You don't need it - you want it. You want it to make the entire web experience better.
Nonense. Using javascript for any of the things the parent mentioned is regressive. Apart from the things the sibling posters have mentioned it can also break:
The back button.
Standard link coloring.
Usage by the visually impaired.
Spidering and automated analysis of all sorts.
Page access on limited devices such as PDA's and kiosks.
Portability.
Maintainability.
User interface responsiveness.
All this lost for zero improvement in functionality. Javascript has it's uses but using it to replace existing functionality is just evidence of a poor web designer.
Oh, and by the way, marketing drivel, what javascript is often used for, does not improve the "web experience". Many so-called web designers wouldn't know what a good web experience was if it jumped up and bit them.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
What is it about products that can be encoded digitally that some people think that their creators dont need to eat?
Grow up, child.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I've installed Linux on dozens of different hardware configurations, mostly Ubuntu recently but SuSe and RedHat also. The only hardware incompatibility trouble I've had were a single pcmcia wireless card that required ndiswrapper and default X11 installs that didn't use the full resolution/performance of the display until I manually configured it. That's it.
Everything from network cards to tv cards to sound cards to disks to scanners to mice to printers to usb devices to bluetooth to you name it just worked.
Any talk about widespread Linux hardware incompatibility now is exaggerated. There's some Linux incompatible hardware around, mostly special purpose devices, but it's uncommon now.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Well, for a company, or even a serious individual, $1.50 is peanuts.
Yes, but it's not $1.50. Don't know how they're organising it but it's likely to be $100 or more when you factor in the staff time and bureaucracy to make the payment.
Depending on context the convenience+cost difference between a free download and something costing 0.01c, or having any other paperwork, can be significant.
Bureaucrats often don't appreciate this, in part because a person's time has little value for them.
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Vista: A billion marketing words and no delivered product.
See sibling post re SIMD. In addition the innermost loop of most hash functions including SHA-1 are bit operations and can be loop unrolled and made expression-parallel to a certain extent, or be speed up with simple hardware to the GB/s range ie. IO limited. After that just hash each file on the disk separately but in parallel. Simple, but it works. Google probably hashes in parallel a lot.
If I truly did have a single huge file/message that I wanted a single hash of quickly I'd just split the file into separate blocks, hash those in parallel and then hash the resulting hashes together. I realize this isn't quite what you're saying but that's part of the reason I had the word "practical" in my post; if performance is an issue there is normally no reason why you can't just redefine the theoretical problem a little, but with no effect on the practical result, to allow large scale parallelism to be used to achieve the performance required.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
A dozen M$ programs, mostly written more than a decade ago, still costs the world $40,000,000,000+ per year with with most of the difficult bits, device drivers, written by third parties. The federal government alone is probably spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software per year. That's hardly "minimal".
The larger an organisation is the less buying off-the-shelf software makes sense. The federal government is one of the largest organisations around. Software development/adaptation costs are fixed and can be spread over all users. Per-seat licensing does not scale in the same way. Large organisations are usually being economically stupid when they pay for per-seat licensing. Yes, they get discounts and so-called "site licenses" (which are just per-seat licensing disguised), but not at a level even remotely reflecting the true cost of efficient development in a commodity market with no monopoly rent. The federal government could save substantial money by beefing up and adapting OO for it's needs, and, incidentally, help to create a more efficient, commodity software market which reflects the true costs of commodity software development. A commodity market for mass market software is long overdue.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No, that's a common fallacy; in fact, it's an intentionally constructed fallacy. Trusted in this context means that you have evidence to trust that the computer will behave in a specified way, particularly from the point of view of remote access. Normally when you connect to a computer remotely you have no way of knowing what it's doing. It could be essentially running any software at all. But if you connect to a Trusted Computer, it provides cryptographic evidence about its software configuration. Knowing what software it is running gives you grounds to know how it will behave; and to trust that behavior. That is the real meaning of Trusted Computing.
It may not be the "alliance"'s meaning but it's not a fallacy. TCM is nothing more than than ordinary crypto, but with the keys hidden in hardware so the owner can't get to them.
A TCM computer is not magic. It can be compromised just like a non-TCM computer using non-cryptographic protection mechanisms can be, by using software bugs, back doors etc. Crypto makes it harder but it's not going to magically fix the bugs. A computer could be made completely "trustworthy" (in the "alliance"'s sense) by not giving the owner the administrator password. TCM is just a new way of making sure the owner doesn't get the administrator password.
In addition you can only trust the computer if you have access to the keys. And you are sure nobody else has them.
Without those keys you have no evidence. Doesn't matter whether the keys are hidden by hardware or not.
Since the whole point of TCM is to not give the owner the keys by hiding them in the hardware his point stands; that is TCM is intrinsically designed to not trust the owner of the computer with the keys i.e. the administrator password. Untrusted computing in other words. Anything else is marketing spin.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Lying is not a crime. As long as they aren't promising anything in a sales contract, they can say whatever they like. If you want a promise, get it written in your contract. You are kidding yourself if you believe PR speak can be judged in a court of law.
It's certainly unethical. It's also called truth in advertising and people can go to jail if they break it too much. You're correct in that PR speak is not held to as high a standard as contracts but the standard is there. And as I've already stated the law is not as sophisticated as it should be in this area.
Some companies do a lot more than others in breaking the spirit but not the letter of the law. M$ had a head start in this area (Bill Gates' parents were law academics) and this is part of the reason why M$ has been doing it from it's earliest days. Unfortunately they set an ethical standard in the industry that many other companies are following in a race to the bottom.
Everyone should learn at school: Buyer beware.
Yes, caveat emptor applies but that is generally referring to selective truth telling and spin rather than outright lies and fraud. It also does not stop the law from blocking the more gross abuses such as safety, fitness for purpose, high pressure sales tactics etc. The law is a very blunt instrument with plenty of things being legal but unethical, occasionally even illegal but ethical. M$ as an organisation however continues to confuse being ethical with being legal.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Geometric parallelism. Assign a different part of the display (usually a horizontal stripe or interlaced picture) to different GPU's/VRAM's. Effectively, each GPU is working at a low display resolution.
SGI and "Evans and Sutherland" in their heyday used to do this when electronics wasn't as fast as it is now and even today there's consumer dual and quad GPU solutions. There's no major reason they couldn't scale beyond that if it became cost effective though it may be necessary to use a broadcast bus to get the data to each of the GPU's. A primitive alternative would be to run multiple PC's side by side each having the same world model but slightly different viewing direction to build up a higher resolution display. I've seen this done to get stereo.
Most 1st person 3D games are graphics limited but if the bottleneck did become the world model then assign different CPU's to different sets of objects in the world model. Remember that each CPU can have it's own copy of the world model with only the relatively low bandwidth data of world updates being broadcast to all the CPU's.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
It may be true that something can't be split up well automatically but pretty much any practical task can be parallelized to some degree manually.
Seriously, I challenge anybody here to name even one real-world CPU or IO intensive task that cannot be split up. Even things like encryption and compression can be pipelined and there are complicated mathematical and statistical tricks including speculative execution that can be applied as well.
It may not be cost effective to do the split but if money is no object some parallelism will almost always help. Yes, tasks can have chokepoints but these become irrelevant if you can parallelize the work before and after the chokepoint.
There are obscure mathematical exceptions, dependencies on external events and it may be hard to do with the tools being used but that's not what I'm talking about here.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
If this is just marketing talk then they're lying. That's fraud.
Some companies walk the walk. M$ just talks the talk.
It's a real shame that the legal system isn't sophisticated enough to deal with the likes of M$ well.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
You cannot endanger something as critical as your business processes on something like this.
As others have noted do your research. Every sales 'droid and their dog is going to tell you that their big expensive package will satisfy every need, can be implemented with only moderate effort and if you sign on the dotted line right now you'll save massive amounts of money, ignoring the fact that you'll save even more money and have much less risk by not buying the package in the first place. You simply can't trust much of the information you'll receive, including here.
I know you're looking for a silver bullet but they usually don't exist in the real world. Every business is different and big packaged software is likely to be only partially applicable.
Work out precisely what problems you're trying to solve e.g. not "improve business efficiency" but "reduce this task from 5 days to 2 days. Break those tasks into sub-tasks and work out what the delays and opportunities for quality improvement are. Start using toolkits, even things as generic as spreadsheets, task planning software and clocks, to analyse and solve each of those tasks/problems. Benchmark yourself and analyse as you go. Buy special purpose packages with generic, open interfaces when you find a specific need for them. You'll learn heaps, have ISO "continuous process improvement" in place, can adapt as you go and will know early whether the goals you had for this business process migration are being reached. You'll need senior management buyin for this but in the long run it's worth it.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
I'm a little surprised Sony is attempting to manipulate the market with deposits etc. The people buying/selling on ebay are just responding to the demand.
Sony should respond to the demand also.
The initial release could be the premium early adopter platinum-gold-kryptonite edition with genuine plastic trim and ultrablack controller, with free HDTV TV, games, Sony Pictures DVD's and movie passes included for only $1500. They can then release progressively lower priced versions with less freebies until they get to their long term price point. This way the both the early adopters willing to pay lots of money get a premimum package and the warm fuzzies and minimal price gouging and the late adopters get it at the price point they prefer also. And the middlemen are left out in the cold. Sony could even do this with date limited vouchers and/or contest entries so that retailer stocking isn't affected and they can change direction quickly if necessary.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
False assumption. You assume without justification they own every copy and therefore they get to control it. The point is, why do they get to decide what I do with my copy? I have it, I decide. They can decide what they do with their copy. Copyright is a government granted privilege, not a right, despite the name and that law is currently disadvantaging millions.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Fair enough. I see from your other posts you've already done most of my suggestions on the original site.
Maybe you're simply seeing the statistical outliers in your forums. If you have a large volume of users over a normal curve of abilities it's a statistical certainty you're going to get a few people who are a children, of lower than average mental ability, drunk and/or high on drugs, sleep deprived, distracted by the TV/spouse/kids/etc., having a momentary lapse, non-native English speaker, inexperienced, color-blind (red-green/blue-yellow) and can't see icons obvious to you, unusual thought processes (e.g. comes from a technical field where "download" has a completely different meaning), in a foul mood and not thinking straight, wanting to establish human contact and/or insure there is live support available before investing time in the software etc. etc.
People are human and even the most intelligent make mistakes. To call all those I've listed stupid (with the exception of "lower than average mental ability") is not correct.
I think one of the reasons you've pushed a few people's buttons is that it is a common error for programmers to regard these outliers as the "typical user" because they are the most visible squeaky wheels. "Stupid users" are also often used as an excuse by programmers to cover up their own shortcomings. I'm not saying that's the case here, just the reason why some people are wondering what's happening.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
If you're referring to the autopackage website I think I know why you're getting those questions.
There's more than a dozen hyperlinks on the main page. None of them say "Download".
Okay. I'll go to the "Help & Support" section. None of the links there say "Download" either.
What's left on the main page that seems vaguely relevant? "Packages; various packages"? I don't want various alternative packages, I want autopackage.
Okay, I'll check the FAQ link on the main page. Do a search for the word "Download"; nothing relevant.
This is stupid, I'll ask in "Forums".
You broke a very common standard when you called your download section "Packages; Various packages". Fix it by changing the word "Packages; Various packages" to "Downloads; autopackage" on the main page so the hyperlink is both standard and has the same name as what it is referring to. People aren't mind readers and they have no way of knowing that a link titled "Packages; Various packages" points to a web page titled "Downloads". You could also make that link more prominent (Different color or top-left corner?) because that's what most people visiting your website for the first time probably want to do.
When you design a web page or a program you need to get into the mind of your intended audiences. Don't assume they know what you do, don't assume they're mind readers and do remember there's a first time for everybody with everything. Standards are one way to to reduce error rates by making sure it's less of a "first time". Also add redundancy so that different members of your intended audience using different thought processes will still get to the right place in the end. e.g. By putting links to the download section in the Help&Support and FAQ sections.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
>But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies
Correct. But you can go round in circles on this one - the only reason said data exists is because there is a legal framework to encourage it.
No, one of the reasons the said data exists is because a legal framework may encourage it. Copyright/patent proponents handwave all the time about they are "essential", however the evidence for it being necessary, except in specific, narrow circumstances, is weak.
e.g. It's probably unnecessary in pretty much the entire music industry now, though no doubt assorted hangers-on would disagree. That's because music does not require a huge investment and many create music without financial reward, though you can invest a lot in marketing and distribution if you're a dinosaur. I suspect that there would be a net benefit to society to drop or drastically reduce copyright on music and lyrics.
A rule of thumb for me is that if an industry is spending a significant percentage of income on marketing then that's an indication of at least an inefficient, wasteful market and maybe even market failure. A market that needs to be fixed with improved, not necessarily more, law.
>If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow
Which is pretty much where patent law entered the picture, I believe (not to stop competitors doing things but to encourage companies to 'open' their inventions to secondary manufacture).
Not sure of the relevance of your point here. Secondary manufacture is still a monopoly.
>Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also.
I think the Victorians got that one quite right. Of course with housing there is still a distinction between copying someone's style (a non-patentable idea), and re-using their blueprint (copyright).
True, and that seems to be a distinction that works in practice in that industry.
>Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use
>copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please.
Well seeing as the hypothetical in this case is a GTA style game and a flight simulator, I think the benefit is pretty small, compared to the human genome. Of course the problem there was the ridiculous notion that you could patent information, rather than just have copyright over an instance of that information.
True.
>One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost .
Not quite - once the cost of collection had been paid off, it's a sunk cost.
No, "paying off" has no effect on the sunk cost. A rational actor will not use the price they paid at all when deciding what price to sell something. The sell price should be chosen to maximize income whatever the buy price was. Profitable businesses certainly plan to make sure their sell price is higher than their buy price but once they've bought that plan is moot, and can lead to businesses selling at a loss to free up inventory.
If you're MS or Oracle of course you can afford to write it off, but for many smaller firms the first few months will be spent paying back their investors. I'd agree with the overall idea that once something has recovered it's cost, and a certain time period has elapsed, it should move into the public domain at a faster rate than it does now - but it would be very hard to measure, especially without putting even more money into the pockets of accountants and lawyers.
Identifying developers is not the same as identifying infringement, whatever they testify. Nobody is going to admit to copying in court, that is self-incriminate, unless they're forced to.
Comparing source for simularity, and using some commonsense about what constitutes simularity, is really the only way to verify whether something is copied.
Just look at the current SCO circus to see how complicated this "he said/she said" argument can get.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
You're exaggerating. I've never read a GIMP tutorial. To draw a straight line the online help ("Draw a straight line") gives the key piece of information (use the Shift key) in seconds. Once you know that it's easy, extends intuitively to the other paint tools and is a heads up that GIMP uses the modifier keys with the mouse. A few seconds experimenting and I know how to bring up the context menu, how to pan the image, how to move the window and a way to get a new pen color. A few seconds more experimenting and I know how to draw patterns and fill. I haven't bothered with doing more but I'm sure I could via the online help.
I've never used any of the GIMP paint tools before (I've mainly used it for photo cropping and resizing) however getting up to speed on the basic drawing functions takes a minute or two only. For something you're likely to be using for hours that's a reasonable investment in time.
There's always room for improvement but most of the complaints here are by people who are just hand waving.
I have no connection with the GIMP project other than as a satisfied user.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I didn't quite mean it in the sense of suffocation! More in the sense of making sure your competitors have to work to keep up, rather than benefit without making an effort.
Fair enough however the government does not and should not be caring about that, except indirectly.
But the main point - in context - was that I won't give your flight sim company my data just because I've already made $20 million and won't lose anything by giving it to you. Even if there was 0% chance of competition (and both being games companies that's unlikely) I'm still not likely to do it unless there is something in it for me. (Maybe there is - publicity at the simplest level).
But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies. And the only reason the government has created the copyright law/privilege is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings". If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow it. e.g. Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also.
Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please.
One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost. Any competitor collecting the same data has to contend with the fact that there's no differentiation (i.e. a commodity market) and the incumbent can price their data at whatever they like, right down to zero. This creates a potential entry barrier equal to almost the total cost of acquiring the data anew. Effectively any vendors in such a market have to be allowed to engage in price fixing for it to work. And then it isn't a free market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If the reader software currently has many vulnerabilities, no matter how obvious it might seem in hindsight, this seems like valuable research to me.
No hindsight required. Any programmer not validating input, particularly from an untrusted source, is simply incompetent.
This isn't "research" as such, merely exposure of incompetents.
The fact that RFID is the vector is irrelevant. Though if the programmers and testers were this incompetent with something as simple as RFID data I hate to think how badly they'd mess up something "complicated", like configuring basic database security, or actually complicated, like software security that can deal with malicious staff.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You're painting an overly simplistic picture of business if you think that it's just about how much money you can make - it's also always about denying your competitors air.
And that is largely what good law attempts to stop. So that the net good of society is maximized.
Unethical businesses do try to push to legal envelope to maximize there competitive advantage however.
A business can compete positively by making a better product or lowering their prices. Making their product a better value proposition in other words.
A business can compete negatively by bringing down or restricting their competitors or their customers. Making the competitor's product a worse value proposition in other words.
Ways to compete negatively include abusing a competitor's trademark, engaging in a protection racket, abusing monopoly power, selling an unsafe product, misrepresentation and fraudulent marketing, physically harming the competitor, bribing officials etc. etc. All of these things do nothing to improve the value of the product and are also illegal.
The law is a blunt instrument and there are still plenty of ways to block a positive-competitive free market, particularly in technology markets where the law is behind. Hopefully the law will eventually catch up and stop the worst excesses.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need it - you want it. You want it to make the entire web experience better.
Nonense. Using javascript for any of the things the parent mentioned is regressive. Apart from the things the sibling posters have mentioned it can also break:
All this lost for zero improvement in functionality. Javascript has it's uses but using it to replace existing functionality is just evidence of a poor web designer.
Oh, and by the way, marketing drivel, what javascript is often used for, does not improve the "web experience". Many so-called web designers wouldn't know what a good web experience was if it jumped up and bit them.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
What is it about products that can be encoded digitally that some people think that their creators dont need to eat?
Grow up, child.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You're exaggerating or you've just had bad luck.
I've installed Linux on dozens of different hardware configurations, mostly Ubuntu recently but SuSe and RedHat also. The only hardware incompatibility trouble I've had were a single pcmcia wireless card that required ndiswrapper and default X11 installs that didn't use the full resolution/performance of the display until I manually configured it. That's it.
Everything from network cards to tv cards to sound cards to disks to scanners to mice to printers to usb devices to bluetooth to you name it just worked.
Any talk about widespread Linux hardware incompatibility now is exaggerated. There's some Linux incompatible hardware around, mostly special purpose devices, but it's uncommon now.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Well, for a company, or even a serious individual, $1.50 is peanuts.
Yes, but it's not $1.50. Don't know how they're organising it but it's likely to be $100 or more when you factor in the staff time and bureaucracy to make the payment.
Depending on context the convenience+cost difference between a free download and something costing 0.01c, or having any other paperwork, can be significant.
Bureaucrats often don't appreciate this, in part because a person's time has little value for them.
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Vista: A billion marketing words and no delivered product.
See sibling post re SIMD. In addition the innermost loop of most hash functions including SHA-1 are bit operations and can be loop unrolled and made expression-parallel to a certain extent, or be speed up with simple hardware to the GB/s range ie. IO limited. After that just hash each file on the disk separately but in parallel. Simple, but it works. Google probably hashes in parallel a lot.
If I truly did have a single huge file/message that I wanted a single hash of quickly I'd just split the file into separate blocks, hash those in parallel and then hash the resulting hashes together. I realize this isn't quite what you're saying but that's part of the reason I had the word "practical" in my post; if performance is an issue there is normally no reason why you can't just redefine the theoretical problem a little, but with no effect on the practical result, to allow large scale parallelism to be used to achieve the performance required.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
A dozen M$ programs, mostly written more than a decade ago, still costs the world $40,000,000,000+ per year with with most of the difficult bits, device drivers, written by third parties. The federal government alone is probably spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software per year. That's hardly "minimal".
The larger an organisation is the less buying off-the-shelf software makes sense. The federal government is one of the largest organisations around. Software development/adaptation costs are fixed and can be spread over all users. Per-seat licensing does not scale in the same way. Large organisations are usually being economically stupid when they pay for per-seat licensing. Yes, they get discounts and so-called "site licenses" (which are just per-seat licensing disguised), but not at a level even remotely reflecting the true cost of efficient development in a commodity market with no monopoly rent. The federal government could save substantial money by beefing up and adapting OO for it's needs, and, incidentally, help to create a more efficient, commodity software market which reflects the true costs of commodity software development. A commodity market for mass market software is long overdue.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No, that's a common fallacy; in fact, it's an intentionally constructed fallacy. Trusted in this context means that you have evidence to trust that the computer will behave in a specified way, particularly from the point of view of remote access. Normally when you connect to a computer remotely you have no way of knowing what it's doing. It could be essentially running any software at all. But if you connect to a Trusted Computer, it provides cryptographic evidence about its software configuration. Knowing what software it is running gives you grounds to know how it will behave; and to trust that behavior. That is the real meaning of Trusted Computing.
It may not be the "alliance"'s meaning but it's not a fallacy. TCM is nothing more than than ordinary crypto, but with the keys hidden in hardware so the owner can't get to them.
A TCM computer is not magic. It can be compromised just like a non-TCM computer using non-cryptographic protection mechanisms can be, by using software bugs, back doors etc. Crypto makes it harder but it's not going to magically fix the bugs. A computer could be made completely "trustworthy" (in the "alliance"'s sense) by not giving the owner the administrator password. TCM is just a new way of making sure the owner doesn't get the administrator password.
In addition you can only trust the computer if you have access to the keys. And you are sure nobody else has them.
Without those keys you have no evidence. Doesn't matter whether the keys are hidden by hardware or not.
Since the whole point of TCM is to not give the owner the keys by hiding them in the hardware his point stands; that is TCM is intrinsically designed to not trust the owner of the computer with the keys i.e. the administrator password. Untrusted computing in other words. Anything else is marketing spin.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Lying is not a crime. As long as they aren't promising anything in a sales contract, they can say whatever they like. If you want a promise, get it written in your contract. You are kidding yourself if you believe PR speak can be judged in a court of law.
It's certainly unethical. It's also called truth in advertising and people can go to jail if they break it too much. You're correct in that PR speak is not held to as high a standard as contracts but the standard is there. And as I've already stated the law is not as sophisticated as it should be in this area.
Some companies do a lot more than others in breaking the spirit but not the letter of the law. M$ had a head start in this area (Bill Gates' parents were law academics) and this is part of the reason why M$ has been doing it from it's earliest days. Unfortunately they set an ethical standard in the industry that many other companies are following in a race to the bottom.
Everyone should learn at school: Buyer beware.
Yes, caveat emptor applies but that is generally referring to selective truth telling and spin rather than outright lies and fraud. It also does not stop the law from blocking the more gross abuses such as safety, fitness for purpose, high pressure sales tactics etc. The law is a very blunt instrument with plenty of things being legal but unethical, occasionally even illegal but ethical. M$ as an organisation however continues to confuse being ethical with being legal.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Geometric parallelism. Assign a different part of the display (usually a horizontal stripe or interlaced picture) to different GPU's/VRAM's. Effectively, each GPU is working at a low display resolution.
SGI and "Evans and Sutherland" in their heyday used to do this when electronics wasn't as fast as it is now and even today there's consumer dual and quad GPU solutions. There's no major reason they couldn't scale beyond that if it became cost effective though it may be necessary to use a broadcast bus to get the data to each of the GPU's. A primitive alternative would be to run multiple PC's side by side each having the same world model but slightly different viewing direction to build up a higher resolution display. I've seen this done to get stereo.
Most 1st person 3D games are graphics limited but if the bottleneck did become the world model then assign different CPU's to different sets of objects in the world model. Remember that each CPU can have it's own copy of the world model with only the relatively low bandwidth data of world updates being broadcast to all the CPU's.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
certain tasks simply cannot be split up.
That's a popular idea. It's almost always wrong.
It may be true that something can't be split up well automatically but pretty much any practical task can be parallelized to some degree manually.
Seriously, I challenge anybody here to name even one real-world CPU or IO intensive task that cannot be split up. Even things like encryption and compression can be pipelined and there are complicated mathematical and statistical tricks including speculative execution that can be applied as well.
It may not be cost effective to do the split but if money is no object some parallelism will almost always help. Yes, tasks can have chokepoints but these become irrelevant if you can parallelize the work before and after the chokepoint.
There are obscure mathematical exceptions, dependencies on external events and it may be hard to do with the tools being used but that's not what I'm talking about here.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
If this is just marketing talk then they're lying. That's fraud.
Some companies walk the walk. M$ just talks the talk.
It's a real shame that the legal system isn't sophisticated enough to deal with the likes of M$ well.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
You cannot endanger something as critical as your business processes on something like this.
As others have noted do your research. Every sales 'droid and their dog is going to tell you that their big expensive package will satisfy every need, can be implemented with only moderate effort and if you sign on the dotted line right now you'll save massive amounts of money, ignoring the fact that you'll save even more money and have much less risk by not buying the package in the first place. You simply can't trust much of the information you'll receive, including here.
I know you're looking for a silver bullet but they usually don't exist in the real world. Every business is different and big packaged software is likely to be only partially applicable.
Work out precisely what problems you're trying to solve e.g. not "improve business efficiency" but "reduce this task from 5 days to 2 days. Break those tasks into sub-tasks and work out what the delays and opportunities for quality improvement are. Start using toolkits, even things as generic as spreadsheets, task planning software and clocks, to analyse and solve each of those tasks/problems. Benchmark yourself and analyse as you go. Buy special purpose packages with generic, open interfaces when you find a specific need for them. You'll learn heaps, have ISO "continuous process improvement" in place, can adapt as you go and will know early whether the goals you had for this business process migration are being reached. You'll need senior management buyin for this but in the long run it's worth it.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Id didn't assume anything. You assumed without justification that controlling every copy is the same as normal property rights. It isn't.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Kudos Microsoft;)
Guilty until proven innocent, your software did nothing but fail to fail and you're saying kudos? What warped M$ marketing reality do you live in?
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
I'm a little surprised Sony is attempting to manipulate the market with deposits etc. The people buying/selling on ebay are just responding to the demand.
Sony should respond to the demand also.
The initial release could be the premium early adopter platinum-gold-kryptonite edition with genuine plastic trim and ultrablack controller, with free HDTV TV, games, Sony Pictures DVD's and movie passes included for only $1500. They can then release progressively lower priced versions with less freebies until they get to their long term price point. This way the both the early adopters willing to pay lots of money get a premimum package and the warm fuzzies and minimal price gouging and the late adopters get it at the price point they prefer also. And the middlemen are left out in the cold. Sony could even do this with date limited vouchers and/or contest entries so that retailer stocking isn't affected and they can change direction quickly if necessary.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
False assumption. You assume without justification they own every copy and therefore they get to control it. The point is, why do they get to decide what I do with my copy? I have it, I decide. They can decide what they do with their copy. Copyright is a government granted privilege, not a right, despite the name and that law is currently disadvantaging millions.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Fair enough. I see from your other posts you've already done most of my suggestions on the original site.
Maybe you're simply seeing the statistical outliers in your forums. If you have a large volume of users over a normal curve of abilities it's a statistical certainty you're going to get a few people who are a children, of lower than average mental ability, drunk and/or high on drugs, sleep deprived, distracted by the TV/spouse/kids/etc., having a momentary lapse, non-native English speaker, inexperienced, color-blind (red-green/blue-yellow) and can't see icons obvious to you, unusual thought processes (e.g. comes from a technical field where "download" has a completely different meaning), in a foul mood and not thinking straight, wanting to establish human contact and/or insure there is live support available before investing time in the software etc. etc.
People are human and even the most intelligent make mistakes. To call all those I've listed stupid (with the exception of "lower than average mental ability") is not correct.
I think one of the reasons you've pushed a few people's buttons is that it is a common error for programmers to regard these outliers as the "typical user" because they are the most visible squeaky wheels. "Stupid users" are also often used as an excuse by programmers to cover up their own shortcomings. I'm not saying that's the case here, just the reason why some people are wondering what's happening.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
If you're referring to the autopackage website I think I know why you're getting those questions.
There's more than a dozen hyperlinks on the main page. None of them say "Download".
Okay. I'll go to the "Help & Support" section. None of the links there say "Download" either.
What's left on the main page that seems vaguely relevant? "Packages; various packages"? I don't want various alternative packages, I want autopackage.
Okay, I'll check the FAQ link on the main page. Do a search for the word "Download"; nothing relevant.
This is stupid, I'll ask in "Forums".
You broke a very common standard when you called your download section "Packages; Various packages". Fix it by changing the word "Packages; Various packages" to "Downloads; autopackage" on the main page so the hyperlink is both standard and has the same name as what it is referring to. People aren't mind readers and they have no way of knowing that a link titled "Packages; Various packages" points to a web page titled "Downloads". You could also make that link more prominent (Different color or top-left corner?) because that's what most people visiting your website for the first time probably want to do.
When you design a web page or a program you need to get into the mind of your intended audiences. Don't assume they know what you do, don't assume they're mind readers and do remember there's a first time for everybody with everything. Standards are one way to to reduce error rates by making sure it's less of a "first time". Also add redundancy so that different members of your intended audience using different thought processes will still get to the right place in the end. e.g. By putting links to the download section in the Help&Support and FAQ sections.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
>But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies
Correct. But you can go round in circles on this one - the only reason said data exists is because there is a legal framework to encourage it.
No, one of the reasons the said data exists is because a legal framework may encourage it. Copyright/patent proponents handwave all the time about they are "essential", however the evidence for it being necessary, except in specific, narrow circumstances, is weak.
e.g. It's probably unnecessary in pretty much the entire music industry now, though no doubt assorted hangers-on would disagree. That's because music does not require a huge investment and many create music without financial reward, though you can invest a lot in marketing and distribution if you're a dinosaur. I suspect that there would be a net benefit to society to drop or drastically reduce copyright on music and lyrics.
A rule of thumb for me is that if an industry is spending a significant percentage of income on marketing then that's an indication of at least an inefficient, wasteful market and maybe even market failure. A market that needs to be fixed with improved, not necessarily more, law.
>If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow
Which is pretty much where patent law entered the picture, I believe (not to stop competitors doing things but to encourage companies to 'open' their inventions to secondary manufacture).
Not sure of the relevance of your point here. Secondary manufacture is still a monopoly.
>Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also.
I think the Victorians got that one quite right. Of course with housing there is still a distinction between copying someone's style (a non-patentable idea), and re-using their blueprint (copyright).
True, and that seems to be a distinction that works in practice in that industry.
>Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use
>copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please. Well seeing as the hypothetical in this case is a GTA style game and a flight simulator, I think the benefit is pretty small, compared to the human genome. Of course the problem there was the ridiculous notion that you could patent information, rather than just have copyright over an instance of that information.
True.
>One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost
. Not quite - once the cost of collection had been paid off, it's a sunk cost.
No, "paying off" has no effect on the sunk cost. A rational actor will not use the price they paid at all when deciding what price to sell something. The sell price should be chosen to maximize income whatever the buy price was. Profitable businesses certainly plan to make sure their sell price is higher than their buy price but once they've bought that plan is moot, and can lead to businesses selling at a loss to free up inventory.
If you're MS or Oracle of course you can afford to write it off, but for many smaller firms the first few months will be spent paying back their investors. I'd agree with the overall idea that once something has recovered it's cost, and a certain time period has elapsed, it should move into the public domain at a faster rate than it does now - but it would be very hard to measure, especially without putting even more money into the pockets of accountants and lawyers.
Since the investors are ra
Will he come out and testify?
Identifying developers is not the same as identifying infringement, whatever they testify. Nobody is going to admit to copying in court, that is self-incriminate, unless they're forced to.
Comparing source for simularity, and using some commonsense about what constitutes simularity, is really the only way to verify whether something is copied.
Just look at the current SCO circus to see how complicated this "he said/she said" argument can get.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
You're exaggerating. I've never read a GIMP tutorial. To draw a straight line the online help ("Draw a straight line") gives the key piece of information (use the Shift key) in seconds. Once you know that it's easy, extends intuitively to the other paint tools and is a heads up that GIMP uses the modifier keys with the mouse. A few seconds experimenting and I know how to bring up the context menu, how to pan the image, how to move the window and a way to get a new pen color. A few seconds more experimenting and I know how to draw patterns and fill. I haven't bothered with doing more but I'm sure I could via the online help.
I've never used any of the GIMP paint tools before (I've mainly used it for photo cropping and resizing) however getting up to speed on the basic drawing functions takes a minute or two only. For something you're likely to be using for hours that's a reasonable investment in time.
There's always room for improvement but most of the complaints here are by people who are just hand waving.
I have no connection with the GIMP project other than as a satisfied user.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I didn't quite mean it in the sense of suffocation! More in the sense of making sure your competitors have to work to keep up, rather than benefit without making an effort.
Fair enough however the government does not and should not be caring about that, except indirectly.
But the main point - in context - was that I won't give your flight sim company my data just because I've already made $20 million and won't lose anything by giving it to you. Even if there was 0% chance of competition (and both being games companies that's unlikely) I'm still not likely to do it unless there is something in it for me. (Maybe there is - publicity at the simplest level).
But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies. And the only reason the government has created the copyright law/privilege is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings". If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow it. e.g. Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also.
Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please.
One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost. Any competitor collecting the same data has to contend with the fact that there's no differentiation (i.e. a commodity market) and the incumbent can price their data at whatever they like, right down to zero. This creates a potential entry barrier equal to almost the total cost of acquiring the data anew. Effectively any vendors in such a market have to be allowed to engage in price fixing for it to work. And then it isn't a free market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If the reader software currently has many vulnerabilities, no matter how obvious it might seem in hindsight, this seems like valuable research to me.
No hindsight required. Any programmer not validating input, particularly from an untrusted source, is simply incompetent.
This isn't "research" as such, merely exposure of incompetents.
The fact that RFID is the vector is irrelevant. Though if the programmers and testers were this incompetent with something as simple as RFID data I hate to think how badly they'd mess up something "complicated", like configuring basic database security, or actually complicated, like software security that can deal with malicious staff.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You're painting an overly simplistic picture of business if you think that it's just about how much money you can make - it's also always about denying your competitors air.
And that is largely what good law attempts to stop. So that the net good of society is maximized.
Unethical businesses do try to push to legal envelope to maximize there competitive advantage however.
A business can compete positively by making a better product or lowering their prices. Making their product a better value proposition in other words.
A business can compete negatively by bringing down or restricting their competitors or their customers. Making the competitor's product a worse value proposition in other words.
Ways to compete negatively include abusing a competitor's trademark, engaging in a protection racket, abusing monopoly power, selling an unsafe product, misrepresentation and fraudulent marketing, physically harming the competitor, bribing officials etc. etc. All of these things do nothing to improve the value of the product and are also illegal.
The law is a blunt instrument and there are still plenty of ways to block a positive-competitive free market, particularly in technology markets where the law is behind. Hopefully the law will eventually catch up and stop the worst excesses.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
No bothersome "geninue advantage" type crap necessary (yet).
Only a matter of time. They're currently "boiling the frog" with DRM.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.