Jesus CHRIST you've been brainwashed to the "Business! money! AMURICA!" way of thinking.
Plainly put, it's the opposite of corruption. This MP is pointing out that continuing to allow a convicted and unreformed monopolist access to the EU government software tendering procedure is itself in contravention of the rules.
He's attempting to get the rules observed. They are in place for a reason and are not solely aimed at US companies or MS. This is a good thing.
That takes a hell of a lot more than a paperclip to achieve. In fact neither the slashdot page nor TFA even mention a paerclip. What they mention is a real time link from a hacked card reader, via a laptop, to another store where someone uses a fake card (presumably with some sort of receiver inside.
"Are you sure? I was under the impression that when using chip and pin, the card terminal securely checks that the pin entered matches the one stored on the chip."
Not quite, the pin-pad and card reader (be they one device or two) encrypt the pin and present it to the card, which verifies whether the PIN is correct. The cryptogram is also, under some circumstances, sent to the bank for verification. The PIN itself is never read from the card and never leaves the trusted hardware in plaintext form.
"As to the original point in the article, my take is that the onus is on the bank to make sure they have been instructed by an authorised person before initiating any cash transaction."
Perfect up until this bit - "The retailers just send your PIN along, they don't care if it's your personal PIN or a generated PIN."
This has never been the case in the UK, we have never had PIN entry at the retailer until the EMV (chip 'n' pin) cards came along, and they work the same way as you suggest - the pin pad and card reader are trusted devices and the PIN never leaves them. They are encrypted, by the card, along with the amount of the transaction (which is displayed to the user, not entered by them) and various other bits of information. The retailer's network never gets your PIN, only the device and the bank's word that it was correct.
We love multiple threads and in some cases multiple processes and/or multiple machines. DBMS's, transaction processing systems, web servers, middle tier data servers....
The code is already in place and the more cores you throw at us the faster we can run. It's not mathematically complex tasks but it is workhorse stuff that parallelises beautifully, though not in a particularly fine-grained way.
There's more to computing than consumer desktops and science/engineering departments. Think about the infrastructure of the world - the financial markets, the credit card networks... all sorts of other things that don't instantly spring to mind:)
Thankfully the UK grants many more rights to employees an d he would have good grounds for it. Unless they were sneaky and made him redundant (involves a payout and you can't fill his position for a certain time afterwards) or made him so uncomfortable that he left of his own accord.
We're not quite French about our employment law, but we're a far cry from the "at will" thing that much of the US has. It sounds horrific.
Oh I agree, formats are no longer relevant in the way they were. I just hope that we don't lose out on a lot of excellent music because it's not the catchy big-number and that's all that's selling now.
"Are you saying that people should be forced to buy the entire album so they listen to the lesser known songs that are possibly very good?"
No. No I'm not. I'm saying it would be a shame if they weren't ever made because the labels figured out that the profits lie in one or two big songs, and that most people wouldn't buy the rest of the album and give it a good listen.
"Also, more often than not, there are typically only 3-4 good songs on an album (there are exceptions, of course) and most consumers would not want to waste money buying the ones they hate. It's not just Britney, it's also some of the electronic mixes (from labels like the Ministry of Sound) where there are some awful songs, but also some very good ones."
Well you'll have no sympathy from me, how on earth would you tell what was good and what was shit on a Ministry of Sound CD?
Being of the (retired) goth persuasion myself, I'm not really that affected by whether the winner of american idol puts out a whole album or just a song, but at present there still needs to be some patronage for music to be heard and available. I suppose that's something else that the internet is changing as we speak.
"where the consumption of art reflects its true value"
Well, this harks back to that old argument about popularity and artistic merit, and whether the two are in any way related. Personally I think it would be sad if we lost the album, and the current practice of bands turning out more tracks than just the catchy, instant-hit type. It could limit the support artists get from labels even further (we're only going to pay for you to produce two songs, both must be hits, otherwise goodbye), and it could limit the instance of the aforementioned B-sides and album tracks.
OTOH, what it will probably show is that the habits vary by genre. Pop nonsense will sell a songle track to the exclusion of others, other music types (and possibly music with older audiences) will sell in a way similar to the album. Well, that would be my guess.
I guess my other point is that I'm not comfortable with the current crop of middlemen and their profit motive, Giving them more information about what people want will result in even less interesting stuff around the edges seeing the light of day.
"more importantly though this "cherry picking" shows the record labels that consumers are tired of the same market drivel and if you give us good content that we like we'll pay."
Do you really think it shows that? I don't.
I think it shows that people are ever more shallow in their music tastes and now only want those one or two big hits, ignoring the rest of the material. How many times have you listened to an album, or an artist's entire catalogue, and come to love one of the b-sides or album tracks more than the one or two big hits? For me it's a lot.
But then I suppose I'm not buying Britney or whatever the big thing is that the idiot children listen to these days.
You're the one claiming the Koran is the only source of rules in Islam.
My source is every would be apostate I've ever met, and that's a few now. They are now non-practicing muslims because apostasy carries a death sentence in some interpretations of the religion. These are people living in western countries that still occasionally like to go and visit family in Iran or Pakistan.
Multi-process and multithreaded applications abound in the real world. Pull your head from your anus and look around you.
Now, are they going to make things faster in exactly the same way as clock increases? Hell no. Do they take some thought to implement? Hell yes.
However they are here and have been here for decades.
This is unless you are referring to very, very narrow definition of parallel processing that is more applicable in the scientific than business or home forums - breaking down set, tricky, mathematical problems into multiple chunks.
if you want to do the same thing over and over again (serve web pages, process payment transactions etc) over multiple processors/cores/whatever, threads work just fine, thanks.
Oh yeah, no "commercial only" thing was meant there, sorry to imply it. Apache web server would be an example of something that's been using these feature for some time too.
"You cannot put this type of thing into threaded design, & expect gains out of it... simply because B has to WAIT on the completion of A, first... no point in placing A or B onto diff. threads"
Oh sure, but where you have multiple threads doing seperate, non-codependant tasks you can parallelise really quite well.
Anyway, yes, my main point is my continued exasperation at folks who say "it's the next big thing" or "it'll never take off". It's here and has been for years!
It's been around for years numbnuts, in commercial and server applications, middle tiers, databases and a million and one other things worked on by serious software developers (i.e. not web programming dweebs).
Parallelism has been around for ages and has been used commercially for a couple of decades. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the USA that's the biggest problem. Get your own house in order.
"or is it simple corruption?"
Jesus CHRIST you've been brainwashed to the "Business! money! AMURICA!" way of thinking.
Plainly put, it's the opposite of corruption. This MP is pointing out that continuing to allow a convicted and unreformed monopolist access to the EU government software tendering procedure is itself in contravention of the rules.
He's attempting to get the rules observed. They are in place for a reason and are not solely aimed at US companies or MS. This is a good thing.
Yes, because oil, water, gas etc are real things. bit shuffling is not the same. Analogy does not always work.
All you care about with bit shuffling are flow rates, not raw resources. So The pricing model is different.
That got me thinking - fingerprint checks, what if you fail and then say "but I cut my finger, it's still healing"?
And that got me thinking further, if they're needed for medical care, what happens to people who do cut their fingers?
Hmmm.
That takes a hell of a lot more than a paperclip to achieve. In fact neither the slashdot page nor TFA even mention a paerclip. What they mention is a real time link from a hacked card reader, via a laptop, to another store where someone uses a fake card (presumably with some sort of receiver inside.
MUCH more than a paperclip.
"Are you sure? I was under the impression that when using chip and pin, the card terminal securely checks that the pin entered matches the one stored on the chip."
Not quite, the pin-pad and card reader (be they one device or two) encrypt the pin and present it to the card, which verifies whether the PIN is correct. The cryptogram is also, under some circumstances, sent to the bank for verification. The PIN itself is never read from the card and never leaves the trusted hardware in plaintext form.
"As to the original point in the article, my take is that the onus is on the bank to make sure they have been instructed by an authorised person before initiating any cash transaction."
Couldn't agree more.
Perfect up until this bit - "The retailers just send your PIN along, they don't care if it's your personal PIN or a generated PIN."
This has never been the case in the UK, we have never had PIN entry at the retailer until the EMV (chip 'n' pin) cards came along, and they work the same way as you suggest - the pin pad and card reader are trusted devices and the PIN never leaves them. They are encrypted, by the card, along with the amount of the transaction (which is displayed to the user, not entered by them) and various other bits of information. The retailer's network never gets your PIN, only the device and the bank's word that it was correct.
Business driven server systems.
:)
We love multiple threads and in some cases multiple processes and/or multiple machines. DBMS's, transaction processing systems, web servers, middle tier data servers....
The code is already in place and the more cores you throw at us the faster we can run. It's not mathematically complex tasks but it is workhorse stuff that parallelises beautifully, though not in a particularly fine-grained way.
There's more to computing than consumer desktops and science/engineering departments. Think about the infrastructure of the world - the financial markets, the credit card networks... all sorts of other things that don't instantly spring to mind
Thankfully the UK grants many more rights to employees an d he would have good grounds for it. Unless they were sneaky and made him redundant (involves a payout and you can't fill his position for a certain time afterwards) or made him so uncomfortable that he left of his own accord.
We're not quite French about our employment law, but we're a far cry from the "at will" thing that much of the US has. It sounds horrific.
Oh I agree, formats are no longer relevant in the way they were. I just hope that we don't lose out on a lot of excellent music because it's not the catchy big-number and that's all that's selling now.
"Are you saying that people should be forced to buy the entire album so they listen to the lesser known songs that are possibly very good?"
No. No I'm not. I'm saying it would be a shame if they weren't ever made because the labels figured out that the profits lie in one or two big songs, and that most people wouldn't buy the rest of the album and give it a good listen.
"Also, more often than not, there are typically only 3-4 good songs on an album (there are exceptions, of course) and most consumers would not want to waste money buying the ones they hate. It's not just Britney, it's also some of the electronic mixes (from labels like the Ministry of Sound) where there are some awful songs, but also some very good ones."
Well you'll have no sympathy from me, how on earth would you tell what was good and what was shit on a Ministry of Sound CD?
Thanks, I'll definitely have a look at that site.
Being of the (retired) goth persuasion myself, I'm not really that affected by whether the winner of american idol puts out a whole album or just a song, but at present there still needs to be some patronage for music to be heard and available. I suppose that's something else that the internet is changing as we speak.
All very valid points, I guess it goes both ways.
More control to the actual artist would be better perhaps.
"where the consumption of art reflects its true value"
Well, this harks back to that old argument about popularity and artistic merit, and whether the two are in any way related. Personally I think it would be sad if we lost the album, and the current practice of bands turning out more tracks than just the catchy, instant-hit type. It could limit the support artists get from labels even further (we're only going to pay for you to produce two songs, both must be hits, otherwise goodbye), and it could limit the instance of the aforementioned B-sides and album tracks.
OTOH, what it will probably show is that the habits vary by genre. Pop nonsense will sell a songle track to the exclusion of others, other music types (and possibly music with older audiences) will sell in a way similar to the album. Well, that would be my guess.
I guess my other point is that I'm not comfortable with the current crop of middlemen and their profit motive, Giving them more information about what people want will result in even less interesting stuff around the edges seeing the light of day.
In other words - just as much as the USA can claim responsibility for Windows...
"more importantly though this "cherry picking" shows the record labels that consumers are tired of the same market drivel and if you give us good content that we like we'll pay."
Do you really think it shows that? I don't.
I think it shows that people are ever more shallow in their music tastes and now only want those one or two big hits, ignoring the rest of the material. How many times have you listened to an album, or an artist's entire catalogue, and come to love one of the b-sides or album tracks more than the one or two big hits? For me it's a lot.
But then I suppose I'm not buying Britney or whatever the big thing is that the idiot children listen to these days.
"It will be like going back to pre taping life where only special people with expensive equipment could make and sell recordings."
No, no it won't.
You or I can still make recordings and distribute them with or without DRM if we wish.
It'll just mean we can't (easily) make copies.
I agree, it's a worse situation than what we have now, but it's not like pre-taping days in that the tools are available to all to distribute media.
There was this one started by some Finnish guy named torvalds that seems to have taken off pretty well. Some of our governments use it now.
You're the one claiming the Koran is the only source of rules in Islam.
My source is every would be apostate I've ever met, and that's a few now. They are now non-practicing muslims because apostasy carries a death sentence in some interpretations of the religion. These are people living in western countries that still occasionally like to go and visit family in Iran or Pakistan.
And still have yet to meet anyone with one. A couple of folks I know have Eee PCs though. Go figure.
"This joke shows ignorance. There are actually more people living in rural America than in urban areas."
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYY out there. 80% of the US population live in urban and suburban areas.
"Islam has no official policy about one's being fair game for converting from Islam. If the Koran states such a policy, please cite it"
So Islam's "official" policies all come from the Koran? Not sharia? Or the immams or any other part of the complex religion?
Multi-process and multithreaded applications abound in the real world. Pull your head from your anus and look around you.
Now, are they going to make things faster in exactly the same way as clock increases? Hell no.
Do they take some thought to implement? Hell yes.
However they are here and have been here for decades.
This is unless you are referring to very, very narrow definition of parallel processing that is more applicable in the scientific than business or home forums - breaking down set, tricky, mathematical problems into multiple chunks.
if you want to do the same thing over and over again (serve web pages, process payment transactions etc) over multiple processors/cores/whatever, threads work just fine, thanks.
Oh yeah, no "commercial only" thing was meant there, sorry to imply it. Apache web server would be an example of something that's been using these feature for some time too.
"You cannot put this type of thing into threaded design, & expect gains out of it... simply because B has to WAIT on the completion of A, first... no point in placing A or B onto diff. threads"
Oh sure, but where you have multiple threads doing seperate, non-codependant tasks you can parallelise really quite well.
Anyway, yes, my main point is my continued exasperation at folks who say "it's the next big thing" or "it'll never take off". It's here and has been for years!
Oh yes, here it is.
And the conclusion?
It's been around for years numbnuts, in commercial and server applications, middle tiers, databases and a million and one other things worked on by serious software developers (i.e. not web programming dweebs).
Parallelism has been around for ages and has been used commercially for a couple of decades. Get over it.