Everyone who is now crying that "Google is being evil" is looking at this from a flawed perspective.
If it were the case that Google had leverage with the Chinese government, and if they could use that leverage to eradicate censorship in China, then perhaps the arguments of hypocrisy would hold water. This, however, is not the case.
The simple fact is, with or without Google operating in China, censorship there will continue to exist. If we assume that this is the case, and further that Google can only operate in China if they agree to abide by the laws in China (regardless of what we think of those laws), then there are only two possible scenarios.
Google refuses to abide by Chinese law and is not allowed to operate at all.
Google abides by the law by censoring results, and is allowed to operate, albeit on a limited basis, in China.
Unless you can make the argument (and, in my estimation, it is an incoherent one) that somehow Google sans censorship is a net positive value to the Chinese citizenry, but censored Google is a net negative value, you must necessarily conclude that some access to Google is better than none.
Fundamentally, the censorship is China's fault, not Google's. They're doing their best to ensure that they give as much access as they can to the people in China.
The band Man or Astro-Man? used to perform a song onstage called "a simple text file" which involved bringing out an Apple ImageWriterII, setting up a microphone, and letting it play. It's actually a pretty good song.
If MS were trying to make money on the console itself, the model suggested would be correct.
That's not what's happening.
MS makes money, theoretically, by achieving a high market penetration and then getting licensing fees for all the games that are sold. High penetration = lots of games = lots of revenue. That's why they're selling these things at a loss---the more people have them, the more money MS makes in the long run.
In this model, there truly _is_ a shortage, because the ideal scenario is an infinite number of XBOX360s available for sale (well, there are a few problems with that---obviously you only need enough that everyone gets one, and beyond that, there is evidence to suggest that in some markets, including this one, demand actually responds inversely to supply in certain situations, hence the rumors that MS was attempting to artificially increase demand by making them hard to get).
MS stands to make the most money by getting as many of the out as possible. Simple as that.
Now, you could argue "but the early adopters are willing to pay more, and they make up a large enough minority that the initial supply will be gone even at $700." Sure, MS could sell the first batch for $700 and drop the price immediately to $500. Problem is, they can only get away with this trick once, if that---once everyone knows that just have to wait a couple months and the price drops a couple hundred bucks, even most of the early adopters will wait, and that kills MS's edge over Sony in getting the XBOX360 out way before the PS3.
I have two kineses---one at work, one at home---and I couldn't live without them.
They also use individual switches per-key, which makes the tactile feedback excellent, and if you get the Classic or better, the keyboard can remap itself (though I'll admit, getting your computer to do this for you is just a SMOP...)
Are you familiar with init? inittab is extremely simple if you're not braindead; the same goes for SysV rc scripts. There's no compelling reason to use XML here. OK, maybe it was easier---"we'll just drop an XML interpreter into init."
People with bf% >20% often look as if they have gynecomastia, but true gyno involves glandular enlargement, nipple sensitivity, and, in some cases, lactation. "Fatty gyno," as it's known, is just a result of being a fatass.
I know. I used to be fat, and I had the latter. As soon as I got off the Haagen-Dazs and onto the elliptical, it went away.
A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy.wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).
So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.
From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.
In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.
This article is bullshit. He's putting out 5 watts. You absolutely cannot cook an egg or bacon on 5 watts. That's like trying to cook the egg by rubbing a piece of rough cloth over the shell really fast.
Why was this not obvious to the OP and the mods? Jeezus what a waste of bandwidth.
The correct way to do this is to distribute the radiated power over the surface of the sphere at the radius in question. Thus, one measures it in terms of power per square meter, i.e., field strength.
Shameless plug here for Advanced Circuits. These guys are awesome, they have a student deal ($33 per board in single quantity), and they do good work.
http://www.4pcb.com/
CCD Cameras + powerful IR source =
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
white out.
Someone needs to make some strong IR radiators and put them near these cameras. If they're cheap enough and easy enough to make, everyone could carry them around just dropping them casually in line of sight of the cameras.
One argument: error messages tell the user that they didn't get you; if it goes into a mailbox with 10e3 other emails you'll miss it. The latter is a worse situation.
Another argument: you _will_ get tons of spam. I did a catch-all account on several of my domains when I was moving (basically, a friend of mine handled all my mail by passing everything addressed to one of my domains to a procmail script I wrote to handle it). My spam went up by about a factor of 5.
A counter-argument: I also found that if you assume that everything to an invalid address is spam, you have a pretty good source from which to train a Bayesian filter.
So it depends on what you want. If you want some Bayes fodder, go for it. If you're doing it for convenience, it's not going to be as great as you think.
that still doesn't keep them from *sniffing* your network
As I said, this doesn't prevent against more than a casual wardriving effort. For better protection, use a VPN. There's no reason to do that in hardware, since you've just added a level of specialization to a layer where it doesn't belong.
Moreover, 802.11i encryption only prevents someone from sniffing you on the local wireless segment. There's still ample opportunity for sniffing upstream. It's inconsistent to argue that you need the anti-sniffing measures of 802.11i when you're not taking the same measures for the rest of the lifetime of your packet. If you _are_ taking steps to prevent upstream sniffing, there's no point in encrypting the wireless network as well.
Until *every* protocol that goes over your network has reliable encryption, then this is still useful.
And, in fact, every protocol that requires encryption should already implement that itself. As I argued above, you can't rely on not being sniffed further down the chain, which means that if you require security you'll still have to encrypt to keep the rest of the route secure.
The fact is, the only remotely useful part of the 802.11i encryption is the implicit authentication, and there are better ways of handling this higher in the protocol stack.
Putting encryption at this level is useless because secure communication with e.g. a webserver still requires that I encrypt over HTTPS, since my link to the server goes over more than just the wireless link. Thus, hardware AES only duplicates functionality. This is one of the premises of the end-to-end argument: put functionality at the highest layer possible to avoid duplication.
The argument that this is useful to keep "baddies" out of your network is weak, too. If you want to keep your wireless network secure, tie MAC addresses to IP addresses, and presto! no one can wardrive your wireless network. No, this is not perfectly secure, but you can secure yourself against a better-than-casual attacker by pushing the necessary authentication up to a higher layer. This approach is more flexible and doesn't require specialized hardware. Plus, when it's shown in five years that AES is breakable in faster than brute-force time, we don't need massive hardware (or firmware) upgrades; just apt-get install openswan.
802.11b should be a standard with the same scope as 802.3 (ethernet)---define the hardware link level and be done with it. Security at the link layer has been shown time and again to be worthless in even the best of cases. Rolling AES into the hardware spec of 802.11i is just window-dressing. The people who decided to do it should be beaten with a stick and forced to read the Saltzer paper until they recite it in their sleep.
(If you haven't read Saltzer's paper on the end-to-end argument, google should provide ample background.)
Slashdot Mirror
If it were the case that Google had leverage with the Chinese government, and if they could use that leverage to eradicate censorship in China, then perhaps the arguments of hypocrisy would hold water. This, however, is not the case.
The simple fact is, with or without Google operating in China, censorship there will continue to exist. If we assume that this is the case, and further that Google can only operate in China if they agree to abide by the laws in China (regardless of what we think of those laws), then there are only two possible scenarios.
Unless you can make the argument (and, in my estimation, it is an incoherent one) that somehow Google sans censorship is a net positive value to the Chinese citizenry, but censored Google is a net negative value, you must necessarily conclude that some access to Google is better than none.
Fundamentally, the censorship is China's fault, not Google's. They're doing their best to ensure that they give as much access as they can to the people in China.
-rsw
The band Man or Astro-Man? used to perform a song onstage called "a simple text file" which involved bringing out an Apple ImageWriterII, setting up a microphone, and letting it play. It's actually a pretty good song.
If MS were trying to make money on the console itself, the model suggested would be correct.
That's not what's happening.
MS makes money, theoretically, by achieving a high market penetration and then getting licensing fees for all the games that are sold. High penetration = lots of games = lots of revenue. That's why they're selling these things at a loss---the more people have them, the more money MS makes in the long run.
In this model, there truly _is_ a shortage, because the ideal scenario is an infinite number of XBOX360s available for sale (well, there are a few problems with that---obviously you only need enough that everyone gets one, and beyond that, there is evidence to suggest that in some markets, including this one, demand actually responds inversely to supply in certain situations, hence the rumors that MS was attempting to artificially increase demand by making them hard to get).
MS stands to make the most money by getting as many of the out as possible. Simple as that.
Now, you could argue "but the early adopters are willing to pay more, and they make up a large enough minority that the initial supply will be gone even at $700." Sure, MS could sell the first batch for $700 and drop the price immediately to $500. Problem is, they can only get away with this trick once, if that---once everyone knows that just have to wait a couple months and the price drops a couple hundred bucks, even most of the early adopters will wait, and that kills MS's edge over Sony in getting the XBOX360 out way before the PS3.
Just my two cents.
-rsw
bumpity bumpity BUMP!
I have two kineses---one at work, one at home---and I couldn't live without them.
They also use individual switches per-key, which makes the tactile feedback excellent, and if you get the Classic or better, the keyboard can remap itself (though I'll admit, getting your computer to do this for you is just a SMOP...)
-rsw
This, children, is why end-to-end solutions are better.
-rsw
Setting up a network takes slightly more brain power than that generated by a petri dish full of E. coli.
-rsw
Are you familiar with init? inittab is extremely simple if you're not braindead; the same goes for SysV rc scripts. There's no compelling reason to use XML here. OK, maybe it was easier---"we'll just drop an XML interpreter into init."
No bloat there.
-rsw
step 1: add XML to something that doesn't need it.
step 2: ?
step 3: profit.
-rsw
Umm, no.
People with bf% >20% often look as if they have gynecomastia, but true gyno involves glandular enlargement, nipple sensitivity, and, in some cases, lactation. "Fatty gyno," as it's known, is just a result of being a fatass.
I know. I used to be fat, and I had the latter. As soon as I got off the Haagen-Dazs and onto the elliptical, it went away.
-rsw
Convert everything into mbox format. formail will help you with that.
Use mairix to search through email.
mutt is the best mail client ever.
-rsw
see subject
Why not add new functionality in release candidates, and only make it an official release once it's stable?
-rsw
A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy .wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).
So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.
From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.
In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.
These ringers pretty much rule the roost.
-rsw
This article is bullshit. He's putting out 5 watts. You absolutely cannot cook an egg or bacon on 5 watts. That's like trying to cook the egg by rubbing a piece of rough cloth over the shell really fast.
Why was this not obvious to the OP and the mods? Jeezus what a waste of bandwidth.
-rsw
Your question is extremely vague, but based on what you've said subversion might be just the ticket. Plus, it rules :-)
I don't know about you guys, but back when I was running linux on a 33 MHz 80386, my kernel compiles went overnight. Now they take, oh, ten minutes.
I'd say that's an improvement, wouldn't you?
...when plotting real-valued functions.
Ha ha. I kill me.
The correct way to do this is to distribute the radiated power over the surface of the sphere at the radius in question. Thus, one measures it in terms of power per square meter, i.e., field strength.
Their normal patch cycle is once a month. The last official "patch day" was July 19th or thereabouts.
I say everyone should make this an office holiday, complete with paper hats and cake, to remind people to run WindowsUpdate.
Or just run Linux.
Shameless plug here for Advanced Circuits. These guys are awesome, they have a student deal ($33 per board in single quantity), and they do good work.
http://www.4pcb.com/
white out.
Someone needs to make some strong IR radiators and put them near these cameras. If they're cheap enough and easy enough to make, everyone could carry them around just dropping them casually in line of sight of the cameras.
One argument: error messages tell the user that they didn't get you; if it goes into a mailbox with 10e3 other emails you'll miss it. The latter is a worse situation.
Another argument: you _will_ get tons of spam. I did a catch-all account on several of my domains when I was moving (basically, a friend of mine handled all my mail by passing everything addressed to one of my domains to a procmail script I wrote to handle it). My spam went up by about a factor of 5.
A counter-argument: I also found that if you assume that everything to an invalid address is spam, you have a pretty good source from which to train a Bayesian filter.
So it depends on what you want. If you want some Bayes fodder, go for it. If you're doing it for convenience, it's not going to be as great as you think.
that still doesn't keep them from *sniffing* your network
As I said, this doesn't prevent against more than a casual wardriving effort. For better protection, use a VPN. There's no reason to do that in hardware, since you've just added a level of specialization to a layer where it doesn't belong.
Moreover, 802.11i encryption only prevents someone from sniffing you on the local wireless segment. There's still ample opportunity for sniffing upstream. It's inconsistent to argue that you need the anti-sniffing measures of 802.11i when you're not taking the same measures for the rest of the lifetime of your packet. If you _are_ taking steps to prevent upstream sniffing, there's no point in encrypting the wireless network as well.
Until *every* protocol that goes over your network has reliable encryption, then this is still useful.
And, in fact, every protocol that requires encryption should already implement that itself. As I argued above, you can't rely on not being sniffed further down the chain, which means that if you require security you'll still have to encrypt to keep the rest of the route secure.
The fact is, the only remotely useful part of the 802.11i encryption is the implicit authentication, and there are better ways of handling this higher in the protocol stack.
Regardless of the academic whinging of some researcher in a basement somewhere.
Uhm, a little respect is in order. These are the guys that invented the internet, Al Gore's claims notwithstanding.
Anyone ever heard of the end-to-end argument?
Putting encryption at this level is useless because secure communication with e.g. a webserver still requires that I encrypt over HTTPS, since my link to the server goes over more than just the wireless link. Thus, hardware AES only duplicates functionality. This is one of the premises of the end-to-end argument: put functionality at the highest layer possible to avoid duplication.
The argument that this is useful to keep "baddies" out of your network is weak, too. If you want to keep your wireless network secure, tie MAC addresses to IP addresses, and presto! no one can wardrive your wireless network. No, this is not perfectly secure, but you can secure yourself against a better-than-casual attacker by pushing the necessary authentication up to a higher layer. This approach is more flexible and doesn't require specialized hardware. Plus, when it's shown in five years that AES is breakable in faster than brute-force time, we don't need massive hardware (or firmware) upgrades; just apt-get install openswan.
802.11b should be a standard with the same scope as 802.3 (ethernet)---define the hardware link level and be done with it. Security at the link layer has been shown time and again to be worthless in even the best of cases. Rolling AES into the hardware spec of 802.11i is just window-dressing. The people who decided to do it should be beaten with a stick and forced to read the Saltzer paper until they recite it in their sleep.
(If you haven't read Saltzer's paper on the end-to-end argument, google should provide ample background.)