You're right it was a bad analogy (nothing unusual for/.), but I don't think (s)he was trolling. The point I think the GP was heading towards is that security by obscurity does not work, in any form. Data mining a database that is "in the wild" is nothing a spammer couldn't have thought of by themselves. The real question is how the data got out there in the first place, and preventing it happening again.
Then we look at Sony's stock report for Oct-Dec 2000, and there is an interesting little blurb. It said that had Sony been able to meet demand with another 1 million PS2 units, they would have pocketed $175 million in profits. $175 million divided by one million consoles equals $175 per console profit.
Poor mathematics skills. You want projected profit per console, you need to divide the $175 million profit by all consoles sold, not just the 1 million shortfall.
To me, "Core OS" means the Windows equivalent of the Linux kernel. If Windows really does need a HTML rendering component as part of the kernel, then no wonder it suffers terribly from feature bloat and all the associated bugs/security holes.
I can think of no sane technical reason why you would want to do this. Locking it in as an all-or-nothing package is the only reason I can come up with.
In a client/server architecture, network transfer delays can cometimes make the arrival of data less predictable than if it were coming from a physical device. This can result in underruns (data not arriving in time) or overruns (more data arriving than there is room for) if the delays are sufficiently large. If an underrun or overrun occurs, the affected element is "Paused" until more data or space becomes available. To avoid pauses, applications can control the amount of data that is kept for each input and output element and can request notices whenever an input begins to run out of data or an output has to buffer up too much data.
Not to mention that they will be getting all this for free. I was fortunate enough to avoid a crippling student debt, but I have to wonder whether the availability of these materials irks American students. You come out of university after X years with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and yet someone somewhere else can get access to the same knowledge for free? For all you know Chinese universities could simply cut-and-paste the entire course, and I bet their students don't owe ridiculous amounts of money once they graduate.
Of course they can't leave the country, or enjoy many of the personal freedoms we have either, I guess...
Trivial to break. Wrapping the cloth around a pole is just an easier way of looking at every x letters....assuming the pole is cylindrical. Get yourself a conical pole, or better a really weird-shaped pole and it gets a bit harder.
Take a more mundane example -- lockpicks. Laws criminalizing the posession of lockpicks by anyone other than a licensed locksmith are obviously wrong because they "blame the tool and not the user." Hell, I might lose my house keys, and need to pick my own lock! And even if it were shown that 99.99% of the use of lockpicks by unlicensed persons was for the purpose of burglary and auto theft -- well, tough, blame the user, not the tool. We have to preserve the unlicensed and unregulated use of that tool for the 0.01% of the uses that are beneficial.
Personally, I'd be blaming whoever built the lock, for developing a product that was unfit for the purpose for which it was bought.
Even if we restrict it to just the lockpick (ignore the lock) then yes, it is the person using the lockpick to break and enter that is committing the crime, not the lockpick itself. As far as a tool goes, it is performing the purpose for which it was developed and sold (or at least stolen).
Bottom line: if you develop substandard products you should be held responsible and accountable when they create problems.
Wow. A security vendor, who has a critical financial interest in creating FUD, claims that disclosing security flaws creates security problems. Forgive me if my eyeballs don't explode with surprise.
Security by obscurity has been proven time and again not to work. Nobody would find a security hole if it didn't exist. Likewise, if one does exist, if one person can find it so can someone else. The responsibility lies squarely with the developers.
Time for a bad analogy (seeing as how this is Slashdot and all): If the door of your house/apartment/room/basement was made of balsa wood rather than a decent hardwood (or a reinforced steel-belted Faraday Cage for you tinfoil-hatters), it would only be a matter of time before someone worked this out. And regardless of whether they boot your front door in and make off with your home entertainment system, or simply leave you a note that says "This door is so thin I can hear you whacking off to Buffy reruns from across the hall (by the way your dinner's getting cold, son)" you can bet if one person can work it out, so can someone else. And the next person might not just leave you a note. So, if the door is your responsibility you better fix it ASAP, or risk the consequences. And if not, you better fry the ass of whoever is responsible, or you'll still risk the consequences yourself.
Landlord won't give you a secure premises? Move out, and tell everyone about it. Or get a gun and a pit bull. Or barricade the door and use the kitchen window for access. Or all three. Windows has more holes than half a dozen slices of Jarlesberg? Switch to a more secure O/S, and add your voice to the complaints. Or install malware detection/removal tools. Or lock it down behind a firewall. Or all three. But don't just stick your head in the sand and hope nobody will notice, that approach just doesn't work.
It's sad, but you're best off if you just copy what was already there. It sells. And as much as I hate it, that's the way to success.
Not just games, that goes for all media too: TV (sitcom plots recycled), music (all pop/hip-hop sounds the same), magazines (just how many times can you recycle the same tired celebrity), etc. etc. Re-hashing someone else's success (I believe the current management wankword for this is "standing on the shoulders of giants") is like betting on the favourite in a horse race - chances of success are good, benefits minor. Actualli innovating is betting on the rank outsider - most likely you'll fall flat on your face, but if you fluke it and get everything right (and that includes things outside your control, like market demand, timing, luck, etc.) then you'll hit it big. Even if "big" doesn't bring much of a profit, you can trade on the reputation from that point onwards (eg. id Software, post-Wolfenstein 3D).
...and any self-respecting kid will have it enabled or cracked within a week. If not by themselves, then through "a friend" or the local stolen-mobile-phone-and-Xbox-chip retailer.
...and in the meantime your competitors have released slightly inferior products much earlier and captured your market share. Then they've used the funds from their initial sales to boost their resources, and started working on the next generation of your product before you've even finished the current one.
From a customer's point of view, your comments hold water. From a shareholder's point of view they don't. Guess which group of people companies care more about?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right it was a bad analogy (nothing unusual for /.), but I don't think (s)he was trolling. The point I think the GP was heading towards is that security by obscurity does not work, in any form. Data mining a database that is "in the wild" is nothing a spammer couldn't have thought of by themselves. The real question is how the data got out there in the first place, and preventing it happening again.
Now, you cannot store everything that's been sent through the 'net. It's simply BY FAR more than you could credibly store.
You didn't think it was merely a coincidence that the term for an unfeasibly large amount of data storage is a "Library of Congress", did you?
Then we look at Sony's stock report for Oct-Dec 2000, and there is an interesting little blurb. It said that had Sony been able to meet demand with another 1 million PS2 units, they would have pocketed $175 million in profits. $175 million divided by one million consoles equals $175 per console profit.
Poor mathematics skills. You want projected profit per console, you need to divide the $175 million profit by all consoles sold, not just the 1 million shortfall.
I'm glad you're not my accountant.
Obligatory penny arcade reference...
...right, which is why the EU is fining them millions of dollars a day for failing to comply with antitrust regulations.
To me, "Core OS" means the Windows equivalent of the Linux kernel. If Windows really does need a HTML rendering component as part of the kernel, then no wonder it suffers terribly from feature bloat and all the associated bugs/security holes.
I can think of no sane technical reason why you would want to do this. Locking it in as an all-or-nothing package is the only reason I can come up with.
I think you missed the obvious... its called the COPE Act because the government doesn't care whether you like it.
Good point. From the NAS Documentation:
In a client/server architecture, network transfer delays can cometimes make the arrival of data less predictable than if it were coming from a physical device. This can result in underruns (data not arriving in time) or overruns (more data arriving than there is room for) if the delays are sufficiently large. If an underrun or overrun occurs, the affected element is "Paused" until more data or space becomes available. To avoid pauses, applications can control the amount of data that is kept for each input and output element and can request notices whenever an input begins to run out of data or an output has to buffer up too much data.
How does that fail to qualify as prior art?
Bah. Wake me when they support NTFS on Linux.
Not to mention that they will be getting all this for free. I was fortunate enough to avoid a crippling student debt, but I have to wonder whether the availability of these materials irks American students. You come out of university after X years with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and yet someone somewhere else can get access to the same knowledge for free? For all you know Chinese universities could simply cut-and-paste the entire course, and I bet their students don't owe ridiculous amounts of money once they graduate.
Of course they can't leave the country, or enjoy many of the personal freedoms we have either, I guess...
True, he's a whackjob, but if there's anything we can do to get the first item on that list happening, I say we go for it!
Trivial to break. Wrapping the cloth around a pole is just an easier way of looking at every x letters. ...assuming the pole is cylindrical. Get yourself a conical pole, or better a really weird-shaped pole and it gets a bit harder.
Sorry, wrong...
Take a more mundane example -- lockpicks. Laws criminalizing the posession of lockpicks by anyone other than a licensed locksmith are obviously wrong because they "blame the tool and not the user." Hell, I might lose my house keys, and need to pick my own lock! And even if it were shown that 99.99% of the use of lockpicks by unlicensed persons was for the purpose of burglary and auto theft -- well, tough, blame the user, not the tool. We have to preserve the unlicensed and unregulated use of that tool for the 0.01% of the uses that are beneficial.
Personally, I'd be blaming whoever built the lock, for developing a product that was unfit for the purpose for which it was bought.
Even if we restrict it to just the lockpick (ignore the lock) then yes, it is the person using the lockpick to break and enter that is committing the crime, not the lockpick itself. As far as a tool goes, it is performing the purpose for which it was developed and sold (or at least stolen).
Bottom line: if you develop substandard products you should be held responsible and accountable when they create problems.
Wow. A security vendor, who has a critical financial interest in creating FUD, claims that disclosing security flaws creates security problems. Forgive me if my eyeballs don't explode with surprise.
Security by obscurity has been proven time and again not to work. Nobody would find a security hole if it didn't exist. Likewise, if one does exist, if one person can find it so can someone else. The responsibility lies squarely with the developers.
Time for a bad analogy (seeing as how this is Slashdot and all): If the door of your house/apartment/room/basement was made of balsa wood rather than a decent hardwood (or a reinforced steel-belted Faraday Cage for you tinfoil-hatters), it would only be a matter of time before someone worked this out. And regardless of whether they boot your front door in and make off with your home entertainment system, or simply leave you a note that says "This door is so thin I can hear you whacking off to Buffy reruns from across the hall (by the way your dinner's getting cold, son)" you can bet if one person can work it out, so can someone else. And the next person might not just leave you a note. So, if the door is your responsibility you better fix it ASAP, or risk the consequences. And if not, you better fry the ass of whoever is responsible, or you'll still risk the consequences yourself.
Landlord won't give you a secure premises? Move out, and tell everyone about it. Or get a gun and a pit bull. Or barricade the door and use the kitchen window for access. Or all three. Windows has more holes than half a dozen slices of Jarlesberg? Switch to a more secure O/S, and add your voice to the complaints. Or install malware detection/removal tools. Or lock it down behind a firewall. Or all three. But don't just stick your head in the sand and hope nobody will notice, that approach just doesn't work.
It's sad, but you're best off if you just copy what was already there. It sells. And as much as I hate it, that's the way to success.
Not just games, that goes for all media too: TV (sitcom plots recycled), music (all pop/hip-hop sounds the same), magazines (just how many times can you recycle the same tired celebrity), etc. etc. Re-hashing someone else's success (I believe the current management wankword for this is "standing on the shoulders of giants") is like betting on the favourite in a horse race - chances of success are good, benefits minor. Actualli innovating is betting on the rank outsider - most likely you'll fall flat on your face, but if you fluke it and get everything right (and that includes things outside your control, like market demand, timing, luck, etc.) then you'll hit it big. Even if "big" doesn't bring much of a profit, you can trade on the reputation from that point onwards (eg. id Software, post-Wolfenstein 3D).
Ahh, I can see it now... Minesweeper 2: The Explosioning
...and any self-respecting kid will have it enabled or cracked within a week. If not by themselves, then through "a friend" or the local stolen-mobile-phone-and-Xbox-chip retailer.
Gates: ... BTW, you do know that RED Hat isn't a communist version of Linux. It actually promotes human rights.
Ha! The RIAA headwuarters would freeze over and Darl McBride would fly, before Gates would ever say anything like that...
Yeah, 55,000 channels and apparently nothing's on.
So what? The internet had brought broadcasting to the masses. But the right to free speech doesn't mean anyone actually has to listen to you.
If you were worried about security, you wouldn't be installing Windows. So quit yer whinin'.
Actually, given the spelling I would be more inclined to suggest it makes the fart grow Honda...
Absinthehol, on the other hand...
...and in the meantime your competitors have released slightly inferior products much earlier and captured your market share. Then they've used the funds from their initial sales to boost their resources, and started working on the next generation of your product before you've even finished the current one.
From a customer's point of view, your comments hold water. From a shareholder's point of view they don't. Guess which group of people companies care more about?
True - problem is it's like herding cats.