The biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it fucking breaks.
NASA has this dead on. When you're dealing with failures that can cost millions, the 2.6 kernel is simply not reliable enough. Hell, if you're dealing with failures that cost thousands, it's not reliable enough... and most server failures cost at least that much for midsize and larger companies. Downtime is really expensive. And you're entirely likely to have it with 2.6.
We in the open source community have this collective groupthink that Linux is extremely stable. It ISN'T, not anymore. 2.2 was incredibly robust... in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. 2.4 was problematic but eventually mostly stabilized... it still has occasional issues with unusual hardware combinations, but by and large it's pretty solid. 2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare from the point of view of pretty much any professional sysadmin. Constant regressions, constant bugfixes, and they won't fucking leave it alone and let it stabilize.
It takes YEARS to shake the bugs out of a piece of software, but they refuse to commit to backporting bugfixes to anything older than a couple of months. They just wave their hands in the air and expect 'the distros' to fix their coding errors, instead of doing it right in the first place. So everyone else has to scramble around and backport bugfixes, or else adopt a pile of new features every couple of months. Then we get the bugfixes for the new code, along with MORE new code, with yet MORE bugs. Rik van Riel has stated, I kid you not, that's he's perfectly okay with only one in three 'stable' kernels actually being, you know, stable.
So of COURSE NASA doesn't use it on servers. Linux is not being written for reliability. It never was, it just happened by accident. It was ALWAYS intended as a desktop Unix, but it was so amazingly robust in its early, simple incarnations, that it was pressed into wide server duty. And instead of realizing why Linux became so popular, the devs seem to have stayed with their desktop orientation... and in fact have changed the development process so it's more fun for them. It's a nightmare for everyone ELSE, but now they don't have to deal with the boring, nasty grunt work of making sure the code actually works in every single case.
I can't find the quote now, but at one time, Linus said something along the lines of "Hardware is inherently stable; there's no reason why software can't be written to the same standard." But he seems to have forgotten that completely. Linux has turned into the Windows of Unix.... lots and lots of features, not so hot on reliability. You KNOW it's a problem when Ars Technica, one of the most competent geek websites anywhere, switched back to Windows for _stability_. The Linux dev team should be completely ashamed of themselves for that one.
I've been using Linux since late 93 or early 94. I put it into real production service in business in '98 or so, and relied on it for years. All we had back then was ext2, which lost data if the box crashed... but it didn't matter much because it never crashed.
I found that my iPod would drive the 580s to reasonable listening levels without any real problem. If you NEEDED an amp, it's virtually certain that you're listening to the music too loud, and damaging your hearing.
That said, an amp is a very good idea on 580s. They're wonderful headphones, but they're high-impedance... 300 ohms. The iPod, like most devices, is designed to drive about 30. You can still get pretty good volume out of it, and it still sounds pretty good, but the clarity and bass will perk right up when you add an amp to that combo. (at least if you have good quality sources... 128k mp3 won't improve much.)
You'll get better sound, by the way, if you use the line out on the dock to drive your amp, rather than the headphone jack.
Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality has been talking some about Take 2. He pointed out, a few days ago, that they're using an old trick.... reserves.
When something bad happens, you 'set aside' an obscenely large amount of money to 'deal with the problem'. You announce, loudly, that you WOULD have made money ('beat the Street') if only the terrible thing hadn't happened. Investors sigh, and your stock gets hit, but usually not that badly. Then, later on, you take some of the money out of the Rainy Day Fund to make a quarter that's not doing so well.
That's exactly what they did here. They set aside THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS to take care of the 'Hot Coffee' problem. This quarter, they announced that the problem wasn't as bad as they thought, so they 'unreserved' eight million dollars...enough to mitigate the damage, so they don't look quite so much like a sucking chest wound.
This is totally an accounting game. By now, they know how much damage Hot Coffee did. They could unreserve all but a million or so... that should be more than enough to handle any additional returns and/or pay for any lawsuits. They didn't do that, because they want to be able to 'beat the Street' in some later quarter, and artificially drive up the stock price.
Investing is EXTREMELY risky if you don't know accounting. Accounting is the language of business, and companies are very good at whitewashing a rotten infrastructure.... only if you 'speak' accounting (or pay someone who does), can you be sure they're on the level.
There are very, very few trustworthy, accurate analysts. When was the last time you saw a 'sell' on ANYTHING?
Second Life has had person to person teleportation, but not POINT TO POINT teleportation. If someone was already in a place you wanted to go, you could be summoned there. (this still works, but it's kind of outmoded now.) You could not, however, just randomly show up anywhere on the map. That is the new default behavior, unless the land owner turns off that feature. There may have been point-to-point teleportation at one time... I know people have talked about being charged to teleport in the very earliest game versions. But in 1.1 and later, there was only person to person TP, and only when explicitly invited by someone already at the destination.
I joined very late in 2003, about a week before 1.2 was released.
The fundamental design of SL was meant to be something like a city. You could 'teleport' to telehubs, much like riding a subway, and then you'd have to fly/drive/whatever to your final destination.
This was done on purpose, to give the world a sense of space; with point to point teleport, the entire world collapses into one dimension. Everything is next to everything. With the telehub approach, the world had some 'space' to it... you couldn't instantly arrive just anywhere. (I liked this approach a lot, you got to see things you'd otherwise miss.)
So this made telehub land worth more than other land; you had a chance to advertise and catch the eyes of passers-by. If you had land near a popular telehub, it could be quite profitable...where land out in the boondocks is worth less, from fewer eyeballs.
SL itself has been pushing the idea of virtual property and virtual ownership; they like, very much, the fact that virtual land has value, and that they can sell their virtual currency for real dollars. When they suddenly change the rules on how things work, they damage the value of things that took advantage of the old way of doing things. Changing the rules cost many of these people real money, in some cases a great deal of it.
I'm glad they stepped up to the plate and took responsibility for the damage... when they're the ones pushing the idea of virtual commerce and property, it behooves them to make people whole if they purposely damage some folks' assets.
I was thinking about games and their relative merits the other day. I think what really screwed up gaming for the last few years was, more than any other single thing, the transition to 3D.
3D programming is enormously more difficult than the old 2D variety. It takes an order of magnitude more programming skill and computer power to to animate and move things in 3D. But people *really like* 3D, and stopped buying 2D games.
So everyone made the transition, whether they were ready or not. This resulted in subpar games, because most of the development effort went into simply getting the 3D engines working.
As an example, look at the huge amount of gameplay that's in the Baldur's Gate series. By using a 2D engine, they were able to cram a game of immense proportions into just a few CDs. Instead of having to model and texture hundreds of critters in 3D, they could use 2D sprites instead. Result: very probably the finest RPG ever created.
At this point, the pain of the 3D transition is easing off. There are many more programmers and artists that understand it, and have optimized their workflow to support it. The canonical example is probably Civ4. Civ4 is a fully 3D game in all respects, but it offers all the power and flexibility of the old 2D games... plus a bunch of stuff you can easily do only in 3D. For the first time, we have a 3D game that trades off absolutely nothing. And it's tremendous fun.
Another example would probably be WoW, which is an incredibly deep and fun experience. There's so much content there that it compares very well with the Baldur's Gate series. There are some story issues with the world not really being malleable to individual characters, but the total experience is world-class. 500+ hours of gameplay is pretty much standard in WoW.... where with Baldur's Gate 2, even if you replay it several times, you're usually looking at no more than 100 or so.
I think, at this point, 3D has been mastered sufficiently that they can start, once again, writing Truly Great Games. 2005 was a good example of some of the stuff that's coming.... there were some phenomenal games this year. Hardly any of them were mainstream... Civ4 being the major exception. Darwinia, Space Rangers 2, Fate... just some awesome games this year. (I'm in a hurry here or I'd list some more examples... there were a TON of great games in 2005.)
I think, ultimately, that this author is exactly right. The next Golden Age is coming.... 2005 to 2010 will have games you'd have killed for if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, like us old folks.:)
It's worth pointing out that Microsoft's only major competitor on the desktop, Apple, offered an OS that was equally insecure. It, too, had no concept of security whatsoever.
If Microsoft HAD insisted on good security, they'd have had their lunches eaten by Apple, because it would have slowed down their operating system so much. When the word got out that the Mac ran eight times as fast as the PC, everyone would have switched, and Microsoft would have died. There would have been about fifty smug Microsoft users, luxuriating in their security, while the insecure but very fast Apple OS ate the entire market. Eventually, when the problems started to crop up, people would have longed for the nice secure Microsoft OS, but in vain, becaues they would have been driven out of business years prior.
Again, it's like blaming Henry Ford for not foreseeing smog, and failing to put a catalytic converter on the Model T.... even though that would have made his cars too expensive and limited his success in the market. 386s and 486s simply don't have time to run much OS code... it has to be simple and fast, to let the user have as much of the slow CPU as possible. If they'd tried to design for multiuser, the overhead would have cost too much.
Remember that my comments are strictly about pre-1995 code. By 1995, machines were fast enough to run security code without slowing the system down that badly. Microsoft continued to choose features over security, every single time. That sucked. A lot.
Blasting them (and possibly suing them) for their choices post-95 is perfectly reasonable. But blaming them for not writing for multiuser in 1991 is just stupid.
Exhibit A: Desqview/X, which tried to do some of the things you're claiming Microsoft should have done. Desqview/X bombed.
Yes, networking existed at the time. But it was unusual. And it was always local; nobody could anonymously access your computer. All these different types of networking you mention just prove that point.... networking wasn't even all compatible. If you had a machine set up for VINES, and someone else was set up for Netware, and a third person was set up for Token Ring, well... you were pretty much hosed, no? No interoperability.
Viruses, such as they were, spread via physical media.... sneakernet. That was the only way they COULD spread, because networks were too different. A NetBEUI exploit wouldn't work on an IPX network, for instance. In some cases they'd be able to spread via network shares, running at a higher level and infecting programs directly, but I'm aware of very few viruses at the time that did that. DOS, of course, had ZERO security... if you got a virus, all your files could be infected in just a few minutes.
In other words, the concept of a remote exploit, of a virus attacking you over your network from somewhere in Russia, was something you'd see in a movie, not something that happened for real. I don't believe I ever even *saw* a PC virus before the advent of email, as a matter of fact... there was lots of scare press about viruses, but they never infected me or the people I knew.
It's ridiculous to blame Microsoft for not seeing the advent of universal networking. Nobody but a few academics had even HEARD OF TCP/IP at the time. From 1995 and later, I agree with you completely. But blaming them for stuff designed and written back in the Windows 3.1 era.... that's crazy.
It's like criticizing Henry Ford for failing to put a catalytic converter in the Model T.
The flaws that have plagued NT have most often come from backward-compatible features re-implemented on the newer OS. (SMB filesharing and the vast numbers of holes that still exist in it is a great example.) Had it *truly* been written from the ground up without trying to be compatible with existing programs, it would, most likely, have been far more secure. NT has a very rich security model. It's leaky because of all the hacks to get the old code running, and to support old clients. The fundamental design is very strong, probably better than any Unix, but it was crippled by the backward compatibility layers.
Most likely, had they abandoned backward compatibility, it would still be less secure than we would like, but it would be much better than it is now. But it might never have gotten really popular if it didn't run the old code.... so Microsoft went the route that was more likely to make them a lot of money.
Even had NT been a fresh start, I'm sure Microsoft would have found ways to screw it up... they were desperate to kill Netscape. They would have done anything they had to, and cleaned up afterward. So we'd still have problems, but I bet they'd be much less severe.
Of course, there's always the argument that one of the worst security blunders they ever made, ActiveX, had nothing whatsoever to do with old software. It was a brand-new, from-scratch implementation of an incredibly bad idea, at a time when they should have known better. It was obvious even to me at the time that it was stupid. They should have understood, far better than a junior admin in a small company, just what a dismal idea it was.
From Microsoft's perspective, however, it was probably the right thing to do. All the billions they've made from that software will pay for an awful lot of fixing. Customers won't have much fun, but Microsoft hasn't been about customers in a long, long time.
Dude, how old are you? I was *there* at the time. Nobody thought about security in networks back then. Hardly anyone thought about security, period. Regular Windows barely even DID networking... they added that later in Windows for Workgroups. (heh, and it still barely did networking:)) Networks were weird and unusual. They were isolated, not tied together, and everyone just assumed you could trust anyone you could run a LAN cable to.
Modems existed, sure, but a FAST modem at the time was 19200 baud. People didn't use that to network. Before the Internet arrived, people used modems to call BBSes. When the Internet arrived in my town, it didn't offer SLIP or PPP... you dialed in and ran programs at the Unix shell prompt. There WAS NO LONG DISTANCE NETWORKING, except on the part of a few eggheads in academia. The concept of a worldwide network was something out of science fiction. In 1990, people would have given the ideas of a global network just ten years later and an invasion from Mars about equal credence.... ie, nearly none.
I assume you're too young to remember, but Microsoft had a huge revelation awhile after Netscape had that first monster IPO. "Wow! This internet thing.... it matters!" And THEN they started revamping all their single-user stuff to go on the Net.
In hindsight, it's very easy to see that they should have started really thinking about this in 1993 or 94, when the Net was first really making headway.... people liked it. A lot. Not figuring it out until 95 was pretty darn boneheaded on their part. And then in their rush to get on the Net and take it over, they made a lot of really, really stupid mistakes. And we're still paying for them.
But fer chrissake, the design of WMF... Microsoft is supposed to magically realize that the long-distance network between about five thousand academics is going to *take over the entire world*? When they were designing WMF, they had probably never even *heard of* ARPANET.
So yes, they DO get a pass on this. Their really serious errors were in trying to push '95 and '98 onto the Net, and writing all that functionality into Office that didn't need to be there. They didn't feel they had time to do it right, so they did it quick to grab the market. From 95 on.... the blame is entirely theirs. It was obvious what would happen.
But in 1991? You're high if you think security was much of an issue back then. DOS had *NO* security. None whatsoever. Neither did 3.1, 95 or 98. (well, 95 and 98 had a tiny bit of security, but it was a thin veneer). And everyone got along just fine, at the time. The only time security was needed was when you were in a corporate environment. Nobody talked from one computer to another, it was all from the workstations to the servers.
The only people that needed security at the time, in other words, were big businesses, and they ran Netware. Other than that, if you wanted to secure your data, you locked your computer up.
Extrapolating from that mindset to 'talking to every computer in the world', in advance, would be nearly impossible. Even having BEEN there, it's hard to wrap my head around how different things were back then.
It's probably a hard problem to patch. From what I've gathered, this is a feature of WMFs, not a bug. They were designed before people even knew what the Internet was. WMFs, apparently, have the ability to specify code to be run on a failure to render. So the bad guys give you a bad WMF file, cleverly renamed as JPG, and stick it in an ad banner. You browse a site (with any browser), Windows fails to render the WMF (which it will recognize even if the filename says JPG), runs the specified failure code, and you're hacked. That fast.
Changing code that's this deeply buried in Windows is risky. The interpreter for WMF is one of the remnants of code left over from single-user computers, and they'll have to test changes very thoroughly. They're GOING to break things with this patch, because they're removing a designed-in feature. They're probably working feverishly to figure out how to minimize the damage, but some damage is inevitable. And the problem could be far worse than it appears; that DLL could be riddled with problems. It may not have been audited in many years.
This is yet another example of how you can't retrofit security; the first Windows versions were designed when security wasn't even an issue, when the Internet was barely a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. There's a mountain of code that was written just to work, not to worry about being handed malicious data. If a user passed bad values to a system call and it crashed, oh well. It was their fault for doing it. It's not like they had anything to gain from it, after all. They owned the computer. Why on earth would the computer need to protect itself from its owner?
With the advent of the Net, Microsoft decided to both stay backward-compatible and extend what they had onto the Internet. And their focus for many years was on new features, not security. Essentially every security person at the time warned them -- stridently -- against the choices they were making. It was obviously going to be a trainwreck. This is just the latest in that ongoing collision between a single-user operating system and exposure to every computer in the world.
This particular exploit is BY FAR the worst one yet...even very competent administrators, doing everything exactly as they should, can get nailed by this one. As bad as this is, though, it's not like they're going to stop here.
Trying to retrofit security onto the Win3.1/Win95 model is like trying to use scotch tape to make cheesecloth waterproof. No matter how much tape you use, even if it's a lot more tape than cloth, it will ALWAYS leak. It might hold water for a bit, but leaks will constantly spring up. They've added tremendous functionality in the NT/2k/XP kernels which can limit what users can do and limit the possible scope of compromises, but many many programs (especially games) require administrator privs just to run. So most people run as Administrator even though they shouldn't. And that makes hacks like this one very easy and *extremely* damaging.
Hopefully Microsoft will get a patch out fast.... they certainly must understand how overwhelmingly bad this problem is. The fact that they're reacting slowly is likely an indication that it's hard to fix.
Often, the reason to go to water cooling is to quiet a system down, rather than to cool it more. The 360 in game playing mode really is pretty loud, and some folks would undoubtedly like it quieter.
Yes, the water cooling would probably run the chips at a lower temperature, but the two major reasons to do this (overclocking and improved reliability) don't really apply. Nobody in their right mind is going to be overclocking a 360, and extending the lifetime of the chips is just making the strongest link in the chain even stronger. Water coolers replace the airflow in the box. The decreased cooling of the hard drive and DVD would make THEIR failure a lot more likely. So, not only are you making the strong link stronger, you're also making the weak links weaker. From a reliability standpoint, not a good decision.
But quieting it down.... yeah, I could see that. This will probably get more common when the consoles get cheaper, and folks have less to lose..
The "quit" suggestions aren't entirely wrong... if they actively try to prevent you from using version control, that means you work for dolts. Working for dolts can pay the bills, but the smarter the management is, the more likely a company is to survive. Working in a stupid company that's not a monopoly tends to be less secure than working in a smart one. (monopolies, like power and water companies, can get ridiculously stupid and still survive.) Smart companies value their employees, are better able to determine who's really worth more, and tend to reward those people appropriately. And they're more fun, too.
There's a difference between 'stupid' and 'uneducated'.. if you can convince your current employers that you're right, then keep the job. If they prove to be dolts, then quietly start looking for another place. Find a smart company with a good product line, and work for them instead. You'll be happier, they'll be happy to have you, and your job is likely to be more secure.
If you're careful, you shouldn't have to spend any time at all unemployed. And changing jobs is the best way to get large raises.
I hate to tell you this, but we had a little bit of a dustup about that whole idea. You might have heard of it... there were a few battles and suchlike. 1860s... it's probably written up somewhere if you look.
The Federal government of the time took a pretty dim view of your theory. They had more guns than the people on your side of the fence. I think it's a safe bet that the modern Feds would like it even less.
Your theory, in other words, didn't survive in any meaningful way. If you disagree strongly enough, guys with guns will, um... make their displeasure known.
Wow, that question was a bit of a shock. Do you realize that you are using a slick 2005 device, and asking for content that was last popular in the 1940s? Everything old really is new again.
It'd be cool if more people thought like you did, the old-time serial radio shows were neat. You can still hear them on NPR on the weekends... Robert Blake hosts an old-time radio show. You could probably convert that for your iPod.
I have a first-shipment 360, and my power supply brick seems neither as heavy nor as hot as many people have reported. It definitely gets warm: it is, after all, a 200w power supply. But it doesn't get blazing hot, and I don't think it weighs six pounds... maybe three.
Back in the late 80s, Seagate had a big problem with stiction. I think the 238s were one of the drrives in question. The size is right and the name sounds familiar... it might have even been the 'poster child' drive for the problem.
Drives are supposed to have a thin layer of lubricant. I was told (this part is anecdotal) that the machines they used to detect the lubrication, which was hand-applied, could detect too little on a given platter and reject it, but not too much. So the workers, fearing termination from a high reject rate, would put too much on the drives. (It was described to me as a manual wiping process... this WAS twenty years ago, but were they still manual even then??). So you ended up with drives with a layer of lube that was several times too thick.
Well, out of the box, that wasn't really a problem. But drives spin, and there's this thing called centripetal force, see.... over time, the excess lube would drift to the outside of the drive. This just happened to be the parking area for the heads when the drive was shut down. So after about a year, the layer of lube would get thick enough that the heads would settle down into it... it was exactly like a drop of water between two mirrors. Drive, she spin down, she no spin back up. The warranty was exactly a year, and most drives failed at about 13 months... and Seagate adamantly refused to replace the drives. So a lot of us poor people ended up doing the 'whack the drive on startup' thing.... a good sharp rap right when you powered it up would often unstick the drive, and you'd be able to use it normally. I don't know if the lube on the drive head decreased reliability... most folks replaced theirs as soon as they could.
This badly damaged Seagate's reputation; in fact, I haven't bought a Seagate drive since. Fortunately for them, I suppose, the market at the time was very small. Even if every single person who owned a computer at the time rejected Seagate, that's, what, maybe a 1% market share loss these days? And I've finally, after 15 years, put them back on my 'allowed purchase' category. I prefer WD myself, but I'd buy Seagate in a pinch.
I don't think any manufacturer would get away with a mistake that bad these days.... if they blew it that badly and refused to fix the drives, the resulting furor would put them out of business in short order.
Battlestar Galactica is really good. I realize that the name summons images of the campy 70s version, but the 2000 edition is something else entirely. It's very different from Firefly, but in terms of quality, it's probably even better. The premise (entire civilization destroyed, tiny remnant of humanity clinging to life) is very interesting, and they seem to be doing it real justice.
Stargate Atlantis isn't bad. It has some good plots. The 'wise native woman' schtick by the actress playing Tayla grates on me, and I don't really like the new guy they just added... but on the whole, they're doing some interesting stuff. Regular Stargate used to be great, but jumped the shark about the time that first latex-clad babe showed up. (season 5, maybe?) Now they've gone off into Yet Another Epic Conflict With Yet Another Unbeatable Bad Guy. With their old plotline mostly resolved, I wish they'd gone back to simple exploration or something, or maybe cancelled it. I still sort of watch the show, but I fast forward through most of it. It's really a shame.
Galatica, though... that's just in a whole different class. Best SF show in years. It feels more like watching a very, very long movie than a TV series.
Mildly interesting trivia note: in the current half-season cliffhanger, the captain of the other Battlestar played the female leader of the resistance movement on Mars in Babylon 5. Took me awhile to remember where I'd seen her, so if anyone else was wondering, that's who it is.:)
The article that I read several days ago said that they use the cobalt-60 to test radiation resistance... they want to see the effects that high radiation levels will have on various pieces of military and civilian hardware. They set up their test gear, shuttle in the cobalt via pneumatic tube, let the gear cook in the extremely intense radiation, and then shuttle the cobalt back into a 'safe' area. I believe the original article claimed that cobalt is good for this, because it doesn't make the whole area permanently radioactive, though I'm not familiar with the reason why. (gamma radiation, maybe???)
The writeup on the article is misleading. Radiation doesn't 'eat its way free'... fer chrissake, people! Acids eat things. Radiation just... radiates. And it was ALREADY free, that's why the needed the darn robot. That whole testing area was absolutely lethal to human beings, even in heavy protective gear. Even the robot couldn't survive it very long... they thought 50 minutes. In actual practice, it lasted longer... but the movement system did fail, so they had to drag it out with a rope.
To the person asking about building a Faraday cage around it.... as far as I know, a Faraday cage isn't an absolute barrier, it's just a very strong one. It attenuates a signal by a very great deal, making signals interception very difficult. But in this case, the 'signal' (the cobalt) is so incredibly powerful that a Faraday cage would just take the edge off, as it were. If my limited understanding of radiation is correct, it'd be just about as effective as sunglasses in front of a supernova. (and I'm not sure that Faraday cages even *work* at these frequencies... the radiation might just punch right through the shield material.)
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Yes, but they also said that they got much, much better stability to boot. Keep reading... they've written a couple of articles about it.
The biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it fucking breaks.
NASA has this dead on. When you're dealing with failures that can cost millions, the 2.6 kernel is simply not reliable enough. Hell, if you're dealing with failures that cost thousands, it's not reliable enough... and most server failures cost at least that much for midsize and larger companies. Downtime is really expensive. And you're entirely likely to have it with 2.6.
We in the open source community have this collective groupthink that Linux is extremely stable. It ISN'T, not anymore. 2.2 was incredibly robust... in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. 2.4 was problematic but eventually mostly stabilized... it still has occasional issues with unusual hardware combinations, but by and large it's pretty solid. 2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare from the point of view of pretty much any professional sysadmin. Constant regressions, constant bugfixes, and they won't fucking leave it alone and let it stabilize.
It takes YEARS to shake the bugs out of a piece of software, but they refuse to commit to backporting bugfixes to anything older than a couple of months. They just wave their hands in the air and expect 'the distros' to fix their coding errors, instead of doing it right in the first place. So everyone else has to scramble around and backport bugfixes, or else adopt a pile of new features every couple of months. Then we get the bugfixes for the new code, along with MORE new code, with yet MORE bugs. Rik van Riel has stated, I kid you not, that's he's perfectly okay with only one in three 'stable' kernels actually being, you know, stable.
So of COURSE NASA doesn't use it on servers. Linux is not being written for reliability. It never was, it just happened by accident. It was ALWAYS intended as a desktop Unix, but it was so amazingly robust in its early, simple incarnations, that it was pressed into wide server duty. And instead of realizing why Linux became so popular, the devs seem to have stayed with their desktop orientation... and in fact have changed the development process so it's more fun for them. It's a nightmare for everyone ELSE, but now they don't have to deal with the boring, nasty grunt work of making sure the code actually works in every single case.
I can't find the quote now, but at one time, Linus said something along the lines of "Hardware is inherently stable; there's no reason why software can't be written to the same standard." But he seems to have forgotten that completely. Linux has turned into the Windows of Unix.... lots and lots of features, not so hot on reliability. You KNOW it's a problem when Ars Technica, one of the most competent geek websites anywhere, switched back to Windows for _stability_. The Linux dev team should be completely ashamed of themselves for that one.
I've been using Linux since late 93 or early 94. I put it into real production service in business in '98 or so, and relied on it for years. All we had back then was ext2, which lost data if the box crashed... but it didn't matter much because it never crashed.
That is SO not true anymore.
I found that my iPod would drive the 580s to reasonable listening levels without any real problem. If you NEEDED an amp, it's virtually certain that you're listening to the music too loud, and damaging your hearing.
That said, an amp is a very good idea on 580s. They're wonderful headphones, but they're high-impedance... 300 ohms. The iPod, like most devices, is designed to drive about 30. You can still get pretty good volume out of it, and it still sounds pretty good, but the clarity and bass will perk right up when you add an amp to that combo. (at least if you have good quality sources... 128k mp3 won't improve much.)
You'll get better sound, by the way, if you use the line out on the dock to drive your amp, rather than the headphone jack.
Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality has been talking some about Take 2. He pointed out, a few days ago, that they're using an old trick.... reserves.
When something bad happens, you 'set aside' an obscenely large amount of money to 'deal with the problem'. You announce, loudly, that you WOULD have made money ('beat the Street') if only the terrible thing hadn't happened. Investors sigh, and your stock gets hit, but usually not that badly. Then, later on, you take some of the money out of the Rainy Day Fund to make a quarter that's not doing so well.
That's exactly what they did here. They set aside THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS to take care of the 'Hot Coffee' problem. This quarter, they announced that the problem wasn't as bad as they thought, so they 'unreserved' eight million dollars...enough to mitigate the damage, so they don't look quite so much like a sucking chest wound.
This is totally an accounting game. By now, they know how much damage Hot Coffee did. They could unreserve all but a million or so... that should be more than enough to handle any additional returns and/or pay for any lawsuits. They didn't do that, because they want to be able to 'beat the Street' in some later quarter, and artificially drive up the stock price.
Investing is EXTREMELY risky if you don't know accounting. Accounting is the language of business, and companies are very good at whitewashing a rotten infrastructure.... only if you 'speak' accounting (or pay someone who does), can you be sure they're on the level.
There are very, very few trustworthy, accurate analysts. When was the last time you saw a 'sell' on ANYTHING?
Second Life has had person to person teleportation, but not POINT TO POINT teleportation. If someone was already in a place you wanted to go, you could be summoned there. (this still works, but it's kind of outmoded now.) You could not, however, just randomly show up anywhere on the map. That is the new default behavior, unless the land owner turns off that feature. There may have been point-to-point teleportation at one time... I know people have talked about being charged to teleport in the very earliest game versions. But in 1.1 and later, there was only person to person TP, and only when explicitly invited by someone already at the destination.
I joined very late in 2003, about a week before 1.2 was released.
The fundamental design of SL was meant to be something like a city. You could 'teleport' to telehubs, much like riding a subway, and then you'd have to fly/drive/whatever to your final destination.
This was done on purpose, to give the world a sense of space; with point to point teleport, the entire world collapses into one dimension. Everything is next to everything. With the telehub approach, the world had some 'space' to it... you couldn't instantly arrive just anywhere. (I liked this approach a lot, you got to see things you'd otherwise miss.)
So this made telehub land worth more than other land; you had a chance to advertise and catch the eyes of passers-by. If you had land near a popular telehub, it could be quite profitable...where land out in the boondocks is worth less, from fewer eyeballs.
SL itself has been pushing the idea of virtual property and virtual ownership; they like, very much, the fact that virtual land has value, and that they can sell their virtual currency for real dollars. When they suddenly change the rules on how things work, they damage the value of things that took advantage of the old way of doing things. Changing the rules cost many of these people real money, in some cases a great deal of it.
I'm glad they stepped up to the plate and took responsibility for the damage... when they're the ones pushing the idea of virtual commerce and property, it behooves them to make people whole if they purposely damage some folks' assets.
I was thinking about games and their relative merits the other day. I think what really screwed up gaming for the last few years was, more than any other single thing, the transition to 3D.
:)
3D programming is enormously more difficult than the old 2D variety. It takes an order of magnitude more programming skill and computer power to to animate and move things in 3D. But people *really like* 3D, and stopped buying 2D games.
So everyone made the transition, whether they were ready or not. This resulted in subpar games, because most of the development effort went into simply getting the 3D engines working.
As an example, look at the huge amount of gameplay that's in the Baldur's Gate series. By using a 2D engine, they were able to cram a game of immense proportions into just a few CDs. Instead of having to model and texture hundreds of critters in 3D, they could use 2D sprites instead. Result: very probably the finest RPG ever created.
At this point, the pain of the 3D transition is easing off. There are many more programmers and artists that understand it, and have optimized their workflow to support it. The canonical example is probably Civ4. Civ4 is a fully 3D game in all respects, but it offers all the power and flexibility of the old 2D games... plus a bunch of stuff you can easily do only in 3D. For the first time, we have a 3D game that trades off absolutely nothing. And it's tremendous fun.
Another example would probably be WoW, which is an incredibly deep and fun experience. There's so much content there that it compares very well with the Baldur's Gate series. There are some story issues with the world not really being malleable to individual characters, but the total experience is world-class. 500+ hours of gameplay is pretty much standard in WoW.... where with Baldur's Gate 2, even if you replay it several times, you're usually looking at no more than 100 or so.
I think, at this point, 3D has been mastered sufficiently that they can start, once again, writing Truly Great Games. 2005 was a good example of some of the stuff that's coming.... there were some phenomenal games this year. Hardly any of them were mainstream... Civ4 being the major exception. Darwinia, Space Rangers 2, Fate... just some awesome games this year. (I'm in a hurry here or I'd list some more examples... there were a TON of great games in 2005.)
I think, ultimately, that this author is exactly right. The next Golden Age is coming.... 2005 to 2010 will have games you'd have killed for if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, like us old folks.
It's worth pointing out that Microsoft's only major competitor on the desktop, Apple, offered an OS that was equally insecure. It, too, had no concept of security whatsoever.
If Microsoft HAD insisted on good security, they'd have had their lunches eaten by Apple, because it would have slowed down their operating system so much. When the word got out that the Mac ran eight times as fast as the PC, everyone would have switched, and Microsoft would have died. There would have been about fifty smug Microsoft users, luxuriating in their security, while the insecure but very fast Apple OS ate the entire market. Eventually, when the problems started to crop up, people would have longed for the nice secure Microsoft OS, but in vain, becaues they would have been driven out of business years prior.
Again, it's like blaming Henry Ford for not foreseeing smog, and failing to put a catalytic converter on the Model T.... even though that would have made his cars too expensive and limited his success in the market. 386s and 486s simply don't have time to run much OS code... it has to be simple and fast, to let the user have as much of the slow CPU as possible. If they'd tried to design for multiuser, the overhead would have cost too much.
Remember that my comments are strictly about pre-1995 code. By 1995, machines were fast enough to run security code without slowing the system down that badly. Microsoft continued to choose features over security, every single time. That sucked. A lot.
Blasting them (and possibly suing them) for their choices post-95 is perfectly reasonable. But blaming them for not writing for multiuser in 1991 is just stupid.
Exhibit A: Desqview/X, which tried to do some of the things you're claiming Microsoft should have done. Desqview/X bombed.
Yes, networking existed at the time. But it was unusual. And it was always local; nobody could anonymously access your computer. All these different types of networking you mention just prove that point.... networking wasn't even all compatible. If you had a machine set up for VINES, and someone else was set up for Netware, and a third person was set up for Token Ring, well... you were pretty much hosed, no? No interoperability.
Viruses, such as they were, spread via physical media.... sneakernet. That was the only way they COULD spread, because networks were too different. A NetBEUI exploit wouldn't work on an IPX network, for instance. In some cases they'd be able to spread via network shares, running at a higher level and infecting programs directly, but I'm aware of very few viruses at the time that did that. DOS, of course, had ZERO security... if you got a virus, all your files could be infected in just a few minutes.
In other words, the concept of a remote exploit, of a virus attacking you over your network from somewhere in Russia, was something you'd see in a movie, not something that happened for real. I don't believe I ever even *saw* a PC virus before the advent of email, as a matter of fact... there was lots of scare press about viruses, but they never infected me or the people I knew.
It's ridiculous to blame Microsoft for not seeing the advent of universal networking. Nobody but a few academics had even HEARD OF TCP/IP at the time. From 1995 and later, I agree with you completely. But blaming them for stuff designed and written back in the Windows 3.1 era.... that's crazy.
It's like criticizing Henry Ford for failing to put a catalytic converter in the Model T.
The flaws that have plagued NT have most often come from backward-compatible features re-implemented on the newer OS. (SMB filesharing and the vast numbers of holes that still exist in it is a great example.) Had it *truly* been written from the ground up without trying to be compatible with existing programs, it would, most likely, have been far more secure. NT has a very rich security model. It's leaky because of all the hacks to get the old code running, and to support old clients. The fundamental design is very strong, probably better than any Unix, but it was crippled by the backward compatibility layers.
Most likely, had they abandoned backward compatibility, it would still be less secure than we would like, but it would be much better than it is now. But it might never have gotten really popular if it didn't run the old code.... so Microsoft went the route that was more likely to make them a lot of money.
Even had NT been a fresh start, I'm sure Microsoft would have found ways to screw it up... they were desperate to kill Netscape. They would have done anything they had to, and cleaned up afterward. So we'd still have problems, but I bet they'd be much less severe.
Of course, there's always the argument that one of the worst security blunders they ever made, ActiveX, had nothing whatsoever to do with old software. It was a brand-new, from-scratch implementation of an incredibly bad idea, at a time when they should have known better. It was obvious even to me at the time that it was stupid. They should have understood, far better than a junior admin in a small company, just what a dismal idea it was.
From Microsoft's perspective, however, it was probably the right thing to do. All the billions they've made from that software will pay for an awful lot of fixing. Customers won't have much fun, but Microsoft hasn't been about customers in a long, long time.
The actual DLL at fault is gdi32, I believe. You will probably have a hard time running your machine without it. :)
The DLL to be unregistered, if I understand correctly, is just one attack vector to get at gdi32... it is not, itself, the problem.
The current exploits may not bite you on 98, but later ones certainly could.
Dude, how old are you? I was *there* at the time. Nobody thought about security in networks back then. Hardly anyone thought about security, period. Regular Windows barely even DID networking... they added that later in Windows for Workgroups. (heh, and it still barely did networking :)) Networks were weird and unusual. They were isolated, not tied together, and everyone just assumed you could trust anyone you could run a LAN cable to.
Modems existed, sure, but a FAST modem at the time was 19200 baud. People didn't use that to network. Before the Internet arrived, people used modems to call BBSes. When the Internet arrived in my town, it didn't offer SLIP or PPP... you dialed in and ran programs at the Unix shell prompt. There WAS NO LONG DISTANCE NETWORKING, except on the part of a few eggheads in academia. The concept of a worldwide network was something out of science fiction. In 1990, people would have given the ideas of a global network just ten years later and an invasion from Mars about equal credence.... ie, nearly none.
I assume you're too young to remember, but Microsoft had a huge revelation awhile after Netscape had that first monster IPO. "Wow! This internet thing.... it matters!" And THEN they started revamping all their single-user stuff to go on the Net.
In hindsight, it's very easy to see that they should have started really thinking about this in 1993 or 94, when the Net was first really making headway.... people liked it. A lot. Not figuring it out until 95 was pretty darn boneheaded on their part. And then in their rush to get on the Net and take it over, they made a lot of really, really stupid mistakes. And we're still paying for them.
But fer chrissake, the design of WMF... Microsoft is supposed to magically realize that the long-distance network between about five thousand academics is going to *take over the entire world*? When they were designing WMF, they had probably never even *heard of* ARPANET.
So yes, they DO get a pass on this. Their really serious errors were in trying to push '95 and '98 onto the Net, and writing all that functionality into Office that didn't need to be there. They didn't feel they had time to do it right, so they did it quick to grab the market. From 95 on.... the blame is entirely theirs. It was obvious what would happen.
But in 1991? You're high if you think security was much of an issue back then. DOS had *NO* security. None whatsoever. Neither did 3.1, 95 or 98. (well, 95 and 98 had a tiny bit of security, but it was a thin veneer). And everyone got along just fine, at the time. The only time security was needed was when you were in a corporate environment. Nobody talked from one computer to another, it was all from the workstations to the servers.
The only people that needed security at the time, in other words, were big businesses, and they ran Netware. Other than that, if you wanted to secure your data, you locked your computer up.
Extrapolating from that mindset to 'talking to every computer in the world', in advance, would be nearly impossible. Even having BEEN there, it's hard to wrap my head around how different things were back then.
As I'm saying in my very verbose way up yonder... if it was that simple, we'd have a patch already. Microsoft must understand how devastating this is.
It's probably a hard problem to patch. From what I've gathered, this is a feature of WMFs, not a bug. They were designed before people even knew what the Internet was. WMFs, apparently, have the ability to specify code to be run on a failure to render. So the bad guys give you a bad WMF file, cleverly renamed as JPG, and stick it in an ad banner. You browse a site (with any browser), Windows fails to render the WMF (which it will recognize even if the filename says JPG), runs the specified failure code, and you're hacked. That fast.
Changing code that's this deeply buried in Windows is risky. The interpreter for WMF is one of the remnants of code left over from single-user computers, and they'll have to test changes very thoroughly. They're GOING to break things with this patch, because they're removing a designed-in feature. They're probably working feverishly to figure out how to minimize the damage, but some damage is inevitable. And the problem could be far worse than it appears; that DLL could be riddled with problems. It may not have been audited in many years.
This is yet another example of how you can't retrofit security; the first Windows versions were designed when security wasn't even an issue, when the Internet was barely a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. There's a mountain of code that was written just to work, not to worry about being handed malicious data. If a user passed bad values to a system call and it crashed, oh well. It was their fault for doing it. It's not like they had anything to gain from it, after all. They owned the computer. Why on earth would the computer need to protect itself from its owner?
With the advent of the Net, Microsoft decided to both stay backward-compatible and extend what they had onto the Internet. And their focus for many years was on new features, not security. Essentially every security person at the time warned them -- stridently -- against the choices they were making. It was obviously going to be a trainwreck. This is just the latest in that ongoing collision between a single-user operating system and exposure to every computer in the world.
This particular exploit is BY FAR the worst one yet...even very competent administrators, doing everything exactly as they should, can get nailed by this one. As bad as this is, though, it's not like they're going to stop here.
Trying to retrofit security onto the Win3.1/Win95 model is like trying to use scotch tape to make cheesecloth waterproof. No matter how much tape you use, even if it's a lot more tape than cloth, it will ALWAYS leak. It might hold water for a bit, but leaks will constantly spring up. They've added tremendous functionality in the NT/2k/XP kernels which can limit what users can do and limit the possible scope of compromises, but many many programs (especially games) require administrator privs just to run. So most people run as Administrator even though they shouldn't. And that makes hacks like this one very easy and *extremely* damaging.
Hopefully Microsoft will get a patch out fast.... they certainly must understand how overwhelmingly bad this problem is. The fact that they're reacting slowly is likely an indication that it's hard to fix.
Often, the reason to go to water cooling is to quiet a system down, rather than to cool it more. The 360 in game playing mode really is pretty loud, and some folks would undoubtedly like it quieter.
Yes, the water cooling would probably run the chips at a lower temperature, but the two major reasons to do this (overclocking and improved reliability) don't really apply. Nobody in their right mind is going to be overclocking a 360, and extending the lifetime of the chips is just making the strongest link in the chain even stronger. Water coolers replace the airflow in the box. The decreased cooling of the hard drive and DVD would make THEIR failure a lot more likely. So, not only are you making the strong link stronger, you're also making the weak links weaker. From a reliability standpoint, not a good decision.
But quieting it down.... yeah, I could see that. This will probably get more common when the consoles get cheaper, and folks have less to lose..
--Cardinal Richelieu
The "quit" suggestions aren't entirely wrong... if they actively try to prevent you from using version control, that means you work for dolts. Working for dolts can pay the bills, but the smarter the management is, the more likely a company is to survive. Working in a stupid company that's not a monopoly tends to be less secure than working in a smart one. (monopolies, like power and water companies, can get ridiculously stupid and still survive.) Smart companies value their employees, are better able to determine who's really worth more, and tend to reward those people appropriately. And they're more fun, too.
There's a difference between 'stupid' and 'uneducated'.. if you can convince your current employers that you're right, then keep the job. If they prove to be dolts, then quietly start looking for another place. Find a smart company with a good product line, and work for them instead. You'll be happier, they'll be happy to have you, and your job is likely to be more secure.
If you're careful, you shouldn't have to spend any time at all unemployed. And changing jobs is the best way to get large raises.
I hate to tell you this, but we had a little bit of a dustup about that whole idea. You might have heard of it... there were a few battles and suchlike. 1860s... it's probably written up somewhere if you look.
The Federal government of the time took a pretty dim view of your theory. They had more guns than the people on your side of the fence. I think it's a safe bet that the modern Feds would like it even less.
Your theory, in other words, didn't survive in any meaningful way. If you disagree strongly enough, guys with guns will, um... make their displeasure known.
Wow, that question was a bit of a shock. Do you realize that you are using a slick 2005 device, and asking for content that was last popular in the 1940s? Everything old really is new again.
It'd be cool if more people thought like you did, the old-time serial radio shows were neat. You can still hear them on NPR on the weekends... Robert Blake hosts an old-time radio show. You could probably convert that for your iPod.
I have a first-shipment 360, and my power supply brick seems neither as heavy nor as hot as many people have reported. It definitely gets warm: it is, after all, a 200w power supply. But it doesn't get blazing hot, and I don't think it weighs six pounds... maybe three.
Perhaps there's more than one manufacturer?
Back in the late 80s, Seagate had a big problem with stiction. I think the 238s were one of the drrives in question. The size is right and the name sounds familiar... it might have even been the 'poster child' drive for the problem.
Drives are supposed to have a thin layer of lubricant. I was told (this part is anecdotal) that the machines they used to detect the lubrication, which was hand-applied, could detect too little on a given platter and reject it, but not too much. So the workers, fearing termination from a high reject rate, would put too much on the drives. (It was described to me as a manual wiping process... this WAS twenty years ago, but were they still manual even then??). So you ended up with drives with a layer of lube that was several times too thick.
Well, out of the box, that wasn't really a problem. But drives spin, and there's this thing called centripetal force, see.... over time, the excess lube would drift to the outside of the drive. This just happened to be the parking area for the heads when the drive was shut down. So after about a year, the layer of lube would get thick enough that the heads would settle down into it... it was exactly like a drop of water between two mirrors. Drive, she spin down, she no spin back up. The warranty was exactly a year, and most drives failed at about 13 months... and Seagate adamantly refused to replace the drives. So a lot of us poor people ended up doing the 'whack the drive on startup' thing.... a good sharp rap right when you powered it up would often unstick the drive, and you'd be able to use it normally. I don't know if the lube on the drive head decreased reliability... most folks replaced theirs as soon as they could.
This badly damaged Seagate's reputation; in fact, I haven't bought a Seagate drive since. Fortunately for them, I suppose, the market at the time was very small. Even if every single person who owned a computer at the time rejected Seagate, that's, what, maybe a 1% market share loss these days? And I've finally, after 15 years, put them back on my 'allowed purchase' category. I prefer WD myself, but I'd buy Seagate in a pinch.
I don't think any manufacturer would get away with a mistake that bad these days.... if they blew it that badly and refused to fix the drives, the resulting furor would put them out of business in short order.
Just visual memory, I could easily be wrong.
Battlestar Galactica is really good. I realize that the name summons images of the campy 70s version, but the 2000 edition is something else entirely. It's very different from Firefly, but in terms of quality, it's probably even better. The premise (entire civilization destroyed, tiny remnant of humanity clinging to life) is very interesting, and they seem to be doing it real justice.
:)
Stargate Atlantis isn't bad. It has some good plots. The 'wise native woman' schtick by the actress playing Tayla grates on me, and I don't really like the new guy they just added... but on the whole, they're doing some interesting stuff. Regular Stargate used to be great, but jumped the shark about the time that first latex-clad babe showed up. (season 5, maybe?) Now they've gone off into Yet Another Epic Conflict With Yet Another Unbeatable Bad Guy. With their old plotline mostly resolved, I wish they'd gone back to simple exploration or something, or maybe cancelled it. I still sort of watch the show, but I fast forward through most of it. It's really a shame.
Galatica, though... that's just in a whole different class. Best SF show in years. It feels more like watching a very, very long movie than a TV series.
Mildly interesting trivia note: in the current half-season cliffhanger, the captain of the other Battlestar played the female leader of the resistance movement on Mars in Babylon 5. Took me awhile to remember where I'd seen her, so if anyone else was wondering, that's who it is.
The article that I read several days ago said that they use the cobalt-60 to test radiation resistance... they want to see the effects that high radiation levels will have on various pieces of military and civilian hardware. They set up their test gear, shuttle in the cobalt via pneumatic tube, let the gear cook in the extremely intense radiation, and then shuttle the cobalt back into a 'safe' area. I believe the original article claimed that cobalt is good for this, because it doesn't make the whole area permanently radioactive, though I'm not familiar with the reason why. (gamma radiation, maybe???)
... radiates. And it was ALREADY free, that's why the needed the darn robot. That whole testing area was absolutely lethal to human beings, even in heavy protective gear. Even the robot couldn't survive it very long... they thought 50 minutes. In actual practice, it lasted longer... but the movement system did fail, so they had to drag it out with a rope.
The writeup on the article is misleading. Radiation doesn't 'eat its way free'... fer chrissake, people! Acids eat things. Radiation just
To the person asking about building a Faraday cage around it.... as far as I know, a Faraday cage isn't an absolute barrier, it's just a very strong one. It attenuates a signal by a very great deal, making signals interception very difficult. But in this case, the 'signal' (the cobalt) is so incredibly powerful that a Faraday cage would just take the edge off, as it were. If my limited understanding of radiation is correct, it'd be just about as effective as sunglasses in front of a supernova. (and I'm not sure that Faraday cages even *work* at these frequencies... the radiation might just punch right through the shield material.)
Malor's First Law of Messaging: Any post criticizing spelling or grammar will contain a mistake of the other type.