Heh.. reminds me of a story from the early days, Atari in 1982.
As the story goes, Parker Brothers had just cranked out "Empire Strikes Back" as a 2600 cart, and for some reason Harlan Ellison had been hired by Video Review magazine to study and review it. Now as many know, Ellison's a cranky old man, and has been since long before he became an old man. He gave the game a shot, pointing out in the review that - like in many videogames at the time - all the player really did was shoot things (in this case, snow walkers) in endless waves until the player couldn't anymore. Impossible to win. Ellison compared it to the Sisyphus myth, damned to push a gigantic boulder up a mountain for eternity, only to watch it roll down the other side and be forced to start again - a staggering waste of time and energy (and in the game's case, money). Long run, it communicated nothing positive, only reinforcing the "can't win, don't try, can't quit" view of the world.
What makes the story interesting is that both the president and the chief scientist at Atari thought so highly of this review that they ordered framed copies for their offices. No doubt it significantly influenced Atari from that point forward.
And considering that Atari was the video game industry at the time, inspiring the Nintendos and EAs to come, it's quite possible that this one 1982 review by Harlan Ellison leads at least indirectly to the points made in this study.
Most people in the United States support the wiretapping program.
The overwhelming majority people in the United States don't know anything about the wiretapping program, other than one exists, because the government's fighting like mad to keep us from knowing anything about it. Relying on a popular poll today for that kind of insight is akin to asking the average on-the-street American in 1944 how they felt about the government using secret high-explosive weapons on Japan to bring the war to a quicker close. I'd venture to say the positive vote would have been pretty high.
The numbers likely would have been different if those Americans knew exactly what was happening in New Mexico at the time, or what the ultimate consequences would be.
Problem: Defend our society from those hell bent on destroying it
Constraint: Do this without turning our society into something not worth defending.
I'm not sure how you do this.
You start by not thinking of it as a friggin' war. A "war" implies a struggle for supremacy and ultimately one side imposing a political will on the other. It implies that, at some point, one side will surrender and the other will rule, and that the entire dynamic at play is in determining which one is which. A war that doesn't end isn't really a war - it's politics.
Problem is, "politics" doesn't usually scare people - it only pisses them off. Only partisans put on uniforms and march into gunfire for politics.
This whole mess has always been about risk, and this bizarre idea that we can somehow build a machine or pass a law and magically make risk go away. That somehow we'll win the "war" and all the nuts out there, all those displaced by the success of Western civilization, will accept their local McDonalds and Walmarts joyfully instead of blowing up planes.
Thing is, no other area of risk management - business, engineering, whatever - focuses on the ideal of risk elimination. It's always risk mitigation, the reduction of risk. The reduction of error. Keeping the probabilities within acceptable tolerances - the very concept responsible for the success of Western civilization over the last four hundred years. Until mathematicisns started really attacking the idea of probability and risk a few centuries back, learning to accommodate risk instead of treating it like a gamble or the will of the gods, humanity as a whole played the all-or-nothing game.
As any engineer knows, if you believe your work is free of fault, it's YOU at fault. That's the whole goal of terrorism: to attack the idea of acceptable tolerance, to push a society into the very all-or-nothing position that the U.S. has been living in since 9/11. Ultimately, to push society back to a pre-Renaissance culture (namely, the 13th century). They love watching the airlines confiscating shampoo, because they know exactly how futile the exercise is. It's always a lot easier to hack a system than to create an unhackable one.
Problem is, we in the U.S. still think this is a war, which is why we're providing tons of free military training and social support to poor, disgruntled, uneducated, West-hating Arab teenagers in Iraq right now. We can't face up to the fact that no matter what we do, sooner or later someone is going to smuggle a suitcase nuke into a major U.S. city and set it off. We can't deal with the inevitability of that fact. But if we could accept that levies built to withstand a Cat 3 hurricane won't stand up to a Cat 5 - no matter how optimistic we're thinking - that would be a good start.
I realize that net neutrality is the latest cause de jour among geeks, but could someone please tell me how FCC regulation of the Internet improves things? Aren't these the same political lackeys who spend most of their time censoring things and who've spent the last ten years or so trying to figure out a way to censor the Internet? Hasn't it occurred to any of you net neutrality fans that this debate isn't all that dissimilar to that ushering in the Communications Act of 1934, which created the FCC and put national airwaves in their hands to begin with?
I guess I question why, on a day where there's yet another "NSA gonna get ya" story on the front page, that so many seem to be in a rush to hand the Internet wholesale to a government agency that's already proven itself to be corrupt and censor-happy.
$600? Could be done, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Blu-Ray? As a businessperson myself, I can see how the "leverage one market into another" thing could work here. A year late? If they hit the ground running and play the launch smart, they're still kill Microsoft. Even when I started RTFA'ing, I imagined that someone got the translation wrong and someone just took the whole computer/console thing out of context. Then I kept reading.
Holy crap. Sony has gone insane.
As other posters have pointed out, this has been tried and tried and tried and tried. Intellivision. Atari. Coleco. Even priced efficiently, it's never worked and for good reason: the WHOLE POINT of owning a console is to ONLY HAVE A SINGLE, STANDARD CONFIG!!
I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, and I still haven't been able to play the damned thing despite owning a machine far more powerful than the specs require. The thing keeps crashing, and after several months of watching the Steam forums Valve came up with a workaround for the many, many others who had the same problem: go into BIOS and jiggle your memory timing! Well, that's great. Only my particular motherboard doesn't have that option, and even if it did, I sure wouldn't be screwing around with BIOS just to get a single program running. Far as I know, Valve *still* hasn't fixed the problem; as far as they're concerned, it's already fixed. Just jiggle your timing, guys.
That whole experience drove me away from Valve for good and back to my trusty PS2 for gaming. Yeah, games have bugs, but if a game doesn't work then it doesn't work *anywhere*. In the console world, you simply never have game developers telling you to jiggle your friggin' memory timings just to get their damned product to run. Again, that's the whole advantage of being a console gamer over being a PC gamer; take that away and no thanks, I'll keep my real computer, thanks. Microsoft isn't this stupid and my slimline PS2 is doing just fine.
Dammit, Sony, don't you realize that Microsoft isn't your greatest competitive challenge here? Or Nintendo? Are you so stupidly blind that you can't see that the PS3's most dangerous competitor is the PS2? You know, that extremely stable platform with thousands of quality titles that developers know inside and out, the one that isn't trying to be anything other than what it is? Don't you realize that there are millions of folks like me who aren't debating between the PS3 and the 360, but over whether or not to ditch our trusty PS2s for this trick pony that's looking more and more like a '48 Tucker?
Well, who cares. The SNES had a slower processor than the Genesis, but better graphics capablities, and you know who won that war. The graphics look amazing and the new games look interesting, so a small detail in spec's isn't going to ward me off. Sounds like another N64 vs PSX fight.
Exactly. In the end, it doesn't matter what the machine can do, but what the developers can do with it.
For all the alleged shortcomings of the PS2, developers over the years have learned to do some amazing things with it. Take a look at Resident Evil 4 on the PS2 and then think back to Silent Hill 2, or Twisted Metal: Black, or any of the early Quake clones - some of the early PS2 games were only a step or two beyond PSX quality. And when PS3 comes out, most of the first couple of years worth of games are going to look startlingly like PS2 games. But if the market is there, developers will spend the next six years learning to work miracles with the architecture.
That's likely what Sony is thinking right now. They know that what matters is how the PS3 is marketed, and if the hardware gives developers room to expand. If they can launch the PS3 well and sell those units, the dev guys will take up the slack. At any rate, the PS3's most significant market competition isn't Wii or the 360 - it's the PS2. Thousands of quality titles, low cost; some of the latest games are looking far better than anything we're likely to see from the PS3 at launch, just due to developer inexperience with the platform. Yeah, you'll be able to play them on the PS3, but really.. how often do you play the original Tomb Raider on the PS2?
My prediction - PS3 will launch strong and overpriced with a dozen or so relatively mediocre titles that look marginally better than the best PS2 has to offer (which is a LOT better than most of the PS2 B-list). Over the next six months, the price will come down, and the real next-gen games will start coming out (RE5, GTA4, etc.), while Sony leverages the success of the PS2 to cement the PS3's place in the market. Geekboys will complain that the 360 runs better hardware (ala Dreamcast), but Sony's going to make sure that the kids want the PS3. Long term, Sony will do just fine thanks to developer adaptation, as always.
There is absolutely nothing that entitles you to get a tech job. The Indians can do the same job you do at a much lower cost.
Well, AC, you know what? In today's global marketplace, nothing entitles you to keep your tech job for longer than three months if your corporate benefactors have a mood swing. Welcome to the party, glad you're here, let me take your coat.
Last number of years, Americans working in tech have had the blade of Indian outsourcing dangled over their heads, customarily as blackmail to force longer hours on fixed salaries. When there's just no more blood to be squeezed from the stone, boom, time to pack up, lay off and ship.
Meanwhile - and I'm saying this from experience working for a large American telecom that fired damned near everybody a few years ago to restock with cheap Indian labor - the Indians coming in would take all this as a show of cultural and intellectual superiority over us pampered, lazy Americans. Not all Indians, but certainly more than enough to carry the stereotype. We Americans have spent the last five years being barely tolerated by Indian coworkers touting the "get used to it, global economy, cheaper and better" dogma.
Now suddenly you're starting to sound like union men! Think it's shitty that Apple changed their minds? I've read other comments in this story pointing out that folks in India have extended families to care for, that they probably had to quit jobs they couldn't get back, etc etc etc. Well, the knife cuts both ways.
You guys weren't being aggressively competitive. You guys were simply used. We know how you feel.
Thing is, as we had to explain to our families why our jobs were being sent overseas, we knew the cold truth that you guys are learning now. It was never about better, or even about as good. It was about being okay while being cheaper. A lot cheaper. Period. Corporations did it because it's easier to look competent short term by cutting costs than by increasing income, and the unfortunate truth is that the American economy right now is still pretty much driven by cost cutting. It was also inevitable that, sooner or later, the incentive would begin to evaporate as those outsourced employees started asking for more money.
A few years ago Dilbert did a strip where our boy tells PHB, "I have some disturbing news. We outsourced our customer service function to India a few years ago. Apparently, they subcontracted the job to Mexico. Then Mexico subcontracted to Vietnam, who subcontracted to the Philippines. ... who subcontracted it to us. It turns out that we're the lowest-cost provider, because we lie about our hold times. In summary, we pay ourselves to hose ourselves. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
PHB: "We should raise prices?"
That's it in a nutshell. Again, welcome to the party - chips and dip are in the corner.
For the record, I agree that doing a three-month cocktease in India was a shitty thing for Apple to do. But then, so was bottom-dollar outsourcing it to begin with. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Do you even know what you are talking about? What security? Feeling secure in your right to be sent to a slave labour camp where you would be able to help complete Stalin's industrialization plan (such as building a huge network of canals that were barely used).
Oh, we're not talking about those people. Those were just troublemakers, rabblerousers, criminals and traitors like that Solzhenitsyn guy.
Contrary to popular belief in America, Communism had a whole lot of fans in Russia (which is why the Communist Party is today the only significant opposition party to Putin's United Russia party), with plenty of people willing to sacrifice freedom for a sense of security under Communist rule. Historically, Russians do this all the time.
Thing is, for a while Russians had it the other way: plenty of freedom (due to a completely collapsed government) and no security. The result? Organized crime by the bucketload and dead schoolkids in Chechnya. How many Russians are now screaming for more freedom? Not many.
It's all perception. No authoritarian/totalitarian state can exist without collaborators who think they're more secure if someone else's freedom is taken away, but who never think that it could be them going to the gulag instead. The sad truth is that even under Stalin, millions of Russians still felt safe and secure, knowing that firestarters were going to the camps.
Very, very true. It makes forensic testimony on criminal court cases a blast, though.
I've got a good friend who does DNA analysis for the state of Florida; I hear the stories all the time. Ten years ago, the challenge was convincing a jury that the evidence was ironclad, because most of them didn't know anything about the science. Now, thanks to CSI, the challenge is to explain that it's not magic. There's no magic computer that instantly identifies a perp based on a hair follicle. In the real world, it's all about statistical analysis and minimalizing margin of error. All math. But thanks to ridiculously unrealistic programs like CSI, we have one huge jury pool that now expects 100% certainty - a mathematical impossibility - in all cases of forensic analysis.
It still boils down to education. In the old days, it was about educating juries that the science was valid. Now, it's about educating them that the science is actually science.
I doubt this one belongs in the same category as Uncle Bob's Wacky Tinfoil Time Machine And Cappuccino Maker. Some seriously interesting things are happening in the field of nanostructured materials these days; an announcement like this doesn't surprise me in the least.
I did some work not long ago with a speciality chemical research firm in New York that develops nano ceramic composites for demanding performance environments (aircraft braking systems, Space Shuttle heat shielding, etc.). They played a big role in this summer's Discovery repair kit deployment. Anyway, I had a chance to learn quite a bit about the tech then.. more or less, it's about reducing nano component size to the point where there's a much greater ratio of surface to mass, which allows the particles to bind together much more tightly. Done right, the resulting material is very light and durable as hell. The New York company is currently getting themselves leveraged into motorcycle and automotive braking markets with this stuff.
Now these armor guys don't sound like they're doing quite the same thing. But I certainly wouldn't blow it off as vaporware. Nanotech isn't sci-fi; most of the cutting-edge work in the field right now is happening in superdurable materials. This fits right in line with where the entire field is at today. If this isn't for real, you can rest assured that the real thing is coming any day now, and that it'll look pretty much exactly like this.
Heh.. I can imagine the cellblock conversation now:
"Judges and juries, man. They don't get nothin'. They don't know that sometimes God wants you to kill your family and, like, do stuff with their body parts. Read the Bible, man - God's all into that. So, what you in here for, man?"
For the record, I can testify that it's definitely in the PS2 version. I've had a copy of PS2 San Andreas since the day it came out, and when the alleged PS2 codes went public I just had to confirm for myself. Drove down to the neighborhood Best Buy, picked up a $20 Action Replay Max kit, loaded it all up and punched in the dozen or so codes. Set sex appeal to max, rank to Godfather, and headed off to Michelle's San Fierro garage.
It works exactly as described, and frankly it's funny as hell. Katie actually goes at it in her nurse's uniform. You can change positions midway through and change the camera angles. The tempo picks up as things continue, and it ends pretty predictably. Folks, there ain't nothing subtle about this one.
As a proud GTA fan, it brings a tear to my eye, just thinking of all those fourteen-year-old boys out there gettin' wit dey hos.. our friends at Rockstar have officially made the big time.
One thing I can't help but wondering is the racial aspect - could any of this be due to the fact that the scenes show a fully clothed black guy screwing a bunch of naked white chicks?
Ah, but see, go back and read what the parent said. I was commenting on the "don't ever quit unless" attitude; that's the extreme one. There are plenty of reasons to quit one job before you've found the next - health, ethics, career decisions, family, personal fulfillment. A guy shouldn't have to be at death's door before he thinks that maybe it'd have been a better idea just to go do something else.
Sometimes you have a cushion, sometimes you don't. Depends on the circumstances. But playing the "never, ever" game is just an excuse to avoid honestly appraising the situation. If the parent had simply said, "always look hard before you leap", I'd have no problem agreeing with that, but that's not what he said.
Personally, I wouldn't run off in a huff just because my employer changed my toys. But I strongly doubt that we're getting the full story here. I think there's considerable more involved going on in this saga.
(And, by the way: the aforementioned criminal employer was the man's own father.)
Err, what? Was he working with hazerdous materials? I'm not trying to be offensive, but I'm honestly curious how it developed, if it wasn't from hazmat.
Yes, actually, he was. Industrial leak testing - nuclear reactors, solvent factories, that kind of fun stuff. Mostly on-site staff liaison work, but close enough to the messy stuff to have an impact.
The real clincher came down when his job wouldn't give him the time off to get what turned out to be melanoma checked out. He finally threatened to quit after two months of wrangling; they kinda needed him so they gave him the time off to have the surgery. By then it had metastasized and it was like a shotgun blast in his body - tumors everywhere, collapsed spine, the works. Doctors figured that he had the surgery about three weeks too late. Within three months his spine had gone and within six he was dead.
Life's even shorter without food. You better have a plan.
Never said otherwise, but that should be the case all the time. Most of the time, people cling to lousy jobs because they don't have a plan, and they're just hoping that someone else's plan works out for them.
Don't ever quite (read it twice) unless you have something else in line.
If we're going to read it twice, then at least spell the word right.
"Don't ever quit without another job lined up." Yeah, I've heard this one over the years many times myself, even though I've ignored it just as many times. Last time was from a friend who'd spent years working a job that wasn't any good for him, that was screwing up his personal life, but was more "stable" than going out and taking risks on what he really wanted to do.
About six months after he told me that line, regarding my headfirst plunge into self-employment a few years back, my friend died of cancer related to his job. He was 29 years old and it was a very nasty, ugly, painful death.
So give it a rest. Life's a lot shorter than people think, and sometimes rushing where angels fear to tread can be the best thing for a guy. In fact, sometimes it can save a life.
Just thought I'd drop this into the discussion since no one else seemed to be doing it.
DVD tech basically boils down to a symbolic interpretive code that lets a content producer create programs that a standard DVD player can read. It's not just the MPEG4 data streams; there's this whole architecture that the designer can use to create nifty menus and DVD options and stuff like that. The code is limited and there's some question over whether the whole rig is Turing Complete (I think that's the term - it's been awhile), but the basis of DVD playback is via interpretative program code rather than straight decrypt and playback.
Just about the only way I could see that an aftermarket protection scheme could work is if they reencrypt with a new formula and then use that code architecture to create a wrapper around the CSS decrypt step. In theory, those DVDs would play back on any CSS-licensed player that accesses the title tracks through the menu code.. but any player that attempts to access the title tracks directly would be stopped by the new encryption scheme.
It wouldn't be long before someone broke the scheme, because that code *still* has to be read in order to be executed on software players, but the promise is enough to give a corporate-think exec a warm fuzzy. Ultimately the only way it'd stick would be to figure out how to exclude software players, but I imagine that'd do some damage to playability on hardware players as well.
I'm just saying this stuff from memory; it'd been a few years since I was really well-read on the subject. Maybe there's someone else here who'd be so kind as to clarify the details.
I inherited a similar system back in the mid-90's when I did internal app development for a major aerospace/defense firm in Central Florida. The thing was a nightmare of nested IFs and CASEs, and every time one of my predecessors needed a new set of conditionals they'd just tack another in.
The thinking (or so I was told) was that in the early days of this app, it was written to be temporary, so just hack something together and make it fast. Unfortunately - and this seemed to be the rule with this company, and I hear still is - the temporary system stuck around because it worked today, and a new system would wait until tomorrow. Or next week. Or whenever.
So every new conditional was another hacked modification, another IF or CASE.
My task was to rewrite this monster and figure out a way to get it away from IF/CASE nesting, but keep every ounce of "flexibility" and functionality. Just a temporary system, they said; we'll replace it with a fully designed system after another year or two of consultation sessions.
After pulling my hair out for several days on that one, I thought about an article I once read on how the Infocom guys did their games. Rather than trying to code for every possible situation, they coded for a single *default* situation - "when in doubt, do this", etc. Then everything else was an exception rather than a rule, and could be easily abstracted. I did something similar with this system and sliced the code base down to about a third of the previous system, without losing any functionality. It actually gained some, since now new functions could be thrown into a database rather than needing to be hardcoded into nested branches.
It took a little longer to develop than what they anticipated. Not much longer, a few weeks, but a little longer. And my supervisor kept complaining that the design was too "involved" for a system that was only temporary.
That was 1997. The thing's still running today.
Moral of the story: In any given situation, the odds of replacement (whether code, or a job, or even a spouse) is essentially a path-of-least-resistance formula. If it's easier to maintain the status quo than it is to upset it, the status quo will almost always be maintained. The more management tells you that the code is temporary, the more you should assume it'll end up permanent.
Also, it never hurts to learn how other developers solved similar problems.:)
This is funny as all git-out. Makes a guy feel nostalgic.
I remember reading all these same arguments - the very same ones - back in 1996 on comp.os.linux.advocacy. "No standard GUI." "Hobbyist OS." "No standard widget set." "If you want to be taken seriously, you're going to have to be a clone of Windows." "If you want users, Linux will have to be a drop in replacement for Windows." "No serious developer wants to have anything to do with the GPL - BSD everything!" "A computer should be as easy to use as a toaster; I don't want to have to know how the computer works in order to use it!"
And my favorite..
"When Windows 98 comes out, Linux will be history. People are only trying Linux because they're tired of Windows 95 crashing."
I even remember a coworker telling me in 1997 that Linux would never reach the enterprise, because no one would trust their business to an OS written by volunteers.. and if it ever got to that point, Microsoft would simply crush it.
Or "buy it out". I always loved that one.
Folks, please, grow up. Like it or not, the free software and Open Source movements have significantly reshaped the computing world. They will continue to do so, which means that we will progressively move to a computing society based on consensus rather than dictation. If more options, GUI's, licenses, widgets, filesystems, even operating systems makes you feel uncomfortable.. well, you're just going to have to cope, adapt, and learn new things. Sometimes simplicity isn't a good thing.
Did the soldier leave any indication that he wanted his private correspondence to be kept for historical reasons? He doesn't have a duty to history any more than he had a duty to donate his organs; if he wanted his email read by his family, well, that's what wills are for.
I'm glad Yahoo's not releasing his passwords - call it a win for privacy advocates.
Ah, but once "they" know whose machine to sniff, it's pretty much over, isn't it?
The bad-guy goal (or the goal of anyone with an interest in privacy, God forbid) is to stay off "their" radar. If they're close enough to have a court order, you're already pretty close to having a court appearance.
The question they're asking these days is how to determine private identification based solely (or primarily) on activity in public communication space. Hard if not impossible where there's a strong vested interest in detection avoidance.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that this is anything new - or something whipped up by this newfangled Internet thing - needs to go grab a book called "The Image: A Guide To Psuedo-Events In America", by historian Daniel Boorstin. Written in 1961, it examines the history of public relations in America during the twentieth century. The book is mainly about how folks discovered that you don't actually need a real event in order to have news. Just create a *reaction*, regardless of whether it was justified by reality, and then report on the reaction.
Boorstin predicted that if things didn't change, the American entertainment and news gathering industries would eventually merge. Rather than accurately reporting the facts, the overriding goal would be to capture and maintain an audience.
Funny part is, when the book came out in 1962, Boorstin was traveling in Europe. Time magazine (IIRC) called him a traitor for suggesting that Americans would be so stupid to allow such a thing to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh.. reminds me of a story from the early days, Atari in 1982.
As the story goes, Parker Brothers had just cranked out "Empire Strikes Back" as a 2600 cart, and for some reason Harlan Ellison had been hired by Video Review magazine to study and review it. Now as many know, Ellison's a cranky old man, and has been since long before he became an old man. He gave the game a shot, pointing out in the review that - like in many videogames at the time - all the player really did was shoot things (in this case, snow walkers) in endless waves until the player couldn't anymore. Impossible to win. Ellison compared it to the Sisyphus myth, damned to push a gigantic boulder up a mountain for eternity, only to watch it roll down the other side and be forced to start again - a staggering waste of time and energy (and in the game's case, money). Long run, it communicated nothing positive, only reinforcing the "can't win, don't try, can't quit" view of the world.
What makes the story interesting is that both the president and the chief scientist at Atari thought so highly of this review that they ordered framed copies for their offices. No doubt it significantly influenced Atari from that point forward.
And considering that Atari was the video game industry at the time, inspiring the Nintendos and EAs to come, it's quite possible that this one 1982 review by Harlan Ellison leads at least indirectly to the points made in this study.
True, albeit odd, story.
The overwhelming majority people in the United States don't know anything about the wiretapping program, other than one exists, because the government's fighting like mad to keep us from knowing anything about it. Relying on a popular poll today for that kind of insight is akin to asking the average on-the-street American in 1944 how they felt about the government using secret high-explosive weapons on Japan to bring the war to a quicker close. I'd venture to say the positive vote would have been pretty high.
The numbers likely would have been different if those Americans knew exactly what was happening in New Mexico at the time, or what the ultimate consequences would be.
As usual, education makes all the difference.
I'm not sure how you do this.
You start by not thinking of it as a friggin' war. A "war" implies a struggle for supremacy and ultimately one side imposing a political will on the other. It implies that, at some point, one side will surrender and the other will rule, and that the entire dynamic at play is in determining which one is which. A war that doesn't end isn't really a war - it's politics.
Problem is, "politics" doesn't usually scare people - it only pisses them off. Only partisans put on uniforms and march into gunfire for politics.
This whole mess has always been about risk, and this bizarre idea that we can somehow build a machine or pass a law and magically make risk go away. That somehow we'll win the "war" and all the nuts out there, all those displaced by the success of Western civilization, will accept their local McDonalds and Walmarts joyfully instead of blowing up planes.
Thing is, no other area of risk management - business, engineering, whatever - focuses on the ideal of risk elimination. It's always risk mitigation, the reduction of risk. The reduction of error. Keeping the probabilities within acceptable tolerances - the very concept responsible for the success of Western civilization over the last four hundred years. Until mathematicisns started really attacking the idea of probability and risk a few centuries back, learning to accommodate risk instead of treating it like a gamble or the will of the gods, humanity as a whole played the all-or-nothing game.
As any engineer knows, if you believe your work is free of fault, it's YOU at fault. That's the whole goal of terrorism: to attack the idea of acceptable tolerance, to push a society into the very all-or-nothing position that the U.S. has been living in since 9/11. Ultimately, to push society back to a pre-Renaissance culture (namely, the 13th century). They love watching the airlines confiscating shampoo, because they know exactly how futile the exercise is. It's always a lot easier to hack a system than to create an unhackable one.
Problem is, we in the U.S. still think this is a war, which is why we're providing tons of free military training and social support to poor, disgruntled, uneducated, West-hating Arab teenagers in Iraq right now. We can't face up to the fact that no matter what we do, sooner or later someone is going to smuggle a suitcase nuke into a major U.S. city and set it off. We can't deal with the inevitability of that fact. But if we could accept that levies built to withstand a Cat 3 hurricane won't stand up to a Cat 5 - no matter how optimistic we're thinking - that would be a good start.
I guess I question why, on a day where there's yet another "NSA gonna get ya" story on the front page, that so many seem to be in a rush to hand the Internet wholesale to a government agency that's already proven itself to be corrupt and censor-happy.
Holy crap. Sony has gone insane.
As other posters have pointed out, this has been tried and tried and tried and tried. Intellivision. Atari. Coleco. Even priced efficiently, it's never worked and for good reason: the WHOLE POINT of owning a console is to ONLY HAVE A SINGLE, STANDARD CONFIG!!
I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, and I still haven't been able to play the damned thing despite owning a machine far more powerful than the specs require. The thing keeps crashing, and after several months of watching the Steam forums Valve came up with a workaround for the many, many others who had the same problem: go into BIOS and jiggle your memory timing! Well, that's great. Only my particular motherboard doesn't have that option, and even if it did, I sure wouldn't be screwing around with BIOS just to get a single program running. Far as I know, Valve *still* hasn't fixed the problem; as far as they're concerned, it's already fixed. Just jiggle your timing, guys.
That whole experience drove me away from Valve for good and back to my trusty PS2 for gaming. Yeah, games have bugs, but if a game doesn't work then it doesn't work *anywhere*. In the console world, you simply never have game developers telling you to jiggle your friggin' memory timings just to get their damned product to run. Again, that's the whole advantage of being a console gamer over being a PC gamer; take that away and no thanks, I'll keep my real computer, thanks. Microsoft isn't this stupid and my slimline PS2 is doing just fine.
Dammit, Sony, don't you realize that Microsoft isn't your greatest competitive challenge here? Or Nintendo? Are you so stupidly blind that you can't see that the PS3's most dangerous competitor is the PS2? You know, that extremely stable platform with thousands of quality titles that developers know inside and out, the one that isn't trying to be anything other than what it is? Don't you realize that there are millions of folks like me who aren't debating between the PS3 and the 360, but over whether or not to ditch our trusty PS2s for this trick pony that's looking more and more like a '48 Tucker?
Exactly. In the end, it doesn't matter what the machine can do, but what the developers can do with it.
For all the alleged shortcomings of the PS2, developers over the years have learned to do some amazing things with it. Take a look at Resident Evil 4 on the PS2 and then think back to Silent Hill 2, or Twisted Metal: Black, or any of the early Quake clones - some of the early PS2 games were only a step or two beyond PSX quality. And when PS3 comes out, most of the first couple of years worth of games are going to look startlingly like PS2 games. But if the market is there, developers will spend the next six years learning to work miracles with the architecture.
That's likely what Sony is thinking right now. They know that what matters is how the PS3 is marketed, and if the hardware gives developers room to expand. If they can launch the PS3 well and sell those units, the dev guys will take up the slack. At any rate, the PS3's most significant market competition isn't Wii or the 360 - it's the PS2. Thousands of quality titles, low cost; some of the latest games are looking far better than anything we're likely to see from the PS3 at launch, just due to developer inexperience with the platform. Yeah, you'll be able to play them on the PS3, but really.. how often do you play the original Tomb Raider on the PS2?
My prediction - PS3 will launch strong and overpriced with a dozen or so relatively mediocre titles that look marginally better than the best PS2 has to offer (which is a LOT better than most of the PS2 B-list). Over the next six months, the price will come down, and the real next-gen games will start coming out (RE5, GTA4, etc.), while Sony leverages the success of the PS2 to cement the PS3's place in the market. Geekboys will complain that the 360 runs better hardware (ala Dreamcast), but Sony's going to make sure that the kids want the PS3. Long term, Sony will do just fine thanks to developer adaptation, as always.
Well, AC, you know what? In today's global marketplace, nothing entitles you to keep your tech job for longer than three months if your corporate benefactors have a mood swing. Welcome to the party, glad you're here, let me take your coat.
Last number of years, Americans working in tech have had the blade of Indian outsourcing dangled over their heads, customarily as blackmail to force longer hours on fixed salaries. When there's just no more blood to be squeezed from the stone, boom, time to pack up, lay off and ship.
Meanwhile - and I'm saying this from experience working for a large American telecom that fired damned near everybody a few years ago to restock with cheap Indian labor - the Indians coming in would take all this as a show of cultural and intellectual superiority over us pampered, lazy Americans. Not all Indians, but certainly more than enough to carry the stereotype. We Americans have spent the last five years being barely tolerated by Indian coworkers touting the "get used to it, global economy, cheaper and better" dogma.
Now suddenly you're starting to sound like union men! Think it's shitty that Apple changed their minds? I've read other comments in this story pointing out that folks in India have extended families to care for, that they probably had to quit jobs they couldn't get back, etc etc etc. Well, the knife cuts both ways.
You guys weren't being aggressively competitive. You guys were simply used. We know how you feel.
Thing is, as we had to explain to our families why our jobs were being sent overseas, we knew the cold truth that you guys are learning now. It was never about better, or even about as good. It was about being okay while being cheaper. A lot cheaper. Period. Corporations did it because it's easier to look competent short term by cutting costs than by increasing income, and the unfortunate truth is that the American economy right now is still pretty much driven by cost cutting. It was also inevitable that, sooner or later, the incentive would begin to evaporate as those outsourced employees started asking for more money.
A few years ago Dilbert did a strip where our boy tells PHB, "I have some disturbing news. We outsourced our customer service function to India a few years ago. Apparently, they subcontracted the job to Mexico. Then Mexico subcontracted to Vietnam, who subcontracted to the Philippines. . .. who subcontracted it to us. It turns out that we're the lowest-cost provider, because we lie about our hold times. In summary, we pay ourselves to hose ourselves. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
PHB: "We should raise prices?"
That's it in a nutshell. Again, welcome to the party - chips and dip are in the corner.
For the record, I agree that doing a three-month cocktease in India was a shitty thing for Apple to do. But then, so was bottom-dollar outsourcing it to begin with. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Oh, we're not talking about those people. Those were just troublemakers, rabblerousers, criminals and traitors like that Solzhenitsyn guy.
Contrary to popular belief in America, Communism had a whole lot of fans in Russia (which is why the Communist Party is today the only significant opposition party to Putin's United Russia party), with plenty of people willing to sacrifice freedom for a sense of security under Communist rule. Historically, Russians do this all the time.
Thing is, for a while Russians had it the other way: plenty of freedom (due to a completely collapsed government) and no security. The result? Organized crime by the bucketload and dead schoolkids in Chechnya. How many Russians are now screaming for more freedom? Not many.
It's all perception. No authoritarian/totalitarian state can exist without collaborators who think they're more secure if someone else's freedom is taken away, but who never think that it could be them going to the gulag instead. The sad truth is that even under Stalin, millions of Russians still felt safe and secure, knowing that firestarters were going to the camps.
I've got a good friend who does DNA analysis for the state of Florida; I hear the stories all the time. Ten years ago, the challenge was convincing a jury that the evidence was ironclad, because most of them didn't know anything about the science. Now, thanks to CSI, the challenge is to explain that it's not magic. There's no magic computer that instantly identifies a perp based on a hair follicle. In the real world, it's all about statistical analysis and minimalizing margin of error. All math. But thanks to ridiculously unrealistic programs like CSI, we have one huge jury pool that now expects 100% certainty - a mathematical impossibility - in all cases of forensic analysis.
It still boils down to education. In the old days, it was about educating juries that the science was valid. Now, it's about educating them that the science is actually science.
I did some work not long ago with a speciality chemical research firm in New York that develops nano ceramic composites for demanding performance environments (aircraft braking systems, Space Shuttle heat shielding, etc.). They played a big role in this summer's Discovery repair kit deployment. Anyway, I had a chance to learn quite a bit about the tech then.. more or less, it's about reducing nano component size to the point where there's a much greater ratio of surface to mass, which allows the particles to bind together much more tightly. Done right, the resulting material is very light and durable as hell. The New York company is currently getting themselves leveraged into motorcycle and automotive braking markets with this stuff.
Now these armor guys don't sound like they're doing quite the same thing. But I certainly wouldn't blow it off as vaporware. Nanotech isn't sci-fi; most of the cutting-edge work in the field right now is happening in superdurable materials. This fits right in line with where the entire field is at today. If this isn't for real, you can rest assured that the real thing is coming any day now, and that it'll look pretty much exactly like this.
"Judges and juries, man. They don't get nothin'. They don't know that sometimes God wants you to kill your family and, like, do stuff with their body parts. Read the Bible, man - God's all into that. So, what you in here for, man?"
"Eh.. I got these boxes from the Post Office.."
It works exactly as described, and frankly it's funny as hell. Katie actually goes at it in her nurse's uniform. You can change positions midway through and change the camera angles. The tempo picks up as things continue, and it ends pretty predictably. Folks, there ain't nothing subtle about this one.
As a proud GTA fan, it brings a tear to my eye, just thinking of all those fourteen-year-old boys out there gettin' wit dey hos.. our friends at Rockstar have officially made the big time.
One thing I can't help but wondering is the racial aspect - could any of this be due to the fact that the scenes show a fully clothed black guy screwing a bunch of naked white chicks?
Ah, but see, go back and read what the parent said. I was commenting on the "don't ever quit unless" attitude; that's the extreme one. There are plenty of reasons to quit one job before you've found the next - health, ethics, career decisions, family, personal fulfillment. A guy shouldn't have to be at death's door before he thinks that maybe it'd have been a better idea just to go do something else.
Sometimes you have a cushion, sometimes you don't. Depends on the circumstances. But playing the "never, ever" game is just an excuse to avoid honestly appraising the situation. If the parent had simply said, "always look hard before you leap", I'd have no problem agreeing with that, but that's not what he said.
Personally, I wouldn't run off in a huff just because my employer changed my toys. But I strongly doubt that we're getting the full story here. I think there's considerable more involved going on in this saga.
(And, by the way: the aforementioned criminal employer was the man's own father.)
Yes, actually, he was. Industrial leak testing - nuclear reactors, solvent factories, that kind of fun stuff. Mostly on-site staff liaison work, but close enough to the messy stuff to have an impact.
The real clincher came down when his job wouldn't give him the time off to get what turned out to be melanoma checked out. He finally threatened to quit after two months of wrangling; they kinda needed him so they gave him the time off to have the surgery. By then it had metastasized and it was like a shotgun blast in his body - tumors everywhere, collapsed spine, the works. Doctors figured that he had the surgery about three weeks too late. Within three months his spine had gone and within six he was dead.
Never said otherwise, but that should be the case all the time. Most of the time, people cling to lousy jobs because they don't have a plan, and they're just hoping that someone else's plan works out for them.
If we're going to read it twice, then at least spell the word right.
"Don't ever quit without another job lined up." Yeah, I've heard this one over the years many times myself, even though I've ignored it just as many times. Last time was from a friend who'd spent years working a job that wasn't any good for him, that was screwing up his personal life, but was more "stable" than going out and taking risks on what he really wanted to do.
About six months after he told me that line, regarding my headfirst plunge into self-employment a few years back, my friend died of cancer related to his job. He was 29 years old and it was a very nasty, ugly, painful death.
So give it a rest. Life's a lot shorter than people think, and sometimes rushing where angels fear to tread can be the best thing for a guy. In fact, sometimes it can save a life.
Just thought I'd drop this into the discussion since no one else seemed to be doing it.
DVD tech basically boils down to a symbolic interpretive code that lets a content producer create programs that a standard DVD player can read. It's not just the MPEG4 data streams; there's this whole architecture that the designer can use to create nifty menus and DVD options and stuff like that. The code is limited and there's some question over whether the whole rig is Turing Complete (I think that's the term - it's been awhile), but the basis of DVD playback is via interpretative program code rather than straight decrypt and playback.
Just about the only way I could see that an aftermarket protection scheme could work is if they reencrypt with a new formula and then use that code architecture to create a wrapper around the CSS decrypt step. In theory, those DVDs would play back on any CSS-licensed player that accesses the title tracks through the menu code.. but any player that attempts to access the title tracks directly would be stopped by the new encryption scheme.
It wouldn't be long before someone broke the scheme, because that code *still* has to be read in order to be executed on software players, but the promise is enough to give a corporate-think exec a warm fuzzy. Ultimately the only way it'd stick would be to figure out how to exclude software players, but I imagine that'd do some damage to playability on hardware players as well.
I'm just saying this stuff from memory; it'd been a few years since I was really well-read on the subject. Maybe there's someone else here who'd be so kind as to clarify the details.
But does that icon come in cornflower blue?
I inherited a similar system back in the mid-90's when I did internal app development for a major aerospace/defense firm in Central Florida. The thing was a nightmare of nested IFs and CASEs, and every time one of my predecessors needed a new set of conditionals they'd just tack another in.
:)
The thinking (or so I was told) was that in the early days of this app, it was written to be temporary, so just hack something together and make it fast. Unfortunately - and this seemed to be the rule with this company, and I hear still is - the temporary system stuck around because it worked today, and a new system would wait until tomorrow. Or next week. Or whenever.
So every new conditional was another hacked modification, another IF or CASE.
My task was to rewrite this monster and figure out a way to get it away from IF/CASE nesting, but keep every ounce of "flexibility" and functionality. Just a temporary system, they said; we'll replace it with a fully designed system after another year or two of consultation sessions.
After pulling my hair out for several days on that one, I thought about an article I once read on how the Infocom guys did their games. Rather than trying to code for every possible situation, they coded for a single *default* situation - "when in doubt, do this", etc. Then everything else was an exception rather than a rule, and could be easily abstracted. I did something similar with this system and sliced the code base down to about a third of the previous system, without losing any functionality. It actually gained some, since now new functions could be thrown into a database rather than needing to be hardcoded into nested branches.
It took a little longer to develop than what they anticipated. Not much longer, a few weeks, but a little longer. And my supervisor kept complaining that the design was too "involved" for a system that was only temporary.
That was 1997. The thing's still running today.
Moral of the story: In any given situation, the odds of replacement (whether code, or a job, or even a spouse) is essentially a path-of-least-resistance formula. If it's easier to maintain the status quo than it is to upset it, the status quo will almost always be maintained. The more management tells you that the code is temporary, the more you should assume it'll end up permanent.
Also, it never hurts to learn how other developers solved similar problems.
This is funny as all git-out. Makes a guy feel nostalgic.
I remember reading all these same arguments - the very same ones - back in 1996 on comp.os.linux.advocacy. "No standard GUI." "Hobbyist OS." "No standard widget set." "If you want to be taken seriously, you're going to have to be a clone of Windows." "If you want users, Linux will have to be a drop in replacement for Windows." "No serious developer wants to have anything to do with the GPL - BSD everything!" "A computer should be as easy to use as a toaster; I don't want to have to know how the computer works in order to use it!"
And my favorite..
"When Windows 98 comes out, Linux will be history. People are only trying Linux because they're tired of Windows 95 crashing."
I even remember a coworker telling me in 1997 that Linux would never reach the enterprise, because no one would trust their business to an OS written by volunteers.. and if it ever got to that point, Microsoft would simply crush it.
Or "buy it out". I always loved that one.
Folks, please, grow up. Like it or not, the free software and Open Source movements have significantly reshaped the computing world. They will continue to do so, which means that we will progressively move to a computing society based on consensus rather than dictation. If more options, GUI's, licenses, widgets, filesystems, even operating systems makes you feel uncomfortable.. well, you're just going to have to cope, adapt, and learn new things. Sometimes simplicity isn't a good thing.
Welcome to the world of grown-ups.
Did the soldier leave any indication that he wanted his private correspondence to be kept for historical reasons? He doesn't have a duty to history any more than he had a duty to donate his organs; if he wanted his email read by his family, well, that's what wills are for.
I'm glad Yahoo's not releasing his passwords - call it a win for privacy advocates.
Ah, but once "they" know whose machine to sniff, it's pretty much over, isn't it?
The bad-guy goal (or the goal of anyone with an interest in privacy, God forbid) is to stay off "their" radar. If they're close enough to have a court order, you're already pretty close to having a court appearance.
The question they're asking these days is how to determine private identification based solely (or primarily) on activity in public communication space. Hard if not impossible where there's a strong vested interest in detection avoidance.
Hasn't it always?
Seriously, anyone who thinks that this is anything new - or something whipped up by this newfangled Internet thing - needs to go grab a book called "The Image: A Guide To Psuedo-Events In America", by historian Daniel Boorstin. Written in 1961, it examines the history of public relations in America during the twentieth century. The book is mainly about how folks discovered that you don't actually need a real event in order to have news. Just create a *reaction*, regardless of whether it was justified by reality, and then report on the reaction.
Boorstin predicted that if things didn't change, the American entertainment and news gathering industries would eventually merge. Rather than accurately reporting the facts, the overriding goal would be to capture and maintain an audience.
Funny part is, when the book came out in 1962, Boorstin was traveling in Europe. Time magazine (IIRC) called him a traitor for suggesting that Americans would be so stupid to allow such a thing to happen.