support running vendor-customized software within the 'secure' region; but the suggested implementable does not make that user-modifiable. The rest of it is the usual morass of DRM 'goodies': memory locations 'protected' from access by non 'trusted' software, device unique master key, etc, etc.
That's pretty much why you would have a separate DRM module at all, when you already have a perfectly good x86 core to work with...
It is interesting that AMD appears to be throwing their hat in with this ARM stuff, rather than the 'Trusted Computing Group's TPM, available from a number of vendors on x86s already; but the expected use cases are every bit as malignant...
While a wholly proprietary pinout(and a different wholly proprietary pinout than the last model's wholly proprietary pinout) the storage card is at least socketed... Given that there are likely to be a reasonable number of these sold, and to deep pocketed buyers, 3rd-party options will likely exist sooner or later. RAM, though, may leave you with a case of buyer's remorse...
Does Windows 8 run on Medfields? I had the impression that (at least with earlier iterations of Windows and earlier lowest-power Atom SKUs) Intel left certain expected features off(PCI bus, possibly some others) that meant that their ultra-low-power parts were x86; but not sufficiently legacy compatible to boot OSes that are expecting a normal 'Wintel' environment.
While I can understand that MS doesn't want 'Windows RT' associated with the sort of hardware that floats around on the dodgy end of the Android spectrum, it seems like pricing the software license as they have isn't an obviously helpful way to do that.
If the OEM has to make a price point, because their customers or sales network says so, the money spent on software licenses will come out of something else(or, since Windows for x86 is apparently cheaper, simply cut a bloody swath through ARM devices and lead Intel to sell a bunch of Atoms...), which won't help hardware quality much.
Given that they maintained a relatively iron grip over 'approved' specs for Windows Phone licencees(you either built the handset within certain parameters, or you didn't get a license, period.) it seems like that already have a template for a much better way to ensure uniform quality and a consistent experience.
With this pricing strategy(along with the 'Ha Ha, no AD for you, not even with some sort of premium SKU" thing), one just gets the impression that they don't really want to sell this particular product...
I am also not a lawyer; but I had the vague sense that there was a difference between 'knowing' in the sense of 'Yup, www.funnyjunk.com/infringingpicture.jpeg is an infringement' and 'knowing' in the sense of 'We have 100,000 plus images submitted by the bottom-feeding scum of the internet with no possibility of manual screening, the probability that there is some infringement in that collection might as well be 100%...".
The former flavor of knowledge might damage your safe-harbor status; but funnyjunk seemed to be following the (insane) plan of threatening to sue the Oatmeal for lampooning the fact that they unabashedly operated in the latter state of knowledge... The idea that anybody could seriously doubt that a large, user-submitted, collection of stuff is probably partially composed of infringing material is nuts. Scrubbing a few of the explicit examples(which doesn't negate the fact that they were valid when the statement was made, and rather looks like an attempt to conceal that validity), really doesn't change the obviousness of the broader premise. I'm a bit surprised that they managed to find a lawyer...
At least for the purpose of argument, I'm assuming that the statistical epidemiology is accurate; but that leaves me very curious indeed about what the mechanism is.
I wouldn't have expected getting more or less sleep to affect the structural integrity of some unlucky blood vessel in your brain. Are there any clues about why such a dramatic effect might occur?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm inclined to wonder if their 'tile-based rendering' scheme for cleverly throwing away work that doesn't actually have to be done is more driver-based than some of the competing GPU vendor's schemes, making them rather touchy about opening that.
It could also just be that they have some sort of inertial paranoia thing going on as a company; but it certainly seems like it might have had to be something good if Intel, Chipzilla himself, couldn't wring decent drivers out of them for their GMA500-based parts.
That isn't exactly a spat on the debian mailing lists over firmware-linux-nonfree, that's a potentially huge design win that ended up sucking fairly hard wherever it showed its miserable face...
Has Sony ever been anything but miserable at software?
As much as saying so makes me suspect that I may have only a shriveled hatred core where my sense of wonder is supposed to be, the Getaway specials program looks like a superb example of why we don't have the space shuttle anymore... An essentially PR-driven program of giving away chunks of wildly expensive orbital lift capacity without any scientific or technological justification because there apparently wasn't anything more sensible to do with it.
I certainly wouldn't bet my life-critical systems, or zillion-dollar defense-contractor-welfare-vehicle, on something banged together from ordinary parts; but it would be wholly unsurprising for it to mostly work, as long as it is watchdogged properly and the soldering isn't so dire that thermal stresses crack it immediately...
There isn't that much radiation in low orbit and microcontrollers don't exactly take very long to reboot.
The FDA has its pros and cons; but the real kicker, to my mind, is the purely rent-seeking customs/trademark enforcement of restrictions on even drugs that are FDA approved in the US, and prescribed by licensed physicians, that are imported from countries where they sell for less.
I'm all for fraud being illegal(either people filling gelcaps with floor sweepings and rat poison and selling it as the real deal, or people selling generics as name brands); but the fact that that our 'free trade for me but not for thee' system means that customs can come down on you like a ton of bricks for importing legally purchased, genuine goods, that are legal in the US, and selling them without misrepresentation because the manufacturer doesn't like that is absolutely insupportable.
There are definitely some seriously skeezy and almost-certainly-fraudulent 'canadian pharmacies' and assorted pill-mills on the internet; but(living in the northern US), there is a fairly visible trend of people simply driving over the border, in person, and walking into the same retail pharmacies that the natives of the savage northlands use, and getting prescriptions filled. If you are on enough expensive drugs, apparently the trip more than pays for itself. I'm doubting that this particular practice is a terrifying cesspool of fraud. More broadly, the fact that even totally legitimate imports are restricted tends to leave the market open for pure fraud, since all the import operations are legally troubled, the 'legitimate' operators that provide the chemical they say they do have a hard time competing with the pure scammers, who are much more dangerous; but also have better margins.
As long as it doesn't pertain to any matter regarding the possibility of tax liability, of course.
There are just some sacrifices that are too great to bear...
Well, Sandvine is the big name in DPI tech, though there are others. Googling 'Lawful Intercept capability' brings up a fair list of vendors, pretty much everybody who sells networking gear, along with a few specialists.
Empirically speaking, there would appear to be a lot of competent techies who are either actively authoritarian or very good at the yuppie Nuremberg defense; because this stuff doesn't build itself, and it doesn't get built by throwing jackbooted morons at the problem...
Team Intellectual Property has done their level best to lump all classes of 'products that they don't like' into a homogenous category of wickedness.
One would think that a meaningful distinction could be drawn between the following categories:
1. Fakes: Capsules full of god-knows-what fraudulently labelled as being something else and sold as such.
2. Counterfeits: Generic drugs (or non-OEM compatible FRUs, in situations like ink cartridges) fraudulently sold as being the name-brand good.
3. Unauthorized resale: Authentic goods being sold in some manner that makes the manufacturer a sad, sad, panda.
4. Authorized distribution: Authentic goods being sold as the manufacturer wanted.
Unfortunately for everyone, except for the blatantly self-interested parties, there has been a concerted effort to muddle the genuinely pernicious and dangerous class 1, and the possibly safe but definitely fraudulent, as in class 2, with the merely-cuts-into-profits-from-price-discrimination-between-countries of class 3.
Thus, while ICE will attempt to hunt you down if you are shipping in boxes of sugar pills labelled as some drug, or generic printer cartridges stamped "HP", they will also bust you for importing authentic Rolexes, legally purchased outside the US, if the trademark holder doesn't want you selling them in the US, despite them being 100% genuine product, with no theft or fraud in the distribution chain...
Eh, it really isn't that hard: just adjust the prices of doing the things you talk about, and the available income of the person making the choice, and it all falls into place. Secondary cases would include people on long-term maintenance drugs and people who are looking to score some of the more interesting anesthetics. Unless you are reasonably well insured, even some fairly prosaic drugs can be painfully expensive through official channels, and getting a doctor to have a look, have a chat, and write the prescription also quite pricey.(You do, of course, also have the people who are, for whatever reason, hellbent on ignoring medical advice concerning side-effects and contraindications and getting the drug anyway)
As for quality, the major distinction to worry about(and, this one probably isn't always trivial to judge) is 'black market or grey market?' Drug makers have extremely strong price discrimination in place, and the US is pretty much always on the high end. 100%-genuine-chemically-identical-and-blessed-by-Pfizer-but-only-for-snow-mexico can easily be vastly cheaper than otherwise identical product stamped for sale in the US.
I thought that the UK had banned all metallic objects longer than they are wide by now, to tackle the knife-crime menace...
Just heard an interview with the council on BBC Radio 4, and it sounds like they've reversed the decision.
Probably best not to give them any credit for a reversal made under pressure.
People show their true colors when they are in control of the situation, not so much when they are being watched...
Given that Intel's mobile graphics strategy has simply been 'license the same stuff from PowerVR as most of the ARM licencees that don't have an in-house design' there doesn't seem to be anything obviously uncompetitive about it.
They aren't going to pull any design wins on the strength of their GPU; because it's the same damn GPU as a number of others; but they also aren't going to be put out in the cold by it...
The world's supply of truly dreadful webcams also seems to be drying up a bit. USB Video Class came too late, and is still rather 'creatively' interpreted in some quarters; but even cheap crap and laptop-integrated webcams of the past few years commonly purport to hew to standard, and often aren't actually lying...
My suspicion would be that Microsoft doesn't much care about what Slashdoters think about Skype(though they do run an awful lot of banner ads here, so maybe we should feel valued...); but that they(likely correctly) wanted to maintain a marketing separation between 'Skype', which has a very strong brand as a cheap-n-consumery chat setup with some low cost and reasonably functional POTS add-ons and whatever iteration of 'Live Communications Server' or 'Microsoft Voice Foundation for SharePoint Server' or similar product will end up incorporating the core technology in Active Directory-integrated and definitely not cheap-n-consumery form.
The matter isn't quite as urgent(because there isn't an obvious strong contender in danger of eating Skype's lunch); but Microsoft's stance on email has been fairly similar: 'Hotmail' did, eventually become 'Windows Live Mail'(some of the time); but you never, ever see any marketing link between 'Exchange' or 'Outlook' and 'Hotmail' or 'Windows Live Mail'(they even killed 'Outlook Express' as the name for their free-and-lousy consumer mail client).
It remains to be seen how much their competitors will allow them to continue doing this; but it looks to me like Microsoft has a distinct aversion to drawing too-close a tie between 'consumer' and 'enterprise' products.
Since the donor vessel was stripped down to nothing but a protien structure is there any reason a non-human vein couldn't be donated? Cattle are slaughtered in bulk for instance, I don't see why a protien structure from one of those couldn't be used.
There could be slight differences in protein structure that would be immunologically tricky. It could also just be that(while certainly complex) the paperwork for implanting human-derived material on an experimental basis is much better defined and less risky than the paperwork for heading down to the local slaughterhouse and harvesting some donor material.
Certainly, for high-value organs that are presently in very short supply, there would be a strong incentive to develop some sort of non cadaver source(whether it be animals, 3d-printed scaffolds, or whatever); but I imagine that, in the short term, if you want it to Just Work and don't necessarily need it to scale immediately, cadaver tissue is easiest.
However, it is entirely possible that their house counsel takes a slightly different view of their obligations under CALEA than some Swede with an LLC in Luxembourg and a p2p network...
Modules intended for DRM purposes are commonly limited to those purposes because running extra code, especially code from random untrusted people, makes your DRM more vulnerable. In this case, AMD seems to be incorporating ARM's "Trustzone" stuff. That does support running vendor-customized software within the 'secure' region; but the suggested implementable does not make that user-modifiable. The rest of it is the usual morass of DRM 'goodies': memory locations 'protected' from access by non 'trusted' software, device unique master key, etc, etc.
That's pretty much why you would have a separate DRM module at all, when you already have a perfectly good x86 core to work with...
It is interesting that AMD appears to be throwing their hat in with this ARM stuff, rather than the 'Trusted Computing Group's TPM, available from a number of vendors on x86s already; but the expected use cases are every bit as malignant...
So AMD and ARM team up, and the product of their blissful union is an on-die TPM?
Thanks for nothing, guys.
While a wholly proprietary pinout(and a different wholly proprietary pinout than the last model's wholly proprietary pinout) the storage card is at least socketed... Given that there are likely to be a reasonable number of these sold, and to deep pocketed buyers, 3rd-party options will likely exist sooner or later. RAM, though, may leave you with a case of buyer's remorse...
These shady ifixit characters are peddling pure propaganda. You can repair a damaged or non-functional macbook pro with just a few clicks!
Does Windows 8 run on Medfields? I had the impression that (at least with earlier iterations of Windows and earlier lowest-power Atom SKUs) Intel left certain expected features off(PCI bus, possibly some others) that meant that their ultra-low-power parts were x86; but not sufficiently legacy compatible to boot OSes that are expecting a normal 'Wintel' environment.
It's not a tablet, it's a 'touch-enabled blade chassis'...
While I can understand that MS doesn't want 'Windows RT' associated with the sort of hardware that floats around on the dodgy end of the Android spectrum, it seems like pricing the software license as they have isn't an obviously helpful way to do that.
If the OEM has to make a price point, because their customers or sales network says so, the money spent on software licenses will come out of something else(or, since Windows for x86 is apparently cheaper, simply cut a bloody swath through ARM devices and lead Intel to sell a bunch of Atoms...), which won't help hardware quality much.
Given that they maintained a relatively iron grip over 'approved' specs for Windows Phone licencees(you either built the handset within certain parameters, or you didn't get a license, period.) it seems like that already have a template for a much better way to ensure uniform quality and a consistent experience.
With this pricing strategy(along with the 'Ha Ha, no AD for you, not even with some sort of premium SKU" thing), one just gets the impression that they don't really want to sell this particular product...
I am also not a lawyer; but I had the vague sense that there was a difference between 'knowing' in the sense of 'Yup, www.funnyjunk.com/infringingpicture.jpeg is an infringement' and 'knowing' in the sense of 'We have 100,000 plus images submitted by the bottom-feeding scum of the internet with no possibility of manual screening, the probability that there is some infringement in that collection might as well be 100%...".
The former flavor of knowledge might damage your safe-harbor status; but funnyjunk seemed to be following the (insane) plan of threatening to sue the Oatmeal for lampooning the fact that they unabashedly operated in the latter state of knowledge... The idea that anybody could seriously doubt that a large, user-submitted, collection of stuff is probably partially composed of infringing material is nuts. Scrubbing a few of the explicit examples(which doesn't negate the fact that they were valid when the statement was made, and rather looks like an attempt to conceal that validity), really doesn't change the obviousness of the broader premise. I'm a bit surprised that they managed to find a lawyer...
At least for the purpose of argument, I'm assuming that the statistical epidemiology is accurate; but that leaves me very curious indeed about what the mechanism is.
I wouldn't have expected getting more or less sleep to affect the structural integrity of some unlucky blood vessel in your brain. Are there any clues about why such a dramatic effect might occur?