If they can't even keep a vending machine with a simple dollar-bill acceptor in working order, what hope is there for a vending machine that runs Linux and reads your fingerprints?
Should be much easier. They don't keep creating new 'harder to forge' versions of the fingerprint every couple of years.
Unfortunately, Hymn no longer works with iTunes 6. I don't share my music, but I did use it to crack everything I bought over iTunes so that I would have permanently usable copies. Since iTunes 6 (and realizing Hymn wasn't likely to be updated), I've stopped buying from iTunes.
I consider weak DRM to be wrong, but a form of practical compromise. But I don't buy anything I can't crack pretty casually. If I've bought something, I want to decide for myself where I can play it, and not lose access to the content when someone else decides to stop supporting it. Otherwise, I'm just renting.
How well would this work as armor for motorcyclists? I spend a lot of time trying to find gear that's comfortable enough to wear as normal clothing. Both so that I'm comfortable on the bike, and so I don't have to spend so much time gearing up and down for each trip, even it it's only to the convenience store.
I remember seeing an Apple produced video about future computer concepts, probably produced in the late 80's. In part of the video, a guy was talking to his tablet, and it was teaching him to read. He held the newspaper up to the tablet screen so it could scan the paper and help him with a word he couldn't figure out.
How does an iPod access the network though the USB connection? That strikes me as really, really scary.
However, this strikes me as just bad reporting. I'll bet it's PC software that dumps the data to an iPod instead of software on the iPod itself. That means it's just using the iPod as a standard external USB drive.
I have to say the dislocated finger slowing my typing agrees with you. My gloves have lots of abrasion protection, but nothing to help with 'bad flexing'.
Anything that makes the gear more comfortable (but equally safe) is good. If it's comfortable enough to wear as normal clothing that's the really big win. Not as much suit up time before every ride would help a lot, and make people (including me) more likely to really use the gear all the time for every ride.
Using WMA unmodified is also problematic for Apple if you start reading the details of the specs.
According to the WMA spec, it is not possible to grant a non-Windows machine all of the rights you can grant to a Windows machine. The first that comes to mind is the ability to burn CDs. I'm pretty sure that also includes the ability to transfer to external devices (like an iPod), but I don't remember that one as clearly.
Why should apple support a DRM scheme that treats it's computers as second class citizens, and may prevent it's own use on their machines?
The main problem with WMA DRM is that it's tied to windows, and was designed to force people (device manufactorers, service provides, etc) to run windows.
WMA Drm directly controls what rights (playback, copy, etc) can be granted. Only Windows servers can grant rights, and only windows machines can receive many types of rights. For example, if WMA Drm is used, no non-Windows box can be granted the right to burn to CD/DVD, even if the content provider wants to do so. My understanding (not 100% certain) is that these contraints apply to all legal WMA players even if the content is totally open.
Variations of this type of problem exist with all major DRM schemes, because each and every player is trying to gain monopolistic control over DRM technology and to leverage their control for their own benefit.
People are concerned about MS gaining excessive control because A) Slashdot hates MS B) MS have shown themselves to be proficient at maintaining monopolies in the past, and for using those monopolies for their own benefit, even at the expense of other people (especially consumers).
However, I should point out that it almost never does any heavy computation other than gaming. Most of the time it's running Camino (web browser), Mail, Aim, iTunes and Synergy.
It's on all day while I'm at work. It's often on all evening while I play Wow. It's put into standby at least twice a weekday while I carry it to/from work. If I never need a computer after I get home, it may spend the night in standby, but that's the exception, not the rule. It certainly never spends the weekend in standby.
I have multiple computers in multiple locations, but I always use the laptop as the interface to the others through a combination of SSH, VNC, and Synergy.
I run OS X on an Apple PowerBook. My uptime is (mostly) measured by how often they release major OS patches. But in truth, I'm exagerating, since I've never reached two months of uptime.
I have gone about a year without a system software crash.
However, this only shows that the CPU is now stable enough to run 8 hours without a noticable error. You might still end up with noticable CPU errors over longer periods of time. I'm accustomed to uptimes measured in months, which I won't get with even slight increases in the CPU error rate.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't try this, or that you shouldn't overclock (which is subject to similar problems), but you should be aware of the effects and be willing to accept them.
Manufactorurs don't push chips this way, in part, because they want to come as close to 100% stability as possible.
One variation that I've seen work well is to allow people full access to their own workstations, but not on servers (or clusters in your case).
This limits the types of access people can have on the heavy server machines, but lets them install apps or do whatever they need locally, including installing a different OS or OS variation based on need or preference.
Of course, the more people 'adjust' their workstations the less support you can afford to give them. You also have to be very careful about how much servers trust any information from workstations (NFS can be very tricky to get right), and have to more draconian with your firewalling policies.
Security versus usability is always a balancing act. It just depends on which balance is right for your environment.
This all lends itself rather nicely to developing things like three dimensional electronic circuits.
Aren't all electronic circuits three dimensional, since we live in a 3d universe? If not, does going in 3 dimensions let us do anything more? My guess is that a 2d turing complete computer is the same as a 3d turing complete computer, so what's your point?
Most circuits in chips today are 2D designs. Just like the circuits you see traced out on a circuit board, but much smaller. The circuits are '3d' in the sense that the leads have some hight, but no logic is expressed in the z dimension, so that third dimension is uninteresting.
There are a few exceptions right now were people are building chips that have multiple levels of 2D circuits with a few vertical interconnects, but the third d isn't really being heavily used.
Having full 3d circuits allows much more complex logic to be expressed in less space with less propogation time. Thus smaller, faster, and less power consumption in the chips for your computer.
Of course, you are correct in your statement that this doesn't affect the turing completeness of your computer. Thus there is no effect on the types of programs the computer can execute, only how quickly they compute them, how much power is consumed, and how big the machine is that does the computing.
Two bits of american history that should be studied very carefully. It scares me when people don't know about them, especially since it was so recently.
Assuming that we trust the security of the site itself, you could do the same thing without GPG. Just allow different Id's to agree or disagree. Same effect, but no technology barrior for 90% of the authors.
the real flaw in this vision is that the drive manufacturers won't play along. There's no money in it for them.
Um... current DVD drives include firmware that make it harder to RIP DVD content. Not impossible, but it's not just a simple "cp -a". I think this shows that licensing constraints and other legal pressures can be used to make drive manufacturers to exactly this.
You are correct, but you are showing that the limitations in transfer are hardware limits, not protocol limits, and that my memory is faulty (something I consider a given).
The article you point to is really interesting, but it talks about offloading the TCP stack handling to the NIC, not about changes to the wire protocol.
This is an interesting and powerful technology, however the general concept isn't new. More importantly it's not overcoming limitations in TCP, only limitations in the PC architecture and in OS implementations of TCP.
MS may be proposing changes to TCP to boost performance, but they don't seem to be covered by the article you are linking. In addition, TCP/IP implementations based on the improvements in various RFC's is perfectly capable of multi-gigabit throughput. I seem to remember reading a slashdot article about Internet 2 researchers seeing sustained long distance transfer rates over FTP (which is usually TCP based) that approached 100 Gb/s.
1991 to today is 14 years, or 9.33 cycles or Moore's law. 40 Mill, halved 10 times is $39,062.50. Since the article is talking about hardware for under $4k, the price is about a tenth of what was predicted.
I'm not drawing any conclusions, just pointing this out.
Oddly enough, most of the podcasts I listen already have ads. The stranger thing is that most of the ads are for other podcasts or podcast related products. So far, the limit has been 1 blurb per show, and it's usually explained as a way to offset broadband costs.
However, I've also heard at least one popular podcast state that broadband costs are around $80 a month. At that rate, I think I'd rather sponser a show than have the ad.
Can you define "Not that expensive"? My understanding is that the cost was measured in 10's of thousands per run and that many situations (single driver -> multiple hardware versions) could easily require multiple runs. However, I've never been involved in an MS driver certification, so I don't really know much about it.
This effect could be enhance by social conditions (not that I know anything about the area these were found at the time).
If a midget town/village/tribe/etc were to get started, I can easily see other groups in an extended area hearing about it and sending all locally occuring dwarfs off to join them.
This would enhance the size of this special group, but be driven by social behaviors instead of genetic.
And for gods sake do something about the frame rate. Movie theatres flicker. Badly. It really messes with me. It didn't used to bother me, but it does now.
That's a question for the Iraqi's to answer, not for other countries. If the Iraqi people started a revolution and asked us to help them, it would be reasonable for us to help overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi people obviously didn't think Saddam was bad enough to warrant being overthrown. They certainly do seem to think that our occupation needs to be resisted, and they're giving us a much better fight than Saddam's army did, which makes it reasonable to believe the Iraqis were capable of overthrowing Saddam if they chose to.
Don't forget that at the end of the first gulf war, the Kurds DID start a revolution. In part it was because they were promised support by the US.
The US decided to withdraw, and reneged on promises of support. Things did not go well for the revolutionaries.
Slashdot Mirror
If they can't even keep a vending machine with a simple dollar-bill acceptor in working order, what hope is there for a vending machine that runs Linux and reads your fingerprints?
Should be much easier. They don't keep creating new 'harder to forge' versions of the fingerprint every couple of years.
Unfortunately, Hymn no longer works with iTunes 6. I don't share my music, but I did use it to crack everything I bought over iTunes so that I would have permanently usable copies. Since iTunes 6 (and realizing Hymn wasn't likely to be updated), I've stopped buying from iTunes.
I consider weak DRM to be wrong, but a form of practical compromise. But I don't buy anything I can't crack pretty casually. If I've bought something, I want to decide for myself where I can play it, and not lose access to the content when someone else decides to stop supporting it. Otherwise, I'm just renting.
How well would this work as armor for motorcyclists? I spend a lot of time trying to find gear that's comfortable enough to wear as normal clothing. Both so that I'm comfortable on the bike, and so I don't have to spend so much time gearing up and down for each trip, even it it's only to the convenience store.
I remember seeing an Apple produced video about future computer concepts, probably produced in the late 80's. In part of the video, a guy was talking to his tablet, and it was teaching him to read. He held the newspaper up to the tablet screen so it could scan the paper and help him with a word he couldn't figure out.
They've had this idea for a long time.
How does an iPod access the network though the USB connection? That strikes me as really, really scary.
However, this strikes me as just bad reporting. I'll bet it's PC software that dumps the data to an iPod instead of software on the iPod itself. That means it's just using the iPod as a standard external USB drive.
I have to say the dislocated finger slowing my typing agrees with you. My gloves have lots of abrasion protection, but nothing to help with 'bad flexing'.
Anything that makes the gear more comfortable (but equally safe) is good. If it's comfortable enough to wear as normal clothing that's the really big win. Not as much suit up time before every ride would help a lot, and make people (including me) more likely to really use the gear all the time for every ride.
Using WMA unmodified is also problematic for Apple if you start reading the details of the specs.
According to the WMA spec, it is not possible to grant a non-Windows machine all of the rights you can grant to a Windows machine. The first that comes to mind is the ability to burn CDs. I'm pretty sure that also includes the ability to transfer to external devices (like an iPod), but I don't remember that one as clearly.
Why should apple support a DRM scheme that treats it's computers as second class citizens, and may prevent it's own use on their machines?
The main problem with WMA DRM is that it's tied to windows, and was designed to force people (device manufactorers, service provides, etc) to run windows.
WMA Drm directly controls what rights (playback, copy, etc) can be granted. Only Windows servers can grant rights, and only windows machines can receive many types of rights. For example, if WMA Drm is used, no non-Windows box can be granted the right to burn to CD/DVD, even if the content provider wants to do so. My understanding (not 100% certain) is that these contraints apply to all legal WMA players even if the content is totally open.
Variations of this type of problem exist with all major DRM schemes, because each and every player is trying to gain monopolistic control over DRM technology and to leverage their control for their own benefit.
People are concerned about MS gaining excessive control because A) Slashdot hates MS B) MS have shown themselves to be proficient at maintaining monopolies in the past, and for using those monopolies for their own benefit, even at the expense of other people (especially consumers).
However, I should point out that it almost never does any heavy computation other than gaming. Most of the time it's running Camino (web browser), Mail, Aim, iTunes and Synergy.
It's on all day while I'm at work. It's often on all evening while I play Wow. It's put into standby at least twice a weekday while I carry it to/from work. If I never need a computer after I get home, it may spend the night in standby, but that's the exception, not the rule. It certainly never spends the weekend in standby.
I have multiple computers in multiple locations, but I always use the laptop as the interface to the others through a combination of SSH, VNC, and Synergy.
I run OS X on an Apple PowerBook. My uptime is (mostly) measured by how often they release major OS patches. But in truth, I'm exagerating, since I've never reached two months of uptime.
I have gone about a year without a system software crash.
However, this only shows that the CPU is now stable enough to run 8 hours without a noticable error. You might still end up with noticable CPU errors over longer periods of time. I'm accustomed to uptimes measured in months, which I won't get with even slight increases in the CPU error rate.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't try this, or that you shouldn't overclock (which is subject to similar problems), but you should be aware of the effects and be willing to accept them.
Manufactorurs don't push chips this way, in part, because they want to come as close to 100% stability as possible.
One variation that I've seen work well is to allow people full access to their own workstations, but not on servers (or clusters in your case).
This limits the types of access people can have on the heavy server machines, but lets them install apps or do whatever they need locally, including installing a different OS or OS variation based on need or preference.
Of course, the more people 'adjust' their workstations the less support you can afford to give them. You also have to be very careful about how much servers trust any information from workstations (NFS can be very tricky to get right), and have to more draconian with your firewalling policies.
Security versus usability is always a balancing act. It just depends on which balance is right for your environment.
This all lends itself rather nicely to developing things like three dimensional electronic circuits.
Aren't all electronic circuits three dimensional, since we live in a 3d universe? If not, does going in 3 dimensions let us do anything more? My guess is that a 2d turing complete computer is the same as a 3d turing complete computer, so what's your point?
Most circuits in chips today are 2D designs. Just like the circuits you see traced out on a circuit board, but much smaller. The circuits are '3d' in the sense that the leads have some hight, but no logic is expressed in the z dimension, so that third dimension is uninteresting.
There are a few exceptions right now were people are building chips that have multiple levels of 2D circuits with a few vertical interconnects, but the third d isn't really being heavily used.
Having full 3d circuits allows much more complex logic to be expressed in less space with less propogation time. Thus smaller, faster, and less power consumption in the chips for your computer.
Of course, you are correct in your statement that this doesn't affect the turing completeness of your computer. Thus there is no effect on the types of programs the computer can execute, only how quickly they compute them, how much power is consumed, and how big the machine is that does the computing.
Two bits of american history that should be studied very carefully. It scares me when people don't know about them, especially since it was so recently.
i vities_Committee
McCarthy Era:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthy_era
Committe on Unamerican Activities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Unamerican_Act
Assuming that we trust the security of the site itself, you could do the same thing without GPG. Just allow different Id's to agree or disagree. Same effect, but no technology barrior for 90% of the authors.
the real flaw in this vision is that the drive manufacturers won't play along. There's no money in it for them.
Um... current DVD drives include firmware that make it harder to RIP DVD content. Not impossible, but it's not just a simple "cp -a". I think this shows that licensing constraints and other legal pressures can be used to make drive manufacturers to exactly this.
You are correct, but you are showing that the limitations in transfer are hardware limits, not protocol limits, and that my memory is faulty (something I consider a given).
The article you point to is really interesting, but it talks about offloading the TCP stack handling to the NIC, not about changes to the wire protocol.
This is an interesting and powerful technology, however the general concept isn't new. More importantly it's not overcoming limitations in TCP, only limitations in the PC architecture and in OS implementations of TCP.
MS may be proposing changes to TCP to boost performance, but they don't seem to be covered by the article you are linking. In addition, TCP/IP implementations based on the improvements in various RFC's is perfectly capable of multi-gigabit throughput. I seem to remember reading a slashdot article about Internet 2 researchers seeing sustained long distance transfer rates over FTP (which is usually TCP based) that approached 100 Gb/s.
1991 to today is 14 years, or 9.33 cycles or Moore's law. 40 Mill, halved 10 times is $39,062.50. Since the article is talking about hardware for under $4k, the price is about a tenth of what was predicted.
I'm not drawing any conclusions, just pointing this out.
Oddly enough, most of the podcasts I listen already have ads. The stranger thing is that most of the ads are for other podcasts or podcast related products. So far, the limit has been 1 blurb per show, and it's usually explained as a way to offset broadband costs.
However, I've also heard at least one popular podcast state that broadband costs are around $80 a month. At that rate, I think I'd rather sponser a show than have the ad.
Can you define "Not that expensive"? My understanding is that the cost was measured in 10's of thousands per run and that many situations (single driver -> multiple hardware versions) could easily require multiple runs. However, I've never been involved in an MS driver certification, so I don't really know much about it.
This effect could be enhance by social conditions (not that I know anything about the area these were found at the time).
If a midget town/village/tribe/etc were to get started, I can easily see other groups in an extended area hearing about it and sending all locally occuring dwarfs off to join them.
This would enhance the size of this special group, but be driven by social behaviors instead of genetic.
And for gods sake do something about the frame rate. Movie theatres flicker. Badly. It really messes with me. It didn't used to bother me, but it does now.
Don't forget that at the end of the first gulf war, the Kurds DID start a revolution. In part it was because they were promised support by the US.
The US decided to withdraw, and reneged on promises of support. Things did not go well for the revolutionaries.