1. As I stated in my last post, I'm fully aware of user stupidity. That does NOT invalidate the value of having good security systems.
We are not in disagreement here. However, you're assuming that having good security systems equals having good security. That is a non sequitur. You can have wonderful security tools, but without good knowledge of how to use those tools, they are essentially useless. Is the default firewall with FC4 good? Absolutely, but it's fantastically easy to screw it up if you don't know what you're doing. The default firewall for XP SP2 is very good as well, but it's also easy to screw up if you don't know what you're doing. For its part, however, Windows does at least attempt to warn you if you're doing something stupid, whereas iptables will remain quite mute if you do something that will make your box a hacker paradise. It's usability that matters here, not ultimate capability. Having a 2000hp engine is rather useless if the driver can't figure out how to start the car.
2. I accept that you don't blame UNIX, but you go on to say that Windows is not responsible for its poor security. That's assinine. Windows, given that they cater to a particularly retarded genre of computer user, should not have its users dancing over razor blades and hot coals.
As opposed to *nix, which only caters to a specificy uber-breed of user that understands awk, sed, and grep. Sure, there are advantages to restricting your user base, and if *nix wants to stay in the I could draft an e-mail to thousands that would tell them that switching from 110v to 220v on their power supply would result in a speed boost. I'm sure there would be plenty of gullible people who would flip that switch, but does that mean that it's just fine to make that switch a huge toggle switch, rather than a small switch behind a steel plate that requires utility and intention to move it?
Depends on your ability to handle support calls. Putting steel plate over said switch will undoubtedly increase your support calls by an order or two of magnitude, all from "a particularly retarded genre of computer user" that expects you to have put such a switch in plain view. Couple your idea of hiding the switch with some obtuse, cryptic documentation (or none at all) as is often the case on *nix systems and you have a recipe for total user frustration. They will give up and go to someone else that doesn't make their lives so miserable when trying to do the most elementary things. If you want to run people away, go right ahead. Just give up on your whole "OSS will take over the world!" mantra while you're doing it.
I never asserted that Windows is impossible to secure, but if you want to start getting into this debate, might I remind you that the OSS model has a demonstrated advantage over closed source solutions. The reasons are vast and numerous, and I don't feel compelled to repeat the lecture here.
Ah, yes...that "million eyeballs" rationale. Now, remind me again why we're still seeing kernel-level security holes found in pieces of Linux code that haven't been touched or modified since kernel 2.0? Oh, yes, I forgot...it's because millions of eyeballs have been staring at the code for years and all of them have consistently been missing this stuff right in front of them.
Sorry to burst your bubble, bub, but your theory remains just that: theory. It is far from provable fact as you assert. In fact, there's ample evidence to show that OSS is not demonstrably better than close models when it comes to the number of bugs and exploits found over time. The one -- and only one -- advantage most OSS has over closed source is time to patch. Most OSS packages are patched almost immediately after a vuln is found, whereas closed source usually takes days or weeks -- sometimes months or never. Of course, the OSS guys are missing something rather huge, namely regression testing. Closed source commercial software, on the other han
Working in a IT department and buying from Dell all the time I will tell you right now your lying out of your ass about it comming with SP2 unless they changed their policys within the last week.
Managing an IT department that purchases a few hundred Dell boxes a year, I can say without equivocation that Dell has been preloading SP2 for at least since January 2005. If you want to be so amazingly stupid as to call me a liar, I can happily arrange for a purchase order summary, complete with dates and OS load specifications, to be faxed to the number of your choice. Care to shut up now, or do you plan on swallowing your knee so soon after chowing down on your foot?
And no firewall wasnt enabled as it was on a LAN with 4 other machines that had firewall already on.
Then it's your own fucking stupid fault for not enabling it before attaching any network cabling, and it's your own fucking stupid fault for having compromised machines behind your goddamed firewall. THat's the only explanation for having machines infected when you're behind a hardware firewall unless you've got (a) public IP's with unfiltered forwarding through your firewall or (b) NAT with forwarding to your specific IP.
In fact, your entire story seems to fantastical that it's clear you're either grossly incompetent or you're just making shit up to make Windows sound bad. I've been around some pretty shitty IT departments in my 20+ year career, but I've never yet heard of anyone so colossally stupid as what you describe yourself doing. Thanks for proving my point: the fault lies with the equipment between the keyboard and the chair. This means you. Go get a fucking clue and quit blaming Microsoft for your fucking stupidity. Ass.
Perhaps you failed to grasp the concept that my example was a quick and dirty one. A competent phisher would've constructed the instructions such that your most common distribution (RH? FC? Debian? SuSE?) is covered in the instructions.
It's not so hard, and if you'd just get out of your stubborn "not MY OS!" streak you'd see that. Haven't you ever had to walk someone through a relatively simple procedure over the phone or via email? How hard is it to write a foolproof way to delete all files on your system in less than five bullet points? It's not that hard at all, which means it could be easily put in an email and mass-mailed everywhere. And people by the thousands, perhaps millions, would do it. And there'd be no security on God's Green Earth that could stop them from doing it if they're so stupid as to be running as a root equivalent.
So much for the vaunted Unix security model, but the fault is not with Unix, it's with the human. The best designed tool in the world cannot prevent a stupid human from abusing it, not unless you're prepared to inhumanly limit what the tool can do, thus limiting its utility. Ergo, poor Windows security is not the fault of Windows any more than poor Linux security is the fault of Linux. Microsoft may be putting poor defaults on their out-of-box configs, but that doesn't mean Windows is impossible to secure. Indeed, if you're willing to spend the time and have the knowledge, you can make any Window system as secure as any Linux system.
If you don't believe me, just try hacking www.microsoft.com. Let me know when you succeed in breaching servers so secure that they weather thousands of attacks per day by some of the most competent hackers on the planet. If Microsoft can secure their systems against all the Microsoft-haters out there itching to put a notch in their belt, what's stopping you from doing the same? Laziness? Ignorance? It certainly isn't the OS, that's for sure.
A system is only as secure as the weakest component. You can put as many locks on your windows as you want, but unless you remember to lock the door to your house all these other measures are utterly useless.
I'll ignore the ad hominem "fanboi" attack and try to focus on what passes for your idea of a point.
I'll take your analogy and up you one: a system is only as secure as its most idiotic administrator. You can put as many locks on your windows and doors and chimneys as you want, but unless the homeowner understands how to operate the locks all this security is utterly useless. The analogy should be clear: within a standard Linux distribution are all the tools I need to make a completely and totally impenetrable system. However, if I don't know where these tools are, what they're called, what their syntax is, and how they all contribute to the overall security of the system, they might as well not be there at all.
Windows is a fantastic example of this. Within a standard Windows XP or 2003 box are all the tools you need to make the box secure and utterly impenetrable (IPSec port filtering, security policies, the built-in firewall, etc.). However, the vast majority of Windows users are utterly unaware of the existence of said tools and, for the most part, wouldn't know what to do with them if they did know what to do with them.
Making a "smarter" OS is folly in this circumstance. Lock it down too tight and users (and some admins) will disable the protection just so they can get things done. Make it too loose and your false security is just that: false security. Strike the middle ground and you're neither fantastically secure nor fantastically flexible. Security is risk, and it is the polar opposite of convenience. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.
These are immutable concepts when viewed on a macroscopic scale. Oh, sure, you can point to the odd design win that is both totally secure and eminently functional, but always at the cost of flexibility. It may do it well, it may be easy to work with, and it may do it securely, but it's only going to do one or two things (example: a typical television)./. Linux users want their security and flexibility and are willing to give up some usability in order to get that. Unfortunately for the frothing zealots, the rest of the world does not share such a view, and thus the term "Linux desktop" is -- and will remain -- an oxymoron until such time as this silly I-want-to-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality grows up and understands reality.
So yes I would readily say that 80% of new out of box PCs are infected....
That's an absurd number to be flinging around based upon your single buying experience. We've purchased hundreds of Dell's and all came with SP2 pre-loaded. Some of the companies we've consulted for have ordered hundreds or thousands of HP's and they came pre-loaded with SP2. IBM does the same. I don't know any companies that buy Gateway but I'm betting they do the same.
Also, if you knew what you were doing, why didn't you enable the default firewall that came with Windows XP RTM before attaching to the 'net to install SP2? It's not as good of a firewall as the one in SP2, but it's much better than a wide-open machine. It would seem you're a victim of your own ignorance or laziness far more than Microsoft is at fault.
Average user is too dumb to add execute permission to something.
Oh really? Is the average user too dumb to follow this simple email below?
----------------
"Hello there. We have attempted to process your payment but there appears to be a problem with your account. We've attached a brief presentation to this email explaining how to rectify these problems with your account so payment can proceed in a timely manner.
Please save the file to your hard drive and execute it from the command line. If you have problems executing it, please type "chmod +x filename.sh" and then execute it.
Thank you for your time and atention in this matter, and we appreciate your business."
Attached file: filename.sh This file has been certified virus free by McAffee Anti-Virus Scanner. --------------------
Now, if you think the above scenario wouldn't happen by the millions, you're smoking some particularly good weed there, bub. This is how phishers get into things and they're very successful at it. What you're failing to grasp here is that the user doesn't need to know how to perform the operation. They only need to be gullible enough to follow instructions. Unfortunately, the more gullible they are, the less likely they are to recognize the threat such an email would pose to their system.
Gullibility is not something restricted to Windows users.
windows is not secure by default for a typical end user that doesn't know much about security there is no argument
And these same clueless end users are supposed to love the easy-to-use, totally intuitive, absolutely-not-cryptic Unix way of doing things so much that, if everyone would just adopt Linux, security would take care of itself.
Is it just me or does anyone else see the silliness of the above argument? Windows is not the problem with security any more than Linux. What's lacking here is something that's easy to use and flexible/powerful and secure. What we want is something with the simple user interface of a television (on/off, channel, volume, and that's about it) but we want the functionality of an I-need-eight-remotes-and-an-AV-consultant-to-run-t his-thing home theater setup.
Personally, I think this form of contradictory nirvana simply cannot exist. If you make Linux easier to use and more accessible to the general public, it must lose either some of its security lustre, some of its flexibility, or some of both. Yet this very thing that would allow Linux to reach the mass market is what the uber-Geek/. Linux heads consistently rail against, right after they finish their rant about how the only reason Linux isn't succeeding on the desktop is because Microsoft is somehow holding them down.
Folks, the weak link here is the human, not the software.
I'm not sure what Microsoft is shipping in its Windows XP boxes anymore, not having ever purchased a retail version of it. However, if you're buying a PC preloaded with Windows, you are almost certain to find SP2 already installed. SP2 fixes a raft of security holes, turns on automatic updates, and, as a bonus, turns on the firewall that was (by default) off on XP RTM and XP SP1.
I'd wager that the vast, overwhelming majority of (legal) Windows XP installations came on machines preloaded with Windows. Given that, your fears of "unpatched" boxes being loaded today seems a bit of an exaggeration.
The biggest security threat these days is users opening worm-laden attachments, despite mountains of FAQ's, instructions, README.TXT, co-worker horror stories, and other forms of documentation, all warning of the dire implications of opening up that oh-so-inviting attachment claiming to have pictures of Paris Hilton's hoo-ha.
The biggest threat to security these days isn't in the OS anymore, it's mounted between the keyboard and the chair. In this respect, Linux (or any *nix for that matter) can be considered more secure than Windows, but only until a competent administrator restricts local users to non-admin-equivalent accounts. Then things rapidly return to something amazingly close to equality.
The corollary would be to give root-level privileges to common users and see how long the vaunted *nix security model holds up. Hint: it isn't nearly as long as we'd like. You're just one shell-script attachment away from disaster when a user gets an email instructing them to save the attachment off, chmod +x it, and execute it, not knowing it contains the ever-useful "rm -rf" command inside. You don't believe that a user would actually do something so stupid as to execute commands outlined in an email body? What have you been smoking lately...of course they would. If *nix ever became as ubiquitous as Windows is now, it would assuredly happen, I'll set my watch and warrant on it.
What they're doing is creating two code paths. One for Intel processors, one for everyone else.
But that begs the amazingly huge question: why is Intel only looking for the "GenuineIntel" attribute? It's trivial to simply test to see whether such capabilities exist on the chip. Even more puzzling, why not let the developer choose "Intel Optimizations" or "Generic Optimizations" at compile time? With Intel compiler, if you select the Intel optimizations, you don't get them if your target platform is anything other than an Intel chip.
How would you feel if you bought a system advertized as a 3GHz P4 but found out it only ran at 1.6GHz when you ran Linux, requiring Windows XP to run the full 3GHz? You'd be outraged, especially if such behavior wasn't clearly spelled out to you beforehand. Intel clearly has kept this more or less under wraps (until now) because practically nobody disassembles code anymore.
They're not unoptimizing for AMD because they're not specifically looking for AMD. They're ARE optimizing only for intel. Period.
And they're optimizing for Intel in the most obtuse manner you can possibly imagine: by looking for a patented attribute that nobody but Intel can have. The compiler could quite easily test for any number of conditions, including setting things up for MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3. It's tantamount to saying "I didn't steal that, it was just laying there, looking like nobody owned it." Sorry, Intel doesn't play the poor, downtrodden, misunderstood altruist angle too well. It's been too busy threatening Compaq with holding back CPU shipments if Compaq started selling AMD chips to brush up on those acting skills I guess.
You can keep right on claiming that Intel is just an innocent participant in this whole affair, but if you have a shred of morality in you, you know this isn't the case. Intel isn't (and shouldn't be) legally required to support a competitor's product, but this kind of behavior can't help but strengthen the case that Intel is doing all sorts of marginally-legal things to keep AMD down. But, when your pet NetBurst architecture runs out of steam so spectacularly, and when your compeitition's chips are beating the crap out of your flagship CPU's, I guess Intel has to stoop to these kinds of thuggish tactics to retain it's market dominance.
Not true. With the current eye-candy-filled websites, Flash animations, animated ads, etc., a 300MHz P2 will slow to a crawl. Don't forget movies (like movie trailers), P2P apps, etc.
I'm sorry to disagree with you but I must. A 300MHz P-II with 512MB of RAM and a good AGP 4X video card will not slow to a crawl during any of the above activities. In fact, the minimum specifications for software decoding of a DVD MPEG-2 bitstream is a 233MHz P-II. The slowdowns you're describing are either (a) greatly exaggerated or (b) easily fixable with a decent video card, probably one costing less than $75.
Also, if you're like me, you will have lots of browser and application windows open at once, consuming a lot of memory. My 2.4GHz P4 with 512MB is already terribly slow when changing windows or workspaces.
Again, I believe you're either exaggerating or having issues with another portion of your system. For example, one of our in-house-built Linux servers is running an Athlon 2500+ with 512MB of RAM on Fedora Core 4. Running X on this system isn't snappy at all. Why? Because it's using a 16MB PCI video card, that's why! You might try to blame this on the CPU or RAM, but it's eight-tenths the fault of the video card and two-tenths the fault of just how old and outdated the entire XWindows system is.
Further, if you're one to keep a ton of things open and running all the time, and these things are consuming lots of resources, you do not fit the mold you earlier described, namely that of a user browsing a bit here and there, composing a document or two, or answering an email. Therefore your point of bringing this up is...what?
That's all well and good if you're a government researcher with access to an Itanium-based supercomputer. But the rest of us don't spend our time testing nuclear warheads; we're just reading email, surfing the web, working on office documents, etc.
Very true. And for that kind of person even a 300MHz Pentium-II with 256MB of RAM would do nicely. However, there are those of us who do CAD work, signal propagation simulations, and -- above all -- gaming. Itanium can do very well in these situations, to the point of overkill.
Also, don't constrain yourself into considering IA64 and Itanium to be the same thing. They are now, but they don't have to be and originally weren't planned to be. IA64 could have been implemented in a wide variety of chips, many much less expensive than the current Itanium. Intel wanted IA64 to become the x86 of the next generation, both from an architectual and a marketing perspective. IA64 would've freed us from the embarrassing limitation of the old x86 design (limitations we are working around today but they are still work-arounds). And, as a handy side-effect, AMD couldn't clone IA64 like it did with x86. AMD's only choice would've been a clean-room reverse engineering of IA64. AMD had no such funds (and still has none) for such a monumental undertaking. It would've left Intel completely and totally in the driver's seat for a long, long time. Thank God it didn't happen.
It would seem you do not understand what's going on here. Intel isn't under any obligation to optimize for AMD, nor should they be. However, what is going on is Intel's compiler is generating code that checks to see if you've got a GenuineIntel chip in the socket. If you do, your code makes maximal use of MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3.
If you don't have a GenuineIntel chip in your machine, the code executes a completely different set of instructions that ignores all of the above speed-enhancing options regardless of whether they are present in your AMD CPU or not.
Intel is doing the exact inverse of what you claim: they aren't optimizing for Intel, they're unoptimizing for AMD.
To make a it a bit plainer, how would you feel if Intel's compiler generated GenuineIntel code cleanly but inserted wait loops (for no good damned reason) in all other code? The wait loops would effectively kill performance in competing processors even though those same CPU's could run the GenuineIntel code without the loops if Intel's compiler weren't so ridiculous.
Keeping the pipeline "decently full" isn't just dependent on the compiler, you know. You need to have the right kind of operations, operations that can be made parellel in the first place. Fluid simulation, finite-element stress analysis, nuclear warhead testing simulation, galaxy formation...all of these types of calculations are fairly easy to make parallel and will keep the Itanium pipes running quite efficiently with Intel's VLIW compiler. If you doubt this, just look at some of the benchmarks you can get out of Itanium's running such code. It really is a good architecture working with a good compiler. Nothing's perfect, but it's simply not the dog you claim it to be.
Given the absolutely incredible performance you can obtain from properly-compiled VLIW code, I'd say "big mistake" is about the worst adjective you could apply. Itanium is a great processor in search of software, nothing more, nothing less.
Sure, an Itanium will run all your existing 32-bit stuff...in compatibility mode, which means you get performance akin to a 300MHz Pentium-II on your $2000 CPU. Remind me again why I'm supposed to buy Itanium?
But to return to seriousness again for a moment, the Itanium isn't pitched at mainstream anymore, and it's debatable whether it ever was. It's an entirely new ISA -- and a very good one at that -- and software developers just didn't see a good reason to jump on it when cheap x86 CPU's were selling like hotcakes.
Intel would've loved to have forced the entire industry to move to IA64 years ago. If it had done so before the Athlon XP ever hit the scene, it's possible the chip giant could have pulled it off. However, with the advent of the Athlon XP (and MP's as well), if Intel abandoned x86, AMD would be there to pick up the pieces, giving customers the option of (a) continued use of their paid-for apps and paid-for OS's on a cheap, fast, x86 chip or (b) loss of all practical use of your 32-bit apps and OS's, total rewrites and recompilations of all core software bits, all on a $2,000 CPU. It's quite clear why Intel didn't try to do such a stupid thing.
So, on the one hand, we can thank AMD for giving us cheap, fast CPU's that run pretty much whatever you want these days. On the other hand, we can thank AMD for keeping us stuck on x86 to begin with, for without AMD we'd almost certainly all be on IA64 today. But, since I like competition, I can say I'm extremely glad things turned out the way they did. IA64 would've been the death-knell for AMD and any other kind of competition, and Intel would be milking us for all we're worth today if it could.
Actually, most of their bragging rights sit with the Pentium M, built on the PIII architecture. Toms has a great article about it. It beats the Athlon 64 FX and the PIV Extreme Edition. That ain't shabby.
No, it's not shabby, but it is an unfair comparison. Tom's Hardware is comparing an overclocked Pentium-M with a stock-clocked Athlon64 FX. To be specific, TH is showing a 2.56GHz up against a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX. You can't buy a 2.56GHz Pentium-M. It doesn't exist. Unless you're willing to overclock your CPU, the fastest Pentium-M you can buy is only going to get you up to 2.13GHz, and that does not outrun the Athlon64 FX 55.
Now, if you want to talk overclocking, then you need to compare an overclocked Athlon64 FX to an overclocked Pentium-M. Some people are getting 3GHz out of their FX chips, a 15% increase over stock. When you apply a roughly 15% linear scaling of the FX to 3GHz, you'll find it pretty much matches the Pentium-M's performance in the Q3 scores and would substantially exceed it in all other benchmarks. Sure, it won't likely scale linearly with clock speed, but it's probably going to be darn close.
The Pentium-M 765 (2.13GHz) goes for about $600 on Pricewatch. You'll need to either purchase an uber-expensive P-M compatible mobo (very $$$) or purchase a regular Socket478 mobo with an adapter to use it.
The Athlon 64 FX 55 is going for around $799 on Pricewatch, and good Socket939 boards are going for around $125.
The P-M might have a slight advantage in cost when you consider the whole package, but I'm willing to bet it's less than 10% difference. However, the P-M will saddle you with a socket Intel has already abandoned, whereas Socket939 is quite current and will be with us for some time to come. The P-M also has nasty performance in the 3D rendering applications when compared with the P4 and the Athlon64/FX/Opteron line. AND...there's no 64-bit Dothan out there.
When you factor in the availability of dual-core Athlon64's that will outrun even the FX series (in multithreaded apps, natch), the Socket939 just keeps looking better and better.
It is not for the vanquished to dictate the terms of surrender. The Japanese started the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor -- before officially declaring war on the United States. The first bomb that fell had a Japanese serial number on it, and the thing it fell on had a U.S. Navy serial number on it.
They picked the fight, and a few years later they were reaping what they sowed. The moral of the story? If you don't want to be the recipient of a "total war" campaign, don't start one with someone else bigger and more powerful than you.
I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"
I think your question was an eminently reasonable one, and I'm going to answer your question with another question. Put simply, it is this: do you think humans should spend infinity on just this one planet?
There are only two possible answers: yes or no. If your answer is "yes," then there is no argument, however persuasive, that would convince you space travel/exploration is redeemable, and we would just agree to disagree.
On the other hand, if your answer was "no" then it begets another question: if you think we're destined to get off this rock, when should we start?
Ah, now this can't be answered with a simple yes or no. There's a lot of reasoning that can can go on here, but here's my thoughts:
Humans should not plan to spend infinity bound to this one planet. If nothing else happens to us in the meantime, the Sun will eventually expand into a red giant and render Earth uninhabitable. If we haven't figured out how to leave Earth before that, our race is doomed. This is an absolute: if we don't leave, we die. But you could argue that won't happen for a few million years, so why care about it? That would be a perfectly valid argument, albeit one I don't subscribe to.
If you believe there is other life in the universe, then a failure to expand into the universe would likely consign the human race to a mere niche while E.T. happily reaps the riches of the rest of the cosmos. And it puts in a poor position to defend ourselves should an alien race decide to wipe us out, since said race would have expanded themselves and have the resources of multiple planets and/or star systems to draw from.
But above all, the reason to leave is because there are untold riches in the form of resources out there. There are more metals in just a few asteroids than all that's been mined since the dawn of humanity. Solar power beamed back to Earth by microwave could finally provide this planet with clean, cheap, effectively infinite power. Microgravity and low gravity could provide us with immensely strong yet lightweight materials. The list of things is as boundless as the universe.
Sure, we can do *some* of these things on Earth, but sooner or later it's going to cost more to extract increasingly-scarce resources from our planet. We need a plan to continue the development of our culture and race when we get to that point, and expanding outwards is the only answer available.
But the first step is getting there -- "there" meaning space in general. Earth hasn't had a viable "space program" since the sixties, when we were moving in leaps and bounds. There's been almost nothing new in the development of one of the most important components of space travel: propulsion. Why? Because nobody's going into space anymore, just LEO. It's a circular argument; propulsion research isn't important because nobody's going anywhere, but nobody's going anywhere because propulsion is so primitive and expensive.
We must break this useless cycle. The results will not be visible for a long time, perhaps longer than you or I will be on this globe. But they will eventually show massive returns just as sure as Columbus's voyage to the New World did. But if we never start, never giving space travel the "kickstart" it had (but lost) in the sixties, we're doomed to just stay in this permanent feedback loop where nothing changes because, well, nothing changes. That form of stagnation is beneath us as a race. We can do better, and we should.
Look, all of these comparisons of XYZ Office versus Microsoft Office are rather pointless. Does MS Office do anything so amazingly special that it can't be done by Open Office? Nope. Does Microsoft charge a lot for it compared to Open Office? Yup. Can you get pretty much whatever you want done with Open Office? Yup. But none of that matters.
What matters is not whether the apps will let you compose documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That's pedantic, and none of these suites could call themselves suites if they couldn't do that. What's lacking here is compatibility with the rest of the Microsoft world, and that's where Open Office falls down hard.
Can Open Office flawlessly open any Microsoft document? Well, that depends. Does the document contain macros or any of that other fancy shmancy crap that Microsoft has rammed into their documents for the last decade? If it does, you can bet Open Office will have trouble with it of some sort. Ditto for formatting. Ditto ditto for embedded linked data. Do many users use this functionality? No, but tons of third-party applications do, and they all break real good when you use something other than gen-you-wine Microsoft Word to open.DOC files. Same thing goes for.XLS,.MDB, and.PPT.
To be sure, none of this is the fault of the guys at Open Office. They have created a fantastic program that can get everything done you might want to do...so long as you don't want to exchange files with the other 98% of the world that uses The Real Thing. It doesn't matter how good Open Office is, the first time you either (a) can't properly open a file sent to you by an MS Office user or (b) someone with MS Office can't open a file you sent to them, all of that open-source goodness is worthless. Like it or not, Microsoft has 98% of the productivity suite market, and their file formats remain stubbornly closed, preventing 100% compatibility.
Until someone gets 100% compatibility with all MS document formats (and until all popular third-party apps don't go batshit when trying to install.DOC dynamic links for programs other than Word, etc.), Open Office is going to be only for the very brave, the very stupid, or the very solitary.
The nice thing here is, the day something comes out with 100% compatiblity (and MS is potentially going to help this out once Office switches to an XML format), MS Office is doomed. There would be no way in hell MS could sustain a $600 price point against a $50 (or free!) alternative that has all the same useful bells and whistles.
The reason we don't have this is because, in the USA, the crooks are writing our laws.
As opposed to the rest of the world, where the laws are written by crooks in Parliament, juntas, dictatorships, and caliphates. Don't think the U.S. has a monopoly on crooked politicians. In fact, the term "crooked politician" is effectively redundant all by itself, just like "crooked lawyer."
I'm going to respond to this on a per-idea basis, you write really good responses =D
Thank you, so do you. It's refreshing to "speak" with someone who can articulate their ideas without descending into dogmatic zealotry. It's such a rare event around here.
I didn't argue this! I don't know why you're fighting me on ideals that I make no mention of.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I'm not necessarily fighting you, I'm fighting the idea put forth in the argument. If it came across as combative against you, I must apologize, that was not the intent. It was, however, the intent to fully explore the morality of the issues being presented.
I stopped right there, because it was going to run into your argument that I'm somehow advocating true piracy, and that people that can't afford something should get it for free. I didn't say that
Then perhaps I misunderstood you, because that's what I thought you were putting forth.
I merely made mention of a very select group where this is a reality, and meant it to say that the *IAA shouldn't be using them in their loss reports
On this we are in total agreement, just as the BSA shouldn't use all pirated copies of, say, MS Office as if they were all lost sales. I have eight home-based PC's, all of which have MS Office on them for convenience's sake. I can only use one of them at a time, however, so I obviously haven't bought eight copies (I did buy one, though). If I were audited, the BSA could say I had seven pirated uses. However, if I had no choice other than to buy them or not have them, I'd not have them and make do with the inconvenience.
You're preaching to the wrong crowd, the same applies to me (albeit I'm still in college). I may buy software because it's the right thing to do, but more often than not it's the pride in owning a shiny CD with a non-generated key, and a license to use it.
Not to mention the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you call customer support for an issue and know you can actually expect to get support. Moral issues aside, that's one of the biggest reasons I can think of to purchase the stuff you might have pirated in the past.
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1. As I stated in my last post, I'm fully aware of user stupidity. That does NOT invalidate the value of having good security systems.
We are not in disagreement here. However, you're assuming that having good security systems equals having good security. That is a non sequitur. You can have wonderful security tools, but without good knowledge of how to use those tools, they are essentially useless. Is the default firewall with FC4 good? Absolutely, but it's fantastically easy to screw it up if you don't know what you're doing. The default firewall for XP SP2 is very good as well, but it's also easy to screw up if you don't know what you're doing. For its part, however, Windows does at least attempt to warn you if you're doing something stupid, whereas iptables will remain quite mute if you do something that will make your box a hacker paradise. It's usability that matters here, not ultimate capability. Having a 2000hp engine is rather useless if the driver can't figure out how to start the car.
2. I accept that you don't blame UNIX, but you go on to say that Windows is not responsible for its poor security. That's assinine. Windows, given that they cater to a particularly retarded genre of computer user, should not have its users dancing over razor blades and hot coals.
As opposed to *nix, which only caters to a specificy uber-breed of user that understands awk, sed, and grep. Sure, there are advantages to restricting your user base, and if *nix wants to stay in the I could draft an e-mail to thousands that would tell them that switching from 110v to 220v on their power supply would result in a speed boost. I'm sure there would be plenty of gullible people who would flip that switch, but does that mean that it's just fine to make that switch a huge toggle switch, rather than a small switch behind a steel plate that requires utility and intention to move it?
Depends on your ability to handle support calls. Putting steel plate over said switch will undoubtedly increase your support calls by an order or two of magnitude, all from "a particularly retarded genre of computer user" that expects you to have put such a switch in plain view. Couple your idea of hiding the switch with some obtuse, cryptic documentation (or none at all) as is often the case on *nix systems and you have a recipe for total user frustration. They will give up and go to someone else that doesn't make their lives so miserable when trying to do the most elementary things. If you want to run people away, go right ahead. Just give up on your whole "OSS will take over the world!" mantra while you're doing it.
I never asserted that Windows is impossible to secure, but if you want to start getting into this debate, might I remind you that the OSS model has a demonstrated advantage over closed source solutions. The reasons are vast and numerous, and I don't feel compelled to repeat the lecture here.
Ah, yes...that "million eyeballs" rationale. Now, remind me again why we're still seeing kernel-level security holes found in pieces of Linux code that haven't been touched or modified since kernel 2.0? Oh, yes, I forgot...it's because millions of eyeballs have been staring at the code for years and all of them have consistently been missing this stuff right in front of them.
Sorry to burst your bubble, bub, but your theory remains just that: theory. It is far from provable fact as you assert. In fact, there's ample evidence to show that OSS is not demonstrably better than close models when it comes to the number of bugs and exploits found over time. The one -- and only one -- advantage most OSS has over closed source is time to patch. Most OSS packages are patched almost immediately after a vuln is found, whereas closed source usually takes days or weeks -- sometimes months or never. Of course, the OSS guys are missing something rather huge, namely regression testing. Closed source commercial software, on the other han
Working in a IT department and buying from Dell all the time I will tell you right now your lying out of your ass about it comming with SP2 unless they changed their policys within the last week.
Managing an IT department that purchases a few hundred Dell boxes a year, I can say without equivocation that Dell has been preloading SP2 for at least since January 2005. If you want to be so amazingly stupid as to call me a liar, I can happily arrange for a purchase order summary, complete with dates and OS load specifications, to be faxed to the number of your choice. Care to shut up now, or do you plan on swallowing your knee so soon after chowing down on your foot?
And no firewall wasnt enabled as it was on a LAN with 4 other machines that had firewall already on.
Then it's your own fucking stupid fault for not enabling it before attaching any network cabling, and it's your own fucking stupid fault for having compromised machines behind your goddamed firewall. THat's the only explanation for having machines infected when you're behind a hardware firewall unless you've got (a) public IP's with unfiltered forwarding through your firewall or (b) NAT with forwarding to your specific IP.
In fact, your entire story seems to fantastical that it's clear you're either grossly incompetent or you're just making shit up to make Windows sound bad. I've been around some pretty shitty IT departments in my 20+ year career, but I've never yet heard of anyone so colossally stupid as what you describe yourself doing. Thanks for proving my point: the fault lies with the equipment between the keyboard and the chair. This means you. Go get a fucking clue and quit blaming Microsoft for your fucking stupidity. Ass.
Perhaps you failed to grasp the concept that my example was a quick and dirty one. A competent phisher would've constructed the instructions such that your most common distribution (RH? FC? Debian? SuSE?) is covered in the instructions.
It's not so hard, and if you'd just get out of your stubborn "not MY OS!" streak you'd see that. Haven't you ever had to walk someone through a relatively simple procedure over the phone or via email? How hard is it to write a foolproof way to delete all files on your system in less than five bullet points? It's not that hard at all, which means it could be easily put in an email and mass-mailed everywhere. And people by the thousands, perhaps millions, would do it. And there'd be no security on God's Green Earth that could stop them from doing it if they're so stupid as to be running as a root equivalent.
So much for the vaunted Unix security model, but the fault is not with Unix, it's with the human. The best designed tool in the world cannot prevent a stupid human from abusing it, not unless you're prepared to inhumanly limit what the tool can do, thus limiting its utility. Ergo, poor Windows security is not the fault of Windows any more than poor Linux security is the fault of Linux. Microsoft may be putting poor defaults on their out-of-box configs, but that doesn't mean Windows is impossible to secure. Indeed, if you're willing to spend the time and have the knowledge, you can make any Window system as secure as any Linux system.
If you don't believe me, just try hacking www.microsoft.com. Let me know when you succeed in breaching servers so secure that they weather thousands of attacks per day by some of the most competent hackers on the planet. If Microsoft can secure their systems against all the Microsoft-haters out there itching to put a notch in their belt, what's stopping you from doing the same? Laziness? Ignorance? It certainly isn't the OS, that's for sure.
A system is only as secure as the weakest component. You can put as many locks on your windows as you want, but unless you remember to lock the door to your house all these other measures are utterly useless.
/. Linux users want their security and flexibility and are willing to give up some usability in order to get that. Unfortunately for the frothing zealots, the rest of the world does not share such a view, and thus the term "Linux desktop" is -- and will remain -- an oxymoron until such time as this silly I-want-to-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality grows up and understands reality.
I'll ignore the ad hominem "fanboi" attack and try to focus on what passes for your idea of a point.
I'll take your analogy and up you one: a system is only as secure as its most idiotic administrator. You can put as many locks on your windows and doors and chimneys as you want, but unless the homeowner understands how to operate the locks all this security is utterly useless. The analogy should be clear: within a standard Linux distribution are all the tools I need to make a completely and totally impenetrable system. However, if I don't know where these tools are, what they're called, what their syntax is, and how they all contribute to the overall security of the system, they might as well not be there at all.
Windows is a fantastic example of this. Within a standard Windows XP or 2003 box are all the tools you need to make the box secure and utterly impenetrable (IPSec port filtering, security policies, the built-in firewall, etc.). However, the vast majority of Windows users are utterly unaware of the existence of said tools and, for the most part, wouldn't know what to do with them if they did know what to do with them.
Making a "smarter" OS is folly in this circumstance. Lock it down too tight and users (and some admins) will disable the protection just so they can get things done. Make it too loose and your false security is just that: false security. Strike the middle ground and you're neither fantastically secure nor fantastically flexible. Security is risk, and it is the polar opposite of convenience. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.
These are immutable concepts when viewed on a macroscopic scale. Oh, sure, you can point to the odd design win that is both totally secure and eminently functional, but always at the cost of flexibility. It may do it well, it may be easy to work with, and it may do it securely, but it's only going to do one or two things (example: a typical television).
Remember how fast Bill Gates switched from "The Internet is for loosers" to "We Invented the Internet" ?
My God! Microsoft invented the Internet? Has someone notified Al Gore? He's sure to be outraged that someone is claiming credit for his invention.
P.S. yes, I know Al Gore's claim is apocryphal. It's a joke. Laugh.
So yes I would readily say that 80% of new out of box PCs are infected....
That's an absurd number to be flinging around based upon your single buying experience. We've purchased hundreds of Dell's and all came with SP2 pre-loaded. Some of the companies we've consulted for have ordered hundreds or thousands of HP's and they came pre-loaded with SP2. IBM does the same. I don't know any companies that buy Gateway but I'm betting they do the same.
Also, if you knew what you were doing, why didn't you enable the default firewall that came with Windows XP RTM before attaching to the 'net to install SP2? It's not as good of a firewall as the one in SP2, but it's much better than a wide-open machine. It would seem you're a victim of your own ignorance or laziness far more than Microsoft is at fault.
Average user is too dumb to add execute permission to something.
Oh really? Is the average user too dumb to follow this simple email below?
----------------
"Hello there. We have attempted to process your payment but there appears to be a problem with your account. We've attached a brief presentation to this email explaining how to rectify these problems with your account so payment can proceed in a timely manner.
Please save the file to your hard drive and execute it from the command line. If you have problems executing it, please type "chmod +x filename.sh" and then execute it.
Thank you for your time and atention in this matter, and we appreciate your business."
Attached file: filename.sh
This file has been certified virus free by McAffee Anti-Virus Scanner.
--------------------
Now, if you think the above scenario wouldn't happen by the millions, you're smoking some particularly good weed there, bub. This is how phishers get into things and they're very successful at it. What you're failing to grasp here is that the user doesn't need to know how to perform the operation. They only need to be gullible enough to follow instructions. Unfortunately, the more gullible they are, the less likely they are to recognize the threat such an email would pose to their system.
Gullibility is not something restricted to Windows users.
You're very trig, my little cully. Long days, pleasant nights to you.
windows is not secure by default for a typical end user that doesn't know much about security there is no argument
t his-thing home theater setup.
/. Linux heads consistently rail against, right after they finish their rant about how the only reason Linux isn't succeeding on the desktop is because Microsoft is somehow holding them down.
And these same clueless end users are supposed to love the easy-to-use, totally intuitive, absolutely-not-cryptic Unix way of doing things so much that, if everyone would just adopt Linux, security would take care of itself.
Is it just me or does anyone else see the silliness of the above argument? Windows is not the problem with security any more than Linux. What's lacking here is something that's easy to use and flexible/powerful and secure. What we want is something with the simple user interface of a television (on/off, channel, volume, and that's about it) but we want the functionality of an I-need-eight-remotes-and-an-AV-consultant-to-run-
Personally, I think this form of contradictory nirvana simply cannot exist. If you make Linux easier to use and more accessible to the general public, it must lose either some of its security lustre, some of its flexibility, or some of both. Yet this very thing that would allow Linux to reach the mass market is what the uber-Geek
Folks, the weak link here is the human, not the software.
WinXP is still a sitting duck out of the box.
I'm not sure what Microsoft is shipping in its Windows XP boxes anymore, not having ever purchased a retail version of it. However, if you're buying a PC preloaded with Windows, you are almost certain to find SP2 already installed. SP2 fixes a raft of security holes, turns on automatic updates, and, as a bonus, turns on the firewall that was (by default) off on XP RTM and XP SP1.
I'd wager that the vast, overwhelming majority of (legal) Windows XP installations came on machines preloaded with Windows. Given that, your fears of "unpatched" boxes being loaded today seems a bit of an exaggeration.
The biggest security threat these days is users opening worm-laden attachments, despite mountains of FAQ's, instructions, README.TXT, co-worker horror stories, and other forms of documentation, all warning of the dire implications of opening up that oh-so-inviting attachment claiming to have pictures of Paris Hilton's hoo-ha.
The biggest threat to security these days isn't in the OS anymore, it's mounted between the keyboard and the chair. In this respect, Linux (or any *nix for that matter) can be considered more secure than Windows, but only until a competent administrator restricts local users to non-admin-equivalent accounts. Then things rapidly return to something amazingly close to equality.
The corollary would be to give root-level privileges to common users and see how long the vaunted *nix security model holds up. Hint: it isn't nearly as long as we'd like. You're just one shell-script attachment away from disaster when a user gets an email instructing them to save the attachment off, chmod +x it, and execute it, not knowing it contains the ever-useful "rm -rf" command inside. You don't believe that a user would actually do something so stupid as to execute commands outlined in an email body? What have you been smoking lately...of course they would. If *nix ever became as ubiquitous as Windows is now, it would assuredly happen, I'll set my watch and warrant on it.
What they're doing is creating two code paths. One for Intel processors, one for everyone else.
But that begs the amazingly huge question: why is Intel only looking for the "GenuineIntel" attribute? It's trivial to simply test to see whether such capabilities exist on the chip. Even more puzzling, why not let the developer choose "Intel Optimizations" or "Generic Optimizations" at compile time? With Intel compiler, if you select the Intel optimizations, you don't get them if your target platform is anything other than an Intel chip.
How would you feel if you bought a system advertized as a 3GHz P4 but found out it only ran at 1.6GHz when you ran Linux, requiring Windows XP to run the full 3GHz? You'd be outraged, especially if such behavior wasn't clearly spelled out to you beforehand. Intel clearly has kept this more or less under wraps (until now) because practically nobody disassembles code anymore.
They're not unoptimizing for AMD because they're not specifically looking for AMD. They're ARE optimizing only for intel. Period.
And they're optimizing for Intel in the most obtuse manner you can possibly imagine: by looking for a patented attribute that nobody but Intel can have. The compiler could quite easily test for any number of conditions, including setting things up for MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3. It's tantamount to saying "I didn't steal that, it was just laying there, looking like nobody owned it." Sorry, Intel doesn't play the poor, downtrodden, misunderstood altruist angle too well. It's been too busy threatening Compaq with holding back CPU shipments if Compaq started selling AMD chips to brush up on those acting skills I guess.
You can keep right on claiming that Intel is just an innocent participant in this whole affair, but if you have a shred of morality in you, you know this isn't the case. Intel isn't (and shouldn't be) legally required to support a competitor's product, but this kind of behavior can't help but strengthen the case that Intel is doing all sorts of marginally-legal things to keep AMD down. But, when your pet NetBurst architecture runs out of steam so spectacularly, and when your compeitition's chips are beating the crap out of your flagship CPU's, I guess Intel has to stoop to these kinds of thuggish tactics to retain it's market dominance.
Not true. With the current eye-candy-filled websites, Flash animations, animated ads, etc., a 300MHz P2 will slow to a crawl. Don't forget movies (like movie trailers), P2P apps, etc.
I'm sorry to disagree with you but I must. A 300MHz P-II with 512MB of RAM and a good AGP 4X video card will not slow to a crawl during any of the above activities. In fact, the minimum specifications for software decoding of a DVD MPEG-2 bitstream is a 233MHz P-II. The slowdowns you're describing are either (a) greatly exaggerated or (b) easily fixable with a decent video card, probably one costing less than $75.
Also, if you're like me, you will have lots of browser and application windows open at once, consuming a lot of memory. My 2.4GHz P4 with 512MB is already terribly slow when changing windows or workspaces.
Again, I believe you're either exaggerating or having issues with another portion of your system. For example, one of our in-house-built Linux servers is running an Athlon 2500+ with 512MB of RAM on Fedora Core 4. Running X on this system isn't snappy at all. Why? Because it's using a 16MB PCI video card, that's why! You might try to blame this on the CPU or RAM, but it's eight-tenths the fault of the video card and two-tenths the fault of just how old and outdated the entire XWindows system is.
Further, if you're one to keep a ton of things open and running all the time, and these things are consuming lots of resources, you do not fit the mold you earlier described, namely that of a user browsing a bit here and there, composing a document or two, or answering an email. Therefore your point of bringing this up is...what?
That's all well and good if you're a government researcher with access to an Itanium-based supercomputer. But the rest of us don't spend our time testing nuclear warheads; we're just reading email, surfing the web, working on office documents, etc.
Very true. And for that kind of person even a 300MHz Pentium-II with 256MB of RAM would do nicely. However, there are those of us who do CAD work, signal propagation simulations, and -- above all -- gaming. Itanium can do very well in these situations, to the point of overkill.
Also, don't constrain yourself into considering IA64 and Itanium to be the same thing. They are now, but they don't have to be and originally weren't planned to be. IA64 could have been implemented in a wide variety of chips, many much less expensive than the current Itanium. Intel wanted IA64 to become the x86 of the next generation, both from an architectual and a marketing perspective. IA64 would've freed us from the embarrassing limitation of the old x86 design (limitations we are working around today but they are still work-arounds). And, as a handy side-effect, AMD couldn't clone IA64 like it did with x86. AMD's only choice would've been a clean-room reverse engineering of IA64. AMD had no such funds (and still has none) for such a monumental undertaking. It would've left Intel completely and totally in the driver's seat for a long, long time. Thank God it didn't happen.
It would seem you do not understand what's going on here. Intel isn't under any obligation to optimize for AMD, nor should they be. However, what is going on is Intel's compiler is generating code that checks to see if you've got a GenuineIntel chip in the socket. If you do, your code makes maximal use of MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3.
If you don't have a GenuineIntel chip in your machine, the code executes a completely different set of instructions that ignores all of the above speed-enhancing options regardless of whether they are present in your AMD CPU or not.
Intel is doing the exact inverse of what you claim: they aren't optimizing for Intel, they're unoptimizing for AMD.
To make a it a bit plainer, how would you feel if Intel's compiler generated GenuineIntel code cleanly but inserted wait loops (for no good damned reason) in all other code? The wait loops would effectively kill performance in competing processors even though those same CPU's could run the GenuineIntel code without the loops if Intel's compiler weren't so ridiculous.
Keeping the pipeline "decently full" isn't just dependent on the compiler, you know. You need to have the right kind of operations, operations that can be made parellel in the first place. Fluid simulation, finite-element stress analysis, nuclear warhead testing simulation, galaxy formation...all of these types of calculations are fairly easy to make parallel and will keep the Itanium pipes running quite efficiently with Intel's VLIW compiler. If you doubt this, just look at some of the benchmarks you can get out of Itanium's running such code. It really is a good architecture working with a good compiler. Nothing's perfect, but it's simply not the dog you claim it to be.
Given the absolutely incredible performance you can obtain from properly-compiled VLIW code, I'd say "big mistake" is about the worst adjective you could apply. Itanium is a great processor in search of software, nothing more, nothing less.
Sure, an Itanium will run all your existing 32-bit stuff...in compatibility mode, which means you get performance akin to a 300MHz Pentium-II on your $2000 CPU. Remind me again why I'm supposed to buy Itanium?
But to return to seriousness again for a moment, the Itanium isn't pitched at mainstream anymore, and it's debatable whether it ever was. It's an entirely new ISA -- and a very good one at that -- and software developers just didn't see a good reason to jump on it when cheap x86 CPU's were selling like hotcakes.
Intel would've loved to have forced the entire industry to move to IA64 years ago. If it had done so before the Athlon XP ever hit the scene, it's possible the chip giant could have pulled it off. However, with the advent of the Athlon XP (and MP's as well), if Intel abandoned x86, AMD would be there to pick up the pieces, giving customers the option of (a) continued use of their paid-for apps and paid-for OS's on a cheap, fast, x86 chip or (b) loss of all practical use of your 32-bit apps and OS's, total rewrites and recompilations of all core software bits, all on a $2,000 CPU. It's quite clear why Intel didn't try to do such a stupid thing.
So, on the one hand, we can thank AMD for giving us cheap, fast CPU's that run pretty much whatever you want these days. On the other hand, we can thank AMD for keeping us stuck on x86 to begin with, for without AMD we'd almost certainly all be on IA64 today. But, since I like competition, I can say I'm extremely glad things turned out the way they did. IA64 would've been the death-knell for AMD and any other kind of competition, and Intel would be milking us for all we're worth today if it could.
Actually, most of their bragging rights sit with the Pentium M, built on the PIII architecture. Toms has a great article about it. It beats the Athlon 64 FX and the PIV Extreme Edition. That ain't shabby.
No, it's not shabby, but it is an unfair comparison. Tom's Hardware is comparing an overclocked Pentium-M with a stock-clocked Athlon64 FX. To be specific, TH is showing a 2.56GHz up against a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX. You can't buy a 2.56GHz Pentium-M. It doesn't exist. Unless you're willing to overclock your CPU, the fastest Pentium-M you can buy is only going to get you up to 2.13GHz, and that does not outrun the Athlon64 FX 55.
Now, if you want to talk overclocking, then you need to compare an overclocked Athlon64 FX to an overclocked Pentium-M. Some people are getting 3GHz out of their FX chips, a 15% increase over stock. When you apply a roughly 15% linear scaling of the FX to 3GHz, you'll find it pretty much matches the Pentium-M's performance in the Q3 scores and would substantially exceed it in all other benchmarks. Sure, it won't likely scale linearly with clock speed, but it's probably going to be darn close.
The Pentium-M 765 (2.13GHz) goes for about $600 on Pricewatch. You'll need to either purchase an uber-expensive P-M compatible mobo (very $$$) or purchase a regular Socket478 mobo with an adapter to use it.
The Athlon 64 FX 55 is going for around $799 on Pricewatch, and good Socket939 boards are going for around $125.
The P-M might have a slight advantage in cost when you consider the whole package, but I'm willing to bet it's less than 10% difference. However, the P-M will saddle you with a socket Intel has already abandoned, whereas Socket939 is quite current and will be with us for some time to come. The P-M also has nasty performance in the 3D rendering applications when compared with the P4 and the Athlon64/FX/Opteron line. AND...there's no 64-bit Dothan out there.
When you factor in the availability of dual-core Athlon64's that will outrun even the FX series (in multithreaded apps, natch), the Socket939 just keeps looking better and better.
It is not for the vanquished to dictate the terms of surrender. The Japanese started the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor -- before officially declaring war on the United States. The first bomb that fell had a Japanese serial number on it, and the thing it fell on had a U.S. Navy serial number on it.
They picked the fight, and a few years later they were reaping what they sowed. The moral of the story? If you don't want to be the recipient of a "total war" campaign, don't start one with someone else bigger and more powerful than you.
I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"
I think your question was an eminently reasonable one, and I'm going to answer your question with another question. Put simply, it is this: do you think humans should spend infinity on just this one planet?
There are only two possible answers: yes or no. If your answer is "yes," then there is no argument, however persuasive, that would convince you space travel/exploration is redeemable, and we would just agree to disagree.
On the other hand, if your answer was "no" then it begets another question: if you think we're destined to get off this rock, when should we start?
Ah, now this can't be answered with a simple yes or no. There's a lot of reasoning that can can go on here, but here's my thoughts:
Humans should not plan to spend infinity bound to this one planet. If nothing else happens to us in the meantime, the Sun will eventually expand into a red giant and render Earth uninhabitable. If we haven't figured out how to leave Earth before that, our race is doomed. This is an absolute: if we don't leave, we die. But you could argue that won't happen for a few million years, so why care about it? That would be a perfectly valid argument, albeit one I don't subscribe to.
If you believe there is other life in the universe, then a failure to expand into the universe would likely consign the human race to a mere niche while E.T. happily reaps the riches of the rest of the cosmos. And it puts in a poor position to defend ourselves should an alien race decide to wipe us out, since said race would have expanded themselves and have the resources of multiple planets and/or star systems to draw from.
But above all, the reason to leave is because there are untold riches in the form of resources out there. There are more metals in just a few asteroids than all that's been mined since the dawn of humanity. Solar power beamed back to Earth by microwave could finally provide this planet with clean, cheap, effectively infinite power. Microgravity and low gravity could provide us with immensely strong yet lightweight materials. The list of things is as boundless as the universe.
Sure, we can do *some* of these things on Earth, but sooner or later it's going to cost more to extract increasingly-scarce resources from our planet. We need a plan to continue the development of our culture and race when we get to that point, and expanding outwards is the only answer available.
But the first step is getting there -- "there" meaning space in general. Earth hasn't had a viable "space program" since the sixties, when we were moving in leaps and bounds. There's been almost nothing new in the development of one of the most important components of space travel: propulsion. Why? Because nobody's going into space anymore, just LEO. It's a circular argument; propulsion research isn't important because nobody's going anywhere, but nobody's going anywhere because propulsion is so primitive and expensive.
We must break this useless cycle. The results will not be visible for a long time, perhaps longer than you or I will be on this globe. But they will eventually show massive returns just as sure as Columbus's voyage to the New World did. But if we never start, never giving space travel the "kickstart" it had (but lost) in the sixties, we're doomed to just stay in this permanent feedback loop where nothing changes because, well, nothing changes. That form of stagnation is beneath us as a race. We can do better, and we should.
Look, all of these comparisons of XYZ Office versus Microsoft Office are rather pointless. Does MS Office do anything so amazingly special that it can't be done by Open Office? Nope. Does Microsoft charge a lot for it compared to Open Office? Yup. Can you get pretty much whatever you want done with Open Office? Yup. But none of that matters.
.DOC files. Same thing goes for .XLS, .MDB, and .PPT.
.DOC dynamic links for programs other than Word, etc.), Open Office is going to be only for the very brave, the very stupid, or the very solitary.
What matters is not whether the apps will let you compose documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That's pedantic, and none of these suites could call themselves suites if they couldn't do that. What's lacking here is compatibility with the rest of the Microsoft world, and that's where Open Office falls down hard.
Can Open Office flawlessly open any Microsoft document? Well, that depends. Does the document contain macros or any of that other fancy shmancy crap that Microsoft has rammed into their documents for the last decade? If it does, you can bet Open Office will have trouble with it of some sort. Ditto for formatting. Ditto ditto for embedded linked data. Do many users use this functionality? No, but tons of third-party applications do, and they all break real good when you use something other than gen-you-wine Microsoft Word to open
To be sure, none of this is the fault of the guys at Open Office. They have created a fantastic program that can get everything done you might want to do...so long as you don't want to exchange files with the other 98% of the world that uses The Real Thing. It doesn't matter how good Open Office is, the first time you either (a) can't properly open a file sent to you by an MS Office user or (b) someone with MS Office can't open a file you sent to them, all of that open-source goodness is worthless. Like it or not, Microsoft has 98% of the productivity suite market, and their file formats remain stubbornly closed, preventing 100% compatibility.
Until someone gets 100% compatibility with all MS document formats (and until all popular third-party apps don't go batshit when trying to install
The nice thing here is, the day something comes out with 100% compatiblity (and MS is potentially going to help this out once Office switches to an XML format), MS Office is doomed. There would be no way in hell MS could sustain a $600 price point against a $50 (or free!) alternative that has all the same useful bells and whistles.
Of course, by those standards, most Americans must be addicted to work, sex, and TV as well.
What is this "sex" thing you speak of? I can find no reference to it in any of my emails.
You know, I was going to do the spelling correction bit, but this -
ends up saving Anakin's sole
is priceless.
"Dad, I caught the fish you lost!"
I was thinking more along the lines of:
"Dad, I fixed that hole in your shoe!"
The reason we don't have this is because, in the USA, the crooks are writing our laws.
As opposed to the rest of the world, where the laws are written by crooks in Parliament, juntas, dictatorships, and caliphates. Don't think the U.S. has a monopoly on crooked politicians. In fact, the term "crooked politician" is effectively redundant all by itself, just like "crooked lawyer."
I'm going to respond to this on a per-idea basis, you write really good responses =D
Thank you, so do you. It's refreshing to "speak" with someone who can articulate their ideas without descending into dogmatic zealotry. It's such a rare event around here.
I didn't argue this! I don't know why you're fighting me on ideals that I make no mention of.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I'm not necessarily fighting you, I'm fighting the idea put forth in the argument. If it came across as combative against you, I must apologize, that was not the intent. It was, however, the intent to fully explore the morality of the issues being presented.
I stopped right there, because it was going to run into your argument that I'm somehow advocating true piracy, and that people that can't afford something should get it for free. I didn't say that
Then perhaps I misunderstood you, because that's what I thought you were putting forth.
I merely made mention of a very select group where this is a reality, and meant it to say that the *IAA shouldn't be using them in their loss reports
On this we are in total agreement, just as the BSA shouldn't use all pirated copies of, say, MS Office as if they were all lost sales. I have eight home-based PC's, all of which have MS Office on them for convenience's sake. I can only use one of them at a time, however, so I obviously haven't bought eight copies (I did buy one, though). If I were audited, the BSA could say I had seven pirated uses. However, if I had no choice other than to buy them or not have them, I'd not have them and make do with the inconvenience.
You're preaching to the wrong crowd, the same applies to me (albeit I'm still in college). I may buy software because it's the right thing to do, but more often than not it's the pride in owning a shiny CD with a non-generated key, and a license to use it.
Not to mention the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you call customer support for an issue and know you can actually expect to get support. Moral issues aside, that's one of the biggest reasons I can think of to purchase the stuff you might have pirated in the past.