- A quantity or amount. - A specified portion. - Something that can be counted or measured.
Nothing to do with any particular size, but has been associated with sub-atomic scales because of physics research that uses the term, Also "quanta" (plural of quantum) with the same definition.
However, "quantum leap" is a very well-used term to denote a huge change in current thinking without any direct evolution in between (like the jumping between discrete quantum states).
Wiki and a good dictionary can be such a boon to the spelling/grammar/"meaning" Nazis.
BTW: I know sod-all about normal physics, let alone quantum stuff, but the phrase quantum leap is more than popular enough in that meaning to counteract your pedantry.
"The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out."
Not for me. 2000/XP was a quantum leap. I didn't think it was a good one at the time (mainly because of system requirements) but it changed an awful lot. And it did it in such a way that it was soon on every computer. That happened in a handful of years too. I'm not so sure I could have said that the jump itself from 2000 to XP was so massive - I still get people who bring me laptops with 2000 on them and they don't even notice that they aren't XP (unless they try to install the artificially-limited DirectX or.NET Frameworks etc.).
"I should remind you that XP is essentially just 2000 with a few interface tweaks. The driver model stayed the same, the kernel version was bumped up by.1, and it was a little more polished."
Exactly. But from 95/98/NT to 2000 was a quantum leap. That happened in, gosh, 2000. And 98 happened in, wow, 1998. Yeah, there was probably some background development before that time but the fact is that every 2-4 years for ages everybody changed up to the latest MS operating system because it was just that damn different. At times, it was hard to keep up - how many bloody versions of 95/95OSR/95OSR2/98/98SE etc. were there on the same codebase? They weren't ground-breaking upgrades. I don't consider them "leaps" in engineering but everyone happily upgraded from one to the other without a fuss or major breakage (WinME excluded for obvious reasons - it was ignored because after years of development it started breaking things without adding new features - some of the NET Frameworks etc. didn't even work on ME but worked fine on 98 because even MS had abandoned ME by that point).
"If it took Microsoft 5 years to go from XP to Vista, what makes you think they could implement severe changes in only 2 years time?"
Because... XP-> Vista is hardly a leap at all, it hardly compares to some of the minor 9x updates that occurred, but because it was parts of the GUI that changed, people think that's somehow more miraculous. There was also significant breakage for very little reward. Suddenly, everything needed new drivers to be rewritten, which often meant new hardware, or unsupported configurations. That's part of the problem - nobody's buying because there are no real technical incentives to do so. It's being thrust upon people.
So five years + two years of development (which would take us back to the Windows 3.1 -> Windows XP comparison that I stated in my previous post) to make any real changes that people want, and they mess it up *again* because Windows 7 doesn't have anything groundbreaking *again*. This is my point. Just look at the articles that describe "every" Vista or Windows 7 feature. How many of them are actually used in production by the majority of MS's customers (even home users)? And how many of them are nothing more than GUI tweaks, minor changes, folding in things that can already be found in Windows freeware, and backwards steps?
I would categorically state that, given permission, you could ship a pre-configured version of XP with a few tweaks (go back to Classic looks, get rid of those horrible services that "need to" load on startup, remove a couple of menu items entirely like that whole "Find... People on the Internet rubbish" etc.), a ton of freeware integrated into the Windows interface (ZoneAlarm springs to mind, as do most of the sysinternals utils, things like MLin.net's startup control panel / startup monitor, a couple of filesystem drivers for things like ext2, a decent unobtrusive search/index tool, a different web browser entirely etc.) done properly and more people (consumers and businesses) would be willing to splash out on "XP-plus-freeware" than on Vista or Windows 7 because it would be familiar, fast, have all the same features and would probably work much nicer.
I know this, because that's EXACTLY what I do... I take on networks to re-do all their serve
UURRRK. Operating systems are UI's? No they aren't. They are operating systems. This is the problem - MS has tied the GUI to the OS and now people associate the GUI with the OS. The OS is several layers below anything that needs to draw on the screen, always has been, still is. To make your OS boot even depend on there being graphics hardware is just a ludicrous assertion. This sort of thinking only leads to the statements I hear along the lines of "Oh, it looks different, it must work much better." Pfft.
The difference? The UI needs no special privileges, can change to suit every single user of the OS in a million ways in seconds, can die and not kill running processes (MS are starting to learn this one) and *it doesn't matter what it looks like*. It really doesn't matter if you prefer XP-style or Vista-style or DOS-style, the computer should still be able to do exactly the same things in roughly the same amount of time (minor overhead for the very-pretty stuff, obviously). The OS is the part doing all the complicated stuff and where all the performance and stability matters. Everything else is sugar-coating so that us poor unfortunate mortals who can't understand binary can actually tell the machine what to do (or, in the general case of MS, be told what to do and that you can't do it).
I can run QT on Windows, or a Redmond-theme on KDE, or a DOS shell, or a Cygwin command-line on Windows, or an actual bash session. It doesn't matter what it looks like (but, obviously, the majority of amateur computer users prefer the GUI and for good reason), so long as I can still do what the hell I want. And I should STILL be able to turn off the crap on a GUI so that it's nice and fast like it used to be (XP / Vista / Classic Mode debacle). The problem is that MS focuses purely on the GUI because people think it's somehow radical to have a pop-up systray icon, or a balloon notification of a completed task, or thumbnail preview of a desktop window, or be able to "shake" a window to minimise all... it's not. It's all variations on a theme that 50% of people will never use at all (and probably turn it off), 49% will play with for ten minutes and then never use and 1% might find adds to their productivity. And almost everything they do has been done before and doesn't actually add anything to the user experience.
Whereas, if they could have speeded up network logons... that would *really* be something. Or locked each process into its own sandbox. Or, say, let me arrange the GUI to put anything I want anywhere I like (why can't I have my systray on the left and Start on the right if I want?). Or maybe provided me with a way to easily monitor and rollback the registry, capturing to an MSI, built into Windows? (No, they just buy Sysinternals and bundle their unmodified free utilities instead).
People like you are why MCSE's are so revered:
1) Change where you put a menu 2) Charge £600 for an "up-to-date" certification that includes the new menu items 3)... 4) Profit (Bugger, it reflected reality for once...)
8 years. 8 bloody years. 8 YEARS. EIGHT... YEARS. Say it to yourself.
What the bloody hell has MS been doing for the last EIGHT YEARS? XP *still* outperforms their only other two Microsoft offerings in the market since its release. In the eight years BEFORE XP, we start with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (remember those days?), go through Windows 95, 98, most decent versions of NT and then Windows 2000. From them to XP... spot the difference. Now jump forward eight years instead and look at the difference, eight years on from XP and what have we got? Next to nothing. Oh, a couple of XP Service Packs that made more difference than every *OS* they've released since.
I looked at every graph on the page and they are all within a reasonable margin of error, especially in the absence of certain details (i.e. are the drivers all optimised for XP, Vista and Windows 7 equally? Was Windows 7 running 32- or 64-bit? etc.). There's nothing there that'll make gamer's go "OOHhh... gotta have that". It's more like "Well, if I do get lumped with Windows 7, hopefully it won't be much worse than my existing, well-configured, XP install".
What the hell have they been doing? I've argued before that there are no significant, new features in Vista and/or Windows 7, a myriad of problems still exist with both (and with XP for that matter), the minimum hardware is increasing all the time just to do the same tasks and there's no performance improvement at all (in fact, with Vista, it's quite likely to be the opposite depending on your uses/hardware). They haven't even bothered to comply with most of the legal demands on them in that time. They sort-of-but-not-quite started documenting SMB/CIFS, which hardly kills your current development teams. Is the code for Windows *really* that bad that this is all they could manage?
Alpha, beta, fine - I expect it to be flaky. In fact, I expect all sorts of debugging code and slagging the disk to death while it churns through buckets of debugging data so they can actually fix real-world problems. However, it builds on Vista drivers which, despite much fuss, are pretty well established now. It performs *identically* to Vista in a lot of tests (which suggests that not much at all has changed under the hood, as does the fact that Vista drivers are still compatible). The new features are basically plug-ins to the existing systems, not massive rewrites of critical code. This all leads me to believe that Windows 7 is a Vista Service Pack, to all intents and purposes. So what the hell were they working on for those 8 years of development with one of the largest software development teams in the world?
I know that this game could be really good. I will need about 60 or 70 basic sprites/models and eventually all of those in various forms of animation, but even just thinking about how to line that up is daunting. So you start off with dummy models. That gets you so far before you realise that most of the programmatic foundation stuff has been done and now you need to make sure it plays nicely and start on some sort of primitive GUI so that you can call it a game. That's before you get close to refining gameplay.
In some ways, business apps etc. are so much easier - you can literally just plod along with a few buttons and comboboxes quite happily. It's all coding and it takes minutes to make the interface usable. Non-trivial games, though, inevitably require graphics skills at some point.
It's possible, but people are getting lazy now and are usually much more specialised.
A lot of the old teams were more than one person too - Codemasters for instance - but I know what you mean. It's not that it can't be done, it's that people don't spend several years solely on one game any more, or that they feel they need graphic artists and musicians and level designers etc. because they can't do it themselves. To an extent, that is true, but the idea of a game is to be... fun. Crayon Physics was one person, I believe, and that's taken a couple of years to come to fruition.
Nowadays, people tend to be "coders" or "artists" or even more specific such as "AI coders", "GUI coders", etc. and there isn't much done without a small team because people are aiming for pretty results from the off. But then, from a coders point of view, I currently have an idea for a game I want to do and I find it hard to start because although I have the game code at the starting stages, I'm not getting good visual feedback from my code so I tend to get stuck in a rut and have to force myself to program. I know that once I get the bare basics of the graphical side up, I will start getting sucked into making the game work as I imagined it and start to "see the code" I need to write rather than just write it.
Collaboration is good, especially for rapid results, but it's the gameplay that makes a game. Personally, I found Crayon Physics a brilliant idea that didn't last long. I really wanted a lot more levels, a lot more freedom, a lot more tools. I can remember taking twenty attempts to join a line to the point that I wanted it to join to. On the other hand, I played Peggle (which is a very basic pinball kind of game), which isn't really my sort of thing at all, and I played it for DAYS straight. It wasn't the graphics (99% of it is red and blue circles and the rest of the graphics just get on my nerves) or the sound, or the controls, it was the gameplay. It was smooth, easy, pick-up-able, intuitive and it just worked.
My university used RAM disks back in the day - it was the only way to get decent performance on older machines. The computers didn't even have hard disks in. My brother (who went to the same university) has a story where he sped up his large FORTRAN compiles by a factor of 10 just by working out how to use the RAMDisk (which was only ever used by the PXE-style boot procedure and then hidden from the OS) for his own purposes and people couldn't work out how he was doing it because he still took stuff home and brought it in on floppy. This is a nice hark back to those times.
The killer, however, is the price... the price of a PC, basically, before you add the RAM. If you're REALLY serious, you'll have machines that can just take the extra RAM directly and do this in software. If you're not willing to pay that much, well, nothing will work for you but a few bits of extra RAM and a fast SSD for the same price won't go amiss. However, if you occupy the middle ground... this still doesn't seem worth the effort. It'd be cheaper to just buy an SSD, some extra RAM for cache and maybe even a cheap PC to throw it all in (if NanoITX supported 8Gig chips, this device could almost be made obsolete overnight).
The interconnect too - yes, it emulates a SATA drive but it emulates two as well and fails to do anything significant with them. So you'd need a RAID0 setup, with independent SATA setup, and an expensive device, with lots of even more expensive RAM just to be a fraction of a second quicker than an off-the-shelf SSD in the same machine. The people for whom it's worth it won't want to be bothered with all this.
The CF Backup feature is fantastic. I love the idea. But 20 minutes is a long time to wait if the battery is only four hours worth when it's brand new (four hours? At least 24 would have been useful and given you a chance to actually do something with it). You would want to be backing up anything this thing held anyway, so you don't really gain anything because the CF is the most inconvenient backup because of its manual nature.
I can't see a situation where 64Gb of fast storage is worth that amount of money + time + hassle + 64Gb of RAM + potential firmware problems + interface cabling +... The bottlenecks in anything serious are going to be elsewhere.
I don't. That's how their system works and I hit it once when I was aiming nmap to a remote location for testing. They saw outgoing packets trying to touch port 139 (and 137 and 443 and whatever else) and flagged it up.
Come on, of all the protocols to let leak out a firewall, NetBIOS has got to be one of the worst.
You're confusing security problems with system capabilities... Windows has a lot of security problems (elevating privileges etc.) that can be taken advantage of but should (eventually) be fixed through patches. No different to Linux, but the scale of the problem on Windows is larger. The solution to that is regular OS updates and least-privilege systems with privilege seperation to limit the impact of such problems. However, both systems offer similar capabilities to users through ordinary channels, except that by default Linux locks down a lot of capabilities and allows you to lock them ALL down.
I'll take this example of Windows and Linux over some basic capabilities a virus needs. For "Linux", I'm assuming standard configurations for a standard distro (i.e. not SELinux) unless mentioned and for Windows, I'm taking XP or Vista in a standard home configuration (managed systems are by definition managed, so they shouldn't have any of the problems listed below with a competent admin). Bear in mind that the answer for SELinux and similar systems to all the questions below is "Almost impossible" but yet you can still run just about any program on them.
Make a program that starts up every boot / login for a particular user (or all users) on a standard home PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard), that is difficult to stop booting up (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard), that distributes itself via email (Windows: Easy unless there's a third-party firewall, Linux: Depends very much on the system configuration but in general harder), or samba to non-passworded shares (Windows: Easy, Linux: Easy?), that opens up an IRC *server* on a port (Windows: Easy unless there's a third party firewall, Linux: Easy but only on allowed ports and probably inaccessible remotely), that hides itself in the process list (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible), that ignores termination requests (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible), and that doesn't attract the attention of an administrator or other user who uses the same PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard).
I disagree totally anyway... you don't need to make it impossible - you need to make it unnecessary and, providing software is up to date, incredibly infeasible. That is easily possible, with such things as secured Linux distros (the above is merely a system call interceptor but it seems to do a pretty damn good job... enough to hinder 99.9% of the viruses out there, I'd say).
And I think that making even Windows secure enough that viruses are no longer viable and soon become distant memories of poor software is *perfectly* possible, it just isn't being done.
"Most viruses don't exploit 'gaping holes' in the OS, they exploit the end user."
Correct. But they run as admin becomes game X demands it. Thus, they have complete control over the machine. My later point (never let a user do anything as admin ever after initial installation, have proper rollback etc.) taken together with this information provides the answer.
"That option is not "I know what I'm doing", it's "defeat the purpose". Or, to the typically ignorant end user, the "make it work" option."
It's also the "I've taken conscious responsibility for if my machine starts spewing spam" option. That isn't currently available.
"The primary mode of infection is the user doing something "dumb", like installing CometCursor, or a smiley pack, or something else that malware can piggyback in on."
Why should ANYTHING installed on a machine affect that machine's operation for any other user? This is another of my points.
"Won't work. Some things genuinely do need to be installed system-wide, like hardware drivers, OS updates, and the like."
Yes. All of which should only ever come from a cryptographically verified reliable source. Hell, make it automatic. The user doesn't need to see this at all. Users that do can do it safely. This is not the problem - the problem is that Game X or Utility Y or even Theme Z compromises the machine when it shouldn't even be ALLOWED to do anything but write some files (only in a pre-defined space allocated by the OS itself and outside the domain of every other program), take input from peripherals (mouse, keyboard) and display something on ONE users screen. That screen could equally well be virtual so that there's not even the possibility of "faking" a desktop. Least privilege principles. If your software never needs to install a driver (that would be "it's not a driver itself"), NEVER allow it to do so. If your software never needs to be able to read C:\ and find out how much free space there is, NEVER let it do so. This can be done, in a way that doesn't break programs that "want" to do it by just faking reads and ignoring writes, or using COW for those obstinate, crappily written old programs. Your OS never has to allow a program to do ANYTHING. THis is how secure systems have worked for YEARS. Try and write to anywhere other than/home/username and/tmp on a properly configured unix system... does it affect what programs you can run, what games you can play? No. Hell, you can even emulate Windows as such an unprivileged user.
"Admin privileges are highly overrated in this context. The list of things a piece of malware might want to do, that it cannot do from a regular user account, is vanishingly small."
Then the users have FAR TOO MUCH power. An unidentified program should never be allowed to write to anywhere but a carefully set aside portion of the disk assigned to just that program. It shouldn't be able to query DMI information, or read from the registry, install startup programs (without confirmation I might add!), install itself into the systray. Not just "unless the user is admin", but it shouldn't be doing these things ANYWAY. The systray sh
My post did address your question, but maybe not as directly as necessary.
Which police? Which law enforcement? Which banks? Which victims? The problem is that such questions are not only difficult to answer but are severely hindered by international boundaries. It's nothing to do with how easy it is to catch the kid down the road doing this to you, it's about how to illicit information from a foreign country who really have no interest in helping you (it's hurting them too, most probably, but that's no incentive). There may even be laws in that country that prevent dissipation of that information outside the country's own law enforcement (Data Protection Acts etc.) Look at the trouble the record industry is having illiciting information on who uses an IP when they KNOW the IP and are represented in the same country as the user and have probable cause to ask for more information. Now imagine that I'm Russian, and the Russian record industry doesn't care what I do... *you* try and extract, based in a foreign country like the USA, the name and address of the Russian user who owns an Russian IP that you think was involved. It's nigh-on impossible, even when you KNOW who it was, let alone if you are just tracing through logs of potential proxies with the intention to seize those proxies to trace back to the original source, etc.
Basically, the law doesn't help you here at all because once you cross international boundaries, things get infinitely more complicated and it ends up costing too much money to even consider it. That's my point... sod the law (it may not even be illegal in the country of the author to do such things, so you can't rely on it) and use technical solutions to STOP THE CRIME BEING POSSIBLE in the first place. It's like whinging that kids keep stealing things out of your house because you have no garden walls, no locks on your doors, you leave the doors open all the time even if you are out and you put a large sign in the street saying "Please don't steal my things". OF COURSE it's against the law to take your things but you'll never get them all back because you'll never know who was walking past when you weren't there and taking a few simple technical measures makes the crime much, much, much more difficult.
It sounds very simple but you're missing the bigger picture.
How do we know that that virus has ANYTHING to do with trafficonverter.biz or that they knowingly provide that service? What are you going to do, shut down the website without a full legal investigation? Brilliant! I don't like slashdot, so I make a virus that looks like it gets its instructions from them, or from random comments posted on there. You've now made it incredibly easy for me to "social-DoS" a website. I can get them shutdown, or cause them lots of financial hassle to deal with the investigation, just by downloading something from them with my virus.
Or say I want AVG out of business - I make the program download a particular older version of AVG to use a known vulnerability in it to propogate my virus or elevate its permissions. Or I just install it on every machine I infect forcibly. If people don't start associating AVG with malware (like that Antivirus 2008/2009 thing) then I've just given them the impression that it's a horrible piece of software that forces itself on you. Or I make sure that it's the only virus scanner that can or can't detect my virus - either way, I win in discrediting AVG.
The fact is that a virus is an unwanted, untrusted application. Because it's untrusted, you can't just start shutting things down because you find a "clue" in that virus's code. That's why it takes *so* long to convict known virus-writers. International boundaries, legal obligations (hence why you can't just "take over" a botnet that has people's/company's PC's in it and issue random command to "clean it up"), verifiable evidence, there are a million holes.
The problem is not that viruses make money. It's that viruses STILL WORK. That they STILL EXIST. That they are STILL CAUGHT by people. They've been around for 30-odd-years and they are more prevelant than ever and 99.9% of viruses operate on a single platform, targetting old, known, already-patched vulnerabilities. The fix for viruses is not to stop their creation by "persuasion" (removing revenue streams, harsher sentences, etc.) but to prevent them by technical means and ensure those means are adhered to. This means punishing users and operating systems that *don't* conform. Virus infections are a daily occurence and people are now blasé about them... I've had people casually mention having dozens of viruses on their machines and could I have a look if they bring it in next month, etc. The problem, again, is an OS that allows such things to exist and propogate so readily and simply (literally, I could write a Windows virus in a matter of hours with no previous knowledge and virtually zero documentation... Unix-based? Wouldn't know where to start because I would need to find a gaping hole in heavily-tested, proven-rugged, complex code that I can barely understand.
My provider shuts customers off if they use port 139 (and others) on their PC's without having previously informed them that, basically, "I know what I'm doing". The Internet stops and all webpages are replaced by an automated message about how to install a firewall (which, thankfully, also includes the "I know what I'm doing" option). I do "know what I'm doing", I have several layers of protection on everything connected to the Internet but I've left this on. What we need is a massive opt-in that enforces this for the average person. My ISP can already scan every webpage and email for me for viruses and replace them with warning text. They need to extend this to be the default, with opt-out. Then when Joe-Idiot gets a virus, it's probably his own fault because he bypassed the safety barrier and thus you can throw him off if his IP starts spamming or trying to infect others.
Even a simple method (e.g. an automated port scan every day, ala GRC.com's ShieldsUp and an email if open ports change). It's not a catch-all but it will certainly shock a few people if they realised just how open their PC's are and will warn companies and professionals when something happens that sho
I work in schools. The files on the PC's we dispose of might be bitmaps that the kids have drawn in TuxPaint, or they might be home addresses contained in a child's special needs report. They might be an MP3 that a teacher uses in class, or they might be a statement on a child who is subject to witness protection containing their real name, where they have a person actively looking for them with a view to kidnapping them. They might be a Word doc run off by a child, or they might contain the names and achievement levels of every child in the class.
It doesn't matter *what* they are, they are all classed as personal files and they are not for dissemination outside the school. The Data Protection Act means that I, as a school technician, have a responsibility to ensure that they do not get disseminated through a fault of my own. The beauty that is Windows cached copies of profiles, temporary files, swapspace, badly written custom programs that cache files or have crappy encryption etc. means you cannot easily store such files on a network without making sure you remove all data from every drive you ever dispose of.
Do I work in top-secret land? No. I work in a primary school with kids from 3 to 10. There are about 25,000 similar primary schools within the UK. The average primary now has about 50 PC's if you count staff laptops - some have over a hundred on their own. Staff take them home and store the same files on USB keys, external drives, their own personal PC's. Now multiply that up because the same restrictions apply (even if, in some cases, only in theory) to secondary schools, universities, anywhere that deals with private records (medical, government, etc.). Across the UK you are looking at *millions* of places where such data is stored, constantly dumping PC's. You get about one or two major breaches a year, if that. That's bloody amazing, considering, and means that a lot of those people have the brains to keep in line with the regulations and wipe their PC's. I know that I securely wipe anything that leaves my domain that doesn't need the data on it, even if it's consigned to the scrapheap. Some places hire professional data disposal companies to do the job. Others have a brain, a technician and a copy of Darik's BnN. For some reason "encryption" hasn't made it to a single school that I've ever worked in and proposals for it are shot-down almost immediately... my job is to mention it and, when shot down, make a note of it.
Yes, we're talking commercial entities but a lot of people on here work in exactly that environment. And a lot of people on here, even on their own personal PC's, have information that should not get out. You might think your data is "mundane", but there's an awful lot of cases to consider. Even a cached FTP password could cause me significant hassle. Now realise that my PC stores, on its disk in some fashion and at some point, my Steam password (cost me a lot of money for all those games, wouldn't want to lose that account), photos of my child (sorry, I'm not a paedophile-fear-mongeror but I don't want anyone else to have those photos unless I've given them), my home address (in copies of my CV etc.). I have actually done it myself - I have been given people's hard disks when they blow the computers up and don't want the old bits... you'd be amazed the stuff a malicious person could do with an average hard drive.
Encryption is vital for such things, even for home use. The trouble is that I'd *still* wipe the drive first. Call me paranoid, but don't come crying to me when someone picks up your second-hand drive on eBay, spots a cached password, or a particular software serial number that they re-use, or finds an illegal copy of a bit of software and decides to report you etc. Even the mundane can hide a lot of info. I've never had a problem when, clearing people's PC's of virus infections, managing to instill absolute fear into people when I tell them that it could have been monitoring files and their online activity since it got on there. There's *always* something on every PC that someone doesn't want you to know is on there and 99% of the time it's a legitimate use.
I was relucatant to install Steam on its initial outings (2003-ish?) because I was anti-DRM and I already owned all the games that were available when it was first launched. Eventually, however, I did it and the benefits far outweigh the costs provided you know what you are buying. You can't get much clearer than the press releases, support FAQ's and license agreeements on matters like that. The only thing that really worries me is having my Counterstrike being stopped from playing online (e.g. Valve going bankrupt, buggering up the banlists, me getting a virus that steals the account details, a chargeback via Paypal etc.) but the cheats have clearly had a much harder time since Steam's release, as most people who were around in the early CS days will attest to, so I can understand the reasoning.
Steam is a nice piece of work. The only problem I have is that there should be a command line option to start up in offline mode. For some reason, if Steam detects even a disconnected VPN connection, it will start up in online mode and try to do DNS resolution which makes it wait nearly a minute before it loads. I have to use a batch script to create an INI file with an undocumented line to make it forcibly start in Online/Offline modes. Compared to some programs I've seen bundled with games, that is *nothing*.
Purchasing is incredibly simply and virtually instantaneous (and works with PayPal, yay!). Downloads are as fast as they could sensibly be. When you're playing the games, the software can be set to not interfere at all and it doesn't. I don't use the friends network at all but I have in the past and it worked really well.
And the prices? Of course, some shops will sell off old stock at loss-making prices because they just want the stockroom space. It doesn't mean that Steam should undercut everybody. It's not a disadvantage that Steam doesn't have these prices, it's good luck on your part for finding a copy of the software which is cheaper than the sensible retail price. And if it's a major Steam title, you can usually just enter the CD-Key into Steam and benefit from perpetual storage for your games on any machine you ever use Steam on as well as important updates and up-to-date online play.
I originally had every Half-Life title in a box that I bought for £25 yonks ago, I owned every one of them at least three times over because my brother had a copy which he gave me and we had some of the extras given to us too (we were Counterstrike nuts, and still play it all the time, but we found it easier to buy the whole Half-Life pack at the time [pre-Steam] because for the same price as CS, you got all the Half-Life games plus we also both got copies of Condition Zero when it first came out etc. - we had small LAN parties at our house where each PC was already kitted out for CS), and I plugged the numbers in to make my first Steam account. Since then, I don't think I've ever touched the disks except to move them to my new house, and that must be, what... 5 years ago? They are all still listed in my Steam account and I just installed them all on my new laptop for the hell of it.
While I was there installing this stuff on my new laptop, I wanted to treat myself to a few small games at Christmas. I much prefer a handful of indie or old games over one big expensive title that will be £10 cheaper next week (plus, with an old game, I know I will enjoy it), so I just browsed through the Steam store. TF2 looked like a good laugh and was dirt cheap, so I happily laid down a few pounds and got it. Browsing the store I spotted a few other things and I already had Half-life 2 that had been a gift when I didn't have the PC to run it but I picked up the two extra Episodes for pennies and installed HL2 on my new machine. That gave me a crapload of extra software too. Then a week later, I bought a silly game that I could play with family - Peggle cost me literally pocket change (I then spotted it for four times the price in a thrift store)
Isn't my point that retrofit is a bit of a waste of time because it means the buyer making a specific choice to do this, whereas what's needed is ubiquity (via an established standard, e.g. BS (British Standard), ISO or equivalent specifying a protocol) so that it becomes standard, therefore attract cheap compatible devices and makes them compete on the basis of cost?
Retrofitting is a nightmare for everyone - the person doing it, the product you're doing it to, the original product manufacturer, the retrofit product and the company making the retrofit products. For instance, my refridgerator would probably NOT like that device you just described - the power spikes of on/off at full blast from the mains would blow its little tiny mind (not to mention the house fuse if it coincides with anything else - which it may well do if, say, a door is opened and the temperature of a room changes hitting the whole room) because it does a soft-controlled startup/shutdown to stop the spikes from the motor going back into the household electric. It wouldn't be a generic retrofit device, because of things like this, as it would only fit a handful of compatible products. It would probably void my warranty on the fridge even if no permanent modifications had to be made, because it wasn't designed to be turned on and off from the mains like that. The manufacturer of the retrofit device itself would probably offer no warranty and certainly wouldn't replace my fridge or guarantee compatibility. All of the same comments apply to anything that you do like this. But if you start BUYING this stuff with these things built-in and it costs only pence more, then it's starts coming into every household.
All this stuff already exists as complete products - coffeemakers that only boil what they need, devices that shut themselves or the mains off when they detect a leak/fault (gas, water, there are devices for both). The point is that non of them interoperate and, because the ones that do are so expensive, the details of how they operate are hidden away and the only people to sell compatible devices/controllers are those that are in a position to charge what they like for them, which makes all the devices expensive, even the silly £5 wall-plugs that are for sale for up to £100 instead but still doing the same job.
It's a vicious cycle that gets broken by a recognised standard for home automation (one may already exist somewhere, but if it does, it's pretty pathetic in terms of industry recognition!) and then a tiny, cheap, sub-licensed, mass-produced generic chip.
Say there was a chip, that had precisely two inputs that connected directly to the mains (e.g. live and neutral, so no intermediate electronics), could fit into a plug or a device itself and provided a mains-serial bus that anything could connect and transmit on with a similar chip. You could start with just a generic plug that advertised it's presence and UUID (probably built-into the chip, ala Bluetooth, WLAN, Ethernet, RFID, etc.). That would show presence of any and all devices in the house.
A simple, tiny, extra input line on the chip (not mains voltage, but logic-level) to measure voltage/current (literally, a handful of components and, on the chip-level, something that can be included in the core of a mass-produced chip or by tying to a 20 pence standard chip) and you've got a whole house electric monitoring system for a handful of pounds. A couple of GPIO lines on the same chip and devices can put any and all data they want onto the bus... you've now got a system that can do ANYTHING - the kettle can tell you when it's boiled, or current water temperature, the washing machine can shut itself off overnight if there's a controller with a time/date chip somewhere on the bus, every device can detect power faults, every device can advertise extra features and react on input.
This sort of chip can be made really cheaply today, now, this second. I can buy a baby monitor that uses digital audio real-time communications over the main
Seriously, it's a good idea but you'll never really manage to standardise it in a way that brings in into an ordinary house ("gadget" houses and those people who already own X10 networks don't really count as "ordinary" users).
What's needed, if you're going to do this, is a universal gadget that does some *very* useful things to the average householder. I would suggest things like... water leak detectors tied into the same system that can shut off the water supply to individual devices, smoke alarms, burglar alarms, entry control, baby monitors (bring the house lights up gradually in the nursery when the baby cries) etc. all tied into the same device. The trouble is that any one facility doesn't really make a killer app and there are individual devices that do each job perfectly but the "universal" device that can demonstrate lots of useful benefits brings far too much cost into the equation (at the moment). Even X10 is prohibitively expensive for simple tasks, but I can buy a pair of remote-RF-controlled 13-amp-switching 220v mains sockets (with remote & 12V battery in every pack) for £5 from my local electronics shop.
I've often looked at automating my house... I have the hardware (opto-isolated I/O boards, relays, spare PC's, tons of logic chips and processors, not to mention cabling, wireless modules, remote sockets, sensors etc.), I have the skills (soldering, wiring, simple logic devices and processors, programming), I even have enough money to do a lot of these things. The problem is that it's much easier and cheaper to just buy a cheap baby monitor, a cheap burglar alarm, a cheap timer, a cheap energy monitor and not let them talk to each other.
However, if we were to establish a real, authenticated standard for automated house control protocols that all of these things could start supporting with a $5 chip plugged in their mains plug, then these systems would build themselves. X10 was supposed to be that, but a quick search for X10 in my country either produces lots of websites without prices at all (scary enough) or things like £50 for a single X10 mains module that then needs controllers, additional modules etc. before anything interesting can really happen (and then it is mostly basic stuff).
It's actually less than half the cost for me to buy my off-the-shelf remote-control socket, rip the remote apart (I get one with every mains module anyway, so I have a big stack of spares), take a wire from the button and plug it into a £20 USB I/O kit from Vellemans and write a bash script to do all the fancy stuff... I can already get temperature, I can already monitor electricity (again, cheaper with a £10 energy monitor from the same shop and either a bit of creative disassembly or a webcam reading the 7-segment digits off it).
This sort of stuff won't go big until there are set standards, that are ubiquitous and start getting included in *everything* (therefore cheap), so that the average homeowner ends up with at least two devices that support it without realising and then thinks "Mmm... these say they can talk together... I wonder what I need to do that?". It's how it worked with Bluetooth... nobody cared or could see the point until you are sitting in your living room with someone else who has Bluetooth and you want to exchange phone numbers etc. When enough people have it to get interest in the general populace (everyone KNOWS you can do this stuff if you have the money), then you can start standardising. But you can't standardise until enough people have it.:-)
The problem with power is that it's powerful. The problem with wireless is that there's nothing to contain the information/power you are sending down it.
Thus, sending power over wireless is one of those things that ain't gonna catch on until someone REALLY comes up with a breakthrough... i.e. using some sort of technique that we didn't imagine or utilitising some counter-intuitive quantum principle or something. All the current methods (magnetic induction, pointing a "beam" of some kind) have extremely fatal flaws. At the moment, a 10p bit of copper not only ensures relatively efficient transmission over a much wider range of uses (analog/digital data and power, even simultaneously) but also makes sure it doesn't leak out anywhere and kill anyone by covering it in a millimetre-thick bit of plastic.
A wireless "beam" system is inherently susceptible to obstacles which, we assume, must recieve the power in absence of its intended target. So the power either has to be very low to be safe, or it has to be in a form that won't affect *anything* in its path. I don't think lasers could be said to "not affect things in their path", so it has to be very low power to be safe (what's the safe wattage for a laser in your eye? We're talking 1mW or something). Now, you can get "fancy" without thinking too much - a wider beam, which spreads the power over a small area which has to be beamed to the device etc. but all you're doing is adding more complexity, bulk, components, etc. and reducing convenience.
Magnetic induction is one of those things where the energy is relatively safe (magnetic fields) and, unfortunately, low-power and non-discriminatory about its dissipation - the stuff leaks in all directions wasting more of its (already quite low) power, in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input. If you scale up to larger-power fields you start intefering with other things - inducing currents in nearby metals, playing hell with magnetic devices, wiping credit cards etc. About the only practical use is short-range, low-power devices with their own power store (batteries). You won't be able to use this for anything serious yet and you're coming up with a marvellously complicated replacement for a 10p bit of cable and a mains transformer.
This is one of those problems that we'll bodge solutions to for the next fifty years and then, at some point, discover some fantastic bit of physics that lets us transport large amounts of energy from one place to another without affecting anything en route. The entire principle will be so brilliant that we'll instantly start ditching wired power overnight (probably before we know that it's completely safe). Until then, this "invention" will be consigned to the gimmick / pound shop / toy market and not actually do anything really useful.
Stop faffing about by using stuff that's sitting on a shelf in your inventor's shed to move energy from one place to another. We can do it already, in a myriad of quite obvious (and inefficient, useless) ways but the implicit problem is that the energy we "move" affects things in its path, or is affected by things in its path, to such a degree that it's not viable to use or invest in... until that problem is solved wireless power will not move on.
We did the same with computer data - first it was consigned to copper. Then lots of people came up with lots of fancy ways to try to use it without copper (infrared, microwave, radio, etc.). People were building RS232-Infrared gadgets in their workrooms. It wasn't until there was a fairly reliable, non-line-of-sight, large-enough-range, power-efficient-enough, wide-enough-bandwidth way to do so that people actually starting taking wireless ethernet/bluetooth/etc. seriously.
The rule of thumb I'd use is: Can you do it on a large scale and be useful to the big players? If not, it's pointless trying. This was true of solar - there were specialised uses that could pump investment money into i
You've hit saturation point - the average PC now is far greater than what the average person can fill up / kill in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. the time before they would have bought another computer anyway). That's not saying I couldn't do it, or that a lot of other people couldn't. But for general usage, you've got it made.
64Gb? So what? My motherboard has supported 4Gb for years but nobody (speaking generally) has an operating system that uses that much and if it does, it certainly doesn't benefit from it for anything other than extreme power use. I've only ever seen/used 4Gb or more in servers and even that is a rare occurence because I deal in general networks - I don't need to crunch terabytes of data and nor does the average person/company. General purpose PC's have absolutely no need for anything past 2Gb at the moment and, of course, there will be natural growth but nowhere *near* the potential speed of growth we could have if RAM was vital - RAM increases in the last five years have been minimal in general purpose PC's and will continue that way, if not lessen. Very, very few people now say "Damn, I ran out of RAM running that program." but I have spent hours trying to tweak an extra Kb to run a DOS game in the past.
We haven't hit a *limit* on RAM, we've hit saturation - the average desktop has more than it will ever use and virtually as much as the average office network server running its databases etc. The general purpose machines have hit that point where they can fulfill any general purpose. I can/have/do run networks of modern PC's from servers with technically inferior specifications to the desktops themselves.
History hasn't proved my statement wrong. CPU use - it's hit saturation for the general purpose PC, several years ago hence "dual-core" etc. and the fact that most people don't even know what their real speed is any more - because it doesn't matter much. RAM use - it's hit saturation for the general purpose PC. Hard disk use hit this point *AGES* ago for a general purpose PC, hence why some laptops, workstations etc. still come with 40Gb and 80Gb when they are 1TB desktop drives available and the 4Gb flash drives from their early days were hardly a burden. Speaking from experience with hard numbers, 1000 average users running everything from office apps to websites, primitive video editing to games, can happily put all their files on one RAID5 without even hitting silly-sized hard disks. We enforce quota for > 1Gb files or >5Gb areas and it's only very rarely that we hit that with any one particular user and it's easily resolved with inconveniencing anyone and more than cancelled out by the other 900 users with only 50Mb in their folders.
When people ask me "What computer should I buy?", my answer for years was to take it off their hands and do all the technical specifications for them so they got what they needed. Nowadays, I just tell them to buy anything that has the right ports - if you have a scanner, printer etc. get a few USB's and some for spare. If you want a gaming machine, make sure it has a PCIe x16 port (or two if you have cash to splash). If you just want a basic office PC, make sure it's got space for a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Every other specification available today will exceed their usage/expectations on a new system.
Back in the days of the 386, the average PC-owning person (even business users) would know what MHz their PC was and how much RAM, hard disk it had. The first of those to stop mattering was hard disk space... any statistic gathered on PC specifications (e.g. Steam surveys among heavy-gamers) will tell you that most people don't fill 10% of their hard disk. CPU speed stopped mattering shortly after - everyone had 2GHz for a while because that was where it stuck for a long time. Nowadays, a 2.5GHz or a 3GHz doesn't really matter - but people do quote core numbers at you now (Quad Xeon, Dual Core etc.) and that's the new metric, not what speed each core runs at. RAM use has now joined that... everyone'
Well, apparently not because the DRAM makers have run into trouble!
To be honest, the average persona really has no need for the power that modern PC's have and RAM seems to have now hit limits where it hadn't before.
- CPU's are fast enough for anything now but even when bogged down with software on unmanaged machines, they're as fast as they can sensibly go. So instead, people are adding cores and that's solved that problem. - Hard disks are too large for the majority of people. Most people never fill a hard disk in their lifetime. - Network speeds etc. are too fast for the majority of people. Most people never hit the bottleneck of their Gigabit-capable motherboard, or extrapolating, hit 8Mbps on their ADSL connections etc. - Graphics cards are too powerful for the needs of most people. And usually come loaded with up to a Gig of dedicated video RAM. There's not much that any relatively modest graphics card can't do. - And now RAM has hit the point where every laptop comes with a couple of Gig (not including the video RAM) that you have to be a power user to fill up (unless you are using Vista and/or crappy software).
My new workplace bought me a laptop. It cost about £500. It's more powerful than the last server I worked on that managed 450 workstations. It laughs at Half-life 2 and similar programs in 60fps at super-high-res widescreen with anti-aliasing (although, I have to admit, it needs to be plugged in to do this at a decent frame rate). All I wanted was something that could run Word and ping networks.
Actual responses recieved from such enquiries, in order of frequency:
"What's Linux?" "We only do Windows. We'll only ever do Windows." "Nobody uses Linux, so we won't produce software for it." "We can't because we license Windows libraries, like XXX." (at least 50% of the stuff I see in schools is either made in Shockwave entirely, or has things like licensed libraries, ActiveX controls etc. It's all DirectX, Flash, Shockwave, MDAC, etc. written with no thought for ever porting at all, so it's actually quicker just to write a competing product than it is to port an existing one, even within the company)
Give it 50 years, we might be there. In 20 if we pushed. In 5 if Vista and Windows 7 really, really flop hard. (Tomorrow if a little company called Research Machines were to fold.:-) ).
The problem is that within 10, everything will be online and delivered by browser anyway (even if that means ActiveX controls, MS-controlled codecs and HUGE, probably annual, terminal services licensing bills) and fat clients won't play much of a part in schools any more.
It's already 75% of the way there - I've just run a set of reading tests that were entirely online, and even have even seen GCSE's etc. that were entirely online in the past, new schools/Academies are more interested in paying parents to get broadband/remote access to their private web/video content than they are about actually buying PC's in-school or hiring technicians, the governments are mandating that every child has online accounts, remote access, homework set online, even down to what they have eaten in the canteen so the parents can pick up on it.
The actual plan is this:
Scrap all the crap teachers. Put all the good ones online and make them produce full interactive courses for everything they know online. Hire unqualified people to supervise children in class and turn on a videoconference/website for them (run over remote terminals, so you can get rid of internal IT support too) (Unsaid but assumed) Sack most of the good teachers once you have the content that you want. (Unsaid but assumed) Scrap the schools and make kids do it from home.
We're well on the way to completing stages 1, 2 and 3 simultaneously already. Legal mandates for the next few years in the UK will wrap that up over the next 3 years.
Actually, running networks of 450 machines plus 1000 (hostile) users almost single-handedly tends to take it out of you. However, I've suggested (and had it suggested to me by staff) several times about teaming up with the good teachers and writing this sort of stuff. We brainstormed for a while and decided to see what problems would arise before we committed ourselves to anything.
The problems:
1) Graphics. You need a professional graphic artist - there really is no way around this, although for early demos and proof-of-concepts you can get away with clipart and dodgy sketches. Another person you have to find/hire. Art departments, sixth-form art students etc. may or may not be interested.
2) Sound. You need a sound studio or access to good quality sound clips. Having the kids record stuff at random on a cheap mic isn't going to work outside the actual school you record it in.
3) Legal liability. Schools don't want you to do anything that means you have to supply a legal disclaimer. Now imagine that you have staff in other schools who have purchased/downloaded your software because it claims to adhere to the curriculum, or provide evidence of student progression, and doesn't. Or say it crashes and takes their network out. Or say it loses the last year's data that it recorded. It's a minefield.
4) Curriculum content. 75% of teacher time is taken up with making sure that they are adhering to the curriculum, planning their lessons so that every single line in their curriculum requirements is fulfilled for every kid etc. Now ask them to do it all again for that computer program you're writing.
5) Time. I haven't got any. The staff haven't got any. The school won't give you any to develop commercial-quality software.
6) Broad compatibility. If it doesn't work on popular school network X, it won't get into other schools just out of sheer technical complaints. This is harder than you think when you see some of these network management tools. I crashed an entire school network once (every server and client locked up until a technician like me can come in and spot the problem) by deploying an standard, fully working MSI package with a space in the (valid) filename. They are Windows systems, but they are so heavily locked down by crappy proprietry software that they can't move.
It's not that I *can't* make the software (I can), it's not that I haven't even had the *opportunity* (I have), or that I can't do it at home (I could) or that I don't want to (I really, really do) or that I haven't tried (I have). The fact is that I would be just a programmer and not an educator... I'd end up with "yet-another-KStars". You need a team (I even state in previous Slashdot posts that I don't believe teams are required for most programming at all, and often hinder the progress, but I mean a team of educator, programmer, artist and upper-level management in at least one school). Pulling a team that consists of a *very good* teaching member of staff, a decent programmer, a half-decent artist together and getting them to work on a good consistent product is hard. I've just said above... I don't believe this is a problem with OSS, it's just an incredibly difficult task no matter how you do it.
Short answer: "Get some real stuff, that the children can... break, hit each other other the head with."
I'm not saying I agree with that (I'm with you personally) but a lot of schools get peanuts for their science budgets, can't afford real science teachers, are legally required to do *something*, have kids that are waiting to be taught today even if reforms are years away, and are virtually powerless against unruly children who shouldn't be in some schools at all, are sued left-right-and-centre by their own student's parents for the slightest silly thing, have H&S restrictions imposed from several layers above and thus their best science lessons are done on PC (in the UK all state-school subjects MUST include some ICT at some point, so you have to have the software anyway). I'm not saying that's right either. But you can either fight to change all this and yet get *something* into the kids heads in the meantime, or you can refuse to and just let all the crap science teachers step in where the professionals won't and ruin the kids education that way. Education is an aboslute minefield. You can't understand it from the outside, though I would say that you don't need to be on the inside to fix it - you just need to be rich enough.
Again, if you don't work in schools, you won't understand this. That doesn't mean you could do better under the same legal restrictions. It doesn't mean you can ignore those restrictions or fight to change them and not ruin at least one generation of kids' education (because they fail their contrived exams because they learned "real" science and/or because their education is neglected while the "real" science is being fought for).
"so, is there an area that is missing ? if that is a missing functionality in one of the existing apps, talk to the devs. it might just get implemented. a whole now application might be less likely to appear, but you never know until you rrreally talk about it:)"
Yes. All of the above.
KDE-Edu is included by default on every single distro that I know of (except the embedded ones). They *aren't* educational in the sense of professional educational institutions. They are freeware toys that are ten-a-penny for any operating system in the world and of no practical value whatsoever. Try them with a group of kids... they will get played with for about a minute. Maybe one or two will find/play a favourite a few days in a row. Then they will be forgotten and the kids will have *learned* nothing at all.
Playing hangman is not an educational game. It's a game. Playing with kstars does not teach you about the cosmos.
For a look at some educational "games" that go down **REALLY** well with schools, have a look at some of the following:
I hate the company but this product has kids voluntarily coming into school EVERY DAY FOR SIX MONTHS at 8:20 every morning to do a 15 minute session before school starts. Look at the features... audio and on-screen instructions, staged progression, weakness identification, randomly generated but always valid and skilled questions (aimed at an 80% percent success rate no matter the kid's current level), natural progression based on success, age, time, etc., reviewing of trouble areas per child from an admin interface, vast statistics (not just random ones!), class-based logins (including import and export of pupil data from other programs as CSV files, so you don't have to re-enter DOB's etc. for 450 pupils to get accurate readings) so you can generate a whole class' data in one hit or log them all into a computer suite in one go, network-wide installation, ties in with the English and Welsh national numeracy curriculums with targetted questions for every single tiny point on all of them, locked down interface so the kids can't start a test, wipe out their scores or even exit the program without staff doing it for them. Now look at the price £150 / seat! This is a program that when you first play with the kids interface you think "It's just maths questions". It's not. It's just what the schools want and need. Teachers send kids out of class for 15 minutes to sit and do these questions and the kids would do anything to do it. They love the games, questions, etc., comparing scores, there's even characters and storylines for the younger kids. It's all self-explanatory (although as a maths-and computing-grad, it really could benefit from a overhaul of the explanations of some particular questions) and the kids ALL enjoy sitting and doing it, whether they are doing 2+2, probability, statistics, symmetry, geometry or trying to formulate an algebraic expression. I've never seen kids so enthusiastic for maths in an ordinary state school.
They are dozens of programs to do science experiments on the computer - whether you agree with the practice or not, some schools cannot do the "bloody Health and Safety" stuff to let kids actually do real experiments. You do actual experiments. You mix chemicals, select your measuring devices, take down measurements, make predictions, observe results, get an explanation of all the processes in play from a single program.
Clicker - it's a simple program that does nothing more than have an icon and a speech-synthesized pronunciation of several thousand words in a children-style WYSIWYG word processor. The kids use it. They sell content packs which do things like add "Castles", "Ancient Greece", etc. into the bargain with full multimedia content for each. This thing retails at £100/seat, content packs extra. The difference be
"Why would you use photomanipulation software for ***producing artwork from scratch***?"
Who said that, where and when? Surprisingly, I was trying to manipulate some images in what I believed was supposed to be an image manipulation program but turned out to be an exercise in "guess the command and how to apply it to an image/layer".
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Latin: "quantus," for basically "how much."
- A quantity or amount.
- A specified portion.
- Something that can be counted or measured.
Nothing to do with any particular size, but has been associated with sub-atomic scales because of physics research that uses the term, Also "quanta" (plural of quantum) with the same definition.
However, "quantum leap" is a very well-used term to denote a huge change in current thinking without any direct evolution in between (like the jumping between discrete quantum states).
Wiki and a good dictionary can be such a boon to the spelling/grammar/"meaning" Nazis.
BTW: I know sod-all about normal physics, let alone quantum stuff, but the phrase quantum leap is more than popular enough in that meaning to counteract your pedantry.
"The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out."
Not for me. 2000/XP was a quantum leap. I didn't think it was a good one at the time (mainly because of system requirements) but it changed an awful lot. And it did it in such a way that it was soon on every computer. That happened in a handful of years too. I'm not so sure I could have said that the jump itself from 2000 to XP was so massive - I still get people who bring me laptops with 2000 on them and they don't even notice that they aren't XP (unless they try to install the artificially-limited DirectX or .NET Frameworks etc.).
"I should remind you that XP is essentially just 2000 with a few interface tweaks. The driver model stayed the same, the kernel version was bumped up by .1, and it was a little more polished."
Exactly. But from 95/98/NT to 2000 was a quantum leap. That happened in, gosh, 2000. And 98 happened in, wow, 1998. Yeah, there was probably some background development before that time but the fact is that every 2-4 years for ages everybody changed up to the latest MS operating system because it was just that damn different. At times, it was hard to keep up - how many bloody versions of 95/95OSR/95OSR2/98/98SE etc. were there on the same codebase? They weren't ground-breaking upgrades. I don't consider them "leaps" in engineering but everyone happily upgraded from one to the other without a fuss or major breakage (WinME excluded for obvious reasons - it was ignored because after years of development it started breaking things without adding new features - some of the NET Frameworks etc. didn't even work on ME but worked fine on 98 because even MS had abandoned ME by that point).
"If it took Microsoft 5 years to go from XP to Vista, what makes you think they could implement severe changes in only 2 years time?"
Because... XP-> Vista is hardly a leap at all, it hardly compares to some of the minor 9x updates that occurred, but because it was parts of the GUI that changed, people think that's somehow more miraculous. There was also significant breakage for very little reward. Suddenly, everything needed new drivers to be rewritten, which often meant new hardware, or unsupported configurations. That's part of the problem - nobody's buying because there are no real technical incentives to do so. It's being thrust upon people.
So five years + two years of development (which would take us back to the Windows 3.1 -> Windows XP comparison that I stated in my previous post) to make any real changes that people want, and they mess it up *again* because Windows 7 doesn't have anything groundbreaking *again*. This is my point. Just look at the articles that describe "every" Vista or Windows 7 feature. How many of them are actually used in production by the majority of MS's customers (even home users)? And how many of them are nothing more than GUI tweaks, minor changes, folding in things that can already be found in Windows freeware, and backwards steps?
I would categorically state that, given permission, you could ship a pre-configured version of XP with a few tweaks (go back to Classic looks, get rid of those horrible services that "need to" load on startup, remove a couple of menu items entirely like that whole "Find... People on the Internet rubbish" etc.), a ton of freeware integrated into the Windows interface (ZoneAlarm springs to mind, as do most of the sysinternals utils, things like MLin.net's startup control panel / startup monitor, a couple of filesystem drivers for things like ext2, a decent unobtrusive search/index tool, a different web browser entirely etc.) done properly and more people (consumers and businesses) would be willing to splash out on "XP-plus-freeware" than on Vista or Windows 7 because it would be familiar, fast, have all the same features and would probably work much nicer.
I know this, because that's EXACTLY what I do... I take on networks to re-do all their serve
UURRRK. Operating systems are UI's? No they aren't. They are operating systems. This is the problem - MS has tied the GUI to the OS and now people associate the GUI with the OS. The OS is several layers below anything that needs to draw on the screen, always has been, still is. To make your OS boot even depend on there being graphics hardware is just a ludicrous assertion. This sort of thinking only leads to the statements I hear along the lines of "Oh, it looks different, it must work much better." Pfft.
The difference? The UI needs no special privileges, can change to suit every single user of the OS in a million ways in seconds, can die and not kill running processes (MS are starting to learn this one) and *it doesn't matter what it looks like*. It really doesn't matter if you prefer XP-style or Vista-style or DOS-style, the computer should still be able to do exactly the same things in roughly the same amount of time (minor overhead for the very-pretty stuff, obviously). The OS is the part doing all the complicated stuff and where all the performance and stability matters. Everything else is sugar-coating so that us poor unfortunate mortals who can't understand binary can actually tell the machine what to do (or, in the general case of MS, be told what to do and that you can't do it).
I can run QT on Windows, or a Redmond-theme on KDE, or a DOS shell, or a Cygwin command-line on Windows, or an actual bash session. It doesn't matter what it looks like (but, obviously, the majority of amateur computer users prefer the GUI and for good reason), so long as I can still do what the hell I want. And I should STILL be able to turn off the crap on a GUI so that it's nice and fast like it used to be (XP / Vista / Classic Mode debacle). The problem is that MS focuses purely on the GUI because people think it's somehow radical to have a pop-up systray icon, or a balloon notification of a completed task, or thumbnail preview of a desktop window, or be able to "shake" a window to minimise all... it's not. It's all variations on a theme that 50% of people will never use at all (and probably turn it off), 49% will play with for ten minutes and then never use and 1% might find adds to their productivity. And almost everything they do has been done before and doesn't actually add anything to the user experience.
Whereas, if they could have speeded up network logons... that would *really* be something. Or locked each process into its own sandbox. Or, say, let me arrange the GUI to put anything I want anywhere I like (why can't I have my systray on the left and Start on the right if I want?). Or maybe provided me with a way to easily monitor and rollback the registry, capturing to an MSI, built into Windows? (No, they just buy Sysinternals and bundle their unmodified free utilities instead).
People like you are why MCSE's are so revered:
1) Change where you put a menu ...
2) Charge £600 for an "up-to-date" certification that includes the new menu items
3)
4) Profit
(Bugger, it reflected reality for once...)
8 years. 8 bloody years. 8 YEARS. EIGHT... YEARS. Say it to yourself.
What the bloody hell has MS been doing for the last EIGHT YEARS? XP *still* outperforms their only other two Microsoft offerings in the market since its release. In the eight years BEFORE XP, we start with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (remember those days?), go through Windows 95, 98, most decent versions of NT and then Windows 2000. From them to XP... spot the difference. Now jump forward eight years instead and look at the difference, eight years on from XP and what have we got? Next to nothing. Oh, a couple of XP Service Packs that made more difference than every *OS* they've released since.
I looked at every graph on the page and they are all within a reasonable margin of error, especially in the absence of certain details (i.e. are the drivers all optimised for XP, Vista and Windows 7 equally? Was Windows 7 running 32- or 64-bit? etc.). There's nothing there that'll make gamer's go "OOHhh... gotta have that". It's more like "Well, if I do get lumped with Windows 7, hopefully it won't be much worse than my existing, well-configured, XP install".
What the hell have they been doing? I've argued before that there are no significant, new features in Vista and/or Windows 7, a myriad of problems still exist with both (and with XP for that matter), the minimum hardware is increasing all the time just to do the same tasks and there's no performance improvement at all (in fact, with Vista, it's quite likely to be the opposite depending on your uses/hardware). They haven't even bothered to comply with most of the legal demands on them in that time. They sort-of-but-not-quite started documenting SMB/CIFS, which hardly kills your current development teams. Is the code for Windows *really* that bad that this is all they could manage?
Alpha, beta, fine - I expect it to be flaky. In fact, I expect all sorts of debugging code and slagging the disk to death while it churns through buckets of debugging data so they can actually fix real-world problems. However, it builds on Vista drivers which, despite much fuss, are pretty well established now. It performs *identically* to Vista in a lot of tests (which suggests that not much at all has changed under the hood, as does the fact that Vista drivers are still compatible). The new features are basically plug-ins to the existing systems, not massive rewrites of critical code. This all leads me to believe that Windows 7 is a Vista Service Pack, to all intents and purposes. So what the hell were they working on for those 8 years of development with one of the largest software development teams in the world?
It's horrible.
I know that this game could be really good. I will need about 60 or 70 basic sprites/models and eventually all of those in various forms of animation, but even just thinking about how to line that up is daunting. So you start off with dummy models. That gets you so far before you realise that most of the programmatic foundation stuff has been done and now you need to make sure it plays nicely and start on some sort of primitive GUI so that you can call it a game. That's before you get close to refining gameplay.
In some ways, business apps etc. are so much easier - you can literally just plod along with a few buttons and comboboxes quite happily. It's all coding and it takes minutes to make the interface usable. Non-trivial games, though, inevitably require graphics skills at some point.
It's possible, but people are getting lazy now and are usually much more specialised.
A lot of the old teams were more than one person too - Codemasters for instance - but I know what you mean. It's not that it can't be done, it's that people don't spend several years solely on one game any more, or that they feel they need graphic artists and musicians and level designers etc. because they can't do it themselves. To an extent, that is true, but the idea of a game is to be... fun. Crayon Physics was one person, I believe, and that's taken a couple of years to come to fruition.
Nowadays, people tend to be "coders" or "artists" or even more specific such as "AI coders", "GUI coders", etc. and there isn't much done without a small team because people are aiming for pretty results from the off. But then, from a coders point of view, I currently have an idea for a game I want to do and I find it hard to start because although I have the game code at the starting stages, I'm not getting good visual feedback from my code so I tend to get stuck in a rut and have to force myself to program. I know that once I get the bare basics of the graphical side up, I will start getting sucked into making the game work as I imagined it and start to "see the code" I need to write rather than just write it.
Collaboration is good, especially for rapid results, but it's the gameplay that makes a game. Personally, I found Crayon Physics a brilliant idea that didn't last long. I really wanted a lot more levels, a lot more freedom, a lot more tools. I can remember taking twenty attempts to join a line to the point that I wanted it to join to. On the other hand, I played Peggle (which is a very basic pinball kind of game), which isn't really my sort of thing at all, and I played it for DAYS straight. It wasn't the graphics (99% of it is red and blue circles and the rest of the graphics just get on my nerves) or the sound, or the controls, it was the gameplay. It was smooth, easy, pick-up-able, intuitive and it just worked.
My university used RAM disks back in the day - it was the only way to get decent performance on older machines. The computers didn't even have hard disks in. My brother (who went to the same university) has a story where he sped up his large FORTRAN compiles by a factor of 10 just by working out how to use the RAMDisk (which was only ever used by the PXE-style boot procedure and then hidden from the OS) for his own purposes and people couldn't work out how he was doing it because he still took stuff home and brought it in on floppy. This is a nice hark back to those times.
The killer, however, is the price... the price of a PC, basically, before you add the RAM. If you're REALLY serious, you'll have machines that can just take the extra RAM directly and do this in software. If you're not willing to pay that much, well, nothing will work for you but a few bits of extra RAM and a fast SSD for the same price won't go amiss. However, if you occupy the middle ground... this still doesn't seem worth the effort. It'd be cheaper to just buy an SSD, some extra RAM for cache and maybe even a cheap PC to throw it all in (if NanoITX supported 8Gig chips, this device could almost be made obsolete overnight).
The interconnect too - yes, it emulates a SATA drive but it emulates two as well and fails to do anything significant with them. So you'd need a RAID0 setup, with independent SATA setup, and an expensive device, with lots of even more expensive RAM just to be a fraction of a second quicker than an off-the-shelf SSD in the same machine. The people for whom it's worth it won't want to be bothered with all this.
The CF Backup feature is fantastic. I love the idea. But 20 minutes is a long time to wait if the battery is only four hours worth when it's brand new (four hours? At least 24 would have been useful and given you a chance to actually do something with it). You would want to be backing up anything this thing held anyway, so you don't really gain anything because the CF is the most inconvenient backup because of its manual nature.
I can't see a situation where 64Gb of fast storage is worth that amount of money + time + hassle + 64Gb of RAM + potential firmware problems + interface cabling + ... The bottlenecks in anything serious are going to be elsewhere.
I don't. That's how their system works and I hit it once when I was aiming nmap to a remote location for testing. They saw outgoing packets trying to touch port 139 (and 137 and 443 and whatever else) and flagged it up.
Come on, of all the protocols to let leak out a firewall, NetBIOS has got to be one of the worst.
(BTW: I admin networks for a living).
You're confusing security problems with system capabilities... Windows has a lot of security problems (elevating privileges etc.) that can be taken advantage of but should (eventually) be fixed through patches. No different to Linux, but the scale of the problem on Windows is larger. The solution to that is regular OS updates and least-privilege systems with privilege seperation to limit the impact of such problems. However, both systems offer similar capabilities to users through ordinary channels, except that by default Linux locks down a lot of capabilities and allows you to lock them ALL down.
I'll take this example of Windows and Linux over some basic capabilities a virus needs. For "Linux", I'm assuming standard configurations for a standard distro (i.e. not SELinux) unless mentioned and for Windows, I'm taking XP or Vista in a standard home configuration (managed systems are by definition managed, so they shouldn't have any of the problems listed below with a competent admin). Bear in mind that the answer for SELinux and similar systems to all the questions below is "Almost impossible" but yet you can still run just about any program on them.
Make a program that starts up every boot / login for a particular user (or all users) on a standard home PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard), that is difficult to stop booting up (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard), that distributes itself via email (Windows: Easy unless there's a third-party firewall, Linux: Depends very much on the system configuration but in general harder), or samba to non-passworded shares (Windows: Easy, Linux: Easy?), that opens up an IRC *server* on a port (Windows: Easy unless there's a third party firewall, Linux: Easy but only on allowed ports and probably inaccessible remotely), that hides itself in the process list (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible), that ignores termination requests (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible), and that doesn't attract the attention of an administrator or other user who uses the same PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard).
That's what I mean.
"You cannot secure a platform against viruses where the end user can execute arbitrary code. It just ain't possible."
http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi?module=adm/unice/challenge
I disagree totally anyway... you don't need to make it impossible - you need to make it unnecessary and, providing software is up to date, incredibly infeasible. That is easily possible, with such things as secured Linux distros (the above is merely a system call interceptor but it seems to do a pretty damn good job... enough to hinder 99.9% of the viruses out there, I'd say).
And I think that making even Windows secure enough that viruses are no longer viable and soon become distant memories of poor software is *perfectly* possible, it just isn't being done.
"Most viruses don't exploit 'gaping holes' in the OS, they exploit the end user."
Correct. But they run as admin becomes game X demands it. Thus, they have complete control over the machine. My later point (never let a user do anything as admin ever after initial installation, have proper rollback etc.) taken together with this information provides the answer.
"That option is not "I know what I'm doing", it's "defeat the purpose". Or, to the typically ignorant end user, the "make it work" option."
It's also the "I've taken conscious responsibility for if my machine starts spewing spam" option. That isn't currently available.
"The primary mode of infection is the user doing something "dumb", like installing CometCursor, or a smiley pack, or something else that malware can piggyback in on."
Why should ANYTHING installed on a machine affect that machine's operation for any other user? This is another of my points.
"Won't work. Some things genuinely do need to be installed system-wide, like hardware drivers, OS updates, and the like."
Yes. All of which should only ever come from a cryptographically verified reliable source. Hell, make it automatic. The user doesn't need to see this at all. Users that do can do it safely. This is not the problem - the problem is that Game X or Utility Y or even Theme Z compromises the machine when it shouldn't even be ALLOWED to do anything but write some files (only in a pre-defined space allocated by the OS itself and outside the domain of every other program), take input from peripherals (mouse, keyboard) and display something on ONE users screen. That screen could equally well be virtual so that there's not even the possibility of "faking" a desktop. Least privilege principles. If your software never needs to install a driver (that would be "it's not a driver itself"), NEVER allow it to do so. If your software never needs to be able to read C:\ and find out how much free space there is, NEVER let it do so. This can be done, in a way that doesn't break programs that "want" to do it by just faking reads and ignoring writes, or using COW for those obstinate, crappily written old programs. Your OS never has to allow a program to do ANYTHING. THis is how secure systems have worked for YEARS. Try and write to anywhere other than /home/username and /tmp on a properly configured unix system... does it affect what programs you can run, what games you can play? No. Hell, you can even emulate Windows as such an unprivileged user.
"Admin privileges are highly overrated in this context. The list of things a piece of malware might want to do, that it cannot do from a regular user account, is vanishingly small."
Then the users have FAR TOO MUCH power. An unidentified program should never be allowed to write to anywhere but a carefully set aside portion of the disk assigned to just that program. It shouldn't be able to query DMI information, or read from the registry, install startup programs (without confirmation I might add!), install itself into the systray. Not just "unless the user is admin", but it shouldn't be doing these things ANYWAY. The systray sh
My post did address your question, but maybe not as directly as necessary.
Which police? Which law enforcement? Which banks? Which victims? The problem is that such questions are not only difficult to answer but are severely hindered by international boundaries. It's nothing to do with how easy it is to catch the kid down the road doing this to you, it's about how to illicit information from a foreign country who really have no interest in helping you (it's hurting them too, most probably, but that's no incentive). There may even be laws in that country that prevent dissipation of that information outside the country's own law enforcement (Data Protection Acts etc.) Look at the trouble the record industry is having illiciting information on who uses an IP when they KNOW the IP and are represented in the same country as the user and have probable cause to ask for more information. Now imagine that I'm Russian, and the Russian record industry doesn't care what I do... *you* try and extract, based in a foreign country like the USA, the name and address of the Russian user who owns an Russian IP that you think was involved. It's nigh-on impossible, even when you KNOW who it was, let alone if you are just tracing through logs of potential proxies with the intention to seize those proxies to trace back to the original source, etc.
Basically, the law doesn't help you here at all because once you cross international boundaries, things get infinitely more complicated and it ends up costing too much money to even consider it. That's my point... sod the law (it may not even be illegal in the country of the author to do such things, so you can't rely on it) and use technical solutions to STOP THE CRIME BEING POSSIBLE in the first place. It's like whinging that kids keep stealing things out of your house because you have no garden walls, no locks on your doors, you leave the doors open all the time even if you are out and you put a large sign in the street saying "Please don't steal my things". OF COURSE it's against the law to take your things but you'll never get them all back because you'll never know who was walking past when you weren't there and taking a few simple technical measures makes the crime much, much, much more difficult.
It sounds very simple but you're missing the bigger picture.
How do we know that that virus has ANYTHING to do with trafficonverter.biz or that they knowingly provide that service? What are you going to do, shut down the website without a full legal investigation? Brilliant! I don't like slashdot, so I make a virus that looks like it gets its instructions from them, or from random comments posted on there. You've now made it incredibly easy for me to "social-DoS" a website. I can get them shutdown, or cause them lots of financial hassle to deal with the investigation, just by downloading something from them with my virus.
Or say I want AVG out of business - I make the program download a particular older version of AVG to use a known vulnerability in it to propogate my virus or elevate its permissions. Or I just install it on every machine I infect forcibly. If people don't start associating AVG with malware (like that Antivirus 2008/2009 thing) then I've just given them the impression that it's a horrible piece of software that forces itself on you. Or I make sure that it's the only virus scanner that can or can't detect my virus - either way, I win in discrediting AVG.
The fact is that a virus is an unwanted, untrusted application. Because it's untrusted, you can't just start shutting things down because you find a "clue" in that virus's code. That's why it takes *so* long to convict known virus-writers. International boundaries, legal obligations (hence why you can't just "take over" a botnet that has people's/company's PC's in it and issue random command to "clean it up"), verifiable evidence, there are a million holes.
The problem is not that viruses make money. It's that viruses STILL WORK. That they STILL EXIST. That they are STILL CAUGHT by people. They've been around for 30-odd-years and they are more prevelant than ever and 99.9% of viruses operate on a single platform, targetting old, known, already-patched vulnerabilities. The fix for viruses is not to stop their creation by "persuasion" (removing revenue streams, harsher sentences, etc.) but to prevent them by technical means and ensure those means are adhered to. This means punishing users and operating systems that *don't* conform. Virus infections are a daily occurence and people are now blasé about them... I've had people casually mention having dozens of viruses on their machines and could I have a look if they bring it in next month, etc. The problem, again, is an OS that allows such things to exist and propogate so readily and simply (literally, I could write a Windows virus in a matter of hours with no previous knowledge and virtually zero documentation... Unix-based? Wouldn't know where to start because I would need to find a gaping hole in heavily-tested, proven-rugged, complex code that I can barely understand.
My provider shuts customers off if they use port 139 (and others) on their PC's without having previously informed them that, basically, "I know what I'm doing". The Internet stops and all webpages are replaced by an automated message about how to install a firewall (which, thankfully, also includes the "I know what I'm doing" option). I do "know what I'm doing", I have several layers of protection on everything connected to the Internet but I've left this on. What we need is a massive opt-in that enforces this for the average person. My ISP can already scan every webpage and email for me for viruses and replace them with warning text. They need to extend this to be the default, with opt-out. Then when Joe-Idiot gets a virus, it's probably his own fault because he bypassed the safety barrier and thus you can throw him off if his IP starts spamming or trying to infect others.
Even a simple method (e.g. an automated port scan every day, ala GRC.com's ShieldsUp and an email if open ports change). It's not a catch-all but it will certainly shock a few people if they realised just how open their PC's are and will warn companies and professionals when something happens that sho
I work in schools. The files on the PC's we dispose of might be bitmaps that the kids have drawn in TuxPaint, or they might be home addresses contained in a child's special needs report. They might be an MP3 that a teacher uses in class, or they might be a statement on a child who is subject to witness protection containing their real name, where they have a person actively looking for them with a view to kidnapping them. They might be a Word doc run off by a child, or they might contain the names and achievement levels of every child in the class.
It doesn't matter *what* they are, they are all classed as personal files and they are not for dissemination outside the school. The Data Protection Act means that I, as a school technician, have a responsibility to ensure that they do not get disseminated through a fault of my own. The beauty that is Windows cached copies of profiles, temporary files, swapspace, badly written custom programs that cache files or have crappy encryption etc. means you cannot easily store such files on a network without making sure you remove all data from every drive you ever dispose of.
Do I work in top-secret land? No. I work in a primary school with kids from 3 to 10. There are about 25,000 similar primary schools within the UK. The average primary now has about 50 PC's if you count staff laptops - some have over a hundred on their own. Staff take them home and store the same files on USB keys, external drives, their own personal PC's. Now multiply that up because the same restrictions apply (even if, in some cases, only in theory) to secondary schools, universities, anywhere that deals with private records (medical, government, etc.). Across the UK you are looking at *millions* of places where such data is stored, constantly dumping PC's. You get about one or two major breaches a year, if that. That's bloody amazing, considering, and means that a lot of those people have the brains to keep in line with the regulations and wipe their PC's. I know that I securely wipe anything that leaves my domain that doesn't need the data on it, even if it's consigned to the scrapheap. Some places hire professional data disposal companies to do the job. Others have a brain, a technician and a copy of Darik's BnN. For some reason "encryption" hasn't made it to a single school that I've ever worked in and proposals for it are shot-down almost immediately... my job is to mention it and, when shot down, make a note of it.
Yes, we're talking commercial entities but a lot of people on here work in exactly that environment. And a lot of people on here, even on their own personal PC's, have information that should not get out. You might think your data is "mundane", but there's an awful lot of cases to consider. Even a cached FTP password could cause me significant hassle. Now realise that my PC stores, on its disk in some fashion and at some point, my Steam password (cost me a lot of money for all those games, wouldn't want to lose that account), photos of my child (sorry, I'm not a paedophile-fear-mongeror but I don't want anyone else to have those photos unless I've given them), my home address (in copies of my CV etc.). I have actually done it myself - I have been given people's hard disks when they blow the computers up and don't want the old bits... you'd be amazed the stuff a malicious person could do with an average hard drive.
Encryption is vital for such things, even for home use. The trouble is that I'd *still* wipe the drive first. Call me paranoid, but don't come crying to me when someone picks up your second-hand drive on eBay, spots a cached password, or a particular software serial number that they re-use, or finds an illegal copy of a bit of software and decides to report you etc. Even the mundane can hide a lot of info. I've never had a problem when, clearing people's PC's of virus infections, managing to instill absolute fear into people when I tell them that it could have been monitoring files and their online activity since it got on there. There's *always* something on every PC that someone doesn't want you to know is on there and 99% of the time it's a legitimate use.
What, exactly, sucks about Steam?
I was relucatant to install Steam on its initial outings (2003-ish?) because I was anti-DRM and I already owned all the games that were available when it was first launched. Eventually, however, I did it and the benefits far outweigh the costs provided you know what you are buying. You can't get much clearer than the press releases, support FAQ's and license agreeements on matters like that. The only thing that really worries me is having my Counterstrike being stopped from playing online (e.g. Valve going bankrupt, buggering up the banlists, me getting a virus that steals the account details, a chargeback via Paypal etc.) but the cheats have clearly had a much harder time since Steam's release, as most people who were around in the early CS days will attest to, so I can understand the reasoning.
Steam is a nice piece of work. The only problem I have is that there should be a command line option to start up in offline mode. For some reason, if Steam detects even a disconnected VPN connection, it will start up in online mode and try to do DNS resolution which makes it wait nearly a minute before it loads. I have to use a batch script to create an INI file with an undocumented line to make it forcibly start in Online/Offline modes. Compared to some programs I've seen bundled with games, that is *nothing*.
Purchasing is incredibly simply and virtually instantaneous (and works with PayPal, yay!). Downloads are as fast as they could sensibly be. When you're playing the games, the software can be set to not interfere at all and it doesn't. I don't use the friends network at all but I have in the past and it worked really well.
And the prices? Of course, some shops will sell off old stock at loss-making prices because they just want the stockroom space. It doesn't mean that Steam should undercut everybody. It's not a disadvantage that Steam doesn't have these prices, it's good luck on your part for finding a copy of the software which is cheaper than the sensible retail price. And if it's a major Steam title, you can usually just enter the CD-Key into Steam and benefit from perpetual storage for your games on any machine you ever use Steam on as well as important updates and up-to-date online play.
I originally had every Half-Life title in a box that I bought for £25 yonks ago, I owned every one of them at least three times over because my brother had a copy which he gave me and we had some of the extras given to us too (we were Counterstrike nuts, and still play it all the time, but we found it easier to buy the whole Half-Life pack at the time [pre-Steam] because for the same price as CS, you got all the Half-Life games plus we also both got copies of Condition Zero when it first came out etc. - we had small LAN parties at our house where each PC was already kitted out for CS), and I plugged the numbers in to make my first Steam account. Since then, I don't think I've ever touched the disks except to move them to my new house, and that must be, what... 5 years ago? They are all still listed in my Steam account and I just installed them all on my new laptop for the hell of it.
While I was there installing this stuff on my new laptop, I wanted to treat myself to a few small games at Christmas. I much prefer a handful of indie or old games over one big expensive title that will be £10 cheaper next week (plus, with an old game, I know I will enjoy it), so I just browsed through the Steam store. TF2 looked like a good laugh and was dirt cheap, so I happily laid down a few pounds and got it. Browsing the store I spotted a few other things and I already had Half-life 2 that had been a gift when I didn't have the PC to run it but I picked up the two extra Episodes for pennies and installed HL2 on my new machine. That gave me a crapload of extra software too. Then a week later, I bought a silly game that I could play with family - Peggle cost me literally pocket change (I then spotted it for four times the price in a thrift store)
Isn't my point that retrofit is a bit of a waste of time because it means the buyer making a specific choice to do this, whereas what's needed is ubiquity (via an established standard, e.g. BS (British Standard), ISO or equivalent specifying a protocol) so that it becomes standard, therefore attract cheap compatible devices and makes them compete on the basis of cost?
Retrofitting is a nightmare for everyone - the person doing it, the product you're doing it to, the original product manufacturer, the retrofit product and the company making the retrofit products. For instance, my refridgerator would probably NOT like that device you just described - the power spikes of on/off at full blast from the mains would blow its little tiny mind (not to mention the house fuse if it coincides with anything else - which it may well do if, say, a door is opened and the temperature of a room changes hitting the whole room) because it does a soft-controlled startup/shutdown to stop the spikes from the motor going back into the household electric. It wouldn't be a generic retrofit device, because of things like this, as it would only fit a handful of compatible products. It would probably void my warranty on the fridge even if no permanent modifications had to be made, because it wasn't designed to be turned on and off from the mains like that. The manufacturer of the retrofit device itself would probably offer no warranty and certainly wouldn't replace my fridge or guarantee compatibility. All of the same comments apply to anything that you do like this. But if you start BUYING this stuff with these things built-in and it costs only pence more, then it's starts coming into every household.
All this stuff already exists as complete products - coffeemakers that only boil what they need, devices that shut themselves or the mains off when they detect a leak/fault (gas, water, there are devices for both). The point is that non of them interoperate and, because the ones that do are so expensive, the details of how they operate are hidden away and the only people to sell compatible devices/controllers are those that are in a position to charge what they like for them, which makes all the devices expensive, even the silly £5 wall-plugs that are for sale for up to £100 instead but still doing the same job.
It's a vicious cycle that gets broken by a recognised standard for home automation (one may already exist somewhere, but if it does, it's pretty pathetic in terms of industry recognition!) and then a tiny, cheap, sub-licensed, mass-produced generic chip.
Say there was a chip, that had precisely two inputs that connected directly to the mains (e.g. live and neutral, so no intermediate electronics), could fit into a plug or a device itself and provided a mains-serial bus that anything could connect and transmit on with a similar chip. You could start with just a generic plug that advertised it's presence and UUID (probably built-into the chip, ala Bluetooth, WLAN, Ethernet, RFID, etc.). That would show presence of any and all devices in the house.
A simple, tiny, extra input line on the chip (not mains voltage, but logic-level) to measure voltage/current (literally, a handful of components and, on the chip-level, something that can be included in the core of a mass-produced chip or by tying to a 20 pence standard chip) and you've got a whole house electric monitoring system for a handful of pounds. A couple of GPIO lines on the same chip and devices can put any and all data they want onto the bus... you've now got a system that can do ANYTHING - the kettle can tell you when it's boiled, or current water temperature, the washing machine can shut itself off overnight if there's a controller with a time/date chip somewhere on the bus, every device can detect power faults, every device can advertise extra features and react on input.
This sort of chip can be made really cheaply today, now, this second. I can buy a baby monitor that uses digital audio real-time communications over the main
That's called USB isn't it? :-)
Seriously, it's a good idea but you'll never really manage to standardise it in a way that brings in into an ordinary house ("gadget" houses and those people who already own X10 networks don't really count as "ordinary" users).
What's needed, if you're going to do this, is a universal gadget that does some *very* useful things to the average householder. I would suggest things like... water leak detectors tied into the same system that can shut off the water supply to individual devices, smoke alarms, burglar alarms, entry control, baby monitors (bring the house lights up gradually in the nursery when the baby cries) etc. all tied into the same device. The trouble is that any one facility doesn't really make a killer app and there are individual devices that do each job perfectly but the "universal" device that can demonstrate lots of useful benefits brings far too much cost into the equation (at the moment). Even X10 is prohibitively expensive for simple tasks, but I can buy a pair of remote-RF-controlled 13-amp-switching 220v mains sockets (with remote & 12V battery in every pack) for £5 from my local electronics shop.
I've often looked at automating my house... I have the hardware (opto-isolated I/O boards, relays, spare PC's, tons of logic chips and processors, not to mention cabling, wireless modules, remote sockets, sensors etc.), I have the skills (soldering, wiring, simple logic devices and processors, programming), I even have enough money to do a lot of these things. The problem is that it's much easier and cheaper to just buy a cheap baby monitor, a cheap burglar alarm, a cheap timer, a cheap energy monitor and not let them talk to each other.
However, if we were to establish a real, authenticated standard for automated house control protocols that all of these things could start supporting with a $5 chip plugged in their mains plug, then these systems would build themselves. X10 was supposed to be that, but a quick search for X10 in my country either produces lots of websites without prices at all (scary enough) or things like £50 for a single X10 mains module that then needs controllers, additional modules etc. before anything interesting can really happen (and then it is mostly basic stuff).
It's actually less than half the cost for me to buy my off-the-shelf remote-control socket, rip the remote apart (I get one with every mains module anyway, so I have a big stack of spares), take a wire from the button and plug it into a £20 USB I/O kit from Vellemans and write a bash script to do all the fancy stuff... I can already get temperature, I can already monitor electricity (again, cheaper with a £10 energy monitor from the same shop and either a bit of creative disassembly or a webcam reading the 7-segment digits off it).
This sort of stuff won't go big until there are set standards, that are ubiquitous and start getting included in *everything* (therefore cheap), so that the average homeowner ends up with at least two devices that support it without realising and then thinks "Mmm... these say they can talk together... I wonder what I need to do that?". It's how it worked with Bluetooth... nobody cared or could see the point until you are sitting in your living room with someone else who has Bluetooth and you want to exchange phone numbers etc. When enough people have it to get interest in the general populace (everyone KNOWS you can do this stuff if you have the money), then you can start standardising. But you can't standardise until enough people have it. :-)
Of course, you're perfectly correct. I'm a dope.
The problem with power is that it's powerful.
The problem with wireless is that there's nothing to contain the information/power you are sending down it.
Thus, sending power over wireless is one of those things that ain't gonna catch on until someone REALLY comes up with a breakthrough... i.e. using some sort of technique that we didn't imagine or utilitising some counter-intuitive quantum principle or something. All the current methods (magnetic induction, pointing a "beam" of some kind) have extremely fatal flaws. At the moment, a 10p bit of copper not only ensures relatively efficient transmission over a much wider range of uses (analog/digital data and power, even simultaneously) but also makes sure it doesn't leak out anywhere and kill anyone by covering it in a millimetre-thick bit of plastic.
A wireless "beam" system is inherently susceptible to obstacles which, we assume, must recieve the power in absence of its intended target. So the power either has to be very low to be safe, or it has to be in a form that won't affect *anything* in its path. I don't think lasers could be said to "not affect things in their path", so it has to be very low power to be safe (what's the safe wattage for a laser in your eye? We're talking 1mW or something). Now, you can get "fancy" without thinking too much - a wider beam, which spreads the power over a small area which has to be beamed to the device etc. but all you're doing is adding more complexity, bulk, components, etc. and reducing convenience.
Magnetic induction is one of those things where the energy is relatively safe (magnetic fields) and, unfortunately, low-power and non-discriminatory about its dissipation - the stuff leaks in all directions wasting more of its (already quite low) power, in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input. If you scale up to larger-power fields you start intefering with other things - inducing currents in nearby metals, playing hell with magnetic devices, wiping credit cards etc. About the only practical use is short-range, low-power devices with their own power store (batteries). You won't be able to use this for anything serious yet and you're coming up with a marvellously complicated replacement for a 10p bit of cable and a mains transformer.
This is one of those problems that we'll bodge solutions to for the next fifty years and then, at some point, discover some fantastic bit of physics that lets us transport large amounts of energy from one place to another without affecting anything en route. The entire principle will be so brilliant that we'll instantly start ditching wired power overnight (probably before we know that it's completely safe). Until then, this "invention" will be consigned to the gimmick / pound shop / toy market and not actually do anything really useful.
Stop faffing about by using stuff that's sitting on a shelf in your inventor's shed to move energy from one place to another. We can do it already, in a myriad of quite obvious (and inefficient, useless) ways but the implicit problem is that the energy we "move" affects things in its path, or is affected by things in its path, to such a degree that it's not viable to use or invest in... until that problem is solved wireless power will not move on.
We did the same with computer data - first it was consigned to copper. Then lots of people came up with lots of fancy ways to try to use it without copper (infrared, microwave, radio, etc.). People were building RS232-Infrared gadgets in their workrooms. It wasn't until there was a fairly reliable, non-line-of-sight, large-enough-range, power-efficient-enough, wide-enough-bandwidth way to do so that people actually starting taking wireless ethernet/bluetooth/etc. seriously.
The rule of thumb I'd use is: Can you do it on a large scale and be useful to the big players? If not, it's pointless trying. This was true of solar - there were specialised uses that could pump investment money into i
You've hit saturation point - the average PC now is far greater than what the average person can fill up / kill in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. the time before they would have bought another computer anyway). That's not saying I couldn't do it, or that a lot of other people couldn't. But for general usage, you've got it made.
64Gb? So what? My motherboard has supported 4Gb for years but nobody (speaking generally) has an operating system that uses that much and if it does, it certainly doesn't benefit from it for anything other than extreme power use. I've only ever seen/used 4Gb or more in servers and even that is a rare occurence because I deal in general networks - I don't need to crunch terabytes of data and nor does the average person/company. General purpose PC's have absolutely no need for anything past 2Gb at the moment and, of course, there will be natural growth but nowhere *near* the potential speed of growth we could have if RAM was vital - RAM increases in the last five years have been minimal in general purpose PC's and will continue that way, if not lessen. Very, very few people now say "Damn, I ran out of RAM running that program." but I have spent hours trying to tweak an extra Kb to run a DOS game in the past.
We haven't hit a *limit* on RAM, we've hit saturation - the average desktop has more than it will ever use and virtually as much as the average office network server running its databases etc. The general purpose machines have hit that point where they can fulfill any general purpose. I can/have/do run networks of modern PC's from servers with technically inferior specifications to the desktops themselves.
History hasn't proved my statement wrong. CPU use - it's hit saturation for the general purpose PC, several years ago hence "dual-core" etc. and the fact that most people don't even know what their real speed is any more - because it doesn't matter much. RAM use - it's hit saturation for the general purpose PC. Hard disk use hit this point *AGES* ago for a general purpose PC, hence why some laptops, workstations etc. still come with 40Gb and 80Gb when they are 1TB desktop drives available and the 4Gb flash drives from their early days were hardly a burden. Speaking from experience with hard numbers, 1000 average users running everything from office apps to websites, primitive video editing to games, can happily put all their files on one RAID5 without even hitting silly-sized hard disks. We enforce quota for > 1Gb files or >5Gb areas and it's only very rarely that we hit that with any one particular user and it's easily resolved with inconveniencing anyone and more than cancelled out by the other 900 users with only 50Mb in their folders.
When people ask me "What computer should I buy?", my answer for years was to take it off their hands and do all the technical specifications for them so they got what they needed. Nowadays, I just tell them to buy anything that has the right ports - if you have a scanner, printer etc. get a few USB's and some for spare. If you want a gaming machine, make sure it has a PCIe x16 port (or two if you have cash to splash). If you just want a basic office PC, make sure it's got space for a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Every other specification available today will exceed their usage/expectations on a new system.
Back in the days of the 386, the average PC-owning person (even business users) would know what MHz their PC was and how much RAM, hard disk it had. The first of those to stop mattering was hard disk space... any statistic gathered on PC specifications (e.g. Steam surveys among heavy-gamers) will tell you that most people don't fill 10% of their hard disk. CPU speed stopped mattering shortly after - everyone had 2GHz for a while because that was where it stuck for a long time. Nowadays, a 2.5GHz or a 3GHz doesn't really matter - but people do quote core numbers at you now (Quad Xeon, Dual Core etc.) and that's the new metric, not what speed each core runs at. RAM use has now joined that... everyone'
Well, apparently not because the DRAM makers have run into trouble!
To be honest, the average persona really has no need for the power that modern PC's have and RAM seems to have now hit limits where it hadn't before.
- CPU's are fast enough for anything now but even when bogged down with software on unmanaged machines, they're as fast as they can sensibly go. So instead, people are adding cores and that's solved that problem.
- Hard disks are too large for the majority of people. Most people never fill a hard disk in their lifetime.
- Network speeds etc. are too fast for the majority of people. Most people never hit the bottleneck of their Gigabit-capable motherboard, or extrapolating, hit 8Mbps on their ADSL connections etc.
- Graphics cards are too powerful for the needs of most people. And usually come loaded with up to a Gig of dedicated video RAM. There's not much that any relatively modest graphics card can't do.
- And now RAM has hit the point where every laptop comes with a couple of Gig (not including the video RAM) that you have to be a power user to fill up (unless you are using Vista and/or crappy software).
My new workplace bought me a laptop. It cost about £500. It's more powerful than the last server I worked on that managed 450 workstations. It laughs at Half-life 2 and similar programs in 60fps at super-high-res widescreen with anti-aliasing (although, I have to admit, it needs to be plugged in to do this at a decent frame rate). All I wanted was something that could run Word and ping networks.
Actual responses recieved from such enquiries, in order of frequency:
"What's Linux?"
"We only do Windows. We'll only ever do Windows."
"Nobody uses Linux, so we won't produce software for it."
"We can't because we license Windows libraries, like XXX." (at least 50% of the stuff I see in schools is either made in Shockwave entirely, or has things like licensed libraries, ActiveX controls etc. It's all DirectX, Flash, Shockwave, MDAC, etc. written with no thought for ever porting at all, so it's actually quicker just to write a competing product than it is to port an existing one, even within the company)
Give it 50 years, we might be there. In 20 if we pushed. In 5 if Vista and Windows 7 really, really flop hard. (Tomorrow if a little company called Research Machines were to fold. :-) ).
The problem is that within 10, everything will be online and delivered by browser anyway (even if that means ActiveX controls, MS-controlled codecs and HUGE, probably annual, terminal services licensing bills) and fat clients won't play much of a part in schools any more.
It's already 75% of the way there - I've just run a set of reading tests that were entirely online, and even have even seen GCSE's etc. that were entirely online in the past, new schools/Academies are more interested in paying parents to get broadband/remote access to their private web/video content than they are about actually buying PC's in-school or hiring technicians, the governments are mandating that every child has online accounts, remote access, homework set online, even down to what they have eaten in the canteen so the parents can pick up on it.
The actual plan is this:
Scrap all the crap teachers.
Put all the good ones online and make them produce full interactive courses for everything they know online.
Hire unqualified people to supervise children in class and turn on a videoconference/website for them (run over remote terminals, so you can get rid of internal IT support too)
(Unsaid but assumed) Sack most of the good teachers once you have the content that you want.
(Unsaid but assumed) Scrap the schools and make kids do it from home.
We're well on the way to completing stages 1, 2 and 3 simultaneously already. Legal mandates for the next few years in the UK will wrap that up over the next 3 years.
Actually, running networks of 450 machines plus 1000 (hostile) users almost single-handedly tends to take it out of you. However, I've suggested (and had it suggested to me by staff) several times about teaming up with the good teachers and writing this sort of stuff. We brainstormed for a while and decided to see what problems would arise before we committed ourselves to anything.
The problems:
1) Graphics. You need a professional graphic artist - there really is no way around this, although for early demos and proof-of-concepts you can get away with clipart and dodgy sketches. Another person you have to find/hire. Art departments, sixth-form art students etc. may or may not be interested.
2) Sound. You need a sound studio or access to good quality sound clips. Having the kids record stuff at random on a cheap mic isn't going to work outside the actual school you record it in.
3) Legal liability. Schools don't want you to do anything that means you have to supply a legal disclaimer. Now imagine that you have staff in other schools who have purchased/downloaded your software because it claims to adhere to the curriculum, or provide evidence of student progression, and doesn't. Or say it crashes and takes their network out. Or say it loses the last year's data that it recorded. It's a minefield.
4) Curriculum content. 75% of teacher time is taken up with making sure that they are adhering to the curriculum, planning their lessons so that every single line in their curriculum requirements is fulfilled for every kid etc. Now ask them to do it all again for that computer program you're writing.
5) Time. I haven't got any. The staff haven't got any. The school won't give you any to develop commercial-quality software.
6) Broad compatibility. If it doesn't work on popular school network X, it won't get into other schools just out of sheer technical complaints. This is harder than you think when you see some of these network management tools. I crashed an entire school network once (every server and client locked up until a technician like me can come in and spot the problem) by deploying an standard, fully working MSI package with a space in the (valid) filename. They are Windows systems, but they are so heavily locked down by crappy proprietry software that they can't move.
It's not that I *can't* make the software (I can), it's not that I haven't even had the *opportunity* (I have), or that I can't do it at home (I could) or that I don't want to (I really, really do) or that I haven't tried (I have). The fact is that I would be just a programmer and not an educator... I'd end up with "yet-another-KStars". You need a team (I even state in previous Slashdot posts that I don't believe teams are required for most programming at all, and often hinder the progress, but I mean a team of educator, programmer, artist and upper-level management in at least one school). Pulling a team that consists of a *very good* teaching member of staff, a decent programmer, a half-decent artist together and getting them to work on a good consistent product is hard. I've just said above... I don't believe this is a problem with OSS, it's just an incredibly difficult task no matter how you do it.
Short answer: "Get some real stuff, that the children can ... break, hit each other other the head with."
I'm not saying I agree with that (I'm with you personally) but a lot of schools get peanuts for their science budgets, can't afford real science teachers, are legally required to do *something*, have kids that are waiting to be taught today even if reforms are years away, and are virtually powerless against unruly children who shouldn't be in some schools at all, are sued left-right-and-centre by their own student's parents for the slightest silly thing, have H&S restrictions imposed from several layers above and thus their best science lessons are done on PC (in the UK all state-school subjects MUST include some ICT at some point, so you have to have the software anyway). I'm not saying that's right either. But you can either fight to change all this and yet get *something* into the kids heads in the meantime, or you can refuse to and just let all the crap science teachers step in where the professionals won't and ruin the kids education that way. Education is an aboslute minefield. You can't understand it from the outside, though I would say that you don't need to be on the inside to fix it - you just need to be rich enough.
Again, if you don't work in schools, you won't understand this. That doesn't mean you could do better under the same legal restrictions. It doesn't mean you can ignore those restrictions or fight to change them and not ruin at least one generation of kids' education (because they fail their contrived exams because they learned "real" science and/or because their education is neglected while the "real" science is being fought for).
"so, is there an area that is missing ? if that is a missing functionality in one of the existing apps, talk to the devs. it might just get implemented. a whole now application might be less likely to appear, but you never know until you rrreally talk about it :)"
Yes. All of the above.
KDE-Edu is included by default on every single distro that I know of (except the embedded ones). They *aren't* educational in the sense of professional educational institutions. They are freeware toys that are ten-a-penny for any operating system in the world and of no practical value whatsoever. Try them with a group of kids... they will get played with for about a minute. Maybe one or two will find/play a favourite a few days in a row. Then they will be forgotten and the kids will have *learned* nothing at all.
Playing hangman is not an educational game. It's a game.
Playing with kstars does not teach you about the cosmos.
For a look at some educational "games" that go down **REALLY** well with schools, have a look at some of the following:
http://www.rm.com/shops/rmshop/Product.aspx?cref=PD2381
RM Maths - Yurk, spit!
I hate the company but this product has kids voluntarily coming into school EVERY DAY FOR SIX MONTHS at 8:20 every morning to do a 15 minute session before school starts. Look at the features... audio and on-screen instructions, staged progression, weakness identification, randomly generated but always valid and skilled questions (aimed at an 80% percent success rate no matter the kid's current level), natural progression based on success, age, time, etc., reviewing of trouble areas per child from an admin interface, vast statistics (not just random ones!), class-based logins (including import and export of pupil data from other programs as CSV files, so you don't have to re-enter DOB's etc. for 450 pupils to get accurate readings) so you can generate a whole class' data in one hit or log them all into a computer suite in one go, network-wide installation, ties in with the English and Welsh national numeracy curriculums with targetted questions for every single tiny point on all of them, locked down interface so the kids can't start a test, wipe out their scores or even exit the program without staff doing it for them. Now look at the price £150 / seat! This is a program that when you first play with the kids interface you think "It's just maths questions". It's not. It's just what the schools want and need. Teachers send kids out of class for 15 minutes to sit and do these questions and the kids would do anything to do it. They love the games, questions, etc., comparing scores, there's even characters and storylines for the younger kids. It's all self-explanatory (although as a maths-and computing-grad, it really could benefit from a overhaul of the explanations of some particular questions) and the kids ALL enjoy sitting and doing it, whether they are doing 2+2, probability, statistics, symmetry, geometry or trying to formulate an algebraic expression. I've never seen kids so enthusiastic for maths in an ordinary state school.
They are dozens of programs to do science experiments on the computer - whether you agree with the practice or not, some schools cannot do the "bloody Health and Safety" stuff to let kids actually do real experiments. You do actual experiments. You mix chemicals, select your measuring devices, take down measurements, make predictions, observe results, get an explanation of all the processes in play from a single program.
Clicker - it's a simple program that does nothing more than have an icon and a speech-synthesized pronunciation of several thousand words in a children-style WYSIWYG word processor. The kids use it. They sell content packs which do things like add "Castles", "Ancient Greece", etc. into the bargain with full multimedia content for each. This thing retails at £100/seat, content packs extra. The difference be
"Why would you use photomanipulation software for ***producing artwork from scratch***?"
Who said that, where and when? Surprisingly, I was trying to manipulate some images in what I believed was supposed to be an image manipulation program but turned out to be an exercise in "guess the command and how to apply it to an image/layer".