They use the cunning trick of setting the directories that contain the music to be "hidden", using whatever mechanisms the host filesystem allows for doing such a thing. With HFS+ I think they had to use a hack, with FAT they use the hidden attribute that's been present in all versions of MSDOS since, well, 2.x I believe. I know it was present on DOS3 anyway.
ie this isn't a serious limitation, it's a "Let's do the minimum possible to avoid the music industry claiming the iPod's designed to help people illegally copy music"
If they had been serious, chances are they'd store all the music in a big, encrypted, file, only maintainable via iTunes or something like that, or have the firmware hide the music and make sectors containing music "write only".
I'm no longer an Apple defender, but on this issue I don't think they're being particularly evil.
I don't think it'd be that big a deal, quite honestly. Apple could continue to sell PowerPC versions of Macs to those who need it, but use an Intel CPU in a "switcher" machine. Most Mac software vendors would compile fat binaries of their existing products. Apple, the largest, would certainly do so, and make sure that the Intel-based Mac has all the software the majority of users would need (as opposed to want) right off the bat.
Imagine a Mac mini selling at around the $500 mark that's significantly more powerful than the existing unit. There are people who'll say "Well, I'm switching from Windows" who'll not see a problem with getting such a unit. And there are those who'll say "Well, I already have a Mac, I don't want to have to lose the sofware I have", who'll avoid it and get the PowerPC based units. It'd be essentially a win-win for Apple, and wouldn't really remove any choices for consumers.
Given Vader isn't able to detect Leia either, I always read it as Vader/Anakin detecting use of the Force, not whether someone has a lot of midi-chlorians.
There's a GBA version, so I presume you can play that with the special adapter. Seems a little unfortunate though as I presume it doesn't make much use of the 'cube's PS2/XBox like power.
If I were the extortionist, I'd write the code to obtain a key from some source (perhaps be pre-loaded with several thousand precalculated RSA "public" keys), encrypt the files, and then release a decrypter with the relevent private key for that particular system.
This works because RSA encryption involves keys that have a public and private portion. The public key is used to encrypt but once encrypted, the data can't be decrypted without the private key. It is immensely difficult to calculate what the private key that goes with a public key is, for larger key sizes (128bits and more) we're talking of the order of decades for the fastest computers to work out. So it's "Pretty Good" encryption.
So, if he's done his homework ("he" is generic here, I don't mean to imply the person who wrote this is of one gender or another, I know that terms like "sie" and "hir" are probably less known on/. than in other groups where gender discrimination is considered a more important issue that must be tackled. This isn't the 1950s any more, or even the kind of Star Wars crap where women are seen as bearers of future Jedi who stay home and get all emotional and lose the will to live when their partners turn to the Dark Side), this kind of scam will work pre[tt]y well.
I thought Motorola produces all the G4s at the moment? My recollection was that IBM doesn't actually make G4s, though it was proposing to make G3s with the velocity engine at some point (these would lack the SMP capability of G4s, but Apple doesn't make SMP G4 machines any more.)
Who would buy a Mac when they could buy a Dell. Does anyone seriously believe Microsoft would release Office for Mac OS X for Intel?
Hold on. This isn't the same proposal as has been made before. We're talking about an Intel-chip based Mac, not a Mac that's a PC clone. We're talking about an OS X that runs on an Intel-chip based Mac, not an OS X that runs on a generic IBM PC clone.
People would buy a Mac instead of a Dell for the same reason as they do today - a nice, well integrated, computer system with a decent OS. Few people buy a Mac thinking to themselves "Dude, this has a PowerPC! That's 32 32 bit general purpose registers, and a RISC based architecture based upon IBM's attempt to create a next generation mainframe and minicomputer platform in the late eighties!"
The only downside this would have against a PowerPC Mac is that older software wouldn't run on it. That's not an issue if you don't have any older software. About 95% of computer uses do not have older versions of any software.
And yes, Microsoft shouldn't have a problem releasing an Intel version of Office for OS X: just as long, that is, as Apple doesn't start selling OS X for generic IBM PC clones.
You'd be surprised how architecturally different Apple's regular offerings are from one another. I believe even Apple's latest PowerBooks use technologies considered obsolete in the rest of the line, such as ADB for the internal bus used for the keyboard and pointing device. The G4 and G5s have much bigger differences between them than the G3s and G4s, and Apple is trying to support a whole range of systems from the ground up.
In that respect, it may be easier for Apple to switch to an entirely new CPU architecture than you might think. The additional support wouldn't be dramatic, it could continue to have a lot in common with the rest of their systems (which heavily use USB and IDE, PCI and AGP, etc), making the CPU and a few other minor details the major changes. It certainly wouldn't need a dedicated department of any serious size to support this version of OS X, it'd just be an additional platform to test the recompiled version upon.
This is, of course, assuming we're talking about Intel chips being used in Macs (with an OS X compiled to run on it) and not a generic version of OS X being developed that'll run on IBM PC clones, which is an entirely different issue.
My reading of it was that ESB strongly implies Leia is another potential Jedi: Yoda tells Obi-Wan that there is another potential after Obi-Wan expresses concern that Luke is their only hope. We then find out it's almost certainly Leia when Luke is able to telepathically communicate with her in order to escape the cloud city.
So whatever else may or may not be true about the siblings thing, the issue with Vader not detecting Leia's use of the force has nothing to do with it. Actually, from what I recall, Leia doesn't know anything about her ability to use the force until Luke tells her in RotJ, which is probably why Vader doesn't detect anything.
That's in the current version of the movies anyway (or at least the "remastered" versions from the mid-nineties. I haven't seen the DVD versions.) Presumably there's a remake in the works to explain why Obi-Wan doesn't remember the droids (ANH) or the existance of Leia and her likely ability to use the force (ESB)...
It's certainly clear that Lucas didn't intend to start in the middle. The original name for the first Star Wars film, before it was called Star Wars, before Lucas filmed a single shot, was "Adventures of the Star Killer: Episode I". My guess is that when it came time to plan the rest of the movies, Lucas had realised there was already a significant, implied, backstory (who is Darth Vader? The last remnants of what Republic had been wiped away? What happened?), and so starting with ANH being "Episode I" wouldn't, chronologically, make a lot of sense.
As far as Leia and Luke being brother and sister goes, I really don't know, but it's clear that Lucas was working on a rough idea when he was putting together the films rather than some already written story that was nine volumes in size. On a more minor note, for example, the character of Bobba Fett was originally supposed to be a storm trooper.
That said, I doubt the "romance" was ever supposed to be between Luke and Leia. Lucas is old fashioned in terms of the stories he tells - ANH owes more to Flash Gordon than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the cliche being set up in ANH is of the fiesty woman hating the obnoxious guy, to eventually blossom into romance. Given that, Luke's an unlikely romantic partner for Leia, compared to Han Solo, and the film doesn't exactly have any genuinely romantic moments in it. In that sense, I think it's "obvious" (precisely because nothing comes of any interaction between the heroes and heroine) that Lucas never intended ANH to be the end of the story. There's a love story in the original Star Wars trilogy, and it's not in ANH. The story is about love between Leia and Han. It's obvious that this was intended right from the beginning.
Not that there's a smoking gun here showing Leia and Luke are siblings. I just don't think the situation is as black and white as you suggest. It's quite credible this was originally something Lucas had in mind, but it's also clear that it wasn't something he'd have considered important at the time: when ANH was made, it had to be as self contained as possible. Little hints are dropped here and there that suddenly make sense in the next two films, Uncle Owen is afraid of Luke ending up like his father, but it seems an over-reaction in context until the subsequent films when you find out who's Luke's father. Beyond that, it wasn't exactly something Lucas could get away with. A film that you have to wait for the sequel to make sense of isn't going to be commercially viable.
When it first played in theatres, ANH was just titled Star Wars and there was no reference to "Episode IV" or "A New Hope". This was changed within a few months when it became clear that it would be possible to make more films in the same saga. Subsequent theatrical releases, and all TV and video, et al, releases, refer to "Episode IV: A New Hope" in the scrolling introduction.
The process that lead to the film being made is well documented. Lucas did have a larger saga in mind, but few film directors, Lucas included, believe they'll be able to persuade a studio to fund an entire series from the get-go, so Star Wars, as it was, was intended to be more-or-less self-contained.
Cell phones aren't marketed as landline replacements. There are clear and obvious differences. On top of which, if a cellphone is operated quickly and able to call out, it can be used to make 911 calls.
The problem here is that is not the case with VoIP phones. You cannot guarantee that a properly operated VoIP phone will connect to an emergency operator if you dial 911 from one, even if your internet connection is operating correctly and the connection between your home and the VoIP's "CO" is perfect.
The 120 days is because this has been something VoIP providers have been unable to offer, and there's work that needs to be done by third parties (eg ILECs) to make this happen.
The major issue with offering 911 until now hasn't been location information - VoIP providers can get that from the customer (and the FCC mandates that that's exactly where they should get the information, with the customer notifying the VoIP provider of changes of location) - but that the ILECs haven't made it easy to interconnect to 911 services, as 911 services generally don't have ten digit numbers.
To get this to work, the ILECs have to open up access to 911, and the VoIP providers have to update their systems and ensure they have relevent and up-to-date databases that map customers to addresses and addresses to 911 access numbers. The latter will not even appear until the ILECs have set everything up.
Then it's something the customer is specifically doing and falls outside of the remit. The FCC is putting the onus on the customer to keep the VoIP provider updated as to where they are. If the customer chooses not to, and uses VoIP from a laptop in a hotel, then it's entirely their responsibility - even with this FCC order - when, instead of using the HOTEL PHONE to call 911 to report the heart attack they or whomever are having, they BOOT UP THEIR FUCKING LAPTOP, connect to the hotel wireless network, and use that instead, and get routed to their home 911 service.
There's reasonable and unreasonable. What the FCC is actually proposing isn't merely reasonable, it's positively good news: for the first time, VoIP services are going to be able to offer real 911 services, something they've been unable to do before now thanks to poor service from ILECs.
As I said in my journal, they're not proposing anything as ludicrous as a database of IP addresses, or GPS receivers, or anything like that.
They're putting the onus on the customer to keep the VoIP provider informed as to where they are, which for the most part isn't going to be a problem as most VoIP phones are used at a fixed location (they're advertised as landline replacements after all, that's the problem.) Quite why each time this subject comes up, people assume the FCC doesn't know as much as they do about the Internet and hasn't thought out simple technical issues (and VoIP providers haven't raised these technical issues with them) is beyond me.
Absolutely. Because there is NO WAY that the members of the FCC have ever heard of the Internet, and they surely have not thought of this very issue. Why, you must be a genius to ever have thought of it! Only on Slashdot could such expert opinion be found that completely demonstrates the idiocy of the paid experts at the FCC.
Did you, for a single second, actually think about your comment before posting? Did you bother to read what the FCC was actually proposing? Did you not think "Hmmm, the obvious problem with this is that VoIP calls could originate from anywhere. I wonder how the FCC is dealing with this issue" before you drew the conclusion that the idea couldn't possibly even have occurred to them?
When this last came up on Slashdot, I was so taken aback by the shows of abject idiocy, I ended up posting a JE on the subject. Alas, a few weeks to actually consider the likelyhood that the FCC would not have foreseen the possibility of VoIP "roaming" doesn't seem to have done much good, and we're still seeing responses in your subthread (because you're not the only one trying to be clever) proposing such wonders as GPS receivers in every VoIP phone.
Ok people, it's like this: everyone gets to register where their phone is. When you subsequently dial 911, you get the real 911 service in your area. And part of the FCC's ruling is that the ILECs need to provide access to that 911 service to the VoIP companies. That's what the FCC is proposing.
I understand what you're saying but you're focussing too much on API and not other details. Most emulators, and I'm assuming VPC is one of them, rarely manage to get more than 30% of the native speed of the target hardware when running on similar hardware, and that's if everything works well and JIT techniques are used. In other words, for the Xbox 360 to emulate an Xbox, I believe it has to be a little over three times as fast, at minimum.
"Aha!" I pretend to hear you cry, "Not so fast! The Xbox360 is well over three times as fast". Well, yes, which is why I said this would be pushing what VPC can do. But the 30% is not an exact 30%. There are some operations that will run well, and others that will not. So realistically, you want something many, many, times faster than that. And you want all that processing to be in the right place too, you're not going to find multiple cores makes it any easier.
As to using.net odds are pretty good that VirtualPC already uses a jit compiler.
Not exactly. Yes, it'll use some form of JIT compiler, but emulating an existing CPU is very different from the type of thing you can get away with when emulating a virtual one. The virtual one can have rules imposed that limit what type of code a program can implement. Self modifying code (which can be the result of something as simple as a game engine compiling a ruleset) and other tricks can seriously cripple a JIT compiler. This is why Java JITs tend to generate code that runs as fast as its C++ counterparts, but tools like VPC rarely achieve anything close to that level of performance.
The bottom line is that throwing in VPC isn't necessarily going to make it easy to run older games. Some will work, doubtlessly, others will run into glitches because they'll push the envelope in areas that work poorly under emulation. Microsoft, looking forward, would be better off encouraging the use of.net CLR (or a similar technology), it can then control how code is executed which, in turn, will make it easier to emulate in the future.
They are already more than just a search engine company...(on portals:) I disagree. I don't see the kind of business that Yahoo or Altavista had.
That's right, and I said they were. Why do people take random sentences and ignore the rest of them when responding to me, even quoting sentences later that point out their previous comment was, essentially, arguing against something I never implied? Geez.
The point is that Google right now is doing what Yahoo!, Excite, et al, did before it, and what MSN, AOL, etc, started off doing and have reinvented almost as many times as the years they've operated. It's becoming a portal, a mismash of random web-based Internet services that get released when they look both different and cool from the competition. And believe me, that's a good thing. Yahoo's webmail is great and was revolutionary when released, but Google's is sufficiently different for the world to be a better place with it. Yahoo's news system is great and was revolutionary when released, Google's is... well, it's different, and a lot people like it. Yahoo's shopping system is great and was revolutionary when released, Google's is... well, actually I don't see a lot of point in Google's, but in time it'll improve. I find Amazon tends to be beat Yahoo Shopping and eBay anyway in terms of functionality, but that's my personal opinion.
Yahoo succeeded, just. It's not clear how viable Yahoo is in the long term. Google, when people stop talking about what a wonderful company it is and actually think about what it's doing, has no clear long term strategy either. It seems to be always "Let's do a bit more, only different!"
I wish them the best of luck, but I don't see a serious thing here that's tying people to Google other than name recognition and being the current leader in something. This isn't Microsoft where they're able to sell an operating system on the basis that everyone else has it, therefore you probably need it if you want to interoperate with the rest of the world. Google searches the same websites everyone else can access. Google's mail talks to the same email addresses the rest of the world does. Google gets their news from the same generic sources the rest of the world does. Only Google Groups comes close to being dependent on something other than technical superiority.
That's nice for us but it's relatively easy to suggest Google can easily become an also-ran. With patience and the right resources, it can be beaten. One 800lb gorilla is working on that.
Again, I disagree. You make the same mistake that most people make. The iPod is more than just a music player. It's a whole new way of making business.
No, the iPod's a music player. The iPod is a little white and silver unit with an LCD screen that can store several thousand "songs" (MP3 or AAC files of approximately 5Mb each) that can play then anywhere. Everything else is a support business that, in concept, doesn't care if it's going onto something with an Apple logo or a Dell or Motorola logo. Apple is trying to change that by controlling who gets to license FairPlay, but that's not enough ultimately to prevent mobile phones with built in HDs becoming the dominant portable music players. The fact that Apple's version is doing this is an implementation detail, and one that's an active handicap to end users.
To assume Apple will continue draconian control over FairPlay to protect sales of one bit of plastic and metal that, increasingly, will compete against commodity devices is to assume that no competition exists, and that if it does, it wouldn't potentially make Apple irrelevent. There are a wide variety of music stores with various different models, and if people start buying phones with, say, Windows Media DRM instead of FairPlay, then Apple will become irrelvent because people will buy music for those phones and gradually replace their collections.
Nobody's saying PDA functionality or MP3 playing or searching is going to die. Gates and Balmer are talking about specific entities. Gates said the iPod will die. Yes, it will. He didn't say MP3 playing functionality will disappear, and neither did I, both of us said the opposite. And yes, it's entirely correct for us to say PDAs and iPods are going to die: PDA functionality migrated to cellphones, but cellphones are not (for the most part), PDAs. PDAs - devices like the Palm Pilot - are no longer relevent to the market.
iPods of course haven't died, but with iPod we're being even more specific, in that we're not just talking about MP3 players but a specific MP3 player. Unless Apple releases an iPod Phone (highly unlikely), the device itself will eventually become obsolete. And if it becomes an iPod phone, it'll be a phone that plays MP3s, not an MP3 player that communicates.
A cellphone is to US companies is a portal to their service package, and as such, they will try hard to keep cellphones plain. A cheaper cellphone means people will be willing to pay higher contract prices.
But they're not. Cellphones contain PDA functionality and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find one without a camera. They're increasing in functionality, and the proposal here - adding a hard drive and MP3 playing - is logical and wouldn't add much to the cost of them. I suggested $60, but that's about the cost of a 2G, 1.8" hard drive from Cornice. In practice, that drive would be replacing expensive flash memory already built into the phone so it might not even increase the cost, and it would be the logical way to make a camera phone more useful.
Well, if you're going to build a hard drive into the phone, why not add a 3.5mm jack too?
Cellphone companies are showing no desire to sell cheap, simplified, phones, especially since you're less likely to want to switch if you invest in an expensive phone that works on one carrier only.
I think both of them are right, FWIW. I've never seen Google's long term strategy, if they exist in five years it'll either be as an also-ran or as something other than a search engine company. It's easy to see how some dotcoms are able to have a long term strategy - Amazon, for example, builds a brand but actually sells things on the basis of that brand, and does a lot of work to ensure they have a superior shopping experience compared to their competitors. Google's slowly working its way to becoming a portal, a business model proven over and over again to be a disaster for the vast majority of the companies that have tried it.
The PDA is dead, its functions supplanted by the cellphone. Today no cellphone exists that challenges the iPod, much as no cellphone - at least beyond a few concept phones like the Nokia 9000 - existed six or seven years ago that had the full calender, notes, et al, functionality we see in pretty much everything today. All we need is about $60 worth of additional hardware in a sizable amount of phones (and mobile phone manufacturers have successfully incorporated much more, often for trivial gains, in the past without problems) comprising of a small low-power hard disk and a 3.5" jack, and we're looking at something that can contain MP3s the same way an iPod can. Manufacturers are experimenting right now, but at this point they're just looking at competing with the flash MP3 player market. Given the benefits of a hard disk to the rest of the system, especially with multimedia and camera phones, expect this to become standard issue within the next two or three years.
Whether any Microsoft technology will be at the heart of any of the iPod and Google replacements remains to be seen. But even Google isn't Google any more. Why would anything resembling it exist in five years? And who the hell is going to buy an iPod if their phone already has all the capacity they need and can play MP3s?
The rumours were originally that Microsoft's reason for buying VirtualPC was so that they could use the technology in the next generation Xbox precisely to overcome architectural differences when implementing backward compatability. The counter to this, I guess, is that emulating an Xbox on the type of hardware we're talking about would stretch the limits of what VPC can do. And stretching the limits when it comes to games that rely on precise timings can be a problem.
Still, it's kind of amusing. My first thought on reading the article summary was to wonder if most Xbox games came with source code...
My second thought is that perhaps Microsoft has gone about this the wrong way. Maybe.net should be the basis of the Xbox development platform, with JIT techniques used to recompile everything as optimally as possible. This has few downsides, and makes implementing backward compatability much, much, easier. No stupid emulators. Just a JIT compiler on the new platform that recompiles old code in such a way that the timings are as close to the originally targetted platform as possible.
It represents a major departure from the all-bad-guys-speak-with-British-accents tack Lucas originally took.
Particularly noticable in that scene where a character voiced by the very British James Earl Jones fights the very American Good 'ol Boy Alec Guinness...;)
(Yeah, I know what you meant, I'm just being annoying)
If the "dictator" comment was a big issue for you, you may need some context.
I mostly disagree with your comment, FWIW. The issue here is whether there's a vulnerability. I don't care how obsessive the proponents on either side, be it Obsessed Colin vs Flippant Linus, that really doesn't impact my view of it. From what I can tell, it's one of those things that requires good timing and good luck to be useful. Generally, in other areas, we tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to similar potential exploits. I'm surprised there's major disagreement here.
Would I trust a kernel right now with this vulnerability? Kind of. Most of us run operating systems with multiple vulnerabilities anyway, because life is too short to spend downloading and installing every patch within minutes of a vulnerability being uncovered, and most of us are not the NSA and are more concerned with being the victim of a mass untargeted attack than egotistical enough to assume someone would target us directly. Indeed, if Linus has a choice between fixing a (hypothetical) buggy IDE driver that keeps crashing the kernel or fixing an obscure root exploit that nobody's targetted because it's a PITA to actually make work, I think most of us would ask him to work on the IDE driver first.
That's different though from being comfortable with the general principle that no effort be made to fix an issue, either at a low or high priority. It doesn't look very good.
There is no such exploitable vulnerability, most of the people on LKML can tell you that, and they certainly wouldn't fix it inside kernelspace would there be one. The fact that the guy STILL holds on to the issue was explained by the top poster.
Absolute rubbish, from start to finish. Even Linus Torvalds claims no such thing.
"As to the HT 'vulnerability', it really seems to be not a whole lot different than what people saw with early SMP and (small) direct-mapped caches. Thank God those days are gone.
"I'd be really surprised if somebody is actually able to get a real-world attack on a real-world pgp key usage or similar out of it (and as to the covert channel, nobody cares). It's a fairly interesting approach, but it's certainly neither new nor HT-specific, [nor does it] necessarily seem all that worrying in real life.
Torvalds is arguing it's unlikely to ever be exploited, not that it's unexploitable or that it's not a vulnerability. The position of those, excluding yourself, who dismiss this is that it's unlikely to be usefully exploited, not that it doesn't exist. We can see it exists!
As to your last sentence, no the top poster doesn't explain it. The top poster simply describes the guy as an obsessive because he's put a lot of time into it, far more than a reasonable person might reasonably be considered to do. That's different from saying he's wrong.
In your last paragraph you clearly demonstrated what is an ad hominem attack, and what is the difference between the top post and your post
My last paragraph was a comment about irony. It had nothing whatsoever to do with attacking your argument on the basis of who you are rather than your argument. It did, however, attack your argument. Your argument was that nothing this guy says should be taken seriously because of an accusation of being mentally off-the-wall. Nash is a perfectly good counter-example. The irony is that you unwittingly brought him up. There's no ad-hominem in there, I wasn't attacking you or your credibility, I was attacking your argument.
I don't care if the guy's obsessive. I care if there's an exploitable vulnerability. Until someone writes code either way, the issue is unproven, but it's clear there's a potential, if unlikely (not impossible, just unlikely) to be useful, vulnerability there. Your comments and those of the thread originator are not convincing because they attack the proponent than explain why the argument itself is false.
There's no childish "dictator" accusation in the post, just a lot of Slashdotters who are a little new and unaware of standard terminology within the FOSS crowds. I've posted an explanation here.
I have one minute to kill before Slashdot will let me post again, so let me add this: these kinds of issues come up a lot these days with old arguments being retread as if for the first time, with a large number of people not understanding basic stuff that's not meant the way it's intended. In some ways, this is a great thing - it suggests that the Free Software and Open Source movements are attracting large numbers of new followers, who see the advantages of code they can change and use to help others. Unwitting flamewars aside, let's hope this continues. It's a shame we can't really give out a "Read this before you start on FOSS" document that explains all of this, as I doubt anyone would read it, and I doubt it'd cover even 1% of what needs to be commented upon.
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ie this isn't a serious limitation, it's a "Let's do the minimum possible to avoid the music industry claiming the iPod's designed to help people illegally copy music"
If they had been serious, chances are they'd store all the music in a big, encrypted, file, only maintainable via iTunes or something like that, or have the firmware hide the music and make sectors containing music "write only".
I'm no longer an Apple defender, but on this issue I don't think they're being particularly evil.
Imagine a Mac mini selling at around the $500 mark that's significantly more powerful than the existing unit. There are people who'll say "Well, I'm switching from Windows" who'll not see a problem with getting such a unit. And there are those who'll say "Well, I already have a Mac, I don't want to have to lose the sofware I have", who'll avoid it and get the PowerPC based units. It'd be essentially a win-win for Apple, and wouldn't really remove any choices for consumers.
Given Vader isn't able to detect Leia either, I always read it as Vader/Anakin detecting use of the Force, not whether someone has a lot of midi-chlorians.
There's a GBA version, so I presume you can play that with the special adapter. Seems a little unfortunate though as I presume it doesn't make much use of the 'cube's PS2/XBox like power.
If I were the extortionist, I'd write the code to obtain a key from some source (perhaps be pre-loaded with several thousand precalculated RSA "public" keys), encrypt the files, and then release a decrypter with the relevent private key for that particular system.
This works because RSA encryption involves keys that have a public and private portion. The public key is used to encrypt but once encrypted, the data can't be decrypted without the private key. It is immensely difficult to calculate what the private key that goes with a public key is, for larger key sizes (128bits and more) we're talking of the order of decades for the fastest computers to work out. So it's "Pretty Good" encryption.
So, if he's done his homework ("he" is generic here, I don't mean to imply the person who wrote this is of one gender or another, I know that terms like "sie" and "hir" are probably less known on /. than in other groups where gender discrimination is considered a more important issue that must be tackled. This isn't the 1950s any more, or even the kind of Star Wars crap where women are seen as bearers of future Jedi who stay home and get all emotional and lose the will to live when their partners turn to the Dark Side), this kind of scam will work pre[tt]y well.
I thought Motorola produces all the G4s at the moment? My recollection was that IBM doesn't actually make G4s, though it was proposing to make G3s with the velocity engine at some point (these would lack the SMP capability of G4s, but Apple doesn't make SMP G4 machines any more.)
People would buy a Mac instead of a Dell for the same reason as they do today - a nice, well integrated, computer system with a decent OS. Few people buy a Mac thinking to themselves "Dude, this has a PowerPC! That's 32 32 bit general purpose registers, and a RISC based architecture based upon IBM's attempt to create a next generation mainframe and minicomputer platform in the late eighties!"
The only downside this would have against a PowerPC Mac is that older software wouldn't run on it. That's not an issue if you don't have any older software. About 95% of computer uses do not have older versions of any software.
And yes, Microsoft shouldn't have a problem releasing an Intel version of Office for OS X: just as long, that is, as Apple doesn't start selling OS X for generic IBM PC clones.
In that respect, it may be easier for Apple to switch to an entirely new CPU architecture than you might think. The additional support wouldn't be dramatic, it could continue to have a lot in common with the rest of their systems (which heavily use USB and IDE, PCI and AGP, etc), making the CPU and a few other minor details the major changes. It certainly wouldn't need a dedicated department of any serious size to support this version of OS X, it'd just be an additional platform to test the recompiled version upon.
This is, of course, assuming we're talking about Intel chips being used in Macs (with an OS X compiled to run on it) and not a generic version of OS X being developed that'll run on IBM PC clones, which is an entirely different issue.
So whatever else may or may not be true about the siblings thing, the issue with Vader not detecting Leia's use of the force has nothing to do with it. Actually, from what I recall, Leia doesn't know anything about her ability to use the force until Luke tells her in RotJ, which is probably why Vader doesn't detect anything.
That's in the current version of the movies anyway (or at least the "remastered" versions from the mid-nineties. I haven't seen the DVD versions.) Presumably there's a remake in the works to explain why Obi-Wan doesn't remember the droids (ANH) or the existance of Leia and her likely ability to use the force (ESB)...
It's certainly clear that Lucas didn't intend to start in the middle. The original name for the first Star Wars film, before it was called Star Wars, before Lucas filmed a single shot, was "Adventures of the Star Killer: Episode I". My guess is that when it came time to plan the rest of the movies, Lucas had realised there was already a significant, implied, backstory (who is Darth Vader? The last remnants of what Republic had been wiped away? What happened?), and so starting with ANH being "Episode I" wouldn't, chronologically, make a lot of sense.
As far as Leia and Luke being brother and sister goes, I really don't know, but it's clear that Lucas was working on a rough idea when he was putting together the films rather than some already written story that was nine volumes in size. On a more minor note, for example, the character of Bobba Fett was originally supposed to be a storm trooper.
That said, I doubt the "romance" was ever supposed to be between Luke and Leia. Lucas is old fashioned in terms of the stories he tells - ANH owes more to Flash Gordon than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the cliche being set up in ANH is of the fiesty woman hating the obnoxious guy, to eventually blossom into romance. Given that, Luke's an unlikely romantic partner for Leia, compared to Han Solo, and the film doesn't exactly have any genuinely romantic moments in it. In that sense, I think it's "obvious" (precisely because nothing comes of any interaction between the heroes and heroine) that Lucas never intended ANH to be the end of the story. There's a love story in the original Star Wars trilogy, and it's not in ANH. The story is about love between Leia and Han. It's obvious that this was intended right from the beginning.
Not that there's a smoking gun here showing Leia and Luke are siblings. I just don't think the situation is as black and white as you suggest. It's quite credible this was originally something Lucas had in mind, but it's also clear that it wasn't something he'd have considered important at the time: when ANH was made, it had to be as self contained as possible. Little hints are dropped here and there that suddenly make sense in the next two films, Uncle Owen is afraid of Luke ending up like his father, but it seems an over-reaction in context until the subsequent films when you find out who's Luke's father. Beyond that, it wasn't exactly something Lucas could get away with. A film that you have to wait for the sequel to make sense of isn't going to be commercially viable.
The process that lead to the film being made is well documented. Lucas did have a larger saga in mind, but few film directors, Lucas included, believe they'll be able to persuade a studio to fund an entire series from the get-go, so Star Wars, as it was, was intended to be more-or-less self-contained.
The problem here is that is not the case with VoIP phones. You cannot guarantee that a properly operated VoIP phone will connect to an emergency operator if you dial 911 from one, even if your internet connection is operating correctly and the connection between your home and the VoIP's "CO" is perfect.
But you knew that.
The major issue with offering 911 until now hasn't been location information - VoIP providers can get that from the customer (and the FCC mandates that that's exactly where they should get the information, with the customer notifying the VoIP provider of changes of location) - but that the ILECs haven't made it easy to interconnect to 911 services, as 911 services generally don't have ten digit numbers.
To get this to work, the ILECs have to open up access to 911, and the VoIP providers have to update their systems and ensure they have relevent and up-to-date databases that map customers to addresses and addresses to 911 access numbers. The latter will not even appear until the ILECs have set everything up.
Otherwise I agree with you.
There's reasonable and unreasonable. What the FCC is actually proposing isn't merely reasonable, it's positively good news: for the first time, VoIP services are going to be able to offer real 911 services, something they've been unable to do before now thanks to poor service from ILECs.
They're putting the onus on the customer to keep the VoIP provider informed as to where they are, which for the most part isn't going to be a problem as most VoIP phones are used at a fixed location (they're advertised as landline replacements after all, that's the problem.) Quite why each time this subject comes up, people assume the FCC doesn't know as much as they do about the Internet and hasn't thought out simple technical issues (and VoIP providers haven't raised these technical issues with them) is beyond me.
People are often so clever, they're stupid.
Did you, for a single second, actually think about your comment before posting? Did you bother to read what the FCC was actually proposing? Did you not think "Hmmm, the obvious problem with this is that VoIP calls could originate from anywhere. I wonder how the FCC is dealing with this issue" before you drew the conclusion that the idea couldn't possibly even have occurred to them?
When this last came up on Slashdot, I was so taken aback by the shows of abject idiocy, I ended up posting a JE on the subject. Alas, a few weeks to actually consider the likelyhood that the FCC would not have foreseen the possibility of VoIP "roaming" doesn't seem to have done much good, and we're still seeing responses in your subthread (because you're not the only one trying to be clever) proposing such wonders as GPS receivers in every VoIP phone.
Ok people, it's like this: everyone gets to register where their phone is. When you subsequently dial 911, you get the real 911 service in your area. And part of the FCC's ruling is that the ILECs need to provide access to that 911 service to the VoIP companies. That's what the FCC is proposing.
Obvious, right?
Apparently not...
"Aha!" I pretend to hear you cry, "Not so fast! The Xbox360 is well over three times as fast". Well, yes, which is why I said this would be pushing what VPC can do. But the 30% is not an exact 30%. There are some operations that will run well, and others that will not. So realistically, you want something many, many, times faster than that. And you want all that processing to be in the right place too, you're not going to find multiple cores makes it any easier.
Not exactly. Yes, it'll use some form of JIT compiler, but emulating an existing CPU is very different from the type of thing you can get away with when emulating a virtual one. The virtual one can have rules imposed that limit what type of code a program can implement. Self modifying code (which can be the result of something as simple as a game engine compiling a ruleset) and other tricks can seriously cripple a JIT compiler. This is why Java JITs tend to generate code that runs as fast as its C++ counterparts, but tools like VPC rarely achieve anything close to that level of performance.The bottom line is that throwing in VPC isn't necessarily going to make it easy to run older games. Some will work, doubtlessly, others will run into glitches because they'll push the envelope in areas that work poorly under emulation. Microsoft, looking forward, would be better off encouraging the use of .net CLR (or a similar technology), it can then control how code is executed which, in turn, will make it easier to emulate in the future.
That's right, and I said they were. Why do people take random sentences and ignore the rest of them when responding to me, even quoting sentences later that point out their previous comment was, essentially, arguing against something I never implied? Geez.
The point is that Google right now is doing what Yahoo!, Excite, et al, did before it, and what MSN, AOL, etc, started off doing and have reinvented almost as many times as the years they've operated. It's becoming a portal, a mismash of random web-based Internet services that get released when they look both different and cool from the competition. And believe me, that's a good thing. Yahoo's webmail is great and was revolutionary when released, but Google's is sufficiently different for the world to be a better place with it. Yahoo's news system is great and was revolutionary when released, Google's is... well, it's different, and a lot people like it. Yahoo's shopping system is great and was revolutionary when released, Google's is... well, actually I don't see a lot of point in Google's, but in time it'll improve. I find Amazon tends to be beat Yahoo Shopping and eBay anyway in terms of functionality, but that's my personal opinion.
Yahoo succeeded, just. It's not clear how viable Yahoo is in the long term. Google, when people stop talking about what a wonderful company it is and actually think about what it's doing, has no clear long term strategy either. It seems to be always "Let's do a bit more, only different!"
I wish them the best of luck, but I don't see a serious thing here that's tying people to Google other than name recognition and being the current leader in something. This isn't Microsoft where they're able to sell an operating system on the basis that everyone else has it, therefore you probably need it if you want to interoperate with the rest of the world. Google searches the same websites everyone else can access. Google's mail talks to the same email addresses the rest of the world does. Google gets their news from the same generic sources the rest of the world does. Only Google Groups comes close to being dependent on something other than technical superiority.
That's nice for us but it's relatively easy to suggest Google can easily become an also-ran. With patience and the right resources, it can be beaten. One 800lb gorilla is working on that.
No, the iPod's a music player. The iPod is a little white and silver unit with an LCD screen that can store several thousand "songs" (MP3 or AAC files of approximately 5Mb each) that can play then anywhere. Everything else is a support business that, in concept, doesn't care if it's going onto something with an Apple logo or a Dell or Motorola logo. Apple is trying to change that by controlling who gets to license FairPlay, but that's not enough ultimately to prevent mobile phones with built in HDs becoming the dominant portable music players. The fact that Apple's version is doing this is an implementation detail, and one that's an active handicap to end users.
To assume Apple will continue draconian control over FairPlay to protect sales of one bit of plastic and metal that, increasingly, will compete against commodity devices is to assume that no competition exists, and that if it does, it wouldn't potentially make Apple irrelevent. There are a wide variety of music stores with various different models, and if people start buying phones with, say, Windows Media DRM instead of FairPlay, then Apple will become irrelvent because people will buy music for those phones and gradually replace their collections.
So, no, I can't see iPods having a future. T
iPods of course haven't died, but with iPod we're being even more specific, in that we're not just talking about MP3 players but a specific MP3 player. Unless Apple releases an iPod Phone (highly unlikely), the device itself will eventually become obsolete. And if it becomes an iPod phone, it'll be a phone that plays MP3s, not an MP3 player that communicates.
But they're not. Cellphones contain PDA functionality and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find one without a camera. They're increasing in functionality, and the proposal here - adding a hard drive and MP3 playing - is logical and wouldn't add much to the cost of them. I suggested $60, but that's about the cost of a 2G, 1.8" hard drive from Cornice. In practice, that drive would be replacing expensive flash memory already built into the phone so it might not even increase the cost, and it would be the logical way to make a camera phone more useful.Well, if you're going to build a hard drive into the phone, why not add a 3.5mm jack too?
Cellphone companies are showing no desire to sell cheap, simplified, phones, especially since you're less likely to want to switch if you invest in an expensive phone that works on one carrier only.
The PDA is dead, its functions supplanted by the cellphone. Today no cellphone exists that challenges the iPod, much as no cellphone - at least beyond a few concept phones like the Nokia 9000 - existed six or seven years ago that had the full calender, notes, et al, functionality we see in pretty much everything today. All we need is about $60 worth of additional hardware in a sizable amount of phones (and mobile phone manufacturers have successfully incorporated much more, often for trivial gains, in the past without problems) comprising of a small low-power hard disk and a 3.5" jack, and we're looking at something that can contain MP3s the same way an iPod can. Manufacturers are experimenting right now, but at this point they're just looking at competing with the flash MP3 player market. Given the benefits of a hard disk to the rest of the system, especially with multimedia and camera phones, expect this to become standard issue within the next two or three years.
Whether any Microsoft technology will be at the heart of any of the iPod and Google replacements remains to be seen. But even Google isn't Google any more. Why would anything resembling it exist in five years? And who the hell is going to buy an iPod if their phone already has all the capacity they need and can play MP3s?
Still, it's kind of amusing. My first thought on reading the article summary was to wonder if most Xbox games came with source code...
My second thought is that perhaps Microsoft has gone about this the wrong way. Maybe .net should be the basis of the Xbox development platform, with JIT techniques used to recompile everything as optimally as possible. This has few downsides, and makes implementing backward compatability much, much, easier. No stupid emulators. Just a JIT compiler on the new platform that recompiles old code in such a way that the timings are as close to the originally targetted platform as possible.
(Yeah, I know what you meant, I'm just being annoying)
I mostly disagree with your comment, FWIW. The issue here is whether there's a vulnerability. I don't care how obsessive the proponents on either side, be it Obsessed Colin vs Flippant Linus, that really doesn't impact my view of it. From what I can tell, it's one of those things that requires good timing and good luck to be useful. Generally, in other areas, we tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to similar potential exploits. I'm surprised there's major disagreement here.
Would I trust a kernel right now with this vulnerability? Kind of. Most of us run operating systems with multiple vulnerabilities anyway, because life is too short to spend downloading and installing every patch within minutes of a vulnerability being uncovered, and most of us are not the NSA and are more concerned with being the victim of a mass untargeted attack than egotistical enough to assume someone would target us directly. Indeed, if Linus has a choice between fixing a (hypothetical) buggy IDE driver that keeps crashing the kernel or fixing an obscure root exploit that nobody's targetted because it's a PITA to actually make work, I think most of us would ask him to work on the IDE driver first.
That's different though from being comfortable with the general principle that no effort be made to fix an issue, either at a low or high priority. It doesn't look very good.
As to your last sentence, no the top poster doesn't explain it. The top poster simply describes the guy as an obsessive because he's put a lot of time into it, far more than a reasonable person might reasonably be considered to do. That's different from saying he's wrong.
My last paragraph was a comment about irony. It had nothing whatsoever to do with attacking your argument on the basis of who you are rather than your argument. It did, however, attack your argument. Your argument was that nothing this guy says should be taken seriously because of an accusation of being mentally off-the-wall. Nash is a perfectly good counter-example. The irony is that you unwittingly brought him up. There's no ad-hominem in there, I wasn't attacking you or your credibility, I was attacking your argument.I don't care if the guy's obsessive. I care if there's an exploitable vulnerability. Until someone writes code either way, the issue is unproven, but it's clear there's a potential, if unlikely (not impossible, just unlikely) to be useful, vulnerability there. Your comments and those of the thread originator are not convincing because they attack the proponent than explain why the argument itself is false.
I have one minute to kill before Slashdot will let me post again, so let me add this: these kinds of issues come up a lot these days with old arguments being retread as if for the first time, with a large number of people not understanding basic stuff that's not meant the way it's intended. In some ways, this is a great thing - it suggests that the Free Software and Open Source movements are attracting large numbers of new followers, who see the advantages of code they can change and use to help others. Unwitting flamewars aside, let's hope this continues. It's a shame we can't really give out a "Read this before you start on FOSS" document that explains all of this, as I doubt anyone would read it, and I doubt it'd cover even 1% of what needs to be commented upon.