Given that using Adobe software to view untrusted material is the rough equivalent of injecting yourself with used needles in the hope of scoring free heroin, I'm going to adopt a "it couldn't possibly be worse?" stance until otherwise demonstrated.
What I've never understood is why MS didn't just make the Sysinternals 'Process Explorer' the default task manager(or at least available by a simple "advanced mode" checkbox) years ago. They've owned Sysinternals lock, stock, and barrel for years, so it presumably isn't a copyright problem, and it blew the native offering out of the water...
A built-in PDF reader, eh? Should I feel sorrier for Adobe's devs, so incompetent that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader built by grown-ups, or for Microsoft's XPS team, who have so failed to set the world on fire with XPS that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader?
If you have a gluttonous lust for ghastly, utterly banal, PR-drivelspeak concerning wiretapping, anybody on Cisco's "Lawful Intercept Mediation Device Suppliers" list is excellent reading.
"Wiretap" is a phrase that limp-wristed 'civil-liberties' fetishists use to make the nation vulnerable to corruption and subversion. The polite term among those who are simply upholding law, order, and legitimate authority in a dangerous world is "lawful intercept capability"...
You needn't even be so negative about it. Unless you are really fucking it up, unbelievably hard, there should be a supply of authoritarian 'patriots' who are quite happy to serve the Leader of the Nation...
Ruling a population purely by fear is pretty difficult. Conveniently, though, some people have shockingly low standards. And revel in them.
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
Even in that case, the PhD system has a serious problem: 1 professor can, and is usually expected to, shepherd more than one student through the PhD process(plus, many research labs would basically fold without the available supply of cheap but highly skilled grunt labor). Thus, the supply of PhDed candidates who want academic jobs increases substantially faster than established professors can die or new professorships can be created.
It is certainly true that, for many PhD students, an academic job is the ideal; but the supply of academic jobs makes that difficult: There is a comparatively small supply of good ones(tenure track faculty, probably won't get rich, unless your field is conducive to consulting on the side; but you are basically assured an adequate income and the opportunity to do what you are interested in. IFF you can make it through the knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth that is getting one of those). Beyond those, though, it can get real grim, real fast. People dealing with absolutely grinding teaching loads, or more or less dead end lab-grunt work for under $30k/year are not at all out of the question.
If the PhD is to be a sort of Academia entrance requirement, they really need to figure out how to keep production at steady levels, and ideally inform people who Just Aren't Going To Cut It as early as possible, so they don't waste their time and money. If the PhD is going to be a much more broadly useful thing, it sounds like it needs some changes.
Unless the charger has to be plugged in to the PC during use for some reason, you might be well served by dropping ~$5 for a teeny little AC-to-5v-on-the-power-pins-of-a-usb-socket adapter. Those things have become cheap as chips now that cellphones and ipods and stuff have moved to USB charging.
If it does have to be connected, many powered USB hubs, if plugged in to their wall wart, will continue feeding downstream devices regardless of the power state of the upstream host. Since those also start at under 10 bucks, it might be worth a shot.
I suspect that I'm walking into a joke; but contemporary HDD platters actually have fairly high coercivity. A decent rare-earth magnet will give you a bit more than a Tesla, if measured at the magnet's surface, so rubbing the platter down with one is not advised; but devices capable of wiping an HDD without opening the case tend to draw multiple amps of mains current, and devices capable of wiping an HDD from a distance tend to involve superconductors and cryogens...
I'm impressed that they manage to deal with ambient magnetic fields. Your average PC has a few modestly chunky motors in it, plus power magnetics in the PSU, and the FCC doesn't regulate magnetic fields, so if it doesn't delete the HDD, it isn't an issue. Back in the CRT days, there were some speakers that had sufficient magnetic fields that they could not be placed near the monitor, on pain of rather horrid image distortion, as well.
The silliness enters the picture when you consider how many non-terrorists own such watches, not when you just look at all the suspected or actual terrorists who do.
Pretty much any watch with reasonably user-accessible alarm buzzer drive leads and adequate timer features is a potential bomb trigger. The techniques for each would differ mostly in pinout, and wouldn't strike a competent electronics hobbyist as anything special. Why chose those Casios? Because they are dirt cheap, ubiquitous, and have reasonably robust timer features.
I'm not impressed by the current "Let's sell it to the telcos for rather less than it is worth; because Ma Bell knows best!" strategy for spectrum re-allocation; but I can't say that I'd be sad to see the end of the rather ghastly waste of high quality spectrum that is legacy broadcasting.
Microsoft has actually been playing the IP-TV game for some years now. I can't speak for the quality of their implementation; but it could hardly be worse than a lot of the shit that cable companies manage to ship with a straight face.
The new development here would be whatever eldrich blood rituals are required to actually get permission from Team Content and the Cable Cartel to do something that might remotely involve change or a hypothetical threat to their revenue and/or serf population.
That, honestly, is where piracy really shines. The cost savings are attractive to hardcore cheapskates; but the really nice part is being able to use technology to the limits of its capability, not to the limits of what some suit thinks are acceptable for his '80s understanding of the TV/Computer distinction.
That positions sounds oddly... mercantilist. Obviously, the US federal government(along with state and local governments, their counterparts worldwide, and assorted individuals and companies) does a fair amount of stuff that is either grossly inefficient or exceeds its mandate. One can argue about the precise breakdown of that, and what is or isn't part of that; but denying its existence is a waste of time.
However, the notion that "if the government takes money from his constituents and then spends it somewhere outside his district, his people are getting poorer" is correct across the board, as opposed to being sometimes correct, depending on the details of the situation, seems absurd. It essentially represents a complete denial that comparative advantage or gains from trade could apply to government business. The whole point of having a federal government is to handle matters that are beyond the scope of individual state governments(and state governments, in turn, bear much the same relationship to local ones). If the matter at hand could be solved by in-state spending of in-state money, bringing the feds into it would be a waste of time.
Try this old game called LIFE , it is a hell of a game, comes with a life subscription , completely interactive and has over 6 billion players. No respawn , no cheats unless it is with a partner that isn't your Sig Other. It has no down time unless you end the game. According to myth , the developer hacked it out in 6 days.
I would rate it 6 stars out of 5.
Unfortunately, there are some serious game-balance issues. While the risk of being spawn-camped is pretty low(NPCs usually end up killing anybody who hangs out in the maternity ward with a rocket launcher...); but some spawn points seriously suck.
Given Sony's long history of successes with the survival-horror genre, I'm assuming that those held responsible will simply be transferred to Sony's new datacenter in Silent Hill...
Unfortunately, it isn't madness. It just isn't being done for your benefit.
From the perspective of designing failure-tolerant systems, artificially coupling distinct functions is, indeed, completely nuts. However, if your primary objective is control, rather than failure tolerance, reducing the number of things that your device is good for when severed from the mothership is entirely sensible. All kinds of DRM and trusted-client related problems become easier if you can force the client to talk to you at regular intervals. The more stuff you tie to the service you control, the more difficult you make it to use any devices that do happen to slip out of your grasp.
I got the impression that the opinionator was looking for a microsoft box, just one that wasn't an xbox. Even in that case, I would be shocked if MS bit.
"Media center PC"(in the generic sense, whether MS, Myth, whatever, based), is sort of a niche category and has stubbornly remained so. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of Kinect SDK integration eventually; but such an offering would end up being more expensive than the xbox equivalent, and rather more complex to use.
Some hypothetical TV-only box, produced by Microsoft, seems to be an even weaker case. Judging by the roku appliances, apple TVs, and assorted networked media streamer widgets, you apparently can't get a network-connected STB device with reasonable codec support and some general purpose processing power to the shelf for under $80 or so. $100-$150 for the ones with a nicer CPU, or an onboard disk, or other premium features. A base model xbox is $199. Since the Kinect alone is ~$100, any sort of TV-only Kinect device isn't going to come in at much under $180. And, for Microsoft, such a device would mean a completely different development branch, no cross-compatibility with even casual xbox games, no opportunity to upsell you on full games, etc. Producing such a thing would just be stupid.
Given the historical location of much NASA activity, and the introduction of the bill by the senator for Florida, it would probably be more efficient to pick out the parts that aren't pork than the ones that are.
I think that there is a reason that this guy is writing opinion pieces for CNN, rather than actual strategies:
Microsoft's "unwillingness" to split off some sort of 'xbox TV' thing: So, the kinect is a ~$100-$120 device(and Microsoft is apparently not making a loss; but not trying to mar a launch by gouging). On top of that, it needs a host device to run the body-detection stuff. So, you might be able to do an 'xbox TV' for a bit less than a base-model xbox SKU+Kinect, by going with a weaker CPU and no GPU; but such a device would still cost much more than a universal remote and not so much less than the base model xbox that it could really differentiate itself.
"Table full of remotes": Y'know why you have so many remotes? Because you have a zillion sucky little set-top-boxes that require more fiddling than joe user is willing to devote to the problem to get working together nicely. Guess what problem your 'xbox TV', no matter how magical the input experience, won't solve? Oh, yeah, that one. Consumer video is a mess, with endless fast-replaced devices, minimal control standardization(and what standardization there is, as with HDMI CEC or Cablecard, is either a few rounds short of fully baked or a failure by design), and some fairly entrenched players who have absolutely no intention of being shoved out of the way so that you can use the box you want to, rather than Scientific Atlanta's latest sick effort. That is the hard part.
I'd be curious to know if (once a drive is dead or failing) shredding reduces its value, or whether any recycling procedure would just start with shredding anyway. A pile of shredded drive chunks should be substantially richer in copper, nickel, rare earths, aluminum, and iron(and possibly gold) than many ores considered to be commercially viable. I imagine that it comes down to whether it is cheaper to get a cleaner separation at the cost more labor, or just grind 'em up and let the refining process sort it out...
Most of the time it's just an oxygen-displacement fire suppression system accident. Occasionally, it's Sergei quietly suffocating a suspected mole behind an out-of-the-way row of racks.... The two look pretty similar after the fact; so you have to call in the professionals.
And be quick about it. A body left in the hot aisle will be a bloated, putrid mass alarmingly quickly.
So, hands up anyone whose privacy concerns RE:Google had to do with people stealing hard drives or breaking into datacenters, rather than Google mining them...
Anybody, anybody? Bueller?
Sure, the fact that the datacenter isn't a shack with no access controls is nice; but mostly from an uptime and efficiency perspective. When it comes to large web players, Google definitely among them, physical attackers are so far down the list of information security concerns that they might as well not rate(for the users, that is. Obviously the operators would face significant costs if people were breaking in and grabbing stuff all the time).
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Given that using Adobe software to view untrusted material is the rough equivalent of injecting yourself with used needles in the hope of scoring free heroin, I'm going to adopt a "it couldn't possibly be worse?" stance until otherwise demonstrated.
What I've never understood is why MS didn't just make the Sysinternals 'Process Explorer' the default task manager(or at least available by a simple "advanced mode" checkbox) years ago. They've owned Sysinternals lock, stock, and barrel for years, so it presumably isn't a copyright problem, and it blew the native offering out of the water...
A built-in PDF reader, eh? Should I feel sorrier for Adobe's devs, so incompetent that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader built by grown-ups, or for Microsoft's XPS team, who have so failed to set the world on fire with XPS that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader?
If you have a gluttonous lust for ghastly, utterly banal, PR-drivelspeak concerning wiretapping, anybody on Cisco's "Lawful Intercept Mediation Device Suppliers" list is excellent reading.
"Wiretap" is a phrase that limp-wristed 'civil-liberties' fetishists use to make the nation vulnerable to corruption and subversion. The polite term among those who are simply upholding law, order, and legitimate authority in a dangerous world is "lawful intercept capability"...
You needn't even be so negative about it. Unless you are really fucking it up, unbelievably hard, there should be a supply of authoritarian 'patriots' who are quite happy to serve the Leader of the Nation...
Ruling a population purely by fear is pretty difficult. Conveniently, though, some people have shockingly low standards. And revel in them.
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
Even in that case, the PhD system has a serious problem: 1 professor can, and is usually expected to, shepherd more than one student through the PhD process(plus, many research labs would basically fold without the available supply of cheap but highly skilled grunt labor). Thus, the supply of PhDed candidates who want academic jobs increases substantially faster than established professors can die or new professorships can be created.
It is certainly true that, for many PhD students, an academic job is the ideal; but the supply of academic jobs makes that difficult: There is a comparatively small supply of good ones(tenure track faculty, probably won't get rich, unless your field is conducive to consulting on the side; but you are basically assured an adequate income and the opportunity to do what you are interested in. IFF you can make it through the knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth that is getting one of those). Beyond those, though, it can get real grim, real fast. People dealing with absolutely grinding teaching loads, or more or less dead end lab-grunt work for under $30k/year are not at all out of the question.
If the PhD is to be a sort of Academia entrance requirement, they really need to figure out how to keep production at steady levels, and ideally inform people who Just Aren't Going To Cut It as early as possible, so they don't waste their time and money. If the PhD is going to be a much more broadly useful thing, it sounds like it needs some changes.
Unless the charger has to be plugged in to the PC during use for some reason, you might be well served by dropping ~$5 for a teeny little AC-to-5v-on-the-power-pins-of-a-usb-socket adapter. Those things have become cheap as chips now that cellphones and ipods and stuff have moved to USB charging.
If it does have to be connected, many powered USB hubs, if plugged in to their wall wart, will continue feeding downstream devices regardless of the power state of the upstream host. Since those also start at under 10 bucks, it might be worth a shot.
I suspect that I'm walking into a joke; but contemporary HDD platters actually have fairly high coercivity. A decent rare-earth magnet will give you a bit more than a Tesla, if measured at the magnet's surface, so rubbing the platter down with one is not advised; but devices capable of wiping an HDD without opening the case tend to draw multiple amps of mains current, and devices capable of wiping an HDD from a distance tend to involve superconductors and cryogens...
I'm impressed that they manage to deal with ambient magnetic fields. Your average PC has a few modestly chunky motors in it, plus power magnetics in the PSU, and the FCC doesn't regulate magnetic fields, so if it doesn't delete the HDD, it isn't an issue. Back in the CRT days, there were some speakers that had sufficient magnetic fields that they could not be placed near the monitor, on pain of rather horrid image distortion, as well.
The silliness enters the picture when you consider how many non-terrorists own such watches, not when you just look at all the suspected or actual terrorists who do.
Pretty much any watch with reasonably user-accessible alarm buzzer drive leads and adequate timer features is a potential bomb trigger. The techniques for each would differ mostly in pinout, and wouldn't strike a competent electronics hobbyist as anything special. Why chose those Casios? Because they are dirt cheap, ubiquitous, and have reasonably robust timer features.
I'm not impressed by the current "Let's sell it to the telcos for rather less than it is worth; because Ma Bell knows best!" strategy for spectrum re-allocation; but I can't say that I'd be sad to see the end of the rather ghastly waste of high quality spectrum that is legacy broadcasting.
Microsoft has actually been playing the IP-TV game for some years now. I can't speak for the quality of their implementation; but it could hardly be worse than a lot of the shit that cable companies manage to ship with a straight face.
The new development here would be whatever eldrich blood rituals are required to actually get permission from Team Content and the Cable Cartel to do something that might remotely involve change or a hypothetical threat to their revenue and/or serf population.
That, honestly, is where piracy really shines. The cost savings are attractive to hardcore cheapskates; but the really nice part is being able to use technology to the limits of its capability, not to the limits of what some suit thinks are acceptable for his '80s understanding of the TV/Computer distinction.
Yo dog. I herd you like summaries so I put a summary of your summary in your summary so your summary can be summarized while it summarizes....
That positions sounds oddly... mercantilist. Obviously, the US federal government(along with state and local governments, their counterparts worldwide, and assorted individuals and companies) does a fair amount of stuff that is either grossly inefficient or exceeds its mandate. One can argue about the precise breakdown of that, and what is or isn't part of that; but denying its existence is a waste of time.
However, the notion that "if the government takes money from his constituents and then spends it somewhere outside his district, his people are getting poorer" is correct across the board, as opposed to being sometimes correct, depending on the details of the situation, seems absurd. It essentially represents a complete denial that comparative advantage or gains from trade could apply to government business. The whole point of having a federal government is to handle matters that are beyond the scope of individual state governments(and state governments, in turn, bear much the same relationship to local ones). If the matter at hand could be solved by in-state spending of in-state money, bringing the feds into it would be a waste of time.
Try this old game called LIFE , it is a hell of a game, comes with a life subscription , completely interactive and has over 6 billion players. No respawn , no cheats unless it is with a partner that isn't your Sig Other. It has no down time unless you end the game. According to myth , the developer hacked it out in 6 days. I would rate it 6 stars out of 5.
Unfortunately, there are some serious game-balance issues. While the risk of being spawn-camped is pretty low(NPCs usually end up killing anybody who hangs out in the maternity ward with a rocket launcher...); but some spawn points seriously suck.
Given Sony's long history of successes with the survival-horror genre, I'm assuming that those held responsible will simply be transferred to Sony's new datacenter in Silent Hill...
Unfortunately, it isn't madness. It just isn't being done for your benefit.
From the perspective of designing failure-tolerant systems, artificially coupling distinct functions is, indeed, completely nuts. However, if your primary objective is control, rather than failure tolerance, reducing the number of things that your device is good for when severed from the mothership is entirely sensible. All kinds of DRM and trusted-client related problems become easier if you can force the client to talk to you at regular intervals. The more stuff you tie to the service you control, the more difficult you make it to use any devices that do happen to slip out of your grasp.
I got the impression that the opinionator was looking for a microsoft box, just one that wasn't an xbox. Even in that case, I would be shocked if MS bit.
"Media center PC"(in the generic sense, whether MS, Myth, whatever, based), is sort of a niche category and has stubbornly remained so. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of Kinect SDK integration eventually; but such an offering would end up being more expensive than the xbox equivalent, and rather more complex to use.
Some hypothetical TV-only box, produced by Microsoft, seems to be an even weaker case. Judging by the roku appliances, apple TVs, and assorted networked media streamer widgets, you apparently can't get a network-connected STB device with reasonable codec support and some general purpose processing power to the shelf for under $80 or so. $100-$150 for the ones with a nicer CPU, or an onboard disk, or other premium features. A base model xbox is $199. Since the Kinect alone is ~$100, any sort of TV-only Kinect device isn't going to come in at much under $180. And, for Microsoft, such a device would mean a completely different development branch, no cross-compatibility with even casual xbox games, no opportunity to upsell you on full games, etc. Producing such a thing would just be stupid.
Given the historical location of much NASA activity, and the introduction of the bill by the senator for Florida, it would probably be more efficient to pick out the parts that aren't pork than the ones that are.
I think that there is a reason that this guy is writing opinion pieces for CNN, rather than actual strategies:
Microsoft's "unwillingness" to split off some sort of 'xbox TV' thing: So, the kinect is a ~$100-$120 device(and Microsoft is apparently not making a loss; but not trying to mar a launch by gouging). On top of that, it needs a host device to run the body-detection stuff. So, you might be able to do an 'xbox TV' for a bit less than a base-model xbox SKU+Kinect, by going with a weaker CPU and no GPU; but such a device would still cost much more than a universal remote and not so much less than the base model xbox that it could really differentiate itself.
"Table full of remotes": Y'know why you have so many remotes? Because you have a zillion sucky little set-top-boxes that require more fiddling than joe user is willing to devote to the problem to get working together nicely. Guess what problem your 'xbox TV', no matter how magical the input experience, won't solve? Oh, yeah, that one. Consumer video is a mess, with endless fast-replaced devices, minimal control standardization(and what standardization there is, as with HDMI CEC or Cablecard, is either a few rounds short of fully baked or a failure by design), and some fairly entrenched players who have absolutely no intention of being shoved out of the way so that you can use the box you want to, rather than Scientific Atlanta's latest sick effort. That is the hard part.
Just drop http://peopleofwalmart.com/?feed=rss2 into your RSS client of choice and get the ambiance delivered online!
I'd be curious to know if (once a drive is dead or failing) shredding reduces its value, or whether any recycling procedure would just start with shredding anyway. A pile of shredded drive chunks should be substantially richer in copper, nickel, rare earths, aluminum, and iron(and possibly gold) than many ores considered to be commercially viable. I imagine that it comes down to whether it is cheaper to get a cleaner separation at the cost more labor, or just grind 'em up and let the refining process sort it out...
Most of the time it's just an oxygen-displacement fire suppression system accident. Occasionally, it's Sergei quietly suffocating a suspected mole behind an out-of-the-way row of racks.... The two look pretty similar after the fact; so you have to call in the professionals.
And be quick about it. A body left in the hot aisle will be a bloated, putrid mass alarmingly quickly.
So, hands up anyone whose privacy concerns RE:Google had to do with people stealing hard drives or breaking into datacenters, rather than Google mining them...
Anybody, anybody? Bueller?
Sure, the fact that the datacenter isn't a shack with no access controls is nice; but mostly from an uptime and efficiency perspective. When it comes to large web players, Google definitely among them, physical attackers are so far down the list of information security concerns that they might as well not rate(for the users, that is. Obviously the operators would face significant costs if people were breaking in and grabbing stuff all the time).