Carrot on a stick? Dude, you can get that at like 48 and it's a pretty easy quest if you're in ZF anyways. That is assuming you have a guildie or a PUG who has the mallet. Gaz'rilla isn't even that bad in a 5-man. We did it with a Warlock pet as the MT! What's so hard about...
Oh, um, wait. Nevermind.
No, and there are reasons for each one of the things it doesn't have.
No Outlook: Has Entourage and Exchange client for Mac. Mac BU used to do Mac OE, but Entourage is basically that with Calendaring and other office integrations
No Project: There's no market for it. Project is niche on windows.
Access: Access is too windows specific, and there's no market room for it. Everyone uses FileMaker Pro, of which there are huge amounts of import and conversion functions for in Excel. I think you can convert mdb files to FileMaker (but my memory is fuzzy)
If there isn't a market for it, don't spend millions on dev time, pm time, testing time, localization, and then support costs in porting it. That's simply the nature of commerical software.
I'll come clean here and say that I in fact did used to work for Microsoft as an intern, in the Macintosh Business Unit. As in, no shit, there I was. These are the people I used to eat lunch with, talk about bugs with, and share the passion for a product with etc. They are Macintosh zealots in the Microsoft community, and deeply care not only about Microsoft, but also the Macintosh community as a whole. As much as you may think of them as black sheep, they wear it as a badge of honor.
I've never heard more talk from a product group about what the "community" will think about a feature, what value it adds to the target audience, etc. It was a core focus, to not only bring Microsoft Office to that community, but enable them to interact fully with their Windows counterparts. There was no secondary citizenship. These people put their all into the product, and are met with relatively great success.
An amazing amount of work goes into making the software a great user-experience. Applescript exposure, different UI, Mac-specific features and development... all of those things because the Mac product was hugely important. Localization into at least 5 different languages (off the top of my head). Different product SKUs, and different new developments with what the Mac community had in mind.
A very cool thing that I found about the team was that in no way lived under the shadow of the greater Office group. They pride themselves on having the "best" version of Office, as wierd as that sounds.
Kevin Brown, the Business Unit Manager when I was there said at a MacWorld (paraphrased from memory): "We know that our users are mostly home and small business users. People aren't using Excel to make incredibly complicated PivotTables, but are using it to balance their checkbook". That quote stuck out in my mind as something that always made me chuckle. It was a realistic look at how this "enterprise class" piece of software was realistically being used by the community at large.
These are developers and testers who use their Mac everyday (some even faking their PC). I knew one tester who used the product for everything. Signs, balancing his budget, right on down to making grocery lists in word, and porting them over to Powerpoint, just to see.
I worked on the clamshell version of Office 2001, and the trophy copy still sits on my desk. I hate to hear when people bash the group as some kind of whack strategy to sink Apple, because not only are these people my professional friends, but they simply don't think that way.
It was a refreshing two summers working for the Evil Empire (tm), but being a part of a group with as much passion for quality and desire to put out the best software possible. It's made me a rabid tester, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I remember that huge Mac lab you see behind you running SETI at home, as we were in the top 20 or so for a while;)
If you guys are reading this, glad to hear you're going strong.
--Jay Bonci (summer of 1999, 2000, Mac Office Core)
The wrong free distinction, it's free as in speech
on
Perl for the Disabled
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· Score: 1
Not that I'm a license stickler usually, but from the article:
All pVoice software is free. Yes, free as in 'free beer'. You can download the software, try it out, if it's usable, you keep it, if you think it's worthless, you delete it. No charge. In fact, if you think it almost does what you want and you have some programming experience, you can download the program sourcecode, modify it and use that too. Again, no charge.
That does not mean pVoice software doesn't have a license agreement. The software is released under the terms of the "Artistic License". You can find the details of the Artistic license here.
Why this is somewhat amusing is that it's the other kind of "free" (as in speech) as well, but people who usually use the beer analogy typically mean that it's not the other.
I'm also really glad to see people sponsoring him and donating licenses to software for development of it. Another cool example about how this community helps support itself.
"The compression/decompression algorithms are stored on the media, not in the adapter, and will take up some of the space on the cards."
And how long will it take a crafty GBA coder to write a fake codec that will kill the audio loader and load up a homebrewed rom off of a SmartMedia card? If you're exposing the loading process to a very easily writable media, then those are the risks.
Other interesting applications exist that don't right now on the GBA for things like photo albums and the like, because of the removable media.
It'll be interesting to see what exactly is used (if any) for "copy protection", especially considering the media. It won't ever be a great PDA (limitedness of input, etc), but it might be a fun gadget for a different market. --[jaybonci]
Of course that the numbers do get a bit inflated, but living on 50K a year is harder in Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, or NYC than it is from where I live, in say Western Massachusetts. Companies that are in the gold rush areas have to pay people more so that they can live there.
For instance. Microsoft pays their employees more if they work in the Silicon Valley campus than they do on the Redmond campus. Why? Because in Silicon valley it's more expensive with less cheap suburbs to live in. This internal memo talks about the compensation differences being (at one point), as high as 25%. This is all because of the premium costs of programmer labor in that environment.
If you live in Western Mass, or the Dakotas or rural Pennsylvania where the cost of living is dirt low, then you're all set. Otherwise, making 50K stretch in Silicon Valley is just a bit tougher.
And yes, I understand XBoxes and the like aren't essential, and that there are many people with a lot less. No sense in not being grateful for when fortune smiles upon you.
While I applaud these people for making steps to make it harder to casually get information off of laptop computers, it still does not stop other attacks on such a system. Flooding the laptops area with uniformly strong signal that matches the watch's key would be as difficult as acquire-and-replicate. There seems to be a smart card like system with keys, and key encrypting keys. It's very comprehensive, and it addresses many aspects of the social and technological attacks.
In my mind, the weak link here is clearly the watch. Watch technology isn't very complicated (read: very big), and how many designs could their possibly be? If one knows where the hardware information is located, a system replacement under the face, and you've got some issues. How many people wear watches to bed at night? Or in the shower? Difficult, but possible
A quick couple of replacements, and you have a watch that has a short range transmitter also transmitting the information that you'd need to dissolve the encryption link, and maybe begin a traditional man-in-the-middle attack. Once you see what cards the watch is holding, shouldn't the rest of the exchange be trivial?
While this is a great mechanism for an encryption scheme, what attacks are there against the physical and social component? These are the items of which spy thrillers are made, and will probably (hopefully) never come into play.
All in all, an excellent read from the UMich folk, and they have my applause.
--jaybonci
Apple and the "probable name game"
on
The Apple Name Game
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· Score: 5, Informative
They may neglect to mention a certain Apple Records that they had to pay off to stay in business. From what I have been told, the very famous MacOS sound "SoSuMi" was derived from that experience. "So sue me."
And how quickly they turn the other cheek.
They used to be: Applecomm.com.au, but on the frontpage there is an announcement regarding the settlement and the change to iGreen.
I can certainly forgive them for their apples being sour.
The only upside of this is if Apple Communications would have become an ISP (not entirely far fetched). The name Apple Internet Access or Apple Broadband could certainly be too close for comfort, and would enjoy at least a small amount of probable name association; the very thing these sorts of suits are trying to protect against. It's a tough situation on either end of the boot.
">>The internet could prove to be the single factor which contributes greatest towards equality of educational opportunity for all around the world.
>Not likely. Only about 5% of the worlds population have internet access, maybe a tad more."
Putting that into perspective, how many people need to do serious research on Astronomy in that depth. It is a fairly abstract field that is well entrenched into academia.
Also put that 5% number into perspective for people who need to do serious research into Astronomy; of them, how many have access (at least part time) to the Internet? It's probably up there near 100%
While not a huge educational opportunity for everyone on the planet, we are looking at a serious contribution to the field.
From what the article reads, it seems to be a very ambitious and interesting project. Very rarely do you see people trying to get together to spread information out to the web in such a fashion. The major problem in my (and I can imagine in their) mind is of format? How can you accomodate the mythical layman's and his or her inherent lack of skill, and still have it be available for advanced researchers to make use of.
It seems that there is simply going to be a huge amount of data-cross referenced and collated. From the second page of the article, it seems to include pictoral data. I also hear talk of XML being thrown around, which is a good start, but there's a lot that goes into that transition. Are they looking to set the layman bar at "your novice astronomer", "the third grade science report", or "grad student". Where is this information really being targeted at the sub-obscure level.
While I don't want to trivialize their massive IT effort, it seems that a lot of this is going to come down to the end user of the data. Their sample study using this information isn't trivial stuff, and does seem to set the aforementioned bar at somewhere in the undergrad-graduate level. Perhaps that is the nature of the data (I'm not that familiar with it). There's an XML schema, some request examples, and other framework stuff already in place to view by potential client writers.
I'm glad to see XML being done the right way (by collaboration with its end users), and those pictures/numbers being available for public research. Maybe someone will throw together an inverse Terraserver or something with Whiz-bang true-layman appeal. Until then, the geeks bow at the effort, because man, space is BIG.
Anyone closer to the project know of any simplification efforts?
The problem with those sorts of compilations (on a Gamecube disk or whatever) is that they feel like emulation. For instance the Intellivision classics disk for the Playstation felt like it was emulated. Besides the unique vantage point of not having a real INTV controller for it, the sound didn't have that 8-bit-crunch to it.
I worry about direct ports or emulation on consoles, because there are the issues or compatibility and accuracy. More often than not, something gets lost in the translation.
Now with some of the pirate tools, you get the best of both worlds, but you tarnish under the light of legality. Having a Bung copier or similar device to jack NES Rom images into an NES-compatible flash cart makes for 100% accurate games, with a huge availability, but by and large, it is illegal.
Companies are at a wierd impass in regards to their classic games. Should one distribute Nintendos with a huge bank of games built in, or release compiliation CDs with subquality compatibility.
Sadly, as I have purchased several of those "classics" emulations/ports for playstation I'd prefer the original hardware.
After a little additional research, I found a link from tsr's NES archive (a completely awesome site) that has a brief blurb about the state of piracy in brazil. It seems like Sega actually granted them some leway to do game hacks: http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/nes/brazil/brazil.html
If that's the case, then great. It doesn't really display the credentials of what us legality-twitchy Americans have come to expect from those sorts of clone machines. It no doubt is an interesting piece.
What really gets me is why publish a 20-in-1 cart with the console then? I know that wouldn't fly then, but I never saw the real gamer appeal (outside of the collector or hopeful collector like myself)... Typically the games in those multicarts are the same game, hacked several different ways, or a large multirom of pirated or poorly hacked together games.
Maybe it's a cultural difference between China/ Hong Kong/Brazil and the rest of the world in regards to the appeal of pirate multi-carts (100-n-1, 520-n-1, 10000-n-1). Quantity vs. Quality? The NES had a fair production of them, due to it's popularity, but honestly, this is the first mention of one I've heard of for the master system.
An interesting unit indeed.
In regards to the Capcom port, I have played several pirate originals of Street Fighter for the NES. The colors were a little yellow, the controls not the greatest, but it was far better than the other originals I have played and played. Do you know if the 8-bit port of SFII was for NES or for SMS?
Well two things are interesting to note here. The first is that it seems to support Game Gear games as well. You can tell this because there was never a Sonic the Hedgehog (as per the screenshot)for the Master System... however there was one for the Game Gear, a nearly identical platform.
Also, I'd be worried about the legality of such an item. The brazilian piracy market is huge, and I'd be largely worried about any sort of retro console with a different design, and a lot of pack-in games. It seems largely like a pirated console with a large set of roms.
It also doesn't seem legal because of the presence of a 20-in-1 rom. Those are a favorite of pirate console and cartridge distributors. Some of them are neat as collectors' items, but by and large they are illegal.
Don't get me wrong, I'm intrigued by the possibility of older consoles making a decent comback, but this one certainly doesn't add up.
There was once an office manager for a medium sized company. Productivity was lagging, so it came down to him to help the problem. He decided it was time to change the lightbulbs. Changing the lightbulbs up 10 watts increased productivity 20% "Wow!" thought the manager. "What an increibly increase for just lightbulbs!"
So he decided to do it again. Up another 10 watts. Another 5% increase! "Excellent. By upping the wattages on the bulbs, i've gotten higher productivity." He tried it again, another 5 watts. Another 2% increase, but people were complaining about the lights. So he took it down those 5 watts. Yet another 2% increase in productivity.
Why?
It has nothing to do with the lights, it's the change. People need an engaging changing environment so that they do become stale, and can remain productive. War rooms probably provide that sort of dynamic environment, but most likely at the cost of high stress.
Maybe they should look into new light bulbs instead.
Okay, so let's look to the future of legacy-free computing. Floppy disks are obsolete, people are moving on to higher density inexpensive media as Zip Disks, or super disks, or CD-RWs (or even CDRs). This is the iMac quesiton. Apple has tried to get rid of the legacy free features (serial ports are on their way out), no more floppy, fast ethernet, etc. These are good moves, but what do you do in the interim.
This question will come up more and more as time goes on. Lets face it, over the wire is the way to go. How often do physical drives fail? Very rarely. The fidelity of modern magnetic media is excellent. Have the students upload their work to something. Make a turning program for windows / mac / linux or a webpage that allows file transfer. It can be done. Make backups of that. No excuses. No sorting through tons of turning floppies.
Make your students go to a web page. Discourage working off of floppies. Floppies are an excellent way of carring viruses (more so than wire tcp transfer). When was the last time a network corrupted data?
Do what apple does. Sum it all up and say "No one ever uses those any more", and then enforce it. Make them obsolete. It will lead to better computing practices, and fewer shocks as to when homework gets turned in.
Another discussion entirely is good data recovery utilities... Something you sound like you could use...
Except that they would lose. And i mean bad. Someone broke the law. It's totally different. It's not like someone reverse engineered the Windows Kernel. Someone stole the source. If you accepted it, you could go to jail. It's stolen property, regardless of what you think of Microsoft.
I can seem them all coming now, with COM and.NET, there is going to be an era of ORG jokes.
The technology is neat. I want to see what it looks like post-release.
Beta is bostonian for "Its Beta then Alpha"
heh
--jay
Look, the market right now for technology is getting weaker and weaker. IPOs are shaky business... some are venturing out (such as AvantGo), but others, such as say transmeta, which are plan nin g an IPO really need to bolster how they look to investors. By claiming a potentially false lead over other chip makers in technology, you try to put in the minds of potential investors that transmeta is a long-term investment.
Most strategists are done with the dot-coms. Stocks need to have some semblence of real world value in order to survive. Without much technology to speak of other than "we are another AMD", which has not been a wall street killer until this year, they need to project the image of a long term strategy.
Its all about business. This is just one facet of it. Keep in mind who is publicly traded and who wants to be
--jay
All the posts ive read so far have been to the tune of "ha, see NOTHING is hack-proof" and "DeCSS lives" or whatever. People are so concerned with the digital security (or lack thereof) of each of these coding schemes that people rarely stop to think: "What im doing is wrong." Im not an RIAA advocate. I dont think that people's right to make backups should be violated? i dont think many big label musicians are starving, but hey, downloading this stuff, copying these movies, etc etc... thats wrong. Petty theft, not a shred better. If this decryption scheme was really just the work of professors interested in data security, thats fine... if it was some law abiding citizen who stumbled across the way to copy these items and reported it to the developer, thats great...however i have a feeling that it was just somebody who wanted to take what isnt theirs.
Now, im no better than you, i have my music, and where i got it i wont say, but hey.. no one stops to think that the whole "digital music revolution" is based largely on a concept nothing more glorious than very fast shoplifting. im not saying that these measures shouldnt be developed, but its kinda sad when something that is wrong is so mainstream. Just a bit of philosophy for thought.
As for the technology, we all know its a cat and mouse game. It just looks like IBM is the mouse this time. Thats what enginners get paid to think about...
Thats it. Thats the number one rule of long term software development. No matter what you do, no matter how good your coders are, entropy happens.
People forget, people leave the project. The coyboy coder stays up all night and in an evil cackle resorts to inline assembly. Stuff like this plagues prodcuts, even ones with the best of software enginnering, paradigms, and tools.
Take netscape for example. There are not that many engineers on it anymore id imagine. Its an OLD codebase. You probably just cant scrap it all and start over. That would take a long time, and people need to get paid for a living...something has to pay the bills.
There are two basic types of software products...Quality driven, and release driven. Release driven is such as Microsoft Office, products put out to meet customer demand, to compete against other products making headway, and to work towards strategic initiatives...not to mention fix bugs, improve UI, etc. Quality is a variable in this release, but time is the number one factor.
Quality driven products are ones like Linux (referring to the linux kernel), or Mozilla. "Its done when we feel its done." It hopefully produces better prodcuts, but more than likely, if you fix every bug that comes down the line, you'll never get it out the, and you'll NEVER pay your bills.
While netscape is sitting and stewing in development, IE can have free reign over features, new functionality, and overall the general market. However, netscape may come out with fewer bugs.
Its a moral dilemma that i think is at the heart of the open source development paradigm. is it better to keep your source closed, private, and singularly maintained to have a trimmer development process, or do you open source it to help flush out those hard to find bugs.
What neither paradigm catches are those integration bugs. Just looking at how all of this comes together will not save anyone from the myriad of hassles that integration of engines, algorithms, and interfaces brings. Teams of coders can be hundred of people big, and still not catch all the bugs.
Systems move toward entropy. I once read somewhere that "NT is so huge no one person understands it all" There will come a time when everything on the planet is like that. Stuff will get bigger, and it will become too difficult to understand all of the code on such a low level that you are going to have to trust the wisdom of coders that came before you.
1x1 banners, or gif images do have their bona-fide uses. For example, take a look at counters. More often than not, most advanced counter scripts will actually tell you from what ip a visit was registered, what browser they were using and any other of those fun and exicting pieces of information passed along in your broswers heading. Now, leaving the paranoia at the door here, a web administrator could use these to modify the pages for you when you log in. Things like a favorite articles section, or perhaps slashdot could better organize itself to intelligently tailor itself to the types of articles that you commonly read. It has been done before. The paranoia about web bugs is only partially viable, since perhaps companies are using the demographics information provided by the banner ads to better track and market their site. Seeing when an email is read helps to present to an exec to tell how many people it has reached to see whether it is worth it to continue funding the project. Its simple enough. Now, ill give the paranoids a nod saying, yes, doubleclick has done some unscrupulous things with their information, but what is to say that all "web bugs" are malicious. What if everyone new of an ethical advertising company? What then... would it be okay for people to take web bug surveys? Or do we all have to live with an unintelligent web? Face it, what you do is tracked... --jay
Okay, there are a lot of things flying around here.. first off, linux and windows... well read the subject. Most people think windows 95/98, a non-protected "go what you want, its your machine and you're the only one on it OS". We are talking about two TOTALLY different things here. Now if you want to talk windows NT and linux, sure go for it. Effective system administration could stop any such virus. You could re-register.vbs files to a scripted something saying that you are about to execute a.vbs file and if you dont know what you are doing executing it, then press NO, or something. Simple enough. UNIX is too inconsistant to be hit by a virus as such... remember, VB is the tool of choice for NT, as perl or python or/bin/sh is for UNIXy OS's. There could easily be something that WELL hid itself in shell code and modified it, or faked the viewing aspect, or something. Unix is genenerally more well explored by its users, however there are plenty of times where there are files where even an experienced user does not mess with.. how many people mess with their.netscape stuff? My point is, UNIX users of the world, count your blessings.... there are many threats out there to security, that even open source is not going to stop... for every crafty person waiting to write a malicious vbs script, there is going to be a crafty perl nutcase waiting to fdisk a few drives. System administration solves many security woes. With a heads up, a good exchange admin can stop this kind of attack, and still gain the benefit of using that particular mail product. Linux looks great because windows (98) looks bad. Thats the way it is. There are people that swear by both. The ILOVEYOU virus sucked. It hurt a lot of companies, businesses and government agencies.. A few friends of mine got it.. however, not running as administrator on their own machines lead to a little file cleanup afterwards.. end of story. System administration is the magic bullet..keep your users under your watchful eye. There will always be something to sneak up on them. Keep in mind what you are comparing when you say "UNIX is safe...", or "UNIX will never have this kinda trouble"... linux should be greatful to shine in the bad press. its about the technology, not the name --jay
Well this bleem emulator is going to be pretty sweet for those people who already own dreamcasts. Isnt this the first WinCE based port for the DreamCast? If so, that is a very cool application of the technology. Very sweet if you ask me. The embedded system may be windows based, but the object model porting is a great concept. --jay
Slashdot Mirror
Carrot on a stick? Dude, you can get that at like 48 and it's a pretty easy quest if you're in ZF anyways. That is assuming you have a guildie or a PUG who has the mallet. Gaz'rilla isn't even that bad in a 5-man. We did it with a Warlock pet as the MT! What's so hard about... Oh, um, wait. Nevermind.
No, and there are reasons for each one of the things it doesn't have.
No Outlook: Has Entourage and Exchange client for Mac. Mac BU used to do Mac OE, but Entourage is basically that with Calendaring and other office integrations
No Project: There's no market for it. Project is niche on windows.
Access: Access is too windows specific, and there's no market room for it. Everyone uses FileMaker Pro, of which there are huge amounts of import and conversion functions for in Excel. I think you can convert mdb files to FileMaker (but my memory is fuzzy)
If there isn't a market for it, don't spend millions on dev time, pm time, testing time, localization, and then support costs in porting it. That's simply the nature of commerical software.
--jay
I'll come clean here and say that I in fact did used to work for Microsoft as an intern, in the Macintosh Business Unit. As in, no shit, there I was. These are the people I used to eat lunch with, talk about bugs with, and share the passion for a product with etc. They are Macintosh zealots in the Microsoft community, and deeply care not only about Microsoft, but also the Macintosh community as a whole. As much as you may think of them as black sheep, they wear it as a badge of honor.
;)
I've never heard more talk from a product group about what the "community" will think about a feature, what value it adds to the target audience, etc. It was a core focus, to not only bring Microsoft Office to that community, but enable them to interact fully with their Windows counterparts. There was no secondary citizenship. These people put their all into the product, and are met with relatively great success.
An amazing amount of work goes into making the software a great user-experience. Applescript exposure, different UI, Mac-specific features and development... all of those things because the Mac product was hugely important. Localization into at least 5 different languages (off the top of my head). Different product SKUs, and different new developments with what the Mac community had in mind.
A very cool thing that I found about the team was that in no way lived under the shadow of the greater Office group. They pride themselves on having the "best" version of Office, as wierd as that sounds.
Kevin Brown, the Business Unit Manager when I was there said at a MacWorld (paraphrased from memory): "We know that our users are mostly home and small business users. People aren't using Excel to make incredibly complicated PivotTables, but are using it to balance their checkbook". That quote stuck out in my mind as something that always made me chuckle. It was a realistic look at how this "enterprise class" piece of software was realistically being used by the community at large.
These are developers and testers who use their Mac everyday (some even faking their PC). I knew one tester who used the product for everything. Signs, balancing his budget, right on down to making grocery lists in word, and porting them over to Powerpoint, just to see.
I worked on the clamshell version of Office 2001, and the trophy copy still sits on my desk. I hate to hear when people bash the group as some kind of whack strategy to sink Apple, because not only are these people my professional friends, but they simply don't think that way.
It was a refreshing two summers working for the Evil Empire (tm), but being a part of a group with as much passion for quality and desire to put out the best software possible. It's made me a rabid tester, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I remember that huge Mac lab you see behind you running SETI at home, as we were in the top 20 or so for a while
If you guys are reading this, glad to hear you're going strong.
--Jay Bonci (summer of 1999, 2000, Mac Office Core)
Why this is somewhat amusing is that it's the other kind of "free" (as in speech) as well, but people who usually use the beer analogy typically mean that it's not the other.
I'm also really glad to see people sponsoring him and donating licenses to software for development of it. Another cool example about how this community helps support itself.
Consider this from the article:
"The compression/decompression algorithms are stored on the media, not in the adapter, and will take up some of the space on the cards."
And how long will it take a crafty GBA coder to write a fake codec that will kill the audio loader and load up a homebrewed rom off of a SmartMedia card? If you're exposing the loading process to a very easily writable media, then those are the risks.
Other interesting applications exist that don't right now on the GBA for things like photo albums and the like, because of the removable media.
It'll be interesting to see what exactly is used (if any) for "copy protection", especially considering the media. It won't ever be a great PDA (limitedness of input, etc), but it might be a fun gadget for a different market.
--[jaybonci]
Of course that the numbers do get a bit inflated, but living on 50K a year is harder in Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, or NYC than it is from where I live, in say Western Massachusetts. Companies that are in the gold rush areas have to pay people more so that they can live there.
For instance. Microsoft pays their employees more if they work in the Silicon Valley campus than they do on the Redmond campus. Why? Because in Silicon valley it's more expensive with less cheap suburbs to live in. This internal memo talks about the compensation differences being (at one point), as high as 25%. This is all because of the premium costs of programmer labor in that environment.
If you live in Western Mass, or the Dakotas or rural Pennsylvania where the cost of living is dirt low, then you're all set. Otherwise, making 50K stretch in Silicon Valley is just a bit tougher.
And yes, I understand XBoxes and the like aren't essential, and that there are many people with a lot less. No sense in not being grateful for when fortune smiles upon you.
--jaybonci
While I applaud these people for making steps to make it harder to casually get information off of laptop computers, it still does not stop other attacks on such a system. Flooding the laptops area with uniformly strong signal that matches the watch's key would be as difficult as acquire-and-replicate. There seems to be a smart card like system with keys, and key encrypting keys.
It's very comprehensive, and it addresses many aspects of the social and technological attacks.
In my mind, the weak link here is clearly the watch. Watch technology isn't very complicated (read: very big), and how many designs could their possibly be? If one knows where the hardware information is located, a system replacement under the face, and you've got some issues. How many people wear watches to bed at night? Or in the shower? Difficult, but possible
A quick couple of replacements, and you have a watch that has a short range transmitter also transmitting the information that you'd need to dissolve the encryption link, and maybe begin a traditional man-in-the-middle attack. Once you see what cards the watch is holding, shouldn't the rest of the exchange be trivial?
While this is a great mechanism for an encryption scheme, what attacks are there against the physical and social component? These are the items of which spy thrillers are made, and will probably (hopefully) never come into play.
All in all, an excellent read from the UMich folk, and they have my applause.
--jaybonci
They may neglect to mention a certain Apple Records that they had to pay off to stay in business. From what I have been told, the very famous MacOS sound "SoSuMi" was derived from that experience. "So sue me."
And how quickly they turn the other cheek.
They used to be:
Applecomm.com.au, but on the frontpage there is an announcement regarding the settlement and the change to iGreen.
I can certainly forgive them for their apples being sour.
The only upside of this is if Apple Communications would have become an ISP (not entirely far fetched). The name Apple Internet Access or Apple Broadband could certainly be too close for comfort, and would enjoy at least a small amount of probable name association; the very thing these sorts of suits are trying to protect against. It's a tough situation on either end of the boot.
--jay
You said:
">>The internet could prove to be the single factor which contributes greatest towards equality of educational opportunity for all around the world.
>Not likely. Only about 5% of the worlds population have internet access, maybe a tad more."
Putting that into perspective, how many people need to do serious research on Astronomy in that depth. It is a fairly abstract field that is well entrenched into academia.
Also put that 5% number into perspective for people who need to do serious research into Astronomy; of them, how many have access (at least part time) to the Internet? It's probably up there near 100%
While not a huge educational opportunity for everyone on the planet, we are looking at a serious contribution to the field.
--jaybonci
From what the article reads, it seems to be a very ambitious and interesting project. Very rarely do you see people trying to get together to spread information out to the web in such a fashion. The major problem in my (and I can imagine in their) mind is of format? How can you accomodate the mythical layman's and his or her inherent lack of skill, and still have it be available for advanced researchers to make use of.
/numbers being available for public research. Maybe someone will throw together an inverse Terraserver or something with Whiz-bang true-layman appeal. Until then, the geeks bow at the effort, because man, space is BIG.
It seems that there is simply going to be a huge amount of data-cross referenced and collated. From the second page of the article, it seems to include pictoral data. I also hear talk of XML being thrown around, which is a good start, but there's a lot that goes into that transition. Are they looking to set the layman bar at "your novice astronomer", "the third grade science report", or "grad student". Where is this information really being targeted at the sub-obscure level.
While I don't want to trivialize their massive IT effort, it seems that a lot of this is going to come down to the end user of the data. Their sample study using this information isn't trivial stuff, and does seem to set the aforementioned bar at somewhere in the undergrad-graduate level. Perhaps that is the nature of the data (I'm not that familiar with it). There's an XML schema, some request examples, and other framework stuff already in place to view by potential client writers.
I'm glad to see XML being done the right way (by collaboration with its end users), and those pictures
Anyone closer to the project know of any simplification efforts?
--jaybonci
The problem with those sorts of compilations (on a Gamecube disk or whatever) is that they feel like emulation. For instance the Intellivision classics disk for the Playstation felt like it was emulated. Besides the unique vantage point of not having a real INTV controller for it, the sound didn't have that 8-bit-crunch to it.
I worry about direct ports or emulation on consoles, because there are the issues or compatibility and accuracy. More often than not, something gets lost in the translation.
Now with some of the pirate tools, you get the best of both worlds, but you tarnish under the light of legality. Having a Bung copier or similar device to jack NES Rom images into an NES-compatible flash cart makes for 100% accurate games, with a huge availability, but by and large, it is illegal.
Companies are at a wierd impass in regards to their classic games. Should one distribute Nintendos with a huge bank of games built in, or release compiliation CDs with subquality compatibility.
Sadly, as I have purchased several of those "classics" emulations/ports for playstation I'd prefer the original hardware.
Oh and yes, NES still rules.
--jaybonci
After a little additional research, I found a link from tsr's NES archive (a completely awesome site) that has a brief blurb about the state of piracy in brazil. It seems like Sega actually granted them some leway to do game hacks:
http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/nes/brazil/brazil.html
If that's the case, then great. It doesn't really display the credentials of what us legality-twitchy Americans have come to expect from those sorts of clone machines. It no doubt is an interesting piece.
What really gets me is why publish a 20-in-1 cart with the console then? I know that wouldn't fly then, but I never saw the real gamer appeal (outside of the collector or hopeful collector like myself)... Typically the games in those multicarts are the same game, hacked several different ways, or a large multirom of pirated or poorly hacked together games.
Maybe it's a cultural difference between China/ Hong Kong/Brazil and the rest of the world in regards to the appeal of pirate multi-carts (100-n-1, 520-n-1, 10000-n-1). Quantity vs. Quality? The NES had a fair production of them, due to it's popularity, but honestly, this is the first mention of one I've heard of for the master system.
An interesting unit indeed.
In regards to the Capcom port, I have played several pirate originals of Street Fighter for the NES. The colors were a little yellow, the controls not the greatest, but it was far better than the other originals I have played and played. Do you know if the 8-bit port of SFII was for NES or for SMS?
Thanks
--jaybonci
It seems you're right. There are listed around the web a few Sonic games for the Master System. I thought it was a genesis-original title.
;)
Seems like you learn new stuff everyday. Even about archaic video games.
--jaybonci
Well two things are interesting to note here. The first is that it seems to support Game Gear games as well. You can tell this because there was never a Sonic the Hedgehog (as per the screenshot)for the Master System... however there was one for the Game Gear, a nearly identical platform.
Also, I'd be worried about the legality of such an item. The brazilian piracy market is huge, and I'd be largely worried about any sort of retro console with a different design, and a lot of pack-in games. It seems largely like a pirated console with a large set of roms.
It also doesn't seem legal because of the presence of a 20-in-1 rom. Those are a favorite of pirate console and cartridge distributors. Some of them are neat as collectors' items, but by and large they are illegal.
Don't get me wrong, I'm intrigued by the possibility of older consoles making a decent comback, but this one certainly doesn't add up.
--jaybonci
A few months back, my manager told me a story.
There was once an office manager for a medium sized company. Productivity was lagging, so it came down to him to help the problem. He decided it was time to change the lightbulbs. Changing the lightbulbs up 10 watts increased productivity 20% "Wow!" thought the manager. "What an increibly increase for just lightbulbs!"
So he decided to do it again. Up another 10 watts. Another 5% increase! "Excellent. By upping the wattages on the bulbs, i've gotten higher productivity." He tried it again, another 5 watts. Another 2% increase, but people were complaining about the lights. So he took it down those 5 watts. Yet another 2% increase in productivity.
Why?
It has nothing to do with the lights, it's the change. People need an engaging changing environment so that they do become stale, and can remain productive. War rooms probably provide that sort of dynamic environment, but most likely at the cost of high stress.
Maybe they should look into new light bulbs instead.
--jay
Okay, so let's look to the future of legacy-free computing. Floppy disks are obsolete, people are moving on to higher density inexpensive media as Zip Disks, or super disks, or CD-RWs (or even CDRs). This is the iMac quesiton. Apple has tried to get rid of the legacy free features (serial ports are on their way out), no more floppy, fast ethernet, etc. These are good moves, but what do you do in the interim.
This question will come up more and more as time goes on. Lets face it, over the wire is the way to go. How often do physical drives fail? Very rarely. The fidelity of modern magnetic media is excellent. Have the students upload their work to something. Make a turning program for windows / mac / linux or a webpage that allows file transfer. It can be done. Make backups of that. No excuses. No sorting through tons of turning floppies.
Make your students go to a web page. Discourage working off of floppies. Floppies are an excellent way of carring viruses (more so than wire tcp transfer). When was the last time a network corrupted data?
Do what apple does. Sum it all up and say "No one ever uses those any more", and then enforce it. Make them obsolete. It will lead to better computing practices, and fewer shocks as to when homework gets turned in.
Another discussion entirely is good data recovery utilities... Something you sound like you could use...
Except that they would lose. And i mean bad. Someone broke the law. It's totally different. It's not like someone reverse engineered the Windows Kernel. Someone stole the source. If you accepted it, you could go to jail. It's stolen property, regardless of what you think of Microsoft.
I can seem them all coming now, with COM and .NET, there is going to be an era of ORG jokes.
The technology is neat. I want to see what it looks like post-release.
Beta is bostonian for "Its Beta then Alpha"
heh
--jay
Look, the market right now for technology is getting weaker and weaker. IPOs are shaky business... some are venturing out (such as AvantGo), but others, such as say transmeta, which are plan nin g an IPO really need to bolster how they look to investors. By claiming a potentially false lead over other chip makers in technology, you try to put in the minds of potential investors that transmeta is a long-term investment.
Most strategists are done with the dot-coms. Stocks need to have some semblence of real world value in order to survive. Without much technology to speak of other than "we are another AMD", which has not been a wall street killer until this year, they need to project the image of a long term strategy.
Its all about business. This is just one facet of it. Keep in mind who is publicly traded and who wants to be
--jay
All the posts ive read so far have been to the tune of "ha, see NOTHING is hack-proof" and "DeCSS lives" or whatever. People are so concerned with the digital security (or lack thereof) of each of these coding schemes that people rarely stop to think: "What im doing is wrong." Im not an RIAA advocate. I dont think that people's right to make backups should be violated? i dont think many big label musicians are starving, but hey, downloading this stuff, copying these movies, etc etc... thats wrong. Petty theft, not a shred better. If this decryption scheme was really just the work of professors interested in data security, thats fine... if it was some law abiding citizen who stumbled across the way to copy these items and reported it to the developer, thats great...however i have a feeling that it was just somebody who wanted to take what isnt theirs.
Now, im no better than you, i have my music, and where i got it i wont say, but hey.. no one stops to think that the whole "digital music revolution" is based largely on a concept nothing more glorious than very fast shoplifting. im not saying that these measures shouldnt be developed, but its kinda sad when something that is wrong is so mainstream. Just a bit of philosophy for thought.
As for the technology, we all know its a cat and mouse game. It just looks like IBM is the mouse this time. Thats what enginners get paid to think about...
--jay
Systems move towards entropy.
Thats it. Thats the number one rule of long term software development. No matter what you do, no matter how good your coders are, entropy happens.
People forget, people leave the project. The coyboy coder stays up all night and in an evil cackle resorts to inline assembly. Stuff like this plagues prodcuts, even ones with the best of software enginnering, paradigms, and tools.
Take netscape for example. There are not that many engineers on it anymore id imagine. Its an OLD codebase. You probably just cant scrap it all and start over. That would take a long time, and people need to get paid for a living...something has to pay the bills.
There are two basic types of software products...Quality driven, and release driven. Release driven is such as Microsoft Office, products put out to meet customer demand, to compete against other products making headway, and to work towards strategic initiatives...not to mention fix bugs, improve UI, etc. Quality is a variable in this release, but time is the number one factor.
Quality driven products are ones like Linux (referring to the linux kernel), or Mozilla. "Its done when we feel its done." It hopefully produces better prodcuts, but more than likely, if you fix every bug that comes down the line, you'll never get it out the, and you'll NEVER pay your bills.
While netscape is sitting and stewing in development, IE can have free reign over features, new functionality, and overall the general market. However, netscape may come out with fewer bugs.
Its a moral dilemma that i think is at the heart of the open source development paradigm. is it better to keep your source closed, private, and singularly maintained to have a trimmer development process, or do you open source it to help flush out those hard to find bugs.
What neither paradigm catches are those integration bugs. Just looking at how all of this comes together will not save anyone from the myriad of hassles that integration of engines, algorithms, and interfaces brings. Teams of coders can be hundred of people big, and still not catch all the bugs.
Systems move toward entropy. I once read somewhere that "NT is so huge no one person understands it all" There will come a time when everything on the planet is like that. Stuff will get bigger, and it will become too difficult to understand all of the code on such a low level that you are going to have to trust the wisdom of coders that came before you.
My thoughts as a software developer
--jay
1x1 banners, or gif images do have their bona-fide uses. For example, take a look at counters. More often than not, most advanced counter scripts will actually tell you from what ip a visit was registered, what browser they were using and any other of those fun and exicting pieces of information passed along in your broswers heading. Now, leaving the paranoia at the door here, a web administrator could use these to modify the pages for you when you log in. Things like a favorite articles section, or perhaps slashdot could better organize itself to intelligently tailor itself to the types of articles that you commonly read. It has been done before. The paranoia about web bugs is only partially viable, since perhaps companies are using the demographics information provided by the banner ads to better track and market their site. Seeing when an email is read helps to present to an exec to tell how many people it has reached to see whether it is worth it to continue funding the project. Its simple enough. Now, ill give the paranoids a nod saying, yes, doubleclick has done some unscrupulous things with their information, but what is to say that all "web bugs" are malicious. What if everyone new of an ethical advertising company? What then... would it be okay for people to take web bug surveys? Or do we all have to live with an unintelligent web? Face it, what you do is tracked... --jay
Okay, there are a lot of things flying around here.. first off, linux and windows... well read the subject. Most people think windows 95/98, a non-protected "go what you want, its your machine and you're the only one on it OS". We are talking about two TOTALLY different things here. Now if you want to talk windows NT and linux, sure go for it. Effective system administration could stop any such virus. You could re-register .vbs files to a scripted something saying that you are about to execute a .vbs file and if you dont know what you are doing executing it, then press NO, or something. Simple enough. UNIX is too inconsistant to be hit by a virus as such... remember, VB is the tool of choice for NT, as perl or python or /bin/sh is for UNIXy OS's. There could easily be something that WELL hid itself in shell code and modified it, or faked the viewing aspect, or something. Unix is genenerally more well explored by its users, however there are plenty of times where there are files where even an experienced user does not mess with.. how many people mess with their .netscape stuff? My point is, UNIX users of the world, count your blessings.... there are many threats out there to security, that even open source is not going to stop... for every crafty person waiting to write a malicious vbs script, there is going to be a crafty perl nutcase waiting to fdisk a few drives. System administration solves many security woes. With a heads up, a good exchange admin can stop this kind of attack, and still gain the benefit of using that particular mail product. Linux looks great because windows (98) looks bad. Thats the way it is. There are people that swear by both. The ILOVEYOU virus sucked. It hurt a lot of companies, businesses and government agencies.. A few friends of mine got it.. however, not running as administrator on their own machines lead to a little file cleanup afterwards.. end of story. System administration is the magic bullet..keep your users under your watchful eye. There will always be something to sneak up on them. Keep in mind what you are comparing when you say "UNIX is safe...", or "UNIX will never have this kinda trouble"... linux should be greatful to shine in the bad press. its about the technology, not the name --jay
Well this bleem emulator is going to be pretty sweet for those people who already own dreamcasts. Isnt this the first WinCE based port for the DreamCast? If so, that is a very cool application of the technology. Very sweet if you ask me. The embedded system may be windows based, but the object model porting is a great concept. --jay