Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
After all, it's a cloud; if they buy into the theory behind it, shouldn't it be possible to deploy the machines pretty much one per datacenter everywhere IBM operates data centers, and build the cloud up that way? Wouldn't the lab be anywhere there was an Internet connection?
Several of us in the Apple Core OS Kernel team are. The Robot Unicorn game is the latest making the rounds between offices; there were a lot that preceded it, like Derecho (both of these would easily lend themselves to touch interfaces, BTW).
However, there's no arguing that most flash games are CPU and power intensive. They love to use idle loops for sound and video synchronization, and they love to render frames in real time, rather than pre-rendering things like cut scenes. This eats CPU and battery life like there's no tomorrow.
Flash enables bad programmers to successfully write programs which end up being bad programs. This is bad for everyone. Among other things, it means there are fewer people to ask me "would you like fries with that?" because they are too busy writing crappy code.
Additionally, Flash itself likes to crash. A lot. Moving the plugin out to an external process was a pain, but it makes it really really obvious who is eating the CPU cycles, and who is actually crashing, when it doesn't take your browser down with it, making it look like a browser crash. Even then, we still get most of the crash reports and most of the blame.
As a user of their technology, I've helped Adobe engineers root cause a lot of issues, including some serious performance problems with their LSO ("Local Shared Object" / "Flash Cookie") implementation (you would not freaking believe what was going on there). Things are slowly getting better.
But there is no way I would in good conscience put Flash on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, at least without an implicit "click to Flash" or similar disruptive interception mechanism to indicate to the user that they are doing something bad. Even then, I still think it couldn't be allowed any more than any other interpreter that would allow you to run arbitrary code downloaded from the net.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the actual problem is DNS. Specifically, he's misconfiguring things such that IPv4 DNS requests return AAAA records indicating an IPv6 address when there is no end-to-end IPv6 connectivity. A DNS server that is queried via IPv4 should only return IPv4 addresses to the querant. See also http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4074.txt.
So he's basically intentionally misconfigured the DNS server, and then is complaining about IPv6 connectivity "not working" for 6over4 when he's not running dual stacks and Ipv4 bridging of IPv6 traffic on both ends (via proxies or via relay routers; see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3068.txt for details).
IPv6 will *never* take off if people keep putting bandages on IPv4 to keep it alive instead of configuring things correctly. It's time to shoot IPv4 in the head. Google is completely reachable via the 6bone, and they are configured correctly; pretty much if you are anywhere in Silicon Valley, you probably have 6bone connectivity to Google, Apple, and a number of other companies. Also all U.S. Federal agencies have been upgraded to IPv6 since early 2008.
And then it completely and totally blows: for breakpoints in code which has undergone basic block replication as part of code generation, or has used static symbols for data or code, or if you want the line numbers in the source debugging to match up to the actual source code.
There's a project declared for a debugger, but the label and other generation for use by what's available today (gdb) just utterly sucks and is almost completely unusable.
The "green card SPAM" is only the most famous early SPAM; if you want to be truly technical, Jordan Hubbard sent the first SPAM via a broadcast message to his/etc/hosts file on the very early net, though he wasn't advertising anything.
You can ask Jordan about this, he rather likes being the first 8-).
The reason it was called SPAM on Usenet in the first place was as an acronym for "Shit Parading As Meat". You capitalize in order to indicate that it's an acronym.
Sure, the U.S. has a lot of mail servers online compared to other countries. That stands to reason, given that the Internet was invented here, SMTP was invented here, email was invented here. Usenet was invented here. AOL was invented here. And SPAM was invented when AOL connected to Usenet.
Where is the SPAM originating? Is it originating from the U.S. as well? Most of the SPAM I see is Russian or Chinese in origin, with a small fraction of it actually coming from the U.S. itself. I get more SPAM that originates from Nigerian scammers, in fact, than I do from U.S. hosts. Most of the viagra and pharmaceutical SPAM I get is from Europe or from India, where it's legal to sell the drugs in question without a prescription and ship them internationally.
This article seems to be about blaming the relays, rather than the origin of the SPAM in the first place, and the U.S. is getting caught out because it has more mail servers, or more Windows machines on the net, and these are being exploited to relay the SPAM, rather than SPAM being a predominantly U.S. problem.
P.S.: I'm not arguing against blacklisting open relays; I still think that's part of the answer
I'm not going to defend this as a good or a bad idea, but by having a separate authoritative channel, they've basically made it possible to verify that someone who posts a review of a product actually owns the product, rather than just being a troll or a shill.
This effectively addresses head on the recent issues that "Yelp" has had in terms of offering paid advertising, using predatory or unethical sales practices, and so on. This is akin to using the getpeername/gethostbyaddr/gethostbyname verification that most SMTP servers do these days to verify that the ARIN IP address delegation agrees with the DNS delegation. By having two independent authorities to provide a countercheck, spoofing your gethostbyaddr doesn't get you anywhere because they can verify that you are really coming from one of the machines you say you are coming from.
Like I said, I don't know if it's a good idea. It's probably not even technically social networking. But it could have a useful application.
Terry, get over yourself already. You're just one very small part of the 99.999% of mindless twats who never have an effect on any process. That's the best place for you, where you can feel safe. Go back to sleep. We'll deal with this.
Actually, foolish person... I work on the Mac/iPhone/iPad as a kernel engineer.
I happen to agree that the device shouldn't be locked down, but I also don't confuse "freedom of speech" with "right to an audience". If I owned a television station and refused to sell air time to neonazis, that's my right. They're perfectly free to build their own television station, but I don't have to rent them time on mine just because, boo hoo, they haven't built theirs yet.
They buy an iPhone or an iPod Touch or an iPad for what they can see it can do.
The do NOT buy it for what they can see it *might* be able to do.
Only engineers and visionaries will buy something for the second reason. Consider that most cars which run on hydrogen are conversions of ordinary petroleum vehicles which were bought specifically to make them do something that they ordinarily would not have been able to do. Someone converting a Ford Escort to run on Hydrogen, though, is highly unlikely to encourage someone to buy a Ford Escort in the hope that conversion kits will be available "at some point in the future". It's even more likely that someone bought a Ford Escort 4 years before the first person converting it to run on Hydrogen in order to have one on hand when conversions kits became available on the off chance that someone would think of converting one to do that four years in the future.
Likewise, the person buying the iPad is not going to do so on the basis of anticipating some killer app that hasn't been thought of by the person who will eventually implement it only have their idea rejected by the app store. We're never going to see a lot of people who fall into the category of: "Oh crap! I bought this thing 4 years ago because I knew someday someone would write this program, and now they have, but I have no way to buy it!".
Yeah, it may piss you off on general principles, but all you're ding is trying to get everyone else to adopt your general principles by compplaining, you're not the white knight errant saving the world from censorship, so get over it.
Russia, unfortunately, doesn't have strong enforcement of the rule of law, and it doesn't acknowledge intellectual property rights.
As much as I think long term software patents are B.S., a much shorter term protection for software and an period of protection aligned with that of other W.T.O. members would go a long way towards opening up Russia to business, and a long way to stopping the "brain drain" their politicians are complaining about. The normalization and bilateral agreements on intellectual property are missing, and that's the major reason Russia remains an observer at the W.T.O. rather than being a member. There an excellent paper which makes this point right here:
Without the ability to feel safe in their homes, they are not going to attract the talent or the entrepreneurs.
Reading the article, it looks like the capitalists are asking for a free-for-all zone, while the government is interested in putting together another cold war era style "science city", where the inhabitants are just as insulated. To quote from the article:
"In California, the climate is beautiful and they don't have the ridiculous problems of Russia," Mr. Shtorkh said. To compete, he said, Russia will form a place apart for scientists. "They should be isolated from our reality," he added.
...which does absolutely nothing to fix that "reality" so that their new "science city" becomes anything more than a walled microcosm of a Silicon Valley suburb surrounding a Silicon Valley tech park.
This seems as wrong to me as the U.S. Government "fixing the economy" by giving tons of taxpayer money to the very people who broke it in the first place. I do not expect this venture to be successful unless they very quickly change their ground rules on intent and plan of action.
They're not just killing people... but trying to kill the people who make the American economy and American government run.
That's simply not true. If their aim was economic destruction rather than simply terror, then they would have set of some talcum powder bombs in as many chip fabs as possible and taken them offline for months. No need to kill anyone: our economy at this point is the information and the ability to process it.
They're just lashing out because of economic and social globalization removing all the elasticity out of the social systems where they used to live on the margins, leaving them no place to go or to live how they'd choose to live. Terror is the way they get your attention.
So in order to get rid of it, you'd got to institute either proportional representation or alternative vote (e.g. in Australia, you vote for your first, second, and third choices, and votes are tallied that way). The main obstacle to this is that the current system benefits the parties currently in power, so it is not in their short term interests to change things. Ironically, the communications latency and participation issues that drove the electoral colleges inclusion in the constitution are no longer relevant, but that hasn't reduced how entrenched it is.
If they can put back together an EEPROM from a data recorder from the Swissair 111 crash where the chip was partially destroyed, they should have no problem whatsoever taking apart a USB key fob to get the data out. Plus their prices for something like this are generally less than the prize that was offered.
Slashdot Mirror
I was with them until the cited Blizzard...
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
-- Terry
It's interesting that it's some place specific...
After all, it's a cloud; if they buy into the theory behind it, shouldn't it be possible to deploy the machines pretty much one per datacenter everywhere IBM operates data centers, and build the cloud up that way? Wouldn't the lab be anywhere there was an Internet connection?
-- Terry
I work at Apple. I am a big fan of Flash games.
Several of us in the Apple Core OS Kernel team are. The Robot Unicorn game is the latest making the rounds between offices; there were a lot that preceded it, like Derecho (both of these would easily lend themselves to touch interfaces, BTW).
However, there's no arguing that most flash games are CPU and power intensive. They love to use idle loops for sound and video synchronization, and they love to render frames in real time, rather than pre-rendering things like cut scenes. This eats CPU and battery life like there's no tomorrow.
Flash enables bad programmers to successfully write programs which end up being bad programs. This is bad for everyone. Among other things, it means there are fewer people to ask me "would you like fries with that?" because they are too busy writing crappy code.
Additionally, Flash itself likes to crash. A lot. Moving the plugin out to an external process was a pain, but it makes it really really obvious who is eating the CPU cycles, and who is actually crashing, when it doesn't take your browser down with it, making it look like a browser crash. Even then, we still get most of the crash reports and most of the blame.
As a user of their technology, I've helped Adobe engineers root cause a lot of issues, including some serious performance problems with their LSO ("Local Shared Object" / "Flash Cookie") implementation (you would not freaking believe what was going on there). Things are slowly getting better.
But there is no way I would in good conscience put Flash on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, at least without an implicit "click to Flash" or similar disruptive interception mechanism to indicate to the user that they are doing something bad. Even then, I still think it couldn't be allowed any more than any other interpreter that would allow you to run arbitrary code downloaded from the net.
-- Terry
Windows XP was end of lifed at the start of the year. Retire the machine already.
That XP doesn't support IPv6 based DNS request is not an argument against IPv6, it's an argument against XP.
-- Terry
But how will people learn that their slowness is due to the operating system attempting to use IPv6 over a router or ISP taht supports only v4?
They will look down for the word "Norway" printed on their country...
-- Terry
It would be nice if people read the standards...
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the actual problem is DNS. Specifically, he's misconfiguring things such that IPv4 DNS requests return AAAA records indicating an IPv6 address when there is no end-to-end IPv6 connectivity. A DNS server that is queried via IPv4 should only return IPv4 addresses to the querant. See also http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4074.txt.
So he's basically intentionally misconfigured the DNS server, and then is complaining about IPv6 connectivity "not working" for 6over4 when he's not running dual stacks and Ipv4 bridging of IPv6 traffic on both ends (via proxies or via relay routers; see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3068.txt for details).
IPv6 will *never* take off if people keep putting bandages on IPv4 to keep it alive instead of configuring things correctly. It's time to shoot IPv4 in the head. Google is completely reachable via the 6bone, and they are configured correctly; pretty much if you are anywhere in Silicon Valley, you probably have 6bone connectivity to Google, Apple, and a number of other companies. Also all U.S. Federal agencies have been upgraded to IPv6 since early 2008.
-- Terry
LLVM is wonderful unless you need a debugger
And then it completely and totally blows: for breakpoints in code which has undergone basic block replication as part of code generation, or has used static symbols for data or code, or if you want the line numbers in the source debugging to match up to the actual source code.
There's a project declared for a debugger, but the label and other generation for use by what's available today (gdb) just utterly sucks and is almost completely unusable.
-- Terry
The "green card SPAM" is only the most famous early SPAM; if you want to be truly technical, Jordan Hubbard sent the first SPAM via a broadcast message to his /etc/hosts file on the very early net, though he wasn't advertising anything.
You can ask Jordan about this, he rather likes being the first 8-).
-- Terry
FYI: A note on capitalizing SPAM...
The reason it was called SPAM on Usenet in the first place was as an acronym for "Shit Parading As Meat". You capitalize in order to indicate that it's an acronym.
-- Terry
The real question is, relaying it FROM where?
Sure, the U.S. has a lot of mail servers online compared to other countries. That stands to reason, given that the Internet was invented here, SMTP was invented here, email was invented here. Usenet was invented here. AOL was invented here. And SPAM was invented when AOL connected to Usenet.
Where is the SPAM originating? Is it originating from the U.S. as well? Most of the SPAM I see is Russian or Chinese in origin, with a small fraction of it actually coming from the U.S. itself. I get more SPAM that originates from Nigerian scammers, in fact, than I do from U.S. hosts. Most of the viagra and pharmaceutical SPAM I get is from Europe or from India, where it's legal to sell the drugs in question without a prescription and ship them internationally.
This article seems to be about blaming the relays, rather than the origin of the SPAM in the first place, and the U.S. is getting caught out because it has more mail servers, or more Windows machines on the net, and these are being exploited to relay the SPAM, rather than SPAM being a predominantly U.S. problem.
P.S.: I'm not arguing against blacklisting open relays; I still think that's part of the answer
-- Terry
Why to broadcast your purchases: Reputation
I'm not going to defend this as a good or a bad idea, but by having a separate authoritative channel, they've basically made it possible to verify that someone who posts a review of a product actually owns the product, rather than just being a troll or a shill.
This effectively addresses head on the recent issues that "Yelp" has had in terms of offering paid advertising, using predatory or unethical sales practices, and so on. This is akin to using the getpeername/gethostbyaddr/gethostbyname verification that most SMTP servers do these days to verify that the ARIN IP address delegation agrees with the DNS delegation. By having two independent authorities to provide a countercheck, spoofing your gethostbyaddr doesn't get you anywhere because they can verify that you are really coming from one of the machines you say you are coming from.
Like I said, I don't know if it's a good idea. It's probably not even technically social networking. But it could have a useful application.
-- Terry
No soup for you! Come back one year! Next!
-AC
No more Usenet cabal?!? End of an era!
Now where are we going to go for our cancel control messages?!?
-- Terry
You believe Kensington won't sell a locking dock?
-- Terry
Can't you get the same information by purchasing it from the cell providers? There's already precedent on this.
-- Terry
Terry, get over yourself already. You're just one very small part of the 99.999% of mindless twats who never have an effect on any process. That's the best place for you, where you can feel safe. Go back to sleep. We'll deal with this.
Actually, foolish person... I work on the Mac/iPhone/iPad as a kernel engineer.
I happen to agree that the device shouldn't be locked down, but I also don't confuse "freedom of speech" with "right to an audience". If I owned a television station and refused to sell air time to neonazis, that's my right. They're perfectly free to build their own television station, but I don't have to rent them time on mine just because, boo hoo, they haven't built theirs yet.
-- Terry
I don't think it matters to 99.999% of people
Here's why:
They buy an iPhone or an iPod Touch or an iPad for what they can see it can do.
The do NOT buy it for what they can see it *might* be able to do.
Only engineers and visionaries will buy something for the second reason. Consider that most cars which run on hydrogen are conversions of ordinary petroleum vehicles which were bought specifically to make them do something that they ordinarily would not have been able to do. Someone converting a Ford Escort to run on Hydrogen, though, is highly unlikely to encourage someone to buy a Ford Escort in the hope that conversion kits will be available "at some point in the future". It's even more likely that someone bought a Ford Escort 4 years before the first person converting it to run on Hydrogen in order to have one on hand when conversions kits became available on the off chance that someone would think of converting one to do that four years in the future.
Likewise, the person buying the iPad is not going to do so on the basis of anticipating some killer app that hasn't been thought of by the person who will eventually implement it only have their idea rejected by the app store. We're never going to see a lot of people who fall into the category of: "Oh crap! I bought this thing 4 years ago because I knew someday someone would write this program, and now they have, but I have no way to buy it!".
Yeah, it may piss you off on general principles, but all you're ding is trying to get everyone else to adopt your general principles by compplaining, you're not the white knight errant saving the world from censorship, so get over it.
-- Terry
Who else wants to show up with a laser pointer?
I'm betting we can chase her away from entering the court house...
-- Terry
It's not about VC and it's not about suburbia.
Russia, unfortunately, doesn't have strong enforcement of the rule of law, and it doesn't acknowledge intellectual property rights.
As much as I think long term software patents are B.S., a much shorter term protection for software and an period of protection aligned with that of other W.T.O. members would go a long way towards opening up Russia to business, and a long way to stopping the "brain drain" their politicians are complaining about. The normalization and bilateral agreements on intellectual property are missing, and that's the major reason Russia remains an observer at the W.T.O. rather than being a member. There an excellent paper which makes this point right here:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/cp73_katz_final.pdf
Without the ability to feel safe in their homes, they are not going to attract the talent or the entrepreneurs.
Reading the article, it looks like the capitalists are asking for a free-for-all zone, while the government is interested in putting together another cold war era style "science city", where the inhabitants are just as insulated. To quote from the article:
"In California, the climate is beautiful and they don't have the ridiculous problems of Russia," Mr. Shtorkh said. To compete, he said, Russia will form a place apart for scientists. "They should be isolated from our reality," he added.
...which does absolutely nothing to fix that "reality" so that their new "science city" becomes anything more than a walled microcosm of a Silicon Valley suburb surrounding a Silicon Valley tech park.
This seems as wrong to me as the U.S. Government "fixing the economy" by giving tons of taxpayer money to the very people who broke it in the first place. I do not expect this venture to be successful unless they very quickly change their ground rules on intent and plan of action.
-- Terry
FYI: AMD-V or Intel Nehalem or later
Nehalem processor TLB address mapping entries include a Virtual Processor Identifier (VPID), while AMD-V supports tagged TLBs.
-- Terry
The point of terrorist attacks is terror
They're not just killing people... but trying to kill the people who make the American economy and American government run.
That's simply not true. If their aim was economic destruction rather than simply terror, then they would have set of some talcum powder bombs in as many chip fabs as possible and taken them offline for months. No need to kill anyone: our economy at this point is the information and the ability to process it.
They're just lashing out because of economic and social globalization removing all the elasticity out of the social systems where they used to live on the margins, leaving them no place to go or to live how they'd choose to live. Terror is the way they get your attention.
-- Terry
Ban the party system
How?
And I don't mean "how could it be possible", I mean "how, specifically, would you do it?"
The two party system is an emergent property of the electoral college and the single-member district plurality voting system (SMDP).
See also "Duverger's law":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_Law
So in order to get rid of it, you'd got to institute either proportional representation or alternative vote (e.g. in Australia, you vote for your first, second, and third choices, and votes are tallied that way). The main obstacle to this is that the current system benefits the parties currently in power, so it is not in their short term interests to change things. Ironically, the communications latency and participation issues that drove the electoral colleges inclusion in the constitution are no longer relevant, but that hasn't reduced how entrenched it is.
-- Terry
"After all .. just breathing emits CO2...."
He forgot to mention: it will also be necessary to suspend most peoples breathing for a while.
-- Terry
Or you'd just pay Chipworks to do it for you
If they can put back together an EEPROM from a data recorder from the Swissair 111 crash where the chip was partially destroyed, they should have no problem whatsoever taking apart a USB key fob to get the data out. Plus their prices for something like this are generally less than the prize that was offered.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00922915 ...or if not the Canadians, give it to the Australians:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1363217.1363243
Or trojan the machine they plug it into and wait for it to be unlocked.
-- Terry
McKusick's second law:
"The number of MIPS delivered to the keyboard has remained constant since 1974" -- Kirk McKusick
-- Terry