Methinks you're perhaps being a tad overoptimistic, here.
The real problem is that this stuff is being commercially driven, which leads to quarter-by-quarter decisions. The time constant of the equilibrium is more commonly measured in years, if not decades, centuries, or millennia. Therefore a business decision about something with environmental equilibrium implications will quite frequently start out wrong, and only be corrected once the discomfort approaches obvious.
I'll see your 10 years, and raise you 10 years. Don't know if it's exactly the Model M, but I'm still using the same old 101-key keyboard that I got back in 1987 with my first IBM. A few years back at a hamfest, I found a brand new old 101-key, still in the unopened box for $25, but my mistake was only buying one.
I would argue that they are neither hobbyists nor C++ geeks, because either of those groups would have done a better job of meta-management of their application. More to the point might be "corporate programming drones who got into software because they thought the money would be good." Keep the eyes on the tube, fingers on the keyboard, work to the schedule, and put the check-mark on the list when "done."
An essential part of multitasking is to understand your own context switch penalty and adjust things appropriately. At the low extreme of multitasking is reading Slashdot while waiting for a run (compile, simulation, whatever) to complete. Well, come to think of it, even lower would be staring into space while waiting for the run. At the high extreme of multitasking, you spend all your time switching and no time working. The sweet spot is most likely different for everyone - know your own and how to work in it.
> Not trying to bust your chops, but what if the question is "how do I rewire this Ethernet jack"? > If you need said Ethernet connection to get online and look up the instructions...
Down in my basement workshop, half of one wall is pegboard. On one hanger is my crimp tool, RJ45 cable checker, and blister pack of RJ45 connectors. On the same hanger, under all of those, is the sheet of dead tree I printed off the web, with the color codes and sequence for the wires.
Well once upon a time, the Doom engine was capped at 35fps. They left it so you could get higher fps numbers for benchmarketing, but they only put images onto the screen at a max rate of 35fps.
I won't say whether or not that's giving THW too much credit or not.
Good point, though I've also seen it made in other places. But I hadn't thought of it with regards to human waste, before. One of those books I read as a kid was "Farmer in the Sky" by Heinlein. Part of the book goes into detail of the process of trying to turn the rock of Ganymede into soil. I'd say that a bunch of human waste stored in vacuum for a while would be good for any farming effort. Actually, I wouldn't store the stuff in a vacuum, I'd store the stuff in some sort of inflatable vessel. Water is mass that took fuel to lift, too. Thermal cycling in orbit would probably satisfy bacterial issues, too.
Besides which, Skylab had a limited design life for one simple reason - waste. I once saw a cutaway picture of Skylab, and at the bottom there was a large, but still finite waste chamber. Waste was vacuum dried and some samples sent to Earth, but the bulk put in the tank. AFAIK there were no provisions to empty it, and once full, the missions would be over, regardless of orbit.
Besides the Apollo era, by definition, is better than anything we can do today, or that NASA will ever be able to do again. It's a truism.
Actually Glenn had only been into space once, on Friendship 7, for 3 orbits sitting in a crammed tiny capsule. Have you ever SEEN a Mercury capsule in person? Besides having no room to speak of, there's only a minor excuse for a window to see out.
Keep in mind that Vista may be the best thing that has happened to hardware makers in quite a while, that is as long as XP is no longer available on new machines, at least not on machines available to John Q Public. With it's "enhanced" hardware requirements, Vista has redefined "bottom end machine" in a way that pleases all sectors of personal computer and associated component manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sales. To them, those cheap-o boxes with no room for profit were a pain in the neck.
As long as *only* Vista is available for the consumer, everyone on the supply side benefits. MSFT doesn't have to sweeten Dell's pot for Vista, Vista itself is the sweetener. MSFT just has to make sure someone else can't offer XP.
Two other mentions were made, the licensed "right" to go back to XP and that business machines only come with Vista. First off, you can buy your new machine with Vista, and then you can turn around and buy a copy of XP and legally install it. Haven't saved any money though, in fact you spent more. That old OEM box of XP you had on your old machine, now a Linux server, was licensed for one machine, activated on that machine, and while maybe you can activate it on a new machine because it does allow some number of major hardware changes, it's technically in violation of the XP license. So essentially you can spend more money to use XP instead of Vista.
As for the business machines, bigger businesses have their own images. They buy new machines, wipe them, and install their images. THAT is what the XP downgrade provision was meant for, because it's going to take 6-12 months or more for corporate rollouts of Vista, and MS knows they can't force businesses like they can the consumer market. Besides, as I said before, the PC supply side probably LIKES Vista and it's "enhanced" hardware requirements.
It's Marvin, not Martin. Brain the size of a galaxy, and they can't even get the name right. Do you need any doors opened? As long as they're not cheerful...
>I suppose that makes sense, from a particularly twisted viewpoint:). And, actually, it fits in nicely with the "secure audio server" VM notion. Putting the >actual DRM in an audio card is problematic because it's too "fixed". You can't easily manage a dozen different DRM schemes, plus you probably don't want to make >it so that consumers can't replace their sound card without losing all their music. Instead, just have the secure audio server VM (SASVM) establish an encrypted >channel to the sound card. Then the SASVM can validate and decrypt the stream, then re-encrypt it for secure tranfer to the audio card -- which may decrypt it, >separate it into channels and re-encrypt it for secure transfer to each speaker.
The block diagram I saw was for video, so I was only presuming audio would be similar. This video system had encryption engines (note the 's') scattered in various places. Strikes me that this couldn't have even been done until current levels of integration. They may well have more silicon in encryption that they used to have in regular function.
>I guess it's job security for a bunch of crypto guys and secure software/hardware engineers, even if it doesn't do anything other than convince users to grab >their media off bit torrent because they can't find a way to format shift it themselves.
So far it seems to have either been job security for wannabees, or for real security people stifled under management that doesn't listen.
I hope you didn't think I was really serious. I was posing a brain-dead argument that actually might be used by some.
Unfortunately, it looks to me as if the US has decided that, first having turned into a resource-consumer, then having farmed out its manufacturing, currently farming out its development and even research, it's going to make its economic mark as an IP shark. If you're going to be an IP shark, you've got to be aggressive and go after IP in every way in every place. Unfortunately in that light, my silly comment starts to look disgustingly serious.
I'll accept your points, and I certainly didn't mean to criticize the technology behind Jar-Jar, just the writing.
I think Gollum may be a more interesting point, though. While trying to save money on people, full animation like Jar-Jar is also tremendously intensive, expensive, and lengthy. Digitizing an actor's movements and using them to animate a computer model might well be easier and faster. Imagine a situation where you're not hired for how you look, talk, or sing, but how you move.
Several years ago we went to see a high-school production of Chicago. At the end, Velma and Roxy came out for that little finishing song-and-dance number. Seconds into the number, it became terribly obvious that the girl playing Velma was an accomplished dancer, and the girl playing Roxy wasn't. It didn't appear to be any conscious attempt to one-up the other, just the movement itself. The contrast didn't show up until the final number, because that was the first time they danced together, and then it was glaring. Now imagine the plain/ugly actor with the graceful moves and the handsome/beautiful, but clumsy actor, in a situation where their motion is used to animate CGI.
>>The other thing that IS happening is that en/decryption capabilities are being built into the peripheral devices, themselves. How about simply sending the >>encrypted video stream to the mpeg engine on your video card and it kicks out an encrypted audio stream to send to your sound card. Unencrypted data never goes >>near chip pins, let alone the PCI bus or onto a hard disk. Nothing in the clear until it's visible and audible.
>Actually, I think a TPM plus Intel VT/AMD-V makes that arguably unnecessary. If devices are going to get into it, I think the logical approach (from the DRM >perspective) is to push it out another layer -- to the actual display/speaker. That's what HDMI does. That way there's no way the user can grab the analog signal >between the video card and display or between the sound card and speakers.
As part of my job, I've seen block diagrams with encryption/decryption engines scattered at various paranoid points. You're right about HDMI, but the block diagrams I've seen make sure that clear media never makes it near anything you can hang a wire off of. In other words, they're concerned about people opening the case and hanging a logic analyzer onto traces on the card. Well, probably the PCI/PCI-E bus, but they've planned it at the card level.
>I think it would almost be better if such a DRM-enabled system did prevent you from doing your own stuff, then people would be less likely to accept it.
Good point. Let's hope they're no better at rolling this stuff out than they have been so far at designing and implementing it.
> how them how DRM has failed to have any effect on piracy, and yet how it's been used to force people to buy the same songs twice.
But buying the same song twice (or even more) is GOOD. It shows up as profit, and helps move the economy. It drives you to work more/harder. Both show up as tax revenue. Maybe DRM should be even more intrusive, and it would have even more good effects.
Fair? If there was concern about fair we wouldn't even be discussing this. It wouldn't even be an issue.
The other thing that IS happening is that en/decryption capabilities are being built into the peripheral devices, themselves. How about simply sending the encrypted video stream to the mpeg engine on your video card and it kicks out an encrypted audio stream to send to your sound card. Unencrypted data never goes near chip pins, let alone the PCI bus or onto a hard disk. Nothing in the clear until it's visible and audible.
Scary - yes. Nasty - yes.
But the good side is that perhaps it circumvents the whole TPM and OS-level control thing. That leaves TPM for ME to control, perhaps for something like anti-theft or other security measures.
The real fear is if DRM-enabled (DRM-disabled?) peripherals won't allow full-capability usage of non-encrypted content. Can I do MY stuff at full capabilities?
It clearly appears that Microsoft is going to *force* Vista to be a success, and most likely they have the clout to do so.
But in this case, though you have the "right" to downgrade your system to XP Pro, do you have the capability do to so?
Drivers are always the thorn in the side, manufacturers would like to supply as few as possible. Now in order to make new sales with OEM Windows they *must* deliver Vista drivers. But no corporation deploys a new OS immediately, it's more likely to be 6-12 months, perhaps longer before corporate Vista rollouts begin. So for the next year or so, manufactures also *must* deliver XP drivers if they want to make new sales into corporate markets.
It's probably going to happen, and it's probably going to hurt Linux, because they're going to take their scarce/expensive resources and put them on 2 different Windows drivers, as opposed to 1 Windows and "everyone else."
We're all made partially of stars. As for original matter, there was mostly hydrogen, a little deuterium, less helium, and negligible (maybe none) amounts of the rest. For that matter, the early universe was too hot to even allow atoms or nuclei to exist, let alone heavy elements.
All of this stuff in us, excluding the H in our H2O, came out of stars. It took several generations of stars being born and dying to get to the raw materials out there for us. I once read, though I can't quote where, that we are relatively early onto the scene, as far as this galaxy goes. Relatively may be a fuzzy term, but I would interpret it to mean that there won't be intelligent life billions of years older than us.
Just like there's a roughly defined habitable zone around the sun, there's also likely a habitable zone in the galaxy. Too far in and the radiation is too great, too far out and there haven't been enough stellar generations, enough scattering of heavy material, to produce complex life.
IMHO, the Drake Equation is optimistic, and doesn't properly address time.
Slashdot Mirror
Science itself is the greatest reverse-engineering project ever undertaken.
> And that isn't a very hard problem.
Methinks you're perhaps being a tad overoptimistic, here.
The real problem is that this stuff is being commercially driven, which leads to quarter-by-quarter decisions. The time constant of the equilibrium is more commonly measured in years, if not decades, centuries, or millennia. Therefore a business decision about something with environmental equilibrium implications will quite frequently start out wrong, and only be corrected once the discomfort approaches obvious.
- Encode *BSD onto bacteria, then hit it with antibiotics, (or flames from a torch) and post "*BSD is dying" on Slashdot.
I'll see your 10 years, and raise you 10 years. Don't know if it's exactly the Model M, but I'm still using the same old 101-key keyboard that I got back in 1987 with my first IBM. A few years back at a hamfest, I found a brand new old 101-key, still in the unopened box for $25, but my mistake was only buying one.
I would argue that they are neither hobbyists nor C++ geeks, because either of those groups would have done a better job of meta-management of their application. More to the point might be "corporate programming drones who got into software because they thought the money would be good." Keep the eyes on the tube, fingers on the keyboard, work to the schedule, and put the check-mark on the list when "done."
But just think of the things that American society's lopsided distribution HAS produced - like Paris Hilton.
An essential part of multitasking is to understand your own context switch penalty and adjust things appropriately. At the low extreme of multitasking is reading Slashdot while waiting for a run (compile, simulation, whatever) to complete. Well, come to think of it, even lower would be staring into space while waiting for the run. At the high extreme of multitasking, you spend all your time switching and no time working. The sweet spot is most likely different for everyone - know your own and how to work in it.
> Not trying to bust your chops, but what if the question is "how do I rewire this Ethernet jack"?
> If you need said Ethernet connection to get online and look up the instructions...
Down in my basement workshop, half of one wall is pegboard. On one hanger is my crimp tool, RJ45 cable checker, and blister pack of RJ45 connectors. On the same hanger, under all of those, is the sheet of dead tree I printed off the web, with the color codes and sequence for the wires.
Well once upon a time, the Doom engine was capped at 35fps. They left it so you could get higher fps numbers for benchmarketing, but they only put images onto the screen at a max rate of 35fps.
I won't say whether or not that's giving THW too much credit or not.
They had a galactic IP network, and vignettes and excerpts were used throughout the book.
It looked like Usenet, complete with headers.
Good point, though I've also seen it made in other places. But I hadn't thought of it with regards to human waste, before. One of those books I read as a kid was "Farmer in the Sky" by Heinlein. Part of the book goes into detail of the process of trying to turn the rock of Ganymede into soil. I'd say that a bunch of human waste stored in vacuum for a while would be good for any farming effort. Actually, I wouldn't store the stuff in a vacuum, I'd store the stuff in some sort of inflatable vessel. Water is mass that took fuel to lift, too. Thermal cycling in orbit would probably satisfy bacterial issues, too.
Besides which, Skylab had a limited design life for one simple reason - waste. I once saw a cutaway picture of Skylab, and at the bottom there was a large, but still finite waste chamber. Waste was vacuum dried and some samples sent to Earth, but the bulk put in the tank. AFAIK there were no provisions to empty it, and once full, the missions would be over, regardless of orbit.
Besides the Apollo era, by definition, is better than anything we can do today, or that NASA will ever be able to do again. It's a truism.
Actually Glenn had only been into space once, on Friendship 7, for 3 orbits sitting in a crammed tiny capsule. Have you ever SEEN a Mercury capsule in person? Besides having no room to speak of, there's only a minor excuse for a window to see out.
Keep in mind that Vista may be the best thing that has happened to hardware makers in quite a while, that is as long as XP is no longer available on new machines, at least not on machines available to John Q Public. With it's "enhanced" hardware requirements, Vista has redefined "bottom end machine" in a way that pleases all sectors of personal computer and associated component manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sales. To them, those cheap-o boxes with no room for profit were a pain in the neck.
As long as *only* Vista is available for the consumer, everyone on the supply side benefits. MSFT doesn't have to sweeten Dell's pot for Vista, Vista itself is the sweetener. MSFT just has to make sure someone else can't offer XP.
Two other mentions were made, the licensed "right" to go back to XP and that business machines only come with Vista. First off, you can buy your new machine with Vista, and then you can turn around and buy a copy of XP and legally install it. Haven't saved any money though, in fact you spent more. That old OEM box of XP you had on your old machine, now a Linux server, was licensed for one machine, activated on that machine, and while maybe you can activate it on a new machine because it does allow some number of major hardware changes, it's technically in violation of the XP license. So essentially you can spend more money to use XP instead of Vista.
As for the business machines, bigger businesses have their own images. They buy new machines, wipe them, and install their images. THAT is what the XP downgrade provision was meant for, because it's going to take 6-12 months or more for corporate rollouts of Vista, and MS knows they can't force businesses like they can the consumer market. Besides, as I said before, the PC supply side probably LIKES Vista and it's "enhanced" hardware requirements.
It's Marvin, not Martin. Brain the size of a galaxy, and they can't even get the name right. Do you need any doors opened? As long as they're not cheerful...
>I suppose that makes sense, from a particularly twisted viewpoint :). And, actually, it fits in nicely with the "secure audio server" VM notion. Putting the >actual DRM in an audio card is problematic because it's too "fixed". You can't easily manage a dozen different DRM schemes, plus you probably don't want to make >it so that consumers can't replace their sound card without losing all their music. Instead, just have the secure audio server VM (SASVM) establish an encrypted >channel to the sound card. Then the SASVM can validate and decrypt the stream, then re-encrypt it for secure tranfer to the audio card -- which may decrypt it, >separate it into channels and re-encrypt it for secure transfer to each speaker.
The block diagram I saw was for video, so I was only presuming audio would be similar. This video system had encryption engines (note the 's') scattered in various places. Strikes me that this couldn't have even been done until current levels of integration. They may well have more silicon in encryption that they used to have in regular function.
>I guess it's job security for a bunch of crypto guys and secure software/hardware engineers, even if it doesn't do anything other than convince users to grab >their media off bit torrent because they can't find a way to format shift it themselves.
So far it seems to have either been job security for wannabees, or for real security people stifled under management that doesn't listen.
I hope you didn't think I was really serious. I was posing a brain-dead argument that actually might be used by some.
Unfortunately, it looks to me as if the US has decided that, first having turned into a resource-consumer, then having farmed out its manufacturing, currently farming out its development and even research, it's going to make its economic mark as an IP shark. If you're going to be an IP shark, you've got to be aggressive and go after IP in every way in every place. Unfortunately in that light, my silly comment starts to look disgustingly serious.
I'll accept your points, and I certainly didn't mean to criticize the technology behind Jar-Jar, just the writing.
I think Gollum may be a more interesting point, though. While trying to save money on people, full animation like Jar-Jar is also tremendously intensive, expensive, and lengthy. Digitizing an actor's movements and using them to animate a computer model might well be easier and faster. Imagine a situation where you're not hired for how you look, talk, or sing, but how you move.
Several years ago we went to see a high-school production of Chicago. At the end, Velma and Roxy came out for that little finishing song-and-dance number. Seconds into the number, it became terribly obvious that the girl playing Velma was an accomplished dancer, and the girl playing Roxy wasn't. It didn't appear to be any conscious attempt to one-up the other, just the movement itself. The contrast didn't show up until the final number, because that was the first time they danced together, and then it was glaring. Now imagine the plain/ugly actor with the graceful moves and the handsome/beautiful, but clumsy actor, in a situation where their motion is used to animate CGI.
Then there's the voice artist...
>>The other thing that IS happening is that en/decryption capabilities are being built into the peripheral devices, themselves. How about simply sending the >>encrypted video stream to the mpeg engine on your video card and it kicks out an encrypted audio stream to send to your sound card. Unencrypted data never goes >>near chip pins, let alone the PCI bus or onto a hard disk. Nothing in the clear until it's visible and audible.
>Actually, I think a TPM plus Intel VT/AMD-V makes that arguably unnecessary. If devices are going to get into it, I think the logical approach (from the DRM >perspective) is to push it out another layer -- to the actual display/speaker. That's what HDMI does. That way there's no way the user can grab the analog signal >between the video card and display or between the sound card and speakers.
As part of my job, I've seen block diagrams with encryption/decryption engines scattered at various paranoid points. You're right about HDMI, but the block diagrams I've seen make sure that clear media never makes it near anything you can hang a wire off of. In other words, they're concerned about people opening the case and hanging a logic analyzer onto traces on the card. Well, probably the PCI/PCI-E bus, but they've planned it at the card level.
>I think it would almost be better if such a DRM-enabled system did prevent you from doing your own stuff, then people would be less likely to accept it.
Good point. Let's hope they're no better at rolling this stuff out than they have been so far at designing and implementing it.
> how them how DRM has failed to have any effect on piracy, and yet how it's been used to force people to buy the same songs twice.
But buying the same song twice (or even more) is GOOD. It shows up as profit, and helps move the economy. It drives you to work more/harder. Both show up as tax revenue. Maybe DRM should be even more intrusive, and it would have even more good effects.
Fair? If there was concern about fair we wouldn't even be discussing this. It wouldn't even be an issue.
In an era where technology makes things plentiful, the most valuable thing you can have is scarcity.
That's what Intellectual Property has evolved into, creating scarcity.
Clearly Jar-Jar Binks is the example to prove your point.
(GDR)
The other thing that IS happening is that en/decryption capabilities are being built into the peripheral devices, themselves. How about simply sending the encrypted video stream to the mpeg engine on your video card and it kicks out an encrypted audio stream to send to your sound card. Unencrypted data never goes near chip pins, let alone the PCI bus or onto a hard disk. Nothing in the clear until it's visible and audible.
Scary - yes. Nasty - yes.
But the good side is that perhaps it circumvents the whole TPM and OS-level control thing. That leaves TPM for ME to control, perhaps for something like anti-theft or other security measures.
The real fear is if DRM-enabled (DRM-disabled?) peripherals won't allow full-capability usage of non-encrypted content. Can I do MY stuff at full capabilities?
It clearly appears that Microsoft is going to *force* Vista to be a success, and most likely they have the clout to do so.
But in this case, though you have the "right" to downgrade your system to XP Pro, do you have the capability do to so?
Drivers are always the thorn in the side, manufacturers would like to supply as few as possible. Now in order to make new sales with OEM Windows they *must* deliver Vista drivers. But no corporation deploys a new OS immediately, it's more likely to be 6-12 months, perhaps longer before corporate Vista rollouts begin. So for the next year or so, manufactures also *must* deliver XP drivers if they want to make new sales into corporate markets.
It's probably going to happen, and it's probably going to hurt Linux, because they're going to take their scarce/expensive resources and put them on 2 different Windows drivers, as opposed to 1 Windows and "everyone else."
We're all made partially of stars. As for original matter, there was mostly hydrogen, a little deuterium, less helium, and negligible (maybe none) amounts of the rest. For that matter, the early universe was too hot to even allow atoms or nuclei to exist, let alone heavy elements.
All of this stuff in us, excluding the H in our H2O, came out of stars. It took several generations of stars being born and dying to get to the raw materials out there for us. I once read, though I can't quote where, that we are relatively early onto the scene, as far as this galaxy goes. Relatively may be a fuzzy term, but I would interpret it to mean that there won't be intelligent life billions of years older than us.
Just like there's a roughly defined habitable zone around the sun, there's also likely a habitable zone in the galaxy. Too far in and the radiation is too great, too far out and there haven't been enough stellar generations, enough scattering of heavy material, to produce complex life.
IMHO, the Drake Equation is optimistic, and doesn't properly address time.