I agree -- Most people don't notice any difference at all on their PC with harder vs software MPEG decoding. In 95% of the cases, when DVD video is playing, it's the only thing the PC is doing, so the freed-up-CPU really isn't able to do much.
I started out in the DVD world with a DVD-ROM drive but at the time the drivers and software were EXTREMELY unstable and lacking in features. Things have improved quite a lot since then, but it's still very cumbersome to actually watch DVD movies on your PC and get the full benefits of DVD.
Firstly, you don't typically get the video quality. Unless you have a really decent monitor (and a big one), video on a 17" monitor really isn't all that thrilling compared to a modestly larger television screen. Plus, since monitors tend to be so precise when rendering video images, you really experience a lot of interlacing flicker and the MPEG artifacts really show up. On television, these artifacts are typically very well subdued.
Secondly, you don't get the AUDIO quality. I'm sorry but the latest and greatest stereo/subwoofer setup just doesn't REMOTELY compare to a real 5.1 home theater setup. In addition, unless you've got a DVD player/MPEG decoder card with "real" audio outputs, you can't even TRY to take advantage of real sound. You're stuck with crappy stereo, or, if you're lucky, Dolby Prologic. No comparison.
When I want to sit down and watch a movie, I want to watch it on my television while I'm sitting on my couch. These decoder cards tend to have composite video output as well, so this tends to work nicely, but it's still quite cumbersome (and typically slow under Windows) to load and start a movie. Plus you're still limited by the audio capabilities of your PC and card. Most people don't have a remote control that works with their PC either.
I still have my DVD-ROM but I only intend to really use it with DVD data. Last year I bought a high-end DVD player with a built-in DTS decoder and 5.1 and fibre audio outputs. I find this much more convenient to use.
When I want to watch a movie, I want to relax, not fiddle with my PC.
I think an MPEG encoder/decoder would be pretty slick though, still.
Why would this annoy your provider? IP's are IP's. They don't usually care if their customers end up with the same IP address for a long time or are assigned a new one every ten minutes.
Typically IP's are renewed by the OS/DHCP client software continually, so you keep the same IP for the entire time your system is online. When you reboot, however, you're assigned a new one like everyone else. Of course, there's also no reason why the DHCP server can't re-assign you the same IP you had before, but that's something on their end; you can't control that. Linux and Windows (or any other DHCP-capable OS) are pretty much identical in this respect; Linux just keeps its IP addresses longer on average because of its longer uptime. If your provider needs your IP address to change, they'll change it. Your DHCP client *must* check in at regular intervals to renew your IP lease. If your IP is slated to be changed, it will be changed then. Of course there's typically little reason to do this (unless they were renumbering their network).
Generally IP addresses are never changed while your system is online. This would of course result in the dropping of all of your existing network connections. Aside from an IP renumbering party, this has never happened to me on a DHCP network, though I don't have ADSL so I can't say if it's a common occurrence or not...
Since they're both essentially owned by the same company and their tech support is mixed together, swbell shares these features.
I also don't think they bring a Windows laptop just because they like Windows and don't know anything about Linux; it's probably because they're using some proprietary diagnostics software that was written for Windows. Even if the laptop is just a basic working network system (no diagnostic software), it only makes sense for it to be Windows, since the vast majority of their customers will be Windows-based.
You cannot "sniff" packets from your neighbor's cable modem. It's true that the data pipe is shared, but it's a better comparison to liken it to switched ethernet.
With cable modems, your download bandwidth isn't much of a problem. Cable networks were designed to spew out a crapload of digital bandwidth to the end users. Upload bandwidth is another story, and servers, obviously, will use a lot more of that bandwidth than people with normal Internet habits.
This is why cable services tend to have conditions that prohibit cable modem subscribers from running "servers."
No I'm just using an older version of X-Win32 X server under '98. All of my X apps run right alongside my existing Windows apps. It's very seamless and even lets me share the clipboard. VERY useful.
I've even gone some steps further and have the two systems linked together on some more lower levels, thus allowing selected syslog messages to be routed through MS Agent, etc.:) Very slick!
I've come across a lot of people that are proud of their title as an "NT Administrator" or "NT Engineer". It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to get a basic NT system/server set up, manage users, etc. It DOES take a bit of intelligence and planning to set up more complex things like roaming user profiles and some of the more advanced NT things, and I've never met an "NT Administrator" that could perform these tasks.
With UNIX, however (thus Linux), you *have* to be good at what you do, or you simply won't be able to function.
There ends up being a line of minimum education for both NT and Linux, and that line is much lower for NT than for Linux. Think of this as a good (fewer clueless Linux admins than NT admins) or a bad (more expensive/fewer Linux admins than NT admins) thing, however you need to.
You HAVE the education and experience to figure things like this out. I hear stories about how the NT admin for such-and-such company can't fix some e-mail problem, or how so-and-so company is desperately wanting to move to roaming profiles but their NT admin can't figure it out.
I've never met a truly competant NT admin, period.
I've met NT kiddies that know how to set up the NT server to share files, do domain logins, *maybe* even set up personal user directories and the like, but beyond that those NT admins might as well be asked to write a 3D modelling app for UNIX. They just don't know where to begin.
A lot of companies just don't know how to judge an NT person's qualifications (or Unix for that matter) so they end up getting stuck with someone that doesn't know as much as they probably should. It's easy to pretend like you know a lot about NT. It's a bit harder to pretend like you know a lot about Unix (except if you're an IRC script kiddie -- then all the other IRC script kiddies think you're God. Of course, the rest of us know better).
For all I know the company here had the same experiences when they originally moved to Exchange. *shrug*
All I know today is that my work workstation is the most stable Windows-based computer I've ever used. I crash/lockup/reboot at home at least once a week (Win98) and my previous experiences with NT4 and 95 were not pleasant ones.
In addition to the workstations in my group (which all perform just as admirably), our NT-based servers have no trouble at all (none that I've noticed or been notified about).
I don't know HOW they do it (they may do weekly scheduled reboots for all I know), but they DO work, and perform their tasks well.
Of course, our Unix servers work just as well (perhaps better), but we need both platforms because we have various huge applications that are either Windows- or UNIX-based, so both sets of servers have their own purposes...
I use MS applications like Outlook, Office (Word/Excel mainly) along with Visual Studio to develop C and Java apps on a daily basis. We do a great deal of media work so I have various streaming media players running along with 3 versions of Netscape (and IE of course) and Gecko/ngLayout that I look through regularly.
We have McAfee checking for viruses, various background management apps for keeping applications updated.
I also have the SETI@Home client running (previously I had the distributed.net stuff going).
I DO put this machine through its paces. It's used very heavily every day, and the only time it gets unstable is after 3-4 weeks when various memory/resource leaks start bogging it down.
I think the difference between NT machines here and your normal NT machines is that only *thoroughly* tested applications and system upgrades are applied. Some of these are even tweaked internally beforehand. Things that don't meet standards (like Active Desktop, Outlook98 and IE5 (though I have both of the latter installed anyway)) simply are not permitted to be installed. At first I thought this was pretty weird, not letting people install system upgrades on their own, etc., but it didn't take long for me to realize that this kind of stability was the result. It's worth it.
Re:Where the hell is the moders?
on
LinuxExpo Report
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· Score: 1
Most moderators have only a few moderator points with which to moderate. If you had set your threshold to -1 you would have seen quite a few more of those duplicates that *were* moderated. Have patience.
When I say I reboot less than once a month, this is my *workstation* I'm talking about.
I have never noticed ANY service outage at all due to a crash or failure of any of our NT servers. We have periods of maintenance, but those are always off-hours and the only time that maintenance has ever gone awry was due to an OS upgrade and improper backups on one of our *UNIX* workstations.
I say this only because I'm trying to point out that NT *can* be deployed successfully *if* you hire competant people.
Never hire a Unix guy to manage your NT systems. Never hire an NT guy to manage your Unix systems.
A lot of big corporations tend to insist upon making all of their systems homogenous. This has quite a few drawbacks, obviously.
The corporation I work for blends the two mainstream operating system classes nicely. For our workhorse applications such as databases, most of our web servers, etc., we use UNIX variants.
All of our desktop systems (and some of our production servers, like for e-mail and some web) are NT4.0. I see quite a few people posting comments that say their NT installations crash *hourly* or at least once a day. No offense intended, but this is more of an indication of poor NT administration than anything else. Our computer support group is responsible for all of our major software packages, service pack updates, etc. This allows them to test everything thoroughly on all of the hardware known to be used by us. The result is a fleet of NT workstations that are nearly as stable as my Linux box at home. I'm not saying they're 100% stable, but I rarely even *log out* of NT but perhaps once every couple of weeks. I've rebooted my workstation *maybe* a dozen times in the year and a half that I've been here.
So, you have two choices. You can train/hire competant Unix people to manage your Unix systems, or you can train/hire competant NT people to manage your NT systems. Reading some of these comments, it sounds like some of you are doing neither.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying NT is superior to Unix in the least, but as far as application support and the fact that most of my work is done for clients using Windows, I need to use it as part of my job.
At home, I own two PC's. One running Linux (without monitor/keyboard) and the other running Win98 along with an X server for my Linux apps. IMO this is an excellent compromise and allows me to take advantage of strengths inherent in both operating systems.
Of course, I still have to reboot Win98 pretty frequently (though usually no more than once or twice a week).
The point is, I do this because I work most productively having access to both operating systems simultaneously. Some people may work in environments where a Unix OS will suffice perfectly, and make them more productive than if they were using Windows. However, there are environments where using Windows IS the best option, because that's what they need to work most productively. It's fairly difficult to develop ActiveX under Unix, for example.
??? It sounded to me like he pretty much knew exactly what he was doing. I myself remember the days when Netscape under Linux used to crash more often than Win95.
When someone offers the completely valid opinion that existing GUI systems are (FOR THE THINGS HE USES THEM FOR) superior to their under-development Linux counterparts, it might be polite to point out some of the strengths of Linux GUI's, but your "good, go away" attitude does nothing but make the "Linux Crowd" look childish. Try to be a bit more mature when someone criticizes something you seem to value so greatly.
A year ago, the GUI end of Linux wasn't nearly as mature as existing operating systems (some might argue that this is still the case). Combine that with the fact that I do a great deal of Windows-centric development at work.
I currently own two PC's at home. One is running Win98, all of the MS office suites, development platforms, Adobe graphics programs, etc., and one X server. The other is running the latest and greatest Linux distribution without a monitor or keyboard. All of my applications are run via X under Win98.
IMO, this is the best of both worlds.
As I've always tried to say, and someone else mentioned this in another comment, it's all about using what makes you more productive. If you can't afford a second system or the time/resources for something like VMware, you'll need to choose a single operating system. If you can honestly say you're more productive under Linux doing Windows-centric work, fine, all the power to you. For those that are much more productive using Windows for similar work, the logical operating system choice would be Windows. If you can afford it (in time and money), a second system (or even VMware) allowing you to run more than one operating system simultaneously might offer you the best productivity.
It's all about YOU using whatever makes YOU most productive. In most cases, you cannot make that decision for someone else. You need to drop that attitude entirely and wake up to the real world.
I just wonder what sort of continuous data stream we'd send them over the course of 50 years... (and vice-versa).
I can just picture their transmission after we've been sending them stuff for 50 years sounding like, "Look, we KNOW ENGLISH already, and can't you send anything faster than that? Great, I guess we have 50 years of this to look forward to."
If you're wearing a contact lens designed to obscure the iris, naturally, iris recognition systems will fail to recognize your iris.
I doubt that this will be the only way to retrieve funds from your local ATM, however. There surely will be backup methods (like your traditional ATM card + PIN).
If you experience some sort of permanent or semi-permanent change, you'd probably want to make a quick visit to your bank to refresh that biometric data.
Though, like the other poster mentioned, iris scanning probably won't be the only way you can access your funds from an ATM.
Banks don't routinely give out things like your PIN, do they? I dunno, in MY bank, nobody even has access to that information. There ARE secure ways of storing things like this.
It's also quite possible that a PIN will still be required to make a withdrawal. (Though I suppose if they've found some way to get at ultra-secure information like your iris image from the bank, they could get your PIN too, but I've never in my life heard of a single case where a PIN was retrieved from a bank...)
Banks already track your ATM movements using your ATM card and PIN. This doesn't make one iota of difference as far as the banks knowing where you are (or were). Chill out...
The only possible "privacy" concern I can think of is having an image of your iris available to your bank, which is personally something I could care less about, but some of the more paranoid on slashdot have loudly pointed this out.
With source code, the packet kiddies will find some way to crash the servers or forge "I found it!" messages and generally cause mischief, much like what happened with Distributed.net and (esp.) it's ancestor at GenX.net.
It's pretty sad that people deliberately find ways to *prevent* progress like this, but it happens.
I sincerely doubt we'll find much anything several million light years away, especially given that our own galaxy is some 100,000 light years across. If you had read anything at all about the project (which it appears you haven't), you'd know that our radio receivers are pretty much capable of receiving most terrestrial-strength radio signals only in the better part of our galaxy.
In all likelyhood, if our galaxy is indeed teeming with life, the signals we receive will originate a bit closer, on the order of a few tens of light years, perhaps a bit further.
At that distance, one or two two-way messages could be sent and received in my lifetime.
What's this about our physicists? What makes you think we CAN invent some sort of faster-than-light communication? Stop putting people down because they can't accomplish the impossible or don't know how to approach the extremely improbable. Why don't you go invent it if you know it can be done and how?
If you think this whole SETI thing is a bunch of crap, fine, just don't run the program! Remember, we're all volunteering our CPU cycles for distributed tasks like these. I personally think it's worth it.
Firstly, the government isn't involved, even indirectly. This is all donation-funded volunteer work. SETI doesn't get crap from the government.
Secondly, you shouldn't automatically distrust all closed-source software simply because most people can't really tell you for certain what it does. You should distrust software you get from untrustworthy people, sure. If you go through this whole procedure of locking down the program using setroot/restricted shell/etc for EVERY closed-source app you run, well, I just feel sorry for you.
That's a whole lotta work for a practically non-existent risk. I've never had a virus on my Windows computers and I've never accidentally run any silly trojans under Unix. Nobody I know has either, and I run closed-source, proprietary apps quite frequently (under both OS's).
There IS a point where founded caution becomes silly paranoia, and in my opinion, this crosses it.
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I agree -- Most people don't notice any difference at all on their PC with harder vs software MPEG decoding. In 95% of the cases, when DVD video is playing, it's the only thing the PC is doing, so the freed-up-CPU really isn't able to do much.
I started out in the DVD world with a DVD-ROM drive but at the time the drivers and software were EXTREMELY unstable and lacking in features. Things have improved quite a lot since then, but it's still very cumbersome to actually watch DVD movies on your PC and get the full benefits of DVD.
Firstly, you don't typically get the video quality. Unless you have a really decent monitor (and a big one), video on a 17" monitor really isn't all that thrilling compared to a modestly larger television screen. Plus, since monitors tend to be so precise when rendering video images, you really experience a lot of interlacing flicker and the MPEG artifacts really show up. On television, these artifacts are typically very well subdued.
Secondly, you don't get the AUDIO quality. I'm sorry but the latest and greatest stereo/subwoofer setup just doesn't REMOTELY compare to a real 5.1 home theater setup. In addition, unless you've got a DVD player/MPEG decoder card with "real" audio outputs, you can't even TRY to take advantage of real sound. You're stuck with crappy stereo, or, if you're lucky, Dolby Prologic. No comparison.
When I want to sit down and watch a movie, I want to watch it on my television while I'm sitting on my couch. These decoder cards tend to have composite video output as well, so this tends to work nicely, but it's still quite cumbersome (and typically slow under Windows) to load and start a movie. Plus you're still limited by the audio capabilities of your PC and card. Most people don't have a remote control that works with their PC either.
I still have my DVD-ROM but I only intend to really use it with DVD data. Last year I bought a high-end DVD player with a built-in DTS decoder and 5.1 and fibre audio outputs. I find this much more convenient to use.
When I want to watch a movie, I want to relax, not fiddle with my PC.
I think an MPEG encoder/decoder would be pretty slick though, still.
Why would this annoy your provider? IP's are IP's. They don't usually care if their customers end up with the same IP address for a long time or are assigned a new one every ten minutes.
Typically IP's are renewed by the OS/DHCP client software continually, so you keep the same IP for the entire time your system is online. When you reboot, however, you're assigned a new one like everyone else. Of course, there's also no reason why the DHCP server can't re-assign you the same IP you had before, but that's something on their end; you can't control that. Linux and Windows (or any other DHCP-capable OS) are pretty much identical in this respect; Linux just keeps its IP addresses longer on average because of its longer uptime. If your provider needs your IP address to change, they'll change it. Your DHCP client *must* check in at regular intervals to renew your IP lease. If your IP is slated to be changed, it will be changed then. Of course there's typically little reason to do this (unless they were renumbering their network).
Generally IP addresses are never changed while your system is online. This would of course result in the dropping of all of your existing network connections. Aside from an IP renumbering party, this has never happened to me on a DHCP network, though I don't have ADSL so I can't say if it's a common occurrence or not...
Since they're both essentially owned by the same company and their tech support is mixed together, swbell shares these features.
I also don't think they bring a Windows laptop just because they like Windows and don't know anything about Linux; it's probably because they're using some proprietary diagnostics software that was written for Windows. Even if the laptop is just a basic working network system (no diagnostic software), it only makes sense for it to be Windows, since the vast majority of their customers will be Windows-based.
You cannot "sniff" packets from your neighbor's cable modem. It's true that the data pipe is shared, but it's a better comparison to liken it to switched ethernet.
With cable modems, your download bandwidth isn't much of a problem. Cable networks were designed to spew out a crapload of digital bandwidth to the end users. Upload bandwidth is another story, and servers, obviously, will use a lot more of that bandwidth than people with normal Internet habits.
This is why cable services tend to have conditions that prohibit cable modem subscribers from running "servers."
Right, but Unix "weenies" are NOT going to be getting jobs as Unix administrators.
You HAVE to be competant to be a Unix admin, but you DON'T have to be very competant to be an NT admin.
No I'm just using an older version of X-Win32 X server under '98. All of my X apps run right alongside my existing Windows apps. It's very seamless and even lets me share the clipboard. VERY useful.
:) Very slick!
I've even gone some steps further and have the two systems linked together on some more lower levels, thus allowing selected syslog messages to be routed through MS Agent, etc.
I've come across a lot of people that are proud of their title as an "NT Administrator" or "NT Engineer". It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to get a basic NT system/server set up, manage users, etc. It DOES take a bit of intelligence and planning to set up more complex things like roaming user profiles and some of the more advanced NT things, and I've never met an "NT Administrator" that could perform these tasks.
With UNIX, however (thus Linux), you *have* to be good at what you do, or you simply won't be able to function.
There ends up being a line of minimum education for both NT and Linux, and that line is much lower for NT than for Linux. Think of this as a good (fewer clueless Linux admins than NT admins) or a bad (more expensive/fewer Linux admins than NT admins) thing, however you need to.
This is exactly my point.
You HAVE the education and experience to figure things like this out. I hear stories about how the NT admin for such-and-such company can't fix some e-mail problem, or how so-and-so company is desperately wanting to move to roaming profiles but their NT admin can't figure it out.
I've never met a truly competant NT admin, period.
I've met NT kiddies that know how to set up the NT server to share files, do domain logins, *maybe* even set up personal user directories and the like, but beyond that those NT admins might as well be asked to write a 3D modelling app for UNIX. They just don't know where to begin.
A lot of companies just don't know how to judge an NT person's qualifications (or Unix for that matter) so they end up getting stuck with someone that doesn't know as much as they probably should. It's easy to pretend like you know a lot about NT. It's a bit harder to pretend like you know a lot about Unix (except if you're an IRC script kiddie -- then all the other IRC script kiddies think you're God. Of course, the rest of us know better).
For all I know the company here had the same experiences when they originally moved to Exchange. *shrug*
All I know today is that my work workstation is the most stable Windows-based computer I've ever used. I crash/lockup/reboot at home at least once a week (Win98) and my previous experiences with NT4 and 95 were not pleasant ones.
In addition to the workstations in my group (which all perform just as admirably), our NT-based servers have no trouble at all (none that I've noticed or been notified about).
I don't know HOW they do it (they may do weekly scheduled reboots for all I know), but they DO work, and perform their tasks well.
Of course, our Unix servers work just as well (perhaps better), but we need both platforms because we have various huge applications that are either Windows- or UNIX-based, so both sets of servers have their own purposes...
I use MS applications like Outlook, Office (Word/Excel mainly) along with Visual Studio to develop C and Java apps on a daily basis. We do a great deal of media work so I have various streaming media players running along with 3 versions of Netscape (and IE of course) and Gecko/ngLayout that I look through regularly.
We have McAfee checking for viruses, various background management apps for keeping applications updated.
I also have the SETI@Home client running (previously I had the distributed.net stuff going).
I DO put this machine through its paces. It's used very heavily every day, and the only time it gets unstable is after 3-4 weeks when various memory/resource leaks start bogging it down.
I think the difference between NT machines here and your normal NT machines is that only *thoroughly* tested applications and system upgrades are applied. Some of these are even tweaked internally beforehand. Things that don't meet standards (like Active Desktop, Outlook98 and IE5 (though I have both of the latter installed anyway)) simply are not permitted to be installed. At first I thought this was pretty weird, not letting people install system upgrades on their own, etc., but it didn't take long for me to realize that this kind of stability was the result. It's worth it.
Most moderators have only a few moderator points with which to moderate. If you had set your threshold to -1 you would have seen quite a few more of those duplicates that *were* moderated. Have patience.
When I say I reboot less than once a month, this is my *workstation* I'm talking about.
I have never noticed ANY service outage at all due to a crash or failure of any of our NT servers. We have periods of maintenance, but those are always off-hours and the only time that maintenance has ever gone awry was due to an OS upgrade and improper backups on one of our *UNIX* workstations.
I say this only because I'm trying to point out that NT *can* be deployed successfully *if* you hire competant people.
Never hire a Unix guy to manage your NT systems. Never hire an NT guy to manage your Unix systems.
A lot of big corporations tend to insist upon making all of their systems homogenous. This has quite a few drawbacks, obviously.
The corporation I work for blends the two mainstream operating system classes nicely. For our workhorse applications such as databases, most of our web servers, etc., we use UNIX variants.
All of our desktop systems (and some of our production servers, like for e-mail and some web) are NT4.0. I see quite a few people posting comments that say their NT installations crash *hourly* or at least once a day. No offense intended, but this is more of an indication of poor NT administration than anything else. Our computer support group is responsible for all of our major software packages, service pack updates, etc. This allows them to test everything thoroughly on all of the hardware known to be used by us. The result is a fleet of NT workstations that are nearly as stable as my Linux box at home. I'm not saying they're 100% stable, but I rarely even *log out* of NT but perhaps once every couple of weeks. I've rebooted my workstation *maybe* a dozen times in the year and a half that I've been here.
So, you have two choices. You can train/hire competant Unix people to manage your Unix systems, or you can train/hire competant NT people to manage your NT systems. Reading some of these comments, it sounds like some of you are doing neither.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying NT is superior to Unix in the least, but as far as application support and the fact that most of my work is done for clients using Windows, I need to use it as part of my job.
At home, I own two PC's. One running Linux (without monitor/keyboard) and the other running Win98 along with an X server for my Linux apps. IMO this is an excellent compromise and allows me to take advantage of strengths inherent in both operating systems.
Of course, I still have to reboot Win98 pretty frequently (though usually no more than once or twice a week).
The point is, I do this because I work most productively having access to both operating systems simultaneously. Some people may work in environments where a Unix OS will suffice perfectly, and make them more productive than if they were using Windows. However, there are environments where using Windows IS the best option, because that's what they need to work most productively. It's fairly difficult to develop ActiveX under Unix, for example.
"...someone who knows what they are doing."
??? It sounded to me like he pretty much knew exactly what he was doing. I myself remember the days when Netscape under Linux used to crash more often than Win95.
When someone offers the completely valid opinion that existing GUI systems are (FOR THE THINGS HE USES THEM FOR) superior to their under-development Linux counterparts, it might be polite to point out some of the strengths of Linux GUI's, but your "good, go away" attitude does nothing but make the "Linux Crowd" look childish. Try to be a bit more mature when someone criticizes something you seem to value so greatly.
A year ago, the GUI end of Linux wasn't nearly as mature as existing operating systems (some might argue that this is still the case). Combine that with the fact that I do a great deal of Windows-centric development at work.
I currently own two PC's at home. One is running Win98, all of the MS office suites, development platforms, Adobe graphics programs, etc., and one X server. The other is running the latest and greatest Linux distribution without a monitor or keyboard. All of my applications are run via X under Win98.
IMO, this is the best of both worlds.
As I've always tried to say, and someone else mentioned this in another comment, it's all about using what makes you more productive. If you can't afford a second system or the time/resources for something like VMware, you'll need to choose a single operating system. If you can honestly say you're more productive under Linux doing Windows-centric work, fine, all the power to you. For those that are much more productive using Windows for similar work, the logical operating system choice would be Windows. If you can afford it (in time and money), a second system (or even VMware) allowing you to run more than one operating system simultaneously might offer you the best productivity.
It's all about YOU using whatever makes YOU most productive. In most cases, you cannot make that decision for someone else. You need to drop that attitude entirely and wake up to the real world.
All ATM's have video cameras recording you as you make your transaction.
I guess if you're really that paranoid you could make all of your ATM transactions using ski masks and platform shoes, but c'mon...
I just wonder what sort of continuous data stream we'd send them over the course of 50 years... (and vice-versa).
I can just picture their transmission after we've been sending them stuff for 50 years sounding like, "Look, we KNOW ENGLISH already, and can't you send anything faster than that? Great, I guess we have 50 years of this to look forward to."
Stop reading them, stop posting on them. Skip and move on. Create an account and explicitely remove "Linux" from your topic list.
If you can't seem to handle that, at the very least STOP WHINING.
If you're wearing a contact lens designed to obscure the iris, naturally, iris recognition systems will fail to recognize your iris.
I doubt that this will be the only way to retrieve funds from your local ATM, however. There surely will be backup methods (like your traditional ATM card + PIN).
If you experience some sort of permanent or semi-permanent change, you'd probably want to make a quick visit to your bank to refresh that biometric data.
Though, like the other poster mentioned, iris scanning probably won't be the only way you can access your funds from an ATM.
Banks don't routinely give out things like your PIN, do they? I dunno, in MY bank, nobody even has access to that information. There ARE secure ways of storing things like this.
It's also quite possible that a PIN will still be required to make a withdrawal. (Though I suppose if they've found some way to get at ultra-secure information like your iris image from the bank, they could get your PIN too, but I've never in my life heard of a single case where a PIN was retrieved from a bank...)
Banks already track your ATM movements using your ATM card and PIN. This doesn't make one iota of difference as far as the banks knowing where you are (or were). Chill out...
The only possible "privacy" concern I can think of is having an image of your iris available to your bank, which is personally something I could care less about, but some of the more paranoid on slashdot have loudly pointed this out.
Not direct contact, but closer than would be comfortable at your average ATM.
With source code, the packet kiddies will find some way to crash the servers or forge "I found it!" messages and generally cause mischief, much like what happened with Distributed.net and (esp.) it's ancestor at GenX.net.
It's pretty sad that people deliberately find ways to *prevent* progress like this, but it happens.
I sincerely doubt we'll find much anything several million light years away, especially given that our own galaxy is some 100,000 light years across. If you had read anything at all about the project (which it appears you haven't), you'd know that our radio receivers are pretty much capable of receiving most terrestrial-strength radio signals only in the better part of our galaxy.
In all likelyhood, if our galaxy is indeed teeming with life, the signals we receive will originate a bit closer, on the order of a few tens of light years, perhaps a bit further.
At that distance, one or two two-way messages could be sent and received in my lifetime.
What's this about our physicists? What makes you think we CAN invent some sort of faster-than-light communication? Stop putting people down because they can't accomplish the impossible or don't know how to approach the extremely improbable. Why don't you go invent it if you know it can be done and how?
If you think this whole SETI thing is a bunch of crap, fine, just don't run the program! Remember, we're all volunteering our CPU cycles for distributed tasks like these. I personally think it's worth it.
Firstly, the government isn't involved, even indirectly. This is all donation-funded volunteer work. SETI doesn't get crap from the government.
Secondly, you shouldn't automatically distrust all closed-source software simply because most people can't really tell you for certain what it does. You should distrust software you get from untrustworthy people, sure. If you go through this whole procedure of locking down the program using setroot/restricted shell/etc for EVERY closed-source app you run, well, I just feel sorry for you.
That's a whole lotta work for a practically non-existent risk. I've never had a virus on my Windows computers and I've never accidentally run any silly trojans under Unix. Nobody I know has either, and I run closed-source, proprietary apps quite frequently (under both OS's).
There IS a point where founded caution becomes silly paranoia, and in my opinion, this crosses it.