... and even the LCD TV market, is the lack of a guarantee of NO DEAD OR STUCK PIXELS. Very few displays have any pixel issues. The industry says that fewer than one percent have problems with any pixels. Yet when you read the warranty details, they will treat a few (usually somewhere from 3 to 8 depending on manufacturer and pixel location on the screen) bad pixels as not covered by the warranty. OK, so they are cheap skates and want to screw over the fewer than 1% of the buyers that luck out and get one of their lemons.
If the figure really is less than 1%, why not offer one of those "extended warranty"-like deals the retailers like to offer... for a cost of say 3% to 5% of the purchase price... but in this case an "absolutely zero dead or stuck pixels no matter what... warranty"? If only 1% of units are bad, then they should make a killing at 3% to 5% of purchase price.
Of course, not everyone would buy that. But if I'm going to plunk down big dollars for a 76 cm 2560x1600 display, I sure don't want to get a lemon with a bad pixel. I'd pay the 5% more to be sure I don't get one.
They could even test units and segregate the stock, selling the flawless ones for more, and the flawed ones for a little less. Even if this price span is break even, this can attract more buyers... some wanting the perfect units... some wanting a discount. Come on you MBA bozos... go after that market.
From many of the posts on the thread in question...
Mod Edit: Blocking ads is being rude to everyone that works for this site. Non-forgivable offense. -Kuliani
What this Kuliani guy needs to learn is that ABUSIVE ads... and I already saw several on his site (I'm not blocking them) are rude... and insulting... to his readers. I fully understand wanting to show ads on the site to support it. But abusive ads are not called for. Friendly, non-abusive, ads keep your community happy while keeping the site alive.
It sounds to me like Time-Warner needs to be banned for 7 days for first offense.
Back when I was building a Linux distro for an ARM platform (specifically IXP435) I found it to have maybe about 1/3 of the power of x86 CPUs of the time, but running so cool that the CPU didn't need a heat sink and didn't get so hot I couldn't put my thumb on the CPU. And that was after running a regression test suite for 20 hours. ARM definitely is a win for the MIPS/Watt metric.
BTW, it would be scientifically simpler to just refer to this metric as "millions of instructions executed per joule of energy converted to heat" (would roughly equates to a gain of information in exchange for a loss of information).
Tell the music industry to stop advertising to poor people! Here's an idea: let the music be free until students get their first job in their field after school. They it's time to pay the piper.
Bring your portable deskside tower with the three 2TB hard drives and the pair of gigabit ethernets to a gamer meet, sometime. Just be sure you are properly configured for IPv6 for the premium stuff.
There's also tons of sharing going on just before and after (and often during), gamer meets (which usually have 2 or 3 bands of wireless channels all clogged up in addition to multiple gigabit and sometimes 10 gigabit ad-hoc LANs).
If we mark off those resources for legal downloading (in the "comprehensive list of alternatives" link at the Educause site) that still don't work with FOSS platforms, how many remain? I know at least Magnatune is among them.
... causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection"
At least for many, breaking the "protection" is not the goal... making stuff work well is. If the people making DRM were to come up with a way that provided the "protection" they (claim) to desire, while also working well on every platform, there wouldn't be as much interest in "breaking" it.
As a user exclusively of FOSS platforms, I consider that every content provider that fails to make sure that my platforms are supported is a content provider that has no interest in revenues from me or other users of these platforms. As such, if WE somehow manage to access their content through means that don't involve any payment, I see no loss to the owner. They didn't have sufficient interest in our money to make an effort to get it. So it is by their own decision that they won't get revenue from us; now ours.
He needs a separate account for the check card or debit card. Maybe even more than one. I currently have 2 of them. I don't keep them at zero from my convenience. But I keep them at levels I can afford to be without for a long time, or even afford to totally lose. My bulk money is stored in 2 other accounts with NO cards associated, and at different banks. I also keep enough cash tucked away in a secret place that I can live on for a couple months (which isn't that much if I stay away from beer, pizza, porn and newegg).
... would never be used by the banks because it requires them to become technically competent and to lose a nice revenue stream of milking victims even more by charging overdraft fees and late fees. But here goes, anyway...
For online purchase, once you check out, the merchant sends the amount to their financial service provider. The FSP connects to a central clearing house and generates a unique transaction code. The CCH stores a description of the transaction and the ID of the merchant. The transaction code is sent back to the merchant. The merchant provides this code to YOU, the buyer.
You go to your bank web site and select the CCH payment screen. It has a place for the transaction code which you cut and paste from the merchant site, and submit. The bank connections with the CCH and obtains full details of the transaction and displays it for you. You verify that it looks familar. The bank tells you if you have enough money to pay it or not. When you choose to pay it, the bank tells the CCH that it is now paid. The CCH tells the merchant's bank that it is paid. The merchant's bank tells the merchant that it is paid. If this isn't done by a transmission push, then at least it can be done by the merchant pulling a status on the transaction code they generated. Back at the merchant web site, you can query the transaction and see that it is now know as paid (after the process finishes, which might take longer during Christmas).
Your account is NOT exposed to the merchant or the merchant's bank. Optionally, you can include your previously stored shipping address (or pick one from several) with the payment and the merchant can use that.
Offline, this is harder to do. Cash may be better there. But it is still doable by having a portable device YOU TRUST with the right software. This could be integrated into other portable devices, like a phone or music player, if you trust that. The mechanism would involve an infrared communication between the vendor (via their cash register) and your device. The vendor sends your device the transaction code, and provides a channel for you to send data to/from banks (and only banks) via a central bank connection. Your device establishes a secure encrypted connection to the CBC using the CBC public key. It then tells the CBC the identity of the bank (the merchant will not get this info). Over that secure channel a 2nd channel is forwarded to the bank. Now the device establishes a secure encrypted channel to your bank using the bank's public key. It logs in to your account at the bank, tells the bank what the transaction code is (the bank now goes back to the CCH as above). You see the amount of the transaction on the device and choose whether or not to pay it. If you pay it, that info gets back to the merchant and you can walk with the merchandise.
Additional security will be needed within the device and your home computer. Your bank will have to manage your account safely (e.g. not let others log in to your account). But those are mechanisms YOU have some control over (change banks if you have one that is sloppy with security). You do not have to depend on a merchant being secure, or the merchant's choice of bank being secure. At the same time, because your identity may not be included with the payments, once payments are made, they are likely not reversible. So it will be like paying in cash.
The difference in security of programming between the C/C++ languages and higher languages, is that in the former case, security is the responsibility of the programmer, whereas in the latter case, security gets delegated to the language framework. Not all programmers can get it right for the former. OTOH, the latter risks programmers doing something really stupid because they think their arse is covered.
That depends on what level of editing you want to do, and what kind of video ingest you have. If you work in uncompressed HD, forget the low end hardware... you'll need a $20,000 box and a screaming monster RAID array. If you work in compressed SD, the possibilities are very real. In between will likely be possible to some degree. And it depends also on what editing capabilities you want. If just frame slicing, it should be easy and fast. If you want some video image morphing, expect some long rendering times. YMMV depending on what you have in computer hardware, video hardware, and what this software (I've never used it) can do.
So, now where can I find a good video capture and playback card, which deliver all video formats in a unified open I-frame-only compressed format (e.g. Dirac) to the software, along with the audio in perfect sync (e.g. audio chunks grouped and tagged with video frames), and also accept exactly that same stream (even if re-ordered frame by frame) on output. Compression is important to avoid having to process 250 megaBYTES of data for HD. Also, this hardware needs to have the various forms of audio/video input/output that are in common use in the marketed region, including genlocked synchronized output. For the USA this would include the SDI and HD-SDI commonly used in broadcast, as well as Firewire, HDMI and preferably also analog. And, of course, its driver needs to be full open source suitable for use on BSD and Linux. If the hardware to software interface is designed in a straight-forward simple manner, with basic commands to set modes, query detected input modes, and read/write data blocks frame by frame, there would be no secrecy needed in the driver.
These economizers that are being referenced are not always usable. They effectively circulate outside air into the data center. When the outside air is too hot, they can't be used. Also, when the outside air has too many pollutants, they can't be used. The cost of having them makes little sense when their usability is low. Other systems could make better use of the investment.
This is definitely a case where goals, not methods, should be prescribed.
So please do post and explain, and do not ignore this, telling how all the rest of people (e.g. those without residency, such as those who visit on business) who may use a Mexico cell phone can get them properly registered.
If the OP's company is a publicly traded corporation, and if this exploit represents any kind of risk to investors in any form, they are already required to include it in the next filing.
As long as having a good working relationship with a vendor that you and your company knows is incompetent and unethical is more important than your security and the principle of doing things right, then you get what you deserve.
You know what the exploit is. But what makes you think you are the only one? What makes you think no unethical hackers know about and won't find out about it for the life of this exploit (which seems from the vendor attitude that it could be very long)?
You (your company) needs to take steps to protect yourself, now, immediately. Do whatever it takes to make the exploit unusable from within your network and from outside. Send the bill to the vendor... on your law firm's letterhead. Mention the names of several sleazebag debt collectors for extra points. If you are afraid of ruining your relationship for that, then, again, you deserve what you get.
I also suggest updating your resume and your LinkedIn profile, and keep an idea on the Indeed listings.
Sounds like you need to communicate with the Justice Department if you are in the US. And don't call yourself Anonymous Coward. Being the biggest poster at Slashdot probably won't impress them.
If your job somehow involves access to financial mechanisms, such as being a programmer of a bank's financial processes, then I'd say the credit check is important, much as it is for a bank teller or bank financial officer. Similarly, if your job involves access to information that could be sold on the black market, to scammers, or to enemy foreign governments, this, too, needs at least a credit check (and in some cases a security clearance). If you are deep in debt, your risk of selling out goes up.
Slashdot Mirror
... and even the LCD TV market, is the lack of a guarantee of NO DEAD OR STUCK PIXELS. Very few displays have any pixel issues. The industry says that fewer than one percent have problems with any pixels. Yet when you read the warranty details, they will treat a few (usually somewhere from 3 to 8 depending on manufacturer and pixel location on the screen) bad pixels as not covered by the warranty. OK, so they are cheap skates and want to screw over the fewer than 1% of the buyers that luck out and get one of their lemons.
If the figure really is less than 1%, why not offer one of those "extended warranty"-like deals the retailers like to offer ... for a cost of say 3% to 5% of the purchase price ... but in this case an "absolutely zero dead or stuck pixels no matter what ... warranty"? If only 1% of units are bad, then they should make a killing at 3% to 5% of purchase price.
Of course, not everyone would buy that. But if I'm going to plunk down big dollars for a 76 cm 2560x1600 display, I sure don't want to get a lemon with a bad pixel. I'd pay the 5% more to be sure I don't get one.
They could even test units and segregate the stock, selling the flawless ones for more, and the flawed ones for a little less. Even if this price span is break even, this can attract more buyers ... some wanting the perfect units ... some wanting a discount. Come on you MBA bozos ... go after that market.
From many of the posts on the thread in question ...
Mod Edit: Blocking ads is being rude to everyone that works for this site. Non-forgivable offense. -Kuliani
What this Kuliani guy needs to learn is that ABUSIVE ads ... and I already saw several on his site (I'm not blocking them) are rude ... and insulting ... to his readers. I fully understand wanting to show ads on the site to support it. But abusive ads are not called for. Friendly, non-abusive, ads keep your community happy while keeping the site alive.
It sounds to me like Time-Warner needs to be banned for 7 days for first offense.
Back when I was building a Linux distro for an ARM platform (specifically IXP435) I found it to have maybe about 1/3 of the power of x86 CPUs of the time, but running so cool that the CPU didn't need a heat sink and didn't get so hot I couldn't put my thumb on the CPU. And that was after running a regression test suite for 20 hours. ARM definitely is a win for the MIPS/Watt metric.
BTW, it would be scientifically simpler to just refer to this metric as "millions of instructions executed per joule of energy converted to heat" (would roughly equates to a gain of information in exchange for a loss of information).
Tell the music industry to stop advertising to poor people! Here's an idea: let the music be free until students get their first job in their field after school. They it's time to pay the piper.
Bring your portable deskside tower with the three 2TB hard drives and the pair of gigabit ethernets to a gamer meet, sometime. Just be sure you are properly configured for IPv6 for the premium stuff.
There's also tons of sharing going on just before and after (and often during), gamer meets (which usually have 2 or 3 bands of wireless channels all clogged up in addition to multiple gigabit and sometimes 10 gigabit ad-hoc LANs).
If we mark off those resources for legal downloading (in the "comprehensive list of alternatives" link at the Educause site) that still don't work with FOSS platforms, how many remain? I know at least Magnatune is among them.
... causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection"
At least for many, breaking the "protection" is not the goal ... making stuff work well is. If the people making DRM were to come up with a way that provided the "protection" they (claim) to desire, while also working well on every platform, there wouldn't be as much interest in "breaking" it.
As a user exclusively of FOSS platforms, I consider that every content provider that fails to make sure that my platforms are supported is a content provider that has no interest in revenues from me or other users of these platforms. As such, if WE somehow manage to access their content through means that don't involve any payment, I see no loss to the owner. They didn't have sufficient interest in our money to make an effort to get it. So it is by their own decision that they won't get revenue from us; now ours.
.. to run on Gentoo Linux.
He needs a separate account for the check card or debit card. Maybe even more than one. I currently have 2 of them. I don't keep them at zero from my convenience. But I keep them at levels I can afford to be without for a long time, or even afford to totally lose. My bulk money is stored in 2 other accounts with NO cards associated, and at different banks. I also keep enough cash tucked away in a secret place that I can live on for a couple months (which isn't that much if I stay away from beer, pizza, porn and newegg).
... would never be used by the banks because it requires them to become technically competent and to lose a nice revenue stream of milking victims even more by charging overdraft fees and late fees. But here goes, anyway ...
For online purchase, once you check out, the merchant sends the amount to their financial service provider. The FSP connects to a central clearing house and generates a unique transaction code. The CCH stores a description of the transaction and the ID of the merchant. The transaction code is sent back to the merchant. The merchant provides this code to YOU, the buyer.
You go to your bank web site and select the CCH payment screen. It has a place for the transaction code which you cut and paste from the merchant site, and submit. The bank connections with the CCH and obtains full details of the transaction and displays it for you. You verify that it looks familar. The bank tells you if you have enough money to pay it or not. When you choose to pay it, the bank tells the CCH that it is now paid. The CCH tells the merchant's bank that it is paid. The merchant's bank tells the merchant that it is paid. If this isn't done by a transmission push, then at least it can be done by the merchant pulling a status on the transaction code they generated. Back at the merchant web site, you can query the transaction and see that it is now know as paid (after the process finishes, which might take longer during Christmas).
Your account is NOT exposed to the merchant or the merchant's bank. Optionally, you can include your previously stored shipping address (or pick one from several) with the payment and the merchant can use that.
Offline, this is harder to do. Cash may be better there. But it is still doable by having a portable device YOU TRUST with the right software. This could be integrated into other portable devices, like a phone or music player, if you trust that. The mechanism would involve an infrared communication between the vendor (via their cash register) and your device. The vendor sends your device the transaction code, and provides a channel for you to send data to/from banks (and only banks) via a central bank connection. Your device establishes a secure encrypted connection to the CBC using the CBC public key. It then tells the CBC the identity of the bank (the merchant will not get this info). Over that secure channel a 2nd channel is forwarded to the bank. Now the device establishes a secure encrypted channel to your bank using the bank's public key. It logs in to your account at the bank, tells the bank what the transaction code is (the bank now goes back to the CCH as above). You see the amount of the transaction on the device and choose whether or not to pay it. If you pay it, that info gets back to the merchant and you can walk with the merchandise.
Additional security will be needed within the device and your home computer. Your bank will have to manage your account safely (e.g. not let others log in to your account). But those are mechanisms YOU have some control over (change banks if you have one that is sloppy with security). You do not have to depend on a merchant being secure, or the merchant's choice of bank being secure. At the same time, because your identity may not be included with the payments, once payments are made, they are likely not reversible. So it will be like paying in cash.
The difference in security of programming between the C/C++ languages and higher languages, is that in the former case, security is the responsibility of the programmer, whereas in the latter case, security gets delegated to the language framework. Not all programmers can get it right for the former. OTOH, the latter risks programmers doing something really stupid because they think their arse is covered.
That depends on what level of editing you want to do, and what kind of video ingest you have. If you work in uncompressed HD, forget the low end hardware ... you'll need a $20,000 box and a screaming monster RAID array. If you work in compressed SD, the possibilities are very real. In between will likely be possible to some degree. And it depends also on what editing capabilities you want. If just frame slicing, it should be easy and fast. If you want some video image morphing, expect some long rendering times. YMMV depending on what you have in computer hardware, video hardware, and what this software (I've never used it) can do.
So, now where can I find a good video capture and playback card, which deliver all video formats in a unified open I-frame-only compressed format (e.g. Dirac) to the software, along with the audio in perfect sync (e.g. audio chunks grouped and tagged with video frames), and also accept exactly that same stream (even if re-ordered frame by frame) on output. Compression is important to avoid having to process 250 megaBYTES of data for HD. Also, this hardware needs to have the various forms of audio/video input/output that are in common use in the marketed region, including genlocked synchronized output. For the USA this would include the SDI and HD-SDI commonly used in broadcast, as well as Firewire, HDMI and preferably also analog. And, of course, its driver needs to be full open source suitable for use on BSD and Linux. If the hardware to software interface is designed in a straight-forward simple manner, with basic commands to set modes, query detected input modes, and read/write data blocks frame by frame, there would be no secrecy needed in the driver.
These economizers that are being referenced are not always usable. They effectively circulate outside air into the data center. When the outside air is too hot, they can't be used. Also, when the outside air has too many pollutants, they can't be used. The cost of having them makes little sense when their usability is low. Other systems could make better use of the investment.
This is definitely a case where goals, not methods, should be prescribed.
Ah ha! ... so that's where the {RI,MP}AA got the idea of DRM. If you outlaw X, then only outlaws will be using X.
How about some SIM cards registered in the names of Mexicans ... even if they are recently killed by drug cartels ... so there are no roaming bills?
... there has been huge rise in the number of stolen phones and SIM cards in Mexico, especially from the few tourists that still come to Mexico.
So please do post and explain, and do not ignore this, telling how all the rest of people (e.g. those without residency, such as those who visit on business) who may use a Mexico cell phone can get them properly registered.
If the OP's company is a publicly traded corporation, and if this exploit represents any kind of risk to investors in any form, they are already required to include it in the next filing.
As long as having a good working relationship with a vendor that you and your company knows is incompetent and unethical is more important than your security and the principle of doing things right, then you get what you deserve.
You know what the exploit is. But what makes you think you are the only one? What makes you think no unethical hackers know about and won't find out about it for the life of this exploit (which seems from the vendor attitude that it could be very long)?
You (your company) needs to take steps to protect yourself, now, immediately. Do whatever it takes to make the exploit unusable from within your network and from outside. Send the bill to the vendor ... on your law firm's letterhead. Mention the names of several sleazebag debt collectors for extra points. If you are afraid of ruining your relationship for that, then, again, you deserve what you get.
I also suggest updating your resume and your LinkedIn profile, and keep an idea on the Indeed listings.
Sounds like you need to communicate with the Justice Department if you are in the US. And don't call yourself Anonymous Coward. Being the biggest poster at Slashdot probably won't impress them.
Sounds like we should all be starting up a side business doing head hunting :-)
If you are going to hire unsuitable people, you might as well hire them cheaper.
If your job somehow involves access to financial mechanisms, such as being a programmer of a bank's financial processes, then I'd say the credit check is important, much as it is for a bank teller or bank financial officer. Similarly, if your job involves access to information that could be sold on the black market, to scammers, or to enemy foreign governments, this, too, needs at least a credit check (and in some cases a security clearance). If you are deep in debt, your risk of selling out goes up.