I read just about all of Gibson's novels the week they came out, and they were super cool... but they have had about zero predictive power.
The word "cyberspace" almost always means that the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, there are exceptions, but the people who are most taken by Gibson's vision are sorely lacking in insight.
The representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Not believing in the predictive power of Gibson's novels doesn't mean I don't consider them important, it just means I'm aware that they're fiction.
Lord of the Rings is a great cultural artifact without having people yammering on about Ringwraiths being real.
I have had SO MUCH trouble, as a system administrator, with users being blocked by Zone Alarm. Can't print? Disable Zone Alarm. Can't see file shares? Disable Zone Alarm. Can't see our web proxy? Disable Zone Alarm. It doesn't seem to do anything to keep users from clicking "Infect Me" when that old "Do you want to run this untrusted program from a website you never heard of" dialog box comes up, though.
THe last time I had malware on a computer I used was back in the early '90s... a DOS-based boot sector virus picked up from a co-worker's floppy disk. Since then my primary antivirus has been "don't be stupid, and don't use internet explorer". Periodic checks have shown no viruses, nothing worse than cookies from websites the antivirus and antispyware mob consider dodgy.
So, yes, I would say that there's a huge disconnect between the risks people face and the tools they need to use... starting with Symantec.
In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro.
And the problem with this would be... what? It's a frigging video game, for gods' sake!
This transformation actually depends on client and server, not OS (although it was created because of Windows - Unix conventions).
OK, I guess technically FTP isn't *quite* older than Windows, but I really don't think there were many people using Windows 1.0 in 1985.:)
Here's some of the operating systems in use at the time:
OS/360, VM/CMS, etcetera: IBM operating systems stored text as 80 column card images, padded with spaces.
VMS and RSX-11 used a one or two byte record length, an optional binary line number, an optional Fortran carriage control character, followed by the text, with null padding added when a line would overlap a block boundary.
CP/M used carriage return or carriage-return line-feed, depending on the application, with a ^Z character to indicate end of file because files only had block counts, not byte lengths.
They'd have KILLED to only have to worry about CRLF.:)
No, seriously, there's no bloody way I'm getting into a car with a control system running Windows. I don't want the dashboard telling me "A fatal exception has occurred...".
One might argue that the DRM should accomplish fewer things in order to make the scheme less prone to failure, and that might be a good argument.
Well, um, that's the argument I'm making. So I'm glad you agree.:)
There's a vast difference between apps and songs, though. Bad apps can damage the phone, or in the case of tethering, Apple's relationship with AT&T. But you can't do any harm with a song you paid for.
I'm not interested in talking about whether Apple is or is not justified in doing so. I don't own an iPhone or a Zune, I have no dog in the hunt.
Also I don't see how it matters who owns the certificate, I'm talking about the technical capbilities. If some vendor on the App store tells Apple "we screwed up and want to withdraw FooCalc because it makes iPhones trigger sneezing attacks" (or whatever) Apple is unlikely to say "no", no matter whether that involves FooCorp or Apple pushing the button to revoke the cert.
That may be, but it may also be that it's simpler to handle whatever cases they expected to handle if they're keyed per-song. Just because you can do it another way doesn't mean it makes the most sense to do so.
Robust design. Minimizing the impact of failure modes. The simpler the design, the more predictable the failure modes, the easier it is to plan around them or limit their impact.
Do you believe Microsoft intended to allow labels to be able to revoke the license to permanently-purchased songs from the Zune Marketplace?
If someone in Microsoft hadn't considered that possibility and decided it was an advantage they're less imaginative and competent than I believe them to be. After all, Apple did: the exact same capability is built into the iPhone App Store... and Apple's historically been critical of strong DRM (the DRM in iTunes is pretty much "honor system" compared to what Microsoft does in Windows Media Player).
Not necessarily. Any DRM scheme that's flexible enough to implement both subscription and purchase should be flexible enough to support a per-target or per-computer key where appropriate. Microsoft did it for Windows Server licensing, after all.
you're making it sound like Zune, as part of their business model
That's what you're inferring, anyway, whether I implied it or not.
I didn't mention any "business model", I was talking about a design flaw they should have tried to avoid.
As for the difference between "blame" and "responsibility", google it.
You have to be able to only revoke the subscription songs when the subscription runs out.
You're assuming that I consider the subscription model a good idea.
But even if I were to grant that, it doesn't mean you should apply the same model to songs that are purchased.
The way you are writing this, you are suggesting that it was Zune's intention all along to allow labels to revoke permanently purchased songs at their whim by building that capability into the design of the DRM.
I'm not casting blame, I'm assigning responsibility.
Yeh, but the guy who you were responding to wrote: Well, assuming the laptop was still under warranty, of course. If the laptop wasn't under warranty he'd have had to pay for a brand new laptop, rather than simply purchasing a replacement battery from eBay or something.
30 days before the end of the warranty isn't the same as out of warranty.:)
Sure it is. That is the only reason to have the DRM granular to the song level: unless you intend to make it possible for a user to have the right to play a song, and just that song, pulled... there is no reason not to use the same encryption key for every song the user bought.
Basically, there's a bug in Zune's DRM scheme that allowed bad data from a supplier to take away the rights to play a large swath of purchased music.
I didn't say that Microsoft took it away from him on purpose. I said that it was Microsoft's fault for designing the Zune DRM in such a way that this could happen.
That is... that bug only matters if the authorization mechanism is granular to the song level, rather than the computer level. The fact that the authorization mechanism is granular to the song level is Microsoft's fault.
Yeh, for a battery that cost them $50 to manufacture. For a laptop that cost them $1500, you think they'd just stroll into the back and bring you a new one?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a year and a half, it'll be here.
Yeh, but by then you'll be able to get 2TB hard drives for 1/10th the price.
The article I read spent a good deal of time talking about flash memory. What article are YOU referring to?
I don't think he as trying to predict anything. He was trying to write a good story in a new way and he did both of those things.
Absolutely agree. I'm not saying he didn't write a good yarn or three.
I read just about all of Gibson's novels the week they came out, and they were super cool... but they have had about zero predictive power.
The word "cyberspace" almost always means that the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, there are exceptions, but the people who are most taken by Gibson's vision are sorely lacking in insight.
The representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Not believing in the predictive power of Gibson's novels doesn't mean I don't consider them important, it just means I'm aware that they're fiction.
Lord of the Rings is a great cultural artifact without having people yammering on about Ringwraiths being real.
I have had SO MUCH trouble, as a system administrator, with users being blocked by Zone Alarm. Can't print? Disable Zone Alarm. Can't see file shares? Disable Zone Alarm. Can't see our web proxy? Disable Zone Alarm. It doesn't seem to do anything to keep users from clicking "Infect Me" when that old "Do you want to run this untrusted program from a website you never heard of" dialog box comes up, though.
THe last time I had malware on a computer I used was back in the early '90s... a DOS-based boot sector virus picked up from a co-worker's floppy disk. Since then my primary antivirus has been "don't be stupid, and don't use internet explorer". Periodic checks have shown no viruses, nothing worse than cookies from websites the antivirus and antispyware mob consider dodgy.
So, yes, I would say that there's a huge disconnect between the risks people face and the tools they need to use... starting with Symantec.
Murray Leinster predicted the future of computer technology better in the '50s than Gibson did in the '90s.
In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro.
And the problem with this would be... what? It's a frigging video game, for gods' sake!
Damn, I picked the wrong RFC.
FTP dates back to 1980. That's older than MS-DOS.
This transformation actually depends on client and server, not OS (although it was created because of Windows - Unix conventions).
OK, I guess technically FTP isn't *quite* older than Windows, but I really don't think there were many people using Windows 1.0 in 1985. :)
Here's some of the operating systems in use at the time:
OS/360, VM/CMS, etcetera: IBM operating systems stored text as 80 column card images, padded with spaces.
VMS and RSX-11 used a one or two byte record length, an optional binary line number, an optional Fortran carriage control character, followed by the text, with null padding added when a line would overlap a block boundary.
CP/M used carriage return or carriage-return line-feed, depending on the application, with a ^Z character to indicate end of file because files only had block counts, not byte lengths.
They'd have KILLED to only have to worry about CRLF. :)
Do the same effects occur in a vacuum?
No, seriously, there's no bloody way I'm getting into a car with a control system running Windows. I don't want the dashboard telling me "A fatal exception has occurred...".
Saved me from posting the same thing.
Last I heard the Great Firewall of Australia was being dumped by the biggest ISP and they were backing away from it.
One might argue that the DRM should accomplish fewer things in order to make the scheme less prone to failure, and that might be a good argument.
Well, um, that's the argument I'm making. So I'm glad you agree. :)
There's a vast difference between apps and songs, though. Bad apps can damage the phone, or in the case of tethering, Apple's relationship with AT&T. But you can't do any harm with a song you paid for.
I'm not interested in talking about whether Apple is or is not justified in doing so. I don't own an iPhone or a Zune, I have no dog in the hunt.
Also I don't see how it matters who owns the certificate, I'm talking about the technical capbilities. If some vendor on the App store tells Apple "we screwed up and want to withdraw FooCalc because it makes iPhones trigger sneezing attacks" (or whatever) Apple is unlikely to say "no", no matter whether that involves FooCorp or Apple pushing the button to revoke the cert.
That may be, but it may also be that it's simpler to handle whatever cases they expected to handle if they're keyed per-song. Just because you can do it another way doesn't mean it makes the most sense to do so.
Robust design. Minimizing the impact of failure modes. The simpler the design, the more predictable the failure modes, the easier it is to plan around them or limit their impact.
Do you believe Microsoft intended to allow labels to be able to revoke the license to permanently-purchased songs from the Zune Marketplace?
If someone in Microsoft hadn't considered that possibility and decided it was an advantage they're less imaginative and competent than I believe them to be. After all, Apple did: the exact same capability is built into the iPhone App Store... and Apple's historically been critical of strong DRM (the DRM in iTunes is pretty much "honor system" compared to what Microsoft does in Windows Media Player).
So Zune should support two separate DRM schemes?
Not necessarily. Any DRM scheme that's flexible enough to implement both subscription and purchase should be flexible enough to support a per-target or per-computer key where appropriate. Microsoft did it for Windows Server licensing, after all.
you're making it sound like Zune, as part of their business model
That's what you're inferring, anyway, whether I implied it or not.
I didn't mention any "business model", I was talking about a design flaw they should have tried to avoid.
As for the difference between "blame" and "responsibility", google it.
Or giant parrots on the hiltops, screaming in FSK.
You have to be able to only revoke the subscription songs when the subscription runs out.
You're assuming that I consider the subscription model a good idea.
But even if I were to grant that, it doesn't mean you should apply the same model to songs that are purchased.
The way you are writing this, you are suggesting that it was Zune's intention all along to allow labels to revoke permanently purchased songs at their whim by building that capability into the design of the DRM.
I'm not casting blame, I'm assigning responsibility.
Get off my lawn!
Yeh, but the guy who you were responding to wrote: Well, assuming the laptop was still under warranty, of course. If the laptop wasn't under warranty he'd have had to pay for a brand new laptop, rather than simply purchasing a replacement battery from eBay or something.
30 days before the end of the warranty isn't the same as out of warranty. :)
It is not designed to allow that.
Sure it is. That is the only reason to have the DRM granular to the song level: unless you intend to make it possible for a user to have the right to play a song, and just that song, pulled... there is no reason not to use the same encryption key for every song the user bought.
Basically, there's a bug in Zune's DRM scheme that allowed bad data from a supplier to take away the rights to play a large swath of purchased music.
I didn't say that Microsoft took it away from him on purpose. I said that it was Microsoft's fault for designing the Zune DRM in such a way that this could happen.
That is... that bug only matters if the authorization mechanism is granular to the song level, rather than the computer level. The fact that the authorization mechanism is granular to the song level is Microsoft's fault.
These are LEGO geeks. If they lose their iPhone, they make another one out of LEGO.
Yeh, for a battery that cost them $50 to manufacture. For a laptop that cost them $1500, you think they'd just stroll into the back and bring you a new one?