The worst problem is the branding... iOS is branded distinctly from OSX, so that users won't mistake the two and try to run applications for one on the other. Windows RT creates a false impression of compatibility which ultimately disappoints users. The dirt cheap Windows CE laptops had the same issue.
And the bing web crawler is extremely inefficient, i had to block it from accessing several of my sites because it was bombarding them with enough requests to cause a continuous 20mbps stream of traffic.
So you make it inconvenient for your employees to do their jobs, which will make some potentially good employees walk and reduce the efficiency of those who remain. Technology is supposed to improve the efficiency of workers, otherwise why bother using it at all? It's very hard to include working exploit code on a piece of paper.
While i agree attachments are often misused, and i utterly detest companies that attach a bunch of images to every email they send out, all you can really do is avoid doing such stupid things yourself... Other people will still do it.
Cracking the password is entirely different from removing the "limitations"... If you can open the file and read it, then you can always modify, print, copy etc the file too. If you can read the file then you have already got past the encryption because either there is no encryption or you have the key.
The only option remotely useful, is the one to encrypt the file with a password for opening. The other "features" are just stupid client side security, and only appear to work if the client respects the options. All the user has to do, is open the file with a different pdf reader that ignores the options. Options like this are actually worse than having no options at all, because they create a false sense of security and encourage users to use them.
If you can read the file, you can always copy data out of it, print it, edit it etc.
Seriously, why do people still run acrobat? PDF is a standard format, there are countless programs which support it and the only reason such files are a target is because adobe reader is basically a monoculture and represents a very large and attractive target. We need diversity among PDF readers, just like diversity among web browsers. It was diversity among web browsers more than anything else that reduced browser attacks and caused hackers to concentrate on proprietary monoculture plugins instead.
Users do not understand what "compiled for arm" means... If they see a product marketed as windows, then they expect it to be able to do the same things that the version of windows they're used to can. This is why users were often disappointed with wince laptops and windows mobile phones, the branding creates expectations which are then not met.
Linux on arm with a few small exceptions *can* have the same catalogue of software as linux on x86, you can have firefox, libreoffice etc... Debian for arm has almost all of the same applications available for it as debian for x86. It's also less well known, and thus carries less expectations.
Apple ios is based on the same kernel as macosx, and yet its intentionally marketed differently so as to avoid just the kind of confusion and disappointment microsoft causes with its "windows everywhere" obsession.
winner, no contest: Intel's best CPU, plus the best GPU money can buy. Why hobble a kick-ass GPU with a second-rate CPU?
Because power consumption is very important for HPC... It might not matter so much for a single user's desktop, but when you scale to thousands of processors the extra power consumption can cost serious amounts of money to keep running both in the power it consumes, and the extra power consumed keeping it cooled.
If your HPC workload primarily uses the GPU, then the CPU may even be sitting idle most of the time, your CPU only needs to be fast enough to keep the GPU fed with data.
Also for HPC, throughput is important... Current CPUs are much faster than the memory to which they're connected, so while some workloads can fit in the cache and run very fast those which result in lots of memory access can be considerably slower. That's why several of the IBM top500 supercomputers use relatively slow embedded PPC cpus, the CPU won't be wasting lots of its time and energy waiting for memory to catch up.
No, the smaller players have motivation to provide one-way migration capabilities... So they waste a lot of effort trying to reverse engineer the dominant player rather than actually improving their products core functionality. What this also means is that your lock-in is generally even worse with the smaller players because none of the competitors have ever thought about providing a migration path.
Fining the NHS is pointless, it only harms the NHS itself... Those responsible don't care because its not their money. They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
And herein lies the problem, each vendor has every incentive to lock customers in and no incentive to follow standards - a serious flaw of the market. And to make matters worse, most of the end customers are not technically savvy enough to realise the business risk of getting locked in to a proprietary system.
And then you get lots and lots of wasted effort trying to port and convert, which is extremely detrimental overall. And although the detriment of porting others code *to* your environment is bad, unless everyone changes at once those who change first will be at a disadvantage.
Which is why you need big buyers (eg governments etc) to demand standards compliant products, and refuse to purchase anything which isn't. Some may see it as interfering in the market, but then this aspect of the market is fundamentally flawed.
When it comes to compiled code the situation is reversed, gcc has been heavily optimized for x86 whereas other architectures although supported have had far less work done on them. There's also Intel's compiler which generally produces faster code than gcc.
x86 is a horrible kludge and always has been, it survives not because it's any good but because there is a large amount of closed source code out there compiled specifically for it. Trying to shoehorn x86 into another market tho, one that isn't previously locked in to it just seems ridiculous... Even if Intel manage to become competitive with ARM by using more efficient fabbing processes, this is only detrimental to end users as an ARM chip fabbed on the same process would be better still.
The root cause of this is that those who learned to program before college did so because they were interested in the subject and usually sought out the information themselves... Those who first learn in college generally have no personal interest in the subject beyond getting a job, and so they invest the minimum required effort in order to get paid and not fired, same as anyone else who's doing a job they don't enjoy.
On the contrary, basic (as in simple, not the language) programming should be taught to all students at a young age... It will help them understand logic and how computers work at a lower level. Computers influence virtually every aspect of our lives today, so it makes sense that everyone should have some level of understanding as to how they work.
No it doesn't, the license agreement on proprietary software provides no warranty whatsoever on the software, you have exactly the same ability to seek redress from the vendor as you do with open source - none.
The business model of skype all along has been to get people locked in and dependent on the service, and then work out ways to make money from it... Wether that means jacking up prices, selling user information, or bombarding users with advertisements. Either way, skype is a return to monopoly telco networks from years gone by, a huge step backwards.
How so? Keeping their IT spending local is likely to improve their economy, at the expense of foreign countries that they would previously have bought software from...
In which case you're no longer relying on encryption, your now relying on obfuscation provided by the HSM... Just takes someone with the right skills/equipment to crack it, and once one person works it out they can provide details of the hack to others.
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What's most stupid is that these "pirating bastards" don't make anything off the work either, almost all torrents are distributed for free.
The worst problem is the branding...
iOS is branded distinctly from OSX, so that users won't mistake the two and try to run applications for one on the other. Windows RT creates a false impression of compatibility which ultimately disappoints users. The dirt cheap Windows CE laptops had the same issue.
And the bing web crawler is extremely inefficient, i had to block it from accessing several of my sites because it was bombarding them with enough requests to cause a continuous 20mbps stream of traffic.
So you make it inconvenient for your employees to do their jobs, which will make some potentially good employees walk and reduce the efficiency of those who remain. Technology is supposed to improve the efficiency of workers, otherwise why bother using it at all? It's very hard to include working exploit code on a piece of paper.
While i agree attachments are often misused, and i utterly detest companies that attach a bunch of images to every email they send out, all you can really do is avoid doing such stupid things yourself... Other people will still do it.
Postscript is a turing complete language, it has even more scope for including malicious code than pdf does.
Incidentally there are also subset versions of the pdf format which don't include stupid features like javascript.
Cracking the password is entirely different from removing the "limitations"...
If you can open the file and read it, then you can always modify, print, copy etc the file too. If you can read the file then you have already got past the encryption because either there is no encryption or you have the key.
The only option remotely useful, is the one to encrypt the file with a password for opening. The other "features" are just stupid client side security, and only appear to work if the client respects the options. All the user has to do, is open the file with a different pdf reader that ignores the options. Options like this are actually worse than having no options at all, because they create a false sense of security and encourage users to use them.
If you can read the file, you can always copy data out of it, print it, edit it etc.
Seriously, why do people still run acrobat? PDF is a standard format, there are countless programs which support it and the only reason such files are a target is because adobe reader is basically a monoculture and represents a very large and attractive target. We need diversity among PDF readers, just like diversity among web browsers. It was diversity among web browsers more than anything else that reduced browser attacks and caused hackers to concentrate on proprietary monoculture plugins instead.
Because step 1 would have been successful, and thus you would never make it to step 2. I think he just miswrote the "return to step 1" bit..
So don't buy anything remotely new, wait for it to come up on ebay for a pittance when its 10 years old.
Which is why you should never become dependent on a proprietary product, you'll be left holding a lemon if it gets dropped.
Users do not understand what "compiled for arm" means... If they see a product marketed as windows, then they expect it to be able to do the same things that the version of windows they're used to can. This is why users were often disappointed with wince laptops and windows mobile phones, the branding creates expectations which are then not met.
Linux on arm with a few small exceptions *can* have the same catalogue of software as linux on x86, you can have firefox, libreoffice etc... Debian for arm has almost all of the same applications available for it as debian for x86. It's also less well known, and thus carries less expectations.
Apple ios is based on the same kernel as macosx, and yet its intentionally marketed differently so as to avoid just the kind of confusion and disappointment microsoft causes with its "windows everywhere" obsession.
>high-performance computing
winner, no contest: Intel's best CPU, plus the best GPU money can buy. Why hobble a kick-ass GPU with a second-rate CPU?
Because power consumption is very important for HPC...
It might not matter so much for a single user's desktop, but when you scale to thousands of processors the extra power consumption can cost serious amounts of money to keep running both in the power it consumes, and the extra power consumed keeping it cooled.
If your HPC workload primarily uses the GPU, then the CPU may even be sitting idle most of the time, your CPU only needs to be fast enough to keep the GPU fed with data.
Also for HPC, throughput is important... Current CPUs are much faster than the memory to which they're connected, so while some workloads can fit in the cache and run very fast those which result in lots of memory access can be considerably slower. That's why several of the IBM top500 supercomputers use relatively slow embedded PPC cpus, the CPU won't be wasting lots of its time and energy waiting for memory to catch up.
No, the smaller players have motivation to provide one-way migration capabilities... So they waste a lot of effort trying to reverse engineer the dominant player rather than actually improving their products core functionality.
What this also means is that your lock-in is generally even worse with the smaller players because none of the competitors have ever thought about providing a migration path.
Fining the NHS is pointless, it only harms the NHS itself... Those responsible don't care because its not their money.
They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
And herein lies the problem, each vendor has every incentive to lock customers in and no incentive to follow standards - a serious flaw of the market. And to make matters worse, most of the end customers are not technically savvy enough to realise the business risk of getting locked in to a proprietary system.
And then you get lots and lots of wasted effort trying to port and convert, which is extremely detrimental overall. And although the detriment of porting others code *to* your environment is bad, unless everyone changes at once those who change first will be at a disadvantage.
Which is why you need big buyers (eg governments etc) to demand standards compliant products, and refuse to purchase anything which isn't. Some may see it as interfering in the market, but then this aspect of the market is fundamentally flawed.
When it comes to compiled code the situation is reversed, gcc has been heavily optimized for x86 whereas other architectures although supported have had far less work done on them. There's also Intel's compiler which generally produces faster code than gcc.
x86 is a horrible kludge and always has been, it survives not because it's any good but because there is a large amount of closed source code out there compiled specifically for it.
Trying to shoehorn x86 into another market tho, one that isn't previously locked in to it just seems ridiculous... Even if Intel manage to become competitive with ARM by using more efficient fabbing processes, this is only detrimental to end users as an ARM chip fabbed on the same process would be better still.
I always thought MIPS would be a better choice than ARM for low power servers... MIPS already has a 64bit variant which is well tried and tested.
The root cause of this is that those who learned to program before college did so because they were interested in the subject and usually sought out the information themselves...
Those who first learn in college generally have no personal interest in the subject beyond getting a job, and so they invest the minimum required effort in order to get paid and not fired, same as anyone else who's doing a job they don't enjoy.
On the contrary, basic (as in simple, not the language) programming should be taught to all students at a young age... It will help them understand logic and how computers work at a lower level. Computers influence virtually every aspect of our lives today, so it makes sense that everyone should have some level of understanding as to how they work.
No it doesn't, the license agreement on proprietary software provides no warranty whatsoever on the software, you have exactly the same ability to seek redress from the vendor as you do with open source - none.
The business model of skype all along has been to get people locked in and dependent on the service, and then work out ways to make money from it... Wether that means jacking up prices, selling user information, or bombarding users with advertisements.
Either way, skype is a return to monopoly telco networks from years gone by, a huge step backwards.
How so? Keeping their IT spending local is likely to improve their economy, at the expense of foreign countries that they would previously have bought software from...
In which case you're no longer relying on encryption, your now relying on obfuscation provided by the HSM... Just takes someone with the right skills/equipment to crack it, and once one person works it out they can provide details of the hack to others.