This sort of releases are nothing new in Malaysia. I live here, and all sort of things get creatively repackaged and released even as alpha builds. I think I still have an old (pirated) CD touting Microsoft newest Chicago OS at home - a bug-ridden alpha release. As they say with buying these pirated products: caveat emptor!
It is not just software that gets repackaged and retitled. I have bought pre-release movies that have blue blocks with labels 'explosion here' (esp. the ones from Hong Kong). We also have, for example, Fast & The Furious III, which is some B-grade chase movie retitled and repackaged with some nifty Photoshop work. Talos the Mummy became Mummy III: Return of Talos and Notting Hill became Four Weddings & A Funeral II, and any comedy with Renee Zellweger movies became Bridget Jones Diary II, III and IV. And so on....
I don't see why this is a problem for *hiding passwords*, but the hash can be intercepted and replay attacks can be done. What you should do would be to have the client request a single-use time-limited challenge nonce from the server and hash the password together with it, and compare with the original.
I agree that it is an interesting article to a certain extent, but is quite fallacious bullcrap.
His thesis is akin to claiming that capitalists are the cause of poverty in the huddled masses and therefore communism will serve us best if we all give our best for the communal good and reap returns collectively. People just don't think like that. A free lunch is a free lunch, and nobody much is going to worry that if s/he as an individual stops paying, who is going to be our collective agents we entrusted to create and hone artists to supply the general public with music.
Lamda calculi is different from your usual calculus that involves integration and differentiation - it's more symbolic processing and discrete maths, and can be traced back to even church/turing, so you can't really blame him for it.
now some anecdote:
I took an undergraduate communicating automata/pi calculus course in cambridge in 1996 - I also had the good luck to be supervised by prof Milner himself (who was the head of the Computer Laboratory at that time) for that course. Then, you could download his notes as.ps files and you think, ok nice latex formatted notes, goody. They turned out to scans of pages written in a rather fanciful script. During the supervision, he fascinated both myself and my supervision partner by flourishing one of those ancient fountain pens which requires dipping into ink, leaving nice blotches on your coursework - and i thought cor, this is the guy who's at the forefront of our technological future. But we both agreed that Milner the coolest dude in the CL.:)
Even so, purposely designing your product so that most non-geek must send it back for a battery refurbishment (yes USD99 is a ridiculous amount -- compare this with phone-battery prices) is milking their base for what they are worth (but this is common behaviour for Apple isn't it?).
So i suggest: everybody, please start a chain-mail and email all your friends/colleagues about it! Maybe we can pressure Apple into doing something like designing battery replacement into their subsequent models... which can't be difficult.
(As a caveat, I dislike chain-mails too, but there is scarcely a more effective way to deal with these sort of grassroot problems)
A sample chain mail could be:
Batteries of some Apple (tm) iPods (tm) may require replacement after a year. The replacement cost from Apple? US99 to replace the batteries -- and this is after lots of complaints and pressure from customers! And no there is no simple way of doing it yourself because you have to snap the casing apart.
This filmmaker was so pissed wthat Apple Tech asked to buy another iPod or pay USD250 instead to replace the batteries that they created this hilarious video to warn everyone about it: http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/
You should forward this to all your friends to warn them about what they are getting for their USD400 toy!
... Dick articulated the concept in a 1977 speech in which he posited the existence of multiple realities overlapping the "matrix world" that most of us experience. Vanilla Sky, with its dizzying shifts between fantasy and fact, likewise ventures into a Dickian warp zone, as does Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. Memento reprises Dick's memory obsession by focusing on a man whose attempts to avenge his wife's murder are complicated by his inability to remember anything. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey discovers the life he's living is an illusion, an idea Dick developed in his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint. Next year, Carrey and Kate Winslet will play a couple who have their memories of each other erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memory, paranoia, alternate realities: Dick's themes are everywhere.
Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes.
And how about fixing that irritating problem where saving a.JPG file saves only as a.BMP? Coz the last thing i want to do while..err..'surfing'... is to actually use my left hand to launch the BMP to JPG converter, as it is...err... usually doing something else urgent...
(Yes, i've emptied the cache, removed the usrid:pwd, jumped through a few hoops, it still happens... good time to upgrade).
They call it 'positive discrimination'. Your post is flamebait so some objectivity is needed here. Malaysia is probably the only country where discriminatory practices favouring the ethnic majority (the bumiputeras, which are largely malays) is enshrined in the constitution (plus a whole slew of laws).
A sampler:
- Preference in university places (last year, made slightly more merit based, but many uni. entries still through MARA matriculations which are only open to malays)
- Subscription to bumiputera-only saving schemes with high govt guaranteed returns
- Preference for all government contracts (this accounts for a *lot* of wealth... since the govt has been on a spending spree)
- Discounts on all housing developments
- Public listing requirement requires minimum of 30% bumiputera shareholders, and a certain number of employees.
- Bumis also get perferencial allotment in various other stuffs like IPO shares etc.
To take it properly into context, this discrimination is to redress the economic balance where the urban businessmen (mostly chinese minorities) are far wealthier relative to the malays (many rural malays, but with much political control) - causing disaffection, instability and racial riots in the early 70s.
30 years since the implementing these drastic policies, the gap has narrowed a bit but the general consensus is that it hasn't quite achieved its objective of equalizing the playing field in such a long time. A few reasons bandied about are:
- The malays become used to being spoonfed by the govt, lose even futher their drive to thrive, whereas the chinese under discrimination strove even harder to succeed
- The hasty implementation of the bumi-enrichment projects (through privatization programs, preferential govt contracts) resulted in firesales where just a handful of well-connected bumiputeras became filthy rich while most still languish in relative poverty,
- Lack of competitiveness and transparency results in cronyism and corruption,
- Lack of meritocracy results in inefficiencies in the economic and job market.
- There is even more disaffection and distrust between the races, and racial integration hasn't improved (recent surveys show that even 95% of university students stick to their own ethnic groups)
Well it remains to be seen how successful these policies would be in what is ultimately a compromise for peace. The government is also finding out now that it is very hard to force the genie back into the bottle and reverse certain damaging policies (the malays will be furious if their rights are touched in any way). BUT, bear in mind that for a developing country, there are hardly any other countries that have a diverse composition like malaysia (60% malays, 27% chinese and 10% indian) and with severely imbalanced political and economic control that have not resulted in a hutu-vs-tutsi like anarchy, but still lives in relative harmony, despite the low-simmering dissatisfactions.
Well, a coupa of months ago Mahathir (our megalomaniac prime minister, who'll be stepping down in a few days) purchased a bunch of aging Sukhois for quite a tidy sum, and in deep gratitude Putin agreed to buy shitloads of our palm oil produce, and knowing Dr M's penchant for ego projects, throws in a bonus of shooting two of our guys into space. Sold!:)
Malaysia is already infamous for squandering their oil riches on pet prestige projects such as building the world tallest building, and sinking loads of money into developing their own national car (moderate success, but poor in qc and selling only with crazy tariff on imports), local silicon valley (kinda bombed but called a success) and regional hollywood (bombed big time) -- so this kind of shit isn't really a precedent.
To be fair, there have been some good advances in the last few decades, but one wonders if this sort of money is well spent esp. when there are other pressing needs in healthcare, education, and rural development. Thankfully, Malaysia has done quite a good job with infrastructure though.
Anyway, it's election time soon and there's nothing like a bit of malaysia-can-do breast-thumping to galvanize the pollsters!
I've viewed that site, though it is interesting, and i think there is a simple explanation for this - there is no good random generator. Hence all subsequent behaviour are 'randomized' from a seed.
As for pre-determined payoffs - well since the tree of outcomes of events are fixed, you can argue that it is predetermined. However, if nobody knows the sequence (if you cannot examine the ROM, etc) then it is as good as random anyway isn't it? Also, the site argues that some challenges are rigged such that if you go 'Highyou lose, if you go 'Low' you also lose, therefore it is unfair. Well, again this can be explained in terms of the predetermined tree -- the selection is not rigged but the way the random seed is being used to generate the outcome resulted in that behaviour. Further down the line, there might be a choice where both 'High' and 'Low' results in a win.
There is also absolutely no evidence that 'they play with punters' emotions'.
This is called arbitrage... it also happens in currency trading, at least before electronic clearing became widespread (this sort of thing thrives on information not being complete). Just google on arbitrage - there are numerous websites services that will supposedly notify/text you of arbitrage opportunities if they detect any. For a fee, of course:)
Ya, it is a commonly held fallacy that changing machines improve the odds. It is takes high-school probability training (or just simple reasoning) to see that the odds of a future given the previous events that have *already* been determined remains the same. Theoretically it is probably possible that the same machine can give 2 jackpots successively, though there is hardly the chance for that.
An aside would be that many machines have an accumulating jackpot since the last win, for which it makes sense to just pick the one with highest pot to maximize your intake if you hit jackpot.
A simple Occam razorish explanation will also to be that the casino *doesn't* need to do this to earn their big bucks. And they earn their big bucks by having a tiny skew in their basic odds (like giving 0.51 odds to themselves v.s. 0.49 odds to you) thus gives them a slight edge, that is multiplied by the volume of transaction to give them a big profit. All they need is to guarantee volume and prevent cheating. Maybe the tickets is just efficiency and to make it possible and easier to track cheaters. To imply that they would tweak the odds is just tinfoil hatting simply because they don't need to. And that is probably illegal.
... that you must be new here! I therefore offer you this PRICELESS series of rhyming haikus that will acquaint you to/. faster than an unladen African swallow:
1. First post! is better
than a beowulf cluster, but
does it run linux?
2. Bittorrent pr0n shared,
but rights of the goatse guy
are belong to us!
3. I A N A L,
But Microsoft and SCO says:
"This is Chewbacca."
4. Yet in other news,
polls show insensitive clods
are from America.
5. Natalie Portman,
both naked and petrified,
covered with hot grits!
6. ?
7. In Soviet Russia,
overlords, for one, welcome
Cowboyneal's profits!
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of releases are nothing new in Malaysia. I live here, and all sort of things get creatively repackaged and released even as alpha builds. I think I still have an old (pirated) CD touting Microsoft newest Chicago OS at home - a bug-ridden alpha release. As they say with buying these pirated products: caveat emptor!
It is not just software that gets repackaged and retitled. I have bought pre-release movies that have blue blocks with labels 'explosion here' (esp. the ones from Hong Kong). We also have, for example, Fast & The Furious III, which is some B-grade chase movie retitled and repackaged with some nifty Photoshop work. Talos the Mummy became Mummy III: Return of Talos and Notting Hill became Four Weddings & A Funeral II, and any comedy with Renee Zellweger movies became Bridget Jones Diary II, III and IV. And so on....
1. First post! is better
than a beowulf cluster, but
does it run linux?
2. Bittorrent pr0n shared,
but rights of the goatse guy
are belong to us!
3. I A N A L,
But Microsoft and SCO says:
"This is Chewbacca."
4. Yet in other news,
polls show insensitive clods
are from America.
5. Natalie Portman,
both naked and petrified,
covered with hot grits!
6. ?
7. In Soviet Russia,
overlords, for one, welcome
Cowboyneal's profits!
Yahoo mail uses cheap bastard technology then :)
I don't see why this is a problem for *hiding passwords*, but the hash can be intercepted and replay attacks can be done. What you should do would be to have the client request a single-use time-limited challenge nonce from the server and hash the password together with it, and compare with the original.
I agree that it is an interesting article to a certain extent, but is quite fallacious bullcrap.
His thesis is akin to claiming that capitalists are the cause of poverty in the huddled masses and therefore communism will serve us best if we all give our best for the communal good and reap returns collectively. People just don't think like that. A free lunch is a free lunch, and nobody much is going to worry that if s/he as an individual stops paying, who is going to be our collective agents we entrusted to create and hone artists to supply the general public with music.
Lamda calculi is different from your usual calculus that involves integration and differentiation - it's more symbolic processing and discrete maths, and can be traced back to even church/turing, so you can't really blame him for it.
now some anecdote:
I took an undergraduate communicating automata/pi calculus course in cambridge in 1996 - I also had the good luck to be supervised by prof Milner himself (who was the head of the Computer Laboratory at that time) for that course. Then, you could download his notes as
Whatever the new algorithm is, they seemed to have fixed the 'candle truck' and 'speaker bracelet' problems! Try it out!
Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
Fahrenheit Weight of air conditioners needed to maintain that temperature: 1/2 ton
The Fahrenheit went there.
Is that like Pascal Length?
Even so, purposely designing your product so that most non-geek must send it back for a battery refurbishment (yes USD99 is a ridiculous amount -- compare this with phone-battery prices) is milking their base for what they are worth (but this is common behaviour for Apple isn't it?).
So i suggest: everybody, please start a chain-mail and email all your friends/colleagues about it! Maybe we can pressure Apple into doing something like designing battery replacement into their subsequent models... which can't be difficult.
(As a caveat, I dislike chain-mails too, but there is scarcely a more effective way to deal with these sort of grassroot problems)
A sample chain mail could be:
Batteries of some Apple (tm) iPods (tm) may require replacement after a year. The replacement cost from Apple? US99 to replace the batteries -- and this is after lots of complaints and pressure from customers! And no there is no simple way of doing it yourself because you have to snap the casing apart.
This filmmaker was so pissed wthat Apple Tech asked to buy another iPod or pay USD250 instead to replace the batteries that they created this hilarious video to warn everyone about it: http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/
You should forward this to all your friends to warn them about what they are getting for their USD400 toy!
Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes.
Reading through some of the reviews found at that second link I damn near pissed my pants laughing.
Looks like you need a little toilet training. This is just the game for you!
And how about fixing that irritating problem where saving a .JPG file saves only as a .BMP? Coz the last thing i want to do while ..err ..'surfing'... is to actually use my left hand to launch the BMP to JPG converter, as it is...err... usually doing something else urgent...
(Yes, i've emptied the cache, removed the usrid:pwd, jumped through a few hoops, it still happens... good time to upgrade).
Simoniker seems starved of silly sounding subtitling suddenly.
Alliterating acronyms are always awful... avoid and abstain asmuch as appropriate!
Someone Set Up Us the Bomb!
They call it 'positive discrimination'. Your post is flamebait so some objectivity is needed here. Malaysia is probably the only country where discriminatory practices favouring the ethnic majority (the bumiputeras, which are largely malays) is enshrined in the constitution (plus a whole slew of laws).
A sampler:
- Preference in university places (last year, made slightly more merit based, but many uni. entries still through MARA matriculations which are only open to malays)
- Subscription to bumiputera-only saving schemes with high govt guaranteed returns
- Preference for all government contracts (this accounts for a *lot* of wealth... since the govt has been on a spending spree)
- Discounts on all housing developments
- Public listing requirement requires minimum of 30% bumiputera shareholders, and a certain number of employees.
- Bumis also get perferencial allotment in various other stuffs like IPO shares etc.
To take it properly into context, this discrimination is to redress the economic balance where the urban businessmen (mostly chinese minorities) are far wealthier relative to the malays (many rural malays, but with much political control) - causing disaffection, instability and racial riots in the early 70s.
30 years since the implementing these drastic policies, the gap has narrowed a bit but the general consensus is that it hasn't quite achieved its objective of equalizing the playing field in such a long time. A few reasons bandied about are:
- The malays become used to being spoonfed by the govt, lose even futher their drive to thrive, whereas the chinese under discrimination strove even harder to succeed
- The hasty implementation of the bumi-enrichment projects (through privatization programs, preferential govt contracts) resulted in firesales where just a handful of well-connected bumiputeras became filthy rich while most still languish in relative poverty,
- Lack of competitiveness and transparency results in cronyism and corruption,
- Lack of meritocracy results in inefficiencies in the economic and job market.
- There is even more disaffection and distrust between the races, and racial integration hasn't improved (recent surveys show that even 95% of university students stick to their own ethnic groups)
Well it remains to be seen how successful these policies would be in what is ultimately a compromise for peace. The government is also finding out now that it is very hard to force the genie back into the bottle and reverse certain damaging policies (the malays will be furious if their rights are touched in any way). BUT, bear in mind that for a developing country, there are hardly any other countries that have a diverse composition like malaysia (60% malays, 27% chinese and 10% indian) and with severely imbalanced political and economic control that have not resulted in a hutu-vs-tutsi like anarchy, but still lives in relative harmony, despite the low-simmering dissatisfactions.
Well, a coupa of months ago Mahathir (our megalomaniac prime minister, who'll be stepping down in a few days) purchased a bunch of aging Sukhois for quite a tidy sum, and in deep gratitude Putin agreed to buy shitloads of our palm oil produce, and knowing Dr M's penchant for ego projects, throws in a bonus of shooting two of our guys into space. Sold! :)
Malaysia is already infamous for squandering their oil riches on pet prestige projects such as building the world tallest building, and sinking loads of money into developing their own national car (moderate success, but poor in qc and selling only with crazy tariff on imports), local silicon valley (kinda bombed but called a success) and regional hollywood (bombed big time) -- so this kind of shit isn't really a precedent.
To be fair, there have been some good advances in the last few decades, but one wonders if this sort of money is well spent esp. when there are other pressing needs in healthcare, education, and rural development. Thankfully, Malaysia has done quite a good job with infrastructure though.
Anyway, it's election time soon and there's nothing like a bit of malaysia-can-do breast-thumping to galvanize the pollsters!
I've viewed that site, though it is interesting, and i think there is a simple explanation for this - there is no good random generator. Hence all subsequent behaviour are 'randomized' from a seed.
As for pre-determined payoffs - well since the tree of outcomes of events are fixed, you can argue that it is predetermined. However, if nobody knows the sequence (if you cannot examine the ROM, etc) then it is as good as random anyway isn't it? Also, the site argues that some challenges are rigged such that if you go 'Highyou lose, if you go 'Low' you also lose, therefore it is unfair. Well, again this can be explained in terms of the predetermined tree -- the selection is not rigged but the way the random seed is being used to generate the outcome resulted in that behaviour. Further down the line, there might be a choice where both 'High' and 'Low' results in a win.
There is also absolutely no evidence that 'they play with punters' emotions'.
This is called arbitrage... it also happens in currency trading, at least before electronic clearing became widespread (this sort of thing thrives on information not being complete). Just google on arbitrage - there are numerous websites services that will supposedly notify/text you of arbitrage opportunities if they detect any. For a fee, of course :)
Ya, it is a commonly held fallacy that changing machines improve the odds. It is takes high-school probability training (or just simple reasoning) to see that the odds of a future given the previous events that have *already* been determined remains the same. Theoretically it is probably possible that the same machine can give 2 jackpots successively, though there is hardly the chance for that.
An aside would be that many machines have an accumulating jackpot since the last win, for which it makes sense to just pick the one with highest pot to maximize your intake if you hit jackpot.
A simple Occam razorish explanation will also to be that the casino *doesn't* need to do this to earn their big bucks. And they earn their big bucks by having a tiny skew in their basic odds (like giving 0.51 odds to themselves v.s. 0.49 odds to you) thus gives them a slight edge, that is multiplied by the volume of transaction to give them a big profit. All they need is to guarantee volume and prevent cheating. Maybe the tickets is just efficiency and to make it possible and easier to track cheaters. To imply that they would tweak the odds is just tinfoil hatting simply because they don't need to. And that is probably illegal.
... that you must be new here! I therefore offer you this PRICELESS series of rhyming haikus that will acquaint you to /. faster than an unladen African swallow:
/.!
1. First post! is better
than a beowulf cluster, but
does it run linux?
2. Bittorrent pr0n shared,
but rights of the goatse guy
are belong to us!
3. I A N A L,
But Microsoft and SCO says:
"This is Chewbacca."
4. Yet in other news,
polls show insensitive clods
are from America.
5. Natalie Portman,
both naked and petrified,
covered with hot grits!
6. ?
7. In Soviet Russia,
overlords, for one, welcome
Cowboyneal's profits!
Comprehende now? Welcome to
...they managed to launch CowboyNeal, after all!
So everyone, that's why you should ALWAYS share your wi-fi connection with your neighbourhood! ;)
Erm, that Microsoft judgment is NOT from Judge Kent, if you see the PDF of the order here it is clearly signed Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker.
:)
But both judges are really funny in a caustic way
Half Life 2 has been renamed Half Life: Forever.