"Sorry, in order for you to connect to the corporate LAN, your GPS needs to be enabled."
This implies that the LAN is already connected and the authentication software reported a denial based on GPS being disabled. It seems reasonable to presume the same LAN could be used to send the coordinates during the authentication process.
For a real intrusive GPS scenario: GPS is always on and logs the location changes every 5-10 minutes with the log uploaded to the company's server whenever the laptop is within range of the company's WiFi. Now the employer knows where you are, where you have been using the laptop and how long at each location.
Yes, lock-in mania has been in full force in some specific area and to some extent in game consoles... but these devices were originally meant to be special-purpose/fixed-function.
Although lock-in always sucks, the kind of damage and inconvenience the above examples may cause are nothing compared to what the "Secure Computing Platform" DRM for PCs would. In this case, DRM will most likely create many more serious issues than the hypothetical "theft" it is meant to stop.
PC stands for Personal Computer, much of "personal" part is gone once you lose the ability to do whatever you want on it.
Things are going to be really entertaining once entertainment industry people start hitting DRM brick walls in their everyday life, preferably at critical moments during production.
I think that the only argument that I hear used widely is that Linux runs well on older hardware.
I owe my first permanent Linux install to this fact... on one of my old Pentiums, the only "DOS-free" OS that would install is Linux, all the NTs failed during setup startup.
As for "rock-solid" and maturity, all the solid and mature Linux software I know about is server-centric. The desktop stuff is mostly average in functionally and reliability but too often sub-par interface-wise, not exactly mature in general.
Things are improving but I think it is still many years too soon for mass acceptance. Maybe the upcoming DRM invasion threat could generate waves of early exiles and pave the way for the rest of us after XP is buried.
Last time I read about hardware DRM on PCs, it went like: secure BIOS -> secure OS -> secure apps, with the 'secure' flag being turned off by the first layer that does not clear.
As for TNC, sounds like this would very likely break PS2/PS3/Xbox/Xbox2/etc.'s online gaming and heaps of other stuff, like appliances and equipment running embedded Linux or other network-enabled OS. If TNC ever goes live, most ISPs that invested milion$ in it will also have invest in a rollback soon thereafter due complaint floods and bulk service cancellations.
Securing the PC and online world to the extent these bits of nonsense intend to is futile. 100% copyright enforcement would slow progress down well beyond what these people can imagine. They are the kamikazes of short-term profit.
As long as DRM-enabled hardware runs non-DRM-enabled software, implementing DRM features in hardware makes no difference for people who do not want to use these capabilities - other than the extra manufacturing, licensing, certification, administration, etc. costs.
My guess is that software emulators for hardware DRM facilities will come up sooner or later and defeat most hardware schemes as well.
When GCC changes the Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs), wholesale breakage is unavoidable until everything is at least recompiled... and adjusted wherever people use ABI-bound wizardry to pull off some stunts such as runtime code generation/modification to setup dynamic library function stubs.
GCC's ABIs are usually changed to fix flaws and increase efficiency. They do not change that often for the older architectures where common practice and optimal sequences are well documented.
Per-socket seems like the fairest for those who insist on per-core or similar licensing.
No matter how many cores or CMT/SMT virtual cores each core has, overall performance is ultimately bound by IO bandwidth and latency. Once a CPU's IO is maxed out, it no longer matters performance-wise how many cores/threads it has, any further processing power will be spent executing NOPs while waiting after IOs. With NUMA architectures (like Opterons), potential IO bandwidth scales (roughly) with the number of CPUs so application throughput can scale more smoothly.
In Intel's case though, the Xeons's shared bus makes multicore MP fairly uninteresting. Per-socket licenses halve licensing costs (or even quarter if a socket license replaces an execution unit (per HT/SMT thread) license) but the shared bus significantly compromises scalability.
Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought.
There is no need for everyone on your street to own a car. You should let anyone in your town borrow your car while you're not using it. Cars spend ~80% of their time parked so by "oversubscribing" them, only one car for every three or four drivers should be sufficient.
As for ISPs and Web servers, it is a generally well accepted fact that >90% of all bandwidth is used by 10% of the customer base so oversubscribing 10:1 would be very conservative since even that 10% is not going to be using it all at the same time. Last time I heard, my ISP's bandwidth oversubscription was estimated to be around 100:1 but I have never had any problem getting a steady 425-475KB/s off my 5Mbps cable service.
If you look at webhosting centers, when people lease a 100Mbps link, they are often guaranteed this 100Mbps. What happens in reality is that the service is oversubscribed and whenever a border link saturation alarms goes off, the datacenter investigates the surge's nature then adds new links if they determine that the surge was caused by legitimate traffic. Under a DDoS attack scenario, even not having any oversubscription can still bring networks down.
As the sibling says, oversubscription is a fact of life. Overselling rights to use facilities on the basis that not everyonw will access them at the same time has been around for ages. I have a municipal pass for libraries and parks but I cannot be everywhere at once and not everybody in town will decide to do the same thing at the same time.
My guess is that communicating with Jedi spirits is a trick only known by Jedi masters and some rare exceptions. Obiwan was told by Yoda that he would be taught how to do it. If even some masters do not know about this trick, how are children without mentor supposed to learn about it to tap into spiritual wisdom from Jedis past?
This trick might also have limits such as only being able to contact spirits of Jedis one met, sort of like spread-spectrum: you need to know exactly what you are looking for, otherwise everything looks like meaningless noise.
If there is zero checking on season passes, many people will setup pass pools and rent-a-pass style things... for pools, people put down a pass' worth in cash and get a pro-rata refund minus processing fees after an amount of time equivalent to a pass' validity period. For rent-a-pass, people would put down a safety deposit and the refund would be the pass's cost divided by the typical number of rentals per pass.
In large pools and rent-a-pass networks, there could be something like one pass per hundred users since not everybody goes to WDL every day of the week for the full day.
For now, DNA is essentially constant across individuals' lifespan... but this may change with future advances in genenetic therapies.
Also, when people die, their possessions (which should include DRM'd content) are usually distributed among beneficiaries. And again, households often/usually share their audio/video/game titles and equipment. Having DRM stuff locked on one person's DNA is problematic in all these cases and many many more.
The only good DRM is no DRM. The next best thing is cracked DRM.
Microsoft and everyone else involved in DRM should DRM their own software's source code so we can see how much they will appreciate being locked out of their own code&all due to a DRM glitch or unexpected side-effect. DRM is plain evil.
I wonder how long it will take for the industry to realize that patenting, trademarking, DRMing, legislating, etc.-ing everything will ultimately kill them rather than help them.
Today's amateurs are tomorrow's experts. By locking up all the content and tools these amateurs need, they are alienating their future talent/customer/worker/etc. pool, this is never good but they will not feel the real damage for another 20+ years - when they will be forced to hire people who had to progress in a locked-up world.
This sucks but that is how they want it, all in the good name of short-term profits.
By definition, emitting light is the only thing OLEDs can do. There is no such thing as LCD-mode OLED but LCDs could use OLED pannels for perfectly uniform backlighting.
As for the OLED keys, they could be programmed and powered by RFID or other similar technology. In large volume, these could probably be manufactured around $1/key.
London and NY are two places where public transportation is working properly and covers most significant areas.
For the less lucky among us (like me), public transportation is a huge waste of time. My previous job was less than 30km away and using metro/bus/train, it was taking me 2.5-4h (depending on traffic and subsequent transfer timing) each way. With a car, it takes less than 40 minutes. I do not like driving but I certainly prefer that to standing in cramped busses for 2-3h/day, even more so during summer while temperature is over 30C with 80% humidity. Busses and metro here are not air-conditionned, only trains are but my destination was backwards to rush-hours traffic and the trains' return schedules did not match mine. If they did, it would have saved me ~1h/day of cramped busses and downtown congestion.
If Australia's copyright laws are like the USA/Canada's, then everything ever written/published has implicit copyright... this would mean that Google should not link to anything ever written/published/etc. from there and not return any links to stuff from any country that has the same or similar clause.
Yes, this and the new proposed canadian bill of a similar nature in an earlier story are retarded.
Because there is a law does not mean it is either right, just or even makes sense. And the boundaries in all three case are context-sensitive.
I am guessing this bill must be the creation of some companies that have published stupid things and want to hide the proof so they can pretend it never happened. In printed media, they cannot take things back once they are printed but online stuff is only one click away from (in)conveniently disappearing - as long as there are no web caches.
Sure, some people are genuinely interested in copyright protection but I suspect most of the major supporters are embarassed companies that want to kill evidence, using a copyright cover story to make their case seem legitimate.
Google cache does not serve content that is not already available online.
If content replication is such a big deal, they should outlaw ISP and corporate use of caching proxies to reduce border traffic from frequently visited pages as well.
AFAIK, Google does not index/cache pages that require registration. If you are so worried about your pages getting GCached, simply hide them behind a registration/login form.
A revolution usually aims at overthrowing one's own government, the people/terrorists in Iraq are only resisting the USA&all's invasion. (And overthrow the puppet government if the USA&all ever pulled out.)
In any case, I had only "civilized" countries in mind when I posted my original post. There, people take everything for granted and are generally not going to stand up for intangible things if doing so could be substantially inconvenient. By the time enough of us wake up, I wonder how far beyond repair our money-for-money governments will have gone.
Being able to make up stats and get away with it is one of the nice things about having a PhD... most people do not have the qualifications nor the data necessary to expose the made-up nature.
This appears to be particularly frequent in more abstract (non-maths) sciences like environment. (I once had lectures on the topic where the speaker cited stats that did not match the notes and were inconsistent across presentations.)
The 10% idle you are seeing is TaskManager. I do not know what is so special about listing processes but it sure seems like TM is using way more CPU time than it probably should.
Of course, with antivirus and tons of other things in the system tray with flashing alarms and other junk, spyware, etc., mileage will vary.
My own XPs idle in the 98-99% range. My only Linux PC idles at 99.5% in large part because I am not running X (and the implied Gnome/KDE widgets) unless I need to.
Seeing how most of the shows worth watching get cancelled, I am in no hurry to buy into HDTV only to boldly be bombarded with more HDTV "reality" shows than ever before.
To have a war, you need two armies. The USA and most countries only have one federally-owned/funded/operated army.
150 years ago, the people had access to most of the same arms as the military, not even remotely so today. This makes revolutions practically unthinkable. So if something happens, it would have to be a coup d'etat, assuming the bureaucrats are still sufficiently vulnerable for that to work and enough people get sufficiently fed up with votes making things right or any sort of measurable difference.
A democracy should put the people's rights first but election funding ensures that politicians/parties have to sell out before they can enter the game.
If you look at sub-$1000 color laser printers and compare that to average inkjets, you will find out that most laser printers (all that I have seen) have one or more of the following three flaws: - highly inaccurate colors - heavily blurred edges - obvious dithering
So having a color laser printer at home solves the clogged heads and dried cartridge issues but is far from guaranteeing better-than-inkjet prints... at least under $1000.
Slashdot Mirror
Re-read the scenario...
"Sorry, in order for you to connect to the corporate LAN, your GPS needs to be enabled."
This implies that the LAN is already connected and the authentication software reported a denial based on GPS being disabled. It seems reasonable to presume the same LAN could be used to send the coordinates during the authentication process.
For a real intrusive GPS scenario: GPS is always on and logs the location changes every 5-10 minutes with the log uploaded to the company's server whenever the laptop is within range of the company's WiFi. Now the employer knows where you are, where you have been using the laptop and how long at each location.
If you can get your hands on the paper, I suggest you walk to the next storage room and grab the finished bills instead!
In both cases, getting through security on the way in/out, that's tough.
I do not buy into lock-in mania.
Yes, lock-in mania has been in full force in some specific area and to some extent in game consoles... but these devices were originally meant to be special-purpose/fixed-function.
Although lock-in always sucks, the kind of damage and inconvenience the above examples may cause are nothing compared to what the "Secure Computing Platform" DRM for PCs would. In this case, DRM will most likely create many more serious issues than the hypothetical "theft" it is meant to stop.
PC stands for Personal Computer, much of "personal" part is gone once you lose the ability to do whatever you want on it.
Things are going to be really entertaining once entertainment industry people start hitting DRM brick walls in their everyday life, preferably at critical moments during production.
I think that the only argument that I hear used widely is that Linux runs well on older hardware.
I owe my first permanent Linux install to this fact... on one of my old Pentiums, the only "DOS-free" OS that would install is Linux, all the NTs failed during setup startup.
As for "rock-solid" and maturity, all the solid and mature Linux software I know about is server-centric. The desktop stuff is mostly average in functionally and reliability but too often sub-par interface-wise, not exactly mature in general.
Things are improving but I think it is still many years too soon for mass acceptance. Maybe the upcoming DRM invasion threat could generate waves of early exiles and pave the way for the rest of us after XP is buried.
Last time I read about hardware DRM on PCs, it went like: secure BIOS -> secure OS -> secure apps, with the 'secure' flag being turned off by the first layer that does not clear.
As for TNC, sounds like this would very likely break PS2/PS3/Xbox/Xbox2/etc.'s online gaming and heaps of other stuff, like appliances and equipment running embedded Linux or other network-enabled OS. If TNC ever goes live, most ISPs that invested milion$ in it will also have invest in a rollback soon thereafter due complaint floods and bulk service cancellations.
Securing the PC and online world to the extent these bits of nonsense intend to is futile. 100% copyright enforcement would slow progress down well beyond what these people can imagine. They are the kamikazes of short-term profit.
As long as DRM-enabled hardware runs non-DRM-enabled software, implementing DRM features in hardware makes no difference for people who do not want to use these capabilities - other than the extra manufacturing, licensing, certification, administration, etc. costs.
My guess is that software emulators for hardware DRM facilities will come up sooner or later and defeat most hardware schemes as well.
When GCC changes the Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs), wholesale breakage is unavoidable until everything is at least recompiled... and adjusted wherever people use ABI-bound wizardry to pull off some stunts such as runtime code generation/modification to setup dynamic library function stubs.
GCC's ABIs are usually changed to fix flaws and increase efficiency. They do not change that often for the older architectures where common practice and optimal sequences are well documented.
Exactly.
COM is an interesting concept and ActiveX is only one very specific application of it.
Per-socket seems like the fairest for those who insist on per-core or similar licensing.
No matter how many cores or CMT/SMT virtual cores each core has, overall performance is ultimately bound by IO bandwidth and latency. Once a CPU's IO is maxed out, it no longer matters performance-wise how many cores/threads it has, any further processing power will be spent executing NOPs while waiting after IOs. With NUMA architectures (like Opterons), potential IO bandwidth scales (roughly) with the number of CPUs so application throughput can scale more smoothly.
In Intel's case though, the Xeons's shared bus makes multicore MP fairly uninteresting. Per-socket licenses halve licensing costs (or even quarter if a socket license replaces an execution unit (per HT/SMT thread) license) but the shared bus significantly compromises scalability.
Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought.
There is no need for everyone on your street to own a car. You should let anyone in your town borrow your car while you're not using it. Cars spend ~80% of their time parked so by "oversubscribing" them, only one car for every three or four drivers should be sufficient.
As for ISPs and Web servers, it is a generally well accepted fact that >90% of all bandwidth is used by 10% of the customer base so oversubscribing 10:1 would be very conservative since even that 10% is not going to be using it all at the same time. Last time I heard, my ISP's bandwidth oversubscription was estimated to be around 100:1 but I have never had any problem getting a steady 425-475KB/s off my 5Mbps cable service.
If you look at webhosting centers, when people lease a 100Mbps link, they are often guaranteed this 100Mbps. What happens in reality is that the service is oversubscribed and whenever a border link saturation alarms goes off, the datacenter investigates the surge's nature then adds new links if they determine that the surge was caused by legitimate traffic. Under a DDoS attack scenario, even not having any oversubscription can still bring networks down.
As the sibling says, oversubscription is a fact of life. Overselling rights to use facilities on the basis that not everyonw will access them at the same time has been around for ages. I have a municipal pass for libraries and parks but I cannot be everywhere at once and not everybody in town will decide to do the same thing at the same time.
My guess is that communicating with Jedi spirits is a trick only known by Jedi masters and some rare exceptions. Obiwan was told by Yoda that he would be taught how to do it. If even some masters do not know about this trick, how are children without mentor supposed to learn about it to tap into spiritual wisdom from Jedis past?
This trick might also have limits such as only being able to contact spirits of Jedis one met, sort of like spread-spectrum: you need to know exactly what you are looking for, otherwise everything looks like meaningless noise.
If there is zero checking on season passes, many people will setup pass pools and rent-a-pass style things... for pools, people put down a pass' worth in cash and get a pro-rata refund minus processing fees after an amount of time equivalent to a pass' validity period. For rent-a-pass, people would put down a safety deposit and the refund would be the pass's cost divided by the typical number of rentals per pass.
In large pools and rent-a-pass networks, there could be something like one pass per hundred users since not everybody goes to WDL every day of the week for the full day.
For now, DNA is essentially constant across individuals' lifespan... but this may change with future advances in genenetic therapies.
Also, when people die, their possessions (which should include DRM'd content) are usually distributed among beneficiaries. And again, households often/usually share their audio/video/game titles and equipment. Having DRM stuff locked on one person's DNA is problematic in all these cases and many many more.
The only good DRM is no DRM. The next best thing is cracked DRM.
Microsoft and everyone else involved in DRM should DRM their own software's source code so we can see how much they will appreciate being locked out of their own code&all due to a DRM glitch or unexpected side-effect. DRM is plain evil.
I wonder how long it will take for the industry to realize that patenting, trademarking, DRMing, legislating, etc.-ing everything will ultimately kill them rather than help them.
Today's amateurs are tomorrow's experts. By locking up all the content and tools these amateurs need, they are alienating their future talent/customer/worker/etc. pool, this is never good but they will not feel the real damage for another 20+ years - when they will be forced to hire people who had to progress in a locked-up world.
This sucks but that is how they want it, all in the good name of short-term profits.
OLED = Organic Light-Emitting Diode.
By definition, emitting light is the only thing OLEDs can do. There is no such thing as LCD-mode OLED but LCDs could use OLED pannels for perfectly uniform backlighting.
As for the OLED keys, they could be programmed and powered by RFID or other similar technology. In large volume, these could probably be manufactured around $1/key.
London and NY are two places where public transportation is working properly and covers most significant areas.
For the less lucky among us (like me), public transportation is a huge waste of time. My previous job was less than 30km away and using metro/bus/train, it was taking me 2.5-4h (depending on traffic and subsequent transfer timing) each way. With a car, it takes less than 40 minutes. I do not like driving but I certainly prefer that to standing in cramped busses for 2-3h/day, even more so during summer while temperature is over 30C with 80% humidity. Busses and metro here are not air-conditionned, only trains are but my destination was backwards to rush-hours traffic and the trains' return schedules did not match mine. If they did, it would have saved me ~1h/day of cramped busses and downtown congestion.
If Australia's copyright laws are like the USA/Canada's, then everything ever written/published has implicit copyright... this would mean that Google should not link to anything ever written/published/etc. from there and not return any links to stuff from any country that has the same or similar clause.
Yes, this and the new proposed canadian bill of a similar nature in an earlier story are retarded.
Because there is a law does not mean it is either right, just or even makes sense. And the boundaries in all three case are context-sensitive.
I am guessing this bill must be the creation of some companies that have published stupid things and want to hide the proof so they can pretend it never happened. In printed media, they cannot take things back once they are printed but online stuff is only one click away from (in)conveniently disappearing - as long as there are no web caches.
Sure, some people are genuinely interested in copyright protection but I suspect most of the major supporters are embarassed companies that want to kill evidence, using a copyright cover story to make their case seem legitimate.
Google cache does not serve content that is not already available online.
If content replication is such a big deal, they should outlaw ISP and corporate use of caching proxies to reduce border traffic from frequently visited pages as well.
AFAIK, Google does not index/cache pages that require registration. If you are so worried about your pages getting GCached, simply hide them behind a registration/login form.
A revolution usually aims at overthrowing one's own government, the people/terrorists in Iraq are only resisting the USA&all's invasion. (And overthrow the puppet government if the USA&all ever pulled out.)
In any case, I had only "civilized" countries in mind when I posted my original post. There, people take everything for granted and are generally not going to stand up for intangible things if doing so could be substantially inconvenient. By the time enough of us wake up, I wonder how far beyond repair our money-for-money governments will have gone.
Being able to make up stats and get away with it is one of the nice things about having a PhD... most people do not have the qualifications nor the data necessary to expose the made-up nature.
This appears to be particularly frequent in more abstract (non-maths) sciences like environment. (I once had lectures on the topic where the speaker cited stats that did not match the notes and were inconsistent across presentations.)
The 10% idle you are seeing is TaskManager. I do not know what is so special about listing processes but it sure seems like TM is using way more CPU time than it probably should.
Of course, with antivirus and tons of other things in the system tray with flashing alarms and other junk, spyware, etc., mileage will vary.
My own XPs idle in the 98-99% range. My only Linux PC idles at 99.5% in large part because I am not running X (and the implied Gnome/KDE widgets) unless I need to.
I cannot throw away what I do not have.
Seeing how most of the shows worth watching get cancelled, I am in no hurry to buy into HDTV only to boldly be bombarded with more HDTV "reality" shows than ever before.
To have a war, you need two armies. The USA and most countries only have one federally-owned/funded/operated army.
150 years ago, the people had access to most of the same arms as the military, not even remotely so today. This makes revolutions practically unthinkable. So if something happens, it would have to be a coup d'etat, assuming the bureaucrats are still sufficiently vulnerable for that to work and enough people get sufficiently fed up with votes making things right or any sort of measurable difference.
A democracy should put the people's rights first but election funding ensures that politicians/parties have to sell out before they can enter the game.
If you look at sub-$1000 color laser printers and compare that to average inkjets, you will find out that most laser printers (all that I have seen) have one or more of the following three flaws:
- highly inaccurate colors
- heavily blurred edges
- obvious dithering
So having a color laser printer at home solves the clogged heads and dried cartridge issues but is far from guaranteeing better-than-inkjet prints... at least under $1000.