No, Windows and Office are the two (the only two) divisions that make money. Their financial breakdown is reported in lots of places, for example :
For the period ended September 30th, the two cash cows of Client (i.e. Windows) and Information Worker (Office) produced operating income of $2.48 billion on revenue of $2.89 billion, and $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion respectively.
MSN lost $97 million on $531 million, CE/Mobility was out $33 million on $17 million revenues (always a good trick, this kind of stuff), and the home of Xbox, Home Entertainment, dropped $177 million on revenues of $505 million. Business Solutions, which includes Navision and Great Plains, and is a sector Microsoft hopes will contribute great things in the future, lost $68 million on $107 million.
There are lots of other ways that don't require a 'stolen' key from Xing. From the mplayer manual:
DVD authentication. The authentication and decryption method of the new-style DVD support is done using a patched libdvdcss (see above). The method can be specified through the environment variable DVDCSS_METHOD, which can be set to key, disk or title.
If nothing is specified it tries the following methods (default: key, title request):
bus key: This key is negotiated during authentication (a long mix of ioctls and various key exchanges, crypto stuff) and is used to encrypt the title and disk keys before sending them over the unprotected bus (to prevent eavesdropping). The bus key is needed to get and predecrypt the crypted disk key.
cached key: MPlayer looks for already cracked title keys which are stored in the ~/.mplayer/DVDKeys directory (fast;).
key: If no cached key is available, MPlayer tries to decrypt the disk key with a set of included player keys.
disk: If the key method fails (e.g. no included player keys), MPlayer will crack the disk key using a brute force algorithm. This process is CPU intensive and requires 64 MB of memory (16M 32Bit entries hash table) to store temporary data. This method should always work (slow).
title request: With the disk key MPlayer requests the crypted title keys, which are inside hidden sectors using ioctl(). The region protection of RPC-2 drives is performed in this step and may fail on such drives. If it succeeds, the title keys will be decrypted with the bus and disk key.
title: This method is used if the title request failed and does not rely on any key exchange with the DVD drive. It uses a crypto attack to guess the title key directly (by finding a repeating pattern in the decrypted VOB content and guessing that the plain text corresponding to the first encrypted bytes is a continuation of that pattern). The method is also known as "known plaintext attack" or "DeCSSPlus". In rare cases this may fail because there is not enough encrypted data on the disk to perform a statistical attack or because the key changes in the middle of a title. This method is the only way to decrypt a DVD stored on a hard disk or a DVD with the wrong region on an RPC2 drive (slow).
Sure, there are some laws that have the effect of restricting what you can do with your own property. You cannot shoot someone, you cannot cause an explosion, you cannot violate copyright etc etc etc. But these are not part of property law. You do not need to sign a contract agreement when you buy a gun that says "I hereby certify that I will not use this Smith & Wesson (TM) to kill someone". You do not need to sign a contract when you buy a book saying that you will not distribute photocopies of it.
On the other hand, the license provisions of CSS mean that it is illegal to decrypt it even if no other laws would be broken in doing so. That is what everyone finds to egritous about the DMCA. Copyright infringement was already against the law. The only purpose of the DMCA was to remove property rights on stuff that you own (or thought you owned...)
I think you are overestimating how hard it would be to make a car from scratch. Ok, completely from scratch would be hard, but then that is a stupid proposition anyway (what tools to do use to make the tools you need to make the tools..... to make the lathe... to smelter the aluminium.....)
But making a car by assembling off-the-shelf parts, or even parts you make yourself with a lathe and so on, would not be so difficult for a good mechanic, it would just take a while. Probably of similar complexity to writing an operating system, starting from a C compiler.
On the other hand, the code to descramble CSS is a few lines of perl. Probably any first year comp sci student could write the program, if they had a good description of the algorithm.
Finally, I think there is a big difference conceptually between something that is hard to do and something that is illegal. For example, I accept that making a car from scratch may be difficult to do, and for me at least (not being a mechanic or engineer) essentially impossible. But I would have a big problem with a law that said "it shall be illegal for a citizen to build a car".
have been fighting tooth and nail to get it into various distros.
possibly they have had to fight so hard because it is crap. The free players (eg mplayer) are *much* better. The point is not whether free or non-free players exist. The point is WHY are there legal issues in creating a free player, and what purpose do those legal restrictions serve?
Until you answer that, you are really just trolling.
I think the point is, the algorithm for breaking CSS is so widely known and has been refined to the point that it is simply a few lines of perl, but these few lines of perl are illegal. Not a trade secret, not copyright infringement, not a patent infringement, but illegal under a new law called the DMCA that makes it illegal to break encryption, no matter now flawed or trivial that encryption may be, and no exceptions for fair use.
This will probably be applied to books soon. I can imagine how it will work: the text will be printed as a mirror image. This probably satisfies the legal defintion of "effective encryption". The fact that the algorithm for breaking the encyption (ie. using a mirror) is public domain is irrelevant, it is still illegal. The only way to legally read such a book would be to buy a special 'licensed' mirror, which comes with all sorts of additional restrictions.
just last week CNN reported what a great moment for it was for iRobot Corporation when they were told by the Pentagon that one of its PackBots was destroyed in action for the first time, meaning the life of a human may have been saved.
Sorry, I am apalled by this sentiment. Bertrand Russell once wrote a letter to the editor of the Times newspaper in London (this was WWI I think?), I can't find a reference to the letter just now but it said something along the lines of "the tragedy of this war is not that we are sending our young men out to die; the tragedy is that we are sending them out to kill".
In the very near future we may be able to conduct wars by proxy, sitting in a plush armchair thousands of miles away instructing the robots to wage war on whatever population the Government chooses (and remember, although the US government is pushing war technology very strongly the rest of the world is only a few years behind). Isn't this a crime against humanity?
Secondly, in the robotic future of war, it will be basically impossible for an enemy to kill a human soldier, because they will mostly be in some bunker somewhere miles away merely directing the robots. Ergo, the only US casualties will be civilian, from 'terror' attacks and so on. Does this disturb you?
Actually, I think that the flood and Noah would be much harder to create than the universe. Simply because the universe is (apparantly) self-consistent and actually works. If you accept that God created the Universe and the physical laws, then isn't drastically violating those same physical laws just to enable Noah to build an ark rather pointless? It would surely have been much easier for God to just move Noah and the selected animals forward in time and avoid the flood altogether, for example.
And after all that, why (and how) did the animals from the ark return to the same place they came from originally? Why would the kangaroos go all the way back to Australia, when they had to travel through lush & easily habitable parts of Asia to get there?
Sorry, but the the idea that "Darwinian" means "preconcieved" or "this is the way it had to be" is exactly the sort of hogwash that would have Darwin himself turning in his grave.
Fundamentalists are pushing their own specific flavour of "preconcieved" and "this is the way it had to be" - to accuse the 'opposition' of making the same mistake is a dangerous trap.
I dont doubt that there are professional geologists, biologists, archaeologists, etc. that happen to believe in a creator being, but you should be very careful here as "creation science" means something quite different. "Creation science" is a junk attempt to justify Biblical creation myths by wrapping it in pseudo-scientific nonsense. It does no benefit to Science or Creation to do that.
I have never met a geologist or earth scientist who is both qualified and has no problem in correlating the scientific data with the historical account of the Genesis flood, assuming you are using the term 'scientist' in its traditional sense. For a start, the 'historical account' is so poor on details that that most of the "creation science" story is invented (such as the age of the Earth - no real geologist would ever claim that the earth is 6000 years old, the bible certainly does not say this either, yet it is held as one of the fundamental tenents of "creation science").
If you want to believe this stuff go right ahead. But you should at least read a book like Ian Plimer's "Telling lies for God" to get a feel for the 'opposing' camp. Much like anyone who wants to go debunk some "scientific creationism" should read at least a few issues of "Creation Ex Nihilo" magazine or similar....
I would have to think that this would be a lot of fun! I would like to see what the NSA and friends could throw at my network, although one would think they wouldn't reveal all their cards...
Actually, I don't think it will be much fun at all, simply because I don't think there is any chance either side will reveal any cards. No doubt there will be some already published exploits and/or configuration gaffes that will be used. But I doubt anything new will come out of this.
Whatever, I have no idea what the corporate tax rate in the USA is. The top rate In Australia is 36% I believe.
OK, after a quick google, I found a mention, The basic federal tax rate for large corporations in the US is 35%. So, I think you are wrong, but anyway it doesn't change the main equation, which is that it only costs Microsoft $200,000 to donate $1 million 'worth' of software.
But the profit Microsoft makes on Windows is something like 80%. So, they donate $1 million, the real cost to them $200,000 but they save at least $300,000 on their tax bill. Net gain of at least $100,000!
I think you are wrong here. Insurance is all about weighing up probabilities and setting a premium based on that. To say that an insurance company would refuse to reinsure due to "miniscule" probabilities of something going wrong is simply inane.
Anyone who's been following the SCO/IBM court proceedings on Groklaw can see where the case is headed, I would not expect they would have too much trouble finding someone to provide reinsurance.
I think the main point here is that the inquisition happened in the dark ages, before the USA even existed. On the other hand, the parent was referencing current USA.;)
Slashdot Mirror
May 1st is May 1st. Its over by May 2nd.
For the period ended September 30th, the two cash cows of Client (i.e. Windows) and Information Worker (Office) produced operating income of $2.48 billion on revenue of $2.89 billion, and $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion respectively.
MSN lost $97 million on $531 million, CE/Mobility was out $33 million on $17 million revenues (always a good trick, this kind of stuff), and the home of Xbox, Home Entertainment, dropped $177 million on revenues of $505 million. Business Solutions, which includes Navision and Great Plains, and is a sector Microsoft hopes will contribute great things in the future, lost $68 million on $107 million.
In C++ however, it is quite clear that void main() is ill-formed, diagnostic required.
Leading question. I hope some gurus answer. I was planning to buy APUE, and I want to know!
Haiku in English is dumb
Add last line next time
But the return type of main() is int!
Yup. You should read about the Council of Nicea to learn something of how arbitrary the 'chosen' texts really are.
DVD authentication. The authentication and decryption method of the new-style DVD support is done using a patched libdvdcss (see above). The method can be specified through the environment variable DVDCSS_METHOD, which can be set to key, disk or title.
If nothing is specified it tries the following methods (default: key, title request):
bus key: This key is negotiated during authentication (a long mix of ioctls and various key exchanges, crypto stuff) and is used to encrypt the title and disk keys before sending them over the unprotected bus (to prevent eavesdropping). The bus key is needed to get and predecrypt the crypted disk key.
cached key: MPlayer looks for already cracked title keys which are stored in the ~/.mplayer/DVDKeys directory (fast ;).
key: If no cached key is available, MPlayer tries to decrypt the disk key with a set of included player keys.
disk: If the key method fails (e.g. no included player keys), MPlayer will crack the disk key using a brute force algorithm. This process is CPU intensive and requires 64 MB of memory (16M 32Bit entries hash table) to store temporary data. This method should always work (slow).
title request: With the disk key MPlayer requests the crypted title keys, which are inside hidden sectors using ioctl(). The region protection of RPC-2 drives is performed in this step and may fail on such drives. If it succeeds, the title keys will be decrypted with the bus and disk key.
title: This method is used if the title request failed and does not rely on any key exchange with the DVD drive. It uses a crypto attack to guess the title key directly (by finding a repeating pattern in the decrypted VOB content and guessing that the plain text corresponding to the first encrypted bytes is a continuation of that pattern). The method is also known as "known plaintext attack" or "DeCSSPlus". In rare cases this may fail because there is not enough encrypted data on the disk to perform a statistical attack or because the key changes in the middle of a title. This method is the only way to decrypt a DVD stored on a hard disk or a DVD with the wrong region on an RPC2 drive (slow).
On the other hand, the license provisions of CSS mean that it is illegal to decrypt it even if no other laws would be broken in doing so. That is what everyone finds to egritous about the DMCA. Copyright infringement was already against the law. The only purpose of the DMCA was to remove property rights on stuff that you own (or thought you owned...)
But making a car by assembling off-the-shelf parts, or even parts you make yourself with a lathe and so on, would not be so difficult for a good mechanic, it would just take a while. Probably of similar complexity to writing an operating system, starting from a C compiler.
On the other hand, the code to descramble CSS is a few lines of perl. Probably any first year comp sci student could write the program, if they had a good description of the algorithm.
Finally, I think there is a big difference conceptually between something that is hard to do and something that is illegal. For example, I accept that making a car from scratch may be difficult to do, and for me at least (not being a mechanic or engineer) essentially impossible. But I would have a big problem with a law that said "it shall be illegal for a citizen to build a car".
possibly they have had to fight so hard because it is crap. The free players (eg mplayer) are *much* better. The point is not whether free or non-free players exist. The point is WHY are there legal issues in creating a free player, and what purpose do those legal restrictions serve?
Until you answer that, you are really just trolling.
This will probably be applied to books soon. I can imagine how it will work: the text will be printed as a mirror image. This probably satisfies the legal defintion of "effective encryption". The fact that the algorithm for breaking the encyption (ie. using a mirror) is public domain is irrelevant, it is still illegal. The only way to legally read such a book would be to buy a special 'licensed' mirror, which comes with all sorts of additional restrictions.
Now do you see the issue here?
Sorry, I am apalled by this sentiment. Bertrand Russell once wrote a letter to the editor of the Times newspaper in London (this was WWI I think?), I can't find a reference to the letter just now but it said something along the lines of "the tragedy of this war is not that we are sending our young men out to die; the tragedy is that we are sending them out to kill".
In the very near future we may be able to conduct wars by proxy, sitting in a plush armchair thousands of miles away instructing the robots to wage war on whatever population the Government chooses (and remember, although the US government is pushing war technology very strongly the rest of the world is only a few years behind). Isn't this a crime against humanity?
Secondly, in the robotic future of war, it will be basically impossible for an enemy to kill a human soldier, because they will mostly be in some bunker somewhere miles away merely directing the robots. Ergo, the only US casualties will be civilian, from 'terror' attacks and so on. Does this disturb you?
Ummm, because there are lots of kangaroo fossils in Australia! By your reasoning, these would have been laid down during the flood.
Anyway, that is completely separate from the question of how the kangaroos got back to Australia afterwards.
And after all that, why (and how) did the animals from the ark return to the same place they came from originally? Why would the kangaroos go all the way back to Australia, when they had to travel through lush & easily habitable parts of Asia to get there?
Fundamentalists are pushing their own specific flavour of "preconcieved" and "this is the way it had to be" - to accuse the 'opposition' of making the same mistake is a dangerous trap.
I dont doubt that there are professional geologists, biologists, archaeologists, etc. that happen to believe in a creator being, but you should be very careful here as "creation science" means something quite different. "Creation science" is a junk attempt to justify Biblical creation myths by wrapping it in pseudo-scientific nonsense. It does no benefit to Science or Creation to do that.
I have never met a geologist or earth scientist who is both qualified and has no problem in correlating the scientific data with the historical account of the Genesis flood, assuming you are using the term 'scientist' in its traditional sense. For a start, the 'historical account' is so poor on details that that most of the "creation science" story is invented (such as the age of the Earth - no real geologist would ever claim that the earth is 6000 years old, the bible certainly does not say this either, yet it is held as one of the fundamental tenents of "creation science").
If you want to believe this stuff go right ahead. But you should at least read a book like Ian Plimer's "Telling lies for God" to get a feel for the 'opposing' camp. Much like anyone who wants to go debunk some "scientific creationism" should read at least a few issues of "Creation Ex Nihilo" magazine or similar....
Yeah, but does anyone think that those names don't suck?
Actually, I don't think it will be much fun at all, simply because I don't think there is any chance either side will reveal any cards. No doubt there will be some already published exploits and/or configuration gaffes that will be used. But I doubt anything new will come out of this.
OK, after a quick google, I found a mention, The basic federal tax rate for large corporations in the US is 35%. So, I think you are wrong, but anyway it doesn't change the main equation, which is that it only costs Microsoft $200,000 to donate $1 million 'worth' of software.
But the profit Microsoft makes on Windows is something like 80%. So, they donate $1 million, the real cost to them $200,000 but they save at least $300,000 on their tax bill. Net gain of at least $100,000!
Because BigInsurCo knows how to evaluate risk, but doesn't know anything about Linux?
Because, to BigInsurCo, it is too small an operation to bother dealing with the details by themselves?
Because OSRM seem to be offering more than just insurance (such as access to their IP lawyers)?
Anyone who's been following the SCO/IBM court proceedings on Groklaw can see where the case is headed, I would not expect they would have too much trouble finding someone to provide reinsurance.
I guess you work in a cubicle, then? :-)
What a stupid thing to say, on Slashdot of all places!
I think the main point here is that the inquisition happened in the dark ages, before the USA even existed. On the other hand, the parent was referencing current USA. ;)