Now how easy is it for the average Joe to break the DRM on some encrypted Disney DVD, and copy it to their computer's hard drive? I'd guess less than 1% of the population would be capable of this.
Ignoring the danger of oversimplifying, let me claim that everything that is technically feasible is eventually made. There is no way (barring an all-out nuclear exchange between US and someone or a real 100% brutal dictatorship in the US with millions executed per year) that high-speed 99.9% anonymous P2P networks won't be developed in the next 5-10 years. Meanwhile the DRM is unlikely to be more than 50-70% effective, because it is so much easier to make something possible than to make it completely impossible. And the beauty of computer technologies is that you need one person to break the DRM and the software or the work itself can be easily copied.
If only this served as a lesson to RIAA/MPAA/everyone else that patents, trademarks (and copyright too!) do stiffle innovation. If this idea occured to pirates, they would be happily printing such disks in millions without worrying about those pesky patents. But RIAA must suffer from long negotiation with those damn lawyers and the technology that might have saved them (i.e. offering something valuable with CDs to differentiate their product from MP3s) goes unused.
Re:A lot of people don't care
on
Analysis of Spyware
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We need an open source project to provide this functionality in a spyware-free format. The reality is that people need dancing girls, they need strippers on their desktop, they need other bells and wistles. And they will install them, so I'd rather see them install GNUGirl and GNUBuddy.
Right. And that contract too is subject to reexamination. So far most people believe that it remains valid and useful. But this isn't true for the copyright social contract.
Not defending child porn per se, just the right of people to access content that they want. Viewing child porn doesn't harm children and I don't like the criminalisation of mere posession in the West. There is just a small step from there to criminalizing posession of anti-government propaganda.
Just think how lucky YOU are. The chance of you having your own DNA is 0.0000000000000000.....[lots of zeroes]...[yet more zeroes]....0000... Without the DNA you wound't be you, would you? And think about all the random events that happened in your life - without them your personal memories (and thus you) would not be the same and you would not exist.
It might very well be that life in some remote corner of the Universe thrives on large asteroids or supernova radiation.:) Just like we have - here and now on our Earth - life forms that enjoy boiling water, sulfuric acid, radiation inside reactor core and what not.
The probability may be 10^1000. That is when you repeat the "Universe" experiment 10^1010 times with similar starting conditions, you would have about 10^10 Earths. The fact that there are 10^21 stars and one had a habitable planet doesn't mean the probability must be 1/10^21.
First, your lifetime may end up longer than you expect right now (read up on physical immortality). Second, we've made quite a lot of progress and are starting to get along with each other. And when we can finally cure stupidity, expect this to made much much simplier.
"Earth is Rare, New Study Suggests". Or, so before the study we thought that one in 10000000000 stars had habitable Earth-like planets, not it appears it's more like one in 1000000000 (because we haven't found the second Jupiter yet). Interesting, but not a big deal.
I say, let's wait until 7-10 years, when the results from the Kepler mission will tell us for sure whether Earth-like planets are common or not.
Don't search for child porn if you don't like it, but other people have the right to disagree. Using the gun analogy, child pornography doesn't harm children, people harm children. The creeps are those that abuse children, not those that share or download child pornography.
Nope. Citizens don't complain about P2P software, labels, studios and pressure groups complain about P2P software.
If one doesn't like KaZaA, they don't use it. In the worst case it will install some spyware, but if someone is too clueless to allow it, they won't realise it anyway.
The problem is that by using labels they attempt to define who I am. I may kill, but I am not a murderer. I may be trolling on Slashdot, but I am not a troll. I may make a mistake, but I am not an idiot. I may go to a supermarket, but I am not a consumer. Letting others define who you are is dangerous, especially, when they try to redefine it.
Personally I am a researcher, a reader, a thinker, an intelligent creature, a human, an atheist. This is how I define myself, and I am not content with being a consumer, especially outside of the proper context (I don't mind that e.g. Logitech considers me one of the consumers).
Another great example is Alien vs. Predator 2. The game is designed such that you don't encounter a monster for about 3 or 4 levels from the beginning, BUT you are being scared from the start (and rather well). Suspence builds up as nowhere else. Finally you are sent to restart flight control computer and it's pretty obvious that finally IT will happen. Still, you need to play most of the level and only then in a brilliant scene you face several alien drones. More scary than anything else except for the episode a few levels later when you are running from the base infested by aliens. Immersion is amazing, my heart was beating like mad.
Stalker will have customizable weapons were you can just stick a scope or a grenade launcher on any gun (not sure about a flashlight and duck tape though).
Hmmm... "prevents absolutely no windows crashes" meets the criteria of "prevents up to 95.8% of windows crashes". Strike one - plus what's up with the obviously made-up 95.8% statistic with its meaningless but important-sounding precision?
I would suspect that 95.8% is a result of some survey the developers did - perhaps they found that on some particularly mess up Windows installation that many crashes are prevented. Of course, the precision is meaningless, you are right about that.
As for the lower limit, perfect Windows installation doesn't crash at all, so there would be nothing to intercept. However, in a real world situation Windows does crash. On my PC PhotoImpact crashes with nearly absolute certainly when I do heavy editing of large images. Perhaps it's bad memory, perhaps video card drivers, perhaps a bug in PhotoImpact, I don't know and it doesn't matter. What matters is that a few minutes ago I successfully finished editing a 3 megapixel photo (it involved opening 6 additional copies of the image and doing a lot of editing). AntiCrash claims that it recovered one crash. From experience I know that it is totally believable that there would be a crash during heavy editing in Photoimpact, but how does AntiCrash knows, unless it really does intercept crashes? It is obvious to me that AntiCrash does work, whether it's effectiveness is 95.8% or less.
So by now we've decided its "revolutionary". Good to see an unbiased starting point. Also, since when does "sold by" mean "endorsed" in all but the loosest sense? Strike Two. Oh, and notice that McAfee only sell one of these products, and not the one that the reviewer makes the most claims about...
The word "revolutionary" was sarcasm/irony/humour (qtothemax and alexq seem to have noticed it, your sarcasm detector may need some tweaking). The point was that for such a supposedly great program there is too little praise online. As for sold by/endorsed, I believe that McAfee would never sell a spyware/placebo application and if AntiCrash does work, then Hare might have something to it too (sorry for accidentally misleading about which one is sold by McAfee).
Ah well, that's okay then. Asked and answered. And absolutely no signs of bias in this result . Absolutely no signs of any attempt at objective measurement of results either. Not one benchmark or even stopwatch timing showing any improvement at all? Strike Three.
I just didn't expect Slashdot to accept the story.:) But the drawing speed increase (and acceleration of application loading/reloading) was so noticeable, the chance of this effect being psychological is very slim. But your point about lack of objective measurements is still valid. Sorry.
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
If I had any affiliation with the product, I would have mentioned that. As it is, I have none whatsoever. I am not even a customer, because I haven't registered the programs.
That's not true. I don't work for that company and I am not promoting their software. I am just genuinely interested, do Hare/AntiCrash work and to what extent.
It's a fact that Hare includes some disk caching that apparently works (applications start/close/restart much faster). It also does something to help windows display faster - the difference was big enough to be real, not a placebo effect. It seems (though I am not 100% sure on this yet) that it also successfully increases the priority of the foreground task (when some CPU intensive task runs in the background, the main app works better).
I am relatively confident that there is no spyware there - AtGuard! doesn't report any connection attempts, SpyBot doesn't show anything and AntiCrash is sold by McAfee.
Unfortunately, the question I asked remains unanswered. Apart from (reasonable) critique of the 88-bit kernel idea and a few references to similar ancient utilities that worked, there is no answer.
The problem is that ANY computer specialist can "invent" as fast as these guys. Just look at your screen right now and there are tens of things just waiting to be patented.
1. Selective antialiasing (don't antialias all fonts/sizes/colors, just some of them for better legibility) 2. Computer clock that displays seconds 3. An icon that changes part of the image procedurally to reflect changes in the state of the application 4. A tab that intelligently expands to fit the text on it, unless the text is too long (there is a width limit) 5. Using colors that genetically represent some ideas in a computer interface (yellow/black to warn about something)
et cetera. Yes, most of these things are prior art, because the programs I am actually looking at are already written, but if you do the same with the program you are developing, you can easily make hundreds of equallly obvious ideas and patent them.
Richard Feynman described in his book ("Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman") how the government asked him (and other researchers in the lab) to give ideas related to nuclear energy in order to patent them. It was like "nuclear reactor on a plane" - a patent for nuclear plane. On a submarine, on a ship, etc., etc. A minute of thinking and a patent is ready - totally defies the intention of the patent system... BTW, Feynman and everyone else got paid 1$ per patent.
There is an important distinction between financial liability and legal liability. Shareholders should be able to limit the former, but not the latter. The point of corporations should be to try risky ideas and implement them in business. If the business fails, shareholders don't lose anything other than the money they invested. But legal liability should not be limited. If the business idea involves abusing children in Africa (e.g. diamond mines), the shareholders and managers should be responsible for it from the day one.
The fact that some companies do it, doesn't mean IBM should/will. And in any case, your argument is a logical fallacy, because marketing considerations are irrelevant to discussion about R&D costs. There might be other factors too, like logistics, manufacturing capacity, security/relyability preferences of the customers, compatibility, impact of the technology on expected lifetime of the chip, etc. But with all else equal, high R&D costs force companies to use the result in the mass product. And overall there is a tiny percentage of products where it was worthwhile to reduce the functionality purely for marketing reasons.
So, apart from a slight inferiority complex you also have a poor grasp of business practices overall.:(
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
You have a poor grasp on basic economics. If something costed a lot in R&D, that is a good reason to mass produce it to spread the R&D costs over a lot of units. The only reason why something is limited to high-end products is that the MANUFACTURING costs are high and the article explicitely states that the fuses are added at no additional cost. So the only logical thing for IBM to do would be to use this technology nearly everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Now how easy is it for the average Joe to break the DRM on some encrypted Disney DVD, and copy it to their computer's hard drive? I'd guess less than 1% of the population would be capable of this.
Ignoring the danger of oversimplifying, let me claim that everything that is technically feasible is eventually made. There is no way (barring an all-out nuclear exchange between US and someone or a real 100% brutal dictatorship in the US with millions executed per year) that high-speed 99.9% anonymous P2P networks won't be developed in the next 5-10 years. Meanwhile the DRM is unlikely to be more than 50-70% effective, because it is so much easier to make something possible than to make it completely impossible. And the beauty of computer technologies is that you need one person to break the DRM and the software or the work itself can be easily copied.
If only this served as a lesson to RIAA/MPAA/everyone else that patents, trademarks (and copyright too!) do stiffle innovation. If this idea occured to pirates, they would be happily printing such disks in millions without worrying about those pesky patents. But RIAA must suffer from long negotiation with those damn lawyers and the technology that might have saved them (i.e. offering something valuable with CDs to differentiate their product from MP3s) goes unused.
We need an open source project to provide this functionality in a spyware-free format. The reality is that people need dancing girls, they need strippers on their desktop, they need other bells and wistles. And they will install them, so I'd rather see them install GNUGirl and GNUBuddy.
Yes, they have switched a long time ago.
Right. And that contract too is subject to reexamination. So far most people believe that it remains valid and useful. But this isn't true for the copyright social contract.
Not defending child porn per se, just the right of people to access content that they want. Viewing child porn doesn't harm children and I don't like the criminalisation of mere posession in the West. There is just a small step from there to criminalizing posession of anti-government propaganda.
These are called "ideals", not "myths". Unfortunately, current IOC administration appears to have very different ideals.
Just think how lucky YOU are. The chance of you having your own DNA is 0.0000000000000000.....[lots of zeroes]...[yet more zeroes]....0000... Without the DNA you wound't be you, would you? And think about all the random events that happened in your life - without them your personal memories (and thus you) would not be the same and you would not exist.
:) Just like we have - here and now on our Earth - life forms that enjoy boiling water, sulfuric acid, radiation inside reactor core and what not.
It might very well be that life in some remote corner of the Universe thrives on large asteroids or supernova radiation.
The Universe is about 156 billions of light years in diameter. Now you know too.
The probability may be 10^1000. That is when you repeat the "Universe" experiment 10^1010 times with similar starting conditions, you would have about 10^10 Earths. The fact that there are 10^21 stars and one had a habitable planet doesn't mean the probability must be 1/10^21.
First, your lifetime may end up longer than you expect right now (read up on physical immortality). Second, we've made quite a lot of progress and are starting to get along with each other. And when we can finally cure stupidity, expect this to made much much simplier.
"Earth is Rare, New Study Suggests". Or, so before the study we thought that one in 10000000000 stars had habitable Earth-like planets, not it appears it's more like one in 1000000000 (because we haven't found the second Jupiter yet). Interesting, but not a big deal.
I say, let's wait until 7-10 years, when the results from the Kepler mission will tell us for sure whether Earth-like planets are common or not.
Don't search for child porn if you don't like it, but other people have the right to disagree. Using the gun analogy, child pornography doesn't harm children, people harm children. The creeps are those that abuse children, not those that share or download child pornography.
Nope. Citizens don't complain about P2P software, labels, studios and pressure groups complain about P2P software.
If one doesn't like KaZaA, they don't use it. In the worst case it will install some spyware, but if someone is too clueless to allow it, they won't realise it anyway.
The problem is that by using labels they attempt to define who I am. I may kill, but I am not a murderer. I may be trolling on Slashdot, but I am not a troll. I may make a mistake, but I am not an idiot. I may go to a supermarket, but I am not a consumer. Letting others define who you are is dangerous, especially, when they try to redefine it.
Personally I am a researcher, a reader, a thinker, an intelligent creature, a human, an atheist. This is how I define myself, and I am not content with being a consumer, especially outside of the proper context (I don't mind that e.g. Logitech considers me one of the consumers).
Another great example is Alien vs. Predator 2. The game is designed such that you don't encounter a monster for about 3 or 4 levels from the beginning, BUT you are being scared from the start (and rather well). Suspence builds up as nowhere else. Finally you are sent to restart flight control computer and it's pretty obvious that finally IT will happen. Still, you need to play most of the level and only then in a brilliant scene you face several alien drones. More scary than anything else except for the episode a few levels later when you are running from the base infested by aliens. Immersion is amazing, my heart was beating like mad.
Stalker will have customizable weapons were you can just stick a scope or a grenade launcher on any gun (not sure about a flashlight and duck tape though).
Hmmm... "prevents absolutely no windows crashes" meets the criteria of "prevents up to 95.8% of windows crashes". Strike one - plus what's up with the obviously made-up 95.8% statistic with its meaningless but important-sounding precision?
:) But the drawing speed increase (and acceleration of application loading/reloading) was so noticeable, the chance of this effect being psychological is very slim. But your point about lack of objective measurements is still valid. Sorry.
I would suspect that 95.8% is a result of some survey the developers did - perhaps they found that on some particularly mess up Windows installation that many crashes are prevented. Of course, the precision is meaningless, you are right about that.
As for the lower limit, perfect Windows installation doesn't crash at all, so there would be nothing to intercept. However, in a real world situation Windows does crash. On my PC PhotoImpact crashes with nearly absolute certainly when I do heavy editing of large images. Perhaps it's bad memory, perhaps video card drivers, perhaps a bug in PhotoImpact, I don't know and it doesn't matter. What matters is that a few minutes ago I successfully finished editing a 3 megapixel photo (it involved opening 6 additional copies of the image and doing a lot of editing). AntiCrash claims that it recovered one crash. From experience I know that it is totally believable that there would be a crash during heavy editing in Photoimpact, but how does AntiCrash knows, unless it really does intercept crashes? It is obvious to me that AntiCrash does work, whether it's effectiveness is 95.8% or less.
So by now we've decided its "revolutionary". Good to see an unbiased starting point. Also, since when does "sold by" mean "endorsed" in all but the loosest sense? Strike Two. Oh, and notice that McAfee only sell one of these products, and not the one that the reviewer makes the most claims about...
The word "revolutionary" was sarcasm/irony/humour (qtothemax and alexq seem to have noticed it, your sarcasm detector may need some tweaking). The point was that for such a supposedly great program there is too little praise online. As for sold by/endorsed, I believe that McAfee would never sell a spyware/placebo application and if AntiCrash does work, then Hare might have something to it too (sorry for accidentally misleading about which one is sold by McAfee).
Ah well, that's okay then. Asked and answered. And absolutely no signs of bias in this result . Absolutely no signs of any attempt at objective measurement of results either. Not one benchmark or even stopwatch timing showing any improvement at all? Strike Three.
I just didn't expect Slashdot to accept the story.
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
If I had any affiliation with the product, I would have mentioned that. As it is, I have none whatsoever. I am not even a customer, because I haven't registered the programs.
That's not true. I don't work for that company and I am not promoting their software. I am just genuinely interested, do Hare/AntiCrash work and to what extent.
It's a fact that Hare includes some disk caching that apparently works (applications start/close/restart much faster). It also does something to help windows display faster - the difference was big enough to be real, not a placebo effect. It seems (though I am not 100% sure on this yet) that it also successfully increases the priority of the foreground task (when some CPU intensive task runs in the background, the main app works better).
I am relatively confident that there is no spyware there - AtGuard! doesn't report any connection attempts, SpyBot doesn't show anything and AntiCrash is sold by McAfee.
Unfortunately, the question I asked remains unanswered. Apart from (reasonable) critique of the 88-bit kernel idea and a few references to similar ancient utilities that worked, there is no answer.
Most people don't live near airports.
The problem is that ANY computer specialist can "invent" as fast as these guys. Just look at your screen right now and there are tens of things just waiting to be patented.
1. Selective antialiasing (don't antialias all fonts/sizes/colors, just some of them for better legibility)
2. Computer clock that displays seconds
3. An icon that changes part of the image procedurally to reflect changes in the state of the application
4. A tab that intelligently expands to fit the text on it, unless the text is too long (there is a width limit)
5. Using colors that genetically represent some ideas in a computer interface (yellow/black to warn about something)
et cetera. Yes, most of these things are prior art, because the programs I am actually looking at are already written, but if you do the same with the program you are developing, you can easily make hundreds of equallly obvious ideas and patent them.
Richard Feynman described in his book ("Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman") how the government asked him (and other researchers in the lab) to give ideas related to nuclear energy in order to patent them. It was like "nuclear reactor on a plane" - a patent for nuclear plane. On a submarine, on a ship, etc., etc. A minute of thinking and a patent is ready - totally defies the intention of the patent system... BTW, Feynman and everyone else got paid 1$ per patent.
There is an important distinction between financial liability and legal liability. Shareholders should be able to limit the former, but not the latter. The point of corporations should be to try risky ideas and implement them in business. If the business fails, shareholders don't lose anything other than the money they invested. But legal liability should not be limited. If the business idea involves abusing children in Africa (e.g. diamond mines), the shareholders and managers should be responsible for it from the day one.
The fact that some companies do it, doesn't mean IBM should/will. And in any case, your argument is a logical fallacy, because marketing considerations are irrelevant to discussion about R&D costs. There might be other factors too, like logistics, manufacturing capacity, security/relyability preferences of the customers, compatibility, impact of the technology on expected lifetime of the chip, etc. But with all else equal, high R&D costs force companies to use the result in the mass product. And overall there is a tiny percentage of products where it was worthwhile to reduce the functionality purely for marketing reasons.
:(
So, apart from a slight inferiority complex you also have a poor grasp of business practices overall.
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
You have a poor grasp on basic economics. If something costed a lot in R&D, that is a good reason to mass produce it to spread the R&D costs over a lot of units. The only reason why something is limited to high-end products is that the MANUFACTURING costs are high and the article explicitely states that the fuses are added at no additional cost. So the only logical thing for IBM to do would be to use this technology nearly everywhere.
I read Slashdot in the PDA mode, you insensitive clod!