Sourceforge drivers (aureal.sourceforge.net) *do* work (I was one of the developers at the time), but are just a hack over some mess of binaries released by aureal just before it died. They are very limited, but pretty stable (and hardware mixing works very well). The best shot these days are the vortex ALSA drivers for 2.6.x, I am using them for a month on my gaming box, and wow, every feature of the card is supported (except perhaps the wavetable, not sure, never used MIDI under linux besides timidity++). I had only one problem with this drivers, was playing UrT and the sound disappeared and I needed to rmmod/modprobe the driver again. Just once.
I hope never... I love to get my dayly dosis of.scr trojans, spam and things alike. It's called FREEDOM, people... I want my FREEDOM to receive as much trojans as I want. If they start filtering screensavers, whats next? porn? 'political' e-mail? bleh.
Unfortunately, Lula government is fucked up in the head. In some aspects they are great (fighting poverty, fighting hunger, promoting OSS, aiming for economic independence, etc). But they have a nasty flaw, their stupid tax policy.
Since their government started all they did in this are is to increase the already ridiculously high taxes on companies (even small ones), they are trying to force everybody that works as a company to work as hired help (thus dramatically increasing taxation), they are trying to tax the INPS thing on the raw income of the companies instead of the payroll... yuck.
It is unfortunate that they, after all the years of experience are still rabid anti-enterprise and anti-rich sindicalist motherfuckers. They are doing NOTHING to address the country's biggest problem which is, surprinsingly, the government itself, full of currupt fucks and money deviation. Instead, all they do is to try to get more money to the govt, which will probably end in some politician's pockets.
And it is amazing that they never learned that in this country, more taxes just means more tax-evasion (which is utterly absurd already). Tax reasonably and go after tax-evaders, and the income will syrocket without the need to destroy the economy like they currently do. I'm seriously thinking of moving outta here because I'm so pissed about this tax thing, which sucks, because this country is beautiful.
Dude, it's shiteasy to hack a locked phone and unlock it. PPL sell this service on the ebays of life for almost nothing, so every average joe can unlock their phones.
The only thing that binds you to the carrier is the usual 1-yr contract that you need to sign to get the phone for dirt-cheap, not the fact that the phone is "locked". And even then, the cost of breaking the contract is often less than you got discounted on the phone...
The same thing will probably happen with this "new subscription computers". People will buy then, tell mcNealy to fuck himself, hack the thing and install linux or bsd or whatever on them. It happens even on the crappy x-boxes...
No it is not. It may be a "microkernel in design" as you say, but it is not "microkernel in implementation". If it was a real microkernel, some random shitty soundcard driver would not be able to crash the entire OS, like it usually happens. And of course it would not have the video/audio/3d performance it has today. True microkernel == too much context switching, which is a show-stopper (at least in x86)
To be 100% fair, it never was a microkernel anyway. But in the 3.x days the NT kernel was small enough to pass as a microkernel (falsely, eh, based on the sheer size/complexity alone). But GUI performance sucked, and had some issues (regular users being unable to change the desktop resolution due to the lack of priviledges comes to mind), and since windows is all about the GUI, they decided to put the GUI (and a lot of other drivers too) in kernelspace. So, now it is not a microkernel, and the kernel is not small anymore.
Windoz had a microkernel in the NT 3.51 days. It is way far from a microkernel today. There are some info about this on the NT 4 resource kit documentation.
Hmm I may be totally wrong here, but ain't this NO EXECUTE thing a responsibility of the operating system?!? Why implement this at the hardware level, besides "making windows more secure"?
"If I have an apple and you have an apple, and we exchange them, now each one of us have one apple; If I have an idea and you have an idea, and we exchange them , now each one of us have two ideas!"
Dude, one gets tired of hearing this BS about "Billions of Dollars Worth of Damages". This is utter crap. I say fuck these companies, fuck the users who got their boxes busted. Viruses, worms and the like are all part of the "Microsoft Experience", if not part of the whole "Computer Experience". If you are serious about using computers as a vital part of your business and don't want to get screwed by a random 18 year old german guy, you must:
1) have a decent hardware/software/network infrastructure (and NO, NO DECENT FUCKING INFRASTRUCUTRE have MicroSoft software in it, nor has peee-cees that the user can fiddle with, like Bill Gates wants us to have) Think old maiframe nets. Those were insanely secure, but expensive. But with todays tech it is possible to build a similar infrastructure for dirt cheap;
2) have COMPETENT people (not MSCE-like our LSB-Cert-Like drones) to admininister said infrastructure.
Every time someone brings this point up I say : A good computing infrastructure is one whose users have NO privileged access to their stations (actually, they have no "personal stations", everything is in central servers, the stations are more like dumb terminals), the allowed software is the bare mininum people need to do their work (eg, no video/audio codecs for the secretary, just word processor and maybe a spreadsheet), disk quotas, tight control on the users profiles, etc. This nazi setup is what we used to have in the early Mainframe and UNIX days, and it worked. I bet serious guys still use these.
Well, what I think is probably wrong, because every friggin company I worked implemented exactly the opposite... Following advice from MS reps, everything became a bunch of pee-cees with windows, whose users had administrative privileges to install whatever they wanted on them, and later became a mix of half-assed-secure (NT, 2k, XP) and insecure (95, 98) boxes... a total mess... I must be really dumb for not understanding the "One Microsoft Way".
Well if anyone is interested, there are ways to setup a mainframe-like environment using nothing but free software (linux on the terminals, linux or BSD on the central servers, OpenOffice, PostgreSQL, maybe Mozilla) some custom software that can be written in Wx... In the end you will need a staff of 2-3 people to manage a network of hundreds of computers/users ] (not counting hardware probs,those scale badly with the number of boxes).
too true, but not anymore... the guys at SRF seemed to come to their senses and released a java version of the proggie this year (IRPF2004). Runs on OsX, Solaris, Linux, anywhere that the sun JDK runs. Used it this year and it is very nice. Check it in 2005.
I *would* agree with ya in a perfect world. But in our real world there are dialup user, free/anonymous ISPs over dialup, sometimes BIG corporate nets may get infected, and they do not have an 'ISP', instead they have some fat pipes going out, so no luck enforcing some TOS... etc etc.
I used to be a nasty pirate myself, until I saw the light. MS enforcing their 'rights' can only be a good thing, since it will shy people (at least people from poor countres) away form their products, thus making the internet safer. But for now it is simply wiser to give updates to the pirates.
as long as your taxes return to you as benefits (like it seems to happen there), fine.
Here we have very high taxes, very high tax-evasion (of course), very-high stealing of public (haha) money, and almost ZERO returns to us as benefits... Makes you feel a clown when you pay taxes here. (Brazil)
(and don't bother replying that noone cares about what happens in third-world shitholes, we all know that noone cares... let me rant in peace, will ya?;-)
1) Because they were already forced to pay for windows (MS tax), and it works, why bother? 2) Because they got their computers with pirated windows preinstalled, and it just works (pretty comon here); 3) Because they are too stupid to install an OS, be it Linux or Windows or whatever else and just use whatever was given to them.
People that download and replaced windows with usually:
1) Got pissed at windoze because of viruses and ativiruses that make the system run dog-slow; 2) Lost critical data to FAT/NTFS failures and got pissed off; 3) Got pissed at the braindead win32 API and seeked alternatives; 4)...
Can you see a potential difference in numbers in both cases?
Slashdot Mirror
Sourceforge drivers (aureal.sourceforge.net) *do* work (I was one of the developers at the time), but are just a hack over some mess of binaries released by aureal just before it died. They are very limited, but pretty stable (and hardware mixing works very well).
The best shot these days are the vortex ALSA drivers for 2.6.x, I am using them for a month on my gaming box, and wow, every feature of the card is supported (except perhaps the wavetable, not sure, never used MIDI under linux besides timidity++). I had only one problem with this drivers, was playing UrT and the sound disappeared and I needed to rmmod/modprobe the driver again. Just once.
cheers.
no shit! I was sure NT was a VMS knock-off...
aureal vortex2 sound cards... had to do a bunch of hacks to get it going on win2k, and performance is far from stellar...
Incredible, but vortex2 works better now on linux than windows... gotta love open-source-hackers...
cheers.
looks sweet... does anyone know if there is something similar for KDE?
cheers.
remove the binary perhaps? worked for me on nautilus.
Nevermind, you were probably unborn when this show was on air. ;-)
Damn I'm getting old.
I hope never... .scr trojans, spam and things alike. It's called FREEDOM, people... I want my FREEDOM to receive as much trojans as I want. If they start filtering screensavers, whats next? porn? 'political' e-mail? bleh.
I love to get my dayly dosis of
cheers.
Uh? I don't get it... the fact that corruption is rampant is actually a PLUS for M$... they surely have the money to buy a bunch of judges.
cheers.
Unfortunately, Lula government is fucked up in the head. In some aspects they are great (fighting poverty, fighting hunger, promoting OSS, aiming for economic independence, etc). But they have a nasty flaw, their stupid tax policy.
Since their government started all they did in this are is to increase the already ridiculously high taxes on companies (even small ones), they are trying to force everybody that works as a company to work as hired help (thus dramatically increasing taxation), they are trying to tax the INPS thing on the raw income of the companies instead of the payroll... yuck.
It is unfortunate that they, after all the years of experience are still rabid anti-enterprise and anti-rich sindicalist motherfuckers. They are doing NOTHING to address the country's biggest problem which is, surprinsingly, the government itself, full of currupt fucks and money deviation. Instead, all they do is to try to get more money to the govt, which will probably end in some politician's pockets.
And it is amazing that they never learned that in this country, more taxes just means more tax-evasion (which is utterly absurd already). Tax reasonably and go after tax-evaders, and the income will syrocket without the need to destroy the economy like they currently do. I'm seriously thinking of moving outta here because I'm so pissed about this tax thing, which sucks, because this country is beautiful.
cheers.
Dude, it's shiteasy to hack a locked phone and unlock it. PPL sell this service on the ebays of life for almost nothing, so every average joe can unlock their phones.
The only thing that binds you to the carrier is the usual 1-yr contract that you need to sign to get the phone for dirt-cheap, not the fact that the phone is "locked". And even then, the cost of breaking the contract is often less than you got discounted on the phone...
The same thing will probably happen with this "new subscription computers". People will buy then, tell mcNealy to fuck himself, hack the thing and install linux or bsd or whatever on them. It happens even on the crappy x-boxes...
Peace
No it is not. It may be a "microkernel in design" as you say, but it is not "microkernel in implementation". If it was a real microkernel, some random shitty soundcard driver would not be able to crash the entire OS, like it usually happens. And of course it would not have the video/audio/3d performance it has today. True microkernel == too much context switching, which is a show-stopper (at least in x86)
peace.
To be 100% fair, it never was a microkernel anyway. But in the 3.x days the NT kernel was small enough to pass as a microkernel (falsely, eh, based on the sheer size/complexity alone). But GUI performance sucked, and had some issues (regular users being unable to change the desktop resolution due to the lack of priviledges comes to mind), and since windows is all about the GUI, they decided to put the GUI (and a lot of other drivers too) in kernelspace. So, now it is not a microkernel, and the kernel is not small anymore.
Peace.
but it a'int a microkernel either, eh? (think QNX).
cheers.
Windoz had a microkernel in the NT 3.51 days. It is way far from a microkernel today. There are some info about this on the NT 4 resource kit documentation.
cheers.
Hmm I may be totally wrong here, but ain't this NO EXECUTE thing a responsibility of the operating system?!?
Why implement this at the hardware level, besides "making windows more secure"?
cheers.
LMAO is this for real?!?!?! You are surely joking...
cheers.
Hmmm lemme see if I remember this right:
"If I have an apple and you have an apple, and we exchange them, now each one of us have one apple;
If I have an idea and you have an idea, and we exchange them , now each one of us have two ideas!"
neat, eh?
peace.
Dude, one gets tired of hearing this BS about "Billions of Dollars Worth of Damages". This is utter crap.
I say fuck these companies, fuck the users who got their boxes busted. Viruses, worms and the like are
all part of the "Microsoft Experience", if not part of the whole "Computer Experience". If you are serious
about using computers as a vital part of your business and don't want to get screwed by a random 18 year
old german guy, you must:
1) have a decent hardware/software/network infrastructure (and NO, NO DECENT FUCKING INFRASTRUCUTRE
have MicroSoft software in it, nor has peee-cees that the user can fiddle with, like Bill Gates
wants us to have) Think old maiframe nets. Those were insanely secure, but expensive. But with todays
tech it is possible to build a similar infrastructure for dirt cheap;
2) have COMPETENT people (not MSCE-like our LSB-Cert-Like drones) to admininister said infrastructure.
Every time someone brings this point up I say : A good computing infrastructure is one whose users have
NO privileged access to their stations (actually, they have no "personal stations", everything is in
central servers, the stations are more like dumb terminals), the allowed software is the bare mininum
people need to do their work (eg, no video/audio codecs for the secretary, just word processor and
maybe a spreadsheet), disk quotas, tight control on the users profiles, etc. This nazi setup is what we
used to have in the early Mainframe and UNIX days, and it worked. I bet serious guys still use these.
Well, what I think is probably wrong, because every friggin company I worked implemented exactly the
opposite... Following advice from MS reps, everything became a bunch of pee-cees with windows, whose
users had administrative privileges to install whatever they wanted on them, and later became a mix
of half-assed-secure (NT, 2k, XP) and insecure (95, 98) boxes... a total mess... I must be really
dumb for not understanding the "One Microsoft Way".
Well if anyone is interested, there are ways to setup a mainframe-like environment using nothing
but free software (linux on the terminals, linux or BSD on the central servers, OpenOffice, PostgreSQL,
maybe Mozilla) some custom software that can be written in Wx...
In the end you will need a staff of 2-3 people to manage a network of hundreds of computers/users ]
(not counting hardware probs,those scale badly with the number of boxes).
Darn I say too much. sorry.
cheers.
too true, but not anymore... the guys at SRF seemed to come to their senses and released
a java version of the proggie this year (IRPF2004). Runs on OsX, Solaris, Linux, anywhere
that the sun JDK runs. Used it this year and it is very nice. Check it in 2005.
cheers.
I *would* agree with ya in a perfect world. But in our real world there are dialup user, free/anonymous ISPs over dialup, sometimes BIG corporate nets may get infected, and they do not have an 'ISP', instead they have some fat pipes going out, so no luck enforcing some TOS... etc etc.
I used to be a nasty pirate myself, until I saw the light. MS enforcing their 'rights' can only be a good thing, since it will shy people (at least people from poor countres) away form their products, thus making the internet safer. But for now it is simply wiser to give updates to the pirates.
cheers.
> in fact I wish they would write code that makes illigimate versions of windows to not allow any virus scanner to run
> plus crash randomly.
And how would they differ from the regular versions, anyway?!
cheers.
Yes for desktops, but for laptops it is a no-no.
MS tax is very real.
cheers.
Yeah it does. Sadly, none of the newer laptops come with a decent APM implementation, and most come with no implementation at all (legacy free:-P).
cheers.
as long as your taxes return to you as benefits (like it seems to happen there), fine.
;-)
Here we have very high taxes, very high tax-evasion (of course), very-high stealing of public (haha) money, and almost ZERO returns to us as benefits... Makes you feel a clown when you pay taxes here. (Brazil)
(and don't bother replying that noone cares about what happens in third-world shitholes, we all know that noone cares... let me rant in peace, will ya?
cheers
People still use windows because:
...
1) Because they were already forced to pay for windows (MS tax), and it works, why bother?
2) Because they got their computers with pirated windows preinstalled, and it just works (pretty comon here);
3) Because they are too stupid to install an OS, be it Linux or Windows or whatever else and just use whatever was given to them.
People that download and replaced windows with usually:
1) Got pissed at windoze because of viruses and ativiruses that make the system run dog-slow;
2) Lost critical data to FAT/NTFS failures and got pissed off;
3) Got pissed at the braindead win32 API and seeked alternatives;
4)
Can you see a potential difference in numbers in both cases?
cheers