I looked really hard at those internet employment "opportunities" a few months ago. I can make 2x the money here in town, 3x if I were willing to move to a better paying area.
Why rewrite the application software? Why not catch it in the firmware and still present a "perfect" face to the assembly level code? Net effect would be an unreliable rate of execution, but who cares about that if the net rate is faster?
Problem is if the VM gets sufficiently complex, it's still a significant loss when it gets corrupted. It's all well and good to say that you just want a browser in the VM, but that browser wants all of its plug-ins, and your bookmarks, oh and your saved passwords too... eventually the VM becomes indistinguishable from the whole machine.
If you want to "protect yourself" when doing something unusual and risky, then a VM can be like using a condom... it diminishes the spontaneity of the act, and provides a measure of protection, but ultimately you're not interacting with the other side in a natural and open manner, and many people just don't want to live that way.
Your house isn't secure, but you do know when someone has broken in. The problem with computer security is the stealth with which the bad guys can operate, and therefore the scale they can operate on.
My CC# isn't secure in the least, every time I use it for any purchase, I'm trusting some underpaid clerk or waiter to not steal it, but they (usually) have limited ability to profit from the theft because I would eventually notice the bogus charges (my wife checks the online statements almost nightly...)
Bad guys stealing CC#s in computers can get millions of valid numbers and skim $20 off of each of them....
I'm not saying it's ideal, or even desirable, but what Sony is doing with the PS3 is approaching secure. Most software requires the latest updates in order to function, and the updates stay on top of known exploits. I think it's the suckiest user experience ever, constant waiting for their slow servers to push patches, and sometimes those patches break functionality that _I_ care about, but it does seem to have kept a cap on unauthorized use, at least if you care about using the secure software base.
Security through obscurity does work much better than open source (when measured in the number of man hours required to break a system).
The problem comes in that obscurity lends a sense of invulnerability, which is false, and the designers of obscure systems don't try as hard as the open ones.
When I am charged with designing a system that is "secure enough," obscurity adds a layer of protection, I try to ensure that there are no embarrassing holes, but at the end of it all, any system, open or closed, is vulnerable unless you control the hardware and monitor it. No matter how clever or strong a lock is, it can always be bypassed.
Having a uniform product line means greater efficiencies in both production and support. Modern business 101, for crying out loud!
Yep, that's what they're doing, uniform, unimaginative, boring, proven. It's what the customers actually want. If you want "bleeding edge" develop it on your own Linux box, prove that it's worth something to somebody besides yourself, and start marketing your revolutionary new widget to the vast market for your brilliant innovations.
There may be a few ideas being stifled inside Cisco/Linksys/Netgear, but not many that have any commercial merit- there's enough competition in the market that good ideas actually do get built.
Florida has Online Sunshine - Their deep revision history is hidden, but the current text is reasonably well indexed. Interaction with Federal and Local laws is left in the domain of weasels for hire.
Bill collection laws (I forget the acronym) in the US make it illegal to threaten legal action you know to be unwinnable, those threatened may sue the threateners in their local small claims court to pick up an easy $500 per (proven) instance.
AT&T pulled this $ hit on me about 15 years ago on terms and rates of a calling card (they tripled the rates without prior notice), a couple of years later (after I refused to pay) they sent a revised TOS including the "pay your bill to accept these terms," which I still didn't. Neither of us went to court over the $50 disagreement.
You agree to the new EULA terms by accepting the associated firmware update. If you don't mind losing use of the PS Store and PSN, you can stay at the previous firmware level. Honestly, if you want control of your computer, use Linux, if you want a media giant controlled games console use the PS3 - different expectations for different machines.
I entered one of the early driver races, seems like about 14 years ago, and got disgusted with the 2nd round of competition when the rules about pitting, collision, etc. started to be the major factor in success instead of improving the (then dismal) simulation realism.
Like all racing, winning is in working the rules, not making the fastest or most effective vehicle - the fastest and the best are quickly barred from competition.
"And, wasn't there quite a fuss recently about AT&T (in their role as ISP) allowing certain government agencies to set up a lot of mysterious equipment in the switching office, tapped into the internet data streams they were carrying?"
Yes, there was.
Most people think this sort of thing shouldn't be the norm...that's why there was a fuss.
You apparently have long since given up.
I've got lots of battles in my life, some of which I actually make a difference in. Howling at my congressman about how terrible it is that my country is spying on its own citizens (as it has since its formation) doesn't seem like a battle I'll personally make much headway in.
And while I suppose my ISP *could* be using the information to build a profile on me, where i go, what email i send, who i send it to, etc, etc... I'm actually quite confident they aren't actually doing this. I know people who work for the ISP. I know a great deal about how they are setup. So... yes... they could...
And, wasn't there quite a fuss recently about AT&T (in their role as ISP) allowing certain government agencies to set up a lot of mysterious equipment in the switching office, tapped into the internet data streams they were carrying?
I am quite confident that anything typed and transmitted on the internet is more accessible than if it were transmitted via radio - at least the radio signals are transient and limited in the geography they transverse - every e-mail I send and receive crosses national borders, how many I'm not sure, but since my ISP is in another country from my access points, at least one. Most traffic is transient and erased within seconds at most points it crosses, except those "special closets" that sniff and/or record everything that passes through them.
If you're interested in sending anything "privately" across the 'net, you'd better be adding a layer of homebrew cryptography, since all the common "proven" algorithms will have been hammered on and shattered by the people who care, at least if you're making it up yourself they'll have to focus on you specifically for a few hours to get through your layer, less likely you'll be caught in a wide range sniffing operation.
The real solution is to wake up, realize you live in a glass house and deal with it. Not everybody can see through your walls, but the number of people who can is so large that the notion of privacy is long dead.
Not that I "believe in the Hum" - but there are differences in perceptive abilities among people, not that the more perceptive are "superior," in-fact the unusually highly perceptive are mostly unhappy due to all the noise they hear that no one else cares about.
The Taos Hum I refer to is supposed to be low frequency emi based (submarine comms, etc.), but most new agers can't tell the difference between that, wi-fi, and a Walkie Talkie.
Discrete maths (logic, proof by induction, etc.) is really underlying most of procedural programming, if you have that, Calculus, diffeqs, etc. are interesting gravy that comes up in a very few, though sometimes critical, junctures.
In high school I used a logarithm to predict the outcome length of a base conversion string. It wasn't necessary, but it saved a bit of code, reduced a 5-10 line solution to maybe 2 or 3 lines. By contrast, the class (and teacher) who were doing base conversion without much grasp of the logical process were coming up with solutions in the several hundreds of lines. It's not that what they were doing was "wrong" - but it took them much longer to do it, and in the end it was much more error prone due to its sheer bulk.
I know an installation line manager who makes 6 figures and (according to his wife) doesn't really know how to read - he can read the drawings that pertain to his responsibility at work, and more importantly, he knows how to get the people he is given to work with to do their jobs correctly. We have had a very competent appliance repair tech (as measured by the fact that his repairs stay working), who apparently thinks "wire" is spelled "wier," it doesn't seem to affect his work, but it probably is holding him back in other areas.
So, no, you don't need to understand "higher maths" to be a programmer, or even to be a good programmer, but it doesn't hurt, and many of the math-snobs you end up working with will put you down if it comes out that you don't know what the derivative of sin() is.
It was in Georgia when I was in High School, or was that sodomy? or bestiality? anyway, what you do in the privacy of your own home, I do not want to hear about.
4.5 million reasons - Real had the audacity to operate inside a jurisdiction that allows looting of profits in exchange for violations of the copyright law, their choice, their loss. I'm curious how the whole picture with Real's finances looks, was $4.5M just a share of their profits, or is it a smackdown bankruptcy verdict that will never get paid in full?
Until you posted this in public, what you did in your own home was your own business - much like people who smoke certain illegal plants, have sex out of wedlock, etc. All those things are illegal, but your right to privacy trumps any need to investigate.
Now, if you start sharing some of those illegal plants, or giving away copies of your recordings, or doing other things publicly, (even bragging about doing them publicly can be a problem), then you're inviting the man in your door. People are so amazed about how stupid regular drug users can be, calling the cops to come inside the house with a bong on the counter or whatever - but if you're posting your illegal activities on the internet, you're inviting the exact same kind of trouble - regardless of how easy it is to do, how reasonable it is to do, or how many other people are doing it, illegal = prosecutable, if anyone cares enough to follow through.
Sadly, when the percentages climb high enough, it doesn't matter... they all believe in Tinkerbell, therefore she exists and matters in a very life affecting way.....I'm starting to get mental images of the Inquisition now.....
W took his 51% win as a "mandate from the people" to continue his agendae, too bad it took 4 more years for the people wake up.
Something in the US bill of rights about "Right to Assemble" got lost when applied to minors here - the town I grew up in systematically eliminated any place where more than 3 or 4 "children" were seen having fun after 8pm. Some pretty damn brutal things happened to some of the pensioners in the following years, all isolated incidents, but I still question whether or not that elderly couple would have been killed and had their car and cash stolen and used for a trip to Disney World if the kids didn't a) hate the old people as a class and b) have something remotely entertaining to do in their own town besides sit home and plot how to get back at the geezers that put them "in their place" at every opportunity.
Hazards of living in a retirement community (my county had the highest per-capita death rate in the nation during those years, primary cause of mortality: old age).
Careful who you're calling wackos - they've been winning 48% of the popular vote in all but the most recent elections - get that up to 51 and the other side becomes the wackos...
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I looked really hard at those internet employment "opportunities" a few months ago. I can make 2x the money here in town, 3x if I were willing to move to a better paying area.
Why rewrite the application software? Why not catch it in the firmware and still present a "perfect" face to the assembly level code? Net effect would be an unreliable rate of execution, but who cares about that if the net rate is faster?
Problem is if the VM gets sufficiently complex, it's still a significant loss when it gets corrupted. It's all well and good to say that you just want a browser in the VM, but that browser wants all of its plug-ins, and your bookmarks, oh and your saved passwords too... eventually the VM becomes indistinguishable from the whole machine.
If you want to "protect yourself" when doing something unusual and risky, then a VM can be like using a condom... it diminishes the spontaneity of the act, and provides a measure of protection, but ultimately you're not interacting with the other side in a natural and open manner, and many people just don't want to live that way.
Your house isn't secure, but you do know when someone has broken in. The problem with computer security is the stealth with which the bad guys can operate, and therefore the scale they can operate on.
My CC# isn't secure in the least, every time I use it for any purchase, I'm trusting some underpaid clerk or waiter to not steal it, but they (usually) have limited ability to profit from the theft because I would eventually notice the bogus charges (my wife checks the online statements almost nightly...)
Bad guys stealing CC#s in computers can get millions of valid numbers and skim $20 off of each of them....
In today's regulatory environment electricity would never be approved for use outside the execution chamber.
Anything sufficiently powerful to be interesting and useful is also dangerous, it's almost an inherent property.
I'm not saying it's ideal, or even desirable, but what Sony is doing with the PS3 is approaching secure. Most software requires the latest updates in order to function, and the updates stay on top of known exploits. I think it's the suckiest user experience ever, constant waiting for their slow servers to push patches, and sometimes those patches break functionality that _I_ care about, but it does seem to have kept a cap on unauthorized use, at least if you care about using the secure software base.
Security through obscurity does work much better than open source (when measured in the number of man hours required to break a system).
The problem comes in that obscurity lends a sense of invulnerability, which is false, and the designers of obscure systems don't try as hard as the open ones.
When I am charged with designing a system that is "secure enough," obscurity adds a layer of protection, I try to ensure that there are no embarrassing holes, but at the end of it all, any system, open or closed, is vulnerable unless you control the hardware and monitor it. No matter how clever or strong a lock is, it can always be bypassed.
Having a uniform product line means greater efficiencies in both production and support. Modern business 101, for crying out loud!
Yep, that's what they're doing, uniform, unimaginative, boring, proven. It's what the customers actually want. If you want "bleeding edge" develop it on your own Linux box, prove that it's worth something to somebody besides yourself, and start marketing your revolutionary new widget to the vast market for your brilliant innovations.
There may be a few ideas being stifled inside Cisco/Linksys/Netgear, but not many that have any commercial merit- there's enough competition in the market that good ideas actually do get built.
Florida has Online Sunshine - Their deep revision history is hidden, but the current text is reasonably well indexed. Interaction with Federal and Local laws is left in the domain of weasels for hire.
Bill collection laws (I forget the acronym) in the US make it illegal to threaten legal action you know to be unwinnable, those threatened may sue the threateners in their local small claims court to pick up an easy $500 per (proven) instance.
AT&T pulled this $ hit on me about 15 years ago on terms and rates of a calling card (they tripled the rates without prior notice), a couple of years later (after I refused to pay) they sent a revised TOS including the "pay your bill to accept these terms," which I still didn't. Neither of us went to court over the $50 disagreement.
You agree to the new EULA terms by accepting the associated firmware update. If you don't mind losing use of the PS Store and PSN, you can stay at the previous firmware level. Honestly, if you want control of your computer, use Linux, if you want a media giant controlled games console use the PS3 - different expectations for different machines.
I entered one of the early driver races, seems like about 14 years ago, and got disgusted with the 2nd round of competition when the rules about pitting, collision, etc. started to be the major factor in success instead of improving the (then dismal) simulation realism.
Like all racing, winning is in working the rules, not making the fastest or most effective vehicle - the fastest and the best are quickly barred from competition.
"And, wasn't there quite a fuss recently about AT&T (in their role as ISP) allowing certain government agencies to set up a lot of mysterious equipment in the switching office, tapped into the internet data streams they were carrying?"
Yes, there was.
Most people think this sort of thing shouldn't be the norm...that's why there was a fuss.
You apparently have long since given up.
I've got lots of battles in my life, some of which I actually make a difference in. Howling at my congressman about how terrible it is that my country is spying on its own citizens (as it has since its formation) doesn't seem like a battle I'll personally make much headway in.
And while I suppose my ISP *could* be using the information to build a profile on me, where i go, what email i send, who i send it to, etc, etc... I'm actually quite confident they aren't actually doing this. I know people who work for the ISP. I know a great deal about how they are setup. So... yes... they could...
And, wasn't there quite a fuss recently about AT&T (in their role as ISP) allowing certain government agencies to set up a lot of mysterious equipment in the switching office, tapped into the internet data streams they were carrying?
I am quite confident that anything typed and transmitted on the internet is more accessible than if it were transmitted via radio - at least the radio signals are transient and limited in the geography they transverse - every e-mail I send and receive crosses national borders, how many I'm not sure, but since my ISP is in another country from my access points, at least one. Most traffic is transient and erased within seconds at most points it crosses, except those "special closets" that sniff and/or record everything that passes through them.
If you're interested in sending anything "privately" across the 'net, you'd better be adding a layer of homebrew cryptography, since all the common "proven" algorithms will have been hammered on and shattered by the people who care, at least if you're making it up yourself they'll have to focus on you specifically for a few hours to get through your layer, less likely you'll be caught in a wide range sniffing operation.
The real solution is to wake up, realize you live in a glass house and deal with it. Not everybody can see through your walls, but the number of people who can is so large that the notion of privacy is long dead.
Not that I "believe in the Hum" - but there are differences in perceptive abilities among people, not that the more perceptive are "superior," in-fact the unusually highly perceptive are mostly unhappy due to all the noise they hear that no one else cares about.
The Taos Hum I refer to is supposed to be low frequency emi based (submarine comms, etc.), but most new agers can't tell the difference between that, wi-fi, and a Walkie Talkie.
Don't move to Taos if you can't take The Hum.
Discrete maths (logic, proof by induction, etc.) is really underlying most of procedural programming, if you have that, Calculus, diffeqs, etc. are interesting gravy that comes up in a very few, though sometimes critical, junctures.
In high school I used a logarithm to predict the outcome length of a base conversion string. It wasn't necessary, but it saved a bit of code, reduced a 5-10 line solution to maybe 2 or 3 lines. By contrast, the class (and teacher) who were doing base conversion without much grasp of the logical process were coming up with solutions in the several hundreds of lines. It's not that what they were doing was "wrong" - but it took them much longer to do it, and in the end it was much more error prone due to its sheer bulk.
I know an installation line manager who makes 6 figures and (according to his wife) doesn't really know how to read - he can read the drawings that pertain to his responsibility at work, and more importantly, he knows how to get the people he is given to work with to do their jobs correctly. We have had a very competent appliance repair tech (as measured by the fact that his repairs stay working), who apparently thinks "wire" is spelled "wier," it doesn't seem to affect his work, but it probably is holding him back in other areas.
So, no, you don't need to understand "higher maths" to be a programmer, or even to be a good programmer, but it doesn't hurt, and many of the math-snobs you end up working with will put you down if it comes out that you don't know what the derivative of sin() is.
It was in Georgia when I was in High School, or was that sodomy? or bestiality? anyway, what you do in the privacy of your own home, I do not want to hear about.
4.5 million reasons - Real had the audacity to operate inside a jurisdiction that allows looting of profits in exchange for violations of the copyright law, their choice, their loss. I'm curious how the whole picture with Real's finances looks, was $4.5M just a share of their profits, or is it a smackdown bankruptcy verdict that will never get paid in full?
Until you posted this in public, what you did in your own home was your own business - much like people who smoke certain illegal plants, have sex out of wedlock, etc. All those things are illegal, but your right to privacy trumps any need to investigate.
Now, if you start sharing some of those illegal plants, or giving away copies of your recordings, or doing other things publicly, (even bragging about doing them publicly can be a problem), then you're inviting the man in your door. People are so amazed about how stupid regular drug users can be, calling the cops to come inside the house with a bong on the counter or whatever - but if you're posting your illegal activities on the internet, you're inviting the exact same kind of trouble - regardless of how easy it is to do, how reasonable it is to do, or how many other people are doing it, illegal = prosecutable, if anyone cares enough to follow through.
Sadly, when the percentages climb high enough, it doesn't matter... they all believe in Tinkerbell, therefore she exists and matters in a very life affecting way .....I'm starting to get mental images of the Inquisition now.....
W took his 51% win as a "mandate from the people" to continue his agendae, too bad it took 4 more years for the people wake up.
Something in the US bill of rights about "Right to Assemble" got lost when applied to minors here - the town I grew up in systematically eliminated any place where more than 3 or 4 "children" were seen having fun after 8pm. Some pretty damn brutal things happened to some of the pensioners in the following years, all isolated incidents, but I still question whether or not that elderly couple would have been killed and had their car and cash stolen and used for a trip to Disney World if the kids didn't a) hate the old people as a class and b) have something remotely entertaining to do in their own town besides sit home and plot how to get back at the geezers that put them "in their place" at every opportunity.
Hazards of living in a retirement community (my county had the highest per-capita death rate in the nation during those years, primary cause of mortality: old age).
Careful who you're calling wackos - they've been winning 48% of the popular vote in all but the most recent elections - get that up to 51 and the other side becomes the wackos...
Kids have been doing this to adults ever since the invention of the transistor radio...