So self modifying code is no longer an option? Once a program is loaded from disk, the executable can not change?
How does the compiler know for certain what is code and what is data in today's extremely complex programming environments. This "automatically" stuff has proven to be quite unreliable in the past.
What happens when data overflows the boundary in to executable program space, does the data outside the "safe" area then become executable? Isn't that the problem they were attempting to solve?
But my point is there are checks that can be performed currently that would avoid these stack smashes. If I can't rely on the programmers to do those checks now, why should I rely on them to properly set this NX bit where and when needed?
Granted, I haven't really paid much attention or done any research on this no-execute flag, but it seems to operate within the data structures of a program such that you can flag a structure, memory block or references to it as non-executable.
If that's the case they how effective can this really be at stopping buffer overflow attacks, we still need to rely on the programmers to tag every data structure as non executable (and that isn't easy). We're talking about the same programmers who don't validate input data or put limits on it.
So basically, fixing a human problem in hardware is no solution. no?
Or is it that by default, nothing is executable unless you specifically tag it to be, so that the system by default won't run anything it loads?
The article has a quote in the side bar "The inscription is obviously a classical reference. It's either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening".
Does it bother anyone else that anyone would seriously state something is "obvious" when they have nearly no information about the meaning, context, author or anything else?
The original deal between Disney and Pixar was for three original stories/films. The contract was later extended to 5 stories/films. According to the terms of that deal Toy Story 2 did not count since it was a sequel, but Pixar seemed to feel it was worth the time (probably since the models/characters were already built). The initial 5 films are: Toy Story, Bugs Life, Monsters, Nemo and the upcoming The Incredibles.
TS2 was released/distributed under the financial terms of the deal, but not under the quota portion.
In the beginning there was an "up to" 3 film deal, in the end Pixar will have created 6 films under the terms, but only 5 by contractual obligation. It's a mess.
There's another whole mess with joint ownership of the existing films and creating sequels from them that 's best left to lawyers.
There's also the difference in the interconnects, that has a lot to do with the efficiency of the system as a whole. Lets see what the VTech system does with ECC RAM installed when some node's aren't double-checking other node's results.
What dolt would think "perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta" and then go to a P2P network instead of Microsoft.com or any of the usual distribution channels ie: versiontracker, download, etc.
The problems with the "dead man fail-safe" are several:
1. sleeping 2. headphones / hearing impairment 3. loss/misplacement of the transmitter 4. potentially significant delay before alert is sent 5. complacency, It's known that regularly repeated warnings are soon ignored
Any of these things could/would lead to false triggers or a delay in dispatch of rescue.
I'm sure there are such situations, but it's hard to imagine one where you would so wounded you could not manage to press a button with almost any pointy part of your body, but would still live long enough for rescue to arrive before you die. IE: if you can't manage to press the button, nothing is going to save you anyway.
The method you used would be unreliable and would probably do nothing to reduce the search time of the S&R mission. Why?
Unless you only allow one hiking team in the park at a time, you will have multiple logs/hits of movement from multiple trail monitors, assuming the monitors manage to effectively send a signal each and every time a human (and only a human) passes the monitor. Once you have all the data logged, how do you know where a hiker party went? Was that them on trail "A" or were they on trail "F"? Are the hikers going to be required to file a hiking plan from which they may not deviate?
So we have: unreliable sensor data and unknown parties with unknown destinations. I don't see where a system such as you proposed would provide any data that an S&R team could use to locate missing people faster. And there's still the whole "you don't know they're missing/in trouble until they don't show up for a few hours/days and someone else calls you.
A far better method would be to use emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) carried by each party or person in the park, and do it on a voluntary basis. When someone gets need help they would activate the ELT which would be "heard" at a central station and S&R teams would be dispatched to home in on the signal. With the right type of box the holder could even press one of several buttons to tell authorities what type of help they need: lost, medical emergency, fire.
This method has the following advantages:
1. There is little to no delay between a person needing assistance and that assistance being dispatched. 2. The search portion of the S&R is virtually eliminated, with beacons you can home in very quickly 3. No-one has to submit to tracking, but they still can have the security it can provide 4. Costs can be recouped by charging a small fee for the transmitters, or for the loss of them 5. The system is probably less complex than the anonymous tracking and reporting/loging 6. No chance of false alerts from large animals moving through the forest 7. Higher chance of successful rescue when you don't have to wait for the person to go missing before trying to find them
Disadvantages: 1. not everyone will want to take an ELT, so S&R will still need to do it the "old fashioned" way at times 2. Potentially higher initial cost depending on how the ELT signal is tracked an the number of units deployed
Your not forcing them to walk down your monitored trail, they are choosing... Actually, in many parks you are only allowed to hike on trails, venturing off marked trails can lead to you a fine or jail time, so walking on a monitored trail is not exactly a "choice". Their "choice" then is to either partake in the parks they pay for and submit to tracking, anonymous or not.
A wonderful view on the military's idea of "testing" is a film called The Pentagon Wars. I think it was an HBO original film and is not out on DVD or VHS. It chronicles the last years of development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the "testing" that the Army was performing on the vehicle, along with the manipulation and outright fraud and that was committed during that development and testing.
Example: A test designed to determine if the Bradley's armor could withstand a blast from a Soviet anti-tank missile was considered a success when a Romanian missile was used instead, and the fuel tanks were filled with water, and the ammo on board the Bradley was filled with sand instead of explosives/powder.
The movie also sheds some light on the corruption that takes place within the "third party verification" program knows as joint testing. The "independent" observers are bribed or coerced in to compliance, or they are simply transferred out of the program.
Anyway... the movie is funny and sad at the same time, as the incompetence and deceit in the film were all real-life events. It's hard to imagine that this behavior was limited to that one program, or that it summarily ended with the release of the film.
Most insurance companies allow you to put your insurance for a vehicle in to what is commonly called "storage mode", where you are only paying a small fraction of the normal insurance rate. You simply call the company before you move the vehicle and they make it "active". The process, in my experience, takes about 5 minutes from dialing to hanging up. Many states also do this with registration. You leave the car essentially unregistered, and pay a few dollars for a single trip registration.
While it's no gas hog, the Ford Focus isn't exactly the epitome of fuel economy. My Golf TDI averages about 40mpg, and gets closer to 50 on steady highway driving. Diesel also usually costs less than gasoline. The Golf would save approximately $25/week on economy alone.
$25/week is just about at the break even point for renting a pickup truck for a half week to go to the river.
Of course no car beat my 750cc motorcycle, ~60mpg for commuting, almost nothing for insurance and registration. On the down side, the Phoenix heat is murder in summer.
Another case-in-point is that SUV's also have the HIGHEST EMISSION STANDARDS of any other car, which make them safer for the environment by default.
SUVs aren't cars, they are classified as light trucks or trucks by the EPA. In comparison to other vehicles in those classes, yes SUVs are held to stricter standards than true utility vehicles or trucks. SUVs are not held to higher emissions standards than passenger cars, never have been, likely never will be.
There are laws in place that mandate that by 2009 all light trucks (most SUVs) and passenger cars must be subject to the same emissions standards as passenger cars (since most are used as passenger vehicles most of the time). There are many political games in progress with funding that are attempting to negate these laws, much like the metric system ie: the laws are passed but no money is allocated to enact/enforce them.
That aside, even if what you stated were the case, and an SUV had 10% stricter standards for emissions, the fact that they get 1/2 to 1/3 the average fuel economy of a passenger car means that SUVs pollute more overall. Emissions standards are based on emissions per mile of various components. If SUV's have the same emissions/mile requirements, that means the engines will need to be 2x to 3x as efficient as passenger cars, the exhaust systems will need to remove 2x to 3x more pollutants than a passenger vehicle or some combination thereof.
If you have some information to substantiate your claim, please provide it, otherwise all the facts I have tell me that your statement is patently false.
That aside... it's a fairly neat project you took on, kudos for seeing a problem and creating a solution from scratch.
Does anyone seriously think that MS is going to break compatibility with the entire installed base just to piss off open source coders? If WinFS, Avalon, or any other "new" system in LH doesn't have some sort of compatibility mode, or a way to turn it off, then MS will essentially block most all upgrades. There's no way major customers are going to bring down their entire network to upgrade every machine at once. The upgrade would potentially take hours to days if all existing data/formats and old applications must be converted/upgraded to the new formats/interfaces/etc.
This article is 100% FUD, fresh from the fudmucker's farm to your door; now in convenient concentrate powder form for your convenience.
of all the intelligent and objective people on Slashdot, and in so many other forums, who saw all of these issues two years ago:
WE TOLD YOU SO!
Now... if you're ready to implement a reliable, trackable, scalable and secure electronic voting system, I think we're all still willing to help you. If you'll just listen this time.
So, would advertising and selling your "archive" of music to someone else be considered "commercial"?... With CDs, I can always sale them or give it away to friends. But with iTunes most people, I think, are not purchasing entire albums, they are purchasing individual tracks. If you tire of a single song you would not have the rest of the album to sell anyway. My suggestion is to become a music pack rat, store your "old" music on CD or DVD in case you want it again later. If you want to give your old tracks away to your friends, then go to their computer and authorize it to play tracks from your account, you only need to do it once unless something drastic happens to iTunes. You are allowed to authorize up to 5 computers at once.
My next question is what is the cost for you to sell a track, or even an album or group of tracks/albums to another party. I don't see anyone reclaiming anything more than about $.40 by selling used iTMS tracks after costs and depreciation. Remember, you have a hard upper limit of $.99 for your price. If a few cents is worth the time and effort it would take to recoup it, then I suggest there are other ways that take just about the same time and effort that would yield higher gains: asking for money on the street, selling plasma once a month, skipping one cup of coffee a week, etc.
But with itunes, the music you no longer want is like a ball and chain. That just doesn't make sense. Now wanting to listen to a track any more is not at all hindering your ability to listen to others, or purchase more tracks. Besides that, I've already shown that selling your track(s) are not likely to produce any profit, and indeed would loose you money.
Delete them and move on, or archive them for later use, or consider a music "leasing" or streaming service, you pay a flat fee and never have to worry about disposing of your library because it isn't yours to begin with.
I don't know how you think "noncommercial" is at all ambiguous, at least for 95% of the cases.
You are allowed to use you music in your home movies, on your web site, on portable players and on your computers as long as the use is not related to business/commercial operations, and you are not producing income from the use of the music.
As for the sale of individual songs... it is inconvenient, but then if you want temporary music, iTMS isn't for you. Go use Rhapsody or buy CDs you can trade in or sell.
You CAN sell you music. This was already argued and brought to a head by the eBay auction. Apple's response was "Yes, you can sell your tracks, but why bother?" Granted, there is no mechanism to do it (yet), but you could indeed sell your entire library at once by simply transferring your account to someone else.
The "join" feature still only works during CD ripping, there's not way to join tracks that you've purchased from the store or already imported. This is SO annoying. The systems have more than enough computing power to merge these songs without having to start over.
I'm guessing I will have to cave in and re-rip all my CDs that should not have gaps between the songs.
There's probably nothing really innovative about this loss-less compression. I'd think that even RLL would come close to, if not surpass, 2:1 compression ratio for music. Loss-less compression is actually easier to achieve and code with music than lossy compression since there are no psychoacoustic decisions or tradeoffs. You know every bit that goes in must come out in the same state.
You are misinterpreting the numbers. These are subscriber/member numbers and have nothing to do with downloaded tracks, albums or revenue generated.
For all we know WalMart as 2.7 million members, but only several thousand have purchased music.
For example. we know that iTMS has sold at least 50 million tracks, but has less than 5 million accounts.
The latest numbers I'd seen released showed iTMS with something like 70% of all legal music downloads, that means that iTMS is selling more than all the other services combined.
Slashdot Mirror
So self modifying code is no longer an option? Once a program is loaded from disk, the executable can not change?
How does the compiler know for certain what is code and what is data in today's extremely complex programming environments. This "automatically" stuff has proven to be quite unreliable in the past.
What happens when data overflows the boundary in to executable program space, does the data outside the "safe" area then become executable? Isn't that the problem they were attempting to solve?
But my point is there are checks that can be performed currently that would avoid these stack smashes. If I can't rely on the programmers to do those checks now, why should I rely on them to properly set this NX bit where and when needed?
Granted, I haven't really paid much attention or done any research on this no-execute flag, but it seems to operate within the data structures of a program such that you can flag a structure, memory block or references to it as non-executable.
If that's the case they how effective can this really be at stopping buffer overflow attacks, we still need to rely on the programmers to tag every data structure as non executable (and that isn't easy). We're talking about the same programmers who don't validate input data or put limits on it.
So basically, fixing a human problem in hardware is no solution. no?
Or is it that by default, nothing is executable unless you specifically tag it to be, so that the system by default won't run anything it loads?
The article has a quote in the side bar "The inscription is obviously a classical reference. It's either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening".
Does it bother anyone else that anyone would seriously state something is "obvious" when they have nearly no information about the meaning, context, author or anything else?
The original deal between Disney and Pixar was for three original stories/films. The contract was later extended to 5 stories/films. According to the terms of that deal Toy Story 2 did not count since it was a sequel, but Pixar seemed to feel it was worth the time (probably since the models/characters were already built).
The initial 5 films are: Toy Story, Bugs Life, Monsters, Nemo and the upcoming The Incredibles.
TS2 was released/distributed under the financial terms of the deal, but not under the quota portion.
In the beginning there was an "up to" 3 film deal, in the end Pixar will have created 6 films under the terms, but only 5 by contractual obligation. It's a mess.
There's another whole mess with joint ownership of the existing films and creating sequels from them that 's best left to lawyers.
There's also the difference in the interconnects, that has a lot to do with the efficiency of the system as a whole.
Lets see what the VTech system does with ECC RAM installed when some node's aren't double-checking other node's results.
BINGO!
What dolt would think "perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta" and then go to a P2P network instead of Microsoft.com or any of the usual distribution channels ie: versiontracker, download, etc.
Then again people are stupid on the whole.
The problems with the "dead man fail-safe" are several:
1. sleeping
2. headphones / hearing impairment
3. loss/misplacement of the transmitter
4. potentially significant delay before alert is sent
5. complacency, It's known that regularly repeated warnings are soon ignored
Any of these things could/would lead to false triggers or a delay in dispatch of rescue.
I'm sure there are such situations, but it's hard to imagine one where you would so wounded you could not manage to press a button with almost any pointy part of your body, but would still live long enough for rescue to arrive before you die. IE: if you can't manage to press the button, nothing is going to save you anyway.
The method you used would be unreliable and would probably do nothing to reduce the search time of the S&R mission. Why?
Unless you only allow one hiking team in the park at a time, you will have multiple logs/hits of movement from multiple trail monitors, assuming the monitors manage to effectively send a signal each and every time a human (and only a human) passes the monitor.
Once you have all the data logged, how do you know where a hiker party went? Was that them on trail "A" or were they on trail "F"? Are the hikers going to be required to file a hiking plan from which they may not deviate?
So we have: unreliable sensor data and unknown parties with unknown destinations. I don't see where a system such as you proposed would provide any data that an S&R team could use to locate missing people faster.
And there's still the whole "you don't know they're missing/in trouble until they don't show up for a few hours/days and someone else calls you.
A far better method would be to use emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) carried by each party or person in the park, and do it on a voluntary basis. When someone gets need help they would activate the ELT which would be "heard" at a central station and S&R teams would be dispatched to home in on the signal. With the right type of box the holder could even press one of several buttons to tell authorities what type of help they need: lost, medical emergency, fire.
This method has the following advantages:
1. There is little to no delay between a person needing assistance and that assistance being dispatched.
2. The search portion of the S&R is virtually eliminated, with beacons you can home in very quickly
3. No-one has to submit to tracking, but they still can have the security it can provide
4. Costs can be recouped by charging a small fee for the transmitters, or for the loss of them
5. The system is probably less complex than the anonymous tracking and reporting/loging
6. No chance of false alerts from large animals moving through the forest
7. Higher chance of successful rescue when you don't have to wait for the person to go missing before trying to find them
Disadvantages:
1. not everyone will want to take an ELT, so S&R will still need to do it the "old fashioned" way at times
2. Potentially higher initial cost depending on how the ELT signal is tracked an the number of units deployed
Your not forcing them to walk down your monitored trail, they are choosing...
Actually, in many parks you are only allowed to hike on trails, venturing off marked trails can lead to you a fine or jail time, so walking on a monitored trail is not exactly a "choice". Their "choice" then is to either partake in the parks they pay for and submit to tracking, anonymous or not.
A wonderful view on the military's idea of "testing" is a film called The Pentagon Wars. I think it was an HBO original film and is not out on DVD or VHS.
It chronicles the last years of development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the "testing" that the Army was performing on the vehicle, along with the manipulation and outright fraud and that was committed during that development and testing.
Example: A test designed to determine if the Bradley's armor could withstand a blast from a Soviet anti-tank missile was considered a success when a Romanian missile was used instead, and the fuel tanks were filled with water, and the ammo on board the Bradley was filled with sand instead of explosives/powder.
The movie also sheds some light on the corruption that takes place within the "third party verification" program knows as joint testing. The "independent" observers are bribed or coerced in to compliance, or they are simply transferred out of the program.
Anyway... the movie is funny and sad at the same time, as the incompetence and deceit in the film were all real-life events. It's hard to imagine that this behavior was limited to that one program, or that it summarily ended with the release of the film.
Most insurance companies allow you to put your insurance for a vehicle in to what is commonly called "storage mode", where you are only paying a small fraction of the normal insurance rate. You simply call the company before you move the vehicle and they make it "active". The process, in my experience, takes about 5 minutes from dialing to hanging up.
Many states also do this with registration. You leave the car essentially unregistered, and pay a few dollars for a single trip registration.
While it's no gas hog, the Ford Focus isn't exactly the epitome of fuel economy. My Golf TDI averages about 40mpg, and gets closer to 50 on steady highway driving. Diesel also usually costs less than gasoline. The Golf would save approximately $25/week on economy alone.
$25/week is just about at the break even point for renting a pickup truck for a half week to go to the river.
Of course no car beat my 750cc motorcycle, ~60mpg for commuting, almost nothing for insurance and registration. On the down side, the Phoenix heat is murder in summer.
Another case-in-point is that SUV's also have the HIGHEST EMISSION STANDARDS of any other car, which make them safer for the environment by default.
SUVs aren't cars, they are classified as light trucks or trucks by the EPA. In comparison to other vehicles in those classes, yes SUVs are held to stricter standards than true utility vehicles or trucks. SUVs are not held to higher emissions standards than passenger cars, never have been, likely never will be.
There are laws in place that mandate that by 2009 all light trucks (most SUVs) and passenger cars must be subject to the same emissions standards as passenger cars (since most are used as passenger vehicles most of the time). There are many political games in progress with funding that are attempting to negate these laws, much like the metric system ie: the laws are passed but no money is allocated to enact/enforce them.
That aside, even if what you stated were the case, and an SUV had 10% stricter standards for emissions, the fact that they get 1/2 to 1/3 the average fuel economy of a passenger car means that SUVs pollute more overall. Emissions standards are based on emissions per mile of various components. If SUV's have the same emissions/mile requirements, that means the engines will need to be 2x to 3x as efficient as passenger cars, the exhaust systems will need to remove 2x to 3x more pollutants than a passenger vehicle or some combination thereof.
If you have some information to substantiate your claim, please provide it, otherwise all the facts I have tell me that your statement is patently false.
That aside... it's a fairly neat project you took on, kudos for seeing a problem and creating a solution from scratch.
Everyone, please take a step away from the keyboard and visit this site:
l ec trical_energy_measured.htm
http://www.nmsea.org/Curriculum/Primer/How_is_e
It's a very nice, plain english, tutorial about the relationship between Volts, Amps, Watts and Joules (the electric pantheon so to speak).
Here, here!
Does anyone seriously think that MS is going to break compatibility with the entire installed base just to piss off open source coders?
If WinFS, Avalon, or any other "new" system in LH doesn't have some sort of compatibility mode, or a way to turn it off, then MS will essentially block most all upgrades. There's no way major customers are going to bring down their entire network to upgrade every machine at once. The upgrade would potentially take hours to days if all existing data/formats and old applications must be converted/upgraded to the new formats/interfaces/etc.
This article is 100% FUD, fresh from the fudmucker's farm to your door; now in convenient concentrate powder form for your convenience.
I almost purchased on in Fry's the other day until I plugged one in to a USB port in the store and noticed two things:
1. The thing is BRIGHT; it doesn't just emit a soft glow, it shines.
2. There is no dimmer/brightness control, it's all or nothing.
There needs to be some key sequence that allows one to choose at least 4 levels of intensity: off, low, medium, high
In wired, and wireless versions.
Some are even illuminated and come attached to a really nice LCD.
of all the intelligent and objective people on Slashdot, and in so many other forums, who saw all of these issues two years ago:
WE TOLD YOU SO!
Now... if you're ready to implement a reliable, trackable, scalable and secure electronic voting system, I think we're all still willing to help you. If you'll just listen this time.
So, would advertising and selling your "archive" of music to someone else be considered "commercial"?... With CDs, I can always sale them or give it away to friends.
But with iTunes most people, I think, are not purchasing entire albums, they are purchasing individual tracks. If you tire of a single song you would not have the rest of the album to sell anyway. My suggestion is to become a music pack rat, store your "old" music on CD or DVD in case you want it again later. If you want to give your old tracks away to your friends, then go to their computer and authorize it to play tracks from your account, you only need to do it once unless something drastic happens to iTunes. You are allowed to authorize up to 5 computers at once.
My next question is what is the cost for you to sell a track, or even an album or group of tracks/albums to another party. I don't see anyone reclaiming anything more than about $.40 by selling used iTMS tracks after costs and depreciation. Remember, you have a hard upper limit of $.99 for your price.
If a few cents is worth the time and effort it would take to recoup it, then I suggest there are other ways that take just about the same time and effort that would yield higher gains: asking for money on the street, selling plasma once a month, skipping one cup of coffee a week, etc.
But with itunes, the music you no longer want is like a ball and chain.
That just doesn't make sense. Now wanting to listen to a track any more is not at all hindering your ability to listen to others, or purchase more tracks. Besides that, I've already shown that selling your track(s) are not likely to produce any profit, and indeed would loose you money.
Delete them and move on, or archive them for later use, or consider a music "leasing" or streaming service, you pay a flat fee and never have to worry about disposing of your library because it isn't yours to begin with.
I don't know how you think "noncommercial" is at all ambiguous, at least for 95% of the cases.
You are allowed to use you music in your home movies, on your web site, on portable players and on your computers as long as the use is not related to business/commercial operations, and you are not producing income from the use of the music.
As for the sale of individual songs... it is inconvenient, but then if you want temporary music, iTMS isn't for you. Go use Rhapsody or buy CDs you can trade in or sell.
You CAN sell you music. This was already argued and brought to a head by the eBay auction. Apple's response was "Yes, you can sell your tracks, but why bother?"
Granted, there is no mechanism to do it (yet), but you could indeed sell your entire library at once by simply transferring your account to someone else.
iDisk
The "join" feature still only works during CD ripping, there's not way to join tracks that you've purchased from the store or already imported. This is SO annoying. The systems have more than enough computing power to merge these songs without having to start over.
I'm guessing I will have to cave in and re-rip all my CDs that should not have gaps between the songs.
There's probably nothing really innovative about this loss-less compression. I'd think that even RLL would come close to, if not surpass, 2:1 compression ratio for music.
Loss-less compression is actually easier to achieve and code with music than lossy compression since there are no psychoacoustic decisions or tradeoffs. You know every bit that goes in must come out in the same state.
You are misinterpreting the numbers. These are subscriber/member numbers and have nothing to do with downloaded tracks, albums or revenue generated.
For all we know WalMart as 2.7 million members, but only several thousand have purchased music.
For example. we know that iTMS has sold at least 50 million tracks, but has less than 5 million accounts.
The latest numbers I'd seen released showed iTMS with something like 70% of all legal music downloads, that means that iTMS is selling more than all the other services combined.