Domain: zdnet.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to zdnet.com.
Comments · 5,181
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Re:Nothing to seeActually after I posted about the 'no pest strip'....I thought about just maybe a few old fashioned "Bug Zappers"....
Or maybe just have a few people at the rally fire over head with HERF guns
.....that should have them falling out of the air like 'flies'.... -
Re:Which IPs in particular?
I couldn't tell from the article, but which intellectual property is MS saying open source solutions are infringing on?
Like SCO MS has never, and will never, say what IP Linux and Open Office violates. The figures Ballmer and MS uses, that Open Source violates 238 MS patents comes from a study conducted by people at PUBPAT, Public Patent Foundation, that concluded 238 patents "Might" be violated. They said "Might" not does, and they didn't say which ones. PUBPAT did the study for Open Source Risk Management, an insurance startup that insures FOOS users against patent or copyright infringement lawsuits.
Falcon -
Re:out of moneySCO 'may run low or even completely out of cash during the process of trying to reorganize
Microsoft should give them another 66 million.
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e-books
I've seen very few textbooks released in e-book format; most of the ones I have seen were in very specialized subjects and released under the GNU FDL.
Do you live in the Third World? They are most useful there, however they are used elsewhere. U Penn list more than 25,000 e-books. The University of Texas lists more. Those are just the first 2 results of a Google of e-books "text books", which lists almost 25,000 results. Of the XO ZDNet" has this to say:
"Assuming this device can survive its harsh environment and continue to function over a period of a half-dozen or more years (still a stretch, in my estimation), a single lightweight (but rugged) device, could easily outlast 100 textbooks in a hot and humid environment. And, by any measure, a $100 laptop equipped with 100 electronic textbooks could be worth its weight in gold in such a third-world setting."
Falcon -
Gates explained it in 1998
As I commented on http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=794
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Gates explained it in 1998
I voted for "To try to grow IE 7's marketshare by adding software pirates to the count"; to partially quote what Bill Gates said in 1998:
"we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect"
http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html
The 'addiction' can only happen if IE7 gets a vast-majority market share like IE6 had.
Now look at http://members.shaw.ca/Limulus/files/w3sbw2-0706.png
The numbers from w3schools.com aren't necessarily indicative of the overall web, but I've found the trends they show are.
Compared to the IE5 -> IE6 transition which was rapid and fairly X shaped on the graph, the IE6 -> IE7 tansition has stalled, with IE7 having plateaued at a level *less* than IE6.
This is very bad for Microsoft, as it represents a prolonged vulnerable state. Since IE6 and 7 are different enough that they need to be treated separately by developers, the difference in market share between IE7 and Firefox is small enough that website developers must take the latter into account too and thus support it (even if you take the Net Applications numbers http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6 to be fully accurate, and I don't, you'll note that the ratio of FF:IE7:IE6 is about 2:5:6. If it was all IE6, that would be 2:11) And if Firefox is supported, there will be less sites that are IE-specific, meaning less 'addiction' to IE.
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whurley responds to "spreading lies on this issue"
I want to publicly comment on the "spreading lies on this issue" that I'm being accused of by many of you in the
/. community. I'll keep my reply simple:
1) Microsoft called this move "open source" in all of there communications with me. In fact, the title of the mail in my inbox from Microsoft is: "Important: Microsoft & Open Source Announcement" . They also referred to it as "open source" in the voice mail they left me the night before.
2) I put "open source" in quotes to highlight the fact that this is NOT open source . That was the entire point of the blog for those of you who obviously didn't read it in it's entirety.
3) Many people on /. tried a new and novel approach and actually read my post before commenting/forming their opinion. Two notable examples of this radical behavior include:
"Will Hurley captures the move accurately" - Matt Asay, CNet
"William Hurley says Microsoft is going "open source," and those quote marks are his point." - Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet So thanks to all of you who commented after actually reading the post. For the rest of you, I hope this helps to clear things up. -
Re:Unpopular...
According to this blog http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=842, the wifi sync requires it to be docked. Which, if true, sort of misses the whole point. Not completely misses it, but sort of misses it...
However, I'm unable to find any confirmation of that info. Anyone? -
Re:I'm getting this feedback often...2. OOo did NOT inherit its bloat from MS Office. Part of it comes from the many tools used to make sure the software was Cross Platform. MS Office has a lot of bloat with NO Cross Platform features. What is their excuse?
That's not true, and here is the proof. Anyone with a Windows computer can easiliy verify the results. MS Office is orders of magnitues faster than OO.o. A warm start of any MS Office tool (Powerpoint, Word, Exel) starts and loads the document in less than 1 second on my P4 3.2 GHz 1GB RAM computer. The reason why is obvious. Better platform integration, preloading libraries and yes, binary formats which is, and always will be, more efficient than XML. -
Re:So...
Do you remember the pre-bubble-burst services that offered free computers (ad supported), the free or discounted net access that was/is ad supported, or most recently free (subscription) music downloads that are ad supported?
Well when the price of these things comes down, we can have free (ad-supported) breakfast cereal!
If one rotates the cereal box for landscape mode, these panels are already about the right size.
Just watch the ads and some other Sony DRM content and the spout is released for you to pour out cereal.
The only thing is the DRM. Some suspect there will be a nanotech virus in the cereal and you'll have to eat Sony breakfast every day to stay alive. It's a good way to get ya to swallow that Sony DRM RFID chip to authenticate your other purchases. Perhaps they're a bit ahead of us? -
Vista vs. Natural Environment Comparison.Microsoft did a great job of naming Vista. It sounds clean and breathtaking like a view from the Italian Alps or the Rocky Mountains looking out over lush glacial vallies that are teaming with life and productivity.
Seems like a nice clean environment right?
However.. on closer inspection the we find the air (gui) has some form of pollution.
The underneath the ground beneath our seemingly nice perch has high levels of naturally occuring radiation.
Not to mention the pirates and corrupt officials that are known to kidnap hapless travelers and hold them hostage for ransom.
Windows Vista should be renamed Windows Chernobyl. That probably is not snappy enough for the mass marketing folks. Since Windows Me! and Vista both share a common and lauded heritage how about renaming it "Windows Squint!"? Lets honor not only the past achievements of ME! but embrace the future while at the same time acknowledging the physical and emotional things that your eyes and intellect do when expecting lush riparian views you gaze up instead upon denuded infertile valleys and barren lands laid to waste by mans insatiable greed?
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Re:Which patentsDoes anyone know what techniques and technologies Vonage used that Sprint and/or Verizon own patents on?
A ZDNet analysis of the disputed Verizon patents 6,104,711, 6,282,574 and 6,359,880.
I haven't been able to find a list of the Sprint patents yet.
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Make that 9 words
Here comes 7 more words for ya. At least it has a possible new feature, this time. (Breaking news! Now with 350% more proof!)
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Re:evesdropping requirementsThe perceived difficulty with tapping fibre seems to be from the assumption that any interruption in data transmission will be noticed and instantly treated as suspicious. I think it's possible that a quick fibre cut and splice on an underwater cable could be perceived as nothing but a temporary and unimportant glitch by Telco's. It may have been done before. And what are they going to do if a tap is detected? Rip up the whole thing and start over or just ignore it?
As the AC points out a repeater is probably a good point to tap. But then what do you do with the connection? You will need to run another cable the same size from the tap to a shore based facility to monitor the traffic. Now that would be noticeable!
Maybe the NSA tells the operators that they have a choice;
1) You can give us access at the end point (like AT&T).
2) If not we will likely attempt a tap that may go wrong disrupting your service.Is there a tin foil hat equivalent for fiber?-)
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Made! In Saskatchewan!
As a Toon Town resident all my life, and a SaskTel user for 95% of that (1.5 years with Fido, ARG!) let me paint a picture of how castrated SaskTel cell-phone service is.
I use that term because "it has no balls whatsoever".
- We pay Bell Mobility in Ontario. Yes, the last-bastion of Crown Corporations only gets a cut of the Bell pie.
- We cannot use the vast majority of web-to-phone services. Promotions and content are carrier-dependant, and despite paying Bell, we do not use their network. How quickly would you lay out a contract for another 400,000 potential customers versus another 4,000,000?
- We get CDMA, with no sim cards. Meaning the phone I pay $300 for can only be used in 14% of the globe compared to the phone you paid $300 for.
Tri-band is A Good Thing.
The main benefits of course are:
- We get rural coverage, which is kind of important. We're larger than California with less than 1 million people. (And yet there's never enough parking downtown!)
- Supporting a heartless local monopoly is preferable to a national one.
- Chances are you know someone who works in the local call centre and can kick them in the nuts for bad service. (See what I did there?)
However, I may be biased. Living here does that. ;-) -
Re:Ms, your case is lost
MS Word didn't screw this up, Adobe prevented it. See http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6079320.html. Microsoft caved to Adobe's demand because it was scared of the EU case. Adobe also got MS to drop its own competing portable format. And after Monday's EU CFI decision affirming the EC slap on them for bundling media player (I really can't imagine a more innocuous product), it looks like Microsoft read that situation right.
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Re:Ms, your case is lost
Better articles w/ links:
News.com
The Guardian (Blog)
CNN Money
ZDNET
And also, actual Lotus Symphony page on IBM's site, with download link. -
Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late
You are, I think confuse liberals with libertarians. The fight to 'get governments out of the way of large megacorps like Microsoft which would happily chew up even medium-sized competitors and spit their not-so-juicy leftovers out on the sidewalk' is one area where libertarians and conservatives seem to be in alliance.
No I think it's you who are confused. Yes Libertarians are for small government but they are also for self responsibility and oppose monopolies, especially those created by government. Reduce the size and power of government then they can't create monopolies by for instance barring competition.
These people will often site Adam Smith [bcgreen.com] as the grandfather of Laissez-faire capitalism and the principle of 'free market'
Yes Adam Smith was pro free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, however what many don't know or simply ignore is that he was also against monopolies saying "that a monopoly would lead to higher prices because of scarcity".
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Re:Not a big dealThat's what some people are claiming but I'm suspicious.
It's been confirmed.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=779I don't see why you'd be suspicious. Microsoft has a history of ignoring user preferences when it comes to privacy choices.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/09/ms_wga_phones_home/ -
Now you know why they have a update backdoor..
In the light of their recent breach of Computer Access laws in practically every country in the world I would consider this new patent a very worrying development.
Further, if you run any type of secure operation (for instance, say you're a non-US government department) I would really start to think very hard about using Windows. I know of one instance where a military outfit decided to use Openoffice.org because they could at least examine the source code and assure themselves it wasn't backdoored - but they still used Windows. I guess they'll rethink that one too now..
Plain and simple: using Windows appears to mean that whatever data and secrets you think you have is not secure. Not secure at all, from abuse, from misuse and - most importantly - from industrial espionage. -
I keep reading things like this
"Once you hit 12TB, RAID5 becomes useless because chance of unrecoverable read error approaches guaranteed"
I keep reading random things about a max size you want for raid 5 because of the chance for errors. But I can't find anywhere with any authority on it, nor can I find what limit one should place on raid.
one of the things I read states what you state http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
Is there a place I can get more information? I got 4 320g HD's, and I want to replace it soon with 500-1t drives. -
Re:Nope
I wanted to see by comparison how many pages the ODF specification, but I can't find a consistent count.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1643 lists a quote by Miguel stating 4-10 depending on "how you count it".
this looks like over 600:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html#17.7.6.Key%20Derivation|outline
so which is it? -
There was such a anti-worm worm...
The Nachi worm was written to search out computers infected with the now-famous Blaster worm and patch the computer with a Microsoft patch. It replicated itself around the world, and once the patch had been implemented and the Blaster worm deleted it deleted itself. Unfortunately it created a heck of a lot of traffic on infected networks, which slowed them down considerably.
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Multiple read-head drives
I think they used to do this on some very old drives. (Big ones, not 3.5" AFAIK.) Also, when you think about the evolution of hard drives, remember that they came from drum systems where there was one head for every track on the drum, so it wouldn't have been a particularly foreign concept to the guys designing the earliest ones.
IIRC, it's not as effective as you might think it would be at first glance. Although it does help some workloads (ones that are seek-limited), I don't think the improvements were enough to justify the technical complexity, which is fairly significant -- especially when it comes to writing or doing simultaneous read/writes (and I don't know how you'd handle cache). Also, apparently you might run into problems maintaining head alignment between multiple servo/head assemblies working on the same platter [1].
The fact that the drive manufacturers gave up on it, and didn't bring it back out back when people were paying much more for fast storage than they do today (relative to consumer/mass-market equipment), makes me think there must have been multiple levels of 'gotchas' involved.
[1] Someone who sounds more knowledgeable than I responding to a similar question: here. -
Re:and DoubleClick
I see the point you are making, but I don't think it's something that would work very well in practice. At the layer 1 level, the ISP will just see a virtual circuit between the end user, and another host on the network, be that Google or DoubleClick or e360. So who do you bill -- the local user or the remote end? Okay, an ISP can use something along the lines of a stateful firewall to help with the billing. This sounds okay so far -- if I request a page from Google, I get billed; if someone spams me, then they initiated the traffic and they get billed.
But wait...the spammer doesn't send to me -- they send to my ISP's mail server (okay, I run a mail server at home, too, but that's a special case, and hardly applicable to Joe User). This means the spammer doesn't get billed; whichever SMTP server first accepted the e-mail gets billed. Okay, that's not so bad -- it provides a financial incentive to mail server admins to make sure their servers are secure, since they will be paying for all e-mails that come from their server. Hmmm...but the ISP isn't going to pay those bills out of the goodness of their hearts, so they are going to have to pass those costs on to the end user. I suspect not all ISPs will charge the same amount for their bandwidth since bandwidth cost varies with locality (don't believe me? The company I work for pays ~$7K per month for a T1, since we operate out of some of the most remote areas in the U.S.; my 768K DSL line is ~$50 per month, and if /. is to be believed, you can get 2-5M DSL lines in Japan and Europe for less than I pay for my 768K line), so what happens if my ISP charges me less for bandwidth than they pay to connect to another ISP's SMTP server? You know they are going to pass the cost on to me, but how do they determine how much I owe? The accounting is starting to get complicated, but let's keep going. When the recipient checks his e-mail, he is going to initiate a POP3 connection, so he gets charged for initiating this service. But wait -- I've already payed to send that e-mail, so now it's being double-billed. Okay, so we exempt POP3 from the pay-for-bandwidth scheme...but you and I both know that won't happen. Now, let's throw one last wrinkle into the equation. Suppose I travel for my business, and therefore I frequently use WiFi at hotels when I check my e-mail or post on /. Being a geek, I know that WiFi has some potential security pitfalls (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=660), so I tunnel e-mail to my server at home using SSH. Now, whether I'm sending or receiving e-mail, I'm getting billed because I'm tunneling through SSH, which I initiate. I'm not too crazy about that, because now I'm definitely getting double-billed for e-mail and therefore paying for the bandwidth for every spam I receive, which is what your proposal was trying to prevent in the first place.
But don't worry because really, it's even worse than that. Now the ISP needs to log every packet across their network and needs to log the state of each packet as well, so you can determine the initiator of the traffic. You've just made your network a lot busier and greatly complicated your billing system so the ISP incurs even more expense in an effort to bill appropriately. So instead of paying a flat rate fee for Internet service, I now pay the cost of the bandwidth I use, plus the cost of the additional bandwidth for the logging/billing system, plus the cost of the more complex billing software. As a result of this additional complexity, I'm now paying ~$75 per month rather than the ~$50 per month I used pay...but at least I'm not paying for e-mails from those accursed spammers! -
We shouldn't be allowed to read the law.
"Comcast (and the other large ISP firms) evade responsibility for the traffic they carry by being "common carriers". The law recognizes that if they just move bits then they're not responsible for - or even aware of the content being transferred."
Let's get this nonsense out of the way.
I suggest you read this before parrotting slashdot.
"But throttling or cancelling transfers based upon the content being carried means that they are exercising editorial control over the traffic they carry."
Not only incorrect (content!=type) but with all the encryption going on impossible.
"I see several in this thread claiming that it's unreasonable to expect Comcast to supply the unlimited access they sold. Some state that overselling their capacity is a normal practice. I call BS here: they willingly contracted with their customers to provide unlimited internet access."
Well it's not only "common carriers" who interprete agreements for their own ends. If you actually read the agreement you sign, it doesn't say you have unlimited bandwidth. Physics would tell you that, let alone common sense.
"The problem isn't that people are using more bandwidth than they "should". The problem is that Comcast / Others sold internet access when they didn't have sufficient resources to support that access. If they are forced to upgrade their systems, buy more bandwidth, or upgrade data centers - it's their problem, not ours."
Unless all the above are free? I'd say it's definately YOUR problem.
"They'll cripple and monetize internet access to the extent that we'll allow. If filtering Bit Torrent works out OK for them, then they'll move on to other bandwidth-heavy transfers. What happens now will determine what happens to YouTube in a few months..."
The same thing that happens to anything using a shared resource. -
Vista is a failure.
And you got all this unsubstantiated speculation from where, exactly?
Well, since you asked, Microsoft's ME II, better known as Vista, is causing unhappy faces everywhere I go. It isn't just that people don't want to use it, or that it's insecure and buggy or that the very word vista has "failure" attached to it. It isn't that Vista isn't even compatible with Microsoft's own SQL Server.
Most of the people that I know only care that it's not possible to deploy Vista with industry standard tools. A rollback is likely, and there are substantial unresolved issues preventing deployment.
Although I'm aware you don't appreciate twitter's attention to these matters, I do. I do appreciate twitter's attention to these things quite a lot.
Thanks, twitter.
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Alexandrian solution
... I don't understand why anyone would connect any machine directly to the Internet without some type of hardware firewall.
That is what the Internet is for. You're projecting Windows' problems onto real computers. There is no reason why a router or hardware firewall should be necessary to add security -- they're both computers with instructions and flaws. Increasing the number of hardware pieces increases the number of failure points at the cost of also increasing latency and reducing actual bandwidth.
There are only three reason why a computer needs to be isolated from the Internet:
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Someone made a big boo-boo!!!
Looks like these guys at Sunnet Berkerming didn't do their homework right... This http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=487 article at ZDNet (who I have at least heard of before) mention the same incident, with a pretty screenshot showing how the plugin from Finjan correctly detected the malicious code on the website.
Sounds to me a bit far from providing "accurate, non-biased synopsis of security-focussed technology trends" as they claim on their site... -
system sounds and network stopping
Well according to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at zdnet http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702 the network even goes down for system sounds. That means every single ping and whatnot will slowdown the network transfers. The next thing is he mentions that every time the sound stops the network stops for a short moment as well. How can you play games like this. Wouldn't this be a huge problem? The whole design of this seems like big ass fuckup.
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Re:Interesting ...
Actually, the articles you link to are a bit disingenuous. Sun controls the ODF committee at OASIS. It's employees account for abou 1/3 of the working group, including the chair. If you include IBM who is closely tied to Sun on this subject it's over 50% between two companies. Sun has created an illusion of openness quite successfully, and people have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
People continue to harp about the patent issue, but one of the top open source licensing advocates, who literally wrote the book on open source licensing, doesn't see a problem with Microsoft's patent license.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2192
The thing you're NOT doing is looking at what biases the people you're trusting have. They are aligned with Sun for financial reasons. They have reason to want ODF to succeed that has nothing to do with it's quality as a standard.
For example, the second article you link to says this at the bottom:
"The author is Vice President & Director of Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc"
How about we get some analysis by people that do NOT have a financial stake in the winner? -
Re:And it damn well should be.
Deliberately dumb? Not really, just baiting. Don't think the Xerox copier hasn't been considered in copyright infringement litigation. The main point is the MPAA and RIAA are so bent on driving a crowbar between the consumer and the media they control, they'll do anything necessary to limit our historical rights. Part of this is threatening manufacturers with litigation if they don't apply copy protection systems to ordinary items under threat of violating some imaginary clause of the DMCA. Unfortunately, the DMCA is being used to drive out all notions of "fair use" and the eventual "public domain" status of any copyrighted work. Fortunately, the public can supply feedback to the Government on how the DMCA is going.
The granddaddy of this litigation in the modern age was the Betamax Case where Universal and others accused VCR makers of being part of a copyright infringement mechanism. That was struck down and the ruling was later challenged by MGM v. Grokster. That allowed the Betamax ruling to stand but failed to define the limits of what is legal or illegal in the Internet age.
Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA were very busy trying to lock down all technical avenues of distribution. They even tried to get copy protection applied to analog audio systems (apply a phase rotation at several frequencies which triggers copy inhibit). I can't find a current link to that but the RIAA gave demonstrations to Congress on how this would reduce the problem of tape copying and off-air recording. Artists countered with their own demonstrations to Congress on how it trashed the audio. The goal was to enact a law to make copying music illegal under any circumstances, including "fair use". The INDUCE Act proposed by Orrin Hatch gives a glimpse into how far this could go.
I have no idea how they let the CD slip out the door without protections but the content controllers (I hesitate to call them providers) have been trying to retrofit restrictions to the CD ever since the CD-R came about for consumers. The MPAA made sure the DVD wouldn't be in the same boat as the CD or the Betamax. The DVD, obviously designed for recording movies, was not to be released in any form without controls approved by the MPAA members. I work with some of the people who were in the room when the first DVD was made in the U.S. What a mess - the MPAA had teams of lawyers ready to sue you for trying to create a mechanism to pirate movies. That's how the DVD was viewed.
Now, there's no shortage of ways to recognize content and disable equipment from use which displeases the MPAA or RIAA. Fortunately, several watchdog groups are pushing back on the laws just as hard to keep some of these historical freedoms and "fair use" alive. Otherwise, we'd get sued for copyright infringement by walking down the street and whistling a song.
Here are a few other things worth reading:
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Re:Nice error, the drop is 10%
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Re:Respect
They bribed DreamWorks? Then why do they use Linux? That's some bad bribing if you ask me.
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some choice 'facts' ..
"You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it, add some services and things like that. Because of the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break", Martin Taylor July 2005
"A number of studies by IDC and Gartner have proved our platform has a lower TCO than open source because there are no hidden costs."
'[Nick Barley] refuted allegations that MS security was lax, saying .. "We've spent a lot of time recently trying to educate the marketplace"', June 2004
"The study found that enterprises using Microsoft's .NET/Windows platform to build and support custom applications incur 25% to 28% less cost than those using J2EE/Linux platform during a four-year lifecycle", May 2004 -
Performance hit in action
Here are some screenshots showing the performance hit in action. Wow! So much for Vista performance!
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Re:Could be DRM related
DRM could of course be at the root, Vista has taken a beating in the press regarding the overhead all the additional DRM code takes. However there were two unrelated articles that I read in the last two days that may have a bearing on this, first this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=288/
which talks a little about audio in Vista and one tagline being "Audio in Vista: more Hell than Heaven". Then there's this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=663/
which while not Vista specific talks about silent data corruption on machines using a particular Realtek Gigabit ethernet chip and driver.
So I have to wonder if these audio problems are not just one specific issue but some combination of O/S, hardware and driver related issues. I haven't been brave enough to try Vista given all the incredibly bad press, the endless complaints of Drm problems, poor or no drivers for both the standard and x64 version and reports (possibly just alarmist fud) of Vista being no less than an MS / Government spy in your home reporting everything you do. On top of that there was also this piece:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2007/08/17.10.s html/
stating that after nine months former editor Jim Louderback gave up on Vista and went back to XP, he was quoted as saying "So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.".
Add all this up and you couldn't pay me enough to try and use Vista, I'm sure that at some point I'm going to be forced to have to deal with it but not anytime soon I hope. -
Re:Could be DRM related
DRM could of course be at the root, Vista has taken a beating in the press regarding the overhead all the additional DRM code takes. However there were two unrelated articles that I read in the last two days that may have a bearing on this, first this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=288/
which talks a little about audio in Vista and one tagline being "Audio in Vista: more Hell than Heaven". Then there's this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=663/
which while not Vista specific talks about silent data corruption on machines using a particular Realtek Gigabit ethernet chip and driver.
So I have to wonder if these audio problems are not just one specific issue but some combination of O/S, hardware and driver related issues. I haven't been brave enough to try Vista given all the incredibly bad press, the endless complaints of Drm problems, poor or no drivers for both the standard and x64 version and reports (possibly just alarmist fud) of Vista being no less than an MS / Government spy in your home reporting everything you do. On top of that there was also this piece:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2007/08/17.10.s html/
stating that after nine months former editor Jim Louderback gave up on Vista and went back to XP, he was quoted as saying "So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.".
Add all this up and you couldn't pay me enough to try and use Vista, I'm sure that at some point I'm going to be forced to have to deal with it but not anytime soon I hope. -
Re:Yeah........
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WHOOPS: 2 last things, 1 will interest you GREATLY
Ontop of the Os400-zOS DB/2 Driven Filesystem I suggested you look @:
(As well as how pagefile.sys uses "raw writes" to bypass filesystems (iirc that is, could be wrong here on SQLServer as well, since I do know that in RAM it maintains its OWN "filesystem for devices"))
For your research?
CHECK THESE OUT! ZFS & after that, "IRON FILESYSTEMS" in the 2nd URL below:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=123
(A great read, & great model for a filesystem (I like the fact you do NOT have to "manage disks" anymore in it, & have a "storage pool", singular one... which is PROBABLY WHY spanning & striping is SO EASY in it...))
Yes - MacOS X users have a treat coming... @ least on the server models!
(Perhaps, later on, maybe even on end-user/home models too, but I don't even KNOW if there are distinctions like that on MacOS X, though I have used it & actually LIKE IT, quite a lot, I do not do much research into them (market share & all that - have to go where the dollars are made, to live, & that my friend...? Is WINDOWS!)
BETTER YET, GET A READ FROM THIS FELLOW (PhD) on "IRON FILESYSTEMS":
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/vijayan-t hesis06.pdf
This one? I think you will LOVE, a great deal... & good luck on your quest/researches into it... this guy? HE HAS THE RIGHT IDEA!
(Combine it with ZFS features, + the possibility of bypassing filesystems drivers, even if ONLY @ TIMES (such as SQLServer does, maintaining its OWN devices in RAM & on DISK iirc, doing so, much as pagefile.sys read/write does, & faster than normal read/write I-O by far too) & man... WoW!)
On a related note - you KNOW somebody is a "nerd/geek", when they get excited about filesystems... lol!
APK
P.S.=> And, on the thing that MIGHT NOT exactly have you "too enthusiastic"?
I have my score on CIS TOOL now up to 85.185!
(Exceeding in fact, the "theoretical max" on this test MOST folks have obtained (around 84/85 range, & in fact, the BSD user who has tried it I cited earlier on here was told, iirc, that is the "usual max"... so much for THAT!)... apk -
Spamking
Roland - still the Slashdot spamking.
This image explains a lot...
http://i.zdnet.com/images/ms/rpiqepaille_105x110.j pg -
Re:And how do you know this exactly?
OK, so you believe that by posting as anonymous, that there is no way it could be tracked back to me? And you believe this in context to a story on a people tracking system?
Dude, spend less time jerking off, your brain needs more exercise.
Every ISP tracks and maintain logs of IPs, and dial in times for dial up customers. Many countries are introducing or have passed laws making it a legal requirement. Many (most?) ISPs are already doing it out of courtesy to law enforcement (wouldn't want to piss off the cia or interpol now would you?).
Some quick unfiltered results from a google search for those who are challenged in using a tool like google;
http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-archive/200 2/msg01352.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6156948.html
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3871
http://safari.oreilly.com/0130454966
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5748649.html
A quote from the last article;
A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."
So brave man go ahead, post any classified secrets you know of as AC on slashdot and see if anybody is listening - that is IF you know of anything classified, somehow I doubt that you do. -
Re:Wait...
Heres a link to his article,he even says he doesn't use vista yet. He is a true FUD spreader http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
c ost.html#questions George Ou also did an article debunking his finding http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673 -
3D movies of living cells
I have to admit that the results obtained with this new kind of microscope are spectacular. You'll find additional references and images of a cervical cancer cell taken using this new imaging technique on this ZDNet post.
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Doesn't anyone remember the past?
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/ma
i n/Could_Sun_hold_a_key_to_SCO.html/ as an example. For those too busy to read, Sun purchased "expansive" rights to Unix from USL shortly after it was acquired by Novel ... long before the deal between Novell and SCO. So Sun's rights predate SCOs. No doubt the legal team imaginative enough to craft the last lawsuits won't let a little matter of time and priority deter them ... but one imagines the Courts would. -
Re:Not interesting... Yeah right.
"When Microsoft writes an application for Linux, I've Won." - Linus Torvalds
Well, seems that Linus can declare himself a winner and retire.
Front Page Extensions for Linux
Triple DES encryption algorithm (source code)
SQL JDBC driver (runs on Linux) .NET (Unix-like compatible source code)Not to mention the technical help Microsoft has provided to Mono (.NET clone for Linux) and Firefox.
Congratulations.
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Re:purple pill? O.o
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=334
I think it deals with recent hypervisor rootkits. Via google and extra keywords of hypervisor and security, you should be able to find more literature. -
Re:iMac and VMWare
The rapid suspend will let you quickly switch between OS X and Linux, both running natively
I heard that this feature was scrapped, unfortunately. I would have loved it, especially for Windows-OS X rapid switiching, for toggling between playing games and actually accomplishing something :) -
Re:Reality
Microsoft could have adapted their software to fit the business requirements.
Actually, they did. Shortly after Peter Quinn first announced support for ODF, and denial of Office, he said rather matter of factly that Mass. would consider Office if they opened up their format (note, made and ISO standard was not a requirement since ODF wasn't an ISO standard at the time either). Note that in 2005, this is what quinn said:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5893208-9.html? tag=st.next
"In fact, one important point that has so far gotten no attention in the coverage of the Massachusetts decision is that the door is actually still open for Microsoft's format's get back on the list. In a telephone interview, CIO Quinn made it clear that if Microsoft fixed its patent license to meet the state's requirements, the state would reconsider the Office XML Reference Schema for inclusion in its standards. "We would support multiple formats as long as they're open" said Quinn. "If Microsoft were to do that, I would expect that we would add it to the list."
So, back in 2005, Quinn said, all Microsoft had to do was fix its patent license, and they were a shoe-in for consideration in addition to ODF. Microsoft did just that, issuing a patent covenant that is very similar to Sun's patent convenant for ODF.
So the question is, why are people still complaining? -
Re:DignityI fail to see how you can draw this conclusion. Stringent airport security certainly helps reduce the chance of dangerous items being passed through the checkpoint, either maliciously or accidentally. The fact of the matter is that those things weren't a big priority before because nothing major ever happened. They have and will continue to mandate more draconian security measures to counter each new incident. You are failing to recognize that the problem with this is that we are not safer in a statistical sense than we ever were. Because a dedicated attacker will always be able to get around the checks in place, all that is accomplished is security theater. In some ways you could say the purveyors of terror have won, by making everyone live in fear and giving up their "convenience" as you call it. When I am having my body cavities searched as a routine procedure somewhere down this path of reasoning, I will think of you. Bank safes are useless, since bank robbers could always rob a bank some other way. Bank security is a layered system where most of its strength is derived from limiting physical access to a select group of trusted people. By definition airport security can not operate this way.
A better analogy would be DRM. I'm sure as a slashdot faithful, you have read many articles and discussions about why DRM is ineffective as security. This is because a DRM security system must use some methods of distinguishing legitimate users from attackers, which is impossible to do 100% correctly. As one approaches 100% effectiveness in such a system, the usability of the subject they are trying to protect approaches 0%. Software security patches are useless, since you can always find more holes. Wrong. Software patches do not cause ever increasing delays (perhaps more often to the contrary), invasions of privacy (also probably the opposite), and reductions of freedom (read functionality in this example) to their users. Their job is to ensure transportation security, not maximize passenger convenience. You would think Schneier would realize this, given that many security holes arise from attempts to make things more convenient. Also, Bruce Schneier is not an authority on anything other than computer security, and his opinion is not significantly more important than anyone else's. Schneier is an expert on security methodology, and that applies to airports as well as computers. While it may not be his specialty, his evaluation is more informed than both of ours. It's much harder to put significant amounts of explosives in underwear than it is to conceal them in shoes. I disagree, and your argument is purely speculation anyway. Not to mention the fact that significant amounts of explosives can be smuggled inside of the anus—although you seem to be okay with ever-increasing invasions of privacy required to help you feel safe. You are talking about 3 different viruses here, which makes your "evidence" completely invalid. I was not suggesting that all three are related except that they are carried on soles and can be contracted through them as well. It was more of an attempt to aggregate for your benefit, since you seem to have missed such evidence in other posts.
I can easily envision viruses/fungii being continually deposited onto the highly trafficked floor, which I have shown can live on surfaces for quite some time, and then the next person picking them up and depositing them into their footwear to be cultivated while they sit on the plane for some duration.
Your link regarding HPV, "it thrives in warm, moist environments," does not suggest that it can not survive at all in any other environment—it may not thrive on an airport floor, but it does not need to in order to be a danger. it's not really a concern. No precautions are being taken to mitigate the risk. If it is not a concern to you, then that is your decision. You do not speak for everyone—which I believe has brought us full circle. -
Just to be fair
You don't have to go very far to find paid assholes. M$, telcos, the RIAA are all engaged in some very rough and ugly astroturfing and cracking.
I see in your list you have the "usual suspects". Now, I have no desire to defend them, but I'd like to point out that even one of my favorite companies has resorted to similar tactics.