Just because they tell you they're going to do it doesn't make it right. They don't check grammar, spelling or factual correctness, they have no business calling themselves editors. "Submission vettors" perhaps.
As another poster has already said, here in the UK the expression is most definitely "on the cards". (That redundant information added to escape the lameness filter. Have a very unlame day!)
After longhorn is released every new computer will ship with it, why should people have to pay extra for hardware required to run it when all they want to do is go online and play music.
You're missing the point. By the time Longhorn ships, the hardware required to run it won't cost any extra, because that $400 computer will include it. Computer hardware only gets cheaper in the sense that you get more for your money; an entry-level PC today costs roughly the same as an entry-level PC from 5 years ago, it's just a damn sight more powerful.
Agreed. I've had my desktops at home and at work running XP (Pro) for a couple of years, with no noticeable slowdown.
Sure, if you don't know what you're doing you can cause yourself some real problems, but that's true of pretty much everything in life, not just computing.
Except that wereas the car industry went and improved their product, the computer industry is content to call everyone an idiot.
You're right, but you are also being a little too harsh at the same time. The home computer market has only really been in existence for a couple of decades, and things *are* getting better. You're essentially comparing a 2000s car to a 1900s one, and 2000s software to ~1980s software. That's a little unfair - I'm betting that cars from the 20s and 30s still suffered a lot of the problems of those from the 00s. Similarly in software, an XP system is a damn sight more stable than a Win95 one.
That said, I agree with your comments about name-calling and finger-pointing; the computing industry, and in particular software development, is immature in more ways than one.
That would seem to imply that the 1300 patents mentioned by the OP are all software ones (assuming that they've not really been granted 1300 patents in the last few days, and that he meant 2004)
Seen in that light, the 500 (while doubtless still generous) are less than half of a single year's worth. Doesn't seem quite so impressive to me anymore...
So you've switched off all the other network-aware services *and* are confident that there are no exploits at all in your www, smtp, pop3 and ssh servers?
Good for you! Meanwhile, cut out the unnecessary fucking abuse, you moron.
You're missing the point about privilleged ports, I think. There is no technical difference between ports below 1024 and those above, other than that those below 1024 are considered to be reserved for particular services. All that does is place the burden of honouring the convention (80 = http, 443 = https, etc) on a limited subset of people (the machine admins), rather than relying on any old user.
To the host computer, there is no difference - apps listening on "privlleged" ports don't get elevated permissions. Allowing non-admin users to open those ports does nothing to compromise the security of the host.
These days, by the way, the distinction between "client" and "server" is rather blurred; if I run say a webserver on my home PC (a desktop) and surf the web, etc from it, is that a client or a server? I'd agree that machines shouldn't open ports that they don't need to open, but it's growing increasingly inaccurate to classify a given machine as a client or a server; many are both at once.
This is about NT Server. The supported, "server" versions of Linux (eg RedHat Advanced Server) are most certainly not free (as in beer). If you want support, you pay for it, and as people are pointing out, it lasts a lot less time than support for NT Server did.
Well, while I realise that there is no "voice of slashdot" as such, if you look at the articles about Blizzard/Vivendi going after the bnetd guys, I think you'll see that all/almost all the highly-rated comments comdemn it.
Meanwhile, on articles about WoW, there is maybe one or two highly-rated posts reminding people about the bnetd case, one or two critical of problems, and the rest saying how great it is.
Of course it's possible to hate them for bnetd but love the game, but "vote with your money" is something of a slashdot mantra. Funny to see it's so rarely applied to something that's actually cool.
No, it's a feature of media player (going to an URL to get a licence) that can be used to exploit holes in IE (by pointing the licence retrieval URL at a malicious website).
The fix is to not attempt to retrieve licences, or to use a different media player.
I've got an FX 5900 non-ultra 128MB. Doom3 and Half-Life 2 are both my bitch.
But at what settings? Are they your bitch at full quality on all settings, with the resolution up as far as your monitor can display and your eyes can cope with?
And I wouldn't be surprised if, two years later, the free driver were faster in at least some occasions than the proprietary. We can code tricks too, you know.
Anyone that good at writing drivers for 3d cards probably already is, for a card manufacturer. Yes, we can code tricks too - but I'm betting that the pros have a damn sight more experience in this domain than we do.
So what you're saying is that ATI and NVidia should sponsor games development in order to sell more graphics cards? A *lot* of money going into Linux at the moment is coming from hardware companies who want to sell more hardware at a greater profit.
The other major source of sponsorship is software development shops like Oracle, who need an OS for their software to run on, and see Linux being popular (and pushed by "the right" hardware people), but I see no analogue to that for games. Third party library developers? I don't suppose there's enough money in that to spend it on getting games written to get licencing fees in return.
The third main revenue stream is support, and franky, if you need to offer support for a game it's so buggy (or hard to play/install/whatever) that no-one's going to play it anyway.
"Open source" or free software tries to alleviate the heavy restrictions that a law (copyright) puts on software.
Copyright law places no such "heavy restrictions" on the software. The restrictions are placed there by the software developers/publishers, using copyright law as a club to back up their demands.
Never forget - no copyright, no GPL. I'd be free to take any GPLed code I like, modify it, and release binaries without ever giving back the modifications.
The actual numbers of vulnerabilities/flaws in Microsoft's closed source code is unknown until a vulnerability is detected and announced.
But that's true of *any* software, including open source stuff - even with the code, the number of vulnerabilities is unknown until and unless you can *prove* that you've found them all. You may fail to find any not because there are none, but because you lack sufficient skill and/or knowledge.
That's true (I for one left university with fairly large debts), but don't forget that today's students are tomorrow's professionals. When you get used to getting something for free, you're not necessarily going to want that to change just because you now have more money - there's *always* something else you can spend it on.
I agree that that is far from a representative sample of the population, but it *may* tell us something about what to expect in the future.
Yes, it was a potential disaster averted. Make no mistake, if the wrong system(s) failed in the wrong way because of the Y2k bug, things could have gone very badly wrong for quite a lot of people.
Yes, it was a hoax, in that it was blown out of all proportion by the media (no surprise there). If you believed the media, then the changeover from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 represented the end of the world, or at least of civilisation as we know it. Nukes would fly, planes would fall, reactors would go critical, fortunes would vaporise.
In a sense, the media attention was good, in that it forced companies and other organisations to address the problem. But make no mistake - the media blow almost *everything* out of proportion. "Potential Slight Problem, Fixes Being Developed" doesn't sell as many papers or as much ad space/ad time as "Y2K Bug Set To Cause Havoc - Millions Could Be Dooooomed!".
Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today
Of course they will. Like them or loathe them, the adware authors are doing it for money, and so target the OS with the largest install base (all other things being equal). Once Linux or MacOS has a more appreciable market share, they'll be targetted too.
Yes, Windows is more vulnerable to remote/local exploits, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about trojans, malware-riddled software and other stuff that requires user intervention to get on to a system. If the hordes ever descend on Linux, so will the malware.
I have been using computers since 1982 (when I was 8 years old). I have built a couple of PCs from parts, and upgraded components a number of times - RAM, motherboard, processor, PSU, graphics card, you name it. I work as a programmer, and have 5.5 years industry experience, and was playing with x86 assembler in the late 80s.
I never read the BIOS output either. As you say, as long as it's there and isn't different enough to last time that I notice, I don't look at what it says. I see RAM size, processor speed, detected drives and then a whole screenful of stuff I completely ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
For all software developers to use documented, open, royalty-free standards for file and other information interchange formats?
If the formats are open, then anyone can write software to read and write them. Surely this is at least a good first step in that direction?
Just because they tell you they're going to do it doesn't make it right. They don't check grammar, spelling or factual correctness, they have no business calling themselves editors. "Submission vettors" perhaps.
P.S.: The expression is "in the cards", not "on the cards".
reference.com disagrees with you:
in the cards
on the cards
As another poster has already said, here in the UK the expression is most definitely "on the cards". (That redundant information added to escape the lameness filter. Have a very unlame day!)
After longhorn is released every new computer will ship with it, why should people have to pay extra for hardware required to run it when all they want to do is go online and play music.
You're missing the point. By the time Longhorn ships, the hardware required to run it won't cost any extra, because that $400 computer will include it. Computer hardware only gets cheaper in the sense that you get more for your money; an entry-level PC today costs roughly the same as an entry-level PC from 5 years ago, it's just a damn sight more powerful.
Agreed. I've had my desktops at home and at work running XP (Pro) for a couple of years, with no noticeable slowdown.
Sure, if you don't know what you're doing you can cause yourself some real problems, but that's true of pretty much everything in life, not just computing.
Except that wereas the car industry went and improved their product, the computer industry is content to call everyone an idiot.
You're right, but you are also being a little too harsh at the same time. The home computer market has only really been in existence for a couple of decades, and things *are* getting better. You're essentially comparing a 2000s car to a 1900s one, and 2000s software to ~1980s software. That's a little unfair - I'm betting that cars from the 20s and 30s still suffered a lot of the problems of those from the 00s. Similarly in software, an XP system is a damn sight more stable than a Win95 one.
That said, I agree with your comments about name-calling and finger-pointing; the computing industry, and in particular software development, is immature in more ways than one.
From the summary:
IBM alone was granted 3,248 patents last year.
That would seem to imply that the 1300 patents mentioned by the OP are all software ones (assuming that they've not really been granted 1300 patents in the last few days, and that he meant 2004)
Seen in that light, the 500 (while doubtless still generous) are less than half of a single year's worth. Doesn't seem quite so impressive to me anymore...
Which says nothing about it's capabilities of being infected with spyware or viruses.
Exactly - it says nothing about it, including that it'll be more prone to malware than OS X.
I say drop the fanboy astroturfing and wait and see.
So you've switched off all the other network-aware services *and* are confident that there are no exploits at all in your www, smtp, pop3 and ssh servers?
Good for you! Meanwhile, cut out the unnecessary fucking abuse, you moron.
You're missing the point about privilleged ports, I think. There is no technical difference between ports below 1024 and those above, other than that those below 1024 are considered to be reserved for particular services. All that does is place the burden of honouring the convention (80 = http, 443 = https, etc) on a limited subset of people (the machine admins), rather than relying on any old user.
To the host computer, there is no difference - apps listening on "privlleged" ports don't get elevated permissions. Allowing non-admin users to open those ports does nothing to compromise the security of the host.
These days, by the way, the distinction between "client" and "server" is rather blurred; if I run say a webserver on my home PC (a desktop) and surf the web, etc from it, is that a client or a server? I'd agree that machines shouldn't open ports that they don't need to open, but it's growing increasingly inaccurate to classify a given machine as a client or a server; many are both at once.
This is about NT Server. The supported, "server" versions of Linux (eg RedHat Advanced Server) are most certainly not free (as in beer). If you want support, you pay for it, and as people are pointing out, it lasts a lot less time than support for NT Server did.
Well, while I realise that there is no "voice of slashdot" as such, if you look at the articles about Blizzard/Vivendi going after the bnetd guys, I think you'll see that all/almost all the highly-rated comments comdemn it.
Meanwhile, on articles about WoW, there is maybe one or two highly-rated posts reminding people about the bnetd case, one or two critical of problems, and the rest saying how great it is.
Of course it's possible to hate them for bnetd but love the game, but "vote with your money" is something of a slashdot mantra. Funny to see it's so rarely applied to something that's actually cool.
No, it's a feature of media player (going to an URL to get a licence) that can be used to exploit holes in IE (by pointing the licence retrieval URL at a malicious website).
The fix is to not attempt to retrieve licences, or to use a different media player.
I've got an FX 5900 non-ultra 128MB. Doom3 and Half-Life 2 are both my bitch.
But at what settings? Are they your bitch at full quality on all settings, with the resolution up as far as your monitor can display and your eyes can cope with?
And I wouldn't be surprised if, two years later, the free driver were faster in at least some occasions than the proprietary. We can code tricks too, you know.
Anyone that good at writing drivers for 3d cards probably already is, for a card manufacturer. Yes, we can code tricks too - but I'm betting that the pros have a damn sight more experience in this domain than we do.
So what you're saying is that ATI and NVidia should sponsor games development in order to sell more graphics cards? A *lot* of money going into Linux at the moment is coming from hardware companies who want to sell more hardware at a greater profit.
The other major source of sponsorship is software development shops like Oracle, who need an OS for their software to run on, and see Linux being popular (and pushed by "the right" hardware people), but I see no analogue to that for games. Third party library developers? I don't suppose there's enough money in that to spend it on getting games written to get licencing fees in return.
The third main revenue stream is support, and franky, if you need to offer support for a game it's so buggy (or hard to play/install/whatever) that no-one's going to play it anyway.
"Open source" or free software tries to alleviate the heavy restrictions that a law (copyright) puts on software.
Copyright law places no such "heavy restrictions" on the software. The restrictions are placed there by the software developers/publishers, using copyright law as a club to back up their demands.
Never forget - no copyright, no GPL. I'd be free to take any GPLed code I like, modify it, and release binaries without ever giving back the modifications.
The actual numbers of vulnerabilities/flaws in Microsoft's closed source code is unknown until a vulnerability is detected and announced.
But that's true of *any* software, including open source stuff - even with the code, the number of vulnerabilities is unknown until and unless you can *prove* that you've found them all. You may fail to find any not because there are none, but because you lack sufficient skill and/or knowledge.
That's true (I for one left university with fairly large debts), but don't forget that today's students are tomorrow's professionals. When you get used to getting something for free, you're not necessarily going to want that to change just because you now have more money - there's *always* something else you can spend it on.
I agree that that is far from a representative sample of the population, but it *may* tell us something about what to expect in the future.
I remember that; I think I first used the web in '94, maybe '95, and altavista.digital.com was the first search engine I knew about.
It would basically be suicide for any corporation to break the law, then.
Precisely, while the same is not true of a real person - they lose a couple of years of their life, not all of it.
Yes, it was a potential disaster averted. Make no mistake, if the wrong system(s) failed in the wrong way because of the Y2k bug, things could have gone very badly wrong for quite a lot of people.
Yes, it was a hoax, in that it was blown out of all proportion by the media (no surprise there). If you believed the media, then the changeover from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 represented the end of the world, or at least of civilisation as we know it. Nukes would fly, planes would fall, reactors would go critical, fortunes would vaporise.
In a sense, the media attention was good, in that it forced companies and other organisations to address the problem. But make no mistake - the media blow almost *everything* out of proportion. "Potential Slight Problem, Fixes Being Developed" doesn't sell as many papers or as much ad space/ad time as "Y2K Bug Set To Cause Havoc - Millions Could Be Dooooomed!".
Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today
Of course they will. Like them or loathe them, the adware authors are doing it for money, and so target the OS with the largest install base (all other things being equal). Once Linux or MacOS has a more appreciable market share, they'll be targetted too.
Yes, Windows is more vulnerable to remote/local exploits, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about trojans, malware-riddled software and other stuff that requires user intervention to get on to a system. If the hordes ever descend on Linux, so will the malware.
That's "Free as in speech" not "free as in beer", or do you think that RedHat give away RHEL AS and support contracts for nothing?
I have been using computers since 1982 (when I was 8 years old). I have built a couple of PCs from parts, and upgraded components a number of times - RAM, motherboard, processor, PSU, graphics card, you name it. I work as a programmer, and have 5.5 years industry experience, and was playing with x86 assembler in the late 80s.
I never read the BIOS output either. As you say, as long as it's there and isn't different enough to last time that I notice, I don't look at what it says. I see RAM size, processor speed, detected drives and then a whole screenful of stuff I completely ignore.