This needs to happen
Facebook is *ripe* for someone writing an auction application. The sooner it happens the better.
117 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
"An important reason nVidia has more crashes because they sell more stuff". Good point if you're comparing them against ATI, but *every* user of those Vista drivers is also using Vista too and in those cases, the figures are awful for nVidia, especially when you bear in mind what a small amount of the running binaries the video driver represents, compared to that which Microsoft has provided.
"One of the few tools available to policy makers to improve air quality in cities is to tax the most polluting cars off the road"
A ban on new sales would get them off the road. A tax doesn't get them off the road, it just collects more money for Livingstone. Which is *obviously* the entire idea. Everyone up and down the country is subject to some degree of 'green' related tax but the extent that Livingstone is going to is likely to permanantly damage the public conception of them.
It's just about the money.
"Phorm's system works by "trawling" websites visited by users and then matches keywords from the content of the page to a profile. Users are then targeted with adverts that are more tailored to their interests on websites that have signed up to Phorm's technology"
Surely the websites themselves aren't going to be happy about this? If I spent a while on Play.com looking at Robbie Williams CDs and then as a result I start getting adverts from Amazon about Robbie Williams and I end up purchasing from there instead, then Play.com are surely not going to be happy about that?!
Firstly the name's Turner not Taylor. If you can't even get *that* right... Onto your points:
Anonymous Coward: "I'll tell you why I'd like it to be opened: because I'm a fairly decent programmer with kernel-mode and device driver experience, and next time some awful bug is giving me trouble I could just *fix* it instead of having to struggle to find some workaround"
And are you going to make sure that your fix isn't ever overwritten by a patch? What if it turns out you weren't as skilled as you thought and perhaps you didn't know the full picture of why it does what it does and you broke compatibility with something else which you didn't or couldn't test at the time? Perhaps you could get away with this for entirely closed off installations but not much else. And of course if *you* can do it, so can millions of other people write their own 'improved' versions of Windows. As a Windows Developer myself I certainly wouldn't want to be coding for such a potentially moving target and I doubt MS would be chirpy about trying to support homebrew versions of Windows either.
AT: "Malware authors being able to find hooks and holes with much more ease."
AC: That's a fairly limited impact. Most malware these days spreads by idiots clicking on it anyway"
You know this how? Most virus checkers root out EXEs these days, it's opening malformed data files that's the bigger problem - that and visiting websites that are loaded with malformed HTML or images. Thanks to UAC in Vista, even running an EXE can have limited impact (assuming the user hasn't turned it off..), but if the writer of that EXE was able to leaf through the source in order to find a way of buffer overrunning their way to elevated privileges then that would make their life a whole heap easier.
AC: "it doesn't even need OS exploits or holes"
Unless you're talking about clicking on .EXEs, yes they do.
AT: "Malware authors being able to create 'pirate' versions of Windows with the malware built right into the OS"
AC: "That one's a total strawman. They can do that right now"
No they can't. Not at the level I'm talking about.
AC: "and it doesn't need access to the source, and access to the source wouldn't make it any easier. If your supposed pirate released a hacked version of windows based on the original sources, it wouldn't have the MS digital signatures on the system files, so they'd have to disable all the checking and system file protection feature in the os anyway... which you can already easily do, in which case you dead easily trojan or wrapper or replace wholesale any windows system file you like anyway. The source is neither necessary nor even useful for this kind of attack."
You're somewhat assuming I mean Window Mode binaries. I don't. Sure you might be able to disable System File Protection, but with the source you could make a version of Windows which *pretends* like it's doing it, but actually isn't. You could make a version of Windows which fakes the appearance of MS signatures on binaries that don't actually have them (to the UI level at least). Once you're inside Windows, especially the kernel level and you're able to simply add bits in without having to add new DLLs or wrapper existing ones then you can do a great deal and without much chance of detection.
AT: "Software developers being able to see how things work will start to use and rely on internal behaviours."
AC: Dude, that's what MS already do anyway, and that's why their public APIs are no use. MS' use of secret internal APIs to gain commercial advantage for their products was half the issue in the monopoly trial, remember?
Of course I do and I also recall the trouble it caused, how long ago that was and how much of a totally different issue that was. For a start, it's one thing to use undocumented APIs and another entirely to rely on the internal behaviour or data structures of a documented API. You might check through the code and decide that an API is almost certainly going to be thread-safe even though it's not marked as such. Then you rely on that at your peril when later versions break that. And it's one thing for MS to be able to ask the Word team whether changing some aspect of the undocumented API will cause them a problem since that's still an internal matter which MS can control. Once the source gets out then they can't have any idea how much changing internal data structures will break the code of people who've tried to be 'a bit clever' and have leveraged access to the source to get around the API. Not to mention people copying chunks of Windows into their own DLLs just to change some behaviour and then finding that the chunk they copied isn't always compatible with different OS patches.
Come on mate, if you blur the line between OS software and application software at the *source code level*, it would lead to an absolute mess as people all over the world leverage knowledge that they shouldn't and couldn't rely on just to try and get an advantage over their competitor. And on top of that, you only have to look at the huge number of Linux distros to see what other problems you may well get.
Well here's just a few:
* Malware authors being able to find hooks and holes with much more ease.
* Malware authors being able to create 'pirate' versions of Windows with the malware built right into the OS. Far more undetectable than even rootkits. Idiot users would love to buy a copy of Windows for £5 at a car boot sale, without realising the full payload.
* Software developers being able to see how things work will start to use and rely on internal behaviours. API not doing quite what you need? Edit it and build another.. All comes tumbling down when MS release a new SP or version.
"2) The 1st option is a cure all for all your childs internet woes, howeve, if you want something more specific for Burnout Paradise turn the fecking Camera Feed Off, which is an option in the game"
AFAIK that only stops the image from your own camera from being sent. I don't think it affects whether or not you receive images that people send you. Maybe Criterion will put out a patch that allows you to turn off images being received.
Been doing this for weeks, it's great fun. You don't have to have been 'beaten' in a race, you only have to get crashed into hard in free roaming mode. Of course people give you the finger when you do it, it's funny! Insults escolate of course, but I've only ever seen it done in good spirits.
Problem is, you have no idea what the age of the people you're connected to are and you can't even wait until late at night - you might be connecting to someone in a different timezone. The game itself is only "3+", too.
You could buy different packages from your ISP, one where the required ports for bittorrent were closed and one where they are open but it cost you more per month and that money went to a pot for artists. You might say what about legal uses of P2P, but is there really that much? If so, what is it all and can't it simply be downloaded from a proper source?
Why do people spend so long and so much effort into cracking encryption schemes? I bet 99% of hackers couldn't do what they do off their own back, they all use knowledge that someone else researched. Sure, an encryption system might have some holes in, but those holes are a *lot* more severe if someone takes the time to find them, and then make them public. Windows/Linux/OSX probably has some gaping security holes that no-one knows about and therefore no-one can leverage. It's only when some prat finds them and publishes them that they become a problem.
"But because the Sony PlayStation 3 has a built in Blu-ray drive, that format's been able to outstrip its rival's figures in terms of both disc sales and shipments of devices capable of playing them"
Exactly, I didn't think HD-DVD ever stood a chance because of this bold but ultimately very smart move that Sony made. They went through a lot of pain to make sure it happened, but now it has, they're laughing.
You could almost applaud Toshiba for throwing in the towel now and allowing the market to flourish from there on in. Stringing it out further to an ultimate demise anyway isn't going to help.
companies such as Netflix want the war to be over as much as the consumer does and by making announcements such as this, they can help tip the balance a bit more. They might actually prefer it if HD-DVD won, but BD winning is probably far more preferable to there still being a war going on in 12 months time.
.. if they increase the clock speed. What would be the point of creating platform variances which would create allsorts of problems for the developers? Would the developers really code in extra performance when they detect that they're on a faster chip? I think you'd then get people trying to overclock their 90nm chips! They didn't do it with the PS2, which means a PS2 is a PS2 and it reliably and consistently runs the games the same, whether it's an early one or the latest slimline.
They can't just hand it over and say "here you go guys". They'd have to spend a *lot* of time going through it all, tidying it up, getting rid of all the bits/comments/whatever not intended for public consumption. There might be things in there that would result in lawsuits, copied code, deliberate nobbling of competitor apps etc...
And if there are businesses out there running OS/2 installations, I don't know as they'd be happy for the security of their systems to be massively compromised in this way, since it's from an age where it's probably got loads of buffer-overrun style loopholes in it, and publishing the source will make them all the more easy to find.
Can anyone see any holes in this method?
When 'the bank' phones, allow them to ask you a security question and then give them a wrong answer. If they're your bank they'll know it's wrong and tell you. If they're a scammer, they'll write it down and not know it's wrong. Obviously the question can't be something which they could have got from the phone book or from your bins.
Imagine if you found them in the street and tried to return them. As people have said, it'd be trivial to make your own copy and thus the police would assume you had. You'd get your house turned over and your computers confiscated and searched. Then they'd find some reason why you weren't worthy of the £20k anyway. If you find them, just cut them up and throw them away somewhere.
They've got rid of the trackball, which is a shame because I thought that worked far better than the wheel thing, which they've retained. Having released a WM6 upgrade for the original Orbit means that this update seems less desirable than it might have been. 3G is good, the extra memory is good, but the processor won't make as much difference as you'd think, and a front facing camera? Does *anyone* do video calling?!
"and the device can now accept Micro SD cards of up to 1GB in size" - my current Orbit has a 2GB card in it, which has always worked fine!
"so.... wma uses 25% more processing power to decrypt??? Is it the algorithm on the Sony player, or is wma that computationally intensive?"
Probably the latter. This is why Sony stuck with ATRAC and SonicStage for as long as they did. The ATRAC codec was designed from the start to be for mobile (MiniDisc), devices and thus is designed so as not to require much processing power on decoding. MP3 and WMA were not designed as such. Hence in the past, a lot of Sony devices, whilst requiring SonicStage to convert your MP3 files, would have considerably superior playing times than other MP3 players. Off the top of my head, I wouldn't be surprosed if this device could play for 20+ hours of ATRAC - if it supported it.