Wow, the un-newsworthiness of this article completely escaped me until you provide a car analogy. It's all so clear now! Obviously, when dealing with a technology that sometimes features geometrically increasing capabilities, we should always remember to think in terms of internal-combustion transportation devices! DUH!
Back on topic, I think it'll be interesting to see how interfaces make selective shutoff of features more intuitive inside a program, instead of having to bump out & modify device settings. To that end, it might be useful to have programming constructs for developers to indicate that such-and-such function will need network access, or what have you, as a hint to a mobile OS that could do runtime analysis & shut down pieces as necessary.
Spare me the false-balance outrage. Reality has a well-known Liberal bias, right? Sometimes when an article claims that Republicans are behind voter intimidation issues but that Democrats are not, that's because it's the truth, not because there's "bias". Republicans have gone to jail over voter intimidation and suppression. It's their issue. If you don't like it, I suggest you bitch to them, not to the reporters who report it.
Regarding the "break in", I think I'll wait until there actually is some sort of conclusive investigation before I presume that what the Republican party's self-serving narrative says happened actually did happen. Karl Rove once floated a false story about a "bug" being planted in Bush's office during an election. Turns out, Rove put it there himself. I don't know if that happened here - but I also don't know that it didn't. Again, you're wanting to paint both sides as equally dubious in these sorts of things, but it seems to me that one party has a particularly worse track record when it comes to political break-ins than the other.
The media's job is both to question and inform. By doing neither and casting critics of CCTV as crackpots (or terrorists), they fail the public. By focusing on non-scandals involving the royals, the tabloids similarly fail the public. Regardless, the media does affect public policy - both by action and inaction.
So yes, the BBC is complicit in the UK's enthusiastic embrace of a surveillance society. Yes, the Beeb is responsible for its influence over public attitude regarding most everything it reports on (or doesn't) in the UK.
Wait, the British Broadcasting Company is reporting about some other country's recent foray into domestic surveillance, even invoking "Big Brother"? Isn't this quite an extreme example of the pot calling the kettle black? I mean, I'm glad that they're reporting about it, but where was the critical reporting about the national rollout of CCTV in their own home country?! Instead, we heard no end of "balanced" reports offering apologist explanations regarding the countering of thug violence, terrorism, and antisocial behavior.
Britain in particular hasn't a leg to stand on when it comes to offering a critical view of others' domestic surveillance.
Also, you're too quick to dismiss the people-waiting-for-Wiis phenomenon. I talked to a Nintendo rep today at Gamestop. He claimed that places like Target and Wal-Mart are routinely receiving Wiis during the week and are holding them for weekend sales to coincide with their Sunday advertising circulars. He suggested that if you want a Wii, go wait outside one of these stores on a Sunday morning. The Target manager said the same thing. You can complain all you want about them being "assholes", but as the Nintendo rep put it, "We can't tell them how to run their stores". It's a fact of life - one which you seem a little out of touch with...
No, you can't keep their bug, any more than you can keep their parking boot. There was a rather interesting (and comical) bit in the campus newspaper at the university where I'm a grad student. Basically, the campus police did a shoddy job of attaching a parking boot to someone's car, and the would-be target of said booting removed the boot, put it in his trunk, and drove off. When this guy was later caught (parking *next* to campus), the police not only issued him some huge fine for excessive parking tickets, but they *arrested* him for stealing the parking boot.
Lesson: If you can remove the boot, leave it there. Regarding the bug, how about mailing it back to the police? They'll have a fun time watching it go back, and forth, and back, and forth among post office routing stations.:)
Sure there is, don't bid $200 for the radio in the first place.
I think you're missing my point. If sellers don't want their item going for $5 if demand doesn't support their desired sale price, they shouldn't offer to sell it without reserve. If I bid $200 (I wouldn't, but that's irrelevant at the moment), I'm supposed to be entering a contract with the seller to buy the item at up to $200, subject to the fair market competition at ebay. I haven't decided that it's worth paying up to $200, no matter what (that's called a "best offer" - eBay has such a thing) - I've decided that if the fair market sets the price at $200, I'll pay it. There is a distinction - especially with collectibles. Furthermore, automated bidding exists (purportedly) in lieu of the sort of bid micromanagement you're proposing. In the presence of automated bidding, bid fairness is even more important.
A more precise analogy would be if I could flood the market with phantom sellers, artificially driving the prices down for legitimate sellers by attracting legitimate buyers away from an item I want to buy. But, buyers can't get away with that - false auctions are incredibly easy to detect (ie, no item shows up).:) Sellers can (and are) getting away with flooding the market with phantom buyers, driving prices up. eBay tolerates this practice because they make marginally more money on this scam (though that's subject to suffer if public opinion changes for the worse over time).
If you think "Cool! I'm winning this radio for only $5.00 and it's easily worth $200!" and then the seller enters a number of shill bids, bumping the price up to $150 - fine. He/she is *really* saying "Sorry pal! I'm not letting go of this $200 radio for only $5.00!" Fair enough.
Good thinking. While we're at it, I should be able to retract my bids if I detect shillery going on, right? Or if I decide that this bid isn't working out (the way your would-be seller decided this auction isn't working out)? Maybe bidders should be able to say, "Sorry, pal, I'm not letting go of this $150 to a dishonest retailer who most likely is going to try to screw me again!"
The problem with shill bids is that there's no similar recourse for the buyer. If the buyer's bid is a contract, then why shouldn't the seller's offer to agree to the honest outcome of the auction also be a contract?
Apparently the point of our civil liberties is to protect everyone on earth, including the terrorists, huh?
The stance that the liberties asserted in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights somehow only apply to citizens is flatly at-odds with those documents. Nowhere does it say anything to the effect of "for US Citizens only". Furthermore, these documents go so far as to say that our rights are inherent, by virtue of us being human - not because some government authority (US or otherwise) grants us those rights. Try going back to Civics class, and leave your xenophobia at the door this time.
Speaking of moderation abuse, whoever thinks being such a blatant jerk is in any way "insightful" has definitely abused the system. Parent is flamebait, pure and simple, and any "insightful" commentary within said post seems accidental at best.
Several early CRT HDTVs cannot display 720p at all, but *can* display 1080i just fine... I recall seeing several Philips CRT owners complaining about this during the early adoption of the 360. Can you set the 360 to output 1080i? (I have no idea, I've never used a 360...). Is there some firmware update to the 360 that will permit 1080i output now?
And they even have a link to our very own lovable Senator Jonathon Edwards [prnewswire.com] contacting Wal-Mart for one PS3.
No, you have a link to a carefully spun press-release by a multinational corporation that's tired of being criticised for its anti-worker policies. It's not nearly as fun to put out a (factual) press release about a staffer working independently to try to do something nice for his boss.
Aren't you worried that, in light of your complete lack of understanding of what a Thesis defense is, that your question might come across as a little...I dunno...ignorant? Just a tad?
It's his committee's job to present alternative views, put him on the spot, be impartial, and even by sincerely proposing the "devil's advocate" position. It's his job to be prepared for that and be able to answer tough questions. This is part of the whole "peer review" thing - look it up. Just because a person's experiences coincide with their research does not mean they are "biased." A scientist is not "biased" if their child gets run over by a drunk driver & that scientist then does a study on the phenomenon of drunk driving. If every one of the members of this person's committee has some conflict of interest, then yes, your concerns of bias are perhaps valid. But tossing out his research as biased without impartially examining it is premature and irresponsible - and contrary to whoever is moderating today, definitely not "insightful". We'd never get anywhere if all scientific conclusions by interested/opinionated parties were automatically rejected because the researcher himself/herself wasn't sufficiently "unbiased".
Have you checked out svideo.com for HDMI cables? I don't work for them or anything - just a happy customer. I got a 6' cable that works just fine with my 1080i/720p set and my Toshiba DVD player for less than $20 shipped to my house. Paying extra money for digital cables is stupid beyond belief.
I've used Linux since before there were distributions, and I know how to read documentation - in my opinion, Fedora represents a backward move in usability and functionality, and it's getting worse as Fedora goes on. (I totally agree that FC1 was pretty usable and had far fewer flat-out broken things in it). In recent versions, far too much stuff just doesn't work - compilers, broken libraries, etc, etc. They seem to bang together the latest bleeding-edge version of whatever is available from the respective open-source respositories and then just release it, regardless of whether or not the whole thing actually works together or not.
There are reliable distributions with functioning tools available - sadly, Fedora no longer is one of them.
This is par for the course regarding Fedora. I've had the misfortune of having to install it on testbed machines at work, and it is the ultimate example of beta software. That's fine, I guess, for people who like to play with a beta OS, and RedHat made no bones about the fact that this is what they were doing with Fedora. That's all well and good - I just have no desire whatsoever to use a rickety, unstable system whose tools (like, say, "ifconfig" on FC4) segfault on me.
I live in Houston - the city is facing a budget crunch and has forced a lot of police officers into early retirement lately. There's been talk of a massive police shortage for the past few years now, and it's really been building. At the same time, the city has several anti-tax radio show hosts who openly mock the idea of raising taxes for anything and instead would rather have the city cut essential services (read: emergency response, fire fighters).
While I have little faith in HPD to do anything remotely intelligent (witness the DNA crime lab scandal that never was resolved), I kind of have to wonder if Chief Hurtt is suggesting something so outrageous in the hopes that people will say, "well, I'd rather pay higher taxes to have more cops on the street than to replace them with cameras in my home or apartment!" Of course, this is probably all wishful thinking on my part (that he's bluffing). It seems like a ridiculous proposal from a cost perspective, as well - it will cost untold huge amounts of money to install and monitor cameras, and doing that as a replacement to police officers just seems misguided.
100 Gb/s Ethernet is not for joe schmoe sitting at home on his consumer broadband connection - it's for servers connected to a backbone link. The idea is that 100 Gb/s Ethernet would be part of a server that could handle far more connections & deliver far more throughput per machine, which is important in the datacenter where you'd like to reduce the raw number of machines to save on power (and as part of that, cooling). Sheesh, if you'd stop bitching for a few minutes about your cable company limiting the rate at which you copy donkey porn, you might discover a whole other world of networking challenges out there that people are working on.
(Obviously you have to have enough bus & memory bandwidth and compute power to drive a 100 Gb/s link - but this is a necessary piece of the puzzle).
I'm curious, where have Intel said they're going to push the whole TCP/IP stack onto a dedicated processor ? I've seen a bit of speculation they're going to do it, but not a statement from Intel themselves. Does one exist ?
It's called "TCP Onloading". Here's an article about it (paid subscription required for the whole article - the abstract is free). Notice that it's coming from Intel research labs.
I don't necessarily think that just because some customers have bought them, means its a good, well thought out and useful idea.
The two most popular gigabit ethernet chipsets (intel's gigabit interface and broadcom's gigabit interface) are "smart" NICs that are based on programmable processors and that feature varying degrees of offload capability. The parent poster was blindingly stupid to claim that such NICs have been failures and that we should dismiss the idea outright because of some special case discussed in a 15 year old paper on a 15 year old architecture.
A lot of people buy Britney Spears music, does that make it good or just popular ?
No, but popular doesn't necessarily == crap, either. As much as the slashdot masses love to believe that people spending IT money are all PHB fools, people who are developing and maintaining mission-critical datacenters have thought various forms of smart NICs and TCP calculation bypass have been an intriguing and good idea for a long time.
The reason is very simple. A modern, well-tuned and optimized TCP/IP stack can process a packet with only about 20 instructions on average.
No, Van Jacobson showed that the fast-path receive could be done in 30 instructions. This doesn't include ("smart"-NIC features, which you ignorantly deride) TCP/IP checksum calculation, nor is it even remotely realistic for a modern TCP/IP stack that supports modern RFCs. You're not including timeout code, connection establishment, state updates, or reassembly on the receive side, and you conveniently completely ignore segmentation issues on the send side.
If "smart" NICs are such a bad idea, then I guess Intel and Sun are really up a creek - Intel currently supports TCP segmentation offload (pushing the packet segmentation task from the TCP stack onto the hardware), and is moving to push the entire TCP stack to a dedicated processor + NIC combo.
Since his talk, Ethernet interfaces have totally obsoleted "smart" network cards.
You couldn't be more wrong. Since the 90s, the boundary of what the NIC should do and what the OS should do has been repeatedly re-examined, and industry leaders in networking have successfully deployed products that big-iron servers rely on.
That's exactly the point of this research - the point is to develop user interfaces that leverage OLEDs to dim the parts of the screen that aren't in use. If you read the article, dimming parts of the display is exactly what they're talking about. The key isn't the LEDs that allow dimming - the key is the user interface research that these guys did to determine what people find acceptable. What's most interesting is that some interfaces are actually preferable to an "all on" solution (for instance, an interface that dims - but does not black out - parts of a document that you aren't currently reading, and which you can scroll through).
Just don't post crappy editorial comments like this...
He's an editor, and additionally, slashdot is a for-profit site designed to generate traffic, sometimes by provoking (gasp) discussion (like this one that you've started) - not just reporting the news. You may disagree with his comment, but why on earth is there such ridiculous uproar every time an editor includes a comment in the story write-up? Get over it.
On to the actual content of your post...
Michael:
People are discovering that when you
buy any product that is subject to "activation", you haven't really bought anything.
You:
Boo hoo, and now some people got caught trying to
stiff Valve.
(Emphasis added by me in both cases, obviously). See, that's the point. Legitimate buyers (e.g., not people trying to stiff Valve, as you assert) are running into trouble with Valve's activation scheme, when trying to use the product in a legitimate (albeit unintended) fashion. In general, that's the entire problem with "copy protection" schemes - it screws legitimate customers and turns them off of their product. So, fine, Valve doesn't care - that doesn't mean that people here don't care, though you obviously don't (seeing as how you bothered to comment about how you don't care). It's also useful to know so that those of us who care can size up Valve's treatment of such issues and decide for ourselves whether or not we'll buy their stuff.
This is an important question and a serious problem - it needs to be addressed *now*. For the previous respondents: you can't just blow this problem off as a "beta" bug and blame the user for using test software - this bug was RELEASED in Fedora Core 2 (along with many others, including a buggy version of gcc that dies on large functions unless you throw it -O0).
Also, all the links describe how to recover from & avoid this bug by manually entering hard drive geometry information for import into the partition table - uh, isn't it obvious then that there's a bug in the code that generates the partition table? A person is not a troll nor are they spouting "FUD" when there is a genuine issue that needs to be resolved. This needs to be resolved so that your average Linux newbie (who presumably is half-following the manuals correctly) or even a CAREFUL Linux newbie doesn't hose their system and give up.
Finally, the take that I've seen on the mailing lists that this isn't really a bug is really quite pathetic - quit shifting the blame. I don't care if "it's really Microsoft's fault" or not. If you know there is a compatibility issue and you can work around it, then you should. Step back for a second - Did Redhat9 have this problem? No. Did previous distributions with different tool versions have this problem? No. The problem exists *now* - ergo, this is a bug, and quite clearly (by virtue of functionality of previous versions), it is possible to release software that does not exhibit this behavior. Fix it and quit arguing.
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Wow, the un-newsworthiness of this article completely escaped me until you provide a car analogy. It's all so clear now! Obviously, when dealing with a technology that sometimes features geometrically increasing capabilities, we should always remember to think in terms of internal-combustion transportation devices! DUH!
Back on topic, I think it'll be interesting to see how interfaces make selective shutoff of features more intuitive inside a program, instead of having to bump out & modify device settings. To that end, it might be useful to have programming constructs for developers to indicate that such-and-such function will need network access, or what have you, as a hint to a mobile OS that could do runtime analysis & shut down pieces as necessary.
Spare me the false-balance outrage. Reality has a well-known Liberal bias, right? Sometimes when an article claims that Republicans are behind voter intimidation issues but that Democrats are not, that's because it's the truth, not because there's "bias". Republicans have gone to jail over voter intimidation and suppression. It's their issue. If you don't like it, I suggest you bitch to them, not to the reporters who report it. Regarding the "break in", I think I'll wait until there actually is some sort of conclusive investigation before I presume that what the Republican party's self-serving narrative says happened actually did happen. Karl Rove once floated a false story about a "bug" being planted in Bush's office during an election. Turns out, Rove put it there himself. I don't know if that happened here - but I also don't know that it didn't. Again, you're wanting to paint both sides as equally dubious in these sorts of things, but it seems to me that one party has a particularly worse track record when it comes to political break-ins than the other.
So yes, the BBC is complicit in the UK's enthusiastic embrace of a surveillance society. Yes, the Beeb is responsible for its influence over public attitude regarding most everything it reports on (or doesn't) in the UK.
Britain in particular hasn't a leg to stand on when it comes to offering a critical view of others' domestic surveillance.
Also, you're too quick to dismiss the people-waiting-for-Wiis phenomenon. I talked to a Nintendo rep today at Gamestop. He claimed that places like Target and Wal-Mart are routinely receiving Wiis during the week and are holding them for weekend sales to coincide with their Sunday advertising circulars. He suggested that if you want a Wii, go wait outside one of these stores on a Sunday morning. The Target manager said the same thing. You can complain all you want about them being "assholes", but as the Nintendo rep put it, "We can't tell them how to run their stores". It's a fact of life - one which you seem a little out of touch with...
Lesson: If you can remove the boot, leave it there. Regarding the bug, how about mailing it back to the police? They'll have a fun time watching it go back, and forth, and back, and forth among post office routing stations. :)
A more precise analogy would be if I could flood the market with phantom sellers, artificially driving the prices down for legitimate sellers by attracting legitimate buyers away from an item I want to buy. But, buyers can't get away with that - false auctions are incredibly easy to detect (ie, no item shows up). :) Sellers can (and are) getting away with flooding the market with phantom buyers, driving prices up. eBay tolerates this practice because they make marginally more money on this scam (though that's subject to suffer if public opinion changes for the worse over time).
The problem with shill bids is that there's no similar recourse for the buyer. If the buyer's bid is a contract, then why shouldn't the seller's offer to agree to the honest outcome of the auction also be a contract?
The stance that the liberties asserted in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights somehow only apply to citizens is flatly at-odds with those documents. Nowhere does it say anything to the effect of "for US Citizens only". Furthermore, these documents go so far as to say that our rights are inherent, by virtue of us being human - not because some government authority (US or otherwise) grants us those rights. Try going back to Civics class, and leave your xenophobia at the door this time.
Speaking of moderation abuse, whoever thinks being such a blatant jerk is in any way "insightful" has definitely abused the system. Parent is flamebait, pure and simple, and any "insightful" commentary within said post seems accidental at best.
Several early CRT HDTVs cannot display 720p at all, but *can* display 1080i just fine... I recall seeing several Philips CRT owners complaining about this during the early adoption of the 360. Can you set the 360 to output 1080i? (I have no idea, I've never used a 360...). Is there some firmware update to the 360 that will permit 1080i output now?
It's his committee's job to present alternative views, put him on the spot, be impartial, and even by sincerely proposing the "devil's advocate" position. It's his job to be prepared for that and be able to answer tough questions. This is part of the whole "peer review" thing - look it up. Just because a person's experiences coincide with their research does not mean they are "biased." A scientist is not "biased" if their child gets run over by a drunk driver & that scientist then does a study on the phenomenon of drunk driving. If every one of the members of this person's committee has some conflict of interest, then yes, your concerns of bias are perhaps valid. But tossing out his research as biased without impartially examining it is premature and irresponsible - and contrary to whoever is moderating today, definitely not "insightful". We'd never get anywhere if all scientific conclusions by interested/opinionated parties were automatically rejected because the researcher himself/herself wasn't sufficiently "unbiased".
Have you checked out svideo.com for HDMI cables? I don't work for them or anything - just a happy customer. I got a 6' cable that works just fine with my 1080i/720p set and my Toshiba DVD player for less than $20 shipped to my house. Paying extra money for digital cables is stupid beyond belief.
There are reliable distributions with functioning tools available - sadly, Fedora no longer is one of them.
This is par for the course regarding Fedora. I've had the misfortune of having to install it on testbed machines at work, and it is the ultimate example of beta software. That's fine, I guess, for people who like to play with a beta OS, and RedHat made no bones about the fact that this is what they were doing with Fedora. That's all well and good - I just have no desire whatsoever to use a rickety, unstable system whose tools (like, say, "ifconfig" on FC4) segfault on me.
While I have little faith in HPD to do anything remotely intelligent (witness the DNA crime lab scandal that never was resolved), I kind of have to wonder if Chief Hurtt is suggesting something so outrageous in the hopes that people will say, "well, I'd rather pay higher taxes to have more cops on the street than to replace them with cameras in my home or apartment!" Of course, this is probably all wishful thinking on my part (that he's bluffing). It seems like a ridiculous proposal from a cost perspective, as well - it will cost untold huge amounts of money to install and monitor cameras, and doing that as a replacement to police officers just seems misguided.
(Obviously you have to have enough bus & memory bandwidth and compute power to drive a 100 Gb/s link - but this is a necessary piece of the puzzle).
I wonder if they've learned from the Simpsons and are just adding antifreeze...
I've been to this guy's talk - OLEDs came up. This is human interface work. Please quit talking out of your ass.
That's exactly the point of this research - the point is to develop user interfaces that leverage OLEDs to dim the parts of the screen that aren't in use. If you read the article, dimming parts of the display is exactly what they're talking about. The key isn't the LEDs that allow dimming - the key is the user interface research that these guys did to determine what people find acceptable. What's most interesting is that some interfaces are actually preferable to an "all on" solution (for instance, an interface that dims - but does not black out - parts of a document that you aren't currently reading, and which you can scroll through).
On to the actual content of your post...
Michael:
You:(Emphasis added by me in both cases, obviously). See, that's the point. Legitimate buyers (e.g., not people trying to stiff Valve, as you assert) are running into trouble with Valve's activation scheme, when trying to use the product in a legitimate (albeit unintended) fashion. In general, that's the entire problem with "copy protection" schemes - it screws legitimate customers and turns them off of their product. So, fine, Valve doesn't care - that doesn't mean that people here don't care, though you obviously don't (seeing as how you bothered to comment about how you don't care). It's also useful to know so that those of us who care can size up Valve's treatment of such issues and decide for ourselves whether or not we'll buy their stuff.
Also, all the links describe how to recover from & avoid this bug by manually entering hard drive geometry information for import into the partition table - uh, isn't it obvious then that there's a bug in the code that generates the partition table? A person is not a troll nor are they spouting "FUD" when there is a genuine issue that needs to be resolved. This needs to be resolved so that your average Linux newbie (who presumably is half-following the manuals correctly) or even a CAREFUL Linux newbie doesn't hose their system and give up.
Finally, the take that I've seen on the mailing lists that this isn't really a bug is really quite pathetic - quit shifting the blame. I don't care if "it's really Microsoft's fault" or not. If you know there is a compatibility issue and you can work around it, then you should. Step back for a second - Did Redhat9 have this problem? No. Did previous distributions with different tool versions have this problem? No. The problem exists *now* - ergo, this is a bug, and quite clearly (by virtue of functionality of previous versions), it is possible to release software that does not exhibit this behavior. Fix it and quit arguing.