The poster and/or editors needed to include links like these in the summary. Otherwise even the avid/.er's scratch our heads wondering wth this is about.
Any ideas how to get a matrox dual head card (G400) working with x.org?:/ Worked fine with xfree86 and the matrox supplied drivers, but not since I upgraded to FC2, which includes x.org. Time to buy a new card?
The one windoze box I have popped up its little 'I want to download SP2' today. With all of the stuff I've kept hearing about how many apps were going to break, does any one have any antecdotal experiences post-SP2-install they'd like to share? I really don't want to install this stupid thing because I need my machine to continue functioning, barely as it may be.
The fundamental question is, now that you've installed it, what did SP2 break?
I noticed that as well, although for nefarious purposes. I was hoping to find my future wife in the essays of the enlightened who have seen the light of Firefox/Opera/et al., as it were.
Wasn't trying to be funny, except maybe the last line. I was rather pissed at the time, because this "feature" turned out to be one more PITA that windows is so good at being.
'Run As...' (the equivalent to 'su - user') didn't work, which is what I said. If I ran program A.exe, some of its spawned child processes/threads would not actually run in the elevated context, but rather spawn in the non-privileged context.
So when you tried to, for example, burn a CD, the application's child processes didn't have enough privs to actually access the drive for writing. The solution? Log out and log back in with the account you were trying to 'Run As...'. Defeats the purpose. The OS should understand enough to realize that A.exe ('run[ning] AS...'), loaded subroutines from goat.dll, and said subroutines should run with in whatever user context A.exe is running.
I agree. I also have to agree with an earlier post which mentioned punishing those who patent what they know already has prior art.
Problem is, I have seen this unprivileged user, and its broken. A few years ago we split our NT accounts in the IT office I worked in into 'priv' and 'non-priv' accounts for each of us. Previously, our typical logins had all the admin privs to do whatever we needed on the workstation.
The plan was that we could use the win2k/xp version of 'su' (whatever it is called, I don't remember) to do things that needed elevated privs. IT DIDN'T WORK. Some of the child processes, for example, of burning a CD would spawn as your unprivileged context - meaning you couldn't burn a damn CD. You had to log out, and log back in with your priv account for a simple task like burning a CD.
I think its great how Microsoft steals ideas from other people (*cough*NIX), comes up with a totally frelled implementation that many times doesn't work - and then A) breaks the existing standards, B) goes off and patents the idea as their own or C) both
Perhaps Microsoft's division which is doing all this should simply be retitled "Patent Whores"
FTA: Google is facing a growing number of critics and skeptics for its somewhat elitist image.
What does this have to do with ARM processors? Because Google has captured the internet community's attention by providing a clean looking, excellent search engine with low overhead for the client?
There were (and are) many search engines before Google. Google just did it better. Now they're elitist? This single line about Google at the end of the article comes off as a cheap shot.
One place that does NOT give you hell: Microcenter. I shop there all the time. Generally, the return policy is 30 days. No stupid 15% restocking fee on the 500$ worth of stuff you just bought that doesn't work right. Their prices are sometimes a little higher (~3-5%) than on the web, but you can't beat the reassurance of being able to take something back if it doesn't work or won't fit or isn't the right part. (How many times have we all accidently picked up the wrong part off the shelf only to get it home and try to figure out why the damn thing won't fit right?)
I'm sure that Microcenter loses some money by doing this, but how much more do they make because their customers are loyal to them and vice-versa?
I've been spending my hard earned dollar at Best Buy for years, but no more. I (foolishly) purchased one of their "extended warranty" plans for an after-market car stereo.
I realize that what I've been through might be minor, but when I see crap about the customer not being right, it makes my blood boil. The reason is simple: companies like Best Buy take "the customer is always right? not anymore" to an extreme - where the customer becomes some kind of pinyata for them to beat on until all the coins drop from your pockets; where they try to make the customer feel like the bad guy for taking them up on sales, warranties, etc.
Here's a short version of the story:
Under this plan, I tried taking the stereo back because it wasn't functioning properly. A week and a half later, they called and said it was fixed. I took the time to reinstall it, only to find that not only wasn't it fixed, but that their fix had caused a new and unrelated problem with the unit. I took it back to the store, where they called a few days later saying it was fixed. The initials on the repair slip indicated it was the same tech, who said nothing was wrong with the unit. Not the problem I originally had it in for, or the new problem. The thing was fine according to this hack.
I took it back a third time being very specific that I did not want this same tech touching it. This time they wanted two pieces of wiring - the harness and the antenna adapter, which cost me about 30$. No problem. I brought all three items to the store, and they sent them all out. A few days later I got a call saying that the unit had been "junked" - they were going to just replace it.
Well, this unit isn't available any longer. No problem, I'll choose a comparable unit close to the price I paid originally. I also asked if they were going to replace, under the warranty, the two pieces of wiring they'd taken. Nope. This is where it starts to get ugly.
The CS rep I'm dealing with at the store has disappeared and returned, and decided on a model he believes is equivalent to what I had. It is priced at about 50$ less than what I paid and lacked several features of my old unit. If I wanted anything else, I would have to pay the difference from the price of this "comparable" unit. No, I can't just take a store credit and be done with it, thats not how it works, he tells me. "Well feature A doesn't seem to be on this model, I really liked that about my old model. Don't you think thats important?" I ask the CS rep. No, he tells me flatly. At this point, I'm getting pretty pissed. No!? WTF?
Back to the wiring stuff. They took the wiring from me, but they're not going to replace it. The CS rep says he'll call the repair people and have it sent to me - it'll be 7-10 days before I get it in the mail. I want to know why it wasn't already on its way, and how I'm supposed to install my "comparable" unit without it. Best Buy repair people knew they had junked the unit and that they weren't going to give me new wiring. The CS rep responds by saying he just called and it is being shipped. I try to explain to him that he's totally missing my point, but he can't hear me. They took something that they're not going to replace - therefore the items belong to ME. My property. Why don't I have them already? Why does it take you calling to get MY stuff back? Why won't you just give me new ones and be done with it?
At this point, he says something to the effect of "well, you're obviously not listening to me, so you can go talk to my supervisor on the other side of the store."
I had to walk away because the attitude this rep was copping was starting to cause a scene (which maybe isn't such a bad thing), but I was about to do something that would have prompted security to haul me off. At this point, a supervisor SHOULD have made him/herself available - this was all going on right in front of the service desk.
I was (am) royally pissed. The guy was a complete prick, didn't give a ri
Bastards, patenting a public working group's suggestion for fixing the broken widget. Anyone else wonder if there is a conspiracy here? If this works for the network appliance giant, SCO might just have a case if they patent a few of the publically submitted kernel patches.
This whole reward thing is nothing more than a PR move. Microsoft comes out looking like the hero for offering the reward which led to the capture of some kid, masking the fact that their crappy code allowed this to happen.
Two questions arise from this:
- What will be the fallout in terms of orgs moving to non-MS platforms (MacOS, Linux, etc)?
- By most accounts, this particular virus/worm was very poorly written. My understanding is that this is also true of most of the other recent viruses. How long will it be before someone writes a virus for win32s which is truly destructive, in terms of things like writing random data in random places (sector 0, anyone?) on the disk, or scrambling the BIOSes and firmware of things like HDDs making them completley unusable?
And before we suggest that the damage was limited to broadband home users who don't patch their machines, consider that orgs like these were taken down: a few banks, at least one coast guard station, St Luke's Hospital, Delta Airlines, and the list goes on.
Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously), but I was under the impression that this is what the DMCA is all about - you don't have a legal right to do *anything* with the XCEL glue _except_ what the directions say you can do with it.
Don't most EULAs (in this case I guess an AUP for the case of Sharman, and the essence of the DMCA) specifically say "...you may not reverse-engineer, disassemble..."? Does what you're saying imply that the EULA lawyers/corps are trying to write their own law, as it were, and attempting to supercede the actual law?
While you have a point about not relying on the OS to provide security, the same is true for a firewall. One should never rely on a single layer for security. Single layers fail or are compromised all the time. I wish it was that simple. Never, ever should the OS be the weakest layer.
I loathe Windows not because it is a microsoft product, but rather because of how it is built. Fools like reddigitaldragon make it worse with crap like "I reinstall every month... get over it" as if this was normal or acceptable.
The core OS of windows is too damn slow, so they put subsystems into the kernel which don't belong to try to make it appear to run faster. This creates an inherentley insecure and unstable environment, because there is no privilege seperation between subsystems and the kernel. Often times applications are allowed or must access those subsystems directly for one reason or another. Hence, it is trivial for an application to take over, crash (intentionally or otherwise), etc the entire system from the kernel level.
Why doesn't the MPEG video compression negate the HD advantages? Because of the MPEG compression, there is a noticable quality difference between my (non-HD) TV on the TiVo and bypassing the TiVo to watch TV directly.
Funny thing, I've been dealing with the same crap trying to find a simple CD player which actually puts the sound to the CD audio channel, as opposed to the wav channel. WMP, for example, besides being so bloated, routes the audio through the wav channel, so you can't control the volume of a CD and your full-screen game independently.
Winamp won't play 'enhanced'/mixed-mode CDs because it sees the data first.
I want something simple - play the audio CD tracks in random order through the CD sound channel. I don't care about MP3s, or any other format. I'm probably going to end up writing my own app in Tcl/Tk.
With all the useless crap they are jamming into cellphones, it _seems_ (albeit contingent on solving some of the security issues mentioned here) like this would be a nice feature to put into a cellphone. Nearly everyone has a cellphone these days, certainly the software has evolved enough to be able to support something like this.
The problem I could see, however, is in the physical design of a magnetic stripe protruding and retracting, and how easy that would be to break.
CMH has had WiFi access throughout the airport for some time now. I happened to be coming home around Christmas time and saw a random sign while waiting for my luggage about WiFi being available.
I went down to an empty corner of the baggage claim area to wait for my ride to show up, and sure enough there was what appeared to be unhindered (no port blocking, etc) WiFi access. And I never really considered CMH to be one of the "leading edge" airports in the country.
Re:My local trendy cafe...
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We have a couple of coffee shops here in the Columbus (OH) area that offer free WiFi. However, my roommate who worked at a non-WiFi'd coffeeshop in an upper class neighborhood told me that the upper management refused to put WiFi in, saying that they didn't want anyone sitting around the coffeeshop, but rather they wanted to move customers in and out of the store. The argument sounds logical if somewhat contrived.
How do you convince your local coffeeshop that putting in WiFi would be good for business? What about offering to install and maintain it, in exchange for say, free coffee now and then? How would you make a proposal like this?
Yeah, XP has the _option_ but it doesn't work properly. I've lost data/corrupted files even a few minutes after closing the one app that writes data to the firewire disk.
You're always supposed to go click the little 'safely remove hardware' thing in the tray, which seems to me to be equivalent to an 'umount' in linux, but I'll be damned if more often than not frelling XP tells me that the hardware can't be removed and that I should try again later. (wtf does that mean? write the cached data and unmount the disk, damnit.)
To reiterate: trying to hot swap firewire devices (and perhaps others) in XP will lead to data loss - maybe not every time, but it will happen.
aye. That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - how fed up I am with American companies hiring techs to support their American customers, but the techs don't know English. I've dealt with Indian, Asian, native speakers etc and its incredibly frustrating.
I'm wondering if this isn't part of a plan on behalf of the companies to build in planned obselense. How many calls does joe average consumer have to make to tech support before he gives up and buys another computer/etc, figuring (or being told by the tech) the computer/etc must not be fixable? Planned obselense (intentionally designing products to fail, in order to force the customer to purchase another) was outlawed in the US a while ago, but this seems like perhaps a back door to the same thing?
I actually like your idea... usually it happens that a cell-phone yapping, laptop using, SUV-driving, etc idiot slams into an innocent in a "normal" car.
Instead of running over us poor people, maybe now the yuppies driving SUVs can each come from different directions and slam into each other.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't coyote linux a somewhat obvious choice for this?
The scripts are open to modification as much or as little as you like. IIRC, the end of the script is building/compiling the packages you've requested.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows should not be allowed for use in any application where life, limb, or property is at risk
Wasn't this in the MS EULA for one of the 9x's? I'm almost positive I read that in one of the manuals or EULAs that came with an OEM disc.
mod parent up.
/.er's scratch our heads wondering wth this is about.
The poster and/or editors needed to include links like these in the summary. Otherwise even the avid
Any ideas how to get a matrox dual head card (G400) working with x.org? :/ Worked fine with xfree86 and the matrox supplied drivers, but not since I upgraded to FC2, which includes x.org. Time to buy a new card?
The one windoze box I have popped up its little 'I want to download SP2' today. With all of the stuff I've kept hearing about how many apps were going to break, does any one have any antecdotal experiences post-SP2-install they'd like to share? I really don't want to install this stupid thing because I need my machine to continue functioning, barely as it may be.
The fundamental question is, now that you've installed it, what did SP2 break?
I noticed that as well, although for nefarious purposes. I was hoping to find my future wife in the essays of the enlightened who have seen the light of Firefox/Opera/et al., as it were.
Wasn't trying to be funny, except maybe the last line. I was rather pissed at the time, because this "feature" turned out to be one more PITA that windows is so good at being.
'Run As...' (the equivalent to 'su - user') didn't work, which is what I said. If I ran program A.exe, some of its spawned child processes/threads would not actually run in the elevated context, but rather spawn in the non-privileged context.
So when you tried to, for example, burn a CD, the application's child processes didn't have enough privs to actually access the drive for writing. The solution? Log out and log back in with the account you were trying to 'Run As...'. Defeats the purpose. The OS should understand enough to realize that A.exe ('run[ning] AS...'), loaded subroutines from goat.dll, and said subroutines should run with in whatever user context A.exe is running.
I agree. I also have to agree with an earlier post which mentioned punishing those who patent what they know already has prior art.
Problem is, I have seen this unprivileged user, and its broken. A few years ago we split our NT accounts in the IT office I worked in into 'priv' and 'non-priv' accounts for each of us. Previously, our typical logins had all the admin privs to do whatever we needed on the workstation.
The plan was that we could use the win2k/xp version of 'su' (whatever it is called, I don't remember) to do things that needed elevated privs. IT DIDN'T WORK. Some of the child processes, for example, of burning a CD would spawn as your unprivileged context - meaning you couldn't burn a damn CD. You had to log out, and log back in with your priv account for a simple task like burning a CD.
I think its great how Microsoft steals ideas from other people (*cough*NIX), comes up with a totally frelled implementation that many times doesn't work - and then A) breaks the existing standards, B) goes off and patents the idea as their own or C) both
Perhaps Microsoft's division which is doing all this should simply be retitled "Patent Whores"
FTA: Google is facing a growing number of critics and skeptics for its somewhat elitist image.
What does this have to do with ARM processors? Because Google has captured the internet community's attention by providing a clean looking, excellent search engine with low overhead for the client?
There were (and are) many search engines before Google. Google just did it better. Now they're elitist? This single line about Google at the end of the article comes off as a cheap shot.
One place that does NOT give you hell: Microcenter. I shop there all the time. Generally, the return policy is 30 days. No stupid 15% restocking fee on the 500$ worth of stuff you just bought that doesn't work right. Their prices are sometimes a little higher (~3-5%) than on the web, but you can't beat the reassurance of being able to take something back if it doesn't work or won't fit or isn't the right part. (How many times have we all accidently picked up the wrong part off the shelf only to get it home and try to figure out why the damn thing won't fit right?)
I'm sure that Microcenter loses some money by doing this, but how much more do they make because their customers are loyal to them and vice-versa?
I've been spending my hard earned dollar at Best Buy for years, but no more. I (foolishly) purchased one of their "extended warranty" plans for an after-market car stereo.
I realize that what I've been through might be minor, but when I see crap about the customer not being right, it makes my blood boil. The reason is simple: companies like Best Buy take "the customer is always right? not anymore" to an extreme - where the customer becomes some kind of pinyata for them to beat on until all the coins drop from your pockets; where they try to make the customer feel like the bad guy for taking them up on sales, warranties, etc.
Here's a short version of the story:
Under this plan, I tried taking the stereo back because it wasn't functioning properly. A week and a half later, they called and said it was fixed. I took the time to reinstall it, only to find that not only wasn't it fixed, but that their fix had caused a new and unrelated problem with the unit. I took it back to the store, where they called a few days later saying it was fixed. The initials on the repair slip indicated it was the same tech, who said nothing was wrong with the unit. Not the problem I originally had it in for, or the new problem. The thing was fine according to this hack.
I took it back a third time being very specific that I did not want this same tech touching it. This time they wanted two pieces of wiring - the harness and the antenna adapter, which cost me about 30$. No problem. I brought all three items to the store, and they sent them all out. A few days later I got a call saying that the unit had been "junked" - they were going to just replace it.
Well, this unit isn't available any longer. No problem, I'll choose a comparable unit close to the price I paid originally. I also asked if they were going to replace, under the warranty, the two pieces of wiring they'd taken. Nope. This is where it starts to get ugly.
The CS rep I'm dealing with at the store has disappeared and returned, and decided on a model he believes is equivalent to what I had. It is priced at about 50$ less than what I paid and lacked several features of my old unit. If I wanted anything else, I would have to pay the difference from the price of this "comparable" unit. No, I can't just take a store credit and be done with it, thats not how it works, he tells me. "Well feature A doesn't seem to be on this model, I really liked that about my old model. Don't you think thats important?" I ask the CS rep. No, he tells me flatly. At this point, I'm getting pretty pissed. No!? WTF?
Back to the wiring stuff. They took the wiring from me, but they're not going to replace it. The CS rep says he'll call the repair people and have it sent to me - it'll be 7-10 days before I get it in the mail. I want to know why it wasn't already on its way, and how I'm supposed to install my "comparable" unit without it. Best Buy repair people knew they had junked the unit and that they weren't going to give me new wiring. The CS rep responds by saying he just called and it is being shipped. I try to explain to him that he's totally missing my point, but he can't hear me. They took something that they're not going to replace - therefore the items belong to ME. My property. Why don't I have them already? Why does it take you calling to get MY stuff back? Why won't you just give me new ones and be done with it?
At this point, he says something to the effect of "well, you're obviously not listening to me, so you can go talk to my supervisor on the other side of the store."
I had to walk away because the attitude this rep was copping was starting to cause a scene (which maybe isn't such a bad thing), but I was about to do something that would have prompted security to haul me off. At this point, a supervisor SHOULD have made him/herself available - this was all going on right in front of the service desk.
I was (am) royally pissed. The guy was a complete prick, didn't give a ri
groundbreaking and interesting programs like Firefly
...tho 4 seasons, Farscape was left hanging because SciFi decided to cancel it in leui of complete garbage like 'Tremors, the series' :/
Bastards, patenting a public working group's suggestion for fixing the broken widget. Anyone else wonder if there is a conspiracy here? If this works for the network appliance giant, SCO might just have a case if they patent a few of the publically submitted kernel patches.
Specifically: You can buy anything.
Except secure code, apparently.
This whole reward thing is nothing more than a PR move. Microsoft comes out looking like the hero for offering the reward which led to the capture of some kid, masking the fact that their crappy code allowed this to happen.
Two questions arise from this:
- What will be the fallout in terms of orgs moving to non-MS platforms (MacOS, Linux, etc)?
- By most accounts, this particular virus/worm was very poorly written. My understanding is that this is also true of most of the other recent viruses. How long will it be before someone writes a virus for win32s which is truly destructive, in terms of things like writing random data in random places (sector 0, anyone?) on the disk, or scrambling the BIOSes and firmware of things like HDDs making them completley unusable?
And before we suggest that the damage was limited to broadband home users who don't patch their machines, consider that orgs like these were taken down: a few banks, at least one coast guard station, St Luke's Hospital, Delta Airlines, and the list goes on.
Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously), but I was under the impression that this is what the DMCA is all about - you don't have a legal right to do *anything* with the XCEL glue _except_ what the directions say you can do with it.
Don't most EULAs (in this case I guess an AUP for the case of Sharman, and the essence of the DMCA) specifically say "...you may not reverse-engineer, disassemble..."? Does what you're saying imply that the EULA lawyers/corps are trying to write their own law, as it were, and attempting to supercede the actual law?
While you have a point about not relying on the OS to provide security, the same is true for a firewall. One should never rely on a single layer for security. Single layers fail or are compromised all the time. I wish it was that simple. Never, ever should the OS be the weakest layer.
... get over it" as if this was normal or acceptable.
I loathe Windows not because it is a microsoft product, but rather because of how it is built. Fools like reddigitaldragon make it worse with crap like "I reinstall every month
The core OS of windows is too damn slow, so they put subsystems into the kernel which don't belong to try to make it appear to run faster. This creates an inherentley insecure and unstable environment, because there is no privilege seperation between subsystems and the kernel. Often times applications are allowed or must access those subsystems directly for one reason or another. Hence, it is trivial for an application to take over, crash (intentionally or otherwise), etc the entire system from the kernel level.
Why doesn't the MPEG video compression negate the HD advantages? Because of the MPEG compression, there is a noticable quality difference between my (non-HD) TV on the TiVo and bypassing the TiVo to watch TV directly.
Funny thing, I've been dealing with the same crap trying to find a simple CD player which actually puts the sound to the CD audio channel, as opposed to the wav channel. WMP, for example, besides being so bloated, routes the audio through the wav channel, so you can't control the volume of a CD and your full-screen game independently.
Winamp won't play 'enhanced'/mixed-mode CDs because it sees the data first.
I want something simple - play the audio CD tracks in random order through the CD sound channel. I don't care about MP3s, or any other format. I'm probably going to end up writing my own app in Tcl/Tk.
With all the useless crap they are jamming into cellphones, it _seems_ (albeit contingent on solving some of the security issues mentioned here) like this would be a nice feature to put into a cellphone. Nearly everyone has a cellphone these days, certainly the software has evolved enough to be able to support something like this.
The problem I could see, however, is in the physical design of a magnetic stripe protruding and retracting, and how easy that would be to break.
CMH has had WiFi access throughout the airport for some time now. I happened to be coming home around Christmas time and saw a random sign while waiting for my luggage about WiFi being available.
I went down to an empty corner of the baggage claim area to wait for my ride to show up, and sure enough there was what appeared to be unhindered (no port blocking, etc) WiFi access. And I never really considered CMH to be one of the "leading edge" airports in the country.
We have a couple of coffee shops here in the Columbus (OH) area that offer free WiFi. However, my roommate who worked at a non-WiFi'd coffeeshop in an upper class neighborhood told me that the upper management refused to put WiFi in, saying that they didn't want anyone sitting around the coffeeshop, but rather they wanted to move customers in and out of the store. The argument sounds logical if somewhat contrived.
How do you convince your local coffeeshop that putting in WiFi would be good for business? What about offering to install and maintain it, in exchange for say, free coffee now and then? How would you make a proposal like this?
Yeah, XP has the _option_ but it doesn't work properly. I've lost data/corrupted files even a few minutes after closing the one app that writes data to the firewire disk.
You're always supposed to go click the little 'safely remove hardware' thing in the tray, which seems to me to be equivalent to an 'umount' in linux, but I'll be damned if more often than not frelling XP tells me that the hardware can't be removed and that I should try again later. (wtf does that mean? write the cached data and unmount the disk, damnit.)
To reiterate: trying to hot swap firewire devices (and perhaps others) in XP will lead to data loss - maybe not every time, but it will happen.
aye. That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - how fed up I am with American companies hiring techs to support their American customers, but the techs don't know English. I've dealt with Indian, Asian, native speakers etc and its incredibly frustrating.
I'm wondering if this isn't part of a plan on behalf of the companies to build in planned obselense. How many calls does joe average consumer have to make to tech support before he gives up and buys another computer/etc, figuring (or being told by the tech) the computer/etc must not be fixable? Planned obselense (intentionally designing products to fail, in order to force the customer to purchase another) was outlawed in the US a while ago, but this seems like perhaps a back door to the same thing?
I actually like your idea ... usually it happens that a cell-phone yapping, laptop using, SUV-driving, etc idiot slams into an innocent in a "normal" car.
Instead of running over us poor people, maybe now the yuppies driving SUVs can each come from different directions and slam into each other.
Slightly O/T, but doesn't this mean that this device could be slightly modified to actually blind one or more of the red light cameras?
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't coyote linux a somewhat obvious choice for this?
The scripts are open to modification as much or as little as you like. IIRC, the end of the script is building/compiling the packages you've requested.