> My system can't be beat. It is the most infallible and secure of any system.
>
> Then it gets beat.
..except we're not talking about that. we're talking about one peer having orders of magnitude more processing that most other nodes combined and the laws of hyper-distant/tail probability.
the principles of bitcoin security and decentralization are comparable to probabilities in the world of quantum mechanics, where the things that are 'possible' and dramatic (such as winning the state lottery 10 times in a row with picks P1, P2,..., P10) are so vanishingly small that it's best modeled as noise ('noise' because of the volume of outcomes also with probability on that order of magnitude). yet making the statement that 'the state lottery will be won ten times (with any number)' is analogously the compliment of the earlier 10 times statement -- and THAT's what makes bitcoin and a world built from QM work in highly predictable ways (that the union of so many interdependent events collapse the macro outcomes to very narrow bands of outcomes, relatively speaking).
I think you missed the part where I said, "if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible".
The median machine (e.g. a typical Dell or HP machine bought at Best Buy) has FAR less capable GPU -- they're typically integrated with the motherboard. The makers of these onboard GPUs (a) care little to nothing about OGL support and (b) typically don't maintain/update their drivers once they have a stable version.
The rub (and MS's leverage) is that D3D is so entrenched as well as far ahead that it'd be corporate suicide to cut D3D support.
Also, it doesn't seem like you registered what I was saying with regard to the fact that OGL driver support either greatly lags or is unavailable (in any real, non-emulated form) on middle-tier Windows machines. In other words, if we removed D3D support, our company's receipts would be down by over 2/3 overnight. You have to understand the gravity of that.
It doesn't sound like you've developed much in the way of commercial quality graphics-centric software for "middle tier" end-users.
Long story short is that if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible, modern OpenGL drivers tend to greatly lag or be unavailable on many Windows machines. Vista and especially Vista 64 really made this worse since maintaining and upgrading GL drivers for middle tier GPU hardware is generally at the bottom of the priority list for 3D driver development. Meanwhile, D3D support tends to be solid, speedy, and well maintained considering especially when you consider what hardware they have to work with.
I'm a senior engineer at a software company that manages a cross-platform codebase that puts OGL and D3D under the same roof (we ship products for OS X and Windows). One of our older products requires OpenGL on Windows due to not wanting to rewrite all its shaders for D3D, and the number of support tickets that we get from that TOWERS our the number of support tickets from our other D3D titles combined. It's downright pathetic how poor OpenGL hardware and driver support is on these middle tier Windows machines.
The last thing the guys and Intel and Nvidia that maintain the drivers for built-in chips that go on the typical Dell machine give a crap about are the state of their OpenGL support. I'm typically surprised to see them have support past 1.3.
Bingo -- thanks dc29A, I was just about to make the post having just read that Tabbi piece.
Folks, if you haven't yet read that Rolling Stone PLEASE DO. This is the next CDS massive wealth transfer for GS and other investment banks, and it's being billed as this wonderful green gift with a giant green bow.
By showing our distaste and by acting against those foreign companies in boycotting their products in our own countries, by pressuring our governments to also stop catering to these companies there is still a lot we can do.
The court may be Swedish, the defendants may be Swedish, the site may even be Swedish, but the companies and groups pushing the prosecution as well as the result of the prosecution most certainly are not purely Swedish and it is against these that we can act.
The biggest lunacy present in the "hey, US laws don't apply on foreign soil" argument in the piracy defense argument is that all the bloody content that's pirated isn't Swedish!
How hard is it for piraters to understand that certain films and music won't be as prevalent if the profit incentives are zero? People don't work for free and resources (sometimes a TON) are consumed for these works to be made!
I'm a cofounder of a small software company that makes entertainment software and we have definitive, crystal clear data that shows how we've been hit by piracy--almost to the point of putting us out of business.
Engineers, artists, and writers work their hearts out to make copyrighted content and software, and it's absurd that their work can be illegally obtained simply because it's technologically possible.
By the same logic of the pro-piracy people, cloning someone in the future won't require the subject's permission since it doesn't hurt the subject. We need to do a reality check on the ownership of the creative works.
Totally. There's two and only two kinds of Diablo players: Softcore players who *think* they're playing and having fun and the hardcore players. It's cocky--I know--but every sure every other HC player stands by my here.
I'm thinking that they'll have HC mode simply because it's a such trivial add for them. In fact, I'm sort of nervous because I'm likely to run my personal life into the abyss if this game has HC mode. Of all things, I'm thinking of avoiding D3 because I'm fearful of fucking up my life! Yikes!
I'm pretty sure that parent was simply making a reference to the fact that back-end cheating can occur easily whenever you're playing online poker (as opposed to a physical deck, etc). Sure enough, I believe there was a hot story a few months back where logs were recovered of a player being in cahoots with someone on the back end.
There seems to be two flaws if a language's "popularity" is measured solely by its web presence and activity... First, proprietary/closed/corporate software development generally occurs off the public/web radar, so if the goal is to evaluate trends in a language's use and popularity, we need to be looking at more than what's on sourceforge, public support forums, and so on. Second, more activity in, say, a C# forum only means that more questions were asked questions about C# than in a C++ forum. The other day someone was insisting to me that Apple rightfully is killing Carbon and going with Cocoa b/c of how much more activity the Cocoa mail list sees than the Carbon mail list (the implication that activity equals popularity *and* quality). I replied that *may* be the case, but it *could* be the case that Cocoa is inherently harder to learn and more a pain than Carbon (thus resulting in more mail list activity and questions).
I head what amounts to high performance desktop graphics (think desktop video gaming), and most of our stuff has to be in C/C++ for performance, legal portability, and embedded/platform portability. So, we're basically no different than companies like EA (codebase wise), so I feel confident and qualified in saying that the whole discussion of what language is the most "popular" is just silly.
It amazes me that people still spend time with these kind of language popularity estimates, as if an X% difference of "usage" actually means anything useful. Even if it were possible to add up and know how many hours the world spent using each language in a year's time, what would that accomplish? I suppose the big discovery would be that it's all about finding the right tool for the job. Of course, the joke here is that any developer or manager worth anything already knows this.
I've considered myself a C/C++ expert for a while now and I didn't realize that a static inline proc would always be collapsed by the compiler. I guess I've just always been pessamistic that a compiler would be that smart (we've all seen compiler do dumb things). How confident are you that most modern compilers (namely, gcc4, MSVS8) will be smart enough? I just gotta believe most compilers wimp-out on collapsing when they encounter a loop.
Far be it from me to dispute the scientific belief that there was a magical singularity 13.7 billion years ago that was the source of all matter/energy and had no father; that created what we know as the universe and will sometimes grant you wishes if you perform certain subatomic interactions in sufficient quantities.
Full disclosure: I'm a physcial science and math person, and I used to be a strong non-denominational Christian. Point being, that framing any kind of view, scientific or religious, in a distracting and disingenuous fashion ("jew on a stick", "telepathically communicate", "grant you wishes") does not contribute anything to the discussion/debate. If you were just going for a laugh, it's all good--I'm just sayin'.
A most insightful and thought-provoking post--thanks for it.
Particularly insightful:
That in itself is a failure of the imagination, and proves that people haven't had very good liberal arts educations.
Well, Christianity is a religion... the largest religion in fact. I dare say debunking Christianity is about 30% of the job. Also, have you seen the beliefs? Might as well start off with the easy pray (pun intended) first. I think that you missed the point of what was actually an insightful statement made by the GP. Namely, that debunking *any* particular religious establishement or denomination is somehow equivalent to debunking all religion.
You seem to be overlooking that he lied to a grand jury. How will presently serving government officals and offices be motivated to be forthright and honest if they know political alliances will bail them out in the end?
Realize that this isn't just about Libby--it's about respect and regard to the law. Is Libby made an example of in that way? It would seem so, but as we're not in a utopian society, there *must* be a clear message to current and future officals that they are not exempt from the law.
When they sold the stock their creed changed from "Do no evil" to "Do no evil to our stockholders".
Easy: the day they went public.
I'm not trying to be a smartass, but I am trying to say that putting the stockholder's interests first is the precise nature of the modern corporation. Anyone who thought that the day of Google "caving in" to a momentary influence would have been deluding themselves. Check out the documentary The Corporation (2003) sometime--it's a great film.
Check out soundspectrum.com sometime.... drop me an email and i'll shoot you a free copy of G-Force (a fork of G-Force was licensed by Apple in 2001 for iTunes but G-Force has continued to grow and improve since then).
andy
I worked with MS for a while, and their project managers use the milestone phrase "code complete" to mean that it's just testing and QA from there (meaning, of course, many many fixes and revs will be introduced into the code after this). So, assuming Chris Jones' comment about being Vista code being "complete" by Aug 2006 was referring to being "code complete," it doesn't say much about when Vista will ship--it just says when non-QA driven changes will no longer be able to get into the codebase past this date.
Please indicate the vector that malware will take to attack a Mac. No network services running out of the box, and users are not running as root (hell, it's not even enabled). No system-wide settings accessible without authentication. So, how exactly is this mythical malware going to get on the box, execute, and bypass permissions?
As a Mac OS X developer, I can tell you there's at least one vector Apple has yet to go near, and it's a doozy: authentication services. Presently, when an app needs authentication to do something, there's no UI feedback to know what admin activities should be granted and what actually follow the authentication. For example, an app can display a prompt window that looks exactly like the mac os authentication window (where, joe six pack wouldn't think twice about entering his user/pass). Of course, once a malicious app has that user and pass, the sky's the limit. That process can use authentication services to do a lot of nasty things. Sure, this vector originates as a piggy back or a malicious executable and preys on Mac OS X being very trusting with authentication, but this vector is very real.
My personal and professional hope is that Apple addresses this threat before it's too late.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is General Failure anyway, and why does he keep trying to read my hard drive??
> My system can't be beat. It is the most infallible and secure of any system.
..except we're not talking about that. we're talking about one peer having orders of magnitude more processing that most other nodes combined and the laws of hyper-distant/tail probability.
..., P10) are so vanishingly small that it's best modeled as noise ('noise' because of the volume of outcomes also with probability on that order of magnitude). yet making the statement that 'the state lottery will be won ten times (with any number)' is analogously the compliment of the earlier 10 times statement -- and THAT's what makes bitcoin and a world built from QM work in highly predictable ways (that the union of so many interdependent events collapse the macro outcomes to very narrow bands of outcomes, relatively speaking).
>
> Then it gets beat.
the principles of bitcoin security and decentralization are comparable to probabilities in the world of quantum mechanics, where the things that are 'possible' and dramatic (such as winning the state lottery 10 times in a row with picks P1, P2,
I think you missed the part where I said, "if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible".
The median machine (e.g. a typical Dell or HP machine bought at Best Buy) has FAR less capable GPU -- they're typically integrated with the motherboard. The makers of these onboard GPUs (a) care little to nothing about OGL support and (b) typically don't maintain/update their drivers once they have a stable version.
The rub (and MS's leverage) is that D3D is so entrenched as well as far ahead that it'd be corporate suicide to cut D3D support.
Also, it doesn't seem like you registered what I was saying with regard to the fact that OGL driver support either greatly lags or is unavailable (in any real, non-emulated form) on middle-tier Windows machines. In other words, if we removed D3D support, our company's receipts would be down by over 2/3 overnight. You have to understand the gravity of that.
It doesn't sound like you've developed much in the way of commercial quality graphics-centric software for "middle tier" end-users.
Long story short is that if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible, modern OpenGL drivers tend to greatly lag or be unavailable on many Windows machines. Vista and especially Vista 64 really made this worse since maintaining and upgrading GL drivers for middle tier GPU hardware is generally at the bottom of the priority list for 3D driver development. Meanwhile, D3D support tends to be solid, speedy, and well maintained considering especially when you consider what hardware they have to work with.
I'm a senior engineer at a software company that manages a cross-platform codebase that puts OGL and D3D under the same roof (we ship products for OS X and Windows). One of our older products requires OpenGL on Windows due to not wanting to rewrite all its shaders for D3D, and the number of support tickets that we get from that TOWERS our the number of support tickets from our other D3D titles combined. It's downright pathetic how poor OpenGL hardware and driver support is on these middle tier Windows machines.
The last thing the guys and Intel and Nvidia that maintain the drivers for built-in chips that go on the typical Dell machine give a crap about are the state of their OpenGL support. I'm typically surprised to see them have support past 1.3.
Bingo -- thanks dc29A, I was just about to make the post having just read that Tabbi piece.
Folks, if you haven't yet read that Rolling Stone PLEASE DO. This is the next CDS massive wealth transfer for GS and other investment banks, and it's being billed as this wonderful green gift with a giant green bow.
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html
This is no joke folks -- wake up, the people are being robbed in broad daylight now.
By showing our distaste and by acting against those foreign companies in boycotting their products in our own countries, by pressuring our governments to also stop catering to these companies there is still a lot we can do.
The court may be Swedish, the defendants may be Swedish, the site may even be Swedish, but the companies and groups pushing the prosecution as well as the result of the prosecution most certainly are not purely Swedish and it is against these that we can act.
The biggest lunacy present in the "hey, US laws don't apply on foreign soil" argument in the piracy defense argument is that all the bloody content that's pirated isn't Swedish!
How hard is it for piraters to understand that certain films and music won't be as prevalent if the profit incentives are zero? People don't work for free and resources (sometimes a TON) are consumed for these works to be made!
I'm a cofounder of a small software company that makes entertainment software and we have definitive, crystal clear data that shows how we've been hit by piracy--almost to the point of putting us out of business.
Engineers, artists, and writers work their hearts out to make copyrighted content and software, and it's absurd that their work can be illegally obtained simply because it's technologically possible.
By the same logic of the pro-piracy people, cloning someone in the future won't require the subject's permission since it doesn't hurt the subject. We need to do a reality check on the ownership of the creative works.
Totally. There's two and only two kinds of Diablo players: Softcore players who *think* they're playing and having fun and the hardcore players. It's cocky--I know--but every sure every other HC player stands by my here.
I'm thinking that they'll have HC mode simply because it's a such trivial add for them. In fact, I'm sort of nervous because I'm likely to run my personal life into the abyss if this game has HC mode. Of all things, I'm thinking of avoiding D3 because I'm fearful of fucking up my life! Yikes!
There's a great lightweight player called Play that may float your boat:
http://sbooth.org/Play/
Basically, it has the core functionality of iTunes, it's free as in beer, and isn't bloated.
I'm pretty sure that parent was simply making a reference to the fact that back-end cheating can occur easily whenever you're playing online poker (as opposed to a physical deck, etc). Sure enough, I believe there was a hot story a few months back where logs were recovered of a player being in cahoots with someone on the back end.
There seems to be two flaws if a language's "popularity" is measured solely by its web presence and activity... First, proprietary/closed/corporate software development generally occurs off the public/web radar, so if the goal is to evaluate trends in a language's use and popularity, we need to be looking at more than what's on sourceforge, public support forums, and so on. Second, more activity in, say, a C# forum only means that more questions were asked questions about C# than in a C++ forum. The other day someone was insisting to me that Apple rightfully is killing Carbon and going with Cocoa b/c of how much more activity the Cocoa mail list sees than the Carbon mail list (the implication that activity equals popularity *and* quality). I replied that *may* be the case, but it *could* be the case that Cocoa is inherently harder to learn and more a pain than Carbon (thus resulting in more mail list activity and questions).
I head what amounts to high performance desktop graphics (think desktop video gaming), and most of our stuff has to be in C/C++ for performance, legal portability, and embedded/platform portability. So, we're basically no different than companies like EA (codebase wise), so I feel confident and qualified in saying that the whole discussion of what language is the most "popular" is just silly.
It amazes me that people still spend time with these kind of language popularity estimates, as if an X% difference of "usage" actually means anything useful. Even if it were possible to add up and know how many hours the world spent using each language in a year's time, what would that accomplish? I suppose the big discovery would be that it's all about finding the right tool for the job. Of course, the joke here is that any developer or manager worth anything already knows this.
I've considered myself a C/C++ expert for a while now and I didn't realize that a static inline proc would always be collapsed by the compiler. I guess I've just always been pessamistic that a compiler would be that smart (we've all seen compiler do dumb things). How confident are you that most modern compilers (namely, gcc4, MSVS8) will be smart enough? I just gotta believe most compilers wimp-out on collapsing when they encounter a loop.
Far be it from me to dispute the scientific belief that there was a magical singularity 13.7 billion years ago that was the source of all matter/energy and had no father; that created what we know as the universe and will sometimes grant you wishes if you perform certain subatomic interactions in sufficient quantities.
Full disclosure: I'm a physcial science and math person, and I used to be a strong non-denominational Christian. Point being, that framing any kind of view, scientific or religious, in a distracting and disingenuous fashion ("jew on a stick", "telepathically communicate", "grant you wishes") does not contribute anything to the discussion/debate. If you were just going for a laugh, it's all good--I'm just sayin'.
You seem to be overlooking that he lied to a grand jury. How will presently serving government officals and offices be motivated to be forthright and honest if they know political alliances will bail them out in the end? Realize that this isn't just about Libby--it's about respect and regard to the law. Is Libby made an example of in that way? It would seem so, but as we're not in a utopian society, there *must* be a clear message to current and future officals that they are not exempt from the law.
This may be a dumb question, but why does TFA only refer to 40 and 104 bit WEP when the more common variants seem to be 64 and 128 bits?
Heh, not to "me too", but your post seriously made my day.
When they sold the stock their creed changed from "Do no evil" to "Do no evil to our stockholders".
Easy: the day they went public.
I'm not trying to be a smartass, but I am trying to say that putting the stockholder's interests first is the precise nature of the modern corporation. Anyone who thought that the day of Google "caving in" to a momentary influence would have been deluding themselves. Check out the documentary The Corporation (2003) sometime--it's a great film.
iPaperweight.
Wow, what a messed up /. story the day ater I found out that my gf has been cheating on me for months (no joke).
Interesting. The iTunes visualizer has dramatically improved over time as well.
Well, we're beind that too, but I can't share much in public, however.
Are you, by any chance, the "Andy O'Meara" referenced in the "About Us" section of that page?
That would be a safe guess.
5) The visualizer.
Check out soundspectrum.com sometime.... drop me an email and i'll shoot you a free copy of G-Force (a fork of G-Force was licensed by Apple in 2001 for iTunes but G-Force has continued to grow and improve since then).
andy
I worked with MS for a while, and their project managers use the milestone phrase "code complete" to mean that it's just testing and QA from there (meaning, of course, many many fixes and revs will be introduced into the code after this). So, assuming Chris Jones' comment about being Vista code being "complete" by Aug 2006 was referring to being "code complete," it doesn't say much about when Vista will ship--it just says when non-QA driven changes will no longer be able to get into the codebase past this date.
Please indicate the vector that malware will take to attack a Mac. No network services running out of the box, and users are not running as root (hell, it's not even enabled). No system-wide settings accessible without authentication. So, how exactly is this mythical malware going to get on the box, execute, and bypass permissions?
As a Mac OS X developer, I can tell you there's at least one vector Apple has yet to go near, and it's a doozy: authentication services. Presently, when an app needs authentication to do something, there's no UI feedback to know what admin activities should be granted and what actually follow the authentication. For example, an app can display a prompt window that looks exactly like the mac os authentication window (where, joe six pack wouldn't think twice about entering his user/pass). Of course, once a malicious app has that user and pass, the sky's the limit. That process can use authentication services to do a lot of nasty things. Sure, this vector originates as a piggy back or a malicious executable and preys on Mac OS X being very trusting with authentication, but this vector is very real.
My personal and professional hope is that Apple addresses this threat before it's too late.