But running the software on an emulator doesn't work. The keys you need do not exist in the software.
The player software has no intrinsic way of knowing if it's running on hardware or inside an emulator. The drive has no intrinsic way of knowing if it's connected to a trusted PC or simply an interface to an emulator that does a very good job of pretending it's a trusted PC. The encryption will make it difficult to write, but not impossible.
If it is in multiple use then it has obviously been compromised and cloned. They then place that key on a revokation list and all machines trying to use that cloned key drop dead.
You're misunderstanding me.
Even assuming a worst-case scenario where discs bought at the store contain the latest version of the revocation list that was available when they were made, that key is good for any media released up until it's put on the revocation list.
So once someone creates an untrusted player that does NOT respond to the command to disable itself, all they have to do is release updates for it once a month or so with a new key that isn't on the list. Again, playing catch-up in that situation is a game that the media corporations can't win.
The restrictions in the drives themselves will be a hassle, but I'm sure someone will come up with a mod chip type piece of hardware to render it a non-issue.
Look at the healthy market for mod chips - a product that is almost universally used for illegal activity. Now try to imagine that NO ONE in the entire world will seize the chance to make a killing selling HDCP-bypass gear to play high-def movies on untrusted devices - a market with many potential consumers who aren't interested in piracy, but don't want to pay thousands of dollars to buy a new DRM-enabled TV.
The key that you need is embedded in a chip such that you need a million-dollar laboratory to get at it.
I'm sure there are at least a few people in the world with access to that equipment.
The short version is that it will let the Powers That Be remotely revoke the privilages of any hardware with keys that are known to have been cracked.
Revoke the privileges of licensed, standards-meeting hardware, maybe.
What I see happening is someone building an emulator that essentially runs the player software in a sandbox that makes it think everything is fine and dandy. Of course, it will have to be updated fairly frequently as new releases include hardware disabling codes for the older keys, but that will be a game of catch-up that the media corporations will never win.
That is, assuming the technology succeeds commercially at all. I personally don't think it will take off, because there's no incremental upgrade path, or a particularly compelling reason to upgrade for the vast majority of the population. Sure, you could play a high-definition movie at quarter resolution on a regular TV, but what's the point? The DVD version will be much cheaper, and look just as good on that display. To get any benefit will mean buying a high-end TV, a new player, and media that costs more. Thanks, but no thanks. And I say that as technology-loving geek who owns hundreds of DVDs. My parents - who watch DVDs on TVs that are 10-20 years old - would probably laugh at the suggestion.
Yep. As far as I know, there's no way to push software updates to a Blackberry over the wireless network. So if the company I work for needs to do this, all of them across the country will have to be brought in to the nearest location with an IT tech.
The people who have Blackberries at the company I work for tend to be execs, or at least high-level businesspeople who are frequently on trips to other cities, so this will be a noticeable hassle for them.
I was born with perfect eyesight, and it didn't start to worsen until I was 7 or 8. Obviously I wasn't wearing any kind of corrective lenses before that. It got worse until I was in my early twenties, and has been more or less stable since then.
Furthermore, I have doubts about the physical mechanism that this theory describes. It implies that wearing corrective lenses forces your eyes to focus at some "unnatural" position, as if the eye were focusing on the corrective lens, rather than the distant objects it's seeing. Maybe I'm not interpreting it correctly. Certainly focusing on very close objects for long periods is stressful on your eyes, but that's not how corrective lenses work.
The Amerika Bomber, maybe? The Nazis were working on an orbital bomber that would launch from Germany, skip across the upper atmosphere, bomb New York, and keep skipping all the way back to the Fatherland.
Incidentally, beware of a minor drawback of this new way of thinking: in your old age, when the novelty of vast fortunes you have meticulously conned and abused out of others wears out and when that 340500sq ft. mansion feels cold and univiting despite of 350 maids and 250 buttlers, you might find that nasty affliction, called "conscience", starting to ache you here and there.
Dude, whatever. Bill Gates has enough money that he could fill up a swimming pool with money, Scrooge McDuck-style. Obviously I'm not him, but if I were ever feeling down, that would be enough to make me cackle with evil glee right there. If I were having a particularly terrible week, maybe I'd buy an entire country, or build an orbiting space battle platform crewed by hot women with Eastern European accents and use it to vapourize my enemies.
I understand this phenomenon, but I don't think the "in Soviet Russia..." joke is a good example of it. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" is one that gets better every time IMO.
Also, for me it would be a question of curiousity. I like to know about things. Last year I went stargazing with some friends, and we spotted a formation of three satellites moving across the sky. I thought that was unbelievably weird, and I wanted to know what they were.
Fortunately, the kind of hobbyists depicted in the article had already done the hard work for me, and I was able to find out that they belong to the US Navy, although their purpose seems uncertain.
My guess is that it would have been much better to leave the tauntaun alive and just snuggle up against it. While it's alive, it will continue to metabolize its fats and produce heat. A dead tauntaun is just a wet gooey blanket.
When you're facing hypothermia, the most important thing is to insulate your body and isolate it from the weather. Snuggling up to a Tauntaun would keep that one part of you warm, but the rest of your body would be acting like a heat sink.
Cutting it open and stuffing Luke inside was the best way to keep him alive, fantasy story or no. Basically it would be acting like a really thick, gooey, smelly sleeping bag.
I was primarily thinking of the managed.NET languages, since the OP talked about VB.
Even with Visual Studio Supreme Devourer of Worlds Edition, you can't tell it to build a C# or VB.NET app as a native Windows executable that will run without the.NET framework, can you? I've never seen it as an option, although I haven't looked that hard either.
There is no reason whatsoever to use VB, unless you like a poor and dinosaur syntax.
VB.NET has almost the same syntax as C#. I learned VB.NET as my first dev language on Windows and moved over to C# last year. It is almost nothing like VB = 6.
VB is actually a bit better for a quick, lightweight app because it's more forgiving of things like how you wrap chunks of code in try/catch blocks, and of multithreading issues.
On the other hand, C# is more efficient to code, and it gives you some abilities that VB.NET doesn't, like being able to properly work with unsigned integers (although I heard VS2005 fixed this in VB). It is also more intuitive to people who've been developing for a long time.
Either way, there's tons of example code available online. For someone who hasn't done ANY development work on Windows, I'd recommend picking up the Deitel "How to Program" book on whichever language they're starting with.
You must've missed the build up (and eventual letdown) of everything the PS2 was supposed to do before launch. Anyone remember the Emotion Processor? At one point I'm pretty sure Sony was claiming they'd cure cancer with that one.
Pretty much all consoles are hyped beyond belief. This is different in my mind because it's not even a complete console that people are claiming will turn one loaf of bread into many - it's just the controller. There isn't even a Killzone 2 video to argue about over whether it's pre-rendered or not. Nintendo has given its fans absolutely NOTHING substantial in terms of what games on the Revolution will be like, but all of them are assuming they'll be exactly the neatest things they would personally design.
Yes, nothing is better than to speculate wildly on the basis of a few facts and PR releases.
I've never seen so many people let their imaginations spin so wildly out of control about a toy. There hasn't been a single screenshot released, or even examples other than tech demos of how the controller will actually be used.
There is no way that the reality of the product will live up to the hopes people are piling on top of it.
if it can infect the system the IT guys did not do their job.
Ah yes, the always lovely combination of denying personal responsibility for one's actions, the implication that anything less than perfection on the part of others is failure, and the dismissal of complex issues as someone else's problem.
The story as it was told to me was that they were mistakenly arrested. I was too young to see them then, but apparently they had some kind of Hollywood creature department-quality dog dummy that they could "vivisect" on stage, as part of their protest against that kind of practice in the real medical/scientific world. Someone thought it was real, and called the police.
What contingency does your company have if all your phone service were lost? Or if there were no electricity? Or how about the roads leading into your company having been washed away?
The way to plan for this contingency is to assume that your data center has been vaporized by a nuclear blast. You have a hot or cold backup data center site that can build a copy of your critical infrastructure in a day or two.
This covers loss of power to a city, quarantine because of plague, earthquakes, etc.
We actually got to try out the earthquake contingency about four years ago. I was a help desk phone tech then, and we got shuttled over to a sort of "battle bridge" call center that had enough equipment for about 1/4 of the team to work normally until our main location was usable again.
* McCain is a Republican. Eisenhower and Lincoln were Republicans. Calling the members of the Project for a New American Empire "Republicans" is an insult to that party's history.
I'm not surprised, given that it's a Ziff-Davis company.
A few years ago, some of the key staff at e.g. Gamespot, Official US Playstation Magazine seemed to get it into their heads that they were edgy and awesome adults, and therefore obligated to act as "hardcore" as possible. The ZD gaming magazines and websites were never paragons of great writing, but suddenly it was like they'd been taken over by the main characters from Gummo trying to be Jay and Silent Bob.
I hope Sony takes Microsoft's lead and gives their "official" magazine to another publisher, because I'm not interested in supporting such a crappy bunch of writers in order to get demo discs.
- Don't sell an average-spec handheld game system for ridiculous prices, including an ad-supported model. - Don't give your product a name that sounds like a mashup of "jizz" and the Latin(/Italian?) world for "world."
I have trouble believing end-users will have access to the same type of DRM as the media companies.
- It would give them at least some of the tools to crack the commercial DRM, because they could experiment at their leisure with the same protection process. - Most end users would flip out if they protected something, forgot the password/etc, and couldn't get access to it again.
I suspect that there may be something that's given a similar UI to work with, but behind the scenes is the same crappy, easily-bypassed "security" as in Microsoft Office. To unprotected your porn, hex edit bytes 23 and 24 of the secure folder to E4E1, that kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
But running the software on an emulator doesn't work. The keys you need do not exist in the software.
The player software has no intrinsic way of knowing if it's running on hardware or inside an emulator. The drive has no intrinsic way of knowing if it's connected to a trusted PC or simply an interface to an emulator that does a very good job of pretending it's a trusted PC. The encryption will make it difficult to write, but not impossible.
If it is in multiple use then it has obviously been compromised and cloned. They then place that key on a revokation list and all machines trying to use that cloned key drop dead.
You're misunderstanding me.
Even assuming a worst-case scenario where discs bought at the store contain the latest version of the revocation list that was available when they were made, that key is good for any media released up until it's put on the revocation list.
So once someone creates an untrusted player that does NOT respond to the command to disable itself, all they have to do is release updates for it once a month or so with a new key that isn't on the list. Again, playing catch-up in that situation is a game that the media corporations can't win.
The restrictions in the drives themselves will be a hassle, but I'm sure someone will come up with a mod chip type piece of hardware to render it a non-issue.
Look at the healthy market for mod chips - a product that is almost universally used for illegal activity. Now try to imagine that NO ONE in the entire world will seize the chance to make a killing selling HDCP-bypass gear to play high-def movies on untrusted devices - a market with many potential consumers who aren't interested in piracy, but don't want to pay thousands of dollars to buy a new DRM-enabled TV.
The key that you need is embedded in a chip such that you need a million-dollar laboratory to get at it.
I'm sure there are at least a few people in the world with access to that equipment.
The short version is that it will let the Powers That Be remotely revoke the privilages of any hardware with keys that are known to have been cracked.
Revoke the privileges of licensed, standards-meeting hardware, maybe.
What I see happening is someone building an emulator that essentially runs the player software in a sandbox that makes it think everything is fine and dandy. Of course, it will have to be updated fairly frequently as new releases include hardware disabling codes for the older keys, but that will be a game of catch-up that the media corporations will never win.
That is, assuming the technology succeeds commercially at all. I personally don't think it will take off, because there's no incremental upgrade path, or a particularly compelling reason to upgrade for the vast majority of the population. Sure, you could play a high-definition movie at quarter resolution on a regular TV, but what's the point? The DVD version will be much cheaper, and look just as good on that display. To get any benefit will mean buying a high-end TV, a new player, and media that costs more. Thanks, but no thanks. And I say that as technology-loving geek who owns hundreds of DVDs. My parents - who watch DVDs on TVs that are 10-20 years old - would probably laugh at the suggestion.
Yep. As far as I know, there's no way to push software updates to a Blackberry over the wireless network. So if the company I work for needs to do this, all of them across the country will have to be brought in to the nearest location with an IT tech.
The people who have Blackberries at the company I work for tend to be execs, or at least high-level businesspeople who are frequently on trips to other cities, so this will be a noticeable hassle for them.
This sounds pretty sketchy to me.
I was born with perfect eyesight, and it didn't start to worsen until I was 7 or 8. Obviously I wasn't wearing any kind of corrective lenses before that. It got worse until I was in my early twenties, and has been more or less stable since then.
Furthermore, I have doubts about the physical mechanism that this theory describes. It implies that wearing corrective lenses forces your eyes to focus at some "unnatural" position, as if the eye were focusing on the corrective lens, rather than the distant objects it's seeing. Maybe I'm not interpreting it correctly. Certainly focusing on very close objects for long periods is stressful on your eyes, but that's not how corrective lenses work.
What in the world are you talking about?
The Amerika Bomber, maybe? The Nazis were working on an orbital bomber that would launch from Germany, skip across the upper atmosphere, bomb New York, and keep skipping all the way back to the Fatherland.
Incidentally, beware of a minor drawback of this new way of thinking: in your old age, when the novelty of vast fortunes you have meticulously conned and abused out of others wears out and when that 340500sq ft. mansion feels cold and univiting despite of 350 maids and 250 buttlers, you might find that nasty affliction, called "conscience", starting to ache you here and there.
Dude, whatever. Bill Gates has enough money that he could fill up a swimming pool with money, Scrooge McDuck-style. Obviously I'm not him, but if I were ever feeling down, that would be enough to make me cackle with evil glee right there. If I were having a particularly terrible week, maybe I'd buy an entire country, or build an orbiting space battle platform crewed by hot women with Eastern European accents and use it to vapourize my enemies.
I understand this phenomenon, but I don't think the "in Soviet Russia..." joke is a good example of it. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" is one that gets better every time IMO.
I fully agree.
Also, for me it would be a question of curiousity. I like to know about things. Last year I went stargazing with some friends, and we spotted a formation of three satellites moving across the sky. I thought that was unbelievably weird, and I wanted to know what they were.
Fortunately, the kind of hobbyists depicted in the article had already done the hard work for me, and I was able to find out that they belong to the US Navy, although their purpose seems uncertain.
Ah, I see. I guess my mind must have recoiled in horror at the thought of anyone using VB6.
My guess is that it would have been much better to leave the tauntaun alive and just snuggle up against it. While it's alive, it will continue to metabolize its fats and produce heat. A dead tauntaun is just a wet gooey blanket.
When you're facing hypothermia, the most important thing is to insulate your body and isolate it from the weather. Snuggling up to a Tauntaun would keep that one part of you warm, but the rest of your body would be acting like a heat sink.
Cutting it open and stuffing Luke inside was the best way to keep him alive, fantasy story or no. Basically it would be acting like a really thick, gooey, smelly sleeping bag.
That "it can't run without the .NET Framework" is always going to be a concern re: any modern versions of Visual Studio, not just the Express editions.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.
I was primarily thinking of the managed .NET languages, since the OP talked about VB.
.NET framework, can you? I've never seen it as an option, although I haven't looked that hard either.
Even with Visual Studio Supreme Devourer of Worlds Edition, you can't tell it to build a C# or VB.NET app as a native Windows executable that will run without the
There is no reason whatsoever to use VB, unless you like a poor and dinosaur syntax.
VB.NET has almost the same syntax as C#. I learned VB.NET as my first dev language on Windows and moved over to C# last year. It is almost nothing like VB = 6.
VB is actually a bit better for a quick, lightweight app because it's more forgiving of things like how you wrap chunks of code in try/catch blocks, and of multithreading issues.
On the other hand, C# is more efficient to code, and it gives you some abilities that VB.NET doesn't, like being able to properly work with unsigned integers (although I heard VS2005 fixed this in VB). It is also more intuitive to people who've been developing for a long time.
Either way, there's tons of example code available online. For someone who hasn't done ANY development work on Windows, I'd recommend picking up the Deitel "How to Program" book on whichever language they're starting with.
(Score:-1, Flamebait)
Guys, you're just reinforcing my opinion that you can't accept honest criticism of your brand of choice.
You must've missed the build up (and eventual letdown) of everything the PS2 was supposed to do before launch. Anyone remember the Emotion Processor? At one point I'm pretty sure Sony was claiming they'd cure cancer with that one.
Pretty much all consoles are hyped beyond belief. This is different in my mind because it's not even a complete console that people are claiming will turn one loaf of bread into many - it's just the controller. There isn't even a Killzone 2 video to argue about over whether it's pre-rendered or not. Nintendo has given its fans absolutely NOTHING substantial in terms of what games on the Revolution will be like, but all of them are assuming they'll be exactly the neatest things they would personally design.
(Score:-1, Troll)
Ah, I see the fanboys have mod points today.
Yes, nothing is better than to speculate wildly on the basis of a few facts and PR releases.
I've never seen so many people let their imaginations spin so wildly out of control about a toy. There hasn't been a single screenshot released, or even examples other than tech demos of how the controller will actually be used.
There is no way that the reality of the product will live up to the hopes people are piling on top of it.
if it can infect the system the IT guys did not do their job.
Ah yes, the always lovely combination of denying personal responsibility for one's actions, the implication that anything less than perfection on the part of others is failure, and the dismissal of complex issues as someone else's problem.
The Right Thing can be different when viewed from different angles.
Give Lord of War a watch and see if you still think that's an accurate statement afterwards.
Didn't they get arrested on that tour?
The story as it was told to me was that they were mistakenly arrested. I was too young to see them then, but apparently they had some kind of Hollywood creature department-quality dog dummy that they could "vivisect" on stage, as part of their protest against that kind of practice in the real medical/scientific world. Someone thought it was real, and called the police.
What contingency does your company have if all your phone service were lost? Or if there were no electricity? Or how about the roads leading into your company having been washed away?
The way to plan for this contingency is to assume that your data center has been vaporized by a nuclear blast. You have a hot or cold backup data center site that can build a copy of your critical infrastructure in a day or two.
This covers loss of power to a city, quarantine because of plague, earthquakes, etc.
We actually got to try out the earthquake contingency about four years ago. I was a help desk phone tech then, and we got shuttled over to a sort of "battle bridge" call center that had enough equipment for about 1/4 of the team to work normally until our main location was usable again.
A room full of law students turning their backs on Gonzales during his speech made me happier than any news regarding the neo-Fascist* administration has for the last few years.
* McCain is a Republican. Eisenhower and Lincoln were Republicans. Calling the members of the Project for a New American Empire "Republicans" is an insult to that party's history.
I'm not surprised, given that it's a Ziff-Davis company.
A few years ago, some of the key staff at e.g. Gamespot, Official US Playstation Magazine seemed to get it into their heads that they were edgy and awesome adults, and therefore obligated to act as "hardcore" as possible. The ZD gaming magazines and websites were never paragons of great writing, but suddenly it was like they'd been taken over by the main characters from Gummo trying to be Jay and Silent Bob.
I hope Sony takes Microsoft's lead and gives their "official" magazine to another publisher, because I'm not interested in supporting such a crappy bunch of writers in order to get demo discs.
- Don't sell an average-spec handheld game system for ridiculous prices, including an ad-supported model.
- Don't give your product a name that sounds like a mashup of "jizz" and the Latin(/Italian?) world for "world."
I have trouble believing end-users will have access to the same type of DRM as the media companies.
- It would give them at least some of the tools to crack the commercial DRM, because they could experiment at their leisure with the same protection process.
- Most end users would flip out if they protected something, forgot the password/etc, and couldn't get access to it again.
I suspect that there may be something that's given a similar UI to work with, but behind the scenes is the same crappy, easily-bypassed "security" as in Microsoft Office. To unprotected your porn, hex edit bytes 23 and 24 of the secure folder to E4E1, that kind of thing.