Probably not. Those forewarned took it seriously because they pay for the service. If Symantec had said that a huge attack was imminent and to block the port and patch your SQL servers, how many people do you think would have listened? Of those who listened, how many of those have processes in place so that the requisite network or software changes would have required approval that would have come too late to do any good?
The people who paid for the warning are going to take it very seriously, but aside from that, I would wager that there would be enough doubt about the validity that measures wouldn't have been taken anyway. Patching the server has the obvious implication for many mission critical databases of a potential restart and potential for undesired change in functionality, so patching in many cases would require a testbed server and evaluation, which this warning provided insufficient time for. Blocking the port, or disabling that part of SQL server, for those with it enabled without needing it, means they need to understand what it does or does not do for them. If they already knew, they would have disabled it sooner, so you can't say they would immediately realize and shut it down.
Ok, I had heard this once, then that Square was backing out, then that Square was appeased, and then again that Square was backing out again..... What is the true status of this?
Re:Still no command-option-w support (OT)
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Safari Beta Updated
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· Score: 1
Aside from X11, I have never experienced this issue while using the Dvorak layout, and their latest update to that is supposed to correct that. command-w works correctly in finder and all my apps. Dvorak has worked just fine and the keyboard layout facilities of OSX have been a lot more consistant than MS's model. In fact, MS operating systems have the single, most crappy keyboard layout implementation in my experience.
Wi-Fi is insecure, but I'm hard pressed to think of a secure 'Physical Layer' implementation. The difference here being that Wi-Fi takes the hub of ethernet and instead dangles it out for the world to see, as opposed to having some physical control of who plugs in. In environments larger than a home or VERY small business, the physical control over copper ethernet isn't that great either. The other difference is that in Wi-Fi world, they added the piece of crap that is WEP to at least deter would be attackers, and that is probably the most security I have seen integrated at the physical layer.
The solution I use is to implement security at the network layer. My wireless router is a linux box with FreeS/WAN running. Forward is denyed to eth2 (wireless interface), and input only for ESP and UDP port 500. Authenticate and encrpyt with IPSec and they get access to the world. Windows 2k/XP, Linux, OSX/*BSD, all of them include or have freely available the tools to connect. Of course this works because there isn't much interesting laptop to laptop traffic, and each laptop that uses the network has a configured firewall configuration, but it works well to protect against piggy-backers and sniffers.
Samba already does support ACLs... I know that is at least possible if XFS is the underlying filesystem. It may be true for the other acl implementations, but Samba certainly is capable.
As an aside, I'm really not that big of a fan of ACLs, they get too complex for users to effectively manage too quickly in large organizations. Sure, in theory it is good to give that degree of granularity, but in practice it is too fine grained. Now if the users used acls judiciously, it is no problem, but I often see users frequently adding groups and users to allow access to certain files without bothering to ever remove them. At that point, the permission system breaks down, and that is my complaint about ACLs.
Well, if a company really had the need, you can bet your ass they can get that support at a reasonable rate from Red Hat. The difficulty associated with complex clustering configurations is mostly in the software, and RedHat is dying to show their stuff. The hardware requires some consideration, but any decent vendor provides the hardware needed (Dell, IBM, HPaq). If you are buying Sun equipment, you are generally expected to have a proficient Solaris administrator on staff to take care of those babies. That Solaris administrator would cost about the same as an administrator with the capability of dealing with two vendors (hardware and software), and knowing how to glue things together.
In the.com days, where competent administrators were gold, the value Sun added with their turn-key solutions and support were well worth the price. Now with pay rates no longer in the stratosphere for good administrators, the value is diminished...
It kind of does. Behavior isn't quite the same, due to the hardware acceleration Apple's version takes advantage of. XFree prior to this had no 2D or 3D acceleration on Quartz. Also, the only Window Manager that came close to making X apps fit in better was OrborOSX, which did an admirable job, but still fell short a bit. quartz-wm does a much better job of making X apps fit in with other Aqua apps. Of course, it remains imperfect. I think the quartz-wm developers could take a cue from WindowMaker and more smoothly integrate X apps into the Dock. Granted a lot of X apps don't provide good icons to put in the dock, but the major ones do have an application icon that would work well in the Dock.
You may say all this is silly trim, but in the world of Apple, a consistant UI is extremely important. You can bet OpenOffice was one of a few significant apps they wanted users to be able to use without slowdown. They may never be able to do anything about qt, gtk+, motif, etc. widgets and menus not matching the Mac style, but they can make the Window focus, interleave, and decoration fit in well, and have Dock entries for X applications.
I'm by no means an expert, but it seems to me that Rendevous is a means of discovering nearby hosts and services. So you know where the nearest print server is. Like a finer grained DNS. With DNS, you can get some good guesses at targets to exploit, but the individual hosts should be locked down. Same here with the services. The only circumstances which Rendevous exposes a dangerous weakness would be either non-secured WAPs or network ports open to the world. Now in both these cases, things are already bad enough so that Rendevous doesn't add any dangers. Commercial networks should have security against access to the media, first. Then, after defeating that an attacker should be faced with security measures on the services they would exploit.
Looks like they have, but without an update comment. They really should own up to what they did. I mean, it was in the *editor's* text, not the submitter's....
Sun is really backed into a corner and this move I don't see as really fixing much....
I have worked at places that use Sun equipment. All but one were using them for legacy apps as they phased them out. The other place used them for everything, but went under because they couldn't recoup the investment.
Sun hardware is nice to work on, and you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it. They are a pleasure to work with, but they are not worth the price premium they charge.
Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation during maintenance can be had for cheaper than Sun equipment. Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes are more cost effective and reliable than Sun offerings. Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...
Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors, and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble. In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them. A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95 and 96 (my personal experience), but now, a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...
Re:I'm tempted to throw mine into the oven as well
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Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
My Apple support story....
Have an iBook, the lid latch broke (what GENIUS designed that flimsy metal hook to hook into a small plastic strip... Hook cut through the plastic within two months of normal use).
Called Apple saying the lid latch broke. They said they used to warranty the lid latch, but found that too many customers had the problem and it wasn't cost effective to warranty it, and thus they no longer honor warranty repair for the iBook lid latch. WTF, this can't be legal, changing the terms of the Warranty without the knowledge and consent of the customer who made the purchase under the old terms.
Later the plastic ring around the headphone jack broke (again, another ingenious design decision, not only do they use plastic for a headphone jack ring when every other device uses metal, but they *also* leave empty space between the plastic ring and plastic case just to make sure the damn ring breaks). Similarly, the plastic around the ethernet jack broke, but I'll let that slide as someone tripped over the ethernet cord. They at least will fix those two (and the frayed power cord).
I guess they get one point for repairing some 'cosmetic' damage other manufacturers wouldn't cover, but lose about 3 points for iBook plastic parts, and about 30 points for renigging on the warranty conditions...
Intel has a faster processor than us, and we can catch up or even beat us, but that would only be an small percentage increase.... I say we just sit on our asses until we can double our speed. We'll be bankrupt by then, but users don't care about the releases.
If you are saying they should be doubling the speed at the same intervals as current incremental changes, you are being ridiculous. They are moving as fast as they can. This is what a competitive market does. They try to move any slower than they possibly can and competition leaves them behind. This is why the x86 platform is becoming much faster much more quickly than other platforms, the fierce competition.
If you don't like the small speed increase releases, just ignore them and pretend they never happen. For example, if you have an Athlon XP1500+, pretend that every successive release until now never happend. Then you'll be happy.
These are not meaningless speed increases. If you have the 2700+ processor, the 3000+ is faster, but not worth an upgrade (not yet anyway). If you have a 1500+ processor, this release is bound to make the 2700+ more reasonable, or even 3000+. Manufacturers do not expect a consumer to buy into every release cycle, but they expect different consumers to be ready to buy into different cycles at different intervals.
SpamNet is based on and shares a userbase with razor (razor.sf.net) which was designed with *nix in mind. SpamAssassin, in fact, incorporates razor (and, by extension spamnet) into the mechanisms it uses to detect spam. Though SpamAssassin does filtering, it also uses razor (SpamNet) and blacklists (mail-abuse.org and ordb.org) to supplement those filtering mechanisms.
Better strategy.... But requires having control of your own mail server...
I run my own mail server. I have Postfix configured to forward username-@the.server to username@the.server by default. So, for example, I registered with amazon username-amazon, and it gets to me. If this email is ever put on a list, I'll complain to amazon, and then create a.forward-amazon and have it put mail in/dev/null. Alternatively you could use procmail or maildrop in the dot-forward file to perform per-extension filtering or bounce messages to explain why the mail will never be read, in case legitimate mail tries to come into that box, perhaps with a random, unique extension provided for them to try a legitimate box. Not only do you have an effective mechanism for filtering out unwanted mail by source and outdated email, you also have a way to track how your email gets out. It has worked quite well. Last week I got three spams, and blocked that address. Aside from that and a couple of other incidents in the past year (about 8 or 9 spam mails total), the signal to noise ratio in that mailbox is excellent.
I can see why, though. Even though there is a set amount of money in the account, if you have a check book and don't closely track your balance, you can bounce checks, and that is not that good for the bank, especially if the person bouncing checks is under 18. When I was 16, I got a checking account with a bank, but only when my parents would be jointly on there, so an accountable adult would be responsible if a problem should arise. I think this is perfectly fine and sensible. I managed my money fine those days, but a great deal of people I knew wouldn't have at that age.
Simply not possible. Assume for a moment that there was infinite food, shelter, energy, health care, transportation, and entertainment.
Now, in such a world where money is not needed, what is the incentive of working? We start partying all day. Now, who cooks the food? Builds the shelter? Take care of the sick? Maintain power plants? Create entertaining music, shows, and games? No one, so the stuff is not unlimited.
Now, we could create armies of AI robots to do our construction work and our entertainment and such. Then they would get mad, start their own country, maybe call it '01' and then we fight and they turn us into batteries and hook us up to a big computer simulation of the late 90s, maybe even call it something like 'the Matrix'.
Ok, that last paragraph was off topic, but this is the same problem with any 'utopian' society. Without the possibility of inequality through different amounts of effort, there is no motivation to do anything.
Backing AMD a bad business decision? If they are hurting in that area (I have not heard), it is not because they make chipsets for AMD motherboards, it is because their chipset is nothing special. Their experience with graphics card hasn't translated that well to motherboards, so the chipsets aren't worth any premium. Maybe if they put GPUs on the motherboards more frequently that weren't underpowered, they would have done better. I really haven't been keeping close track of nVidia and the nForce (hell, I still have a Voodoo3 running in this thing), but AMD has been doing well as far as I can tell, so there is certainly a market to exploit.
Don't think I have ever seen so much flamebait in one post.
CDs are not necessarily ultimately superior. For one thing, nostalgia for the medium is a valid reason to like LPs. And the case has been frequently made that the analog nature of the medium has the capabiblity (if well cared for), to sound more realistic than CDs. Perhaps 16 bit sample sizes aren't fine grained enough. Perhaps the waveforms generated from 44100 samples a second don't catch as much detail as needed. I have a tin ear, so I can't tell, but there are reasons why LPs could be considered better than CDs, and it is not elitism.
Macs do have value over Windows counterparts. OS9 and earlier really have nothing to offer over Windows, but OSX drastically improved both the core and some UI concepts over OS9. The all-from-one place approach appeals to people seeking simplicity, and when you add up the value of everything you get in an apple purchase, things get more equalized (though I agree, Macs are underpowered, but the laptop battery time is overwhelmingly good).
I really think the speaker cable thing is outrageous, but I don't know people that drastic.
As to the anime/manga thing, they are talking about the success of the medium in their relative nation, comics in the US, manga in Japan. In Japan, the manga is cheap and disposable. It is very commonplace and not in any way considered elite. Comics in the US are closer to what you describe. As they say, there are no 'manga' stores in Japan, they are sold next to everything else. In the US, there are comic book stores dedicated to comics and associated things. That is more an indication of elitism.
In the US, I don't see Anime and Manga as being excessively popular (especially not Manga, most places that bother to carry it don't make a big effort over it, indicating it isn't *that* profitable. Which Anime things have you seen? I would accuse maybe Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z of flat characters, thin plot, and unimpressive artwork. There are many other series which offer good characters, plot, and artwork. I tend to like the more funny series, so I can't offer as good advice on serious Anime as others will. Ghost in the Shell for one seems to have much more involved everything, though it really isn't my sort of thing. Same with cowboy Bebop. I'm not crazy about either of these series, but I think they provide good examples to counter your claim.
I can see his point though. If they want to try without risk, it is really difficult. Yes, the bootloader configuration is friendly to existing boot configurations and is helpful in configuring multi-boot configurations. The problem is that the repartitioning step is too scary or not feasible for users with intact data. This requires other software to do it non-destructively (Partition Magic). Parted now could be used for fat filesystems, but as XP proliferates, NTFS becomes more and more dominant and that cannot be moved or resized by any open source project.
Heavy work with parted and NTFS, or kernel work enabling boot from a loopback filesystem on an NTFS volume would go a long way for those 'on the fence', or wanting to change, but can't just dive in until they figure out how they can get their necessary things done in Linux.
Though not as feasible to use as a primary desktop it once was, I would say the architecture had just as much technical potential as OSX, and more than XP.
What hurts BeOS is the lack of third party support. For a 'multimedia os' it had/has crappy format/codec support. Applications were sparse. Linux had these same setbacks once upon a time, but the nature of the platform lent itself well to a grass roots movement of software developers, and BeOS did not. They offered decent tools, but the proprietary, closed source core really didn't appeal all that much to developers that already could do stuff with Linux. Sure BeOS was a more 'all-in-one' package with a better graphics system, but the business behind it killed the technology.
Besides, I burned the image file to CD from PE and installed from it fine. Not documented officially, but it works quite well.
Paying any money for BeOS Pro is being ripped off. The bonuses it once gave are nullified by the negatives of its age. Max and Developer Edition have done a good job of extendending the life of the OS through third party applications, extensions, and replacements. It is a good hold over until a reimplementation is complete. I'll be the first to say that extending the closed-source release can only go so far, but it is a very good holdover until a complete solution comes along.
Actually, I do *only* drive manual-transmission cars, I like them better, but aside from that..
The reason why these demoes are always wrong is because the people don't care to follow the particular vision of the designer.
For example, in this house, computer technology is integrated into places that existed before computers, and that is the vision these people have of how computers should and will be used, which is crap.
PDAs as light switches? That is horrible. For one, even in the future the price of a light switch versus even a pathetic PDA will cause people to shy from it. For another, the Interface would suck. The only advantage to a PDA is the mobility, you don't want to be tied into a PDA screen in a fixed location, no matter how nice the display (and ruggedized). Turning on lights blindly becomes difficult.
Another thing is the screen on the front door. That is really a moot point. Now we could do the same thing with a whiteboard if we *really* wanted, but we have never wanted that really. As the article mentions, we have phones now and so people stopped caring so much. Now with cell phones being ubiquitous, they can just call from anywhere, no reason to ever bother going to the front door without calling first. And the bit about listening to only important messages at the front door while taking off my shoes, also not my taste. If people were that obsessed, they would mount their answering machines by the door. Nothing is so critical that it cannot wait for you to walk to the living room instead of the front door. If it is extremely critical, your cell phone already has been called with the message.
And the notion of using TVs instead of computers... well WebTV has shown us just how crazy people are about *that* concept. Monitors at the intended distance suck for text. No matter how good the display is, the eyes don't like reading a lot of text on a display that is supposed to be 7 foot or more away. I do not want IM, email, and web on my TV, I would get bad eye strain.
The 'home' of the future focuses on bringing computer interfaces to places where people really don't want it. The trend is clear, mobility is what they want. Maybe embedded computerized gadgets here and there, but laptops, PDAs, cell phones are really the realm for communications and information gathering. I have a computer with a TV display rigged up for movies and some gaming. I use a laptop for everything else. Link email, IM, and phone messaging all into one and you have something more along the lines of what a lot of people want.
Though still off, the Office of the future is a bit more on target. Microsoft understands the office environment a bit better. Except the surround display, which I think would be good for gaming and certain types of work, but wouldn't bring too much benefit for average computer workers. Peripheal vision isn't good enough to really use for anything...
Basically, this 'home of the future' suffers from the same thing all homes of the futures that have preceeded it. They used to want to put phones, videophones, and televisions in weird places and combine them in various ways. And consumers respond to the prospect by saying neato, but I don't *want* a TV there, I don't *want* people to see me when I'm on the phone with them, I want devices to stay separate, they are easier to use that way. Same here. People want light switches to control lights. They want thermostats separate. They want computers to be separate. Things get too hard to understand if everything becomes part of one complex gadget instead of many, simple gadgets.
Well, at least around here (bunch of Townhouses), things are too much of a mess for anything like that to be remotely possible. The junction box for all the homes is randomly hooked up, with no record of what wire goes where, and they even use standard splitters in that box to further confuse things. As far as reading from the homes, the homes are all together, so without trespassing into your house, they can't be sure. With townhomes, apartments, and densely constructed neighborhoods, 'sniffing' isn't so feasible.
Also there is the assumption that the technicians care to go to the trouble. Around here, technicians say flat out (while bosses are not looking, of course), to check cable hookups before calling for cable installation if all you want is TV. 8 times out of 10 the technician never bothers to disconnect. And if they don't even bother checking that, they can't be expected to detect minute differences in RF between 1 or 2 connections.
All this said, I am aware this is theft of service. And I actually don't do it (my only TV is so far away from the working cable outlet, it was only worth my time to see if it worked). And I know the omission of the filter doesn't give me rights, but as I said, free cable tv is a highly unofficial benefit, provider hates it, but consumers like it and learn of it by word of mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not. Those forewarned took it seriously because they pay for the service. If Symantec had said that a huge attack was imminent and to block the port and patch your SQL servers, how many people do you think would have listened? Of those who listened, how many of those have processes in place so that the requisite network or software changes would have required approval that would have come too late to do any good?
The people who paid for the warning are going to take it very seriously, but aside from that, I would wager that there would be enough doubt about the validity that measures wouldn't have been taken anyway. Patching the server has the obvious implication for many mission critical databases of a potential restart and potential for undesired change in functionality, so patching in many cases would require a testbed server and evaluation, which this warning provided insufficient time for. Blocking the port, or disabling that part of SQL server, for those with it enabled without needing it, means they need to understand what it does or does not do for them. If they already knew, they would have disabled it sooner, so you can't say they would immediately realize and shut it down.
Ok, I had heard this once, then that Square was backing out, then that Square was appeased, and then again that Square was backing out again..... What is the true status of this?
Aside from X11, I have never experienced this issue while using the Dvorak layout, and their latest update to that is supposed to correct that. command-w works correctly in finder and all my apps. Dvorak has worked just fine and the keyboard layout facilities of OSX have been a lot more consistant than MS's model. In fact, MS operating systems have the single, most crappy keyboard layout implementation in my experience.
Wi-Fi is insecure, but I'm hard pressed to think of a secure 'Physical Layer' implementation. The difference here being that Wi-Fi takes the hub of ethernet and instead dangles it out for the world to see, as opposed to having some physical control of who plugs in. In environments larger than a home or VERY small business, the physical control over copper ethernet isn't that great either. The other difference is that in Wi-Fi world, they added the piece of crap that is WEP to at least deter would be attackers, and that is probably the most security I have seen integrated at the physical layer.
The solution I use is to implement security at the network layer. My wireless router is a linux box with FreeS/WAN running. Forward is denyed to eth2 (wireless interface), and input only for ESP and UDP port 500. Authenticate and encrpyt with IPSec and they get access to the world. Windows 2k/XP, Linux, OSX/*BSD, all of them include or have freely available the tools to connect. Of course this works because there isn't much interesting laptop to laptop traffic, and each laptop that uses the network has a configured firewall configuration, but it works well to protect against piggy-backers and sniffers.
Samba already does support ACLs... I know that is at least possible if XFS is the underlying filesystem. It may be true for the other acl implementations, but Samba certainly is capable.
As an aside, I'm really not that big of a fan of ACLs, they get too complex for users to effectively manage too quickly in large organizations. Sure, in theory it is good to give that degree of granularity, but in practice it is too fine grained. Now if the users used acls judiciously, it is no problem, but I often see users frequently adding groups and users to allow access to certain files without bothering to ever remove them. At that point, the permission system breaks down, and that is my complaint about ACLs.
Well, if a company really had the need, you can bet your ass they can get that support at a reasonable rate from Red Hat. The difficulty associated with complex clustering configurations is mostly in the software, and RedHat is dying to show their stuff. The hardware requires some consideration, but any decent vendor provides the hardware needed (Dell, IBM, HPaq). If you are buying Sun equipment, you are generally expected to have a proficient Solaris administrator on staff to take care of those babies. That Solaris administrator would cost about the same as an administrator with the capability of dealing with two vendors (hardware and software), and knowing how to glue things together.
.com days, where competent administrators were gold, the value Sun added with their turn-key solutions and support were well worth the price. Now with pay rates no longer in the stratosphere for good administrators, the value is diminished...
In the
It kind of does. Behavior isn't quite the same, due to the hardware acceleration Apple's version takes advantage of. XFree prior to this had no 2D or 3D acceleration on Quartz. Also, the only Window Manager that came close to making X apps fit in better was OrborOSX, which did an admirable job, but still fell short a bit. quartz-wm does a much better job of making X apps fit in with other Aqua apps. Of course, it remains imperfect. I think the quartz-wm developers could take a cue from WindowMaker and more smoothly integrate X apps into the Dock. Granted a lot of X apps don't provide good icons to put in the dock, but the major ones do have an application icon that would work well in the Dock.
You may say all this is silly trim, but in the world of Apple, a consistant UI is extremely important. You can bet OpenOffice was one of a few significant apps they wanted users to be able to use without slowdown. They may never be able to do anything about qt, gtk+, motif, etc. widgets and menus not matching the Mac style, but they can make the Window focus, interleave, and decoration fit in well, and have Dock entries for X applications.
I'm by no means an expert, but it seems to me that Rendevous is a means of discovering nearby hosts and services. So you know where the nearest print server is. Like a finer grained DNS. With DNS, you can get some good guesses at targets to exploit, but the individual hosts should be locked down. Same here with the services. The only circumstances which Rendevous exposes a dangerous weakness would be either non-secured WAPs or network ports open to the world. Now in both these cases, things are already bad enough so that Rendevous doesn't add any dangers. Commercial networks should have security against access to the media, first. Then, after defeating that an attacker should be faced with security measures on the services they would exploit.
Cool, good to see you explain it and admit the correction.
Looks like they have, but without an update comment. They really should own up to what they did. I mean, it was in the *editor's* text, not the submitter's....
Sun is really backed into a corner and this move I don't see as really fixing much....
I have worked at places that use Sun equipment. All but one were using them for legacy apps as they phased them out. The other place used them for everything, but went under because they couldn't recoup the investment.
Sun hardware is nice to work on, and you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it. They are a pleasure to work with, but they are not worth the price premium they charge.
Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation during maintenance can be had for cheaper than Sun equipment. Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes are more cost effective and reliable than Sun offerings. Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...
Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors, and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble. In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them. A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95 and 96 (my personal experience), but now, a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...
My Apple support story....
Have an iBook, the lid latch broke (what GENIUS designed that flimsy metal hook to hook into a small plastic strip... Hook cut through the plastic within two months of normal use).
Called Apple saying the lid latch broke. They said they used to warranty the lid latch, but found that too many customers had the problem and it wasn't cost effective to warranty it, and thus they no longer honor warranty repair for the iBook lid latch. WTF, this can't be legal, changing the terms of the Warranty without the knowledge and consent of the customer who made the purchase under the old terms.
Later the plastic ring around the headphone jack broke (again, another ingenious design decision, not only do they use plastic for a headphone jack ring when every other device uses metal, but they *also* leave empty space between the plastic ring and plastic case just to make sure the damn ring breaks). Similarly, the plastic around the ethernet jack broke, but I'll let that slide as someone tripped over the ethernet cord. They at least will fix those two (and the frayed power cord).
I guess they get one point for repairing some 'cosmetic' damage other manufacturers wouldn't cover, but lose about 3 points for iBook plastic parts, and about 30 points for renigging on the warranty conditions...
And don't forget:
Super e-iXserve 2.0 Custom Ultimate Turbo Champion Edition: The New Challengers
Wow, a great idea, I can see it now...
Intel has a faster processor than us, and we can catch up or even beat us, but that would only be an small percentage increase.... I say we just sit on our asses until we can double our speed. We'll be bankrupt by then, but users don't care about the releases.
If you are saying they should be doubling the speed at the same intervals as current incremental changes, you are being ridiculous. They are moving as fast as they can. This is what a competitive market does. They try to move any slower than they possibly can and competition leaves them behind. This is why the x86 platform is becoming much faster much more quickly than other platforms, the fierce competition.
If you don't like the small speed increase releases, just ignore them and pretend they never happen. For example, if you have an Athlon XP1500+, pretend that every successive release until now never happend. Then you'll be happy.
These are not meaningless speed increases. If you have the 2700+ processor, the 3000+ is faster, but not worth an upgrade (not yet anyway). If you have a 1500+ processor, this release is bound to make the 2700+ more reasonable, or even 3000+. Manufacturers do not expect a consumer to buy into every release cycle, but they expect different consumers to be ready to buy into different cycles at different intervals.
SpamNet is based on and shares a userbase with razor (razor.sf.net) which was designed with *nix in mind. SpamAssassin, in fact, incorporates razor (and, by extension spamnet) into the mechanisms it uses to detect spam. Though SpamAssassin does filtering, it also uses razor (SpamNet) and blacklists (mail-abuse.org and ordb.org) to supplement those filtering mechanisms.
Better strategy.... But requires having control of your own mail server...
.forward-amazon and have it put mail in /dev/null. Alternatively you could use procmail or maildrop in the dot-forward file to perform per-extension filtering or bounce messages to explain why the mail will never be read, in case legitimate mail tries to come into that box, perhaps with a random, unique extension provided for them to try a legitimate box. Not only do you have an effective mechanism for filtering out unwanted mail by source and outdated email, you also have a way to track how your email gets out. It has worked quite well. Last week I got three spams, and blocked that address. Aside from that and a couple of other incidents in the past year (about 8 or 9 spam mails total), the signal to noise ratio in that mailbox is excellent.
I run my own mail server. I have Postfix configured to forward username-@the.server to username@the.server by default. So, for example, I registered with amazon username-amazon, and it gets to me. If this email is ever put on a list, I'll complain to amazon, and then create a
I can see why, though. Even though there is a set amount of money in the account, if you have a check book and don't closely track your balance, you can bounce checks, and that is not that good for the bank, especially if the person bouncing checks is under 18. When I was 16, I got a checking account with a bank, but only when my parents would be jointly on there, so an accountable adult would be responsible if a problem should arise. I think this is perfectly fine and sensible. I managed my money fine those days, but a great deal of people I knew wouldn't have at that age.
Simply not possible. Assume for a moment that there was infinite food, shelter, energy, health care, transportation, and entertainment.
Now, in such a world where money is not needed, what is the incentive of working? We start partying all day. Now, who cooks the food? Builds the shelter? Take care of the sick? Maintain power plants? Create entertaining music, shows, and games? No one, so the stuff is not unlimited.
Now, we could create armies of AI robots to do our construction work and our entertainment and such. Then they would get mad, start their own country, maybe call it '01' and then we fight and they turn us into batteries and hook us up to a big computer simulation of the late 90s, maybe even call it something like 'the Matrix'.
Ok, that last paragraph was off topic, but this is the same problem with any 'utopian' society. Without the possibility of inequality through different amounts of effort, there is no motivation to do anything.
Backing AMD a bad business decision? If they are hurting in that area (I have not heard), it is not because they make chipsets for AMD motherboards, it is because their chipset is nothing special. Their experience with graphics card hasn't translated that well to motherboards, so the chipsets aren't worth any premium. Maybe if they put GPUs on the motherboards more frequently that weren't underpowered, they would have done better. I really haven't been keeping close track of nVidia and the nForce (hell, I still have a Voodoo3 running in this thing), but AMD has been doing well as far as I can tell, so there is certainly a market to exploit.
Don't think I have ever seen so much flamebait in one post.
CDs are not necessarily ultimately superior. For one thing, nostalgia for the medium is a valid reason to like LPs. And the case has been frequently made that the analog nature of the medium has the capabiblity (if well cared for), to sound more realistic than CDs. Perhaps 16 bit sample sizes aren't fine grained enough. Perhaps the waveforms generated from 44100 samples a second don't catch as much detail as needed. I have a tin ear, so I can't tell, but there are reasons why LPs could be considered better than CDs, and it is not elitism.
Macs do have value over Windows counterparts. OS9 and earlier really have nothing to offer over Windows, but OSX drastically improved both the core and some UI concepts over OS9. The all-from-one place approach appeals to people seeking simplicity, and when you add up the value of everything you get in an apple purchase, things get more equalized (though I agree, Macs are underpowered, but the laptop battery time is overwhelmingly good).
I really think the speaker cable thing is outrageous, but I don't know people that drastic.
As to the anime/manga thing, they are talking about the success of the medium in their relative nation, comics in the US, manga in Japan. In Japan, the manga is cheap and disposable. It is very commonplace and not in any way considered elite. Comics in the US are closer to what you describe. As they say, there are no 'manga' stores in Japan, they are sold next to everything else. In the US, there are comic book stores dedicated to comics and associated things. That is more an indication of elitism.
In the US, I don't see Anime and Manga as being excessively popular (especially not Manga, most places that bother to carry it don't make a big effort over it, indicating it isn't *that* profitable. Which Anime things have you seen? I would accuse maybe Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z of flat characters, thin plot, and unimpressive artwork. There are many other series which offer good characters, plot, and artwork. I tend to like the more funny series, so I can't offer as good advice on serious Anime as others will. Ghost in the Shell for one seems to have much more involved everything, though it really isn't my sort of thing. Same with cowboy Bebop. I'm not crazy about either of these series, but I think they provide good examples to counter your claim.
I can see his point though. If they want to try without risk, it is really difficult. Yes, the bootloader configuration is friendly to existing boot configurations and is helpful in configuring multi-boot configurations. The problem is that the repartitioning step is too scary or not feasible for users with intact data. This requires other software to do it non-destructively (Partition Magic). Parted now could be used for fat filesystems, but as XP proliferates, NTFS becomes more and more dominant and that cannot be moved or resized by any open source project.
Heavy work with parted and NTFS, or kernel work enabling boot from a loopback filesystem on an NTFS volume would go a long way for those 'on the fence', or wanting to change, but can't just dive in until they figure out how they can get their necessary things done in Linux.
Though not as feasible to use as a primary desktop it once was, I would say the architecture had just as much technical potential as OSX, and more than XP.
What hurts BeOS is the lack of third party support. For a 'multimedia os' it had/has crappy format/codec support. Applications were sparse. Linux had these same setbacks once upon a time, but the nature of the platform lent itself well to a grass roots movement of software developers, and BeOS did not. They offered decent tools, but the proprietary, closed source core really didn't appeal all that much to developers that already could do stuff with Linux. Sure BeOS was a more 'all-in-one' package with a better graphics system, but the business behind it killed the technology.
Complete with outdated drivers and utilities....
Besides, I burned the image file to CD from PE and installed from it fine. Not documented officially, but it works quite well.
Paying any money for BeOS Pro is being ripped off. The bonuses it once gave are nullified by the negatives of its age. Max and Developer Edition have done a good job of extendending the life of the OS through third party applications, extensions, and replacements. It is a good hold over until a reimplementation is complete. I'll be the first to say that extending the closed-source release can only go so far, but it is a very good holdover until a complete solution comes along.
Actually, I do *only* drive manual-transmission cars, I like them better, but aside from that..
The reason why these demoes are always wrong is because the people don't care to follow the particular vision of the designer.
For example, in this house, computer technology is integrated into places that existed before computers, and that is the vision these people have of how computers should and will be used, which is crap.
PDAs as light switches? That is horrible. For one, even in the future the price of a light switch versus even a pathetic PDA will cause people to shy from it. For another, the Interface would suck. The only advantage to a PDA is the mobility, you don't want to be tied into a PDA screen in a fixed location, no matter how nice the display (and ruggedized). Turning on lights blindly becomes difficult.
Another thing is the screen on the front door. That is really a moot point. Now we could do the same thing with a whiteboard if we *really* wanted, but we have never wanted that really. As the article mentions, we have phones now and so people stopped caring so much. Now with cell phones being ubiquitous, they can just call from anywhere, no reason to ever bother going to the front door without calling first. And the bit about listening to only important messages at the front door while taking off my shoes, also not my taste. If people were that obsessed, they would mount their answering machines by the door. Nothing is so critical that it cannot wait for you to walk to the living room instead of the front door. If it is extremely critical, your cell phone already has been called with the message.
And the notion of using TVs instead of computers... well WebTV has shown us just how crazy people are about *that* concept. Monitors at the intended distance suck for text. No matter how good the display is, the eyes don't like reading a lot of text on a display that is supposed to be 7 foot or more away. I do not want IM, email, and web on my TV, I would get bad eye strain.
The 'home' of the future focuses on bringing computer interfaces to places where people really don't want it. The trend is clear, mobility is what they want. Maybe embedded computerized gadgets here and there, but laptops, PDAs, cell phones are really the realm for communications and information gathering. I have a computer with a TV display rigged up for movies and some gaming. I use a laptop for everything else. Link email, IM, and phone messaging all into one and you have something more along the lines of what a lot of people want.
Though still off, the Office of the future is a bit more on target. Microsoft understands the office environment a bit better. Except the surround display, which I think would be good for gaming and certain types of work, but wouldn't bring too much benefit for average computer workers. Peripheal vision isn't good enough to really use for anything...
Basically, this 'home of the future' suffers from the same thing all homes of the futures that have preceeded it. They used to want to put phones, videophones, and televisions in weird places and combine them in various ways. And consumers respond to the prospect by saying neato, but I don't *want* a TV there, I don't *want* people to see me when I'm on the phone with them, I want devices to stay separate, they are easier to use that way. Same here. People want light switches to control lights. They want thermostats separate. They want computers to be separate. Things get too hard to understand if everything becomes part of one complex gadget instead of many, simple gadgets.
Well, at least around here (bunch of Townhouses), things are too much of a mess for anything like that to be remotely possible. The junction box for all the homes is randomly hooked up, with no record of what wire goes where, and they even use standard splitters in that box to further confuse things. As far as reading from the homes, the homes are all together, so without trespassing into your house, they can't be sure. With townhomes, apartments, and densely constructed neighborhoods, 'sniffing' isn't so feasible.
Also there is the assumption that the technicians care to go to the trouble. Around here, technicians say flat out (while bosses are not looking, of course), to check cable hookups before calling for cable installation if all you want is TV. 8 times out of 10 the technician never bothers to disconnect. And if they don't even bother checking that, they can't be expected to detect minute differences in RF between 1 or 2 connections.
All this said, I am aware this is theft of service. And I actually don't do it (my only TV is so far away from the working cable outlet, it was only worth my time to see if it worked). And I know the omission of the filter doesn't give me rights, but as I said, free cable tv is a highly unofficial benefit, provider hates it, but consumers like it and learn of it by word of mouth.