They are referring to the "B" type connectors which per the standard are only used at the device end. The 3.0 B plugs are not compatible with the 2.0 B receptacle by dint of having an "extra bit" bolted on, whereas the 3.0 A plugs are compatible with the 2.0 A receptacle, which is typically used on the host PC.
So essentially
- you can connect any two devices with an old A-B cable and it will still work
- you can't use the new cable with old devices
Which seems very sensible - you won't have new cables unless you get new devices, and you can't waste your new cables connecting up old devices that can't use their extra wires, whereas in a pinch you can still use an old cable with a new device albeit at lower speed.
My main complaint about DIN is that it's a bitch to solder, especially the smaller types. I suppose it also works itself loose rather easily because of the circular form factor.
That said, I have a lot of affection for my IBM Model M, so I shall be sad when PS/2 ports are gone completely and I have to chance it with some inferior USB -> PS/2 converter that might not provide enough current, or doesn't have proper key rollover.
Yes, but the reason people design proprietary interfaces is because patent and copyright law lets them control which devices implement them.
Hence reducing protection of proprietary interfaces would lead to people saying "screw it, let's use the standard interface".
But really, why would you want 6 kinds of socket in your PC, or have to buy adapters that go in standard sockets so you can use their non-standard IO port? I remember the days of having to buy ISA cards to plug in your scanner, for heavens sake.
My wife has cursive that is next to unintelligible, even for herself. When she writes a shopping list, it's just annoying and occasionally comedic. The problem is that lives hang daily on her written word, because she's a paediatric oncologist.
My writing has improved markedly since I quit being a doctor because I don't feel the pressure to spew it onto the page as fast as possible because the paperwork is consuming valuable time that I could be using to do something useful. On the other hand, I type a hell of a lot faster than I ever wrote. But if I need something to be 100% legible, I print. In blocks.
Having seen some of the crap that gets proposed as an ISO standard (and it's European counterpart, CEN), having tried to STOP some of the crap that gets proposed as "standard"... I can honestly say that ISO is irrelevant for software standards, or worse, actually destructive.
The standards that make the internet work were put out there on mailing lists, exposed to the world, such that every knowledgeable hacker around could (and would) cast in their opinion, and they are all the better for them. The openness is right there, built into the name - Request For Comments. Once they are "done", everyone can just download them.
ISO standards for software artefacts are in my experience, compiled by small, self-interested clubs of people, not subjected to great scrutiny, and not vetted for quality. ISO doesn't care - it's business model is the publishing of paper standards books, so they like as many new standards and versions of standards as possible. Because of their business model, your new standard is then not disseminated as widely as possible (as software standards should be for maximum interoperability), but stuck behind a paywall, which means that you don't get open implementations. They cater specifically to that mindset which dictates that nothing you get for free has value, and are doing very well out of it. The only reason they have relevance is that having "ISO Standard" on your checklist is impressive, despite not actually contributing to the function of something at all
"RAND" itself is not "RAND" - the rub is in the "reasonable", which implies some royalties (even if they are small ones).
But is it reasonable to charge royalties to people who can't afford to pay them? Isn't that discriminating against people who don't have money? What if you charge big companies large royalties to make up for it? Isn't that discriminating against giant corporations?
You can't have royalties without discriminating. RAND is just the classic corporate legislative wolf in sheep's clothing.
he fact that the ingame character you're talking to was voiced by Martin Sheen ends up adding very little to the actual game in comparison to how much it added to the bill
You might be right about the value / cost ratio, but good voice acting can make an otherwise average game far better.
e.g. Hostile Waters - Antaeus Rising - voice work by Glynis Barber, Paul Darrow, and Tom Baker. In particular, Baker's work as the narrator (together with Warren Ellis' redoubtable wordsmithing) helped some of the cutscenes literally bring me to tears.
The other thing that can make or break any piece of visual media is the music - a good composer can make your emotions dance to his tune.
Without a core of fun, these things are of course worthless, but they can make a game/film/tv-show more engaging than it would otherwise be. Mass Effect 2 is in a genre I just consider to be a sci-fi show that involves the player, so good production values are essential - you can see this in the success of recent Final Fantasy games, which at their hearts are just CGI movies you have to work hard to unlock.
Run it in a VM with an immutable base disk image and a difference disk that gets thrown out every time it boots.
Update the base image periodically vs new threats.
While it's probably POSSIBLE to root the host of the VM you are running in, I'm willing to bet that it's too much effort for most spammermeisters right now.
I watched 2012 at the weekend with my wife. We laughed a lot at the sheer implausibility of much of it.
But if neutrino emissions really do affect radioactive decay rates (I'm assuming more neutrinos == more decay) then the core idiocy of the plot, that neutrinos, the vast majority of which just pass through the earth unhindered, somehow overheated the core of the earth causing cataclysmic seismic activity, might still be idiocy, but instead of being totally way-out-there, may actually have a minor basis in scientific fact.
Microsoft probably do love some open-source projects, but not ones that compete with them. They love projects that increase the value of Windows at no cost to them.
They probably don't mind too much about Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. The worst you can say about them is that they don't direct the user to Bing by default. But they all make Windows nicer to use, at no cost to the user or to Microsoft, as do many other projects. There is a thriving set of open-source projects that ONLY target Windows, would you believe, and MS love these (until they compete with something they do), because they are a reason to stay with Windows.
They do, of course, hate OpenOffice, because it eats into their market.
And the corollary : which database do people choose to develop their new application?
The one they are running already, of course.
As a government org that is trying to cut costs wherever possible, and realising most of these cuts via redundancy, it saddens me that my employer still pays a very large Oracle/Solaris bill when the vast majority of things (if not everything) we use it for could be done equally well by PostgreSQL/Linux. The problem being that we have an enterprise license, so that making a saving on it would imply significant cost and effort porting most, if not all, of our existing databases and applications. It might be cost effective to hire a couple of developers to port them - it might even cost less than our support contracts - but no manager is going to take the RISK involved.
Meanwhile I see new apps get pushed into the Oracle instances because they are a piece of infrastructure that is already there, which just tightens their grip on our cash.
Even better ; store the encryption key (encrypted by a password) AND the data on the card.
To enable it's authenticity to be checked, sign a hash of the data with an official government key.
Smart cards can quite happily generate and store an encryption key and never release it - the card does the decryption and releases the requested data when you provide your passphrase.
It's quite doable to have an ID card / medical record / whatever personal information system that doesn't require ANY central database of information. It's just like carrying around official papers, only they are a lot more secure and a great deal harder to forge than paper documents.
The problem is that various intelligence personnel all look at the potential for collecting data on their citizens and get a chubby semi hard-on. The giant central database of information, providing access to it, and securing it appropriately is by far the most difficult part of that kind of system to get right, and probably the main reason for implementation failure. A system that JUST consists of secured data on a smart card, and maybe a keyserver for PKI, is a great deal simpler to implement, and actually stands a chance of being useful within a decade.
We had an enterprise license for Symantec that we let expire and went for McAfee instead. File-intensive operations that previously took about 5 minutes now take in excess of 12. During the process, the virus scanner process eats about 60% of one of the CPU cores (it's a multithreaded app designed to exploit as much CPU as possible). I never noticed Symantec eating any amount of CPU - logically it must have happened, but I reckon it was about 1 or 2 percent.
Eclipse now takes MINUTES to open instead of a few tens of seconds.
So my subjective opinion of McAfee is very low indeed.
I agree that you can design a fancy computerised voting system, probably involving cryptographic technologies, that is at the same time anonymous, secure, auditable, and efficient. I even find the ideas behind such designs appeal to my hackers instincts.
But I oppose electronic voting, because the number of people who can audit such a system is so small. Placing the sanctity of democracy in the hands of a limited priesthood of technical experts is not democratic. You want a system that the maximum number of people can audit, which means paper ballots.
Yes, they are vulnerable to stuffing and corruption - but face it, if these things are happening, do you really think an electronic system won't also be manipulated to bias the results? The only difference is that the electronic system makes it MUCH easier to conceal, because it intrinsically reduces both the number of people involved collecting the votes and also the number of people who can successfully audit the vote.
Vodafone don't care about firmware upgrades unless they can control the content.
I have an N900, admittedly a niche product, and they just stalled and stalled about putting newer firmware on it. I think they are currently 2 or 3 versions behind the latest, and they are unlikely to produce a newer version since they dropped the phone from their line up. They probably dropped it because they can't control it.
They intentionally make vague threats about installing vanilla firmware and losing your warranty. They refuse to clarify their position on the matter.
The only reason iPhone users get their upgrades on Vodafone is because Apple dictates what software goes on it through their contract.
I like the C# solution to this problem ; boolean expressions MUST be booleans, which stops x = y being accepted, x == y works because it's a boolean operator. Now the compiler catches all those stupid errors.
Hmm. In HHGTG, they just shipped the "useless" segment of the population off their planet. And then all died of a virulent disease caused by the loss of some of those people.
Decreasing the diversity of the species isn't healthy. The universe doesn't care whether you are intelligent or skilled - it just cares that you fit the available niche. Who is to say that being a shellsuit-clad chav isn't the survival trait of the 21st century...
The end result of unbridled capitalism is fascism though - "Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy." [Wikipedia]
Corporations definitely seek to organise the political system according to their values - you just have to look at how much they spend on lobbying. The logical end result is a government by the corporate, for the corporate. Laissez-faire capitalism only works so long as there are controls on how powerful any one corporation is permitted to become, otherwise as corporations merge with others, eventually you end up with the position of corporations that are more powerful than nation states - this is already the case, but the nation states are far enough down the list that the ones at the top remain comfortable.
most sci-fi movies portray robots as powerful, even indestructible but slow and sometimes clumsy
I think the trend decreases as the ability to produce special effects increases ; clunky slow robots in movies appear to be caused by clunky slow SFX.
Other notable exceptions to the clunky and slow law, excepting robots / cyborgs played by human actors ; the NX 6 class robot bodies in I, Robot, any robot in the Matrix trilogy, the robot spiders in Minority Report.
That fits. The mobile providers are terrified of being seen as mere data carriers, because it would disassociate their one real asset - phone numbers - from their network. Currently you can only reach a phone number on their network, via their network (or via a roaming agreement). Switching your phone number to another network is a pain in the ass.
Remove that anchor, and customers will be free to migrate from one network service to another. Which means they would have to operate on their merits, which they really don't want to have to do.
Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.
Slashdot Mirror
They are referring to the "B" type connectors which per the standard are only used at the device end. The 3.0 B plugs are not compatible with the 2.0 B receptacle by dint of having an "extra bit" bolted on, whereas the 3.0 A plugs are compatible with the 2.0 A receptacle, which is typically used on the host PC.
So essentially
- you can connect any two devices with an old A-B cable and it will still work
- you can't use the new cable with old devices
Which seems very sensible - you won't have new cables unless you get new devices, and you can't waste your new cables connecting up old devices that can't use their extra wires, whereas in a pinch you can still use an old cable with a new device albeit at lower speed.
My main complaint about DIN is that it's a bitch to solder, especially the smaller types. I suppose it also works itself loose rather easily because of the circular form factor.
That said, I have a lot of affection for my IBM Model M, so I shall be sad when PS/2 ports are gone completely and I have to chance it with some inferior USB -> PS/2 converter that might not provide enough current, or doesn't have proper key rollover.
Yes, but the reason people design proprietary interfaces is because patent and copyright law lets them control which devices implement them.
Hence reducing protection of proprietary interfaces would lead to people saying "screw it, let's use the standard interface".
But really, why would you want 6 kinds of socket in your PC, or have to buy adapters that go in standard sockets so you can use their non-standard IO port? I remember the days of having to buy ISA cards to plug in your scanner, for heavens sake.
My wife has cursive that is next to unintelligible, even for herself. When she writes a shopping list, it's just annoying and occasionally comedic. The problem is that lives hang daily on her written word, because she's a paediatric oncologist.
My writing has improved markedly since I quit being a doctor because I don't feel the pressure to spew it onto the page as fast as possible because the paperwork is consuming valuable time that I could be using to do something useful. On the other hand, I type a hell of a lot faster than I ever wrote. But if I need something to be 100% legible, I print. In blocks.
Having seen some of the crap that gets proposed as an ISO standard (and it's European counterpart, CEN), having tried to STOP some of the crap that gets proposed as "standard" ... I can honestly say that ISO is irrelevant for software standards, or worse, actually destructive.
The standards that make the internet work were put out there on mailing lists, exposed to the world, such that every knowledgeable hacker around could (and would) cast in their opinion, and they are all the better for them. The openness is right there, built into the name - Request For Comments. Once they are "done", everyone can just download them.
ISO standards for software artefacts are in my experience, compiled by small, self-interested clubs of people, not subjected to great scrutiny, and not vetted for quality. ISO doesn't care - it's business model is the publishing of paper standards books, so they like as many new standards and versions of standards as possible. Because of their business model, your new standard is then not disseminated as widely as possible (as software standards should be for maximum interoperability), but stuck behind a paywall, which means that you don't get open implementations. They cater specifically to that mindset which dictates that nothing you get for free has value, and are doing very well out of it. The only reason they have relevance is that having "ISO Standard" on your checklist is impressive, despite not actually contributing to the function of something at all
"RAND" itself is not "RAND" - the rub is in the "reasonable", which implies some royalties (even if they are small ones).
But is it reasonable to charge royalties to people who can't afford to pay them? Isn't that discriminating against people who don't have money? What if you charge big companies large royalties to make up for it? Isn't that discriminating against giant corporations?
You can't have royalties without discriminating. RAND is just the classic corporate legislative wolf in sheep's clothing.
Hmm. Not sure about that - the Eneloops have some nice characteristics, but their energy density is lower than standard NiMH cells.
he fact that the ingame character you're talking to was voiced by Martin Sheen ends up adding very little to the actual game in comparison to how much it added to the bill
You might be right about the value / cost ratio, but good voice acting can make an otherwise average game far better.
e.g. Hostile Waters - Antaeus Rising - voice work by Glynis Barber, Paul Darrow, and Tom Baker. In particular, Baker's work as the narrator (together with Warren Ellis' redoubtable wordsmithing) helped some of the cutscenes literally bring me to tears.
The other thing that can make or break any piece of visual media is the music - a good composer can make your emotions dance to his tune.
Without a core of fun, these things are of course worthless, but they can make a game/film/tv-show more engaging than it would otherwise be. Mass Effect 2 is in a genre I just consider to be a sci-fi show that involves the player, so good production values are essential - you can see this in the success of recent Final Fantasy games, which at their hearts are just CGI movies you have to work hard to unlock.
Run it in a VM with an immutable base disk image and a difference disk that gets thrown out every time it boots.
Update the base image periodically vs new threats.
While it's probably POSSIBLE to root the host of the VM you are running in, I'm willing to bet that it's too much effort for most spammermeisters right now.
I watched 2012 at the weekend with my wife. We laughed a lot at the sheer implausibility of much of it.
But if neutrino emissions really do affect radioactive decay rates (I'm assuming more neutrinos == more decay) then the core idiocy of the plot, that neutrinos, the vast majority of which just pass through the earth unhindered, somehow overheated the core of the earth causing cataclysmic seismic activity, might still be idiocy, but instead of being totally way-out-there, may actually have a minor basis in scientific fact.
Bah.
If they don't need to edit it, export it to a PDF.
But I agree. I used to do my CV in OOo and send it out as .doc - then I saw it on a recruiter's instance of Word and it did, indeed, look shite.
Microsoft probably do love some open-source projects, but not ones that compete with them. They love projects that increase the value of Windows at no cost to them.
They probably don't mind too much about Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. The worst you can say about them is that they don't direct the user to Bing by default. But they all make Windows nicer to use, at no cost to the user or to Microsoft, as do many other projects. There is a thriving set of open-source projects that ONLY target Windows, would you believe, and MS love these (until they compete with something they do), because they are a reason to stay with Windows.
They do, of course, hate OpenOffice, because it eats into their market.
And the corollary : which database do people choose to develop their new application?
The one they are running already, of course.
As a government org that is trying to cut costs wherever possible, and realising most of these cuts via redundancy, it saddens me that my employer still pays a very large Oracle/Solaris bill when the vast majority of things (if not everything) we use it for could be done equally well by PostgreSQL/Linux. The problem being that we have an enterprise license, so that making a saving on it would imply significant cost and effort porting most, if not all, of our existing databases and applications. It might be cost effective to hire a couple of developers to port them - it might even cost less than our support contracts - but no manager is going to take the RISK involved.
Meanwhile I see new apps get pushed into the Oracle instances because they are a piece of infrastructure that is already there, which just tightens their grip on our cash.
Even better ; store the encryption key (encrypted by a password) AND the data on the card.
To enable it's authenticity to be checked, sign a hash of the data with an official government key.
Smart cards can quite happily generate and store an encryption key and never release it - the card does the decryption and releases the requested data when you provide your passphrase.
It's quite doable to have an ID card / medical record / whatever personal information system that doesn't require ANY central database of information. It's just like carrying around official papers, only they are a lot more secure and a great deal harder to forge than paper documents.
The problem is that various intelligence personnel all look at the potential for collecting data on their citizens and get a chubby semi hard-on. The giant central database of information, providing access to it, and securing it appropriately is by far the most difficult part of that kind of system to get right, and probably the main reason for implementation failure. A system that JUST consists of secured data on a smart card, and maybe a keyserver for PKI, is a great deal simpler to implement, and actually stands a chance of being useful within a decade.
McAfee is much worse than Symantec though.
We had an enterprise license for Symantec that we let expire and went for McAfee instead. File-intensive operations that previously took about 5 minutes now take in excess of 12. During the process, the virus scanner process eats about 60% of one of the CPU cores (it's a multithreaded app designed to exploit as much CPU as possible). I never noticed Symantec eating any amount of CPU - logically it must have happened, but I reckon it was about 1 or 2 percent.
Eclipse now takes MINUTES to open instead of a few tens of seconds.
So my subjective opinion of McAfee is very low indeed.
I agree that you can design a fancy computerised voting system, probably involving cryptographic technologies, that is at the same time anonymous, secure, auditable, and efficient. I even find the ideas behind such designs appeal to my hackers instincts.
But I oppose electronic voting, because the number of people who can audit such a system is so small. Placing the sanctity of democracy in the hands of a limited priesthood of technical experts is not democratic. You want a system that the maximum number of people can audit, which means paper ballots.
Yes, they are vulnerable to stuffing and corruption - but face it, if these things are happening, do you really think an electronic system won't also be manipulated to bias the results? The only difference is that the electronic system makes it MUCH easier to conceal, because it intrinsically reduces both the number of people involved collecting the votes and also the number of people who can successfully audit the vote.
Do democracy a favour. Use a pencil.
But they don't get sold on "up to 100 watts" and turn out to be a 50.
Vodafone don't care about firmware upgrades unless they can control the content.
I have an N900, admittedly a niche product, and they just stalled and stalled about putting newer firmware on it. I think they are currently 2 or 3 versions behind the latest, and they are unlikely to produce a newer version since they dropped the phone from their line up. They probably dropped it because they can't control it.
They intentionally make vague threats about installing vanilla firmware and losing your warranty. They refuse to clarify their position on the matter.
The only reason iPhone users get their upgrades on Vodafone is because Apple dictates what software goes on it through their contract.
I like the C# solution to this problem ; boolean expressions MUST be booleans, which stops x = y being accepted, x == y works because it's a boolean operator. Now the compiler catches all those stupid errors.
... and THEN run you through with his genuine reproduction bat'leth.
* Kahless
Hmm. In HHGTG, they just shipped the "useless" segment of the population off their planet. And then all died of a virulent disease caused by the loss of some of those people.
Decreasing the diversity of the species isn't healthy. The universe doesn't care whether you are intelligent or skilled - it just cares that you fit the available niche. Who is to say that being a shellsuit-clad chav isn't the survival trait of the 21st century...
The end result of unbridled capitalism is fascism though - "Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy." [Wikipedia]
Corporations definitely seek to organise the political system according to their values - you just have to look at how much they spend on lobbying. The logical end result is a government by the corporate, for the corporate. Laissez-faire capitalism only works so long as there are controls on how powerful any one corporation is permitted to become, otherwise as corporations merge with others, eventually you end up with the position of corporations that are more powerful than nation states - this is already the case, but the nation states are far enough down the list that the ones at the top remain comfortable.
most sci-fi movies portray robots as powerful, even indestructible but slow and sometimes clumsy
I think the trend decreases as the ability to produce special effects increases ; clunky slow robots in movies appear to be caused by clunky slow SFX.
Other notable exceptions to the clunky and slow law, excepting robots / cyborgs played by human actors ; the NX 6 class robot bodies in I, Robot, any robot in the Matrix trilogy, the robot spiders in Minority Report.
That fits. The mobile providers are terrified of being seen as mere data carriers, because it would disassociate their one real asset - phone numbers - from their network. Currently you can only reach a phone number on their network, via their network (or via a roaming agreement). Switching your phone number to another network is a pain in the ass.
Remove that anchor, and customers will be free to migrate from one network service to another. Which means they would have to operate on their merits, which they really don't want to have to do.
Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.