China is still basically a communist country with a free market. Nearly everything is state owned. The only reason they are in the WTO is pure corporate greed. Also, it could be argued that it was necessary to prevent another arms race and potential cold war, but it looks like they are hell bent on moving in that direction anyways.
"I have not studied computer science, firmware trojans nor antivirus. Could someone explain to me: 1) How do firmware trojans work? 2) Are they OS independent? 3) What information can they send and/or damage can they do to a system?I have not studied computer science, firmware trojans nor antivirus. Could someone explain to me: 1) How do firmware trojans work? 2) Are they OS independent? 3) What information can they send and/or damage can they do to a system?"
1) Modern computer firmware is almost like an operating system (in some cases it is, like linux for instance.....). This is the software layer that is in between the exposed hardware and the real operating system running on top of the stack. Its like a BIOS, but much more developed and flexible. A BIOS generally just gives out hardware addresses and whatnot and allows the OS the interact with the iron pretty much directly. I believe that the LinuxBIOS people were some of the first to start developing something other than a dumb bios. So yeah, you have a mini-OS running on your hardware which can be exploited any number of ways without your actual operating system being any wiser.
2) Is your BIOS OS independant?
3) They could easily send keystrokes and probably network data. In theory you could probably build something that would read a whole hard drive and forward its contents somewhere else.
Yeah. Its kind of interesting that most of our major, critical electronics are being manufactured in china, which is a communist country and not exactly an ally at the moment other than financially. They are already looking at starting another arms race. Imagine if in the 1970s, our computers were being manufactured in the USSR. I don't really see why we should be looking at goods manufactured in china any differently. Clearly, if anything, they have no regard for our health and safety standards and keep churning out crap intended for kids laced with all sorts of deadly chemicals. Who knows. Maybe they are doing it on purpose. It almost seems like it would be fairly trivial for them to slip crap like this in. I mean how many times have laptops and netbooks recently been released with key loggers and everything else because "Ooops, some employee used an infected flash disk to set up the system"
Windows doesn't support ICC profiles for printers and ICM profiles for monitors that can be calibrated with any number of tools? No color management at all huh?
"Operating system level Since 1997 color management in Windows is handled at the OS level through an ICC color management system. Beginning with Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a new color architecture known as Windows Color System.[5] WCS supplements the Image Color Management (ICM) system in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, originally written by Heidelberg.[6][7] Apple's Mac operating systems have provided OS-level color management since 1993, through ColorSync. Operating systems which use the X Window System for graphics use ICC profiles, and support for color management on Linux, still less mature than on other platforms, is coordinated through OpenICC at freedesktop.org and makes use of LittleCMS."
Its trivial to create a pretty standardized pdf as well. Just flatten everything and save as a version 5 or 6 pdf and most anything worth its salt will render it correctly.
Oh yeah? What SLR could you possibly buy used for $200? Oh wait. You said SLR and NOT DSLR. Heck you can find old Pentax K1000s for like $50-100 anymore. Old pentax glass is generally kind of on the cheap side too (and they make great glass!) I don't even think you could buy an original rebel DSLR for $200
(I honestly don't know if it has the 40% figure, but dig for it, it was all over the news if you need a citation that badly)
Common practice is to have a backup BOP to eliminate the single point of failure. The BOP is not nearly as reliable as oil companies would like to make it out to be.
Too many things to go wrong. The ballistics might not match the gun. The fingerprints might be from the thief's mother. I could go on and on. If you are going to go through that much trouble then wouldn't it be easier just to off the fucker and bury him in a ditch 500 miles away in the middle of a national forest, tens of miles from any path? Especially since they don't know you and have no connection to you. See that's the secret of serial killers. They typically only prey on people that have never met them before. The police usually have nothing to go by, unless they recognize the slight patterns and start to profile you. The zodiac killer shot lots of people and wore a mask and never got caught. I mean these people get away with murder for YEARS. Or hide a kilo of coke in his cellar and then narc him out? Or burn his house down and make his life total fucking hell? I mean what's the point of such a long and convoluted plan with so many points of failure?
In reality, the fact of the matter is that whoever has the laptop now is very likely not the person that stole it. If you are going to plot to utterly destroy someone's life, you should always be sure you have the right man. How can you be sure in such a situation?
The card costs $1200. Do you think that they would just put it in a static bag and drop it in a cardboard box? The packaging of a high-end retail item is typically one of the most important aspects. Companies spend a lot of time and money to have really interesting packaging.
I was going to make a snarky remark about how it would be unlikely that you would have a gf if you bought this card, but come to think of it, if you have $1200 to blow on a video card, there is a very good chance that you have a girlfriend.
Trust me. If they think they could sell a $2400 card, they certainly would try. When the front of the pack started costing about $500 for the price of admission, it was clear to me that they would just keep increasing the limit higher and higher. $1200 is a lot, but at only 1000 cards, I think they realize this is a very limited market.
You do realize that was only 12 years ago? (98?) We've come a long way. Then compare it to smartphone development, which has grown light years faster than the PC side of things. It goes to show what competition can bring to innovation. The PC has become a stale fixed platform. Sure we get a faster processor every couple of years and the amount of ram in PCs now is astounding, but at its core, its still basically the same machine that existed 15-20 years ago. 64-bit is the only thing relatively new, and to be honest, that's fairly old hat by now. When 4GB or RAM started to become relatively cheap, it forced OEMs to start throwing 64-bit windows on their machines so consumers could upgrade eventually. Most vista machines shipped were shipped with 32-bit Vista, the tides finally seem to be shifting with windows 7. SMP on the average dell desktop? Surely that's progress, but most workstations in the 90s had SMP. Its only taken us 10+ years for that to become common and cheap. The only thing that keeps intel pushing forward is the fact that amd is right on their coattails, and has demonstrated that they can beat them time and time again when they become lax. Now apple uses nothing but intel, so there aren't even any alternate platforms for the PC anymore. The smartphone space may be interesting to watch, because lots of interesting PC-like technologies will start to appear with the flood of pads following the ipad being only the beginning. Over time these devices will become more and more PC-like, and I personally think that people desire smaller and smaller form factors. Witness the fall of the desktop to the notebook to the netbook, and now perhaps to the pad. If you can give people hulu, facebook, and farmville, you really have satisfied the masses. The future is certainly going to be interesting in a lot of ways.
I did see that. I read it wrong though as I was skimming for that bit. Yeah, I was kind of gathering that, but he does just skip right over it quickly. At first I read it that he compared his mp3s using the program against some outside database, but my second thought was that he used his mp3s as the base for his fingerprints.
Yeah. OS X is the gay candyland of choice. Only butt pirates would love a computer with one mouse button that costs 5x as much as a comparable PC running Windows, which can play actual games and has real non-apple software by the way. "Think different." Hmm. Who might that slogan appeal to? The gay population in the united states is 9% of the total. Macs make up 9% of the market share for personal computers. Need I say more? Everyone knows that steve jobs is gay and is dying of AIDs. I read that on the internet somewhere, so I know its true.
Yeah. Windows really blows. I mean like how many viruses did you clean off of windows machines last week? I counted 30. On one machine. Why would you even pay money for that garbage when linux is free?
"I'm shocked at how such broad claims can be accepted by patent offices..."
I'm not. There are patents on anything, like say multitouch. Seems like a pretty basic concept to me. You can have a touch screen, the next logical step is obviously having one that accepts input in multiple spots at once. In fact that's not even an innovation as most screens have multitouch, its actually the software the needs to be written around the concept, but even that would be obvious, like pinch and zoom for example.
No. I was talking about how you claimed that Compiz uses up 2% at idle. What are you claiming? That your system with nothing else running is hovering at 2% or are you saying that compiz is using 2% at any given time? I wasn't trying to say anything about the 3.4% you keep harping about. Yes that's certainly not a bad number. I was just talking about how your display interface of choice shouldn't take up ANY CPU. If it can't offload to the gpu, it is totally useless to me. As it is windows aero does not even register on my CPU. The pretty desktop widgets take up 2% or so, but I can toggle them off with an icon on my taskbar. My experience with X and especially compiz is that they both eat CPU cycles like candy and something tells me that even with perfectly good video card drivers with real decent open gl acceleration, compiz and X would still eat up CPU cycles. Why? Because they both suck. Maybe one day instead of coding 4 different window managers/desktop environments running on an ancient windows server from the 1990s and having major distros line up on a single solution that integrates from top to bottom as one homogeneous piece of code. I won't hold my breath.
Yeah, that is unfair. I didn't realize all he did was post some code. That should certainly fall under free speech. I don't think their lawyers have anything to stand on here. If I were him I'd let them try to take him to court and then turn around and sue for harassment. I was wondering how he was getting matches for his song. He doesn't mention what database he is querying for a match.
Yeah. I actually went back and RTFA. I guess all he did was post an article about how to accomplish the same thing the article he read describes. Sucks to be him, but he should keep up his blog as I don't think there are any trade secrets there. At first I thought he wrote a competing application.
They can be vague. Remember in a software patent all you need to say is "a method for identifying music playing by listening to a small sample and comparing to a list of sonic fingerprints" and you are pretty much all set. If amazon can patent buying items with one single click anything is nearly possible.
Why is this unfair? I mean yeah, asking him to take down his blog is unfair, but if they have a valid patent and he is infringing upon their techniques then he is in the wrong. I understand this sucks for him (and should represent a challenge rather than a defeat if he has any conviction), but patents are the law of the land as well as copyright and a whole slew of other laws that seem to favor the business that can afford the better lawyers. I don't agree that ideas can be patented, but the USPTO seems to think that they can be. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a real device to be patentable. Just a concept is enough. We need patent reform pretty bad, but its clear to me that its going to get to the point where you cannot create any software without infringing on *some* patent. Its going to take a whole lot of pain and suffering before we get to the point where people start to realize the idiocy of patenting any obvious idea, and with corporate america as our new lords and masters, and the international banks pulling the strings from the shadows don't expect it to happen any time soon.
He's talking about the hardware. Of course you can't effective browse the web on a 486. If you can't run firefox 2, then an upgrade was looooong overdue!
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China is still basically a communist country with a free market. Nearly everything is state owned. The only reason they are in the WTO is pure corporate greed. Also, it could be argued that it was necessary to prevent another arms race and potential cold war, but it looks like they are hell bent on moving in that direction anyways.
"I have not studied computer science, firmware trojans nor antivirus. Could someone explain to me:
1) How do firmware trojans work?
2) Are they OS independent?
3) What information can they send and/or damage can they do to a system?I have not studied computer science, firmware trojans nor antivirus. Could someone explain to me:
1) How do firmware trojans work?
2) Are they OS independent?
3) What information can they send and/or damage can they do to a system?"
1) Modern computer firmware is almost like an operating system (in some cases it is, like linux for instance.....). This is the software layer that is in between the exposed hardware and the real operating system running on top of the stack. Its like a BIOS, but much more developed and flexible. A BIOS generally just gives out hardware addresses and whatnot and allows the OS the interact with the iron pretty much directly. I believe that the LinuxBIOS people were some of the first to start developing something other than a dumb bios. So yeah, you have a mini-OS running on your hardware which can be exploited any number of ways without your actual operating system being any wiser.
2) Is your BIOS OS independant?
3) They could easily send keystrokes and probably network data. In theory you could probably build something that would read a whole hard drive and forward its contents somewhere else.
Yeah. Its kind of interesting that most of our major, critical electronics are being manufactured in china, which is a communist country and not exactly an ally at the moment other than financially. They are already looking at starting another arms race. Imagine if in the 1970s, our computers were being manufactured in the USSR. I don't really see why we should be looking at goods manufactured in china any differently. Clearly, if anything, they have no regard for our health and safety standards and keep churning out crap intended for kids laced with all sorts of deadly chemicals. Who knows. Maybe they are doing it on purpose. It almost seems like it would be fairly trivial for them to slip crap like this in. I mean how many times have laptops and netbooks recently been released with key loggers and everything else because "Ooops, some employee used an infected flash disk to set up the system"
Windows doesn't support ICC profiles for printers and ICM profiles for monitors that can be calibrated with any number of tools? No color management at all huh?
"Operating system level
Since 1997 color management in Windows is handled at the OS level through an ICC color management system. Beginning with Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a new color architecture known as Windows Color System.[5] WCS supplements the Image Color Management (ICM) system in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, originally written by Heidelberg.[6][7]
Apple's Mac operating systems have provided OS-level color management since 1993, through ColorSync.
Operating systems which use the X Window System for graphics use ICC profiles, and support for color management on Linux, still less mature than on other platforms, is coordinated through OpenICC at freedesktop.org and makes use of LittleCMS."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management
Its trivial to create a pretty standardized pdf as well. Just flatten everything and save as a version 5 or 6 pdf and most anything worth its salt will render it correctly.
Oh yeah? What SLR could you possibly buy used for $200? Oh wait. You said SLR and NOT DSLR. Heck you can find old Pentax K1000s for like $50-100 anymore. Old pentax glass is generally kind of on the cheap side too (and they make great glass!) I don't even think you could buy an original rebel DSLR for $200
More than that. Blow out preventers have something like a 40% failure rate according to recent statistics released.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100713/ts_csm/313442
(I honestly don't know if it has the 40% figure, but dig for it, it was all over the news if you need a citation that badly)
Common practice is to have a backup BOP to eliminate the single point of failure. The BOP is not nearly as reliable as oil companies would like to make it out to be.
Too many things to go wrong. The ballistics might not match the gun. The fingerprints might be from the thief's mother. I could go on and on. If you are going to go through that much trouble then wouldn't it be easier just to off the fucker and bury him in a ditch 500 miles away in the middle of a national forest, tens of miles from any path? Especially since they don't know you and have no connection to you. See that's the secret of serial killers. They typically only prey on people that have never met them before. The police usually have nothing to go by, unless they recognize the slight patterns and start to profile you. The zodiac killer shot lots of people and wore a mask and never got caught. I mean these people get away with murder for YEARS. Or hide a kilo of coke in his cellar and then narc him out? Or burn his house down and make his life total fucking hell? I mean what's the point of such a long and convoluted plan with so many points of failure?
In reality, the fact of the matter is that whoever has the laptop now is very likely not the person that stole it. If you are going to plot to utterly destroy someone's life, you should always be sure you have the right man. How can you be sure in such a situation?
The card costs $1200. Do you think that they would just put it in a static bag and drop it in a cardboard box? The packaging of a high-end retail item is typically one of the most important aspects. Companies spend a lot of time and money to have really interesting packaging.
I was going to make a snarky remark about how it would be unlikely that you would have a gf if you bought this card, but come to think of it, if you have $1200 to blow on a video card, there is a very good chance that you have a girlfriend.
Trust me. If they think they could sell a $2400 card, they certainly would try. When the front of the pack started costing about $500 for the price of admission, it was clear to me that they would just keep increasing the limit higher and higher. $1200 is a lot, but at only 1000 cards, I think they realize this is a very limited market.
You do realize that was only 12 years ago? (98?) We've come a long way. Then compare it to smartphone development, which has grown light years faster than the PC side of things. It goes to show what competition can bring to innovation. The PC has become a stale fixed platform. Sure we get a faster processor every couple of years and the amount of ram in PCs now is astounding, but at its core, its still basically the same machine that existed 15-20 years ago. 64-bit is the only thing relatively new, and to be honest, that's fairly old hat by now. When 4GB or RAM started to become relatively cheap, it forced OEMs to start throwing 64-bit windows on their machines so consumers could upgrade eventually. Most vista machines shipped were shipped with 32-bit Vista, the tides finally seem to be shifting with windows 7. SMP on the average dell desktop? Surely that's progress, but most workstations in the 90s had SMP. Its only taken us 10+ years for that to become common and cheap. The only thing that keeps intel pushing forward is the fact that amd is right on their coattails, and has demonstrated that they can beat them time and time again when they become lax. Now apple uses nothing but intel, so there aren't even any alternate platforms for the PC anymore. The smartphone space may be interesting to watch, because lots of interesting PC-like technologies will start to appear with the flood of pads following the ipad being only the beginning. Over time these devices will become more and more PC-like, and I personally think that people desire smaller and smaller form factors. Witness the fall of the desktop to the notebook to the netbook, and now perhaps to the pad. If you can give people hulu, facebook, and farmville, you really have satisfied the masses. The future is certainly going to be interesting in a lot of ways.
Yeah. How many dead trees remain standing for years and years?
Marathon was first released for the Macintosh in 1994 NOT 1990.
I did see that. I read it wrong though as I was skimming for that bit. Yeah, I was kind of gathering that, but he does just skip right over it quickly. At first I read it that he compared his mp3s using the program against some outside database, but my second thought was that he used his mp3s as the base for his fingerprints.
Yeah. OS X is the gay candyland of choice. Only butt pirates would love a computer with one mouse button that costs 5x as much as a comparable PC running Windows, which can play actual games and has real non-apple software by the way. "Think different." Hmm. Who might that slogan appeal to? The gay population in the united states is 9% of the total. Macs make up 9% of the market share for personal computers. Need I say more? Everyone knows that steve jobs is gay and is dying of AIDs. I read that on the internet somewhere, so I know its true.
Go ahead. Mod me down. I dare you.
Yeah. Windows really blows. I mean like how many viruses did you clean off of windows machines last week? I counted 30. On one machine. Why would you even pay money for that garbage when linux is free?
Go ahead. Mod me up. I dare you.
Yeah. Linux isn't competition. Its the ghetto OS of choice by reeking communists who are too expect everything in life to be free.
Go ahead. Mod me down. I dare you.
"I'm shocked at how such broad claims can be accepted by patent offices..."
I'm not. There are patents on anything, like say multitouch. Seems like a pretty basic concept to me. You can have a touch screen, the next logical step is obviously having one that accepts input in multiple spots at once. In fact that's not even an innovation as most screens have multitouch, its actually the software the needs to be written around the concept, but even that would be obvious, like pinch and zoom for example.
No. I was talking about how you claimed that Compiz uses up 2% at idle. What are you claiming? That your system with nothing else running is hovering at 2% or are you saying that compiz is using 2% at any given time? I wasn't trying to say anything about the 3.4% you keep harping about. Yes that's certainly not a bad number. I was just talking about how your display interface of choice shouldn't take up ANY CPU. If it can't offload to the gpu, it is totally useless to me. As it is windows aero does not even register on my CPU. The pretty desktop widgets take up 2% or so, but I can toggle them off with an icon on my taskbar. My experience with X and especially compiz is that they both eat CPU cycles like candy and something tells me that even with perfectly good video card drivers with real decent open gl acceleration, compiz and X would still eat up CPU cycles. Why? Because they both suck. Maybe one day instead of coding 4 different window managers/desktop environments running on an ancient windows server from the 1990s and having major distros line up on a single solution that integrates from top to bottom as one homogeneous piece of code. I won't hold my breath.
Yeah, that is unfair. I didn't realize all he did was post some code. That should certainly fall under free speech. I don't think their lawyers have anything to stand on here. If I were him I'd let them try to take him to court and then turn around and sue for harassment. I was wondering how he was getting matches for his song. He doesn't mention what database he is querying for a match.
Yeah. I actually went back and RTFA. I guess all he did was post an article about how to accomplish the same thing the article he read describes. Sucks to be him, but he should keep up his blog as I don't think there are any trade secrets there. At first I thought he wrote a competing application.
They can be vague. Remember in a software patent all you need to say is "a method for identifying music playing by listening to a small sample and comparing to a list of sonic fingerprints" and you are pretty much all set. If amazon can patent buying items with one single click anything is nearly possible.
Why is this unfair? I mean yeah, asking him to take down his blog is unfair, but if they have a valid patent and he is infringing upon their techniques then he is in the wrong. I understand this sucks for him (and should represent a challenge rather than a defeat if he has any conviction), but patents are the law of the land as well as copyright and a whole slew of other laws that seem to favor the business that can afford the better lawyers. I don't agree that ideas can be patented, but the USPTO seems to think that they can be. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a real device to be patentable. Just a concept is enough. We need patent reform pretty bad, but its clear to me that its going to get to the point where you cannot create any software without infringing on *some* patent. Its going to take a whole lot of pain and suffering before we get to the point where people start to realize the idiocy of patenting any obvious idea, and with corporate america as our new lords and masters, and the international banks pulling the strings from the shadows don't expect it to happen any time soon.
He's talking about the hardware. Of course you can't effective browse the web on a 486. If you can't run firefox 2, then an upgrade was looooong overdue!
Genuine fractals already does this. The results are amazing, but you aren't going to make a 100x100 pixel image look good on a billboard.