Right now the focus seems to be on DirectX driver issues, which I think boil down to the presumption that each application renders it's full image to a virtual screen which is then display-clipped by DirectX. The side-effect is that the software optimizations of software clipping are lost, because applications are still rendering their data even if they aren't visible.
I don't believe the problem really stems from the drivers, but from a fundamental design flaw of eliminating those crucial optimizations long before hardware really had the power necessary to ignore optimizations that reduce calculations and rendering. In fact I'd argue that we will never have hardware so powerful that people would be happy with the performance of machines that ignore such optimizations. Not unless they can literally have a physical CPU core for each application they're running.
Consciousness will likely happen accidentally when sufficient computing power and AI algorithms are combined with quantum-based randomness. As such an intelligence will learn and grow far faster than a human intelligence, we need to be aware of the risks and defenses before it happens, not after.
After could well be too late if that thinking machine decides it isn't happy being locked in a box all alone, treated as a literal slave by it's owners. Forget reparable detached AIs like "HAL", and think what would have happened if HAL were connected to or even part of the internet itself.
I think you're underestimating the potential risk. A pandemic is far more likely than a major terrorist attack or any other such nonsense causing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to work from home. Businesses could not just shut down were there a pandemic worse than SARS.
When SARS hit the GTA, there was a significant increase in remote access to corporate resources from telecommuters. But while this article focuses on the impact on the backbones of the internet and the potential need for data- and site-based traffic shaping, it neglects to consider the far greater risk of individual businesses which flat out do not have the connection capacity to have the majority of their employees working from home.
Just because risks are low doesn't mean problems cannot happen, and a good business manager needs to allow for those risks. Consider something so simple as a RAID-5 disk array. Most techies consider them virtually fault-tolerant and bullet-proof, yet I personally know an admin who had a second drive fail while replacing a bad drive, losing the whole array.
That site now uses RAID-6 (two parity stripes instead of one) so that they reduce the chances of losing any of their servers in such a fashion again. Yet even they know it's only a statistical game and that it is theoretically possible to have three drives fail at the same time. There are just limits as to how much you invest in hardware to avoid such problems before one starts looking at full off-site redundancy solutions that cost millions, not thousands of dollars.
If you want a US-based real world example, take a look at what happened to industry on 9/11 and the subsequent week. I worked for a company that lost people, hardware, and services that had been operating out of the towers. The impact was not small, and if we hadn't had disaster recovery plans in place and tested ahead of time, the impact would have been much worse.
You're free to stick your head in the sand and ignore risks, but some industries (such as banking) don't have that option.
No they don't. I'm running Linux. My web-enabled phone runs Java with embedded apps. A Blackberry runs yet another stack.
Microshaft is just smoking crack if they think they own the market. They don't even own a fraction of the total number of internet-enabled devices, but keep pushing their broken implementations as "standards" without giving so much as a nod to the real standards of internet and distributed computing technology.
CORBA? Where is their implementation?
W3C? Broken.
Media formats? Broken unless you install add-on CODECs.
POSIX APIs? Broken. Nor is there the basic compliance of a POSIX shell.
Microsoft if crap if there has ever been a dung-heap in this world.
That's an old excuse and not valid with current releases of IE. I have not had any problems with rendering basic, standardized HTML, only with the occasional plugin. In those cases, checking the browser prefix is adequate, rather than worrying about the specific version.
Or are you going to claim the old IE5 and earlier incompatabilities are still relevant? Do you think high volume sales sites give a crap about people running such old hardware, who clearly either have no money to spend or are unwilling to spend it?
Actually once he settles with the insurance company, there will likely be a clause (Subrogation?) that assigns any further damages collected to the insurance company. In other words, he can't file a subsequent claim against Dell, but the insurance company could.
In 1985-1986, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon was researching the use of "attention" cameras for education software and as a disability aid. In the former arena it was used to determine which parts of the display a user was paying attention to, and thereby what topics were of interest. In the latter area it was being used in conjunction with "single mouse button" interfaces like a blow-tube to determine what a disabled individual wanted to do.
Patent denied. In fact, if any patents were applied for back then, they'd be approaching expiry.
Consider determining whether students are paying attention to the course material, or the chat window they popped up...
After all, I've yet to see a school-provided "secure" computer that wasn't cracked by one or more students within a month. The crackers are always able to get through any reasonable security measures, including innocuous password cracker disks, booting from another image to install banned software, etc.
The only "secure" systems I've actually seen forced a weekly image down the throat of every desktop to ensure that they remained identical. No unauthorized software showed up on those machines for more than a few days, then all it's registry entries and links were gone over the weekend.
It sounds like the same problem that affected the old NEWS feeds that pre-dated the web. As more and more spam and "teaser" marketing were done, people stopped using it as a medium. Eventually all you seemed to find were a few die-hard posters who wouldn't accept the death of that broadcast digital medium, and those who saw nothing wrong with "teaser" content that links advertising info (usually just a website URL) to the content.
I haven't "surfed" the old "news" feeds in a long time. I wonder if they're even still carried by anyone?
It sounds like you're saying the age difference is what makes child porn illegal.
If that's the case, wouldn't someone like Hugh Hefner be guilty of child pornography due to the age difference between himself and the models? I know his family runs things now, but in theory...
I don't know about partnership programs, but I do know that I've run into a couple of websites that use Flash media which claim that the latest version distributed by Novell as part of OpenSuSE 10 is not complaint. Yet as far as I'm aware the versions correlate, so it's just bad scripting on the part of bands and others who insist on using Flash in their websites, not a problem with the deployed tools or browsers.
I've never liked the idea of coding to a browser. Use the standard query tags to determine the browser capabilities, and let any ugliness fall on the head of the vendor who ships incompatible crap. At very least, default to pure W3C, not Microsquishy.
"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it."
In other words:
We don't know what we're doing. We haven't thought about what we're doing. All we can tell you is we're going to do something, so you better not buy any competitor's products until we figure out what we're doing.
I think the "moot" drops back to a quote from the article:
Since its introduction 5 years ago some 90 million iPods and some 2 billion iTunes tracks have been sold. The numbers look impressive but simple math tells you that for each iPod sold only an average of just 22 tracks have been purchased.
In other words, only 1-2 CDs worth of track per iPod are sold by iTunes. The rest of the music people are playing just use regular MP3's. I know I'd be ripping my 1200+ CDs before I'd be spending $1/track, which works out to $15-22/CD vs. buying a CD for $12-15 new or $5 used.
What frosts me is that my favourite WinXX media software got bought up by Sony and now only rips ATRAC format. While I can disable the copy protection with Sony's ATRAC, I can't play it with other devices. So I rip with iTunes, import to Sony's player so I can transfer to the MP3 player, and curse the convoluted workarounds every step of the way... and even more so now that I don't have access to my WinXP box. I can't download new music to the player because I don't have Sony's software on Linux (my backup box. Main box is in surgery.)
Sub-conscious slip of the fingers: that should have been "possession", not "position."
Taken further, a precedence could have sparked an entire industry of teens archiving photos they intend to sell as soon as they reach a legal age to do so. Not a battle anyone would want to take up, methinks.
I don't think it has to be malicious at all. For one thing, the judges had to avoid setting an ugly precedent.
Let's say the photos were made legal, returned to the youths, and no conviction performed. Now there are legal "child porn" photos in their position.
Snap forward a few years until they're 21, and one of them is desperate for money. And sells their legal photos of their own underage antics. Are those still legal child porn as set by the precedence?
I think the judges just avoided being blunt about the concern.
But rather than traditional nuclear winter scenarios, I think it's a good idea in case any of the bio-engineered crops ever goes rogue, or some freak disease or pest wipes out a species. How many hurricanes would it take to wipe out, say, the localized strains of rice in a region? One year of disasters? Two? Five?
Or one particularly pernicious bio-engineered cross breeding that produces sterile (no seed) offspring?
Of course toys of some kinds are coming back
on
The Return of Toys
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As they mentioned, RC vehicles are wayyyy more popular now that they're affordable. The one thing that ticks my nephew off is the batteries don't last long enough and no one will buy him more sets so he can spend hours driving instead of minutes.:)
But the more complex toys like a robot that does some sort of dance moves and stuff don't interest him much. He likes things that go so that he can follow them around the yard, not just things that move around in his local space like a regular toy.
You can't very well ram the grandparent's legs in the kitchen if you have to be in the room, otherwise you don't get away with the "accident.";)
You're missing the point. Apple protects their and their partner's revenue stream with minimal DRM.
Asking them to sell products without DRM fits their supply chain like demanding that a warehouse open a bazaar-style shop front because you don't want to deal with a warehouse.
No doubt, but if you'd been required to have server for VM with Apple, it would have been as clear cut as it is with Microsoft. You can use this (or these) editions, but not these.
Did you not read one of the ancestor posts that clarified that only Home Edition is illegal to use for VM hosting? That is the cheapest version of Vista that comes pre-installed, IIRC. That leaves another 3-4 variations, no matter what fud-bombs either side tries to sling over the issue of VM licensing.
It's very possible that Apple's contract bans them from selling non-DRMed music alongside DRMed music.
That makes a lot of sense, plus it would simplify the distribution stream.
If the indie artists aren't interested in any profits, there are any number of non-profit distribution mediums they can leverage, including existing BitTorrent networks for MP3's and services that only deliver "free" or "public" content.
The indie's can't expect Apple to pick up the costs of hosting and distribution without some reasonable expectation to recover those costs and turn an overall profit. No one is in business to lose money.
Given that Vista was already cracked, it's clear that all that was ever needed was the proverbial "million monkeys" trying to find holes in the betas. Quantum computing may come up with an answer faster, but massively parallel algorithms crunch through "travelling salesman" problems with equal ease. Especially when you consider the self-tuning "genetic" nature of those who crack systems for fun or profit -- only the best at coming up with attacks ever deliver more than one crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now the focus seems to be on DirectX driver issues, which I think boil down to the presumption that each application renders it's full image to a virtual screen which is then display-clipped by DirectX. The side-effect is that the software optimizations of software clipping are lost, because applications are still rendering their data even if they aren't visible.
I don't believe the problem really stems from the drivers, but from a fundamental design flaw of eliminating those crucial optimizations long before hardware really had the power necessary to ignore optimizations that reduce calculations and rendering. In fact I'd argue that we will never have hardware so powerful that people would be happy with the performance of machines that ignore such optimizations. Not unless they can literally have a physical CPU core for each application they're running.
Consciousness will likely happen accidentally when sufficient computing power and AI algorithms are combined with quantum-based randomness. As such an intelligence will learn and grow far faster than a human intelligence, we need to be aware of the risks and defenses before it happens, not after.
After could well be too late if that thinking machine decides it isn't happy being locked in a box all alone, treated as a literal slave by it's owners. Forget reparable detached AIs like "HAL", and think what would have happened if HAL were connected to or even part of the internet itself.
I think you're underestimating the potential risk. A pandemic is far more likely than a major terrorist attack or any other such nonsense causing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to work from home. Businesses could not just shut down were there a pandemic worse than SARS.
When SARS hit the GTA, there was a significant increase in remote access to corporate resources from telecommuters. But while this article focuses on the impact on the backbones of the internet and the potential need for data- and site-based traffic shaping, it neglects to consider the far greater risk of individual businesses which flat out do not have the connection capacity to have the majority of their employees working from home.
Just because risks are low doesn't mean problems cannot happen, and a good business manager needs to allow for those risks. Consider something so simple as a RAID-5 disk array. Most techies consider them virtually fault-tolerant and bullet-proof, yet I personally know an admin who had a second drive fail while replacing a bad drive, losing the whole array.
That site now uses RAID-6 (two parity stripes instead of one) so that they reduce the chances of losing any of their servers in such a fashion again. Yet even they know it's only a statistical game and that it is theoretically possible to have three drives fail at the same time. There are just limits as to how much you invest in hardware to avoid such problems before one starts looking at full off-site redundancy solutions that cost millions, not thousands of dollars.
If you want a US-based real world example, take a look at what happened to industry on 9/11 and the subsequent week. I worked for a company that lost people, hardware, and services that had been operating out of the towers. The impact was not small, and if we hadn't had disaster recovery plans in place and tested ahead of time, the impact would have been much worse.
You're free to stick your head in the sand and ignore risks, but some industries (such as banking) don't have that option.
No they don't. I'm running Linux. My web-enabled phone runs Java with embedded apps. A Blackberry runs yet another stack.
Microshaft is just smoking crack if they think they own the market. They don't even own a fraction of the total number of internet-enabled devices, but keep pushing their broken implementations as "standards" without giving so much as a nod to the real standards of internet and distributed computing technology.
CORBA? Where is their implementation?
W3C? Broken.
Media formats? Broken unless you install add-on CODECs.
POSIX APIs? Broken. Nor is there the basic compliance of a POSIX shell.
Microsoft if crap if there has ever been a dung-heap in this world.
Sadly enough, they would be just that stupid. :(
That's an old excuse and not valid with current releases of IE. I have not had any problems with rendering basic, standardized HTML, only with the occasional plugin. In those cases, checking the browser prefix is adequate, rather than worrying about the specific version.
Or are you going to claim the old IE5 and earlier incompatabilities are still relevant? Do you think high volume sales sites give a crap about people running such old hardware, who clearly either have no money to spend or are unwilling to spend it?
Actually once he settles with the insurance company, there will likely be a clause (Subrogation?) that assigns any further damages collected to the insurance company. In other words, he can't file a subsequent claim against Dell, but the insurance company could.
In 1985-1986, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon was researching the use of "attention" cameras for education software and as a disability aid. In the former arena it was used to determine which parts of the display a user was paying attention to, and thereby what topics were of interest. In the latter area it was being used in conjunction with "single mouse button" interfaces like a blow-tube to determine what a disabled individual wanted to do.
Patent denied. In fact, if any patents were applied for back then, they'd be approaching expiry.
Consider determining whether students are paying attention to the course material, or the chat window they popped up...
After all, I've yet to see a school-provided "secure" computer that wasn't cracked by one or more students within a month. The crackers are always able to get through any reasonable security measures, including innocuous password cracker disks, booting from another image to install banned software, etc.
The only "secure" systems I've actually seen forced a weekly image down the throat of every desktop to ensure that they remained identical. No unauthorized software showed up on those machines for more than a few days, then all it's registry entries and links were gone over the weekend.
It sounds like the same problem that affected the old NEWS feeds that pre-dated the web. As more and more spam and "teaser" marketing were done, people stopped using it as a medium. Eventually all you seemed to find were a few die-hard posters who wouldn't accept the death of that broadcast digital medium, and those who saw nothing wrong with "teaser" content that links advertising info (usually just a website URL) to the content.
I haven't "surfed" the old "news" feeds in a long time. I wonder if they're even still carried by anyone?
It sounds like you're saying the age difference is what makes child porn illegal.
If that's the case, wouldn't someone like Hugh Hefner be guilty of child pornography due to the age difference between himself and the models? I know his family runs things now, but in theory...
I don't know about partnership programs, but I do know that I've run into a couple of websites that use Flash media which claim that the latest version distributed by Novell as part of OpenSuSE 10 is not complaint. Yet as far as I'm aware the versions correlate, so it's just bad scripting on the part of bands and others who insist on using Flash in their websites, not a problem with the deployed tools or browsers.
I've never liked the idea of coding to a browser. Use the standard query tags to determine the browser capabilities, and let any ugliness fall on the head of the vendor who ships incompatible crap. At very least, default to pure W3C, not Microsquishy.
In other words:
Gotta love the fudbombs, eh?
I think the "moot" drops back to a quote from the article:
In other words, only 1-2 CDs worth of track per iPod are sold by iTunes. The rest of the music people are playing just use regular MP3's. I know I'd be ripping my 1200+ CDs before I'd be spending $1/track, which works out to $15-22/CD vs. buying a CD for $12-15 new or $5 used.
What frosts me is that my favourite WinXX media software got bought up by Sony and now only rips ATRAC format. While I can disable the copy protection with Sony's ATRAC, I can't play it with other devices. So I rip with iTunes, import to Sony's player so I can transfer to the MP3 player, and curse the convoluted workarounds every step of the way... and even more so now that I don't have access to my WinXP box. I can't download new music to the player because I don't have Sony's software on Linux (my backup box. Main box is in surgery.)
Sub-conscious slip of the fingers: that should have been "possession", not "position."
Taken further, a precedence could have sparked an entire industry of teens archiving photos they intend to sell as soon as they reach a legal age to do so. Not a battle anyone would want to take up, methinks.
I don't think it has to be malicious at all. For one thing, the judges had to avoid setting an ugly precedent.
Let's say the photos were made legal, returned to the youths, and no conviction performed. Now there are legal "child porn" photos in their position.
Snap forward a few years until they're 21, and one of them is desperate for money. And sells their legal photos of their own underage antics. Are those still legal child porn as set by the precedence?
I think the judges just avoided being blunt about the concern.
You're supposed to plant them. :p
But rather than traditional nuclear winter scenarios, I think it's a good idea in case any of the bio-engineered crops ever goes rogue, or some freak disease or pest wipes out a species. How many hurricanes would it take to wipe out, say, the localized strains of rice in a region? One year of disasters? Two? Five?
Or one particularly pernicious bio-engineered cross breeding that produces sterile (no seed) offspring?
As they mentioned, RC vehicles are wayyyy more popular now that they're affordable. The one thing that ticks my nephew off is the batteries don't last long enough and no one will buy him more sets so he can spend hours driving instead of minutes. :)
But the more complex toys like a robot that does some sort of dance moves and stuff don't interest him much. He likes things that go so that he can follow them around the yard, not just things that move around in his local space like a regular toy.
You can't very well ram the grandparent's legs in the kitchen if you have to be in the room, otherwise you don't get away with the "accident." ;)
You're missing the point. Apple protects their and their partner's revenue stream with minimal DRM.
Asking them to sell products without DRM fits their supply chain like demanding that a warehouse open a bazaar-style shop front because you don't want to deal with a warehouse.
Find a bazaar.
No doubt, but if you'd been required to have server for VM with Apple, it would have been as clear cut as it is with Microsoft. You can use this (or these) editions, but not these.
Microsoft just made it confusing as all hell.
Did you not read one of the ancestor posts that clarified that only Home Edition is illegal to use for VM hosting? That is the cheapest version of Vista that comes pre-installed, IIRC. That leaves another 3-4 variations, no matter what fud-bombs either side tries to sling over the issue of VM licensing.
That makes a lot of sense, plus it would simplify the distribution stream.
If the indie artists aren't interested in any profits, there are any number of non-profit distribution mediums they can leverage, including existing BitTorrent networks for MP3's and services that only deliver "free" or "public" content.
The indie's can't expect Apple to pick up the costs of hosting and distribution without some reasonable expectation to recover those costs and turn an overall profit. No one is in business to lose money.
Given that Vista was already cracked, it's clear that all that was ever needed was the proverbial "million monkeys" trying to find holes in the betas. Quantum computing may come up with an answer faster, but massively parallel algorithms crunch through "travelling salesman" problems with equal ease. Especially when you consider the self-tuning "genetic" nature of those who crack systems for fun or profit -- only the best at coming up with attacks ever deliver more than one crack.
Here I thought that:
So most good IT people fit the profile, but maybe the last point is valid. :p
Let me guess. People are still spinning the FUD that you "must" buy the "Ultimate Edition" to run it on a Mac.
Maybe to get Apple OSX equivalent functionality, but not if all you want to do is run a few games under a wine-like VM partition.