Actually, 64 voxels per square millimeter is "unlimited" for all practical purposes. If you can simulate a world to the limit of what the eye can see, you're done.
If they do indeed do anything procedural (but there's not hint that they do), then a simple fractal will take care of actual unlimited detail.
(and yes,/., I can type the above in a minute or less. can I please get a "knows how to use a keyboard" mode???)
It'll take a while for this tech to get turned into an engine with animation/shading/lighting working, and no game developer will touch it until that happens.
That's also my highest doubts. How does the system handle animations at all? The demos they have shown so far have no movement aside from the camera.
I am very, very much looking forward to this. I can barely imagine the amount of creative potential being freed up if for most real-life objects you don't need hours of artist time anymore, but simply throw them into a laser scanner and be done with it. Your artists could focus on other things.
But I'd very much like to know what the shortcomings and limitations are.
Does that translate into more sales? Because piracy doesn't matter, sales do. Piracy is only important in so far as it reduces sales. We point that out all the time when they make the foolish equation of "x illegal copies == x lost sales", which isn't true. Likewise "x less illegal copies" does not equal "x more sales".
In fact, if they would release both of these numbers, we would finally see some actual hints on what the correlation is. So if they found a 50% reduction in piracy, but only 5% additional sales, we'd have a first data point for an equation.
Funny how they don't seem to be interested in that... I wonder why...
What is true, however, is that in politics and PR, there is a very common trick: Announce some plan so out there that protest is guaranteed. Wait for the protest and check how widespread and loud it is. Then adjust the real thing that you had planned all along to be just under your estimated protest threshold and release it as the "compromise solution".
In most cases, you will get more than if you had gone for the real thing right away, and with less protest, as people think you have "given in".
well, that game just went on my "download a pirate copy, just because" list.
I just realize that this has been a trend for me for years now. If I read "DRM free", I feel zero inclination to go on btjunkie - either I like it and buy it or I don't and don't. But the more DRM there is in the crap, the more I'm inclined to most definitely not give them my money.
Too bad we're not in the majority. Just imagine if putting DRM on your game were a surefire way of having close to zero sales, but being on the top of the torrent lists. The whole thing would disappear so quickly, we'd wonder if it was all just a dream.
Because in the end, these guys are just about money.
Only in part. My work experience says that most projects really aren't that complicated - until the managers or the lawyers show up. Or in other words: The risk-averse types. Who don't really avert any risks - I've worked closely with the corporate risk manager for a while. Managers don't reduce risks, they manage them. In other words: They write them down and file them, so that when the shit hits the fan, they can hide behind the paperwork. That is part of what makes many projects unnecessarily complicated. The actual project is often fairly simple. But doing it in a way that management understands is what makes it complicated.
In settings - even corporate environments - where people are allowed to make mistakes, and risk is part of doing business, projects are generally a lot simpler. Because at the point where you have to say "and if X happens, we're fucked" you do actual risk management - you check what the risk is, and if it's a risk you're willing to take, you take it. And that's that. Your risk assessment documentation basically is "we know that if X happens, we're fucked. we're taking that chance". You don't need 20 people signing off on 100 pages detailling everything to manage risk. You only need that if all of those 20 people are insisting on covering their asses.
We've seen this pattern before. Repeatedly. MS greates strength and greatest weakness at the same time is their ability and will to stay beyond losses that would've ruined most smaller companies.
Sometimes, this staying power makes them pull through in the end. Sometimes, it means they just burn even more money.
It's the typical MS way. No, they won't sell Bing. They will hang on to it until it either turns a profit, or is so dead that not even the braindead who fall for 419 scams would buy it anymore. Then they will kill it silently, when the press is looking the other way. They don't like to admit failure.
Very little or even no project management can still mean the project succeeds. Think about practically any project done in the hobby environment. You don't need MS Project to go on a camping trip with your buddies. You assort tasks, everyone does his share, and whatever problems come up will be solved when they come up.
It works because people care about the project and will do more than just what has been specified for them. In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that in environments where people are truly motivated, planning and management is detrimental to the end result.
However, there are two conditions under which project management becomes required: a) If people don't give a fuck and won't do a thing unless you tell them explicitly what they need to do. b) The project reaches a complexity where individual members lose sight of the overal goal and state.
The key can be stored on disk and unlocked by the user (passphrase, gesture, etc.). This would actually improve security.
If the user needs to input a passphrase to unlock a key which then decrypts the password with which he logs into his mail account - doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose of storing the password in the first place, namely that the user doesn't have to repeatedly enter it?
This is why I rail on people like you. You come up with complicated solutions that leave the root problem unsolved, and only add more complexity which creates more security problems (now you also have to worry about your key, the decryption routine, in-memory storage of both key and password, etc. etc.).
That would make the sqlite file useless to an attacker, yes.
But if he can fetch the sqlite file, he has deep enough access to access other data on the device, very likely including the in-memory decrypted password.
You'd need more than just a safe storage. You would need an OS that does the proper segmentation as well. If you're doing that anyways, making sure nobody who shouldn't get access to the sqlite data in the first place is a lot easier.
For maximum security, of course, you'd want to do both.
The only thing certificates, hashes, challenge-response, etc. etc. gain you is the attacker doesn't learn your password itself. If you use the same password for other things, that's an advantage. But it doesn't prevent him from accessing your account after cracking your phone.
(and yes,/., it took less than a minute to type that. moronic system)
The entire point of this kind of password storage is to remove user interaction.
Which at the end of days, no matter how you skin the cat, means that the phone must contain all the data it needs to authenticate itself to the server and access your e-mail account. So no matter what solution you come up with, it will break at this point.
Yes, there are challenge-response or hashing ways that gain you one thing: Someone cracking your phone can access your mail, but he doesn't know the password itself, only its hash or response. That can be useful if you tend to re-use passwords (and honestly, who doesn't?).
A tiny step forward would be multi-password authentication. AKA I don't have one password that will unlock my account, but several (or as many as I want). That way I could give my desktop computer one, and my phone a different one. Now if my phone gets stolen or cracked, I don't have to change all my passwords, but only invalidate the ones that were on the phone. That would be a small convenience step, but no change in security (the effect of multiple passwords on brute-forcing, hacking, etc. is negliegable - so you're now a 5 in 25752 trillion instead of 1. Big deal)
I'm sure most would agree encrypted password data in at least SHA or MD5 would be kind of a good idea!"
Yeah, because SHA1 and MD5 are one-way hashes which are just great if you actually, you know, need to know the password so you can tell the mailserver.
When I started reading/., one of the reasons was that the editors had enough of a clue to weed out submissions from people who had not the slightest idea what the fuck they were talking about. At that time,/. stood out from the mainstream publications, who generally didn't employ geeks and the normal journalist had to ask his geek friends about what this "HTML" thing he noticed at the end of every webpage address was.
Please. One thing we really don't need more of is people with half-a-clue meddling in security and giving advise. For us security professionals, the clueless secretary is not our worst enemy. She at least knows she knows nothing and will listen to us. Our worst enemy in the company environment is the self-proclaimed power user who think he knows what he's doing, but is in fact only messing things up. And because he thinks he's smart, he won't listen to the security department.
Now yes, there are better ways than storing the passwords in plain-text. Encrypting them would help. You'd think. But in order to decrypt them, you have to have the key. Which means you have to store it on the phone. Or in other words: Right next to the database. So encrypting the sqlite data would be the equivalent of having a really good lock on your door, and hanging the keys on a nail right next to it. Anyone who breaks your phone enough to get the sqlite file will also be able to get the key file the same way. All you're doing is making everything more complicated and wasting CPU cycles on pointless crypto.
Thing is, Apple has to make the Mac play nice with Windows servers if they want any business penetration.
I don't think that's true.
Playing nice with windows is what Linux has been trying for 10+ years and look where it's gotten us. Oh right, yes: If you try to play nice with someone who doesn't, you are chasing not only a moving target, but a target intentionally moving away from you.
Apple's strategy is different: Make shiny new toys that the guys at the top want. And the guys at the top don't care if it plays nice with the network or not. The last company I worked for ordered 50 iPads for the top-50 of the company. How much opposition do you think the head of IT put up? Hint: He was one of the guys you wouldn't see without his iPad after that.
The only companies where technical or security aspects ever determined the choice of hard- or software that I've seen are in the military or nuclear industries.
They claim that a click on an "I accept" button constitutes a binding contract. But a checkbox in the configuration that I don't want to be tracked doesn't?
Frankly, stop treating corporations like responsible citizens. They aren't. They are cheaters, liars and frauds. Their only purpose is profit. If they were humans, they would qualify as psychopaths.
For a while now I've come to the conclusion that the government should provide all essential services (water, electricity, Internet, postal service, mass-transit, etc.) via non-profit companies whose purpose it is to provide an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. At the same time, there is no state monopoly and anyone who feels he can do better is free to try.
The private sector always claims it is more efficient than state-run companies. That's what brought us the whole desaster of privatisation. Well, if they are so much better, they will have no trouble competing and offering either better service or better price, or even both.
Epic has written a response defending its practices."
If you still don't see what's wrong with these people, that sentence is all you need. Get caught with the hands in the cookie jar and then go about explaining why it was an ok thing to do.
How long until we as a society finally realize that corporations do not have ethics ? They are, almost by definition, psychopaths. We need to start treating them like the dangerous criminals they are.
No, I'm not a communist. I do, however, strongly advocate seing things the way they are, and not fool yourself with delusions of an idealized version of your world. And corporations behaving as valuable members of society is an abberation, not the norm.
There actually are new forms of buildings. I live in 2 mio. people city, and we have plenty of new buildings that wouldn't and couldn't have been built like this 50 years ago.
However, apparently nobody thought that most of the old buildings would simply still be around. The building I live in is a bit over a hundred years old. Most of the ones in the neighborhood are as well. Not much room for new buildings.
Choosing our children doesn't happen much, but pre-birth screening for genetic defects has become fairly common.
In summary, no they didn't get much exactly right. But make your own predictions about 60 years from now, and then compare notes. It is really hard to be even somewhat close over almost one lifetime.
I would generalize this further. When you look at the relatively close future (like 100 years or less), assume that humans won't change. We will want the same things we want today. Those things you mention are some of that.
But throwing it our would not have established a precedent. Actually letting it go to trial and passing a clear verdict is probably the biggest help the judge could give the accused in this case, especially regarding their potential countersuit.
And unless courts work very different in the US, the judge simply didn't have a way to sanction the DA beyond a stern reprimand.
For 40-50 years of age, those predictions are surprisingly accurate. If you watch carefully, you notice that while they got many details wrong, the basics are mostly correct. While our buildings look nothing like in the background image of the BBC part, for example, they do in fact incorporate many technological advances. The error is only in how visible those are. Same with the computers in the first video. While ours today look nothing like those depicted, the functions were largely predicted correctly.
If anything, I'm quite surprised at how good the predictions are.
Nothing will change in the United States without a revolution,
Change often starts small, not large. Revolutions are the exception, not the norm for major changes. And many times, the revolution that's written into the history books was only the tip of the iceberg.
I've become an enemy of corporate culture myself, both from experiences within and without, as a customer and a former employee. I'm not fanatical about it, but I do make it a point to shop in smaller, owner-run shops when it's not too much trouble. I drink juices instead of Coke not only because it's healthier but also because I dislike the Coca-Cola companies ways. I moved both my landline and my mobile to smaller carriers. None of that is revolutionary, and it won't make much of a difference. But if enough people do it, it will. My shopping at the small store down the street may contribute to helping it stay there instead of being crowded out by yet another superstore. The few bucks it costs me because the small store can't match the superstore prices are nothing compared to what a revolution would potentially cost.
Not being able to change the big picture is not an excuse for not making the changes in the small matters that are entirely possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, 64 voxels per square millimeter is "unlimited" for all practical purposes. If you can simulate a world to the limit of what the eye can see, you're done.
If they do indeed do anything procedural (but there's not hint that they do), then a simple fractal will take care of actual unlimited detail.
(and yes, /., I can type the above in a minute or less. can I please get a "knows how to use a keyboard" mode???)
It'll take a while for this tech to get turned into an engine with animation/shading/lighting working, and no game developer will touch it until that happens.
That's also my highest doubts. How does the system handle animations at all? The demos they have shown so far have no movement aside from the camera.
I am very, very much looking forward to this. I can barely imagine the amount of creative potential being freed up if for most real-life objects you don't need hours of artist time anymore, but simply throw them into a laser scanner and be done with it. Your artists could focus on other things.
But I'd very much like to know what the shortcomings and limitations are.
So reduced piracy.
Does that translate into more sales? Because piracy doesn't matter, sales do. Piracy is only important in so far as it reduces sales. We point that out all the time when they make the foolish equation of "x illegal copies == x lost sales", which isn't true.
Likewise "x less illegal copies" does not equal "x more sales".
In fact, if they would release both of these numbers, we would finally see some actual hints on what the correlation is. So if they found a 50% reduction in piracy, but only 5% additional sales, we'd have a first data point for an equation.
Funny how they don't seem to be interested in that... I wonder why...
Actually, that is not always true.
What is true, however, is that in politics and PR, there is a very common trick: Announce some plan so out there that protest is guaranteed. Wait for the protest and check how widespread and loud it is. Then adjust the real thing that you had planned all along to be just under your estimated protest threshold and release it as the "compromise solution".
In most cases, you will get more than if you had gone for the real thing right away, and with less protest, as people think you have "given in".
We used computers without a net connection for decades.
We still do, all the time. Or have you never used your notebook on a train, plane or some other place without Internet?
btw, that RPS article is fantastic. Take a look (last link in the summary), just for the screenshots. What a way to clearly express your opinion. :-)
well, that game just went on my "download a pirate copy, just because" list.
I just realize that this has been a trend for me for years now. If I read "DRM free", I feel zero inclination to go on btjunkie - either I like it and buy it or I don't and don't. But the more DRM there is in the crap, the more I'm inclined to most definitely not give them my money.
Too bad we're not in the majority. Just imagine if putting DRM on your game were a surefire way of having close to zero sales, but being on the top of the torrent lists. The whole thing would disappear so quickly, we'd wonder if it was all just a dream.
Because in the end, these guys are just about money.
Only in part. My work experience says that most projects really aren't that complicated - until the managers or the lawyers show up. Or in other words: The risk-averse types. Who don't really avert any risks - I've worked closely with the corporate risk manager for a while. Managers don't reduce risks, they manage them. In other words: They write them down and file them, so that when the shit hits the fan, they can hide behind the paperwork.
That is part of what makes many projects unnecessarily complicated. The actual project is often fairly simple. But doing it in a way that management understands is what makes it complicated.
In settings - even corporate environments - where people are allowed to make mistakes, and risk is part of doing business, projects are generally a lot simpler. Because at the point where you have to say "and if X happens, we're fucked" you do actual risk management - you check what the risk is, and if it's a risk you're willing to take, you take it. And that's that. Your risk assessment documentation basically is "we know that if X happens, we're fucked. we're taking that chance". You don't need 20 people signing off on 100 pages detailling everything to manage risk. You only need that if all of those 20 people are insisting on covering their asses.
We've seen this pattern before. Repeatedly. MS greates strength and greatest weakness at the same time is their ability and will to stay beyond losses that would've ruined most smaller companies.
Sometimes, this staying power makes them pull through in the end. Sometimes, it means they just burn even more money.
It's the typical MS way. No, they won't sell Bing. They will hang on to it until it either turns a profit, or is so dead that not even the braindead who fall for 419 scams would buy it anymore. Then they will kill it silently, when the press is looking the other way. They don't like to admit failure.
Actually, it isn't that simple.
Very little or even no project management can still mean the project succeeds. Think about practically any project done in the hobby environment. You don't need MS Project to go on a camping trip with your buddies. You assort tasks, everyone does his share, and whatever problems come up will be solved when they come up.
It works because people care about the project and will do more than just what has been specified for them. In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that in environments where people are truly motivated, planning and management is detrimental to the end result.
However, there are two conditions under which project management becomes required:
a) If people don't give a fuck and won't do a thing unless you tell them explicitly what they need to do.
b) The project reaches a complexity where individual members lose sight of the overal goal and state.
Ok, hands up, who else thought "what the heck are they doing with WIFI on the moon?" upon reading the headline? :-)
The key can be stored on disk and unlocked by the user (passphrase, gesture, etc.). This would actually improve security.
If the user needs to input a passphrase to unlock a key which then decrypts the password with which he logs into his mail account - doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose of storing the password in the first place, namely that the user doesn't have to repeatedly enter it?
This is why I rail on people like you. You come up with complicated solutions that leave the root problem unsolved, and only add more complexity which creates more security problems (now you also have to worry about your key, the decryption routine, in-memory storage of both key and password, etc. etc.).
That would make the sqlite file useless to an attacker, yes.
But if he can fetch the sqlite file, he has deep enough access to access other data on the device, very likely including the in-memory decrypted password.
You'd need more than just a safe storage. You would need an OS that does the proper segmentation as well. If you're doing that anyways, making sure nobody who shouldn't get access to the sqlite data in the first place is a lot easier.
For maximum security, of course, you'd want to do both.
The only thing certificates, hashes, challenge-response, etc. etc. gain you is the attacker doesn't learn your password itself. If you use the same password for other things, that's an advantage. But it doesn't prevent him from accessing your account after cracking your phone.
(and yes, /., it took less than a minute to type that. moronic system)
The entire point of this kind of password storage is to remove user interaction.
Which at the end of days, no matter how you skin the cat, means that the phone must contain all the data it needs to authenticate itself to the server and access your e-mail account.
So no matter what solution you come up with, it will break at this point.
Yes, there are challenge-response or hashing ways that gain you one thing: Someone cracking your phone can access your mail, but he doesn't know the password itself, only its hash or response. That can be useful if you tend to re-use passwords (and honestly, who doesn't?).
A tiny step forward would be multi-password authentication. AKA I don't have one password that will unlock my account, but several (or as many as I want). That way I could give my desktop computer one, and my phone a different one. Now if my phone gets stolen or cracked, I don't have to change all my passwords, but only invalidate the ones that were on the phone. That would be a small convenience step, but no change in security (the effect of multiple passwords on brute-forcing, hacking, etc. is negliegable - so you're now a 5 in 25752 trillion instead of 1. Big deal)
I'm sure most would agree encrypted password data in at least SHA or MD5 would be kind of a good idea!"
Yeah, because SHA1 and MD5 are one-way hashes which are just great if you actually, you know, need to know the password so you can tell the mailserver.
When I started reading /., one of the reasons was that the editors had enough of a clue to weed out submissions from people who had not the slightest idea what the fuck they were talking about. At that time, /. stood out from the mainstream publications, who generally didn't employ geeks and the normal journalist had to ask his geek friends about what this "HTML" thing he noticed at the end of every webpage address was.
Please. One thing we really don't need more of is people with half-a-clue meddling in security and giving advise. For us security professionals, the clueless secretary is not our worst enemy. She at least knows she knows nothing and will listen to us. Our worst enemy in the company environment is the self-proclaimed power user who think he knows what he's doing, but is in fact only messing things up. And because he thinks he's smart, he won't listen to the security department.
Now yes, there are better ways than storing the passwords in plain-text. Encrypting them would help. You'd think. But in order to decrypt them, you have to have the key. Which means you have to store it on the phone. Or in other words: Right next to the database.
So encrypting the sqlite data would be the equivalent of having a really good lock on your door, and hanging the keys on a nail right next to it. Anyone who breaks your phone enough to get the sqlite file will also be able to get the key file the same way. All you're doing is making everything more complicated and wasting CPU cycles on pointless crypto.
Thing is, Apple has to make the Mac play nice with Windows servers if they want any business penetration.
I don't think that's true.
Playing nice with windows is what Linux has been trying for 10+ years and look where it's gotten us. Oh right, yes: If you try to play nice with someone who doesn't, you are chasing not only a moving target, but a target intentionally moving away from you.
Apple's strategy is different: Make shiny new toys that the guys at the top want. And the guys at the top don't care if it plays nice with the network or not. The last company I worked for ordered 50 iPads for the top-50 of the company. How much opposition do you think the head of IT put up? Hint: He was one of the guys you wouldn't see without his iPad after that.
The only companies where technical or security aspects ever determined the choice of hard- or software that I've seen are in the military or nuclear industries.
You're spot on.
They claim that a click on an "I accept" button constitutes a binding contract. But a checkbox in the configuration that I don't want to be tracked doesn't?
Frankly, stop treating corporations like responsible citizens. They aren't. They are cheaters, liars and frauds. Their only purpose is profit. If they were humans, they would qualify as psychopaths.
Treat them like that.
For a while now I've come to the conclusion that the government should provide all essential services (water, electricity, Internet, postal service, mass-transit, etc.) via non-profit companies whose purpose it is to provide an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. At the same time, there is no state monopoly and anyone who feels he can do better is free to try.
The private sector always claims it is more efficient than state-run companies. That's what brought us the whole desaster of privatisation. Well, if they are so much better, they will have no trouble competing and offering either better service or better price, or even both.
Epic has written a response defending its practices."
If you still don't see what's wrong with these people, that sentence is all you need. Get caught with the hands in the cookie jar and then go about explaining why it was an ok thing to do.
How long until we as a society finally realize that corporations do not have ethics ? They are, almost by definition, psychopaths. We need to start treating them like the dangerous criminals they are.
No, I'm not a communist. I do, however, strongly advocate seing things the way they are, and not fool yourself with delusions of an idealized version of your world. And corporations behaving as valuable members of society is an abberation, not the norm.
There actually are new forms of buildings. I live in 2 mio. people city, and we have plenty of new buildings that wouldn't and couldn't have been built like this 50 years ago.
However, apparently nobody thought that most of the old buildings would simply still be around. The building I live in is a bit over a hundred years old. Most of the ones in the neighborhood are as well. Not much room for new buildings.
Choosing our children doesn't happen much, but pre-birth screening for genetic defects has become fairly common.
In summary, no they didn't get much exactly right. But make your own predictions about 60 years from now, and then compare notes. It is really hard to be even somewhat close over almost one lifetime.
I would generalize this further. When you look at the relatively close future (like 100 years or less), assume that humans won't change. We will want the same things we want today. Those things you mention are some of that.
But throwing it our would not have established a precedent. Actually letting it go to trial and passing a clear verdict is probably the biggest help the judge could give the accused in this case, especially regarding their potential countersuit.
And unless courts work very different in the US, the judge simply didn't have a way to sanction the DA beyond a stern reprimand.
For 40-50 years of age, those predictions are surprisingly accurate. If you watch carefully, you notice that while they got many details wrong, the basics are mostly correct. While our buildings look nothing like in the background image of the BBC part, for example, they do in fact incorporate many technological advances. The error is only in how visible those are.
Same with the computers in the first video. While ours today look nothing like those depicted, the functions were largely predicted correctly.
If anything, I'm quite surprised at how good the predictions are.
Nothing will change in the United States without a revolution,
Change often starts small, not large. Revolutions are the exception, not the norm for major changes. And many times, the revolution that's written into the history books was only the tip of the iceberg.
I've become an enemy of corporate culture myself, both from experiences within and without, as a customer and a former employee. I'm not fanatical about it, but I do make it a point to shop in smaller, owner-run shops when it's not too much trouble. I drink juices instead of Coke not only because it's healthier but also because I dislike the Coca-Cola companies ways. I moved both my landline and my mobile to smaller carriers. None of that is revolutionary, and it won't make much of a difference. But if enough people do it, it will. My shopping at the small store down the street may contribute to helping it stay there instead of being crowded out by yet another superstore. The few bucks it costs me because the small store can't match the superstore prices are nothing compared to what a revolution would potentially cost.
Not being able to change the big picture is not an excuse for not making the changes in the small matters that are entirely possible.