A relatively interesting experiment, no doubt, but the article didn't answer a lot of obvious and relevant questions.
First, how big was the sample size? Everything is given as percentages and we all know how meaningless they can be if the number of people tested is small.
Second, what is the racial demographic of the users on There.com? There are plenty of parts of the world, e.g. Russia, where racism (in particular against black people) would not come as a surprise to anyone. If the demographic is primarily American or European then it would be slightly more surprising.
Third, and this is just curiosity, how many people actually complied with the first (totally unreasonable) request in the DITF experiment?
In fairness to Hasbro, they probably would have some legal difficulties of their own if they offered their application outside of North America, since Mattel (their archrival!) owns the rights to Scrabble in the rest of the world. Yes, it's a very strange situation.
On a related note, I wonder if Facebook would be able (or willing) to continue to offer Scrabulous to users outside the US. That's a significant (and growing) portion of Facebook's userbase.
Wow, this whole idea is fantastically stupid in so many ways. In a sense I admire the gall of whichever company sold this technology, as they must have known that it couldn't possibly work. No doubt they'll roll out some ad-hoc solution to the magazine workaround (earning themselves another hearty payday as all the machines are updated). This can be repeated for each new workaround until everyone involved retires rich and their customer is too embarrassed to admit that the whole thing was obviously a waste of money.
At least it's a tobacco company getting shafted. Can't feel too sorry for them.
I R'ed the FA, but I can't work out whether this is the end of the service altogether, or whether the existing service will live on but without new books being added. Despite the jingoistic tone of the summary, the former would be bad news for everyone -- although Google's tools may be better, it's surely better to have more of this information readily available to everyone.
Either way, I think it's a disappointing climbdown for Microsoft, and surprising given how much money they've been willing to throw at previous projects that were never likely to turn a short-term profit (XBox). I'll be interested to see what the "more sustainable strategies" mentioned in the article turn out to be.
Those evil laws are the same laws that keep me from taking GIMP, making a few changes, closing the source, slapping DRM on it, changing the name to Uber PhotoMax 6000, and selling it at Best Buy for $85 a copy. That's actually perfectly legal, provided that you include the source code to your modified version on the CD (which 99% of users will have no interest in or use for).
I think the first thing that needs to happen, is that some agency (the NSA seems the most suited) needs to create and bootstrap 'reference platforms' for various architectures. Create a secure compiler chain from the ground up, auditing code the whole way. There's no other way to be sure that you're not just compiling in backdoors, otherwise. That's probably excessive. You only need a from-scratch compiler to be just powerful enough to compile some version of, say, GCC. That solves the bootstrap problem. Then you need to audit the source for the version(s) of GCC you use, which is non-trivial but surely easier than writing a compiler from scratch.
When will there be a properly-supported 64 bit version? Assuming 64 bit is the future, delaying it will only increase the difficulty of adding 64-bit compatability later. I know there are third-party builds but they're not updated regularly and their reliability is questionable.
How did they manage to build a detector that can work out whether the cosmic rays collided with the actual bits (no pun intended) that hold the data? According to the oracle, cosmic rays collide with nuclei in an essential random way, so there's no way a detector could just see a ray passing through and know whether it was on a collision course. Perhaps they are detecting the pions and other subatomic particles that result from a collision actually occurring? If they've found a way to do that then it sounds fairly ingenious to me and a well-deserved patent.
The article doesn't explain how 1940s hardware competing with modern hardware is a remotely interesting contest. The reason is that the Collosus machines (Collosi?) were both highly specialised for the task, in that they could not do anything but simulate a Lorentz machine very fast, and of course massively parallel. In particular, Collosus was not Turing-complete, so it could not execute arbitrary programs (in the modern sense) - the honour of first Turing-complete machine usually goes to the ENIAC, although this is hotly disputed. So, this might be an interesting contest, although I would still expect a good modern implementation to win.
More information, as always, at Wikipedia.
Urm, even if you reject the scientific theory of evolution, it's just ridiculous to reject natural selection. You can easily observe it in your own lifetime, as Darwin did.
Well, this is a brave move and, if any of the people namedropped on the site (Torvalds, RMS et al) get behind it then it becomes even braver. Of course Microsoft are unlikely to raise to the bait - they are (or consider themselves to be) far too powerful for that. That said, just imagine they did actually identify particular patents that Linux infringes - and let's be honest, with the current state of the patent system, is that so unlikely? I don't imagine for a moment that any infringement is deliberate, or even known about now, but I'd say there's a non-trivial chance that it could happen. So, what then?
"Rewriting the code" is nowhere near so easy as the site makes it sound. Software patents are often granted for particular concepts - not just ways of doing them. What if some core kernel routine were found to be infringing? That can't just be ripped out and replaced, many years of development and testing have gone into it!
So, seriously, this is a brave move, and I'm pleased to see it. We should totally get behind it. But calling the bluff is a dangerous move if it turns out Microsoft really is holding the cards.
Should be rather a slow one with a lot of hard disk churning, if experience is any guide.
(I kid, of course. The modern JVM is more wonderful than Natalie Portman, and requires considerably less grits.)
I've always wondered how you actually go about understanding a file system with absolutely no documentation. I realise in this case that they just had to circumvent some DRM-style file protection, but that still leaves the question of how xboxdvdfs came to be understood in the first place. Does anyone know how they do this? Little to my surprise, the article offers no details.
Really, how serious a threat is this? If someone has unrestricted physical access to your machine then you're already in serious trouble. We all know how breakable the NTFS file encryption is, so if they really want to get at your files, they can just reboot into Fedora from a CD, or run any other tool that circumvents the encryption. If they just want to destroy data then you can put a hammer through the hard drive, and no OS can prevent that... So, I'm not saying that this vulnerability shouldn't be fixed, but maybe they should work on making NTFS a bit stronger first - if that's even possible.
Also, does anyone else think Slashdot should have a special section for buffer overflows? They seem to spawn more stories than several of the other sections...
I scrolled through the first 11 pages of this article before getting bored. Do they ever tell us how good the player ended up being? It's an interesting idea but I can't see it challenging even a beginner.
Of course, when you throw out the PC, you then have to purchase a new copy of the operating system. In 99% of cases this is Windows. So you reduce the incentive for Microsoft to fix the spyware problem; in fact, you reward them for not fixing it! Quite brilliant!
In fairness to Microsoft, Windows now does have a pretty good resistance to spyware, IF you run as user. The problem is that most people don't know what this means, how to do it, or anything of the sort. Education is the only solution.
Note that I declined to make a "??? PROFIT!" joke in this post.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the jury got nobled!
No wait. Nobbled. The jury got nobbled. ...
Okay this joke didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.
A relatively interesting experiment, no doubt, but the article didn't answer a lot of obvious and relevant questions.
First, how big was the sample size? Everything is given as percentages and we all know how meaningless they can be if the number of people tested is small.
Second, what is the racial demographic of the users on There.com? There are plenty of parts of the world, e.g. Russia, where racism (in particular against black people) would not come as a surprise to anyone. If the demographic is primarily American or European then it would be slightly more surprising.
Third, and this is just curiosity, how many people actually complied with the first (totally unreasonable) request in the DITF experiment?
I've never understood that aspect of the US criminal justice system; it smacks somewhat of deliberate intimidation
Sounds to me like you've understood it exactly.
In fairness to Hasbro, they probably would have some legal difficulties of their own if they offered their application outside of North America, since Mattel (their archrival!) owns the rights to Scrabble in the rest of the world. Yes, it's a very strange situation.
On a related note, I wonder if Facebook would be able (or willing) to continue to offer Scrabulous to users outside the US. That's a significant (and growing) portion of Facebook's userbase.
Wow, this whole idea is fantastically stupid in so many ways. In a sense I admire the gall of whichever company sold this technology, as they must have known that it couldn't possibly work. No doubt they'll roll out some ad-hoc solution to the magazine workaround (earning themselves another hearty payday as all the machines are updated). This can be repeated for each new workaround until everyone involved retires rich and their customer is too embarrassed to admit that the whole thing was obviously a waste of money.
At least it's a tobacco company getting shafted. Can't feel too sorry for them.
"drivers and software that work on Windows Vista are going to work really well on Windows 7; in fact, they'll work the same"
Bzzt! Logical inconsistency detected! Abort/retry/fail?
I R'ed the FA, but I can't work out whether this is the end of the service altogether, or whether the existing service will live on but without new books being added. Despite the jingoistic tone of the summary, the former would be bad news for everyone -- although Google's tools may be better, it's surely better to have more of this information readily available to everyone.
Either way, I think it's a disappointing climbdown for Microsoft, and surprising given how much money they've been willing to throw at previous projects that were never likely to turn a short-term profit (XBox). I'll be interested to see what the "more sustainable strategies" mentioned in the article turn out to be.
So, with this expansion in the market, there should be a whole lot more RIM jobs available. Err, and Apple jobs. Obviously.
Sounds like you'd probably like Wikipedia's list of unusual articles. A print version of that would be awesome.
When will there be a properly-supported 64 bit version? Assuming 64 bit is the future, delaying it will only increase the difficulty of adding 64-bit compatability later. I know there are third-party builds but they're not updated regularly and their reliability is questionable.
How did they manage to build a detector that can work out whether the cosmic rays collided with the actual bits (no pun intended) that hold the data? According to the oracle, cosmic rays collide with nuclei in an essential random way, so there's no way a detector could just see a ray passing through and know whether it was on a collision course. Perhaps they are detecting the pions and other subatomic particles that result from a collision actually occurring? If they've found a way to do that then it sounds fairly ingenious to me and a well-deserved patent.
The article doesn't explain how 1940s hardware competing with modern hardware is a remotely interesting contest. The reason is that the Collosus machines (Collosi?) were both highly specialised for the task, in that they could not do anything but simulate a Lorentz machine very fast, and of course massively parallel. In particular, Collosus was not Turing-complete, so it could not execute arbitrary programs (in the modern sense) - the honour of first Turing-complete machine usually goes to the ENIAC, although this is hotly disputed. So, this might be an interesting contest, although I would still expect a good modern implementation to win. More information, as always, at Wikipedia.
Urm, even if you reject the scientific theory of evolution, it's just ridiculous to reject natural selection. You can easily observe it in your own lifetime, as Darwin did.
Well, this is a brave move and, if any of the people namedropped on the site (Torvalds, RMS et al) get behind it then it becomes even braver. Of course Microsoft are unlikely to raise to the bait - they are (or consider themselves to be) far too powerful for that. That said, just imagine they did actually identify particular patents that Linux infringes - and let's be honest, with the current state of the patent system, is that so unlikely? I don't imagine for a moment that any infringement is deliberate, or even known about now, but I'd say there's a non-trivial chance that it could happen. So, what then?
"Rewriting the code" is nowhere near so easy as the site makes it sound. Software patents are often granted for particular concepts - not just ways of doing them. What if some core kernel routine were found to be infringing? That can't just be ripped out and replaced, many years of development and testing have gone into it!
So, seriously, this is a brave move, and I'm pleased to see it. We should totally get behind it. But calling the bluff is a dangerous move if it turns out Microsoft really is holding the cards.
Yours wasn't so good either, was it?
So... can it run Linux?
The answer is obviously yes, but only the even version numbers.
Crack coming in 3... 2...
What's that? CSS got cracked years ago? Look, behind you - a three-headed terrorist! Think of the children!
*runs*
I've always wondered how you actually go about understanding a file system with absolutely no documentation. I realise in this case that they just had to circumvent some DRM-style file protection, but that still leaves the question of how xboxdvdfs came to be understood in the first place. Does anyone know how they do this? Little to my surprise, the article offers no details.
Really, how serious a threat is this? If someone has unrestricted physical access to your machine then you're already in serious trouble. We all know how breakable the NTFS file encryption is, so if they really want to get at your files, they can just reboot into Fedora from a CD, or run any other tool that circumvents the encryption. If they just want to destroy data then you can put a hammer through the hard drive, and no OS can prevent that... So, I'm not saying that this vulnerability shouldn't be fixed, but maybe they should work on making NTFS a bit stronger first - if that's even possible.
Also, does anyone else think Slashdot should have a special section for buffer overflows? They seem to spawn more stories than several of the other sections...
I scrolled through the first 11 pages of this article before getting bored. Do they ever tell us how good the player ended up being? It's an interesting idea but I can't see it challenging even a beginner.
Of course, when you throw out the PC, you then have to purchase a new copy of the operating system. In 99% of cases this is Windows. So you reduce the incentive for Microsoft to fix the spyware problem; in fact, you reward them for not fixing it! Quite brilliant! In fairness to Microsoft, Windows now does have a pretty good resistance to spyware, IF you run as user. The problem is that most people don't know what this means, how to do it, or anything of the sort. Education is the only solution. Note that I declined to make a "??? PROFIT!" joke in this post.