If the client has Javascript enabled, that is true. If not, the password is sent in the clear.
Of course, the MD5 hash is sent in the clear, allowing a brute force attack on the password.
Hashing the password is better than nothing. But, SSL would be a much better and more secure solution (after all, yahoo does give you two modes to login, "Standard" and "Secure", so obviously they don't see the hash as the secure solution either).
There is no good reason not to do https - they certainly have the compute power, and could even do SSL offload if needed.
They should also allow the user to choose a longer time for the session timeout, even if done securely.
One of the things I dislike the most about Yahoo! Mail is their login process..
1. It defaults to clear http, not https. Nice way to encourage users to expose their passwords... This should obviously default to https, and require users to jump through hoops to send their password in the clear. (GMail uses https for authentication).
2. Authentication only lasts a day, then your session expires and you have to re-authenticate. For me, the expiration usually happened when I was typing a long reply to an e-mail, and clicked "send" only to be greeted with the error message saying I needed to authenticate again (in the clear), and my message was lost.
This combination is particularly briliant... encourage insecure authentication, then require users to do it often.
This is just one of many ways that GMail beats Yahoo! Mail.. I'll check out the improvements, but I doubt I'll ever go back to Yahoo.
You seem to be reading quite a bit into the response. Perhaps you didn't read the question this was answering...
The front page post described Cinelerra as "The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today" and the parent post asked whether that was true. Two of the products listed failed to meet the criteria for comparison.
Just because it's triggered in error doesn't mean it's not a cause for concern.. This is just exposing capabilities they built into the product before they were ready to force it on their customers.
I don't want to invest $1,000 in a HD-Tivo, only to later find out that programs I record are forced to expire beyond my control. Not to mention the commercials it records automatically, popups on the screen offering more advertising, etc..
What's next? Disable 30 second skip (yes, they are getting pressure to do this)?
No thanks, my MythTV box works great, and will never be forced to obey a company's decision before mine.
MainActor & Piranha look excellent. But they are not open source.
Kino looks good, I think that would be the only open source competitor. Based on the screenshots, I would guess that Cinelerra is farther along than Kino.
It sounds like there was nothing close to a job offer here, just a recruiter spamming possible candidates.
But, if they did know who he was, then it was probably just an information gathering mission, which is pretty common. Bring someone from your competitor in, dangle a high paying job in front of them, and grab as much information as they are willing to give. Then, come up with some excuse about organizational changes, and the position being eliminated or delayed..
I would think this technique would work very well on someone who seems very insecure -- constantly needing to prove his worth, and loves to hear himself talk.
It's really too bad.. MS hiring ESR would be the best thing that could happen to the free software movement. Eliminate a jackass that somehow gets quoted as authoritative in the press, and inject all that bullshit inside of MS.
As others mentioned, half of the evolution process is missing.. there is no selection of better traits. Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
So, we still have the genetic randomization going on, resulting in differences in humans. But, then what happens? All the strains of humans just keep going.
Does this result in the spectrum of humans spreading increasingly wider, so eventually subjects at two extremes barely resemble the same species?
Will any noticeable branching happen? In previous evolution, one group survived and thrived, replacing members without an adaptation. Now, since the others still survive, and the difference between the weak and strong won't result in a dramatic difference in results for either group. Probably not anything recognizable outside the normal differences between tall & short, thin & fat, smart & dumb.
He does technology reviews, that's the whole point of his column. I have read others where he hasn't been too kind to the product being reviewed.
Just because he likes a product does not mean there is some ulterior motive.
Look at some of his past review titles:
- Why Is Fujitsu's Tablet PC Clumsy? - Apple's New Mouse Is Not That Mighty - Microsoft Homework Tools Bit Clumsy to Use
Certainly not glowing endorsements..
If you want an example of fluff reviews, take a look at the various golf magazines. There is a small group of advertisers, and tight interdependance on each other. The "reviews" they publish just describe the varying levels of greatness of all the products. They really have to stretch to come up with the "cons" for any products.
Even on powerful systems, decoding and displaying HDTV content can be tough. The current S3 "Unichrome" integrated video processors include MPEG decoding capabilities. This goes well beyond MPEG acceleration in XvMC / DxVA.. It does most of the MPEG processing in hardware, rather than only the iDCT/MC.
Hopefully these new cards will continue to support MPEG decoding.. If so, I'll buy one & ditch my Nvidia with their closed source binary drivers.
But, I would need to understand a few issues before taking the plunge:
- Are the specs & source code for the card fully open? (VIA / S3 have had some issues on this front in the past). - Are these cards available for purchase? The S3 DeltaChrome & GammaChrome cards were not available as far as I could tell. Only the unichrome was available, as an integrated video option on VIA motherboards. - Does it have full MPEG2 decoding support? - Does it have MPEG4 accel support? How about MPEG4.10 / AVC accel (or full decoding)?
From TFA: The companies say they have to abide by local regulations, and point out that since China is set to be the world's biggest internet market, they cannot ignore it.
Ahh.. so that's what it boils down to. "There is money to be made there. We have to bend over for their government and/or police, it's our fiduciary responsibility".
Fuck Yahoo. Helping send a person to jail for 10 years for a petty "crime"? I'm sure this will not be lost on the Chinese market, and there goes your "world's biggest Internet market".
Beyond the nonsensical claims about the product features and capabilities, you can easily see where all their screen caps have been edited.
If you're going to put effort into a hoax, at least make it good. I thought it would take a better job of photoshopping to make it to the front page of/.
From TFA: "Hitachi said it did not have concrete plans for launching the products in overseas markets, explaining that consumers in Europe and the United States were not as keen on high-end recorders."
I am very happy with my MythTV PVR (well, it could be a bit more stable, but it's still very usable). I have two HD tuners and two analog tuners, so I can record a lot of stuff.
One difficulty of open solutions is that they can't handle encrypted channels (ESPN, Showtime, etc). A commercial DVR, with 'CableCard' support would solve this. -- Of course, you would also give up the commercial removal/skipping, full networked operation, unlimited hardware/software, etc.. I guess I'll stick with MythTV.
Is the whole company evil, or just the top execs?
on
MySQL and SCO Join Forces
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't know any current SCO employees, but I have always assumed that there were quite a few normal techies working away at SCO, trying their best to ignore the crap coming from management. I know I have often disagreed with the choices/directions of management in companies I have worked for (though, obviously not to the level of SCO's choices). Some of those people have probably stayed to continue their work, despite the behavior at the top.
So, what I'm rambling on about is that the OS side of the house is probably a reasonable group of people, trying to improve a Unix platform. The litigation side of the house is a bunch of worthless bastards. MySQL is working with the former.. even though it still required approval from the latter.
While the XvMC situation is not great, it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I am currently using it on an X86-64 Gentoo system, with an Nvidia FX5200 card, and their version 7676 binary drivers. I primarily play video through MythTV, though I also use mplayer for some things (both of which support XvMC).
MythTV has infrequent stable/public releases. But, they have very frequent development updates via their svn server. The svn version is usually stable, though sometimes bugs are introduced (as expected.. always keep a stable version around in case of problems).
It works for the most part. The issues I have:
- XvMC fails to initialize after a system restart. I get some cryptic error message about a failed authentication, apparenly when allocating resources of some type. This is a problem specific to the x86-64 XvMC drivers. After restarting mplayer 20+ times, it will eventually succeed. It will then work normally until the next reboot.
- I sometimes get choppy video with a "prebuffering pause" error message. This behavior is sometimes unpredictable (it works great for a long time, then suddenly I get choppy video).
Overall, XvMC is still worth using for me. My system is fast enough to do HDTV without XvMC turned on, but I usually leave XvMC enabled because I think it provides better playback than pure software.
If there was a completely open source option for XvMC video drivers, I would drop the Nvidia in a heartbeat. That initialization/authentication bug has been around for a LONG time, but Nvidia has not fixed it. It would have been quickly resolved, and overall playback would be better, with an open source driver.
One area the article didn't touch on at all was MPEG decoding. Most video cards today have hardware to accelerate decoding of MPEG2 video. Some even have MPEG4 acceleration.
For lo-res stuff, like DVDs, this is not a big deal because modern CPUs don't break a sweat decoding that stuff. But, when you go to HDTV (1920x1080i / 1280x720p) video, even fast processors feel the load. In Windows, there is a standard API (DxVA) which is supported by most video drivers. In the Linux world, there is similar support, but it's a bit trickier..
Linux XvMC API - Enables hardware offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation in MPEG2 processing. The API is relatively new, and support has recently been added to key applications (MythTV, Mplayer, Xine, (vlc?) ).
NVidia - supports XvMC in their binary / closed source driver releases. XvMC is suported by their newer FX series cards (and newer), and GeForce4 MX cards. It is not supported in the hardware of the other GeForce4 cards.
ATI - No support for XvMC in Linux. (ATI was the pioneer of the MPEG2 acceleration hardware, available in their Radeon line for many years. But, they don't support this at all in Linux.)
VIA/S3 Unichrome - There is a Unichrome driver project on sourceforge, which supports the excellent MPEG2 accleration of the Unichrome integrated graphics processors. (Though, it's not clear to me if it's completely open source or relies on VIAs closed drivers/libraries). The S3 MPEG2 processing is beyond normal acceleration. They do full MPEG2 decoding in hardware - which allows for HDTV display with very low CPU requirements. S3 also has standalone video cards (DeltaChrome, GammaChrome), I don't know the state of Linux or MPEG2 support for those. The Unichrome also has hardware support for MPEG4 processing, which is not yet supported in Linux.
Others - Any other Video cards with XvMC support in Linux that I missed?
--- The MPEG2 acceleration support in Linux is not great yet. But, at least it's better than MacOS.. In OS X, the DVD player is built with MPEG2 acceleration support, but no other applications can use it (there is no open / published API). So, HDTV display has ridiculous CPU requirements (Dual G5 is stated as required for the ElGato EyeTV 500). The vast majority of Macs have video hardware that supports MPEG2 accel, but none can actually use it.
You can't get the premium channels, like HBO, Showtime, etc. But, most cable systems I have heard of have the locals available in the clear (I have heard the FCC requires them to be unscrambled, but I am not sure of this).
My local Comcast system has ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox in the clear. They also have InHD, InHD2, and ESPN-HD in the clear.
What is the "Osbourne Effect"? Is that where you can't understand what the hell someone is saying, for various reasons (slurred speach, illogical conclusions, etc)? Yes, a reduction of that is really needed here at slashdot.
A cool thing for Apple, would be to reduce the Osborne effect, where people don't buy your existing product because you've pre-announced something better.
The 2.6.13 kernel also includes updates to the DVB c ode / drivers to support newer devices.
- pchdtv.com HD3000 -- Previously, they used v4l drivers. It seems that the direction now is to use DVB drivers. The new kernel will work in DVB mode with th HD3000.
- DVico FusionHDTV3 QAM -- Newly supported card, I have one & have tested it with OTA and cable (QAM) reception. Works great with MythTV (as does the HD3000).
--
Support for the DVico FusionHDTV5 cards is also under way. I'm not sure if it made it into the 2.6.13 release ( I doubt it.. patching the kernel will probably be necessary ).
I have never been a Walmart shopper.. They sell a lot of cheap junk there, and their prices have never seemed to to be lower than anyone else.
I do shop quite a bit at Target. I fear they are not much better in terms of selling items made in third world sweat shops. But, they're still not as overall bad as Walmart - like the enormous power they wield / abuse over their suppliers, their predatory way of going into small communities and destroying any existing businesses, employment policies/wages, etc.
One of the bigger risks of DRM, as I see it, is giving authority over your system to another entity. Not surprisingly, in many of the schemes pitched thus far, big business decides all and your PC must obey (see the broadcast flag). The same effect exists for the HD copy protection schemes.. the studios decide all, and your hardware must obey.
At least an open standard form of DRM could put everyone on equal footing, rathern than locking in the big media company's control over the industry. If independant producers have the same access/right/privileges as the big players, it makes for a much better solution.
Personally, I am all for a good system of protecting the rights of content producers. But, the last thing I want is that system being used to lock in the power of big business and the garbage that they peddle.
Am I the only one that thinks gaming is going nowhere on the Mac platform?
The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small.. If gaming is important to you, you probably wouldn't choose a Mac as your platform.
With the console game platforms becoming even more powerful, I think more people in general will use them for all their gaming needs, and not use PC's (which may be a good thing for Apple, it makes PC gaming less relevant).
Of course, there will always be a handful of games for the Mac. But, I see no reason why that will change in the near future, regardless of PowerPC vs x86, OpenGL vs DirectX, etc.
Why would games be easy to port because they are on the same architecture? The operating system is completely different. I don't think it will be any easier than porting an OpenGL app to current Macs.
Obviously, this easy porting hasn't panned out for x86 Linux.. Even though it runs on the same architecture, very few games are ported to Linux.
I have a Mac Mini, and the first thing I did after getting it was to crack it open and replace the 256MB DIMM with a 1GB DIMM. 1GB gives plenty of head room.
On my PowerBook, it came with 512MB, and it was sufficient for basic operation. But, if I had a few large apps open, things would slow down. Adding a 256MB DIMM to go to 768MB gave me much better performance.
Slashdot Mirror
If the client has Javascript enabled, that is true. If not, the password is sent in the clear.
Of course, the MD5 hash is sent in the clear, allowing a brute force attack on the password.
Hashing the password is better than nothing. But, SSL would be a much better and more secure solution (after all, yahoo does give you two modes to login, "Standard" and "Secure", so obviously they don't see the hash as the secure solution either).
There is no good reason not to do https - they certainly have the compute power, and could even do SSL offload if needed.
They should also allow the user to choose a longer time for the session timeout, even if done securely.
One of the things I dislike the most about Yahoo! Mail is their login process..
1. It defaults to clear http, not https. Nice way to encourage users to expose their passwords... This should obviously default to https, and require users to jump through hoops to send their password in the clear. (GMail uses https for authentication).
2. Authentication only lasts a day, then your session expires and you have to re-authenticate. For me, the expiration usually happened when I was typing a long reply to an e-mail, and clicked "send" only to be greeted with the error message saying I needed to authenticate again (in the clear), and my message was lost.
This combination is particularly briliant... encourage insecure authentication, then require users to do it often.
This is just one of many ways that GMail beats Yahoo! Mail.. I'll check out the improvements, but I doubt I'll ever go back to Yahoo.
You seem to be reading quite a bit into the response. Perhaps you didn't read the question this was answering...
The front page post described Cinelerra as "The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today" and the parent post asked whether that was true. Two of the products listed failed to meet the criteria for comparison.
Just because it's triggered in error doesn't mean it's not a cause for concern.. This is just exposing capabilities they built into the product before they were ready to force it on their customers.
I don't want to invest $1,000 in a HD-Tivo, only to later find out that programs I record are forced to expire beyond my control. Not to mention the commercials it records automatically, popups on the screen offering more advertising, etc..
What's next? Disable 30 second skip (yes, they are getting pressure to do this)?
No thanks, my MythTV box works great, and will never be forced to obey a company's decision before mine.
MainActor & Piranha look excellent. But they are not open source.
Kino looks good, I think that would be the only open source competitor. Based on the screenshots, I would guess that Cinelerra is farther along than Kino.
It sounds like there was nothing close to a job offer here, just a recruiter spamming possible candidates.
But, if they did know who he was, then it was probably just an information gathering mission, which is pretty common. Bring someone from your competitor in, dangle a high paying job in front of them, and grab as much information as they are willing to give. Then, come up with some excuse about organizational changes, and the position being eliminated or delayed..
I would think this technique would work very well on someone who seems very insecure -- constantly needing to prove his worth, and loves to hear himself talk.
It's really too bad.. MS hiring ESR would be the best thing that could happen to the free software movement. Eliminate a jackass that somehow gets quoted as authoritative in the press, and inject all that bullshit inside of MS.
As others mentioned, half of the evolution process is missing.. there is no selection of better traits. Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
So, we still have the genetic randomization going on, resulting in differences in humans. But, then what happens? All the strains of humans just keep going.
Does this result in the spectrum of humans spreading increasingly wider, so eventually subjects at two extremes barely resemble the same species?
Will any noticeable branching happen? In previous evolution, one group survived and thrived, replacing members without an adaptation. Now, since the others still survive, and the difference between the weak and strong won't result in a dramatic difference in results for either group. Probably not anything recognizable outside the normal differences between tall & short, thin & fat, smart & dumb.
He does technology reviews, that's the whole point of his column. I have read others where he hasn't been too kind to the product being reviewed.
Just because he likes a product does not mean there is some ulterior motive.
Look at some of his past review titles:
- Why Is Fujitsu's Tablet PC Clumsy?
- Apple's New Mouse Is Not That Mighty
- Microsoft Homework Tools Bit Clumsy to Use
Certainly not glowing endorsements..
If you want an example of fluff reviews, take a look at the various golf magazines. There is a small group of advertisers, and tight interdependance on each other. The "reviews" they publish just describe the varying levels of greatness of all the products. They really have to stretch to come up with the "cons" for any products.
Even on powerful systems, decoding and displaying HDTV content can be tough. The current S3 "Unichrome" integrated video processors include MPEG decoding capabilities. This goes well beyond MPEG acceleration in XvMC / DxVA.. It does most of the MPEG processing in hardware, rather than only the iDCT/MC.
Hopefully these new cards will continue to support MPEG decoding.. If so, I'll buy one & ditch my Nvidia with their closed source binary drivers.
But, I would need to understand a few issues before taking the plunge:
- Are the specs & source code for the card fully open? (VIA / S3 have had some issues on this front in the past).
- Are these cards available for purchase? The S3 DeltaChrome & GammaChrome cards were not available as far as I could tell. Only the unichrome was available, as an integrated video option on VIA motherboards.
- Does it have full MPEG2 decoding support?
- Does it have MPEG4 accel support? How about MPEG4.10 / AVC accel (or full decoding)?
From TFA: The companies say they have to abide by local regulations, and point out that since China is set to be the world's biggest internet market, they cannot ignore it.
Ahh.. so that's what it boils down to. "There is money to be made there. We have to bend over for their government and/or police, it's our fiduciary responsibility".
Fuck Yahoo. Helping send a person to jail for 10 years for a petty "crime"? I'm sure this will not be lost on the Chinese market, and there goes your "world's biggest Internet market".
Beyond the nonsensical claims about the product features and capabilities, you can easily see where all their screen caps have been edited.
If you're going to put effort into a hoax, at least make it good. I thought it would take a better job of photoshopping to make it to the front page of
From TFA: "Hitachi said it did not have concrete plans for launching the products in overseas markets, explaining that consumers in Europe and the United States were not as keen on high-end recorders."
I am very happy with my MythTV PVR (well, it could be a bit more stable, but it's still very usable). I have two HD tuners and two analog tuners, so I can record a lot of stuff.
One difficulty of open solutions is that they can't handle encrypted channels (ESPN, Showtime, etc). A commercial DVR, with 'CableCard' support would solve this. -- Of course, you would also give up the commercial removal/skipping, full networked operation, unlimited hardware/software, etc.. I guess I'll stick with MythTV.
I don't know any current SCO employees, but I have always assumed that there were quite a few normal techies working away at SCO, trying their best to ignore the crap coming from management. I know I have often disagreed with the choices/directions of management in companies I have worked for (though, obviously not to the level of SCO's choices). Some of those people have probably stayed to continue their work, despite the behavior at the top.
So, what I'm rambling on about is that the OS side of the house is probably a reasonable group of people, trying to improve a Unix platform. The litigation side of the house is a bunch of worthless bastards. MySQL is working with the former.. even though it still required approval from the latter.
While the XvMC situation is not great, it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I am currently using it on an X86-64 Gentoo system, with an Nvidia FX5200 card, and their version 7676 binary drivers. I primarily play video through MythTV, though I also use mplayer for some things (both of which support XvMC).
MythTV has infrequent stable/public releases. But, they have very frequent development updates via their svn server. The svn version is usually stable, though sometimes bugs are introduced (as expected.. always keep a stable version around in case of problems).
It works for the most part. The issues I have:
- XvMC fails to initialize after a system restart. I get some cryptic error message about a failed authentication, apparenly when allocating resources of some type. This is a problem specific to the x86-64 XvMC drivers. After restarting mplayer 20+ times, it will eventually succeed. It will then work normally until the next reboot.
- I sometimes get choppy video with a "prebuffering pause" error message. This behavior is sometimes unpredictable (it works great for a long time, then suddenly I get choppy video).
Overall, XvMC is still worth using for me. My system is fast enough to do HDTV without XvMC turned on, but I usually leave XvMC enabled because I think it provides better playback than pure software.
If there was a completely open source option for XvMC video drivers, I would drop the Nvidia in a heartbeat. That initialization/authentication bug has been around for a LONG time, but Nvidia has not fixed it. It would have been quickly resolved, and overall playback would be better, with an open source driver.
One area the article didn't touch on at all was MPEG decoding. Most video cards today have hardware to accelerate decoding of MPEG2 video. Some even have MPEG4 acceleration.
For lo-res stuff, like DVDs, this is not a big deal because modern CPUs don't break a sweat decoding that stuff. But, when you go to HDTV (1920x1080i / 1280x720p) video, even fast processors feel the load. In Windows, there is a standard API (DxVA) which is supported by most video drivers. In the Linux world, there is similar support, but it's a bit trickier..
Linux XvMC API - Enables hardware offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation in MPEG2 processing. The API is relatively new, and support has recently been added to key applications (MythTV, Mplayer, Xine, (vlc?) ).
NVidia - supports XvMC in their binary / closed source driver releases. XvMC is suported by their newer FX series cards (and newer), and GeForce4 MX cards. It is not supported in the hardware of the other GeForce4 cards.
ATI - No support for XvMC in Linux. (ATI was the pioneer of the MPEG2 acceleration hardware, available in their Radeon line for many years. But, they don't support this at all in Linux.)
VIA/S3 Unichrome - There is a Unichrome driver project on sourceforge, which supports the excellent MPEG2 accleration of the Unichrome integrated graphics processors. (Though, it's not clear to me if it's completely open source or relies on VIAs closed drivers/libraries). The S3 MPEG2 processing is beyond normal acceleration. They do full MPEG2 decoding in hardware - which allows for HDTV display with very low CPU requirements. S3 also has standalone video cards (DeltaChrome, GammaChrome), I don't know the state of Linux or MPEG2 support for those. The Unichrome also has hardware support for MPEG4 processing, which is not yet supported in Linux.
Others - Any other Video cards with XvMC support in Linux that I missed?
--- The MPEG2 acceleration support in Linux is not great yet. But, at least it's better than MacOS.. In OS X, the DVD player is built with MPEG2 acceleration support, but no other applications can use it (there is no open / published API). So, HDTV display has ridiculous CPU requirements (Dual G5 is stated as required for the ElGato EyeTV 500). The vast majority of Macs have video hardware that supports MPEG2 accel, but none can actually use it.
You can't get the premium channels, like HBO, Showtime, etc. But, most cable systems I have heard of have the locals available in the clear (I have heard the FCC requires them to be unscrambled, but I am not sure of this).
My local Comcast system has ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox in the clear. They also have InHD, InHD2, and ESPN-HD in the clear.
Most cable systems use QAM256 encoding.
What is the "Osbourne Effect"? Is that where you can't understand what the hell someone is saying, for various reasons (slurred speach, illogical conclusions, etc)? Yes, a reduction of that is really needed here at slashdot.
A cool thing for Apple, would be to reduce the Osborne effect, where people don't buy your existing product because you've pre-announced something better.
The 2.6.13 kernel also includes updates to the DVB c ode / drivers to support newer devices.
- pchdtv.com HD3000 -- Previously, they used v4l drivers. It seems that the direction now is to use DVB drivers. The new kernel will work in DVB mode with th HD3000.
- DVico FusionHDTV3 QAM -- Newly supported card, I have one & have tested it with OTA and cable (QAM) reception. Works great with MythTV (as does the HD3000).
--
Support for the DVico FusionHDTV5 cards is also under way. I'm not sure if it made it into the 2.6.13 release ( I doubt it.. patching the kernel will probably be necessary ).
I have never been a Walmart shopper.. They sell a lot of cheap junk there, and their prices have never seemed to to be lower than anyone else.
I do shop quite a bit at Target. I fear they are not much better in terms of selling items made in third world sweat shops. But, they're still not as overall bad as Walmart - like the enormous power they wield / abuse over their suppliers, their predatory way of going into small communities and destroying any existing businesses, employment policies/wages, etc.
(1) See Fletch: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089155/
One of the bigger risks of DRM, as I see it, is giving authority over your system to another entity. Not surprisingly, in many of the schemes pitched thus far, big business decides all and your PC must obey (see the broadcast flag). The same effect exists for the HD copy protection schemes.. the studios decide all, and your hardware must obey.
At least an open standard form of DRM could put everyone on equal footing, rathern than locking in the big media company's control over the industry. If independant producers have the same access/right/privileges as the big players, it makes for a much better solution.
Personally, I am all for a good system of protecting the rights of content producers. But, the last thing I want is that system being used to lock in the power of big business and the garbage that they peddle.
Am I the only one that thinks gaming is going nowhere on the Mac platform?
The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small.. If gaming is important to you, you probably wouldn't choose a Mac as your platform.
With the console game platforms becoming even more powerful, I think more people in general will use them for all their gaming needs, and not use PC's (which may be a good thing for Apple, it makes PC gaming less relevant).
Of course, there will always be a handful of games for the Mac. But, I see no reason why that will change in the near future, regardless of PowerPC vs x86, OpenGL vs DirectX, etc.
Why would games be easy to port because they are on the same architecture? The operating system is completely different. I don't think it will be any easier than porting an OpenGL app to current Macs.
Obviously, this easy porting hasn't panned out for x86 Linux.. Even though it runs on the same architecture, very few games are ported to Linux.
What?!? A Rupert Murdoch company making up their own version of news?
This is shocking to Americans who value the (self proclaimed) "Fair and Balanced" Fox News channel.
I have a Mac Mini, and the first thing I did after getting it was to crack it open and replace the 256MB DIMM with a 1GB DIMM. 1GB gives plenty of head room.
On my PowerBook, it came with 512MB, and it was sufficient for basic operation. But, if I had a few large apps open, things would slow down. Adding a 256MB DIMM to go to 768MB gave me much better performance.