Stop being a bunch of pansies and BURN IT IN A REACTOR!
This is so right it's scary. If we would actually say "screw it" and started a nuclear recycling program (or hell, just a new nuclear program in general), these tedious storage systems would be virtually unnecessary.
The problem is that Chernobyl and TMI scared way too many people here for it to be feasible. For example, Since TMI there has been no new reactors built in the US. Every time they try to build one, NIMBY comes into play, they get some hippy crazies into the mix, and it goes down the tubes. They can't even replace aging reactors with newer, safer reactors without running into this.
Remember Captain Planet? (Who Doesn't?) There was a bad guy in it called Duke Nukem that would pollute the planet with Toxic Nuclear radiation. They even had an episode where someone built the "safest nuclear reactor" under the best technology available, and of course portrayed it as some glowing green goo and radiation spewing cesspool that Nukem used for his own evil deeds. Even though it was dead wrong in almost every possible scenario it was (and probably still is today on some Turner network somewhere) burned into kids minds that have now grown up and are voting No on these things, Even though These Next Generation Reactors are infinitely safer, cleaner, and more productive then their older counterparts.
Today, we could build a fission reactor that's has an efficiency ratio around 90%+ with very little waste and whatever waste is left has nowhere near the half-life of what we're throwing away now. this would also pave the way for fusion reactors since the sites could be retrofitted once the technology becomes viable. Why are we wasting our time on these lower efficiency fossil fuel systems which can pollute and waste what little natural resources we have left, when we can be building a very efficient, powerful and low environmental impacting reactor today.
Toshiba and Sony are bad, but at one time, Compaq was the absolute worst bundler's I've ever seen. Worse then even Packard Bell's bloated builds of the day
Back when Windows 95 first came out, Compaq had a build of 95 that was so overloaded, I referred to it as CompaqOS. Looking at it you would have no idea that MS even made the OS, since just about every branded Windows Item was Replaced with Presario. Even the Login prompts were different, with a graphical user interface similar to the Welcome screen but worse.
Then came the apps. Every app in the thing was it's 16 bit equivalent. Half of the time they would crash. Things like Answering machines, and media player software that was specificially tied to the proprietary hardware CD player buttons in the front were the Norm for this system. the best part? if you uninstalled the programs, the system would crash.
Upgrade it? good Luck. A friend of mine had a One Piece P133 Machine that had Compaq OS. If you did any upgrade to it, it would fail. regardless of what OS it was. Windows 95b, 98, Me, NT, Even Linux would crash on this if you looked at it the wrong way. The only OS that would run even relatively stable on this thing was the overbloated OS that came with it.
Thankfully, Compaq quit doing this stuff afater around 97-98, probably because they realized it was a tech support nightmare.
...as long as there is some intricate and weird way to have your Sim die in it.
Don't believe it's a factor? Ask anyone who played The Sims what their favorite moment in it was. I can make a safe bet that it revolves around the Sim dying in one way or another.
I swear, that's the only reason anyone played The Sims. In fact, the few Sims games that had death removed from the game (usually the console versions. Not sounding good for the Wii already) never sold well or got good reviews, with most reviewers chastising the port because your Sim couldn't meet the reaper.
Emule has a system like this, and it basically slows everything down in the name of fair sharing. It takes absolutely forever to start downloads, since you're stuck in a vicious "chicken and egg" circle of "I can't upload anything to download" and "I can't download anything to upload".
As it stands, Bittorrent is how the Edonkey protocol used to be before ratio systems were added to the clients; Fast. After Edonkey started adding anti-leech systems to the clients, the speed went into the toilet, and the queues started skyrocketing.
I suspect that if this catches on, you can kiss 300kb's downloads goodbye.
The biggest problem going with Ford right now is their SUV division. SUVs don't sell when the gas price is high, and that's pretty much what keeps Ford afloat.
The US market wants mid to full size cars but doesn't want the huge gas hit. Why isn't there a Fusion hybrid now instead of next year? What about a Crown Victoria Hybrid? Why isn't Ford using it's Engine division technology to sell big vehicles with better gas mileage, especially when now all of a sudden their cars are getting better mileage.
Ford's averaged the lowest gas mileage of any other car at one point. For example My previous 99 Ford ZX2 and my current 2003 Ford Focus averaged about 25-30 MPG. Just about any other car in these classes foreign or domestic beats these cars, and these are Ford's small cars. Even V6 engines can beat that. Now all of a sudden the new focuses get 37-40. what happened other than now gas mileage is in vogue?
I've had 3 fords over 10 years, 2 used and 1 new, and I enjoyed every one of them. The interior doesn't matter to me as long as it gets from point A to B, and so far I've only had one breakdown that stranded me (a ECM module in my 87 Grand Marquis that was actually recalled at one point) unlike my parents Cadillac's and Buick that would break down every 4 months regardless of how you maintained it, or my aunt's new Chevy SUV which keeps killing batteries. The only problem with my current Focus has been it doesn't like cold weather and the radio display keeps getting lines in the LCD panel (this is radio #2 going on #3). Hopefully the MS deal will result in better radio's than this Blaupunkt Factory POS, but who knows.
The message is clear. They believe their monopoly can be best maintained by catering to producers, rather than to consumers. Consumer choice is not driving that market.
And it's going to hurt them. probably long term and big time.
Zune is a failure vs Ipod because consumers don't want to deal with DRM everytime they want to listen to something, especially when there are hundreds if not thousands of music players that will play non DRM files. Including the Ipod.
Vista will fail for similar reasons. Business is happy with XP and will support it until Microsoft doesn't, and maybe adopt Linux after that. Consumers will only upgrade when they buy a new PC, and will stay around even after support is killed. if Apple starts opening their mouth about vista DRM screwing their music experience, they might just buy a Mac next time. Hell I don't know why Apple hasn't done a "Buy a Mac and get an Ipod Free" deal as of yet. It would definitely get a mac in the door faster.
It's looking the same way for office2007 business wise. I know we look at it and say to ourselves "training nightmare". I'm sure we're not the only ones saying that especially since our business is Higher education. I can only imagine what a commercial business is saying.
Apple and Microsoft had the power. They had the power to give both AA's the finger and work directly with the artists. They had the power to ignore them completely and let the users rip until the cows come home. They had the power to screw these Hi-def DVD formats until they relaxed the standards to work with existing hardware and software. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be giving the RIAA the finger while somewhat bowing down to the MPAA's HD lockdown Schemes, and MS is asking both AA's which lower cheek to kiss in a futile attempt to gain some more exclusive content that Apple's going to get anyway because their the market leader. Even then, all MS is really going to get in the end is more demands from the AA's when they could have easily just stayed the course they were going and force the AA's to conform to the digital age or die.
If there is any time for Apple and Linux to start pushing themselves, now's the time.
Seriously. They could delay those games until 2008 for all I care. As long as they keep the Wii shop channel flowing with new games every week I'll be happy.
Honestly, I originally wanted a Wii because I wanted a Gamecube, and since I was putting off buying a GC for so long it got to the point where the Wii was coming, then once the Shop details were released, I was sold. The scary part was while waiting in the Wii line, I met not one, not two, but three separate PS3 Ebayer groups who stood in the PS3 line the week before, bought 3 PS3's and proceeded to make 4-6000 dollars on eBay. It makes you wonder why didn't Sony sell the PS3 on eBay in the first place since all of them were going to end up there anyway.
Anyhow, The retro gaming (as well as the Gamecube support) is what got me dead set on making the Wii my next console since the Dreamcast. As long as that doesn't dry up (and how can it) I don't see where this game drought is. The only thing left would be to get the Neo Geo games on board and I'm set for a long time.
MS Office may be a monopoly, but I'd rather deal with Microsoft any day over Autodesk.
We used to have a CAD class at the college, but we had to cancel it due to the costs of AutoCAD. We could teach using another CAD offering, but since Autocad is still the de-facto industry standard, and the only CAD professor available knew only AutoCAD, it would be a disservice to the students to teach a CAD class without teaching AutoCAD. The upgrade from Autocad 2000 to their latest offering was something around $2000 per seat, And this was education pricing. Compound this with the fact that we are starting to phase out computer labs with a laptop per student initiative which would make the AutoCAD costs even higher, not to mention that there wasn't enough students interested in the class to recoup the costs, the college made the decision to kill the class.
Of course, we don't have a huge engineering department or engineering students (we focus on liberal arts) so it was an easier decision for us but I can probably make a safe bet that if other small colleges were put into this same situation of CAD class vs Cost, then the class would go. You just can't justify a $20000 cost every 1-3 years for 10-20 students tops Especially when we can spend this money on other classes with much higher student counts and better software cost options for education.
The way the main article reads, it sounds like Microsoft screwed up something. then you read the article and it's about QOS and performance improvements in the stack. Nowhere in the article does it say they "did it wrong".
Keep it simple as possible. If all she wants to do is the internet, set her up with something like MSN TV or maybe even a Wii once the browser comes out and if it supports SSL. Also, some cable companies offer web browsing through their digital cable box, and I'm sure that there's some linux distro out there that runs in a very small storage footprint (256MB or less) that can be run in a set top box configuration.
Bottom line, if she just wants to surf the internet, get her something that just surfs.
I'm still trying to figure out how you save a cheerleader that's already survived 100ft falls, being run over by a car, a garbage disposer, blunt trauma stab to her brain, her own autopsy, a high speed head on collision, multiple compound fractures over the past few weeks and no telling what else.
I guess you could kidnap her and lock her in a room until New York goes boom, but I don't see her dying anytime soon. Hell, even if Cylar pops her brain, I don't see any reason why you couldn't just stuff it back in her head and Claire's talking about the senior prom like it never happened.
i'll second this, although We use a domain to set user permissions, but it would work without domains using gpedit.msc
Basically, make an admin account (call it "school user" for example) and Password protect it install everything using that account, secure using gpedit.msc, Remove CREATOR OWNER permissions on the C:\, C:\program files, C:\windows and C:\windows\system32 folders then log out.
From there, log into administrator (the real one) copy the "school user" profile into the Default user profile using the Users profiles settings found in system properties Giving "everyone" access when you copy the profile, then change the permission manually in the "default user" profile so that everyone cannot write to it. Then make a third user account. Use compmgmt.msc to make that account a member of the guests and users groups. (make sure that guest accounts will delete once they log out. It's in gpedit.msc somewhere) optionally hide both administrator and "school user" and log out of administrator.
Log into the third account and test everything. it should not allow you to install anything if done correctly or write anywhere except for the third user profile. once you log out it should delete the profile (sometimes it doesn't for some reason. This helps with that a lot) and the settings should be safe.
Of course I'm assuming XP Pro. I'm pretty sure XP Home doesn't have these utils available.
Netscape was practically Free. it's licencing allowed just about anyone outside of governments free use of the Browser. In fact, The only Netscape browser I can remember that had a Nag screen was 2.01, and Microsoft at one time was selling IE in stores the same way Netscape was.
Even under this situation, MS didn't start really gaining share until late IE4 Early IE5, and code quality was the reason Netscape started slipping market share. Not Win98 or Free browsers like Netscape would like you to believe. By that logic, Linux with Apache is just as guilty with doing Netscape in as Microsoft with IE, Since most of Netscape's money was made on Netscape's Web server software and not their browsers.
Navigator was absolute junk by the time Netscape was done with it. They kept claiming that MS was purposely denying access to windows so they couldn't code it better, well then explain why the Sun terminal I used to use at school had the same Netscape "crash after 1 hour use" bug that windows had, In fact, when they created mozilla.org and open sourced the thing, the first thing the Dev's for mozilla.org did was chuck the code and started from scratch.
Netscape could have saved their product, they could have diversified into other markets, they could have recoded it to work better, they could have did a ton of things, but in the end while Opera with their pay browser was still keeping their business going, Netscape decided that suing MS was the easier of all the other options. pure and simple.
Simply put, Microsoft did not Kill off Netscape. Netscape killed off Netscape.
I though I would never say this, but in a sense, I want Microsoft to know who I am when it comes to WGA. That way, when WGA screws up, I can prove that I'm the owner.
Something like when I activate windows, I have the option to login to my passport to associate my windows ID with that Windows Serial Key. that way, if my key is stolen by some hacker and WGA decides to lock my computer down, I can contact MS and prove that I'm the original owner of that key and get it either unlocked or a new key resubmitted.
If I have to deal with WGA on windows, at least allow me to protect myself from being screwed out of my purchase by the next key stealing Trojan or eventual random keygen.
I do. I had to deal with the KT133 back then as a tech. Absolute nightmare.
I don't know why AMD chose ATI outside of being cheaper. Nvidia practically saved AMD with NForce, especially in the corporate sector, where most companies wouldn't touch AMD with a ten foot pole because of os stability problems the other chipsets would cause. I don't think ATI is even close to making a chipset remotely competitive to Nforce Stability wise. At least their current graphic drivers don't suck as bad as they did in 99.
I remember having my K7N420 and nothing could compare to it in stability wise during it's day. it blew my older KT7A completely away when it came to uptime, in fact it's still is used as my secondary today. It needed a capacitor replacement at one point but MSI took care of that out of warranty a few months ago. Both My Shuttle sn41g2's have been rock solid as well.
If I had to make an honest guess what is keeping the AMD fanboys away, it's the sockets. I know it's my big reason. One thing I could trust about AMD is that they would support a socket until the cows come home. Look at Socket A, or even Socket 7 for example. the only time before AMD64 that they stopped supporting a socket prematurely was when they did Slot-A. and they definitely made up that mistake with Socket A.
In the Socket A Athlon Period, Intel had socket 370, 423, 478 and LGA 755. Now with AMD64, you got 740, 939, 940, AM2, and the upcoming 1207 pin socket, with talks about yet another socket revision for AM2. in the AMD64 period, Intel was phasing out 478 and was moving towards 755, and hasn't changed since.
When I used to upgrade my Athlon systems, I would start motherboard first, then processor a few months later. you could do this with no problem outside of going PC133 to DDR, now, the next architecture could be completely pin incompatible with what you buy today, that coupled with shifting RAM technologies make it a very hard sell to go AMD outside of opteron.
Hopefully, 4x4 will change this, but time will tell.
First off, to date, no one has hijacked the Vista kernel. The only known way to do it so far is by bypassing the kernel altogether and run Vista in a VM. This works because it doesn't need any exploit in the OS (That's any OS from Vista to Linux, in fact this could be used to theoretically create a OS agnostic virus). This is what Blue Pill does, and Security experts have already stated that It's easy to detect
Second, if they did have a way to hack the kernel, that would be seen as a kernel exploit and would be patched. I doubt Microsoft would leave such an exploitable hole in their kernel setup for long.
No, they should have fought the EU to the end on this.
According to the EU, MS apparently has some obligation to keep these security companies leeching off their OS exploits alive, even to the point of opening their system to security exploits in Vista to do so.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand Symantec going nuts about the OneCare advertising, and can somewhat understand the security center, (although I think MS should allow Symantec to write whatever they want there instead of letting Symantec Disable the thing for their own offering, since apparently, I need even more tray icons telling me something I don't know for some reason.) but the kernel access is simply unacceptable.
Basically there are two ways to go here.
1) Lock down the kernel so absolutely nothing outside of a service pack (being some sort of boot disk) can touch it, run everything else outside of kernel space, and have documented Kernel API calls to allow you to search for anything trying to hide outside of kernel space, which will stop many to all Rootkit attacks since nothing can hide and increase kernel stability since nothing can patch it, with the only drawback being some performance loss since low level access is off limits now.
or
2) Do it the EU way and "ensure that consumers continue to have a choice in security software" (which by the way, Isn't a problem) by opening the kernel to third party apps, which will no doubt be exploited regardless of how MS protects the kernel patching by malware and allow most rootkits and the like to latch onto the kernel while these so called security programs happily let the malware run in kernel space because it doesn't even know it's on the PC. That way, the Security companies can claim that Microsoft "Still has a Security Problem" and "need us now more than ever"
I don't know about you, but option 1 is the way to go for me, but since it sounds like their going option 2, then apparently all this security that Vista has will be no better than XP in the long run and I can expect seeing more FU and hacker defender rootkits in the vista future.
Also keep in mind that Vista is being used here. Vista has it's own protection layer on top of IE7's. On XP it would be theoretically easier to infect, but either way, it's a much better improvement over IE6.
Regardless, there are still some troubling security holes in Vista IE7 that should be fixed, and this article does one hell of a job showing how it is exploited. I don't like how protected mode stays disabled after you install one toolbar. I'm also troubled that Windows Defender isn't mentioned at all in protecting windows against the more questionable toolbars. Maybe he just wanted to focus on IE and ok'ed anything defender related, but I would hope it would flat out deny any spyware toolbars from installing in the first place.
This "license server" is going to basically crush Vista sales in the enterprise sector. They'll run XP until MS gives up supporting it, and even then they might keep it going.
I know we won't be running it with this in place any time soon. We have roughly 2000 PCs at any one time running Windows XP in the hands of College students. I can see if we switch to Vista one of our "WaReZ d00dZ" students putting our key on the net or getting infected by some key stealing trojan, and suddenly, we got to deal with 2000 PCs shutting down and 2000 irate students ringing the support phone off the hook. Yeah! that sounds like fun! That wouldn't be a Tech Support Nightmare or anything! On the bright side, I wouldn't fear Hell anymore because I'd be pretty sure that's exactly what it would be like.
2003 server will sell even less with this. I don't know about most admins, but I can bet they don't like the fact that Microsoft can basically flip a switch and BAM, all your mission critical servers are useless.
This is definitely a Lawsuit or a Mac Exodius waiting to happen for Microsoft. Hopefully they see it that way.
It's already been demonstrated how easy it is to bypass the new "security"
You mean Blue Pill I believe. You know how they did it? by using VT (you know pacifica, the CPU partitioning capabilities in AMD processors) built into these newer processors to virtually circumvent the OS, not by hacking the kernel. In theory, this attack could be used successfully against ANY OS as long as it has access to sufficient permissions to activate VT and install. It's also easy to detect, as described Here
They *arent* stopping the need for this software, just making it harder for the competition.
Windows OneCare is not built into Windows Vista and must be bought seperatly. You can thank Symantec for that. The only thing that is integrated into Vista is Windows Defender, which the AV companies will probably sue MS over, and I can bet that both OneCare and Defender use the same protocol that MS is telling the AV vendors to use.
First, I remember Slashdot during the Clinton Administration, and I sure as hell don't remember seeing anything bashing or Promoting Clinton. Now Bush hits office and there's so many bush bashing articles that I'm surprised there isn't a BushBash tag yet. I swear they put them up just to give the backlash section more articles.
Second, If you're going to Bash Bush, at least bash him with something from This Year! I remember this in Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004 for god's sake, and the administration said countless times that the report said Bin Laden was going to attack, but didn't give any details that would have stopped 9/11. We didn't know what he was planning, we didn't know when, where or how. All we knew is that he was. and you would have to be completely inept if you though Bin Laden wasn't going to do anything after the Cole, the embassy buildings, and the first WTC attempt. Don't Believe me? Well Read it yourself
Now it's 2006, an election year, and all of a sudden this story rises from the dead like some zombie and trumpeted like it's fresh news. Sound's like a 427 (you know one of those "(Insert group of people here) For (Insert something you cant be against here)" groups) is hard at work submitting to me.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Bush has done a bad job, but I don't have to be reminded every week until he's out of office. I just hope that the Democrats finally put up a real canidate to challenge for the whitehouse instead of a robot and a douchebag like the last two.
Why is it taking everyone else so long to initiate a recall
I don't know about anyone else, but I somewhat know Lenovo's side.
Working for a Thinkpad University has a few benefits, one of them is talking to Lenovo Engineers directly at conferences, where we share our experiences with the Thinkpad with people inside the company. This results in better designs for our students. The R60 build quality I believe is an example of this, especially comparing it against the R51's we used in the past.
Our last conference with Lenovo happened the week that Dell recalled the batteries. Me and the staff I work with, as well as staff from other various Thinkpad University participants was on hand, and Lenovo wasted no time talking about the Dell recall. In Fact it was the first thing on their list.
Basically, their engineers said flat out that their was no reports of any IBM laptop exploding or catching on fire that was a result of a Lenovo battery failure (This was before the LAX incident BTW, which resulted in this recall) They did say, surprisingly however, that they DID have reports of battery explosions on IBM/Lenovo's in the past, but once they investigated the explosion, found out that it was a third party battery and NOT a Lenovo one.
They Continued the talk by showing an opened battery that was used for their R60/T60 line. (One of the ones they are actually recalling) I was actually amazed at how much engineering goes into their battery designs. Just about everything about this battery is designed with safety in mind. In fact, they said they sacrifice battery storage for safety. All of their current-gen batteries have DSP's in them that monitor Voltage, capacity, heat, as well as overall health of the battery cells and will completely disable the battery if these values get out of spec. This alone makes the battery very hard to overcharge or short, which is one of the primary reasons for battery flame-out. Second, the case holding the batteries actually isolates and cushion the individual cell from each other, so if in the event of leakage or dropage, the chance of flame-out by a short would be even more minimized.
They also had a third party battery on hand, and showed why those batteries flame-out. basically they built them as cheap as possible and they did not have the DSP to monitor the battery condition and would just basically emulate the chip. Because of this, the motherboard on the Thinkpad would think the battery is in perfect condition when in reality it's cells are overheating and basically lighting on fire. The other thing the third parties wouldn't do is isolate the individual cells and would wrap them up together in cellophane, which made them hotter running and more prone to explosion if a leak occurred.
The LAX incident according to our Lenovo Rep, is the first and only confirmed case where a First Party Battery Flamed-Out in a Thinkpad, and is the direct reason the batteries were recalled. So Lenovo's not wasting time here, where Dell let a few dozen or so go in flames and swept it under the rug for a few months. One thing I can say for certain, however, is if these batteries can go up in flames, just about any other design with these Sony cells in them is a zippo lighter waiting to happen
Slashdot Mirror
Stop being a bunch of pansies and BURN IT IN A REACTOR!
This is so right it's scary. If we would actually say "screw it" and started a nuclear recycling program (or hell, just a new nuclear program in general), these tedious storage systems would be virtually unnecessary.
The problem is that Chernobyl and TMI scared way too many people here for it to be feasible. For example, Since TMI there has been no new reactors built in the US. Every time they try to build one, NIMBY comes into play, they get some hippy crazies into the mix, and it goes down the tubes. They can't even replace aging reactors with newer, safer reactors without running into this.
Remember Captain Planet? (Who Doesn't?) There was a bad guy in it called Duke Nukem that would pollute the planet with Toxic Nuclear radiation. They even had an episode where someone built the "safest nuclear reactor" under the best technology available, and of course portrayed it as some glowing green goo and radiation spewing cesspool that Nukem used for his own evil deeds. Even though it was dead wrong in almost every possible scenario it was (and probably still is today on some Turner network somewhere) burned into kids minds that have now grown up and are voting No on these things, Even though These Next Generation Reactors are infinitely safer, cleaner, and more productive then their older counterparts.
Today, we could build a fission reactor that's has an efficiency ratio around 90%+ with very little waste and whatever waste is left has nowhere near the half-life of what we're throwing away now. this would also pave the way for fusion reactors since the sites could be retrofitted once the technology becomes viable. Why are we wasting our time on these lower efficiency fossil fuel systems which can pollute and waste what little natural resources we have left, when we can be building a very efficient, powerful and low environmental impacting reactor today.
Toshiba and Sony are bad, but at one time, Compaq was the absolute worst bundler's I've ever seen. Worse then even Packard Bell's bloated builds of the day
Back when Windows 95 first came out, Compaq had a build of 95 that was so overloaded, I referred to it as CompaqOS. Looking at it you would have no idea that MS even made the OS, since just about every branded Windows Item was Replaced with Presario. Even the Login prompts were different, with a graphical user interface similar to the Welcome screen but worse.
Then came the apps. Every app in the thing was it's 16 bit equivalent. Half of the time they would crash. Things like Answering machines, and media player software that was specificially tied to the proprietary hardware CD player buttons in the front were the Norm for this system. the best part? if you uninstalled the programs, the system would crash.
Upgrade it? good Luck. A friend of mine had a One Piece P133 Machine that had Compaq OS. If you did any upgrade to it, it would fail. regardless of what OS it was. Windows 95b, 98, Me, NT, Even Linux would crash on this if you looked at it the wrong way. The only OS that would run even relatively stable on this thing was the overbloated OS that came with it.
Thankfully, Compaq quit doing this stuff afater around 97-98, probably because they realized it was a tech support nightmare.
...as long as there is some intricate and weird way to have your Sim die in it.
Don't believe it's a factor? Ask anyone who played The Sims what their favorite moment in it was. I can make a safe bet that it revolves around the Sim dying in one way or another.
I swear, that's the only reason anyone played The Sims. In fact, the few Sims games that had death removed from the game (usually the console versions. Not sounding good for the Wii already) never sold well or got good reviews, with most reviewers chastising the port because your Sim couldn't meet the reaper.
Emule has a system like this, and it basically slows everything down in the name of fair sharing. It takes absolutely forever to start downloads, since you're stuck in a vicious "chicken and egg" circle of "I can't upload anything to download" and "I can't download anything to upload".
As it stands, Bittorrent is how the Edonkey protocol used to be before ratio systems were added to the clients; Fast. After Edonkey started adding anti-leech systems to the clients, the speed went into the toilet, and the queues started skyrocketing.
I suspect that if this catches on, you can kiss 300kb's downloads goodbye.
The biggest problem going with Ford right now is their SUV division. SUVs don't sell when the gas price is high, and that's pretty much what keeps Ford afloat.
The US market wants mid to full size cars but doesn't want the huge gas hit. Why isn't there a Fusion hybrid now instead of next year? What about a Crown Victoria Hybrid? Why isn't Ford using it's Engine division technology to sell big vehicles with better gas mileage, especially when now all of a sudden their cars are getting better mileage.
Ford's averaged the lowest gas mileage of any other car at one point. For example My previous 99 Ford ZX2 and my current 2003 Ford Focus averaged about 25-30 MPG. Just about any other car in these classes foreign or domestic beats these cars, and these are Ford's small cars. Even V6 engines can beat that. Now all of a sudden the new focuses get 37-40. what happened other than now gas mileage is in vogue?
I've had 3 fords over 10 years, 2 used and 1 new, and I enjoyed every one of them. The interior doesn't matter to me as long as it gets from point A to B, and so far I've only had one breakdown that stranded me (a ECM module in my 87 Grand Marquis that was actually recalled at one point) unlike my parents Cadillac's and Buick that would break down every 4 months regardless of how you maintained it, or my aunt's new Chevy SUV which keeps killing batteries. The only problem with my current Focus has been it doesn't like cold weather and the radio display keeps getting lines in the LCD panel (this is radio #2 going on #3). Hopefully the MS deal will result in better radio's than this Blaupunkt Factory POS, but who knows.
The message is clear. They believe their monopoly can be best maintained by catering to producers, rather than to consumers. Consumer choice is not driving that market.
And it's going to hurt them. probably long term and big time.
Zune is a failure vs Ipod because consumers don't want to deal with DRM everytime they want to listen to something, especially when there are hundreds if not thousands of music players that will play non DRM files. Including the Ipod.
Vista will fail for similar reasons. Business is happy with XP and will support it until Microsoft doesn't, and maybe adopt Linux after that. Consumers will only upgrade when they buy a new PC, and will stay around even after support is killed. if Apple starts opening their mouth about vista DRM screwing their music experience, they might just buy a Mac next time. Hell I don't know why Apple hasn't done a "Buy a Mac and get an Ipod Free" deal as of yet. It would definitely get a mac in the door faster.
It's looking the same way for office2007 business wise. I know we look at it and say to ourselves "training nightmare". I'm sure we're not the only ones saying that especially since our business is Higher education. I can only imagine what a commercial business is saying.
Apple and Microsoft had the power. They had the power to give both AA's the finger and work directly with the artists. They had the power to ignore them completely and let the users rip until the cows come home. They had the power to screw these Hi-def DVD formats until they relaxed the standards to work with existing hardware and software. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be giving the RIAA the finger while somewhat bowing down to the MPAA's HD lockdown Schemes, and MS is asking both AA's which lower cheek to kiss in a futile attempt to gain some more exclusive content that Apple's going to get anyway because their the market leader. Even then, all MS is really going to get in the end is more demands from the AA's when they could have easily just stayed the course they were going and force the AA's to conform to the digital age or die.
If there is any time for Apple and Linux to start pushing themselves, now's the time.
Seriously. They could delay those games until 2008 for all I care. As long as they keep the Wii shop channel flowing with new games every week I'll be happy.
Honestly, I originally wanted a Wii because I wanted a Gamecube, and since I was putting off buying a GC for so long it got to the point where the Wii was coming, then once the Shop details were released, I was sold. The scary part was while waiting in the Wii line, I met not one, not two, but three separate PS3 Ebayer groups who stood in the PS3 line the week before, bought 3 PS3's and proceeded to make 4-6000 dollars on eBay. It makes you wonder why didn't Sony sell the PS3 on eBay in the first place since all of them were going to end up there anyway.
Anyhow, The retro gaming (as well as the Gamecube support) is what got me dead set on making the Wii my next console since the Dreamcast. As long as that doesn't dry up (and how can it) I don't see where this game drought is. The only thing left would be to get the Neo Geo games on board and I'm set for a long time.
MS Office may be a monopoly, but I'd rather deal with Microsoft any day over Autodesk.
We used to have a CAD class at the college, but we had to cancel it due to the costs of AutoCAD. We could teach using another CAD offering, but since Autocad is still the de-facto industry standard, and the only CAD professor available knew only AutoCAD, it would be a disservice to the students to teach a CAD class without teaching AutoCAD. The upgrade from Autocad 2000 to their latest offering was something around $2000 per seat, And this was education pricing. Compound this with the fact that we are starting to phase out computer labs with a laptop per student initiative which would make the AutoCAD costs even higher, not to mention that there wasn't enough students interested in the class to recoup the costs, the college made the decision to kill the class.
Of course, we don't have a huge engineering department or engineering students (we focus on liberal arts) so it was an easier decision for us but I can probably make a safe bet that if other small colleges were put into this same situation of CAD class vs Cost, then the class would go. You just can't justify a $20000 cost every 1-3 years for 10-20 students tops Especially when we can spend this money on other classes with much higher student counts and better software cost options for education.
Hmm. I thought it was a SlashBash.
The way the main article reads, it sounds like Microsoft screwed up something. then you read the article and it's about QOS and performance improvements in the stack. Nowhere in the article does it say they "did it wrong".
Keep it simple as possible. If all she wants to do is the internet, set her up with something like MSN TV or maybe even a Wii once the browser comes out and if it supports SSL. Also, some cable companies offer web browsing through their digital cable box, and I'm sure that there's some linux distro out there that runs in a very small storage footprint (256MB or less) that can be run in a set top box configuration.
Bottom line, if she just wants to surf the internet, get her something that just surfs.
I'm still trying to figure out how you save a cheerleader that's already survived 100ft falls, being run over by a car, a garbage disposer, blunt trauma stab to her brain, her own autopsy, a high speed head on collision, multiple compound fractures over the past few weeks and no telling what else.
I guess you could kidnap her and lock her in a room until New York goes boom, but I don't see her dying anytime soon. Hell, even if Cylar pops her brain, I don't see any reason why you couldn't just stuff it back in her head and Claire's talking about the senior prom like it never happened.
i'll second this, although We use a domain to set user permissions, but it would work without domains using gpedit.msc
Basically, make an admin account (call it "school user" for example) and Password protect it install everything using that account, secure using gpedit.msc, Remove CREATOR OWNER permissions on the C:\, C:\program files, C:\windows and C:\windows\system32 folders then log out.
From there, log into administrator (the real one) copy the "school user" profile into the Default user profile using the Users profiles settings found in system properties Giving "everyone" access when you copy the profile, then change the permission manually in the "default user" profile so that everyone cannot write to it. Then make a third user account. Use compmgmt.msc to make that account a member of the guests and users groups. (make sure that guest accounts will delete once they log out. It's in gpedit.msc somewhere) optionally hide both administrator and "school user" and log out of administrator.
Log into the third account and test everything. it should not allow you to install anything if done correctly or write anywhere except for the third user profile. once you log out it should delete the profile (sometimes it doesn't for some reason. This helps with that a lot) and the settings should be safe.
Of course I'm assuming XP Pro. I'm pretty sure XP Home doesn't have these utils available.
Netscape was practically Free. it's licencing allowed just about anyone outside of governments free use of the Browser. In fact, The only Netscape browser I can remember that had a Nag screen was 2.01, and Microsoft at one time was selling IE in stores the same way Netscape was.
Even under this situation, MS didn't start really gaining share until late IE4 Early IE5, and code quality was the reason Netscape started slipping market share. Not Win98 or Free browsers like Netscape would like you to believe. By that logic, Linux with Apache is just as guilty with doing Netscape in as Microsoft with IE, Since most of Netscape's money was made on Netscape's Web server software and not their browsers.
Navigator was absolute junk by the time Netscape was done with it. They kept claiming that MS was purposely denying access to windows so they couldn't code it better, well then explain why the Sun terminal I used to use at school had the same Netscape "crash after 1 hour use" bug that windows had, In fact, when they created mozilla.org and open sourced the thing, the first thing the Dev's for mozilla.org did was chuck the code and started from scratch.
Netscape could have saved their product, they could have diversified into other markets, they could have recoded it to work better, they could have did a ton of things, but in the end while Opera with their pay browser was still keeping their business going, Netscape decided that suing MS was the easier of all the other options. pure and simple.
Simply put, Microsoft did not Kill off Netscape. Netscape killed off Netscape.
I know IE7 phones home, and fireefox 2 does too for anti-phishing. They both can also be disabled by the user.
I don't see how this is any different than what MS or mozilla is doing. As long as it can be disabled by the user it should be ok.
I though I would never say this, but in a sense, I want Microsoft to know who I am when it comes to WGA. That way, when WGA screws up, I can prove that I'm the owner.
Something like when I activate windows, I have the option to login to my passport to associate my windows ID with that Windows Serial Key. that way, if my key is stolen by some hacker and WGA decides to lock my computer down, I can contact MS and prove that I'm the original owner of that key and get it either unlocked or a new key resubmitted.
If I have to deal with WGA on windows, at least allow me to protect myself from being screwed out of my purchase by the next key stealing Trojan or eventual random keygen.
I do. I had to deal with the KT133 back then as a tech. Absolute nightmare.
I don't know why AMD chose ATI outside of being cheaper. Nvidia practically saved AMD with NForce, especially in the corporate sector, where most companies wouldn't touch AMD with a ten foot pole because of os stability problems the other chipsets would cause. I don't think ATI is even close to making a chipset remotely competitive to Nforce Stability wise. At least their current graphic drivers don't suck as bad as they did in 99.
I remember having my K7N420 and nothing could compare to it in stability wise during it's day. it blew my older KT7A completely away when it came to uptime, in fact it's still is used as my secondary today. It needed a capacitor replacement at one point but MSI took care of that out of warranty a few months ago. Both My Shuttle sn41g2's have been rock solid as well.
If I had to make an honest guess what is keeping the AMD fanboys away, it's the sockets. I know it's my big reason. One thing I could trust about AMD is that they would support a socket until the cows come home. Look at Socket A, or even Socket 7 for example. the only time before AMD64 that they stopped supporting a socket prematurely was when they did Slot-A. and they definitely made up that mistake with Socket A.
In the Socket A Athlon Period, Intel had socket 370, 423, 478 and LGA 755. Now with AMD64, you got 740, 939, 940, AM2, and the upcoming 1207 pin socket, with talks about yet another socket revision for AM2. in the AMD64 period, Intel was phasing out 478 and was moving towards 755, and hasn't changed since.
When I used to upgrade my Athlon systems, I would start motherboard first, then processor a few months later. you could do this with no problem outside of going PC133 to DDR, now, the next architecture could be completely pin incompatible with what you buy today, that coupled with shifting RAM technologies make it a very hard sell to go AMD outside of opteron.
Hopefully, 4x4 will change this, but time will tell.
First off, to date, no one has hijacked the Vista kernel. The only known way to do it so far is by bypassing the kernel altogether and run Vista in a VM. This works because it doesn't need any exploit in the OS (That's any OS from Vista to Linux, in fact this could be used to theoretically create a OS agnostic virus). This is what Blue Pill does, and Security experts have already stated that It's easy to detect
Second, if they did have a way to hack the kernel, that would be seen as a kernel exploit and would be patched. I doubt Microsoft would leave such an exploitable hole in their kernel setup for long.
No, they should have fought the EU to the end on this.
According to the EU, MS apparently has some obligation to keep these security companies leeching off their OS exploits alive, even to the point of opening their system to security exploits in Vista to do so.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand Symantec going nuts about the OneCare advertising, and can somewhat understand the security center, (although I think MS should allow Symantec to write whatever they want there instead of letting Symantec Disable the thing for their own offering, since apparently, I need even more tray icons telling me something I don't know for some reason.) but the kernel access is simply unacceptable.
Basically there are two ways to go here.
1) Lock down the kernel so absolutely nothing outside of a service pack (being some sort of boot disk) can touch it, run everything else outside of kernel space, and have documented Kernel API calls to allow you to search for anything trying to hide outside of kernel space, which will stop many to all Rootkit attacks since nothing can hide and increase kernel stability since nothing can patch it, with the only drawback being some performance loss since low level access is off limits now.
or
2) Do it the EU way and "ensure that consumers continue to have a choice in security software" (which by the way, Isn't a problem) by opening the kernel to third party apps, which will no doubt be exploited regardless of how MS protects the kernel patching by malware and allow most rootkits and the like to latch onto the kernel while these so called security programs happily let the malware run in kernel space because it doesn't even know it's on the PC. That way, the Security companies can claim that Microsoft "Still has a Security Problem" and "need us now more than ever"
I don't know about you, but option 1 is the way to go for me, but since it sounds like their going option 2, then apparently all this security that Vista has will be no better than XP in the long run and I can expect seeing more FU and hacker defender rootkits in the vista future.
Maybe I'm getting my history wrong, but weren't analysts saying the same thing during the age of "Web 1.0"?
Also keep in mind that Vista is being used here. Vista has it's own protection layer on top of IE7's. On XP it would be theoretically easier to infect, but either way, it's a much better improvement over IE6.
Regardless, there are still some troubling security holes in Vista IE7 that should be fixed, and this article does one hell of a job showing how it is exploited. I don't like how protected mode stays disabled after you install one toolbar. I'm also troubled that Windows Defender isn't mentioned at all in protecting windows against the more questionable toolbars. Maybe he just wanted to focus on IE and ok'ed anything defender related, but I would hope it would flat out deny any spyware toolbars from installing in the first place.
This "license server" is going to basically crush Vista sales in the enterprise sector. They'll run XP until MS gives up supporting it, and even then they might keep it going.
I know we won't be running it with this in place any time soon. We have roughly 2000 PCs at any one time running Windows XP in the hands of College students. I can see if we switch to Vista one of our "WaReZ d00dZ" students putting our key on the net or getting infected by some key stealing trojan, and suddenly, we got to deal with 2000 PCs shutting down and 2000 irate students ringing the support phone off the hook. Yeah! that sounds like fun! That wouldn't be a Tech Support Nightmare or anything! On the bright side, I wouldn't fear Hell anymore because I'd be pretty sure that's exactly what it would be like.
2003 server will sell even less with this. I don't know about most admins, but I can bet they don't like the fact that Microsoft can basically flip a switch and BAM, all your mission critical servers are useless.
This is definitely a Lawsuit or a Mac Exodius waiting to happen for Microsoft. Hopefully they see it that way.
It's already been demonstrated how easy it is to bypass the new "security"
You mean Blue Pill I believe. You know how they did it? by using VT (you know pacifica, the CPU partitioning capabilities in AMD processors) built into these newer processors to virtually circumvent the OS, not by hacking the kernel. In theory, this attack could be used successfully against ANY OS as long as it has access to sufficient permissions to activate VT and install. It's also easy to detect, as described Here
They *arent* stopping the need for this software, just making it harder for the competition.
Windows OneCare is not built into Windows Vista and must be bought seperatly. You can thank Symantec for that. The only thing that is integrated into Vista is Windows Defender, which the AV companies will probably sue MS over, and I can bet that both OneCare and Defender use the same protocol that MS is telling the AV vendors to use.
As For The Competition that MS is trying to "Screw"...
Trend Micro runs on Vista
Computer Associates runs on Vista
Avast runs on Vista
Sophos Runs on Vista
AVG Runs on Vista
Mcafee runs on vista
Symantec runs on vista
Exactly.
First, I remember Slashdot during the Clinton Administration, and I sure as hell don't remember seeing anything bashing or Promoting Clinton. Now Bush hits office and there's so many bush bashing articles that I'm surprised there isn't a BushBash tag yet. I swear they put them up just to give the backlash section more articles.
Second, If you're going to Bash Bush, at least bash him with something from This Year! I remember this in Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004 for god's sake, and the administration said countless times that the report said Bin Laden was going to attack, but didn't give any details that would have stopped 9/11. We didn't know what he was planning, we didn't know when, where or how. All we knew is that he was. and you would have to be completely inept if you though Bin Laden wasn't going to do anything after the Cole, the embassy buildings, and the first WTC attempt. Don't Believe me? Well Read it yourself
Now it's 2006, an election year, and all of a sudden this story rises from the dead like some zombie and trumpeted like it's fresh news. Sound's like a 427 (you know one of those "(Insert group of people here) For (Insert something you cant be against here)" groups) is hard at work submitting to me.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Bush has done a bad job, but I don't have to be reminded every week until he's out of office. I just hope that the Democrats finally put up a real canidate to challenge for the whitehouse instead of a robot and a douchebag like the last two.
Why is it taking everyone else so long to initiate a recall
I don't know about anyone else, but I somewhat know Lenovo's side.
Working for a Thinkpad University has a few benefits, one of them is talking to Lenovo Engineers directly at conferences, where we share our experiences with the Thinkpad with people inside the company. This results in better designs for our students. The R60 build quality I believe is an example of this, especially comparing it against the R51's we used in the past.
Our last conference with Lenovo happened the week that Dell recalled the batteries. Me and the staff I work with, as well as staff from other various Thinkpad University participants was on hand, and Lenovo wasted no time talking about the Dell recall. In Fact it was the first thing on their list.
Basically, their engineers said flat out that their was no reports of any IBM laptop exploding or catching on fire that was a result of a Lenovo battery failure (This was before the LAX incident BTW, which resulted in this recall) They did say, surprisingly however, that they DID have reports of battery explosions on IBM/Lenovo's in the past, but once they investigated the explosion, found out that it was a third party battery and NOT a Lenovo one.
They Continued the talk by showing an opened battery that was used for their R60/T60 line. (One of the ones they are actually recalling) I was actually amazed at how much engineering goes into their battery designs. Just about everything about this battery is designed with safety in mind. In fact, they said they sacrifice battery storage for safety. All of their current-gen batteries have DSP's in them that monitor Voltage, capacity, heat, as well as overall health of the battery cells and will completely disable the battery if these values get out of spec. This alone makes the battery very hard to overcharge or short, which is one of the primary reasons for battery flame-out. Second, the case holding the batteries actually isolates and cushion the individual cell from each other, so if in the event of leakage or dropage, the chance of flame-out by a short would be even more minimized.
They also had a third party battery on hand, and showed why those batteries flame-out. basically they built them as cheap as possible and they did not have the DSP to monitor the battery condition and would just basically emulate the chip. Because of this, the motherboard on the Thinkpad would think the battery is in perfect condition when in reality it's cells are overheating and basically lighting on fire. The other thing the third parties wouldn't do is isolate the individual cells and would wrap them up together in cellophane, which made them hotter running and more prone to explosion if a leak occurred.
The LAX incident according to our Lenovo Rep, is the first and only confirmed case where a First Party Battery Flamed-Out in a Thinkpad, and is the direct reason the batteries were recalled. So Lenovo's not wasting time here, where Dell let a few dozen or so go in flames and swept it under the rug for a few months. One thing I can say for certain, however, is if these batteries can go up in flames, just about any other design with these Sony cells in them is a zippo lighter waiting to happen