Linux will also use the swap partition even if you already have 4GB ram and no support for PAE... Never bothered to work out how or why it does that. I don't think all your swap gets mmap'd tho, so it doesn't need available address space. Each process has its own private address space, and swap is used as/when.
Also having your swap on a seperate partition should at least remove the overhead of filesystem calls. It also eliminates any chance of fragmentation and lets you put it anywhere on the drive...
Linux also lets you define a priority for your swap partitions, if you set them all the same then it will effectively stripe the swap usage across your multiple partitions. I have a system with swap spread over 3 seperate physical disks.
Because hiding them is insecure... pr0n.jpg.exe becomes pr0n.jpg, and exe files can contain their own icons and this one just happens to have an icon that looks like a jpeg file.
The entire OS structure is largely a mess tho... The "windows" dir contains a mixture of libraries, binaries and other miscellaneous junk... And system32 just contains more of the same. The "Program Files" aka "progra~1" directory contains the actual executables for some programs, but often the libraries are copied to system32. Also the programs are often in multiple subdirs of the form "vendor\programname\".. Quite often you know what program you need but can't remember the vendor. And then they store all kinds of junk in the registry too.
Have a single temp directory in a standard location, or at most 2 (one that survives a reboot, one that doesnt ala/tmp and/var/tmp on solaris).
They should take on the unix/macos ideas,/bin and/lib for critical system libs (safemode required stuff, kernel, etc),/usr for the rest of the OS files... with everything seperated up according to what type of files they are... Any user-installed apps (not part of the os) go in an equivalent/usr/local or/opt and never mess with the os dirs, or a macos style applications dir. Configuration for the application goes in the same dir, unless it's user-specific config in which case it goes in that user's homedir. To remove an app, delete it, all trace of the app is gone except for per-user configs, create a standard for where per-user configs are stored so that those too can be easily removed if you no longer use the app, but they can be left if the user still wants them.
Among the other advantages of this approach, when you migrate machines, even if the new machine has a newer os, its easy to copy all your apps and settings across without disturbing the core os itself.
What was the issue? Some things are trivial and fairly obvious mistakes, that are often easy to fix without breaking anything, in which case it's not too hard to get a patch out quickly. Format string problems for instance, shouldn't be too hard to correct. Often a little extra validation can correct a problem too, just put in a check for a value being zero before doing a division etc. Things like this are also easy to test, and don't break anything else.
Longer turnarounds arise when the issue is more of a design flaw than a simple typo, or when your patch includes more than just a fix for the reported issue. I think security patches should only ever fix the issue at hand, with any feature updates available separately. I don't want the process of patching my system to introduce new features that could bring with them new bugs.
None of which I really want... I already have far too many friends lists, I already have far too many messaging systems, and we've had matchmaking systems like xlink, gamespy etc for a long time... Why should i pay for a copy of something I already had? Not only that, but why should I use a service that's far (in terms of latency) from me, when the people i want to play against are right next to me (same isp, not same location). I want the ability to arbitrarily setup private servers in locations of my choice where we can play online games. I used to run my own quake servers, and I often fire up a casual server to play games with friends.
Never played gears of war so i can't comment specifically on that game... I can understand MMORPG's charging a subscription for online play, but in that case they shouldnt charge for the game media (how it would suck to buy something then be told you need to pay more to actually play it)... Any game where it's the game that provides the entertainment, and not the online world it connects to really shouldn't charge for online play, and should make it possible for people to run their own servers. Lan-play is still very much commonplace here too.
When i wanted less clutter with my xbox games, i simply got the xbox chipped, installed a larger hd and put all the games i played on it. No clutter. So your willing to wait several years after the games were released, and then pay more for the uncluttered version (which only offers you the same luxury pirated copies did a few years ago) than the original cluttered one costs? No wonder piracy rates are so high, the pirate versions really are better.
You are not differentiating between what is "right" and what people "believe to be right".
A liberal society gives people the impression they know what's going on, based on the information given to them. Even in the most authoritarian of regimes people will still believe what they want to, based on the information they have.
That in a sufficiently liberal regime people can freely open their mouths is largely irrelevant, if the vast majority of the people believe the information that the government allows to flow to them. Sure there's a few who won't in any regime, and the only difference between current "liberal" and totalitarian regimes is how these people are dealt with. Under a totalitarian regime such people are locked up or killed. Under a "liberal" regime, such people are simply branded as insane conspiracy theorists. The end result is the same, people don't believe their stories and thus don't propagate them to others.
The fact is Britain and the US have done many many questionable things, but their respective governments are still powerful enough to say otherwise, and have enough influence that anyone coming along with an opposing voice can be made to appear far less credible, and thus has to work much harder to gain the kind of support required to make their voice heard. By contrast, Nazi Germany, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Imperial Japan and the USSR have also done many questionable things, but they no longer have sufficient influence to make people believe their versions of events. If anything, subsequent governments want to distance themselves from the former regimes and also use them as blame-sinks.
So you see, in our supposedly liberal societies you may well be free to say what you want, and you may even be right, but that doesn't mean anyone will believe you so long as someone else (that military organisation you talk about) has a louder voice than you. They may even lock you up, just like a totalitarian regime would. But they will say it's "for your own good" because you are "insane" or "a danger".
I never said that might makes right... Might allows you to dictate what people perceive as being the truth. The USSR did not lose WW2, they won it. They lost the cold war, but that was an entirely different "conflict". Countries have risen and fallen throughout history, the USSR didn't fall in battle, they collapsed due to their own mismanagement, as have many other countries.
Only they didn't... The USSR won the war in Europe, Britain would eventually have lost to Germany.. Germany was severely out-manned and outgunned, being attacked from both sides by Britain and the USSR. Similarly, Japan was outgunned by a combination of the USA and China.
It has more to do with resources than governments, in fact the most effective government was Germany. Hitler was able to take a struggling country and turn it into a world superpower, capable of easily defeating France and several smaller weaker countries, and able to take on the British empire, also a major power in those days.
The difference is that Germany and Japan were defeated, and forced to answer for their crimes... The USSR were long considered the enemy and so information about their crimes were widely publicised in the west... The collapse of the USSR just served to bring more crimes to light. The US and UK however, also committed a lot of heinous crimes during the war, but being the victors were never brought to justice for it. And being still stable powers, are still able to cover up their crimes.
Like they say, history is written by the victors. The US and UK are the victorious parties who are still around in the same form.
XP has got a lot slower since it was released... Especially installing SP2 takes a big hit, that said i still doubt it would be unusable on a 1.5ghz box...
Best Buy? I don't live in the US.. Stores have limited shelf space, old shows need to be removed to make space for new ones. There's always things going off the shelves, and stores of different sizes have different stock.
Yes, true, which is unacceptable really... On the other hand, software patents are not valid in Europe, and the specifications for MPEG are open. At least with open specs you can create your own implementation, licensing it under the broken american patent system is another matter tho. I certainly don't think any single company should be granted an artificial monopoly on TV broadcasts...
It wouldn't matter, windows passwords are encrypted with 2 rather poor algorithms (yes, the weaker of the two is kept for legacy reasons but can be turned off, but its still stupid to have 2 at all). I don't think they use any random entropy, not even a salt...
Funny you should mention that, windows has a really kludgy way of handling dates beyond 2000... It basically still uses a 2 digit date, and defines an arbitrary split point, eg: Dates below 70 are considered in the year 2000, over 70 are considered in the 1900s.
Excel also has some stupid bugs to do with dates, which microsoft are now trying to enshrine in the ooxml format.
It's fairly common for fixes not to be back ported... Microsoft don't want to admit a problem exists unless they have to... A lot of issues got fixed in vista which never went public as vulnerabilities. When a patch is released, blackhats will reverse engineer it to find out what was patched and write exploits, since many people won't install the patches. This is made worse if it's a silent patch where it was never disclosed what was being patched (often several patches will be bundled together but not all of them will be admitted to. It's much harder to do the same with vista, because so much other stuff has been changed and/or recompiled with a newer compiler etc. Very few of the binaries are the same.
A new RNG is not really a selling point, the only way it will help their bottom line is if enough people know about flaws in the old one that it's profitable to replace it. Look at it from a business perspective, microsoft will.
Could you do the same with a TV card that has no antenna connected? Proper "snow" input... Tho i guess it could be subverted if you were in the vicinity with a powerfull enough transmitter.
So as if life wasn't hard enough for poor students, they have a choice between losing their grant money, or losing the ability to easily pirate media. These students are POOR, they won't buy your media if they can't pirate it at college, they will either pirate it elsewhere (possibly putting money into the hands of organised piracy groups) or simply do without. They can't afford to pay the excessively high prices for this stuff, so you are just making life even harder for people who are already short of cash and often experiencing life away from home for the first time.
The one good thing that could come out of this, is that it could encourage colleges to promote the use of free software. When i was at college, the only way most of us could afford all the software we used on campus and needed for our courses, was to pirate it. If the college were to provide it to us for free on DVD that would make life much easier.
It was pirated because that's what people are used to. Non pirated versions are often inferior (drm etc) than the pirated ones, such that many people are now in the habit of simply downloading pirated copies. Many probably didn't even realise that 'in rainbows' was available legitimately under the same terms they usually pirate it.
They could also easily undercut the pirates... They offer for download an ad-supported version in a standard format and at multiple resolutions right when the show airs, or even before... And host it using something like Akamai... So the legal one comes out first, is the same or better quality than the pirate version, downloads as quick or faster, but has ads. For most people, it will simply be easier to put up with the ads (providing they're not insanely intrusive) than to wait for a pirate version with the ads stripped. So long as the pirate version is significantly better, people will have incentive to download that instead.
Do you really think i want to carry a stack of DVDs with me whenever i travel? I travel a lot, and often find myself on planes/trains and in hotels... And I always have a laptop with me due to the nature of why i'm travelling. My laptop HD is more than big enough to carry a stack of TV episodes, which work out around 350mb when xvid compressed. I would hate to have the hassle of lugging around a stack of physical media, and having to search through it and swap it in when i wanted to watch something. Not to mention having to keep track of them so i dont lose them. There's also the inconvenience of DVDs, TV shows often come out on DVD several months after they have aired, and several months later are no longer on the shelves. There's only a short timescale to buy a DVD, and if you miss it you have major hassle trying to find it again. If your really lucky old shows will get rereleased on dvd, but your then relying on something that might not even happen.
I also play games when i travel, and i got so sick of the games that demanded i keep the original media in the drive (for the sale reason, dragging round a stack of media) that i've started using nocd cracks, and more recently simply running a pirate version anyway because they already come with the nocd cracks (and thus offer me a superior product)
I would complain just the same if there was a TV show that required a particular brand of TV to view... The specifications of television signals are public knowledge such that with the right tools i could construct my own television. Alternatively, because producing a TV would be difficult, and manufacturers who already produce TVs are competing with each other and keeping prices lower than it would cost me to make my own (economies of scale), I am free to purchase a TV from any one of many different vendors depending purely on my own free choices. There is no single entity that is guaranteed to make money from my purchase of a TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux will also use the swap partition even if you already have 4GB ram and no support for PAE... Never bothered to work out how or why it does that. I don't think all your swap gets mmap'd tho, so it doesn't need available address space. Each process has its own private address space, and swap is used as/when.
Also having your swap on a seperate partition should at least remove the overhead of filesystem calls. It also eliminates any chance of fragmentation and lets you put it anywhere on the drive...
Linux also lets you define a priority for your swap partitions, if you set them all the same then it will effectively stripe the swap usage across your multiple partitions. I have a system with swap spread over 3 seperate physical disks.
Because hiding them is insecure...
pr0n.jpg.exe becomes pr0n.jpg, and exe files can contain their own icons and this one just happens to have an icon that looks like a jpeg file.
The entire OS structure is largely a mess tho...
/tmp and /var/tmp on solaris).
/bin and /lib for critical system libs (safemode required stuff, kernel, etc), /usr for the rest of the OS files... with everything seperated up according to what type of files they are... /usr/local or /opt and never mess with the os dirs, or a macos style applications dir. Configuration for the application goes in the same dir, unless it's user-specific config in which case it goes in that user's homedir.
The "windows" dir contains a mixture of libraries, binaries and other miscellaneous junk... And system32 just contains more of the same.
The "Program Files" aka "progra~1" directory contains the actual executables for some programs, but often the libraries are copied to system32. Also the programs are often in multiple subdirs of the form "vendor\programname\".. Quite often you know what program you need but can't remember the vendor. And then they store all kinds of junk in the registry too.
Have a single temp directory in a standard location, or at most 2 (one that survives a reboot, one that doesnt ala
They should take on the unix/macos ideas,
Any user-installed apps (not part of the os) go in an equivalent
To remove an app, delete it, all trace of the app is gone except for per-user configs, create a standard for where per-user configs are stored so that those too can be easily removed if you no longer use the app, but they can be left if the user still wants them.
Among the other advantages of this approach, when you migrate machines, even if the new machine has a newer os, its easy to copy all your apps and settings across without disturbing the core os itself.
What was the issue?
Some things are trivial and fairly obvious mistakes, that are often easy to fix without breaking anything, in which case it's not too hard to get a patch out quickly. Format string problems for instance, shouldn't be too hard to correct.
Often a little extra validation can correct a problem too, just put in a check for a value being zero before doing a division etc. Things like this are also easy to test, and don't break anything else.
Longer turnarounds arise when the issue is more of a design flaw than a simple typo, or when your patch includes more than just a fix for the reported issue. I think security patches should only ever fix the issue at hand, with any feature updates available separately. I don't want the process of patching my system to introduce new features that could bring with them new bugs.
But the Wii can also run gamecube games natively, without emulation...
All of the gamecube games should run on it, i don't know of any that don't.
None of which I really want...
I already have far too many friends lists, I already have far too many messaging systems, and we've had matchmaking systems like xlink, gamespy etc for a long time... Why should i pay for a copy of something I already had?
Not only that, but why should I use a service that's far (in terms of latency) from me, when the people i want to play against are right next to me (same isp, not same location).
I want the ability to arbitrarily setup private servers in locations of my choice where we can play online games. I used to run my own quake servers, and I often fire up a casual server to play games with friends.
Never played gears of war so i can't comment specifically on that game...
I can understand MMORPG's charging a subscription for online play, but in that case they shouldnt charge for the game media (how it would suck to buy something then be told you need to pay more to actually play it)...
Any game where it's the game that provides the entertainment, and not the online world it connects to really shouldn't charge for online play, and should make it possible for people to run their own servers. Lan-play is still very much commonplace here too.
When i wanted less clutter with my xbox games, i simply got the xbox chipped, installed a larger hd and put all the games i played on it. No clutter.
So your willing to wait several years after the games were released, and then pay more for the uncluttered version (which only offers you the same luxury pirated copies did a few years ago) than the original cluttered one costs? No wonder piracy rates are so high, the pirate versions really are better.
You are not differentiating between what is "right" and what people "believe to be right".
A liberal society gives people the impression they know what's going on, based on the information given to them. Even in the most authoritarian of regimes people will still believe what they want to, based on the information they have.
That in a sufficiently liberal regime people can freely open their mouths is largely irrelevant, if the vast majority of the people believe the information that the government allows to flow to them.
Sure there's a few who won't in any regime, and the only difference between current "liberal" and totalitarian regimes is how these people are dealt with. Under a totalitarian regime such people are locked up or killed. Under a "liberal" regime, such people are simply branded as insane conspiracy theorists. The end result is the same, people don't believe their stories and thus don't propagate them to others.
The fact is Britain and the US have done many many questionable things, but their respective governments are still powerful enough to say otherwise, and have enough influence that anyone coming along with an opposing voice can be made to appear far less credible, and thus has to work much harder to gain the kind of support required to make their voice heard.
By contrast, Nazi Germany, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Imperial Japan and the USSR have also done many questionable things, but they no longer have sufficient influence to make people believe their versions of events. If anything, subsequent governments want to distance themselves from the former regimes and also use them as blame-sinks.
So you see, in our supposedly liberal societies you may well be free to say what you want, and you may even be right, but that doesn't mean anyone will believe you so long as someone else (that military organisation you talk about) has a louder voice than you. They may even lock you up, just like a totalitarian regime would. But they will say it's "for your own good" because you are "insane" or "a danger".
I never said that might makes right...
Might allows you to dictate what people perceive as being the truth.
The USSR did not lose WW2, they won it. They lost the cold war, but that was an entirely different "conflict".
Countries have risen and fallen throughout history, the USSR didn't fall in battle, they collapsed due to their own mismanagement, as have many other countries.
Only they didn't...
The USSR won the war in Europe, Britain would eventually have lost to Germany.. Germany was severely out-manned and outgunned, being attacked from both sides by Britain and the USSR.
Similarly, Japan was outgunned by a combination of the USA and China.
It has more to do with resources than governments, in fact the most effective government was Germany. Hitler was able to take a struggling country and turn it into a world superpower, capable of easily defeating France and several smaller weaker countries, and able to take on the British empire, also a major power in those days.
The difference is that Germany and Japan were defeated, and forced to answer for their crimes...
The USSR were long considered the enemy and so information about their crimes were widely publicised in the west... The collapse of the USSR just served to bring more crimes to light.
The US and UK however, also committed a lot of heinous crimes during the war, but being the victors were never brought to justice for it. And being still stable powers, are still able to cover up their crimes.
Like they say, history is written by the victors. The US and UK are the victorious parties who are still around in the same form.
XP has got a lot slower since it was released... Especially installing SP2 takes a big hit, that said i still doubt it would be unusable on a 1.5ghz box...
Best Buy? I don't live in the US..
Stores have limited shelf space, old shows need to be removed to make space for new ones. There's always things going off the shelves, and stores of different sizes have different stock.
Yes, true, which is unacceptable really...
On the other hand, software patents are not valid in Europe, and the specifications for MPEG are open. At least with open specs you can create your own implementation, licensing it under the broken american patent system is another matter tho.
I certainly don't think any single company should be granted an artificial monopoly on TV broadcasts...
It wouldn't matter, windows passwords are encrypted with 2 rather poor algorithms (yes, the weaker of the two is kept for legacy reasons but can be turned off, but its still stupid to have 2 at all). I don't think they use any random entropy, not even a salt...
Funny you should mention that, windows has a really kludgy way of handling dates beyond 2000... It basically still uses a 2 digit date, and defines an arbitrary split point, eg:
Dates below 70 are considered in the year 2000, over 70 are considered in the 1900s.
Excel also has some stupid bugs to do with dates, which microsoft are now trying to enshrine in the ooxml format.
It's fairly common for fixes not to be back ported...
Microsoft don't want to admit a problem exists unless they have to... A lot of issues got fixed in vista which never went public as vulnerabilities.
When a patch is released, blackhats will reverse engineer it to find out what was patched and write exploits, since many people won't install the patches. This is made worse if it's a silent patch where it was never disclosed what was being patched (often several patches will be bundled together but not all of them will be admitted to.
It's much harder to do the same with vista, because so much other stuff has been changed and/or recompiled with a newer compiler etc. Very few of the binaries are the same.
A new RNG is not really a selling point, the only way it will help their bottom line is if enough people know about flaws in the old one that it's profitable to replace it.
Look at it from a business perspective, microsoft will.
Could you do the same with a TV card that has no antenna connected? Proper "snow" input...
Tho i guess it could be subverted if you were in the vicinity with a powerfull enough transmitter.
So as if life wasn't hard enough for poor students, they have a choice between losing their grant money, or losing the ability to easily pirate media.
These students are POOR, they won't buy your media if they can't pirate it at college, they will either pirate it elsewhere (possibly putting money into the hands of organised piracy groups) or simply do without. They can't afford to pay the excessively high prices for this stuff, so you are just making life even harder for people who are already short of cash and often experiencing life away from home for the first time.
The one good thing that could come out of this, is that it could encourage colleges to promote the use of free software.
When i was at college, the only way most of us could afford all the software we used on campus and needed for our courses, was to pirate it. If the college were to provide it to us for free on DVD that would make life much easier.
It was pirated because that's what people are used to.
Non pirated versions are often inferior (drm etc) than the pirated ones, such that many people are now in the habit of simply downloading pirated copies. Many probably didn't even realise that 'in rainbows' was available legitimately under the same terms they usually pirate it.
They could also easily undercut the pirates...
They offer for download an ad-supported version in a standard format and at multiple resolutions right when the show airs, or even before... And host it using something like Akamai...
So the legal one comes out first, is the same or better quality than the pirate version, downloads as quick or faster, but has ads. For most people, it will simply be easier to put up with the ads (providing they're not insanely intrusive) than to wait for a pirate version with the ads stripped.
So long as the pirate version is significantly better, people will have incentive to download that instead.
Do you really think i want to carry a stack of DVDs with me whenever i travel?
I travel a lot, and often find myself on planes/trains and in hotels... And I always have a laptop with me due to the nature of why i'm travelling.
My laptop HD is more than big enough to carry a stack of TV episodes, which work out around 350mb when xvid compressed. I would hate to have the hassle of lugging around a stack of physical media, and having to search through it and swap it in when i wanted to watch something. Not to mention having to keep track of them so i dont lose them.
There's also the inconvenience of DVDs, TV shows often come out on DVD several months after they have aired, and several months later are no longer on the shelves. There's only a short timescale to buy a DVD, and if you miss it you have major hassle trying to find it again. If your really lucky old shows will get rereleased on dvd, but your then relying on something that might not even happen.
I also play games when i travel, and i got so sick of the games that demanded i keep the original media in the drive (for the sale reason, dragging round a stack of media) that i've started using nocd cracks, and more recently simply running a pirate version anyway because they already come with the nocd cracks (and thus offer me a superior product)
I would complain just the same if there was a TV show that required a particular brand of TV to view...
The specifications of television signals are public knowledge such that with the right tools i could construct my own television.
Alternatively, because producing a TV would be difficult, and manufacturers who already produce TVs are competing with each other and keeping prices lower than it would cost me to make my own (economies of scale), I am free to purchase a TV from any one of many different vendors depending purely on my own free choices.
There is no single entity that is guaranteed to make money from my purchase of a TV.