The problem with Sony officially supporting the emulator and homebrew application market is not a technical, but rather a legal and copyright problem. There would be the issue of licensing fees for content which Sony does not own, such as the Final Fantasy properties, when the cost and complexity of settling who gets paid for what and how have not been completely worked out. There is no way that Sony is going to willingly expose itself to copyright infringement litigation by supporting the homebrew emulator market, or at least not officially as some people might like. The homebrew emulator hackers have much less exposure financially to litigation than does a large corporation such as Sony, so while the garage hacker is not likely to be sued for ripping ROMs and hacking together emulators for various platforms Sony almost certainly would be. As much as Sony would like to increase their hardware sales they cannot do that by supporting and encouraging infringement of copyright.
It is known that James Earl Jones was paid a mere $2,500 for his voice over services in "Star Wars" and only $8,000 on "Return of the Jedi". The $650,000 that Mark Hamill is said to have received sounds very high considering what the other actors are known to have received for their appearances in these films.
If they're actually selling the thing to the highest bidder, I'm guessing TP isn't going to join in the bidding.
Why wouldn't they sell to the highest bidder then turn around and sell it to tipping point as well? There is after all no honor among most thieves. The only reason that they might not do this is to protect their right to future deals with the underworld, but if they can find a way to sell the information anonymously in both cases then it would be like selling arms to both sides in a conflict, very lucrative as long as both sides do not know who they are really buying from.
The same thing happened when Microsoft announced the name XBOX for their console. Apparently there was a small company in Florida called XBOX Technologies which sued Microsoft for trademark infringement. They settled it out of court and Microsoft proceeded to use the name XBOX for their console. Microsoft will either buy the company or the rights to the name and that will be the end of it.
The article was bang on when it asked how a company with annual revenues of 3.4 billion can have a fundamentally higher market capitalization than companies which revenues in the $74 billion plus range? Where is the money? Are the Google shareholders receiving a dividend? How much is the IP really worth in licensing, advertising, and other revenue streams? The technical side of Google appears to be quite sound, but from business perspective their nose bleed share prices are not backed up by the realities of the corporate balance sheet. The current price of the shares, ~50 times annual earnings, has already PRICED IN an expected growth rate of 25-30% which means that unless Google can better that expected performance the share price is not justified. I work in the IT industry and I appreciate the services that Google provides, but the current share price looks like a come-on to a sucker bet. There will be a painful adjustment in the future and it will be interesting to see which big investors are left without a chair when the music stops.
The point was that assembly is an inappropriate choice for business reasons. You would get much more out of your programming dollars with efficient algorithm design and judicious use of design patterns in the high level language than you would by optimizing your assembly. When you compare the cost of developer hours w/the cost of hardware the choice becomes clear. The real world is not like the University where academic arguments are allowed to stand on their own technical merits. In the real world, at the end of the day, the company needs to beat competitors to market and turn a profit or we can all find different jobs when the company folds. The other reason that I am skeptical is that there are very few people anymore who can beat a modern optimizing compiler with hand-code assembly and those people, if they can be found at all, are going to be extremely expensive. It is sort of like the AI chess programs out there, sure there are a few grandmasters that can beat the best efforts of the Fritz programmers, but the rest of us will lose every time to the likes of deep blue and Fritz and it is the same when most humans go up against the modern compilers. I disagree with the bare metal argument in that not EVERYONE needs to know how to hand optimize assembly. If someone chooses to specialize in that then that is their choice, but in the vast majority of business cases assembly is way below the optimal developer noise level and should be left to the compiler. I would not hire someone who makes that argument because it indicates a lack of real world project experience in a business setting where money is at stake. I don't want an ivory tower academic *nix programmer fresh out of school who thinks that C is the best choice for my next business project because he believes that he is the best bare metal h4x0|2 in world. I will let my competitor hire him.
I still think it's a good idea, and necessary, for everyone to be able to program down to bare metal
Unless you need that level of control, and there are very few legitimate cases, then you are shooting yourself in the foot by not taking advantage of modern development tools and programming environments such as Java, C++, and C#. Your competitors are all using these tools to write high quality applications in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes an assembly hacker to do half the amount of work. You wouldn't dig the foundation for a skyscraper with a garden trowel so why would you chose assembly for your next enterprise project for which management has allocated just three months from concept to complete working system? If you chose to write your next project in Apple II assembly your competitors will eat your lunch and you will no longer be employed as a software developer. The choice of a higher level language and modern tools does not, as you suggest, demonstrate a lack of skill or understanding, but rather a pragmatic and logical approach to 99.99% of the programming problems which are likely to occur in the real world on a semi-regular basis. I manage offshore developers, yeah I know it's the dark side but that is another discussion, and let me tell you that a statement like that in a job interview will effectively eliminate you from my consideration.
Windows XP SP2 is doing this already to some extent, such as when they dialog the user "Program X is connecting to remote host. Do you wish to allow this?" and the like. I agree that program and role based security could be taken further and it has with the Microsoft.NET Framework, but not many companies are currently developing major projects in.NET, so there will be some years of lag before the role based and code access security features of.NET begin to make inroads into a critical mass of the Windows software out there. Microsoft is doing a good job under tough circumstances, albeit under circumstances of their own making, to move Windows in the right direction, but they cannot break all of the legacy applications either. Microsoft knows what they are doing on the security front, even if they didn't they have enough resources to hire anyone in the world they want who DOES know, and they will get to where they are going eventually...it will just take time.
Does anyone else remember the glory days of Netscape when they had a private on-site sushi bar, full time masseuses, and a nose-bleed P/E ratio? I do not own any Google shares right now, but if I did I would sell them after reading something like this, or in the words of Joseph Kennedy, "When the shoeshine boy starts giving you tips, it is time to get out of the market."
This sounds like the sort of problem which can be solved with a simple truth table or Karnaugh map and Boolean minterms with the bitwise operators available in the programming language of your choice. For example if we take voting to mean the most votes of one type, true or false, for a particular bit in the output then the truth table for the function would look something like the following:
if we then take the bitwise and of the minterms then the result would be the following:
(!A & B & C) & (A & !B & C) & (A & B & !C) & (A & B & C)
Perhaps I have missed something? It has been a while since I studied boolean algebra. I have seen questions like these in interviews before where the answers have very little to do with the software that the company actually writes. How often would the bitwise and of three integers come up in the average business application development scenario? If the interview was for an engineering type software company or a hardware manufacturer then it makes more sense. Anyway, that was my coffee break crack at the problem...back to the real world.
Alright, but would you spend the time to debug trace the binaries for an entire sever product, Oracle xi for example, or would you just use a competing open source product instead? At some point you have to ask yourself the question: is it worth it? how much is my time worth? I agree with you 100 percent that what you say is entirely possible to do, but a week or month worth of developer time is worth more than the price of most retail software packages. If you are doing this out of hobby interest or self education then fine, but wouldn't you rather spend $100 for the average software package or use an open source product then decompile, refactor, and compile your own custom version? BTW...If you develop for a company and you get code through decompilation you should let the management know so they are at least aware of the risk (and get that in writing), that way if you ever get hauled into court they cannot point the finger at you and say that you did it without management knowledge and approval.
The obfuscator that I use for my.NET assembly DLLs renames all of the non-public variables, methods, and references to names like A, a, b, etc. and overloads each name as many times as it can before it actually compiles the assembly. If the assembly is disassembled then the code will something like the following:
public class A : B
{
public void a(int b, string c)
{ // Do something here
}
}
so yes the code will be decompiled, but it will not be in a form that will be very readable to the average human programmer. The obfuscators are designed to make code look like it did in the old Fortran days when people used letters and other non-obvious names for variables, functions, and files. This has been shown time and again to lead to massive headaches in maintenance, readability, and understandability of the code, although from the standpoint of the computer the program runs the same as its non-obfuscated version. Is obfuscation a silver bullet? No, the determined attacker will still be able to decipher your code given enough time and tenacity, but at the very least obfuscation and instruction mixing ratchet up the difficulty several orders of magnitude. At some point the attack becomes difficult enough that all but the most determined decide its not worth the trouble.
code obfuscation and assembly mixers/manglers make disassembly of compiled code a tiresome and nearly impossible task. It is like taking a four course meal and throwing it in the blender, it still provides the same nutritional value, but it is not possible to separate the apple pie from the mashed potatoes after the compiled assembly has been obfuscated/mangled by these tools. It would probably be easier to re-write your own DVD Audio player software from scratch as an open source project than it would be to try and disassemble software which was compiled in such a way as to prevent just such an attack.
If companies spent their time wringing their hands over whether a business strategy was legal or not, in those cases where it is not obviously illegal, then their competitors would eat their lunch and they would be out of business. If the company knowingly operates illegally then that is a different story, but for those grey areas, to use Microsoft's own words, "we compete vigorously and fairly".
2. Sell products that break laws or include properties of others for A LOT of money.
Again, if companies spent their time chasing down all of the different laws in all of the different localities and all possible patents that they might be infringing upon, especially software patents which are an entirely different discussion, then they would never get any productive work done. I am of the opinion that the courts and the legal system are a cost center for most companies and not a profit generating activity. Companies play the legal game because they have to defend their assets against every two-bit attorney who wants to raid their coffers, not because the particularly like dealing with the courts. The courts, like governments, provide a necessary function in society, but they frequently overstep their bounds and regulate, litigate, and legislate until all of the productivity is squeezed out of the economy and nobody can get anything done.
3. Pay off gov't or company suing them.
That is a very serious charge and you had better have the facts to back it up before you make the accusation. If a company decides to settle a legal action without admitting guilt then that is an acceptable and legal conclusion to the matter under our legal system, at least in the US it is anyway. However, if you are claiming that someone in power took bribery or payment to settle, then I say again that that is a serious charge and should not be made without proof to back it up or else it is merely a slanderous and spurious accusation.
safety is one thing but government mandated rationing of speed to conservere fuel is un-american. If should be able to use as much gas as I am willing to pay for. They can increase the gas tax if they want to and gas will get more expensive in the long run but price controls, rationing, and the like never work...just ask the Russians.
While I agree with the basic assertion, that hackers and technically minded people generally have poor grammar and usage habits, I also believe that the usage, or misusage as the case may be, is not always due to lack of understanding or knowledge of the grammatically correct way of expression. Rather, it has become common in the technical profession, primarily to facilitate efficiency in communication, to truncate certain words or adopt abbreviated phrasing, especially in informal communications such as e-mail, IRC chat, and instant messaging conversations. The desire to streamline communication in "geek" conversations is not a new phenomenon, but it has become more obvious to outsiders in recent years, with the explosion of the Internet into the mainstream, than it was previously. It is also common for hackers to inject programming terms in their normal speaking as shorthand for more verbose English equivalents. For example, I have heard some geeks qualify their questions with the phrase "?P" which is taken from the Prolog language to indicate a conditional predicate such as "Pizza, P?" instead of "Would you like to go for Pizza?". The point is that languages and usage evolve over time in dynamic fashion as the needs and priorities of speakers change. Those who appoint themselves as Arbiters or the "pure" language and sit in judgment of everyone else get modded Troll and rightly so. The language belongs to all of the speakers, not just the grammar Nazis and the intellectual elitists who wish to mummify the language by wrapping it up in a static and unchanging form.
Two million dollars budget for a game... no wonder profits are so low.
In the case of EA at least some of that is amortized licensing costs for securing the game rights to certain leagues, teams, and player names. EA, for example, just recently paid many millions of dollars for the rights to all of the NFL team, player, and league names for the next several years. This means that anyone who wants to compete with them cannot use any of those names in their game and has to use made up leagues, players, and teams instead. When your average Wal-Mart shopper sees the choice between Madden NFL 20XX Football with the names of their favorite teams and players or Championship Footbal with made up teams and players which one do you think he will chose? They are paying two million dollars per game to lock their competitors out of the market through exclusivity agreements...and for EA at least profits on sports games are certainly not low.
The problem with expensive investments in AI is that the publisher must have a series of successful games built on the fruits of that labor before there is any profit. This could possibly be mitigated somewhat by licensing this engine for use by other companies, but this is also weighed by the fact that your competitors are now using the same or similar types of advanced artificial intelligence in their games which may hurt sales of your own games. Large publishers, such as EA and Microsoft, have the resources and wherewithal to make these long term bets, but the smaller boutique firms have neither the willingness nor the ability to finance the development of these types of advanced engines in house. It may be useful to look at some numbers from 2004, courteously compiled by the http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blog/2005/02/24/" >shrapnelgames blog.
The total revenue for the game industry in 2004 was 1.2 billion dollars which was down 100 million from 2003. During this same period only two games had sales of over 500,000 units, but there were 18 games which had sales of 250,000 or more. Based upon the varying definitions of what constitutes a "new release" there were roughly 1,100 games released in 2004 of which maybe 6% earned a profit. The average budget for a competitive game is said to be around two million dollars with an average break even point of around 110,000 units sold. The average retail game price is $24.45 with only 5,000 total units sold.
Clearly, the open source community is willing to undertake these efforts on their own initiative or for other reasons related to research, as was the case with the student produced game. I am in no way denigrating the efforts of these students, what they produced with the resources available to them was simply amazing and of surprising quality. However, in the world of retail games it takes a certain amount of marketing, advertising, and Wal-Mart end caps to rise above the background noise, unless you are like the aforementioned established game companies and the reputation speaks for itself, at least until they release a real stinker. At the end of the day, when all things are factored in, there is simply not enough money in the budget of the average game to make this type of advanced artificial intelligence worth the risk and expense, at least right now. However, if there is any constant in the game industry it is change and this will probably change in the years to come. I would like to see some new and innovative games too, instead of Madden 2017, but it looks like we will have to wait a while yet.
But application vendors don't want their customers to have the ability to move to anyone else at will. It goes against the grain of how they do business.
Alright, but suppose that they gave you the software at a lower price in the first place because they knew that you would not be able to switch vendors easily? It could be argued that this should be disclosed up-front, but even if it had been you know what would have happened...some middle manager would have siezed upon the opportunity to save a buck now in exchange for a problem which may or may not occur in the distant future. The point is that portability is going to cost more money, which might squeeze some smaller customers out of the market entirely even though they are wiling to take the lock-in to save money. This is why software is broken down into enterprise, professional, standard, and other editions so that each firm can decide what is important to them and pay only for the features that they want (mostly).
It is not entirely the fault of Microsoft for the licensing headaches, you can blame the collective attorneys of the world for putting everyone, including the open source people, through the licensing hurdles. Licenses are primarily about protecting the producer from frivolous litigation by armies of lawyers throwing 'theory of liability' lawsuits around like hand grenades and hoping that one will score a hit. The lawyers are responsible for the death of personal responsibility in society and if it weren't for all the lawsuits and bullshit we wouldn't need long-winded and complex descriptions of what are otherwise fairly straightforward agreements to protect ourselves from losing our collective shirts.
The most common structure used to index large amounts of data stored on magnetic or other large capacity media is the B-Tree and its variants. The article linked here explains the basic idea of the balanced multiway tree or B-Tree. The advantage of this type of index is that the index can be stored entirely on the collection of tapes, cartridges, disks or whatever else while only the portion of the tree which currently being operated on need be read into volatile or main memory. The B-Tree allows for efficient access to massive amounts of data while minimizing disk reads and writes. Theoretically, the B-Tree and its variants could be scaled up to address an unlimited amount data in logarithmic time.
It is precisely because of this inability for the average user to confirm the sender with vanilla e-mail (no cryptography add-ons) that many banks do not send any account related e-mails on an automated basis with links to login pages. For example, I receive monthly bank statement notifications in the e-mail from my bank, but these messages include no links to their online banking sites (plain text only).
The 'C' node is analagous to the "man-in-the-middle" in the cryptanalysis attack on public key algorithms. How can you trust 'C'? What if 'C' is really the RIAA, MPAA, or one of their agents or minions? The problem is that 'C' knows the REAL IP addresses of both 'A' and 'B' and thus can log them for later analysis or forward them to any number of third parties. Detection could be made more difficult by involving additional middlemen in the hopes that at least some of them are not an agents, but this does not address the root of the problem since there could be entire networks of middle men agents who are all cooperating to log the activities of 'A' and 'B'.
Perhaps, but they never said that.NET framework would be the BASIS for an OS. They said that longhorn would SUPPORT.NET, but that does not mean that they are going to write the kernel in C#. Where has Java been used to build the kernel of an OS? If you must compare things then compare apples and apples not apples and oranges. If one programming language could solve everyone's problems equally well then we all would have switched to this magic language a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Sony officially supporting the emulator and homebrew application market is not a technical, but rather a legal and copyright problem. There would be the issue of licensing fees for content which Sony does not own, such as the Final Fantasy properties, when the cost and complexity of settling who gets paid for what and how have not been completely worked out. There is no way that Sony is going to willingly expose itself to copyright infringement litigation by supporting the homebrew emulator market, or at least not officially as some people might like. The homebrew emulator hackers have much less exposure financially to litigation than does a large corporation such as Sony, so while the garage hacker is not likely to be sued for ripping ROMs and hacking together emulators for various platforms Sony almost certainly would be. As much as Sony would like to increase their hardware sales they cannot do that by supporting and encouraging infringement of copyright.
It is known that James Earl Jones was paid a mere $2,500 for his voice over services in "Star Wars" and only $8,000 on "Return of the Jedi". The $650,000 that Mark Hamill is said to have received sounds very high considering what the other actors are known to have received for their appearances in these films.
If they're actually selling the thing to the highest bidder, I'm guessing TP isn't going to join in the bidding.
Why wouldn't they sell to the highest bidder then turn around and sell it to tipping point as well? There is after all no honor among most thieves. The only reason that they might not do this is to protect their right to future deals with the underworld, but if they can find a way to sell the information anonymously in both cases then it would be like selling arms to both sides in a conflict, very lucrative as long as both sides do not know who they are really buying from.
The same thing happened when Microsoft announced the name XBOX for their console. Apparently there was a small company in Florida called XBOX Technologies which sued Microsoft for trademark infringement. They settled it out of court and Microsoft proceeded to use the name XBOX for their console. Microsoft will either buy the company or the rights to the name and that will be the end of it.
The article was bang on when it asked how a company with annual revenues of 3.4 billion can have a fundamentally higher market capitalization than companies which revenues in the $74 billion plus range? Where is the money? Are the Google shareholders receiving a dividend? How much is the IP really worth in licensing, advertising, and other revenue streams? The technical side of Google appears to be quite sound, but from business perspective their nose bleed share prices are not backed up by the realities of the corporate balance sheet. The current price of the shares, ~50 times annual earnings, has already PRICED IN an expected growth rate of 25-30% which means that unless Google can better that expected performance the share price is not justified. I work in the IT industry and I appreciate the services that Google provides, but the current share price looks like a come-on to a sucker bet. There will be a painful adjustment in the future and it will be interesting to see which big investors are left without a chair when the music stops.
The point was that assembly is an inappropriate choice for business reasons. You would get much more out of your programming dollars with efficient algorithm design and judicious use of design patterns in the high level language than you would by optimizing your assembly. When you compare the cost of developer hours w/the cost of hardware the choice becomes clear. The real world is not like the University where academic arguments are allowed to stand on their own technical merits. In the real world, at the end of the day, the company needs to beat competitors to market and turn a profit or we can all find different jobs when the company folds. The other reason that I am skeptical is that there are very few people anymore who can beat a modern optimizing compiler with hand-code assembly and those people, if they can be found at all, are going to be extremely expensive. It is sort of like the AI chess programs out there, sure there are a few grandmasters that can beat the best efforts of the Fritz programmers, but the rest of us will lose every time to the likes of deep blue and Fritz and it is the same when most humans go up against the modern compilers. I disagree with the bare metal argument in that not EVERYONE needs to know how to hand optimize assembly. If someone chooses to specialize in that then that is their choice, but in the vast majority of business cases assembly is way below the optimal developer noise level and should be left to the compiler. I would not hire someone who makes that argument because it indicates a lack of real world project experience in a business setting where money is at stake. I don't want an ivory tower academic *nix programmer fresh out of school who thinks that C is the best choice for my next business project because he believes that he is the best bare metal h4x0|2 in world. I will let my competitor hire him.
I still think it's a good idea, and necessary, for everyone to be able to program down to bare metal
Unless you need that level of control, and there are very few legitimate cases, then you are shooting yourself in the foot by not taking advantage of modern development tools and programming environments such as Java, C++, and C#. Your competitors are all using these tools to write high quality applications in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes an assembly hacker to do half the amount of work. You wouldn't dig the foundation for a skyscraper with a garden trowel so why would you chose assembly for your next enterprise project for which management has allocated just three months from concept to complete working system? If you chose to write your next project in Apple II assembly your competitors will eat your lunch and you will no longer be employed as a software developer. The choice of a higher level language and modern tools does not, as you suggest, demonstrate a lack of skill or understanding, but rather a pragmatic and logical approach to 99.99% of the programming problems which are likely to occur in the real world on a semi-regular basis. I manage offshore developers, yeah I know it's the dark side but that is another discussion, and let me tell you that a statement like that in a job interview will effectively eliminate you from my consideration.
Windows XP SP2 is doing this already to some extent, such as when they dialog the user "Program X is connecting to remote host. Do you wish to allow this?" and the like. I agree that program and role based security could be taken further and it has with the Microsoft .NET Framework, but not many companies are currently developing major projects in .NET, so there will be some years of lag before the role based and code access security features of .NET begin to make inroads into a critical mass of the Windows software out there. Microsoft is doing a good job under tough circumstances, albeit under circumstances of their own making, to move Windows in the right direction, but they cannot break all of the legacy applications either. Microsoft knows what they are doing on the security front, even if they didn't they have enough resources to hire anyone in the world they want who DOES know, and they will get to where they are going eventually...it will just take time.
Ballmer probably meant hardware devices, such as a good NAT/Firewall router at the company gateway, when he said that.
Does anyone else remember the glory days of Netscape when they had a private on-site sushi bar, full time masseuses, and a nose-bleed P/E ratio? I do not own any Google shares right now, but if I did I would sell them after reading something like this, or in the words of Joseph Kennedy, "When the shoeshine boy starts giving you tips, it is time to get out of the market."
This sounds like the sort of problem which can be solved with a simple truth table or Karnaugh map and Boolean minterms with the bitwise operators available in the programming language of your choice. For example if we take voting to mean the most votes of one type, true or false, for a particular bit in the output then the truth table for the function would look something like the following:
000 - false
001 - false
010 - false
011 - true
100 - false
101 - true
110 - true
111 - true
if we then take the bitwise and of the minterms then the result would be the following:
(!A & B & C) & (A & !B & C) & (A & B & !C) & (A & B & C)
Perhaps I have missed something? It has been a while since I studied boolean algebra. I have seen questions like these in interviews before where the answers have very little to do with the software that the company actually writes. How often would the bitwise and of three integers come up in the average business application development scenario? If the interview was for an engineering type software company or a hardware manufacturer then it makes more sense. Anyway, that was my coffee break crack at the problem...back to the real world.
Alright, but would you spend the time to debug trace the binaries for an entire sever product, Oracle xi for example, or would you just use a competing open source product instead? At some point you have to ask yourself the question: is it worth it? how much is my time worth? I agree with you 100 percent that what you say is entirely possible to do, but a week or month worth of developer time is worth more than the price of most retail software packages. If you are doing this out of hobby interest or self education then fine, but wouldn't you rather spend $100 for the average software package or use an open source product then decompile, refactor, and compile your own custom version? BTW...If you develop for a company and you get code through decompilation you should let the management know so they are at least aware of the risk (and get that in writing), that way if you ever get hauled into court they cannot point the finger at you and say that you did it without management knowledge and approval.
The obfuscator that I use for my .NET assembly DLLs renames all of the non-public variables, methods, and references to names like A, a, b, etc. and overloads each name as many times as it can before it actually compiles the assembly. If the assembly is disassembled then the code will something like the following:
// Do something here
public class A : B
{
public void a(int b, string c)
{
}
}
so yes the code will be decompiled, but it will not be in a form that will be very readable to the average human programmer. The obfuscators are designed to make code look like it did in the old Fortran days when people used letters and other non-obvious names for variables, functions, and files. This has been shown time and again to lead to massive headaches in maintenance, readability, and understandability of the code, although from the standpoint of the computer the program runs the same as its non-obfuscated version. Is obfuscation a silver bullet? No, the determined attacker will still be able to decipher your code given enough time and tenacity, but at the very least obfuscation and instruction mixing ratchet up the difficulty several orders of magnitude. At some point the attack becomes difficult enough that all but the most determined decide its not worth the trouble.
code obfuscation and assembly mixers/manglers make disassembly of compiled code a tiresome and nearly impossible task. It is like taking a four course meal and throwing it in the blender, it still provides the same nutritional value, but it is not possible to separate the apple pie from the mashed potatoes after the compiled assembly has been obfuscated/mangled by these tools. It would probably be easier to re-write your own DVD Audio player software from scratch as an open source project than it would be to try and disassemble software which was compiled in such a way as to prevent just such an attack.
1. Steal from other companies/Break Laws.
If companies spent their time wringing their hands over whether a business strategy was legal or not, in those cases where it is not obviously illegal, then their competitors would eat their lunch and they would be out of business. If the company knowingly operates illegally then that is a different story, but for those grey areas, to use Microsoft's own words, "we compete vigorously and fairly".
2. Sell products that break laws or include properties of others for A LOT of money.
Again, if companies spent their time chasing down all of the different laws in all of the different localities and all possible patents that they might be infringing upon, especially software patents which are an entirely different discussion, then they would never get any productive work done. I am of the opinion that the courts and the legal system are a cost center for most companies and not a profit generating activity. Companies play the legal game because they have to defend their assets against every two-bit attorney who wants to raid their coffers, not because the particularly like dealing with the courts. The courts, like governments, provide a necessary function in society, but they frequently overstep their bounds and regulate, litigate, and legislate until all of the productivity is squeezed out of the economy and nobody can get anything done.
3. Pay off gov't or company suing them.
That is a very serious charge and you had better have the facts to back it up before you make the accusation. If a company decides to settle a legal action without admitting guilt then that is an acceptable and legal conclusion to the matter under our legal system, at least in the US it is anyway. However, if you are claiming that someone in power took bribery or payment to settle, then I say again that that is a serious charge and should not be made without proof to back it up or else it is merely a slanderous and spurious accusation.
safety is one thing but government mandated rationing of speed to conservere fuel is un-american. If should be able to use as much gas as I am willing to pay for. They can increase the gas tax if they want to and gas will get more expensive in the long run but price controls, rationing, and the like never work...just ask the Russians.
While I agree with the basic assertion, that hackers and technically minded people generally have poor grammar and usage habits, I also believe that the usage, or misusage as the case may be, is not always due to lack of understanding or knowledge of the grammatically correct way of expression. Rather, it has become common in the technical profession, primarily to facilitate efficiency in communication, to truncate certain words or adopt abbreviated phrasing, especially in informal communications such as e-mail, IRC chat, and instant messaging conversations. The desire to streamline communication in "geek" conversations is not a new phenomenon, but it has become more obvious to outsiders in recent years, with the explosion of the Internet into the mainstream, than it was previously. It is also common for hackers to inject programming terms in their normal speaking as shorthand for more verbose English equivalents. For example, I have heard some geeks qualify their questions with the phrase "?P" which is taken from the Prolog language to indicate a conditional predicate such as "Pizza, P?" instead of "Would you like to go for Pizza?". The point is that languages and usage evolve over time in dynamic fashion as the needs and priorities of speakers change. Those who appoint themselves as Arbiters or the "pure" language and sit in judgment of everyone else get modded Troll and rightly so. The language belongs to all of the speakers, not just the grammar Nazis and the intellectual elitists who wish to mummify the language by wrapping it up in a static and unchanging form.
Two million dollars budget for a game... no wonder profits are so low.
In the case of EA at least some of that is amortized licensing costs for securing the game rights to certain leagues, teams, and player names. EA, for example, just recently paid many millions of dollars for the rights to all of the NFL team, player, and league names for the next several years. This means that anyone who wants to compete with them cannot use any of those names in their game and has to use made up leagues, players, and teams instead. When your average Wal-Mart shopper sees the choice between Madden NFL 20XX Football with the names of their favorite teams and players or Championship Footbal with made up teams and players which one do you think he will chose? They are paying two million dollars per game to lock their competitors out of the market through exclusivity agreements...and for EA at least profits on sports games are certainly not low.
The problem with expensive investments in AI is that the publisher must have a series of successful games built on the fruits of that labor before there is any profit. This could possibly be mitigated somewhat by licensing this engine for use by other companies, but this is also weighed by the fact that your competitors are now using the same or similar types of advanced artificial intelligence in their games which may hurt sales of your own games. Large publishers, such as EA and Microsoft, have the resources and wherewithal to make these long term bets, but the smaller boutique firms have neither the willingness nor the ability to finance the development of these types of advanced engines in house. It may be useful to look at some numbers from 2004, courteously compiled by the http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blog/2005/02/24/" >shrapnelgames blog.
The total revenue for the game industry in 2004 was 1.2 billion dollars which was down 100 million from 2003. During this same period only two games had sales of over 500,000 units, but there were 18 games which had sales of 250,000 or more. Based upon the varying definitions of what constitutes a "new release" there were roughly 1,100 games released in 2004 of which maybe 6% earned a profit. The average budget for a competitive game is said to be around two million dollars with an average break even point of around 110,000 units sold. The average retail game price is $24.45 with only 5,000 total units sold.
Clearly, the open source community is willing to undertake these efforts on their own initiative or for other reasons related to research, as was the case with the student produced game. I am in no way denigrating the efforts of these students, what they produced with the resources available to them was simply amazing and of surprising quality. However, in the world of retail games it takes a certain amount of marketing, advertising, and Wal-Mart end caps to rise above the background noise, unless you are like the aforementioned established game companies and the reputation speaks for itself, at least until they release a real stinker. At the end of the day, when all things are factored in, there is simply not enough money in the budget of the average game to make this type of advanced artificial intelligence worth the risk and expense, at least right now. However, if there is any constant in the game industry it is change and this will probably change in the years to come. I would like to see some new and innovative games too, instead of Madden 2017, but it looks like we will have to wait a while yet.
But application vendors don't want their customers to have the ability to move to anyone else at will. It goes against the grain of how they do business.
Alright, but suppose that they gave you the software at a lower price in the first place because they knew that you would not be able to switch vendors easily? It could be argued that this should be disclosed up-front, but even if it had been you know what would have happened...some middle manager would have siezed upon the opportunity to save a buck now in exchange for a problem which may or may not occur in the distant future. The point is that portability is going to cost more money, which might squeeze some smaller customers out of the market entirely even though they are wiling to take the lock-in to save money. This is why software is broken down into enterprise, professional, standard, and other editions so that each firm can decide what is important to them and pay only for the features that they want (mostly).
It is not entirely the fault of Microsoft for the licensing headaches, you can blame the collective attorneys of the world for putting everyone, including the open source people, through the licensing hurdles. Licenses are primarily about protecting the producer from frivolous litigation by armies of lawyers throwing 'theory of liability' lawsuits around like hand grenades and hoping that one will score a hit. The lawyers are responsible for the death of personal responsibility in society and if it weren't for all the lawsuits and bullshit we wouldn't need long-winded and complex descriptions of what are otherwise fairly straightforward agreements to protect ourselves from losing our collective shirts.
The most common structure used to index large amounts of data stored on magnetic or other large capacity media is the B-Tree and its variants. The article linked here explains the basic idea of the balanced multiway tree or B-Tree. The advantage of this type of index is that the index can be stored entirely on the collection of tapes, cartridges, disks or whatever else while only the portion of the tree which currently being operated on need be read into volatile or main memory. The B-Tree allows for efficient access to massive amounts of data while minimizing disk reads and writes. Theoretically, the B-Tree and its variants could be scaled up to address an unlimited amount data in logarithmic time.
It is precisely because of this inability for the average user to confirm the sender with vanilla e-mail (no cryptography add-ons) that many banks do not send any account related e-mails on an automated basis with links to login pages. For example, I receive monthly bank statement notifications in the e-mail from my bank, but these messages include no links to their online banking sites (plain text only).
The 'C' node is analagous to the "man-in-the-middle" in the cryptanalysis attack on public key algorithms. How can you trust 'C'? What if 'C' is really the RIAA, MPAA, or one of their agents or minions? The problem is that 'C' knows the REAL IP addresses of both 'A' and 'B' and thus can log them for later analysis or forward them to any number of third parties. Detection could be made more difficult by involving additional middlemen in the hopes that at least some of them are not an agents, but this does not address the root of the problem since there could be entire networks of middle men agents who are all cooperating to log the activities of 'A' and 'B'.
Perhaps, but they never said that .NET framework would be the BASIS for an OS. They said that longhorn would SUPPORT .NET, but that does not mean that they are going to write the kernel in C#. Where has Java been used to build the kernel of an OS? If you must compare things then compare apples and apples not apples and oranges. If one programming language could solve everyone's problems equally well then we all would have switched to this magic language a long time ago.