Thanks, but no thanks. Honeywell (and others) have put a lot of R&D and solid engineering into their sensors (door, window, motion, glass-break, running water, etc) and there are already "convenient" standards like z-wave for home automation. Honeywell systems like the L5100 are dead easy install, and very easy. http://www.security.honeywell.com/hsc/products/control/wi/ly/329673.html
BUT they suffer from this cloud service business. Ulgh? No. Cloud functionality is fine, but not when used for lock in. The honeywell system has a great mobile phone app? But You Must Subscribe to their service at $10-$20/mo. No thanks.
What I would fund on kickstarter would be some kind of open interface or open firmware for these. Ideally the low level stuff we leave alone, because it works well, and just dress up the front-end. It needs to be open source.
No need to reinvent the wheel with modules and sensors at this stage. That comes later so we can have free hardware, also.
Anyone know of any open firmware replacements for anything like the L5100?
I once emailed RHovespain @ Novell because I saw a tremendous opportunity for Novell -- to be the SUSE/Ubuntu of the small business world. I was very excited about SLES / SLED and the possibilities for our small business customers (who typically use SBS2003 and now SBS2008). To have something like eBox/samba/ldap in one box with a well-maintained package repository.. seamless virtualization for legacy apps.. Their press releases were making me really excited with the possibilities. All the pieces exist independently, pretty much... All Novell has to do is put the pieces together.
The Novell website for potential enthusiasts like me was nigh impossible to navigate. I spent the better part of 2 days buring about 11 CDs (no DVD distribution was available) of SLES/SLED 10 and after that.. being thoroughly underwhelmed. I basically wanted SBS in a box (something for file serving, something for intranet, ldap, workstation management and exchange type functionality) and seemed to be advertised as such (with groupwise) but I just couldn't make it materialize after playing with it for a couple days. I lost interest after that.
The point is that Novell very much has missed the boat in terms of knowing what their would-be customers want.. While it would have been easy to anticipate the licensing snafu I don't think this would have been a real problem especially if this was prelude to tighter integration with microsoft stuff. That certainly would have been an easier pill for businesses to swallow, I think, if they could have their "business in a box" app.
I would like to see the Novell name on a such product that appeals to small businesses and certainly they could make this happen on a modest budget with the talent they still employ.
FTA: A testing of XP to Vista to Windows 7 on a custom-built desktop... went smoothly.
This is a bit of a lie. They are keeping 32 bit versions the whole way through. There is NO upgrade migration path across major architecture boundaries as there was with Windows Old (tm) to Windows 386/3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows XP. To go from 32 bit to 64 bit is just not possible, and with a lot of oems STIL selling 32 bit Vista.. WTF.
I guess 32 bit makes sense with the whole netbook/reduced footprint PCs but for those of us with a "serious" workstation budget, that are spending money on IT, Windows is looking more like a toy/pretend OS than ever. We need a serious OS that does complicated things fast and without a lot of headache in a business enviornment. Businesses like us are probably driving the upper end of the market because We Have Things To Do that need the horsepower, but Microsoft I guess is focused on the low end now?
In retrospect it makes a bit of sense if you think of it like this: If you have a 75 year old grandma computer illiterate type (that has never used XP), with The Ultimate Rig, Windows Vista probably is great. It probably does everything they want, and this description certainly fits the description of those "Mohave" folks in the MS ads..
Unfortunately for those of us that depend on our PCs for our livelihood, and enjoy heavy lifting with our Rigs.. Vista is not the best choice for a variety of reasons I'm sure everyone already knows. Those of us in need of more than 4gb of ram-- hell! a reliable OS that can be up for more than a few days!-- are feeling a bit left in the cold with Vista. I don't think it is possible some theme tweaks and bundled programs would please both me and grandma (vista home vis a vis vista business)
We did (attempted) some test migrations from 64 bit vista to 64 bit seven and.. well.. the installer made no attempt to do anything upgrade-like. In fact it moved all profiles, windows folder and program files folders into windows.old and that is about it. It is likely they expect mass deployments in this type of enviornment... but it would be nice if they were up front about that sort of thing.
Incompatible drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think these people did anything with 64 bit windows. Maybe 64 bit is not meant for any home user?
Smart people should be working at Microsoft. This whole situation is astonishingly dumb. They are one of the few companies on earth with the resources and expertise to make driver problems like this a non-issue. How many hundred man-years of compatibility work for dos apps/older apps went into windows 95? This is no different now.
Who, that knew what they were doing, retired? (lol)
Thousands of our clients had another showstopping problem: Compatibility.
These are not home users.. these are business users. You'd be surprised how many small to smallish shops are running custom stuff, or 5 to 10 year old Line-of-Business software. Guess what? Compatibility still doesn't seem to be there in Windows 7. It seems in our beta testing Anyone who stuck with or downgraded from XP for compatibility reasons is going to continue to have the same compatibility issues.
For Clients who have wanted to invest time and effort into us working with vendors to get their apps working on vista 64-- A lot of grotesque crashes can be traced to stupid stuff. For example the SendTo folder is gone, moved somewhere else.. but there is some kind of quasi-folder in place of SendTo that some installers work with and others bomb out. Renaming the SendTo special folder and replacing it with a normal folder works just fine. If this were a linux-style hardlink the installer wouldn't crash. Instead it appears to be some sort of bastardized NTFS hardlink type abomination. Program compat. tab seems to have no effect on these "special" folders. (Special in the sense here as clinically retarded.)
So windows 7 doesn't seem to be much help in that regard in our testing, so far.
Do you know how much work went into dos compatibility in windows 95? How much pure compatibility testing? That is what needs to happen here, and certainly hasn't. There is a bug in SimCity for DOS to do with allocating freeing some ram, then immediately trying to read it. Early versions of '95 would reclaim the memory immediately, causing SimCity to crash... well, MS added a bit of code in there to check to see if it was SimCity and if so the memory was not reclaimed immediately.
Seems like there has been a shift inside MS from the pragmatists to the idealists.
$100 to the first person to setup a Dillon Edwards Investments site at ClownPenis.fart. (It is an old and prophetic SNL skit.. for those of you that may not know)
For some odd reason windows stores the Power Management stuff in the registry in a Binary (!) obscure (!!) machine/driver-specific acpi (!!!) way. This means doing stuff with it via group policy is tricky at best. Fortunately, the EPA has a really great solution we've been using for years and is absolutely fantastic.
Unfortunately the EPA's EZ GPO page seems to have gone poof or something recently, but you can get it here.
Basically, you push a (simple) msi to the machines (I do this a lot of the time via psexec (props to Mark Russinovich) but there are other methods. Once you have that running on the machine you can configure how you want your machines to behave/re power management:
Monitor Sleep time when logged in
...when not logged in
Hybernate or Suspend to ram options
Allow logged-in users to override (e.g. laptops/presentation mode)
Non Intrusive setup/no options
We also have a script that runs at midnight a few days of the month that does the magic packet thing as has been mentioned so WSUS and/or SMS (or SC:CM) can do their thing and automatic updates run as normal. In a few "why does my machine have to boot up every day this sucks" user groups we have a scheduled job to send magic packets about 15 minutes before they arrive to wake up their machines. With hybernate they hardly know anything happened.
Corporate users (well me, anyway) want a tool to make it easy to deploy and I haven't found anything all-inclusive. Sad to say that a lot of hosted business apps run as active X controls or other BS that needs IE. What I need is a way to deploy firefox with specific settings, deploy ie tab with it, then have a list of sites that are always used for ietab. I need to configure this through group policy at least. I could have firefox on 500 machines tomorrow if I had this and I knew it worked perfectly. It should also be easy to deploy upgrades.
I have been tinkering with this myself but.. busybusy and I haven't made much progress.
...well, the release candidate anyway. It does fix some issues, but Vista just doesn't feel stable. Period. It is very hard for us to make the business case for vista because it doesn't seem to hold up well under load. What do I mean? Well, things like Mega-Tasking with lots of apps open, lots of I/O, lots of network activity.. it craps out in strange ways.
We've been using vista 64 business for over a year (because if we didn't use it on our work desktops we wouldn't properly test it..eating your own dogfood..and all that) and in no short order we have experienced all sorts of fun issues. Just off the top of my head: *unstable video drivers (crashes, black screens, etc. SP1 makes this worse) *slow file i/o *explorer is unresponsive (its just like on windows 98 when some program in the co-operative multitasking would flake out and take the system with it.. except command prompt windows continue to run just fine) *the tiff viewer that comes with vista is broken. the solution from ms? use the office 2007 document viewer. Nevermind the "new improved" built-in fax stuff on vista. *backup with vista has never worked (maybe in sp1 its ok?) *attempting to uninstall sp1 rc1 resulted in bluescreening (whee) *users that want to change the font or size run into Serious Issues with minor changes.. text cutoffs etc *random window placement/size issues on multiple monitors *people that like to use the keyboard in the default save/save as dialogue cause all sorts of weird issues if they hit arrow keys. google this one... its weird *explorer isn't smart about huge files and generating previews.. big images cause explorer to hang which seems like the whole system *have I mentioned horrible performance?
At one point forums.nvidia.com had 110+ pages of people having driver issues in one thread. I can attest that things have not improved to xp-levels of stability in the past year.
I really, really hope Linux continues growing exponentially. Good windows app support on linux would be golden. I am super impressed by wine at this point.... so tempting.
Well, I'll agree that the "crappiness of tech" is more psychological than reality (as other have pointed to really amazing innovations for 2007) I think it is important to clarify that personal computers are not yet to the point that they are as refined as, say, a toaster.
What has happened, I think, is that marketing hype leads individuals to have the expectation of technology that it is as easy as the "old" way and that it is somehow much better. People want tech like a toaster.. you press the button, you get what you want. For the tech arena, I think this is why devices like the iPod have been brilliant. It does what you want without a lot of fuss.
With Vista, the marketing hype was all there but they failed to actually make a product that was a clear improvement over the prior generation from the user's perspective.
Vista doesn't have that. In fact, vista does dumb things like... the fiasco with windows explorer being plagued with slow file copies, being flaky with copies, etc. SP1 is supposed to correct this, but the RC of SP1 is being met with mixed reviews. Very often we see Vista portrayed as User Vs. Vista, not working together harmoniously.
It really is plagued by stability problems-- our (limited) vista production machines can scarcely make it through a day without rebooting to keep things stable. See this video for a very, very common video related crash. Also from the video, I find it amusing that the command prompt is faster AND more coherent at handling files than the new awesomer windows explorer.
Lets not even get into the Windows Home Server (tm) corrupting files randomly. How does crap like this this happen!?!?!?
I'd say from a user expectations point of view (for their day to day tech needs), it was a pretty crappy year for users.
I want to be her friend. We need more people like this in the world.
She really did nothing wrong and probably feels that the world around her has gone crazy... her crime, like many of ours, is that she's a bit smarter than average and probably has a slightly twisted sense of humor as a result. I mean.. who among us, especially on Slashdot, can really say we haven't constructed something similar in the past?
Everyone has lost their mind and the terrorists really have won. This is probably worth 3 days of special reports from NBC... It really sucks for her because I'm sure this one episode will linger with her for years, years and years and no one really deserves to have that kind of mental baggage rattling around from something so innocuous. "Remember that time I was minding my own business but something I didn't realize would scare people scared enough people that a team of hitmen had to take me out and it was covered by 11 television networks and 50 or so newspapers?" I don't understand why, at every level of society, human beings make other human beings jump through ridiculous and endless series of hoops just to get from A to B.
I went to a robotics competition once, on the opposite side of the US with my team from college. It was before the whole terrorism thing. We crated the robot up in a 2 foot foam and cardboard cube at the airport and my tools were among our carry on luggage. Included butane, soldering equipment, rosin core solder, micro torch, electric screwdriver, mini drill (for drilling PCBs or wire-wrap stuff) and a lot of other similar things. It didn't occur to me, my teacher, or anyone on the team, that this might be an issue. As my toolbox disappeared into the x-ray scanner I felt a twinge of panic.. the security guard raised one eyebrow and asked what "..is all this for?" After I swallowed most of my internal organs, I explained what we were doing and he waved us through. Good times. good times.
The conversation, at worst, should have been.. Security Guard: "Can I see your ID? What is this?" HEr: "Here is my MIT student ID and this is my career day shirt. See? Socket To Me?" Guard: "MIT? Eh, probably shouldn't wear this around her with people being crazy and all... here, have a bag?". But of course it never will be because that would require independent thought on the part of.. someone... at some point during the ordeal. The security guard(s) involved were probably following the rules.. but again.. you cannot substitute rules for brains.. and the "rules" were created with the worst possible situation in mind. BS like this tells me eventually they'll be one rule: "If you see something out of the ordinary, PRESS THE BIG RED EMERGENCY BUTTON" which promptly gasses everyone and then whatever is sorted out while everyone is unconscious. Tazer first and ask questions later anyone?
There is a lot more going on with the whole "Life On Mars" thing than you will see really published anywhere. I'm not saying there are little green men on mars, but it seems like every article I read, this one included, downplays the significance of finding Life Outside Earth. That is a Big Deal.
If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.
One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms.
IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.
In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this or here.
This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"
There is something seriously wrong here. I'm not sure that no wrong was done, but I'm also sure that there were better things Federal Agents could have been doing.
I'm not really a gamer, but I have to say using an original XBox (cheaply acquired, second hand, pawn, etc) as a network media front end for something like MythTV is pretty awesome... This isn't really possible without modifcations. I'm not interested in playing games.. but what I am interested in is a cheap media center box with decent TV out capability. That is one Really Awesome, Non-Infringing use.
I don't really think any of the analogies fit, either. It is what it is, which is not necessarily used for game piracy (though probably is some significant percentage of the time). On the one hand you can say it is like installing feature X in your car to get more horsepower. Well, that'll make your car go faster... which is potentially illegal. I mean your stock Geo is perfectly capable of moving along at any set speed limit.. so any modification to go faster is intended to break the speed limit.... It doesn't really fit either, but I would bet the situation could have been solved with a conversation, perhaps an interview at the station, etc.
However, that would require an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the situation: the parties involved, the scope and scale of the crime, etc. Apparently the folks in charge here here were either intellectually incapable of that or Conditioned to Obey(tm). Either way it is scary, and that is probably the intention.
I feel sorry for the folks involved. Probably, on the whole, just nerds like us in the wrong place at the wrong time. One looses one's stuff for an inexcusably long time and one is presumed guilty. If one is lucky one gets to be a media poster child on some scale about the "Dangers of XYZ". I would hope these folks can truly get a trial with a jury of their peers AND that the judge doesn't force the omission of "irrelevant facts" like "there were no pirated games found at the home". I would love to see this type of thing crushed by Jury Nullification. (If you ever want out of Jury Duty go up to the prosecutor, lean in, and whisper 'I know all About Jury Nullification').
Consider the BS one has to go through for simple things involving the government such as DMV tag renewals, tickets for various minor offenses, property tax, etc and then consider the crap these folks will have to endure, probably for years, over a mod chip. This is dumb.
It scares me just how prevalent this type of software is.. not just the spam bots but the malware and other stuff meant to steal data. Locating+shutting down spambots is the easiest task. I'm pretty small time but I found something interesting once while working with a new client to get them fixed up with antivirus and internet monitoring software (squid+sarg). I'd locked down some things and I kept noticing one PC trying to connect to yahoo every week at about 2:00 am. Long story short it was apparently attempting to email a 500kb attachment... that was apparently a log of everything typed in the week before and some other stuff. That *almost* went unnoticed. That type of infection is downright scary.... who is going to notice a 500kb email going out through an https connection at yahoo? It didn't even seem to be part of a command+control network... just gathering info??
The spambot infections is just the most visible symptom of a larger problem... they're talking about some "big name" companies apparently, but it is the smaller and medium sized businesses that really make the world tick... it is simply too complex, challenging and costly to really secure windows boxes without severely compromising functionality. It is also apparently not something that lends itself well to automation... I see big companies using enterprise software to "lock down" workstations and "reset" workstation images as their solution but there isn't really a small business answer here that I know of. If the tools were better/easier to use it might be easier to keep an eye on one's "flock" but it is a horrible pain both in setup and upkeep to really anticipate what might be happening. The entire stack one could use in windows to manage this stuff, from Event Logging to vb scripting automation, and all the way up to group policy is half-assed at best. This is the type of result you can expect.
this type of story is why I think that learning and/or heuristic scanners (both at the machine and router/firewall/proxy level) are pretty much the only way we can win. I'm not imagining something sentient, mind you, just something that will sift through all the event logs and point me toward things actually worth my attention instead of "every little thing".
I have an 8800GTX since Nov 15. Being a corporate customer, we've also had the various flavors of vista since Nov 30th.
The new shiny 100.xx drivers are complete and utter crap across the board. The nVidia card touted as the ultimate in vista preparedness, the 8800, barely works on vista at all. See nVidia forumsThe class action stie and my own video. There are thousands of folks out there with issues. The nvidia drivers thread (70+ pages) has been deleted at least 3 times that I know of (from before the Jan 30th launch).
In my youtube video.. just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly. For example.. I can't hit control-a to select all my icons.. it crashes the driver? WTF nVidia?
To make matters worse, nvidia appear to have thunked the 32 bit drivers into 64 bit address space... so there doesn't seem to be a true 64 bit driver out there for vista at all. Can anyone comment on this??
The 97.xx drivers.. what Microsoft shipped with vista.. are probably the best and most stable drivers at this point. On some of the other forums the reviewers have gone back to "stock" drivers for Intel and nVidia hardware.. and this eliminates some of the apparent vista stability issues. Some people have had ok luck out of the 100.xx drivers..
The truth is, I think, no one expects the vista drivers for hardware we already have to be this amazing break through. What is a bit scary is that the driver support is apparently so poor at this point in time... and it is poorest on hardware supposedly designed with vista in mind. The RTM drivers for vista/older cards aren't that bad.. they're playable in a lot of cases.. A lot of people, myself included, are having problems with source engine games IF the settings are cranked up way high. 800x600? No problem. 1920x1200 4xAA 4xAF.. Heloooo Pink Checkerboard Textures!
I'm not too terribly miffed I can't game quite as well on XP SP2... I am more than a little disappointed the drivers are buggy for basic things like.. screensaver... overlay video playback... being up for more than 4 hours? Given the state of Vista and that the graphics subsystem hasn't really changed much since RC1 I would have expected much better drivers-- especially since there are all these vista techdemos floating around.. at least in the case of the 8800+vista.
This is the type of thing Ballmer has in mind, I think, when he's talking of patents, lawsuits, etc. Microsoft can and has special rights to all these formats. I don't see anything inherently wrong in "forking" open office. Especially if their mods can be Freely integrated into open office.
I'd guess Microsoft wants to maneuver Novell and other companies into the situation where they are writing plugins not necessarily covered by the GPL. "Ohh, only Novell Office can understand Microsoft Office formats." In other cases like the MA case Microsoft can say there are other apps that can deal with their formats when in fact it is perhaps smallest slice possible of the whole *office crowd, smaller even than folks using staroffice and other incarnations, that can deal with the formats.
Novell offer Novell Open Office to other distros? Why bother. I bet it is part of their "strategy" for pushing novell.
Novell already has some plug-ins to deal with VBA and they work really well. SLE desktop, from a business standpoint, seems very slick and usable. Novell needs to get their marketing act together, though. Novell seems to have the magical product stack for small businesses but they keep dropping the ball in the PR and Marketing departments. I could do a better job than they are doing! But that is a rant for another time... (I really, really hope Novell/Groupwise turns into an exchange killer. )
My guess is, after having read the article and the links, Microsoft phoned up Novell and said something along the lines of "You know, we invented that language there. VBA...." or perhaps Novell approached MS about better VBA integration.
I don't see anything inherently wrong here... but if the goal of Microsoft is in fact to encourage situations where the community can't benefit from one company's advancements, hinder group,cross-company efforts, etc then shame on them.
Yeah, I saw someone mention that somewhere else googling around. I should send a screen shot because... you end up with a windows explorer window halfway off the screen. I can't make the window any more narrow than about 140 pixels.. it used to be something like 32 pixels. and no always on top.
Well, yeah, I have a model-M but I remapped caps to the winkey some time ago. I haven't really got used to it yet. The laptop I have to use also has the winkey in an obscure location... perhaps I should have left out the details about the how and focused more on the functionality/UI issue.
The point was that if you click start and then type a program, as you seem to be at least somewhat encouraged to do, you cannot just hit enter. You have to wait a sec for it to figure out what you're talking about. Good UI would have been waiting for auto-complete its quicksearch or whatever before processing enter. They didn't try. The fact is the UI updates immediately after you hit the first character, and often matches one of the programs you most recently used. The UI doesn't seem to update its list again until you stop typing. So if you know all you need for notepad is to type notepad and hit enter you should be able to. You can't type notepad and hit enter. You have to type notepad.. wait for a sec.. then press enter.
It reminds me of another "bug".. moving around folders with windows explorer.. to delete a bunch of files you've selected you can't hit delete then enter. If you do that windows tries to launch whatever program is associated all those files. at the same time. If you hit delete then y before it actually asks you if you are sure it unselects whatever you spent time selecting and snaps you to files beginning with Y. Good Job boys.
To me this seems like what it would be like trying type without a keyboard buffer on an older machine. We had good keyboard buffers then. It helps stem the insanity.
It seems like a good idea.. you know.. to be able to type word, excel, powerpoint, etc instead of "winword" or the explicit executable name. It is just different.
I know I can get the old run menu by modifying my prefs or hitting caps+R and have everything peachy fine, but it isn't really trying to make use of the new feature. I was trying to at the rationale behind doing it that way and honestly try and use the "new and improved" thingie.:)
Vista: An Enigma Wrapped In a Paradox
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 5, Informative
Ok. I've been running vista on one machine or another for a while.. since early beta.. and am now running the release version on my main machine. There are quite a few headscratchers in here. I often tell my colleagues I'm like the little kid from the 6th sense.. except instead of dead people I see bugs. Things that annoy the crap out of me that have been there at least one maybe two versions of windows ago.
In the past days of clicking through endless options and dialogs to configure things such as encryption certificates, etc I often wondered if this was really better than editing a single line in an easy-to-find text file.
Start menu? Hardly ever used the damn thing. Shortcut keys with and I put the quicklaunch bar off to one side with the 40 or so frequently used programs I use.
Vista doesn't support dragging the quicklaunch bar off of the stat menu and off to one side because it was "confusing to end users." No one seems to have found a registry override as yet.
Vista doesn't handle symlinks properly. It used to be "c:\documents and settings" but now in vista it is c:\users. I see a clever little "C:\documents and settings" shortcut on my C drive. OOOOoo is this a symlink? No? I get Access Denied when trying to double-click. Opening the path via an API however works fine. Go figure.
BUGS. Features? Half-Features? Call them what you want. I think most technical folks that have to work on this know these problems exist but architecturally or bureaucratically they are hard or impossible to fix.
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run. I would say this is just an odd quirk about me and how I think menus take too long and too much work to do something, but now the run area has been replaced with a little place you type in stuff and through the magic of windows desktop search it finds whatever you type in the area above that normally occupied by program icons. The bug? You have to let it search. No matter what. Yeah, WTF? This works great on a home PC where you maybe have maybe 10,000 files. Network drives? Oh no. You can't just type n:\ then hit enter. You have to physically wait a sec for it to pull up n:\ in the list of programs above the start menu THEN hit enter. WOW, WHAT A GREAT FEATURE. No more control-esc n:\ enter for me. It is nowctrl+esc n:\ wait..wait..wait.. enter. Otherwise I get some random program like Notepad. Or Flash. Or Firefox.
On the one hand I can see how the start menu splaying itself all over your screen as you "drill down" to whatever the hell obscure program you need might be unappealing. On the other hand confining the entirety of all programs available to you to a 400x600 pixel window doesn't seem like a good fix.
This is just the start menu. Don't even get me started on the new file explorer, which is the least half-baked area of Vista in my opinion. Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments? I'm sure I could go on all day.
I take all this as evidence that a lot of new features in vista are based on good ideas.. new paradigms in UI design.. it just seems that the vast majority are implemented poorly at best and implemented recklessly at worst. I would not expect this in 2006 when others are able to produce such polished and solid OSs. I would have to agree this seems like code-rot from the inside out probably due to the megalithic internal structure at MS
Actually, most modern chipsets (nforce4 939, i875 iirc, i915/i925/etc) support 66mhz on most, if not all, of the standard PCI slots.. so they'll top out around 266mbytes/sec. I found a program that would tell me what speed the slot was running at, but I promptly lost it again. Reviews such as this one amuse me. Not that I'm a scsi bigot, but when you can get a 160gb 15krpm 1 year warranty OEM seagate scsi drive + used adaptec 29160 for about the same price as a raptor... and the scsi disk makes the ide disk feel like a PIO disk from 10 years ago.. I have to wonder. These are nice for capacity, I guess.. I'd be pretty hapy if pci express scsi controllers were cheap.
I have always wished that sites would implement a version of semi- public key encryption. When I log on to paypal or my bank or whatever I want all my communication with them to be automatically signed by my semi-public key. It isn't truly public, but I can use it to verify the authenticity of sender. One key pair for each of the critical communications senders sending to me. A lot of email clients have close to this capability built right in with their public key encryption, but not a lot of automated systems out there actually take advantage of that. I want to know on a per-message basis that 1) I am assured I am the person with which the initiator intended to communicate in a cryptographic sense and 2) that who is communicating with me is the same entity I'm used to doing business with and they have not changed.
It really isn't that hard to run that on top of good old open email, and make it user friendly enough for the public. It just hasn't been done.
Ok. All slashvertisement comments aside, I get as excited about 'teh new hotness' in drives as much as the next person. But this is SO poorly submitted. 300MB/sec? PLEASE. You MIGHT get 70% of that speed doing a transfer from that 16mb buffer to the controller, but that is just misleading. Without even reading, I'm guessing they're talking about 3Gb/sec SATA-II. Woo. So that is wrong. "Interface Speed" is what you wanted to say there. Not "Transfer Rate".
What about "WD Characterizes this as the highest performance section of the desktop market." Wrong again. Helooo??? Raptor??
I mean. Talk about something cool, at least. New TCQ optimizations? Read-before-write? 24/7 100% duty cycle?
SR is a decent place to check out reviews and benchmarks. Do your homework! Astroturf like this only spreads confusion and disinformation.
I got a 15k RPM SCSI drive from hypermicro. It is a seagate, 73gb. It was only about $250 with an adaptec controller (which wasn't a whole lot more than a WD74 gb raptor at the time). At the beginning of the disk, it has over a 90Mbyte xfer rate on a 160mbyte/sec interface, which totally crushes all this other crap. My drive is (was?) the leading drive on non-raid configurations on hdtach's website, even against the 400gb SATA WD behemoth. 2x36gb raptors are about the same speed as one decent 15k RPM scsi disk.
I haven't really looked, but I would guess the drive in the post is what.. neighborhood of 60mbyte/sec? 70? Meh. Meh I say. We didn't even talk about I/Os/sec. between 7200 rpm, 10k RPM and 15k RPM.
The idea of an article like this on slashdot is not bad. It is just that this article is misleading and/or wrong and isn't really news at all. And so on and so forth.
This is a general reply to all the +5 comments that are saying stuff like 'picocell' and 'well, you could modify xyz and... but you'd still need to sign on to the provider's network'
Look. It is very simple. Take advantage of the 'free calling to other members' most providers offer. I.e. Add a tmobile phone to your plan and make your plan a shared-minutes plan. Get free tmobile to tmoble. Make liberal use of the headset port.
Take ANY GSM phone that has a good USB and headset interface. A bit of straightforward hacking (as asterisk already supports sound cards for in and outbound sound channels) gets the headset connected to the asterisk box. Now all you need to do is press buttons on the phone.
Enter the usb interface, basically a com port in disguise. ATDT ring a bell? A lot of phones support this last time I checked. Most motorola phones for sure so you can dial folks in your bluetooth organizer with the click of a wand. Instead, you can just have Asterisk decode the DTMF and (with a dialing rule) when you've dialed 7 or 10 digits, it will encode it as an ATDT string, send to the phone, and connect the audio channels.
Ta-Da. It works, by the way (though instead of a USB interface I just hacked the keypad interface as it was more convenient for me to do that with the equipment I have. My interface is on a com port and tied together with an Atmel microcontroller FYI I did this initially because I was annoyed I had to pay to call to check my VM on my office phone).
The HP 100LX / 200LX was essentially abandoned by HP with similar reasoning. HP came out with the 320LX, a WinCE device. Yet, the 200LX persists to this very day. (A decade+later)
I think Sharp dumping the USA market makes perfect business sense. The average american consumer is just too ignorant for the C7xx/C860/C3000 line of PDAs. Most folks want something that 'just works.' They are ignorant of cross-compiling, and probably find the lack of a unified (stable) software set annoying at best.
The nicest thing about the 200LX was the software suite was extremely well designed and put together. For me, the 200lx 'just worked' right of of the box for everything I needed it for, and it was completely painless to make it do more. The Zaurus pales in comparison, but with a little diligence I think I can get it where I want it. It isn't much fun trying to port or fix botched ports of the software you want.
You may be right that this will be the last good PDA model Sharp makes.. but after carrying my 200LX for just over a decade, I've found my successor.
Just as before, the average consumer did not want a DOS palmatop in a sea of (then extremely crappy) WinCE devices. They want something that just works.
Me? I'm having a very good time cross-compiling things for the Arm, porting scripts and utilities and really turning this PDA into an ultra-portable laptop. I almost have a dos emulator running at a nice speed. I doubt that most folks want to do this stuff. Most of the techies I work with want a PDA that 'just works'. I can't say that I blame them, but I want another 10-year PDA.
I suspect this device will have the same cult following as the 200LX does, even though the software is a bit rocky with all the variations in the Zaurus famuly. I can only hope it persists for a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, but no thanks. Honeywell (and others) have put a lot of R&D and solid engineering into their sensors (door, window, motion, glass-break, running water, etc) and there are already "convenient" standards like z-wave for home automation.
Honeywell systems like the L5100 are dead easy install, and very easy.
http://www.security.honeywell.com/hsc/products/control/wi/ly/329673.html
BUT they suffer from this cloud service business. Ulgh? No. Cloud functionality is fine, but not when used for lock in. The honeywell system has a great mobile phone app? But You Must Subscribe to their service at $10-$20/mo. No thanks.
What I would fund on kickstarter would be some kind of open interface or open firmware for these. Ideally the low level stuff we leave alone, because it works well, and just dress up the front-end. It needs to be open source.
No need to reinvent the wheel with modules and sensors at this stage. That comes later so we can have free hardware, also.
Anyone know of any open firmware replacements for anything like the L5100?
I believe this is intel's "NGFF" or "Next Gen Form Factor" -- I think the trade name is now m.2 . This format which apparently is a hybrid pcie-e and sata form factor. I guess the electrical signals are there for sata? But these devices can operate at pci-e x2 or x4. http://www.techpowerup.com/178188/intel-ssd-530-in-ngff-form-factor-pictured-arrives-in-q2.html
Look familiar?
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/27850/adata_shows_working_next_generation_form_factor_ngff_on_video_at_ces/index.html
Apple seems to have their own "extra long" variety (maybe) -- possibly to get at capacities around 1tb?
I once emailed RHovespain @ Novell because I saw a tremendous opportunity for Novell -- to be the SUSE/Ubuntu of the small business world. I was very excited about SLES / SLED and the possibilities for our small business customers (who typically use SBS2003 and now SBS2008). To have something like eBox/samba/ldap in one box with a well-maintained package repository.. seamless virtualization for legacy apps.. Their press releases were making me really excited with the possibilities. All the pieces exist independently, pretty much... All Novell has to do is put the pieces together.
The Novell website for potential enthusiasts like me was nigh impossible to navigate. I spent the better part of 2 days buring about 11 CDs (no DVD distribution was available) of SLES/SLED 10 and after that.. being thoroughly underwhelmed. I basically wanted SBS in a box (something for file serving, something for intranet, ldap, workstation management and exchange type functionality) and seemed to be advertised as such (with groupwise) but I just couldn't make it materialize after playing with it for a couple days. I lost interest after that.
The point is that Novell very much has missed the boat in terms of knowing what their would-be customers want.. While it would have been easy to anticipate the licensing snafu I don't think this would have been a real problem especially if this was prelude to tighter integration with microsoft stuff. That certainly would have been an easier pill for businesses to swallow, I think, if they could have their "business in a box" app.
I would like to see the Novell name on a such product that appeals to small businesses and certainly they could make this happen on a modest budget with the talent they still employ.
FTA: A testing of XP to Vista to Windows 7 on a custom-built desktop ... went smoothly.
This is a bit of a lie. They are keeping 32 bit versions the whole way through. There is NO upgrade migration path across major architecture boundaries as there was with Windows Old (tm) to Windows 386/3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows XP. To go from 32 bit to 64 bit is just not possible, and with a lot of oems STIL selling 32 bit Vista.. WTF.
I guess 32 bit makes sense with the whole netbook/reduced footprint PCs but for those of us with a "serious" workstation budget, that are spending money on IT, Windows is looking more like a toy/pretend OS than ever. We need a serious OS that does complicated things fast and without a lot of headache in a business enviornment. Businesses like us are probably driving the upper end of the market because We Have Things To Do that need the horsepower, but Microsoft I guess is focused on the low end now?
In retrospect it makes a bit of sense if you think of it like this: If you have a 75 year old grandma computer illiterate type (that has never used XP), with The Ultimate Rig, Windows Vista probably is great. It probably does everything they want, and this description certainly fits the description of those "Mohave" folks in the MS ads..
Unfortunately for those of us that depend on our PCs for our livelihood, and enjoy heavy lifting with our Rigs.. Vista is not the best choice for a variety of reasons I'm sure everyone already knows. Those of us in need of more than 4gb of ram-- hell! a reliable OS that can be up for more than a few days!-- are feeling a bit left in the cold with Vista. I don't think it is possible some theme tweaks and bundled programs would please both me and grandma (vista home vis a vis vista business)
We did (attempted) some test migrations from 64 bit vista to 64 bit seven and.. well.. the installer made no attempt to do anything upgrade-like. In fact it moved all profiles, windows folder and program files folders into windows.old and that is about it. It is likely they expect mass deployments in this type of enviornment... but it would be nice if they were up front about that sort of thing.
Incompatible drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think these people did anything with 64 bit windows. Maybe 64 bit is not meant for any home user?
Smart people should be working at Microsoft. This whole situation is astonishingly dumb. They are one of the few companies on earth with the resources and expertise to make driver problems like this a non-issue. How many hundred man-years of compatibility work for dos apps/older apps went into windows 95? This is no different now.
Who, that knew what they were doing, retired? (lol)
Thousands of our clients had another showstopping problem: Compatibility.
These are not home users.. these are business users. You'd be surprised how many small to smallish shops are running custom stuff, or 5 to 10 year old Line-of-Business software. Guess what? Compatibility still doesn't seem to be there in Windows 7. It seems in our beta testing Anyone who stuck with or downgraded from XP for compatibility reasons is going to continue to have the same compatibility issues.
For Clients who have wanted to invest time and effort into us working with vendors to get their apps working on vista 64-- A lot of grotesque crashes can be traced to stupid stuff. For example the SendTo folder is gone, moved somewhere else.. but there is some kind of quasi-folder in place of SendTo that some installers work with and others bomb out. Renaming the SendTo special folder and replacing it with a normal folder works just fine. If this were a linux-style hardlink the installer wouldn't crash. Instead it appears to be some sort of bastardized NTFS hardlink type abomination. Program compat. tab seems to have no effect on these "special" folders. (Special in the sense here as clinically retarded.)
So windows 7 doesn't seem to be much help in that regard in our testing, so far.
Do you know how much work went into dos compatibility in windows 95? How much pure compatibility testing? That is what needs to happen here, and certainly hasn't. There is a bug in SimCity for DOS to do with allocating freeing some ram, then immediately trying to read it. Early versions of '95 would reclaim the memory immediately, causing SimCity to crash... well, MS added a bit of code in there to check to see if it was SimCity and if so the memory was not reclaimed immediately.
Seems like there has been a shift inside MS from the pragmatists to the idealists.
$100 to the first person to setup a Dillon Edwards Investments site at ClownPenis.fart. (It is an old and prophetic SNL skit.. for those of you that may not know)
Unfortunately the EPA's EZ GPO page seems to have gone poof or something recently, but you can get it here.
Basically, you push a (simple) msi to the machines (I do this a lot of the time via psexec (props to Mark Russinovich) but there are other methods. Once you have that running on the machine you can configure how you want your machines to behave/re power management:
We also have a script that runs at midnight a few days of the month that does the magic packet thing as has been mentioned so WSUS and/or SMS (or SC:CM) can do their thing and automatic updates run as normal. In a few "why does my machine have to boot up every day this sucks" user groups we have a scheduled job to send magic packets about 15 minutes before they arrive to wake up their machines. With hybernate they hardly know anything happened.
Corporate users (well me, anyway) want a tool to make it easy to deploy and I haven't found anything all-inclusive. Sad to say that a lot of hosted business apps run as active X controls or other BS that needs IE. What I need is a way to deploy firefox with specific settings, deploy ie tab with it, then have a list of sites that are always used for ietab. I need to configure this through group policy at least. I could have firefox on 500 machines tomorrow if I had this and I knew it worked perfectly. It should also be easy to deploy upgrades.
I have been tinkering with this myself but.. busybusy and I haven't made much progress.
...well, the release candidate anyway. It does fix some issues, but Vista just doesn't feel stable. Period. It is very hard for us to make the business case for vista because it doesn't seem to hold up well under load. What do I mean? Well, things like Mega-Tasking with lots of apps open, lots of I/O, lots of network activity.. it craps out in strange ways.
We've been using vista 64 business for over a year (because if we didn't use it on our work desktops we wouldn't properly test it..eating your own dogfood..and all that) and in no short order we have experienced all sorts of fun issues. Just off the top of my head:
*unstable video drivers (crashes, black screens, etc. SP1 makes this worse)
*slow file i/o
*explorer is unresponsive (its just like on windows 98 when some program in the co-operative multitasking would flake out and take the system with it.. except command prompt windows continue to run just fine)
*the tiff viewer that comes with vista is broken. the solution from ms? use the office 2007 document viewer. Nevermind the "new improved" built-in fax stuff on vista.
*backup with vista has never worked (maybe in sp1 its ok?)
*attempting to uninstall sp1 rc1 resulted in bluescreening (whee)
*users that want to change the font or size run into Serious Issues with minor changes.. text cutoffs etc
*random window placement/size issues on multiple monitors
*people that like to use the keyboard in the default save/save as dialogue cause all sorts of weird issues if they hit arrow keys. google this one... its weird
*explorer isn't smart about huge files and generating previews.. big images cause explorer to hang which seems like the whole system
*have I mentioned horrible performance?
SP1 Vista Driver Crash and Slow File Copy Whee.
At one point forums.nvidia.com had 110+ pages of people having driver issues in one thread. I can attest that things have not improved to xp-levels of stability in the past year.
I really, really hope Linux continues growing exponentially. Good windows app support on linux would be golden. I am super impressed by wine at this point.... so tempting.
Well, I'll agree that the "crappiness of tech" is more psychological than reality (as other have pointed to really amazing innovations for 2007) I think it is important to clarify that personal computers are not yet to the point that they are as refined as, say, a toaster.
What has happened, I think, is that marketing hype leads individuals to have the expectation of technology that it is as easy as the "old" way and that it is somehow much better. People want tech like a toaster.. you press the button, you get what you want. For the tech arena, I think this is why devices like the iPod have been brilliant. It does what you want without a lot of fuss.
With Vista, the marketing hype was all there but they failed to actually make a product that was a clear improvement over the prior generation from the user's perspective.
Vista doesn't have that. In fact, vista does dumb things like... the fiasco with windows explorer being plagued with slow file copies, being flaky with copies, etc. SP1 is supposed to correct this, but the RC of SP1 is being met with mixed reviews. Very often we see Vista portrayed as User Vs. Vista, not working together harmoniously.
It really is plagued by stability problems-- our (limited) vista production machines can scarcely make it through a day without rebooting to keep things stable. See this video for a very, very common video related crash. Also from the video, I find it amusing that the command prompt is faster AND more coherent at handling files than the new awesomer windows explorer.
Lets not even get into the Windows Home Server (tm) corrupting files randomly. How does crap like this this happen!?!?!?
I'd say from a user expectations point of view (for their day to day tech needs), it was a pretty crappy year for users.
I want to be her friend. We need more people like this in the world.
She really did nothing wrong and probably feels that the world around her has gone crazy... her crime, like many of ours, is that she's a bit smarter than average and probably has a slightly twisted sense of humor as a result. I mean.. who among us, especially on Slashdot, can really say we haven't constructed something similar in the past?
Everyone has lost their mind and the terrorists really have won. This is probably worth 3 days of special reports from NBC... It really sucks for her because I'm sure this one episode will linger with her for years, years and years and no one really deserves to have that kind of mental baggage rattling around from something so innocuous. "Remember that time I was minding my own business but something I didn't realize would scare people scared enough people that a team of hitmen had to take me out and it was covered by 11 television networks and 50 or so newspapers?" I don't understand why, at every level of society, human beings make other human beings jump through ridiculous and endless series of hoops just to get from A to B.
I went to a robotics competition once, on the opposite side of the US with my team from college. It was before the whole terrorism thing. We crated the robot up in a 2 foot foam and cardboard cube at the airport and my tools were among our carry on luggage. Included butane, soldering equipment, rosin core solder, micro torch, electric screwdriver, mini drill (for drilling PCBs or wire-wrap stuff) and a lot of other similar things. It didn't occur to me, my teacher, or anyone on the team, that this might be an issue. As my toolbox disappeared into the x-ray scanner I felt a twinge of panic.. the security guard raised one eyebrow and asked what "..is all this for?" After I swallowed most of my internal organs, I explained what we were doing and he waved us through. Good times. good times.
The conversation, at worst, should have been.. Security Guard: "Can I see your ID? What is this?" HEr: "Here is my MIT student ID and this is my career day shirt. See? Socket To Me?" Guard: "MIT? Eh, probably shouldn't wear this around her with people being crazy and all... here, have a bag?". But of course it never will be because that would require independent thought on the part of.. someone... at some point during the ordeal. The security guard(s) involved were probably following the rules.. but again.. you cannot substitute rules for brains.. and the "rules" were created with the worst possible situation in mind. BS like this tells me eventually they'll be one rule: "If you see something out of the ordinary, PRESS THE BIG RED EMERGENCY BUTTON" which promptly gasses everyone and then whatever is sorted out while everyone is unconscious. Tazer first and ask questions later anyone?
There is a lot more going on with the whole "Life On Mars" thing than you will see really published anywhere. I'm not saying there are little green men on mars, but it seems like every article I read, this one included, downplays the significance of finding Life Outside Earth. That is a Big Deal.
If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.
One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms.
IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.
In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this or here.
This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"
There is something seriously wrong here. I'm not sure that no wrong was done, but I'm also sure that there were better things Federal Agents could have been doing.
... It doesn't really fit either, but I would bet the situation could have been solved with a conversation, perhaps an interview at the station, etc.
I'm not really a gamer, but I have to say using an original XBox (cheaply acquired, second hand, pawn, etc) as a network media front end for something like MythTV is pretty awesome... This isn't really possible without modifcations. I'm not interested in playing games.. but what I am interested in is a cheap media center box with decent TV out capability. That is one Really Awesome, Non-Infringing use.
I don't really think any of the analogies fit, either. It is what it is, which is not necessarily used for game piracy (though probably is some significant percentage of the time). On the one hand you can say it is like installing feature X in your car to get more horsepower. Well, that'll make your car go faster... which is potentially illegal. I mean your stock Geo is perfectly capable of moving along at any set speed limit.. so any modification to go faster is intended to break the speed limit.
However, that would require an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the situation: the parties involved, the scope and scale of the crime, etc. Apparently the folks in charge here here were either intellectually incapable of that or Conditioned to Obey(tm). Either way it is scary, and that is probably the intention.
I feel sorry for the folks involved. Probably, on the whole, just nerds like us in the wrong place at the wrong time. One looses one's stuff for an inexcusably long time and one is presumed guilty. If one is lucky one gets to be a media poster child on some scale about the "Dangers of XYZ". I would hope these folks can truly get a trial with a jury of their peers AND that the judge doesn't force the omission of "irrelevant facts" like "there were no pirated games found at the home". I would love to see this type of thing crushed by Jury Nullification. (If you ever want out of Jury Duty go up to the prosecutor, lean in, and whisper 'I know all About Jury Nullification').
Consider the BS one has to go through for simple things involving the government such as DMV tag renewals, tickets for various minor offenses, property tax, etc and then consider the crap these folks will have to endure, probably for years, over a mod chip. This is dumb.
It scares me just how prevalent this type of software is.. not just the spam bots but the malware and other stuff meant to steal data. Locating+shutting down spambots is the easiest task. I'm pretty small time but I found something interesting once while working with a new client to get them fixed up with antivirus and internet monitoring software (squid+sarg). I'd locked down some things and I kept noticing one PC trying to connect to yahoo every week at about 2:00 am. Long story short it was apparently attempting to email a 500kb attachment... that was apparently a log of everything typed in the week before and some other stuff. That *almost* went unnoticed. That type of infection is downright scary.... who is going to notice a 500kb email going out through an https connection at yahoo? It didn't even seem to be part of a command+control network... just gathering info??
The spambot infections is just the most visible symptom of a larger problem... they're talking about some "big name" companies apparently, but it is the smaller and medium sized businesses that really make the world tick... it is simply too complex, challenging and costly to really secure windows boxes without severely compromising functionality. It is also apparently not something that lends itself well to automation... I see big companies using enterprise software to "lock down" workstations and "reset" workstation images as their solution but there isn't really a small business answer here that I know of. If the tools were better/easier to use it might be easier to keep an eye on one's "flock" but it is a horrible pain both in setup and upkeep to really anticipate what might be happening. The entire stack one could use in windows to manage this stuff, from Event Logging to vb scripting automation, and all the way up to group policy is half-assed at best. This is the type of result you can expect.
this type of story is why I think that learning and/or heuristic scanners (both at the machine and router/firewall/proxy level) are pretty much the only way we can win. I'm not imagining something sentient, mind you, just something that will sift through all the event logs and point me toward things actually worth my attention instead of "every little thing".
I have an 8800GTX since Nov 15. Being a corporate customer, we've also had the various flavors of vista since Nov 30th. The new shiny 100.xx drivers are complete and utter crap across the board. The nVidia card touted as the ultimate in vista preparedness, the 8800, barely works on vista at all. See nVidia forums The class action stie and my own video. There are thousands of folks out there with issues. The nvidia drivers thread (70+ pages) has been deleted at least 3 times that I know of (from before the Jan 30th launch).
In my youtube video.. just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly. For example.. I can't hit control-a to select all my icons.. it crashes the driver? WTF nVidia?
To make matters worse, nvidia appear to have thunked the 32 bit drivers into 64 bit address space... so there doesn't seem to be a true 64 bit driver out there for vista at all. Can anyone comment on this??
The 97.xx drivers.. what Microsoft shipped with vista.. are probably the best and most stable drivers at this point. On some of the other forums the reviewers have gone back to "stock" drivers for Intel and nVidia hardware.. and this eliminates some of the apparent vista stability issues. Some people have had ok luck out of the 100.xx drivers..
The truth is, I think, no one expects the vista drivers for hardware we already have to be this amazing break through. What is a bit scary is that the driver support is apparently so poor at this point in time... and it is poorest on hardware supposedly designed with vista in mind. The RTM drivers for vista/older cards aren't that bad.. they're playable in a lot of cases.. A lot of people, myself included, are having problems with source engine games IF the settings are cranked up way high. 800x600? No problem. 1920x1200 4xAA 4xAF.. Heloooo Pink Checkerboard Textures!
I'm not too terribly miffed I can't game quite as well on XP SP2... I am more than a little disappointed the drivers are buggy for basic things like.. screensaver... overlay video playback... being up for more than 4 hours? Given the state of Vista and that the graphics subsystem hasn't really changed much since RC1 I would have expected much better drivers-- especially since there are all these vista techdemos floating around.. at least in the case of the 8800+vista.
This is the type of thing Ballmer has in mind, I think, when he's talking of patents, lawsuits, etc. Microsoft can and has special rights to all these formats. I don't see anything inherently wrong in "forking" open office. Especially if their mods can be Freely integrated into open office.
..." or perhaps Novell approached MS about better VBA integration.
I'd guess Microsoft wants to maneuver Novell and other companies into the situation where they are writing plugins not necessarily covered by the GPL. "Ohh, only Novell Office can understand Microsoft Office formats." In other cases like the MA case Microsoft can say there are other apps that can deal with their formats when in fact it is perhaps smallest slice possible of the whole *office crowd, smaller even than folks using staroffice and other incarnations, that can deal with the formats.
Novell offer Novell Open Office to other distros? Why bother. I bet it is part of their "strategy" for pushing novell.
Novell already has some plug-ins to deal with VBA and they work really well. SLE desktop, from a business standpoint, seems very slick and usable. Novell needs to get their marketing act together, though. Novell seems to have the magical product stack for small businesses but they keep dropping the ball in the PR and Marketing departments. I could do a better job than they are doing! But that is a rant for another time... (I really, really hope Novell/Groupwise turns into an exchange killer. )
My guess is, after having read the article and the links, Microsoft phoned up Novell and said something along the lines of "You know, we invented that language there. VBA.
I don't see anything inherently wrong here... but if the goal of Microsoft is in fact to encourage situations where the community can't benefit from one company's advancements, hinder group,cross-company efforts, etc then shame on them.
Yeah, that doesn't actually do anything special.
I miss always on top.
Yeah, I saw someone mention that somewhere else googling around. I should send a screen shot because... you end up with a windows explorer window halfway off the screen. I can't make the window any more narrow than about 140 pixels.. it used to be something like 32 pixels. and no always on top.
Well, yeah, I have a model-M but I remapped caps to the winkey some time ago. I haven't really got used to it yet. The laptop I have to use also has the winkey in an obscure location... perhaps I should have left out the details about the how and focused more on the functionality/UI issue.
.. moving around folders with windows explorer.. to delete a bunch of files you've selected you can't hit delete then enter. If you do that windows tries to launch whatever program is associated all those files. at the same time. If you hit delete then y before it actually asks you if you are sure it unselects whatever you spent time selecting and snaps you to files beginning with Y. Good Job boys.
:)
The point was that if you click start and then type a program, as you seem to be at least somewhat encouraged to do, you cannot just hit enter. You have to wait a sec for it to figure out what you're talking about. Good UI would have been waiting for auto-complete its quicksearch or whatever before processing enter. They didn't try. The fact is the UI updates immediately after you hit the first character, and often matches one of the programs you most recently used. The UI doesn't seem to update its list again until you stop typing. So if you know all you need for notepad is to type notepad and hit enter you should be able to. You can't type notepad and hit enter. You have to type notepad.. wait for a sec.. then press enter.
It reminds me of another "bug"
To me this seems like what it would be like trying type without a keyboard buffer on an older machine. We had good keyboard buffers then. It helps stem the insanity.
It seems like a good idea.. you know.. to be able to type word, excel, powerpoint, etc instead of "winword" or the explicit executable name. It is just different.
I know I can get the old run menu by modifying my prefs or hitting caps+R and have everything peachy fine, but it isn't really trying to make use of the new feature. I was trying to at the rationale behind doing it that way and honestly try and use the "new and improved" thingie.
Ok. I've been running vista on one machine or another for a while.. since early beta.. and am now running the release version on my main machine. There are quite a few headscratchers in here. I often tell my colleagues I'm like the little kid from the 6th sense.. except instead of dead people I see bugs. Things that annoy the crap out of me that have been there at least one maybe two versions of windows ago.
In the past days of clicking through endless options and dialogs to configure things such as encryption certificates, etc I often wondered if this was really better than editing a single line in an easy-to-find text file.
Start menu? Hardly ever used the damn thing. Shortcut keys with and I put the quicklaunch bar off to one side with the 40 or so frequently used programs I use.
Vista doesn't support dragging the quicklaunch bar off of the stat menu and off to one side because it was "confusing to end users." No one seems to have found a registry override as yet.
Vista doesn't handle symlinks properly. It used to be "c:\documents and settings" but now in vista it is c:\users. I see a clever little "C:\documents and settings" shortcut on my C drive. OOOOoo is this a symlink? No? I get Access Denied when trying to double-click. Opening the path via an API however works fine. Go figure.
BUGS. Features? Half-Features? Call them what you want. I think most technical folks that have to work on this know these problems exist but architecturally or bureaucratically they are hard or impossible to fix.
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run. I would say this is just an odd quirk about me and how I think menus take too long and too much work to do something, but now the run area has been replaced with a little place you type in stuff and through the magic of windows desktop search it finds whatever you type in the area above that normally occupied by program icons. The bug? You have to let it search. No matter what. Yeah, WTF? This works great on a home PC where you maybe have maybe 10,000 files. Network drives? Oh no. You can't just type n:\ then hit enter. You have to physically wait a sec for it to pull up n:\ in the list of programs above the start menu THEN hit enter. WOW, WHAT A GREAT FEATURE. No more control-esc n:\ enter for me. It is nowctrl+esc n:\ wait..wait..wait.. enter. Otherwise I get some random program like Notepad. Or Flash. Or Firefox.
On the one hand I can see how the start menu splaying itself all over your screen as you "drill down" to whatever the hell obscure program you need might be unappealing. On the other hand confining the entirety of all programs available to you to a 400x600 pixel window doesn't seem like a good fix.
This is just the start menu. Don't even get me started on the new file explorer, which is the least half-baked area of Vista in my opinion. Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments? I'm sure I could go on all day.
I take all this as evidence that a lot of new features in vista are based on good ideas.. new paradigms in UI design.. it just seems that the vast majority are implemented poorly at best and implemented recklessly at worst. I would not expect this in 2006 when others are able to produce such polished and solid OSs. I would have to agree this seems like code-rot from the inside out probably due to the megalithic internal structure at MS
Actually, most modern chipsets (nforce4 939, i875 iirc, i915/i925/etc) support 66mhz on most, if not all, of the standard PCI slots.. so they'll top out around 266mbytes/sec. I found a program that would tell me what speed the slot was running at, but I promptly lost it again. Reviews such as this one amuse me. Not that I'm a scsi bigot, but when you can get a 160gb 15krpm 1 year warranty OEM seagate scsi drive + used adaptec 29160 for about the same price as a raptor... and the scsi disk makes the ide disk feel like a PIO disk from 10 years ago.. I have to wonder. These are nice for capacity, I guess.. I'd be pretty hapy if pci express scsi controllers were cheap.
I have always wished that sites would implement a version of semi- public key encryption. When I log on to paypal or my bank or whatever I want all my communication with them to be automatically signed by my semi-public key. It isn't truly public, but I can use it to verify the authenticity of sender. One key pair for each of the critical communications senders sending to me. A lot of email clients have close to this capability built right in with their public key encryption, but not a lot of automated systems out there actually take advantage of that. I want to know on a per-message basis that 1) I am assured I am the person with which the initiator intended to communicate in a cryptographic sense and 2) that who is communicating with me is the same entity I'm used to doing business with and they have not changed.
It really isn't that hard to run that on top of good old open email, and make it user friendly enough for the public. It just hasn't been done.
Ok. All slashvertisement comments aside, I get as excited about 'teh new hotness' in drives as much as the next person. But this is SO poorly submitted. 300MB/sec? PLEASE. You MIGHT get 70% of that speed doing a transfer from that 16mb buffer to the controller, but that is just misleading. Without even reading, I'm guessing they're talking about 3Gb/sec SATA-II. Woo. So that is wrong. "Interface Speed" is what you wanted to say there. Not "Transfer Rate".
What about "WD Characterizes this as the highest performance section of the desktop market." Wrong again. Helooo??? Raptor??
I mean. Talk about something cool, at least. New TCQ optimizations? Read-before-write? 24/7 100% duty cycle?
SR is a decent place to check out reviews and benchmarks. Do your homework! Astroturf like this only spreads confusion and disinformation.
I got a 15k RPM SCSI drive from hypermicro. It is a seagate, 73gb. It was only about $250 with an adaptec controller (which wasn't a whole lot more than a WD74 gb raptor at the time). At the beginning of the disk, it has over a 90Mbyte xfer rate on a 160mbyte/sec interface, which totally crushes all this other crap. My drive is (was?) the leading drive on non-raid configurations on hdtach's website, even against the 400gb SATA WD behemoth. 2x36gb raptors are about the same speed as one decent 15k RPM scsi disk.
I haven't really looked, but I would guess the drive in the post is what.. neighborhood of 60mbyte/sec? 70? Meh. Meh I say. We didn't even talk about I/Os/sec. between 7200 rpm, 10k RPM and 15k RPM.
The idea of an article like this on slashdot is not bad. It is just that this article is misleading and/or wrong and isn't really news at all. And so on and so forth.
That is really good to know, and probably great for a long-term solution. I had a low-end nokia I used for free though ;)
This is a general reply to all the +5 comments that are saying stuff like 'picocell' and 'well, you could modify xyz and ... but you'd still need to sign on to the provider's network'
Look. It is very simple. Take advantage of the 'free calling to other members' most providers offer. I.e. Add a tmobile phone to your plan and make your plan a shared-minutes plan. Get free tmobile to tmoble. Make liberal use of the headset port.
Take ANY GSM phone that has a good USB and headset interface. A bit of straightforward hacking (as asterisk already supports sound cards for in and outbound sound channels) gets the headset connected to the asterisk box. Now all you need to do is press buttons on the phone.
Enter the usb interface, basically a com port in disguise. ATDT ring a bell? A lot of phones support this last time I checked. Most motorola phones for sure so you can dial folks in your bluetooth organizer with the click of a wand. Instead, you can just have Asterisk decode the DTMF and (with a dialing rule) when you've dialed 7 or 10 digits, it will encode it as an ATDT string, send to the phone, and connect the audio channels.
Ta-Da. It works, by the way (though instead of a USB interface I just hacked the keypad interface as it was more convenient for me to do that with the equipment I have. My interface is on a com port and tied together with an Atmel microcontroller FYI I did this initially because I was annoyed I had to pay to call to check my VM on my office phone).
The HP 100LX / 200LX was essentially abandoned by HP with similar reasoning. HP came out with the 320LX, a WinCE device. Yet, the 200LX persists to this very day. (A decade+later)
I think Sharp dumping the USA market makes perfect business sense. The average american consumer is just too ignorant for the C7xx/C860/C3000 line of PDAs. Most folks want something that 'just works.' They are ignorant of cross-compiling, and probably find the lack of a unified (stable) software set annoying at best.
The nicest thing about the 200LX was the software suite was extremely well designed and put together. For me, the 200lx 'just worked' right of of the box for everything I needed it for, and it was completely painless to make it do more. The Zaurus pales in comparison, but with a little diligence I think I can get it where I want it. It isn't much fun trying to port or fix botched ports of the software you want.
You may be right that this will be the last good PDA model Sharp makes.. but after carrying my 200LX for just over a decade, I've found my successor.
Just as before, the average consumer did not want a DOS palmatop in a sea of (then extremely crappy) WinCE devices. They want something that just works.
Me? I'm having a very good time cross-compiling things for the Arm, porting scripts and utilities and really turning this PDA into an ultra-portable laptop. I almost have a dos emulator running at a nice speed. I doubt that most folks want to do this stuff. Most of the techies I work with want a PDA that 'just works'. I can't say that I blame them, but I want another 10-year PDA.
I suspect this device will have the same cult following as the 200LX does, even though the software is a bit rocky with all the variations in the Zaurus famuly. I can only hope it persists for a decade.