How many millions of televisions are purchased in 10 years? Multiply that by $15 and that's the minimum amount of money that will be spent on this. Over a BILLION dollars. Perhaps a few hundred million in chips is a reasonable mandate to help the hearing impared, but a BILLION dollars is alot to mandate so that the FCC can rape the public of spectrum for cash. What do we, as consumers or whatever, need digital broadcast TV for anyway? How does anybody benifit? People who can afford this already pay for cable or sattelite, and people who can't afford cable and sattelite are going to be forced to buy new TVs, or tuner boxes. If they were going to open up that spectum for FREE public use, then I could see some value in this, but they're not going to do that.
Sure, it was a dual processor system, and it used approx, 500 watts idle, and 600 watts at load. You could NOT use a 600va UPS, in fact, intel wouldn't let us put two systems on the same 10 amp circuit, and we had 1300va UPSs for each 2 processor system with monitor. The quads had two 20 amp power cords (the ones with the horizontal blades), and needed it's own 3000va UPS. You couldn't put two on the same UPS. That means the quad CPU systems used over 1500 watts of power at full load by your calculation (There was 16GB of memory in the systems, so it probably uses less then that in a lesser configuration). Can you say hair dryer? (BTW, the system required at least two of it's 4 800 watt power supplys to be in place to power up, so the estimation isn't that far off).
Unfortuantly, we finished our development and sent the systems back, so I can't take any measurements to give you exact numbers. You'll have to settle for my memory of the situation.
More has to happen then an IA-64 price drop. (Or more has to happen to cause an IA-64 price drop, depending on how you look at it.) IA-64 is a beast. It's a HUGE chip that drinks power. The system I used last used more power then any of my kitchen appliances except for the oven. That has to be fixed. The CPU with the fixin's has to cost less then just the power module probably costs right now. Then there's intel not letting anyone actually build systems with Itanium in it. They white box the systems, and let vendors rebrand them. That's not going to go over well forever. You have to wonder what intel is hiding that they won't let OEMs build boards and systems though... What dirty little secrets does Itanium hide?
The second problem is that it's proprietary. Yes, proprietary, just like Power 4 and PA-RISC. Intel bills it as open, but if you want open you should go Sparc, MIPS, Alpha (dead soon unfortunatly), or x86. Those are the architectures that have competitive vendors manufacturing the cores. People write all kinds of software for x86. Not just desktop applications. Itanium can't get that kind of support if only Intel makes it. You'll see X86-64 in embedded devices right out of the gate. There are manufacturers DROOLING over a low power 64 bit chip to stick in their storage boxes and database servers. You won't see Itanium in there.
You have to wonder wether there are two different companies over at intel. You've got the Pentium 4, which is basically driven by the marketing department, and is a huge marketing success, but the architecture is nothing to write home about, and generally lame in the innovation department. Then you have the Itanium, which is a big grown up microprocessor that was driven by the engineers, and is going to turn out to be a marketing failure. Oh well.
Actually, 150 Watts. And that doesn't count the waste in the per CPU power module, or the chipset and memory. You're talking ~5-600 watts for a single CPU system. Mmm.. Space heatery.
Telling them that they need to get their skills up to par won't do much good. When I've run into this problem with people, I try to make them feel at ease. Try holding after hour gatherings the local bar. Then don't talk about work. Once they feel you're not an ass, then start bring up the concepts of work. When I've treated by co-developers with respect, I generally get respect back.
Yep, that works great. Unfortunatly, after you have respect you still get to do all the work yourself. People who don't work will never work unless their job is on the line. People who can't figure out how to do their job after years will never figure it out. Unfortunatly a sizeable percentage of professional programmers fall into one of those two categories because the jobs paid well, and there weren't as many good programmers as there were jobs. It's also hard to tell if somebody is a good programmer or not when you hire them. You typically can't look at their previous work like you can with somebody from almost any other profession. Also, people who can't tell and hire bad programmers, tend to hire lots of bad programmers. Anyway, back to the point: Respectful coworkers are not necissarily competent, hard-working coworkers.
Of course for some of us that's not an issue, because the rest of the development staff on your project gets laid off and you have to write and test the whole 20k line product yourself anyway. I'm not bitter though. I didn't have to stay, and at least I like all the code now, and when something is broken I don't have to count on somebody else to fix it. Unfortunatly, the long hours aren't scoring big points with the S.O.
Somebody has a skewed view of teenage cash flow. When I was in highschool, I had three (yes, three. Programming in dBase, stocking shelves late at night at a linens store, and flipping burgers on the weekend) jobs, and I had more then enough cash for a car. You only need $1000 or so for something that will get you around, and with no financial obligations it's easy to save that much money. I could have done it with one job, and I *never* had an allowance.
Hell, I had more disposable income when I was in high school then I've had at any other point in my life so far, and I make almost $80k/year right now!
While what you say about sparse files is generally true, that's probably not what this is. This is probably a single bit error on this guy's hard drive. There's probably more of them, but he noticed this one because it popped up in a noticeable location. The hard drive is probably on the way out, or he's got some faulty memory (if it's ECC, otherwise this could just be a fluke).
Tar does deal with sparse files correctly, and if this were one, he wouldn't be having trouble.
First of all, CRC is hardly encryption. Second of all, any sort of hardware you're likely to be communicating with was probably designed by somebody with a little more math background then a VB script kiddie. We're not talking about some lameo warez serial number database, we're talking about actual professionally designed RS232 hardware. Electrical engineers understand that CRC is for detecting a variety of errors, and they don't put the checksum in there for fun or obfsucation. It really is designed to catch certain errors. It's nothing complex, either. These checksums have to be computed by almost no hardware. There's usually an adder (not even a complete adder because there's no overflow bit), a single register, and a lookup table or two. If you're lucky, the table is computed in a straightforward manner using polynomial arithmetic. If not, you have no real choice but to dig the table(s) out of somewhere. We're not talking PGP here, but the table is calculated in such a way as to avoid patterns. More importantly, the algorithm should take into account not only the values of the data, but the position of each value. Maybe one device in a hundred is designed by some idiot that uses a simple checksum.
I think I agree with your general points, but actually the worms could have been a lot worse. Had Code Red, for example, performed destructive actions on the target servers, it would have been an absolute disaster, and everyone would have remembered The Day Code Red Hit.
And people would have restored their backups, and life would have gone on. People who don't do backups would have been caught with their pants down, and we would know in the future not to do business with them. The world certainly would not have ended. In fact, if code red had done actual damage, it could have been the best thing to have ever happened in terms of improving the general security of windows boxes.
There are a very small number of times that something large like this can hit before people realize that they have to pay attention to security, and do backups.
The only thing AMD has going for them (literally) is x86 compatibility.
And price. And power consumption (better by a factor of 10!). And size. And simplicity of the bus (HyperTransport). And cost to manufacture. And third party chipset support. And working, available 64-bit windows.
Also, from what I've heard, it runs 32 bit applications faster then existing AMD ia32 implementations. Certainly faster then a 1Ghz Pentium 3.
If the price of Itanium stays over $1000 per processor, and it's as easy to implement SMP with hammer (Opteron... Whatever) as it looks like it's going to be, you'll be seeing 64bit AMD boxes outperforming Itanium boxes that cost twice as much. I wouldn't be surprised to see 8 way opterons for the same price as a quad Itanium.
It's unfortunate that Itanium has such an uphill battle. It's clearly the superior architecture. Current implementations have a tough fight ahead if they can't get the complexity and the price down. At $500/CPU without the need for the gigantic per CPU power regulator and 750watt power supply, Itanium might be successful in the workstation market competing with hammer. At $1000-1500 per CPU, plus the outrageous board space and power requirements, the lack of third party board and chipset support, the insistance of intel that OEMs sell rebranded intel manufactured whiteboxes, and a host of other issues, the outlook is not good.
First of all, don't be listening to the guys that are telling you to try a variety of input. They've obviously never done this before.
If the sign doesn't use one of the standard polynomial CRC algorithms, you're only real option is to disassemble the binary you have to dig out the algorithm. Even if it does uses a standard algorithm (It's probably CRC16), you'll still have to figure out what data it's using. You can guess and check, and you may get lucky. Disassembling is a sure thing, and probably the quickest way to go, but check your licensing agreement.
I recently reverse engineered the CRC for my LG TP-5250 cell phone which, as it turns out, uses the standard CRC16 algorithm, but is creative about which data is uses to compute the checksum. Without a dissassembler it would have taken months to figure out what bytes were being used and in what order. You can read about how/what I did here.
When you purchase an Apple computer it comes with three coupons for a free OS upgrade. (At least mine did. Both my powerbook and my G4 tower.), So I doubt that they'll be extorting money out of that many users. They definatly won't be taking money from people who just bought macs with 10.1.
Look in digikey. It's called electrolumonescent plastic. You can buy it in 12" square sheets, and you can build the inverter for ~$10 worth of parts. The chip that drives the inverter is the MC33441 , and the datasheet tells you everything you need to know to build what you just described. The chip is tiny! I have some right here, and I can fit 4 of them on a dime. You shouldn't have any trouble squeezing it under your keyboard. (Good luck soldering to it though:)
First of all, x86 processors do not have a big endian mode. They are strictly little endian. Secondly, the little endian mode on PowerPC has never worked 100% correctly.
Either way, it's a moot point. Good code works correctly on either platform. Even OS code should be written endian clean, since no matter what the endianness of your processor, the PCI bus is little endian, and ethernet is big endian. The MacOS X kernel already runs on x86, so I assume that they've been careful.
It's fortunate for you that you got the chance to do that. It's a pain in the ass when you don't hear anything about it until after some stupid secretary that can't read puts it in a pile of bills, and the finance department just assumes it's a bill and pays it. Then, as the technical and administrative contact, you get an e-mail requesting the necissary PGP signed e-mail to allow the transfer and you have to figure out how to get the money back.
You only need a seperate signon for Windows and Linux if you actually run Windows. This argument works both ways. There is no support for SSO in Windows, because you need a seperate password for your Linux accounts. See? If you're only using linux, SSO is already available with ssh_keygen, and the authorized_keys file, or the the hosts.equiv file. (I'm sure there are other ways to do it out of the box as well.)
Exactly. The only remaining question is wether Microsoft will can a good product to spite Apple. I'd say that while they're under the watchful eye of antitrust lawyers they probably won't, but they're making Apple take that gamble.
Their core is software that runs on windows. They make far fewer products for MacOS then for windows, and they benifit from platform control and OEM payments.
You're right though, they don't loose either way. Which is why I think that this big stink is just for show. They'll put the pressure on in the media, and complain about not "fealing the love", but in reality Apple did microsft a bigger favor with MacOS X then microsoft did for apple. MS will pull in $300 million easily on Office X, and mac users don't usually upgrade, so they could have had zero upgrade sales, but thanks to MacOS X they get to resell office to 20% of the mac user base. Steve Jobs knows MS won't pull the product, so he'll keep pushing the 'switch' campaign anyway.
So they make what, $225 per copy? They sell every copy of Office for the Mac at retail. That comes out to $67 million dollars. That's for a product that still has two to three years left in it. They may not have hit projections, but they're still turning some serious profit. This really smells to me like Bill telling Steve to lay off the anti-windows campaign more than worrying that they'll fail to turn a profit on the product. Microsoft and Apple have been playing these games for years.
I think it's more likely that Microsoft is trying to get Apple to divert it's marketing budget away from the current compaign encouraging users to ditch windows, and instead spend those advertising dollars to get the existing apple user base to upgrade to MacOS X. I'm sure that they're selling more then enough copies (1.2 millon in the first 6 months, did it say?) to justify having developed Office X, but what they really want is for Apple to stop going after their core business.
Yes, but you restarted the graphic subsystem. Look, I get the point, but you're asking for the wrong feature to solve the problem. I understand what you want and that it's a nice thing, and what I'm telling you is that what you say is stupid isn't the problem, the problem you're looking to solve is that unlike win32 applications, X applications have to be attached to an X server to continue to run, so they don't survive a server restart. It's not stupid to have to configure your monitor. It's not stupid that the video card needs to be initialized when you switch configurations. What I am saying is that for now you can make most of the problem go away by configuring your session correctly. Some of your applications may not return to *exactly* the same state you left them in, but you can get it pretty damn close. Certainly close enough to be tolerable the very few times that you actually end up restarting X because of a monitor configuration.
Yes, it would be nice if the protocol and graphics sections of X were seperate in a useable way so that you could restart one without affecting the other, but really, how often do you plug in a new monitor that you weren't expecting? Do you plug in a projector frequently? Put an entry in there. Now you don't have to restart when you use a projector. Go out and buy a new monitor every week? Well, then I guess this is a serious problem for you.
Saying "There are more attacks on linux systems" becomes FUD when you imply that this is bad. More attacks doesn mean more successful breakins. Truth can be FUD in the right context.
Slashdot Mirror
How many millions of televisions are purchased in 10 years? Multiply that by $15 and that's the minimum amount of money that will be spent on this. Over a BILLION dollars. Perhaps a few hundred million in chips is a reasonable mandate to help the hearing impared, but a BILLION dollars is alot to mandate so that the FCC can rape the public of spectrum for cash. What do we, as consumers or whatever, need digital broadcast TV for anyway? How does anybody benifit? People who can afford this already pay for cable or sattelite, and people who can't afford cable and sattelite are going to be forced to buy new TVs, or tuner boxes. If they were going to open up that spectum for FREE public use, then I could see some value in this, but they're not going to do that.
Sure, it was a dual processor system, and it used approx, 500 watts idle, and 600 watts at load. You could NOT use a 600va UPS, in fact, intel wouldn't let us put two systems on the same 10 amp circuit, and we had 1300va UPSs for each 2 processor system with monitor. The quads had two 20 amp power cords (the ones with the horizontal blades), and needed it's own 3000va UPS. You couldn't put two on the same UPS. That means the quad CPU systems used over 1500 watts of power at full load by your calculation (There was 16GB of memory in the systems, so it probably uses less then that in a lesser configuration). Can you say hair dryer? (BTW, the system required at least two of it's 4 800 watt power supplys to be in place to power up, so the estimation isn't that far off).
Unfortuantly, we finished our development and sent the systems back, so I can't take any measurements to give you exact numbers. You'll have to settle for my memory of the situation.
More has to happen then an IA-64 price drop. (Or more has to happen to cause an IA-64 price drop, depending on how you look at it.) IA-64 is a beast. It's a HUGE chip that drinks power. The system I used last used more power then any of my kitchen appliances except for the oven. That has to be fixed. The CPU with the fixin's has to cost less then just the power module probably costs right now. Then there's intel not letting anyone actually build systems with Itanium in it. They white box the systems, and let vendors rebrand them. That's not going to go over well forever. You have to wonder what intel is hiding that they won't let OEMs build boards and systems though... What dirty little secrets does Itanium hide?
The second problem is that it's proprietary. Yes, proprietary, just like Power 4 and PA-RISC. Intel bills it as open, but if you want open you should go Sparc, MIPS, Alpha (dead soon unfortunatly), or x86. Those are the architectures that have competitive vendors manufacturing the cores. People write all kinds of software for x86. Not just desktop applications. Itanium can't get that kind of support if only Intel makes it. You'll see X86-64 in embedded devices right out of the gate. There are manufacturers DROOLING over a low power 64 bit chip to stick in their storage boxes and database servers. You won't see Itanium in there.
You have to wonder wether there are two different companies over at intel. You've got the Pentium 4, which is basically driven by the marketing department, and is a huge marketing success, but the architecture is nothing to write home about, and generally lame in the innovation department. Then you have the Itanium, which is a big grown up microprocessor that was driven by the engineers, and is going to turn out to be a marketing failure. Oh well.
Actually, 150 Watts. And that doesn't count the waste in the per CPU power module, or the chipset and memory. You're talking ~5-600 watts for a single CPU system. Mmm.. Space heatery.
Fibre Channel uses copper too. Perhaps you're thinking of something else?
Telling them that they need to get their skills up to par won't do much good. When I've run into this problem with people, I try to make them feel at ease. Try holding after hour gatherings the local bar. Then don't talk about work. Once they feel you're not an ass, then start bring up the concepts of work. When I've treated by co-developers with respect, I generally get respect back.
Yep, that works great. Unfortunatly, after you have respect you still get to do all the work yourself. People who don't work will never work unless their job is on the line. People who can't figure out how to do their job after years will never figure it out. Unfortunatly a sizeable percentage of professional programmers fall into one of those two categories because the jobs paid well, and there weren't as many good programmers as there were jobs. It's also hard to tell if somebody is a good programmer or not when you hire them. You typically can't look at their previous work like you can with somebody from almost any other profession. Also, people who can't tell and hire bad programmers, tend to hire lots of bad programmers. Anyway, back to the point: Respectful coworkers are not necissarily competent, hard-working coworkers.
Of course for some of us that's not an issue, because the rest of the development staff on your project gets laid off and you have to write and test the whole 20k line product yourself anyway. I'm not bitter though. I didn't have to stay, and at least I like all the code now, and when something is broken I don't have to count on somebody else to fix it. Unfortunatly, the long hours aren't scoring big points with the S.O.
Somebody has a skewed view of teenage cash flow. When I was in highschool, I had three (yes, three. Programming in dBase, stocking shelves late at night at a linens store, and flipping burgers on the weekend) jobs, and I had more then enough cash for a car. You only need $1000 or so for something that will get you around, and with no financial obligations it's easy to save that much money. I could have done it with one job, and I *never* had an allowance.
Hell, I had more disposable income when I was in high school then I've had at any other point in my life so far, and I make almost $80k/year right now!
While what you say about sparse files is generally true, that's probably not what this is. This is probably a single bit error on this guy's hard drive. There's probably more of them, but he noticed this one because it popped up in a noticeable location. The hard drive is probably on the way out, or he's got some faulty memory (if it's ECC, otherwise this could just be a fluke).
Tar does deal with sparse files correctly, and if this were one, he wouldn't be having trouble.
First of all, CRC is hardly encryption. Second of all, any sort of hardware you're likely to be communicating with was probably designed by somebody with a little more math background then a VB script kiddie. We're not talking about some lameo warez serial number database, we're talking about actual professionally designed RS232 hardware. Electrical engineers understand that CRC is for detecting a variety of errors, and they don't put the checksum in there for fun or obfsucation. It really is designed to catch certain errors. It's nothing complex, either. These checksums have to be computed by almost no hardware. There's usually an adder (not even a complete adder because there's no overflow bit), a single register, and a lookup table or two. If you're lucky, the table is computed in a straightforward manner using polynomial arithmetic. If not, you have no real choice but to dig the table(s) out of somewhere. We're not talking PGP here, but the table is calculated in such a way as to avoid patterns. More importantly, the algorithm should take into account not only the values of the data, but the position of each value. Maybe one device in a hundred is designed by some idiot that uses a simple checksum.
I think I agree with your general points, but actually the worms could have been a lot worse. Had Code Red, for example, performed destructive actions on the target servers, it would have been an absolute disaster, and everyone would have remembered The Day Code Red Hit.
And people would have restored their backups, and life would have gone on. People who don't do backups would have been caught with their pants down, and we would know in the future not to do business with them. The world certainly would not have ended. In fact, if code red had done actual damage, it could have been the best thing to have ever happened in terms of improving the general security of windows boxes.
There are a very small number of times that something large like this can hit before people realize that they have to pay attention to security, and do backups.
The only thing AMD has going for them (literally) is x86 compatibility.
And price. And power consumption (better by a factor of 10!). And size. And simplicity of the bus (HyperTransport). And cost to manufacture. And third party chipset support. And working, available 64-bit windows.
Also, from what I've heard, it runs 32 bit applications faster then existing AMD ia32 implementations. Certainly faster then a 1Ghz Pentium 3.
If the price of Itanium stays over $1000 per processor, and it's as easy to implement SMP with hammer (Opteron... Whatever) as it looks like it's going to be, you'll be seeing 64bit AMD boxes outperforming Itanium boxes that cost twice as much. I wouldn't be surprised to see 8 way opterons for the same price as a quad Itanium.
It's unfortunate that Itanium has such an uphill battle. It's clearly the superior architecture. Current implementations have a tough fight ahead if they can't get the complexity and the price down. At $500/CPU without the need for the gigantic per CPU power regulator and 750watt power supply, Itanium might be successful in the workstation market competing with hammer. At $1000-1500 per CPU, plus the outrageous board space and power requirements, the lack of third party board and chipset support, the insistance of intel that OEMs sell rebranded intel manufactured whiteboxes, and a host of other issues, the outlook is not good.
First of all, don't be listening to the guys that are telling you to try a variety of input. They've obviously never done this before.
If the sign doesn't use one of the standard polynomial CRC algorithms, you're only real option is to disassemble the binary you have to dig out the algorithm. Even if it does uses a standard algorithm (It's probably CRC16), you'll still have to figure out what data it's using. You can guess and check, and you may get lucky. Disassembling is a sure thing, and probably the quickest way to go, but check your licensing agreement.
I recently reverse engineered the CRC for my LG TP-5250 cell phone which, as it turns out, uses the standard CRC16 algorithm, but is creative about which data is uses to compute the checksum. Without a dissassembler it would have taken months to figure out what bytes were being used and in what order. You can read about how/what I did here.
When you purchase an Apple computer it comes with three coupons for a free OS upgrade. (At least mine did. Both my powerbook and my G4 tower.), So I doubt that they'll be extorting money out of that many users. They definatly won't be taking money from people who just bought macs with 10.1.
Ah, crap. I pulled that link out of my bookmarks, and it's out of date now. For the datasheet, go here: http://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/MC33441-D.PDF
Look in digikey. It's called electrolumonescent plastic. You can buy it in 12" square sheets, and you can build the inverter for ~$10 worth of parts. :)
The chip that drives the inverter is the MC33441 , and the datasheet tells you everything you need to know to build what you just described. The chip is tiny! I have some right here, and I can fit 4 of them on a dime. You shouldn't have any trouble squeezing it under your keyboard. (Good luck soldering to it though
First of all, x86 processors do not have a big endian mode. They are strictly little endian. Secondly, the little endian mode on PowerPC has never worked 100% correctly.
Either way, it's a moot point. Good code works correctly on either platform. Even OS code should be written endian clean, since no matter what the endianness of your processor, the PCI bus is little endian, and ethernet is big endian. The MacOS X kernel already runs on x86, so I assume that they've been careful.
READING THE FIRST PARAGRAPH
It's fortunate for you that you got the chance to do that. It's a pain in the ass when you don't hear anything about it until after some stupid secretary that can't read puts it in a pile of bills, and the finance department just assumes it's a bill and pays it. Then, as the technical and administrative contact, you get an e-mail requesting the necissary PGP signed e-mail to allow the transfer and you have to figure out how to get the money back.
You only need a seperate signon for Windows and Linux if you actually run Windows. This argument works both ways. There is no support for SSO in Windows, because you need a seperate password for your Linux accounts. See? If you're only using linux, SSO is already available with ssh_keygen, and the authorized_keys file, or the the hosts.equiv file. (I'm sure there are other ways to do it out of the box as well.)
Exactly. The only remaining question is wether Microsoft will can a good product to spite Apple. I'd say that while they're under the watchful eye of antitrust lawyers they probably won't, but they're making Apple take that gamble.
Their core is software that runs on windows. They make far fewer products for MacOS then for windows, and they benifit from platform control and OEM payments.
You're right though, they don't loose either way. Which is why I think that this big stink is just for show. They'll put the pressure on in the media, and complain about not "fealing the love", but in reality Apple did microsft a bigger favor with MacOS X then microsoft did for apple. MS will pull in $300 million easily on Office X, and mac users don't usually upgrade, so they could have had zero upgrade sales, but thanks to MacOS X they get to resell office to 20% of the mac user base. Steve Jobs knows MS won't pull the product, so he'll keep pushing the 'switch' campaign anyway.
So they make what, $225 per copy? They sell every copy of Office for the Mac at retail. That comes out to $67 million dollars. That's for a product that still has two to three years left in it. They may not have hit projections, but they're still turning some serious profit. This really smells to me like Bill telling Steve to lay off the anti-windows campaign more than worrying that they'll fail to turn a profit on the product. Microsoft and Apple have been playing these games for years.
I think it's more likely that Microsoft is trying to get Apple to divert it's marketing budget away from the current compaign encouraging users to ditch windows, and instead spend those advertising dollars to get the existing apple user base to upgrade to MacOS X. I'm sure that they're selling more then enough copies (1.2 millon in the first 6 months, did it say?) to justify having developed Office X, but what they really want is for Apple to stop going after their core business.
~>gimp RS232.gif
(Window pops up)
Works fine here. You just can't save as a gif without extra software (That you are only supposed to use where the patent isn't enforcable).
Yes, but you restarted the graphic subsystem. Look, I get the point, but you're asking for the wrong feature to solve the problem. I understand what you want and that it's a nice thing, and what I'm telling you is that what you say is stupid isn't the problem, the problem you're looking to solve is that unlike win32 applications, X applications have to be attached to an X server to continue to run, so they don't survive a server restart. It's not stupid to have to configure your monitor. It's not stupid that the video card needs to be initialized when you switch configurations. What I am saying is that for now you can make most of the problem go away by configuring your session correctly. Some of your applications may not return to *exactly* the same state you left them in, but you can get it pretty damn close. Certainly close enough to be tolerable the very few times that you actually end up restarting X because of a monitor configuration.
Yes, it would be nice if the protocol and graphics sections of X were seperate in a useable way so that you could restart one without affecting the other, but really, how often do you plug in a new monitor that you weren't expecting? Do you plug in a projector frequently? Put an entry in there. Now you don't have to restart when you use a projector. Go out and buy a new monitor every week? Well, then I guess this is a serious problem for you.
It's true, so how, exactly, could it be FUD?
Saying "There are more attacks on linux systems" becomes FUD when you imply that this is bad. More attacks doesn mean more successful breakins. Truth can be FUD in the right context.