Given that a single Radeon X850 XT as used in the article retails at around $450, I'd say so. $900 would go quite a long way for the rest of the computer.
Re:How Linux Killed An Industry
on
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It will detail the besieging of Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Unix and the ultimate demise of their parent companies.
In many cases, Linux isn't a suitable replacement to Solaris, and Solaris runs incredibly well on SPARC. Sun also produce reasonably priced Opteron boxes that run either Linux or Solaris.
I totally agree with you there. Making sure that someone understands object-oriented programming before releasing them on a project written in an object-oriented language is absolutely vital. A simple error in an equation can easily be corrected. An application which has been badly designed can be a nightmare.
I dislike Microsoft's software and business practices as much as anyone, but if for some bizarre reason they offered me a job, I'd take it if the salary was good enough, even though I'd rather not work there. Everyone has a price. If they offered you $200,000/year, would you turn it down?
If someone won't follow your advice, whoever they are, then you can't (and shouldn't) help them.
The web browser is only half the problem. The fact that people will happily run any.exe they get their hands on is the other half. While I think that MS has to take most of the blame for the current situation of Windows's security, teaching users a bit of common sense can go a long way.
You're absolutely spot on about normal users not caring. They'll happily let their system turn into a spyware-infested zombie, and only complain when it actually completely fucks up. They don't care and don't understand the damage a broadband connection can do to others when compromised.
It's pretty much impossible. If one application or device can decode encrypted data into video/audio, then so can any other application or device. It's merely a matter of reverse-enginnering the encryption. Even if that fails, there's always streaming the audio/video straight to another computer. It only needs to happen once, and it's on P2P.
The only way to stop it is by very seriously limiting what computers can do. Even then, there's nothing stopping you plugging the output from the sound card into another device.
Re:Looks like they've got their focus...
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
How ? They don't write every application. They can't _make_ users not do stupid things.
No, they can't stop every single user or application doing something stupid, but they can certainly improve on the current situation.
You can do that now - just don't run IE as an Administrator.
Except that by default XP is installed with a single Administrator account. I think it would be worth breaking a handful of badly written applications in order to improve security and stop subjecting the rest of the internet to zombie machines.
There are a handful of viruses that actually exploit OS vulnerabilities and bugs (most - if not all - of which have been fixed) everything else comes back to either the user (deliberately running malicious code, running with higher than necessary privileges) and applications (requiring higher than necessary privileges, or just plain buggy).
Again, it's far, far too easy for the user to accidentally run malicious code. With a default XP install, it's a single wrong click. Most viruses and spyware also seem to propagate through IE, and not third-party applications. And by including a web brower, a media player, and a video editor into the OS (all arguably used to increase their monopoly), but not a virus/spyware scanner (pretty vital for the past 10 years), they have certainly shown that they don't give a damn about security in general.
Re:Looks like they've got their focus...
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
Given the vast bulk of security problems lie with applications and users
That is extremely debatable. While inexperienced users can be tricked quite easily, you'd think that the biggest corporation on the planet would at least be able to limit the problem. The firewall in SP2 was a start, but how about making something that stops the OS being taken over after one wrong click on a message box in IE?
There are so many people with spyware/virus problems, including reasonably experienced users, that at some point Microsoft has to start taking the blame.
Are you trying to prove his point or something? Out of interest, which software have you written ("our software")?
Many open source libraries are licenced under the LGPL specifically because the authors obviously want people to have the freedom to use them for closed-source software. However, some are licensed differently, and his point was that it can be a PITA to make sure that the licence isn't being violated.
Most developers genuinely don't want to violate the GPL, and an abrasive, angry attitude when it is done purely by accident doesn't do the open source community any favours at all.
Why are you and all the people replying to you taking any interest in the number of clicks it takes to turn on the firewall?
The number of clicks is irrelevant. What is most important is how easy/intuitive it is to find it and configure it, and if it is possible to create/use a shortcut of any kind if you use it regularly.
Although it would probably be cheaper and more amusing to sue the fuck out of them and buy the corpse of the company, Gator/Claria seem to operate just about within the boundaries of the law, which would make it quite a difficult and lengthly process.
Firstly his speech admitting MS had cocked up, and now the purchase of a despised spyware company for $500-fucking-million, it's really starting to look like Ballmer has totally lost the plot. If I remember correctly, Hotmail was bought for $350 million. What the hell could Gat^H^H^HClaria have that is worth that much?
And this really makes MS's attempt to improve on security appear comical.
I'll burn some karma too. In this article he hasn't posted a link to his plaguerised 'overview'. Is this a poor attempt to make it look like that no money changes hands between him and slashdot?
Why buy sun hardware these days when better unix-based OSs and better price-performance are available everywhere else?
Sun x86 stuff has a pretty good price/performance ratio, and Solaris is a decent OS, especially compared to Linux with the flaky 2.6.x kernel (why the fuck isn't there a 2.7.x for unstable stuff?), poor backwards-compatibility and compatiblity between distros. What are you comparing it to exactly?
2) The Xbox 360 is using 2.4GHhz wireless controllers last I heard. Not a bad concept, but what happens when the battery dies mid-game? What about the cost of batters that add up over time? What happens if I have some other 2.4GHz device such as a phone or wireless router in the near location? I'm not the most knowledgable about wireless communications, but could this cause some interference?
I have a Logitech keyboard and mouse, and I'm pretty certain it uses the same frequency. I've never had any of the problems you describe, so I'd assume it should be OK for the XBox 360. Microsoft make wireless PC peripherals, so they should know what they are doing with this. Batteries shouldn't be a problem if it comes with a charger. You would be looking at a good few years of life with a NiMH battery.
I think that making the leap from "Jobs didn't go cell and instead switched to Intel" to "Cell must not be that good." is an incredible, and incorrect, leap of logic. There is a vast array of other factors involved in that choice.
Yes, there's certainly a few more factors than merely performance, but if the Cell was to perform like it was alleged to - as a revolutionary CPU that would eclipse all other CPUs, it would be a lot more likely that Apple would at least have held off and produced a Mac which ran Cell CPUs, and maybe switched at a later date. They didn't even entertain the idea of a Cell-powered Mac.
Well, yes. There were benchmarks being put around suggesting that the Cell would be faster than 4 Opterons or something crazy like that. People were suggesting that there would be 4 x 4GHz Cell CPUs in the PS3. Absolutely crazy stuff.
I think when Apple ditched PPC architecture, that gave it away that the Cell wouldn't be as good as everyone thought it would be. I'd imagine Jobs would have taken at least a passing glance at it before making the switch,
Who's suprised? It's quite obvious that the main advantage for having 3 x 3GHz in the XBox 360 was so that people would think 'OMG it runs at 9GHz!!'. Multi-threading isn't that much of an advantage in games as we've seen from the Athlon X2 and Pentium D benchmarks, and will be even less so when running on a console which is doing fuck-all else. While some games could be written specifically for the Xenon CPU, many would be ported from other platforms, and not be designed to be optimized for multi-core.
Come on, it was MS and Sony in a bullshit competition. It was obvious they were going to be misleading.
why are people so interested in searching their own desktops?
Inexperienced users are quite often incapable, or simply can't be bothered to make a directory structure to store their documents in. Many dump them straight onto the desktop or 'My Documents', and this becomes a problem when people have >250GB hard drives. Desktop searching software allows users to dump files where ever they want, and let the OS organise it all for them.
But in this case, the Athlon 64 is significantly faster.
While AMD clearly make better price/perfomance processors in the high-end, it seems to even out with processors that are a few years old. Which makes quite a bit of sense considering that Intel's main market in the desktop seems to be moderately powered systems used for running MS Office.
A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.
A 400GB drive isn't redundant, unlike the setup in the article, so if it fails, you've lost 400GB of data. The drives are SCSI, which means they will be incredibly reliable, and a lot more so than a consumer-grade SATA drive. I would accessing large files on that thing would be incredibly fast.
Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.
A 486 router/firewall can actually be cheaper than a Linksys/D-Link router, seeing as it isn't hard to pick them up for free. You also have an enormous amount of flexibility (for example traffic shaping) not found in a cheap router.
If you set up both entire drives as a software raid array under Linux, with exactly the same parameters as in the motherboard raid, and use the Linux mdpart patch (2.6.6 or later, do NOT use 2.6.5 or below), you can get Linux and Windows to share the same array.
Getting it to boot is a bit of a bitch though. You need to use a ramdisk and experiment with LILO an awful lot. LILO also won't work with anything other RAID1 for obvious reasons
So I guess you must really hate Mac OS X huh? Let's see:
web browser -> Safari movie playback -> Quicktime email -> mail
No, because Apple doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems. That is the main difference, and I can't believe people still make that comparison.
And where exactly do you draw the line? Should they take "defrag" out of Windows because it competes with Disk Keeper? How about Scandisk? It competes with Norton Utilities and other products. What about the file system compression and encrpyption included in Windows? Remote Desktop competes Timbuktu Remote and many other applications. Windows Movie Maker sure should be ripped out, even though it only exists so that MS could show feature parity with OS X. Windows XP has built is support for zip files, further destroiyng PK Zip's market share. Now we've got MS Anti-Spyware coming out - I guess they will ruin Adaware and other pay spyware removal programs. It even detects viruses so it's sure to erode Symantec and Mcaffee's business. Backup should be ripped out along with Paint and Wordpad. Calculator is probably pretty evil too.
Defrag and Scandisk are tools that are NEEDED in Windows in order to keep it running. File system compression, encryption and zip support are an interesting point, but they could be considered insignificant and simple enough not to matter. Windows Movie Maker and Remote Desktop are also an interesting point, however they are not shoved in your face to matter too much. Backup, Paint, WordPad and Calculator are incredibly simple applications and couldn't possibly be sold commercially.
And all of the above (with the possible exception of Movie Maker) haven't been used to gain MS leverage in other markets.
I certainly don't want to pay for Windows and then be expected to pay for 45 different other programs just to get basic functionality.
Nobody is suggesting that, mainly because the alternatives are also free, and MS would let you download the separate applications for free. It would just mean the consumers and suppliers would have to actually make a choice.
However you seem to be missing the point. This isn't about the consumer, it's about what this does to competitors. The main problem is that when Microsoft not only bundles, but forcably shoves their software down your throat, it gives them a huge advantage over competitors, and they are using their monopoly to gain that advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that a single Radeon X850 XT as used in the article retails at around $450, I'd say so. $900 would go quite a long way for the rest of the computer.
It will detail the besieging of Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Unix and the ultimate demise of their parent companies.
You know which company created AIX, right?
In many cases, Linux isn't a suitable replacement to Solaris, and Solaris runs incredibly well on SPARC. Sun also produce reasonably priced Opteron boxes that run either Linux or Solaris.
I totally agree with you there. Making sure that someone understands object-oriented programming before releasing them on a project written in an object-oriented language is absolutely vital. A simple error in an equation can easily be corrected. An application which has been badly designed can be a nightmare.
I dislike Microsoft's software and business practices as much as anyone, but if for some bizarre reason they offered me a job, I'd take it if the salary was good enough, even though I'd rather not work there. Everyone has a price. If they offered you $200,000/year, would you turn it down?
If someone won't follow your advice, whoever they are, then you can't (and shouldn't) help them.
.exe they get their hands on is the other half. While I think that MS has to take most of the blame for the current situation of Windows's security, teaching users a bit of common sense can go a long way.
The web browser is only half the problem. The fact that people will happily run any
You're absolutely spot on about normal users not caring. They'll happily let their system turn into a spyware-infested zombie, and only complain when it actually completely fucks up. They don't care and don't understand the damage a broadband connection can do to others when compromised.
It's pretty much impossible. If one application or device can decode encrypted data into video/audio, then so can any other application or device. It's merely a matter of reverse-enginnering the encryption. Even if that fails, there's always streaming the audio/video straight to another computer. It only needs to happen once, and it's on P2P.
The only way to stop it is by very seriously limiting what computers can do. Even then, there's nothing stopping you plugging the output from the sound card into another device.
How ? They don't write every application. They can't _make_ users not do stupid things.
No, they can't stop every single user or application doing something stupid, but they can certainly improve on the current situation.
You can do that now - just don't run IE as an Administrator.
Except that by default XP is installed with a single Administrator account. I think it would be worth breaking a handful of badly written applications in order to improve security and stop subjecting the rest of the internet to zombie machines.
There are a handful of viruses that actually exploit OS vulnerabilities and bugs (most - if not all - of which have been fixed) everything else comes back to either the user (deliberately running malicious code, running with higher than necessary privileges) and applications (requiring higher than necessary privileges, or just plain buggy).
Again, it's far, far too easy for the user to accidentally run malicious code. With a default XP install, it's a single wrong click. Most viruses and spyware also seem to propagate through IE, and not third-party applications. And by including a web brower, a media player, and a video editor into the OS (all arguably used to increase their monopoly), but not a virus/spyware scanner (pretty vital for the past 10 years), they have certainly shown that they don't give a damn about security in general.
Given the vast bulk of security problems lie with applications and users
That is extremely debatable. While inexperienced users can be tricked quite easily, you'd think that the biggest corporation on the planet would at least be able to limit the problem. The firewall in SP2 was a start, but how about making something that stops the OS being taken over after one wrong click on a message box in IE?
There are so many people with spyware/virus problems, including reasonably experienced users, that at some point Microsoft has to start taking the blame.
Are you trying to prove his point or something? Out of interest, which software have you written ("our software")?
Many open source libraries are licenced under the LGPL specifically because the authors obviously want people to have the freedom to use them for closed-source software. However, some are licensed differently, and his point was that it can be a PITA to make sure that the licence isn't being violated.
Most developers genuinely don't want to violate the GPL, and an abrasive, angry attitude when it is done purely by accident doesn't do the open source community any favours at all.
Why are you and all the people replying to you taking any interest in the number of clicks it takes to turn on the firewall?
The number of clicks is irrelevant. What is most important is how easy/intuitive it is to find it and configure it, and if it is possible to create/use a shortcut of any kind if you use it regularly.
Although it would probably be cheaper and more amusing to sue the fuck out of them and buy the corpse of the company, Gator/Claria seem to operate just about within the boundaries of the law, which would make it quite a difficult and lengthly process.
Firstly his speech admitting MS had cocked up, and now the purchase of a despised spyware company for $500-fucking-million, it's really starting to look like Ballmer has totally lost the plot. If I remember correctly, Hotmail was bought for $350 million. What the hell could Gat^H^H^HClaria have that is worth that much?
And this really makes MS's attempt to improve on security appear comical.
What better way to shut down a company that produces so much spyware and other unwanted adds than to buy them.
Sends out the wrong sort of message when they buy them for $500 million though.
I'll burn some karma too. In this article he hasn't posted a link to his plaguerised 'overview'. Is this a poor attempt to make it look like that no money changes hands between him and slashdot?
Why buy sun hardware these days when better unix-based OSs and better price-performance are available everywhere else?
Sun x86 stuff has a pretty good price/performance ratio, and Solaris is a decent OS, especially compared to Linux with the flaky 2.6.x kernel (why the fuck isn't there a 2.7.x for unstable stuff?), poor backwards-compatibility and compatiblity between distros. What are you comparing it to exactly?
2) The Xbox 360 is using 2.4GHhz wireless controllers last I heard. Not a bad concept, but what happens when the battery dies mid-game? What about the cost of batters that add up over time? What happens if I have some other 2.4GHz device such as a phone or wireless router in the near location? I'm not the most knowledgable about wireless communications, but could this cause some interference?
I have a Logitech keyboard and mouse, and I'm pretty certain it uses the same frequency. I've never had any of the problems you describe, so I'd assume it should be OK for the XBox 360. Microsoft make wireless PC peripherals, so they should know what they are doing with this. Batteries shouldn't be a problem if it comes with a charger. You would be looking at a good few years of life with a NiMH battery.
I think that making the leap from "Jobs didn't go cell and instead switched to Intel" to "Cell must not be that good." is an incredible, and incorrect, leap of logic. There is a vast array of other factors involved in that choice.
Yes, there's certainly a few more factors than merely performance, but if the Cell was to perform like it was alleged to - as a revolutionary CPU that would eclipse all other CPUs, it would be a lot more likely that Apple would at least have held off and produced a Mac which ran Cell CPUs, and maybe switched at a later date. They didn't even entertain the idea of a Cell-powered Mac.
Well, yes. There were benchmarks being put around suggesting that the Cell would be faster than 4 Opterons or something crazy like that. People were suggesting that there would be 4 x 4GHz Cell CPUs in the PS3. Absolutely crazy stuff.
I think when Apple ditched PPC architecture, that gave it away that the Cell wouldn't be as good as everyone thought it would be. I'd imagine Jobs would have taken at least a passing glance at it before making the switch,
Who's suprised? It's quite obvious that the main advantage for having 3 x 3GHz in the XBox 360 was so that people would think 'OMG it runs at 9GHz!!'. Multi-threading isn't that much of an advantage in games as we've seen from the Athlon X2 and Pentium D benchmarks, and will be even less so when running on a console which is doing fuck-all else. While some games could be written specifically for the Xenon CPU, many would be ported from other platforms, and not be designed to be optimized for multi-core.
Come on, it was MS and Sony in a bullshit competition. It was obvious they were going to be misleading.
why are people so interested in searching their own desktops?
Inexperienced users are quite often incapable, or simply can't be bothered to make a directory structure to store their documents in. Many dump them straight onto the desktop or 'My Documents', and this becomes a problem when people have >250GB hard drives. Desktop searching software allows users to dump files where ever they want, and let the OS organise it all for them.
I'd have to disagree with those comparisons:
$170 - Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800MHz
$94 - Athlon XP 3000
In this case, the P4 is significantly faster.
$320 - Pentium 4 650 3.4GHz LGA775
$162 - Athlon 64 3400
But in this case, the Athlon 64 is significantly faster.
While AMD clearly make better price/perfomance processors in the high-end, it seems to even out with processors that are a few years old. Which makes quite a bit of sense considering that Intel's main market in the desktop seems to be moderately powered systems used for running MS Office.
A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.
A 400GB drive isn't redundant, unlike the setup in the article, so if it fails, you've lost 400GB of data. The drives are SCSI, which means they will be incredibly reliable, and a lot more so than a consumer-grade SATA drive. I would accessing large files on that thing would be incredibly fast.
Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.
A 486 router/firewall can actually be cheaper than a Linksys/D-Link router, seeing as it isn't hard to pick them up for free. You also have an enormous amount of flexibility (for example traffic shaping) not found in a cheap router.
If you set up both entire drives as a software raid array under Linux, with exactly the same parameters as in the motherboard raid, and use the Linux mdpart patch (2.6.6 or later, do NOT use 2.6.5 or below), you can get Linux and Windows to share the same array.
Getting it to boot is a bit of a bitch though. You need to use a ramdisk and experiment with LILO an awful lot. LILO also won't work with anything other RAID1 for obvious reasons
So I guess you must really hate Mac OS X huh?
Let's see:
web browser -> Safari
movie playback -> Quicktime
email -> mail
No, because Apple doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems. That is the main difference, and I can't believe people still make that comparison.
And where exactly do you draw the line? Should they take "defrag" out of Windows because it competes with Disk Keeper?
How about Scandisk? It competes with Norton Utilities and other products.
What about the file system compression and encrpyption included in Windows?
Remote Desktop competes Timbuktu Remote and many other applications.
Windows Movie Maker sure should be ripped out, even though it only exists so that MS could show feature parity with OS X.
Windows XP has built is support for zip files, further destroiyng PK Zip's market share.
Now we've got MS Anti-Spyware coming out - I guess they will ruin Adaware and other pay spyware removal programs. It even detects viruses so it's sure to erode Symantec and Mcaffee's business.
Backup should be ripped out along with Paint and Wordpad.
Calculator is probably pretty evil too.
Defrag and Scandisk are tools that are NEEDED in Windows in order to keep it running. File system compression, encryption and zip support are an interesting point, but they could be considered insignificant and simple enough not to matter. Windows Movie Maker and Remote Desktop are also an interesting point, however they are not shoved in your face to matter too much. Backup, Paint, WordPad and Calculator are incredibly simple applications and couldn't possibly be sold commercially.
And all of the above (with the possible exception of Movie Maker) haven't been used to gain MS leverage in other markets.
I certainly don't want to pay for Windows and then be expected to pay for 45 different other programs just to get basic functionality.
Nobody is suggesting that, mainly because the alternatives are also free, and MS would let you download the separate applications for free. It would just mean the consumers and suppliers would have to actually make a choice.
However you seem to be missing the point. This isn't about the consumer, it's about what this does to competitors. The main problem is that when Microsoft not only bundles, but forcably shoves their software down your throat, it gives them a huge advantage over competitors, and they are using their monopoly to gain that advantage.