I agree, this is a poor choice if your only goal is a typical black box Windows image. However, listen to what the author was trying to do:
I'm doing a little personal research into a project that tracks what changes get made to your system every time you install a program.
As you know from using it, Prism Deploy allows you to see every single file change, registry change, file deletion, and file modification that has been made since the last snapshot. Sure, you could put all of that into an executable if you want and distribute that, but you could also save it as a prism image, and use that information to create your own package, or in the author's case, whatever undisclosed nefarious purpose he has in mind.
I'm going to start with an absolutely fresh Windows XP install, take a full snapshot of the entire installation on the hard drive, and burn that to a DVD... With every program I install, I'm going to take another snapshot... all programs installed on a separate hard drive, all registry entries etc on the OS drive. [emphasis mine]
I think that prism deploy (or a similar tool) would allow him to do this with minimal work.
It isn't free, but they do have a free trial. I've tried a number of programs to package executable programs and manage Windows images, but nothing has come close.
I'm really interested to see if there are any freeware programs that come close.
For me working at an Educational Institution, Symantec Corporate was worse than your average virus in terms of CPU and Memory usage, and caused more noticeable problems to the user as well. I've switched over to free antiviral software, and am working on packing clavAV into an msi to push out.
Does anyone else find this scarily similar to how it worked in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
Also, it isn't "welcoming our new selectively amnesiac rodent overloads." It's "I for one am welcoming our memory-erasing government sponsored scientist overlords."
This sort of project makes a lot of sense in a place like Japan where there are a few places with very dense population separated by rural areas.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
I know you were just kidding, but I'd like to contribute.
The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu doesn't even begin to cover what should be removable from the Operating System. Internet Explorer is the back end for a number of programs and cannot be fully removed, a few programs even rely on MSN Messenger and will not allow you to remove it if they are installed. There are all sorts of extra services running, like one for office that waits for it to be installed so it can clean it up. There's Alexa, a never ending assortment of drivers for ancient equipment. The system restore and hibernation services are installed and running whether you want them or not. And even in XP (although this is worse in Vista) the indexing service.
There are replacements for every single one of these applications that are better than the original, yet there is no way to easily remove them. You should check out the nLite program for making your own Windows image to get an idea of all of the cruft that is built into Windows (and isn't anywhere in the add/remove programs menu). With Linux, everything outside of the Kernel can be removed, usually without even restarting. With Windows you need to reinstall just to remove most of this junk, and that's assuming you have the administrative knowledge to make your own custom image.
Yes, ads are the business model that many websites rely on, but consider how ads work.
Every time you buy a product, you're paying a little extra fee to be advertised to. Ads aren't free money that appears out of the air, they don't make things cheaper, they are just a different way of distributing wealth. You are still paying to fund these websites, they are not free, the cost of the ads is paid by YOU every time you buy something.
Personally, if I am going to pay the same regardless, I'd prefer not to have ads. Maybe the wealth isn't being distributed fairly, but honestly I think my eyeball-hours are worth more than that. To use a wee bit of economist speak: the market will adjust.
There are tons of free web hosts, and it's easy to set up a website yourself or have your techno-savvy friend do it. (Broadband + $15/mo for static IP + Old PC + LAMP + $6/yr Domain Name). If you're getting enough web traffic that you need more bandwidth than that, consider commercializing your user base in more than one way. (T-shirts, events, subscription benefits, surveys, etc...)
Almost certainly, because unlike Firewire, USB ports are "dumb" and all of the processing is done at the CPU. More data will mean more processing required. Whether the increase is linear or parabolic I cannot tell you.
Maybe your transfers don't take as long, but I am willing to bet that small chunks won't see any benefit.
I am not sure how they are doing the "chunks," but wouldn't it vary by device driver? USB is, after all, a universal serial bus. In addition you'll need to remember that your USB 2.0 devices won't see any improvement. When new USB 3.0 devices come out I expect they'll have lower latency, although what I'm really interested in is the potential of the optical connection.
I encourage all of my users to use Firefox by including it on our PC images, showing them it's cool features, and letting them know about how it's more secure. I've been running into problems with self-signed SSL certificates though.
I run a router/firewall based on the Untangle software, which in turn is a modified Debian/Knoppix setup. It also does VPN, based on the open source openVPN software, and it uses self-signed SSL certificates for it. While I don't mind adding our firewalls to a safe list, my users freak out with all of the warnings and aren't sure what they should do. I've been telling them to use Internet Explorer, but it makes my skin crawl to say it. Hopefully the Mozilla team will reconsider their position to make their software more open-source friendly.
If you don't respect others privacy and they will not respect yours. and you shouldn't hold people/and companies at a higher standard if you are not willing to follow it yourself.
The problem with that is that I have DRM encrusted songs because I respected their privacy and bought them online, and the pirates have DRM free songs because they didn't respect their privacy.
So it is more like: if you respect their rights than you will not have any privacy or rights, but if you do not respect their rights than you get to have your privacy, because there is no DRM spying on you, and your rights, because you can play stuff wherever you want.
Actually there's a pretty good solution to this, and it is already in place in several places on the internet. If you get the password wrong 3 times than you must wait X seconds before attempting again and enter a captcha. This way you aren't completely locked out, but it would take years to brute force your account. (Unless you use the password 4444 like my boss *headdesk*)
I have heard two theories regarding this. One is that Venus is regularly losing atmosphere, but because it already has an unbelievably crushing density of atmosphere, it will not have any noticeable thinning for millions of years.
Another theory that I have heard is that the magnetic field of Venus is actually caused by the interaction of solar wind with it's ionosphere, thus limiting the loss of atmosphere due to solar wind.
In my experiences with developing and using web 2.0 apps I have found that there is a lot of problems with useless information.
The perfect example of this is Slashdot, even with the moderation system it is still full of useless, off topic, biased, and jaded information. This isn't to bash Slashdot, it is far and above one of the best communities around.
The problem with using Web 2.0 is how much work it is. If you require registration than you will have to maintain logins, and if you don't you have to deal with hordes of advertising spam and junk posts. Even if you do maintain logins you'll still have to sort out unsavory individuals somehow.
Most corporate websites won't have the kind of dedicated moderation staff Slashdot and other community driven sites have, so the problem will be even worse.
Application developers will need to think long and hard about whether a truly "web 2.0" system of application development is worth the work it will create.
I propose that you cannot prove that we aren't increasing the temperature of the planet
Every time you post a logical fallacy, God kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
It is awfully hard to debate your point when you don't actually mention what you feel is a logical fallacy.
Are you claiming that one of the statements I made was false or that my reasoning was bad? If so, please show me where I am wrong so that I can correct it.
I'd also like to add that the original comment that I was disagreeing with may use chagrined language, but has some good points. I strongly disagree with the troll moderation, even if you do not agree with what someone is saying, you should still value the points they are trying to make.
Despite the political rhetoric we have no proof as to how much human activity is contributing to any warming trends, and even less of an idea on the possible side effects of any direct intervention. Other scientists have actually proposed putting more particulate pollution into the air to create a mild 'nuclear winter' style cooling in order to offset any rising temperatures.
I'll leave out the fact that temperatures globally have been flat for several years now, but I will point out in closing that hair brained schemes such as this one remind me of a five year old child trying to rebuild a Formula 1 engine with a pair of chopsticks. We are so very ignorant of how and why we have or can effect the climate. The sheer hubris of some people today who assume we have such great control over climate just amazes, and scares, me.
I agree that the climate is extremely complex, and that while we cannot understand all of the factors involved, we can draw some simple conclusions about some of the effects we are having on the environment.
You probably already know that humans produce a lot of carbon dioxide. We breathe it out, we burn things, and our agricultural and industrial processes create even more.
You probably also know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that greenhouse gasses increase warming due to sunlight.
You may or may not know that the ppm of carbon dioxide has been increasing over the years.
I propose that you cannot prove that we aren't increasing the temperature of the planet
Slashdot or Message Board?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Feel free to mod me down, but at what point did Slashdot become a run of the mill message board where we discuss the latest movies and TV?
I'll admit I was slightly frustrated when we received two headline articles that were slightly masked advertisement for this movie. However, this article doesn't even attempt to well... be an article, or create a veneer of providing useful information.
Yes, I'm sure the movie is amazing, but is it really necessary to have a few articles about it followed by a straight-out discussion?
Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?
The short answer is, no. The explanation is as follows:
From what I understand after reading a bit of Wikipedia, the human eye doesn't have a "resolution" like games. You'll notice that you can see more of things that are closer than of things that are far away. Therefore we have angular resolution which is more accurate towards the center of our field of view, and closer to our eye. According to Wikipedida that is:
50 CPD (1.2 minute of arc per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m).
In addition, I think that the number of colors we can "see" vastly exceeds what current monitors can render, although IMHO we have already exceeded (using only 6 million colors) the noticeable difference between one color and another. I'll grant that it is still entirely possible that a higher number of colors could look more "real" even if we aren't able to directly distinguish between 1/6,000,000'th of a difference in color in the same sense that 120 fps looks better than 60 fps even though we aren't able to count the frames.
First off, I'd like to say that I RTFA and agree with nearly all of their suggestions.
(Although some of them were rather silly, a cached programs popup? Like I need more popups on my toolbar. If users are smart enough to know how much page file Vista is using, they're smart enough to know why).
As a systems admin, what I'd really like in addition to the modular OS is a much advanced installer. I would like a full set of options on what to install and what not to install. (Lets go ahead an uncheck WMP DRM, Alexa, Windows Messenger, and a whole other host of unnecessary crap). Maybe even a "quick minimal" installation of only the required components to get Windows to run. You'll notice even Vista runs fairly nicely once add SP1 and chop it up with a tool like vLite.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, this is a poor choice if your only goal is a typical black box Windows image. However, listen to what the author was trying to do:
I'm doing a little personal research into a project that tracks what changes get made to your system every time you install a program.
As you know from using it, Prism Deploy allows you to see every single file change, registry change, file deletion, and file modification that has been made since the last snapshot. Sure, you could put all of that into an executable if you want and distribute that, but you could also save it as a prism image, and use that information to create your own package, or in the author's case, whatever undisclosed nefarious purpose he has in mind.
I'm going to start with an absolutely fresh Windows XP install, take a full snapshot of the entire installation on the hard drive, and burn that to a DVD... With every program I install, I'm going to take another snapshot... all programs installed on a separate hard drive, all registry entries etc on the OS drive. [emphasis mine]
I think that prism deploy (or a similar tool) would allow him to do this with minimal work.
The best tool I have ever used is Prism Deploy.
It isn't free, but they do have a free trial. I've tried a number of programs to package executable programs and manage Windows images, but nothing has come close.
I'm really interested to see if there are any freeware programs that come close.
Shihar, that post was truly amazing. I almost wish there was a +6 insightful mod. Excellently spoken.
For me working at an Educational Institution, Symantec Corporate was worse than your average virus in terms of CPU and Memory usage, and caused more noticeable problems to the user as well. I've switched over to free antiviral software, and am working on packing clavAV into an msi to push out.
Does anyone else find this scarily similar to how it worked in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
Also, it isn't "welcoming our new selectively amnesiac rodent overloads." It's "I for one am welcoming our memory-erasing government sponsored scientist overlords."
This sort of project makes a lot of sense in a place like Japan where there are a few places with very dense population separated by rural areas.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
I have a rather simple solution (that will probably never happen) to this problem.
Sell me one license to use/play/run whatever you are selling. Then let me use/play/run it wherever I want whenever I want, however I want.
Give me the right to give or sell my license to someone else, meaning I would no longer be able to use/play/run whatever you are selling anymore.
Let me worry about format shifts, backing it up, keeping track of my devices, etc.
I know you were just kidding, but I'd like to contribute.
The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu doesn't even begin to cover what should be removable from the Operating System. Internet Explorer is the back end for a number of programs and cannot be fully removed, a few programs even rely on MSN Messenger and will not allow you to remove it if they are installed. There are all sorts of extra services running, like one for office that waits for it to be installed so it can clean it up. There's Alexa, a never ending assortment of drivers for ancient equipment. The system restore and hibernation services are installed and running whether you want them or not. And even in XP (although this is worse in Vista) the indexing service.
There are replacements for every single one of these applications that are better than the original, yet there is no way to easily remove them. You should check out the nLite program for making your own Windows image to get an idea of all of the cruft that is built into Windows (and isn't anywhere in the add/remove programs menu). With Linux, everything outside of the Kernel can be removed, usually without even restarting. With Windows you need to reinstall just to remove most of this junk, and that's assuming you have the administrative knowledge to make your own custom image.
The OEM cost for XP Pro and Vista Business has been $129.99 for a while now. It's only $30 for the Home versions though.
Yes, ads are the business model that many websites rely on, but consider how ads work.
Every time you buy a product, you're paying a little extra fee to be advertised to. Ads aren't free money that appears out of the air, they don't make things cheaper, they are just a different way of distributing wealth. You are still paying to fund these websites, they are not free, the cost of the ads is paid by YOU every time you buy something.
Personally, if I am going to pay the same regardless, I'd prefer not to have ads. Maybe the wealth isn't being distributed fairly, but honestly I think my eyeball-hours are worth more than that. To use a wee bit of economist speak: the market will adjust.
There are tons of free web hosts, and it's easy to set up a website yourself or have your techno-savvy friend do it. (Broadband + $15/mo for static IP + Old PC + LAMP + $6/yr Domain Name). If you're getting enough web traffic that you need more bandwidth than that, consider commercializing your user base in more than one way. (T-shirts, events, subscription benefits, surveys, etc...)
Where I work the ratio is 1800:2 and the guy I work with can't even do basic windows tasks, so it is 1800:1 for all intents and purposes.
Oh, and for bonus points we're only budgeted $16.66 per user per year for software/licensing/equipment/supplies. More than 1/3 of it goes to ink...
Oh, and the pay sucks too.
Also, will this spec require more cpu overhead?
Almost certainly, because unlike Firewire, USB ports are "dumb" and all of the processing is done at the CPU. More data will mean more processing required. Whether the increase is linear or parabolic I cannot tell you.
Maybe your transfers don't take as long, but I am willing to bet that small chunks won't see any benefit.
I am not sure how they are doing the "chunks," but wouldn't it vary by device driver? USB is, after all, a universal serial bus. In addition you'll need to remember that your USB 2.0 devices won't see any improvement. When new USB 3.0 devices come out I expect they'll have lower latency, although what I'm really interested in is the potential of the optical connection.
If you know of a way to push out certificates to user's home computers that you have no control over I would be very interested to hear it.
Or do most of your users choose to VPN into their work account when they're already at work?
Also, some of us just don't have funds. If I want certs for my organization, they'll have to come out of my own pocket.
I encourage all of my users to use Firefox by including it on our PC images, showing them it's cool features, and letting them know about how it's more secure. I've been running into problems with self-signed SSL certificates though.
I run a router/firewall based on the Untangle software, which in turn is a modified Debian/Knoppix setup. It also does VPN, based on the open source openVPN software, and it uses self-signed SSL certificates for it. While I don't mind adding our firewalls to a safe list, my users freak out with all of the warnings and aren't sure what they should do. I've been telling them to use Internet Explorer, but it makes my skin crawl to say it. Hopefully the Mozilla team will reconsider their position to make their software more open-source friendly.
If you don't respect others privacy and they will not respect yours. and you shouldn't hold people/and companies at a higher standard if you are not willing to follow it yourself.
The problem with that is that I have DRM encrusted songs because I respected their privacy and bought them online, and the pirates have DRM free songs because they didn't respect their privacy.
So it is more like: if you respect their rights than you will not have any privacy or rights, but if you do not respect their rights than you get to have your privacy, because there is no DRM spying on you, and your rights, because you can play stuff wherever you want.
Actually there's a pretty good solution to this, and it is already in place in several places on the internet. If you get the password wrong 3 times than you must wait X seconds before attempting again and enter a captcha. This way you aren't completely locked out, but it would take years to brute force your account. (Unless you use the password 4444 like my boss *headdesk*)
I have heard two theories regarding this. One is that Venus is regularly losing atmosphere, but because it already has an unbelievably crushing density of atmosphere, it will not have any noticeable thinning for millions of years.
Another theory that I have heard is that the magnetic field of Venus is actually caused by the interaction of solar wind with it's ionosphere, thus limiting the loss of atmosphere due to solar wind.
In my experiences with developing and using web 2.0 apps I have found that there is a lot of problems with useless information.
The perfect example of this is Slashdot, even with the moderation system it is still full of useless, off topic, biased, and jaded information. This isn't to bash Slashdot, it is far and above one of the best communities around.
The problem with using Web 2.0 is how much work it is. If you require registration than you will have to maintain logins, and if you don't you have to deal with hordes of advertising spam and junk posts. Even if you do maintain logins you'll still have to sort out unsavory individuals somehow.
Most corporate websites won't have the kind of dedicated moderation staff Slashdot and other community driven sites have, so the problem will be even worse.
Application developers will need to think long and hard about whether a truly "web 2.0" system of application development is worth the work it will create.
I propose that you cannot prove that we aren't increasing the temperature of the planet
Every time you post a logical fallacy, God kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
It is awfully hard to debate your point when you don't actually mention what you feel is a logical fallacy.
Are you claiming that one of the statements I made was false or that my reasoning was bad? If so, please show me where I am wrong so that I can correct it.
I'd also like to add that the original comment that I was disagreeing with may use chagrined language, but has some good points. I strongly disagree with the troll moderation, even if you do not agree with what someone is saying, you should still value the points they are trying to make.
Despite the political rhetoric we have no proof as to how much human activity is contributing to any warming trends, and even less of an idea on the possible side effects of any direct intervention. Other scientists have actually proposed putting more particulate pollution into the air to create a mild 'nuclear winter' style cooling in order to offset any rising temperatures.
I'll leave out the fact that temperatures globally have been flat for several years now, but I will point out in closing that hair brained schemes such as this one remind me of a five year old child trying to rebuild a Formula 1 engine with a pair of chopsticks. We are so very ignorant of how and why we have or can effect the climate. The sheer hubris of some people today who assume we have such great control over climate just amazes, and scares, me.
I agree that the climate is extremely complex, and that while we cannot understand all of the factors involved, we can draw some simple conclusions about some of the effects we are having on the environment.
You probably already know that humans produce a lot of carbon dioxide. We breathe it out, we burn things, and our agricultural and industrial processes create even more.
You probably also know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that greenhouse gasses increase warming due to sunlight.
You may or may not know that the ppm of carbon dioxide has been increasing over the years.
I propose that you cannot prove that we aren't increasing the temperature of the planet
Feel free to mod me down, but at what point did Slashdot become a run of the mill message board where we discuss the latest movies and TV?
I'll admit I was slightly frustrated when we received two headline articles that were slightly masked advertisement for this movie. However, this article doesn't even attempt to well... be an article, or create a veneer of providing useful information.
Yes, I'm sure the movie is amazing, but is it really necessary to have a few articles about it followed by a straight-out discussion?
Oh, and get off my lawn.
... oh wait.
Anyone got the math for how much video memory you'd need to render a landscape at high enough resolution with a large and complex enough environment to fool the human eye?
The short answer is, no. The explanation is as follows:
From what I understand after reading a bit of Wikipedia, the human eye doesn't have a "resolution" like games. You'll notice that you can see more of things that are closer than of things that are far away. Therefore we have angular resolution which is more accurate towards the center of our field of view, and closer to our eye. According to Wikipedida that is:
50 CPD (1.2 minute of arc per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m).
In addition, I think that the number of colors we can "see" vastly exceeds what current monitors can render, although IMHO we have already exceeded (using only 6 million colors) the noticeable difference between one color and another. I'll grant that it is still entirely possible that a higher number of colors could look more "real" even if we aren't able to directly distinguish between 1/6,000,000'th of a difference in color in the same sense that 120 fps looks better than 60 fps even though we aren't able to count the frames.
(Although some of them were rather silly, a cached programs popup? Like I need more popups on my toolbar. If users are smart enough to know how much page file Vista is using, they're smart enough to know why).
As a systems admin, what I'd really like in addition to the modular OS is a much advanced installer. I would like a full set of options on what to install and what not to install. (Lets go ahead an uncheck WMP DRM, Alexa, Windows Messenger, and a whole other host of unnecessary crap). Maybe even a "quick minimal" installation of only the required components to get Windows to run. You'll notice even Vista runs fairly nicely once add SP1 and chop it up with a tool like vLite.
Many objections, regardless of their merits, are irrelevant to the appeals process.
Hmm, what is the difference between an objection and an appeal again?
define:objection - expostulation: the act of expressing earnest opposition or protest.
define:appeal - challenge (a decision); "She appealed the verdict"
Ahh yes, completely different.