It is simple but not necessarily obvious how to install Windows without catching something. I'm sorry if this is redundant, but I felt the need to counter the many posts that implied you need 3rd-party hardware/software.
1. Disconnect your network and install Windows from CD. Decline the offers to register or install updates.
2. Enable the firewall. Block everything.
3. Run windows update and install everything it suggests.
4. Configure windows to download updates automatically.
5. Punch holes in your firewall if you must.
That's it! An external router/firewall might be a a good idea to protect you from future worms, but it is not essential for safe installation of Windows.
I run a couple of dozen PCs with a couple of terabytes using garden-variety mid-tower cases sitting on 2 parallel steel shelving units with an aisle in between.
The backs of the machines are to the aisle and I have a common keyboard/monitor/mouse setup with long extension cables that I swap as necessary.
I run Linux so I only need the keyboard and console in exceptional circumstances. If I were forced to run Windows, I would use VNC and a similar setup.
Each machine has 4 ATA hard drives and no CD. For system setup, I do a network install initiated from a floppy. All other maintenance is over the network.
While this setup is a little bit clumsier than a rack system might be, it is far cheaper because it is built 100% from commodity components.
I found the ISOs for SUSE 9.1 beta4 on eDonkey network (using the free eMule client). I suppose I shall read the copyright notices before posting a link.
Sure. Then the testers then have the right to post them on the Web and/or p2p networks. Assuming the distro is GPL.
If the entire distro isn't GPL, then the GPL-derived subset of it still must be. (e.g. they've announced that YAST will be GPL-ed, but I'm not sure that it is yet.) And if the GPL-derived subset is not readily identifiable, surely that makes the whole thing a derivative work.
It would not behoove SUSE to pull a SCO and say "parts of this are secret but I won't clearly identify which."
A cursory search of the SUSE site and mirrors reveals only 9.0. Surely the 9.1 beta must be available for download someplace. Can somebody provide a URL?
I'm not only a compiler user - I'm a compiler writer - and Cringley's comments about the naivete of my kind are not entirely off the mark.
However, he neglects to mention that Linux has powerful allies: China, Japan, and a legion of lesser developed countries who will strongly resist Microsoft imperialism. Hope lies with them.
ACM sponsors the contest but does not run it. The finals and general regional framework are set by a committee headed by Bill Poucher at Baylor University.
The regional directors have a fair amount of autonomy as to how they run the contest. Several regions (and the finals) never release their judging data. Many others publish the judging data and/or correct solutions to the problems. I am strongly in favour of the latter approach and have argued its merits (without success) to the powers that be. In response I have heard arguments about "when it's over it's over" but none have convinced me. I can come to no other conclusion than that those judges who withold data do so due to fear of scrutiny.
In any event you should not tar all regions with the same brush, nor should you blame ACM. They sponsor a great contest, albeit one that could be improved.
The mime-type bug has been known for a long time. Microsoft has corrected it (twice:-)). I know this because my parents' computer was infected between their first and second attempts to fix the problem.
In a nutshell, Microsoft uses the filename extension, not the mime type, to decide how to open a particular file. On the other hand, Outlook uses the mime type to decide whether or not to automatically launch images, sound files, etc. So all you had to do was to send a mail with an embedded image with a filename ending in.exe, and it was executed.
It has been more than a year since Microsoft crippled^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfixed IE/OE sufficiently to remove this vulnerability.
I must concur with previous posters that the best approach is to avoid these software products.
If only Britannica abandoned their direct-sale network. On at least a couple of occasions I've initiated the purchase process only to terminate it when they wanted to send a vacuum cleaner^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h salesman to my house, as opposed to giving me a price list.
So for the same money I bought my daughter a nice laptop with wireless.
A high-quality bound encyclopedia has many advantages, not the least of which is that you can open it anywhere and begin a fascinating journey through human knowledge. In comparison, Web space is vast but constrained, cluttered, and low-res.
Last week I ran a spam filter on all the email I recieved for the last several months. The filter came up with a dozen 'false positives' - messages that I had not flagged as spam when I manually classified them. 11 of them were clearly errors I made in my original classification. The 12th was a solicitation from the alumni association of my alma mater....
Before I used a spam filter, I once missed a very important message whose subject line was something to the effect of "URGENT - DON't REBOOT THIS MORNING." That was a bad one to miss.
Of course humans make mistakes, and it is entirely possible for an automated or semi-automated system to be more accurate than a human alone.
You may occasionally have to replace worn-out parts like ignition wires and plugs, but there are no "tune-up" adjustments to be made. Similarly, I'm sure self-tuning in guitars doesn't obviate string replacement.
Automotive engineering involves compromises
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Don't be quick to assume that the auto manufacturers are incompetent and that some script kiddie can find a performance tweak they overlooked.
Many compromises are made in designing the control systems, and a mod chip just selects a different set of compromises. Some of these are:
Ignition timing. Advanced ignition timing may result in higher performance, but also may cause pre-ignition (knock) which will damage your engine unless you use premium fuel.
Fuel economy.
Driveability - throttle lag, stumbling, rough idle, run-on, are all issues of concern.
Emissions. High combustion temperatures send NOx emissions through the roof.
Maintenance intervals.
Longevity.
Manufacturing cost.
Of these, manufacturing cost (and emissions, if you're environmentally inconsiderate) are they only compromises for which your criteria are likely to be different from those of the manufacturer, and hence the ones where aftermarket modifications might help. I don't see why the particular firmware in the chip would affect manufacturing cost, so it boils down to the other issues.
Hyperbole.
1 Rhet. A figure of speech consisting in exaggerated or extravagant
statement, used to express strong feeling or produce a strong impression, and
not intended to be understood literally. [OED]
I don't see why disposable DVDs are any more amenable to ripping than rentals.
A friend of mine always rips rental DVDs. Not because she keeps a copy, but because her exercise-room TV has no video input, and he has to use a VCR to convert them to RF for the benefit of the TV. The Macrovision in unripped DVDs prevents this. A fortunate side-effect is that she can skip the trailers and other junk and just watch the movie.
My 2 bits' worth on the subject at hand:
(bit 1) I might pay a premium to avoid having to bother returning the DVD, but not a $5 premium. Even if the price were right, my conscience would bother me contributing all that plastic and other junk to a land-fill site.
(bit 2) Disposable DVDs might facilitate mail-order sites with huge inventories. There are many hard-to-find titles that I'd love to see, if the price were right.
I recall being very disappointed when my new VAX 11/750 running BSD 4.1 was much slower than my PDP 11/45 running BSD 2.8. All the applications I tested: cc, yacc, etc. were faster on the 16-bit PDP than the 32-bit VAX.
P.S. I often use a small subset of Cygwin tools when I do maintenance on other Windows machines. Generally all I do is throw cygwin1.dll, vim, ls, tar, dd, and a few other goodies onto a floppy/key disk and I'm away to the races.
Several people complained about Cygwin, but yours was the first to articulate a problem - lack of integration with the Windows environment.
For me, this was not an issue. I installed the complete system, started X11 and some Xterms, and live happily as if I were on a Linux system. The file structures, home directories, and password files were created properly and automatically by the installation. bash profiles went into.bashrc in the normal way.
It is true that from windows you have to know to navigate to c:\cygwin\home to find the home directories, and from cygwin you have to know the arcane Windows pathnames like c:\Documents and Settings\... \Desktop and so on.
There are also Windowing system wars. I am happy enough using the Windows Window managaer (with the Power Toys setup to give me follow focus). From Cygwin I use some X11 apps (like xv, xterm) and also some Win32 apps (gsview, Word, etc.). I never try to compile Win32 apps from source... I suppose if I wanted to do this I'd use Visual Studio.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what I'd like Cygwin to do differently. But that's because I'm a *nix user grudgingly forced into the Windows world, not a Windows user. So all the stuff that people whose mother tongue is Windows find familiar, I find strange.
I just got a Motorola phone from Fido for $12 net, Including 12V car power supply and headphones. (from Telephone Booth). The only plan requirement is 3 months at $25/mo.
Linksys 802.11b routers can often be had for $79 at Staples/Future Shop.
Brand-X 802.11b router plus USB adapter $90 a Costco.
These are Canadian Dollars, so multiply by 0.80 for U.S.
The PDP/11 ran BSD 2.8 just fine. Segmented architecture, 16 bit addresses. I think you'd call it Unix-like, and it certainly had pre-emptive multitasking.
BSD 2.8 had vi, job control, yacc, cc,... What more could anybody want?
Back to the 286. While it didn't have paged address translation or demand paging, it had address translation through segment registers and could handily support multitasking.
This is not to say that Linux ran on it - this I don't recall. Just that your aspersions on the 286 are overly broad.
Slashdot Mirror
It is simple but not necessarily obvious how to install Windows without catching something. I'm sorry if this is redundant, but I felt the need to counter the many posts that implied you need 3rd-party hardware/software.
1. Disconnect your network and install Windows from CD. Decline the offers to register or install updates.
2. Enable the firewall. Block everything.
3. Run windows update and install everything it suggests.
4. Configure windows to download updates automatically.
5. Punch holes in your firewall if you must.
That's it! An external router/firewall might be a a good idea to protect you from future worms, but it is not essential for safe installation of Windows.
Suppose the "few hours time" is lost to the Coast Guard in the middle of a search-and-rescue mission?
I run a couple of dozen PCs with a couple of terabytes using garden-variety mid-tower cases sitting on 2 parallel steel shelving units with an aisle in between.
The backs of the machines are to the aisle and I have a common keyboard/monitor/mouse setup with long extension cables that I swap as necessary.
I run Linux so I only need the keyboard and console in exceptional circumstances. If I were forced to run Windows, I would use VNC and a similar setup.
Each machine has 4 ATA hard drives and no CD. For system setup, I do a network install initiated from a floppy. All other maintenance is over the network.
While this setup is a little bit clumsier than a rack system might be, it is far cheaper because it is built 100% from commodity components.
I looked there and didn't see a 9.1 download. I saw a testimonial from somebody who claimed to be downloading it but declined to share the address.
I found the ISOs for SUSE 9.1 beta4 on eDonkey network (using the free eMule client). I suppose I shall read the copyright notices before posting a link.
Sure. Then the testers then have the right to post them on the Web and/or p2p networks. Assuming the distro is GPL.
If the entire distro isn't GPL, then the GPL-derived subset of it still must be. (e.g. they've announced that YAST will be GPL-ed, but I'm not sure that it is yet.) And if the GPL-derived subset is not readily identifiable, surely that makes the whole thing a derivative work.
It would not behoove SUSE to pull a SCO and say "parts of this are secret but I won't clearly identify which."
I believe it must be released to testers under the GPL. So I would expect a copy to be available somewhere.
A cursory search of the SUSE site and mirrors reveals only 9.0. Surely the 9.1 beta must be available for download someplace. Can somebody provide a URL?
thanks
I'm not only a compiler user - I'm a compiler writer - and Cringley's comments about the naivete of my kind are not entirely off the mark.
However, he neglects to mention that Linux has powerful allies: China, Japan, and a legion of lesser developed countries who will strongly resist Microsoft imperialism. Hope lies with them.
ACM sponsors the contest but does not run it. The finals and general regional framework are set by a committee headed by Bill Poucher at Baylor University.
The regional directors have a fair amount of autonomy as to how they run the contest. Several regions (and the finals) never release their judging data. Many others publish the judging data and/or correct solutions to the problems. I am strongly in favour of the latter approach and have argued its merits (without success) to the powers that be. In response I have heard arguments about "when it's over it's over" but none have convinced me. I can come to no other conclusion than that those judges who withold data do so due to fear of scrutiny.
In any event you should not tar all regions with the same brush, nor should you blame ACM. They sponsor a great contest, albeit one that could be improved.
The mime-type bug has been known for a long time. Microsoft has corrected it (twice :-)). I know this because my parents' computer was infected between their first and second attempts to fix the problem.
.exe, and it was executed.
In a nutshell, Microsoft uses the filename extension, not the mime type, to decide how to open a particular file. On the other hand, Outlook uses the mime type to decide whether or not to automatically launch images, sound files, etc. So all you had to do was to send a mail with an embedded image with a filename ending in
It has been more than a year since Microsoft crippled^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfixed IE/OE sufficiently to remove this vulnerability.
I must concur with previous posters that the best approach is to avoid these software products.
So for the same money I bought my daughter a nice laptop with wireless.
A high-quality bound encyclopedia has many advantages, not the least of which is that you can open it anywhere and begin a fascinating journey through human knowledge. In comparison, Web space is vast but constrained, cluttered, and low-res.
Before I used a spam filter, I once missed a very important message whose subject line was something to the effect of "URGENT - DON't REBOOT THIS MORNING." That was a bad one to miss.
Of course humans make mistakes, and it is entirely possible for an automated or semi-automated system to be more accurate than a human alone.
Cars are self-tuning.
You may occasionally have to replace worn-out parts like ignition wires and plugs, but there are no "tune-up" adjustments to be made. Similarly, I'm sure self-tuning in guitars doesn't obviate string replacement.
Many compromises are made in designing the control systems, and a mod chip just selects a different set of compromises. Some of these are:
Of these, manufacturing cost (and emissions, if you're environmentally inconsiderate) are they only compromises for which your criteria are likely to be different from those of the manufacturer, and hence the ones where aftermarket modifications might help. I don't see why the particular firmware in the chip would affect manufacturing cost, so it boils down to the other issues.Ignition timing. Advanced ignition timing may result in higher performance, but also may cause pre-ignition (knock) which will damage your engine unless you use premium fuel.
Fuel economy.
Driveability - throttle lag, stumbling, rough idle, run-on, are all issues of concern.
Emissions. High combustion temperatures send NOx emissions through the roof.
Maintenance intervals.
Longevity.
Manufacturing cost.
Here's one for CA$99.99.
That's half the price of a new TV!
Besides, tell my friend, not me.
I don't see why disposable DVDs are any more amenable to ripping than rentals.
A friend of mine always rips rental DVDs. Not because she keeps a copy, but because her exercise-room TV has no video input, and he has to use a VCR to convert them to RF for the benefit of the TV. The Macrovision in unripped DVDs prevents this. A fortunate side-effect is that she can skip the trailers and other junk and just watch the movie.
My 2 bits' worth on the subject at hand:
(bit 1) I might pay a premium to avoid having to bother returning the DVD, but not a $5 premium. Even if the price were right, my conscience would bother me contributing all that plastic and other junk to a land-fill site.
(bit 2) Disposable DVDs might facilitate mail-order sites with huge inventories. There are many hard-to-find titles that I'd love to see, if the price were right.
Yankovic once said in an interview that he acquires permission to use all material he parodies.
I recall being very disappointed when my new VAX 11/750 running BSD 4.1 was much slower than my PDP 11/45 running BSD 2.8. All the applications I tested: cc, yacc, etc. were faster on the 16-bit PDP than the 32-bit VAX.
I kept the VAX anyway.
P.S. I often use a small subset of Cygwin tools when I do maintenance on other Windows machines. Generally all I do is throw cygwin1.dll, vim, ls, tar, dd, and a few other goodies onto a floppy/key disk and I'm away to the races.
Several people complained about Cygwin, but yours was the first to articulate a problem - lack of integration with the Windows environment.
.bashrc in the normal way.
... \Desktop and so on.
... I suppose if I wanted to do this I'd use Visual Studio.
For me, this was not an issue. I installed the complete system, started X11 and some Xterms, and live happily as if I were on a Linux system. The file structures, home directories, and password files were created properly and automatically by the installation. bash profiles went into
It is true that from windows you have to know to navigate to c:\cygwin\home to find the home directories, and from cygwin you have to know the arcane Windows pathnames like c:\Documents and Settings\
There are also Windowing system wars. I am happy enough using the Windows Window managaer (with the Power Toys setup to give me follow focus). From Cygwin I use some X11 apps (like xv, xterm) and also some Win32 apps (gsview, Word, etc.). I never try to compile Win32 apps from source
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what I'd like Cygwin to do differently. But that's because I'm a *nix user grudgingly forced into the Windows world, not a Windows user. So all the stuff that people whose mother tongue is Windows find familiar, I find strange.
I just got a Motorola phone from Fido for $12 net,
Including 12V car power supply and headphones. (from Telephone Booth). The only plan requirement is 3 months at $25/mo.
Linksys 802.11b routers can often be had for $79 at Staples/Future Shop.
Brand-X 802.11b router plus USB adapter $90 a Costco.
These are Canadian Dollars, so multiply by 0.80 for U.S.
What's the answer to the question? Is this something that pre-2.4.23 users should be concerned with?
The PDP/11 ran BSD 2.8 just fine. Segmented architecture, 16 bit addresses. I think you'd call it Unix-like, and it certainly had pre-emptive multitasking.
... What more could anybody want?
BSD 2.8 had vi, job control, yacc, cc,
Back to the 286. While it didn't have paged address translation or demand paging, it had address translation through segment registers and could handily support multitasking.
This is not to say that Linux ran on it - this I don't recall. Just that your aspersions on the 286 are overly broad.