I don't believe you will find any correlation between gun control and gun crime that cannot be explained through other social factors present in the society.
Take two extremes (and this is anecdotal evidence) - Japan where guns are strictly controlled and Switzerland where almost everyone has a semi-automatic weapon from National Guard duty. Neither of these countries has the violent crime problem that is found in the USA. The real question is not one of how prevalent guns are in the particular society, it's one of how prepared the population generally is to use those guns that are in the society in a violent manner.
The only thing that can be said about gun control is more accidental deaths occur from gun related injuries if there are more guns in the general population.
I'm sure you'll find all sorts of "evidence" which shows crime going up and down as you look at changes in gun laws which also conveniently ignores other social changes in the same time. I'm sure you'll see people arguing that guns are needed for self defense and that guns aren't a defensive weapon, but effectively a counter offense.
Personally I don't carry a gun (statistics do seem to show that carrying a gun means you have a higher chance of being killed in the US) but I believe it's the decision of a society as a whole as to what degree its citizens should be allowed to arm itself.
An interesting aside, I believe (IANAL - could have my sources mixed up) that the Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the interpretation of the constitution to guarantee individuals the right to bear arms, instead affirming the view that the 2nd amendment refers to state controlled militias. Those that swear by the constitution as a defense of the right to bear arms should be aware that the Supreme Court's view is that you do not have that right in the US.
First, I believe changing the IP address doesn't work if you are using SSL. Private key won't match the public key. I *think* (big assumption there) the auto-updater in XP uses SSL and if it doesn't then it's dumb.
Second, what I really don't understand about all of this is why they didn't just increment the version number so the Windows installer program saw the reverse patching as a downgrade and refused to do it (or at least gave another one of those wonderful warnings that everyone ignores).
Third, this isn't just a Windows problem. Many Linux distros as well as MacOS X have auto-updaters which could just as easily be fooled by a routing change unless using a combination of SSL and signing of the downloads.
This is also not very encouraging for MS' auto-update feature in XP
Why not? I don't think you read the problem here. It's not that the versions of the updates on Microsoft's site are bad it's that 3rd parties can have the bad codebases on their own site and therefore people can download the faulty code again.
Autoupdate in XP connects to Microsoft, not an arbitrary 3rd party. There's not the possibility of downloading the older code.
This is EXACTLY the daft attitude that makes things break all the time. If I was in a particularly mean mood I'd ask if you were a VB programmer.
Aside from the c:\winnt variation, c:\windows is a USER DEFINED directory which is set on install. It doesn't even have to be on "C" drive - it can be anywhere.
Programmers that make broadly incorrect assumptions like this should be dragged by their heels through steaming piles of goat vomit. Then they should really be tortured.
From Korea, he was almost certainly playing Lineage (the most popular MMORPG in the world). Morons suggesting EQ or UO don't know the demographics of those game and are just flipping off at the current targets of choice.
You don't have to turn the laser on and off - you just move the seek head. Last I looked, this is a pretty standard function of CD-ROM drives...
The smart card can interpret the movements of the laser beam, or the on/off pulses as the laser is moved over the receptor and away from it again as a request. Decent cryptographic requests could be slow though...
It all fails the ultimate test anyhow - eventually the plaintext key must be passed to your CPU where someone with a debugger can snatch it and decrypt the entire disc.
Telstra actually has one of the largest MS Exchange deployments in the world - in fact I believe Microsoft has several case studies out there about the Telstra Exchange deployment. I find it interesting that they are considering Linux workstations when there isn't actually a Linux client for their messaging system.
On the flip side, many of their client applications use quite a thin client (at least according to some of the devs I know that work there) so in the general case it wouldn't be too big a shift to just rewrite the thin clients and leave the servers as they are.
Personally though I go with the "bit of smoke" theory. Telstra has far more corporate weight than Microsoft in Australia and MS would do almost anything to keep their golden egg.
They don't have to be on the net. I used to work for a government department that controlled traffic lights. From my workstation I could change the state of almost any traffic light in the state. From my workstation I could also browse the internet.
Consider then a virus that allowed someone to put a back door into my workstation. They would then have the ability to sniff passwords and ultimately give them control over the traffic lights.
A similar thing could be said for any device which can be controlled from a machine which is either connected to the net, or can be accessed by other machines ultimately connected to an untrusted network.
While the chance is slim that any of this could happen, don't discount the possibility just through your ignorance of how these systems could be attacked. Sure the traffic lights aren't directly connected to the net, but that's not the point.
The flaw I see in your reasoning is the assumption that the methods of discovery which are common between open and closed source software will find an equal number of bugs.
Taking Microsoft as an example (although their reputation isn't that great), they have been reported to use 1 dedicated tester for every dedicated programmer. This isn't someone who just uses the software and plays with it a little, this is someone whose job it is to look at the design and actively figure out ways to crash the machine.
Your average open source project, or even high profile project doesn't have anywhere near this number of dedicated testers because, quite frankly, it's not a fun job. Sure there are plenty of people who use the software for their own uses, but proving something works for you is not stressing the boundary conditions any more than the average user of closed source software would stress those conditions.
I would suggest you look more closely at the typical development cycles for open and closed source software and note that there is reason to believe that in some cases close source software may indeed be less buggy than open source.
The "many eyes" theory does help open source, but whether it makes up the difference of having an army of paid and somewhat dedicated testers is an interesting area for debate.
Ok, ignoring all your smart-arse comments and still trying to help you understand Win2k's VM system. I'm not sure if you are actually interested or just trying to bash Microsoft now, but what the hell - I'll try to help anyway.
The best "manual" I'd recommend for this stuff is "Inside Windows 2000", or even looking over the Platform SDK. There's a lot of info there about how the VM system works and what the performance counters exported by it mean.
On Win2k at the bottom of Task Manger, there's a thing we like to call the Status Bar. It has a field with the text: Mem Usage 150,321KB. It matches the Total value in Commit Charge.
That number is the total amount of memory used by the OS and all applications, yes.
Obviously, VM Size, I don't know why I didn't look at that "not chosen by default" column. Oh, but it still fell 40MB short of the total. Probably still not the "real" column to look at. There are about 20 more columns that can be viewed, let me know which one is the "real" column.
VM Size is the "real" column. The Memory Usage column is the real amount of RAM the process is using which is generally more realvent to users and hence selected by default. I'm sorry you feel angry that you selected the wrong column.
VM Size falls short of the total because it is actually reporting the "Private Bytes" figure from the performance counters. This number excludes a few things. Shoot me an email if you want me to explain further, but chapter 7 of Inside Windows 2000 goes into a lot of detail on this.
See, when a user starts a program it's usually referred to as an "application" and typically shows up in Task Manager under the "Applications" tab. Still with me? Then, when the OS starts a program, or an "application" starts a helper program, those are called "processes". They typically show up on the "Processes" tab of Task Manager. Your FM that you Rd probably didn't cover that, did it?
You are wrong, and I'm not sure where you got that description from - it's just bizarre. An "Application" in the context of Task Manager is simply a top level window. It means nothing. In fact for every "Application" in the first tab there is a process in the second tab which is running - just right click on the app and choose "Go To Process". Processes are a core OS object which contains a virtual memory space, some system resources and at least one thread of execution. They are the base objects which are used to manage memory (exactly the same as on Linux).
Nope, VM Size was still missing 40MB. Any more guesses? Because, you ARE guessing.
No, I'm not guessing. I was just skipping the details on exactly what the VM Size column doesn't include. To summarize though, it misses all the kernel memory and any shared VM pages.
Actually, I do have a copy of the Task Manager User's Guide (who doesn't?). I bought it on Amazon.com, used from somebody who'd never read it. (For those in our audience who are slow, this is a reference to throx who felt that if he/she through a few technical sounding words around it would seem like he/she knew something. Sadly, he/she does not.)
I have the strange feeling that I know a little more about OS architecture than you do, give your strange explanation of Applications and Processes. There's several different "Manuals" you can read and I'm guessing you haven't read any of the ones I've suggested?
Given this thread is so old, I'll send you a copy via email. Hope you appreciate the help.
This argument for raw bandwidth between the host and device is just dumb. Unless you have a massive RAID array sitting at the end of your SCSI or IDE bus you aren't even going to come close to saturating the bandwidth. When the data rate from the HDD doesn't exceed 20M/sec, anyone touting the merits of U320 SCSI over ATA-133 is just in a pissing contest over things that really don't matter.
1) How does Task Manager say 150M is in use? Is it the "Commit Charge" or are you calculating from total physical memory and available physical memory?
2) What are you using to tally the memory used? My guess is the "Memory Usage" column which corresponds to the working set of the process. However, the real column to look at is "VM Size" which tallies the total allocations for the process.
3) Don't be so naive as to think only one application is running. There are at least 20 processes running on your average Windows box on startup. You should be able to verify this easily using Task Manager.
You aren't missing any libs and inproc COM servers. Windows isn't hiding anything. It's just the failure of the user (in this case you) to understand the data presented. The difference of 80M is more than likely the difference between the working sets and the total VM size of the processes.
There's no need to "look at the source". It's perfectly well documented. Perhaps you just need to RTFM?
Actually, if you compare Mozilla's memory usage to that of explorer.exe, Mozilla is still a bigger memory hog, even when Explorer is running the entire shell in addition to HTML rendering.
Viewing CNN's home page I found Mozilla taking around 16M and Explorer.exe around 15M. Those are total allocated memory sizes, not working set.
Three times is a bit out, but it is definitely less memory efficient.
To me it seems slightly more stable, but it's handling of Bookmarks annoys me enough to stop me from using it as my default browser. I far prefer the Drag/Drop ability you have on the IE menu.
One side of the moon is always facing the earth. It can be relatively easily shown that the side of the moon facing the earth alternates between light and darkenss on a 29 day cycle by looking up into the sky twice a month. It would be a reasonable assumption to assume the side we can't see behaves the same way.
If they choose Passport for authentication then your alternative is to not access their site and continue to work the way you currently do. What alternatives were you expecting?
You have no more right to demand not to use Microsoft than someone else has the right to demand to use Microsoft. Either way, if you don't like it then don't use it.
There have been innumerable cases on the books where the government has been held to be breaking the law - not just individuals within the government. I'm not sure where you got the idea that they'd never been taken to court and lost.
Passport works just fine with any browser that supports cookies. The previous poster is just raving on about something he (obviously) has never tested.
There are some *web sites* that Microsoft runs that don't support non-IE browsers (zone.com for example), but that's not an issue with Passport. I just logged into MSDN Subscriber Downloads with Mozilla to test it out. No problems at all, in fact was just as smooth as using IE.
[i]That's right, they wouldn't be complaining, because how much would 270,000 installs of RedHat cost? $89.95, that's how much.[/i]
Assuming they didn't want support for any install but one. Of course, if you don't want support at all why not just download it?
Wake up a little. If you are installing 270,000 copies of *anything* you go to the company and arrance some sort of support deal that is independant of the retail price.
Accounting for stock options would be far more of a worry for OSS based companies than Microsoft at the present time. Sure, it would knock a few hundred million off Microsoft's reported profits but for a company like RH whose stock option outputs exceed their profits by large margins it would be a disaster.
It seems most people have missed the point that the EQ for the PS2 will not be the same "world" as the EQ for the PC. This means (thankfully) that current EQ players don't have to deal with the PS2 players who have significantly decreased interaction, or with the limits the processing power and graphics of the PS2 would impact on the main development tree.
In essence, I see EQ for the PS2 as something that will be the same in name only.
Now what was that L/R/R/U/D/A/B combo for dragon punch to Tormax again?
The question isn't whether Unix is dead...
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...but why Timothy is trolling. Are hits really that bad?
No one forces you to upgrade the OS or apps. That's a business decision. If your business decides to upgrade the version of Office then you'll almost certainly need a new piece of code from Codeweavers to support it anyway. You've gained nothing.
As for "security features", you are running MS Office so your system is now vulnerable to any Office based trojans - welcome to the club. Unfortunately the virus scanners won't work (because you're running Linux not Windows).
I've been running Windows for 12 years now. Never had a virus, trojan or registry problems that weren't caused by my own software. I wonder what you're doing wrong, or if you're just prone to exaggeration?
Cute "bash MS" post, but the fact/fiction ratio was just a little out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe you will find any correlation between gun control and gun crime that cannot be explained through other social factors present in the society.
Take two extremes (and this is anecdotal evidence) - Japan where guns are strictly controlled and Switzerland where almost everyone has a semi-automatic weapon from National Guard duty. Neither of these countries has the violent crime problem that is found in the USA. The real question is not one of how prevalent guns are in the particular society, it's one of how prepared the population generally is to use those guns that are in the society in a violent manner.
The only thing that can be said about gun control is more accidental deaths occur from gun related injuries if there are more guns in the general population.
I'm sure you'll find all sorts of "evidence" which shows crime going up and down as you look at changes in gun laws which also conveniently ignores other social changes in the same time. I'm sure you'll see people arguing that guns are needed for self defense and that guns aren't a defensive weapon, but effectively a counter offense.
Personally I don't carry a gun (statistics do seem to show that carrying a gun means you have a higher chance of being killed in the US) but I believe it's the decision of a society as a whole as to what degree its citizens should be allowed to arm itself.
An interesting aside, I believe (IANAL - could have my sources mixed up) that the Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the interpretation of the constitution to guarantee individuals the right to bear arms, instead affirming the view that the 2nd amendment refers to state controlled militias. Those that swear by the constitution as a defense of the right to bear arms should be aware that the Supreme Court's view is that you do not have that right in the US.
First, I believe changing the IP address doesn't work if you are using SSL. Private key won't match the public key. I *think* (big assumption there) the auto-updater in XP uses SSL and if it doesn't then it's dumb.
Second, what I really don't understand about all of this is why they didn't just increment the version number so the Windows installer program saw the reverse patching as a downgrade and refused to do it (or at least gave another one of those wonderful warnings that everyone ignores).
Third, this isn't just a Windows problem. Many Linux distros as well as MacOS X have auto-updaters which could just as easily be fooled by a routing change unless using a combination of SSL and signing of the downloads.
Then the https connection is just going to barf at you, if I remember my crypto correctly.
This is also not very encouraging for MS' auto-update feature in XP
Why not? I don't think you read the problem here. It's not that the versions of the updates on Microsoft's site are bad it's that 3rd parties can have the bad codebases on their own site and therefore people can download the faulty code again.
Autoupdate in XP connects to Microsoft, not an arbitrary 3rd party. There's not the possibility of downloading the older code.
This is EXACTLY the daft attitude that makes things break all the time. If I was in a particularly mean mood I'd ask if you were a VB programmer.
Aside from the c:\winnt variation, c:\windows is a USER DEFINED directory which is set on install. It doesn't even have to be on "C" drive - it can be anywhere.
Programmers that make broadly incorrect assumptions like this should be dragged by their heels through steaming piles of goat vomit. Then they should really be tortured.
From Korea, he was almost certainly playing Lineage (the most popular MMORPG in the world). Morons suggesting EQ or UO don't know the demographics of those game and are just flipping off at the current targets of choice.
You don't have to turn the laser on and off - you just move the seek head. Last I looked, this is a pretty standard function of CD-ROM drives...
The smart card can interpret the movements of the laser beam, or the on/off pulses as the laser is moved over the receptor and away from it again as a request. Decent cryptographic requests could be slow though...
It all fails the ultimate test anyhow - eventually the plaintext key must be passed to your CPU where someone with a debugger can snatch it and decrypt the entire disc.
Telstra actually has one of the largest MS Exchange deployments in the world - in fact I believe Microsoft has several case studies out there about the Telstra Exchange deployment. I find it interesting that they are considering Linux workstations when there isn't actually a Linux client for their messaging system.
On the flip side, many of their client applications use quite a thin client (at least according to some of the devs I know that work there) so in the general case it wouldn't be too big a shift to just rewrite the thin clients and leave the servers as they are.
Personally though I go with the "bit of smoke" theory. Telstra has far more corporate weight than Microsoft in Australia and MS would do almost anything to keep their golden egg.
They don't have to be on the net. I used to work for a government department that controlled traffic lights. From my workstation I could change the state of almost any traffic light in the state. From my workstation I could also browse the internet.
Consider then a virus that allowed someone to put a back door into my workstation. They would then have the ability to sniff passwords and ultimately give them control over the traffic lights.
A similar thing could be said for any device which can be controlled from a machine which is either connected to the net, or can be accessed by other machines ultimately connected to an untrusted network.
While the chance is slim that any of this could happen, don't discount the possibility just through your ignorance of how these systems could be attacked. Sure the traffic lights aren't directly connected to the net, but that's not the point.
The flaw I see in your reasoning is the assumption that the methods of discovery which are common between open and closed source software will find an equal number of bugs.
Taking Microsoft as an example (although their reputation isn't that great), they have been reported to use 1 dedicated tester for every dedicated programmer. This isn't someone who just uses the software and plays with it a little, this is someone whose job it is to look at the design and actively figure out ways to crash the machine.
Your average open source project, or even high profile project doesn't have anywhere near this number of dedicated testers because, quite frankly, it's not a fun job. Sure there are plenty of people who use the software for their own uses, but proving something works for you is not stressing the boundary conditions any more than the average user of closed source software would stress those conditions.
I would suggest you look more closely at the typical development cycles for open and closed source software and note that there is reason to believe that in some cases close source software may indeed be less buggy than open source.
The "many eyes" theory does help open source, but whether it makes up the difference of having an army of paid and somewhat dedicated testers is an interesting area for debate.
Ok, ignoring all your smart-arse comments and still trying to help you understand Win2k's VM system. I'm not sure if you are actually interested or just trying to bash Microsoft now, but what the hell - I'll try to help anyway.
The best "manual" I'd recommend for this stuff is "Inside Windows 2000", or even looking over the Platform SDK. There's a lot of info there about how the VM system works and what the performance counters exported by it mean.
On Win2k at the bottom of Task Manger, there's a thing we like to call the Status Bar. It has a field with the text: Mem Usage 150,321KB. It matches the Total value in Commit Charge.
That number is the total amount of memory used by the OS and all applications, yes.
Obviously, VM Size, I don't know why I didn't look at that "not chosen by default" column. Oh, but it still fell 40MB short of the total. Probably still not the "real" column to look at. There are about 20 more columns that can be viewed, let me know which one is the "real" column.
VM Size is the "real" column. The Memory Usage column is the real amount of RAM the process is using which is generally more realvent to users and hence selected by default. I'm sorry you feel angry that you selected the wrong column.
VM Size falls short of the total because it is actually reporting the "Private Bytes" figure from the performance counters. This number excludes a few things. Shoot me an email if you want me to explain further, but chapter 7 of Inside Windows 2000 goes into a lot of detail on this.
See, when a user starts a program it's usually referred to as an "application" and typically shows up in Task Manager under the "Applications" tab. Still with me? Then, when the OS starts a program, or an "application" starts a helper program, those are called "processes". They typically show up on the "Processes" tab of Task Manager. Your FM that you Rd probably didn't cover that, did it?
You are wrong, and I'm not sure where you got that description from - it's just bizarre. An "Application" in the context of Task Manager is simply a top level window. It means nothing. In fact for every "Application" in the first tab there is a process in the second tab which is running - just right click on the app and choose "Go To Process". Processes are a core OS object which contains a virtual memory space, some system resources and at least one thread of execution. They are the base objects which are used to manage memory (exactly the same as on Linux).
Nope, VM Size was still missing 40MB. Any more guesses? Because, you ARE guessing.
No, I'm not guessing. I was just skipping the details on exactly what the VM Size column doesn't include. To summarize though, it misses all the kernel memory and any shared VM pages.
Actually, I do have a copy of the Task Manager User's Guide (who doesn't?). I bought it on Amazon.com, used from somebody who'd never read it. (For those in our audience who are slow, this is a reference to throx who felt that if he/she through a few technical sounding words around it would seem like he/she knew something. Sadly, he/she does not.)
I have the strange feeling that I know a little more about OS architecture than you do, give your strange explanation of Applications and Processes. There's several different "Manuals" you can read and I'm guessing you haven't read any of the ones I've suggested?
Given this thread is so old, I'll send you a copy via email. Hope you appreciate the help.
:-)
This argument for raw bandwidth between the host and device is just dumb. Unless you have a massive RAID array sitting at the end of your SCSI or IDE bus you aren't even going to come close to saturating the bandwidth. When the data rate from the HDD doesn't exceed 20M/sec, anyone touting the merits of U320 SCSI over ATA-133 is just in a pissing contest over things that really don't matter.
1) How does Task Manager say 150M is in use? Is it the "Commit Charge" or are you calculating from total physical memory and available physical memory?
2) What are you using to tally the memory used? My guess is the "Memory Usage" column which corresponds to the working set of the process. However, the real column to look at is "VM Size" which tallies the total allocations for the process.
3) Don't be so naive as to think only one application is running. There are at least 20 processes running on your average Windows box on startup. You should be able to verify this easily using Task Manager.
You aren't missing any libs and inproc COM servers. Windows isn't hiding anything. It's just the failure of the user (in this case you) to understand the data presented. The difference of 80M is more than likely the difference between the working sets and the total VM size of the processes.
There's no need to "look at the source". It's perfectly well documented. Perhaps you just need to RTFM?
Libraries are counted against a process' memory allocation, as are inproc COM servers and the like.
I think you are grasping at straws here.
Actually, if you compare Mozilla's memory usage to that of explorer.exe, Mozilla is still a bigger memory hog, even when Explorer is running the entire shell in addition to HTML rendering.
Viewing CNN's home page I found Mozilla taking around 16M and Explorer.exe around 15M. Those are total allocated memory sizes, not working set.
Three times is a bit out, but it is definitely less memory efficient.
To me it seems slightly more stable, but it's handling of Bookmarks annoys me enough to stop me from using it as my default browser. I far prefer the Drag/Drop ability you have on the IE menu.
Just watch who you are calling an idiot.
One side of the moon is always facing the earth. It can be relatively easily shown that the side of the moon facing the earth alternates between light and darkenss on a 29 day cycle by looking up into the sky twice a month. It would be a reasonable assumption to assume the side we can't see behaves the same way.
If they choose Passport for authentication then your alternative is to not access their site and continue to work the way you currently do. What alternatives were you expecting?
You have no more right to demand not to use Microsoft than someone else has the right to demand to use Microsoft. Either way, if you don't like it then don't use it.
There have been innumerable cases on the books where the government has been held to be breaking the law - not just individuals within the government. I'm not sure where you got the idea that they'd never been taken to court and lost.
[i]I'm not going to have it made illegal to use someone else.[/i]
When was this ever suggested?
Passport works just fine with any browser that supports cookies. The previous poster is just raving on about something he (obviously) has never tested.
There are some *web sites* that Microsoft runs that don't support non-IE browsers (zone.com for example), but that's not an issue with Passport. I just logged into MSDN Subscriber Downloads with Mozilla to test it out. No problems at all, in fact was just as smooth as using IE.
[i]That's right, they wouldn't be complaining, because how much would 270,000 installs of RedHat cost? $89.95, that's how much.[/i]
Assuming they didn't want support for any install but one. Of course, if you don't want support at all why not just download it?
Wake up a little. If you are installing 270,000 copies of *anything* you go to the company and arrance some sort of support deal that is independant of the retail price.
Accounting for stock options would be far more of a worry for OSS based companies than Microsoft at the present time. Sure, it would knock a few hundred million off Microsoft's reported profits but for a company like RH whose stock option outputs exceed their profits by large margins it would be a disaster.
It seems most people have missed the point that the EQ for the PS2 will not be the same "world" as the EQ for the PC. This means (thankfully) that current EQ players don't have to deal with the PS2 players who have significantly decreased interaction, or with the limits the processing power and graphics of the PS2 would impact on the main development tree.
In essence, I see EQ for the PS2 as something that will be the same in name only.
Now what was that L/R/R/U/D/A/B combo for dragon punch to Tormax again?
...but why Timothy is trolling. Are hits really that bad?
No one forces you to upgrade the OS or apps. That's a business decision. If your business decides to upgrade the version of Office then you'll almost certainly need a new piece of code from Codeweavers to support it anyway. You've gained nothing.
As for "security features", you are running MS Office so your system is now vulnerable to any Office based trojans - welcome to the club. Unfortunately the virus scanners won't work (because you're running Linux not Windows).
I've been running Windows for 12 years now. Never had a virus, trojan or registry problems that weren't caused by my own software. I wonder what you're doing wrong, or if you're just prone to exaggeration?
Cute "bash MS" post, but the fact/fiction ratio was just a little out there.