Re:A valid on topic question
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Certainly a valid question. Looking at the USB 1.0 and 1.1 designs it's obvious that Intel's goal was to make peripheral development as cheap as possible.
They made the hardware cheap by putting every thing they could into software. If you could save a gate by making it a "soft function", they did it. Why? Two big reasons:
1. Mfgs pay for each unit of hardware produced while software is a flat cost... whether you sell 100 widget joysticks or 10 million widget joysticks you only pay the software guys once, unlike an extra transistor that you 100 versus 10 million of.
2. More software functionality equals more CPU bandwidth used. And chipzilla loves CPU hungry designs.
I don't think it'll be IDE vs. SCSI though. Yes Firewire is more expensive than USB... but it's being incorporated into relatively expensive devices (camcorders, hard drives, etc) as opposed to keyboards and mice. If firewire adds $1 to the cost of a $2000 camcorder, that's no big deal. If that $1 was instead on a $10 keyboard it'd be a totally different story.
Did anyone else attend WinHEC? USB 2.0 is dead...
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Listen folks... anyone who attended WinHEC in Anaheim this year couldn't have missed the writing on the wall. USB is low speed keyboard/mice/joystick/ticker-tape stuff. High bandwidth video/storage/networking is Firewire.
And we're all grown up enough to realize that Windows (and WinHEC) drive the volumes that hardware manufacturers look at to determine what to make.
Put a fork in USB 2.0... it's toast.
Re:HP repeats the Apollo debacle
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
This is clearly Michael Dell's wet dream... one of the goals of his price war. I just wish I could figure out how this affects *my* employer... IBM.
Boy I'm glad I sold my house in Austin in January! First the Dell layoffs and dot-com bust killed the Austin market... The shell-shocked victim techies started migrating to Houston to do the Compaq thing. That great big sucking sound you hear is Central and Eastern Texas collapsing.
His father's letter essential said "give us 5 grand and we'll go away". All they're apparently arguing about is the price.
Maybe if he hadn't of already caved in on the point of principle this would be worthy of discussion on slashdot.
(Believe me... I'm against evil megaliths pushing around the little guys, but once you agree that there *is* a price worth giving up the moral high ground then you're operating on their level)
We've all heard of "Security through obscurity", well his methods are "Detection through obscurity". Once his detector becomes public (or there is an open Oracle the way the SDMI challenge had) people will quickly alter their techniques to avoid it.
Since there is virtually zero technical information in the article let me take a guess as to what he could be doing: Picture two rows of three pixels...
P11 P12 P13
P21 P22 P23
If the vertical rows have the same values *except* for the LSB of each [i.e. P11&0xFE == P21&0xFE && P21&0xFE == P22&0xFE && P13&0xFE == P23&0xFE], then the probability of an encoded message rises the more this condition exists thoughout the picture.
But it's easy enough to make an encoding algorithm smart enough to avoid that trap.
Jan,
I agree with you totally regarding *some* dot-com employees need/deserve $700 chairs.
But I also agree with the Salon article... you don't have to go through many dot-com auctions to see that they were buying Aerons for *everybody*. The last one I went to in Austin for Agilion (sp?) was amazing... it looks like every seat in the place (secretaries, conference rooms, programmers, janitors) had an Aeron! There were brand new Aerons still in the plastic wrap sitting there presumably for people yet to be hired. They had small Aerons and large Aerons (every though the medium fits virtually everybody)!
-Rob
(And don't even get me started on Foosball tables!)
You forget: This worm is no skin off you a55 as long as your system is secure. I don't see anything but goodness here...
If you don't like worms, keep your system secure before you get hit.
I agree with you that I respect Senator Glenn for his accomplishments but he is the *LAST* person that should be ragging on Tito.
His last space ride on the shuttle was a tourist trip if I've ever seen one. And because of his pioneering role in the space program and the big set of balls he had to have to get on top of one of those early rockets, I say Bravo! Sen Glenn has earned one free E-ticket ride on the shuttle.
He should have kept his mouth shut on the Tito trip lest people start realizing this is the (old distinguished) pot calling the kettle black.
This system could result in huge lawsuits against monitor/TV manufacturers. Just picture the GlamCo sees 2 million HDTVs/Monitors when Joe Hacker hacks one. The content producers now deactivate all of the monitors/TVs sharing GlamCo's key.
Can you imagine their support people saying "No, your TV is not broken. We deactivated it because a 13-year old in Norway reflashed an EPROM. I'm sorry... but our new models still work. Would you like to purchase one now for $899?"
Ah... but the best thing the MPAA could do for the pirates would be to give everybody a DVD with a personalized watermark. Say for example I take my StarWars, you take your StarWars, and Joe down the street grabs his StarWars and we do a bit by bit comparison. The differences are.... THE WATERMARK. And now we all know what bits need to be twiddled with to remove said stupid watermark. Why that could cut a good 50% off the time it takes to remove them!
-Rob
Note the company's website promotes the idea of police using this stuff for through-wall radar. Remember that thermal imagers have led to people getting arrested because their garage gave off more heat than the cops liked when they drove down the street...
Next people will be getting arrested because the cops saw them leaning over their coffee table too frequently... or maybe in Georgia the cops will use the radar to see some oral-to-body-part contact that happens to be illegal down in the South.
This is a bad thing.
I've thought about this a bit in the past and feel that multiple passes would solve this problem. You do one pass over the data using a long FFT window... this gives you fine frequency resolution that allows establishment of the chordal patterns tied to time. Then you do another pass over the data using a short FFT window; this will give you good temporal resolution but will be ambiguous as to individual notes.... however you now pull in the chordal pattern data to resolve ambiguities to the most harmonious note.
Just remember: A human can do it, therefore it must be possible. If there isn't enough data in the raw music itself, there must be other assumed idiomatic information being used by the human. Represent that idiomatic information in code, and it can be automated.
-Rob
As I mentioned in another post, they've got to be looking at the messages going through the Windows Event Queue... filtering out ones related to Copy/Print/etc. Any app that uses nonstandard message tokens should work... also this provides the first step to start disassembling the security code: what message tokens are they looking for, etc.
My guess:
Piece 1) They have an installable filesystem that uses a data file stored within the normal windows filesystem. This installable filesystem will only open files when piece number 2 says it's OK.
Piece 2) A series of hooks into the GUI that intercepts Window Messages by hooking the systems event queue. If a clipboard message, print message, etc come through destined for the window queue corresponding to a "protected document" they're discarded.
Piece 3) The "integrity checker" which is probably pinging the other modules to make sure they're still alive. (Hey, that's got to be good for system performance!)
We need to be careful though... suppose that a mutation of the modified genes leads to a moth who is recessive sterile... that is, it's offspring will be sterile if both the mother and father have the mutated gene.
Now that gene will spread through the population, without impacting reproduction until it hits a certain percentage and then, quite suddenly, the odds of finding a mate that *doesn't* have the recessive gene will be miniscule and the following generation's population will head rapidly to the basement.
Umm... For manufacturing it's opportunity cost. A totally made-up example to demonstrate: You have two widgets, a low power widget that sells for $10 with a profit of $4. Your high power widget (with the Titanium gwingus) sells for $30 with a profit of $10.
If you only have manufacturing room to make one model, and your total unit count is limited (due to those LCD displays)... which are you going to build? Let 'x' be the number of LCD displays available, and calculate x*$4 versus x*$10.
I'm not saying this is what's going on, but its certainly plausable.
Thinkpads are geared towards large corporate purchasers (just try to order an A20p as an individual if you doubt that), so a Crusoe Go/No-Go decision is going to based around the saleability of that product to the suits.
That could mean:
1) Corporate IT wants to stick with the Intel brand name. Good tech don't mean crap if the customers won't plunk down their change.
2) IBM has doubts about the robustness of the chip. Because Thinkpads go into their highest value enterprise accounts, they'll be more picky about compatibility/longevity issues than otherwise. The overall customer relationship here is far more valuable that the profit from a single batch of ThinkPads.
3) Intel or AMD has incented this behaviour by cutting IBM a deal. Remember the bottom line is $$$. IBM is a huge company so the fact that one part is making the chips, or that another portion ponied up vulture capital doesn't mean a thing. Witness IBM PCCo leaving IBM PSP's OS/2 to twist in the wind when the MS OEM agreements came around.
4) Manufacturing bandwidth. They may not have room in their factories to built yet-another ThinkPad variation. Jiminy Crickits... in early June I tried to splurge on a ThinkPad A20p (complete with video capture, 15" LCD and a titanium case) and was given a *LATE OCTOBER* delivery date. Folks, that's 5 months of backlog. I'm sure they'd be filling those orders sooner if they could. (Off-Topic: After a month of waiting I canceled my order and bought a Dell Inspiron 7500 which was on my doorstep in 2 days)
5) Cluelessness. I consider this the least possible... IBM (recently) has been doing an outstanding job of moving technology from the research labs to the customer. The ThinkPad folks have been some of the best at product execution.
-Rob
Compared to the current crop of moral poseurs and wannabe anti-technology intellectuals, the originals were genuine heroes. They were fighting for a way of life, not for moral control or cultural power.
Uh... Jon, what's the difference between a "way of life" and "cultural power and moral control"? If I'm not mistaken a way of life consists of culture and morals.
Forgot one thing: I haven't seen the GDROM format documented anywhere, so it's probably not patented but rather a trade secret. If a trade secret gets exposed, it's no longer a secret and has no legal protection. So if they got Kalisto under an agreement, they could now prevent him from sharing his knowledge of the trade secret GDROM format
They used GPL'ed code to cut their development cost and they would have continued to use the code unless they were caught. Now they'll go back and remove it but there's still an incentive to use GPL'ed code in a closed way: 1) They probably won't get caught. 2) If they do, there's no penalty... just say "whoops... that was an accident"
The point is: If instead of GPL'ed code it was another company's copyrighted code, there is no way they'd get off we a "mea culpa... we'll be good boys now". There would have been extra cash involved or the company who got ripped off would have gotten some rights to the violating product... note that nVidia still doesn't think that they should have to open up the offending module.
Hell... why doesn't some company take Linux and relabel it as their own OS and sell it as a binary only. Then over the next four years they can go in and rewrite subroutine after subroutine in successive releases as people complain... the company will then have four years of revenue off of the work of other people.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly a valid question. Looking at the USB 1.0 and 1.1 designs it's obvious that Intel's goal was to make peripheral development as cheap as possible.
They made the hardware cheap by putting every thing they could into software. If you could save a gate by making it a "soft function", they did it. Why? Two big reasons:
1. Mfgs pay for each unit of hardware produced while software is a flat cost... whether you sell 100 widget joysticks or 10 million widget joysticks you only pay the software guys once, unlike an extra transistor that you 100 versus 10 million of.
2. More software functionality equals more CPU bandwidth used. And chipzilla loves CPU hungry designs.
I don't think it'll be IDE vs. SCSI though. Yes Firewire is more expensive than USB... but it's being incorporated into relatively expensive devices (camcorders, hard drives, etc) as opposed to keyboards and mice. If firewire adds $1 to the cost of a $2000 camcorder, that's no big deal. If that $1 was instead on a $10 keyboard it'd be a totally different story.
Listen folks... anyone who attended WinHEC in Anaheim this year couldn't have missed the writing on the wall. USB is low speed keyboard/mice/joystick/ticker-tape stuff. High bandwidth video/storage/networking is Firewire.
And we're all grown up enough to realize that Windows (and WinHEC) drive the volumes that hardware manufacturers look at to determine what to make.
Put a fork in USB 2.0... it's toast.
This is clearly Michael Dell's wet dream... one of the goals of his price war. I just wish I could figure out how this affects *my* employer... IBM.
Boy I'm glad I sold my house in Austin in January! First the Dell layoffs and dot-com bust killed the Austin market... The shell-shocked victim techies started migrating to Houston to do the Compaq thing. That great big sucking sound you hear is Central and Eastern Texas collapsing.
His father's letter essential said "give us 5 grand and we'll go away". All they're apparently arguing about is the price.
Maybe if he hadn't of already caved in on the point of principle this would be worthy of discussion on slashdot.
(Believe me... I'm against evil megaliths pushing around the little guys, but once you agree that there *is* a price worth giving up the moral high ground then you're operating on their level)
We've all heard of "Security through obscurity", well his methods are "Detection through obscurity". Once his detector becomes public (or there is an open Oracle the way the SDMI challenge had) people will quickly alter their techniques to avoid it. Since there is virtually zero technical information in the article let me take a guess as to what he could be doing: Picture two rows of three pixels...
P11 P12 P13
P21 P22 P23
If the vertical rows have the same values *except* for the LSB of each [i.e. P11&0xFE == P21&0xFE && P21&0xFE == P22&0xFE && P13&0xFE == P23&0xFE], then the probability of an encoded message rises the more this condition exists thoughout the picture.
But it's easy enough to make an encoding algorithm smart enough to avoid that trap.
Jan,
I agree with you totally regarding *some* dot-com employees need/deserve $700 chairs.
But I also agree with the Salon article... you don't have to go through many dot-com auctions to see that they were buying Aerons for *everybody*. The last one I went to in Austin for Agilion (sp?) was amazing... it looks like every seat in the place (secretaries, conference rooms, programmers, janitors) had an Aeron! There were brand new Aerons still in the plastic wrap sitting there presumably for people yet to be hired. They had small Aerons and large Aerons (every though the medium fits virtually everybody)!
-Rob
(And don't even get me started on Foosball tables!)
You forget: This worm is no skin off you a55 as long as your system is secure. I don't see anything but goodness here...
If you don't like worms, keep your system secure before you get hit.
I agree with you that I respect Senator Glenn for his accomplishments but he is the *LAST* person that should be ragging on Tito.
His last space ride on the shuttle was a tourist trip if I've ever seen one. And because of his pioneering role in the space program and the big set of balls he had to have to get on top of one of those early rockets, I say Bravo! Sen Glenn has earned one free E-ticket ride on the shuttle.
He should have kept his mouth shut on the Tito trip lest people start realizing this is the (old distinguished) pot calling the kettle black.
This system could result in huge lawsuits against monitor/TV manufacturers. Just picture the GlamCo sees 2 million HDTVs/Monitors when Joe Hacker hacks one. The content producers now deactivate all of the monitors/TVs sharing GlamCo's key.
Can you imagine their support people saying "No, your TV is not broken. We deactivated it because a 13-year old in Norway reflashed an EPROM. I'm sorry... but our new models still work. Would you like to purchase one now for $899?"
I smell lawsuits ready and waiting to happen...
Ah... but the best thing the MPAA could do for the pirates would be to give everybody a DVD with a personalized watermark. Say for example I take my StarWars, you take your StarWars, and Joe down the street grabs his StarWars and we do a bit by bit comparison. The differences are.... THE WATERMARK. And now we all know what bits need to be twiddled with to remove said stupid watermark. Why that could cut a good 50% off the time it takes to remove them!
-Rob
Note the company's website promotes the idea of police using this stuff for through-wall radar. Remember that thermal imagers have led to people getting arrested because their garage gave off more heat than the cops liked when they drove down the street...
Next people will be getting arrested because the cops saw them leaning over their coffee table too frequently... or maybe in Georgia the cops will use the radar to see some oral-to-body-part contact that happens to be illegal down in the South.
This is a bad thing.
I've thought about this a bit in the past and feel that multiple passes would solve this problem. You do one pass over the data using a long FFT window... this gives you fine frequency resolution that allows establishment of the chordal patterns tied to time. Then you do another pass over the data using a short FFT window; this will give you good temporal resolution but will be ambiguous as to individual notes.... however you now pull in the chordal pattern data to resolve ambiguities to the most harmonious note. Just remember: A human can do it, therefore it must be possible. If there isn't enough data in the raw music itself, there must be other assumed idiomatic information being used by the human. Represent that idiomatic information in code, and it can be automated. -Rob
Tackhead,
Are you the i-Opener forum's Tackhead? Good to see you're still around.
"Roastbeef"
As I mentioned in another post, they've got to be looking at the messages going through the Windows Event Queue... filtering out ones related to Copy/Print/etc. Any app that uses nonstandard message tokens should work... also this provides the first step to start disassembling the security code: what message tokens are they looking for, etc.
My guess: Piece 1) They have an installable filesystem that uses a data file stored within the normal windows filesystem. This installable filesystem will only open files when piece number 2 says it's OK. Piece 2) A series of hooks into the GUI that intercepts Window Messages by hooking the systems event queue. If a clipboard message, print message, etc come through destined for the window queue corresponding to a "protected document" they're discarded. Piece 3) The "integrity checker" which is probably pinging the other modules to make sure they're still alive. (Hey, that's got to be good for system performance!)
We need to be careful though... suppose that a mutation of the modified genes leads to a moth who is recessive sterile... that is, it's offspring will be sterile if both the mother and father have the mutated gene. Now that gene will spread through the population, without impacting reproduction until it hits a certain percentage and then, quite suddenly, the odds of finding a mate that *doesn't* have the recessive gene will be miniscule and the following generation's population will head rapidly to the basement.
Umm... For manufacturing it's opportunity cost. A totally made-up example to demonstrate: You have two widgets, a low power widget that sells for $10 with a profit of $4. Your high power widget (with the Titanium gwingus) sells for $30 with a profit of $10.
If you only have manufacturing room to make one model, and your total unit count is limited (due to those LCD displays)... which are you going to build? Let 'x' be the number of LCD displays available, and calculate x*$4 versus x*$10.
I'm not saying this is what's going on, but its certainly plausable.
Thinkpads are geared towards large corporate purchasers (just try to order an A20p as an individual if you doubt that), so a Crusoe Go/No-Go decision is going to based around the saleability of that product to the suits.
That could mean:
1) Corporate IT wants to stick with the Intel brand name. Good tech don't mean crap if the customers won't plunk down their change.
2) IBM has doubts about the robustness of the chip. Because Thinkpads go into their highest value enterprise accounts, they'll be more picky about compatibility/longevity issues than otherwise. The overall customer relationship here is far more valuable that the profit from a single batch of ThinkPads.
3) Intel or AMD has incented this behaviour by cutting IBM a deal. Remember the bottom line is $$$. IBM is a huge company so the fact that one part is making the chips, or that another portion ponied up vulture capital doesn't mean a thing. Witness IBM PCCo leaving IBM PSP's OS/2 to twist in the wind when the MS OEM agreements came around.
4) Manufacturing bandwidth. They may not have room in their factories to built yet-another ThinkPad variation. Jiminy Crickits... in early June I tried to splurge on a ThinkPad A20p (complete with video capture, 15" LCD and a titanium case) and was given a *LATE OCTOBER* delivery date. Folks, that's 5 months of backlog. I'm sure they'd be filling those orders sooner if they could. (Off-Topic: After a month of waiting I canceled my order and bought a Dell Inspiron 7500 which was on my doorstep in 2 days)
5) Cluelessness. I consider this the least possible... IBM (recently) has been doing an outstanding job of moving technology from the research labs to the customer. The ThinkPad folks have been some of the best at product execution.
-Rob
This is right on the money.
Compared to the current crop of moral poseurs and wannabe anti-technology intellectuals, the originals were genuine heroes. They were fighting for a way of life, not for moral control or cultural power.
Uh... Jon, what's the difference between a "way of life" and "cultural power and moral control"? If I'm not mistaken a way of life consists of culture and morals.
Forgot one thing: I haven't seen the GDROM format documented anywhere, so it's probably not patented but rather a trade secret. If a trade secret gets exposed, it's no longer a secret and has no legal protection. So if they got Kalisto under an agreement, they could now prevent him from sharing his knowledge of the trade secret GDROM format
Moderate this up. They have some very relevent historical treasures that should be with the professional museum people.
Let's look at this in a more jaded way...
They used GPL'ed code to cut their development cost and they would have continued to use the code unless they were caught. Now they'll go back and remove it but there's still an incentive to use GPL'ed code in a closed way:
1) They probably won't get caught.
2) If they do, there's no penalty... just say "whoops... that was an accident"
The point is: If instead of GPL'ed code it was another company's copyrighted code, there is no way they'd get off we a "mea culpa... we'll be good boys now". There would have been extra cash involved or the company who got ripped off would have gotten some rights to the violating product... note that nVidia still doesn't think that they should have to open up the offending module.
Hell... why doesn't some company take Linux and relabel it as their own OS and sell it as a binary only. Then over the next four years they can go in and rewrite subroutine after subroutine in successive releases as people complain... the company will then have four years of revenue off of the work of other people.
Whoop-de-do. How about all 15 billion systems already out there with the old code?