It's a very simple model really, when you think about it. Let's examine their possible train of thought:
Sites can sell advertising when they get lots of frequent users. Sites need users to get users. Sites need some kind of user list to bootstrap. Where can you get a big list of users from? Why, isn't that opensource stuff based on lots of people communicating in the open, over the net? Oh, hey, let's use those suckers. Hmm. How can we make more suckers sign up after the first ones? Hmm... we need to make the ones who aren't in the DB feel like they should be. I know... rank them!
Hmm... do these people care about rankings? Will it actually be useful? Ahh... Who cares?
Memory is reliably addressed -- writing to the address you wrote to earlier will change the same physical part of the ram. There are already existing tools that erase passphrases after a certain period without use. All you need to do is make those tools also scrub the addresses used to store it. A simple patch would cover that.
What's more of a problem is: how to make this timeout+prompt for passphrase thing work with disk-level encyption regardless of whether you're a console or in a GUI, on an otherwise decent OS like unix? I wouldn't trust Windows to implement disk-level encyption safely anyway, so all bets are off there. But unix still has serious issues regarding the simple presentation of a dialog box to the user no matter what part of the system they're looking at, in a reliable and secure way.
That doesn't even address the vector of replacing the setup.exe (or equivalent) on, say, an Office 2003 cd posted on thepiratebay.
Why stop there? Most of the Windows OS torrents are slipstreamed. There's no reason to assume they didn't slipstream a few viruses, bots, and backdoors in there too.
Yes, sorry. I do understand why. I just don't always remember. Not entirely my fault, I have to say; the people who design these variations should differentiate them more, instead of trying to borrow popularity from well established technologies.
Trust is a precious resource that you must cultivate; it's not a boomerang. Never risk throwing it away.
Agreed. This is exactly what freecom did when they sold me a usb bluetooth adaptor with an antenna. I dropped it one day, and the little case popped open. OK, that happens; no big deal. What WAS a big deal though, was the antenna -- it was simply a bit of plastic, swinging from a hole in the case. There were no wires attached to this, nothing else near it that even suggested it might have accidentally been shipped with a "placeholder" or something like that. It was simple, unadultered fraud. The antenna might as well have been made by Tomy, which is a shame, as otherwise, it worked fine, and the antenna probably was unnecessary after all (I bought that model FOR it's antenna figuring it wouldn't hurt, and might help).
What do freecom gain from this? Something like $5, I'd guess, after the store etc. take their cuts.
What do they lose? Me, as a an IT industry purchaser, ever buying their products again. Me telling other IT people on slashdot what I think of Freecom.
What could they have done instead, to compete with manufacturer X's? "We're confident in our product's reception/transmission, and have no need for gimmicks like the antennas manufacturer X uses." I probably would have bought a lot more of their stuff after that.
I think the key point is that ISPs are paid to facilitate a communication layer, which transports requests and answers between your systems and third party systems. If they intercept that communication and mess with it, they're not providing the service you asked for. It goes way beyond things like traffic shaping, which are already perceived as pretty bad for ISPs to do (although in that case, I think it's more a question of HOW they do it).
The other point I'd like to make is that this article's headline is complete BS. I know of at least one ISP that has no such plans. So, it's not "UK ISPs" it's "Some UK ISPs" -- most likely one, or two.
I see this is getting marked as a troll. Fair enough, if that's your opinion, BUT... it's my opinion that moderators should have actually done the certification before saying that, or THEY are the ones with a bias.
You will also note that the British seem to have no trouble confusing the word "continent" with the specific place "The Continent". This is exactly the same issue as "solar system" vs. "The Solar System", and exactly as pointless to argue about, since it doesn't hinder communication at all.
Well, that's because they use the name "Europe" or "The European Continent", when there's any ambiguity. What are we going to call Our Solar System, when "The Solar System" means the one people have colonised and live on? What are we going to call The Sun when every colony has it's own? Hell, what do we call it in games right now? That's why people are trying to argue for naming conventions.
You can't do that with physics on a graphics card because it's a one way pipeline, from your program to your monitor.
I don't think that's the case. Graphics cards work on the same PCI-X buses that acceleration cards probably use lately. They use DMA to communicate with main memory without involving the processor. The VRAM might be optimised for writing, but it should be very possible to do calculations on the card, and get the results back. That's the whole point of the generalised GPGPU techniques.
On physics being done in the CPU as well, and on physics engines not being used for much beyond extra eye-candy... well, it's the natural consequence of having machines without that feature as standard. You can't rely on it for the core gameplay, therefore it's only used for bonus features.
You must not be microsoft certified, as you'll realise just how similar this indoctrination is to the one you sat through to get your Microsoft(tm) permission to work in IT.
Sounds about right, as far as it goes. But isn't the real problem that we drill energy from under ground, and release it into the atmosphere, with no way to put it back?
looks like some senators might actually be listening to their constituents
Possibly. The question for me is... why did this come up in the middle of a wider net neutrality debate? Granted, the two are (vaguely) related -- in the way that bike theft statistics are related to the number of bikes you can fit on a road, perhaps.
However, it sounds to me like they're trying to bribe netizens into giving up long-term goals like net neutrality in exchange for getting a relatively small gripe-of-the-moment issue resolved. I say small and gripe of the moment, because this is bound to get solved anyway -- there's no way ISPs will be able to lie to customers about what they're getting forever. Net neutrality is a much larger issue though.
Note to young readers/logicians: I'm NOT saying this is happening. I'm NOT being paranoid. I'm raising a legitimate concern, and warning people not to automatically assume this is a good thing to get behind. It could be a great thing to get behind. Getting behind it could also screw you in ways you don't yet realise. Research, THEN support.
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I think you'll find that ISPs would moan a lot less if the telcos weren't charging extortionate fees.
Technically, there's no reason why not. There are plenty of different private IP ranges to use so that one NAT'd subnet isn't confused with another.
I think they meant rich in the ironic sense... you know, as in, "that's rich, coming from you."
No, I can assure you, it IS minimal.
Being part of an organisation doesn't always give you insight into it. Sometimes it makes you blind to it.
Personally, my vote is for the all-binary Microsoft-employee vs. Non-microsoft-employee model.
It's a very simple model really, when you think about it. Let's examine their possible train of thought:
Sites can sell advertising when they get lots of frequent users. Sites need users to get users. Sites need some kind of user list to bootstrap. Where can you get a big list of users from? Why, isn't that opensource stuff based on lots of people communicating in the open, over the net? Oh, hey, let's use those suckers. Hmm. How can we make more suckers sign up after the first ones? Hmm... we need to make the ones who aren't in the DB feel like they should be. I know... rank them!
Hmm... do these people care about rankings? Will it actually be useful? Ahh... Who cares?
Memory is reliably addressed -- writing to the address you wrote to earlier will change the same physical part of the ram. There are already existing tools that erase passphrases after a certain period without use. All you need to do is make those tools also scrub the addresses used to store it. A simple patch would cover that.
What's more of a problem is: how to make this timeout+prompt for passphrase thing work with disk-level encyption regardless of whether you're a console or in a GUI, on an otherwise decent OS like unix? I wouldn't trust Windows to implement disk-level encyption safely anyway, so all bets are off there. But unix still has serious issues regarding the simple presentation of a dialog box to the user no matter what part of the system they're looking at, in a reliable and secure way.
I'm sure there's some way to hotswap a normal RAM module without frying it, even if it involves attaching extra ground wires for a while.
Hmm. I can't help wondering how something that's worth $100 per day to google isn't worth the finder keeping forever.
As long as no one at microsoft is riding dragons and turning up at Aslevjal, I'll not worry just yet
Why stop there? Most of the Windows OS torrents are slipstreamed. There's no reason to assume they didn't slipstream a few viruses, bots, and backdoors in there too.
Yes, sorry. I do understand why. I just don't always remember. Not entirely my fault, I have to say; the people who design these variations should differentiate them more, instead of trying to borrow popularity from well established technologies.
Well, one man's smart marketing decision is another man's blatant lie. It comes down to individual scruples, I guess.
Agreed. This is exactly what freecom did when they sold me a usb bluetooth adaptor with an antenna. I dropped it one day, and the little case popped open. OK, that happens; no big deal. What WAS a big deal though, was the antenna -- it was simply a bit of plastic, swinging from a hole in the case. There were no wires attached to this, nothing else near it that even suggested it might have accidentally been shipped with a "placeholder" or something like that. It was simple, unadultered fraud. The antenna might as well have been made by Tomy, which is a shame, as otherwise, it worked fine, and the antenna probably was unnecessary after all (I bought that model FOR it's antenna figuring it wouldn't hurt, and might help).
What do freecom gain from this? Something like $5, I'd guess, after the store etc. take their cuts.
What do they lose? Me, as a an IT industry purchaser, ever buying their products again. Me telling other IT people on slashdot what I think of Freecom.
What could they have done instead, to compete with manufacturer X's? "We're confident in our product's reception/transmission, and have no need for gimmicks like the antennas manufacturer X uses." I probably would have bought a lot more of their stuff after that.
Dumbasses.
I think the key point is that ISPs are paid to facilitate a communication layer, which transports requests and answers between your systems and third party systems. If they intercept that communication and mess with it, they're not providing the service you asked for. It goes way beyond things like traffic shaping, which are already perceived as pretty bad for ISPs to do (although in that case, I think it's more a question of HOW they do it).
The other point I'd like to make is that this article's headline is complete BS. I know of at least one ISP that has no such plans. So, it's not "UK ISPs" it's "Some UK ISPs" -- most likely one, or two.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22689812-2,00.html
I see this is getting marked as a troll. Fair enough, if that's your opinion, BUT... it's my opinion that moderators should have actually done the certification before saying that, or THEY are the ones with a bias.
Well, that's because they use the name "Europe" or "The European Continent", when there's any ambiguity. What are we going to call Our Solar System, when "The Solar System" means the one people have colonised and live on? What are we going to call The Sun when every colony has it's own? Hell, what do we call it in games right now? That's why people are trying to argue for naming conventions.
Yes, but what makes you think God would start at ~5.8 ft, and scale the final model DOWN? ;)
I don't think that's the case. Graphics cards work on the same PCI-X buses that acceleration cards probably use lately. They use DMA to communicate with main memory without involving the processor. The VRAM might be optimised for writing, but it should be very possible to do calculations on the card, and get the results back. That's the whole point of the generalised GPGPU techniques.
On physics being done in the CPU as well, and on physics engines not being used for much beyond extra eye-candy... well, it's the natural consequence of having machines without that feature as standard. You can't rely on it for the core gameplay, therefore it's only used for bonus features.
You must not be microsoft certified, as you'll realise just how similar this indoctrination is to the one you sat through to get your Microsoft(tm) permission to work in IT.
Sounds about right, as far as it goes. But isn't the real problem that we drill energy from under ground, and release it into the atmosphere, with no way to put it back?
Possibly. The question for me is... why did this come up in the middle of a wider net neutrality debate? Granted, the two are (vaguely) related -- in the way that bike theft statistics are related to the number of bikes you can fit on a road, perhaps.
However, it sounds to me like they're trying to bribe netizens into giving up long-term goals like net neutrality in exchange for getting a relatively small gripe-of-the-moment issue resolved. I say small and gripe of the moment, because this is bound to get solved anyway -- there's no way ISPs will be able to lie to customers about what they're getting forever. Net neutrality is a much larger issue though.
Note to young readers/logicians: I'm NOT saying this is happening. I'm NOT being paranoid. I'm raising a legitimate concern, and warning people not to automatically assume this is a good thing to get behind. It could be a great thing to get behind. Getting behind it could also screw you in ways you don't yet realise. Research, THEN support.
For all intents and purposes, it's depleted, if we can't put it back the way we found it, as quickly as we take away.
Some people just aren't in their element when it comes to elementary science. Perhaps they're confused by their background in elemental magic.