All video drivers have to be built for the version of the kernel you are using. NVidia distributes RPM versions for several major distributions, but you will have to build it yourself if you use some other kernel.
Well, sorta... The *actual* driver is binary, and works with all supported kernels (and all supported cards). All that needs to be compiled is a wrapper. This wrapper provides a psudo-abstraction layer between the particular kernel in use, and the binary driver.
I think what NVidia did was ingenious: they can support most major kernels, without exposing their IP and trade secrets. The merits of that are subject to debate (I think what they did is fine), but the fact is, they provide working drivers for Linux users (and if you don't like it, of course you don't have to use their products/drivers at all).
Obviously the perfect solution would be for the Linux kernel to provide a nice abstraction layer for all drivers, but with so many people being against binary-only drivers, that likely won't happen soon. Meanwhile, NVidia came up with an elegant solution in my opinion.
The majority also lack SCSI, video capture, and probably USB, as well. Yet, the 2.4 kernel supports all of these. What was your point again?
Yes, but these things are more common than Firewire currently, and more useful (for most) than ACPI (we do have general APM support, which works pretty nicely on my laptop).
It's all about demand and developer resources. Even with a thousand developers, resources are still limited. Plus, developers tend to work on those areas they are skilled in, or areas they particularly enjoy.
The best part? Anyone with the knowledge and time can write a driver for these things. Without (in most cases) even having to recompile the kernel. My Linux box has support for my ATI Remote. That's certainly less popular than Firewire or ACPI, but for me, it was needed and I found a driver for it. If you need to use some hardware in Windows, that has no Windows driver, good luck finding some hacker who has whipped up a workable solution.
The faster p2p application I know was probably Audiogalaxy, where you could not cap the speed, and if you wanted to be able to download 10 tracks simultaneously, you had to allow 10 simultaneous uploads as well. Also, it would try and connect you with the user who you could get the fastest download from.
I really liked AudioGalaxy. I ran the client on my headless Linux box (file server), but used the web site on my Windows box, or whatever machine I wanted to. They were all behind the same NAT, so the outside sees it as the same machine. Worked rather well, until suddenly they stopped carrying any real content.
I hated Napster (poorly written interface), but it did the job. Then I discovered Scour Exchange, which was a lot nicer, but then it was shut down. AudioGalaxy was the best, and of course that is no longer. Limewire (Gnutella?) didn't seem to have any files I was looking for last time I tried it. Now it's binary newsgroups and Kazaalite...
I'll have to give Freenet a try today... unless the record labels want to give me a way to try stuff out before I buy it...
Just a couple of weeks ago, I picked up an Audigy 2 at Best Buy. 10 days later I returned it and picked up a new burner and some RAM.
Why?
I have had two problems with Creative's cards. The first one, and most annoying for me, is that they lock up. I don't know if this is a hardware or driver issue, but I've experienced this with an AWE-32, PCI-128, and most recently the Audigy. All three were completely different computers and operating systems (P-166, Win95; AMD 233, Win98; PIII-800, Win2k).
When I brought the Audigy home, I was impressed. Metal jacks that probably wouldn't break as easily as the colored plastic ones. A firewire port. An alleged 106db S/N ratio.
With some testing, it lived up to the S/N ratio quite nicely, and I was surprised. Output levels were in the "semi-pro" range, eg, it drove my mixer's meter right to 0db easily. No hard drive/video/network interference in the output or input.
But even despite all of this, if I fire up a playlist in WinAmp and just let it run, it will lock up randomly. It usually crops up after a few hours of continuous play, but it's done this in as little as 30 minutes. From that point on, the card is effectively dead until you power-cycle. Same exact behavior I had with their previous products.
Now on to the second issue I have with the company (but not related to the Audigy). Twice -- in two different eras -- I have bought what I thought to be a Creative Labs card, but it turned out to be a relabeled card from a company they bought out.
First was back in 1995 or '96, allegedly an SB16. The card was actually an Aztech Sound Galaxy 16.
Second was a PCI-128, I was lucky enough to get an Ensonique card (that I've found to be a good card anyway, works well in the Linux box).
I'm fed up with Creative Labs, and Voyetra/Turtle Beach isn't much better (no Win2k support for older Montego II cards, which I own 3). So I'm now using two no-name external USB devices, which (if you don't care about "3D" or MIDI) give great PCM playback quality, low S/N ratio (being external to the PC), and hot-swappability.
So... am I the only one who thinks Creative Labs sucks?
...and was dying to get started playing with it. No sooner than I plug it in does my phone ring.
It's my aunt, who I hadn't heard from in about 2 years. I thought to myself, how nice. I felt like I had been missed, that someone was thinking about me.
Then I hear, "oh, by the way, I bought a new CD-ROM drive, and your cousin and I decided to install it ourselves. Now the computer won't boot.".
Me: How drunk were you? Her: We had a few beers...
This phone call went on for about an hour, walking her through the elimination process (turned out to be a master/slave jumper issue).
Now I just play dumb. They all know it's bogus, and sometimes it's hard to stay quiet when I see someone do something stupid, or do something the hard way, but in the end it's worth it.
Philips has come out strongly so far against "crippled" copy protected CDs.
That only applies to the existing RedBook audio CD format (or Orange book? Whatever). I'm sure they wouldn't care -- and may even support -- new standards supporting DRM techniques.
What they disapproved of was companies bastardizing a format that Philips helped invent, breaking the established standards and then putting the logo on the disc as though it were compliant.
This would be like the W3C telling Microsoft that they can't put the term "CSS" on their browser. Microsoft would of course be free to invent a new, similar standard, and the W3C would likely even support it as a new standard. Just so they aren't claiming that it is CSS (not the best analogy, full of holes, but it let me get a jab in at MSIE:)
Anyway, I don't think Philips is in any way against DRM. As you said, they have no direct interest in it, in either direction, but they *do* have an interest in making money. If that means creating/supporting a new technology that provides for the recording companies' needs (and their support would certainly help the format to take off), then I'm sure they'd be in full support of it.
It's fairly obvious this doesn't happen (or else it's a recent development).
I didn't mean to imply that it happens for every security hole that is later exploited. What I meant was, if in fact someone internal does discover such a bug, they'd rather cover it up. Remember, Microsoft *hates* full disclosure policies, and people who post their vulnerabilities to a forum such as BugTraq. For better or for worse, I suspect this does happen from time to time (okay, so my "daily basis" was a bit of a stretch;)
I guess I should (grudgingly) acknowledge that over the last year or two this has been (slowly) turning around (for new version releases), but most of the products still show the results of this culture.
They are getting better, but as you imply, it will be a while before this new "focus on security" creeps into wide practice. Until then, we'll still have IIS 4.0, MSIE, and various versions of Outlook and Outlook Express floating around.
I admit as well, I am glad they're starting to get their act together. I don't know how good a job they'll do, but I suspect they have the resources to do it well if they really wanted to. I'm still quite impressed with Windows 2000, and it's the only thing that stopped me from migrating away all together. Now it's been a couple years and I'm still using it.
The libertarian party thought so, too. Lots of people (myself included) put some money together to run a full-page ad in USA Today in response to the ONDCP's printed ad.
I heard about that, and loved it. It's great when a group can get a message in front of people that at least makes them think about what they have been hearing. So many people take things at face value, be it the evening news, or the anti-drug commercials, etc, that they often don't question it. Something like this puts the question in their mind.
I'm personally not really for or against drugs, but I agree that making them legal would completely stop the "war on drugs". People tend to forget that there are, in fact, two sides to a war...
First of all, I remember the commercial you're referring to, and I think it was pretty well done. It was done in a Mastercard-style. "Machine gun: $800. 20 pounds of explosives: $1800...." It went on, listing off all these artifacts of terrorism and their costs. It ended by saying, "Where do terrorists get the money to do what they do? If you buy drugs, maybe from you."
That was one of them, but there was another with teenagers. One teen says something like "I helped terrorists buy guns". Fade to black, then to another teen: "I helped kill thousands of people". And so on.
I thought they were rediculous, playing on people's fears much like this Surviving Terrorism junk. Production values may have been good (nice dramatic effect), but that doesn't make the message any less bogus. I mean, what was wrong with "This is your brain on drugs"?
Reminds me of that whole "Truth" campaign. They didn't even have nice production values, just shots of them loitering on a tobacco company's property, bothering people, etc (possibly staged, I don't know or care).
This is ridiculous. What's wrong with selling people what they want? If people are willing to part their money for things that you don't deem worthy, they're stupid?
I don't recall using the word "stupid". "unsuspecting" and "scared" does not imply "stupid".
Gee, I guess everyone who buys a Mercedes is stupid and "unsuspecting" then, because they could get by just as easily with a Kia.
Mercedes is not capitolizing on people's fears and selling snake oil. That's what's happening here.
In 1999, a local computer store was selling a software CD, for $25, that would "fix Y2K problems and make all of your software Y2K compliant!" which is obviously bogus. This is similar, but far worse, in my opinion.
They must be getting ripped off by those "pathetic" scam-artists at Daimler-Chrysler.
You get a lot more for the extra money though. Even if a good chunk of that is "a name", that's fine and that's what the person wants to pay for.
Selling howto books on being prepared for terrorist attacks isn't illegal, but I believe that the people selling them know that they are simply capitolizing on people's fears, not really giving them anything of value. Hence the term, "scam". Maybe a legal scam, maybe borderline, but still a scam.
Again, I never said the people were stupid, only "unsuspecting", meaning that they are taken in by the pitch, believing that this will really help them prepare for such events. 9/11 scared the hell out of a lot of people. Some are having a hard time moving past it, especially those who have been affected in a personal way.
Selling this is a lot like "earthquake forecasts", or those people who claim to be able to talk to dead relatives, or phone psychics... what they're doing is not illegal, but their customers are unsuspecting, and possibly scared with nowhere else to turn. Note once again I never said "stupid".
You're kidding! No way! I wish I had seen that. That must be just too funny.
Funny, in a sad, pathetic sort of way... South Park did a great episode that, keeping in mind that this is South Park, actually put a good perspective on it (My Future Self and Me)...
Even worse was the banner ad I saw a page-load or two ago, right here on Slashdot. It linked to SurvivingTerrorism.com, a pathetic attempt to scam money out of unsuspecting people who are scared. Likely the same people who stocked up on supplies for Y2K...
You forget 2 more arguments that are commonly used to push agendas...
The sad thing is, if you stretch it, you can pretty much associate anything with anything else. Money goes around, and you never know how the recipient is going to spend money. You can't be responsible for everything that happens as a far-removed indirect result...
I was going to continue on that topic, but I just noticed the banner ad here:
Survive Terrorism Protect yourself now from smallpox, dirty bombs, and martial law.
And the link points to SurvivingTerrorism.com (actually the link was a 404, but a page in that domain). Pathetic:(
...everyone uses terrorism to push their agenda. I'm so sick of that phrase. Don't like something that people are doing? Tell them that it funds terrorists, and they'll stop. I suppose it works -- the average person probably believes this crap.
I was so pissed the first time I saw the commercial with the teenagers saying "I helped terrorists because I bought a dime bag" (or whatever). 9/11 was a *terrible* event, yes, but to try to make people think they're partly responsible because they commit some petty crime? Total BS.
I've been thinking about building some electric motor assistance to my mountain bike, with an array of rechargable batteries within the larger triangle of the frame and perhaps a solar panel for more prolonged usage away from AC outlets.
I've been thinking about a "stepper motor" idea for a while, for a simple 21-speed bicycle where the motor *is* the front wheel. This wouldn't interferer in any way with manual operation, and would provide a nice way to add power to an otherwise standard bicycle.
The wheel would provide permanent magnets, while a unit positioned just outside the wheel would provide electro-magnets controlled by a relatively small CPU, in a manner similar to the "rail motor" in a typical VCR unit. During "deceleration" you could retrieve some of the energy to recharge batteries (a few UPS batteries, or even motorcycle lead-acid batteries) would do the trick. Up-hill and just random coasting could be done quite effortlessly, and when the batteries are dead, it's still a normal bike.
I keep putting off implementing this on my 21-speed "mountain" bike (like there are any mountains here), but it'd be a nice project for when I get really, really bored. And lazy.
Anyway, I don't expect there to be 1,000s of comprimised servers by tommorow...
No, but does that make this any less valid? A determined cracker will find a way. Maybe he has to comprimise an internal box first, to then be able to crack the SSL key -- does that make this any less risky?
It seems to me, to avoid timing attacks, that the server (SSL or whatever) should be careful to ensure that the response timing is similar whether it is an error condition or success condition -- in other words, give no clue, timing or otherwise, whether a particular query was successful, partly right, or a failure. The response timing (similar to the other timing vulnerability discovered a few weeks ago) should not give any indication as to how "close" you are to cracking the key -- much like common methods of determining if a human response is a lie or truth.
To truly hide is to truly mask the response timing, either by artificially (randomly) inflating the response time, or (better still) inflating the response time to result in a similar timing pattern regardless of the cause (success or failure or anything in between).
Anyone really considering security has thought of this already, and either artificially pads the response time, or at least makes the timing seem arbitrary.
Oh, please. That's just one big stupid OSS flag-waver. IE versions since 4 have been plenty stable and, yes, I do administer LANs of up to 80 machines, all running MSIE 5.5 and 6 reliably. For me and other "die-hard Windows users," Mozilla hangs and crashes. IE doesn't. Does that mean that Mozilla sucks?
Hm. First, I will say this: IE is stable, sure. But does IE do what the user wants to be done?
How many users can raise their hands and indicate that it's okay for web pages to pop up additional browser windows to display advertisements. Perhaps even maximize some of them.
How many users would say it's okay to "stretch" the standards -- standards that the rest of the Internet is based upon -- implementing them in MSIE so that pages end up being IE-only?
I will give you this: MSIE is stable on Windows 2000 and XP in my experience. Mozilla is stable on Windows *lt;any version>, Linux, *BSD, Mac, and so on. Mozilla lets you decide if you want sites to spawn new browser processes on your machine. Mozilla complies with established standards -- standards that extend far beyond the Wintel world.
If you use linux because it works for you, that's just great, but don't go making blanket statements that are dead wrong. Wishing doesn't make it so. If IE 'sucked,' it would be obsoleted by popular opinion. It doesn't and it isn't.
Honestly, this has nothing to do with reliability, or Linux. It has to do with a browser doing things according to *your* preferences, *your* best interests, as opposed to those of the company distributing the browser (or their partners).
And, WRT your familiar commentary about the magic of having "the source," how much does that mean to the 99.6% of the world who can't code? I certainly can't code beyond scripts, so I don't care and I'm not about to hire someone to do it for me. If it's broken, I find something that ain't, just like everyone else.
It's not about being able to modify or review the source, it's about the methodology that is open source. The fact that hundreds, possibly thousands in this case, of competant programmers are reviewing each-other's source code. All coming from different environments, different backgrounds, different training -- and all spotting different potential problem areas. Bringing in different new ideas.
This, as opposed to a company who may say something like "Okay, you've found a potentially serious security flaw. Here's what we're going to do: pretend it's not there, we'll fix it in the next major release, and hope no "hacker" finds it on his or her own."
Don't tell me this doesn't happen on a daily basis over in Redmond (and in other closed-source projects).
Seriously IE sucks. Even die hard Windows users I know switch to Mozilla or Opera. I do use the best tool for the job which is why I use Mozilla. Maybe if Microsoft opensourced IE it'd improve and not suck so much. Pitiful considering how few platforms they even support and the headstart they had.
I have to agree: IE sucks ass, Mozilla is just far superior.
The hardest thing people have to deal with is change. I wish more people (who were around at the time) would remember how hard it was to switch from Netscape to MSIE. IE was a better browser as of 4.0, and people were reluctant to change. Now Mozilla is a better browser as of a few months ago, and again people are reluctant to change.
But here's the kicker. Mozilla allows you to block popup ads (intelligently), disable JavaScript and HTML in mail/news, use tabbed browsing (trust me, once you get used to it you won't be able to stand any other way), and most notably, use the same browser on any OS you happen to be stuck on at the moment. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD (where it seems fastest in my opinion), Mac, etc -- Mozilla is there for you. Where's MSIE? On two of them (and very different implementations at that), and simply not available (for marketing reasons, not technical ones) on the others.
I love Mozilla, and really want to see it prosper, based on technical, usability, and availability merits -- all of which it earns on its own, if you're willing to forget why IE is your "favorite" browser for a few minutes...
Am I the only one here that is happy Mozilla 1.3 is out? After reading the posts here it sounds like/. would bitch if they were hung with a new rope.
Not at all. I've been using 1.3b since it came out (and 1.3a before that, mostly for the Bayesian SPAM filtering), and I'm quite tweaked that a new Mozilla is out. I use Mozilla exclusively on all my systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Win2k).
Memory usage doesn't bother me, I'm now up to half a gig of memory. Hard disk? Ha, nothing compared to an MSIE update. Load time? Negligable these days.
I think people like to bitch about the new features. Image sizing - which MSIE has, and is on by default (off by default in Moz); Bayesian filtering, which Outlook will likely never have; Popup killing integrated in the browser, which is even more improved than it was before (and is absolutely great -- I know IE users who've paid actual money for add-on popup killers that don't work half the time)...
Mozilla is the most wonderful thing to come from open source besides Linux and Apache, and MySQL and Perl and FreeBSD, in my opinion:) While that may sound like I'm down-playing it, I truly love Mozilla and every new feature that comes with it.
I never understood the smooth scrolling feature in IE. It's so dreadfully annoying! It's simply not very accurate and the page seems to live its own life when using the mouse-wheel. I may be spastic, but I have always been unable to be friends with it. I say: "Go down a bit!" and IE responds with "Sure, let's fucking go down half a screen!" and then it takes its bloody time to do so, too! In the meantime, I have to wait a a whole half seconds before I can undo its over-generous scrolling efforts, upon which it decides I want to see five lines too much from the top of the viewscreen. I-- simply-- get-- the-- urge-- to-- kill when that damn feature's turned on. Who the hell thinks its useful, anyway? Do those people exist?
I realize this was meant in humor, but what kind of video card/chip do you have? I use Mozilla almost exclusively, but on my systems IE's smooth scrolling is rather nice. In fact, Mozilla does this too on my Linux systems (RedHat 8.0, whatever Moz version came preinstalled) -- but NOT my Windows systems...
Now mind you on a slower system it is extremely painful; my laptop (Trident chip) has this disabled because it's painful, but on my GeForce or even my ancient Voodoo3 cards, it's a nice effect, making it easier to scroll while reading.
It also depends on your "mouse wheel scroll" settings, which are somewhere buried in the control panel. The default of 3 "lines" (lines being subjective, as it doesn't correspond to any actual lines in MSIE with any font I've seen) is acceptable...
Looking at the new features - they got one of the more annoying features from IE in there - I can't stand the frigging image resize feature. If I want too look at pr0n, I want it to fill the screen in all its pixel-by-pixel glory, not some badly-rescaled image
You can (as with most everything in Mozilla) turn it off. All it does is scale the image to fit the current browser window -- and it's a very simplistic pixel resize (why on earth they can't implement a nice resample is beyond me).
However, it is actually handy on the occasional image that is some 2048x1600 or whatever, like sattelite photos etc. I always used to find myself opening them in an image editor to see the whole image in one screenful... though, admittedly, I disabled the feature (I've been using 1.3b which had this).
I'll never forget their position on Microsoft "Smart Tags." That's when I realized I didn't understand EFF anymore. The very idea that a web browser displaying a page "incorrectly" could possibly be copyright infringement... *sigh*
This was no simple case of "incorrectly" displaying a web page. This was a case of intentionally modifying the text of a potentially copyrighted work, providing links to some external site.
In my opinion, and obviously many others (since it seems to have gone away on its own anyway), what they did was sneaky and wrong, not unlike many similar spyware programs.
As for this case, hm, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this. I kinda want to say that, copyright aside, just the fact that they took the time to compile the list, and are making it available *to their visitors*, makes it wrong to just copy the data and post it on your own site. But, then again, I'm not sure. It's a tough one...
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
Searching google (exact terms: "boil a frog" temperature slowly) turns up many, many uses of the analogy, applied to just about any topic. I must be bored today, but I looked at all of the results, and not a single one cited any scientific study or anything.
Fine. I'll start the water...:p
Damn. I tried one last place, and found this. Guess it's not true...
Anyone know of a similar place (electronics surplus) in the Atlanta area? I miss Skycraft very much since I moved from the Orlando area, and have been looking, without success, for a similar place here for the last year...
Down there a Radio Shack employee pointed me to Skycraft (I was looking for RF transistors), and I'd been going there weekly ever since. Now that I'm in Georgia, I'm desparately seeking a similar store...
I moved from Kissimmee, FL to Alpharetta, GA a little over a hear ago, and the one thing I miss the most -- being an electronics geek as well as a computer geek -- is Skycraft (linked in the summary). That place kicks butt.
I found many things there that I haven't been able to find anywhere since. RF transistors, various ICs, and even neat little LCD displays (50 cents each!) that I used in a couple MP3-player projects (via parallel port)...
I so miss that place. The poor guy at the Kissimmee Radio Shack who told me about that place doesn't understand the amount of business he lost from me;)
As I said in some other context: the "slippery slope" argument was old when the first caveman used it against another caveman to explain why cave paintings were a bad idea.
Why is this argument so bad?
Ever hear the story about boiling a frog? Basically, you can boil a frog, and he won't complain, as long as you increase the temperature slowly. Being a cold-blooded animal, frogs only notice temperature changes, not absolute temperatures. So a frog will happily stay in the water while you boil him to death, provided you increase the temperature in small increments.
Windows Product Activation is a small step. TCPA -- itself quite harmless -- is a small step. MS introduces Palladium et al, and it seems to be a small step from activation and TCPA.
Next thing you know, we're not only registering our copy of Windows, we're providing information to verify that we are only using one copy.
Paying an extra tax on blank CDs is bullshit in my opinion. I'm not sure, but I think there is such a "levy" in the US either on CDs, burners, or both. I just picked up a new burner and a 50-pack of CDs today. You know what I have planned for them? Software backups, and fair-use compilations of my favorite songs for the car (from, obviously, legitimately purchased CDs).
I know many, many people who purchase a computer and have no intention of committing piracy, of software or music. I don't know what the situation is in Germany, but I'm sure it's similar, anyway -- I'm sure there are people who buy computers for other purposes.
Here's the problem. If everyone -- and I mean *everyone* -- is violating some particular law, then that law needs to be revisited. Obviously that law isn't for the good of the people, if the people themselves are violating it. So the solution is to change the law -- NOT to tax everyone who is violating it.
If the laws in the US were changed so that copyrights actually expired in a reasonable amount of time -- thus making copyright laws actually useful again -- I think things would be okay.
First, who exactly is providing this money? Why do they have so much against Microsoft, that they would offer money only if you choose to boycott their products?
Non-MS products are good and fine for some of us, but face it: when these people graduate, and go out in the real world, they will be using Windows XP at work, using MS Word for everything, creating PowerPoint slides...
These people will, in most cases, be using Windows and Microsoft Office at home. At school they'll be lost with Gnome and OpenOffice (or whatever).
I just think that whoever made this offer has some serious problems (and, some serious money to support his personal agenda)... but unfortunately, to prepare the students for what they will face in the real world, you need to let them use MSIE, MS Word, Windows, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
All video drivers have to be built for the version of the kernel you are using. NVidia distributes RPM versions for several major distributions, but you will have to build it yourself if you use some other kernel.
Well, sorta... The *actual* driver is binary, and works with all supported kernels (and all supported cards). All that needs to be compiled is a wrapper. This wrapper provides a psudo-abstraction layer between the particular kernel in use, and the binary driver.
I think what NVidia did was ingenious: they can support most major kernels, without exposing their IP and trade secrets. The merits of that are subject to debate (I think what they did is fine), but the fact is, they provide working drivers for Linux users (and if you don't like it, of course you don't have to use their products/drivers at all).
Obviously the perfect solution would be for the Linux kernel to provide a nice abstraction layer for all drivers, but with so many people being against binary-only drivers, that likely won't happen soon. Meanwhile, NVidia came up with an elegant solution in my opinion.
The majority also lack SCSI, video capture, and probably USB, as well. Yet, the 2.4 kernel supports all of these. What was your point again?
Yes, but these things are more common than Firewire currently, and more useful (for most) than ACPI (we do have general APM support, which works pretty nicely on my laptop).
It's all about demand and developer resources. Even with a thousand developers, resources are still limited. Plus, developers tend to work on those areas they are skilled in, or areas they particularly enjoy.
The best part? Anyone with the knowledge and time can write a driver for these things. Without (in most cases) even having to recompile the kernel. My Linux box has support for my ATI Remote. That's certainly less popular than Firewire or ACPI, but for me, it was needed and I found a driver for it. If you need to use some hardware in Windows, that has no Windows driver, good luck finding some hacker who has whipped up a workable solution.
The faster p2p application I know was probably Audiogalaxy, where you could not cap the speed, and if you wanted to be able to download 10 tracks simultaneously, you had to allow 10 simultaneous uploads as well. Also, it would try and connect you with the user who you could get the fastest download from.
I really liked AudioGalaxy. I ran the client on my headless Linux box (file server), but used the web site on my Windows box, or whatever machine I wanted to. They were all behind the same NAT, so the outside sees it as the same machine. Worked rather well, until suddenly they stopped carrying any real content.
I hated Napster (poorly written interface), but it did the job. Then I discovered Scour Exchange, which was a lot nicer, but then it was shut down. AudioGalaxy was the best, and of course that is no longer. Limewire (Gnutella?) didn't seem to have any files I was looking for last time I tried it. Now it's binary newsgroups and Kazaalite...
I'll have to give Freenet a try today... unless the record labels want to give me a way to try stuff out before I buy it...
Just a couple of weeks ago, I picked up an Audigy 2 at Best Buy. 10 days later I returned it and picked up a new burner and some RAM.
Why?
I have had two problems with Creative's cards. The first one, and most annoying for me, is that they lock up. I don't know if this is a hardware or driver issue, but I've experienced this with an AWE-32, PCI-128, and most recently the Audigy. All three were completely different computers and operating systems (P-166, Win95; AMD 233, Win98; PIII-800, Win2k).
When I brought the Audigy home, I was impressed. Metal jacks that probably wouldn't break as easily as the colored plastic ones. A firewire port. An alleged 106db S/N ratio.
With some testing, it lived up to the S/N ratio quite nicely, and I was surprised. Output levels were in the "semi-pro" range, eg, it drove my mixer's meter right to 0db easily. No hard drive/video/network interference in the output or input.
But even despite all of this, if I fire up a playlist in WinAmp and just let it run, it will lock up randomly. It usually crops up after a few hours of continuous play, but it's done this in as little as 30 minutes. From that point on, the card is effectively dead until you power-cycle. Same exact behavior I had with their previous products.
Now on to the second issue I have with the company (but not related to the Audigy). Twice -- in two different eras -- I have bought what I thought to be a Creative Labs card, but it turned out to be a relabeled card from a company they bought out.
First was back in 1995 or '96, allegedly an SB16. The card was actually an Aztech Sound Galaxy 16.
Second was a PCI-128, I was lucky enough to get an Ensonique card (that I've found to be a good card anyway, works well in the Linux box).
I'm fed up with Creative Labs, and Voyetra/Turtle Beach isn't much better (no Win2k support for older Montego II cards, which I own 3). So I'm now using two no-name external USB devices, which (if you don't care about "3D" or MIDI) give great PCM playback quality, low S/N ratio (being external to the PC), and hot-swappability.
So... am I the only one who thinks Creative Labs sucks?
...and was dying to get started playing with it. No sooner than I plug it in does my phone ring.
It's my aunt, who I hadn't heard from in about 2 years. I thought to myself, how nice. I felt like I had been missed, that someone was thinking about me.
Then I hear, "oh, by the way, I bought a new CD-ROM drive, and your cousin and I decided to install it ourselves. Now the computer won't boot.".
Me: How drunk were you?
Her: We had a few beers...
This phone call went on for about an hour, walking her through the elimination process (turned out to be a master/slave jumper issue).
Now I just play dumb. They all know it's bogus, and sometimes it's hard to stay quiet when I see someone do something stupid, or do something the hard way, but in the end it's worth it.
Philips has come out strongly so far against "crippled" copy protected CDs.
:)
That only applies to the existing RedBook audio CD format (or Orange book? Whatever). I'm sure they wouldn't care -- and may even support -- new standards supporting DRM techniques.
What they disapproved of was companies bastardizing a format that Philips helped invent, breaking the established standards and then putting the logo on the disc as though it were compliant.
This would be like the W3C telling Microsoft that they can't put the term "CSS" on their browser. Microsoft would of course be free to invent a new, similar standard, and the W3C would likely even support it as a new standard. Just so they aren't claiming that it is CSS (not the best analogy, full of holes, but it let me get a jab in at MSIE
Anyway, I don't think Philips is in any way against DRM. As you said, they have no direct interest in it, in either direction, but they *do* have an interest in making money. If that means creating/supporting a new technology that provides for the recording companies' needs (and their support would certainly help the format to take off), then I'm sure they'd be in full support of it.
It's fairly obvious this doesn't happen (or else it's a recent development).
;)
I didn't mean to imply that it happens for every security hole that is later exploited. What I meant was, if in fact someone internal does discover such a bug, they'd rather cover it up. Remember, Microsoft *hates* full disclosure policies, and people who post their vulnerabilities to a forum such as BugTraq. For better or for worse, I suspect this does happen from time to time (okay, so my "daily basis" was a bit of a stretch
I guess I should (grudgingly) acknowledge that over the last year or two this has been (slowly) turning around (for new version releases), but most of the products still show the results of this culture.
They are getting better, but as you imply, it will be a while before this new "focus on security" creeps into wide practice. Until then, we'll still have IIS 4.0, MSIE, and various versions of Outlook and Outlook Express floating around.
I admit as well, I am glad they're starting to get their act together. I don't know how good a job they'll do, but I suspect they have the resources to do it well if they really wanted to. I'm still quite impressed with Windows 2000, and it's the only thing that stopped me from migrating away all together. Now it's been a couple years and I'm still using it.
The libertarian party thought so, too. Lots of people (myself included) put some money together to run a full-page ad in USA Today in response to the ONDCP's printed ad.
I heard about that, and loved it. It's great when a group can get a message in front of people that at least makes them think about what they have been hearing. So many people take things at face value, be it the evening news, or the anti-drug commercials, etc, that they often don't question it. Something like this puts the question in their mind.
I'm personally not really for or against drugs, but I agree that making them legal would completely stop the "war on drugs". People tend to forget that there are, in fact, two sides to a war...
First of all, I remember the commercial you're referring to, and I think it was pretty well done. It was done in a Mastercard-style. "Machine gun: $800. 20 pounds of explosives: $1800. ..." It went on, listing off all these artifacts of terrorism and their costs. It ended by saying, "Where do terrorists get the money to do what they do? If you buy drugs, maybe from you."
That was one of them, but there was another with teenagers. One teen says something like "I helped terrorists buy guns". Fade to black, then to another teen: "I helped kill thousands of people". And so on.
I thought they were rediculous, playing on people's fears much like this Surviving Terrorism junk. Production values may have been good (nice dramatic effect), but that doesn't make the message any less bogus. I mean, what was wrong with "This is your brain on drugs"?
Reminds me of that whole "Truth" campaign. They didn't even have nice production values, just shots of them loitering on a tobacco company's property, bothering people, etc (possibly staged, I don't know or care).
This is ridiculous. What's wrong with selling people what they want? If people are willing to part their money for things that you don't deem worthy, they're stupid?
I don't recall using the word "stupid". "unsuspecting" and "scared" does not imply "stupid".
Gee, I guess everyone who buys a Mercedes is stupid and "unsuspecting" then, because they could get by just as easily with a Kia.
Mercedes is not capitolizing on people's fears and selling snake oil. That's what's happening here.
In 1999, a local computer store was selling a software CD, for $25, that would "fix Y2K problems and make all of your software Y2K compliant!" which is obviously bogus. This is similar, but far worse, in my opinion.
They must be getting ripped off by those "pathetic" scam-artists at Daimler-Chrysler.
You get a lot more for the extra money though. Even if a good chunk of that is "a name", that's fine and that's what the person wants to pay for.
Selling howto books on being prepared for terrorist attacks isn't illegal, but I believe that the people selling them know that they are simply capitolizing on people's fears, not really giving them anything of value. Hence the term, "scam". Maybe a legal scam, maybe borderline, but still a scam.
Again, I never said the people were stupid, only "unsuspecting", meaning that they are taken in by the pitch, believing that this will really help them prepare for such events. 9/11 scared the hell out of a lot of people. Some are having a hard time moving past it, especially those who have been affected in a personal way.
Selling this is a lot like "earthquake forecasts", or those people who claim to be able to talk to dead relatives, or phone psychics... what they're doing is not illegal, but their customers are unsuspecting, and possibly scared with nowhere else to turn. Note once again I never said "stupid".
You're kidding! No way! I wish I had seen that. That must be just too funny.
Funny, in a sad, pathetic sort of way... South Park did a great episode that, keeping in mind that this is South Park, actually put a good perspective on it (My Future Self and Me)...
Even worse was the banner ad I saw a page-load or two ago, right here on Slashdot. It linked to SurvivingTerrorism.com, a pathetic attempt to scam money out of unsuspecting people who are scared. Likely the same people who stocked up on supplies for Y2K...
The sad thing is, if you stretch it, you can pretty much associate anything with anything else. Money goes around, and you never know how the recipient is going to spend money. You can't be responsible for everything that happens as a far-removed indirect result...
I was going to continue on that topic, but I just noticed the banner ad here:
And the link points to SurvivingTerrorism.com (actually the link was a 404, but a page in that domain). Pathetic
...everyone uses terrorism to push their agenda. I'm so sick of that phrase. Don't like something that people are doing? Tell them that it funds terrorists, and they'll stop. I suppose it works -- the average person probably believes this crap.
I was so pissed the first time I saw the commercial with the teenagers saying "I helped terrorists because I bought a dime bag" (or whatever). 9/11 was a *terrible* event, yes, but to try to make people think they're partly responsible because they commit some petty crime? Total BS.
I've been thinking about building some electric motor assistance to my mountain bike, with an array of rechargable batteries within the larger triangle of the frame and perhaps a solar panel for more prolonged usage away from AC outlets.
I've been thinking about a "stepper motor" idea for a while, for a simple 21-speed bicycle where the motor *is* the front wheel. This wouldn't interferer in any way with manual operation, and would provide a nice way to add power to an otherwise standard bicycle.
The wheel would provide permanent magnets, while a unit positioned just outside the wheel would provide electro-magnets controlled by a relatively small CPU, in a manner similar to the "rail motor" in a typical VCR unit. During "deceleration" you could retrieve some of the energy to recharge batteries (a few UPS batteries, or even motorcycle lead-acid batteries) would do the trick. Up-hill and just random coasting could be done quite effortlessly, and when the batteries are dead, it's still a normal bike.
I keep putting off implementing this on my 21-speed "mountain" bike (like there are any mountains here), but it'd be a nice project for when I get really, really bored. And lazy.
Anyway, I don't expect there to be 1,000s of comprimised servers by tommorow...
No, but does that make this any less valid? A determined cracker will find a way. Maybe he has to comprimise an internal box first, to then be able to crack the SSL key -- does that make this any less risky?
It seems to me, to avoid timing attacks, that the server (SSL or whatever) should be careful to ensure that the response timing is similar whether it is an error condition or success condition -- in other words, give no clue, timing or otherwise, whether a particular query was successful, partly right, or a failure. The response timing (similar to the other timing vulnerability discovered a few weeks ago) should not give any indication as to how "close" you are to cracking the key -- much like common methods of determining if a human response is a lie or truth.
To truly hide is to truly mask the response timing, either by artificially (randomly) inflating the response time, or (better still) inflating the response time to result in a similar timing pattern regardless of the cause (success or failure or anything in between).
Anyone really considering security has thought of this already, and either artificially pads the response time, or at least makes the timing seem arbitrary.
Oh, please. That's just one big stupid OSS flag-waver. IE versions since 4 have been plenty stable and, yes, I do administer LANs of up to 80 machines, all running MSIE 5.5 and 6 reliably. For me and other "die-hard Windows users," Mozilla hangs and crashes. IE doesn't. Does that mean that Mozilla sucks?
Hm. First, I will say this: IE is stable, sure. But does IE do what the user wants to be done?
How many users can raise their hands and indicate that it's okay for web pages to pop up additional browser windows to display advertisements. Perhaps even maximize some of them.
How many users would say it's okay to "stretch" the standards -- standards that the rest of the Internet is based upon -- implementing them in MSIE so that pages end up being IE-only?
I will give you this: MSIE is stable on Windows 2000 and XP in my experience. Mozilla is stable on Windows *lt;any version>, Linux, *BSD, Mac, and so on. Mozilla lets you decide if you want sites to spawn new browser processes on your machine. Mozilla complies with established standards -- standards that extend far beyond the Wintel world.
If you use linux because it works for you, that's just great, but don't go making blanket statements that are dead wrong. Wishing doesn't make it so. If IE 'sucked,' it would be obsoleted by popular opinion. It doesn't and it isn't.
Honestly, this has nothing to do with reliability, or Linux. It has to do with a browser doing things according to *your* preferences, *your* best interests, as opposed to those of the company distributing the browser (or their partners).
And, WRT your familiar commentary about the magic of having "the source," how much does that mean to the 99.6% of the world who can't code? I certainly can't code beyond scripts, so I don't care and I'm not about to hire someone to do it for me. If it's broken, I find something that ain't, just like everyone else.
It's not about being able to modify or review the source, it's about the methodology that is open source. The fact that hundreds, possibly thousands in this case, of competant programmers are reviewing each-other's source code. All coming from different environments, different backgrounds, different training -- and all spotting different potential problem areas. Bringing in different new ideas.
This, as opposed to a company who may say something like "Okay, you've found a potentially serious security flaw. Here's what we're going to do: pretend it's not there, we'll fix it in the next major release, and hope no "hacker" finds it on his or her own."
Don't tell me this doesn't happen on a daily basis over in Redmond (and in other closed-source projects).
Seriously IE sucks. Even die hard Windows users I know switch to Mozilla or Opera. I do use the best tool for the job which is why I use Mozilla. Maybe if Microsoft opensourced IE it'd improve and not suck so much. Pitiful considering how few platforms they even support and the headstart they had.
I have to agree: IE sucks ass, Mozilla is just far superior.
The hardest thing people have to deal with is change. I wish more people (who were around at the time) would remember how hard it was to switch from Netscape to MSIE. IE was a better browser as of 4.0, and people were reluctant to change. Now Mozilla is a better browser as of a few months ago, and again people are reluctant to change.
But here's the kicker. Mozilla allows you to block popup ads (intelligently), disable JavaScript and HTML in mail/news, use tabbed browsing (trust me, once you get used to it you won't be able to stand any other way), and most notably, use the same browser on any OS you happen to be stuck on at the moment. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD (where it seems fastest in my opinion), Mac, etc -- Mozilla is there for you. Where's MSIE? On two of them (and very different implementations at that), and simply not available (for marketing reasons, not technical ones) on the others.
I love Mozilla, and really want to see it prosper, based on technical, usability, and availability merits -- all of which it earns on its own, if you're willing to forget why IE is your "favorite" browser for a few minutes...
Am I the only one here that is happy Mozilla 1.3 is out? After reading the posts here it sounds like /. would bitch if they were hung with a new rope.
:) While that may sound like I'm down-playing it, I truly love Mozilla and every new feature that comes with it.
Not at all. I've been using 1.3b since it came out (and 1.3a before that, mostly for the Bayesian SPAM filtering), and I'm quite tweaked that a new Mozilla is out. I use Mozilla exclusively on all my systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Win2k).
Memory usage doesn't bother me, I'm now up to half a gig of memory. Hard disk? Ha, nothing compared to an MSIE update. Load time? Negligable these days.
I think people like to bitch about the new features. Image sizing - which MSIE has, and is on by default (off by default in Moz); Bayesian filtering, which Outlook will likely never have; Popup killing integrated in the browser, which is even more improved than it was before (and is absolutely great -- I know IE users who've paid actual money for add-on popup killers that don't work half the time)...
Mozilla is the most wonderful thing to come from open source besides Linux and Apache, and MySQL and Perl and FreeBSD, in my opinion
I never understood the smooth scrolling feature in IE. It's so dreadfully annoying! It's simply not very accurate and the page seems to live its own life when using the mouse-wheel. I may be spastic, but I have always been unable to be friends with it. I say: "Go down a bit!" and IE responds with "Sure, let's fucking go down half a screen!" and then it takes its bloody time to do so, too! In the meantime, I have to wait a a whole half seconds before I can undo its over-generous scrolling efforts, upon which it decides I want to see five lines too much from the top of the viewscreen. I-- simply-- get-- the-- urge-- to-- kill when that damn feature's turned on. Who the hell thinks its useful, anyway? Do those people exist?
I realize this was meant in humor, but what kind of video card/chip do you have? I use Mozilla almost exclusively, but on my systems IE's smooth scrolling is rather nice. In fact, Mozilla does this too on my Linux systems (RedHat 8.0, whatever Moz version came preinstalled) -- but NOT my Windows systems...
Now mind you on a slower system it is extremely painful; my laptop (Trident chip) has this disabled because it's painful, but on my GeForce or even my ancient Voodoo3 cards, it's a nice effect, making it easier to scroll while reading.
It also depends on your "mouse wheel scroll" settings, which are somewhere buried in the control panel. The default of 3 "lines" (lines being subjective, as it doesn't correspond to any actual lines in MSIE with any font I've seen) is acceptable...
Looking at the new features - they got one of the more annoying features from IE in there - I can't stand the frigging image resize feature. If I want too look at pr0n, I want it to fill the screen in all its pixel-by-pixel glory, not some badly-rescaled image
You can (as with most everything in Mozilla) turn it off. All it does is scale the image to fit the current browser window -- and it's a very simplistic pixel resize (why on earth they can't implement a nice resample is beyond me).
However, it is actually handy on the occasional image that is some 2048x1600 or whatever, like sattelite photos etc. I always used to find myself opening them in an image editor to see the whole image in one screenful... though, admittedly, I disabled the feature (I've been using 1.3b which had this).
I'll never forget their position on Microsoft "Smart Tags." That's when I realized I didn't understand EFF anymore. The very idea that a web browser displaying a page "incorrectly" could possibly be copyright infringement... *sigh*
This was no simple case of "incorrectly" displaying a web page. This was a case of intentionally modifying the text of a potentially copyrighted work, providing links to some external site.
In my opinion, and obviously many others (since it seems to have gone away on its own anyway), what they did was sneaky and wrong, not unlike many similar spyware programs.
As for this case, hm, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this. I kinda want to say that, copyright aside, just the fact that they took the time to compile the list, and are making it available *to their visitors*, makes it wrong to just copy the data and post it on your own site. But, then again, I'm not sure. It's a tough one...
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
:p
Searching google (exact terms: "boil a frog" temperature slowly) turns up many, many uses of the analogy, applied to just about any topic. I must be bored today, but I looked at all of the results, and not a single one cited any scientific study or anything.
Fine. I'll start the water...
Damn. I tried one last place, and found this. Guess it's not true...
Anyone know of a similar place (electronics surplus) in the Atlanta area? I miss Skycraft very much since I moved from the Orlando area, and have been looking, without success, for a similar place here for the last year...
Down there a Radio Shack employee pointed me to Skycraft (I was looking for RF transistors), and I'd been going there weekly ever since. Now that I'm in Georgia, I'm desparately seeking a similar store...
Anyone?
I moved from Kissimmee, FL to Alpharetta, GA a little over a hear ago, and the one thing I miss the most -- being an electronics geek as well as a computer geek -- is Skycraft (linked in the summary). That place kicks butt.
;)
I found many things there that I haven't been able to find anywhere since. RF transistors, various ICs, and even neat little LCD displays (50 cents each!) that I used in a couple MP3-player projects (via parallel port)...
I so miss that place. The poor guy at the Kissimmee Radio Shack who told me about that place doesn't understand the amount of business he lost from me
As I said in some other context: the "slippery slope" argument was old when the first caveman used it against another caveman to explain why cave paintings were a bad idea.
Why is this argument so bad?
Ever hear the story about boiling a frog? Basically, you can boil a frog, and he won't complain, as long as you increase the temperature slowly. Being a cold-blooded animal, frogs only notice temperature changes, not absolute temperatures. So a frog will happily stay in the water while you boil him to death, provided you increase the temperature in small increments.
Windows Product Activation is a small step. TCPA -- itself quite harmless -- is a small step. MS introduces Palladium et al, and it seems to be a small step from activation and TCPA.
Next thing you know, we're not only registering our copy of Windows, we're providing information to verify that we are only using one copy.
Paying an extra tax on blank CDs is bullshit in my opinion. I'm not sure, but I think there is such a "levy" in the US either on CDs, burners, or both. I just picked up a new burner and a 50-pack of CDs today. You know what I have planned for them? Software backups, and fair-use compilations of my favorite songs for the car (from, obviously, legitimately purchased CDs).
I know many, many people who purchase a computer and have no intention of committing piracy, of software or music. I don't know what the situation is in Germany, but I'm sure it's similar, anyway -- I'm sure there are people who buy computers for other purposes.
Here's the problem. If everyone -- and I mean *everyone* -- is violating some particular law, then that law needs to be revisited. Obviously that law isn't for the good of the people, if the people themselves are violating it. So the solution is to change the law -- NOT to tax everyone who is violating it.
If the laws in the US were changed so that copyrights actually expired in a reasonable amount of time -- thus making copyright laws actually useful again -- I think things would be okay.
I'm sure Germany's situation would be similar...
First, who exactly is providing this money? Why do they have so much against Microsoft, that they would offer money only if you choose to boycott their products?
Non-MS products are good and fine for some of us, but face it: when these people graduate, and go out in the real world, they will be using Windows XP at work, using MS Word for everything, creating PowerPoint slides...
These people will, in most cases, be using Windows and Microsoft Office at home. At school they'll be lost with Gnome and OpenOffice (or whatever).
I just think that whoever made this offer has some serious problems (and, some serious money to support his personal agenda)... but unfortunately, to prepare the students for what they will face in the real world, you need to let them use MSIE, MS Word, Windows, etc...