If you take a look at some of the many exploits used on the internet, many of them have been created by copying-and-pasting proof of concept code distributed by security researchers. Given that anyone capable of creating a complex exploit like this would have to be pretty skilled, that completely excludes the average script kiddie.
Although releasing proof of concept code may be necessary if Intel absolutely refuse to acknowledge or fix the issue, releasing it straight away for every single malware author to use with absolutely no patch for it would be really, really irresponsible, and probably cause a significant amount of damage.
This insanity will probably be enough to put multiple ISPs out of business, considering they'll probably have to install new infrastructure, actively kick their paying customers, and be unable to sell 'premium' services. The idiots who came up with this have no idea about the damage they're about to cause.
I'd be surprised if ISPs don't take the sort of action you described.
Every professional programmer I've met who uses command line tools over GUI tools does it because they are working in an environment that lacks quality GUI tools (or because you really think it makes you 'l33t' - but that's really about as toolish of an attitude as I can imagine).
For file management, a decent shell can often be substantially quicker than (for example) Explorer, especially for performing an operation with a set of files matching a filename pattern. If you wish to make a quick change to a file, it's much faster to just fire up Vi within a shell rather than go to the trouble of running a GUI-based editor. While IDEs are obviously superior for writing software with a large complex UI, when it comes to merely a command-line tool/daemon, most of those advantages are lost, and many people prefer the efficiency of a shell coupled with Emacs or Vi.
The effect on the PS3 sales will unfortunately be minimal. Not only do the vast, vast majority of people not know or understand what they have done wrong, but after a few pretty screenshots or videos of the PS3, there'll be no doubt that people will conveniently forgive Sony for this crap. Remember all the/.ers overlooking the MPAAs actions when LOTR came out?
For this to make any long-term difference whatsoever, an enormous boycott would be needed.
How the hell can AMD be making such better chips and companies like Dell still selling Intel powered crap?
Because most of the machines that Dell sells are to people who will be doing nothing more than running Windows and Office, so performance won't be a massive factor. Intel will also be selling both the CPU and chipset at an enormous discount.
The next-gen Intel chips for Apple should be pretty good if they're based on the Pentium M, which unlike the P4 seems to be able to compete reasonably well with its AMD counterparts. If it isn't, then in a few years Dell will be the only place selling Intel-based systems seeing as most places are losing their patience with Intel.
Either way, the inevitable angry, mis-informed arguments between Intel-using Apple fanboys and AMD fanboys on slashdot next year should be pretty amusing.
Receive continual updates, bug fixes, serious flaws get fixed for an annual price.
For updates which provide new features not advertised when the product was released, fair enough: a subscription is reasonable. However 'bug fixes' and 'serious flaws' are faults with something you have paid for and should be fixed for free for a sensible time after release, just like any other product.
Not only did they go $16.49 over budget, as a few people have already pointed out, they have missed out the OS, case, speakers, mouse, keyboard and monitor. They seem to have failed miserably.
Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux.
Outside of Slashdot, Solaris is still a serious OS and in many ways better than Linux. You also cannot simply cut and paste code from one kernel to another. If you want a server which is reasonably stable, you go for an x86 box running Linux. If you want one that absolutely cannot ever fail, and will be running for a long time you go with SPARC and Solaris. Although x86 may have a better power/performance ratio than SPARC, it really doesn't mean that it is always the better solution.
RISC OS's greatest weakness is its back-end. The back-end should really have been re-written a very long time ago to include pre-emptive multi-tasking and proper memory protection. Putting most of the OS in ROM made it incredibly easy to fix a broken machine within barely a few minutes, and considering it was sold as an educational machine, upgrading was usually done by a professional anyway.
Despite these setbacks, RISC OS's main advantage is its front-end. The drag-and-drop system and anti-aliased fonts were years ahead of anything else when they first came out, and all the applications were self-contained, making it possible to treat an application like a file and allowing for very easy application installation and uninstallation. The filemanager is also one of the best I have ever used due to its reponsiveness and simplicity.
If it could be open-sourced and have its back-end replaced with something a lot more modern, there should still be a large userbase for it considering that it has a very responsive, intuitive and simple user interface in sharp contrast to operating systems such as Windows.
Let them continue with this crap and they will eventually kill their own business model. Nobody needs music, but they need your money. If they weren't so incredibly greedy, piracy problems could be resolved with prices of $5/CD and $0.50/track.
Ok. As a guy that both works for banks and works for ISPs and deals with end users web sites and all that... I have to say I see a lot of willful ignorance on all sides.
Definitely agree with you there. The companies who can actually do something about internet crime seem to do the least about it. If you email a webhost, even a reputable one about a blatent phishing site that they are hosting, they will do absolutely fuck all for at least 24-48 hours while the site gets more victims. A site designed to look exactly like PayPal or whatever should be shut down immediately, considering that it can have no ligitimate purpose.
ISPs will happily let their customers continue to be connected to the internet even when they blatently have a virus attacking other hosts (in the form of excessive traffic out of port 139, 445 et all). And these same ISPs are the ones who supply the public with 2MBit DSL lines and no security software.
Only on an LCD would 50hz be considered acceptable.
I was referring to the approximate framerate of a game, considering that would be the deciding factor in the number of transmitted frames, not the refresh rate of the screen.
Furthermore, especially if you want to do it realtime, compression takes...computing power! The more you compress, the more computing-intensive it is to (de)compress. Plus, images (textures, video) are not compression friendly.
So there goes your thin-client, with a massive CPU for compression anyway (you could say 'use dedicated (de)compression hardware...but if you do that, why not replace that cost with a cpu?).
Yes, compressing the video output from a game would take a large amount of CPU power. However, the decompression takes a lot less processing power, and so it wouldn't need a particularly powerful CPU on the thin client. Textures and video are certainly compression-friendly, compare the size of a BMP to a PNG.
When we play games - we need (at a minimum) 76Hz video at 1600x1200 full colour resolution...plus a couple of 44kHz audio channels...sustained - no dropouts and minimal latency.
1600x1200 is a very high resolution even by today's standards. You will also find that many games look perfectly OK at a framerate of much lower than that. Try 1280x1024x50hz.
That's 76 x 1600x1200 x 24 bits/second of graphics...3.5Gbits/sec. Realtime compression tricks might cut that in half - but even a dedicated 1GHz link to eachuser is insufficient.
No it isn't. It's not even close. Realtime compression makes the required bandwidth a mere fraction of what would be needed if the data was uncompressed.
A T1 line to every user (1.544Mbits/sec) wouldn't come close. Right now, you'd need a high quality synchronous optical network into every home.
It wouldn't need to be synchronous. A thin client downloads more data than it uploads. Think about it.
I totally agree. While I didn't fully agree with the iTunes hack (didn't achieve anything that couldn't already be done, and broke quite a reasonable service), this is definitely a good thing, like DeCSS. Breaking a service which either enforces price-fixing or having to use a particular OS is ethical, and certainly good work.
And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy (I hate those bastards!), before you ask.
"If you're interested in contributing money to support the Mozilla Project, there are many ways to donate."
Which does NOT link to a donation page for the Mozilla Project. Maybe a mistake when copying and pasting from the Firefox site? This smells like a scam. Has anyone actually tested this thing, and made sure it isn't full of spyware or any other crap?
Nope, I was serious. I don't know why I got modded Funny. I think Google certainly has the talent and the opportunity to turn the industry on it's head with a totally from-the-ground-up OS. http://os.google.com/ (not active yet, but some day it will be, trust you me)
Maybe Google doesn't need an OS? Shifting a large number of applications to the web browser (by a plug in or whatever) would be a big enough kick in the balls to MS.
Some cool features GoS will have:
- chipset emulation built in the kernel (run windows/linux/solaris software "natively")
Chipset emulation alone wouldn't cut it. To run a foreign binary you need to either emulate the entire machine and run the OS inside it, or emulate the functionality of the kernel and various other bits and pieces.
- search capability integrated in the file system
- distributed processing support (yes, a beowulf cluster) -- have 3 GoS boxes on your home network, have two of them as slaves for offloading work
Yes, if they were to create an OS, you could be pretty certain that those features would be there.
However, I don't think they'd go to the trouble of a new OS. Unless it was heavily based on an Open Source OS, it's a hell of a lot of work, even for the engineers at Google. Making day-to-day tasks more platform-independent would probably do an awful lot more damage to MS.
Firstly, offshore outsourcing in computer science appears to be grinding to a halt, according to a few sources, mainly because overall it doesn't really save money. Slashdot won't report it because their parent company, VA Software actively supports outsourcing. OSTG has plenty of adverts on it (not here though obviously - two-faced bastards).
Secondly, no manager wants to get too carried away with outsourcing, because inevitably their job is next, especially seeing as they will have an enormous salary.
Finally, as even Slashdot will report, India is becoming too expensive(!!) for outsourcing. However, not many countries have as many English speakers as India, so it isn't as easy to achieve.
There's a good joelonsoftare article on why it makes sense to hire programmers based on skill, rather than salary.
I think the most simple answer is probably the right one.
Apple got pissed off that the PPC was getting very few performance increases compared to the x86, and probably had a poor price/performance ratio. They also would have liked to release a more powerful laptop.
They quietly had OS X running on x86 architecture for years, in case IBM fucked them over, and when they saw that Intel had a decent processor in the pipeline (pun not intentional), and know that AMD already has decent processors, they decided to make the switch.
The right to privacy. This is a tool created by the same people who make Windows, and shows that Microsoft may well start favouring certain spyware companies.
I think what's starting to scare MS is that OO.org is inevitably going to be more than sufficient for using in a normal office, and once set up, a Gnome/KDE desktop is perfectly usable.
All those office machines running Windows/MS Office could eventually switch to Linux and save quite a bit of money. MS got into the home because people used it at work, and when Linux stops being an ass to setup, people could end up using it at home because it's what they use at work. It's not out of the question that Linux could end up taking quite a large bite out of MS's desktop market share in the future.
With the blatent lying about the release dates of HL2 and DoD, the stuttering bug which went unfixed for months, and Steam being an annoying bastard for a single-player game, it's absolutely amazing that they manage to still sell so many copies. They are probably the most badly-behaved company in the games industry, with the possible exception of EA.
Seriously though, the noise from any system with a large number of hard drives is going to be mainly from the fans cooling them. Stacking up 8 drives in a computer without properly cooling them is asking for trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take a look at some of the many exploits used on the internet, many of them have been created by copying-and-pasting proof of concept code distributed by security researchers. Given that anyone capable of creating a complex exploit like this would have to be pretty skilled, that completely excludes the average script kiddie.
Although releasing proof of concept code may be necessary if Intel absolutely refuse to acknowledge or fix the issue, releasing it straight away for every single malware author to use with absolutely no patch for it would be really, really irresponsible, and probably cause a significant amount of damage.
This insanity will probably be enough to put multiple ISPs out of business, considering they'll probably have to install new infrastructure, actively kick their paying customers, and be unable to sell 'premium' services. The idiots who came up with this have no idea about the damage they're about to cause.
I'd be surprised if ISPs don't take the sort of action you described.
For file management, a decent shell can often be substantially quicker than (for example) Explorer, especially for performing an operation with a set of files matching a filename pattern. If you wish to make a quick change to a file, it's much faster to just fire up Vi within a shell rather than go to the trouble of running a GUI-based editor.
While IDEs are obviously superior for writing software with a large complex UI, when it comes to merely a command-line tool/daemon, most of those advantages are lost, and many people prefer the efficiency of a shell coupled with Emacs or Vi.
The effect on the PS3 sales will unfortunately be minimal. Not only do the vast, vast majority of people not know or understand what they have done wrong, but after a few pretty screenshots or videos of the PS3, there'll be no doubt that people will conveniently forgive Sony for this crap. Remember all the /.ers overlooking the MPAAs actions when LOTR came out?
For this to make any long-term difference whatsoever, an enormous boycott would be needed.
How the hell can AMD be making such better chips and companies like Dell still selling Intel powered crap?
Because most of the machines that Dell sells are to people who will be doing nothing more than running Windows and Office, so performance won't be a massive factor. Intel will also be selling both the CPU and chipset at an enormous discount.
The next-gen Intel chips for Apple should be pretty good if they're based on the Pentium M, which unlike the P4 seems to be able to compete reasonably well with its AMD counterparts. If it isn't, then in a few years Dell will be the only place selling Intel-based systems seeing as most places are losing their patience with Intel.
Either way, the inevitable angry, mis-informed arguments between Intel-using Apple fanboys and AMD fanboys on slashdot next year should be pretty amusing.
Absolutely, but to generalize their contribution to modern computing as nothing more than theft and good marketing is pure garbage.
Compare Microsoft's contributions to modern computing to those made by IBM, Sun, Apple, and SGI.
Receive continual updates, bug fixes, serious flaws get fixed for an annual price.
For updates which provide new features not advertised when the product was released, fair enough: a subscription is reasonable. However 'bug fixes' and 'serious flaws' are faults with something you have paid for and should be fixed for free for a sensible time after release, just like any other product.
Also, 'budget' memory in my experience seems to have a nasty habit of failing memtest86. There's a reason for it being cheap.
they went over budget by $16.49
Not only did they go $16.49 over budget, as a few people have already pointed out, they have missed out the OS, case, speakers, mouse, keyboard and monitor. They seem to have failed miserably.
Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux.
Outside of Slashdot, Solaris is still a serious OS and in many ways better than Linux. You also cannot simply cut and paste code from one kernel to another. If you want a server which is reasonably stable, you go for an x86 box running Linux. If you want one that absolutely cannot ever fail, and will be running for a long time you go with SPARC and Solaris. Although x86 may have a better power/performance ratio than SPARC, it really doesn't mean that it is always the better solution.
RISC OS's greatest weakness is its back-end. The back-end should really have been re-written a very long time ago to include pre-emptive multi-tasking and proper memory protection. Putting most of the OS in ROM made it incredibly easy to fix a broken machine within barely a few minutes, and considering it was sold as an educational machine, upgrading was usually done by a professional anyway.
Despite these setbacks, RISC OS's main advantage is its front-end. The drag-and-drop system and anti-aliased fonts were years ahead of anything else when they first came out, and all the applications were self-contained, making it possible to treat an application like a file and allowing for very easy application installation and uninstallation. The filemanager is also one of the best I have ever used due to its reponsiveness and simplicity.
If it could be open-sourced and have its back-end replaced with something a lot more modern, there should still be a large userbase for it considering that it has a very responsive, intuitive and simple user interface in sharp contrast to operating systems such as Windows.
Let them continue with this crap and they will eventually kill their own business model. Nobody needs music, but they need your money. If they weren't so incredibly greedy, piracy problems could be resolved with prices of $5/CD and $0.50/track.
Ok. As a guy that both works for banks and works for ISPs and deals with end users web sites and all that... I have to say I see a lot of willful ignorance on all sides.
Definitely agree with you there. The companies who can actually do something about internet crime seem to do the least about it. If you email a webhost, even a reputable one about a blatent phishing site that they are hosting, they will do absolutely fuck all for at least 24-48 hours while the site gets more victims. A site designed to look exactly like PayPal or whatever should be shut down immediately, considering that it can have no ligitimate purpose.
ISPs will happily let their customers continue to be connected to the internet even when they blatently have a virus attacking other hosts (in the form of excessive traffic out of port 139, 445 et all). And these same ISPs are the ones who supply the public with 2MBit DSL lines and no security software.
Only on an LCD would 50hz be considered acceptable.
I was referring to the approximate framerate of a game, considering that would be the deciding factor in the number of transmitted frames, not the refresh rate of the screen.
Furthermore, especially if you want to do it realtime, compression takes...computing power! The more you compress, the more computing-intensive it is to (de)compress. Plus, images (textures, video) are not compression friendly.
So there goes your thin-client, with a massive CPU for compression anyway (you could say 'use dedicated (de)compression hardware...but if you do that, why not replace that cost with a cpu?).
Yes, compressing the video output from a game would take a large amount of CPU power. However, the decompression takes a lot less processing power, and so it wouldn't need a particularly powerful CPU on the thin client. Textures and video are certainly compression-friendly, compare the size of a BMP to a PNG.
When we play games - we need (at a minimum) 76Hz video at 1600x1200 full colour resolution...plus a couple of 44kHz audio channels...sustained - no dropouts and minimal latency.
1600x1200 is a very high resolution even by today's standards. You will also find that many games look perfectly OK at a framerate of much lower than that. Try 1280x1024x50hz.
That's 76 x 1600x1200 x 24 bits/second of graphics...3.5Gbits/sec. Realtime compression tricks might cut that in half - but even a dedicated 1GHz link to eachuser is insufficient.
No it isn't. It's not even close. Realtime compression makes the required bandwidth a mere fraction of what would be needed if the data was uncompressed.
A T1 line to every user (1.544Mbits/sec) wouldn't come close. Right now, you'd need a high quality synchronous optical network into every home.
It wouldn't need to be synchronous. A thin client downloads more data than it uploads. Think about it.
I totally agree. While I didn't fully agree with the iTunes hack (didn't achieve anything that couldn't already be done, and broke quite a reasonable service), this is definitely a good thing, like DeCSS. Breaking a service which either enforces price-fixing or having to use a particular OS is ethical, and certainly good work.
And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy (I hate those bastards!), before you ask.
On http://www.getfoxie.com.nyud.net:8090/contact/ (actual site is /.ed):
"If you're interested in contributing money to support the Mozilla Project, there are many ways to donate."
Which does NOT link to a donation page for the Mozilla Project. Maybe a mistake when copying and pasting from the Firefox site? This smells like a scam. Has anyone actually tested this thing, and made sure it isn't full of spyware or any other crap?
Nope, I was serious. I don't know why I got modded Funny. I think Google certainly has the talent and the opportunity to turn the industry on it's head with a totally from-the-ground-up OS.
http://os.google.com/ (not active yet, but some day it will be, trust you me)
Maybe Google doesn't need an OS? Shifting a large number of applications to the web browser (by a plug in or whatever) would be a big enough kick in the balls to MS.
Some cool features GoS will have:
- chipset emulation built in the kernel (run windows/linux/solaris software "natively")
Chipset emulation alone wouldn't cut it. To run a foreign binary you need to either emulate the entire machine and run the OS inside it, or emulate the functionality of the kernel and various other bits and pieces.
- search capability integrated in the file system
- distributed processing support (yes, a beowulf cluster) -- have 3 GoS boxes on your home network, have two of them as slaves for offloading work
Yes, if they were to create an OS, you could be pretty certain that those features would be there.
However, I don't think they'd go to the trouble of a new OS. Unless it was heavily based on an Open Source OS, it's a hell of a lot of work, even for the engineers at Google. Making day-to-day tasks more platform-independent would probably do an awful lot more damage to MS.
Don't worry about it.
Firstly, offshore outsourcing in computer science appears to be grinding to a halt, according to a few sources, mainly because overall it doesn't really save money. Slashdot won't report it because their parent company, VA Software actively supports outsourcing. OSTG has plenty of adverts on it (not here though obviously - two-faced bastards).
Secondly, no manager wants to get too carried away with outsourcing, because inevitably their job is next, especially seeing as they will have an enormous salary.
Finally, as even Slashdot will report, India is becoming too expensive(!!) for outsourcing. However, not many countries have as many English speakers as India, so it isn't as easy to achieve.
There's a good joelonsoftare article on why it makes sense to hire programmers based on skill, rather than salary.
First post for me, you worthless shitheads.
I think the most simple answer is probably the right one.
Apple got pissed off that the PPC was getting very few performance increases compared to the x86, and probably had a poor price/performance ratio. They also would have liked to release a more powerful laptop.
They quietly had OS X running on x86 architecture for years, in case IBM fucked them over, and when they saw that Intel had a decent processor in the pipeline (pun not intentional), and know that AMD already has decent processors, they decided to make the switch.
What right is being infringed or threatened?
The right to privacy. This is a tool created by the same people who make Windows, and shows that Microsoft may well start favouring certain spyware companies.
I think what's starting to scare MS is that OO.org is inevitably going to be more than sufficient for using in a normal office, and once set up, a Gnome/KDE desktop is perfectly usable.
All those office machines running Windows/MS Office could eventually switch to Linux and save quite a bit of money. MS got into the home because people used it at work, and when Linux stops being an ass to setup, people could end up using it at home because it's what they use at work. It's not out of the question that Linux could end up taking quite a large bite out of MS's desktop market share in the future.
With the blatent lying about the release dates of HL2 and DoD, the stuttering bug which went unfixed for months, and Steam being an annoying bastard for a single-player game, it's absolutely amazing that they manage to still sell so many copies. They are probably the most badly-behaved company in the games industry, with the possible exception of EA.
How did he assemble that with such hairy palms?
Seriously though, the noise from any system with a large number of hard drives is going to be mainly from the fans cooling them. Stacking up 8 drives in a computer without properly cooling them is asking for trouble.