Er... rental places pay special licenses and have special "rental" versions made by the official distributor. Go buy any ex-rental DVD and you can see it's specially made for the rental market by the original distributor. I now, because the only time I ever rented a video myself (and yes, I mean video), the rental place had to put up a big sign saying that they didn't have something like Shrek because it was not available to rental shops at all because of a change in distribution license.
Renting is *not* just some guy renting out ordinary DVD's illicitly (you'll notice that the copyright warnings on your DVD's prohibit that) - they have a special arrangement and special rental-only material that only rental shops can use, and they no doubt pay a percentage of each rental to the relevant company. There is nothing "dishonest" about renting a movie - damn, it was nearly £5 for 24 hours last time I looked at it, and modern things like LoveFilm.com aren't any better.
I don't really care. So long as he didn't just sit on his arse, that's a hell of a chunk of money to live off for a couple of years. And given that that's only *direct* sales, given that most of his games are on Steam, given that it's almost *all* profit etc. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that he won't have been starving in 2009 or 2010 unless he's an idiot. 2006/7 might be a different story but then that's out of scope of this conversation.
"Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you"
Which is exactly why some people decide "fuck it" and go and break people's copy protection schemes. 1% of your customers is a big chunk of your income, especially in a economic slump. And that 1% are likely to be the most tech-savvy, probably quite large consumers of such content and, by strange coincidence, quite capable of destroying your petty copy protection and letting everyone in the world have it, safe in the knowledge that that life in a non-DMCA country.
Just a for-instance. If a company doesn't care about me, I don't care about that company either. I wouldn't break such things myself but hell, if someone comes up with a way to consume their content MILLIONS like me (even if we're only 1%) and millions of others that spot an opportunity will be doing what they can to view your content.
I'm not saying that companies that "play fair" have zero piracy, that would be an insane claim, but it's the act of deliberately excluding customers that WANT to consume your content that creates the majority of the problem in the first place.
Signed,
A happy hacked-get_iplayer user who download iPlayer content that I'm legally entitled to view, via an unofficial channel, because it's the only damn way I can view it properly and in a reasonable manner.
If the place I'm dining at employs people on the basis that they needs tips to reach reasonable wages, that's reason enough not to dine there. My tipping or not won't help them at all, they are working for an unreasonable employer (by definition). Chances are that in such places, tips are shared, or the restaurant takes X% of tips anyway.
My tip is not to fund your wages. It's a special, voluntary recognition of a job well done. Bleeding-heart stories might make me part with more but that's not for the person writing the receipt to decide. Either pay your staff properly, or allow customers to tip hassle-free if they WISH to and don't try to guilt me into providing a tip because I either have to create a fuss in your restaurant to have the tip removed, or I have to pretend that your employees are brainless slaves that must work there because it's the only place in the world that will offer them employment and every employer is similarly unreasonable.
It's as much the employers fault, in that case, as it is the employees. It takes *seconds* to adjust the bill so that all prices include a decent guaranteed wage for your employees, so that your employees *always* get a decent wage and still the outstanding employees will get more. Anything else is price-gouging to maximise profit at the expense of the quality of your employees.
A tip is an out-of-band recompense for doing something extraordinary. Put it on my bill without my express permission, and be prepared for a fuss.
Re:Was this a leak or reverse-engineering?
on
HDCP Master Key Revealed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Copy protection using encryption is inherently insecure, because you have to give genuine customers some way of viewing material, thus some way to break the encryption. The second you do that, you are going against the established design criteria of modern encryption. No encryption specifically guards against multiple genuine recipients having multiple, genuine, valid decryption keys for ever and ever, and preventing *ANYONE* (even the genuine recipients) from ever decrypting that content.
Copy protection requires a WHOLE different design, one which no one has really bothered with, and any copy-protection system that advertises that it "uses AES" or any other such nonsense can possibly be taken seriously. That's *NOT* what it was designed to not and *NOT* what it will do. Hell, even DES, AES, etc. had stated lifetimes which were much shorter than the current copyright extension terms. Encryption and copy-protection try to solve different problems. Their combined use can complicate but not prevent such things from happening.
Because, as in all things, most people are honest.
If I want a movie, I buy it. That might mean buying it second-hand, or buying it from a friend, but I don't do the shady deals in pubs with strangers. Most people are like me, and most people actually pay for stuff. VCR's and DVD-R's are, of course, used for piracy - because they are recording devices. But if you didn't have those, people have camcorders, or webcams, or any one of a million and one recording devices.
The recording device, or the technology built into any recorded media, does not stop anything, at all, ever, except genuine, honest customers doing something quite reasonable. Anyone who wants an illegal copy can get one in any one of a million different ways. Hell, the early DVD rippers basically screenshotted the screen of a DVD player so many times a second and recorded the audio. It's not hard at all, because of the "analog hole". But the only people who bother to go to that amount of effort are established pirates and those who genuinely believe they are doing something quite reasonable and should be allowed to do it.
Despite popular opinion, that's NOT the majority of people.
Like all encryption systems - if you learn enough about the keys, you can crack them and recover the original keys. In this case, just 40 devices with HDCP and a lot of mathematics is virtually guaranteed to recover the master key.
Don't use encryption to secure a digital product. It *will* fail because, at some point, you have to give people a key to access that product - thus they have access to the decrypted stream and to a number which is reliant on the private key. Encryption does NOT take account of protecting against an authorised user with a valid decryption key, or numbers of those users working in a concerted effort to crack your encryption. It's a misuse of the technology and any company that claims the opposite (e.g. all DRM companies) are lying to you.
"Positech Games is an indie video game developer from the UK. Owned by ex-Lionhead Studios programmer Cliff Harris, the company was formed in 1997..."
This is not a "guy in the backroom" kind of indie. This is a "breakaway from the large publisher's" indie. This guy used to work on The Sims and things like that. There is, incidentally, no such thing as a one-man company in the UK (as it claims on the website). You must, by law, have at least a Company Secretary as well - and they can't be the same person. It's probably his wife or something but still, it's misleading to claim a "one-man company", especially when he's hired people to do all sorts of work on those games.
"Cliffski, of Positech Games, made $189,423 in 2008 from direct sales."
That means he is way within the professional games league, and way within the scope of hiring, say, accountants, artists, programmers, and anything else, even if they don't work for his "company" (which is actually just a liability-sink for anything he does wrong).
"As with many indie video game projects, development cost was a significant issue. After an initial experiment spending several hundred dollars to purchase stock spaceship models, Harris eventually solicited quotes from 3 different artists and selected the most expensive one. The user interface was constructed by Chris Hildenbrand, a UI expert, leaving Harris to do his own special effect and user module graphics."
Thus, it's still not a one-man operation and actually he *did* hire texture artists to do all these things way before he even made a penny on it. So I'd personally expect a DLC to be a bit more than a couple of textures and some datafiles.
I played GSB. It was a little bit like Critical Mass (http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/ - another indie developer) but with fancy graphics that killed my laptop, and a very boring, very un-interactive, main game. I'm not sure the DLC would be worth anything at all, considering the game barely qualified its purchase price for me.
This is really just a PR stunt - I noticed Steam deals on the same things only the other day. This is just a way to get free publicity and, to be honest, this guy can afford to buy his own. I don't begrudge him a successful game, or a wage from paying customers, but to claim it's a one-man operation is a BIG stretch of the definition and there are thousands of others like him out there that don't need free advertising posing as a "unique event" that's happened many times in the past, especially for a very, very basic DLC add-on that could probably be knocked up in a matter of hours.
As a former subscriber who has disabled adverts on this site, I'm more pissed off with Slashdot for posting this "event" than I am the developer trying to get some free press for his game, even if I don't like his game.
There is nothing more likely to get me to argue about a bill than "A X% gratuity has been included in your total price". Has it really? Bloody cheek, what makes you think I was going to give you one in the first place and/or that it would ever be a particular price?
I call it rude. It's like the porters who cough politely and wait for their money. The most they will get will be a small lozenge and a recommendation to see their doctor about that cough. Don't say a thing, though, and just walk right out of the room after lugging all my stuff up five flights of stairs and you *will* get yourself a nice tip.
People: stop "tipping" others who do a shit job. You're just encouraging people to do a shit job because they still get paid for it. Instead, tip the ones who do a good job TWICE as much and don't pay the lazy, rude, idiots anything past your legal obligation.
And, yes, the whole "pay what you want" thing is really just a tip-based scenario, so it's hardly ground-breaking. More important would be the results of such an exercise AFTER you done all those sales. I'd be interested in learning just how much good work is appreciated voluntarily, having bought such things myself.
Multi-million dollars graphics render farms and we still can't draw convincing fire, trees or animate a human walking smoothly (even with motion capture you often "see the join" between one action and another).
Bought a house two years ago. We have the paper deeds. They trump all electronic records (the conveyancer was a family friend, so she explained it all). I call bullshit.
Most people / mortgage companies store their paper deeds in a secured area, like a safe deposit box, that's all. The land registry's electronic records are only concerned with certain details and are not a definitive legal ruling. And the land registry keep paper copies too, why do you think you have to sign so many forms?
I'm not saying it isn't possible but saying that paper deeds don't exist is crap. If it was on the BBC, link to it (there'll be a news story on the site still, for years yet). When you buy a house in the UK, the person who does most of the legwork is usually a solicitor (either for you, or your mortgage company) - they don't do stuff lightly, don't generally accept things that aren't on paper (or provide sufficient proof that they can't be sued for not doing their job), and don't want to get into a fight over who owns £200,000 worth of house because they didn't photocopy something.
I actually bought my house via fax, for at least part of it, from Corfu. But still that was only a last-minute oversight after mountains of paperwork (and even checking of passports in the UK to ensure we were who we said we were) and the conveyancer (a long-term family friend) refused to let the sale go through without something from us on paper - anything else and our word would have been good enough to that friend but they honestly CAN'T take that sort of risk, with the financial rules how they are.
Without modern farming methods, the world population would still be what it was 100 years ago (it's currently twice what it was in the 60's, so you can extrapolate back if you need to). That is, if we had the last 100 years of our tech stripped from us today, most of us would starve to death because we would not have enough food to support the current population, die of "treatable" disease (like diarrhoea, diabetes, food allergies etc. for instance) and all sorts of things. In comparison things like using a calculator or search engine are NOTHING. Thus, it's pretty stupid to worry about what if our kids can't read a book if they have no idea how to grow enough food to eat.
How much of the land you own is dedicated to your food production? How much food could you grow if you dedicated every inch of land you own to food production, even using modern fertilisers? What do you think those numbers were for your great-grandfather 100 years ago? See? It's silly isn't it? Worrying about whether our kids can research stuff in a library is nonsense in comparison.
You've made the critical (and silly) assumption that everything has to be streamed from a single location (i.e. no local caches or geo-distributed traffic - unicast may suggest that but, in that case, nobody sensible ever uses unicast in that sense anyway - my Youtube vids don't come from the one server that holds that one particular video via one IP route) and that, if you account for local traffic, the Internet isn't *ALREADY* pushing that amount of traffic around, and you're also looking at it as a cumulative big number rather than the other end.
There are about 20 million broadband lines to ordinary homes in the UK. Let's say that "broadband" is classed as 1MBps or up (not far from the official figure). That means that just the UK home market (a tiny piss-ant of a country with a poor quality, monopolistic telecoms firm in charge of pretty much all of that) does about one sixth of what you're saying already (so you're already orders of magnitude out in your assertions before we even start) - admittedly for a single channel but still, it's nothing. The UK home broadband market, counting the traffic just from the ISP to the home user (i.e. the slowest proportion, and that can't be multicast or otherwise "cached" any more locally than it already is), does (in theory) 1/6th of that demonstration channel TODAY, NOW, ALREADY (and probably more because the average speed and number of connections are always moving upwards). Nobody's stressing about what will happen tomorrow, notice, because... well, nobody's really seen anything to stress about yet. Multiply in the OTHER end of the equation (e.g. UK hosts and servers, UK traffic transporters, business networks, leased lines, dedicated fibre, IPTV networks, phone line networks, etc.) and that's absolutely nothing. So the crappy UK home broadband infrastructure is capable today of doing what you claim is impossible globally.
Now people don't use 1MBps connections constantly (but it's moving that way), and some might argue the backend on BT's end doesn't exist but then you have to think about Japan and Finland where uncontended home 100Mbps connections are the rule rather than the exception, in the same way that people don't watch every channel at the same time, and not everybody watches them at the same time. Large IP transports are exchanging Tb/s and Pb/s of traffic and have been for many years. CERN produces (or will soon) 15 petabytes annually, and will distribute that data over the Internet to many countries (11 at the last count I think) who will distribute it to 100's of "second-tier" users for analysis. That's ONE endpoint. And therefore, by definition, even the international links are pushing more than that. At absolute most, in our imaginary scenario, one household will be streaming no more than 3 or 4 channels simultaneously, on average (notice how I've overestimated). That's within the bounds, even with "perfect" HDTV which most people can't even tell the difference for, of an average bog-standard ADSL2 installation and backend network today.
And that's *without* dirty tricks. BBC iPlayer caches even streamed TV - most (not all) ISP's have a box that receives a single stream from the BBC (so an entire ISP's customers watching a big event means ONE stream to the ISP - like the recent Olympics and World Cup where no ISP fell over whatsoever) and then distribute that to their customers at their end. If you add up all the ISP bandwidth, it's a lot. If you add up the actual, sensible, thought-out routed bandwidth, it's nothing. Even the BBC caching boxes cache *EVERYTHING* that the channel broadcasts, so even the archived programs and everything they show, it's just one stream to one box in one ISP and then pushed on from there, live or not.
You also made the mistake of sticking "cannot support... multicast streaming" in your rebuttal - which instantly kills your argument *again* because depending on how well you multicast, you can cut the traffic by orders of magnitude again really quickly. But multicast is basically shit and
We will never be "the same" as we were yesterday. Our great-grandparents probably didn't go to school. Our grandparents probably did but left as early as they could. Our parents almost certainly attended school and got some qualifications. We are required by law to attend school and almost certain will leave with a raft of skills - not a SINGLE one of which will be Latin.
My great-grandparents probably did not have electricity, or bulbs, so they could not study at night without breathing in carcinogens from a fire hazard. My grandparents were evacuated from their education into villages and towns to avoid undirected "batch-dropped" bombs. My parents never saw a computer until they already had children.
Humans do not stay the same. The skills my parents need are different to the ones I need and always will be. I *do not* need to memorise lots of phone numbers because I have multiple SIM cards and online backups that do that for me. I don't even KNOW most of the numbers I dial regularly. My grandparents probably had a 4-digit phone number when they first used one, and barely knew anyone they could phone. My great-grandparents did not have biros to write with, and I don't write with one now (I can't remember the last time I had to write anything down, except on computer!).
Stop complaining about "drastic changes" that the human body or mind has to undergo. It's ALWAYS in flux, my daughter will not learn the same language that I've spent my life learning. If we're talking critical changes, then things like planetary legacies, etc. are infinitely more important than "our children may use a calculator instead of their fingers" or any of the things mentioned in this article.
Humans are a flexible, adaptable, learning machine. That's what makes us so fantastically successful (relatively speaking to other mammals our size). Our brains will automatically adapt to what they need to learn to support modern life. In this case, probably long-term memory will eventually make way for improvisational and logistical skills. That's not a BAD thing.
How do you think you will push the backbone and critical points to upgrade their networks to cope with such capacity without first pushing the limit further and further?
And to say that the Internet can't handle such things is junk that was disproved about ten or more years ago when everyone got off their modems and jumped onto broadband. iPlayer is the UK's most popular website, in terms of Gb's or traffic, and basically streams dozens of channels 24/7 including archive footage and HD. ITV Player does the same for another TV channel over here. Sky player does the same for all registered Sky satellite users. 4oD is all run via Youtube and includes almost complete back catalogues of all their shows (including all 136 episodes of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway comedy series and other things that were filmed 20+ years ago). Youtube does no end of streaming from all over the Internet all the time. Hell, most adverts online include some Flash video at some point.
The bandwidth is more than present - large Internet hubs often have 50% occupancy on their lines at all times to cope with surges, traffic increase etc. There are no large ISP's going out of business because they can't afford the bandwidth (and the fair-use-policy brigade is a profit-eeking measure, not a cost-cutting one), there are no overloaded Internet bottlenecks slowing countries down. Hell, I pay £10 a month for a VPS in London Docklands and they give me 500Gb a month (and that's their SMALLEST package) - that sort of bandwidth was unheard of 10 years ago and I don't think I could ever fill it without posting huge downloads or videos online.
Multicast is difficult to configure, tricky to route and firewall and needs all sorts of support out of these cheapy £10 home routers that ISP's offer. And, actually, you don't save that much compared to just unicasting the damn thing anyway, except internally.
Bandwidth is not the problem - ISP's fair-use policies, traffic management and things like 3G connections are the bottlenecks. Everything else is more than capable of doing everything you'd ever need. Hell, WebM isn't as efficient as some of the codecs on offer to Youtube and yet it's most cost-effective for them to use WebM than anything else, even for HD. The BBC are still researching and using Dirac, and all the UK TV companies are signing up to something called Project Kangaroo which will offer all channels, archives and streaming, to UK residents. It's actually CHEAPER than broadcasting for them.
The bottlenecks are not on the main lines and the servers, streaming is within the realm of the average casual website hoster. The bottlenecks are political, and client-side (i.e. computers not capable of display HD quality movies at 60Hz).
And the more video we use, the more the central backbones have to upgrade to cope. They aren't screaming that they can't do that at the moment (and 10Gb/s networking gear is nearing business-standard-tech at the moment, with 100Gb/s on the horizon), the universities are putting orders-of-magnitude more data across the standard Internet every day (look at CERN's traffic usage!) and "Internet2" isn't having any infrastructure problems either. The tech is there. The limits is probably not going to come until every home has a true 1Gb/s connection and, even then, I doubt you'll hit any signficant barriers.
Give it a few years and they might think about it. There are already tons of professions on the official Australia Skilled Occupation lists (http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/sol/)- the "good" ones generally require you to pass a strict competency test from the Austrlian computing organisations or provide a significant, verifiable history to them. Even then, the "sought-after" professions are more management and farming than they are actual IT - Cartographer, Picture Framer, Piano Tuner, Sign Writer and Welder are on there, though.
If you apply for a visa, for example, it's often easier to get one if you can harvest a crop than anything else. You can even get exclusive Working Holiday extension visas only if you work on that side of things.
I had a Working Holiday Visa for Australia - I could have entered Australia at any time in the past two years and stayed for a year, no-questions-asked, and then applied for migration. I have about 17 days left to use it and I can't see myself doing it. Australia are kicking themselves in the nuts in terms of the IT I specialise in (government / education). But to actually get a longer term visa, they wanted me to take tests, prove work history in management, etc. And it would have been easier for me to qualify as a fruit picker or kangaroo-poo cleaner (seriously) than an IT guy.
When you can feed a family of four, and a little extra, on something that can fit in a garden shed, then we'll talk. Until then, you're just a *very* bad farmer trying to farm something that's extremely widespread, not very nutritious, and would have grown in your pond using technology that costs an awful lot more than just planting a decent bush or tree in your back yard.
Algae is okay for fish to eat (but even then usually have something else too), and you can then eat those fish, but to suggest eating algae can solve world hunger is ridiculous - if that was the case, we'd have been doing this en-masse for millenia instead of all this processed food / farming lark.
Feed my family "for free", or reduce my petrol bills and then we can take you seriously. Until then, you might as well claim that you've lived the past 50 years by sucking moss off rocks at your local beach while everyone else is eating the fish, shellfish, local birds, etc.
My laptop cost about £400 about two years ago. It is *not* top-of-the-range. I favoured hard disk space, a large screen, and lots of ports over any other factor. Still, it's dual-core. It runs XP, so there is no GPU acceleration of the desktop etc.
I load opera. I open my saved sessions that contains 26 of the websites that I check every day. Before I can blink, 26 tabs open and my download light starts going crazy. By the time the first link has loaded, they've *all* loaded. I can't read faster than my computer can display them and lots of them are quite heavy and they are all loading simultaneously over bog-standard 54Mbps wireless with a bog-standard home broadband connection. I even have all caching disabled (except for a tiny RAM cache in Opera) because, basically, it's a waste of my precious disk space and RAM because I can't notice the difference between that and just loading each time. Firefox has a MUCH longer loading time but performs pretty much the same. IE doesn't seem much different but I have an ancient version and probably wouldn't be allowed to install IE9 on XP anyway.
Flash games work. iPlayer works. I can have dozens of windows open and loading simultaneously and the only bottleneck is the Internet connection. However, even in work with a squid cache that prioritises caching all those sites (I'm the IT manager) and two 24Mbit lines, I still can't click on the first tab before it's loaded its content (and the first tab is all that matters, because the rest have to wait until I've read the first one).
GPU acceleration is worthless here. I'm really *not* going to notice and the future is smaller and smaller devices that load at these same speeds. My phone's HTML rendering is lousy-slow but then the connection is lousy-slow and my phone is ancient. Anything half-modern renders the first text in less than a second and can scroll smoothly. That's all that counts.
In an age where average people think it's acceptable for a computer to take 5-10 minutes to boot, to take 20-30 seconds to show something actually loading after they double-click, where machines are bogged down with AV and anti-spyware and firewall and toolbars and everything else, GPU acceleration won't do shit. If people go for it, it'll be because it was enforced, or because of the "HDTV/Bluray/3D" gotta-have-it phenomenon.
That problem has nothing to do with processors, speeds, hardware or anything else. It's shitty software that's not designed for purpose, bundled into an over-specced generalised gadget that claims to make phone calls and passing it off as a phone.
ARM aren't to blame, nor are any ARM chips. Blame the stupid manufacturer that did a bad job of writing "ATH" down a serial line.
1) Include a programming language that's not directly related to the task at hand and/or allows execution of dangerous statements. (Javascript in Adobe, VBA in Office, etc.) 2) Execute said code whenever and wherever you see it (VBScript / Javascript viewed in IE, ability to execute CScript, Adobe running Javascript and Flash content found inside PDF) 3) Use native code execution as part of your file format (WMF vulnerability - not relevant to PDF as far as I know but I couldn't be certain myself). 4) Bundle your program so that it integrates into everything (web browser, printer list, startup list, etc.) so there are as many avenues of accidental execution as possible open to an attacker targeting a large user-base program. 5) Introduce more and more levels of crap into the format, way beyond its original design (Font embedding, Javascript execution, form submission, JPEG, PNG, SVG, Flash, etc. direct embedding rather than converting to your supposedly "portable" document format etc.)
Pretty much, if you see a program do any of the above, it's likely to fall on its arse at some point, security-wise.
Or, you could just stop buying that shit. Sorta like number 3 but no nearly so complex and inter-related. The fact that lots of people still do means that the majority of them don't care about those same things.
I don't know how many times I've had to explain to people about the iTunes installation limits, DVD/BluRay region encoding, HDCP and other similar things, but it doesn't stop *anyone* from actually using that service/product. We that actually care are in the minority. And it's *incredibly* simple for anyone to get their head around - if you don't like the terms of what you signed up to, don't sign up to it.
Unfortunately, almost everyone I know has a contract-paid mobile phone, sometimes with upgrades every year even if they don't want them, has an un-cracked DVD player or DVD software, has things bought from the Wii store that they can't easily move onto another Wii, has a car that won't allow them to use third party parts without destroying the entire warranty, etc.etc.etc.
There's an awful lot of consumer protection enshrined in law that these EULA's claim to override. Most of the time they don't, because you can't give away certain rights, especially in a "shrinkwrap" license that you haven't signed. But how many lawsuits are there over them? How many people just re-buy a TomTom map when they break their device and want to move it onto their new one? People just don't care because, in everyday life, in ordinary usage, there's no need to worry about such things. Accepting that you "can't" copy something and buying yet-another-copy takes significantly time, effort and money (if you think of your time as being billable) than fighting for the opposite.
Such apathy is rampant. You can't change that amount of people's minds that quickly, especially not for something that has a very minor impact on their life.
And the rules are ever so simple: Don't do business with companies that play these games, don't buy products that have these "features".
That's always been the rule, whether you're talking pyramid schemes, endowment mortgages, oxygen-free gold-plated audio cables or whatever else. If the product will cost you time/money because of a problem, or doesn't do what it says it does, don't put money their way.
People like myself have a running blacklist. There are products/companies that I will not give money to again. People assume that I'm actually not enforcing it that strictly but actually there's yet to be a single company that's pulled itself off that list. It includes everything from mobile phone companies that like to hang up on me, to the chip shop where the woman was extremely grumpy and grouchy but still wanted to take my money, to the IT suppliers that I've used during the course of my career, to the software manufacturers that have ignored repeated bug reports, to the GPS manufacturer that refused to refund me after changing the way their "Whole of Europe" maps worked (making me connect to the Internet to download and install each country's map every time I cross a border kinda spoils the point of having a "Whole of Europe" map in the first place), to the bank that laughed at my mortgage application (whereas the little mortgage shop next door gladly gave me a better deal without query and has had many years of perfect, on-time accurate payments every since).
My personal blacklist does not dent Sony, or HDCP manufacturers, or the mobile phone companies one bit. I'm not stupid, I know that. But it sure hurts the local shops, small businesses and general reputation of them among my friends and colleagues.
So the iPad just has a copy of the textbook. There may be other, collaborative tools, but then surely any difference is due to the extra tools, not the electronic textbook version. Thus what you're actually testing is "does having an iPad make the student better?" not "does having an electronic copy of the textbook make the student better?".
And, working in schools since I left university, as the IT guy, I can tell you the result now. The IT-literate ones will work wonders and maybe perform slightly better with such tools. The rest will stay the same or even decrease. Blanket-applying such technology in the expectation that it makes everything better for everyone is like saying that giving everyone a lesson in quantum physics from a German-speaking teacher makes us all experts in quantum physics and German. People are different, learn differently, and can't be blanket-taught. Teachers, the real ones who know how to teach, have been saying this and using differential techniques for DECADES. And then some idiot, who normally has little or no experience in education, or who can learn only in one particular method themselves, suggests such things and demonstrates a tiny, short-term gain while the students are taking part in a prototype trial and then announces that everyone, everywhere can do the same for ever.
Giving a kid a pen instead of a quill does not make them a better student. Giving a kid a lined book does not make them a better student. Giving a kid a homework diary does not make them a better student. Giving a kid a computer does not make them a better student.
Expand for other unnecessary gumph. A student, by definition, is someone who is being taught. In the early stages of their education, this is *all* via outside influences (e.g. school) that are required to be compulsory for the majority of students to actually achieve anything (i.e. left to their own devices, 99.9% of people would not go to school if they didn't have to). That teaching must be done by a teacher, who they are in contact with for 8 hours a day, every working day, and who needs to be specially trained, good at imparting information in lots of different ways, and quite intellectual. This is how schools have worked since the very first one, until recently. Now they are lucky if one of the several staff in the classroom pays them attention for more than a minute at a time. Guess what - improving that teacher (by removing bad teachers, re-training mediocre teachers, and paying good teachers what they are worth) makes a *million* times more difference than any gadget you thrust on the kids. In the UK in the past 20-something years, only a handful of teachers have actually been removed from the profession because they were inadequate - this is statistically extremely unlikely and is due to *nobody* in education wanting to push bad teachers out - terrible teachers are given fabulous references so that "some other sucker" (i.e. another school with kids requiring an education) takes them off their hands.
The ancient Greeks had teachers, the Romans had teachers, the Victorians had teachers. In previous generations, kids were made to sit in classes all day long. Bad behaviour and any distractions were not tolerated. The kids learned because they had to, whether they had gadgets or not. They did not have the excuses of dyslexia, ADHD, or irritable bowel syndrome. They were taught. Yes, there were still a load that "failed", there was still trouble, still people leaving school without an adequate education, but they were required to be there for many years LESS than students currently are, were taught much more to a higher standard, and actually "failed" on exams at the time with work that would now be marked as B or A grades. Go take a look at any 1960's "O"-level (the O stands for "ordinary" - no political correctness here) Maths paper and compare it to a modern A-level (the A stands for "advanced" - and O-levels are now called "General Certificates of Secondary Education") - which the kids now ta
Would I buy a computer game knowing it came from North Korea?
Break the question down before you even think about answering it - how do I know if something has been programmed in, made in, assembled in, or had any other part of its production process in North Korea, or anywhere else for that matter? Where was Doom 3 programmed? Does it use code written by slave children in India who are force-fed C++ classes instead of their normal education, paid 1p a day and beaten regularly? I have *no* idea and no real way to prove either way. Thus singling out North Korea makes no sense.
If it is produced in North Korea, how do I *KNOW* what the funds it generates are used to support? Do you know what ID Software spent your $29.99 on? Maybe they sent it to a Gay & Lesbian support group, or funded investment in an African orange grove, or maybe they actually did use it to buy one of their employees a hand gun - you have NO idea. Thus singling out a particular company in North Korea based on accusations and vague connections makes no sense.
If it comes to my attention that a game is produced by a company who has other actions I disapprove of, will I stop buying the game? Well, I hate Sony. I disagree with most of their actions. Their involvement on a project might well kill it off in my mind. But it very much depends on their involvement and precisely which actions we're talking about, whether they affect my morals and whether or not that should be related to some other product they are producing. I disagree with Afghanistan growing opium, but does that mean I can't buy fruit from Afghanistan IN CASE some of the drug-money was used to sow the field in the first place? Or, surely, giving them an increased trade in other, more legitimate, goods will provide them an incentive to move away from growing opium? I have no idea. Thus singling out a particular game because of tenuous links to things I may not approve it by a single company in its production chain makes no sense.
Assuming we KNOW that this software was written in North Korea. Assume that we KNOW that every company along the line knew this. Assume that we KNOW that the North Korean's are then taking those "trained" programmers and using them to program nuclear missiles. Does that mean I'd not buy the game? Still unlikely. The production of the game didn't make them program nuclear missiles (or whatever), someone else did. At some point someone clearly crossed the boundary between making a flash game and funding cyberwarfare. That's the person who is the problem, that's the person who should be asked probing questions. That's the part that the government needs to step in and stop ALL trade with that country, not half-assed this company is "good", this company is "bad" because it employs "X" crap.
And I take offence at the tone of the submission. Trying to make me feel guilty by association is almost entirely racism. The article is trying to paint *all* North Korean activity (including programming a video game) as somehow evil. Would I buy it? If it was a good game that I was interested in, yes. Sadly I don't have an infinite lifetime in which to research every individual, company, funding source and country involved in the production of even a minor flash game. If you have a problem with North Korea, lobby for a blanket trade ban. Otherwise, please stop spreading such rampant discrimination because a newspaper company has a flash game on its website.
The GP2X is a dual 200Mhz processor handheld console that runs off 2 AA batteries and was released in 2005. It was not that revolutionary, it was not that expensive, it was not that difficult to program. You can program on both chips so long as you don't mind temporarily ditching the in-built MPEG-decoding firmware that runs on one of them (it's replaced on each bootup) or being very careful where you tread. The Nintendo DS was multiprocessor. And not in the unconventional sense of "one CPU and a handful of support chips", two real, full, general purpose, programmable chips. Most modern games consoles have more than one real chip, many of them using multiple specialised processors (e.g. IBM's Cell in the PS3 which is a "9-chip" component).
Massive parallelism has been around forever and it's in consumer electronics already and has been for quite a while. It might not be *designed* like that but you have always had home computers with multiple processors that can be programmed to operate in parallel. There were people misusing floppy drive controller chips and sound processors to do all sorts, and the GPU is "another" processor now, and one that's extremely good at running lots of things in parallel. Do you think that your CPU could ever keep up with software-rendering on a modern game? Or that a single-core "general purpose" GPU could?
Your professor is right, except for his timescales - parallelism is already here, right down to tiny embedded systems, and has been for years. Just that hardly anybody uses it without some seriously specialised programming design beforehand. That tells you quite a lot about how expensive it is to use effectively. Hell, to a new programmer, even threading and re-entrancy can be a huge nightmare for them and our solution at the moment is blocking locks and things like that (so that we can *think* about them being seperate linear instances). If you can become an expert in parallelism you'll probably have a good career ahead - but a specialist one. Everyone else is just waiting until they can pass everything off to a dedicated chip and get told when it's finished - they don't *WANT* to properly program parallel programs (tongue twister!), they just want everything to happen serially and faster, or the closest approximation to that that they can get.
Seriously, when you program any graphics library, you just throw a huge amount of 3D object data into another processor and let it get on with it. You don't care if it runs at 6GHz, or whether it's got a separate internal processor for every pixel of the final image running at 1MHz, so long as it damn-well draws the screen as quickly as possible and tells you when it's done. Parallelism is a hidden facet of modern architecture precisely because it's so necessary and so damn complicated to do it right. Programmers, on the whole, are much happier with linear processes. It's taken games this long to pass off physics, AI, etc. to a separate thread, and we've had threading for DECADES.
Parallel things are just a placeholder at the moment because we can't up the GHz much and if we could, it wouldn't help that much with the tasks we want to do. So even operating systems are handing off everything they can to other chips - Ethernet TCP offloading, GPU, sound-processors, RAID, you name it. It's all about making the general-purpose CPU's do as little as possible so the main use of the computer can continue uninterrupted. And parallelism is only used to increase the things we can do, not break tasks into much more efficient subtasks. Most people who have dual-core or above in the early days wanted it so that other things (e.g. antivirus) got out of the way of the real process (e.g. games!) so it could have as much time running in it's single thread as possible.
Parallelism can see fantastic gains but it needs to be done from the design stage each time. Mainstream multi-core products are too much of a moving target to do anything more fancy than run a number of huge, single-threaded programs at the same time. That's *not* the same thing, and never will be. Parallelism is specialised. Games programmers would give their right arm for everyone to have a single 100GHz processor instead.
That's like banning video recorders because people use them to infringe copyright (please stop calling it piracy - it's legally inaccurate). The majority use of video recorders was entirely legitimate, and at the time every company that produced media was trying to find some way to stop the "horrendous" technology which was going to destroy television / movies forever. The same happened with DVD recorders, tape recorders, photocopiers, etc. before it. And still, the MAJORITY use was entirely legitimate.
Whether the majority used of hacked PS3's is legitimate or not, there is an ENTIRELY legitimate use for them - hell, even governments and research projects were using PS2's and XBoxes with hacked firmware to build compute clusters. And just because there are both legitimate and illegal practices possible, both of which can ONLY be made possible if a single act is performed, does not make that act illegal.
If I'd ever owned any console past the SNES, I wouldn't *care* what the reasoning was - I would have bought a device that had a feature that the company arbitrarily removed without option ("not upgrading" isn't an option if that stops you using the console for another entirely legitimate purpose - i.e. buying new games that you bought). Thus, it's a potential breach of contract WHATEVER the EULA says (50% of the average EULA is unenforceable, the same as 50% of any particular large chain's refund policies, etc.). I'd be demanding my right to the full range of features that I bought AND I'd be deliberately hacking the thing too.
It was a stupid decision to remove an established feature that people *did* take into account when they were purchasing. But then, I've never bought a Sony device in my life and I haven't bought any modern consoles (does a £10 Dreamcast from a bootsale count if it was for my mother?). Just because there's an illegal use does not render my right to perform perfectly legitimate acts void.
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Er... rental places pay special licenses and have special "rental" versions made by the official distributor. Go buy any ex-rental DVD and you can see it's specially made for the rental market by the original distributor. I now, because the only time I ever rented a video myself (and yes, I mean video), the rental place had to put up a big sign saying that they didn't have something like Shrek because it was not available to rental shops at all because of a change in distribution license.
Renting is *not* just some guy renting out ordinary DVD's illicitly (you'll notice that the copyright warnings on your DVD's prohibit that) - they have a special arrangement and special rental-only material that only rental shops can use, and they no doubt pay a percentage of each rental to the relevant company. There is nothing "dishonest" about renting a movie - damn, it was nearly £5 for 24 hours last time I looked at it, and modern things like LoveFilm.com aren't any better.
I don't really care. So long as he didn't just sit on his arse, that's a hell of a chunk of money to live off for a couple of years. And given that that's only *direct* sales, given that most of his games are on Steam, given that it's almost *all* profit etc. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that he won't have been starving in 2009 or 2010 unless he's an idiot. 2006/7 might be a different story but then that's out of scope of this conversation.
"Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you"
Which is exactly why some people decide "fuck it" and go and break people's copy protection schemes. 1% of your customers is a big chunk of your income, especially in a economic slump. And that 1% are likely to be the most tech-savvy, probably quite large consumers of such content and, by strange coincidence, quite capable of destroying your petty copy protection and letting everyone in the world have it, safe in the knowledge that that life in a non-DMCA country.
Just a for-instance. If a company doesn't care about me, I don't care about that company either. I wouldn't break such things myself but hell, if someone comes up with a way to consume their content MILLIONS like me (even if we're only 1%) and millions of others that spot an opportunity will be doing what they can to view your content.
I'm not saying that companies that "play fair" have zero piracy, that would be an insane claim, but it's the act of deliberately excluding customers that WANT to consume your content that creates the majority of the problem in the first place.
Signed,
A happy hacked-get_iplayer user who download iPlayer content that I'm legally entitled to view, via an unofficial channel, because it's the only damn way I can view it properly and in a reasonable manner.
If the place I'm dining at employs people on the basis that they needs tips to reach reasonable wages, that's reason enough not to dine there. My tipping or not won't help them at all, they are working for an unreasonable employer (by definition). Chances are that in such places, tips are shared, or the restaurant takes X% of tips anyway.
My tip is not to fund your wages. It's a special, voluntary recognition of a job well done. Bleeding-heart stories might make me part with more but that's not for the person writing the receipt to decide. Either pay your staff properly, or allow customers to tip hassle-free if they WISH to and don't try to guilt me into providing a tip because I either have to create a fuss in your restaurant to have the tip removed, or I have to pretend that your employees are brainless slaves that must work there because it's the only place in the world that will offer them employment and every employer is similarly unreasonable.
It's as much the employers fault, in that case, as it is the employees. It takes *seconds* to adjust the bill so that all prices include a decent guaranteed wage for your employees, so that your employees *always* get a decent wage and still the outstanding employees will get more. Anything else is price-gouging to maximise profit at the expense of the quality of your employees.
A tip is an out-of-band recompense for doing something extraordinary. Put it on my bill without my express permission, and be prepared for a fuss.
Copy protection using encryption is inherently insecure, because you have to give genuine customers some way of viewing material, thus some way to break the encryption. The second you do that, you are going against the established design criteria of modern encryption. No encryption specifically guards against multiple genuine recipients having multiple, genuine, valid decryption keys for ever and ever, and preventing *ANYONE* (even the genuine recipients) from ever decrypting that content.
Copy protection requires a WHOLE different design, one which no one has really bothered with, and any copy-protection system that advertises that it "uses AES" or any other such nonsense can possibly be taken seriously. That's *NOT* what it was designed to not and *NOT* what it will do. Hell, even DES, AES, etc. had stated lifetimes which were much shorter than the current copyright extension terms. Encryption and copy-protection try to solve different problems. Their combined use can complicate but not prevent such things from happening.
Because, as in all things, most people are honest.
If I want a movie, I buy it. That might mean buying it second-hand, or buying it from a friend, but I don't do the shady deals in pubs with strangers. Most people are like me, and most people actually pay for stuff. VCR's and DVD-R's are, of course, used for piracy - because they are recording devices. But if you didn't have those, people have camcorders, or webcams, or any one of a million and one recording devices.
The recording device, or the technology built into any recorded media, does not stop anything, at all, ever, except genuine, honest customers doing something quite reasonable. Anyone who wants an illegal copy can get one in any one of a million different ways. Hell, the early DVD rippers basically screenshotted the screen of a DVD player so many times a second and recorded the audio. It's not hard at all, because of the "analog hole". But the only people who bother to go to that amount of effort are established pirates and those who genuinely believe they are doing something quite reasonable and should be allowed to do it.
Despite popular opinion, that's NOT the majority of people.
Like all encryption systems - if you learn enough about the keys, you can crack them and recover the original keys. In this case, just 40 devices with HDCP and a lot of mathematics is virtually guaranteed to recover the master key.
Don't use encryption to secure a digital product. It *will* fail because, at some point, you have to give people a key to access that product - thus they have access to the decrypted stream and to a number which is reliant on the private key. Encryption does NOT take account of protecting against an authorised user with a valid decryption key, or numbers of those users working in a concerted effort to crack your encryption. It's a misuse of the technology and any company that claims the opposite (e.g. all DRM companies) are lying to you.
"Positech Games is an indie video game developer from the UK. Owned by ex-Lionhead Studios programmer Cliff Harris, the company was formed in 1997..."
This is not a "guy in the backroom" kind of indie. This is a "breakaway from the large publisher's" indie. This guy used to work on The Sims and things like that. There is, incidentally, no such thing as a one-man company in the UK (as it claims on the website). You must, by law, have at least a Company Secretary as well - and they can't be the same person. It's probably his wife or something but still, it's misleading to claim a "one-man company", especially when he's hired people to do all sorts of work on those games.
"Cliffski, of Positech Games, made $189,423 in 2008 from direct sales."
That means he is way within the professional games league, and way within the scope of hiring, say, accountants, artists, programmers, and anything else, even if they don't work for his "company" (which is actually just a liability-sink for anything he does wrong).
"As with many indie video game projects, development cost was a significant issue. After an initial experiment spending several hundred dollars to purchase stock spaceship models, Harris eventually solicited quotes from 3 different artists and selected the most expensive one. The user interface was constructed by Chris Hildenbrand, a UI expert, leaving Harris to do his own special effect and user module graphics."
Thus, it's still not a one-man operation and actually he *did* hire texture artists to do all these things way before he even made a penny on it. So I'd personally expect a DLC to be a bit more than a couple of textures and some datafiles.
I played GSB. It was a little bit like Critical Mass (http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/ - another indie developer) but with fancy graphics that killed my laptop, and a very boring, very un-interactive, main game. I'm not sure the DLC would be worth anything at all, considering the game barely qualified its purchase price for me.
This is really just a PR stunt - I noticed Steam deals on the same things only the other day. This is just a way to get free publicity and, to be honest, this guy can afford to buy his own. I don't begrudge him a successful game, or a wage from paying customers, but to claim it's a one-man operation is a BIG stretch of the definition and there are thousands of others like him out there that don't need free advertising posing as a "unique event" that's happened many times in the past, especially for a very, very basic DLC add-on that could probably be knocked up in a matter of hours.
As a former subscriber who has disabled adverts on this site, I'm more pissed off with Slashdot for posting this "event" than I am the developer trying to get some free press for his game, even if I don't like his game.
There is nothing more likely to get me to argue about a bill than "A X% gratuity has been included in your total price". Has it really? Bloody cheek, what makes you think I was going to give you one in the first place and/or that it would ever be a particular price?
I call it rude. It's like the porters who cough politely and wait for their money. The most they will get will be a small lozenge and a recommendation to see their doctor about that cough. Don't say a thing, though, and just walk right out of the room after lugging all my stuff up five flights of stairs and you *will* get yourself a nice tip.
People: stop "tipping" others who do a shit job. You're just encouraging people to do a shit job because they still get paid for it. Instead, tip the ones who do a good job TWICE as much and don't pay the lazy, rude, idiots anything past your legal obligation.
And, yes, the whole "pay what you want" thing is really just a tip-based scenario, so it's hardly ground-breaking. More important would be the results of such an exercise AFTER you done all those sales. I'd be interested in learning just how much good work is appreciated voluntarily, having bought such things myself.
Multi-million dollars graphics render farms and we still can't draw convincing fire, trees or animate a human walking smoothly (even with motion capture you often "see the join" between one action and another).
Bought a house two years ago. We have the paper deeds. They trump all electronic records (the conveyancer was a family friend, so she explained it all). I call bullshit.
Most people / mortgage companies store their paper deeds in a secured area, like a safe deposit box, that's all. The land registry's electronic records are only concerned with certain details and are not a definitive legal ruling. And the land registry keep paper copies too, why do you think you have to sign so many forms?
I'm not saying it isn't possible but saying that paper deeds don't exist is crap. If it was on the BBC, link to it (there'll be a news story on the site still, for years yet). When you buy a house in the UK, the person who does most of the legwork is usually a solicitor (either for you, or your mortgage company) - they don't do stuff lightly, don't generally accept things that aren't on paper (or provide sufficient proof that they can't be sued for not doing their job), and don't want to get into a fight over who owns £200,000 worth of house because they didn't photocopy something.
I actually bought my house via fax, for at least part of it, from Corfu. But still that was only a last-minute oversight after mountains of paperwork (and even checking of passports in the UK to ensure we were who we said we were) and the conveyancer (a long-term family friend) refused to let the sale go through without something from us on paper - anything else and our word would have been good enough to that friend but they honestly CAN'T take that sort of risk, with the financial rules how they are.
Without modern farming methods, the world population would still be what it was 100 years ago (it's currently twice what it was in the 60's, so you can extrapolate back if you need to). That is, if we had the last 100 years of our tech stripped from us today, most of us would starve to death because we would not have enough food to support the current population, die of "treatable" disease (like diarrhoea, diabetes, food allergies etc. for instance) and all sorts of things. In comparison things like using a calculator or search engine are NOTHING. Thus, it's pretty stupid to worry about what if our kids can't read a book if they have no idea how to grow enough food to eat.
How much of the land you own is dedicated to your food production? How much food could you grow if you dedicated every inch of land you own to food production, even using modern fertilisers? What do you think those numbers were for your great-grandfather 100 years ago? See? It's silly isn't it? Worrying about whether our kids can research stuff in a library is nonsense in comparison.
You've made the critical (and silly) assumption that everything has to be streamed from a single location (i.e. no local caches or geo-distributed traffic - unicast may suggest that but, in that case, nobody sensible ever uses unicast in that sense anyway - my Youtube vids don't come from the one server that holds that one particular video via one IP route) and that, if you account for local traffic, the Internet isn't *ALREADY* pushing that amount of traffic around, and you're also looking at it as a cumulative big number rather than the other end.
There are about 20 million broadband lines to ordinary homes in the UK. Let's say that "broadband" is classed as 1MBps or up (not far from the official figure). That means that just the UK home market (a tiny piss-ant of a country with a poor quality, monopolistic telecoms firm in charge of pretty much all of that) does about one sixth of what you're saying already (so you're already orders of magnitude out in your assertions before we even start) - admittedly for a single channel but still, it's nothing. The UK home broadband market, counting the traffic just from the ISP to the home user (i.e. the slowest proportion, and that can't be multicast or otherwise "cached" any more locally than it already is), does (in theory) 1/6th of that demonstration channel TODAY, NOW, ALREADY (and probably more because the average speed and number of connections are always moving upwards). Nobody's stressing about what will happen tomorrow, notice, because... well, nobody's really seen anything to stress about yet. Multiply in the OTHER end of the equation (e.g. UK hosts and servers, UK traffic transporters, business networks, leased lines, dedicated fibre, IPTV networks, phone line networks, etc.) and that's absolutely nothing. So the crappy UK home broadband infrastructure is capable today of doing what you claim is impossible globally.
Now people don't use 1MBps connections constantly (but it's moving that way), and some might argue the backend on BT's end doesn't exist but then you have to think about Japan and Finland where uncontended home 100Mbps connections are the rule rather than the exception, in the same way that people don't watch every channel at the same time, and not everybody watches them at the same time. Large IP transports are exchanging Tb/s and Pb/s of traffic and have been for many years. CERN produces (or will soon) 15 petabytes annually, and will distribute that data over the Internet to many countries (11 at the last count I think) who will distribute it to 100's of "second-tier" users for analysis. That's ONE endpoint. And therefore, by definition, even the international links are pushing more than that. At absolute most, in our imaginary scenario, one household will be streaming no more than 3 or 4 channels simultaneously, on average (notice how I've overestimated). That's within the bounds, even with "perfect" HDTV which most people can't even tell the difference for, of an average bog-standard ADSL2 installation and backend network today.
And that's *without* dirty tricks. BBC iPlayer caches even streamed TV - most (not all) ISP's have a box that receives a single stream from the BBC (so an entire ISP's customers watching a big event means ONE stream to the ISP - like the recent Olympics and World Cup where no ISP fell over whatsoever) and then distribute that to their customers at their end. If you add up all the ISP bandwidth, it's a lot. If you add up the actual, sensible, thought-out routed bandwidth, it's nothing. Even the BBC caching boxes cache *EVERYTHING* that the channel broadcasts, so even the archived programs and everything they show, it's just one stream to one box in one ISP and then pushed on from there, live or not.
You also made the mistake of sticking "cannot support... multicast streaming" in your rebuttal - which instantly kills your argument *again* because depending on how well you multicast, you can cut the traffic by orders of magnitude again really quickly. But multicast is basically shit and
We will never be "the same" as we were yesterday. Our great-grandparents probably didn't go to school. Our grandparents probably did but left as early as they could. Our parents almost certainly attended school and got some qualifications. We are required by law to attend school and almost certain will leave with a raft of skills - not a SINGLE one of which will be Latin.
My great-grandparents probably did not have electricity, or bulbs, so they could not study at night without breathing in carcinogens from a fire hazard. My grandparents were evacuated from their education into villages and towns to avoid undirected "batch-dropped" bombs. My parents never saw a computer until they already had children.
Humans do not stay the same. The skills my parents need are different to the ones I need and always will be. I *do not* need to memorise lots of phone numbers because I have multiple SIM cards and online backups that do that for me. I don't even KNOW most of the numbers I dial regularly. My grandparents probably had a 4-digit phone number when they first used one, and barely knew anyone they could phone. My great-grandparents did not have biros to write with, and I don't write with one now (I can't remember the last time I had to write anything down, except on computer!).
Stop complaining about "drastic changes" that the human body or mind has to undergo. It's ALWAYS in flux, my daughter will not learn the same language that I've spent my life learning. If we're talking critical changes, then things like planetary legacies, etc. are infinitely more important than "our children may use a calculator instead of their fingers" or any of the things mentioned in this article.
Humans are a flexible, adaptable, learning machine. That's what makes us so fantastically successful (relatively speaking to other mammals our size). Our brains will automatically adapt to what they need to learn to support modern life. In this case, probably long-term memory will eventually make way for improvisational and logistical skills. That's not a BAD thing.
How do you think you will push the backbone and critical points to upgrade their networks to cope with such capacity without first pushing the limit further and further?
And to say that the Internet can't handle such things is junk that was disproved about ten or more years ago when everyone got off their modems and jumped onto broadband. iPlayer is the UK's most popular website, in terms of Gb's or traffic, and basically streams dozens of channels 24/7 including archive footage and HD. ITV Player does the same for another TV channel over here. Sky player does the same for all registered Sky satellite users. 4oD is all run via Youtube and includes almost complete back catalogues of all their shows (including all 136 episodes of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway comedy series and other things that were filmed 20+ years ago). Youtube does no end of streaming from all over the Internet all the time. Hell, most adverts online include some Flash video at some point.
The bandwidth is more than present - large Internet hubs often have 50% occupancy on their lines at all times to cope with surges, traffic increase etc. There are no large ISP's going out of business because they can't afford the bandwidth (and the fair-use-policy brigade is a profit-eeking measure, not a cost-cutting one), there are no overloaded Internet bottlenecks slowing countries down. Hell, I pay £10 a month for a VPS in London Docklands and they give me 500Gb a month (and that's their SMALLEST package) - that sort of bandwidth was unheard of 10 years ago and I don't think I could ever fill it without posting huge downloads or videos online.
Multicast is difficult to configure, tricky to route and firewall and needs all sorts of support out of these cheapy £10 home routers that ISP's offer. And, actually, you don't save that much compared to just unicasting the damn thing anyway, except internally.
Bandwidth is not the problem - ISP's fair-use policies, traffic management and things like 3G connections are the bottlenecks. Everything else is more than capable of doing everything you'd ever need. Hell, WebM isn't as efficient as some of the codecs on offer to Youtube and yet it's most cost-effective for them to use WebM than anything else, even for HD. The BBC are still researching and using Dirac, and all the UK TV companies are signing up to something called Project Kangaroo which will offer all channels, archives and streaming, to UK residents. It's actually CHEAPER than broadcasting for them.
The bottlenecks are not on the main lines and the servers, streaming is within the realm of the average casual website hoster. The bottlenecks are political, and client-side (i.e. computers not capable of display HD quality movies at 60Hz).
And the more video we use, the more the central backbones have to upgrade to cope. They aren't screaming that they can't do that at the moment (and 10Gb/s networking gear is nearing business-standard-tech at the moment, with 100Gb/s on the horizon), the universities are putting orders-of-magnitude more data across the standard Internet every day (look at CERN's traffic usage!) and "Internet2" isn't having any infrastructure problems either. The tech is there. The limits is probably not going to come until every home has a true 1Gb/s connection and, even then, I doubt you'll hit any signficant barriers.
Give it a few years and they might think about it. There are already tons of professions on the official Australia Skilled Occupation lists (http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/sol/)- the "good" ones generally require you to pass a strict competency test from the Austrlian computing organisations or provide a significant, verifiable history to them. Even then, the "sought-after" professions are more management and farming than they are actual IT - Cartographer, Picture Framer, Piano Tuner, Sign Writer and Welder are on there, though.
If you apply for a visa, for example, it's often easier to get one if you can harvest a crop than anything else. You can even get exclusive Working Holiday extension visas only if you work on that side of things.
I had a Working Holiday Visa for Australia - I could have entered Australia at any time in the past two years and stayed for a year, no-questions-asked, and then applied for migration. I have about 17 days left to use it and I can't see myself doing it. Australia are kicking themselves in the nuts in terms of the IT I specialise in (government / education). But to actually get a longer term visa, they wanted me to take tests, prove work history in management, etc. And it would have been easier for me to qualify as a fruit picker or kangaroo-poo cleaner (seriously) than an IT guy.
When you can feed a family of four, and a little extra, on something that can fit in a garden shed, then we'll talk. Until then, you're just a *very* bad farmer trying to farm something that's extremely widespread, not very nutritious, and would have grown in your pond using technology that costs an awful lot more than just planting a decent bush or tree in your back yard.
Algae is okay for fish to eat (but even then usually have something else too), and you can then eat those fish, but to suggest eating algae can solve world hunger is ridiculous - if that was the case, we'd have been doing this en-masse for millenia instead of all this processed food / farming lark.
Feed my family "for free", or reduce my petrol bills and then we can take you seriously. Until then, you might as well claim that you've lived the past 50 years by sucking moss off rocks at your local beach while everyone else is eating the fish, shellfish, local birds, etc.
My laptop cost about £400 about two years ago. It is *not* top-of-the-range. I favoured hard disk space, a large screen, and lots of ports over any other factor. Still, it's dual-core. It runs XP, so there is no GPU acceleration of the desktop etc.
I load opera. I open my saved sessions that contains 26 of the websites that I check every day. Before I can blink, 26 tabs open and my download light starts going crazy. By the time the first link has loaded, they've *all* loaded. I can't read faster than my computer can display them and lots of them are quite heavy and they are all loading simultaneously over bog-standard 54Mbps wireless with a bog-standard home broadband connection. I even have all caching disabled (except for a tiny RAM cache in Opera) because, basically, it's a waste of my precious disk space and RAM because I can't notice the difference between that and just loading each time. Firefox has a MUCH longer loading time but performs pretty much the same. IE doesn't seem much different but I have an ancient version and probably wouldn't be allowed to install IE9 on XP anyway.
Flash games work. iPlayer works. I can have dozens of windows open and loading simultaneously and the only bottleneck is the Internet connection. However, even in work with a squid cache that prioritises caching all those sites (I'm the IT manager) and two 24Mbit lines, I still can't click on the first tab before it's loaded its content (and the first tab is all that matters, because the rest have to wait until I've read the first one).
GPU acceleration is worthless here. I'm really *not* going to notice and the future is smaller and smaller devices that load at these same speeds. My phone's HTML rendering is lousy-slow but then the connection is lousy-slow and my phone is ancient. Anything half-modern renders the first text in less than a second and can scroll smoothly. That's all that counts.
In an age where average people think it's acceptable for a computer to take 5-10 minutes to boot, to take 20-30 seconds to show something actually loading after they double-click, where machines are bogged down with AV and anti-spyware and firewall and toolbars and everything else, GPU acceleration won't do shit. If people go for it, it'll be because it was enforced, or because of the "HDTV/Bluray/3D" gotta-have-it phenomenon.
That problem has nothing to do with processors, speeds, hardware or anything else. It's shitty software that's not designed for purpose, bundled into an over-specced generalised gadget that claims to make phone calls and passing it off as a phone.
ARM aren't to blame, nor are any ARM chips. Blame the stupid manufacturer that did a bad job of writing "ATH" down a serial line.
1) Include a programming language that's not directly related to the task at hand and/or allows execution of dangerous statements. (Javascript in Adobe, VBA in Office, etc.)
2) Execute said code whenever and wherever you see it (VBScript / Javascript viewed in IE, ability to execute CScript, Adobe running Javascript and Flash content found inside PDF)
3) Use native code execution as part of your file format (WMF vulnerability - not relevant to PDF as far as I know but I couldn't be certain myself).
4) Bundle your program so that it integrates into everything (web browser, printer list, startup list, etc.) so there are as many avenues of accidental execution as possible open to an attacker targeting a large user-base program.
5) Introduce more and more levels of crap into the format, way beyond its original design (Font embedding, Javascript execution, form submission, JPEG, PNG, SVG, Flash, etc. direct embedding rather than converting to your supposedly "portable" document format etc.)
Pretty much, if you see a program do any of the above, it's likely to fall on its arse at some point, security-wise.
Or, you could just stop buying that shit. Sorta like number 3 but no nearly so complex and inter-related. The fact that lots of people still do means that the majority of them don't care about those same things.
I don't know how many times I've had to explain to people about the iTunes installation limits, DVD/BluRay region encoding, HDCP and other similar things, but it doesn't stop *anyone* from actually using that service/product. We that actually care are in the minority. And it's *incredibly* simple for anyone to get their head around - if you don't like the terms of what you signed up to, don't sign up to it.
Unfortunately, almost everyone I know has a contract-paid mobile phone, sometimes with upgrades every year even if they don't want them, has an un-cracked DVD player or DVD software, has things bought from the Wii store that they can't easily move onto another Wii, has a car that won't allow them to use third party parts without destroying the entire warranty, etc.etc.etc.
There's an awful lot of consumer protection enshrined in law that these EULA's claim to override. Most of the time they don't, because you can't give away certain rights, especially in a "shrinkwrap" license that you haven't signed. But how many lawsuits are there over them? How many people just re-buy a TomTom map when they break their device and want to move it onto their new one? People just don't care because, in everyday life, in ordinary usage, there's no need to worry about such things. Accepting that you "can't" copy something and buying yet-another-copy takes significantly time, effort and money (if you think of your time as being billable) than fighting for the opposite.
Such apathy is rampant. You can't change that amount of people's minds that quickly, especially not for something that has a very minor impact on their life.
And the rules are ever so simple: Don't do business with companies that play these games, don't buy products that have these "features".
That's always been the rule, whether you're talking pyramid schemes, endowment mortgages, oxygen-free gold-plated audio cables or whatever else. If the product will cost you time/money because of a problem, or doesn't do what it says it does, don't put money their way.
People like myself have a running blacklist. There are products/companies that I will not give money to again. People assume that I'm actually not enforcing it that strictly but actually there's yet to be a single company that's pulled itself off that list. It includes everything from mobile phone companies that like to hang up on me, to the chip shop where the woman was extremely grumpy and grouchy but still wanted to take my money, to the IT suppliers that I've used during the course of my career, to the software manufacturers that have ignored repeated bug reports, to the GPS manufacturer that refused to refund me after changing the way their "Whole of Europe" maps worked (making me connect to the Internet to download and install each country's map every time I cross a border kinda spoils the point of having a "Whole of Europe" map in the first place), to the bank that laughed at my mortgage application (whereas the little mortgage shop next door gladly gave me a better deal without query and has had many years of perfect, on-time accurate payments every since).
My personal blacklist does not dent Sony, or HDCP manufacturers, or the mobile phone companies one bit. I'm not stupid, I know that. But it sure hurts the local shops, small businesses and general reputation of them among my friends and colleagues.
So the iPad just has a copy of the textbook. There may be other, collaborative tools, but then surely any difference is due to the extra tools, not the electronic textbook version. Thus what you're actually testing is "does having an iPad make the student better?" not "does having an electronic copy of the textbook make the student better?".
And, working in schools since I left university, as the IT guy, I can tell you the result now. The IT-literate ones will work wonders and maybe perform slightly better with such tools. The rest will stay the same or even decrease. Blanket-applying such technology in the expectation that it makes everything better for everyone is like saying that giving everyone a lesson in quantum physics from a German-speaking teacher makes us all experts in quantum physics and German. People are different, learn differently, and can't be blanket-taught. Teachers, the real ones who know how to teach, have been saying this and using differential techniques for DECADES. And then some idiot, who normally has little or no experience in education, or who can learn only in one particular method themselves, suggests such things and demonstrates a tiny, short-term gain while the students are taking part in a prototype trial and then announces that everyone, everywhere can do the same for ever.
Giving a kid a pen instead of a quill does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a lined book does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a homework diary does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a computer does not make them a better student.
Expand for other unnecessary gumph. A student, by definition, is someone who is being taught. In the early stages of their education, this is *all* via outside influences (e.g. school) that are required to be compulsory for the majority of students to actually achieve anything (i.e. left to their own devices, 99.9% of people would not go to school if they didn't have to). That teaching must be done by a teacher, who they are in contact with for 8 hours a day, every working day, and who needs to be specially trained, good at imparting information in lots of different ways, and quite intellectual. This is how schools have worked since the very first one, until recently. Now they are lucky if one of the several staff in the classroom pays them attention for more than a minute at a time. Guess what - improving that teacher (by removing bad teachers, re-training mediocre teachers, and paying good teachers what they are worth) makes a *million* times more difference than any gadget you thrust on the kids. In the UK in the past 20-something years, only a handful of teachers have actually been removed from the profession because they were inadequate - this is statistically extremely unlikely and is due to *nobody* in education wanting to push bad teachers out - terrible teachers are given fabulous references so that "some other sucker" (i.e. another school with kids requiring an education) takes them off their hands.
The ancient Greeks had teachers, the Romans had teachers, the Victorians had teachers. In previous generations, kids were made to sit in classes all day long. Bad behaviour and any distractions were not tolerated. The kids learned because they had to, whether they had gadgets or not. They did not have the excuses of dyslexia, ADHD, or irritable bowel syndrome. They were taught. Yes, there were still a load that "failed", there was still trouble, still people leaving school without an adequate education, but they were required to be there for many years LESS than students currently are, were taught much more to a higher standard, and actually "failed" on exams at the time with work that would now be marked as B or A grades. Go take a look at any 1960's "O"-level (the O stands for "ordinary" - no political correctness here) Maths paper and compare it to a modern A-level (the A stands for "advanced" - and O-levels are now called "General Certificates of Secondary Education") - which the kids now ta
Would I buy a computer game knowing it came from North Korea?
Break the question down before you even think about answering it - how do I know if something has been programmed in, made in, assembled in, or had any other part of its production process in North Korea, or anywhere else for that matter? Where was Doom 3 programmed? Does it use code written by slave children in India who are force-fed C++ classes instead of their normal education, paid 1p a day and beaten regularly? I have *no* idea and no real way to prove either way. Thus singling out North Korea makes no sense.
If it is produced in North Korea, how do I *KNOW* what the funds it generates are used to support? Do you know what ID Software spent your $29.99 on? Maybe they sent it to a Gay & Lesbian support group, or funded investment in an African orange grove, or maybe they actually did use it to buy one of their employees a hand gun - you have NO idea. Thus singling out a particular company in North Korea based on accusations and vague connections makes no sense.
If it comes to my attention that a game is produced by a company who has other actions I disapprove of, will I stop buying the game? Well, I hate Sony. I disagree with most of their actions. Their involvement on a project might well kill it off in my mind. But it very much depends on their involvement and precisely which actions we're talking about, whether they affect my morals and whether or not that should be related to some other product they are producing. I disagree with Afghanistan growing opium, but does that mean I can't buy fruit from Afghanistan IN CASE some of the drug-money was used to sow the field in the first place? Or, surely, giving them an increased trade in other, more legitimate, goods will provide them an incentive to move away from growing opium? I have no idea. Thus singling out a particular game because of tenuous links to things I may not approve it by a single company in its production chain makes no sense.
Assuming we KNOW that this software was written in North Korea. Assume that we KNOW that every company along the line knew this. Assume that we KNOW that the North Korean's are then taking those "trained" programmers and using them to program nuclear missiles. Does that mean I'd not buy the game? Still unlikely. The production of the game didn't make them program nuclear missiles (or whatever), someone else did. At some point someone clearly crossed the boundary between making a flash game and funding cyberwarfare. That's the person who is the problem, that's the person who should be asked probing questions. That's the part that the government needs to step in and stop ALL trade with that country, not half-assed this company is "good", this company is "bad" because it employs "X" crap.
And I take offence at the tone of the submission. Trying to make me feel guilty by association is almost entirely racism. The article is trying to paint *all* North Korean activity (including programming a video game) as somehow evil. Would I buy it? If it was a good game that I was interested in, yes. Sadly I don't have an infinite lifetime in which to research every individual, company, funding source and country involved in the production of even a minor flash game. If you have a problem with North Korea, lobby for a blanket trade ban. Otherwise, please stop spreading such rampant discrimination because a newspaper company has a flash game on its website.
The GP2X is a dual 200Mhz processor handheld console that runs off 2 AA batteries and was released in 2005. It was not that revolutionary, it was not that expensive, it was not that difficult to program. You can program on both chips so long as you don't mind temporarily ditching the in-built MPEG-decoding firmware that runs on one of them (it's replaced on each bootup) or being very careful where you tread. The Nintendo DS was multiprocessor. And not in the unconventional sense of "one CPU and a handful of support chips", two real, full, general purpose, programmable chips. Most modern games consoles have more than one real chip, many of them using multiple specialised processors (e.g. IBM's Cell in the PS3 which is a "9-chip" component).
Massive parallelism has been around forever and it's in consumer electronics already and has been for quite a while. It might not be *designed* like that but you have always had home computers with multiple processors that can be programmed to operate in parallel. There were people misusing floppy drive controller chips and sound processors to do all sorts, and the GPU is "another" processor now, and one that's extremely good at running lots of things in parallel. Do you think that your CPU could ever keep up with software-rendering on a modern game? Or that a single-core "general purpose" GPU could?
Your professor is right, except for his timescales - parallelism is already here, right down to tiny embedded systems, and has been for years. Just that hardly anybody uses it without some seriously specialised programming design beforehand. That tells you quite a lot about how expensive it is to use effectively. Hell, to a new programmer, even threading and re-entrancy can be a huge nightmare for them and our solution at the moment is blocking locks and things like that (so that we can *think* about them being seperate linear instances). If you can become an expert in parallelism you'll probably have a good career ahead - but a specialist one. Everyone else is just waiting until they can pass everything off to a dedicated chip and get told when it's finished - they don't *WANT* to properly program parallel programs (tongue twister!), they just want everything to happen serially and faster, or the closest approximation to that that they can get.
Seriously, when you program any graphics library, you just throw a huge amount of 3D object data into another processor and let it get on with it. You don't care if it runs at 6GHz, or whether it's got a separate internal processor for every pixel of the final image running at 1MHz, so long as it damn-well draws the screen as quickly as possible and tells you when it's done. Parallelism is a hidden facet of modern architecture precisely because it's so necessary and so damn complicated to do it right. Programmers, on the whole, are much happier with linear processes. It's taken games this long to pass off physics, AI, etc. to a separate thread, and we've had threading for DECADES.
Parallel things are just a placeholder at the moment because we can't up the GHz much and if we could, it wouldn't help that much with the tasks we want to do. So even operating systems are handing off everything they can to other chips - Ethernet TCP offloading, GPU, sound-processors, RAID, you name it. It's all about making the general-purpose CPU's do as little as possible so the main use of the computer can continue uninterrupted. And parallelism is only used to increase the things we can do, not break tasks into much more efficient subtasks. Most people who have dual-core or above in the early days wanted it so that other things (e.g. antivirus) got out of the way of the real process (e.g. games!) so it could have as much time running in it's single thread as possible.
Parallelism can see fantastic gains but it needs to be done from the design stage each time. Mainstream multi-core products are too much of a moving target to do anything more fancy than run a number of huge, single-threaded programs at the same time. That's *not* the same thing, and never will be. Parallelism is specialised. Games programmers would give their right arm for everyone to have a single 100GHz processor instead.
That's like banning video recorders because people use them to infringe copyright (please stop calling it piracy - it's legally inaccurate). The majority use of video recorders was entirely legitimate, and at the time every company that produced media was trying to find some way to stop the "horrendous" technology which was going to destroy television / movies forever. The same happened with DVD recorders, tape recorders, photocopiers, etc. before it. And still, the MAJORITY use was entirely legitimate.
Whether the majority used of hacked PS3's is legitimate or not, there is an ENTIRELY legitimate use for them - hell, even governments and research projects were using PS2's and XBoxes with hacked firmware to build compute clusters. And just because there are both legitimate and illegal practices possible, both of which can ONLY be made possible if a single act is performed, does not make that act illegal.
If I'd ever owned any console past the SNES, I wouldn't *care* what the reasoning was - I would have bought a device that had a feature that the company arbitrarily removed without option ("not upgrading" isn't an option if that stops you using the console for another entirely legitimate purpose - i.e. buying new games that you bought). Thus, it's a potential breach of contract WHATEVER the EULA says (50% of the average EULA is unenforceable, the same as 50% of any particular large chain's refund policies, etc.). I'd be demanding my right to the full range of features that I bought AND I'd be deliberately hacking the thing too.
It was a stupid decision to remove an established feature that people *did* take into account when they were purchasing. But then, I've never bought a Sony device in my life and I haven't bought any modern consoles (does a £10 Dreamcast from a bootsale count if it was for my mother?). Just because there's an illegal use does not render my right to perform perfectly legitimate acts void.