Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
and
Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
which I would assume that most of which is now in the public domain as of 9/20/2000.
and
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
So, if M$ can use open source stuff, why can't
the rest of us?
What I do is listen to speakers that are in the ballpark of my budget and get those. Speakers are what you listen to and have the most impact on the quality of sound. At one time it was recommended to allocate 50% of your budget to speakers and the rest to electronics, but that may have changed with the advent of 5+ channels of sound. As for a receiver, just get whatever does the digital decoding that you want and is good. I have an Onkyo, but many others make fine receivers.
Every so often this legality issue comes up and I'm sick of it. Garth Brooks did it with used cds, etc info here.
So under the same logic its illegal for me to buy my house and (hopefully) sell it at a profit, just as it is illegal for me to buy a car and (hopefully) sell it.
I agree that standards are good, and so are conventions. I do not think that there is any "driving standard" in terms as to which side of the road to drive on. In the US its on the right side and in England its on the left.
A standard to me implies some kind of documented specification that is complete enough to create/recreate from that specification. Some examples are POSIX, X.509, HTTPD/HTML, PKCS#11, etc. To me, Microsoft has not declared themselves a standard, but rather a convention. They obfuscate system calls, continuously change their document formats (so even older products by M$ cannot read them), etc, etc.
This is not yet another M$ bash per say, but a plea to Microsoft that if they want to become a standard, please publish that standard.
The www.top500.org only lists 1 NT system and 499 UNIX systems. And to keep things fair of the 5 "self-made" models there is 1 nt system and 4 UNIX systems. So, I guess that I'm not the only one who cannot tune NT properly.
MS support what makes them money. NT on Alpha wasn't profitable so it got dropped. Incredibly they have chosen to support what is by far the most popular chip architecture. Amazing!
Got a cite for the MMX bit? It sounds like bullshit. Using M$ rather than MS doesn't do any favors for your credibility.
Yup, this google search picked up some 1,250 results.
And this article titled "DOJ Says Microsoft Bullied Intel" is a lame, but existant
example.
Slow on 1Gz? Worthless anecdotal opinion, but a few possible options to explain it none-the-less:
1. You don't have a clue what you are doing with W2K. Probably fucked something up trying to 'tweak' it.
2. You are running loads of services and programs in the background.
3. You're confusing 'is running slow' with 'menus take a while to appear'. 400ms is the default delay. Search the registry and tweak (oooh) the delay.
4. You have 64Mb or less RAM. It's cheap, buy some more.
Is it? No I don't have a clue as to why my box with 256 Megs of ram
(and 1gig page file) runs out
of memory when I click on the Microsoft Intellimouse Configuration. And
the only "tweaks" that I have done is to stop unneeded services, and
turning off window animation, speeding up menu's to 0ms delay, etc.
Think about it guys. Since when has or will Microsoft lead the OS market in CPU utilization?
One of the funniest things I ask people when they think that NT is great is that I ask them:
If its so great, then why does it only run on the bottom of the line hardware?
Yeah there for a while NT did run on an Alpha, but that was basically unsupported by both M$ and 3rd party vendors.
Oops, A reply to my own message. Yes M$ _DID_ try to utilize MMX when Intel 1st came out with it and "exclusively" at that. However, I still think that my Win2k box with a 1Ghz processor is SLOW! So I guess the bloat has drastically overcome any optimizations they have done. Also, Intel was a witness in the Govnt case regarding this MMX scam.
SSL is in a similar situation - the key bears the DNS name if the site it is for, and your
browser will warn you if it recieves a key for the wrong site, or not signed by a
recognized CA. You didn't turn those off did you? If not, then one or the other will
come up when confronted with a man-in-the-middle attack (either he'll send a properly
signed key, but not for the right site, or he'll have a forged and unsigned key for the site
you were really going to) and you'll know what you're facing.
I didn't think the article was very groundbreaking or anything either but a good one to pass around the office to the technically challenged:)
But I did get a few things from the article. The above quote could result in a man in the middle attack if the "man" were able to get one of the known CA's to sign a cert for him with that hostname. As goofy as most CA's are, I don't see how difficult this could be.
It comes back to the eternal question of "who do you trust?". Do you know the registration policies of every CA in your netscape or IE database, or why those CA's are even in the database at all (eg, how were they picked)?
In a nutshell, I thought that this article was OK because I do believe in client and server certs which are issued by a common CA. If I were to buy something online and I at least knew who the CA was before I went to the secure side of the site, and had already been issued a client cert from the same CA and the browser asked me to pick one of one certs that match that environment, then I would feel as though that connection was much more secure than with only a server cert that I would more likely blindly trust because the url says https:// and the little lock icon is "locked".
That information appears to be correct, however in my readings of the "accident" there was also one other factor that rarely gets meantioned, and it appears very relavent to fellow/.ers.
The UI was severly flawed at chernobyl for the operators to use. The above engineering faults were present, however there were also very serious issues in the UI that the operators of the reactor were unaware of. For example, the 1st time the reactor overheated the initial problem was due to the above engineering problems, but the UI to the operators caused them to freak out (overreact, no put intended). The initial overheating was not that big of a deal, and their training told them to stuff the rods into the reactor to slow down the reaction. Well, now its the engineering problem again because the rods were not designed properly, and the reactor temp kept going up, and so did the urgency of the alarms, so the operators by their training kept stuffing the rods in and did it much quicker this time, and again since the rods were flakey they actually speed up the reaction and the temp and the problems until Europe was covered in a cloud...
The moral of the story is that it is initially easy to say that it was a pure engineering disaster, but we UI designers also need to understand the importance of properly designing feedback mechanisms to operators so that they can properly deal with _normal_ variations in the course of operations of dangerous and powerful equipment.
I have yet to meet an average/above average computer user that expects software to work properly or consistantly. Its quite normal for the average office/home user to have their OS and/or applications crash because they have never experienced anything different.
One thing that really scares me is that when I see science fiction things (Runaway comes to mind), it really freaks me out how "junky" (ie, buggy) all of the cool electronic toys, robots, etc are.
In summary, I completly blame the consumer for the state of software suckiness. I would guess that it is due to ignorance of how software is supposed to behave, and their willingness to sacrefice consistancy and reliability for "ease of use" by applications "thinking for them". Most computer users feel pretty powerless over software and just take what they get. These same people would leave their car on the side of the road if their car behaved like their OS/applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if programming is art than I'm definitely a still life piece since I do nothing at work!
What I do is listen to speakers that are in the ballpark of my budget and get those. Speakers are what you listen to and have the most impact on the quality of sound. At one time it was recommended to allocate 50% of your budget to speakers and the rest to electronics, but that may have changed with the advent of 5+ channels of sound. As for a receiver, just get whatever does the digital decoding that you want and is good. I have an Onkyo, but many others make fine receivers.
So under the same logic its illegal for me to buy my house and (hopefully) sell it at a profit, just as it is illegal for me to buy a car and (hopefully) sell it.
A standard to me implies some kind of documented specification that is complete enough to create/recreate from that specification. Some examples are POSIX, X.509, HTTPD/HTML, PKCS#11, etc. To me, Microsoft has not declared themselves a standard, but rather a convention. They obfuscate system calls, continuously change their document formats (so even older products by M$ cannot read them), etc, etc.
This is not yet another M$ bash per say, but a plea to Microsoft that if they want to become a standard, please publish that standard.
The www.top500.org only lists 1 NT system and 499 UNIX systems. And to keep things fair of the 5 "self-made" models there is 1 nt system and 4 UNIX systems. So, I guess that I'm not the only one who cannot tune NT properly.
Think about it guys. Since when has or will Microsoft lead the OS market in CPU utilization?
One of the funniest things I ask people when they think that NT is great is that I ask them:
If its so great, then why does it only run on the bottom of the line hardware?
Yeah there for a while NT did run on an Alpha, but that was basically unsupported by both M$ and 3rd party vendors.
Oops, A reply to my own message. Yes M$ _DID_ try to utilize MMX when Intel 1st came out with it and "exclusively" at that. However, I still think that my Win2k box with a 1Ghz processor is SLOW! So I guess the bloat has drastically overcome any optimizations they have done. Also, Intel was a witness in the Govnt case regarding this MMX scam.
I didn't think the article was very groundbreaking or anything either but a good one to pass around the office to the technically challenged :)
But I did get a few things from the article. The above quote could result in a man in the middle attack if the "man" were able to get one of the known CA's to sign a cert for him with that hostname. As goofy as most CA's are, I don't see how difficult this could be.
It comes back to the eternal question of "who do you trust?". Do you know the registration policies of every CA in your netscape or IE database, or why those CA's are even in the database at all (eg, how were they picked)?
In a nutshell, I thought that this article was OK because I do believe in client and server certs which are issued by a common CA. If I were to buy something online and I at least knew who the CA was before I went to the secure side of the site, and had already been issued a client cert from the same CA and the browser asked me to pick one of one certs that match that environment, then I would feel as though that connection was much more secure than with only a server cert that I would more likely blindly trust because the url says https:// and the little lock icon is "locked".
That information appears to be correct, however in my readings of the "accident" there was also one other factor that rarely gets meantioned, and it appears very relavent to fellow /.ers.
The UI was severly flawed at chernobyl for the operators to use. The above engineering faults were present, however there were also very serious issues in the UI that the operators of the reactor were unaware of. For example, the 1st time the reactor overheated the initial problem was due to the above engineering problems, but the UI to the operators caused them to freak out (overreact, no put intended). The initial overheating was not that big of a deal, and their training told them to stuff the rods into the reactor to slow down the reaction. Well, now its the engineering problem again because the rods were not designed properly, and the reactor temp kept going up, and so did the urgency of the alarms, so the operators by their training kept stuffing the rods in and did it much quicker this time, and again since the rods were flakey they actually speed up the reaction and the temp and the problems until Europe was covered in a cloud...
The moral of the story is that it is initially easy to say that it was a pure engineering disaster, but we UI designers also need to understand the importance of properly designing feedback mechanisms to operators so that they can properly deal with _normal_ variations in the course of operations of dangerous and powerful equipment.
I have yet to meet an average/above average computer user that expects software to work properly or consistantly. Its quite normal for the average office/home user to have their OS and/or applications crash because they have never experienced anything different.
One thing that really scares me is that when I see science fiction things (Runaway comes to mind), it really freaks me out how "junky" (ie, buggy) all of the cool electronic toys, robots, etc are.
In summary, I completly blame the consumer for the state of software suckiness. I would guess that it is due to ignorance of how software is supposed to behave, and their willingness to sacrefice consistancy and reliability for "ease of use" by applications "thinking for them". Most computer users feel pretty powerless over software and just take what they get. These same people would leave their car on the side of the road if their car behaved like their OS/applications.