Perhaps you should tell these game companies why you didn't buy their games, and that you would have otherwise... If sales drop, they will just claim you pirated it and push for even more intrusive DRM.
Obviously this big drop in sales has nothing to do with the fact relatively few games, and very few decent ones have been released recently. Nor could it possibly have anything to do with the global financial situation... No, obviously PIRATES are to blame and as such we need stricter laws, tougher punishments and increasingly onerous drm schemes to ensure the video game industry fat cats can continue to enjoy unrealistically high profit margins.
If you know your neighbors, you can quite easily give them the key to access your wireless... Your 60 year old neighbor isn't going to abuse it, your 16yr old neighbor isn't either because you know them and any illegal activity will easily be traced back to them... The evil kiddie fiddler who parks his van round the corner and sits in the back downloading kiddie porn through your connection doesn't know you, and you don't know him, so when the police turn up asking why your connection has been used to download kiddie porn you have nothing to tell them.
They will say that by doing it deliberately you are aware of and accept the risks and responsibility of unknown third parties using your network to do illegal things... So if someone decides to download a bunch of kiddie porn through your open wifi, the cops will come straight back and arrest you for it.
Well, the police also lock the cars as well as putting notes on them...
A friend of mine got hit by this, he had an old car which used 2 keys - one to open the door, and one to start the engine... He had lost the door key, but still had the engine one, so he simply left the car unlocked. Being an old, rusty and totally worthless looking vehicle it never got stolen, and he never left anything in it worth stealing either. It wasn't a problem until the cops came along and locked him out of it.
Sleep and hibernate worked on both the dells, sleep worked on the eee 901 (not hibernate, the swap partition isn't big enough).. I didn't try it on the fujitsu but have no reason to believe it wouldn't... Sleep/hibernate also worked on the quad core desktop box.
The only laptop on that list which has a webcam is the eee, and yes that worked out of the box.
Windows has generally lowered people's standards, to the point that constant crashing, malware and reinstalls are considered normal, acceptable and unavoidable.
I have installed Ubuntu on a bunch of machines lately, and on all of them it worked straight out of the box with no tweaking required...
2 Dell laptops, a C610 and (i believe) a D800 An eee 901 A custom built box with an asus motherboard and quad core cpu A fujitsu lifebook e-series (old, p3/700) An HP workstation, not sure of the model An older custom built box with a single core amd64
It supported wireless out of the box on those machines that had wireless, and it came with a set of apps ready to run... On the machine which used proprietary graphics drivers, it told me i needed them and i just had to confirm i wanted to install them.
A windows install is a lot more hassle, if the machine is especially new it wont have drivers and you might be forced to load them manually... I have seen lots of windows installs running with generic vesa graphics (ie extremely slowly) because people didnt realize they had to install proper video drivers.
And once you have got windows and all its various drivers installed, you still have a pretty useless system that can't do very much until you install some applications (which you have to do manually).
On a unix box it's pretty easy... Take a copy of/home,/usr/local and a list of the packages you have installed, possibly copy/etc if you have custom configs you need, wipe your system, reinstall everything in your package list and copy your local/home dirs back...
That's the beauty of having an OS where everything is well organized. Windows is just a mess, no centralized package management, mixed data and executable files in the same dirs, configuration stored in various places including a binary database...
Also whatever features you need, report them to similar but lacking applications and eventually they should get implemented.. A lot of people have fairly minimal requirements so some of the more advanced stuff never gets considered, and those who do need it tend to just complain without saying what it is exactly they need.
Internal communication perhaps, but how much important business communication goes over the internet with no encryption whatsoever?
I would place far more trust in a company that i have a legally binding contract with, than with some middle man providers of network transit or dns who have the ability to intercept email traffic.
The MMU on the Sparcv7 cpus was horribly broken on Linux... But to have a CPU like that, you need something like a Sparcstation 2 or similar. I had Linux on an SS2 and also migrated it to NetBSD for the same reason you mentioned.
I used to run Linux on a Sparcstation 20, which had 4 Sparcv8 cpus and it ran pretty well... It definitely ran a 2.4.x kernel perfectly well, not sure if i put a 2.6.x on it. I still have the box, and the disks somewhere - it used to be my mail server for many years, and i only replaced it because spam filtering was starting to tax it too much.
I never used them with a monitor, because serial console is far more useful..
Incidentally, netbooting gets round the silo limitations if you need to boot a big kernel, or just compress your kernel and use modules for everything else... I always ran stripped down kernels anyway so it wasn't an issue.
If Oracle don't want to commit resources to developing solaris, they should triple license (including GPL) it... Solaris is too widely used to die, so third parties will continue developing it and having it GPL licensed will allow drivers to flow from linux (which linux has a lot more of and solaris is very much lacking) and zfs/dtrace to flow back.
Yes, someone should port it and only provide it as source or a diff, there shouldn't be any licensing issues there since it isn't linked yet, and the GPL does not apply to anyone who just compiles it for their own use and doesn't distribute the binaries...
You sure you had 16 cpus? The E4500 has 8 slots, 2 cpus per slot, but you need to use at least one of those slots for an IO board otherwise you have no scsi and no networking, so the practical limit is 14 cpus...
Not really, they could quite easily adapt Linux to support those processors, it already runs on Sparc and supports the T1 at the very least, i wouldn't be surprised if it already supported the T2+... And the SPARC64 processors these days are made by Fujitsu anyway..
People are slow to adapt...
on
R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
As someone else pointed out, getting infected with a piece of malware is extremely serious... Not something you can run some automated tool to "clean up"... Most of the malware i've seen is not just a single infection, it tries to install additional malware too (to decrease the chance of you finding it all, nothing detects every piece of malware) and will often change system configuration to make it intentionally insecure, because none of the anti malware tools will detect if you have a legitimate but old (ie vulnerable) system binary installed, or if you have an insecure configuration such as allowing activex controls to run automatically without prompting. What you need to do is restore the system from known clean media and manually verify any data files you copy back (don't copy back any executable binaries).
Another issue with public shared hosting, is that often the web server runs as a single user, so that all the different sites need to be readable by that user. If one site gets compromised and an attacker gets a shell as the web server user they can read and possibly modify every other user's files... Quite often this will be enough to retrieve database passwords if not more.
Also consider the popular website authoring tools people use, which usually default to FTP and often don't support anything else. If your webhost doesn't support FTP you will lose customers.
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
SCP is 4-5 times slower than FTP? What kind of CPU do you have? I am easily able to saturate a 100Mbit link using a core2 system thats a couple of years old now... Even on a 1Gbit link i think the disk is the bottleneck moreso than the encryption these days.. Yes it uses a lot more cpu, but it isn't any slower.
Perhaps you are using an extremely poor implementation of SCP?
A lot of web hosting is done on colocated boxes, sitting on a lan with a lot of other colocated boxes... If one of them gets compromised, running a sniffer to capture insecure logins to the others is not too hard.
Could you give some example of the features outlook has which other applications lack? I've always found outlook to be an extremely poor mail client, especially if mail is all you use it for.
So sorry... I have 10+ years of emails in maildir format (ie 1 small raw textfile for each mail), separated into dirs by year or months depending on the volume of mail for a given time period. Over the time i've collected it, i've migrated it between at least 6 different physical servers running a variety of different mail server software and accessed it using a variety of different imap clients... You've screwed yourself by getting your important data locked in a proprietary format, so you've lost the freedom i have to choose what i access my mail from.
We have a mix of macs and linux boxes as well as windows workstations... We need to be able to access groupware from any of those, which makes exchange unfit for purpose... Mac support is poor (entourage hooks over the web interface which is really kludgy) and linux support is non existent. So we'll have to use something else.
We also want to have custom applications, which are deployed on unix servers which can talk to the server and insert calendar entries, we have various job tracking systems that could benefit from adding calendar entries which were synced to mobile devices, but there is no standard way for these apps to talk to exchange over the network.
Incidentally i have found outlook to be a terrible email client, it doesn't set the in-reply-to header properly (i believe it has its own method, intentionally incompatible as another form of lockin), it always tries to post replies at the top (making for very unreadable mailing list archives), it generates extremely bloated html emails, and as you pointed out it runs extremely slowly if the server is slow (my imap clients just download mail in the background from a slow server, actual ui responsiveness and startup time is not affected by slow server performance).
If you use exchange, you are also trusting your data to a massive leviathan that aims to eventually be a competitor for every business in every industry... Your data may not be on their servers, but it is stored on their proprietary filesystem in their proprietary format which requires their proprietary os and applications to read... And while google guarantee your continued access to the data so long as you keep making your subscription payments, much like any other subscription service, MS make no such guarantees...
Obviously the ideal situation is to keep your data on your own machines, and in formats you can control...
I agree that it's stupid to keep your data on someone else's servers, but it's just as stupid to keep it in someone else's formats and yet millions of businesses are willing to take that risk already.
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Perhaps you should tell these game companies why you didn't buy their games, and that you would have otherwise...
If sales drop, they will just claim you pirated it and push for even more intrusive DRM.
Obviously this big drop in sales has nothing to do with the fact relatively few games, and very few decent ones have been released recently. Nor could it possibly have anything to do with the global financial situation...
No, obviously PIRATES are to blame and as such we need stricter laws, tougher punishments and increasingly onerous drm schemes to ensure the video game industry fat cats can continue to enjoy unrealistically high profit margins.
Where do the homeless get power for their laptops?
If you know your neighbors, you can quite easily give them the key to access your wireless...
Your 60 year old neighbor isn't going to abuse it, your 16yr old neighbor isn't either because you know them and any illegal activity will easily be traced back to them... The evil kiddie fiddler who parks his van round the corner and sits in the back downloading kiddie porn through your connection doesn't know you, and you don't know him, so when the police turn up asking why your connection has been used to download kiddie porn you have nothing to tell them.
They will say that by doing it deliberately you are aware of and accept the risks and responsibility of unknown third parties using your network to do illegal things... So if someone decides to download a bunch of kiddie porn through your open wifi, the cops will come straight back and arrest you for it.
Well, the police also lock the cars as well as putting notes on them...
A friend of mine got hit by this, he had an old car which used 2 keys - one to open the door, and one to start the engine... He had lost the door key, but still had the engine one, so he simply left the car unlocked. Being an old, rusty and totally worthless looking vehicle it never got stolen, and he never left anything in it worth stealing either. It wasn't a problem until the cops came along and locked him out of it.
Sleep and hibernate worked on both the dells, sleep worked on the eee 901 (not hibernate, the swap partition isn't big enough).. I didn't try it on the fujitsu but have no reason to believe it wouldn't... Sleep/hibernate also worked on the quad core desktop box.
The only laptop on that list which has a webcam is the eee, and yes that worked out of the box.
Windows has generally lowered people's standards, to the point that constant crashing, malware and reinstalls are considered normal, acceptable and unavoidable.
I have installed Ubuntu on a bunch of machines lately, and on all of them it worked straight out of the box with no tweaking required...
2 Dell laptops, a C610 and (i believe) a D800
An eee 901
A custom built box with an asus motherboard and quad core cpu
A fujitsu lifebook e-series (old, p3/700)
An HP workstation, not sure of the model
An older custom built box with a single core amd64
It supported wireless out of the box on those machines that had wireless, and it came with a set of apps ready to run... On the machine which used proprietary graphics drivers, it told me i needed them and i just had to confirm i wanted to install them.
A windows install is a lot more hassle, if the machine is especially new it wont have drivers and you might be forced to load them manually... I have seen lots of windows installs running with generic vesa graphics (ie extremely slowly) because people didnt realize they had to install proper video drivers.
And once you have got windows and all its various drivers installed, you still have a pretty useless system that can't do very much until you install some applications (which you have to do manually).
On a unix box it's pretty easy... Take a copy of /home, /usr/local and a list of the packages you have installed, possibly copy /etc if you have custom configs you need, wipe your system, reinstall everything in your package list and copy your local/home dirs back...
That's the beauty of having an OS where everything is well organized. Windows is just a mess, no centralized package management, mixed data and executable files in the same dirs, configuration stored in various places including a binary database...
Never tried running Creative Suite on Mac?
Also whatever features you need, report them to similar but lacking applications and eventually they should get implemented.. A lot of people have fairly minimal requirements so some of the more advanced stuff never gets considered, and those who do need it tend to just complain without saying what it is exactly they need.
Internal communication perhaps, but how much important business communication goes over the internet with no encryption whatsoever?
I would place far more trust in a company that i have a legally binding contract with, than with some middle man providers of network transit or dns who have the ability to intercept email traffic.
The MMU on the Sparcv7 cpus was horribly broken on Linux... But to have a CPU like that, you need something like a Sparcstation 2 or similar. I had Linux on an SS2 and also migrated it to NetBSD for the same reason you mentioned.
I used to run Linux on a Sparcstation 20, which had 4 Sparcv8 cpus and it ran pretty well... It definitely ran a 2.4.x kernel perfectly well, not sure if i put a 2.6.x on it. I still have the box, and the disks somewhere - it used to be my mail server for many years, and i only replaced it because spam filtering was starting to tax it too much.
I never used them with a monitor, because serial console is far more useful..
Incidentally, netbooting gets round the silo limitations if you need to boot a big kernel, or just compress your kernel and use modules for everything else... I always ran stripped down kernels anyway so it wasn't an issue.
Masquerading as a really obsolete version of Mozilla no less...
If Oracle don't want to commit resources to developing solaris, they should triple license (including GPL) it... Solaris is too widely used to die, so third parties will continue developing it and having it GPL licensed will allow drivers to flow from linux (which linux has a lot more of and solaris is very much lacking) and zfs/dtrace to flow back.
Yes, someone should port it and only provide it as source or a diff, there shouldn't be any licensing issues there since it isn't linked yet, and the GPL does not apply to anyone who just compiles it for their own use and doesn't distribute the binaries...
You sure you had 16 cpus?
The E4500 has 8 slots, 2 cpus per slot, but you need to use at least one of those slots for an IO board otherwise you have no scsi and no networking, so the practical limit is 14 cpus...
Not really, they could quite easily adapt Linux to support those processors, it already runs on Sparc and supports the T1 at the very least, i wouldn't be surprised if it already supported the T2+... And the SPARC64 processors these days are made by Fujitsu anyway..
As someone else pointed out, getting infected with a piece of malware is extremely serious... Not something you can run some automated tool to "clean up"...
Most of the malware i've seen is not just a single infection, it tries to install additional malware too (to decrease the chance of you finding it all, nothing detects every piece of malware) and will often change system configuration to make it intentionally insecure, because none of the anti malware tools will detect if you have a legitimate but old (ie vulnerable) system binary installed, or if you have an insecure configuration such as allowing activex controls to run automatically without prompting. What you need to do is restore the system from known clean media and manually verify any data files you copy back (don't copy back any executable binaries).
Another issue with public shared hosting, is that often the web server runs as a single user, so that all the different sites need to be readable by that user. If one site gets compromised and an attacker gets a shell as the web server user they can read and possibly modify every other user's files... Quite often this will be enough to retrieve database passwords if not more.
Also consider the popular website authoring tools people use, which usually default to FTP and often don't support anything else. If your webhost doesn't support FTP you will lose customers.
SCP is 4-5 times slower than FTP? What kind of CPU do you have?
I am easily able to saturate a 100Mbit link using a core2 system thats a couple of years old now... Even on a 1Gbit link i think the disk is the bottleneck moreso than the encryption these days.. Yes it uses a lot more cpu, but it isn't any slower.
Perhaps you are using an extremely poor implementation of SCP?
A lot of web hosting is done on colocated boxes, sitting on a lan with a lot of other colocated boxes... If one of them gets compromised, running a sniffer to capture insecure logins to the others is not too hard.
Could you give some example of the features outlook has which other applications lack? I've always found outlook to be an extremely poor mail client, especially if mail is all you use it for.
So sorry...
I have 10+ years of emails in maildir format (ie 1 small raw textfile for each mail), separated into dirs by year or months depending on the volume of mail for a given time period. Over the time i've collected it, i've migrated it between at least 6 different physical servers running a variety of different mail server software and accessed it using a variety of different imap clients... You've screwed yourself by getting your important data locked in a proprietary format, so you've lost the freedom i have to choose what i access my mail from.
We have a mix of macs and linux boxes as well as windows workstations... We need to be able to access groupware from any of those, which makes exchange unfit for purpose... Mac support is poor (entourage hooks over the web interface which is really kludgy) and linux support is non existent. So we'll have to use something else.
We also want to have custom applications, which are deployed on unix servers which can talk to the server and insert calendar entries, we have various job tracking systems that could benefit from adding calendar entries which were synced to mobile devices, but there is no standard way for these apps to talk to exchange over the network.
Incidentally i have found outlook to be a terrible email client, it doesn't set the in-reply-to header properly (i believe it has its own method, intentionally incompatible as another form of lockin), it always tries to post replies at the top (making for very unreadable mailing list archives), it generates extremely bloated html emails, and as you pointed out it runs extremely slowly if the server is slow (my imap clients just download mail in the background from a slow server, actual ui responsiveness and startup time is not affected by slow server performance).
If you use exchange, you are also trusting your data to a massive leviathan that aims to eventually be a competitor for every business in every industry... Your data may not be on their servers, but it is stored on their proprietary filesystem in their proprietary format which requires their proprietary os and applications to read... And while google guarantee your continued access to the data so long as you keep making your subscription payments, much like any other subscription service, MS make no such guarantees...
Obviously the ideal situation is to keep your data on your own machines, and in formats you can control...
I agree that it's stupid to keep your data on someone else's servers, but it's just as stupid to keep it in someone else's formats and yet millions of businesses are willing to take that risk already.