When MS stops supporting it, I'll stop getting all these insistent messages to download the latest security fixes which aren't, and can finally have a stable platform I can start to understand. This is a good thing.
No, you're wrong. When MS stops supporting it, you can either pull the plug to your internet connection and continue to use it as a standalone computer, isolated from the rest of the internet world, or you can get rooted from the very first vulnerability that goes unpatched by MS.
What will really happen is that MS will not stop releasing patches for another 5 years from the last date of shipment of XP, so you should be fine until about 2012 or so, at which point we'll hopefully all be using a decent desktop OS that has UNIX underneath. Who knows, by then MS may have actually decided to fix security once and for all and use a BSD based kernel with Windows libraries on top...
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Unix based desktops vary greatly in their usability. Some of them can be cluttered, or cryptic. But they always stay out of the user's way.
I was about to write a post agreeing with everything you said, but then GAIM popped up on my FC6 desktop and half of my sentence got typed into the GAIM window...
I will admit that OS X is stellar in this regard, and Windows is absolutely annoying in every aspect when it comes to this. I can be playing World of Warcraft on my Windows box at home (the only thing I use it for) and in the middle of a battle, up pops my anti-virus software just letting me know that it's downloading an update! It task swaps back to the desktop, just to let me know "hey, I'm doing something!" There are way too many Windows programs that do this. Linux and Gnome are only slightly better.
I long for a day when other developers will figure out what Apple has, but even Apple isn't that great at it because Apple's Software Update feature pops up on my Windows box wanting me to upgrade the DRM on iTunes and again it interrupts my WoW gaming session.
Why on earth would someone intelligent enough to make a Linux Media Center want to watch that terrible movie? Seriously Sony, I want those 2 hours of my life back!
If you exempted those good-as-money gold transactions from taxation, investors could do something similar. Basically, they could set up "pseudo-dollars" that are instantly redeemable for real dollars (and vice versa). Then they would be exempt from dividend taxation until they want to spend the dollars on consumption.
I get the point, but then why aren't investors putting their money into WoW gold right now? I think there are a couple reasons for it:
1. An artificially created economy where thousands (probably millions) in gold is generated every day by monsters means inflation is inevitable because the total supply of money keeps increasing faster than people can take money out of the system (ask a high level player how much gold they've accumulated and you'll see what I mean). This drives down the value of said gold, so it would be a terrible investment because you don't get interest on your gold in WoW.
2. There is no way (that I know of) to purchase gold without using a credit or debit card. I don't know of any way to buy something on a credit or debit card without first paying taxes to the IRS on that money. Until in-game gold sellers start offering direct deposit from my paycheck pre-taxes like an IRA then I don't see how it will ever work.
Really? How many viruses can be transmitted through simply mounting a drive?
How about a lot? Did you know that Windows has this thing called "autorun" where BillG, in his infinite wisdom, decided that any removable media placed in your computer should have the ability to automatically EXECUTE software at Administrator level? This is turned on by default on ALL Windows machines since Windows 95.
SCOpuku: Destroying one's company by launching frivolous legal action against Open Source developers and/or companies. See SCO.
I don't like this new word, because the japanese "seppuku" or ritual suicide was done out of honor, like a defeated general falling on his own sword to preserve the honor of his family. There is nothing honorable about SCO or their executives.
Did you ever see how amazing WoW looks on a 30" display?
I went the less expensive route and just purchased a Westinghouse LV37M3 37" LCD 1080p monitor. It has standard DVI, VGA, and HDMI inputs, so I just plugged it into my PC and now I can enjoy WoW as god intended it... in full 37" widescreen glory.
Yes, it does rock... Give me a lifetime supply of food and drink and I will never leave the house again.
And once the US government figures out that taxing gasoline would be a great way to pay for the war on terror...
I would actually support that. I think a policy of funding any wars to secure oil 100% through taxation of said oil would be a more realistic way to show the true cost of the Iraq war. When gas starts costing $10 a gallon then people might think twice about their need to consume vast amounts of fossil fuels and the true costs of war to secure limited energy resources.
I don't think I've ever gotten Redhat to call back on any support issue over the 4 years I was a customer. (The only reaction I've ever seen from their customer support is to quietly close my tickets that stayed open for more than a year -- without ever putting in an explanatory note or fixing the problem, of course)
You're either a troll or you've never used Redhat support. While they might be the best, they are a far cry better than Microsoft (give us $300 just to talk to us and we _might_ be able to help you fix your problem). If you open a web ticket with Redhat you usually get a response in less than 24 hours (faster if you mark it as high priority). Granted, their first response is likely to be "send us a sysreport and netdump output", but that's standard for most technology companies (hard to support something if you can't see what's wrong).
There were two oversights in the older VW's electrical system:
Ah german automobiles! Masters of mechanical engineering, but couldn't find a decent EE to save their life...
Hopefully things are better now because I have a 2006 Jetta TDI (turbodiesel) that I'm hoping doesn't have a complete electrical system failure within a few years...
It's not necessarily waste to have more land than you need today under cultivation. Tomorrow there may very well be a drought or blight that reduces production per acre; keeping that extra land cultivated can be a very useful form of insurance, even if the food rots.
Unless your farming techniques leech tons of nutrients from the soil and promote topsoil erosion, making your land unusable for any type of farming within a couple of decades, which is standard Archer Daniels Midland procedure for maximizing the corn output of a given acre of land.
This company does not care what happens to our country in the next 50 years. All they care about are making sure their quarterly profits meet Wall Street's expectations. 50 years from now when there we start seeing all of middle north america turned into a giant dust bowl from topsoil erosion and overfarming of corn, we'll regret the fact that we let ADM lobbyists buy our government and subsidize their profiteering off of US soil, but all of those executives at ADM will have long since retired to their McMansions and McYachts.
The real problem with copyright law is that large corporations are allowed to possess them. This is just another example of the much larger problem of large corporations being allowed to do anything an individual can do.
You're an idiot. What's wrong with a corporation owning a copyright? The author of the book specifically agreed to transfer the copyright in exchange for: publication, promotion, advertising, distribution (having your book in thousands of bookstores worldwide doesn't just happen), royalties, pre-payment of royalties, etc.
If a corporation wants to take on the risk of publishing a book that might or might not make any money, who are you to refuse them the right to do that? Corporation or real person (individual), it makes no difference. You're trying to take rights away from people (corporations).
For example telesurgery, where a surgeon conducts operations remotely through the use of a robot, and where you really don't want packets getting delayed and are willing to pay for the elevated service.
Here's a novel thought: The internet was never designed for mission critical (lives depend on it) type services. ALL packets you send across the internet get delivered on a "best effort" type of basis. If you are doing anything as critical as telesurgery where lives depend on it, just buy dedicated lines to make sure there is no possibility of a third-party introducing latency or overusing shared bandwidth.
Look at Secunia's page on IIS 6.0, which is 3 or 4 years old: 3 vulnerabilities total, all patched and none of them seriously critical.
The thing that I really care about when I run a webserver is not how many vulnerabilities there are, but how severely they can affect the system. IIS runs as a kernel module in ring 0, which means that any IIS exploit and the box is completely pwned. Apache runs as a normal user called "apache", which means any Apache exploit and whoops, I might get my content changed or defaced.
When you are dealing with a security incident on your website this is a HUGE deal.... It's the difference between "somebody defaced our content so we better patch Apache and upload our old content off of backup tapes..." and "oh shit they just rooted our entire web server farm... let's break out the Windows CDs and rebuild 20 servers from scratch."
Downtime on scenario 1: A couple of hours, tops... Downtime on scenario 2: 24 hours or more.
When you're running a serious website, these things matter, and that is why IIS security is still a joke.
Symantec's net income mysteriously increased by $10 million....In other news, Microsoft's net income shows a decrease of $10 million. Upon investigation of Microsoft's income statement, "other expenses" showed an increase of $10 million...
You're really funny, but in all seriousness, it's far more likely that Symantec has to push Windows, because that is their bread and butter. They have a symbiotic relationship with Microsoft just like a nurse fish does with a shark. If Microsoft were really secure, 90% of Symantec's products would have no reason for existence. And the more copies of Windows sold, the more money Symantec makes, therefore, it's pretty easy to connect the money to the report. No bribery from Microsoft necessary... just keep things as insecure as always and Symantec can keep their "protection" money rolling in.
a fairer comparison would be redhat to all microsoft products rolled together.
Actually, a fairer comparison would be Redhat to Microsoft + the top 1000 downloads on download.com. Because that's what Redhat really is, the Linux kernel, GNU userspace, and about 5,000 odd OSS packages that some people might or might not find useful, so Redhat supports them with security updates. Any admin worth their salt doesn't install the packages they don't need, and even if they do, if the binaries sit on disk and are never executed, who cares about a vulnerability that can't be exploited?
I think Mac is falling victim to this as well. They include a lot of OSS software with Mac OS X now and a lot of the security fixes I get on my Mac are for GNU userspace and things like that.
Apple has done nothing new here, nor have they made it easier.
You're wrong there. Apple has made it easier by making it act just like an iPod. Millions of people have bought and used iPods; how many millions have bought and used media extenders? Oh that's right... not that many.
Your use of the words "Na na na na..." is covered by various copyrights issued to Apple Records and the Beatles, and under title 17 U.S.C of the DMCA and various and sundry provisions that we bought and err... paid for, you are hereby ordered to cease and decist all use of the above four words. Furthermore, please report to the nearest chapter of your RIAA headquarters for brain modification, so that you will no longer remember the melody or hear the song in your head...
The Cell is a basically 204GFLOPS/32bit machine (plus the Power RISC, basically a Mac G5), with an internal 1.6Tbps bus. But even its builtin gigabit ethernet is puny compared to that kind of dataflow.
You fail to grasp that the internal bus is not for I/O. It's for transferring from RAM to video memory and vice-versa. When you're trying to render to 2+ megapixels in 24-bit color at 60 fps while doing real-time 3d shading effects, you can use as much memory->GPU bandwidth as possible. Gigabit ethernet is just an afterthought compared to the bandwidth modern games need between system memory and the GPU.
No, you're quite incorrect. US courts do not and cannot declare people "innocent", merely "not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" which isn't the same thing.
You guys are all failing to understand this properly. It's a civil case, not a criminal case, therefore, the burden of proof is only 50%, and there is no such thing as "innocent" or "guilty". If the case is tried the jury either finds "for the plaintiff" or "for the defendant". Didn't you people ever watch The People's Court?
What scares me is that Media Extenders have been around for 4 or 5 years, cost about $100, and do everything this product does and more. Also considering a lot of the Media Extenders are UPnP and various other forms, they are not MS Media Center exclusive and I know people that use them with their *nix servers all the time.
Apple just made a media extender that's actually capable of being used by somebody that doesn't understand home networking, Unix, and codecs. That's about 99% of the target market. The other 1% that understand what in the hell a WEP key is and know how to configure DHCP and know how to create a Samba share and know how to set permissions on the Samba share properly and know how to mount the Samba share on their media extender and know how to transcode content into the codec that their media extender supports will probably not by an Apple TV...
SANS do not need to be defragged. Let me be a little more clear on this: When you allocate a LUN (logical unit) on your SAN and present it to a server, you are doing one of two things:
1. Presenting physical spindles to the server as raw disks -or- 2. Presenting a RAID volume to the server, which consists of a section of many disks.
All SAN vendors that I'm aware of allocate LUNs as contiguous areas of disk. It's faster this way because heads don't have to seek very far to find data within the same LUN. Even if you're allocating a RAID 5 LUN spread across 20 disks, the SAN is going to take a small section of each of those 20 disks and that is dedicated to your LUN. It's a contiguous section and it stays the same throughout the life of the LUN, that is unless you extend it or grow the LUN at a later date.
Now, the server's data on that LUN can and will become fragmented, but this needs to be taken care of at the OS level, not the SAN level. If you're running Windows file servers, use the Windows defrag tool. If you're using Veritas file system they have a defragmentation tool of their own.
There is one possible way that SANs can become fragmented but it's very unlikely that this would affect performance: If you grow or extend your LUNs many many times by adding new sections to them, I suppose this could theoretically affect performance adversely, but it's highly unlikely.
I seriously doubt fragmentation is an issue. More likely some of your users think it's ok to have gigabytes worth of data on their desktop and roaming profiles are killing you. This is a user education issue, not a SAN issue.
Anyway, I don't have a problem with the Europeans making this discovery, and I'm as patriotic as anyone, because this kind of thing is a human endeavor, and I'm just happy that my country can make a significant impact.
I heard a very interesting story on NPR this morning (sorry I can't find it on their website yet) about how China now has a space program that is 3 times larger than the US, and they are now likely to reach the moon within a decade or less, where at our current level of funding, NASA isn't likely to reach the moon until 2020. Apparently China has decided to put 200,000 people into their space program (3 times the amount of employees that NASA has), and their program is very reminiscint (sp?) of the Gemini program started in the 60's in the US.
This is where having a population that is not visionary and forward thinking is dangerous. We run the real risk of becoming a has-been in space exploration, at a time when in the next 100 years or so our planet is becoming less and less habitable, we need to be looking for a backup plan.
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What will really happen is that MS will not stop releasing patches for another 5 years from the last date of shipment of XP, so you should be fine until about 2012 or so, at which point we'll hopefully all be using a decent desktop OS that has UNIX underneath. Who knows, by then MS may have actually decided to fix security once and for all and use a BSD based kernel with Windows libraries on top...
I will admit that OS X is stellar in this regard, and Windows is absolutely annoying in every aspect when it comes to this. I can be playing World of Warcraft on my Windows box at home (the only thing I use it for) and in the middle of a battle, up pops my anti-virus software just letting me know that it's downloading an update! It task swaps back to the desktop, just to let me know "hey, I'm doing something!" There are way too many Windows programs that do this. Linux and Gnome are only slightly better.
I long for a day when other developers will figure out what Apple has, but even Apple isn't that great at it because Apple's Software Update feature pops up on my Windows box wanting me to upgrade the DRM on iTunes and again it interrupts my WoW gaming session.
Thank you for this list of artists. I will now proceed to buy all of their albums on allofmp3.com...
1. An artificially created economy where thousands (probably millions) in gold is generated every day by monsters means inflation is inevitable because the total supply of money keeps increasing faster than people can take money out of the system (ask a high level player how much gold they've accumulated and you'll see what I mean). This drives down the value of said gold, so it would be a terrible investment because you don't get interest on your gold in WoW.
2. There is no way (that I know of) to purchase gold without using a credit or debit card. I don't know of any way to buy something on a credit or debit card without first paying taxes to the IRS on that money. Until in-game gold sellers start offering direct deposit from my paycheck pre-taxes like an IRA then I don't see how it will ever work.
Am I missing something here?
Yes, it does rock... Give me a lifetime supply of food and drink and I will never leave the house again.
Hopefully things are better now because I have a 2006 Jetta TDI (turbodiesel) that I'm hoping doesn't have a complete electrical system failure within a few years...
This company does not care what happens to our country in the next 50 years. All they care about are making sure their quarterly profits meet Wall Street's expectations. 50 years from now when there we start seeing all of middle north america turned into a giant dust bowl from topsoil erosion and overfarming of corn, we'll regret the fact that we let ADM lobbyists buy our government and subsidize their profiteering off of US soil, but all of those executives at ADM will have long since retired to their McMansions and McYachts.
If a corporation wants to take on the risk of publishing a book that might or might not make any money, who are you to refuse them the right to do that? Corporation or real person (individual), it makes no difference. You're trying to take rights away from people (corporations).
When you are dealing with a security incident on your website this is a HUGE deal.... It's the difference between "somebody defaced our content so we better patch Apache and upload our old content off of backup tapes..." and "oh shit they just rooted our entire web server farm... let's break out the Windows CDs and rebuild 20 servers from scratch."
Downtime on scenario 1: A couple of hours, tops...
Downtime on scenario 2: 24 hours or more.
When you're running a serious website, these things matter, and that is why IIS security is still a joke.
I think Mac is falling victim to this as well. They include a lot of OSS software with Mac OS X now and a lot of the security fixes I get on my Mac are for GNU userspace and things like that.
SANS do not need to be defragged. Let me be a little more clear on this: When you allocate a LUN (logical unit) on your SAN and present it to a server, you are doing one of two things:
1. Presenting physical spindles to the server as raw disks -or-
2. Presenting a RAID volume to the server, which consists of a section of many disks.
All SAN vendors that I'm aware of allocate LUNs as contiguous areas of disk. It's faster this way because heads don't have to seek very far to find data within the same LUN. Even if you're allocating a RAID 5 LUN spread across 20 disks, the SAN is going to take a small section of each of those 20 disks and that is dedicated to your LUN. It's a contiguous section and it stays the same throughout the life of the LUN, that is unless you extend it or grow the LUN at a later date.
Now, the server's data on that LUN can and will become fragmented, but this needs to be taken care of at the OS level, not the SAN level. If you're running Windows file servers, use the Windows defrag tool. If you're using Veritas file system they have a defragmentation tool of their own.
There is one possible way that SANs can become fragmented but it's very unlikely that this would affect performance: If you grow or extend your LUNs many many times by adding new sections to them, I suppose this could theoretically affect performance adversely, but it's highly unlikely.
I seriously doubt fragmentation is an issue. More likely some of your users think it's ok to have gigabytes worth of data on their desktop and roaming profiles are killing you. This is a user education issue, not a SAN issue.
This is where having a population that is not visionary and forward thinking is dangerous. We run the real risk of becoming a has-been in space exploration, at a time when in the next 100 years or so our planet is becoming less and less habitable, we need to be looking for a backup plan.