The C code, a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (and associated DOS documentation), and a pulling back of "optimised" asm to boring old "slow" C code and you'd be up.
I'd give it a month before someone's made an SDL version without any asm left in it at all.
"And I'm not talking about filming victims or suspects in a sensitive situation."
So, apart from the exclusions you consciously made....
The fact is that police being recorded by devices themselves - no, there should be no exception, with adequate oversight and HARSH penalties for even a minute on-duty without video record once they are in place.
But being recorded by the public - sorry, sometimes the police have to step in and say "go away". Whether to calm a riot and disperse you (notice one of these phrases is not "stop filming" but "go away"). Or to stop someone finding out their son's dead by some moron on YouTube uploading his murder.
But, over and above that, every time you treat the police like the enemy, some people in the police will treat you like the enemy too. I'm all for the police being made to record their actions, if nothing else than to cover their own backside when something like this happens. But to have a dozen people crowded around every arrest of a drunk on a Saturday night trying to film it - that's just inflaming a situation and making their job harder.
If you feel that YOU need to film a police officer, there's something inherently wrong with policing that filming won't fix. But if you want police to film themselves and be required to produce that in evidence upon a court order and with appropriate moderation to ensure it's necessary - that's an entirely different matter.
The last thing some cop on the late-shift pinning a nutter who's trying to kill him to the floor outside a pub needs is twenty people all clamouring in his face to get "the shot", uploading it to YouTube with their own commentary that misses off all of the previous chase and tags it as just "police brutality". But that does not mean he shouldn't have a camera on his person that he suffers sanctions for if there's no account for why it stopped recording.
"But could you explain, officer, why you requested the woman to stop filming for apparently no reason, shortly before she alleges that you beat her?"
And I think the requirements are a bit higher than "asked you to", more along the lines of officially ordering you to, for a given purpose, because you're creating a nuisance or otherwise interfering.
It's not to say that they can't still stop you filming, but it all becomes a lot more suspicious when you use a police ability normally reserved for acts of horror or where you could tip a suicidal person over the edge to stop you filming what they claim is just a legitimate traffic stop.
Would love to meet the sales rep at a company that tries to charge me for backing up my workplace's software.
The amount of backups taken and required would make even the cheapest bit of software 10-fold more expensive just because of that clause, and see us move to an alternative. And I do that because my employer needs that kind of data security.
I bet, even if that were true, there'd always be a competitor who would sell me their competing product but not charge for backups (because, let's face it, they'd get more business and more money overall that way),
Yeah, how dare I pay an absolute pittance to support what was a brilliant and unique site nearly - what - 10 years ago?
To be honest, not really that bothered about the money (it was less than $10 I think), but the cheek of ignoring it is annoying enough to make me go elsewhere.
Can anyone tell me why, as a subscriber with the "Disable Advertising" button, I keep getting ads at the top of Slashdot, not matter the status of the button? Only happened the last few days.
Pretty sure the terms of what I paid for say I shouldn't be seeing it, even years after paying.
The alternative of runtime-performance hits, and allowing arrays to grow to unreasonable - and uncontrollable - sizes without inserting checks similar to those that combat buffer overflows just seems to be something that nobody wants.
Fact is, moan all you like, system libraries can be written in any language you like, and interface with C code and C-style functions quite easily. There's nothing stopping - as Windows is moving towards - system libraries being written in a managed language and interfacing with old-style C API's.
But nobody's doing that. Not because buffer overflow in C isn't a problem, not because they naively think their code is bulletproof. But simply because of reasons of performance, memory use and knock-on library sizes and dependencies.
Nobody is stopping yourself, or anyone else, from rewriting something as performance critical as GnuTLS in any language you like. But nobody has. And if they have, nobody that develops code that requires GnuTLS uses it.
For kernels and drivers, I'd fight the corner of "It has to be C, or a similar, dangerous, low-level language". Once you get to the application layer of things like OpenSSL, GnuTLS, or pretty much any library, there's no excuse. Nobody's writing them, and if they are they are losing out to the C-based libraries. And not BECAUSE they are written in C and we all have this nostalgia for crappy C code, not BECAUSE these things must be written in C to work properly, not BECAUSE the API is C-based and not language interfaces with it - but obviously because of other reasons.
What those exact reasons are, I'll leave others to discuss. But I greatly suspect it's to do with the huge size and impact of such managed languages.
What do start-up speeds, pinning apps, 3 monitors, resume from sleep, etc. have to do with a fucking start menu? Nothing.
P.S. My start menu setup - no program is more than 4 keypresses away. Windows-key to open the menu. P for programs. I for Internet. M for Mozilla. F for Firefox. My productivity is not improved ONE BIT by having narrow-down search (have it on my email client, it's great, on my start menu, no?)
Newbies don't get the tiles any quicker than anyone else. In fact, if you don't see that Metro is Active Desktop from '95 brought back from the dead, it makes me think you weren't around then. We did this 20 years ago. We rejected it 20 years ago in favour of a more obvious system than hiding all my icons and letting me hunt for them by knowing their name.
The Metro interface may work for you, it doesn't work for everyone. That's not hard to understand. I can't work on multi-monitor setups, it pisses me off - and yes, I program. I couldn't do it since the days of the monochrome debug monitor you could attach back when that was LUDICROUSLY expensive and stderr actually meant something.
FORCING someone, anyone, into a pattern of working is not good. And sure it's the people most used to their working pattern that are rebelling. The people who have honed their computing environment over decades. Why piss them off, at the expense of a single Boolean option? Seriously? What's the point?
Fact is, I use Windows 8 without all that crap. I deploy Windows 8 without all that crap. It's STUPENDOUSLY fast, even on built-in drivers (one of the best features of 8, in my opinion, is the ability to deploy a single, driverless image to basically ANYTHING and have it pick up enough default drivers to be usable immediately - I have deployed two complete networks with it, without the only single specific driver I've ever had to install on top being a high-security smartcard interface for banking purposes). And, guess what, my users ask for the start menu. I give it to them. I give them Classic Shell so - if they want - they can get back to Metro in one Boolean option. Or holding Shift when pressing the Windows key (or vice-versa, if they want).
Fact is, it's not about what YOU think is best for everyone. One size does not fit all. Windows 8 blew my mind at first (Touch interface, right? Deployed it on a touchscreen PC without a mouse. Accidentally opened IE in Metro. Took me and my boss 10 minutes of pissing about and then a Google to figure out the gesture to close the fucker - swipe down from top). Windows 8 blows newbies minds, even though that haven't used a PC before (which is fast approaching zero, if not there already now).
Nobody gives a shit about Metro not because nobody uses it, but because we're FORCED into it. For no good reason. I'll beat any metric you like on a system that I'm used to and I've set up, compared to the default out-of-the-box Metro shit. And every second I spend training for it or fighting against it, is a second I could spend doing some actual work. So I don't piss about. I install ClassicShell, wherever I go, I deploy ClassicShell for hundreds of users - and I've yet to have one say "Give me Metro back" (and if they did, I literally can say to them "There's the option, just switch it off or customise as you see fit" without them affecting ANYONE else).
Queen Elizabeth I put lead-based white-paint on her face because she didn't want to look "tan" like people who work outdoors for a living.
Then the tan was a status symbol meaning you could travel to foreign countries. Now it's a symbol that you're a cheap holiday maker / self-tanner who goes just for the look of the thing and, thus, it's out of fashion.
It's never as simple as "trait X is more attractive", even in genetics.
Ignoring the rumour-based article with zero facts:
What we really need then is a distributed, peer-to-peer, anonymised source-control system.
Publish a hash and that hash corresponds to a certain "official" branch of the code and can't be retracted. Do it right and any fork can publish their hash and maintain their own branch even if the original project goes under. Source-code verification - that's no harder than today, but you could set up code verification of, say, the most popular hash the same way you do TrueCrypt audits.
However, before that, we really need a bunch of people to be pushing out patches to TC and be shown to still be developing it, anonymous or not. I don't particularly care about TC being taken down - to me that just proves it's usefulness and effectiveness, if that's true. What I care about is, whether the project died or was taken down, we need people to develop on it - and at least start adding UEFI etc. support.
You just make sure there's more than one bit of information per "cycle" in the signal.
That's achieved by various methods, many clever and mathematical, some as simple as changing the phase of the signal (imagine a perfect sine wave at 5Hz - now suddenly change it to a bit further through the wave, you get a spike, a tangent, a visible change, but you're still on 5Hz) - the same way you can have AM (amplitude modulation) on a certain frequency, and FM (frequency modulation) over the top of it, this is called PM (phase modulation). When you join all these techniques together, get into MIMO, add all sorts of clever coding theory, you can get as much as you like from the signal - the only limit is how accurate you are sending and receiving.
Modems used this. Your car stereo uses some of it. Your mobile phone uses it. And wireless access points basically would be awful without it (equivalent to "radio modems", which can be pretty atrocious in their speeds for consumer-level tech).
Doesn't matter how fast you do that, you won't sell it to gamers just through added latency, control (how the hell are you going to game via a tablet?) and screen-size. Plus who the hell wants to buy two home computers just so they can use one of them from a distance? Look at Steam Home Streaming if you want to do this - I assure you, it has a multitude of limitations even with beefy PC's at both ends.
The thin-client problem is one that solves only a handful of the problems people have with larger systems (not home installs) and has limitations that see everyone go through "thin-client / fat client / thin client" switches endlessly.
Fact is, if you have to have two machines to game on one, you're causing yourself problems.
As someone who's just ripped out a thin-client install in a school (where it was slow, un-updateable, had lots of limitations, etc. and where it's actually been cheaper all along just to put "real" machines into the rooms) I assure you that it's something we would all like the idea of until we tried to use it.
Not that I can't find a use case for faster Wifi. But, as you point out, 99% of people won't need it until it becomes almost obsolete.
And, still, the power it supplies will be unable to compensate you for anywhere near the purchase price + installation cost + maintenance costs over its lifetime, let alone pay back the original investors from just the "profit" part of that payment to the company that made it.
Sorry, it's just a huge waste. I'm all for progress and advancement and science, but when it comes from ideas that are just poor commercial products to a handful of super-rich wastrels for the look of the thing, at the expense of ideas where you could easily make a difference, it really bugs me.
And, I invoke my golden rule: Call me again when I can buy it in a shop near me. Until then, it's all pie in the sky. And if you can't get that far - there's a reason for that. Maybe your idea just isn't that great?
Getting approval to replace even a mile of actual road with that stuff is going to take you decades before you even start.
The recovery disks all work. I can guarantee you. I had a batch of laptops that we Truecrypt and I saved all the recovery disks as ISO's onto a removable device (a Zalman - you put.iso's on it and it pretends to be a virtual USB CD-Rom which you can boot from).
We had a particular set of laptops with a particular BIOS version that was incompatible with any form of encryption. We found it out after encrypting every laptop (the problem was that the BIOS expected a certain part of the disk to be zeros, and in plain NTFS filesystems it always was - even the pre-boot check passed because that part hadn't gone encrypted yet). Upon full encryption of the disk, the computers became unbootable - and though we had backups, the sheer amount of data and laptops we had meant we didn't want to restore them all.
So we fought for a BIOS update from the manufacturer (they delivered, eventually, but weeks later) but in the meantime needed to decrypt all those laptops. We booted the Zalman with the respective ISO file, manually decrypted them all (which takes a long time using only BIOS calls without the benefit of SATA drivers etc.), and gave them back to users for a while until the BIOS update arrived.
Sorry, but there's nothing wrong with Truecrypt's rescue disk functionality. You just need to store and verify the rescue disks and remember the password that you used on them (even if you later change the PC to use a different TC password). I recovered over a dozen random laptops using them.
I'd say it's easier to ignore one comment, than an entire front-page article.
Especially given you can just "foe" me and never see me again. No matter how many times I've tried that with shitty articles / authors, I still end up with more shitty articles by the same authors.
Who are you, why should we care, where would we go if we WANTED to read this personal musing (not here, I'm guessing). Seriously.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but honestly Slashdot is not a "weblog". This kind of post is much better suited to your blog, but I'm guessing it doesn't get any hits when you post it there. Your amateur rendition of why the world should be your way is of no interest to me. It's not even tech-related, to be honest.
It's junk like this that TURNS PEOPLE OFF this website.
It's the old thin-client problem, reinvented with virtual machines.
Of course you can run 16 computers/users off one VM, but they will each get 1/16th of the capabilities of the computer, on average.
Sometimes that scales - e.g. small businesses virtualising their half-idle servers. Sometimes it doesn't - e.g. most thin clients when you want to get towards 3D or anything intensive.
But for power users? It almost always doesn't. If you need that kind of power, you have to spend ridiculous amounts of money, or you have to keep the resources to one-or-more per user (i.e. give them a desktop with a decent 3D card).
It's what killed off OnLive. Sure, if we all played 2D Mario games, it would be fabulous. But we don't. And as soon as the demand on the hardware increases, you can't afford to share it when you could get twice as much power for the same money.
Here's a hint then: Don't upload confidential files.
Why does your stupidity of an unrealistic use case (uploading a file you don't want to share to an untrusted third party) render the service untenable?
Fact is, I use VirusTotal a lot of deal with confidential information all the time. I use it to reassure myself that the things I'm handling aren't going to affect the confidential data or the programs that handle it.
Personally, I think every PDF->Word or Word->PDF service is infinitely more dangerous as a source of uploaded confidential information that could be retained.
And, as pointed out, you DO NOT have to use the service, DO NOT have to upload the file at all, and DO NOT have to use this client...
And with Virustotal, you're free to calculate the hash yourself and go look up the URL it goes to (in fact, VirusTotal clients do this - generate a hash, lookup the hash, and only upload if it doesn't already exist).
And why would you be uploading personal files to check for viruses? Surely your personal files are the ones you KNOW are clean? It's the random crap you download and are sent that you have to scan.
In my previous house, bamboo was all over the back garden. You couldn't get rid of it. Every summer we'd cut it all down and burn it, and every winter it would come back. Sometimes even in the same summer. You could walk over the grass and suddenly impale yourself upon an 2-inch-tall bamboo shoot that was taking root - no kidding.
It grew so fast that you had to get every bit or a few weeks later you'd have a stem that you need a hacksaw to cut through. And it could easily grow 6-8 feet tall and become a hazard.
Pretty much ruined the tiny garden we had. The stuff is a pain, and that was just in the UK.
Useful construction material, no doubt, but we've known that for thousands of years. The problem is that where it falls short is biodegradement, so you have to do unnatural things to it so that it won't biodegrade. And farming it properly is no mean feat if you care about the surrounding lands not becoming unofficial bamboo farms too.
I'd happily build a house, or a tree house, or just about anything from it. But don't put one seed of it near my back garden, thanks.
Every time I've ever used Bing to find something, unless it's quite literally things like the frontpage of some project that I search the name of, I can never find it. I can even narrow it down, deliberately AIMING for the page that I know exists and the keywords on that page, and exact phrases that appear there.
On Google, bang, first hits. On Bing, you can scroll pages and anything you hit that's relevant appears to be mostly by accident.
Honestly, the most popular search on Bing must be "google.com" or "Firefox" (when people first set up their IE-only computers with Bing as default).
That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology. They are now so ubiquitous that there's little point spending a fortune for something that can do the same, but "slightly faster" or with more megapixels, or whatever.
Sure, there are evolutions, and merges of technology, and lots of new developments still to come but if the phones don't have something new, then they are all just the same as each other, give or take a few statistics here or there.
Smartphones beat out ordinary mobile phones, that's for sure, but it was a long while coming. Tablets are in the same place at the moment - they are powerful enough to run almost anything and so there's little to distinguish them except for company name and some random technical specifications.
Welcome to the era of ubiquitous computing, where my mobile phone can plot a course across Europe, suck down traffic data and tell people on Facebook when I'm going to arrive quicker than I could do it myself on a full PC. While also handling all my calls, monitoring my car engine, checking my Exchange accounts, etc.
The problem we have now is not pricing - the cost of something going down is rarely a problem for the consumers or the manufacturers and their suppliers. The problem we have now is what comes next? We all have Turing-capable machines that run at stupendous speeds, and most of us actually have several. The question is how do you design your services to take account of this - TV streaming, etc. is still in its infancy and pretty much in denial at the moment.
I have to say, the computer is a tool. But it's MY tool. It's there - existing, in front of ME - purely, simply and solely because I require it to help me and be something I can use to make my life easier.
That said, almost everything that is supposed to "help" me actually gets in my way. Not everything, but almost everything. Autocomplete is one of my bugbears, for sure. And while smart quotes, etc. help most of the time, they just aren't smart enough and - when you WANT to override them - break the workflow in the way you have to override them (and often I see myself, and other users, in a tug-of-war between what they want and what the computer wants to do and keeps repeatedly doing despite obvious dislike on the part of the user... things like bulleted lists, horizontal lines, hyperlinks and paragraphs in Word just refusing to apply to the correct sections of text are a classic example).
This is also my problem with "modern" Windows and Ubuntu desktops - too much shit doing stuff without me asking it to do that. I don't want crap indexing and running off to the net to look for drivers. You might think it's useless but it's ONE CHECKBOX to let me turn it off and work how I want to. There's too much "updating this" at an inconvenient time, forcing me to reboot and bugging me about it at irregular intervals, too much "I've put your top ten used items up here" right where I'd prefer to CHOOSE what ten tools to put up there - because my workflow changes over time and simple statistics can't reflect what I need at any one point.
There's a reason I have a Start Menu setup where I have major categories (each with a unique initial letter for easy selection) and sub-categories (mostly with a unique initial letter) and can get to any program I like from THOUSANDS in two-three characters where any Windows search algorithm is basically useless without half of a weird program name that I never remember, typed properly, followed by a lot of hunting and mouse/cursor selection of the program I'm actually after from a list of 10 irrelevant items.
That computer you sold me? It's mine. That OS you sold me? It's mine. The programs I install? They're mine.
It's ALL there to let me save time. That time includes initial training time and even the extra microsecond I get from selecting something from the keyboard alone rather than reaching for the mouse, or whatever other action saves me milliseconds each time but is performed THOUSANDS of times a day.
Fuck off and let me use the tool I've bought to work the way *I* want it to. And if you don't (e.g. Windows 8), the choice is easy - I fix your shit for you, or I just don't use it. Either option is fine by me, because my workflow matters more.
I've never seen an MS dialog that is just "running off to do something" that actually gave me any benefit. Reporting errors. Looking up solutions. Gathering diagnostics. Looking for updates. Hell, file copy dialogs are so bad now that you have to use an explorer replacement to make them perform anywhere near sensibly or speedily. It takes longer to GUI-copy a few thousand files than it does to do ten times that amount on the command-line.
Call me old-fashioned, but my computer is under my control. It does what I say. It does it when I say. And only when I say. Just the background services on a modern machine scare the crap out of me. So much unnecessary shit running all the time waiting to go run... but don't tamper! Turn off Windows Search in Windows 8 and you can't install a language pack, for instance.
I have to say that I've taken to dialling back the last few versions of Windows to something more akin to Windows 98 than anything else. My users have been grateful for it (hundreds, if not thousands of them over the years). I get to work the way I need to. And people who want to customise and have all the fancy shit can.
Fact is, when you're a one-finger typer who presses Caps Lock twice to get a single capital letter, you don't notice the productivity tha
I don't think I've ever seen a CD / DVD (production, or that I've burnt) not work until it's literally destroyed. If you don't scratch them - which is easy to ensure, just put them in a nice case either jewel case or soft-cover - then they just keep working. I can still read CD's that I've burned that are over 10 years old - and people always say that CD-R's, especially the cheap CD-R's that I use, deteriorate quicker than normal CD's.
In fact, only one of them - the day I burned it - failed a checksum verification check, so I investigated (as that was very odd) and found a single byte was in error. I wrote the byte to change on a slip of paper and put it inside the case.
To this day, you can read that CD, correct that byte, and it works perfectly.
I've seen a dozen times more DVD's / CD's that I can't read from day-one because of some stupid DRM than I ever have material deterioration.
Slashdot Mirror
TL;DR
(but wrote you off as a nutter anyway)
The C code, a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (and associated DOS documentation), and a pulling back of "optimised" asm to boring old "slow" C code and you'd be up.
I'd give it a month before someone's made an SDL version without any asm left in it at all.
"And I'm not talking about filming victims or suspects in a sensitive situation."
So, apart from the exclusions you consciously made....
The fact is that police being recorded by devices themselves - no, there should be no exception, with adequate oversight and HARSH penalties for even a minute on-duty without video record once they are in place.
But being recorded by the public - sorry, sometimes the police have to step in and say "go away". Whether to calm a riot and disperse you (notice one of these phrases is not "stop filming" but "go away"). Or to stop someone finding out their son's dead by some moron on YouTube uploading his murder.
But, over and above that, every time you treat the police like the enemy, some people in the police will treat you like the enemy too. I'm all for the police being made to record their actions, if nothing else than to cover their own backside when something like this happens. But to have a dozen people crowded around every arrest of a drunk on a Saturday night trying to film it - that's just inflaming a situation and making their job harder.
If you feel that YOU need to film a police officer, there's something inherently wrong with policing that filming won't fix. But if you want police to film themselves and be required to produce that in evidence upon a court order and with appropriate moderation to ensure it's necessary - that's an entirely different matter.
The last thing some cop on the late-shift pinning a nutter who's trying to kill him to the floor outside a pub needs is twenty people all clamouring in his face to get "the shot", uploading it to YouTube with their own commentary that misses off all of the previous chase and tags it as just "police brutality". But that does not mean he shouldn't have a camera on his person that he suffers sanctions for if there's no account for why it stopped recording.
"But could you explain, officer, why you requested the woman to stop filming for apparently no reason, shortly before she alleges that you beat her?"
And I think the requirements are a bit higher than "asked you to", more along the lines of officially ordering you to, for a given purpose, because you're creating a nuisance or otherwise interfering.
It's not to say that they can't still stop you filming, but it all becomes a lot more suspicious when you use a police ability normally reserved for acts of horror or where you could tip a suicidal person over the edge to stop you filming what they claim is just a legitimate traffic stop.
Would love to meet the sales rep at a company that tries to charge me for backing up my workplace's software.
The amount of backups taken and required would make even the cheapest bit of software 10-fold more expensive just because of that clause, and see us move to an alternative. And I do that because my employer needs that kind of data security.
I bet, even if that were true, there'd always be a competitor who would sell me their competing product but not charge for backups (because, let's face it, they'd get more business and more money overall that way),
Yeah, how dare I pay an absolute pittance to support what was a brilliant and unique site nearly - what - 10 years ago?
To be honest, not really that bothered about the money (it was less than $10 I think), but the cheek of ignoring it is annoying enough to make me go elsewhere.
Great,
Can anyone tell me why, as a subscriber with the "Disable Advertising" button, I keep getting ads at the top of Slashdot, not matter the status of the button? Only happened the last few days.
Pretty sure the terms of what I paid for say I shouldn't be seeing it, even years after paying.
The alternative of runtime-performance hits, and allowing arrays to grow to unreasonable - and uncontrollable - sizes without inserting checks similar to those that combat buffer overflows just seems to be something that nobody wants.
Fact is, moan all you like, system libraries can be written in any language you like, and interface with C code and C-style functions quite easily. There's nothing stopping - as Windows is moving towards - system libraries being written in a managed language and interfacing with old-style C API's.
But nobody's doing that. Not because buffer overflow in C isn't a problem, not because they naively think their code is bulletproof. But simply because of reasons of performance, memory use and knock-on library sizes and dependencies.
Nobody is stopping yourself, or anyone else, from rewriting something as performance critical as GnuTLS in any language you like. But nobody has. And if they have, nobody that develops code that requires GnuTLS uses it.
For kernels and drivers, I'd fight the corner of "It has to be C, or a similar, dangerous, low-level language". Once you get to the application layer of things like OpenSSL, GnuTLS, or pretty much any library, there's no excuse. Nobody's writing them, and if they are they are losing out to the C-based libraries. And not BECAUSE they are written in C and we all have this nostalgia for crappy C code, not BECAUSE these things must be written in C to work properly, not BECAUSE the API is C-based and not language interfaces with it - but obviously because of other reasons.
What those exact reasons are, I'll leave others to discuss. But I greatly suspect it's to do with the huge size and impact of such managed languages.
What do start-up speeds, pinning apps, 3 monitors, resume from sleep, etc. have to do with a fucking start menu? Nothing.
P.S. My start menu setup - no program is more than 4 keypresses away. Windows-key to open the menu. P for programs. I for Internet. M for Mozilla. F for Firefox. My productivity is not improved ONE BIT by having narrow-down search (have it on my email client, it's great, on my start menu, no?)
Newbies don't get the tiles any quicker than anyone else. In fact, if you don't see that Metro is Active Desktop from '95 brought back from the dead, it makes me think you weren't around then. We did this 20 years ago. We rejected it 20 years ago in favour of a more obvious system than hiding all my icons and letting me hunt for them by knowing their name.
The Metro interface may work for you, it doesn't work for everyone. That's not hard to understand. I can't work on multi-monitor setups, it pisses me off - and yes, I program. I couldn't do it since the days of the monochrome debug monitor you could attach back when that was LUDICROUSLY expensive and stderr actually meant something.
FORCING someone, anyone, into a pattern of working is not good. And sure it's the people most used to their working pattern that are rebelling. The people who have honed their computing environment over decades. Why piss them off, at the expense of a single Boolean option? Seriously? What's the point?
Fact is, I use Windows 8 without all that crap. I deploy Windows 8 without all that crap. It's STUPENDOUSLY fast, even on built-in drivers (one of the best features of 8, in my opinion, is the ability to deploy a single, driverless image to basically ANYTHING and have it pick up enough default drivers to be usable immediately - I have deployed two complete networks with it, without the only single specific driver I've ever had to install on top being a high-security smartcard interface for banking purposes). And, guess what, my users ask for the start menu. I give it to them. I give them Classic Shell so - if they want - they can get back to Metro in one Boolean option. Or holding Shift when pressing the Windows key (or vice-versa, if they want).
Fact is, it's not about what YOU think is best for everyone. One size does not fit all. Windows 8 blew my mind at first (Touch interface, right? Deployed it on a touchscreen PC without a mouse. Accidentally opened IE in Metro. Took me and my boss 10 minutes of pissing about and then a Google to figure out the gesture to close the fucker - swipe down from top). Windows 8 blows newbies minds, even though that haven't used a PC before (which is fast approaching zero, if not there already now).
Nobody gives a shit about Metro not because nobody uses it, but because we're FORCED into it. For no good reason. I'll beat any metric you like on a system that I'm used to and I've set up, compared to the default out-of-the-box Metro shit. And every second I spend training for it or fighting against it, is a second I could spend doing some actual work. So I don't piss about. I install ClassicShell, wherever I go, I deploy ClassicShell for hundreds of users - and I've yet to have one say "Give me Metro back" (and if they did, I literally can say to them "There's the option, just switch it off or customise as you see fit" without them affecting ANYONE else).
Fuck off imposing your workflow on others.
Queen Elizabeth I put lead-based white-paint on her face because she didn't want to look "tan" like people who work outdoors for a living.
Then the tan was a status symbol meaning you could travel to foreign countries. Now it's a symbol that you're a cheap holiday maker / self-tanner who goes just for the look of the thing and, thus, it's out of fashion.
It's never as simple as "trait X is more attractive", even in genetics.
Ignoring the rumour-based article with zero facts:
What we really need then is a distributed, peer-to-peer, anonymised source-control system.
Publish a hash and that hash corresponds to a certain "official" branch of the code and can't be retracted. Do it right and any fork can publish their hash and maintain their own branch even if the original project goes under. Source-code verification - that's no harder than today, but you could set up code verification of, say, the most popular hash the same way you do TrueCrypt audits.
However, before that, we really need a bunch of people to be pushing out patches to TC and be shown to still be developing it, anonymous or not. I don't particularly care about TC being taken down - to me that just proves it's usefulness and effectiveness, if that's true. What I care about is, whether the project died or was taken down, we need people to develop on it - and at least start adding UEFI etc. support.
You just make sure there's more than one bit of information per "cycle" in the signal.
That's achieved by various methods, many clever and mathematical, some as simple as changing the phase of the signal (imagine a perfect sine wave at 5Hz - now suddenly change it to a bit further through the wave, you get a spike, a tangent, a visible change, but you're still on 5Hz) - the same way you can have AM (amplitude modulation) on a certain frequency, and FM (frequency modulation) over the top of it, this is called PM (phase modulation). When you join all these techniques together, get into MIMO, add all sorts of clever coding theory, you can get as much as you like from the signal - the only limit is how accurate you are sending and receiving.
Modems used this. Your car stereo uses some of it. Your mobile phone uses it. And wireless access points basically would be awful without it (equivalent to "radio modems", which can be pretty atrocious in their speeds for consumer-level tech).
Doesn't matter how fast you do that, you won't sell it to gamers just through added latency, control (how the hell are you going to game via a tablet?) and screen-size. Plus who the hell wants to buy two home computers just so they can use one of them from a distance? Look at Steam Home Streaming if you want to do this - I assure you, it has a multitude of limitations even with beefy PC's at both ends.
The thin-client problem is one that solves only a handful of the problems people have with larger systems (not home installs) and has limitations that see everyone go through "thin-client / fat client / thin client" switches endlessly.
Fact is, if you have to have two machines to game on one, you're causing yourself problems.
As someone who's just ripped out a thin-client install in a school (where it was slow, un-updateable, had lots of limitations, etc. and where it's actually been cheaper all along just to put "real" machines into the rooms) I assure you that it's something we would all like the idea of until we tried to use it.
Not that I can't find a use case for faster Wifi. But, as you point out, 99% of people won't need it until it becomes almost obsolete.
And, still, the power it supplies will be unable to compensate you for anywhere near the purchase price + installation cost + maintenance costs over its lifetime, let alone pay back the original investors from just the "profit" part of that payment to the company that made it.
Sorry, it's just a huge waste. I'm all for progress and advancement and science, but when it comes from ideas that are just poor commercial products to a handful of super-rich wastrels for the look of the thing, at the expense of ideas where you could easily make a difference, it really bugs me.
And, I invoke my golden rule: Call me again when I can buy it in a shop near me. Until then, it's all pie in the sky. And if you can't get that far - there's a reason for that. Maybe your idea just isn't that great?
Getting approval to replace even a mile of actual road with that stuff is going to take you decades before you even start.
The recovery disks all work. I can guarantee you. I had a batch of laptops that we Truecrypt and I saved all the recovery disks as ISO's onto a removable device (a Zalman - you put .iso's on it and it pretends to be a virtual USB CD-Rom which you can boot from).
We had a particular set of laptops with a particular BIOS version that was incompatible with any form of encryption. We found it out after encrypting every laptop (the problem was that the BIOS expected a certain part of the disk to be zeros, and in plain NTFS filesystems it always was - even the pre-boot check passed because that part hadn't gone encrypted yet). Upon full encryption of the disk, the computers became unbootable - and though we had backups, the sheer amount of data and laptops we had meant we didn't want to restore them all.
So we fought for a BIOS update from the manufacturer (they delivered, eventually, but weeks later) but in the meantime needed to decrypt all those laptops. We booted the Zalman with the respective ISO file, manually decrypted them all (which takes a long time using only BIOS calls without the benefit of SATA drivers etc.), and gave them back to users for a while until the BIOS update arrived.
Sorry, but there's nothing wrong with Truecrypt's rescue disk functionality. You just need to store and verify the rescue disks and remember the password that you used on them (even if you later change the PC to use a different TC password). I recovered over a dozen random laptops using them.
I'd say it's easier to ignore one comment, than an entire front-page article.
Especially given you can just "foe" me and never see me again. No matter how many times I've tried that with shitty articles / authors, I still end up with more shitty articles by the same authors.
Who are you, why should we care, where would we go if we WANTED to read this personal musing (not here, I'm guessing). Seriously.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but honestly Slashdot is not a "weblog". This kind of post is much better suited to your blog, but I'm guessing it doesn't get any hits when you post it there. Your amateur rendition of why the world should be your way is of no interest to me. It's not even tech-related, to be honest.
It's junk like this that TURNS PEOPLE OFF this website.
It's the old thin-client problem, reinvented with virtual machines.
Of course you can run 16 computers/users off one VM, but they will each get 1/16th of the capabilities of the computer, on average.
Sometimes that scales - e.g. small businesses virtualising their half-idle servers. Sometimes it doesn't - e.g. most thin clients when you want to get towards 3D or anything intensive.
But for power users? It almost always doesn't. If you need that kind of power, you have to spend ridiculous amounts of money, or you have to keep the resources to one-or-more per user (i.e. give them a desktop with a decent 3D card).
It's what killed off OnLive. Sure, if we all played 2D Mario games, it would be fabulous. But we don't. And as soon as the demand on the hardware increases, you can't afford to share it when you could get twice as much power for the same money.
Here's a hint then: Don't upload confidential files.
Why does your stupidity of an unrealistic use case (uploading a file you don't want to share to an untrusted third party) render the service untenable?
Fact is, I use VirusTotal a lot of deal with confidential information all the time. I use it to reassure myself that the things I'm handling aren't going to affect the confidential data or the programs that handle it.
Personally, I think every PDF->Word or Word->PDF service is infinitely more dangerous as a source of uploaded confidential information that could be retained.
And, as pointed out, you DO NOT have to use the service, DO NOT have to upload the file at all, and DO NOT have to use this client...
Nobody's making you do it.
And with Virustotal, you're free to calculate the hash yourself and go look up the URL it goes to (in fact, VirusTotal clients do this - generate a hash, lookup the hash, and only upload if it doesn't already exist).
And why would you be uploading personal files to check for viruses? Surely your personal files are the ones you KNOW are clean? It's the random crap you download and are sent that you have to scan.
Amen.
In my previous house, bamboo was all over the back garden. You couldn't get rid of it. Every summer we'd cut it all down and burn it, and every winter it would come back. Sometimes even in the same summer. You could walk over the grass and suddenly impale yourself upon an 2-inch-tall bamboo shoot that was taking root - no kidding.
It grew so fast that you had to get every bit or a few weeks later you'd have a stem that you need a hacksaw to cut through. And it could easily grow 6-8 feet tall and become a hazard.
Pretty much ruined the tiny garden we had. The stuff is a pain, and that was just in the UK.
Useful construction material, no doubt, but we've known that for thousands of years. The problem is that where it falls short is biodegradement, so you have to do unnatural things to it so that it won't biodegrade. And farming it properly is no mean feat if you care about the surrounding lands not becoming unofficial bamboo farms too.
I'd happily build a house, or a tree house, or just about anything from it. But don't put one seed of it near my back garden, thanks.
Are you kidding?
Every time I've ever used Bing to find something, unless it's quite literally things like the frontpage of some project that I search the name of, I can never find it. I can even narrow it down, deliberately AIMING for the page that I know exists and the keywords on that page, and exact phrases that appear there.
On Google, bang, first hits. On Bing, you can scroll pages and anything you hit that's relevant appears to be mostly by accident.
Honestly, the most popular search on Bing must be "google.com" or "Firefox" (when people first set up their IE-only computers with Bing as default).
What else, precisely, were you expecting?
That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology. They are now so ubiquitous that there's little point spending a fortune for something that can do the same, but "slightly faster" or with more megapixels, or whatever.
Sure, there are evolutions, and merges of technology, and lots of new developments still to come but if the phones don't have something new, then they are all just the same as each other, give or take a few statistics here or there.
Smartphones beat out ordinary mobile phones, that's for sure, but it was a long while coming. Tablets are in the same place at the moment - they are powerful enough to run almost anything and so there's little to distinguish them except for company name and some random technical specifications.
Welcome to the era of ubiquitous computing, where my mobile phone can plot a course across Europe, suck down traffic data and tell people on Facebook when I'm going to arrive quicker than I could do it myself on a full PC. While also handling all my calls, monitoring my car engine, checking my Exchange accounts, etc.
The problem we have now is not pricing - the cost of something going down is rarely a problem for the consumers or the manufacturers and their suppliers. The problem we have now is what comes next? We all have Turing-capable machines that run at stupendous speeds, and most of us actually have several. The question is how do you design your services to take account of this - TV streaming, etc. is still in its infancy and pretty much in denial at the moment.
I have to say, the computer is a tool. But it's MY tool. It's there - existing, in front of ME - purely, simply and solely because I require it to help me and be something I can use to make my life easier.
That said, almost everything that is supposed to "help" me actually gets in my way. Not everything, but almost everything. Autocomplete is one of my bugbears, for sure. And while smart quotes, etc. help most of the time, they just aren't smart enough and - when you WANT to override them - break the workflow in the way you have to override them (and often I see myself, and other users, in a tug-of-war between what they want and what the computer wants to do and keeps repeatedly doing despite obvious dislike on the part of the user... things like bulleted lists, horizontal lines, hyperlinks and paragraphs in Word just refusing to apply to the correct sections of text are a classic example).
This is also my problem with "modern" Windows and Ubuntu desktops - too much shit doing stuff without me asking it to do that. I don't want crap indexing and running off to the net to look for drivers. You might think it's useless but it's ONE CHECKBOX to let me turn it off and work how I want to. There's too much "updating this" at an inconvenient time, forcing me to reboot and bugging me about it at irregular intervals, too much "I've put your top ten used items up here" right where I'd prefer to CHOOSE what ten tools to put up there - because my workflow changes over time and simple statistics can't reflect what I need at any one point.
There's a reason I have a Start Menu setup where I have major categories (each with a unique initial letter for easy selection) and sub-categories (mostly with a unique initial letter) and can get to any program I like from THOUSANDS in two-three characters where any Windows search algorithm is basically useless without half of a weird program name that I never remember, typed properly, followed by a lot of hunting and mouse/cursor selection of the program I'm actually after from a list of 10 irrelevant items.
That computer you sold me? It's mine.
That OS you sold me? It's mine.
The programs I install? They're mine.
It's ALL there to let me save time. That time includes initial training time and even the extra microsecond I get from selecting something from the keyboard alone rather than reaching for the mouse, or whatever other action saves me milliseconds each time but is performed THOUSANDS of times a day.
Fuck off and let me use the tool I've bought to work the way *I* want it to. And if you don't (e.g. Windows 8), the choice is easy - I fix your shit for you, or I just don't use it. Either option is fine by me, because my workflow matters more.
I've never seen an MS dialog that is just "running off to do something" that actually gave me any benefit. Reporting errors. Looking up solutions. Gathering diagnostics. Looking for updates. Hell, file copy dialogs are so bad now that you have to use an explorer replacement to make them perform anywhere near sensibly or speedily. It takes longer to GUI-copy a few thousand files than it does to do ten times that amount on the command-line.
Call me old-fashioned, but my computer is under my control. It does what I say. It does it when I say. And only when I say. Just the background services on a modern machine scare the crap out of me. So much unnecessary shit running all the time waiting to go run... but don't tamper! Turn off Windows Search in Windows 8 and you can't install a language pack, for instance.
I have to say that I've taken to dialling back the last few versions of Windows to something more akin to Windows 98 than anything else. My users have been grateful for it (hundreds, if not thousands of them over the years). I get to work the way I need to. And people who want to customise and have all the fancy shit can.
Fact is, when you're a one-finger typer who presses Caps Lock twice to get a single capital letter, you don't notice the productivity tha
I don't think I've ever seen a CD / DVD (production, or that I've burnt) not work until it's literally destroyed. If you don't scratch them - which is easy to ensure, just put them in a nice case either jewel case or soft-cover - then they just keep working. I can still read CD's that I've burned that are over 10 years old - and people always say that CD-R's, especially the cheap CD-R's that I use, deteriorate quicker than normal CD's.
In fact, only one of them - the day I burned it - failed a checksum verification check, so I investigated (as that was very odd) and found a single byte was in error. I wrote the byte to change on a slip of paper and put it inside the case.
To this day, you can read that CD, correct that byte, and it works perfectly.
I've seen a dozen times more DVD's / CD's that I can't read from day-one because of some stupid DRM than I ever have material deterioration.