Hear hear! XML is a complete waste of time. I just don't understand why everyone and their brother is so gung-ho about XML. It's ugly to humans and ugly to computers (not completely trivial to parse). Before anyone implements something that uses XML they really need to take a look at YAML.
When dealing with XMLHTTPRequests, JSON is the only reasonable way to communicate with Javascript. I often just use plaintext, too, and parse with a quick regular expression. It much better than sifting through the XML tree with the clunky DOM interfaces.
I've used all 3 techniques (JSON, plaintext, XML) when building my gaming site and I can tell you that for returning messages to javascript from XMLHTTPRequests, JSON kicks XMLs butt any day of the week.
No I wouldn't equate "most powerful" with power consumption which is what watts measure. A 750 watt speaker system means you can pump 750 watts worth of power through them and they wont break. That doesn't mean they will be loud. That is, there is no direct translation from watts to decibels. Some speakers and speaker cabinets are more efficient than others (some speaker's mothers...).
I think their claim of most powerful has more to do with loudness and frequency response.
You are correct. Going straight to the person who could help you the most is a grevious violation of protocol. First you file form 457s22 (making sure to initial paragraphs 3, 41, and 72, obviously). Then Submit this form in triplicate to your supervisor, the current head of the TCP/IP security subcommity and the associate vice chairman of the s22OE working group.
After that has been processed you will recieve form 4208XX which needs to be filled out within 12 hours (!!!) and refiled (in triplicate, of course) to the same people plus the organizational director of document services. Don't worry, after that you only have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for them to approve or deny your request.
Or you could just go right to the IT guys and buy them lunch as someone else suggested. But isn't the red tape method more rewarding in the end?
and I hope you wouldn't, modern c/c++ compilers can do better asm then humans anyway
No they can't, not even close.
Well, it depends what you mean by "better". Can a compiler get a inner loop optimized as well as a human can by hand? Well, I had this exact argument with a guy at work who wrote a memory test for an embedded system in assembly because "it needed to be fast". So I said, "why did you waste your time writing in assembly?" I wrote a C version and the compiler ended up optimizing it better than the human had (16% faster!).
On the other hand, in general I find that when looking at compiler generated assembly I find things that I would have done differently (that is, better). But the downside is writing assembly that works is a pain in the butt. And this is where the compiler kicks a human's ass. I have found compiler bugs where the compiler spits out the wrong assembly, but 99.99% of the time it produces assembly that corresponds to your source code. And since C is at an ever so slightly higher level of abstraction from assembly you are guaranteed to write better code in C.
Only fools write first in assembly any more. Assembly should be reserved for things that absolutely can not be done in C, like interrupt routine wrappers and extremely speed critical inner loops. Otherwise you are just making an unmaintainable mess for no reason.
So, if by "good" you mean the tightest, fastest, most optimized code possible, then you are generally right. A really good human can generally outdo a compiler. But even then not 100% of the time. Now, if by "good" you mean code that is maintainable and bug free then no, a human writing assembly cannot even begin to compete with a compiler writing assembly from human generated C.
This question reminded me of the classic Paul Graham essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular". Despite the title, much of the essay is about how much high school sucks and what could be done to fix it.
So a software engineer, a hardware engineer and their manager are in the car going to an expo in their rental car. To get there they must navigate a treacherous mountain road. While they are coming down a steep and narrow incline the car's brakes go out. The car starts going way too fast and they all fear this will be the end of their lives. But somehow the driver manages to not careen off the road and the manage glide to a stop once safely down the hill.
They all get out and catch their breath for a minute.
The manager is first to speak, "Well, let me get my cell phone so I can call the tow truck to take it to the garage."
The hardware engineer says, "No, no, no, just pop the hood and we can fix the problem ourselves."
The software engineer says, "Guys, just wait. Before we do anything we should take it up the hill and see if it happens again!"
You could probably use bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/). It was originally meant for tracking bugs, but it is flexible enough to do what you want. Assign each computer a bug which gets a unique number and lets you add timestamped comments and attachments at will.
If you're targetting savvy developers (ie, me), then they probably wont read your crappy html mail (and I'd probably unsubscribe even if it were text, but that's really a different issue). But if you were targetting my mom, she'd probably not notice or care. In fact, she might like the html version with its pretty pictures or whatever.
The best way is to send both a text part and an HTML part and let the client decide how they want to see it. I made sure my client automatically shows me the text part if there are both.
O'Gara's piece was an attempt at a smear job by painting PJ as a crazy elderly Jehovah's Witness. Those in the SCO camp/pro-SCO people must be incredibly desperate to be resorting to tactics like that.
And stupid too. Given SCO's CEO, good old Darl, is a Utah dwelling Mormon it's not really in SCO's best interest making fun of other people's religions. There's so many of ways to make a Mormon look like a crazy religious kook, do they really want to open that door?
I agree with what others have said--I don't care about the format too much as long as it's text and has a timestamp in front.
What really matters to me is that errors get logged nicely. "Error number #57575" or even "permission denied" doesn't help at all. It needs to be specific "permission denied while opening file/blah/blah" is infintely better since it lets you actually fix the error without looking something up on google. Speaking of that, if you *do* have some kind of strange error you are reporting and you know it's not going to make sense, at least make it long and unique so I *can* look it up on google. Terseness can be a good quality in a program, but it is *not* a good quality in an error log.
Just remember, the people installing your software and using probably don't the first thing about the way it works on the inside. You have to explain to them what went wrong and give them clues on how to fix it in a short error line.
Oh, it's also nice to have a link back to the original source line that caused the problem. In C, use __FILE__, __LINE__, and __func__ (if you have it) so that if I'm really stumped I can download your source, quickly find the error and start working backwards to find the cause. However, this could get confusing if there are a number of different versions of your code floating around, and it's not as important as the other things I mentioned.
When this happens to me (*every* time I go to Home Depot, by the way), I just just walk away purposefully, ignoring the cries of "Sir! Sir! You set off the alarm". I don't make eye contact, I don't speed up or slow down. Just ignore. It feels good when you finally reach that Zen-like state of perfect ignoring.
I made the mistake of stopping once and had to sit there while they wasted my time rooting through all my bags. And yes, it's a waste of *my* time--It's not my duty to give them peace of mind. I guarantee they won't go out of their way to give *me* peace of mind.
This is the same way I handle the bozos at the end of the Fry's line that insist on checking eveyone's bag. I just scoot on past and ignore everything they say. The Fry's guys won't chase you though; The Home Depot people do.:-)
-David
Re:Volume Logic with Automatic Gain Control
on
Normalizing Music?
·
· Score: 1
I also give a big thumbs up for Volume Logic. I use it at home and at work and it is great. It has a so many settings that you can make the compression subtle or completely over the top. It evens out classical music very well and it also makes my ripped records sound good (they are very quiet without it). I also have some audience recorded live concert material (ahem) and it improves the sound of those by an unbelievable amount.
Despite the above rave review, Volume Logic is not a panacea. It can significantly change the balance of certain songs, especially songs that have rather sparse instrumentation. For instance, New Order's "Blue Monday" sounds really bad during the opening drum part. It ends up boosting the volume of the tape hiss which makes it sound like a really bad recording. It corrects itself once the song starts, but it ruins the intro.
You can turn the processing off in one click if that becomes an issue. Mostly it just makes listening great. I bought it especially for work so that I can keep everything at a constant level--audible, but not annoying to coworkers.
Insurance it totally doable. I made sure when I got my renter's insurance (and later my homeowner's insurance) that it covered my CD collection. I gave them estimates (and inflated it by some margin to give me room to grow) and there was no problem. My insurance company considers CDs as being in the same category as jewelry and so they are used to people having items worth large amounts of money. My CD collection (1000+) barely dented their lowest cap.
I've been running it at work for 3 or 4 years now and at home for 2. At work we have a 3 disk raid array and at home I have a 4 disk raid array. I've had multiple crashes, disks that went out and power-failures and haven't lost either raid set yet. I've had some close calls, but I was always able to salvage the array, fsck it and move on.
The one really cool feature that's been added to linux recently is the ability to grow your raid. My original drives at home were 120 GB each. I have been slowly buying replacement 200 GB drives for my raid set over the past few months (as my budget allows). Each time I'd buy a new drive I'd mark it as failed in the raid, shutdown linux and replace the drive, and then power back on and hot-add the new drive. After all 4 were replaced I ran the new version of mdadm with linux 2.6.8 and grew the raid set:
Yes, heat is definitely an issue, and an issue I didn't even think about when setting up my 4 disk linux software raid 5 set.
After I set it up for the first time, I had a drive die on me really quickly and noticed when I replaced it that it was murderously hot. As in "burning my fingers" hot. So I went and bought these little hd cooling fans that fit in front of a 5 1/4" drive bay (and come with 3.5" drive mounting adapters) and have 3 little fans on them. They cost about $7 each. I put 4 of them in my machine and they kept the drives at room temperature. Ahhh.
But the noise was a problem as all those fans together sounded like a wind tunnel. Especially 2 years later when all the little fans started dying and making extremely loud noises. Think annoying fan noise multiplied by 12. Ugh. Then I found this neat product:
I agree with you. I thought compared to other games out there it was enjoyable. I had a lot of fun playing it. I was disappointed, though, when comparing it to the original--it doesn't stack up at all.
My least favorite change wasn't the universal ammo or the lack of inventory (though I do miss the micromanaging of the inventory). What I really miss the old weapon mod system. DX2 only lets you mod the weapon twice, and then you have to throw it out and start with a new gun. I hated that. I never got attached to any of my weapons like I did in DX1. I remember LOVING my cool hyper-accurate and long distance enhanced sniper rifle and my cool silenced pistol with laser sight, scope and damage and distance enhacers. Ahhh.... If I could have named the weapon I would have done it in a second.:-) When I got thrown in jail in DX1 I was heartbroken that I might not get my same weapon back (and overjoyed when I found it in the weapons locker). And I never felt that attached to anything I had in DX2.
Yes, but my original point was that hacking a TV or set top box to send out cleartext video that was supposed to be encrypted is going to be difficult. And it is going to be near/completely impossible to do this directly from a computer with no hack on any of the other equipment.
People compare this with DVD cracking, but that was a walk in the park compared to this. There will be no 3 line perl script to unencrypt HDTV.
The X-Box is almost an apt comparison. Yes, it's hackable now, but it took a while and the X-Box is a fairly stable and widely owned product. There are nowhere near as many HDTVs as there are X-Boxes. And each new TV has to be hacked--There is no global hack that you can use on them all. They all have different OSes and different ways of protecting themselves. Not only that, year to year the TV's are changing drastically. Just because one year it gets hacked, doesn't mean the next year's model will be susceptable to the same hack. Whereas most of the X-Boxes are the same, if not very similar (again, as far as I know--I don't own an X-Box). Not to mention that the X-Box is running a very familiar architecture--these TVs run on many different micros, not plain old pentiums.
I'm just pointing out that it's not going to be as easy as some here seem to suggest. I don't mean to suggest that it shouldn't be done... But it may be easier to convince the FCC to get rid of the stupid broadcast flag requirement... Ok, maybe not.:-)
Well, I hear there are already devices on the blacklist, though I haven't seen it first-hand.
And they couldn't blacklist TI, since the TI chip doesn't have any built in keys or or identifying info (from the 5c/1394 side). They can (as far as I know) only blacklist individual devices. They can blacklist *your* Pioneer VCR, and not mine, for instance.
It doesn't matter if you have a chip that supports the 5C and M6 encryption. Unless you have a key signed with the DTLA's private key, no other device will talk to you. And, say you get a key, they protect against that too. Every device is required to implement a viral SRM list--a black list of sorts. Once a key makes it onto the black list no other device will talk to it again...
Changing the firmware is probably the only option. But some chip makers have made that difficult.
Replacing the chip with a pin compatible device that lacks the encryption feature might work if it's on the TV, though just because it's pin compatible doesn't mean the TV's firmware can't check to make sure the encryption option is installed (and refuse to work with it if it isn't).
There is no gaping hole that I can see. I don't think it's unbreakable or anything, but it's going to be a lot harder than the DVD encryption problem ever was.
I doubt DTCP will last any longer than the DVD encryption standard did.
As much as I wish this would be true, the DTCP is much more secure than the DVD copy protection scheme. It uses Diffie-Hellman and eliptic curve stuff for the key negotiation and though it uses an encryption method comparable to DES for the data (ie, weak by todays standards), it rotates the key often enough to make it really difficult to break.
If it is broken it will likely be confined to specific devices, not a global hack like the DVD encryption breakage turned out to be.
Unless, of course, someone steals the top level DTCP top level private key. But I suspect they guard that vigorously.
Next year, when manufacturers are required to implement the broadcast flag, you will not be able to use your computer to view programs that are protected (channel 7 in LA (ABC) now sets the broadcast flag for almost all content). This is because protected content is required to be transmitted accross 1394 encrypted by DTCP (an encryption/key management standard). The DTCP license explicitly disallows the use of the standard on a computer. Specifically, it does not allow unencrpyted data to go across a PCI bus which rules out all firewire interfaces to your computer.
You can only get the details of DTCP if you sign a contract that says you owe them $8,000,000 if you leak any details of the standard.
So you will be SOL as more and more programs get the broadcast flag.
At work we've been benchmarking some 1394 to ATA bridges under XP and suddenly one day they all started running at 1/2 the speed they used to. After some digging around we found that someone had installed SP2 on our test system. We backed it out and the performance doubled (well, it went back to normal)!
So if you use Firewire disks on your computer--watch out...
Yes, for style of indenting to work you need really good editor support which is why I don't actually use that technique.
Have you every used emacs? It's use of the tab key is novel (I think). Tab doesn't insert a tab when you're editing source code. Tab indents the line to where it should be. "Where it should be", of course, is completely customizable. A few other editors have this feature now too, I believe. I used to be annoyed that I couldn't manage that white space by myself but I quickly realized it's much better that way.
Anyway, if emacs knew how to do that tabbing style then I might consider switching to it, but we do have people at work that use CodeWrite for editing and I don't think it has a similar mode.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear! XML is a complete waste of time. I just don't understand why everyone and their brother is so gung-ho about XML. It's ugly to humans and ugly to computers (not completely trivial to parse). Before anyone implements something that uses XML they really need to take a look at YAML.
When dealing with XMLHTTPRequests, JSON is the only reasonable way to communicate with Javascript. I often just use plaintext, too, and parse with a quick regular expression. It much better than sifting through the XML tree with the clunky DOM interfaces.
I've used all 3 techniques (JSON, plaintext, XML) when building my gaming site and I can tell you that for returning messages to javascript from XMLHTTPRequests, JSON kicks XMLs butt any day of the week.
-David
No I wouldn't equate "most powerful" with power consumption which is what watts measure. A 750 watt speaker system means you can pump 750 watts worth of power through them and they wont break. That doesn't mean they will be loud. That is, there is no direct translation from watts to decibels. Some speakers and speaker cabinets are more efficient than others (some speaker's mothers...).
I think their claim of most powerful has more to do with loudness and frequency response.
-David
You are correct. Going straight to the person who could help you the most is a grevious violation of protocol. First you file form 457s22 (making sure to initial paragraphs 3, 41, and 72, obviously). Then Submit this form in triplicate to your supervisor, the current head of the TCP/IP security subcommity and the associate vice chairman of the s22OE working group.
After that has been processed you will recieve form 4208XX which needs to be filled out within 12 hours (!!!) and refiled (in triplicate, of course) to the same people plus the organizational director of document services. Don't worry, after that you only have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for them to approve or deny your request.
Or you could just go right to the IT guys and buy them lunch as someone else suggested. But isn't the red tape method more rewarding in the end?
-David
On the other hand, in general I find that when looking at compiler generated assembly I find things that I would have done differently (that is, better). But the downside is writing assembly that works is a pain in the butt. And this is where the compiler kicks a human's ass. I have found compiler bugs where the compiler spits out the wrong assembly, but 99.99% of the time it produces assembly that corresponds to your source code. And since C is at an ever so slightly higher level of abstraction from assembly you are guaranteed to write better code in C.
Only fools write first in assembly any more. Assembly should be reserved for things that absolutely can not be done in C, like interrupt routine wrappers and extremely speed critical inner loops. Otherwise you are just making an unmaintainable mess for no reason.
So, if by "good" you mean the tightest, fastest, most optimized code possible, then you are generally right. A really good human can generally outdo a compiler. But even then not 100% of the time. Now, if by "good" you mean code that is maintainable and bug free then no, a human writing assembly cannot even begin to compete with a compiler writing assembly from human generated C.
-David
This question reminded me of the classic Paul Graham essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular". Despite the title, much of the essay is about how much high school sucks and what could be done to fix it.
-David
So a software engineer, a hardware engineer and their manager are in the car going to an expo in their rental car. To get there they must navigate a treacherous mountain road. While they are coming down a steep and narrow incline the car's brakes go out. The car starts going way too fast and they all fear this will be the end of their lives. But somehow the driver manages to not careen off the road and the manage glide to a stop once safely down the hill.
They all get out and catch their breath for a minute.
The manager is first to speak, "Well, let me get my cell phone so I can call the tow truck to take it to the garage."
The hardware engineer says, "No, no, no, just pop the hood and we can fix the problem ourselves."
The software engineer says, "Guys, just wait. Before we do anything we should take it up the hill and see if it happens again!"
Heh.
-David
You could probably use bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/). It was originally meant for tracking bugs, but it is flexible enough to do what you want. Assign each computer a bug which gets a unique number and lets you add timestamped comments and attachments at will.
-David
If you're targetting savvy developers (ie, me), then they probably wont read your crappy html mail (and I'd probably unsubscribe even if it were text, but that's really a different issue). But if you were targetting my mom, she'd probably not notice or care. In fact, she might like the html version with its pretty pictures or whatever.
The best way is to send both a text part and an HTML part and let the client decide how they want to see it. I made sure my client automatically shows me the text part if there are both.
-David
I agree with what others have said--I don't care about the format too much as long as it's text and has a timestamp in front.
/blah/blah" is infintely better since it lets you actually fix the error without looking something up on google. Speaking of that, if you *do* have some kind of strange error you are reporting and you know it's not going to make sense, at least make it long and unique so I *can* look it up on google. Terseness can be a good quality in a program, but it is *not* a good quality in an error log.
What really matters to me is that errors get logged nicely. "Error number #57575" or even "permission denied" doesn't help at all. It needs to be specific "permission denied while opening file
Just remember, the people installing your software and using probably don't the first thing about the way it works on the inside. You have to explain to them what went wrong and give them clues on how to fix it in a short error line.
Oh, it's also nice to have a link back to the original source line that caused the problem. In C, use __FILE__, __LINE__, and __func__ (if you have it) so that if I'm really stumped I can download your source, quickly find the error and start working backwards to find the cause. However, this could get confusing if there are a number of different versions of your code floating around, and it's not as important as the other things I mentioned.
-David
So this implies they wrote their own PNG reading routines instead of using libpng?
Is this some sort of NIH thing?
libpng has a BSDish licence if I recall... So that can't be the issue...
-David
When this happens to me (*every* time I go to Home Depot, by the way), I just just walk away purposefully, ignoring the cries of "Sir! Sir! You set off the alarm". I don't make eye contact, I don't speed up or slow down. Just ignore. It feels good when you finally reach that Zen-like state of perfect ignoring.
:-)
I made the mistake of stopping once and had to sit there while they wasted my time rooting through all my bags. And yes, it's a waste of *my* time--It's not my duty to give them peace of mind. I guarantee they won't go out of their way to give *me* peace of mind.
This is the same way I handle the bozos at the end of the Fry's line that insist on checking eveyone's bag. I just scoot on past and ignore everything they say. The Fry's guys won't chase you though; The Home Depot people do.
-David
I also give a big thumbs up for Volume Logic. I use it at home and at work and it is great. It has a so many settings that you can make the compression subtle or completely over the top. It evens out classical music very well and it also makes my ripped records sound good (they are very quiet without it). I also have some audience recorded live concert material (ahem) and it improves the sound of those by an unbelievable amount.
Despite the above rave review, Volume Logic is not a panacea. It can significantly change the balance of certain songs, especially songs that have rather sparse instrumentation. For instance, New Order's "Blue Monday" sounds really bad during the opening drum part. It ends up boosting the volume of the tape hiss which makes it sound like a really bad recording. It corrects itself once the song starts, but it ruins the intro.
You can turn the processing off in one click if that becomes an issue. Mostly it just makes listening great. I bought it especially for work so that I can keep everything at a constant level--audible, but not annoying to coworkers.
-David
Maybe there needs to be disk crashing insurance...
But then again I suppose that's what backups are...
-David
Insurance it totally doable. I made sure when I got my renter's insurance (and later my homeowner's insurance) that it covered my CD collection. I gave them estimates (and inflated it by some margin to give me room to grow) and there was no problem. My insurance company considers CDs as being in the same category as jewelry and so they are used to people having items worth large amounts of money. My CD collection (1000+) barely dented their lowest cap.
-David
The one really cool feature that's been added to linux recently is the ability to grow your raid. My original drives at home were 120 GB each. I have been slowly buying replacement 200 GB drives for my raid set over the past few months (as my budget allows). Each time I'd buy a new drive I'd mark it as failed in the raid, shutdown linux and replace the drive, and then power back on and hot-add the new drive. After all 4 were replaced I ran the new version of mdadm with linux 2.6.8 and grew the raid set:Suddenly my raid set had grown to cover the full 200 GB of each drive. I just have to say, that is really cool!
-David
Yes, heat is definitely an issue, and an issue I didn't even think about when setting up my 4 disk linux software raid 5 set.
After I set it up for the first time, I had a drive die on me really quickly and noticed when I replaced it that it was murderously hot. As in "burning my fingers" hot. So I went and bought these little hd cooling fans that fit in front of a 5 1/4" drive bay (and come with 3.5" drive mounting adapters) and have 3 little fans on them. They cost about $7 each. I put 4 of them in my machine and they kept the drives at room temperature. Ahhh.
But the noise was a problem as all those fans together sounded like a wind tunnel. Especially 2 years later when all the little fans started dying and making extremely loud noises. Think annoying fan noise multiplied by 12. Ugh. Then I found this neat product:
Cooler Master 4 in 3 device module.
Instead of 12 little fans I now have one big super-quiet fan, and my drives still say nice and cool. It was definitely worth the $30 I paid for it.
Don't forget about heat.
-David
I agree with you. I thought compared to other games out there it was enjoyable. I had a lot of fun playing it. I was disappointed, though, when comparing it to the original--it doesn't stack up at all.
:-) When I got thrown in jail in DX1 I was heartbroken that I might not get my same weapon back (and overjoyed when I found it in the weapons locker). And I never felt that attached to anything I had in DX2.
My least favorite change wasn't the universal ammo or the lack of inventory (though I do miss the micromanaging of the inventory). What I really miss the old weapon mod system. DX2 only lets you mod the weapon twice, and then you have to throw it out and start with a new gun. I hated that. I never got attached to any of my weapons like I did in DX1. I remember LOVING my cool hyper-accurate and long distance enhanced sniper rifle and my cool silenced pistol with laser sight, scope and damage and distance enhacers. Ahhh.... If I could have named the weapon I would have done it in a second.
-David
Yes, but my original point was that hacking a TV or set top box to send out cleartext video that was supposed to be encrypted is going to be difficult. And it is going to be near/completely impossible to do this directly from a computer with no hack on any of the other equipment.
:-)
People compare this with DVD cracking, but that was a walk in the park compared to this. There will be no 3 line perl script to unencrypt HDTV.
The X-Box is almost an apt comparison. Yes, it's hackable now, but it took a while and the X-Box is a fairly stable and widely owned product. There are nowhere near as many HDTVs as there are X-Boxes. And each new TV has to be hacked--There is no global hack that you can use on them all. They all have different OSes and different ways of protecting themselves. Not only that, year to year the TV's are changing drastically. Just because one year it gets hacked, doesn't mean the next year's model will be susceptable to the same hack. Whereas most of the X-Boxes are the same, if not very similar (again, as far as I know--I don't own an X-Box). Not to mention that the X-Box is running a very familiar architecture--these TVs run on many different micros, not plain old pentiums.
I'm just pointing out that it's not going to be as easy as some here seem to suggest. I don't mean to suggest that it shouldn't be done... But it may be easier to convince the FCC to get rid of the stupid broadcast flag requirement... Ok, maybe not.
-David
Well, I hear there are already devices on the blacklist, though I haven't seen it first-hand.
And they couldn't blacklist TI, since the TI chip doesn't have any built in keys or or identifying info (from the 5c/1394 side). They can (as far as I know) only blacklist individual devices. They can blacklist *your* Pioneer VCR, and not mine, for instance.
-David
It doesn't matter if you have a chip that supports the 5C and M6 encryption. Unless you have a key signed with the DTLA's private key, no other device will talk to you. And, say you get a key, they protect against that too. Every device is required to implement a viral SRM list--a black list of sorts. Once a key makes it onto the black list no other device will talk to it again...
Changing the firmware is probably the only option. But some chip makers have made that difficult.
Replacing the chip with a pin compatible device that lacks the encryption feature might work if it's on the TV, though just because it's pin compatible doesn't mean the TV's firmware can't check to make sure the encryption option is installed (and refuse to work with it if it isn't).
There is no gaping hole that I can see. I don't think it's unbreakable or anything, but it's going to be a lot harder than the DVD encryption problem ever was.
-David
If it is broken it will likely be confined to specific devices, not a global hack like the DVD encryption breakage turned out to be.
Unless, of course, someone steals the top level DTCP top level private key. But I suspect they guard that vigorously.
-David
Next year, when manufacturers are required to implement the broadcast flag, you will not be able to use your computer to view programs that are protected (channel 7 in LA (ABC) now sets the broadcast flag for almost all content). This is because protected content is required to be transmitted accross 1394 encrypted by DTCP (an encryption/key management standard). The DTCP license explicitly disallows the use of the standard on a computer. Specifically, it does not allow unencrpyted data to go across a PCI bus which rules out all firewire interfaces to your computer.
You can only get the details of DTCP if you sign a contract that says you owe them $8,000,000 if you leak any details of the standard.
So you will be SOL as more and more programs get the broadcast flag.
-David
At work we've been benchmarking some 1394 to ATA bridges under XP and suddenly one day they all started running at 1/2 the speed they used to. After some digging around we found that someone had installed SP2 on our test system. We backed it out and the performance doubled (well, it went back to normal)!
So if you use Firewire disks on your computer--watch out...
-David
Yes, for style of indenting to work you need really good editor support which is why I don't actually use that technique.
Have you every used emacs? It's use of the tab key is novel (I think). Tab doesn't insert a tab when you're editing source code. Tab indents the line to where it should be. "Where it should be", of course, is completely customizable. A few other editors have this feature now too, I believe. I used to be annoyed that I couldn't manage that white space by myself but I quickly realized it's much better that way.
Anyway, if emacs knew how to do that tabbing style then I might consider switching to it, but we do have people at work that use CodeWrite for editing and I don't think it has a similar mode.
-David