The last time I tried to use a cell network for internet access, the lag was horrid (300+ms) compared to real broadband. How is the lag on these systems? I'd rather have the responsive 450kbps connection than the unresponsive 1.5mbps connection.
I agree. If I had to chose one specific strategic reason for this I'd say it's to keep things open for Google.
Microsoft has MSN which they like to try to push (quietly so as not to upset the DOJ). If AT&T, Comcast, Verison, Sprint, T-Mobile, or others decided to start giving preference to their own search (this includes site-finder like stuff) or net neutrality falters (so Google services are reduced unless someone pays extra) then Google could be in for a world of hurt. By the time the mandatory court case got far (at least far enough for an injunction) this could have become quite bad for Google.
Should the court not grant such an injunction, take a long time to grant it, or the ISPs did it sneakily enough Google could suffer some real harm by the time things got "fixed".
Google wants more people on the 'net. There is no question about that. This also serves branding ("I get my internet from Google", "Google lowered my broadband prices"). But it promises Google that even if net neutrality is denied by the supreme court, they have a possibly big partner that they can try to prevent from pushing stuff like that on them.
This is at minimum (and skeptically) a preventative measure. In the short term I think the other benefits will be better, but this is a safe play for Google.
I assume it's primarily a cost type thing. Flying 4 small automated UAVs is probably cheaper than even 1 manned craft.
There are other possible reasons too. At their size, it's relatively easy to fly the UAVs at low alititudes (like 1 or 2k feet). They are going to be quiet (unlike a small Cessna) when close to the ground. They could be run 'round the clock, and if they can hold a charge (or they put solar panels on 'em) they could stay up for 12+ hours at a time.
I can see some real good points for why you may want a UAV.
No kidding. I would really like to see a poll of the jury members, and if they would change their votes if they had been told that Hans's ex-friend (the wife's new dude) had confessed to killing 8 people.
Some facts are prejudicial.
Some facts are prejudicial for a very good reason.
I'd like to see numbers on how that would have changed things.
Too bad ReiserFS will probably die. I'm going to guess that they won't be giving him his own computer in prison to continue development with. I wonder if someone else will effectively try to step up and take control of the project, or it will just lose all it's momentum (not that it didn't in the last few years anyway).
I've had to do that too (bonus points for doing it without turning off the computer, because it wouldn't be able to boot back up... yes, it was stupid to do).
Most people won't know that, or how to do it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it was a cheap motherboard with the flash chip soldered on and no backup, thus basically unfixable.
It could be a brick. There is nothing to prevent Apple from releasing a patch that would simply erase the BIOS/EFI from the thing. It's not like they couldn't get their hands on one box to see exactly how to do it.
Without a BIOS, your computer is bricked.
Normal software updates might render the OS unusable, and you're right you could just install Ubuntu. But Apple could truly brick the thing if they decided too.
Am I the only one who thinks it would be hilarious if every model they shipped out contained a faulty motherboard, with signals rerouted to hide the fact everything is running from a Mac Mini stashed in the "powersupply"?
That would be great.
I've got to say, for a scam they are really committed.
At first, I thought this was all interesting and going to have an interesting legal battle attached to it. Then it was clear this was a scam and there would be no fun to watch. Now I'm starting to wonder if I'll get to see the legal fight after all. Maybe it's not a scam?
The theory that people were passing around was that it would be primarily targeted at raytracing and have a small rasterization engine that was decent but not high performance.
It was a stupid idea. I don't think even Intel could could make raytracing parts competitive in the market at this point. If they wanted to do that with a new part, I would expect them to be showing MUCH more at this stage. If they were to just drop this on the world in the next few months or year, no one would be able to support it fast enough to make the part reasonable for most games.
This is the clear path. I'm actually a bit skeptical that raytracing was anything but a tech demo they have been toying with. I kinda doubt it's being seriously considered for anything but it's ability to be a relatively familiar demo that can use it's many cores.
Right. It's rare that chips perform massively above their spec, or are disabled just for fun. Most of the time it's because they won't perform at that higher speed or have some other error (some bad cache). OCers do other mods to try to make things more stable (like run extra voltage through the chip, stronger cooling, etc). Without those changes the chips won't run faster without crashing noticeably often.
I was just trying to point out that this isn't something new that AMD invented to screw with people. Companies have been doing stuff like this for years. There is no reason Intel couldn't have been doing this exact thing in the last few years, they just haven't.
Everyone already does that. That's one of the reasons that Celerons used to be so popular with the overclocker crowd. When Intel didn't have enough of one kind of Celeron but had too many of another, they would mark down the faster chips or disable some cache on a P3.
Due to yields, if you buy a slow processor there is a good chance that it is capable of running quite a bit faster. When you buy a top of the line processor, that's much less likely.
GPU makers have been known to do the same thing. I remember when you could flash a low end card (one of the GeForce 4s?) to be a more expensive one (more shaders) and you might end up with a working card (wasn't disabled due to errors, just to 'meet quota').
This is normal. If they didn't do this, people would have to buy the faster chips which would cause their price to drop.
That's an interesting article, I hadn't seen that.
Of course, the article says that's what they do when they know the area. They just use the landscape to guide them. When unfamiliar with an area, it says they use the sun, starts, and magnetic field of the Earth to find out which way to go.
So, from reading the article, the birds observing the chemical reaction, thus slowing it down long enough for the magnetic field of the Earth to have a detectable effect when it shouldn't.
Quantum mechanics is so weird. Neat!
But when the researchers looked for this, shouldn't that looking have caused the metaphorical pot to be watched thus inducing the effect, or had no one tried to measure this simply because they knew the reaction didn't take long enough (or shouldn't, ignoring quantum mechanics)?
Bonus questions: The article said that had proved this by using a strong electric field to alter the way this reaction goes. Would it be possible to inject something into the birds that would prevent them from "watching" this reaction, so it would go at it's "normal" speed?
I understand. But the Ghost in the Shell movie (the first) was dubbed, and the two series (Stand Alone Complex 1 & 2) were also dubbed, all with the same actors (those who seem to be responsible for half the Anime that hits the US). It's not like they don't have decent actors.
How about releasing a version of GiTS2: Innocence that's dubbed into English first for those of us who want to be able to look at the art and not have to read all the subtitles?
That's a good question. I've wondered that too. I don't think there are any game studios near me. I'm pretty sure I'd have to go at least 75 miles to get to one with more than 2 or 3 employees.
I can think of three reasons.
Big companies - Microsoft hires tons of people. Many eventually leave. That leaves a large pool of talent in the Seattle area
Industry - This ties in with #1. Nintendo had lots of video game programmers, so not only are there programmers up in Washington, there are game programmers
Finance - There are many more banks and VCs and such in a town like Seattle, San Fran, or any other large city than in smaller places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That makes it easier to expand your company past 3 people.
Number 2 is probably the biggest reasons. If you want to act, you go to NYC or Hollywood. If you want to be in fashion you go to Paris, Milan, or NYC. If you want to be in games you can go to Seattle, San Fran, or Dallas (they seem to have quite a few, iD among others). Once people start following that advice, it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
That's cute and all, but what is that in pocket money? When you take out taxes, health care, rent, gas, water, electricity, phone, internet, etc... how much is left? Is there still an advantage in the UK? Does the advantage switch to the US? Are they about the same then?
Now you'll have to go based on average. Things are more expensive in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, London, etc. than in smaller places like Dallas, Kansas City, Omaha, etc.
Speaking of which, how does the average salary of the place most of these jobs are located in effect this? Are the UK numbers higher because most video game jobs are located in extremely expensive areas?
I don't see how there is much you can do. There was an article here a few months ago about a group that started sending out bad XML because too many people were using the DTD they were hosting, to the tune of 10,000s of hits a day that were completely unnecessary.
The company I work (not Fortune 500, smaller) sees some stuff that continues to floor me. Our dealings are mostly transactions of information (containing important things like bank accounts) between our computes and those of other companies. We have had to, quite a few times, flat out turn people down because they refuse to run securely. Not without massive DB encryption. Not hashing everything. Just not using SSL, an easy to implement addition on top of HTTP (which carries our conversations with people).
Every two months or so, we are put in the position of telling people that the SSL certificate on their production system expired last night. This usually entails a discussion as to why we can't just let them slide, or give them a day, etc. We've had people switch off good SSL certificates from very valid authorities to self-signed certificates.
In fact the expiration problem happened enough that someone seriously suggested we consider making a little program to check people's certificates and warn us when they were going to expire so we could warn them. Things got better and it didn't happen. Many people just don't care.
I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end. Then they called our office to make sure we knew it was about to expire and to find out if we really wanted that to happen. Then today, a few weeks after it expired, I got an email reminding me that it expired and they'd be glad to renew it. I don't know how many companies are this proactive about renewing SSL certs, but I'd have had to have my head buried pretty far in the sand to not have noticed all that.
We've seen plenty of poor security designs. I don't expect other operations to be perfectly secure. But the number of these companies who seem either ignorant or dismissive of SSL continues to surprise me from time to time.
Best advice? If you can at all, shut them down. Very few of the companies we have worked with have been very nice about turning on SSL. Some have said "just add S to the URL" (it was secure, they just didn't give us that URL). Some have said "sorry, we'll get that right up". More than a few have not been that easy. Turning people off is the best power we have. If your contracts are big enough (as a Fortune 300 company, they might be) you could try to put security provisions in them with penalties for shenanigans. But we've found that when discussions aren't working, just disconnecting people usually gets their attention.
True, but the federal government has done this kind of thing before. Besides simply declaring that such taxes can't be passed (you could argue interstate-commerce clause), the feds can just fiddle with funding.
"Violate our ban and you get no federal help for disasters, or maybe to help with police/etc, or road assistance, or health care (ouch), or something else." The states will run scared. It worked for getting the drinking age raised to 21.
I've been here for quite a few years. I think maybe 9.
Since when has/. not lobbied for certain things?
Democrats, liberals, net neutrality, voter verified paper trails, and tons more. This has only increased (unsurprisingly) since the Politics section was created (which helped reduce the S/N on the other bits). Slashdot has been quite vocal in various things (like almost anything anti-Bush) for years and years.
All that said, this is a private website. They can lobby for whatever they want. That story went through the firehose (or at least other copied did) and was quite popular. Readers seem to want to discuss it as well.
No, because the music is accessible without agreeing to the license agreement.
Now if the music required a little piece of software on the disc to listen to, they could then use the license agreement.
However, at that point it's no longer an audio CD, and people wouldn't buy it. If they did, they would return it when they found out it wouldn't work in their car.
The important thing is that you have to go through the agreement to get to the content. That's my understanding.
If clicking did constitute agreement, then simply hacking the text to say "I disagree" would be an effective way to not agree to the EULA, and that's pretty absurd.
Nope. Once you changed something, then it's no longer the agreement that Apple agreed to, so the agreement isn't valid and you can't use the software.
How is clicking "I agree" any different than doing the same kind of thing when signing up for a bank account or buying something online where you do the same thing? You type your name and click "I agree" to get a loan online. I believe courts have said that it can be considered a signature, at least in the US.
I agree with my sibling comments that this is almost certainly infeasible. Storage would be a nightmare, trying to suddenly absorb all that energy.
However, the first thing that came to my mind was radio. Protecting antennas (especially the large ones like AM broadcast) I'd imagine is quite tough and expensive. You are going to take hits, and you have to have everything designed to deflect as much energy as possible. You obviously don't want your millions and millions of dollars of equipment getting fried. The insurance on all this can't be cheap.
Yet if you could use a laser to drain local clouds near your antennas... you might be able to seriously mitigate possible strikes or at least the damage they might cause.
Heck, if you could make this really cheap (obviously difficult, especially given laser power requirements) you could protect kids sports events and such that might otherwise get cancelled.
In the midwest, sudden and STRONG thunderstorms are quite normal during parts of the year. I could see this being useful.
Heck, synch the pulses up to the local radio station as an advertisement. "LAZR 102.7, now protecting you from lightning. Shows start when the thunder does!"
How do you figure? Some people would say to buy a refurb motherboard and build your own, but others would suggest you buy one of the few non-Apple PPC boards (like those the Amiga groups used, IIRC) and install on those.
Because Apple said so. They are allowed to put whatever restrictions in their license they want, as long as they are legal. They can put some really weird things in that and have each product have conflicting requirements.
The question here is: is that particular restriction legal (and thus valid) or illegal (and thus can be ignored)
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My big question would be: what's the lag?
The last time I tried to use a cell network for internet access, the lag was horrid (300+ms) compared to real broadband. How is the lag on these systems? I'd rather have the responsive 450kbps connection than the unresponsive 1.5mbps connection.
I agree. If I had to chose one specific strategic reason for this I'd say it's to keep things open for Google.
Microsoft has MSN which they like to try to push (quietly so as not to upset the DOJ). If AT&T, Comcast, Verison, Sprint, T-Mobile, or others decided to start giving preference to their own search (this includes site-finder like stuff) or net neutrality falters (so Google services are reduced unless someone pays extra) then Google could be in for a world of hurt. By the time the mandatory court case got far (at least far enough for an injunction) this could have become quite bad for Google.
Should the court not grant such an injunction, take a long time to grant it, or the ISPs did it sneakily enough Google could suffer some real harm by the time things got "fixed".
Google wants more people on the 'net. There is no question about that. This also serves branding ("I get my internet from Google", "Google lowered my broadband prices"). But it promises Google that even if net neutrality is denied by the supreme court, they have a possibly big partner that they can try to prevent from pushing stuff like that on them.
This is at minimum (and skeptically) a preventative measure. In the short term I think the other benefits will be better, but this is a safe play for Google.
I assume it's primarily a cost type thing. Flying 4 small automated UAVs is probably cheaper than even 1 manned craft.
There are other possible reasons too. At their size, it's relatively easy to fly the UAVs at low alititudes (like 1 or 2k feet). They are going to be quiet (unlike a small Cessna) when close to the ground. They could be run 'round the clock, and if they can hold a charge (or they put solar panels on 'em) they could stay up for 12+ hours at a time.
I can see some real good points for why you may want a UAV.
No kidding. I would really like to see a poll of the jury members, and if they would change their votes if they had been told that Hans's ex-friend (the wife's new dude) had confessed to killing 8 people.
Some facts are prejudicial.
Some facts are prejudicial for a very good reason.
I'd like to see numbers on how that would have changed things.
Too bad ReiserFS will probably die. I'm going to guess that they won't be giving him his own computer in prison to continue development with. I wonder if someone else will effectively try to step up and take control of the project, or it will just lose all it's momentum (not that it didn't in the last few years anyway).
I've had to do that too (bonus points for doing it without turning off the computer, because it wouldn't be able to boot back up... yes, it was stupid to do).
Most people won't know that, or how to do it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it was a cheap motherboard with the flash chip soldered on and no backup, thus basically unfixable.
It could be a brick. There is nothing to prevent Apple from releasing a patch that would simply erase the BIOS/EFI from the thing. It's not like they couldn't get their hands on one box to see exactly how to do it.
Without a BIOS, your computer is bricked.
Normal software updates might render the OS unusable, and you're right you could just install Ubuntu. But Apple could truly brick the thing if they decided too.
Am I the only one who thinks it would be hilarious if every model they shipped out contained a faulty motherboard, with signals rerouted to hide the fact everything is running from a Mac Mini stashed in the "powersupply"?
That would be great.
I've got to say, for a scam they are really committed.
At first, I thought this was all interesting and going to have an interesting legal battle attached to it. Then it was clear this was a scam and there would be no fun to watch. Now I'm starting to wonder if I'll get to see the legal fight after all. Maybe it's not a scam?
The theory that people were passing around was that it would be primarily targeted at raytracing and have a small rasterization engine that was decent but not high performance.
It was a stupid idea. I don't think even Intel could could make raytracing parts competitive in the market at this point. If they wanted to do that with a new part, I would expect them to be showing MUCH more at this stage. If they were to just drop this on the world in the next few months or year, no one would be able to support it fast enough to make the part reasonable for most games.
This is the clear path. I'm actually a bit skeptical that raytracing was anything but a tech demo they have been toying with. I kinda doubt it's being seriously considered for anything but it's ability to be a relatively familiar demo that can use it's many cores.
Right. It's rare that chips perform massively above their spec, or are disabled just for fun. Most of the time it's because they won't perform at that higher speed or have some other error (some bad cache). OCers do other mods to try to make things more stable (like run extra voltage through the chip, stronger cooling, etc). Without those changes the chips won't run faster without crashing noticeably often.
I was just trying to point out that this isn't something new that AMD invented to screw with people. Companies have been doing stuff like this for years. There is no reason Intel couldn't have been doing this exact thing in the last few years, they just haven't.
Everyone already does that. That's one of the reasons that Celerons used to be so popular with the overclocker crowd. When Intel didn't have enough of one kind of Celeron but had too many of another, they would mark down the faster chips or disable some cache on a P3.
Due to yields, if you buy a slow processor there is a good chance that it is capable of running quite a bit faster. When you buy a top of the line processor, that's much less likely.
GPU makers have been known to do the same thing. I remember when you could flash a low end card (one of the GeForce 4s?) to be a more expensive one (more shaders) and you might end up with a working card (wasn't disabled due to errors, just to 'meet quota').
This is normal. If they didn't do this, people would have to buy the faster chips which would cause their price to drop.
That's an interesting article, I hadn't seen that.
Of course, the article says that's what they do when they know the area. They just use the landscape to guide them. When unfamiliar with an area, it says they use the sun, starts, and magnetic field of the Earth to find out which way to go.
So, from reading the article, the birds observing the chemical reaction, thus slowing it down long enough for the magnetic field of the Earth to have a detectable effect when it shouldn't.
Quantum mechanics is so weird. Neat!
But when the researchers looked for this, shouldn't that looking have caused the metaphorical pot to be watched thus inducing the effect, or had no one tried to measure this simply because they knew the reaction didn't take long enough (or shouldn't, ignoring quantum mechanics)?
Bonus questions: The article said that had proved this by using a strong electric field to alter the way this reaction goes. Would it be possible to inject something into the birds that would prevent them from "watching" this reaction, so it would go at it's "normal" speed?
I understand. But the Ghost in the Shell movie (the first) was dubbed, and the two series (Stand Alone Complex 1 & 2) were also dubbed, all with the same actors (those who seem to be responsible for half the Anime that hits the US). It's not like they don't have decent actors.
How about releasing a version of GiTS2: Innocence that's dubbed into English first for those of us who want to be able to look at the art and not have to read all the subtitles?
That's a good question. I've wondered that too. I don't think there are any game studios near me. I'm pretty sure I'd have to go at least 75 miles to get to one with more than 2 or 3 employees.
I can think of three reasons.
Number 2 is probably the biggest reasons. If you want to act, you go to NYC or Hollywood. If you want to be in fashion you go to Paris, Milan, or NYC. If you want to be in games you can go to Seattle, San Fran, or Dallas (they seem to have quite a few, iD among others). Once people start following that advice, it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
That's cute and all, but what is that in pocket money? When you take out taxes, health care, rent, gas, water, electricity, phone, internet, etc... how much is left? Is there still an advantage in the UK? Does the advantage switch to the US? Are they about the same then?
Now you'll have to go based on average. Things are more expensive in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, London, etc. than in smaller places like Dallas, Kansas City, Omaha, etc.
Speaking of which, how does the average salary of the place most of these jobs are located in effect this? Are the UK numbers higher because most video game jobs are located in extremely expensive areas?
I don't see how there is much you can do. There was an article here a few months ago about a group that started sending out bad XML because too many people were using the DTD they were hosting, to the tune of 10,000s of hits a day that were completely unnecessary.
The company I work (not Fortune 500, smaller) sees some stuff that continues to floor me. Our dealings are mostly transactions of information (containing important things like bank accounts) between our computes and those of other companies. We have had to, quite a few times, flat out turn people down because they refuse to run securely. Not without massive DB encryption. Not hashing everything. Just not using SSL, an easy to implement addition on top of HTTP (which carries our conversations with people).
Every two months or so, we are put in the position of telling people that the SSL certificate on their production system expired last night. This usually entails a discussion as to why we can't just let them slide, or give them a day, etc. We've had people switch off good SSL certificates from very valid authorities to self-signed certificates.
In fact the expiration problem happened enough that someone seriously suggested we consider making a little program to check people's certificates and warn us when they were going to expire so we could warn them. Things got better and it didn't happen. Many people just don't care.
I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end. Then they called our office to make sure we knew it was about to expire and to find out if we really wanted that to happen. Then today, a few weeks after it expired, I got an email reminding me that it expired and they'd be glad to renew it. I don't know how many companies are this proactive about renewing SSL certs, but I'd have had to have my head buried pretty far in the sand to not have noticed all that.
We've seen plenty of poor security designs. I don't expect other operations to be perfectly secure. But the number of these companies who seem either ignorant or dismissive of SSL continues to surprise me from time to time.
Best advice? If you can at all, shut them down. Very few of the companies we have worked with have been very nice about turning on SSL. Some have said "just add S to the URL" (it was secure, they just didn't give us that URL). Some have said "sorry, we'll get that right up". More than a few have not been that easy. Turning people off is the best power we have. If your contracts are big enough (as a Fortune 300 company, they might be) you could try to put security provisions in them with penalties for shenanigans. But we've found that when discussions aren't working, just disconnecting people usually gets their attention.
True, but the federal government has done this kind of thing before. Besides simply declaring that such taxes can't be passed (you could argue interstate-commerce clause), the feds can just fiddle with funding.
"Violate our ban and you get no federal help for disasters, or maybe to help with police/etc, or road assistance, or health care (ouch), or something else." The states will run scared. It worked for getting the drinking age raised to 21.
I've been here for quite a few years. I think maybe 9.
Since when has /. not lobbied for certain things?
Democrats, liberals, net neutrality, voter verified paper trails, and tons more. This has only increased (unsurprisingly) since the Politics section was created (which helped reduce the S/N on the other bits). Slashdot has been quite vocal in various things (like almost anything anti-Bush) for years and years.
All that said, this is a private website. They can lobby for whatever they want. That story went through the firehose (or at least other copied did) and was quite popular. Readers seem to want to discuss it as well.
No, because the music is accessible without agreeing to the license agreement.
Now if the music required a little piece of software on the disc to listen to, they could then use the license agreement.
However, at that point it's no longer an audio CD, and people wouldn't buy it. If they did, they would return it when they found out it wouldn't work in their car.
The important thing is that you have to go through the agreement to get to the content. That's my understanding.
Nope. Once you changed something, then it's no longer the agreement that Apple agreed to, so the agreement isn't valid and you can't use the software.
How is clicking "I agree" any different than doing the same kind of thing when signing up for a bank account or buying something online where you do the same thing? You type your name and click "I agree" to get a loan online. I believe courts have said that it can be considered a signature, at least in the US.
I agree with my sibling comments that this is almost certainly infeasible. Storage would be a nightmare, trying to suddenly absorb all that energy.
However, the first thing that came to my mind was radio. Protecting antennas (especially the large ones like AM broadcast) I'd imagine is quite tough and expensive. You are going to take hits, and you have to have everything designed to deflect as much energy as possible. You obviously don't want your millions and millions of dollars of equipment getting fried. The insurance on all this can't be cheap.
Yet if you could use a laser to drain local clouds near your antennas... you might be able to seriously mitigate possible strikes or at least the damage they might cause.
Heck, if you could make this really cheap (obviously difficult, especially given laser power requirements) you could protect kids sports events and such that might otherwise get cancelled.
In the midwest, sudden and STRONG thunderstorms are quite normal during parts of the year. I could see this being useful.
Heck, synch the pulses up to the local radio station as an advertisement. "LAZR 102.7, now protecting you from lightning. Shows start when the thunder does!"
(be afraid of NPR pledge drive week)
That's why you have to click "agree" when you first install OS X (that includes first boot on pre-installed computers).
That's tantamount to a signature.
How do you figure? Some people would say to buy a refurb motherboard and build your own, but others would suggest you buy one of the few non-Apple PPC boards (like those the Amiga groups used, IIRC) and install on those.
Because Apple said so. They are allowed to put whatever restrictions in their license they want, as long as they are legal. They can put some really weird things in that and have each product have conflicting requirements.
The question here is: is that particular restriction legal (and thus valid) or illegal (and thus can be ignored)