Re:Itanium at 1.6 GHz in 2003 ?
on
Intel's Big Chip
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· Score: 4, Interesting
AFAIK - Enough said.
As people have pointed out the 800Mhz Itanium chips - the fastest you can buy - have an integer performance slightly less than an 800Mhz PIII.
From the article: "Applications will be about one and a half to two times faster than what you get on a (current) Itanium" I'm assuming this is WITH the huge L3 cache in pilot systems if they are claimed actual application performance.
Let's compare this to the REAL competition: IBMs Power4.
IBM Power4 1.3GHz - shipping for a while now:
SPECint2000 = 814 SPECint_base2000 = 790
SPECfp2000 = 1169 SPECfp_base2000 = 1098
Even the best Itanium reported int numbers are:
SPECint2000 = 365 SPECint_base2000 = 358
(Same box) SPECfp2000 = 610 SPECfp_base2000 = 526
Even if the McKinley (which doesn't ship for 6 months or so) produces double the Itanium numbers (which it won't) it'll still lag the currently shipping Power4 chips. And with only an clock speed increase of 60% over the next three years IBM can stay ahead simply by getting the 1.8Ghz models out the door in the next 24 months. (That's assuming that the 1.6Ghz McKinleys will even outperform the current Power4s.)
It looks like Intel has increased clock speed by 25% added a bunch of L3 cache and is claiming 150%-200% gain. I think Intel has a (big) dog on their hands and they're trying to dress it up. The P4 performance will probably continue to outrun their flagship "server" chip and because of AMD Intel can't afford to strangle the P4's performance as they might have been able to in the past.
Intel said, "Wait for Merced." - which we did for years. Then they said, "Well, the Itanium sucks, but wait for McKinley!"
The radio stations in Grand Theft Auto III really help make the game and the ads really help make the radio stations work. They add to the "texture" of the game and give the game makers the ability to make subtle (and funny) commentaries on society.
The wierd thing is that MOST of the ads are fake... but some of the personal promotions stuff (Game Radio) are real or are they... the bleed over between the fake ads and reality adds another dimension to the game.
This article also shows that if you ignore ads THEY WILL STOP. If you don't like ads complain and specifically do not buy those products.
A sakters arems and body have the same angular velocity, because her arms are attached to her body. it takes more energy to move her arms around when they are extended (further to go) and since they are attached to her body, the whole thing slows down.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear, I was refering to the fact that when you climb a flight of stairs the Earth slows down. THAT effecting rotational energy is like the skater.
The slingshoting a spacecraft is more like a line of skaters in a whip. The last skater gets flung at a far greater speed - stealing energy from the whole group. But if the group is large enough it doesn't notice.
The short answer is: Yes.
Physics works everywhere all the time. When you climb a flight of stairs or walk up a hill it slows the Earth's rotation - and it speeds back up as you walk back down.
No - seriously - just as an ice skater's rotation slows or speeds as they extend or contract their arms the same principles apply to all rotating bodies. Everytime we slingshot a space vehicle around the Earth we are effectively transfering some of the planet's energy to the vehicle and that energy has to come from somewhere.
But the amounts here are so small that the effect is not measurable or "effective" in the scale of anything we could notice. It's like the fact that anything with mass has a gravatational field - but you don't notice the effect of the gravity created by your pen.
Alright, sorry about giving away the "big secret". It's been so long (3+ years at least) I wasn't even aware they still did it.
Also - it was SO trivial I didn't know it was SUCH a secret.
Anyway - not much I can do about it. I can't edit my comment and I had mod points I was willing to spend, but I guess it's passed out of the edit window because it won't let me mod it.
Yes. It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow
posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in
my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall
having a dress code.
Whatever you think of his politics I love the idea of a snooty doorman looking at the M$ users and making them continue to stand in line outside the club.;)
It raises the bar for entry to the list, and
ensures that users really want to be there.
There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the
crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free
Software[] Another is to
continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of
your message so as not to betray your use of the software.[] Both methods demonstrate an effort made to post to the list,
as well as a certain degree of technical acumen.
I hate to say it but this probably works wonders. I remember when alt.hackers instituted a policy in which it was listed as a "moderated" newsgroup but there was no moderator. So any submitted stories were simply mailed into the ether.
You had to edit your header so that you 'approved' your own post. Yes, it was trivial but a quick comparison between that group and 'alt.2600' proved that even that low a bar worked wonders for the level of content.
=tkk
Makes a certain amount of sense...
on
Pheromone Robotics
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Ants are very simple creatures that working collectively in groups to accomplish fairly complicated tasks using mostly smell.
Modeling behavior along these lines and allowing simple creatures to relay very simple state messages with each robot repeating it to others would allow behavior and information to be propagated and acted on even in hostile situations. (Only short range communication is possible for instance.)
ie If the robots are searching for something and one finds the target it could alert the others around it and they could repeat the message and alter their behavior accordingly - if required. Eventually the alert would filter across all robots and reach "home" at which point a response could be propagated back to the successful creature the same way.
If your creatures are too simple there are limitations, however. If you put certain acids on ants other ants will assume they're dead - the smell trigger - and carry them to "dead ant" pile even if they're struggling. The "un-dead" ant will be carried back to the dead ant pile repeatedly until the smell wears off.
They're not victims Re:Theft isn't new.
on
Gift Card Hacking
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· Score: 2
Why does every security lapse mentioned on/. blamed on the victims?
The victims here are the consumers - not the stores. The stores get money for all goods sold and they're happy - the only people who get screwed are the people who's gifts get stolen.
No one's baming the consumers - they're blaming the stores for implementing idiotic policies and practices that benefit themselves at the cost of the consumer.
... if people had some sense of ethics this wouldn't be a problem.
And if my mother had wheels she'd be a wagon.
That being said the has never been the case and (IMHO) will never be the case and people who deal and cash and goods need to be aware of this and deal appropriately.
You can bet these stores watch THEIR money carefully once it gets in the cash register - but they don't seem to care at all about protecting their customer's money or interest once they get their's. It's like the store saying "it's our policy to leave your money on the counter while you shop - but if some one take's it before we ring it up it's your problem not ours."
All in all DES is a pretty good algorithm but it does reveal what the NSA knew THEN (1970s) and it seems equal or better than the public knowledge now.
DES is NOT a group (proved 1992), the number of permutations (16) also makes it hardened against DiffCrypt where 8 is not enough. It wasn't until difcrypt came along that the need for 16 perms was finally revealed. (More proof that the NSA knew about DC then if we needed it.)
The permutations are also needed against linear crypt - 8 permutations are 2^21 plaintext breakable and 16 is 2^43. You're right - linear is the most effective (as far as we know;) attack against DES as of now.
The shift from a theoritical 2^47 to a real life 2^43 isn't THAT bad - seems to be a good general compromise between being hardened against a broad range of attacks. If the NSA had allowed uniform Sboxes the difficulty would fall as low as 2^26.
I do wonder in coming years if we'll learn of an NSA technique against DES we never thought of... but I have to think that if they assumed that foreign govs knew (or would come to know what the NSA knew - remember the Russian are very good at math and codes) that they really did want an all-around secure algorithm.
As I heard someone once suggest though - given that the NSA measures it's computing power in "acres" and has for years... what if they just dedicated older super computers to brute force attacks like searching for, factoring and cataloging very large prime numbers and mapping/cataloging every possible text-block in to out-put out of every major alogrithm? Couldn't they have an amazing pre-computed brute force hammer to apply when needed? If you think your RSA is safe because of the difficulty involved in factoring very large primes - what if someone had been working on it for 30+ years with ever increasing computer power?
You're right that the NSA knew about Differential Cryptanalysis years before anyone. I extrapolated this largely using the same facts - but if you read _AC_ carefully they openly acknowledge this.
But you're wrong in the fact that DES IS resistant to DC. The bit S-box design the NSA gave IBM are designed to make it STRONGER against DC NOT weaker.
"As in choosing the key length , another of the NSA'a design criteria was based on making the algorithm [DES] resistant to differential cryptanalysis..." _AC_ first edition Schneier page 238
If you want to bust the NSA's chops complain that they made the key length go from 128 to (effectively) 56 bits. Now that hurt...
Here's something I'm unsure of - if standardesque DirectX software is used to program the XBox then shouldn't porting those games to a Windows computer be fairly easy? I know the XBox has nifty optimizations - especially for 3D - but isn't just about ANY decent gaming computer sold today able to match the specialty hardware because it has a processor that's twice as fast and a video card that can be repeatedly upgraded?
The reason I ask is because most hardcore gamers (obviously the core XBox market) probably have a gaming computer and if I can get Halo or DOA3 or TitleX for my computer (which has better graphics than my TV set and I'm used to playing games on) why would I buy an XBox?
Why wouldn't I would buy a PS2 or a gamecube if I buy a console so I could play games NOT available on my computer....
This being said is M$ going to have to embargo the good XBox games to "XBox only" to keep the Windows game market from eating their own lunch?
If M$ doesn't have a big backlog of cool XBox only games would seem that they might be limiting their market to "gamers who can't afford a good gaming computer" and those who have enough money to buy everything out there. I don't think this is a broad enough market to support an entire platform.
How's it worse in Microsoft's case? They're losing roughly $100 per Box. That's also around the same that the PS2 lost.
I think M$ is losing more than Sony did - with added harddrive and custom components - and will benefit less from VSLI etc that brings down cost for Sony et al in the long run. I also think that Sony's position as a consumer hardware producer (plus with original PS experience) would give then significantly less investment/start-up cost for launching the product.
That being said, maybe I'm wrong... I have a lot of friends who work on PS2 in and out of Sony so I have pretty good PS2 lowdown - but my M$ scoop isn't nearly as good. But I also think M$ has ulterior motives that they feel justifies the extra expense... see below...
XBox is not Microsoft's push to get a PC in your living room. It's their push to be the gaming console you have in your living room.
I didn't say they're trying to get a PC into the livingroom - I just said that they're trying to get into the livingroom. Isn't M$ a heavy investor in ulimateTV and webTV? You don't think M$ has designs on being your digital dispensor of entertainment - with a game playing, digital cable box capable of HD recording and interactive TV web surfing and purchasing via MSN.com?
I think they are... (whether that qualifies as a conspiracy theory is left up to the reader as an exercise.;)
Where is your proof of this? I see no reason to believe that the hardware Sony/Nintendo or M$ loose money on hardware
It's commonly known that game hardware loses money for the first 2-3 years, but in M$'s case it's much worse than the usual models.
If you don't trust financial news on Slashdot how about "Reuters"? This article quotes Wall Street tech analysts as saying that M$ stands to lose about US$1,000,000,000 (yes Billion) with a break even date somewhere in 2004 if it's "moderately" successful.
Heck they're spending >$5,000,000 just to advertise it - for that much money they could just give away 1.5million units as a promotion!
Why would M$ do this? Because this box is their attempt to get into livingrooms - and heck MSN has lost over 2Billion and will probably NEVER turn a profit - so why worry about another billion?
That's really the problem - once the Xboxs and games are shipped there aren't patches. I don't think M$ has the mentality of the console down... what are they going to do? Distribute flash-ROM system upgrades for everyone who bought 1.0?
Consoles are suppossed to be like toasters - you plug them in, press the button and they just work.
Every system upgrade - assuming you get people to do it stands a chance of breaking already shipped games - then you'll have ot upgrade you DOA3 to version2 to get it to work again. I don't think so...
"There are more secure parts of their network," says Lamo. "It's more difficult to get into their advertising reporting statistics than their news production tools."
Yeah - because having someone mess with your advertising stats might mean giving false information to your corporate masters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H advertisers. As where this is simply allowing anyone with a web browser to lie to potentially millions of citizens seeking information. Fsck them - we're talking about the bottom line here.
So it's pretty clear where their priorities lie... as if it wasn't before.
"Let's say that we give every single government emplyee the right to read everyone's email and access everyone's web habits and everything else."
Does this is any real way make you safer or prevent the terrible scenerio you lay-out?
Sadly the answer is, "No." Even if you allow the government to do this you won't be any safer. If the terrorists are smart enough to use encryption over the internet now in this country (no evidence of this - but they're making laws as if it's true) then they can create ways around these restrictions. They can exchange porno pix or vacation photos with encoded messages for instance. And if they're willing to wait for years to strike then they don't need the urgency of the Internet to communicate - they can use regular mail... unless you want to give the government access to that too...
If these people can fly round trip to Spain for a 6 hour f2f meeting (as reported) they can certainly easily exchange one-time pads (unbreakable encryption technology) for completely secure communications. You lay-out a compellingly bad scenerio but you don't show how the changes you suggest make that scenerio any less likely.
The perspective you need is to consider at what level you feel safer... Should we require people to carry papers and only move between cities or states or even crosstown only with permission?
Why not? We'd be safer...
Since I feel we wouldn't be much safer under this scenerio let's ask what would be lost. Do we really want to empower the government to know everything we do on-line? Remember J. Edgar Hoover? He kept files and ran investigations on anyone he felt like - documenting their private lives and then used that knowledge for political ends. Do we want the government to be able to do this legally? I don't...
As with all civil liberties I think the government must should a pressing and immediate need - and that their remedy address that immediate need and ONLY that need.
The terrorists apparently (according to media reports) used the NYC public library and Hotmail to communicate. Neither place stores such messages in any way beyond what the users keep. And there's no indication that they used encryption for these communications - they just used public access and free accounts to fly "below radar". You can also encode messages into the content - as a series of text messages or encode it inside images or MP3 tracks - rather than simply encrypting text.
Going lo-tech like this (and using phone cards like the OKC bombers did) drives law enforcement crazy trying to recreate/retrace steps. If the terrorists are as tech savvy and wiley as the Justice department paints them to be then they'll just shift tactics giving them the same protections they have now - but stripping Americans of their personal privacy protections..
I fully support the right of (and agree with the needs of) law enforcement to protect us and pursue people who break the law - but I don't trust law enforcement to "police" themselves when given wide berth to perform their duties.
While I sympathize with the idea of feeling a deep personal loss that is the wrong time to enact laws, strike back blindly or make rash decisions. (I admit that other than finding out that one of the terrorists lived about a block and a half from my house my personal involvement in the tragedy is relatively limited.) The law is suppossed to be the fair handed and impartial enactor of what society views as necessary - that's why the state can execute someone but you can't - even if you're the aggrieved party.
Anyway - I didn't mean to go on like that... this is my first post since last Tuesday - suddenly my karma points seemed unimportant... The bottom line is - remedies NEED to address REAL problems and provide REAL solutions to those problems not just band-aid fixes that hurt in the long run and don't help - even in the short term. I don't trust our (largely) tech-ignorant Congress to pass good laws on difficult issues on such short notice when they have (mostly) law enforcement as advisors and consultants.
=tkk
Someone HAS to say it....
on
Data Mining?
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· Score: 1
"Is USDCO buying other mines? "We have options on other sites."
Someone is going to copy this model saying: "We must not have a mineshaft gap!"
Miss you Stanley....
=tkk
Now if I could just work 'precious bodily fluids' into a post...
CERT of course, you're right.... CNet was created by a virus! Or is that ZDnet?;)
VERY COOL byte by byte dissection of the "Morris-Internet" worm in Usenix of that time BTW. Used a couple of backdoors and everyone's favorite - unchecked input to overflow the stack. (Unbounded char255 input never checked whether the incoming String was more than 255 characters.)
Almost the SAME vulnerability as the current Code Red worm.
The Morris worms were 'supposed to' kill themselves if another worm was present. A last minute mod added a programming bug meant there was a 25% chance that a individual worm would become eternal and ignore all others. These eternal worms would eventually overwhelm the machine. That was the real problem.
=tkk
PS Still remember the joke from the college newspaper, "Number 1 lie: That a worm could make Unix any slower." Ah shared undergrad account machines.
Slashdot Mirror
As people have pointed out the 800Mhz Itanium chips - the fastest you can buy - have an integer performance slightly less than an 800Mhz PIII.
From the article: "Applications will be about one and a half to two times faster than what you get on a (current) Itanium"
I'm assuming this is WITH the huge L3 cache in pilot systems if they are claimed actual application performance.
Let's compare this to the REAL competition: IBMs Power4.
IBM Power4 1.3GHz - shipping for a while now:
SPECint2000 = 814 SPECint_base2000 = 790
SPECfp2000 = 1169 SPECfp_base2000 = 1098
Even the best Itanium reported int numbers are:
SPECint2000 = 365 SPECint_base2000 = 358
(Same box) SPECfp2000 = 610 SPECfp_base2000 = 526
Even if the McKinley (which doesn't ship for 6 months or so) produces double the Itanium numbers (which it won't) it'll still lag the currently shipping Power4 chips.
And with only an clock speed increase of 60% over the next three years IBM can stay ahead simply by getting the 1.8Ghz models out the door in the next 24 months. (That's assuming that the 1.6Ghz McKinleys will even outperform the current Power4s.)
It looks like Intel has increased clock speed by 25% added a bunch of L3 cache and is claiming 150%-200% gain. I think Intel has a (big) dog on their hands and they're trying to dress it up. The P4 performance will probably continue to outrun their flagship "server" chip and because of AMD Intel can't afford to strangle the P4's performance as they might have been able to in the past.
Intel said, "Wait for Merced." - which we did for years. Then they said, "Well, the Itanium sucks, but wait for McKinley!"
=tkk
"Grand Theft Auto" brought to you by Ford!
Survey says, "BZZZZZZZZZZZZT"!
;)
=tkk
The radio stations in Grand Theft Auto III really help make the game and the ads really help make the radio stations work. They add to the "texture" of the game and give the game makers the ability to make subtle (and funny) commentaries on society.
The wierd thing is that MOST of the ads are fake... but some of the personal promotions stuff (Game Radio) are real or are they... the bleed over between the fake ads and reality adds another dimension to the game.
This article also shows that if you ignore ads THEY WILL STOP. If you don't like ads complain and specifically do not buy those products.
=tkk
Sorry, maybe I was unclear, I was refering to the fact that when you climb a flight of stairs the Earth slows down. THAT effecting rotational energy is like the skater.
The slingshoting a spacecraft is more like a line of skaters in a whip. The last skater gets flung at a far greater speed - stealing energy from the whole group. But if the group is large enough it doesn't notice.
=tkk
The short answer is: Yes.
Physics works everywhere all the time. When you climb a flight of stairs or walk up a hill it slows the Earth's rotation - and it speeds back up as you walk back down.
No - seriously - just as an ice skater's rotation slows or speeds as they extend or contract their arms the same principles apply to all rotating bodies. Everytime we slingshot a space vehicle around the Earth we are effectively transfering some of the planet's energy to the vehicle and that energy has to come from somewhere.
But the amounts here are so small that the effect is not measurable or "effective" in the scale of anything we could notice. It's like the fact that anything with mass has a gravatational field - but you don't notice the effect of the gravity created by your pen.
=tkk
Alright, sorry about giving away the "big secret". It's been so long (3+ years at least) I wasn't even aware they still did it.
Also - it was SO trivial I didn't know it was SUCH a secret.
Anyway - not much I can do about it. I can't edit my comment and I had mod points I was willing to spend, but I guess it's passed out of the edit window because it won't let me mod it.
=tkk
Whatever you think of his politics I love the idea of a snooty doorman looking at the M$ users and making them continue to stand in line outside the club. ;)
It raises the bar for entry to the list, and ensures that users really want to be there. There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free Software[] Another is to continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of your message so as not to betray your use of the software.[] Both methods demonstrate an effort made to post to the list, as well as a certain degree of technical acumen.
I hate to say it but this probably works wonders. I remember when alt.hackers instituted a policy in which it was listed as a "moderated" newsgroup but there was no moderator. So any submitted stories were simply mailed into the ether.
You had to edit your header so that you 'approved' your own post. Yes, it was trivial but a quick comparison between that group and 'alt.2600' proved that even that low a bar worked wonders for the level of content.
=tkk
Ants are very simple creatures that working collectively in groups to accomplish fairly complicated tasks using mostly smell.
Modeling behavior along these lines and allowing simple creatures to relay very simple state messages with each robot repeating it to others would allow behavior and information to be propagated and acted on even in hostile situations. (Only short range communication is possible for instance.)
ie If the robots are searching for something and one finds the target it could alert the others around it and they could repeat the message and alter their behavior accordingly - if required. Eventually the alert would filter across all robots and reach "home" at which point a response could be propagated back to the successful creature the same way.
If your creatures are too simple there are limitations, however. If you put certain acids on ants other ants will assume they're dead - the smell trigger - and carry them to "dead ant" pile even if they're struggling. The "un-dead" ant will be carried back to the dead ant pile repeatedly until the smell wears off.
=tkk
and we couldn't find him for an hour!
The Miabatsui Monstrosity... "Mine's Bigger".
;)
=tkk
The victims here are the consumers - not the stores. The stores get money for all goods sold and they're happy - the only people who get screwed are the people who's gifts get stolen.
No one's baming the consumers - they're blaming the stores for implementing idiotic policies and practices that benefit themselves at the cost of the consumer.
And if my mother had wheels she'd be a wagon.
That being said the has never been the case and (IMHO) will never be the case and people who deal and cash and goods need to be aware of this and deal appropriately.
You can bet these stores watch THEIR money carefully once it gets in the cash register - but they don't seem to care at all about protecting their customer's money or interest once they get their's.
It's like the store saying "it's our policy to leave your money on the counter while you shop - but if some one take's it before we ring it up it's your problem not ours."
=tkk
The real question is - where did the muck come from?
;)
Easy - it evolved from creationists!
=tkk
All in all DES is a pretty good algorithm but it does reveal what the NSA knew THEN (1970s) and it seems equal or better than the public knowledge now.
;) attack against DES as of now.
DES is NOT a group (proved 1992), the number of permutations (16) also makes it hardened against DiffCrypt where 8 is not enough. It wasn't until difcrypt came along that the need for 16 perms was finally revealed. (More proof that the NSA knew about DC then if we needed it.)
The permutations are also needed against linear crypt - 8 permutations are 2^21 plaintext breakable and 16 is 2^43. You're right - linear is the most effective (as far as we know
The shift from a theoritical 2^47 to a real life 2^43 isn't THAT bad - seems to be a good general compromise between being hardened against a broad range of attacks. If the NSA had allowed uniform Sboxes the difficulty would fall as low as 2^26.
I do wonder in coming years if we'll learn of an NSA technique against DES we never thought of... but I have to think that if they assumed that foreign govs knew (or would come to know what the NSA knew - remember the Russian are very good at math and codes) that they really did want an all-around secure algorithm.
As I heard someone once suggest though - given that the NSA measures it's computing power in "acres" and has for years... what if they just dedicated older super computers to brute force attacks like searching for, factoring and cataloging very large prime numbers and mapping/cataloging every possible text-block in to out-put out of every major alogrithm? Couldn't they have an amazing pre-computed brute force hammer to apply when needed? If you think your RSA is safe because of the difficulty involved in factoring very large primes - what if someone had been working on it for 30+ years with ever increasing computer power?
=tkk
You're right that the NSA knew about Differential Cryptanalysis years before anyone. I extrapolated this largely using the same facts - but if you read _AC_ carefully they openly acknowledge this.
But you're wrong in the fact that DES IS resistant to DC. The bit S-box design the NSA gave IBM are designed to make it STRONGER against DC NOT weaker.
"As in choosing the key length , another of the NSA'a design criteria was based on making the algorithm [DES] resistant to differential cryptanalysis..." _AC_ first edition Schneier page 238
If you want to bust the NSA's chops complain that they made the key length go from 128 to (effectively) 56 bits. Now that hurt...
=tkk
Here's something I'm unsure of - if standardesque DirectX software is used to program the XBox then shouldn't porting those games to a Windows computer be fairly easy? I know the XBox has nifty optimizations - especially for 3D - but isn't just about ANY decent gaming computer sold today able to match the specialty hardware because it has a processor that's twice as fast and a video card that can be repeatedly upgraded?
The reason I ask is because most hardcore gamers (obviously the core XBox market) probably have a gaming computer and if I can get Halo or DOA3 or TitleX for my computer (which has better graphics than my TV set and I'm used to playing games on) why would I buy an XBox?
Why wouldn't I would buy a PS2 or a gamecube if I buy a console so I could play games NOT available on my computer....
This being said is M$ going to have to embargo the good XBox games to "XBox only" to keep the Windows game market from eating their own lunch?
If M$ doesn't have a big backlog of cool XBox only games would seem that they might be limiting their market to "gamers who can't afford a good gaming computer" and those who have enough money to buy everything out there. I don't think this is a broad enough market to support an entire platform.
=tkk
I think M$ is losing more than Sony did - with added harddrive and custom components - and will benefit less from VSLI etc that brings down cost for Sony et al in the long run. I also think that Sony's position as a consumer hardware producer (plus with original PS experience) would give then significantly less investment/start-up cost for launching the product.
That being said, maybe I'm wrong... I have a lot of friends who work on PS2 in and out of Sony so I have pretty good PS2 lowdown - but my M$ scoop isn't nearly as good. But I also think M$ has ulterior motives that they feel justifies the extra expense... see below...
XBox is not Microsoft's push to get a PC in your living room. It's their push to be the gaming console you have in your living room.
I didn't say they're trying to get a PC into the livingroom - I just said that they're trying to get into the livingroom. Isn't M$ a heavy investor in ulimateTV and webTV? You don't think M$ has designs on being your digital dispensor of entertainment - with a game playing, digital cable box capable of HD recording and interactive TV web surfing and purchasing via MSN.com?
I think they are... (whether that qualifies as a conspiracy theory is left up to the reader as an exercise.
=tkk
It's commonly known that game hardware loses money for the first 2-3 years, but in M$'s case it's much worse than the usual models.
If you don't trust financial news on Slashdot how about "Reuters"? This article quotes Wall Street tech analysts as saying that M$ stands to lose about US$1,000,000,000 (yes Billion) with a break even date somewhere in 2004 if it's "moderately" successful.
Heck they're spending >$5,000,000 just to advertise it - for that much money they could just give away 1.5million units as a promotion!
Why would M$ do this? Because this box is their attempt to get into livingrooms - and heck MSN has lost over 2Billion and will probably NEVER turn a profit - so why worry about another billion?
=tkk
Whoa....
I know Clock Foo!
=tkk
Gee all that time and effort just to model the behavior I see in the hallway of my house with my dogs everyday...
=tkk
That's really the problem - once the Xboxs and games are shipped there aren't patches. I don't think M$ has the mentality of the console down... what are they going to do? Distribute flash-ROM system upgrades for everyone who bought 1.0?
Consoles are suppossed to be like toasters - you plug them in, press the button and they just work.
Every system upgrade - assuming you get people to do it stands a chance of breaking already shipped games - then you'll have ot upgrade you DOA3 to version2 to get it to work again.
I don't think so...
Shipped is shipped.
=tkk
Yeah - because having someone mess with your advertising stats might mean giving false information to your corporate masters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H advertisers. As where this is simply allowing anyone with a web browser to lie to potentially millions of citizens seeking information. Fsck them - we're talking about the bottom line here.
So it's pretty clear where their priorities lie... as if it wasn't before.
=tkk
"Let's say that we give every single government emplyee the right to read everyone's email and access everyone's web habits and everything else."
Does this is any real way make you safer or prevent the terrible scenerio you lay-out?
Sadly the answer is, "No." Even if you allow the government to do this you won't be any safer. If the terrorists are smart enough to use encryption over the internet now in this country (no evidence of this - but they're making laws as if it's true) then they can create ways around these restrictions. They can exchange porno pix or vacation photos with encoded messages for instance. And if they're willing to wait for years to strike then they don't need the urgency of the Internet to communicate - they can use regular mail... unless you want to give the government access to that too...
If these people can fly round trip to Spain for a 6 hour f2f meeting (as reported) they can certainly easily exchange one-time pads (unbreakable encryption technology) for completely secure communications. You lay-out a compellingly bad scenerio but you don't show how the changes you suggest make that scenerio any less likely.
The perspective you need is to consider at what level you feel safer... Should we require people to carry papers and only move between cities or states or even crosstown only with permission?
Why not? We'd be safer...
Since I feel we wouldn't be much safer under this scenerio let's ask what would be lost.
Do we really want to empower the government to know everything we do on-line? Remember J. Edgar Hoover? He kept files and ran investigations on anyone he felt like - documenting their private lives and then used that knowledge for political ends. Do we want the government to be able to do this legally? I don't...
Perspective indeed...
=tkk
The terrorists apparently (according to media reports) used the NYC public library and Hotmail to communicate. Neither place stores such messages in any way beyond what the users keep. And there's no indication that they used encryption for these communications - they just used public access and free accounts to fly "below radar". You can also encode messages into the content - as a series of text messages or encode it inside images or MP3 tracks - rather than simply encrypting text.
Going lo-tech like this (and using phone cards like the OKC bombers did) drives law enforcement crazy trying to recreate/retrace steps. If the terrorists are as tech savvy and wiley as the Justice department paints them to be then they'll just shift tactics giving them the same protections they have now - but stripping Americans of their personal privacy protections..
I fully support the right of (and agree with the needs of) law enforcement to protect us and pursue people who break the law - but I don't trust law enforcement to "police" themselves when given wide berth to perform their duties.
While I sympathize with the idea of feeling a deep personal loss that is the wrong time to enact laws, strike back blindly or make rash decisions. (I admit that other than finding out that one of the terrorists lived about a block and a half from my house my personal involvement in the tragedy is relatively limited.) The law is suppossed to be the fair handed and impartial enactor of what society views as necessary - that's why the state can execute someone but you can't - even if you're the aggrieved party.
Anyway - I didn't mean to go on like that... this is my first post since last Tuesday - suddenly my karma points seemed unimportant... The bottom line is - remedies NEED to address REAL problems and provide REAL solutions to those problems not just band-aid fixes that hurt in the long run and don't help - even in the short term. I don't trust our (largely) tech-ignorant Congress to pass good laws on difficult issues on such short notice when they have (mostly) law enforcement as advisors and consultants.
=tkk
Someone is going to copy this model saying:
"We must not have a mineshaft gap!"
Miss you Stanley....
=tkk
Now if I could just work 'precious bodily fluids' into a post...
Bill lives in a COMPLETELY different neighborhood. ;)
He don't come 'round our hood very much.
=tkk
CERT of course, you're right....
CNet was created by a virus! Or is that ZDnet?
VERY COOL byte by byte dissection of the "Morris-Internet" worm in Usenix of that time BTW. Used a couple of backdoors and everyone's favorite - unchecked input to overflow the stack. (Unbounded char255 input never checked whether the incoming String was more than 255 characters.)
Almost the SAME vulnerability as the current Code Red worm.
The Morris worms were 'supposed to' kill themselves if another worm was present. A last minute mod added a programming bug meant there was a 25% chance that a individual worm would become eternal and ignore all others. These eternal worms would eventually overwhelm the machine. That was the real problem.
=tkk
PS Still remember the joke from the college newspaper, "Number 1 lie: That a worm could make Unix any slower." Ah shared undergrad account machines.