Uh, I might be wrong, but I thought that 1080i was well below the capabilities of most modern computer monitors and video cards. I have a lowly Geforce2 video card and 4 year old sony monitor (it was a nice one back then I admit) and it has no problem with 1920x1080 though I must admit its a "wierd" aspect ratio compared to what I normally use (1600x1200). Maybe if I had a widescreen monitor it would look more normal. My setup goes all the way up to 2048x1536 though you can tell its really pushing the video card at that point. The monitor has no apparent issues with it however except for the 60hz refresh rate.
They are setting the stock price high to get in with a certain catagory of investors. I don't know much more than that but it seems like with a high stock price they want a few shares in the hands of investors that will hold the stock for a long term.
What I really want to know is if the original poster notified microsoft of the upgrade failure and provided them with hardware list and software list so that it could be attempted to discover why 3 of 5 machines did not reboot.
I've upgraded 5 machines myself and 100% of them succefully rebooted and have been running since I did it. In fact I started out with an early beta of SP2 on one of them and did incremental upgrades to this point without any reliability problems.
I bet all of the non-start problems can be traced to a single piece of hardware or software that the person runs and its likely that 90% of installations (if not far more) would go off without a hitch. The nice thing to do would be to let MS know whats happening so they can solve the issue for the others affected or at least list the issue so those affected won't attempt the upgrade until there is a workaround or fix.
Clippy was written to save microsoft money on its tech support costs. It worked amazingly. It would have been a far better product if they had the time and money to fully implement it instead of only the beginner API. The full design included an intermediate and advanced level that would have annoyed the normal/. users far less than the beginner only version we got ot see. As it is clippy is an astounding success, most/. readers just happen to be out of the target audience which is why clippy could be turned off.
I haven't done too much PHP programming but given what I have done with PHP compared to what I have to do quite often with C# I think that it would show that C# is a more efficient language to code in especially given the widespread availability of world class development tools. I bet you get increased productivity out of your C# programmers to add on top of the lower cost to employ them.
Of course this is opinion and speculation just to ward of those who would try and accuse me of talking out my ass. I am in fact doing just that but I think if you studied it my hunch would have some truth to it.
Yup, I agree with you, its funny how many people site software cost as a big part of the cost of getting a website up and running. Even if you had to buy a super expensive licence that ran 100k it would still only be the cost to keep on a couple admins for a year, and those are poorly paid ones.
The tivo problem is indeed the VOIP's problem. What happens is the VOIP sets up its circuit to filter out "non-voice" data (basically just gets rid of high frequency stuff) so they can compress the signal further. This of course wipes out modem communication. If you pay more you can get a "fax line" through vonage (don't know about other VOIP solutions) that doesn't do the filtering so it gives a connection that tivo can use if you set the modem speed slower in the tivo. I have a feeling that the people using DSL will end up having similar problems as they expand DSL to take up more of the channel and filter more out of the voice side.
I don't see any reason why they should expect people to speak English on the site in general. I guess I could see why they would complain if they created a community and then everyone spoke a different language in it. I guess I'd expect that if I went into a community founded by someone English speaking that the communication there would be in english and if I went into one founded by a Brazilian then the language would be Portuguese (unless the Brazilian liked some other language). Anyways I guess my point is if you created the community to be a circle of English speaking friends then you have some right to be upset if a bunch of people come in and speak a different language and leave your out of your own community but if you are complaining because there are other communities that speak other languages then you need to go sit on your thumb.
Yes. Though aren't there a few hardware drivers that don't work right without root privledge?
BTW I was giving linux the credit it deserves for doing the non-admin thing right by that statement. It upsets me that many windows applications can't say the same.
Could someone explain why Linux and its utilities have so many critical security notices posted against it? Are Linux programmers unbelievably bad at programming? Are Linux programmers just people who moved up from the lawn maintenance crew?
My point is that every piece of software is made by humans that make mistakes. One big problem that windows has currently that linux does not is that linux usually runs processes with minimum privledge and has minimum attack surface by default whereas XP and older have a huge attack surface and run everything as admin by default.
As anyone that understands security should know the best way to stop exploits is writing correct code. They also know that its impossible to do this 100% and so advise other defenses. I've been running RC candidates of XP SP2 and it goes a long way to lowering the attack surface. It also seems to lower privledges of services. I think it will go a long way to reducing the number of vulnerabilities in the OS not by fixing them necessarily but by not exposing them to the world to exploit. I just wish that someone could train application developers to write code that runs correctly under non-admin accounts.
The other part of the security picture that I failed to mention is security vs ease of use. A very secure computer does very little and the general person in the past (heck even now) had little in the way of knowledge of how to work on a secure machine and less of why the security is important. Futhermore numerous poorly written apps failed to operate correctly without more privledge than necessary which gave MS the incorrect incentive to run everything with high privledge and open up all the doors. There will certainly be a large cost to MS in retraining XP users to handle the SP2 restrictions. Another big training period is going to come teaching people (after they teach 3rd party developers) how to handle living as non-admin. Again I think all of this stuff is in the works but it will take time. They really do act like they have to get security right this time. If past actions are anything to go by, once MS gets its mind set on something, it achieves it at all costs.
I am uncertain that IE Developers are competent programmers.
I'll bite, I can guarantee that some number of Mozilla developers are not competent programmers given the number of possible contributors to the project.
That said, I think MS realizes it has a problem now and is dealing with it, unfortunately it will take a year or two for it to really be dealt with. Mozilla knew (I hope and assume here) there was a problem right from the start and took steps to mitigate a lot of the problems that IE is plagued with (and netscape would probably have been plauged with before the complete rewrite of code). Its a new style vs old style mentality. Many applications (OSS as well as proprietary commercial) from the early to mid 90's are plauged with the type of problems that IE has. The problem is that MS rested on its laurels instead of continuing to push IE forward and improve it. They also were under the highly misguided impression that people didn't really care about security and weren't willing to pay for it. Hopefully the truth has come home to roost and we will see better products out of redmond.
I thought MS took public action on it by making thier browser not pass on the shell URI, that was MS's patch for the exploit. Now this doesn't make MS gods or anything, but it should serve as a model of how MS prioritized the bug and as a model of how to avoid hitting it with your application.
I'd advise knowing slightly more than that, I actually think a fair number of "IE" security holes are actually in the mshtml.dll. Unfortunately a great many others are in wierd random dlls like webdav and stuff.
Might want to delete mshtml.dll and possibly browseui.dll and shdocvw.dll and that should get rid of a majority of IE security holes. I won't vouch for how many applications you totally nuke by doing that though.
BTW I found the list by running the dependancy walker on iexplore.exe and checking html/browser specific looking things in the list.
Except that the extended service agreement (at least the one I had) said if the product was damaged for any reason they would replace it. I hear that they have changed the wording in newer service plans, but with all the crap I've heard about best buy and the service plans I no longer buy them.
The bottom line is that Best Buy needs to make its sales such that they profit the company. If they lower the prices so much that the loss from the sale is more than the profit from extra buys, then they shouldn't have the sale. It should be taken for granted that there are customers that will buy only sale items (I'm often that customer) so when they set up the sale they should assume that.
Frankly, Best Buys problem is bad cutomer service and nothing special in regards to product. All they have is price and I've found the couple bucks savings I'd get over shopping somewhere else (circuit city tends to be right on best buy's prices and not nearly so evil) is not worth the hassle of dealing with best buy as a store.
In some ways I'm not sure how this is different on the surface from cell phone number portability.
One reason it is different is that the common names (domain names) are portable. Another may be infrastructure though I think that phone numbers were not designed to be easily switchable between phone companies so as far as that argument goes it might be a wash.
In the end I don't think there is as compelling an argument for ip porability as there was for phone number portability since the IP is not exactly your identity on line whereas your phone number is very definitely your phone identity.
Agreed, though the GPL does in a way accomplish definition 1 of communism. It uses private ownership to enact a guarantee that the work is available to the community for all time and including all changes that may be made to the work in the future. Note that communism is not the description of a government but is instead the description of a type of group social interaction. Libertarianism would not preclude communism in any way, because by your definition they seek only to make sure you can say and think what you want with out restriction in which case they wouldn't mind being part of communist interactions until they decided that they wanted to own something themselves.
In the end that discussion doesn't matter really, MS is using its shared source initiative for purley capitalist reasons. They found out that manufacturers of PDA's didn't like the fact that if they changed CE to work for them that they had to give ownership of the changes back to MS. The new agreement (according to what I read in the article) would allow those manufacturers to maintain ownership of the changes while still being allowed to distribute the changed OS.
I think that the spirit of GPL is communistic (and thats not to be equated with bad) in that it seeks to keep the information free for all. In some ways when you GPL a work you are trying to guarantee that the work is available for all to use and that any changes made to the work remain avaiable for all to use. You are using the capitalist framework to ensure a communist outcome (and yes communist is probably the wrong word to use but its what the parent used so I kept with it).
If they were trying to raise the bar of entry it would be tens of thousands of dollars and come with very strict redistribution and licencing restrictions like the xbox SDK.
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Uh, I might be wrong, but I thought that 1080i was well below the capabilities of most modern computer monitors and video cards. I have a lowly Geforce2 video card and 4 year old sony monitor (it was a nice one back then I admit) and it has no problem with 1920x1080 though I must admit its a "wierd" aspect ratio compared to what I normally use (1600x1200). Maybe if I had a widescreen monitor it would look more normal. My setup goes all the way up to 2048x1536 though you can tell its really pushing the video card at that point. The monitor has no apparent issues with it however except for the 60hz refresh rate.
They are setting the stock price high to get in with a certain catagory of investors. I don't know much more than that but it seems like with a high stock price they want a few shares in the hands of investors that will hold the stock for a long term.
I've upgraded 5 machines myself and 100% of them succefully rebooted and have been running since I did it. In fact I started out with an early beta of SP2 on one of them and did incremental upgrades to this point without any reliability problems.
I bet all of the non-start problems can be traced to a single piece of hardware or software that the person runs and its likely that 90% of installations (if not far more) would go off without a hitch. The nice thing to do would be to let MS know whats happening so they can solve the issue for the others affected or at least list the issue so those affected won't attempt the upgrade until there is a workaround or fix.
Clippy was written to save microsoft money on its tech support costs. It worked amazingly. It would have been a far better product if they had the time and money to fully implement it instead of only the beginner API. The full design included an intermediate and advanced level that would have annoyed the normal /. users far less than the beginner only version we got ot see. As it is clippy is an astounding success, most /. readers just happen to be out of the target audience which is why clippy could be turned off.
Of course this is opinion and speculation just to ward of those who would try and accuse me of talking out my ass. I am in fact doing just that but I think if you studied it my hunch would have some truth to it.
Problem is VOIP sells itself as a replacement for phone service and it is not as it doesn't support data transmission.
Yup, I agree with you, its funny how many people site software cost as a big part of the cost of getting a website up and running. Even if you had to buy a super expensive licence that ran 100k it would still only be the cost to keep on a couple admins for a year, and those are poorly paid ones.
The tivo problem is indeed the VOIP's problem. What happens is the VOIP sets up its circuit to filter out "non-voice" data (basically just gets rid of high frequency stuff) so they can compress the signal further. This of course wipes out modem communication. If you pay more you can get a "fax line" through vonage (don't know about other VOIP solutions) that doesn't do the filtering so it gives a connection that tivo can use if you set the modem speed slower in the tivo. I have a feeling that the people using DSL will end up having similar problems as they expand DSL to take up more of the channel and filter more out of the voice side.
I don't see any reason why they should expect people to speak English on the site in general. I guess I could see why they would complain if they created a community and then everyone spoke a different language in it. I guess I'd expect that if I went into a community founded by someone English speaking that the communication there would be in english and if I went into one founded by a Brazilian then the language would be Portuguese (unless the Brazilian liked some other language). Anyways I guess my point is if you created the community to be a circle of English speaking friends then you have some right to be upset if a bunch of people come in and speak a different language and leave your out of your own community but if you are complaining because there are other communities that speak other languages then you need to go sit on your thumb.
BTW I was giving linux the credit it deserves for doing the non-admin thing right by that statement. It upsets me that many windows applications can't say the same.
My point is that every piece of software is made by humans that make mistakes. One big problem that windows has currently that linux does not is that linux usually runs processes with minimum privledge and has minimum attack surface by default whereas XP and older have a huge attack surface and run everything as admin by default.
As anyone that understands security should know the best way to stop exploits is writing correct code. They also know that its impossible to do this 100% and so advise other defenses. I've been running RC candidates of XP SP2 and it goes a long way to lowering the attack surface. It also seems to lower privledges of services. I think it will go a long way to reducing the number of vulnerabilities in the OS not by fixing them necessarily but by not exposing them to the world to exploit. I just wish that someone could train application developers to write code that runs correctly under non-admin accounts.
The other part of the security picture that I failed to mention is security vs ease of use. A very secure computer does very little and the general person in the past (heck even now) had little in the way of knowledge of how to work on a secure machine and less of why the security is important. Futhermore numerous poorly written apps failed to operate correctly without more privledge than necessary which gave MS the incorrect incentive to run everything with high privledge and open up all the doors. There will certainly be a large cost to MS in retraining XP users to handle the SP2 restrictions. Another big training period is going to come teaching people (after they teach 3rd party developers) how to handle living as non-admin. Again I think all of this stuff is in the works but it will take time. They really do act like they have to get security right this time. If past actions are anything to go by, once MS gets its mind set on something, it achieves it at all costs.
I'll bite, I can guarantee that some number of Mozilla developers are not competent programmers given the number of possible contributors to the project.
That said, I think MS realizes it has a problem now and is dealing with it, unfortunately it will take a year or two for it to really be dealt with. Mozilla knew (I hope and assume here) there was a problem right from the start and took steps to mitigate a lot of the problems that IE is plagued with (and netscape would probably have been plauged with before the complete rewrite of code). Its a new style vs old style mentality. Many applications (OSS as well as proprietary commercial) from the early to mid 90's are plauged with the type of problems that IE has. The problem is that MS rested on its laurels instead of continuing to push IE forward and improve it. They also were under the highly misguided impression that people didn't really care about security and weren't willing to pay for it. Hopefully the truth has come home to roost and we will see better products out of redmond.
Eh, my first PC was a Tandy CoCo 1 and mhz for mhz the proc in the coco was faster than the first PC if I remember correctly.
Strike that, with custom settings (relaxed some restrictions for stuff I have to do at work) I still can't click through the links.
What are your security settings in IE. With default settings I am unable to get any of the links to work, clicking on them is fully ignored.
I thought MS took public action on it by making thier browser not pass on the shell URI, that was MS's patch for the exploit. Now this doesn't make MS gods or anything, but it should serve as a model of how MS prioritized the bug and as a model of how to avoid hitting it with your application.
I'd advise knowing slightly more than that, I actually think a fair number of "IE" security holes are actually in the mshtml.dll. Unfortunately a great many others are in wierd random dlls like webdav and stuff.
Might want to delete mshtml.dll and possibly browseui.dll and shdocvw.dll and that should get rid of a majority of IE security holes. I won't vouch for how many applications you totally nuke by doing that though.
BTW I found the list by running the dependancy walker on iexplore.exe and checking html/browser specific looking things in the list.
The bottom line is that Best Buy needs to make its sales such that they profit the company. If they lower the prices so much that the loss from the sale is more than the profit from extra buys, then they shouldn't have the sale. It should be taken for granted that there are customers that will buy only sale items (I'm often that customer) so when they set up the sale they should assume that.
Frankly, Best Buys problem is bad cutomer service and nothing special in regards to product. All they have is price and I've found the couple bucks savings I'd get over shopping somewhere else (circuit city tends to be right on best buy's prices and not nearly so evil) is not worth the hassle of dealing with best buy as a store.
I got that, so I clicked search again, and bam got lots of sites, though they all had linux in the domain name.
One reason it is different is that the common names (domain names) are portable. Another may be infrastructure though I think that phone numbers were not designed to be easily switchable between phone companies so as far as that argument goes it might be a wash.
In the end I don't think there is as compelling an argument for ip porability as there was for phone number portability since the IP is not exactly your identity on line whereas your phone number is very definitely your phone identity.
In the end that discussion doesn't matter really, MS is using its shared source initiative for purley capitalist reasons. They found out that manufacturers of PDA's didn't like the fact that if they changed CE to work for them that they had to give ownership of the changes back to MS. The new agreement (according to what I read in the article) would allow those manufacturers to maintain ownership of the changes while still being allowed to distribute the changed OS.
I think that the spirit of GPL is communistic (and thats not to be equated with bad) in that it seeks to keep the information free for all. In some ways when you GPL a work you are trying to guarantee that the work is available for all to use and that any changes made to the work remain avaiable for all to use. You are using the capitalist framework to ensure a communist outcome (and yes communist is probably the wrong word to use but its what the parent used so I kept with it).
If they were trying to raise the bar of entry it would be tens of thousands of dollars and come with very strict redistribution and licencing restrictions like the xbox SDK.