You missed an important one - news organizations also provide legal departments (good and bad). Bad in that legal sometimes quashes stories unnecessarily. But good in that they often will take a stand and publish something that could get them in hot water but legally in the clear.
Lone wolf reporters can easily get swamped with all sorts of lawsuits - despite anti-SLAPP and shield laws. Enforcing either takes lawyers and lots of money. And between paying for lawyers and having to attend court, it could easily put a reporter out of business.
Anyhow, I don't believe this story. They may have 100,000 paying subscribers, but they probably charged the same rates for the ads as they did when they were free. So they effectively earned 100,000 subscriptions without losing any money. Let's see the numbers after ad rates have been adjusted. Advertisers aren't stupid and they're tracking these things as well. It would be interesting to see if the subscribers have a higher click-through rate or not, and what advertisers are demanding for their dollar.
Yes, but you look at a day's schedule for an average person. You wake up, you get ready, and you are off to work, probably less than 2 hours after you've woken up. When you get home, you are most likely awake for something like 4-5 hours before going to bed. So you tend to be at your home longer in the evenings than you are in the morning. Thus, more lighting needed in the evening at your home if you don't have sunlight streaming through your windows.
So, the energy-efficient CFL and LED lights are off in my house, great. But now the sunlight streaming in, it's still too hot to open the windows, so I run the AC longer. So for the bedroom, instead of the 26W of the 2x 13W CFLs being on, I get to run my 1kW portable AC. Yeah, I'm saving energy!
And these days, once I hit fall, the lights come on when I get home because even though there's sunlight, it isn't terribly useful. I could use the lighter sky during the morning commute though. Instead now it's dark in the morning and dark-ish when I get back.
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am? I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
Because it's impossible to tell intentions. And it'll make setting an alarm extremely complicated.
Setting an alarm looks easy enough - 7AM go off.
But what if it's an alarm for a meeting? Should it be 7AM regardless of DST? What if you have people in different time zones? Is it 7AM where you are, and whatever time it is over there? Or is it whatever time it is over there, and 6/8AM where you are?
With timezones, it's easy. When you factor in DST rules are different for different locations, the time gets a LOT more vague when one place is in DST but the other isn't. Or you have this with places that observe and places that don't.
In fact, the iPhone bug isn't unique - you're going to have this problem as DST starts coming off the next week or two with people not having the right time for conference calls. A variant of this bug continues to show every year as things get internationalized. US/Canada is easy as most places either do DST or don't, and the rules are fixed so other than the places that don't observe DST, there's no issue with alarms. But other countries...
Not to mention, 3D stereoscopic movies have been around for how long? Maybe half a century?
It's something that keeps coming into and out of fashion every decade or so.
No, there are many reasons why 3D stereoscopic vision doesn't work. First, filming is hard. Your camera suddenly has 2 more variables if you want to do it right - inter-ocular distance (distance between lenses), and convergence point (the angle between the two cameras). Contrary to popular belief, a fixed inter-ocular distance and infinite convergence (what you get when you stick two cameras side-by-side) isn't the most enjoyable to watch for more than a few minutes.
So now directors have a new set of variables to worry about - get the filming wrong and the scene has to be re-taken (though there's limited ways to post-process it later). And why those 3D camcorders on the market will always produce "home video" looking 3D (fixed lenses, fixed convergence).
Next, lots of people don't like to wear glasses.
Finally, 3D stereoscopic vision fails if you want to lie down infront of the TV. There's a reason all those 3D displays are set up so you're looking at the screen straight on. Lean to one side or another and the effect's a mess. No more sprawling across the couch - you must sit straight up.
That clearly reminds me PalmOS (the 3.0 to 3.5 Palm time), where you didn't even have enough RAM allocated dynamically to be able to do such a simple thing as decompressing a Gif file (the lookup table didn't fit in it). Like with the iOS now, the doc was pretty much not clear about how much RAM you could allocate when running an application, but we finally found that we could only count on 32MB !!! So, at the end, after 10 years, phone operating systems didn't evolve much in terms of stupidity...:)
You do realize why, right? Like the original iPhone, iPHone 3G, iPOd Touch (original and 2G) only had 128MB of RAM. The iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3G and 4G and iPad only have 256MB, and iPhone4 has 512MB.
Given the kernel takes a bit off, plus all the other stuff running in the background, being able to consistently allocate 32MB seems reasonable. Especially since iOS 4 supports suspending apps and backgrounding services, which means chunks of RAM can be taken away.
And Linux suffers the same fate too - you may have heard of the oomkiller? On embedded platforms, oomkiller can strike quite randomly, depending on what else is running at the same time so even allocating a huge chunk of RAM can easily result in getting killed. At one point, we decided it was best to enable swap on the hard drive even though it killed disk performance - having our embedded app die randomly was a far worse outcome than the losee of performance with swap.
Without swap, your options are limited should people want to allocate huge swaths of RAM. The fact that you get warnings to clean up your RAM is a small advantage. And PalmOS devices have to split working RAM with storage - when you're talking about running in 1/2/4MB of RAM, a lot of tricks are done because you can't blithely allocate RAM.
What do you mean why should they? Who says they should? The retailer and Microsoft made a mistake. This is not much different than if Microsoft had pushed empty boxes through retail outlets and customers got screwed over. Go return the thing to the retailer, ask for money back, and complain to Microsoft support. The particulars of DRM are insignificant here, and the only thing that matters is how the retailer and Microsoft responds, and if they do it again. Same as if they'd done anything else to inconvenience you.
I can tell you that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and publishers get VERY interested in a retailer that breaks street date. Microsoft can't really be blamed for providing an incomplete update as no one other than beta testers are supposed to have it (and they are warned to NOT move their hard drive around because the update will mess up Xbox360s not in the beta)
Retailers are deathly afraid of breaking street date. Individual stores get fined for breaking it (lots of money - 10s of thousands of dollars easily), and even worse, entire chains can get put on industry blacklists that basically mean they never, ever receive product ahead of time - the product they ordered would be shipped on the release date which means their customers only get the product a few days afterwards (plus the lowered margins since they have to pay for overnight shipping back and forth, and the obvious loss of business when customers leave them because they can't get product on time).
That's why stores breaking street date tend to be rare - I think the last case involved some Atari game that a publisher bought retail from another retailer who broke street date for the publisher only. And the publisher refused to identify who sold it to them which is why Atari blamed them for pirating a game - no one should have a copy. I think the last time it happened resulted in people having to wait for the activation servers to come alive - they had the game, but were locked out from playing it. And gamers often find themselves banned for piracy if playing unreleased games online.
Microsoft's mistake is having a beta update available - but that's a given, since they have people with beta Kinect hardware. The only people who should be getting that update are those in the beta program. To demand that the consoles have the latest firmware available isn't an unusual request - you'll find Sony does the same thing, as does Nintendo, as does Steam should you want to play online to prevent cheating.
This is a rare circumstance - beta testers are warned about moving their hard drives around would screw with Xbox Live connectivity, and this retailer seriously messed up. At the very least, Microsoft would be very interested in talking to those people and would probably pay not only to have those Xboxes and Kinects returned back to Microsoft (and exchanged with new ones), but the retailer is going to pay Microsoft for it all.
It's also interesting that most big-name titles have "DO NOT SELL BEFORE xx/xx/xxxx" printed on the stickers on the game itself too - I would presume Kinect hardware and games have similar markings so it's not as if the retailer didn't know.
My guess is, that retailer or chain is now in some very hot water. Usually these things are handled very quietly, but once it starts hitting the news big-time, heads will roll...
Granted, Geocities sites had a lot of terrible design. Blink and marquee tags, unreadable color combinations, cursor animations and sound on pages (aaaargh!) but doesn't anyone find that the simpler Geocities sites are better designed that many of today's sites?
There are a few geocities sites that I've seen that were quite well done. I was wary when I first clicked on those links, but they turned out half decent informative pages.
And really, those geocities pages are just like what pages used to look like on the old myspace...
Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.
Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.
I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well. It's not like these organizations can just stop using that software that they have.
If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.
It's also why Microsoft spends billions of dollars on backwards compatibility. Microsoft would love to just chuck out the crap on Windows and start afresh. Apple does this - if you don't use published APIs, you'll often find your app breaks in the next OS release. Microsoft would love to do this, but it's too hard.
The vast majority for the backwards compatibility is business - where Microsoft makes their money. Fixing bugs that can break an API is something they have to do carefully because it only has to break one critical application that can keep a company from upgrading, and that can easily be 10,000+ licenses we're talking about.
And it's usually the developer's fault (most developers are stupid and do stupid things). In fact, you can count on a lot of developers (for all OSes) to do crap - pass wrong parameters in (that'll break should the function actually check), do horrendous coding practices (polling loops in your battery powered device), etc. And companies have it worse - between contractors and inhouse developers under pressure to "make it work" and "let's make it flexible and overdesign it".
Yes, there is malware. But lets not censor people because their computer may be insecure. We do need to encourage people to produce and publish more. Too much of the web is becoming filler "content" for selling commercials, the same as television and magazines. They don't really care what content is or says, as long as it's attention grabbing it sells ads.
People produce and publish lots already. Given the number of blogs, facebook posts, tweets, youtube videos, etc. that are posted daily, I don't think the problem is it's difficult to publish. Encouraging people to produce more content would just drive the signal to noise ratio down even further because now everyone will be broadcasting their every fart and live streaming of their toilet feces that it'll drive everyone else to the edited gardens where the signal to noise ratio is purportedly higher.
It's why we don't visit hundreds of blogs daily, and use things like RSS and aggregators. There's so much crap out there that having someone do a bit of pruning and posting what they think people are interested in is a product in and of itself. Which is basically just rehashing what some content producer has published. It may not be the same as the big media networks out there, but the little popular ones will just rise to take their place, bringing together eyeballs and content producers. And advertisers to help pay for it all.
But the point stands: whether HTML5 is good or bad is pretty much irrelevant to the inarguable fact that Flash is a security mess. Even if HTML5 turns out to be even worse, that doesn't make the current state of affairs with Flash acceptable. Adobe needs to get its act together, regardless of their competition's CERT alert count. The only bug counts their dev team should care about are their own.
Except that with HTML5, the security mess isn't as big because browsers are updated far more frequently by many people. Adobe is slow to adapt and their security patches are even slower to come out. Whereas HTML5 security issues can be fixed quickly because there are so many browsers out there.
Say something hits HTML5. Firefox comes out with a patch that resolves it, so people use Firefox temporarily while Apple (Safari), Opera, Microsoft, Google fix the bug as well. Or maybe Google finds and fixes the bug and releases a new Chrome. We can all move over temporarily. Either way, between Mozilla and Google, one of them will have the issue fixed first. And maybe Apple and Microsoft could surprise us by having a timely patch as well.
But a flash security hole? Well, we have to wait until Adobe decides to fix it. Like that one they announced yesterday.
It's the same on smartphones - the iPhone has to wait for Apple to release an update to fix any browser flaws, ditto Microsoft. Android users can choose among the millions of other web browsers (like Firefox!).
Anyhow, hopefully the Mozilla guys are smart enough to put in a little drop-down alert (not a popup) when some script wants access to the camera/microphone. Popups don't work (they'll be dismissed without reading), but a drop down notice saying the page wants access to camera/microphone that has to be explicitly approved would be preferable. (Like the "do you want to save your password" prompt - it won't save unless you click OK, just like this won't activate the camera/microphone without permission either).
Yes, you can create a free/open-source implementation of Java, as long as you are licensing from Sun/Oracle under the terms of the Java license.
But really, how long can it be before Oracle's suing open source implementations of Java, too?
I know, GPL, law isn't on their side, etc. But who really thinks that will stop them from trying to manage a win simply based on having more lawyers and money?
Very unlikely actually. You forget that Java on the desktop doesn't make much money - it's far more lucrative to make it free, get people addicted and use Java elsewhere that makes more money - enterprise and mobile devices.
Forget smartphones for a moment, as they are but a tiny drop in total phone sales. The vast majority of those phones ('dumbphones' or 'featurephones') allow apps, and have for years. Those phones run Java, and Sun made (and Oracle makes) a killing licensing Java technology for all those handsets - both from the handset manufacturer and the carriers. And with the hundreds of millions of phones made annually, that's a lot of money.
Oracle's not going to give up such a lucrative source of cash anytime soon. And Android's Java implementation is in the direct line of fire because of it.
I suppose a lot of this comes from the fact that not EVERYONE is aware of what a killswitch would even mean. If you think about how much people overall understand the internet, the majority of people out there probably just assumed it would be nice to have. It is very unfortunate that we live in such an age where ignorance is more dangerous than anything else.
I believe this is more of 69% "don't know what the killswitch is". So they think that in the event of an attack, hitting the killswitch will magically kill the attacker or such. If you defined it as "during a cyberattack, would you justify turning off the Internet", you'll find that proportion is probably "no". After all, people need their Facebook/Farmville/Netflix/Hulu/online shopping/etc.
That and it probably sounds like a nice idea. But they don't realize just how much of their daily routines depend on the Internet.
Really I knew it was fake at it runs android. A playstation phone would run some kind of playstation Firmware/OS. There's no way sony would run android on a "playstation" branded device.
Well, it can run Android underneath, actually.
People seem to be under the mistaken impression Android is free and open. It's not, it's open-source. You can lock down an Android device quite easily, and even slap a pretty shell on top of it. The only thing Sony would give you is the Linux source code, but there's no way you can run it on your PSPhone at all. And they don't even need to work with Google at all! Sony is free to ship the PSPhone without "with Google". Just like all the Archos tablets and Barnes and Noble Nooks (and soon NOok Colors) out there. And probably many more Android-running devices as well.
Root your phone and Sony'll just make a mandatory update to fix that flaw. Even if it's Android.
Sony can easily make a locked-down Android running PSPhone, slap their PS UI layer on top, and have it only work with Playstation Network.
Android's just a platform, which being open-source is very adaptable to the needs of the developer. Alas, it also means that each and every developer outside of the OHA (thus without "with Google") will end up with their own marketplace app store.
*WHAP!* That's for implying that torrents are anywhere near safe.
Do you know how many idiots have a fucking rootkitted Windows install because they got it from torrents? I live in Southern California, I have ABSOLUTELY ZERO shortage of business on that end.
Funny thing about torrents. It turns out that usually the main install executable is perfectly fine - it installs a clean copy of whatever program you're pirating. And since most commercial developers even code-sign their setup.exe files, you can even view the digital signatures on the files and verify them.
However, it's the attached keygen or crack that's usually either a trojan or has a malware wrapper around it. I'd say that most keygens and cracks are infected, and your antivirus is actually telling the truth when it says they're infected. It's practically impossible to get a clean keygen/crack, even ye olde crack sites often now unwittingly host them. It's far more profitable this way as it's trivially easy to release a crack and hope someone bundles it together with the software to make it easy.
And even usenet's not immune. I can't remember a day when browsing I don't see thousands of identical posts containing the same virus executable with different names.
Hell, it's even gotten into movies (the movie's 600MB, but it's just a 2 minute video saying "You need to install XXX to play, please visit www.fishysite.com to download").
Explains the rise of the old.nfo file with the required serial number built in - you can't trust cracks and keygens to actually work.
I suspect it was actually OK. However, the description said it came with some possible "abandonware" which may be true, but is still a copyright violation. And the SDK doesn't allow for distribution of software to which you're not allowed to distribute.
Nothing to do with GPL (there are tons of GPL software on the App Store, and the FSF can always go via Cydia if you want to be Free) since it presumes the developer is complying by providing source somehow (I wonder if there's a way to actually build it into the IPA itself?). But simple copyright violation - it came with software the developer wasn't allowed to distribute.
I wonder if there will be an changes in response to the Oracle Java suit. If I understand correctly, it was a matter of the completeness of the Java support. Perhaps that could mean Android would be able to run apps that weren't intended for the phones?
Well, they could make Dalvik be J2SE compatible, which would come under the free patent license for J2SE only.
Sun never licensed J2ME under a free patent license for a very good reason - J2ME is/was quite lucrative, being on tons of "dumbphones" and "featurephones". Carriers and handset manufacturers were paying a good chunk of money to Sun to license J2ME. And you can bet Oracle's not giving up that source of money, either.
J2SE was given away for free since it was mostly desktop oriented, and for that you want ubiquity moreso than money. The more Java on the desktop, the more Java developers and the wider the platform gets. But considering how much Java is available on phones (smartphones is but a tiny market compared to all phones), there's no need to give away what people are paying for already.
How is it ever right that you be legally barred from modifying a computer you paid for and own? The concept is ludicrous from the start. The Xbox 360 is a specialized computer, you're not leasing or renting it, you bought it, you own it. You should have every right to modify that equipment as you see fit, just as Microsoft has the right to ban that console from accessing the network that they own.
You can modify it yourself just fine. However, the law really hates it when you do it commercially. Do it yourself, fine. Run a business to do it? Well, now you're in a bit more trouble because of the profit motive. If you'll note, there are plenty of people who can do jailbreaking of Xbox360s and Microsoft ignores them. There are plenty of modded Xbox360s out there.
You've been able to do both of these things on the 360 for a while. What would be really nice is the ability to install the game to the hard drive from a disk but not have the disk present, meaning I can enjoy the benefits of finding the cheapest copy of the game AND playing without needing the disk on both the 360s I have at home (carrying the disk between them is a completely unecessary chore put in place purely to prevent piracy, yet another way in which legitimate customers are disadvantaged in order to try and crack down on pirates, meanwhile pirates easily avoid the measures and get all the benefit).
How do you propose to protect against this scenario? I rent a game from Gamefly (think Netflix for games), or get it via Goosiz (??? - it's a used game trading site). I get the game, rip it to my Xbox360. I then return the game (and get a new one, or you get points you can trade for another game, and new releases are worth more).
Lather, rinse, repeat. Given I'm sure a number of/.'ers already do this with Netflix DVDs (rent/rip/return). If Microsoft allowed this, game sales would definitely plummet (and there would be brisk sales for those offering hacked hard drives).
The only way I see it is if the DVD contains a unique serial number, in which case the Xbox verifies it with Microsoft to ensure that the same serial number doesn't show up in multiple places within a short period of time or seem to move around a lot, or show up multiple times simultaneously. This is doable on the PS3 as that is one of ROM-Mark's possible functions is a unique serial number per disc. Don't think it's used, but it's something Sony can use to brick people's PS3s with.
Right now, the only reason the disc is required is the disc is encrypted, and the Xbox360's ripper doesn't rip the key, so it needs the disc to decrypt the on-harddrive copy. Games you download have a separate key in their license, which is why they act differently. But obviously you cannot have Microsoft give you a "ripped DVD key" since it doesn't protect against rent/rip/return. But sell and advertise that you'll modify consoles to play pirated games and the like, and you'll find your modding services severely curtailed. It's a reason most modders don't take cash - you bring your Xbox360 to them and a beer as a courtesy call. This has been going on forever since the PSX days. Most PSX mod stores sell legit games and you have to ask for special service, and don't advertise. There have been enough crackdowns the past 15 years for the PSX, PS2, Xbox, etc. It's also why modders tend to advertise only in small time classified ads and it's almost always done in the home, never an actual place of business.
Still, no love either way - considering the documentation is out there, and there's a community of people willing to do it for a nominal gift, the for-profits tend to rub the whole community the wrong way and get crackdowns going.
It's also why what Sony's doing is more unethical because besides going after the business selling modchips (PS Jailbreak, Lik-Sang) they go after customers as well. The only time Microsoft has done so
On the other hand, for devices like laptops, I doubt that they would put this amount of software into firmware. It is likely that the extra components that turn plain Wi-Fi into Wi-Fi Direct will be entirely software that is delivered by a package of drivers and helper programs that are all provided by the OS or via a setup disc. This sort of of all-in-one setup will likely be offered to Windows and Mac users. However, users of independent operating systems, like Linux, will likely not see this, and will likely still have to manually setup these subsystems. Therefore, for Linux users, I imagine that we will see no real difference at all between a plain Wi-Fi chipset and a Wi-Fi Direct chipset.
It would probably be similar to that "one touch secure" thing you see on wireless routers these days. You push a button on the router, another button on your device (or click the button on your laptop) and automagically the router and your laptop are communicating via WPA2 security. Except expanded for more devices (that one-touch setup really is only for PCs to APs - I don't think I've ever seen it implemented elsewehre).
So Linux might get it yet - all it takes is someone to figure out the protocol and how the keys and such are derived. After all, you push two buttons and the SSID and WPA2 keys are exchanged somehow. A Linux implementation would also happen because there's still a number of embedded Linux devices out there (including stuff like TVs) that would benefit from this.
Though still - given the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and I think even the iPod Touch/iPhones all support wifi ad-hoc gaming (I think the iOS one is via WiFi or Bluetooth)...
Time on the water is cheap compared to time over land, calculating cost per mile. We deal in a lot of stuff in ocean containers, and it is the overland portion of the trip that is expensive. Once it is on a truck, you need one truck and one driver for one container, instead of one vessel and 20 crew for hundreds of containers. And not all the parts come from China. Flying specialized parts from China to NC isn't much different than to NC either, when you are talking about that kind of volume.
Time on land can be cheap as well. If you're shipping mass quantities of product from China to NC, the best route would be to go by water. Once at port, the containers are loaded onto trains because the source and destination are the same. Trucks are used from that point because the destinations are different and the quantities are lower. In which case, having 2/3rds of your population close by means less charges.
Trains are an excellent and economical way to move product, especially if the product you're moving start at the same source and are all heading to the same destination in huge quantities. Not so economical if product has to be picked up or dropped off at multiple locations. So a manufacturing facility near the east coast isn't as bad even if all your source parts come from China.
And Apple is the big bully in the market - their orders are so large Apple can severely distort markets for components. Especially as everyone covets an Apple order so they can tie up production lines for months rather than days as they fulfill the small orders. I'm sure Apple might end up having to own a railroad just to get timely shipments.
Seriously, what does this post have to do with the new custom maps discussed at Blizzcon, or anything else discussed at Blizzcon, other than tangentially that they're both related to SC2? What part of the content of this post hasn't been posted 1000 times before in every story even mentioning SC2 -- or WoW -- in the past year? Not to mention the fact that one of the things you specifically mentioned, chat channels, is a feature they've been promising to add for almost just as long.
Because instead of fixing real problems, Blizzard decides to focus on puff work?
I'm not a fan of b.net 2.0 (it sucks compared to the old b.net). Blizzard has made things better since SC2's release, but things have moved so slowly that I've not really played SC2 much (I had hoped SC2 would tide me over until Halo Reach, but my b.net 2.0 issues took TWO WEEKS to resolve. In the end, I played Flash games and SC2 has been collecting dust ever since. All that's happened is I played 20 minutes from mid-August until September 14 to verify that yes, my account was fixed.
There are still plenty of issues with b.net 2.0, so while new map types and such are cool, I'm sure a bunch of people would prefer Blizzard fix the issues so they can have a regular game of SC2 first rather than a buggy game with a new map.
Especially at something like Blizzcon - make a worthwhile announcement about common complaints. Of course they can't because the fixes to b.net are really in the form of "for an extra $10/month, you can play local LAN games" and "for $5/month you can play your friends in Europe" and such (thanks, Activision. Nope you have fun screwing up Bungie like you did Blizzard). And they can't do that because they haven't finished setting the rates yet.
I was seriously considering pre-ordering Diablo 3 when I got SC2. I'm happy I didn't considering most of the issues aren't with the game itself, but b.net. At least if I get back into Sc2, I have some new gametypes to play. Guess I should get that done before I get charged a monthly fee for them.
If you really wanna, you can use DHCP6 to assign addresses. You can even use NAT if you really want to (as pointless as that would be). Other than that, as long as you can remember that instead of each network having a different (but systematically determinate) broadcast address, it's always ff05::1, you'll be fine.
NATv6, while not defined, probably isn't that useless. Think ISPs are gonna give up that $5/month/ip deal they got going? And they'll probably force-firewall everything but::1 to protect people from inadvertently putting every PC on the network, since NAT served as a (admittedly poor) firewall.
That, and people may refer to IP addresses by number - like I have a test IPv6 network using FC00::/64 (FC00 is the private network prefix - just like 10, 192.168, etc.). And not really want to have to type the gobbledegook that their ISP gives them.
Between the link-local, stateless autoconfig, ISP's address, and a simple FC00::/64, most people will probalby want to type the latter when referring to internal machines. Sure, you can assign tons of IPv6 addresses to an interface, so they will have link-local, ISP-prefix IPv6 address, and private network IPv6 address (FC00::/64). But then again, if a machine fails to get Internet (v6) connectivity, people will probably ping the private or link-local addresses and forget they have a third IP address as well.
Perhaps the biggest issue is the lack of NATv6. Then people could treat IPv6 as a a nicer version of IPv4 instead of a whole new set of things people have to master now. Otherwise we could just give FC00::1, FC00::2, etc to internal PCs, and have IPv6 working internally and the router will translate it to whatever ugly thing their ISP gives them. Their ISP prefix doesn't make it to their internal network, they can forget link-local addresses, and just use FC00::blah as their internal IPv6 addresses just like they do for 192.168.x.x.
Or, even better, a combination NATv6/NATv4 at the router level. Then your existing IPv4 equipment works just fine (the router does the IPv4 to IPv6 translation as necessary), you can experiment with IPv6 slowly (give all your PCs IPv6 private addresses (and NATv6 will translate those as appropriate). IPv6 only hosts can be reached by IPv4 hosts through the NATv4/NATv6 router they have (the router detects it only gets AAAA IPs doing DNS, so it'll map a connection back and forth and do protocol translation). This method also works in that there can be a (pseudo-) domain so you can enter in an IPv6 address into an IPv4 program (e.g., FC00-something-something-something-...-blah.ipv6-literal.net) which the router will see as an attempt to connect to an IPv6 host via IPv4 and map appropriately. And if it's IPv4 reachable, it does NATv4 like everything else.
Sure, it's clunky, but the less people have to do, the faster it'll get adopted. Right now people need new equipment, training and all that to implement IPv6 properly. Or we can design a NATv6 box that anyone can drop in and start doing IPv6 on the external side (alongside IPv4) while not having to do a single thing inside. I'm more willing to replace my home router than to have to now set everything inside (if possible - I have a number of things that don't do IPv6) to do IPv6. Then we could do the transition yesterday because no one cares if you're using IPv6 or IPv4 externally, and internally things worked the same way as they always had. People who want to do pure IPv6 can do so at their leisure, everyone's mom and dad can just replace their linksys router with something and go away happy. Instead now we have hacks like 6to4 and teredo and other things.
Perhaps we can use the remaining year of IPv4 addresses left to properly do such a device so going to IPv6 is just replacing that little linksys box rather than having to setup everything. Corporations with IPv4 only routers and internal gears keep their hardware investments, again they only need to replace their router, etc. Sure it's nasty
They should mention in the summary this is a local privilege escalation exploit only.
Local exploits become remote exploits througha vulnerable service or bad passwords. Just because something can only be done locally means nothing. It just means all I need to do is gain any sort of access then use the exploit. Instant root. And all I needed was just the ability to run a bit of my code. Or if I've previously gotten access in but not used it because running things as "nobody" isn't terribly useful, now with the ability to get root makes it very useful.
It's the same sort of thing that let that jailbreakme.com thing work - Safari downloads a PDF, the PDF display code tries to display it and fails, and runs the exploit code. Exploit code runs as Safari, uses a priviledge escalation hole to get root access, then does lal the jailbreak stuff as root.
Assuming they can actually come up with the money to launch it, I wonder how long it will be up there before it "accidentally" gets hit with a "stray" surface-to-air or air-to-air missile. It'll either be that or incentive to clean up some space "junk." Maybe this is what it will take to get NASA a bigger budget.
Well, testing of surface to LEO missiles will probably not happen - it endangers everything else up there with all the debris. And any explosions themselves will send pieces into new unpredictable orbits as well.
Unless one doesn't have many satellites up there already, shooting down a satellite has the effect of endangering your own satellites as well. I'm sure the DoD would be highly amused should one of their covert satellites get destroyed from space junk caused by testing of said missile.
The only way is if NASA gets funding to do space junk cleanup and they "accidentally" do too good a job.
I think we're probably close to a critical mass of space junk - where one stray piece crashes into satellites and the satellite's pieces cause more collisions. Practically overnight we'd go from satellites everywhere to having nothing but fine mists of dust - a man-made ring like Saturn or something.
Oracle's patent moves probably didn't help, but Apple's normally not a company to be afraid of software patents - they have a big enough portfolio of their own.
(Phone patents are another beast - they're held by companies that Apple often doesn't have as long a history of dealing with and they don't yet have patent non-aggression pacts)
MacOS X will probably be using J2SE, which the Sun/Oracle Java patent licenses will allow. Since Apple ported the Sun JVM, it would be a compliant suite. Sun/Oracle never gave free patent licenses for J2ME, however (as J2ME is very lucrative, being used in most cellphones around the world ("dumbphones" and featurephones)).
Android, however, unless it implements J2SE wouldn't be covered.
As for mobile patents, it would appear most don't have non-aggression pacts, going by all the mobile lawsuits all over the place. At least on the ones that aren't covered by RAND.
It doesn't come as a huge surprise though - I think the Java as an API in MacOS X has been quietly deprecated since Panther or so - you could still use it, but Apple pretty much depreceated it quietly for many years. It does affect a few apps I use though - Vuze and JBidWatcher, but those are on an older Mac that can't run Snow Leopard anyhow.
Actually, it depends on your cellphone plan. Many data plans often give you just a private IP address, NAT'ed or double-NAT to the Internet. Considering most of the usage is just connecting to a remote server and getting information, this works fine. Many cheaper plans also go through a transparent HTTP proxy as well which caches and reduces image quality.
Even the mobile stick/pods/hub plans are often NAT'ed. If you want to do VPN, there's often a VPN tier of service that gets you a real live IP address. If you want it, the cellphone industry makes you pay, as usual.
It's all done because your plan determines which gateway you use, and if you're not authorized to use a particular gateway, either the connection is denied, or you get dinged heavily.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed an important one - news organizations also provide legal departments (good and bad). Bad in that legal sometimes quashes stories unnecessarily. But good in that they often will take a stand and publish something that could get them in hot water but legally in the clear.
Lone wolf reporters can easily get swamped with all sorts of lawsuits - despite anti-SLAPP and shield laws. Enforcing either takes lawyers and lots of money. And between paying for lawyers and having to attend court, it could easily put a reporter out of business.
Anyhow, I don't believe this story. They may have 100,000 paying subscribers, but they probably charged the same rates for the ads as they did when they were free. So they effectively earned 100,000 subscriptions without losing any money. Let's see the numbers after ad rates have been adjusted. Advertisers aren't stupid and they're tracking these things as well. It would be interesting to see if the subscribers have a higher click-through rate or not, and what advertisers are demanding for their dollar.
So, the energy-efficient CFL and LED lights are off in my house, great. But now the sunlight streaming in, it's still too hot to open the windows, so I run the AC longer. So for the bedroom, instead of the 26W of the 2x 13W CFLs being on, I get to run my 1kW portable AC. Yeah, I'm saving energy!
And these days, once I hit fall, the lights come on when I get home because even though there's sunlight, it isn't terribly useful. I could use the lighter sky during the morning commute though. Instead now it's dark in the morning and dark-ish when I get back.
Not to mention, 3D stereoscopic movies have been around for how long? Maybe half a century?
It's something that keeps coming into and out of fashion every decade or so.
No, there are many reasons why 3D stereoscopic vision doesn't work. First, filming is hard. Your camera suddenly has 2 more variables if you want to do it right - inter-ocular distance (distance between lenses), and convergence point (the angle between the two cameras). Contrary to popular belief, a fixed inter-ocular distance and infinite convergence (what you get when you stick two cameras side-by-side) isn't the most enjoyable to watch for more than a few minutes.
So now directors have a new set of variables to worry about - get the filming wrong and the scene has to be re-taken (though there's limited ways to post-process it later). And why those 3D camcorders on the market will always produce "home video" looking 3D (fixed lenses, fixed convergence).
Next, lots of people don't like to wear glasses.
Finally, 3D stereoscopic vision fails if you want to lie down infront of the TV. There's a reason all those 3D displays are set up so you're looking at the screen straight on. Lean to one side or another and the effect's a mess. No more sprawling across the couch - you must sit straight up.
You do realize why, right? Like the original iPhone, iPHone 3G, iPOd Touch (original and 2G) only had 128MB of RAM. The iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3G and 4G and iPad only have 256MB, and iPhone4 has 512MB.
Given the kernel takes a bit off, plus all the other stuff running in the background, being able to consistently allocate 32MB seems reasonable. Especially since iOS 4 supports suspending apps and backgrounding services, which means chunks of RAM can be taken away.
And Linux suffers the same fate too - you may have heard of the oomkiller? On embedded platforms, oomkiller can strike quite randomly, depending on what else is running at the same time so even allocating a huge chunk of RAM can easily result in getting killed. At one point, we decided it was best to enable swap on the hard drive even though it killed disk performance - having our embedded app die randomly was a far worse outcome than the losee of performance with swap.
Without swap, your options are limited should people want to allocate huge swaths of RAM. The fact that you get warnings to clean up your RAM is a small advantage. And PalmOS devices have to split working RAM with storage - when you're talking about running in 1/2/4MB of RAM, a lot of tricks are done because you can't blithely allocate RAM.
I can tell you that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and publishers get VERY interested in a retailer that breaks street date. Microsoft can't really be blamed for providing an incomplete update as no one other than beta testers are supposed to have it (and they are warned to NOT move their hard drive around because the update will mess up Xbox360s not in the beta)
Retailers are deathly afraid of breaking street date. Individual stores get fined for breaking it (lots of money - 10s of thousands of dollars easily), and even worse, entire chains can get put on industry blacklists that basically mean they never, ever receive product ahead of time - the product they ordered would be shipped on the release date which means their customers only get the product a few days afterwards (plus the lowered margins since they have to pay for overnight shipping back and forth, and the obvious loss of business when customers leave them because they can't get product on time).
That's why stores breaking street date tend to be rare - I think the last case involved some Atari game that a publisher bought retail from another retailer who broke street date for the publisher only. And the publisher refused to identify who sold it to them which is why Atari blamed them for pirating a game - no one should have a copy. I think the last time it happened resulted in people having to wait for the activation servers to come alive - they had the game, but were locked out from playing it. And gamers often find themselves banned for piracy if playing unreleased games online.
Microsoft's mistake is having a beta update available - but that's a given, since they have people with beta Kinect hardware. The only people who should be getting that update are those in the beta program. To demand that the consoles have the latest firmware available isn't an unusual request - you'll find Sony does the same thing, as does Nintendo, as does Steam should you want to play online to prevent cheating.
This is a rare circumstance - beta testers are warned about moving their hard drives around would screw with Xbox Live connectivity, and this retailer seriously messed up. At the very least, Microsoft would be very interested in talking to those people and would probably pay not only to have those Xboxes and Kinects returned back to Microsoft (and exchanged with new ones), but the retailer is going to pay Microsoft for it all.
It's also interesting that most big-name titles have "DO NOT SELL BEFORE xx/xx/xxxx" printed on the stickers on the game itself too - I would presume Kinect hardware and games have similar markings so it's not as if the retailer didn't know.
My guess is, that retailer or chain is now in some very hot water. Usually these things are handled very quietly, but once it starts hitting the news big-time, heads will roll...
There are a few geocities sites that I've seen that were quite well done. I was wary when I first clicked on those links, but they turned out half decent informative pages.
And really, those geocities pages are just like what pages used to look like on the old myspace...
It's also why Microsoft spends billions of dollars on backwards compatibility. Microsoft would love to just chuck out the crap on Windows and start afresh. Apple does this - if you don't use published APIs, you'll often find your app breaks in the next OS release. Microsoft would love to do this, but it's too hard.
The vast majority for the backwards compatibility is business - where Microsoft makes their money. Fixing bugs that can break an API is something they have to do carefully because it only has to break one critical application that can keep a company from upgrading, and that can easily be 10,000+ licenses we're talking about.
Some examples
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/06/999999.aspx - 9000 install scripts to install various products for various employees. Now imagine the need to test, verify and fix. And they have source code.
And it's usually the developer's fault (most developers are stupid and do stupid things). In fact, you can count on a lot of developers (for all OSes) to do crap - pass wrong parameters in (that'll break should the function actually check), do horrendous coding practices (polling loops in your battery powered device), etc. And companies have it worse - between contractors and inhouse developers under pressure to "make it work" and "let's make it flexible and overdesign it".
There's a reason thedailywtf.com exists.
Here's another link showing how Microsoft has to patch against developers:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003873.aspx
Sometimes developers lie to the OS:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/11/71307.aspx
Ideally, Microsoft would do something and start fresh. Oh wait, they did. It was called Vista and panned by everyone because things broke.
People produce and publish lots already. Given the number of blogs, facebook posts, tweets, youtube videos, etc. that are posted daily, I don't think the problem is it's difficult to publish. Encouraging people to produce more content would just drive the signal to noise ratio down even further because now everyone will be broadcasting their every fart and live streaming of their toilet feces that it'll drive everyone else to the edited gardens where the signal to noise ratio is purportedly higher.
It's why we don't visit hundreds of blogs daily, and use things like RSS and aggregators. There's so much crap out there that having someone do a bit of pruning and posting what they think people are interested in is a product in and of itself. Which is basically just rehashing what some content producer has published. It may not be the same as the big media networks out there, but the little popular ones will just rise to take their place, bringing together eyeballs and content producers. And advertisers to help pay for it all.
Except that with HTML5, the security mess isn't as big because browsers are updated far more frequently by many people. Adobe is slow to adapt and their security patches are even slower to come out. Whereas HTML5 security issues can be fixed quickly because there are so many browsers out there.
Say something hits HTML5. Firefox comes out with a patch that resolves it, so people use Firefox temporarily while Apple (Safari), Opera, Microsoft, Google fix the bug as well. Or maybe Google finds and fixes the bug and releases a new Chrome. We can all move over temporarily. Either way, between Mozilla and Google, one of them will have the issue fixed first. And maybe Apple and Microsoft could surprise us by having a timely patch as well.
But a flash security hole? Well, we have to wait until Adobe decides to fix it. Like that one they announced yesterday.
It's the same on smartphones - the iPhone has to wait for Apple to release an update to fix any browser flaws, ditto Microsoft. Android users can choose among the millions of other web browsers (like Firefox!).
Anyhow, hopefully the Mozilla guys are smart enough to put in a little drop-down alert (not a popup) when some script wants access to the camera/microphone. Popups don't work (they'll be dismissed without reading), but a drop down notice saying the page wants access to camera/microphone that has to be explicitly approved would be preferable. (Like the "do you want to save your password" prompt - it won't save unless you click OK, just like this won't activate the camera/microphone without permission either).
Very unlikely actually. You forget that Java on the desktop doesn't make much money - it's far more lucrative to make it free, get people addicted and use Java elsewhere that makes more money - enterprise and mobile devices.
Forget smartphones for a moment, as they are but a tiny drop in total phone sales. The vast majority of those phones ('dumbphones' or 'featurephones') allow apps, and have for years. Those phones run Java, and Sun made (and Oracle makes) a killing licensing Java technology for all those handsets - both from the handset manufacturer and the carriers. And with the hundreds of millions of phones made annually, that's a lot of money.
Oracle's not going to give up such a lucrative source of cash anytime soon. And Android's Java implementation is in the direct line of fire because of it.
I believe this is more of 69% "don't know what the killswitch is". So they think that in the event of an attack, hitting the killswitch will magically kill the attacker or such. If you defined it as "during a cyberattack, would you justify turning off the Internet", you'll find that proportion is probably "no". After all, people need their Facebook/Farmville/Netflix/Hulu/online shopping/etc.
That and it probably sounds like a nice idea. But they don't realize just how much of their daily routines depend on the Internet.
Well, it can run Android underneath, actually.
People seem to be under the mistaken impression Android is free and open. It's not, it's open-source. You can lock down an Android device quite easily, and even slap a pretty shell on top of it. The only thing Sony would give you is the Linux source code, but there's no way you can run it on your PSPhone at all. And they don't even need to work with Google at all! Sony is free to ship the PSPhone without "with Google". Just like all the Archos tablets and Barnes and Noble Nooks (and soon NOok Colors) out there. And probably many more Android-running devices as well.
Root your phone and Sony'll just make a mandatory update to fix that flaw. Even if it's Android.
Sony can easily make a locked-down Android running PSPhone, slap their PS UI layer on top, and have it only work with Playstation Network.
Android's just a platform, which being open-source is very adaptable to the needs of the developer. Alas, it also means that each and every developer outside of the OHA (thus without "with Google") will end up with their own marketplace app store.
Funny thing about torrents. It turns out that usually the main install executable is perfectly fine - it installs a clean copy of whatever program you're pirating. And since most commercial developers even code-sign their setup.exe files, you can even view the digital signatures on the files and verify them.
However, it's the attached keygen or crack that's usually either a trojan or has a malware wrapper around it. I'd say that most keygens and cracks are infected, and your antivirus is actually telling the truth when it says they're infected. It's practically impossible to get a clean keygen/crack, even ye olde crack sites often now unwittingly host them. It's far more profitable this way as it's trivially easy to release a crack and hope someone bundles it together with the software to make it easy.
And even usenet's not immune. I can't remember a day when browsing I don't see thousands of identical posts containing the same virus executable with different names.
Hell, it's even gotten into movies (the movie's 600MB, but it's just a 2 minute video saying "You need to install XXX to play, please visit www.fishysite.com to download").
Explains the rise of the old .nfo file with the required serial number built in - you can't trust cracks and keygens to actually work.
I suspect it was actually OK. However, the description said it came with some possible "abandonware" which may be true, but is still a copyright violation. And the SDK doesn't allow for distribution of software to which you're not allowed to distribute.
Nothing to do with GPL (there are tons of GPL software on the App Store, and the FSF can always go via Cydia if you want to be Free) since it presumes the developer is complying by providing source somehow (I wonder if there's a way to actually build it into the IPA itself?). But simple copyright violation - it came with software the developer wasn't allowed to distribute.
Well, they could make Dalvik be J2SE compatible, which would come under the free patent license for J2SE only.
Sun never licensed J2ME under a free patent license for a very good reason - J2ME is/was quite lucrative, being on tons of "dumbphones" and "featurephones". Carriers and handset manufacturers were paying a good chunk of money to Sun to license J2ME. And you can bet Oracle's not giving up that source of money, either.
J2SE was given away for free since it was mostly desktop oriented, and for that you want ubiquity moreso than money. The more Java on the desktop, the more Java developers and the wider the platform gets. But considering how much Java is available on phones (smartphones is but a tiny market compared to all phones), there's no need to give away what people are paying for already.
You can modify it yourself just fine. However, the law really hates it when you do it commercially. Do it yourself, fine. Run a business to do it? Well, now you're in a bit more trouble because of the profit motive. If you'll note, there are plenty of people who can do jailbreaking of Xbox360s and Microsoft ignores them. There are plenty of modded Xbox360s out there.
How do you propose to protect against this scenario? I rent a game from Gamefly (think Netflix for games), or get it via Goosiz (??? - it's a used game trading site). I get the game, rip it to my Xbox360. I then return the game (and get a new one, or you get points you can trade for another game, and new releases are worth more).
Lather, rinse, repeat. Given I'm sure a number of /.'ers already do this with Netflix DVDs (rent/rip/return). If Microsoft allowed this, game sales would definitely plummet (and there would be brisk sales for those offering hacked hard drives).
The only way I see it is if the DVD contains a unique serial number, in which case the Xbox verifies it with Microsoft to ensure that the same serial number doesn't show up in multiple places within a short period of time or seem to move around a lot, or show up multiple times simultaneously. This is doable on the PS3 as that is one of ROM-Mark's possible functions is a unique serial number per disc. Don't think it's used, but it's something Sony can use to brick people's PS3s with.
Right now, the only reason the disc is required is the disc is encrypted, and the Xbox360's ripper doesn't rip the key, so it needs the disc to decrypt the on-harddrive copy. Games you download have a separate key in their license, which is why they act differently. But obviously you cannot have Microsoft give you a "ripped DVD key" since it doesn't protect against rent/rip/return.
But sell and advertise that you'll modify consoles to play pirated games and the like, and you'll find your modding services severely curtailed. It's a reason most modders don't take cash - you bring your Xbox360 to them and a beer as a courtesy call. This has been going on forever since the PSX days. Most PSX mod stores sell legit games and you have to ask for special service, and don't advertise. There have been enough crackdowns the past 15 years for the PSX, PS2, Xbox, etc. It's also why modders tend to advertise only in small time classified ads and it's almost always done in the home, never an actual place of business.
Still, no love either way - considering the documentation is out there, and there's a community of people willing to do it for a nominal gift, the for-profits tend to rub the whole community the wrong way and get crackdowns going.
It's also why what Sony's doing is more unethical because besides going after the business selling modchips (PS Jailbreak, Lik-Sang) they go after customers as well. The only time Microsoft has done so
It would probably be similar to that "one touch secure" thing you see on wireless routers these days. You push a button on the router, another button on your device (or click the button on your laptop) and automagically the router and your laptop are communicating via WPA2 security. Except expanded for more devices (that one-touch setup really is only for PCs to APs - I don't think I've ever seen it implemented elsewehre).
So Linux might get it yet - all it takes is someone to figure out the protocol and how the keys and such are derived. After all, you push two buttons and the SSID and WPA2 keys are exchanged somehow. A Linux implementation would also happen because there's still a number of embedded Linux devices out there (including stuff like TVs) that would benefit from this.
Though still - given the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and I think even the iPod Touch/iPhones all support wifi ad-hoc gaming (I think the iOS one is via WiFi or Bluetooth)...
Time on the water is cheap compared to time over land, calculating cost per mile. We deal in a lot of stuff in ocean containers, and it is the overland portion of the trip that is expensive. Once it is on a truck, you need one truck and one driver for one container, instead of one vessel and 20 crew for hundreds of containers. And not all the parts come from China. Flying specialized parts from China to NC isn't much different than to NC either, when you are talking about that kind of volume.
Time on land can be cheap as well. If you're shipping mass quantities of product from China to NC, the best route would be to go by water. Once at port, the containers are loaded onto trains because the source and destination are the same. Trucks are used from that point because the destinations are different and the quantities are lower. In which case, having 2/3rds of your population close by means less charges.
Trains are an excellent and economical way to move product, especially if the product you're moving start at the same source and are all heading to the same destination in huge quantities. Not so economical if product has to be picked up or dropped off at multiple locations. So a manufacturing facility near the east coast isn't as bad even if all your source parts come from China.
And Apple is the big bully in the market - their orders are so large Apple can severely distort markets for components. Especially as everyone covets an Apple order so they can tie up production lines for months rather than days as they fulfill the small orders. I'm sure Apple might end up having to own a railroad just to get timely shipments.
Because instead of fixing real problems, Blizzard decides to focus on puff work?
I'm not a fan of b.net 2.0 (it sucks compared to the old b.net). Blizzard has made things better since SC2's release, but things have moved so slowly that I've not really played SC2 much (I had hoped SC2 would tide me over until Halo Reach, but my b.net 2.0 issues took TWO WEEKS to resolve. In the end, I played Flash games and SC2 has been collecting dust ever since. All that's happened is I played 20 minutes from mid-August until September 14 to verify that yes, my account was fixed.
There are still plenty of issues with b.net 2.0, so while new map types and such are cool, I'm sure a bunch of people would prefer Blizzard fix the issues so they can have a regular game of SC2 first rather than a buggy game with a new map.
Especially at something like Blizzcon - make a worthwhile announcement about common complaints. Of course they can't because the fixes to b.net are really in the form of "for an extra $10/month, you can play local LAN games" and "for $5/month you can play your friends in Europe" and such (thanks, Activision. Nope you have fun screwing up Bungie like you did Blizzard). And they can't do that because they haven't finished setting the rates yet.
I was seriously considering pre-ordering Diablo 3 when I got SC2. I'm happy I didn't considering most of the issues aren't with the game itself, but b.net. At least if I get back into Sc2, I have some new gametypes to play. Guess I should get that done before I get charged a monthly fee for them.
NATv6, while not defined, probably isn't that useless. Think ISPs are gonna give up that $5/month/ip deal they got going? And they'll probably force-firewall everything but ::1 to protect people from inadvertently putting every PC on the network, since NAT served as a (admittedly poor) firewall.
That, and people may refer to IP addresses by number - like I have a test IPv6 network using FC00::/64 (FC00 is the private network prefix - just like 10, 192.168, etc.). And not really want to have to type the gobbledegook that their ISP gives them.
Between the link-local, stateless autoconfig, ISP's address, and a simple FC00::/64, most people will probalby want to type the latter when referring to internal machines. Sure, you can assign tons of IPv6 addresses to an interface, so they will have link-local, ISP-prefix IPv6 address, and private network IPv6 address (FC00::/64). But then again, if a machine fails to get Internet (v6) connectivity, people will probably ping the private or link-local addresses and forget they have a third IP address as well.
Perhaps the biggest issue is the lack of NATv6. Then people could treat IPv6 as a a nicer version of IPv4 instead of a whole new set of things people have to master now. Otherwise we could just give FC00::1, FC00::2, etc to internal PCs, and have IPv6 working internally and the router will translate it to whatever ugly thing their ISP gives them. Their ISP prefix doesn't make it to their internal network, they can forget link-local addresses, and just use FC00::blah as their internal IPv6 addresses just like they do for 192.168.x.x.
Or, even better, a combination NATv6/NATv4 at the router level. Then your existing IPv4 equipment works just fine (the router does the IPv4 to IPv6 translation as necessary), you can experiment with IPv6 slowly (give all your PCs IPv6 private addresses (and NATv6 will translate those as appropriate). IPv6 only hosts can be reached by IPv4 hosts through the NATv4/NATv6 router they have (the router detects it only gets AAAA IPs doing DNS, so it'll map a connection back and forth and do protocol translation). This method also works in that there can be a (pseudo-) domain so you can enter in an IPv6 address into an IPv4 program (e.g., FC00-something-something-something-...-blah.ipv6-literal.net) which the router will see as an attempt to connect to an IPv6 host via IPv4 and map appropriately. And if it's IPv4 reachable, it does NATv4 like everything else.
Sure, it's clunky, but the less people have to do, the faster it'll get adopted. Right now people need new equipment, training and all that to implement IPv6 properly. Or we can design a NATv6 box that anyone can drop in and start doing IPv6 on the external side (alongside IPv4) while not having to do a single thing inside. I'm more willing to replace my home router than to have to now set everything inside (if possible - I have a number of things that don't do IPv6) to do IPv6. Then we could do the transition yesterday because no one cares if you're using IPv6 or IPv4 externally, and internally things worked the same way as they always had. People who want to do pure IPv6 can do so at their leisure, everyone's mom and dad can just replace their linksys router with something and go away happy. Instead now we have hacks like 6to4 and teredo and other things.
Perhaps we can use the remaining year of IPv4 addresses left to properly do such a device so going to IPv6 is just replacing that little linksys box rather than having to setup everything. Corporations with IPv4 only routers and internal gears keep their hardware investments, again they only need to replace their router, etc. Sure it's nasty
Local exploits become remote exploits througha vulnerable service or bad passwords. Just because something can only be done locally means nothing. It just means all I need to do is gain any sort of access then use the exploit. Instant root. And all I needed was just the ability to run a bit of my code. Or if I've previously gotten access in but not used it because running things as "nobody" isn't terribly useful, now with the ability to get root makes it very useful.
It's the same sort of thing that let that jailbreakme.com thing work - Safari downloads a PDF, the PDF display code tries to display it and fails, and runs the exploit code. Exploit code runs as Safari, uses a priviledge escalation hole to get root access, then does lal the jailbreak stuff as root.
Well, testing of surface to LEO missiles will probably not happen - it endangers everything else up there with all the debris. And any explosions themselves will send pieces into new unpredictable orbits as well.
Unless one doesn't have many satellites up there already, shooting down a satellite has the effect of endangering your own satellites as well. I'm sure the DoD would be highly amused should one of their covert satellites get destroyed from space junk caused by testing of said missile.
The only way is if NASA gets funding to do space junk cleanup and they "accidentally" do too good a job.
I think we're probably close to a critical mass of space junk - where one stray piece crashes into satellites and the satellite's pieces cause more collisions. Practically overnight we'd go from satellites everywhere to having nothing but fine mists of dust - a man-made ring like Saturn or something.
MacOS X will probably be using J2SE, which the Sun/Oracle Java patent licenses will allow. Since Apple ported the Sun JVM, it would be a compliant suite. Sun/Oracle never gave free patent licenses for J2ME, however (as J2ME is very lucrative, being used in most cellphones around the world ("dumbphones" and featurephones)).
Android, however, unless it implements J2SE wouldn't be covered.
As for mobile patents, it would appear most don't have non-aggression pacts, going by all the mobile lawsuits all over the place. At least on the ones that aren't covered by RAND.
It doesn't come as a huge surprise though - I think the Java as an API in MacOS X has been quietly deprecated since Panther or so - you could still use it, but Apple pretty much depreceated it quietly for many years. It does affect a few apps I use though - Vuze and JBidWatcher, but those are on an older Mac that can't run Snow Leopard anyhow.
Actually, it depends on your cellphone plan. Many data plans often give you just a private IP address, NAT'ed or double-NAT to the Internet. Considering most of the usage is just connecting to a remote server and getting information, this works fine. Many cheaper plans also go through a transparent HTTP proxy as well which caches and reduces image quality.
Even the mobile stick/pods/hub plans are often NAT'ed. If you want to do VPN, there's often a VPN tier of service that gets you a real live IP address. If you want it, the cellphone industry makes you pay, as usual.
It's all done because your plan determines which gateway you use, and if you're not authorized to use a particular gateway, either the connection is denied, or you get dinged heavily.