No, it's been claimed by one email to have been there for ten years, possibly as part of a FUD effort. Read the claim that the FBI did this to monitor their "parent organization", the EOUSA - One, I'm fairly certain the EOUSA is not the FBI's parent organization - both are part of the DOJ, but I'm reasonably sure one is not under the other. Also, really - the FBI paying people to backdoor stuff to monitor another DOJ organization? It screams "bullshit" to me and destroys this guy's credibility.
Whether or not it is actually there is a whole different story. Any serious attacks against the crypto would have been found by now.
Side channel attack vulnerabilities (claimed by the email) are much more difficult to find, but also are generally of much lower severity security-wise - 95%+ of the time, if someone has the level of local access to your machine to execute a side channel attack, there are easier ways for them to get your data and private communications. (Exception: DRM implementations.) Putting a side channel attack vulnerability into an IPSEC implementation is going to be of little benefit to an attacker, and of little to no detriment to most users.
I forgot to say - I don't consider WP7 to be a "good" touch-oriented OS (IMO it's a massive step backwards from WM6.5, so many of the features I liked were removed so I'm guaranteed to move to Android now), but WP7 has a far greater chance of producing a non-sucking tablet than Windows 7 does.
Scaling a PC OS to a tablet always seems to result in failure.
Scaling a good touch-oriented phone OS up to a tablet, however, seems to work well.
See, as an example, the success of the iPad (basically a giant iPhone) and the various Android tablets (pre-Honeycomb, basically giant Android phones, such as the Huawei S7 and the Galaxy Tab series mentioned in TFA).
Oh yeah - I love my Huawei S7 (Android-based tablet, pre-Honeycomb, running 2.1 and with a 2.2 Froyo upgrade in the pipeline). Android took the entry barriers to the tablet market and hit them with a nuke.
There are problems that exist, and some satphone manufacturers do better at trying to focus on those solutions.
Inmarsat still seems pretty healthy, and they focus on two major market segments - maritime and aviation. Ships and aircraft are two situations where the exorbitant prices (and limitations) of satphones are justifiable.
The other is the military - At least if you look at Wikipedia's citations, apparently DoD income represents about half of Iridium's revenue if I read it correctly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications_Inc.#cite_note-11 - Yes, they have their own network, but in some cases it's easier to resurrect someone else's failed network for pennies on the dollar, and cost-reduce it a bit with paying civilian customers (Again - ships and aircraft).
The point of this upgrade is not the single-user speed - it's the capacity in numbers of users.
The reason carriers are deploying LTE and other 4G technologies is so that more people can use the network at "3G-type" usage patterns without an AT&T happening (an AT&T is when the network becomes so overcrowded that peak per-user bandwidth gets worse than the previous generation - I've seen reports that AT&T 3G in midtown Manhattan is slower than EDGE is in most other places.), not per-user bandwidth. As soon as LTE adoption spreads, you're going to see peak bandwidths drop.
Given that some of Xilinx's parts can reconfigure from flash memory in only 1-2 seconds, this much smaller part should be able to configure in under half a second if the reconfiguration architecture is done right.
So you could reconfigure it as part of an application startup sequence. Not sure how you'd handle device contention though (an attempt to run two apps that both want to use the FPGA - context switching would be a real bitch).
The largest I have seen has two PowerPC 440 cores. That would be the Virtex-5 FX130T and FX200T (Only different in the number of logic gates available).
None of the current V6s do, but I keep hearing about Xilinx going to ARM. It is in one of their roadmap documents but no real info on exactly where in the roadmap it is.
Unlike Intel's solution, the Xilinx units have everything on a single silicon die.
He seems to be claiming a process relatively similar to the thermal depolymerization process that Changing World Technologies (a little bit TOO optimistic of a name if you ask me...) tried.
CWT's technology deadended. Part of it was due to NIMBYism at the pilot plant, part was due to betting on changes to USDA regulations that would ban feeding animal parts to other animals which never actually went through, but there has to be some other reason for it... Otherwise it would've taken off rapidly in Europe, where feeding animal parts to other animals IS banned and you actually have to pay a hefty disposal fee for animal waste due to concerns about prion-based diseases.
Good luck doing C# work on an AVR or STM32/LPC1xxx chip.
If that's your attitude, I feel sorry for anyone working for you.
C/C++ have been around for decades for a reason - they WORK.
C# is newer, primarily pushed by a single vendor, and to me, that screams "fad". It's a shitty choice for anyone who is writing code that has any expectation of being used for more than a short period of time. It's also a crap choice for anyone who is going to do cross-platform work, partly for the reasons stated a few posts above. Non-Microsoft implementations of C#/.NET consistently lag behind and despite the (in theory) open spec - stuff always breaks compatibility-wise with the non-MS implementations.
I don't think they'll show a list of all networks that are in an area - it would be too easy for a competitor to datamine them then.
What they effectively have is a lookup service: MAC + SSID -> your location to within Wi-Fi range
You'll notice that a lot of Google products are now location enabled - Maps can, if you are using Wi-Fi, determine automatically where you are. Same for Android devices even when GPS and cellular signals are turned off. The data collection efforts in question are how Google provides those services.
I wish I had mod points right now... If you've used a Google product that told you your location without GPS or a cellular signal, you have benefited from their Wi-Fi data collection.
However, I can't condone collecting "payload" data - only MAC and SSID.
I've actually been pretty happy with my WM6.5 phone. However, I'm a power user that runs a cooked ROM. Stock AT&T ROMs suck - bloated, slow, unreliable.
However, WP7 removes basically every feature WM6.5 had that made it attractive to power users despite its UI glitches. So Microsoft basically threw away their existing customer base.
Yup. AT&T is approaching the point where they will lose me as a customer. Phone selection is why I moved to them, and in the past four years, AT&T and Verizon have effectively switched places.
Verizon has stopped spending 9 months delaying a phone for "network certification" (read: we haven't finished crippling it yet) issues. (See Treo 650 and XV6800 - both were delayed 9 months for crippling compared to Sprint, the XV6800 was what prompted me to switch to AT&T), and is now releasing some very nice devices far more open than their previous releases (Droid series).
AT&T, on the other hand, is releasing bloated crippled ROMs for their devices, and most of their Android devices are fundamentally crippled hardware or severely backlevel Android releases. Look at the Aria - HVGA??? My Tilt 2 (WM6.5 unit) had a WVGA screen! One of their recent releases (only 2-3 months old) only had Android 1.6.
I forgot to mention - even if they are KDE 4ing, they're basically throwing away their existing market share. WP7 has very few of the capabilities that attracted current WM6.5 users to the platform in the iPhone age.
I have a WM6.5 phone and am pretty happy with it, but I am NOT going to be purchasing a WP7 phone. I'm not sure what I'll be going for - I like my Android tablet but the selection of Android phones that support AT&T's 3G bands is kinda crap right now.
WM5/WM6 didn't really have significant lockdown, but as I understand it, the differences are: WP7 - Adds a shiny UI WP7 - Removes quite a few features/capabilities present in WM5/WM6 (see above regarding encrypted Exchange connections as an example) WP7 - Adds iPhone-style lockdown WP7 - Removes cut and paste (present in 5/6) WP7 - Removes multitasking (present in 5/6)
The question is - how much of this crippling was an intentional design decision, and how much of it is Microsoft pulling a KDE 4?
Everything I've read about WP7 indicates that it's a step backwards in terms of flexibility and features from WM6.5.
Yes, the UI is cleaner and shinier, but iPhone and Android also have very nice UIs, in addition to having more applications available and more capabilities than WP7.
The problem is that for people who HAVE shared their email address with you on FB, there is no good way to synchronize that data to another address book.
Channels are shared between users - 1.0/1.1 used TDMA, 2.0/3.0 use either TDMA or S-CDMA.
However, as I mentioned in my post, as user count goes up, providers can throw more channels at the problem.
e.g. if you wanted to give 5 Mbps without any potential for slowdown within the cable network (not counting overselling of your backhaul), you could assign 7 users per channel. 8 users per channel would have a slight bit of sharing, but negligible.
DOCSIS 3.0 supports bonding of multiple channels.
My guess is that as you increase your caps towards the maximum capability of DOCSIS 2.0, you are more and more likely to see sharing effects. However, you're even more likely to see evidence of the backhaul being oversold long before that with most cable providers.
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No, it's been claimed by one email to have been there for ten years, possibly as part of a FUD effort. Read the claim that the FBI did this to monitor their "parent organization", the EOUSA - One, I'm fairly certain the EOUSA is not the FBI's parent organization - both are part of the DOJ, but I'm reasonably sure one is not under the other. Also, really - the FBI paying people to backdoor stuff to monitor another DOJ organization? It screams "bullshit" to me and destroys this guy's credibility.
Whether or not it is actually there is a whole different story. Any serious attacks against the crypto would have been found by now.
Side channel attack vulnerabilities (claimed by the email) are much more difficult to find, but also are generally of much lower severity security-wise - 95%+ of the time, if someone has the level of local access to your machine to execute a side channel attack, there are easier ways for them to get your data and private communications. (Exception: DRM implementations.) Putting a side channel attack vulnerability into an IPSEC implementation is going to be of little benefit to an attacker, and of little to no detriment to most users.
I forgot to say - I don't consider WP7 to be a "good" touch-oriented OS (IMO it's a massive step backwards from WM6.5, so many of the features I liked were removed so I'm guaranteed to move to Android now), but WP7 has a far greater chance of producing a non-sucking tablet than Windows 7 does.
Big difference.
Scaling a PC OS to a tablet always seems to result in failure.
Scaling a good touch-oriented phone OS up to a tablet, however, seems to work well.
See, as an example, the success of the iPad (basically a giant iPhone) and the various Android tablets (pre-Honeycomb, basically giant Android phones, such as the Huawei S7 and the Galaxy Tab series mentioned in TFA).
Oh yeah - I love my Huawei S7 (Android-based tablet, pre-Honeycomb, running 2.1 and with a 2.2 Froyo upgrade in the pipeline). Android took the entry barriers to the tablet market and hit them with a nuke.
There are problems that exist, and some satphone manufacturers do better at trying to focus on those solutions.
Inmarsat still seems pretty healthy, and they focus on two major market segments - maritime and aviation. Ships and aircraft are two situations where the exorbitant prices (and limitations) of satphones are justifiable.
The other is the military - At least if you look at Wikipedia's citations, apparently DoD income represents about half of Iridium's revenue if I read it correctly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications_Inc.#cite_note-11 - Yes, they have their own network, but in some cases it's easier to resurrect someone else's failed network for pennies on the dollar, and cost-reduce it a bit with paying civilian customers (Again - ships and aircraft).
Nope. I played for 10 minutes this morning to check out Stormwind from the air, then logged out for the day.
I'm going to an open mic night after work so I won't even be playing tonight.
The point of this upgrade is not the single-user speed - it's the capacity in numbers of users.
The reason carriers are deploying LTE and other 4G technologies is so that more people can use the network at "3G-type" usage patterns without an AT&T happening (an AT&T is when the network becomes so overcrowded that peak per-user bandwidth gets worse than the previous generation - I've seen reports that AT&T 3G in midtown Manhattan is slower than EDGE is in most other places.), not per-user bandwidth. As soon as LTE adoption spreads, you're going to see peak bandwidths drop.
Yup. Think of the misbehaving little kid that wants attention.
If you give them the attention they want, they'll just misbehave more.
We need to stop giving the terrorists so much attention, it only encourages them.
You'll do a hell of a lot more damage with a lot less boom if you can derail the train.
Note that this doesn't even require explosives...
Yup. All this does is:
Waste your money
Get you a dose of radiation while still ending in a patdown
Given that some of Xilinx's parts can reconfigure from flash memory in only 1-2 seconds, this much smaller part should be able to configure in under half a second if the reconfiguration architecture is done right.
So you could reconfigure it as part of an application startup sequence. Not sure how you'd handle device contention though (an attempt to run two apps that both want to use the FPGA - context switching would be a real bitch).
The largest I have seen has two PowerPC 440 cores. That would be the Virtex-5 FX130T and FX200T (Only different in the number of logic gates available).
None of the current V6s do, but I keep hearing about Xilinx going to ARM. It is in one of their roadmap documents but no real info on exactly where in the roadmap it is.
Unlike Intel's solution, the Xilinx units have everything on a single silicon die.
He seems to be claiming a process relatively similar to the thermal depolymerization process that Changing World Technologies (a little bit TOO optimistic of a name if you ask me...) tried.
CWT's technology deadended. Part of it was due to NIMBYism at the pilot plant, part was due to betting on changes to USDA regulations that would ban feeding animal parts to other animals which never actually went through, but there has to be some other reason for it... Otherwise it would've taken off rapidly in Europe, where feeding animal parts to other animals IS banned and you actually have to pay a hefty disposal fee for animal waste due to concerns about prion-based diseases.
Part of it being they seem pointless.
The range is so short and the delay so long with contactless that it's faster to just swipe the card than to tap it for me.
He's very, very good at Verizon Math. He also made it clear that he was practicing Verizon Math.
Do note that Verizon Math is very different from traditional math.
Good luck doing C# work on an AVR or STM32/LPC1xxx chip.
If that's your attitude, I feel sorry for anyone working for you.
C/C++ have been around for decades for a reason - they WORK.
C# is newer, primarily pushed by a single vendor, and to me, that screams "fad". It's a shitty choice for anyone who is writing code that has any expectation of being used for more than a short period of time. It's also a crap choice for anyone who is going to do cross-platform work, partly for the reasons stated a few posts above. Non-Microsoft implementations of C#/.NET consistently lag behind and despite the (in theory) open spec - stuff always breaks compatibility-wise with the non-MS implementations.
On the other hand, the rants you hear from the guy running Fusion Garage sound like someone seriously out of touch with reality.
I don't think they'll show a list of all networks that are in an area - it would be too easy for a competitor to datamine them then.
What they effectively have is a lookup service:
MAC + SSID -> your location to within Wi-Fi range
You'll notice that a lot of Google products are now location enabled - Maps can, if you are using Wi-Fi, determine automatically where you are. Same for Android devices even when GPS and cellular signals are turned off. The data collection efforts in question are how Google provides those services.
I wish I had mod points right now... If you've used a Google product that told you your location without GPS or a cellular signal, you have benefited from their Wi-Fi data collection.
However, I can't condone collecting "payload" data - only MAC and SSID.
I've actually been pretty happy with my WM6.5 phone. However, I'm a power user that runs a cooked ROM. Stock AT&T ROMs suck - bloated, slow, unreliable.
However, WP7 removes basically every feature WM6.5 had that made it attractive to power users despite its UI glitches. So Microsoft basically threw away their existing customer base.
Yup. AT&T is approaching the point where they will lose me as a customer. Phone selection is why I moved to them, and in the past four years, AT&T and Verizon have effectively switched places.
Verizon has stopped spending 9 months delaying a phone for "network certification" (read: we haven't finished crippling it yet) issues. (See Treo 650 and XV6800 - both were delayed 9 months for crippling compared to Sprint, the XV6800 was what prompted me to switch to AT&T), and is now releasing some very nice devices far more open than their previous releases (Droid series).
AT&T, on the other hand, is releasing bloated crippled ROMs for their devices, and most of their Android devices are fundamentally crippled hardware or severely backlevel Android releases. Look at the Aria - HVGA??? My Tilt 2 (WM6.5 unit) had a WVGA screen! One of their recent releases (only 2-3 months old) only had Android 1.6.
I forgot to mention - even if they are KDE 4ing, they're basically throwing away their existing market share. WP7 has very few of the capabilities that attracted current WM6.5 users to the platform in the iPhone age.
I have a WM6.5 phone and am pretty happy with it, but I am NOT going to be purchasing a WP7 phone. I'm not sure what I'll be going for - I like my Android tablet but the selection of Android phones that support AT&T's 3G bands is kinda crap right now.
WM5/WM6 didn't really have significant lockdown, but as I understand it, the differences are:
WP7 - Adds a shiny UI
WP7 - Removes quite a few features/capabilities present in WM5/WM6 (see above regarding encrypted Exchange connections as an example)
WP7 - Adds iPhone-style lockdown
WP7 - Removes cut and paste (present in 5/6)
WP7 - Removes multitasking (present in 5/6)
The question is - how much of this crippling was an intentional design decision, and how much of it is Microsoft pulling a KDE 4?
Everything I've read about WP7 indicates that it's a step backwards in terms of flexibility and features from WM6.5.
Yes, the UI is cleaner and shinier, but iPhone and Android also have very nice UIs, in addition to having more applications available and more capabilities than WP7.
The problem is that for people who HAVE shared their email address with you on FB, there is no good way to synchronize that data to another address book.
Channels are shared between users - 1.0/1.1 used TDMA, 2.0/3.0 use either TDMA or S-CDMA.
However, as I mentioned in my post, as user count goes up, providers can throw more channels at the problem.
e.g. if you wanted to give 5 Mbps without any potential for slowdown within the cable network (not counting overselling of your backhaul), you could assign 7 users per channel. 8 users per channel would have a slight bit of sharing, but negligible.
DOCSIS 3.0 supports bonding of multiple channels.
My guess is that as you increase your caps towards the maximum capability of DOCSIS 2.0, you are more and more likely to see sharing effects. However, you're even more likely to see evidence of the backhaul being oversold long before that with most cable providers.