Maybe NSA wants to build a searchable database of SHA1 preimages. Maybe FBI wants to crack domestic terrorists' GPG keys (because, thanks to export restrictions, *no* international terrorist could ever have access to strong encryption, right guys?) Maybe NTSB wants to sort everyone's mother's maiden names alphabetically and cross-index with blood type in order to make a pretty picture.
There are a million uses for this kind of lightning-fast random access storage, so it's useless to speculate. Whichever government agency is using it, one thing's certain: they're not using it for our benefit.
No, it's not a bad thing that the software doesn't support the "invasive" copy protection (which is easily broken now, BTW).
It *is* a bad thing that the software doesn't support AAC or Windows Media, both of which are more suited to portable devices than MP3 on account of their superior audio quality per kbps of compressed audio.
It's only extortion when you have no legal grounds for taking away the thing under contention. If this sap had entered into a *contract* with the sheriff's department, then he would've been perfectly within his rights to shut down their website and hold their content hostage until they paid up.
His bad, for not comprehending the legal requirements for ethically doing business.
Given a sufficient amount of money and technical prowess, I'm sure one can build an RFID scanner to defeat this jamming technology. But this raises the bar somewhat, and gives a modicum of privacy assurance for the cost of a single RFID tag.
Think of it like the safety seal on over-the-counter medications. Is that plastic doohicky ironclad proof that some loony hasn't poisoned your NyQuil? Of course not -- there're always ways to tamper with a bottle. But at least the seal raises the bar, so that only persistent and resourceful loonies need apply.
As you say: for the truly paranoid, an active version of this device could do a much better job. Heck, if you're going to the trouble of carrying around a device with batteries, complicated logic and an RF transmitter, you might as well just jam the region of the spectrum that RFID tags like to use.
Okay: for argument's sake we'll say that PSCP works like a charm to prevent nasty evil crackers from debugging my program effectively.
We'll ignore the obvious problem presented by the fact that your.NET program's IL instructions are JITted into machine code at runtime, thereby making it pointless to modify the IL -- unless these people are invalidating the JITted code every time the IL code changes (is that even allowed?) or providing a translator between IL and machine code that inserts code-morphing instructions into the OUTPUT machine code (which I seriously doubt).
We'll ignore the fact that instructions which modify other code are generally very easy to spot -- because they must refer to regions of a program's address space where code resides -- and it should be easy to find these code morphing instructions and turn them into no-ops.
We'll set both of those tricky issues aside and focus on the crux of the matter. How does this PSCP protect the program *before* it starts running? When the cracker gets his hands on my juicy.NET assembly which is bursting with code, how does PSCP prevent him from taking the assembly apart and dissecting? Answer: PSCP *doesn't* provide any such protection.
So, the school of crackers that likes to use a debugger to deduce program behavior may find themselves having trouble. But in the worst case, all I need to do is run the morphing code in a debugger, record the location of the program counter at the point in the program's execution in which I'm interested, and then consult the corresponding section of the program code that resides in the original.NET assembly. I may need to hunt back and forth for a little while to find the specific place I'm interested in, but I can't imagine that PSCP is able to change offsets or locations of instructions by very much.
Think about it: if PSCP wanted to change the location of a jump target, for example, it would need to track down every other instruction in the program that jumped to that instruction, and modify the jump to point to the new location of the jump target.
Galeon is an X application. Some proportion of its core memory, and some percentage of its process's CPU cycles, are devoted to Xlib housekeeping, maintaining offscreen buffers for GTK, and translating between the Xlib world and the GTK world.
I'm not saying that X is slow or bloated or has bad breath or herpes. I'm just saying that you can't point to your X server's low resource consumption and claim that X is efficient. You need to take into account all of the X-related resources used by client apps, the kernel memory and processing overhead resulting from all of the loopback socket connections, etc.
I have been eagerly awaiting the release of a Tablet Mac for some time. My thinking on this point has become quite definite (some would say, "stubborn") after reitering the following chain of logic in my head for nearly a year now:
I spend my workday in front of a perfectly adequate desktop system. A notebook/tablet PC for me is more of an accessory than a necessity.
If the goal of a portable computer is truly portability, why must we always encumber ourselves with a keyboard? It's called Bluetooth, people! If I want a keyboard I'll tote one along with me, but the choice should be mine.
Ditto for optical drives, floppy drives and Zip disks.
Laptop pointing devices suck donkey balls. When is the last time you moved anything in the real world across a distance of 15 inches by caressing a flat rectangle of plastic? IBM's nipple is a great improvement, but I prefer to save my nipple-tweaking time for when I'm not at the computer, thankeeverymuch.
Tablet PCs use the world's original intuitive data entry device, the pen. If it was good enough for William Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.
Now let's think about laptops from the gaming angle:
It is well known that notebooks are not good at playing games unless they're made nearly as heavy, as bulky and as hot as a desktop system.
It is well known that Macs are not good at playing games (because so few games are ported to OS X).
Mac notebooks are generally regarded as the most well-designed and stylish notebooks on the market.
One has nothing to lose by buying a Mac notebook vs. a PC notebook, because PC notebooks can't play games well.
One has nothing to lose gaming-ability-wise by buying a Mac notebook vs. a Mac desktop, because one cannot lose the ability to play games which do not exist.
I want a portable computer, but I don't like being slave to the keyboard. I'm willing to sacrifice gaming for the privilege of being portable. I'm also willing to sacrifice gaming, and pay a steep hardware premium, for the immense privilege of using OS X. All signs point to a Tablet Mac in my future; problem is, there is no such animal! My ideal computer is alas little more than a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye.
Oh, Steve, why are you so cruel? Why do you taunt me so with your shiny-pretty OS and your beautiful (ok, annoying) brushed metal windows only to slam the door in my face when I try to buy into your dream? *sob* WHY!?!?
The cynic in me reads this statement as "The graphical subsystem on previous versions of PalmOS suffered from extreme lack of foresight and failed to allocate enough bits to device coordinates, thereby preventing PalmOS from supporting any reasonable screen resolution. We're not quite so myopic now, and we've allocated 32 bits for the same purpose."
Big whoop. By this metric, Windows (and X) are capable of supporting TWO BILLION x TWO BILLION resolution screens, because they use an entire 32-bit unsigned integer for the device coordinate along each axis!
When I insert a CD into my CD player (a host device), its firmware starts a process of reading the RedBook audio stored on the CD's sectors.
When I insert a CD into my PlayStation, its onboard operating system reads the ISO filesystem and prepares to run the executable image(s) stored there.
Because TVI used overly-broad wording on their patent, they're opening themselves up to prior art that extends as far back as the first CD player. Their patent is most likely unenforcable.
Hmm, I would consider VHS to be a storage medium more than a hardware platform; in the realm of analog storage media, the undisputed winner would have to be the venerable gramophone record, which is still a going concern (albeit just barely). First introduced in 1888, it was standardized to the 78rpm format we know and love sometime in the 30s. Then again, there's always paper, papyrus and carved stone which predate even LPs.;)
If we're concerned more with stuff that can be displayed on a screen, however, then you're right: the VHS is older than the PC.
I wonder just how backward-compatible the Hebrew language really is. I know for a fact that American Hebrew-school Hebrew and modern colloquial Hebrew (as spoken in Israel) are pretty different, though a speaker of one can generally understand a speaker of the other. I also know that Israeli Hebrew and is radically different from pre-WWII Hebrew which, as I understand, didn't have a single dialect. Every pocket of Jewish culture added its own quirks of pronunciation, according to the tongue of wherever they resided. And of course, even then, I'm sure the language has drifted since biblical days. The grammar and spelling are probably quite similar, thanks to all of the ancient writings and the strength of Jewish tradition, but I'd bet the pronunciation is radically different.
If MSFT truly is switching to PPC architecture, that implies one of two things.
1) They're replacing the entire XBox operating system, tossing the approach of "let's bundle a stripped-down copy of Windows 2000 on every DVD" and going with something else -- perhaps Windows Embedded, which runs on just about any architecture you can imagine.
2) They're keeping the current OS (or switching to a more recent revision of Windows) and have ported the whole kit and kaboodle to PPC architecture. This is not too far-fetched, considering that they supported Windows NT on PPC and Alpha architectures until fairly recently.
In either case, recall that Microsoft recently bought Connectix' Virtual PC software. Thus far they've revamped it and will be releasing it for both Mac and and Windows platforms. On Mac, it will serve the same market it always has. On Windows, it will act as a competitor to VMWare.
Now, with Microsoft's total control over the DirectX API and intimate knowledge of the internals of their own OS, I rate it as "difficult but not impossible" for them to adapt the Virtual PC software for use as an x86 emulation layer on a PPC XBox.
The first sign that this is happening might be sudden, unprecedented support for 3D graphics cards in the MacOS version of Virtual PC. If we see such support crop up, it's a good indicator that MSFT is (a) using PPC for XBox 2 and (b) making plans for backward compatibility with XBox games.
No, silly, my post said Sony set a precedent -- namely, that their newer-generation Playstation consoles would be backward compatible with their older-generation consoles.:) The precedent for backward compatibility would, I think, be exemplified in the x86 architecture. Thanks to instruction-level compatibility and BIOS, it is still possible to install and run DOS 1.0 (shipped circa 1980) on a modern PC. I may be in the dark about an even longer-running stretch of compatibility in some architecture out there. Out of curiosity, can you think of any other hardware that spans 23 years of backward-compatibility?
Your reasoning is sound. Also, note that Sony set a precedent with the backward compatibility of the PS2. Sony knows they'd damn well better make the PS3 play PS2 games. Even if the PS3's architecture is so radically different that their clever hardware-reuse trick won't work, it should have enough horsepower to emulation the Emotion Engine in software, perhaps even with code morphing akin to Transmeta's and -- the most important part -- some sort of emulated 3D pipeline.
So: if Microsoft wants to stay in the game and woo future XBox customers, they need to strive for backward compatibility as well.
Finally, note that the XBox is built on the Windows platform and the DirectX APIs, which are particularly good at handling version and driver differences. Your old XBox 1 games target DirectX 8, DirectInput, DirectSound, etc, and are completely agnostic of the actual underlying hardware platform, or the actual version of DirectX. Backward compatibility in the XBox world is virtually guaranteed. This is where Microsoft's "PC in a tiny box" strategy will really pay off.
Judging from the relevant federal code (helpfully posted below), there does appear to be *some* chance that the Republican senators broke the law, by exceeding their authorized access to the files which, although were not "property" of the government, were stored on a government computer.
On the slim chance that any of the Republican senators are prosecuted, how much would you like to bet that they get off with a reprimand and a slap on the wrist?
Now, if the janitor in that office had been caught paging through the Dems' (or the Repubs') confidential memos, you can be sure he would have been prosecuted as a computer criminal. Judges are getting more heavy-handed as of late, and it's becoming increasingly more popular to invoke the Patriot Act in cases of computer crime. There's a very good chance that our poor janitor would have been tried, and convicted, as a terrorist.
But, because the criminals in this case are rich, powerful, important white men with many friends in government, they'll likely get off scot free.
I say: give these slandering, pandering, filibustering, dirty-bird legislators a taste of their own medicine! Let them be tried under the inappropriately harsh laws that snuck into the books under THEIR noses. It'll never happen of course, but it sure would be nice.
To clarify an earlier remark, when I said "That only would be the case if Photoshop CS...able to determine the intent of the person sitting at the console," what I meant is that the code embedded in Photoshop is a fallible currency detection algorithm, and not a magical crime detection algorithm. See the difference?
You claim that currency detection algorithms embedded in Photoshop will prevent counterfeiters from cranking out counterfeit dollars. Your claim is predicated on the assumption that counterfeiters are incapable of downloading The GIMP.
But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that counterfeiters are indeed too stupid to use old printer drivers, old versions of Photoshop or unencumbered image manipulation tools, and that they are too stupid to crack software. Let us attack the problem from another angle.
You assume that the currency detection algorithms are infallible, and that they will never produce a false positive or fail to recognize an image of currency. You also assume that *any* reproduction of currency must be illegal.
Our helpful friend http://www.rulesforuse.org informs us that the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992 permits color illustrations under the following conditions:
1. the illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated;
2. the illustration is one-sided; and
3. all negatives...graphic files...and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.
As we can see, US code defines terms for legal reproduction of color images of currency. Far from being concerned with the intent of the user, I'm arguing that widespread anticounterfeiting measures are only appropriate if they can consistently distinguish between legal and illegal acts, which Photoshop most patently cannot. Its algorithm may produce false positives or negatives; it cannot reliably determine the surface area of many image formats; it cannot determine whether a pair of images will eventually be printed onto two sides of a page.
You could make a slightly stronger case for anti-counterfeiting measures embedded in printer drivers, but see my first paragraph for reasons why that won't work well either.
So, to recap, currency detection algorithms in our software are
1) ineffective, inasmuch as they do little to curb counterfeiting
2) intrusive, inasmuch as they prevent computer users from pursuing perfectly legal activities, and waste our time and money by causing our software to fail unexpectedly.
These particular pieces of hardware aren't "wired to keep people from committing a crime." That only would be the case if Photoshop CS were not only 100% accurate in recognizing images of currency, but able to determine the intent of the person sitting at the console. If they've got an algorithm to do this, I'd love to know about it!
No, the problem with currency detection embedded into image-processing hardware and software is a matter of fair use. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to manipulate both images of actual money and money-like images. Automatically preventing anyone from working with such images based on the assumption that they're all criminals is tantamount to preventing anyone from recording broadcast television shows on the assumption that they're all going to make illegal copies of the TV shows.
OOPS! I forgot, the upcoming television standard makes just such a provision with its 'broadcast flag.' Of course, unlike the federal government, major corporations don't even need to pretend to have our best interests in mind.
The goal of broadcasters in this case is to maximize their degree of control over what we see, hear and do with their shows...even though the only point of television is to pitch advertising at us, from which they derive all of their profits.
Setting ethics aside, one could argue that broadcasting corporations are only practicing due diligence by taking any legal action that might increase profits. So what's the federal government's excuse? And why should Adobe, Canon, Epson, et al, cooperate?
It's encouraging to hear from someone who had a normal childhood despite these setbacks, who in fact did so without the benefit/handicap of drugs.
I wasn't a very active kid -- which is why I was diagnosed ADD instead of ADHD -- and I can't say I enjoyed my childhood much. But I identify strongly with your comments on creativity and spontaneity. In my field of work, creativity is seldom rewarded and often punished. That's why my business card says "Software Engineer" rather than "Software Artist." Nonetheless, I've been lauded several times within the past year for coming up with creative solutions to difficult problems. Most of these were schemes I hatched whilst daydreaming, when I should've been doing something else.
I suppose part of "growing out of" my ADD was learning to channel it into productivity, similarly to your own efforts. Only, looking back, I can't remember ever making the conscious choice to control my ADD. It just sort of happened.
I *will* say that when Tourette's came back to haunt me (in a very big way!) during the latter half of my university studies, I found a novel solution: I began smoking huge quantities marijuana. I didn't realize it at the time -- I thought I was just being rebellious and indulging in a slightly naughty habit -- but I was self-medicating against the Tourette's.
My job requires me to perform 100% mentally and so I can no longer indulge in this particular form of treatment, but I think, if I had to make the same choice today, I would choose marijuana over any of the antipsychotic or anti-epilepsy drugs commonly used to treat severe Tourette's sufferers.
It's quite possible that you're right. If so, then neural feedback therapy would be an effective treatment for both -- you're essentially training your brain to stay in its "sweet spot" more of the time, and more effectively.
All I know for sure is that biofeedback helped me somewhat, but that I eventually "grew out of" both ADD and Tourette's (for the most part).
Well, from personal experience I can say that I never felt addicted to dexedrine. I never got a buzz from it, or felt "speedy" or unable to control my thoughts -- quite the opposite, in fact. The dexedrine helped me focus, which is its intended effect.
Because of the way it aggravated my tics, I eventually began taking it only as necessary (before exams or big projects)....and after a few more years, I felt I didn't need it at all.
Then again, I can drink caffeine at 11pm and be sleeping like a baby within half an hour. My body reacts strangely to stimulants; always has. So YMMV.
Most Tourette's sufferers are not of the colorful cuss-like-a-sailor variety. Most of us are pretty normal guys and gals who, if you observe them often enough, seem to have an awful lot of nervous energy. If you catch me on a really bad day you might peg me as a Tourette's case, but for the most part I keep my tics to myself.
The problem is, you find yourself sitting there studying (or coding, or reading the abstract to some paper, or writing some paper) and you catch yourself repeating some tic... and yes, it annoys you. So you will your body to stop.
Then you get absorbed in your task again and before you know it, you're at it again. If it's a muscular tic, you sometimes end up with a sore muscle at the end of the day from repeating the same movement all day. All of this most certainly detracts from your powers of concentration.
I'm not certain if it goes the other way as well. I guess if you spaced out and fucked up something really important, you might become aggravated enough to set your tics off.
For the most part, though, ADD doesn't cause frustration or angst for the suffer. It's the parents, schoolteachers and bosses *around* you that have a problem with how you act.
Severe ADD is like living your life as a series of 30-second commercial spots. Your mind drifts where it will, from one state to the next, largely independent of what's going on around you. The only way to anchor yourself in the present is to interact with your environment. That's why we ADD sufferers do so miserably in school: it's not interactive enough! I'm thankful that my ADD is very mild and manifests itself as absentmindedness and a penchant to go off on tangents at the drop of a hat.
But, I digress -- and in digressing reinforce my point. My point is that ADD symptoms are unlikely to irritate Tourette's symptoms. The link between the two disorders resists analysis, but it's most definitely there.
I'd like to reinforce the point that ADD medications exacerbate Tourette's symptoms!!! It could be that your daughter naturally has some slight inclination toward Tourette's, which was exaggerated when she began taking medications. There is every chance that going off the meds, or switching meds, will make her tics easier to control. Neural feedback therapy could therefore help in both areas, by getting her off the drugs.
Let me begin by pointing out that there is a correlation between ADD/ADHD and Tourette's. In other words, having one increases your chances of having the other.
I was diagnosed with mild Tourette's Syndrome when I was in sixth grade. It manifested itself similarly to your daughter's symptoms -- minor vocal and muscular tics. It wasn't a significant bother, but it impaired me enough that I sought medication for it. I began taking Clonidine transdermally (through a skin patch) to help ease my Tourette's symptoms.
A year after starting the Tourette's medication, I was diagnosed with ADD. This was ~1990, before ADD was a "trendy" disease. At the time, none of my family had ever heard of it before. So I began a regimen of Dexedrine, to help with the ADD.
I stayed on both medications for a further year, until I developed an allergy to the skin patch. At that time, my doctor recommended I try neural feedback therapy to help control the Tourette's. I went in for an hour of therapy every two weeks for a year. Over the course of the year I became better able to control my tics, but only with great concentration. If I became flustered or anxious or nervous or just plain stopped paying attention, I would lose control and the tics would come back. But, at the end of the year, I decided I was able to control the Tourette's well enough to stop therapy and medication.
I continued with Dexedrine throughout my junior-high and high school years, and gradually stopped taking it when I got to college. I firmly believe that the Dexedrine was a great help in high school; even though it exacerbated my Tourette's symptoms, it allowed me to finish high school having learned what I needed in order to get into college. Could I have used some other means to achieve the same ends? Probably. But the medication worked.
Today I'm a slightly disorganized, nervous and fidgety young man living a normal life and working a full-time job in software development. My duties expand every day and I find myself diverting more and more of my attention toward organization and self-management. But I can manage.
Will neural feedback therapy help your daughter? I'd say, give it a try. It could be that the techniques I learned to help control my Tourette's also gave me an edge in studying... we'll never get a chance to perform that experiment, since now I'm all grown up. But I know from firsthand experience that it's possible to reign one's body in using only the power of one's concentration. So give it a shot. If it doesn't work, there's always the drugs.
P.S. I would recommend looking at alternatives to Ritalin. Dexedrine and Desoxyn , AFAIK, achieve the same thing but with fewer side effects (less of a methamphetamine-like effect on the human body).
I'm guessing (hoping) that the detection mechanism relies on some optical property of banknote paper, rather than simple recognition of features on the bill's surface. For instance, maybe it's able to detect microprinting or those little colored threads embedded in the paper.
If we can find out specifically what property causes Photoshop to recognize a bill, we can add that property into all of our images, thereby rendering them unopenable in Photoshop! The sinister and nefarious open-source bandits could write a worm that, after infecting a machine, would alter every image file on the system so that it was unopenable. Photoshop would become a useless application, and The GIMP would reign supreme!
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Maybe NSA wants to build a searchable database of SHA1 preimages. Maybe FBI wants to crack domestic terrorists' GPG keys (because, thanks to export restrictions, *no* international terrorist could ever have access to strong encryption, right guys?) Maybe NTSB wants to sort everyone's mother's maiden names alphabetically and cross-index with blood type in order to make a pretty picture.
There are a million uses for this kind of lightning-fast random access storage, so it's useless to speculate. Whichever government agency is using it, one thing's certain: they're not using it for our benefit.
No, it's not a bad thing that the software doesn't support the "invasive" copy protection (which is easily broken now, BTW).
It *is* a bad thing that the software doesn't support AAC or Windows Media, both of which are more suited to portable devices than MP3 on account of their superior audio quality per kbps of compressed audio.
It's only extortion when you have no legal grounds for taking away the thing under contention. If this sap had entered into a *contract* with the sheriff's department, then he would've been perfectly within his rights to shut down their website and hold their content hostage until they paid up.
His bad, for not comprehending the legal requirements for ethically doing business.
Given a sufficient amount of money and technical prowess, I'm sure one can build an RFID scanner to defeat this jamming technology. But this raises the bar somewhat, and gives a modicum of privacy assurance for the cost of a single RFID tag.
Think of it like the safety seal on over-the-counter medications. Is that plastic doohicky ironclad proof that some loony hasn't poisoned your NyQuil? Of course not -- there're always ways to tamper with a bottle. But at least the seal raises the bar, so that only persistent and resourceful loonies need apply.
As you say: for the truly paranoid, an active version of this device could do a much better job. Heck, if you're going to the trouble of carrying around a device with batteries, complicated logic and an RF transmitter, you might as well just jam the region of the spectrum that RFID tags like to use.
Okay: for argument's sake we'll say that PSCP works like a charm to prevent nasty evil crackers from debugging my program effectively.
.NET program's IL instructions are JITted into machine code at runtime, thereby making it pointless to modify the IL -- unless these people are invalidating the JITted code every time the IL code changes (is that even allowed?) or providing a translator between IL and machine code that inserts code-morphing instructions into the OUTPUT machine code (which I seriously doubt).
.NET assembly which is bursting with code, how does PSCP prevent him from taking the assembly apart and dissecting? Answer: PSCP *doesn't* provide any such protection.
.NET assembly. I may need to hunt back and forth for a little while to find the specific place I'm interested in, but I can't imagine that PSCP is able to change offsets or locations of instructions by very much.
We'll ignore the obvious problem presented by the fact that your
We'll ignore the fact that instructions which modify other code are generally very easy to spot -- because they must refer to regions of a program's address space where code resides -- and it should be easy to find these code morphing instructions and turn them into no-ops.
We'll set both of those tricky issues aside and focus on the crux of the matter. How does this PSCP protect the program *before* it starts running? When the cracker gets his hands on my juicy
So, the school of crackers that likes to use a debugger to deduce program behavior may find themselves having trouble. But in the worst case, all I need to do is run the morphing code in a debugger, record the location of the program counter at the point in the program's execution in which I'm interested, and then consult the corresponding section of the program code that resides in the original
Think about it: if PSCP wanted to change the location of a jump target, for example, it would need to track down every other instruction in the program that jumped to that instruction, and modify the jump to point to the new location of the jump target.
Galeon is an X application. Some proportion of its core memory, and some percentage of its process's CPU cycles, are devoted to Xlib housekeeping, maintaining offscreen buffers for GTK, and translating between the Xlib world and the GTK world.
I'm not saying that X is slow or bloated or has bad breath or herpes. I'm just saying that you can't point to your X server's low resource consumption and claim that X is efficient. You need to take into account all of the X-related resources used by client apps, the kernel memory and processing overhead resulting from all of the loopback socket connections, etc.
I have been eagerly awaiting the release of a Tablet Mac for some time. My thinking on this point has become quite definite (some would say, "stubborn") after reitering the following chain of logic in my head for nearly a year now:
Now let's think about laptops from the gaming angle:
I want a portable computer, but I don't like being slave to the keyboard. I'm willing to sacrifice gaming for the privilege of being portable. I'm also willing to sacrifice gaming, and pay a steep hardware premium, for the immense privilege of using OS X. All signs point to a Tablet Mac in my future; problem is, there is no such animal! My ideal computer is alas little more than a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye.
Oh, Steve, why are you so cruel? Why do you taunt me so with your shiny-pretty OS and your beautiful (ok, annoying) brushed metal windows only to slam the door in my face when I try to buy into your dream? *sob* WHY!?!?
NASA can't help you, son. But Kazaa sure can!
Right.
The cynic in me reads this statement as "The graphical subsystem on previous versions of PalmOS suffered from extreme lack of foresight and failed to allocate enough bits to device coordinates, thereby preventing PalmOS from supporting any reasonable screen resolution. We're not quite so myopic now, and we've allocated 32 bits for the same purpose."
Big whoop. By this metric, Windows (and X) are capable of supporting TWO BILLION x TWO BILLION resolution screens, because they use an entire 32-bit unsigned integer for the device coordinate along each axis!
When I insert a CD into my CD player (a host device), its firmware starts a process of reading the RedBook audio stored on the CD's sectors.
When I insert a CD into my PlayStation, its onboard operating system reads the ISO filesystem and prepares to run the executable image(s) stored there.
Because TVI used overly-broad wording on their patent, they're opening themselves up to prior art that extends as far back as the first CD player. Their patent is most likely unenforcable.
Hmm, I would consider VHS to be a storage medium more than a hardware platform; in the realm of analog storage media, the undisputed winner would have to be the venerable gramophone record, which is still a going concern (albeit just barely). First introduced in 1888, it was standardized to the 78rpm format we know and love sometime in the 30s. Then again, there's always paper, papyrus and carved stone which predate even LPs. ;)
If we're concerned more with stuff that can be displayed on a screen, however, then you're right: the VHS is older than the PC.
I wonder just how backward-compatible the Hebrew language really is. I know for a fact that American Hebrew-school Hebrew and modern colloquial Hebrew (as spoken in Israel) are pretty different, though a speaker of one can generally understand a speaker of the other. I also know that Israeli Hebrew and is radically different from pre-WWII Hebrew which, as I understand, didn't have a single dialect. Every pocket of Jewish culture added its own quirks of pronunciation, according to the tongue of wherever they resided. And of course, even then, I'm sure the language has drifted since biblical days. The grammar and spelling are probably quite similar, thanks to all of the ancient writings and the strength of Jewish tradition, but I'd bet the pronunciation is radically different.
If MSFT truly is switching to PPC architecture, that implies one of two things.
1) They're replacing the entire XBox operating system, tossing the approach of "let's bundle a stripped-down copy of Windows 2000 on every DVD" and going with something else -- perhaps Windows Embedded, which runs on just about any architecture you can imagine.
2) They're keeping the current OS (or switching to a more recent revision of Windows) and have ported the whole kit and kaboodle to PPC architecture. This is not too far-fetched, considering that they supported Windows NT on PPC and Alpha architectures until fairly recently.
In either case, recall that Microsoft recently bought Connectix' Virtual PC software. Thus far they've revamped it and will be releasing it for both Mac and and Windows platforms. On Mac, it will serve the same market it always has. On Windows, it will act as a competitor to VMWare.
Now, with Microsoft's total control over the DirectX API and intimate knowledge of the internals of their own OS, I rate it as "difficult but not impossible" for them to adapt the Virtual PC software for use as an x86 emulation layer on a PPC XBox.
The first sign that this is happening might be sudden, unprecedented support for 3D graphics cards in the MacOS version of Virtual PC. If we see such support crop up, it's a good indicator that MSFT is (a) using PPC for XBox 2 and (b) making plans for backward compatibility with XBox games.
No, silly, my post said Sony set a precedent -- namely, that their newer-generation Playstation consoles would be backward compatible with their older-generation consoles. :) The precedent for backward compatibility would, I think, be exemplified in the x86 architecture. Thanks to instruction-level compatibility and BIOS, it is still possible to install and run DOS 1.0 (shipped circa 1980) on a modern PC. I may be in the dark about an even longer-running stretch of compatibility in some architecture out there. Out of curiosity, can you think of any other hardware that spans 23 years of backward-compatibility?
Your reasoning is sound. Also, note that Sony set a precedent with the backward compatibility of the PS2. Sony knows they'd damn well better make the PS3 play PS2 games. Even if the PS3's architecture is so radically different that their clever hardware-reuse trick won't work, it should have enough horsepower to emulation the Emotion Engine in software, perhaps even with code morphing akin to Transmeta's and -- the most important part -- some sort of emulated 3D pipeline.
So: if Microsoft wants to stay in the game and woo future XBox customers, they need to strive for backward compatibility as well.
Finally, note that the XBox is built on the Windows platform and the DirectX APIs, which are particularly good at handling version and driver differences. Your old XBox 1 games target DirectX 8, DirectInput, DirectSound, etc, and are completely agnostic of the actual underlying hardware platform, or the actual version of DirectX. Backward compatibility in the XBox world is virtually guaranteed. This is where Microsoft's "PC in a tiny box" strategy will really pay off.
Judging from the relevant federal code (helpfully posted below), there does appear to be *some* chance that the Republican senators broke the law, by exceeding their authorized access to the files which, although were not "property" of the government, were stored on a government computer.
On the slim chance that any of the Republican senators are prosecuted, how much would you like to bet that they get off with a reprimand and a slap on the wrist?
Now, if the janitor in that office had been caught paging through the Dems' (or the Repubs') confidential memos, you can be sure he would have been prosecuted as a computer criminal. Judges are getting more heavy-handed as of late, and it's becoming increasingly more popular to invoke the Patriot Act in cases of computer crime. There's a very good chance that our poor janitor would have been tried, and convicted, as a terrorist.
But, because the criminals in this case are rich, powerful, important white men with many friends in government, they'll likely get off scot free.
I say: give these slandering, pandering, filibustering, dirty-bird legislators a taste of their own medicine! Let them be tried under the inappropriately harsh laws that snuck into the books under THEIR noses. It'll never happen of course, but it sure would be nice.
To clarify an earlier remark, when I said "That only would be the case if Photoshop CS...able to determine the intent of the person sitting at the console," what I meant is that the code embedded in Photoshop is a fallible currency detection algorithm, and not a magical crime detection algorithm. See the difference?
You claim that currency detection algorithms embedded in Photoshop will prevent counterfeiters from cranking out counterfeit dollars. Your claim is predicated on the assumption that counterfeiters are incapable of downloading The GIMP.
But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that counterfeiters are indeed too stupid to use old printer drivers, old versions of Photoshop or unencumbered image manipulation tools, and that they are too stupid to crack software. Let us attack the problem from another angle.
You assume that the currency detection algorithms are infallible, and that they will never produce a false positive or fail to recognize an image of currency. You also assume that *any* reproduction of currency must be illegal.
Our helpful friend http://www.rulesforuse.org informs us that the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992 permits color illustrations under the following conditions:
1. the illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated;
2. the illustration is one-sided; and
3. all negatives...graphic files...and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.
As we can see, US code defines terms for legal reproduction of color images of currency. Far from being concerned with the intent of the user, I'm arguing that widespread anticounterfeiting measures are only appropriate if they can consistently distinguish between legal and illegal acts, which Photoshop most patently cannot. Its algorithm may produce false positives or negatives; it cannot reliably determine the surface area of many image formats; it cannot determine whether a pair of images will eventually be printed onto two sides of a page.
You could make a slightly stronger case for anti-counterfeiting measures embedded in printer drivers, but see my first paragraph for reasons why that won't work well either.
So, to recap, currency detection algorithms in our software are
1) ineffective, inasmuch as they do little to curb counterfeiting
2) intrusive, inasmuch as they prevent computer users from pursuing perfectly legal activities, and waste our time and money by causing our software to fail unexpectedly.
These particular pieces of hardware aren't "wired to keep people from committing a crime." That only would be the case if Photoshop CS were not only 100% accurate in recognizing images of currency, but able to determine the intent of the person sitting at the console. If they've got an algorithm to do this, I'd love to know about it!
No, the problem with currency detection embedded into image-processing hardware and software is a matter of fair use. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to manipulate both images of actual money and money-like images. Automatically preventing anyone from working with such images based on the assumption that they're all criminals is tantamount to preventing anyone from recording broadcast television shows on the assumption that they're all going to make illegal copies of the TV shows.
OOPS! I forgot, the upcoming television standard makes just such a provision with its 'broadcast flag.' Of course, unlike the federal government, major corporations don't even need to pretend to have our best interests in mind.
The goal of broadcasters in this case is to maximize their degree of control over what we see, hear and do with their shows...even though the only point of television is to pitch advertising at us, from which they derive all of their profits.
Setting ethics aside, one could argue that broadcasting corporations are only practicing due diligence by taking any legal action that might increase profits. So what's the federal government's excuse? And why should Adobe, Canon, Epson, et al, cooperate?
It's encouraging to hear from someone who had a normal childhood despite these setbacks, who in fact did so without the benefit/handicap of drugs.
I wasn't a very active kid -- which is why I was diagnosed ADD instead of ADHD -- and I can't say I enjoyed my childhood much. But I identify strongly with your comments on creativity and spontaneity. In my field of work, creativity is seldom rewarded and often punished. That's why my business card says "Software Engineer" rather than "Software Artist." Nonetheless, I've been lauded several times within the past year for coming up with creative solutions to difficult problems. Most of these were schemes I hatched whilst daydreaming, when I should've been doing something else.
I suppose part of "growing out of" my ADD was learning to channel it into productivity, similarly to your own efforts. Only, looking back, I can't remember ever making the conscious choice to control my ADD. It just sort of happened.
I *will* say that when Tourette's came back to haunt me (in a very big way!) during the latter half of my university studies, I found a novel solution: I began smoking huge quantities marijuana. I didn't realize it at the time -- I thought I was just being rebellious and indulging in a slightly naughty habit -- but I was self-medicating against the Tourette's.
My job requires me to perform 100% mentally and so I can no longer indulge in this particular form of treatment, but I think, if I had to make the same choice today, I would choose marijuana over any of the antipsychotic or anti-epilepsy drugs commonly used to treat severe Tourette's sufferers.
It's quite possible that you're right. If so, then neural feedback therapy would be an effective treatment for both -- you're essentially training your brain to stay in its "sweet spot" more of the time, and more effectively.
All I know for sure is that biofeedback helped me somewhat, but that I eventually "grew out of" both ADD and Tourette's (for the most part).
Ah.
Well, from personal experience I can say that I never felt addicted to dexedrine. I never got a buzz from it, or felt "speedy" or unable to control my thoughts -- quite the opposite, in fact. The dexedrine helped me focus, which is its intended effect.
Because of the way it aggravated my tics, I eventually began taking it only as necessary (before exams or big projects)....and after a few more years, I felt I didn't need it at all.
Then again, I can drink caffeine at 11pm and be sleeping like a baby within half an hour. My body reacts strangely to stimulants; always has. So YMMV.
You're joking, of course, but you've got a point.
... and yes, it annoys you. So you will your body to stop.
Most Tourette's sufferers are not of the colorful cuss-like-a-sailor variety. Most of us are pretty normal guys and gals who, if you observe them often enough, seem to have an awful lot of nervous energy. If you catch me on a really bad day you might peg me as a Tourette's case, but for the most part I keep my tics to myself.
The problem is, you find yourself sitting there studying (or coding, or reading the abstract to some paper, or writing some paper) and you catch yourself repeating some tic
Then you get absorbed in your task again and before you know it, you're at it again. If it's a muscular tic, you sometimes end up with a sore muscle at the end of the day from repeating the same movement all day. All of this most certainly detracts from your powers of concentration.
I'm not certain if it goes the other way as well. I guess if you spaced out and fucked up something really important, you might become aggravated enough to set your tics off.
For the most part, though, ADD doesn't cause frustration or angst for the suffer. It's the parents, schoolteachers and bosses *around* you that have a problem with how you act.
Severe ADD is like living your life as a series of 30-second commercial spots. Your mind drifts where it will, from one state to the next, largely independent of what's going on around you. The only way to anchor yourself in the present is to interact with your environment. That's why we ADD sufferers do so miserably in school: it's not interactive enough! I'm thankful that my ADD is very mild and manifests itself as absentmindedness and a penchant to go off on tangents at the drop of a hat.
But, I digress -- and in digressing reinforce my point. My point is that ADD symptoms are unlikely to irritate Tourette's symptoms. The link between the two disorders resists analysis, but it's most definitely there.
I'd like to reinforce the point that ADD medications exacerbate Tourette's symptoms!!! It could be that your daughter naturally has some slight inclination toward Tourette's, which was exaggerated when she began taking medications. There is every chance that going off the meds, or switching meds, will make her tics easier to control. Neural feedback therapy could therefore help in both areas, by getting her off the drugs.
Let me begin by pointing out that there is a correlation between ADD/ADHD and Tourette's. In other words, having one increases your chances of having the other.
... we'll never get a chance to perform that experiment, since now I'm all grown up. But I know from firsthand experience that it's possible to reign one's body in using only the power of one's concentration. So give it a shot. If it doesn't work, there's always the drugs.
I was diagnosed with mild Tourette's Syndrome when I was in sixth grade. It manifested itself similarly to your daughter's symptoms -- minor vocal and muscular tics. It wasn't a significant bother, but it impaired me enough that I sought medication for it. I began taking Clonidine transdermally (through a skin patch) to help ease my Tourette's symptoms.
A year after starting the Tourette's medication, I was diagnosed with ADD. This was ~1990, before ADD was a "trendy" disease. At the time, none of my family had ever heard of it before. So I began a regimen of Dexedrine, to help with the ADD.
I stayed on both medications for a further year, until I developed an allergy to the skin patch. At that time, my doctor recommended I try neural feedback therapy to help control the Tourette's. I went in for an hour of therapy every two weeks for a year. Over the course of the year I became better able to control my tics, but only with great concentration. If I became flustered or anxious or nervous or just plain stopped paying attention, I would lose control and the tics would come back. But, at the end of the year, I decided I was able to control the Tourette's well enough to stop therapy and medication.
I continued with Dexedrine throughout my junior-high and high school years, and gradually stopped taking it when I got to college. I firmly believe that the Dexedrine was a great help in high school; even though it exacerbated my Tourette's symptoms, it allowed me to finish high school having learned what I needed in order to get into college. Could I have used some other means to achieve the same ends? Probably. But the medication worked.
Today I'm a slightly disorganized, nervous and fidgety young man living a normal life and working a full-time job in software development. My duties expand every day and I find myself diverting more and more of my attention toward organization and self-management. But I can manage.
Will neural feedback therapy help your daughter? I'd say, give it a try. It could be that the techniques I learned to help control my Tourette's also gave me an edge in studying
P.S. I would recommend looking at alternatives to Ritalin. Dexedrine and Desoxyn , AFAIK, achieve the same thing but with fewer side effects (less of a methamphetamine-like effect on the human body).
I'm guessing (hoping) that the detection mechanism relies on some optical property of banknote paper, rather than simple recognition of features on the bill's surface. For instance, maybe it's able to detect microprinting or those little colored threads embedded in the paper.
If we can find out specifically what property causes Photoshop to recognize a bill, we can add that property into all of our images, thereby rendering them unopenable in Photoshop! The sinister and nefarious open-source bandits could write a worm that, after infecting a machine, would alter every image file on the system so that it was unopenable. Photoshop would become a useless application, and The GIMP would reign supreme!