The local high school
requires that every student complete a 'tech' requirement to graduate
by either passing an online test or by taking a one-semester 'tech'
class. The 'tech' subjects that the students are required to know
are not computer languages, file systems, operating system functions,
user interface layout, programming, etc. No, the 'tech subjects'
are MS Excel, MS Word, MS Publisher, MS Powerpoint, and MS Front
Page. The online test displays screens from these apps and then
asks the student to select the proper menu choice to perform some
desired action. The student gets three trys for each question and
then they 'fail' the question and on to the next. Worse is that
the test is based on Office XP, not Office 2003. Of course,
Office 2007 will have different menus so all of that 'knowledge' will
soon be obsolete. Keep in mind that a lot of these
kids have parents who work at Microsoft.
Microsoft didn't drop any balls. They DESIGNED wga to send info to their server and they made installation of wga MANDATORY if you wanted to download critical security updates. The only thing Microsoft has done is to slightly modify wga and post crap like this 'dropped the ball on privacy' stuff to make themselves sound more warm and cuddly. Microsoft is still installing wga and they can (and will) have it do whatever they need it to do in the near future.
Climate on our planet is never
constant. It could be global cooling
that we were bitching about instead of global warming.
Obviously, it was warmer 1,000 years ago in 986 when Greenland was
settled but then got a lot
colder 400 years later. Think of the slashdot story that
would have been.
Laptop batteries hold a lot of energy and could obviously be used by the bad guys to do bad things on an airplane. A year ago, at great difficulty, I emailed some info on this to Homeland Security. Other than getting put into their database as a certified crank and possible terrorist, I never heard a word or a question. No doubt, they're hard at work on the problem, though. Right.
Maybe Bill Gates understands the umpty-ump millions of lines of codes but what happens after he's gone? Then we'll need mere mortals to go in and understand enough to confidently code the Vista2 release...and they won't be able to do it. They'll throw up their hands, clutch their heads, and say 'I...can't...rememmber...what...that...does.' Frankly, the umpty-ump millions of lines of code in Windows Vista seems a little over the top for what is theoretically supposed to be system software that will let your word processor run so you can write a letter to Aunt Minnie. My cell phone can browse the web with a puny processor and not much code. Do people really want a new 'Windows' that uses dozens of gigabytes of hard disk, needs much more powerful hardware, new drivers, etc. just to do what they're doing now? Tell me again, what does Windows Vista do that Linux doesn't? Will Windows Vista be more secure? Doubt it as long as Microsoft keeps on using ActiveX, installing stuff like 'Windows Genuine Advantage' and the like. When will people realize that Bill Gates is not really the answer and that 'Windows' is not the question?
Right now, most people and businesses have desktop computers running Windows with the MS Office app and other apps. Companies have enormous numbers of employees running around updating, patching, fixing, migrating, configuring, etc. Home users spend a lot of time wrestling with viruses, bots, spam, installation, migration, drivers, etc. Maybe in the future, we will just buy a computer that's an appliance like a toaster that only runs one app, Googlenet 1.0, that won't do anything until you plug it into the net and hook up with Google (or Microsoft) to get your apps, data, etc. Big and small businesses would really go for that because they could get rid of all of those IT Windows support people. Home users would like that because they could just use the digital information instead of wrestling with system issues so much.
I don't see what the big deal is. Looks like Google is just building another server farm, only bigger...way bigger. People have been building those for 10+ years. Google has been adding a lot of stuff to 'google.com' so it's not surprising that they would be adding a lot of server capacity to keep up. Also, Google has their online apps like word processor and spreadsheet coming and those use a LOT of server capacity whereas things like Google Earth are more bandwidth intensive. Of course, the personal computer was supposed to eliminate the need for the massive central server and yet here we are in 2006 and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all building more and bigger server complexes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I just accessed Windows Update and installed the latest update for Windows Genuine Advantage. Yes, I know it's spyware, evil, and doing nothing good for my system. Yes, I have a completely legal Windows XP system. However, you have to install WGA before the windows update site will give you the latest security updates and you cannot use Win XP without those. So...Microsoft has unlimited leverage with this, at least until someone sues them and wins. Fortunately, I have another partition without Windows formatted with a file system that Windows cannot read so the bulk of the system is safe from Microsoft. What a sad state of affairs, though, that the biggest software company in the world does business like this. Why would anyone ever voluntarily choose anything Microsoft? You would have to have your head examined for holes.
Used to be that Intel (and others) would give samples to reviewers, under a non-disclosure agreement, a short while before the launch date and then the reviews using real hardware would be posted on the day of the launch. Now, we are getting more and more 'reviews' of hardware that is not actually being sold or even shipping or even with a firm launch date. This just seems like reviews of vaporware hardware designed to hype the product rather than an actual measurement of real performance of a product that can actually be purchased. There have now been so many hypware reviews of 'Conroe' that the real reviews of the actual product that ships will probably be ignored as 'old stuff.' If the product is really good, it will be just as good on the day it ships and doesn't need a lot of pre-shipping hype. If the product is not really quite as good as the reviews of pre-shipping samples suggest, then the reviews are nothing but misleading. Either way, why not just wait until the product actual is shipped to start posting reviews of it?
Windows is reasonably secure against viruses and spyware as long as you don't use it on the internet. There are so many ways that Windows is vulnerable on the internet, though, that it's doubtful that it can ever be really secure if you want to use Internet Explorer. If you need to do IE, just use a clean, patched install behind a firewall and reinstall it from clean images periodically. Oh, and don't use any apps or keep your data on that install either, of course.
When desktop computers first became affordable to school districts, they were supposed to be essential education tools. The student was supposed to sit down at the computer and have it be a patient tutor that would lead him past the difficulties he might be having as he pointed and clicked his way through powerful educational software. Well, a very small part of that might still be true but most of what kids do with computers in school now is Googling to 'research' the topic du jour and then powerpointing up what they find. The result of this 'education' is that kids never crack a book in the library, rely on superficial, shallow information that is often incorrect, have weak writing skills, and don't think beyond the depth of a powerpoint bullet point. High school students from 20 years ago got a much better education than current high school students are getting. The only thing current high school students would beat them on is powerpoint and Word art skills.
There are a lot of buildings with cell tower antennas on the roof. Most of them have been added within the last 5 years or so, to existing buildings. The cell phone companies like using rooftop cell sites because they are elevated, easy to hide, don't require building an unattractive tower, and are relatively inexpensive to lease. Maybe the building you work in has a 5,000 watt cell transmitter antenna on the roof just a few feet above your head. If cell phone radiation increases the incidence of brain tumors, as is looking more and more likely, stories like this are just the first to come out of the pipeline but they will not be the last.
The problem is all the prepared or frozen stuff that people buy like rice-a-roni, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat canned soup, or tv dinners to save time and to get tasty meals. Look on the ingredients and there is always a LOT of salt (aka sodium) along with monosodium glutamate in some form ('sodium caseinate', 'glutamic acid,' 'hydrolyzed protein,' autolyzed protein'). The massive doses of salt causes a lot hypertension and the MSG causes nerve system problems (not to mention headaches) that lead to other things. If people just ate fresh food (fruit, vegetables, and meat) that they prepared themselves they would be a lot healthier and feel better, too.
Windows 95 brought TCP/IP and a web browser. Windows 98 brought USB and FAT32. Windows 2K/XP brought multi-user and NTFS. Quick, in 30 seconds or less, what is Vista is going to have that's interesting? I predict it will a draconian DRM thingy to go with some product activation scheme even more onerous that WinXP. Yeah, that's got me excited...not.
I went into my local Costco a month ago and asked their computer guy if they had an AMD dual-core machine. His reply was "Does AMD make a dual-core machine?"
Now, that's funny! Just about everyone, apparently.
Tell those people to open up their HP or Dell or whatever box and look
at the components inside. Everything in there will say 'Made in
China' on it.
A BSA guy will fit right in with the rest of the sleazy bunch in the white house and their enron-like supporters. Is there even ONE senior guy in the Bush administration who puts the good of the country ahead of private agendas and interests?
The Intel 'core' architecture looks like it is focused first and foremost on single-core performance but with improved dual-core capabilities beyond the current 'netburst' architecture which was essentially single-core only. For example, the new core memory aliasing described on the last page of the article doesn't look like it will scale very well with more than two cores and even two cores will have performance hits, although it will be much better than the current Intel dual-core processors. The core architecture apparently uses shared l2 cache, though, while the current AMD design uses seperate l2 cache for each core that mirror via hypertransport link and onboard memory controller. The Intel core approach will probably give better single-core performance than AMD but suffer with dual-core or multi-core. Since most software (and benchmarks) don't multithread enough to benefit much from dual or multi-core, Intel wins. But...if future OS software is more multithreaded, AMD probably wins. Since Windows Vista,.NET 2.0, and DirectX 10 all support sophisticated multithreading, Intel looks like they will still be in trouble competing with AMD, even if AMD doesn't udpate their current design.
...it sounds like rootkits are becoming a BIG problem at Microsoft:
"When
you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the
only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really
is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike
Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at
Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here."
Now
those sound like the words of someone who has 'been there and done
that' more than a few times. If Microsoft is having those kinds of
problems with the hardware, software, and expertise they have at their
disposal, imagine the kinds of problem that 'Sam's Plumbing and Heating
Co.' is having.
...to run their spyware, that is. ALL of the hardware and software vendors seem to think it's open season on the user to run whatever spyware and adware on his system they want to. To sweeten the pot, they'll even spam him a few times a week with some post-sale 'great deals' to investigate.
If the US government buys hardware and/or software for sensitive uses from ANYONE in the current wild west market without thoroughly testing it and removing all of the crap, they are totally insane. Totally.
Everyone has seen slow Windows and they want to know WHY it's slow. No one cares about Microsoft being slow to develop new Windows or IE or whatever. Yawwwn.
Try googling on "George Bush nutcase" with Windows XP and the 'no filtering' option set and you'll probably get about 198,000 hits. Now try on another platform and you could get as many as 203,000 hits.
The system of base-10 numbers that we use today was from the Arabic world. The romans used their system of 'roman numerals' which was greatly inferior and, most importantly, lacked a 'zero', or even the important concept of zero.
There wasn't anything new in the article to justify a story on Slashdot. Yes, Intel held their IDF but they do that every year. Yes, Intel has AMD in their sights. Yes, Intel is focused on performance. Prototype tablet machines. That's all the same every year, too. Flash memory to run apps from. Not new and not even interesting. Where's the NEWS???
Slashdot Mirror
The local high school requires that every student complete a 'tech' requirement to graduate by either passing an online test or by taking a one-semester 'tech' class. The 'tech' subjects that the students are required to know are not computer languages, file systems, operating system functions, user interface layout, programming, etc. No, the 'tech subjects' are MS Excel, MS Word, MS Publisher, MS Powerpoint, and MS Front Page. The online test displays screens from these apps and then asks the student to select the proper menu choice to perform some desired action. The student gets three trys for each question and then they 'fail' the question and on to the next. Worse is that the test is based on Office XP, not Office 2003. Of course, Office 2007 will have different menus so all of that 'knowledge' will soon be obsolete. Keep in mind that a lot of these kids have parents who work at Microsoft.
Microsoft didn't drop any balls. They DESIGNED wga to send info to their server and they made installation of wga MANDATORY if you wanted to download critical security updates. The only thing Microsoft has done is to slightly modify wga and post crap like this 'dropped the ball on privacy' stuff to make themselves sound more warm and cuddly. Microsoft is still installing wga and they can (and will) have it do whatever they need it to do in the near future.
Climate on our planet is never constant. It could be global cooling that we were bitching about instead of global warming. Obviously, it was warmer 1,000 years ago in 986 when Greenland was settled but then got a lot colder 400 years later. Think of the slashdot story that would have been.
Laptop batteries hold a lot of energy and could obviously be used by the bad guys to do bad things on an airplane. A year ago, at great difficulty, I emailed some info on this to Homeland Security. Other than getting put into their database as a certified crank and possible terrorist, I never heard a word or a question. No doubt, they're hard at work on the problem, though. Right.
Maybe Bill Gates understands the umpty-ump millions of lines of codes but what happens after he's gone? Then we'll need mere mortals to go in and understand enough to confidently code the Vista2 release...and they won't be able to do it. They'll throw up their hands, clutch their heads, and say 'I...can't...rememmber...what...that...does.' Frankly, the umpty-ump millions of lines of code in Windows Vista seems a little over the top for what is theoretically supposed to be system software that will let your word processor run so you can write a letter to Aunt Minnie. My cell phone can browse the web with a puny processor and not much code. Do people really want a new 'Windows' that uses dozens of gigabytes of hard disk, needs much more powerful hardware, new drivers, etc. just to do what they're doing now? Tell me again, what does Windows Vista do that Linux doesn't? Will Windows Vista be more secure? Doubt it as long as Microsoft keeps on using ActiveX, installing stuff like 'Windows Genuine Advantage' and the like. When will people realize that Bill Gates is not really the answer and that 'Windows' is not the question?
Right now, most people and businesses have desktop computers running Windows with the MS Office app and other apps. Companies have enormous numbers of employees running around updating, patching, fixing, migrating, configuring, etc. Home users spend a lot of time wrestling with viruses, bots, spam, installation, migration, drivers, etc. Maybe in the future, we will just buy a computer that's an appliance like a toaster that only runs one app, Googlenet 1.0, that won't do anything until you plug it into the net and hook up with Google (or Microsoft) to get your apps, data, etc. Big and small businesses would really go for that because they could get rid of all of those IT Windows support people. Home users would like that because they could just use the digital information instead of wrestling with system issues so much.
I don't see what the big deal is. Looks like Google is just building another server farm, only bigger...way bigger. People have been building those for 10+ years. Google has been adding a lot of stuff to 'google.com' so it's not surprising that they would be adding a lot of server capacity to keep up. Also, Google has their online apps like word processor and spreadsheet coming and those use a LOT of server capacity whereas things like Google Earth are more bandwidth intensive. Of course, the personal computer was supposed to eliminate the need for the massive central server and yet here we are in 2006 and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all building more and bigger server complexes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I just accessed Windows Update and installed the latest update for Windows Genuine Advantage. Yes, I know it's spyware, evil, and doing nothing good for my system. Yes, I have a completely legal Windows XP system. However, you have to install WGA before the windows update site will give you the latest security updates and you cannot use Win XP without those. So...Microsoft has unlimited leverage with this, at least until someone sues them and wins. Fortunately, I have another partition without Windows formatted with a file system that Windows cannot read so the bulk of the system is safe from Microsoft. What a sad state of affairs, though, that the biggest software company in the world does business like this. Why would anyone ever voluntarily choose anything Microsoft? You would have to have your head examined for holes.
Used to be that Intel (and others) would give samples to reviewers, under a non-disclosure agreement, a short while before the launch date and then the reviews using real hardware would be posted on the day of the launch. Now, we are getting more and more 'reviews' of hardware that is not actually being sold or even shipping or even with a firm launch date. This just seems like reviews of vaporware hardware designed to hype the product rather than an actual measurement of real performance of a product that can actually be purchased. There have now been so many hypware reviews of 'Conroe' that the real reviews of the actual product that ships will probably be ignored as 'old stuff.' If the product is really good, it will be just as good on the day it ships and doesn't need a lot of pre-shipping hype. If the product is not really quite as good as the reviews of pre-shipping samples suggest, then the reviews are nothing but misleading. Either way, why not just wait until the product actual is shipped to start posting reviews of it?
Windows is reasonably secure against viruses and spyware as long as you don't use it on the internet. There are so many ways that Windows is vulnerable on the internet, though, that it's doubtful that it can ever be really secure if you want to use Internet Explorer. If you need to do IE, just use a clean, patched install behind a firewall and reinstall it from clean images periodically. Oh, and don't use any apps or keep your data on that install either, of course.
When desktop computers first became affordable to school districts, they were supposed to be essential education tools. The student was supposed to sit down at the computer and have it be a patient tutor that would lead him past the difficulties he might be having as he pointed and clicked his way through powerful educational software. Well, a very small part of that might still be true but most of what kids do with computers in school now is Googling to 'research' the topic du jour and then powerpointing up what they find. The result of this 'education' is that kids never crack a book in the library, rely on superficial, shallow information that is often incorrect, have weak writing skills, and don't think beyond the depth of a powerpoint bullet point. High school students from 20 years ago got a much better education than current high school students are getting. The only thing current high school students would beat them on is powerpoint and Word art skills.
There are a lot of buildings with cell tower antennas on the roof. Most of them have been added within the last 5 years or so, to existing buildings. The cell phone companies like using rooftop cell sites because they are elevated, easy to hide, don't require building an unattractive tower, and are relatively inexpensive to lease. Maybe the building you work in has a 5,000 watt cell transmitter antenna on the roof just a few feet above your head. If cell phone radiation increases the incidence of brain tumors, as is looking more and more likely, stories like this are just the first to come out of the pipeline but they will not be the last.
The problem is all the prepared or frozen stuff that people buy like rice-a-roni, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat canned soup, or tv dinners to save time and to get tasty meals. Look on the ingredients and there is always a LOT of salt (aka sodium) along with monosodium glutamate in some form ('sodium caseinate', 'glutamic acid,' 'hydrolyzed protein,' autolyzed protein'). The massive doses of salt causes a lot hypertension and the MSG causes nerve system problems (not to mention headaches) that lead to other things. If people just ate fresh food (fruit, vegetables, and meat) that they prepared themselves they would be a lot healthier and feel better, too.
Windows 95 brought TCP/IP and a web browser. Windows 98 brought USB and FAT32. Windows 2K/XP brought multi-user and NTFS. Quick, in 30 seconds or less, what is Vista is going to have that's interesting? I predict it will a draconian DRM thingy to go with some product activation scheme even more onerous that WinXP. Yeah, that's got me excited...not.
I went into my local Costco a month ago and asked their computer guy if they had an AMD dual-core machine. His reply was "Does AMD make a dual-core machine?"
We're not fascist yet since we fall short on several of the 14 characteristics of the fascist state:
1 -- Displays of the flag have decreased and most don't sing when its time to sing 'God Bless America' at baseball games.
8 -- There's very little intertwining of religion and government on an official basis, other than in the rhetoric of a few leaders.
14 -- Our elections are generally not fraudulent, although Diebold et. al. are making inroads.
Okay, we're not doing too well on 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 but there's still hope.
"Who wants to buy things from a Chinese company?"
Now, that's funny! Just about everyone, apparently. Tell those people to open up their HP or Dell or whatever box and look at the components inside. Everything in there will say 'Made in China' on it.
A BSA guy will fit right in with the rest of the sleazy bunch in the white house and their enron-like supporters. Is there even ONE senior guy in the Bush administration who puts the good of the country ahead of private agendas and interests?
The Intel 'core' architecture looks like it is focused first and foremost on single-core performance but with improved dual-core capabilities beyond the current 'netburst' architecture which was essentially single-core only. For example, the new core memory aliasing described on the last page of the article doesn't look like it will scale very well with more than two cores and even two cores will have performance hits, although it will be much better than the current Intel dual-core processors. The core architecture apparently uses shared l2 cache, though, while the current AMD design uses seperate l2 cache for each core that mirror via hypertransport link and onboard memory controller. The Intel core approach will probably give better single-core performance than AMD but suffer with dual-core or multi-core. Since most software (and benchmarks) don't multithread enough to benefit much from dual or multi-core, Intel wins. But...if future OS software is more multithreaded, AMD probably wins. Since Windows Vista, .NET 2.0, and DirectX 10 all support sophisticated multithreading, Intel looks like they will still be in trouble competing with AMD, even if AMD doesn't udpate their current design.
"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here."
Now those sound like the words of someone who has 'been there and done that' more than a few times. If Microsoft is having those kinds of problems with the hardware, software, and expertise they have at their disposal, imagine the kinds of problem that 'Sam's Plumbing and Heating Co.' is having.
...to run their spyware, that is. ALL of the hardware and software vendors seem to think it's open season on the user to run whatever spyware and adware on his system they want to. To sweeten the pot, they'll even spam him a few times a week with some post-sale 'great deals' to investigate.
If the US government buys hardware and/or software for sensitive uses from ANYONE in the current wild west market without thoroughly testing it and removing all of the crap, they are totally insane. Totally.
Everyone has seen slow Windows and they want to know WHY it's slow. No one cares about Microsoft being slow to develop new Windows or IE or whatever. Yawwwn.
Try googling on "George Bush nutcase" with Windows XP and the 'no filtering' option set and you'll probably get about 198,000 hits. Now try on another platform and you could get as many as 203,000 hits.
The system of base-10 numbers that we use today was from the Arabic world. The romans used their system of 'roman numerals' which was greatly inferior and, most importantly, lacked a 'zero', or even the important concept of zero.
There wasn't anything new in the article to justify a story on Slashdot. Yes, Intel held their IDF but they do that every year. Yes, Intel has AMD in their sights. Yes, Intel is focused on performance. Prototype tablet machines. That's all the same every year, too. Flash memory to run apps from. Not new and not even interesting. Where's the NEWS???