Actually, it does damage them in their Xbox business. The thing is, Microsoft is betting the company on several businesses and Xbox is one of those businesses. If Xbox sales go flat (because consumers decide to wait for the next product) then Microsoft is hurting. If that happens and they have problems in several other businesses then you won't need to complain about Microsoft being a problem anymore because they will be out of business.
The only problem with that is that traditional business models require a huge upfront investment in development where open source businesses make money off of software that other people develop.
If anything, open source should do better in an economic downturn due to the low initial cost of the software, more people should be using open source and open source businesses should be thriving if the open source business model works.
An open source business is like the PSS branch of microsoft, without the rest of the company...the products appear for free and you get paid to tell people how to use them...if the model works at all, it should work perfectly in this economy.
Maybe open source software is too good...if it dosen't break, who needs to pay for support???
Maybe OSS businesses should make a business of supporting "buggy" microsoft software.;)
Actually, I think that is the key flaw in the OSS business model philosophy: If companies base thier income on answering user questions, they depend on users having problems. That is contrary to the user's and developer's goals of creating software that is easy to use, predictable, reliable, and solves the user's needs.
How can a company survive and create good software when every problem they fix prevents users from paying them more money?
That works all fine and dandy until someone uses NAT to connect their wireless access point to your network in such a way that you can't see their MAC addresses.
(That's how we used to run networks of 20 machines in a dorm room when they restricted traffic to the NIC with the MAC address that we had to register with the network admin.)
Precisely. Three inputs and three outputs just isn't enough. I am waiting for them to come out with networkable controllers so that I can have more inputs and outputs. Once I get a couple dozen inputs and outputs, I can build a decent robot to type and move the mouse for me so I don't have to be at work to modify my bios settings.:)
So, McKinley isn't a properly designed system?
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is a rather odd quote from the article:
(bolding is my emphasis)
To protect against heat-related system meltdowns, McKinley includes a programmable thermal trip that can throttle processor performance by 40 percent to cut power consumption. But the company sees that more as a safety net, not as an answer to thermal issues. "This should never be needed in a properly designed system," said Naffziger.
Re:What a dog
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm sure it is proprietary, but Intel has written it's own optimizing compiler for the IA64 instruction set.
It is an interesting solution to the performance problem: Rather than just increase clock speed again, figure out the performance details at compile time and arrange the code to help the processor run it more efficiently.
For example, if you have an if statement and the compiler can determine that 95% of the time the TRUE block will be executed, the code can be arranged so the branch prediction will choose the more frequent route and the pipeline penalty won't need to be paid as frequently. (This is just a simple case of optimization, the IA64 will require insanely complex optimizations, but that is just expanding on what compiler writers have been doing for years.)
It makes the compiler orders of magnitude more complex, but it could potentially increase execution speed by a couple orders of magnitude too.
W2k gave me problems with The Sims, NT4 drivers (all that were available at the time) for my scanner, and an initial problem with RealAudio (fixed in a newer version of RA). That is all I can think of at the moment. There may have been a few others.
Because unlike Win98 or WinME which are built on the unstable Win9x codebase, WinXP is built on the same codebase as NT4 and W2k. If WinXP even allows half of the Win9x apps that didn't run on W2k to run, it is well worth paying for the increased stability and application support.
W2k has not had any unexplained crashes on my system for a year. I have rebooted less than a dozen times this YEAR with w2k. There are application software problems, but they are predictable.
My only complaint with W2k is that many win9x applications are not compatible with it. WinXP (in the beta) appears to do a good job of solving that problem.
The interesting thing is that MS did a large portion of the OS/2 development. The people that wrote the OS/2 kernel then went on to develop the NT kernel.
I defected from MS four years ago, but after using W2k, I am now running MS products on half of my x86 machines again.
XP is built on the NT4/W2k core with a huge amount of support for 9x programs. A large amount of the development effort was spent on making XP run all of the 9x applications that were incompatible with W2k.
That all depends on the applications that the users are running, the existing level of network traffic, and the way that users are working. In one office where I worked, X was excruciatingly slow, but we had 30+ people using the same AIX box for email, accounting, payroll, file shares, authentication, and some scientific simulations. It frequently required several minutes to log in.
I would suggest experimenting on a private network, run a sniffer (or something like MRTG) and multiply the network load by the number of expected clients.
People are more productive when they are comfortable. The chatter from other offices is distracting, so I bring in headphones and play music on winamp and it helps me to concentrate.
Don't tell me that you have never adjusted the refresh rate on your video card, changed the font color, or installed your favorite text editor. Installing winamp or setting background colors is the tech equivalent of putting family photos on your desk and having a radio in your office.
Everyone does it, and it would hurt both morale and productivity if you prohibited people from having that small amount of control over their environment. Afterall, it isn't like they are going rogue and installing their favorite operating system on company computers.;)
The "subscription" use is not for IT, it is for home users that don't want to go out and spend $500 for an office suite. It is for the market that dosen't blink at spending $30/month for cable TV and would never spend $300 for a dish even if it was cheaper in the long run.
Microsoft isn't in it's current position because it is stupid. They understand the market that they dominate.
This is the primary reason why they loose data. They put the floppy in their backpack, without a disk case, in the same pocket as pencils, pens, and grime. I have seen students with disks full of grit and disks that have had tracks eaten out of the media when abrasive grit got between the head and the media.
Additionally, students can be incredibly stupid as to what they put on floppy disks and where they forget them.
I found one disk that contained a file "Moms Credit Card" and inside contained the number and expiration date. Another lost disk contained minutes of a frat meeting...suffice it to say, there were a few incriminating items on that disk.
My recommendation would be to remove the floppies from all machines except for the lab monitor station. Have a couple external (USB) floppy drives on that system so that if one goes bad, they can switch to another. Other than that, force the students to store everything on the network.
Sure - cryptographically split decss into 5 parts and host 5 parts of it on 5 different pages with a sixth as the key.
Give one piece to each of 5 friends to host, you host the key portion. Make a link to each site. No problem. Individually each person dosen't have decss. And their search engine should fail if it actually verifies the file.
However, I am not a lawyer. You are at your own risk.
Your last statement of opinion that, "arithmetic is basically useless," is frightening. We have too many people in this country already that can't add $2.50 and $2.50 to get $5.00 without the assistance of a calculator.
I would have been severely hampered in my calculus classes if I needed a calculator for basic arithmetic. Computers don't SOLVE problems, they can brute force solutions to problems. The real value of solving problems is the insights gained along the way. We didn't gain any real insight when computers proved the 4-color therom by brute force.
We don't need to do rote processes as much, that's why I like computers, but arithmetic is as essential as good spelling and grammar skills are. (My spelling and grammar skills need work, but I still believe that they are essential in our society.)
The thing that annoys me to no end is that many 'discontinued' products have absolutely no information provided. When I buy a surplus 10 megabit hub and I am unable to even find the voltage for the power supply, something is wrong.
I often purchase surplus items and many times the manufactures including HP, INTEL, SUN, and others barely acknowledge that they ever made the units that initially sold for over $10,000.
I'm not going to buy a new item anyway, I don't have the money. But I want to gain experience with technology other than wintel systems. I suspect that they spend more telling me and others that they don't have the information than they would if they released at least minimal specs.
What you really need to ask is what type of life do you want to provide for your child?
The type of death that you help prevent is not importiant if as a result your child's life is not worth living.
What if your child was forced to a private school after being contiously harrassed because they are different?
I knew several people in high school that were subjected to torment far worse than even steriotypical fraternity hazing at universities. One person in my high school suffered a fractured skull when they were thrown into a bush (a common hazing ritual at the time) next to the building.
It was the attitude of the school and the administration that allowed these problems to happen. "Bushing" was given a blind eye at my school until a student's skull was fractured. It is the attitude and atmosphere that kills.
If you are worried about your child, be a friend to your child and other children. Get to know them, mentor them, and let them know that they are importiant. Open your eyes and see the children living in poverty, the latch-key children, and those with single parents that are struggling. They need someone to look up to.
Imagine going to work and being lectured all day (training sessions with no feedback), silently submitting proposals, having them marked and returned, feeling the stress of relationships with co-workers, but then having nobody to share your day with.
Now remember that most fathers spend an average of something like 15 seconds communicating with their children on an average day. Put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would feel.
I agree, I think that following the collective conciousness model of slashdot, it might be better to elect a dozen or so representatives to have an irc style chat rather than have one individual representing the community.
Take those whose posts have been moderated to 3+ and insightful for example and have them represent us.
Issues such as this one involve so many variables that a single person may not be able to grasp the full concequences of any given action within the situation. A group, however, should be able to analyze the situation and collectively grasp and explain the concequences.
Here at the University of Idaho, all on campus machines that are not designated to be external servers can only send outgoing connections. All dorms and student lab machines are firewalled from the internet and from eachother.
This very effectively keeps student porn web servers from popping up, but it dosen't prevent us from downloading anything.
It easily prevents a large number of security problems, but it also creates a group of people that use SSH to forward high numbered ports from CS servers so that they can access their systems despite the firewall.
I moved off campus because I trust my server more than I trust the campus servers that are unavaliable too often for comfort and I am using ADSL so that I can telnet to my machine from anywhere. It is a simple solution, nobody is forcing you to stay on campus and ADSL actually gives me a faster connection to the internet than the university service did.
I understand their position, and they still have a problem with people downloading gigs of mp3s and other files, but it nearly eliminates the liability problems of student run illegal MP3, Warez, and porn servers.
I prefer the ability to have complete control over servers holding my data, they prefer to have complete control over the servers on their network. It is a difference of opinion, but if you have a friend (or a friendly server) outside of any firewall, you can forward ports and bypass the firewalls.
It all boils down to LIABILITY, the Universities do not like to have the risk of lawsuit.
Sure I read online news, but there is no way I would find out what was happening locally online.
Besides, I spend too much time staring at a crt anyway.:)
Honestly though, I subscribe to the larger of the three local papers, I read the student paper at my university and sometimes the paper from the neighboring university, I listen to NPR, and occasionally watch CNN or Northwest Cable News on TV if I have time.
The critical factors are time and relavancy. Online data comes and goes and is often not archived. My schedule is such that I may not see the TV for a couple days in a row, but I can flip through the old newspaper to find out what exactly happened last week.
That being said, I often only have time to briefly skim the comics on a daily basis, I love odd information or just continued learning pieces, I like my hard news stories to have good hard leads because my time is limited, and I need to know what is happening (or has happened) locally.
The internet tells me many things, but almost never what I *need* to know. Slashdot is good for geek stuff...but it just fills a small nitch of my information needs.
As long as you keep the local papers running, and they tell me everything that happened locally, national things with local impact, and major national news items, I will continue to read the physical printed newspaper.
Sure, my campus has 10Mbit ethernet in each dorm room, but I have substantially faster transfer rates and much less lag off campus using xDSL from a local ISP. Besides, the university has that pesky firewall that prevents anyone from talking to me.
As I see it, about half of the internet "crime" wouldn't be considered crime in any other placement.
It is as if you were walking around town, only half of the buildings have closed windows, most buildings are missing doors. None of the cars are locked and they all have the keys sitting on the seat. You lean against a brick wall and suddenly you are inside the building. Most merchants have a pile of cash on the counter instead of using cash registers. Instead of fences, some businesses have small signs saying "Unauthorized Entry is Prohibited".
In some places, maybe most, it is your fault if you leave the keys in the car, unlocked, and it is stolen.
Legally, the operators of a server that is hacked, or the software designers, should be partly responsible if the vulerability has been known for a month or more.
For example, an ISP where I worked had a line ping flooded, but it was a 56k line, and they had source routing enabled on the routers (a vulerability known for 5 years at that time). Sure, the attacker was partly to blame, but so were we.
The problem with most "computer crime" prosecution that I have heard, either it is completely ignored, or the prosecution dosen't understand the network and they charge a person for mass murder when they are guilty of breaking and entering.
If you looked through the catalog, you would have noticed that less than 2% of the advertized items were surveliance gear. At least a third of the electronics hobbiest places that I have looked at carry a few "spy" items.
The problem is that a reasonable action would have been to send a letter explaining that the items are illegal and requesting that they be discontinued. Then, a search warrent action would have been understandable if the company was in non-compliance.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it does damage them in their Xbox business. The thing is, Microsoft is betting the company on several businesses and Xbox is one of those businesses. If Xbox sales go flat (because consumers decide to wait for the next product) then Microsoft is hurting. If that happens and they have problems in several other businesses then you won't need to complain about Microsoft being a problem anymore because they will be out of business.
If this is an "information leak" it is most likely being leaked from nintendo or sony...why would anyone leak information that damages themselves?
This looks like a hoax and smells like a hoax.
The only problem with that is that traditional business models require a huge upfront investment in development where open source businesses make money off of software that other people develop.
;)
If anything, open source should do better in an economic downturn due to the low initial cost of the software, more people should be using open source and open source businesses should be thriving if the open source business model works.
An open source business is like the PSS branch of microsoft, without the rest of the company...the products appear for free and you get paid to tell people how to use them...if the model works at all, it should work perfectly in this economy.
Maybe open source software is too good...if it dosen't break, who needs to pay for support???
Maybe OSS businesses should make a business of supporting "buggy" microsoft software.
Actually, I think that is the key flaw in the OSS business model philosophy: If companies base thier income on answering user questions, they depend on users having problems. That is contrary to the user's and developer's goals of creating software that is easy to use, predictable, reliable, and solves the user's needs.
How can a company survive and create good software when every problem they fix prevents users from paying them more money?
That works all fine and dandy until someone uses NAT to connect their wireless access point to your network in such a way that you can't see their MAC addresses.
(That's how we used to run networks of 20 machines in a dorm room when they restricted traffic to the NIC with the MAC address that we had to register with the network admin.)
Precisely. Three inputs and three outputs just isn't enough. I am waiting for them to come out with networkable controllers so that I can have more inputs and outputs. Once I get a couple dozen inputs and outputs, I can build a decent robot to type and move the mouse for me so I don't have to be at work to modify my bios settings. :)
(bolding is my emphasis)
To protect against heat-related system meltdowns, McKinley includes a programmable thermal trip that can throttle processor performance by 40 percent to cut power consumption. But the company sees that more as a safety net, not as an answer to thermal issues. "This should never be needed in a properly designed system," said Naffziger.
I'm sure it is proprietary, but Intel has written it's own optimizing compiler for the IA64 instruction set.
It is an interesting solution to the performance problem: Rather than just increase clock speed again, figure out the performance details at compile time and arrange the code to help the processor run it more efficiently.
For example, if you have an if statement and the compiler can determine that 95% of the time the TRUE block will be executed, the code can be arranged so the branch prediction will choose the more frequent route and the pipeline penalty won't need to be paid as frequently. (This is just a simple case of optimization, the IA64 will require insanely complex optimizations, but that is just expanding on what compiler writers have been doing for years.)
It makes the compiler orders of magnitude more complex, but it could potentially increase execution speed by a couple orders of magnitude too.
W2k gave me problems with The Sims, NT4 drivers (all that were available at the time) for my scanner, and an initial problem with RealAudio (fixed in a newer version of RA). That is all I can think of at the moment. There may have been a few others.
Because unlike Win98 or WinME which are built on the unstable Win9x codebase, WinXP is built on the same codebase as NT4 and W2k. If WinXP even allows half of the Win9x apps that didn't run on W2k to run, it is well worth paying for the increased stability and application support.
W2k has not had any unexplained crashes on my system for a year. I have rebooted less than a dozen times this YEAR with w2k. There are application software problems, but they are predictable.
My only complaint with W2k is that many win9x applications are not compatible with it. WinXP (in the beta) appears to do a good job of solving that problem.
The interesting thing is that MS did a large portion of the OS/2 development. The people that wrote the OS/2 kernel then went on to develop the NT kernel.
I defected from MS four years ago, but after using W2k, I am now running MS products on half of my x86 machines again.
XP is built on the NT4/W2k core with a huge amount of support for 9x programs. A large amount of the development effort was spent on making XP run all of the 9x applications that were incompatible with W2k.
That all depends on the applications that the users are running, the existing level of network traffic, and the way that users are working. In one office where I worked, X was excruciatingly slow, but we had 30+ people using the same AIX box for email, accounting, payroll, file shares, authentication, and some scientific simulations. It frequently required several minutes to log in.
I would suggest experimenting on a private network, run a sniffer (or something like MRTG) and multiply the network load by the number of expected clients.
People are more productive when they are comfortable. The chatter from other offices is distracting, so I bring in headphones and play music on winamp and it helps me to concentrate.
;)
Don't tell me that you have never adjusted the refresh rate on your video card, changed the font color, or installed your favorite text editor. Installing winamp or setting background colors is the tech equivalent of putting family photos on your desk and having a radio in your office.
Everyone does it, and it would hurt both morale and productivity if you prohibited people from having that small amount of control over their environment. Afterall, it isn't like they are going rogue and installing their favorite operating system on company computers.
The "subscription" use is not for IT, it is for home users that don't want to go out and spend $500 for an office suite. It is for the market that dosen't blink at spending $30/month for cable TV and would never spend $300 for a dish even if it was cheaper in the long run.
Microsoft isn't in it's current position because it is stupid. They understand the market that they dominate.
Students do not know how to care for their disks.
Period.
This is the primary reason why they loose data. They put the floppy in their backpack, without a disk case, in the same pocket as pencils, pens, and grime. I have seen students with disks full of grit and disks that have had tracks eaten out of the media when abrasive grit got between the head and the media.
Additionally, students can be incredibly stupid as to what they put on floppy disks and where they forget them.
I found one disk that contained a file "Moms Credit Card" and inside contained the number and expiration date. Another lost disk contained minutes of a frat meeting...suffice it to say, there were a few incriminating items on that disk.
My recommendation would be to remove the floppies from all machines except for the lab monitor station. Have a couple external (USB) floppy drives on that system so that if one goes bad, they can switch to another. Other than that, force the students to store everything on the network.
Sure - cryptographically split decss into 5 parts and host 5 parts of it on 5 different pages with a sixth as the key.
Give one piece to each of 5 friends to host, you host the key portion. Make a link to each site. No problem. Individually each person dosen't have decss. And their search engine should fail if it actually verifies the file.
However, I am not a lawyer. You are at your own risk.
Your last statement of opinion that, "arithmetic is basically useless," is frightening. We have too many people in this country already that can't add $2.50 and $2.50 to get $5.00 without the assistance of a calculator.
I would have been severely hampered in my calculus classes if I needed a calculator for basic arithmetic. Computers don't SOLVE problems, they can brute force solutions to problems. The real value of solving problems is the insights gained along the way. We didn't gain any real insight when computers proved the 4-color therom by brute force.
We don't need to do rote processes as much, that's why I like computers, but arithmetic is as essential as good spelling and grammar skills are.
(My spelling and grammar skills need work, but I still believe that they are essential in our society.)
The thing that annoys me to no end is that many 'discontinued' products have absolutely no information provided. When I buy a surplus 10 megabit hub and I am unable to even find the voltage for the power supply, something is wrong.
I often purchase surplus items and many times the manufactures including HP, INTEL, SUN, and others barely acknowledge that they ever made the units that initially sold for over $10,000.
I'm not going to buy a new item anyway, I don't have the money. But I want to gain experience with technology other than wintel systems. I suspect that they spend more telling me and others that they don't have the information than they would if they released at least minimal specs.
What you really need to ask is what type of life do you want to provide for your child?
The type of death that you help prevent is not importiant if as a result your child's life is not worth living.
What if your child was forced to a private school after being contiously harrassed because they are different?
I knew several people in high school that were subjected to torment far worse than even steriotypical fraternity hazing at universities.
One person in my high school suffered a fractured skull when they were thrown into a bush (a common hazing ritual at the time) next to the building.
It was the attitude of the school and the administration that allowed these problems to happen. "Bushing" was given a blind eye at my school until a student's skull was fractured. It is the attitude and atmosphere that kills.
If you are worried about your child, be a friend to your child and other children. Get to know them, mentor them, and let them know that they are importiant. Open your eyes and see the children living in poverty, the latch-key children, and those with single parents that are struggling. They need someone to look up to.
Imagine going to work and being lectured all day (training sessions with no feedback), silently submitting proposals, having them marked and returned, feeling the stress of relationships with co-workers, but then having nobody to share your day with.
Now remember that most fathers spend an average of something like 15 seconds communicating with their children on an average day.
Put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would feel.
I agree, I think that following the collective conciousness model of slashdot, it might be better to elect a dozen or so representatives to have an irc style chat rather than have one individual representing the community.
Take those whose posts have been moderated to 3+ and insightful for example and have them represent us.
Issues such as this one involve so many variables that a single person may not be able to grasp the full concequences of any given action within the situation. A group, however, should be able to analyze the situation and collectively grasp and explain the concequences.
Here at the University of Idaho, all on campus machines that are not designated to be external servers can only send outgoing connections. All dorms and student lab machines are firewalled from the internet and from eachother.
This very effectively keeps student porn web servers from popping up, but it dosen't prevent us from downloading anything.
It easily prevents a large number of security problems, but it also creates a group of people that use SSH to forward high numbered ports from CS servers so that they can access their systems despite the firewall.
I moved off campus because I trust my server more than I trust the campus servers that are unavaliable too often for comfort and I am using ADSL so that I can telnet to my machine from anywhere. It is a simple solution, nobody is forcing you to stay on campus and ADSL actually gives me a faster connection to the internet than the university service did.
I understand their position, and they still have a problem with people downloading gigs of mp3s and other files, but it nearly eliminates the liability problems of student run illegal MP3, Warez, and porn servers.
I prefer the ability to have complete control over servers holding my data, they prefer to have complete control over the servers on their network. It is a difference of opinion, but if you have a friend (or a friendly server) outside of any firewall, you can forward ports and bypass the firewalls.
It all boils down to LIABILITY, the Universities do not like to have the risk of lawsuit.
Sure I read online news, but there is no way I would find out what was happening locally online.
:)
Besides, I spend too much time staring at a crt anyway.
Honestly though, I subscribe to the larger of the three local papers, I read the student paper at my university and sometimes the paper from the neighboring university, I listen to NPR, and occasionally watch CNN or Northwest Cable News on TV if I have time.
The critical factors are time and relavancy. Online data comes and goes and is often not archived. My schedule is such that I may not see the TV for a couple days in a row, but I can flip through the old newspaper to find out what exactly happened last week.
That being said, I often only have time to briefly skim the comics on a daily basis, I love odd information or just continued learning pieces, I like my hard news stories to have good hard leads because my time is limited, and I need to know what is happening (or has happened) locally.
The internet tells me many things, but almost never what I *need* to know. Slashdot is good for geek stuff...but it just fills a small nitch of my information needs.
As long as you keep the local papers running, and they tell me everything that happened locally, national things with local impact, and major national news items, I will continue to read the physical printed newspaper.
Sure, my campus has 10Mbit ethernet in each dorm room, but I have substantially faster transfer rates and much less lag off campus using xDSL from a local ISP. Besides, the university has that pesky firewall that prevents anyone from talking to me.
As I see it, about half of the internet "crime" wouldn't be considered crime in any other placement.
It is as if you were walking around town, only half of the buildings have closed windows, most buildings are missing doors. None of the cars are locked and they all have the keys sitting on the seat. You lean against a brick wall and suddenly you are inside the building. Most merchants have a pile of cash on the counter instead of using cash registers. Instead of fences, some businesses have small signs saying "Unauthorized Entry is Prohibited".
In some places, maybe most, it is your fault if you leave the keys in the car, unlocked, and it is stolen.
Legally, the operators of a server that is hacked, or the software designers, should be partly responsible if the vulerability has been known for a month or more.
For example, an ISP where I worked had a line ping flooded, but it was a 56k line, and they had source routing enabled on the routers (a vulerability known for 5 years at that time). Sure, the attacker was partly to blame, but so were we.
The problem with most "computer crime" prosecution that I have heard, either it is completely ignored, or the prosecution dosen't understand the network and they charge a person for mass murder when they are guilty of breaking and entering.
Education is definately needed.
If you looked through the catalog, you would have noticed that less than 2% of the advertized items were surveliance gear. At least a third of the electronics hobbiest places that I have looked at carry a few "spy" items.
The problem is that a reasonable action would have been to send a letter explaining that the items are illegal and requesting that they be discontinued. Then, a search warrent action would have been understandable if the company was in non-compliance.