The only way that companies are really going to make big money off open-source is to in a sense, drop open source. As long as they can sell something that can't be given away(such as the Finder in OS X), there's money to be made. Otherwise, they'll sell support contracts here and there, but no company is going to make it in to the "big time" with just support; even IBM has other buisnesses.
mDNS is nice, I won't deny that, but it's not quite ready for prime-time yet. The biggest issue with mDNS so far is that services using it don't do queries against the remote device in the way AppleTalk did, so for example, a printer set up via mDNS will not tell the computer what configuration options it has(RAM, trays, etc), whereas a Mac doing AppleTalk would get that sort of information from the printer, so those extra settings have to be put in by the user. Along the same lines, at least with HP's current printers, they have a hard-wired mDNS name based off the printer model and MAC address(I think), whereas the AppleTalk name for the HP printer can be changed to whatever you like. Lastly, mDNS still has some perceived speed issues, as it seems to take just a bit longer to get a list of devices from mDNS, whereas AppleTalk was almost instantaneous on an up-to-date network.
This of course can all change in time, if companies are willing to go through the effort. HP could make their printers re-namable, HP/Apple could take care of the information queries, and Apple could probably speed things up by not having OS X simultaneously do an AppleTalk, mDNS, and straight IP-range scan in the server browser. mDNS will be the ultimate successor of AppleTalk, and do it just as well, but at this point, it still needs a bit more time to mature. It should be interesting to see how 10.3 changes things.
That is all true, but the difference between "real" money and "digital" money is that with digital money, you're going to end up with "perfect" money; no flaws, nothing to track, just 1's and 0's. Real money has ink, paper, and numerous physical traits to identify it, making a "perfect" copy nearly impossible, digitial money is as simple as figuring out what the ATM told the smart card to make it say it had more money.
Frankly, smart cards shouldn't be on that list, as the intended use(storing money on the card) has not been perfected against people hacking the card for more money. Smart cards trust the "client", and as any MMORPG developer can tell you, that's a bad thing. Paper money and credit cards at least have some protection, smart cards on the other hand are a relitively easy fraud source for anyone with a card writer, and the resources to use it; unlike any other method, you end up with a perfect "digital copy" of the money.
Think of it this way, a website is like a 1-800 number; you pay for the number, you pay every time someone uses it, and you have a finite number of people you can serve at once. Now, some people have reccomended dial-spamming SCO's 800 number, which is borderline illegal, since you're tying up their system, preventing real customers from contacting them, and costing them money at the same time; something that's sure to get law enforcement's attention sooner or later.
The difference with the/. effect is that everyone who visits is a customer in a certain sense; they visited the site because they're interested in something that's on the site. This is the difference between going to the site for the "utility" provided by the site's content, and simply going to a site so that someone else can't.
While SCO and spammers are on the same level morally as far as I'm concerned, if you DDoS their site, you're doing the same thing as tying up someone's 800 number; and that's just something that's "not cool" and quite possibly not legal.
It hasn't exactly moved, it's only being shown on more channels. It'll be back on CTN tomorrow, at a new time-slot of 11:30pm, with Family Guy moving to 11.
FYI, you can force the AirPort Extreme base station to run in pure 802.11g, mixed mode, or pure 802.11b, so when in pure g mode, you can ensure to a large extent that you won't be losing bandwidth to b clients.
In theory, every USB key will contain a different DES key, so that even if you had a new USB key, you still wouldn't be able to get at the data on the drive.
For the love of Mike, most Slashdot readers here are geeks; they build their own machines, not buy machines bundled with Windows. All jokes/flames aside, just how many of you out there are actually using a machine that came with Windows, but you never used that copy?
As I understand it, only the Windows versions of WMP and Real Player support true DRM controls(such as what BuyMusic.com is using). If this is the case, then that would be why it's Windows specific, since other platforms wouldn't support the DRM used.
I can't help but feel that with programs like this, that we aren't in some way meddling with IT operations of an organization, when we shouldn't be. Obviously, what money is being spent on is a valid concern, and should be visible to every last citizen, but there's a fine line between looking, and touching.
I know as a crowd, we/. geeks like to joke about Dilbert, PHBs, and other office-life quirks, but trying to embarrass or otherwise force the hand of IT managers seems like we're all becoming PHBs here. All jokes aside about the government, there are competent people in the IT sector, who have to make decisions for what's best for their agency, with the limited resources they have, much like most other IT professionals. Why should we force our ideals and preferences on to these managers and decision makers, when we would revolt at the same idea if done to us? Just because they're the government, do they need millions of people to micro-manage them from the outside?
The government should always be accountable for its actions, but the fact of the matter is that if we meddle too much, and don't let IT managers make the right decisions for their agencies, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot, and creating more problems than we started with.
It's "impossible" because it would, according to the article, require laying fiber, and no one in their right mind wants to lay cables if they can avoid it. Now, they could try it over their phone lines, but unfortunately, unless someone invents the Dense Wave Multiplexing of the DSL world, you're simply not going to get the 45Mb/sec speeds it requires from good ole' copper lines in such a spread out area, which then brings us back to fiber. The 45Mb/sec goal could be reached right now, but there's no one willing to bankroll that kind of infastructure upgrade.
With this exploit now out there(at least in theory anyway), I guess the question now becomes what can we expect from it. Assuming that a black-hat or someone else of an infamous nature figures out this exploit, what are the ramficiations that we can expect? Obviously, many routers are owned and run by compotent admins, but with all the Cisco routers out there, it's niaeve to believe that all of the routers will be fixed before someone exploits this.
Given that, what does everyone suppose will happen to the internet as a whole? The core routers will most likely be fixed ASAP, but there's always the problem of the "oopps, I forgot that one" router. Will this exploit become the ever-lasting Code Red(in terms of network problems), or will its threat blow over just like Code Red?
There is one big difference worth noting, and that is that the Apple hole was a flaw in the screensaver subsystem, which required physical access to exploit(at which point, you should be remembering that a computer is done for if you have physical access anyhow). This flaw on the other hand is a remote exploit, which makes it far easier to exploit than a local exploit, and can be used at any time(versus only when the screensaver is on). I still think we're a bit hard on MS, but something like this should be patched ASAP, even a day is too late.
I'm primarily a Mac user here, but can someone please explain to me why the Linux equivilent of InstallShield(or VISE, or anything else like that) hasn't been created yet? While it isn't the best solution when you want to deal with versioning, dependancies, and top-notch security, it still seems silly that such a program isn't around, when it's obvious that most everbody that isn't tech-head wants such a program. Is there really such an evil reason that people can't have simple, easy to use installers on Linux?
PAE isn't a "real" solution like going to 64bits is; the processor is still 32bits, so it's doing paging tricks to get past the 4GB barrier. Those tricks work, but it has a very noticable speed penelty for doing so. One other thing to keep in mind right now is that just because the chip arcitecture supports 4bil^2 worth of memory, doesn't mean that current devices are designed to use it. That much memory is overkill, and designing a chipset/CPU at this point that can use that much is just as much overkill. Full 64bit memory addressing requires more logic, more transistors, and more traces to use, so it's not surprising that Apple/AMD aren't going the whole 64bits; they'll get there when they're ready.
I talked to one of Nvidia's audio engineers yesterday about this article(they were doing a presentation here at a local LAN party), and this is what he had to say about the nForce2's performance.
1. The only worse board they could have used to do the test is a Chaintech; the MSI is a very poor board in terms of audio design compared to the higher-end boards.
2. Nvidia's reference boards in the labs use some good SigmaTel codecs which are far superior to anything anyone else is using; so most(if not all) boards are of lower quality than what Nvidia intends.
Nvidia is supposedly going to get in contact with ExtremeTech soon, so it's highly possible that the article will be changed/ammended in the future. They aren't going to sit to the side and let the nForce get a bad rap.
It's more than a legitimate gripe, it may very well be that Activsion is in the right. Obviously, I haven't seen the contract Activision/Viacom signed, but with this kind of deal, both sides usually have to give and take. Activision had to deal with the cost to buy the rights to Star Trek games, and has to deal with Viacom more or less micromanaging projects so that it sticks with the Trek "rules." The converse of this is that if the contract was written up as a partnership arrangement, then something would have to be done to assure Activision that it was worth the effort of the licence, most likely a clause stating that Viacom would make an effort to churn out ideas for Trek that would provide a foundation for Activsion to make games based off of it.
Now, if this is the case(and it's a big if), then Viacom might very well be in violation of their contract. While I think Enterprise is a good series, as game material it sucks, the beginning of human exploration lacks ships, characters, colonies, and other things that lay the foundation for a game. I imagine however that Viacom will take the easy exit, pay Activision off, and possibly void the contract.
After thinking about it, I don't think that a "fat suit" would work. When the person goes through the scanner, the image generated will not be of the proper shapes for a human(if it were built like a wool jacket, for example), so it would be relitively easy to tell when another search method is needed. A thin layer of skin-tight clothing might change that a bit, but skin tight means that anything on you protrudes, which also looks odd. Overall, it can be done, but I'd imagine that it would be next to impossible to pull off.
Actually, in the DVD version, one of the extras mentioned that they used real GPL code in scenes where they showed code. So unless someone wasn't telling the truth on their end, you wouldn't have been seeing something like that in the movie.
Sorry to go slightly off-topic here, but the MacHack guys are not doing anyone a favor by creating GLCheat for OS X. As a Windows gamer, we already have to deal with enough problems of people using such cheats in games(CS comes to mind first and foremost), so it's not very pleasing to see that now the Mac guys have to worry about such cheating going on in their games either(while Q3, Jedi Knight, etc are multi-platform, OS X still has games that are platform locked, and up until now, GLCheat free). Some of the hacks turned out are indeed impressive, but please hack responsibly guys; GLCheat is not doing anyone any favors.
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The only way that companies are really going to make big money off open-source is to in a sense, drop open source. As long as they can sell something that can't be given away(such as the Finder in OS X), there's money to be made. Otherwise, they'll sell support contracts here and there, but no company is going to make it in to the "big time" with just support; even IBM has other buisnesses.
mDNS is nice, I won't deny that, but it's not quite ready for prime-time yet. The biggest issue with mDNS so far is that services using it don't do queries against the remote device in the way AppleTalk did, so for example, a printer set up via mDNS will not tell the computer what configuration options it has(RAM, trays, etc), whereas a Mac doing AppleTalk would get that sort of information from the printer, so those extra settings have to be put in by the user. Along the same lines, at least with HP's current printers, they have a hard-wired mDNS name based off the printer model and MAC address(I think), whereas the AppleTalk name for the HP printer can be changed to whatever you like. Lastly, mDNS still has some perceived speed issues, as it seems to take just a bit longer to get a list of devices from mDNS, whereas AppleTalk was almost instantaneous on an up-to-date network.
This of course can all change in time, if companies are willing to go through the effort. HP could make their printers re-namable, HP/Apple could take care of the information queries, and Apple could probably speed things up by not having OS X simultaneously do an AppleTalk, mDNS, and straight IP-range scan in the server browser. mDNS will be the ultimate successor of AppleTalk, and do it just as well, but at this point, it still needs a bit more time to mature. It should be interesting to see how 10.3 changes things.
Why "heart", of course.
That is all true, but the difference between "real" money and "digital" money is that with digital money, you're going to end up with "perfect" money; no flaws, nothing to track, just 1's and 0's. Real money has ink, paper, and numerous physical traits to identify it, making a "perfect" copy nearly impossible, digitial money is as simple as figuring out what the ATM told the smart card to make it say it had more money.
Frankly, smart cards shouldn't be on that list, as the intended use(storing money on the card) has not been perfected against people hacking the card for more money. Smart cards trust the "client", and as any MMORPG developer can tell you, that's a bad thing. Paper money and credit cards at least have some protection, smart cards on the other hand are a relitively easy fraud source for anyone with a card writer, and the resources to use it; unlike any other method, you end up with a perfect "digital copy" of the money.
Think of it this way, a website is like a 1-800 number; you pay for the number, you pay every time someone uses it, and you have a finite number of people you can serve at once. Now, some people have reccomended dial-spamming SCO's 800 number, which is borderline illegal, since you're tying up their system, preventing real customers from contacting them, and costing them money at the same time; something that's sure to get law enforcement's attention sooner or later.
/. effect is that everyone who visits is a customer in a certain sense; they visited the site because they're interested in something that's on the site. This is the difference between going to the site for the "utility" provided by the site's content, and simply going to a site so that someone else can't.
The difference with the
While SCO and spammers are on the same level morally as far as I'm concerned, if you DDoS their site, you're doing the same thing as tying up someone's 800 number; and that's just something that's "not cool" and quite possibly not legal.
It hasn't exactly moved, it's only being shown on more channels. It'll be back on CTN tomorrow, at a new time-slot of 11:30pm, with Family Guy moving to 11.
FYI, you can force the AirPort Extreme base station to run in pure 802.11g, mixed mode, or pure 802.11b, so when in pure g mode, you can ensure to a large extent that you won't be losing bandwidth to b clients.
This isn't redundant, it's a very worthwhile date to note. 10 years ago Second Reality completely changed the PC world for the better.
In theory, every USB key will contain a different DES key, so that even if you had a new USB key, you still wouldn't be able to get at the data on the drive.
For the love of Mike, most Slashdot readers here are geeks; they build their own machines, not buy machines bundled with Windows. All jokes/flames aside, just how many of you out there are actually using a machine that came with Windows, but you never used that copy?
Happy April Fools Day on that MacOpinion link...
As I understand it, only the Windows versions of WMP and Real Player support true DRM controls(such as what BuyMusic.com is using). If this is the case, then that would be why it's Windows specific, since other platforms wouldn't support the DRM used.
I can't help but feel that with programs like this, that we aren't in some way meddling with IT operations of an organization, when we shouldn't be. Obviously, what money is being spent on is a valid concern, and should be visible to every last citizen, but there's a fine line between looking, and touching.
/. geeks like to joke about Dilbert, PHBs, and other office-life quirks, but trying to embarrass or otherwise force the hand of IT managers seems like we're all becoming PHBs here. All jokes aside about the government, there are competent people in the IT sector, who have to make decisions for what's best for their agency, with the limited resources they have, much like most other IT professionals. Why should we force our ideals and preferences on to these managers and decision makers, when we would revolt at the same idea if done to us? Just because they're the government, do they need millions of people to micro-manage them from the outside?
I know as a crowd, we
The government should always be accountable for its actions, but the fact of the matter is that if we meddle too much, and don't let IT managers make the right decisions for their agencies, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot, and creating more problems than we started with.
It's "impossible" because it would, according to the article, require laying fiber, and no one in their right mind wants to lay cables if they can avoid it. Now, they could try it over their phone lines, but unfortunately, unless someone invents the Dense Wave Multiplexing of the DSL world, you're simply not going to get the 45Mb/sec speeds it requires from good ole' copper lines in such a spread out area, which then brings us back to fiber. The 45Mb/sec goal could be reached right now, but there's no one willing to bankroll that kind of infastructure upgrade.
With this exploit now out there(at least in theory anyway), I guess the question now becomes what can we expect from it. Assuming that a black-hat or someone else of an infamous nature figures out this exploit, what are the ramficiations that we can expect? Obviously, many routers are owned and run by compotent admins, but with all the Cisco routers out there, it's niaeve to believe that all of the routers will be fixed before someone exploits this. Given that, what does everyone suppose will happen to the internet as a whole? The core routers will most likely be fixed ASAP, but there's always the problem of the "oopps, I forgot that one" router. Will this exploit become the ever-lasting Code Red(in terms of network problems), or will its threat blow over just like Code Red?
There is one big difference worth noting, and that is that the Apple hole was a flaw in the screensaver subsystem, which required physical access to exploit(at which point, you should be remembering that a computer is done for if you have physical access anyhow). This flaw on the other hand is a remote exploit, which makes it far easier to exploit than a local exploit, and can be used at any time(versus only when the screensaver is on). I still think we're a bit hard on MS, but something like this should be patched ASAP, even a day is too late.
I'm primarily a Mac user here, but can someone please explain to me why the Linux equivilent of InstallShield(or VISE, or anything else like that) hasn't been created yet? While it isn't the best solution when you want to deal with versioning, dependancies, and top-notch security, it still seems silly that such a program isn't around, when it's obvious that most everbody that isn't tech-head wants such a program. Is there really such an evil reason that people can't have simple, easy to use installers on Linux?
PAE isn't a "real" solution like going to 64bits is; the processor is still 32bits, so it's doing paging tricks to get past the 4GB barrier. Those tricks work, but it has a very noticable speed penelty for doing so. One other thing to keep in mind right now is that just because the chip arcitecture supports 4bil^2 worth of memory, doesn't mean that current devices are designed to use it. That much memory is overkill, and designing a chipset/CPU at this point that can use that much is just as much overkill. Full 64bit memory addressing requires more logic, more transistors, and more traces to use, so it's not surprising that Apple/AMD aren't going the whole 64bits; they'll get there when they're ready.
I talked to one of Nvidia's audio engineers yesterday about this article(they were doing a presentation here at a local LAN party), and this is what he had to say about the nForce2's performance.
1. The only worse board they could have used to do the test is a Chaintech; the MSI is a very poor board in terms of audio design compared to the higher-end boards.
2. Nvidia's reference boards in the labs use some good SigmaTel codecs which are far superior to anything anyone else is using; so most(if not all) boards are of lower quality than what Nvidia intends.
Nvidia is supposedly going to get in contact with ExtremeTech soon, so it's highly possible that the article will be changed/ammended in the future. They aren't going to sit to the side and let the nForce get a bad rap.
You're forgetting the basic rule of network gaming though: never trust the client. If you rely on the client for anything, you're vulnerable.
It's more than a legitimate gripe, it may very well be that Activsion is in the right. Obviously, I haven't seen the contract Activision/Viacom signed, but with this kind of deal, both sides usually have to give and take. Activision had to deal with the cost to buy the rights to Star Trek games, and has to deal with Viacom more or less micromanaging projects so that it sticks with the Trek "rules." The converse of this is that if the contract was written up as a partnership arrangement, then something would have to be done to assure Activision that it was worth the effort of the licence, most likely a clause stating that Viacom would make an effort to churn out ideas for Trek that would provide a foundation for Activsion to make games based off of it.
Now, if this is the case(and it's a big if), then Viacom might very well be in violation of their contract. While I think Enterprise is a good series, as game material it sucks, the beginning of human exploration lacks ships, characters, colonies, and other things that lay the foundation for a game. I imagine however that Viacom will take the easy exit, pay Activision off, and possibly void the contract.
After thinking about it, I don't think that a "fat suit" would work. When the person goes through the scanner, the image generated will not be of the proper shapes for a human(if it were built like a wool jacket, for example), so it would be relitively easy to tell when another search method is needed. A thin layer of skin-tight clothing might change that a bit, but skin tight means that anything on you protrudes, which also looks odd. Overall, it can be done, but I'd imagine that it would be next to impossible to pull off.
Actually, in the DVD version, one of the extras mentioned that they used real GPL code in scenes where they showed code. So unless someone wasn't telling the truth on their end, you wouldn't have been seeing something like that in the movie.
Sorry to go slightly off-topic here, but the MacHack guys are not doing anyone a favor by creating GLCheat for OS X. As a Windows gamer, we already have to deal with enough problems of people using such cheats in games(CS comes to mind first and foremost), so it's not very pleasing to see that now the Mac guys have to worry about such cheating going on in their games either(while Q3, Jedi Knight, etc are multi-platform, OS X still has games that are platform locked, and up until now, GLCheat free). Some of the hacks turned out are indeed impressive, but please hack responsibly guys; GLCheat is not doing anyone any favors.