I don't see why ATI couldn't distribute this sort of patch directly, anyway. As has been mentioned elsewhere, nVidia's just made it a bit harder, and doing this sort of reverse engineering should be completely legal anyway (IANAL).
Users don't read dialog boxes. It could've had red flashing lights around it, and it wouldn't have mattered. It would still have remained checked by default and users would click the "OK" button to make the thing go away.
Also, think about the actual action they'd need to perform to not install the software. Sure, it's easy to say "just uncheck it," but think about what that means. Unchecking the dialog box means that you have to know what the iPhone Configuration Utility is and why you absolutely don't need it. Unchecking it means risking that something will go wrong, because you didn't install something that your computer told you you needed.
So continue using b and i without fear. They're still in HTML 4 (if "deprecated") and will almost certainly continue to be in HTML 5.
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I won't comment on the ORM, Views and CCK stuff beyond agreeing that it could be a lot better (though what we have now is much better than where we were). I'm not sure what would constitute solid deployment procedures for you, so without an example I can't comment.
4) Using native PHP as the templating language. This causes more headaches than one you can possibly believe. A proper templating language should be used instead which will prevent lazy or incompetant developers from adding business logic into templates.
I can't say that I agree with you on that--most of the template engines I've seen end up replicating a high percentage of core PHP--but in any case, it's a problem that has been fixed already by theme engines. Don't like phptemplate? Use Smarty: http://drupal.org/project/smarty or develop your own theme engine.
5) An army of incompetant, unexperienced developers contributing sub-par modules.
I would say that's not so much the problem as that there isn't a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff currently, though it sounds like that's in the works for the next iteration of drupal.org.
6) Lack of any kind of namespacing whatsoever. "De-Facto Namespacing" is a pile of shit.
Heh. Agreed, though I think that this is somewhat a function of the lack of namespacing in PHP influencing the design.
Except real encryption doesn't work this way. Almost all encryption contains a feedback loop in it where the results of the previous block of encryption is fed into the the next block of encryption--specifically to thwart statistical analysis of its contents. This is how you can encrypt something with a lot of repeating bits (like, say, a bitmap with large blocks of color) and still get something that looks like random noise out.
Personally, I'd say that, almost by definition, any completely opaque encrypted blob is unsearchable by definition, though I won't discount the idea that someone smarter than I am could make it work. The scenarios for using that sort of tech don't seem all that compelling to me, though.
Sure, some people do... but how many people are actually in this category? And is it worth the Mozilla Foundation's time and money to provide official support for it?
It's a legitimate question, and I'm betting the answer is: "Not enough to worry about." If you don't want to upgrade to XP or Vista because of the typical reasons I hear (don't like activation, too bloated, whatever), then switch to Linux or something. Or just keep using Firefox 3.1. Or fork Firefox to support Win2K, since you've got a vested interest in it. Just because it's your problem doesn't make it Mozilla's problem.
If your machine and 32 bit OS supports Physical Address Extension, it will be able to handle up to 64 GB of RAM. I know because I'm on a 32 bit Win2K3 Server machine that sees all 4 GB of RAM installed just fine.
Bad PR, mostly--see the Sony Rootkit. Even if you're right, it's hard to sway the court of public opinion. And honestly, it could even be illegal to retaliate against pirates in such a fashion, though IANAL so I couldn't say for sure.
Also, you say you're 100% sure--but what if the malware code got activated by accident somehow and damaged a customer computer? Are you willing to take that sort of risk? Besides, do you really want to stoop to the level of a malware author? Really?
I don't think pirating is right, but technical solutions to the problem just don't seem to work, or harm legitimate customers more than the pirates, and I'd say that it's not worth the effort to try to fight this social problem with technical solutions that don't work or actively harm the wrong people.
Ultimately though, if you want to do it, go ahead. I'm almost curious to see what'd happen myself.
My university actually teaches with a wide variety of programming languages. The beginning classes are in Java, but there are a required courses that use C, C++, Python, C#, Scheme, and a smattering of classes where they don't specify the language to use. And interestingly enough, for everything except Java, Scheme, and the memory management portion of C++, they expect the students to *gasp* learn most these languages almost completely on their own.
I don't mind removing pointers from the introductory classes--they are hard for a beginning programmer with little experience to grasp, I'd say--, but removing them from the curriculum altogether seems like a really bad idea to me.
Not quite true for heat pumps, actually. You can move around 3-4 joules of heat with 1 joule of electricity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency
Gas obviously doesn't use electricity, but it almost certainly costs less money to use it to raise the temperature of a room by 1 degree than it would for a resistive heater.
Heh. The real irony is that it would've cost them a lot less to just heat the rooms with whatever system they had. Heat from a resistive heater is a lot less efficient than a heat pump or gas, usually.
I would go so far as to say it's more important, if you can, to *watch* your users as they try to use your software. That can be an even bigger eye opener. I'd say it's much more important to give them something they can use, even if it doesn't have everything they might want.
Um... care to explain your math? It could just as easily stay at 1%. Not saying the DRM's a good thing, but you seem to be extrapolating from 2 data points, namely 0 failures in 0 days to 1% failure in 8 days. Not statistically solid at all.
Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests
So... how were these students selected? Or did they just advertise "hey, we'll pay you to take this survey"? And is the sample truly representative of non-college students? Or even students from other colleges?
Statistically, it doesn't make much sense to infer from this sample, it seems like, especially if the participants were self-selected. Wake me up when these people come up with a statistically sound study.
Not to mention that most of these sorts of notices are served via certified mail, so they know if you got it (and signed for it) or not. I suppose you could not pick up or sign for any certified mail, but it definitely makes it harder to claim you 'never got the notice'.
Hmm... Interesting. I would imagine that one could replicate that feature without too much difficulty (aside from the tedium of setting it up once) by using Thunderbird's existing global inbox feature and setting up a bunch of folders and rules. Would be nice to see something that could set that up automatically.
Hmm. Could be true... but then, if they decide to use that ploy, they'll lose all the 'goodwill' that these services spent in trying to give them better tools to fight copyright infringement in the first place. These service providers aren't going to give up and die if they can help it, and they've got fairly deep pockets too. So, what happens? They completely backtrack on all of the tools and filtering and the *AA goes back to square one.
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I'm sure you'd agree that techies are well-benefited by understanding how a businessman thinks. Doesn't mean the techie has to agree with them.
I don't see why ATI couldn't distribute this sort of patch directly, anyway. As has been mentioned elsewhere, nVidia's just made it a bit harder, and doing this sort of reverse engineering should be completely legal anyway (IANAL).
Yeah, 'cause we all know how smart it is to give strangers who're selling you stuff your SSN. FAIL.
If this is how retailers are "smartening up" to ID theft, I'll take my business elsewhere, thanks.
Users don't read dialog boxes. It could've had red flashing lights around it, and it wouldn't have mattered. It would still have remained checked by default and users would click the "OK" button to make the thing go away.
Also, think about the actual action they'd need to perform to not install the software. Sure, it's easy to say "just uncheck it," but think about what that means. Unchecking the dialog box means that you have to know what the iPhone Configuration Utility is and why you absolutely don't need it. Unchecking it means risking that something will go wrong, because you didn't install something that your computer told you you needed.
*That* is why it's a problem.
There is support for Vista here: http://kb.palm.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/32859_en.html
Good intentions do not exempt one from consequences for acting outside the rule of law.
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States
IE reports whether the OS is 32bit or 64bit in the User Agent string. Other browsers may (or may not) as well.
They've been un-deprecated in HTML 5:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#changed-elements
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-i-element
So continue using b and i without fear. They're still in HTML 4 (if "deprecated") and will almost certainly continue to be in HTML 5.
I won't comment on the ORM, Views and CCK stuff beyond agreeing that it could be a lot better (though what we have now is much better than where we were). I'm not sure what would constitute solid deployment procedures for you, so without an example I can't comment.
4) Using native PHP as the templating language. This causes more headaches than one you can possibly believe. A proper templating language should be used instead which will prevent lazy or incompetant developers from adding business logic into templates.
I can't say that I agree with you on that--most of the template engines I've seen end up replicating a high percentage of core PHP--but in any case, it's a problem that has been fixed already by theme engines. Don't like phptemplate? Use Smarty: http://drupal.org/project/smarty or develop your own theme engine.
5) An army of incompetant, unexperienced developers contributing sub-par modules.
I would say that's not so much the problem as that there isn't a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff currently, though it sounds like that's in the works for the next iteration of drupal.org.
6) Lack of any kind of namespacing whatsoever. "De-Facto Namespacing" is a pile of shit.
Heh. Agreed, though I think that this is somewhat a function of the lack of namespacing in PHP influencing the design.
Except real encryption doesn't work this way. Almost all encryption contains a feedback loop in it where the results of the previous block of encryption is fed into the the next block of encryption--specifically to thwart statistical analysis of its contents. This is how you can encrypt something with a lot of repeating bits (like, say, a bitmap with large blocks of color) and still get something that looks like random noise out.
Personally, I'd say that, almost by definition, any completely opaque encrypted blob is unsearchable by definition, though I won't discount the idea that someone smarter than I am could make it work. The scenarios for using that sort of tech don't seem all that compelling to me, though.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/teaching/modules/security/lectures/symmetric-key.html - see the block cipher modes section for info on that.
Sure, some people do... but how many people are actually in this category? And is it worth the Mozilla Foundation's time and money to provide official support for it?
It's a legitimate question, and I'm betting the answer is: "Not enough to worry about." If you don't want to upgrade to XP or Vista because of the typical reasons I hear (don't like activation, too bloated, whatever), then switch to Linux or something. Or just keep using Firefox 3.1. Or fork Firefox to support Win2K, since you've got a vested interest in it. Just because it's your problem doesn't make it Mozilla's problem.
If your machine and 32 bit OS supports Physical Address Extension, it will be able to handle up to 64 GB of RAM. I know because I'm on a 32 bit Win2K3 Server machine that sees all 4 GB of RAM installed just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
According to http://www.circuitcity.com/closed.html their extended warranties aren't affected by the closure.
Bad PR, mostly--see the Sony Rootkit. Even if you're right, it's hard to sway the court of public opinion. And honestly, it could even be illegal to retaliate against pirates in such a fashion, though IANAL so I couldn't say for sure.
Also, you say you're 100% sure--but what if the malware code got activated by accident somehow and damaged a customer computer? Are you willing to take that sort of risk? Besides, do you really want to stoop to the level of a malware author? Really?
I don't think pirating is right, but technical solutions to the problem just don't seem to work, or harm legitimate customers more than the pirates, and I'd say that it's not worth the effort to try to fight this social problem with technical solutions that don't work or actively harm the wrong people.
Ultimately though, if you want to do it, go ahead. I'm almost curious to see what'd happen myself.
My university actually teaches with a wide variety of programming languages. The beginning classes are in Java, but there are a required courses that use C, C++, Python, C#, Scheme, and a smattering of classes where they don't specify the language to use. And interestingly enough, for everything except Java, Scheme, and the memory management portion of C++, they expect the students to *gasp* learn most these languages almost completely on their own.
I don't mind removing pointers from the introductory classes--they are hard for a beginning programmer with little experience to grasp, I'd say--, but removing them from the curriculum altogether seems like a really bad idea to me.
Not quite true for heat pumps, actually. You can move around 3-4 joules of heat with 1 joule of electricity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency Gas obviously doesn't use electricity, but it almost certainly costs less money to use it to raise the temperature of a room by 1 degree than it would for a resistive heater.
Heh. The real irony is that it would've cost them a lot less to just heat the rooms with whatever system they had. Heat from a resistive heater is a lot less efficient than a heat pump or gas, usually.
I would go so far as to say it's more important, if you can, to *watch* your users as they try to use your software. That can be an even bigger eye opener. I'd say it's much more important to give them something they can use, even if it doesn't have everything they might want.
Um... care to explain your math? It could just as easily stay at 1%. Not saying the DRM's a good thing, but you seem to be extrapolating from 2 data points, namely 0 failures in 0 days to 1% failure in 8 days. Not statistically solid at all.
Not to mention that most of these sorts of notices are served via certified mail, so they know if you got it (and signed for it) or not. I suppose you could not pick up or sign for any certified mail, but it definitely makes it harder to claim you 'never got the notice'.
Hmm... Interesting. I would imagine that one could replicate that feature without too much difficulty (aside from the tedium of setting it up once) by using Thunderbird's existing global inbox feature and setting up a bunch of folders and rules. Would be nice to see something that could set that up automatically.
Hmm. Could be true... but then, if they decide to use that ploy, they'll lose all the 'goodwill' that these services spent in trying to give them better tools to fight copyright infringement in the first place. These service providers aren't going to give up and die if they can help it, and they've got fairly deep pockets too. So, what happens? They completely backtrack on all of the tools and filtering and the *AA goes back to square one.
Here's another location where the article can be read: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2008-04-20.shtml