From the article: "Considering that most good programmers are pretty bad at security,"
I don't necessarily accept this assumption. Most good programmers are good at coding up the design and requirements they've been given. The customer/architect/business analyst/technical lead needs to identify security requirements before they can be coded. It's very expensive to leave identifying security requirements to programmers. Not every project has the same needs. Sure, the programmer could guess. But each programmer on the project would end up spending a different amount of time and money on the security aspect if it's not clearly prioritized.
Likewise, if security requirements are not specified well enough, a security test-plan cannot be written or executed. If you need security, ensure it's somebody's explicit JOB on the project to ensure security gets into the design & QA.
Security costs money before a single line of code is written. Decide how much you need, where it's to be applied, and ensure it becomes a critical requirement through coding and testing. You can't expect security to just "happen" simply by hiring some "good programmers" as the author says.
Sure, you can take an end-run around the whole digital protection scheme with an analog "rip", but consider these problems: 1) the DAC -> ADC process introducing resampling artifacts (probably minor), 2) PC/EMF/motherboard/HDcontroller noise while in the analog stage (quite possible), and 3) your PC will need to be VERY close to your fancy new SACD/DVD-Audio player whenever you want to "rip" (pain in the ass, but you do NOT want a long run of analog cables to your PC). High quality soundcards with an isolated analog input section can help with #2, for a price. Here's a good site with soundcard performance benchmarks.
This seems like a step backwards: Consumers will need to upgrade PC hardware to end up with a lower quality analog rip of more expensive music media.
Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the onus will be on consumers to make sure they're aware of what they're buying.
"Copyright owners are entitled to use whatever formats they want to use," von Lohmann said. "If they really want to protect their content they can go back to vinyl."
What kind of snarky remark is that?! 1) This probably makes the recording industry laugh! "Sure they'll go back to vinyl." 2) I really don't think consumers want to protect their content with -that- amount of sacrifice.
It could simply be CNN's editing, but I would have rather the EFF pointed out something like "consumers will protect their content by continuing to rip from consumer friendly formats."
Canada: Telus will be trying something similar
on
Cable TV A La Carte?
·
· Score: 2
From the Edmonton Journal last month:
The West's largest telephone company is venturing into the broadcast distribution market.
Telus Communications applied to the CRTC for a broadcast distribution licence in British Columbia and Alberta. Their proposed system would initially carry 200 channels in 16 cities, including Calgary and Edmonton.
Canada's broadcast and communications regulator has set November 18th to hear interventions and applications against the move, but so far neither Shaw, Bell, nor any other major cable companies have spoken against Telus' plan.
The company's proposed distribution system would utilize Telus' extensive telephone network in BC and Alberta. This would enable consumers to pick and choose which channels they want. Currently, satellite lets you do the same thing with more channels, while cable is restricted to a tier system.
It is expected Telus would start the new service next spring.
Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS.
Haven't Linux and Windows used acclerated hardware video drivers for drawing their GUI for many years? I'm talking about Windows 95 era, possibly even WFWG 3.11. I'm sorry if it only takes a $30 "hotshot" graphics card to accelerate the rendering of a perfectly usable 2-D GUI in X or Win32, but them's the breaks.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
Growing pains? Okay, but be careful what you label growth or progress. Are 3D or photo realistic GUIs easier, more reliable, or more productive? I think they might be more attractive and way cool, but is that really net "growth" considering the immense R&D and consumer expense to get it?
In a letter addressing the pastoral treatment of homosexuals, the Catholic Church gave what some perceive as permission (or at least acceptance) of violence towards homosexuals:
"People should not be surprised when a morally offensive lifestyle is physically attacked." --The Vatican
It would be a nice gesture, in my opinion, if the Vatican proved both the existence and authority of the superior deity which allows this "unsurprised" attitude toward physical violence. Until then, perhaps they should not be surprised when their own intolerant lifestyles are physically attacked.
If you've ever wondered about the legalities of recording calls without one side knowing about it: Can We Tape? (Summary: In most states, it's legal.) Though I don't have a link, I am fairly certain this practice is legal in all Canadian provinces also.
Something to think about, if you've ever considered threatening or cursing at a telemarketer (very likely), or if you find they do it to you (less likely).
From the article: Lasers do have one big drawback. The beam is not very effective in inclement weather and requires greater levels of energy to pierce thick clouds.
One sad possibility of this hacking is that a certain amount of national (or regime) shame may have come as a result of this hack being publicized so widely. This really is an embarassing blunder. So if we are to believe that Saddam is a ruler who beats/imprisons/executes his own people when he is unsatisfied with their devotion, some IT people in Iraq may very well be betting beaten or imprisoned or worse because of this.
In a free world, exposing hacks results in incompetent people being retrained or fired and the problem gets fixed. In an unfree regime, well,...
Someone here was claiming that NASA has never had a software bug. That sounded pretty unbelievable to me. And sure enough, it's not true. In the recent Mars missions alone, they had a bunch of software bugs resulting in things varying from non-fatal vehicle failures to outright loss of spacecraft.
Regarding the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft, from nasa.gov: "The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software"
Also, here are several "software bugs" (their words) relating to the Mars Surveyor Lander Vehicle are described. These bugs were detected and fixed in the field (ie, Mars). At least one of the bugs caused a heater failure in the vehicle on Mars. This failure was recovered from.
Anyways, those are just two quickies, but NASA has their share of bugs. (And generally some pretty ingenious ways to reprogram and update vehicle software post-launch.)
Among the features the email client will have are "in-line viewing of attachments" and "user-scripting capabilities". (!) In order to displace Outlook, I suppose people will demand these features. But let's hope the OSA Foundation does a better job on securing these features than MS!
The parallel port & USB flash ROM tools also appear to be gone. This has nothing to do with BIOS, by the way. These are tools that allow you to upload binaries (either copied or original code compiled with GCC and other tools) to a flash ROM and run it on any GBA. These products are likely offensive to Nintendo because: 1) consumers could pirate games with them 2) smalltime and wannabe developers could create demos and games with them without forking out big money for the official GBA dev hardware
I'm sure #1 is the main concern for Nintendo. But they've really done a disservice to the GBA demo scene and developers & students that want to get their feet wet with a really great platform.
If you're unfamiliar with #2 (developing your own demos/games/apps for GBA), please take a look at some GBA developer scene links: GBADEV GBAEMU Yahoo GBADEV Group GBA Dev'rs
I am sure MS must be coming to the conclusion that an open development model is better.
With 50,000 employees to draw from and no downsizing in sight, it may not be critical that MS get the most productivity out of their employees. "Productivity" was the point of this study. That's not necessarily the ultimate goal of MS. In fact, it's most certainly not. When Ballmer reports to his shareholders, he wants to say "we were most profitable", not "we were most productive". Short-sighted? Perhaps. But perhaps not in their market-share position. Anyways, my point is that MS is likely still convinced that their closed-source practices keep them immensely profitable. Now if you can find a study that shows open source practices are more profitable than Microsoft's current practices, then you might be on to something...
here's a page [raytheon.com] talking about it in Feb 2000, for example.
No, I think that is a different object. In the article you provided (did you read it?!), it says the object's orbit is 3 trillion km from the Sun, while Quaoar's is apparently less than 10 billion km from the Sun. The object you mention's mass is estimated to be between 1 and 10 Jupiters. Quaoar is apparently a tenth the size of Earth. These sound like entirely different objects.
I would like to write a full fledged 3d-Animation Software package from scratch.... The question is, what is the best programming paradigm to use for such a project?
Ask Larry Wall nicely. Maybe he'll squeeze some NURBS and Inverse Kinematics support into Perl 6.
I believe my point was explained in my first sentence. In case it wasn't clear, I'll repeat it: MS hates the idea of any legal or illegal chip, and they're simply lucky that there's allegedly stolen code on this chip. If there was no stolen code, they'd still hate the chip yet they wouldn't have as much legal ground to shut down Lik Sang.
90% of the people who buy it are going to use it to steal more data. Just because it can be used to install linux on the xbox doesn't mean that that's what people are going to use it for.... I would bet that most users with mod chips are just using them to steal games.
By your rationale, any hard drive over 10GB or so should be illegal and retailers and manufacturers associated with 60, 80, and 120GB+ drives should be shut down because 90% of them are using them to steal data. It's true, face it. MP3s and pirated software are what motivates the development and sale of big cheap IDE drives. To use your own wording: Why should software companies and recording artists tolerate the sale of cheap, massive hard drives?
Let me answer that for you: Because we're all innocent until proven guilty. Let me buy my ice pick, my barbed wire, my big hard disks, and my non-copyrighted mod chips so I can develop original X-Box apps in my fortified arctic fortess, unless you can prove otherwise. Okay?
That's why MS is angry- what's on the chip, not the fact that there's a chip.
No, let's be honest: MS is angry that there is a chip. Plain and simple. Now, they are claiming that the chip contains leaked dev code, and that's how they hope to eliminate/reduce the chips being sold. If a law has been broken WRT copyright or confidentiality, then they have reason to pursue legal action. But I'm pretty sure they'll be pissed off that chips exist with or without stolen code.
Even as legal, reverse-engineered chips exist, people will do two things that MS does not like: 1) Buy a console and pirate games. The console is cheap (possibly subsidized) and MS sees reduced or no license revenues from these games. 2) Buy a console and run it for non-gaming purposes altogether (eg, MP3 station, Linux box, etc.) Again, they end up selling a barely profitable console and MS sees no license revenues from game sales.
Practially, this means that you can transform your machine into a WiFi or Bluetooth system by simply installing the right software.
That doesn't seem possible. At the very least an antenna and possibly some signal amplification/attenuation circuitry will be needed, no? Soundcards only have a limited amount of bandwidth, S/N, etc. so what other type of hardware will I need before it's -actually- "simply installing the right software"?
It also means that as new future wireless technologies emerge, your hardware can support them by a simple software install.
Again, I'm not an RF expert, but are you saying there will be no need to buy different antenna hardware for different parts of the EM spectrum?
Slashdot Mirror
The most time-consuming part is tracking down drivers for disparate modems and other devices.
;-) Anyways... Try this link for modem init strings and drivers. Good luck.
"Disparate" modems, eh?
From the article: "Considering that most good programmers are pretty bad at security,"
I don't necessarily accept this assumption. Most good programmers are good at coding up the design and requirements they've been given. The customer/architect/business analyst/technical lead needs to identify security requirements before they can be coded. It's very expensive to leave identifying security requirements to programmers. Not every project has the same needs. Sure, the programmer could guess. But each programmer on the project would end up spending a different amount of time and money on the security aspect if it's not clearly prioritized.
Likewise, if security requirements are not specified well enough, a security test-plan cannot be written or executed. If you need security, ensure it's somebody's explicit JOB on the project to ensure security gets into the design & QA.
Security costs money before a single line of code is written. Decide how much you need, where it's to be applied, and ensure it becomes a critical requirement through coding and testing. You can't expect security to just "happen" simply by hiring some "good programmers" as the author says.
The antennas can be so well tuned that several networks can be co-located in the same physical space.
I can co-locate several networks in the same physical space without 'tuning' my CAT-5 cable. Amazing stuff, that.
Sure, you can take an end-run around the whole digital protection scheme with an analog "rip", but consider these problems: 1) the DAC -> ADC process introducing resampling artifacts (probably minor), 2) PC/EMF/motherboard/HDcontroller noise while in the analog stage (quite possible), and 3) your PC will need to be VERY close to your fancy new SACD/DVD-Audio player whenever you want to "rip" (pain in the ass, but you do NOT want a long run of analog cables to your PC). High quality soundcards with an isolated analog input section can help with #2, for a price. Here's a good site with soundcard performance benchmarks.
This seems like a step backwards: Consumers will need to upgrade PC hardware to end up with a lower quality analog rip of more expensive music media.
From the article:
Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the onus will be on consumers to make sure they're aware of what they're buying.
"Copyright owners are entitled to use whatever formats they want to use," von Lohmann said. "If they really want to protect their content they can go back to vinyl."
What kind of snarky remark is that?! 1) This probably makes the recording industry laugh! "Sure they'll go back to vinyl." 2) I really don't think consumers want to protect their content with -that- amount of sacrifice.
It could simply be CNN's editing, but I would have rather the EFF pointed out something like "consumers will protect their content by continuing to rip from consumer friendly formats."
From the Edmonton Journal last month:
The West's largest telephone company is venturing into the broadcast distribution market.
Telus Communications applied to the CRTC for a broadcast distribution licence in British Columbia and Alberta. Their proposed system would initially carry 200 channels in 16 cities, including Calgary and Edmonton.
Canada's broadcast and communications regulator has set November 18th to hear interventions and applications against the move, but so far neither Shaw, Bell, nor any other major cable companies have spoken against Telus' plan.
The company's proposed distribution system would utilize Telus' extensive telephone network in BC and Alberta. This would enable consumers to pick and choose which channels they want. Currently, satellite lets you do the same thing with more channels, while cable is restricted to a tier system.
It is expected Telus would start the new service next spring.
Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS.
Haven't Linux and Windows used acclerated hardware video drivers for drawing their GUI for many years? I'm talking about Windows 95 era, possibly even WFWG 3.11. I'm sorry if it only takes a $30 "hotshot" graphics card to accelerate the rendering of a perfectly usable 2-D GUI in X or Win32, but them's the breaks.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
Growing pains? Okay, but be careful what you label growth or progress. Are 3D or photo realistic GUIs easier, more reliable, or more productive? I think they might be more attractive and way cool, but is that really net "growth" considering the immense R&D and consumer expense to get it?
If you use OGG Vorbis to encode your music? ;-)
In a letter addressing the pastoral treatment of homosexuals, the Catholic Church gave what some perceive as permission (or at least acceptance) of violence towards homosexuals:
"People should not be surprised when a morally offensive lifestyle is physically attacked." --The Vatican
It would be a nice gesture, in my opinion, if the Vatican proved both the existence and authority of the superior deity which allows this "unsurprised" attitude toward physical violence. Until then, perhaps they should not be surprised when their own intolerant lifestyles are physically attacked.
[What's that smell? Ah, my karma burning.]
If you've ever wondered about the legalities of recording calls without one side knowing about it:
Can We Tape? (Summary: In most states, it's legal.)
Though I don't have a link, I am fairly certain this practice is legal in all Canadian provinces also.
Something to think about, if you've ever considered threatening or cursing at a telemarketer (very likely), or if you find they do it to you (less likely).
From the article:
Lasers do have one big drawback. The beam is not very effective in inclement weather and requires greater levels of energy to pierce thick clouds.
Yay for temperate rainforests!
One sad possibility of this hacking is that a certain amount of national (or regime) shame may have come as a result of this hack being publicized so widely. This really is an embarassing blunder. So if we are to believe that Saddam is a ruler who beats/imprisons/executes his own people when he is unsatisfied with their devotion, some IT people in Iraq may very well be betting beaten or imprisoned or worse because of this.
...
In a free world, exposing hacks results in incompetent people being retrained or fired and the problem gets fixed. In an unfree regime, well,
Someone here was claiming that NASA has never had a software bug. That sounded pretty unbelievable to me. And sure enough, it's not true. In the recent Mars missions alone, they had a bunch of software bugs resulting in things varying from non-fatal vehicle failures to outright loss of spacecraft.
Regarding the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft, from nasa.gov: "The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software"
Also, here are several "software bugs" (their words) relating to the Mars Surveyor Lander Vehicle are described. These bugs were detected and fixed in the field (ie, Mars). At least one of the bugs caused a heater failure in the vehicle on Mars. This failure was recovered from.
Anyways, those are just two quickies, but NASA has their share of bugs. (And generally some pretty ingenious ways to reprogram and update vehicle software post-launch.)
On a related note, here's a paper from NASA entitled "The Infeasibility of Quantifying the Reliability of Life-Critical Real-Time Software".
Maybe you cool a water computer with silicon? ;-) Sorry.
Among the features the email client will have are "in-line viewing of attachments" and "user-scripting capabilities". (!)
In order to displace Outlook, I suppose people will demand these features. But let's hope the OSA Foundation does a better job on securing these features than MS!
The chain will continue with their children's children, etc...
You're a sick bastard. Children shouldn't be having sex.
The parallel port & USB flash ROM tools also appear to be gone. This has nothing to do with BIOS, by the way. These are tools that allow you to upload binaries (either copied or original code compiled with GCC and other tools) to a flash ROM and run it on any GBA. These products are likely offensive to Nintendo because:
1) consumers could pirate games with them
2) smalltime and wannabe developers could create demos and games with them without forking out big money for the official GBA dev hardware
I'm sure #1 is the main concern for Nintendo. But they've really done a disservice to the GBA demo scene and developers & students that want to get their feet wet with a really great platform.
If you're unfamiliar with #2 (developing your own demos/games/apps for GBA), please take a look at some GBA developer scene links:
GBADEV
GBAEMU
Yahoo GBADEV Group
GBA Dev'rs
RFTA idiot
RFTA? Really Fucked The Acronym?!
I am sure MS must be coming to the conclusion that an open development model is better.
With 50,000 employees to draw from and no downsizing in sight, it may not be critical that MS get the most productivity out of their employees. "Productivity" was the point of this study. That's not necessarily the ultimate goal of MS. In fact, it's most certainly not. When Ballmer reports to his shareholders, he wants to say "we were most profitable", not "we were most productive". Short-sighted? Perhaps. But perhaps not in their market-share position. Anyways, my point is that MS is likely still convinced that their closed-source practices keep them immensely profitable. Now if you can find a study that shows open source practices are more profitable than Microsoft's current practices, then you might be on to something...
Here's Michael Naimark's current draft article:
How To ZAP A Camera
here's a page [raytheon.com] talking about it in Feb 2000, for example.
No, I think that is a different object. In the article you provided (did you read it?!), it says the object's orbit is 3 trillion km from the Sun, while Quaoar's is apparently less than 10 billion km from the Sun. The object you mention's mass is estimated to be between 1 and 10 Jupiters. Quaoar is apparently a tenth the size of Earth. These sound like entirely different objects.
I would like to write a full fledged 3d-Animation Software package from scratch. ... The question is, what is the best programming paradigm to use for such a project?
Ask Larry Wall nicely. Maybe he'll squeeze some NURBS and Inverse Kinematics support into Perl 6.
OK, but what's your point?
... I would bet that most users with mod chips are just using them to steal games.
I believe my point was explained in my first sentence. In case it wasn't clear, I'll repeat it: MS hates the idea of any legal or illegal chip, and they're simply lucky that there's allegedly stolen code on this chip. If there was no stolen code, they'd still hate the chip yet they wouldn't have as much legal ground to shut down Lik Sang.
90% of the people who buy it are going to use it to steal more data. Just because it can be used to install linux on the xbox doesn't mean that that's what people are going to use it for.
By your rationale, any hard drive over 10GB or so should be illegal and retailers and manufacturers associated with 60, 80, and 120GB+ drives should be shut down because 90% of them are using them to steal data. It's true, face it. MP3s and pirated software are what motivates the development and sale of big cheap IDE drives. To use your own wording: Why should software companies and recording artists tolerate the sale of cheap, massive hard drives?
Let me answer that for you: Because we're all innocent until proven guilty. Let me buy my ice pick, my barbed wire, my big hard disks, and my non-copyrighted mod chips so I can develop original X-Box apps in my fortified arctic fortess, unless you can prove otherwise. Okay?
That's why MS is angry- what's on the chip, not the fact that there's a chip.
No, let's be honest: MS is angry that there is a chip. Plain and simple. Now, they are claiming that the chip contains leaked dev code, and that's how they hope to eliminate/reduce the chips being sold. If a law has been broken WRT copyright or confidentiality, then they have reason to pursue legal action. But I'm pretty sure they'll be pissed off that chips exist with or without stolen code.
Even as legal, reverse-engineered chips exist, people will do two things that MS does not like:
1) Buy a console and pirate games. The console is cheap (possibly subsidized) and MS sees reduced or no license revenues from these games.
2) Buy a console and run it for non-gaming purposes altogether (eg, MP3 station, Linux box, etc.) Again, they end up selling a barely profitable console and MS sees no license revenues from game sales.
Practially, this means that you can transform your machine into a WiFi or Bluetooth system by simply installing the right software.
That doesn't seem possible. At the very least an antenna and possibly some signal amplification/attenuation circuitry will be needed, no? Soundcards only have a limited amount of bandwidth, S/N, etc. so what other type of hardware will I need before it's -actually- "simply installing the right software"?
It also means that as new future wireless technologies emerge, your hardware can support them by a simple software install.
Again, I'm not an RF expert, but are you saying there will be no need to buy different antenna hardware for different parts of the EM spectrum?