Since it is a civil case, they can't just go and send in the FBI to seize everything right away. So the court is formally telling these people: Your computers are evidence, you must treat them as such. Should the people fail to do that, and erase things, they could be charged with tampering with evidence.
In civil cases (sometimes criminal too depending on the circumstances) you commonly see things like this, where the court will instruct someone that they are not to alter or throw away something because it is going to be evidence. Sometimes courts also will order additional retention.
Like say your company doesn't keep e-mail. All employees have to use POP and the server doesn't store anything. That's legal, in most cases you don't have to keep e-mail for records, if you don't want. Then a case comes up that involves it. The court might order you to retain all e-mail, for a time, because of that, though it isn't your standard policy.
Without this order, the employees would be free to wipe their computers if they wished. You and I can do a SATA secure erase on our disks at any time, for any reason, if we want and no legal trouble will come of that. It is our data, we do as we please (as an aside, you should do that on an SSD prior to reinstall, for performance reasons). These people cannot, temporarily, or they could get in trouble, because the court considers that what they have on their computers may be evidence and this order is why they cannot.
Had the same kind of thing happen with a laptop at work. It got stolen from the guy's car. It had Computrace on it so we called them up and had it fired up. After a fair bit of time the police were ready and used the info to go and arrest the people (who of course had a bunch of stolen goods). They then had to hang on to the laptop for like 9 months as evidence even though it was a pretty clear and quick, by court standards, case.
Thing is not only does it take some time for the prosecution to get everything ready (make sure they aren't missing anything and so on) but defense attorneys quite often wish to delay things to distance their client from the event, and to have time to try and negotiate a better plea. As such it can take a lot of time, even when things are straight forward.
The fact that it has always been "right next to doom" is all the evidence you need of that. There have been massive changes in the world, particularly regarding the likelihood of total nuclear war, and it budged hardly at all. It has been "the boy who cried wolf" for a long time now.
It may have started with good intentions about really showing people how close we were to nuclear war, but it has long since just been a random scream about doom with no basis in reality.
Services like instagram absolutely require user submissions to survive. They make their money on advertising and that only works if they have stuff that people want to come and see. Since they have no content creation arm, they rely on user submissions. Piss off the users, and they've got nothing and they are boned.
It would be more like if the guy in the comic was leaving all sorts of cool antique items in Chad's garage and Chad was charging others to come and look at them, but was still saying he was going to take and sell them.
Most Liniksys routers these days run vxWorks. Now that doesn't mean that this vulnerability couldn't be above the OS/driver level and thus still applicable, or that the code isn't broken in the same way, but the GL model is something of an anomaly these days running their Linux firmware. They switches to vxWorks some time ago for most things. They claim it was to use less memory (and they did cut the RAM in their devices), Linux types claim it was to avoid having to GPL things.
You seem to be arguing with someone that doesn't exist in this thread. I've seen nobody say "China can never make quality hardware." What people are saying is that they will need to make quality hardware, before they'll gain much in the way of US marketshare. Many of us have noticed that goods developed and branded by Chinese companies tend to be cheap at the expense of all quality. That will be a problem in the smartphone market most likely.
I'm quite sure China can produce quality goods, because I own some of them. I've goods that were produced in China, to the spec of a foreign company that are quite high quality. However that does not mean that the goods their domestic companies are choosing to produce are high quality.
Also your whining about complacency and bringing down empires shows a real lack of awareness of the US and the world. For one, you can hardly call the US complacent. Lots of top notch R&D happens in the US, lots of top notch manufacturing. A simple example would be the CPU most likely in your PC: Intel. They have the most advanced fabs in the world, and ruthlessly push the technology curve ahead. And yes, they manufacture in the US dominantly (8 of 11 fabs).
What's more there's nothing to "bring down". The US is a nation, not an empire and guess what? The US doesn't have to be #1 at everything to still be a nice place to live. I've been to a number of countries, all of them by definition not #1 at all the things the US is, and they were all quite nice. Canada, Norway, the UK, all places I would be very happy to live. They don't get to claim many "#1s" but they don't have to. It isn't a situation of "Someone is the best and everyone else sucks."
There is room in the world for a successful China AND US, just as there is room for a successful UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and so on.
Branding does matter, and Huawei is rather odd to American ears.
Other than that it'll be all about what they can offer in terms of price, features, and quality. Quality seems to be a big issue for many Chinese brands. They focus on low price above all else, and drive quality down too far. This could be a particular issue in the smartphone market where carries want to lock people in to 2 year contracts. That means that equipment needs to survive for 2 years, or you'll have angry customers.
So long as the anon-tards are ok with me blocking them in their houses with a fleet of ROVs. Same basic deal as what they are talking about: Using a ton of automatically controlled systems to deny access. If they aren't ok with it being done to them, in the real world, then why should we be ok with them doing it to others on computers?
The other thing about DDoS attacks is they almost always involve breaking the law anyhow, by using botnets. Unless you legally have access to 100% of the systems you are using AND the ToS of the providers allows you to generate traffic of the levels you do, then you are already in the wrong. Exploiting systems and using them for a botnet is not legal and it should be extremely obvious why.
These morons don't want a legit protest, because next to nobody agrees with them and they are lazy. If they went out for a physical protest, they'd get like 20 people to show up for one day and it'd be ignored. So they want to use sleazy, illegal, tactics to try and amplify their voice.
It also ignores the fundamental point of a protest. A protest is NOT to disrupt activity, particularly not to have just a couple people do so. It is to show large scale support or opposition for something. It is to let the public, and the government, know that a lot of people want something. It is impressive by its size.
If 250k people show up in a park and protest something, that is impressive, that is something to be noticed, respected. The large number of people makes it noteworthy. If I rent out a shitload of video and sound equipment so I can broadcast myself all over a park, and protest alone, that doesn't make it noteworthy, other than as to what an egomaniac I am.
They don't want freedom, they want tyranny, where they get to be the tyrants. A large segment of the public refusing to do business with a company because of their policies is freedom in its fullest. A small group of people shutting down a company's ability to do business because they don't like it is not.
Because the same group that controls the budget, controls it. Congress sets both, and there is just no reason to have the debt ceiling in that case. It would only be useful if some other party controlled it. It is just a position for political grandstanding as it stands. There is no point to having a limit on someone if that person is the one who sets the limit and can raise it as they please.
Is the government can't save money. Part of a sound personal budget is saving money in good times so it can be spent in bad times. Fair enough, but the government can't do that. It is meaningless for the entity that mints money to "save" it. If the government printed, or rather simply changed the entry in a database, so they had more money, but then didn't put that money in to circulation and "saved" it, it would have the effect as if they'd done nothing. If instead they actually took money out of circulation, kept it when they collected taxes or what have you, it would lead to deflation which is a very, very bad thing.
So what does the government do? Well it borrows. When the government "saves" what it does instead is to pay down the amount of outstanding debt. Then when it "spends savings" it issues more debt.
That is how it works. You can't compare public accounts to private ones because they function different. You can't demand that the government run itself the same way you run your personal finances, because they aren't the same.
That isn't to say that the government doesn't need to keep borrowing reasonable, but it is very different than personal borrowing.
That is the kind of sales that one Call of Duty game can do.
Now that's fine, I'm not saying everything should (or can) be a massive billion dollar hit but let's have a little perspective. What do developers tend to make?
This would particularly be interesting if you take off the outliers. Remove Angry Birds, and any other really big hit apps and then see what it looks like for the masses of developers.
At this point, the nVidia binary driver is the only driver out there that provides what you get on Windows, which is to say all the latest features, good speed, and stability. Anything else makes compromises of varying amounts. Now for a simple game, this might be ok. Some games stick with 2D, use SDL, and call it a day. They'll work with the SVGA X server if it comes to that, perhaps just with some tearing/slow graphics. However for a modern 3D game that makes use of some fancy features, that doesn't cut it.
Well that situation is a problem. For one it is a problem simply because not everyone has an nVidia card but then of course there's the whole religious crusade some people have against closed source, particularly with regards to drivers.
With pro applications, you can just say "Quadro or GTFO" and require the binary driver. People will deal with it. With this? All it would do is get them all kinds of hate mail.
Also, funny enough, when you talk OpenGL, nVidia is the only one who really does it well in Windows too. Not long ago at work we had a system that was running HFSS. That does not require OpenGL, but will use it if available to accelerate graphics. The system had an ass slow graphics card (it was a server repurposed to be a workstation basically) and so a new video card was wanted. We picked up a cheap AMD 7000 series card... and ran in to a strange problem: In remote desktop, HFSS worked fine. On the system itself, no dice.
After going around and around a sneaking suspicion creeped up on me. I pulled the AMD card and stuck in an nVidia card. Everything started working.
nVidia produces top flight OpenGL drivers, which on Windows are as fast as their Driect3D drivers (which are really fast). Everyone else... much more hit or miss.
Seems Firefox has had some problems: http://blog.gerv.net/2011/01/why_firefox_on_linux_is_not_accelerated/. The salient quote being: "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now."
Also doing some more basic compositing and doing a full out 3D game are things that are a bit different in terms of complexity and problems.
I'm going to say Blizzard probably knows what they are talking about. They have quite a few graphics developers, quite a few QA people, quite a few sysadmins, and so on and oh, they were the ones who wrote the client. They probably have a reason for what they are doing.
We have the monitor sitting where it does because it is easy and non-stressful to look at. You keep your neck in a neutral position and can see what you are doing. Your mouse and keyboard are then on the desk for the same reason with regards to your hands. If I move the monitor down to the desk, I'll suffer from neck and back pain in a hurry, because I'll be working hunched over.
Also, if you make your input and output device the same device, then you have the problem that your hands are blocking a large part of your output device. My keyboard is pretty large and my hands block off most of it from view when I type. Why would I want to do that with a display?
You could have two displays, but then the question is again why. Keyboards are mice offer excellent tactile feedback because they are physical devices. I can touch type at 80wpm+ on a physical keyboard, literally with my eyes closed. I can't come anywhere near that on a touchscreen.
Touchscreens are useful only in some situations, mainly where you have a limited amount of space and as such your display and input devices need to be the same. There is just no reason to want them on the desktop. They are more expensive, and less usable, than what we already have.
I think people forget that touchscreens are NOT new. They've been around for a long time, yet there's been no interest in bringing them to desktop computing on a large scale. There are plenty of reasons for it, ergonomics top among them.
They aren't popular, but they do exist. Dell makes one, the ST2220T. We have one at work. It is a 22" monitor (IPS) with an optical touch screen interface that can do 2 point multi-touch. It works ok. Windows 7 works natively with it and goes in to touch mode when you plug it in.
However the fact that it has existed for quite some time, and that you've never heard of it, tells you how popular it has been.
I have a pretty good idea, actually. The interesting thing about doing support is I have a pretty good idea what everyone is doing, since I oversee all the systems. I tend to know when people get computers, what they are for, and so on. Comes with the territory.
He does no real research to speak of, he has published two articles in the last 4 years, in all cases as a co-author with other professors in the department. He hasn't gotten a grant in I don't know how long, he had only a couple grad students, I'm not sure if he has any of them anymore.
All of that regardless: He still owes it to his students to teach a good class. Undergraduates are the reason there is a university. They ARE the work, not a distraction from it. That doesn't mean that research isn't important as well but if you took every research dollar away from the university, it would survive, though it would have to be downsized. If you took all the undergraduate tuition away, it would fold. So while teaching may be a small part of a professor's job (not always the case) it is an important one.
Patching servers is a small part of my job. I don't spend much time on it, most of my time is spent elsewhere, particularly since it is highly automated. I probably spend more time per month fixing printer issues than patching servers, and I only deal with stuff like that if all the student workers are busy. So does that mean I should just phone it in? It is a small part of my job so I shouldn't care, just let it be?
Of course not, it is a highly important part of my job. I need to be mindful, keep up on patches, etc. In the event there is a problem, and more of my time is required to get it done right then that's where my time needs to be spent.
UCPOP. There is newer software, SGP, though it is still outdated. However since the course is one of teaching programming, there is no need for it to be done in clisp, another language could be chosen which would then have different (and superior) tools. This is for computer engineering.
You don't seem to understand: I'm the guy who does instructional computer support. I have a pretty damn good idea of what the classes are actually about, what they use, what alternatives there are, etc. The good professors try to use products that are actually used in industry. Matlab, Cadence, HFSS, ADS, Visual Studio, etc. That way as students learn the theory, the tools they use to do so are practical knowledge as well. If you need a circuit simulation tool, why not use Cadence if possible, as it is actually a tool that companies like nVidia use to design their current gen products.
This particular professor just does not care to do any work. He want to just keep teaching the same thing, over and over, which in technology is even more unacceptable than normal.
About 7.5 years old. It is reasonable that they cease supporting it with new drivers. You can still get drivers for it, they have drivers for OSes up to and including Windows 8, they just aren't keeping support in newer unified drivers.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. They gave you over 7 years of driver updates. It is fairly unrealistic to assume that they'll continue with new support forever, particularly given that there is little reason. The 7 series can't do WDDM 1.1 or 1.2, it can't handle DirectX 10, 10.1, 11 or 11.1, it can't do CUDA, DirectCompute or OpenCL. There is just little in the way of things to implement for it.
If you wish to continue using the card, no problem (though be aware that an Intel 4000 series GPU found in Ivy Bridge processors is likely to be faster, and certainly has far more features) just use the 306 series drivers. It will continue to operate with those no problem.
If the security issues is what you are worried about, it looks like it only affected the 310 drivers, so no issues there.
I work for a research university (doing IT support) and while many professors do choose to do a lot of work, many do not. There are those that work long hours, get a lot of grants and so on. There are others that teach one or maybe two classes, do no real research, and don't even seem to be at work much. However they continue to get paid, continue to hold their jobs.
Also don't think that all professors work hard on the classes they teach. Many phone it in extremely badly. They don't update their curriculum, ever, they have their grad students do all the grading, they don't write good tests, etc. We've got one guy who we are struggling to get software last updated in 1995 working on our new Linux server because he is unwilling to update his course to something newer. Instead of lecturing he has a set of old computer based presentations from circa 2000 that he has his grad students play for the class.
He still has a job, and I've seen no move to try and oust him, even if the could (he has tenure, needless to say).
I think that may be what Forbes is on about. While some professors choose to have a very intense career, it is largely by choice. They care about their teaching, research, or both and heavily invest time in it. However they don't have to, they won't get fired if they are lazy about it. They can phone it in very badly, and yet still keep their job.
Also it takes quite a bit for a professor to get fired or laid off. We've suffered a lot of budget cuts in recent years, and I have not seen any faculty that were shown the door because of it. We had a few volunteer to retire to help their department out, but I cannot think of any that were laid off. That isn't something you can say for a lot of jobs. The job security is pretty good. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is an outside occurrence.
So I can see how it would rate as a low stress job. I'm not saying it is quite as simple as Forbes makes it out to be, but there is something to it.
I can believe in corrupt police framing people, heck we've seen them do it across the globe. I can believe in corrupt police murdering people, again, we've seen it. But why would they murder someone, to frame someone else? That seems like a "supervillian" move, meaning needlessly complex to achieve the actual goal. Just murder the person you want killed and be done with it.
There is just no credibility to this guy.
Also, as a practical matter, if what he says about all this information grabbing is true, he's probably guilty of a bunch of computer crimes in Belize too. He certainly would be in the US. You can't just go and keylog people because you want to.
If you leak only certain things, well then the argument can be made that you did it out of conscience. You saw these things and said "The public needs to know this. Even though I took an oath not to reveal this, this public needs to know, it is more important." This is the kind of thing that happened with the Pentagon Papers.
However when you just go and wholesale release whatever you can grab, well that kinda goes out the window. You didn't do it for conscience reasons, you did it for other reasons, ego it would appear in this case. You want to "get them" or whatever. It wasn't a reasoned action.
Well, intent should and does matter in what you do. The reason behind your actions can be as important as the actions themselves.
There is also the issue of harm and potential harm caused vs what was gained. While it seems to be taken as an article of faith on/. that extreme government crimes were revealed, I've yet to have anyone point them out to me. The only thing that seems to get referred to is the "collateral murder" video which if you watch unedited clearly shows the opposite: There was no crime, the soldiers engaged per the rules of war (which are quite different from regular civilian laws).
A selective leak of information that the public needs to know can be a very noble act. A big dump of anything classified you get your hands on is not.
Intel is NOT crippling Ivy Bridge processors. Rather what happens is that minor variations silicon wafer mean that different chips come out with different characteristics. It doesn't take much to change things either, we are talking thins with features just 22nm wide, little things have large effects.
When you get a wafer of chips, you have to test and bin them. Some just flat out won't work. There'll have been some kind of defect on the wafer and it screws the chip over. You toss those. Some will work, but not in the range you want, again those get tossed. Some will work but not completely, parts will be damaged. For processors you usually have to toss them, GPUs often will disable the affected areas and bin it as a lower end part.
Of the chips that do work, they'll have different characteristics in terms of what clock speed they can handle before having issues and what their resistance is, and thus their power usage.
What's happening here is Intel is taking the best of the best resistance wise and binning them for a new line. They discovered that some IB chips are much lower power usage than they though (if properly frequency limited) and thus are selling a special line for power critical applications.
They can't just "make all the chips better" or something. This is normal manufacturing variation and as a practical matter Intel has some of the best fab processes out there and thus best yields.
CPU speeds are sometimes an artificial limit (though often not, because not only must a chip be capable of a given speed, it has to do it at it's TDP spec) but power usage is not. It uses what it uses.
Apple generally charges $100 per upgrade and they only do fixes for 2 versions old, so they'll update 10.6 now, but not 10.5. At the rate they release, you have to update every few years to keep getting patches. RedHat charges $350-8600 per year depending on the options you want ($350 is for self support 2 socket x86, $8600 is for premium support 4 socket POWER). Oracle charges a retarded amount of Solaris support, it is kinda a hardware/software combo support and is thousands a year, and you have to uninstall any updates if you stop paying for support.
If you pay for the software, you pay for updates at some point. MS is pretty good in that regard. 10 years from the date of release, sometimes extended. So Windows Server 2012, for example, will be supported until 1/10/2023 at a minimum.
Even in the world of free software, updates are still required for support after a time. Canoical supports a Ubutnu release for a max of 5 years (for LTS, regular is 2 years). After that, you have to get the new version. It is free, but you still have to get the new version.
Also, Windows isn't "several hundred dollars" unless you are talking Windows Server, and even then only new usually.
MS provides long support lifecycles, 10 years from release minimum and subject to extension, which XP has been. XP will continue to get updates until mid 2014.
I'm sure they intend to fix it, they just haven't gotten the fix tested yet. MS can't just go and bash out a fix and release it and hope nothing goes wrong, they have to regression test their fixes and it is not a fast process.
Seems like we had a story about this same shit a month ago. It is still basically just scare mongering.
Yes, virus scanners are not good at brand new threats. A threat must be identified, and an update sent out before it can be blocked. Virus scanners are not magic AI boxes that can evaluate code for its intent, nor is there an "evil bit" that is set in bad code.
However, it turns out not to matter since viruses spread like, well, viruses, and virus scanners are inoculation. It is a herd immunity thing. New threats aren't on any systems, they are put up in various places to try and infect systems. They start slowly spreading. They get identified and an update sent out, and their spread is limited as potential hosts are inoculated.
Virus scanners are NOT perfect, but then no defense is. Geeks need to stop living in this fantasy land where there is perfect security. There's not. Ever. There is only layers of defense, defense in depth, to try and keep threats out and eternal vigilance.
Virus scanners are a valuable tool to help strengthen a defense. For most people they'll catch most of the threats they are likly to encounter and that is not nothing.
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Since it is a civil case, they can't just go and send in the FBI to seize everything right away. So the court is formally telling these people: Your computers are evidence, you must treat them as such. Should the people fail to do that, and erase things, they could be charged with tampering with evidence.
In civil cases (sometimes criminal too depending on the circumstances) you commonly see things like this, where the court will instruct someone that they are not to alter or throw away something because it is going to be evidence. Sometimes courts also will order additional retention.
Like say your company doesn't keep e-mail. All employees have to use POP and the server doesn't store anything. That's legal, in most cases you don't have to keep e-mail for records, if you don't want. Then a case comes up that involves it. The court might order you to retain all e-mail, for a time, because of that, though it isn't your standard policy.
Without this order, the employees would be free to wipe their computers if they wished. You and I can do a SATA secure erase on our disks at any time, for any reason, if we want and no legal trouble will come of that. It is our data, we do as we please (as an aside, you should do that on an SSD prior to reinstall, for performance reasons). These people cannot, temporarily, or they could get in trouble, because the court considers that what they have on their computers may be evidence and this order is why they cannot.
Had the same kind of thing happen with a laptop at work. It got stolen from the guy's car. It had Computrace on it so we called them up and had it fired up. After a fair bit of time the police were ready and used the info to go and arrest the people (who of course had a bunch of stolen goods). They then had to hang on to the laptop for like 9 months as evidence even though it was a pretty clear and quick, by court standards, case.
Thing is not only does it take some time for the prosecution to get everything ready (make sure they aren't missing anything and so on) but defense attorneys quite often wish to delay things to distance their client from the event, and to have time to try and negotiate a better plea. As such it can take a lot of time, even when things are straight forward.
The fact that it has always been "right next to doom" is all the evidence you need of that. There have been massive changes in the world, particularly regarding the likelihood of total nuclear war, and it budged hardly at all. It has been "the boy who cried wolf" for a long time now.
It may have started with good intentions about really showing people how close we were to nuclear war, but it has long since just been a random scream about doom with no basis in reality.
Services like instagram absolutely require user submissions to survive. They make their money on advertising and that only works if they have stuff that people want to come and see. Since they have no content creation arm, they rely on user submissions. Piss off the users, and they've got nothing and they are boned.
It would be more like if the guy in the comic was leaving all sorts of cool antique items in Chad's garage and Chad was charging others to come and look at them, but was still saying he was going to take and sell them.
Most Liniksys routers these days run vxWorks. Now that doesn't mean that this vulnerability couldn't be above the OS/driver level and thus still applicable, or that the code isn't broken in the same way, but the GL model is something of an anomaly these days running their Linux firmware. They switches to vxWorks some time ago for most things. They claim it was to use less memory (and they did cut the RAM in their devices), Linux types claim it was to avoid having to GPL things.
You seem to be arguing with someone that doesn't exist in this thread. I've seen nobody say "China can never make quality hardware." What people are saying is that they will need to make quality hardware, before they'll gain much in the way of US marketshare. Many of us have noticed that goods developed and branded by Chinese companies tend to be cheap at the expense of all quality. That will be a problem in the smartphone market most likely.
I'm quite sure China can produce quality goods, because I own some of them. I've goods that were produced in China, to the spec of a foreign company that are quite high quality. However that does not mean that the goods their domestic companies are choosing to produce are high quality.
Also your whining about complacency and bringing down empires shows a real lack of awareness of the US and the world. For one, you can hardly call the US complacent. Lots of top notch R&D happens in the US, lots of top notch manufacturing. A simple example would be the CPU most likely in your PC: Intel. They have the most advanced fabs in the world, and ruthlessly push the technology curve ahead. And yes, they manufacture in the US dominantly (8 of 11 fabs).
What's more there's nothing to "bring down". The US is a nation, not an empire and guess what? The US doesn't have to be #1 at everything to still be a nice place to live. I've been to a number of countries, all of them by definition not #1 at all the things the US is, and they were all quite nice. Canada, Norway, the UK, all places I would be very happy to live. They don't get to claim many "#1s" but they don't have to. It isn't a situation of "Someone is the best and everyone else sucks."
There is room in the world for a successful China AND US, just as there is room for a successful UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and so on.
Branding does matter, and Huawei is rather odd to American ears.
Other than that it'll be all about what they can offer in terms of price, features, and quality. Quality seems to be a big issue for many Chinese brands. They focus on low price above all else, and drive quality down too far. This could be a particular issue in the smartphone market where carries want to lock people in to 2 year contracts. That means that equipment needs to survive for 2 years, or you'll have angry customers.
So long as the anon-tards are ok with me blocking them in their houses with a fleet of ROVs. Same basic deal as what they are talking about: Using a ton of automatically controlled systems to deny access. If they aren't ok with it being done to them, in the real world, then why should we be ok with them doing it to others on computers?
The other thing about DDoS attacks is they almost always involve breaking the law anyhow, by using botnets. Unless you legally have access to 100% of the systems you are using AND the ToS of the providers allows you to generate traffic of the levels you do, then you are already in the wrong. Exploiting systems and using them for a botnet is not legal and it should be extremely obvious why.
These morons don't want a legit protest, because next to nobody agrees with them and they are lazy. If they went out for a physical protest, they'd get like 20 people to show up for one day and it'd be ignored. So they want to use sleazy, illegal, tactics to try and amplify their voice.
It also ignores the fundamental point of a protest. A protest is NOT to disrupt activity, particularly not to have just a couple people do so. It is to show large scale support or opposition for something. It is to let the public, and the government, know that a lot of people want something. It is impressive by its size.
If 250k people show up in a park and protest something, that is impressive, that is something to be noticed, respected. The large number of people makes it noteworthy. If I rent out a shitload of video and sound equipment so I can broadcast myself all over a park, and protest alone, that doesn't make it noteworthy, other than as to what an egomaniac I am.
They don't want freedom, they want tyranny, where they get to be the tyrants. A large segment of the public refusing to do business with a company because of their policies is freedom in its fullest. A small group of people shutting down a company's ability to do business because they don't like it is not.
Because the same group that controls the budget, controls it. Congress sets both, and there is just no reason to have the debt ceiling in that case. It would only be useful if some other party controlled it. It is just a position for political grandstanding as it stands. There is no point to having a limit on someone if that person is the one who sets the limit and can raise it as they please.
It should just be eliminated.
Is the government can't save money. Part of a sound personal budget is saving money in good times so it can be spent in bad times. Fair enough, but the government can't do that. It is meaningless for the entity that mints money to "save" it. If the government printed, or rather simply changed the entry in a database, so they had more money, but then didn't put that money in to circulation and "saved" it, it would have the effect as if they'd done nothing. If instead they actually took money out of circulation, kept it when they collected taxes or what have you, it would lead to deflation which is a very, very bad thing.
So what does the government do? Well it borrows. When the government "saves" what it does instead is to pay down the amount of outstanding debt. Then when it "spends savings" it issues more debt.
That is how it works. You can't compare public accounts to private ones because they function different. You can't demand that the government run itself the same way you run your personal finances, because they aren't the same.
That isn't to say that the government doesn't need to keep borrowing reasonable, but it is very different than personal borrowing.
That is the kind of sales that one Call of Duty game can do.
Now that's fine, I'm not saying everything should (or can) be a massive billion dollar hit but let's have a little perspective. What do developers tend to make?
This would particularly be interesting if you take off the outliers. Remove Angry Birds, and any other really big hit apps and then see what it looks like for the masses of developers.
At this point, the nVidia binary driver is the only driver out there that provides what you get on Windows, which is to say all the latest features, good speed, and stability. Anything else makes compromises of varying amounts. Now for a simple game, this might be ok. Some games stick with 2D, use SDL, and call it a day. They'll work with the SVGA X server if it comes to that, perhaps just with some tearing/slow graphics. However for a modern 3D game that makes use of some fancy features, that doesn't cut it.
Well that situation is a problem. For one it is a problem simply because not everyone has an nVidia card but then of course there's the whole religious crusade some people have against closed source, particularly with regards to drivers.
With pro applications, you can just say "Quadro or GTFO" and require the binary driver. People will deal with it. With this? All it would do is get them all kinds of hate mail.
Also, funny enough, when you talk OpenGL, nVidia is the only one who really does it well in Windows too. Not long ago at work we had a system that was running HFSS. That does not require OpenGL, but will use it if available to accelerate graphics. The system had an ass slow graphics card (it was a server repurposed to be a workstation basically) and so a new video card was wanted. We picked up a cheap AMD 7000 series card... and ran in to a strange problem: In remote desktop, HFSS worked fine. On the system itself, no dice.
After going around and around a sneaking suspicion creeped up on me. I pulled the AMD card and stuck in an nVidia card. Everything started working.
nVidia produces top flight OpenGL drivers, which on Windows are as fast as their Driect3D drivers (which are really fast). Everyone else... much more hit or miss.
Seems Firefox has had some problems: http://blog.gerv.net/2011/01/why_firefox_on_linux_is_not_accelerated/. The salient quote being: "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now."
Also doing some more basic compositing and doing a full out 3D game are things that are a bit different in terms of complexity and problems.
I'm going to say Blizzard probably knows what they are talking about. They have quite a few graphics developers, quite a few QA people, quite a few sysadmins, and so on and oh, they were the ones who wrote the client. They probably have a reason for what they are doing.
We have the monitor sitting where it does because it is easy and non-stressful to look at. You keep your neck in a neutral position and can see what you are doing. Your mouse and keyboard are then on the desk for the same reason with regards to your hands. If I move the monitor down to the desk, I'll suffer from neck and back pain in a hurry, because I'll be working hunched over.
Also, if you make your input and output device the same device, then you have the problem that your hands are blocking a large part of your output device. My keyboard is pretty large and my hands block off most of it from view when I type. Why would I want to do that with a display?
You could have two displays, but then the question is again why. Keyboards are mice offer excellent tactile feedback because they are physical devices. I can touch type at 80wpm+ on a physical keyboard, literally with my eyes closed. I can't come anywhere near that on a touchscreen.
Touchscreens are useful only in some situations, mainly where you have a limited amount of space and as such your display and input devices need to be the same. There is just no reason to want them on the desktop. They are more expensive, and less usable, than what we already have.
I think people forget that touchscreens are NOT new. They've been around for a long time, yet there's been no interest in bringing them to desktop computing on a large scale. There are plenty of reasons for it, ergonomics top among them.
They aren't popular, but they do exist. Dell makes one, the ST2220T. We have one at work. It is a 22" monitor (IPS) with an optical touch screen interface that can do 2 point multi-touch. It works ok. Windows 7 works natively with it and goes in to touch mode when you plug it in.
However the fact that it has existed for quite some time, and that you've never heard of it, tells you how popular it has been.
I have a pretty good idea, actually. The interesting thing about doing support is I have a pretty good idea what everyone is doing, since I oversee all the systems. I tend to know when people get computers, what they are for, and so on. Comes with the territory.
He does no real research to speak of, he has published two articles in the last 4 years, in all cases as a co-author with other professors in the department. He hasn't gotten a grant in I don't know how long, he had only a couple grad students, I'm not sure if he has any of them anymore.
All of that regardless: He still owes it to his students to teach a good class. Undergraduates are the reason there is a university. They ARE the work, not a distraction from it. That doesn't mean that research isn't important as well but if you took every research dollar away from the university, it would survive, though it would have to be downsized. If you took all the undergraduate tuition away, it would fold. So while teaching may be a small part of a professor's job (not always the case) it is an important one.
Patching servers is a small part of my job. I don't spend much time on it, most of my time is spent elsewhere, particularly since it is highly automated. I probably spend more time per month fixing printer issues than patching servers, and I only deal with stuff like that if all the student workers are busy. So does that mean I should just phone it in? It is a small part of my job so I shouldn't care, just let it be?
Of course not, it is a highly important part of my job. I need to be mindful, keep up on patches, etc. In the event there is a problem, and more of my time is required to get it done right then that's where my time needs to be spent.
UCPOP. There is newer software, SGP, though it is still outdated. However since the course is one of teaching programming, there is no need for it to be done in clisp, another language could be chosen which would then have different (and superior) tools. This is for computer engineering.
You don't seem to understand: I'm the guy who does instructional computer support. I have a pretty damn good idea of what the classes are actually about, what they use, what alternatives there are, etc. The good professors try to use products that are actually used in industry. Matlab, Cadence, HFSS, ADS, Visual Studio, etc. That way as students learn the theory, the tools they use to do so are practical knowledge as well. If you need a circuit simulation tool, why not use Cadence if possible, as it is actually a tool that companies like nVidia use to design their current gen products.
This particular professor just does not care to do any work. He want to just keep teaching the same thing, over and over, which in technology is even more unacceptable than normal.
About 7.5 years old. It is reasonable that they cease supporting it with new drivers. You can still get drivers for it, they have drivers for OSes up to and including Windows 8, they just aren't keeping support in newer unified drivers.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. They gave you over 7 years of driver updates. It is fairly unrealistic to assume that they'll continue with new support forever, particularly given that there is little reason. The 7 series can't do WDDM 1.1 or 1.2, it can't handle DirectX 10, 10.1, 11 or 11.1, it can't do CUDA, DirectCompute or OpenCL. There is just little in the way of things to implement for it.
If you wish to continue using the card, no problem (though be aware that an Intel 4000 series GPU found in Ivy Bridge processors is likely to be faster, and certainly has far more features) just use the 306 series drivers. It will continue to operate with those no problem.
If the security issues is what you are worried about, it looks like it only affected the 310 drivers, so no issues there.
I work for a research university (doing IT support) and while many professors do choose to do a lot of work, many do not. There are those that work long hours, get a lot of grants and so on. There are others that teach one or maybe two classes, do no real research, and don't even seem to be at work much. However they continue to get paid, continue to hold their jobs.
Also don't think that all professors work hard on the classes they teach. Many phone it in extremely badly. They don't update their curriculum, ever, they have their grad students do all the grading, they don't write good tests, etc. We've got one guy who we are struggling to get software last updated in 1995 working on our new Linux server because he is unwilling to update his course to something newer. Instead of lecturing he has a set of old computer based presentations from circa 2000 that he has his grad students play for the class.
He still has a job, and I've seen no move to try and oust him, even if the could (he has tenure, needless to say).
I think that may be what Forbes is on about. While some professors choose to have a very intense career, it is largely by choice. They care about their teaching, research, or both and heavily invest time in it. However they don't have to, they won't get fired if they are lazy about it. They can phone it in very badly, and yet still keep their job.
Also it takes quite a bit for a professor to get fired or laid off. We've suffered a lot of budget cuts in recent years, and I have not seen any faculty that were shown the door because of it. We had a few volunteer to retire to help their department out, but I cannot think of any that were laid off. That isn't something you can say for a lot of jobs. The job security is pretty good. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is an outside occurrence.
So I can see how it would rate as a low stress job. I'm not saying it is quite as simple as Forbes makes it out to be, but there is something to it.
I can believe in corrupt police framing people, heck we've seen them do it across the globe. I can believe in corrupt police murdering people, again, we've seen it. But why would they murder someone, to frame someone else? That seems like a "supervillian" move, meaning needlessly complex to achieve the actual goal. Just murder the person you want killed and be done with it.
There is just no credibility to this guy.
Also, as a practical matter, if what he says about all this information grabbing is true, he's probably guilty of a bunch of computer crimes in Belize too. He certainly would be in the US. You can't just go and keylog people because you want to.
If you leak only certain things, well then the argument can be made that you did it out of conscience. You saw these things and said "The public needs to know this. Even though I took an oath not to reveal this, this public needs to know, it is more important." This is the kind of thing that happened with the Pentagon Papers.
However when you just go and wholesale release whatever you can grab, well that kinda goes out the window. You didn't do it for conscience reasons, you did it for other reasons, ego it would appear in this case. You want to "get them" or whatever. It wasn't a reasoned action.
Well, intent should and does matter in what you do. The reason behind your actions can be as important as the actions themselves.
There is also the issue of harm and potential harm caused vs what was gained. While it seems to be taken as an article of faith on /. that extreme government crimes were revealed, I've yet to have anyone point them out to me. The only thing that seems to get referred to is the "collateral murder" video which if you watch unedited clearly shows the opposite: There was no crime, the soldiers engaged per the rules of war (which are quite different from regular civilian laws).
A selective leak of information that the public needs to know can be a very noble act. A big dump of anything classified you get your hands on is not.
Intel is NOT crippling Ivy Bridge processors. Rather what happens is that minor variations silicon wafer mean that different chips come out with different characteristics. It doesn't take much to change things either, we are talking thins with features just 22nm wide, little things have large effects.
When you get a wafer of chips, you have to test and bin them. Some just flat out won't work. There'll have been some kind of defect on the wafer and it screws the chip over. You toss those. Some will work, but not in the range you want, again those get tossed. Some will work but not completely, parts will be damaged. For processors you usually have to toss them, GPUs often will disable the affected areas and bin it as a lower end part.
Of the chips that do work, they'll have different characteristics in terms of what clock speed they can handle before having issues and what their resistance is, and thus their power usage.
What's happening here is Intel is taking the best of the best resistance wise and binning them for a new line. They discovered that some IB chips are much lower power usage than they though (if properly frequency limited) and thus are selling a special line for power critical applications.
They can't just "make all the chips better" or something. This is normal manufacturing variation and as a practical matter Intel has some of the best fab processes out there and thus best yields.
CPU speeds are sometimes an artificial limit (though often not, because not only must a chip be capable of a given speed, it has to do it at it's TDP spec) but power usage is not. It uses what it uses.
Apple generally charges $100 per upgrade and they only do fixes for 2 versions old, so they'll update 10.6 now, but not 10.5. At the rate they release, you have to update every few years to keep getting patches. RedHat charges $350-8600 per year depending on the options you want ($350 is for self support 2 socket x86, $8600 is for premium support 4 socket POWER). Oracle charges a retarded amount of Solaris support, it is kinda a hardware/software combo support and is thousands a year, and you have to uninstall any updates if you stop paying for support.
If you pay for the software, you pay for updates at some point. MS is pretty good in that regard. 10 years from the date of release, sometimes extended. So Windows Server 2012, for example, will be supported until 1/10/2023 at a minimum.
Even in the world of free software, updates are still required for support after a time. Canoical supports a Ubutnu release for a max of 5 years (for LTS, regular is 2 years). After that, you have to get the new version. It is free, but you still have to get the new version.
Also, Windows isn't "several hundred dollars" unless you are talking Windows Server, and even then only new usually.
MS provides long support lifecycles, 10 years from release minimum and subject to extension, which XP has been. XP will continue to get updates until mid 2014.
I'm sure they intend to fix it, they just haven't gotten the fix tested yet. MS can't just go and bash out a fix and release it and hope nothing goes wrong, they have to regression test their fixes and it is not a fast process.
Seems like we had a story about this same shit a month ago. It is still basically just scare mongering.
Yes, virus scanners are not good at brand new threats. A threat must be identified, and an update sent out before it can be blocked. Virus scanners are not magic AI boxes that can evaluate code for its intent, nor is there an "evil bit" that is set in bad code.
However, it turns out not to matter since viruses spread like, well, viruses, and virus scanners are inoculation. It is a herd immunity thing. New threats aren't on any systems, they are put up in various places to try and infect systems. They start slowly spreading. They get identified and an update sent out, and their spread is limited as potential hosts are inoculated.
Virus scanners are NOT perfect, but then no defense is. Geeks need to stop living in this fantasy land where there is perfect security. There's not. Ever. There is only layers of defense, defense in depth, to try and keep threats out and eternal vigilance.
Virus scanners are a valuable tool to help strengthen a defense. For most people they'll catch most of the threats they are likly to encounter and that is not nothing.