The people that wrote the fuel injector firmware code were likely embedded systems engineers which falls under electrical engineering.
Actually I had a contract offered to me for doing exactly that and I am not an electrical engineer, though I do work with embedded systems.
I have yet to see a civil engineer design something which has a mean time between failures in the 10,000+ year category. For saftey critical software, thats on the low end. Of course the software may be running on 10,000 different devices simultaneously around the world which makes that number seem much less impressive. When you build a bridge, only one is contructed, not 10,000+.
In the US if someone who writes software wants to be recognized as an Engineer, they can go out and get licensed as a P.E. (Professional Engineer). This license places the liability upon the engineer for the work they do and is not something which is given out as easily as an engineering degree.
Sure, make light of the industry. I've been writing safety critical software for the last 7 years. You can thank the software engineers that wrote the fuel injector firmware for the turboprop on your plane for properly engineering it to always work. And while you're at it the software engineers who wrote the code running the life support systems in the ICU also deserve some props.
Not all of us work in a fault tolerant environment. Because we do our jobs well, you don't hear about the latest scandal on Slashdot. This would explain the lack of articles about software bugs causing airbags in Ford cars failing to deploy. I know you were just joking, but to some of us, software engineering is serious business.
It's double the number of bits. If you look at the largest value a 16 bit number or a 32 bit number can store, its not "double" in size.
When it comes down to it, they're just bits, how you use them is up to you.
Isn't AMD working on a system which switches back to a low-power on-board graphics chip when drawing the OS?
I don't know what AMD/ATI is currently working on, but you can not draw an Operating System. You can however draw a windowing system, for instance XOrg rendering KDE or Gnome. This is Slashdot, us nerds are pedantic.
Perhaps you meant having a low power chip which can take over for simple 2D graphics. I believe Aero (hopefully I got the name correct) uses 3D graphics now, and its all the rage in the Linux world to use XGL, a 3D renderer for a windowing system. So it is unlikely that it would be utilized by whatever modern OS you install unless you explicitly select 2D rendering for your Desktop.
If you think understanding how the unit circle is derived, and memorizing a few points on an eighth of it so you can approximate results quickly in your head, then yes I memorized a couple tricks. However the ability to apply a small amount of memorized material in a generic manner for solving a multitude of problems is very efficient. I think we're talking about completely different things though, I'm talking about the understanding that comes with learning, and being able to use that knowledge outside the context in which it was taught. That transcends the idea of "monkey see, monkey do." All learning involves memorization. Spelling vs. Language is a perfect example of this. However, I think Math is a very important subject for teaching critical thinking. The ability to take ideas away from the context in which they were learned and do something else with them is creative. Saying that Math class does not teach creativity is not giving the subject enough credit.
I don't want to get in an argument over whether I actually learned calculus or just memorized a few "algebraic tricks" to make it easy. However, when I tutor hot girls in math in my free time after work, I explain the relationship between acceleration, velocity, and displacement, so they understand "What" the numbers describe and how they fit. I teach ways of looking at problems and how to think about the numbers you are given, not the derivative of x^3 is 3x^2. I was just teaching my waitress the other day to use sine and cosine to break vectors into horizontal and vertical components. That may be a trick I "memorized," but it has served me well for years and years, because I know how the unit circle works and push comes to shove, I could derive a unit circle by hand using the pythagorean theorem. For convenience though, I memorized a couple points on it when I was using it frequently.
Its analogous to saying that since a writer is not inventing new words, only using ones memorized, it is merely "monkey see, monkey do."
If that's what you consider memorizing instead of learning then please enlighten me with your definition of learning.
For some reason I thought you were talking about continuous systems, which do require differential equations. I have taken a discrete math course and work with both continuous and discrete systems daily using MATLAB/Simulink. I've been out of college for a bit so I screw up the jargon occasionally. For the record I still think you're pretentious for thinking that people can't intuitively understand Continuous Math without having advanced beyond DiffEQ.
Spoken like someone without much math experience. Until you get *past* diff-Eq, virtually all useful continuous math is wrote memorization (except perhaps proofs...that's mostly covered in geometry). Further, it's pretty much all memorization of algorithms. If you're not teaching algorithms, you're not teaching kids to understand math.
You got modded inciteful for this pretentious crap? When I was in High School, graduated '99, understanding of trig identities combined with AP Calculus made physics easy. Every time the teacher wrote an arbitrary algebraic equation for some obscure purpose on the board, I was figuring out how to derive it using calculus. Watch what you say about public schools, some of the smartest people I know got damn good educations from them.
Continuous math? That's practically graduate level engineering, definitely advanced for undergrad. I don't think you'll get many undergraduate level physics classes going over things like Mass Spring Damper systems. Are you claiming that outside the US the average college graduate has learned about Discrete and Continuous Systems after finishing the equivalent of a CS Degree?
Creativity does need to be encouraged at an early age - which is what literature, music, and art do. Losing those would definitely be worse than losing science or math, IMHO.
It takes 2 decades of study to catch up to where the research is in Math and Science, so why bother? I assure you, not all math is memorization, and if you that was your only means of learning, without understanding, you personally had bad teachers. Don't generalize your bad education across the rest of the US, there are tons of good schools out there. When you understand math, you don't memorize it, you learn it.
Applied Math, like algebra based physics is a different story. In fact, thats fairly equivalent to learning Java before micro-code. In my intro CS Class, the TA would write up some classes for us to use in our program, we did not have to understand the internal workings of those classes, just their API. In later classes we learned enough to make them ourselves. Understanding control structures and language syntax is a good starting point, it also familiarizes students with the concept of separation of duties, and compilers. At work, I need to trust that my coworker will handle the details on their side of the interface and I handle mine. We don't have time to do both. Teaching kids about black boxes is necessary for working on teams. Some institutions may be taking this to extremes with their intro classes, but an intro class is supposed to be a taste of what's to come and be accessible to students from as many disciplines as possible. This is a good thing, since it results in more people having some insight, however small, into what is involved in writing software. Just as high school physics leaves most kids with a basic understanding of Newtons 3 Laws, gravity, etc.
FYI, The mirror I checked for cygwin does not have gtags or htags. However you can also compile the sources for those projects in cygwin and make your own binaries.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
That saying proves itself everyday. I know most people don't understand science, but if you are reporting on it at least pay attention long enough to accurately report what you were told by someone who does understand. Why do people think it's ok to be proud of their ignorance? Its one thing to own your weaknesses having tried and failed, but it seems like most non-technical people stopped trying.
If no one owns the IP, there's no one to sue you for infringing. If someone can sue you for infringing, then we have found the owner.
There should be some sort of IP "salvage rights" or preferably lapse into the public domain. Since the IP is no longer owned, it makes sense that anyone should be able to use and re-use it at will.
However switch grass can be farmed on less desirable farmland than corn, which leads me to believe that it will become a cash crop. This is just a preliminary strain of the grass and this experiment was to establish a baseline for future comparison. Something this heavily modified genetically I would not want to eat anyway so its a moot point.
Re:The only measure I know of by which Rails sucks
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Rails May Not Suck
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I don't know the people involved, but most people I do know that are involved in the open source community like the CCC guys have pretty amazing stories too. There are a LOT of good people out there, unfortunately the idiots are the loudest and this guy decided to feed the troll, which means he's not part of the solution if you get my drift.
Re:The only measure I know of by which Rails sucks
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Rails May Not Suck
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· Score: 1
That's a good measure for those who have no intention of developing with the technology. However when I evalute something's technical merits, I actually try to make something with it.
If it handles certain tasks better than other methods I know, it's useful.
If it assumes too much about how I'm supposed to use it, its much less useful. Not being thread-safe, not having both blocking and non-blocking versions of certain API calls, etc are all points against a product. I also grade on elegance of design. There's an old saying, what do you get when you mix 100 gallons of ice cream and a teaspoon of shit. 100 gallons of shit. If the layer below the one you're writing is poorly designed, the design flaws will invariably propogate upward.
One last point about these "easy to use" frameworks geared towards the average folk. The more complex details you hide trying to make it simple to use, the easier it becomes to use it wrong unknowingly. There is no silver bullet to get around algorithm efficiency, and a properly ingrained understanding of how computers solve problems and how to classify various problem types. Teaching someone to use an over-powered IDE and giving them a certificate which says that they know how to make programs that run, is no assurance that those programs will run well.
The author of the opinion piece said Rails helps smart people write a certain type of program faster. That is an arrogant statement, there are plenty of smart people without the formal training the author has had which probably use Rails poorly. It would have been more accurate to say, "Rails helps people who think a certain way accomplish a limited subset of tasks faster."
The more I read, the more both sides of this drama sound like elitist pricks, which can be an epidemic among web communities. Some very smart people over compensate for not having been popular in High School and create exclusive online communities rather than inclusive ones, these people tend to handle any criticism very poorly. Of course these people get worn down by people demanding so much from them without ever offering any compensation for their time.
If you want a good measure of what sort of people are in a given community, go to their IRC channel and ask a question from their FAQ.
(Disclaimer: not a web developer, never used Rails, no plans to in the near future)
While assembly language is a valuable skill you core ciricullum should have included a computer architecture class which covers a platform agnostic version of assembly code. If you did well in that class, stop right there.
For the last 2 years I have been working heavily with microcontrollers and each has their own flavor of assembly language based on the architecture. If you did well in your class which taught assembly language, wait until you need it to do something, its absolutely pointless to learn a specific architecture otherwise.
If your grasp of computer architecture and language theory is strong, it should only take a day or two to pick up a new assembly variant. Don't get me wrong, it is a useful skill. Some platforms have feature rich instruction sets, while others are so utilitarian and sparse it gives them a simple elegance.
The most important thing to learn in school is How To Learn. The rest you can pick up as you go.
Thank you, all I was asking was for civility. Stating that I don't "get it" is condescending.
You seem to think that a conspiracy is necessary for this technology to be abused, I'm more worried about incompetence. You call me paranoid, yet an acceptable manner of wiretapping is rootkiting a cell phone such that it is always on and listening. With the PATRIOT Act as part of the laws of my nation, I do not trust techology. Trust must be earned and blind faith is ill advised.
When I make engineering decisions involving product development, the questions from my original post are the ones I ask. I don't like the answers to those questions in this case so I am not planning on investing in any device which uses this technology. There are other ways to deliver those features which do not have the potential to violate my privacy, whether it be my viewing habits, or potentially the conversations I hold in my living room. It's not really that far fetched that a secret warrant, protected by the PATRIOT Act unlike the warrantless wiretapping, could accomplish this.
It's like that doctor whose wife and daughters were killed in a home invasion, after he was severely beaten. I don't remember his name but this quote stood out in my mind "I am one of the unluckiest men alive." While this may sound callous, it's not luck that made him unprepared to protect his family. It was the undeserved faith he placed in society to keep him safe. 99.9999% of the time you can get away with that. While it is tragic what happened, and it may have been bad luck that they picked his house, it is not luck that failed to protect his family. Perhaps he should have prayed for their safety, or he could have bought a gun and been trained in how to use it, to best prepare for that 0.0001% of the time. Would he have been safer in a cabin in the middle of the woods, maybe, maybe not.
Let me phrase this another way. Consider this scenario, a hacker roots your television via this protocol. Via the TV speakers, he is able to record all the audio in the vicinity and records you giving your CC# to the pizza place. Will the TV Manufacturer be at all liable for any of this? No. You're S.O.L. Why would you be unable to sue them for damages? Because you made the decision to buy the TV and place it in your living room. The point of all of this is that ultimately no one else is responsible for your security. If they drop the ball, you have no recourse.
I have decided that I don't want devices in my home which transmit data over possibly encrypted channels to those which are undeserving of my trust. Data which I have no control over, which is "supposed to be" innocuous. Am I paranoid? Yes. Am I less likely to have "bad luck" when it comes to privacy? Yes. So "phone home" was a bad choice of words, I still fail to see how my points are invalid. It may be improbable, but they are still valid concerns.
I "get it" you don't much care how you get your pay-per-view. You trust that society will have your back and this would not be abused without you knowing. You're are by all means welcome to do so. I do not trust that the manufacturers have the technical competence to implement this securely, nor do I trust my cable company not to abuse my privacy.
This may not be something you care about at all, however some of us value our privacy and do not take it lightly. We prefer not to trust corporations to have our best interests at heart, nor do we trust our government to protect our interests either. As the Information Age progresses, privacy becomes more important than ever before.
I hope you have good luck with Tru2Way, the other defect it adds is a pluggable DRM mechanism. I hope you trust your cable company to program what your TV is allowed to display.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree. I don't want devices networked over propreitary channels inside my home. With my computers which are on the internet, I control the communications. With my television, they control that, and that is unacceptable.
You may point out next that if I have a cell phone that would be hypocritical too, which is correct. This inconsistency with my home security policy I plan on correcting, as soon as I can get a production quality phone running OpenMoko.
We have a right to privacy, feel free to give up that right if you want, its no skin off my back. Just stop saying I don't understand the technology, its insulting and you're embarrassing yourself. We obviously have different philosophies when it comes to security and privacy.
I also do not appreciate your attack on my technical credibility. How is it that I am the one who doesn't understand the technical issues, yet you're perfectly content to let your cable company control a 2-way communication channel into your home. I should write some proof of concept code that turns one of those TV's into a monitoring device. Speakers can work as microphones. Would you believe me then that its a bad idea?
They want to put a virtual machine into your television that runs an application downloaded to your TV from your cable provider. The question is not whether you trust your cable provider not to silently sell you out to the NSA, its whether you are going to allow that sort of hole in your home security. I assume since you're from the slashdot crowd you know enough not to leave your router set to the default password. We've all read the stuff about using the PC speaker as an input to capture the sound from the keyboard and decode that to get which keys were pressed.
Privacy is essential for a healthy democracy. Don't trade yours away for shiny toys when you have the choice not to. For the record all my routers run openwrt, and I control what programs run inside my house. Do you know what your computers are running?
Cable is dead anyway, I torrent my television. There's is no way in hell I'll invest in this technology even if its the only thing on the market after a few years. This is just another method to sell new TVs. I have no intention of buying a new one for a long time, nor should I have to.
I'll be laughing my ass off when this gets hacked and every comcast subscriber sees nothing but goatse for a week. All you would need is a modded surfboard cable modem to get on the network. This is just another point of failure for a television.
I'm not worried about them "monitoring" me so much as I feel it to be an invasion of my privacy.
Those services exist without this sort of invasive technology. Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't want a device like this in my house phoning home whenever my cable company wants. Service providers have already breached a trust with blanket wire tapping of internet service. Is the NSA going to start monitoring TV viewing habits too?
Why do I want my appliances talking back to any service provider? I value my privacy and I don't want my TV reporting my viewing habits any more than I want a smart fridge reporting my eating habits.
What's wrong with the push method of content distribution? I am skeptical as to what value this really adds to my viewing experience. I get the feeling its not about improving the user's experience at all, but more for gathering data on viewing habits to better price advertising time. I guess I'm at a loss as to what compelling technical problem this solves. The only thing the article really mentions is a lack of standardization for how these devices can acheive 2 way communication, but it never states why that is even necessary.
The article is not FUD, I don't know where you worked, but having worked on embedded systems for several planes, this one included, though indirectly since I ended up writing about 1/3 of the code base for the electronic flight bag for the 777, which is being used in the 787. I've also worked on systems for the new A380, all at various companies which Boeing and or EADS subcontract to for the various widgets that make up a plane.
However, the system integrators are Boeing engineers at the manufacturing plant in Everett, WA. The decision to connect internal subnets to a live network would most likely be done at that level, by people who are not security minded, but have to make things as easy as possible for the people who buy these systems and have to use them, the airlines. The amount of users that have legitimate purposes for accessing these systems and communicating with them from the airline's network at the airport (another security risk) is very diverse. Many of which have to be assumed to be completely technologically illiterate.
This combined with the fact that everything is ALWAYS LATE, so its rushed rather than designed correct the first time, leaves a non-zero probability that the network can become compromised from an attack which exploits vulnerabilities in these machines segregating the plane's systems from the passenger systems. Odds are its either a common industrial partitioned operating system (fancy talk for sandboxes, which may or may not be escapable), or a common one like a licensed and modified embedded windows, or embedded linux or BSD, depending on the vendor.
I know for a fact though that some of those systems are embedded linux and advertised as such. What if one of those systems were designed on a 2.5 kernel? Impossible you say? There is a risk, dismissing it as FUD does not make it less of a risk.
I saw this on Slashdot and thought, "HEY, I think I worked on that!" Wow, that company was a trip, and all those numbers get mixed up in my head. It was either an RTCA created spec like the DO-178B software development guidelines for process quality, which is lengthy and can be extensively audited for compliance. Or one of the ARINC ones.
Good guess, but its more likely to be the Electronic Flight Bag which would be linked into the administrative network for map updates and day to day information. That article from 2005 doesn't mention the EFB provider is Astronautics which did the 777's. http://www.astronautics.com/new/PIDDemo/Piddemo.html
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to see a civil engineer design something which has a mean time between failures in the 10,000+ year category. For saftey critical software, thats on the low end. Of course the software may be running on 10,000 different devices simultaneously around the world which makes that number seem much less impressive. When you build a bridge, only one is contructed, not 10,000+.
In the US if someone who writes software wants to be recognized as an Engineer, they can go out and get licensed as a P.E. (Professional Engineer). This license places the liability upon the engineer for the work they do and is not something which is given out as easily as an engineering degree.
Sure, make light of the industry. I've been writing safety critical software for the last 7 years. You can thank the software engineers that wrote the fuel injector firmware for the turboprop on your plane for properly engineering it to always work. And while you're at it the software engineers who wrote the code running the life support systems in the ICU also deserve some props.
Not all of us work in a fault tolerant environment. Because we do our jobs well, you don't hear about the latest scandal on Slashdot. This would explain the lack of articles about software bugs causing airbags in Ford cars failing to deploy. I know you were just joking, but to some of us, software engineering is serious business.
It's double the number of bits. If you look at the largest value a 16 bit number or a 32 bit number can store, its not "double" in size. When it comes down to it, they're just bits, how you use them is up to you.
Perhaps you meant having a low power chip which can take over for simple 2D graphics. I believe Aero (hopefully I got the name correct) uses 3D graphics now, and its all the rage in the Linux world to use XGL, a 3D renderer for a windowing system. So it is unlikely that it would be utilized by whatever modern OS you install unless you explicitly select 2D rendering for your Desktop.
If you think understanding how the unit circle is derived, and memorizing a few points on an eighth of it so you can approximate results quickly in your head, then yes I memorized a couple tricks. However the ability to apply a small amount of memorized material in a generic manner for solving a multitude of problems is very efficient. I think we're talking about completely different things though, I'm talking about the understanding that comes with learning, and being able to use that knowledge outside the context in which it was taught. That transcends the idea of "monkey see, monkey do." All learning involves memorization. Spelling vs. Language is a perfect example of this. However, I think Math is a very important subject for teaching critical thinking. The ability to take ideas away from the context in which they were learned and do something else with them is creative. Saying that Math class does not teach creativity is not giving the subject enough credit.
I don't want to get in an argument over whether I actually learned calculus or just memorized a few "algebraic tricks" to make it easy. However, when I tutor hot girls in math in my free time after work, I explain the relationship between acceleration, velocity, and displacement, so they understand "What" the numbers describe and how they fit. I teach ways of looking at problems and how to think about the numbers you are given, not the derivative of x^3 is 3x^2. I was just teaching my waitress the other day to use sine and cosine to break vectors into horizontal and vertical components. That may be a trick I "memorized," but it has served me well for years and years, because I know how the unit circle works and push comes to shove, I could derive a unit circle by hand using the pythagorean theorem. For convenience though, I memorized a couple points on it when I was using it frequently.
Its analogous to saying that since a writer is not inventing new words, only using ones memorized, it is merely "monkey see, monkey do."
If that's what you consider memorizing instead of learning then please enlighten me with your definition of learning.
For some reason I thought you were talking about continuous systems, which do require differential equations. I have taken a discrete math course and work with both continuous and discrete systems daily using MATLAB/Simulink. I've been out of college for a bit so I screw up the jargon occasionally. For the record I still think you're pretentious for thinking that people can't intuitively understand Continuous Math without having advanced beyond DiffEQ.
Continuous math? That's practically graduate level engineering, definitely advanced for undergrad. I don't think you'll get many undergraduate level physics classes going over things like Mass Spring Damper systems. Are you claiming that outside the US the average college graduate has learned about Discrete and Continuous Systems after finishing the equivalent of a CS Degree?It takes 2 decades of study to catch up to where the research is in Math and Science, so why bother? I assure you, not all math is memorization, and if you that was your only means of learning, without understanding, you personally had bad teachers. Don't generalize your bad education across the rest of the US, there are tons of good schools out there. When you understand math, you don't memorize it, you learn it.
Applied Math, like algebra based physics is a different story. In fact, thats fairly equivalent to learning Java before micro-code. In my intro CS Class, the TA would write up some classes for us to use in our program, we did not have to understand the internal workings of those classes, just their API. In later classes we learned enough to make them ourselves. Understanding control structures and language syntax is a good starting point, it also familiarizes students with the concept of separation of duties, and compilers. At work, I need to trust that my coworker will handle the details on their side of the interface and I handle mine. We don't have time to do both. Teaching kids about black boxes is necessary for working on teams. Some institutions may be taking this to extremes with their intro classes, but an intro class is supposed to be a taste of what's to come and be accessible to students from as many disciplines as possible. This is a good thing, since it results in more people having some insight, however small, into what is involved in writing software. Just as high school physics leaves most kids with a basic understanding of Newtons 3 Laws, gravity, etc.
FYI, The mirror I checked for cygwin does not have gtags or htags. However you can also compile the sources for those projects in cygwin and make your own binaries.
I'm sure I misquoted it. Guess that means I'm incompetent ;)
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
That saying proves itself everyday. I know most people don't understand science, but if you are reporting on it at least pay attention long enough to accurately report what you were told by someone who does understand. Why do people think it's ok to be proud of their ignorance? Its one thing to own your weaknesses having tried and failed, but it seems like most non-technical people stopped trying.
If no one owns the IP, there's no one to sue you for infringing. If someone can sue you for infringing, then we have found the owner.
There should be some sort of IP "salvage rights" or preferably lapse into the public domain. Since the IP is no longer owned, it makes sense that anyone should be able to use and re-use it at will.
However switch grass can be farmed on less desirable farmland than corn, which leads me to believe that it will become a cash crop. This is just a preliminary strain of the grass and this experiment was to establish a baseline for future comparison. Something this heavily modified genetically I would not want to eat anyway so its a moot point.
I don't know the people involved, but most people I do know that are involved in the open source community like the CCC guys have pretty amazing stories too. There are a LOT of good people out there, unfortunately the idiots are the loudest and this guy decided to feed the troll, which means he's not part of the solution if you get my drift.
That's a good measure for those who have no intention of developing with the technology. However when I evalute something's technical merits, I actually try to make something with it.
If it handles certain tasks better than other methods I know, it's useful.
If it assumes too much about how I'm supposed to use it, its much less useful. Not being thread-safe, not having both blocking and non-blocking versions of certain API calls, etc are all points against a product. I also grade on elegance of design. There's an old saying, what do you get when you mix 100 gallons of ice cream and a teaspoon of shit. 100 gallons of shit. If the layer below the one you're writing is poorly designed, the design flaws will invariably propogate upward.
One last point about these "easy to use" frameworks geared towards the average folk. The more complex details you hide trying to make it simple to use, the easier it becomes to use it wrong unknowingly. There is no silver bullet to get around algorithm efficiency, and a properly ingrained understanding of how computers solve problems and how to classify various problem types. Teaching someone to use an over-powered IDE and giving them a certificate which says that they know how to make programs that run, is no assurance that those programs will run well.
The author of the opinion piece said Rails helps smart people write a certain type of program faster. That is an arrogant statement, there are plenty of smart people without the formal training the author has had which probably use Rails poorly. It would have been more accurate to say, "Rails helps people who think a certain way accomplish a limited subset of tasks faster."
The more I read, the more both sides of this drama sound like elitist pricks, which can be an epidemic among web communities. Some very smart people over compensate for not having been popular in High School and create exclusive online communities rather than inclusive ones, these people tend to handle any criticism very poorly. Of course these people get worn down by people demanding so much from them without ever offering any compensation for their time.
If you want a good measure of what sort of people are in a given community, go to their IRC channel and ask a question from their FAQ.
(Disclaimer: not a web developer, never used Rails, no plans to in the near future)
While assembly language is a valuable skill you core ciricullum should have included a computer architecture class which covers a platform agnostic version of assembly code. If you did well in that class, stop right there. For the last 2 years I have been working heavily with microcontrollers and each has their own flavor of assembly language based on the architecture. If you did well in your class which taught assembly language, wait until you need it to do something, its absolutely pointless to learn a specific architecture otherwise. If your grasp of computer architecture and language theory is strong, it should only take a day or two to pick up a new assembly variant. Don't get me wrong, it is a useful skill. Some platforms have feature rich instruction sets, while others are so utilitarian and sparse it gives them a simple elegance. The most important thing to learn in school is How To Learn. The rest you can pick up as you go.
Thank you, all I was asking was for civility. Stating that I don't "get it" is condescending.
You seem to think that a conspiracy is necessary for this technology to be abused, I'm more worried about incompetence. You call me paranoid, yet an acceptable manner of wiretapping is rootkiting a cell phone such that it is always on and listening. With the PATRIOT Act as part of the laws of my nation, I do not trust techology. Trust must be earned and blind faith is ill advised.
When I make engineering decisions involving product development, the questions from my original post are the ones I ask. I don't like the answers to those questions in this case so I am not planning on investing in any device which uses this technology. There are other ways to deliver those features which do not have the potential to violate my privacy, whether it be my viewing habits, or potentially the conversations I hold in my living room. It's not really that far fetched that a secret warrant, protected by the PATRIOT Act unlike the warrantless wiretapping, could accomplish this.
It's like that doctor whose wife and daughters were killed in a home invasion, after he was severely beaten. I don't remember his name but this quote stood out in my mind "I am one of the unluckiest men alive." While this may sound callous, it's not luck that made him unprepared to protect his family. It was the undeserved faith he placed in society to keep him safe. 99.9999% of the time you can get away with that. While it is tragic what happened, and it may have been bad luck that they picked his house, it is not luck that failed to protect his family. Perhaps he should have prayed for their safety, or he could have bought a gun and been trained in how to use it, to best prepare for that 0.0001% of the time. Would he have been safer in a cabin in the middle of the woods, maybe, maybe not.
Let me phrase this another way. Consider this scenario, a hacker roots your television via this protocol. Via the TV speakers, he is able to record all the audio in the vicinity and records you giving your CC# to the pizza place. Will the TV Manufacturer be at all liable for any of this? No. You're S.O.L. Why would you be unable to sue them for damages? Because you made the decision to buy the TV and place it in your living room. The point of all of this is that ultimately no one else is responsible for your security. If they drop the ball, you have no recourse.
I have decided that I don't want devices in my home which transmit data over possibly encrypted channels to those which are undeserving of my trust. Data which I have no control over, which is "supposed to be" innocuous. Am I paranoid? Yes. Am I less likely to have "bad luck" when it comes to privacy? Yes. So "phone home" was a bad choice of words, I still fail to see how my points are invalid. It may be improbable, but they are still valid concerns.
I "get it" you don't much care how you get your pay-per-view. You trust that society will have your back and this would not be abused without you knowing. You're are by all means welcome to do so. I do not trust that the manufacturers have the technical competence to implement this securely, nor do I trust my cable company not to abuse my privacy.
This may not be something you care about at all, however some of us value our privacy and do not take it lightly. We prefer not to trust corporations to have our best interests at heart, nor do we trust our government to protect our interests either. As the Information Age progresses, privacy becomes more important than ever before.
I hope you have good luck with Tru2Way, the other defect it adds is a pluggable DRM mechanism. I hope you trust your cable company to program what your TV is allowed to display.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree. I don't want devices networked over propreitary channels inside my home. With my computers which are on the internet, I control the communications. With my television, they control that, and that is unacceptable. You may point out next that if I have a cell phone that would be hypocritical too, which is correct. This inconsistency with my home security policy I plan on correcting, as soon as I can get a production quality phone running OpenMoko. We have a right to privacy, feel free to give up that right if you want, its no skin off my back. Just stop saying I don't understand the technology, its insulting and you're embarrassing yourself. We obviously have different philosophies when it comes to security and privacy.
I also do not appreciate your attack on my technical credibility. How is it that I am the one who doesn't understand the technical issues, yet you're perfectly content to let your cable company control a 2-way communication channel into your home. I should write some proof of concept code that turns one of those TV's into a monitoring device. Speakers can work as microphones. Would you believe me then that its a bad idea? They want to put a virtual machine into your television that runs an application downloaded to your TV from your cable provider. The question is not whether you trust your cable provider not to silently sell you out to the NSA, its whether you are going to allow that sort of hole in your home security. I assume since you're from the slashdot crowd you know enough not to leave your router set to the default password. We've all read the stuff about using the PC speaker as an input to capture the sound from the keyboard and decode that to get which keys were pressed. Privacy is essential for a healthy democracy. Don't trade yours away for shiny toys when you have the choice not to. For the record all my routers run openwrt, and I control what programs run inside my house. Do you know what your computers are running?
Mod parent up. CCC is run by anarchy. The anarchists have the best groupware.
Cable is dead anyway, I torrent my television. There's is no way in hell I'll invest in this technology even if its the only thing on the market after a few years. This is just another method to sell new TVs. I have no intention of buying a new one for a long time, nor should I have to. I'll be laughing my ass off when this gets hacked and every comcast subscriber sees nothing but goatse for a week. All you would need is a modded surfboard cable modem to get on the network. This is just another point of failure for a television. I'm not worried about them "monitoring" me so much as I feel it to be an invasion of my privacy.
Those services exist without this sort of invasive technology. Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't want a device like this in my house phoning home whenever my cable company wants. Service providers have already breached a trust with blanket wire tapping of internet service. Is the NSA going to start monitoring TV viewing habits too?
Why do I want my appliances talking back to any service provider? I value my privacy and I don't want my TV reporting my viewing habits any more than I want a smart fridge reporting my eating habits.
What's wrong with the push method of content distribution? I am skeptical as to what value this really adds to my viewing experience. I get the feeling its not about improving the user's experience at all, but more for gathering data on viewing habits to better price advertising time. I guess I'm at a loss as to what compelling technical problem this solves. The only thing the article really mentions is a lack of standardization for how these devices can acheive 2 way communication, but it never states why that is even necessary.
The article is not FUD, I don't know where you worked, but having worked on embedded systems for several planes, this one included, though indirectly since I ended up writing about 1/3 of the code base for the electronic flight bag for the 777, which is being used in the 787. I've also worked on systems for the new A380, all at various companies which Boeing and or EADS subcontract to for the various widgets that make up a plane.
However, the system integrators are Boeing engineers at the manufacturing plant in Everett, WA. The decision to connect internal subnets to a live network would most likely be done at that level, by people who are not security minded, but have to make things as easy as possible for the people who buy these systems and have to use them, the airlines. The amount of users that have legitimate purposes for accessing these systems and communicating with them from the airline's network at the airport (another security risk) is very diverse. Many of which have to be assumed to be completely technologically illiterate.
This combined with the fact that everything is ALWAYS LATE, so its rushed rather than designed correct the first time, leaves a non-zero probability that the network can become compromised from an attack which exploits vulnerabilities in these machines segregating the plane's systems from the passenger systems. Odds are its either a common industrial partitioned operating system (fancy talk for sandboxes, which may or may not be escapable), or a common one like a licensed and modified embedded windows, or embedded linux or BSD, depending on the vendor.
I know for a fact though that some of those systems are embedded linux and advertised as such. What if one of those systems were designed on a 2.5 kernel? Impossible you say? There is a risk, dismissing it as FUD does not make it less of a risk.
I saw this on Slashdot and thought, "HEY, I think I worked on that!" Wow, that company was a trip, and all those numbers get mixed up in my head. It was either an RTCA created spec like the DO-178B software development guidelines for process quality, which is lengthy and can be extensively audited for compliance. Or one of the ARINC ones.
Good guess, but its more likely to be the Electronic Flight Bag which would be linked into the administrative network for map updates and day to day information. That article from 2005 doesn't mention the EFB provider is Astronautics which did the 777's. http://www.astronautics.com/new/PIDDemo/Piddemo.html