It's cheap, the upgrade check is trivial (and if it annoys you, it can be bypassed completely), and most importantly the license can be transferred from computer to computer. I'd recommend it over the OEM version if you just want a basic copy of Windows for games or Boot Camp.
While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.
For exactly the same reason we can't just run all our apps under Wine, or switch to another OS entirely: We use Windows for its cruft. Developers write some strange code due to poor programming skills, unreasonable deadlines, or simply because it was easier to hack together a workaround than trying to get Microsoft to fix a buggy library or API. Then Microsoft decides to update Windows, and does their best to make the new OS run all the horrible code that somehow managed to work on the old OS... Which just makes the new OS even cruftier and buggier than the last. Repeat this cycle a dozen times and you have Windows Vista.
Unfortunately, even though Microsoft's coders would love to start from scratch, and I'm sure they could put out a good OS if they wanted to, Microsoft knows we use Windows for its cruft. If Microsoft suddenly cut old legacy apps loose (or confined them to a Classic-like abstraction layer) the new Windows would lose its main advantage over *nix or MacOS. Microsoft doesn't want to compete on features, or ease of use, or really compete at all, not when it's so much easier to beat the market over the head with their Club of +1 Legacy Support.
Our only escape from this cycle is, as customers, to do our best to rid ourselves of unmaintained, poorly written, legacy apps. Make the case for open source, virtualized, web-based, or any high-agility solution that won't tie you to some arcane software or hardware down the line. Microsoft will only rethink their strategy when the market for cruft begins to die out, so do your part.
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles", multi-string value, defaults to something like "C:\pagefile.sys 512 1024". If you want more than one page file insert a null character between them.
If you want to do things by-the-book, you can use pagefilescript.vbs which happens to be in the %systemroot%/system32 directory in XP, 2003, and probably Vista. Info here.
Electrolysis doesn't release carbon dioxide per se, but it uses electricity which comes from coal or oil, to produce hydrogen that contains less energy than the oil you had to burn to make it
I think you miss the point of hydrogen power. As nice as it would be to have vehicles powered by clean, renewable energy, mechanical engineers have thus far been stymied in designing solar plants, wind farms, or hydroelectric dams to fit stock passenger vehicles. Fortunately, other engineers who more frequently "think outside the box" suggested the concept of stored energy. Vehicles could load up at convenient times and travel a substantial distance before returning to refill. Insidiously like gasoline engines - I know. Clean energy could power a electrolysis machine, which converts electricity into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would be supercooled and put into a vehicle, which would then burn it (combining it with free oxygen to produce easily-trapped water vapor) and produce motive force. It's ingenious and nearly pollution-free.
Plants get carbon from the ground too. In fact, industrialized agriculture has been depleting soil organic carbon for decades from overfertilization and overproduction. If we start mass-producing even more crops to supply our energy needs, we may trade sucking carbon from miles below the ground for carbon inches below the ground, but the problem will remain the same.
Yes, but the bacteria are producing it from decaying plant material. You'd have to see how much greenhouse gases are being produced by the bacteria as they decompose the vinegar/cellulose/whatever before calling this a better solution than conventional electrolysis.
Uh, people lie under oath all the time - it's called perjury, and not often caught. Lie detectors can be easily fooled with a little practice and are inadmissible evidence in most courts. Even "truth drugs" are really just sedatives; like alcohol, they impair judgement, but also like alcohol, they blur fantasy and reality.
But then again... I learned all that from Wikipedia. Naturally they'd want to besmirch the competition.
I dunno, a cheap, low-powered memory technology should be good regardless of the speed. For one thing, you can RAID any number of individual cells, for another, most drive space in PCs and handheld devices today is used for music, photos, and video, none of which are especially disk-intensive. Even 1080p Blu-Ray is only ~5MB/s.
But that doesn't mean I have high hopes;/. rarely goes a week without some miracle new storage technology yet I'm still using hard drives and the odd flash chip.
If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be?
Uh, less than $831. Of that $831, Apple would normally get $432 over the course of two years. They'd be happier getting cash up front, and happier still enlarging their market. I doubt an unlocked iPhone would be more than $700, which isn't that far from what people were paying a couple months ago.
But it's moot unless Apple can get out of their exclusivity contract.
Why not just change the software to report in bits, base 10? It would make it a hell of a lot easier to make calculations in your head like "Would all these files fit on a DVD?" or "How long will it take this file to download on my connection?"
In a great example of NIMBY hypocrisy in action, geeks who praise the metric system for everyone else won't accept metric units of storage capacity. Tell me: How is standardizing 'Kilobytes' (1024 groups of 8 bits) any different than standardizing Miles (5280 groups of 12 inches) or Gallons (16 groups of 8 ounces)?
Valve put a warning on the box that the licenses could only be activated in their respective countries. The foreign resellers conveniently forgot to tell that to people who purchased the software. The resellers misrepresented the product, not Valve.
Imagine I pulled off "Academic Use Only", "Upgrade Version", or "Not For Resale" stickers from product boxes, and sold them as full, unrestricted products. How is that any different? Would the developer be to blame? Would they be "breaking the law" and "sabotaging legally purchased products" if they don't honor my false claims?
I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't operate any coding sweatshops in Malaysia.
They may hire people from foreign countries on H1B visas, but they actually come to the US, live here, earn, spend, and pay taxes.
Likewise, you're free to travel to Thailand, live there, and buy discounted games.
I just don't get all the hatred for Valve. With their development costs and retailer markups, they'd go bankrupt if they sold the Orange Box here for $15. No one in Thailand could afford it for $50. Does charging poor people less and rich people more make Valve some sort of monster?
I dunno, I'd think I could be pretty productive at a job where I only had to put in eight hours every six months, and nothing at work changed during the intervening period.
Of course, just like every other time- or labor-saving invention, it wouldn't make our lives easier. It would be adapted for business, and no one would be able to keep up in the labor market without putting in six months of work every night. Such is the price of a free market.
I'm not, as it's a weird comparison. One is a prize for completing a project, the other is the worth of a company. One involves repeating what Robert Goddard was doing 75 years ago (with a grant equivalent to $60000 in 2007 dollars) in slightly larger scale with a modern control system. The other involves streaming ten million videos a day all over the planet.
Next up: The world isn't fair, as my house is worth less than the salaries of all McDonalds employees put together.
Yeah, the rules specifically state that it has to be entirely rocket-powered.
A.4.2 Vehicle must take-off vertically utilizing only rocket power from Point A. No aerodynamic or air-breathing methods of hovering, propulsion, steering, or landing are permitted except in the case of abort.
Sucks, as I didn't see that until I'd already built a lander with repulsorlifts.
It was meant to be funny, but if I had found an important node that might (a) directly belong to one of the people operating the network, (b) was making or accepting connections to one of their private computers, or (c) had the encryption keys necessary to issue commands to vast numbers of nodes, I'd contact the NSA/DHS/FBI/CIA/whoever had jurisdiction and was capable of gaining access to the node or its ISP in a hurry.
The last thing I'd do is nmap the IP address - it's like figuring out the location of a terrorist safe house, then knocking on the front door, shouting "anyone home?", and walking around peeping in the windows.
Now the botnet admins are tipped off, so naturally they'd immediately change servers and delete any evidence from the previous node, then start looking at ways to improve their code to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Oh, and have the botnet start ddosing the guy just for the heck of it.
A lot of us are used to dealing with regular viruses/worms/trojans, where the enemy is just an algorithm; you can probe and mess around to your heart's content until you find the problem (and fix it). But active botnets are run by real criminals who react to threats and learn from their mistakes. Computer security experts need to adapt by learning from real-world law enforcement, who have been discovering ways to track and ensnare intelligent foes for millenia.
Even the smallest fighter in the US arsenal today can carry 7000 pounds of armament, and planes that could be considered "bombers" carry more than twice that.
Of course, bombers generally don't carry more bombs than their mission justifies, to improve flight handling and reduce the chance of accidents. And I won't argue that you could do an awful lot of damage with 2000 pounds of high explosives.
But then again, a large pickup truck could carry 4000 pounds of explosives, and compared to an unmanned experimental aircraft flying into restricted airspace, most terrorists would just as soon save money and draw as little attention as possible. They're very practical.
If the "command and control" servers have been found, why haven't the IPs been masked to physical addresses and physical security types with physical balaclavas and physical MP5s probing the physical door?
Slashdot Mirror
I could certainly see GTA making some kids think they can out-run cops in order to get out of a speeding ticket
If kids think that, they haven't played GTA much. Cops respawn every quarter mile or so when you have a wanted level.
On the other hand, GTA taught me that auto detailers are convenient, quick, and the single greatest threat to the criminal justice system.
It's cheap, the upgrade check is trivial (and if it annoys you, it can be bypassed completely), and most importantly the license can be transferred from computer to computer. I'd recommend it over the OEM version if you just want a basic copy of Windows for games or Boot Camp.
While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.
For exactly the same reason we can't just run all our apps under Wine, or switch to another OS entirely: We use Windows for its cruft. Developers write some strange code due to poor programming skills, unreasonable deadlines, or simply because it was easier to hack together a workaround than trying to get Microsoft to fix a buggy library or API. Then Microsoft decides to update Windows, and does their best to make the new OS run all the horrible code that somehow managed to work on the old OS... Which just makes the new OS even cruftier and buggier than the last. Repeat this cycle a dozen times and you have Windows Vista.
Unfortunately, even though Microsoft's coders would love to start from scratch, and I'm sure they could put out a good OS if they wanted to, Microsoft knows we use Windows for its cruft. If Microsoft suddenly cut old legacy apps loose (or confined them to a Classic-like abstraction layer) the new Windows would lose its main advantage over *nix or MacOS. Microsoft doesn't want to compete on features, or ease of use, or really compete at all, not when it's so much easier to beat the market over the head with their Club of +1 Legacy Support.
Our only escape from this cycle is, as customers, to do our best to rid ourselves of unmaintained, poorly written, legacy apps. Make the case for open source, virtualized, web-based, or any high-agility solution that won't tie you to some arcane software or hardware down the line. Microsoft will only rethink their strategy when the market for cruft begins to die out, so do your part.
Oops. It's "pagefileconfig.vbs"... But yes, it's on XP boxes.
And the GP was specifically looking for a script-based solution.
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles", multi-string value, defaults to something like "C:\pagefile.sys 512 1024". If you want more than one page file insert a null character between them.
If you want to do things by-the-book, you can use pagefilescript.vbs which happens to be in the %systemroot%/system32 directory in XP, 2003, and probably Vista. Info here.
Electrolysis doesn't release carbon dioxide per se, but it uses electricity which comes from coal or oil, to produce hydrogen that contains less energy than the oil you had to burn to make it
I think you miss the point of hydrogen power. As nice as it would be to have vehicles powered by clean, renewable energy, mechanical engineers have thus far been stymied in designing solar plants, wind farms, or hydroelectric dams to fit stock passenger vehicles. Fortunately, other engineers who more frequently "think outside the box" suggested the concept of stored energy. Vehicles could load up at convenient times and travel a substantial distance before returning to refill. Insidiously like gasoline engines - I know. Clean energy could power a electrolysis machine, which converts electricity into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would be supercooled and put into a vehicle, which would then burn it (combining it with free oxygen to produce easily-trapped water vapor) and produce motive force. It's ingenious and nearly pollution-free.
Plants get carbon from the ground too. In fact, industrialized agriculture has been depleting soil organic carbon for decades from overfertilization and overproduction. If we start mass-producing even more crops to supply our energy needs, we may trade sucking carbon from miles below the ground for carbon inches below the ground, but the problem will remain the same.
Yes, but the bacteria are producing it from decaying plant material. You'd have to see how much greenhouse gases are being produced by the bacteria as they decompose the vinegar/cellulose/whatever before calling this a better solution than conventional electrolysis.
Uh, people lie under oath all the time - it's called perjury, and not often caught. Lie detectors can be easily fooled with a little practice and are inadmissible evidence in most courts. Even "truth drugs" are really just sedatives; like alcohol, they impair judgement, but also like alcohol, they blur fantasy and reality.
But then again... I learned all that from Wikipedia. Naturally they'd want to besmirch the competition.
Actually, there are some things better not seen at 586x magnification.
I dunno, a cheap, low-powered memory technology should be good regardless of the speed. For one thing, you can RAID any number of individual cells, for another, most drive space in PCs and handheld devices today is used for music, photos, and video, none of which are especially disk-intensive. Even 1080p Blu-Ray is only ~5MB/s.
/. rarely goes a week without some miracle new storage technology yet I'm still using hard drives and the odd flash chip.
But that doesn't mean I have high hopes;
If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be?
Uh, less than $831. Of that $831, Apple would normally get $432 over the course of two years. They'd be happier getting cash up front, and happier still enlarging their market. I doubt an unlocked iPhone would be more than $700, which isn't that far from what people were paying a couple months ago.
But it's moot unless Apple can get out of their exclusivity contract.
Why not just change the software to report in bits, base 10? It would make it a hell of a lot easier to make calculations in your head like "Would all these files fit on a DVD?" or "How long will it take this file to download on my connection?"
In a great example of NIMBY hypocrisy in action, geeks who praise the metric system for everyone else won't accept metric units of storage capacity. Tell me: How is standardizing 'Kilobytes' (1024 groups of 8 bits) any different than standardizing Miles (5280 groups of 12 inches) or Gallons (16 groups of 8 ounces)?
Valve put a warning on the box that the licenses could only be activated in their respective countries. The foreign resellers conveniently forgot to tell that to people who purchased the software. The resellers misrepresented the product, not Valve.
Imagine I pulled off "Academic Use Only", "Upgrade Version", or "Not For Resale" stickers from product boxes, and sold them as full, unrestricted products. How is that any different? Would the developer be to blame? Would they be "breaking the law" and "sabotaging legally purchased products" if they don't honor my false claims?
I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't operate any coding sweatshops in Malaysia.
They may hire people from foreign countries on H1B visas, but they actually come to the US, live here, earn, spend, and pay taxes.
Likewise, you're free to travel to Thailand, live there, and buy discounted games.
I just don't get all the hatred for Valve. With their development costs and retailer markups, they'd go bankrupt if they sold the Orange Box here for $15. No one in Thailand could afford it for $50. Does charging poor people less and rich people more make Valve some sort of monster?
I dunno, I'd think I could be pretty productive at a job where I only had to put in eight hours every six months, and nothing at work changed during the intervening period.
Of course, just like every other time- or labor-saving invention, it wouldn't make our lives easier. It would be adapted for business, and no one would be able to keep up in the labor market without putting in six months of work every night. Such is the price of a free market.
Forget esoteric units, how fast is it in Playstation3s per foot-second?
-- To the Prat-cave!
(prat)
Sorry, I was looking at the user's choice winner. With NoScript on, Brian Greene's section didn't load.
The winning video is "The Problem with Math.", according to the site. "Ducky" placed fourth.
I'm not, as it's a weird comparison. One is a prize for completing a project, the other is the worth of a company. One involves repeating what Robert Goddard was doing 75 years ago (with a grant equivalent to $60000 in 2007 dollars) in slightly larger scale with a modern control system. The other involves streaming ten million videos a day all over the planet.
Next up: The world isn't fair, as my house is worth less than the salaries of all McDonalds employees put together.
Yeah, the rules specifically state that it has to be entirely rocket-powered.
A.4.2 Vehicle must take-off vertically utilizing only rocket power from Point A. No aerodynamic or air-breathing methods of hovering, propulsion, steering, or landing are permitted except in the case of abort.
Sucks, as I didn't see that until I'd already built a lander with repulsorlifts.
It was meant to be funny, but if I had found an important node that might (a) directly belong to one of the people operating the network, (b) was making or accepting connections to one of their private computers, or (c) had the encryption keys necessary to issue commands to vast numbers of nodes, I'd contact the NSA/DHS/FBI/CIA/whoever had jurisdiction and was capable of gaining access to the node or its ISP in a hurry.
The last thing I'd do is nmap the IP address - it's like figuring out the location of a terrorist safe house, then knocking on the front door, shouting "anyone home?", and walking around peeping in the windows.
Now the botnet admins are tipped off, so naturally they'd immediately change servers and delete any evidence from the previous node, then start looking at ways to improve their code to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Oh, and have the botnet start ddosing the guy just for the heck of it.
A lot of us are used to dealing with regular viruses/worms/trojans, where the enemy is just an algorithm; you can probe and mess around to your heart's content until you find the problem (and fix it). But active botnets are run by real criminals who react to threats and learn from their mistakes. Computer security experts need to adapt by learning from real-world law enforcement, who have been discovering ways to track and ensnare intelligent foes for millenia.
Even the smallest fighter in the US arsenal today can carry 7000 pounds of armament, and planes that could be considered "bombers" carry more than twice that.
Of course, bombers generally don't carry more bombs than their mission justifies, to improve flight handling and reduce the chance of accidents. And I won't argue that you could do an awful lot of damage with 2000 pounds of high explosives.
But then again, a large pickup truck could carry 4000 pounds of explosives, and compared to an unmanned experimental aircraft flying into restricted airspace, most terrorists would just as soon save money and draw as little attention as possible. They're very practical.
If the "command and control" servers have been found, why haven't the IPs been masked to physical addresses and physical security types with physical balaclavas and physical MP5s probing the physical door?