They added a feature. Despite the whiners, it's not taking anything away, and if someone doesn't like it, they don't have to use it.
I would like to see resale (or at least trading) of games, but this isn't a bad feature and certainly has its uses. Going on vacation or something? Let a friend play your stuff. Etc.
Actually, no it isn't.. Your assuming CPU instructions always behave the same.
Wow, you're an idiot. Obviously if you're paranoid that somehow not only has the NSA solved the halting problem and included code analysis on the chip that detects if you're checking randomness (and that this would take such a trivial amount of space on the silicon that intel could even manage it), you can always copy the data elsewhere and check it. Unless you believe they've done the same for every chip. Which is no more stupid, because it's that stupid to begin with.
(This applies equally to anything that "detects what you're doing with the random data" (making an SSL connection, generating a key, etc) and weakens it.)
How is ignoring the lesser issues in favor of the glaring issues "perfect" over "good"? This is not about twiddling with the colors of the buttons and the size of fonts. Those aren't the big issues, unless you're a bad manager. This is about fixing the critical vulnerabilities and terrible bugs and ignoring the trivial, perfectionist stuff.
What you and everyone else is missing (possible Billy G too) is that all of these problems he's trying to address is caused by dictatorships, despots and other forms of corruption and tyranny.
I don't see the GP missing this at all, merely pointing out the less-than-philanthropic side of The Gates Foundation. The GP is saying more that the foundation is a front for Gates' personal profit than actually doing something good.
Your point is more applicable to Gates' statement itself: Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs. Ideally, information on things like purifying water, health, etc can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. Of course, this may not work out ideally, but it's something more toward the root of the problem than establishing control by drugs.
You're overlooking the bigger picture in an attempt to rationalize your portfolio. Your "good investment" makes money when people want the stock, which generally means when the company does well (or just looks good). The company and its board own the majority of those shares. A windfall for you is a massive increase in their net. Anytime you make money from them, they are making tons of money doing probably-bad things and passing those profits on to willing investors. You.
If everyone on the other hand tried to sell the stock, the value would crash and the company would go under because everyone was trying to jump ship and sell to squeeze the last bit of profit out of it. But they don't, because people, yourself included, are completely supporting them doing bad things, because they give you money. Rationalize all you want, but you are a supporter.
This kind of thing shouldn't be hard at all. You don't need complicated logic puzzles or any such thing. You just need something that's hard for a computer to figure out, but easy for a human.
For instance, render a 3D scene and ask a question about perspective. "What is the person holding in her right hand?" "What is the person looking at?" and similar such questions. Trivial to render. Hard to figure out, because it's far beyond simple image recognition: you have to see and interpret what's going on in the scene. It doesn't have to be confusing or hard at all. (And rendering is super cheap these days.)
Definitely funny, but not exactly... you could have a Zombie Preparedness Plan or Alien Invasion Plan or Ant Uprising Plan... you might even write it yourself, but that doesn't mean you actually believe it's going to happen. It's just what you'd do if it did happen, quite probably involving a speech where you utter your surprise that it actually happened.
RIM, whether they like it or not, is transitioning into a services company.
I wonder if this is the route we will see MS take. As relevant to the story they've already been doing Office as a service (most likely to compete with google), though I don't know how good or useful this is. I'm sure they could be doing this for other businessy/enterprisey products. Mostly they need to figure out they really aren't a leader or top dog, and focus on what they can do well, not try to compete with everything poorly. I doubt without a culture change (starting at the top) this will happen, though. MS has seen everyone as a competitor that needs shut down from day 1, so this would require huge sweeping change.
I fully expect to see BingBook+ before this is all over though, years after even Google stops caring about social networking.
Disagree. They've been losing relevance for a long time, and we're noticing now that they're struggling to find any relevance. They did have a lot of relevance to lose, as they squandered away what relevance Windows had, trying for markets they were weak in (server) while neglecting markets they were strong in (desktop), all while continuing to be so far behind the curve they just don't get what's going on until it's years too late (mobile).
They might have been a strong player in the game console market, but then they pulled an XBone.
Business is still pretty big, but with Windows losing day-to-day familiarity with users, their last bastion is going to erode quickly as users start asking "why can't we use something else?" I fully expect them to throw billions at trying to find relevance for years to come, though. This all might be foreshadowed by RIM and Blackberry: originally king at business, trying to fit in elsewhere, disrupted by technology they didn't grasp, falling behind, throwing money at trying to stay relevant, while everyone else wants to move on.
Well hooray for you, but I have to reboot win8 (game machine) constantly. Apparently, it has a well-known bug where it sends a reset command to the hard drive under certain conditions. This can cause the drive to go away until you power-cycle the machine (even the bios doesn't see it). It's not a BSOD: everything just stops working and you lose anything you were doing, because the drive it was running off is now gone. (It also blows away UEFI stuff, but fortunately you can get it booting grub again from the windows side.)
Happens extremely randomly on two entirely different systems with three different drives. Lots of reports. No fix.
Bluetooth? I'm sure it will have bluetooth.. do you mean "able to make calls"? That'd be nice, but I don't see anything about it.
However, their philosophy is more "a wide range of devices for every need" than Apples "one device, take it or leave it." Samsung has a whole range of devices differing in small features and size... Tab 3, Tab 10 3, Note 2, S4, Mega, etc. Pick a size and whether you want a stylus or not and they've got a device for you. Whether it's a phone or not doesn't seem to have a huge impact.
Samsung is rumored to be working on a 12" Galaxy Note. This may not be a perfect replacement for paper, but with a full pressure-sensitive stylus and sufficient size, it's a good start. I can't wait.
It doesn't matter that much if one is slightly faster in Javascript or rendering when Firefox will halt up for 5-10 seconds rendering a new tab. Maybe it's faster than Chrome, but if I have to wait for it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much Firefox devs work on "UI sluggishness" if it's a single thing can lock up all input to the browser.
It is being done all the time. What is this fraudulent nonsense even doing here on/. Was this not already debunked enough?
No, it's not debunked; that is, no one has shown it not to be what's claimed. However it has been shown that even if it is what it claims it's no better than an optimized classical simulated version. It's like someone claims they have a quantum chicken, and it may be quantum chicken, but it still can't cross the road faster than a fast non-quantum chicken.
Simply having the source code doesn't mean you have the ability to actually use the source code to make bug fixes should the need arise.
And yet, it still means that you can fix it, or even rewrite it in something else, if you want. Not having the source code means this is between much-more-difficult and impossible. The lesson here should be that everything we use should be open source, including compilers and libraries, not "well in theory I might have problems, so screw that whole open source thing.. proprietary all the way!"
Sadly while this was my first thought, they're claiming "well we have this system so he committed treason, but he lied about it being bad". Yeah. Right.
Here's an example where the 5th amendment makes a positive difference.
Prosecutor: Your honor, we don't have any evidence, but we're pretty sure he killed that man because he's all shifty looking.
Judge: Tell us why you killed that man.
Defendant:
Judge: Let the record show the defendant has refused to answer the question. This court is holding him in contempt. I order him confined in prison until such time as he consents to answer the question. Bailiff, take him away.
Defendant: I didn't kill the man,
Judge: You're lying, that's perjury, go to jail.
Defendant: But there's no proof!
Judge: The confession you refuse to give would be proof; refuse to give it, you're in contempt, deny it and it's perjury. Jail!
They also didn't have OSHA and other worker protections back in the 1930's. A lot of men were injured or fell to their death constructing the Empire State Building on a practically slave wages.
Sure but the question here isn't "can we do it without safety regs" it's "can we even accomplish this given modern technology". However, the Empire State Building is about 434m (according to wikipedia). I would be very surprised if the requirements didn't go up with height, and at nearly double that, I'm sure things get considerably more difficult. Maybe if they have Gibsonian-style nanoassemblers... but that's a little beyond modern technology.
The comic (as previously posted) was amusing and also wrong; a user-level exploit might be able to get you those things, if credentials aren't encrypted. Browser exploit can probably scrape your pages or similar, which is of course bad. However, a system-level exploit can do all this and more:
All of the above, plus for every user on a multi-user system
Read your keystrokes, and thus get passwords without decryption
Read directly from memory, therefore also bypassing the need for decryption, and accessing even more sensitive information unaided (GPG/SSH/SSL/etc unencrypted, etc)
Such exploits may be less bad for you, but would be considerably worse for any of the large services you rely on, potentially exposing the entire userbase.
This may be somewhat theoretical, but only because most people generally have enough sense to patch system-level exploits quickly. Most apparently not including Microsoft.
Why can't you imagine this? One of these costs $130, off-the-shelf. They have eleven total, all around the world, which is $1430, off-the-shelf. Add in some more for the sensor setup etc... maybe even double or triple it, if you're feeling generous. I imagine one guy can write a program that takes care of all of these. How much do your rack probes per data center cost? How much to install all of them? How much does the monitoring device cost?
Then, how long and how many people does it take to test them all regularly after they're installed? And how hard are they to install on an existing data center, vs dropping one of these on the floor, slapping some RFID stickers around, and walking away?
I imagine this is a trial run and IBM could probably come up with an even cheaper bulk solution if they need to. But it sure sounds like a lot less overall.. just the installation and maintenance probably makes it worth it, even if the price is more (which I doubt).
Github did this recently too which was annoying, because it was useful. They're not entirely clear why... "confusing" doesn't seem nearly as likely as "abuse", though I am not aware of any abuse in particular. Since Google is providing Drive as an alternative, and not even immediately removing the service for those using it, it's not even as bad as Github's move, which removed it for everyone. I suppose it's an opportunity to cut another Google dependency though if you really want.
How will we be able in the future to distinguish between "fake" media and "real" media. As media is being used in legal battles, eventually there will have to be a requirement to determine an 'authentic' footage, which means we will need some form of protocol, file format and/or tools which can create media which can be proven as 100% original and unaltered in any way.
Signed image/video.. private key stored on a chip in a camera, frames and video gets signed before writing. Produce an unaltered/unhacked device and the signed video. Anything else should be considered altered.
While you could arguably hack apart a device and get at its key, doing so while leaving no trace brings us back into physical forensics, and almost certainly significantly harder to do. Add a few different measures like light-sensitive markers, exposed EPROM, etc. It's not about preventing hacking (or even difficult), it's about simply making alteration evident.
Slashdot Mirror
They added a feature. Despite the whiners, it's not taking anything away, and if someone doesn't like it, they don't have to use it.
I would like to see resale (or at least trading) of games, but this isn't a bad feature and certainly has its uses. Going on vacation or something? Let a friend play your stuff. Etc.
Wow, you're an idiot. Obviously if you're paranoid that somehow not only has the NSA solved the halting problem and included code analysis on the chip that detects if you're checking randomness (and that this would take such a trivial amount of space on the silicon that intel could even manage it), you can always copy the data elsewhere and check it. Unless you believe they've done the same for every chip. Which is no more stupid, because it's that stupid to begin with.
(This applies equally to anything that "detects what you're doing with the random data" (making an SSL connection, generating a key, etc) and weakens it.)
How is ignoring the lesser issues in favor of the glaring issues "perfect" over "good"? This is not about twiddling with the colors of the buttons and the size of fonts. Those aren't the big issues, unless you're a bad manager. This is about fixing the critical vulnerabilities and terrible bugs and ignoring the trivial, perfectionist stuff.
I don't see the GP missing this at all, merely pointing out the less-than-philanthropic side of The Gates Foundation. The GP is saying more that the foundation is a front for Gates' personal profit than actually doing something good.
Your point is more applicable to Gates' statement itself: Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs. Ideally, information on things like purifying water, health, etc can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. Of course, this may not work out ideally, but it's something more toward the root of the problem than establishing control by drugs.
You're overlooking the bigger picture in an attempt to rationalize your portfolio. Your "good investment" makes money when people want the stock, which generally means when the company does well (or just looks good). The company and its board own the majority of those shares. A windfall for you is a massive increase in their net. Anytime you make money from them, they are making tons of money doing probably-bad things and passing those profits on to willing investors. You.
If everyone on the other hand tried to sell the stock, the value would crash and the company would go under because everyone was trying to jump ship and sell to squeeze the last bit of profit out of it. But they don't, because people, yourself included, are completely supporting them doing bad things, because they give you money. Rationalize all you want, but you are a supporter.
Wow poor edit sorry ... should be: "Trivial to render. Hard for a program to figure out ... It doesn't have to be confusing or hard for a human at all."
This kind of thing shouldn't be hard at all. You don't need complicated logic puzzles or any such thing. You just need something that's hard for a computer to figure out, but easy for a human.
For instance, render a 3D scene and ask a question about perspective. "What is the person holding in her right hand?" "What is the person looking at?" and similar such questions. Trivial to render. Hard to figure out, because it's far beyond simple image recognition: you have to see and interpret what's going on in the scene. It doesn't have to be confusing or hard at all. (And rendering is super cheap these days.)
Definitely funny, but not exactly ... you could have a Zombie Preparedness Plan or Alien Invasion Plan or Ant Uprising Plan ... you might even write it yourself, but that doesn't mean you actually believe it's going to happen. It's just what you'd do if it did happen, quite probably involving a speech where you utter your surprise that it actually happened.
I wonder if this is the route we will see MS take. As relevant to the story they've already been doing Office as a service (most likely to compete with google), though I don't know how good or useful this is. I'm sure they could be doing this for other businessy/enterprisey products. Mostly they need to figure out they really aren't a leader or top dog, and focus on what they can do well, not try to compete with everything poorly. I doubt without a culture change (starting at the top) this will happen, though. MS has seen everyone as a competitor that needs shut down from day 1, so this would require huge sweeping change.
I fully expect to see BingBook+ before this is all over though, years after even Google stops caring about social networking.
Disagree. They've been losing relevance for a long time, and we're noticing now that they're struggling to find any relevance. They did have a lot of relevance to lose, as they squandered away what relevance Windows had, trying for markets they were weak in (server) while neglecting markets they were strong in (desktop), all while continuing to be so far behind the curve they just don't get what's going on until it's years too late (mobile).
They might have been a strong player in the game console market, but then they pulled an XBone.
Business is still pretty big, but with Windows losing day-to-day familiarity with users, their last bastion is going to erode quickly as users start asking "why can't we use something else?" I fully expect them to throw billions at trying to find relevance for years to come, though. This all might be foreshadowed by RIM and Blackberry: originally king at business, trying to fit in elsewhere, disrupted by technology they didn't grasp, falling behind, throwing money at trying to stay relevant, while everyone else wants to move on.
Well hooray for you, but I have to reboot win8 (game machine) constantly. Apparently, it has a well-known bug where it sends a reset command to the hard drive under certain conditions. This can cause the drive to go away until you power-cycle the machine (even the bios doesn't see it). It's not a BSOD: everything just stops working and you lose anything you were doing, because the drive it was running off is now gone. (It also blows away UEFI stuff, but fortunately you can get it booting grub again from the windows side.)
Happens extremely randomly on two entirely different systems with three different drives. Lots of reports. No fix.
Bluetooth? I'm sure it will have bluetooth .. do you mean "able to make calls"? That'd be nice, but I don't see anything about it.
However, their philosophy is more "a wide range of devices for every need" than Apples "one device, take it or leave it." Samsung has a whole range of devices differing in small features and size ... Tab 3, Tab 10 3, Note 2, S4, Mega, etc. Pick a size and whether you want a stylus or not and they've got a device for you. Whether it's a phone or not doesn't seem to have a huge impact.
Samsung is rumored to be working on a 12" Galaxy Note. This may not be a perfect replacement for paper, but with a full pressure-sensitive stylus and sufficient size, it's a good start. I can't wait.
If nothing else, in addition to the mechanical interlock, you could have an electronic one that says "hey, I'm plugged in right!" or not.
No, a person cannot be evil. Each and every one of the cells in the body can be evil, but the person cannot. A person doesn't exist without cells.
It doesn't matter that much if one is slightly faster in Javascript or rendering when Firefox will halt up for 5-10 seconds rendering a new tab. Maybe it's faster than Chrome, but if I have to wait for it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much Firefox devs work on "UI sluggishness" if it's a single thing can lock up all input to the browser.
No, it's not debunked; that is, no one has shown it not to be what's claimed. However it has been shown that even if it is what it claims it's no better than an optimized classical simulated version. It's like someone claims they have a quantum chicken, and it may be quantum chicken, but it still can't cross the road faster than a fast non-quantum chicken.
And yet, it still means that you can fix it, or even rewrite it in something else, if you want. Not having the source code means this is between much-more-difficult and impossible. The lesson here should be that everything we use should be open source, including compilers and libraries, not "well in theory I might have problems, so screw that whole open source thing .. proprietary all the way!"
Sadly while this was my first thought, they're claiming "well we have this system so he committed treason, but he lied about it being bad". Yeah. Right.
Here's an example where the 5th amendment makes a positive difference.
Prosecutor: Your honor, we don't have any evidence, but we're pretty sure he killed that man because he's all shifty looking.
Judge: Tell us why you killed that man.
Defendant:
Judge: Let the record show the defendant has refused to answer the question. This court is holding him in contempt. I order him confined in prison until such time as he consents to answer the question. Bailiff, take him away.
Defendant: I didn't kill the man,
Judge: You're lying, that's perjury, go to jail.
Defendant: But there's no proof!
Judge: The confession you refuse to give would be proof; refuse to give it, you're in contempt, deny it and it's perjury. Jail!
Sure but the question here isn't "can we do it without safety regs" it's "can we even accomplish this given modern technology". However, the Empire State Building is about 434m (according to wikipedia). I would be very surprised if the requirements didn't go up with height, and at nearly double that, I'm sure things get considerably more difficult. Maybe if they have Gibsonian-style nanoassemblers... but that's a little beyond modern technology.
The comic (as previously posted) was amusing and also wrong; a user-level exploit might be able to get you those things, if credentials aren't encrypted. Browser exploit can probably scrape your pages or similar, which is of course bad. However, a system-level exploit can do all this and more:
Such exploits may be less bad for you, but would be considerably worse for any of the large services you rely on, potentially exposing the entire userbase.
This may be somewhat theoretical, but only because most people generally have enough sense to patch system-level exploits quickly. Most apparently not including Microsoft.
Why can't you imagine this? One of these costs $130, off-the-shelf. They have eleven total, all around the world, which is $1430, off-the-shelf. Add in some more for the sensor setup etc ... maybe even double or triple it, if you're feeling generous. I imagine one guy can write a program that takes care of all of these. How much do your rack probes per data center cost? How much to install all of them? How much does the monitoring device cost?
Then, how long and how many people does it take to test them all regularly after they're installed? And how hard are they to install on an existing data center, vs dropping one of these on the floor, slapping some RFID stickers around, and walking away?
I imagine this is a trial run and IBM could probably come up with an even cheaper bulk solution if they need to. But it sure sounds like a lot less overall .. just the installation and maintenance probably makes it worth it, even if the price is more (which I doubt).
Github did this recently too which was annoying, because it was useful. They're not entirely clear why ... "confusing" doesn't seem nearly as likely as "abuse", though I am not aware of any abuse in particular. Since Google is providing Drive as an alternative, and not even immediately removing the service for those using it, it's not even as bad as Github's move, which removed it for everyone. I suppose it's an opportunity to cut another Google dependency though if you really want.
Signed image/video .. private key stored on a chip in a camera, frames and video gets signed before writing. Produce an unaltered/unhacked device and the signed video. Anything else should be considered altered.
While you could arguably hack apart a device and get at its key, doing so while leaving no trace brings us back into physical forensics, and almost certainly significantly harder to do. Add a few different measures like light-sensitive markers, exposed EPROM, etc. It's not about preventing hacking (or even difficult), it's about simply making alteration evident.