"If someone breaks into your house because you left the door unlocked, it's not YOUR fault, but the fault of whoever it was that showed the thief how to use a door knob."
One would argue that a decent MS admin would remember to keep the door locked.
This is just about the stupidiest comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
"It's high time we stopped teaching Chemistry and Biology! People are spreading information that essentially maps out exactly how the human body works, which allows for all sorts of chemical and biological weapons! And explosives, too!"
Wrong analogy. Let's just imagine that these biologists and chemists were not only creating these potentially life-threatening entities, but were handing them to "bio-kiddies" to wreak havoc on the world. What if ever biological "advance" in the field of weapons was diagrammed, exploited, and written in clearly blue in white on a sheet of paper EXACTLY how to kill someone? Then you'd have a decent analogy.
"In other news, Master Lock wants to release a new model made out of twine and butter."
Not even close. In fact, both egotistical and lame (although what can you expect for a low-number Slashdot user. Where's your evidence? Ever get the feeling that, just perhaps, people go after Microsoft with viruses and worms because of a PERCEIVED evil?
"They ask the community to avoid discussing the security of the lock, since they anticipate it getting deployed widely, and once the ButterLock is being used to secure mission-critical systems, it will be extremely important to keep its flaws a secret."
Hardly. MS publishes every flaw they find. Literally hundreds of thousands, same as Open Source projects.
The difference, though, is that very few people want to ATTACK Open Source projects. Meanwhile, others perceive they have a RIGHT to do so to Microsoft, including fellow Open Source coders.
"Continue to enjoy POP3 e-mail service, with an option to switch to the world's largest Web-based e-mail service, MSN"
As in, "We're going to continue to allow you to use the POP3 services already available through quest. If you'd like to switch to MSN, you need to use one of the Microsoft clients.
I don't see this as a negative at all. (And besides, aren't most Slashdotters running their own Sendmail facilities on their boxen at this point anyway?)
Now that the next, next-generation of iPaqs are coming out, can anyone point us to some cheaper, older ones? I'm thinking between 16 and 32 megs of memory, hopefully able to run PocketPC 2 as a base, and Linux if I feel like it.
I always find the best prices for old hardware come out a month or two after the new hardware comes out. Oh, and has anyone gotten Pocket PC 2/Linux running on one of the black and white machines yet?
It's less the end user and more the IT manager. The user rarely, if ever, knows that a new upgrade will do the "trick".
Case in point: a user of ours was having difficulties saving extremely large PowerPoint presentations. We tried everything we could to get Office 2000 to corporate (including numerous MS Knowledge Base-suggested fixes). The end result: the only way we were going to fix it was to "upgrade" to Office XP.
Was there another solution? Sure. We could have kept the hacked registry keys and crossed our fingers. The user would have never known the difference. The problem here, though, is what is a "bug" and what's an honest-to-goodness limitation of the current version of the software.
Another point on that note: many of the limitations set aside by developers (in the number of pages a document can have in memory, the number of rows a spreadsheet can include) are forecasted not by them but the limitations of the current technology. Sure, if MS used a less pretty office assistant they can save a few megs for that spreadsheet. But the bottom line is, at the time, developers of older versions of software did not, or simply were not able to, think ahead.
Which leads once again to my question: what's a bug and what's a limitation? That will determine whether people will pay for an upgrade.
Uh, hehe... no. It's the hardware, not necessarily the OS. Sega made a big deal initially about Windows CE compatibility in the first revisions of the Dreamcast, then gradually dropped the name (only a few games were using it anyway).
Inside the Box is pretty strong:
Modified GeForce 3 nVidia motherboard Decent speed chip and decent sized hard drive
To be honest, as it is, most Slashdotters would love to have a cheap system like this to work with (and come November, some of us will).
As much as I'm indifferent towards MS (I don't share the rampant hatred most people have towards the company around here, but I don't think Windows ME was a stellar marketing decision, either) I have had one negative experience selling MS software on eBay.
Specifically, I received a copy of Windows NT 4.0 workstation with my copy of Visual C++ I purchased in college. I attempted to sell just the NT 4.0 workstation CD (with key, and thus its license). I never installed the CD on any of my machines, so I thought it would be ok.
MS contacted eBay and my auction was immediately shut down for "illegal goods". When I asked eBay customer support the reason, they said that Microsoft claimed I was selling the CD without a proper license. I said to them I was selling the CD with its associated license, and I had never installed the software. They said to contact Microsoft, which I did and it was never resolved.
To this date I harbor no ill will towards MS or eBay (I've completed dozens of other auctions without issue, and for what eBay does [getting a ton of people to look at your auction], it does well). Still, I can't imagine what it'll be like in the future.
Outside of licensing issues (which I could care less about -- if they could somehow magically get most of my games to work in Linux, I'd switch over from XP immediately) my concerns is if they'll have coverage for the various incarnations of DirectX 8. That's a pretty good API. Particularly, support for things like pixel shaders and programmable elements on nVidia cards -- things that OpenGL have a hard time doing, if at all -- would be welcome. I could do without some of DirectX's foibles (CPU cycles, anyone?) but the API as it stands is pretty impressive.
Since the board site claims to be "under attack" (never knew "attack" meant "Slashdotted") I found a text-based version of the buffer hack in the newsgroups. Have a read.
Here's a great tip by Andrew Welch, of Ambrosia Software :
The window server has a cool feature in OS X 10.1 that isn't enabled by
default (though it will be in an upcoming update, as I understand it): window
buffer compression.
A little background. Under OS X, the contents of each window are saved in a
buffer, so that they can be updated instantly, and also so that the cool
transparency effects in Aqua are possible. This is a good thing, to have a
fully buffered window manager -- however, it uses a lot of memory.
In 32 bit mode ("Millions" in System Preferences), a window that is 800
pixels wide by 600 pixels high uses up 1.9mb of RAM. When you consider that
there are usually over 100 windows open when you're using OS X (not all
windows are visible), you start to realize that this can start to add up in
terms of RAM usage.
The more windows you open, the more RAM they use up, the more that virtual
memory will have to page in and out while you use your applications to do
work. This can cause slow-downs as the disk grinds to do the virtual memory
paging.
So what Apple did was they implemented a compression mechanism into the
window server. When a window's contents haven't changed for a given period of
time, the window server compresses them, so they take up less memory. Since
it uses a compression method that doesn't require the buffer to be fully
decompressed to do compositing (dragging a window around, updating the
screen, etc.), you won't notice a slowdown with this compression turned on.
In fact, because less memory is being used up by the window buffers, more RAM
will be available for your applications, with will mean less virtual memory
paging, and may in fact result in speeding up your machine. Additionally,
since less data needs to be read (it is compressed, after all!), things like
updating windows may be faster as well.
If you are a power user who has lots of windows open, you might consider
giving this hack a shot. I'm using it, and getting compression ratios of
about 8.5:1 (in other words, my window buffers are using 8x less RAM than
they normally would).
Now then, onto the hack! First, open up the Terminal application (found in
/Applications/Utilities/) and type:
Then hit Control-X to exit pico (hitting the Y key to save the changes before
exiting when it asks you), then log out and back in again, and ta da!
Compressed window buffers. Enjoy...
If you want to verify that your window compression is working, install the OS
X 10.1 developer tools, and run the QuartzDebug app
(/Developer/Applications/), then click on the "Show window list" button.
Windows that have compressed buffers will have a C next to the size of the
window's buffer in the kByte column of the window list.
Some people are a bit concerned that enabling this compression might slow
things down; that's actually not true. It will actually be faster, for the
two reasons I mentioned. First, less swapping (which will happen somewhat,
regardless of how much RAM you have).
Secondly, consider that most modern CPUs are memory bandwidth-bound. When you
need to update a window with a 200K buffer, you have to read in 200K of data,
then write out 200K of data.
The vast majority of the time spent doing this copying involves the CPU just
sitting and spinning waiting for data. If you use the compressed buffer, and
a reasonable 10:1 compression ratio, you only need to read in 20K of data,
running it by a simple algorithm, and write out 200K of data.
Since your are 10x less memory bound, and since you're using CPU cycles that
would have been wasted anyway, you are faster. This is the same principle
behind RLE blitters, etc.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Aren't these the same "guys" who removed a provision about slavery from the Constitution as not to alienate the southern colonies.
Our forefathers were no better than us, folks. They were just as hypocritical.
"How many of you have tried and failed when attempting to ping your Rep on government issues that were important to you?"
Actually, I haven't tried for two reasons. One is the natural inclination of mine that since it's "wartime" most people really won't care (heck, most representatives only listen with one ear open during peacetime). But it goes beyond that.
Personally, I think "nerds" should step back and ask themselves whether it's really necessary to have what they consider "freedom". I'm all for freedom of speech, but in day-to-day life do with really need to encrypt everything? Further, given that people are dying, can there at least be a temporary moratorium on personal freedom to prevent further killings.
Nerds like conspiracies. They like the X-Files and love to think there's some higher "man" out there trying to dictate how they should act. Truth of the matter is: every wartime provision ever made negatively affecting personal freedom has either been mitigated or repealed over time. Find me one negatory personal freedom provision the US made in WWII or Vietnam that has stuck through to this day? If anything, these occasional provisions make us value our personal freedoms more.
I for one believe in logic, and my statement still stands to this day. People on these boards continually say "I'd rather be dead that lose my freedom of speech". I say, "What's the point of freedom of speech if you're already dead?"
I wanted to use Mandrake since 7 but was held back on laptop incompatibilites. I've used RedHat since the dawn of time, not because it was the best distro per se but that it always seemed to identify my hardware correctly. They were always behind the times with KDE and usability, though.
"Most of the current solutions which have been proposed seem more like draconian measures that will be forced down our throats...whether we like it or not."
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not draconian if you have a choice, and you do have a choice in the matter based on your wallet.
Don't like the DRM measures coming forth on CDs? Don't buy the CDs. Don't even listen to the music. While some pop bands are obviously a profit-centered venture, most artists actually *do* want you to listen to their music; measures taken to stop this listening will not only hurt the labels in the pocketbooks, but also get the artists themselves to argue against whatever measures are being taken to reduce public listening.
Also, let me just say that paying "a few pennies every time you look for the time on your watch" is X-Fileish and activistic to the extreme. Obviously this is not going to happen. Do you think high-level executives in the government and military personnel (to cite recent events) would ever warrant this?
For that matter, I'm a firm believer that the subscription plans in place now (like cell phone bills) will eventually be dwindled to nothing based on current competition. There are only so many minutes a cell phone company can provide in a month. After a while you hit limits, and gradually the costs erode to practically nothing (similar to water and electricity, communication will eventually become publically-owned).
Per the update: "According to the FAQ, the phone is crippled - only stores crippled AAC files, not unencumbered mp3's. A shame."
A shame? If I'm playing MP3's on my cell phone in general, chances are that I'm going to be using some kind of proprietary interface to get the tracks onto the phone to begin with. I have no intention of playing P2P with this thing (and I don't know if it's even feasible).
That said, the average music lover would probably toss a few CD's into their CD-ROM drives, copy the songs to this AAC format on the phone, and be done with it. If I have no purpose to transfer these AAC files anywhere else, why should I care if they are quote-unquote "cripped"?
"5. What do you think of the FreeBSD 5 kernel and WindowsXP's new features from a clearly technical point of view?
Linus Torvalds: I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. And quite frankly, I don't see anythign very interesting on a technical level in either."
Doesn't Torvalds sound amazingly like Gates in this line?
"I don't care so much about OS's other than Windows, I just want to make Windows the most innovative product it can be."
NTFS, NTFS, NTFS boys. In a year or two most systems out there will have it in XP, and Linux will be catching up to support it. We can make a run for a majority of the NTFS 5.0 changes now, so at least people will be able to access their drives.
Slashdot Mirror
One would argue that a decent MS admin would remember to keep the door locked.
When you're successful, apparently, you are allowed to do anything stupid and call it "art". :)
"It's high time we stopped teaching Chemistry and Biology! People are spreading information that essentially maps out exactly how the human body works, which allows for all sorts of chemical and biological weapons! And explosives, too!"
Wrong analogy. Let's just imagine that these biologists and chemists were not only creating these potentially life-threatening entities, but were handing them to "bio-kiddies" to wreak havoc on the world. What if ever biological "advance" in the field of weapons was diagrammed, exploited, and written in clearly blue in white on a sheet of paper EXACTLY how to kill someone? Then you'd have a decent analogy.
"In other news, Master Lock wants to release a new model made out of twine and butter."
Not even close. In fact, both egotistical and lame (although what can you expect for a low-number Slashdot user. Where's your evidence? Ever get the feeling that, just perhaps, people go after Microsoft with viruses and worms because of a PERCEIVED evil?
"They ask the community to avoid discussing the security of the lock, since they anticipate it getting deployed widely, and once the ButterLock is being used to secure mission-critical systems, it will be extremely important to keep its flaws a secret."
Hardly. MS publishes every flaw they find. Literally hundreds of thousands, same as Open Source projects.
The difference, though, is that very few people want to ATTACK Open Source projects. Meanwhile, others perceive they have a RIGHT to do so to Microsoft, including fellow Open Source coders.
As in, "We're going to continue to allow you to use the POP3 services already available through quest. If you'd like to switch to MSN, you need to use one of the Microsoft clients.
I don't see this as a negative at all. (And besides, aren't most Slashdotters running their own Sendmail facilities on their boxen at this point anyway?)
I always find the best prices for old hardware come out a month or two after the new hardware comes out. Oh, and has anyone gotten Pocket PC 2/Linux running on one of the black and white machines yet?
Case in point: a user of ours was having difficulties saving extremely large PowerPoint presentations. We tried everything we could to get Office 2000 to corporate (including numerous MS Knowledge Base-suggested fixes). The end result: the only way we were going to fix it was to "upgrade" to Office XP.
Was there another solution? Sure. We could have kept the hacked registry keys and crossed our fingers. The user would have never known the difference. The problem here, though, is what is a "bug" and what's an honest-to-goodness limitation of the current version of the software.
Another point on that note: many of the limitations set aside by developers (in the number of pages a document can have in memory, the number of rows a spreadsheet can include) are forecasted not by them but the limitations of the current technology. Sure, if MS used a less pretty office assistant they can save a few megs for that spreadsheet. But the bottom line is, at the time, developers of older versions of software did not, or simply were not able to, think ahead.
Which leads once again to my question: what's a bug and what's a limitation? That will determine whether people will pay for an upgrade.
$499? What are you smoking? The Box itself is $299 (at a hundred dollar loss to Microsoft -- see the latest Wired issue).
Inside the Box is pretty strong:
Modified GeForce 3
nVidia motherboard
Decent speed chip and decent sized hard drive
To be honest, as it is, most Slashdotters would love to have a cheap system like this to work with (and come November, some of us will).
Specifically, I received a copy of Windows NT 4.0 workstation with my copy of Visual C++ I purchased in college. I attempted to sell just the NT 4.0 workstation CD (with key, and thus its license). I never installed the CD on any of my machines, so I thought it would be ok.
MS contacted eBay and my auction was immediately shut down for "illegal goods". When I asked eBay customer support the reason, they said that Microsoft claimed I was selling the CD without a proper license. I said to them I was selling the CD with its associated license, and I had never installed the software. They said to contact Microsoft, which I did and it was never resolved.
To this date I harbor no ill will towards MS or eBay (I've completed dozens of other auctions without issue, and for what eBay does [getting a ton of people to look at your auction], it does well). Still, I can't imagine what it'll be like in the future.
And the funny thing is the same guy posted it.
Outside of licensing issues (which I could care less about -- if they could somehow magically get most of my games to work in Linux, I'd switch over from XP immediately) my concerns is if they'll have coverage for the various incarnations of DirectX 8. That's a pretty good API. Particularly, support for things like pixel shaders and programmable elements on nVidia cards -- things that OpenGL have a hard time doing, if at all -- would be welcome. I could do without some of DirectX's foibles (CPU cycles, anyone?) but the API as it stands is pretty impressive.
Huh? You can get an X-Box (just the system, not a system + games bundle) for $300. See here.
Anyone think the X-Box will make a good, cheap Linux box?
Since the board site claims to be "under attack" (never knew "attack" meant "Slashdotted") I found a text-based version of the buffer hack in the newsgroups. Have a read.
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist
Here's a great tip by Andrew Welch, of Ambrosia Software :
The window server has a cool feature in OS X 10.1 that isn't enabled by
default (though it will be in an upcoming update, as I understand it): window
buffer compression.
A little background. Under OS X, the contents of each window are saved in a
buffer, so that they can be updated instantly, and also so that the cool
transparency effects in Aqua are possible. This is a good thing, to have a
fully buffered window manager -- however, it uses a lot of memory.
In 32 bit mode ("Millions" in System Preferences), a window that is 800
pixels wide by 600 pixels high uses up 1.9mb of RAM. When you consider that
there are usually over 100 windows open when you're using OS X (not all
windows are visible), you start to realize that this can start to add up in
terms of RAM usage.
The more windows you open, the more RAM they use up, the more that virtual
memory will have to page in and out while you use your applications to do
work. This can cause slow-downs as the disk grinds to do the virtual memory
paging.
So what Apple did was they implemented a compression mechanism into the
window server. When a window's contents haven't changed for a given period of
time, the window server compresses them, so they take up less memory. Since
it uses a compression method that doesn't require the buffer to be fully
decompressed to do compositing (dragging a window around, updating the
screen, etc.), you won't notice a slowdown with this compression turned on.
In fact, because less memory is being used up by the window buffers, more RAM
will be available for your applications, with will mean less virtual memory
paging, and may in fact result in speeding up your machine. Additionally,
since less data needs to be read (it is compressed, after all!), things like
updating windows may be faster as well.
If you are a power user who has lots of windows open, you might consider
giving this hack a shot. I'm using it, and getting compression ratios of
about 8.5:1 (in other words, my window buffers are using 8x less RAM than
they normally would).
Now then, onto the hack! First, open up the Terminal application (found in
/Applications/Utilities/) and type:
sudo pico
(you'll need to enter your admin password in order to proceed)
Move the cursor down below the first tag, and paste the following text
in:
BackingCompression
compressionScanTime
5.000000000000000e+00
minCompressableSize
8193
minCompressionRatio
1.100000023841858e+00
Then hit Control-X to exit pico (hitting the Y key to save the changes before
exiting when it asks you), then log out and back in again, and ta da!
Compressed window buffers. Enjoy...
If you want to verify that your window compression is working, install the OS
X 10.1 developer tools, and run the QuartzDebug app
(/Developer/Applications/), then click on the "Show window list" button.
Windows that have compressed buffers will have a C next to the size of the
window's buffer in the kByte column of the window list.
Some people are a bit concerned that enabling this compression might slow
things down; that's actually not true. It will actually be faster, for the
two reasons I mentioned. First, less swapping (which will happen somewhat,
regardless of how much RAM you have).
Secondly, consider that most modern CPUs are memory bandwidth-bound. When you
need to update a window with a 200K buffer, you have to read in 200K of data,
then write out 200K of data.
The vast majority of the time spent doing this copying involves the CPU just
sitting and spinning waiting for data. If you use the compressed buffer, and
a reasonable 10:1 compression ratio, you only need to read in 20K of data,
running it by a simple algorithm, and write out 200K of data.
Since your are 10x less memory bound, and since you're using CPU cycles that
would have been wasted anyway, you are faster. This is the same principle
behind RLE blitters, etc.
--
Regards
Roo
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Aren't these the same "guys" who removed a provision about slavery from the Constitution as not to alienate the southern colonies.
Our forefathers were no better than us, folks. They were just as hypocritical.
Define "lives destroyed". Clearly your definition is subjective, and cannot be quantified.
Actually, I haven't tried for two reasons. One is the natural inclination of mine that since it's "wartime" most people really won't care (heck, most representatives only listen with one ear open during peacetime). But it goes beyond that.
Personally, I think "nerds" should step back and ask themselves whether it's really necessary to have what they consider "freedom". I'm all for freedom of speech, but in day-to-day life do with really need to encrypt everything? Further, given that people are dying, can there at least be a temporary moratorium on personal freedom to prevent further killings.
Nerds like conspiracies. They like the X-Files and love to think there's some higher "man" out there trying to dictate how they should act. Truth of the matter is: every wartime provision ever made negatively affecting personal freedom has either been mitigated or repealed over time. Find me one negatory personal freedom provision the US made in WWII or Vietnam that has stuck through to this day? If anything, these occasional provisions make us value our personal freedoms more.
I for one believe in logic, and my statement still stands to this day. People on these boards continually say "I'd rather be dead that lose my freedom of speech". I say, "What's the point of freedom of speech if you're already dead?"
Hopefully 8.1 will work with my laptop.
Except that was delayed until recently, as well. I was expecting my CDs over 2 weeks ago.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not draconian if you have a choice, and you do have a choice in the matter based on your wallet.
Don't like the DRM measures coming forth on CDs? Don't buy the CDs. Don't even listen to the music. While some pop bands are obviously a profit-centered venture, most artists actually *do* want you to listen to their music; measures taken to stop this listening will not only hurt the labels in the pocketbooks, but also get the artists themselves to argue against whatever measures are being taken to reduce public listening.
Also, let me just say that paying "a few pennies every time you look for the time on your watch" is X-Fileish and activistic to the extreme. Obviously this is not going to happen. Do you think high-level executives in the government and military personnel (to cite recent events) would ever warrant this?
For that matter, I'm a firm believer that the subscription plans in place now (like cell phone bills) will eventually be dwindled to nothing based on current competition. There are only so many minutes a cell phone company can provide in a month. After a while you hit limits, and gradually the costs erode to practically nothing (similar to water and electricity, communication will eventually become publically-owned).
A shame? If I'm playing MP3's on my cell phone in general, chances are that I'm going to be using some kind of proprietary interface to get the tracks onto the phone to begin with. I have no intention of playing P2P with this thing (and I don't know if it's even feasible).
That said, the average music lover would probably toss a few CD's into their CD-ROM drives, copy the songs to this AAC format on the phone, and be done with it. If I have no purpose to transfer these AAC files anywhere else, why should I care if they are quote-unquote "cripped"?
OK, Muldner, you can chill out now.
Linus Torvalds: I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. And quite frankly, I don't see anythign very interesting on a technical level in either."
Doesn't Torvalds sound amazingly like Gates in this line?
"I don't care so much about OS's other than Windows, I just want to make Windows the most innovative product it can be."
NTFS, NTFS, NTFS boys. In a year or two most systems out there will have it in XP, and Linux will be catching up to support it. We can make a run for a majority of the NTFS 5.0 changes now, so at least people will be able to access their drives.
If you have a problem with the man, TURN OFF HIS ARTICLES in your user's settings. God.