bull... what company do you go by that doesn't have a hugeass EULA?
And keep in mine that EULAs and any sort of contract is 98% CYA... It's there with tonnes of clauses that you will violate every day but are there so that if you do something stupid, they have a contract saying that you're not allowed to do that. If everyone were to go 100% by their contract, they wouldn't be using the web at all. Yes, this does give them excessive power, but they don't exercise it unless they need to, which is why they still have clients. Same reason why noone reads the EULAs on software, they just click "yeah I agree lets get on with it". The EULAs are there so if you do something annoying, they can nail you for it.
NO CONTRACT SHOULD EVER LIMIT FUNDEMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS
SO DON'T SIGN IT. It's your choice to sign up for an ISP that has a crazyass EULA. As long as there is competition there will be resonable TOSs, and when there isn't, that's where the goverment is supposed to step in to limit what they can do.
I think that you're going a little haywire thou with your freedom thing. Try to redirect some of that energy to what's happening in the aftermath of the attacks, or towards MPAA or RIAA.
Never mind that how long has the patches been available and posted prominantly on the MS web site listed under "critical updates"?
Answer, much longer. IIRC several months prior to CodeRed coming out.
It doesn't take a lot of work to pop on by to MS every now and then and download any critical/recommended patches. However it's pretty clear that most of these people aren't even aware that they were running a website, much less infected. However you must have had your head under a rock for a while to not have heard about it in the news. Bah, someone just write a proggy that shuts down these servers (one that works) and then go through the DShield database and shut'em all down. You could fake the IP address so it wouldn't be traceable anyways, or at the very least make it a program that you could give to ISPs so that they could run it against their networks to shut down anyone with these servers still running. But I guess that it's just as easy to have them terminate their client's connection. Bah.
The problem, here, I would think, is that these boxen are probably sitting somewhere on the net not being maintained. I mean any sysadmin, or even any user who circuits the web should have heard about it by now. If they haven't, then they're most likely not really using the web on that connection, in which case cutting them off won't really get their attention (not directly at least) anyways.
I wonder if there is any statistics on, in the past month, the boxes that have been recognized by their owners and patched. I find it hard to believe that you could account for the (still) 150+ CR hits a day that I get by just "ignorant" people or crappy sysadmins.
MS is *in part* responsible for not keeping retail/OEM copies reasonably up-to-date.
Except of course for the fact that they print most of them in advance and have large stores of the CDs, they're not just going to throw them all out when all it takes is 5 minutes once your server is online to patch any problems that have crept up.
However I suppose that they could provide a patch disk with it, or a supplimental CD that does contain all necessary upgrades.
Oh WAIT, that's right, that's what Windows Update is for!
However you can only use Windows Update if you have a legally purchased copy of Windows... And I'll bet you that many many many of those people who are running vulnerable servers don't have a legal copy. Or just clicked "cancel" when Windows prompted them to update their system the first time it was connected to the internet.
MS has done their job, maybe not the best way that they could have done it, but they provided all the tools needed, and even almost-automated the task of updating your system, all you have to do is follow the wizard. However most people just click "cancel" and never give it a second thought.
And for all of you out there who are toting how MS is so insecure and buggy, lets keep in mind that you're comparing apples to oranges here. IIS has much much more functionality than Apache does, and it has been around much longer, unfortunately in this case longer means a more convoluted codebase =(. However I can't defend them by that really, because bugs like simple buffer overflow attacks should have been caught in testing, or shouldn't have ever happened in the first place. You'd think by now people would have learned their lessons about static sized buffers (or at least not checking the length of the input prior to storage)... Oh well.
Wow. I used to have a lot of those too. Oh man that stuff was fun... Not nearly as mechanical as Meccano or even Lego could be, but it was damned cool. And when you hit them really hard they just shattered, much better than lego did =P. The cool parts was that due to the shapes you could have cool things happen by pushing on certain parts of them, which would cause others to move. Umm, closest anaolgy I can think of would be something like oragami. Anywyas, that stuff was cool. Oh... the days... Man I'm old now! =(
Pretty sure it was Meccano. This was like 15 years ago folks =). I can't remember what I had for breakfast a week ago nevermind what toys I played with when I was 8.
But from the sounds of everyone's posts, yeah it was Meccano. The edges on everything was round, and I never had much trouble with the screws.
loved it. What about robotix? That stuff was really damned cool. You could build all sorts of mechanical things that would do stuff. My friends and I used to have wars where we'd build stuff with different brands and then war it out. construx usually always won.
Man, back to the good old days. Anyone else remember some others? I can't remember them all. I remember one that actually had screws and metal bars that you could bolt together in all different shapes and sizes, and motors too, but I can't remember the name of it.
It's very obvious that all these precautions are exactly that and nothing more. They are only there to give people a more secure feeling, and as that as their goal, they accomplish it. If terrorists are willing to die for their cause, there is not dick-all that we can do about it.
If they couldn't use planes, they'd use bigger bombs. Or they'd just blow up 20 planes in midair over land (does C4 have a known signature on xray detectors?) or they'd use ceramic knives or guns, or they'd just blow up their targets with remote controlled airplanes and a lot of homemade explosives. Making this a little more difficult to do isn't going to solve the problem. But I guess that since it's more important right now for people to feel secure, this might be a good thing after all.
What I was quoting was "cash and cash equivilents" which means cash in the bank and stuff that can be redily transferred into cash. Everything else is in stocks and assets and other things that cannot be readily transferred into cash. I know that he says that they have $300mil in cash, but I can't seem to find that information anywhere in reports. Do you know of any links to back that up?
you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but from how I read it, it states:
Cash and cash equivalents $72,459,166 down from $109,989,741 a year ago. They started those quarters with $85,212,830 in 2001 and $248,429,962 in 2000.
and Total current assets are $144,055,087 down from $179,681,174 a year ago.
and posted a Net loss of $27,559,775 vs $17,422,183 a year ago. Thus a 59% increase in net loss. Of course, once you "adjust it" they're breaking even, but that's cheating.
So unless I'm reading it wrong, that's how I see it.
yeah I noticed that too. Their rate of loss is 59% higher than that of 2nd quarter 2000. Their cash reserves are also drying up pretty quickly. Kinda sucks, but unless IBM gives another huge cash infusion I don't think that they have much time left.
when unsecured machines on their network are comprimised
And if they were policing, people would cry foul.
And BTW -- you are NOT ALLOWED to run ANY servers on your machine under the @home network, at least according to my contract. So why would they police anyways?
I don't ever recall saying that I was. I don't think that MS can argue that piracy doesn't help them either. It just strikes me as amazing that the only protection on software is a serial number which gets distributed with the pirated software, and then the companies complain about piracy. They're also very quick to shout "piracy costs us $5bil a year" or something like that, when the vast majority of pirated software wouldn't have been bought if they couldn't use it for free, so that's not true at all.
Damn, I wish I was a CEO or board member, that'd mean I'd be rich =). Well I guess that's not true in today's economy.
As for the "about face", well, I can complain and defend, but I have to be realistic. People are generally very hypocritical. For example, ask yourself this (very hypothetical) question:
If you were the CEO of Microsoft, and had the opportunity of doing an action that would (a) squish that little company over there, (b) put $50mil in more sales into your company, and (c) put $500k into your pocket, can you honestly say that you wouldn't?
I can't. And I consider myself to be a good person. But this is the nature of a capitalist society, unfortunately.
And you're right. If a small portion of the piracy goes down, any additional money will go to the company. The only way that it might, in turn, effect the employees is if they don't get laid off due to insufficient funds. But otherwise yes, the company will just keep the extra money.
I don't know if that answered your question, thou.
I have a 1.4G running at 1.48 (Can't clock it any higher : ) and it idles around 49C and tops out (after several secs) at 61C when running CPUBurn.
However I just had an idea. You can get temp sensors (external) that have a small flat plate that you can put between your CPU surface and the heatsink that will measure the CPU temp. If you could plug one of these into one of the aux fan jacks, and have it "vary" the "RPM" of the "fan" to be, say, 100x the tempurature, you could get a much better readout from your CPU temp, and have it power down the system immediately if it detects a large jump in temp. This might be about 1sec faster than getting the under-the-chip sensor readout, but 1sec may be just enough time to save your processor.
I have a Athlon 1.4 and a Abit MB, and I have MBM set to poll 1/sec and it does change, so I'm sure that the chipset itself polls more than once every few seconds (I'd guess actually that the chipset does the measurement whenever it is polled).
However the -5,-12V readouts don't work, Temp sensor 1 reports 23C all the time (even under heavy load) and Core 1 reports around 0.41V (it does change), while the bios reports core 1 at 3.41V. Also Fan 3 and Fan 4 don't report anything, but do give power to the fan. Anyone know what's up? It's using the standard VIA686B chipset selection. ??
Make it a law: in order to email me or send me junkmail or otherwise harass me with advertising, you must pay me to get my updated contact information. (It'd be like $0.001 per but you know, when someone sends out 1,000,000 emails that's $10000 extra. At the rate of emails that I get, about 30 spams a day prefilter, that'd add up after a while).
Even if it was like $0.0001 the advertiser could benefit because they would have up-to-date advertising information.
And if I could indicate what I like and don't like, then they can also target better.
So $0.0001 if you just want my updated email address, or $0.001 if you want to know what I don't like, or $0.005 if you want to know what I like.
Pay per use advertising. Nice!
Scary thing is that it could benefit the advertisers too. =)
Serious question here. I'm sorry, but what does this have anything to do with the Paris Expo? Security is their #1 concern? I'm not following the relevance.
And what are these other million blatant lies that MS spreads about linux?
Please, point me to a list of them, and provided that they are true you won't hear another word out of me.
All of the zealoting that I do is because the comments that people post are either strongly misleading or outright wrong. Many people tend to have notions about things or hear rumours and carry them as the truth without actually having any proof to back it up. Indeed I think that the majority of the population tends to believe what they're told without much inquiry.
Yes, I am a bit of a MS zealot, but only because there are so many people around here that spread total FUD without knowing what it is that they are talking about. I also crusade for linux against my other MS zealot friends. I think I just like the debating.
I will have to agree that MS needs to fire their speechwriters. However if you ask any software company who's profits are being eaten into by the progression of linux, they'll be likely to agree with everything that they're saying.
however the "cancer" remark was a little... inciteful.
You say Windows XP comes with lots of innovations, but you're using Microsoft's proprietary definition of the word "innovation". Every one of the features you listed are already available in other OSs, many of which have been for a long time.
Really? I didn't realize that you can have 1 click file sharing, out of the box 1 click usage of webcams, simplified networking and sharing (unix style is far from simple), and many other usability features that they spent many months doing intensive usability studies to improve.
And when you talk about "other OSes" I can only think of two, either Linux, or Mac.
As for linux, it's not (yet) a mainstream OS. Things usually work fine, but anything not off the beaten path and the average user is up a creek. I tried to install on my new machine with a GeForce 3 card, and Xwindows didn't throw an error or complain, it just FUBARED nicely on switching into graphics mode, after a bit of usage locking up the system. I popped onto some newsgroups and boards to figure out what happened, and it wasn't a trivial "download new driver" fix. Indeed most of the recommendations were how to fix it from under xwindows. Well if I had it up and running, I wouldn't need to fix it! The point of the matter here is that it isn't yet ready for mainstream use. Indeed many people (both linux zealots and non alike) are saying that it may never become a desktop OS. Why? Because it was never aimed at that.
The other OS would be MacOS. Sure, it's user friendly, but at the expense of configurability and options. Yes, with the new unix kernel it's quite a bit different and indeed appealing, but again, they were aimed at different markets from the start. Or at the very least different niches. Complaining that MS has only been implementing what users want or have been available for years is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. If I'm not mistaken, Linux and co has been aiming at emulating and replicating what is already available for windows based systems... You can't blame one OS for not being up to another OS's par if they weren't aimed at the same place in the first place, otherwise you could blame linux just as much as you could blame windows just as much as you could blame MacOS.
You just sold your freedom to use your OS according to your own terms without having to contact the vendor for each nontrivial change
Yay more FUD. I guess you consider changing 3 major components or upgrading your computer to be "nontrivial changes"? Indeed in many cases MS has stated that it will be tied to the BIOS, and since by your (or at least many other similar arguments) on how people are reluctant to upgrade their machines and don't do so very frequently, this issue is a non starter. You can change your video card, sound card and add a network card without requiring reactiviation. And that is hardly a nontrivial change anyways. And reactivation is not a major PITA anyways, just requires an extra 15 minutes. not a big deal.
your freedom for anyone to view or modify the OS's source code
Whoops! Silly me. I forgot that software wants to be free. How could I forget that having unrestricted access to software that you buy that is indeed the only reason why there are software companies in the first place is a right, not a privilidge. If you have a problem with it, don't use it and don't complain about it.
your freedom to choose a vendor for each standard or component
Again, to what are you referring? You can buy your hardware from anywhere you please. If you are an advanced user, or indeed one that would be up for such a choose then integrate the system yourself and choose whatever software that you want. Most users take it and like it.
(sigh). I will however agree that their marketing is, in some cases, sleazy, but welcome to corporate america. 'tis the joys of living in a capitalist society.
XP is all about licensing software instead of buying it.
How do you figure? There is no major change in the way that you purchase XP over any other OS that MS has put out in the last 5 years.
Sorry. I meant PROFIT when I said MONEY. Not gross revenue
You can't say that they get most of their profit from one section when, if you look at the charts and data, the others have similar costs and revenues. MS does get about 1/3rd of their sales/profit from OEM, but they've always made more money in the business side of things which doesn't have single shot OEM'd licenses.
They do not need another OS that requires 4 times more RAM to provide them the same user interface
It has become very clear that you have never used or seen XP. The user interface is VERY VERY different than windows 95, much more user friendly and powerful. much.
You speak about "most users" which you are obviously mistaken. MS spends more money on R&D and user intesive studies than most other companies (as a percentage of revenue of course). Many users find things that they like in the newer releases of the software. Certainly they don't use 90% of the functionality, but out of the 150 things changed there are 3 or 4 that they really like and will use a lot. Indeed there are, however, many users (note many, not most) who are satisfied with their Win95 and Office95 which allows them to view the web and send emails and write documents and store reciepies and baseball card lists. However in many many cases across the board people buy things that they don't need. It is slowing down, but gaming is still strong. I know that my mom, who has been satisfied with her PII/233 for a year now has been bugging me for an upgrade because she found a new multimedia recipe book that requires a more powerful machine. My dad who has been using my old Cel300A system finally bought a newer one because he's gotten into the Flight Simulator games lately. 95% of both their usage doesn't require anything new, but all you need is one thing that you want to run that you can't to create the desire/need to upgrade your hardware.
you do make a very good point, however it's the same thing as the car. Once you use it, you won't want to go back (unless you have good self restraint!). It does have a lot of nicities and lots of improvements here and there, but Win2K is pretty much all you'll need. For many home users this should be a very welcome upgrade from the Win9X series. It will be a huge change, pretty much along the order of magnitude as the Win3.1 -> Win95 launch. For the rest of us, it'll be like the WinNT3.51 -> WinNT4.
Yeah, I think that's the same way with any large government/corporation/group of people. You will never be able to please everyone all the time, but there is a large difference between being grumbling at US policy and believing that they are doing something so atrociously wrong that 19 people will give up their lives to just send a message. There's a huge difference there. People might want to listen up when they've been hit over there head with it like that.
Again, not condoning what happened, but just stating a point.
Trying to submit this and/. is down again. Wow. I have had, at least, 2 or 3 outages a week since they switched to their new codebase. Wow. I think some more testing might have been in order =) Ah well, I should be working anyways.
There is a big difference to be known between where the user is forced to upgrade and where the user goes "well, I've been 'needing' a new machine for a while now, I guess this is a good time to get one!"
Just a thought.
BTW - I like your SIG, that's from B5 isn't it? Ivonova said it, can't remember when. Was it 4-01, The Hour of the Wolf?
Please explain this problem to me. I don't understand everyone's beef about that.
There is *no* personal information sent. It sends a small hash of information that's not even reversable. And before someone crys foul, just think about it for a second. People are bound to crack it, and thus they will also learn how it works. IF it indeed was sending personal information, Microsoft would get in huge shit and very bad PR, and since nobody who has hacked it has reported such a thing, it's safe to say that it doesn't happen.
I know that when I legally buy a piece of software I certainly opt in for the online registration and full benefits of owning a product. I don't care about the call home feature anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay for DSL, i can run *WHATEVER* i want on it.
bull... what company do you go by that doesn't have a hugeass EULA?
And keep in mine that EULAs and any sort of contract is 98% CYA... It's there with tonnes of clauses that you will violate every day but are there so that if you do something stupid, they have a contract saying that you're not allowed to do that. If everyone were to go 100% by their contract, they wouldn't be using the web at all. Yes, this does give them excessive power, but they don't exercise it unless they need to, which is why they still have clients. Same reason why noone reads the EULAs on software, they just click "yeah I agree lets get on with it". The EULAs are there so if you do something annoying, they can nail you for it.
NO CONTRACT SHOULD EVER LIMIT FUNDEMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS
SO DON'T SIGN IT. It's your choice to sign up for an ISP that has a crazyass EULA. As long as there is competition there will be resonable TOSs, and when there isn't, that's where the goverment is supposed to step in to limit what they can do.
I think that you're going a little haywire thou with your freedom thing. Try to redirect some of that energy to what's happening in the aftermath of the attacks, or towards MPAA or RIAA.
how long has CodeRed been known about now?
Never mind that how long has the patches been available and posted prominantly on the MS web site listed under "critical updates"?
Answer, much longer. IIRC several months prior to CodeRed coming out.
It doesn't take a lot of work to pop on by to MS every now and then and download any critical/recommended patches. However it's pretty clear that most of these people aren't even aware that they were running a website, much less infected. However you must have had your head under a rock for a while to not have heard about it in the news. Bah, someone just write a proggy that shuts down these servers (one that works) and then go through the DShield database and shut'em all down. You could fake the IP address so it wouldn't be traceable anyways, or at the very least make it a program that you could give to ISPs so that they could run it against their networks to shut down anyone with these servers still running. But I guess that it's just as easy to have them terminate their client's connection. Bah.
The problem, here, I would think, is that these boxen are probably sitting somewhere on the net not being maintained. I mean any sysadmin, or even any user who circuits the web should have heard about it by now. If they haven't, then they're most likely not really using the web on that connection, in which case cutting them off won't really get their attention (not directly at least) anyways.
I wonder if there is any statistics on, in the past month, the boxes that have been recognized by their owners and patched. I find it hard to believe that you could account for the (still) 150+ CR hits a day that I get by just "ignorant" people or crappy sysadmins.
[/ramble]
MS is *in part* responsible for not keeping retail/OEM copies reasonably up-to-date.
Except of course for the fact that they print most of them in advance and have large stores of the CDs, they're not just going to throw them all out when all it takes is 5 minutes once your server is online to patch any problems that have crept up.
However I suppose that they could provide a patch disk with it, or a supplimental CD that does contain all necessary upgrades.
Oh WAIT, that's right, that's what Windows Update is for!
However you can only use Windows Update if you have a legally purchased copy of Windows... And I'll bet you that many many many of those people who are running vulnerable servers don't have a legal copy. Or just clicked "cancel" when Windows prompted them to update their system the first time it was connected to the internet.
MS has done their job, maybe not the best way that they could have done it, but they provided all the tools needed, and even almost-automated the task of updating your system, all you have to do is follow the wizard. However most people just click "cancel" and never give it a second thought.
And for all of you out there who are toting how MS is so insecure and buggy, lets keep in mind that you're comparing apples to oranges here. IIS has much much more functionality than Apache does, and it has been around much longer, unfortunately in this case longer means a more convoluted codebase =(. However I can't defend them by that really, because bugs like simple buffer overflow attacks should have been caught in testing, or shouldn't have ever happened in the first place. You'd think by now people would have learned their lessons about static sized buffers (or at least not checking the length of the input prior to storage)... Oh well.
ZAKS!!!!!!!!! OH my god!!!!
... the days... Man I'm old now! =(
Wow. I used to have a lot of those too. Oh man that stuff was fun... Not nearly as mechanical as Meccano or even Lego could be, but it was damned cool. And when you hit them really hard they just shattered, much better than lego did =P. The cool parts was that due to the shapes you could have cool things happen by pushing on certain parts of them, which would cause others to move. Umm, closest anaolgy I can think of would be something like oragami. Anywyas, that stuff was cool. Oh
Pretty sure it was Meccano. This was like 15 years ago folks =). I can't remember what I had for breakfast a week ago nevermind what toys I played with when I was 8.
But from the sounds of everyone's posts, yeah it was Meccano. The edges on everything was round, and I never had much trouble with the screws.
loved it. What about robotix? That stuff was really damned cool. You could build all sorts of mechanical things that would do stuff. My friends and I used to have wars where we'd build stuff with different brands and then war it out. construx usually always won.
Man, back to the good old days. Anyone else remember some others? I can't remember them all. I remember one that actually had screws and metal bars that you could bolt together in all different shapes and sizes, and motors too, but I can't remember the name of it.
It's very obvious that all these precautions are exactly that and nothing more. They are only there to give people a more secure feeling, and as that as their goal, they accomplish it. If terrorists are willing to die for their cause, there is not dick-all that we can do about it.
If they couldn't use planes, they'd use bigger bombs. Or they'd just blow up 20 planes in midair over land (does C4 have a known signature on xray detectors?) or they'd use ceramic knives or guns, or they'd just blow up their targets with remote controlled airplanes and a lot of homemade explosives. Making this a little more difficult to do isn't going to solve the problem. But I guess that since it's more important right now for people to feel secure, this might be a good thing after all.
What I was quoting was "cash and cash equivilents" which means cash in the bank and stuff that can be redily transferred into cash. Everything else is in stocks and assets and other things that cannot be readily transferred into cash. I know that he says that they have $300mil in cash, but I can't seem to find that information anywhere in reports. Do you know of any links to back that up?
you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but from how I read it, it states:
Cash and cash equivalents $72,459,166 down from $109,989,741 a year ago. They started those quarters with $85,212,830 in 2001 and $248,429,962 in 2000.
and Total current assets are $144,055,087 down from $179,681,174 a year ago.
and posted a Net loss of $27,559,775 vs $17,422,183 a year ago. Thus a 59% increase in net loss. Of course, once you "adjust it" they're breaking even, but that's cheating.
So unless I'm reading it wrong, that's how I see it.
yeah I noticed that too. Their rate of loss is 59% higher than that of 2nd quarter 2000. Their cash reserves are also drying up pretty quickly. Kinda sucks, but unless IBM gives another huge cash infusion I don't think that they have much time left.
check it out for yourself.
except it didn't work.
at least it never did when I tried it.
because the IIS machine runs scripts as IUSR_ which is a member of the guests group only.
The exploits actually upload code into the memory area of IIS, thus running as whatever user IIS is running as.
when unsecured machines on their network are comprimised
And if they were policing, people would cry foul.
And BTW -- you are NOT ALLOWED to run ANY servers on your machine under the @home network, at least according to my contract. So why would they police anyways?
How is this a perfect example? I see very little relevance between that and Microsoft product activation.
I can agree with you, however, that the customer is inconvenienced and gets nothing back in return.
i'm not trying to bait you, i'm honestly curious.
Thank you for being honest and not flaming me =)
why are you unhappy about widespread piracy?
I don't ever recall saying that I was. I don't think that MS can argue that piracy doesn't help them either. It just strikes me as amazing that the only protection on software is a serial number which gets distributed with the pirated software, and then the companies complain about piracy. They're also very quick to shout "piracy costs us $5bil a year" or something like that, when the vast majority of pirated software wouldn't have been bought if they couldn't use it for free, so that's not true at all.
Damn, I wish I was a CEO or board member, that'd mean I'd be rich =). Well I guess that's not true in today's economy.
As for the "about face", well, I can complain and defend, but I have to be realistic. People are generally very hypocritical. For example, ask yourself this (very hypothetical) question:
If you were the CEO of Microsoft, and had the opportunity of doing an action that would (a) squish that little company over there, (b) put $50mil in more sales into your company, and (c) put $500k into your pocket, can you honestly say that you wouldn't?
I can't. And I consider myself to be a good person. But this is the nature of a capitalist society, unfortunately.
And you're right. If a small portion of the piracy goes down, any additional money will go to the company. The only way that it might, in turn, effect the employees is if they don't get laid off due to insufficient funds. But otherwise yes, the company will just keep the extra money.
I don't know if that answered your question, thou.
I have a 1.4G running at 1.48 (Can't clock it any higher : ) and it idles around 49C and tops out (after several secs) at 61C when running CPUBurn.
However I just had an idea. You can get temp sensors (external) that have a small flat plate that you can put between your CPU surface and the heatsink that will measure the CPU temp. If you could plug one of these into one of the aux fan jacks, and have it "vary" the "RPM" of the "fan" to be, say, 100x the tempurature, you could get a much better readout from your CPU temp, and have it power down the system immediately if it detects a large jump in temp. This might be about 1sec faster than getting the under-the-chip sensor readout, but 1sec may be just enough time to save your processor.
I have a Athlon 1.4 and a Abit MB, and I have MBM set to poll 1/sec and it does change, so I'm sure that the chipset itself polls more than once every few seconds (I'd guess actually that the chipset does the measurement whenever it is polled).
However the -5,-12V readouts don't work, Temp sensor 1 reports 23C all the time (even under heavy load) and Core 1 reports around 0.41V (it does change), while the bios reports core 1 at 3.41V. Also Fan 3 and Fan 4 don't report anything, but do give power to the fan. Anyone know what's up? It's using the standard VIA686B chipset selection. ??
Make it a law: in order to email me or send me junkmail or otherwise harass me with advertising, you must pay me to get my updated contact information. (It'd be like $0.001 per but you know, when someone sends out 1,000,000 emails that's $10000 extra. At the rate of emails that I get, about 30 spams a day prefilter, that'd add up after a while).
Even if it was like $0.0001 the advertiser could benefit because they would have up-to-date advertising information.
And if I could indicate what I like and don't like, then they can also target better.
So $0.0001 if you just want my updated email address, or $0.001 if you want to know what I don't like, or $0.005 if you want to know what I like.
Pay per use advertising. Nice!
Scary thing is that it could benefit the advertisers too. =)
Serious question here. I'm sorry, but what does this have anything to do with the Paris Expo? Security is their #1 concern? I'm not following the relevance.
And what are these other million blatant lies that MS spreads about linux?
Please, point me to a list of them, and provided that they are true you won't hear another word out of me.
All of the zealoting that I do is because the comments that people post are either strongly misleading or outright wrong. Many people tend to have notions about things or hear rumours and carry them as the truth without actually having any proof to back it up. Indeed I think that the majority of the population tends to believe what they're told without much inquiry.
Yes, I am a bit of a MS zealot, but only because there are so many people around here that spread total FUD without knowing what it is that they are talking about. I also crusade for linux against my other MS zealot friends. I think I just like the debating.
I will have to agree that MS needs to fire their speechwriters. However if you ask any software company who's profits are being eaten into by the progression of linux, they'll be likely to agree with everything that they're saying.
however the "cancer" remark was a little... inciteful.
You say Windows XP comes with lots of innovations, but you're using Microsoft's proprietary definition of the word "innovation". Every one of the features you listed are already available in other OSs, many of which have been for a long time.
Really? I didn't realize that you can have 1 click file sharing, out of the box 1 click usage of webcams, simplified networking and sharing (unix style is far from simple), and many other usability features that they spent many months doing intensive usability studies to improve.
And when you talk about "other OSes" I can only think of two, either Linux, or Mac.
As for linux, it's not (yet) a mainstream OS. Things usually work fine, but anything not off the beaten path and the average user is up a creek. I tried to install on my new machine with a GeForce 3 card, and Xwindows didn't throw an error or complain, it just FUBARED nicely on switching into graphics mode, after a bit of usage locking up the system. I popped onto some newsgroups and boards to figure out what happened, and it wasn't a trivial "download new driver" fix. Indeed most of the recommendations were how to fix it from under xwindows. Well if I had it up and running, I wouldn't need to fix it! The point of the matter here is that it isn't yet ready for mainstream use. Indeed many people (both linux zealots and non alike) are saying that it may never become a desktop OS. Why? Because it was never aimed at that.
The other OS would be MacOS. Sure, it's user friendly, but at the expense of configurability and options. Yes, with the new unix kernel it's quite a bit different and indeed appealing, but again, they were aimed at different markets from the start. Or at the very least different niches. Complaining that MS has only been implementing what users want or have been available for years is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. If I'm not mistaken, Linux and co has been aiming at emulating and replicating what is already available for windows based systems... You can't blame one OS for not being up to another OS's par if they weren't aimed at the same place in the first place, otherwise you could blame linux just as much as you could blame windows just as much as you could blame MacOS.
You just sold your freedom to use your OS according to your own terms without having to contact the vendor for each nontrivial change
Yay more FUD. I guess you consider changing 3 major components or upgrading your computer to be "nontrivial changes"? Indeed in many cases MS has stated that it will be tied to the BIOS, and since by your (or at least many other similar arguments) on how people are reluctant to upgrade their machines and don't do so very frequently, this issue is a non starter. You can change your video card, sound card and add a network card without requiring reactiviation. And that is hardly a nontrivial change anyways. And reactivation is not a major PITA anyways, just requires an extra 15 minutes. not a big deal.
your freedom for anyone to view or modify the OS's source code
Whoops! Silly me. I forgot that software wants to be free. How could I forget that having unrestricted access to software that you buy that is indeed the only reason why there are software companies in the first place is a right, not a privilidge. If you have a problem with it, don't use it and don't complain about it.
your freedom to choose a vendor for each standard or component
Again, to what are you referring? You can buy your hardware from anywhere you please. If you are an advanced user, or indeed one that would be up for such a choose then integrate the system yourself and choose whatever software that you want. Most users take it and like it.
(sigh). I will however agree that their marketing is, in some cases, sleazy, but welcome to corporate america. 'tis the joys of living in a capitalist society.
XP is all about licensing software instead of buying it.
How do you figure? There is no major change in the way that you purchase XP over any other OS that MS has put out in the last 5 years.
Sorry. I meant PROFIT when I said MONEY. Not gross revenue
You can't say that they get most of their profit from one section when, if you look at the charts and data, the others have similar costs and revenues. MS does get about 1/3rd of their sales/profit from OEM, but they've always made more money in the business side of things which doesn't have single shot OEM'd licenses.
They do not need another OS that requires 4 times more RAM to provide them the same user interface
It has become very clear that you have never used or seen XP. The user interface is VERY VERY different than windows 95, much more user friendly and powerful. much.
You speak about "most users" which you are obviously mistaken. MS spends more money on R&D and user intesive studies than most other companies (as a percentage of revenue of course). Many users find things that they like in the newer releases of the software. Certainly they don't use 90% of the functionality, but out of the 150 things changed there are 3 or 4 that they really like and will use a lot. Indeed there are, however, many users (note many, not most) who are satisfied with their Win95 and Office95 which allows them to view the web and send emails and write documents and store reciepies and baseball card lists. However in many many cases across the board people buy things that they don't need. It is slowing down, but gaming is still strong. I know that my mom, who has been satisfied with her PII/233 for a year now has been bugging me for an upgrade because she found a new multimedia recipe book that requires a more powerful machine. My dad who has been using my old Cel300A system finally bought a newer one because he's gotten into the Flight Simulator games lately. 95% of both their usage doesn't require anything new, but all you need is one thing that you want to run that you can't to create the desire/need to upgrade your hardware.
you do make a very good point, however it's the same thing as the car. Once you use it, you won't want to go back (unless you have good self restraint!). It does have a lot of nicities and lots of improvements here and there, but Win2K is pretty much all you'll need. For many home users this should be a very welcome upgrade from the Win9X series. It will be a huge change, pretty much along the order of magnitude as the Win3.1 -> Win95 launch. For the rest of us, it'll be like the WinNT3.51 -> WinNT4.
Yeah, I think that's the same way with any large government/corporation/group of people. You will never be able to please everyone all the time, but there is a large difference between being grumbling at US policy and believing that they are doing something so atrociously wrong that 19 people will give up their lives to just send a message. There's a huge difference there. People might want to listen up when they've been hit over there head with it like that.
/. is down again. Wow. I have had, at least, 2 or 3 outages a week since they switched to their new codebase. Wow. I think some more testing might have been in order =) Ah well, I should be working anyways.
Again, not condoning what happened, but just stating a point.
Trying to submit this and
There is a big difference to be known between where the user is forced to upgrade and where the user goes "well, I've been 'needing' a new machine for a while now, I guess this is a good time to get one!"
Just a thought.
BTW - I like your SIG, that's from B5 isn't it? Ivonova said it, can't remember when. Was it 4-01, The Hour of the Wolf?
but I do not want to support a phone-home product
Please explain this problem to me. I don't understand everyone's beef about that.
There is *no* personal information sent. It sends a small hash of information that's not even reversable. And before someone crys foul, just think about it for a second. People are bound to crack it, and thus they will also learn how it works. IF it indeed was sending personal information, Microsoft would get in huge shit and very bad PR, and since nobody who has hacked it has reported such a thing, it's safe to say that it doesn't happen.
I know that when I legally buy a piece of software I certainly opt in for the online registration and full benefits of owning a product. I don't care about the call home feature anyways.