"Changes in a PC's Basic Input/Output System" is not necessarily the same as a different drive in the PC. Possible scenario: You do a BIOS upgrade of your mainboard to add support for a new processor version, because you want to upgrade. Vista detects the change and blocks access to your data;-)
Most companies use their existing system until they see a compelling need to upgrade. Because a migration always costs money. So it is not unusual at all if a company is a few years behind. I remember working on a Windows 3.x application in 1998/1999, because the customer's IT was still running on that version.
He did break the school policy and that's allowed to go beyond the Constitution.
If the school is a public school, it is considered an entity of the state and has to observe the constitution. There have been reports of lawsuits on/. before where the school lost (sorry, I do not remember the links;-) Private schools have more leeway since they are not part of the state.
BONG HITS 4 JESUS isn't something that can be protected under the constitution because it isn't a political or ideolical belief. However, it should make this kid #1 on the drug screening list and possibly consistituted sufficient cause for a search of the home for contraband. But those are both likely outcomes of any free speech one might choose to make.
BONG HITS 4 JESUS is pretty ambiguous. It might be interpreted as political speech that drugs should be legalized. Or it could be interpreted as promoting illegal drug use (the interpretation of the school officials). Or maybe just as a stupid joke. In the absence of a clear meaning, I think the state should be careful not to infringe on civil rights by choosing the interpretation that is most damaging to the speaker
If you look elsewhere, you will find that Valve is doing the Good Idea (except for the have-to-hope-Steam-won't-shut-down factor, which I still dislike). So it can be done. If EA is too stupid, tough luck;-)
Not to mention this thing doesn't seem to support 8-core operation yet anyway:( Correct. It appears to be a higher clocked but otherwise severely limited version of the Opteron 22XX series, relabeled and fitted with a controller for non-registered, non-ECC RAM. The QuadFX may be interesting for gamers, but I doubt anyone else would want it.
It is rather obvious that the QuadFX is a niche release for gamers, on several grounds.
1) Only one memory module per channel supported, and no ECC. Not what you want for high reliability or in memory-intensive tasks. This disqualifies the QuadFX as server processor.
2) Much cheaper than the (closest in performance) Opteron 2220 SE but castrated as described above. I guess AMD did that intentionally to avoid cannibalizing the server market.
So I'd consider the Intel, with a high quality board, for "affordable HPC". Not the QuadFX. Disregarding bigger machines for a moment. If you have the money, an 8-way Opteron looks pretty nice...
lied to the U.N. in order to justify the invasion (fake WMD proof)
I should have stopped after reading this and tossed your remarks in the 'brainwashed' basket. To lie, one has to have the intent to deceive. While I know no one will ever convince you of this clear fact, but the Bush administration did not have this intent. Their intelligence was wrong, and they believed it.
How do you know that? Of course proving intent either way is difficult, but their shifting arguments suggest to me that they were just fishing for reasons.
First, the Bush administration claimed that Saddam was supporting Al Quaida.
When that claim was rejected as unrealistic by world opinion, the justification shifted to "Saddam has WMDs". In support of this position, Colin Powell held a presentation in the UN Security Council with rather questionable evidence. Also, UN inspections failed to find WMDs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UN_Security_Counc il_and_the_Iraq_war for details.
After that, I remember that the Bush administration used to cite humanitarian reasons for the invasion (liberate the people of Iraq). While those had some merit, the fact that they came up last in the discussion made them suspect: Why did Bush not claim from the start that it was a liberation mission? And why are other states with worse regimes left alone? North Korea comes to mind.
To me, this looks like the behaviour of someone who was determined to invade from the start and just looked for a public justification.
The problem is that punishing the media for publishing "leaked" information makes it too easy for the government to suppress reports about things they did wrong. Just put a "classified" sticker on the topic and hey, we can prosecute anyone who calls us on it. There are very good reasons to guarantee freedom of speech, one of them is protecting against government's abuse of power to silence critics.
So if publishing "leaked" information is prosecuted at all, there should be a reservation that makes it punishable only if the court finds that the information is significantly useful for an enemy power.
More to the point, most of the world _wants_ America to fail so they can rub your nose in it; they'd laugh at any suggestion that they should send their soldiers in to die in order clear up your mess.
America, represented by the Bush government, has invaded Iraq against the will of most of the world and lied to the U.N. in order to justify the invasion (fake WMD proof). That is not a good basis to get the rest of the world to help out if things go wrong.
Note that this was different after 9/11, when the USA went after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for supporting the terrorists. At that time, there was considerable support for the USA. But with the Iraq war, the USA have pissed it all away.
The official document does indeed read like the Russians caved in on all fronts. To an extent where I wonder if it is telling the whole truth. Russia is still a considerable power and I don't think they need to suck up everything the US is telling them. Maybe the US government is just spreading propaganda here??
I've shot a 1965, romanian built AK-47 modified - the one with plastic on it - some 5 years ago. The gun was 35 years old, fired low and right, but had good groupings at 100m. Seems it wasn't fired much Interesting, because the "low and right" could be compensated with adjustable sights. Good groupings are a much more meaningful indicator of quality. So the Ak-47 seems not to be so bad after all. According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ak-47, the chamber and barrel are chromium lined which should ensure low wear too.
Since the Nuremberg Trials after WW2, it has become increasingly common to try at least a few leaders of the losing party as war criminals. The lower ranks within the ruling class will still get away, but those at the very top do have to fear for their lives if they lose.
Latest example: Saddam Hussein who will probably be hanged.
Win95 was a PITA, I fought with it for a weekend before I found out how to keep Plug&Pray from running amok. The solution was to let the hardware detection only handle essential stuff like keyboard, mouse and harddisk controller, then manually install drivers for the rest of the hardware.
Win98 was somewhat better (after I used 98lite, http://www.litepc.com/ on it), but still easily crashed by bad applications.
Windows 2000 was a massive improvement, finally a reliable system. I used it first in 2003, with a new PC that had no trouble with the increased hardware requirements.
I agree about Win XP and activation, it was the first Microsoft OS I did not even want to pirate (yes I could have a copy from a friend if I wanted). Vista seems even worse. Still running on Windows 2000 and occasionally trying a new Linux distribution. Linux is getting better at a nice pace, and soon it might reach a point where I use it by default and run Windows only for games;-)
Arguably every OS should come with an RDBMS and applications should make more use of it instead of depending on a broad assortment of different mini-databases like sqlite and such. There's nothing wrong with them on their own but with ten programs that each use them, I've effectively got ten copies of sqlite (tiny - not a big deal) which each may be of a different version (which is a big deal since some or all of them may have holes) instead of just having one database that gets updated, along with its client libraries, every time a hole is found.
The One Big Version has its own problems, especially versioning. Sometimes, an upgrade will break compatibility and suddenly some of your applications are fuxxored. I've seen it happen with the RichEdit DLL in Windows. Somewhat offtopic, but it still illustrates the point.
The assortment of different mini-databases is less susceptible to this, especially when they get updated through new versions of the applications. That guarantees that app version and database version match.
There was one quite interesting post on Moishe Lettvin's blog (emphasis mine):
disclaimer - I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period (a member of the class of 17 uninformed decision makers) although not on this feature, er, menu.
The people who designed the source control system for Windows were *not* idiots. They were trying to solve the following problem: - thousands of developers, - promiscuous dependency taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences --> with a single codebase, if each developer broke the build once every two years there would never be a Longhorn build (or some such statistic - I forget the actual number)
There are three obvious solutions to this problem: 1. federate out the source tree, and pay the forward and reverse integration taxes (primarily delay in finding build breaks), or... 2. remove a large number of the unneccesary dependencies between the various parts of Windows, especially the circular dependencies. 3. Both 1&2 #1 was the winning solution in large part because it could be executed by a small team over a defined period of time. #2 would have required herding all the Windows developers (and PMs, managers, UI designers...), and is potentially an unbounded problem.
(There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows, which certainly counts as a Microsoft trade secret so I am not at liberty to discuss it)
Note: the open source community does not have this problem (at least not to the same degree) as they tend not to take dependencies on each other to the same degree, specifically: - rarely take dependencies on unshipped code - rarely make circular dependencies - mostly take depemdencies on mature stable components.
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Now I'm not a Microsoft employee, but even as an outsider I've seen some hints that it might be the "promiscuous dependency taking" that has delayed Vista.
1) Integration of Internet Explorer. Microsoft claims that IE and Windows are inextricably linked together, and at least for Windows 2000 and newer this seems to be true. For instance, if you type a URL into the address bar of the Windows Explorer, it will show you web pages. IMHO a stupid design, the web browser should be an application, not a fixed part of the GUI.
2) The RPC service being responsible for things a "remote procedure call service" has no business handling. In August 2003, a worm called MSBlast spread by exploiting a buffer overflow in the DCOM RPC service (see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBlast). At that time me, trying to be clever, thought: "I don't want anyone remotely executing stuff on my PC anyway. I'll just switch the service off and be fine". Lo and behold: After turning off the RPC service, various local functions were dead as well. Including the Services menu in the control panel. I was lucky that I could reactivate the RPC service by manually editing the registry, else I would have spent a day reinstalling.
So it seems quite believable that Microsoft is choking itself by lack of discipline in designing Windows;-)
This is an example of R&D that is mostly D, a patient search through design space rather than a flash of inspiration. It's worth encouraging via the patent system. Flashes of inspiration are so gloriously fun that people will do them anyway.
I see a problem with that: Patents are designed to protect concepts, not implementations of a known concept. But a patient search through design space gives you just that, a particular implementation of known concepts. Granting a monopoly (patent) on the concept would be unfair to others in this case, and is indeed supposed to be blocked by prior art (sloppyness of the patent office nonwithstanding).
The German version of the utility model, the "Gebrauchsmuster", might be a more appropriate protection for products like this. For a short description, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebrauchsmuster.
The US patent system being as it is, I'd expect the HurriQuake patents to be granted by the USPTO but revoked in court if someone bothers to sue them;-)
Getting a misplaced HurriQuake nail out of the wood will be even worse. If you are lucky, you can just cut it off and place a new one nearby. If you are not so lucky (the nail MUST go out), removing it will be a lot more difficult than removing the screw.
This is one of the reasons why workability is not a criterion for patentability, because the hardware does not actually have to be engineered to any reasonable level of detail before a patent can be granted. For example, you might submit a patent that to be built requires materials that are impossibly strong or light. That won't show up anywhere in your patent documents, and anyone who tries to engineer such a device on the basis of your patent will rapdily discover they are wasting their time.
Unfortunately, not demanding workability offers another avenue for abuse: People can now patent ideas that are not feasible yet, without actually contributing to the art. But as soon as someone else does the hard work and makes it possible, that someone can be sued for patent violation when he tries to market his design.
"...that Novell faces a choice of sticking with Microsoft and being left behind, or turning its back on the patent deal." If Novell has already signed a binding contract, they may not be able to turn back. In that case, they will have to stick with Microsoft for better or worse. From the outside, we will probably not see if they are stuck or just stubborn;-)
A Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet Asia: "For production machines and everyday usage, virtualization is a fairly new technology and one that we think is not yet mature enough for broad consumer adoption."
[...]
Michael Silver, Gartner's research vice president, wrote on the analyst company's blog that like Windows rootkits, there is a risk that VM rootkits can be installed unbeknownst to the consumer.
"Microsoft says that consumers don't understand the risks of running virtual machines, and they only want enterprises that understand the risks to run Vista on a VM," Silver said.
I call bullshit on both counts.
First, technology being immature has never stopped Microsoft before from selling it. And for protecting the consumer, a warning in the EULA would suffice. As in "Microsoft does not guarantee for correct function in a virtual environment". An outright prohibition points to other motives.
Second, unscrupulous makers of rootkits will hardly be stopped by an EULA, Mr. Silver.
And how do you propose to sell closed-source software that runs on all versions of 'Nux Maybe not on all, but on most: Specify (for instance) -X.Org 6.9 or higher -a minimum kernel version (2.6.x) that has already found its way into the major distributions -minimum graphics hardware with suitable Linux drivers
Of these three requirements, only the third would be difficult (and that is mostly the fault of the graphics hardware manufacturers).
If people notice that a company is never providing public domain works, that would certainly be grounds for an investigation and sanctions (including potential loss of all registered copyrights) for intentional destruction of works to bypass copyright limits. The negative media attention alone would scare most big companies.
Not with the extremely long copyright timespans we have today (IIRC 95 years in case of a Work For Hire). For example, if a company is (intentionally ?) sloppy in keeping the original of a Work For Hire recorded in 2000, it will become obvious when someone wants a DRM free copy in 2096. That is 90 years in the future. Such a distant threat is easily discounted by the average manager in favor of a short term cost improvement. After all, he will not be around to be punished when the negative media attention occurs.
If you follow the reports at Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/), you will find that SCO are good at delaying things but make very little progress in getting anything proven. Also, the court is quite generous in granting their wishes for more time. In contrast, IBM's conterclaims appear a lot more convincing and I'd expect those to be successful.
So SCO is doing a rather prolonged FUD campaign, but with little hope of getting any money out of IBM. At the same time, they might have to pay IBM more damages than they can afford. I'm starting to believe what many people on Groklaw said: SCO is doing the anti-linux propaganda for M$, not acting in its own best interests as company.
Remains to be seen. They will be that dumb if they migrate to Vista en masse. But so far, I have not read any announcements from big companies that they want to switch to Vista. By 2008 we will know more - if companies still shun Vista after a year of evaluation, it means they really disliked something about it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Changes in a PC's Basic Input/Output System" is not necessarily the same as a different drive in the PC. Possible scenario: ;-)
You do a BIOS upgrade of your mainboard to add support for a new processor version, because you want to upgrade. Vista detects the change and blocks access to your data
Most companies use their existing system until they see a compelling need to upgrade. Because a migration always costs money.
So it is not unusual at all if a company is a few years behind. I remember working on a Windows 3.x application in 1998/1999, because the customer's IT was still running on that version.
If the school is a public school, it is considered an entity of the state and has to observe the constitution. There have been reports of lawsuits on
Private schools have more leeway since they are not part of the state.
BONG HITS 4 JESUS is pretty ambiguous. It might be interpreted as political speech that drugs should be legalized. Or it could be interpreted as promoting illegal drug use (the interpretation of the school officials). Or maybe just as a stupid joke.
In the absence of a clear meaning, I think the state should be careful not to infringe on civil rights by choosing the interpretation that is most damaging to the speaker
If you look elsewhere, you will find that Valve is doing the Good Idea (except for the have-to-hope-Steam-won't-shut-down factor, which I still dislike). So it can be done. If EA is too stupid, tough luck ;-)
Not to mention this thing doesn't seem to support 8-core operation yet anyway :(
Correct. It appears to be a higher clocked but otherwise severely limited version of the Opteron 22XX series, relabeled and fitted with a controller for non-registered, non-ECC RAM.
The QuadFX may be interesting for gamers, but I doubt anyone else would want it.
It is rather obvious that the QuadFX is a niche release for gamers, on several grounds.
1) Only one memory module per channel supported, and no ECC. Not what you want for high reliability or in memory-intensive tasks. This disqualifies the QuadFX as server processor.
2) Much cheaper than the (closest in performance) Opteron 2220 SE but castrated as described above. I guess AMD did that intentionally to avoid cannibalizing the server market.
So I'd consider the Intel, with a high quality board, for "affordable HPC". Not the QuadFX. Disregarding bigger machines for a moment. If you have the money, an 8-way Opteron looks pretty nice...
How do you know that? Of course proving intent either way is difficult, but their shifting arguments suggest to me that they were just fishing for reasons.
First, the Bush administration claimed that Saddam was supporting Al Quaida.
When that claim was rejected as unrealistic by world opinion, the justification shifted to "Saddam has WMDs". In support of this position, Colin Powell held a presentation in the UN Security Council with rather questionable evidence. Also, UN inspections failed to find WMDs.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UN_Security_Coun
After that, I remember that the Bush administration used to cite humanitarian reasons for the invasion (liberate the people of Iraq). While those had some merit, the fact that they came up last in the discussion made them suspect:
Why did Bush not claim from the start that it was a liberation mission?
And why are other states with worse regimes left alone? North Korea comes to mind.
To me, this looks like the behaviour of someone who was determined to invade from the start and just looked for a public justification.
The problem is that punishing the media for publishing "leaked" information makes it too easy for the government to suppress reports about things they did wrong. Just put a "classified" sticker on the topic and hey, we can prosecute anyone who calls us on it. There are very good reasons to guarantee freedom of speech, one of them is protecting against government's abuse of power to silence critics.
So if publishing "leaked" information is prosecuted at all, there should be a reservation that makes it punishable only if the court finds that the information is significantly useful for an enemy power.
America, represented by the Bush government, has invaded Iraq against the will of most of the world and lied to the U.N. in order to justify the invasion (fake WMD proof). That is not a good basis to get the rest of the world to help out if things go wrong.
Note that this was different after 9/11, when the USA went after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for supporting the terrorists. At that time, there was considerable support for the USA. But with the Iraq war, the USA have pissed it all away.
The official document does indeed read like the Russians caved in on all fronts. To an extent where I wonder if it is telling the whole truth. Russia is still a considerable power and I don't think they need to suck up everything the US is telling them.
Maybe the US government is just spreading propaganda here??
I've shot a 1965, romanian built AK-47 modified - the one with plastic on it - some 5 years ago. The gun was 35 years old, fired low and right, but had good groupings at 100m. Seems it wasn't fired much
Interesting, because the "low and right" could be compensated with adjustable sights. Good groupings are a much more meaningful indicator of quality. So the Ak-47 seems not to be so bad after all.
According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ak-47, the chamber and barrel are chromium lined which should ensure low wear too.
Since the Nuremberg Trials after WW2, it has become increasingly common to try at least a few leaders of the losing party as war criminals. The lower ranks within the ruling class will still get away, but those at the very top do have to fear for their lives if they lose.
Latest example: Saddam Hussein who will probably be hanged.
Win95 was a PITA, I fought with it for a weekend before I found out how to keep Plug&Pray from running amok. The solution was to let the hardware detection only handle essential stuff like keyboard, mouse and harddisk controller, then manually install drivers for the rest of the hardware.
;-)
Win98 was somewhat better (after I used 98lite, http://www.litepc.com/ on it), but still easily crashed by bad applications.
Windows 2000 was a massive improvement, finally a reliable system. I used it first in 2003, with a new PC that had no trouble with the increased hardware requirements.
I agree about Win XP and activation, it was the first Microsoft OS I did not even want to pirate (yes I could have a copy from a friend if I wanted). Vista seems even worse. Still running on Windows 2000 and occasionally trying a new Linux distribution.
Linux is getting better at a nice pace, and soon it might reach a point where I use it by default and run Windows only for games
The One Big Version has its own problems, especially versioning. Sometimes, an upgrade will break compatibility and suddenly some of your applications are fuxxored. I've seen it happen with the RichEdit DLL in Windows. Somewhat offtopic, but it still illustrates the point.
The assortment of different mini-databases is less susceptible to this, especially when they get updated through new versions of the applications. That guarantees that app version and database version match.
Now I'm not a Microsoft employee, but even as an outsider I've seen some hints that it might be the "promiscuous dependency taking" that has delayed Vista.
1) Integration of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft claims that IE and Windows are inextricably linked together, and at least for Windows 2000 and newer this seems to be true. For instance, if you type a URL into the address bar of the Windows Explorer, it will show you web pages. IMHO a stupid design, the web browser should be an application, not a fixed part of the GUI.
2) The RPC service being responsible for things a "remote procedure call service" has no business handling.
In August 2003, a worm called MSBlast spread by exploiting a buffer overflow in the DCOM RPC service (see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBlast). At that time me, trying to be clever, thought:
"I don't want anyone remotely executing stuff on my PC anyway. I'll just switch the service off and be fine".
Lo and behold:
After turning off the RPC service, various local functions were dead as well. Including the Services menu in the control panel. I was lucky that I could reactivate the RPC service by manually editing the registry, else I would have spent a day reinstalling.
So it seems quite believable that Microsoft is choking itself by lack of discipline in designing Windows
I see a problem with that:
Patents are designed to protect concepts, not implementations of a known concept. But a patient search through design space gives you just that, a particular implementation of known concepts. Granting a monopoly (patent) on the concept would be unfair to others in this case, and is indeed supposed to be blocked by prior art (sloppyness of the patent office nonwithstanding).
The German version of the utility model, the "Gebrauchsmuster", might be a more appropriate protection for products like this. For a short description, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebrauchsmuster.
The US patent system being as it is, I'd expect the HurriQuake patents to be granted by the USPTO but revoked in court if someone bothers to sue them
Getting a misplaced HurriQuake nail out of the wood will be even worse.
If you are lucky, you can just cut it off and place a new one nearby. If you are not so lucky (the nail MUST go out), removing it will be a lot more difficult than removing the screw.
Unfortunately, not demanding workability offers another avenue for abuse:
People can now patent ideas that are not feasible yet, without actually contributing to the art. But as soon as someone else does the hard work and makes it possible, that someone can be sued for patent violation when he tries to market his design.
"...that Novell faces a choice of sticking with Microsoft and being left behind, or turning its back on the patent deal." ;-)
If Novell has already signed a binding contract, they may not be able to turn back. In that case, they will have to stick with Microsoft for better or worse.
From the outside, we will probably not see if they are stuck or just stubborn
I call bullshit on both counts.
First, technology being immature has never stopped Microsoft before from selling it. And for protecting the consumer, a warning in the EULA would suffice. As in "Microsoft does not guarantee for correct function in a virtual environment". An outright prohibition points to other motives.
Second, unscrupulous makers of rootkits will hardly be stopped by an EULA, Mr. Silver.
And how do you propose to sell closed-source software that runs on all versions of 'Nux
Maybe not on all, but on most:
Specify (for instance)
-X.Org 6.9 or higher
-a minimum kernel version (2.6.x) that has already found its way into the major distributions
-minimum graphics hardware with suitable Linux drivers
Of these three requirements, only the third would be difficult (and that is mostly the fault of the graphics hardware manufacturers).
Not with the extremely long copyright timespans we have today (IIRC 95 years in case of a Work For Hire).
For example, if a company is (intentionally ?) sloppy in keeping the original of a Work For Hire recorded in 2000, it will become obvious when someone wants a DRM free copy in 2096. That is 90 years in the future. Such a distant threat is easily discounted by the average manager in favor of a short term cost improvement. After all, he will not be around to be punished when the negative media attention occurs.
If you follow the reports at Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/), you will find that SCO are good at delaying things but make very little progress in getting anything proven. Also, the court is quite generous in granting their wishes for more time. In contrast, IBM's conterclaims appear a lot more convincing and I'd expect those to be successful.
So SCO is doing a rather prolonged FUD campaign, but with little hope of getting any money out of IBM. At the same time, they might have to pay IBM more damages than they can afford. I'm starting to believe what many people on Groklaw said:
SCO is doing the anti-linux propaganda for M$, not acting in its own best interests as company.
Remains to be seen. They will be that dumb if they migrate to Vista en masse. But so far, I have not read any announcements from big companies that they want to switch to Vista. ;-)
By 2008 we will know more - if companies still shun Vista after a year of evaluation, it means they really disliked something about it