As much as I hate microsoft, I think they are on a real winner with this one.
I'm failing to see the difference between this "service" they're offering and just running a SIP client on a 802.11 enabled cellphone (or other device). SIP clients are already available for Windows CrapEdition devices (have been for ages).
Of course, I'm a little miffed that I still can't seem to get a SIP client for my Sony Ericsson P900 (runs Symbian UIQ):(
We're talking about universities, not evening schools.
Actually, even (especially) in schools I think it would be massively beneficial to have Linux machines. I'm not advocating binning all the Windows machines. I've seen far too many people who have basically been trained how to use Windows like animals (i.e. "to start a word processor you click Start -> Programs -> Office -> Word") and can't accept a computer which is slightly different. Basically they haven't got any thinking skills.
When I was at university I saw a lot of people come into the computer society and just freak out and leave when they realised they weren't going to use a Windows machine - they only wanted to surf the web or use a word processor (which our Linux machines were very capable of doing) but refused to deal with the concept that it wasn't Windows, many of them wouldn't even log into the machines, let alone try to use the software they were after.
People need to be introduced to non-windows machines at a young age and shown that it _isn't_ scary - install a bunch of Macs and Linux boxes at the schools and have a curriculum that gets people using them as much as the Windows machines - they will then learn that different != bad and simple problem solving skills (i.e. if the machine has an icon that says "OpenOffice Writer" instead of "Microsoft Word" then use that to get to the word processor rather than just giving up). Teaching people to use their brains to figure out how to do stuff instead of just expecting everything to always be exactly the same is an important life skill and will also help them when migrating between different versions of the same software (which invariably move everything around)
All the free beer in the world won't make up for time wasted on daily anti-virus runs, difficult place keeping due to short run times and an inadequate GUI.
All the free beer in the world could make you too drunk to care though:)
because they get enormous discounts to keep them on windows. at our university, microsoft charges us about 10% of list price.
Actually, I believe MS hand out a number of their products as freebees to universities in order to get the students hooked (along with free or heavilly discounted software development tools).
ISTR that the Swansea University Computer Society (with it's quite well known connections to Linux) was offered freebee licences a few years ago on the condition that they ran Windows on _all_ their machines (naturally they declined).
Infact, the way MS conducts business has many similarities with the narcotics business - get them hooked young and then crank up the price.
A good code review can often (not always) find problems before they show up at runtime.
In my experience, code reviews only pick up the reasonably obvious problems - your example was an obvious problem that could be spotted a mile off. Code reviews generally don't tend to pick up problems in intricate algorithms.
Infact, looking at the user agent string _at all_ is a bug, nomatter what string you're looking for. It is the reason that browsers have to fake their UA strings (IE claims to be Mozilla, Opera often claims to be IE, etc) - if you check UA strings then you have to update the site every time a new browser is released. On the other hand, presumably your UA test was to serve up some specific code needed to work around browser bugs - that makes detecting a later version of the browser and serving up the same code to be an invalid thing to do since that later version which hasn't yet been released may not have the same bugs so you're suddenly serving up workarounds that aren't needed and may potentially break.
That said, as other people pointed out, whilest MS didn't originally spot this bug (whcih may or may not be a problem with their QA procedures), they _did_ spot it over 6 months ago and didn't bother to fix it - that's the bigger problem. I wouldn't complain too much since under existing hardware this didn't affect people much - the real problem is that they also take this attitude with security bugs, and that's more worrying (only fix the bug when it has public attention... usually coz it's being exploited in the wild)
Hydrogen power pretty much is a waste of time and money because you lose net energy making it
But the same applies for any energy storage system - i.e. it takes more energy to charge your batteries than you get out of them, etc. The question that needs to be asked is is it beneficial despite the lost energy. For example:
- It's more efficient to have 1 massive generator than lots of little engines, are the losses involved in energy storage outweighed by the gain in efficiency of generating the energy originally?
- Do we want to power the cars by nuclear power? If so, hydrogen energy storage gives us a way to do that which doesn't involve putting dangerous fissile material in millions of cars travelling at high speed.
These are just examples of the questions we need to ask - I'm not saying the answers are "yes" to all (or any) of them, but just saying "it loses us net energy so is useless" is over simplifying the problem.
If you were getting your energy from oil, and it you had to expend two barrels of oil for each barrel you extracted, you wouldn't bother, regardless of the market price of oil.
We already have to use oil in order to extract (and distribute) oil. If the market price is high enough then sure, it's worthwhile only having a production efficiency of 50%.
But remember, hydrogen shouldn't be treated as an energy _source_ - it's simply another method of storing energy we already have, just like batteries.
Does this mean you have to top up the oil at the same time as the fuel (or indeed, mix oil in with the fuel) as with a 2-stroke?
ISTR the EU has mandated a ban on 2-stroke engines (I think this is partly due to the environmental impact of burning 2-stroke oil and partly to do with the inefficiency of a 2-stroke engine leading to a quantity of unburnt fuel making it into the exhaust on each cycle). Would the rotary engine be affected by this kind of ban?
Heck, I'm regretting that I may have to soon replace my 5 year old laptop, because even fvwm is getting too bloated.
I'm still using my 8 year old P166 laptop (with a load more memory than it originally came with). It's fine for running X with a few terminals open - Enlightenment 0.17 is pretty light weight. That said, running FireFox on it is fairly painful.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
Well, the whole "trusted certification authority" is a bogus idea to begin with.
You see, the whole certificate signing idea is this: 1. Alice presents me with a certificate. 2. I look at the certificate and see it's signed by Bob. 3. Bob's a mate - I trust him, so I can place a degree of trust in the fact that Alice is really Alice since someone I trust has verified that.
All well and good - Bob's a mate who has earned my trust in the past. Now, it all falls down with this idea of central CAs like Verisign - Verisign is a big corporation, why should I trust them? I don't know them, I've not had much in the way of dealings with them, and in _general_ my experience with large companies tells me that many of them are untrustworthy. So in that case, if Alice hands me a cert that's signed by Verisign, why should I trust that Alice is who she says she is if I don't even trust the people who are verifying that?
One possible solution to the problem is to set up a trust network where a "percentage of trust" is assigned to each link in the network. That way anyone can sign anyone else's certificate and you can follow the links in the network to come up with an end figure for how much to trust the certificate. The problem with that is that someone I absolutely don't trust will always be reachable through such a network, and if Orkut has shown me anything it's that the number of "hops" between me and any other person in the world are relatively few. So if I can get to someone I don't trust at all in only a few hops (say 5 hops, for example), that makes the amount of trust between any 2 people in the network surprisingly low. So again, the whole thing falls apart.
You never trust email; nothing important from a financial institution is ever communicated solely by email.
What the financial institutions should be doing is signing their emails. "Don't enter sensitive information on a website when there's no padlock in the status bar" is a simple enough message to convey - why not "don't trust email when there's no padlock in the status bar" too?
Admittedly this still suffers from the same problem as SSL - you're only verifying the email really came from the domain it claimed to come from (i.e. if I register hsbc-banking.co.uk and get a cert for it I could legitimately send you signed mails from that domain - you would have to know that HSBC's domain is actually hsbc.co.uk, not hsbc-banking.co.uk). However, it's a step up from where we are now.
What the hell is wrong with England?!? You people invented modern democratic society and civil rights, and you've been happily flushing it down the drain
No, the government is flushing it down the drain, not the people. Once the government has been voted in they can pretty much do what they want until the next general election (the current government were voted in originally because they lied about their policies).
Of course the really criminal thing is that despite repeatedly lieing to the electorate (tuition fees, iraq, etc) people _still_ vote for them. Both Labour and the Tories are completely crazy but people feel that voting for another party such as the Lib Dems is a wasted vote so they never get in. The sad thing is that if all the people who don't want to "waste their votes" actually voted for the Lib Dems they would win by a landslide.
Gun control, CCTV, now ID cards--every time I look at America's problems, I can always cheer myself up by remembering that whatever we're doing wrong, you're guaranteed to do something worse.
Well given the amount of fatal shootings in the US compared to the UK, quite frankly I'm happy for guns to be controlled. It's not as if you can't get one if you legitimately need it, but the whole place feels somewhat safer not having everyone wandering around with a gun to protect themselves from everyone else who's also wandering around with a gun.
No ID will be perfect, but is that an objection to making them better?
My main objection to the ID cards is that they are next to useless (Even MI:5 has said this) and will cost *vast* amounts of money. This isn't some corporation choosing to spend their money, this is the government choosing to spend _my_ money. Either taxes will go up to pay for it or money will be diverted away from more essential things (choose: do you want an ID card or your cancer treated?).
I don't believe the benefits of "better" ID cards outweigh the cost, and quite frankly I'm getting sick of the government getting it's own way on things the public really don't want and justifying them because they allegedly "stop terrorism" (they won't).
The best way of preventing terrorism would've been to not go to war another country just because the US told us to (especially using a lie as justification). These days I continually feel like the UK is in the shower in jail and reaching down for the soap.
No. It IS the law. We have to wait until we can vote our Bair and his "Two legs baaad - four legs good" cronies, and re-elect the totally corrupt and morally bankrupt tories instead.
By which time it's too late since the money is already spent.
As a side point, it's worth noting that even MI:5 have come out and said the ID cards are a complete waste of money... other than the government there seems to be _no one_ in favor of the things. This is just another example of why our political system is so broken - the Labour government has time and time again got away with doing things the public _do_ _not_ _want_. And the even more crazy thing is that come general election time the public vote them in again!
I doubt the gay vote is enough to get the LibDems in, but I could be wrong. (The Scots voted Gay a few days ago, and they are not noted for doing so.)
Now, I'm not homophobic, although you clearly are. You appear to be attempting to attach a homophobic stigma to the Lib Dems, and I have to ask why - they are the only one of the 3 main parties who have vaguely sane policies. And unlike Labour and the Tories, when the Lib Dems do their campaigning they actually tell you what _they_ are going to do rather than spending all their time telling you how shit the other party is.
I have never played a video DVD on any of my machines either. The more restrictions they add to the disks, the higher the nuisance facor becomes, the less people will use them and the smaller their market will be. Frankly, I don't give a damn...
I break the EUCD every time I play a DVD... why? because my DVD player is a MythTV box playing DVDs through Xine. Haven't been arrested yet. I expect the same to apply to blu-ray/HDDVD - someone will publish a crack (probably anonymously to avoid the DMCA/EUCD punishments) and everyone will use it. Are they really going to start arresting everyone who uses the crack to watch legally purchased content that they _own_ on their _own_ hardware for their _own_ entertainment? I doubt it.
Tell me, how's even DVD Jon supposed to circumvent encryption that's embedded in the hardware?
Cracking HDCP isn't really a very useful thing to do (and AFAIK it's already been done anyway). If you want to be able to _use_ the content from a blu-ray disc you really want to be cracking the blu-ray encryption.
My understanding of the details is fuzzy, but from what I understand the only connection between HDCP and blu-ray is that the _licencing terms_ for the blu-ray decryption technology require the software to guarantee that the decrypted content is only sent to (un)trusted hardware (e.g. HDCP). I.e. the content on the blu-ray disc is decrypted by the player and then reencrypted over HDCP.
This of course is fundamentally incompatable with free software since the incorporating the decryption algorithm and keys in FOSS code would publish it and render the DRM useless. What _would_ be compatable with free software (but not good for the consumer) is if the HDCP video stream came directly from the blu-ray disc and didn't get decrypted by intermediate software, but I don't think that's how it works (for one thing, manipulation of such a stream by the software in any way wouldn't be possible, so you couldn't do stuff like overlay text on the video, change aspect ratio, etc.)
But will Linux be able to avoid it because it controls the hardware?
Nope - you just plain won't be able to play blu-ray discs with free software until someone cracks their DRM... Just the same as you can't watch DVDs with free software without cracking the DRM.
As I understand it, the requirement for HDCP is that you aren't allowed to licence the blu-ray (or HDDVD) decryption technology without a guarantee that you'll only output to HDCP devices. However, you also can't licence the technology if you're going to give it away (open source) so the point is a bit moot.
Does anyone have an idea as to how hard it would be to break the encryption scheme being placed on the next gen technology?
From what I've previously read in the HDCP Wikipedia article it seemed like HDCP was already as good as cracked anyway - big vulnerabilities in the design of the protocol _and_ hardware available which strips the HDCP protection out of the data stream.
I think this is the case for pretty much any DRM system - they are putting a decryption system in the hands of the public and _someone_ is going to have the inclination and technical ability to crack it. And once you've rolled out a DRM system it's going to be pretty hard to change it... "oh, that 2000ukp TV you bought a year ago? Yeah, you're going to have to buy a new one coz the DRM protocols have all changed"
Of course the content providers are doing their level best to make cracking the DRM illegal, but even then I still expect cracks to be written and published (possibly anonymously) and what are they going to do about it? Arrest anyone found playing a blu-ray disc they _own_ on hardware they _own_ for their _own_ entertainment? I don't think so.
why would it be unfair? The guy was playing solitair while on the company clock.
Firing people is difficult - they have to have _really_ done something wrong. Basically unless the employee is guilty of gross misconduct (spending 5 minutes playing solitare really isn't gonna qualify as gross misconduct) the employer must perform some other disciplinary action first and only fire the employee if that didn't work.
My company wants us to make sure we get 40 hours of billable time in each week. We aren't supposed to be playing games, surfing for porn, or anything else not work related when we are on the clock.
This very much depends on what kind of job you're in - if the job involves a lot of brainwork then people _have_ to take breaks from it otherwsie they start making mistakes. Yeah, stop them from taking breaks and the _amount_ of work done may go up, but the _quality_ of the work will hit rock bottom.
Perhaps people need to take more responsibility for their inappropriate actions.
I agree entirely that people need to take responsibility for their own actions (and that was really the point of my post). However, firing someone for *one* minor mistake is over the top.
Certainly here in the UK, employers don't fire people for something minor - it's crazy, you spend vast sums of money training someone and then fire them just like that without seeing if there is a more amicable solution to the problem? I dare say the amount of money spent getting his replacement up to speed is far going to outweigh the amount of money lost by someone spending 5 minutes playing solitare.
Maybe it's different in the US - do employers really just want to be rid of a minor problem that bad that they won't try to _solve it_?
Which is why they then ban "time wasting" items such as solitare and slashdot thinking it will increase productivity (it probobly wont though)
That was my point - if they make your job suck by completely banning things they consider "time wasting" then you just won't care enough about your job any more to do the work. i.e. productivity goes _down_. If someone's doing a good job the way to get them to do more work is to offer bonuses, etc. rather than punishing them.
Carrot and stick... Sadly many employers think the stick is the be-all and end-all and ignore the carrot.
One went further, and had me install squid with a list of approved websites needed for business. Everything else was blocked.
It really is unreasonable to have such policies without some kind of technical help to enforce them. It doesn't need to be bullet proof - it just makes things easier for the employees honestly trying to follow the policy.
You've clearly never worked in such an environment if you think it makes things easier for anyone. Take it from someone who has: the list of approved websites always catches something you legitimately need for work, you then need to stop what you're doing and chade the sysadmin around to get it unblocked. In the end, everyone gets a lot less work done (including the sysadmin who's now having to service the unblock requests).
This kind of filtering is fine in places like schools, but in a work environment there should be a clear IT policy and disciplinary action taken if someone breaks policy. Of course any employer who thinks firing someone is the _first_ course of disciplinary action is clearly insane (and in the UK the employer would almost certainly be up on unfair dismissal charges for firing someone just because they had solitare open).
But employers ultimately need to learn that preventing employees from enjoying their jobs isn't going to improve their work output in the long run, it'll just make them disenfranchised and quit.
If someone is doing good work but spending 10 minutes a day playing solitare then so what? - 10 minutes is nothing and if you repremand them for it and make their job suck the quality of all their work will go down. The employer will be worse off and the employee will be looking for another job.
Sadly some employers seem to think they will get more work out of people if they make their jobs suck. Whilest this may be true for a while, as soon as the employees can get out they will - I often wonder if my last employer has worked out that this is why 5 of us (out of 8 employees) quit within a month of eachother.
Yes, of course, as did IE (and MS Office/Works, at first). MSFT is willing to eat that if it gives them a foot in the door.
My point was that the original poster said that MS could drop all their other business and survive on the Xbox alone, which isn't the case since the Xbox lost them money.
No, typically no money changes hands at peering points.
But this is a contractural problem, not a legal problem. If Google peers with Verizon don't charge Google then that's their own fault for writing the contract in that way. They could write a contract requiring Google to pay for the peering (and Google has every right to refuse to sign the contract and thus the traffic will be transited through another network instead of peered directly).
However, the ISPs are pushing for _legislation_ rather than just changing their peering contracts. The implication is that they want to be able to charge content providers who they aren't peering with (and thus have no contract with). I.e. if Google is connected to an ISP called "foo" and Verizon is connected to "foo" then "foo" can route the traffic between Google and Verizon - there is no contract between Google and Verizon and each of them is paying "foo" for a transit agreement to route the traffic. In this case, Verizon's _customers_ are paying for Verizon's transit agreement with "foo", but Verizon wants to be able to charge Google too. This seems wholley unfair since Google is having to pay for it's transit agreement with "foo" too.
This is just another example of bad laws being pushed so that greedy corporations can charge parties they don't have contracts with without losing their common carrier status. (At the moment Verizon could block Google's traffic and require Google to sign a contract in order for them to carry it, but that would prevent Verizon from being considered a common carrier since they would be censoring content).
I'd like to know what kind of hardware they used to create the demo's. From my experience the nvidia drivers aren't very stable.
In my experience, stability hasn't been a problem for nVidia drivers released over the past few years (it was a problem 4 or 5 years ago but they seem to have sorted it). There are still some niggling bugs (not usually stability related) which would've been fixed a long time ago if the drivers were open though... I think a public bugzilla would also help so we can see the progress of our bug reports.
What bothers me is that the FOSS community didn't seem to take this technology seriously until Microsoft announced it was going into Vista.
The FOSS community _has_ been taking this technology seriously, it's just not hit the main-stream. (Seems to be the case with most FOSS GUI stuff that Apple and Microsoft get there first with the shiny bits.)
From the screen shots I've seen of Vista it looks like the 3D UI features (e.g. 3D windows, etc) are ripped off Project Looking Glass and OS-X, both of which have been around for a long time. As usual, Microsoft are just taking someone else's work and putting it in a system that's already main-stream.
My immediate questions really are how long until: 1. XGL ships as standard with Fedora Core 2. Enlightenment DR0.17 supports all the shiny XGL functionality. Is XGL fundamentally compatable with E17's existing composite system?
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate microsoft, I think they are on a real winner with this one.
:(
I'm failing to see the difference between this "service" they're offering and just running a SIP client on a 802.11 enabled cellphone (or other device). SIP clients are already available for Windows CrapEdition devices (have been for ages).
Of course, I'm a little miffed that I still can't seem to get a SIP client for my Sony Ericsson P900 (runs Symbian UIQ)
We're talking about universities, not evening schools.
Actually, even (especially) in schools I think it would be massively beneficial to have Linux machines. I'm not advocating binning all the Windows machines. I've seen far too many people who have basically been trained how to use Windows like animals (i.e. "to start a word processor you click Start -> Programs -> Office -> Word") and can't accept a computer which is slightly different. Basically they haven't got any thinking skills.
When I was at university I saw a lot of people come into the computer society and just freak out and leave when they realised they weren't going to use a Windows machine - they only wanted to surf the web or use a word processor (which our Linux machines were very capable of doing) but refused to deal with the concept that it wasn't Windows, many of them wouldn't even log into the machines, let alone try to use the software they were after.
People need to be introduced to non-windows machines at a young age and shown that it _isn't_ scary - install a bunch of Macs and Linux boxes at the schools and have a curriculum that gets people using them as much as the Windows machines - they will then learn that different != bad and simple problem solving skills (i.e. if the machine has an icon that says "OpenOffice Writer" instead of "Microsoft Word" then use that to get to the word processor rather than just giving up). Teaching people to use their brains to figure out how to do stuff instead of just expecting everything to always be exactly the same is an important life skill and will also help them when migrating between different versions of the same software (which invariably move everything around)
All the free beer in the world won't make up for time wasted on daily anti-virus runs, difficult place keeping due to short run times and an inadequate GUI.
:)
All the free beer in the world could make you too drunk to care though
because they get enormous discounts to keep them on windows. at our university, microsoft charges us about 10% of list price.
Actually, I believe MS hand out a number of their products as freebees to universities in order to get the students hooked (along with free or heavilly discounted software development tools).
ISTR that the Swansea University Computer Society (with it's quite well known connections to Linux) was offered freebee licences a few years ago on the condition that they ran Windows on _all_ their machines (naturally they declined).
Infact, the way MS conducts business has many similarities with the narcotics business - get them hooked young and then crank up the price.
A good code review can often (not always) find problems before they show up at runtime.
In my experience, code reviews only pick up the reasonably obvious problems - your example was an obvious problem that could be spotted a mile off. Code reviews generally don't tend to pick up problems in intricate algorithms.
Infact, looking at the user agent string _at all_ is a bug, nomatter what string you're looking for. It is the reason that browsers have to fake their UA strings (IE claims to be Mozilla, Opera often claims to be IE, etc) - if you check UA strings then you have to update the site every time a new browser is released. On the other hand, presumably your UA test was to serve up some specific code needed to work around browser bugs - that makes detecting a later version of the browser and serving up the same code to be an invalid thing to do since that later version which hasn't yet been released may not have the same bugs so you're suddenly serving up workarounds that aren't needed and may potentially break.
That said, as other people pointed out, whilest MS didn't originally spot this bug (whcih may or may not be a problem with their QA procedures), they _did_ spot it over 6 months ago and didn't bother to fix it - that's the bigger problem. I wouldn't complain too much since under existing hardware this didn't affect people much - the real problem is that they also take this attitude with security bugs, and that's more worrying (only fix the bug when it has public attention... usually coz it's being exploited in the wild)
Hydrogen power pretty much is a waste of time and money because you lose net energy making it
But the same applies for any energy storage system - i.e. it takes more energy to charge your batteries than you get out of them, etc. The question that needs to be asked is is it beneficial despite the lost energy. For example:
- It's more efficient to have 1 massive generator than lots of little engines, are the losses involved in energy storage outweighed by the gain in efficiency of generating the energy originally?
- Do we want to power the cars by nuclear power? If so, hydrogen energy storage gives us a way to do that which doesn't involve putting dangerous fissile material in millions of cars travelling at high speed.
These are just examples of the questions we need to ask - I'm not saying the answers are "yes" to all (or any) of them, but just saying "it loses us net energy so is useless" is over simplifying the problem.
If you were getting your energy from oil, and it you had to expend two barrels of oil for each barrel you extracted, you wouldn't bother, regardless of the market price of oil.
We already have to use oil in order to extract (and distribute) oil. If the market price is high enough then sure, it's worthwhile only having a production efficiency of 50%.
But remember, hydrogen shouldn't be treated as an energy _source_ - it's simply another method of storing energy we already have, just like batteries.
the engine burns its lubricant by design.
Does this mean you have to top up the oil at the same time as the fuel (or indeed, mix oil in with the fuel) as with a 2-stroke?
ISTR the EU has mandated a ban on 2-stroke engines (I think this is partly due to the environmental impact of burning 2-stroke oil and partly to do with the inefficiency of a 2-stroke engine leading to a quantity of unburnt fuel making it into the exhaust on each cycle). Would the rotary engine be affected by this kind of ban?
Heck, I'm regretting that I may have to soon replace my 5 year old laptop, because even fvwm is getting too bloated.
I'm still using my 8 year old P166 laptop (with a load more memory than it originally came with). It's fine for running X with a few terminals open - Enlightenment 0.17 is pretty light weight. That said, running FireFox on it is fairly painful.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
Well, the whole "trusted certification authority" is a bogus idea to begin with.
You see, the whole certificate signing idea is this:
1. Alice presents me with a certificate.
2. I look at the certificate and see it's signed by Bob.
3. Bob's a mate - I trust him, so I can place a degree of trust in the fact that Alice is really Alice since someone I trust has verified that.
All well and good - Bob's a mate who has earned my trust in the past. Now, it all falls down with this idea of central CAs like Verisign - Verisign is a big corporation, why should I trust them? I don't know them, I've not had much in the way of dealings with them, and in _general_ my experience with large companies tells me that many of them are untrustworthy. So in that case, if Alice hands me a cert that's signed by Verisign, why should I trust that Alice is who she says she is if I don't even trust the people who are verifying that?
One possible solution to the problem is to set up a trust network where a "percentage of trust" is assigned to each link in the network. That way anyone can sign anyone else's certificate and you can follow the links in the network to come up with an end figure for how much to trust the certificate. The problem with that is that someone I absolutely don't trust will always be reachable through such a network, and if Orkut has shown me anything it's that the number of "hops" between me and any other person in the world are relatively few. So if I can get to someone I don't trust at all in only a few hops (say 5 hops, for example), that makes the amount of trust between any 2 people in the network surprisingly low. So again, the whole thing falls apart.
You never trust email; nothing important from a financial institution is ever communicated solely by email.
What the financial institutions should be doing is signing their emails. "Don't enter sensitive information on a website when there's no padlock in the status bar" is a simple enough message to convey - why not "don't trust email when there's no padlock in the status bar" too?
Admittedly this still suffers from the same problem as SSL - you're only verifying the email really came from the domain it claimed to come from (i.e. if I register hsbc-banking.co.uk and get a cert for it I could legitimately send you signed mails from that domain - you would have to know that HSBC's domain is actually hsbc.co.uk, not hsbc-banking.co.uk). However, it's a step up from where we are now.
What the hell is wrong with England?!? You people invented modern democratic society and civil rights, and you've been happily flushing it down the drain
No, the government is flushing it down the drain, not the people. Once the government has been voted in they can pretty much do what they want until the next general election (the current government were voted in originally because they lied about their policies).
Of course the really criminal thing is that despite repeatedly lieing to the electorate (tuition fees, iraq, etc) people _still_ vote for them. Both Labour and the Tories are completely crazy but people feel that voting for another party such as the Lib Dems is a wasted vote so they never get in. The sad thing is that if all the people who don't want to "waste their votes" actually voted for the Lib Dems they would win by a landslide.
Gun control, CCTV, now ID cards--every time I look at America's problems, I can always cheer myself up by remembering that whatever we're doing wrong, you're guaranteed to do something worse.
Well given the amount of fatal shootings in the US compared to the UK, quite frankly I'm happy for guns to be controlled. It's not as if you can't get one if you legitimately need it, but the whole place feels somewhat safer not having everyone wandering around with a gun to protect themselves from everyone else who's also wandering around with a gun.
No ID will be perfect, but is that an objection to making them better?
My main objection to the ID cards is that they are next to useless (Even MI:5 has said this) and will cost *vast* amounts of money. This isn't some corporation choosing to spend their money, this is the government choosing to spend _my_ money. Either taxes will go up to pay for it or money will be diverted away from more essential things (choose: do you want an ID card or your cancer treated?).
I don't believe the benefits of "better" ID cards outweigh the cost, and quite frankly I'm getting sick of the government getting it's own way on things the public really don't want and justifying them because they allegedly "stop terrorism" (they won't).
The best way of preventing terrorism would've been to not go to war another country just because the US told us to (especially using a lie as justification). These days I continually feel like the UK is in the shower in jail and reaching down for the soap.
No. It IS the law. We have to wait until we can vote our Bair and his "Two legs baaad - four legs good" cronies, and re-elect the totally corrupt and morally bankrupt tories instead.
By which time it's too late since the money is already spent.
As a side point, it's worth noting that even MI:5 have come out and said the ID cards are a complete waste of money... other than the government there seems to be _no one_ in favor of the things. This is just another example of why our political system is so broken - the Labour government has time and time again got away with doing things the public _do_ _not_ _want_. And the even more crazy thing is that come general election time the public vote them in again!
I doubt the gay vote is enough to get the LibDems in, but I could be wrong. (The Scots voted Gay a few days ago, and they are not noted for doing so.)
Now, I'm not homophobic, although you clearly are. You appear to be attempting to attach a homophobic stigma to the Lib Dems, and I have to ask why - they are the only one of the 3 main parties who have vaguely sane policies. And unlike Labour and the Tories, when the Lib Dems do their campaigning they actually tell you what _they_ are going to do rather than spending all their time telling you how shit the other party is.
I have never played a video DVD on any of my machines either. The more restrictions they add to the disks, the higher the nuisance facor becomes, the less people will use them and the smaller their market will be. Frankly, I don't give a damn...
I break the EUCD every time I play a DVD... why? because my DVD player is a MythTV box playing DVDs through Xine. Haven't been arrested yet. I expect the same to apply to blu-ray/HDDVD - someone will publish a crack (probably anonymously to avoid the DMCA/EUCD punishments) and everyone will use it. Are they really going to start arresting everyone who uses the crack to watch legally purchased content that they _own_ on their _own_ hardware for their _own_ entertainment? I doubt it.
Tell me, how's even DVD Jon supposed to circumvent encryption that's embedded in the hardware?
Cracking HDCP isn't really a very useful thing to do (and AFAIK it's already been done anyway). If you want to be able to _use_ the content from a blu-ray disc you really want to be cracking the blu-ray encryption.
My understanding of the details is fuzzy, but from what I understand the only connection between HDCP and blu-ray is that the _licencing terms_ for the blu-ray decryption technology require the software to guarantee that the decrypted content is only sent to (un)trusted hardware (e.g. HDCP). I.e. the content on the blu-ray disc is decrypted by the player and then reencrypted over HDCP.
This of course is fundamentally incompatable with free software since the incorporating the decryption algorithm and keys in FOSS code would publish it and render the DRM useless. What _would_ be compatable with free software (but not good for the consumer) is if the HDCP video stream came directly from the blu-ray disc and didn't get decrypted by intermediate software, but I don't think that's how it works (for one thing, manipulation of such a stream by the software in any way wouldn't be possible, so you couldn't do stuff like overlay text on the video, change aspect ratio, etc.)
But will Linux be able to avoid it because it controls the hardware?
Nope - you just plain won't be able to play blu-ray discs with free software until someone cracks their DRM... Just the same as you can't watch DVDs with free software without cracking the DRM.
As I understand it, the requirement for HDCP is that you aren't allowed to licence the blu-ray (or HDDVD) decryption technology without a guarantee that you'll only output to HDCP devices. However, you also can't licence the technology if you're going to give it away (open source) so the point is a bit moot.
Does anyone have an idea as to how hard it would be to break the encryption scheme being placed on the next gen technology?
From what I've previously read in the HDCP Wikipedia article it seemed like HDCP was already as good as cracked anyway - big vulnerabilities in the design of the protocol _and_ hardware available which strips the HDCP protection out of the data stream.
I think this is the case for pretty much any DRM system - they are putting a decryption system in the hands of the public and _someone_ is going to have the inclination and technical ability to crack it. And once you've rolled out a DRM system it's going to be pretty hard to change it... "oh, that 2000ukp TV you bought a year ago? Yeah, you're going to have to buy a new one coz the DRM protocols have all changed"
Of course the content providers are doing their level best to make cracking the DRM illegal, but even then I still expect cracks to be written and published (possibly anonymously) and what are they going to do about it? Arrest anyone found playing a blu-ray disc they _own_ on hardware they _own_ for their _own_ entertainment? I don't think so.
why would it be unfair? The guy was playing solitair while on the company clock.
Firing people is difficult - they have to have _really_ done something wrong. Basically unless the employee is guilty of gross misconduct (spending 5 minutes playing solitare really isn't gonna qualify as gross misconduct) the employer must perform some other disciplinary action first and only fire the employee if that didn't work.
My company wants us to make sure we get 40 hours of billable time in each week. We aren't supposed to be playing games, surfing for porn, or anything else not work related when we are on the clock.
This very much depends on what kind of job you're in - if the job involves a lot of brainwork then people _have_ to take breaks from it otherwsie they start making mistakes. Yeah, stop them from taking breaks and the _amount_ of work done may go up, but the _quality_ of the work will hit rock bottom.
Perhaps people need to take more responsibility for their inappropriate actions.
I agree entirely that people need to take responsibility for their own actions (and that was really the point of my post). However, firing someone for *one* minor mistake is over the top.
Certainly here in the UK, employers don't fire people for something minor - it's crazy, you spend vast sums of money training someone and then fire them just like that without seeing if there is a more amicable solution to the problem? I dare say the amount of money spent getting his replacement up to speed is far going to outweigh the amount of money lost by someone spending 5 minutes playing solitare.
Maybe it's different in the US - do employers really just want to be rid of a minor problem that bad that they won't try to _solve it_?
Which is why they then ban "time wasting" items such as solitare and slashdot thinking it will increase productivity (it probobly wont though)
That was my point - if they make your job suck by completely banning things they consider "time wasting" then you just won't care enough about your job any more to do the work. i.e. productivity goes _down_. If someone's doing a good job the way to get them to do more work is to offer bonuses, etc. rather than punishing them.
Carrot and stick... Sadly many employers think the stick is the be-all and end-all and ignore the carrot.
One went further, and had me install squid with a list of approved websites needed for business. Everything else was blocked.
It really is unreasonable to have such policies without some kind of technical help to enforce them. It doesn't need to be bullet proof - it just makes things easier for the employees honestly trying to follow the policy.
You've clearly never worked in such an environment if you think it makes things easier for anyone. Take it from someone who has: the list of approved websites always catches something you legitimately need for work, you then need to stop what you're doing and chade the sysadmin around to get it unblocked. In the end, everyone gets a lot less work done (including the sysadmin who's now having to service the unblock requests).
This kind of filtering is fine in places like schools, but in a work environment there should be a clear IT policy and disciplinary action taken if someone breaks policy. Of course any employer who thinks firing someone is the _first_ course of disciplinary action is clearly insane (and in the UK the employer would almost certainly be up on unfair dismissal charges for firing someone just because they had solitare open).
But employers ultimately need to learn that preventing employees from enjoying their jobs isn't going to improve their work output in the long run, it'll just make them disenfranchised and quit.
If someone is doing good work but spending 10 minutes a day playing solitare then so what? - 10 minutes is nothing and if you repremand them for it and make their job suck the quality of all their work will go down. The employer will be worse off and the employee will be looking for another job.
Sadly some employers seem to think they will get more work out of people if they make their jobs suck. Whilest this may be true for a while, as soon as the employees can get out they will - I often wonder if my last employer has worked out that this is why 5 of us (out of 8 employees) quit within a month of eachother.
Yes, of course, as did IE (and MS Office/Works, at first). MSFT is willing to eat that if it gives them a foot in the door.
My point was that the original poster said that MS could drop all their other business and survive on the Xbox alone, which isn't the case since the Xbox lost them money.
No, typically no money changes hands at peering points.
But this is a contractural problem, not a legal problem. If Google peers with Verizon don't charge Google then that's their own fault for writing the contract in that way. They could write a contract requiring Google to pay for the peering (and Google has every right to refuse to sign the contract and thus the traffic will be transited through another network instead of peered directly).
However, the ISPs are pushing for _legislation_ rather than just changing their peering contracts. The implication is that they want to be able to charge content providers who they aren't peering with (and thus have no contract with). I.e. if Google is connected to an ISP called "foo" and Verizon is connected to "foo" then "foo" can route the traffic between Google and Verizon - there is no contract between Google and Verizon and each of them is paying "foo" for a transit agreement to route the traffic. In this case, Verizon's _customers_ are paying for Verizon's transit agreement with "foo", but Verizon wants to be able to charge Google too. This seems wholley unfair since Google is having to pay for it's transit agreement with "foo" too.
This is just another example of bad laws being pushed so that greedy corporations can charge parties they don't have contracts with without losing their common carrier status. (At the moment Verizon could block Google's traffic and require Google to sign a contract in order for them to carry it, but that would prevent Verizon from being considered a common carrier since they would be censoring content).
MS could of course turn to just rely on MSN and Xbox
Didn't the XBox related activities make a loss?
I'd like to know what kind of hardware they used to create the demo's. From my experience the nvidia drivers aren't very stable.
In my experience, stability hasn't been a problem for nVidia drivers released over the past few years (it was a problem 4 or 5 years ago but they seem to have sorted it). There are still some niggling bugs (not usually stability related) which would've been fixed a long time ago if the drivers were open though... I think a public bugzilla would also help so we can see the progress of our bug reports.
What bothers me is that the FOSS community didn't seem to take this technology seriously until Microsoft announced it was going into Vista.
The FOSS community _has_ been taking this technology seriously, it's just not hit the main-stream. (Seems to be the case with most FOSS GUI stuff that Apple and Microsoft get there first with the shiny bits.)
From the screen shots I've seen of Vista it looks like the 3D UI features (e.g. 3D windows, etc) are ripped off Project Looking Glass and OS-X, both of which have been around for a long time. As usual, Microsoft are just taking someone else's work and putting it in a system that's already main-stream.
My immediate questions really are how long until:
1. XGL ships as standard with Fedora Core
2. Enlightenment DR0.17 supports all the shiny XGL functionality. Is XGL fundamentally compatable with E17's existing composite system?