All it takes is a single vulnerability, and you're security is useless.
People who don't get security don't fully grasp the way in that all software fundamentally has vulnerabilities - the more complex software becomes, up to the level of a modern operating system the more outright impossible it becomes to plug every last hole.
Buy your measure, no software can have the secure label slapped on it. What has happened here is that Microsoft has made XP secure up to perhaps the level of Linux. *ducks* IMHO, properly hardened *nix is superior again. But for all practical purposes this version of XP would be pretty much 'good enough', and arguably more secure than some arbitrary non-hardened linux distro.
The real criticism of the Air Force here is purely one of principal: Rather than safety in obscurity, they chose the most attacked and exploited operating system in history to run their boxes.
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though
<blame>
Microsoft could use their own customized download tool that leverages bittorrent, but does not require publishing a.torrent file to the web or to torrent search engines for use with a non-Microsoft download client. For example the tool could pick up the torrent file from authorized servers only. I think there is really little excuse other than not undermining the anti-piracy FUD engine
If disabled Windows can still parse autorun.inf and start the software on the removeable storage by double clicking on your CD-ROM drive. It is still a nice feature for packaging.
So doing it manually reduces the risk of malware infection by this means. Does not eliminate.
So adding a prompt... like already exists in windows (UAC)... for auto-running content from removable media or even network storage for that matter, is all that is needed.
I can confirm Radeon 4850 hell with Suse and Mandriva, however ubuntu seems to have 4850s working reasonably painlessly out of the box now on 8.10 etc and 9.04 works nicely. 48xx support in Linux is getting better.
However....
Even with 3D setting itself up perfectly, in Ubuntu 904 I get intermittent random display artifacts, especially in compiz, and even visible on a black background. These appear to be the same as you get when overclocking or running two low core voltage. This is not a fault with my hardware as this card has run brutal looping benchmarks in various Windows versions with various driver versions, ATITool/Furmark etc and not even a trace of visual artifacts for days. I can only conclude that the OSS and Proprietary drivers for 48xx on linux are still crap, or at least interacting strangely with the hardware (GPU VID set too low thus GPU buggin out?).
(Ill get modded down, but it needs to be said...) Just because Nintendo et al are catering to a previously neglected market for games, thus making more of their revenue form people who aren't traditionally the customer base of the games industry, it *does not* follow that hardcore gaming is being dumped, dying or abandoned in any fashion.
Exploiting a previously unfilled niche, for overall growth does not require that some other aspect of the system loses out. Aside from obvious logical flaws in TFA's rant, observations above don't stack up: since when are World of Warcraft players considered 'casual'? You could be forgiven for making that assumption of course, until you actually meet a few or play yourself.
Hardcore gamers are not going anywhere, even if they aren't going to be the biggest percentage of revenue in the future.
So unless the current mainstream s selling their PS3s in order to buy a Wii - making a change in habits - the overall games market is growing because of the addition of new consumers.
I would have found it a more plausible read if TFA was talking about how casual gaming is a *gateway drug*, and how it is a very clever marketing move.
Nope, if Intel wants to keep the treadmill going it needs to be funding something that eats cycles like crazy yet once people see they just HAVE to have it.
"computing hardware had evolved sufficiently to reach a level of performance that allowed for speedy execution of virtually all common computing tasks."
640Kb was once way more than enough for speedy execution of virtually all computing tasks. In fact show me a point in computing history where current commodity hardware wasn't adequate for all common computing tasks? TFAs premise, despite only being a bit of fun, is a fallacy unfortunately. Who's to say there won't be compelling new computing tasks demanding ludicrous performance in 2025?
I think the uptake of low-power low-cost computing in emerging markets and in ultra-portables, is being misconstrued as a shift in trend and not what it really is - a niche being filled with new consumers.
In order to have intelligent life, not only must the planet itself be similar to Earth in all respects, but the star it orbits must be very similar to our Sun.
No. We don't know that. We can't even begin to assign odds on what we might find when we turn over a rock on the surface of another world. With our sample size of 1, Earth, we have next to no data to support much to do with extraterrestrial life let alone any basis to declare where intelligent life can and cannot exist.
Oceans under Europa and other such worlds may harbor life, and the possibility of complex life is valid, therefore the possibility of intelligent (at some level) life can't be discounted.
It is interesting the reason we aren't seeing more planets closer to earth size is simply the limits of the sensitivity of our observations. This is interesting, the star being red dwarf, such stars outnumber ones like our sun 10 to 1 in this galaxy, the Gilese system shows these stars could be very planet friendly.
How many other PCs are infected just to get this one guy? They did post it on a website, nonetheless, its seems in this case they specifically targeted the suspect:
(wired)
"In several of the cases outlined, the FBI hosted the CIPAV on a website, and tricked the target into clicking on a link." "The CIPAV will be deployed via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address posted to the subject's private chat room on MySpace.com.""
You have to wonder though, in such use this trojan must end up on the PCs of people who are not Suspects, and the data is handed back to the FBI.
Any one really think they do not have a Linux version? It's harder, but not impossible, and certainly desirable.
Heating anywhere within a storm, even in the upper levels would be adding energy to the system. I don't see how heating the higher cooling levels of rising air would do anything but accelerate the storm. This is a weapon?
More realistically a sunshade cooling the ocean surface in the path of the storm would weaken it.
I know some guys who were running some wi-fi gear on a roof with a small linux server etc andto beat the elements (many days a year of driving horizontal rain and gale force windows) they submerged some low power components in a metal tool chest filled with mineral oil. Their set up had 4gb CF and USB keyfobs for storage. There was a 12VDC input power car-PC-style supply that handles variable input (goes as low as 6v) and they ran long wires down to a small 240v/12v transformer in the building. This meant that even if moisture got in, the components were very well protected as water would sit at the bottom of the oil, and there was utterly no dangerous voltage exposed to the outdoors. They later they went with a smaller o-ring sealed aluminum box filled with proper transformer oil, but the original hack was working fine after 1 year.
From my own experience with dunking rigs in oil, you only need to watch out for a few things, one being the mineral oil leaching plasticizers out of wire insulation - they eventually become brittle. You also need to seal your electrolytic caps with a little epoxy so the rubber seal doesn't get eaten alive. Interestingly most caps seem to survive a long time like this, but personally I'd recommend motherboards with solid aluminum caps.
However these things don't become a problem for months, so you'd likely get away with just dunking your rig and leaving it. You also cannot dunk a HDD, as the oil will get inside it and foul things up. I haven't tried it, but it would be possible to seal up in a box or 'pot' a mechanical HDD in epoxy, but best to stick with SSD / Compactflash.
Shareware games were how stuff like Wolfenstein/Doom and others pretty much built the PC game industry as we know it in the 90s. So I ask whatever happened to shareware? You'd download what was pretty much the full game without significant limitations (for example the shareware version would have only the first episode of several) and you paid a comparatively small fee to get the full version. If you didn't like the shareware game you were neither likely to pirate the full version nor end up with a regrettable purchasing decision. It was a great business model and it grew the market.
Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Evaluation Level: EAL1
Miracle Linux:EAL1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5.1:EAL4+
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2; Windows XP Professional SP2 and x64 SP2; Windows XP Embedded SP2 EAL4+
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows XP EAL4+
"It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it.... So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.""
... we had two coders to a computer, we were that strapped for resources. When the first one collapsed/died from exhaustion the second would take over the keyboard.
It has circumventable copy protection and installs on anything. Mac OSX: not so much.
The ever present shadow-ecosystem that piracy provides is actually a nice feature. Despite Microsoft's proprietary license, their OS is comparatively more Free as in Freedom than we care to admit.
So Windows is trivially pirate-able and on 90% of the worlds computers. You think that is a coincidence?
"the problem boils down to a combination of unfamiliar software and unfamiliar hardware, which can 'push users over the edge.' This accounts for the allegedly high return rates of Linux netbooks"
If there was any truth in the unfamiliarity portion of the above analysis then where is the high return rate for Macs?
I have friends who've purchased Linux netbooks (EEE etc) use them for a week or two and then ask me how they can put Windows on it. It seems to me that unfamiliarity is an unhelpful oversimplification of what is going wrong.
Although things are better than they have ever been for desktop Linux, and getting better constantly, Linux is still soundly thumped on usability by Mac OSX and even Windows.
Which is exactly why Macs hardly get returned because they are not Windows, because Mac OSX doesn't really have any showstopping problems and oh if you don't like OSX that much you can easily have Windows XP/Vista by Boot Camp or Fusion.
From my experience one reason was installing software, not the lack of software choice. Next general usability problems, a rather limited in power perhaps dumbed-down GUI, and for everything else there is the Shell with it's prohibitive learning curve and epic discover-ability failure.
So you want to open a application you have on a USB key? Ok so you quickly double click on the binary, but that doesn't work, doesn't this know what to do with a binary? So you google to find out what is wrong. It turns out you need to open terminal, chmod +x,./filename perhaps sudo etc.
The important point to note here is that, these things are NOT possible for a novice to figure out by herself without consulting documentation or Googling, or asking someone who knows. Indeed I know enough to help people, but I can't help seeing their side of the argument. You can see someone laying down a few hundred bucks on a new laptop starting to question the return on their investment when they encounter showstopping usability problems. Also I recall be asked something like "This is bullshit. Can I have Windows back now pls".
The problem is the novice doesn't have benefit of prior initiation into the Linux universe. With no understanding why these things are the way they are in the first place, you could be forgiven for asking who wrote this crap?
Basicly it disappoints me, that the netbook OS developers didn't try to resolve some of these long-standing usability problems from the bleeding-obvious department. They should also be stongly communicating the free and open nature of linux, which goes a long way to helping people understand they paid for the hardware, not for the operating system.
As more people learn what Linux is about things will change, and usability is improved, along with the sentiment towards the end user in developers throwing them a bone or two.
I for one, welcome the use of games to give us some "virtual reality" experience to current affairs. There's a lot of insight from the kind of immersing experience first person shooters give. To families who find it insensitive, this is not trivializing the experience. They should be thankful the stories of what really happens on the ground can be experienced through such a compelling medium. A lot depends on the tone and accuracy of end result of course, there are many games based on historic battles, but they do deviate from actual events in the name of interactivity. But so many FPS games today are very plot-linear and cinematic that it is easy to use real-world battlefield stories in place of fictional ones, and very disappointing that this isn't done more.
Slashdot Mirror
Modded troll by people who don't get security
All it takes is a single vulnerability, and you're security is useless.
People who don't get security don't fully grasp the way in that all software fundamentally has vulnerabilities - the more complex software becomes, up to the level of a modern operating system the more outright impossible it becomes to plug every last hole.
Buy your measure, no software can have the secure label slapped on it. What has happened here is that Microsoft has made XP secure up to perhaps the level of Linux. *ducks* IMHO, properly hardened *nix is superior again. But for all practical purposes this version of XP would be pretty much 'good enough', and arguably more secure than some arbitrary non-hardened linux distro.
The real criticism of the Air Force here is purely one of principal: Rather than safety in obscurity, they chose the most attacked and exploited operating system in history to run their boxes.
You are being redundant.
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though
Microsoft could use their own customized download tool that leverages bittorrent, but does not require publishing a .torrent file to the web or to torrent search engines for use with a non-Microsoft download client. For example the tool could pick up the torrent file from authorized servers only. I think there is really little excuse other than not undermining the anti-piracy FUD engine
If disabled Windows can still parse autorun.inf and start the software on the removeable storage by double clicking on your CD-ROM drive. It is still a nice feature for packaging.
So doing it manually reduces the risk of malware infection by this means. Does not eliminate.
So adding a prompt... like already exists in windows (UAC)... for auto-running content from removable media or even network storage for that matter, is all that is needed.
I can confirm Radeon 4850 hell with Suse and Mandriva, however ubuntu seems to have 4850s working reasonably painlessly out of the box now on 8.10 etc and 9.04 works nicely. 48xx support in Linux is getting better.
However....
Even with 3D setting itself up perfectly, in Ubuntu 904 I get intermittent random display artifacts, especially in compiz, and even visible on a black background. These appear to be the same as you get when overclocking or running two low core voltage. This is not a fault with my hardware as this card has run brutal looping benchmarks in various Windows versions with various driver versions, ATITool/Furmark etc and not even a trace of visual artifacts for days. I can only conclude that the OSS and Proprietary drivers for 48xx on linux are still crap, or at least interacting strangely with the hardware (GPU VID set too low thus GPU buggin out?).
I already torrent furiously in my sleep.
... something like 20 years is more realistic. A reduction is what's needed, anything else is a step backward.
(Ill get modded down, but it needs to be said...) Just because Nintendo et al are catering to a previously neglected market for games, thus making more of their revenue form people who aren't traditionally the customer base of the games industry, it *does not* follow that hardcore gaming is being dumped, dying or abandoned in any fashion.
Exploiting a previously unfilled niche, for overall growth does not require that some other aspect of the system loses out. Aside from obvious logical flaws in TFA's rant, observations above don't stack up: since when are World of Warcraft players considered 'casual'? You could be forgiven for making that assumption of course, until you actually meet a few or play yourself.
Hardcore gamers are not going anywhere, even if they aren't going to be the biggest percentage of revenue in the future.
So unless the current mainstream s selling their PS3s in order to buy a Wii - making a change in habits - the overall games market is growing because of the addition of new consumers.
I would have found it a more plausible read if TFA was talking about how casual gaming is a *gateway drug*, and how it is a very clever marketing move.
Nope, if Intel wants to keep the treadmill going it needs to be funding something that eats cycles like crazy yet once people see they just HAVE to have it.
Real-time ray-tracing.
"computing hardware had evolved sufficiently to reach a level of performance that allowed for speedy execution of virtually all common computing tasks."
640Kb was once way more than enough for speedy execution of virtually all computing tasks. In fact show me a point in computing history where current commodity hardware wasn't adequate for all common computing tasks? TFAs premise, despite only being a bit of fun, is a fallacy unfortunately. Who's to say there won't be compelling new computing tasks demanding ludicrous performance in 2025?
I think the uptake of low-power low-cost computing in emerging markets and in ultra-portables, is being misconstrued as a shift in trend and not what it really is - a niche being filled with new consumers.
In order to have intelligent life, not only must the planet itself be similar to Earth in all respects, but the star it orbits must be very similar to our Sun.
No. We don't know that. We can't even begin to assign odds on what we might find when we turn over a rock on the surface of another world. With our sample size of 1, Earth, we have next to no data to support much to do with extraterrestrial life let alone any basis to declare where intelligent life can and cannot exist.
Oceans under Europa and other such worlds may harbor life, and the possibility of complex life is valid, therefore the possibility of intelligent (at some level) life can't be discounted.
It is interesting the reason we aren't seeing more planets closer to earth size is simply the limits of the sensitivity of our observations. This is interesting, the star being red dwarf, such stars outnumber ones like our sun 10 to 1 in this galaxy, the Gilese system shows these stars could be very planet friendly.
(wired) "In several of the cases outlined, the FBI hosted the CIPAV on a website, and tricked the target into clicking on a link." "The CIPAV will be deployed via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address posted to the subject's private chat room on MySpace.com.""
You have to wonder though, in such use this trojan must end up on the PCs of people who are not Suspects, and the data is handed back to the FBI.
Any one really think they do not have a Linux version? It's harder, but not impossible, and certainly desirable.
Heating anywhere within a storm, even in the upper levels would be adding energy to the system. I don't see how heating the higher cooling levels of rising air would do anything but accelerate the storm. This is a weapon?
More realistically a sunshade cooling the ocean surface in the path of the storm would weaken it.
I know some guys who were running some wi-fi gear on a roof with a small linux server etc andto beat the elements (many days a year of driving horizontal rain and gale force windows) they submerged some low power components in a metal tool chest filled with mineral oil. Their set up had 4gb CF and USB keyfobs for storage. There was a 12VDC input power car-PC-style supply that handles variable input (goes as low as 6v) and they ran long wires down to a small 240v/12v transformer in the building. This meant that even if moisture got in, the components were very well protected as water would sit at the bottom of the oil, and there was utterly no dangerous voltage exposed to the outdoors. They later they went with a smaller o-ring sealed aluminum box filled with proper transformer oil, but the original hack was working fine after 1 year.
From my own experience with dunking rigs in oil, you only need to watch out for a few things, one being the mineral oil leaching plasticizers out of wire insulation - they eventually become brittle. You also need to seal your electrolytic caps with a little epoxy so the rubber seal doesn't get eaten alive. Interestingly most caps seem to survive a long time like this, but personally I'd recommend motherboards with solid aluminum caps.
However these things don't become a problem for months, so you'd likely get away with just dunking your rig and leaving it. You also cannot dunk a HDD, as the oil will get inside it and foul things up. I haven't tried it, but it would be possible to seal up in a box or 'pot' a mechanical HDD in epoxy, but best to stick with SSD / Compactflash.
Shareware games were how stuff like Wolfenstein/Doom and others pretty much built the PC game industry as we know it in the 90s. So I ask whatever happened to shareware? You'd download what was pretty much the full game without significant limitations (for example the shareware version would have only the first episode of several) and you paid a comparatively small fee to get the full version. If you didn't like the shareware game you were neither likely to pirate the full version nor end up with a regrettable purchasing decision. It was a great business model and it grew the market.
Evaluation by Common Criteria Portal:
Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Evaluation Level: EAL1
Miracle Linux:EAL1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5.1:EAL4+
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2; Windows XP Professional SP2 and x64 SP2; Windows XP Embedded SP2 EAL4+
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows XP EAL4+
http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/products_OS.html#OS
This at least shows that Vista is total swiss cheese and that much-patched 2003/XP is in the same ballpark as some linux distributions.
"The problem is that MacOS is not full of holes like swiss cheese."
Google pwn2own and see how that statement holds up. It has many holes.
"It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. ... So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.""
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html
... we had two coders to a computer, we were that strapped for resources. When the first one collapsed/died from exhaustion the second would take over the keyboard.
Apple are doing everything but condone jailbreaking because they know it's a nice feature and they are selling iPhones because of it.
1. Select an arbitrary public health/social/economic issue
2. ????
3. Propose tax as a solution
4. ???
5. Profit ?
Er.. Windows is free.. isn't it? :)
It has circumventable copy protection and installs on anything. Mac OSX: not so much.
The ever present shadow-ecosystem that piracy provides is actually a nice feature. Despite Microsoft's proprietary license, their OS is comparatively more Free as in Freedom than we care to admit.
So Windows is trivially pirate-able and on 90% of the worlds computers. You think that is a coincidence?
"the problem boils down to a combination of unfamiliar software and unfamiliar hardware, which can 'push users over the edge.' This accounts for the allegedly high return rates of Linux netbooks"
If there was any truth in the unfamiliarity portion of the above analysis then where is the high return rate for Macs?
./filename perhaps sudo etc.
I have friends who've purchased Linux netbooks (EEE etc) use them for a week or two and then ask me how they can put Windows on it. It seems to me that unfamiliarity is an unhelpful oversimplification of what is going wrong.
Although things are better than they have ever been for desktop Linux, and getting better constantly, Linux is still soundly thumped on usability by Mac OSX and even Windows.
Which is exactly why Macs hardly get returned because they are not Windows, because Mac OSX doesn't really have any showstopping problems and oh if you don't like OSX that much you can easily have Windows XP/Vista by Boot Camp or Fusion.
From my experience one reason was installing software, not the lack of software choice. Next general usability problems, a rather limited in power perhaps dumbed-down GUI, and for everything else there is the Shell with it's prohibitive learning curve and epic discover-ability failure.
So you want to open a application you have on a USB key? Ok so you quickly double click on the binary, but that doesn't work, doesn't this know what to do with a binary? So you google to find out what is wrong. It turns out you need to open terminal, chmod +x,
The important point to note here is that, these things are NOT possible for a novice to figure out by herself without consulting documentation or Googling, or asking someone who knows. Indeed I know enough to help people, but I can't help seeing their side of the argument. You can see someone laying down a few hundred bucks on a new laptop starting to question the return on their investment when they encounter showstopping usability problems. Also I recall be asked something like "This is bullshit. Can I have Windows back now pls".
The problem is the novice doesn't have benefit of prior initiation into the Linux universe. With no understanding why these things are the way they are in the first place, you could be forgiven for asking who wrote this crap?
Basicly it disappoints me, that the netbook OS developers didn't try to resolve some of these long-standing usability problems from the bleeding-obvious department. They should also be stongly communicating the free and open nature of linux, which goes a long way to helping people understand they paid for the hardware, not for the operating system.
As more people learn what Linux is about things will change, and usability is improved, along with the sentiment towards the end user in developers throwing them a bone or two.
I for one, welcome the use of games to give us some "virtual reality" experience to current affairs. There's a lot of insight from the kind of immersing experience first person shooters give. To families who find it insensitive, this is not trivializing the experience. They should be thankful the stories of what really happens on the ground can be experienced through such a compelling medium. A lot depends on the tone and accuracy of end result of course, there are many games based on historic battles, but they do deviate from actual events in the name of interactivity. But so many FPS games today are very plot-linear and cinematic that it is easy to use real-world battlefield stories in place of fictional ones, and very disappointing that this isn't done more.