Except that nobody watching benefits nobody... and that is the reality for the vast majority of those hundreds of channels which are perpetually being multicast by cable companies. I get that the cable companies do not (choose to) perceive the additional cost from multicasting all of those channels... but there are indeed measurable costs to them, and one of those costs is the bandwidth usage of all those unwatched channels, which could otherwise be reallocated to help remedy that network clog issue that you mentioned. In addition, more and more consumers are already shifting their usage from the broadcast model to the streaming model on their own; it's not like the cable company is going to be able to stop the problem from getting worse. Thus, it is ultimately in their best interest to accept the inevitable, and find a way to reliably profit from the changing habits of their customer base. And -- aside from primarily sports enthusiasts -- their customers aren't really watching "live" television multicasts nearly as frequently as they once were. Thus, the case for multicast based systems becomes less compelling, every single day.
In addition to that, your observation brings up an ironic tie-in to the topic at hand, in that broadcast is an always-on technology which perpetually burns up power at both ends of the connection; thus, properly completing the transition to streaming will clearly save the cable companies some not-insignificant sum of money, in reductions to their own utility bills. (Not that customers will see that reflected in their bills, of course.)
The world is rapidly moving away from the cable model... and the cable box itself is no exception. Therefore, the solution to this issue is pretty clear: transition away from big box cable endpoints to Roku or AppleTV endpoints. This moves customers into the future by shifting away from a DVR model to a streaming model, and it shifts away from insanely power-hungry boxes to devices which typically use about 1 to 3 watts at peak use.
(It's actually a simple solution to multiple problems. Unfortunately, the cable industry has been resisting these types of moves for so long, that even though they've effectively already lost this battle on multiple fronts, (for all practical purposes) they still resist just because of muscle memory.)
This doesn't appear to be specifically broken out anywhere, but I think it's an important point that the Silverlight Netflix client software has never supported greater than 720p at 3Mbps. Adding support for HTML5/MSE/EME to Safari will mean that Mac users can finally view all of those "Super HD" streams in full 1080p on their computers. (I've been chomping at the bit for that one, myself... now, if Apple would just release those darned beta redemption codes, so I can go play!)
... If the Linux client was a pre-compiled binary, it could probably be made reasonably secure against people trying to copy content. At least as secure as a DVD or BluRay anyway.
I'd say, you just answered your own question: If a Linux binary could be made "at least as secure as a DVD or BluRay," then Big Media would instantly label it as a non-starter, because optical media is not even remotely secure at this point; all you need to do is pop open MakeMKV, and those movies will come off of the disk in an unencrypted format in short order, ready to be converted by Handbrake for whatever purpose you might find appealing, from PSP to piracy.
Which, I think, is actually the entire point of going to DRMed streaming media... Big Media is actually trying to make it harder to decrypt their content, rather than maintain the status quo.
I glanced at the Google Street View link in the ITWorld.com article, and the 2007 imagery for that location shows that the bike lane didn't exist at that time... and likewise, it shows that nobody is parked in front of the hydrant. Move forward, and all three of the subsequent snapshots of that location show cars (which were no doubt all ticketed) parked alongside the newly painted bike lane, directly adjacent to that hydrant -- but more interestingly, the photos also show "no-parking" markings on the street leading up to just a bit before that hydrant. At a glance, any reasonable person would interpret the street markings to indicate that parking there was perfectly legal, and expected. And really, how much more than "a glance" do most people give to their city parking, when they're probably already late for work?
That said: I wouldn't necessarily go straight to NYPD malice for the explanation. Seems to me, someone in the DOT simply wasn't paying enough attention to his surroundings when he designated the street re-painting requirements, (oops) and low-paid NYPD traffic cops simply discovered and took advantage of the situation to easily meet their ticket quotas, without ever really asking or caring about the "why."
"...but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
Shouldn't that be made Blackberry special? I mean, I loved my old crackberry as much as the next geek back-in-the-day... but pretty nearly everyone has moved on, at this point.
"However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.' It looks like this is another blow to privacy on the web."
I don't know about you, but I can think of one fairly effective and extremely easy to use "standard"... AdBlock.
And how do they propose determining the price for a projector, when a single unit can readily have a screen size ranging from 30 inches to 300 inches?
Easy: they charge the maximum the device is capable of (in this case, 300 inches).
Well, I don't know about you, but I didn't buy a projector because it could project a maximum size of 300 inches... I bought it because it was far cheaper than practically every other remotely comparable large-form-factor television, even when projecting at "only" 80 inches, as I am. Thus, when the price of the hardware is factored into the equation, the amount of dough that you can expect to squeeze out of your viewing audience is dramatically impacted.
Which is to say: if Dreamworks actually goes down this path, then they had better find a way to convince every other studio to follow them... otherwise, I'll just stop watching Dreamworks films entirely in favor of their competition. (Pixar puts out some pretty darned good stuff, after all.)
The conflict of interest is pretty unmistakable, here... but we have to keep in mind that even absent that conflict, this would still be the most obvious choice for both the former FCC commissioners and for the lobbying groups. The commissioners obviously have an interest in the field, and the lobbying groups would want to hire someone who knows more then a little bit about the inner workings of their "arch nemesis."
I mean... sure, moves like this will always have that sort'a greasy slimy feel to them, no matter how you cut it. But where else are they going to go?
(Plus, there's some pretty darned good scratch in going all turncoat!)
My thoughts, exactly. Crud, I still don't make that kind of scratch, and I'm a Senior Software Engineer who is rapidly approaching 40! Frankly, I'd switch to welding in a heartbeat (and probably lower my heartrate considerably) if I could actually get a raise in the process.
I find it amusing that a post suggesting that Yahoo should basically just "close up shop and go home" was posted anonymously. It makes me wonder if perhaps the hands behind this particular post belong to someone at Google... who doesn't want Yahoo to succeed at it's various rumored "come back" plans, such as trying to swipe the default iOS search engine crown, and trying to build a YouTube competitor.
Windows based ATM machines are almost certainly running on XP Embedded, rather than the retail version of XP... support for Embedded doesn't end until January 2016. Thus, if the financial industry is moving away from XP to Linux, it isn't necessarily related to Microsoft's XP support schedules.
I switched technology careers at 30 myself; I went from help desk technician and system administration to web development, and I'm quite satisfied with the results. Of course, it probably helps that I'd already been trying to get into web development for the better part of the preceding decade... but that's not the point. The point is that it can indeed be done, if you have the skills and the drive to get where you want to be. Most jobs outside of the education field and higher sciences aren't nearly as difficult to break into, as people usually think.
My advice to you would be, very simply, just apply for the job you want, and see what happens. It'll most likely take more than a few interviews before you find someone willing to take a chance on you, and of course, you'll probably have to start out at an entry level position... but if you're coming from the educational field, then you probably won't take too much of a hit to your paycheck.
Frankly, Nike's advice actually works, here: if you want to get a different/better job... just do it.
I have five kids, (ranging from three to eleven years old) and while they do sometimes play video games, (the four year old is almost better at MarioKart Wii than me, and he's only been playing it for less than a year!) my focus for them this year has been primarily Legos. We made a point of scavenging all of my old Legos from my parents house just a couple of months ago, and we purchased hundreds of dollars worth of new Legos for Christmas. And you know what? While only a couple of them have had any kind of a lasting interest in video games, every single one of them is perfectly happy to sit down with a pile of bricks in front of them, for hours on end.
I think there is just something intrinsically satisfying about building something with your own hands. Legos capture that in a simplified "child friendly" form like nothing else I've experienced in my own lifetime. So no: I won't focus specifically on those "vintage" video games... but I will be searching the web for PDFs of my old Lego kit instruction manuals. (So far, I've only found one... the official Lego site doesn't go far enough back in their archive. Yet.)
What does Scrum have to to with allocation of development resources...
Scrum in-and-of-itself isn't really critical to the issue I was attempting to address; I was only using it to help illustrate that development teams do not have unlimited resources. Scrum is simply one of the tools that my particular team uses to organize and prioritize our workload, so that we can appropriately allocate what limited resources we do have. I hypothesized (within the context of the original thread) that Valve likely uses some similar management methodology to organize their own workload.
Also, not every dev shop has a dedicated "maintenance team"... I work in a small dev shop where all of us cross-task to both development and maintenance. So in my case, it's absolutely a given that higher priority tasks (such as new development of a highly anticipated game, for example) would take resources away from lower priority tasks (such as maintenance of a game that's over a decade old, and not bringing in any cash at all for the company).
Disclosure: I am an Apple fan -- but I absolutely will not defend the practice of purging negative comments from community forums. I think censorship is probably the single most frustrating experience anyone can have in a forum, warranted or not. I speak from experience: I've been censored recently as well -- in an entirely different forum, and for reasons which seemed entirely unreasonable to me. Ironically, I had made the egregious error of trying to help.
In responding to a thread about a bug, I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3. I then went on to speculate (and I suspect this is where I went wrong) that as soon as we see a fix to that bug, we should all be on the lookout for the impending release of HL3. A short time later, that entire thread had suddenly vanished from the Steam forum, with no explanation.
And the problem crops up elsewhere as well; forum admins are frequently overzealous, especially when they see something that they view as a potential slight to their corporate overlords. It's a very unfortunate trend, and as I see it, the only way to avoid being unreasonably censored is to post your comments elsewhere, where -- hopefully -- unbiased management will leave your commentary on controversial matters intact. (Slashdot might qualify as such a haven... I know I haven't been censored here. Yet.)
The charger is a mini linux machine what needs to use an apple developer account to dynamically add the devices UDID to the developer portal.
It then signs the malicious app and installs it.
It takes advantage of ad-hoc distribution and would require a new Apple developer account every 100 devices.
Everything that Ernest said, plus one more important note: Your phone must be either unlocked or not passcode/password protected, in order for this exploit to function. (Just another good reason to use what should be common sense security precautions, really.)
First, I will preface my comment by saying that I am not actually in favor of government regulation of the internet... but if we were to actually go down that road, I would opine that the only step necessary to dramatically improve US broadband, would be to incorporate salary caps into the C- level positions at the existing telcos. If the money can't be siphoned up the chain to the bank account of those money-hungry CEOs, then it seems to me that the most likely places for all that cash to go would be a) back into the company, (as in, both the lower level employees and the infrastructure) or b) back to the customers and stockholders.
I mean, I'm all for a free market and the capitalistic system and all that... but good grief! Salaries at the top are positively obscene!
Personally, in your situation I would probably recommend going full tilt into the formal Agile process. Strictly speaking, the formalized definition of the "Agile process" does not necessarily coincide with what most people think of as "agile". In an "agile" world, maybe you can make changes at a whim, simply because the customer says jump... but in the "Agile process", you don't really make changes to the current sprint; all changes get dropped into the product backlog, and prioritized appropriately to be included in a future sprint. If you're changing the scope of tasks included in the current sprint, then you're not really doing Agile.
Mind you, there are infrequent times when a new requirement or a bug report might actually trumps the sprint altogether... personally, I would classify those as emergencies. And let's be frank: How many actual emergencies do you think take place in the world of computer programming?
(Source: My employer sent me to ScrumMaster training a couple of weeks ago.)
The subject line pretty much says it all. The only real question here is, how long will it take him to well-and-truly trash the XBox division, such that it's no longer recoverable?
Yup... exactly like that. As I said, I didn't really think it was likely to pass the prior art gamut. Now, let's see if the patent examiners happen upon that, in their evaluation of Apple's application, and if they agree that it constitutes prior art. (Patent examiners do document all of their findings in their process, right? Right?... )
Slashdot Mirror
Except that nobody watching benefits nobody... and that is the reality for the vast majority of those hundreds of channels which are perpetually being multicast by cable companies. I get that the cable companies do not (choose to) perceive the additional cost from multicasting all of those channels... but there are indeed measurable costs to them, and one of those costs is the bandwidth usage of all those unwatched channels, which could otherwise be reallocated to help remedy that network clog issue that you mentioned. In addition, more and more consumers are already shifting their usage from the broadcast model to the streaming model on their own; it's not like the cable company is going to be able to stop the problem from getting worse. Thus, it is ultimately in their best interest to accept the inevitable, and find a way to reliably profit from the changing habits of their customer base. And -- aside from primarily sports enthusiasts -- their customers aren't really watching "live" television multicasts nearly as frequently as they once were. Thus, the case for multicast based systems becomes less compelling, every single day.
In addition to that, your observation brings up an ironic tie-in to the topic at hand, in that broadcast is an always-on technology which perpetually burns up power at both ends of the connection; thus, properly completing the transition to streaming will clearly save the cable companies some not-insignificant sum of money, in reductions to their own utility bills. (Not that customers will see that reflected in their bills, of course.)
The world is rapidly moving away from the cable model... and the cable box itself is no exception. Therefore, the solution to this issue is pretty clear: transition away from big box cable endpoints to Roku or AppleTV endpoints. This moves customers into the future by shifting away from a DVR model to a streaming model, and it shifts away from insanely power-hungry boxes to devices which typically use about 1 to 3 watts at peak use.
(It's actually a simple solution to multiple problems. Unfortunately, the cable industry has been resisting these types of moves for so long, that even though they've effectively already lost this battle on multiple fronts, (for all practical purposes) they still resist just because of muscle memory.)
This doesn't appear to be specifically broken out anywhere, but I think it's an important point that the Silverlight Netflix client software has never supported greater than 720p at 3Mbps. Adding support for HTML5/MSE/EME to Safari will mean that Mac users can finally view all of those "Super HD" streams in full 1080p on their computers. (I've been chomping at the bit for that one, myself... now, if Apple would just release those darned beta redemption codes, so I can go play!)
... If the Linux client was a pre-compiled binary, it could probably be made reasonably secure against people trying to copy content. At least as secure as a DVD or BluRay anyway.
I'd say, you just answered your own question: If a Linux binary could be made "at least as secure as a DVD or BluRay," then Big Media would instantly label it as a non-starter, because optical media is not even remotely secure at this point; all you need to do is pop open MakeMKV, and those movies will come off of the disk in an unencrypted format in short order, ready to be converted by Handbrake for whatever purpose you might find appealing, from PSP to piracy.
Which, I think, is actually the entire point of going to DRMed streaming media... Big Media is actually trying to make it harder to decrypt their content, rather than maintain the status quo.
I glanced at the Google Street View link in the ITWorld.com article, and the 2007 imagery for that location shows that the bike lane didn't exist at that time... and likewise, it shows that nobody is parked in front of the hydrant. Move forward, and all three of the subsequent snapshots of that location show cars (which were no doubt all ticketed) parked alongside the newly painted bike lane, directly adjacent to that hydrant -- but more interestingly, the photos also show "no-parking" markings on the street leading up to just a bit before that hydrant. At a glance, any reasonable person would interpret the street markings to indicate that parking there was perfectly legal, and expected. And really, how much more than "a glance" do most people give to their city parking, when they're probably already late for work?
That said: I wouldn't necessarily go straight to NYPD malice for the explanation. Seems to me, someone in the DOT simply wasn't paying enough attention to his surroundings when he designated the street re-painting requirements, (oops) and low-paid NYPD traffic cops simply discovered and took advantage of the situation to easily meet their ticket quotas, without ever really asking or caring about the "why."
"...but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
Shouldn't that be made Blackberry special? I mean, I loved my old crackberry as much as the next geek back-in-the-day... but pretty nearly everyone has moved on, at this point.
"However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.' It looks like this is another blow to privacy on the web."
I don't know about you, but I can think of one fairly effective and extremely easy to use "standard"... AdBlock.
And how do they propose determining the price for a projector, when a single unit can readily have a screen size ranging from 30 inches to 300 inches?
Easy: they charge the maximum the device is capable of (in this case, 300 inches).
Well, I don't know about you, but I didn't buy a projector because it could project a maximum size of 300 inches... I bought it because it was far cheaper than practically every other remotely comparable large-form-factor television, even when projecting at "only" 80 inches, as I am. Thus, when the price of the hardware is factored into the equation, the amount of dough that you can expect to squeeze out of your viewing audience is dramatically impacted.
Which is to say: if Dreamworks actually goes down this path, then they had better find a way to convince every other studio to follow them... otherwise, I'll just stop watching Dreamworks films entirely in favor of their competition. (Pixar puts out some pretty darned good stuff, after all.)
And how do they propose determining the price for a projector, when a single unit can readily have a screen size ranging from 30 inches to 300 inches?
The conflict of interest is pretty unmistakable, here... but we have to keep in mind that even absent that conflict, this would still be the most obvious choice for both the former FCC commissioners and for the lobbying groups. The commissioners obviously have an interest in the field, and the lobbying groups would want to hire someone who knows more then a little bit about the inner workings of their "arch nemesis."
I mean... sure, moves like this will always have that sort'a greasy slimy feel to them, no matter how you cut it. But where else are they going to go?
(Plus, there's some pretty darned good scratch in going all turncoat!)
To clarify... that was 40 years old... not 40k. (Doh!)
My thoughts, exactly. Crud, I still don't make that kind of scratch, and I'm a Senior Software Engineer who is rapidly approaching 40! Frankly, I'd switch to welding in a heartbeat (and probably lower my heartrate considerably) if I could actually get a raise in the process.
I find it amusing that a post suggesting that Yahoo should basically just "close up shop and go home" was posted anonymously. It makes me wonder if perhaps the hands behind this particular post belong to someone at Google... who doesn't want Yahoo to succeed at it's various rumored "come back" plans, such as trying to swipe the default iOS search engine crown, and trying to build a YouTube competitor.
"Doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!"
Windows based ATM machines are almost certainly running on XP Embedded, rather than the retail version of XP... support for Embedded doesn't end until January 2016. Thus, if the financial industry is moving away from XP to Linux, it isn't necessarily related to Microsoft's XP support schedules.
I switched technology careers at 30 myself; I went from help desk technician and system administration to web development, and I'm quite satisfied with the results. Of course, it probably helps that I'd already been trying to get into web development for the better part of the preceding decade... but that's not the point. The point is that it can indeed be done, if you have the skills and the drive to get where you want to be. Most jobs outside of the education field and higher sciences aren't nearly as difficult to break into, as people usually think.
My advice to you would be, very simply, just apply for the job you want, and see what happens. It'll most likely take more than a few interviews before you find someone willing to take a chance on you, and of course, you'll probably have to start out at an entry level position... but if you're coming from the educational field, then you probably won't take too much of a hit to your paycheck.
Frankly, Nike's advice actually works, here: if you want to get a different/better job... just do it.
Why does this sound so much like the makings of a B horror flick to me? (When it happens, just remember that you read it here first, folks.)
I have five kids, (ranging from three to eleven years old) and while they do sometimes play video games, (the four year old is almost better at MarioKart Wii than me, and he's only been playing it for less than a year!) my focus for them this year has been primarily Legos. We made a point of scavenging all of my old Legos from my parents house just a couple of months ago, and we purchased hundreds of dollars worth of new Legos for Christmas. And you know what? While only a couple of them have had any kind of a lasting interest in video games, every single one of them is perfectly happy to sit down with a pile of bricks in front of them, for hours on end.
I think there is just something intrinsically satisfying about building something with your own hands. Legos capture that in a simplified "child friendly" form like nothing else I've experienced in my own lifetime. So no: I won't focus specifically on those "vintage" video games... but I will be searching the web for PDFs of my old Lego kit instruction manuals. (So far, I've only found one... the official Lego site doesn't go far enough back in their archive. Yet.)
What does Scrum have to to with allocation of development resources ...
Scrum in-and-of-itself isn't really critical to the issue I was attempting to address; I was only using it to help illustrate that development teams do not have unlimited resources. Scrum is simply one of the tools that my particular team uses to organize and prioritize our workload, so that we can appropriately allocate what limited resources we do have. I hypothesized (within the context of the original thread) that Valve likely uses some similar management methodology to organize their own workload.
Also, not every dev shop has a dedicated "maintenance team"... I work in a small dev shop where all of us cross-task to both development and maintenance. So in my case, it's absolutely a given that higher priority tasks (such as new development of a highly anticipated game, for example) would take resources away from lower priority tasks (such as maintenance of a game that's over a decade old, and not bringing in any cash at all for the company).
Disclosure: I am an Apple fan -- but I absolutely will not defend the practice of purging negative comments from community forums. I think censorship is probably the single most frustrating experience anyone can have in a forum, warranted or not. I speak from experience: I've been censored recently as well -- in an entirely different forum, and for reasons which seemed entirely unreasonable to me. Ironically, I had made the egregious error of trying to help.
In responding to a thread about a bug, I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3. I then went on to speculate (and I suspect this is where I went wrong) that as soon as we see a fix to that bug, we should all be on the lookout for the impending release of HL3. A short time later, that entire thread had suddenly vanished from the Steam forum, with no explanation.
And the problem crops up elsewhere as well; forum admins are frequently overzealous, especially when they see something that they view as a potential slight to their corporate overlords. It's a very unfortunate trend, and as I see it, the only way to avoid being unreasonably censored is to post your comments elsewhere, where -- hopefully -- unbiased management will leave your commentary on controversial matters intact. (Slashdot might qualify as such a haven... I know I haven't been censored here. Yet.)
The charger is a mini linux machine what needs to use an apple developer account to dynamically add the devices UDID to the developer portal. It then signs the malicious app and installs it. It takes advantage of ad-hoc distribution and would require a new Apple developer account every 100 devices.
Everything that Ernest said, plus one more important note: Your phone must be either unlocked or not passcode/password protected, in order for this exploit to function. (Just another good reason to use what should be common sense security precautions, really.)
First, I will preface my comment by saying that I am not actually in favor of government regulation of the internet... but if we were to actually go down that road, I would opine that the only step necessary to dramatically improve US broadband, would be to incorporate salary caps into the C- level positions at the existing telcos. If the money can't be siphoned up the chain to the bank account of those money-hungry CEOs, then it seems to me that the most likely places for all that cash to go would be a) back into the company, (as in, both the lower level employees and the infrastructure) or b) back to the customers and stockholders.
I mean, I'm all for a free market and the capitalistic system and all that... but good grief! Salaries at the top are positively obscene!
Personally, in your situation I would probably recommend going full tilt into the formal Agile process. Strictly speaking, the formalized definition of the "Agile process" does not necessarily coincide with what most people think of as "agile". In an "agile" world, maybe you can make changes at a whim, simply because the customer says jump... but in the "Agile process", you don't really make changes to the current sprint; all changes get dropped into the product backlog, and prioritized appropriately to be included in a future sprint. If you're changing the scope of tasks included in the current sprint, then you're not really doing Agile.
Mind you, there are infrequent times when a new requirement or a bug report might actually trumps the sprint altogether... personally, I would classify those as emergencies. And let's be frank: How many actual emergencies do you think take place in the world of computer programming?
(Source: My employer sent me to ScrumMaster training a couple of weeks ago.)
The subject line pretty much says it all. The only real question here is, how long will it take him to well-and-truly trash the XBox division, such that it's no longer recoverable?
Yeah, just like ESATAp
Yup... exactly like that. As I said, I didn't really think it was likely to pass the prior art gamut. Now, let's see if the patent examiners happen upon that, in their evaluation of Apple's application, and if they agree that it constitutes prior art. (Patent examiners do document all of their findings in their process, right? Right? ... )