For a company with next to no prior experience in the console business, no reputation for quality in the console market (or anywhere else according to some people), and with so many people associating their name with Windows 95 crashing in yet another BSOD... Yes, they (Microsoft) have done very well. The fact that the Xbox even made it to the "big three" (PS2 and Gamecube being the other two members) is a testament to its success. Microsoft may have big pockets, but no amount of money can make people buy something (unless you pay them more than they have to pay you, which somewhat defeats the point). Considering where Microsoft started (scratch), making their very first console a relative success considering the competition is a fairly remarkable feat.
Working with web "designers" who have no concept of what is actually possible to realize in standard (X)HTML and CSS is a pain in the ass, though. Especially if one doesn't want to use Javascript.
As proof of this amazing(?) feat of programming, the server still works, at least at this moment in time it's
still serving its page, though slowly. Despite the author's hacky implementation (serving content depending on what port the request is sent through) I think we must congratulate him - few servers survive a slashdotting for this long. Anyone remember the spud server? (there was a real one too.)
In the event that a foreign infiltrator gets onboard, plugs his laptop into the first ethernet outlet he can find, and hacks away, I'd say a firewall would be pretty useful.
Also, the Swedish Army has its own network, very similar to the Internet in construction, called FMIP (think Sweden's DARPAnet here), which this ship could potentially connect to. So a firewall would be a good thing to have in case an attacker got access to that.
If this boat is running anything like the NT systems I used when I was in the army (the Swedish army that is) I'd say it's pretty stable and secure. Windows NT has had quite some time to mature as an operating system and has had most of its bugs fixed by now. Obviously, they won't be connecting these things to the Internet, so no need to worry about hax0rz.
I, for one, welcome our new Swedish Navy Stealth Ship overlords.
Oh, please. There's no such thing as private e-mail, unless by private you mean encrypted. Sending an e-mail is like sending a postcard in terms of security. If you use it for anything you need to keep secret, you make a mistake. Besides, I think it's good that things like this incident are brought out into the open. People (the Mozilla organization) shouldn't get away with being assholes in their dealings with those to whom they owe every bit of thanks, even if that means posting their "private" e-mail.
This is why I like open source software development. Just look at that forum thread. Inside a company like IBM or Microsoft, a debate like this would be kept covered up out of PR fears. Open source developers more often than not do not give a shit about PR (which is a good thing), they just want to make the best possible program. They also don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, getting their salaries lowered, or whatnot. So we get to see the nitty gritty details of intra-project disputes and arguments from the front row, even silly things like what theme ships with Firefox as the default.
In other words, us happy AMD owners are safe. Yay! Unfortunately, IA-64 is so unpopular among consumer users (the ones who are likely to be sloppy with their anti-virus protections and fall victim to this sort of thing) that future viruses for 64-bit Windows will likely be targeting the x86-64.
Great product. Unfortunately, its price is listed at about 10x the "few hundred dollars" the original submitter specified in his posting.
I've found the Canon Canoscan flatbeds do a good job of automatically scanning straight to PDF, only minimal user intervention (hit "enter") is required. There's a special mode for scanning text which enhances contrast, so messy notes and diagrams should be fine, too. The resulting PDF:s are also remarkably small in size for what is essentially a huge bitmap. I've a Canon Canoscan 8000F myself, it's very fast and can do higher DPI's than most people need, and although it might be a bit out of his price range, I'm sure the cheaper models can do the same job nearly as well.
I've a laptop as my main PC, and I can't run Seti on it because that would keep the CPU going, not only reducing the battery life from ~5h to about 1-2h, while keeping the fan running (an annoying noise if there ever was one), but also reducing the lifetime of the battery unit itself significantly, a costly part to replace if you're a student like myself.
By saying essentially that power consumption is nothing to worry about, and that I might as well shut my machine down, you're displaying remarkable ignorance. Open mouth, insert foot.
Actually, I checked before posting just so I wouldn't make an ass of myself like the guy I replied to, and I found (much unsurprisingly) that domainwitheld.com is in fact not owned by anyone at this time.
You think he was stupid, but you're in fact the one who completely missed that the domain name he posted (and which you so conveniently blocked out of your response) is "domainwitheld.com". See those words, "domain witheld"? Meaning he did not disclose the real domain name he used to us, meaning he didn't post it to Slashdot, so it won't be harvested. Do think before you post, next time...
How exactly is FAT not a "real" file system? It's still very widely in use, particularly on devices smaller than 2 GB (digital cameras come to mind). It's still useful because it's so simple, well-known, and easy to implement. That makes it real enough to be "real" to most people with a clue.
My comparison between NTFS and FAT is valid because if you are running Windows, those are the only two filesystems you have to choose between. Comparing NTFS with, for instance, ReiserFS is not really interesting because they're not really alternatives to each other. Unless you choose your operating system based on what filesystems it supports...
I don't think I understand you. I don't use a third party defrag tool, I use the one Microsoft provides, and it works fine. I don't know how NTFS works internally to prevent defragmentation, clearly it does something, because (as everyone with a clue will likely already know) NTFS deals with fragmentation far better than many other file systems, most notably FAT.
As for my "special category" remark, I was merely proactively defending against the massive amounts of "NTFS sucks, my drive is fragmented to death"-themed replies I was expecting. After all, it would be naive of me to assume that just because NTFS works for me, it automatically works for everyone else. There's no good explanation for this, but the easiest way to explain it is that I am simply somehow special and that's why it works for me.:)
It must be pretty damn good if it can outdo NTFS. I have three computers with WinXP (NTFS 5.1) that I run quite a bit of data through on a daily basis, and neither needs to be defragmented very often at all (two of them have never needed defragmentation in more than a year of use). Mind you, I might fall into some special category of people who don't fall victim to fragmentation for some reason. Anyway, my point is, before you make remarks regarding how well this compares to NTFS, and/or how much "Microsoft sucks", consider how well NTFS still holds up considering its age. Another bonus is, I don't risk losing file system integrity if there's a power failure.;)
For all intents and purposes, the probability is zero. Consider that an MD5 signature is 32 bits. That means, there are 2^32 possible values. So the raw probability of two unique sets of data matching the same MD5 signature is 2^-32, about 0.00000002%.
By running applications such as Filemon and Regmon and the Task manager, you can get a pretty clear picture of what a program does or does not do to your system when running it. A good virus scanner and an application-level firewall also come highly recommended.
This does not, of course, eliminate the chance that your mysterious app won't do something bad the 10th, 100th or 1000th time it's run, when you may be less suspecting of foul behaviour. However, I've yet to come across, or hear of any major spreads of such a trojan.
Tell that to the hard-drive manufacturers. They don't accept it, or use in in the industry.
Surely however, you know that's just for marketing reasons. Using MB = 10^6 bytes lets them market hard drives as being bigger, sometimes a LOT bigger, than they really are. Even Windows will use the correct definition when reporting disk sizes...
As a comparison, consider one of the recent 200 GB hard drives. 200*1024^3 - 200*10^9 = 14748364800, 14748364800/1024^3 = 13.74 GB.
So basically, the hard drive manufacturers are cheating customers out of a lot of pr0n storage by using the wrong units... Then again, HDD space is so cheap nowadays, most people could care less.
Anyway, my point is, what the hard drive manufacturers/marketers use has fuck nowt to do with what's "correct" or standardized. If it were the other way around, you can be sure they'd still pick whatever unit made their hard drives seem the biggest...
I would hate to get into a long debate about my foelisting policies, but suffice to say, my foelist is extremely short considering the number of assholes, dickheads and fuckwits there are on Slashdot. Hell, I'm not even in it.
I had mod points yesterday, I regret having wasted them now. But marking someone "foe" automatically gives them a permanent -1 from my POV, so it's just as good.:)
Foelisted for daring to suggest that the bastard known as MiB (along with KiB, GiB, TiB...) is somehow more correct or "better" than the well-known, universally accepted, industry standard MB (kB, GB, TB...).
As another poster has already mentioned, MiB is just a made-up atrocity (it's not even a real ISO standard!) which noone needs or wants.
Now, this seems like a genuinely nice thing to do by Microsoft. I can't wait to see how the Slashdot hordes of RMS fanboys are going to spin it to make Microsoft seem like the bad guy again...
Retail Windows (any variety) on a Vaio or a recent Stinkpad.
Congratulations for placing yourself in the "so l33t I can't spell" camp with that comment. Though I admit, "Stinkpad" is a bit more inventive than "Windoze".
Anyway, I am in fact using Windows XP on a ThinkPad, less than a year old. I wiped the hard drive when I got it, installed Windows XP from scratch, and downloaded the drivers I needed from IBM's website. Everything, including WEP, is working marvelously. Best laptop I ever used.
I would mod you down for posting such bullcrap, but by posting this, I am of course giving up any chance to do so. A shame.
Slashdot Mirror
For a company with next to no prior experience in the console business, no reputation for quality in the console market (or anywhere else according to some people), and with so many people associating their name with Windows 95 crashing in yet another BSOD... Yes, they (Microsoft) have done very well. The fact that the Xbox even made it to the "big three" (PS2 and Gamecube being the other two members) is a testament to its success. Microsoft may have big pockets, but no amount of money can make people buy something (unless you pay them more than they have to pay you, which somewhat defeats the point). Considering where Microsoft started (scratch), making their very first console a relative success considering the competition is a fairly remarkable feat.
Working with web "designers" who have no concept of what is actually possible to realize in standard (X)HTML and CSS is a pain in the ass, though. Especially if one doesn't want to use Javascript.
As proof of this amazing(?) feat of programming, the server still works, at least at this moment in time it's still serving its page, though slowly. Despite the author's hacky implementation (serving content depending on what port the request is sent through) I think we must congratulate him - few servers survive a slashdotting for this long. Anyone remember the spud server? (there was a real one too.)
In the event that a foreign infiltrator gets onboard, plugs his laptop into the first ethernet outlet he can find, and hacks away, I'd say a firewall would be pretty useful.
Also, the Swedish Army has its own network, very similar to the Internet in construction, called FMIP (think Sweden's DARPAnet here), which this ship could potentially connect to. So a firewall would be a good thing to have in case an attacker got access to that.
If this boat is running anything like the NT systems I used when I was in the army (the Swedish army that is) I'd say it's pretty stable and secure. Windows NT has had quite some time to mature as an operating system and has had most of its bugs fixed by now. Obviously, they won't be connecting these things to the Internet, so no need to worry about hax0rz.
I, for one, welcome our new Swedish Navy Stealth Ship overlords.
Oh, please. There's no such thing as private e-mail, unless by private you mean encrypted. Sending an e-mail is like sending a postcard in terms of security. If you use it for anything you need to keep secret, you make a mistake. Besides, I think it's good that things like this incident are brought out into the open. People (the Mozilla organization) shouldn't get away with being assholes in their dealings with those to whom they owe every bit of thanks, even if that means posting their "private" e-mail.
This is why I like open source software development. Just look at that forum thread. Inside a company like IBM or Microsoft, a debate like this would be kept covered up out of PR fears. Open source developers more often than not do not give a shit about PR (which is a good thing), they just want to make the best possible program. They also don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, getting their salaries lowered, or whatnot. So we get to see the nitty gritty details of intra-project disputes and arguments from the front row, even silly things like what theme ships with Firefox as the default.
Gotta love it.
Yes, it is. The USA is not a "democracy".
In other words, us happy AMD owners are safe. Yay! Unfortunately, IA-64 is so unpopular among consumer users (the ones who are likely to be sloppy with their anti-virus protections and fall victim to this sort of thing) that future viruses for 64-bit Windows will likely be targeting the x86-64.
Great product. Unfortunately, its price is listed at about 10x the "few hundred dollars" the original submitter specified in his posting.
I've found the Canon Canoscan flatbeds do a good job of automatically scanning straight to PDF, only minimal user intervention (hit "enter") is required. There's a special mode for scanning text which enhances contrast, so messy notes and diagrams should be fine, too. The resulting PDF:s are also remarkably small in size for what is essentially a huge bitmap. I've a Canon Canoscan 8000F myself, it's very fast and can do higher DPI's than most people need, and although it might be a bit out of his price range, I'm sure the cheaper models can do the same job nearly as well.
I've a laptop as my main PC, and I can't run Seti on it because that would keep the CPU going, not only reducing the battery life from ~5h to about 1-2h, while keeping the fan running (an annoying noise if there ever was one), but also reducing the lifetime of the battery unit itself significantly, a costly part to replace if you're a student like myself.
By saying essentially that power consumption is nothing to worry about, and that I might as well shut my machine down, you're displaying remarkable ignorance. Open mouth, insert foot.
Actually, I checked before posting just so I wouldn't make an ass of myself like the guy I replied to, and I found (much unsurprisingly) that domainwitheld.com is in fact not owned by anyone at this time.
You think he was stupid, but you're in fact the one who completely missed that the domain name he posted (and which you so conveniently blocked out of your response) is "domainwitheld.com". See those words, "domain witheld"? Meaning he did not disclose the real domain name he used to us, meaning he didn't post it to Slashdot, so it won't be harvested. Do think before you post, next time...
How exactly is FAT not a "real" file system? It's still very widely in use, particularly on devices smaller than 2 GB (digital cameras come to mind). It's still useful because it's so simple, well-known, and easy to implement. That makes it real enough to be "real" to most people with a clue.
My comparison between NTFS and FAT is valid because if you are running Windows, those are the only two filesystems you have to choose between. Comparing NTFS with, for instance, ReiserFS is not really interesting because they're not really alternatives to each other. Unless you choose your operating system based on what filesystems it supports...
I don't think I understand you. I don't use a third party defrag tool, I use the one Microsoft provides, and it works fine. I don't know how NTFS works internally to prevent defragmentation, clearly it does something, because (as everyone with a clue will likely already know) NTFS deals with fragmentation far better than many other file systems, most notably FAT.
:)
As for my "special category" remark, I was merely proactively defending against the massive amounts of "NTFS sucks, my drive is fragmented to death"-themed replies I was expecting. After all, it would be naive of me to assume that just because NTFS works for me, it automatically works for everyone else. There's no good explanation for this, but the easiest way to explain it is that I am simply somehow special and that's why it works for me.
It must be pretty damn good if it can outdo NTFS. I have three computers with WinXP (NTFS 5.1) that I run quite a bit of data through on a daily basis, and neither needs to be defragmented very often at all (two of them have never needed defragmentation in more than a year of use). Mind you, I might fall into some special category of people who don't fall victim to fragmentation for some reason. Anyway, my point is, before you make remarks regarding how well this compares to NTFS, and/or how much "Microsoft sucks", consider how well NTFS still holds up considering its age. Another bonus is, I don't risk losing file system integrity if there's a power failure. ;)
Oops. I must have been thinking CRC32. Anyway, so much the better - that puts the probability somewhere around 0.000...[37 zeroes]...2%.
For all intents and purposes, the probability is zero. Consider that an MD5 signature is 32 bits. That means, there are 2^32 possible values. So the raw probability of two unique sets of data matching the same MD5 signature is 2^-32, about 0.00000002%.
By running applications such as Filemon and Regmon and the Task manager, you can get a pretty clear picture of what a program does or does not do to your system when running it. A good virus scanner and an application-level firewall also come highly recommended.
This does not, of course, eliminate the chance that your mysterious app won't do something bad the 10th, 100th or 1000th time it's run, when you may be less suspecting of foul behaviour. However, I've yet to come across, or hear of any major spreads of such a trojan.
Tell that to the hard-drive manufacturers. They don't accept it, or use in in the industry.
Surely however, you know that's just for marketing reasons. Using MB = 10^6 bytes lets them market hard drives as being bigger, sometimes a LOT bigger, than they really are. Even Windows will use the correct definition when reporting disk sizes...
As a comparison, consider one of the recent 200 GB hard drives.
200*1024^3 - 200*10^9 = 14748364800, 14748364800/1024^3 = 13.74 GB.
So basically, the hard drive manufacturers are cheating customers out of a lot of pr0n storage by using the wrong units... Then again, HDD space is so cheap nowadays, most people could care less.
Anyway, my point is, what the hard drive manufacturers/marketers use has fuck nowt to do with what's "correct" or standardized. If it were the other way around, you can be sure they'd still pick whatever unit made their hard drives seem the biggest...
I would hate to get into a long debate about my foelisting policies, but suffice to say, my foelist is extremely short considering the number of assholes, dickheads and fuckwits there are on Slashdot. Hell, I'm not even in it.
I had mod points yesterday, I regret having wasted them now. But marking someone "foe" automatically gives them a permanent -1 from my POV, so it's just as good. :)
Foelisted for daring to suggest that the bastard known as MiB (along with KiB, GiB, TiB...) is somehow more correct or "better" than the well-known, universally accepted, industry standard MB (kB, GB, TB...).
As another poster has already mentioned, MiB is just a made-up atrocity (it's not even a real ISO standard!) which noone needs or wants.
Now, this seems like a genuinely nice thing to do by Microsoft. I can't wait to see how the Slashdot hordes of RMS fanboys are going to spin it to make Microsoft seem like the bad guy again...
(this almost made fp, too!)
Retail Windows (any variety) on a Vaio or a recent Stinkpad.
Congratulations for placing yourself in the "so l33t I can't spell" camp with that comment. Though I admit, "Stinkpad" is a bit more inventive than "Windoze".
Anyway, I am in fact using Windows XP on a ThinkPad, less than a year old. I wiped the hard drive when I got it, installed Windows XP from scratch, and downloaded the drivers I needed from IBM's website. Everything, including WEP, is working marvelously. Best laptop I ever used.
I would mod you down for posting such bullcrap, but by posting this, I am of course giving up any chance to do so. A shame.