Wikipedia is excellent for some content but sucks for other. Many pages are bloated with fanboyish crap (+/=useless details) while they miss some important facts and - often - lack any critical approach ("bad side" of story often gets deleted by fans). While it can be very useful and condensed source of information, Wikipedia should not be only source of information, especially for stuff of wide (non-expert) interest.
Most problems are minor glitches video, sound glitches and sometimes screen gets corrupted (apart from games that use PS2 HDD). Some bugs are even fixed with 1.10 firmware. I suppose that 80%-90% of those games will be resolved with firmware updates (which console can download str8 from SCEI web site).
A witch-hunt. In this era of erosion of human rights in USA, UK but also other countries, this is what government is able to use to be effective against terrorists. Democracy, privacy, personal rights, right of free speech - are just a myth. No country ever really allowed this (maybe not even ancient Greece in that brief democracy period).
To lower the margin by which attacker can avoid being discovered, U.K. just put anyone remotely being suspect in jail. This woman is probably only a symphatiser. These days you obviously aren't allowed to be one, as government and courts are very effective at eliminating your ability to be loud (with a pretext of "hate speech" and similar carefully crafted and obviously misused instruments).
Now protesters in UK should start wearing shirts with al quaida manual and weapon manuals printed, that's the way how government can be pressured to back off at least in this case.
End of the line is that you will have to somehow persuade people to give their money for music. Right now that money is spent on other things as access to music is easy and cheap (even free). DRM doesn't help here. So the money is now in concerts (live performances) prices of which did rise significantly in recent years.
Flat model? Maybe (like a tax we pay to state TV houses in some countries), but it isn't going to get many people rich and money will again be ripped by clever managers and all those intermediate rats.
Idea about using decades old logic doesn't work. Someone has to mantain all that code: kernel, basic libraries, platform API's etc.
Problem is, software gets old, obsoleted by new ideas and when next-gen of hardware takes over, so updates are needed all the time. If you don't pay attention, you can end up with cruft like X Windows protocol which people are now trying to fix and improve to compete with other popular OS's.
Unlike in this novel, actual (best) code search won't need digging, it will be advertised, categorised, documented, just ready to be used.
Backdoor? unlikely. First, for drive recovery in case of a failure they will have to provide algorithm for decryption (or simply document it, whatever it is (AES?)). So using a password, data from the platters should be restorable. This is a big PITA when trying to include a backdoor, as any intentional flaws would be very hard to hide. And in a case existence of the backdoor is EVER revealed, Seagate would probably be brought to court in coutries like China or Russia.
Second, one password isn't unsecure if encrption is strong enough. Note that it is probably (if they chose sufficiently strong algorithm) impossible to decrypt it during any comprehensible time:)
They could someday extend it to have configurable (at setup) number of passwords, so police would never be able to find out if a suspect had given them everything, even if they find truecrypt.
However you can be certain that protected video path and other DRM-protective kernel stuff will be immediately shut down if patchguard is bypassed (and apps will refuse to play content). In case of secret/unpatched workarounds, apps relying on DRM for copy protection can be fooled and content ripped, which is Microsoft's biggest concern.
Yes, but it isn't a cheap energy source. It takes approx. same effort to develop a open source application equvalent to closed source one.
Big difference is that resulting IP doesn't belong to a specific company in specific country but to a whole civilisation (i.e. anyone skilled to make good use of it). This divides benefits more equally between poor and rich countries, as otherwise rich ones would suck up most of the money spent in the sector (because their companies are mostly advanced in that sector). Unfortunately this isn't happening with other industries, so powerful countries manage to keep or even extend their economical lead.
Why do they always invest in developing medicines which aren't a one-time cure, but only are effective if constantly used? I can imagine this thing won't be for world's poor & middle class majority (but then, they aren't as fat as Americans).
THe evidence here is probably only the fact that he is the last person to be seen with her and actually only known to the police with motives to kill her (because of divorce dispute). I however have doubts that he is the murderer as it would be very stupid of him to do that and he's more than intelligent enough to realise that he w'd be the prime suspect (however he IS a tough personality, so it is possible). Statistics will probably say that in 80%-90% of cases missing/killed wife is a crime commited by husband, and inspectors are aware of that.
Although there is a little possibility that his wife is alive (though I hope she is). In case of a tragedy I hope they'll at least find her body so poor kids can know her fate.
"As others have pointed out indirectly, Israel's nuclear weapons have already stabalized the Middle East by eliminating a major source of intense wars in the region. The invasion of Iraq eliminated another."
LOL, except that U.S.A. CAUSED a war there and destabilised the country in the long term. WHat do you think was solved? If US leaves today, tomorrow there will be new bloodbaths and country will divide, probably in wars. Neighbouring Iran will sponsor creation of Shiite country and maybe the'll even join Iran, while Kurds will engage into the war with Turkey. All because of a danger to big important countries like Kuwait and Israel.
But maybe you don't care about that as long as discounted iraqi oil helps up US economy and GI's can have fun killing "extremists".
"I mean do you SERIOUSLY want North Korea and Iran to have nukes?"
I want it. Period. Otherwise your government will attack and occupy Iran or North Korea sooner or later. They aren't threat to USA even with nuclear capabilities. Only problem is that too many right-wing radicals (Bush included) are unjustifiably putting them in the same basket as organizations which attacked WTC.
This software is obviously a loophole for extracting HD content. As decrypting and decoding is obviously done in software, hackers will rip the h264/VC1/mpeg2 high-def video and AC3/DTS/whatever audio streams from Intervideo software implementation. Similar hacking occured before before with a software DVD-Audio players. Only problem is that it's a fairly big download for only a movie, I believe that HD formats won't become mainstream unless media houses decide to push out exclusive HD releases few months before regular DVD releases (though it won't be very well accelted by theater holders and might annoy regular public which don't intend to buy new equipment just for a few exclusive titles).
MS quickly updated the thing, but I doubt that DRM'd music providers will enforce it until last issues are resolved (like support for media center). In the meantime it already got obsolete before, as 1.2 version was released.
Yes, drmdbg is at least a year old and AFAIR it worked reliably only with Japanese XP version at that time, so it's reasonable to suppose that FairUse4WM authors improved the method (as they also did in 1.2).
So Microsoft gives control over kernel driver auditing and signing to media companies? Or those just trust Microsoft in this case?
I assume that they do this to prevent someone from grabbing framebuffer from video cards and such tricks, because data will probably be decrypted only in the GPU. Though it could still be defeated if someone hacks kernel(without TPM protection that is, but most hardware doesn't have TPM yet, or at least they don' want us to know it). On a running kernel, even with a TPM protection, a rootkit exploit could give hackers full ring0 access (of course, MS can patch kernel and media houses would allow playback of newer content only on patched kernel, so the exploit is useful only if it remains secret as long as possible and is known only throughout HDDVD ripping community:)).
Another method, probably only effective without TPM, could be virtualisation. For example AMD CPU and northbridge with IOMMU (for graphic card access) could fool OS into believing that it is running natively. Software VM with direct access to PCI device could also work, but in this case graphic card can "find out" what is happening - maybe here IOMMU can be utilisied to present fake address space to gfx card which is talking to software VM so it can't find out. And even fooling of a TPM chip is theoretically possible as long as processor itself doesn't do that.
Microsoft and media companies went to great lenghts to protect the content, but there are still few weak points and HDCP isn't very much secure.
HW virtualisation is about running the unmodified OS on top of other operating system. SW approach (paravirtualisation) is about modifying the guest (and somewhat host) OS to be simpler to virtualise it, get better performance by chopping out unnecessary operations on guest OS and optimise it to specifically use certain host API for even better performance gains.
Of course, HW virtualisation speed depends mostly on what hardware can do. AMD is ahead currently (and their boards will even support IOMMU for simpler PCI access control). It's certain that performance will improve with next-gen hardware, especially Intel. In the meantime it would make sense to support both methods for best performance - i.e. use hardware stuff where useful (e.g. for transparent page handling between OS's) and still modify guest OS not to do costly stuff which will be trapped and emulated in VMM (in fact maybe VMM will give performance improvement even with a single OS kernel).
In the long term, we can expect virtualisation to come to desktop - sharing of video, sound and input devices will allow people to simultaneously run linux and windows, somewhat lowering the barrier for linux adopters (i.e. users will be able to launch windows to use their killer app or game without rebooting).
"How on earth can OpenGL grow if it always has to support the lowest common denominator."
It won't. They are dividing the API into OpenGL-ES 1.0 and 2.0. Both are stripped versions of OpenGL (with only what is needed for gaming on embedded devices). 1.0 is targeted at small handheld devices like mobile phones and PDA's (it even includes fixed point arithmetic) while 2.0 more powerful console devices such as Playstation 3.
Supporting lowest common denominator doesn't even have to hold back the spec : Linux kernel is going well despite it's support for everything from the mobile phones to top 100 machines.
Because many people don't see urge to upgrade to Vista (especially because it won't scale so well on many existing machines as XP), MS needs to lure people with new features. Problem with Vista is in fact that it has many improvements under the hood, but only stuff like the new Aero engine is visible and that is what matters to customers.
Hardcore gamers will surely be first to adopt, some of them already have the hardware (except the DX10 cards which ATI/Nvidia will probably offer simultaneously with DX10 for huge price tags to maximise profit). Only market leaders in game engine design will utilize best of DX10 - and at the same time scale back to DX9 (it's not very easy to make engine which uses multiple API's anyway). Other 90% will target only DX9 and SM2.0 class hardware. Some will use OpenGL extensions and deliver those features to Vista, but not outside of FPS genre as usual.
Xen and VmWare should join forces in architecturing common paravirtualisation interfaces, because it's an opportunity to get it engineered in a right way. Let's not forget UML which is a slightly different approach (port of linux to itself to exist as a usermode proccess).
The question is (I didn't understand that from the text), if this will enable them to run unmodified guest OS's (as current Windows, Linux...) with such low level access from the host OS, or they still need customizations?
Btw. one simple example of such API is NTVDM, a DOS virtual machine which can run some DOS games/apps in native speed under XP/W2K (of course it is incompatible with many DOS progs). DOS apps behave like a dedicated operating system in many respects - they hook to DOS, BIOS and TSR's (interrupts) where possible, e.g. for accessing file system, simple memory allocation or restoring shell after finishing, but they still run in real mode with full access to hardware and usually full control of the machine - comparable to Win9x OS series.
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Wikipedia is excellent for some content but sucks for other. Many pages are bloated with fanboyish crap (+/=useless details) while they miss some important facts and - often - lack any critical approach ("bad side" of story often gets deleted by fans). While it can be very useful and condensed source of information, Wikipedia should not be only source of information, especially for stuff of wide (non-expert) interest.
Most problems are minor glitches video, sound glitches and sometimes screen gets corrupted (apart from games that use PS2 HDD). Some bugs are even fixed with 1.10 firmware. I suppose that 80%-90% of those games will be resolved with firmware updates (which console can download str8 from SCEI web site).
So even Sony can't create an emulator for PS3 :)
Maybe PCSX2 folks should lend them a hand...
A witch-hunt.
In this era of erosion of human rights in USA, UK but also other countries, this is what government is able to use to be effective against terrorists. Democracy, privacy, personal rights, right of free speech - are just a myth. No country ever really allowed this (maybe not even ancient Greece in that brief democracy period).
To lower the margin by which attacker can avoid being discovered, U.K. just put anyone remotely being suspect in jail. This woman is probably only a symphatiser. These days you obviously aren't allowed to be one, as government and courts are very effective at eliminating your ability to be loud (with a pretext of "hate speech" and similar carefully crafted and obviously misused instruments).
Now protesters in UK should start wearing shirts with al quaida manual and weapon manuals printed, that's the way how government can be pressured to back off at least in this case.
Well this is no more illegal than having a copy of America's Army.
Seems like muslim people are second class citizens in UK.
End of the line is that you will have to somehow persuade people to give their money for music. Right now that money is spent on other things as access to music is easy and cheap (even free). DRM doesn't help here.
So the money is now in concerts (live performances) prices of which did rise significantly in recent years.
Flat model? Maybe (like a tax we pay to state TV houses in some countries), but it isn't going to get many people rich and money will again be ripped by clever managers and all those intermediate rats.
Idea about using decades old logic doesn't work. Someone has to mantain all that code: kernel, basic libraries, platform API's etc.
Problem is, software gets old, obsoleted by new ideas and when next-gen of hardware takes over, so updates are needed all the time. If you don't pay attention, you can end up with cruft like X Windows protocol which people are now trying to fix and improve to compete with other popular OS's.
Unlike in this novel, actual (best) code search won't need digging, it will be advertised, categorised, documented, just ready to be used.
Backdoor? unlikely. First, for drive recovery in case of a failure they will have to provide algorithm for decryption (or simply document it, whatever it is (AES?)). So using a password, data from the platters should be restorable.
:)
This is a big PITA when trying to include a backdoor, as any intentional flaws would be very hard to hide.
And in a case existence of the backdoor is EVER revealed, Seagate would probably be brought to court in coutries like China or Russia.
Second, one password isn't unsecure if encrption is strong enough. Note that it is probably (if they chose sufficiently strong algorithm) impossible to decrypt it during any comprehensible time
They could someday extend it to have configurable (at setup) number of passwords, so police would never be able to find out if a suspect had given them everything, even if they find truecrypt.
However you can be certain that protected video path and other DRM-protective kernel stuff will be immediately shut down if patchguard is bypassed (and apps will refuse to play content). In case of secret/unpatched workarounds, apps relying on DRM for copy protection can be fooled and content ripped, which is Microsoft's biggest concern.
Yes, but it isn't a cheap energy source. It takes approx. same effort to develop a open source application equvalent to closed source one.
Big difference is that resulting IP doesn't belong to a specific company in specific country but to a whole civilisation (i.e. anyone skilled to make good use of it). This divides benefits more equally between poor and rich countries, as otherwise rich ones would suck up most of the money spent in the sector (because their companies are mostly advanced in that sector). Unfortunately this isn't happening with other industries, so powerful countries manage to keep or even extend their economical lead.
Why do they always invest in developing medicines which aren't a one-time cure, but only are effective if constantly used? I can imagine this thing won't be for world's poor & middle class majority (but then, they aren't as fat as Americans).
THe evidence here is probably only the fact that he is the last person to be seen with her and actually only known to the police with motives to kill her (because of divorce dispute). I however have doubts that he is the murderer as it would be very stupid of him to do that and he's more than intelligent enough to realise that he w'd be the prime suspect (however he IS a tough personality, so it is possible). Statistics will probably say that in 80%-90% of cases missing/killed wife is a crime commited by husband, and inspectors are aware of that.
Although there is a little possibility that his wife is alive (though I hope she is). In case of a tragedy I hope they'll at least find her body so poor kids can know her fate.
...inspector Columbo?
"As others have pointed out indirectly, Israel's nuclear weapons have already stabalized the Middle East by eliminating a major source of intense wars in the region. The invasion of Iraq eliminated another."
LOL, except that U.S.A. CAUSED a war there and destabilised the country in the long term. WHat do you think was solved? If US leaves today, tomorrow there will be new bloodbaths and country will divide, probably in wars. Neighbouring Iran will sponsor creation of Shiite country and maybe the'll even join Iran, while Kurds will engage into the war with Turkey. All because of a danger to big important countries like Kuwait and Israel.
But maybe you don't care about that as long as discounted iraqi oil helps up US economy and GI's can have fun killing "extremists".
"I mean do you SERIOUSLY want North Korea and Iran to have nukes?"
I want it. Period. Otherwise your government will attack and occupy Iran or North Korea sooner or later. They aren't threat to USA even with nuclear capabilities. Only problem is that too many right-wing radicals (Bush included) are unjustifiably putting them in the same basket as organizations which attacked WTC.
This software is obviously a loophole for extracting HD content. As decrypting and decoding is obviously done in software, hackers will rip the h264/VC1/mpeg2 high-def video and AC3/DTS/whatever audio streams from Intervideo software implementation. Similar hacking occured before before with a software DVD-Audio players. Only problem is that it's a fairly big download for only a movie, I believe that HD formats won't become mainstream unless media houses decide to push out exclusive HD releases few months before regular DVD releases (though it won't be very well accelted by theater holders and might annoy regular public which don't intend to buy new equipment just for a few exclusive titles).
MS quickly updated the thing, but I doubt that DRM'd music providers will enforce it until last issues are resolved (like support for media center). In the meantime it already got obsolete before, as 1.2 version was released.
Yes, drmdbg is at least a year old and AFAIR it worked reliably only with Japanese XP version at that time, so it's reasonable to suppose that FairUse4WM authors improved the method (as they also did in 1.2).
Pluto is NOT a planet. Get over it.
So Microsoft gives control over kernel driver auditing and signing to media companies? Or those just trust Microsoft in this case?
:)).
I assume that they do this to prevent someone from grabbing framebuffer from video cards and such tricks, because data will probably be decrypted only in the GPU.
Though it could still be defeated if someone hacks kernel(without TPM protection that is, but most hardware doesn't have TPM yet, or at least they don' want us to know it).
On a running kernel, even with a TPM protection, a rootkit exploit could give hackers full ring0 access (of course, MS can patch kernel and media houses would allow playback of newer content only on patched kernel, so the exploit is useful only if it remains secret as long as possible and is known only throughout HDDVD ripping community
Another method, probably only effective without TPM, could be virtualisation. For example AMD CPU and northbridge with IOMMU (for graphic card access) could fool OS into believing that it is running natively. Software VM with direct access to PCI device could also work, but in this case graphic card can "find out" what is happening - maybe here IOMMU can be utilisied to present fake address space to gfx card which is talking to software VM so it can't find out. And even fooling of a TPM chip is theoretically possible as long as processor itself doesn't do that.
Microsoft and media companies went to great lenghts to protect the content, but there are still few weak points and HDCP isn't very much secure.
HW virtualisation is about running the unmodified OS on top of other operating system.
SW approach (paravirtualisation) is about modifying the guest (and somewhat host) OS to be simpler to virtualise it, get better performance by chopping out unnecessary operations on guest OS and optimise it to specifically use certain host API for even better performance gains.
Of course, HW virtualisation speed depends mostly on what hardware can do. AMD is ahead currently (and their boards will even support IOMMU for simpler PCI access control). It's certain that performance will improve with next-gen hardware, especially Intel. In the meantime it would make sense to support both methods for best performance - i.e. use hardware stuff where useful (e.g. for transparent page handling between OS's) and still modify guest OS not to do costly stuff which will be trapped and emulated in VMM (in fact maybe VMM will give performance improvement even with a single OS kernel).
In the long term, we can expect virtualisation to come to desktop - sharing of video, sound and input devices will allow people to simultaneously run linux and windows, somewhat lowering the barrier for linux adopters (i.e. users will be able to launch windows to use their killer app or game without rebooting).
"How on earth can OpenGL grow if it always has to support the lowest common denominator."
It won't. They are dividing the API into OpenGL-ES 1.0 and 2.0. Both are stripped versions of OpenGL (with only what is needed for gaming on embedded devices). 1.0 is targeted at small handheld devices like mobile phones and PDA's (it even includes fixed point arithmetic) while 2.0 more powerful console devices such as Playstation 3.
Supporting lowest common denominator doesn't even have to hold back the spec : Linux kernel is going well despite it's support for everything from the mobile phones to top 100 machines.
Because many people don't see urge to upgrade to Vista (especially because it won't scale so well on many existing machines as XP), MS needs to lure people with new features. Problem with Vista is in fact that it has many improvements under the hood, but only stuff like the new Aero engine is visible and that is what matters to customers.
Hardcore gamers will surely be first to adopt, some of them already have the hardware (except the DX10 cards which ATI/Nvidia will probably offer simultaneously with DX10 for huge price tags to maximise profit). Only market leaders in game engine design will utilize best of DX10 - and at the same time scale back to DX9 (it's not very easy to make engine which uses multiple API's anyway). Other 90% will target only DX9 and SM2.0 class hardware. Some will use OpenGL extensions and deliver those features to Vista, but not outside of FPS genre as usual.
Xen and VmWare should join forces in architecturing common paravirtualisation interfaces, because it's an opportunity to get it engineered in a right way. Let's not forget UML which is a slightly different approach (port of linux to itself to exist as a usermode proccess).
The question is (I didn't understand that from the text), if this will enable them to run unmodified guest OS's (as current Windows, Linux...) with such low level access from the host OS, or they still need customizations?
Btw. one simple example of such API is NTVDM, a DOS virtual machine which can run some DOS games/apps in native speed under XP/W2K (of course it is incompatible with many DOS progs). DOS apps behave like a dedicated operating system in many respects - they hook to DOS, BIOS and TSR's (interrupts) where possible, e.g. for accessing file system, simple memory allocation or restoring shell after finishing, but they still run in real mode with full access to hardware and usually full control of the machine - comparable to Win9x OS series.
For new DX10 there will be equivalent extension to OpenGL and this will work in windows, linux or Mac (if graphic card driver supports that feature).