So why lie them flat and try to force air front to back when it wants to rise?
A) You don't want 10% of the servers at the bottom getting ice build-up, while 20% at the top are about to burst into flames... Feeding the output from one server to the input of another is a bad idea.
B) It would be a horribly inefficient use of space to have your server taking up 0.5 meters vertically, and sprawling out across the floor.
C) Convection is horrendously weak. A little fan blowing horizontally probably provides 1,000 times as much pressure. And with low-pressure, and low volume, you need much larger cavities to cool well enough.
D) We already DO use convection... Cold air is piped through the floor, and hot air is removed from intakes in the ceiling.
After all, many of us here on slashdot have the technical ability (or could get it easily: some of these folks are really smart) to do this same type of criminal activity. They don't do it because they aren't criminals.
I expect most all of us would break almost any law if the life of someone we cared about was on the line. So, now that we've established that we're all criminals, the only question is one of how much motivation one person needs, versus another...
Crimes always increase when the economy gets worse, and fall when the economy improves. Though I don't claim to know the percentage, there's clearly a large chunk of the population that are upstanding citizens when times are good, and criminals if given just a bit of proper motivation...
The dollar regained gained some, after having steadily declined from about EUR 1.25 to about EUR 0.65
And? Yes, there was a very short love-affair with the Euro, causing it to get ridiculously inflated, as the US was quicker to show signs of the recession coming on...
It's unthinkable
Only while times are good... In times of real depression, all it takes is one country getting fed-up, maybe stationing a few divisions of soldiers on the border, and declaring they won't be playing any more. Even if you were flagrantly ignorant of the obvious before now, the problems with Greece have should have made it crystal clear how little central control the EU has, when it's not to the advantage of an individual member country. Again, if things got really bad, instead of offering to help, Germany & France could simply called-in control of their own currency.
It has a whole lot to do with the reluctance towards looking at only one side of an issue.
The intellectual dishonesty you've shown in your response is absolutely astonishing. The US did not arbitrarily pick a side. Europeans openly recognized, before the US did anything, that genocide was taking place, and that something needed to be done. The idea you could twist it into a "nuanced issue" just shows exactly how dishonest you're willing to be, to try and support your point.
In my experience the anti-Americanism in Europe is exaggerated in the US media.
The US media hardly ever touches on the subject, so I don't know what you're talking about./. OTOH, is a great example, where all the anti-Americanism is on display, front and center.
I don't experience anti-Americanism in Europe as worse than anti-Europism in the US, or anti-California-ism in Texas.
I might believe that, if you'd been honest about ANYTHING in the rest of your comment... And for the several Euro ex-pats with whom I've discussed the subject before.
While the US has supported Israel, it's also keeping them from completely bombing the shit out of everyone in the region at the slightest provocation.
And Iraq? While also somewhat allied with them, at the same time, the US is really all that is keeping Saudi Arabia from taking over the rest of the middle-east. They're pretty quiet about it, but there's no question who the power in the region is.
The US has bent everyone else over and had their way far too long.
Umm... No. Not at all really.
Now that the US's economy is a mess, the dollar is weak and getting weaker and the Euro is fast taking the place the Dollar once had
The dollar has gained quite significantly since 2007. The Euro's mindshare was the first thing to go in the recession... Not just a chink in the armor, but a forced realization that a defacto currency, from which any country can opt-out at any time, with no central governing authority, but with individual authorities with a poor understanding of how to handle such changes, and with several weak players involved, is not a safe bet in the slightest. The risk of Greece defaulting on it's loans is forcing down the Euro right this minute, despite stronger EU countries making guarantees on Greece's behalf...
Much like China, the EU looks like a great economy, if you don't look too deeply, and you're not forced to see what is going to happen when the first speed-bump comes along.
the US needs to be sent a strong, loud and clear message that it's hay day is over and it's going to have to rely upon diplomacy, cooperation and fair play instead of idle threats and ham-fisted foreign policy towards it's allies.
I'd point to Kosovo for a look at what European "diplomacy" can do... Lots of speeches over the years about "never again," and then a whole lot of nothing when a real stand needs to be made, when nobody has economic interests on the line... For all the money, for all the pot-shots at the US, for all the bluster, nobody in the world stood up to put a stop to the genocide, until the US stepped in... This in not just my opinion, for the record, there's no shortage of Europeans who hang their head in shame when forced to recognize their leaders lack the backbone to backup their own stated morals.
Sadly, we saw this repeated again in Darfur. The US was tied-up in two all-out wars, so the most flagrant example of genocide in decades in left unopposed. No Europe, no China, no Russia. Nobody. It took the US to make a big deal about it, politically, and pledge a large chunk of money towards the effort, before anything happened, and it was still a pathetic effort, which left many thousands to be raped and murdered long into the effort, such as it was. Contrast this with Kosovo.
I say this not as an ignorant and arrogant American, but as a distant observer... Frankly, we'd all better hope and pray that the US's "hay day" isn't over, by a long shot, because it's clear there's nobody out there willing to take over the tough and unrewarding roles the US has performed for several decades... When the pirates are taking over the oceans, making trade impossible, and China is doing really nasty stuff with it's clout, everyone will long for the days when the worst we had to deal with was "ham-fisted foreign policy" we all whined about... Not that it shouldn't be whined about, but this (largely Europeans) fervent anti-Americanism we see touted on/. so often is a rather serious case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The grass may seems greener on the other side, but it's pretty clear that there's no grass at all over there...
So, what has been stopping the US of A adopting a loser-pays -all legal system?
Mainly the ease with which an unscrupulous individual can "PROVE" they don't have a dollar to their name...
So, the out and out criminals continue to file frivolous lawsuits... If they lose, they have no provable income to pay the winner's legal fees. If they happen to win, then not only do you have to pay the adjudicated amount, you also get stuck paying their legal bill, however over-inflated it happens to be...
But then again, I'm this crazy and wild person who actually cares about usability, especially in a GUI...
There are dozens of GUIs which can be used on a Linux system. I seriously doubt you've tried them all. Just as Windows has a couple choices for a horrible UI, and a slightly-less horrible UI.
I also believe your statement that Linux has better security is wrong; from my perspective, Linux and Windows have pretty much the exact same permissions system and the exact same amount of protection in them*.
That's laughable.
The way that the Windows GUI, and X11 work is vastly, fundamentally different. There is a whole class of attacks allowing local users to gain Administrative, which are fundamentally impossible to solve on Windows, but have never been possible with X11.
For servers, see something like Apache's Windows port, and read the documentations for the reasons they severely discourage the use of eg SSL/certificates, due to the lack of security/protection in the OS.
See "chroot" on Linux. Privilege escalation in OpenSSH. setuid/setgid applications. setuid() in code, allowing easy dropping of privs. Many simple but strong security method utilized far and wide in the Unix world, but still unheard-of in the Windows world.
Actually, Windows permissions are more powerful than Linux ones...
Windows permissions are more cumbersome, that's all. Sure, it looks advanced, but it's really just more complicated, as you have to handle every little in and out of the permissions on each folder, and parent and sub-folders, enabling or disabling propagation on a case by case basis. Sure, you have 500,000 knobs on Windows permissions, instead of the simple 4 digits for Unix, but there is NOTHING... absolutely NOTHING you can do with Windows permissions, which you cannot with Unix permissions.
The only difference is that Windows has tons of people trying to crack into it, and Linux doesn't.
Linux is used on tons of servers... a far more valuable target than your personal desktop. There are also far more computers running Linux in the world than Windows. Try finding a new excuse.
and Windows' UAC feature is more usable, since it alerts the user before the application fails.
The video begins with left-side user installing Linux and right-side user installing Windows.
The time span shows Left installing Linux, messing up, starting over two or three times and text that says "time elapsed: 3 days" at the end of which the user looks a bit tired but finally satisfied.
Was the last Linux distro you installed Yggdrasil? If not, this example is pure crap, as I can't remember the last time the defaults (clicking NEXT) didn't work, with ANY Linux distro I've come across.
The only reason people have a poor impression of Linux installs these days, is because some people try to setup a dual-boot scenario, which is inherently more complex. Since they're trying to set that up to try out Linux, guess what gets blamed for every problem along the way, with resizing the Windows partitions, bugs with Windows seeing Linux partitions as "corrupt", bugs with the Windows boot-loader, et al.
I don't claim to know why, but/. has become far more politicized in the past few years. It was certainly never perfect, but discussions about any issue included far more information, and far less ranting, yelling and baseless assertions.
Since you can still find plenty of the later (good) comments around here, I can only conclude the moderation pool has shifted to people who are much more persuaded by arguments rather than information. And we see both sides getting prominence, oddly enough. It's a shame the two extremes can't just cancel each other out.
It could be demographics shifting, it could be editors pandering, or it could just be slashcode or layout change influencing who does and doesn't moderate/metamoderate. But I'm every bit as tired of it as you are./. was always much more technical, and much less political than today. And while it certainly wasn't perfect, particularly as individuals and groups managed to twist the mod system to their advantage and noise was occasionally masking out the signal, I'd still say we're getting the short shrift these days, as this crap is gradually degrading/. into the same cesspool as every other large blog (with comments) on the planet.
No, history has shown that everyone who existed before *recorded* history will be mostly forgotten
"recorded history" is something that only exists in hindsight. If records of today survive, today is recorded history. If they do not, it's simply before "recorded history".
Yes, right now the world is largely civilized and peaceful, and records are being preserved. But if history has taught us anything, it's that a dark age could pop-up at any time, and damn near all records we have could be lost and/or forgotten in very short-order.
While you're assuming it's possible to be remembered forever because of a handful of ancient examples, I would instead argue that for every one we find, there were millions and millions of others who similarly should have been remembered, and were not. Even being prolific is no guarantee of anything.
At the same time, someone needn't be remembered personally in order for their influence to continue. Nobody remembers who invented the wheel, or decided to cook food, but the influence of those people remains
It's most likely that thousands of different people invented the wheel, and similarly, decided to cook food. What you're talking about is mere fairy tales for children.
we're all the products of our ancestors, both physically and philosophically.
The overwhelming majority of all people who have ever lived, no longer exist in the gene pool, so genetics is right out. If you want to go that way, the only option is to pull a modern-day Ghengis Khan routine.
While it's certainly not possible to say, I similarly find it extremely unlikely that there is absolutely anything left of your contribution to the minds of your children, a good 10 generations down the line. While not easily provable, the fact that there is a pre-history at all does lend some credence to this hypothesis.
From the subjective point of view of my illusionary consciousness, it's better to hang around and exist, than wink out of existence for eternity.
That means nothing. All you're saying is that YOU WANT TO LIVE (right now). Once you cease to want to live, that is no longer true, so I still don't understand your objection to euthanasia. Additionally, that really doesn't explain why it's better to live than not, except, again, YOU WANT TO.
As with definitions, if you can't explain your opinion, without including a statement of same, said opinion in it, you're really not explaining anything at all.
but where I am at, we're having significant issues with certain folks (ahem, students) absolutely slamming the Teh Tubes with torrent traffic and videos, so much so that people are having trouble checking email and reading webpages.
As a matter of fact, I can suggest prioritizing ACKs. This will greatly improve the responsiveness of interactive network access, while not noticeably slowing down such bulk-traffic. It simply needs to be done by your network admin on the routed directly connected to your internet pipe(s). Just about all relevant network devices support such configuration. It's not a utopia (won't be as fast as if nobody else was on), but it will help quite tremendously, changing browsing from "impossible", to "a bit slow".
Yes, IP addresses are decimal. That doesn't preclude a subset of hexadecimal values being used to form some message in a (decimal) IP address. At an extreme, you could code binary values in (decimal) IP addresses as well... 101.10.1.111.
That's a lot of indignation there for such a trivial joke...
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Read that last sentence to yourself a few times, let it sink in. Now you can say sorry.
I fully agree that a pagefile on a solid-state disk will be much faster than a hard disk. You must also agree that a page-file on a RAMDISK would be even faster... Both express a fundamental misunderstanding, however.
A) I'm not sorry. B) I did not call you an idiot... but your response isn't exactly impressive.
That doesn't help boot time,
Indeed not, which is why I pointed out that people are finding it necessary to reboot less and less these days.
that doesn't help sleep time
I fail to see your point. Sleep (S3 Suspect) is almost instantaneous, and will see no speed improvement from solid-state storage.
You'll be lucky to get 10% of that in the cache - VERY lucky (seeing as all those media and data files will be pushing out the useful stuff you actually stand a chance of wanting to read again).
There are methods for both Unix systems and more recent Windows systems to force the most frequently accessed files to remain cached in RAM, NOT allowing "media and data" to push it out.
You seem to have a problem with SSDs
No, merely your justification of them, and the false logic on display here.
Small world (guess who!). I try not to be too pedantic here on/. as it all too often overwhelms the real point, and adds far to little to the conversation.
1. If a subset is used, then enough people will probably start using a full version of MPEG-1 (with MP3 audio) that free and legal software cannot support,
This is extremely unlikely. MPEG files are MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2) video, and layer-1 or layer-2 audio. You will never see MP3 audio in MPEG files, though it's technically allowable, it never happens.
and 2. Ogg Theora and Vorbis have better quality.
Vorbis does have better quality, just by virtue of being VBR while MP2 is CBR. If MP2 had been VBR in the standard, the difference would be minimal, but that's not the case, so my dreams fall flat. Never the less, audio bitrate is perhaps 1/10th of the overall bitrate, so it may not be significant.
For video, I will say unequivocally, no, Theora is NOT any better than a good MPEG-1 video encoder (see mencoder or ffmpeg/libavcodec). As I said in my previous post, there are nominal differences between the underlying standards of MPEG-1 video, and MPEG-4 (part-2/ASP) video. MPEG-1 is much maligned only because encoders weren't very good 15 years ago, that same junk continues to propogate, and even if it didn't, people's experiences watching an old VCD 10 years ago is all they know of MPEG-1.
That thread merely shows most people don't have much grasp of audio/video encoding, have borderline superstitious beliefs with such subjects they do not understand, and are therefore quite vulnerable to marketing tripe thrown at them, such as On2's PSNR comparisons, combined with "easy" videos which aren't difficult to make look good at low bitrates.
There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone.
If you believe this, then what's the difference if you're here for a couple more years or not?
If there's nothing but oblivion, then you might well have never existed. Oblivion isn't some old folk's home where you can reflect on your life. Your thoughts, memories, experiences: *poof* gone. Whatever contributions you've made to the world will be forgotten in short-order, and history has shown everyone will be forgotten COMPLETELY in time.
So what's the point of it all? 40 years, 60 years, what does it matter, when you're just running out the clock until everything about you are is obliterated.
Streaming video needs an Apache. By that, I mean a very standardized server and set of protocols for delivering files encoded in a non-proprietary, free-to-use, free-to-decode, unrestricted-in-every-imaginable-sense manner.
There is one big problem with this. Every video provider WANTS their walled-garden. I've worked in the business, I'm certain this is (almost exclusively) the case.
You could have the 100% free format in-hand, hand it to the Hulu management, and the #1 question will be "Does that mean people will be able to download our videos?" Near-sighted as it is, control of the viewer is paramount. You don't get ad views if the user can download the video once, and watch it 100 times, or if they can access it via Boxee, or some other direct feed. RealMedia was popular for years precisely because their (inferior) proprietary format offered that kind of control to the provider.
Encoding video and serving it, though, is not easy. That's why so much goes into protecting the intellectual property; it was not trivial to create. Wade around in the fifteen profiles for MPEG-4 Part 10 aka AVC aka H.264 for a while and realize that this is not trivial.
That's partially true, but largely a complete misunderstanding of the history of video encoding...
Video really started with the JPEG. Sub-sample the chroma, break it into blocks, run it through DCT, quantize it, then huffman-code it. At high bitrates, as found on DVDs, MJPEG (just a series of JPEG images) is actually surpisingly competitive with real video standards. Then you go to MPEG-1, which added the concept of differential images (P/B-frames), and motion compensation on top of JPEG compression. Once the world got to that point, video compression was pretty much done... all the low-hanging fruit were taken, and the sum total gives us something like 75% (educated guess) of the theoretical maximum possible compression without discernible visual artifacts.
That was over 20 years ago. Since then, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (Divx) have been rehashes of the same old tech, with absolutely trivial changes. The same is true for just about all proprietary codecs as well, from RealVideo codecs, to WMV, to Flash video, and yes, even Theora, all are based on the same thing. Somewhat complex and difficult in it's inception, but ever since, a solved problems so easy a 10 year-old could write-up a new video format.
With H.264, there are a few minor tech improvements that allow you to perhaps squeeze 10% better efficiency out of it, at the expense of massive CPU usage on both ends, and even that only at low bitrates. But that's really all it offers. Sure, it was a lot of work for the committee to all agree, and to do the testing to prove everything out, but really, all it added was deblocking, which allows you to make a low-bitrate video that's just fuzzy instead of breaking apart at the seams with blockiness, so it looks less terrible when used by those who don't know what they're doing...
In short, writing a video standard is not remotely as complex as you make it out to be. In fact the real magic is in the numerous parties around the world who go to great lengths to write a codec based on the format that squeezes every last possible bit of efficiency out of the format, and that can be done just as well with MPEG-1 as it can with JPEG. And Xvid, libavcodec, and x264 show the "free" world is at least as good at it as companies with a truck-load of money to throw at it. And even more significantly, early codecs like MPEG-1 have lost their patent protection, and so can just be used directly. In fact it's been royalty-free to implement an MPEG-1 decoder for so long, that practically all video player software supports it by default, and most hardware supports it as well. If your browser has ANY plugin that can play video, 99% chance one or all of them also handle MPEG-1. Why the horribly inefficient and CPU-heavy Theora was tossed around for the HTML video
we can get down to exploiting a given MiFi device. We don't know how many 6-byte prefixes are in use, but that's where YOU THE READER come in. Please let me know what prefixes you see on your individual devices, and I'll add them to the attack set.
I've seen more enticing offers in my Spam box...
How many people are really going to take him up on this offer, exactly? If you understand the topic, you know you'll be making it much easier for people to break-in to the service your paying for, and at worse, perhaps making your own device stick out like a sore thumb as it becomes one of very few submitted... But even if you're completely ignorant of what's going on here, the phrasing is plenty menacing anyhow...
"Gee. He wants me to e-mail him my secret ID# so he can add my device to the attack set? Sure! Why not?"
Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk,
Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant access to your apps/files, the SECOND time you open them. Combine this with eg. S3/suspend support proliferating, greatly reducing the reasons for most people to ever shutdown their systems, and with the fact that system memory caching will be faster than any disk, and it's not hard to make the case that more RAM is more beneficial for most common usage patterns.
The problem here is that you're saying some ingenious mechanical device should be patentable, but some digital device that replaces it, should not, despite them accomplishing the same thing, and being equally as non-obvious.
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake.
The US is the only country with a Blue Water navy any more. If you want to get rid of that, sure, we can cut the budget. No blue water navy means international shipping traffic is in a lot of trouble, though.
And South Korea. Surely you wont mind when the North overruns them in a matter of days.
Or Japan. The #2 economy, with an "Army" that has rules of engagement so lax they are effectively forbidden from shooting to kill.
Slashdot Mirror
A) You don't want 10% of the servers at the bottom getting ice build-up, while 20% at the top are about to burst into flames... Feeding the output from one server to the input of another is a bad idea.
B) It would be a horribly inefficient use of space to have your server taking up 0.5 meters vertically, and sprawling out across the floor.
C) Convection is horrendously weak. A little fan blowing horizontally probably provides 1,000 times as much pressure. And with low-pressure, and low volume, you need much larger cavities to cool well enough.
D) We already DO use convection... Cold air is piped through the floor, and hot air is removed from intakes in the ceiling.
I expect most all of us would break almost any law if the life of someone we cared about was on the line. So, now that we've established that we're all criminals, the only question is one of how much motivation one person needs, versus another...
Crimes always increase when the economy gets worse, and fall when the economy improves. Though I don't claim to know the percentage, there's clearly a large chunk of the population that are upstanding citizens when times are good, and criminals if given just a bit of proper motivation...
And? Yes, there was a very short love-affair with the Euro, causing it to get ridiculously inflated, as the US was quicker to show signs of the recession coming on...
Only while times are good... In times of real depression, all it takes is one country getting fed-up, maybe stationing a few divisions of soldiers on the border, and declaring they won't be playing any more. Even if you were flagrantly ignorant of the obvious before now, the problems with Greece have should have made it crystal clear how little central control the EU has, when it's not to the advantage of an individual member country. Again, if things got really bad, instead of offering to help, Germany & France could simply called-in control of their own currency.
The intellectual dishonesty you've shown in your response is absolutely astonishing. The US did not arbitrarily pick a side. Europeans openly recognized, before the US did anything, that genocide was taking place, and that something needed to be done. The idea you could twist it into a "nuanced issue" just shows exactly how dishonest you're willing to be, to try and support your point.
The US media hardly ever touches on the subject, so I don't know what you're talking about. /. OTOH, is a great example, where all the anti-Americanism is on display, front and center.
I might believe that, if you'd been honest about ANYTHING in the rest of your comment... And for the several Euro ex-pats with whom I've discussed the subject before.
Them most of all...
While the US has supported Israel, it's also keeping them from completely bombing the shit out of everyone in the region at the slightest provocation.
And Iraq? While also somewhat allied with them, at the same time, the US is really all that is keeping Saudi Arabia from taking over the rest of the middle-east. They're pretty quiet about it, but there's no question who the power in the region is.
Umm... No. Not at all really.
The dollar has gained quite significantly since 2007. The Euro's mindshare was the first thing to go in the recession... Not just a chink in the armor, but a forced realization that a defacto currency, from which any country can opt-out at any time, with no central governing authority, but with individual authorities with a poor understanding of how to handle such changes, and with several weak players involved, is not a safe bet in the slightest. The risk of Greece defaulting on it's loans is forcing down the Euro right this minute, despite stronger EU countries making guarantees on Greece's behalf...
Much like China, the EU looks like a great economy, if you don't look too deeply, and you're not forced to see what is going to happen when the first speed-bump comes along.
I'd point to Kosovo for a look at what European "diplomacy" can do... Lots of speeches over the years about "never again," and then a whole lot of nothing when a real stand needs to be made, when nobody has economic interests on the line... For all the money, for all the pot-shots at the US, for all the bluster, nobody in the world stood up to put a stop to the genocide, until the US stepped in... This in not just my opinion, for the record, there's no shortage of Europeans who hang their head in shame when forced to recognize their leaders lack the backbone to backup their own stated morals.
Sadly, we saw this repeated again in Darfur. The US was tied-up in two all-out wars, so the most flagrant example of genocide in decades in left unopposed. No Europe, no China, no Russia. Nobody. It took the US to make a big deal about it, politically, and pledge a large chunk of money towards the effort, before anything happened, and it was still a pathetic effort, which left many thousands to be raped and murdered long into the effort, such as it was. Contrast this with Kosovo.
I say this not as an ignorant and arrogant American, but as a distant observer... Frankly, we'd all better hope and pray that the US's "hay day" isn't over, by a long shot, because it's clear there's nobody out there willing to take over the tough and unrewarding roles the US has performed for several decades... When the pirates are taking over the oceans, making trade impossible, and China is doing really nasty stuff with it's clout, everyone will long for the days when the worst we had to deal with was "ham-fisted foreign policy" we all whined about... Not that it shouldn't be whined about, but this (largely Europeans) fervent anti-Americanism we see touted on /. so often is a rather serious case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The grass may seems greener on the other side, but it's pretty clear that there's no grass at all over there...
Mainly the ease with which an unscrupulous individual can "PROVE" they don't have a dollar to their name...
So, the out and out criminals continue to file frivolous lawsuits... If they lose, they have no provable income to pay the winner's legal fees. If they happen to win, then not only do you have to pay the adjudicated amount, you also get stuck paying their legal bill, however over-inflated it happens to be...
There are dozens of GUIs which can be used on a Linux system. I seriously doubt you've tried them all. Just as Windows has a couple choices for a horrible UI, and a slightly-less horrible UI.
That's laughable.
The way that the Windows GUI, and X11 work is vastly, fundamentally different. There is a whole class of attacks allowing local users to gain Administrative, which are fundamentally impossible to solve on Windows, but have never been possible with X11.
For servers, see something like Apache's Windows port, and read the documentations for the reasons they severely discourage the use of eg SSL/certificates, due to the lack of security/protection in the OS.
See "chroot" on Linux. Privilege escalation in OpenSSH. setuid/setgid applications. setuid() in code, allowing easy dropping of privs. Many simple but strong security method utilized far and wide in the Unix world, but still unheard-of in the Windows world.
Windows permissions are more cumbersome, that's all. Sure, it looks advanced, but it's really just more complicated, as you have to handle every little in and out of the permissions on each folder, and parent and sub-folders, enabling or disabling propagation on a case by case basis. Sure, you have 500,000 knobs on Windows permissions, instead of the simple 4 digits for Unix, but there is NOTHING... absolutely NOTHING you can do with Windows permissions, which you cannot with Unix permissions.
Linux is used on tons of servers... a far more valuable target than your personal desktop. There are also far more computers running Linux in the world than Windows. Try finding a new excuse.
I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Was the last Linux distro you installed Yggdrasil? If not, this example is pure crap, as I can't remember the last time the defaults (clicking NEXT) didn't work, with ANY Linux distro I've come across.
The only reason people have a poor impression of Linux installs these days, is because some people try to setup a dual-boot scenario, which is inherently more complex. Since they're trying to set that up to try out Linux, guess what gets blamed for every problem along the way, with resizing the Windows partitions, bugs with Windows seeing Linux partitions as "corrupt", bugs with the Windows boot-loader, et al.
I don't claim to know why, but /. has become far more politicized in the past few years. It was certainly never perfect, but discussions about any issue included far more information, and far less ranting, yelling and baseless assertions.
Since you can still find plenty of the later (good) comments around here, I can only conclude the moderation pool has shifted to people who are much more persuaded by arguments rather than information. And we see both sides getting prominence, oddly enough. It's a shame the two extremes can't just cancel each other out.
It could be demographics shifting, it could be editors pandering, or it could just be slashcode or layout change influencing who does and doesn't moderate/metamoderate. But I'm every bit as tired of it as you are. /. was always much more technical, and much less political than today. And while it certainly wasn't perfect, particularly as individuals and groups managed to twist the mod system to their advantage and noise was occasionally masking out the signal, I'd still say we're getting the short shrift these days, as this crap is gradually degrading /. into the same cesspool as every other large blog (with comments) on the planet.
"recorded history" is something that only exists in hindsight. If records of today survive, today is recorded history. If they do not, it's simply before "recorded history".
Yes, right now the world is largely civilized and peaceful, and records are being preserved. But if history has taught us anything, it's that a dark age could pop-up at any time, and damn near all records we have could be lost and/or forgotten in very short-order.
While you're assuming it's possible to be remembered forever because of a handful of ancient examples, I would instead argue that for every one we find, there were millions and millions of others who similarly should have been remembered, and were not. Even being prolific is no guarantee of anything.
It's most likely that thousands of different people invented the wheel, and similarly, decided to cook food. What you're talking about is mere fairy tales for children.
The overwhelming majority of all people who have ever lived, no longer exist in the gene pool, so genetics is right out. If you want to go that way, the only option is to pull a modern-day Ghengis Khan routine.
While it's certainly not possible to say, I similarly find it extremely unlikely that there is absolutely anything left of your contribution to the minds of your children, a good 10 generations down the line. While not easily provable, the fact that there is a pre-history at all does lend some credence to this hypothesis.
That means nothing. All you're saying is that YOU WANT TO LIVE (right now). Once you cease to want to live, that is no longer true, so I still don't understand your objection to euthanasia. Additionally, that really doesn't explain why it's better to live than not, except, again, YOU WANT TO.
As with definitions, if you can't explain your opinion, without including a statement of same, said opinion in it, you're really not explaining anything at all.
So this is just going in circles.
As a matter of fact, I can suggest prioritizing ACKs. This will greatly improve the responsiveness of interactive network access, while not noticeably slowing down such bulk-traffic. It simply needs to be done by your network admin on the routed directly connected to your internet pipe(s). Just about all relevant network devices support such configuration. It's not a utopia (won't be as fast as if nobody else was on), but it will help quite tremendously, changing browsing from "impossible", to "a bit slow".
Yes, IP addresses are decimal. That doesn't preclude a subset of hexadecimal values being used to form some message in a (decimal) IP address. At an extreme, you could code binary values in (decimal) IP addresses as well... 101.10.1.111.
That's a lot of indignation there for such a trivial joke...
I fully agree that a pagefile on a solid-state disk will be much faster than a hard disk. You must also agree that a page-file on a RAMDISK would be even faster... Both express a fundamental misunderstanding, however.
A) I'm not sorry.
B) I did not call you an idiot... but your response isn't exactly impressive.
Indeed not, which is why I pointed out that people are finding it necessary to reboot less and less these days.
I fail to see your point. Sleep (S3 Suspect) is almost instantaneous, and will see no speed improvement from solid-state storage.
There are methods for both Unix systems and more recent Windows systems to force the most frequently accessed files to remain cached in RAM, NOT allowing "media and data" to push it out.
No, merely your justification of them, and the false logic on display here.
Small world (guess who!). I try not to be too pedantic here on /. as it all too often overwhelms the real point, and adds far to little to the conversation.
This is extremely unlikely. MPEG files are MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2) video, and layer-1 or layer-2 audio. You will never see MP3 audio in MPEG files, though it's technically allowable, it never happens.
Vorbis does have better quality, just by virtue of being VBR while MP2 is CBR. If MP2 had been VBR in the standard, the difference would be minimal, but that's not the case, so my dreams fall flat. Never the less, audio bitrate is perhaps 1/10th of the overall bitrate, so it may not be significant.
For video, I will say unequivocally, no, Theora is NOT any better than a good MPEG-1 video encoder (see mencoder or ffmpeg/libavcodec). As I said in my previous post, there are nominal differences between the underlying standards of MPEG-1 video, and MPEG-4 (part-2/ASP) video. MPEG-1 is much maligned only because encoders weren't very good 15 years ago, that same junk continues to propogate, and even if it didn't, people's experiences watching an old VCD 10 years ago is all they know of MPEG-1.
That thread merely shows most people don't have much grasp of audio/video encoding, have borderline superstitious beliefs with such subjects they do not understand, and are therefore quite vulnerable to marketing tripe thrown at them, such as On2's PSNR comparisons, combined with "easy" videos which aren't difficult to make look good at low bitrates.
If you believe this, then what's the difference if you're here for a couple more years or not?
If there's nothing but oblivion, then you might well have never existed. Oblivion isn't some old folk's home where you can reflect on your life. Your thoughts, memories, experiences: *poof* gone. Whatever contributions you've made to the world will be forgotten in short-order, and history has shown everyone will be forgotten COMPLETELY in time.
So what's the point of it all? 40 years, 60 years, what does it matter, when you're just running out the clock until everything about you are is obliterated.
Ah, I see. So patents are only for very expensive devices...
There is one big problem with this. Every video provider WANTS their walled-garden. I've worked in the business, I'm certain this is (almost exclusively) the case.
You could have the 100% free format in-hand, hand it to the Hulu management, and the #1 question will be "Does that mean people will be able to download our videos?" Near-sighted as it is, control of the viewer is paramount. You don't get ad views if the user can download the video once, and watch it 100 times, or if they can access it via Boxee, or some other direct feed. RealMedia was popular for years precisely because their (inferior) proprietary format offered that kind of control to the provider.
That's partially true, but largely a complete misunderstanding of the history of video encoding...
Video really started with the JPEG. Sub-sample the chroma, break it into blocks, run it through DCT, quantize it, then huffman-code it. At high bitrates, as found on DVDs, MJPEG (just a series of JPEG images) is actually surpisingly competitive with real video standards. Then you go to MPEG-1, which added the concept of differential images (P/B-frames), and motion compensation on top of JPEG compression. Once the world got to that point, video compression was pretty much done... all the low-hanging fruit were taken, and the sum total gives us something like 75% (educated guess) of the theoretical maximum possible compression without discernible visual artifacts.
That was over 20 years ago. Since then, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (Divx) have been rehashes of the same old tech, with absolutely trivial changes. The same is true for just about all proprietary codecs as well, from RealVideo codecs, to WMV, to Flash video, and yes, even Theora, all are based on the same thing. Somewhat complex and difficult in it's inception, but ever since, a solved problems so easy a 10 year-old could write-up a new video format.
With H.264, there are a few minor tech improvements that allow you to perhaps squeeze 10% better efficiency out of it, at the expense of massive CPU usage on both ends, and even that only at low bitrates. But that's really all it offers. Sure, it was a lot of work for the committee to all agree, and to do the testing to prove everything out, but really, all it added was deblocking, which allows you to make a low-bitrate video that's just fuzzy instead of breaking apart at the seams with blockiness, so it looks less terrible when used by those who don't know what they're doing...
In short, writing a video standard is not remotely as complex as you make it out to be. In fact the real magic is in the numerous parties around the world who go to great lengths to write a codec based on the format that squeezes every last possible bit of efficiency out of the format, and that can be done just as well with MPEG-1 as it can with JPEG. And Xvid, libavcodec, and x264 show the "free" world is at least as good at it as companies with a truck-load of money to throw at it. And even more significantly, early codecs like MPEG-1 have lost their patent protection, and so can just be used directly. In fact it's been royalty-free to implement an MPEG-1 decoder for so long, that practically all video player software supports it by default, and most hardware supports it as well. If your browser has ANY plugin that can play video, 99% chance one or all of them also handle MPEG-1. Why the horribly inefficient and CPU-heavy Theora was tossed around for the HTML video
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From TFA:
I've seen more enticing offers in my Spam box...
How many people are really going to take him up on this offer, exactly? If you understand the topic, you know you'll be making it much easier for people to break-in to the service your paying for, and at worse, perhaps making your own device stick out like a sore thumb as it becomes one of very few submitted... But even if you're completely ignorant of what's going on here, the phrasing is plenty menacing anyhow...
"Gee. He wants me to e-mail him my secret ID# so he can add my device to the attack set? Sure! Why not?"
Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant access to your apps/files, the SECOND time you open them. Combine this with eg. S3/suspend support proliferating, greatly reducing the reasons for most people to ever shutdown their systems, and with the fact that system memory caching will be faster than any disk, and it's not hard to make the case that more RAM is more beneficial for most common usage patterns.
The problem here is that you're saying some ingenious mechanical device should be patentable, but some digital device that replaces it, should not, despite them accomplishing the same thing, and being equally as non-obvious.
So don't go to war with Russia...
China has vastly fewer nukes than Russia. Pakistan, North Korea, et al. have vastly fewer still...
XP is now... finally... unavailable.
PC retailers have to chose between Vista and 7. The overwhelming sales of 7 suggest Vista is a monumental piece of crap.
The US is the only country with a Blue Water navy any more. If you want to get rid of that, sure, we can cut the budget. No blue water navy means international shipping traffic is in a lot of trouble, though.
And South Korea. Surely you wont mind when the North overruns them in a matter of days.
Or Japan. The #2 economy, with an "Army" that has rules of engagement so lax they are effectively forbidden from shooting to kill.
So, what would you like to cut?