The MAFIAA standard plan to releasing content on the internet while maintaining control of the distribution chain:
1) Let a company license it for cheap. It's either an end-of-life service that lets them make a few more pennies on content that's long since been monetized, or should it for some reason take off, this will help build up demand.
2) Should it catch on, jack up the contract prices so that it doesn't undercut other media sales.
3) License the same content to a financially sound natural competitor of the company in #1, so that they can bleed company #1 of customers.
4) After company #1 has been sufficiently weakened, jack up the contract prices on company #2 and all further companies.
5) Profit. Internet distribution is handled through a number of smaller providers engaged in bitter competition, so they won't work together and they don't have the individual clout to dictate any of the terms of future contacts.
The MAFIAA learned their mistake from iTunes, where they waited until it was too late to try to stop Apple. And while they eventually got variable pricing, they still had to give Apple more control than they're comfortable with - it still makes them rage to this day. They aren't going to make the same mistake with films and TV shows: no single competitor will be allowed to get big enough to dictate contract terms. It will be the studios who make a profit and the studios who anyone has to go through to publish content; the role of the distributors is to distribute content as cheap as possible for the studios.
And thus we're on Step 3. WalMart is the competitor the studios are setting up to combat Netflix. When Netflix is sufficiently bled, WalMart will then have their contract prices increased just as Netflix had.
Some people may find this strange, but society generally doesn't like it if you harbor criminals. Hopefully the FBI has the brains to realize the IRC owners are not always the hackers, but that doesn't mean that the IRC owners are in the clear.
Bingo. We all knew this was coming, it was inevitable the moment Netflix made it big and people started unsubscribing from cable/satellite.
The studios originally licensed content to Netflix believing they were an end of the line service - a place for content to go once every other method of squeezing out profit had been exhausted. Instead people stopped buying DVDs, stopped buying $3 episodes off of iTunes, stopped buying Video On Demand, etc. So instead of extracting the last few pennies out of their content, the existence of Netflix has been severely undermining more profitable viewing methods. The studios aren't charities of course and want what they believe they should be making (or to put it more appropriately: they strongly believe in price discrimination), which means if viewers are going to use Netflix as they currently are then Netflix will have to pay more for the right to deliver their content. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Finally, the next step will be for the studios to license their content to a Netflix competitor for cheap for a short period of time, similar to what the RIAA did with Apple & Amazon. The purpose will be to try to diminish the influence of Netflix, as a large independent content delivery company is going to squeeze the studios on profits. The end result will be that none of the content delivery companies will have enough leverage to use against the studios, leaving the studios in complete control of pricing.
Officially it's the same date as regular XP. However XP64 is really Server 2003, so I'm a bit surprised it won't be supported until 2015 like the rest of the Server 2003 lineup.
The fact that it's Server 2003 is also why there's no SP3. XP64 SP2 is its "SP3".
It looks like they will provide optional toggle to switch to a more traditional desktop... for now.
That's the bit that worries me. MS doesn't like having multiple desktop paradigms at once. If this really is how they want a Windows 8 desktop to operate, then I'd expect we'd get a repeat of the start menu for Vista/7: the "old" way becomes the classic option in Windows 8, and then gets thrown out entirely in Windows 9.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.
Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end. It falls in to that same trap that shows like Lost and Heroes did, where confusing the audience was mistaken for a clever plot ("ha ha, I fooled you!"). Certainly there are good reasons to do arcs, and well done arcs are fantastic, but as it stands the main arcs of Moffet's seasons make absolutely no sense. It's very hard to enjoy a show when you have no idea what's going on.
Passwords are too hard to remember, particularly for the hardcore Facebook addicts. Instead it will be your username and your mother's name, that way you can quickly look it up on your friends list should you forget it.
The problem with Eureka is that their schedule is a mess. They haven't done a full 13 episode season since what, 2007? And this is in comparison to shows like Stargate that have 20 episode seasons. Basically it's on for two months and then off the air the other 10.
The Apple iOS Backup File Extraction module however is not an attack vector for directly exploiting iOS. Rather it is what is known as a post-exploitation module.
"The post-exploitation modules (post for short) are designed to run on systems that were compromised through another vector, whether its social engineering, a guessed password, or an unpatched vulnerability," HD Moore, Rapid7 chief security officer and Metasploit chief architect told InternetNews.com. "This module requires iTunes to be installed and for a backend to be accessible that has not been encrypted."
If I'm reading this right, the "exploit" is that Metasploit can now read unencrypted backups. I'm not sure how this is an exploit (the backup DB format isn't much of a secret), but there you go.
If you want a real exploit, look into the "i0n1c" exploit being used to jailbreak phones on the latest OS.
They announced that they weren't sure if CC info was compromised, which they've only now confirmed (it's not as if the hackers left a polite note stating what they took). They're definitely guilty of handling this poorly, but at no point can I recall them lying, nor is there reason to doubt that the passwords were hashed.
To give Sony all the credit they deserve (however little it is), the sensitive records like passwords probably weren't stored in plaintext.
It's standard operating procedure at most companies to treat any data breaches as if the data was plaintext and will be immediately exploited. Once the hackers have taken the data, you have no way to tell if they have a way to decrypt/reverse it or not, so you simply assume they do.
At the same time.almost no one feels like explaining to users what password hashes are and why their data is probably safe, so the public announcements always reflect the assumption above and present the worst case scenario to users, and maybe encryption is mentioned somewhere. Whether the data was decrypted or not, if you say it was then you've covered your ass. It's not as if most laypeople believe that the encryption will hold anyhow.
In short, Sony's pretty damned stupid, but whether anything was encrypted or not they're going to treat it as if it wasn't, and their warnings are going to reflect that. Just because they aren't talking about it being encrypted doesn't mean it was stored in plaintext. The resolution is the same either way: assume the bad guys have it in plaintext form, and watch your credit reports.
Why would they raise it? If anything they'd lower it, and not just to protect their profits.
Unicasting content is insanely wasteful. Even with CDNs with good placement (Akamai, etc) that's 1 unicast stream per TV. If you follow this to its logical conclusion and Netflix or some other IPTV provider usurps cable/satellite for subscription channels, what happens the next time Monday Night Football is on ESPN? They're going to stream it to unicast it to 11 million households, many of whom are going to want to do DVR things like skipping and pausing?
Multicasting is going to be around for a long, long time still. So long as it does, the cable/fiber/satellite networks are still the gatekeepers; they're not going to embrace IP multicasting when they have a perfectly good system that does the same thing.
Mozilla has already done enough damage in the UI department with fonts under Windows. Oh god the pain, it's like every character suddenly went on the Fat Albert diet and became bold.
Sure, that will get you fresh water to setup additional farms with. But where do you get the energy to run the desalinization plant, given that desalinization requires oodles of power?
Ultimately all the world's resource shortages can be solved by the application of energy in some manner. But to get there you first need cheap, limitless energy. Until then, the resources we have to work with are a function of the amount of energy we have and how much we're willing to pay for the resulting product. Which is one of the points of the report in the first place.
Although I think you missed the point of the "Pick 2" gag, much like the DS(1), the 3DS has already foregone "powerful". It's an ARM11 CPU, little RAM, and a GPU that's basically OpenGL ES 1.1 (iPhone 1 era) with a couple extra fixed-function features. The only thing not out of date is the 3D screen, but that's something that can be turned off.
With the 3D screen turned off it should by all means be small and long lasting, but this is not the case. Instead it's just small; small, short lasting, slow, and not very cheap. Clearly Nintendo has flubbed the 3DS - I only question whether this is an overall failure to execute, or if they simply sacrificed too much for that damn 3D screen.
In spite of what the intentional vague summary may hint at, this is all about upstream bandwidth, not downstream. AT&T's "4G" devices are competitive with similar HSPA+ 14.4 devices when it comes to downstream bandwidth, which is why TFA doesn't even bother to mention it. It's upstream bandwidth that's capped: everything but the iPhone 4 is capped at 384Kbps.
However from AT&T's perspective they didn't flub 4G. As far as they're concerned they're running a content delivery network, not a content creation network. Every MHz they can deallocate from upstream bandwidth to downstream bandwidth is that much faster downloads their customers receive, which as most people are content consumers are all they care about in the first place. This is just AT&T realizing what wireline broadband providers have known for a long time: only the geeks care about highly asymmetrical connections.
Not to excuse any of this as being "good" - it makes a total farce of 4G among other things (not that T-Mo, VZ, and Sprint helped). But if the fact that carriers are moving to highly asymmetrical connections surprises you in any way, you haven't been paying very good attention to the state of the broadband market.
Since Slashdot summaries are always a bit dated, it's been bumped up to an 8.9 by the USGS. The good news is that it was off-shore and 15.2mi down, the bad news is that it was off-shore and generated a large tsunami that is still wrecking havoc in Japan and may be heading elsewhere.
Best of luck to the Japanese; if anyone is prepared it's them, but I don't know how one prepares for something quite like this.
I was going to go with one of a dozen SG-1/SGA episodes myself.
Suns + wormholes almost always result in a rockin' 1960s adventure - unless it results in changing the makeup of a star and (nearly) dooming the neighboring civilizations.
When they have enough importance that they're not channel 305, and when advertisers revere them enough to put on ads beyond electric nicotine inhalers and not-from-the-US-mint "collectible" money.
Sure, but that means it's still less functional than a PSP-Go, never mind a PSP-3000. It can't play PS2 games, it can't play PSP games, so that leaves you with what, PS1 games? Anyone who wanted to play PS1 games on a phone was already doing that thanks to some very good PS1 emulators and the fact that PS1 games are a dime a dozen (and easy to image).
In true Tick fashion, even on Slashdot he doesn't get any respect. Here he gets listed after a hero that farts toast and burns the US Constitution for warmth.
The odd thing about this is that even with the release of the console's important keys, it's still not practical to pirate PSN games. You can pirate PS3 games that come on a disc until you're blue in the face, but the tools don't exist to do so with newer PSN games - as a result only a small number of them can be pirated at the moment.
Either Capcom knows something we don't know or they're preparing for the inevitable, because right now you'd be hard pressed to pirate BCR2 even without phone-home DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
The MAFIAA standard plan to releasing content on the internet while maintaining control of the distribution chain:
The MAFIAA learned their mistake from iTunes, where they waited until it was too late to try to stop Apple. And while they eventually got variable pricing, they still had to give Apple more control than they're comfortable with - it still makes them rage to this day. They aren't going to make the same mistake with films and TV shows: no single competitor will be allowed to get big enough to dictate contract terms. It will be the studios who make a profit and the studios who anyone has to go through to publish content; the role of the distributors is to distribute content as cheap as possible for the studios.
And thus we're on Step 3. WalMart is the competitor the studios are setting up to combat Netflix. When Netflix is sufficiently bled, WalMart will then have their contract prices increased just as Netflix had.
Some people may find this strange, but society generally doesn't like it if you harbor criminals. Hopefully the FBI has the brains to realize the IRC owners are not always the hackers, but that doesn't mean that the IRC owners are in the clear.
Bingo. We all knew this was coming, it was inevitable the moment Netflix made it big and people started unsubscribing from cable/satellite.
The studios originally licensed content to Netflix believing they were an end of the line service - a place for content to go once every other method of squeezing out profit had been exhausted. Instead people stopped buying DVDs, stopped buying $3 episodes off of iTunes, stopped buying Video On Demand, etc. So instead of extracting the last few pennies out of their content, the existence of Netflix has been severely undermining more profitable viewing methods. The studios aren't charities of course and want what they believe they should be making (or to put it more appropriately: they strongly believe in price discrimination), which means if viewers are going to use Netflix as they currently are then Netflix will have to pay more for the right to deliver their content. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Finally, the next step will be for the studios to license their content to a Netflix competitor for cheap for a short period of time, similar to what the RIAA did with Apple & Amazon. The purpose will be to try to diminish the influence of Netflix, as a large independent content delivery company is going to squeeze the studios on profits. The end result will be that none of the content delivery companies will have enough leverage to use against the studios, leaving the studios in complete control of pricing.
Officially it's the same date as regular XP. However XP64 is really Server 2003, so I'm a bit surprised it won't be supported until 2015 like the rest of the Server 2003 lineup.
The fact that it's Server 2003 is also why there's no SP3. XP64 SP2 is its "SP3".
Because whether it's behind a paywall or not, it's an interesting & nerdy story.
That's the bit that worries me. MS doesn't like having multiple desktop paradigms at once. If this really is how they want a Windows 8 desktop to operate, then I'd expect we'd get a repeat of the start menu for Vista/7: the "old" way becomes the classic option in Windows 8, and then gets thrown out entirely in Windows 9.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.
Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end. It falls in to that same trap that shows like Lost and Heroes did, where confusing the audience was mistaken for a clever plot ("ha ha, I fooled you!"). Certainly there are good reasons to do arcs, and well done arcs are fantastic, but as it stands the main arcs of Moffet's seasons make absolutely no sense. It's very hard to enjoy a show when you have no idea what's going on.
Passwords are too hard to remember, particularly for the hardcore Facebook addicts. Instead it will be your username and your mother's name, that way you can quickly look it up on your friends list should you forget it.
The problem with Eureka is that their schedule is a mess. They haven't done a full 13 episode season since what, 2007? And this is in comparison to shows like Stargate that have 20 episode seasons. Basically it's on for two months and then off the air the other 10.
If I'm reading this right, the "exploit" is that Metasploit can now read unencrypted backups. I'm not sure how this is an exploit (the backup DB format isn't much of a secret), but there you go.
If you want a real exploit, look into the "i0n1c" exploit being used to jailbreak phones on the latest OS.
They announced that they weren't sure if CC info was compromised, which they've only now confirmed (it's not as if the hackers left a polite note stating what they took). They're definitely guilty of handling this poorly, but at no point can I recall them lying, nor is there reason to doubt that the passwords were hashed.
To give Sony all the credit they deserve (however little it is), the sensitive records like passwords probably weren't stored in plaintext.
It's standard operating procedure at most companies to treat any data breaches as if the data was plaintext and will be immediately exploited. Once the hackers have taken the data, you have no way to tell if they have a way to decrypt/reverse it or not, so you simply assume they do.
At the same time.almost no one feels like explaining to users what password hashes are and why their data is probably safe, so the public announcements always reflect the assumption above and present the worst case scenario to users, and maybe encryption is mentioned somewhere. Whether the data was decrypted or not, if you say it was then you've covered your ass. It's not as if most laypeople believe that the encryption will hold anyhow.
In short, Sony's pretty damned stupid, but whether anything was encrypted or not they're going to treat it as if it wasn't, and their warnings are going to reflect that. Just because they aren't talking about it being encrypted doesn't mean it was stored in plaintext. The resolution is the same either way: assume the bad guys have it in plaintext form, and watch your credit reports.
Why would they raise it? If anything they'd lower it, and not just to protect their profits.
Unicasting content is insanely wasteful. Even with CDNs with good placement (Akamai, etc) that's 1 unicast stream per TV. If you follow this to its logical conclusion and Netflix or some other IPTV provider usurps cable/satellite for subscription channels, what happens the next time Monday Night Football is on ESPN? They're going to stream it to unicast it to 11 million households, many of whom are going to want to do DVR things like skipping and pausing?
Multicasting is going to be around for a long, long time still. So long as it does, the cable/fiber/satellite networks are still the gatekeepers; they're not going to embrace IP multicasting when they have a perfectly good system that does the same thing.
Mozilla has already done enough damage in the UI department with fonts under Windows. Oh god the pain, it's like every character suddenly went on the Fat Albert diet and became bold.
Sure, that will get you fresh water to setup additional farms with. But where do you get the energy to run the desalinization plant, given that desalinization requires oodles of power?
Ultimately all the world's resource shortages can be solved by the application of energy in some manner. But to get there you first need cheap, limitless energy. Until then, the resources we have to work with are a function of the amount of energy we have and how much we're willing to pay for the resulting product. Which is one of the points of the report in the first place.
Although I think you missed the point of the "Pick 2" gag, much like the DS(1), the 3DS has already foregone "powerful". It's an ARM11 CPU, little RAM, and a GPU that's basically OpenGL ES 1.1 (iPhone 1 era) with a couple extra fixed-function features. The only thing not out of date is the 3D screen, but that's something that can be turned off.
With the 3D screen turned off it should by all means be small and long lasting, but this is not the case. Instead it's just small; small, short lasting, slow, and not very cheap. Clearly Nintendo has flubbed the 3DS - I only question whether this is an overall failure to execute, or if they simply sacrificed too much for that damn 3D screen.
In spite of what the intentional vague summary may hint at, this is all about upstream bandwidth, not downstream. AT&T's "4G" devices are competitive with similar HSPA+ 14.4 devices when it comes to downstream bandwidth, which is why TFA doesn't even bother to mention it. It's upstream bandwidth that's capped: everything but the iPhone 4 is capped at 384Kbps.
However from AT&T's perspective they didn't flub 4G. As far as they're concerned they're running a content delivery network, not a content creation network. Every MHz they can deallocate from upstream bandwidth to downstream bandwidth is that much faster downloads their customers receive, which as most people are content consumers are all they care about in the first place. This is just AT&T realizing what wireline broadband providers have known for a long time: only the geeks care about highly asymmetrical connections.
Not to excuse any of this as being "good" - it makes a total farce of 4G among other things (not that T-Mo, VZ, and Sprint helped). But if the fact that carriers are moving to highly asymmetrical connections surprises you in any way, you haven't been paying very good attention to the state of the broadband market.
Since Slashdot summaries are always a bit dated, it's been bumped up to an 8.9 by the USGS. The good news is that it was off-shore and 15.2mi down, the bad news is that it was off-shore and generated a large tsunami that is still wrecking havoc in Japan and may be heading elsewhere.
Best of luck to the Japanese; if anyone is prepared it's them, but I don't know how one prepares for something quite like this.
Meanwhile for the US there are active tsunami warnings in Hawaii, and NOAA has just issued a watch for the US West Coast.
I was going to go with one of a dozen SG-1/SGA episodes myself.
Suns + wormholes almost always result in a rockin' 1960s adventure - unless it results in changing the makeup of a star and (nearly) dooming the neighboring civilizations.
Extrapolation: because past performance perfectly predicts future growth.
Just keep in mind that the first generation of Light Peak isn't optical, it's copper.
When they have enough importance that they're not channel 305, and when advertisers revere them enough to put on ads beyond electric nicotine inhalers and not-from-the-US-mint "collectible" money.
Sure, but that means it's still less functional than a PSP-Go, never mind a PSP-3000. It can't play PS2 games, it can't play PSP games, so that leaves you with what, PS1 games? Anyone who wanted to play PS1 games on a phone was already doing that thanks to some very good PS1 emulators and the fact that PS1 games are a dime a dozen (and easy to image).
In true Tick fashion, even on Slashdot he doesn't get any respect. Here he gets listed after a hero that farts toast and burns the US Constitution for warmth.
The odd thing about this is that even with the release of the console's important keys, it's still not practical to pirate PSN games. You can pirate PS3 games that come on a disc until you're blue in the face, but the tools don't exist to do so with newer PSN games - as a result only a small number of them can be pirated at the moment.
Either Capcom knows something we don't know or they're preparing for the inevitable, because right now you'd be hard pressed to pirate BCR2 even without phone-home DRM.