First of all good luck on getting a dual P4 up and running. If you had a harddrive with a higher spindle speed and lower seek time your programs will start up faster. Your application developers also need to work on toning down the file system access for their fucking programs to open. Look at ICQ, everything the program needs/uses is contained in their library files. There's dozens of the fucking things to open and thus maintain in the file system. Office2k is the same way as are so many other Windows apps.
Whoa no way dude. Sony didn't know shit about the console gaming market when they launched the Playstation. The guy they had working with Nintendo on the sound system for the Nintendo 32-bit project (I think it was called project Reality or some such) had to persuade the Sony execs to let him start work on the PSX. Before the PSX was released in Japan Sony was in a similar position to where Microsoft is now. Everyone was really skeptical that the PSX would take off in a market that until then had only made anyone moderate profits. Nintendo and Sega were both recognizable names but then no one had really made a bajillion dollars in the industry. Nintendo's 32-bit project was meant from the get go to be a 3D box so everyone else decided they needed 3D toys too. Sega began work on the Saturn and soon released Virtua Fighter in arcades to show off some of the stuff you could do with 3D graphics. The PSX gains some corporate acceptance within Sony and then it comes out around the same time as the Saturn. Sony makes oodles due to the early entrance into the 3D console market. Nintendo plays catch up with the N64 but the lack of a CD-ROM makes it difficult for them to get some of the bigger game contracts (Square, Konami, Capcom). If Microsoft offers something exceptional before Sony or Nintendo does they will get their foot into the market. I think maybe the fact their hardware is familiar ground for PC game developers (Relic, Bungie, et al) will get them some initial ground.
This article is pretty fucking retarded. Take their reason four for example. The Dreamcast was released according to the schedule Sega had followed for years! The Genesis was released (a technically inferior product) way before Nintendo managed to release the SNES. The SNES had a larger palette and could output more colours on screen (65,536 and 256 respectively) than the Genesis (512 and 64 respectively). Sega tried to outdo Nintendo by releasing their SegaCD but the idea flopped because it didn't add any graphical capabilities to the system, merely some extra storage. The Genesis came out first however and managed to get its foot in the door which kept it alive dispite the SNES whomping it in most areas iincluding licensees. Sega heard the rumblings of a 32-bit console from Nintendo and thus popped out the Saturn before Nintendo's planned release date, Nintendo's console however was scrapped and its partner Sony took the technology and made the PSX. The Dreamcast's launch was intended to give them a leg up on Sony and Nintendo with their 128-bit products. Lots of people buying the PS2 already owned another console many of these are Dreamcasts.
The Xbox definitely has its work cut out for it in proving itself to be a major player in the console market. I don't think the technology is as problematic for sales as Dan Egger suggests. Everything has to do with games. A console needs to be widely accepted (the Saturn obviously wasn't) in order for people like Konami to develop their blockbusters for it. The important factor the PS2 has right now is that alot of developers have already released games and have lots in the works. The Xbox needs to show people some production shots of games people REALLY want and they need to show them off soon. No one cares how good the graphics look if the game sucks. I'm going to be picking up a PS2 so I can play the Final Fantasy series, I got my N64 off eBay for Zelda. I don't see myself grabbing an Xbox because there aren't any games planned for it that I'm dying to obsess over (I knew i would own a PS2 because FFX and XI were announced for it).
A cellular network is inefficient for the sort of thing you're talking about dude. There's little power to wasting two and a half megabits on a single user. You're missing my point. Cellular radio is BAD FOR HIGH BANDWIDTH CONNECTIONS. The point of splitting regions into cells is to get the most usage out of the available bandwidth. Giving people several megabits worth on a single connection is a complete waste. Stop trying to sound like some fucking dot com visionary talking about "wireless broadband", thats just stupid buzz words. There's a handful of wireless applications that require 2.4 megabits to work properly. Human voices can fit in a relatively small amount of space as can music. Text data requires even less space (think about how much information a single kilobyte actually is). You want video in your car? Fuck that. You're a bad enough driver as it is.
I love space exploration yet I hate the ISS. Fortunately some other people here feel the same way as me. The ISS is a waste of fucking money. It is essentially Space Station Alpha with foreign parts attached to it. Most of the shit they have planned for the ISS could be more easily accomplished using unmanned satillites. And just so people will stop mentioning it. The ISS and any other orbital station CANNOT BE USED AS A FUCKING GAS STATION FOR "MORE COMPLEX MISSIONS". Get it through your fucking heads. The ISS is not large enough to even hold enough fuel to transfer to another ship going to Mars and theres no real way to get thatm uch fuel up there economically. It is MUCH FUCKING EASIER to go from the ground to a high orbit into a slingshot orbit and then to Mars than it is to stop a hundred miles above the fucking ground. Thats right, the ISS is VERY VERY VERY LOW TO THE GROUND. By the time a vehicle gets out of the atmosphere the most energy consuming part of the trip is over. Ever notice the absence of large fuel tanks on the probes we've launched into deep space?
It would be much more feasible to launch a larger number of smaller simpler space stations than waste a bunch of resources on a single complex station. It'd cost alot less for individual agencies to just launch their own modules with their own experiments on board. Collabaration is fine and ought to be encouraged (SI measurements, standardized parts and tools, similar computer systems). Deciding policy by committee is retarded and wastes far too much time. Its unfortunate everyone's been suckering into the political sham that calls itself the ISS.
Re:Happy 40th Man-in-space anniversary
on
Mir 2
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· Score: 2
Talk to your parents and grandparents about that problem. They decided not to watch the latter Apollo missions on TV so everything after 17 was scrapped and all the plans NASA had to do rad things were also scrapped. There's a running joke in the Johnson space center in Houston that all the equipment in the mission control center is used to monitor television ratings.
Fuck streaming mp3s to your car or watching video. There are much more practical fucking ways to get video and broadcast radio into your car without trying to use a cellular network. If you want digital audio in your car look to satillite radio or digital terrestrial broadcast. For video, well stop picking at straws. A 2.4Mbps wireless connection per user is a waste of bandwidth. How would "streaming radio" be any fucking different than the analog radio you've got in your car right now? The wireless medium is a shitty one that is way overburdened as it is.
Wrong nothing. Wireless connections are retarded for non-mobile applications. I want a fiber line to my house rather than having a very interference prone antenna. Besides my media coming down a pipe with only practically limited bandwidth (I could feasibly have several terabits of bandwidth on a single piece of fiber) it is also alot harder for my signal to be intercepted. Not so with wireless.
Compressed and uncompressed media alike are both run through audio out drivers (either direct WAV out or DirectSound). There's nothing in DirectSound output that prohibits the playing of compressed media. As long as I don't use Microsoft's decoder in WindowsXP it doesn't give a flying fuck what music I'm playing.
Every time someone announces a new higher speed for mobile devices I just sit back and sigh. Wireless devices don't really NEED a 2.4Mb wireless pipe hooked onto them. I'd easily go for less bandwidth at a much lower cost. I'm paying 35$ a month for my cell phone with internet capabilities. Instead of offering me a 2.4Mbps pipe how about offering a cheaper pipe at around say 64Kbps and then let me hook any wireless device I want up to the channel. I could use my phone or maybe plug in an adapter for use with my laptop. Stop promising some technology will "change everything" because everything changes regardless of what one company does. Its such a misnomer. Just give me a little bit of wireless bandwidth either for talking or hopping on the internet when I'm not at home.
Fuck Netscape, if they can't figure out how to get their product in front of users they DESERVE to go out of business. Shit dude, when Microsoft started packaging IE with Windows people spent the time to download Netscape. That was of course until Netscape decided a quality product was not something they would ship. Users want working software and IE worked when Netscape didn't. What Microsoft does is the same thing every other fucking successful company does. Where do you fucking people get these ideas thato ne corporate entitity is in any way more wholesome than another? Just because AMD is the underdog in the processor market doesn't make them a better corporation. IBM did the same shit Microsoft does now for YEARS and no one really gave a shit. My Ford analogy works just fucking fine because Ford has a monopoly on their niche of the market. I want to use Mopar parts in a mustang god dammit but Ford won't let me. I think I'm going to sue them! You fucking idiots.
Well unfortunately for you Microsoft writes their fucking operating system. They can do whatever they damn fucking please with their software. How come the double standard? Linux zealots cream their pants howling about Microsoft's lack of interoperability yet run either GNOME or KDE? What the FUCK is your fucking problem. Microsoft writes their OS to their specifications as does anyone else who writes software. In this little concept the world calls capitalism, you sell things. Often times you only sell things because your product has scant few extra features than your competition. No one bitches at Ford because their cars won't accept Mopar parts do they?
So you're trying to tell everyone that WindowsXP won't play WAV or CDA files anymore? Yeah good fucking logic you've got there. THe majority of audio formats around right now have zero copyright protection as most of them started out for use in sound sampler software. If you're so fucking concerned don't use WindowsXP and stop bitching about it. You're acting like Microsoft is somehow expected to write an operating system for the people by the people, they write an OS to make fucking money and can impliment anything they want into the OS in order to make money. It's called capitalism.
This reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon I read today. Dilbert tells this guy the new computer product needs 400 new features and that no one could possibly use software of that complexity. So the guy adds "friendly user interface" to the list. I giggled for about 20 minutes. So anyways. Clippy was a cool idea back when Office 97 came out. If you had problems because Office 97 was a shitty product to use if you didn't have a MOUS you could try to get Clippy to help you. Sometimes he worked but most of the time he told you how to save files. Microsoft needs to make two interfaces, one for novice users and one for MOUS certificate holders. Look at what Adobe has done with Photoshop. They released an LE version that has most of the features and capabilities of the professional version (and most importantly can open and edit proprietary Photoshop files) that is fucking easy to use. Dear Microsoft, take a hint from Adobe and hire a couple guys to write an easy to use face to stick on top of Office apps. Shit it ought to be alot easier now since Office is now going to be completely modularized. Let users choose from an EasyInterface or a MOUSCertifiedInterface. Nuff' said.
This is funny because in crypto books the subject of protecting private keys (which are really insecure when you think about it) is always really briefly browsed over by the authors. This isn't because they haven't thought of it or anything, it is just the REALLY insecure part of asymetric encryption. You can pick the longest keylength in the history of computing but if your private end of the key is compromised you're fucked. It is safest to assume no means of electronic information storage or transfer is secure. Thus never trust it. Never store private keys opn your hard drive (or anything that is readily available) because it is not really too difficult to write an email worm that finds your private key and emails it off to some address. The best means of a private key would be biometric but even then it can be faked, with enough resources it could be faked rather easily. Keep your private key physically on your person and never assume anything you want secure will always remain secure. Like most things computer security is a matter of dilligence, not the amount of technology you're using.
Most of your "non-obvious" security falls to shit if you use disk indexing which most WinNT users do use. You can write an email worm that scans your various indexes for PGP or similar strings and still find your fucking keys. All sorts of recursion are only going to confuse human infiltrators to your system, they're going to do very little to counter a well written worm.
The reason for such blatant branding isn't all about advertising. In order to protect their fashion design the designers stylize their logo and stick it on their clothing. Tommy Hilfiger shirts are identified by not only their colours but their logo. Were the logo not there, anyone could make a similar shirt with a similar cut and sell it cutting in on Tommy Hilfiger's profits. By having a very marketable logo and stylizing it on products you prevent people from copying your style. It's VERY profitable and smart marketing dude. Clothing companies are good at it and thus make lots of money.
The ISP market is a very amusing one indeed. You've got dozens of companies in the same area offering the same service for the same price and sometimes all using the same dial-ups. Of course there's going to be a large shake out soon in the market. Only the companies offering the best services for the lowest price will survive. If you're an ISP that offers some personal web space and an email address you better take a look at the big boys like MSN and AOL. AOL customers get a pretty broad range of services for a decent price. They don't rely on Yahoo! or someone else to provide content for them like so many other ISPs do now. This is how a free market works. It sucks for the guy who has been overworked at some little ISP who's about to lose his job but thats how the cookie gets jumped on and obliterated.
The problem with having your remote box doing apt get updates via cron is you end up breaking shit all the time without realizing it. More than once the latest and greatest package has its own set of bugs you just unknowingly stuck on your box. Stick with an older heavily patched version of a deamon that is well documented. Switching to new code constantly is only going to open up security holes you don't know about.
Since when did America go from innocent until proven guilty to guilty no matter what. All I see anymore is another example of the government saying "well if you haven't done anything wrong you don't have to worry". Why don't we remote controlled cameras in the offices of our elected officials and broadcast the feeds in television. C-SPAN could make their own reality series about how the bribes and pure criminality taking place in publicly funded buildings.
Okay can someone please give me one really good reason I'd want a game console with a multi-user POSIX compliant kernel running on it? A game console needs the bare minimum of resource menagement as to use as little overhead as you possibly can. Writing for consoles is so very different than writing for PCs because you're adapting a general purpose system for use in your game as opposed to having a box meant for the task you're programming it for. From what I have seen Microsoft seems to be making the XBox merely a compact PC with powerful hardware games can use. PC architecture is shitty for the high intensity operations detailed 3D graphics need. The Indreama's licensing was novel though I doubt it would have ever made money had the project gotten off the ground. Console makers thrive from game (software) sales because publishers need their seal of approval. Charging a few scant dollars for Angus Linuxprogrammer to write his own game won't attract too many investors to your project. I think the project had some good ideas but for the most part it couldn't compete with its own business plan.
So what is your defense againt SGI pursuing their trademark? Because I have my head up my ass? You're bound for success with logic like that. SGI is bound by copyright law to pursue those infringing on their trademarks. Do you not fucking get that? Naming a product OpenIL which is one letter different from their registered trademark can EASILY be seen as causing market confusion. SGI is publicly held and thus has to do what its investors tell it to do. You've only proved you don't like me because I'm better looking than you.
I think the Ars article makes a veyr good point, OS X is a new and improved OS that is sort of intended for new computers. I doubt I'll stick this thing on my G3 333Mhz Powerbook since I'm not getting much of a bargain. Alot of the apps I use now are based on Classic (apart from Appleworks) so I can only make them run slower by switching. However If I just bought a brand spanking new G4 I would almost immediately pick this thing up and spend the time downloading carbonized versions of the programs I use most often. This isn't about the OS sucking on its initial release. It is destined for brand new systems with enough resources to handle it, not for your aging beige G3. I don't think many of the linux zealots here would understand because when you grab the latest kernel it is merely an incremental revision rather than an entirely new OS with a bajillion differences between it and the old system.
I'm wondering if by 2011 the DNS system will still even be relavant to 90% of the internet. By then I think we'll see a much higher peer presence on the net where we log onto a directory server at the ISP which lets people connect to our personal web server appliances. Well for the most part this is a pipe dream. However I do think DNS might not survive the next decade. It is already fairly dated which causes about a bajillion workarounds just to enable dynamic internet connections. I think we'll only see more and more dynamic network nodes due to the fact half of the things in your home will end up being internet aware. Would you rather adapt DNS in order to get a permenant address for your PDA (which will eventually end up being a true personal assistant with a silicon rather than carbon based brain) or merely have your ISP do the work by providing directory access to you.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Are you people fucking retarded? Take five fucking minutes to read up on registering a trademark. In order to maintain your trademark YOU HAVE TO ENFORCE YOUR OWNERSHIP OF IT. Companies such as SGI have to maintain legions of lawyers to do just this because they own the trademark rights to things such as OpenGL. Names like OpenIL and OpenAL look alot like OpenGL which has the possibility of causing confusion. Stop whining you fuckers. Trademarks are important because we live in a capitalist society where you're often only as good as the products your customers know you for. If you work for a business that makes money and have even ONE corporate logo then go ahead and respond. Otherwise shut the fuck up and stop whining because someone is enforcing a trademark they pay fucking money for because it represents not only a product but the company behind the product.
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First of all good luck on getting a dual P4 up and running. If you had a harddrive with a higher spindle speed and lower seek time your programs will start up faster. Your application developers also need to work on toning down the file system access for their fucking programs to open. Look at ICQ, everything the program needs/uses is contained in their library files. There's dozens of the fucking things to open and thus maintain in the file system. Office2k is the same way as are so many other Windows apps.
Whoa no way dude. Sony didn't know shit about the console gaming market when they launched the Playstation. The guy they had working with Nintendo on the sound system for the Nintendo 32-bit project (I think it was called project Reality or some such) had to persuade the Sony execs to let him start work on the PSX. Before the PSX was released in Japan Sony was in a similar position to where Microsoft is now. Everyone was really skeptical that the PSX would take off in a market that until then had only made anyone moderate profits. Nintendo and Sega were both recognizable names but then no one had really made a bajillion dollars in the industry. Nintendo's 32-bit project was meant from the get go to be a 3D box so everyone else decided they needed 3D toys too. Sega began work on the Saturn and soon released Virtua Fighter in arcades to show off some of the stuff you could do with 3D graphics. The PSX gains some corporate acceptance within Sony and then it comes out around the same time as the Saturn. Sony makes oodles due to the early entrance into the 3D console market. Nintendo plays catch up with the N64 but the lack of a CD-ROM makes it difficult for them to get some of the bigger game contracts (Square, Konami, Capcom). If Microsoft offers something exceptional before Sony or Nintendo does they will get their foot into the market. I think maybe the fact their hardware is familiar ground for PC game developers (Relic, Bungie, et al) will get them some initial ground.
This article is pretty fucking retarded. Take their reason four for example. The Dreamcast was released according to the schedule Sega had followed for years! The Genesis was released (a technically inferior product) way before Nintendo managed to release the SNES. The SNES had a larger palette and could output more colours on screen (65,536 and 256 respectively) than the Genesis (512 and 64 respectively). Sega tried to outdo Nintendo by releasing their SegaCD but the idea flopped because it didn't add any graphical capabilities to the system, merely some extra storage. The Genesis came out first however and managed to get its foot in the door which kept it alive dispite the SNES whomping it in most areas iincluding licensees. Sega heard the rumblings of a 32-bit console from Nintendo and thus popped out the Saturn before Nintendo's planned release date, Nintendo's console however was scrapped and its partner Sony took the technology and made the PSX. The Dreamcast's launch was intended to give them a leg up on Sony and Nintendo with their 128-bit products. Lots of people buying the PS2 already owned another console many of these are Dreamcasts.
The Xbox definitely has its work cut out for it in proving itself to be a major player in the console market. I don't think the technology is as problematic for sales as Dan Egger suggests. Everything has to do with games. A console needs to be widely accepted (the Saturn obviously wasn't) in order for people like Konami to develop their blockbusters for it. The important factor the PS2 has right now is that alot of developers have already released games and have lots in the works. The Xbox needs to show people some production shots of games people REALLY want and they need to show them off soon. No one cares how good the graphics look if the game sucks. I'm going to be picking up a PS2 so I can play the Final Fantasy series, I got my N64 off eBay for Zelda. I don't see myself grabbing an Xbox because there aren't any games planned for it that I'm dying to obsess over (I knew i would own a PS2 because FFX and XI were announced for it).
A cellular network is inefficient for the sort of thing you're talking about dude. There's little power to wasting two and a half megabits on a single user. You're missing my point. Cellular radio is BAD FOR HIGH BANDWIDTH CONNECTIONS. The point of splitting regions into cells is to get the most usage out of the available bandwidth. Giving people several megabits worth on a single connection is a complete waste. Stop trying to sound like some fucking dot com visionary talking about "wireless broadband", thats just stupid buzz words. There's a handful of wireless applications that require 2.4 megabits to work properly. Human voices can fit in a relatively small amount of space as can music. Text data requires even less space (think about how much information a single kilobyte actually is). You want video in your car? Fuck that. You're a bad enough driver as it is.
I love space exploration yet I hate the ISS. Fortunately some other people here feel the same way as me. The ISS is a waste of fucking money. It is essentially Space Station Alpha with foreign parts attached to it. Most of the shit they have planned for the ISS could be more easily accomplished using unmanned satillites. And just so people will stop mentioning it. The ISS and any other orbital station CANNOT BE USED AS A FUCKING GAS STATION FOR "MORE COMPLEX MISSIONS". Get it through your fucking heads. The ISS is not large enough to even hold enough fuel to transfer to another ship going to Mars and theres no real way to get thatm uch fuel up there economically. It is MUCH FUCKING EASIER to go from the ground to a high orbit into a slingshot orbit and then to Mars than it is to stop a hundred miles above the fucking ground. Thats right, the ISS is VERY VERY VERY LOW TO THE GROUND. By the time a vehicle gets out of the atmosphere the most energy consuming part of the trip is over. Ever notice the absence of large fuel tanks on the probes we've launched into deep space?
It would be much more feasible to launch a larger number of smaller simpler space stations than waste a bunch of resources on a single complex station. It'd cost alot less for individual agencies to just launch their own modules with their own experiments on board. Collabaration is fine and ought to be encouraged (SI measurements, standardized parts and tools, similar computer systems). Deciding policy by committee is retarded and wastes far too much time. Its unfortunate everyone's been suckering into the political sham that calls itself the ISS.
Talk to your parents and grandparents about that problem. They decided not to watch the latter Apollo missions on TV so everything after 17 was scrapped and all the plans NASA had to do rad things were also scrapped. There's a running joke in the Johnson space center in Houston that all the equipment in the mission control center is used to monitor television ratings.
Fuck streaming mp3s to your car or watching video. There are much more practical fucking ways to get video and broadcast radio into your car without trying to use a cellular network. If you want digital audio in your car look to satillite radio or digital terrestrial broadcast. For video, well stop picking at straws. A 2.4Mbps wireless connection per user is a waste of bandwidth. How would "streaming radio" be any fucking different than the analog radio you've got in your car right now? The wireless medium is a shitty one that is way overburdened as it is.
Wrong nothing. Wireless connections are retarded for non-mobile applications. I want a fiber line to my house rather than having a very interference prone antenna. Besides my media coming down a pipe with only practically limited bandwidth (I could feasibly have several terabits of bandwidth on a single piece of fiber) it is also alot harder for my signal to be intercepted. Not so with wireless.
Compressed and uncompressed media alike are both run through audio out drivers (either direct WAV out or DirectSound). There's nothing in DirectSound output that prohibits the playing of compressed media. As long as I don't use Microsoft's decoder in WindowsXP it doesn't give a flying fuck what music I'm playing.
Every time someone announces a new higher speed for mobile devices I just sit back and sigh. Wireless devices don't really NEED a 2.4Mb wireless pipe hooked onto them. I'd easily go for less bandwidth at a much lower cost. I'm paying 35$ a month for my cell phone with internet capabilities. Instead of offering me a 2.4Mbps pipe how about offering a cheaper pipe at around say 64Kbps and then let me hook any wireless device I want up to the channel. I could use my phone or maybe plug in an adapter for use with my laptop. Stop promising some technology will "change everything" because everything changes regardless of what one company does. Its such a misnomer. Just give me a little bit of wireless bandwidth either for talking or hopping on the internet when I'm not at home.
Fuck Netscape, if they can't figure out how to get their product in front of users they DESERVE to go out of business. Shit dude, when Microsoft started packaging IE with Windows people spent the time to download Netscape. That was of course until Netscape decided a quality product was not something they would ship. Users want working software and IE worked when Netscape didn't. What Microsoft does is the same thing every other fucking successful company does. Where do you fucking people get these ideas thato ne corporate entitity is in any way more wholesome than another? Just because AMD is the underdog in the processor market doesn't make them a better corporation. IBM did the same shit Microsoft does now for YEARS and no one really gave a shit. My Ford analogy works just fucking fine because Ford has a monopoly on their niche of the market. I want to use Mopar parts in a mustang god dammit but Ford won't let me. I think I'm going to sue them! You fucking idiots.
Well unfortunately for you Microsoft writes their fucking operating system. They can do whatever they damn fucking please with their software. How come the double standard? Linux zealots cream their pants howling about Microsoft's lack of interoperability yet run either GNOME or KDE? What the FUCK is your fucking problem. Microsoft writes their OS to their specifications as does anyone else who writes software. In this little concept the world calls capitalism, you sell things. Often times you only sell things because your product has scant few extra features than your competition. No one bitches at Ford because their cars won't accept Mopar parts do they?
So you're trying to tell everyone that WindowsXP won't play WAV or CDA files anymore? Yeah good fucking logic you've got there. THe majority of audio formats around right now have zero copyright protection as most of them started out for use in sound sampler software. If you're so fucking concerned don't use WindowsXP and stop bitching about it. You're acting like Microsoft is somehow expected to write an operating system for the people by the people, they write an OS to make fucking money and can impliment anything they want into the OS in order to make money. It's called capitalism.
This reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon I read today. Dilbert tells this guy the new computer product needs 400 new features and that no one could possibly use software of that complexity. So the guy adds "friendly user interface" to the list. I giggled for about 20 minutes. So anyways. Clippy was a cool idea back when Office 97 came out. If you had problems because Office 97 was a shitty product to use if you didn't have a MOUS you could try to get Clippy to help you. Sometimes he worked but most of the time he told you how to save files. Microsoft needs to make two interfaces, one for novice users and one for MOUS certificate holders. Look at what Adobe has done with Photoshop. They released an LE version that has most of the features and capabilities of the professional version (and most importantly can open and edit proprietary Photoshop files) that is fucking easy to use. Dear Microsoft, take a hint from Adobe and hire a couple guys to write an easy to use face to stick on top of Office apps. Shit it ought to be alot easier now since Office is now going to be completely modularized. Let users choose from an EasyInterface or a MOUSCertifiedInterface. Nuff' said.
This is funny because in crypto books the subject of protecting private keys (which are really insecure when you think about it) is always really briefly browsed over by the authors. This isn't because they haven't thought of it or anything, it is just the REALLY insecure part of asymetric encryption. You can pick the longest keylength in the history of computing but if your private end of the key is compromised you're fucked. It is safest to assume no means of electronic information storage or transfer is secure. Thus never trust it. Never store private keys opn your hard drive (or anything that is readily available) because it is not really too difficult to write an email worm that finds your private key and emails it off to some address. The best means of a private key would be biometric but even then it can be faked, with enough resources it could be faked rather easily. Keep your private key physically on your person and never assume anything you want secure will always remain secure. Like most things computer security is a matter of dilligence, not the amount of technology you're using.
Most of your "non-obvious" security falls to shit if you use disk indexing which most WinNT users do use. You can write an email worm that scans your various indexes for PGP or similar strings and still find your fucking keys. All sorts of recursion are only going to confuse human infiltrators to your system, they're going to do very little to counter a well written worm.
The reason for such blatant branding isn't all about advertising. In order to protect their fashion design the designers stylize their logo and stick it on their clothing. Tommy Hilfiger shirts are identified by not only their colours but their logo. Were the logo not there, anyone could make a similar shirt with a similar cut and sell it cutting in on Tommy Hilfiger's profits. By having a very marketable logo and stylizing it on products you prevent people from copying your style. It's VERY profitable and smart marketing dude. Clothing companies are good at it and thus make lots of money.
The ISP market is a very amusing one indeed. You've got dozens of companies in the same area offering the same service for the same price and sometimes all using the same dial-ups. Of course there's going to be a large shake out soon in the market. Only the companies offering the best services for the lowest price will survive. If you're an ISP that offers some personal web space and an email address you better take a look at the big boys like MSN and AOL. AOL customers get a pretty broad range of services for a decent price. They don't rely on Yahoo! or someone else to provide content for them like so many other ISPs do now. This is how a free market works. It sucks for the guy who has been overworked at some little ISP who's about to lose his job but thats how the cookie gets jumped on and obliterated.
The problem with having your remote box doing apt get updates via cron is you end up breaking shit all the time without realizing it. More than once the latest and greatest package has its own set of bugs you just unknowingly stuck on your box. Stick with an older heavily patched version of a deamon that is well documented. Switching to new code constantly is only going to open up security holes you don't know about.
Since when did America go from innocent until proven guilty to guilty no matter what. All I see anymore is another example of the government saying "well if you haven't done anything wrong you don't have to worry". Why don't we remote controlled cameras in the offices of our elected officials and broadcast the feeds in television. C-SPAN could make their own reality series about how the bribes and pure criminality taking place in publicly funded buildings.
Okay can someone please give me one really good reason I'd want a game console with a multi-user POSIX compliant kernel running on it? A game console needs the bare minimum of resource menagement as to use as little overhead as you possibly can. Writing for consoles is so very different than writing for PCs because you're adapting a general purpose system for use in your game as opposed to having a box meant for the task you're programming it for. From what I have seen Microsoft seems to be making the XBox merely a compact PC with powerful hardware games can use. PC architecture is shitty for the high intensity operations detailed 3D graphics need. The Indreama's licensing was novel though I doubt it would have ever made money had the project gotten off the ground. Console makers thrive from game (software) sales because publishers need their seal of approval. Charging a few scant dollars for Angus Linuxprogrammer to write his own game won't attract too many investors to your project. I think the project had some good ideas but for the most part it couldn't compete with its own business plan.
So what is your defense againt SGI pursuing their trademark? Because I have my head up my ass? You're bound for success with logic like that. SGI is bound by copyright law to pursue those infringing on their trademarks. Do you not fucking get that? Naming a product OpenIL which is one letter different from their registered trademark can EASILY be seen as causing market confusion. SGI is publicly held and thus has to do what its investors tell it to do. You've only proved you don't like me because I'm better looking than you.
I think the Ars article makes a veyr good point, OS X is a new and improved OS that is sort of intended for new computers. I doubt I'll stick this thing on my G3 333Mhz Powerbook since I'm not getting much of a bargain. Alot of the apps I use now are based on Classic (apart from Appleworks) so I can only make them run slower by switching. However If I just bought a brand spanking new G4 I would almost immediately pick this thing up and spend the time downloading carbonized versions of the programs I use most often. This isn't about the OS sucking on its initial release. It is destined for brand new systems with enough resources to handle it, not for your aging beige G3. I don't think many of the linux zealots here would understand because when you grab the latest kernel it is merely an incremental revision rather than an entirely new OS with a bajillion differences between it and the old system.
I'm wondering if by 2011 the DNS system will still even be relavant to 90% of the internet. By then I think we'll see a much higher peer presence on the net where we log onto a directory server at the ISP which lets people connect to our personal web server appliances. Well for the most part this is a pipe dream. However I do think DNS might not survive the next decade. It is already fairly dated which causes about a bajillion workarounds just to enable dynamic internet connections. I think we'll only see more and more dynamic network nodes due to the fact half of the things in your home will end up being internet aware. Would you rather adapt DNS in order to get a permenant address for your PDA (which will eventually end up being a true personal assistant with a silicon rather than carbon based brain) or merely have your ISP do the work by providing directory access to you.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Are you people fucking retarded? Take five fucking minutes to read up on registering a trademark. In order to maintain your trademark YOU HAVE TO ENFORCE YOUR OWNERSHIP OF IT. Companies such as SGI have to maintain legions of lawyers to do just this because they own the trademark rights to things such as OpenGL. Names like OpenIL and OpenAL look alot like OpenGL which has the possibility of causing confusion. Stop whining you fuckers. Trademarks are important because we live in a capitalist society where you're often only as good as the products your customers know you for. If you work for a business that makes money and have even ONE corporate logo then go ahead and respond. Otherwise shut the fuck up and stop whining because someone is enforcing a trademark they pay fucking money for because it represents not only a product but the company behind the product.