truth be told, the Sine Qua Non of hardware-based calculations is true 128-bit
"quad-precision" floating point calculations as performed in hardware.
For in-hardware calculation, yes. For a quick approximation or when the result
has no serious consequences, yes. For anyone serious about getting the correct
answer, no no no
We (by which I mean CS, math, and hard-science folks) have known since the
earliest days of floating point that it has inherent, unavoidable flaws that
no arbitrary fixed number of bits can solve. Virtually all CPUs before 1985
(the year the 386DX came out - Or for Apple folks, 1990 with the 68040) didn't
even have an FPU included in the CPU for a good reason - The only people doing
"serious" number crunching understood the limitations of floating point, and
would't use it even if the CPU supported it for exactly the reasons you mention.
Not until 1992, with the popularity of Wolf3d, did Joe Sixpack start using his
machine for serious (if you can call it that) FP number-crunching, and in the
domain of gaming, perfect accuracy of the result doesn't matter nearly so much
as speed.
If you care about your answer, no matter how many bits the FPU supports,
you do it in software. Period. You use GMP, and don't round until the final
result... and while that might not always prove possible due to having finite
memory, I highly doubt we'll ever see even a 1024-bit FPU, much less one using
1048576 bits.
Unfortunately, and as one of your links mentions, I seriously wonder if many
of the current generation of programmers even knows about this issue,
nevermind cares (Huh, I sound like a cranky old man now). FAR too often I
encounter code that uses something like "if(fpvar==0.0)"... That works
fine in integers, but after a long series of FP calculations, 3E-15 just
doesn't equal zero no matter how much it "should".
The tickets prices, if you could buy one at face
value, were quite reasonable: maybe $40 tops. Even
adjusted for inflation, that's nowhere near the face
value of tickets today.
The FP post aside, where do you live that concerts
cost significantly more than $40?
Yeah, a very small number of ageing superstars
can pull down over a hundred per ticket, because their
target audience has also aged, makes more now, and can afford
to buy what amounts to bragging rights for getting to see
their "favorite" artist "live" (aka on the jumbotron).
But even the plain ol' "stars", almost always sell for
under $50 a head, and that for semi-decent seats (such
as first balcony, or the front few orchestra/stage
rows). General admission or main floor seating, even for
a big-name show, rarely goes for over $30.
If you really can't afford that, check out your
smaller local clubs... They frequently get obscure but
good bands, or the musical equivalent of "off broadway"
stars, or even the occasional big name doing an "up
close and personal" tour, for $10-$20 a head.
And if even that will blow the bank, every pub in
town will have local/regional talent playing live on
any given Friday and Saturday night, usually for a $5
cover or 2-drink minimum or some similar pittance. You
might hear a lot of steaming heaps of dung that way, but
you'll also discover a few acts you might really like.
The more heavily patented (with associated royalties,
etc) something is, the less likely it is that industry
will actually use it...
That brings up a serious point I have pondered amidst all the
SlashFUD on this topic...
Philips has patented this "flag". Neither congress nor the
FCC has required its use.
Now, I see two possible outcomes here:
First, if the Congresscritters do mandate implementation,
it would seem to me that Philips, simply by not licensing the
use of their flag, could instantly drive all other TV
manufacturers out of the market. They could also all-but-destroy
the market for anything that connects to a TV by having
only two inputs - Old fashioned low-quality analog coax, or
the New Spiffy Philips Compatibilty Connector System (TM),
also patented. Who wants to play XBox or watch an HD-DVD at
480i?
Second, Congress does not require the use of this flag. This
means that, no matter how many industry leaders support it,
some no-name Taiwanese company will gladly feed the
market demand for noncompliant TVs, and no one, not even
the clueless masses, will buy a TV that forces them to watch
ads.
And on a final note... If people don't like it, they can
pay to get around it? Since when has the USPTO allowed
patents on well-defined crimes, in this case, plain and
simple "extortion"?
I recently did a slipstreamed XP disc w/ SP2 and all the
critical updates already integrated, and I found myself
having to remove the unessential stuff (demos, extras)
from the CD image if I wanted to fit it onto one disc.
They make these things now... Like CDs, but called "DVDs". They
hold 7x as much, and virtually all new PCs come with one built
in.;-)
Sorry. Yeah, where I work, we also have FAR too many PCs still
in use from before the days of ubiquitous DVD drives. But my
solution has tended toward replacing obsolete drives for $20
each, when possible.
And wake me up when MS also natively supports Ext3,
ReiserFS, etcetera on their own OSes too
Why? With virtualization, the host OS has no need to
understand the guest OS's filesystem any more than it
needs to know the guest's binary format. You just point
it at a partition or an FS image file, and let it do its
thing.
Some of us actually consider that one of the most
useful features of running a virtual machine - Absolutely
perfect 100% backups involve nothing more complicated
than shutting down the guest OS and copying its image
file. You can even perfectly backup a running OS
that way, you just need to pause it and do a state dump;
Then when you restart it, you resume right where you left
off.
It is not the travelling of electrons that gets the
electric signal propagating.
The travel itself, no. The wavefront of "pressure" moving
along the path of the electrons, yes. The electrons themselves
move at only (depending heavily on current and wire diameter)
around 1-10cm per hour.
But the wave still only travels somewhere between.25 and.75c
(IIRC, hams use a factor of around.7c for the speed in a whip
antenna, while tiny ethernet strands only give around.33c).
Does the difference there really matter all that
much? For long-distance communication, sure. But for chip interconnects? Doubtful.
Immersion beyond simple 2D controls is only natural
when all games are now being created in 3D.
The problem arises when console manufacturers start
(or rather, when they started, since they've gone
too far already) putting far more buttons than a typical
human can remember how to use. Add in the idea of
mode-specific buttons ("X fires in the minigames, jumps
in the main screen, pans left on the map...") or even
chording, and you quickly have even experienced gamers
who limit their interaction to the merest basics of
what they have available.
Myself as an example... I've enjoyed gaming for around
20 years now, I consider myself "pretty darn good" at
them, I prefer using a command-prompt for most tasks
on a PC, and yet even on a first-gen PSX, I treat the
controller basically like an SNES controller with extra
"oh shit" buttons - By which I mean, it has a dpad,
start, select, four buttons and shoulders, and everything
else just gets whacked randomly when I can't figure out
what the hell the game wants me to press to get the purple
stone to light up by squishing the lucky firefly against
its control panel.
Don't ever, ever believe anyone who tells you that you
can get technical support from "the community". Because
"the community" with whom a computer journalist, website
operator or Open Source loudmouth interacts, is not the
same community that is open to you.
First - I'd like to point out that I liked the sample
dialogue. A little too close-to-home, perhaps, but
still funny.
However...
You hear/read conversations like that all too
often for the sole reason that they occur after
the hardware purchase.
When someone buys a Mac, they get a hardware and software
platform specifically designed and sold together.
When someone buys an OEM Windows PC, they get hardware
specifically designed to work with Windows, and frequently
compliance-tested and certified to do exactly that.
Linux will run on the Mac. It will run on old Macs. It
will run on the PC. It will run on old PCs. It will run
on your TiVo. It will run on your DSL router, on your
calculator, on your Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox.
But none of those specifically have Linux in mind as a
design criterion.
With five minutes of checking, you can pick hardware that
DOES work under Linux. As a perk, such hardware
tends to include "geek-preferred" devices - The best
and cheapest parts you can buy for a given purpose.
But no - People either pick hardware by the flashiest
box or the unqualified lowest price, and then act surprised
the hardware doesn't work with anything except what
the box says. And don't think that only extends to Linux
support - "oh gee, XP drivers? Yeah, sorry, we don't support
that model anymore".
If I sound like a Linux apologist, I have the excuse that
everyone (in the PC world) really does design their
products with Windows in mind. But move out of that comfort
zone, and see how well you do... You can get Linux 90%
functional on your frickin' toaster; How well does it run
OS-X? How well does your old PowerMac run Windows?
I can honestly tell you that when I build a PC,
it will run Linux and have 100% of its intended functionality.
It will also run Windows, with the same full functionality.
So if it sounds arrogant to tell people "You chose not to do
your homework, so you failed the class", then I guess yeah,
you can call me arrogant. But unsurprisingly, when you someday
need to know the ancient capitol of Assyria, we geeks know
how you'll spend your last lifeline.
Actually, I meant that to refer to the original NES.
And I do apologize, I didn't mean to come off so caustically - I meant that
very tongue-in-cheek.
I do, however, still assert that a GBA (or the older SNES) remake doesn't replace
the experience of playing the original... Better than nothing, but it tends to
give a very rosey tint to the memory of playing it.
For example, I've played both SMB2(E) and DDP, and SMB2 looks SO much more
well-done. I've also played the "real" SMB2(J), and while it has a few features
not found in SMB1, the SNES combo calling it "lost levels" seems more
appropriate than calling it a proper sequel to the original - It has almost the
exact same gameplay, level patterns (flag,flag,flag,castle, repeat), even the
same (or at least VERY similar) sprites.
Playing the SNES version, you'd think they made SMB2(J) after SMB3, with a
deliberately "retro" look. I haven't played the GBA version, but expect it
has the same enhancements. Now, I have no problem with enhancing a classic
game - For example, when I played Final Fantasy II (J, not II(E)==IV(J)), I chose
to go with the PSX remake. But I have most certainly tried out both the proto
and the Demiforce translation from the Japanese to see what it felt like on the
original NES.
Some people just prefer to have a game they bought on an official cartridge
I own a LOT of actual NES cartridges. But y'know, they just never
released the "real" SMB2 in the US, and even if they had, you can't buy
them new anymore anyway. So about 10 years too late to go out and buy a
cartridge, in another country, in a language I don't know.
Yeah. Played comfortably on the original hardware. What-ever!
I have three real NES consoles, two originals and one mini, and I'll
still download a game I own to play it before I'll fight with
one of them to make a game work.
Then, no offense, but you either use so much higher quality displays than the
rest of us that you can't fairly compare the two, or you've never used an LCD display.
Not a solution in search of a problem, DVI removes exactly such a beast - Namely,
removing an D2A2D path that compensates for a digital device trying to maintain
backward compatibility with old analogue (CRT) displays. Yes, newer flat panels do
a pretty good job of autosyncing - But particularly if you use ClearType (or whatever
your preferred platform calls its version of subpixel sampling), you can see
the difference even on high-quality analogue displays (most people complain about
this as either moire or color-fringed text).
Now, a bit more on-topic, I have a very serious problem with this device...
While a neat idea, it seems to me that:
1) Few video cards support a 3840x1024 output device, and
2) A pair of GF6600s, giving quad DVI out up to 2048x1536
per panel, costs half as much.
Considering that, why would anyone buy this? Okay, someone mentioned the laptop
market - But I have a pretty kickass Latitude less than a year old, and it won't
drive anything above 1920 (I suppose it might go to 2048 if I manually hacked the
timing, but 1920 pushes the available video bandwidth). Incidentally, for everyone
wondering why Matrox didn't use DVI, I just gave the answer... DVI has a bandwidth of
165MHz, into which a mode of 2048x1200@60Hz using CV-RB just barely squeezes. At
3840x1024@60Hz (again using CV-RB), you need 252.8MHz - Or looking at it from a different
direction to make it work, you'd need a refresh rate of 36Hz. If that doesn't
cause eye-bleedyness, I don't know what would.
Dear mods: Please learn to recognize the difference
between someone posting inflamatory comments solely
for the purpose of causing trouble, and someone
posting a generally negative but both correct and topical
comment.
Although JustNiz may have grossly oversimplified the concept
of SaaS, the idea still applies. Why would anyone pay over
and over and over just to leave their data at the mercy of
a third party?
If Blizzard goes under, your WoW character ceases to exist,
tough cookies but no real loss. If Oracle Online (or whatever
they decide to call their SaaS rebranding) goes under, what
sane CIO/CTO wants to tell his boss "Well, our entire CRM
database, including all open orders and customer billing
information, will cease to exist at the end of the month,
and we have no way to export it, nor any way to use it
standalone even if we could. Oh, and BTW, I've decided to
spend more time with my family"?
so you can still have a chance to play it in
(close to) the original format if you can find
an import copy.
Oy, just download
FCE Ultra, an open source NES/Famicom emulator, and play
the actual original, as well as the original
Doki Doki Panic.
You'll need to find the ROMs, of course (no, I don't
have them - Why keep an illegal copy around when it
only takes about 30 seconds to find and download any
game ever created?), but that shouldn't present much
pf a problem.
So if you ran a cacheing DNS proxy on your machine
Just an update - I just set up exactly such a proxy (DNRD) on my masq'ing
gateway, and it works like a charm. So MS hasn't done anything too
sophisticated to get around blacklisting them, just enough to count as a
nuissance.
Good idea, but no luck. Same result, though with one slight difference
which might prove useful as a workaround - The first attempt timed
out, meaning it really performs the query rather than having a hardcoded
list of IP mappings. So if you ran a cacheing DNS proxy on your machine
(ie, exactly what the built-in DNS service does, but one not containing a
built-in Microsoft hack), pointed your machine's DNS to itself, and tell
the proxy to use a bogus address for the sites in question, that should
successfully block them.
Better to do this at the firewall, though (a real external hardware
firewall, not Microsoft's "trust us, this works" crap).
Did the moderators Read The Fine Article before giving the parent points?
Did you? Or did we somehow read entirely different articles?
Felten in talking about "a conspiracy of about forty devices" is not
saying that (defectors at) forty device makers have to reveal secret keys.
The linked article specifically says exactly that! The described
attack requires knowing the key vector of each of the 40 devices used in the
attack:
There are two things to notice about this process. First, in order
to do it, you need to know either Alice's or Bob's secret vector.
[...]
In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes
a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP
completely.
Then the crack is done by analysing the bit streams between the devices (between
player and display, or whatevre).
Really, now? Perhaps you could quote where he says that? Because, I can't help but notice
that it says NOTHING about analyzing the conversation itself. In my last
paragraph, I hypothesized that a brute-force attack on the actual conversation
might suffice, but Felton said nothing at all about that. In fact, to apply
the method he describes, you don't even need to ever build the devices - You just
need to know their keys and the victim-device's addition rules.
From that, you can solve a 40-variable linear equasion to produce arbitrary
valid keys, which comes as close to a full crack as matters for any practical
application.
Now, I did not know, as one or two others pointed out, that anyone can
obtain huge numbers of keys without significant expense or contractual restrictions.
That would seem to make Felten's attack trivial, and if true, I look forward to buying
a black-market HDCP-stripping dongle in the very near future. I admit my lack of
information on that point. But the points you take issue with don't even
seem to come from the current topic!
if any 40 devices conspire together, they can break the security of the system
From TFA:
it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private
vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it's only a matter
of time before someone does it.
Apparently Mr. Felten has a somewhat twisted idea of "eminently doable".
The HDCP CA will certainly only give out keys to people who sign very very
scary agreements not to engage in exactly the sort of activities described. While
a few of them might "accidentally" leak their keys, I find it exceedingly
unlikely that 40 such companies will pay for a key vector, just to take the
risk of getting sued out of existence.
Though I have to wonder about the actual security of these keys under the condition
of physical access. That point might make Felten's proposed crack viable,
if we just need to find a weaknedd in 40 devices out of the thousands that will
eventually hit the market - ESPECIALLY if player software needs to have a valid
key as well.
I also wonder why we need to "know" even one, much less 40, secret keys beforehand,
however... It doesn't sound like you need to come up with the correct answer to get
a single response. If you faked 40 devices, couldn't you still get the target device
to respond at least once to each, thereby getting the necessary 40 unknowns? Sure,
this would reduce to 40 instances of cracking a 56(?) bit key, but a modern PC can
brute-force that in under a day.
RDP is basically like pcAnywhere or VNC...it relies heavily on sending
bitmaps back and forth
Uh, no. Have you ever actually used RDP as more than a "oh gee, nice
of them to finally include that"? Doing VNC on a machine on the local
network crawls. RDP even over a dialup feels almost as responsive as
sitting at the remote machine (except you quickly gain a full appreciation of
just how often networks "hiccup").
Citrix essentially invented the technology behind RDP and ICA.
If by "invented" you mean "First thought to apply the idea of a remote
X desktop to Windows", I would agree. But the core idea existed LONG
before even Windows ever appeared on the scene. Microsoft simply made
it very, very difficult to implement on Windows (and even Citrix needed
to add kernel code), so it took quite a few generations of Windows to
make the idea viable.
Finally a major publisher is paying attention to the
protests for their customers.
Don't speak too soon - Do you really think they'll
just completely skip the copy protections (because we
all know that without it, games like... Oh, say,
Galactic Civ II, would never have become
best sellers)?
Next week on Slashdot: Ubisoft partners with Sony to
provide their next-gen copy protection, which runs so
discretely no one without the (leaked) password to the
secret "remote compliance monitoring port" will even
know it exists.
The first thing I do when I install XP is disable Luna
and all the graphical tweaks except for show window contents
while dragging.
Same here, and I have no reason to suspect I wouldn't do the
same on Vista as well. So if Microsoft hopes taking out the
CPU-sucking eye-candy will dissuade piracy, I hope for their
sake they have a plan "B".
Though, I do like ClearType. On a DVI-connected
flat panel, it really does make small text MUCH easier
on the eyes.
What trade secrets? Like how to illegally divert
traffic to the NSA?
I know you meant that sarcastically, but stop and think
about the deeper issue in what you've said...
We need to ask ourselves, "WHY has AT&T provided
traffic to the NSA?"
Companies do things for only two reasons - Profit, and
to (grudgingly) comply with the law. So, AT&T either has
established some form of commercial deal where the NSA
pays them for data; or part of our new body of unknowable
laws says that all sufficiently-large communication nexus
must provide the spooks with a feed.
So, you could argue that releasing this information
could help AT&T's competition either make money or
to less burdensomly comply with secret laws.
Either way, I say fuck 'em all, they can have all
my traffic and waste massive CPU time decrypting it
just to find out what time I need to pick up my
dry-cleaning. I'll still support the EFF, ACLU, and
whoever else wants to take up this fight; but I learned
long ago not to trust any organization (government
or private) to behave in a particular way (ie, not spying
on US citizens) just because our national code-of-fiction
says so. The only liberty has a firing pin, and the
only privacy has a unique private key.
Because he wanted to limit our definition of "planet" to
basically refer to sufficiently-large objects that formed
from the same accretion disk as the Earth, and have a
reasonably-stable basically-circular orbit (for which
reason I'd also suggest including a criterion for orbital
eccentricity, so if we ever find a comet or similar kuiper
object asteroid the size
of Neptune that just happens to travel perfectly along
the ecliptic, we don't get into this same stupid debate
all over again).
Pluto, with its highly inclined orbit (up to 17deg from
the ecliptic - The next worst, Mercury, only makes it 7deg)
quite possibly did not originate from our solar
system's accretion disk.
From the real FA that does not allow copy and pasting from their website via
a DRM like mechanism
Wow! I've just encountered my first effective form of DRM - A thorough Slashdotting!
Oh, damn. It loaded this time... Okay...
Huh... Not a very effective way to block cutting-and-pasting... I don't even
need to view the source or disable Javascript to do whatever I want. Apparently,
"Section 6 of the act says such a prohibition ``shall not apply`` to" FireFox users.
Actually, it did somehow stop me from selecting subparagraphs... This amazing
anti-copying tech literally forced me to copy an entire paragraph at a time.
Woo-woo, consider me impressed.
there are actually very few such disasters which would
completely destroy a photo while leaving a digitized version
of that photo intact.
While true, I can burn a dozen copies of my photo collection
to DVD and mail them to relatives and friends in various parts
of the planet. It any disaster(s) manage to wipe out all of
New England, California, Florida, and Australia, I don't think
I'll really care much about the survival of my pictures.
More on-topic, I'd suggest just buying a cheap flatbed with an
autofeeder. They can usually handle any rectangular size up to
the size of the scanner, they work tolerably well (even if it jams frequently on a difficult batch of prints, unjamming every 20-30 sounds a hell of a lot better than manually loading one at a
time), and even though most flatbeds go painfully slow, you
can load a batch before work and bed and go through perhaps
200 a day.
Slashdot Mirror
truth be told, the Sine Qua Non of hardware-based calculations is true 128-bit "quad-precision" floating point calculations as performed in hardware.
For in-hardware calculation, yes. For a quick approximation or when the result has no serious consequences, yes. For anyone serious about getting the correct answer, no no no
We (by which I mean CS, math, and hard-science folks) have known since the earliest days of floating point that it has inherent, unavoidable flaws that no arbitrary fixed number of bits can solve. Virtually all CPUs before 1985 (the year the 386DX came out - Or for Apple folks, 1990 with the 68040) didn't even have an FPU included in the CPU for a good reason - The only people doing "serious" number crunching understood the limitations of floating point, and would't use it even if the CPU supported it for exactly the reasons you mention. Not until 1992, with the popularity of Wolf3d, did Joe Sixpack start using his machine for serious (if you can call it that) FP number-crunching, and in the domain of gaming, perfect accuracy of the result doesn't matter nearly so much as speed.
If you care about your answer, no matter how many bits the FPU supports, you do it in software. Period. You use GMP, and don't round until the final result... and while that might not always prove possible due to having finite memory, I highly doubt we'll ever see even a 1024-bit FPU, much less one using 1048576 bits.
Unfortunately, and as one of your links mentions, I seriously wonder if many of the current generation of programmers even knows about this issue, nevermind cares (Huh, I sound like a cranky old man now). FAR too often I encounter code that uses something like "if(fpvar==0.0)"... That works fine in integers, but after a long series of FP calculations, 3E-15 just doesn't equal zero no matter how much it "should".
The tickets prices, if you could buy one at face value, were quite reasonable: maybe $40 tops. Even adjusted for inflation, that's nowhere near the face value of tickets today.
The FP post aside, where do you live that concerts cost significantly more than $40?
Yeah, a very small number of ageing superstars can pull down over a hundred per ticket, because their target audience has also aged, makes more now, and can afford to buy what amounts to bragging rights for getting to see their "favorite" artist "live" (aka on the jumbotron). But even the plain ol' "stars", almost always sell for under $50 a head, and that for semi-decent seats (such as first balcony, or the front few orchestra/stage rows). General admission or main floor seating, even for a big-name show, rarely goes for over $30.
If you really can't afford that, check out your smaller local clubs... They frequently get obscure but good bands, or the musical equivalent of "off broadway" stars, or even the occasional big name doing an "up close and personal" tour, for $10-$20 a head.
And if even that will blow the bank, every pub in town will have local/regional talent playing live on any given Friday and Saturday night, usually for a $5 cover or 2-drink minimum or some similar pittance. You might hear a lot of steaming heaps of dung that way, but you'll also discover a few acts you might really like.
The more heavily patented (with associated royalties, etc) something is, the less likely it is that industry will actually use it...
That brings up a serious point I have pondered amidst all the SlashFUD on this topic...
Philips has patented this "flag". Neither congress nor the FCC has required its use.
Now, I see two possible outcomes here:
First, if the Congresscritters do mandate implementation, it would seem to me that Philips, simply by not licensing the use of their flag, could instantly drive all other TV manufacturers out of the market. They could also all-but-destroy the market for anything that connects to a TV by having only two inputs - Old fashioned low-quality analog coax, or the New Spiffy Philips Compatibilty Connector System (TM), also patented. Who wants to play XBox or watch an HD-DVD at 480i?
Second, Congress does not require the use of this flag. This means that, no matter how many industry leaders support it, some no-name Taiwanese company will gladly feed the market demand for noncompliant TVs, and no one, not even the clueless masses, will buy a TV that forces them to watch ads.
And on a final note... If people don't like it, they can pay to get around it? Since when has the USPTO allowed patents on well-defined crimes, in this case, plain and simple "extortion"?
I recently did a slipstreamed XP disc w/ SP2 and all the critical updates already integrated, and I found myself having to remove the unessential stuff (demos, extras) from the CD image if I wanted to fit it onto one disc.
;-)
They make these things now... Like CDs, but called "DVDs". They hold 7x as much, and virtually all new PCs come with one built in.
Sorry. Yeah, where I work, we also have FAR too many PCs still in use from before the days of ubiquitous DVD drives. But my solution has tended toward replacing obsolete drives for $20 each, when possible.
And wake me up when MS also natively supports Ext3, ReiserFS, etcetera on their own OSes too
Why? With virtualization, the host OS has no need to understand the guest OS's filesystem any more than it needs to know the guest's binary format. You just point it at a partition or an FS image file, and let it do its thing.
Some of us actually consider that one of the most useful features of running a virtual machine - Absolutely perfect 100% backups involve nothing more complicated than shutting down the guest OS and copying its image file. You can even perfectly backup a running OS that way, you just need to pause it and do a state dump; Then when you restart it, you resume right where you left off.
Sigh... Here go a few mod points. Forgive, I meant to mod you up and the stupid scroll-wheel changed it on me right as I clicked "Moderate".
So, I suppose posting this will undo it.
It is not the travelling of electrons that gets the electric signal propagating.
.25 and .75c
(IIRC, hams use a factor of around .7c for the speed in a whip
antenna, while tiny ethernet strands only give around .33c).
The travel itself, no. The wavefront of "pressure" moving along the path of the electrons, yes. The electrons themselves move at only (depending heavily on current and wire diameter) around 1-10cm per hour.
But the wave still only travels somewhere between
Does the difference there really matter all that much? For long-distance communication, sure. But for chip interconnects? Doubtful.
Immersion beyond simple 2D controls is only natural when all games are now being created in 3D.
The problem arises when console manufacturers start (or rather, when they started, since they've gone too far already) putting far more buttons than a typical human can remember how to use. Add in the idea of mode-specific buttons ("X fires in the minigames, jumps in the main screen, pans left on the map...") or even chording, and you quickly have even experienced gamers who limit their interaction to the merest basics of what they have available.
Myself as an example... I've enjoyed gaming for around 20 years now, I consider myself "pretty darn good" at them, I prefer using a command-prompt for most tasks on a PC, and yet even on a first-gen PSX, I treat the controller basically like an SNES controller with extra "oh shit" buttons - By which I mean, it has a dpad, start, select, four buttons and shoulders, and everything else just gets whacked randomly when I can't figure out what the hell the game wants me to press to get the purple stone to light up by squishing the lucky firefly against its control panel.
Don't ever, ever believe anyone who tells you that you can get technical support from "the community". Because "the community" with whom a computer journalist, website operator or Open Source loudmouth interacts, is not the same community that is open to you.
First - I'd like to point out that I liked the sample dialogue. A little too close-to-home, perhaps, but still funny.
However...
You hear/read conversations like that all too often for the sole reason that they occur after the hardware purchase.
When someone buys a Mac, they get a hardware and software platform specifically designed and sold together.
When someone buys an OEM Windows PC, they get hardware specifically designed to work with Windows, and frequently compliance-tested and certified to do exactly that.
Linux will run on the Mac. It will run on old Macs. It will run on the PC. It will run on old PCs. It will run on your TiVo. It will run on your DSL router, on your calculator, on your Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox.
But none of those specifically have Linux in mind as a design criterion.
With five minutes of checking, you can pick hardware that DOES work under Linux. As a perk, such hardware tends to include "geek-preferred" devices - The best and cheapest parts you can buy for a given purpose. But no - People either pick hardware by the flashiest box or the unqualified lowest price, and then act surprised the hardware doesn't work with anything except what the box says. And don't think that only extends to Linux support - "oh gee, XP drivers? Yeah, sorry, we don't support that model anymore".
If I sound like a Linux apologist, I have the excuse that everyone (in the PC world) really does design their products with Windows in mind. But move out of that comfort zone, and see how well you do... You can get Linux 90% functional on your frickin' toaster; How well does it run OS-X? How well does your old PowerMac run Windows?
I can honestly tell you that when I build a PC, it will run Linux and have 100% of its intended functionality. It will also run Windows, with the same full functionality. So if it sounds arrogant to tell people "You chose not to do your homework, so you failed the class", then I guess yeah, you can call me arrogant. But unsurprisingly, when you someday need to know the ancient capitol of Assyria, we geeks know how you'll spend your last lifeline.
Played much GBA?
Actually, I meant that to refer to the original NES.
And I do apologize, I didn't mean to come off so caustically - I meant that very tongue-in-cheek.
I do, however, still assert that a GBA (or the older SNES) remake doesn't replace the experience of playing the original... Better than nothing, but it tends to give a very rosey tint to the memory of playing it.
For example, I've played both SMB2(E) and DDP, and SMB2 looks SO much more well-done. I've also played the "real" SMB2(J), and while it has a few features not found in SMB1, the SNES combo calling it "lost levels" seems more appropriate than calling it a proper sequel to the original - It has almost the exact same gameplay, level patterns (flag,flag,flag,castle, repeat), even the same (or at least VERY similar) sprites.
Playing the SNES version, you'd think they made SMB2(J) after SMB3, with a deliberately "retro" look. I haven't played the GBA version, but expect it has the same enhancements. Now, I have no problem with enhancing a classic game - For example, when I played Final Fantasy II (J, not II(E)==IV(J)), I chose to go with the PSX remake. But I have most certainly tried out both the proto and the Demiforce translation from the Japanese to see what it felt like on the original NES.
Some people just prefer to have a game they bought on an official cartridge
... [ca-chick] ... [ca-chick] ... [blow blow blow] ... [ca-chick] ... [ca-chick] ... [blow blow blow] ... [wipe wipe wipe] ... [ca-chick] ... [ca-chick] ... [blow blow blow] ... [slam slam slam] ... [wipe wipe wipe] ... [ca-chick] ... ... [ca-chick] ... [ca-chick][ca-chick][ca-chicka-chicka-chicka]
I own a LOT of actual NES cartridges. But y'know, they just never released the "real" SMB2 in the US, and even if they had, you can't buy them new anymore anyway. So about 10 years too late to go out and buy a cartridge, in another country, in a language I don't know.
and played comfortably on a console.
[scrrrrrrrch]
"Grrr"
[scrrrrch]
"Grrrrrrr!"
[gachunk]
"Goddamn piece of"
[GCHK]
[ca-chick]
[resignedly] "Fuck it." [Fires up emulator]
Yeah. Played comfortably on the original hardware. What-ever!
I have three real NES consoles, two originals and one mini, and I'll still download a game I own to play it before I'll fight with one of them to make a game work.
DVI is a solution in search of a problem.
Then, no offense, but you either use so much higher quality displays than the rest of us that you can't fairly compare the two, or you've never used an LCD display.
Not a solution in search of a problem, DVI removes exactly such a beast - Namely, removing an D2A2D path that compensates for a digital device trying to maintain backward compatibility with old analogue (CRT) displays. Yes, newer flat panels do a pretty good job of autosyncing - But particularly if you use ClearType (or whatever your preferred platform calls its version of subpixel sampling), you can see the difference even on high-quality analogue displays (most people complain about this as either moire or color-fringed text).
Now, a bit more on-topic, I have a very serious problem with this device... While a neat idea, it seems to me that:
1) Few video cards support a 3840x1024 output device, and
2) A pair of GF6600s, giving quad DVI out up to 2048x1536 per panel, costs half as much.
Considering that, why would anyone buy this? Okay, someone mentioned the laptop market - But I have a pretty kickass Latitude less than a year old, and it won't drive anything above 1920 (I suppose it might go to 2048 if I manually hacked the timing, but 1920 pushes the available video bandwidth). Incidentally, for everyone wondering why Matrox didn't use DVI, I just gave the answer... DVI has a bandwidth of 165MHz, into which a mode of 2048x1200@60Hz using CV-RB just barely squeezes. At 3840x1024@60Hz (again using CV-RB), you need 252.8MHz - Or looking at it from a different direction to make it work, you'd need a refresh rate of 36Hz. If that doesn't cause eye-bleedyness, I don't know what would.
Dear mods: Please learn to recognize the difference between someone posting inflamatory comments solely for the purpose of causing trouble, and someone posting a generally negative but both correct and topical comment.
Although JustNiz may have grossly oversimplified the concept of SaaS, the idea still applies. Why would anyone pay over and over and over just to leave their data at the mercy of a third party?
If Blizzard goes under, your WoW character ceases to exist, tough cookies but no real loss. If Oracle Online (or whatever they decide to call their SaaS rebranding) goes under, what sane CIO/CTO wants to tell his boss "Well, our entire CRM database, including all open orders and customer billing information, will cease to exist at the end of the month, and we have no way to export it, nor any way to use it standalone even if we could. Oh, and BTW, I've decided to spend more time with my family"?
so you can still have a chance to play it in (close to) the original format if you can find an import copy.
Oy, just download FCE Ultra, an open source NES/Famicom emulator, and play the actual original, as well as the original Doki Doki Panic.
You'll need to find the ROMs, of course (no, I don't have them - Why keep an illegal copy around when it only takes about 30 seconds to find and download any game ever created?), but that shouldn't present much pf a problem.
So if you ran a cacheing DNS proxy on your machine
Just an update - I just set up exactly such a proxy (DNRD) on my masq'ing gateway, and it works like a charm. So MS hasn't done anything too sophisticated to get around blacklisting them, just enough to count as a nuissance.
Anyone out there with XP who can reproduce this?
Good idea, but no luck. Same result, though with one slight difference which might prove useful as a workaround - The first attempt timed out, meaning it really performs the query rather than having a hardcoded list of IP mappings. So if you ran a cacheing DNS proxy on your machine (ie, exactly what the built-in DNS service does, but one not containing a built-in Microsoft hack), pointed your machine's DNS to itself, and tell the proxy to use a bogus address for the sites in question, that should successfully block them.
Better to do this at the firewall, though (a real external hardware firewall, not Microsoft's "trust us, this works" crap).
Did you? Or did we somehow read entirely different articles?
Felten in talking about "a conspiracy of about forty devices" is not saying that (defectors at) forty device makers have to reveal secret keys.
The linked article specifically says exactly that! The described attack requires knowing the key vector of each of the 40 devices used in the attack:
Then the crack is done by analysing the bit streams between the devices (between player and display, or whatevre).
Really, now? Perhaps you could quote where he says that? Because, I can't help but notice that it says NOTHING about analyzing the conversation itself. In my last paragraph, I hypothesized that a brute-force attack on the actual conversation might suffice, but Felton said nothing at all about that. In fact, to apply the method he describes, you don't even need to ever build the devices - You just need to know their keys and the victim-device's addition rules.
From that, you can solve a 40-variable linear equasion to produce arbitrary valid keys, which comes as close to a full crack as matters for any practical application.
Now, I did not know, as one or two others pointed out, that anyone can obtain huge numbers of keys without significant expense or contractual restrictions. That would seem to make Felten's attack trivial, and if true, I look forward to buying a black-market HDCP-stripping dongle in the very near future. I admit my lack of information on that point. But the points you take issue with don't even seem to come from the current topic!
From TFA: Apparently Mr. Felten has a somewhat twisted idea of "eminently doable".
The HDCP CA will certainly only give out keys to people who sign very very scary agreements not to engage in exactly the sort of activities described. While a few of them might "accidentally" leak their keys, I find it exceedingly unlikely that 40 such companies will pay for a key vector, just to take the risk of getting sued out of existence.
Though I have to wonder about the actual security of these keys under the condition of physical access. That point might make Felten's proposed crack viable, if we just need to find a weaknedd in 40 devices out of the thousands that will eventually hit the market - ESPECIALLY if player software needs to have a valid key as well.
I also wonder why we need to "know" even one, much less 40, secret keys beforehand, however... It doesn't sound like you need to come up with the correct answer to get a single response. If you faked 40 devices, couldn't you still get the target device to respond at least once to each, thereby getting the necessary 40 unknowns? Sure, this would reduce to 40 instances of cracking a 56(?) bit key, but a modern PC can brute-force that in under a day.
RDP is basically like pcAnywhere or VNC...it relies heavily on sending bitmaps back and forth
Uh, no. Have you ever actually used RDP as more than a "oh gee, nice of them to finally include that"? Doing VNC on a machine on the local network crawls. RDP even over a dialup feels almost as responsive as sitting at the remote machine (except you quickly gain a full appreciation of just how often networks "hiccup").
Citrix essentially invented the technology behind RDP and ICA.
If by "invented" you mean "First thought to apply the idea of a remote X desktop to Windows", I would agree. But the core idea existed LONG before even Windows ever appeared on the scene. Microsoft simply made it very, very difficult to implement on Windows (and even Citrix needed to add kernel code), so it took quite a few generations of Windows to make the idea viable.
Finally a major publisher is paying attention to the protests for their customers.
Don't speak too soon - Do you really think they'll just completely skip the copy protections (because we all know that without it, games like... Oh, say, Galactic Civ II, would never have become best sellers)?
Next week on Slashdot: Ubisoft partners with Sony to provide their next-gen copy protection, which runs so discretely no one without the (leaked) password to the secret "remote compliance monitoring port" will even know it exists.
The first thing I do when I install XP is disable Luna and all the graphical tweaks except for show window contents while dragging.
Same here, and I have no reason to suspect I wouldn't do the same on Vista as well. So if Microsoft hopes taking out the CPU-sucking eye-candy will dissuade piracy, I hope for their sake they have a plan "B".
Though, I do like ClearType. On a DVI-connected flat panel, it really does make small text MUCH easier on the eyes.
What trade secrets? Like how to illegally divert traffic to the NSA?
I know you meant that sarcastically, but stop and think about the deeper issue in what you've said...
We need to ask ourselves, "WHY has AT&T provided traffic to the NSA?"
Companies do things for only two reasons - Profit, and to (grudgingly) comply with the law. So, AT&T either has established some form of commercial deal where the NSA pays them for data; or part of our new body of unknowable laws says that all sufficiently-large communication nexus must provide the spooks with a feed.
So, you could argue that releasing this information could help AT&T's competition either make money or to less burdensomly comply with secret laws.
Either way, I say fuck 'em all, they can have all my traffic and waste massive CPU time decrypting it just to find out what time I need to pick up my dry-cleaning. I'll still support the EFF, ACLU, and whoever else wants to take up this fight; but I learned long ago not to trust any organization (government or private) to behave in a particular way (ie, not spying on US citizens) just because our national code-of-fiction says so. The only liberty has a firing pin, and the only privacy has a unique private key.
Why within 10deg of the ecliptic?
Because he wanted to limit our definition of "planet" to basically refer to sufficiently-large objects that formed from the same accretion disk as the Earth, and have a reasonably-stable basically-circular orbit (for which reason I'd also suggest including a criterion for orbital eccentricity, so if we ever find a comet or similar kuiper object asteroid the size of Neptune that just happens to travel perfectly along the ecliptic, we don't get into this same stupid debate all over again).
Pluto, with its highly inclined orbit (up to 17deg from the ecliptic - The next worst, Mercury, only makes it 7deg) quite possibly did not originate from our solar system's accretion disk.
From the real FA that does not allow copy and pasting from their website via a DRM like mechanism
Wow! I've just encountered my first effective form of DRM - A thorough Slashdotting!
Oh, damn. It loaded this time... Okay...
Huh... Not a very effective way to block cutting-and-pasting... I don't even need to view the source or disable Javascript to do whatever I want. Apparently, "Section 6 of the act says such a prohibition ``shall not apply`` to" FireFox users.
Actually, it did somehow stop me from selecting subparagraphs... This amazing anti-copying tech literally forced me to copy an entire paragraph at a time. Woo-woo, consider me impressed.
there are actually very few such disasters which would completely destroy a photo while leaving a digitized version of that photo intact.
While true, I can burn a dozen copies of my photo collection to DVD and mail them to relatives and friends in various parts of the planet. It any disaster(s) manage to wipe out all of New England, California, Florida, and Australia, I don't think I'll really care much about the survival of my pictures.
More on-topic, I'd suggest just buying a cheap flatbed with an autofeeder. They can usually handle any rectangular size up to the size of the scanner, they work tolerably well (even if it jams frequently on a difficult batch of prints, unjamming every 20-30 sounds a hell of a lot better than manually loading one at a time), and even though most flatbeds go painfully slow, you can load a batch before work and bed and go through perhaps 200 a day.