I can see a few categories of people where WGA will bring a benefit to microsoft
1: people who go "OMG MS has caught me, I'd better pay up before this gets serious" and/or don't want to risk using cracks. 2: small buisnesses who currently don't have any volume licenses at all (note: afaict WGA does not stop people overrunning thier volume licenses) and are currently running on pirate copies 3: dodgy PC vendors who are selling machines preloaded with pirate copies of windows (IIRC under certain circumstances WGA offers a free copy as a reward for turning in pirates)
Afaict the killer is the round trip times, a ssl connection takes more round trips to set up than a plain TCP one and web browsers frequently set up new connections (yes there is keepalive but thats still a far cry from a system that uses a single persistant connection).
No problem if you are on a fast low latency connection but if you aren't those extra round trips can really add up.
If someone is willing to pay them for their serviceIf someone is willing to pay them for their services But that isn't really what happens in a class action. Instead a group of lawyers and a couple of sample plaintiffs takes over the right to sue from a large class of people without asking most of them. Then rather than persuing the case to the end they make a settlement where the class get some token ammount that is often payed in vouchers.
64-bit windows can't run 16-bit binaries, afaict the only reason for not supporting win16 binaries is that MS couldn't be bothered debugging the code in question.
wine on 64-bit linux OTOH can run win16 binaries;)
"It is important to note that glyph data is supplied to the X server by the X client. Any remote X client can gain root privileges on the X server using the proof of concept program attached.
It is also trivial to exploit this vulnerability as a DoS by causing an existing X client program (such as Firefox) to render a long text string. It may be possible to use Flash movies, Java applets, or embedded web fonts to supply the custom glyph data necessary for reliable remote code execution."
but AFAIK there's no possible way to remotely exploit this (outside of another vulnerability). Which is the key, in most cases* neither a local "root" vulnerability or a remote vulnerability in some unprivilaged daemon are that much of a threat on thier own.
Combine the two though and you get the equivilent of a remote root vulnerability which is about the most serious class of vulnerability arround.
Since remote unprivilaged code execution vulnerabilities are pretty common closing holes in the local privilages system promptly is a vital part of keeping systems secure.
* there are exceptions to this, terminal servers would be an obvious one where a local root vulnerability is a very serious issue on it's own.
which is tantamount to a tax BTW It is in some ways like a tax but unlike most taxes which can only hit your citizens and residents inflation will hit anyone who holds either your currency or bonds (government or otherwise) denominated in your currency.
they could do what they did with the GBC, the GBC could run old gameboy games but it was also possible to make both dual mode games (taking advantage of the GBCs better graphics but still retaining compatibility with the original gameboy) and GBC only games.
I'm not convinced putting a complex interface chip on every module is a good idea. They tend to result in memory modules that are power hungry (read: a pain to cool) and expensive intel have tried this twice (though the second time they only did it with the server/workstation stuff), first with rambus then fbdimm, both times they backed down (the latest xeons have on-die memory controllers that work with plain ddr3).
Plus every extra stage you add to the path between CPU core and memory adds latency, memory latency is bad if you have code doing significant random access to the ram.
(I wonder why this is? Are they such Luddites? Or are they just ignorant of the technology? Or perhaps they don't see a way to collect overdue fines.;-) Copyright!
Lending out physical copies from libraries is something that has been accepted by law (either for free or with some fixed payment decided by and payed by the government depending on your country) in most countries for a very long time.
You can't really lend out or sell an ebook, only copy it. Since the library would be copying the books they would need either a specific agreement with the copyright holder or a new compulsory license law to let them do that. The copyright holder or compulsory license would probablly insist on some form of drm to ensure that when a "borrower" "returned" a book they actually lost access to it, this would in turn mean the library would have to deal with the various competing drm systems.
I noticed that all the TVs on display were hooked up by coax Probablly because it's easier to distribute to lots of TVs.
and that HDMI cables are annoyingly expensive. Thats more a case of the big box stores trying to rip you off on accessories than any real manufacturing issue. At least for short runs it's possible to pick up cables much cheaper (though still more expensive than say USB cables)
If video cabling used, say, H.264, or maybe JPEG2000 to preserve a higher quality colorspace, we could perhaps get away with using cheap USB cables for video connections. Viable? Right now the real time encoders would probablly cost far more than you would save, and the extra artifacts introduced would probablly piss off a lot of users too.
You forgot to mention that you're legally blind. I'm typing this on a 24" LCD at 1680x1050, and it looked like absolute crap with (good) VGA cables. Pixels were ghosted and there was no such thing as a single-pixel-wide vertical line. I have astigmatism and even I could tell that it was artifacted all to hell. Sounds like something in the chain was shit, most likely the input circuitry in your display (i've noticed sucky VGA inputs seem to be a particular problem on HDTVs, haven't had the problem on a monitor myself but it wouldn't surprise me if there are some shit ones out there).
The question then becomes how many pure displayport (vs displayport with DVI/HDMI compatibility) connectors will we actually see in the forseeable future.
It depends how they do it. I'd agree if they wired everything seperately but if they just had one data channel and then logically split it into the various applications I'd think it would be perfectly doable.
video+usb+ethernet+audio isn't really that much more bandwidth than video alone.
the output implies that google.cn doesn't have a mirror in China, because geographically India is closer to China than to US Or it could mean that if no explicit handling is configured the fallback option is the US servers.
Also geographic closeness doesn't nessacerally imply good network connections between two points.
Revolt isn't necessary: the Federal Government is going to go bankrupt in the fairly near future Cant they just order the federal reserve to print more money?
Afaict most US debt is denominated in US dollars so the US can simply inflate it's way out of it.
despite the title of the/. post they aren't rewriting everything, "just" the win32 subsystem.
essentially they are at a point where they have two uses, strugle to get ever closer to the poorly documented behaviour of windows themselves or integrate as much of possible of wines code (who have put a lot more resources into reverse engineering win32).
but you certainly can't run any kind of OS on a PIC. Depends which pic and on your deinfition of OS;).
There's two kinds of embedded platforms: those with an OS, and those without. IMO it's more of a continum. going from low end to high end
* chips (e.g. the really small pics) with so little resources that you are almost certain to be programming them in assembler and you are going to be counting bytes of that precious data memory. * chips (e.g. the larger 8-bit pics) that are big enough to handle a reasonble set of libraries for C or similar, a mainloop that calls a number of peices of state machine based code repeatedly (can be considered a crude form of cooperative multitasking) and some interrupts for time criticial stuff. There are sometimes very primitive "operating systems" used on such chips (look up tinyos sometime). * chips (e.g. the 16/32-bit pics and many arm based microcontrollers) that have the cabability to reasonably handle a preemptive multitasked environment if desired but don't have the memory needed for even a stripped down unix-like system. * systems (while it varies this is about the point where we switch from single chips to a setup with a seperate processor, ram, flash etc) that have the memory for a stripped down unix-like system but lack a mmu (not fun to debug a system with a complex os and no memory protection. * systems with a mmu and the ram/storage to run a very stripped down unix-like system. * systems that can run a fully featured operating system with software and libraries comparable to those used on the desktop.
you can hopefully see that the APS is not trying to rip people off or make everyone miserable. What I guess they are doing is trying to drive people to subscribe rather than buying single articles by making the single article price stupidly high.
Subscriptions have a number of advantages for a publisher
1: it provides a more steady stream of income. In general stability is good especially for a smaller buisness or a nonprofit. 2: people may keep paying even if they no longer really need the subscription. People will only pay on a per article basis if it's something that really matters to them. 3: gathering the payments into fewer larger transactions mean less of the money the customer pays goes to the the financial institutions. 4: by encouraging insitution wide subscriptions they can get money from central university budgets rather than individual research budgets.
Breaking inter-VM communications down into little itty bitty packets, running them one by one through a virtual bridge table without the benefit of content addressable memory, and then back up through a virtual ethernet interface is not a particularly efficient use of resources. True, otoh making the physical and virtual networks one logical subnet makes the management much easier. Do you really want to have to reconfigure and possibly readdress everything just because you are moving a vm between host boxes to cope with demand?
holy shit that looks amazing! Oh there are such moments, the ending credits of GTA4 with thier incrediblly detailed flyovers are the example that immediately springs to mind.
but at least what i find is that when i'm actually playing (as apposed to staring at credits etc) that stops mattering as all my concentration is focused on the task in hand.
The Wii is a potential annoyance for those with home theater setups. The only audio output is two-channel analog and it's through the video port. Unless the HT receiver supports pass-through for the kind of video being used, special cabling is required to hook up the Wii to a TV and to a home theater system. Are phono stacking leads really considered that special?
The problem for spirit as I understand it is they really need to be tilted towards the sun (or at minimum be at zero tilt) to maintain survival power levels through the winter and right now they are tilted away from the sun.
normally this would be achieved by driving to a location that is tilted correctly for overwintering but they can't do that if they are stuck.
They are considering digging one side of sprint in further to get a more favourable tilt but if they do that it will almost certainly mean the rover will never move again.
personally though it doesn't bother me too much since AMD is for the most part a legitimate competitor For the moment they are still a player at the low-midrange. The trouble is that stuff makes relatively little money. Most of intels competitors in the PC processor market have been gradually killed off because of both the huge economies of scale intel has and the fact that intel could make the big margins on the high end stuff.
AMD pulled a rabbit out of the hat (opteron/athlon64) while intel was slumbering (p4/itanium) but now intel have got thier act together (core2/nahelm) I just don't see how amd/globalfoundries (afaict despite the split the two companies are still heavilly dependent on each other) can keep going much longer.
I hope i'm wrong but I just can't see a bright future for AMD.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see a few categories of people where WGA will bring a benefit to microsoft
1: people who go "OMG MS has caught me, I'd better pay up before this gets serious" and/or don't want to risk using cracks.
2: small buisnesses who currently don't have any volume licenses at all (note: afaict WGA does not stop people overrunning thier volume licenses) and are currently running on pirate copies
3: dodgy PC vendors who are selling machines preloaded with pirate copies of windows (IIRC under certain circumstances WGA offers a free copy as a reward for turning in pirates)
Afaict the killer is the round trip times, a ssl connection takes more round trips to set up than a plain TCP one and web browsers frequently set up new connections (yes there is keepalive but thats still a far cry from a system that uses a single persistant connection).
No problem if you are on a fast low latency connection but if you aren't those extra round trips can really add up.
If someone is willing to pay them for their serviceIf someone is willing to pay them for their services
But that isn't really what happens in a class action. Instead a group of lawyers and a couple of sample plaintiffs takes over the right to sue from a large class of people without asking most of them. Then rather than persuing the case to the end they make a settlement where the class get some token ammount that is often payed in vouchers.
64-bit windows can't run 16-bit binaries, afaict the only reason for not supporting win16 binaries is that MS couldn't be bothered debugging the code in question.
wine on 64-bit linux OTOH can run win16 binaries ;)
from the advisory:
"It is important to note that glyph data is supplied to the X server by the X client. Any remote X client can gain root privileges on the X server using the proof of concept program attached.
It is also trivial to exploit this vulnerability as a DoS by causing an existing X client program (such as Firefox) to render a long text string. It may be possible to use Flash movies, Java applets, or embedded web fonts to supply the custom glyph data necessary for reliable remote code execution."
but AFAIK there's no possible way to remotely exploit this (outside of another vulnerability).
Which is the key, in most cases* neither a local "root" vulnerability or a remote vulnerability in some unprivilaged daemon are that much of a threat on thier own.
Combine the two though and you get the equivilent of a remote root vulnerability which is about the most serious class of vulnerability arround.
Since remote unprivilaged code execution vulnerabilities are pretty common closing holes in the local privilages system promptly is a vital part of keeping systems secure.
* there are exceptions to this, terminal servers would be an obvious one where a local root vulnerability is a very serious issue on it's own.
which is tantamount to a tax BTW
It is in some ways like a tax but unlike most taxes which can only hit your citizens and residents inflation will hit anyone who holds either your currency or bonds (government or otherwise) denominated in your currency.
they could do what they did with the GBC, the GBC could run old gameboy games but it was also possible to make both dual mode games (taking advantage of the GBCs better graphics but still retaining compatibility with the original gameboy) and GBC only games.
I'm not convinced putting a complex interface chip on every module is a good idea. They tend to result in memory modules that are power hungry (read: a pain to cool) and expensive intel have tried this twice (though the second time they only did it with the server/workstation stuff), first with rambus then fbdimm, both times they backed down (the latest xeons have on-die memory controllers that work with plain ddr3).
Plus every extra stage you add to the path between CPU core and memory adds latency, memory latency is bad if you have code doing significant random access to the ram.
(I wonder why this is? Are they such Luddites? Or are they just ignorant of the technology? Or perhaps they don't see a way to collect overdue fines. ;-)
Copyright!
Lending out physical copies from libraries is something that has been accepted by law (either for free or with some fixed payment decided by and payed by the government depending on your country) in most countries for a very long time.
You can't really lend out or sell an ebook, only copy it. Since the library would be copying the books they would need either a specific agreement with the copyright holder or a new compulsory license law to let them do that. The copyright holder or compulsory license would probablly insist on some form of drm to ensure that when a
"borrower" "returned" a book they actually lost access to it, this would in turn mean the library would have to deal with the various competing drm systems.
I noticed that all the TVs on display were hooked up by coax
Probablly because it's easier to distribute to lots of TVs.
and that HDMI cables are annoyingly expensive.
Thats more a case of the big box stores trying to rip you off on accessories than any real manufacturing issue. At least for short runs it's possible to pick up cables much cheaper (though still more expensive than say USB cables)
If video cabling used, say, H.264, or maybe JPEG2000 to preserve a higher quality colorspace, we could perhaps get away with using cheap USB cables for video connections. Viable?
Right now the real time encoders would probablly cost far more than you would save, and the extra artifacts introduced would probablly piss off a lot of users too.
You forgot to mention that you're legally blind. I'm typing this on a 24" LCD at 1680x1050, and it looked like absolute crap with (good) VGA cables. Pixels were ghosted and there was no such thing as a single-pixel-wide vertical line. I have astigmatism and even I could tell that it was artifacted all to hell.
Sounds like something in the chain was shit, most likely the input circuitry in your display (i've noticed sucky VGA inputs seem to be a particular problem on HDTVs, haven't had the problem on a monitor myself but it wouldn't surprise me if there are some shit ones out there).
The question then becomes how many pure displayport (vs displayport with DVI/HDMI compatibility) connectors will we actually see in the forseeable future.
It depends how they do it. I'd agree if they wired everything seperately but if they just had one data channel and then logically split it into the various applications I'd think it would be perfectly doable.
video+usb+ethernet+audio isn't really that much more bandwidth than video alone.
the output implies that google.cn doesn't have a mirror in China, because geographically India is closer to China than to US
Or it could mean that if no explicit handling is configured the fallback option is the US servers.
Also geographic closeness doesn't nessacerally imply good network connections between two points.
Revolt isn't necessary: the Federal Government is going to go bankrupt in the fairly near future
Cant they just order the federal reserve to print more money?
Afaict most US debt is denominated in US dollars so the US can simply inflate it's way out of it.
despite the title of the /. post they aren't rewriting everything, "just" the win32 subsystem.
essentially they are at a point where they have two uses, strugle to get ever closer to the poorly documented behaviour of windows themselves or integrate as much of possible of wines code (who have put a lot more resources into reverse engineering win32).
but you certainly can't run any kind of OS on a PIC. ;).
Depends which pic and on your deinfition of OS
There's two kinds of embedded platforms: those with an OS, and those without.
IMO it's more of a continum. going from low end to high end
* chips (e.g. the really small pics) with so little resources that you are almost certain to be programming them in assembler and you are going to be counting bytes of that precious data memory.
* chips (e.g. the larger 8-bit pics) that are big enough to handle a reasonble set of libraries for C or similar, a mainloop that calls a number of peices of state machine based code repeatedly (can be considered a crude form of cooperative multitasking) and some interrupts for time criticial stuff. There are sometimes very primitive "operating systems" used on such chips (look up tinyos sometime).
* chips (e.g. the 16/32-bit pics and many arm based microcontrollers) that have the cabability to reasonably handle a preemptive multitasked environment if desired but don't have the memory needed for even a stripped down unix-like system.
* systems (while it varies this is about the point where we switch from single chips to a setup with a seperate processor, ram, flash etc) that have the memory for a stripped down unix-like system but lack a mmu (not fun to debug a system with a complex os and no memory protection.
* systems with a mmu and the ram/storage to run a very stripped down unix-like system.
* systems that can run a fully featured operating system with software and libraries comparable to those used on the desktop.
I would think that the vast majoirty of embedded processors don't run an OS at all.....
you can hopefully see that the APS is not trying to rip people off or make everyone miserable.
What I guess they are doing is trying to drive people to subscribe rather than buying single articles by making the single article price stupidly high.
Subscriptions have a number of advantages for a publisher
1: it provides a more steady stream of income. In general stability is good especially for a smaller buisness or a nonprofit.
2: people may keep paying even if they no longer really need the subscription. People will only pay on a per article basis if it's something that really matters to them.
3: gathering the payments into fewer larger transactions mean less of the money the customer pays goes to the the financial institutions.
4: by encouraging insitution wide subscriptions they can get money from central university budgets rather than individual research budgets.
Breaking inter-VM communications down into little itty bitty packets, running them one by one through a virtual bridge table without the benefit of content addressable memory, and then back up through a virtual ethernet interface is not a particularly efficient use of resources.
True, otoh making the physical and virtual networks one logical subnet makes the management much easier. Do you really want to have to reconfigure and possibly readdress everything just because you are moving a vm between host boxes to cope with demand?
holy shit that looks amazing!
Oh there are such moments, the ending credits of GTA4 with thier incrediblly detailed flyovers are the example that immediately springs to mind.
but at least what i find is that when i'm actually playing (as apposed to staring at credits etc) that stops mattering as all my concentration is focused on the task in hand.
The Wii is a potential annoyance for those with home theater setups. The only audio output is two-channel analog and it's through the video port. Unless the HT receiver supports pass-through for the kind of video being used, special cabling is required to hook up the Wii to a TV and to a home theater system.
Are phono stacking leads really considered that special?
The problem for spirit as I understand it is they really need to be tilted towards the sun (or at minimum be at zero tilt) to maintain survival power levels through the winter and right now they are tilted away from the sun.
normally this would be achieved by driving to a location that is tilted correctly for overwintering but they can't do that if they are stuck.
They are considering digging one side of sprint in further to get a more favourable tilt but if they do that it will almost certainly mean the rover will never move again.
personally though it doesn't bother me too much since AMD is for the most part a legitimate competitor
For the moment they are still a player at the low-midrange. The trouble is that stuff makes relatively little money. Most of intels competitors in the PC processor market have been gradually killed off because of both the huge economies of scale intel has and the fact that intel could make the big margins on the high end stuff.
AMD pulled a rabbit out of the hat (opteron/athlon64) while intel was slumbering (p4/itanium) but now intel have got thier act together (core2/nahelm) I just don't see how amd/globalfoundries (afaict despite the split the two companies are still heavilly dependent on each other) can keep going much longer.
I hope i'm wrong but I just can't see a bright future for AMD.