Yeah, Iceland's approach of just letting their entire financial sector collapse has worked out better than expected, although that may be partially because a lot of the bankers were former fishermen and had fishing to fall back on when the banking thing collapsed. That said, I don't think we can credit the government for their amazing foresight in this regard, they were just too small to do anything else. The problem in the US is that the government was big enough to actually save the assholes on Wall Street.
This looks like another example of what happens when the general populace is considerably more progressive than the ruling elite. If I had "grand" in my title in Iran, I would be scared shitless about the populace getting fed up with your bullshit and overthrowing you and your friends.
Plus, bombs smuggled on as checked bags doesn't appear to be very common. It seems like it would be a big expense to stop something that doesn't happen.
As I understand it, they're only printing the receiver. The barrel, firing chamber, pin, etc... can all be bought legally as parts, only the receiver is restricted because that's where the serial number is.
So really it's just a project to make untraceable guns easier to acquire. Yay.
I don't think Microsoft or Sony are considering the WiiU a major threat at the moment. They'll just treat it like the Wii, that console for everybody who wasn't going to buy one of our consoles anyway.
But they got the product out the door on time and on budget and it's not hard for the customer to use, so everybody is happy. At least for a few years until the blatant security vulnerabilities are published.
Did the vendors who made the systems do the certification? Was security one of the criteria on the accreditation process? I would assume some form of security was on there, but do the people who know stuff about security (like the NSA) approve it?
NextGen has been a huge boondoggle up to this point, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if an insecure system crept through the approval process because all of the alternatives kept failing. Encrypting the traffic would not be trivial either, because you have issues with key management and the fact that anybody can buy transponders and reverse engineer keys out of them. This equipment ultimately has to be available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry small aircraft pilot to be useful, and it's impossible to vet all of them. Even if you did, light aircraft aren't secure storage facilities, and it only takes one theft to render a naive system broken.
The embedded controller market is a market full of devices programmed by hardware engineers, not by security professionals. They don't open up their systems for peer review and thus security flaws make it into the final product. There is definitely a sense of security through obscurity with those products, and it almost works except that the internet makes it too easy to broadcast information to the world.
At least now they know that their system is insecure, instead of having it come as a complete surprise when some attacker exploits the weakness to cause some sort of disaster.
Not really, Minecraft is piss easy to pirate if you don't care about online play. If you do care about online play, you need to find a non-authenticating server (which will be full of other pirates, so caveat emptor) but otherwise it's not any different. The "DRM" is really just about preventing other people from impersonating you (and taking your stuff) on multiplayer servers, it's not really copy protection.
For what it is worth, my PC is going on 6 years old now and still plays pretty much every game released, and usually at pretty high settings! It's a Core2Duo at 2.4 Ghz with 2GB of memory. It used to have an 8800GTX but that card died and I had to replace it with a 660Ti a few months ago. That card will carry over into whatever my next system is though. The first game I've run across that it can't handle is the new Mechwarrior Online, although that game isn't technically out yet. I know that any console port games should work fine (unless the porting job was terrible), because it has considerably more power than any of the current consoles. I've yet to find an indie game that even comes close to stressing it too.
There have been some murmurings lately of game companies getting access to the next generation consoles. All they've said is that they are "very impressive", which is probably more than the nondisclosure agreements probably allow them to say already. It's not entirely impossible to see one or two new consoles out as a big surprise this Christmas, but the timeframe is getting very very tight on that. Next year, especially next Christmas, is much more likely IMHO.
Given the nature of the people in the Bitcoin community, it would only be news if this wasn't some hairbrained scheme with no backing whatsoever beyond one crazy guy with Photoshop. The chance that someone has done the legwork necessary to make this actually work is zero. This has as much chance of actually happening as some dilapidated theater getting bought up and renovated with Bitcoin money so it can show DuckTales on endless loop like the masses demand.
How important is 400G to the last mile? You might as well ask how important a new high bypass turbine engine for jumbo jets will be to my motorcycle. It's for a totally different market. We're just barely getting to the point where it starts to make sense for early adopters to get 10G Ethernet on their ridiculously tricked out boxes (and industry has been using it for backhaul for some time now), and 1G Ethernet is still gross overkill for the majority of users. We have at least gotten to the point where 10MB Ethernet is too slow however.
It sounds to me like they're struggling financially and are trying to convert all of you "lifetime" folks back into monthly paying members so they can pay their bills. My guess is that for a measly half a gig you could find a much better deal elsewhere and a lot of very annoyed people are probably going to do exactly that. There is a good chance this company won't exist in a year regardless, and this is just giving you a head start on finding a new cloud hosting company.
I would argue that there never was a firm line between the two.
The main difference to me seemed to be which plan the carrier offered for the phone. Unlimited Data? Smartphone. Per-byte charges for data? Featurephone. Of course Unlimited data is gone, but Smartphone users still can't be opted to be charged per byte (and they wouldn't want to, Featurephone data charges were outrageous). Featurephones often had other restrictions aimed at making more money for the phone company, like not being allowed to install ringtones unless they came from the company store (at hilariously marked up prices), and extra charges for MMS, etc...
The difference with iOS is that you're not stuck running in a VM. It uses a more jail-like concept to sandbox the app, which is much lighter weight than running a full VM. The result is that apps on the iPhone tend to run a lot faster than similar apps on other platforms, and is why Apple has been slower than Android and Symbian builders to improve the specs of its phones.
And a full feature web browser. People forget just how terrible your average cell phone browser was back then and how much of a killer feature Safari was on the iPhone.
You can use accelerometers as a form of dead reckoning, but the problem is that errors are compounded over time, and depending on the quality of the sensor those error bars become ridiculously large in fairly short order. After a day or two it wouldn't even be able to tell you if you were still somewhere on the Earth.
Extremely expensive and temperamental laser gyroscopes can maintain reasonable accuracy for about 30 minutes on a moving vehicle. The $0.05 accelerometer in your phone would be in bad shape after a few seconds, a minute at most.
I think the problem is that Blackberry and Apple redefined what it means to be a "smartphone". Back in the day if you could run some sort of hobbled web browser and maybe some highly constrained apps you were a smartphone, but then phones with full browsers appeared that didn't have tons of arbitrary limits on their applications and finally had enough power to do interesting things. When you look back at the old days of app development, everybody talked endlessly about how hard it was to cram what they wanted to do in the 200k install limit on those platforms. They were also terribly slow due to the multiple layers of abstraction on top of relatively modest hardware.
John Carmack had a comment about it:
The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything.
Remember that this post was 6 years ago, back in the early days of "smartphones", so don't get your panties in a twist about the "modern cell phone" comment.
What? What Desktop OSes were Android and iOS derived from? MacOS has been slowly converging on iOS for years now and Google had no previous OS before Android. It is fair to say that Symbian was designed for weaker phones, but that's largely a matter of what design compromises it made like having a crappy web browser that falls over when you try to visit half of the websites out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Government doesn't test MPG at 80MPH, so you don't have to worry about that.
We need to tell Europe to stop watching Fox News. They're getting a weird impression of us.
Yeah, Iceland's approach of just letting their entire financial sector collapse has worked out better than expected, although that may be partially because a lot of the bankers were former fishermen and had fishing to fall back on when the banking thing collapsed. That said, I don't think we can credit the government for their amazing foresight in this regard, they were just too small to do anything else. The problem in the US is that the government was big enough to actually save the assholes on Wall Street.
This looks like another example of what happens when the general populace is considerably more progressive than the ruling elite. If I had "grand" in my title in Iran, I would be scared shitless about the populace getting fed up with your bullshit and overthrowing you and your friends.
Plus, bombs smuggled on as checked bags doesn't appear to be very common. It seems like it would be a big expense to stop something that doesn't happen.
As I understand it, they're only printing the receiver. The barrel, firing chamber, pin, etc... can all be bought legally as parts, only the receiver is restricted because that's where the serial number is.
So really it's just a project to make untraceable guns easier to acquire. Yay.
I don't think Microsoft or Sony are considering the WiiU a major threat at the moment. They'll just treat it like the Wii, that console for everybody who wasn't going to buy one of our consoles anyway.
But they got the product out the door on time and on budget and it's not hard for the customer to use, so everybody is happy. At least for a few years until the blatant security vulnerabilities are published.
Did the vendors who made the systems do the certification? Was security one of the criteria on the accreditation process? I would assume some form of security was on there, but do the people who know stuff about security (like the NSA) approve it?
NextGen has been a huge boondoggle up to this point, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if an insecure system crept through the approval process because all of the alternatives kept failing. Encrypting the traffic would not be trivial either, because you have issues with key management and the fact that anybody can buy transponders and reverse engineer keys out of them. This equipment ultimately has to be available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry small aircraft pilot to be useful, and it's impossible to vet all of them. Even if you did, light aircraft aren't secure storage facilities, and it only takes one theft to render a naive system broken.
The embedded controller market is a market full of devices programmed by hardware engineers, not by security professionals. They don't open up their systems for peer review and thus security flaws make it into the final product. There is definitely a sense of security through obscurity with those products, and it almost works except that the internet makes it too easy to broadcast information to the world.
At least now they know that their system is insecure, instead of having it come as a complete surprise when some attacker exploits the weakness to cause some sort of disaster.
Not really, Minecraft is piss easy to pirate if you don't care about online play. If you do care about online play, you need to find a non-authenticating server (which will be full of other pirates, so caveat emptor) but otherwise it's not any different. The "DRM" is really just about preventing other people from impersonating you (and taking your stuff) on multiplayer servers, it's not really copy protection.
For what it is worth, my PC is going on 6 years old now and still plays pretty much every game released, and usually at pretty high settings! It's a Core2Duo at 2.4 Ghz with 2GB of memory. It used to have an 8800GTX but that card died and I had to replace it with a 660Ti a few months ago. That card will carry over into whatever my next system is though. The first game I've run across that it can't handle is the new Mechwarrior Online, although that game isn't technically out yet. I know that any console port games should work fine (unless the porting job was terrible), because it has considerably more power than any of the current consoles. I've yet to find an indie game that even comes close to stressing it too.
There have been some murmurings lately of game companies getting access to the next generation consoles. All they've said is that they are "very impressive", which is probably more than the nondisclosure agreements probably allow them to say already. It's not entirely impossible to see one or two new consoles out as a big surprise this Christmas, but the timeframe is getting very very tight on that. Next year, especially next Christmas, is much more likely IMHO.
Without DRM I'm sure he would be quoting piracy rates of 120-140%.
The problem is that the job makes normal people suicidal.
I'm not sure I would say that your average 4channer doesn't need therapy.
Given the nature of the people in the Bitcoin community, it would only be news if this wasn't some hairbrained scheme with no backing whatsoever beyond one crazy guy with Photoshop. The chance that someone has done the legwork necessary to make this actually work is zero. This has as much chance of actually happening as some dilapidated theater getting bought up and renovated with Bitcoin money so it can show DuckTales on endless loop like the masses demand.
How important is 400G to the last mile? You might as well ask how important a new high bypass turbine engine for jumbo jets will be to my motorcycle. It's for a totally different market. We're just barely getting to the point where it starts to make sense for early adopters to get 10G Ethernet on their ridiculously tricked out boxes (and industry has been using it for backhaul for some time now), and 1G Ethernet is still gross overkill for the majority of users. We have at least gotten to the point where 10MB Ethernet is too slow however.
It sounds to me like they're struggling financially and are trying to convert all of you "lifetime" folks back into monthly paying members so they can pay their bills. My guess is that for a measly half a gig you could find a much better deal elsewhere and a lot of very annoyed people are probably going to do exactly that. There is a good chance this company won't exist in a year regardless, and this is just giving you a head start on finding a new cloud hosting company.
I would argue that there never was a firm line between the two.
The main difference to me seemed to be which plan the carrier offered for the phone. Unlimited Data? Smartphone. Per-byte charges for data? Featurephone. Of course Unlimited data is gone, but Smartphone users still can't be opted to be charged per byte (and they wouldn't want to, Featurephone data charges were outrageous). Featurephones often had other restrictions aimed at making more money for the phone company, like not being allowed to install ringtones unless they came from the company store (at hilariously marked up prices), and extra charges for MMS, etc...
The difference with iOS is that you're not stuck running in a VM. It uses a more jail-like concept to sandbox the app, which is much lighter weight than running a full VM. The result is that apps on the iPhone tend to run a lot faster than similar apps on other platforms, and is why Apple has been slower than Android and Symbian builders to improve the specs of its phones.
And a full feature web browser. People forget just how terrible your average cell phone browser was back then and how much of a killer feature Safari was on the iPhone.
You can use accelerometers as a form of dead reckoning, but the problem is that errors are compounded over time, and depending on the quality of the sensor those error bars become ridiculously large in fairly short order. After a day or two it wouldn't even be able to tell you if you were still somewhere on the Earth.
Extremely expensive and temperamental laser gyroscopes can maintain reasonable accuracy for about 30 minutes on a moving vehicle. The $0.05 accelerometer in your phone would be in bad shape after a few seconds, a minute at most.
Remember that this post was 6 years ago, back in the early days of "smartphones", so don't get your panties in a twist about the "modern cell phone" comment.
What? What Desktop OSes were Android and iOS derived from? MacOS has been slowly converging on iOS for years now and Google had no previous OS before Android. It is fair to say that Symbian was designed for weaker phones, but that's largely a matter of what design compromises it made like having a crappy web browser that falls over when you try to visit half of the websites out there.