Man... remember on commodore 64, the game EMPIRE? I'd log on 5 different bbses a day to play my rounds, then there was global wars on PC, oh and tradewars of course, then came the multi-line BBSES with games like telearena, those were the days...
Games, message boards, chatting with the Sysop, leeching with ratios, following the craze from 2400 bauds to 9600, to 14,400HST that wasn't compatible with anything else than USR modems, and you needed that Veverything that you couldn't afford, copy parties with people from a BBS, real GTs, argh... I miss those... sorry for the memories the olders will remember all this:)
I've bought one of those board after reading all the raving reviews about them and that supposed-leaked marketting thing with Nvidia bashing them, I thought maybe they were good. I went out and bought a 64Megs with TV-out for less than 100$, it ran okay for games, offering decent performance, but as soon as I touched Lightwave3D (i.e. professionnal 3D application that requires OpenGL acceleration) it SUCKED big time, the layout wasn't even updating correctly and the scene was breaking down and smudging like hell. I emailed tech support, their answers?? (that should be a classic a la "where's the any key")
"when you use Autocad or Lightwave or any pro 3D apps, you have to go in the properties->hardware acceleration OFF"
(implying also that if you want to switch from working to gaming you need to go to that control pannel everytime... PAIN!!!).
So basically you buy a 3d accelerator that has no 3d acceleration for software that requires 3d acceleration.
Those of you that will say "yeah but calm down beavis, that card is for gaming, what else do you expect from a 3d board??"
well 2 things: if it DOESN'T accelerate my pro apps, at least make it not BREAK them at least, and second, every NVIDIA product works in all 3d software, so if one is doing it, the others would be damned not to follow.
Anyways, I returned the card and went to buy a Geforce 2MX for the time being...
BS. Microsoft has charity licenses, I tried one of their courses for MCSA recently (and on a side note, NEVER ATTEND ANY BETA COURSES if you are paying from your pockets and expect the manuals to be flawless and have more than 30% of the labs working properly, but that was another story).
One of the student was running an art gallery and told me about this specific issue, win2k pro could be had for about 5$ea under that program, of course you gave to be registered and be 100% legit, so I'd guess win98 would be even less than that.
The point is you can sell candy bars and equip a lab easily for that price, its almost as cheap as burning redhat cds, so, as much as I don't like Microsoft's acting on specific cases, this is blattant diffamation and BS. If you want to make linux look good and MS look bad, you and all the people that modded you up are simply enforcing the stereotype of the typical "linux rebel-teen-acting extremist (whatever that means)".
I don't want to start a flame war with this comment, but I do think it's relevant for the overall image of the community. I am not pro Y or against X, I enjoy debates and challenging ideas and even if it would go against my way of thinking, I will always evaluate and do the exercise of second-guessing myself to be sure that I made the right choice, but stuff like this that gets modded up is simply disgusting, not specially for me, but for the people working so hard to make the Linux community look mature and professionnal. It's okay in my book to not agree on KDE or Gnome and having debates that split the community in 2, if you think that hurts the overall image, BSing users that attracts attention, in my book, is far worse.
Well I guess he made his day by saying a double-sided comment like this, the goal of this place is to generate discussion in the first place.
What good would it be if he'd say "yet another stupid patent that will be passed" without adding anything completely opposing a previous statement? The whole thread would be bitching whining about the patent office people that are brainless, some trolls about how USA is "the land of the free" with DMCA SSCA and EtCeTeR-A and other flames, and the typical "hey I patented sticking a finger in my nose to clean it"
I'd tend to second that, you know it's a movie, you know it's a review, if you don't well now you know.
Good journalism is also catching the interest of the reader. This worked for me and I had the exact same reaction than you "heck hollywood releasing something like that? Its probably going to have a twist and a big moral issue with how bad file swapping is and other BS, let's read on":)
This I find amusing, compared to april 1st when all the subjects were totally lame. Anyways, obviously when you have 100,000s of readers, you will never get everybody on your side, you'll always do something good, excellent and bad at the same time.
That's one thing that is cool about projectors, they don't devaluate very rapidly (check on ebay for anything 1-2 yrs old) compared to high-end TV. Plus it's not a pain in the ass to move around, plus you can have the size of screen that you want when you have 800+ lumens and good screen. (well obviously the more lumens the better if you're to do 15' diagonal:) )
When I see people buying HDTV TVs at C$5000+ I don't understand why they aren't looking a medium range projector with HDTV support. Okay you don't buy anything under XGA resolution because with all the resampling it'll screw up the quality big time, but still, at 5K you have a nice tv, but at 5K you have a BIG refurb projector that can do both progressive playback of your dvd, give you an image that has easily 4 time the area covered, and best of all, you can play quake at wall size!.
In my case I've been trying to grab a cheap DLP XGA projector for a while, I don't want a 60 inch tv that will be a pain to move around, I want a 90 inch "tv" that I'll be able to plug my computer on it and also have fun watching movies like in the theatre:).
The replacement lamps are very expensive, but then again, when you look at the "kit" they sell you for 400$, it's basically a specific lamp with specific properties (metal halide, etc etc) at a specific voltage, plus a little crappy plastic holder... there's no optics (you read "lamp module" you'd think it has some collimating lenses or something) and you can buy these same lamps from a third party at 1/5th of the price, and you just have to mount it back on the plastic thing that was attaching the old lamp. If you have to break it, so what, nothing a high-temperature epoxy can't fix.
Anyways, nice to see articles like that, but LCD sucks, DLP is the way to go for video projectors, too bad parts are still expensive, anyone here knows a 3rd party supplier that won't only sell developper kits at 3K$?
You're in a school, this is would be one of the BEST environment to educate the people about all of these issues. You'll say that some people won't give a rat, but that's like in society in general, if people don't give a rat and anarchy reigns, stronger measure needs to be taken.
I might have gotten something wrong but if you're managing the network, usually it falls within your responsibilities to make sure to implement EVERYTHING (including some policy, or at least submitting them) for the proper operation of the network, which includes both load balancing, security and legality (to a certain extent, at least proving that you thought about it and implemented it to a certain level won't hurt).
Now if we tell you to cut down trees for a paper company and we hand you a kitchen knife, you'll say "you're crazy", well same goes with being an admin, if you're ADMIN and you can't do zit, it's a big issue. If it was a mess before you arrived, probably that the organization was a mess in the first place, I'd document everything, put up a structure of the network and who's responsible for what, limit the number of people that have "power" over the administration because as we all know, the more admins on a box, the more potential problems. So you have to do your part, be professionnal, use people's experience and be opened to suggestion, but at the same time, document every problem, and don't always go to your supervisor saying all of the problems, he's probably already familiar with them, for every problem, bring in a solution or two with arguments and documented facts (and normally supervisors like having a choice and feel like they did the work so... use that to your advantage).
As for the P2P application, I've fixed the problem at work, I've putted QoS and 1-2K/s on the total bandwidth, it's transparent "it's still working so I didn't do anything" and when those dead weights would come and see me "well probably its not optimized for our network structure and I have enough work to do, if this is a priority, go see your manager or big boss". It's politically correct since you didn't block the port and the user has no idea on what's really going on (unless reading slashdot:) ) , and it put the user in a situation where he would have to go look his manager to ask to waste time leeching (which he will obviously won't do:) ) and I get no heat. Dunno up to what it could extend since where I work most people are reasonable and mature, and school isn't the same environment, but then again, it's a suggestion and I'm sure a lot of people here will have many more.
Normally there is a grey zone on which you can "play", since 2 or 3 years, here in Montreal and the areas, there are at least twice as much polices on the roads that there used to be. They've found out that it was a great source of revenues especially when the gov. wants to find ways to cut out budgets. Ok, I am all for fining the guilty people and all, but this gets annoying when you get a speeding ticket at 120 in a 100 zone (Km/h, 1 mile = 1.6 Km) I mean, 20 years ago that limit was okay, the cars weren't as safe and all, but today, in 2002, driving at 100 is painfully slow especially when you have 2000 miles to travel. Before you wouldn't get a ticket at that speed, unless the cop really had a quota to fill, but you'd get one at 130-140 obviously.
There was that grey zone where the cops could use their judgment, today everything must be black or white, you have to be a role model citizen or else you're a terrorist, you have to buy everything that you watch or look at all the advertizing or else you are stealing, you have to buy a computer with windows and office shipped on it else you are the reason why the economy will crash, etc, etc, if then else, bla bla. This is getting very out of hand, and people shouldn't tolerate cameras like that. Some polices strongly disagree with this because it also replaces the agents that would be doing that watch, so less effectives, less power, etc etc.
I mean, it's okay to put such a system to MONITOR (aka RESEARCH PURPOSE) people's habbit and see how many % are speeding up and comming out with a way to slow down the traffic, it's okay to put such a system on places that abuses are being made and notify the people that there is such of a system in place, it's okay to put it where a lot of accidents are happening, but EVERYWHERE? heck, this is very unsecuring. They want 0 or 1 from us, but when THEY have to give US what they OWE us (tax return, interests, misjudgment and all) we have to WAIT or FIGHT our way to justice and it's clearly not 0s and 1s. Having a gray zone in both ways balances the for and against of this system.
While I am not for those breaking the law and I can hear the people already replying "well roll at the speed that the law permits and you won't have a problem" I'll say; let these cameras there, and there's nothing that will stop them to use them or install new ones to monitor people all over the place, there is no way that this will sort out bad guys from good guys in a 100% fashion, and I am not for "50 is the limit, you were rolling at 51 because you sneezed and pressed the accelerator a bit more, here's your 70$ fine", this is blattant abuse. Of course those of you who never got abusive tickets are probably thinking like I used to think before, but the day you'll get crossed in a technology error or bug, you'll change idea pretty quickly I can be sure.
That doesn't have to do anything with spammers, they don't receive a zit from spammers, the typical spammer is a guy running a home buisness or a store that thinks like "if I send out 40,000 email and get a response from only 0.1% of that amount it's going to recuperate the costs and make it worthwhile (and it wouldn't work if people were smart, the problem is SOME people do respond).
I still don't understand how you can operate a mouse and a keyboard, and respond to an email that will help you to get out of debt and entrust your finance to someone that SPAMMED you, I don't know what kind of education these people get but this is very sad. And this is one of the place where the government should protect people from themselves and I wouldn't say anything.
Anyways the point is, big corporation are even more touched than us as individuals, because they get a LOT of traffic wasted on their net feed, they need extra ressources on their mail servers and either a net admin or every employee needs to check their junk folders once in a while to trim the crap from the good messaged filtered out, this costs productivity and equipment for something that shouldn't be there in the first place.
You don't see telemarketters calling people one by one thru the receptionnist in a 1000 employee company right? you don't see vacuum vendors going from desk to desk in large corporations:). You get the idea. This touches EVERYBODY with no exeptions, this isn't a matter of having money or not, these spammers are taxing useless bandwidth, time, and hardware, and I am not even counting how many are total frauds.
There's one thing I don't get. We are tax payers, the people we elect are law-makers, they are paid to find solutions to common problems. They love passing laws. But WHY do they always have to go against the population and not work with them?
Get this: name me 10 subject that would get 99% approval among the population? heck even TAX CUT wouldn't get 99% because some people would be affraid of the system collapsing, etc etc... but SPAM? come on... if it's not 99% it's going to be 99.9%.
My question is: Why is the system so slow about it? why am I being spammed at a rate of 80 messages a day (including 20 that passes the "HIGH" setting in my hotmail account) I mean if I get spammed, I am sure senate representatives are getting spammed like hell too, I am sure it costs microsoft a LOT in bandwidth and storage and all to keep up with spam on their service (if they have a million of users that are like me receiving 20 spam for 1 valid email (and I am not joking) their system is totally wasted for nothing.
Why so much tolerance? why not blocking every higher class where the biggest spam machines comes from? the hell with the valid users; if they are cutted out, they will do something other than reading about it and sitting there, switch ISP or if it's another country with only one wire well they will do pressure to the higher instances to get their connection back. My way might be drastic, but I am FED UP with it, I've been waiting for 3 years for this problem to get solved and it's just getting worse.
It's like... remember like 5-10 years ago when you could post on usenet without getting any trouble? the worst thing that could happen to you was someone using flash.c against you?:), When I saw the net going commercial, I knew this would be bad, I said "well one day everybody will have a net connection and I'll have higher speed" and this is the good side, but some days I'd rather go back to my unix dialup account and have the feeling I had without the aggression of abusive emails, script kiddies and all that crap we have these days... ok this is a bit extreme but I'm sure you all get the idea.
We are barely starting to see something happening, but it's not by destroying the spam of ONE guy that you will scare the others off, this is going to get out of hands even worse, they will see how the legal system is bloated and exploit every single holes in it if they have to.
The system seems to protect the megacorporation more than little guys like you and me, but in this case, it would help BOTH sides, so why is it taking so long? cut asia off for a day, heck, DO SOMETHING. Ideas? heck , these guys are payed over twice my salary to come up with creative ideas, why don't they do their jobs and save me from taking the laws in my own hands?
Starwars is that kind of movies that geeks and non-geeks can enjoy. So it makes a good excuse for a mini-social event.
In my case, all the company is going at the same time (well those who are interrested) ( 20, people, easy to organize), it makes a social event, it reservces me the seat to the back of mine so that way if it's someone that I already know that is going to kick in my chair, I'll have full authority to choke him in his popcorn without fearing that the next 10 other people next to him are his street friends and are going to wait for me outside after the movie:)
8 channels ATA/100 48Bits LBA support 64Bits/66MHZ PCI Linux/Windows drivers Good Raid5 results when you use the 7850 and not the 7810 (2MB cache extra on the 7850).
This my friend, is the cream of what you can get with IDE, and I use this with 8 maxtor drives for a non-critical datacenter (temporary rendered images). IDE drives are a bit less reliable than SCSI drives, that's why I built an array with ventilated cases (they run for 20$ each these days). You make that raid 5, in case one breaks, and off you go, it costed me a bit over 1/3 of the price of a comparable SCSI solution.
Bandwidth? PCI64bits/66mhz = theorical 528MB/sec peak bandwidth. The storage switch itself is very well optimized, but it also depends on the drives themselves, of course in my case storage was more important that the overall speed, so adding maxtor 160GB drives (5400rpm) won't be as efficient as using the Western Digital 120GB drives 7200rpm that have 8MB cache on them (this must be a killer drive with that raid card, I'd love to try this one day).
Heck, I'm waiting for my Service pack 3 for win2k to apply the 14 pages of hotfix and security patch automatically to my newer systems without having to reload the windowsupdate/rebooting 3 times (explorer 5.5sp2, reboot, security roolup jan 2002, reboot and finally the critical, and that doesn't include post-sp2 hotfixes that aren't "critical").
No wonder I am considering FreeBSD for my email server, yeah it'll need maintenance and security, yes I hate the overhead and everything is so much simpler in windows, that I have to give it to microsoft, but GOD, I don't want to reboot a zillion time after applying patches every week, heck, I don't want to apply patches every week:).
Why downloading a overbloated system that kills CPU usage and hogs down the system (on PC that is) like media player 7 and above does, if you could have it in a tightly optimized and efficient distributed way? I say: go macromedia.
Flash is everywhere, like it or not, and they do a good job at porting the plugin to a lot of platforms (even if it's not EVERYWHERE yet) Like it or not, if you surf the web a lot, you hit flash content, the plugin is small, you don't need a 5MB download and install and useless clugging down just to view one file once in a while.
Most of the people on windows are downloading quicktime to almost exclusively view movies encoded with that sorenson coded, mainly because most of all of the other codecs supplied by apple sucks (exept the dv).
I mean, most of them are about the quality of microsoft AVI RLE encoding (aside from the mjpeg and mpeg and dv and anythign high bandwidth that isn't impressive over the net). I do a lot of video editing, I did codec research and analysis a few years ago, made codec-buster files and evaluated most of them with their strong and weak points, if apple would want quicktime to take off and become useful on something other than a Mac, they would have to bring in big guns. Sorenson is nice but it's not even close to DIVX in quality and performance (try playing a quicktime movie at 1280x960 for example, and feel the jerking and all). Why download a 20megs movie preview if you can fit it in 5 megs with about the same quality? that's an extra 4:1 compression (I'm talking roughly here and not considering the time of encoding and all).
Usually if I want to distribute a movie on PC with the maximum quality at lowest bitrate possible, I think DIVX. If I want to distribute cross-platform, with no hassles, MPEG comes to mind. there are VERY good mpeg encoders and if you know what you are doing and how mpeg works, you can output VERY nice results taking minimal bandwidth and competing directly with realvideo (well for anything above 80x80 like most people like encoding in RV). The BIG problem with mpeg movies, is the people encoding them. They hack a cable signal to their tv tuner and encode without knowing what an I-frame is and where they could cut off or optimize the bandwidth usage. The result? most mpeg movies on the net sucks and gives a bad name to mpeg.
I think most people that have basic video codec knowledge here aren't impressed by sorenson, especially when leeching a 20+ meg movie trailer for the resolution it gives, at these file size we're used to double of that resolution with about the same quality when using PC codecs like mpeg-4 based.
Yeah quicktime 6 will have mpeg-4 I know, good for them, but too late, DIVX got the crown there, plus it's EFFICIENT, I can watch HDTV video on my athlon with that beast.
When we were young, we wished we could have all the high-tech toys, and when we would see a report or something on TV, it always seemed light-years away technologies.
Today kids, you have it SO good, you don't even WISH you had higher-tech toys like we wished back then. I remember having GiJoes and saying "why don't they talk, what the F* am I supposed to do with a plastic thing that has a hard time bending, what if I put a wire attached to a battery in the back where there's a screw " (gosh I'm only 26 and I talk like 50, I imagine their pain:) ). Today, you have LCD etch a sketch, toy PDAs, video games that makes me shy about drooling over a VIC-20 when I was 8 or 10, etc...
Even later, I had an amiga, I wanted to do serious 3D, I was stucked with a 680x0 processor because I couldn't afford bigger, alpha, etc... at that time only if you had a load of money, you could afford to play with video editing, animating, etc... today, the crappiest PC at 500$ litteraly KILLS my best machine for 3d not even 10 years ago, by a factor of over 100!. Heck get a MSI 6378, a duron 1Ghz and 256 mb of ram, costs you nothing, you can cascade them, and awhh I'll stop here you get the drill...
So all this to say, I'm still happy to see that the millitary is playing with the toys in our backyard. Yes they have the budget to parallel massive amount of processors, 3d chips, and they still have a lot of high-tech toys that we couldn't afford to own, but the margin is WAY thinner than it used to be, at least now I am not wishing as bad as I used to, I got enough toys to satisfy my spare time.
Of course, I am Human and fundamentally more is never enough... I still wish I would have interactive raytracing/caustics/global illumination at 1600s1200x30fps but at least now I can DO these images in minutes instead of weeks:) And I am quite sure I'll see this in my lifetime.
Just when I bought a batch of copied tapes for a small fortunes, I see DVD that are released... dang...
I should do that with all the shows that I loved when I was young, lucky how I am they would probably all come out in DVD... of course if I expect that... oh forget about it:)
But seriously, transformers the 1st and second generation were really cool, as I kid I really loved playing with these toys, Soundwave was the coolest robot in the show and shockwave was one the coolest toy:) (gun, lights, buzzer:) ) Megatron kept breaking up at the rotation axis of the gun (who got one that isn't slacked or glued?) but overall they were VERY educative toys (remember building omega supreme as a kid the first time?) and very durable (with a few exeptions). Too bad today the tv series of the newer generation totally suck and the toys as well.
If they can release the full G1 and G2 original in DVD I'll buy them all.
What's going on above them, usually they are the last to know about changes or marketting decisions, yes they are to blame as a group for not having the initiative to better this situation, but then again, some companies will fire people "telling the truth" because they simply don't want to hear it.
There's also the fact that tech support is perceived like a receptionnist, Executives point of view: We need them, but they aren't "valuable assets". So who, that is competent enough and knows his stuff very well (and wants to help) will settle for a low-pay and crappy condition job with no gratification?
Usually they take some interns or people that just finished school to do this, Most of these people don't have real job experience and they take 3 months to a year or two to realize that they have a crappy job. Most that stays are doing so because they don't know better, but the real competent people soon realize that they can do better, have better conditions, job and pay. Executives don't acknoledge that and they loose all their competent people (minus one or two that will be kept as group leader or trainers and will get ok conditions). And by the time the employee knows his stuff very well and knows how to answer most problems and get the "feeling" of the problem and not just looking up questions/answers sheets, they switch jobs because of what I just mentionned before, so basically they have a high cycle rate and almost no knowledge from the start.
To sum it up: You get what you pay for.
And to answer the question, one place you get very good support and tools is with National Instrument. I use their labview software and the tech support are knowledgable staff with CS degree or similar. Why are they doing this? I have no clue, but at least these people knows their stuff.
The person using the flawed application? the person creating the flawed application?
Follow me on this.
there are both sides for this, some people MIGHT want a less secure software (thus, a bit more rushed, thus less expensive) because of his specific application, why would his customers that don't request the features absorb the costs?
We could discuss this point and give out gray areas, and it could make an interresting debate, but It's 1am and I'll limit this to something plain and simple and this is no microsoft bashing karma whoring since I already topped the 50 limit,
Here goes: If you want the companies to be responsible for security flaws in their software, you have to first see if they do any misleading claims. Guess who comes to mind first? yes.. Microsoft. I don't run unix servers at work yet, I am exploring putting my email server on FreeBSD with postfix (which is kinda bitchy for a win2k guy that lost his unix/amiga side a long time ago:) ) and there's one thing seriously pissing me off from Microsoft, not as a Linux zealot (I hate linux at it's current state to be honnest) but as a customer who bought for almost 6 digits of microsoft software. They put so much on marketting, they put so much on presentation, they put so much in finding new ways of doing stuff, or clever ways to steal^H^H^H^H^H Implement existing ideas, but GOD I *HATE* it when I see them claiming their OS is the most secure, GOD I HATE it when they say it's more reliable than any competitor OS, I hate it when there's a bug and I think it's me who is the problem and I find out it's an OS bug (but that I can live with it). All this to say: If a vendor claims that his OS/Software suite/product is more secure for marketting purposes, it SHOULD AUTOMATICALLY MAKE HIM RESPONSIBLE FOR *ANY* UNEXPECTED ARISING SECURITY ISSUES, ESPECIALLY THE MAJOR ONES.
Look at how nimda killed most servers and workstations running IIS, look at the freakin time it took for this bastard to get off the net? even MONTHS later I still had port 80 probbing on my machine for god's sake, how many high-speed provider shutted down incoming traffic on port 80? this was due to one serious SECURITY flaw and costed a lot of downtime and unexepected expenses.
Yes there are stupid admins that don't update their machines often. But let's be honnest here, how many update do you need for major flaws on IIS versus Apache for example? I run IIS as an intranet, so I can "forget to update", but if I'd run it on internet for example, how many updates a month would I have to do compared to apache? a LOT more, I read both security lists out of curiosity, and the feeling I had about this was absolutely true. Too bad Apache doesn't have a IIS front-end and ease of use on win2k because I'm sure IIS would take an even bigger drop. I guess microsoft will do something really good with IIS6 because they are probably feeling the heat right now.
Anyways, this is the reason why I will NEVER run my critical services such as DNS server or EMAIL on microsoft software (I use the ISP's for now, considering moving locally) they rush their things out, and fix later, which is totally unacceptable, and forcing to upgrade your browser instead of patching the bugs, and introducing new ones, etc... this is really becomming a serious issue, I wouldn't mind all this if they would at LEAST be honnest about this, but no, they want to go the PR way and bullshit people about security compared to unix system? come on, I have yet to see a nimda breaking loose on unix servers (this is only one example, let's not talk about melissa or any others).
There aren't only negative sides to Microsoft software, windows 2000 is the best OS I've ever used since my amiga, it has it's downsides, amiga has it's downsides too so nothing is perfect, Win2k server is great for small buisness like mine and it's stable enough to do the job and I find IIS great for running my intranet. Well IIS would probably be the only software I'd expose out to the internet (if it was a non-critical server), because it's simple, easy to manage, permissions sets up pretty simply (for those of us who hate text files), but like a lot of people here, even if I find most microsoft software simple and Ok, I'd NEVER build a mission-critical solution on their product, I'd never run a "ebay" on IIS, I'd never be a ISP and running my DNS services on win2k, some do, and some don't have much problems, but when they do have them, they can tell you what hell looks like.
So all this to say: If you want to sell stuff with no responsibilities attached to it because the people don't ask you for it or simply because of budget constraint, you can still be succesful and fill a need, but if you LIE about it, in my book, you diserve to be punished, and severely. If you'd be turning blue and a doctor would tell you "it's nothing, just take two aspirins" and you'd die a few hours later, he'd get his career kissed goodbye, while buisness isn't necessarely life, you can messup a LOT of lifes if your buisness go down because you miss a demo or your 20 programmers are down for 2 days because of a big virus attack and you need to rebuild all the servers and so on, I'm sure there's probably one example from a slashdot reader that could say he missed a demo and financing because of a stupid issue like this (well this might be a bit stretched but you get the point), what about the life of those employees? What about the total cost of all this downtime in the country?
Microsoft is quick to blaim piracy costing BILLION of $$$, but they are quick also to change subject when we ask them how much THEY are costing to the industry because of downtime or upgrade or patching. Again, I am not against Microsoft because I think they are still doing great product, I am against their ATTITUDE towards the industry and all the false (or at least exagerated) claims they are making, if I'd do 1/2 of this as a small buisness, I would kiss my career goodbye, why would US's Icon be allowed to do this blattanly?
You have all these cards grabbing video at crazy datarates... for 100-200$ (like that MSI geforce3 ti 200 board that I've bought that has svhs in and captures uncompressed), I remember not so long ago when getting a capture system that was doing MJPEG at 1 meg a second (DPS PVR) was costing 20 times that price and the quality was a fraction (not to say, this was the "high end" of what was available on personnal computers).
Today you have a tv tuner, computers fast enough to handle realtime compression of full NTSC@30FPS signal with minimal loss in quality, drives that don't need to be A/V-rated (remember that 7,000$ 4GB baracuda for the flyer?), Bandwidth and storage beyond beleif... god.. some of you here will understand the feeling when I say that the younger crowd here probably didn't have to mess or invest in those expensive equipment, and will never appreciate newer technologies and pricing as much as we do:)
Anyways, sorry for this little incursion, I think I'll go plug my vidi-24RT back in my amiga 1200:)
It's already cool to see AMD having their 64bits supported in the next windows, I understand why they are acting like this. While it's not good from a purist's point of view... buisness is buisness and they did do a major strike to get microsoft to not only support Intel like everyone thought they would at first.
I live in montreal, It always amazes me when people from US thinks in Canada "we are less free", I mean, the only biggest difference I've seen in the "free" arena is you guys can own and carry guns (which I find decent since the people who commit gun murder here don't get their guns legitimately in the first place anyways!). Aside from that, the impression that the US gives is that they are clamping your life to an embarrassing extent, all these DMCA, MPAA, RIAA, civil rights cases and horror stories, we don't hear that much comming from Canada. If our Gov. would back up big companies like that to the extent that it affects us as consumers and we have the last word, they'd be facing a massive revolt. US seems to pass these laws at just the correct rate so people don't notice they are getting screwed off, but slashing in what their ancestor fought to get. And they pay more attention to the "liberty" in other countries and saying how good US is, than preserving their own:). That's the other side's impression.
There was once in my life that I considered moving to the States, but would I go today with everything happening?, I don't know I couldn't answer this question unless I would have something in front of me. (Canada has it's bad points too, like over-taxing to name one, the only thing you're not taxed for yet is breathing and having sex (oh, mark that last one off, 15% tax (gst, pst) on condoms or pills:) ).
About the patent cases, here the thing I know is you have to do very (VERY) good paperwork to get your pattent in, it's not just a matter of filling a 1 page form and sending it to the patent office. I don't know about the process in the US, but either some people are really making a point by releasing stupid patents because the system is flawed and too lame, or they are really good at writing their patent application, and you need to back up a bit and re-read it to notice exactly what it means:), either way, things like that slowly degrades the value of patents in the united states, and affects the credibility of the whole system, and at the same time, the legitimacy of decent applications.
It's all about the card, cheap cards will perform terrible, like I posted a bit lower, the Dlink cards are TERRIBLE, but if you give a shot to an Intel Pro 1000T, these are the best cards on the market for gigabit ethernet over copper. 3Com is also good, but with my dlink cards I was getting HALF the bandwidth that I would get with my pro1000T.
Slashdot Mirror
Man... remember on commodore 64, the game EMPIRE? I'd log on 5 different bbses a day to play my rounds, then there was global wars on PC, oh and tradewars of course, then came the multi-line BBSES with games like telearena, those were the days...
Games, message boards, chatting with the Sysop, leeching with ratios, following the craze from 2400 bauds to 9600, to 14,400HST that wasn't compatible with anything else than USR modems, and you needed that Veverything that you couldn't afford, copy parties with people from a BBS, real GTs, argh... I miss those... sorry for the memories the olders will remember all this
I've bought one of those board after reading all the raving reviews about them and that supposed-leaked marketting thing with Nvidia bashing them, I thought maybe they were good. I went out and bought a 64Megs with TV-out for less than 100$, it ran okay for games, offering decent performance, but as soon as I touched Lightwave3D (i.e. professionnal 3D application that requires OpenGL acceleration) it SUCKED big time, the layout wasn't even updating correctly and the scene was breaking down and smudging like hell. I emailed tech support, their answers?? (that should be a classic a la "where's the any key")
"when you use Autocad or Lightwave or any pro 3D apps, you have to go in the properties->hardware acceleration OFF"
(implying also that if you want to switch from working to gaming you need to go to that control pannel everytime... PAIN!!!).
So basically you buy a 3d accelerator that has no 3d acceleration for software that requires 3d acceleration.
Those of you that will say "yeah but calm down beavis, that card is for gaming, what else do you expect from a 3d board??"
well 2 things: if it DOESN'T accelerate my pro apps, at least make it not BREAK them at least, and second, every NVIDIA product works in all 3d software, so if one is doing it, the others would be damned not to follow.
Anyways, I returned the card and went to buy a Geforce 2MX for the time being...
I've got only one thing to say to the creators of this big brother device:
IN YOUR FACE!
heh.
BS. Microsoft has charity licenses, I tried one of their courses for MCSA recently (and on a side note, NEVER ATTEND ANY BETA COURSES if you are paying from your pockets and expect the manuals to be flawless and have more than 30% of the labs working properly, but that was another story).
One of the student was running an art gallery and told me about this specific issue, win2k pro could be had for about 5$ea under that program, of course you gave to be registered and be 100% legit, so I'd guess win98 would be even less than that.
The point is you can sell candy bars and equip a lab easily for that price, its almost as cheap as burning redhat cds, so, as much as I don't like Microsoft's acting on specific cases, this is blattant diffamation and BS. If you want to make linux look good and MS look bad, you and all the people that modded you up are simply enforcing the stereotype of the typical "linux rebel-teen-acting extremist (whatever that means)".
I don't want to start a flame war with this comment, but I do think it's relevant for the overall image of the community. I am not pro Y or against X, I enjoy debates and challenging ideas and even if it would go against my way of thinking, I will always evaluate and do the exercise of second-guessing myself to be sure that I made the right choice, but stuff like this that gets modded up is simply disgusting, not specially for me, but for the people working so hard to make the Linux community look mature and professionnal. It's okay in my book to not agree on KDE or Gnome and having debates that split the community in 2, if you think that hurts the overall image, BSing users that attracts attention, in my book, is far worse.
Well I guess he made his day by saying a double-sided comment like this, the goal of this place is to generate discussion in the first place.
What good would it be if he'd say "yet another stupid patent that will be passed" without adding anything completely opposing a previous statement? The whole thread would be bitching whining about the patent office people that are brainless, some trolls about how USA is "the land of the free" with DMCA SSCA and EtCeTeR-A and other flames, and the typical "hey I patented sticking a finger in my nose to clean it"
Oh.. wait... nevermind.
> Can't have it both way, I'm afraid.
:)
My ex girlfriend used to say that too...
Sorry, couldn't resist
I'd tend to second that, you know it's a movie, you know it's a review, if you don't well now you know.
:)
Good journalism is also catching the interest of the reader. This worked for me and I had the exact same reaction than you "heck hollywood releasing something like that? Its probably going to have a twist and a big moral issue with how bad file swapping is and other BS, let's read on"
This I find amusing, compared to april 1st when all the subjects were totally lame. Anyways, obviously when you have 100,000s of readers, you will never get everybody on your side, you'll always do something good, excellent and bad at the same time.
Anyways, I've found that amusing.
That's one thing that is cool about projectors, they don't devaluate very rapidly (check on ebay for anything 1-2 yrs old) compared to high-end TV. Plus it's not a pain in the ass to move around, plus you can have the size of screen that you want when you have 800+ lumens and good screen. (well obviously the more lumens the better if you're to do 15' diagonal :) )
:).
When I see people buying HDTV TVs at C$5000+ I don't understand why they aren't looking a medium range projector with HDTV support. Okay you don't buy anything under XGA resolution because with all the resampling it'll screw up the quality big time, but still, at 5K you have a nice tv, but at 5K you have a BIG refurb projector that can do both progressive playback of your dvd, give you an image that has easily 4 time the area covered, and best of all, you can play quake at wall size!.
In my case I've been trying to grab a cheap DLP XGA projector for a while, I don't want a 60 inch tv that will be a pain to move around, I want a 90 inch "tv" that I'll be able to plug my computer on it and also have fun watching movies like in the theatre
The replacement lamps are very expensive, but then again, when you look at the "kit" they sell you for 400$, it's basically a specific lamp with specific properties (metal halide, etc etc) at a specific voltage, plus a little crappy plastic holder... there's no optics (you read "lamp module" you'd think it has some collimating lenses or something) and you can buy these same lamps from a third party at 1/5th of the price, and you just have to mount it back on the plastic thing that was attaching the old lamp. If you have to break it, so what, nothing a high-temperature epoxy can't fix.
Anyways, nice to see articles like that, but LCD sucks, DLP is the way to go for video projectors, too bad parts are still expensive, anyone here knows a 3rd party supplier that won't only sell developper kits at 3K$?
You're in a school, this is would be one of the BEST environment to educate the people about all of these issues. You'll say that some people won't give a rat, but that's like in society in general, if people don't give a rat and anarchy reigns, stronger measure needs to be taken.
:) ) , and it put the user in a situation where he would have to go look his manager to ask to waste time leeching (which he will obviously won't do :) ) and I get no heat. Dunno up to what it could extend since where I work most people are reasonable and mature, and school isn't the same environment, but then again, it's a suggestion and I'm sure a lot of people here will have many more.
I might have gotten something wrong but if you're managing the network, usually it falls within your responsibilities to make sure to implement EVERYTHING (including some policy, or at least submitting them) for the proper operation of the network, which includes both load balancing, security and legality (to a certain extent, at least proving that you thought about it and implemented it to a certain level won't hurt).
Now if we tell you to cut down trees for a paper company and we hand you a kitchen knife, you'll say "you're crazy", well same goes with being an admin, if you're ADMIN and you can't do zit, it's a big issue. If it was a mess before you arrived, probably that the organization was a mess in the first place, I'd document everything, put up a structure of the network and who's responsible for what, limit the number of people that have "power" over the administration because as we all know, the more admins on a box, the more potential problems. So you have to do your part, be professionnal, use people's experience and be opened to suggestion, but at the same time, document every problem, and don't always go to your supervisor saying all of the problems, he's probably already familiar with them, for every problem, bring in a solution or two with arguments and documented facts (and normally supervisors like having a choice and feel like they did the work so... use that to your advantage).
As for the P2P application, I've fixed the problem at work, I've putted QoS and 1-2K/s on the total bandwidth, it's transparent "it's still working so I didn't do anything" and when those dead weights would come and see me "well probably its not optimized for our network structure and I have enough work to do, if this is a priority, go see your manager or big boss". It's politically correct since you didn't block the port and the user has no idea on what's really going on (unless reading slashdot
Good luck.
Normally there is a grey zone on which you can "play", since 2 or 3 years, here in Montreal and the areas, there are at least twice as much polices on the roads that there used to be. They've found out that it was a great source of revenues especially when the gov. wants to find ways to cut out budgets. Ok, I am all for fining the guilty people and all, but this gets annoying when you get a speeding ticket at 120 in a 100 zone (Km/h, 1 mile = 1.6 Km) I mean, 20 years ago that limit was okay, the cars weren't as safe and all, but today, in 2002, driving at 100 is painfully slow especially when you have 2000 miles to travel. Before you wouldn't get a ticket at that speed, unless the cop really had a quota to fill, but you'd get one at 130-140 obviously.
There was that grey zone where the cops could use their judgment, today everything must be black or white, you have to be a role model citizen or else you're a terrorist, you have to buy everything that you watch or look at all the advertizing or else you are stealing, you have to buy a computer with windows and office shipped on it else you are the reason why the economy will crash, etc, etc, if then else, bla bla. This is getting very out of hand, and people shouldn't tolerate cameras like that. Some polices strongly disagree with this because it also replaces the agents that would be doing that watch, so less effectives, less power, etc etc.
I mean, it's okay to put such a system to MONITOR (aka RESEARCH PURPOSE) people's habbit and see how many % are speeding up and comming out with a way to slow down the traffic, it's okay to put such a system on places that abuses are being made and notify the people that there is such of a system in place, it's okay to put it where a lot of accidents are happening, but EVERYWHERE? heck, this is very unsecuring. They want 0 or 1 from us, but when THEY have to give US what they OWE us (tax return, interests, misjudgment and all) we have to WAIT or FIGHT our way to justice and it's clearly not 0s and 1s. Having a gray zone in both ways balances the for and against of this system.
While I am not for those breaking the law and I can hear the people already replying "well roll at the speed that the law permits and you won't have a problem" I'll say; let these cameras there, and there's nothing that will stop them to use them or install new ones to monitor people all over the place, there is no way that this will sort out bad guys from good guys in a 100% fashion, and I am not for "50 is the limit, you were rolling at 51 because you sneezed and pressed the accelerator a bit more, here's your 70$ fine", this is blattant abuse. Of course those of you who never got abusive tickets are probably thinking like I used to think before, but the day you'll get crossed in a technology error or bug, you'll change idea pretty quickly I can be sure.
That doesn't have to do anything with spammers, they don't receive a zit from spammers, the typical spammer is a guy running a home buisness or a store that thinks like "if I send out 40,000 email and get a response from only 0.1% of that amount it's going to recuperate the costs and make it worthwhile (and it wouldn't work if people were smart, the problem is SOME people do respond).
:). You get the idea. This touches EVERYBODY with no exeptions, this isn't a matter of having money or not, these spammers are taxing useless bandwidth, time, and hardware, and I am not even counting how many are total frauds.
I still don't understand how you can operate a mouse and a keyboard, and respond to an email that will help you to get out of debt and entrust your finance to someone that SPAMMED you, I don't know what kind of education these people get but this is very sad. And this is one of the place where the government should protect people from themselves and I wouldn't say anything.
Anyways the point is, big corporation are even more touched than us as individuals, because they get a LOT of traffic wasted on their net feed, they need extra ressources on their mail servers and either a net admin or every employee needs to check their junk folders once in a while to trim the crap from the good messaged filtered out, this costs productivity and equipment for something that shouldn't be there in the first place.
You don't see telemarketters calling people one by one thru the receptionnist in a 1000 employee company right? you don't see vacuum vendors going from desk to desk in large corporations
That's probably why they are limited to 4 pictures a day, that thing costs so much a minute.
34723984723 to go...
:), When I saw the net going commercial, I knew this would be bad, I said "well one day everybody will have a net connection and I'll have higher speed" and this is the good side, but some days I'd rather go back to my unix dialup account and have the feeling I had without the aggression of abusive emails, script kiddies and all that crap we have these days... ok this is a bit extreme but I'm sure you all get the idea.
There's one thing I don't get. We are tax payers, the people we elect are law-makers, they are paid to find solutions to common problems. They love passing laws. But WHY do they always have to go against the population and not work with them?
Get this: name me 10 subject that would get 99% approval among the population? heck even TAX CUT wouldn't get 99% because some people would be affraid of the system collapsing, etc etc... but SPAM? come on... if it's not 99% it's going to be 99.9%.
My question is: Why is the system so slow about it? why am I being spammed at a rate of 80 messages a day (including 20 that passes the "HIGH" setting in my hotmail account) I mean if I get spammed, I am sure senate representatives are getting spammed like hell too, I am sure it costs microsoft a LOT in bandwidth and storage and all to keep up with spam on their service (if they have a million of users that are like me receiving 20 spam for 1 valid email (and I am not joking) their system is totally wasted for nothing.
Why so much tolerance? why not blocking every higher class where the biggest spam machines comes from? the hell with the valid users; if they are cutted out, they will do something other than reading about it and sitting there, switch ISP or if it's another country with only one wire well they will do pressure to the higher instances to get their connection back. My way might be drastic, but I am FED UP with it, I've been waiting for 3 years for this problem to get solved and it's just getting worse.
It's like... remember like 5-10 years ago when you could post on usenet without getting any trouble? the worst thing that could happen to you was someone using flash.c against you?
We are barely starting to see something happening, but it's not by destroying the spam of ONE guy that you will scare the others off, this is going to get out of hands even worse, they will see how the legal system is bloated and exploit every single holes in it if they have to.
The system seems to protect the megacorporation more than little guys like you and me, but in this case, it would help BOTH sides, so why is it taking so long? cut asia off for a day, heck, DO SOMETHING. Ideas? heck , these guys are payed over twice my salary to come up with creative ideas, why don't they do their jobs and save me from taking the laws in my own hands?
Starwars is that kind of movies that geeks and non-geeks can enjoy. So it makes a good excuse for a mini-social event.
:)
In my case, all the company is going at the same time (well those who are interrested) ( 20, people, easy to organize), it makes a social event, it reservces me the seat to the back of mine so that way if it's someone that I already know that is going to kick in my chair, I'll have full authority to choke him in his popcorn without fearing that the next 10 other people next to him are his street friends and are going to wait for me outside after the movie
False.
3WARE 7850 IDE RAID CONTROLLER.
8 channels ATA/100
48Bits LBA support
64Bits/66MHZ PCI
Linux/Windows drivers
Good Raid5 results when you use the 7850 and not the 7810 (2MB cache extra on the 7850).
This my friend, is the cream of what you can get with IDE, and I use this with 8 maxtor drives for a non-critical datacenter (temporary rendered images). IDE drives are a bit less reliable than SCSI drives, that's why I built an array with ventilated cases (they run for 20$ each these days). You make that raid 5, in case one breaks, and off you go, it costed me a bit over 1/3 of the price of a comparable SCSI solution.
Bandwidth? PCI64bits/66mhz = theorical 528MB/sec peak bandwidth. The storage switch itself is very well optimized, but it also depends on the drives themselves, of course in my case storage was more important that the overall speed, so adding maxtor 160GB drives (5400rpm) won't be as efficient as using the Western Digital 120GB drives 7200rpm that have 8MB cache on them (this must be a killer drive with that raid card, I'd love to try this one day).
only 2?
:).
Heck, I'm waiting for my Service pack 3 for win2k to apply the 14 pages of hotfix and security patch automatically to my newer systems without having to reload the windowsupdate/rebooting 3 times (explorer 5.5sp2, reboot, security roolup jan 2002, reboot and finally the critical, and that doesn't include post-sp2 hotfixes that aren't "critical").
No wonder I am considering FreeBSD for my email server, yeah it'll need maintenance and security, yes I hate the overhead and everything is so much simpler in windows, that I have to give it to microsoft, but GOD, I don't want to reboot a zillion time after applying patches every week, heck, I don't want to apply patches every week
Why downloading a overbloated system that kills CPU usage and hogs down the system (on PC that is) like media player 7 and above does, if you could have it in a tightly optimized and efficient distributed way? I say: go macromedia.
Flash is everywhere, like it or not, and they do a good job at porting the plugin to a lot of platforms (even if it's not EVERYWHERE yet) Like it or not, if you surf the web a lot, you hit flash content, the plugin is small, you don't need a 5MB download and install and useless clugging down just to view one file once in a while.
Most of the people on windows are downloading quicktime to almost exclusively view movies encoded with that sorenson coded, mainly because most of all of the other codecs supplied by apple sucks (exept the dv).
I mean, most of them are about the quality of microsoft AVI RLE encoding (aside from the mjpeg and mpeg and dv and anythign high bandwidth that isn't impressive over the net). I do a lot of video editing, I did codec research and analysis a few years ago, made codec-buster files and evaluated most of them with their strong and weak points, if apple would want quicktime to take off and become useful on something other than a Mac, they would have to bring in big guns. Sorenson is nice but it's not even close to DIVX in quality and performance (try playing a quicktime movie at 1280x960 for example, and feel the jerking and all). Why download a 20megs movie preview if you can fit it in 5 megs with about the same quality? that's an extra 4:1 compression (I'm talking roughly here and not considering the time of encoding and all).
Usually if I want to distribute a movie on PC with the maximum quality at lowest bitrate possible, I think DIVX. If I want to distribute cross-platform, with no hassles, MPEG comes to mind. there are VERY good mpeg encoders and if you know what you are doing and how mpeg works, you can output VERY nice results taking minimal bandwidth and competing directly with realvideo (well for anything above 80x80 like most people like encoding in RV). The BIG problem with mpeg movies, is the people encoding them. They hack a cable signal to their tv tuner and encode without knowing what an I-frame is and where they could cut off or optimize the bandwidth usage. The result? most mpeg movies on the net sucks and gives a bad name to mpeg.
I think most people that have basic video codec knowledge here aren't impressed by sorenson, especially when leeching a 20+ meg movie trailer for the resolution it gives, at these file size we're used to double of that resolution with about the same quality when using PC codecs like mpeg-4 based.
Yeah quicktime 6 will have mpeg-4 I know, good for them, but too late, DIVX got the crown there, plus it's EFFICIENT, I can watch HDTV video on my athlon with that beast.
When we were young, we wished we could have all the high-tech toys, and when we would see a report or something on TV, it always seemed light-years away technologies.
:) ). Today, you have LCD etch a sketch, toy PDAs, video games that makes me shy about drooling over a VIC-20 when I was 8 or 10, etc...
:) And I am quite sure I'll see this in my lifetime.
Today kids, you have it SO good, you don't even WISH you had higher-tech toys like we wished back then. I remember having GiJoes and saying "why don't they talk, what the F* am I supposed to do with a plastic thing that has a hard time bending, what if I put a wire attached to a battery in the back where there's a screw " (gosh I'm only 26 and I talk like 50, I imagine their pain
Even later, I had an amiga, I wanted to do serious 3D, I was stucked with a 680x0 processor because I couldn't afford bigger, alpha, etc... at that time only if you had a load of money, you could afford to play with video editing, animating, etc... today, the crappiest PC at 500$ litteraly KILLS my best machine for 3d not even 10 years ago, by a factor of over 100!. Heck get a MSI 6378, a duron 1Ghz and 256 mb of ram, costs you nothing, you can cascade them, and awhh I'll stop here you get the drill...
So all this to say, I'm still happy to see that the millitary is playing with the toys in our backyard. Yes they have the budget to parallel massive amount of processors, 3d chips, and they still have a lot of high-tech toys that we couldn't afford to own, but the margin is WAY thinner than it used to be, at least now I am not wishing as bad as I used to, I got enough toys to satisfy my spare time.
Of course, I am Human and fundamentally more is never enough... I still wish I would have interactive raytracing/caustics/global illumination at 1600s1200x30fps but at least now I can DO these images in minutes instead of weeks
Just when I bought a batch of copied tapes for a small fortunes, I see DVD that are released... dang...
:)
:) (gun, lights, buzzer :) ) Megatron kept breaking up at the rotation axis of the gun (who got one that isn't slacked or glued?) but overall they were VERY educative toys (remember building omega supreme as a kid the first time?) and very durable (with a few exeptions). Too bad today the tv series of the newer generation totally suck and the toys as well.
I should do that with all the shows that I loved when I was young, lucky how I am they would probably all come out in DVD... of course if I expect that... oh forget about it
But seriously, transformers the 1st and second generation were really cool, as I kid I really loved playing with these toys, Soundwave was the coolest robot in the show and shockwave was one the coolest toy
If they can release the full G1 and G2 original in DVD I'll buy them all.
What's going on above them, usually they are the last to know about changes or marketting decisions, yes they are to blame as a group for not having the initiative to better this situation, but then again, some companies will fire people "telling the truth" because they simply don't want to hear it.
There's also the fact that tech support is perceived like a receptionnist, Executives point of view: We need them, but they aren't "valuable assets". So who, that is competent enough and knows his stuff very well (and wants to help) will settle for a low-pay and crappy condition job with no gratification?
Usually they take some interns or people that just finished school to do this, Most of these people don't have real job experience and they take 3 months to a year or two to realize that they have a crappy job. Most that stays are doing so because they don't know better, but the real competent people soon realize that they can do better, have better conditions, job and pay. Executives don't acknoledge that and they loose all their competent people (minus one or two that will be kept as group leader or trainers and will get ok conditions). And by the time the employee knows his stuff very well and knows how to answer most problems and get the "feeling" of the problem and not just looking up questions/answers sheets, they switch jobs because of what I just mentionned before, so basically they have a high cycle rate and almost no knowledge from the start.
To sum it up: You get what you pay for.
And to answer the question, one place you get very good support and tools is with National Instrument. I use their labview software and the tech support are knowledgable staff with CS degree or similar. Why are they doing this? I have no clue, but at least these people knows their stuff.
The person using the flawed application?
:) ) and there's one thing seriously pissing me off from Microsoft, not as a Linux zealot (I hate linux at it's current state to be honnest) but as a customer who bought for almost 6 digits of microsoft software. They put so much on marketting, they put so much on presentation, they put so much in finding new ways of doing stuff, or clever ways to steal^H^H^H^H^H Implement existing ideas, but GOD I *HATE* it when I see them claiming their OS is the most secure, GOD I HATE it when they say it's more reliable than any competitor OS, I hate it when there's a bug and I think it's me who is the problem and I find out it's an OS bug (but that I can live with it). All this to say: If a vendor claims that his OS/Software suite/product is more secure for marketting purposes, it SHOULD AUTOMATICALLY MAKE HIM RESPONSIBLE FOR *ANY* UNEXPECTED ARISING SECURITY ISSUES, ESPECIALLY THE MAJOR ONES.
the person creating the flawed application?
Follow me on this.
there are both sides for this, some people MIGHT want a less secure software (thus, a bit more rushed, thus less expensive) because of his specific application, why would his customers that don't request the features absorb the costs?
We could discuss this point and give out gray areas, and it could make an interresting debate, but It's 1am and I'll limit this to something plain and simple and this is no microsoft bashing karma whoring since I already topped the 50 limit,
Here goes: If you want the companies to be responsible for security flaws in their software, you have to first see if they do any misleading claims. Guess who comes to mind first? yes.. Microsoft. I don't run unix servers at work yet, I am exploring putting my email server on FreeBSD with postfix (which is kinda bitchy for a win2k guy that lost his unix/amiga side a long time ago
Look at how nimda killed most servers and workstations running IIS, look at the freakin time it took for this bastard to get off the net? even MONTHS later I still had port 80 probbing on my machine for god's sake, how many high-speed provider shutted down incoming traffic on port 80? this was due to one serious SECURITY flaw and costed a lot of downtime and unexepected expenses.
Yes there are stupid admins that don't update their machines often. But let's be honnest here, how many update do you need for major flaws on IIS versus Apache for example? I run IIS as an intranet, so I can "forget to update", but if I'd run it on internet for example, how many updates a month would I have to do compared to apache? a LOT more, I read both security lists out of curiosity, and the feeling I had about this was absolutely true. Too bad Apache doesn't have a IIS front-end and ease of use on win2k because I'm sure IIS would take an even bigger drop. I guess microsoft will do something really good with IIS6 because they are probably feeling the heat right now.
Anyways, this is the reason why I will NEVER run my critical services such as DNS server or EMAIL on microsoft software (I use the ISP's for now, considering moving locally) they rush their things out, and fix later, which is totally unacceptable, and forcing to upgrade your browser instead of patching the bugs, and introducing new ones, etc... this is really becomming a serious issue, I wouldn't mind all this if they would at LEAST be honnest about this, but no, they want to go the PR way and bullshit people about security compared to unix system? come on, I have yet to see a nimda breaking loose on unix servers (this is only one example, let's not talk about melissa or any others).
There aren't only negative sides to Microsoft software, windows 2000 is the best OS I've ever used since my amiga, it has it's downsides, amiga has it's downsides too so nothing is perfect, Win2k server is great for small buisness like mine and it's stable enough to do the job and I find IIS great for running my intranet. Well IIS would probably be the only software I'd expose out to the internet (if it was a non-critical server), because it's simple, easy to manage, permissions sets up pretty simply (for those of us who hate text files), but like a lot of people here, even if I find most microsoft software simple and Ok, I'd NEVER build a mission-critical solution on their product, I'd never run a "ebay" on IIS, I'd never be a ISP and running my DNS services on win2k, some do, and some don't have much problems, but when they do have them, they can tell you what hell looks like.
So all this to say: If you want to sell stuff with no responsibilities attached to it because the people don't ask you for it or simply because of budget constraint, you can still be succesful and fill a need, but if you LIE about it, in my book, you diserve to be punished, and severely. If you'd be turning blue and a doctor would tell you "it's nothing, just take two aspirins" and you'd die a few hours later, he'd get his career kissed goodbye, while buisness isn't necessarely life, you can messup a LOT of lifes if your buisness go down because you miss a demo or your 20 programmers are down for 2 days because of a big virus attack and you need to rebuild all the servers and so on, I'm sure there's probably one example from a slashdot reader that could say he missed a demo and financing because of a stupid issue like this (well this might be a bit stretched but you get the point), what about the life of those employees? What about the total cost of all this downtime in the country?
Microsoft is quick to blaim piracy costing BILLION of $$$, but they are quick also to change subject when we ask them how much THEY are costing to the industry because of downtime or upgrade or patching. Again, I am not against Microsoft because I think they are still doing great product, I am against their ATTITUDE towards the industry and all the false (or at least exagerated) claims they are making, if I'd do 1/2 of this as a small buisness, I would kiss my career goodbye, why would US's Icon be allowed to do this blattanly?
You have all these cards grabbing video at crazy datarates... for 100-200$ (like that MSI geforce3 ti 200 board that I've bought that has svhs in and captures uncompressed), I remember not so long ago when getting a capture system that was doing MJPEG at 1 meg a second (DPS PVR) was costing 20 times that price and the quality was a fraction (not to say, this was the "high end" of what was available on personnal computers).
:)
:)
Today you have a tv tuner, computers fast enough to handle realtime compression of full NTSC@30FPS signal with minimal loss in quality, drives that don't need to be A/V-rated (remember that 7,000$ 4GB baracuda for the flyer?), Bandwidth and storage beyond beleif... god.. some of you here will understand the feeling when I say that the younger crowd here probably didn't have to mess or invest in those expensive equipment, and will never appreciate newer technologies and pricing as much as we do
Anyways, sorry for this little incursion, I think I'll go plug my vidi-24RT back in my amiga 1200
It's already cool to see AMD having their 64bits supported in the next windows, I understand why they are acting like this. While it's not good from a purist's point of view... buisness is buisness and they did do a major strike to get microsoft to not only support Intel like everyone thought they would at first.
I live in montreal, It always amazes me when people from US thinks in Canada "we are less free", I mean, the only biggest difference I've seen in the "free" arena is you guys can own and carry guns (which I find decent since the people who commit gun murder here don't get their guns legitimately in the first place anyways!). Aside from that, the impression that the US gives is that they are clamping your life to an embarrassing extent, all these DMCA, MPAA, RIAA, civil rights cases and horror stories, we don't hear that much comming from Canada. If our Gov. would back up big companies like that to the extent that it affects us as consumers and we have the last word, they'd be facing a massive revolt. US seems to pass these laws at just the correct rate so people don't notice they are getting screwed off, but slashing in what their ancestor fought to get. And they pay more attention to the "liberty" in other countries and saying how good US is, than preserving their own :). That's the other side's impression.
:) ).
:), either way, things like that slowly degrades the value of patents in the united states, and affects the credibility of the whole system, and at the same time, the legitimacy of decent applications.
There was once in my life that I considered moving to the States, but would I go today with everything happening?, I don't know I couldn't answer this question unless I would have something in front of me. (Canada has it's bad points too, like over-taxing to name one, the only thing you're not taxed for yet is breathing and having sex (oh, mark that last one off, 15% tax (gst, pst) on condoms or pills
About the patent cases, here the thing I know is you have to do very (VERY) good paperwork to get your pattent in, it's not just a matter of filling a 1 page form and sending it to the patent office. I don't know about the process in the US, but either some people are really making a point by releasing stupid patents because the system is flawed and too lame, or they are really good at writing their patent application, and you need to back up a bit and re-read it to notice exactly what it means
It's all about the card, cheap cards will perform terrible, like I posted a bit lower, the Dlink cards are TERRIBLE, but if you give a shot to an Intel Pro 1000T, these are the best cards on the market for gigabit ethernet over copper. 3Com is also good, but with my dlink cards I was getting HALF the bandwidth that I would get with my pro1000T.