"In October 2006, I wrote about the TPM and its "use" in Mac OS X. Since Apple provided no software or firmware drivers for the TPM...
"Apple's TPM Keys"
"The media has been discussing "Apple's use of TPM" for a long time now. There have been numerous reports of system attackers bypassing "Apple's TPM protection" and finding "Apple's TPM keys." Nevertheless, it is important to note that Apple does not use the TPM."
In short, while there was a TPM chip in some of the early shipping Intel systems, there were no drivers for it, and Apple did not use it. Current shipping Macintel systems don't even have the TPM chip, so there's no possible way for them to use one.
I don't like existing in the murky world of armchair people positing what is and isn't legal.
You think that if the courts rule in favour of Apple that will stop thousands of armchair lawyers stating with great certainty that Apple's EULA is illegal and unenforceable, and that they have the God-given right to install OS X on anything they damn well please?
It certainly didn't stop thousands of armchair lawyers from claiming Microsoft is not a monopoly, because they're not the only people in the world making an operating system...
1) You, the customer, are a dim bulb and have no idea what our "Internet service" is. Just buy it. Whatever it is, we assure you that it's fast and you have no other choice.
2) Our competitors are hapless morons.
So far as I can tell, Time-Warner and Verizon (the duopoly around here) have pretty much exactly the same philosophy when it comes to their internet service ads...
The ads for satellite TV I've seen also follow the same pattern—particularly the latter.
It isn't possible to "own" a piece of the web in the same way I own my house. Even my domain name... If BigCo decides they want it, I wouldn't be able to afford the court costs to keep it.
I would say that if BigCo decides they want my house (or, more likely, the land it's standing on), if they're big and ruthless enough, I probably can't afford the court costs to fight them off for that, either. It's just that big companies don't usually care enough about any particular piece of residential land to go to that kind of trouble.
If they're already talking about some sort of force-feedback for the iPhone today, I find it very hard to believe that by 2015 they won't have something working for the high-end touch devices to run highly customizable tactile feedback for a variety of different applications. I'm quite sure that a touch keyboard will be among the first things they give such feedback to.
Once we can do that, we will be freed from having to use the exact same keyboard for word processing, programming, multimedia editing, math, and gaming, and the Optimus Maximus will seem less like a really awesome novelty, and more like a good first step:-)
I am increasingly convinced that the computer as we see it today is very much an intermediate stage, and that it will be when it changes to match the real-world paradigms it imitates, rather than bending those paradigms to fit within its limited capacities, that we will see the beginning of the end of the infancy of the computer age.
In the U.S., a "midsize" business is generally defined as one with approximately 1,000 or so employees.
Do you have a reference for that?
It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that I have found that just about everyone I've talked to has their own definitions of what "small" and "medium" mean in terms of businesses. From my perspective, I'd say "small" is anything under 100 employees, and "medium" starts just above that. However, I also know people who consider "small" to end and "medium" to start at more like 20.
So having some kind of official or semi-official authority defining this would at least make it easier to have an idea what size *some* people are talking about when they say "small" or "medium" business...
Read some of the replies further up, you twitâ"like the ones linking to the PDFs from the evidence submitted for one of various MS antitrust trials that include this email in them.
Shame on you for not actually paying any attention at all, and just posting out your ass...wait, this is Ars Technica, isn't it?
It's Slashdot?
Oh. Well, then, your response is more understandable, but no less stupid.
I'm afraid I don't have a source, as I saw it on a TV program of some sort at least a decade ago, but there most certainly was work going on at least that long ago on creating AI that, rather than just *being* intelligent, would *learn* to be intelligent through various combinations of interaction and being fed chunks of raw data.
But, as you and others have indicated, this isn't the kind of thing that gets the press, because no one's interested in a computer that talks baby talk; they want to know when they can expect to be stuck in jars and treated to a startling misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics while hooked up to a reality simulator;-)
Something like "No, little Johnny doesn't need exposure to this extreme violence. But a little minor nudity never hurt anyone." probably wouldn't work so well with US age-based ratings.
Right, and there are definitely those who don't want you to be able to easily make that distinction. There are a disturbing and depressing number of Americans who really do believe that not only is watching a woman take her shirt and bra off more damaging to a child than watching someone get shot or beheaded, but it is their duty as good Christians to make sure that everyone believes that—or at least has that standard enforced on them.
The Constitution is a "technicality" to most people. "Got off on a technicality" often means "they didn't have a search warrant when they obtained the evidence".
Yes. Which means that even if they had perfectly legitimate reasons to search for, and find, the articles that became the tainted evidence—even if they could quite legitimately have obtained a search warrant, but didn't for whatever reason—said articles could never thereafter be used as evidence in that trial. That's a technicality. (Naturally, there are more clear-cut violations that count less as "technicalities" and more as "serious infringements on Constitutional rights", but I really don't see the two as being equivalent...)
This has always struck me as a really, really dumb way of handling 4th amendment violations. A better way, in my book, would be to allow the evidence (as long as chain of custody and all that was properly observed), but summarily fire everyone involved in collecting it, with no chance of working in the field again. Seems to me that would not only be a more effective deterrent to overzealous cops, but also ensure that people who are guilty, but had crucial evidence against them obtained illegally, still go to jail.
My wife takes regular business trips to China, and has learned something interesting about the "one child" policy: apparently, the way it works now is that you can keep having daughters as long as you want, but once you have a male child, you aren't allowed to have any more children (at least, not without paying some kind of penalty that even someone well-to-do in a 1st world country would find prohibitive...)
There is a qualitative difference there. Gold -> paper and cash -> credit both significantly increase the amount of money (or access to money) you can reasonably carry on your person. The only difference with an RFID vs mag-stripe is whether you have to swipe or wave vaguely in the general direction of the reader.
Oh, it's worse than that...our application vendor didn't even use SQL DATE fields. They used 6-digit packed decimal fields, which were evidently hastily expanded to cope with Y2K (dates after 1999 are of the form 1yyMMdd).
And I don't think that what I'm trying to do is especially amenable to your suggestion even with DATE fields. Here's an example:
We have a table of classification codes and associated values, which are keyed by state, code, and effective date. For any given combination of state and code, there are likely to be at least a half-dozen to a dozen records with different dates, so if I want to figure out some of the values associated with a particular code, I need to find the record whose state = myState, code = myCode, and date is the greatest less than myDate (and myDate may very well be some time in the past).
I'll freely admit I'm no SQL guru; I've had exactly one database course and learned the rest on the job as required. But I've been trying off and on to come up with a way to do this on the DB side for at least 2 years now with no success...
Java just happens to be my language of choice, there was no particular merit being attached to it there; for the rest, until you can come up with a way—within the confines of AS/400 DB2 SQL—to do things like, "How does this field compare to the matching field in the record before it?" and quickly finding the most recently dated records with certain keys, it just won't be able to cut it.
If there is such a way, I would be overjoyed if you would tell me, because I have yet to find one that actually works...
(Dan if you're reading this, how many rows do your reports average out to?)
Let's see...I think we've got a couple of tables around the 100k-row mark, and another somewhere between 200k and 300k. So we don't need a lot more rowspace (though I know of people elsewhere who do, more like a million rows...), but we do need some more...
What kind of processing are you having to do that can't be done on the database itself?
First: bear in mind we're using a proprietary application on an AS/400, which, though it uses a perfectly ordinary DB2 database, and we're OK with certain modifications to said database, we can't exactly say to have complete control over.
Second: please clarify "on the database itself." We're not about to alter live data just so we can pull out a summary report.
Third: for the most part (see fourth, below), it's not about complex processing; we just want to do simple stuff like subtotalling, and sometimes switching around some values because the aforementioned proprietary application likes to use negative signs in silly ways sometimes. It's about presentation, since management likes things in a "sensible" format, and looking nice, not in tab-delimited or fixed-width text.
Fourth: the exception to that is when we see problems and need to troubleshoot our database—sometimes to send bug reports to our vendor, sometimes to figure out what I need to fix in my own code. We sometimes need to run quick searches and processing on an entire table, and yes, I know databases can do that, but I don't know of any tool that can browse quickly through a remote DB2 table, colour-code, stick in fudge factors, and run quick lookups vs other related tables the way we can with Excel. Emphasis on the "quick" here: I can *do* a lot of this through straight table queries, but it's so much faster to query it all out once, and then let Excel do the work.
I'm sure there will be more to change than just that, and probably some unintended consequences of such a change as well.
Oh, I'm sure there's more to it, too, and I'm fully aware of the law of unintended consequences; however, I can't imagine that it would be a tremendous undertaking.
When someone tells you you're using a hammer to cut wood, you can't just tell them that it costs them little to put serrated edges on the hammer's head and that they should just darn well do it.
Possibly, but when you complain that the competitor's hammer has a claw on the back for removing nails more easily, and theirs just has a smooth back, and they tell you that no hammer should ever need a claw for removing nails and you're an idiot for asking, it just leaves you scratching your head saying, "Who's the idiot?"
...what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet?
We're querying data out of a database and trying to do simple processing on it (the type that Excel does very well) in the simplest ways we can, and present it to the bosses. Yes, I could write a Java program to subtotal all our payments by type and spit it out in some kind of elegant format, or we could spring for a dozen more Crystal Reports licenses, but the fact is that Excel does this just fine, and now we don't even have to use 6 worksheets within a workbook to hold it all.
I hate Microsoft, but I just have no way of recommending replacing Office with OpenOffice while this is an issue.
Oh, and by the way (not directed at you, but at the stuck-up git who wrote that quote, which I read, too): when someone says they have a reason to use more than X of something in your product, and all it would cost you to give it to them is (I think) changing the types of a bunch of variables, and maybe adding a couple of extra converter methods, you don't tell them, "No one should ever need that many! Only an idiot would even ask for that!" You either say, "Well, we don't currently have enough demand for that feature to be worth the trouble," or you just darn well do it!
From what I've seen, this release still has the absurd 65535 row limit on Calc—the only reason such a limit was acceptable in previous versions was because MS Office didn't yet support more, but now that Office 2007 supports up to 4 million-some-odd rows, there is absolutely no excuse for putting that many or more into OpenOffice.
More than 65K rows is the killer feature that has gotten parts of my company to upgrade to 2007. Until and unless OOo supports it, there's no way we'll be able to use it as a full replacement for MS Office, as much as we'd like to.
Way to be a stereotyping twit. I live 25 minutes from a small city, an hour from a large one (where the nearest real airport is), and you know what? I live 5 minutes from a commercial area with several grocery stores, a mall, a half-dozen car dealerships and assorted mechanics, a cinema, and many other stores.
Just because you're not in the heart of New York City where it's all happening doesn't mean you're in the backwoods of Montana, mate. You might want to actually try visiting the rural towns and villages you so deride someday. Until you do, please stop spouting idiotic nonsense about them.
Slashdot Mirror
Cribbed shamelessly from an Ars Technica discussion on the same issue:
"TPM DRM" In Mac OS X: A Myth That Won't Die
Amit Singh
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bo...chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
Beating a Dead Horse
"In October 2006, I wrote about the TPM and its "use" in Mac OS X. Since Apple provided no software or firmware drivers for the TPM ...
"Apple's TPM Keys"
"The media has been discussing "Apple's use of TPM" for a long time now. There have been numerous reports of system attackers bypassing "Apple's TPM protection" and finding "Apple's TPM keys." Nevertheless, it is important to note that Apple does not use the TPM."
In short, while there was a TPM chip in some of the early shipping Intel systems, there were no drivers for it, and Apple did not use it. Current shipping Macintel systems don't even have the TPM chip, so there's no possible way for them to use one.
Dan Aris
I don't like existing in the murky world of armchair people positing what is and isn't legal.
You think that if the courts rule in favour of Apple that will stop thousands of armchair lawyers stating with great certainty that Apple's EULA is illegal and unenforceable, and that they have the God-given right to install OS X on anything they damn well please?
It certainly didn't stop thousands of armchair lawyers from claiming Microsoft is not a monopoly, because they're not the only people in the world making an operating system...
Dan Aris
1) You, the customer, are a dim bulb and have no idea what our "Internet service" is. Just buy it. Whatever it is, we assure you that it's fast and you have no other choice. 2) Our competitors are hapless morons.
So far as I can tell, Time-Warner and Verizon (the duopoly around here) have pretty much exactly the same philosophy when it comes to their internet service ads...
The ads for satellite TV I've seen also follow the same pattern—particularly the latter.
Dan Aris
I would say that if BigCo decides they want my house (or, more likely, the land it's standing on), if they're big and ruthless enough, I probably can't afford the court costs to fight them off for that, either. It's just that big companies don't usually care enough about any particular piece of residential land to go to that kind of trouble.
Dan Aris
If they're already talking about some sort of force-feedback for the iPhone today, I find it very hard to believe that by 2015 they won't have something working for the high-end touch devices to run highly customizable tactile feedback for a variety of different applications. I'm quite sure that a touch keyboard will be among the first things they give such feedback to.
Once we can do that, we will be freed from having to use the exact same keyboard for word processing, programming, multimedia editing, math, and gaming, and the Optimus Maximus will seem less like a really awesome novelty, and more like a good first step :-)
I am increasingly convinced that the computer as we see it today is very much an intermediate stage, and that it will be when it changes to match the real-world paradigms it imitates, rather than bending those paradigms to fit within its limited capacities, that we will see the beginning of the end of the infancy of the computer age.
Dan Aris
Hmm, if you're dealing with manufacturing, I suppose "midsize" could well be 1000 employees. Hadn't thought of that.
I guess a lot depends on the industry you're in :-)
Dan Aris
Do you have a reference for that?
It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that I have found that just about everyone I've talked to has their own definitions of what "small" and "medium" mean in terms of businesses. From my perspective, I'd say "small" is anything under 100 employees, and "medium" starts just above that. However, I also know people who consider "small" to end and "medium" to start at more like 20.
So having some kind of official or semi-official authority defining this would at least make it easier to have an idea what size *some* people are talking about when they say "small" or "medium" business...
Dan Aris
...so juicy sweeeet!
;-)
Dan Aris
No, it's real.
Read some of the replies further up, you twitâ"like the ones linking to the PDFs from the evidence submitted for one of various MS antitrust trials that include this email in them.
Shame on you for not actually paying any attention at all, and just posting out your ass...wait, this is Ars Technica, isn't it?
It's Slashdot?
Oh. Well, then, your response is more understandable, but no less stupid.
Dan Aris
I'm afraid I don't have a source, as I saw it on a TV program of some sort at least a decade ago, but there most certainly was work going on at least that long ago on creating AI that, rather than just *being* intelligent, would *learn* to be intelligent through various combinations of interaction and being fed chunks of raw data.
But, as you and others have indicated, this isn't the kind of thing that gets the press, because no one's interested in a computer that talks baby talk; they want to know when they can expect to be stuck in jars and treated to a startling misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics while hooked up to a reality simulator ;-)
Dan Aris
No, I think you're misunderstanding how this works.
Given that there are 6 locations where all (or nearly all) of the pictures being used were taken,
Deriving from this that the probability of getting any 1 of these right by random guessing is 1 in 6,
Given that the accuracy averaged over 200 pictures is slightly less than 1 in 6,
The computer does slightly worse than chance.
However, my guess is that the first given is not entirely correct ;-)
Dan Aris
Right, and there are definitely those who don't want you to be able to easily make that distinction. There are a disturbing and depressing number of Americans who really do believe that not only is watching a woman take her shirt and bra off more damaging to a child than watching someone get shot or beheaded, but it is their duty as good Christians to make sure that everyone believes that—or at least has that standard enforced on them.
Dan Aris
Yes. Which means that even if they had perfectly legitimate reasons to search for, and find, the articles that became the tainted evidence—even if they could quite legitimately have obtained a search warrant, but didn't for whatever reason—said articles could never thereafter be used as evidence in that trial. That's a technicality. (Naturally, there are more clear-cut violations that count less as "technicalities" and more as "serious infringements on Constitutional rights", but I really don't see the two as being equivalent...)
This has always struck me as a really, really dumb way of handling 4th amendment violations. A better way, in my book, would be to allow the evidence (as long as chain of custody and all that was properly observed), but summarily fire everyone involved in collecting it, with no chance of working in the field again. Seems to me that would not only be a more effective deterrent to overzealous cops, but also ensure that people who are guilty, but had crucial evidence against them obtained illegally, still go to jail.
Dan Aris
My wife takes regular business trips to China, and has learned something interesting about the "one child" policy: apparently, the way it works now is that you can keep having daughters as long as you want, but once you have a male child, you aren't allowed to have any more children (at least, not without paying some kind of penalty that even someone well-to-do in a 1st world country would find prohibitive...)
Dan Aris
There is a qualitative difference there. Gold -> paper and cash -> credit both significantly increase the amount of money (or access to money) you can reasonably carry on your person. The only difference with an RFID vs mag-stripe is whether you have to swipe or wave vaguely in the general direction of the reader.
Dan Aris
Oh, it's worse than that...our application vendor didn't even use SQL DATE fields. They used 6-digit packed decimal fields, which were evidently hastily expanded to cope with Y2K (dates after 1999 are of the form 1yyMMdd).
And I don't think that what I'm trying to do is especially amenable to your suggestion even with DATE fields. Here's an example:
We have a table of classification codes and associated values, which are keyed by state, code, and effective date. For any given combination of state and code, there are likely to be at least a half-dozen to a dozen records with different dates, so if I want to figure out some of the values associated with a particular code, I need to find the record whose state = myState, code = myCode, and date is the greatest less than myDate (and myDate may very well be some time in the past).
I'll freely admit I'm no SQL guru; I've had exactly one database course and learned the rest on the job as required. But I've been trying off and on to come up with a way to do this on the DB side for at least 2 years now with no success...
Dan Aris
What part of "management requires reports in that format" did you not understand? Or did you expect us to just show them the raw database views?
Dan Aris
The horror! It appears you need to read the rest of my posts on this thread, you dimwit.
Dan Aris
Java just happens to be my language of choice, there was no particular merit being attached to it there; for the rest, until you can come up with a way—within the confines of AS/400 DB2 SQL—to do things like, "How does this field compare to the matching field in the record before it?" and quickly finding the most recently dated records with certain keys, it just won't be able to cut it.
If there is such a way, I would be overjoyed if you would tell me, because I have yet to find one that actually works...
Dan Aris
Let's see...I think we've got a couple of tables around the 100k-row mark, and another somewhere between 200k and 300k. So we don't need a lot more rowspace (though I know of people elsewhere who do, more like a million rows...), but we do need some more...
Dan Aris
First: bear in mind we're using a proprietary application on an AS/400, which, though it uses a perfectly ordinary DB2 database, and we're OK with certain modifications to said database, we can't exactly say to have complete control over.
Second: please clarify "on the database itself." We're not about to alter live data just so we can pull out a summary report.
Third: for the most part (see fourth, below), it's not about complex processing; we just want to do simple stuff like subtotalling, and sometimes switching around some values because the aforementioned proprietary application likes to use negative signs in silly ways sometimes. It's about presentation, since management likes things in a "sensible" format, and looking nice, not in tab-delimited or fixed-width text.
Fourth: the exception to that is when we see problems and need to troubleshoot our database—sometimes to send bug reports to our vendor, sometimes to figure out what I need to fix in my own code. We sometimes need to run quick searches and processing on an entire table, and yes, I know databases can do that, but I don't know of any tool that can browse quickly through a remote DB2 table, colour-code, stick in fudge factors, and run quick lookups vs other related tables the way we can with Excel. Emphasis on the "quick" here: I can *do* a lot of this through straight table queries, but it's so much faster to query it all out once, and then let Excel do the work.
I'm sure there will be more to change than just that, and probably some unintended consequences of such a change as well.Oh, I'm sure there's more to it, too, and I'm fully aware of the law of unintended consequences; however, I can't imagine that it would be a tremendous undertaking.
When someone tells you you're using a hammer to cut wood, you can't just tell them that it costs them little to put serrated edges on the hammer's head and that they should just darn well do it.Possibly, but when you complain that the competitor's hammer has a claw on the back for removing nails more easily, and theirs just has a smooth back, and they tell you that no hammer should ever need a claw for removing nails and you're an idiot for asking, it just leaves you scratching your head saying, "Who's the idiot?"
Dan Aris
...what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet?We're querying data out of a database and trying to do simple processing on it (the type that Excel does very well) in the simplest ways we can, and present it to the bosses. Yes, I could write a Java program to subtotal all our payments by type and spit it out in some kind of elegant format, or we could spring for a dozen more Crystal Reports licenses, but the fact is that Excel does this just fine, and now we don't even have to use 6 worksheets within a workbook to hold it all.
I hate Microsoft, but I just have no way of recommending replacing Office with OpenOffice while this is an issue.
Oh, and by the way (not directed at you, but at the stuck-up git who wrote that quote, which I read, too): when someone says they have a reason to use more than X of something in your product, and all it would cost you to give it to them is (I think) changing the types of a bunch of variables, and maybe adding a couple of extra converter methods, you don't tell them, "No one should ever need that many! Only an idiot would even ask for that!" You either say, "Well, we don't currently have enough demand for that feature to be worth the trouble," or you just darn well do it!
Dan Aris
From what I've seen, this release still has the absurd 65535 row limit on Calc—the only reason such a limit was acceptable in previous versions was because MS Office didn't yet support more, but now that Office 2007 supports up to 4 million-some-odd rows, there is absolutely no excuse for putting that many or more into OpenOffice.
More than 65K rows is the killer feature that has gotten parts of my company to upgrade to 2007. Until and unless OOo supports it, there's no way we'll be able to use it as a full replacement for MS Office, as much as we'd like to.
Dan Aris
Way to be a stereotyping twit. I live 25 minutes from a small city, an hour from a large one (where the nearest real airport is), and you know what? I live 5 minutes from a commercial area with several grocery stores, a mall, a half-dozen car dealerships and assorted mechanics, a cinema, and many other stores.
Just because you're not in the heart of New York City where it's all happening doesn't mean you're in the backwoods of Montana, mate. You might want to actually try visiting the rural towns and villages you so deride someday. Until you do, please stop spouting idiotic nonsense about them.
Dan Aris
You should come back, a lot has changed since Oligarch was still a realm.
There's a lot more to the game now than there used to be, which can be a mixed blessing, but it's definitely a blessing in the end :-)
Dan Aris