You can build an ARM clone out of 74HC TTL ICs {which is what Steve Furber and Sophie [then Roger] Wilson actually did, after proving the instruction set on an emulator based around an expanded BBC Model B}
Never knew that Sophie Wilson had a sex change.
Does that mean that you can credit the ARM as a female co-designed architecture or not?
But Niagara has 8 cores, each capable of runnning 4 threads. Importantly, they all use the same instruction set and have access to external memory. They all have MMUs too.
So you could run a traditional OS on it, and all the cores would be used if needed. On a Cell, there is a single PowerPC core, which is a bit underpowered with no out of order execution for example. The bulk of the processing power is in the SPEs. But these have a different instruction set, no access to external memory and no MMU.
If you're writing a game with procedural textures, you can live with this by partitioning the algorithm amongst the SPEs and using the PowerPC essentially for housekeeping. But it would take a lot of work to partition a general purpose OS like this. So the two machines are not really aimed at the same market.
I meant having a decent human actor play a character like Gollum is more convincing than having him voice the CGI animation's scowling and gurning.
Look at the expression on his face in that picture - doesn't it show more the character's mad obsession better than the computer generated character managed? I still reckon that CGI is bit primitive when you need to do stuff like that, you spend more time admiring the technology than suspending disbelief.
It's like someone said of the Star Wars films - Peter Cushing was a much more effective villain than Jabba the Hut for example.
I would expect that for a website which is mostly textual, like most personal home pages. Do you have forms prompting people for input? Do you have large quantity of data which would normally be displayed as a graph? Do you have a shopping cart? These are the things which are hard to provide "Equivalent Facilitation" for. These are the things businesses have to deal with.
The website I was talking about it just text and downloads, so no. But I did some work on a hotel room booking system a while back, and that would render fine in anything from IE3.0 upwards. And forms for input have been in HTML since the original version - most stuff can be done with hidden fields and Javascript form.submit. All the shopping cart stuff was done with server side scripting.
And for loads of data, what's so bad about a table with a bunch of 1px gifs? I know it's not buzzword compliant, but it's completely portable.
And in terms of focus group, literally no one I know has said 'wow, what a slick website' in the last ten years. But I've heard a lot of complaints that websites have an unclear user interface, or are just plain broken on a minority browser. And people have complimented me on the downloads website, since it loads fast and is viewable on anything. These are mostly embedded programmers and (gasp) people that work outside the computer business. I'm sure if your focus group were web designers, you'd get a different answer of course, but who cares.
I don't have a problem with using CSS/DHTML and so on if you can detect that the browser supports it, the problem is websites that depend on it, especially when there are Web 1.0 techniques you can fall back to but choose not to. And it's even worse when they depend on it for aeshetic reasons, like custom UI widgets that aren't discoverable even when you find the browser they work on.
E.g. there's a shopping centre that has a website with wierd scroll up/scroll down buttons to scroll down to the opening times of the stores. Their are completely unintuitive, and even worse they only work on Firefox. Or comments on Digg, which didn't work for ages on Opera because they depend on some DHTML magic to pop up a HTML form. Non of this stuff is at all necessary, but the real problem is that it seems to be untested on anything other than the browser the developer uses.
You can kind of see it in all the moaning about IE. It would be nice if new versions of IE supported CSS for example, but it misses the fact that the vast majority of people will continue to use the version of IE that came with their OS, and you basically need to design stuff that will work on that for the forseeable future, not something which tests each and every technique possible in the latest CSS/DHTML standard.
And come to think of it, if the websites are all coded to the latest standards the problem is that IE doesn't support them, as web designers always seem to whine, how come I have problems in Opera 9, which probably has the best CSS support at the moment? It seems more likely that they fiddled with their code until it worked on the latest Firefox nightly build with bug fixes for all the features that they depend on, made a few barbed comments on slashdot about evil Microsoft not supporting standards and buggered off home.
Which is why even though I hate government intervention, it's actually rather satisfying that they're getting screwed over poor accessibility support. The government should force them to read the MSDN articles on accessibility, which are actually rather good.
It is very very expensive and time consuming to make a website S.508 compliant. S.508 sites are plain and simple because in order to be compliant, you cannot take advantage of most of the DHTML and interactive content used on websites today. As a result, companies that want a slick website that is accessible tend to make two websites, one for disabled people and one for everyone else.
Which meams they'll probably work properly in Opera too, unlike most butt ugly DHTML Web 2.0 monstrosities.
Incidentally, I tried my website with Lynx, and the only change I needed to make was a link from the NOFRAMES section to the index, and a few alt tags. Which I guess means that it's now accessible to a screen reader. Or a cellphone. Or an Atari ST.
And just FYI, no one cares if your website is slick, you will get exactly 0 extra sales because of that. What you will do is lose sales to people that get annoyed when the slick interface doesn't work correctly in the browser they chose to use. And the browsers on most cellphones will completely choke on a DHTML website.
I've always thought there's something a bit Gödelly about this, along the lines of "Any sufficiently complex system can never be secure".
E.g. I added a new hard drive, and left it downloading a vast 55GB set of files by FTP from the UK over my shiny new 2Mbit connection. Since the machine at the other end is ADSL, it's a very slow process. When I try and watch a DVD, I'd get a BSOD. Figured the drive was bad, so I checked the SMART data. Can't see the drive at all, motherboard has a Sil3112 and the the shitty SATA drivers manage to fumble the SMART command so they always go to drive 0 even if you ask for drive 1. The two drives are in non raid mode, and I'm using the non raid drivers, so I should be able to do this, but all the tools I have return drive 0 data for both drives.
Flipped the drives around. Now I see SMART data for the new drive on both drives. SMART data looks ok - no reallocated sectors for example. Got the Debugging Tools for Windows and WinDbg'd the dump - csrss.exe had aborted and the system bug checked since it needs csrss.exe. Looking in the log, csrss had aborted due to an IO error, STATUS_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES. Elsewhere in the error log I can see references to running out of non paged pool. Figured that the SATA driver had a leak. Turned on pool tagging, left it FTPing with PoolTag from the DDK running. I can see the lots of non paged pool being allocated to tag HidC, the Hid class driver.
I bought a cheap USB remote control, a Trust NB-5100P. At least on my system, it seems to Hid Class driver to use lots of memory. It's pretty dramatic, a K per second. Over 24hours day I ended up with 57MB of non paged memory to just this driver. If I stop the system tray applet, the memory is freed instantly.
So it looks like once I got the new drive and started to leave the machine on for several days pulling the files, I could get to the point where it run out of non paged pool and died. Now I only turn on the Trust control panel applet when I'm watching video.
Who's at fault here
1) Trust for making the stupid applet which uses vast amounts of a extremely precious resource. Note that the HID class driver isn't leaking - if you turn off the trust applet the memory is freed. Trust have managed to bring down the system from user mode though. 2) Silicon Image for making a driver that misroutes IOCTL_SMART_* 3) Me for buying Trust/Silicon Image stuff and expecting it to work properly.
It must be a remarkably egoless existence. Arguing passionately for both sides of an issue, flaming other people you agreed with seconds ago, following up with "Mod Parent Up!" to your greatest enemies. Like being crazy perhaps. Or being God.
In fact, did not Jesus say "Mod up thine enemies" and "Let he who has never trolled cast the first downmod". And the initials of Jesus Christ in the original Hebrew is better transliterated as AC. Come to think of it, the Torah repeatedly mentions the incomprehensibleness of God.
>I just downloaded the MGADiag.exe file from TFA and ran in under wine on Ubuntu. It ran >and gave me a hash key, I then followed the steps in TFA and wham, it worked as advertised >and I was then "validated" to download IE7 if I wanted to. > >WGA seems to be some pretty broken code IMO:-)
Maybe they've decided that minimising false negatives is more important than minimising false positives, i.e. a few people with no Windows license getting the download is more important than a few people with getting no download. It kind of makes sense, since denying the upgrade to paying users means support calls which cost money. Presumably if you have pirated Windows and really wanted to get the update, you could just download the files from a genuine machine at work anyway.
Or maybe they're machiavellian enough to allow downloads just because you're running wine or Ubuntu. It's not like most updates are any use to you I suspect, and it sidesteps any complaints about illegal tying arrangements.
How does total garbage like this get marked as insightful
Because it's sceptical of the US government, and everyone knows that scepticism of your government is a sign of intelligence.
The sad thing is that if the grandparent had said the US was rational in having nukes, he would have got modded back to the stoneage.
But saying the same thing about Iran is apparently +5 Insightful. The more I see this, the more I realise that some people, have a sort of anti Nationalism. If Nationalism is "my country right or wrong", anti Nationalism is "my government is always wrong". Never mind that the enemies of the US have much nastier governments with much more evil objectives.
http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/ 0.html (v) PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.
Admittedly it's oil shale, i.e. mixed with sand and so on, but it's possible to extract it. And at current and probably future prices it's not that uneconomic.
It's a shame that they're so short of petrochemicals that they're forced to develop nuclear power at vast expense.
It's also a shame that no one has offered to supply them with nuclear fuel.
Oh wait, they have vast amounts of oil and gas, and the rest of the world has recognized their right to develop nuclear power and offered them cheap nuclear fuel if they give up their enrichment program.
In June, trying to persuade Iran to change course, the Europeans, the US, Russia and China offered Iran a package of economic and trading incentives to halt its attempts to enrich uranium. It was a reasonable offer: in return for introducing an open and verifiable nuclear policy and for guaranteeing "regional security arrangements", they would supply Iran with trading and economic agreements that would permit peaceful development of its nuclear industry. A doubting US had to be persuaded to sign up to the offer, but there are still hopes that Iran will respond positively when it publishes its reply on Thursday, the day the UN deadline runs out.
That may be true if your opponent is at least partially rational. Eg the US, the USSR, China and so on. It's not true if your opponent is non rational. And I mean rational here in the loosest possible sense, i.e. that safeguards prevent a paranoid individual from triggering armageddon.
I'd say that none of the countries in the Middle East are completely rational. Maybe Israel, but it's hard for a tiny country with a secret nuclear weapons program surrounded by genocidal but technically backward countries to stay rational. They may decide to decentralise their lauch process for example, to be sure that they can respond to a first strike.
If you look at Tariq Aziz's interview post Gulf War II, decision making inside Iraq was highly non rational, almost as if they assumed that the apocalypse was innevitable, and highly disconnected from any objective news at the same time. My guess is that Iran and Syria are in a similar state.
And the attempt at getting nukes is likely to trigger disasterous intervention from either the US or Israel. So for Middle Eastern countries, a nuke program does not increase safety.
The idea is it can rollback partially completed transactions and recover from bad shutdowns. Also it can do it quickly without searching the whole filesystem for inconsistencies. That's the whole point to NTFS.
Well when he became a CEO of a major Japanese firm he became US born by assimilation.
It's the racist 19th Century assumption that being "UK born" only applies to the narrow biological sense that accounts for our slightly disappointing economic performance post war I suspect.
Spokesman bin Dan Ladin of al Qaida on the Internet (Nasdaq:ALLA) explained 'Sharia law decrees that spammers should be turned a canned meat product, which happens to be halal. Now true Muslims can taste the delicacy that is processed, tinned meat. And anti Bush Internet types will join our cause. Muhahahaha. Don't put that last bit in the press release, you infidel dog.'
Look at the history of DVD. Originally, the DVD Alliance didn't want to allow any software players, because they thought the keys would leak. People complained like mad, so they changed the policy. Then someone disassembled the Xing DVD player, and a key did leak.
Now fast forward to HD content - Blue ray and HDDVD. If I were HDDVD Alliance or whoever decides on licensing, I'd probably want some measure like this.
And Microsoft have only done this for pressed disks - as they point out
In an interview hastily organised by Microsoft public relations staff after they learned APC was planning to run this story, Riley was at pains to point out that Blu Ray and HD-DVD were storage media and you could put an MPEG-4 movie on them and play them on a 32bit Vista PC just fine.
But he conceded that a commercially-produced BluRay or HD-DVD movie with next-generation high definition protected content wouldnt play on a 32 bit PC.
So by 'asked' they mean 'it was a condition of licensing the intellectual property, which we must do to make a legal software player'
I.e. it's the fault of the studios, Microsoft could either have no playback, or playback on a DRM'd system.
Actually, current unlicensed DVD players don't rely on the Xing key, as described here
But I'd guess the fact that a key leaked from a DVD software player would cause the people licensing HDDVD and BlueRay software players do demand draconian DRM like this. Also, if you're Microsoft, a company famous for having vast cash reserves, you don't want to get sued for leaking keys, so you'd probably want to DRM your player to some extent just for self preservation.
What happened to "Developers, Developemrs, Developers" ?
You know what? I've got a copy of the Vista Driver Development kit, and I've written XP and NT drivers in the past.
When Vista comes out, I plan to get a Verisign Class 3 certificate for $500 and write a filter driver to allow RPC-1 drives to be used, sign it and put it on my website.
Slashdot Mirror
Never knew that Sophie Wilson had a sex change.
Does that mean that you can credit the ARM as a female co-designed architecture or not?
Intel do some pretty beefy ARM compatibles.
800Mhz, 333Mhz FSB.
http://www.intel.com/design/iio/iop333.htm
It's still in order, no SMT, but I reckon most embedded applications can live with that.
But Niagara has 8 cores, each capable of runnning 4 threads. Importantly, they all use the same instruction set and have access to external memory. They all have MMUs too.
9 423
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=1
It's an SMP beast.
So you could run a traditional OS on it, and all the cores would be used if needed. On a Cell, there is a single PowerPC core, which is a bit underpowered with no out of order execution for example. The bulk of the processing power is in the SPEs. But these have a different instruction set, no access to external memory and no MMU.
If you're writing a game with procedural textures, you can live with this by partitioning the algorithm amongst the SPEs and using the PowerPC essentially for housekeeping. But it would take a lot of work to partition a general purpose OS like this. So the two machines are not really aimed at the same market.
I meant having a decent human actor play a character like Gollum is more convincing than having him voice the CGI animation's scowling and gurning.
Look at the expression on his face in that picture - doesn't it show more the character's mad obsession better than the computer generated character managed? I still reckon that CGI is bit primitive when you need to do stuff like that, you spend more time admiring the technology than suspending disbelief.
It's like someone said of the Star Wars films - Peter Cushing was a much more effective villain than Jabba the Hut for example.
Andy Serkis would have been great as a live action Gollum - he looks much creepier than the CGI Gollum in that picture.
Your joke is funnier with the ORIGINAL KLINGON!
I would expect that for a website which is mostly textual, like most personal home pages. Do you have forms prompting people for input? Do you have large quantity of data which would normally be displayed as a graph? Do you have a shopping cart? These are the things which are hard to provide "Equivalent Facilitation" for. These are the things businesses have to deal with.
The website I was talking about it just text and downloads, so no. But I did some work on a hotel room booking system a while back, and that would render fine in anything from IE3.0 upwards. And forms for input have been in HTML since the original version - most stuff can be done with hidden fields and Javascript form.submit. All the shopping cart stuff was done with server side scripting.
And for loads of data, what's so bad about a table with a bunch of 1px gifs? I know it's not buzzword compliant, but it's completely portable.
And in terms of focus group, literally no one I know has said 'wow, what a slick website' in the last ten years. But I've heard a lot of complaints that websites have an unclear user interface, or are just plain broken on a minority browser. And people have complimented me on the downloads website, since it loads fast and is viewable on anything. These are mostly embedded programmers and (gasp) people that work outside the computer business. I'm sure if your focus group were web designers, you'd get a different answer of course, but who cares.
I don't have a problem with using CSS/DHTML and so on if you can detect that the browser supports it, the problem is websites that depend on it, especially when there are Web 1.0 techniques you can fall back to but choose not to. And it's even worse when they depend on it for aeshetic reasons, like custom UI widgets that aren't discoverable even when you find the browser they work on.
E.g. there's a shopping centre that has a website with wierd scroll up/scroll down buttons to scroll down to the opening times of the stores. Their are completely unintuitive, and even worse they only work on Firefox. Or comments on Digg, which didn't work for ages on Opera because they depend on some DHTML magic to pop up a HTML form. Non of this stuff is at all necessary, but the real problem is that it seems to be untested on anything other than the browser the developer uses.
You can kind of see it in all the moaning about IE. It would be nice if new versions of IE supported CSS for example, but it misses the fact that the vast majority of people will continue to use the version of IE that came with their OS, and you basically need to design stuff that will work on that for the forseeable future, not something which tests each and every technique possible in the latest CSS/DHTML standard.
And come to think of it, if the websites are all coded to the latest standards the problem is that IE doesn't support them, as web designers always seem to whine, how come I have problems in Opera 9, which probably has the best CSS support at the moment? It seems more likely that they fiddled with their code until it worked on the latest Firefox nightly build with bug fixes for all the features that they depend on, made a few barbed comments on slashdot about evil Microsoft not supporting standards and buggered off home.
Which is why even though I hate government intervention, it's actually rather satisfying that they're getting screwed over poor accessibility support. The government should force them to read the MSDN articles on accessibility, which are actually rather good.
It is very very expensive and time consuming to make a website S.508 compliant. S.508 sites are plain and simple because in order to be compliant, you cannot take advantage of most of the DHTML and interactive content used on websites today. As a result, companies that want a slick website that is accessible tend to make two websites, one for disabled people and one for everyone else.
Which meams they'll probably work properly in Opera too, unlike most butt ugly DHTML Web 2.0 monstrosities.
Incidentally, I tried my website with Lynx, and the only change I needed to make was a link from the NOFRAMES section to the index, and a few alt tags. Which I guess means that it's now accessible to a screen reader. Or a cellphone. Or an Atari ST.
And just FYI, no one cares if your website is slick, you will get exactly 0 extra sales because of that. What you will do is lose sales to people that get annoyed when the slick interface doesn't work correctly in the browser they chose to use. And the browsers on most cellphones will completely choke on a DHTML website.
I've always thought there's something a bit Gödelly about this, along the lines of "Any sufficiently complex system can never be secure".
E.g. I added a new hard drive, and left it downloading a vast 55GB set of files by FTP from the UK over my shiny new 2Mbit connection. Since the machine at the other end is ADSL, it's a very slow process. When I try and watch a DVD, I'd get a BSOD. Figured the drive was bad, so I checked the SMART data. Can't see the drive at all, motherboard has a Sil3112 and the the shitty SATA drivers manage to fumble the SMART command so they always go to drive 0 even if you ask for drive 1. The two drives are in non raid mode, and I'm using the non raid drivers, so I should be able to do this, but all the tools I have return drive 0 data for both drives.
Flipped the drives around. Now I see SMART data for the new drive on both drives. SMART data looks ok - no reallocated sectors for example. Got the Debugging Tools for Windows and WinDbg'd the dump - csrss.exe had aborted and the system bug checked since it needs csrss.exe. Looking in the log, csrss had aborted due to an IO error, STATUS_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES. Elsewhere in the error log I can see references to running out of non paged pool. Figured that the SATA driver had a leak. Turned on pool tagging, left it FTPing with PoolTag from the DDK running. I can see the lots of non paged pool being allocated to tag HidC, the Hid class driver.
I bought a cheap USB remote control, a Trust NB-5100P. At least on my system, it seems to Hid Class driver to use lots of memory. It's pretty dramatic, a K per second. Over 24hours day I ended up with 57MB of non paged memory to just this driver. If I stop the system tray applet, the memory is freed instantly.
So it looks like once I got the new drive and started to leave the machine on for several days pulling the files, I could get to the point where it run out of non paged pool and died. Now I only turn on the Trust control panel applet when I'm watching video.
Who's at fault here
1) Trust for making the stupid applet which uses vast amounts of a extremely precious resource. Note that the HID class driver isn't leaking - if you turn off the trust applet the memory is freed. Trust have managed to bring down the system from user mode though.
2) Silicon Image for making a driver that misroutes IOCTL_SMART_*
3) Me for buying Trust/Silicon Image stuff and expecting it to work properly.
Britney has quite a following on /.
http://britneyspears.ac/physics/basics/basics.htm
It must be a remarkably egoless existence. Arguing passionately for both sides of an issue, flaming other people you agreed with seconds ago, following up with "Mod Parent Up!" to your greatest enemies. Like being crazy perhaps. Or being God.
In fact, did not Jesus say "Mod up thine enemies" and "Let he who has never trolled cast the first downmod". And the initials of Jesus Christ in the original Hebrew is better transliterated as AC. Come to think of it, the Torah repeatedly mentions the incomprehensibleness of God.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
>I just downloaded the MGADiag.exe file from TFA and ran in under wine on Ubuntu. It ran :-)
>and gave me a hash key, I then followed the steps in TFA and wham, it worked as advertised >and I was then "validated" to download IE7 if I wanted to.
>
>WGA seems to be some pretty broken code IMO
Maybe they've decided that minimising false negatives is more important than minimising false positives, i.e. a few people with no Windows license getting the download is more important than a few people with getting no download. It kind of makes sense, since denying the upgrade to paying users means support calls which cost money. Presumably if you have pirated Windows and really wanted to get the update, you could just download the files from a genuine machine at work anyway.
Or maybe they're machiavellian enough to allow downloads just because you're running wine or Ubuntu. It's not like most updates are any use to you I suspect, and it sidesteps any complaints about illegal tying arrangements.
What happens if you install IE7 btw?
How does total garbage like this get marked as insightful
/ 0.html
Because it's sceptical of the US government, and everyone knows that scepticism of your government is a sign of intelligence.
The sad thing is that if the grandparent had said the US was rational in having nukes, he would have got modded back to the stoneage.
But saying the same thing about Iran is apparently +5 Insightful. The more I see this, the more I realise that some people, have a sort of anti Nationalism. If Nationalism is "my country right or wrong", anti Nationalism is "my government is always wrong". Never mind that the enemies of the US have much nastier governments with much more evil objectives.
http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism
(v) PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure
religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of
life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there
is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted
motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of
totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that
one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings
of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any
means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely
against Britain and the United States.
If you really want oil, Canada has loads.
Admittedly it's oil shale, i.e. mixed with sand and so on, but it's possible to extract it. And at current and probably future prices it's not that uneconomic.
It's also a shame that no one has offered to supply them with nuclear fuel.
Oh wait, they have vast amounts of oil and gas, and the rest of the world has recognized their right to develop nuclear power and offered them cheap nuclear fuel if they give up their enrichment program.
http://www.sundayherald.com/57551
That may be true if your opponent is at least partially rational. Eg the US, the USSR, China and so on. It's not true if your opponent is non rational. And I mean rational here in the loosest possible sense, i.e. that safeguards prevent a paranoid individual from triggering armageddon.
I'd say that none of the countries in the Middle East are completely rational. Maybe Israel, but it's hard for a tiny country with a secret nuclear weapons program surrounded by genocidal but technically backward countries to stay rational. They may decide to decentralise their lauch process for example, to be sure that they can respond to a first strike.
If you look at Tariq Aziz's interview post Gulf War II, decision making inside Iraq was highly non rational, almost as if they assumed that the apocalypse was innevitable, and highly disconnected from any objective news at the same time. My guess is that Iran and Syria are in a similar state.
And the attempt at getting nukes is likely to trigger disasterous intervention from either the US or Israel. So for Middle Eastern countries, a nuke program does not increase safety.
Ooh, I know this.
USB hot plate!
Umm, what do you mean be "wasn't journalling until v5". It's always had a transaction log file from the initial release. Check here for NT 3.1.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=101670
The idea is it can rollback partially completed transactions and recover from bad shutdowns. Also it can do it quickly without searching the whole filesystem for inconsistencies. That's the whole point to NTFS.
You realise that the performance of any processor will increase with bigger caches and faster main memory, right?
Well when he became a CEO of a major Japanese firm he became US born by assimilation.
It's the racist 19th Century assumption that being "UK born" only applies to the narrow biological sense that accounts for our slightly disappointing economic performance post war I suspect.
"British born US Citizen"
It means "not a real American, just a technical one".
Press Release / Fatwa
=====================
Spokesman bin Dan Ladin of al Qaida on the Internet (Nasdaq:ALLA) explained 'Sharia
law decrees that spammers should be turned a canned meat product, which happens to
be halal. Now true Muslims can taste the delicacy that is processed, tinned meat.
And anti Bush Internet types will join our cause. Muhahahaha. Don't put that last
bit in the press release, you infidel dog.'
(c) PR News 2006.
Look at the history of DVD. Originally, the DVD Alliance didn't want to allow any software players, because they thought the keys would leak. People complained like mad, so they changed the policy. Then someone disassembled the Xing DVD player, and a key did leak.
Now fast forward to HD content - Blue ray and HDDVD. If I were HDDVD Alliance or whoever decides on licensing, I'd probably want some measure like this.
And Microsoft have only done this for pressed disks - as they point out
http://www.apcstart.com/site/dwarne/2006/08/1139/
So by 'asked' they mean 'it was a condition of licensing the intellectual property, which we must do to make a legal software player'
I.e. it's the fault of the studios, Microsoft could either have no playback, or playback on a DRM'd system.
Actually, current unlicensed DVD players don't rely on the Xing key, as described here
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/20011128_
But I'd guess the fact that a key leaked from a DVD software player would cause the people licensing HDDVD and BlueRay software players do demand draconian DRM like this. Also, if you're Microsoft, a company famous for having vast cash reserves, you don't want to get sued for leaking keys, so you'd probably want to DRM your player to some extent just for self preservation.
What happened to "Developers, Developemrs, Developers" ?
/ 09/502014.aspx
= /library/en-us/Storage_r/hh/Storage_r/k307_6baca45 d-504c-46b9-9724-f82132c2bead.xml.asp
You know what? I've got a copy of the Vista Driver Development kit, and I've written XP and NT drivers in the past.
When Vista comes out, I plan to get a Verisign Class 3 certificate for $500 and write a filter driver to allow RPC-1 drives to be used, sign it and put it on my website.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/12
My plan is to catch and hack the IOCTL_DVD_* requests, or maybe you'd need to filter over the DVD drive itself.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Also, I'll sign any driver people send to me for a small fee, provided they send me the source code and it's well written.
Daleks and Cybermen seem to get on ok without depression.