Domain: arstechnica.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to arstechnica.com.
Comments · 9,494
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Re:The rest of the world has moved on?
LTE is not GSM.
It's not directly GSM and I never said it was, I said VARIANT, as in based on GSM
GSM is not 4G.
Duh, I never said that it was
Verizon dumps CDMA for GSM-based LTE in 4G networksengadget.com
In fact, there *is* no 4G, no such thing exists.
Verizon had a choice of three competing 4G technologies: LTE, WiMAX, and UMB. UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) was formerly known as EV-DO Rev. C, and is supposed to be fully backwards-compatible with other CDMA technologies while providing a significant speed boost. The technology has had few takers so far, however, and Verizon's decision to move away from EV-DO may doom UMB to a niche.arstechnica.com
Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO for AT&T's wireless unit also his commitment to LTE, for the company's upgrade path to 4G.telecoms.com
Perhaps you should write to Verizon and AT&T and tell them they have no clue what they are talking about. They could probably use a good consultant like yourself.
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The hotness of it all...
Notionally there is a billion dollars at stake:
The judge said that they could not get their billion dollars in punitive dollars...
Before that YouTube/Google did not take down the 100000 videos that Viacom asked them to take down.
If you think about it, the 'spooks' already know what you watch. There is no conspiracy to get you, this is beef between Viacom and Google. The latest twist is that they want to know who is uploading their shows. If you watch something that just so happens to theirs then you have only committed a small thoughtcrime, maybe unwittingly.
It is a big day on the cyber-frontier, it's getting all 4th generational though. I think it is time for the citizenry to take back the net, with a wi-fi peer to peer 'darknet' that uses no centralised infrastructure.
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Re:Dirty thieves
First Sale doctrine does not protect software, as Autodesk found out last May. So I would imagine eth 1's former professor is out there busily changing either software or book at the present time.
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MediaDefender, NebuAd, and clickstreams
I don't see how this can apply to anyone doing non forensic computer repair. However, looking at section 1702.104 and the exemptions in section 1702.324 I can see a couple of interesting places this law could apply.
The obvious one, which is not a new idea, relates to companies like MediaDefender performing investigations on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA. They act like a private investigator but do not have a licence to do so (obtaining or furnishing information related to identity, habits, location, transactions, etc of a person with computer-based data not available to the public (subsections (a)(1)(B) and (b) )); MediaSentry role in RIAA lawsuit comes under scrutiny.
The non obvious one deals with anyone who works with clickstream data, e.g. NebuAd,Doubleclick, Google, etc. They all obtain information to do with a person and subsection (a)(1)(B) is a huge or statement. Since identity is one of these ors you could define a person using a unique identifier, only track habits, location, affiliations, or transactions, and still possibly be subject to this.
Is a unique identifier a person? It could be, AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data
" AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.
The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with "buy ecstasy" and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless. "
Something to think about... But then again, IANAL and not even an American so what would I know.
Sec. 1702.104. INVESTIGATIONS COMPANY.
(a) A person acts as an investigations company for the purposes of this chapter if the person:
(1) engages in the business of obtaining or furnishing, or accepts employment to obtain or furnish, information related to:
(A) crime or wrongs done or threatened against a state or the United States;
(B) the identity, habits, business, occupation,knowledge, efficiency, loyalty, movement, location, affiliations, associations, transactions, acts, reputation, or character of a person;
(C) the location, disposition, or recovery of lost or stolen property; or
(D) the cause or responsibility for a fire, libel, loss, accident, damage, or injury to a person or to property;
(2) engages in the business of securing, or accepts employment to secure, evidence for use before a court, board, officer, or investigating committee;
(3) engages in the business of securing, or accepts employment to secure, the electronic tracking of the location of an individual or motor vehicle other than for criminal justice purposes by or on behalf of a governmental entity; or
(4) engages in the business of protecting, or accepts employment to protect, an individual from bodily harm through the use of a personal protection officer.(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public.
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This law is to prevent me from perv catchingI am a contractor that operates outside the box, almost a vigilante. I cannot name what software I use or I would be easily identified. I do not engage in corp espionage but this law would stop me in my tracks if I were to ever have stepped foot in Texas. Thank god, I am smarter than that. I am not the only one out there and some people will simply blackmail you to bankruptcy, but I enjoy staying a few extra nights in town and waiting for the police to drag your ass out of your office when you come in on Monday after the weekend expecting to sit your fat ass down in your office with a new computer and monitor.
First thing I do on any computer I work on in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Idaho or New Mexico is do a search for Child Porn with keywords and a hash check. Hash check works because some of the child porn has been out there since it was just NNTP and email and the particular images are very easy to find. If you can help build a better perv trap for me and others like me, please do I am not a programmer. Over 20 lowlifes turned into the police and feds including a local bank manager, a coffee shop owner and a HS physics teacher. I hope to turn in many more. Have any of y'all done this when you found child porn working in IT, or did you turn a blind eye?
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Re:I am confused...
Don't be confused; you're correct - the only difference between this and PocketPC VoIP is that this is the iPhone. Skype for mobile is slightly different - it uses the regular network for calls rather than a Wifi or other data connection, so you get charged at the usual rate for regular voice calls. However, Skype then proxy the call anywhere in the world for their usual tariff. The important point is you're still paying your mobile operator for the voice call.
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Ars Technica - Why modular Windows will suck...
A while back, Ars Technica had a good piece: "Why modular Windows will suck for Microsoft and suck for you". This was the persuasive snippet that stuck with me.
...
The issue is that modularization strikes a blow against the very concept of a platform. When a software developer writes a program for Windows XP, they more or less know what they're going to get...
With a modularized Windows, that could fly right out the Window. ...As our friend in Redmond, Steve likes to say, "developers, developers, developers, developers...".
Anyhow, the full article is a good read. If nothing else, it serves as some inoculation against the MS PR machine that got its claws into that NYT story.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/modular-windows-will-suck.ars
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Fluff piece
He really doesn't know anything about the internals of the Windows kernel or the Mach kernel, he's just assuming that since the NT kernel is "monolithic" and the Mach kernel is a "microkernel" then the latter must be better, and the reason it's better is it is "smaller."
If you want to know where the real problems with Windows lie, they're in the API and the shell, not the kernel. The NT kernel is perfectly fine. See this Ars write-up by someone knowlegeable:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.arsI'd like to point out that Microsoft employs one of the original authors of the Mach kernel, Rick Rashid. He runs Microsoft Research. Look it up.
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Re:Netsol
I'll give you some more shit for recommending Network Solutions, if that's indeed what you mean by "netsol".
Do they pay you to spam
/. ? -
Re:Cool!
Progress is slow when new medicine is constantly under attack and being made...
illegal: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071900524.html
'sinful': http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7287071.stm
and unteachable: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080627-louisiana-passes-first-antievolution-academic-freedom-law.html -
Not anymoreAC wrote:
Also: cracked versions of XP can't upgrade to ie7.
I thought Microsoft removed the Windows Genuine Advantage check from the Windows Internet Explorer 7 installer.
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No sympathy from me
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker. So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.What it means to have to click on that folder is that you have not provided adequate leadership on programming, the primary function of your software company. Because you have established no rules to make installation convenient for your paying customers, as the filesystem hierarchy standard does for Linux users for free, your programmers just toss their junk together in whatever way is most convenient for them. After all this time, to have failed to create an analogous Windows filesystem hierarchy standard, is atrocious, negligent incompetence.
College should teach programmers how to write efficient algorithms. You should teach them how to integrate those algorithms into a larger project, with your own model of advanced object-oriented programming, which you should have developed but have not. Then, every one of your programmers would know the same convention for the entire path of any downloaded install binary. It appears from your complaints in this article that you have not even defined a directory naming standard. I wasn't planning to be so hard on you for the many failures of your products to increase my convenience or to perform their advertised functions, but after your literally monumental public displays of incompetence, you have the audacity to whine that all the good programmers are foreign.
You are not a good programmer. You have failed to demonstrate the expertise to define standards that would ensure that useful information is made available by your various product teams to the other teams, for your buzzword "interoperability" to be meaningful within your own brand. You are therefore not qualified to speak at a junior college computer science faculty barbecue about good programming, or to anybody else about any other aspect of technical aptitude, because you have demonstrated a complete lack of any. The spectacle of you speaking to Congress as a technology expert is an embarrassment to the nation. I do not believe a corporation is entitled to the individual right to Free Speech which is incorrectly asserted as defense of corporate donations to politics. I do believe that the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom that led to unprecedented price-to-earning ratios, which necessitated the eventual correction of the dot-com bust, was a direct result of that inappropriate tolerance of corporate interference in government. Politicians who should have been neutral were instead at the very best, shading the truth to say favorable things about their information technology donors whenever the subject was raised, and investors foolish enough to believe that anything they said about that industry was said as representative of the people concluded that then-current stock prices were likely to be justified by near-future earnings, and were taken to the cleaners.
You, of course, are not a big enough fish to be single-handedly responsible for all, or even for very much of that, but you are the most willing public mouthpiece of the information technology industry's thirst for cheaper foreign laborers. I want you to shut the hell up about all immigration laws, for one thing because your software demonstrates your abject lack of qualification to make any of the statements that you have previously made, to Congress no less, about the lack of talented programmers. You don't know a good programmer from Shinola, and nobody in the Congress would help you pretend that you are, excep -
And in other news...
An ISP in Japan will also soon be throttling their user's bandwidth.
Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .
I for one, welcome our Japanese ISP bandwidth capping overlords! Please?
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Re:FYI
The original story made me cringe. I would have imagined that it would have made Norvig do the same. Hope the rebuttal hits the right points.
Here's the link:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-why-the-cloud-cannot-obscure-the-scientific-method.html -
missing link
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-why-the-cloud-cannot-obscure-the-scientific-method.html
I like the fact that the web and search/aggregate engines may combine vast amounts of data in ways we now
cannot imagine - it expands the field for new scientific research enormously. Replace science? No. -
Counter article on Ars
Why the cloud cannot obscure the scientific method by John Timmer.
If you've scrolled down this far, you might as well read it all
:) -
"Microcosm" by Carl Zimmer
I've read several glowing reviews of Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer (this one is from Ars Technica), and I'm deeply intrigued by what I've heard of it. Reviewers agree that Zimmer does a wonderful job of explaining the science, as well as the attendant politics (stem cells, intelligent design), rendering it understandable to the layman, while not insulting the more knowledgeable. Would anyone here who has read it care to comment?
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Re:January 2010
Pretty hefty. Why do you think they're working on this?
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Re:Data for my claim
From here;
"the average iTunes user spends only $12 per year at the store"
Not every iPod owner is an iTunes user. How many songs are on a typical kid's iPod? Only an average of 12 songs/year and only for those who use iTunes.
iTunes is a niche boutique next to the freeway where most don't bother to even look.
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Re:Hassle
The current tech darling Apple has a big hole in their DRM making it mostly useless. On another note, look up the number of 30 or 60 Gig players sold and then note the nubmer of DRM song sales average per player. The price and the DRM is keeping Itunes a nich market. This is especially true for those without an iPod. My MP3 player is 100% incompatable with iTunes, so my purchases have been zero. There were a few songs I would have considered, but I lack compatible hardware (actualy Apple has incompatible songs).
Bolding added by me.
Niche? My, you have an interesting definition of niche.The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes & Noble. Rhapsody is in the tenth slot with 1 percent.
I think, perhaps you mistake what you do, with what the world does. While the PC game market has only about 15% of the total market, that's 15% vs the rest of the group. Not a bad slice of the pie given how many consoles and handhelds are out there currently with games being sold for them. -
Re:you do know what "contrived" means right?You mean like these consistently reproducible results?
Firefox 3 used less memory than Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, and Opera, and it also freed more memory than the other browsers when pages were closed... The results of this experiment, which others have been able to consistently reproduce using the same tools, represent a big victory for Firefox, which has previously faced widespread criticism for its high memory consumption.
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Re:Microsofts heritageHell, maybe even Commodore. I doubt it. Although I was too young to have much knowledge of the company back when I was actually using an Amiga, from what I gather Commodore were the masters of bungling. Check out Ars Technica's series of articles about the rise and fall of the Amiga. They're quite interesting.
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Re:Wow. get a load of that. proof not requiredWhy can't a radio station be charged with "making available? Hell, anyone can pull out a tape recorder. OMG, I hummed a song earlier today! What if someone heard me and downloaded music because of it. Can they charge me?? And the scary part is, that it's no joke.... Not at all. If you can play the radio too loud, and liable for infringement, even when you are on the side of law, that's no good... So next time you are humming on the street... check your wallet beforehand for that $150.000 per song...
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Re:Wow. get a load of that. proof not requiredWhy can't a radio station be charged with "making available? Hell, anyone can pull out a tape recorder. OMG, I hummed a song earlier today! What if someone heard me and downloaded music because of it. Can they charge me?? And the scary part is, that it's no joke.... Not at all. If you can play the radio too loud, and liable for infringement, even when you are on the side of law, that's no good... So next time you are humming on the street... check your wallet beforehand for that $150.000 per song...
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feeds
News feeds:
IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xmlStandards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rssI keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xmlAnandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspxArs Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssxPhoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.phpLinux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rssKDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdfOpen Source Software Planets:
http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml
http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml
http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml
http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml
http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml
http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml
http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml
http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml
mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xmlhttp://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml
environment feeds:
Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rssBest environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xmlI keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xmlother feeds:
Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xmlBruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdfThe intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".
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Re:source of knighthood vs source of funding
Its the govt who decide who gets "honored". The monarch is pretty much just the person who makes the announcement. So, Hawking's "slap" was fairly squarely aimed at Blair and co.
Regarding who honors actually get dished out to, y'know the Darling brothers - Codemasters founders - got honored just recently? Its really not just celebs, musicians and sporty types.
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registereduser1946
My Feeds: Select: All 95 subscriptions, None, Unassigned A to Z Kids Stuff children http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/atoz.xml ABC News: Top Stories news http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/fp_rss20.xml About Computing Center technology http://z.about.com/6/g/pcworld/b/rss2.xml About.com Archaeology Archaeology http://z.about.com/6/g/archaeology/b/rss2.xml All Things Digital technology http://feeds.allthingsd.com/atd-feed/ Archaeology News Archaeology news http://www.topix.net/rss/science/archaeology.xml Ars Technica tech news http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf ArsTechnica: Security Content Security technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/security BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition U.K. http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition Science/Nature http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml Boing Boing odd http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag Breaking News: CBSNews.com news http://www.cbsnews.com/feeds/rss/main.rss Breitbart.tv varied news topics http://www.breitbart.com/xml/recentvideo.xml ChannelWeb Complete Feed Computer news http://www.crn.com/cwb/globalcontent/cweball/index.xml;jsessionid=L0I1HBDQISHBCQSNDLQSKH0CJUNN2JVN Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories news http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss CNN.com - Offbeat odd http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_offbeat.rss CNN.com - Politics politics http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss CNN.com - U.S. U.S. news http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_us.rss Computerworld Breaking News technology http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News Cool Tools technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools Courant.com - Connecticut News Ct. news http://feeds.courant.com/Courant/ConnecticutNews Defense Tech U.S. defense news http://www.defensetech.org/index.rdf Discovery News - Technology technology http://dsc.discovery.com/news/subjects/technology/xdb/topstories.xml Drudge Report news http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedPalooza/lwDu Dvorak Uncensored news http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?feed=rss2 Engadget robots & gadgets http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml Extremetech technology http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml Fark.com news http://www.pluck.com/rss/fark.rss FileForum software http://fileforum.b
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Feeds
I read a whole bunch, but the best/most useful are:
Digg: Sure, the commentary here is better, but it's nice to know what the Obamanation thinks of the latest political scandals.
Ars Technica: They've got good articles on various technical issues. Relatively low-volume.
Boing Boing: Quirky news, with a slant towards privacy concerns, steampunk, and general weirdness.
Wired's Threat Level: Alerts on various privacy issues, as well as other things the government is doing that you don't want them to be. -
Re:Seriously, WTF?Or 4) Put it in the well designed, over engineered Yucca Mountain facility. This (Yucca Mountain and long-term nuclear waste storage) was also in the news recently. Ars Technica has a nice write-up for nerds that aren't nuclear scientists: The whole (short) article is interesting, but I think these two paragraphs are important:
- "Despite the uncertainties, the authors argue that there are very real reasons to start using Yucca Mountain: 60,000 metric tons of waste, currently stored in 72 sites, "many adjacent to metropolitan areas and all next to rivers, lakes, or the ocean." It's easy to default to inertia while waiting for greater certainty about Yucca Mountain or hoping something better comes along, but the authors argue that the current storage system creates far too much risk for this to be an acceptable path.
The paper argues that storage in the facilities at Yucca Mountain is not irreversible; if problems arise, the waste could be temporarily removed, or adjustments to the structural properties could be made. In fact, the authors argue, experience with pilot programs may be the best way to start reducing some of the outstanding uncertainties that are making the current debate so difficult. Without this knowledge, we may never be able to refine long-term models of waste storage."
- "Despite the uncertainties, the authors argue that there are very real reasons to start using Yucca Mountain: 60,000 metric tons of waste, currently stored in 72 sites, "many adjacent to metropolitan areas and all next to rivers, lakes, or the ocean." It's easy to default to inertia while waiting for greater certainty about Yucca Mountain or hoping something better comes along, but the authors argue that the current storage system creates far too much risk for this to be an acceptable path.
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Re:Does not compute
Actually, Roadrunner uses the Cell chip for the heavy lifting, not the AMD chips:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080618-game-and-pc-hardware-combo-tops-supercomputer-list.html -
Re:In Germany, you are a thief
There have been arrests for it in the US for several years. I'm not sure how many of these were prosecuted, but I've heard of others and I believe one was prosecuted (but it may have been Michigan, which has separate laws).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060622-7111.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/07/tech/main707361.shtml -
Re:In Germany, you are a thief
There have been arrests for it in the US for several years. I'm not sure how many of these were prosecuted, but I've heard of others and I believe one was prosecuted (but it may have been Michigan, which has separate laws).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060622-7111.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/07/tech/main707361.shtml -
Re:Download safe, but useless
I'm using FF3, have one tab open and FF is using 94,865 K of RAM. And they were supposed to have fixed all those memory leaks?! Doesn't look like it from here. It's about:config time again, I see.
Meanwhile, here are some unbiased results from Ars Technica, showing the memory usage of firefox 3 in comparison with other browsers, with 50 tabs open.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html
If you want lower memory usage than what firefox 3 can give you ... you would need to use no browser at all it would seem. -
Re:8 million, all set to exploit
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Re:CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses
So just don't use it.
No one's holding a gun to your head. If it's causing you such pain just use another browser.
Well, exactly. Anyone who wants to minimise the level of memory usage and also use a modern, capable browser should of course use ... Errrrr ...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html ... Firefox 3. :)
How embarrasing is that finding for the OP on this topic? -
Re:More communist lies
Zoink!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070803-shocker-microsoft-combats-chinese-piracy-via-major-price-cuts.html
Guess again.
Besides if they are too poor to buy Windows, how do they afford the computer to run it on? -
Re:Cause found, not to worry.
Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat? They currently give out IE for free, so it's not like they're making money off of it, and the vast majority of Firefox installs go on Windows computers, so it's not like Firefox significantly is increasing Linux adoption...
Hell, the IE team sent them a cake:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
And I'd wager it makes their jobs a lot more interesting and important, so there's no resentment there.
I don't get why Microsoft would care, frankly. -
Re:Microsoft-DDOS?
Makes sense. The IE team at MS loves firefox: http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
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SproutCore isn't *that* young
SproutCore was built while SproutIT developed Mailroom. Mailroom was launched in February 2006 (Interview with Charles Jolley, SproutIt.com).
So the core is much older and tested rather well. The only thing that's new is the hype ...
Btw. The Ars Technica article on SproutCore is good as well SproutCore: rich web apps in JavaScript, no Flash needed -
Re:Free iPhones!The iPhone is quickly rising, so it may, in a few years, become the #1 smartphone, with heavy reliance on Safari Mobile, OS X Mobile, and of course, iTunes and QuickTime. Is it really rising that fast? Or is it leveling off now that the initial hype has died down?
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Re:I would really like to try this outNo, I'm saying X is a full-on network protocol, and not fairly compared to the Windows GDI.exe. I see. Ok. I won't argue that they have different strengths/origins. The question becomes how deep is Aqua? The tone of your question would seem to imply that the answer is "everything above the command line", and I don't know enough to argue otherwise. OSX is an interesting beast. As you quoted, it runs a hybrid microkernes, has a largely FreeBSD derived userland, and API and other inheritances from NeXT, etc--it draws from many sources!
I'd recommend the following Ars Technica article on Quartz which is what I think you're looking for, rather than Aqua (aqua being basically the theme/skin)
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/13
wiki has an article too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Graphics
(I think they're calling it "Core Graphics" instead of Quartz nowadays)
In short, graphically, OSX is not at all based on X11. You CAN install an optional X11 server that allows you to run X programs, but it's neither required nor integral to the OS. -
Drake Equation
Let's get a grip on reality, dude. Slashdot isn't anywhere near as big 'n' important as you geeks want like to think it is. How many active slashdot accounts are there?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in accounting terms, you guys would be considered a rounding error.
It's sort of like the Slashdotter's version of the Drake equation:
N = (Number of slashdotters) x (Number of active Slashdot accounts) x (Time since world record attempt was announced) x (Number of Slashdotters that even use Firefox) x (Number of slashdotters that actually give a shit if Mozilla breaks the record.)
That last one weeded me out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - I'll take my troll mod now. Thank you, sir. May I have another? -
Re:The scene has changed.
Maybe your eyes are better than mine, but I don't think we're even getting that.
Texture size and number of objects in a scene on Crysis would be the best examples, there is a difference. Games are moving to levels (especially for HD or 1920x1200&up players) that the texture limitations of DX9.0c can't bring the detail needed, and this is just one 'tiny' aspect of DX10.
http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/09/18/dx10_part3/page3.html
Bundling it into Vista is bad, for a slew of reasons, and the shit they've pulled with several 'Vista only' titles,
DX10 has specific reasons why it only runs on Vista. Go ask the people hacking the libraries for XP. They will run, but it expects the OS to be handling aspects of the GPU that XP isn't doing.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
DX10 is designed around Vista because it expects GPU RAM Virtualization to be available from the OS. (Only Vista can do this) DX10 expects even 'in-game' threads/processes to be prioritized and handled by the OS, and only Vista can do this because it has a pre-emptive scheduler for the GPU, XP don't (in fact no other OS has one). To put these things in XP would be to make a full WDDM for XP, and that is not quite so easy.
The DX10 stuff like this is a tie over from the XBox360 development team, and DX10 is what MS and Robbie learned to take gaming forward on the PC.
As for the 'Vista Only' titles, there were reasons for them at the time. For example Halo 2, as its online play is Games for Windows Live, and at the time used Vista's communication framework, and Live for Windows (the Gaming connection) was a Vista only technology. So the Halo 2 development went forward with these considerations, and other internal optimizations in the game just exepcted the Vista WDDM to be there, etc. Microsoft went back and wrote Live Games for Windows for XP from the ground up. (Hence some of the new networking features in XP SP3, just to support it.)
So it may have seemed nefarious, but was not a con, just a platform specific feature and optimization design, pure and simple... Sadly MS was counting on NVidia and ATI to have their WDDM drivers at XP levels at release of VIsta, and this didn't happen. When MS jumped in with NVidia and ATI and 'helped' their driver development the fruit of this was seen around June 07, as Vista was catching to XP in gaming performance, and by Sept 07, had equaled it.
I see absolutely nothing to recommend Vista over XP, at this time or in the near future.
This is where Microsoft's marketing sucks. They should do like Apple and list every tiny feature.(Remember the 300 list about Leopard?) If Microsoft did a list like this for Vista, it would be around 10,000 items in their list.
If I had time this morning, I could take your circumstances and make a very credible case for Vista. I also understand where you are coming from as Vista is a plumbing and architecture shift, they burned their time to build more features based on these changes with the iniitial dump of Longhorn. Windows 7 is basically going to be a showcase of what is already in Vista, since it doesn't have any major architecture changes planned.
Hardly a year out of date. The figures you post are one month old, and involve Vista SP1 final, vs SP3 of XP. I admit I am impressed by the evening out that Vista has managed to achieve, in those tests.
Ok, year was a bit of tongue in cheek.
A lot of people didn't realize that NVidia and ATI had to write the Vista WDDM drivers from scratch, as it is a dramatic different model than XPDM. From letting Vista do scheduling to RAM virtualization and handing over more to the OS from core driver level to even Aero Composer.
And even though I think NVidia and ATI could have done better at launch, as they didn't provide drivers to beta testers -
Re:Why do i feel that ...
Most people don't understand Moore's Law
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars -
Re:No, he's talking about replacing TCP/IP.The Internet's congestion avoidance mechanism, an afterthought that was tacked-on in the late 80's, reduces and increases the rate of TCP streams to match available network resources, but it doesn't molest UDP at all. One very important point here is that this 'afterthought' in TCP works at the end-points. The network remains dumb, it is the end-points that decide how to do congestion management. Wasn't that what Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was supposed to address? Good point. ATM died because the benefits weren't worth the costs (much more complex hardware all around, never mind the protocol stacks).
A related point that seems to run through the article is that more bandwidth is not the solution. But he doesn't explain why - for example This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's or the Internet meltdown problem disappeared spontaneously in the 80's. What we need to do is engineer a better interface between P2P and the Internet, such that each can share information with the other to find the best way to copy desired content. In the first case I think he's completely wrong, more bandwidth is exactly what solved the problem. Both in the network and the applications use of that bandwidth (netscape was the first to do simultaneous requests over multiple connections - which did not require any protocol changes). In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet and nowadays a half-baked pundit) predicting a "gigalapse" of the internet specifically due to a lack of bandwidth...
It's interesting to note that ATT themselves have declared more bandwidth to be the solution. They didn't phrase it quite that way, but ultimately that's the conclusion an educated reader can draw from their research results. 1x the bandwidth of a 'managed network' requires 2x the bandwidth in a 'neutral network' to achieve the same throughputs, etc. Sounds like a lot, but then you realize that bandwidth costs are not linear, nor are management costs. In fact, they tend to operate in reverse economies of scale - bandwidth gets cheaper the more you buy (think of it as complexity O(x+n) due to fixed costs and the simple 1 to 1 nature of links), but management gets more expensive the more you do it because the 1-to-1 nature of links gets subsumed by having to manage the effects of all connections on each other n-to-n style for O(x+n^2). Ars Technica analysis of ATT report -
Re:15 million CPU years
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Simple explanation
Obviously this is because the female characters are off-balance due to their breasts shrinking.
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Re:Ooooh, factsies
The optical drive speed dropped 14% from 42 Mbit (PS2 4X DVD) to 36 Mbit (PS3 1x BD), but the system gained a harddrive for caching. Sorry, it's not "significantly slower".
Ya that is so cool of them to make a kludge for their design error, so it only affect 90% of the games, hoping the caching will do it part for the 10% designed to deal with it.
>>in addition the 'cell' processor that 'didn't need' a GPU
Are you a fucking retard?
Why are you looking for a date in your league?
Here are a couple links, since Google might be too hard for you. Next time just google it yourself, especialy before you post and make yourself look like an ass by being an ass.
The Sony CELL/PS3 plans were all around the web, no GPU needed, etc. It is mentioned in virtually every technical article from before the PS3, during its development, and even is noted when Sony gave up on PS3's CELL doing graphical rendering and called in NVidia late in the game.
The GPU in the PS3 (RSX) is actually slower than a vanilla off the shelf NVidia 7800 GPU, as it doesnt have the 7800 full bandwidth, and performance is between a 7600 GPU and a 7800 GPU.
But this is better than Sony sticking with trying to cut corners and suck marginal GPU performance out of the CELL as they planned all along.
http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2007/01/11/gates-ps3-will-never-have-graphics-advantage/
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/playstation3.ars -
Re:Keep it up and it won't be a "theory"
I have no idea where people come up with this junk. All of this discussion of theory vs. law vs. fact is depressing on a supposed 'geek' web site.
Here's the best paper I've seen on this collection of words in science: Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path
I came across it at the ever more sane Ars Technica.
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Re:Tell them this:Until they remove the "MPAA approved" copyright merit badge, dont help them in any way.
Or... Does anybody remember THIS? I do. Nice bit a FUD there, but even the site you linked to will tell you this is not a merit badge but an unoffical patch. It's also only for participating troops in the LA area. (I wonder who's on their donor list. hmmm). Not only that but this was 2 years ago. The program might not even still be around.