Isn't that *almost* the same as saying "if you are logged on as root?"
No. You can get boned even if you're logged in as a normal user. And you have to set your security settings down to use the ActiveX components that many websites require... the whole model is nuts, it's trying to apply discrestionary access control to a realm where mandatory access control is required.
They took a technology that they already used and repurposed it to fit the needs for a plug-in architecture for Internet Explorer.
Wrong.
they took a technology they already used and repurposed it to fit their needs, using a completely inappropriate and inherently unfixable security model that puts the responsibility for determining the access privileges of an object so far from the component that's in a position to tell what those privileges should be that there's no way to reliably determine them.
The downside to ActiveX is that it can be installed and used without user intervention if it's in the trusted zone, and there's no way to guarantee that the trusted zone doesn't include untrusted objects. Every other browser in the world requires an explicit installation step (whether it requires a restart or not... that's a complete red herring) so the only attack possible is a social engineering one... there's no technical backdoor for the untrusted object to sneak through without the user (be he ever so savvy) noticing.
If the impacts were of small enough objects over long enough time, you might get layers of ejecta that built up into mountains.
Another possibility is that an encounter with ring material while it was still cooling weakened the surface enough for volcanic outflow to build up the ridge.
I'd still class these as very low probability, either one requires Iapetus to be lined up with the rings to an unlikely degree of precision.
You get a crater from a really powerful hit from straight above, when a fast moving body (be it accelerated by gravity or just floating through space at high speed) hits the surface. Not from a satellite of atmosphere-less planet, hitting the surface horizontally.
For grazing impacts you get parallel grooves as displayed by the moons of mars. For almost any other angle of impact, the released kinetic energy dominates and you get a more or less circular crater: elliptical craters are rare, but they're still craters rather than mountains.
Re:What realtime interactive full-motion video?
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
I'd say that any of the 3D games qualify as "realtime interactive full motion video".
Ironically, gamers use "FMV" - "full motion video" - to describe the cut-scenes in the more movie-like video-games like Final Fantasy, and the distinguishing factor between these cut-scenes and the everyday "running around in a realtime-interactive 3d-environment" that most of the game-play consists of is the level of realism in the cut-scenes.
It's only the very latest games that seem to use use the regular 3d engine to render the cut-scenes, at least with any great effectiveness. And these still look better than the realtime-interactive part of the game... generally because the animation and physics is fully scripted instead of depending on what a friend of mine used to call "meatball AI" when we were doing video-games - back in the '80s when good realtime interactive 2d was a challenge and the Amiga's blitter was a breakthrough.
20 years later we have better graphics... ALMOST good enough to handle cartoon photorealism (Legend of Zelda - Windwalker is an amazing approach to that, but the physics of sailing and wave motion is all wrong even for a cartoon world), but the AI is still crude as hell.
Re:Its been done... (Score:1) by mabinogi (74033) Neutral on Saturday January...but that one won't fit in SD based devices that expect the length to be fixed.
It sure looks like it's the same length as a regular SD card: in fact it looks like it's exactly the same design as the Sandisk one, except instead off a fragile hinged frame around the USB part of the card (that will make it hard to fit the card into some USB sockets where there's little clearance) it's just got a couple of notches to narrow the upper part of the card down to fit in the socket.
There's also been a CF card that used the same schtick, but it never seems to have made it to the market. I'd been wondering why all memory cards didn't come with some such arrangement... I guess it's like the way canned or bottled coffee didn't make the jump from asian food stores to mainstream groceries until it got a "big name" like Starbucks involved (or why nobody needed multitasking in a personal computer until Microsoft "invented" it).
Because it's hard to do in Windows? Isn't that enough reason?
Luckily we have lots of concurrency to chew on...
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
The performance gains should initially be about the same as having a true dual-CPU system (only the system will be cheaper because the motherboard doesn't have to have two sockets and associated "glue" chippery), which means something less than double the speed even in the ideal case, and just like today it will boost reasonably well-written multi-threaded applications. Not single-threaded ones.
That's OK, for most people dropping back to 1 GHz and getting half a dozen cores would give them a lot nicer computer than pushing the CPU speed to 4 GHz on a single chip. Why? because there's gobs of concurrency on your desktop already no matter what your processor... no mater what your OS, there's half a dozen processes (tasks, whatever) that each take turns using a lot of the CPU and occasionally stepping on each others toes and making your computer feel slow.
For games, increasingly, the bottleneck is the video card. There's still a lot of straight-line code in most games, but things like the physics engine, the rendering engine, and the user interface... these parts of the system can be made to have relatively narrow communication channels between each other. Each can then become a separate thread, or even a separate program, running on a separate processor. Overall a 6x1GHz system would still be able to provide a better experience than a 1x4GHz one, even for games.
This won't make the benchmark boys happy, but who cares? They haven't been happy in a long time anyway.
GPUs are good enough that a realtime 3d window manager is possible. It's a much simpler problem than FMV, and Apple's beginning to play with some of the features in Quartz Extreme and Exposé, but until someone actually produces something like my fantasy 3dWM we won't see much demand for it.
"A machine that can do realtime interactive full motion video".
Only in a very limited way. The absolutely latest "realtime interactive full-motion video" - Halflife 2 - is just beginning to do optical transparency and realistic physics in a reasonable way. It's only good enough to fool the eye for a few seconds, if you pay attention to shadows and reflections, but it's the first system that's managed to provide anything like photorealistic rendering.
Luckily raytracing is very parallelisable through brute-force techniques (give each GPU a full copy of the polygon database and a segment of the screen to render, and Nx as many processors will be able to give you Nx the framerate... up until pushing out the polygons starts taking a significant part of the CPU), and luminosity (shadowcasting is a really crude kind of luminosity calculation) and the physics engine can be run separately from the final engine...
So "realtime interactive full-motion video" is potentially possible, but we're not there yet.
I know why companies think they need to keep a tight rein on product announcements, I know the moral of the Osborne-2.
What I'm getting at here is that for the product that matters a few weeks advance notice is just going to hurt their competitor's sales. Oh, and that's Dell and HP, not Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't make computers, they do operating systems and other products where they have lock-in... and Apple's been telegraphing everything to do with Tiger as hard as they can already.
I don't know why you care about the office suite. Office suites aren't a product category any more... there's only two kinds of office suites in the world that people will actually use: Microsoft Office, and free ones.
Either Apple is coming out with a cheap Mac (at last! A computer for the rest of us!) or they're not and all the excitement it's generating should tell them something...
I dunno, the people most hurt by the possibility of a low end Mac that doesn't suck are companies selling Windows boxes to people who really want a Mac but can't justify spending a grand for crummy hardware.
It sure doesn't help Microsoft.
Unless the rumor's false, in which case what grounds does Apple have for a suit?
They're both 3d user interfaces, they just have different control systems.
You (and Jakob) are talking about the user's controls, but a 3d user interface doesn't need to work like a helicopter to take advantage of the fact that we're primates and predators and have senses and minds evolved for a 3d model of the world.
If you could buy a helicopter for $50k, vanishingly few people would still buy one. that's half the cost of my house, three times as much as my car, and I resent having to spend that much just to get around.
While a savannah is a plane, it is still a 3d environment. You don't have an overall "plan view" of your environment, you see things nearer to you or further away. When something interests you, you don't stand off and look at it from a distance unless it's something very much larger than you... for most things, distance maps attention. Things you're actively working on are close to you.
And this 3d feature has been part of 2d GUIs since around 1980, when Smalltalk and the Xerox Star office system first showed us a positional UI. You have icons (small things, in the distance) and overlapping windows, with windows in front of each other, Mac OS X even gives you a shallow version of this.
That's where 3d will shine... IF someone comes up with a GUI that gives us a "Savannah view" of our environment, without making navigation any harder then pointing and clicking on the projection plane of the screen. "Go there", "show me that",... and "that" becomes the closest object, shouldering other windows or GUI elements off to the side or into the distance...
Yes, I know theer's an embedded NT, that's not what I was asking.
What I was getting at is why, given that Pocket PC's hardware requirements are the same order of magnitude as the *full* NT, Microsoft persists in making people run Windows CE on the bloody things instead of something based on NT...
For the stated $25 a month you can get a plain jane prepaid candybar phone that gets calls and makes calls.
Where?
I've been trying to find a cheap low-power long-standby mono "it's just a damn phone" "bar" like my old Nokia 6100 forever. They don't seem to make them any more... at the very least they all have battery-eating color screens.
If you can't look after your phone, you don't deserve one!
It's a tool, not a pet or a family member.
HP used to advertise their calculators at trade shows by throwing them at the wall and demonstrating they still worked. They published articles about HP calculators that could go through a snowplow. HP sold that division. Now they sell iPaqs that need a $80 shock-cushioned case wrapped around them in case you drop them from your belt.
Marantz ran an ad, once, that showed a burned out hulk of an amplifier that had fallen four stories in an apartment fire and sat in mud and ashes for a week and still worked. I don't dare jostle my stereo system these days, something might get knocked loose.
It's about time people started making equipment like that again.
I had a Nokia like that, then my company changed carriers and replaced the fat, dumb, happy Nokia with the monochrome screen, no value-added features that I'd have to pay Verizon extra every month to actually use, and good enough battery life that I could forget to charge it for a week and it was still working...
Now I have an LG flip-phone with a color screen, "Get It Now", and all kinds of features that... "not only don't I want them, but I can't imagine anyone wanting them" (thank you William Gibson), and I still haven't figured out how to completely disable the unusable-and annoying-voice-recognition with the easy one-finger activation that you can turn on if you unhook the phone from the belt clip the wrong way...
And if I go a day without charging it turns itself off... wasting enough power to keep it on standby until I get home by playing a cute little movie and tune to tell me it's out of power.
Does that mean my cell phone will now crash as often as my PC at work does?
More often. Your PC is running NT, not CE.
I routinely reset my Pocket PC phone edition before placing a call, because otherwise it was likely to crash while trying to complete it.
I don't know why they can't just run NT on these things. We were running NT desktops on P-100s with 16M in the '90s, with 1024x768 screens, and they were FASTER than the Pocket PC (and we used to think those requirements were outrageous). Why they need to run a stripped down pre-NT-Windows-based OS on a machine with less than 1/16th the screen area, four times the RAM, and 4 times the CPU I have no idea...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that *almost* the same as saying "if you are logged on as root?"
No. You can get boned even if you're logged in as a normal user. And you have to set your security settings down to use the ActiveX components that many websites require... the whole model is nuts, it's trying to apply discrestionary access control to a realm where mandatory access control is required.
They took a technology that they already used and repurposed it to fit the needs for a plug-in architecture for Internet Explorer.
Wrong.
they took a technology they already used and repurposed it to fit their needs, using a completely inappropriate and inherently unfixable security model that puts the responsibility for determining the access privileges of an object so far from the component that's in a position to tell what those privileges should be that there's no way to reliably determine them.
The downside to ActiveX is that it can be installed and used without user intervention if it's in the trusted zone, and there's no way to guarantee that the trusted zone doesn't include untrusted objects. Every other browser in the world requires an explicit installation step (whether it requires a restart or not... that's a complete red herring) so the only attack possible is a social engineering one... there's no technical backdoor for the untrusted object to sneak through without the user (be he ever so savvy) noticing.
If the impacts were of small enough objects over long enough time, you might get layers of ejecta that built up into mountains.
Another possibility is that an encounter with ring material while it was still cooling weakened the surface enough for volcanic outflow to build up the ridge.
I'd still class these as very low probability, either one requires Iapetus to be lined up with the rings to an unlikely degree of precision.
You get a crater from a really powerful hit from straight above, when a fast moving body (be it accelerated by gravity or just floating through space at high speed) hits the surface. Not from a satellite of atmosphere-less planet, hitting the surface horizontally.
For grazing impacts you get parallel grooves as displayed by the moons of mars. For almost any other angle of impact, the released kinetic energy dominates and you get a more or less circular crater: elliptical craters are rare, but they're still craters rather than mountains.
I'd say that any of the 3D games qualify as "realtime interactive full motion video".
Ironically, gamers use "FMV" - "full motion video" - to describe the cut-scenes in the more movie-like video-games like Final Fantasy, and the distinguishing factor between these cut-scenes and the everyday "running around in a realtime-interactive 3d-environment" that most of the game-play consists of is the level of realism in the cut-scenes.
It's only the very latest games that seem to use use the regular 3d engine to render the cut-scenes, at least with any great effectiveness. And these still look better than the realtime-interactive part of the game... generally because the animation and physics is fully scripted instead of depending on what a friend of mine used to call "meatball AI" when we were doing video-games - back in the '80s when good realtime interactive 2d was a challenge and the Amiga's blitter was a breakthrough.
20 years later we have better graphics... ALMOST good enough to handle cartoon photorealism (Legend of Zelda - Windwalker is an amazing approach to that, but the physics of sailing and wave motion is all wrong even for a cartoon world), but the AI is still crude as hell.
Re:Its been done... (Score:1)
by mabinogi (74033) Neutral on Saturday January
It sure looks like it's the same length as a regular SD card: in fact it looks like it's exactly the same design as the Sandisk one, except instead off a fragile hinged frame around the USB part of the card (that will make it hard to fit the card into some USB sockets where there's little clearance) it's just got a couple of notches to narrow the upper part of the card down to fit in the socket.
There's also been a CF card that used the same schtick, but it never seems to have made it to the market. I'd been wondering why all memory cards didn't come with some such arrangement... I guess it's like the way canned or bottled coffee didn't make the jump from asian food stores to mainstream groceries until it got a "big name" like Starbucks involved (or why nobody needed multitasking in a personal computer until Microsoft "invented" it).
You're already using a 3D UI, unless you're using RatPoison or some similar tiled or full-screen-only window manager.
There's a Winston Churchill quote that seems approprieate here.
Because it's hard to do in Windows? Isn't that enough reason?
The performance gains should initially be about the same as having a true dual-CPU system (only the system will be cheaper because the motherboard doesn't have to have two sockets and associated "glue" chippery), which means something less than double the speed even in the ideal case, and just like today it will boost reasonably well-written multi-threaded applications. Not single-threaded ones.
That's OK, for most people dropping back to 1 GHz and getting half a dozen cores would give them a lot nicer computer than pushing the CPU speed to 4 GHz on a single chip. Why? because there's gobs of concurrency on your desktop already no matter what your processor... no mater what your OS, there's half a dozen processes (tasks, whatever) that each take turns using a lot of the CPU and occasionally stepping on each others toes and making your computer feel slow.
For games, increasingly, the bottleneck is the video card. There's still a lot of straight-line code in most games, but things like the physics engine, the rendering engine, and the user interface... these parts of the system can be made to have relatively narrow communication channels between each other. Each can then become a separate thread, or even a separate program, running on a separate processor. Overall a 6x1GHz system would still be able to provide a better experience than a 1x4GHz one, even for games.
This won't make the benchmark boys happy, but who cares? They haven't been happy in a long time anyway.
What realtime interactive full-motion video?.
We're just about ready for realtime interactive 3d user interfaces.
GPUs are good enough that a realtime 3d window manager is possible. It's a much simpler problem than FMV, and Apple's beginning to play with some of the features in Quartz Extreme and Exposé, but until someone actually produces something like my fantasy 3dWM we won't see much demand for it.
"A machine that can do realtime interactive full motion video".
Only in a very limited way. The absolutely latest "realtime interactive full-motion video" - Halflife 2 - is just beginning to do optical transparency and realistic physics in a reasonable way. It's only good enough to fool the eye for a few seconds, if you pay attention to shadows and reflections, but it's the first system that's managed to provide anything like photorealistic rendering.
Luckily raytracing is very parallelisable through brute-force techniques (give each GPU a full copy of the polygon database and a segment of the screen to render, and Nx as many processors will be able to give you Nx the framerate... up until pushing out the polygons starts taking a significant part of the CPU), and luminosity (shadowcasting is a really crude kind of luminosity calculation) and the physics engine can be run separately from the final engine...
So "realtime interactive full-motion video" is potentially possible, but we're not there yet.
I know why companies think they need to keep a tight rein on product announcements, I know the moral of the Osborne-2.
What I'm getting at here is that for the product that matters a few weeks advance notice is just going to hurt their competitor's sales. Oh, and that's Dell and HP, not Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't make computers, they do operating systems and other products where they have lock-in... and Apple's been telegraphing everything to do with Tiger as hard as they can already.
I don't know why you care about the office suite. Office suites aren't a product category any more... there's only two kinds of office suites in the world that people will actually use: Microsoft Office, and free ones.
Either Apple is coming out with a cheap Mac (at last! A computer for the rest of us!) or they're not and all the excitement it's generating should tell them something...
Either way, it's a win for Apple.
I dunno, the people most hurt by the possibility of a low end Mac that doesn't suck are companies selling Windows boxes to people who really want a Mac but can't justify spending a grand for crummy hardware.
It sure doesn't help Microsoft.
Unless the rumor's false, in which case what grounds does Apple have for a suit?
I thought PSP has already been out for years...
They're both 3d user interfaces, they just have different control systems.
You (and Jakob) are talking about the user's controls, but a 3d user interface doesn't need to work like a helicopter to take advantage of the fact that we're primates and predators and have senses and minds evolved for a 3d model of the world.
If you could buy a helicopter for $50k, vanishingly few people would still buy one. that's half the cost of my house, three times as much as my car, and I resent having to spend that much just to get around.
While a savannah is a plane, it is still a 3d environment. You don't have
... and "that" becomes the closest object, shouldering other
an overall "plan view" of your environment, you see things nearer to you or
further away. When something interests you, you don't stand off and look at
it from a distance unless it's something very much larger than you... for most
things, distance maps attention. Things you're actively working on are close
to you.
And this 3d feature has been part of 2d GUIs since around 1980, when Smalltalk
and the Xerox Star office system first showed us a positional UI. You have
icons (small things, in the distance) and overlapping windows, with windows
in front of each other, Mac OS X even gives you a shallow version of this.
That's where 3d will shine... IF someone comes up with a GUI that gives us
a "Savannah view" of our environment, without making navigation any harder
then pointing and clicking on the projection plane of the screen. "Go there",
"show me that",
windows or GUI elements off to the side or into the distance...
Remember Apple's old ad campaign "Rip, Mix, Burn...?"
You can even just burn your tracks to CD and rip them in whatever codec floats your boat.
Just change the order. "Mix, Burn, Rip".
Yes, I know theer's an embedded NT, that's not what I was asking.
What I was getting at is why, given that Pocket PC's hardware requirements are the same order of magnitude as the *full* NT, Microsoft persists in making people run Windows CE on the bloody things instead of something based on NT...
For the stated $25 a month you can get a plain jane prepaid candybar phone that gets calls and makes calls.
Where?
I've been trying to find a cheap low-power long-standby mono "it's just a damn phone" "bar" like my old Nokia 6100 forever. They don't seem to make them any more... at the very least they all have battery-eating color screens.
If you can't look after your phone, you don't deserve one!
It's a tool, not a pet or a family member.
HP used to advertise their calculators at trade shows by throwing them at the wall and demonstrating they still worked. They published articles about HP calculators that could go through a snowplow. HP sold that division. Now they sell iPaqs that need a $80 shock-cushioned case wrapped around them in case you drop them from your belt.
Marantz ran an ad, once, that showed a burned out hulk of an amplifier that had fallen four stories in an apartment fire and sat in mud and ashes for a week and still worked. I don't dare jostle my stereo system these days, something might get knocked loose.
It's about time people started making equipment like that again.
I had a Nokia like that, then my company changed carriers and replaced the fat, dumb, happy Nokia with the monochrome screen, no value-added features that I'd have to pay Verizon extra every month to actually use, and good enough battery life that I could forget to charge it for a week and it was still working...
... "not only don't I want them, but I can't imagine anyone wanting them" (thank you William Gibson), and I still haven't figured out how to completely disable the unusable-and annoying-voice-recognition with the easy one-finger activation that you can turn on if you unhook the phone from the belt clip the wrong way...
Now I have an LG flip-phone with a color screen, "Get It Now", and all kinds of features that
And if I go a day without charging it turns itself off... wasting enough power to keep it on standby until I get home by playing a cute little movie and tune to tell me it's out of power.
Christ.
Whoever designed this needs better meds.
Does that mean my cell phone will now crash as often as my PC at work does?
More often. Your PC is running NT, not CE.
I routinely reset my Pocket PC phone edition before placing a call, because otherwise it was likely to crash while trying to complete it.
I don't know why they can't just run NT on these things. We were running NT desktops on P-100s with 16M in the '90s, with 1024x768 screens, and they were FASTER than the Pocket PC (and we used to think those requirements were outrageous). Why they need to run a stripped down pre-NT-Windows-based OS on a machine with less than 1/16th the screen area, four times the RAM, and 4 times the CPU I have no idea...