Compared to CD players footprint, there's not many. I don't know a soul with a Sansa device.
Also, note I said where memory card is the primary playback case. I don't know about Sansa, but usually when a device has the slot, it's usually largely ignored in favor of wireless or wired transfer between it and a computer or a server. People using sneakernet-style transfer I would wager in the vast vast minority.
The CD tax is senseless, but if grading on a curve, the memory cards makes even less sense.
At *least* burning music to CD represents a larger share of what is done with blank media, so that people can pop portions of their collection into their car cd player (and nowadays to a less extent in other cd players). Of course they penalize everyone 'just in case' and even in the case of burning music to CD there are plenty of fair-use sorts of applications ('mix tapes', burning legally purchased music, etc), which makes it absurd.
In the memory card situation, mostly I see them purchased for cameras, game consoles, and general sneakernet of data. There isn't a huge ecosystem of music players that take memory cards as the primary medium. Must music lives on an iPod or cellphone and arrives on other stereo systems by way of bluetooth, aux jacks, or iPod dock connection. Sure, there are things that take usb hard drives as sources and primarily play music, but I think that's such a vanishingly small use of even those specific units as to render any sense of entitlement beyond absurd.
I will admit FF pretty much ended at FFX for me, so I can't comment much on his work in recent games when present. I don't want any MMO, so X1 and XIV are out. XII's gameplay really turned me off so badly I couldn't get past it (basically making the game an offline MMO simulator in many ways). 13.. just... well... yeah....
Looking back, FFVII remains one of my favorite experiences. I tried to think more carefully about why on a recent replay.
The top thing had to be the music. It was just fantastic. Maybe I just like chiptunes, but even as late as FFX, it seemed like they had some notable 'background' tracks. Now it seems like they are all generic toned down orchestral pieces that aren't noticable at all and just barely tweak to fit the mood. Except for when they make some pop song to prop up somewhere in the middle of the game...
The open ended nature of exploration absolutely was up there. There are a lot of games that continue to get this part at least. One of the big moments when playing FFVII for the first time was leavinig midgar. Up until that point, I thought it was going to be a game like FFX or later turned out to be. Then when the world map presented itself, the contrast did a lot (for me) toward making midgar feel more like a cramped place with little control of your destiny relative to the larger world.
Another thing was how the story panned out. The general theme was certainly not new, but the details were so convoluted, I liked it. Of course, I like Crono Trigger and there was nothing partiuclarly complex about the story at all.
Finally, I think the lack of definition and no voice actors helped. I fill in the details with whatever I like. Crisis Core tought me I really won't like the voice actors if I get to make up my mind about how they should sound ahead of time.
Think they are talking about the developers who only do games not available on media. Typically cheaper and by smaller groups of developers, frequently independent of large publishers. We are talking about developers for whom the barrier to entry for creating and distributing media is too high and/or incurs a cost too high for the type of game.
As much as I'm displeased with the current state of affairs of 'owning' your purchase brought on by XBL, Steam, PSN, etc. (it being a step ever further back from copy-protected media), it does allow smaller game studios to get in the market without a lot of the logisitics problems associated with media distribution.
I don't see why putting 8.5 billion out there was required for that... I'm sure that Skype or Facebook would've gladly written XBL and WinPhone support for much much less.
Basically skype seems to have a *whole* lot of traction/brand recognition. MS wants to control that to prop up their struggling mobile phone play (read: screw over iOS/Android/etc users). Torpedoing Linux support will probably be just side-effect.
My hope is that MS has the causative relationship reversed. Skype is ubiquitous because they endeavour to work on all devices. If Skype becomes an Xbox/Windows/Windows Phone play, I expect their subscriber base to evaporate.
I'ts a matter of "too much" and "too monolithic". "Too fast" implies there will come a time when everything is magically ok to do things like PSN because we'll have magic security that can't be messed up by humans. No matter what you do, the wrong people will always mess it up. It isn't like the technology today is so immature that Sony couldn't have done a better job securing it, they don't have any particularly complex needs security-wise than anyone else has for over a decade. At *least* hosting providers have to let people run as root on their little neck of the woods without access to other places which is a bit demanding, but Sony just has to let people do fairly simple stuff that doesn't require them to execute any arbitrary code on Sony servers at any privilege.
Of course I agree that things are moving online too much because it's had a rather bad impact on single-player games. So many games are only multi-player now, and many of the ones that are both have merely a token single-player campaign that is little more than training for the multi-player experience. Multi-player has its place, but you never can experience a good story or assume the role of someone *particularly* important because its always either quick pick-up matches or a persistent world that cannot change due to your particular progress as it would ruin the world for others. I also agree that online-only copies are dangerous. Even in a hypothetical world where security is perfect, you are still at the mercy of the companies viability and interest. At *least* this has demonstrated to a *lot* of people that they can still play their discs, but all of their PSN purchases are useless.
From the perspective of being too monolithic, each platform has approximately one major platform driving all of the online gaming experience nowadays. If XBL goes down, XBox is pretty well crippled, PSN obviously puts PS# out of commission, and if Steam went bad... a *whole* lot of Mac/PC gamers would be out of luck. Used to be that online games were told specifically who to connect to and server browsers were a fungible third-party application to frontend the process. If your current choice of server browser index server was out of commission, you used another one to get to the same game. I really don't like the trend where the ability to play a game is tied to the ongoing health of the company that produced and/or sold it to me.
So playing video back from SMB shares won't work by clicking in dolphin. A *lot* of KDE tries to induce a copy to local disk before *starting* to open, which is useless when the file is many gigs. Of course, if you want to use a non-KDE app because it's better or the only one, the KDE developers *should* consider that problem (even though I've seen them express the rather foolish sentiment that it's not their problem).
kioslaves *were* great, then gvfs came along and went the extra mmile of FUSE integration and suddenly kioslaves were far from the sensible approach.
SOAP is needlessly/hopelessly complicated. For a given implementation, at the surface API-wise it doesn't look particularly horrid, but then you see the on the wire representation of it.... It's not hard to understand why two different implementations disagree and why most of the sane webservices world goes to much more straightforward JSON based communication when they have a choice now.
The whining is important, because then when LTS hits you with the asinine Unity crap, you still would want to complain.
The whining is at *least* as many people pissed at having settings taken away and forced into someone's 'vision' that doesn't work for everyone as how buggy it is.
Let's say the payload indeed meets the criteria, with what appears to be a shifting/random identifier. You know that next-hop, ip-wise, could chose to track you at layer 3.
Because in this proposal, your 'terminal' that you interact with (your phone) is owned by you. The specific transaction (e.g. specific transaction amount, maybe a recurring schedule and tolerance) is all part of the transaction request and your phone evaluates it for what it is. It then talks to the bank and says "hey, I'm authorizing *this* specific transaction, give me some authorization data so that the retailers equipment can call you back and verify I did"). In terms of online use, I used PoS case because I figured that was the bigger leap. Online should obviously follow. If you want to avoid the phone-to-bank link being separate/cell based, you can have the phone (or desktop app) send the same protected payload via PoS provided network. Even in the desktop case, I'd lean toward phones as they are the only commonly available device with managed code model in place (excepting jailbroken phones).
This isn't appreciably any slower than today. Some retailers have very slow credit terminals, some have very fast terminals. The amount of data being transferred isn't appreciably more, though admittedly you have a three way conversation
An alternative is easy in concept, but the satus quo has the industry in a strangle hold. It's not like even a large consumer group acting together could *change* things from 'outside'
We are talking about 16 'secret' numbers that allow whoever figures them out to charge however much they want against your account. Occasionally an additional view on the back are needed for some retailers, but at the end of the day to even buy $5 of something with your card you must trust the seller to not do bad things with your account *and* keep it safe from others. This might have been about the best you could do when the seller was doing a carbon copy and would phone in the slips at the end of the day, but now everyone *immediately* contacts a server for validation and nearly every person with a card also has a pocket sized computer device capable of independently talking to bank servers. It's completely reasonable to have point-of-sale equipment that pairs with a phone and have the phone connect directly to bank servers to *specifically* authorize a transaction amount and have the PoS verify that data as well without such a silly use of an account number and just exchangine public keys and per-transaction authorization data.
The common defense is "oh, well, most card companies don't hold the customer liable for everything", ignoring: -Some companies will hold the cardholder liable for some of it -Sometimes they may argue that the cardholder didn't act promptly or other circumstance -Even when everything works as 'promised', there is a cost incurred *somewhere* and that impacts you, either in higher interest rates on credit, lower interest rates on checking, and/or merchant prices due to processing fees. I'm about convinced this last one is the biggest motivation not to change, they play funny games with margin and can blame identity theft.
So they are trying to get people to opt-in to submit location data to show some indication of where people are, ok...
Why do it in a way that: -Is limited only to iPhones -Limited to a method that won't work in the relatively near future
Why not do something like asking people to use something like google latitude and sharing their location? Or providing an open-source app that delivers a verifiable degree of vagueness/random identifier per update?
No matter how you slice it, if you did participate in anything like this, never presume anonymity is assured. Even in that open-source case, even if the app injects data with randomized identifier and vague location, the peer can track your IP and assemble unique paths per IP.
Even then, you see a data trail that follows the towers along my commute most weekdays. Not many people will hit that same pattern. Bonus for knowing that I was out sick one day and noting that only one of the candidate trails didn't go in that day.
Even then I find their keyboard deficient. It *resizes* windows on typing. Even if not 'maximizing', it still shrinks your window to make room for the keyboard. This might be 'ok' if it put things back when done, but it doesn't, leaving you a blank set of useless space.
I would argue that 'most' people who want to have multitasking really want a laptop. If what you say has truth for 'most' people, I'd replace 'xoom' with 'tablet' and maybe I'd buy it. In tablet space, the biggest player is the iPad, which is nothing but maximized stuff. Tablets have had a long time to 'take hold' without doing so, always a niche product. Even the iPad figures pale in comparison to phone form factor devices despite being king of the tablet hill.
Conversely, if *only* looking at the tablet market, I dare say that iPad's relative success is due in no small part to a market that has always wanted their 'computers' to act like a phone. I'm not part of that market, but they are out there.
But the fact it kept resizing the window instead of overlaying seemed very un-smooth to me. I would think you'd want to determine the location of the text input field and overlap the part of the screen not in use when possible instead of forcing the user to re-maximize their app every time they type something.
All that said, I can't help but to feel these tablet fanatics are screwing up the UI for laptops and desktops for the sake of touchscreen in pursuit of the misguided goal of a 'unified' UI.
Very good advice. One issue is a *lot* of their users are commercial companies that viewed this as a way not to sweat the details at all. For many of those, if they have to sweat backup and all that, they might as well do the hosting themselves because the cost delta for them is not particularly large.
But then if malicious client knows 'xyz', they can compromise the system without knowing the password. This is the crux of the problem with that scenario, it assumes the attacker must compromise the password and while trying to protect it, turns the hash into a 'plaintext password' equivalent.
Because then the 'hash' becomes the 'password' for all intents and purposes, bringing you right back to square one: your password is stored 'in the clear' on the server. Even if not keyboard friendly, an attacker gives not much of a rat's ass about that detail.
In a world with plenty of well understood crypto schemes like public-private key systems where you can prove yourself without a shared secret... why the hell do we trust so much of our wealth with a trivial to see/copy account number being tossed around like crazy?
Passwords and answers to secret questions should always be hashed
Does approximately zero good if 90% of your users have trivial passwords. In fact, 'secret answers' will almost *always* be simple, one-word english text, rendering hashes meaningless. Even if Sony did do hashing, they are going to keep it simply and say "you're screwed" to avoid setting expectations high for people with crappy passwords.
Credit card information and other sensitive information should be encrypted (preferably AES-256 or stronger).
If you compromise a running system, then many bets are off here. They could have done this and either: -Every user logged in at the time had their password in memory so that they could decrypt (assuming password is the key to per-user crypto-protected storage) -The filesystem was using crypto-protection for offline attacks, but given an online attack, the encryption didn't matter (global crypto-protected storage).
No one should say 'It's encrypted, it's all ok', they should think hard about what it *means* and what the exposures are.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to CD players footprint, there's not many. I don't know a soul with a Sansa device.
Also, note I said where memory card is the primary playback case. I don't know about Sansa, but usually when a device has the slot, it's usually largely ignored in favor of wireless or wired transfer between it and a computer or a server. People using sneakernet-style transfer I would wager in the vast vast minority.
The CD tax is senseless, but if grading on a curve, the memory cards makes even less sense.
At *least* burning music to CD represents a larger share of what is done with blank media, so that people can pop portions of their collection into their car cd player (and nowadays to a less extent in other cd players). Of course they penalize everyone 'just in case' and even in the case of burning music to CD there are plenty of fair-use sorts of applications ('mix tapes', burning legally purchased music, etc), which makes it absurd.
In the memory card situation, mostly I see them purchased for cameras, game consoles, and general sneakernet of data. There isn't a huge ecosystem of music players that take memory cards as the primary medium. Must music lives on an iPod or cellphone and arrives on other stereo systems by way of bluetooth, aux jacks, or iPod dock connection. Sure, there are things that take usb hard drives as sources and primarily play music, but I think that's such a vanishingly small use of even those specific units as to render any sense of entitlement beyond absurd.
I will admit FF pretty much ended at FFX for me, so I can't comment much on his work in recent games when present. I don't want any MMO, so X1 and XIV are out. XII's gameplay really turned me off so badly I couldn't get past it (basically making the game an offline MMO simulator in many ways). 13.. just... well... yeah....
Looking back, FFVII remains one of my favorite experiences. I tried to think more carefully about why on a recent replay.
The top thing had to be the music. It was just fantastic. Maybe I just like chiptunes, but even as late as FFX, it seemed like they had some notable 'background' tracks. Now it seems like they are all generic toned down orchestral pieces that aren't noticable at all and just barely tweak to fit the mood. Except for when they make some pop song to prop up somewhere in the middle of the game...
The open ended nature of exploration absolutely was up there. There are a lot of games that continue to get this part at least. One of the big moments when playing FFVII for the first time was leavinig midgar. Up until that point, I thought it was going to be a game like FFX or later turned out to be. Then when the world map presented itself, the contrast did a lot (for me) toward making midgar feel more like a cramped place with little control of your destiny relative to the larger world.
Another thing was how the story panned out. The general theme was certainly not new, but the details were so convoluted, I liked it. Of course, I like Crono Trigger and there was nothing partiuclarly complex about the story at all.
Finally, I think the lack of definition and no voice actors helped. I fill in the details with whatever I like. Crisis Core tought me I really won't like the voice actors if I get to make up my mind about how they should sound ahead of time.
The worst thing was the translation.
Think they are talking about the developers who only do games not available on media. Typically cheaper and by smaller groups of developers, frequently independent of large publishers. We are talking about developers for whom the barrier to entry for creating and distributing media is too high and/or incurs a cost too high for the type of game.
As much as I'm displeased with the current state of affairs of 'owning' your purchase brought on by XBL, Steam, PSN, etc. (it being a step ever further back from copy-protected media), it does allow smaller game studios to get in the market without a lot of the logisitics problems associated with media distribution.
I don't see why putting 8.5 billion out there was required for that... I'm sure that Skype or Facebook would've gladly written XBL and WinPhone support for much much less.
Basically skype seems to have a *whole* lot of traction/brand recognition. MS wants to control that to prop up their struggling mobile phone play (read: screw over iOS/Android/etc users). Torpedoing Linux support will probably be just side-effect.
My hope is that MS has the causative relationship reversed. Skype is ubiquitous because they endeavour to work on all devices. If Skype becomes an Xbox/Windows/Windows Phone play, I expect their subscriber base to evaporate.
I'ts a matter of "too much" and "too monolithic". "Too fast" implies there will come a time when everything is magically ok to do things like PSN because we'll have magic security that can't be messed up by humans. No matter what you do, the wrong people will always mess it up. It isn't like the technology today is so immature that Sony couldn't have done a better job securing it, they don't have any particularly complex needs security-wise than anyone else has for over a decade. At *least* hosting providers have to let people run as root on their little neck of the woods without access to other places which is a bit demanding, but Sony just has to let people do fairly simple stuff that doesn't require them to execute any arbitrary code on Sony servers at any privilege.
Of course I agree that things are moving online too much because it's had a rather bad impact on single-player games. So many games are only multi-player now, and many of the ones that are both have merely a token single-player campaign that is little more than training for the multi-player experience. Multi-player has its place, but you never can experience a good story or assume the role of someone *particularly* important because its always either quick pick-up matches or a persistent world that cannot change due to your particular progress as it would ruin the world for others. I also agree that online-only copies are dangerous. Even in a hypothetical world where security is perfect, you are still at the mercy of the companies viability and interest. At *least* this has demonstrated to a *lot* of people that they can still play their discs, but all of their PSN purchases are useless.
From the perspective of being too monolithic, each platform has approximately one major platform driving all of the online gaming experience nowadays. If XBL goes down, XBox is pretty well crippled, PSN obviously puts PS# out of commission, and if Steam went bad... a *whole* lot of Mac/PC gamers would be out of luck. Used to be that online games were told specifically who to connect to and server browsers were a fungible third-party application to frontend the process. If your current choice of server browser index server was out of commission, you used another one to get to the same game. I really don't like the trend where the ability to play a game is tied to the ongoing health of the company that produced and/or sold it to me.
So playing video back from SMB shares won't work by clicking in dolphin. A *lot* of KDE tries to induce a copy to local disk before *starting* to open, which is useless when the file is many gigs. Of course, if you want to use a non-KDE app because it's better or the only one, the KDE developers *should* consider that problem (even though I've seen them express the rather foolish sentiment that it's not their problem).
kioslaves *were* great, then gvfs came along and went the extra mmile of FUSE integration and suddenly kioslaves were far from the sensible approach.
Each will excel above the other if pointed at the right problem set for its given design.
x86 CPUs will Excel above Cell so long as microsoft won't port it
SOAP is needlessly/hopelessly complicated. For a given implementation, at the surface API-wise it doesn't look particularly horrid, but then you see the on the wire representation of it.... It's not hard to understand why two different implementations disagree and why most of the sane webservices world goes to much more straightforward JSON based communication when they have a choice now.
The whining is important, because then when LTS hits you with the asinine Unity crap, you still would want to complain.
The whining is at *least* as many people pissed at having settings taken away and forced into someone's 'vision' that doesn't work for everyone as how buggy it is.
It is about belief.
Let's say the payload indeed meets the criteria, with what appears to be a shifting/random identifier. You know that next-hop, ip-wise, could chose to track you at layer 3.
Because in this proposal, your 'terminal' that you interact with (your phone) is owned by you. The specific transaction (e.g. specific transaction amount, maybe a recurring schedule and tolerance) is all part of the transaction request and your phone evaluates it for what it is. It then talks to the bank and says "hey, I'm authorizing *this* specific transaction, give me some authorization data so that the retailers equipment can call you back and verify I did"). In terms of online use, I used PoS case because I figured that was the bigger leap. Online should obviously follow. If you want to avoid the phone-to-bank link being separate/cell based, you can have the phone (or desktop app) send the same protected payload via PoS provided network. Even in the desktop case, I'd lean toward phones as they are the only commonly available device with managed code model in place (excepting jailbroken phones).
This isn't appreciably any slower than today. Some retailers have very slow credit terminals, some have very fast terminals. The amount of data being transferred isn't appreciably more, though admittedly you have a three way conversation
An alternative is easy in concept, but the satus quo has the industry in a strangle hold. It's not like even a large consumer group acting together could *change* things from 'outside'
We are talking about 16 'secret' numbers that allow whoever figures them out to charge however much they want against your account. Occasionally an additional view on the back are needed for some retailers, but at the end of the day to even buy $5 of something with your card you must trust the seller to not do bad things with your account *and* keep it safe from others. This might have been about the best you could do when the seller was doing a carbon copy and would phone in the slips at the end of the day, but now everyone *immediately* contacts a server for validation and nearly every person with a card also has a pocket sized computer device capable of independently talking to bank servers. It's completely reasonable to have point-of-sale equipment that pairs with a phone and have the phone connect directly to bank servers to *specifically* authorize a transaction amount and have the PoS verify that data as well without such a silly use of an account number and just exchangine public keys and per-transaction authorization data.
The common defense is "oh, well, most card companies don't hold the customer liable for everything", ignoring:
-Some companies will hold the cardholder liable for some of it
-Sometimes they may argue that the cardholder didn't act promptly or other circumstance
-Even when everything works as 'promised', there is a cost incurred *somewhere* and that impacts you, either in higher interest rates on credit, lower interest rates on checking, and/or merchant prices due to processing fees. I'm about convinced this last one is the biggest motivation not to change, they play funny games with margin and can blame identity theft.
So they are trying to get people to opt-in to submit location data to show some indication of where people are, ok...
Why do it in a way that:
-Is limited only to iPhones
-Limited to a method that won't work in the relatively near future
Why not do something like asking people to use something like google latitude and sharing their location? Or providing an open-source app that delivers a verifiable degree of vagueness/random identifier per update?
No matter how you slice it, if you did participate in anything like this, never presume anonymity is assured. Even in that open-source case, even if the app injects data with randomized identifier and vague location, the peer can track your IP and assemble unique paths per IP.
Even then, you see a data trail that follows the towers along my commute most weekdays. Not many people will hit that same pattern. Bonus for knowing that I was out sick one day and noting that only one of the candidate trails didn't go in that day.
Even then I find their keyboard deficient. It *resizes* windows on typing. Even if not 'maximizing', it still shrinks your window to make room for the keyboard. This might be 'ok' if it put things back when done, but it doesn't, leaving you a blank set of useless space.
I would argue that 'most' people who want to have multitasking really want a laptop. If what you say has truth for 'most' people, I'd replace 'xoom' with 'tablet' and maybe I'd buy it. In tablet space, the biggest player is the iPad, which is nothing but maximized stuff. Tablets have had a long time to 'take hold' without doing so, always a niche product. Even the iPad figures pale in comparison to phone form factor devices despite being king of the tablet hill.
Conversely, if *only* looking at the tablet market, I dare say that iPad's relative success is due in no small part to a market that has always wanted their 'computers' to act like a phone. I'm not part of that market, but they are out there.
But the fact it kept resizing the window instead of overlaying seemed very un-smooth to me. I would think you'd want to determine the location of the text input field and overlap the part of the screen not in use when possible instead of forcing the user to re-maximize their app every time they type something.
All that said, I can't help but to feel these tablet fanatics are screwing up the UI for laptops and desktops for the sake of touchscreen in pursuit of the misguided goal of a 'unified' UI.
Very good advice. One issue is a *lot* of their users are commercial companies that viewed this as a way not to sweat the details at all. For many of those, if they have to sweat backup and all that, they might as well do the hosting themselves because the cost delta for them is not particularly large.
But then if malicious client knows 'xyz', they can compromise the system without knowing the password. This is the crux of the problem with that scenario, it assumes the attacker must compromise the password and while trying to protect it, turns the hash into a 'plaintext password' equivalent.
If the CA is rigorous, trusted, then yes.
If you have a self-signed cert, like a lot of applications do, or a compromised CA... welcome to man in the middle.
Because then the 'hash' becomes the 'password' for all intents and purposes, bringing you right back to square one: your password is stored 'in the clear' on the server. Even if not keyboard friendly, an attacker gives not much of a rat's ass about that detail.
In a world with plenty of well understood crypto schemes like public-private key systems where you can prove yourself without a shared secret... why the hell do we trust so much of our wealth with a trivial to see/copy account number being tossed around like crazy?
Passwords and answers to secret questions should always be hashed
Does approximately zero good if 90% of your users have trivial passwords. In fact, 'secret answers' will almost *always* be simple, one-word english text, rendering hashes meaningless. Even if Sony did do hashing, they are going to keep it simply and say "you're screwed" to avoid setting expectations high for people with crappy passwords.
Credit card information and other sensitive information should be encrypted (preferably AES-256 or stronger).
If you compromise a running system, then many bets are off here. They could have done this and either:
-Every user logged in at the time had their password in memory so that they could decrypt (assuming password is the key to per-user crypto-protected storage)
-The filesystem was using crypto-protection for offline attacks, but given an online attack, the encryption didn't matter (global crypto-protected storage).
No one should say 'It's encrypted, it's all ok', they should think hard about what it *means* and what the exposures are.