Ion engines like this on space stations is really cool. Potentially, a powerful enough one could be used to slow boost, well, just about anything to just about any orbit, given enough time. It could even lift an object to the moon (it would take a while, but for robotic probes, who cares?). Meaning that we could use chemical rockets only to reach LEO, and after than lift everything with ion engines. Cheap geosynchronous satellites, supplies for interplanetary travel, you name it. And the engine could lower its own orbit and be reused for another package after its done. It needs some fuel, true, but nowhere near as much as chemical thrust does.
The difference is that locomotives have huge inertial mass, so they require massive power to get moving. Once moving, they require significantly less power to stay in motion, courtesy of the laws of motion. Therefore, electric-hybrid makes sense: batteries provide the initial power, so you can build a smaller diesel than you would otherwise need. Larger jumbo-jets, on the other hand, pretty much fly like a brick with wings. They run at close to full power pretty much the whole flight (I think its actually 70-80%), pretty well negating the advantage to hybrid setups. Especially given the added weight of such a setup (negligible in cars/locomotives, huge in aircraft).
The thing about health care that no one seems to mention is the cost of R&D for drugs. FDA approval costs well upwards of half a billion, and can take 10 years. AFAIK many new drugs are developed by US based companies, and are protected by patents that may only apply in the US (certainly not everywhere). The result is that to recoup that cost, they need to charge Americans more for even basic health care. I have absolutely no figures for how much that cost is, but I imagine its considerable. Plus, Americans don't exactly live the healthiest lifestyles. I suppose you may still have a point, but one single area doesn't render the whole system necessarily broken.
Of course, the FDA approval thing also brings up another issue, which is that government has a huge influence in private sector businesses. That means our economy isn't really free, and the regulation is in many cases more than is truly required to maintain environmental or safety standards. Even in this case, NASA certifying the Dragon capsule man-rated will add considerable cost, much of it unnecessary. Safety is obviously important: filing paper in quadruplicate, not so much.
Riiiight, because SpaceX is a giant, well-funded corporation that can afford to take massive losses on its first few launches in order to lure us away from the competition. Except in this case the competition is Russia who is definitely very expensive, and SpaceX is a (fairly) small startup reliant on NASA funds run by an engineer, not a businessman. So, no, its not a loss leader. They can't afford one. The private sector just really does do things cheaper than the government, due to less bureaucracy, inertia, and congressional district appeasement. Now, if they produce a true monopoly, especially a government given one (the absolute worst form of socialist-capitalist hybrid, bringing the worst of basically everything), then trouble could be coming. I just don't see that, though.
Oh thank God, someone on Slashdot actually has some sens. All it takes is one quick visit to TFA to see that that news site is the most biased news outlet I have ever seen. Its literally more sensationalist than Fox News, just in the other direction. The people who wrote the article authored no less than 4 books like "Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election". The entire things takes "it might have been possible to hack the election" to "look! It was possible, so they did!" They don't say "reveals how it might have been hacked", which would be true, they say "was hacked", which they have absolutely no proof of whatsoever. Just suspicions, and their suspicions at that. And saying people died in "a suspicious plane crash"? Thats some nice inuendo right there. They are literally suggesting that Bush had a person killed for testifying against him. Over the top, much?
Maybe this is true in the modern statement of Einstein's theory, but the way the theory was originally developed (at least, the way Einstein himself developed it) was that nothing could move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and we are going to call that c. (incidentally, its a lower case "c".) And since the way its developed also happens in this case to be the way we know things, it is very correct and true to say "nothing can move faster than the speed of light in vacuum". For convenience sake, we abbreviate this to "nothing can move faster than c", but what c really means is the speed of light. All of Einstein's thought experiments work on the premise of the speed of light, which is c, not the other way around. The relativity of simultaneity, for instance, uses observation by light to show that objects can't travel faster than light. And, in point of fact, if light (information-bearing light) could travel faster than this speed, so could anything else, since it would no longer violate the law of causality. Moreover, things that do not convey information may also travel faster than light with no contradiction. It really is the observational power of light in particular that is used in the theory. So, yeah, the theory of relativity really does state "nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum, and this speed is "c".(Not very strong source, but explains it a little better: Wikipedia. Also gives interesting examples of things that do travel faster than light.)
Now, since relativity is hardly a thoroughly proven theory, and given that scientific theories tend to look accurate until we arrive at better observations (poor, poor Newton), it is definitely news that they have shown that none of our current methods allow for light to travel faster than this speed. Doesn't preclude the possibility of arriving at some higher law that does allow for it, but it seems somewhat doubtful at this point.
You're quite right. I posted in haste after only skimming TFA. Thought this guy got 2 and a half years for this, which seemed way too severe considering what he did. Wish Slashdot had a delete function. Turned out that was some other guy who actually made a fairly malicious virus. This guy should get a punishment, just not that bad. A hefty slap on the wrist, to discourage this kind of thing. To be followed shortly by a job offer, most likely. Still a little skeptical about how they can interpret "storing" malware, but I do understand the necessity for it. It could be impossible to prove he created it.
Kawaguchi uploaded a file containing the virus, which was titled to suggest child pornography, to the Internet via the file-sharing software Share
Well, normally I consider people who upload viruses via file-sharing software to be scum of the earth, but this guy seems like he was actually doing it for a moderately good cause. "Think of the children" is hella over used, malware is malware, and vigilante justice it questionable, but punishing this guy seems kinda weird, especially that strongly. Also, how the hell do they define "storing" malware? Technically, that could mean anyone infected is guilty, which is really scary.
This was my thought too. An 800m tower is a pretty big target for winds, but I'm pretty sure Arizona isn't all that hostile an environment, though, when I think about it. Very few/ no storms (dustorms maybe), I don't think it gets earthquakes, next to no rain. And the only moving parts, as far as I understand it, are the turbines, which isn't really "a lot". Any power plant is going to have maintenance costs of some kind. This needs no fuel, and supposedly can work at night. It doesn't use rare, expensive, or toxic chemicals in production like solar panels generally do (its basically a giant metal tube on top of a glass greenhouse). Dust collection on top of the greenhouse is probably the biggest issue I can see, and you could probably create some sort of automated cleaning system for that. Payback is estimate at 11 years, which is pretty short, and this should be able to last twice that at the very minimum, so it seems like a pretty good idea for empty deserts like this.
I know. I didn't even hear about Avatar until after it was out (for several days at that), thats how much I was out of the news cycle. I've discovered that bugs tend to be a problem in under-the-rock living conditions, did you manage to get rid of them or just use them as part of your food cycle?:)
Now, unfortunately, I visit/. every day, so I always get my daily dose (and then some) of Hollywood gossip.
You are sort of right, and sort of wrong. You're right that not all kids learn the same way, and much more importantly at the same rate.
However, there are ways to teach kids that can work for most (as in 90%* of them). Those remaining 10% won't learn, either because they are too stupid or they don't want to... but I repeat myself. Trouble is, we teach the 90% as if they were the 10%, since "we can't leave any child behind!". And of course, you can't really discipline them either, since the parents won't let you (their child is, of course, a "special precious flower". News flash: no, he/she isn't. He/she is an idiotic teenager.) The result: no one ends up learning. The 10% won't, and the 89% are too held back by the 10%. The remaining 1% are self-motivated enough to learn on their own. Of course, advanced classes and the like can alleviate this problem... until the parents of the kids who aren't in the advanced classes demand equality and that their kid be let into it, ruining it for everyone.
I'm serious about this. The American educational system has been ruined by the bottom layer of society, and a cultural meme that we have to educate everyone equally. Simple fact: not everyone is intelligent enough or motivated enough to succeed in society. No amount of money will change that. Things like the Kahn Academy are cool, since they allow at least a few children to move past this retarded and retarding idea, but what is needed is a ground up acceptance of the fact that not all kids are equally smart. Broadly speaking, most are smart enough, and it is them we need to teach, with special advanced (actually advanced) courses for the cream of the crop. The bottom layer? Leave them in class with the rest. It isn't worth spending the extra time and money on them to give them special classes, since they are highly unlikely to benefit anyways. They'll pick up a little, hopefully enough to at least get by. You can't give them much more, since they simply won't or can't accept it.
*all percentages are completely made up simply as illustrative points. If you prefer, you can replace them with "a majority" and "a minority". The point is still valid. All these opinions are formed from recent first and second hand experience of the receiving end of the education system.
In those pictures it does look considerably better than no AA, thanks for pointing those out. Seems like MLAA is perfect for the PS3: it has a pretty slow and dated graphics card, but quite a lot of spare cycles on the CPU, as long as you can do it in parallel, which this can. Always amazed me how few PS3 games have AA. You're right, games without AA, especially on 720p (or *shudder* 480p) on a large TV, look absolutely shitty. One reason I love my PC: I've used AA in pretty much everything for almost 5 years now.
This reminds me of a glitch in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl game. If you turned on AA in game, the crosshairs would disappear. I've always suspected something like that was going on, where it would see the straight lines of the crosshair and blend it into the rest of the picture. I believe it worked right if you enabled AA from drivers outside the game, which reinforced my theory considerably.
Yes, GPU would be better. I mean, look at Intel's amazing GPU divis... oh wait. That's why they want AA on the CPU. Because, you know, they actually have CPUs that are pretty decent. AMD probably added support because of their whole Fusion platform.
So, it basically blurs the image around areas of high contrast? Sounds like thats whats going on. Looks like it, too. I can understand why they are targeting this at mobile and lower powered devices: it kinda looks crappy. I might even say that no antialiasing looks better, but I'd really have to see more samples, especially contrasting this with regular MSAA. I suspect, however, that normal antialiasing will always look considerably better. For instance, normal AA would not blur the edge between two high-contrast textures on a wall (I think, since it is actually aware that it is processing polygon edges), while I suspect MLAA will, since it only sees an area of high contrast. Look at the sample image they post in the article: the white snow on the black rock looks blurred in the MLAA processed picture, while it has no aliasing artifacts at all in the unprocessed image. Its pretty slight, but its definitely there. Like I say, need to see more real world renders to really tell if its a problem at all or simply a minor thing no one will ever notice. I'll stick to my 4X MSAA, TYVM.
up front disclaimer, I hate Apple, and will not buy any of their devices for the forseeable future. But I have good reasons for this hatred, not all of which I have time or room to fit here. Now, lets try actually citing some sources here, shall we?
The release of the iPhone 3GS (and later iPod Touch 3rd Generation) brought hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) to the iPhone. This was designed to accomplish one thing: instantaneous remote wipe....Jonathan Zdziarski found that the iPhone OS automatically decrypts data when a request for data is made, effectively making the encryption worthless for protecting data.
source . Some of what Zdziarski says here. After a little more research, I discovered that apparently iOS 4 devices do use your passcode to encrypt the hardware keys, so they can't be read when you are logged out. source That is actually a reasonable system: the original one, not so much. Just because something uses "hardware encryption" doesn't mean it actually encrypts data effectively. As I said, the original system didn't, and wasn't intended to: it was only intended to make remote wiping your device faster (since you can just erase the key, not the whole drive.)
And as for why there isn't any iOS malware: seriously, stop and think for a second. If Apple reviews every last app on the official App Store, its kinda hard to sneak malware in, isn't it? Also, you might want to actually look up Android's security system. After about 20 seconds, I found that, surprise surprise, Android alsosandboxes applications so that they can't read each others data. In other words: it doesn't matter if the passwords are stored plaintext, since other applications can't read them anyways. Hence, why all the Android malware I've ever heard about doesn't mess with the phone itself, but rather calls home/ phones premium numbers/ etc. Maybe there is an actual virus for Android that messes with the data on the phone. Never heard of it though.(edit:someone mentioned storing apps on SD cards, and then reading those. You can't do that from the phone directly any more than you can read the internal memory, and if you get physical access no encryption is really gonna help. And the same problem exist on iPhone... oh wait, you can't use SD cards with those at all. Apple likes the flash memory premium too much) If it breaks the sandboxing, sure, but if it does that on the iPhone it can do the exact same thing, password keychain or no (proof: they did). And precisely how you said they can't: through root. I'm not sure how passcode encryption effects this or what iOS version they were using, but I would presume its iOS 4.
And I never said an encrypted system wasn't better, I said it wasn't much better... which, as it turns out, it isn't. I absolutely think that passwords should be encrypted. But with another password, not a keychain stored on the device itself. Its just the tiniest bit better than plaintext, but not by much. I can't believe people on Slashdot still keep thinking "oh, encryption, that means my data is secure!"
And I'm not sure how "Google specifically designed" Android to be locked down. AFAIK all the phones that prevent custom firmware use an encrypted bootloader system, which has very little to do with Android itself. Please, inform me how Google is responsible for that. As for Honeycomb source: straw man much? Where is ANY iOS source? Android source will be out at least by Ice Cream Sandwich, relax, Google is just being prudent. For once. I know FOSS fanatics want absolutel
And, as a result, installing custom software requires jailbreaking the iDevice. I'm pretty sure thats the main reason (probably the only one, in fact) why Apple does this encryption. It also increases security, precisely because Apple can review every app that can be installed on the iDevice. The Android model is a bit less secure: but its far more open. Upping the security might be a good idea... but if it comes at the cost of this freedom and openness: then no. And yes, I realize not all Android phones are open and unlockable, and many companies do everything they can to lock it down. This, however, is not the fault of Android, but greedy phone makes and wireless providers.
Oh, and keychains don't add any real security, they just make it slightly harder to hack. Encryption is not magic. Encrypting with data on the device, as iPhones do, is nearly worthless.
This. Maybe you could do some sort of hardware-level black-box encryption system (kinda like I how SIM cards already work). That way, simply reading the file system wouldn't be sufficient, you would need to actually be able to perform a hardware level request to decrypt the password. Doesn't add much security, but maybe better than nothing? Don't think it would be worth the cost, though. Anything able to read your filesystem if probably gonna be able to get around this.
What we really need are device tokens to authenticate the device to the your email server. I believe GMail has a system like this for people who activate two-factor authentication to allow email programs to work without being reauthenticated. This token would only work on that specific phone, so copying it wouldn't allow access to the email, though I'm not exactly sure how/if this would work. I'm sure there is someway. Obviously, combining the above two would work wonders (so the hardware black-box would do all the encryption, theoretically making it impossible to hack, and the encryption would be unique to this phone), but then you wouldn't be able to access your email except through that phone. Unless you use two-factor authentication, but since that usually involves calling your phone... might cause some problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I don't see anything about cars in that post, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Only the top 1,000 IPs (for now). Makes perfect sense for PayPal, and its pretty easy to do. "Anonymous", huh. Idiots.
Ion engines like this on space stations is really cool. Potentially, a powerful enough one could be used to slow boost, well, just about anything to just about any orbit, given enough time. It could even lift an object to the moon (it would take a while, but for robotic probes, who cares?). Meaning that we could use chemical rockets only to reach LEO, and after than lift everything with ion engines. Cheap geosynchronous satellites, supplies for interplanetary travel, you name it. And the engine could lower its own orbit and be reused for another package after its done. It needs some fuel, true, but nowhere near as much as chemical thrust does.
In Soviet Russia, Space Station lives on you!
The difference is that locomotives have huge inertial mass, so they require massive power to get moving. Once moving, they require significantly less power to stay in motion, courtesy of the laws of motion. Therefore, electric-hybrid makes sense: batteries provide the initial power, so you can build a smaller diesel than you would otherwise need. Larger jumbo-jets, on the other hand, pretty much fly like a brick with wings. They run at close to full power pretty much the whole flight (I think its actually 70-80%), pretty well negating the advantage to hybrid setups. Especially given the added weight of such a setup (negligible in cars/locomotives, huge in aircraft).
The thing about health care that no one seems to mention is the cost of R&D for drugs. FDA approval costs well upwards of half a billion, and can take 10 years. AFAIK many new drugs are developed by US based companies, and are protected by patents that may only apply in the US (certainly not everywhere). The result is that to recoup that cost, they need to charge Americans more for even basic health care. I have absolutely no figures for how much that cost is, but I imagine its considerable. Plus, Americans don't exactly live the healthiest lifestyles. I suppose you may still have a point, but one single area doesn't render the whole system necessarily broken.
Of course, the FDA approval thing also brings up another issue, which is that government has a huge influence in private sector businesses. That means our economy isn't really free, and the regulation is in many cases more than is truly required to maintain environmental or safety standards. Even in this case, NASA certifying the Dragon capsule man-rated will add considerable cost, much of it unnecessary. Safety is obviously important: filing paper in quadruplicate, not so much.
I think they missed a "costs of" in their. Should be: "helped by... ever-falling costs of internet access worldwide..."
Nah, everyone knows sheep don't like apples. What you got there is more of an equine species, like a horse or more probably a donkey. A male one.
P.S. Its called a joke, mods and repliers. I feel the need to point this out, which is kinda sad.
Riiiight, because SpaceX is a giant, well-funded corporation that can afford to take massive losses on its first few launches in order to lure us away from the competition. Except in this case the competition is Russia who is definitely very expensive, and SpaceX is a (fairly) small startup reliant on NASA funds run by an engineer, not a businessman. So, no, its not a loss leader. They can't afford one. The private sector just really does do things cheaper than the government, due to less bureaucracy, inertia, and congressional district appeasement. Now, if they produce a true monopoly, especially a government given one (the absolute worst form of socialist-capitalist hybrid, bringing the worst of basically everything), then trouble could be coming. I just don't see that, though.
Oh thank God, someone on Slashdot actually has some sens. All it takes is one quick visit to TFA to see that that news site is the most biased news outlet I have ever seen. Its literally more sensationalist than Fox News, just in the other direction. The people who wrote the article authored no less than 4 books like "Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election". The entire things takes "it might have been possible to hack the election" to "look! It was possible, so they did!" They don't say "reveals how it might have been hacked", which would be true, they say "was hacked", which they have absolutely no proof of whatsoever. Just suspicions, and their suspicions at that. And saying people died in "a suspicious plane crash"? Thats some nice inuendo right there. They are literally suggesting that Bush had a person killed for testifying against him. Over the top, much?
Maybe this is true in the modern statement of Einstein's theory, but the way the theory was originally developed (at least, the way Einstein himself developed it) was that nothing could move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and we are going to call that c. (incidentally, its a lower case "c".) And since the way its developed also happens in this case to be the way we know things, it is very correct and true to say "nothing can move faster than the speed of light in vacuum". For convenience sake, we abbreviate this to "nothing can move faster than c", but what c really means is the speed of light. All of Einstein's thought experiments work on the premise of the speed of light, which is c, not the other way around. The relativity of simultaneity, for instance, uses observation by light to show that objects can't travel faster than light. And, in point of fact, if light (information-bearing light) could travel faster than this speed, so could anything else, since it would no longer violate the law of causality. Moreover, things that do not convey information may also travel faster than light with no contradiction. It really is the observational power of light in particular that is used in the theory. So, yeah, the theory of relativity really does state "nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum, and this speed is "c".(Not very strong source, but explains it a little better: Wikipedia. Also gives interesting examples of things that do travel faster than light.)
Now, since relativity is hardly a thoroughly proven theory, and given that scientific theories tend to look accurate until we arrive at better observations (poor, poor Newton), it is definitely news that they have shown that none of our current methods allow for light to travel faster than this speed. Doesn't preclude the possibility of arriving at some higher law that does allow for it, but it seems somewhat doubtful at this point.
You're quite right. I posted in haste after only skimming TFA. Thought this guy got 2 and a half years for this, which seemed way too severe considering what he did. Wish Slashdot had a delete function. Turned out that was some other guy who actually made a fairly malicious virus. This guy should get a punishment, just not that bad. A hefty slap on the wrist, to discourage this kind of thing. To be followed shortly by a job offer, most likely. Still a little skeptical about how they can interpret "storing" malware, but I do understand the necessity for it. It could be impossible to prove he created it.
Edit: damnit, the 2.5 years appears to be for someone else. Oops.
FTFA:
Kawaguchi uploaded a file containing the virus, which was titled to suggest child pornography, to the Internet via the file-sharing software Share
Well, normally I consider people who upload viruses via file-sharing software to be scum of the earth, but this guy seems like he was actually doing it for a moderately good cause. "Think of the children" is hella over used, malware is malware, and vigilante justice it questionable, but punishing this guy seems kinda weird, especially that strongly. Also, how the hell do they define "storing" malware? Technically, that could mean anyone infected is guilty, which is really scary.
I'm sure it won't be abused, of course. /sarcasm
This was my thought too. An 800m tower is a pretty big target for winds, but I'm pretty sure Arizona isn't all that hostile an environment, though, when I think about it. Very few/ no storms (dustorms maybe), I don't think it gets earthquakes, next to no rain. And the only moving parts, as far as I understand it, are the turbines, which isn't really "a lot". Any power plant is going to have maintenance costs of some kind. This needs no fuel, and supposedly can work at night. It doesn't use rare, expensive, or toxic chemicals in production like solar panels generally do (its basically a giant metal tube on top of a glass greenhouse). Dust collection on top of the greenhouse is probably the biggest issue I can see, and you could probably create some sort of automated cleaning system for that. Payback is estimate at 11 years, which is pretty short, and this should be able to last twice that at the very minimum, so it seems like a pretty good idea for empty deserts like this.
The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings.
Compensating for something there, Arizona?
I know. I didn't even hear about Avatar until after it was out (for several days at that), thats how much I was out of the news cycle. I've discovered that bugs tend to be a problem in under-the-rock living conditions, did you manage to get rid of them or just use them as part of your food cycle? :)
Now, unfortunately, I visit /. every day, so I always get my daily dose (and then some) of Hollywood gossip.
You are sort of right, and sort of wrong. You're right that not all kids learn the same way, and much more importantly at the same rate.
However, there are ways to teach kids that can work for most (as in 90%* of them). Those remaining 10% won't learn, either because they are too stupid or they don't want to... but I repeat myself. Trouble is, we teach the 90% as if they were the 10%, since "we can't leave any child behind!". And of course, you can't really discipline them either, since the parents won't let you (their child is, of course, a "special precious flower". News flash: no, he/she isn't. He/she is an idiotic teenager.) The result: no one ends up learning. The 10% won't, and the 89% are too held back by the 10%. The remaining 1% are self-motivated enough to learn on their own. Of course, advanced classes and the like can alleviate this problem... until the parents of the kids who aren't in the advanced classes demand equality and that their kid be let into it, ruining it for everyone.
I'm serious about this. The American educational system has been ruined by the bottom layer of society, and a cultural meme that we have to educate everyone equally. Simple fact: not everyone is intelligent enough or motivated enough to succeed in society. No amount of money will change that. Things like the Kahn Academy are cool, since they allow at least a few children to move past this retarded and retarding idea, but what is needed is a ground up acceptance of the fact that not all kids are equally smart. Broadly speaking, most are smart enough, and it is them we need to teach, with special advanced (actually advanced) courses for the cream of the crop. The bottom layer? Leave them in class with the rest. It isn't worth spending the extra time and money on them to give them special classes, since they are highly unlikely to benefit anyways. They'll pick up a little, hopefully enough to at least get by. You can't give them much more, since they simply won't or can't accept it.
*all percentages are completely made up simply as illustrative points. If you prefer, you can replace them with "a majority" and "a minority". The point is still valid. All these opinions are formed from recent first and second hand experience of the receiving end of the education system.
In those pictures it does look considerably better than no AA, thanks for pointing those out. Seems like MLAA is perfect for the PS3: it has a pretty slow and dated graphics card, but quite a lot of spare cycles on the CPU, as long as you can do it in parallel, which this can. Always amazed me how few PS3 games have AA. You're right, games without AA, especially on 720p (or *shudder* 480p) on a large TV, look absolutely shitty. One reason I love my PC: I've used AA in pretty much everything for almost 5 years now.
This reminds me of a glitch in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl game. If you turned on AA in game, the crosshairs would disappear. I've always suspected something like that was going on, where it would see the straight lines of the crosshair and blend it into the rest of the picture. I believe it worked right if you enabled AA from drivers outside the game, which reinforced my theory considerably.
Yes, GPU would be better. I mean, look at Intel's amazing GPU divis... oh wait. That's why they want AA on the CPU. Because, you know, they actually have CPUs that are pretty decent. AMD probably added support because of their whole Fusion platform.
So, it basically blurs the image around areas of high contrast? Sounds like thats whats going on. Looks like it, too. I can understand why they are targeting this at mobile and lower powered devices: it kinda looks crappy. I might even say that no antialiasing looks better, but I'd really have to see more samples, especially contrasting this with regular MSAA. I suspect, however, that normal antialiasing will always look considerably better. For instance, normal AA would not blur the edge between two high-contrast textures on a wall (I think, since it is actually aware that it is processing polygon edges), while I suspect MLAA will, since it only sees an area of high contrast. Look at the sample image they post in the article: the white snow on the black rock looks blurred in the MLAA processed picture, while it has no aliasing artifacts at all in the unprocessed image. Its pretty slight, but its definitely there. Like I say, need to see more real world renders to really tell if its a problem at all or simply a minor thing no one will ever notice. I'll stick to my 4X MSAA, TYVM.
up front disclaimer, I hate Apple, and will not buy any of their devices for the forseeable future. But I have good reasons for this hatred, not all of which I have time or room to fit here. Now, lets try actually citing some sources here, shall we?
The release of the iPhone 3GS (and later iPod Touch 3rd Generation) brought hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) to the iPhone. This was designed to accomplish one thing: instantaneous remote wipe....Jonathan Zdziarski found that the iPhone OS automatically decrypts data when a request for data is made, effectively making the encryption worthless for protecting data.
source . Some of what Zdziarski says here. After a little more research, I discovered that apparently iOS 4 devices do use your passcode to encrypt the hardware keys, so they can't be read when you are logged out. source That is actually a reasonable system: the original one, not so much. Just because something uses "hardware encryption" doesn't mean it actually encrypts data effectively. As I said, the original system didn't, and wasn't intended to: it was only intended to make remote wiping your device faster (since you can just erase the key, not the whole drive.)
And as for why there isn't any iOS malware: seriously, stop and think for a second. If Apple reviews every last app on the official App Store, its kinda hard to sneak malware in, isn't it? Also, you might want to actually look up Android's security system. After about 20 seconds, I found that, surprise surprise, Android also sandboxes applications so that they can't read each others data. In other words: it doesn't matter if the passwords are stored plaintext, since other applications can't read them anyways. Hence, why all the Android malware I've ever heard about doesn't mess with the phone itself, but rather calls home/ phones premium numbers/ etc. Maybe there is an actual virus for Android that messes with the data on the phone. Never heard of it though.(edit:someone mentioned storing apps on SD cards, and then reading those. You can't do that from the phone directly any more than you can read the internal memory, and if you get physical access no encryption is really gonna help. And the same problem exist on iPhone... oh wait, you can't use SD cards with those at all. Apple likes the flash memory premium too much) If it breaks the sandboxing, sure, but if it does that on the iPhone it can do the exact same thing, password keychain or no (proof: they did). And precisely how you said they can't: through root. I'm not sure how passcode encryption effects this or what iOS version they were using, but I would presume its iOS 4.
And I never said an encrypted system wasn't better, I said it wasn't much better... which, as it turns out, it isn't. I absolutely think that passwords should be encrypted. But with another password, not a keychain stored on the device itself. Its just the tiniest bit better than plaintext, but not by much. I can't believe people on Slashdot still keep thinking "oh, encryption, that means my data is secure!"
And I'm not sure how "Google specifically designed" Android to be locked down. AFAIK all the phones that prevent custom firmware use an encrypted bootloader system, which has very little to do with Android itself. Please, inform me how Google is responsible for that. As for Honeycomb source: straw man much? Where is ANY iOS source? Android source will be out at least by Ice Cream Sandwich, relax, Google is just being prudent. For once. I know FOSS fanatics want absolutel
And, as a result, installing custom software requires jailbreaking the iDevice. I'm pretty sure thats the main reason (probably the only one, in fact) why Apple does this encryption. It also increases security, precisely because Apple can review every app that can be installed on the iDevice. The Android model is a bit less secure: but its far more open. Upping the security might be a good idea... but if it comes at the cost of this freedom and openness: then no. And yes, I realize not all Android phones are open and unlockable, and many companies do everything they can to lock it down. This, however, is not the fault of Android, but greedy phone makes and wireless providers.
Oh, and keychains don't add any real security, they just make it slightly harder to hack. Encryption is not magic. Encrypting with data on the device, as iPhones do, is nearly worthless.
This. Maybe you could do some sort of hardware-level black-box encryption system (kinda like I how SIM cards already work). That way, simply reading the file system wouldn't be sufficient, you would need to actually be able to perform a hardware level request to decrypt the password. Doesn't add much security, but maybe better than nothing? Don't think it would be worth the cost, though. Anything able to read your filesystem if probably gonna be able to get around this.
What we really need are device tokens to authenticate the device to the your email server. I believe GMail has a system like this for people who activate two-factor authentication to allow email programs to work without being reauthenticated. This token would only work on that specific phone, so copying it wouldn't allow access to the email, though I'm not exactly sure how/if this would work. I'm sure there is someway. Obviously, combining the above two would work wonders (so the hardware black-box would do all the encryption, theoretically making it impossible to hack, and the encryption would be unique to this phone), but then you wouldn't be able to access your email except through that phone. Unless you use two-factor authentication, but since that usually involves calling your phone... might cause some problems.