I have a Raite 715. The Kiss player is one of many brands under which it was sold. Unfortunately, Raite is bankrupt and not making them anymore, so the prices have gone up on the remaining players. This also leaves the future of firmware updates in doubt.
On the other hand, there have been new firmware releases as recently as last week. Also, you can get hacked versions of the firmware that include the loopholes (macrovision off/region select) menu.
Oh, and it playes SVCD as well as regular VCD. The latest firmware version lets it play any MPEG file.
The language doesn't really matter, the programming concepts do. However, it's very difficult to talk about programming concepts in the absence of a language, so they need to settle on one.
It makes sense to use one that has real practical use, so students can learn relevant skills along with the theory. That makes the education more valuable and easier to grab onto for the students.
At EMC, we sell high-end storage systems. They're essentially supercomputers dedicated to providing high-performance ultra-reliable storage. We currently support upto 32GB of cache RAM in one system.
I've seen low-end storage systems based on Linux in the one TB range. As these systems grow up, they'll quickly get into the >4GB range if they want any sort of performance.
There's a difference between the architecture and the implementation. The architecture may allow for a 64-bit address space, but not require it. In many 64-bit processors, many of the address lines are hard-wired to zero. I would not be at all surprised if this is true for Itanium.
Also, even if the processor actually supports true 64-bit addresses, that doesn't mean the motherboard chipsets will support it. Hence, real systems may be limited in their memory configurations.
Remember, ten digit dialing just means you have to dial the area code.
I believe that in most places, the current system is that if you are dialing an area code, you first dial a '1.' If you are not dialing an area code, you do not first dial a '1,' even if it is a long distance number. Some phone companies will, on request, block 7-digit dialing for non-local calls.
Now if they wanted to make my phone number be something like (xxx) xxx-xxxx-xxx, then that would be a pain, not only for remembering phone numbers, but also for all the old phone equipment that has the current system burned in firmware. Even if the equipment is upgradable, the cost of doing so would be significant.
Unfortunately, Raite is apparently bankrupt. I have one of the players, and for the most part, it is excellent. Unfortunately, there are complaints of noisy drives and other problems caused by excessively-cheap hardware. There are also apparently a few firmware bugs that haven't been fixed, and it is now doubtful that they ever will be.
The only thing I've seen problems with, though, is the lack of a random play feature for MP3s (and fastforward/rewind in MP3 files, but I wasn't expecting that).
Now if they would release the firmware source code...
The best hope for Raite is for another company to buy them and start making them again.
For more information on the Raite players (including firmware files), I recommend the egroups Raite group.
So if they're no longer going to be in the hardware business, does that mean that they will let consumers upgrade their own units by adding new drives?
The original Iridium business model failed because they couldn't recoup their investment (pay back the debt) in the satellites.
Now that they are bankrupt, it only makes sense that someone would pick them up for next to nothing. Now the new company doesn't have the debt overhead from launching all those satellites. This means that they only have to maintain operational break-even to stay alive. They don't have to pay the interest on their debt.
Of course, this only works until the satellites run out of fuel (they have to periodically adjust their orbits or go down in flames). Then they have to start launching replacement satellites. However, if they can build up enough of a user base before then, they might be able to pull it off. (And the replacement satellites could provide all sorts of additional capabilities.)
This could be good news for second-teir news sites. If the major news sites get swamped, many people will hit Yahoo to find other news sites.
Personally, I expect to do a lot of searching to find full results (ballot issues, local candidates, sixth-party results [let alone third-party results], and such).
What does a window manager do for VNC? VNC provides PCAnywhere-like access cross-platform to let you control a desktop on another machine (whether Mac, Windows, or Unix). It works by copying pixel-level information; not high-level stuff a window manager would care about.
Or is there some other "VNC" acronym in play here?
This isn't terribly likely. Life in space is entirely based on life on Earth. Hence, space living, though outside the atmosphere, is subject to whatever political and financial winds are blowing.
Whether it is because of a technical failure that causes evacuation, funding crisis that leaves it unmanned for a time, or political upheaval that removes support, the odds are highly in favor of there being a time with no humans in space within the next 20 years.
What will change this is when life in space is self-sustaining. Then it will no longer be subject to terrestrial issues.
If Mir had been manned just a little longer, then it would have been years ago.
Re:Huge crytography implications!
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring.
Factoring is provably in NP.
If P=NP, then there is a polynomial time factoring algorithm.
A polynomial time factoring algorithm would significantly reduce the computation required to break RSA.
The point you're missing is that if there is a polynomial time algorithm for an NP-complete problem, then there is a polynomial time algorithm for every problem in NP.
Huge crytography implications!
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
This could have huge implications for cryptography. If P=NP, then that means that any problem that has been proven to be in NP can be solved in polynomial time. One good example is factoring, which is generally believed to be in the class of problems that aren't NP-hard, but still aren't in P.
So if P=NP, then RSA breaks.
Probably all public key cryptography breaks.
Secret key cryptography is probably still fine, though. Of course, those secret keys are usually exchanged using public key algorithms.
With 45 days of secrecy, that gives companies a month and a half to put out a patch. This is probably way too long. 15 days to put out a patch is a bit more reasonable.
Of course, if you consider it as 15 days to put out a patch and 30 days for people to get it installed, then it isn't too bad.
Personally, I think it should be a two-tiered policy. 15 days of secrecy once the software vendor has been notified. Then, if a patch has been released that fixes the problem, an announcement of "unspecified security problem" with a reference to the patch should be released, followed by an explanation 30 days after people have had a chance to install the patch. If no patch is released, then the full details are released at the end of the initial 15 days.
Oh well, 45 days is still better than never--much better.
I don't see as the exploits are needed. Sure, they should release them to those responsible for fixing the software, but there's no need to release them to the general public (unless the general public is who is responsible for fixing the software, as in Linux).
Besides, it shouldn't take anyone more than a day or two to write an exploit, anyway.
Amazon experimented with different prices for different customers, but has promised never to do it again.
Also, Amazon stated that they didn't target prices based on customer profiles; instead they were experimenting to determine how much the price influenced purchasing decisions. That may or may not be true, but if it is, then it isn't nearly as bad as had been feared.
First, they allow the sale of DVDs in one region (generally region 1) while the movie is still in theatres in other parts of the world. The movie industry has long used a staggered release schedule, such that movies are released in different countries months after being released in the US. While this allows time for dubbing and subtitling, it also allows for the hype from the US to be used to promote it elsewhere. (If this were the only reason, then region coding would only be used on new releases.)
Second, region codes allow the industry to charge different prices to different customers. It's like a chain of stores hiking prices in lower and upper class neighborhoods (where people don't have cars to shop around or don't care), while cutting prices in middle-class neighborhoods (the gas industry was recently attacked for this practice). With DVDs, instead of doing it by neighborhood, they do it by country. They can charge several times more for the same thing in some parts of the world, and region coding lets them get away with it.
Reading between the lines, it looks like what is going on is that the disc exploits the details of the region coding spec to detect if the player will support more than one region. Unless the player rejects the non-region-1 portion of the disc, the region-1 part won't play. The MPAA must be feeling very happy that their original region coding implementation allowed for this.
Now this is easy to bypass. The trick is that you have to have the player figure out what region the disc wants and switch to that region, and that region only. For now, this will require a player that allows you to manually reset the region. For example, with my Raite 715 DVD/MP3 player, I can use a secret menu to set it to region free, or to any specific region. Hence, I can set it to only region 1 for these new DVDs and to region free when I want to play some other region.
Eventually, we can hope someone will put out a player that detects that the majority of the content is flagged for a given region, so it will switch to that region. What would be really cool is a DVD player with open-source firmware. Hey, that's what Livid is!
EMC has internships that are Unix-based, so if you're interested in working in Massachusetts or North Carolina (Research Triangle Park), there are possibilities. You can look at www.emc.com.
(If you don't know, EMC is the leader in very-high-end storage solutions. We're talking over 17 terabytes in one box right now. And yes, I do work for EMC--I use Linux at my desk.)
Of course, probably any large high-tech company will do Unix interns. As others have suggested, you can search the job sites. If you have a particular geographic area in mind, find out what companies are there, and contact them.
If they can share your account information with their partners, and their partners don't have a privacy policy, then they can indirectly share your information with anyone they want.
This brings up several important points:
Are your viewing habbits considered part of your account information?
If you are concerned about privacy, then you should get a TiVo-branded unit, not a partner-branded unit, though this means you may miss out on some added benefits of hybrid hardware (i.e., built-in DSS tuner or AOL Web-TVish Internet access).
When someone files for a patent on something, and it turns out that there was, in fact, prior art that they were not aware of, not only does it invalidate the latter patent, but it also provides evidence that the patented "device" was, in fact, obvious.
It's not conclusive, but certainly helps the argument when several people came up with the same idea independently.
I, too, am waiting for on-demand video. I want to be able to select and watch anything ever broadcast. I just hope they set it up so that you have the choice of either having advertising inserted or paying a small fee.
The Panasonic ShowStopper is exactly the same as the current ReplayTV models (the 3020 and the 3030), though they've announce a 60-hour unit that isn't shipping yet (using the Maxtor 60G drive; why don't they use the new 80G?).
I have the ReplayTV 2020, which is almost exactly the same as the 3020. The difference is that the newer units will save closed captioning, and the newer units will send out Macrovision signals when the source signal had Macrovision (the 2020 simply strips it out--too bad Amazon finally ran out of them).
Anyway, I can't tell you how wonderful this unit is. As you know, it dials in every night (for maybe 10 minuts) to a local number (you have to pay long distance if there's no local number), and it downloads the TV listings. You then tell it to record specific shows, or you tell it to search, based on title, description, actors, or director. For example, I can tell it to record anything with John Cleese in it. You can also tell it to watch for shows you want to see, even if they aren't currently airing (I've got mine set to record Doctor Who).
So when I go to watch TV, I don't have to channel surf to find something I want--I just watch something it has recorded.
Oh, and it has the 30-second skip button for commercials that TiVo lacks. While this may seem like a minor detail, I've become addicted to it. I essentially don't watch commercials anymore. Sure, I over-skip, but then I use the 8-second instant replay button to go back.
If you watch enough TV to make paying for cable worthwhile, then buying one of these is definitely worthwhile.
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I have a Raite 715. The Kiss player is one of many brands under which it was sold. Unfortunately, Raite is bankrupt and not making them anymore, so the prices have gone up on the remaining players. This also leaves the future of firmware updates in doubt.
On the other hand, there have been new firmware releases as recently as last week. Also, you can get hacked versions of the firmware that include the loopholes (macrovision off/region select) menu.
Oh, and it playes SVCD as well as regular VCD. The latest firmware version lets it play any MPEG file.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with it.
When I took it in 1986, it was based on Pascal.
The language doesn't really matter, the programming concepts do. However, it's very difficult to talk about programming concepts in the absence of a language, so they need to settle on one.
It makes sense to use one that has real practical use, so students can learn relevant skills along with the theory. That makes the education more valuable and easier to grab onto for the students.
At EMC, we sell high-end storage systems. They're essentially supercomputers dedicated to providing high-performance ultra-reliable storage. We currently support upto 32GB of cache RAM in one system.
I've seen low-end storage systems based on Linux in the one TB range. As these systems grow up, they'll quickly get into the >4GB range if they want any sort of performance.
The address space may be less than 64-bits wide.
There's a difference between the architecture and the implementation. The architecture may allow for a 64-bit address space, but not require it. In many 64-bit processors, many of the address lines are hard-wired to zero. I would not be at all surprised if this is true for Itanium.
Also, even if the processor actually supports true 64-bit addresses, that doesn't mean the motherboard chipsets will support it. Hence, real systems may be limited in their memory configurations.
Remember, ten digit dialing just means you have to dial the area code.
I believe that in most places, the current system is that if you are dialing an area code, you first dial a '1.' If you are not dialing an area code, you do not first dial a '1,' even if it is a long distance number. Some phone companies will, on request, block 7-digit dialing for non-local calls.
Now if they wanted to make my phone number be something like (xxx) xxx-xxxx-xxx, then that would be a pain, not only for remembering phone numbers, but also for all the old phone equipment that has the current system burned in firmware. Even if the equipment is upgradable, the cost of doing so would be significant.
The only thing I've seen problems with, though, is the lack of a random play feature for MP3s (and fastforward/rewind in MP3 files, but I wasn't expecting that).
Now if they would release the firmware source code...
The best hope for Raite is for another company to buy them and start making them again.
For more information on the Raite players (including firmware files), I recommend the egroups Raite group.
So if they're no longer going to be in the hardware business, does that mean that they will let consumers upgrade their own units by adding new drives?
The original Iridium business model failed because they couldn't recoup their investment (pay back the debt) in the satellites.
Now that they are bankrupt, it only makes sense that someone would pick them up for next to nothing. Now the new company doesn't have the debt overhead from launching all those satellites. This means that they only have to maintain operational break-even to stay alive. They don't have to pay the interest on their debt.
Of course, this only works until the satellites run out of fuel (they have to periodically adjust their orbits or go down in flames). Then they have to start launching replacement satellites. However, if they can build up enough of a user base before then, they might be able to pull it off. (And the replacement satellites could provide all sorts of additional capabilities.)
It seems that the original site redirected through an advertising site that is blocked on my host.
This could be good news for second-teir news sites. If the major news sites get swamped, many people will hit Yahoo to find other news sites.
Personally, I expect to do a lot of searching to find full results (ballot issues, local candidates, sixth-party results [let alone third-party results], and such).
Or is there some other "VNC" acronym in play here?
This isn't terribly likely. Life in space is entirely based on life on Earth. Hence, space living, though outside the atmosphere, is subject to whatever political and financial winds are blowing.
Whether it is because of a technical failure that causes evacuation, funding crisis that leaves it unmanned for a time, or political upheaval that removes support, the odds are highly in favor of there being a time with no humans in space within the next 20 years.
What will change this is when life in space is self-sustaining. Then it will no longer be subject to terrestrial issues.
If Mir had been manned just a little longer, then it would have been years ago.
RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring.
Factoring is provably in NP.
If P=NP, then there is a polynomial time factoring algorithm.
A polynomial time factoring algorithm would significantly reduce the computation required to break RSA.
The point you're missing is that if there is a polynomial time algorithm for an NP-complete problem, then there is a polynomial time algorithm for every problem in NP.
This could have huge implications for cryptography. If P=NP, then that means that any problem that has been proven to be in NP can be solved in polynomial time. One good example is factoring, which is generally believed to be in the class of problems that aren't NP-hard, but still aren't in P.
So if P=NP, then RSA breaks.
Probably all public key cryptography breaks.
Secret key cryptography is probably still fine, though. Of course, those secret keys are usually exchanged using public key algorithms.
Scary.
With 45 days of secrecy, that gives companies a month and a half to put out a patch. This is probably way too long. 15 days to put out a patch is a bit more reasonable.
Of course, if you consider it as 15 days to put out a patch and 30 days for people to get it installed, then it isn't too bad.
Personally, I think it should be a two-tiered policy. 15 days of secrecy once the software vendor has been notified. Then, if a patch has been released that fixes the problem, an announcement of "unspecified security problem" with a reference to the patch should be released, followed by an explanation 30 days after people have had a chance to install the patch. If no patch is released, then the full details are released at the end of the initial 15 days.
Oh well, 45 days is still better than never--much better.
I don't see as the exploits are needed. Sure, they should release them to those responsible for fixing the software, but there's no need to release them to the general public (unless the general public is who is responsible for fixing the software, as in Linux).
Besides, it shouldn't take anyone more than a day or two to write an exploit, anyway.
Just a minor nitpick:
Amazon experimented with different prices for different customers, but has promised never to do it again.
Also, Amazon stated that they didn't target prices based on customer profiles; instead they were experimenting to determine how much the price influenced purchasing decisions. That may or may not be true, but if it is, then it isn't nearly as bad as had been feared.
Regions are there for two reasons:
First, they allow the sale of DVDs in one region (generally region 1) while the movie is still in theatres in other parts of the world. The movie industry has long used a staggered release schedule, such that movies are released in different countries months after being released in the US. While this allows time for dubbing and subtitling, it also allows for the hype from the US to be used to promote it elsewhere. (If this were the only reason, then region coding would only be used on new releases.)
Second, region codes allow the industry to charge different prices to different customers. It's like a chain of stores hiking prices in lower and upper class neighborhoods (where people don't have cars to shop around or don't care), while cutting prices in middle-class neighborhoods (the gas industry was recently attacked for this practice). With DVDs, instead of doing it by neighborhood, they do it by country. They can charge several times more for the same thing in some parts of the world, and region coding lets them get away with it.
Reading between the lines, it looks like what is going on is that the disc exploits the details of the region coding spec to detect if the player will support more than one region. Unless the player rejects the non-region-1 portion of the disc, the region-1 part won't play. The MPAA must be feeling very happy that their original region coding implementation allowed for this.
Now this is easy to bypass. The trick is that you have to have the player figure out what region the disc wants and switch to that region, and that region only. For now, this will require a player that allows you to manually reset the region. For example, with my Raite 715 DVD/MP3 player, I can use a secret menu to set it to region free, or to any specific region. Hence, I can set it to only region 1 for these new DVDs and to region free when I want to play some other region.
Eventually, we can hope someone will put out a player that detects that the majority of the content is flagged for a given region, so it will switch to that region. What would be really cool is a DVD player with open-source firmware. Hey, that's what Livid is!
EMC has internships that are Unix-based, so if you're interested in working in Massachusetts or North Carolina (Research Triangle Park), there are possibilities. You can look at www.emc.com.
(If you don't know, EMC is the leader in very-high-end storage solutions. We're talking over 17 terabytes in one box right now. And yes, I do work for EMC--I use Linux at my desk.)
Of course, probably any large high-tech company will do Unix interns. As others have suggested, you can search the job sites. If you have a particular geographic area in mind, find out what companies are there, and contact them.
If they can share your account information with their partners, and their partners don't have a privacy policy, then they can indirectly share your information with anyone they want.
This brings up several important points:
Are your viewing habbits considered part of your account information?
If you are concerned about privacy, then you should get a TiVo-branded unit, not a partner-branded unit, though this means you may miss out on some added benefits of hybrid hardware (i.e., built-in DSS tuner or AOL Web-TVish Internet access).
When someone files for a patent on something, and it turns out that there was, in fact, prior art that they were not aware of, not only does it invalidate the latter patent, but it also provides evidence that the patented "device" was, in fact, obvious.
It's not conclusive, but certainly helps the argument when several people came up with the same idea independently.
I, too, am waiting for on-demand video. I want to be able to select and watch anything ever broadcast. I just hope they set it up so that you have the choice of either having advertising inserted or paying a small fee.
The Panasonic ShowStopper is exactly the same as the current ReplayTV models (the 3020 and the 3030), though they've announce a 60-hour unit that isn't shipping yet (using the Maxtor 60G drive; why don't they use the new 80G?).
I have the ReplayTV 2020, which is almost exactly the same as the 3020. The difference is that the newer units will save closed captioning, and the newer units will send out Macrovision signals when the source signal had Macrovision (the 2020 simply strips it out--too bad Amazon finally ran out of them).
Anyway, I can't tell you how wonderful this unit is. As you know, it dials in every night (for maybe 10 minuts) to a local number (you have to pay long distance if there's no local number), and it downloads the TV listings. You then tell it to record specific shows, or you tell it to search, based on title, description, actors, or director. For example, I can tell it to record anything with John Cleese in it. You can also tell it to watch for shows you want to see, even if they aren't currently airing (I've got mine set to record Doctor Who).
So when I go to watch TV, I don't have to channel surf to find something I want--I just watch something it has recorded.
Oh, and it has the 30-second skip button for commercials that TiVo lacks. While this may seem like a minor detail, I've become addicted to it. I essentially don't watch commercials anymore. Sure, I over-skip, but then I use the 8-second instant replay button to go back.
If you watch enough TV to make paying for cable worthwhile, then buying one of these is definitely worthwhile.