Maybe it's just the languages I learnt on (delphi and to a lesser extent VB) that biased me but I find code that uses properties* far more natural than code that has get and set all over the place and has extra brackets all over the place.
*To clarify I mean properties at the language level like in VB and delphi, not what java calls properties. Can't comment on C# because I haven't used it yet.
I mean even 3d Realms when they went out of business 3D realms haven't actually gone out of business, they got rid of the internal dev team and most of the other staff but the company is still arround, still running a website and still selling games (though now as download only). They have even got someone to finish off DNF for them.
Should you? how? DRM covers so many different things to different people, it can mean anything from basic CD protection at one end to ubisofts shit at the other. Noone (not even the companies running them) really knows how long the activation servers will remain online and i've never seen a company be upfront about the problems caused by the anti-hacking steps they take as part of thier DRM efforts.
Fair enough they put warnings on games that you will need an internet connection.
What they don't tell you is the other side of things, a purchase with an online activation requirement is essentially a rental of unspecified duration, sooner or later those activation servers will almost certainly be taken offline (especially in an industry as volatile as gaming, sure steam is big now but who knows if it will stay that way). Nor do they tell you about the problems that ever more agressive CD protections schems can cause.
Afaict GOG didn't actually lie, they just posted things in a slightly misleading way. They said the site was down, they said it wasn't the end, they just didn't give any details as to what would be happening causing people to speculate the worst.
On the other hand, a desktop firewall and a server-based firewall has too much of an overlap in terms of their function. While there is overlap I still think it's prudent to have both.
Desktop firewalls can protect against threats inside the network and can also control "phoning home" more effectively than server based firewalls (a LOT of app vendors tunnel there stuff over http to get it through corporate firewalls). However it is difficult to enforce policy using them because they are so spread out (especially if not all machines are under central IT control) and not everything can be protected by them (lots of things other than PCs have ethernet ports these days)
Central firewalls are good for enforcing policies like what machines can access the web and for defending against attackers outside the network connecting in.
Ideally you would also put all the non-PC devices on seperate networks as well so they can be protected from the general mass of PCs (at least one of which is likely to get infected sooner or later) and their users.
The trouble with server based firewalls is it's hard for them to tell what is generating the traffic.
Many places allow HTTP out to almost anywhere since you can't really use the web without it. Unfortunately for network admins application vendors have realised this and started pigybacking thier traffic onto HTTP to get it through firewalls.
Plus sometimes malicious or infected devices get inside the network, server based soloutions can't help in this situation, desktop firewalls may be able to depending on how they are configured.
Remember SSL only encrypts connections. Unless you trust every server in the email path and have them all configured to use SSL to talk to each other then it is not enough to provide security.
For real security you want an end to end encryption and authentication solution and even then you shouldn't access the system from untrusted devices.
If padding or springing is too hard or too soft it may as well not be there at all as in the former case it will hardly compress at all and in the latter case it will just sit at maximum compression, in neither case will it spread weight or cusion impacts effecitvely. What is too hard or too soft depends on the weight of the object in question and in some cases also on the size of the contact area and cats weigh a lot less than people.
Also cats seem quite happy to curl up on pretty hard surfaces as long as they aren't cold (our cat used to curl up in the middle of the landing where there is a junction in the heating pipes and hence a warm spot), furniture designed for humans often may as well be a hard surface for something as light as a cat.
And, thanks to current technology making it so hard Casual copying (or just making archival copies for youself) of TV in SD is pretty trivial, press play on your DVR and press record on your VCR or DVD recorder. If your TV provider is mean enough to use macrovision you will need a box to remove that but at least round here they don't afaict. It's a bit time consuming but you can do it while you are watching the programs anyway.
In HD otoh it is indeed a nightmare and HDCP (thanks to the DMCA an similar laws even a cracked protection scheme is usefull against equipment manufacturers) along with the gradual killing off of component will help keep it that way.
A digital signiture on it's own is only part of the puzzle for identifying an entity (wheter that entity is an individual or an organisation). You also need a way to determine that the key used to make that signiture really belongs to the entity in question.
One thing i've noticed in the UK is that while small online purchases (one book, one game, a small bag of components etc) are indeed often sent through the ordinary post and delivered by the postman anything slightly bigger or more valuable than that and it will most likely be sent by a courier and there are a LOT of different couriers so presumablly their delivery density is pretty low.
Though what happens with electronic components makes the consumer stuff look positively eco friendly. Considerable overpackaging (CPC are particularly bad for this) and lots of stuff getting sent by air either because of farnell overnighting stuff around europe (if a component is out of stock in leeds farnell will send it directly from one of their other european warehouses) or because the only source available is in the US (hell some companies even send their FREE SAMPLES transatlantic by air!)
I have done pretty similar tests and found the Core i7 is about 60% faster on my workloads, clock for clock. The 3.6GHz P4 was released in june 2004
The 3.33GHz i7 with turbo boost to take it to 3.6GHz was released in may 2009. 60% in five years doesn't sound like all that much to me.
A year later the top i7 is still 3.33GHz headline with turbo to 3.6GHz, just with two more cores, a few tweaks to the core but not much of significance to most apps afaict (I think they added some special purpose crypto stuff).
Intel and AMD seem to have mostly abandoned individual core performance in favor of throwing cores at the problem. Unfortunately that only works if you are running apps that can take advantage of all those cores.
The density of a flash based storage device depends on the density on the chip and the density of chips.
SSDs* don't seem to get anywhere near the overall density that the small flash cards do. The largest SSDs in the 2.5 inch form factor seem to be 512GB and the largest SSDs in the 3.5 inch form factor seem to be 1TB. I dunno for sure why this is but I suspect it's because noone is prepared to put the engineering effort required to cram all those chips into a product that at current flash prices would be extremely niche.
Density on the chips is important for two reasons, firstly it increases the ammount of flash you can get in with a given degree of cramming effort. Secondly and more importantly it will drive down the cost.
*defined as flash storage units that can replace and outperform a hard drive.
How does the cpu know you provided the right unlock code if it cannot be calculated from the serial number?
There is just one way, store it too on the cpu. Just put it in a special section of memory that can't be read out through software and lock out further attempts at entering a code for an hour or so after a small number of wrong codes.
With say 4 billion possible codes (and they could make the code much longer than that) and a chip that will only let you try 3 an hour you are going to be there for a very long time trying to guess the code.
Yes someone probablly could decap the chip, remove any protective layers and read out the code with a microscope but by the time they have done that it would probablly have been cheaper to just buy the damn code.
Bad PHP on it's own should not on it's own cause the system to be rooted. If it does you have other problems (be they admin stupidity or local root exploits like this one).
I've noticed that there seems to be sufficiant overlap between the E-GSM-900 band and the 902–928 MHz ISM band in the US that you should be able to get some uplink and some downlink channels within the ISM band.
Anyone have any thoughts on the legality of doing this if the power was kept low enough?
While on the landline network someone can just climb up a pole and attach a monitoring device to your phone line. Some monitoring devices don't even require direct electrical coupling to the line. If they were smart about it I doubt anyone would notice they weren't a legitimate telecom engineer.
The fact is phones whether fixed line or mobile are not secure from either the government or a sufficiently motivated private entity. If secret information is being handled they should be treated as such.
I haven't used one but I'd expect call stability to be much the same as any other VOIP. That is totally dependent on the network conditions between you and your call provider. If the network is mostly loaded with protocols that play nice and isn't loaded too heavilly voip works great. If the network is heavilly loaded with agressive protocols like bittorrent it will probablly be shit. Jitter is the enemy of things like VOIP.
As for voice quality i'd expect that to be much the same as any other cellphone. I dunno what quality settings sky/vonage/google use but I suspect it's lower compression than most mobile phones.
simple things like "permanent TCP connection to whereever" One of the things that anyone who designs a protocol that uses long running TCP connections will learn either from others or from experiance is that TCP handles the case of a long running connection with little to no data flow rather badly especially once nats get involved. Connections that have been up for a long time sometimes drop out and worse the endpoints don't always notice they have dropped out for some time.
To work arround this protocols have generally added their own keepalive meachnisms to reduce the chance of connections falling over and speed up the detection of fallen connections. Of course this also means more small packets flying arround:/
nobody can prevent me from taking my femto Node B to a different country where it would work on a spectrum allocated to somebody else. Wouldn't GPS be a trivial soloution to that problem? Just make the cell refuse to come up if it's too far from it's authorised location.
I think the key word is "signalling load". Raw data capacity isn't the only thing that is in limited supply on most networks. Especially networks like GSM that keep the control and data channels seperate.
I could well imagine that keeping a GRPS connection up 24/7 would put far more load on the signaling systems than making circuit switched voice connections every so often.
For an analogy/.ers are likely to be familiar. Send large packets over ethernet with even with consumer grade hardware you can max out fast ethernet quite easily and with half decent gear you can max out gigabit ethernet.
But start pushing lots of tiny packets and you can easilly get into a situation where the limit is not the maximum rate of the line but how fast the routers, switches and network cards can deal with packets.
My Sky+ box that I got 4 months ago included written instructions (from Sky, just to be clear) on how to connect a VCR to the Sky box to archive recordings It does indeed, it seems they are prepared to let you archive over an analog SD connection (they even put in menu items to let you queue up programs for it) but with HDCP on the HDMI port and removal of component they are leaving no "legit" way to archive your recordings in HD.
In the UK, they are only still used for murder trials. wikipedia claims:
In England and Wales (which have the same legal system), minor criminal cases are heard without a jury in the Magistrates' Courts. Middle ranking ("triable either way") offences may be tried by magistrates or the defendant may elect trial by jury in the Crown Court. Serious ("indictable") offences, however, must be tried before a jury in the Crown Court. Juries sit in a few civil cases, in particular, defamation and cases involving the state. Juries also sit in coroner's courts for more contentious inquests
I consider wikipedia more trustworthy than a random AC on/. If you have a better source confirmin or refuting this please post it.
All HDCP really does is placate ignorant studio bosses whilst making things more costly for the consumer. The other thing HDCP does is push casual copying to SD only. Why can't you just go out and buy an uncrippled HDMI to HDD/bluray recorder for your AV stack? because to make one that was actually useful would require making it decrypt HDCP. Add in the DMCA (and DMCA-alike laws that have popped up around the developed world) and even with HDCP cracked it would almost certainly be illegal to use it to make such a product. If you want to keep a HD copy of something longer than your locked down DVR has space to keep it and/or past the life of your locked down DVR your options are very limited (and at least here in the UK component is no longer being fitted on new sky+ HHD boxes so that doesn't provide a workaround either for many peopel).
The serious pirates currently rip the media direct onto computers because it's quick and gives the best quality copies and currently the pirates are mostly ahead in the arms race of blu-ray protection vs it's crackers but ultimately i'd expect them to use whatever avenue is open to them.
No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do. What HDCP does (and thanks to the DMCA and it's clones will continue to do to a large extent even now it's cracked) is prevent the open sale of devices that can capture and record the stream from a protected device.
Cracking the encryption on the source directly also falls foul of various laws and so you won't see consumer devices that can do that either.
The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.
P.S. since there is no real way to measure "casual copying" I doubt anyone knows what proportion of piracy happens through that method.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's just the languages I learnt on (delphi and to a lesser extent VB) that biased me but I find code that uses properties* far more natural than code that has get and set all over the place and has extra brackets all over the place.
*To clarify I mean properties at the language level like in VB and delphi, not what java calls properties. Can't comment on C# because I haven't used it yet.
I mean even 3d Realms when they went out of business
3D realms haven't actually gone out of business, they got rid of the internal dev team and most of the other staff but the company is still arround, still running a website and still selling games (though now as download only). They have even got someone to finish off DNF for them.
Should you? how? DRM covers so many different things to different people, it can mean anything from basic CD protection at one end to ubisofts shit at the other. Noone (not even the companies running them) really knows how long the activation servers will remain online and i've never seen a company be upfront about the problems caused by the anti-hacking steps they take as part of thier DRM efforts.
Fair enough they put warnings on games that you will need an internet connection.
What they don't tell you is the other side of things, a purchase with an online activation requirement is essentially a rental of unspecified duration, sooner or later those activation servers will almost certainly be taken offline (especially in an industry as volatile as gaming, sure steam is big now but who knows if it will stay that way). Nor do they tell you about the problems that ever more agressive CD protections schems can cause.
Afaict GOG didn't actually lie, they just posted things in a slightly misleading way. They said the site was down, they said it wasn't the end, they just didn't give any details as to what would be happening causing people to speculate the worst.
On the other hand, a desktop firewall and a server-based firewall has too much of an overlap in terms of their function.
While there is overlap I still think it's prudent to have both.
Desktop firewalls can protect against threats inside the network and can also control "phoning home" more effectively than server based firewalls (a LOT of app vendors tunnel there stuff over http to get it through corporate firewalls). However it is difficult to enforce policy using them because they are so spread out (especially if not all machines are under central IT control) and not everything can be protected by them (lots of things other than PCs have ethernet ports these days)
Central firewalls are good for enforcing policies like what machines can access the web and for defending against attackers outside the network connecting in.
Ideally you would also put all the non-PC devices on seperate networks as well so they can be protected from the general mass of PCs (at least one of which is likely to get infected sooner or later) and their users.
The trouble with server based firewalls is it's hard for them to tell what is generating the traffic.
Many places allow HTTP out to almost anywhere since you can't really use the web without it. Unfortunately for network admins application vendors have realised this and started pigybacking thier traffic onto HTTP to get it through firewalls.
Plus sometimes malicious or infected devices get inside the network, server based soloutions can't help in this situation, desktop firewalls may be able to depending on how they are configured.
Remember SSL only encrypts connections. Unless you trust every server in the email path and have them all configured to use SSL to talk to each other then it is not enough to provide security.
For real security you want an end to end encryption and authentication solution and even then you shouldn't access the system from untrusted devices.
If padding or springing is too hard or too soft it may as well not be there at all as in the former case it will hardly compress at all and in the latter case it will just sit at maximum compression, in neither case will it spread weight or cusion impacts effecitvely. What is too hard or too soft depends on the weight of the object in question and in some cases also on the size of the contact area and cats weigh a lot less than people.
Also cats seem quite happy to curl up on pretty hard surfaces as long as they aren't cold (our cat used to curl up in the middle of the landing where there is a junction in the heating pipes and hence a warm spot), furniture designed for humans often may as well be a hard surface for something as light as a cat.
And, thanks to current technology making it so hard
Casual copying (or just making archival copies for youself) of TV in SD is pretty trivial, press play on your DVR and press record on your VCR or DVD recorder. If your TV provider is mean enough to use macrovision you will need a box to remove that but at least round here they don't afaict. It's a bit time consuming but you can do it while you are watching the programs anyway.
In HD otoh it is indeed a nightmare and HDCP (thanks to the DMCA an similar laws even a cracked protection scheme is usefull against equipment manufacturers) along with the gradual killing off of component will help keep it that way.
A digital signiture on it's own is only part of the puzzle for identifying an entity (wheter that entity is an individual or an organisation). You also need a way to determine that the key used to make that signiture really belongs to the entity in question.
One thing i've noticed in the UK is that while small online purchases (one book, one game, a small bag of components etc) are indeed often sent through the ordinary post and delivered by the postman anything slightly bigger or more valuable than that and it will most likely be sent by a courier and there are a LOT of different couriers so presumablly their delivery density is pretty low.
Though what happens with electronic components makes the consumer stuff look positively eco friendly. Considerable overpackaging (CPC are particularly bad for this) and lots of stuff getting sent by air either because of farnell overnighting stuff around europe (if a component is out of stock in leeds farnell will send it directly from one of their other european warehouses) or because the only source available is in the US (hell some companies even send their FREE SAMPLES transatlantic by air!)
I have done pretty similar tests and found the Core i7 is about 60% faster on my workloads, clock for clock.
The 3.6GHz P4 was released in june 2004
The 3.33GHz i7 with turbo boost to take it to 3.6GHz was released in may 2009. 60% in five years doesn't sound like all that much to me.
A year later the top i7 is still 3.33GHz headline with turbo to 3.6GHz, just with two more cores, a few tweaks to the core but not much of significance to most apps afaict (I think they added some special purpose crypto stuff).
Intel and AMD seem to have mostly abandoned individual core performance in favor of throwing cores at the problem. Unfortunately that only works if you are running apps that can take advantage of all those cores.
The density of a flash based storage device depends on the density on the chip and the density of chips.
SSDs* don't seem to get anywhere near the overall density that the small flash cards do. The largest SSDs in the 2.5 inch form factor seem to be 512GB and the largest SSDs in the 3.5 inch form factor seem to be 1TB. I dunno for sure why this is but I suspect it's because noone is prepared to put the engineering effort required to cram all those chips into a product that at current flash prices would be extremely niche.
Density on the chips is important for two reasons, firstly it increases the ammount of flash you can get in with a given degree of cramming effort. Secondly and more importantly it will drive down the cost.
*defined as flash storage units that can replace and outperform a hard drive.
How does the cpu know you provided the right unlock code if it cannot be calculated from the serial number?
There is just one way, store it too on the cpu.
Just put it in a special section of memory that can't be read out through software and lock out further attempts at entering a code for an hour or so after a small number of wrong codes.
With say 4 billion possible codes (and they could make the code much longer than that) and a chip that will only let you try 3 an hour you are going to be there for a very long time trying to guess the code.
Yes someone probablly could decap the chip, remove any protective layers and read out the code with a microscope but by the time they have done that it would probablly have been cheaper to just buy the damn code.
Bad PHP on it's own should not on it's own cause the system to be rooted. If it does you have other problems (be they admin stupidity or local root exploits like this one).
I've noticed that there seems to be sufficiant overlap between the E-GSM-900 band and the 902–928 MHz ISM band in the US that you should be able to get some uplink and some downlink channels within the ISM band.
Anyone have any thoughts on the legality of doing this if the power was kept low enough?
While on the landline network someone can just climb up a pole and attach a monitoring device to your phone line. Some monitoring devices don't even require direct electrical coupling to the line. If they were smart about it I doubt anyone would notice they weren't a legitimate telecom engineer.
The fact is phones whether fixed line or mobile are not secure from either the government or a sufficiently motivated private entity. If secret information is being handled they should be treated as such.
I haven't used one but I'd expect call stability to be much the same as any other VOIP. That is totally dependent on the network conditions between you and your call provider. If the network is mostly loaded with protocols that play nice and isn't loaded too heavilly voip works great. If the network is heavilly loaded with agressive protocols like bittorrent it will probablly be shit. Jitter is the enemy of things like VOIP.
As for voice quality i'd expect that to be much the same as any other cellphone. I dunno what quality settings sky/vonage/google use but I suspect it's lower compression than most mobile phones.
simple things like "permanent TCP connection to whereever"
One of the things that anyone who designs a protocol that uses long running TCP connections will learn either from others or from experiance is that TCP handles the case of a long running connection with little to no data flow rather badly especially once nats get involved. Connections that have been up for a long time sometimes drop out and worse the endpoints don't always notice they have dropped out for some time.
To work arround this protocols have generally added their own keepalive meachnisms to reduce the chance of connections falling over and speed up the detection of fallen connections. Of course this also means more small packets flying arround :/
nobody can prevent me from taking my femto Node B to a different country where it would work on a spectrum allocated to somebody else.
Wouldn't GPS be a trivial soloution to that problem? Just make the cell refuse to come up if it's too far from it's authorised location.
I think the key word is "signalling load". Raw data capacity isn't the only thing that is in limited supply on most networks. Especially networks like GSM that keep the control and data channels seperate.
I could well imagine that keeping a GRPS connection up 24/7 would put far more load on the signaling systems than making circuit switched voice connections every so often.
For an analogy /.ers are likely to be familiar. Send large packets over ethernet with even with consumer grade hardware you can max out fast ethernet quite easily and with half decent gear you can max out gigabit ethernet.
But start pushing lots of tiny packets and you can easilly get into a situation where the limit is not the maximum rate of the line but how fast the routers, switches and network cards can deal with packets.
My Sky+ box that I got 4 months ago included written instructions (from Sky, just to be clear) on how to connect a VCR to the Sky box to archive recordings
It does indeed, it seems they are prepared to let you archive over an analog SD connection (they even put in menu items to let you queue up programs for it) but with HDCP on the HDMI port and removal of component they are leaving no "legit" way to archive your recordings in HD.
In the UK, they are only still used for murder trials.
wikipedia claims:
In England and Wales (which have the same legal system), minor criminal cases are heard without a jury in the Magistrates' Courts. Middle ranking ("triable either way") offences may be tried by magistrates or the defendant may elect trial by jury in the Crown Court. Serious ("indictable") offences, however, must be tried before a jury in the Crown Court. Juries sit in a few civil cases, in particular, defamation and cases involving the state. Juries also sit in coroner's courts for more contentious inquests
I consider wikipedia more trustworthy than a random AC on /. If you have a better source confirmin or refuting this please post it.
All HDCP really does is placate ignorant studio bosses whilst making things more costly for the consumer.
The other thing HDCP does is push casual copying to SD only. Why can't you just go out and buy an uncrippled HDMI to HDD/bluray recorder for your AV stack? because to make one that was actually useful would require making it decrypt HDCP. Add in the DMCA (and DMCA-alike laws that have popped up around the developed world) and even with HDCP cracked it would almost certainly be illegal to use it to make such a product. If you want to keep a HD copy of something longer than your locked down DVR has space to keep it and/or past the life of your locked down DVR your options are very limited (and at least here in the UK component is no longer being fitted on new sky+ HHD boxes so that doesn't provide a workaround either for many peopel).
The serious pirates currently rip the media direct onto computers because it's quick and gives the best quality copies and currently the pirates are mostly ahead in the arms race of blu-ray protection vs it's crackers but ultimately i'd expect them to use whatever avenue is open to them.
No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do.
What HDCP does (and thanks to the DMCA and it's clones will continue to do to a large extent even now it's cracked) is prevent the open sale of devices that can capture and record the stream from a protected device.
Cracking the encryption on the source directly also falls foul of various laws and so you won't see consumer devices that can do that either.
The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.
P.S. since there is no real way to measure "casual copying" I doubt anyone knows what proportion of piracy happens through that method.