In the EU bureaucracy, power is pretty much split into 3 blocks: - The European Commission - non-elected, nominated and agreed by and between the countries governments - The Council of Europe - representatives of each country's governments - The European Parliement - directly elected
Somehow I suspect this treaty is being negociated by the European Commission, same as ACTA. That would make the "EU's" demands it contains not surprising at all: the Commission is (unsurprisingly) the one force in Europe which is deepest in the pocket of corporate special interests (for example, they were the ones that wanted Software Patents in Europe).
The European Parliement on the other hand tends to side more with Citizens and Consumers (again, unsurprisingly).
The funny bit is that, if the Commission does manage to get this treaty signed by Canada, it might still be voted down in Europe by the European Parliement.
Any kind of electromagnetic radiation can induce a current in a line of conductive material such as, for example, the copper lines in a circuit board that connect the data pins in the memory modules with the memory controller (which is usually part of the CPU).
Thus, although electromagnetic radiation cannot flip bits in the memory modules, in a digital system it can produce effects which are similar because it is capable of changing the voltage levels in the data lines while said bits are being read from memory. Given the ever lower voltages in modern digital systems (due to the increase in speed, voltage levels have to be kept low to avoid overheating and delay issues due to capacitive effects), much less energy is required to flip a bit while "in-transit" (really simplified metaphor here).
This is why, if you place a PC close to a powerfull emitter of electromagnetic radiation it will start to misbehave.
I don't like pirates... they suck profit out of a tough field and generally make the world a worse place out of their selfishness... but I pirate games all the time just as a demo, and buy the ones that don't suck.
I guess it's okay if you do it.
I quote: "just as a demo, and buy the ones that don't suck"
I do exactly the same as the GP, so I'm really interested to know how exactly can we otherwise evaluate if a game is good enough to buy. Please let us know.
We're past the time when demos were freely available and representative of the game as a whole, commercial game review sites and magazines are pretty much in the pocket of the industry (two words: "grade inflaction") and will hype POSes harder than anybody else and "user review" sites are full of fanboys and "grassroots marketing".
[How often have you seen a game review which actually heavilly criticized a game from a major publisher due to bugs?]
To add insult to injury, consumer legislation is such that in many countries you'll be hard pressed to get a refund if a game doesn't at all work in your system. As a mater of fact, pirating games before buying them has saved me lots of problem with games that wouldn't work at all or were just too buggy: try getting a refund from any game store (especially an online one) on a game because it crashes every 10 minutes and see how far you get.
The day when I can go back to the store and get my money back on a game because it's buggy and/or sucks is the day I'll stop downloading games before buying them.
A software program is essentially a complex logic structure. One of the disciplines in Maths is Logic.
One could thus assume that a deep understanding of at least one of the areas in Maths is needed for Software Development.
However Logic (the Mathematical discipline) is just a formalization of an innate human ability - one can think logically and create logical structures without actually knowing the formalization.
Thus, in my view, a deep understanding of Math is thus not needed for Software Development.
That said, knowing the basics of Maths is needed and in fact expected of everybody in Software Development, so much so that it's pretty much assumed that anyboy in or wanting to get into Software Development knows them.
As selection criteria, Professional Experience/Proven Skill pretty much trump everything else.
(Think about it, who would you rather have, the guy with 10 years Software Engineering experience in the field or the one just fresh out of university with a Maths Doctorate)
After that you'll go for people which can work well in a team.
Maths is a nice to have, but except for very specific domains (such as Quants and other positions where you're creating Algorithm engines), it will never outweight Experience and Teamwork skills.
Most Sofware Engineering work out there is Algorithm-lite and instead is mostly based around Integration, User Interfaces and Workflow.
That said, Maths is usefull in IT, some times quite unexpectedly. Having a strong Maths foundation does help a lot in understanding many things, especially at the highest levels of Software Engineering (Software Design and Architecture).
Creating 100% secure software is like trying to prove an absolute statement (as in "All X have Y") - to prove it right, every single one of the subjects of your statement have to comform to it, while proving it wrong only takes one that does not.
Or in more specific terms: no matter how good the team developing a piece of software is and how long they have to do it, all it takes is one of them doing a single mistake and the results is not 100% secure.
It's reasonable to expect that all first order mistakes (i.e. the blindingly obvious) are caught, it is however not reasonable to expect that higher-order mistakes (for example: "unexpected interactions with a different version of a certain library installed in the same system in the 64 bit version of the OS") are caught, expecially those relating to external factors (which can change after the release is done).
Also there are economic limits to the level of security in a piece of software: more specifically, time is money, getting only the top best professionals to do it is a lot of money and (suprise, suprise) people are not willing to pay the higher price that such a product would require to break-even.
All I know is that not long before I left the country Health Insurance (Ziekenkostenverzekering) became mandatory for everybody above a certain age with it being reimbursed for those with low incomes.
This was probably in 2006.
At the time I read all about it in a phamplet that was sent to me by my Insurance company (I had Health Insurance already). I also saw first hand the effects (price-wise) when that measure came into effect: certainly the sudden jump in price on the basic package - which is all I had: the "Oh shit!" insurance coverage - for all health insurance policies available at the time did not happen simply out of thin air.
Not saying it's worse than the US - in fact, with the exception of the very bad tax-costs to amount-of-public-services-provided ratio (and the weather;)), I find Holland one of the best places to live in - just that in my experience mandatory insurance = higher prices for the same coverage.
With regards to Healthcare, I rather prefer the system in the UK to the one in Holland. That said, I am very healthy and barelly used any of them (so I don't know them that well first hand) and my income is high enough that if I need to I can pay for private care and skip the queues.
I guess it's up to MS to make a easy to use idiot-proof threaded framework for crappy programmers to use.
Good luck with that!
I do software design and development mostly with Java (which has built-in multithreading from the ground-up which is reasonably idiot-proof) and can tell you that most Java Programmers don't really understand how to create programs which are not prone to dealdlocks and critical-race conditions in a multi-threaded environment. In fact, plenty of them, when using standard frameworks (i.e. J2EE) are not even aware that their code is being used in a multi-threaded way. This is probably related to how simple Sun has made Multi-threading look-like in Java.
In fact, I've actually done a lot of interviewing for Senior Designer/Developer types and the area in which most candidates were likelly to be weak on was Multi-threading.
A Multi-threading implementation is by necessity a tradeoff between performance and simplicity: - When it's too simple you tend to end up with huge blocks of code which are single-threaded (because less experience developers will use the buil-in features in a coarse manner without really understanding what they do) - When it's too complex it rarelly gets used at all.
The biggest problem is no one has ever given me an answer as to why my money has to go to pay the medical bills of my neighbor who smokes half a pack a day, or my neighbor on the other side who thinks it's funny to drink a case of beer each weekend by themselves.
What about my coworkers who refuse to walk up one flight of stairs or drink a liter of Pepsi every day? Why should I have to pay for their medical expenses when they can't be bothered to take care of themselves?
There should be some kind of Health Insurance which gives you lower premiums if you lead a healthy lifestyle - certainly I remember that being available in the one country I lived in where Health Insurance was the way people paid for healthcare (Holland). I myself paid less because I neither smoke nor drink heavilly.
If you don't have access to this option (because the US system is designed in such a way that Health Insurance is cheaper when bought as a block by the Employers and as such individual behaviours cannot affect the price) then the problem is with the Rules and Regulations behind it, since in a proper free market, players will soon appear offering lower premiums for those willing to go the extra mile to keep healthy - just like Car Insurance premiums are cheaper for those with a long history of accident free driving.
I remember when I used to live in Holland and Mandatory Health Insurance came into effect: almost instantly my Health Insurance Premium went up by 30% (with no extra coverage being provided): checking with price-comparisson sites showed that the increase was all across the industry.
in my experience, Mandatory Insurance of any kind is just a form of tax payed directly to the Insurance companies.
That said, although I do believe the US desperatelly needs a big overhaul of it's Healthcare system [*], what ended up being passed only solves one of the problems (lack of Universal Coverage) without significantly improving the efficiency of the whole system [**] while introducing measures which, given the lack of restructuring of the way the Insurance Industry works in this area and the lack of Tort Reform, have the potential to make the Healthcare costs higher, not lower.
* The US spends twice as much as a percentage of GDP in Healthcare than everybody else and yet comes out very bad in things like child mortality rates
** Universal Coverage does help a bit on the efficiency front due to things like "Herd Immunity"
The Chinese government activelly encourages Chinese companies and people to steal ideas and processes from Western companies so that they can later compete with them not just in China but also outside.
Even the laws there are done in such a way that any Western company that wants to enter the Chinese market has to do so in a joint venture with a Chinese company which then can learn from said Western company. There are already cases where once a couple of Chinese companies where "trained" in this way, the laws where changed to kick out the Western companies and those Chinese companies started competing in that area outside China.
Example: Lenovo.
Sending your R&D to China is pretty much just giving it for free to the Chinese government.
[Note that I am not critical of the Chinese for doing this: they're doing what's good for them at the expense of dumb Western shareholders]
The problem is not the Indians, it's the Indian education system and the IT bubble in India.
I've worked with plenty of Indians in the UK and they're as good as everybody else: there's plenty of true hackers types (in the good sense of the word) out there that happen to be Indian.
However, my experience with our in-house teams based in India and with developers from Indian consultancies placed at the client in the UK is that they have a very high number of mediocre developers (and even some exceptionally bad ones). Note that what's common with these two is that hiring decisions are taken by Indian companies/divisions in India.
I've recently read in The Economist (the January 31st one, I believe - paper magazine, no link, sry) that a company in India has examined the ouput of Indian universities and concluded that only 12% (not fully sure about the number, around this value though) of the engineers trained every year by Indian Universities is actually competent enough to work in technology with a Western Corporation.
I've also had discussions with a friend of mine about this (who happens to be Indian) and our conclusion is that in India too many people go into IT because it pays well (not because they're any good at it) and that most of the better ones have emigrated from India.
It's always been my dream to be profiled by law enforcement on the basis of my shopping.
Who knows, maybe my toilet paper buying habits exactly match those of a known terrorist and the men in black will single me out for "special attention". After all, who doesn't want to be incarcerated for 28 days without actually being accused of anything because of buying "the supermarket's brand in packs of 4 in average once every two months" just like the terrorists.
The good news is that using a Government provided electronic ID card for shopping will bring me closer to my dream.
The main discussion in the article is about what to do with regards to reducing DRM (although game focused).
Although not game focused, my post shows that, at least in some areas, you can vote with your wallet away from the usual suspects in the hardware-DRM arena without actually having to give up on anything (in fact, by voting with my wallet I ended up having a better experience overall).
This is also why I own a gaming PC (which costs more than a non-gaming home PC because of the need for better CPU and Graphics Card) which is an open solution instead of an XBox or Playstation, why I have neither a BluRay player nor an HD TV and why I'm never going to buy an Apple product again (my 7 year old iPod is gathering dust somewhere).
Whenever I see a Slashdot story about a shinny new gadget from one of the usual suspects all the fanboys come out of the woodwork and plenty of people that should know better by now go all glaze-eyed about it.
I have plenty of money to get all the latest and greatest new gadgets and yet I choose not to buy products from some manufacturers preciselly because of their past and currenty history of shafting their costumers both directly and indirectly.
I've been preaching this around here for ages now (mostly as "don't buy Sony") but I get the impression that plenty of techy people are just switch their brains off whenever they see a new gadget and are (unknowingly) prone to peer-pressure in the form of tech fashion and fads.
The specific example of the parent of my OP, just proved me right and reafirmed my commitment to being choosy, so allow me my little moment of glee.
Most people learn best what's bad for them by trying something and getting hurt.
Those of little wisdom only learn anything this way: they're just too mentally short-sighted to see much beyond the "uuuhh, shinyyyy".
A couple of disconnections of one's connection, a couple of "going for vacations but the game doesn't work there", a couple of "Ubisoft's servers down due to unexpected problems" will do wonders in educating the unwashed masses.
Funnily enough I have this cheap no-name external-HD/Media-Player device that allows me to play XViD and DivX encoded files on my TV. I can either play files from my PC via Ethernet (NOT streaming, just files in shared folders), from the internal HD or from USB mass storage devices.
There are out there other (more expensive) devices just like it that play HD.
No DRM, no issues: my PC doesn't even need to be on. It's not even brand new technology: I've had this for 3 years now.
Going for media playing solutions from the likes of Sony, Microsoft or Apple is like tatooing on your forhead "I'm a Dumb Media Bitch".
Here's a good example (credits to Nassim Taleb and his "The Black Swan" book) on the risks of extrapolation (of which curve fitting is one method): - Based on previous experience, a turkey will confidently predict that he will wake up every morning be fed during the day and go to spleep in the evening. He can be easilly extrapolate this from the fact that it has happened every day of it's life. At some point before Christmas this turkey is going to have a big surprise...
Draconian IT Security policies that end up achieving the opposite effect are caused by the same underlying problems as the theatrical Security that's currently done in most airports:
If a Well-Balanced Security policy is in place and Something Bad happens, they blame the Security guys. If a Draconian Security policy is in place and Something Bad happens they can blame the person that "went around the security" (i.e. wrote a password in a piece of paper)
When a new widget/software is proclaimed as the next silver bullet, if Security gets it and Something Bad happens, they're the ones blames, if they do get it, then they can blame the widget/software
The guy that prevented thousands of Bad Somethings never got promoted to management, since Nothing Happened. They guys that get promotions are the ones that make an Heroic Recover when Something Bad happens
Billions of man-hours wasted can easilly be ignored when spread over many people as many small hassles.
The blame here is in Management - rewards and punishement are distributed on the basis of easilly observable artifacts of The Work instead of looking at the hard to define and hard to measure Results.
This problem is very common in all kinds of professions and in most countries...
Just recently I decided to go back to WoW (after a break of almost 5 years) bought the Battle Chest in a bricks and mortar store, in the UK, for £14.95.
That's less than $20 at current exchange rates.
First time ever that I bought anything in the UK that was cheaper than in the US.
'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.'
The "otherwise" basically means "in any way whatsoever" (i.e. thus also when not using Apple hardware, software or documentation).
The "in or by" means that it doesn't mater if the software does not at all target Apple products in any way: if the mechanism is used in or by the Apple software or services you can't do it.
The "any services or other Apple software or technology" means anything that Apple uses (even if it's as simple as Basic HTTP Authentication in an obscure Apple website).
The "or enable others to do so" means any tool that might help others do so. In my example above (Basic HTTP Authentication in an obscure Apple website) this means Packet Sniffers, HTTP Proxies (unless they have no logs) and in fact any means of intercepting an HTTP Request/Response. In fact (and given that Basic HTTP Authentication is easy to break) it could potentially be interpreted to cover an utility application that would allow you to more easilly read the RFC for HTTP 1.0 or a Base64 decoder (since that's the way the username:password are encoded in Basic HTTP Authentication).
Here's a plausible scenario: - Security researcher accepts this. He/she just agreed to never create any software that would show the weakness in a mechanism that was also implemented or used in any Apple product or service (even if not done by Apple) now and forever. This even if said research and said software was otherwise completely unrelated to Apple software/hardware and was not even done using knowledge aquired in any way from the Apple docs.
Slashdot Mirror
In the EU bureaucracy, power is pretty much split into 3 blocks:
- The European Commission - non-elected, nominated and agreed by and between the countries governments
- The Council of Europe - representatives of each country's governments
- The European Parliement - directly elected
Somehow I suspect this treaty is being negociated by the European Commission, same as ACTA. That would make the "EU's" demands it contains not surprising at all: the Commission is (unsurprisingly) the one force in Europe which is deepest in the pocket of corporate special interests (for example, they were the ones that wanted Software Patents in Europe).
The European Parliement on the other hand tends to side more with Citizens and Consumers (again, unsurprisingly).
The funny bit is that, if the Commission does manage to get this treaty signed by Canada, it might still be voted down in Europe by the European Parliement.
Any kind of electromagnetic radiation can induce a current in a line of conductive material such as, for example, the copper lines in a circuit board that connect the data pins in the memory modules with the memory controller (which is usually part of the CPU).
Thus, although electromagnetic radiation cannot flip bits in the memory modules, in a digital system it can produce effects which are similar because it is capable of changing the voltage levels in the data lines while said bits are being read from memory. Given the ever lower voltages in modern digital systems (due to the increase in speed, voltage levels have to be kept low to avoid overheating and delay issues due to capacitive effects), much less energy is required to flip a bit while "in-transit" (really simplified metaphor here).
This is why, if you place a PC close to a powerfull emitter of electromagnetic radiation it will start to misbehave.
I quote: "just as a demo, and buy the ones that don't suck"
I do exactly the same as the GP, so I'm really interested to know how exactly can we otherwise evaluate if a game is good enough to buy. Please let us know.
We're past the time when demos were freely available and representative of the game as a whole, commercial game review sites and magazines are pretty much in the pocket of the industry (two words: "grade inflaction") and will hype POSes harder than anybody else and "user review" sites are full of fanboys and "grassroots marketing".
[How often have you seen a game review which actually heavilly criticized a game from a major publisher due to bugs?]
To add insult to injury, consumer legislation is such that in many countries you'll be hard pressed to get a refund if a game doesn't at all work in your system. As a mater of fact, pirating games before buying them has saved me lots of problem with games that wouldn't work at all or were just too buggy: try getting a refund from any game store (especially an online one) on a game because it crashes every 10 minutes and see how far you get.
The day when I can go back to the store and get my money back on a game because it's buggy and/or sucks is the day I'll stop downloading games before buying them.
A software program is essentially a complex logic structure. One of the disciplines in Maths is Logic.
One could thus assume that a deep understanding of at least one of the areas in Maths is needed for Software Development.
However Logic (the Mathematical discipline) is just a formalization of an innate human ability - one can think logically and create logical structures without actually knowing the formalization.
Thus, in my view, a deep understanding of Math is thus not needed for Software Development.
That said, knowing the basics of Maths is needed and in fact expected of everybody in Software Development, so much so that it's pretty much assumed that anyboy in or wanting to get into Software Development knows them.
As selection criteria, Professional Experience/Proven Skill pretty much trump everything else.
(Think about it, who would you rather have, the guy with 10 years Software Engineering experience in the field or the one just fresh out of university with a Maths Doctorate)
After that you'll go for people which can work well in a team.
Maths is a nice to have, but except for very specific domains (such as Quants and other positions where you're creating Algorithm engines), it will never outweight Experience and Teamwork skills.
Most Sofware Engineering work out there is Algorithm-lite and instead is mostly based around Integration, User Interfaces and Workflow.
That said, Maths is usefull in IT, some times quite unexpectedly. Having a strong Maths foundation does help a lot in understanding many things, especially at the highest levels of Software Engineering (Software Design and Architecture).
I actually used their political memory section in deciding who to vote for in the last EU Parliement elections ...
Creating 100% secure software is like trying to prove an absolute statement (as in "All X have Y") - to prove it right, every single one of the subjects of your statement have to comform to it, while proving it wrong only takes one that does not.
Or in more specific terms: no matter how good the team developing a piece of software is and how long they have to do it, all it takes is one of them doing a single mistake and the results is not 100% secure.
It's reasonable to expect that all first order mistakes (i.e. the blindingly obvious) are caught, it is however not reasonable to expect that higher-order mistakes (for example: "unexpected interactions with a different version of a certain library installed in the same system in the 64 bit version of the OS") are caught, expecially those relating to external factors (which can change after the release is done).
Also there are economic limits to the level of security in a piece of software: more specifically, time is money, getting only the top best professionals to do it is a lot of money and (suprise, suprise) people are not willing to pay the higher price that such a product would require to break-even.
You'll only really know once you observe it.
All I know is that not long before I left the country Health Insurance (Ziekenkostenverzekering) became mandatory for everybody above a certain age with it being reimbursed for those with low incomes.
This was probably in 2006.
At the time I read all about it in a phamplet that was sent to me by my Insurance company (I had Health Insurance already). I also saw first hand the effects (price-wise) when that measure came into effect: certainly the sudden jump in price on the basic package - which is all I had: the "Oh shit!" insurance coverage - for all health insurance policies available at the time did not happen simply out of thin air.
Not saying it's worse than the US - in fact, with the exception of the very bad tax-costs to amount-of-public-services-provided ratio (and the weather ;)), I find Holland one of the best places to live in - just that in my experience mandatory insurance = higher prices for the same coverage.
With regards to Healthcare, I rather prefer the system in the UK to the one in Holland. That said, I am very healthy and barelly used any of them (so I don't know them that well first hand) and my income is high enough that if I need to I can pay for private care and skip the queues.
Good luck with that!
I do software design and development mostly with Java (which has built-in multithreading from the ground-up which is reasonably idiot-proof) and can tell you that most Java Programmers don't really understand how to create programs which are not prone to dealdlocks and critical-race conditions in a multi-threaded environment. In fact, plenty of them, when using standard frameworks (i.e. J2EE) are not even aware that their code is being used in a multi-threaded way. This is probably related to how simple Sun has made Multi-threading look-like in Java.
In fact, I've actually done a lot of interviewing for Senior Designer/Developer types and the area in which most candidates were likelly to be weak on was Multi-threading.
A Multi-threading implementation is by necessity a tradeoff between performance and simplicity:
- When it's too simple you tend to end up with huge blocks of code which are single-threaded (because less experience developers will use the buil-in features in a coarse manner without really understanding what they do)
- When it's too complex it rarelly gets used at all.
There should be some kind of Health Insurance which gives you lower premiums if you lead a healthy lifestyle - certainly I remember that being available in the one country I lived in where Health Insurance was the way people paid for healthcare (Holland). I myself paid less because I neither smoke nor drink heavilly.
If you don't have access to this option (because the US system is designed in such a way that Health Insurance is cheaper when bought as a block by the Employers and as such individual behaviours cannot affect the price) then the problem is with the Rules and Regulations behind it, since in a proper free market, players will soon appear offering lower premiums for those willing to go the extra mile to keep healthy - just like Car Insurance premiums are cheaper for those with a long history of accident free driving.
I remember when I used to live in Holland and Mandatory Health Insurance came into effect: almost instantly my Health Insurance Premium went up by 30% (with no extra coverage being provided): checking with price-comparisson sites showed that the increase was all across the industry.
in my experience, Mandatory Insurance of any kind is just a form of tax payed directly to the Insurance companies.
That said, although I do believe the US desperatelly needs a big overhaul of it's Healthcare system [*], what ended up being passed only solves one of the problems (lack of Universal Coverage) without significantly improving the efficiency of the whole system [**] while introducing measures which, given the lack of restructuring of the way the Insurance Industry works in this area and the lack of Tort Reform, have the potential to make the Healthcare costs higher, not lower.
* The US spends twice as much as a percentage of GDP in Healthcare than everybody else and yet comes out very bad in things like child mortality rates
** Universal Coverage does help a bit on the efficiency front due to things like "Herd Immunity"
This is actually how I use my Oyster card: never register, always pay in cash.
I also change it for a new one once in a while.
£3 every couple of months is a great price to pay for a little bit of insurance if Britain ever goes the final bit down the way to Police State.
I sh*t at Work.
The Chinese government activelly encourages Chinese companies and people to steal ideas and processes from Western companies so that they can later compete with them not just in China but also outside.
Even the laws there are done in such a way that any Western company that wants to enter the Chinese market has to do so in a joint venture with a Chinese company which then can learn from said Western company. There are already cases where once a couple of Chinese companies where "trained" in this way, the laws where changed to kick out the Western companies and those Chinese companies started competing in that area outside China.
Example: Lenovo.
Sending your R&D to China is pretty much just giving it for free to the Chinese government.
[Note that I am not critical of the Chinese for doing this: they're doing what's good for them at the expense of dumb Western shareholders]
The problem is not the Indians, it's the Indian education system and the IT bubble in India.
I've worked with plenty of Indians in the UK and they're as good as everybody else: there's plenty of true hackers types (in the good sense of the word) out there that happen to be Indian.
However, my experience with our in-house teams based in India and with developers from Indian consultancies placed at the client in the UK is that they have a very high number of mediocre developers (and even some exceptionally bad ones). Note that what's common with these two is that hiring decisions are taken by Indian companies/divisions in India.
I've recently read in The Economist (the January 31st one, I believe - paper magazine, no link, sry) that a company in India has examined the ouput of Indian universities and concluded that only 12% (not fully sure about the number, around this value though) of the engineers trained every year by Indian Universities is actually competent enough to work in technology with a Western Corporation.
I've also had discussions with a friend of mine about this (who happens to be Indian) and our conclusion is that in India too many people go into IT because it pays well (not because they're any good at it) and that most of the better ones have emigrated from India.
It's always been my dream to be profiled by law enforcement on the basis of my shopping.
Who knows, maybe my toilet paper buying habits exactly match those of a known terrorist and the men in black will single me out for "special attention". After all, who doesn't want to be incarcerated for 28 days without actually being accused of anything because of buying "the supermarket's brand in packs of 4 in average once every two months" just like the terrorists.
The good news is that using a Government provided electronic ID card for shopping will bring me closer to my dream.
The main discussion in the article is about what to do with regards to reducing DRM (although game focused).
Although not game focused, my post shows that, at least in some areas, you can vote with your wallet away from the usual suspects in the hardware-DRM arena without actually having to give up on anything (in fact, by voting with my wallet I ended up having a better experience overall).
This is also why I own a gaming PC (which costs more than a non-gaming home PC because of the need for better CPU and Graphics Card) which is an open solution instead of an XBox or Playstation, why I have neither a BluRay player nor an HD TV and why I'm never going to buy an Apple product again (my 7 year old iPod is gathering dust somewhere).
Whenever I see a Slashdot story about a shinny new gadget from one of the usual suspects all the fanboys come out of the woodwork and plenty of people that should know better by now go all glaze-eyed about it.
I have plenty of money to get all the latest and greatest new gadgets and yet I choose not to buy products from some manufacturers preciselly because of their past and currenty history of shafting their costumers both directly and indirectly.
I've been preaching this around here for ages now (mostly as "don't buy Sony") but I get the impression that plenty of techy people are just switch their brains off whenever they see a new gadget and are (unknowingly) prone to peer-pressure in the form of tech fashion and fads.
The specific example of the parent of my OP, just proved me right and reafirmed my commitment to being choosy, so allow me my little moment of glee.
Not for sale anymore.
Here's a similar one from the same store (note that this one doesn't have ethernet).
FYI, £50 is roughly 75 USD. It will probably be at least 20% cheaper in the US than the UK: it always is.
By the way, these thing are often sold as HD enclosures by Computer component stores.
Most people learn best what's bad for them by trying something and getting hurt.
Those of little wisdom only learn anything this way: they're just too mentally short-sighted to see much beyond the "uuuhh, shinyyyy".
A couple of disconnections of one's connection, a couple of "going for vacations but the game doesn't work there", a couple of "Ubisoft's servers down due to unexpected problems" will do wonders in educating the unwashed masses.
Funnily enough I have this cheap no-name external-HD/Media-Player device that allows me to play XViD and DivX encoded files on my TV. I can either play files from my PC via Ethernet (NOT streaming, just files in shared folders), from the internal HD or from USB mass storage devices.
There are out there other (more expensive) devices just like it that play HD.
No DRM, no issues: my PC doesn't even need to be on. It's not even brand new technology: I've had this for 3 years now.
Going for media playing solutions from the likes of Sony, Microsoft or Apple is like tatooing on your forhead "I'm a Dumb Media Bitch".
Here's a good example (credits to Nassim Taleb and his "The Black Swan" book) on the risks of extrapolation (of which curve fitting is one method): ...
- Based on previous experience, a turkey will confidently predict that he will wake up every morning be fed during the day and go to spleep in the evening. He can be easilly extrapolate this from the fact that it has happened every day of it's life. At some point before Christmas this turkey is going to have a big surprise
Draconian IT Security policies that end up achieving the opposite effect are caused by the same underlying problems as the theatrical Security that's currently done in most airports:
The blame here is in Management - rewards and punishement are distributed on the basis of easilly observable artifacts of The Work instead of looking at the hard to define and hard to measure Results.
This problem is very common in all kinds of professions and in most countries ...
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!
Just recently I decided to go back to WoW (after a break of almost 5 years) bought the Battle Chest in a bricks and mortar store, in the UK, for £14.95.
That's less than $20 at current exchange rates.
First time ever that I bought anything in the UK that was cheaper than in the US.
Let me highlight the significant bits for you:
'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.'
The "otherwise" basically means "in any way whatsoever" (i.e. thus also when not using Apple hardware, software or documentation).
The "in or by" means that it doesn't mater if the software does not at all target Apple products in any way: if the mechanism is used in or by the Apple software or services you can't do it.
The "any services or other Apple software or technology" means anything that Apple uses (even if it's as simple as Basic HTTP Authentication in an obscure Apple website).
The "or enable others to do so" means any tool that might help others do so. In my example above (Basic HTTP Authentication in an obscure Apple website) this means Packet Sniffers, HTTP Proxies (unless they have no logs) and in fact any means of intercepting an HTTP Request/Response. In fact (and given that Basic HTTP Authentication is easy to break) it could potentially be interpreted to cover an utility application that would allow you to more easilly read the RFC for HTTP 1.0 or a Base64 decoder (since that's the way the username:password are encoded in Basic HTTP Authentication).
Here's a plausible scenario:
- Security researcher accepts this. He/she just agreed to never create any software that would show the weakness in a mechanism that was also implemented or used in any Apple product or service (even if not done by Apple) now and forever. This even if said research and said software was otherwise completely unrelated to Apple software/hardware and was not even done using knowledge aquired in any way from the Apple docs.