When BluRay and HD-DVD came out, it offered better quality video to people who didn't really need it. Sure high definition was nice, but it wasn't really a good enough reason to toss out the old DVD stuff to make room for it. Besides, with video downloads and online rentals coming about, there was just not a good enough reason for it. Add to that the fact the Blu-Ray DRM was so damn restrictive that people were constantly having to update their BluRay player to handle new films....
DVD on the other hand introduced a much simpler format for viewers than VHS. It took the world by storm by adding a huge amount of value beyond earlier formats.
Wii was amazing because it added the motion controller and games like workout games and such.
Wii U doesn't actually offer anything that can be considered value. Nintendo will almost certainly destroy their entire market since Wii people just don't see the value in upgrading. We want the new games, but the cost of the console is too high.
If Nintendo really wanted to make it work, they'd have made a Wii 2 with internal storage, a simpler online game store, added backwards support for Wii games and made it HD. Wii U is just not interesting.
P.S. my friends with kids who need their first consoles are buying Wii not Wii U. The Wii U controller is too big and unmanageable for the kids.
Windows phone is actually pretty good...try it for a month and try to go back
Nokia has had endless production problems, build quality problems, update problems etc... for years. They held onto Symbian for so long that when they realized how bad it was, peoples heads rolled and if they didn't have tons of cash, they'd have sunk.
Nokia couldn't make a smart phone to save their lives. They are a hardware company, always have been a hardware company and always will be a hardware company. They don't understand that when a smart phone is sold, they need to commit to it long term. They only understand a business model that says that once they sell the phone, they need to convince you to buy a new one. Nokia's biggest mistake is thinking that they can be Apple in a world where the real profit on the phone comes from the music store, movie store and app store. The phone is just the hardware and the profit isn't there. The guy making the operating system makes the money off the stores. Nokia doesn't get it and never did and never will. In the case of Apple, it was iTunes and then iOS which made it happen. The iPod, iPhone and iPad were just the tools to run those programs.
Nokia only had the "Most Smart Phones Sold" title because they took Symbian and made Series 60 which was a piss poor replacement for Series 40. They put it on feature phones and pretty much gave them away and made up for it in quantity. 99% of all Series 60 phone users never connected to the internet on their phones.
Microsoft needs to understand that they need to make their own phone because there is no place in this world anymore for companies like Nokia and HTC.
Nokia has done far more to make Microsoft look bad by doing things like putting that fat dorky guy Elop on the stage wearing a 3 piece suit... no shit... an actual suit to try and convince people their new phones were cool. Even better, they threw Ballmer into the mix and tweedle dee and tweedle dum bounced around talking up how awesome the new Nokia phones were.
I had to wait for ages to buy a Samsung Ativ S because I wouldn't be caught dead with a phone that was seen in their hands.
Microsoft doesn't need to buy a cell phone company... They can simply buy a reference design for a phone and customize it and release it. Buying a cell phone company which depends on releasing 200 new models a year is even dumber than Google buying Motorola haha. The Nokia business model died when Apple came around and unless Microsoft screws Nokia over and does it right, Nokia will kill Windows Phone
Why buy Nokia, the uncoolest phone company ever when you can make a cool phone in house for a 20th the price and risk?
I use laser etching for gigs of data into aluminum foil to store data content into the foil as binary data with ECC. Binary data is burned through. Clear text is then etched upon upon the surface as a microscopic print.
The end result is a printer media which should last several thousand years.
If they have the contract to an American firm, they'd take the initial payment and invest it in lobbying for why they need more money because they didn't understand the scale of the project when they started. They would be late, messy and never get done doing it. Then after being 5 years late, they'll go to court and only the lawyers will end up the better for it.
The Indian company on the other hand will simply develop an unusable product which will represent a product which is a literal interpretation of the original contract but will be a disaster since they'll always choose the wrong meaning of any word which could have to meanings.
Either way, the project will be a wreck because American companies suck at delivering software to the government and Indian companies never actually understand what they're supposed to make... They do make great things... Just not what they were supposed to. Haha
Even if I ever considered Playstation worth my time (I'm against consoles as disposable crap which leaves me with games I can never play again)....
If Apple moves to ARM, it doesn't really matter. Will still just patch the kernel to boot on other hardware anyway. Within a generation or two, there should be enough differences between the different systems that the OS should be generic enough to make it easily patchable.
Use TPM all you want, that's of little significance. TPM is more useful for blocking software from running on your hardware than it is useful for making an OS which won't run elsewhere. This is because of the beauty of patching.
UEFI secure boot again blocks software from booting on your hardware, not running software on other hardware. It's all an issue of how difficult or useful the system will be without an account to use it on.
So, all that matters is that there's a way to get your hands on a copy of the OS which I'm guessing will be accomplished within hours of release of PS4. Then it's a matter of popping it up inside of VMware with kernel debugging and trap unknown hardware calls (general protection faults) and step through the sections looking for TPM code... this takes a shit load of time since it's probably quite obscure, but it's just a matter of patience. I think I had the knowledge to crack through this sort of code when I was around 15 years old... had the patience too. Now I'm like 100 years old and can't be bothered to care... but I'm sure there is someone out there who will:)
I didn't know this, but to be fair, for official records which contain information that needs to be recalled for purposes of medical lookups, treatment related issues and maybe also choosing what prison to send that person to, there needs to be record of their genetic make up.
You may be right about the 62 shades of gray here (sorry, couldn't resist a sexual reference) but people lean more in one direction that in other in most cases. In addition, from an ethical point of view, there are people sick enough that they would perform this type of a change simply to gain access to women's locker rooms more readily.
The answer should be a second field in the database for "Born as..."
Screw the CO2.... Norway really needs to jack up power costs since it's a bitch that Sweden who barely counts as a power producer pays less for electricity than we do. Somehow, Norway has obscene power costs and we produce insane amounts of it.
Ok... I'm a loser and can't keep my nose out of this.
When you're developing a system on the scale of FaceBook and running on a language like PHP and the article is about building yet another data center with a 120 megawatt draw, maybe the comment you're responding to could have some value.
Let's imagine for a moment that having two departments of developers, one who designs and builds a PHP version of the site and a second who reimplements the functionality using more optimal languages... we can see these people as being human compilers. When you're running a system on this scale, if you can improve performance of your code by 10% by using a more optimal language, you could effectively reduce your need for power by 10%. When you're measuring your power consumption in hundreds of megawatts, somehow, I figure that might be attractive.
So, let's suggest for a moment that UI designers and database developers aren't always the most optimal coders. I know, who'd have though? Now let's imagine that there's programmers who adore sitting around cutting a few clock cycles off here and there (there are). While PHP may give you a huge amount of flexibility, it comes at a huge cost. It requires developers to use a huge amount of string processing to accomplish relatively trivial tasks. PHP makes it look like a single line of code, but in reality, that single line, if substituted with a few lines of hand optimized code could use less than a hundredth of the CPU power. Now consider that even with projects like HipHop, the code given to the system is heavily burdened with table lookups which can't be replaced programatically by an optimal compiler.
So, I'm going to give both of your statements merit. First because you're defending the technology as an enabler. He's bashing the technology because of lack of efficiency. I agree with you that PHP scales fantastically in this case, that however does not mean it does it in an optimal fashion which I think should be seen as the spirit of his posting.
Seriously... at $45 a copy for Windows (probably being the average thanks to OEM licensing) was there ever money there to begin with? Let's face it, Windows licenses in a server/workstation virtualization environment is all that really matters with regards to operating system sales. In addition, they have that other little cash cow called Office which probably yields them 10 times as much per user as Windows does.
But you're probably suggesting that Android or Mac or Linux could take market share on that. Let's be honest, there is no centralized administration for Mac or Android. Linux has it in about 10,000 different versions, but there's no one size fits all solution. Try adding one. How many different decentralized configuration management systems are there now? Last I checked, almost every file in the/etc directory is a different format and most changes require restarting services or applications. Could it be done... I guess so, but where would you find the workforce to maintain it. There's no standard place to learn anything about Linux. There's the CompTia certs... but those really only exist to have something to laugh at.
Let me start by saying "Adapt or die". That said, as a Cisco instructor, I still teach a ton of T1/E1 and Frame Relay.
The reason is simple. Power and resiliency. When you're a government agency who is deploying massive numbers of sensors for weather and earth quake monitoring, it is often cheaper to install and maintain equipment based on a cheap pair of copper wire capable of carrying power and signal over long distances. Thanks to T1/ISDN having been designed to function over long distances when all network switching for a telephone company was centralized instead of ASDL which is last mile only, T1 is a far more attractive tech.
Others here might say "What about solar cells and batteries?" Even the most reliable batteries won't last more than 4 years in "the wild". T1 lines can run for a dozen years or more without sending out a helicopter into the mountains for repairs.
So, while I believe that T1 is dead in business unless it's in deep rural areas, it is still rapidly growing in weather, radar and earth quake monitoring.
I don't know, I found that having kids gave me far more time to keep my skills up to date. Though, after having user CVS, Subversion, Mercury, GIT and more, sometimes the issue is that having gone through so many stages of evolution, it's hard to unscramble the different tools. In my case, it often is a lack of patience with the new tools with watching the same damn mistakes being made over and over. I really like GIT, but when I was forced to work with bazaar, the tool of choice from the 22 year old tool hotshot, I constantly found myself baffled senseless when I'd try to check in code and I'd find myself having to check out and repatch manually to check in. Personally, I felt it was less an issue of me specifically and more an issue of a tool which takes the enacts route of making 10,000 things easier, but removed the simplicity of the basic function of the tool which was the ability to check out and check in.
I think often younger programmers come in with new tools such as python and a dozen other new scripting languages, but some of us have been scripting or coding in thirty different languages over a period of decades. It's not that we lose the interest in learning new tricks. It's that we want to see that there is actually value in the new trick before wasting time learning a tool which might simply not offer any benefits. Personally, I finally bent and learned python (which is still consider sloppy as hell) and the some numb nuts insisted we needed Ruby too. After a few iterations of that, you end up with a code vase employing 10 languages and when the kids who added that code move onto their next job, we need to replace them with a new guy who now has to learn 9 new languages just to get started. Sometimes limiting yourself to a two or three lesser tools which take more work is more efficient in the long term.
I agree with the original post that people need to adapt to new methods and technologies. Someone who isn't interested in test driven development or peer programming or code review in a modern market is pretty much useless.
I wrote an internal paper in at an old job suggesting a method of water marking that would be invisible by the viewer, require almost no CPU performance requirement and also would survive multiple generations of re-encoding and scaling. Water marking is not what you think it is.
As an example what I suggested would take an H.264 file that is already encoded and alter each macro block only slightly so that there would be a slight (not noticeable) phase shift in the chroma planes. It would be progressive towards 16 -20 "hot spots" and would require no encoding since the phase shift can be implemented by simply altering the CABAC or CAVLC just by a little bit. It could in theory increase the file size by several bits per hour, but that was a fair trade-off in my opinion. The end result would be a video that is entirely the same to the viewer.. after all, the chroma planes are such poor quality compared to the luma with that it would not deteriorate the viewer's experience at all, it would be able to be done while delivering the file using a simple change to the web server delivering the file and it would survive multiple generations allowing the original purchaser's account number to be identified from the file even after scaling and re-encoding.
In fact, I did a demo of this tech on a real-time streamer which was pretty cool. We set up a demo of 9 MPEG-2 transport stream remultiplexers in a fashion which appeared to be geographic oriented and streamed television signals. We then produced from those 9 MPEG-2 remultiplexers 512 different multicast streams. We then altered the PMT (program map table) for the viewers of the signal in a geographic region to selectively choose the PID of different streams. Then we went to the pirate bay and waited for certain water marked TV shows to appear. They had been ripped and sometimes re-encoded for iPhone. Once we knew the region it came from, we changed the geographic regions to be local to the region which was represented by the video we downloaded. Rinse and repeat until such time as we narrowed the signal to individual house numbers, the third week. You might be surprised to hear it, but we clearly identified and verified the user which had been ripping the shows. We asked him to stop and that was the end of it.
What was the benefit of this? Easy, we managed to create a relatively simple system that could be employed to identify people pirating shows and ask them to stop. The other end result, the content providers backed off their insistence that we employ DRM and content protection. Using the same technology for video on demand allows users to view their shows on web browsers without DRM.
In case you're wondering how complex this was... it took me about 4 days to implement the stream parser, about another day and a half to implement the CABAC/CAVLC tweaker and about two weeks testing internally before it could be trialed. Took a little longer on the EIT inserter as it wasn't really meant to function on a fine scale regional system, but that was just a matter of some database work.
I have also worked on some DRM systems designed to be entirely non-intrusive. That is a much greater challenge since DRM should be hard to crack and should also allow users that do have rights to use the files without noticing the DRM. As you might notice, it almost certainly can't be done. So I focused instead on water marking in such a way that there's no chance it would ever degrade the viewing experience.
I hate both types of rights management. But, if people like myself don't try to solve the problem in such a way that the legitimate user isn't impacted, then the idiots in hollywood will do it in ways where they are.
I started a project on this nearly 2 years ago within my company to make use of WebCL as a means for providing real-time video coding and decoding. The problem I faced more than anything else at the time was audio synchronization. I also made a bunch of noise about this with regards to the stupid video tag being codec dependent. My implementation however was purely H.264 at the time.
I'm glad to see someone taking this serious. This has many options including providing support for DRM for vendors who want to use it without forcing DRM into the W3C standards. As I said... about damn time.
Sad you would choose to live somewhere you'd actually feel the need to depend on a gun.:(
BTW... I recently experimented a bit with guns. I can see it to be enjoyable to spend a day at the range... well if I could do something about the noise at least. I just could never see actually being intelligent enough to tie my own shoe laces, but being dumb enough to live somewhere I would actually need to use a gun for any purpose other than recreation or worst case, getting food... just gutting it sounds quite awful. But in either of those cases, while I might use the gun as a tool or toy, I can't see ever needing it to be so reliable I couldn't get a second chance to sort things out.
Well... I guess some people voluntarily prefer to put themselves into circumstances where they might get lucky and get a chance to kill another person.
Cool! You found a way to remove that last burden of free software which is free IT services. I'm guessing you're volunteering to work for free and install Linux and train all the users and support them over the long term all for free?
I used to buy a new laptop or desktop every 3 months. Now I buy I'm only upgrading ram or hard drive occasionally. My "Power House" laptop, a Core i7 with 16gigs of memory is from two summers ago. I have little or no interest in "POWER GAMING" machines. Instead, portability and battery life area far more interesting. Windows 8, who the hell needs to upgrade for that. I broke out old computers which were sluggish on Windows 7 and installed Windows 8 upgrades and they ran beautifully. Even gave them away to people who might have bought new machines otherwise.
These days, I tend to buy new toys like projectors and book binding machines. New PCs aren't that interesting.
That said... when I was in the states two weeks ago, I bought 3 Surface Pros... I should go back and buy 3 more:)
There is still a cost on large ISPs. The holy land of carrier grade NAT would be to NAT the entire ISPs v4 network and route statics for customers who want their own addresses. Even with big iron (think ASR9k) the active translation table can be far beyond the scale of the hardware.
That said, a more conservative approach would use private IPs for the P routers and internal addresses for the PE routers. Then a VRF would provide a/30 between edges for private networking. Another VRF would carry static routes for customer subnets. Customers would be CGNATed at the PE from a single IP for multiple customers. This makes the router requirements larger at the provider edge but much easier to maintain. Then it would use 2-4 IP addresses (depending on use of/30 or/31 subnets) per PE router and completely free up the pool used for P routers. This means a national scale ISP like Comcast could probably function on a/16.
I think he has a point. Unless Hollywood can sort out the issue with how to perform cuts without forcing the eyes to refocus all the time, it will be disorienting and to some people even sickening. If 3D gets even more realistic, it'll be a bigger problem.
Maybe it is less important to fix the problems with the 3D itself and more important to focus on transitions which are softer on the eyes and brain. Just watch films from before smooth transitions. You can see how much better films became when a simple smooth transition method came along.
messages are pretty easy to ignore. I feel guilty ignoring invites. This will just make it so that spammers will send these messages using invites instead.
I agree that standard coding techniques are a good thing. I prefer however to focus it towards and existing file or module. If a file was written in a given style, follow that style. It makes the file readable.
Generally I have found that working with a pile of libraries written by third parties, there's no way you can be sure that you'll have a full product with a single given coding style. So, you're already used to calling outside of your own module using alternative coding styles. But when you mix the coding styles heavily in a given file and worse, in a given function, it becomes unreadable.
Things can easily get carried away of course. If you look at gstreamer, the variance between modules regarding coding style is a nightmare. Product is great and I always enjoyed working on it, but there's so little consistency in the system due to being overly complex that some people will do the bare minimum to get their code working with it and then just code an entirely different way after that. It would have worked better of course if people would make an attempt to move their integration code into a separate file and make the transition between files instead of strictly between modules.
I'm hoping at some point that tools like swing will also allow making borders between like languages to have a method of enforcing coding style at the edges of modules.
"...Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8"
Ok, driver support (yes, still an issue), motion sensor support, touch support, documentation, etc... I use Linux all the time... from my Windows machine. I admit, Linux has come a long way, but when companies like Dell are still using 6-8 months to get a single computer out of the door (which was already in production), it just means we're still not there. Even when they managed to ship, it still wasn't 100%.
Biggest problem with Linux these days is still that there's too many damn options. For example, there's gobs and gobs of graphing calculator programs for Linux, nearly all of them still need to be finished and most of them don't have any developers anymore.
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When BluRay and HD-DVD came out, it offered better quality video to people who didn't really need it. Sure high definition was nice, but it wasn't really a good enough reason to toss out the old DVD stuff to make room for it. Besides, with video downloads and online rentals coming about, there was just not a good enough reason for it. Add to that the fact the Blu-Ray DRM was so damn restrictive that people were constantly having to update their BluRay player to handle new films....
DVD on the other hand introduced a much simpler format for viewers than VHS. It took the world by storm by adding a huge amount of value beyond earlier formats.
Wii was amazing because it added the motion controller and games like workout games and such.
Wii U doesn't actually offer anything that can be considered value. Nintendo will almost certainly destroy their entire market since Wii people just don't see the value in upgrading. We want the new games, but the cost of the console is too high.
If Nintendo really wanted to make it work, they'd have made a Wii 2 with internal storage, a simpler online game store, added backwards support for Wii games and made it HD. Wii U is just not interesting.
P.S. my friends with kids who need their first consoles are buying Wii not Wii U. The Wii U controller is too big and unmanageable for the kids.
Windows phone is actually pretty good...try it for a month and try to go back
Nokia has had endless production problems, build quality problems, update problems etc... for years. They held onto Symbian for so long that when they realized how bad it was, peoples heads rolled and if they didn't have tons of cash, they'd have sunk.
Nokia couldn't make a smart phone to save their lives. They are a hardware company, always have been a hardware company and always will be a hardware company. They don't understand that when a smart phone is sold, they need to commit to it long term. They only understand a business model that says that once they sell the phone, they need to convince you to buy a new one. Nokia's biggest mistake is thinking that they can be Apple in a world where the real profit on the phone comes from the music store, movie store and app store. The phone is just the hardware and the profit isn't there. The guy making the operating system makes the money off the stores. Nokia doesn't get it and never did and never will. In the case of Apple, it was iTunes and then iOS which made it happen. The iPod, iPhone and iPad were just the tools to run those programs.
Nokia only had the "Most Smart Phones Sold" title because they took Symbian and made Series 60 which was a piss poor replacement for Series 40. They put it on feature phones and pretty much gave them away and made up for it in quantity. 99% of all Series 60 phone users never connected to the internet on their phones.
Microsoft needs to understand that they need to make their own phone because there is no place in this world anymore for companies like Nokia and HTC.
Nokia has done far more to make Microsoft look bad by doing things like putting that fat dorky guy Elop on the stage wearing a 3 piece suit... no shit... an actual suit to try and convince people their new phones were cool. Even better, they threw Ballmer into the mix and tweedle dee and tweedle dum bounced around talking up how awesome the new Nokia phones were.
I had to wait for ages to buy a Samsung Ativ S because I wouldn't be caught dead with a phone that was seen in their hands.
Microsoft doesn't need to buy a cell phone company... They can simply buy a reference design for a phone and customize it and release it. Buying a cell phone company which depends on releasing 200 new models a year is even dumber than Google buying Motorola haha. The Nokia business model died when Apple came around and unless Microsoft screws Nokia over and does it right, Nokia will kill Windows Phone
Why buy Nokia, the uncoolest phone company ever when you can make a cool phone in house for a 20th the price and risk?
I use laser etching for gigs of data into aluminum foil to store data content into the foil as binary data with ECC. Binary data is burned through. Clear text is then etched upon upon the surface as a microscopic print.
The end result is a printer media which should last several thousand years.
If they have the contract to an American firm, they'd take the initial payment and invest it in lobbying for why they need more money because they didn't understand the scale of the project when they started. They would be late, messy and never get done doing it. Then after being 5 years late, they'll go to court and only the lawyers will end up the better for it.
The Indian company on the other hand will simply develop an unusable product which will represent a product which is a literal interpretation of the original contract but will be a disaster since they'll always choose the wrong meaning of any word which could have to meanings.
Either way, the project will be a wreck because American companies suck at delivering software to the government and Indian companies never actually understand what they're supposed to make... They do make great things... Just not what they were supposed to. Haha
Even if I ever considered Playstation worth my time (I'm against consoles as disposable crap which leaves me with games I can never play again)....
:)
If Apple moves to ARM, it doesn't really matter. Will still just patch the kernel to boot on other hardware anyway. Within a generation or two, there should be enough differences between the different systems that the OS should be generic enough to make it easily patchable.
Use TPM all you want, that's of little significance. TPM is more useful for blocking software from running on your hardware than it is useful for making an OS which won't run elsewhere. This is because of the beauty of patching.
UEFI secure boot again blocks software from booting on your hardware, not running software on other hardware. It's all an issue of how difficult or useful the system will be without an account to use it on.
So, all that matters is that there's a way to get your hands on a copy of the OS which I'm guessing will be accomplished within hours of release of PS4. Then it's a matter of popping it up inside of VMware with kernel debugging and trap unknown hardware calls (general protection faults) and step through the sections looking for TPM code... this takes a shit load of time since it's probably quite obscure, but it's just a matter of patience. I think I had the knowledge to crack through this sort of code when I was around 15 years old... had the patience too. Now I'm like 100 years old and can't be bothered to care... but I'm sure there is someone out there who will
Seriously, how hard is this? Just download two copies and diff them, then "correct" the difference.
This is just nonsense.
I didn't know this, but to be fair, for official records which contain information that needs to be recalled for purposes of medical lookups, treatment related issues and maybe also choosing what prison to send that person to, there needs to be record of their genetic make up.
You may be right about the 62 shades of gray here (sorry, couldn't resist a sexual reference) but people lean more in one direction that in other in most cases. In addition, from an ethical point of view, there are people sick enough that they would perform this type of a change simply to gain access to women's locker rooms more readily.
The answer should be a second field in the database for "Born as..."
Screw the CO2.... Norway really needs to jack up power costs since it's a bitch that Sweden who barely counts as a power producer pays less for electricity than we do. Somehow, Norway has obscene power costs and we produce insane amounts of it.
Ok... I'm a loser and can't keep my nose out of this.
When you're developing a system on the scale of FaceBook and running on a language like PHP and the article is about building yet another data center with a 120 megawatt draw, maybe the comment you're responding to could have some value.
Let's imagine for a moment that having two departments of developers, one who designs and builds a PHP version of the site and a second who reimplements the functionality using more optimal languages... we can see these people as being human compilers. When you're running a system on this scale, if you can improve performance of your code by 10% by using a more optimal language, you could effectively reduce your need for power by 10%. When you're measuring your power consumption in hundreds of megawatts, somehow, I figure that might be attractive.
So, let's suggest for a moment that UI designers and database developers aren't always the most optimal coders. I know, who'd have though? Now let's imagine that there's programmers who adore sitting around cutting a few clock cycles off here and there (there are). While PHP may give you a huge amount of flexibility, it comes at a huge cost. It requires developers to use a huge amount of string processing to accomplish relatively trivial tasks. PHP makes it look like a single line of code, but in reality, that single line, if substituted with a few lines of hand optimized code could use less than a hundredth of the CPU power. Now consider that even with projects like HipHop, the code given to the system is heavily burdened with table lookups which can't be replaced programatically by an optimal compiler.
So, I'm going to give both of your statements merit. First because you're defending the technology as an enabler. He's bashing the technology because of lack of efficiency. I agree with you that PHP scales fantastically in this case, that however does not mean it does it in an optimal fashion which I think should be seen as the spirit of his posting.
Seriously... at $45 a copy for Windows (probably being the average thanks to OEM licensing) was there ever money there to begin with? Let's face it, Windows licenses in a server/workstation virtualization environment is all that really matters with regards to operating system sales. In addition, they have that other little cash cow called Office which probably yields them 10 times as much per user as Windows does.
/etc directory is a different format and most changes require restarting services or applications. Could it be done... I guess so, but where would you find the workforce to maintain it. There's no standard place to learn anything about Linux. There's the CompTia certs... but those really only exist to have something to laugh at.
But you're probably suggesting that Android or Mac or Linux could take market share on that. Let's be honest, there is no centralized administration for Mac or Android. Linux has it in about 10,000 different versions, but there's no one size fits all solution. Try adding one. How many different decentralized configuration management systems are there now? Last I checked, almost every file in the
In short, this is just silly.
Let me start by saying "Adapt or die". That said, as a Cisco instructor, I still teach a ton of T1/E1 and Frame Relay.
The reason is simple. Power and resiliency. When you're a government agency who is deploying massive numbers of sensors for weather and earth quake monitoring, it is often cheaper to install and maintain equipment based on a cheap pair of copper wire capable of carrying power and signal over long distances. Thanks to T1/ISDN having been designed to function over long distances when all network switching for a telephone company was centralized instead of ASDL which is last mile only, T1 is a far more attractive tech.
Others here might say "What about solar cells and batteries?" Even the most reliable batteries won't last more than 4 years in "the wild". T1 lines can run for a dozen years or more without sending out a helicopter into the mountains for repairs.
So, while I believe that T1 is dead in business unless it's in deep rural areas, it is still rapidly growing in weather, radar and earth quake monitoring.
What makes it blackmail and extortion? My neighbors already know that I occasionally pirate stuff. I'm pretty ok with this.
I don't know, I found that having kids gave me far more time to keep my skills up to date. Though, after having user CVS, Subversion, Mercury, GIT and more, sometimes the issue is that having gone through so many stages of evolution, it's hard to unscramble the different tools. In my case, it often is a lack of patience with the new tools with watching the same damn mistakes being made over and over. I really like GIT, but when I was forced to work with bazaar, the tool of choice from the 22 year old tool hotshot, I constantly found myself baffled senseless when I'd try to check in code and I'd find myself having to check out and repatch manually to check in. Personally, I felt it was less an issue of me specifically and more an issue of a tool which takes the enacts route of making 10,000 things easier, but removed the simplicity of the basic function of the tool which was the ability to check out and check in.
I think often younger programmers come in with new tools such as python and a dozen other new scripting languages, but some of us have been scripting or coding in thirty different languages over a period of decades. It's not that we lose the interest in learning new tricks. It's that we want to see that there is actually value in the new trick before wasting time learning a tool which might simply not offer any benefits. Personally, I finally bent and learned python (which is still consider sloppy as hell) and the some numb nuts insisted we needed Ruby too. After a few iterations of that, you end up with a code vase employing 10 languages and when the kids who added that code move onto their next job, we need to replace them with a new guy who now has to learn 9 new languages just to get started. Sometimes limiting yourself to a two or three lesser tools which take more work is more efficient in the long term.
I agree with the original post that people need to adapt to new methods and technologies. Someone who isn't interested in test driven development or peer programming or code review in a modern market is pretty much useless.
Pretty convince you've hit the nail on the head. This isn't an issue of cracking encryption but simply gaining initial access to the phone via pin
I wrote an internal paper in at an old job suggesting a method of water marking that would be invisible by the viewer, require almost no CPU performance requirement and also would survive multiple generations of re-encoding and scaling. Water marking is not what you think it is.
As an example what I suggested would take an H.264 file that is already encoded and alter each macro block only slightly so that there would be a slight (not noticeable) phase shift in the chroma planes. It would be progressive towards 16 -20 "hot spots" and would require no encoding since the phase shift can be implemented by simply altering the CABAC or CAVLC just by a little bit. It could in theory increase the file size by several bits per hour, but that was a fair trade-off in my opinion. The end result would be a video that is entirely the same to the viewer.. after all, the chroma planes are such poor quality compared to the luma with that it would not deteriorate the viewer's experience at all, it would be able to be done while delivering the file using a simple change to the web server delivering the file and it would survive multiple generations allowing the original purchaser's account number to be identified from the file even after scaling and re-encoding.
In fact, I did a demo of this tech on a real-time streamer which was pretty cool. We set up a demo of 9 MPEG-2 transport stream remultiplexers in a fashion which appeared to be geographic oriented and streamed television signals. We then produced from those 9 MPEG-2 remultiplexers 512 different multicast streams. We then altered the PMT (program map table) for the viewers of the signal in a geographic region to selectively choose the PID of different streams. Then we went to the pirate bay and waited for certain water marked TV shows to appear. They had been ripped and sometimes re-encoded for iPhone. Once we knew the region it came from, we changed the geographic regions to be local to the region which was represented by the video we downloaded. Rinse and repeat until such time as we narrowed the signal to individual house numbers, the third week. You might be surprised to hear it, but we clearly identified and verified the user which had been ripping the shows. We asked him to stop and that was the end of it.
What was the benefit of this? Easy, we managed to create a relatively simple system that could be employed to identify people pirating shows and ask them to stop. The other end result, the content providers backed off their insistence that we employ DRM and content protection. Using the same technology for video on demand allows users to view their shows on web browsers without DRM.
In case you're wondering how complex this was... it took me about 4 days to implement the stream parser, about another day and a half to implement the CABAC/CAVLC tweaker and about two weeks testing internally before it could be trialed. Took a little longer on the EIT inserter as it wasn't really meant to function on a fine scale regional system, but that was just a matter of some database work.
I have also worked on some DRM systems designed to be entirely non-intrusive. That is a much greater challenge since DRM should be hard to crack and should also allow users that do have rights to use the files without noticing the DRM. As you might notice, it almost certainly can't be done. So I focused instead on water marking in such a way that there's no chance it would ever degrade the viewing experience.
I hate both types of rights management. But, if people like myself don't try to solve the problem in such a way that the legitimate user isn't impacted, then the idiots in hollywood will do it in ways where they are.
I started a project on this nearly 2 years ago within my company to make use of WebCL as a means for providing real-time video coding and decoding. The problem I faced more than anything else at the time was audio synchronization. I also made a bunch of noise about this with regards to the stupid video tag being codec dependent. My implementation however was purely H.264 at the time.
I'm glad to see someone taking this serious. This has many options including providing support for DRM for vendors who want to use it without forcing DRM into the W3C standards. As I said... about damn time.
Sad you would choose to live somewhere you'd actually feel the need to depend on a gun. :(
BTW... I recently experimented a bit with guns. I can see it to be enjoyable to spend a day at the range... well if I could do something about the noise at least. I just could never see actually being intelligent enough to tie my own shoe laces, but being dumb enough to live somewhere I would actually need to use a gun for any purpose other than recreation or worst case, getting food... just gutting it sounds quite awful. But in either of those cases, while I might use the gun as a tool or toy, I can't see ever needing it to be so reliable I couldn't get a second chance to sort things out.
Well... I guess some people voluntarily prefer to put themselves into circumstances where they might get lucky and get a chance to kill another person.
Cool! You found a way to remove that last burden of free software which is free IT services. I'm guessing you're volunteering to work for free and install Linux and train all the users and support them over the long term all for free?
AWESOME!
I used to buy a new laptop or desktop every 3 months. Now I buy I'm only upgrading ram or hard drive occasionally. My "Power House" laptop, a Core i7 with 16gigs of memory is from two summers ago. I have little or no interest in "POWER GAMING" machines. Instead, portability and battery life area far more interesting. Windows 8, who the hell needs to upgrade for that. I broke out old computers which were sluggish on Windows 7 and installed Windows 8 upgrades and they ran beautifully. Even gave them away to people who might have bought new machines otherwise.
:)
These days, I tend to buy new toys like projectors and book binding machines. New PCs aren't that interesting.
That said... when I was in the states two weeks ago, I bought 3 Surface Pros... I should go back and buy 3 more
Seriously... if you can't type over a hundred, it's not ever worth talking about.
"Power Users" expect more..,. besides, who wants to have to look down at their keyboard to type?
There is still a cost on large ISPs. The holy land of carrier grade NAT would be to NAT the entire ISPs v4 network and route statics for customers who want their own addresses. Even with big iron (think ASR9k) the active translation table can be far beyond the scale of the hardware.
/30 between edges for private networking. Another VRF would carry static routes for customer subnets. Customers would be CGNATed at the PE from a single IP for multiple customers. This makes the router requirements larger at the provider edge but much easier to maintain. Then it would use 2-4 IP addresses (depending on use of /30 or /31 subnets) per PE router and completely free up the pool used for P routers. This means a national scale ISP like Comcast could probably function on a /16.
That said, a more conservative approach would use private IPs for the P routers and internal addresses for the PE routers. Then a VRF would provide a
I think he has a point. Unless Hollywood can sort out the issue with how to perform cuts without forcing the eyes to refocus all the time, it will be disorienting and to some people even sickening. If 3D gets even more realistic, it'll be a bigger problem.
Maybe it is less important to fix the problems with the 3D itself and more important to focus on transitions which are softer on the eyes and brain. Just watch films from before smooth transitions. You can see how much better films became when a simple smooth transition method came along.
messages are pretty easy to ignore. I feel guilty ignoring invites. This will just make it so that spammers will send these messages using invites instead.
I agree that standard coding techniques are a good thing. I prefer however to focus it towards and existing file or module. If a file was written in a given style, follow that style. It makes the file readable.
Generally I have found that working with a pile of libraries written by third parties, there's no way you can be sure that you'll have a full product with a single given coding style. So, you're already used to calling outside of your own module using alternative coding styles. But when you mix the coding styles heavily in a given file and worse, in a given function, it becomes unreadable.
Things can easily get carried away of course. If you look at gstreamer, the variance between modules regarding coding style is a nightmare. Product is great and I always enjoyed working on it, but there's so little consistency in the system due to being overly complex that some people will do the bare minimum to get their code working with it and then just code an entirely different way after that. It would have worked better of course if people would make an attempt to move their integration code into a separate file and make the transition between files instead of strictly between modules.
I'm hoping at some point that tools like swing will also allow making borders between like languages to have a method of enforcing coding style at the edges of modules.
"...Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8"
Ok, driver support (yes, still an issue), motion sensor support, touch support, documentation, etc... I use Linux all the time... from my Windows machine. I admit, Linux has come a long way, but when companies like Dell are still using 6-8 months to get a single computer out of the door (which was already in production), it just means we're still not there. Even when they managed to ship, it still wasn't 100%.
Biggest problem with Linux these days is still that there's too many damn options. For example, there's gobs and gobs of graphing calculator programs for Linux, nearly all of them still need to be finished and most of them don't have any developers anymore.
Why does it always have to be one or the other?