HTC are actually going to continue to ship phones with locked bootloaders, and release an unlocking tool on the support website for them: presumably it's a warranty and support thing, and possibly a security one as well: it sounds pretty convoluted, but then, so is the current root exploit - su binary - engineering bootloader - S-OFF process to get custom firmware on there anyway. I'd prefer them to just have a button in the settings menu (like the Nexus One had for root), but the extra layers of "here be dragons" will probably stop people from doing it without realising the implications of trusting a firmware dev - if you could reflash phones straight-up, I suspect we'd see a bunch of custom Kesha ROMs loaded with trojans.
Consider the professionals. What do you think all those stage technicians, sound engineers, etc. etc. use when dealing with audio? That's right, headphones.
Actually, stage techs and live engineers use headphones for isolation, so they can hear what they're doing. They'll pull them off for listening to what the overall mix sounds like, and in a studio, where you can get reasonable quiet on demand, they'll listen on a set of frighteningly expensive ultra-flat powered monitors, since (you guessed it) in a well designed listening room, with good speakers and decent isolation, headphones don't even come close.
In this case, though, privacy of ballots is essential to an honest election, to prevent more traditional electoral fraud like vote-buying. Votes have to be entirely anonymous once you leave the booth so that your employer/union leader/other Big Bad of the month can't pressurise you into voting one way or another. The right to an honest election hinges on a vote being one individual's opinion, not that of someone else with an angle to work. All you do by making votes voter-verifiable is move the point of fraud from the system to the individual, which is probably easier to execute.
Websense's big problem is that it's used in secondary schools and sixth form colleges in the UK (equivalent to junior high and above, I think). Few people are more industrious at finding simple holes than a school full of bored and idle kids wanting to surf myspace during lessons.
Gamers need very little bandwidth, but care a lot about latency: you can get a very playable ping (in some cases better than on a DSL/cable link) on an ISDN line. Unfortunately, broadband providers tend to bundle better latencies and better bandwith together, or even ignore latencies entirely.
That said, your average gamer is more likely to want good bandwidth for things like patches, so there's some truth to what you say, but the actual act of gaming is surprisingly bandwidth-unintensive: with proper QoS going on, you can run torrents and FPSes together quite happily.
Re:Okay, it's a neat idea ...
on
The Google Navy
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· Score: 0
I get the feeling they're patenting it in order to avoid being trolled by it in future: it's exactly the kind of thing that they would get trolled with (well, anything Google does is the kind of thing that gets trolled, by dint of Google doing it) and the fact that you hold a patent doesn't mean you have to enforce that patent.
It's a shame we live in the era where this is not just acceptable, but necessary, but that's where we are.
As far as I can tell, "their own code" is an EFI string to identify the box as Apple hardware: the whole point of the move to x86 for Apple was to get Mac OS running on commodity (therefore cheap) hardware. The best analogy I can think of now is identifying Firefox as MSIE to use a website that demands you use IE for nontechnical reasons- the *only* reason OSX doesn't run on "normal" x86 is because of an artifical restriction, not a technical one. (There's not really a good car analogy: something to do with ECUs, maybe.Incompatibilities on cars tends to have some kind of physical reason behind them)
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HTC are actually going to continue to ship phones with locked bootloaders, and release an unlocking tool on the support website for them: presumably it's a warranty and support thing, and possibly a security one as well: it sounds pretty convoluted, but then, so is the current root exploit - su binary - engineering bootloader - S-OFF process to get custom firmware on there anyway. I'd prefer them to just have a button in the settings menu (like the Nexus One had for root), but the extra layers of "here be dragons" will probably stop people from doing it without realising the implications of trusting a firmware dev - if you could reflash phones straight-up, I suspect we'd see a bunch of custom Kesha ROMs loaded with trojans.
Consider the professionals. What do you think all those stage technicians, sound engineers, etc. etc. use when dealing with audio? That's right, headphones.
Actually, stage techs and live engineers use headphones for isolation, so they can hear what they're doing. They'll pull them off for listening to what the overall mix sounds like, and in a studio, where you can get reasonable quiet on demand, they'll listen on a set of frighteningly expensive ultra-flat powered monitors, since (you guessed it) in a well designed listening room, with good speakers and decent isolation, headphones don't even come close.
In this case, though, privacy of ballots is essential to an honest election, to prevent more traditional electoral fraud like vote-buying. Votes have to be entirely anonymous once you leave the booth so that your employer/union leader/other Big Bad of the month can't pressurise you into voting one way or another. The right to an honest election hinges on a vote being one individual's opinion, not that of someone else with an angle to work. All you do by making votes voter-verifiable is move the point of fraud from the system to the individual, which is probably easier to execute.
don't forget the tried and tested CCTV-foiler, bane of Kentish shopping centres and Daily Mail readers everywhere.
Modern technology, eh?
Websense's big problem is that it's used in secondary schools and sixth form colleges in the UK (equivalent to junior high and above, I think). Few people are more industrious at finding simple holes than a school full of bored and idle kids wanting to surf myspace during lessons.
Gamers need very little bandwidth, but care a lot about latency: you can get a very playable ping (in some cases better than on a DSL/cable link) on an ISDN line. Unfortunately, broadband providers tend to bundle better latencies and better bandwith together, or even ignore latencies entirely. That said, your average gamer is more likely to want good bandwidth for things like patches, so there's some truth to what you say, but the actual act of gaming is surprisingly bandwidth-unintensive: with proper QoS going on, you can run torrents and FPSes together quite happily.
I get the feeling they're patenting it in order to avoid being trolled by it in future: it's exactly the kind of thing that they would get trolled with (well, anything Google does is the kind of thing that gets trolled, by dint of Google doing it) and the fact that you hold a patent doesn't mean you have to enforce that patent.
It's a shame we live in the era where this is not just acceptable, but necessary, but that's where we are.
Uzbekistanding it would certainly become a chore.
Yeah, it's dead.
As far as I can tell, "their own code" is an EFI string to identify the box as Apple hardware: the whole point of the move to x86 for Apple was to get Mac OS running on commodity (therefore cheap) hardware. The best analogy I can think of now is identifying Firefox as MSIE to use a website that demands you use IE for nontechnical reasons- the *only* reason OSX doesn't run on "normal" x86 is because of an artifical restriction, not a technical one.
(There's not really a good car analogy: something to do with ECUs, maybe.Incompatibilities on cars tends to have some kind of physical reason behind them)