No. Among other reasons why this can't be the case, VoD programming is inserted at the node/neighborhood level, where nodes only serve a couple hundred people at most. If the whole city saw it, the feed came all the way from the top.
Should the user not be free to run software as they please then? Because there are plenty of complaints just in this article that are people bitching about just that - how Vista is somehow preventing them from doing what they want. Should "untrusted applications" be everything other than a select few applications that only Microsoft gets to define?
And if not, how should users tell the OS that an application is trusted? Perhaps they could indicate that in some kind of dialog box...
At the end of the day the user is the only one responsible for their system. If they want to run an application that will wipe their hard drives, drink all their beer, and knock up their wife, then that is their right, and their responsibility. Sadly too few people seem to understand the latter part of that.
At some point this tripe gets ridiculous, particularly when Vista has been out there for over 2 years now. The Win32 API has its flaws, but security issues are due to problems with the underlying OS, not the API.
If there are security flaws in the Win32 API as implemented by Vista, please by all means point them out. But I'm going to be surprised if you can point out anything that doesn't fall under "It's a system level change, you need admin credentials moron" school of thought. Most people don't understand security nearly as well as they think they do, and Slashdot is no different.
It really isn't funny. Apple doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about gaming on OS X, so the only thing that works reliably are the core functions needed for their GUI, CoreImage, etc. If you actually try using half the GL functions that are usually reserved for games, you'll run in to all sorts of bugs. And sometimes you'll just run in to the fact that some of those functions don't even exist under the OS X drivers. It's a hell of a lot like working with a MiniGL driver from back in the 3Dfx days, except Apple dropped the wrong set of functions.
That's kind of, sort of, not really true. The Diamondville core supports x86-64, but Intel is playing an odd game where they're disabling it on some processors for no specific reason. The Atom 200 and 300 series leave it enabled, meanwhile the N27x series disable it for no obvious reason. Meanwhile the Silverthorne core used in the Atom Z5xx series is more ambiguous; none of the products its used in support x86-64, but there's a lot of disagreement over whether it's actually a different core. The reigning belief is that Diamondville is just Silverthorne built to use the GTL bus, which means Silverthorne supports x86-64 all along.
So why would Intel artificially disable x86-64 support? There's the million dollar question.
I probably should also add that the Intel Core (1) is 32bit only. Replaced since 2006 by the Core 2, MS may not want Core (1) boxes limited to Vista, hence they still need a 32bit version
I have never heard the boxes themselves called a profit center. Cable companies have to buy the boxes now, meanwhile it's going to take years to recover the costs of the boxes, never mind the incidentals like broken and stolen boxes. The boxes are a PITA I admit, but then again I could just get a new TV with a CableCARD slot, just like I could get a TV with an ATSC tuner.
The rest of that however is true, but why on earth is that a bad thing? We bitch and moan that the DTV transition is being pushed back, then we bitch that the cable companies want to go digital for the same reasons. Every analog channel Comcast takes back is a pair of HD channels at full quality, or 38Mb of internet bandwidth, or nearly a dozen SD channels, etc. Should it come as any surprise that the cable guys want to do more productive things with their bandwidth too?
You can't test two different machines with different cases and compare the results, that's not how the scientific process works. Both machines need to be tested against the same cases - then and only then will you be able to appropriately tell if the software made a difference.
Anyhow, back on the subject, some of WinXP's default networking parameters are a bit conservative when it comes to high-bandwidth links that don't have LAN-like latency (particularly the TCP Receive Window/RWIN); a good but short description of this can be found at DSL Reports. So I wouldn't be absolutely shocked if once he corrects his methodology, he still gets similar results, although in general I find RWIN tweaking to be bollocks compared to the few people that swear it works. Vista and later OSs include self-adjusting network stacks that compensate for this and then some (Microsoft is rather proud of their sustained bandwidth over very high latency links), so I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
It's worth noting that the original R4 is no longer sold, and the company that made it is long gone. The R4's sold now are all poor knock-offs with no support. If you're a pirate they won't work with future games, and if you're a homebrewer the compatibility is absolutely terrible thanks in part to shoddy DLDI patching. There are other, better flash carts (AceKart, CycloDS, M3, etc) that can meet your needs, whichever side of the spectrum you may go.
Maybe, maybe not. Do you think the labels would want DRM-free music? Doubtful
Clearly not, but having DRM was a mistake for them in the first place. They forced DRM, and then they watched everyone else fall to Apple. DRM was a double-edged sword; it could stop at least some file sharing, but it locked people to Apple. And the last thing the labels want is people locked to Apple, who has been spending the last 6 years dictating to the labels how things would be priced and organized. There's a number of stories here about how tenuous the Apple/label relationship was because the labels couldn't simply boss Apple around.
The labels want DRM, but they don't want people tied to Apple, so they have to pick the lesser of two evils here. Don't think they've learned their lesson because they have not, they simply made a choice that has some benefit to us (and more benefit to them in the long run).
The only acceptable outcome for consumers is DRM-free music and fixed pricing; price discrimination is no more a consumer-friendly position than DRM was, and unlike DRM we'll never be able to make it go away. You can't buy something and the un-price discriminate it.
The labels wanted tiered (or really, higher) pricing and a larger cut of revenue for anything downloaded via cellular; Apple wouldn't initially give in and they were too big & powerful for the labels to simply ignore. So the labels propped up Amazon's store by allowing them to sell everything DRM free and taking a smaller cut of revenue than from Apple, and refused Apple the same rights. This was to force Apple's hand; to either risk being driven out of business, or to "play" with the labels.
Apple could have taken the correct option and continued to hold out for fair treatment and reasonable pro-consumer policies. Instead they sold out. The iTunes Music Store is now just yet another front for the labels, controlled by the labels.
And all their other fronts (e.g. Amazon and WalMart) will quickly adopt the same policies now that the labels have no reason to continue offering them favorable terms.
this is pretty much guaranteed to bring decent windows (and OS X) app and gaming support to Linux.
At this point, this isn't necessarily a true statement. Outstanding bugs aside, none of these solutions offer 3D performance that approaches a native. The performance hit is enough to force you turn down the quality settings in the best of cases, and astronomical in the worst. Although there can be a future going this way, we'd need to see a massive performance improvement to bring us to some level of parity. Running Windows games very slowly is an improvement over not being able to run them at all, but it's still not usable.
I don't expect the current methods of 3D acceleration on VMs is going to do the trick, it's going to take direct hardware access to get speed where it needs to be.
As you say, this is some of the tightest security ever found. Yet, it has been broken by some very smart people.
To be fair, at least for the iPhone itself, the DRM wasn't very good. Apple used the same S5L processor and encryption key set on both the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G. With the iPhone 2G at launch, everything ran as root and a trivial Safari exploit could be used to remote execute code as root - being able to run that code allowed key retrieval. Since Apple did fix the root security issues with iPhone OS 1.1.3 and later with all applications now running as the very limited user Mobile, but since they did not change the keys for the 3G it was not very hard (in the scale of breaking DRM at least) to crack open the firmware of the iPhone 3G and jailbreak that too. The iPhone's primary hardware should not be considered a strong DRM platform because Apple did not properly implement it before it was broken for good.
This of course does not apply to the S-Gold radio; that was completely changed between the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G, and the Dev Team beating that is indeed an amazing hack. Never the less, it took them 5-6 months to break it, which is actually rather remarkable. This was another case where Apple learned its lesson, as the 2G's radio was not properly secured, either.
Futhermore, if you want to look at an iPhone device properly secured, look at the iPod Touch 2G. Apple did change the keys that time, and so far it has not been possible to break it for 4 months. At a bare minimum, a remote code execution exploit and a local privilege execution exploit must be found in the Touch in order to have a chance at capturing its keys, and that's just to decrypt the firmware. We have no idea what other surprises are on the Touch since no one has made it that far yet.
I'm not entirely convinced that it's impossible to build an unbreakable device. DRM has been getting better over the years, the Xbox 360 still doesn't have a way to execute unsigned code (without hardware modification), for example.
Huh? She tested, and I quote: "Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari". That's a perfectly fine selection of browsers, it's all the major browsers on the market right now. It's true that she could have added Opera (although whether it's a major browser is certainly up for debate) but that doesn't require dropping any browsers. Tests not run do not tell us any useful information.
Psystar is also accusing Apple of bricking Macs that don't run on genuine Apple hardware
I'm pretty sure only Apple sells Macs, and I'm also pretty sure Apple is using genuine Apple hardware. Ergo there is no such thing as a Mac with non-genuine Apple hardware. Pystar may sell a computer that can hobble on Mac OS X, but that is not a Mac. What Pystar means to say is:
Pystar is also accusing Apple of bricking their shoddy hardware which has been cobbled together to run Mac OS X
Of course the bricking claim is also bogus; Apple's firmware updates don't run on any kind of Hack (including Pystar's machines) so nothing can be bricked. At this point Pystar isn't even grasping for straws, it's a Hail Mary attempt when the football game ended an hour ago and everyone has gone home.
Just to add to this, the labels are mandating DRM for Apple to cause exactly what DfD wants: the labels want people to boycott Apple. Apple is too big and too strong for the labels taste; the labels want to raise prices and use variable prices, they want to do away with individual tracks on hot items, they want to increasing the amount of advertising and payola at digital music stores. Apple will have none of this, and they're big enough to keep the labels from getting it.
Divide and conquer, that's the labels' plan. Boycotting Apple just helps the labels cut down Apple and get what they want. I'm not going to say to buy exclusively from Apple (because that's just stupid and Apple's not perfect by a longshot), but boycotting Apple over DRM right now is probably the most destructive action you could do to yourself and the consumer-friendly digital music market right now.
It's entirely possible that they or the US Government on their behalf will file a complaint with the World Trade Organization, calling the bailout an illegal subsidy and/or dumping. Every couple of years the industry tends to get slammed for illegal subsidies or price fixing, so they're due.
The document must include a plan for how SMEs will be involved.
Perhaps this is an Aussie thing, but what do they mean when they are talking about "involving" Small and Medium Enterprises? Is this about subcontracting work to other companies? Making the final service affordable to smaller businesses? Etc. It's a very non-descriptive statement.
I loaded it up early this morning, and in short, it's terrible. It's everything bad about Second Life meets the Xbox NXE meets Miis. I was going to write a lengthy explaination as to what's wrong, but Tycho over at Penny Arcade has done a much better job hitting on everything, and using bigger words in the process. So without further ado:
The Beta for Playstation home is now available to everyone, and now you know what I know: this is what happens when your marketing department tries to make a game. Here is everything you need to understand about Home, if you should accidentally launch it from your XMB: press and hold the Playstation button in the center of your Dual-Shock or Sixaxis controller. From the menu that appears, select Quit.
There are things about Home that are simply beyond my understanding. Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.
If you approach an arcade machine and there is a person standing in front of it, you will not be able to play it. Likewise, if you see people bowling and think that bowling is something you might like to do, you probably wont be able to. Unable to play arcade games like Ice Breakers and Carriage Return the first several times we logged on, these games had begun to take on an epic stature in our minds. These were gushing fonts of liquid fun, habit-forming and dangerous - for the good of our virtual society, the supply had to be controlled. When we were finally able to play them, we learned that they were the equivalent of browser games.
There is nothing about the experience of using Home to suggest that you are actually moving through a single, contiguous environment. It is very clearly a handful of walled off zones, where you are confronted by incessant load screens in a desperate search for stimulation. From the moment you enter one of their ultrahygenic "amusement regions," it's clear that all life has been burned away. You get the sense that this is a place in which no interesting thing could ever happen.
There is already a growing school of Home apologetics, fostered by the same Order of Perpetual Masochism that lauded the rumble-free Sixaxis at launch and suggested, hilariously, that Lair and Heavenly Sword were videogames. They're under the impression that because something is free, this places it on some golden dais beyond censure. It's no virtue to give away something that no-one in their right mind would buy. Sony has no idea what this world is for, and that ambiguity infuses every simulated millimeter of it.
This is the terrible secret that roils beneath their false universe: it is nothing more than a cumbersome menu, a rampart over which you must hoist yourself to accomplish the most basic tasks.
Exactly. NPCs don't buy [stuff], nor do they buy any of the resulting products [stuff] is used in. There was no way to directly create ISK from this exploit. At most (and this is a stretch), you can say ISK was created by players being able to afford better gear and then killing more NPCs in a set period of time, generating fauceting in more ISK as bounties - and that would be such little ISK that it's not even worth mentioning other than to be pedantic.
apparently responsible for the fraudulent creation of trillions of ISK
No, that's not it at all. I'm not sure how TFS ended up at that conclusion
The bug was a manufacturing bug, similar in some respects to an item duping bug. Certain types of production in EVE are multi-step processes where materials get made in to other materials before everything finally is made in to a finished good*. Players could build certain mid-process manufacturing materials (we'll call the fake materials [stuff]) without needing the materials/inputs normally required to build said [stuff]. This resulted in a lot of [stuff] being made out of nothing that was then used to build finished products. No ISK was ever created since this exploit created [stuff], not ISK. The exploiters could sell their fake [stuff] to other players for ISK, but there was never any more ISK in the game because of it.
Ironically this was better for the vast majority of players who were not in to manufacturing, since the deflation that results from the excess [stuff] meant they could get many finished goods for cheaper than what they should actually be at. The flip side is that correcting this means that prices on the deflated goods are about to shoot up like a rocket, in other words the game is about to hit a period of rapid inflation as the market corrects for the lack of further fake [stuff].
*Specifically, it was an exploit involving Tech 2 manufacturing. The production chain looks like this, and things that could be fraudulently made are tagged with [stuff]: Raw Materials -> Basic Materials [stuff] -> Advanced Materials [stuff] -> Components -> Finished Goods
With all due respect, if you read TFA they're looking at desktop OSs. Solaris is about as much of a desktop OS as Cowboy Neal is a suave, socially gifted babe magnet - which is to say it's not in the least bit a desktop OS. While what you say is technically true, it's not what is being discussed. There is no desktop OS optimized for SSDs.
I was thinking the same thing. For those unfamiliar with the specs, the DS has 2 256x192 pixel (62mmx 46mm) screens, giving it a dot pitch of.24mm. In terms of resolution this puts it above most 320x240 PocketPCs, but well below newer devices such as an iPhone/iPod Touch at 320x480. The bigger issue is that a.24mm dot pitch is extremely coarse for a mobile device (.24 would be around that of a desktop monitor) - compared again to the iPhone at.16 or so, it doesn't give much room for font anti-aliasing.
You won't quite go blind like the OP is exaggerating about, but as a DS owner I can't say I find reading text particularly comfortable on the device. I'll take an iPhone, a Kindle, a PSP, etc any day of the week over a DS.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Among other reasons why this can't be the case, VoD programming is inserted at the node/neighborhood level, where nodes only serve a couple hundred people at most. If the whole city saw it, the feed came all the way from the top.
Should the user not be free to run software as they please then? Because there are plenty of complaints just in this article that are people bitching about just that - how Vista is somehow preventing them from doing what they want. Should "untrusted applications" be everything other than a select few applications that only Microsoft gets to define?
And if not, how should users tell the OS that an application is trusted? Perhaps they could indicate that in some kind of dialog box...
At the end of the day the user is the only one responsible for their system. If they want to run an application that will wipe their hard drives, drink all their beer, and knock up their wife, then that is their right, and their responsibility. Sadly too few people seem to understand the latter part of that.
At some point this tripe gets ridiculous, particularly when Vista has been out there for over 2 years now. The Win32 API has its flaws, but security issues are due to problems with the underlying OS, not the API.
If there are security flaws in the Win32 API as implemented by Vista, please by all means point them out. But I'm going to be surprised if you can point out anything that doesn't fall under "It's a system level change, you need admin credentials moron" school of thought. Most people don't understand security nearly as well as they think they do, and Slashdot is no different.
It really isn't funny. Apple doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about gaming on OS X, so the only thing that works reliably are the core functions needed for their GUI, CoreImage, etc. If you actually try using half the GL functions that are usually reserved for games, you'll run in to all sorts of bugs. And sometimes you'll just run in to the fact that some of those functions don't even exist under the OS X drivers. It's a hell of a lot like working with a MiniGL driver from back in the 3Dfx days, except Apple dropped the wrong set of functions.
The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.
That's kind of, sort of, not really true. The Diamondville core supports x86-64, but Intel is playing an odd game where they're disabling it on some processors for no specific reason. The Atom 200 and 300 series leave it enabled, meanwhile the N27x series disable it for no obvious reason. Meanwhile the Silverthorne core used in the Atom Z5xx series is more ambiguous; none of the products its used in support x86-64, but there's a lot of disagreement over whether it's actually a different core. The reigning belief is that Diamondville is just Silverthorne built to use the GTL bus, which means Silverthorne supports x86-64 all along.
So why would Intel artificially disable x86-64 support? There's the million dollar question.
I probably should also add that the Intel Core (1) is 32bit only. Replaced since 2006 by the Core 2, MS may not want Core (1) boxes limited to Vista, hence they still need a 32bit version
I have never heard the boxes themselves called a profit center. Cable companies have to buy the boxes now, meanwhile it's going to take years to recover the costs of the boxes, never mind the incidentals like broken and stolen boxes. The boxes are a PITA I admit, but then again I could just get a new TV with a CableCARD slot, just like I could get a TV with an ATSC tuner.
The rest of that however is true, but why on earth is that a bad thing? We bitch and moan that the DTV transition is being pushed back, then we bitch that the cable companies want to go digital for the same reasons. Every analog channel Comcast takes back is a pair of HD channels at full quality, or 38Mb of internet bandwidth, or nearly a dozen SD channels, etc. Should it come as any surprise that the cable guys want to do more productive things with their bandwidth too?
You can't test two different machines with different cases and compare the results, that's not how the scientific process works. Both machines need to be tested against the same cases - then and only then will you be able to appropriately tell if the software made a difference.
Anyhow, back on the subject, some of WinXP's default networking parameters are a bit conservative when it comes to high-bandwidth links that don't have LAN-like latency (particularly the TCP Receive Window/RWIN); a good but short description of this can be found at DSL Reports. So I wouldn't be absolutely shocked if once he corrects his methodology, he still gets similar results, although in general I find RWIN tweaking to be bollocks compared to the few people that swear it works. Vista and later OSs include self-adjusting network stacks that compensate for this and then some (Microsoft is rather proud of their sustained bandwidth over very high latency links), so I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
It's worth noting that the original R4 is no longer sold, and the company that made it is long gone. The R4's sold now are all poor knock-offs with no support. If you're a pirate they won't work with future games, and if you're a homebrewer the compatibility is absolutely terrible thanks in part to shoddy DLDI patching. There are other, better flash carts (AceKart, CycloDS, M3, etc) that can meet your needs, whichever side of the spectrum you may go.
Clearly not, but having DRM was a mistake for them in the first place. They forced DRM, and then they watched everyone else fall to Apple. DRM was a double-edged sword; it could stop at least some file sharing, but it locked people to Apple. And the last thing the labels want is people locked to Apple, who has been spending the last 6 years dictating to the labels how things would be priced and organized. There's a number of stories here about how tenuous the Apple/label relationship was because the labels couldn't simply boss Apple around.
The labels want DRM, but they don't want people tied to Apple, so they have to pick the lesser of two evils here. Don't think they've learned their lesson because they have not, they simply made a choice that has some benefit to us (and more benefit to them in the long run).
The only acceptable outcome for consumers is DRM-free music and fixed pricing; price discrimination is no more a consumer-friendly position than DRM was, and unlike DRM we'll never be able to make it go away. You can't buy something and the un-price discriminate it.
Apple traded one policy for a worse one.
Apple sold out.
The labels wanted tiered (or really, higher) pricing and a larger cut of revenue for anything downloaded via cellular; Apple wouldn't initially give in and they were too big & powerful for the labels to simply ignore. So the labels propped up Amazon's store by allowing them to sell everything DRM free and taking a smaller cut of revenue than from Apple, and refused Apple the same rights. This was to force Apple's hand; to either risk being driven out of business, or to "play" with the labels.
Apple could have taken the correct option and continued to hold out for fair treatment and reasonable pro-consumer policies. Instead they sold out. The iTunes Music Store is now just yet another front for the labels, controlled by the labels.
And all their other fronts (e.g. Amazon and WalMart) will quickly adopt the same policies now that the labels have no reason to continue offering them favorable terms.
It seems that the poor blog has been Slashdotted, so here's the Google cache entry for it complete with graphics.
At this point, this isn't necessarily a true statement. Outstanding bugs aside, none of these solutions offer 3D performance that approaches a native. The performance hit is enough to force you turn down the quality settings in the best of cases, and astronomical in the worst. Although there can be a future going this way, we'd need to see a massive performance improvement to bring us to some level of parity. Running Windows games very slowly is an improvement over not being able to run them at all, but it's still not usable.
I don't expect the current methods of 3D acceleration on VMs is going to do the trick, it's going to take direct hardware access to get speed where it needs to be.
To be fair, at least for the iPhone itself, the DRM wasn't very good. Apple used the same S5L processor and encryption key set on both the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G. With the iPhone 2G at launch, everything ran as root and a trivial Safari exploit could be used to remote execute code as root - being able to run that code allowed key retrieval. Since Apple did fix the root security issues with iPhone OS 1.1.3 and later with all applications now running as the very limited user Mobile, but since they did not change the keys for the 3G it was not very hard (in the scale of breaking DRM at least) to crack open the firmware of the iPhone 3G and jailbreak that too. The iPhone's primary hardware should not be considered a strong DRM platform because Apple did not properly implement it before it was broken for good.
This of course does not apply to the S-Gold radio; that was completely changed between the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G, and the Dev Team beating that is indeed an amazing hack. Never the less, it took them 5-6 months to break it, which is actually rather remarkable. This was another case where Apple learned its lesson, as the 2G's radio was not properly secured, either.
Futhermore, if you want to look at an iPhone device properly secured, look at the iPod Touch 2G. Apple did change the keys that time, and so far it has not been possible to break it for 4 months. At a bare minimum, a remote code execution exploit and a local privilege execution exploit must be found in the Touch in order to have a chance at capturing its keys, and that's just to decrypt the firmware. We have no idea what other surprises are on the Touch since no one has made it that far yet.
I'm not entirely convinced that it's impossible to build an unbreakable device. DRM has been getting better over the years, the Xbox 360 still doesn't have a way to execute unsigned code (without hardware modification), for example.
Huh? She tested, and I quote: "Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari". That's a perfectly fine selection of browsers, it's all the major browsers on the market right now. It's true that she could have added Opera (although whether it's a major browser is certainly up for debate) but that doesn't require dropping any browsers. Tests not run do not tell us any useful information.
I'm pretty sure only Apple sells Macs, and I'm also pretty sure Apple is using genuine Apple hardware. Ergo there is no such thing as a Mac with non-genuine Apple hardware. Pystar may sell a computer that can hobble on Mac OS X, but that is not a Mac. What Pystar means to say is:
Of course the bricking claim is also bogus; Apple's firmware updates don't run on any kind of Hack (including Pystar's machines) so nothing can be bricked. At this point Pystar isn't even grasping for straws, it's a Hail Mary attempt when the football game ended an hour ago and everyone has gone home.
Just to add to this, the labels are mandating DRM for Apple to cause exactly what DfD wants: the labels want people to boycott Apple. Apple is too big and too strong for the labels taste; the labels want to raise prices and use variable prices, they want to do away with individual tracks on hot items, they want to increasing the amount of advertising and payola at digital music stores. Apple will have none of this, and they're big enough to keep the labels from getting it.
Divide and conquer, that's the labels' plan. Boycotting Apple just helps the labels cut down Apple and get what they want. I'm not going to say to buy exclusively from Apple (because that's just stupid and Apple's not perfect by a longshot), but boycotting Apple over DRM right now is probably the most destructive action you could do to yourself and the consumer-friendly digital music market right now.
Only if you're Sony or Microsoft at this point. Nintendo seems unable to detect or unwilling to ban people loading copied games.
It's entirely possible that they or the US Government on their behalf will file a complaint with the World Trade Organization, calling the bailout an illegal subsidy and/or dumping. Every couple of years the industry tends to get slammed for illegal subsidies or price fixing, so they're due.
Perhaps this is an Aussie thing, but what do they mean when they are talking about "involving" Small and Medium Enterprises? Is this about subcontracting work to other companies? Making the final service affordable to smaller businesses? Etc. It's a very non-descriptive statement.
I loaded it up early this morning, and in short, it's terrible. It's everything bad about Second Life meets the Xbox NXE meets Miis. I was going to write a lengthy explaination as to what's wrong, but Tycho over at Penny Arcade has done a much better job hitting on everything, and using bigger words in the process. So without further ado:
Exactly. NPCs don't buy [stuff], nor do they buy any of the resulting products [stuff] is used in. There was no way to directly create ISK from this exploit. At most (and this is a stretch), you can say ISK was created by players being able to afford better gear and then killing more NPCs in a set period of time, generating fauceting in more ISK as bounties - and that would be such little ISK that it's not even worth mentioning other than to be pedantic.
No, that's not it at all. I'm not sure how TFS ended up at that conclusion
The bug was a manufacturing bug, similar in some respects to an item duping bug. Certain types of production in EVE are multi-step processes where materials get made in to other materials before everything finally is made in to a finished good*. Players could build certain mid-process manufacturing materials (we'll call the fake materials [stuff]) without needing the materials/inputs normally required to build said [stuff]. This resulted in a lot of [stuff] being made out of nothing that was then used to build finished products. No ISK was ever created since this exploit created [stuff], not ISK. The exploiters could sell their fake [stuff] to other players for ISK, but there was never any more ISK in the game because of it.
Ironically this was better for the vast majority of players who were not in to manufacturing, since the deflation that results from the excess [stuff] meant they could get many finished goods for cheaper than what they should actually be at. The flip side is that correcting this means that prices on the deflated goods are about to shoot up like a rocket, in other words the game is about to hit a period of rapid inflation as the market corrects for the lack of further fake [stuff].
*Specifically, it was an exploit involving Tech 2 manufacturing. The production chain looks like this, and things that could be fraudulently made are tagged with [stuff]: Raw Materials -> Basic Materials [stuff] -> Advanced Materials [stuff] -> Components -> Finished Goods
With all due respect, if you read TFA they're looking at desktop OSs. Solaris is about as much of a desktop OS as Cowboy Neal is a suave, socially gifted babe magnet - which is to say it's not in the least bit a desktop OS. While what you say is technically true, it's not what is being discussed. There is no desktop OS optimized for SSDs.
I was thinking the same thing. For those unfamiliar with the specs, the DS has 2 256x192 pixel (62mmx 46mm) screens, giving it a dot pitch of .24mm. In terms of resolution this puts it above most 320x240 PocketPCs, but well below newer devices such as an iPhone/iPod Touch at 320x480. The bigger issue is that a .24mm dot pitch is extremely coarse for a mobile device (.24 would be around that of a desktop monitor) - compared again to the iPhone at .16 or so, it doesn't give much room for font anti-aliasing.
You won't quite go blind like the OP is exaggerating about, but as a DS owner I can't say I find reading text particularly comfortable on the device. I'll take an iPhone, a Kindle, a PSP, etc any day of the week over a DS.