The only difference is now only the bad actors know about the problem.
Know about but not necessarily how to actually do it. About all they know is from the guardian article that it took upwards of 50 000 GBP worth of equipment (and some security researchers) to actually figure out how to do it.
He should have disclosed without notifying. That way they could not have stopped him.
The point of notification is to give them an opportunity to fix it. The problem with cars is that 'fixing' it may not be possible, or may be astronomically expensive.
Volkswagon wanted them to publish a redacted version of the paper, that explained how they did the hack but not the actual key (codes) they discovered, and they refused. That seems kind of dickish on the researchers parts honestly. It depends on the details of what exactly was to be redacted, so I'll withhold too much judgment, but with things that aren't connected to the internet there's a big problem in trying to actually roll out fixes. Of course there's no point in publishing a paper if you can't say anything about your method used, and if anything interesting about that was redacted it's basically a non starter.
As we embed computers into more things this is going to be a bigger problem going forward. Are we going to need to replace 100 dollar car FOB starters every time there's a security hack? I suppose it might come to that, it's not like physical car locks are all that secure either. But if the hack requires 100 000 dollars in equipment and professional security expert time that puts the barrier to common criminals high.
The researchers main point seems to be that they aren't saying anything that isn't already public just from a different method. In that case sure, I suppose they could have just published and the situation wouldn't be much different. But I'm not sure how true their claim is.
The different in counting depends on what you're counting exactly as 'cash'. Your yahoo link gives apple as 176 billion dollars in assets, 15 billion of which are property 800 million as inventory, 1 billion in goodwill, and 4 billion in intangibles. There are about 40 billion dollars in outstanding cash liabilities.
The difference is in what exactly you want to count as 'cash'. Companies usually take their money and buy stuff with it, if they don't want to buy other companies or to give the money to shareholders they can buy other companies bonds (sometimes even for overnight), they can buy government debts etc. etc. etc. As per the guardian link, Apple has a lot of money waiting to repatriate it to US investors whenever congress can be bought into offering a 'one time' tax break for doing so.
What Apple could use for a buyout (of anyone really) would be their cash, cash equivalents, short term investments and long term investments. They might end up with some complex web of borrowing money against those assets too, but that's relatively normal.
I love my dogs very much, but The love for my son and his needs are much greater.
Like a lot of regular services, there are usually defence contractors who offer similar services that meet whatever national government requirements are - for 10x the price naturally.
I would think that microsoft or google (though more likely microsoft than google) offer something similar to their commercial offerings but certified for defence. If not them, then likely you're looking at either Lockheed Martin, HP, IBM and expecting to pay very large sums of money.
The Xbox2 was Power PC. But yes, for our purposes basically a PC.
It's the 3rd Xbox, so Xbox3. Whatever MS marketing wants to call it is irrelevant to what it is. I am very much aware what they are calling it, and very deliberately not going along with it.
In the context of the discussion though, my point was that an xbox dev kit isn't going to let you do something you can't do on a PC, given that there is a kinect SDK already. Anything interesting you can do on an Xbox you can prototype on PC first, and use that to get yourself money for a dev kit.
This is different from say, mobile phones, where most computers don't have flash cameras or a touch screen display that would work particularly well under emulation, or, say, the wii motion controllers which don't have a PC equivalent. If you want to do something innovative with that hardware you need a dev kit for the actual hardware. For the Xbox there isn't really any innovative hardware there. (I don't mean that critically).
If it's just games, that's nice for a lot of people but not as exciting in terms of something really new.
I don't think it's supposed to be new. It's aimed at indie devs and people like me who teach game development where we cannot justify real development kits to be handed to students (what could possibly go wrong? Oh.. right... students).
The thing is, the Xbox3 is basically a PC, so for anything really 'new' you have PC development to demo it, and then pitch that to someone who has money to let you buy a development kit if you want it. If you just want to make a game, this works well.
The default in VS I think is Any CPU which I'd bet 90% of people don't bother changing.
VS Express 2012 still seems to be x86.
Compiling was probably the wrong term, that's part of it, but you need to actually test your stuff on ARM, and it's a chicken and egg thing, Windows RT never went far enough for it to be a serious development target, and because it was never a serious development target it never went anywhere. I certainly agree, MS's plan was to make the future both ARM and x86.
I don't think it's that people didn't want Windows on this form factor, I don't think people care what OS it is, as long as it works and works with the software they want. And Windows RT doesn't do that. And never will.
Wealth and economic diversity matter more than absolute size.
If you're sticking to absolute size you're only into nonsense comparisons. Russia is twice the size of the US but half the population (and 1/5th the per capita income). China is 4x the population and the same size as the US. Canada is 1/9th the population but same size, brazil is 2/3rds the population and ~80% the size but 1/5th the per capita wealth, and australia is ~75% the size of the US and 1/13 the population.
So there wouldn't be any sensible comparisons to the US really. You could do based on population density over all, or population density per arable land (the latter being preferable) but that puts the US in comparison to such similar countries, like the Central African republic, and Ukraine.
The US belongs in charts with other western countries with decent per capita incomes, with asterisks for Canada, Australia and the US for being big, and Luxembourg, The Netherlands etc. for being really small.
As I say the US is doing pretty well overall. But you really can look at Japan and South Korea and ask whether or not there is something worth copying from them to make better policy.
You're not going to save a billion dollar boondoggle by lowering the price and wasting even more money trying to shift a product people don't want.
Microsoft should sell haswell based windows 7 touchscreen devices, or windows 9 if it doesn't suck. And go from there.
Windows RT is a double dose of failure. ARM Soc's are fine, but it's not really a great product on the legacy compatibility side of things (which is a big deal for windows) and since no one is compiling for windows ARM it's pretty much a dead end. And windows 8 is a disaster. Doubling down on double failure is not a good idea.
No, Japan is the first large country on the list, and maybe RoK (south Korea), but I agree, overall that looks pretty good for the US, and even Japan and the US are very different geographies and population distributions. Other relatively big developed western countries (France, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia etc.) are all not on there. So a bunch of smaller countries have faster internet.. and? If you want to compare the EU to the US then the US seems to be doing alright.
Depends where you are but the emergency alert settings don't respect vibrate or noise around here. Which makes sense. If it's an emergency alert, for a real emergency, people beyond just the cell phone operator should want to know about it.
We got one where I am a few days ago for a tornado warning. In that context the phone having a loud panic attack seems prudent - tornado incoming right bloody now.
Emergency alerts should be for just that though "if you're getting this you need to take action in response RIGHT NOW". 4am looking for a license plate is probably unlikely to rise to that level, unfortunate as an abduction may be.
REVEALING THE NAMES OF ANALYSTS WITH ACCESS TO TOP SECRET PROJECTS!
That, and a lot more is easy to find now that the NSA data centres are off in the middle of no where.
When your major work is done in major metropolitan places this is hard, but in bluffdale Utah this is super easy. Look for the expensive houses on the land registry and being publicly listed. Anyone who doesn't have any obvious source of a big income works on something important at either camp williams or the NSA data centre. You have their house, spouse(s), kids, kids schools everything. All with public information.
Small towns are incredibly easy to infiltrate for this sort of thing. If you want to know who is most vulnerable all you need is the local pimp and an employee at the local credit union and you can find everything you need about enough people in the town to get everything you want.
There are other things you could look for too. Who has the fastest internet service, who gets a lot of computer parts packages from newegg etc. Who frequents the expensive restaurants, who drives the newest most expensive cars? If you want to figure out who the special forces guys are in any western country, go to the city where their training base is are and look for sports cars. (Gurkha's obviously not until recently as they weren't paid enough for sports cars).
Indeed, watching people add 'linux support' for an engine they don't own at a stretch goal of an extra 100k seemed.... laughably stupid. I think we spent 30 grand converting from directx 8 to directx 9... which was a basically nothing job, but it still took a man month or so of development time and another man month or so of new testing.
And that sort of improvised feature creep is definitely a problem. If you want to add a cloth map, or a bound manual for backers or whatever you can make some sort of sensible cost estimate on those. Even if you end up losing a bit of money on the stretch goal itself you got some free press etc. out of it. But promising systems without doing any serious planning is a path to promises that can't be kept.
But how is anything the UN says gonna affect private enterprise?
Countries are subject to national laws. Countries are all part of the UN, and even the ones that aren't can be more or less forced to go along with it by the ones that are.
do all countries obey UN mandates
Insofar as anyone obeys the laws they themselves have agreed to follow (which, I take your point, is not as often as one might hope).
sooner or later SOMEBODY is gonna grab 'em.
So... making an effort towards later rather than sooner is probably worthwhile.
Certainly the UN is only as capable as its member states, who are only so capable, and eventually I'm sure law and order will break down enough for whatever reason that anyone who feels like it can go pillage historical artefacts from everyone else. But for the moment we try and avoid that.
There isn't an infinite time horizon solution. We could simply say 'free for all, first come first serve' and let the artefacts get sold, but eventually notions of private property will break down long enough for someone to steal them from their owner of the day and if they have bigger weapons than the other guy, I guess that makes it legal. But for as long as there is lawful authority (insofar as such a thing exists at all) we can make laws to try and do the best possible for now, and when we're dead the next group of people can deal with whatever their problem of the day is. Lets face it, if they find the 25th century equivalent of oil under the apollo landing sights, they're getting moved to museums, and I wouldn't begrudge my greatx20 grand children whatever choice they think is best. For the moment 'don't touch' seems like the best bet.
For the wars of the day drones are great tech, since the other side has basically no anti aircraft assets of any sort. But not every war is going to be against a country that was bombed for a decade and had no air defences, or against a bunch of light infantry insurgents fighting from tunnels in a country with no appreciable air force for 30 years.
The entire challenge of military planning is figuring out what assets you need for the types of wars you'll end up in. And that's not trivial since you never know who is going to have a revolution or go crazy and start the next war you find yourself in.
You are mentioning it as if Star Citizen was already released and delivered what it has promised.
No, I'm assuming that it will probably suck.
But people are willing to give now 14 million dollars to a game that basically has some art assets in an engine (and close to 6 of that came before there was even an engine I think). But if you're a publisher today, a big one, you looked at that and went 'holy shit, you mean people actually want to play a space sim game that isn't a giant trading sim (X series)? I had no idea! Lets get some people on that. Top people.". 3 or 4 years from now we'll probably see all manner of remakes, add ons, tie ins, new IP etc. to the space combat genre. And half of those will suck too. But it shows there's money to be made on a good space sim, so people will try and make good space sims.
I'm not saying he is a one hit wonder. Hey may be good because he's willing and able to look at his work, realize when it sucks, go back and fix it, and do better. That can eat up time and money, and the bigger your project the more staff you have to change gears with.
Kickstarter is a lesson to investors and publishers etc. that there is money available for things they didn't think there was a market for. If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's. As it is we'll probably see a lot, some of which will suck (and some of which will be the kickstarted projects unfortunately), but the 'product' you're buying on kickstarter is really paying to create a genre or a product family or the like. Sure, you might get star citizen or some adventure game that *might* be good. But expectations are high on those. I'll be happy if funding star citizen means one of the big guys picks up on 'space sims can make money again? Hurray!' XWing vs Tie Fighter 2015' or whatever.
The original project maybe not. The stretch goals probably.
With stretch goals you either need more time or more staff than you had originally planned on. If your stretch goal is 10% more than your base game and involves some trivial art feature that's easy to just hire an artist or overtime and existing one for.
When you get 8x as much money as you were planning on, you stick in goals that you don't think you'll meet, or don't have serious cost estimations for. And that's where you get into trouble. People aren't serious about getting down to work when they know there is way more money than you expected available to pay them, hiring on significantly more staff than you were expecting, with the required office space and infrastructure and training that goes with that takes time, a lot of it, and then with the way kickstarter funding is counted by tax agencies you may be screwed on any money you didn't spend that calendar year and be looking at a huge tax bill. Etc.
Oh, and as with all creative enterprises, just because I made a great movie/game/story last time doesn't mean I will do so next time, or maybe my great idea will turn out to be... not so great on implementation and now I have to do something else. Changing gears costs money too.
That's pretty much it. It's not in Intels long term strategic interest to have ARM chips fabbed on the best possible process, that would make them look more competitive with Intel processors. If they had massive surplus capacity in an older process then sure, I suppose they could sell that to someone, but why not just sell the equipment and move the people on to better things?
That's nearly what I did (delete it on sight). Their main page at ubisoft.com needs to have a message about this rather than just a 'under maintenance' type message.
That would be a hash of the password rather than the encrypted password, although that may be what they mean and they're using sloppy language. (Encrypting it could work the same way, but then you still just have the password in another form).
I think the question was more 'why weren't usernames and e-mails encrypted' and the answer is probably that they're part of a searchable 'find friends' type database.
Seems like. "Smart" Search on windows 8.1 preview already has a habit of spitting back very sketchy sites when doing searches for windows feature type things, this is just going to make it worse.
And lets face it, this is all happening relatively quickly, MS may not have someone lined up to take that job, and they can hire for it a month from now with a bunch of shiny new press about all the customer driven changes they've made before launch.
I seriously doubt Ballmer wants to actually deal with being the one in charge of the entertainment division on top of his actual job. Not for any reason other than he's likely got enough other work to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference is now only the bad actors know about the problem.
Know about but not necessarily how to actually do it. About all they know is from the guardian article that it took upwards of 50 000 GBP worth of equipment (and some security researchers) to actually figure out how to do it.
He should have disclosed without notifying. That way they could not have stopped him.
The point of notification is to give them an opportunity to fix it. The problem with cars is that 'fixing' it may not be possible, or may be astronomically expensive.
Volkswagon wanted them to publish a redacted version of the paper, that explained how they did the hack but not the actual key (codes) they discovered, and they refused. That seems kind of dickish on the researchers parts honestly. It depends on the details of what exactly was to be redacted, so I'll withhold too much judgment, but with things that aren't connected to the internet there's a big problem in trying to actually roll out fixes. Of course there's no point in publishing a paper if you can't say anything about your method used, and if anything interesting about that was redacted it's basically a non starter.
As we embed computers into more things this is going to be a bigger problem going forward. Are we going to need to replace 100 dollar car FOB starters every time there's a security hack? I suppose it might come to that, it's not like physical car locks are all that secure either. But if the hack requires 100 000 dollars in equipment and professional security expert time that puts the barrier to common criminals high.
The researchers main point seems to be that they aren't saying anything that isn't already public just from a different method. In that case sure, I suppose they could have just published and the situation wouldn't be much different. But I'm not sure how true their claim is.
Apple has 145 billion dollars in cash and other liquid assets it could use for a buyout as of April supposedly. Tech crunch
They had 120 billion dollars in long term investments as of October The guardian on 120 billion dollar investment strategy
The different in counting depends on what you're counting exactly as 'cash'. Your yahoo link gives apple as 176 billion dollars in assets, 15 billion of which are property 800 million as inventory, 1 billion in goodwill, and 4 billion in intangibles. There are about 40 billion dollars in outstanding cash liabilities.
The difference is in what exactly you want to count as 'cash'. Companies usually take their money and buy stuff with it, if they don't want to buy other companies or to give the money to shareholders they can buy other companies bonds (sometimes even for overnight), they can buy government debts etc. etc. etc. As per the guardian link, Apple has a lot of money waiting to repatriate it to US investors whenever congress can be bought into offering a 'one time' tax break for doing so.
What Apple could use for a buyout (of anyone really) would be their cash, cash equivalents, short term investments and long term investments. They might end up with some complex web of borrowing money against those assets too, but that's relatively normal.
I love my dogs very much, but The love for my son and his needs are much greater.
Like a lot of regular services, there are usually defence contractors who offer similar services that meet whatever national government requirements are - for 10x the price naturally.
I would think that microsoft or google (though more likely microsoft than google) offer something similar to their commercial offerings but certified for defence. If not them, then likely you're looking at either Lockheed Martin, HP, IBM and expecting to pay very large sums of money.
The Xbox2 was Power PC. But yes, for our purposes basically a PC.
It's the 3rd Xbox, so Xbox3. Whatever MS marketing wants to call it is irrelevant to what it is. I am very much aware what they are calling it, and very deliberately not going along with it.
In the context of the discussion though, my point was that an xbox dev kit isn't going to let you do something you can't do on a PC, given that there is a kinect SDK already. Anything interesting you can do on an Xbox you can prototype on PC first, and use that to get yourself money for a dev kit.
This is different from say, mobile phones, where most computers don't have flash cameras or a touch screen display that would work particularly well under emulation, or, say, the wii motion controllers which don't have a PC equivalent. If you want to do something innovative with that hardware you need a dev kit for the actual hardware. For the Xbox there isn't really any innovative hardware there. (I don't mean that critically).
If it's just games, that's nice for a lot of people but not as exciting in terms of something really new.
I don't think it's supposed to be new. It's aimed at indie devs and people like me who teach game development where we cannot justify real development kits to be handed to students (what could possibly go wrong? Oh.. right... students).
The thing is, the Xbox3 is basically a PC, so for anything really 'new' you have PC development to demo it, and then pitch that to someone who has money to let you buy a development kit if you want it. If you just want to make a game, this works well.
The default in VS I think is Any CPU which I'd bet 90% of people don't bother changing.
VS Express 2012 still seems to be x86.
Compiling was probably the wrong term, that's part of it, but you need to actually test your stuff on ARM, and it's a chicken and egg thing, Windows RT never went far enough for it to be a serious development target, and because it was never a serious development target it never went anywhere. I certainly agree, MS's plan was to make the future both ARM and x86.
I don't think it's that people didn't want Windows on this form factor, I don't think people care what OS it is, as long as it works and works with the software they want. And Windows RT doesn't do that. And never will.
Wealth and economic diversity matter more than absolute size.
If you're sticking to absolute size you're only into nonsense comparisons. Russia is twice the size of the US but half the population (and 1/5th the per capita income). China is 4x the population and the same size as the US. Canada is 1/9th the population but same size, brazil is 2/3rds the population and ~80% the size but 1/5th the per capita wealth, and australia is ~75% the size of the US and 1/13 the population.
So there wouldn't be any sensible comparisons to the US really. You could do based on population density over all, or population density per arable land (the latter being preferable) but that puts the US in comparison to such similar countries, like the Central African republic, and Ukraine.
The US belongs in charts with other western countries with decent per capita incomes, with asterisks for Canada, Australia and the US for being big, and Luxembourg, The Netherlands etc. for being really small.
As I say the US is doing pretty well overall. But you really can look at Japan and South Korea and ask whether or not there is something worth copying from them to make better policy.
You're not going to save a billion dollar boondoggle by lowering the price and wasting even more money trying to shift a product people don't want.
Microsoft should sell haswell based windows 7 touchscreen devices, or windows 9 if it doesn't suck. And go from there.
Windows RT is a double dose of failure. ARM Soc's are fine, but it's not really a great product on the legacy compatibility side of things (which is a big deal for windows) and since no one is compiling for windows ARM it's pretty much a dead end. And windows 8 is a disaster. Doubling down on double failure is not a good idea.
No, Japan is the first large country on the list, and maybe RoK (south Korea), but I agree, overall that looks pretty good for the US, and even Japan and the US are very different geographies and population distributions. Other relatively big developed western countries (France, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia etc.) are all not on there. So a bunch of smaller countries have faster internet.. and? If you want to compare the EU to the US then the US seems to be doing alright.
Depends where you are but the emergency alert settings don't respect vibrate or noise around here. Which makes sense. If it's an emergency alert, for a real emergency, people beyond just the cell phone operator should want to know about it.
We got one where I am a few days ago for a tornado warning. In that context the phone having a loud panic attack seems prudent - tornado incoming right bloody now.
Emergency alerts should be for just that though "if you're getting this you need to take action in response RIGHT NOW". 4am looking for a license plate is probably unlikely to rise to that level, unfortunate as an abduction may be.
REVEALING THE NAMES OF ANALYSTS WITH ACCESS TO TOP SECRET PROJECTS!
That, and a lot more is easy to find now that the NSA data centres are off in the middle of no where.
When your major work is done in major metropolitan places this is hard, but in bluffdale Utah this is super easy. Look for the expensive houses on the land registry and being publicly listed. Anyone who doesn't have any obvious source of a big income works on something important at either camp williams or the NSA data centre. You have their house, spouse(s), kids, kids schools everything. All with public information.
Small towns are incredibly easy to infiltrate for this sort of thing. If you want to know who is most vulnerable all you need is the local pimp and an employee at the local credit union and you can find everything you need about enough people in the town to get everything you want.
There are other things you could look for too. Who has the fastest internet service, who gets a lot of computer parts packages from newegg etc. Who frequents the expensive restaurants, who drives the newest most expensive cars? If you want to figure out who the special forces guys are in any western country, go to the city where their training base is are and look for sports cars. (Gurkha's obviously not until recently as they weren't paid enough for sports cars).
Indeed, watching people add 'linux support' for an engine they don't own at a stretch goal of an extra 100k seemed.... laughably stupid. I think we spent 30 grand converting from directx 8 to directx 9... which was a basically nothing job, but it still took a man month or so of development time and another man month or so of new testing.
And that sort of improvised feature creep is definitely a problem. If you want to add a cloth map, or a bound manual for backers or whatever you can make some sort of sensible cost estimate on those. Even if you end up losing a bit of money on the stretch goal itself you got some free press etc. out of it. But promising systems without doing any serious planning is a path to promises that can't be kept.
But how is anything the UN says gonna affect private enterprise?
Countries are subject to national laws. Countries are all part of the UN, and even the ones that aren't can be more or less forced to go along with it by the ones that are.
do all countries obey UN mandates
Insofar as anyone obeys the laws they themselves have agreed to follow (which, I take your point, is not as often as one might hope).
sooner or later SOMEBODY is gonna grab 'em.
So... making an effort towards later rather than sooner is probably worthwhile.
Certainly the UN is only as capable as its member states, who are only so capable, and eventually I'm sure law and order will break down enough for whatever reason that anyone who feels like it can go pillage historical artefacts from everyone else. But for the moment we try and avoid that.
There isn't an infinite time horizon solution. We could simply say 'free for all, first come first serve' and let the artefacts get sold, but eventually notions of private property will break down long enough for someone to steal them from their owner of the day and if they have bigger weapons than the other guy, I guess that makes it legal. But for as long as there is lawful authority (insofar as such a thing exists at all) we can make laws to try and do the best possible for now, and when we're dead the next group of people can deal with whatever their problem of the day is. Lets face it, if they find the 25th century equivalent of oil under the apollo landing sights, they're getting moved to museums, and I wouldn't begrudge my greatx20 grand children whatever choice they think is best. For the moment 'don't touch' seems like the best bet.
Pretty much.
For the wars of the day drones are great tech, since the other side has basically no anti aircraft assets of any sort. But not every war is going to be against a country that was bombed for a decade and had no air defences, or against a bunch of light infantry insurgents fighting from tunnels in a country with no appreciable air force for 30 years.
The entire challenge of military planning is figuring out what assets you need for the types of wars you'll end up in. And that's not trivial since you never know who is going to have a revolution or go crazy and start the next war you find yourself in.
Well sure, leave it to EA to fuck up free money, SWTOR anyone? But still, someone may create or pick up a decent space shooter franchise.
You are mentioning it as if Star Citizen was already released and delivered what it has promised.
No, I'm assuming that it will probably suck.
But people are willing to give now 14 million dollars to a game that basically has some art assets in an engine (and close to 6 of that came before there was even an engine I think). But if you're a publisher today, a big one, you looked at that and went 'holy shit, you mean people actually want to play a space sim game that isn't a giant trading sim (X series)? I had no idea! Lets get some people on that. Top people.". 3 or 4 years from now we'll probably see all manner of remakes, add ons, tie ins, new IP etc. to the space combat genre. And half of those will suck too. But it shows there's money to be made on a good space sim, so people will try and make good space sims.
I'm not saying he is a one hit wonder. Hey may be good because he's willing and able to look at his work, realize when it sucks, go back and fix it, and do better. That can eat up time and money, and the bigger your project the more staff you have to change gears with.
Kinda.
Kickstarter is a lesson to investors and publishers etc. that there is money available for things they didn't think there was a market for. If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's. As it is we'll probably see a lot, some of which will suck (and some of which will be the kickstarted projects unfortunately), but the 'product' you're buying on kickstarter is really paying to create a genre or a product family or the like. Sure, you might get star citizen or some adventure game that *might* be good. But expectations are high on those. I'll be happy if funding star citizen means one of the big guys picks up on 'space sims can make money again? Hurray!' XWing vs Tie Fighter 2015' or whatever.
The original project maybe not. The stretch goals probably.
With stretch goals you either need more time or more staff than you had originally planned on. If your stretch goal is 10% more than your base game and involves some trivial art feature that's easy to just hire an artist or overtime and existing one for.
When you get 8x as much money as you were planning on, you stick in goals that you don't think you'll meet, or don't have serious cost estimations for. And that's where you get into trouble. People aren't serious about getting down to work when they know there is way more money than you expected available to pay them, hiring on significantly more staff than you were expecting, with the required office space and infrastructure and training that goes with that takes time, a lot of it, and then with the way kickstarter funding is counted by tax agencies you may be screwed on any money you didn't spend that calendar year and be looking at a huge tax bill. Etc.
Oh, and as with all creative enterprises, just because I made a great movie/game/story last time doesn't mean I will do so next time, or maybe my great idea will turn out to be... not so great on implementation and now I have to do something else. Changing gears costs money too.
That's pretty much it. It's not in Intels long term strategic interest to have ARM chips fabbed on the best possible process, that would make them look more competitive with Intel processors. If they had massive surplus capacity in an older process then sure, I suppose they could sell that to someone, but why not just sell the equipment and move the people on to better things?
That's nearly what I did (delete it on sight). Their main page at ubisoft.com needs to have a message about this rather than just a 'under maintenance' type message.
Plenty of time, as less than an hour after the hack occurred, for ~60% of users.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
That would be a hash of the password rather than the encrypted password, although that may be what they mean and they're using sloppy language. (Encrypting it could work the same way, but then you still just have the password in another form).
I think the question was more 'why weren't usernames and e-mails encrypted' and the answer is probably that they're part of a searchable 'find friends' type database.
Seems like. "Smart" Search on windows 8.1 preview already has a habit of spitting back very sketchy sites when doing searches for windows feature type things, this is just going to make it worse.
And lets face it, this is all happening relatively quickly, MS may not have someone lined up to take that job, and they can hire for it a month from now with a bunch of shiny new press about all the customer driven changes they've made before launch.
I seriously doubt Ballmer wants to actually deal with being the one in charge of the entertainment division on top of his actual job. Not for any reason other than he's likely got enough other work to do.