Re:Of course it'll srupass apple
on
Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think we'll have a big slaughter of Windows market share as they continue to not-get-Linux, and then things will REALLY get interesting. I don't believe for a second that MS is going to go down, down, down and just drop off the face of the planet.
A few years after longhorn is released, when the market is closer to 50/50 for linux/windows machines, and MS will be forced to actually do things better just to survive.
There's a lot in the way of human resources at microsoft, and that could create some dang good stuff - given the need to, when there's a giant penguin huffing down your neck.
PNG is good for its own purposes, but it's no.jpg replacement. JPG = lossy and phenomenal compression, where PNG = nonlossy and kind-of-average compression.
Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB, where a.jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
PNG is a good replacement for.gif, but not for.jpg, yet.
This has me thinking about the patent game large companies play. Take IBM, Apple, Microsoft - all with gigantic patent portfolios, and products that use many of them (and probably many of those of the other companies too). When IBM infringes on an Apple patent, they get together, cross license patents under certain conditions, and go on their merry way.
This is all fine as a defense against a company that actually has a product. But take something like these smaller companies, who only own a patent portfolio, or perhaps one big patent altogether, and no products. They find that Adobe infringes on their patent and... Adobe have no recourse. No cross licensing to be done as the smaller company has no product. The smaller company may even be privately owned, so there's no chance of a simple cheap buyout.
While we're all looking at MS, Apple, IBM, Adobe etc and going "tsk! omg!" as they acquire yet another silly patent, they're not necessarily the ones who're going to be a pain in the butt about it, it's the smaller rogues like Forgent, or Acacia etc.
Might as well print your own bogus money. You could even print a $699 bill. Put Darl's picture in the center. "In Laywers We Trust" or similar. That would cost you nothing, except time. If it's good enough, do a rear image, and save both as TIF files for sharing.
I'd pixelled up an SCO Dollar once. Send in 699 of them
If SCO and Rob Enderle aren't outright lying (!) then they hint that they're not going after smaller users.
From Rob's keynote at SCOForum 2004, he states: "Now I hear from the Linux folks that it is SCO that is the bad guy here taking away the rights of those that worked hard to contribute to Linux and to that I say Bull Shit. SCO, unlike the RIAA which is targeting kids, is going after large well funded companies who are perfectly able to take care of themselves. In all cases the firms being challenged have more resources and are larger than SCO. If there is one thing firms like Daimler Chrysler don't need is a bunch of "hang'em high" bigots who think of themselves as judge, jury, and executioner."
So it comes down to - do you believe Rob Enderle, that SCO is only going after the big companies, and isn't like the RIAA and targeting kids..?
Choice. perhaps that's where all your training lies. perhaps you have a mac at home and you work with solaris in the daytime. perhaps you just have an opinion that solaris is better. Lots of reasons =)
However, a port of solaris to the POWER architecture doesn't necessarily mean an immediate version for PowerPC machines, or Macs.
Since really relevant results aren't generally gained from reading meta tags, and search engines & indexers that analyse pages don't use them so much any more, it seems to be a bit like banning disk notchers for getting double the capacity out of single sided 5.25" disks. Sure you might gain some sales of 5.25" disks but... who really cares?
Since I don't keep up with things.. Is PCI Express way better than AGP, for bandwidth on graphics cards? If so - is there anything new from the AGP camp planned?
Mibby I'm just sticking my head in the sand, but there's a difference between being watched and having data stored about me, and it being available to different people beyond it's intended purpose.
That's how the whole system works, by only pushing so far into people's privacy. I see it the same way too, and if it were black & white then Scott McNealy would be right - with all the ways we can be tracked, the potential is there for having NO privacy. My phone company knows when I make calls and when I receive them, and who to & who from. My ISP knows when I'm online, the IPs I make contact with, and I bet if they wanted they could tell what I'm transferring. My electricity and gas suppliers know when I'm at home, and cameras in stores & on roads can know where I am much of the time.
But for most purposes, none of this information is used outside its intended purposes. Not every random-joe gets to look up my phone details, nor trace all my movements, or see what I'm downloading. It's a little of my privacy stripped away in pieces for each separate institution that needs it, which does total up to a technical complete-lack-of-privacy... but it still works because they don't all get together to analyse my particular movements in life. The complete loss of privacy is only a potential one.
Besides, any business with even five separate departments trying to all communicate with each other about what they're doing has logistics problems keeping together, heaven help the hundreds of institutions that keep info on me if they tried to organise themselves enough to get any sane information from what they have on me.
Could this possibly tie in with their crappy newly-released PCs? I'd love to get one of those and tear it apart to see what DRM they've put in.
You can do that, as soon as you buy a DRM-enabled screwdriver to undo the DRM-enabled screws on the DRM-enabled case.
Social engineering anyone?
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This all sounds very similar to the problem with a security system in a corporation. You can have as brilliantly designed a security system as you like, but if you have a hole on the inside (a person who is lax with keys, or passwords etc) then the whole security system falls down from the inside.
Similarly here, an act that's got good intentions ends up having a few well paid government people slip in an exception here for telemarketers or a leniency for charities etc, and when it comes to implementation, the whole thing falls down
Stats won't help a robot with billiards, as there are no coordinates recorded to base new calulations on. Perhaps there *should* be? I think it would be fairly easy to record coords from each pro game from this day forward and the billiards industry should invent a table that does it. That would be awesome for so many reasons.
On top of the stats like this - not every pool table is identical. Chess is purely a logical game, where the table in pool may differ according to how old the table is, the humidity, the air pressure, temperature, how clean your balls are, the cue tip (chalking anyone?).
You might have a robot that can be perfect at a game played on a known surface, but that'll only be the one table it's built for. That's where having the bot work as an adaptable machine would come into play.
A Canadian scientist has created another game-playing machine, designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool.
Far simpler perhaps, in ways. The strategy behind a pool game might be easier compared to chess, but there's nothing physical in chess that needs simulating. That's a whole new ball game (ha!) for a computer/robot over a chess simulation.
This looks up there with the research into teaching robots to walk, scale stairs & run. Good solid research sure, but I wouldn't go putting it down by comparing it to a chess simulation.
..for CE because, as usual, people will have to patch their CE-based PDA
Good point, if WinCE based machines operate in a network manner the same as desktop Windows. Are they in any way comparable? If you somehow had a desktop running WinCE, would it be comparable to say, a Win XP machine with its networking?
But do they run Linux? And what impact will this have on my privacy?
You no longer need to just settle for wardriving for network access, you can wardrive for CPU time as well.
Want to improve your dnetc scores? Easy done! just tune into your neighbour's computer, and get theirs to tune into those of their neighbour, and their neighbour beyond that...:)
I've told this one on/. before, but it doesn't hurt again. It was slightly luckier than your case.
I bought a used Mac on eBay - $10 including monitor, and I thought that was a bit lucky. It arrived, and I understood why the description was "sold as is".
It'd not only been through a flood (silt and leaves all through) but had been used as a nest for mice for a good while. there was nesting material, mouse turds and pee all through the thing as well.
Thankfully, all this had happened while it was in storage:). With a rather long involved clean that included washing a motherboard under running water for ages, and completely disassembling the PSU to wash everything out, it worked. Even the HD was happy. There was a good bit of corrosion over some of the tracks and IC legs, but it doesn't seem to be getting worse after a spray over with furniture polish.
And now, I own a pet mouse. One that's just kept right out of the insides of computers:)
I must mention the always useful Clock Chipping page, with info on overclocking just about any archaic mac that can be. IIs, Quadras, PCI Powermacs, Performas, iMacs, G3s and G4s.
Why settle for 25MHz when you can blaze along at 33MHz?
One of the quotes direct from that little presentation: "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."
Only for an apple product would the fans care more about how pretty it looked, rather than how fast it ran. Not saying it isn't fast, but why all the fuss over pictures?
This time, because there are no specs to go with the pictures. We have an image to pore over, look at, spot the differences in, all in the vacuum before a product release. It gives us something to do:)
Last year was the opposite. A leak for a few hours on Apple's own site had a picture of the current G4 models, but with the new G5 specs listed next to it. Then, we didn't have a picture but only an idea of how fast it ran.
I get the impression (only from the/. blurb so far) that this hole is, by orders of magnitude, more serious than anything reported for Mac OS X previously.
There was one equally as bad, almost 18 months ago. I think it was August 2002.
a telnet:// URL could be used to do the same thing - with a pipe in the url, telnet could be run and piped out to another command that did anything an attacker wanted.
The good news that time was that a security update was released 9 hours after the discoverer (in japan) reported it to Apple.
Bad bug, quick fix. I hope the same applies in this case.
Go to goodwill, and grab some mac LCs. $5 for the LC, $5 for the monitor, and set them up behind a box. something simple, anything. Then have one huge "play" button that when pressed, hits Any Key on the keyboard.
Have an applescript running and make it play the audio you need with quicktime whenever any key is pressed. Simple, cheap, and besides old macs you could use ANY old computer. I mention the macs only because I know those particular ones are common, cheap, MacOS 7.5.3 is a Free(beer) download, and you have the audio recording and playback hardware all there.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we'll have a big slaughter of Windows market share as they continue to not-get-Linux, and then things will REALLY get interesting. I don't believe for a second that MS is going to go down, down, down and just drop off the face of the planet.
A few years after longhorn is released, when the market is closer to 50/50 for linux/windows machines, and MS will be forced to actually do things better just to survive.
There's a lot in the way of human resources at microsoft, and that could create some dang good stuff - given the need to, when there's a giant penguin huffing down your neck.
PNG is good for its own purposes, but it's no .jpg replacement. JPG = lossy and phenomenal compression, where PNG = nonlossy and kind-of-average compression.
.jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
.gif, but not for .jpg, yet.
Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB, where a
PNG is a good replacement for
This has me thinking about the patent game large companies play. Take IBM, Apple, Microsoft - all with gigantic patent portfolios, and products that use many of them (and probably many of those of the other companies too). When IBM infringes on an Apple patent, they get together, cross license patents under certain conditions, and go on their merry way.
This is all fine as a defense against a company that actually has a product. But take something like these smaller companies, who only own a patent portfolio, or perhaps one big patent altogether, and no products. They find that Adobe infringes on their patent and... Adobe have no recourse. No cross licensing to be done as the smaller company has no product. The smaller company may even be privately owned, so there's no chance of a simple cheap buyout.
While we're all looking at MS, Apple, IBM, Adobe etc and going "tsk! omg!" as they acquire yet another silly patent, they're not necessarily the ones who're going to be a pain in the butt about it, it's the smaller rogues like Forgent, or Acacia etc.
Might as well print your own bogus money. You could even print a $699 bill. Put Darl's picture in the center. "In Laywers We Trust" or similar. That would cost you nothing, except time. If it's good enough, do a rear image, and save both as TIF files for sharing.
:)
I'd pixelled up an SCO Dollar once. Send in 699 of them
Or 1400, your choice
If SCO and Rob Enderle aren't outright lying (!) then they hint that they're not going after smaller users.
From Rob's keynote at SCOForum 2004, he states: "Now I hear from the Linux folks that it is SCO that is the bad guy here taking away the rights of those that worked hard to contribute to Linux and to that I say Bull Shit. SCO, unlike the RIAA which is targeting kids, is going after large well funded companies who are perfectly able to take care of themselves. In all cases the firms being challenged have more resources and are larger than SCO. If there is one thing firms like Daimler Chrysler don't need is a bunch of "hang'em high" bigots who think of themselves as judge, jury, and executioner."
So it comes down to - do you believe Rob Enderle, that SCO is only going after the big companies, and isn't like the RIAA and targeting kids..?
Choice. perhaps that's where all your training lies. perhaps you have a mac at home and you work with solaris in the daytime. perhaps you just have an opinion that solaris is better. Lots of reasons =)
However, a port of solaris to the POWER architecture doesn't necessarily mean an immediate version for PowerPC machines, or Macs.
Since really relevant results aren't generally gained from reading meta tags, and search engines & indexers that analyse pages don't use them so much any more, it seems to be a bit like banning disk notchers for getting double the capacity out of single sided 5.25" disks. Sure you might gain some sales of 5.25" disks but... who really cares?
Since I don't keep up with things.. Is PCI Express way better than AGP, for bandwidth on graphics cards? If so - is there anything new from the AGP camp planned?
.
I fear something like AGP EXTREME
Mibby I'm just sticking my head in the sand, but there's a difference between being watched and having data stored about me, and it being available to different people beyond it's intended purpose.
That's how the whole system works, by only pushing so far into people's privacy. I see it the same way too, and if it were black & white then Scott McNealy would be right - with all the ways we can be tracked, the potential is there for having NO privacy. My phone company knows when I make calls and when I receive them, and who to & who from. My ISP knows when I'm online, the IPs I make contact with, and I bet if they wanted they could tell what I'm transferring. My electricity and gas suppliers know when I'm at home, and cameras in stores & on roads can know where I am much of the time.
But for most purposes, none of this information is used outside its intended purposes. Not every random-joe gets to look up my phone details, nor trace all my movements, or see what I'm downloading. It's a little of my privacy stripped away in pieces for each separate institution that needs it, which does total up to a technical complete-lack-of-privacy... but it still works because they don't all get together to analyse my particular movements in life. The complete loss of privacy is only a potential one.
Besides, any business with even five separate departments trying to all communicate with each other about what they're doing has logistics problems keeping together, heaven help the hundreds of institutions that keep info on me if they tried to organise themselves enough to get any sane information from what they have on me.
Could this possibly tie in with their crappy newly-released PCs? I'd love to get one of those and tear it apart to see what DRM they've put in.
You can do that, as soon as you buy a DRM-enabled screwdriver to undo the DRM-enabled screws on the DRM-enabled case.
This all sounds very similar to the problem with a security system in a corporation. You can have as brilliantly designed a security system as you like, but if you have a hole on the inside (a person who is lax with keys, or passwords etc) then the whole security system falls down from the inside.
Similarly here, an act that's got good intentions ends up having a few well paid government people slip in an exception here for telemarketers or a leniency for charities etc, and when it comes to implementation, the whole thing falls down
Stats won't help a robot with billiards, as there are no coordinates recorded to base new calulations on. Perhaps there *should* be? I think it would be fairly easy to record coords from each pro game from this day forward and the billiards industry should invent a table that does it. That would be awesome for so many reasons.
On top of the stats like this - not every pool table is identical. Chess is purely a logical game, where the table in pool may differ according to how old the table is, the humidity, the air pressure, temperature, how clean your balls are, the cue tip (chalking anyone?).
You might have a robot that can be perfect at a game played on a known surface, but that'll only be the one table it's built for. That's where having the bot work as an adaptable machine would come into play.
A Canadian scientist has created another game-playing machine, designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool.
Far simpler perhaps, in ways. The strategy behind a pool game might be easier compared to chess, but there's nothing physical in chess that needs simulating. That's a whole new ball game (ha!) for a computer/robot over a chess simulation.
This looks up there with the research into teaching robots to walk, scale stairs & run. Good solid research sure, but I wouldn't go putting it down by comparing it to a chess simulation.
Good point, if WinCE based machines operate in a network manner the same as desktop Windows. Are they in any way comparable? If you somehow had a desktop running WinCE, would it be comparable to say, a Win XP machine with its networking?
But do they run Linux? And what impact will this have on my privacy?
:)
You no longer need to just settle for wardriving for network access, you can wardrive for CPU time as well.
Want to improve your dnetc scores? Easy done! just tune into your neighbour's computer, and get theirs to tune into those of their neighbour, and their neighbour beyond that...
...and couldn't resist putting a bit of a spin on it.
I've told this one on /. before, but it doesn't hurt again. It was slightly luckier than your case.
:). With a rather long involved clean that included washing a motherboard under running water for ages, and completely disassembling the PSU to wash everything out, it worked. Even the HD was happy. There was a good bit of corrosion over some of the tracks and IC legs, but it doesn't seem to be getting worse after a spray over with furniture polish.
:)
I bought a used Mac on eBay - $10 including monitor, and I thought that was a bit lucky. It arrived, and I understood why the description was "sold as is".
It'd not only been through a flood (silt and leaves all through) but had been used as a nest for mice for a good while. there was nesting material, mouse turds and pee all through the thing as well.
Thankfully, all this had happened while it was in storage
And now, I own a pet mouse. One that's just kept right out of the insides of computers
Also the front page of the author's site shows he had that dualie up to 1.67MHz!
:)
Commodore 64 with AltiVec!
(yeah, I know you meant 1.67GHz
I must mention the always useful Clock Chipping page, with info on overclocking just about any archaic mac that can be. IIs, Quadras, PCI Powermacs, Performas, iMacs, G3s and G4s.
Why settle for 25MHz when you can blaze along at 33MHz?
You can view a much shorter timeline of it all, History according to Microsoft.
:)
One of the quotes direct from that little presentation: "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."
Good to know where it REALLY all started
Only for an apple product would the fans care more about how pretty it looked, rather than how fast it ran. Not saying it isn't fast, but why all the fuss over pictures?
:)
This time, because there are no specs to go with the pictures. We have an image to pore over, look at, spot the differences in, all in the vacuum before a product release. It gives us something to do
Last year was the opposite. A leak for a few hours on Apple's own site had a picture of the current G4 models, but with the new G5 specs listed next to it. Then, we didn't have a picture but only an idea of how fast it ran.
> Bad bug, quick fix. I hope the same applies in this case.
Now I look at it closer Apple were supposedly notified in February, and this was publicly written up 10th of this month. 8 days ago.
Well that sucks.
I get the impression (only from the /. blurb so far) that this hole is, by orders of magnitude, more serious than anything reported for Mac OS X previously.
There was one equally as bad, almost 18 months ago. I think it was August 2002.
a telnet:// URL could be used to do the same thing - with a pipe in the url, telnet could be run and piped out to another command that did anything an attacker wanted.
The good news that time was that a security update was released 9 hours after the discoverer (in japan) reported it to Apple.
Bad bug, quick fix. I hope the same applies in this case.
Go to goodwill, and grab some mac LCs. $5 for the LC, $5 for the monitor, and set them up behind a box. something simple, anything. Then have one huge "play" button that when pressed, hits Any Key on the keyboard.
Have an applescript running and make it play the audio you need with quicktime whenever any key is pressed. Simple, cheap, and besides old macs you could use ANY old computer. I mention the macs only because I know those particular ones are common, cheap, MacOS 7.5.3 is a Free(beer) download, and you have the audio recording and playback hardware all there.
A much better (and much larger) version of the panorama has been available at the NASA site for days.
That's a pretty huge image. Take the full version and zoom around - there's proof martians have advanced technology