This also ensures that the lifespan of media is temporary, rather than enduring. In a weird way, artists seeking to use DRM cash in on their work today are ensuring their relative anonymity tomorrow, when no one can find a playable copy of that old song they used to love so much as a kid back in '08.
I tend to think of it as ensuring repeated sales of their art throughout their lifetimes.
For a while there, ensuring this was as easy as making sure that your music was released on the format du jour. Records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs.... With the advent of digital music sans a physical medium, this trend of rebuying all of your albums is at risk. Suddenly, you're faced with customers never having to rebuy the White album, and you see your sustained profits going down the tubes.
DRM solves that. Now, rather than coming out with a new format every few years, you just have to come up with a new DRM scheme and turn off the old servers. Because the devices playing the music are somewhat general purpose, it's easy to move quickly--you don't have to worry about market penetration for the players, because it's just a free software update away.
I've never found AVG's free software to be that great, but I'm fairly certain that the last time it was installed on my computer was several years ago. It seemed ok, and it was one of the only free solutions which included on-access scanning. It never detected any viruses, so eventually I stopped using it, and shortly thereafter I started using Linux full-time, so I know that I'm a little behind the times.
Most AV these days actually use heuristics to guess at whether a program is malicious. There's not much better that they can do, for the reasons that you point out. But a POC exploit without a payload is not malicious, so why should the AV fire? Kapersky is doing the right thing here.
As for the marketing aspect, sadly, that's just business. Every AV vendor out there makes the same claims. If one of them made weaker claims than the others, they might get your business for their honesty, but the pointy-haired bosses out there will compare the two and say, "This one prevents unknown viruses. Get that one."
A good balance would be to allow signed programs from certain manufacturers, and white list any other required software which isn't signed. That minimizes the white list process, while still giving you the option of using software from vendors who don't want to pay for a signing key.
In practice, this works out like HTTP over SSL does today. We have a third-party vetting of websites, but anyone who does not want to pay for that vetting can still use HTTPS connections. The main difference is that we're still talking mostly about business customers doing this, because you need some way to ensure that your users aren't going to whitelist Elfbowl. In other words, this works for corporations, but not so much for grandmothers.
Are you kidding? The list of "good" programs will change constantly. You'd very nearly need hourly updates to get this working.
Update Windows? Does iexplore.exe have a new signature? You need to update your security product.
Even better, you could require vendors to pay you to vet their product. That way, you get money coming out of both ends--the end-users who need your updates, and the vendors each time they update their software.
That's a ditto moment. It sounds exactly like where I was about 2 months ago.
I consider a framework essential for DOM traversal these days. If you want to run in multiple browsers, you'll either be writing one yourself or using one that's pre-written. There are a lot of really good frameworks out there, but I picked jQuery for the exact same reasons you did--it's no-nonsense, low-cruft, and highly extensible. Highly recommended.
Eh, there are two main points which got conflated.
1) A drive this size will likely not be used for high-performance tasks. That is, it will probably be used for storage of music and movies rather than for applications and swap.
2) That enclosures will be slow.
Point 1 still hasn't been contested, and the first "troll" post didn't seem to care to discuss that--he just seemed to want to attack the idea that someone would only use a disk this size on a slow bus. The more I think about it, the more it sounds trollish--rather than attacking the thesis of the post, he nit-picked in order to argue.
Point 2--you're right. There are high-speed external enclosures, though in my experience, eSATA is fairly rare. I have a drive (used for backups) with both eSATA and USB, and I'd love to be able to use the eSATA, but so far, I have been unable to find an expansion card with suitable (if any) Linux support. Nonetheless, I'm not at all surprised that this was overlooked by the OP, but it's still irrelevant. If you don't need high write speeds, that should not deter you from buying this drive.
RAID 1/5/6 will have worse write speed, anyway. RAID 0 is what you're looking for, but you want to use it only as a working drive, and transfer completed (and to some extent, even intermediary) work to safer storage as soon as possible.
Of course, we're mostly talking about raw video here. Working with anything compressed, and you can probably get away with simpler, safer solutions from the get-go.
No, he asked in his first post how many would be connected to a low-speed bus, and he clarified his point when someone else who couldn't read mentioned swap files. Here, I'll quote it for you:
I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.
So if you weren't intentionally trolling, it definitely came off that way.
There's a bit of truth to what he says, too. Lots of people use drives this size for what is effectively long-term storage. They use it for their movie collections, their music, their HD TV shows, etc. Without that, in fact, the market for these drives would be really, really small--limited, if I were guessing, to people working with video. Write-performance will have a pretty big impact in that market, but just about anywhere else where this kind of massive storage is used, it's probably going to be negligible.
In the general case, Apple notebooks are comparable in price to Windows notebooks for a short period of time after Apple refreshes their line. After that, comparable PC notebooks start coming down in price, but the Apples won't for some time (basically, you'll be able to get cheap refurbs once there's a new refresh, at which point, the Apples will be comparable again.)
Apple's doing something smart with their new lines. They're slowly differentiating themselves in the hardware side again. New twists on input (the new trackpad), multiple GPUs (which other manufacturers have done, but it's still pretty rare), and speed increases independent of the CPU (GPU+OpenCL in Snow Leopard) mean that it's almost impossible to compare a Macbook Pro with any given PC notebook. Now, in 3 months when they're no longer even remotely competitive on specs, the fan base can easily claim that with the ability to use the lower-power GPU, a direct feature-for-feature comparison will not be fair.
No, it lets Google stop the bad app and alert the user. Most users will probably take Google's word that it's bad, but if they don't want to, then they can manually add it.
It's not perfect security, as you seem to think is required to protect things. It's a trade-off between security and freedom, and not a bad one, honestly.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, Google did say that killed apps will be refunded. Apple has made no such promise. Score 1 for Google.
Apple has shown a history of anticompetitive practices and an unwillingness to allow certain apps on the iPhone in the first place. Google has not. This lends credibility to the idea that Google will only be using this on bad applications, whereas we have no reason to believe this of Apple. Google allows users to install their own apps, which means that if someone really wants to run that killed application, they should be able to by loading it themselves instead of using the Android Market. Apple doesn't give this option at all.
Google's implementation of the kill switch is a clear safety measure. For most users, and for the safety of the network, it's a good thing. For power users, it shouldn't matter, as it can be bypassed. I think that there's a real argument that Google's kill switch is less evil than Apple's, and it may even border on good.
Something I've never understood is how the government got the money to pay for the war machines, bombs, and bullets. I mean, you hear all the time how that got us out of the depression, but it just doesn't add up.
Was the government printing money at that point? Is that what did it? Because overprinting money is generally not a good thing, and is arguably one of the reasons we're having problems right now.
Sure, but a good driver who takes care of his car can avoid most accidents, and even if they can't, they can mitigate damage in some ways. Where you're driving (to, from, and which road) will also make a difference. My whole point is that you can't just say "Flying's statistically safer than driving, so you shouldn't be as afraid of it" (which I realize, of course, you did not exactly say) because individual circumstances can have a huge impact on the actual safety of your drive.
Statistics aren't magical. It's entirely possible that a safe, conscientious driver is safer driving than flying (I haven't seen any statistics which break it down that way before.) There are a whole lot of considerations that need to go into a statistic like that for it to have any real meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
This also ensures that the lifespan of media is temporary, rather than enduring. In a weird way, artists seeking to use DRM cash in on their work today are ensuring their relative anonymity tomorrow, when no one can find a playable copy of that old song they used to love so much as a kid back in '08.
I tend to think of it as ensuring repeated sales of their art throughout their lifetimes.
For a while there, ensuring this was as easy as making sure that your music was released on the format du jour. Records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs.... With the advent of digital music sans a physical medium, this trend of rebuying all of your albums is at risk. Suddenly, you're faced with customers never having to rebuy the White album, and you see your sustained profits going down the tubes.
DRM solves that. Now, rather than coming out with a new format every few years, you just have to come up with a new DRM scheme and turn off the old servers. Because the devices playing the music are somewhat general purpose, it's easy to move quickly--you don't have to worry about market penetration for the players, because it's just a free software update away.
Wow, that's pretty crazy.
I've never found AVG's free software to be that great, but I'm fairly certain that the last time it was installed on my computer was several years ago. It seemed ok, and it was one of the only free solutions which included on-access scanning. It never detected any viruses, so eventually I stopped using it, and shortly thereafter I started using Linux full-time, so I know that I'm a little behind the times.
Most AV these days actually use heuristics to guess at whether a program is malicious. There's not much better that they can do, for the reasons that you point out. But a POC exploit without a payload is not malicious, so why should the AV fire? Kapersky is doing the right thing here.
As for the marketing aspect, sadly, that's just business. Every AV vendor out there makes the same claims. If one of them made weaker claims than the others, they might get your business for their honesty, but the pointy-haired bosses out there will compare the two and say, "This one prevents unknown viruses. Get that one."
2009 Toyota Yaris has 4-stars for frontal impact, and is listed as untested for side impacts.
Is AVG really that much cheaper? In my experience, most of the antivirus vendors are comparable in price/license/year.
A good balance would be to allow signed programs from certain manufacturers, and white list any other required software which isn't signed. That minimizes the white list process, while still giving you the option of using software from vendors who don't want to pay for a signing key.
In practice, this works out like HTTP over SSL does today. We have a third-party vetting of websites, but anyone who does not want to pay for that vetting can still use HTTPS connections. The main difference is that we're still talking mostly about business customers doing this, because you need some way to ensure that your users aren't going to whitelist Elfbowl. In other words, this works for corporations, but not so much for grandmothers.
Are you kidding? The list of "good" programs will change constantly. You'd very nearly need hourly updates to get this working.
Update Windows? Does iexplore.exe have a new signature? You need to update your security product.
Even better, you could require vendors to pay you to vet their product. That way, you get money coming out of both ends--the end-users who need your updates, and the vendors each time they update their software.
JS is client side
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript
Just 'cause it's fun pointing out the mistakes of others, you know?
That's a ditto moment. It sounds exactly like where I was about 2 months ago.
I consider a framework essential for DOM traversal these days. If you want to run in multiple browsers, you'll either be writing one yourself or using one that's pre-written. There are a lot of really good frameworks out there, but I picked jQuery for the exact same reasons you did--it's no-nonsense, low-cruft, and highly extensible. Highly recommended.
Most encyclopedias are like that. Now Wikipedia, existing entirely in the ether, could probably do away with that bias.
Yeah, that sort of setup would probably work, too. Snapshots with rsync (and hard links) are nifty :)
Eh, there are two main points which got conflated.
1) A drive this size will likely not be used for high-performance tasks. That is, it will probably be used for storage of music and movies rather than for applications and swap.
2) That enclosures will be slow.
Point 1 still hasn't been contested, and the first "troll" post didn't seem to care to discuss that--he just seemed to want to attack the idea that someone would only use a disk this size on a slow bus. The more I think about it, the more it sounds trollish--rather than attacking the thesis of the post, he nit-picked in order to argue.
Point 2--you're right. There are high-speed external enclosures, though in my experience, eSATA is fairly rare. I have a drive (used for backups) with both eSATA and USB, and I'd love to be able to use the eSATA, but so far, I have been unable to find an expansion card with suitable (if any) Linux support. Nonetheless, I'm not at all surprised that this was overlooked by the OP, but it's still irrelevant. If you don't need high write speeds, that should not deter you from buying this drive.
That's why it's always so important to cite your references.
Uh oh, are you running Linux? Are you aware of the head parking problem with these drives?
http://kerneltrap.org/node/14912
RAID 1/5/6 will have worse write speed, anyway. RAID 0 is what you're looking for, but you want to use it only as a working drive, and transfer completed (and to some extent, even intermediary) work to safer storage as soon as possible.
Of course, we're mostly talking about raw video here. Working with anything compressed, and you can probably get away with simpler, safer solutions from the get-go.
No, he asked in his first post how many would be connected to a low-speed bus, and he clarified his point when someone else who couldn't read mentioned swap files. Here, I'll quote it for you:
I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1003109&cid=25457241
So if you weren't intentionally trolling, it definitely came off that way.
There's a bit of truth to what he says, too. Lots of people use drives this size for what is effectively long-term storage. They use it for their movie collections, their music, their HD TV shows, etc. Without that, in fact, the market for these drives would be really, really small--limited, if I were guessing, to people working with video. Write-performance will have a pretty big impact in that market, but just about anywhere else where this kind of massive storage is used, it's probably going to be negligible.
Imagine an alien race so advanced that they consider humans to be mere animals. We, as a race, have certainly experimented on animals.
In the general case, Apple notebooks are comparable in price to Windows notebooks for a short period of time after Apple refreshes their line. After that, comparable PC notebooks start coming down in price, but the Apples won't for some time (basically, you'll be able to get cheap refurbs once there's a new refresh, at which point, the Apples will be comparable again.)
Apple's doing something smart with their new lines. They're slowly differentiating themselves in the hardware side again. New twists on input (the new trackpad), multiple GPUs (which other manufacturers have done, but it's still pretty rare), and speed increases independent of the CPU (GPU+OpenCL in Snow Leopard) mean that it's almost impossible to compare a Macbook Pro with any given PC notebook. Now, in 3 months when they're no longer even remotely competitive on specs, the fan base can easily claim that with the ability to use the lower-power GPU, a direct feature-for-feature comparison will not be fair.
Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!
No, it lets Google stop the bad app and alert the user. Most users will probably take Google's word that it's bad, but if they don't want to, then they can manually add it.
It's not perfect security, as you seem to think is required to protect things. It's a trade-off between security and freedom, and not a bad one, honestly.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, Google did say that killed apps will be refunded. Apple has made no such promise. Score 1 for Google.
Apple has shown a history of anticompetitive practices and an unwillingness to allow certain apps on the iPhone in the first place. Google has not. This lends credibility to the idea that Google will only be using this on bad applications, whereas we have no reason to believe this of Apple. Google allows users to install their own apps, which means that if someone really wants to run that killed application, they should be able to by loading it themselves instead of using the Android Market. Apple doesn't give this option at all.
Google's implementation of the kill switch is a clear safety measure. For most users, and for the safety of the network, it's a good thing. For power users, it shouldn't matter, as it can be bypassed. I think that there's a real argument that Google's kill switch is less evil than Apple's, and it may even border on good.
Something I've never understood is how the government got the money to pay for the war machines, bombs, and bullets. I mean, you hear all the time how that got us out of the depression, but it just doesn't add up.
Was the government printing money at that point? Is that what did it? Because overprinting money is generally not a good thing, and is arguably one of the reasons we're having problems right now.
Sure, but a good driver who takes care of his car can avoid most accidents, and even if they can't, they can mitigate damage in some ways. Where you're driving (to, from, and which road) will also make a difference. My whole point is that you can't just say "Flying's statistically safer than driving, so you shouldn't be as afraid of it" (which I realize, of course, you did not exactly say) because individual circumstances can have a huge impact on the actual safety of your drive.
Statistics aren't magical. It's entirely possible that a safe, conscientious driver is safer driving than flying (I haven't seen any statistics which break it down that way before.) There are a whole lot of considerations that need to go into a statistic like that for it to have any real meaning.
Oops :) Obviously I meant "blob."