Whoops, I was doing this on windows' calculator and did 9*10^6 instead of 900*10^6 (I thought something didn't look right). My point still stands that a millimetre antenna is going to do a very poor job of propagating a 900MHz signal.
In the scope of modern technologies, I fail to grap how RFID is going to impact our privacy any more than other things we currently use almost daily (credit cards, air miles, debit... ). RFID tags generally store a number, that's it. An RFID reader reading that number has absolutely not idea what that number signifies without access to some kind of back end database.
The idea that RFID id will allow some kind of brand new breakthrough in how stores track you is absurd for a few reasons. First off, they can already track what you buy by doing something like linking a hash of your credit card number with every purchase you've ever made. The second idea brought up is they would be able to track how you use that product (which is equally absurd). RFID readers for passive tags have a high read rate up to about 10 feet. So then is an open-ish concept store going to blanket it's 10000 sq. ft. floor space with $3000 RFID readers? The ROI for that kind of a system is pathetically low. Not to mention that to get these decent reads the passive tag has to be about the size of a credit card.
People bring up that there are passive RFID tags that are so small that they could be embedded in just about anything. This is true, but I counter with the fact that the read range on these passive tags is a few millimetres-centimetres. So if you a product with these hidden RFID tags, businesses won't be able to get even the unique ID unless they're basically rubbing it with an antenna. Doubt me? Think about physics for a second. A common frequency for RFID is ~900MHz; antennas tend to read the best at either 1/4 wavelength, or 5/8 wavelength. We'll go with 1/4 since it will allow the smallest antenna. 1/4 wavelength for 900MHz is 8 metres. Passive tag antennas are much shorter than this, so they don't do the best job of radiating power back. A millimetre tag will do a much much much worse job at it, infact it will mostly just be seen as interference by the signal.
Secondly, in response to privacy concerns the EPC has put into its RFID Gen 2 spec that tags can be self destructing. What's the big concern since the tag will be able to destroy itself as soon as you leave the store?
Why would you need to compare it against a database? There are already free programs that can do a pretty good job of comparing one submission against all the others. If a cheater in a large class copied code from the net, there's a good chance that somebody in the class copied it from the same resource.
Plus schools are cash strapped enough as it is, they don't need something else draining their coffers.
I was discussing the quality of the comment, not the quality of the code. I agree that meaningful variable names, and appropriate named constants go a long way to improve the readability of code. Sometimes even with descriptive variables, how the system got to that state can be confusing to somebody who is looking at the program for the first time.
It's important to comment "if x==456 then..." if it is not readily apparent why x might contain that value.
having a comment of "// check to see if x is 456" is counter productive, you're right. A comment like "// x having the value of 456 indicates that the previous operation failed because the CPU burst into flames" is useful, and can help programmers decipher huge decision structures.
Think that not supporting HDTV output will have two benefits.
1) Reduction in console cost for Nintendo (and hopefully the customer) at the cost of a feature that very few people actually use. I'm sure the percentage of the population that own an HDTV is small ( less than 5%). The percentage of HDTV owners who are interested in the revolution but won't buy one because of its lack of HDTV output is even smaller. Not to mention that the Revolution isn't targeted at your typical HDTV owner, it's targeted at families who may not want to dump out $2000 for a TV for the kids.
2) Game development costs go down. Microsoft requiring all games to be HDTV ready is going to increase development costs. Since there is no such thing with the Revolution, hopefully that will result in a lower standard MSRP (I believe both Sony and Microsoft have said they want to raise game prices).
If both the signal and noise were amplied together, then the signal to noise ratio would remain the same (and SNR is what really matters when trying to retrieve intelligence).
In the past, Microsoft has been very good at playing catch-up. They have been able to identify an area that the company lacks, and then through a variety of methods such as standardization, guaranteeing interoperability, undercutting, and flat out buying competitors they unify a market and they make a lot of money in the process.
Microsoft in the past, rightly or not, was seen as a great innovator. I can remember in high school listening to a Microsoft employee talk about his job and being amazed about how fun it sounded to work there. Even though they were playing catch up in a lot of what they were doing, they were able to come off to a lot of people as improving whatever they were copying and pushing it in bold new directions.
The problem now is that the perception of Microsoft has shifted to a more accurate one: a company that does not innovate, and "borrows" all of its good ideas rather than pushing the limits. This memo just furthers this idea. Online advertising has been done before, it has failed miserably before (anybody remember the dot com burst?) but now that Google has made a successful business model from it, Microsoft suddenly stands at attention and decides to get into the market.
Right now Microsoft can't even compete with Google in the areas which Google is strong. Even though Microsoft released its "new" search engine, it still only occupies something like 5-10% of users with Google having something like 50%. I realize that Bill Gates desperately wants to kill Google off, because he (rightly) sees the company as a huge threat. The problem is that Google is much better at doing what Google does than Microsoft is.
If Bill Gates wants to kill Google, he's going to have to find a way to leverage what Microsoft is dominant in (oh say... desktop operating systems) against Google. An even better idea would be to start innovating again, bring back the public perception that Microsoft is a leading edge company and start bringing back really smart people back to the company, and start doing something new.
One thing to remember too is that Linux (or OSDL) have no equivalent that I'm aware of for WHQL. Allowing binary drivers with no means to ensure the quality of the driver is just asking for a cheap lazy company to put out a driver that may put all of its users up the creek without a paddle.
I'll come straight out and admit that I'm a Java programmer, but I've used PHP and I will admit it is simple to use.
I find the comparison that the article makes between them is very one dimensional, it's saying that PHP is better than JSP, which I suppose is debatable (I prefer JSP;) ). The problem is that Java is so much more than just JSP on the server side, it has an entire framework of technologies (some part of J2EE, some not) that make it a complete package. If they want to compare Java and PHP, it should bring in not only ease of development, but scalability, interoperability and security. I would have also liked to see the number of commerical websites running PHP vs the number of commercial websites running Java. For instance my home page has TorrentFlux on it, which is php based. So I guess I fall into that 22 million, although that's not really by design.
I won't try and say Java is better (because of my limited PHP experience) but if an author wants to convince me that PHP is better than Java, it's going to have to talk about more than simplicity and hype.
1) Triggers are hidden application logic that are very hard to debug, and are easily overlooked or forgotten by developers. Business logic (other than defensive logic like unique indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, not-null columns) does not belong in the database. They belong in the middle tier. They also make it much more difficult to move to another database.
I completely disagree. First off you should have the source for the triggers stored somewhere sane, and secondly sometimes the best triggers are ones that do really mundane things like altering data in other tables so that you don't have to to do it on every insert/update/delete.
If you think MySQL is not a "real" database, it is, and has been since 4.0. As an Oracle (and now MySQL DBA), I can honestly say that I can't wait to dump Oracle and get the Boats.com website over to MySQL.
Nobody can blame you for not wanting to administer Oracle, but MySQL is not the way to go. I'm sure when you were learning to ride a bike, you saw no need to take off the training wheels. It's also not like you have a choice of MySQL and Oracle, there is a sea of alternatives out there.
2) Stored procedures are like PERL - it's very easy to make a mess unless you are very careful. They are also hidden logic, and very difficult to debug. And again, keep that logic out of the database. They also make it much more difficult to move to another database
Again, I completely disagree. First off stored procedures are compiled and optimized by your DBMS, so they are very fast. Secondly it takes load off the client computer, and puts it towards the "beefy" host. Thirdly it makes programming much more logical. Personally, I would rather put "call get_formatted_order(x)" in code, than doing all of the SQL in the program which can be just as bad as far as intelligbility goes. Oh yeah, and keep the source code for all your stored procedures somewhere handy!
3) Views are a nice feature, but most often used to support business and reporting. I don't like managers connecting to the database to run queries (SELECT * FROM very_large_table_1, very_large_table_2; and suddenly you have cartesian join that results in tens of millions of rows coming back, bogging everything down). To do reports, views aren't necessary.
Views are meant to abstract your business logic (in combination with functions/stored procedures) from the actual implementation of the database.
I was assuming that MySQL was using MyISAM tables when I said it was much faster. If using InnoDB, then MySQL is basically the same speed give or take.
MySQL is good for a very limited subset of projects, namely stupid web applications. MyISAM tables don't even support referential integrity! MySQL is also good for getting the hang of SQL queries, but anybody who has used databases for more than a year should "graduate" on to something a little more mature... enter PostgreSQL.
While PostgreSQL doesn't offer the insane (but inherently flawed) performance of MySQL, it is a standards compliant, free as in speech, database system. The windows version is rediculously simple to set up, and it opens the doors to things that MySQL is only promising at this point.
Considering the devlopment history of Vista and Duke Nukem Forever, and the frequent announcements of feature changes/removals and delays, it's safe to say they will have similar hardware requirements:P
The TT SI-97 costs about $45 CDN, while a VGA Silencer costs about $30 CDN. I use a VGA silencer and it's a pretty nice product, so I'm curious why it was not included in the benchmarking.
Didn't MS apply for a patent on obtaining elevated user permissions to perform a task awhile back? MS patents have absolutely nothing to do with what they have invented, they are more concerned with keeping their competitors under control.
Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so. (You could alter the ciphertext in hopes of getting the proper resulting plaintext, but it'd take forever)
But if the device were to never get the self destruct message, the man in the middle attack would be successful as far as the user is concerned. Telling the server you're dead is just icing on the cake.
Salting would be inconvenient, but there has to be some way of generating the salt, and I'm sure if the DRM was restrictive enough on players people would figure out how that is generated as well.
No offence, but what you just described doesn't make any sense. If the public key of the device is in the firmware I would imagine that somebody will get a hold of it pretty quick.
Also it's fairly easy to implement a man in the middle attack for what you just described. Once you have the player's public key you can intercept all the traffic going to it and decrypt it. Besides, since public key cryptography is usually used for key exchange for a symmetric cipher you could also start collecting the server's symmetric encryption keys, and then from there you could start making educated guesses on what kind of encryption alogrithm they're using... but I digress
If you capture enough data you could figure out what messages were going to the player, and then if necessary you could just capture the (presumably encrypted) responses from the player to the server. So lets say that your player gets a "self destruct message" you just intercept it and throw it away, and then just replay a previous "ok i'm dead" message back to the server.
If Microsoft was ever setting itself up to fall flap on its face, Vista is that time. You mean I not only get degraded picture quality if I don't upgrade to a DRM monitor with the new windows, certain games will run like a steaming pile of cow feces? Wow! Where do I sign up???
So much of Vista reeks of Microsoft management telling customers what they want. Windows XP is going to be the last Microsoft OS I run.
There's nothing passing off a biased article that has absolutely no backing statistics or references off as an "interesting article".
Here is one of my favourite comments from the article:
"And of course, the long list of lawsuits that Microsoft is straddled with. I am sure it is a business model for companies such as Sun and Oracle to just sue Microsoft whenever their profits are down due to insanely stupid and useless products that no one is buying."
With regards to sun: as I remember it, Microsoft tried marketing their own version of Java without liscencing it from Sun. Being one of Sun's flagship products, I don't blame them at all for suing microsoft. Not to meantion that Java is freely downloadable for both development and use, so I really don't see how it classifies as a product that "no one is buying".
reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted
Lets say that the number of times that a windows machine has to be rebooted in a month is represented by N, and the number of reboots eliminated is M. If N is large enough (or M is sufficiently small), N-M is approximately equal to N. And since with a combination of forced updates combined with the awesome staying power of Windows N is rather large, you can have M equal to just about anything and the downtime for a Windows machine will stay about the same while still reducing the number of reboots.
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Whoops, I was doing this on windows' calculator and did 9*10^6 instead of 900*10^6 (I thought something didn't look right). My point still stands that a millimetre antenna is going to do a very poor job of propagating a 900MHz signal.
In the scope of modern technologies, I fail to grap how RFID is going to impact our privacy any more than other things we currently use almost daily (credit cards, air miles, debit... ). RFID tags generally store a number, that's it. An RFID reader reading that number has absolutely not idea what that number signifies without access to some kind of back end database.
The idea that RFID id will allow some kind of brand new breakthrough in how stores track you is absurd for a few reasons. First off, they can already track what you buy by doing something like linking a hash of your credit card number with every purchase you've ever made. The second idea brought up is they would be able to track how you use that product (which is equally absurd). RFID readers for passive tags have a high read rate up to about 10 feet. So then is an open-ish concept store going to blanket it's 10000 sq. ft. floor space with $3000 RFID readers? The ROI for that kind of a system is pathetically low. Not to mention that to get these decent reads the passive tag has to be about the size of a credit card.
People bring up that there are passive RFID tags that are so small that they could be embedded in just about anything. This is true, but I counter with the fact that the read range on these passive tags is a few millimetres-centimetres. So if you a product with these hidden RFID tags, businesses won't be able to get even the unique ID unless they're basically rubbing it with an antenna. Doubt me? Think about physics for a second. A common frequency for RFID is ~900MHz; antennas tend to read the best at either 1/4 wavelength, or 5/8 wavelength. We'll go with 1/4 since it will allow the smallest antenna. 1/4 wavelength for 900MHz is 8 metres. Passive tag antennas are much shorter than this, so they don't do the best job of radiating power back. A millimetre tag will do a much much much worse job at it, infact it will mostly just be seen as interference by the signal.
Secondly, in response to privacy concerns the EPC has put into its RFID Gen 2 spec that tags can be self destructing. What's the big concern since the tag will be able to destroy itself as soon as you leave the store?
Why would you need to compare it against a database? There are already free programs that can do a pretty good job of comparing one submission against all the others. If a cheater in a large class copied code from the net, there's a good chance that somebody in the class copied it from the same resource.
Plus schools are cash strapped enough as it is, they don't need something else draining their coffers.
I was discussing the quality of the comment, not the quality of the code. I agree that meaningful variable names, and appropriate named constants go a long way to improve the readability of code. Sometimes even with descriptive variables, how the system got to that state can be confusing to somebody who is looking at the program for the first time.
It's important to comment "if x==456 then..." if it is not readily apparent why x might contain that value. having a comment of "// check to see if x is 456" is counter productive, you're right. A comment like "// x having the value of 456 indicates that the previous operation failed because the CPU burst into flames" is useful, and can help programmers decipher huge decision structures.
Think that not supporting HDTV output will have two benefits.
1) Reduction in console cost for Nintendo (and hopefully the customer) at the cost of a feature that very few people actually use. I'm sure the percentage of the population that own an HDTV is small ( less than 5%). The percentage of HDTV owners who are interested in the revolution but won't buy one because of its lack of HDTV output is even smaller. Not to mention that the Revolution isn't targeted at your typical HDTV owner, it's targeted at families who may not want to dump out $2000 for a TV for the kids.
2) Game development costs go down. Microsoft requiring all games to be HDTV ready is going to increase development costs. Since there is no such thing with the Revolution, hopefully that will result in a lower standard MSRP (I believe both Sony and Microsoft have said they want to raise game prices).
If both the signal and noise were amplied together, then the signal to noise ratio would remain the same (and SNR is what really matters when trying to retrieve intelligence).
I was talking about an equivalent for WHQL on binary drivers.
In the past, Microsoft has been very good at playing catch-up. They have been able to identify an area that the company lacks, and then through a variety of methods such as standardization, guaranteeing interoperability, undercutting, and flat out buying competitors they unify a market and they make a lot of money in the process.
Microsoft in the past, rightly or not, was seen as a great innovator. I can remember in high school listening to a Microsoft employee talk about his job and being amazed about how fun it sounded to work there. Even though they were playing catch up in a lot of what they were doing, they were able to come off to a lot of people as improving whatever they were copying and pushing it in bold new directions.
The problem now is that the perception of Microsoft has shifted to a more accurate one: a company that does not innovate, and "borrows" all of its good ideas rather than pushing the limits. This memo just furthers this idea. Online advertising has been done before, it has failed miserably before (anybody remember the dot com burst?) but now that Google has made a successful business model from it, Microsoft suddenly stands at attention and decides to get into the market.
Right now Microsoft can't even compete with Google in the areas which Google is strong. Even though Microsoft released its "new" search engine, it still only occupies something like 5-10% of users with Google having something like 50%. I realize that Bill Gates desperately wants to kill Google off, because he (rightly) sees the company as a huge threat. The problem is that Google is much better at doing what Google does than Microsoft is.
If Bill Gates wants to kill Google, he's going to have to find a way to leverage what Microsoft is dominant in (oh say... desktop operating systems) against Google. An even better idea would be to start innovating again, bring back the public perception that Microsoft is a leading edge company and start bringing back really smart people back to the company, and start doing something new.
One thing to remember too is that Linux (or OSDL) have no equivalent that I'm aware of for WHQL. Allowing binary drivers with no means to ensure the quality of the driver is just asking for a cheap lazy company to put out a driver that may put all of its users up the creek without a paddle.
The way I see it, IBM has two very easy answers to SCO's request.
1) Hand them a blank piece of paper.
2) Attach a bell and a whistle to a CD containing the source for the latest 2.6 kernel.
I'll come straight out and admit that I'm a Java programmer, but I've used PHP and I will admit it is simple to use.
;) ). The problem is that Java is so much more than just JSP on the server side, it has an entire framework of technologies (some part of J2EE, some not) that make it a complete package. If they want to compare Java and PHP, it should bring in not only ease of development, but scalability, interoperability and security. I would have also liked to see the number of commerical websites running PHP vs the number of commercial websites running Java. For instance my home page has TorrentFlux on it, which is php based. So I guess I fall into that 22 million, although that's not really by design.
I find the comparison that the article makes between them is very one dimensional, it's saying that PHP is better than JSP, which I suppose is debatable (I prefer JSP
I won't try and say Java is better (because of my limited PHP experience) but if an author wants to convince me that PHP is better than Java, it's going to have to talk about more than simplicity and hype.
And with the right combination of joins and foreign keys, those tables can be made to suit any occasion.
I was assuming that MySQL was using MyISAM tables when I said it was much faster. If using InnoDB, then MySQL is basically the same speed give or take.
MySQL is good for a very limited subset of projects, namely stupid web applications. MyISAM tables don't even support referential integrity! MySQL is also good for getting the hang of SQL queries, but anybody who has used databases for more than a year should "graduate" on to something a little more mature... enter PostgreSQL.
While PostgreSQL doesn't offer the insane (but inherently flawed) performance of MySQL, it is a standards compliant, free as in speech, database system. The windows version is rediculously simple to set up, and it opens the doors to things that MySQL is only promising at this point.
Friends don't let friends use MySQL!
Considering the devlopment history of Vista and Duke Nukem Forever, and the frequent announcements of feature changes/removals and delays, it's safe to say they will have similar hardware requirements :P
The TT SI-97 costs about $45 CDN, while a VGA Silencer costs about $30 CDN. I use a VGA silencer and it's a pretty nice product, so I'm curious why it was not included in the benchmarking.
Patenting != inventing.
Didn't MS apply for a patent on obtaining elevated user permissions to perform a task awhile back? MS patents have absolutely nothing to do with what they have invented, they are more concerned with keeping their competitors under control.
Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so. (You could alter the ciphertext in hopes of getting the proper resulting plaintext, but it'd take forever)
But if the device were to never get the self destruct message, the man in the middle attack would be successful as far as the user is concerned. Telling the server you're dead is just icing on the cake.
Salting would be inconvenient, but there has to be some way of generating the salt, and I'm sure if the DRM was restrictive enough on players people would figure out how that is generated as well.
No offence, but what you just described doesn't make any sense. If the public key of the device is in the firmware I would imagine that somebody will get a hold of it pretty quick.
Also it's fairly easy to implement a man in the middle attack for what you just described. Once you have the player's public key you can intercept all the traffic going to it and decrypt it. Besides, since public key cryptography is usually used for key exchange for a symmetric cipher you could also start collecting the server's symmetric encryption keys, and then from there you could start making educated guesses on what kind of encryption alogrithm they're using... but I digress
If you capture enough data you could figure out what messages were going to the player, and then if necessary you could just capture the (presumably encrypted) responses from the player to the server. So lets say that your player gets a "self destruct message" you just intercept it and throw it away, and then just replay a previous "ok i'm dead" message back to the server.
If Microsoft was ever setting itself up to fall flap on its face, Vista is that time. You mean I not only get degraded picture quality if I don't upgrade to a DRM monitor with the new windows, certain games will run like a steaming pile of cow feces? Wow! Where do I sign up???
So much of Vista reeks of Microsoft management telling customers what they want. Windows XP is going to be the last Microsoft OS I run.
There's nothing passing off a biased article that has absolutely no backing statistics or references off as an "interesting article".
Here is one of my favourite comments from the article:
"And of course, the long list of lawsuits that Microsoft is straddled with. I am sure it is a business model for companies such as Sun and Oracle to just sue Microsoft whenever their profits are down due to insanely stupid and useless products that no one is buying."
With regards to sun: as I remember it, Microsoft tried marketing their own version of Java without liscencing it from Sun. Being one of Sun's flagship products, I don't blame them at all for suing microsoft. Not to meantion that Java is freely downloadable for both development and use, so I really don't see how it classifies as a product that "no one is buying".
when asked if they had any comments regarding the announcement, a scientist was quoted as saying "... but this one goes to eleven"
reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted
Lets say that the number of times that a windows machine has to be rebooted in a month is represented by N, and the number of reboots eliminated is M. If N is large enough (or M is sufficiently small), N-M is approximately equal to N. And since with a combination of forced updates combined with the awesome staying power of Windows N is rather large, you can have M equal to just about anything and the downtime for a Windows machine will stay about the same while still reducing the number of reboots.