Adobe Flash as a Content Classifier
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Flash must live on! If Flash dies out then that means highly annoying and CPU-hogging advertisements will be converted into HTML5 and get around my simple flashblock. I don't like Flash as much as the next guy but when you can currently carte blanche disable flash and easily remove the most heinous of web content, I fully support its continued use.
SmartScreen is awesome because it blocks things like jquery being loaded from CDN sites such as google because it sees multiple pages reference that so therefore it must be out to get you, right?/sarcasm
Nothing like having a web app that slowly stops working across the enterprise as browsers start blocking the javascript includes. That's what you get for hosting your app in the cloud!
It is an upgrade because in the Win32 world the API for GPU video decompression acceleration is called DXVA. Note the DX at the beginning. It doesn't stand for OpenGL.
(Other than adding an additional HD decoder board)
While on a smaller scale, isn't this just like the Imperator cancellation?
...our tremendous success with 'Dark Age of Camelot' set the standard for Mythic of releasing nothing less than triple-A games, and 'Imperator' was simply not meeting that standard.
A game shop so good that it can not produce a game good enough to be made by them! This should come as no surprise to players who would read the "Grab Bag" posts where weekly Mythic would correct themselves on how various aspects of DAOC worked. They didn't even know how their own tremendously successful MMOG worked under the hood, how could they design a new one?
Imperator was a miserable failure despite being hyped by Jacobs as a ground up rewrite designed to be ground breaking and compelling title. The concept of a game which was fun PvE and PvP turned out to be too hard to write, so they fell back to PvE only and still couldn't do it...
The problem is that because of the complexity of having both a PvP/PvE game, it is wisest for us to focus on one of those two elements. So now they landed a juicy development deal with a preexisting ruleset and a decent budget backed by a large set of resources (albeit the overworked and inexperienced resources of EA) and they are going back to re-do things?
Sounds to me like Mythic again has produced content which wasn't good enough to be produced by Mythic.
I've tried creating a VMWare Player Ubuntu MythFrontend installation. The frontend running in vmware took up so much CPU (on an Athlon X2 4600) that you could code while watching, but compiling or playing WoW would make it skip. I didn't put much work into trying to optimize it considering it seemed a halfgineered solution.
There was a Google Summer of Code project this year asigned to Mike Woods to get the frontend to run on Win32 (it actually did for a while, long time ago). Last message from him said he was trying to get QT to play nice with windows DLLs and didn't appear to have libmyth compiling yet. He disappeared after that.
This is exactly the same thing I thought. All he's doing is preconverting his recorded programs to 3gp and then serving them up. I can do the same thing with nuvexport to asf and apache.
I've dug around trying to get my recorded programs to my phone, but most solutions require you to pre-transcode the file. Things like SlingBox and Sony LocationFree do it on the fly, which is what it should be. The big problem I have that everything wants you to define your video list ahead of time, rather than have a Video On Demand system that pulls from the Myth recorded database.
Here are some other technologies that people interested in this should look at: ffserver (from ffmpeg) ffmpeg.sf.net LiveMedia (used in Sony's product) live555.com Videolan Client (has live and VoD support now) videolan.org nuvexport + mythtranscode
Well if I was going to give you my opinion on every headset on the market, I would have entitled my post "Bluetooth Headset Roundup".:)
I was simply pointing out that this article shouldn't be considered aa good sampling of bluetooth headsets, and that most are cheaper. I can't say much more than that other than I own a Motorola HS820, it cost $35, it works great.
So four devices from two manufacturers constitues a roundup now? Motorola isn't even represented despite being a major player in the market. The devices also cost 2-3x more than the bluetooth headsets everyone I know has.
If you're looking for a bluetooth headset, don't use this roundup at all, since there are plenty of great headsets which cost less than half the ones reviewed.
Kudos to the people on the ivtv and MythTV projects - you rock. I spent a good deal of time working on the ivtv driver to get audio working on the PVR-150. You should also thank Hauppauge for providing some source to help the project along. The ability to control these cards under Linux (I feel) far surpasses that of their windows counterpart.
That said, the current drive is to get migrate ivtv back into the kernel and the stock v4l system. There are a few fantastic developers putting a lot of time in to make this happen. Using the 0.4 stable release I got a friend of mine up and running with his card in just a few minutes. Soon, installing a WinTV PVR card will pretty much be a no-brainer and we can all digitize our pathetic analog signals to our heart's content.
I have actually been in the middle of this before, having found a way to passively grab billing information from a larger online subscription-based game. A colleague and I built a complete technical description of the issues, theoretical "worst case" possibilities, as well as a working proof-of-concept exploit, making it clear that we would wait for a suitable fix to be in place before we would release details. We got an email back within several hours from one of the lead programmers who wanted to do a conference call but when we agreed, we never heard from him again.
We were then contacted by a manager-type that this 2-year-old hole was already being fixed. We offered our expertise to review their solution but they weren't interested. Instead, 2 special agents from the FBI showed up at my work to interrogate my involvement in felony extortion.
After a 4 hour long interview session (during which I was escorted to the restroom and watercooler by an armed agent) and I provided all correspondance and source code, they left and never came back. The best part the WTF? look I got when I described how this company was transmitting credit card information XORed with a cleartext seed transmitted in the previous packet. Second place had to be the "Why are we wasting our time here?" look I got when I explained the only credit card information I have actually seen was my own.
The hole was silently fixed in a patch distributed weeks later, and replaced with another algorithm which was also easily exploited. Again, we went through the entire process of creating documentation and a working exploit and sending it to the company. This hole was patched months later.
The company's response was always hostile at best, which I found odd considering we were trying to help them protect their customers. They never disclosed (publicly or to the credit corporations providing merchant accounts) that there was any issue.
American Express has an extremely specific policy on security, and have a minumum requirements policy which all online merchants are supposed to adhere to. They also require you to notify them if security has been compromised. California law also states that card holders must be notified if their account information may have been compromised. Apparently it's not a big deal if noone abides by these rules.
When the company is unresponsive in resolving security flaws, I feel that disclosure is imperative to allow users to take their own precautions to protect themselves. I'm not malicious, but I imagine that there are a lot of people smarter than I am that are.
Re:I do not (have an MP3)
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
Well I had given you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you made a tongue-in-cheek joke rather than just posting a troll. Then you went and opened your mouth and now I know you're just a dick.
Re:I do not (have an MP3)
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
Ah, well perhaps you should post a complete thought in your original message. I'll give you a template for next time, just check off the proper answer:
I do not have an Mp3 of this anywhere I assure you. This is because: (__) MP3 are illegal (__) I do not enjoy this type of music (__) My hard drive crashed and I have no backup (__) My friend borrowed my iPod (__) I'm deaf, you insensitive clod!
Re:Somewhere A Nerd Cries into his Beer.
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. When hit the comments page the first comment (rated +5 funny) was "Who the fuck are you, and why do I care?" Apparently most the Slashdot crowd already has attained all knowledge worth knowing in the universe.
At least we won't have to fight them off for tickets.
Re:I do not (have an MP3)
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
His entire first album is free for download on blissfully non-DRMed MP3 from his site. Your joke is weak on the premise that you assume all mp3s are illegal, which they are not.
500 repsonses and no one has mentioned the.NET platform yet? In Longhorn, we'll enjoy UIs that run in only on 3D accelerated hardware, and described in XML, so there goes tomorrow's cycles too.
This is not an incident which happens overseas only either. A collegue and I contacted an online corportation regarding their trivial XOR encryption of credit card information from its clients, and included exploit code.
(long story deleted) This US company claimed because I had exploit code, I was in posession of its clients credit card numbers and was attempting to extort said company for cash and source code. I got a serious grilling from the FBI, who informed me that I did the wrong thing by reverse engineering their billing code and finding how easy it was to decrypt it.
I guess the basic idea is that if something is insecure, noone should ever try to get it fixed.
I recently had quite a struggle getting a cable box with a 1394 port on it from my local cable co (BrightHouse Tampa). I had dreams of a pure digital connection from the tuner to the computer, right to file or to my XvMC X session. After finally getting it and connecting it to my computer, and writing a a good chunk of code to get it to talk through the firewire card in my linux box... every channel is either analog or 5C.
Most the channels here in Tampa are analog and there is no MPEG encoder chip on the Scientific Atlanta 3250HD box, so that means nothing comes out of the firewire port for those channels. The rest of the channels are encrypted and flagged as CCI "once", meaning that only hardware that supports 5C can read it and that hardware must respect the "copy only once" intent of the flag. As far as I know, there is no way to decrypt 5C content in software, which leaves the user with unusable transport streams.
I'd still love to work on a pure digital PVR (one that doesn't make several analog->digital->analog->etc convertsions once the signal gets to the box), but firewire definately doesn't further that cause.
Exactly. I've picked a few dozen barrel style locks and I'd have to say that the Kensington lock on my boss' computer had to have been the easiest I've ever done. A secure barrel lock has at least twice as many tumblers and has to be picked half a dozen times as you rotate the barrel through its full range of motion (which just means it takes more time, not that it is very secure). Take a look at a coke machine or laundrimat's machines for an example of what a decent lock looks like.
I can unlock a kensington using two paperclips in about 15 seconds, probably the same amount of time a user with a key would fumble with it before they got it open. Anyone who believed that this was actually securing their machine should have really taken a better look at the device before they put their faith in it.
There are already a number of cards available which can receive ATSC HDTV broadcasts (which require an additional antenna) in addition to analog cable and broadcast. The nice step up here is the use of their own NXT2004 chip, which provides a QAM demodulator.
I've been looking for years now for a tuner card which will allow me to watch Time Warner's Digital Cable here in Tampa. Step one is getting a demodulator which can sync to the QAM-256 signal. Tne next big hurdle is determining if my cable provider uses a proprietary mechanism on top of that to encapsulate their streams. There are no standards here as far as I can find, just commonly used implementations.
A cable comes into my apartment with 50+ digital channels, including the networks in HDTV. I've got a cable box that decodes it without having to put up an aerial... why can't I have a card in my computer that does the same thing? This card could end up being just another useless ATSC tuner card.
Strangely enough, I have an Athlon TBird 1.4GHz (pre PR rating!) that did the same thing. Changed 3 power supplies, the motherboard, the network card, both memory sticks, about 5 heatsinks and it would still die within 2 days. Underclocked to 1.3GHz and never had a problem since.
It also idled around 55c and topped out 65c. For reference, a 1500+ and this 1700+ run 35-55c, and that (pointing) 2000+ runs 40-55c. The guy who wrote the article just has never dealt with old school tbird CPUs.
I was trying to debug a DHCP issue in the firmware when I noticed the same thing. I was wondering if D-LINK had consent from the hosts they querried for NTP information.
The fun thing is that it does this when you set the NTP server in the configuration to blank, so there's no way to stop it yourself. I have an NTP server on my linux box already and I tried pointing the router to it, but every time it polls the time, it screws up the routers clock:-/
One of the problems with the CPU cooler on this case is that is is designed to work in 3 orientations. Heatpipes only work when the end of the pipe is higher than the heat source you're trying to sink. The claim the six pipes combined are 150W/sec, but two are pointed down, two are level, and two go up. (image ) Therefore, you can only really get 50W/sec any one position you put the case in (on its side, upside down, or right-side up)
Yeah, they roll out and rename it again, then follow it with this statement:
"The new Windows Mobile brand [will] help customers more readily understand and identify the software inside Pocket PCs and Smartphones and the consistent experience they can expect,"
Microsoft. Helping consumers identify software by renaming it twice a year.
Slashdot Mirror
At Wheatley Laboratories, CPU *is* potato!
Flash must live on! If Flash dies out then that means highly annoying and CPU-hogging advertisements will be converted into HTML5 and get around my simple flashblock. I don't like Flash as much as the next guy but when you can currently carte blanche disable flash and easily remove the most heinous of web content, I fully support its continued use.
SmartScreen is awesome because it blocks things like jquery being loaded from CDN sites such as google because it sees multiple pages reference that so therefore it must be out to get you, right? /sarcasm
Nothing like having a web app that slowly stops working across the enterprise as browsers start blocking the javascript includes. That's what you get for hosting your app in the cloud!
It is an upgrade because in the Win32 world the API for GPU video decompression acceleration is called DXVA. Note the DX at the beginning. It doesn't stand for OpenGL.
(Other than adding an additional HD decoder board)
...our tremendous success with 'Dark Age of Camelot' set the standard for Mythic of releasing nothing less than triple-A games, and 'Imperator' was simply not meeting that standard.A game shop so good that it can not produce a game good enough to be made by them! This should come as no surprise to players who would read the "Grab Bag" posts where weekly Mythic would correct themselves on how various aspects of DAOC worked. They didn't even know how their own tremendously successful MMOG worked under the hood, how could they design a new one?
Imperator was a miserable failure despite being hyped by Jacobs as a ground up rewrite designed to be ground breaking and compelling title. The concept of a game which was fun PvE and PvP turned out to be too hard to write, so they fell back to PvE only and still couldn't do it...
The problem is that because of the complexity of having both a PvP/PvE game, it is wisest for us to focus on one of those two elements. So now they landed a juicy development deal with a preexisting ruleset and a decent budget backed by a large set of resources (albeit the overworked and inexperienced resources of EA) and they are going back to re-do things?Sounds to me like Mythic again has produced content which wasn't good enough to be produced by Mythic.
(All quotes from Mark Jacobs)
I've tried creating a VMWare Player Ubuntu MythFrontend installation. The frontend running in vmware took up so much CPU (on an Athlon X2 4600) that you could code while watching, but compiling or playing WoW would make it skip. I didn't put much work into trying to optimize it considering it seemed a halfgineered solution.
There was a Google Summer of Code project this year asigned to Mike Woods to get the frontend to run on Win32 (it actually did for a while, long time ago). Last message from him said he was trying to get QT to play nice with windows DLLs and didn't appear to have libmyth compiling yet. He disappeared after that.
This is exactly the same thing I thought. All he's doing is preconverting his recorded programs to 3gp and then serving them up. I can do the same thing with nuvexport to asf and apache.
I've dug around trying to get my recorded programs to my phone, but most solutions require you to pre-transcode the file. Things like SlingBox and Sony LocationFree do it on the fly, which is what it should be. The big problem I have that everything wants you to define your video list ahead of time, rather than have a Video On Demand system that pulls from the Myth recorded database.
Here are some other technologies that people interested in this should look at:
ffserver (from ffmpeg) ffmpeg.sf.net
LiveMedia (used in Sony's product) live555.com
Videolan Client (has live and VoD support now) videolan.org
nuvexport + mythtranscode
Well if I was going to give you my opinion on every headset on the market, I would have entitled my post "Bluetooth Headset Roundup". :)
I was simply pointing out that this article shouldn't be considered aa good sampling of bluetooth headsets, and that most are cheaper. I can't say much more than that other than I own a Motorola HS820, it cost $35, it works great.
So four devices from two manufacturers constitues a roundup now? Motorola isn't even represented despite being a major player in the market. The devices also cost 2-3x more than the bluetooth headsets everyone I know has.
If you're looking for a bluetooth headset, don't use this roundup at all, since there are plenty of great headsets which cost less than half the ones reviewed.
Kudos to the people on the ivtv and MythTV projects - you rock.
I spent a good deal of time working on the ivtv driver to get audio working on the PVR-150. You should also thank Hauppauge for providing some source to help the project along. The ability to control these cards under Linux (I feel) far surpasses that of their windows counterpart.
That said, the current drive is to get migrate ivtv back into the kernel and the stock v4l system. There are a few fantastic developers putting a lot of time in to make this happen. Using the 0.4 stable release I got a friend of mine up and running with his card in just a few minutes. Soon, installing a WinTV PVR card will pretty much be a no-brainer and we can all digitize our pathetic analog signals to our heart's content.
I have actually been in the middle of this before, having found a way to passively grab billing information from a larger online subscription-based game. A colleague and I built a complete technical description of the issues, theoretical "worst case" possibilities, as well as a working proof-of-concept exploit, making it clear that we would wait for a suitable fix to be in place before we would release details. We got an email back within several hours from one of the lead programmers who wanted to do a conference call but when we agreed, we never heard from him again.
We were then contacted by a manager-type that this 2-year-old hole was already being fixed. We offered our expertise to review their solution but they weren't interested. Instead, 2 special agents from the FBI showed up at my work to interrogate my involvement in felony extortion.
After a 4 hour long interview session (during which I was escorted to the restroom and watercooler by an armed agent) and I provided all correspondance and source code, they left and never came back. The best part the WTF? look I got when I described how this company was transmitting credit card information XORed with a cleartext seed transmitted in the previous packet. Second place had to be the "Why are we wasting our time here?" look I got when I explained the only credit card information I have actually seen was my own.
The hole was silently fixed in a patch distributed weeks later, and replaced with another algorithm which was also easily exploited. Again, we went through the entire process of creating documentation and a working exploit and sending it to the company. This hole was patched months later.
The company's response was always hostile at best, which I found odd considering we were trying to help them protect their customers. They never disclosed (publicly or to the credit corporations providing merchant accounts) that there was any issue.
American Express has an extremely specific policy on security, and have a minumum requirements policy which all online merchants are supposed to adhere to. They also require you to notify them if security has been compromised. California law also states that card holders must be notified if their account information may have been compromised. Apparently it's not a big deal if noone abides by these rules.
When the company is unresponsive in resolving security flaws, I feel that disclosure is imperative to allow users to take their own precautions to protect themselves. I'm not malicious, but I imagine that there are a lot of people smarter than I am that are.
Well I had given you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you made a tongue-in-cheek joke rather than just posting a troll. Then you went and opened your mouth and now I know you're just a dick.
Ah, well perhaps you should post a complete thought in your original message. I'll give you a template for next time, just check off the proper answer:
I do not have an Mp3 of this anywhere I assure you. This is because:
(__) MP3 are illegal
(__) I do not enjoy this type of music
(__) My hard drive crashed and I have no backup
(__) My friend borrowed my iPod
(__) I'm deaf, you insensitive clod!
Agreed. When hit the comments page the first comment (rated +5 funny) was "Who the fuck are you, and why do I care?" Apparently most the Slashdot crowd already has attained all knowledge worth knowing in the universe.
At least we won't have to fight them off for tickets.
His entire first album is free for download on blissfully non-DRMed MP3 from his site. Your joke is weak on the premise that you assume all mp3s are illegal, which they are not.
500 repsonses and no one has mentioned the .NET platform yet? In Longhorn, we'll enjoy UIs that run in only on 3D accelerated hardware, and described in XML, so there goes tomorrow's cycles too.
This is not an incident which happens overseas only either. A collegue and I contacted an online corportation regarding their trivial XOR encryption of credit card information from its clients, and included exploit code.
(long story deleted)
This US company claimed because I had exploit code, I was in posession of its clients credit card numbers and was attempting to extort said company for cash and source code. I got a serious grilling from the FBI, who informed me that I did the wrong thing by reverse engineering their billing code and finding how easy it was to decrypt it.
I guess the basic idea is that if something is insecure, noone should ever try to get it fixed.
I recently had quite a struggle getting a cable box with a 1394 port on it from my local cable co (BrightHouse Tampa). I had dreams of a pure digital connection from the tuner to the computer, right to file or to my XvMC X session. After finally getting it and connecting it to my computer, and writing a a good chunk of code to get it to talk through the firewire card in my linux box... every channel is either analog or 5C.
Most the channels here in Tampa are analog and there is no MPEG encoder chip on the Scientific Atlanta 3250HD box, so that means nothing comes out of the firewire port for those channels. The rest of the channels are encrypted and flagged as CCI "once", meaning that only hardware that supports 5C can read it and that hardware must respect the "copy only once" intent of the flag. As far as I know, there is no way to decrypt 5C content in software, which leaves the user with unusable transport streams.
I'd still love to work on a pure digital PVR (one that doesn't make several analog->digital->analog->etc convertsions once the signal gets to the box), but firewire definately doesn't further that cause.
Exactly. I've picked a few dozen barrel style locks and I'd have to say that the Kensington lock on my boss' computer had to have been the easiest I've ever done. A secure barrel lock has at least twice as many tumblers and has to be picked half a dozen times as you rotate the barrel through its full range of motion (which just means it takes more time, not that it is very secure). Take a look at a coke machine or laundrimat's machines for an example of what a decent lock looks like.
I can unlock a kensington using two paperclips in about 15 seconds, probably the same amount of time a user with a key would fumble with it before they got it open. Anyone who believed that this was actually securing their machine should have really taken a better look at the device before they put their faith in it.
There are already a number of cards available which can receive ATSC HDTV broadcasts (which require an additional antenna) in addition to analog cable and broadcast. The nice step up here is the use of their own NXT2004 chip, which provides a QAM demodulator.
I've been looking for years now for a tuner card which will allow me to watch Time Warner's Digital Cable here in Tampa. Step one is getting a demodulator which can sync to the QAM-256 signal. Tne next big hurdle is determining if my cable provider uses a proprietary mechanism on top of that to encapsulate their streams. There are no standards here as far as I can find, just commonly used implementations.
A cable comes into my apartment with 50+ digital channels, including the networks in HDTV. I've got a cable box that decodes it without having to put up an aerial... why can't I have a card in my computer that does the same thing? This card could end up being just another useless ATSC tuner card.
Strangely enough, I have an Athlon TBird 1.4GHz (pre PR rating!) that did the same thing. Changed 3 power supplies, the motherboard, the network card, both memory sticks, about 5 heatsinks and it would still die within 2 days. Underclocked to 1.3GHz and never had a problem since.
It also idled around 55c and topped out 65c. For reference, a 1500+ and this 1700+ run 35-55c, and that (pointing) 2000+ runs 40-55c. The guy who wrote the article just has never dealt with old school tbird CPUs.
I was trying to debug a DHCP issue in the firmware when I noticed the same thing. I was wondering if D-LINK had consent from the hosts they querried for NTP information.
:-/
The fun thing is that it does this when you set the NTP server in the configuration to blank, so there's no way to stop it yourself. I have an NTP server on my linux box already and I tried pointing the router to it, but every time it polls the time, it screws up the routers clock
One of the problems with the CPU cooler on this case is that is is designed to work in 3 orientations. Heatpipes only work when the end of the pipe is higher than the heat source you're trying to sink. The claim the six pipes combined are 150W/sec, but two are pointed down, two are level, and two go up. (image ) Therefore, you can only really get 50W/sec any one position you put the case in (on its side, upside down, or right-side up)
Well DVDA has always been touted as the Human Beowulf Cluster. Still, I'm reluctant to touch that technology.
Yeah, they roll out and rename it again, then follow it with this statement: "The new Windows Mobile brand [will] help customers more readily understand and identify the software inside Pocket PCs and Smartphones and the consistent experience they can expect,"
Microsoft. Helping consumers identify software by renaming it twice a year.