The previous (monkey) poster is just too used to working with crap like Win98. XP does not require periodic reinstalls.
My latest reinstall is from early 2000 when I wiped my Win98 partition and installed Windows 2000. After that I've upgraded it to XP, XP+SP1, XP+SP2 and changed motherboard, CPU, videocard etc at least 5 times.
Of course my OS drive is connected to Adaptec 19160, so I dont have the usual problem of 'inaccessible boot device' when the motherboard IDE controller changes.
System works fine. I've hand-removed some glut from registry couple of times, but there really has been no reason for format/reinstall.
The retailer where I work at does this. We of course only sell 'white box' PCs that are built from parts. So any Windows is installed by hand at the time of building, and we naturally include all updates.
Ya get what you pay for when you go for that crappy Dell or Compaq or whatever...
They will - not yet, but give em few weeks to get the new SKUs to the channel. I'd imagine all retail/OEM CDs will have SP2 builtin by November. Manufacturing all those CDs takes a while, you see...
Also I think they wait until all translations are done, at least for europe. Don't want to have situation where they have US/UK XP+SP2 and (for example) Finnish XP+SP1. Once the different language versions are translated, they'll move over.
Of course if you buy your computer preinstalled from a good store that builds the systems from scratch, you can already expect SP2 preinstalled (tho the CD media is still just XP+SP1 for now)
Yes it does. 98SE is mostly immune to current worms, but try XP + dialup. You'll be rebooting from sasser within 5 minutes.
And even on dialup, 98SE tends to become virus/spyware farm if a normal clueles (l)user uses it to browse the net. Old unpatched IE5, old unpatched outlook. GREAT COMBO
They do. At least in europe retailers are giving out 'Microsoft Windows Security Update CD's. Works on any windows version, but sadly is not quite up to date on XP patches anymore. Next edition is coming soon (called 'Windows XP Service Pack 2 CD') - I fully expect MS to hand out those for free via retailers as well. You can already order one via MS webpage.
Install the Windows XP off a CD that includes SP2 slipstreamed in, and your survival time online 'unpatched' goes up dramatically. Something about a reasonably good firewall that is turned on by the default installation...
""An exception caused by a program executing code in its data stack is not going to cause a blue screen unless the code in question is a driver or part of the kernel. The program will simply crash with the appropriate error being logged.""
And guess where ZoneAlarm 4.5 sticks it's stuff into? You gotta go pretty low-level to intercept packets.
And in case of Gunbound, it's actually the Gunbound's anti-hacking system ('GameGuard') that causes the bluescreen. I think it also goes to poke something WAY low-level in Windows - trying to ensure that the game files are untouched, and that there are no cheating programs in the memory. And SP2 doesn't enjoy being poked...
Problem is - due to these broken applications, people think there is something wrong with the HARDWARE. Developers suck, but AMD and Microsoft are the ones that will be flamed by clueless (l)users.
NX exception. I dunno why, but SP2 *bluescreens* on NX violations. I personally thought it would just kill the application gracefully, but to my experience this is not true.
What I really hate is that AMD touted NX to be the best thing since sliced bread, and so far it has only caused some minor grief due to broken applications (ZoneAlarm 4.5 and Gunbound being my two recent examples - both outright crash the computer on AMD64+SP2, and it's due to NX)
I personally can handle these problems, but when a joe sixpack buys his brand spanking new and shiny AMD64 gaming computer, and gets SP2 auto-loaded, and his favourite title starts to reboot/bluescreen his computer, he's gonna come back to the store and whine how his computer is broken. And THAT will suck to the poor guys in the trenches having to 'fix' these setups.
Telling a customer that his precious game won't work because AMD inserted this cool 'anti virus prevention feature' and MS started to support it in SP2 won't make him too happy... even if the actual problem is the broken code of the game - from a 2-bit publisher who won't release a patch even if all the AMD64 owners together would go and hold a gun to their head...
Just go and disable the alerts in the security center. You know - read the new windows, select the options that suit you most. It'll stop bugging you when you choose how you want to handle auto updates/firewall/antivirus. One option basically being 'stop bugging me'.
How badly does the new NX-feature on AMD64 break everything? I do know that you can exclude programs from the no execute-protection if they refuse to work, but if 90% of apps break until next update, unless I list 'em in some whitelist, I will most likely put off the update by a few weeks.
It seems to work smoothly on my 2nd computer (P4 2.67Ghz), but that's more like a sandbox with extremely common hardware components and almost no apps beyond web browser and few productivity thingys, so it can be formatted at will anyway. Bit scared of upgrading my main system - Adaptec SCSI controller, A8V Deluxe motherboard with both VIA SATA and Promise SATA controllers, Radeon 9800pro, tons of hard drives... it would be just much more of a pain to recover if, for example, the NX protection feature becomes a huge hassle until developers can fix their broken programs, and restoring my OS partition from backup would take over an hour... I guess I'm lazy:p
Same thing when I was in a hospital for 2 weeks. Only way I could somehow survive was to read. A LOT. like 7 books in two weeks, which is impressive considering the pain medication I was on early on (pancreatitis. Very very painful stuff...)
COMMON SENSE; If it gives you something to clicky on, it's on a plishing expedition. If it fails the 'why wouldn't the company just show this the next time I log onto their website?'-test, its a scam. If it threatens ya with something unless you click the scammy link, its a scam.
Only example that fails some of this is the MS hotmail threat, but thats Microsoft for you. And even it does NOT provide a 'press here to login to your hotmail account and give all your details to a scammer'-link.
I knew people are stupid, but shees - *think*. Read the text and *think*. You can spot all the scams WITHOUT seeing where the links point to, or what the email headers were.
Even without having the full message headers to spot obivious scams, I got 'em all right.
You can spot most plishing scams by asking the simple question; Why would the company in question email this to me, instead just showing the same thing when I log into the website in question next time?
Also if the message asks you to do something by click something instead of just going to the website in question like you always do, it's most likely a scam.
And if the email tries to scare you by account closures, its very much a scam.
Only example that fails these rules is the stupid Hotmail warning thingy, but that I knew to be legimate since I know MS is that stupid in handling the whole thing. And even it doesn't fail the second bit - there is no 'sign up to your hotmail account to do this and that by pressing here' link.
But yeah - I do agree that very high percentage of the Joe Lusers fall for this stuff. Common sense is Hard(tm).
Re:true remote storage transparency
on
Ethernet at 10 Gbps
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Diskless workstations aren't.
They are just (ab)using the disks of the servers. How Uber Are Your Servers(tm)? Show me a server that can sustain that 1 gigabyte a sec disk access to support those workstations...:p
With 10 gigabit LAN, the bottleneck won't be the LAN. It will be your servers. Their I/O busses, disk systems etc.
Even at 1 gigabit, usually the bottleneck is elsewhere.
10 Gigabits = roughly 1 gigabytes/sec. Considering that PCI bus is 33MB/sec, and even PCI-X is 66MB/sec... Heck the memory bus of my brand new system is only about 1 gigabytes a second.
Um; Even if we assume that we'd have sizeable human population off-world right now (sizeable enough to reproduce and continue the species), should earth (or sun) go 'poof' on this instant, we'd be toast. Period. At our current tech level, we are dependant on the small planet we are on.
Yes, we can imagine a lot of tech that could, in theory, support us elsewhere right now. It's all unproven, and right now Earth is required for the existence of the species.
There is the small issue of the size of galaxy. Even if we'd start to colonize the whole thing exponentially at the speed of light (the theoretical max by current knowledge), it would take considerable time to fill up the galaxy.
Main catch with Drake is that we do not know how common it is for technologically advanced civilizations to wipe themselves out. If 99% of civilizations fail the jump off their planet to colonization and/or are unable to stabilize population growth to levels that are sustainable by the homeworld, the natural selection would never get to galactic level. Earth is a pretty damn nice 'womb' for life. Space is HARSH. We are still just bipedal monkeys with some nice toys, completely depending on earth itself.
Galaxy could be filled by life, but just about nobody gets past the 'split the atom -> learn interstellar travel' bit. Earth has been bit too close of being nuked to a wasteland for quite a while, and we are still way off from the start of colonization of the galaxy. By thousands of years - probably tens of thousands.
If every technologically advanced race has to survive tens of thousands of years without wiping their own planet and/or without killing themselves off by stripmining/outgrowing the available resources, it may be that communicating technological civilizations are common, but the jump to a galactic one is almost impossible. So every species is confined to their own limited niche of their home planet. The gulf outside is just... damn big thing to 'evolve out of'.
Dunno bout mac-specific versions, but X800 XT platinum already owns this overpriced nvidia hardware in most cases.
6800 has one feature that the X800 does not have (PS3.0 support), which is mostly useless for quite a while - probably way past the useful life of 6800 as a high end card.
384MB is so low. Lots of current games are already unplayable with high details on at 512MB. Planetside, SWG, DAOC and numerous others (tho mostly online games) are total lagfests without 1GB RAM already.
If you had asked my guess on reqs, it would've been something like 512MB, 2Ghz, GF4/Radeon9500. I'm surprised how low they actually are.
Nothing major will be done before there is a first real impact during modern times.
Let's pray it's a small one ('levels a (part of a) city, causes some climate instability for a few years') instead of a big one ('levels a continent, fucks up entire earth for decades')
In fact, scientists have real factual data of an impact during the past 100 years - the Tunguska object. Yep, it was most likely a cometary fragment and not an asteroid, and yep, it exploded in the atmosphere well above ground. It still levelled huge amounts of forest and caused tons of damage. Had it happened in densely populated areas, the casualties would have been major. In fact, had that one hit western europe instead of a remote area in russia, we might have completely different look at the problem today.
Lucky you. Tho I doubt its 'unlimited'. As in if you use it for internet traffic and leech 100GB via your mobile, you will either get your contract terminated, or you get a fat bill.
At least in Finland, 100MB monthly data is something like 10 euros, and extra MBs are charged separately. Ripoff for net surfing via mobile phone...
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The previous (monkey) poster is just too used to working with crap like Win98. XP does not require periodic reinstalls.
My latest reinstall is from early 2000 when I wiped my Win98 partition and installed Windows 2000. After that I've upgraded it to XP, XP+SP1, XP+SP2 and changed motherboard, CPU, videocard etc at least 5 times.
Of course my OS drive is connected to Adaptec 19160, so I dont have the usual problem of 'inaccessible boot device' when the motherboard IDE controller changes.
System works fine. I've hand-removed some glut from registry couple of times, but there really has been no reason for format/reinstall.
The retailer where I work at does this. We of course only sell 'white box' PCs that are built from parts. So any Windows is installed by hand at the time of building, and we naturally include all updates.
Ya get what you pay for when you go for that crappy Dell or Compaq or whatever...
They will - not yet, but give em few weeks to get the new SKUs to the channel. I'd imagine all retail/OEM CDs will have SP2 builtin by November. Manufacturing all those CDs takes a while, you see...
Also I think they wait until all translations are done, at least for europe. Don't want to have situation where they have US/UK XP+SP2 and (for example) Finnish XP+SP1. Once the different language versions are translated, they'll move over.
Of course if you buy your computer preinstalled from a good store that builds the systems from scratch, you can already expect SP2 preinstalled (tho the CD media is still just XP+SP1 for now)
Yes it does. 98SE is mostly immune to current worms, but try XP + dialup. You'll be rebooting from sasser within 5 minutes.
And even on dialup, 98SE tends to become virus/spyware farm if a normal clueles (l)user uses it to browse the net. Old unpatched IE5, old unpatched outlook. GREAT COMBO
They do. At least in europe retailers are giving out 'Microsoft Windows Security Update CD's. Works on any windows version, but sadly is not quite up to date on XP patches anymore. Next edition is coming soon (called 'Windows XP Service Pack 2 CD') - I fully expect MS to hand out those for free via retailers as well. You can already order one via MS webpage.
Install the Windows XP off a CD that includes SP2 slipstreamed in, and your survival time online 'unpatched' goes up dramatically. Something about a reasonably good firewall that is turned on by the default installation...
""An exception caused by a program executing code in its data stack is not going to cause a blue screen unless the code in question is a driver or part of the kernel. The program will simply crash with the appropriate error being logged.""
And guess where ZoneAlarm 4.5 sticks it's stuff into? You gotta go pretty low-level to intercept packets.
And in case of Gunbound, it's actually the Gunbound's anti-hacking system ('GameGuard') that causes the bluescreen. I think it also goes to poke something WAY low-level in Windows - trying to ensure that the game files are untouched, and that there are no cheating programs in the memory. And SP2 doesn't enjoy being poked...
Problem is - due to these broken applications, people think there is something wrong with the HARDWARE. Developers suck, but AMD and Microsoft are the ones that will be flamed by clueless (l)users.
NX exception. I dunno why, but SP2 *bluescreens* on NX violations. I personally thought it would just kill the application gracefully, but to my experience this is not true.
What I really hate is that AMD touted NX to be the best thing since sliced bread, and so far it has only caused some minor grief due to broken applications (ZoneAlarm 4.5 and Gunbound being my two recent examples - both outright crash the computer on AMD64+SP2, and it's due to NX)
I personally can handle these problems, but when a joe sixpack buys his brand spanking new and shiny AMD64 gaming computer, and gets SP2 auto-loaded, and his favourite title starts to reboot/bluescreen his computer, he's gonna come back to the store and whine how his computer is broken. And THAT will suck to the poor guys in the trenches having to 'fix' these setups.
Telling a customer that his precious game won't work because AMD inserted this cool 'anti virus prevention feature' and MS started to support it in SP2 won't make him too happy... even if the actual problem is the broken code of the game - from a 2-bit publisher who won't release a patch even if all the AMD64 owners together would go and hold a gun to their head...
*sigh*
The packages were digitally signed by MS. Unless they were afraid of faked MS signatures (should be impossible, no?), it shouldn't matter.
Just go and disable the alerts in the security center. You know - read the new windows, select the options that suit you most. It'll stop bugging you when you choose how you want to handle auto updates/firewall/antivirus. One option basically being 'stop bugging me'.
The bluetooth fix is; UNINSTALL the stupid widcomm crap and let XP just detect your bluetooth hardware. It'll Just Work with the new bluetooth stack.
It only asks permission to LISTEN (open ports for listening). So all phone-home applications are ignored by the firewall.
So, while the builtin is WAY better than nothing, everyone should really install a third party one that controls all access on application basis.
So, anyone tried this with an AMD64 CPU yet?
:p
How badly does the new NX-feature on AMD64 break everything? I do know that you can exclude programs from the no execute-protection if they refuse to work, but if 90% of apps break until next update, unless I list 'em in some whitelist, I will most likely put off the update by a few weeks.
It seems to work smoothly on my 2nd computer (P4 2.67Ghz), but that's more like a sandbox with extremely common hardware components and almost no apps beyond web browser and few productivity thingys, so it can be formatted at will anyway. Bit scared of upgrading my main system - Adaptec SCSI controller, A8V Deluxe motherboard with both VIA SATA and Promise SATA controllers, Radeon 9800pro, tons of hard drives... it would be just much more of a pain to recover if, for example, the NX protection feature becomes a huge hassle until developers can fix their broken programs, and restoring my OS partition from backup would take over an hour... I guess I'm lazy
Same thing when I was in a hospital for 2 weeks. Only way I could somehow survive was to read. A LOT. like 7 books in two weeks, which is impressive considering the pain medication I was on early on (pancreatitis. Very very painful stuff...)
Wrong. I used mozilla, I could not see the links.
I still got 10 out of 10.
COMMON SENSE; If it gives you something to clicky on, it's on a plishing expedition. If it fails the 'why wouldn't the company just show this the next time I log onto their website?'-test, its a scam. If it threatens ya with something unless you click the scammy link, its a scam.
Only example that fails some of this is the MS hotmail threat, but thats Microsoft for you. And even it does NOT provide a 'press here to login to your hotmail account and give all your details to a scammer'-link.
I knew people are stupid, but shees - *think*. Read the text and *think*. You can spot all the scams WITHOUT seeing where the links point to, or what the email headers were.
""You got 10 out of 10 correct, or 100 % ""
Even without having the full message headers to spot obivious scams, I got 'em all right.
You can spot most plishing scams by asking the simple question; Why would the company in question email this to me, instead just showing the same thing when I log into the website in question next time?
Also if the message asks you to do something by click something instead of just going to the website in question like you always do, it's most likely a scam.
And if the email tries to scare you by account closures, its very much a scam.
Only example that fails these rules is the stupid Hotmail warning thingy, but that I knew to be legimate since I know MS is that stupid in handling the whole thing. And even it doesn't fail the second bit - there is no 'sign up to your hotmail account to do this and that by pressing here' link.
But yeah - I do agree that very high percentage of the Joe Lusers fall for this stuff. Common sense is Hard(tm).
Diskless workstations aren't.
:p
They are just (ab)using the disks of the servers. How Uber Are Your Servers(tm)? Show me a server that can sustain that 1 gigabyte a sec disk access to support those workstations...
With 10 gigabit LAN, the bottleneck won't be the LAN. It will be your servers. Their I/O busses, disk systems etc.
Even at 1 gigabit, usually the bottleneck is elsewhere.
10 Gigabits = roughly 1 gigabytes/sec. Considering that PCI bus is 33MB/sec, and even PCI-X is 66MB/sec... Heck the memory bus of my brand new system is only about 1 gigabytes a second.
Um; Even if we assume that we'd have sizeable human population off-world right now (sizeable enough to reproduce and continue the species), should earth (or sun) go 'poof' on this instant, we'd be toast. Period. At our current tech level, we are dependant on the small planet we are on.
Yes, we can imagine a lot of tech that could, in theory, support us elsewhere right now. It's all unproven, and right now Earth is required for the existence of the species.
There is the small issue of the size of galaxy. Even if we'd start to colonize the whole thing exponentially at the speed of light (the theoretical max by current knowledge), it would take considerable time to fill up the galaxy.
... damn big thing to 'evolve out of'.
Main catch with Drake is that we do not know how common it is for technologically advanced civilizations to wipe themselves out. If 99% of civilizations fail the jump off their planet to colonization and/or are unable to stabilize population growth to levels that are sustainable by the homeworld, the natural selection would never get to galactic level. Earth is a pretty damn nice 'womb' for life. Space is HARSH. We are still just bipedal monkeys with some nice toys, completely depending on earth itself.
Galaxy could be filled by life, but just about nobody gets past the 'split the atom -> learn interstellar travel' bit. Earth has been bit too close of being nuked to a wasteland for quite a while, and we are still way off from the start of colonization of the galaxy. By thousands of years - probably tens of thousands.
If every technologically advanced race has to survive tens of thousands of years without wiping their own planet and/or without killing themselves off by stripmining/outgrowing the available resources, it may be that communicating technological civilizations are common, but the jump to a galactic one is almost impossible. So every species is confined to their own limited niche of their home planet. The gulf outside is just
Dunno bout mac-specific versions, but X800 XT platinum already owns this overpriced nvidia hardware in most cases.
6800 has one feature that the X800 does not have (PS3.0 support), which is mostly useless for quite a while - probably way past the useful life of 6800 as a high end card.
384MB is so low. Lots of current games are already unplayable with high details on at 512MB. Planetside, SWG, DAOC and numerous others (tho mostly online games) are total lagfests without 1GB RAM already.
If you had asked my guess on reqs, it would've been something like 512MB, 2Ghz, GF4/Radeon9500. I'm surprised how low they actually are.
Nothing major will be done before there is a first real impact during modern times.
Let's pray it's a small one ('levels a (part of a) city, causes some climate instability for a few years') instead of a big one ('levels a continent, fucks up entire earth for decades')
In fact, scientists have real factual data of an impact during the past 100 years - the Tunguska object. Yep, it was most likely a cometary fragment and not an asteroid, and yep, it exploded in the atmosphere well above ground. It still levelled huge amounts of forest and caused tons of damage. Had it happened in densely populated areas, the casualties would have been major. In fact, had that one hit western europe instead of a remote area in russia, we might have completely different look at the problem today.
Lucky you. Tho I doubt its 'unlimited'. As in if you use it for internet traffic and leech 100GB via your mobile, you will either get your contract terminated, or you get a fat bill.
At least in Finland, 100MB monthly data is something like 10 euros, and extra MBs are charged separately. Ripoff for net surfing via mobile phone...