MSNBC is describing another well-known company...
on
Gift Card Hacking
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Some retailers don't take basic security steps to protect against counterfeiting that would cheat consumers out of the money stored on the cards. Add to that surprising merchant "expiration" fees and leftover balances that revert to the retailers, and the cards may not really be such a good deal for consumers.
Just search and replace "retailers" with "software companies" and "cards" with "OS", for example...
You have to get the latest Windows PSDK headers from Microsoft. The ones bundled with VC++ are already outdated and are for Windows NT 4, not Windows 2000.
of the price, since MS software is largely pirated (piracy rates in China is more than 90%), but because they fear that MS has somehow planted a backdoor that helps the U.S. government to spy their communication channels (remember the NSAKey registry that was introduced in NT SP5?).
Hey, this is not a question of opensource vs close-source. It is a problem of stupidity. Any person who is stupid enough to leave a database server open to Internet access and without the admin password set deserves a lesson or two. It can just happen to any other OS or database system.
(1) The Hard drive interface is custom - you can't just plug it into a normal PC (yet, the electrical format will probably be sussed very soon and adaptors made)
No, it is only a normal IDE interface. You can plug it into your PC, but it has a custom partition format that is not recognizable by any other OS (yet).
It may not be that simple. The Xbox BIOS may recognize only certain HDD firmware identifiers and anything that does not belong to the list will be banned.
A package manager exists for Windows, it is called MSI. It is not very sophisticated and sometimes even stupid, but it works most of the time. It allows repair, uninstall and rollback of applications. Windows XP has an additional feature called System Restore that couples with MSI so that it allows driver rollback and return to a given restore point without destroying user documents.
Really? What exactly Mozilla/Netscape has that makes it so dog slow that it requires a turbo mode, when IE and Opera don't need at all? A browser is a browser! Skin? But WinAMP is also pretty fast with skind. Just tell me the "features" that warrant me to run that turbo mode.
Yeah, by the time mozilla 1.5.* is out, IE should be in version 8 or.NET or whatever. Even Opera would be at least in version 7. At that time, I think no one will ever bother running Mozilla again.
I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.
I think Carmack is supporting what MS has being doing for quite a long time since Windows 3.x: Compatibility mode. It detects whether a certain program is running and adjusts itself accordingly to support quirks and bugs. But a driver that deceives the end-users without they ever knowing that it is "optimizing" on their behalf (and degrading the quality and as if it is good for them) is not acceptable.
Many people would cry foul if MS attempts to "optimize" MS Office in such a way. In fact, they have been claiming that IE is faster than Netscape because it is preloaded when it is not the case at all (it is only preloaded when Active Desktop is enabled). Netscape is a bloat and you will see the difference if you compare the load time of Netscape Messenger versus Outlook Express in case you still insist that IE is preloaded. Outlook Express is not integrated and thus not preloaded. Of course, you get additional features like automatic virus loading, but that's a different story.
Why? Because Kylix is supposed to be able to compile C++... in the future... Anyway, sticking to Delphi for Linux limits the compiler to Pascal only, which is no good.
Yeah, it is also a negligence of the computer's owner to have installed Windows 95 or MacOS 9 infested with nasty bugs. MS and Apple shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost. Am I following correctly your logic?
Poor and oppressed populations have high birthrates as well as high deathrates, but this is not true in China. The quality of life is of course far far away from Americans, but many people managed to live and improve under this environment. Compared to Chinese people, American people have a well-founded government with a reasonable Constitution. What the Congress has passed is something short-term. Yet, you seem to be pissed off by granting a little bit more power to the FBI. While it might not be good in the long term, I think that is understandable in the short term.
Look, Chinese people have been under a monarchy or totalitarian regime for over 5000 years. Yet there are more Chinese people than any other ethnic group in the world. Care to say something about this?
be just another OS/2. The WinOS/2 subsystem was so good that it killed OS/2. What's the fun of running Windows apps in Linux? Higher stability? But Win2K/XP is already quite good for this purpose and it comes preinstalled anyway. I think that if you really plan to use Linux, stay away from Windows apps and stick with native ones. Besides, we have VMWare for it and it almost guarantees 100% compatibility.
I will not use Opera until it supports Unicode. I need to read Chinese and Japanese web sites and without Unicode support, my English based OS is not able to process these web sites properly. Netscape support in this area is half baked and IE is the best so far. Opera seems promising, but still not there (localization of the UI doesn't count)
... and this triggers the automatic MS bashing procedure at slashdot. I just remember that I read something like this just about two weeks ago.
Software is different than hardware and is easily cloneable. You can sell software for free like Linux, but you hardly can do that with hardware. So different rules apply here, i.e., if EULAs tell that you cannot resell that piece of software, so be it. The money you paid MS is only a right to use, not a right to sell (in most cases, but there are also scenarios where you can really "sell", i.e., transfer your right to somebody else).
Besides requiring people to use two hands as someone has pointed out already (when the trend is going towards hands-free), this requires heavy memorization and the initial learning curve may be even higher than normal keyboards.
Moreover, different people have different finger shapes - I have seen people with a larger index finger than the middle finger or of irregular shapes due to accidents. Will they be incapable of using these phones? Discriminating people due to their finger shapes is also very innovative!
Extending this technology to other input methods in Asia (Chinese and Japanese) will be awkward to say the least.
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I believe it is WDM (Windows Driver model), the core of newer drivers. It is introduced since Win98 and is not present in Win95.
You have to get the latest Windows PSDK headers from Microsoft. The ones bundled with VC++ are already outdated and are for Windows NT 4, not Windows 2000.
of the price, since MS software is largely pirated (piracy rates in China is more than 90%), but because they fear that MS has somehow planted a backdoor that helps the U.S. government to spy their communication channels (remember the NSAKey registry that was introduced in NT SP5?).
SetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, GetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE) | WS_EX_LAYERED); SetLayeredWindowAttributes (hwnd, 0, 180, LWA_ALPHA);
GUI programming in Windows is quite snappy.
Hey, this is not a question of opensource vs close-source. It is a problem of stupidity. Any person who is stupid enough to leave a database server open to Internet access and without the admin password set deserves a lesson or two. It can just happen to any other OS or database system.
It may not be that simple. The Xbox BIOS may recognize only certain HDD firmware identifiers and anything that does not belong to the list will be banned.
A package manager exists for Windows, it is called MSI. It is not very sophisticated and sometimes even stupid, but it works most of the time. It allows repair, uninstall and rollback of applications. Windows XP has an additional feature called System Restore that couples with MSI so that it allows driver rollback and return to a given restore point without destroying user documents.
Really? What exactly Mozilla/Netscape has that makes it so dog slow that it requires a turbo mode, when IE and Opera don't need at all? A browser is a browser! Skin? But WinAMP is also pretty fast with skind. Just tell me the "features" that warrant me to run that turbo mode.
I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.
Hey, Xbox is only a PC in disguise and PC-based MAME has been here for ages. I wonder how ironic is this.
Many people would cry foul if MS attempts to "optimize" MS Office in such a way. In fact, they have been claiming that IE is faster than Netscape because it is preloaded when it is not the case at all (it is only preloaded when Active Desktop is enabled). Netscape is a bloat and you will see the difference if you compare the load time of Netscape Messenger versus Outlook Express in case you still insist that IE is preloaded. Outlook Express is not integrated and thus not preloaded. Of course, you get additional features like automatic virus loading, but that's a different story.
Let us go back to emulate Xbox under MS-DOS!
Why? Because Kylix is supposed to be able to compile C++... in the future... Anyway, sticking to Delphi for Linux limits the compiler to Pascal only, which is no good.
Yeah, it is also a negligence of the computer's owner to have installed Windows 95 or MacOS 9 infested with nasty bugs. MS and Apple shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost. Am I following correctly your logic?
This is ridiculous. So everytime an invention that doubles/triples the storage space is a discovery of WinZip?
Poor and oppressed populations have high birthrates as well as high deathrates, but this is not true in China. The quality of life is of course far far away from Americans, but many people managed to live and improve under this environment. Compared to Chinese people, American people have a well-founded government with a reasonable Constitution. What the Congress has passed is something short-term. Yet, you seem to be pissed off by granting a little bit more power to the FBI. While it might not be good in the long term, I think that is understandable in the short term.
Look, Chinese people have been under a monarchy or totalitarian regime for over 5000 years. Yet there are more Chinese people than any other ethnic group in the world. Care to say something about this?
be just another OS/2. The WinOS/2 subsystem was so good that it killed OS/2. What's the fun of running Windows apps in Linux? Higher stability? But Win2K/XP is already quite good for this purpose and it comes preinstalled anyway. I think that if you really plan to use Linux, stay away from Windows apps and stick with native ones. Besides, we have VMWare for it and it almost guarantees 100% compatibility.
this time by Macromedia, when they have time to do so?
I will not use Opera until it supports Unicode. I need to read Chinese and Japanese web sites and without Unicode support, my English based OS is not able to process these web sites properly. Netscape support in this area is half baked and IE is the best so far. Opera seems promising, but still not there (localization of the UI doesn't count)
... and this triggers the automatic MS bashing procedure at slashdot. I just remember that I read something like this just about two weeks ago.
Software is different than hardware and is easily cloneable. You can sell software for free like Linux, but you hardly can do that with hardware. So different rules apply here, i.e., if EULAs tell that you cannot resell that piece of software, so be it. The money you paid MS is only a right to use, not a right to sell (in most cases, but there are also scenarios where you can really "sell", i.e., transfer your right to somebody else).
"Only the paranoid survive..."
They have those scientists with pretty silver suits to handle snail mail with viral attachments...
Moreover, different people have different finger shapes - I have seen people with a larger index finger than the middle finger or of irregular shapes due to accidents. Will they be incapable of using these phones? Discriminating people due to their finger shapes is also very innovative!
Extending this technology to other input methods in Asia (Chinese and Japanese) will be awkward to say the least.