Two separate efforts using technology to protect people from earthquakes (emphasis mine)
As opposed to efforts using what, brute force?
Fair enough, this is a bit of a troll, but it just makes me wonder if certain story submitters have figured out that a title with "Nanotech" and "Wireless" is best followed up with a starting line containing "Technology" in order to maximize story acceptance rate.
Especially considering that the actual articles are remarkably low on content/references/links...
Some of you might remember the DVD-Audio 'hack'. Well guess what? The Intervideo keys got revoked. Then guess what happened?
That's right, the people that payed Intervideo for their player that was advertised to play DVD-Audio are TOL. Intervideo pulled the functionality out of their new players and the people that had bought the older version are only going to be able to playback DVD-Audio discs that were mastered pre-revoked keys. Unless they upgrade, in which case they can't play any DVD-Audio.
I'm just saying that software players that play any of the new DRMd media are bound to be 'cracked' and you are bound to be on the short end of the pissing contest, even though you are paying for a product based on functionality that's advertised.
I can't wait for this to happen to a 'hardware' player that has sold many units. What's needed is a large enough quantity of people being pissed off by paying for something that won't deliver. Unfortunately getting a key out of a hardware device is probably at least one or two orders of magnitude more complicated...
I know, I know, not nearly as l33t. And of course CF is still a lot cheaper, so if the guy's intent is to actually produce this adapter it may be worth the proof-of-concept stage. Of course there's a good chance that one of the companies that make these sort of adapters will pick it up and start building them for $0.99 each.
Theo is a real sharp programmer, and an eloquent writer when he wants to be. I met him once. I went to shake his hand. I swear, he did not notice. This left me to think that when Theo commits social gaffes, it is not his fault and he can't help himself. We all have our lacks, issues, and strengths.
What Theo did was a classic case of blame shifting. Trivialize the problems on your side whilst (trying to) change the subject to a problem on the other side. I don't understand why no-one brought this up in the discussion earlier, it's very transparent. All the -public- name calling demonstrates it nicely because it's basically committing the same 'crime'. Eye for an eye I don't think is considered terribly humane.
Now the interesting thing to me is the way they tried to trivialize the copyright infringement. Supposedly the code should have never made it into CVS, it was a mistake. However, it was being used to develop the driver for BSD (and to be licensed under the BSD license).
When corporations do stuff like this, they generally use clean-room reverse-engineering. I wonder what the legality is of the approach they used, copyright-wise. Consider a more extreme case. Let's say I take the Linux kernel source tree, and one by one I start 'rewriting' every bit of source (while most certainly glancing at the original), could I then license the 'new' kernel under whatever terms I want?
I could be wrong, but wasn't the copyright violation being made when the code is copied from the GPL code into the local development version of the developer? And the CVS commit is just a wider spread distribution after that? I've wondered about this for a while because 'tainting' is practically only being talked about in the context of closed-source corporations, not in the context of someone having seen Open Source software.
I haven't followed the actual code, but setting pointers to 0 is actually wrong (if right for the specific architecture then it is semantically wrong). Shouldn't they be NULL instead? I haven't coded C in a long time, but I remember reading the comp.lang.c faq, and they warn against using memset to zero data structures because not all architectures use a 0 for Null.
Perhaps,- that's something that could be argued about. However, the case in point has nothing to do with pointers. He named the variable Ptrs, but the matter of fact is that it's declared as an array of longs, not an array of "long *". So using memset is fine. But perhaps there's something underlying wrong right there in the code; maybe it should have been actual pointers, not longs to begin with.
With regards to NULL, I'd like to have that argument. I think it's very hard to come up with a reasonable hmmmm, well, reason, why NULL should not basically be 0. I never use NULL, because it's a define. It doesn't make sense to me, is it defined as an integer or as a float, or a pointer? (I know the answer, but I'm saying that the basic concept is wrong). AFAIK it's not part of the standard. So if I were to initialize a pointer I'd use something like: char *ptr = (char *)0;
That should be fine. Although one interesting point is that I'm not sure that a 0 pointer is technically defined as 'bad'. That is to say, I can imagine a platform where a pointer points to memory address 0, and that's perfectly fine. Not any platform that I'm aware off (except for special cases), but still. Could take a long night of stiff drinks before you'd convince me to use NULL;-)
Good points. But, we should give the guy some credit, he does state in the readme:
This examples are for Proof of Concept only.
They are not the most error free,optimized,commented,beautifull code to have ever been written
Personally I would never write code like this, proof of concept or not, avoiding the portability problems for example would not have taken more time to write. But pressumably more experience. So probably the best thing to do is be constructive about it.
I'll give it a shot on some of the issues that I found:
- don't assume long = 32 bit and short int = 16 bit. Different compilers/platforms will have different sizes. If you need to proof of concept something and don't want to deal with the portability issues, do something like:
typedef unsigned long u32; typedef unsigned short u16;
And then use u32/u16 throughout. That way, if someone wants to port the code, all they have to do is define the proper typedefs for their platform (I usually put that stuff in it's own header, like "to_port.h" or something).
Also, it makes it very obvious that you are relying on certain vars to be of a certain size.
- don't rely on how variables are stored in memory i.e. on what endian-ness the architecture is. If you take a 32 bit unsigned integer, the low 0-7 bits are not stored at the same memory address on different architecture. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, google for little-endian & big-endian. If you don't want to deal with special casing it, do something like #define LITTLE_ENDIAN 1 in your to_port.h, and then in the code do something like
#ifndef LITTLE_ENDIAN #error This code assumes little endian #endif
- this code:
long Ptrs[65535];
long Tail[65535];
stores 512KB on the stack. That's generally considered quite extravagent, to put it mildly.
- use memset instead of this code:
for(n=0;n<65535;n++){
Head[n]=0;
Tail[n]=0;
}
as an example, Microsoft's compiler can inline memset making it extremely fast, compared to a for loop. Btw. the write-through cache on the CPU would probably prefer it if this was broken up into two separate loops, so memory gets accessed linearly, instead of jumping back and forth.
As can be seen on RegisterFlies, it appears that some of the officers at RegisterFly are trying to fix the problems. The new CEO claims to have put in all his private assets to make this work.
There is some skeptisism in the forums because people aren't seeing immediate results. Well fair enough. BUT.
There's something that bothers me a lot more though.
Assuming that RegisterFlies doesn't make all this stuff up, then the other officers (John & Glen) keep on making very strong allegations towards Kevin Medina. (e.g. from the official statement by the new CEO John: "Mr. Medina is a selfish, cold hearted, self loving, criminal.") Well, I don't know much about the legal system, but I would suspect that any lawyer would give you the strongest advice not to even mention the guy's name until all lawsuits have been settled. I mean this is just asking for counter libel/slander (whatever the proper word is) suits.
If you just put all your private assets into a company, why would you make it susceptible to that?
Next, if you read the forums, people have sustained extremely serious damage. Kevin Medina may have been causing all this, a court will have to decide, but it's very likely that some very hefty lawsuits will be filed against RegisterFly by their customers (and not Kevin Medina, their contract is with RF after all). Why would anyone invest all they have into a company that is set up for this sort of trouble?
If John and Glen are doing what is being reported on RegisterFlies, then all the power to them. I hope for them it works out, but I'm sorry to say that it's hard to see a positive future for RegisterFly.
They claim their software will survive a hard drive format, but not sure how... anyone know?
That's an interesting claim. First of all I would guess they are going with the DOS/Windows definitition of a format. If that's what they are talking about, then yes, it is technically possible because although a format rewrites a partition, it does not change the initial code that gets loaded from the disk, which resides in the MBR (Master Boot Record). The MBR points to the partition that the OS sits on, and you can reformat a partition without touching the MBR. The MBR starts btw on the very first sector on a disk.
Still, a thief clever enough to format a drive is pretty close to being clever enough to do a "fdisk/mbr" or take out the hard drive entirely of course...
In any case, it's still hard to believe, because something that loads during the very initial boot time is not something that can just 'phone home'. That is all 16 bit x86 code and will be entirely discarded when Windows loads. So they would have to phone home pre-Windows boot, meaning that now they need drivers for every possible Ethernet adapter, the USB/PCI/Cardbus/whatever bus it's sitting on, a TCP/IP stack etc etc.
I seriously doubt they can survive a harddrive format (especially when it involves for example a re-install of Windows XP). Their website, although politically correct, does not excude the technical expertise it would take to pull that off. But that's just one opinion...
Yes, Tom Hanks wasn't on an island when he goes to the top of the hill and looks around at an endless expanse of ocean (he was in a hollywood backlot) but the expression on his face made you believe he was.
Hehe. Yeah, made you believe Tom Hanks was looking around. Now how believable it was that "Chuck Noland" was looking around is another story all together.
Glory days for Linux indeed. More drivers released for Vista in the last couple of weeks than Linux drivers for the last 10 years.
Yeah....
Ignoring the credibility and "quality vs. quantity" issues with your statement, the point is that so long as people revert to downloading binaries from unknown (untrusted) places and installing them on their system, we are still a long ways away from security being 'fixed' in Windows.
Not to say that the same issues couldn't arise with Linux, btw, they could, but (and I'm saying this as a predominantly XP user) it's less likely:
And none of the Vista drivers require you to recompile your kernel to get them working either.
Exactly; you'd rather download a binary blob from a random place and install it as an Administrator.
So to get back to the glory days for Linux,- (and the context in which I wrote it) in the long term, if Microsoft doesn't solve (instead of fix, which is too simple of a term considering the problem) the security issues with Windows, then I don't think it's a far stretch to predict that that will have positive effects on Linux's marketshare.
Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers
on
Listing of Vista Drivers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers from places linked to by this site?
I mean, all good intentions aside, but drivers are binary files, it's rediculous enough that most of them aren't digitally signed even when downloaded from the original manufacturer. But explain why exactly this site is sending us to "files.3dnews.ru" to download ATI drivers???
Shit, I can't even come up with a hooker/unprotected sex analogy that's silly enough to describe this.
In any case, if this is the way for Vista customers to get their new purchase to work, then yeah, glory days for Linux ahead...
Objectivists practically get sexually aroused at the thought of corporations.
But this certainly isn't. You evidently have no idea what objectivism is. I would say that the term "Fringe, anti-corporate" is absolutely compatible with being an objectivist.
Reading your BIOS to determine CPU ain't gonna be useful. I doubt any BIOSes store info on which CPU is on the board.
As a former BIOS coder, I'll second that. Even if the BIOS did store some system specific info in Flash (on Embedded BIOSs sometimes this is done because CMOS is not reliable), there is NO way that Skype would know the format/place/meaning of this. It would be specific to a certain build of a specific BIOS for a specific board by a specific vendor.
In any case, the method described to dump the BIOS is not very likely to get anything close to the complete, original BIOS image to begin with. By dumping memory at F000:0000 through F000:FFFF, a 16 bit DOS program, under Windows, will get the memory resident part of the BIOS. Most BIOSs are far bigger than 64KB and the memory resident part is the decompressed runtime part, which is nothing like what the actual BIOS image looks like at boot time.
They are most likely using this in combination with other more or less 'unique' things to identify a specific machine. It wouldn't surprise me if after this some people would do a more in-depth analysis of their code and find out that it also reads the serial number of the harddrive and gets the MAC address of the Ethernet adapter.
These generators aren't the most environmentally friendly, but during disaster recovery I'd think that's one of your least concerns; it's only temporary anyway.
No matter how much RAM you have, Windows still seems to need a swap file that is constantly being written to (not to mention all the writing to the registry). Given that current flash technologies have a limited number erase/write cycles, I hope the flash-based hard-drive is replaceable.
Nah, that's old news. Tons of current Flash implementations have a transparant 'load balancing', combined with much improved erase cycles. Look at the datasheet for some modern Flash devices, and do the math. The last time I checked it on a 4GB device, it would take 10 years of continuous writes before you'd hit the write cycle limit.
Yes, apparently (judging by feedback) some folks around here like the slapping on the backs congratulating each other how great Linux uptime is and how poor the uptime of Windows is.
The matter of the fact is though, that many people that actually use Windows, even those that pretty much despise it (like myself), are not going to be convinced by your circle jerk.
I mean seriously:
I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month.
I'm NOT a Windows expert, but I have about 6 Windows boxes around the house that pretty much only get shutdown for reasons that can't be blamed on the OS. I don't know how much time exactly goes between reboots, and frankly, I don't care. It's extremely rare that I have to shut one down because it has become unstable. (mind you, it does happen, but I've also seen my share of kernel panics)
I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed
How many do you want? I've NEVER had a virus or rootkit or anything like that on ANY of my Windows boxes. You are probably talking about machines of users that, well, don't know any better. As much as people hate it when it's being said; the same thing would have happened if Linux had the same popularity as Windows. Linux may be more secure by design, but the biggest problem is that people just aren't. They just want the gawdam Garfield Mouse Cursor. You can say that you would have never granted root access to your mother. I've seen enough mothers that would have gone through the effort to just reinstall the OS entirely (most likely without knowing it) to get their Weather Report in the system tray. Both Linux and Windows as well as PCs in general have some fundamental flaws that have yet to be resolved (and yeah sure, Windows tops the list).
Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly.
Now you are just making stuff up. If there's a reason to do that, it's only because of the applications (i.e. third party service) running on the box and pretty has nothing to do with Windows. It's very much possible to write a service for Linux that would basically bring the system to it's knees.
I mean, I hate to be defending freaking M$ here, but who are you guys trying to fool? Do you think you are doing the Linux community a service? Because I can guarantee you that avid/competent Windows users are not going to read this and go "ah! we switcheth the boxen to Linux!"
I hate Windows. I hate the way Microsoft has taken advantage of it's monopoly. I think many parts of the Windows kernel are not well designed, and more importantly because of legacy support is severly crippled. But I also don't think Linux is all that well designed (how long did it take to get a scheduler that approaches some form of real-timeness, and yes, I think that is important even for non-embedded OSs). If you can measure penis size by uptime, then yeah, perhaps Linux wins. But the stability in both OSs is pretty much entirely determined by third-party software, arcane hardware or third-party drivers.
If I had to rank those I would say that Linux probably wins on being able to deal with bad third-party software. Windows probably wins on dealing with arcane hardware, and both do equally bad when it comes down to (bad) third-party drivers.
If you could put back on your old hat as a customer, if I came in and started talking to you about virtualization on Linux, and this Microsoft guy showed up and started talking to you about virtualization on Windows, what would you say to us?
What a weirdly constructed phrase. If I was the customer I would say, wtf are you talking about? Or I might say, get the fuck out of here, I'm not interested in your virtualization marketing-speak.
What I need as a customer is for things to become mre clean, simple, consistent, stable, secure, etc, I don't need yet another layer of shit on top of the layers of poop that are already there.
If I'm a CIO, that's what I'm dealing with: "What are you guys doing to make my life easier to make those things work together?" I saw virtualization as a key to us being able to do that in a different manner than we have in the past.
Why? So instead of two dual core systems I can now buy one quad core? Except the two dual core systems would always run smoother because there's less resource contention?
Is virtualization really what the market demands nowadays??
Just as a little backstory, one of the quotes the guy has on his facebook (which he now has taken down) was "I like to find the most difficult solutions to the simplest of problems".
If you think this in any way, shape or form justifies what happened, you are one sick motherfucker. Read your freaking constitution, for christ sakes.
Just to be clear: I did NOT mean to say that ALL Open Source software is worth nothing; quite to the contrary. But I also believe that pretty much all of the worthwhile Open Source software is written/maintained by very serious organizations/people who do not consider their efforts a "for the fun of it" kinda thing.
The thing that a lot of (dare I say 'young') people seem to miss is that putting out a product with certain claims is going to generate certain expectations. In the real world, people, and especially businesses, are going to be pretty pissed off when the expectations aren't met. So when you are putting out your project that you threw together "for the fun of it", please make sure you 'manage expectations'. You can be proud of your work, but just don't claim it will do anything it can't fully deliver. And that includes documentation.
Maybe, just maybe, people are not in it for the money. Maybe they love to code for "the pure fun of it". After all, millions of people do crosswords, solve sudoku, climb mountains, ride bicycles, and blast apart aliens, for the sheer joy of it.
That's fine, but don't pretend it is anything more than that. A solved sudoku is worth nothing. An unfortunate amount of Open Source 'software' is worth the same.
If you rearrange the letters and the numbers they correspond with, won't that screw up phone numbers that use text spellings? For example, Comcast's main phone number is 1-800-COMCAST
Looks like they thought of that: now you just dial 1-800-MNOPLY
Slashdot Mirror
But did you see that tote bag with a laptop pouch?!
Two separate efforts using technology to protect people from earthquakes (emphasis mine)
As opposed to efforts using what, brute force?
Fair enough, this is a bit of a troll, but it just makes me wonder if certain story submitters have figured out that a title with "Nanotech" and "Wireless" is best followed up with a starting line containing "Technology" in order to maximize story acceptance rate.
Especially considering that the actual articles are remarkably low on content/references/links...
Some of you might remember the DVD-Audio 'hack'. Well guess what? The Intervideo keys got revoked. Then guess what happened?
That's right, the people that payed Intervideo for their player that was advertised to play DVD-Audio are TOL. Intervideo pulled the functionality out of their new players and the people that had bought the older version are only going to be able to playback DVD-Audio discs that were mastered pre-revoked keys. Unless they upgrade, in which case they can't play any DVD-Audio.
I'm just saying that software players that play any of the new DRMd media are bound to be 'cracked' and you are bound to be on the short end of the pissing contest, even though you are paying for a product based on functionality that's advertised.
I can't wait for this to happen to a 'hardware' player that has sold many units. What's needed is a large enough quantity of people being pissed off by paying for something that won't deliver. Unfortunately getting a key out of a hardware device is probably at least one or two orders of magnitude more complicated...
From the article, the 1.8 inch drive is not pin for pin compatible with ATA/CF. Pinouts for both are listed in the forum.
This makes not exactly hard into not exactly easy.
Hehe, or you could just buy a 1.8" flash drive...
I know, I know, not nearly as l33t. And of course CF is still a lot cheaper, so if the guy's intent is to actually produce this adapter it may be worth the proof-of-concept stage. Of course there's a good chance that one of the companies that make these sort of adapters will pick it up and start building them for $0.99 each.
Theo is a real sharp programmer, and an eloquent writer when he wants to be. I met him once. I went to shake his hand. I swear, he did not notice. This left me to think that when Theo commits social gaffes, it is not his fault and he can't help himself. We all have our lacks, issues, and strengths.
What Theo did was a classic case of blame shifting. Trivialize the problems on your side whilst (trying to) change the subject to a problem on the other side. I don't understand why no-one brought this up in the discussion earlier, it's very transparent. All the -public- name calling demonstrates it nicely because it's basically committing the same 'crime'. Eye for an eye I don't think is considered terribly humane.
Now the interesting thing to me is the way they tried to trivialize the copyright infringement. Supposedly the code should have never made it into CVS, it was a mistake. However, it was being used to develop the driver for BSD (and to be licensed under the BSD license).
When corporations do stuff like this, they generally use clean-room reverse-engineering. I wonder what the legality is of the approach they used, copyright-wise. Consider a more extreme case. Let's say I take the Linux kernel source tree, and one by one I start 'rewriting' every bit of source (while most certainly glancing at the original), could I then license the 'new' kernel under whatever terms I want?
I could be wrong, but wasn't the copyright violation being made when the code is copied from the GPL code into the local development version of the developer? And the CVS commit is just a wider spread distribution after that? I've wondered about this for a while because 'tainting' is practically only being talked about in the context of closed-source corporations, not in the context of someone having seen Open Source software.
I'm not sure why this is getting press now, given that a very similar exploit has been known and public since October 2000 (bug 56236)
erm, maybe because this is a fairly serious bug that still remains unfixed???
I haven't followed the actual code, but setting pointers to 0 is actually wrong (if right for the specific architecture then it is semantically wrong). Shouldn't they be NULL instead? I haven't coded C in a long time, but I remember reading the comp.lang.c faq, and they warn against using memset to zero data structures because not all architectures use a 0 for Null.
;-)
Perhaps,- that's something that could be argued about. However, the case in point has nothing to do with pointers. He named the variable Ptrs, but the matter of fact is that it's declared as an array of longs, not an array of "long *". So using memset is fine. But perhaps there's something underlying wrong right there in the code; maybe it should have been actual pointers, not longs to begin with.
With regards to NULL, I'd like to have that argument. I think it's very hard to come up with a reasonable hmmmm, well, reason, why NULL should not basically be 0. I never use NULL, because it's a define. It doesn't make sense to me, is it defined as an integer or as a float, or a pointer? (I know the answer, but I'm saying that the basic concept is wrong). AFAIK it's not part of the standard. So if I were to initialize a pointer I'd use something like:
char *ptr = (char *)0;
That should be fine. Although one interesting point is that I'm not sure that a 0 pointer is technically defined as 'bad'. That is to say, I can imagine a platform where a pointer points to memory address 0, and that's perfectly fine. Not any platform that I'm aware off (except for special cases), but still. Could take a long night of stiff drinks before you'd convince me to use NULL
This examples are for Proof of Concept only.
They are not the most error free,optimized,commented,beautifull code
to have ever been written
Personally I would never write code like this, proof of concept or not, avoiding the portability problems for example would not have taken more time to write. But pressumably more experience. So probably the best thing to do is be constructive about it.
I'll give it a shot on some of the issues that I found:
- don't assume long = 32 bit and short int = 16 bit. Different compilers/platforms will have different sizes. If you need to proof of concept something and don't want to deal with the portability issues, do something like:
typedef unsigned long u32;
typedef unsigned short u16;
And then use u32/u16 throughout. That way, if someone wants to port the code, all they have to do is define the proper typedefs for their platform (I usually put that stuff in it's own header, like "to_port.h" or something).
Also, it makes it very obvious that you are relying on certain vars to be of a certain size.
- don't rely on how variables are stored in memory i.e. on what endian-ness the architecture is. If you take a 32 bit unsigned integer, the low 0-7 bits are not stored at the same memory address on different architecture. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, google for little-endian & big-endian. If you don't want to deal with special casing it, do something like #define LITTLE_ENDIAN 1 in your to_port.h, and then in the code do something like - this code: stores 512KB on the stack. That's generally considered quite extravagent, to put it mildly.
- use memset instead of this code: as an example, Microsoft's compiler can inline memset making it extremely fast, compared to a for loop. Btw. the write-through cache on the CPU would probably prefer it if this was broken up into two separate loops, so memory gets accessed linearly, instead of jumping back and forth.
As can be seen on RegisterFlies, it appears that some of the officers at RegisterFly are trying to fix the problems. The new CEO claims to have put in all his private assets to make this work.
There is some skeptisism in the forums because people aren't seeing immediate results. Well fair enough. BUT.
There's something that bothers me a lot more though.
Assuming that RegisterFlies doesn't make all this stuff up, then the other officers (John & Glen) keep on making very strong allegations towards Kevin Medina. (e.g. from the official statement by the new CEO John: "Mr. Medina is a selfish, cold hearted, self loving, criminal.") Well, I don't know much about the legal system, but I would suspect that any lawyer would give you the strongest advice not to even mention the guy's name until all lawsuits have been settled. I mean this is just asking for counter libel/slander (whatever the proper word is) suits.
If you just put all your private assets into a company, why would you make it susceptible to that?
Next, if you read the forums, people have sustained extremely serious damage. Kevin Medina may have been causing all this, a court will have to decide, but it's very likely that some very hefty lawsuits will be filed against RegisterFly by their customers (and not Kevin Medina, their contract is with RF after all). Why would anyone invest all they have into a company that is set up for this sort of trouble?
If John and Glen are doing what is being reported on RegisterFlies, then all the power to them. I hope for them it works out, but I'm sorry to say that it's hard to see a positive future for RegisterFly.
They claim their software will survive a hard drive format, but not sure how... anyone know?
/mbr" or take out the hard drive entirely of course...
That's an interesting claim. First of all I would guess they are going with the DOS/Windows definitition of a format. If that's what they are talking about, then yes, it is technically possible because although a format rewrites a partition, it does not change the initial code that gets loaded from the disk, which resides in the MBR (Master Boot Record). The MBR points to the partition that the OS sits on, and you can reformat a partition without touching the MBR. The MBR starts btw on the very first sector on a disk.
Still, a thief clever enough to format a drive is pretty close to being clever enough to do a "fdisk
In any case, it's still hard to believe, because something that loads during the very initial boot time is not something that can just 'phone home'. That is all 16 bit x86 code and will be entirely discarded when Windows loads. So they would have to phone home pre-Windows boot, meaning that now they need drivers for every possible Ethernet adapter, the USB/PCI/Cardbus/whatever bus it's sitting on, a TCP/IP stack etc etc.
I seriously doubt they can survive a harddrive format (especially when it involves for example a re-install of Windows XP). Their website, although politically correct, does not excude the technical expertise it would take to pull that off. But that's just one opinion...
all of you must be new here
Yes, Tom Hanks wasn't on an island when he goes to the top of the hill and looks around at an endless expanse of ocean (he was in a hollywood backlot) but the expression on his face made you believe he was.
Hehe. Yeah, made you believe Tom Hanks was looking around. Now how believable it was that "Chuck Noland" was looking around is another story all together.
[ducks]
Glory days for Linux indeed. More drivers released for Vista in the last couple of weeks than Linux drivers for the last 10 years.
Yeah....
Ignoring the credibility and "quality vs. quantity" issues with your statement, the point is that so long as people revert to downloading binaries from unknown (untrusted) places and installing them on their system, we are still a long ways away from security being 'fixed' in Windows.
Not to say that the same issues couldn't arise with Linux, btw, they could, but (and I'm saying this as a predominantly XP user) it's less likely:
And none of the Vista drivers require you to recompile your kernel to get them working either.
Exactly; you'd rather download a binary blob from a random place and install it as an Administrator.
So to get back to the glory days for Linux,- (and the context in which I wrote it) in the long term, if Microsoft doesn't solve (instead of fix, which is too simple of a term considering the problem) the security issues with Windows, then I don't think it's a far stretch to predict that that will have positive effects on Linux's marketshare.
Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers from places linked to by this site?
I mean, all good intentions aside, but drivers are binary files, it's rediculous enough that most of them aren't digitally signed even when downloaded from the original manufacturer. But explain why exactly this site is sending us to "files.3dnews.ru" to download ATI drivers???
Shit, I can't even come up with a hooker/unprotected sex analogy that's silly enough to describe this.
In any case, if this is the way for Vista customers to get their new purchase to work, then yeah, glory days for Linux ahead...
He's an objectivist.
Okay that part is perhaps informative.
Objectivists practically get sexually aroused at the thought of corporations.
But this certainly isn't. You evidently have no idea what objectivism is. I would say that the term "Fringe, anti-corporate" is absolutely compatible with being an objectivist.
Reading your BIOS to determine CPU ain't gonna be useful. I doubt any BIOSes store info on which CPU is on the board.
As a former BIOS coder, I'll second that. Even if the BIOS did store some system specific info in Flash (on Embedded BIOSs sometimes this is done because CMOS is not reliable), there is NO way that Skype would know the format/place/meaning of this. It would be specific to a certain build of a specific BIOS for a specific board by a specific vendor.
In any case, the method described to dump the BIOS is not very likely to get anything close to the complete, original BIOS image to begin with. By dumping memory at F000:0000 through F000:FFFF, a 16 bit DOS program, under Windows, will get the memory resident part of the BIOS. Most BIOSs are far bigger than 64KB and the memory resident part is the decompressed runtime part, which is nothing like what the actual BIOS image looks like at boot time.
They are most likely using this in combination with other more or less 'unique' things to identify a specific machine. It wouldn't surprise me if after this some people would do a more in-depth analysis of their code and find out that it also reads the serial number of the harddrive and gets the MAC address of the Ethernet adapter.
there's nothing cooler than using sol.exe as your decryption key
lol, especially when Windows Automatic Update decides the time has come to add a new deck image to Solitaire.
Any reason why this $100 generator wouldn't work?
I'm no expert on these, I'm just curious.
These generators aren't the most environmentally friendly, but during disaster recovery I'd think that's one of your least concerns; it's only temporary anyway.
No matter how much RAM you have, Windows still seems to need a swap file that is constantly being written to (not to mention all the writing to the registry). Given that current flash technologies have a limited number erase/write cycles, I hope the flash-based hard-drive is replaceable.
Nah, that's old news. Tons of current Flash implementations have a transparant 'load balancing', combined with much improved erase cycles. Look at the datasheet for some modern Flash devices, and do the math. The last time I checked it on a 4GB device, it would take 10 years of continuous writes before you'd hit the write cycle limit.
Yes, apparently (judging by feedback) some folks around here like the slapping on the backs congratulating each other how great Linux uptime is and how poor the uptime of Windows is.
The matter of the fact is though, that many people that actually use Windows, even those that pretty much despise it (like myself), are not going to be convinced by your circle jerk.
I mean seriously:
I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month.
I'm NOT a Windows expert, but I have about 6 Windows boxes around the house that pretty much only get shutdown for reasons that can't be blamed on the OS. I don't know how much time exactly goes between reboots, and frankly, I don't care. It's extremely rare that I have to shut one down because it has become unstable. (mind you, it does happen, but I've also seen my share of kernel panics)
I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed
How many do you want? I've NEVER had a virus or rootkit or anything like that on ANY of my Windows boxes. You are probably talking about machines of users that, well, don't know any better. As much as people hate it when it's being said; the same thing would have happened if Linux had the same popularity as Windows. Linux may be more secure by design, but the biggest problem is that people just aren't. They just want the gawdam Garfield Mouse Cursor. You can say that you would have never granted root access to your mother. I've seen enough mothers that would have gone through the effort to just reinstall the OS entirely (most likely without knowing it) to get their Weather Report in the system tray. Both Linux and Windows as well as PCs in general have some fundamental flaws that have yet to be resolved (and yeah sure, Windows tops the list).
Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly.
Now you are just making stuff up. If there's a reason to do that, it's only because of the applications (i.e. third party service) running on the box and pretty has nothing to do with Windows. It's very much possible to write a service for Linux that would basically bring the system to it's knees.
I mean, I hate to be defending freaking M$ here, but who are you guys trying to fool? Do you think you are doing the Linux community a service? Because I can guarantee you that avid/competent Windows users are not going to read this and go "ah! we switcheth the boxen to Linux!"
I hate Windows. I hate the way Microsoft has taken advantage of it's monopoly. I think many parts of the Windows kernel are not well designed, and more importantly because of legacy support is severly crippled. But I also don't think Linux is all that well designed (how long did it take to get a scheduler that approaches some form of real-timeness, and yes, I think that is important even for non-embedded OSs). If you can measure penis size by uptime, then yeah, perhaps Linux wins. But the stability in both OSs is pretty much entirely determined by third-party software, arcane hardware or third-party drivers.
If I had to rank those I would say that Linux probably wins on being able to deal with bad third-party software. Windows probably wins on dealing with arcane hardware, and both do equally bad when it comes down to (bad) third-party drivers.
If you could put back on your old hat as a customer, if I came in and started talking to you about virtualization on Linux, and this Microsoft guy showed up and started talking to you about virtualization on Windows, what would you say to us?
What a weirdly constructed phrase. If I was the customer I would say, wtf are you talking about? Or I might say, get the fuck out of here, I'm not interested in your virtualization marketing-speak.
What I need as a customer is for things to become mre clean, simple, consistent, stable, secure, etc, I don't need yet another layer of shit on top of the layers of poop that are already there.
If I'm a CIO, that's what I'm dealing with: "What are you guys doing to make my life easier to make those things work together?" I saw virtualization as a key to us being able to do that in a different manner than we have in the past.
Why? So instead of two dual core systems I can now buy one quad core? Except the two dual core systems would always run smoother because there's less resource contention?
Is virtualization really what the market demands nowadays??
Just as a little backstory, one of the quotes the guy has on his facebook (which he now has taken down) was "I like to find the most difficult solutions to the simplest of problems".
If you think this in any way, shape or form justifies what happened, you are one sick motherfucker. Read your freaking constitution, for christ sakes.
Just to be clear: I did NOT mean to say that ALL Open Source software is worth nothing; quite to the contrary. But I also believe that pretty much all of the worthwhile Open Source software is written/maintained by very serious organizations/people who do not consider their efforts a "for the fun of it" kinda thing.
The thing that a lot of (dare I say 'young') people seem to miss is that putting out a product with certain claims is going to generate certain expectations. In the real world, people, and especially businesses, are going to be pretty pissed off when the expectations aren't met. So when you are putting out your project that you threw together "for the fun of it", please make sure you 'manage expectations'. You can be proud of your work, but just don't claim it will do anything it can't fully deliver. And that includes documentation.
Maybe, just maybe, people are not in it for the money. Maybe they love to code for "the pure fun of it". After all, millions of people do crosswords, solve sudoku, climb mountains, ride bicycles, and blast apart aliens, for the sheer joy of it.
That's fine, but don't pretend it is anything more than that. A solved sudoku is worth nothing. An unfortunate amount of Open Source 'software' is worth the same.
If you rearrange the letters and the numbers they correspond with, won't that screw up phone numbers that use text spellings? For example, Comcast's main phone number is 1-800-COMCAST
Looks like they thought of that: now you just dial 1-800-MNOPLY