I work for a small college for 4 years and this is just about dead on except for a few things.
#1 Imagine Dilbert. Now imagine it 10 times worse. Also Imagine that everyone thinks their Dilbert.
#2, It should say somewhere to the left of Al Franken, or Rush Limbaugh's Evil Twin. It's like that's where all the Hippies from the 60's congregate to die.
Cant add much to #3. That's dead on.
#4: Add "It's a Trap" to your repertoire. Repeat. This happened to my boss and somehow he still had a job.
#5 is Dead on too.
#6: lets just say this has been on my mind as of late.
#7 We don't have a Union, because we don't need one because people that should get fired never do. Lets just say that my office is Either 50 or 90 Degrees depending on Maintenance's mood, and it doesn't matter which building your in or what season.
#8 Agreed. Learn until you PH.D everything or get canned.
#9 Dead on.
The only thing I'd add is Be Stupid. The Stupider that you are or act, the higher the pay and or Job Retention. The smart in a College get weeded out because he/she made someone stupid look stupid. Also, read my Sig. How do you think I came up with it.
This issue came up in the City of Heroes Message board, and the userbase pretty much declared foul to the point where the devs stepped in to completely deny it.
My take is a little different. I don't mind in game advertising as long as it follows certain rules.
1) It drops the price of the game, either in the original cost or in the case of an MMORPG, the price per month. 2) it doesn't interfere with the game in any way, so that I don't get constantly bombarded by it.
A perfect example of something I would accept is lets say that they want to add Advertisements in COH. In the game, there are fake billboards everywhere for fake products, and even stores that are somewhat recongnizable to their real counterparts (EX: InFront Steakhouse, Major Flanders Fried Chicken, ETC)
If they started selling and replacing advertising on all the fake billboards with real advertising, I would be ok with that as long as not every billboard was the same ad, and it followed standard Billboard physics (IE Not Blinking and asking me to punch the monkey by clicking on it or something.) so in this example, if Pepsi Started buying Ad space from Cryptic to put Pepsi billboards around the City, it wouldn't bother me as long as they are the same billboards I might see driving down the freeway. The same thing goes if all the Major Flanders became KFC's overnight. To me, it would make it more realistic since that's what I would expect to see in a city.
Now if it got to the point where every loading screen is advertising Pepsi, Or The Endurance Inspiration became Pepsi cans, or Crimson is sending me on a mission because the Devouring Earth stole the secret formula for Pepsi in the hopes of using it's own drink to brainwash the populous, I'd be pissed. Also I'd be pissed if I'm still paying 14.95 a month instead of 9.95 a month.
I've had a Leatherman Micra on my keychain for almost 5 years now. It's the best thing I have on this keychain next to the keys.
Get one of those and one of those quick release dual keyrings, remove the one ring and attach the Micra (or a Juice if you want pliers. Wish they had pliers that small when I bought mine) in its place to quick detach the tool from the ring, and it's all you'll ever need for most computers, even the compaq onen since those Compaq nuts have slots to accept a flathead screwdriver (outside of the security ones.)
Right now, I got a Micra and a Mag-Lite Solitare flashlight on my keyring. The only thing I wish would happen is that Maglite would make an LED Flashlight that took AAAA size to be even smaller, other than that It's the most portable all purpose toolkit you can use.
This is what I brought up in the last Bittorrent article. Now that the client also handles tracking, it's putting a bulls-eye on Bittorrent itself when the bulls-eye was originally on the illegal trackers.
Now that it's going to have torrent search, that chest size bulls-eye is now a bomb size one. It won't be long before the AA's Come knocking on Cohen's door with a CAD or a Lawsuit now.
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central tracker for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client to spread bandwidth costs and increase speed. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basically this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill and a file could theoretically survive in the wild forever. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central host for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basicially this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
Actually, with the amount of power these new consoles sport, they could easily have their predecessors, as well as their Competitor's predecessors games to back them up.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have more than enough horsepower to emulate not only their own previous consoles, but also each others previous consoles. the only thing that would stop them would be licencing issues, and the PS3 would have the edge since Nvidia is their partner and they designed half of the previous Xbox, which was based on a standard X86 PC to begin with. The only thing that would stop them is the Bios and the Xbox OS.
Back in the Xbox 360 article I said that Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, and at 1.8 TFlops They didn't disappoint, and either did sony with the Cell. This thing is almost 2x+ the Xbox 360 in just about every stat but RAM.
The SDK however, has got me a little concerned. Sony is notorious for having bad SDK's for their hardware, specifically the PS2 at launch. Although it's unclear what the Xbox or PS3 SDK is like, my guess is that Xbox 360 dev kit is going to be easier than the Sony one, simply because it's what Microsoft does; make software and programming tools.
Nvidia in the PS3 is definitely going to make it a lot easier for devs since it's probably going to be documented by Nvidia, and will most likely use hardware calls that are similar to their PC counterparts. The only question left is how easy is it to program the Cell, and how will Sony's SDK stack up to the MS one.
Overall if these specs are attainable, Sony's got something here, and it's Developer base will see to it that it trounces the Xbox 360 with it's sheer power, it just might take a year for it to show it's full potential. Nintendo, on the other hand, better show off something that truly lives up to it's "revolution" name.
I don't know about boomerang... looks more like a banana to me.
It's pretty sad when I can look at an Xbox 360 Controller and say it looks better than this one.
I won't finally judge it until I actually hold one, but I dont understand why Sony would screw up a good controller design for what looks more like an asethethic change rather than a functional one, unless they had to make it bigger to hold the wireless circuity.
Many of the most virulent forms of viruses out there dont use security flaws. They use the notion that everyone using a computer is an idiot and will run anything you send to them no matter how you send it.
Most viruses could do everything they need to do, and spread, and spam, or whatever in a simple user account. They just would be easier to remove than if the user was Administrator, since it would be harder to delete virus scanners, install rootkits or the like. Look as most mailing worms; all they do anymore is look at files for E-mails and spam all those e-mails with viruses using it's own mailing engine that it found from the scan. Explain to me how a user account on a highly secure OS would stop a virus like that if it was doing everything in the users temp folder, executing using that users startup file, and only scanning their Documents folder and their internet cache for e-mails.
It's not about security of the OS anymore, it's about the security of the person using the computer. The majority of People tend to click on anything that they receive in their inbox and dismiss any security warning without even thinking of what may happen if its a virus. Apparently thats still a problem when Sober.P is a high spreading worm, and it involves user interaction to spread.
Of course, all of the information on Cell is preliminary and is questionable at best, but the max Gflops that Cell is supposed to run at is somewhere around 250 Gflops. At least thats what Wikipedia is telling me.
If thats anywhere near accurate, it's going to take a quad core Cell based PS3 system to take on the Tri Core Xbox 360 it terms of sheer mathamatical speed.
Of course, CPU GFLOPS isn't the only thing that translates into good graphics and gameplay. Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, (In fact, the ATI core on the Xbox 360 seems to be the weak point compared to it's massive Processing CPU) and there is so much not known about cell that it's performance is speculative at best, but Sony has definetly got it's work cut out for them if they want to compete with the Xbox 360 processing wise, and Nintendo better have something absoletly unreal if their coming out as late as they are.
Whoa! I actually felt the 30 Minutes of my life pull from my body after watching that. I don't know which is worse, That Show, The VGA's or G4.
The 360 definetly looks a little better when there's people standing next to it so you can get a idea what the size of it is. I'm also intreged by the Phantom sounding Marketplace that they talked little about. That's about all you got out of the "Pimp My Crap band and gamers you never heard of with Frodo Baggins and oh. Here's the Xbox 360 show"
Perfect Dark Zero better be in an alpha state, because I've seen Better Graphics in Quake II. And the frame rate it appeared to be getting in the "competition" was worse than what the N64 Perfect Dark used to get. It had to be somewhere around 2-5FPS (which is probably why they kept the camera's off the screens as much as possible). The other previews for games looked promising. Specificially the Project Gotham and the game that kinda had beefed up Doom III Graphics (missed the name).
The Ourcolony.net preview in five minutes gave more infomation about the XBox 360 then the entire 30 minutes on MTV. Frankly the power that is in this thing, especially considering it's size, is staggering. 1TFLOPS of processing power (if that number is true) is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you start imagining a Beowulf Cluster of these and just 100 of them have a good chance of getting you ranked in the top500 list.
Frankly, considering the market their trying to attract with this version, it kinda makes sense. Although it would make more sense to drop the price of this thing to free and offer an upgrade to Home for $50.
This is basicially a crippled WinXP anyway, so anyone that's going to do any amount of mid to high end computing is going to go to home or Pro anyway.
Low end wise, they want something out there to make it look like Windows Isn't expensive, After all it's pretty sad when a company can almost build a low end PC cheaper than putting windows on it anymore.
your going to want to get a few things first, and your going to need some time to do this.
First get these. do a google search if you dont know where to get them.
HijackThis Microsoft Antispyware spywareblaster winsockfix (it's at majorgeeks if you do a google search)
First off, make a restore point, then if you cant get online at all run the winsock fix which should fix that, then install spywareblaster, update it and enable all protection
From there update all of your existing anti-virus/anti-spyware to the latest revisions and defs, Then Install Microsoft Antispyware and update it to the latest defs. The reason you want MSAS is because MSAS will start prompting about any questionable activity it detects. make sure you set anything it considers questionable to block or remove. This will at least give you a general Idea what to look for and keep the reinfection down to a point. Then in MSAS, do a full system scan. Remove everything that it finds and restart the PC in safe mode with no network.
When it boots up in safe mode, stop and keep in mind that if you open up any explorer windows you just reinfected your PC again, so make sure everything you need is on the desktop or accessable in the start menu. From there do another scan with MSAS, as well as any other anti-virus/spyware app you updated in the first part with full system scans. Then using the command prompt, delete everything in the following folders
C:\documents and settings\\local settings\temp C:\documents and settings\\local settings\temporary internet files C:\windows\temp
From there run hijackthis and look it over. anything you see there that looks questionable in there you remove. in particular, startup entries going to temp folders, random named exe files, exe files in C:\windows or C:\windows\system32 and any bho or dpf that you cant remember installing, or has the word search, bar, smiley, sounds fishy or like it's trying to benefit something that should be ok by itself, especially if you dont have it, such as "Microsoft Antispyware Helper" (yes I saw a real nasty one using this as it's name). If you are really in doubt, and have access to another machine, go to http://www.hijackthis.de/en put the hijackthis log into it, and it will tell you what to delete and why. After you clean it up make a clean log from hijackthis and restart.
From there restart and it should be clear or relitively clear. If it's not, then run hijackthis again and compare it to the old file. It should give you clues on what to look for, but there is a good chance that your system is rootkited (something rootkitrevealer will tell you). If it is, I'd recommend a reinstall since there's no telling whats going on in the background, but if you still need to clean it the only way is to insert the hard drive into another PC and do another full anti spyware/virus scan on the drive. or use pebuilder to boot the machine into windows and do it that way.
IE tells you when there's an update available too, the problem is that MS hasn't released a browser update in over a year, and when they do they tie it was their service packs. As for Windows Update, if you click on the updates icon and select Advanced install, it will list every patch that was downloaded and information on what it patches, but most people are going to ignore it and it will force the install the next day.
As XP Service Pack 2 replaces the older windows XP builds out there, you'll see the patch scenario get better over time, since it forces all updates to install unless you specificially tell it not to install them, and most people will not mess with the default settings that XPSP2 has. The problem with this is it's practically going to take a complete PC 5 year cycle before you see it.
I was commenting more about IE size than Firefox Size. Even at 4.7 meg, to someone on a dial up that's a good 10-20 minute download.
Patching would help Firefox immensly, especially if the only difference between 1.03 and 1.04 is a 200-300k file or set of files. You could send browser updates much faster than before with less bandwidth cost on the mozilla project, and use the option of a full download when it's only absoletly or practially necessary to do so.
From what someone said in this thread, Firefox is getting something soon like this. That's definetly a step in the right direction.
Patching is something where Firefox really needs to catch up on.
One of the advantages of IE is that when an exploit comes around you just send everyone a 300k file instead of 20MB of browser. With Firefox, you have to send them an entire browser every time 1 exploit comes out.
What Firefox needs is some sort of patching element built in to deal with patching the browser instead of forcing a complete downoad. It's not that Firefox cant do this. In fact, since most of the code is spread out across many files it should be a cakewalk to just update the affected file(s) automaticially with little to no user intervention. This would keep the file size download to a very minimum, allow it to update more frequently without waiting for a point release, and be easier to handle for people who dont know or care about security issues.
Even if the OS was designed Correctly, it would get hacked.
Lets say they had a full security model designed from the ground up to completely protect Administrator. Lets say that on a default install it made you a user account instead of admin. lets go even as far as everything you install is installed on your account only and that simply erasing your profile removes everything you ever done with that profile on the machine.
All it's going to take to get that machine hacked is one single Privilage Esclation exploit. It doesn't matter if it's local or remote, or what you have to do to exploit it, if it there it's over.
Don't Believe me, ask Kevin Mitnick. He's a prime example of how to get into a machine using Social Engineering. He understood that the machine wasn't the weakeast link in the chain but the person behind the keyboard was, and it's really easy to fool that person to do whatever you want them to do because most people dont know (or care) what they are doing.
It would be trivial for someone to create an executible file that can exploit said root vulnerability, send it to John Q Luser and poof, his box is now the hackers box. How do you think sobig got on so many machines? All it is is an attached file that someone opens. If no one opened the file their wouldn't be such a huge oubreak of it. Doing the same thing with a rootkit instead of a virus would be just as trivial.
And if you think it can't happen to linux or OSX or whatnot, think again. both of those OS's have or had local and global exploits this year alone, and it's a safe bet that there are a lot of unpatched machines out there, but in any case I can almost bet you could make a program for any of those OS's, and if it asked for the root password to install it and the person really wanted it, they would type the password in and it's over anyway. So if 10 Year old Billy really wants that new "Shoot the kitten out of the cannon" game that just came out on adware4freesearch.com, he will do anything to install it, even if it exploits root and formats your hard drive if the kitten breaks the 1000 YD Barrier
The only true way that this would ever be stopped is if every user ran in a True VM environment (Like VMWare) that was totally seperate from the host os and had a disposable operating environment independent of the user's profile, which would be erased once the user shut down or logged off, and even then, they could be doing something malicious for the time they are logged in.
True, but you can make it very difficult to change it.
For example, you can make it an addon in "Add/remove Programs" like they do with UPNP. that way, in most cases you would need to put the Windows XP CD into the machine in order to install open Raw Sockets.
Yes the malware could include the files to install Unrestriced Raw sockets, but if the files to enable Raw Sockets are protected and restriced correctly it would be dfficult for any program other than Windows to modify them.
They do this now already. For example Try getting XP Home to Join A corporate domain. On starter edition, they even limit the amount of processes that can be run, so it's not exactly something new here.
Code wise, There would be nothing different, except for the fact on XP Home it couldn't open Raw Sockets. This could easily be averted at the installer level, so that the program will not install on XP Home or do a check when the program starts. If it finds XP home, tell them it wont run and exit. Also keep in mind that the 95/8/ME's still out there would have a tough time using Raw Sockets, so you'd probably have a check somewhere to check for those systems anyway.
As for Admin Rights, Everybody Runs as Administrator. Period. The only time you don't see it is either people who know better or corporate networks, both of which I'd trust more than 10 Year old Billy who really wants that new "Shoot the kitten out of the cannon" game that just came out on adware4freesearch.com and even if they do restrict users like the're claiming the're going to do on longhorn, it's a good bet that Billy will know the Admin Password and will happily type it in in order to start shooting kittens out of a cannon.
Restricting them is a start in the right direction, but the way Microsoft did it is screwed up.
What they should have done is make raw socket restrictions mandatory on Windows XP home and below (Media Center, Reduced Media and Starter edition) and allowed Windows XP professional and above to at least be able to run with full raw sockets if you turn on a setting in TCP/IP settings.
They have this new Security center thing running all the time warning you about your antivirus and firewall changes. It would have been trivial to make it scream at you all day if it found unrestricted raw sockets was turned on in XP Pro, and have an option to turn off the warning if you really turned the Raw Sockets on just like you can with the antivirus and firewall settings.
The only good thing here is that they at least left it on in their server line. If they shut it off there they would have a real mess.
What the Tech Report is saying, is that since they had some driver issues with a reference MB, on most likely Beta drivers, their not going to be competitive in the Intel Market.
First off. everybody knows that if you have an Intel procesor, you should use an Intel chipset for the highest level of stability. I mean when the processor manufacturer makes a chipset for their own processor, it better be as stable as possible. Intel tends to focus on stability rather than performance because they are more interested in the business market rather than the enthusiast market, and the business market wants stability.
Nvidia on the other hand, focuses on performace. Every chipset that they've ever made was focused on this. It just so happens that in the AMD market, their chipset is regarderd to also be the most stable of the major AMD chipsets.
I've owned nothing but Nforce since it was announced. Both my Nforce and Nforce2 boards were as stable as anything I've found on the Intel side. Problem wise, the only thing they ever had issues with was the sound and IDE drivers (where they actually warn you their beta) and frankly, even those drivers were a cut above their competition.
Frankly, and this is my opinion, The Tech report has is out for Nvidia. Period. You read anything about Nvidia on their site and they will find a problem with it. Meanwhile they think ATI and Intel are the second coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, since when did Slashdot starting posting ridiculous reviews from Joe Schmoe off the street?
:( :| :) :D
Let's see if it submitted Article Passes the Slashdot article Submission test...
1) Does it Prase Linux: NO
2) Does it Bash Microsoft: YES
3) Does it talk about Firefox: YES
4) Is it duplicating something from today: NO
From what I see, it passed three of the four tests, so it's gold.
Maybe it's just me, but I always thought WLW was a more interesting station.
500,000 100% modulated watts is a little crazy. you would have to practially feel it on a humid day.
I work for a small college for 4 years and this is just about dead on except for a few things.
#1 Imagine Dilbert. Now imagine it 10 times worse. Also Imagine that everyone thinks their Dilbert.
#2, It should say somewhere to the left of Al Franken, or Rush Limbaugh's Evil Twin. It's like that's where all the Hippies from the 60's congregate to die.
Cant add much to #3. That's dead on.
#4: Add "It's a Trap" to your repertoire. Repeat. This happened to my boss and somehow he still had a job.
#5 is Dead on too.
#6: lets just say this has been on my mind as of late.
#7 We don't have a Union, because we don't need one because people that should get fired never do. Lets just say that my office is Either 50 or 90 Degrees depending on Maintenance's mood, and it doesn't matter which building your in or what season.
#8 Agreed. Learn until you PH.D everything or get canned.
#9 Dead on.
The only thing I'd add is Be Stupid. The Stupider that you are or act, the higher the pay and or Job Retention. The smart in a College get weeded out because he/she made someone stupid look stupid. Also, read my Sig. How do you think I came up with it.
This issue came up in the City of Heroes Message board, and the userbase pretty much declared foul to the point where the devs stepped in to completely deny it.
My take is a little different. I don't mind in game advertising as long as it follows certain rules.
1) It drops the price of the game, either in the original cost or in the case of an MMORPG, the price per month.
2) it doesn't interfere with the game in any way, so that I don't get constantly bombarded by it.
A perfect example of something I would accept is lets say that they want to add Advertisements in COH. In the game, there are fake billboards everywhere for fake products, and even stores that are somewhat recongnizable to their real counterparts (EX: InFront Steakhouse, Major Flanders Fried Chicken, ETC)
If they started selling and replacing advertising on all the fake billboards with real advertising, I would be ok with that as long as not every billboard was the same ad, and it followed standard Billboard physics (IE Not Blinking and asking me to punch the monkey by clicking on it or something.) so in this example, if Pepsi Started buying Ad space from Cryptic to put Pepsi billboards around the City, it wouldn't bother me as long as they are the same billboards I might see driving down the freeway. The same thing goes if all the Major Flanders became KFC's overnight. To me, it would make it more realistic since that's what I would expect to see in a city.
Now if it got to the point where every loading screen is advertising Pepsi, Or The Endurance Inspiration became Pepsi cans, or Crimson is sending me on a mission because the Devouring Earth stole the secret formula for Pepsi in the hopes of using it's own drink to brainwash the populous, I'd be pissed. Also I'd be pissed if I'm still paying 14.95 a month instead of 9.95 a month.
I've had a Leatherman Micra on my keychain for almost 5 years now. It's the best thing I have on this keychain next to the keys.
Get one of those and one of those quick release dual keyrings, remove the one ring and attach the Micra (or a Juice if you want pliers. Wish they had pliers that small when I bought mine) in its place to quick detach the tool from the ring, and it's all you'll ever need for most computers, even the compaq onen since those Compaq nuts have slots to accept a flathead screwdriver (outside of the security ones.)
Right now, I got a Micra and a Mag-Lite Solitare flashlight on my keyring. The only thing I wish would happen is that Maglite would make an LED Flashlight that took AAAA size to be even smaller, other than that It's the most portable all purpose toolkit you can use.
This is what I brought up in the last Bittorrent article. Now that the client also handles tracking, it's putting a bulls-eye on Bittorrent itself when the bulls-eye was originally on the illegal trackers.
Now that it's going to have torrent search, that chest size bulls-eye is now a bomb size one. It won't be long before the AA's Come knocking on Cohen's door with a CAD or a Lawsuit now.
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central tracker for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client to spread bandwidth costs and increase speed. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basically this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill and a file could theoretically survive in the wild forever. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central host for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basicially this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
Actually, with the amount of power these new consoles sport, they could easily have their predecessors, as well as their Competitor's predecessors games to back them up.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have more than enough horsepower to emulate not only their own previous consoles, but also each others previous consoles. the only thing that would stop them would be licencing issues, and the PS3 would have the edge since Nvidia is their partner and they designed half of the previous Xbox, which was based on a standard X86 PC to begin with. The only thing that would stop them is the Bios and the Xbox OS.
Back in the Xbox 360 article I said that Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, and at 1.8 TFlops They didn't disappoint, and either did sony with the Cell. This thing is almost 2x+ the Xbox 360 in just about every stat but RAM.
The SDK however, has got me a little concerned. Sony is notorious for having bad SDK's for their hardware, specifically the PS2 at launch. Although it's unclear what the Xbox or PS3 SDK is like, my guess is that Xbox 360 dev kit is going to be easier than the Sony one, simply because it's what Microsoft does; make software and programming tools.
Nvidia in the PS3 is definitely going to make it a lot easier for devs since it's probably going to be documented by Nvidia, and will most likely use hardware calls that are similar to their PC counterparts. The only question left is how easy is it to program the Cell, and how will Sony's SDK stack up to the MS one.
Overall if these specs are attainable, Sony's got something here, and it's Developer base will see to it that it trounces the Xbox 360 with it's sheer power, it just might take a year for it to show it's full potential. Nintendo, on the other hand, better show off something that truly lives up to it's "revolution" name.
I don't know about boomerang... looks more like a banana to me.
It's pretty sad when I can look at an Xbox 360 Controller and say it looks better than this one.
I won't finally judge it until I actually hold one, but I dont understand why Sony would screw up a good controller design for what looks more like an asethethic change rather than a functional one, unless they had to make it bigger to hold the wireless circuity.
Many of the most virulent forms of viruses out there dont use security flaws. They use the notion that everyone using a computer is an idiot and will run anything you send to them no matter how you send it.
Most viruses could do everything they need to do, and spread, and spam, or whatever in a simple user account. They just would be easier to remove than if the user was Administrator, since it would be harder to delete virus scanners, install rootkits or the like. Look as most mailing worms; all they do anymore is look at files for E-mails and spam all those e-mails with viruses using it's own mailing engine that it found from the scan. Explain to me how a user account on a highly secure OS would stop a virus like that if it was doing everything in the users temp folder, executing using that users startup file, and only scanning their Documents folder and their internet cache for e-mails.
It's not about security of the OS anymore, it's about the security of the person using the computer. The majority of People tend to click on anything that they receive in their inbox and dismiss any security warning without even thinking of what may happen if its a virus. Apparently thats still a problem when Sober.P is a high spreading worm, and it involves user interaction to spread.
Of course, all of the information on Cell is preliminary and is questionable at best, but the max Gflops that Cell is supposed to run at is somewhere around 250 Gflops. At least thats what Wikipedia is telling me.
If thats anywhere near accurate, it's going to take a quad core Cell based PS3 system to take on the Tri Core Xbox 360 it terms of sheer mathamatical speed.
Of course, CPU GFLOPS isn't the only thing that translates into good graphics and gameplay. Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, (In fact, the ATI core on the Xbox 360 seems to be the weak point compared to it's massive Processing CPU) and there is so much not known about cell that it's performance is speculative at best, but Sony has definetly got it's work cut out for them if they want to compete with the Xbox 360 processing wise, and Nintendo better have something absoletly unreal if their coming out as late as they are.
Whoa! I actually felt the 30 Minutes of my life pull from my body after watching that. I don't know which is worse, That Show, The VGA's or G4.
The 360 definetly looks a little better when there's people standing next to it so you can get a idea what the size of it is. I'm also intreged by the Phantom sounding Marketplace that they talked little about. That's about all you got out of the "Pimp My Crap band and gamers you never heard of with Frodo Baggins and oh. Here's the Xbox 360 show"
Perfect Dark Zero better be in an alpha state, because I've seen Better Graphics in Quake II. And the frame rate it appeared to be getting in the "competition" was worse than what the N64 Perfect Dark used to get. It had to be somewhere around 2-5FPS (which is probably why they kept the camera's off the screens as much as possible). The other previews for games looked promising. Specificially the Project Gotham and the game that kinda had beefed up Doom III Graphics (missed the name).
The Ourcolony.net preview in five minutes gave more infomation about the XBox 360 then the entire 30 minutes on MTV. Frankly the power that is in this thing, especially considering it's size, is staggering. 1TFLOPS of processing power (if that number is true) is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you start imagining a Beowulf Cluster of these and just 100 of them have a good chance of getting you ranked in the top500 list.
Frankly, considering the market their trying to attract with this version, it kinda makes sense. Although it would make more sense to drop the price of this thing to free and offer an upgrade to Home for $50.
This is basicially a crippled WinXP anyway, so anyone that's going to do any amount of mid to high end computing is going to go to home or Pro anyway.
Low end wise, they want something out there to make it look like Windows Isn't expensive, After all it's pretty sad when a company can almost build a low end PC cheaper than putting windows on it anymore.
your going to want to get a few things first, and your going to need some time to do this.
First get these. do a google search if you dont know where to get them.
HijackThis
Microsoft Antispyware
spywareblaster
winsockfix (it's at majorgeeks if you do a google search)
First off, make a restore point, then if you cant get online at all run the winsock fix which should fix that, then install spywareblaster, update it and enable all protection
From there update all of your existing anti-virus/anti-spyware to the latest revisions and defs, Then Install Microsoft Antispyware and update it to the latest defs. The reason you want MSAS is because MSAS will start prompting about any questionable activity it detects. make sure you set anything it considers questionable to block or remove. This will at least give you a general Idea what to look for and keep the reinfection down to a point. Then in MSAS, do a full system scan. Remove everything that it finds and restart the PC in safe mode with no network.
When it boots up in safe mode, stop and keep in mind that if you open up any explorer windows you just reinfected your PC again, so make sure everything you need is on the desktop or accessable in the start menu. From there do another scan with MSAS, as well as any other anti-virus/spyware app you updated in the first part with full system scans. Then using the command prompt, delete everything in the following folders
C:\documents and settings\\local settings\temp
C:\documents and settings\\local settings\temporary internet files
C:\windows\temp
From there run hijackthis and look it over. anything you see there that looks questionable in there you remove. in particular, startup entries going to temp folders, random named exe files, exe files in C:\windows or C:\windows\system32 and any bho or dpf that you cant remember installing, or has the word search, bar, smiley, sounds fishy or like it's trying to benefit something that should be ok by itself, especially if you dont have it, such as "Microsoft Antispyware Helper" (yes I saw a real nasty one using this as it's name). If you are really in doubt, and have access to another machine, go to http://www.hijackthis.de/en put the hijackthis log into it, and it will tell you what to delete and why. After you clean it up make a clean log from hijackthis and restart.
From there restart and it should be clear or relitively clear. If it's not, then run hijackthis again and compare it to the old file. It should give you clues on what to look for, but there is a good chance that your system is rootkited (something rootkitrevealer will tell you). If it is, I'd recommend a reinstall since there's no telling whats going on in the background, but if you still need to clean it the only way is to insert the hard drive into another PC and do another full anti spyware/virus scan on the drive. or use pebuilder to boot the machine into windows and do it that way.
IE tells you when there's an update available too, the problem is that MS hasn't released a browser update in over a year, and when they do they tie it was their service packs. As for Windows Update, if you click on the updates icon and select Advanced install, it will list every patch that was downloaded and information on what it patches, but most people are going to ignore it and it will force the install the next day.
As XP Service Pack 2 replaces the older windows XP builds out there, you'll see the patch scenario get better over time, since it forces all updates to install unless you specificially tell it not to install them, and most people will not mess with the default settings that XPSP2 has. The problem with this is it's practically going to take a complete PC 5 year cycle before you see it.
I was commenting more about IE size than Firefox Size. Even at 4.7 meg, to someone on a dial up that's a good 10-20 minute download.
Patching would help Firefox immensly, especially if the only difference between 1.03 and 1.04 is a 200-300k file or set of files. You could send browser updates much faster than before with less bandwidth cost on the mozilla project, and use the option of a full download when it's only absoletly or practially necessary to do so.
From what someone said in this thread, Firefox is getting something soon like this. That's definetly a step in the right direction.
Patching is something where Firefox really needs to catch up on.
One of the advantages of IE is that when an exploit comes around you just send everyone a 300k file instead of 20MB of browser. With Firefox, you have to send them an entire browser every time 1 exploit comes out.
What Firefox needs is some sort of patching element built in to deal with patching the browser instead of forcing a complete downoad. It's not that Firefox cant do this. In fact, since most of the code is spread out across many files it should be a cakewalk to just update the affected file(s) automaticially with little to no user intervention. This would keep the file size download to a very minimum, allow it to update more frequently without waiting for a point release, and be easier to handle for people who dont know or care about security issues.
Even if the OS was designed Correctly, it would get hacked.
Lets say they had a full security model designed from the ground up to completely protect Administrator. Lets say that on a default install it made you a user account instead of admin. lets go even as far as everything you install is installed on your account only and that simply erasing your profile removes everything you ever done with that profile on the machine.
All it's going to take to get that machine hacked is one single Privilage Esclation exploit. It doesn't matter if it's local or remote, or what you have to do to exploit it, if it there it's over.
Don't Believe me, ask Kevin Mitnick. He's a prime example of how to get into a machine using Social Engineering. He understood that the machine wasn't the weakeast link in the chain but the person behind the keyboard was, and it's really easy to fool that person to do whatever you want them to do because most people dont know (or care) what they are doing.
It would be trivial for someone to create an executible file that can exploit said root vulnerability, send it to John Q Luser and poof, his box is now the hackers box. How do you think sobig got on so many machines? All it is is an attached file that someone opens. If no one opened the file their wouldn't be such a huge oubreak of it. Doing the same thing with a rootkit instead of a virus would be just as trivial.
And if you think it can't happen to linux or OSX or whatnot, think again. both of those OS's have or had local and global exploits this year alone, and it's a safe bet that there are a lot of unpatched machines out there, but in any case I can almost bet you could make a program for any of those OS's, and if it asked for the root password to install it and the person really wanted it, they would type the password in and it's over anyway. So if 10 Year old Billy really wants that new "Shoot the kitten out of the cannon" game that just came out on adware4freesearch.com, he will do anything to install it, even if it exploits root and formats your hard drive if the kitten breaks the 1000 YD Barrier
The only true way that this would ever be stopped is if every user ran in a True VM environment (Like VMWare) that was totally seperate from the host os and had a disposable operating environment independent of the user's profile, which would be erased once the user shut down or logged off, and even then, they could be doing something malicious for the time they are logged in.
True, but you can make it very difficult to change it.
For example, you can make it an addon in "Add/remove Programs" like they do with UPNP. that way, in most cases you would need to put the Windows XP CD into the machine in order to install open Raw Sockets.
Yes the malware could include the files to install Unrestriced Raw sockets, but if the files to enable Raw Sockets are protected and restriced correctly it would be dfficult for any program other than Windows to modify them.
They do this now already. For example Try getting XP Home to Join A corporate domain. On starter edition, they even limit the amount of processes that can be run, so it's not exactly something new here.
Code wise, There would be nothing different, except for the fact on XP Home it couldn't open Raw Sockets. This could easily be averted at the installer level, so that the program will not install on XP Home or do a check when the program starts. If it finds XP home, tell them it wont run and exit. Also keep in mind that the 95/8/ME's still out there would have a tough time using Raw Sockets, so you'd probably have a check somewhere to check for those systems anyway.
As for Admin Rights, Everybody Runs as Administrator. Period. The only time you don't see it is either people who know better or corporate networks, both of which I'd trust more than 10 Year old Billy who really wants that new "Shoot the kitten out of the cannon" game that just came out on adware4freesearch.com and even if they do restrict users like the're claiming the're going to do on longhorn, it's a good bet that Billy will know the Admin Password and will happily type it in in order to start shooting kittens out of a cannon.
Restricting them is a start in the right direction, but the way Microsoft did it is screwed up.
What they should have done is make raw socket restrictions mandatory on Windows XP home and below (Media Center, Reduced Media and Starter edition) and allowed Windows XP professional and above to at least be able to run with full raw sockets if you turn on a setting in TCP/IP settings.
They have this new Security center thing running all the time warning you about your antivirus and firewall changes. It would have been trivial to make it scream at you all day if it found unrestricted raw sockets was turned on in XP Pro, and have an option to turn off the warning if you really turned the Raw Sockets on just like you can with the antivirus and firewall settings.
The only good thing here is that they at least left it on in their server line. If they shut it off there they would have a real mess.
What the Tech Report is saying, is that since they had some driver issues with a reference MB, on most likely Beta drivers, their not going to be competitive in the Intel Market.
First off. everybody knows that if you have an Intel procesor, you should use an Intel chipset for the highest level of stability. I mean when the processor manufacturer makes a chipset for their own processor, it better be as stable as possible. Intel tends to focus on stability rather than performance because they are more interested in the business market rather than the enthusiast market, and the business market wants stability.
Nvidia on the other hand, focuses on performace. Every chipset that they've ever made was focused on this. It just so happens that in the AMD market, their chipset is regarderd to also be the most stable of the major AMD chipsets.
I've owned nothing but Nforce since it was announced. Both my Nforce and Nforce2 boards were as stable as anything I've found on the Intel side. Problem wise, the only thing they ever had issues with was the sound and IDE drivers (where they actually warn you their beta) and frankly, even those drivers were a cut above their competition.
Frankly, and this is my opinion, The Tech report has is out for Nvidia. Period. You read anything about Nvidia on their site and they will find a problem with it. Meanwhile they think ATI and Intel are the second coming.
Well that explans this then.a f.htm
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http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20050401/t
It's about 3/4th's down the page. or click the link below for the quick picture.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20050401/t