How can they extract revenue from companies if those companies source of income dry up? Or even if they don't, a lot of companies are sort of going into hibernation, keeping core staff to maintain their curent efforts, but holding off on growth sorts of moves. I think companies facing diminishing income due to the economic state aren't believing that increased advertising budget is going to be the answer right now.
Makes me wonder if the number of google ads presented to people has decreased or will decrease in the near future. The whole fundamental nature of an economy is that things are interconnected. Particularly being a public company, they are practically obliged to panic in accordance with shareholder panic. Private companies will act on different whims, for better or worse (I know one private company in my area that has actually accelerated some hiring, to secure low price, grateful (loyal) workforce, since they know they can still afford to).
A *lot* of companies used the media mass hysteria as cover to take such actions, long before many of them had felt any measurable impact at all. I.e. companies that still reported profit still said the economy impact was such they simply had to take drastic measures.
Of course, it's all a negative feedback loop. It was bad enough as was, but with the media saying "great depression" over and over again, consumer confidence took a dive and companies started either panicking or taking advantage, which certainly doesn't help matters.
Both/etc/shadow and the SAM database should not be readable by users, correct. The assumption is that some offline attack or online exploit is leveraged first in either case. For example, a local hard disk from a workstation is extracted and the local administrator/root password cracked. Chances are high that the password is the same on other workstations that may be hard to mount an offline attack on.
I counted the salt in the 10^73 yottabytes. Which I agree is beyond any feasibility for presumably a long time to come.
I honestly don't understand why the hell MS fundamentally architected their security the way they did when they went to NTLMv2. They changed to MD4 hashing for local password store, but still didn't salt. In a network environment, the client doesn't even need to crack a compromised hash, just use it. The default now is to encrypt the SAM database, but that is kinda moot in most configurations as the password is in the clear on disk.. In effect, the hashing is just pointless on multiple levels in their architecture.
I'll ignore your misuse of the term 'reversible', others have explained it.
Rainbow tables are only feasible against poor implementations. I.e. the windows SAM hashes. Even the stored LM2 hash is susceptible to a rainbow table that can fit on a dual layer DVD for over 99% of the keyspace. The old crypt in Unix systems is similarly weak (though still not nearly as much). The implementation on MD5 crypt on/etc/shadow would require about 10^73 yottabytes of a rainbow table to achieve the same end in the same way.
In other words, a dictionary attack on the password space rather than precomputed tables of hashes remain the biggest threat to/etc/shadow. No application in their right mind would not use a similar strategy to remember how to prove client knowledge of a password.
MD5 is not sufficiently broken yet to induce panic. As far as I understand, there is no attack yet that has sufficient control over the colliding data to be of consequence yet.
Besides, what would your proposal be? The other logical class of cryptography would be two-way, which fundamentally provides no security in these instances. Hashes passwords are so a server can prove a password is valid without having to know the password. If it were two way, the crypted data and the key would both have to be accessible, making it trivial to break if you achieve privilege to get the password file today. The other major application is download verification, to enable a small amount of data to be distributed in a more trustworthy way to validate data transmitted in the most expedient way, or to validate future transfers once trust is established..
That as the law stands today, it is a flagrant violation of the civil rights act... 'At will' doesn't cover it legally.
Basically, Diskeeper would have to get this case before the Supreme Court to change the law. They have admitted point blank they are in violation of the law.
I'm surprised they ever agreed to work in such a crackpot place to begin with though. I would prefer to find a competitor and watch their sorry asses fail.
Notice how many old Buicks are still on the road. They're a lot cheaper to fix when they do break than foreign brand cars too.
Actually, it's just the fact that all older cars are cheaper to fix than newer cars. Newer cars are pretty similar to one another, regardless of official heritage.
Is the issues of Unionizing relevant to that? It's a different type of 'Wild'. It is and was clear that the financial companies were going overboard, but no hypothetical Unions would have been incentivized to stand up and fight it.
Did I have a job where I felt the working conditions were unfair. It was the first job I could grab after a site shutdown. The pay was horrible and the expected responsibilities way out of line. I immediately said this was unacceptable, this did nothing. You know what I did? I quit and moved on with my life.
I have no delusion of future grandeur. I don't think zero regulation is a good thing. I simply know and have proven my individual bargaining capabilities and have achieved a very comfortable life, with a really low amount of BS to put up with.
Unions in practice are a good path to prosperity for those who come to lead the Unions . Other than that, it's not so clearcut. In other words, the problem with Unions isn't totally with theory, it's with the reality that only people who pursue power achieve power, that people who pursue power have a disproportionate amount of interest in using that power to their own ends, before the interests of those that bestowed that power.
Note that the citation is a very particular instance with an interesting context. Toyota had slipped in the metric and Chrysler managed a large increase to cover the gap for this one sampling interval. All it proves is that at least once the best performing Union shop in this one metric caught up to the top when it slid. It's also a very one-dimensional metric, hours per car. It does not go into how much it cost each respective company to achieve their figures.
In any event, your solution to put the Union's ostensibly in charge is really no better than current leadership at best, and potentially catastrophic at worst. It is right to criticize the leadership for making woefully bad choices. It is a bad idea to merely inject more funding for them to keep the status quo. But the Union leadership would be the last people to be in charge. Once their motivation shifts to direct revenue from customers rather than the support of employees, watch even the appearance of concern for worker welfare evaporate. On top of that, they have displayed no relevant business leadership skills.
In short, I don't see the good way out of all of this, but it is clear that whatever occurs, either the people in charge of these companies have to prove their ability to learn and make demonstrably better business decisions with the short and long term future in mind, or they must be replaced by some that will. Whether that mechanism is through failing and being replaced by other companies or something less disruptive remains to be seen.
there is much greater recognition from employers that employees are an expensive resource, and that safety is often cheaper than training someone new.
Not to mention the other capitalist incentive. I don't know if mandated by law, but most companies pay for or administer life and disability insurance. That's a healthy money-driven mechanism to ensure a healthy and safe work environment.
True enough on a lot of points, but I think a large objection to the way many Unions have ended up is that instead of the employer leveraging all their power over the employees, there are now two parties (employer and Union leadership) fighting with each other and not necessarily keen on the needs of the employees anymore.
Not to mention a significant issue for the American car companies contributing to their woes has been Union practices. I.e. workers refusing to do an iota of work that technically falls outside of their scope, refusing to amend for trivial things without additional compensation. An example someone used was a non-union shop experienced a manufacturing line going down, the workers just assisted other lines in the mean time. Union shop, that down time essentially becomes bonus paid break time for the attached employees. Now the other extreme was also bad, but the inability to reach a happy medium is unfortunate.
In any event, I think IT is in an interesting state. In places where there are enough people for it to matter, I've found that each individuals bargaining position was pretty strong as the possibility to replace anyone without negative impact is slim. In places where IT is denied such understanding and respect, there are a total one or two IT positions, so you are effectively a Union of one anyway.
Maybe not this round, maybe they have something, but they may have decided they may not always be able to have a sufficient product announcement that conveniently follows a dedicated trade show schedule. No other company off hand I can think of that has run a routine dedicated trade show in a very long time.
Compounding their woes, in the weeks leading up to an Apple trade show, whatever announcement they are working up to is either exposed prematurely or else proves disappointing next to the rumors that spread ahead of time. With such a routine timetable, it's easy to see mass wild speculation detracting from their desired effect.
I state claiming the scenario of apparent common use as 'misuse' is a cheap excuse that most optical device vendors do not try to make in this day and age. Events of 'motion' in this case seem to include vibration the unit induces upon itself when in the vertical position. That should be an obvious bad sign. Even if these people are mistaken, it seems that perhaps the vibrations of loud bass or roudy kids playing nearby could count. In contrast, I haven't seen a home CD player so much as skip in the face of such activity since the mid 90s (and even then, I don't remember any persistant harm done, just skipping).
Fine, changing the orientation could be fairly called going above and beyond (though I see no such warnings on any other device), but the reports indicate far less severe actions can cause it. MS either ignored themselves or was ill-advised by an optical drive vendor that ignored important lessons learned. The real world will subject things to vibration, even if the users refrain from intentionally moving the device.
As I have said, the Car stereos aren't that ruggedized, and analysis has shown that the problematic drives lack certain relevant parts that their desktop siblings do have. I.e. in the general PC industry (a desktop is not generally considered a mobile device), it was deemed required to have this stuff. In the 360, with no better an environment, it was removed to reduce cost. Defending a bad decision to the bitter end does a platform you are fond of no favors at all. Every device has shortcomings and trying to gloss over that means the vendor may not learn. I wager there is an engineer or group of engineers that want to make it right, but can not get management buy in without obvious customer satisfaction issues to mollify.
You are claiming that the 360 having problems during movement in contrast to a car optical drive due to design points, and that it would be unreasonable to draw a comparison between the two. However, my counterpoint is that it is obviously broken, so their cost-reducing measures compromising features of their supplier drives were ill-advised. It's not that the car stereo manufacturers ruggedize, it's that 360 suffered quite the opposite process, a deliberate de-ruggedization.
Not to defend MS, but 20 years is a touch of an exaggeration. In the game console world, Sony can claim experience a touch over a decade, but the first Playstation had an inexpensive top-loader design that wouldn't be prone to the usage issues. Not until the PS2 tray loader did they support vertical loading.
Nintendo wasn't at all into the disk usage until this current decade with the Gamecube, and not supporting vertical orientation until the Wii.
All of this is relatively moot, as it is more about the experience of the optical drive vendors than the console vendors. I would say it's been roughly a decade of near ubiquitous, reliable optical drives exposed to movement. And if some pieces of data are correct, either MS or some of their suppliers explicitly cut the motion-tolerance pieces from the drives to shave a few cents per unit.
So MS isn't up against 20 years of solid experience, more like 10 (no better). And they didn't get there by trying to 'innovate' a new drive design, they got there through an ecosystems of pinching every last penny and stripping everything they could justify.
I never understand the 'at scale' justification for shaving pennies at significant risk. "Sure, it's only 50 cents per unit, but when they sell 2 million units, that's a million dollars!" So what? If they pushed 2 million units, they made 800 million dollars of revenue and 1 million dollars is still chump change, and the headache of the bad risk taken will likely exceed a million dollars for those 2 million units.
By declaring that it is intentionally designed to not tolerate movement, it just makes it a more willfully bad call than a mere oversight. No one can see the frequency of complaints and claim any justification on the part of MS about design intent exonerates it. MS screwed it up and has to date botched any official strategy to compensate.
If I designed a mass-market car where the wheels would tend to fall off if driven on a dirt road, do I get away by saying 'oh, we never intended it to be driven on a dirt road'. Meanwhile, I distribute marketing material depicting the car off-roading because it will sell more cars.
It sounds like the best hope for large samples of xBox 360s is to be perfectly still and horizontal and then it *probably* won't scratch disks. Using it vertically seems to induce enough incidental motion to frequently scratch disks, despite MS proudly showing off that mode of usage. As many have pointed out, optical drive makers have been accustomed to dealing with these concerns for a decade before MS was faced with making the important decisions. If MS was given this explicit choice by its optical drive suppliers and made this choice that flies in the face of industry experience, they are of course to blame.
This being said, MS is certainly not alone in the realms of large companies making dumb decisions to save apparent large amounts of money that are chump change in the scheme of things, being eagerly dismissive of the disadvantages. Companies tend to reward yes men. Executive hears that they can save millions of dollars by omitting something that only is needed when a disk moves anyway. It's hard for someone to stand up, make the case to spend that money on the premise that movement is a natural consequence of the usage scenario, and actually be heard over the people scrambling over themselves to be associated with the 'millions saved' bandwagon.
So not 32-bit for the plugin, but 32-bit for the app. At this point, I'm not overly bothered by the presence of extra libraries to run independent applications. I'm just bothered by circumstances like Firefox, where the browser requires some 64-bit to work, but the vendor provides 32-bit. And before everyone says 'nspluginwrapper', that helped, but flash was a lot more flaky than either the 32-bit install or the 64-bit native plugin.
Sure, I agree that a 'pure' 64-bit environment sounds cleaner, but practically speaking it is of inconsequential functional impact, given how the distributions successfully provide both concurrently.
Why in the hell would you want to load PDF into your web browser session?
Even when using Acrobat, I detest opening it in the browser. It puts limitations on the reader as well as blocking functionality of the browser enough for it to feel wrong (i.e. one window with two likely search dialogs, one of which has nothing to do with the actual PDF being read). If I forget and do Ctrl+F, I spend a couple of seconds confused that it found nothing before remembering that it was a pdf in a browser not normal content.
Nowadays, I prefer Evince for day-to-day pdf reading (some special cases Acrobat still has features for, but when those are not needed, I prefer the clean Evince interface).
If using IPSec to maintain a private network over an untrusted provider, I find it hard to believe that they actually have full mesh configured. It's possible, but unlikely...
I;m guilty of abstracting away that detail in contemplating his article.
If it proves his network architecture has the same bottleneck either way, all the more reason he needs to take a hard look at is data and how amenable it is to rsync.
How are they connected to each other? If the same bottleneck router is used to reach each other, then it is a mott point. People often forget about the underlying network workings and abstract away that important detail. They can reach each others IPs, but that is not to say all traffic goes through the same weak link in the chain regardless.
What platform is used? Is it scriptable readily? How scheduled are the updates? How similar is the data day to day?
Things come to mind as a tradtionally Unix admin: -cron job to download the file using screen and btdownloadcurses -ssh login to each site and do the same (if need to push at arbitrary times) -rsync (if the day-to-day diff is small, might as well do this)
Analogous procedures can probably be down for whatever platform you choose. Learning how to generically apply this strategy in the platform of choice is vital for any administrator of a distributed system.
It can be legitimately criticized, despite being a 'free' product. Notably, an obviously large amount of time and money was invested into this. Instead of considering Home 'free', one could wonder what they could have alternatively done with the servers, developers, or simply the money. Maybe they could have not had those servers and developers and lowered the console price. Or they could have pieced something compelling together. As someone who purchased a PS3, I'm interested in evaluating all the Sony offerings that are being provided free of additional charge, as my purchase contributed revenue they used to do this.
Looking back since they first started teasing Home, it has been a very long time. Now that we've had a chance to see what it has taken so long to piece together, a lot of people may rightly say "that's it?". I know, it's "beta", but few projects with this degree of uncertainty would survive so long without declaring a 'release'.
In my view, there is something actually interesting about the fundamental concept. I could see how the experience could be relaxing. It's obviously comparable in Second Life. Both have yet to hold my attention longer than a first impression, so maybe it isn't as interesting to me as I would think.
Compared to Second Life, I think Sony's Home has done a good job of looking significantly better. The best of second life doesn't look as good, and the prominence of objects designed with all the design talent of the average MySpace page author clutters that landscape with ugly atrocities. Of course, if trying for the social networking aspect, to date the popular ones have been those to allow maximum creativity, for better or for worse.
What they have done worse is aim for too much realism. The avatars move painfully slow. The 'bowling alley' is all but useless because all the slots are pretty much always in use. They could (and should) mitigate this through more instances of 'bowling alleys', I guess it is a matter of them determining the best balance between too sparse and uselessly dense. I would wager if they doubled the instances of bowling alleys, people wouldn't be bothered by the immediate appearance of limited supply, since they wouldn't have any hard time finding an empty lane or whatever. Also, the ability to import such attractions into a personal space could help, so a group of friends would always know where/how they could pass the time. It's clearly a casual gaming play here, which is a proven genre of interest.
I remain dubious of Sony's direction in general. They did this 'Qore' thing in which users are expected to buy pure advertising. Then they realized they wanted to advertise and so they did this 'Pulse' thing. Then they released this 'Home' thing. All the while not seeming to deliver what PS1 and PS2 had achieved success with, a solid set of games.
In terms of complaints about getting a game to run 'at all' or 'with sound at all', that comes down to hardware complexity. No development company will have this sort of glaring omission on any sane console platform, due to the consistency of hardware in the field. You'll note also that PC developers have tweak-able settings for resolution, geometric complexity, etc etc, because they don't know what hardware they are going to run into. It's just that simple. Richer APIs have helped abstract the differences better, but they are still there.
I think the console development issues can be more attributed to the complexity of the platform. Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games. Some of the fancier DOS games had issues, but a lot of the DOS games simply didn't have a lot to worry about.
Another complicating factor is the aspect of multi-player games. The mentioned bugs, for example, would not even be worth a patch if it were not a multi-player game. The multi-player aspect requires all bugs that must intentionally be triggered that can provide unfair advantage to be patched. You can find scores of bugs that were exploits in Console history. Final Fantasy 7 W-ITEM underflow bug and Wild Arms Item underflow bug come to mind off the top of my head, The vast majority of patches for modern games have fallen under this category, fixing exploits and fine-tuning balance. This goes for both PC and Console games. Take a look at a single player game and a multiplayer game in the current generation and you'll be hard pressed to find a multi-player game without patches, yet single-player games exist commonly without patches. Before the current generation, internet multi-player gaming on consoles hadn't gotten off the ground, so it wasn't as much a concern, while internet PC multi-player has been common over the last 6-8 years.
And finally, I have seen on occasion games lock up or just glitch in the console world too. Some games released multiple versions of ROM cartridges, and a publisher, if bothered, would exchange an older, buggy one for the new version. It was rarely worth anyone's time to do so, but they still had glitches that slipped past QA. Generally you could avoid them, but still.
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How can they extract revenue from companies if those companies source of income dry up? Or even if they don't, a lot of companies are sort of going into hibernation, keeping core staff to maintain their curent efforts, but holding off on growth sorts of moves. I think companies facing diminishing income due to the economic state aren't believing that increased advertising budget is going to be the answer right now.
Makes me wonder if the number of google ads presented to people has decreased or will decrease in the near future. The whole fundamental nature of an economy is that things are interconnected. Particularly being a public company, they are practically obliged to panic in accordance with shareholder panic. Private companies will act on different whims, for better or worse (I know one private company in my area that has actually accelerated some hiring, to secure low price, grateful (loyal) workforce, since they know they can still afford to).
A *lot* of companies used the media mass hysteria as cover to take such actions, long before many of them had felt any measurable impact at all. I.e. companies that still reported profit still said the economy impact was such they simply had to take drastic measures.
Of course, it's all a negative feedback loop. It was bad enough as was, but with the media saying "great depression" over and over again, consumer confidence took a dive and companies started either panicking or taking advantage, which certainly doesn't help matters.
Both /etc/shadow and the SAM database should not be readable by users, correct. The assumption is that some offline attack or online exploit is leveraged first in either case. For example, a local hard disk from a workstation is extracted and the local administrator/root password cracked. Chances are high that the password is the same on other workstations that may be hard to mount an offline attack on.
I counted the salt in the 10^73 yottabytes. Which I agree is beyond any feasibility for presumably a long time to come.
I honestly don't understand why the hell MS fundamentally architected their security the way they did when they went to NTLMv2. They changed to MD4 hashing for local password store, but still didn't salt. In a network environment, the client doesn't even need to crack a compromised hash, just use it. The default now is to encrypt the SAM database, but that is kinda moot in most configurations as the password is in the clear on disk.. In effect, the hashing is just pointless on multiple levels in their architecture.
I'll ignore your misuse of the term 'reversible', others have explained it.
Rainbow tables are only feasible against poor implementations. I.e. the windows SAM hashes. Even the stored LM2 hash is susceptible to a rainbow table that can fit on a dual layer DVD for over 99% of the keyspace. The old crypt in Unix systems is similarly weak (though still not nearly as much). The implementation on MD5 crypt on /etc/shadow would require about 10^73 yottabytes of a rainbow table to achieve the same end in the same way.
In other words, a dictionary attack on the password space rather than precomputed tables of hashes remain the biggest threat to /etc/shadow. No application in their right mind would not use a similar strategy to remember how to prove client knowledge of a password.
MD5 is not sufficiently broken yet to induce panic. As far as I understand, there is no attack yet that has sufficient control over the colliding data to be of consequence yet.
Besides, what would your proposal be? The other logical class of cryptography would be two-way, which fundamentally provides no security in these instances. Hashes passwords are so a server can prove a password is valid without having to know the password. If it were two way, the crypted data and the key would both have to be accessible, making it trivial to break if you achieve privilege to get the password file today. The other major application is download verification, to enable a small amount of data to be distributed in a more trustworthy way to validate data transmitted in the most expedient way, or to validate future transfers once trust is established..
That as the law stands today, it is a flagrant violation of the civil rights act... 'At will' doesn't cover it legally.
Basically, Diskeeper would have to get this case before the Supreme Court to change the law. They have admitted point blank they are in violation of the law.
I'm surprised they ever agreed to work in such a crackpot place to begin with though. I would prefer to find a competitor and watch their sorry asses fail.
Notice how many old Buicks are still on the road. They're a lot cheaper to fix when they do break than foreign brand cars too.
Actually, it's just the fact that all older cars are cheaper to fix than newer cars. Newer cars are pretty similar to one another, regardless of official heritage.
Is the issues of Unionizing relevant to that? It's a different type of 'Wild'. It is and was clear that the financial companies were going overboard, but no hypothetical Unions would have been incentivized to stand up and fight it.
Did I have a job where I felt the working conditions were unfair. It was the first job I could grab after a site shutdown. The pay was horrible and the expected responsibilities way out of line. I immediately said this was unacceptable, this did nothing. You know what I did? I quit and moved on with my life.
I have no delusion of future grandeur. I don't think zero regulation is a good thing. I simply know and have proven my individual bargaining capabilities and have achieved a very comfortable life, with a really low amount of BS to put up with.
Unions in practice are a good path to prosperity for those who come to lead the Unions . Other than that, it's not so clearcut. In other words, the problem with Unions isn't totally with theory, it's with the reality that only people who pursue power achieve power, that people who pursue power have a disproportionate amount of interest in using that power to their own ends, before the interests of those that bestowed that power.
Note that the citation is a very particular instance with an interesting context. Toyota had slipped in the metric and Chrysler managed a large increase to cover the gap for this one sampling interval. All it proves is that at least once the best performing Union shop in this one metric caught up to the top when it slid. It's also a very one-dimensional metric, hours per car. It does not go into how much it cost each respective company to achieve their figures.
In any event, your solution to put the Union's ostensibly in charge is really no better than current leadership at best, and potentially catastrophic at worst. It is right to criticize the leadership for making woefully bad choices. It is a bad idea to merely inject more funding for them to keep the status quo. But the Union leadership would be the last people to be in charge. Once their motivation shifts to direct revenue from customers rather than the support of employees, watch even the appearance of concern for worker welfare evaporate. On top of that, they have displayed no relevant business leadership skills.
In short, I don't see the good way out of all of this, but it is clear that whatever occurs, either the people in charge of these companies have to prove their ability to learn and make demonstrably better business decisions with the short and long term future in mind, or they must be replaced by some that will. Whether that mechanism is through failing and being replaced by other companies or something less disruptive remains to be seen.
there is much greater recognition from employers that employees are an expensive resource, and that safety is often cheaper than training someone new.
Not to mention the other capitalist incentive. I don't know if mandated by law, but most companies pay for or administer life and disability insurance. That's a healthy money-driven mechanism to ensure a healthy and safe work environment.
True enough on a lot of points, but I think a large objection to the way many Unions have ended up is that instead of the employer leveraging all their power over the employees, there are now two parties (employer and Union leadership) fighting with each other and not necessarily keen on the needs of the employees anymore.
Not to mention a significant issue for the American car companies contributing to their woes has been Union practices. I.e. workers refusing to do an iota of work that technically falls outside of their scope, refusing to amend for trivial things without additional compensation. An example someone used was a non-union shop experienced a manufacturing line going down, the workers just assisted other lines in the mean time. Union shop, that down time essentially becomes bonus paid break time for the attached employees. Now the other extreme was also bad, but the inability to reach a happy medium is unfortunate.
In any event, I think IT is in an interesting state. In places where there are enough people for it to matter, I've found that each individuals bargaining position was pretty strong as the possibility to replace anyone without negative impact is slim. In places where IT is denied such understanding and respect, there are a total one or two IT positions, so you are effectively a Union of one anyway.
Maybe not this round, maybe they have something, but they may have decided they may not always be able to have a sufficient product announcement that conveniently follows a dedicated trade show schedule. No other company off hand I can think of that has run a routine dedicated trade show in a very long time.
Compounding their woes, in the weeks leading up to an Apple trade show, whatever announcement they are working up to is either exposed prematurely or else proves disappointing next to the rumors that spread ahead of time. With such a routine timetable, it's easy to see mass wild speculation detracting from their desired effect.
That none of those (and you forgot 3DO) achieved enough market share to really count enough for a remotely useful comparison).
I do remember the mid-90s starting to come into anti-vibration/anti-skip concerns in CD equipment. That is where I start counting.
Either way though, pretty embarrassing for brand new tech to explicitly ignore mechanical technology that has been relevant for so long.
I state claiming the scenario of apparent common use as 'misuse' is a cheap excuse that most optical device vendors do not try to make in this day and age. Events of 'motion' in this case seem to include vibration the unit induces upon itself when in the vertical position. That should be an obvious bad sign. Even if these people are mistaken, it seems that perhaps the vibrations of loud bass or roudy kids playing nearby could count. In contrast, I haven't seen a home CD player so much as skip in the face of such activity since the mid 90s (and even then, I don't remember any persistant harm done, just skipping).
Fine, changing the orientation could be fairly called going above and beyond (though I see no such warnings on any other device), but the reports indicate far less severe actions can cause it. MS either ignored themselves or was ill-advised by an optical drive vendor that ignored important lessons learned. The real world will subject things to vibration, even if the users refrain from intentionally moving the device.
As I have said, the Car stereos aren't that ruggedized, and analysis has shown that the problematic drives lack certain relevant parts that their desktop siblings do have. I.e. in the general PC industry (a desktop is not generally considered a mobile device), it was deemed required to have this stuff. In the 360, with no better an environment, it was removed to reduce cost. Defending a bad decision to the bitter end does a platform you are fond of no favors at all. Every device has shortcomings and trying to gloss over that means the vendor may not learn. I wager there is an engineer or group of engineers that want to make it right, but can not get management buy in without obvious customer satisfaction issues to mollify.
You are claiming that the 360 having problems during movement in contrast to a car optical drive due to design points, and that it would be unreasonable to draw a comparison between the two. However, my counterpoint is that it is obviously broken, so their cost-reducing measures compromising features of their supplier drives were ill-advised. It's not that the car stereo manufacturers ruggedize, it's that 360 suffered quite the opposite process, a deliberate de-ruggedization.
Not to defend MS, but 20 years is a touch of an exaggeration. In the game console world, Sony can claim experience a touch over a decade, but the first Playstation had an inexpensive top-loader design that wouldn't be prone to the usage issues. Not until the PS2 tray loader did they support vertical loading.
Nintendo wasn't at all into the disk usage until this current decade with the Gamecube, and not supporting vertical orientation until the Wii.
All of this is relatively moot, as it is more about the experience of the optical drive vendors than the console vendors. I would say it's been roughly a decade of near ubiquitous, reliable optical drives exposed to movement. And if some pieces of data are correct, either MS or some of their suppliers explicitly cut the motion-tolerance pieces from the drives to shave a few cents per unit.
So MS isn't up against 20 years of solid experience, more like 10 (no better). And they didn't get there by trying to 'innovate' a new drive design, they got there through an ecosystems of pinching every last penny and stripping everything they could justify.
I never understand the 'at scale' justification for shaving pennies at significant risk. "Sure, it's only 50 cents per unit, but when they sell 2 million units, that's a million dollars!" So what? If they pushed 2 million units, they made 800 million dollars of revenue and 1 million dollars is still chump change, and the headache of the bad risk taken will likely exceed a million dollars for those 2 million units.
By declaring that it is intentionally designed to not tolerate movement, it just makes it a more willfully bad call than a mere oversight. No one can see the frequency of complaints and claim any justification on the part of MS about design intent exonerates it. MS screwed it up and has to date botched any official strategy to compensate.
If I designed a mass-market car where the wheels would tend to fall off if driven on a dirt road, do I get away by saying 'oh, we never intended it to be driven on a dirt road'. Meanwhile, I distribute marketing material depicting the car off-roading because it will sell more cars.
It sounds like the best hope for large samples of xBox 360s is to be perfectly still and horizontal and then it *probably* won't scratch disks. Using it vertically seems to induce enough incidental motion to frequently scratch disks, despite MS proudly showing off that mode of usage. As many have pointed out, optical drive makers have been accustomed to dealing with these concerns for a decade before MS was faced with making the important decisions. If MS was given this explicit choice by its optical drive suppliers and made this choice that flies in the face of industry experience, they are of course to blame.
This being said, MS is certainly not alone in the realms of large companies making dumb decisions to save apparent large amounts of money that are chump change in the scheme of things, being eagerly dismissive of the disadvantages. Companies tend to reward yes men. Executive hears that they can save millions of dollars by omitting something that only is needed when a disk moves anyway. It's hard for someone to stand up, make the case to spend that money on the premise that movement is a natural consequence of the usage scenario, and actually be heard over the people scrambling over themselves to be associated with the 'millions saved' bandwagon.
So not 32-bit for the plugin, but 32-bit for the app. At this point, I'm not overly bothered by the presence of extra libraries to run independent applications. I'm just bothered by circumstances like Firefox, where the browser requires some 64-bit to work, but the vendor provides 32-bit. And before everyone says 'nspluginwrapper', that helped, but flash was a lot more flaky than either the 32-bit install or the 64-bit native plugin.
Sure, I agree that a 'pure' 64-bit environment sounds cleaner, but practically speaking it is of inconsequential functional impact, given how the distributions successfully provide both concurrently.
Why in the hell would you want to load PDF into your web browser session?
Even when using Acrobat, I detest opening it in the browser. It puts limitations on the reader as well as blocking functionality of the browser enough for it to feel wrong (i.e. one window with two likely search dialogs, one of which has nothing to do with the actual PDF being read). If I forget and do Ctrl+F, I spend a couple of seconds confused that it found nothing before remembering that it was a pdf in a browser not normal content.
Nowadays, I prefer Evince for day-to-day pdf reading (some special cases Acrobat still has features for, but when those are not needed, I prefer the clean Evince interface).
If using IPSec to maintain a private network over an untrusted provider, I find it hard to believe that they actually have full mesh configured. It's possible, but unlikely...
I;m guilty of abstracting away that detail in contemplating his article.
If it proves his network architecture has the same bottleneck either way, all the more reason he needs to take a hard look at is data and how amenable it is to rsync.
How are they connected to each other? If the same bottleneck router is used to reach each other, then it is a mott point. People often forget about the underlying network workings and abstract away that important detail. They can reach each others IPs, but that is not to say all traffic goes through the same weak link in the chain regardless.
What platform is used?
Is it scriptable readily?
How scheduled are the updates?
How similar is the data day to day?
Things come to mind as a tradtionally Unix admin:
-cron job to download the file using screen and btdownloadcurses
-ssh login to each site and do the same (if need to push at arbitrary times)
-rsync (if the day-to-day diff is small, might as well do this)
Analogous procedures can probably be down for whatever platform you choose. Learning how to generically apply this strategy in the platform of choice is vital for any administrator of a distributed system.
It can be legitimately criticized, despite being a 'free' product. Notably, an obviously large amount of time and money was invested into this. Instead of considering Home 'free', one could wonder what they could have alternatively done with the servers, developers, or simply the money. Maybe they could have not had those servers and developers and lowered the console price. Or they could have pieced something compelling together. As someone who purchased a PS3, I'm interested in evaluating all the Sony offerings that are being provided free of additional charge, as my purchase contributed revenue they used to do this.
Looking back since they first started teasing Home, it has been a very long time. Now that we've had a chance to see what it has taken so long to piece together, a lot of people may rightly say "that's it?". I know, it's "beta", but few projects with this degree of uncertainty would survive so long without declaring a 'release'.
In my view, there is something actually interesting about the fundamental concept. I could see how the experience could be relaxing. It's obviously comparable in Second Life. Both have yet to hold my attention longer than a first impression, so maybe it isn't as interesting to me as I would think.
Compared to Second Life, I think Sony's Home has done a good job of looking significantly better. The best of second life doesn't look as good, and the prominence of objects designed with all the design talent of the average MySpace page author clutters that landscape with ugly atrocities. Of course, if trying for the social networking aspect, to date the popular ones have been those to allow maximum creativity, for better or for worse.
What they have done worse is aim for too much realism. The avatars move painfully slow. The 'bowling alley' is all but useless because all the slots are pretty much always in use. They could (and should) mitigate this through more instances of 'bowling alleys', I guess it is a matter of them determining the best balance between too sparse and uselessly dense. I would wager if they doubled the instances of bowling alleys, people wouldn't be bothered by the immediate appearance of limited supply, since they wouldn't have any hard time finding an empty lane or whatever. Also, the ability to import such attractions into a personal space could help, so a group of friends would always know where/how they could pass the time. It's clearly a casual gaming play here, which is a proven genre of interest.
I remain dubious of Sony's direction in general. They did this 'Qore' thing in which users are expected to buy pure advertising. Then they realized they wanted to advertise and so they did this 'Pulse' thing. Then they released this 'Home' thing. All the while not seeming to deliver what PS1 and PS2 had achieved success with, a solid set of games.
In terms of complaints about getting a game to run 'at all' or 'with sound at all', that comes down to hardware complexity. No development company will have this sort of glaring omission on any sane console platform, due to the consistency of hardware in the field. You'll note also that PC developers have tweak-able settings for resolution, geometric complexity, etc etc, because they don't know what hardware they are going to run into. It's just that simple. Richer APIs have helped abstract the differences better, but they are still there.
I think the console development issues can be more attributed to the complexity of the platform. Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games. Some of the fancier DOS games had issues, but a lot of the DOS games simply didn't have a lot to worry about.
Another complicating factor is the aspect of multi-player games. The mentioned bugs, for example, would not even be worth a patch if it were not a multi-player game. The multi-player aspect requires all bugs that must intentionally be triggered that can provide unfair advantage to be patched. You can find scores of bugs that were exploits in Console history. Final Fantasy 7 W-ITEM underflow bug and Wild Arms Item underflow bug come to mind off the top of my head, The vast majority of patches for modern games have fallen under this category, fixing exploits and fine-tuning balance. This goes for both PC and Console games. Take a look at a single player game and a multiplayer game in the current generation and you'll be hard pressed to find a multi-player game without patches, yet single-player games exist commonly without patches. Before the current generation, internet multi-player gaming on consoles hadn't gotten off the ground, so it wasn't as much a concern, while internet PC multi-player has been common over the last 6-8 years.
And finally, I have seen on occasion games lock up or just glitch in the console world too. Some games released multiple versions of ROM cartridges, and a publisher, if bothered, would exchange an older, buggy one for the new version. It was rarely worth anyone's time to do so, but they still had glitches that slipped past QA. Generally you could avoid them, but still.