And yet I STILL see many examples of people reinventing the wheel when code provided by the OS or compiler or runtime or by some nice suitably licensed library can do the same job.
Like Cryptography for example. If you are writing your own implementation of AES or RSA or SHA, you are probably doing it wrong when there are so many freely licensed well-tested implementations out there (either as part of the OS/compiler or as FOSS software you can use)
Ok so a bunch of community access channels (broadcasting things like council meetings, school board meetings and other local events) in various parts of Vermont want this stuff from Comcast.
What do the voters (those who voted for the Vermont legislature and those who voted for elected officials in areas where these community access stations exist) want? Is there actually pressure from the electorate (or from the people who are running these community access stations or the elected politicians) for this stuff or is this the Vermont regulator making a decision on its own because it thinks it knows whats good for community access channels in Vermont?
And if you think you can avoid the high fees by taking other forms of transport at Sydney Airport, forget it. All the other forms of transport you could use (taxis, Uber, trains, buses etc) have airport fees attached as well (as far as I know they all do anyway)
Samsung are using their Samsung Exynos chips in their smartwatch line so they obviously have something suitable, they just dont sell it to 3rd parties (and certainly wouldn't sell to someone making a direct competitor to their own smartwatches)
Unless there is something magic about the Qualcomm parts (or Qualcomm holds patents that are required to build an SoC suitable for an Android wear device) why couldn't someone else who makes SoCs of this sort get into the market?
Does Samsung sell its Exynos SoCs to other vendors? Does Mediatek make a SoC suitable for a smartwatch?
SED and FED are technologies that use microscopic versions of the electron gun from a CRT to power each individual pixel. They promised all sorts of advantages over existing display tech like LCD but both technologies just sort of fizzled out.
What happened? Did LCD (LED-backlit LCD) get good enough that the advantages of SED/FED over LCD were no longer enough to overcome the disadvantages? Were problems found in turning SED/FED displays into something that could be mass-produced at a price low enough to be commercially viable? Was SED/FED buried by vested interests who wanted to protect other display technologies from competition?
As long as the cost of replacing all that software with something new (and probably a lot of hardware too in cases where the existing hardware can't support the new software) is higher than the estimated cost (to the business, not to society at large) that would arise should the worst happen, they wont replace it.
Heck, it may well be that there is no new software that can be used and they would need to not just replace the PCs but the gear they talk to (I doubt the companies that make that kind of gear would want to spend money upgrading software for old obsolete hardware so it can run on more modern systems, not when they have more modern hardware to sell you:)
Anyone in congress who even mentions support for such an idea (at least anyone who actually matters enough that they could possibly get a bill going) will get a nice fat campaign donation cheque from the lobby group representing the drug companies and that will be the end of that.
The drug companies know that if medical cannabis becomes properly legal (rather than the grey area where its legal at state level in many states but remains 100% illegal at the federal level) it will hurt their bottom line as more patients use cannabis instead of the drugs owned and controlled by "big pharma" and will do whatever it takes to ensure that doesn't happen.
Companies like Microsoft and Google and Apple would probably rather not have exploits in their software bought and sold on the open market I am sure so why haven't they lobbied governments to make such buying and selling of vulnerabilities illegal (with heavy penalties up to jail time for violations).
It should be illegal for anyone except the vendor of the software to buy such vulnerabilities (companies, governments, anyone) and illegal to sell it to anyone other than the original vendor.
With less market to sell to and heavy penalties, the only people still active will be the black hats who provide vulnerabilities to malware authors and criminal gangs and the like and where there is no risk of being caught and punished (because they are in countries like Russia where the criminal gangs running the cybercrime operations are in good with the government) and there are a lot less of those.
Some will say that if you ban this it will just drive it deeper underground but the criminal gangs and such who want to use vulnerabilities for bad things (malware, cyber attacks, stealing credit card numbers etc) are already deep underground along with the hackers that supply them and most of those operating semi-legitimately probably dont particularly want to go to jail and aren't suddenly going to start selling their services to the Russian cybercrime gangs.
Less vulnerabilities will be floating around out there to be exploited and less people will be engaged in the business of finding vulnerabilities for abusive purposes (meaning the vendors and other white hats who look for vulnerabilities with the intent of fixing them will have less competition)
There are still streaming video sites out there that need Flash. Including the iView catch-up TV site for the Australian ABC (national government-run broadcaster) which refuses to work without Flash on my Windows 7 PC using any of the browsers I have (including Internet Exploder and Mozilla SeaMonkey)
That said, I do not have the ActiveX version of Flash installed (which is what this exploit is targeting) and I have Flash set in SeaMonkey so it will ask me before activating any Flash content (meaning I can white list those sites that need Flash). So I should be safe from Flash exploits unless someone hacks the iView site to serve out bogus Flash files I should be safe from Flash related nasties:)
Does this new company do any of the scumbag things PayPal is able to get away with but that banks generally can't legally do? Like freezing your account or taking money out of it for no reason?
If you want to read more about the backstory behind Xerox PARC and what went on, go read "The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", its got a whole section covering what went on at PARC.
There is no way the Xerox Alto (or some derivative of it) would have been profitable as a commercial product back in 1971, the cost to build one was too high. Even as late as 1981 when the Alto-derived Xerox Star machine came on the market, units were being sold for as high as $16k (far more than things like the VIC-20 and Apple II were selling for)
Plus, Xerox had a number of problems at that point that they had to deal with. On the one hand they had the US government looking into whether they were abusing their market dominance but at the same time new players out of Japan and elsewhere were challenging that dominance. The management was focused on how they could convince the DOJ that they weren't abusing their market power whilst at the same time finding new ways to use that market power to get their new competitors out of the market.
Yes there were things that Xerox upper management got wrong but there was no way the "Xerox Office" (Altos plus laser printers plus Ethernet plus whatever else) would have worked as a product in 1973 given the high cost of production.
Franchise laws already contain strong protections so manufacturers can't do things like that to force the dealers out of business (GM got hit with this when they axed a bunch of dealers as part of their bankruptcy and were forced to partially reverse the decision after some lawsuits by axed dealers)
Why not pass a law that says something along the lines of "manufacturers can only open their own manufacturer shops if that manufacturer has no franchised dealers anywhere in the state". That way Tesla (who has no franchised dealers and no plans to open any) gets to open manufacturer shops but Ford and GM and Toyota and VAG and the others dont get to run factory dealerships since they already have franchised dealerships everywhere.
Ends the objection of the franchised dealers where they say "if you allow Tesla in, the manufacturers who provide us with cars will open their own dealers as well and put us out of business".
AMD, Intel and NVIDIA (who make the GPUs in desktop machines ) are on board with AOM meaning they will presumably support hardware acceleration of the new coded but what about the companies that make mobile GPUs powering most of the world's phones (and the SOCs they go into) like Qualcomm and Samsung? Will there be hardware acceleration for the new codec in the Samsung Exynos chips or the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips?
Ok so if the US intelligence agencies knew the DNC had been hacked why didn't they do anything about it? Why didn't they tell the DNC there was a hacker in their network?
Were they worried about the hackers finding out that there was someone watching them and then shutting off that particular source of information? Was there some issue with a government agency sharing information with the operations of a political party during an election?
The other thing that hasn't been answered is why this happened. Why were the Russians interested in the DNC? Did Russia stand to gain something by influencing the election in a way that caused Hillary and the Democrats to lose?
Washington State already has laws banning games that have a "payout rate" such as Key Master or Stacker (where it will prevent you from winning unless a certain amount of money has gone through the machine).
I have a Gigabyte motherboard and a Skylake Core i5 and installed the new BIOS update (which says "Update CPU Microcode") and so far it seems to be going good. No random reboots or crashes and no noticeable slowdowns.
If bills in congress had to address a single item only then so much bad crap wouldn't get passed because someone managed to get it into a bill that no-one can say no to.
If Kia can put Apple Car Play into even their cheapest base model cars as a standard feature, why the hell does BMW need to charge money (either a one-off fee or a monthly fee) for the thing?
If the governments in these states really cared about having a free and open internet, they would repeal any state laws that restrict broadband competition or the roll out of new players (be it companies like Google, community groups, non-profit groups, municipalities or whoever else) and pass state laws that overrule any monopolies at the local level (be they monopolies put in place by local laws or monopolies granted via exclusive franchise deals).
And they would tell AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum and the other last-century dinosaur ISPs to get stuffed when said ISPs complain about having to actually compete.
There are a fair few A380 flights on transatlantic routes between the US and Europe as well where the high fixed costs (lack of slots at the major transatlantic hubs, high airport fees, high route fees etc) make running more flights with smaller planes less viable than it is for, say, flights within North America or flights within Europe)
Not all members of those particular religions are against action on climate change or want to bring about the end of the world. I know people personally who are part of those particular faiths who are very much in favor of cleaning up the planet and stopping climate change.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet I STILL see many examples of people reinventing the wheel when code provided by the OS or compiler or runtime or by some nice suitably licensed library can do the same job.
Like Cryptography for example. If you are writing your own implementation of AES or RSA or SHA, you are probably doing it wrong when there are so many freely licensed well-tested implementations out there (either as part of the OS/compiler or as FOSS software you can use)
Ok so a bunch of community access channels (broadcasting things like council meetings, school board meetings and other local events) in various parts of Vermont want this stuff from Comcast.
What do the voters (those who voted for the Vermont legislature and those who voted for elected officials in areas where these community access stations exist) want? Is there actually pressure from the electorate (or from the people who are running these community access stations or the elected politicians) for this stuff or is this the Vermont regulator making a decision on its own because it thinks it knows whats good for community access channels in Vermont?
And if you think you can avoid the high fees by taking other forms of transport at Sydney Airport, forget it. All the other forms of transport you could use (taxis, Uber, trains, buses etc) have airport fees attached as well (as far as I know they all do anyway)
Samsung are using their Samsung Exynos chips in their smartwatch line so they obviously have something suitable, they just dont sell it to 3rd parties (and certainly wouldn't sell to someone making a direct competitor to their own smartwatches)
Unless there is something magic about the Qualcomm parts (or Qualcomm holds patents that are required to build an SoC suitable for an Android wear device) why couldn't someone else who makes SoCs of this sort get into the market?
Does Samsung sell its Exynos SoCs to other vendors?
Does Mediatek make a SoC suitable for a smartwatch?
SED and FED are technologies that use microscopic versions of the electron gun from a CRT to power each individual pixel. They promised all sorts of advantages over existing display tech like LCD but both technologies just sort of fizzled out.
What happened? Did LCD (LED-backlit LCD) get good enough that the advantages of SED/FED over LCD were no longer enough to overcome the disadvantages? Were problems found in turning SED/FED displays into something that could be mass-produced at a price low enough to be commercially viable? Was SED/FED buried by vested interests who wanted to protect other display technologies from competition?
As long as the cost of replacing all that software with something new (and probably a lot of hardware too in cases where the existing hardware can't support the new software) is higher than the estimated cost (to the business, not to society at large) that would arise should the worst happen, they wont replace it.
Heck, it may well be that there is no new software that can be used and they would need to not just replace the PCs but the gear they talk to (I doubt the companies that make that kind of gear would want to spend money upgrading software for old obsolete hardware so it can run on more modern systems, not when they have more modern hardware to sell you :)
Anyone in congress who even mentions support for such an idea (at least anyone who actually matters enough that they could possibly get a bill going) will get a nice fat campaign donation cheque from the lobby group representing the drug companies and that will be the end of that.
The drug companies know that if medical cannabis becomes properly legal (rather than the grey area where its legal at state level in many states but remains 100% illegal at the federal level) it will hurt their bottom line as more patients use cannabis instead of the drugs owned and controlled by "big pharma" and will do whatever it takes to ensure that doesn't happen.
Companies like Microsoft and Google and Apple would probably rather not have exploits in their software bought and sold on the open market I am sure so why haven't they lobbied governments to make such buying and selling of vulnerabilities illegal (with heavy penalties up to jail time for violations).
It should be illegal for anyone except the vendor of the software to buy such vulnerabilities (companies, governments, anyone) and illegal to sell it to anyone other than the original vendor.
With less market to sell to and heavy penalties, the only people still active will be the black hats who provide vulnerabilities to malware authors and criminal gangs and the like and where there is no risk of being caught and punished (because they are in countries like Russia where the criminal gangs running the cybercrime operations are in good with the government) and there are a lot less of those.
Some will say that if you ban this it will just drive it deeper underground but the criminal gangs and such who want to use vulnerabilities for bad things (malware, cyber attacks, stealing credit card numbers etc) are already deep underground along with the hackers that supply them and most of those operating semi-legitimately probably dont particularly want to go to jail and aren't suddenly going to start selling their services to the Russian cybercrime gangs.
Less vulnerabilities will be floating around out there to be exploited and less people will be engaged in the business of finding vulnerabilities for abusive purposes (meaning the vendors and other white hats who look for vulnerabilities with the intent of fixing them will have less competition)
There are still streaming video sites out there that need Flash.
Including the iView catch-up TV site for the Australian ABC (national government-run broadcaster) which refuses to work without Flash on my Windows 7 PC using any of the browsers I have (including Internet Exploder and Mozilla SeaMonkey)
That said, I do not have the ActiveX version of Flash installed (which is what this exploit is targeting) and I have Flash set in SeaMonkey so it will ask me before activating any Flash content (meaning I can white list those sites that need Flash). So I should be safe from Flash exploits unless someone hacks the iView site to serve out bogus Flash files I should be safe from Flash related nasties :)
Does this new company do any of the scumbag things PayPal is able to get away with but that banks generally can't legally do? Like freezing your account or taking money out of it for no reason?
If you want to read more about the backstory behind Xerox PARC and what went on, go read "The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", its got a whole section covering what went on at PARC.
There is no way the Xerox Alto (or some derivative of it) would have been profitable as a commercial product back in 1971, the cost to build one was too high. Even as late as 1981 when the Alto-derived Xerox Star machine came on the market, units were being sold for as high as $16k (far more than things like the VIC-20 and Apple II were selling for)
Plus, Xerox had a number of problems at that point that they had to deal with. On the one hand they had the US government looking into whether they were abusing their market dominance but at the same time new players out of Japan and elsewhere were challenging that dominance. The management was focused on how they could convince the DOJ that they weren't abusing their market power whilst at the same time finding new ways to use that market power to get their new competitors out of the market.
Yes there were things that Xerox upper management got wrong but there was no way the "Xerox Office" (Altos plus laser printers plus Ethernet plus whatever else) would have worked as a product in 1973 given the high cost of production.
Franchise laws already contain strong protections so manufacturers can't do things like that to force the dealers out of business (GM got hit with this when they axed a bunch of dealers as part of their bankruptcy and were forced to partially reverse the decision after some lawsuits by axed dealers)
Why not pass a law that says something along the lines of "manufacturers can only open their own manufacturer shops if that manufacturer has no franchised dealers anywhere in the state". That way Tesla (who has no franchised dealers and no plans to open any) gets to open manufacturer shops but Ford and GM and Toyota and VAG and the others dont get to run factory dealerships since they already have franchised dealerships everywhere.
Ends the objection of the franchised dealers where they say "if you allow Tesla in, the manufacturers who provide us with cars will open their own dealers as well and put us out of business".
AMD, Intel and NVIDIA (who make the GPUs in desktop machines
) are on board with AOM meaning they will presumably support hardware acceleration of the new coded but what about the companies that make mobile GPUs powering most of the world's phones (and the SOCs they go into) like Qualcomm and Samsung? Will there be hardware acceleration for the new codec in the Samsung Exynos chips or the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips?
Ok so if the US intelligence agencies knew the DNC had been hacked why didn't they do anything about it? Why didn't they tell the DNC there was a hacker in their network?
Were they worried about the hackers finding out that there was someone watching them and then shutting off that particular source of information? Was there some issue with a government agency sharing information with the operations of a political party during an election?
The other thing that hasn't been answered is why this happened. Why were the Russians interested in the DNC? Did Russia stand to gain something by influencing the election in a way that caused Hillary and the Democrats to lose?
Washington State already has laws banning games that have a "payout rate" such as Key Master or Stacker (where it will prevent you from winning unless a certain amount of money has gone through the machine).
I have a Gigabyte motherboard and a Skylake Core i5 and installed the new BIOS update (which says "Update CPU Microcode") and so far it seems to be going good. No random reboots or crashes and no noticeable slowdowns.
Unfortunately the rest of the world wants our iron ore, coal, natural gas, gold, wheat, cows, wool, sheep and other exports so we cant leave :)
If bills in congress had to address a single item only then so much bad crap wouldn't get passed because someone managed to get it into a bill that no-one can say no to.
If Kia can put Apple Car Play into even their cheapest base model cars as a standard feature, why the hell does BMW need to charge money (either a one-off fee or a monthly fee) for the thing?
If the governments in these states really cared about having a free and open internet, they would repeal any state laws that restrict broadband competition or the roll out of new players (be it companies like Google, community groups, non-profit groups, municipalities or whoever else) and pass state laws that overrule any monopolies at the local level (be they monopolies put in place by local laws or monopolies granted via exclusive franchise deals).
And they would tell AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum and the other last-century dinosaur ISPs to get stuffed when said ISPs complain about having to actually compete.
There are a fair few A380 flights on transatlantic routes between the US and Europe as well where the high fixed costs (lack of slots at the major transatlantic hubs, high airport fees, high route fees etc) make running more flights with smaller planes less viable than it is for, say, flights within North America or flights within Europe)
The OP specifically turned off the "web protection" (which should have stopped the program scanning web traffic, encrypted or otherwise)
Not all members of those particular religions are against action on climate change or want to bring about the end of the world. I know people personally who are part of those particular faiths who are very much in favor of cleaning up the planet and stopping climate change.