A better solution would be if web browsers, and anonymizing proxies, would only strip out other server referers. I.e., when you go from slashdot.org to example.com, sure, block that one referer. When you're moving around within example.com, don't.
It's really pointless to block referers within a single site. Unless you're going through something like Tor, where each request comes from different IPs, there's nothing that can't be trivially learned from the server logs anyway.
Sadly, I've never seen the option to just block 'foreign' referers.
Of course, if you've blocking pages based on referer, instead of other content, you need to let in the blank referer anyway. Because, duh, that is probably a bookmark.
No, this is like a neighbor running a business that depends on people thinking he's cool and has a lot going on, and who helps with that image by pointing at YOU who are giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, because, apparently, you are too fucking stupid to only hand stuff to people who you want to have it.
Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security.
Minor addition: They aren't stupid in some circumstances. For example, there are some exploits that include someone directing you to a login page, and gleaning your password from it somehow. It is totally rational to, say, watch what page someone arrives via, and only let them in if they are coming in with a known link, or coming in via a bookmark. (Which has no referer.)
It is idiotic to trust referers, or anything the web browser supplies, when the attack is the surfer. When the attacker is another website, locking down certain pages to only be reachable via other, specific, known pages, or from a bookmark, is a reasonable security addition. There's no reason that someone would be reaching a bank's login screen from a random URL, and they damn certainly shouldn't be reaching the password submission page from it. The number of attacks this fights is tiny, but it completely shuts the whole class of attacks down from the start.
Of course, they have to be careful of people with filters, and should probably allow a referer that is the / of their site to let them in.
Now, there are people out there who will say 'I built a custom start page which is kept on my machine that uses a form with hidden variables and the right submission URL so I can login to my bank with one click, and your suggestion stops it!'. It'd like to apologize to each of you personally: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That should cover everyone.
It is trivial to defeat referrers. Especially if you're determined, as this peson proved he is.
It is trivial for surfers to defeat referers. (Note the correct incorrect spelling.) There are lots of anonymizing proxies that will serve http://example.com/ as the referer for any item on example.com, thus passing almost all referer checks. (1)
However, it's completely impossible for another web site to defeat referer checks, without getting all their end users to download said proxies and install them.
Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security. However, they are fine to use to stop people at other web sites from leeching your site's content. (And by 'content', I mostly mean images and stuff. Web site operates who block deep linking to web pages are, well, fairly dumb and not quite following how the internet works. But they can if they want to, although even there a better solution is to use cookies and session ids.)
1) Of course, you can break the proxies in all circumstances, even when they are legitimately on your site, by putting all your web pages on example.com, with no referer checks, and images and everything else on, say, images.example.com, with a referer block of everything but example.com. The proxy will always use images.example.com when getting stuff from the image server, and hence it will never work. If people with referer blocking start annoying you, go ahead.
As an added bonus, it's probably easier to set up than actually trying to figure out how to tell the web server which content you want people to be able to link to and which you don't. PDFs? flash? With my method, you just stick them on different virtual server. The only rule is that nothing on the image server can link to or include anything else on the image server.
Doing something that's 'exactly like' something that's against the law, but not actually against the law is not, in fact, illegal. I myself participated in, or at least a knowing accomplice to, bank fraud, theft, solicitation, and extortion, and it wasn't illegal because it was, in fact, a stage performance of 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
Notice the law used in this 'case', and I use the term loosely because the defendant was a moron, was the DMCA, with the claim that a deep link was circumventing an access control device, not any sort of copying claim. The DMCA may be part of copyright law, but it wasn't a 'copyright violation', it was a violation of the same law making DeCSS illegal, which is orthogonal to any actual copying.
As there wasn't as access control device at all, I think everyone needs to realize this ruling was utterly bogus and will quite successfully be challenged by any morerately intelligent lawyer. The law is rather lax about what an 'access control device' is, but if someone walks up to a device and says 'gimme', without forging any sort of information, and the device says 'sure', I think we can conclude it is not, in fact, controlling access.
Now, if the linking site had recommended installing a proxy that forges Referers to get around the linked site's referering blocking, sure. Or had managed to embed an microscopic iframe of the home page earlier as the user surfed, thus gaining them a cookie they would need later for the direct link. I don't agree with the DMCA in general, but I can see how those could be violations of the 'access control' portions of it.
But the linked site made absolutely no technological attempt to control access, and thus the DMCA is completely and utterly inapplicable.
No, you aren't allowed to copy someone's copyrighted content without their permission. You're allowed to use it however the fuck you want if you were given a legal copy.
Of course, neither of that applies, because writing the location down that someone can go and ask the copyright owner for a copy is neither 'using' nor 'copying' anything. There are free local newspapers in dispensers around town, if I say 'Go to this address, take an paper from the holder, turn to page 89', I haven't copied or even used a damn thing. It would be pure nonsense for the newspaper to sue me because, by giving a page number, I was denying them ad revenue as readers flipped through the magazine.
You're reading way too much into your interpetation of what the word 'standard' means. Sadly, it is, um, completely wrong.
But for future reference, 'standard' != 'attributes of the most common'. The most common MP3 player is the iPod, but it would be completely incorrect to say 'standard mp3 players can read Apple's DRM'.
If anything, standard is 'most version of', although that is still slightly wrong. If people buy 30% chocolate ice cream, 40% strawberry, and 30% vanilla, you can't say 'strawberrry is the standard flavor'. It is, most closely, 'the norm'.
If, OTOH, there are fifty products on the market and 45 of them are vanilla (Despite them holding only 30% of the market), you could arguably say that standard ice cream was, vanilla, and the 5 others are non-standard, despite them collectively making up 70% of the market. You wouldn't, but you could.
There are a set of features that operating systems have. Almost all the ones with network capabilities have network sniffing capabilities. Almost all the ones with floppies can read and write floppy images. Almost all the ones with CD reading abilities have CD image making capabilities, and a goodly percentage of the ones with CD burning can make and burn images. (That is lagging behind because it is fairly new, but all of them will.)
Almost all operating systems come with a text editor that can open files bigger than 2^16 bytes in size and can handle multiple types of line endings.
Almost all operating systems have enough low-level utilities that you can transfer the damn thing to another disk and boot it without any third party tools.
Almost all operating systems make an attempt to at least read non-native file systems.
These are, if you will, standard features of operating systems. They aren't only what is commonly included with OSes, they are, as mentioned above, pretty much defined as part of an OS in computer theory.
If there is a device, the OS should provide access to it at lower-levels all the way up to whatever makes sense. So you can access both filesystem images and the files through the filesystem. So you can access both a GUI and the video hardware directly. (Assuming permissions, of course.) Almost all operating systems pick a layer of abstraction of hardware that makes sense to them, and let you access that layer or any lower layer using tools built into the OS.
Guess what OS made those be 'almost all' instead of 'all'?
(And this is exactly why the Free software community doesn't like binary drivers - they cause all sorts of random stability problems and the manufacturers don't care).
Hilariously, it's exactly the same thing on Windows and Linux: binary drivers suck and cause problems.
If MS wants to hand out backup or CD burning or even antivirus software, I don't actually mind. (I'd take issues with them selling subscriptions to the antivirus, because, frankly, letting them make extra money from security holes is a bad idea. But whatever.)
Those are actual system tools, things that really do belong in the OS.
Actually, I don't have a lot of problems with Paintbrush. But it shouldn't be positioned as a drawing program. It's perfectly good for a screenshot-and-cropping program.
The problem is that notepad doesn't let you open large files, and doesn't let you have different types of line endings, and doesn't handle binary files well.
I mean, I'm not asking for emacs or even vi. I'm just saying that, for operating system text editor, Notepad sucks, it sucks so bad that people use WordPad or even MS-DOS Edit.
There is an astonishing amount of people who thinks computers operate in a semi-random manner. That crashes and security holes and having to reinstall the OS and all sorts of crap happen because of some force of nature, and we just have to put up with it.
This lowers the quality of all software, not just Microsoft software. Even businesses that don't compete with MS. They can either do things right and spend more and take longer, or they can shove it out the door unfinished and save money. In any other industry, the latter would quickly put them out of business, but it became expected because MS does it.
That's why, incidentally, so many people decry MS's past monopolist practices. We don't care who 'wins', we care that by 'cheating' in the marketplace, MS managed to get shoddy products as a 'standard' that no one can compete against with better products because everyone expects crap!
And the sad part is, M$ has all the vendors producing drivers SPECIFICALLY for their operating system. All they have to do is provide a stable kernel and easy/efficient module system for these drivers, and they'd be golden -- every advantage is on their side there. This opposed to Linux and *BSD, who are still more or less reverse engineering many of their drivers.
This is actually what's causing the damn trouble. Many companies who build hardware apparently can't code drivers worth shit.
Yeah, there are the certification things that MS has started giving to drivers, but often times they drivers aren't certified, and what are you supposed to do?
MS is such an absurdly large company, I don't know why the hell they can't have a 'drivers' division.
You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.
Now, OSes tend to come with a bit more than that, like shells and lots of APIs, but the real 'operating system' part is 'this is a hardware device, this is how I talk to this specific thing, this is how programs talk to me to get me to talk to it'. The fact MS is slacking on the 'this is how I talk to is' is just hilarious. It's how to write an OS without writing half the OS, I guess.
Of course, MS also doesn't include all sorts of other pieces of standard OSes, like CD and floppy imagers and image writers and image mounters, or network sniffing utilities. You know, actual hardware tools that OSes should come with. Even their text editor sucks.
They're too busy throwing in crippled applications like WordPad and Windows Movie Maker and Paintbrush. Not to mention various network clients like IE and Outlook. Almost always to target some competition.
Damn, look at that. Another user who registered just to post in this story and managed to have this incredibly expensive card and is certain that the card is not snake oil. What. Are. The. Odds.
You are a lying sack of shit. Oh, I don't mean about what the card does, I'm sure it actually does all that. The problem is...it doesn't matter.
You see, to talk to a network card, you have to, duh, go through the windows network stack. You can't magically avoid it unless you give each game drivers to talk directly to the card, which this rather obviously doesn't.
And, you cannot, in fact, offload UDF, because UDF doesn't have anything to offload, you idiot.
IP has checksums, which are used for both UDP and TCP, and non-crap 35 dollar network cards have that offloaded onto them. It'd be pretty damn stupid to only calculate it for one kind of packet. They also both have lengths, which, again, are both calculated in the card. TCP has additional calculations to keep up with connections, and also reassemble packets, and, like I said, non-crap cards can do that.
But there is nothing you can do to a UDP packet, in the network card, besides the checksum, to provide less of a burden on the CPU, because it basically is just the ports, the checksum, the length, and the data.
And 'switching priorities' might be sane if you were talking about a server, but if you're one of these idiotic gamer twits who thinks their network card is the problem, as opposed to their internet connection being crappy, you're probably not going to accessing anything else on the internet at the same time in the first place. Um, duh. I'm just imagining someone going 'Yeah, this card really lowered my pings in CS while I was downloading torrents, thanks to changing the priority of UDP packets!'. (Of course, that can't actually work, as the card can't alter incoming priorities.)
In fact, listening to all the crap this card supposedly does, I'm astonished it's not slower than a 'dump data on the line' network card. You know, maybe that's why they refuse to compare it with another on the same machine.
Qara is hilarious. I can see why everyone takes an issue with her magic style. It's just 'blow the shit out of everything with fireballs'.
If you're not playing under hardcore rules, it's lot of fun. If you are, you either have to kick her out of your party or immediately take control of her in every combat situtation and make sure she doesn't do stupid stuff. (My favorite is the touch spell for catching people on fire. Fun when she ends up in melee combat.)
1) When you set aside retirement money in stocks, you most certainly ARE doing something productive. You are contributing to the pool of capital that enhances productivity. The reason you are able to collect so much more at a much later date is because you contribution paved the way for proportionally greater productivity until that point. While you may be indifferent to when you get the money, society is not. It makes a HUGE difference to everyone else whether you will consume your output today (by spending your earnings) or allow the rest of society to "work with your output" over 40 years.
You can't 'consume' money. The only way to 'remove' money from the world is to keep it in a mattress or physically destroy it. And there's no logical reason as to why other people would do more with your money if you loaned it to them, instead of them getting it when you purchased something from them in exchange for the money.
Imagine that the only good is sheep. You herd sheep for a living. You also eat sheep and use them for various products. What if instead of killing one, you let it multiply exponentially over the years. You then can consume a lot more. That is clearly not rent seeking. Yet this is exactly what you do when you invest: allow your output to grow instead of being destroyed (consumed).
Wealth does not multiple when left alone. (In fact, neither do sheep, you genius. Sheep die when left alone, because they are stupid.)
Wealth may multiple when used, even when used by others, but 'used' is the opposite of 'left alone'.
2) Yes, "having everyone own almost anything and charging people for the use." is a viable retirement strategy, scalable to the ENTIRE population, even with zero birthrates worldwide. How? If people can see these demographic shifts coming, and they will, entrepreneurs will invest all of those savings to automate production of the goods people will want to consume on retirement, which can be operated by a skeleton crew of the people who at retirement would prefer the extra income for doing being in that skeleton crew.
We are nowhere near the point that the entire world can be automated, and probably never will, but, more to the point, that still doesn't make sense. What, is everyone going to own a tiny fraction of the five hundred machines that are delivering goods and services, and thus make back exactly what they pay into the system? That insane balancing act rather obviously doesn't work if you have to pay operators workers anything. Money would fall out of the automated system, and it's hard to see how it would get back in if everyone owns part of the 'need producing' machines and can get everything they need for free.
If somehow, in the future, we have machines capable of producing everything everyone needs with little or no human work, which is not at all likely, your idea that everyone would 'own' these machines and charge 'everyone else' for their use is so loopy I don't even know where to start. Sane people realize that if we have the necessities being produced for free or almost free, it would be a good idea to have the government operate the machines and raise everyone's standard of living, leaving only those who want to buy luxuries to have to work.
I mean, what exactly happens to people who don't own the machines when this starts? They no longer can work anywhere, because everything is being produced with no work. However, they can't purchase anything, because food is still, for some reason, being charged for. This system is so goofy I can't even grasp how you think it works. You're in Star Trek replicator land, and trying to tack capitalism onto it. In the real world, if things cost nothing to produce, the price will drop to almost zero, and, tada, you can't make a living off operating the plant. Duh.
3) Your vision of an ownership society is archaic. You are dreaming of a time when one's entire worth had to be tied up in a farm or a machine, with no other investments. This
I have no idea how it would be harder to read sequentially than any other way. If flash truly had a problem with 'sequential' data, an obvious solution would be to, duh, not store the file sequentially. Space it out at whatever intervals flash wants. Or just don't load it sequentially...read the first meg, put it in place, read the tenth meg, put it place, read the second meg, put it in place...
If, OTOH, flash only wants to read 15 megs before having a small rest before it can read another 15 megs, obviously my idea would be a bad one.
And Vista's ReadyBoost sounds like an idiotic idea from what I've heard of it. It's exactly what I dismissed above: A damn swap file on a flash drive. (And it's a damn compressed and encrypted swap file. Yeah, let's make things even slower.)
If we want to introduce a third tier of memory between hard drive and RAM, let's do it right and make it slower ram, not flash.
Keith Olbermann (or possibly his writers?) is basically one of the few people who are actually willing to say 'This is what X said. It is a complete and utter lie.', as opposed to 'This is what X said. This is what Y said in response.'.(1)
In other words, he is one of the only news people at the 24 hour news networks.
1) X is usually Republicans or the Administration, which causes Republicans to dislike him, but they find it really hard to actually disagree with anything he's actually said, because, duh, it's true. And this isn't because he's 'liberal', it's because the news media actually stopped reporting facts about politics about a decade and a half ago, instead resorting to 'He said she said' reporting, and the Republicans got really good at synchronized lying.
If you don't watch a lot of TV, you're missing what he's lampooning.
See, he's not a strawman. There are people on real TV networks that act exactly like him, or, at least, exactly like him but stupider.
Yes, stupider. Colbert will often 'outsmart' himself, or at least he would if he were actually the person he's pretending to be, by repeating Republican talking points and then bringing up the rather obvious objection to them and then just randomly dismissing the objection with some obviously idiotic reason, or, if he talking point is just blatently factually incorrect, will appeal to 'truthiness' in that it feels correct.
O'Reilly and other Republican talking heads don't bring up the objection.
Colbert, to rephrase, is playing an informed Republican, vs. all the uninformed ones that manage to get airtime on the 'real' television networks. Because he's informed, he often makes literally no sense, because he states the actual facts, and then come to the official Republican conclusion, usually by inserting something that obviously isn't true in the middle.
And I'm not talking just about Fox, although O'Reilly is a big part of it. CNN has the idiots too.
Slashdot Mirror
A better solution would be if web browsers, and anonymizing proxies, would only strip out other server referers. I.e., when you go from slashdot.org to example.com, sure, block that one referer. When you're moving around within example.com, don't.
It's really pointless to block referers within a single site. Unless you're going through something like Tor, where each request comes from different IPs, there's nothing that can't be trivially learned from the server logs anyway.
Sadly, I've never seen the option to just block 'foreign' referers.
Of course, if you've blocking pages based on referer, instead of other content, you need to let in the blank referer anyway. Because, duh, that is probably a bookmark.
I'm glad someone else gets the fucking point that just because a web surfer can defeat referer logging doesn't mean a linking web site can.
No, this is like a neighbor running a business that depends on people thinking he's cool and has a lot going on, and who helps with that image by pointing at YOU who are giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, because, apparently, you are too fucking stupid to only hand stuff to people who you want to have it.
Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security.
Minor addition: They aren't stupid in some circumstances. For example, there are some exploits that include someone directing you to a login page, and gleaning your password from it somehow. It is totally rational to, say, watch what page someone arrives via, and only let them in if they are coming in with a known link, or coming in via a bookmark. (Which has no referer.)
It is idiotic to trust referers, or anything the web browser supplies, when the attack is the surfer. When the attacker is another website, locking down certain pages to only be reachable via other, specific, known pages, or from a bookmark, is a reasonable security addition. There's no reason that someone would be reaching a bank's login screen from a random URL, and they damn certainly shouldn't be reaching the password submission page from it. The number of attacks this fights is tiny, but it completely shuts the whole class of attacks down from the start.
Of course, they have to be careful of people with filters, and should probably allow a referer that is the / of their site to let them in.
Now, there are people out there who will say 'I built a custom start page which is kept on my machine that uses a form with hidden variables and the right submission URL so I can login to my bank with one click, and your suggestion stops it!'. It'd like to apologize to each of you personally: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That should cover everyone.
It is trivial to defeat referrers. Especially if you're determined, as this peson proved he is.
It is trivial for surfers to defeat referers. (Note the correct incorrect spelling.) There are lots of anonymizing proxies that will serve http://example.com/ as the referer for any item on example.com, thus passing almost all referer checks. (1)
However, it's completely impossible for another web site to defeat referer checks, without getting all their end users to download said proxies and install them.
Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security. However, they are fine to use to stop people at other web sites from leeching your site's content. (And by 'content', I mostly mean images and stuff. Web site operates who block deep linking to web pages are, well, fairly dumb and not quite following how the internet works. But they can if they want to, although even there a better solution is to use cookies and session ids.)
1) Of course, you can break the proxies in all circumstances, even when they are legitimately on your site, by putting all your web pages on example.com, with no referer checks, and images and everything else on, say, images.example.com, with a referer block of everything but example.com. The proxy will always use images.example.com when getting stuff from the image server, and hence it will never work. If people with referer blocking start annoying you, go ahead.
As an added bonus, it's probably easier to set up than actually trying to figure out how to tell the web server which content you want people to be able to link to and which you don't. PDFs? flash? With my method, you just stick them on different virtual server. The only rule is that nothing on the image server can link to or include anything else on the image server.
I'd be inclined to just return a bit of JavaScript that loads my own page (and ads) in place of the linker's.
I think this solution is a lot funnier than referer blocking.
Or, even better, bounce them to a completely unrelated page on the linker's website, so it looks like his navigation is completely flummuxed.
Doing something that's 'exactly like' something that's against the law, but not actually against the law is not, in fact, illegal. I myself participated in, or at least a knowing accomplice to, bank fraud, theft, solicitation, and extortion, and it wasn't illegal because it was, in fact, a stage performance of 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
Notice the law used in this 'case', and I use the term loosely because the defendant was a moron, was the DMCA, with the claim that a deep link was circumventing an access control device, not any sort of copying claim. The DMCA may be part of copyright law, but it wasn't a 'copyright violation', it was a violation of the same law making DeCSS illegal, which is orthogonal to any actual copying.
As there wasn't as access control device at all, I think everyone needs to realize this ruling was utterly bogus and will quite successfully be challenged by any morerately intelligent lawyer. The law is rather lax about what an 'access control device' is, but if someone walks up to a device and says 'gimme', without forging any sort of information, and the device says 'sure', I think we can conclude it is not, in fact, controlling access.
Now, if the linking site had recommended installing a proxy that forges Referers to get around the linked site's referering blocking, sure. Or had managed to embed an microscopic iframe of the home page earlier as the user surfed, thus gaining them a cookie they would need later for the direct link. I don't agree with the DMCA in general, but I can see how those could be violations of the 'access control' portions of it.
But the linked site made absolutely no technological attempt to control access, and thus the DMCA is completely and utterly inapplicable.
No, you aren't allowed to copy someone's copyrighted content without their permission. You're allowed to use it however the fuck you want if you were given a legal copy.
Of course, neither of that applies, because writing the location down that someone can go and ask the copyright owner for a copy is neither 'using' nor 'copying' anything. There are free local newspapers in dispensers around town, if I say 'Go to this address, take an paper from the holder, turn to page 89', I haven't copied or even used a damn thing. It would be pure nonsense for the newspaper to sue me because, by giving a page number, I was denying them ad revenue as readers flipped through the magazine.
You're reading way too much into your interpetation of what the word 'standard' means. Sadly, it is, um, completely wrong.
But for future reference, 'standard' != 'attributes of the most common'. The most common MP3 player is the iPod, but it would be completely incorrect to say 'standard mp3 players can read Apple's DRM'.
If anything, standard is 'most version of', although that is still slightly wrong. If people buy 30% chocolate ice cream, 40% strawberry, and 30% vanilla, you can't say 'strawberrry is the standard flavor'. It is, most closely, 'the norm'.
If, OTOH, there are fifty products on the market and 45 of them are vanilla (Despite them holding only 30% of the market), you could arguably say that standard ice cream was, vanilla, and the 5 others are non-standard, despite them collectively making up 70% of the market. You wouldn't, but you could.
There are a set of features that operating systems have. Almost all the ones with network capabilities have network sniffing capabilities. Almost all the ones with floppies can read and write floppy images. Almost all the ones with CD reading abilities have CD image making capabilities, and a goodly percentage of the ones with CD burning can make and burn images. (That is lagging behind because it is fairly new, but all of them will.)
Almost all operating systems come with a text editor that can open files bigger than 2^16 bytes in size and can handle multiple types of line endings.
Almost all operating systems have enough low-level utilities that you can transfer the damn thing to another disk and boot it without any third party tools.
Almost all operating systems make an attempt to at least read non-native file systems.
These are, if you will, standard features of operating systems. They aren't only what is commonly included with OSes, they are, as mentioned above, pretty much defined as part of an OS in computer theory.
If there is a device, the OS should provide access to it at lower-levels all the way up to whatever makes sense. So you can access both filesystem images and the files through the filesystem. So you can access both a GUI and the video hardware directly. (Assuming permissions, of course.) Almost all operating systems pick a layer of abstraction of hardware that makes sense to them, and let you access that layer or any lower layer using tools built into the OS.
Guess what OS made those be 'almost all' instead of 'all'?
WordPad is a word processor, not a text editor. And it's is only a mediocre word processor at that.
But the fact the Windows' text editor is so shitty that you need to use a damn word processor instead is not really a credit to anything.
Yes, let's pretend Linux has a default text editor, and let's pretend it's set to vi while we're at it.
The only things with 'default' text editors are GUI environments like KDE and Gnome, and quite obviously neither of them uses vi.
(And this is exactly why the Free software community doesn't like binary drivers - they cause all sorts of random stability problems and the manufacturers don't care).
Hilariously, it's exactly the same thing on Windows and Linux: binary drivers suck and cause problems.
It's just, on Windows, they're encouraged.
There are two separate issues there.
One is that Microsoft has locked down Vista where other antivirus software is going to have trouble running at all.
Two is the possibility they'll charge for antivirus subscriptions.
Bingo.
If MS wants to hand out backup or CD burning or even antivirus software, I don't actually mind. (I'd take issues with them selling subscriptions to the antivirus, because, frankly, letting them make extra money from security holes is a bad idea. But whatever.)
Those are actual system tools, things that really do belong in the OS.
Actually, I don't have a lot of problems with Paintbrush. But it shouldn't be positioned as a drawing program. It's perfectly good for a screenshot-and-cropping program.
The problem is that notepad doesn't let you open large files, and doesn't let you have different types of line endings, and doesn't handle binary files well.
I mean, I'm not asking for emacs or even vi. I'm just saying that, for operating system text editor, Notepad sucks, it sucks so bad that people use WordPad or even MS-DOS Edit.
It's called 'lowering expectations'.
There is an astonishing amount of people who thinks computers operate in a semi-random manner. That crashes and security holes and having to reinstall the OS and all sorts of crap happen because of some force of nature, and we just have to put up with it.
This lowers the quality of all software, not just Microsoft software. Even businesses that don't compete with MS. They can either do things right and spend more and take longer, or they can shove it out the door unfinished and save money. In any other industry, the latter would quickly put them out of business, but it became expected because MS does it.
That's why, incidentally, so many people decry MS's past monopolist practices. We don't care who 'wins', we care that by 'cheating' in the marketplace, MS managed to get shoddy products as a 'standard' that no one can compete against with better products because everyone expects crap!
And the sad part is, M$ has all the vendors producing drivers SPECIFICALLY for their operating system. All they have to do is provide a stable kernel and easy/efficient module system for these drivers, and they'd be golden -- every advantage is on their side there. This opposed to Linux and *BSD, who are still more or less reverse engineering many of their drivers.
This is actually what's causing the damn trouble. Many companies who build hardware apparently can't code drivers worth shit.
Yeah, there are the certification things that MS has started giving to drivers, but often times they drivers aren't certified, and what are you supposed to do?
MS is such an absurdly large company, I don't know why the hell they can't have a 'drivers' division.
You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.
Now, OSes tend to come with a bit more than that, like shells and lots of APIs, but the real 'operating system' part is 'this is a hardware device, this is how I talk to this specific thing, this is how programs talk to me to get me to talk to it'. The fact MS is slacking on the 'this is how I talk to is' is just hilarious. It's how to write an OS without writing half the OS, I guess.
Of course, MS also doesn't include all sorts of other pieces of standard OSes, like CD and floppy imagers and image writers and image mounters, or network sniffing utilities. You know, actual hardware tools that OSes should come with. Even their text editor sucks.
They're too busy throwing in crippled applications like WordPad and Windows Movie Maker and Paintbrush. Not to mention various network clients like IE and Outlook. Almost always to target some competition.
Damn, look at that. Another user who registered just to post in this story and managed to have this incredibly expensive card and is certain that the card is not snake oil. What. Are. The. Odds.
You are a lying sack of shit. Oh, I don't mean about what the card does, I'm sure it actually does all that. The problem is...it doesn't matter.
You see, to talk to a network card, you have to, duh, go through the windows network stack. You can't magically avoid it unless you give each game drivers to talk directly to the card, which this rather obviously doesn't.
And, you cannot, in fact, offload UDF, because UDF doesn't have anything to offload, you idiot.
IP has checksums, which are used for both UDP and TCP, and non-crap 35 dollar network cards have that offloaded onto them. It'd be pretty damn stupid to only calculate it for one kind of packet. They also both have lengths, which, again, are both calculated in the card. TCP has additional calculations to keep up with connections, and also reassemble packets, and, like I said, non-crap cards can do that.
But there is nothing you can do to a UDP packet, in the network card, besides the checksum, to provide less of a burden on the CPU, because it basically is just the ports, the checksum, the length, and the data.
And 'switching priorities' might be sane if you were talking about a server, but if you're one of these idiotic gamer twits who thinks their network card is the problem, as opposed to their internet connection being crappy, you're probably not going to accessing anything else on the internet at the same time in the first place. Um, duh. I'm just imagining someone going 'Yeah, this card really lowered my pings in CS while I was downloading torrents, thanks to changing the priority of UDP packets!'. (Of course, that can't actually work, as the card can't alter incoming priorities.)
In fact, listening to all the crap this card supposedly does, I'm astonished it's not slower than a 'dump data on the line' network card. You know, maybe that's why they refuse to compare it with another on the same machine.
Qara is hilarious. I can see why everyone takes an issue with her magic style. It's just 'blow the shit out of everything with fireballs'.
If you're not playing under hardcore rules, it's lot of fun. If you are, you either have to kick her out of your party or immediately take control of her in every combat situtation and make sure she doesn't do stupid stuff. (My favorite is the touch spell for catching people on fire. Fun when she ends up in melee combat.)
1) When you set aside retirement money in stocks, you most certainly ARE doing something productive. You are contributing to the pool of capital that enhances productivity. The reason you are able to collect so much more at a much later date is because you contribution paved the way for proportionally greater productivity until that point. While you may be indifferent to when you get the money, society is not. It makes a HUGE difference to everyone else whether you will consume your output today (by spending your earnings) or allow the rest of society to "work with your output" over 40 years.
You can't 'consume' money. The only way to 'remove' money from the world is to keep it in a mattress or physically destroy it. And there's no logical reason as to why other people would do more with your money if you loaned it to them, instead of them getting it when you purchased something from them in exchange for the money.
Imagine that the only good is sheep. You herd sheep for a living. You also eat sheep and use them for various products. What if instead of killing one, you let it multiply exponentially over the years. You then can consume a lot more. That is clearly not rent seeking. Yet this is exactly what you do when you invest: allow your output to grow instead of being destroyed (consumed).
Wealth does not multiple when left alone. (In fact, neither do sheep, you genius. Sheep die when left alone, because they are stupid.)
Wealth may multiple when used, even when used by others, but 'used' is the opposite of 'left alone'.
2) Yes, "having everyone own almost anything and charging people for the use." is a viable retirement strategy, scalable to the ENTIRE population, even with zero birthrates worldwide. How? If people can see these demographic shifts coming, and they will, entrepreneurs will invest all of those savings to automate production of the goods people will want to consume on retirement, which can be operated by a skeleton crew of the people who at retirement would prefer the extra income for doing being in that skeleton crew.
We are nowhere near the point that the entire world can be automated, and probably never will, but, more to the point, that still doesn't make sense. What, is everyone going to own a tiny fraction of the five hundred machines that are delivering goods and services, and thus make back exactly what they pay into the system? That insane balancing act rather obviously doesn't work if you have to pay operators workers anything. Money would fall out of the automated system, and it's hard to see how it would get back in if everyone owns part of the 'need producing' machines and can get everything they need for free.
If somehow, in the future, we have machines capable of producing everything everyone needs with little or no human work, which is not at all likely, your idea that everyone would 'own' these machines and charge 'everyone else' for their use is so loopy I don't even know where to start. Sane people realize that if we have the necessities being produced for free or almost free, it would be a good idea to have the government operate the machines and raise everyone's standard of living, leaving only those who want to buy luxuries to have to work.
I mean, what exactly happens to people who don't own the machines when this starts? They no longer can work anywhere, because everything is being produced with no work. However, they can't purchase anything, because food is still, for some reason, being charged for. This system is so goofy I can't even grasp how you think it works. You're in Star Trek replicator land, and trying to tack capitalism onto it. In the real world, if things cost nothing to produce, the price will drop to almost zero, and, tada, you can't make a living off operating the plant. Duh.
3) Your vision of an ownership society is archaic. You are dreaming of a time when one's entire worth had to be tied up in a farm or a machine, with no other investments. This
I have no idea how it would be harder to read sequentially than any other way. If flash truly had a problem with 'sequential' data, an obvious solution would be to, duh, not store the file sequentially. Space it out at whatever intervals flash wants. Or just don't load it sequentially...read the first meg, put it in place, read the tenth meg, put it place, read the second meg, put it in place...
If, OTOH, flash only wants to read 15 megs before having a small rest before it can read another 15 megs, obviously my idea would be a bad one.
And Vista's ReadyBoost sounds like an idiotic idea from what I've heard of it. It's exactly what I dismissed above: A damn swap file on a flash drive. (And it's a damn compressed and encrypted swap file. Yeah, let's make things even slower.)
If we want to introduce a third tier of memory between hard drive and RAM, let's do it right and make it slower ram, not flash.
Keith Olbermann (or possibly his writers?) is basically one of the few people who are actually willing to say 'This is what X said. It is a complete and utter lie.', as opposed to 'This is what X said. This is what Y said in response.'.(1)
In other words, he is one of the only news people at the 24 hour news networks.
1) X is usually Republicans or the Administration, which causes Republicans to dislike him, but they find it really hard to actually disagree with anything he's actually said, because, duh, it's true. And this isn't because he's 'liberal', it's because the news media actually stopped reporting facts about politics about a decade and a half ago, instead resorting to 'He said she said' reporting, and the Republicans got really good at synchronized lying.
If you don't watch a lot of TV, you're missing what he's lampooning.
See, he's not a strawman. There are people on real TV networks that act exactly like him, or, at least, exactly like him but stupider.
Yes, stupider. Colbert will often 'outsmart' himself, or at least he would if he were actually the person he's pretending to be, by repeating Republican talking points and then bringing up the rather obvious objection to them and then just randomly dismissing the objection with some obviously idiotic reason, or, if he talking point is just blatently factually incorrect, will appeal to 'truthiness' in that it feels correct.
O'Reilly and other Republican talking heads don't bring up the objection.
Colbert, to rephrase, is playing an informed Republican, vs. all the uninformed ones that manage to get airtime on the 'real' television networks. Because he's informed, he often makes literally no sense, because he states the actual facts, and then come to the official Republican conclusion, usually by inserting something that obviously isn't true in the middle.
And I'm not talking just about Fox, although O'Reilly is a big part of it. CNN has the idiots too.
Man, if it wasn't for that first paragraph, I'd think you were Colbert.