That makes no sense because they are pushing HTML5 which allows the same thing
That is a battle on a different front. HTML5 is better for Apple than plugins that may be IE only, or cross browser but Windows only (or unstable on other platforms). While it may look like an inconsistent position from an iPod/iPhone/iPad point of view it makes much more sense when considering the desktop and laptop markets.
What OS are they running? Without TRIM support on both the drive and the OS (Windows 7, Windows 2008 at the moment IIRC, or Linux with a kernel version 2.6.33 or above but I'm not aware of any distros carrying that as standard yet - even the beta of Ubuntu 10.04 is still at 2.6.32) the block fragmentation within the drive will cause write performance degradation over time.
I'm told that writing solid blocks of 0s will cause a drive's controller to mark the block as not needing erase-before-write next time (which is what a TRIM call does) - I'm not sure if this is for all drives or if I was reading about a specific range though (or if the "fact" is true at all! - I'll give it a try on my netbook's SSD if/when write performance becomes an issue). If this theory is correct then erasing free space by writing a file from/dev/zero should help or for a full clear do that first, then image the drive to elsewhere, then zero the entire drive, then copy the image back on. This in theory will result in no split blocks, though I've not tested this theory myself yet. If zeroing blocks does not mark them in the same way as TRIM does then you will only be making the problem worse.
Sony may not be paying. Amazon may have paid out to make this one problem go away. If many people try the same thing they'll probably stop doing so and instead refer people directly to Sony instead.
OK, so they run memory allocation in a separate thread. What exactly does the other thread do while the mm thread is running, and if it blocks like I think, how does that speed anything up?
If the new memory allocation thread keeps a small pool pre-allocated then the calling thread doesn't need to block unless it needs something more than the pool has available. Whether or not such a pool is kept, when free is called it can return almost immediately so the main thread can get on with something else leaving the memory management thread to either add the freeed block back to the pool or hand it back to the OS in the background (presumably another CPU/core).
For a task that allocates and deallocates small bocks a lot, and isn't itself keeping the available cores busy, I can image this giving a noticeable-but-not-massive boost in performance which could be significant for long-running number crunching or high performance tasks like physics engine calculations. Though it is not unlikely that some use patterns will see a small performance drop with this technique so blindly applying it everywhere is not a good idea (even where there may be a small gain I'd refrain - a small gain in performance may not be worth the little bit of extra complexity when debugging and potential limiting of portability).
It is, unless and until the quacks manage to overturn this decision, now legal to state that you think Chiropractic treatment is a croc-o-shite, as evidenced by the fact that the chose to defend themselves against people suggesting their services are a croc-o-shite using the legal system rather than any providing some good scientific evidencethat their treatments may in fact not be a croc-o-shite. This is indeed a GoodThing.
In the few cases that Chiropractic treatments have been shown to help, those relating directly to the spine, the same help could equally be given by any physiotherapist or in many cases anyone well trained enough to use massage theraputically.
[accident happens at party]
* Damn, I need an excuse to go deal with this before anyone notices
* Pants send SMS to user
* Looks at phone. "Sorry guys, I've got to deal with this." - heads away looking like an important person whi is on-call rather than an incontinent person who has just paid an unintended call.
As well as the options already mentioned (including in my own posts above), one extra thing you can try for CV/application "fodder" is to take part in sites like stackoverflow, superuser and serverfault. If you can earn a good "reputation" on one or more of those sites it could be worth mentioning that you are an active member and dropping your user name. I'm on page one of two of those sites user-listing-ordered-by-rep pages, though mainly because I'm a sad social inadequate with too much free time of an evening rather than because I'm trying to get my name out there (as I'm currently gainfully employed and "safe" for the foreseeable future) so I've not tested the "helpful to mention on a CV or in an interview" theory yet, but having a good rep on such sites shouldn't harm you (unless your post history makes it obvious you were browsing those sites helping others when you should have been concentrating on your current/previous employer's problems!) and may shine a beneficial light on you if the prospective employer bothers to check and likes the tone and technical quality of your participation.
I would not pursue this as a first line of course, but if you have some free time on your hands and nothing else practical to do with that time... If nothing else you might learn something useful yourself - I've have a few "oh, that's an interesting point/idea" moments from responses to questions that relate to my areas of interest.
After all, most 20-year-old Indian Comp. Sci. students already have every certification available from Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and Red Hat, or so they claim...
In defence of said Indian workers it might not be them making the outlandish claims - it is just as likely that their employers/agents are being economical/imaginative with the truth. In the same way that recruitment agents based over here (offering candidates from over here) have been know expand things like "Oct 2005 to Dec 2005, worked a testing/QA department testing a Java based application" into things like "Five years of Java programming experience".
I'm sick and tired of canned "write open source" replies like this on Slashdot. I'm not saying you're wrong, let me be clear. It's just such a cliché response.
Breaking through the HR firewall is nothing special to computer-related jobs. This is universal. Therefore, be wary of this canned response, as it doesn't take much insight into your situation to say "do more work to show you can do more work."
The canned response is perfectly valid though - just a little too specific. It should be "find opportunities to prove you can do what the people who might employ you want you to be able to do". For instance someone who volunteered at an "English as a foreign language" training school for a while, which helped her get an interview for her first decent paid job (with a translation service provider). Doing this is exactly the same as doing good open source work which may help make your application for a programming job more attractive. Judging what open source work would be considered "good" by a prospective employer is the hard part here though. GSoC, as suggested by others already, might be a good place to start looking though - the OP may find a number of small projects/enhancements that sufficiently overlap their current skillset for them to be able to submit useful work.
Way to be helpful, might as well utter that old adage, "You should have thought about it before."
That doesn't alter the fact that however the point was presented, or however unintentionally up-his-own-arse the person making the point may have seemed to take the more negative stance, it is a very valid point. Networking can help a lot in may cases.
Maybe it is the Sunday evening pub meal and drinks talking (as I'm not usually one to give the benefit of the doubt!) but I didn't read the post you replied to as "this is what I did but you are too late nyar nyar n nyar nyar", but more as "this is what I did and this is how it helped my plans". The OP could still try the technique - there may be opportunities locally for some sort of technical volunteer work that could be used as the same sort of "CV fodder" spring-board and/or to gain a good reference for future applications for paid work. While the relatively easy-to-access college volunteer work option has gone for the OP there are likely to be opportunities to look for at this later stage. There may well be departments/organisations related to the University or its student bodies or local charities that could use some technical help but can ill afford a trained/accredited resource. If you can get in contact with someone like that at an appropriate time it can be a win/win situation: they get the temporary technical help they need but can't actually afford and the OP gets some CV fodder and/or a useful reference, or at least some experience that could be talked about at interview. Having some real world "dealing with users" / "dealing with customers" / "dealing with management" / "real-world problem solving" experience to talk about critically in an interview can make a massive difference to your chances once you get as far as the interview - it can indicate to the interviewer that not only do you know some facts/techniques but you are also capable of applying them outside academic situations and are capable of dealing with the real people in the real world at the same time. (by "talk about critically" I don't mean just "having a go" about the things that were/went wrong, I mean "what went well and why, what could have been done better, how would you approach the same task again if you had the power of hindsight, how were other people/resources helpful or not" and so on - constructive critique of your progress and experience)
Ever if you don't even manage any of that the exposure, through volunteering, to work outside an academic environment might teach you some useful stuff - even if only "I don't actually like X" or "I more enjoy Y and I'm more proficient in it than Z" or "hmmm, I didn't realise I would need A so much, maybe evidence of reading around / practising / otherwise persuing that area will help me jump from the CV stage to the interview stage more easily".
If you have time and can find volunteer work it will rarely be a disadvantage to you - especially if you are otherwise completely unemployed because it isn't like there would be a lot else practical to fill your time with. This in itself helps a CV/application look more attractive - which would you rather interview from the choice of people who graduated six months ago: those who have sat on their hands for six months doing nothing more than scanning jobs adverts and similar, or the people who have done, or tried to do, something practical with some of the time they had available?
To cut a long story short: as pointed out by the responder above both networking and volunteering can help and the two techniques can be mutually supportive of each other. And if you are not lucky enough to find any good opportunities, what have you lost by trying?
To be honest I don't care about the info I have on FB. All they have is my name, an incorrect birth date, a low resolution indication of my general location, and a list of people that I am linked with in some way. Nothing of much value to any third party that I can think of.
What does bother me though is the idea of someone passing on my information (whether I care about the information or not) for profit. I I'm to be hored out to the world I'll do the horing and have the profit thankyouverymuch. If someone else wants to try gain from my info maybe I'll let them, but it is only common curtsey to ask for permission rather than automatically opting me in.
From a technical point of view I assume this linking of you to your FB account (and from there to other information and linking information FB holds) is going to be done by the 3rd party web site making a client-side request to FB (this request, being client-side, would contain your FB session ID cookie value) which then redirects to a script on the 3rd party site with some sort of session ID that can be used to make further requests to FB server side. This would not be difficult to block if you run a cleaning proxy (strip out requests to FB pages from with pages that were not served from an FB server to start with) or simply by using a separate browser. By "separate" I mean really separate: not common add-ons for instance (flash cookies, if you aren't in the habit of blocking flash by default, are cross-browser and even survive through "private browsing" mods) - true separation might mean having to run it in a VM or some such construct (which may, in turn, mean I can't be bothered enough for the hassle).
If I were to ever see signs that a site had gone prying into what information there is about be out there I would never revisit that site or those relating to it, and would recommend that my contacts do the same. Unfortunately I'm in a minority - most people are not as bitter, anal, and vindictive enough to carry out threats of "never coming back" so in the long run my avoidance of such sites won't make much difference to them in the grand scheme of things.
How about some crusaders who mount spam campaigns that, when clicked, scare the holy living hell out of the recipient?
Because if you hit the wrong idiot with a weak heart and a litigious or determined-and-violent violent family who happen to be in, or have contacts in, your jurisdiction you have something on your hands that you'd rather not deal with. Some may even track you down just over the "sucker" thing: the uneducated don't tend to respond to an insult with a cunningly worded witty repost.
And then you need to consider the "pro" spammers who, seeing your vigilante action as something that might impact their margins in the long run, may be inclined to use any spare resource present in the botnets they have some control over to DDoS the web server and any other service/account that is traceable back to you from there.
This is not the only famous old computer related name+logo that is being "miss used" to flog PC parts. See http://www.acorncomputers.co.uk/ for another example.
And I can't figure out why I would want to upgrade. I didn't upgrade to Koala, because the only real change I could find was they dropped pidgen for evolution or something like that.
The main reason to upgrade if you don't care for new features/packages (or changes to existing features/packages) is security support. 9.04 officially drops out of support in October (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Release_history) which means you are likely to stop getting patches for security issues. Lucid, being an LTS release, will be officially supported longer than most other releases so you'll be good from that PoV until 2013 (three years instead of the usual 18 months).
If you are happy with 9.04 at the moment then there is no requirement to upgrade. Beyond October that will change, at that point you should move to 9.10 or 10.04 (or 10.10 assuming the normal release pattern is continuing) to continue getting security updates. I put 9.10 on my netbook when I last rebuilt its OS setup mainly "just because", though did notice a slight performance improvement in a few places (enough to be aware of but probably not enough to specifically upgrade for, I'm guessing some of the improvement is from the use of ext4 which you'll not move to automatically when upgrading rather than reinstalling anyway). I very much doubt I'll upgrade in the near future as at this point there is not real need for me to do so until I start needing a newer version of a package (and can't be bothered to maintain my own compile of it) or 11.04 when Karmic hits its end-or-support date.
Clearly it isn't Intel over AMD, it could support both Intel VT and AMD-V. Don't throw out the hate without justification!
I think the claimed Intel/AMD distinction is not about which particular set of visualization helper modes were supported - it is about the differences in general availability of the features between the manufacturers. I think *all* recent AMD chips have the relevant support, whereas Intel are still segmenting their market by putting out chips both with and without - see http://news.cnet.com/some-intel-chips-dont-support-windows-7-xp-mode/ for one example of this being discussed.
While 8 and 16Mhz was all that was available initially, it certainly wasn't uncommon to see 25 and 33 Mhz models later. AMD even put out 386SX and 386DX chips intended to ran at 40MHz and it was claimed by some to run faster than a 486@25MHz for some tasks. I had one of said SXs in my machine at the time and the machine certainly didn't do badly compared to the 486s running at 25MHz at school at the time (though I never ran anything to scientifically test the relative performance).
Might be better to somehow "pollute" the data first...
If enough people do this for them to care, all they have to do is scan for any updates that preceded an account close by a short amount of time and roll them back just as easily as they would undo a delete. I'm guessing old copies of the information are kept as well as the latest (now polluted if that is what you have done) for various reasons so this would not be at all difficult for them to do.
That went in (in Windows 95, I think) when CDs were only manufactured by major vendors, before home CD writers or USB storage devices. So it probably seemed "safe" at the time.
Many people questioned the safety of autorun win Win95. Auto-running from removable media had already been a problem - one of the first viruses documented as being in-the-wild was distributed on Apple floppies and got itself run via that system's autorun feature (unlike PCs descended from the IBM line and its compatibles several machines and OSs,Apple's machines and Commodor's Amiga lines being two examples, supported detecting a new floppy being inserted) and that was long before Windows 95 hit the market.
The potential problems were well know by that point. As you suggest MS's official policy was just "it is safe enough for now, we'll fix it later".
The only reason, I have ad block is because of facebook. While personally I don't like facebook, I have lots of friends on it so I do use it. The problem with facebook is it allows ads that look exactly like facebook apps. Sometimes is really hard to tell the ad from the app.
My solution there is just to completely ignore them - both apps and ads that look like apps. I use facebook due only to people I know being on there too, but the people I know on there know I'm only there to use it as a messaging service and don't take part in the apps business.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes no sense because they are pushing HTML5 which allows the same thing
That is a battle on a different front. HTML5 is better for Apple than plugins that may be IE only, or cross browser but Windows only (or unstable on other platforms). While it may look like an inconsistent position from an iPod/iPhone/iPad point of view it makes much more sense when considering the desktop and laptop markets.
What OS are they running? Without TRIM support on both the drive and the OS (Windows 7, Windows 2008 at the moment IIRC, or Linux with a kernel version 2.6.33 or above but I'm not aware of any distros carrying that as standard yet - even the beta of Ubuntu 10.04 is still at 2.6.32) the block fragmentation within the drive will cause write performance degradation over time.
I'm told that writing solid blocks of 0s will cause a drive's controller to mark the block as not needing erase-before-write next time (which is what a TRIM call does) - I'm not sure if this is for all drives or if I was reading about a specific range though (or if the "fact" is true at all! - I'll give it a try on my netbook's SSD if/when write performance becomes an issue). If this theory is correct then erasing free space by writing a file from /dev/zero should help or for a full clear do that first, then image the drive to elsewhere, then zero the entire drive, then copy the image back on. This in theory will result in no split blocks, though I've not tested this theory myself yet. If zeroing blocks does not mark them in the same way as TRIM does then you will only be making the problem worse.
This might get quite expensive for Sony..
Sony may not be paying. Amazon may have paid out to make this one problem go away. If many people try the same thing they'll probably stop doing so and instead refer people directly to Sony instead.
OK, so they run memory allocation in a separate thread. What exactly does the other thread do while the mm thread is running, and if it blocks like I think, how does that speed anything up?
If the new memory allocation thread keeps a small pool pre-allocated then the calling thread doesn't need to block unless it needs something more than the pool has available. Whether or not such a pool is kept, when free is called it can return almost immediately so the main thread can get on with something else leaving the memory management thread to either add the freeed block back to the pool or hand it back to the OS in the background (presumably another CPU/core).
For a task that allocates and deallocates small bocks a lot, and isn't itself keeping the available cores busy, I can image this giving a noticeable-but-not-massive boost in performance which could be significant for long-running number crunching or high performance tasks like physics engine calculations. Though it is not unlikely that some use patterns will see a small performance drop with this technique so blindly applying it everywhere is not a good idea (even where there may be a small gain I'd refrain - a small gain in performance may not be worth the little bit of extra complexity when debugging and potential limiting of portability).
It is, unless and until the quacks manage to overturn this decision, now legal to state that you think Chiropractic treatment is a croc-o-shite, as evidenced by the fact that the chose to defend themselves against people suggesting their services are a croc-o-shite using the legal system rather than any providing some good scientific evidencethat their treatments may in fact not be a croc-o-shite. This is indeed a GoodThing.
In the few cases that Chiropractic treatments have been shown to help, those relating directly to the spine, the same help could equally be given by any physiotherapist or in many cases anyone well trained enough to use massage theraputically.
[accident happens at party]
* Damn, I need an excuse to go deal with this before anyone notices
* Pants send SMS to user
* Looks at phone. "Sorry guys, I've got to deal with this." - heads away looking like an important person whi is on-call rather than an incontinent person who has just paid an unintended call.
As well as the options already mentioned (including in my own posts above), one extra thing you can try for CV/application "fodder" is to take part in sites like stackoverflow, superuser and serverfault. If you can earn a good "reputation" on one or more of those sites it could be worth mentioning that you are an active member and dropping your user name. I'm on page one of two of those sites user-listing-ordered-by-rep pages, though mainly because I'm a sad social inadequate with too much free time of an evening rather than because I'm trying to get my name out there (as I'm currently gainfully employed and "safe" for the foreseeable future) so I've not tested the "helpful to mention on a CV or in an interview" theory yet, but having a good rep on such sites shouldn't harm you (unless your post history makes it obvious you were browsing those sites helping others when you should have been concentrating on your current/previous employer's problems!) and may shine a beneficial light on you if the prospective employer bothers to check and likes the tone and technical quality of your participation.
I would not pursue this as a first line of course, but if you have some free time on your hands and nothing else practical to do with that time... If nothing else you might learn something useful yourself - I've have a few "oh, that's an interesting point/idea" moments from responses to questions that relate to my areas of interest.
After all, most 20-year-old Indian Comp. Sci. students already have every certification available from Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and Red Hat, or so they claim...
In defence of said Indian workers it might not be them making the outlandish claims - it is just as likely that their employers/agents are being economical/imaginative with the truth. In the same way that recruitment agents based over here (offering candidates from over here) have been know expand things like "Oct 2005 to Dec 2005, worked a testing/QA department testing a Java based application" into things like "Five years of Java programming experience".
I'm sick and tired of canned "write open source" replies like this on Slashdot. I'm not saying you're wrong, let me be clear. It's just such a cliché response.
Breaking through the HR firewall is nothing special to computer-related jobs. This is universal. Therefore, be wary of this canned response, as it doesn't take much insight into your situation to say "do more work to show you can do more work."
The canned response is perfectly valid though - just a little too specific. It should be "find opportunities to prove you can do what the people who might employ you want you to be able to do". For instance someone who volunteered at an "English as a foreign language" training school for a while, which helped her get an interview for her first decent paid job (with a translation service provider). Doing this is exactly the same as doing good open source work which may help make your application for a programming job more attractive. Judging what open source work would be considered "good" by a prospective employer is the hard part here though. GSoC, as suggested by others already, might be a good place to start looking though - the OP may find a number of small projects/enhancements that sufficiently overlap their current skillset for them to be able to submit useful work.
Way to be helpful, might as well utter that old adage, "You should have thought about it before."
That doesn't alter the fact that however the point was presented, or however unintentionally up-his-own-arse the person making the point may have seemed to take the more negative stance, it is a very valid point. Networking can help a lot in may cases.
Maybe it is the Sunday evening pub meal and drinks talking (as I'm not usually one to give the benefit of the doubt!) but I didn't read the post you replied to as "this is what I did but you are too late nyar nyar n nyar nyar", but more as "this is what I did and this is how it helped my plans". The OP could still try the technique - there may be opportunities locally for some sort of technical volunteer work that could be used as the same sort of "CV fodder" spring-board and/or to gain a good reference for future applications for paid work. While the relatively easy-to-access college volunteer work option has gone for the OP there are likely to be opportunities to look for at this later stage. There may well be departments/organisations related to the University or its student bodies or local charities that could use some technical help but can ill afford a trained/accredited resource. If you can get in contact with someone like that at an appropriate time it can be a win/win situation: they get the temporary technical help they need but can't actually afford and the OP gets some CV fodder and/or a useful reference, or at least some experience that could be talked about at interview. Having some real world "dealing with users" / "dealing with customers" / "dealing with management" / "real-world problem solving" experience to talk about critically in an interview can make a massive difference to your chances once you get as far as the interview - it can indicate to the interviewer that not only do you know some facts/techniques but you are also capable of applying them outside academic situations and are capable of dealing with the real people in the real world at the same time. (by "talk about critically" I don't mean just "having a go" about the things that were/went wrong, I mean "what went well and why, what could have been done better, how would you approach the same task again if you had the power of hindsight, how were other people/resources helpful or not" and so on - constructive critique of your progress and experience)
Ever if you don't even manage any of that the exposure, through volunteering, to work outside an academic environment might teach you some useful stuff - even if only "I don't actually like X" or "I more enjoy Y and I'm more proficient in it than Z" or "hmmm, I didn't realise I would need A so much, maybe evidence of reading around / practising / otherwise persuing that area will help me jump from the CV stage to the interview stage more easily".
If you have time and can find volunteer work it will rarely be a disadvantage to you - especially if you are otherwise completely unemployed because it isn't like there would be a lot else practical to fill your time with. This in itself helps a CV/application look more attractive - which would you rather interview from the choice of people who graduated six months ago: those who have sat on their hands for six months doing nothing more than scanning jobs adverts and similar, or the people who have done, or tried to do, something practical with some of the time they had available?
To cut a long story short: as pointed out by the responder above both networking and volunteering can help and the two techniques can be mutually supportive of each other. And if you are not lucky enough to find any good opportunities, what have you lost by trying?
I failed at being a pimp too. Due to being dyslexic I wasted all my money on a warehouse.
To be honest I don't care about the info I have on FB. All they have is my name, an incorrect birth date, a low resolution indication of my general location, and a list of people that I am linked with in some way. Nothing of much value to any third party that I can think of.
What does bother me though is the idea of someone passing on my information (whether I care about the information or not) for profit. I I'm to be hored out to the world I'll do the horing and have the profit thankyouverymuch. If someone else wants to try gain from my info maybe I'll let them, but it is only common curtsey to ask for permission rather than automatically opting me in.
From a technical point of view I assume this linking of you to your FB account (and from there to other information and linking information FB holds) is going to be done by the 3rd party web site making a client-side request to FB (this request, being client-side, would contain your FB session ID cookie value) which then redirects to a script on the 3rd party site with some sort of session ID that can be used to make further requests to FB server side. This would not be difficult to block if you run a cleaning proxy (strip out requests to FB pages from with pages that were not served from an FB server to start with) or simply by using a separate browser. By "separate" I mean really separate: not common add-ons for instance (flash cookies, if you aren't in the habit of blocking flash by default, are cross-browser and even survive through "private browsing" mods) - true separation might mean having to run it in a VM or some such construct (which may, in turn, mean I can't be bothered enough for the hassle).
If I were to ever see signs that a site had gone prying into what information there is about be out there I would never revisit that site or those relating to it, and would recommend that my contacts do the same. Unfortunately I'm in a minority - most people are not as bitter, anal, and vindictive enough to carry out threats of "never coming back" so in the long run my avoidance of such sites won't make much difference to them in the grand scheme of things.
Bill Gates wants to be seen as some kind of third world savior but in the end, he's just another capitalist with money to burn.
You are aware that Bill has retired from all but a non-exec position aren't you? He has surprisingly little say in what MS do these days.
How about some crusaders who mount spam campaigns that, when clicked, scare the holy living hell out of the recipient?
Because if you hit the wrong idiot with a weak heart and a litigious or determined-and-violent violent family who happen to be in, or have contacts in, your jurisdiction you have something on your hands that you'd rather not deal with. Some may even track you down just over the "sucker" thing: the uneducated don't tend to respond to an insult with a cunningly worded witty repost.
And then you need to consider the "pro" spammers who, seeing your vigilante action as something that might impact their margins in the long run, may be inclined to use any spare resource present in the botnets they have some control over to DDoS the web server and any other service/account that is traceable back to you from there.
This is not the only famous old computer related name+logo that is being "miss used" to flog PC parts. See http://www.acorncomputers.co.uk/ for another example.
And I can't figure out why I would want to upgrade. I didn't upgrade to Koala, because the only real change I could find was they dropped pidgen for evolution or something like that.
The main reason to upgrade if you don't care for new features/packages (or changes to existing features/packages) is security support. 9.04 officially drops out of support in October (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Release_history) which means you are likely to stop getting patches for security issues. Lucid, being an LTS release, will be officially supported longer than most other releases so you'll be good from that PoV until 2013 (three years instead of the usual 18 months).
If you are happy with 9.04 at the moment then there is no requirement to upgrade. Beyond October that will change, at that point you should move to 9.10 or 10.04 (or 10.10 assuming the normal release pattern is continuing) to continue getting security updates. I put 9.10 on my netbook when I last rebuilt its OS setup mainly "just because", though did notice a slight performance improvement in a few places (enough to be aware of but probably not enough to specifically upgrade for, I'm guessing some of the improvement is from the use of ext4 which you'll not move to automatically when upgrading rather than reinstalling anyway). I very much doubt I'll upgrade in the near future as at this point there is not real need for me to do so until I start needing a newer version of a package (and can't be bothered to maintain my own compile of it) or 11.04 when Karmic hits its end-or-support date.
Clearly it isn't Intel over AMD, it could support both Intel VT and AMD-V. Don't throw out the hate without justification!
I think the claimed Intel/AMD distinction is not about which particular set of visualization helper modes were supported - it is about the differences in general availability of the features between the manufacturers. I think *all* recent AMD chips have the relevant support, whereas Intel are still segmenting their market by putting out chips both with and without - see http://news.cnet.com/some-intel-chips-dont-support-windows-7-xp-mode/ for one example of this being discussed.
First off 386s ran at 8 or 16 MHz (typically).
While 8 and 16Mhz was all that was available initially, it certainly wasn't uncommon to see 25 and 33 Mhz models later. AMD even put out 386SX and 386DX chips intended to ran at 40MHz and it was claimed by some to run faster than a 486@25MHz for some tasks. I had one of said SXs in my machine at the time and the machine certainly didn't do badly compared to the 486s running at 25MHz at school at the time (though I never ran anything to scientifically test the relative performance).
I'm sure a good slave works out much better value for money in the long run...
All corporations are inherently sociopathic, lacking in empathy, remorse, guilt...
A corporation pays my salary, so they can't be all bad.
They only pay you because slavery is illegal. Doing the right thing because you have no choice doesn't count when good karma is being totted up.
Might be better to somehow "pollute" the data first...
If enough people do this for them to care, all they have to do is scan for any updates that preceded an account close by a short amount of time and roll them back just as easily as they would undo a delete. I'm guessing old copies of the information are kept as well as the latest (now polluted if that is what you have done) for various reasons so this would not be at all difficult for them to do.
knocked offline...taken offline....takedown...knock out.......have knocked it off..."De-peered,"'...pulled the plug... refusing to transmit
... IT IS A DEAD ISP! </cleese>
It's just like MS. They may not succeed at first... Actually, they never succeed at first try, at anything.
Hence some people won't touch anything Microsoft until the third major release.
That went in (in Windows 95, I think) when CDs were only manufactured by major vendors, before home CD writers or USB storage devices. So it probably seemed "safe" at the time.
Many people questioned the safety of autorun win Win95. Auto-running from removable media had already been a problem - one of the first viruses documented as being in-the-wild was distributed on Apple floppies and got itself run via that system's autorun feature (unlike PCs descended from the IBM line and its compatibles several machines and OSs,Apple's machines and Commodor's Amiga lines being two examples, supported detecting a new floppy being inserted) and that was long before Windows 95 hit the market.
The potential problems were well know by that point. As you suggest MS's official policy was just "it is safe enough for now, we'll fix it later".
The only reason, I have ad block is because of facebook. While personally I don't like facebook, I have lots of friends on it so I do use it. The problem with facebook is it allows ads that look exactly like facebook apps. Sometimes is really hard to tell the ad from the app.
My solution there is just to completely ignore them - both apps and ads that look like apps. I use facebook due only to people I know being on there too, but the people I know on there know I'm only there to use it as a messaging service and don't take part in the apps business.