There needs to be some submitter accountability around here 'cause I imagine it's probably a lot of the same idiots who submit this pseudoscientific crap. I expect this kind of tripe from my ex-gf, who was on neurofeedback treatment for many years, but this is unacceptable for slashdot. Maybe whenever these kinds of articles crop up and are sufficiently debunked in the discussion the submitter should be banned from submitting any more stories for a few months. Or atleast when future submissions link to the same news source, the submission should be automatically flagged as being of questionable integrity.
I don't follow hardware much anymore so I'll take your word on that one. But the difference in clockspeeds between the revolution and other next gen. consoles is much larger: 729MHz compared to 3 cores at 3.2GHz. Assuming that the technology is even remotely comparable, that gap represents a significant difference in Nintendo's strategy, if only that they aren't touting hardware figures such as clockspeed and memory as the reason to buy the revolution--which I think was the author's point.
I don't see what's wrong with what he reported. I don't find it hard to believe that a writer for IGN might be close enough with a few revolution developers to be able to get some basic info such as clockspeeds on the revolution.
Besides, if you read the article, he isn't trying to make the point that revolution is likely a POS that can't compete with the other next gen consoles. He's simply making a point about their strategy, which clearly isn't trying to design the most powerful console of the three. Even if the architectures are drastically different, the difference in clockspeeds and available memory is very significant.
I know some of you fanboys might feel emasculated by these specs, but your own assumptions and criticisms of the article are totally off base. I mean, why are those numbers complete crap? How do you know they're crap? Are you a close acquaintance with someone who's working on the revolution? And did the author suggest that the architectures were the same for all the platforms, or that the hardware performance of the system can be perfectly and accurately extrapolated from the clockspeeds? No, he simply gave information that he had, which were the clockspeeds in this case. He leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate what they will by comparing them with the numbers for gamecube, and other consoles, and the author in fact states "numbers don't mean everything."
So don't rip on the author for simply reporting the information that he has. If hearing the specs for the revolution pisses you off, then just don't read articles reporting on them.
Sure, it might be part of the specs. But that doesn't mean that this DRM scheme will be enforceable. They can include anything they want into the specs, but if the players don't sell, or they sell and people sue, they will have to change the specs. Poorly designed technology gets rejected by consumers and driven into disuse all of the time.
How long do you think a manufacturer will continue producing a device that no one wants? And if no one wants to buy a Blu-Ray player, will the studios continue to distribute in that format? I don't see a lot of DVD players supporting DIVX these days.
What is ridiculous isn't whether or not the movie studios will try it, but believing that the scheme would actually work (IEEE Spectrum magazine voted AACS as one of the technologies most likely to fail). We just don't have the kind of technology required for such enforcement to be feasible--broadcast encryption will always be vulnerable to key-sharing, which is a problem that is mathematically insoluble. And once people figure out how to generate/extract/steal decryption keys, regular users will start being affected by revoked keys, and the manufacturers will end up with the same problem as disabling an entire line of players when a single device is compromised.
Besides, consumers won't put up with the kind of inconvenience such a scheme would cause. Unless these players come with useful features (outside of DRM enforcement) requiring an internet connection, I wouldn't agree to hooking my player up to ther internet. And if I have to worry about the player not working if my internet connection goes down, or their servers go down, then I'd just opt to buy my movies in other formats. And like I said earlier, there's no guarantee that the manufacturer will find out that a machine has been compromised.
That's unfeasible. If a certain model of Blu-Ray player sells 200,000 units, and a single person cracks the player, the manufacturer can't just disable all 200,000 units. If I buy a $200 Blu-Ray player, and it just stops working one day for no apparent reason, the manufacturer will have a lot of explaining to do. It just wouldn't fly.
And if they did just disable the entire model, they would have to recall every single unit of the player sold and issue new ones to all the owners who legally paid for the device and did not breach any kind of end-user contract. So unless they had a way of IDing the owner of each unit, the person who cracks it will probably also get issued a new player. The system just wouldn't work well as a deterent.
Besides, how would they figure out if a particular model has been cracked or not? Even though internet access is pretty ubiquitous in the U.S., most people probably wouldn't put up with having to be connected to the internet to watch a Blu-Ray DVD (Much less having their identity associated with their DVD player. Some people still value their privacy). And assuming that someone has cracked the player so that they can bypass the DRM, what makes you think that the cracked player will be able to alert the DRM servers that the system has been tampered with?
It's simply technically impractical, and most likely even impossible, to enforce such DRM schemes. Just look at all the software applications and games that try the same thing and have all failed without exception.
Well, if a certain popular Blu-Ray player is a lot easier to crack than other Blu-Ray or HD players, then Blu-Ray may become more popular in general simply due to that.
Google Pages is beta, so there probably are some bugs. But what you describe seems to be more related to a lack of understanding of HTML. Image tags can be aligned vertically in either top, bottom, or middle positions relative to the text. They can also be aligned horizontally to the left or right of the text. You can't align an image to the center of text because it just doesn't make sense to do so. If you want an image to be in the center of the page, just center the text/paragraph justification and put the image on its own line. Then whether the images is top/bottom/middle/left/right aligned doesn't matter.
What kind of useless re-ordering would result from what he proposes? It would actually make sorting domains and subdomains by their parent/root domains a lot easier.
Instead of getting:
admin.mywebsite.com
business.newsforge.com
mail.google.com
mail.yahoo.com
news.google.com
news.yahoo.com
newsforge.com
programming.newsforge.com
reuters.com
www.google.com
www.mywebsite.com
www.reuters.com
www.yahoo.com
when you sort alphabetically, you would simply have:
I totally agree with you. And though I'm not so sure if what you're describing is the case with the current thread, It's pretty lame that your post would be modded as a troll since you make a very good point.
What exactly was the conclusion that they drew? It seems to me that they've simply stated known data (astronauts who have visited the moon develop cataracts about 7 years earlier than those who haven't. That there were only 12 astronauts whom have visited the moon doesn't change this fact), and speculate that cosmic radiation may be the cause of these observed occurences since it affects the aging of cells.
If they would have said that visiting the moon causes you to develop cataracts 7 years earlier than usual, then that might be drawing conclusions based on insufficient observations. But just because they're talking about a small number of individuals doesn't mean they can't make a statement of fact.
I agree. What you describe ultimately ends up being a tyranny of the majority, especially with the bipartisan system. In a true participatory democracy, most aspects of government would be delegated to local government, which would act through frequent broad-based referendums.
The problem is that there are more than two sides to most issues. And with the current political system, both the Democrats and Republicans are simply different factions of the American business party--since their campaign funding, and thus their election, comes from the extremely wealthy, whom are mostly corporate entities, or large stockholders.
It doesn't take nearly as much money to run for offices at the local government level, and thus the bipartisan sytem has a much weaker hold there, and independents have a much better chance of getting elected. Also, because power isn't as consolidated, the majority rule isn't as likely to always be composed of the same majority (ie. one party or another).
The U.S. government is actually quite far from a true participatory democracy. Referendums are rarely held, most issues being decided by representatives without consulting the public, and so the most anyone can do is choose one party or the other during election time.
Yea, it's sorta like worrying about a cure for AIDS putting pharmacutical companies producing current treatments out of business. Business should be secondary to progress.
IMO, you can't get any simpler than Mario Party. The mini-games all have very simple rules and don't require that much coordination to play (we often played them while drinking 40's and never ran into any problems trying to figure out the controls or objectives), and the learning curve is very shallow so anyone can just pick it up and jump in with veteran players.
If that's so then why are Walmart, and Nike, and pretty much all U.S. clothing manufacturers allowed to run sweatshops in other countries that would violate labor laws here in the U.S.?
In regards to online banking, biometrics isn't really an option. And, personally, I don't really see any obvious problems with a standard username/password verification system, or "lowest common denominator digital identity solution," as the author so succinctly put it. The main problem is with people lacking common sense when it comes to basic internet security practices. What it comes down to is that the PEBKAC. With credit card fraud, many large credit card issuers do have back-up security protocals in place, such as calling to verify a purchase when the shipping address is different from the billing address. Some banking companies make you punch in your pin/password via a virtual keypad so as to foil thwart keylogging attacks. But it's hard to speculate what other security practices may be put in place on the basis of the article since it really doesn't say anything other than 'identity theft costs the UK a lot of money', 'more businesses are spending more on securing transactions', and 'a felxible, robust, scalable, tiered, and cost-effective solution--which we happen to sell--is the best solution for large application owners.'
It's hard to analyze what he's saying from a technical perspective. The article really doesn't provide any techncial analysis (or description, for that matter) of various security models. It reads like a sales-pitch--lots of professional-sounding jargon and technical terms overloaded with excessive/meaningless adjectives. The whole piece seems to be written by someone with a non-technical degree as it mostly addresses the business aspects of information (it talks about the issue in terms of markets, financial cost, and revenue potential, which kinda tells you that this isn't an IT security expert, but rather someone with a business degree in an upper-management position). But even from a business prespective most of the statements are meaningless (though they might attract potential investors whom don't know anything about IT and can't spot the mounds of bullshit coming out of this guy's mouth); many of the sentences don't even make any sense, for example: "The integrated identity model provides a new perspective on identity management for large application owners, and significantly simplifies the deployment and management of applications which span communities, require a tiered authentication and risk model or raise significant privacy issues."--yes, that string of words which you just said makes perfect sense; just keep talking while I go shift some paradigms with my positive synergies.
Honestly, what the hell was the/. editor thinking when he posted this? Luckily, most/.ers don't read the article either so I'm sure we'll still manage to have some interesting disucssions which are completely unrelated to the article.
Actually, 10% of £1.3 billion is £130 million, not £1.3 million.
But I agree with you that this article seems to be written for the sole purpose of hyping up the threat of online identity fraud. The (poorly written) article provides almost no useful technical information, and it's clearly just a marketing piece aimed at attracting customers. The author works for Thales eSecurity, a company which sells precisely the security services/solutions that the article is promoting. Their website is kinda sketchy too--using a bunch of dummy links of common search terms at the bottom of each page, presumably to boost search engine rankings.
It's pretty sad really that so many companies out there rely on, and indeed thrive off of, purely bullshitting people into paying for crap products/services. It really requires no talent to profit from the general gullibility of most people while contributing nothing at all to society. All it takes is for one to have the initial capital and the ability to market medicore yet high-priced products or services to potential customers.
Yes, we've all heard that same tired argument that's constantly used to justify every new government policy that encroaches on our rights as individuals. Frankly, I'm not mad at the government for being unable to stop the 9/11 attacks. Absolute security is unattainable, and the increased security we gain from capitulating to fear-mongering government officials isn't worth the trade-offs. I'm really more upset at our government leaders for their foreign policy decisions that elicits hostility from people of other nations and motivates such attacks.
Most bands people end up listening to are signed because only a band with a distribution system gets their music out. Sure, label execs want the best music on their label, but that doesn't mean they have good taste in music. A band is usually only signed if it is seen as "marketable," which may not even conform to the label exec's own tastes in music. That's why most good bands, imho, come from indie labels.
So basically you're saying that you need record labels to tell you what's good music? That's pretty sad considerng what offerings the big four labels have been promoting the most these days.
Slashdot Mirror
There needs to be some submitter accountability around here 'cause I imagine it's probably a lot of the same idiots who submit this pseudoscientific crap. I expect this kind of tripe from my ex-gf, who was on neurofeedback treatment for many years, but this is unacceptable for slashdot. Maybe whenever these kinds of articles crop up and are sufficiently debunked in the discussion the submitter should be banned from submitting any more stories for a few months. Or atleast when future submissions link to the same news source, the submission should be automatically flagged as being of questionable integrity.
I don't follow hardware much anymore so I'll take your word on that one. But the difference in clockspeeds between the revolution and other next gen. consoles is much larger: 729MHz compared to 3 cores at 3.2GHz. Assuming that the technology is even remotely comparable, that gap represents a significant difference in Nintendo's strategy, if only that they aren't touting hardware figures such as clockspeed and memory as the reason to buy the revolution--which I think was the author's point.
I don't see what's wrong with what he reported. I don't find it hard to believe that a writer for IGN might be close enough with a few revolution developers to be able to get some basic info such as clockspeeds on the revolution.
Besides, if you read the article, he isn't trying to make the point that revolution is likely a POS that can't compete with the other next gen consoles. He's simply making a point about their strategy, which clearly isn't trying to design the most powerful console of the three. Even if the architectures are drastically different, the difference in clockspeeds and available memory is very significant.
I know some of you fanboys might feel emasculated by these specs, but your own assumptions and criticisms of the article are totally off base. I mean, why are those numbers complete crap? How do you know they're crap? Are you a close acquaintance with someone who's working on the revolution? And did the author suggest that the architectures were the same for all the platforms, or that the hardware performance of the system can be perfectly and accurately extrapolated from the clockspeeds? No, he simply gave information that he had, which were the clockspeeds in this case. He leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate what they will by comparing them with the numbers for gamecube, and other consoles, and the author in fact states "numbers don't mean everything."
So don't rip on the author for simply reporting the information that he has. If hearing the specs for the revolution pisses you off, then just don't read articles reporting on them.
yea, that's what all guys with a low clockspeeds say.
Sure, it might be part of the specs. But that doesn't mean that this DRM scheme will be enforceable. They can include anything they want into the specs, but if the players don't sell, or they sell and people sue, they will have to change the specs. Poorly designed technology gets rejected by consumers and driven into disuse all of the time.
How long do you think a manufacturer will continue producing a device that no one wants? And if no one wants to buy a Blu-Ray player, will the studios continue to distribute in that format? I don't see a lot of DVD players supporting DIVX these days.
What is ridiculous isn't whether or not the movie studios will try it, but believing that the scheme would actually work (IEEE Spectrum magazine voted AACS as one of the technologies most likely to fail). We just don't have the kind of technology required for such enforcement to be feasible--broadcast encryption will always be vulnerable to key-sharing, which is a problem that is mathematically insoluble. And once people figure out how to generate/extract/steal decryption keys, regular users will start being affected by revoked keys, and the manufacturers will end up with the same problem as disabling an entire line of players when a single device is compromised.
Besides, consumers won't put up with the kind of inconvenience such a scheme would cause. Unless these players come with useful features (outside of DRM enforcement) requiring an internet connection, I wouldn't agree to hooking my player up to ther internet. And if I have to worry about the player not working if my internet connection goes down, or their servers go down, then I'd just opt to buy my movies in other formats. And like I said earlier, there's no guarantee that the manufacturer will find out that a machine has been compromised.
Ok, that makes much more sense. Thanks.
That's unfeasible. If a certain model of Blu-Ray player sells 200,000 units, and a single person cracks the player, the manufacturer can't just disable all 200,000 units. If I buy a $200 Blu-Ray player, and it just stops working one day for no apparent reason, the manufacturer will have a lot of explaining to do. It just wouldn't fly.
And if they did just disable the entire model, they would have to recall every single unit of the player sold and issue new ones to all the owners who legally paid for the device and did not breach any kind of end-user contract. So unless they had a way of IDing the owner of each unit, the person who cracks it will probably also get issued a new player. The system just wouldn't work well as a deterent.
Besides, how would they figure out if a particular model has been cracked or not? Even though internet access is pretty ubiquitous in the U.S., most people probably wouldn't put up with having to be connected to the internet to watch a Blu-Ray DVD (Much less having their identity associated with their DVD player. Some people still value their privacy). And assuming that someone has cracked the player so that they can bypass the DRM, what makes you think that the cracked player will be able to alert the DRM servers that the system has been tampered with?
It's simply technically impractical, and most likely even impossible, to enforce such DRM schemes. Just look at all the software applications and games that try the same thing and have all failed without exception.
Well, if a certain popular Blu-Ray player is a lot easier to crack than other Blu-Ray or HD players, then Blu-Ray may become more popular in general simply due to that.
Google Pages is beta, so there probably are some bugs. But what you describe seems to be more related to a lack of understanding of HTML. Image tags can be aligned vertically in either top, bottom, or middle positions relative to the text. They can also be aligned horizontally to the left or right of the text. You can't align an image to the center of text because it just doesn't make sense to do so. If you want an image to be in the center of the page, just center the text/paragraph justification and put the image on its own line. Then whether the images is top/bottom/middle/left/right aligned doesn't matter.
What kind of useless re-ordering would result from what he proposes? It would actually make sorting domains and subdomains by their parent/root domains a lot easier.
Instead of getting:
when you sort alphabetically, you would simply have:
I totally agree with you. And though I'm not so sure if what you're describing is the case with the current thread, It's pretty lame that your post would be modded as a troll since you make a very good point.
My computer crashes all the time, and I'm always kicking it on accident. And I'm supposed to use this thing for work? Is this really a good idea?
I think your problem EBKAC.
What exactly was the conclusion that they drew? It seems to me that they've simply stated known data (astronauts who have visited the moon develop cataracts about 7 years earlier than those who haven't. That there were only 12 astronauts whom have visited the moon doesn't change this fact), and speculate that cosmic radiation may be the cause of these observed occurences since it affects the aging of cells.
If they would have said that visiting the moon causes you to develop cataracts 7 years earlier than usual, then that might be drawing conclusions based on insufficient observations. But just because they're talking about a small number of individuals doesn't mean they can't make a statement of fact.
I agree. What you describe ultimately ends up being a tyranny of the majority, especially with the bipartisan system. In a true participatory democracy, most aspects of government would be delegated to local government, which would act through frequent broad-based referendums.
The problem is that there are more than two sides to most issues. And with the current political system, both the Democrats and Republicans are simply different factions of the American business party--since their campaign funding, and thus their election, comes from the extremely wealthy, whom are mostly corporate entities, or large stockholders.
It doesn't take nearly as much money to run for offices at the local government level, and thus the bipartisan sytem has a much weaker hold there, and independents have a much better chance of getting elected. Also, because power isn't as consolidated, the majority rule isn't as likely to always be composed of the same majority (ie. one party or another).
The U.S. government is actually quite far from a true participatory democracy. Referendums are rarely held, most issues being decided by representatives without consulting the public, and so the most anyone can do is choose one party or the other during election time.
Yea, it's sorta like worrying about a cure for AIDS putting pharmacutical companies producing current treatments out of business. Business should be secondary to progress.
No, I'm a broke-ass college student. Besides, I happen to like the taste of malt liquor.
IMO, you can't get any simpler than Mario Party. The mini-games all have very simple rules and don't require that much coordination to play (we often played them while drinking 40's and never ran into any problems trying to figure out the controls or objectives), and the learning curve is very shallow so anyone can just pick it up and jump in with veteran players.
If that's so then why are Walmart, and Nike, and pretty much all U.S. clothing manufacturers allowed to run sweatshops in other countries that would violate labor laws here in the U.S.?
Apparently this chick would.
In regards to online banking, biometrics isn't really an option. And, personally, I don't really see any obvious problems with a standard username/password verification system, or "lowest common denominator digital identity solution," as the author so succinctly put it. The main problem is with people lacking common sense when it comes to basic internet security practices. What it comes down to is that the PEBKAC. With credit card fraud, many large credit card issuers do have back-up security protocals in place, such as calling to verify a purchase when the shipping address is different from the billing address. Some banking companies make you punch in your pin/password via a virtual keypad so as to foil thwart keylogging attacks. But it's hard to speculate what other security practices may be put in place on the basis of the article since it really doesn't say anything other than 'identity theft costs the UK a lot of money', 'more businesses are spending more on securing transactions', and 'a felxible, robust, scalable, tiered, and cost-effective solution--which we happen to sell--is the best solution for large application owners.'
It's hard to analyze what he's saying from a technical perspective. The article really doesn't provide any techncial analysis (or description, for that matter) of various security models. It reads like a sales-pitch--lots of professional-sounding jargon and technical terms overloaded with excessive/meaningless adjectives. The whole piece seems to be written by someone with a non-technical degree as it mostly addresses the business aspects of information (it talks about the issue in terms of markets, financial cost, and revenue potential, which kinda tells you that this isn't an IT security expert, but rather someone with a business degree in an upper-management position). But even from a business prespective most of the statements are meaningless (though they might attract potential investors whom don't know anything about IT and can't spot the mounds of bullshit coming out of this guy's mouth); many of the sentences don't even make any sense, for example: "The integrated identity model provides a new perspective on identity management for large application owners, and significantly simplifies the deployment and management of applications which span communities, require a tiered authentication and risk model or raise significant privacy issues."--yes, that string of words which you just said makes perfect sense; just keep talking while I go shift some paradigms with my positive synergies.
Honestly, what the hell was the /. editor thinking when he posted this? Luckily, most /.ers don't read the article either so I'm sure we'll still manage to have some interesting disucssions which are completely unrelated to the article.
Actually, 10% of £1.3 billion is £130 million, not £1.3 million.
But I agree with you that this article seems to be written for the sole purpose of hyping up the threat of online identity fraud. The (poorly written) article provides almost no useful technical information, and it's clearly just a marketing piece aimed at attracting customers. The author works for Thales eSecurity, a company which sells precisely the security services/solutions that the article is promoting. Their website is kinda sketchy too--using a bunch of dummy links of common search terms at the bottom of each page, presumably to boost search engine rankings.
It's pretty sad really that so many companies out there rely on, and indeed thrive off of, purely bullshitting people into paying for crap products/services. It really requires no talent to profit from the general gullibility of most people while contributing nothing at all to society. All it takes is for one to have the initial capital and the ability to market medicore yet high-priced products or services to potential customers.
Yes, we've all heard that same tired argument that's constantly used to justify every new government policy that encroaches on our rights as individuals. Frankly, I'm not mad at the government for being unable to stop the 9/11 attacks. Absolute security is unattainable, and the increased security we gain from capitulating to fear-mongering government officials isn't worth the trade-offs. I'm really more upset at our government leaders for their foreign policy decisions that elicits hostility from people of other nations and motivates such attacks.
Yes, but who cares what you think? You live on a farm.
I kid, I kid. :-p
Most bands people end up listening to are signed because only a band with a distribution system gets their music out. Sure, label execs want the best music on their label, but that doesn't mean they have good taste in music. A band is usually only signed if it is seen as "marketable," which may not even conform to the label exec's own tastes in music. That's why most good bands, imho, come from indie labels.
So basically you're saying that you need record labels to tell you what's good music? That's pretty sad considerng what offerings the big four labels have been promoting the most these days.