I'm beginning to realize too many engineers and computer nerds fall into a trap where they can only see how things will fail. This makes sense, because that is what a good engineer should do. However, the brightest engineers I know often have a hard time thinking outside the box. When given an idea that doesn't mesh with their existing view of the world, they are often quick to shoot it down.
I think many engineers would do very well to learn things and associate with people who are very far from their occuptaions. Hang out with somebody who does Feng Shui for a living--it really is just a different language for expressing good design and architecture. Read up on Taoism. Hang out with people who deal with the public--a nurse or something. Hang out with a couple artists. Learn Jazz, where the idea is to *not* have a rigid musical structure. Force yourself to enjoy sports... hockey has a lot of skill! Force yourself into doing things that don't require stringent rules like programming. And for god sake, stop trying to fucking correct your girlfriend/wife/whatever on minor technical details (even though it is hard sometimes, trust me)!!
The more you force yourself to *stop* thinking like an engineer, the better you'll be at engineering and the happier your life will be overall.
Also I doubt your claim that Aero actually does TTF rendering on the GPU, do you have any references to back that up?
Ask and ye shall receive:
One of the most important factors in determining WPF performance is that it is render boundâ"the more pixels you have to render, the greater the performance cost. However, the more rendering that can be offloaded to the graphics processing unit (GPU), the more performance benefits you can gain. The WPF application hardware rendering pipeline takes full advantage of Microsoft DirectX features on hardware that supports a minimum of Microsoft DirectX version 7.0. Further optimizations can be gained by hardware that supports Microsoft DirectX version 7.0 and PixelShader 2.0+ features.
ClearType in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can take advantage of hardware acceleration for better performance and to reduce CPU load and system memory requirements. By using the pixel shaders and video memory of a graphics card, ClearType provides faster rendering of text, particularly when animation is used.
Exploit the card for more then just drawing rectangles. For example, does the 10-year old card manage the entire rendering of a font on the GPU? Or does it just take pixels from the CPU? You realize on a DirectX 10 capable card, Vista will hand the entire process of rendering a font to the GPU, right? In fact, the GPU will cache the font on the video card instead of the system RAM.
Dude, 10 year old video cards could *not* handle what Vista needs. I'd wager the video card is the single most important hardware upgrade you need for a happy Vista experience. Even more then RAM or CPU. You need a modern video card for a fast, happy Vista experience.
Why are so many techies such damn "get off my lawn" about anything but their narrow little world? The 80 character green screen ain't coming back gramps... deal!
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier.
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU? You are telling me that rather then having to load a window from system RAM to the video card RAM every time you maximize or minimize a window is faster then storing both on the video card ram and then sending a quick set of commands to the GPU?
You do realize that in most cases, when you minimize a window in Vista, the GPU still keeps a fully rendered version of the "normal" size window in its memory? You do realize that that trick lets you hover over the taskbar and see "tail -f/var/log/messages" in PuTTY console while the thing is minimized, right? Can your CPU and the system memory do that? Turn Aero off and you loose all that, and eat more system memory.
We have powerful video cards these days and only a fool wouldn't exploit them to speed up the windowing system. Me thinks some are too blinded by hate and narrow imagination to appreciate cool things.
What you ask exists. Vista Virtual Store. Basically, if your crappy app writes to "C:\program files" in vista and you are running as a standard user, Vista will do exactly what you describe... it will redirect the file IO to a place owned by the user, not the system.
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
If you've got a card that does DirectX10 it will even hand the fonts to the video card and let the video card deal with font rendering and caching. Once you turn off Aero, the video card is just an old-school video card. Since a certain set of nerds seem to hate nice looking things, I bet most of them turn off the one thing that makes Vista way more snappy than XP--Aero.
Some how create a way for.NET apps that are compiled as "Any CPU" to call libraries compiled as x86.
If you compile a.NET app as "Any CPU" the runtime will take your MSIL and compile it to the native instruction set of the CPU. That means if you are running 64-bit, it will compile 64-bit. If you run 32-bit, it will compile 32-bit. The problem is, a 64-bit library cannot call a 32-bit one. Thus if you compile "Any CPU" and try calling a 32-bit library when you run on a 64-bit system,.NET will throw an exception.
So what do most people do? Compile their.NET apps as 32-bit. Then they know it will run everywhere.
Now, I'm no expert in 32/64-bit issues, but it seems to be if Microsoft had a way for.NET apps compiled for "Any CPU" to transparently deal with 32/64-bit libraries, you'd see more 64-bit apps. Again, I'm no expert and there are probably some pretty good reasons this is hard, if not impossible, to do.
If I was boss, I'd also make it so a single 32-bit installer could detect what CPU you've got and install 64-bit binaries or 32-bit automatically. From what I can tell, right now you pretty much have to ship two installers--one for 64-bit and one for 32-bit.
What failed was developer training, not user training. Developers could basically assume a user was running root. That let them take shortcuts like writing shit to "Program Files" or messing around with system files.
You have to understand the history as well. Microsoft grew up as a single-user OS and slowly morphed into a multi-user OS. They didn't grow up with the culture that unix-like systems have where the system was assumed to be multi-user.
Bottom line is we will always need some variant of sudo (aka UAC). UAC is actually the best sudo implementation there is so far, at least in my opinion. Granted, there is still room for improvement, but that mainly lies in "integration". For example, the common dialogs need a way for me to load notepad.exe, edit "C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts", and give me a UAC prompt when I save the file. That way I don't have to remember to load notepad.exe with elevated privileges. Let me write a new file to a protected directory and UAC me then instead loading the app with elevated privileges. That kind of integration will make the new world of "dont run as root" more enjoyable. The goal is to make it so there is no excuse for nerds to disable UAC (thus running as root 24/7).
You can write javascript that enhances a page. One can quickly write an implementation that keeps each image a standard page (good for SEO, good for multi-tab) but can also swap the image and not reload the page. Then you can right-click "Open new tab" or just click on it and not refresh the entire page.
It is called "sudo" and if your theoretical linux games would need root access to install mods as well. Or do you run your linux box as root all the time?
I'll admit, I run as root most of the time in Linux too, at least when I'm in a GUI. Know why? For most of Linux's history, it was a pain in the ass to not run as root. Only until recently have they had a good way to elevate privileges in the GUI. Guess what, that implementation is a hell of a lot like UAC. Guess what, I can live in Ubuntu as a normal user now and it will pop up a UAC-like dialog when an app needs elevation.
Perhaps the blame should go to game company for their shitty programming. UAC has been around for a long time and if modern games still can't function under UAC, they suck. And if a game mod has one editing files in "C:\Program Files", the user should need root to do so--"Program Files" is a shared resource like "/usr/bin".
Consider it a test, if the user can't figure out how to get past the UAC dialog, maybe they shouldn't be fucking around in "C:\Program Files" anyway.
Vista is the first Microsoft OS that isn't eye candy. The semi-transparent windows get out of your way and let you focus on your task, not the windowing system.
And don't be so quick to dismiss so-called "eye candy". "Eye candy" is usually a easy way to dismiss anything usable by normal people. Is the iPod just "eye candy"? The iPhone? The Wii? Would you rather drive a Geo Metro or a Honda Civic?
Techies worry me sometimes. Too much fuss over left-brain "numbers", too little attention to right-brain "creative" things. Creativity and art matter just as much, if not more, then a table of features.
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks like Aero wasn't turned on for these screen shots. Probably a driver thing. Vista without the glass doesn't look nearly as good.
I think like Vista, this version will be a lot of little things that improve the OS not huge ones. Then you'll go back from Windows 7 to Vista and go "jeez... how did I live without this Windows 7 feature" just like when you go back to XP and get pissed how crappy the taskbar is, how "in your face" the windows were, how crappy the file dialogs were, how crappy taskman.exe was, or how generally insecure the default setup was. Vista is a huge improvement over XP but it is hard to describe what improved. Just a lot of little annoyances are gone or smoothed out. Windows 7 will probably be the same.
And can I rant for a second? Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.
On Vista when it wants to reboot, the nag screen as a "snooze" button so you can defer the nagging for up to 4 hours. After the 4 hours, you can just hit the snooze again for four hours and when you leave for the day it will just reboot for you. I think they improved it quite a bit.
I sure wish Microsoft would figure out a way to let 3rd party installers hook into it's auto-update system. Every seems to want to re-invent that wheel and they all seem to do a really shitty job of it. The way I see it is there is no reason for "GoogleUpdater.exe", "QuicktimeUpdater" or whatever when the OS seems to have a pretty good update system already.
Have you looked at your phone bill? At lease on AT&T those "IM" messages seem to be converted into some kind of SMS message and sent through what appears to be a gateway. I originally thought like you probably do, they are actually TCP/IP packets leaving your phone. Then I looked at my SMS usage and found lots of messages to a couple of numbers and then it dawned on my the IM stuff goes through a SMS gateway.
I pay $5/mo for something like 500 IM's and TXT's. In fact, I don't even know the number because I've yet to hit it.
There is only so many text messages you send a month and lowering the price really won't change that. However, if they raised the price from $5 to $10 a month, I'd probably cut back on the plan. In other words, I think they found my sweet spot:-)
Note: I am not 15 years old, and 15 year olds probably change this picture quite a bit. I'd imagine a 15 year old kid might push the upper bounds of even a 5,000 message a month plan. They dont pay the phone bill though, they bear the costs of text messages via punishment when they go over whatever their folks pay. Maybe you should look at the supply/demand curve for kids who only indirectly bear the cost of text messages.
Is that the zinger in this article is nothing but a wireframe mockup hosted on flickr. Seriously. What the fuck? So we are now reduced to using poorly compressed JPG's on flickr as an excuse to get up in arms about Microsoft?
Do you think, even if that photo was of the patent, the price in that image has any bearing on reality besides being a wireframe mockup? Seriously?
And I suspect we are a bit on the same page. Personally, I think most computer crime is akin to real-world viruses. The stronger our anti-boitics, the stronger and more resistant the bugs get.
My only concern is, and I doubt you are part of this, sites like Slashdot seem to carry a strange attitude that because something takes place on a computer, it is immune from law. You sometimes see comments from people who whine about a spammer getting 10 years in jail--"they didn't hurt anybody". You'll get a story about some fuckhead getting 5 years for hacking a corporate network and some comments will bitch "they were just learning, and besides people should lock their doors better". All of it silly nonsense that has no place in our industry.
To answer your question directly:
My question is, what part of this constitutes "tossing your hands up and saying 'we give up'"?
Tossing your hands up and saying "we give up" means we just blame the user, blame the system admin, or blame anybody but the criminal. Often times they won't even be labeled as criminals, worse they'll manipulate language to make them sound like some kind of modern hero (Hacker vs Cracker is nothing more then straight Orwellian doublespeak). I think such talk is a form of denial and worse a form of insidious propaganda. It is also a byproduct of a more innocent time in our computing history.
Bottom line is, I'm sure we are on the same page.
It might also include an examination of history to see if people have faced problems that had similar underlying principles, even if those problems were radically different in outward appearance.
Look no further then how nature deals with nasty stuff. Study our own immune systems. Study the immune systems found in nature. The two are very similar. How we combat AID's or the common cold are good starting points for how we combat online criminals and their software.
But without somebody with authority talking about it, nobody will take computer crime as seriously as it needs to. Until somebody as high up as Obama starts preaching the gospel of security, we wont stand a chance.
Too bad "leaders" of certain open source movements dont start talking about security more. Maybe if somebody like RMS starts advocating for more law enforcement, these people would grow up and put more pressure on our leaders to take this seriously.
But I sure wish I could at least get a QAM tuner on a PCI card that has a Cable Card slot on it. Once I finally make the plunge to getting HDTV myself I'll probably use this cute little guy and route around the whole mess. But the problem with all those solutions is you are basically going from Digital -> Analog -> Digital when you can just record the feed right off the wire with no loss in quality. I'm also reading stories about how the some in the industry want to down-convert the analog ports to keep us evil criminals from stealing the content we pay for. And regardless, I need a set top box.
And yes, I rant and yet I don't have HDTV personally. Every time I look into what it will take to get HDTV + SageTV, I get pissed and give up. The SageTV is a requirement, the lady would kill me if I took that away (Tivo lacks this or this). The analog capture card gives me comfort though, even if it isn't ideal.
It is all bullshit. In the not-so-distant future, I predict we'll all be streaming our content straight from Discovery.com or MSNBC.com. My only fear is even that technology will have a lot of strings attached that will make it very hard for "unblessed" devices to use them. It was awesome how much of the Olympics were on NBC.com, but you know what? I never watched it because I watch that on my SageTV with a remote, not on my desktop computer. They also have a lot of content I'd like to watch like old Office episodes, but those too will only work through their web page. If they just published a podcast, I could watch them. Hell, they could load them up with commercials too because it is hard to skip around in streaming content.
I know you are getting squeezed by the content producers who either want to play geographical "tricks" (i.e. opening ceremony of the Olympics + tape delay) or don't want their content on a torrent site. In many ways, your guys life would be easier if you didn't have all the fucking crazy encryption schemes, but the content guys wouldn't like that.
I'm sorry you're so pissed off by all this
It pisses me off because I think the HDTV industry is still very immature. Too many resolutions and fucking who fucking decided to let each program have it's own aspect ratio!!!! Seriously, that is bullshit. Everything should be the same resolution and the same aspect ratio. Even if it isn't filmed in the same aspect ratio, the video signal should transmit the letterboxing too, not have my TV, in theory, switch resolutions and aspect ratios. Why? Theory and reality dont match and not all TV's will adjust the aspect ratio and instead just let the picture look like shit. And yes, I know that in theory the cable box should tell the TV about aspect ratios changing, but they don't, at least here in Seattle (comcast). Seriously, the aspect-ratio, resolution changing is bullshit and I was amazed this was a "feature". TV's shouldn't be treated like multi-resolution CRT's. They are fixed resolution, fixed aspect ratio devices and this is especially true with pixel-based systems like LCD's and plasma screens.
Then there are to many new acronyms (took a while to figure out how ATSC and QAM fit into the mix). To little integration between devices. Too little industry lore about what works and what doesn't.
Hopefully the transition in Feb. will get things maturing faster. I do hope, and think, that things will eventually settle down and I'll be able to buy a $80 QAM tuner from fry's that takes a Cable Card. And if not, Hauppague is just about to ship an analog tuner that will do real-time 1080i over component cables.
Honestly, I could do without TV.
And honestly, I could to. The only thing that makes it worth while are DVR's like SageTV or Tivo.
And yes, I comskip the fuck out of what I record too (which I imagine is a very small minority, small enough the content companies dont care) I imagine the top slots for commercials these days are the ones that are those 5 second "this show brought to you buy Toyota" that are quick enough that you haven't picked up the remote.
Motorcycles have smaller plates (at least in my state). You have to get tabs for you boat in this state, and they use stickers. It doesn't have to be a large metal plate. We could use stickers or anything really. Just so long as there is a bike, a number, and in some database, the name of the owner.
The rest of your questions, like how do you know the bike rider was the registered owner are are valid. We'd have to figure that out.
As for BIN numbers... (to motorcycles get MIN numbers?:-) Hmm.. dunno.
Obviously my plan has holes... I do think I'm on to at least something:-)
By the way, I think police dont always enforce the bike laws because both they and the city fears political backlash. The bike lobby might be small, but damn are they vocal!
I dont think you fully understand the politics behind this.
Digital cable signals are encrypted so that people cannot easily steal cable from the cable company.
I understand this, and that is fine. What I do care about is that currently it is impossible to use anything but "blessed" hardware to receive all but a few HDTV channels I pay for. Your cable card is great for Tivo's, which are "blessed", but right now you can't just throw together a computer and install SageTV/MythTV/Windows MCE and get the same channels.
Worse, there is no requirement for which QAM channels you can carry in the clear. You can throw the switch at any time and render the digital tuner in my HTPC even more useless than it is right now.
I could go on about how you can and do change the QAM channel mapping at will, but I wont...
Either way your inflammatory tone and language detracts from your message.
This is slashdot, home of the flamewar. But honestly, the state of HDTV and the cable industry piss me off. The whole thing is a huge mess and I'm sorely tempted to put together a political action committee to lobby for change.
Hopefully we'll all just route around the cable company and stream content over the inter-web. If I was a gambling man, I'd be betting on that future.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm beginning to realize too many engineers and computer nerds fall into a trap where they can only see how things will fail. This makes sense, because that is what a good engineer should do. However, the brightest engineers I know often have a hard time thinking outside the box. When given an idea that doesn't mesh with their existing view of the world, they are often quick to shoot it down.
I think many engineers would do very well to learn things and associate with people who are very far from their occuptaions. Hang out with somebody who does Feng Shui for a living--it really is just a different language for expressing good design and architecture. Read up on Taoism. Hang out with people who deal with the public--a nurse or something. Hang out with a couple artists. Learn Jazz, where the idea is to *not* have a rigid musical structure. Force yourself to enjoy sports... hockey has a lot of skill! Force yourself into doing things that don't require stringent rules like programming. And for god sake, stop trying to fucking correct your girlfriend/wife/whatever on minor technical details (even though it is hard sometimes, trust me)!!
The more you force yourself to *stop* thinking like an engineer, the better you'll be at engineering and the happier your life will be overall.
Ask and ye shall receive:
Source: Optimizing Performance: Taking Advantage of Hardware
Source: Graphics Rendering Tiers.
Source: ClearType Overview
See also: Typography in Windows Presentation Foundation
vs
"I own an iPhone" vs "I own a RAZR v3". "The new iPhone is sweet" vs "The new Samsung A610 is sweet".
Anybody else notice the difference?
Exploit the card for more then just drawing rectangles. For example, does the 10-year old card manage the entire rendering of a font on the GPU? Or does it just take pixels from the CPU? You realize on a DirectX 10 capable card, Vista will hand the entire process of rendering a font to the GPU, right? In fact, the GPU will cache the font on the video card instead of the system RAM.
Dude, 10 year old video cards could *not* handle what Vista needs. I'd wager the video card is the single most important hardware upgrade you need for a happy Vista experience. Even more then RAM or CPU. You need a modern video card for a fast, happy Vista experience.
Why are so many techies such damn "get off my lawn" about anything but their narrow little world? The 80 character green screen ain't coming back gramps... deal!
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier.
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU? You are telling me that rather then having to load a window from system RAM to the video card RAM every time you maximize or minimize a window is faster then storing both on the video card ram and then sending a quick set of commands to the GPU?
You do realize that in most cases, when you minimize a window in Vista, the GPU still keeps a fully rendered version of the "normal" size window in its memory? You do realize that that trick lets you hover over the taskbar and see "tail -f /var/log/messages" in PuTTY console while the thing is minimized, right? Can your CPU and the system memory do that? Turn Aero off and you loose all that, and eat more system memory.
We have powerful video cards these days and only a fool wouldn't exploit them to speed up the windowing system. Me thinks some are too blinded by hate and narrow imagination to appreciate cool things.
What you ask exists. Vista Virtual Store. Basically, if your crappy app writes to "C:\program files" in vista and you are running as a standard user, Vista will do exactly what you describe... it will redirect the file IO to a place owned by the user, not the system.
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
If you've got a card that does DirectX10 it will even hand the fonts to the video card and let the video card deal with font rendering and caching. Once you turn off Aero, the video card is just an old-school video card. Since a certain set of nerds seem to hate nice looking things, I bet most of them turn off the one thing that makes Vista way more snappy than XP--Aero.
Some how create a way for .NET apps that are compiled as "Any CPU" to call libraries compiled as x86.
If you compile a .NET app as "Any CPU" the runtime will take your MSIL and compile it to the native instruction set of the CPU. That means if you are running 64-bit, it will compile 64-bit. If you run 32-bit, it will compile 32-bit. The problem is, a 64-bit library cannot call a 32-bit one. Thus if you compile "Any CPU" and try calling a 32-bit library when you run on a 64-bit system, .NET will throw an exception.
So what do most people do? Compile their .NET apps as 32-bit. Then they know it will run everywhere.
Now, I'm no expert in 32/64-bit issues, but it seems to be if Microsoft had a way for .NET apps compiled for "Any CPU" to transparently deal with 32/64-bit libraries, you'd see more 64-bit apps. Again, I'm no expert and there are probably some pretty good reasons this is hard, if not impossible, to do.
If I was boss, I'd also make it so a single 32-bit installer could detect what CPU you've got and install 64-bit binaries or 32-bit automatically. From what I can tell, right now you pretty much have to ship two installers--one for 64-bit and one for 32-bit.
What failed was developer training, not user training. Developers could basically assume a user was running root. That let them take shortcuts like writing shit to "Program Files" or messing around with system files.
You have to understand the history as well. Microsoft grew up as a single-user OS and slowly morphed into a multi-user OS. They didn't grow up with the culture that unix-like systems have where the system was assumed to be multi-user.
Bottom line is we will always need some variant of sudo (aka UAC). UAC is actually the best sudo implementation there is so far, at least in my opinion. Granted, there is still room for improvement, but that mainly lies in "integration". For example, the common dialogs need a way for me to load notepad.exe, edit "C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts", and give me a UAC prompt when I save the file. That way I don't have to remember to load notepad.exe with elevated privileges. Let me write a new file to a protected directory and UAC me then instead loading the app with elevated privileges. That kind of integration will make the new world of "dont run as root" more enjoyable. The goal is to make it so there is no excuse for nerds to disable UAC (thus running as root 24/7).
You can write javascript that enhances a page. One can quickly write an implementation that keeps each image a standard page (good for SEO, good for multi-tab) but can also swap the image and not reload the page. Then you can right-click "Open new tab" or just click on it and not refresh the entire page.
Javascript = good.
Shitty Javascript = bad.
It is called "sudo" and if your theoretical linux games would need root access to install mods as well. Or do you run your linux box as root all the time?
I'll admit, I run as root most of the time in Linux too, at least when I'm in a GUI. Know why? For most of Linux's history, it was a pain in the ass to not run as root. Only until recently have they had a good way to elevate privileges in the GUI. Guess what, that implementation is a hell of a lot like UAC. Guess what, I can live in Ubuntu as a normal user now and it will pop up a UAC-like dialog when an app needs elevation.
Perhaps the blame should go to game company for their shitty programming. UAC has been around for a long time and if modern games still can't function under UAC, they suck. And if a game mod has one editing files in "C:\Program Files", the user should need root to do so--"Program Files" is a shared resource like "/usr/bin".
Consider it a test, if the user can't figure out how to get past the UAC dialog, maybe they shouldn't be fucking around in "C:\Program Files" anyway.
Vista is the first Microsoft OS that isn't eye candy. The semi-transparent windows get out of your way and let you focus on your task, not the windowing system.
And don't be so quick to dismiss so-called "eye candy". "Eye candy" is usually a easy way to dismiss anything usable by normal people. Is the iPod just "eye candy"? The iPhone? The Wii? Would you rather drive a Geo Metro or a Honda Civic?
Techies worry me sometimes. Too much fuss over left-brain "numbers", too little attention to right-brain "creative" things. Creativity and art matter just as much, if not more, then a table of features.
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks like Aero wasn't turned on for these screen shots. Probably a driver thing. Vista without the glass doesn't look nearly as good.
I think like Vista, this version will be a lot of little things that improve the OS not huge ones. Then you'll go back from Windows 7 to Vista and go "jeez... how did I live without this Windows 7 feature" just like when you go back to XP and get pissed how crappy the taskbar is, how "in your face" the windows were, how crappy the file dialogs were, how crappy taskman.exe was, or how generally insecure the default setup was. Vista is a huge improvement over XP but it is hard to describe what improved. Just a lot of little annoyances are gone or smoothed out. Windows 7 will probably be the same.
And can I rant for a second? Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.
On Vista when it wants to reboot, the nag screen as a "snooze" button so you can defer the nagging for up to 4 hours. After the 4 hours, you can just hit the snooze again for four hours and when you leave for the day it will just reboot for you. I think they improved it quite a bit.
I sure wish Microsoft would figure out a way to let 3rd party installers hook into it's auto-update system. Every seems to want to re-invent that wheel and they all seem to do a really shitty job of it. The way I see it is there is no reason for "GoogleUpdater.exe", "QuicktimeUpdater" or whatever when the OS seems to have a pretty good update system already.
Have you looked at your phone bill? At lease on AT&T those "IM" messages seem to be converted into some kind of SMS message and sent through what appears to be a gateway. I originally thought like you probably do, they are actually TCP/IP packets leaving your phone. Then I looked at my SMS usage and found lots of messages to a couple of numbers and then it dawned on my the IM stuff goes through a SMS gateway.
I pay $5/mo for something like 500 IM's and TXT's. In fact, I don't even know the number because I've yet to hit it.
There is only so many text messages you send a month and lowering the price really won't change that. However, if they raised the price from $5 to $10 a month, I'd probably cut back on the plan. In other words, I think they found my sweet spot :-)
Note: I am not 15 years old, and 15 year olds probably change this picture quite a bit. I'd imagine a 15 year old kid might push the upper bounds of even a 5,000 message a month plan. They dont pay the phone bill though, they bear the costs of text messages via punishment when they go over whatever their folks pay. Maybe you should look at the supply/demand curve for kids who only indirectly bear the cost of text messages.
As am I. It was trying to point out there is more to life then what the parent talks about.
Not an anti-us troll :-)
this is an old post. but how do you know it is your drunkness, not my spelling that is the problem :-)
Is that the zinger in this article is nothing but a wireframe mockup hosted on flickr. Seriously. What the fuck? So we are now reduced to using poorly compressed JPG's on flickr as an excuse to get up in arms about Microsoft?
Do you think, even if that photo was of the patent, the price in that image has any bearing on reality besides being a wireframe mockup? Seriously?
And I suspect we are a bit on the same page. Personally, I think most computer crime is akin to real-world viruses. The stronger our anti-boitics, the stronger and more resistant the bugs get.
My only concern is, and I doubt you are part of this, sites like Slashdot seem to carry a strange attitude that because something takes place on a computer, it is immune from law. You sometimes see comments from people who whine about a spammer getting 10 years in jail--"they didn't hurt anybody". You'll get a story about some fuckhead getting 5 years for hacking a corporate network and some comments will bitch "they were just learning, and besides people should lock their doors better". All of it silly nonsense that has no place in our industry.
To answer your question directly:
Tossing your hands up and saying "we give up" means we just blame the user, blame the system admin, or blame anybody but the criminal. Often times they won't even be labeled as criminals, worse they'll manipulate language to make them sound like some kind of modern hero (Hacker vs Cracker is nothing more then straight Orwellian doublespeak). I think such talk is a form of denial and worse a form of insidious propaganda. It is also a byproduct of a more innocent time in our computing history.
Bottom line is, I'm sure we are on the same page.
Look no further then how nature deals with nasty stuff. Study our own immune systems. Study the immune systems found in nature. The two are very similar. How we combat AID's or the common cold are good starting points for how we combat online criminals and their software.
But without somebody with authority talking about it, nobody will take computer crime as seriously as it needs to. Until somebody as high up as Obama starts preaching the gospel of security, we wont stand a chance.
Too bad "leaders" of certain open source movements dont start talking about security more. Maybe if somebody like RMS starts advocating for more law enforcement, these people would grow up and put more pressure on our leaders to take this seriously.
But I sure wish I could at least get a QAM tuner on a PCI card that has a Cable Card slot on it. Once I finally make the plunge to getting HDTV myself I'll probably use this cute little guy and route around the whole mess. But the problem with all those solutions is you are basically going from Digital -> Analog -> Digital when you can just record the feed right off the wire with no loss in quality. I'm also reading stories about how the some in the industry want to down-convert the analog ports to keep us evil criminals from stealing the content we pay for. And regardless, I need a set top box.
And yes, I rant and yet I don't have HDTV personally. Every time I look into what it will take to get HDTV + SageTV, I get pissed and give up. The SageTV is a requirement, the lady would kill me if I took that away (Tivo lacks this or this). The analog capture card gives me comfort though, even if it isn't ideal.
It is all bullshit. In the not-so-distant future, I predict we'll all be streaming our content straight from Discovery.com or MSNBC.com. My only fear is even that technology will have a lot of strings attached that will make it very hard for "unblessed" devices to use them. It was awesome how much of the Olympics were on NBC.com, but you know what? I never watched it because I watch that on my SageTV with a remote, not on my desktop computer. They also have a lot of content I'd like to watch like old Office episodes, but those too will only work through their web page. If they just published a podcast, I could watch them. Hell, they could load them up with commercials too because it is hard to skip around in streaming content.
We live in interesting times, that is for sure.
And I know that there are many sides to the coin.
I know you are getting squeezed by the content producers who either want to play geographical "tricks" (i.e. opening ceremony of the Olympics + tape delay) or don't want their content on a torrent site. In many ways, your guys life would be easier if you didn't have all the fucking crazy encryption schemes, but the content guys wouldn't like that.
It pisses me off because I think the HDTV industry is still very immature. Too many resolutions and fucking who fucking decided to let each program have it's own aspect ratio!!!! Seriously, that is bullshit. Everything should be the same resolution and the same aspect ratio. Even if it isn't filmed in the same aspect ratio, the video signal should transmit the letterboxing too, not have my TV, in theory, switch resolutions and aspect ratios. Why? Theory and reality dont match and not all TV's will adjust the aspect ratio and instead just let the picture look like shit. And yes, I know that in theory the cable box should tell the TV about aspect ratios changing, but they don't, at least here in Seattle (comcast). Seriously, the aspect-ratio, resolution changing is bullshit and I was amazed this was a "feature". TV's shouldn't be treated like multi-resolution CRT's. They are fixed resolution, fixed aspect ratio devices and this is especially true with pixel-based systems like LCD's and plasma screens.
Then there are to many new acronyms (took a while to figure out how ATSC and QAM fit into the mix). To little integration between devices. Too little industry lore about what works and what doesn't.
Hopefully the transition in Feb. will get things maturing faster. I do hope, and think, that things will eventually settle down and I'll be able to buy a $80 QAM tuner from fry's that takes a Cable Card. And if not, Hauppague is just about to ship an analog tuner that will do real-time 1080i over component cables.
And honestly, I could to. The only thing that makes it worth while are DVR's like SageTV or Tivo.
And yes, I comskip the fuck out of what I record too (which I imagine is a very small minority, small enough the content companies dont care) I imagine the top slots for commercials these days are the ones that are those 5 second "this show brought to you buy Toyota" that are quick enough that you haven't picked up the remote.
Anyway, cheers and happy new year :-)
Motorcycles have smaller plates (at least in my state). You have to get tabs for you boat in this state, and they use stickers. It doesn't have to be a large metal plate. We could use stickers or anything really. Just so long as there is a bike, a number, and in some database, the name of the owner.
The rest of your questions, like how do you know the bike rider was the registered owner are are valid. We'd have to figure that out.
As for BIN numbers... (to motorcycles get MIN numbers? :-) Hmm.. dunno.
Obviously my plan has holes... I do think I'm on to at least something :-)
By the way, I think police dont always enforce the bike laws because both they and the city fears political backlash. The bike lobby might be small, but damn are they vocal!
I dont think you fully understand the politics behind this.
I understand this, and that is fine. What I do care about is that currently it is impossible to use anything but "blessed" hardware to receive all but a few HDTV channels I pay for. Your cable card is great for Tivo's, which are "blessed", but right now you can't just throw together a computer and install SageTV/MythTV/Windows MCE and get the same channels.
Worse, there is no requirement for which QAM channels you can carry in the clear. You can throw the switch at any time and render the digital tuner in my HTPC even more useless than it is right now.
I could go on about how you can and do change the QAM channel mapping at will, but I wont...
This is slashdot, home of the flamewar. But honestly, the state of HDTV and the cable industry piss me off. The whole thing is a huge mess and I'm sorely tempted to put together a political action committee to lobby for change.
Hopefully we'll all just route around the cable company and stream content over the inter-web. If I was a gambling man, I'd be betting on that future.