Java is far, far safer than C++. C++ does not enforce type safety at all. For example, in Java you cannot possibly have a buffer overrun or access freed memory as you can in C++. I think most of the security notices are about C and C++ programs, not Java programs. I think you're referring to the Java runtime, which is written in, you guessed it, C.
Yet it is Java that has had its run-time environments pulled for security concerns.
As for saying it only works of encrypt/decrypt, such obfuscation in conjunction with copyright law is good enough for preventing unauthorized 3rd party clients/software from interoperating with your products. If the only way they can create or verify signed messages to/from your services/other software is by copying your obfuscated signing module then they breach copyright law.
Interoperability is a recognized reason by US Copyright Law for reverse engineering, no matter how much obfuscation or encyprtion is done.
that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time.
Assuming "full" obfuscation if you do that you'd only capture the "program" for generating that one hash alone - one input and its corresponding output. The path would be different for different data/inputs. For a 256 bit hash you'd have to run it 2^256 times.
Of course there might not be full obfuscation. But I see no evidence so far that full obfuscation would be impossible or that difficult. Maybe someone could prove it impractical.
If the point is to merely obfuscate the program and not allow the user to actually run it, then yes you'd be right. That would also be pretty useless.
If the point is to run the program, then you are wrong as the program that must be run must at some point pass through the CPU to do its function. A capture program would be capturing the data as well, and would be able to note what portions of memory were being read/written/manipulated as well, so you'd also capture the any changes that temporarily decoded a section of memory, then executed that block before re-encoding it.
What you reference only works for encrypt/decrypt. However, between those two points something else has to happen - a portion of the real program has to run. The cracking program only needs to decipher where the boundaries between the encryption/decryption are so as to capture the exposed real program while it is operating - which has to happen for the user to actually be able to use the program, and monitoring the CPU instructions and cache would prove to be a very effective and efficient way to do it - e.g. they may be relying on tricks in the CPU to mask instructions before running them - e.g. XOR/AND/NOT etc - whereby it stays in the CPU cache only - however, even that is fully capturable by the kind of program/cracking I'm specifying be run in conjuction with a virtualized environment.
In other words, as I and many others have pointed out, as long as the program - not the obfuscator - actually has to run through some kind of execution unit, it can be captured. If it doesn't, then it's no better than putting a program into a ZIP file and saying is obfuscated.
I'm sure they can further obfuscate the actual code, but at the end of the day the processor is going to have to run machine code, and one way or the other you can tap the processor's activity to read the "decrypted" code. Beyond that, I imagine the performance penalties involved will be monstrous. Even normal obfuscation techniques have pretty heavy penalties.
Not really. I've seen memory encryption units that ensure that all data hitting memory is encrypted, and it's possible to have the startup code also encrypted in flash and decrypted internally.
All you need is an appropriate virtual environment - VMware, etc. - and you're set to capture the decrypted data. Even TPM can't get around that if you emulate the TPM chip sufficiently. At worse, you end up with something like the Bochs Pentium Emulator that emulates every single instruction and all hardware - e.g you can run x86 code on a non-x86 processor, at a high cost of performance, but the software running on it couldn't tell it was in a virtual environment.
The code is encrypted in such a form that it is never decrypted into CPU instructions. Every operation the program does is a form of mathematical transformation. Yes, it's got a lot of overhead (probably impractical at the moment)
Then the program is never run, only the decryption of it. Even then, a smart cracker can obtain the original code through simple means. For the user to actually use the program it has to at some point be run on the CPU; even if they figured out how to direct it to a DSP present on all computers, you can still trace the DSP using virtualized environments and it'll be pretty obvious very quickly that that is what is being done early in the instruction cycles.
OK as an example what if you have worked out a way to transform an arbitrary program in to a huge bunch of "if else", goto statements with "magic numbers" or worse (e.g.
setaddress(mod(magic1+sha256memoizer(magic2+parm1+parm2+...),dataend))=parm3;
linenumber=mod(magic3+sha256memoizer(magic4+parm5+parm6+...),maxlines);
goto linenumber;
) and some stores and loads so that it's still equivalent and does the same thing but just a bit slower. So when you disassemble it - it's still a big mess that makes it hard to figure out or "improve" - which is the whole purpose of at least some code obfuscation.
All this means is that someone will then write a program that will work with a virtualized environment (e.g VMware, VirtualBox, etc) - may be even a device driver that snoops memory - that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time. They'll then use that in order to reverse engineer the program, reapply the cypher and continue on their merry way of hacking the software in the way the TFA's author is trying to prevent.
Now, given the amount of time it would take for the obfuscated program to run in the manner you are speaking, the aforementioned cracking software probably has plenty of CPU cycles to figure out each step and generate an intercept function to overcome the jigsaw obfuscation.
In then end, it just means the cracking tools become better.
Perhaps the more appropriate question would be: Is Microsoft Losing?
The concept of Mature Company and all that entails seems to apply. Microsoft is no longer growing, the are re-aligning and consolidating, while trying to figure where they fit into the future. Up to a few years ago they saw themselves as the future.
buggy whips at fifty paces
Micrsoft hasn't really grown since the late 1990's or early 2000's in several aspects.
In terms of Stock, they've been relatively flat since about 1999, and as a result only started paying dividends a few years ago to try to appease stockholders since they could no longer buy and sell to make a few easy bucks.
In terms of employees, they've had some major rounds of layoffs (>1000) in the last few years so they've actually shrunk.
In terms of market, they've stagnated and are having a harder and harder time getting people to buy new versions of Office and Windows.
FYI - HyperV may be making inroads, but mostly because it gets sold with most all Windows Server licenses if buyers are not careful. It's a bundling thing and you have to pay attention to not get it if you don't want it. Don't forget, HyperV came about only after MS bought VirtualPC to try to get into the Virtualization business - after Linux already had KVM, Xen, and several other viable options.
Comparatively, VMware is considered the market master when it comes to Virtual Environments and they've got the most infrastructure out there to drive sales and train staff.
Eh, not a Windows company? They've had products out for Mac for a long time.
Technically they've had Mac products longer then they've had Windows products. But that's not the point.
The point is that over 20 years ago, Microsoft went from being a general software company (with products on Mac, DOS, etc) to a software operating system (ie, Windows) company supported by various general software products, some of which continued on other platforms. The ball has now swung back and the operating system portion of the business is now shrinking in at least importance if not also market share and revenue, so they once again have to morph the company into something else, only they don't really know what yet - Ballmer is going for Devices and Services with his latest restructure, but we'll see if that holds.
Noteably their devices tend to be really good for the most part; it tends to be the software on the devices that suck. I wouldn't trade my MS keyboard and mouse for anything; but I don't run Windows. Kin and Zune are either the exception or they flopped due to being so closely tied to the Windows ecosystem, etc; I never used either so can't say.
...Microsoft would make $24+ billion annually with Windows and Office each contributing $1billion a month! Now the whole of the company is only $19 billion annually.
According to Microsoft's annual 10-K report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), published on Tuesday, their total Surface revenue for all of fiscal 2013 amounted to just $853m. That's nearly $50m less than the $900m charge Redmond took when it discounted its remaining Surface RT inventory by $150 per box.
And that's not all. That $900m writedown was related to Surface RT only, but the $853m revenue figure includes sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro combined.
Further down in its 10-K filing, Redmond reports that it upped its sales and marketing budget for the Windows Division in 2013 by a jaw-dropping $1bn, which included an $898m increase in advertising costs "associated primarily with Windows 8 and Surface."
Got that? Microsoft spent more in a single year advertising the Windows 8 and Surface launches than it took in from Surface sales that same year.
And remember, none of this was even spread over an entire calendar year. Microsoft's fiscal 2013 ended on June 30. It launched Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface RT on October 26, 2012. The Surface Pro launch came later, in February. But whichever way you slice it, Microsoft managed to mow through an $898m marketing budget in just eight calendar months – and consumers still didn't take the bait.
Strangely enough, Slashdot does not consider this news...
Further, the summary on this related articlenoted that they only made $17billion over a 12 month period - down nearly $7billion from their peak - they use to make over $24 billion annually with Windows and Office each carrying a $1billion revenue every month.
1. Having the board consist of the reps from the AMA (as now) and then also have reps from Insurance and the FDA, none overlapping.
2. Let the charges be what they are, and the time gets reported too; charges/time outside the norm would have to carry explanation.
I'm not delighted with the Flaimbait mod on this one. There appear to be some thin skinned Linux advocates who aren't familiar with deploying real time software in life critical situations.
FYI - the vanilla Linux Kernel has some pretty good support for true Real-Time Applications, including appropriate schedules. However, if it fails to meet your needs there are a few variants that are specially enhanced for true Real-Time Applications; there need is less now since a good chunk of their features have been migrated to the vanilla Linux Kernel.
try driving for more than 30 minutes with two smallish kids in the car
Try actually parenting - teach them to behave, have an attention span >30 seconds, play games with them, etc. My wife has our 2 year old look for trucks. On a long trip (> several hours) we have a tablet (Nubi Jr. with some YouTube videos loaded on it) that we could use if necessary, but even then we try not to if it can be helped.
Now I'm not saying long trips are not a problem with kids - they are, especially since it is no longer legal to let them out of their car seats for a few minutes without stopping the car (and thus making the entire trip even longer; for those that are not parents getting 1 kid in a car seat could take 15 minutes or more if they are being a problem), or try having an infant along that is being breastfed - some take 15 minutes, others may take an hour, and they feed on regular schedules (every 2-3 hours - again, potentially make a 10 hour trip into a 20 hour trip).
Of course the irony is that you could just board a bus and then no car seats are required!
Pure software patents should be dropped. However, when the software is a required piece of a hardware system (aka, Firmware) it should be allowed.
The other problem is for software that does something that really is a an invention, such as LZW compression, and not a "drop-down menu".
And how do you define Firmware when the worlds of Embedded and non-Embedded computing are mixing so well?
Would Android ROMs be considered embedded? Or would it be limited to the ROM uploaded to your wireless card? or CD/DVD/BD Burner? Where do you draw the line?
I currently work on a system that is for-all-intents an "embedded system" yet we load "normal" software onto it.
While IANAL, SCOTUS has ruled that a non-patentable compont can be part of a larger patentable component, but the sum of non-patentable components do not a patentable component make. That is, software for a rubber curing machine can be part of the patent for the rubber curing maching even if the software is otherwise unpatentable by itself; however, that also precludes someone from being able to sue for patent infringement when someone took that software and used it in another device entirely - f.e, a device to lay rubber on the road - should the software apply there too.
This sounded really cool about 10 years ago, but what real appeal does this have over laptop+tablet? What are the use cases where this kind of flexibility actually matters?
If I'm using a tablet I'm either on the road or at home - I never see a case for doing "tablet" style stuff at work. Considering "Thinkpad" is an enterprise brand, what need does this fill other than fulfilling Microsoft's desire to turn their Windows userbase into a tablet userbase?
I'll leave aside the fact that almost no one wants Windows8 for it's Metro interface (as witnessed by the Surface RT's spectacular sales failure).
ASUS Transformer running Android. Wouldn't think of using Windows in that kind of situation though.
Love mine (ASUS Transformer Infinity); and yes, I do intend on writing documents, spreadsheets, etc. with it - once AndroOffice is fully useful enough. I've already written a couple letters with it, but then finished them on my laptop before sending them out. (Yes there are other office productivity suites out there; but only AndroOffice is ODF compatible. Sadly it needs more work but it is coming along.) Main sour points are: (i) ease of which to get files on/off the device, and (ii) printing from it (not possible as far as I can tell).
But can Windows be gratis without being libre? One reason why Linux can be gratis is that it is libre, and so contributing to the various OSS projects is easy. Could one do this for Windows? Could Microsoft develop a business plan where Windows is gratis?
Microsoft could if they desired base Windows on Linux or a BSD, much like Apple did with Mac OSX and make the key differentiator be the interface they provide. It would certainly solve many of the driver issues all around; but don't count on that happening.
Could Microsoft make Windows fully gratis? Sure. But that would cut out billions dollars of revenue that the company relies on, so don't count on it. If they could successfully manage the reorg just announced, then they should be able to make Windows gratis, but that would also require shifting their income dependency away from Office and Windows to hardware - not an easy task when those two products produce much of the money that nearly everything else in the company relies on.
Except they are. Every new game where graphics are an emphasis has moved on from DX9, and so are the engines.
You own comment reflects the issue. Not every games puts an emphasis on graphics, and IMHO the ones that suck at game play try to emphasize graphics to distract the buyers in order to keep sales going. While having something look good is nice, having better game play is required.
Look, if you're going to make a claim that they should resurrect old and dusty IP you might actually bother to look to see if they haven't already re-released it on prior systems.
Excitebike - 1984
Excitebike 64 - 2000
Classic NES Series: Excitebike - 2004
Excitebike - 2007
Excitebike: World Rally - 2009
3D Classics: Excitebike - 2011
1080: TenEighty Snowboarding - 1998
1080 Avalanche - 2003
1080: TenEighty Snowboarding - 2008
But none of those really have one of the major features of ExciteBike - building your own track. Yes, I love racing games, but I want to build my own tracks too.
The problem with your bad attempt at an analogy is that none of those crimes really represent anything personal. The kinds of people that commit those crimes don't care who their victim are. Even a rapist doesn't have any strong preference. It's not personal. You're just unlucky.
On the other hand, terrorism and any other kind of warfare is a form of vendetta.
We use different words for different things because they are distinct.
The only way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in it - but for the vast majority that is primarily not reading or perpetuating the news about it as they have no othe rmeans of participation. The terrorists themselves, like you say about the aforementioned criminals, don't care about the victims - just their message, which gets lost due to the violence of the activities - no one can tell you about the message of Al Quaida with respect to the 1993 WTC bombing or 9/11, only that Al Quaida did it, everything else (what Al Quaida really cared about communicating) was lost information.
So the GP is quite accurate in the comparison - the victim of a carjacking, rape, or armed robbery can really do nothing to stop the crime, and the criminal doing them won't care about the victim's desire to "not participate so as to stop it"; terrorism is no different.
She was unprofessional as a journalist and came off as immature as well. These people weren't squirming, they were just answering this bull dog's questions as best they could without getting fired in the process. She was clearly interested in painting them in a negative light so I would not attribute journalist credentials to her in this exchange. They did clearly state that policy makers hand down the requirements of their job--in other words the NSA doesn't choose targets the politicians do. End of story really. She seems angry.
I can't comment on this apart from the partial transcript, because the blog is down. But from what i read, it was perfectly acceptable behaviour from a journalist. Perhaps you are not familiar with journalists who ask hard, uncomfortable questions to someone's face. If you are in the US, you are probably used to interviews where the questions are vetted beforehand, and "questioning" is done in the absence of the questioned in clearly biased opinion broadcasts. Professional journalism in a functioning democracy consists of asking people hard questions to their face, and either have them answer them fully or partially, make a promise to give an answer if they don't know, or obviously refuse to answer them. An important part of that sentence is the bit allowing them to answer the questions; "opinion" televeision does not allow that. The only time I saw an american president being asked hard unscheduled questions in a live interview, it was a foreign journalist who later received death threats for being "rude" enough to ask the president a question he had not agreed beforehand was an acceptable one for him to answer. And you call yourselves the land of the free.
I haven't read it but a good and professional journalist also knows whether the person being asked can answer the question being asked. From all the info here on/. it seems like a lot of questions were asked that the best answer would be "talk to your Congressional representative".
Keep in mind that NSA (and even HR people for the NSA) and similar government organizations and agencies have NDAs and Clearance requirements - even for clerical workers. Answering a question that violates those could be considered treason. Whistleblowers don't go on TV to answer questions; they tend to communicate directly through private channels with private persons that are able to report it while everything is legally figured out, Snowden being such an example among many others (e.g Deep Throat). (I won't comment regarding anything else regarding Snowden and/or whether he is a criminal and should be punished, etc.)
Fact is, the NSA HR people have a fine line. There's a lot they can and will say about working at the NSA. But there is also a lot the cannot say until you've signed all the paperwork - and even then.
All-in-all, I'd say (based on the reports) that she was unprofessional at the very least because she was asking the questions to the wrong people and she should have known it. Nothing like going up to a Ticket Salesman and asking them the details of playing the instruments/sport the tickets are being sold for.
It certainly was a failure at the time, but let's put it in perspective. Windows 3.1/3.11 was the mainstream OS at that time. I believe technology has improved just a tiny fraction since then...
Some more perspective...
The leading Track Geometry Measurement System developed originally by a South Carolina Company called E.H. Reeves & Associates (later ImageMap Inc, and now MerMec Inc) is based on DOS. Its 2009 era rewrite is based on Linux. Both are preferred to (as of 2007) the parent company's (MerMec SpA) products, including a Windows-based version.
Just saying that just because the technology has "changed" does not mean it has necessarily "improved". Win3.11 was pretty good. DOS enabled a lot of cool technology. Yes, things have changed, matured, etc - but not always for the better, in good directions, or in manners that could continue to sustain certain kinds of technology.
I'd wager that what use to be done on DOS is not wholesalely done on Windows now; but that the vast majority (>80%) probably switched to Linux, with a good number of gains for BSD, QNX, VxWorks, etc as well and a small minority going to Windows.
Sure, but I think the idea is that if your spreadsheet doesn't do all the calculations it needs to do more or less instantly, on any computer built within the last ten years, you're either a) horribly misusing your spreadsheet, or b) using a horribly written spreadsheet program.
I wouldn't necessarily agree.
For instance, I used a spreadsheet to do an algorithm comparison. For the comparison I had to have thousands of rows of data that were calculated with dependencies on previous rows with multiple sets and multiple spreadsheets doing this (e.g. 5 columns made a set, 5 sets in one spreadsheet, and again in another, then additional spreadsheets utilizing those to do certain tests, again for the same entire data set, for each algorithm I was comparing - in this case just two algorithms). It takes Calc a few minutes to do the calculations - and I would expect it to.
Now, Calc loads slower than the equivalent XLS/XLSX document for the reason I mentioned earlier. However the file size is dramatically different. The ODF version is only a couple megabytes at most (well under 5...possibly under 1). The XLS version is 23 megabytes. Getting Excel to recalculate it isn't much different in time - it's just the load time that differs.
Now, you could argue that a program would likely be better than a spreadsheet; but it would also take a lot more to get to doing the comparison too - having to build an entire GUI for something just to be able to manipulate the values and see the differences. So for a test, it worked great and did what I needed it to do.
It's kinda like redesigning your VW Bug to be able to back up to a full-on commercial loading dock to load groceries.
Now that said, sure, why the hell not? The GPU is just sitting there, might as well make use of it. But it's more along the lines of 'why the hell not' than 'this will make it faster!'
As in my case, I doubt using the GPU would really speed it up all that much. Sure, you could probably hand each data set row by row to different GPUs, and get some benefits of parallel processing - but it'd be a real PITA for it get it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is far, far safer than C++. C++ does not enforce type safety at all. For example, in Java you cannot possibly have a buffer overrun or access freed memory as you can in C++. I think most of the security notices are about C and C++ programs, not Java programs. I think you're referring to the Java runtime, which is written in, you guessed it, C.
Yet it is Java that has had its run-time environments pulled for security concerns.
As for saying it only works of encrypt/decrypt, such obfuscation in conjunction with copyright law is good enough for preventing unauthorized 3rd party clients/software from interoperating with your products. If the only way they can create or verify signed messages to/from your services/other software is by copying your obfuscated signing module then they breach copyright law.
Interoperability is a recognized reason by US Copyright Law for reverse engineering, no matter how much obfuscation or encyprtion is done.
that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time.
Assuming "full" obfuscation if you do that you'd only capture the "program" for generating that one hash alone - one input and its corresponding output. The path would be different for different data/inputs. For a 256 bit hash you'd have to run it 2^256 times.
Of course there might not be full obfuscation. But I see no evidence so far that full obfuscation would be impossible or that difficult. Maybe someone could prove it impractical.
If the point is to merely obfuscate the program and not allow the user to actually run it, then yes you'd be right. That would also be pretty useless.
If the point is to run the program, then you are wrong as the program that must be run must at some point pass through the CPU to do its function. A capture program would be capturing the data as well, and would be able to note what portions of memory were being read/written/manipulated as well, so you'd also capture the any changes that temporarily decoded a section of memory, then executed that block before re-encoding it.
What you reference only works for encrypt/decrypt. However, between those two points something else has to happen - a portion of the real program has to run. The cracking program only needs to decipher where the boundaries between the encryption/decryption are so as to capture the exposed real program while it is operating - which has to happen for the user to actually be able to use the program, and monitoring the CPU instructions and cache would prove to be a very effective and efficient way to do it - e.g. they may be relying on tricks in the CPU to mask instructions before running them - e.g. XOR/AND/NOT etc - whereby it stays in the CPU cache only - however, even that is fully capturable by the kind of program/cracking I'm specifying be run in conjuction with a virtualized environment.
In other words, as I and many others have pointed out, as long as the program - not the obfuscator - actually has to run through some kind of execution unit, it can be captured. If it doesn't, then it's no better than putting a program into a ZIP file and saying is obfuscated.
Not really. I've seen memory encryption units that ensure that all data hitting memory is encrypted, and it's possible to have the startup code also encrypted in flash and decrypted internally.
All you need is an appropriate virtual environment - VMware, etc. - and you're set to capture the decrypted data. Even TPM can't get around that if you emulate the TPM chip sufficiently. At worse, you end up with something like the Bochs Pentium Emulator that emulates every single instruction and all hardware - e.g you can run x86 code on a non-x86 processor, at a high cost of performance, but the software running on it couldn't tell it was in a virtual environment.
The code is encrypted in such a form that it is never decrypted into CPU instructions. Every operation the program does is a form of mathematical transformation. Yes, it's got a lot of overhead (probably impractical at the moment)
Then the program is never run, only the decryption of it. Even then, a smart cracker can obtain the original code through simple means. For the user to actually use the program it has to at some point be run on the CPU; even if they figured out how to direct it to a DSP present on all computers, you can still trace the DSP using virtualized environments and it'll be pretty obvious very quickly that that is what is being done early in the instruction cycles.
Sorry, but it's BS.
OK as an example what if you have worked out a way to transform an arbitrary program in to a huge bunch of "if else", goto statements with "magic numbers" or worse (e.g. setaddress(mod(magic1+sha256memoizer(magic2+parm1+parm2+...),dataend))=parm3; linenumber=mod(magic3+sha256memoizer(magic4+parm5+parm6+...),maxlines); goto linenumber; ) and some stores and loads so that it's still equivalent and does the same thing but just a bit slower. So when you disassemble it - it's still a big mess that makes it hard to figure out or "improve" - which is the whole purpose of at least some code obfuscation.
All this means is that someone will then write a program that will work with a virtualized environment (e.g VMware, VirtualBox, etc) - may be even a device driver that snoops memory - that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time. They'll then use that in order to reverse engineer the program, reapply the cypher and continue on their merry way of hacking the software in the way the TFA's author is trying to prevent.
Now, given the amount of time it would take for the obfuscated program to run in the manner you are speaking, the aforementioned cracking software probably has plenty of CPU cycles to figure out each step and generate an intercept function to overcome the jigsaw obfuscation.
In then end, it just means the cracking tools become better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Perhaps the more appropriate question would be: Is Microsoft Losing?
The concept of Mature Company and all that entails seems to apply. Microsoft is no longer growing, the are re-aligning and consolidating, while trying to figure where they fit into the future. Up to a few years ago they saw themselves as the future.
buggy whips at fifty paces
Micrsoft hasn't really grown since the late 1990's or early 2000's in several aspects.
In terms of Stock, they've been relatively flat since about 1999, and as a result only started paying dividends a few years ago to try to appease stockholders since they could no longer buy and sell to make a few easy bucks.
In terms of employees, they've had some major rounds of layoffs (>1000) in the last few years so they've actually shrunk.
In terms of market, they've stagnated and are having a harder and harder time getting people to buy new versions of Office and Windows.
FYI - HyperV may be making inroads, but mostly because it gets sold with most all Windows Server licenses if buyers are not careful. It's a bundling thing and you have to pay attention to not get it if you don't want it. Don't forget, HyperV came about only after MS bought VirtualPC to try to get into the Virtualization business - after Linux already had KVM, Xen, and several other viable options.
Comparatively, VMware is considered the market master when it comes to Virtual Environments and they've got the most infrastructure out there to drive sales and train staff.
Eh, not a Windows company? They've had products out for Mac for a long time.
Technically they've had Mac products longer then they've had Windows products. But that's not the point.
The point is that over 20 years ago, Microsoft went from being a general software company (with products on Mac, DOS, etc) to a software operating system (ie, Windows) company supported by various general software products, some of which continued on other platforms. The ball has now swung back and the operating system portion of the business is now shrinking in at least importance if not also market share and revenue, so they once again have to morph the company into something else, only they don't really know what yet - Ballmer is going for Devices and Services with his latest restructure, but we'll see if that holds.
Noteably their devices tend to be really good for the most part; it tends to be the software on the devices that suck. I wouldn't trade my MS keyboard and mouse for anything; but I don't run Windows. Kin and Zune are either the exception or they flopped due to being so closely tied to the Windows ecosystem, etc; I never used either so can't say.
...Microsoft would make $24+ billion annually with Windows and Office each contributing $1billion a month! Now the whole of the company is only $19 billion annually.
Correction - $19 billion (for $5 billion down) - still, the point stands.
According to Microsoft's annual 10-K report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), published on Tuesday, their total Surface revenue for all of fiscal 2013 amounted to just $853m. That's nearly $50m less than the $900m charge Redmond took when it discounted its remaining Surface RT inventory by $150 per box.
And that's not all. That $900m writedown was related to Surface RT only, but the $853m revenue figure includes sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro combined.
Further down in its 10-K filing, Redmond reports that it upped its sales and marketing budget for the Windows Division in 2013 by a jaw-dropping $1bn, which included an $898m increase in advertising costs "associated primarily with Windows 8 and Surface."
Got that? Microsoft spent more in a single year advertising the Windows 8 and Surface launches than it took in from Surface sales that same year.
And remember, none of this was even spread over an entire calendar year. Microsoft's fiscal 2013 ended on June 30. It launched Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface RT on October 26, 2012. The Surface Pro launch came later, in February. But whichever way you slice it, Microsoft managed to mow through an $898m marketing budget in just eight calendar months – and consumers still didn't take the bait.
Strangely enough, Slashdot does not consider this news...
Further, the summary on this related articlenoted that they only made $17billion over a 12 month period - down nearly $7billion from their peak - they use to make over $24 billion annually with Windows and Office each carrying a $1billion revenue every month.
So how about:
1. Having the board consist of the reps from the AMA (as now) and then also have reps from Insurance and the FDA, none overlapping.
2. Let the charges be what they are, and the time gets reported too; charges/time outside the norm would have to carry explanation.
Thoughts?
...it would be one way to get NetFlix under Linux by plugging the ChromeCast into your Linux PC's HDMI port??
I'm not delighted with the Flaimbait mod on this one. There appear to be some thin skinned Linux advocates who aren't familiar with deploying real time software in life critical situations.
FYI - the vanilla Linux Kernel has some pretty good support for true Real-Time Applications, including appropriate schedules. However, if it fails to meet your needs there are a few variants that are specially enhanced for true Real-Time Applications; there need is less now since a good chunk of their features have been migrated to the vanilla Linux Kernel.
try driving for more than 30 minutes with two smallish kids in the car
Try actually parenting - teach them to behave, have an attention span >30 seconds, play games with them, etc. My wife has our 2 year old look for trucks. On a long trip (> several hours) we have a tablet (Nubi Jr. with some YouTube videos loaded on it) that we could use if necessary, but even then we try not to if it can be helped.
Now I'm not saying long trips are not a problem with kids - they are, especially since it is no longer legal to let them out of their car seats for a few minutes without stopping the car (and thus making the entire trip even longer; for those that are not parents getting 1 kid in a car seat could take 15 minutes or more if they are being a problem), or try having an infant along that is being breastfed - some take 15 minutes, others may take an hour, and they feed on regular schedules (every 2-3 hours - again, potentially make a 10 hour trip into a 20 hour trip).
Of course the irony is that you could just board a bus and then no car seats are required!
Pure software patents should be dropped. However, when the software is a required piece of a hardware system (aka, Firmware) it should be allowed.
The other problem is for software that does something that really is a an invention, such as LZW compression, and not a "drop-down menu".
And how do you define Firmware when the worlds of Embedded and non-Embedded computing are mixing so well?
Would Android ROMs be considered embedded? Or would it be limited to the ROM uploaded to your wireless card? or CD/DVD/BD Burner? Where do you draw the line?
I currently work on a system that is for-all-intents an "embedded system" yet we load "normal" software onto it.
While IANAL, SCOTUS has ruled that a non-patentable compont can be part of a larger patentable component, but the sum of non-patentable components do not a patentable component make. That is, software for a rubber curing machine can be part of the patent for the rubber curing maching even if the software is otherwise unpatentable by itself; however, that also precludes someone from being able to sue for patent infringement when someone took that software and used it in another device entirely - f.e, a device to lay rubber on the road - should the software apply there too.
This sounded really cool about 10 years ago, but what real appeal does this have over laptop+tablet? What are the use cases where this kind of flexibility actually matters?
If I'm using a tablet I'm either on the road or at home - I never see a case for doing "tablet" style stuff at work. Considering "Thinkpad" is an enterprise brand, what need does this fill other than fulfilling Microsoft's desire to turn their Windows userbase into a tablet userbase?
I'll leave aside the fact that almost no one wants Windows8 for it's Metro interface (as witnessed by the Surface RT's spectacular sales failure).
ASUS Transformer running Android. Wouldn't think of using Windows in that kind of situation though.
Love mine (ASUS Transformer Infinity); and yes, I do intend on writing documents, spreadsheets, etc. with it - once AndroOffice is fully useful enough. I've already written a couple letters with it, but then finished them on my laptop before sending them out. (Yes there are other office productivity suites out there; but only AndroOffice is ODF compatible. Sadly it needs more work but it is coming along.) Main sour points are: (i) ease of which to get files on/off the device, and (ii) printing from it (not possible as far as I can tell).
But can Windows be gratis without being libre? One reason why Linux can be gratis is that it is libre, and so contributing to the various OSS projects is easy. Could one do this for Windows? Could Microsoft develop a business plan where Windows is gratis?
Microsoft could if they desired base Windows on Linux or a BSD, much like Apple did with Mac OSX and make the key differentiator be the interface they provide. It would certainly solve many of the driver issues all around; but don't count on that happening.
Could Microsoft make Windows fully gratis? Sure. But that would cut out billions dollars of revenue that the company relies on, so don't count on it. If they could successfully manage the reorg just announced, then they should be able to make Windows gratis, but that would also require shifting their income dependency away from Office and Windows to hardware - not an easy task when those two products produce much of the money that nearly everything else in the company relies on.
Except they are. Every new game where graphics are an emphasis has moved on from DX9, and so are the engines.
You own comment reflects the issue. Not every games puts an emphasis on graphics, and IMHO the ones that suck at game play try to emphasize graphics to distract the buyers in order to keep sales going. While having something look good is nice, having better game play is required.
Look, if you're going to make a claim that they should resurrect old and dusty IP you might actually bother to look to see if they haven't already re-released it on prior systems. Excitebike - 1984 Excitebike 64 - 2000 Classic NES Series: Excitebike - 2004 Excitebike - 2007 Excitebike: World Rally - 2009 3D Classics: Excitebike - 2011 1080: TenEighty Snowboarding - 1998 1080 Avalanche - 2003 1080: TenEighty Snowboarding - 2008
But none of those really have one of the major features of ExciteBike - building your own track. Yes, I love racing games, but I want to build my own tracks too.
The problem with your bad attempt at an analogy is that none of those crimes really represent anything personal. The kinds of people that commit those crimes don't care who their victim are. Even a rapist doesn't have any strong preference. It's not personal. You're just unlucky.
On the other hand, terrorism and any other kind of warfare is a form of vendetta.
We use different words for different things because they are distinct.
The only way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in it - but for the vast majority that is primarily not reading or perpetuating the news about it as they have no othe rmeans of participation. The terrorists themselves, like you say about the aforementioned criminals, don't care about the victims - just their message, which gets lost due to the violence of the activities - no one can tell you about the message of Al Quaida with respect to the 1993 WTC bombing or 9/11, only that Al Quaida did it, everything else (what Al Quaida really cared about communicating) was lost information.
So the GP is quite accurate in the comparison - the victim of a carjacking, rape, or armed robbery can really do nothing to stop the crime, and the criminal doing them won't care about the victim's desire to "not participate so as to stop it"; terrorism is no different.
She was unprofessional as a journalist and came off as immature as well. These people weren't squirming, they were just answering this bull dog's questions as best they could without getting fired in the process. She was clearly interested in painting them in a negative light so I would not attribute journalist credentials to her in this exchange. They did clearly state that policy makers hand down the requirements of their job--in other words the NSA doesn't choose targets the politicians do. End of story really. She seems angry.
I can't comment on this apart from the partial transcript, because the blog is down. But from what i read, it was perfectly acceptable behaviour from a journalist. Perhaps you are not familiar with journalists who ask hard, uncomfortable questions to someone's face. If you are in the US, you are probably used to interviews where the questions are vetted beforehand, and "questioning" is done in the absence of the questioned in clearly biased opinion broadcasts. Professional journalism in a functioning democracy consists of asking people hard questions to their face, and either have them answer them fully or partially, make a promise to give an answer if they don't know, or obviously refuse to answer them. An important part of that sentence is the bit allowing them to answer the questions; "opinion" televeision does not allow that. The only time I saw an american president being asked hard unscheduled questions in a live interview, it was a foreign journalist who later received death threats for being "rude" enough to ask the president a question he had not agreed beforehand was an acceptable one for him to answer. And you call yourselves the land of the free.
I haven't read it but a good and professional journalist also knows whether the person being asked can answer the question being asked. From all the info here on /. it seems like a lot of questions were asked that the best answer would be "talk to your Congressional representative".
Keep in mind that NSA (and even HR people for the NSA) and similar government organizations and agencies have NDAs and Clearance requirements - even for clerical workers. Answering a question that violates those could be considered treason. Whistleblowers don't go on TV to answer questions; they tend to communicate directly through private channels with private persons that are able to report it while everything is legally figured out, Snowden being such an example among many others (e.g Deep Throat). (I won't comment regarding anything else regarding Snowden and/or whether he is a criminal and should be punished, etc.)
Fact is, the NSA HR people have a fine line. There's a lot they can and will say about working at the NSA. But there is also a lot the cannot say until you've signed all the paperwork - and even then.
All-in-all, I'd say (based on the reports) that she was unprofessional at the very least because she was asking the questions to the wrong people and she should have known it. Nothing like going up to a Ticket Salesman and asking them the details of playing the instruments/sport the tickets are being sold for.
It certainly was a failure at the time, but let's put it in perspective. Windows 3.1/3.11 was the mainstream OS at that time. I believe technology has improved just a tiny fraction since then...
Some more perspective...
The leading Track Geometry Measurement System developed originally by a South Carolina Company called E.H. Reeves & Associates (later ImageMap Inc, and now MerMec Inc) is based on DOS. Its 2009 era rewrite is based on Linux. Both are preferred to (as of 2007) the parent company's (MerMec SpA) products, including a Windows-based version.
Just saying that just because the technology has "changed" does not mean it has necessarily "improved". Win3.11 was pretty good. DOS enabled a lot of cool technology. Yes, things have changed, matured, etc - but not always for the better, in good directions, or in manners that could continue to sustain certain kinds of technology.
I'd wager that what use to be done on DOS is not wholesalely done on Windows now; but that the vast majority (>80%) probably switched to Linux, with a good number of gains for BSD, QNX, VxWorks, etc as well and a small minority going to Windows.
Sure, but I think the idea is that if your spreadsheet doesn't do all the calculations it needs to do more or less instantly, on any computer built within the last ten years, you're either a) horribly misusing your spreadsheet, or b) using a horribly written spreadsheet program.
I wouldn't necessarily agree.
For instance, I used a spreadsheet to do an algorithm comparison. For the comparison I had to have thousands of rows of data that were calculated with dependencies on previous rows with multiple sets and multiple spreadsheets doing this (e.g. 5 columns made a set, 5 sets in one spreadsheet, and again in another, then additional spreadsheets utilizing those to do certain tests, again for the same entire data set, for each algorithm I was comparing - in this case just two algorithms). It takes Calc a few minutes to do the calculations - and I would expect it to.
Now, Calc loads slower than the equivalent XLS/XLSX document for the reason I mentioned earlier. However the file size is dramatically different. The ODF version is only a couple megabytes at most (well under 5...possibly under 1). The XLS version is 23 megabytes. Getting Excel to recalculate it isn't much different in time - it's just the load time that differs.
Now, you could argue that a program would likely be better than a spreadsheet; but it would also take a lot more to get to doing the comparison too - having to build an entire GUI for something just to be able to manipulate the values and see the differences. So for a test, it worked great and did what I needed it to do.
It's kinda like redesigning your VW Bug to be able to back up to a full-on commercial loading dock to load groceries.
Now that said, sure, why the hell not? The GPU is just sitting there, might as well make use of it. But it's more along the lines of 'why the hell not' than 'this will make it faster!'
As in my case, I doubt using the GPU would really speed it up all that much. Sure, you could probably hand each data set row by row to different GPUs, and get some benefits of parallel processing - but it'd be a real PITA for it get it right.