Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum, flying in the crashed enemy saucer, which is piloted by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, gets inside the mother ship and uses his laptop computer to put a virus into the aliens' main computer system. He can do this because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the "Windows 95" operating system; in fact the whole reason why they have attacked the Earth is to destroy Bill Gates.
You're right, it's not - for the record, I believe that the Apple Tablet will very likely define the way these devices will be designed and used, much like the iPhone did for high-end smartphones - and I'm not an Apple fanboy. Apparently, Dan's brillant satire in the GP seems to be a little too close for comfort for some people here...
We are now in the "As Macworld or the Worldwide Developer’s Conference draws near, the chatter builds to a fever pitch. Rumor sites jockey for position, posting a new unverifiable, contradictory rumor every hour or so. eBay is flooded with six-month-old, slightly used gadgets as college students, underemployed web designers and independent musicians struggle to clear credit card space." phase.
German c't magazine recently published an interesting design for a directional WiFi antenna (about 9 dBi gain) which can be built from materials lying around in most households (not in mine, though - unless someone invents an antenna made out of discarded pizza cartons):
Doesn't do much good for 11n, though, as that standard uses several antennas and the signal processing algorithms are optimized to use their specific characteristics.
> The only problem is they're both working on it and not working on it at the same time
I imagine this poses one hell of a problem for middle management when it comes to year-end reviews. I don't know, do they put their developers into boxes containing poison gas flasks linked to geiger counters in order to determine who's slacking off and who's actually working?
Beware of the dork side. Once you step down the dork path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will!
You will live in your mother's basement. You will never kiss a girl. The only girls you will ever see will be pr0n on the internet. You will have no outlet but playing with your own light saber.
Don't cross over to the dork side. --- (Full credit for this one goes to/. user macdaddy357)
One of the things that I wonder about most in today's tech market is the utter inability of _any_ competitor to design a line of mp3 players that come even close to the Apple iPods in terms of design, price, usability, haptics, brand recognition, packaging, availability and "ecosystem". They may come close in one aspect or the other, or even trump Apple in certain areas such as price, but I couldn't name a single player I'd choose over any one in the iPod line if I wanted to buy one. Every so-called "iPod killer" I've looked at was either ugly, had an user interface designed for martians by martians, lousy battery life, a bad case of "all-your-music-are-belong-to-us" DRM, or cost about the same as an equivalent iPod. The Zune, by the way, is no exception to this - I wouldn't buy this ugly-looking contraption at any price.
This summer, I bought a friend whom I charitably describe as "not a computer genius" a white 1 GB Nano for her birthday, and she was soon ripping CDs with iTunes and downloading songs from the Apple store without my help. She's really proud of it and showed it to all her friends - probably the first piece of computer related tech she owned that didn't make her feel stupid and out-of-it.
By the way, I'm not one of those Apple fanboys and don't even own a separate mp3 player, a 2 GB SD card in my cellphone does it for me. No need to lug around yet another gadget, nursing its battery and keeping it from getting broken or stolen.
Exercise: Make a drawing on paper of what your system looks like from the point of view of people on the outside. Draw it in a similar fashion to how one might draw a house, or a favorite car.
A) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
A block of swiss cheese
A large question mark
A fat mall-cop with powdered sugar around his mouth
A small child in a corner, crying, holding a security blanket
A Diebold voting terminal
B) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
Fort Knox
A medieval castle under siege with the invaders having boiling tar poured on them.
A resettable Viet-Cong boobytrap with dozens of pigs already skewered on it
The business end of a.357 Magnum
An illuminated Jesus standing atop a Sun E10K
A solid, faceless slab of hyperdense radioactive metal extracted from the heart of a neutron star
C) You need to increase your system's security.
Full credit for this one goes to/.er Bowie J. Poag (16898)
I know most people here would like to see Microsoft going down in flames and F/OSS taking over the world.
Wishful thinking, I say.
They must still have some aces down their corporate sleeves because it appears that they're still hiring people like crazy: a friend of mine who deals in office furniture over in Redmond tells me that they're delivering chairs to Microsoft headquarters as fast as they can manufacture them!
Expensive dual Xeon rack server, merrily buzzing along on the table with the case open while I was installing software
Reach for a CD on the shelf above the server. Fail to see the case screws that are lying above the CD case.
????
Disaster!
The mainboard, both processors, and 4 gig of RAM were toast after that incident. Good thing my employer paid for the spare parts, although I got to hear a few words from my boss that cannot be found in a family-oriented dictionary...
heise.de (those are meant primarily for scanner tests, but they also come in handy for printer comparisons) heise.de, older version (unfortunately, they offer only a 300 dpi version, not the original)
And while you're at heise.de, check out those cool backgrounds, each available in several resolutions. OK for individual use, no redistribution allowed.
From the second image in TFA you can see that the "graphics card" is only a Silicon Image DVI adapter card interfacing with the GMCH of the Intel chipset (probably a 82915G/82945G providing Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900/950 functionality).
There is only one Silicon Image TMDS transmitter on the card, which means that 1600 x 1200 is pretty much the end of the line taking into account the 165 MHz maximum bandwidth of a single link DVI connection, as some people in our company unwittingly discovered when they installed their 24.1-Inch Sun LCDs...
In the operating system market, our competitors include IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Sun"), Microsoft Corp. ("Microsoft") and other Linux distributors. These and other competitors are aggressively pursuing the current UNIX operating system market.
Too bad it's probably just sloppy wording rather than Microsoft ditching Longhorn and going F/OSS (or even "aggressively pursuing the current UNIX operating system market"). 8-)
...the bad news is that the arrest of spammers still makes it into the news headlines - and that includes the dead-tree news, not only slashdot. This somehow tells me we're not doing enough to get rid of that scourge.
Which is more secure, Windows or Linux? It depends on whom you ask. Here's what Bruce Schneier, a reputable security researcher and author of "Applied Cryptography" and other computer-security related books has to say on the matter:
Linux Security
I'm a big fan of the Honeynet Project (and a member of their board of directors). They don't have a security product; they do security research. Basically, they wire computers up with sensors, put them on the Internet, and watch hackers attack them.
They just released a report about the security of Linux:
Recent data from our honeynet sensor grid reveals that the average life expectancy to compromise for an unpatched Linux system has increased from 72 hours to 3 months. This means that a unpatched Linux system with commonly used configurations (such as server builds of RedHat 9.0 or Suse 6.2) have an online mean life expectancy of 3 months before being successfully compromised.
This is much greater than that of Windows systems, which have average life expectancies on the order of a few minutes.
It's also important to remember that this paper focuses on vulnerable systems. The Honeynet researchers deployed almost 20 vulnerable systems to monitor hacker tactics, and found that no one was hacking the systems. That's the real story: the hackers aren't bothering with Linux. Two years ago, a vulnerable Linux system would be hacked in less than three days; now it takes three months.
Why? My guess is a combination of two reasons. One, Linux is that much more secure than Windows. Two, the bad guys are focusing on Windows -- more bang for the buck.
Bruce Schneier Posted on January 06, 2005 at 01:45 PM ------------ Different methodology, different results. My money's on Schneier.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Those are "Community Champions", meaning that they got 10 or more other people to donate for the ad.
Due to the large number of names and the semi-frequent changes and corrections on top of the way the names were sorted (by last name) it was fairly impossible to pull out the Community Champions separately. I decided that it also made more sense for them to be seen as "integrated" within the community, rather than segregated out on their own... AND, in some ways... the underline brings a sort of mysterious attention to them--the kind of special notice that they deserve!
For us, there are hidden costs other than the £ 11 you quote in your post (and those assume that electrical power is relatively cheap - ask a resident of California...). For example, the additional 70W of dissipated energy have to be eliminated through air conditioning, and air conditioning is expensive (think 7000 persons and more than 12000 PCs, displays and printers in one building). Yes, we enforce power saving modes with desktop PCs, printers and monitors wherever possible.
There are more factors that make the switch to TFTs econonomically sensible to us: smaller storage and moving expenses, employee satisfaction and health, lower repair bills. Plus, our company is ISO14001 certified, which means that we're audited regularly about our ecological practices.
You're right, we probably won't save the planet by doing this, but we'll at least have a slightly better conscience on our way to extinction;-)
> If you compare a new 17in (for example) CRT with a new 17in LCD, the power draw is almost the same.
Keep in mind that the viewable area of CRTs is smaller than the specification by about 1", so the comparison should really be 17" TFT vs. 18" CRT (the latter not being widely available, it's pretty much 17" and 19" today).
One reason we are phasing out the CRTs in the company I work for is the reduced energy consumption. According to our measurements, the TFTs use less than 50% power than a CRT of equivalent size, and we haven't seen a single CRT model that comes even close to a typical 17" TFT (around 40W nominal, depending on the manufacturer).
That is all well and good but there are something like 200 million Windows users out there who aren't bound by the dictates of an all-powerful system administrator.
Judging from what I see when I go clean up systems that have slowed down to a crawl, a good-sized part of those users are bound by the dictates of an all-powerful system administrator.
Just do me a favour and stop referring to it as a tax, it just makes you look stupid. Income tax is a tax - you earn money, you pay it; you earn money but don't pay it, you're breaking the law. Windows licence fees a tax? Who's going to arrest yo for not paying for something you've not ordered or received?
Income tax is just one example for taxation. Taxes on gasoline, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, sales (U.S. states tax) are better analogies - you have to pay them, and if don't you're breaking the law. In Microsoft's case there's no law, but the licensing terms they used to impose on OEMs (see next paragraph).
These days, you can buy a PC from major vendors without a Microsoft operating system installed. This has not always been the case: we used to run OS/2 at our company in the early 90s, and placed an RFC for several thousand systems with all the major players in the industry. Since we ran OS/2, we had no use for the Windows licenses that came with the PCs, but as it turned out it was impossible to get them without. The vendor reps would hem and haw when we grilled them about this, but not one of them offered a configuration without a Microsoft Windows 3.1 license, even though it would have given them a considerable pricing advantage and each of them desperately wanted to win the bid. None of them admitted to it, but I suspect that selling systems without a Windows license would have put them in trouble with Microsoft at the time.
As I said, the situation is better today, but you still have less choices if you want to get a system without a Windows preinstall (note: build-your-own is not an option except for hobbyists). Sinking hardware prices mean that the OS and application costs figure more prominently in the equation, which is good for F/OSS and bad for Microsoft who will have to adjust their prices downwards (cf. "Starter Edition").
Slashdot Mirror
Movie review
Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum, flying in the crashed enemy saucer, which is piloted by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, gets inside the mother ship and uses his laptop computer to put a virus into the aliens' main computer system. He can do this because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the "Windows 95" operating system; in fact the whole reason why they have attacked the Earth is to destroy Bill Gates.
You're right, it's not - for the record, I believe that the Apple Tablet will very likely define the way these devices will be designed and used, much like the iPhone did for high-end smartphones - and I'm not an Apple fanboy. Apparently, Dan's brillant satire in the GP seems to be a little too close for comfort for some people here...
We are now in the "As Macworld or the Worldwide Developer’s Conference draws near, the chatter builds to a fever pitch. Rumor sites jockey for position, posting a new unverifiable, contradictory rumor every hour or so. eBay is flooded with six-month-old, slightly used gadgets as college students, underemployed web designers and independent musicians struggle to clear credit card space." phase.
Click here for the rest of the Apple life cycle
German c't magazine recently published an interesting design for a directional WiFi antenna (about 9 dBi gain) which can be built from materials lying around in most households (not in mine, though - unless someone invents an antenna made out of discarded pizza cartons):
Example (he should have been more careful with the length and spacing of the wires)
The original article in c't (German)
Doesn't do much good for 11n, though, as that standard uses several antennas and the signal processing algorithms are optimized to use their specific characteristics.
> The only problem is they're both working on it and not working on it at the same time
I imagine this poses one hell of a problem for middle management when it comes to year-end reviews. I don't know, do they put their developers into boxes containing poison gas flasks linked to geiger counters in order to determine who's slacking off and who's actually working?
Beware of the dork side. Once you step down the dork path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will!
You will live in your mother's basement. You will never kiss a girl. The only girls you will ever see will be pr0n on the internet. You will have no outlet but playing with your own light saber.
Don't cross over to the dork side. /. user macdaddy357)
---
(Full credit for this one goes to
One of the things that I wonder about most in today's tech market is the utter inability of _any_ competitor to design a line of mp3 players that come even close to the Apple iPods in terms of design, price, usability, haptics, brand recognition, packaging, availability and "ecosystem". They may come close in one aspect or the other, or even trump Apple in certain areas such as price, but I couldn't name a single player I'd choose over any one in the iPod line if I wanted to buy one. Every so-called "iPod killer" I've looked at was either ugly, had an user interface designed for martians by martians, lousy battery life, a bad case of "all-your-music-are-belong-to-us" DRM, or cost about the same as an equivalent iPod. The Zune, by the way, is no exception to this - I wouldn't buy this ugly-looking contraption at any price.
This summer, I bought a friend whom I charitably describe as "not a computer genius" a white 1 GB Nano for her birthday, and she was soon ripping CDs with iTunes and downloading songs from the Apple store without my help. She's really proud of it and showed it to all her friends - probably the first piece of computer related tech she owned that didn't make her feel stupid and out-of-it.
By the way, I'm not one of those Apple fanboys and don't even own a separate mp3 player, a 2 GB SD card in my cellphone does it for me. No need to lug around yet another gadget, nursing its battery and keeping it from getting broken or stolen.
A) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
B) If your picture looks like or includes any of the following objects, proceed to step C:
C) You need to increase your system's security.
Full credit for this one goes to
Some of these look pretty serious, although there's not exploit circulating yet:
Intel information about affected drivers
Fixes can be found here
I know most people here would like to see Microsoft going down in flames and F/OSS taking over the world.
Wishful thinking, I say.
They must still have some aces down their corporate sleeves because it appears that they're still hiring people like crazy: a friend of mine who deals in office furniture over in Redmond tells me that they're delivering chairs to Microsoft headquarters as fast as they can manufacture them!
This one hurt:
The mainboard, both processors, and 4 gig of RAM were toast after that incident. Good thing my employer paid for the spare parts, although I got to hear a few words from my boss that cannot be found in a family-oriented dictionary...
druckerchannel.de, part 1
druckerchannel.de, part 2
heise.de (those are meant primarily for scanner tests, but they also come in handy for printer comparisons)
heise.de, older version (unfortunately, they offer only a 300 dpi version, not the original)
And while you're at heise.de, check out those cool backgrounds, each available in several resolutions. OK for individual use, no redistribution allowed.
From the second image in TFA you can see that the "graphics card" is only a Silicon Image DVI adapter card interfacing with the GMCH of the Intel chipset (probably a 82915G/82945G providing Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900/950 functionality).
There is only one Silicon Image TMDS transmitter on the card, which means that 1600 x 1200 is pretty much the end of the line taking into account the 165 MHz maximum bandwidth of a single link DVI connection, as some people in our company unwittingly discovered when they installed their 24.1-Inch Sun LCDs...
The "leg humping" hack should be combined with the "drink from the toilet bowl" hack for added realism.
Bruce Schneier
Posted on January 06, 2005 at 01:45 PM
------------
Different methodology, different results. My money's on Schneier.
Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
I rest my case.
RESTAURANT
or:
ENTER HERE FOR EXPRESS VASECTOMY SERVICE
[Credit: Dave Barry, "Dave Barry Does Japan"]
(from spreadfirefox.com)
For us, there are hidden costs other than the £ 11 you quote in your post (and those assume that electrical power is relatively cheap - ask a resident of California...). For example, the additional 70W of dissipated energy have to be eliminated through air conditioning, and air conditioning is expensive (think 7000 persons and more than 12000 PCs, displays and printers in one building). Yes, we enforce power saving modes with desktop PCs, printers and monitors wherever possible.
;-)
There are more factors that make the switch to TFTs econonomically sensible to us: smaller storage and moving expenses, employee satisfaction and health, lower repair bills. Plus, our company is ISO14001 certified, which means that we're audited regularly about our ecological practices.
You're right, we probably won't save the planet by doing this, but we'll at least have a slightly better conscience on our way to extinction
> If you compare a new 17in (for example) CRT with a new 17in LCD, the power draw is almost the same.
Keep in mind that the viewable area of CRTs is smaller than the specification by about 1", so the comparison should really be 17" TFT vs. 18" CRT (the latter not being widely available, it's pretty much 17" and 19" today).
One reason we are phasing out the CRTs in the company I work for is the reduced energy consumption. According to our measurements, the TFTs use less than 50% power than a CRT of equivalent size, and we haven't seen a single CRT model that comes even close to a typical 17" TFT (around 40W nominal, depending on the manufacturer).
These days, you can buy a PC from major vendors without a Microsoft operating system installed. This has not always been the case: we used to run OS/2 at our company in the early 90s, and placed an RFC for several thousand systems with all the major players in the industry. Since we ran OS/2, we had no use for the Windows licenses that came with the PCs, but as it turned out it was impossible to get them without. The vendor reps would hem and haw when we grilled them about this, but not one of them offered a configuration without a Microsoft Windows 3.1 license, even though it would have given them a considerable pricing advantage and each of them desperately wanted to win the bid. None of them admitted to it, but I suspect that selling systems without a Windows license would have put them in trouble with Microsoft at the time.
As I said, the situation is better today, but you still have less choices if you want to get a system without a Windows preinstall (note: build-your-own is not an option except for hobbyists). Sinking hardware prices mean that the OS and application costs figure more prominently in the equation, which is good for F/OSS and bad for Microsoft who will have to adjust their prices downwards (cf. "Starter Edition").
This nifty quiz can help you assess your phishing detection abilities. Recommended.