You do have a point, but the same can be said of commercial software... Once a particular commercial app becomes dominant, there is no reason to continue improving it.. just look at the total stagnation of IE over the past couple of years, no new features, no improvements to css/png support etc.. Atleast if an opensource product becomes dominant, there will still be some incentive for new features, since oss software is written by and for users, those users who desire new features and are capable of writing them, are free to do so.. In an ideal world, opensource apps will commoditize the current feature sets and commercial vendors will have no alternative but to offer new and innovative feature in order to make sales.
This has a lot to do with large chunks of IE already being resident in memory as part of the OS. It also has to do with firefox's cross platform XUL interface, IE has a much lighter interface that just calls OS functions, firefox can't do this so easily as it would become far less portable.. Also, firefox has a far more complete rendering engine, including proper support for png and much better css/css2 support, support for these extra features obviously require additional code, compare the size of a really old version of netscape or mosaic.
It also comes with several unpassworded accounts out of the box, and comes complete with a default telnetd so people can login to those default accounts.
Actually the lack of os media is the biggest problem, i have a lot of old hardware on which i would like to play with older os's but i don't have any media to install them, and finding it is virtually impossible... What we need, is a repository of abandonware OS's, if someone is willing to set that up i have a reasonable selection i could donate.
Because ms have always competed on price, against novell netware and propriatory unix microsoft always was the cheap option. They offered inferior products at a cheaper price, and never even tried to pretend their products were better, they were just cheaper. Now their competition is still superior, as it always has been, but it's now cheaper too.. Microsoft can no longer offer a cheap crap solution, theyre offering an expensive crap solution but theyre trying to hold on to the advantage they used to have because that's easier than actually competing on product quality.. Aside from that, they realise from their own experience that customers dont give a shit about product quality, all they care about is cost, and microsoft can't compete with free.
Yes.. But remember firefox is actually being updated, unlike ie which has been stagnant for years. As soon as new advertisement methods become known, people will update firefox to block them too.
Depends on the architecture and load actually... a 3ghz system is likely to be running at a higher multiplier over the system bus, a 3way 1ghz system however could use something like NUMA to increase the effective throughput to memory... not all architectures have as brain dead implementations of multiprocessing as x86 does
What would be good, is a way to check the os of the box sending you traffic, if it's windows then drop the mail. Seriously, every single spam i've recieved today has been from a windows machine, while every legitimate mail has been from some form of unix, if we were to reject mail coming from windows hosts we could cut out a vast majority of it.
Actually when you buy a computer you are NOT informed of the dangers of viruses and spyware etc. Infact, you see the microsoft blurb saying xp is the most secure windows ever etc etc. If these users ever hear of viruses, it will be on the advertisement media of the antivirus and firewall products, so people dismiss it as simply being a sales ploy, because microsoft has told them windows is secure without third party tools.
So the only people buying from them are IE users, why would they ever bother to support people who never buy from them? If you encounter a site like this you should make it clear you won't buy from them until you can access their site with your browser of choice. If they begin to lose sales because of their shoddy site design then they will change it. If however all of their customers use ie and noone else says anything they will happily make their site more and more ie dependant. Besides, some of us don't have the option of switching to ie to view the site.
This is not a way of life, that is the most pathetic attitude i have ever heard. Having to deal with such shit every day is totally unacceptable. People won't accept such low standards in other area so why should they in computing? People complain loudly if they buy any other product that has such high levels of problems, yet with windows people have been so beaten down by years and years of total crap that they have lost the will to stand up for their basic consumer rights.
Except that the 2 year old version of windows is the CURRENT version. There is nothing newer, only patches to the 2 year old version. If you buy a retail cd you will get the 2 year old version and have to patch it, many users wouldn't do that and would just connect it to the net unpatched. And considering an unpatched machine gets infected in 4 minutes, even if they connected and started patching immediately it would be infected before the patching completed.
Actually if you buy bandwidth directly from almost any major carrier you will get the ability to send spoofed packets, most of the egress filtering is for end-users and doesn't apply when you buy serious amounts of bandwidth. Imagine this, you order a 155mb line from uunet and you route 50 C-class blocks behind it, adding egress filtering would severely hamper router performance at that level and if you have that much bandwidth it's reasonable for you to have backup lines aswell, there may even be uses for sending spoofed packets out.. Most egress filtering is done on the smaller customer-facing routers. As for the hordes of script kiddies, sure... they have their public exploits they got from bugtraq... But consider that spamming is big business, the spammers make lots of money and can afford to hire highly skilled people to actually write 0day exploits for them. Script kiddies have to rely on having helpfull friends to provide for them
And dont forget that spammers are unscrupulous and won't think twice about hacking machines.. What if they break into the router doing the egress filtering and turn it off?
Or they could hack a box on a fast line. Many isp's still don't filter spoofed outgoing traffic (mine doesn`t) and many block outgoing connections on 25 from their customers, not that you need to, you could configure the box not to reset the connections anyway.. Ofcourse this would introduce latency, but potentially massively increase throughput.. And you will never know the true IP of the spammer's box (which may also be a hacked box anyway) As for clueless isp's, theres thousands of them all around the world.. people have been launching ddos attacks with spoofed packets for years and are still doing so, noone notices.. Aside from the fact that clueless isp's are likely to be insecure as hell and spammers will have no qualms about compromising their routers and servers and changing configurations... Many isp's wouldnt notice until the end of the month when their traffic usage bill came and was massively higher than expected, this gives the spammer a good few weeks atleast.
The athlon 64 is actually a newer and more advanced cpu than the xp.. hence it produces less heat etc.. I have another example tho, a dell inspiron 5160 p4-m 3.2ghz, under windows it throttles back while under linux it crashes itself with the heat, oronically that usually happens while running a copy of windows under vmware.. day-long compiles seem to have no effect on it
But in a few years when they're obsolete and the companies who bought them don't want them anymore they will be available cheap on ebay.. Just like the $40k sun workstations you can pick up for $10 nowadays.
And i'm sure the development cost of windows was recouped many years ago. The fact is with things like this, you only have initial costs, not ongoing costs like you do when producing physical goods. So then, why is hardware getting steadily cheaper while software is just increasing in price? They should be held accountable and not be allowed to take more than a nominal profit on each item.. They would still do well out of shear volume, but would then be on a fairer playing field with hardware makers etc.
If theres nothing better, so what? why should i live with crap just because there's nothing better (or perceived to be.. for many uses macos or linux would be much better) I have a windows install for the sole purpose of playing games. Why? for precisely the reason you state, there's no better platform for playing games on.. not because windows is a good platform for games, far from it, simply because its the only platform that will run the most games properly. Tho saying that, windows is a TERRIBLE platform for games.. Try building a windows machine with the same specs as an xbox and then running the windows version of a game also available on the xbox, which do you think will run better? In my opinion, windows is a terrible platform for games simply because of it's size. I also consider linux and macos to be poor gaming platforms too. What we need are games that take over the hardware, like console games do or amiga games used to (yes the amiga had a very capable os, but 99% of games used it simply to bootstrap and had it flushed from memory while the game was running)
If you read the license agreement for 2k you will find that ms has the right to terminate your license to use it at any time. Sure you can still use 2k after that but it makes you a pirate...
Well, 2k has a few flaws (mostly IE related) that are fixed in xp but which there are no fixes for 2k..
As for the skinnable interface, that actually makes it slower, even if you adopt the win2k skin it's still slower than real win2k.. and the resource usage is noticeably higher, not just marginally.. The faster booting is just a cheat too, it may present a login prompt quicker but it's not really booted, it finishes loading in the background.
And some of us are on dialups where we pay by the minute, also other people are on connections where they pay for bandwidth usage.. We should be able to send valve a bill for this.
The Switchproxy extension for firefox is nice and lets you flip between multiple proxies easily, usefull for laptops where your going between multiple networks regularly.
Slashdot Mirror
You do have a point, but the same can be said of commercial software... Once a particular commercial app becomes dominant, there is no reason to continue improving it.. just look at the total stagnation of IE over the past couple of years, no new features, no improvements to css/png support etc..
Atleast if an opensource product becomes dominant, there will still be some incentive for new features, since oss software is written by and for users, those users who desire new features and are capable of writing them, are free to do so..
In an ideal world, opensource apps will commoditize the current feature sets and commercial vendors will have no alternative but to offer new and innovative feature in order to make sales.
This has a lot to do with large chunks of IE already being resident in memory as part of the OS.
It also has to do with firefox's cross platform XUL interface, IE has a much lighter interface that just calls OS functions, firefox can't do this so easily as it would become far less portable..
Also, firefox has a far more complete rendering engine, including proper support for png and much better css/css2 support, support for these extra features obviously require additional code, compare the size of a really old version of netscape or mosaic.
*Only* got 512mb? I regularly use machines with a fraction of that
It also comes with several unpassworded accounts out of the box, and comes complete with a default telnetd so people can login to those default accounts.
Actually the lack of os media is the biggest problem, i have a lot of old hardware on which i would like to play with older os's but i don't have any media to install them, and finding it is virtually impossible...
What we need, is a repository of abandonware OS's, if someone is willing to set that up i have a reasonable selection i could donate.
Because ms have always competed on price, against novell netware and propriatory unix microsoft always was the cheap option. They offered inferior products at a cheaper price, and never even tried to pretend their products were better, they were just cheaper.
Now their competition is still superior, as it always has been, but it's now cheaper too.. Microsoft can no longer offer a cheap crap solution, theyre offering an expensive crap solution but theyre trying to hold on to the advantage they used to have because that's easier than actually competing on product quality..
Aside from that, they realise from their own experience that customers dont give a shit about product quality, all they care about is cost, and microsoft can't compete with free.
Yes..
But remember firefox is actually being updated, unlike ie which has been stagnant for years. As soon as new advertisement methods become known, people will update firefox to block them too.
Depends on the architecture and load actually...
a 3ghz system is likely to be running at a higher multiplier over the system bus, a 3way 1ghz system however could use something like NUMA to increase the effective throughput to memory... not all architectures have as brain dead implementations of multiprocessing as x86 does
What would be good, is a way to check the os of the box sending you traffic, if it's windows then drop the mail.
Seriously, every single spam i've recieved today has been from a windows machine, while every legitimate mail has been from some form of unix, if we were to reject mail coming from windows hosts we could cut out a vast majority of it.
Actually when you buy a computer you are NOT informed of the dangers of viruses and spyware etc. Infact, you see the microsoft blurb saying xp is the most secure windows ever etc etc.
If these users ever hear of viruses, it will be on the advertisement media of the antivirus and firewall products, so people dismiss it as simply being a sales ploy, because microsoft has told them windows is secure without third party tools.
So the only people buying from them are IE users, why would they ever bother to support people who never buy from them?
If you encounter a site like this you should make it clear you won't buy from them until you can access their site with your browser of choice. If they begin to lose sales because of their shoddy site design then they will change it. If however all of their customers use ie and noone else says anything they will happily make their site more and more ie dependant.
Besides, some of us don't have the option of switching to ie to view the site.
This is not a way of life, that is the most pathetic attitude i have ever heard. Having to deal with such shit every day is totally unacceptable.
People won't accept such low standards in other area so why should they in computing?
People complain loudly if they buy any other product that has such high levels of problems, yet with windows people have been so beaten down by years and years of total crap that they have lost the will to stand up for their basic consumer rights.
Except that the 2 year old version of windows is the CURRENT version. There is nothing newer, only patches to the 2 year old version. If you buy a retail cd you will get the 2 year old version and have to patch it, many users wouldn't do that and would just connect it to the net unpatched. And considering an unpatched machine gets infected in 4 minutes, even if they connected and started patching immediately it would be infected before the patching completed.
Actually if you buy bandwidth directly from almost any major carrier you will get the ability to send spoofed packets, most of the egress filtering is for end-users and doesn't apply when you buy serious amounts of bandwidth. Imagine this, you order a 155mb line from uunet and you route 50 C-class blocks behind it, adding egress filtering would severely hamper router performance at that level and if you have that much bandwidth it's reasonable for you to have backup lines aswell, there may even be uses for sending spoofed packets out..
Most egress filtering is done on the smaller customer-facing routers.
As for the hordes of script kiddies, sure... they have their public exploits they got from bugtraq... But consider that spamming is big business, the spammers make lots of money and can afford to hire highly skilled people to actually write 0day exploits for them. Script kiddies have to rely on having helpfull friends to provide for them
And dont forget that spammers are unscrupulous and won't think twice about hacking machines.. What if they break into the router doing the egress filtering and turn it off?
Or they could hack a box on a fast line. Many isp's still don't filter spoofed outgoing traffic (mine doesn`t) and many block outgoing connections on 25 from their customers, not that you need to, you could configure the box not to reset the connections anyway..
Ofcourse this would introduce latency, but potentially massively increase throughput.. And you will never know the true IP of the spammer's box (which may also be a hacked box anyway)
As for clueless isp's, theres thousands of them all around the world.. people have been launching ddos attacks with spoofed packets for years and are still doing so, noone notices..
Aside from the fact that clueless isp's are likely to be insecure as hell and spammers will have no qualms about compromising their routers and servers and changing configurations... Many isp's wouldnt notice until the end of the month when their traffic usage bill came and was massively higher than expected, this gives the spammer a good few weeks atleast.
The athlon 64 is actually a newer and more advanced cpu than the xp.. hence it produces less heat etc..
I have another example tho, a dell inspiron 5160 p4-m 3.2ghz, under windows it throttles back while under linux it crashes itself with the heat, oronically that usually happens while running a copy of windows under vmware.. day-long compiles seem to have no effect on it
But the patch was designed to update the 2000 machines to xp.. Patches specifically designed for xp should just refuse to run on 2000 anyway.
But in a few years when they're obsolete and the companies who bought them don't want them anymore they will be available cheap on ebay.. Just like the $40k sun workstations you can pick up for $10 nowadays.
And i'm sure the development cost of windows was recouped many years ago. The fact is with things like this, you only have initial costs, not ongoing costs like you do when producing physical goods.
So then, why is hardware getting steadily cheaper while software is just increasing in price? They should be held accountable and not be allowed to take more than a nominal profit on each item.. They would still do well out of shear volume, but would then be on a fairer playing field with hardware makers etc.
If theres nothing better, so what? why should i live with crap just because there's nothing better (or perceived to be.. for many uses macos or linux would be much better)
I have a windows install for the sole purpose of playing games. Why? for precisely the reason you state, there's no better platform for playing games on.. not because windows is a good platform for games, far from it, simply because its the only platform that will run the most games properly. Tho saying that, windows is a TERRIBLE platform for games.. Try building a windows machine with the same specs as an xbox and then running the windows version of a game also available on the xbox, which do you think will run better?
In my opinion, windows is a terrible platform for games simply because of it's size. I also consider linux and macos to be poor gaming platforms too. What we need are games that take over the hardware, like console games do or amiga games used to (yes the amiga had a very capable os, but 99% of games used it simply to bootstrap and had it flushed from memory while the game was running)
If you read the license agreement for 2k you will find that ms has the right to terminate your license to use it at any time. Sure you can still use 2k after that but it makes you a pirate...
Well, 2k has a few flaws (mostly IE related) that are fixed in xp but which there are no fixes for 2k..
As for the skinnable interface, that actually makes it slower, even if you adopt the win2k skin it's still slower than real win2k.. and the resource usage is noticeably higher, not just marginally..
The faster booting is just a cheat too, it may present a login prompt quicker but it's not really booted, it finishes loading in the background.
And some of us are on dialups where we pay by the minute, also other people are on connections where they pay for bandwidth usage.. We should be able to send valve a bill for this.
The Switchproxy extension for firefox is nice and lets you flip between multiple proxies easily, usefull for laptops where your going between multiple networks regularly.