Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week. How about 8x500 MHz on the desktop, instead of 1x4GHz which is still crippled by 1 CPU hogging app?
It is true, as cheap as SMP motherboards have gotten there is no reason why SMP systems are not more available. The choices right now are pretty much, build yourself or buy an expensive workstation. All the first tier OEM's should be selling SMP desktop systems in thier high end product lines ($2000+) and maybe even thier mid range lines ($1200-$2000). Dell did it for a little while with the Optiplex line and some 2nd tier OEM's are doing, like Alienware, but SMP should be more common place then it is.
Rev 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
Rev 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Rev 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
More importantly, why wouldn't I just buy a Laptop to begin with ? $1600 buys a very nice one, even if that included a Monitor, mouse and keyboard. Now not only can I use it at work and at home, but on the road as well and although the monitor, keyboard and mouse are nice, I don't NEED them. This device has the worst features of both, in that it needs a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and it is not that powerful, flexable or upgradable and it is not nearly as portable as a laptop. I see no purpose in this device, you either want a powerful, flexable and upgradable system (a desktop) or you are willing to sacrafice all or most of these features for the sake of portabilty (a laptop).
Windows is Prostitute and Microsoft is her Pimp. The Pimp wants the Prostitute to be easier and more accessable and doesn't want to inconvience the John by making them use a condom, so naturally the Prostitute is going to get a few diseases. The Pimp will want to keep the disease a secrect, but will also want the Prostitute to keep working. So she is going to spread the disease around alot before it gets treated.
As it gains more market share it will become less secure
In reality, just the opposite is true. With each new release, all of the major brands of Linux have gotten more secure out of the box and easier to maintain that sercurity over time with better and easier tools. Red hat is good example of this, a few years ago, an out of box install of Redhat meant all services where enabled by default and the user had to disables them if they didn't want them. Today services are disabled by default and only enabled at the users request. This is harder for thier customers, but makes for more secure box.
Windows isn't the biggest target of worms, trojans and virus because its popular, it is the biggest target because it is an easy target. Microsoft themselves put out the greatest software in the world for writing worms and trojans (VB Script) and then integrated it completely into thier OS and most of thier other software as well. Of course now they refuse to fix the software or to even have it turned off by default.
Lets face it, Windows is Prostitute and Microsoft is her Pimp. The Pimp wants the Prostitute to be easier and more accessable and doesn't want to inconvience the John by making them use a condom, so naturally the Prostitute is going to get a few diseases. The Pimp will want to keep the disease a secrect, but will also want the Prostitute to keep working. So she is going to spread the disease around alot before it gets treated.
There is no double standard going on here. It is simple, Ximian is offering the service for free, if you want the "Value Added" service, it will cost you $9.95 a month, or if you want to you don't have to use the service at all and your current copy of Ximian Gnome will continue as before.
What Microsoft was (and still is) proposing is every computer sold with thier products HAS to use.NET and the user HAS to pay for this service. If the user chooses not to use.NET, thier products will stop working after 1 year at which time they must purchase a new copy at a much higher rate than using the service would have cost them.
I see a big difference in how each business handles this, Ximian gives you three choices; don't use service (product continues to work), use basic free service, pay for advanced service. Microsofts.NET strategy gives you two choices, pay for the service or don't pay for the service (product stops working). I see no double standard here.
Mind you, I beleive this to be a hoax. Potentialy however, a backdoor or trojan hardcoded into XP, means that every XP system can be easily hacked by anyone who knows how to use it. In theory, I could write a program, that portscans systems on the internet, looking for a paticular port opened by this trojan, then infects the system, which in turn starts the process over. As the number of infected systems grew, the traffic on the internet would increase, making a very effective internet wide Denial of Service attack. It would also be possible, and much easier, to just have the OS self destruct after after a random amount of time. Have the trojan delete or corrupt random DLL's, forcing you to do a reinstall or overwrite the first 1K of the hard drive forcing you to have to run fdisk and reformat your disk before reinstalling. With a backdoor or trojan, all this and more becomes trival to do accross 90% of the home computers in the U.S.
There is an easy solution, although it may not be perfect. I write all my documents in StarOffice and save them as HTML files, I then change the extension from.html to.doc and send it away. MSWord will open it just as if it was a true MS.doc file. There are a couple downsides, first you are limited to formating, styles and fonts allowed by HTML and second, if the recieving person makes changes and saves the file in the latest Office XP file format and sends it back to you, you will not be able to read it.
I only see one champion, and that is TiVo. They cooperate with the hacking community, they use our favorite OS. They don't hide behind a veil of invulnerability (far from it) snd seem to be able to straddle the fence between commercial interests and the public good.
Not to mention the fact that they are a technology company who actually has a business plan. They also did not burn thier venture captial money on stupid things and instead used it to bring an excellent product and service to market. From what I hear they have enough cash to operate for the next couple of years, inspite of the recession, thier user base and earnings are increasing as expected, and they will probably be profitable in 2-3 years. Whats not to like about this company.
Windows Update is visible enough, and certianly fits the bill for "Single Point Disttibution". The problem is Microsoft neglects it. All of these email viruses have had a patch available for at least a year. Why haven't these patches made it into Windows Update ? If someone wants to install these patches, they must dig around the MS website to find it. Also there has been little or no notification of these patches. Bottom line is the patches are useless if no one knows about them or can not find them.
How would you improve on the way MS issues patches?
I would like them to start with accessablity, Patches are useless if no one knows about them and/or can't find them.
What about Windows Update do you not like?
It is usually several weeks, if not months out of date. The patch for these email viruses has been available a very long time, but has never made its way into Windows Update.
What would you change,
More frequent Updates, say weekly, maybe even daily. A single point of information on the MS website, where users can go to find the latest patches and information. Maybe even a mailing list or a listserv. Fast and Complete discloser of problems, no "we will get back to you in two or three weeks" answers.
and why do you think it would help the average user?
I am not even going to answer this one, I think the benfits to the end user are obvious.
You are right, it is a bit of hero worship, but is it also true that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are among the greatest programers in the world. Those of us with lesser skill can only gain from thier insights. Although I would not be interested in listening to you and your friends talk about the meaning of life, I would very much like to listen to Emerson and Thoreau or Freud and Jung speak on the subject.
In theory, I could setup a Non Profit organization, which provides grants and a place for "Researchers" to pubish thier findings. Say I charge a $1 processing fee, I give a $1 grant for research and provide a Website for publication of the research. I very carefully place a "FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY" disclaimer at the top of every article. Now these Hackers have protection from the DMCA, based on the presedent of this court case.
In some odd way, this case may in fact weaken or at least open a loophole in the DMCA. Since Corley neither wrote DeCSS or offered it for sale nor asserted he planned to violate the DMCA, the case should be thrown out as the Felton case was. Corley and the EFF should argue these very points when they apeal to the Supreme Court.
A Terapin Video CD Recorder, $499 is a bit steep, but less than $1499 for the Video DvD Recorder. Works just like a VCR, except you use a CDR disc instead of a tape. It burns the disc as a standard VCD so it is also playable on most DvD players and Computers.
I just don't see a reason, honestly, for having 'awesome gfx' in a laptop
Personally, I'd love to be able to take a laptop with "Awesome Graphics" and sound for that matter, to a Lan Party instead of lugging my desktop with me.
I think I will stick with my Tyan Tiger, with 2 x 1.2 Ghz Athlon's. $500 for the board, 2 processors and 256MB of RAM, life does not get better than this.
He has written some of the greatest horror and fantasy stories of all time. Stephen King, who writes the same type of stuff and is far more popular, is a hack, compared to Barker.
They said the same thing about Win95, 98, 98SE and ME, they also said it about WinNT and 2K. And it was true, each version sucked a little less, but still sucked. My experiance with Windows in general is, it is stable as long as you never have to use non native drivers or install any software. XP is no different, I just installed my copy and it worked great for about 5 minutes. Word of advice, Intel PC Anypoint software will screw up XP so bad you can't even get into Safe Mode and the Compatibility settings didn't work. It is only 9 in the morning and I've had to do 3 installs, without the AnyPoint Software I can access shares, but I still can't access the Internet. I haven't even gotten to installing any apps and I am having trouble. I think I will go back to Win2K and return XP to the store.
(I'm considering it right now, given the know improvements in stability between XP and 98
This is an interesting statment, it characterizes each new release of Windows. Before the release all the magazines and Beta Testers tell us over and over how the BSOD is gone and this is a more stable Windows. The it gets released and within weeks, we start finding out that nothing has really changed, Microsoft may have fixed some bugs, but usually introduced several more. Not to mention we loose compatibilty with at least some of our old software. WinME was the worst release to date and I don't hold much hope for XP.
The more of this crap I see the more inclined I am to seek work arounds for anything they come up with. They'll never win and in the end it will have cost them more than their lost revenues.
If this legislation passes, I plan to put up a honey pot system for the sole purpose of setting them up for a billion dollar law suit. Once the drive has been corrupted or wiped, how does the RIAA prove the MP3's were illegal copies of songs, instead of recordings of my children singing silly little ditties and also on the drive were irreplacable pictures and videos of my GrandFather, the day before he died. No $$$ value, but tons of sentimental value. Any decent litigation Lawyer could convince a Judge this was worth way more than $5000.
This is a bad statment. Part of Politics is the art compromise and by giving him this much you are telling him he is on the right track. Remember most of these guys have people filter thier mail for them and sum up issues as "Number For and Number Against" and a statment like this one could be taken as a "Number For". When writting your letters, give them no room for compromise, no room to "Fix" the bill. Tell them the current copyright laws are enough, this bill will only gut Fair Use and should be completely thrown away.
In any event, I doubt that the 2.4 series will go down in Linux history as anything great.
This is true, as the kernel has moved along each new version has been more evolutionary the revolutionary. This is the way it is suppose to be, at some point many parts become stable and need little or no attention, such as serial and LPT ports. Things just work and at that point each release is more or less adding support for current hardware, routine bug fixes and the occassional rewrite of one or more subsystems.
What are atom bombs good for outside of war? Nothing?
The Atom Bomb itself is a tool of war, but consider the technology that depended on its development. In the US we don't use Nuclear Power much, but other countries, upto 80% of thier power comes from nuclear plants. The study of radiation in medicine has brought forth treatment for cancer and more advanced X-Ray type machines. This is what comes to mind, I am sure others can think of more.
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Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week. How about 8x500 MHz on the desktop, instead of 1x4GHz which is still crippled by 1 CPU hogging app?
It is true, as cheap as SMP motherboards have gotten there is no reason why SMP systems are not more available. The choices right now are pretty much, build yourself or buy an expensive workstation. All the first tier OEM's should be selling SMP desktop systems in thier high end product lines ($2000+) and maybe even thier mid range lines ($1200-$2000). Dell did it for a little while with the Optiplex line and some 2nd tier OEM's are doing, like Alienware, but SMP should be more common place then it is.
Rev 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
Rev 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Rev 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Good thing I have some karma to burn.
More importantly, why wouldn't I just buy a Laptop to begin with ? $1600 buys a very nice one, even if that included a Monitor, mouse and keyboard. Now not only can I use it at work and at home, but on the road as well and although the monitor, keyboard and mouse are nice, I don't NEED them. This device has the worst features of both, in that it needs a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and it is not that powerful, flexable or upgradable and it is not nearly as portable as a laptop. I see no purpose in this device, you either want a powerful, flexable and upgradable system (a desktop) or you are willing to sacrafice all or most of these features for the sake of portabilty (a laptop).
Windows is Prostitute and Microsoft is her Pimp. The Pimp wants the Prostitute to be easier and more accessable and doesn't want to inconvience the John by making them use a condom, so naturally the Prostitute is going to get a few diseases. The Pimp will want to keep the disease a secrect, but will also want the Prostitute to keep working. So she is going to spread the disease around alot before it gets treated.
As it gains more market share it will become less secure
In reality, just the opposite is true. With each new release, all of the major brands of Linux have gotten more secure out of the box and easier to maintain that sercurity over time with better and easier tools. Red hat is good example of this, a few years ago, an out of box install of Redhat meant all services where enabled by default and the user had to disables them if they didn't want them. Today services are disabled by default and only enabled at the users request. This is harder for thier customers, but makes for more secure box.
Windows isn't the biggest target of worms, trojans and virus because its popular, it is the biggest target because it is an easy target. Microsoft themselves put out the greatest software in the world for writing worms and trojans (VB Script) and then integrated it completely into thier OS and most of thier other software as well. Of course now they refuse to fix the software or to even have it turned off by default.
Lets face it, Windows is Prostitute and Microsoft is her Pimp. The Pimp wants the Prostitute to be easier and more accessable and doesn't want to inconvience the John by making them use a condom, so naturally the Prostitute is going to get a few diseases. The Pimp will want to keep the disease a secrect, but will also want the Prostitute to keep working. So she is going to spread the disease around alot before it gets treated.
There is no double standard going on here. It is simple, Ximian is offering the service for free, if you want the "Value Added" service, it will cost you $9.95 a month, or if you want to you don't have to use the service at all and your current copy of Ximian Gnome will continue as before.
What Microsoft was (and still is) proposing is every computer sold with thier products HAS to use
I see a big difference in how each business handles this, Ximian gives you three choices; don't use service (product continues to work), use basic free service, pay for advanced service. Microsofts
Also, what the heck would they do?
Mind you, I beleive this to be a hoax. Potentialy however, a backdoor or trojan hardcoded into XP, means that every XP system can be easily hacked by anyone who knows how to use it. In theory, I could write a program, that portscans systems on the internet, looking for a paticular port opened by this trojan, then infects the system, which in turn starts the process over. As the number of infected systems grew, the traffic on the internet would increase, making a very effective internet wide Denial of Service attack. It would also be possible, and much easier, to just have the OS self destruct after after a random amount of time. Have the trojan delete or corrupt random DLL's, forcing you to do a reinstall or overwrite the first 1K of the hard drive forcing you to have to run fdisk and reformat your disk before reinstalling. With a backdoor or trojan, all this and more becomes trival to do accross 90% of the home computers in the U.S.
There is an easy solution, although it may not be perfect. I write all my documents in StarOffice and save them as HTML files, I then change the extension from .html to .doc and send it away. MSWord will open it just as if it was a true MS .doc file. There are a couple downsides, first you are limited to formating, styles and fonts allowed by HTML and second, if the recieving person makes changes and saves the file in the latest Office XP file format and sends it back to you, you will not be able to read it.
I only see one champion, and that is TiVo. They cooperate with the hacking community, they use our favorite OS. They don't hide behind a veil of invulnerability (far from it) snd seem to be able to straddle the fence between commercial interests and the public good.
Not to mention the fact that they are a technology company who actually has a business plan. They also did not burn thier venture captial money on stupid things and instead used it to bring an excellent product and service to market. From what I hear they have enough cash to operate for the next couple of years, inspite of the recession, thier user base and earnings are increasing as expected, and they will probably be profitable in 2-3 years. Whats not to like about this company.
Windows Update is visible enough, and certianly fits the bill for "Single Point Disttibution". The problem is Microsoft neglects it. All of these email viruses have had a patch available for at least a year. Why haven't these patches made it into Windows Update ? If someone wants to install these patches, they must dig around the MS website to find it. Also there has been little or no notification of these patches. Bottom line is the patches are useless if no one knows about them or can not find them.
How would you improve on the way MS issues patches?
I would like them to start with accessablity, Patches are useless if no one knows about them and/or can't find them.
What about Windows Update do you not like?
It is usually several weeks, if not months out of date. The patch for these email viruses has been available a very long time, but has never made its way into Windows Update.
What would you change,
More frequent Updates, say weekly, maybe even daily. A single point of information on the MS website, where users can go to find the latest patches and information. Maybe even a mailing list or a listserv. Fast and Complete discloser of problems, no "we will get back to you in two or three weeks" answers.
and why do you think it would help the average user?
I am not even going to answer this one, I think the benfits to the end user are obvious.
You are right, it is a bit of hero worship, but is it also true that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are among the greatest programers in the world. Those of us with lesser skill can only gain from thier insights. Although I would not be interested in listening to you and your friends talk about the meaning of life, I would very much like to listen to Emerson and Thoreau or Freud and Jung speak on the subject.
In theory, I could setup a Non Profit organization, which provides grants and a place for "Researchers" to pubish thier findings. Say I charge a $1 processing fee, I give a $1 grant for research and provide a Website for publication of the research. I very carefully place a "FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY" disclaimer at the top of every article. Now these Hackers have protection from the DMCA, based on the presedent of this court case.
In some odd way, this case may in fact weaken or at least open a loophole in the DMCA. Since Corley neither wrote DeCSS or offered it for sale nor asserted he planned to violate the DMCA, the case should be thrown out as the Felton case was. Corley and the EFF should argue these very points when they apeal to the Supreme Court.
A Terapin Video CD Recorder, $499 is a bit steep, but less than $1499 for the Video DvD Recorder. Works just like a VCR, except you use a CDR disc instead of a tape. It burns the disc as a standard VCD so it is also playable on most DvD players and Computers.
from the and-i-want-a-cute-smart-girl dept
Shouldn't this be from the and-i-want-a-cute-smart-bisexual-girl dept
I just don't see a reason, honestly, for having 'awesome gfx' in a laptop
Personally, I'd love to be able to take a laptop with "Awesome Graphics" and sound for that matter, to a Lan Party instead of lugging my desktop with me.
I think I will stick with my Tyan Tiger, with 2 x 1.2 Ghz Athlon's. $500 for the board, 2 processors and 256MB of RAM, life does not get better than this.
He has written some of the greatest horror and fantasy stories of all time. Stephen King, who writes the same type of stuff and is far more popular, is a hack, compared to Barker.
They said the same thing about Win95, 98, 98SE and ME, they also said it about WinNT and 2K. And it was true, each version sucked a little less, but still sucked. My experiance with Windows in general is, it is stable as long as you never have to use non native drivers or install any software. XP is no different, I just installed my copy and it worked great for about 5 minutes. Word of advice, Intel PC Anypoint software will screw up XP so bad you can't even get into Safe Mode and the Compatibility settings didn't work. It is only 9 in the morning and I've had to do 3 installs, without the AnyPoint Software I can access shares, but I still can't access the Internet. I haven't even gotten to installing any apps and I am having trouble. I think I will go back to Win2K and return XP to the store.
(I'm considering it right now, given the know improvements in stability between XP and 98
This is an interesting statment, it characterizes each new release of Windows. Before the release all the magazines and Beta Testers tell us over and over how the BSOD is gone and this is a more stable Windows. The it gets released and within weeks, we start finding out that nothing has really changed, Microsoft may have fixed some bugs, but usually introduced several more. Not to mention we loose compatibilty with at least some of our old software. WinME was the worst release to date and I don't hold much hope for XP.
The more of this crap I see the more inclined I am to seek work arounds for anything they come up with. They'll never win and in the end it will have cost them more than their lost revenues.
If this legislation passes, I plan to put up a honey pot system for the sole purpose of setting them up for a billion dollar law suit. Once the drive has been corrupted or wiped, how does the RIAA prove the MP3's were illegal copies of songs, instead of recordings of my children singing silly little ditties and also on the drive were irreplacable pictures and videos of my GrandFather, the day before he died. No $$$ value, but tons of sentimental value. Any decent litigation Lawyer could convince a Judge this was worth way more than $5000.
Yes there are good sides to it
This is a bad statment. Part of Politics is the art compromise and by giving him this much you are telling him he is on the right track. Remember most of these guys have people filter thier mail for them and sum up issues as "Number For and Number Against" and a statment like this one could be taken as a "Number For". When writting your letters, give them no room for compromise, no room to "Fix" the bill. Tell them the current copyright laws are enough, this bill will only gut Fair Use and should be completely thrown away.
In any event, I doubt that the 2.4 series will go down in Linux history as anything great.
This is true, as the kernel has moved along each new version has been more evolutionary the revolutionary. This is the way it is suppose to be, at some point many parts become stable and need little or no attention, such as serial and LPT ports. Things just work and at that point each release is more or less adding support for current hardware, routine bug fixes and the occassional rewrite of one or more subsystems.
What are atom bombs good for outside of war? Nothing?
The Atom Bomb itself is a tool of war, but consider the technology that depended on its development. In the US we don't use Nuclear Power much, but other countries, upto 80% of thier power comes from nuclear plants. The study of radiation in medicine has brought forth treatment for cancer and more advanced X-Ray type machines. This is what comes to mind, I am sure others can think of more.