I've been a customer for five years, and have never suffered from the alleged traffic shaping you mention. I've always been able to use my line to the max, doing BitTorrent, newsgroup, and link encryption, among others.
The only time my traffic was severely affected was after a tempest, when my line would only synchronize to 100 kbps for a few days, before they made some kind of repair.
Re:More details needed in story summary
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 1
> Despite the numerous slashdot articles and buzz about it, I'm seeing scant actual details.
That's probably because you're not getting your news at the right place. Here's the detailed technical analysis released last week:
Bullshit. I've lost 26 pounds last year over the course of 7 months, and have not regained them in the 12 months since I reached my chosen weight (and I see no reason this should change). I now oscillate by 2 pounds around my chosen weight, depending on whether I'm indulging in some rich tasty food for a couple of days, or make a slight effort to go back to my chosen weight.
Losing 26 pounds wasn't that hard by the way (thankfully). I reduced or stopped the obvious bad habits (soda and pastry at noon every day, too rich breakfast, too many restaurants), monitored my weight (the most important part), did some light exercice (to ensure the few muscles I had would not disappear during the diet), and that's it. I was helped by the fact that I had quite a lot of work to do at the same time, so I could concentrate on it and forget the slight hunger I sometimes felt.
And unless Google *forces* updates to the plugin, security patches will never be applied
As far as I know, most if not all Google desktop apps use an auto-updater that does its job in utter silence (to the fury of control freaks, of course). This is definitely the case for Google Chrome, Google Talk, and Google Gears (which is a browser plugin).
Your comment is hard to understand. Apparently, from three persons you know, two were great problem solvers, one became an engineer, the other did medicine. The third one was not a great problem solver, and you won't tell what became of him. Weird.
My anecdotal evidence is that one of my friends is a great problem solver (and tinkerer), and is a dentist. Several of his dentist friends are good problem solvers. I believe he's a better problem solver than me, and I'm an engineer. Several of my engineer coworkers are not that good at problem solving, but can cram quite a lot.
> Computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response.
No. It all depends on what you run on the computer. Maybe you used to run programs that were (relatively) more demanding than what you run now, maybe most programs are now relatively less demanding than most programs were, but it is not the general case that computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response. They've mostly stagnated, barely improved.
> these days the printer has it's own processor and RAM
They've always had that. Actually in the mid-90s my printer was more powerful than my computer. It's just that the printers processors and RAM have vastly improved, too.
I just bought a new PC, and was absolutely dismayed when I activated the AHCI (SATA) firmware to discover it added about ten full seconds to the boot time. I have no idea what it performs during that time (some kind of calibration? I sure hope it's not a stupid just-to-be-safe timeout).
Conversely, I have desactivated IDE support, and it has now become very hard to enter the BIOS since the initial screen goes by so fast. I get about a quarter of a second to press the right key.
The usability of the BIOS is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. It's a shame no progress has occurred in that area in such a long time. I want it to go as fast as possible when everything is settled, but I also want to be able to pause and look at everything step by step while I am installing hardware. Apparently no one cares about that.:(
This paper provides a great explanation of the current state of the data recovery industry. How modern hard drives work, how they fail, how they can be recovered, myths and realities.
Unless the company has made great advances in the product they advertise at the end of the paper, you can be sure that two passes are more than enough to prevent anyone from recovering your data. Intelligence agencies are more likely to kidnap and torture you than invest the extraordinary time and money to get your bits back.
I did that a few weeks ago, to get Ecstatica II to play its music under Windows XP. I am not an über programmer, and spent way too much time on this task (but it was fun, and instructive!). Actually, had the creators of the game not left the debugging info in the executable, I would not have been able to do it.
So, even though it sounds impressive, I don't think the ability to dump assembly code and correct binary images is a good indicator of überness. Actually, this is what crackers do all day long. This is so common that great tools have been developed (by über programmers?;-)) to help people do just that.
Überness is mostly about how you solve a problem, and mostly not about the problems you solve.
I think you missed the point. The distinction between continuous commands (best done with a mouse) and the discrete commands (best done with a switch, aka button) is very important. I do not believe that half the point of a GUI is the ability to use the mouse. I'd say it's mostly about using graphics to present a cleaner, more enjoyable, more engaging, more understandable view of the program.
(By the way, do you know that there are 16-buttons CAD mouses? Seems like some professionals like to be able to issue continuous and discrete commands almost at the same time.)
The reason vi and emacs arent't in common use is because they are ugly/cryptic and difficult to learn. Of course this is all subjective, but subjectivity really matters. The blogger says that long-time users tend to learn keyboard shortcuts anyway, and I have seen that. He says that with a more modern approach (e.g. using nicely designed translucent overlays), you can help users learn the system as they use it. I definitely believe that. Maybe his illustration is not the most convincing, but with more animations, and a more spacial approach to menus, I believe you can approach the power of Vi while keeping the intuitiveness of GUIs.
If a nuclear missile could be launched with the push of one button, it probably would've happened. Good thing the missiles require several keys, codes, and such like.
First, we've been using chip-and-pin smartcard-based credit and debit cards for years in France, without significant problems. Of course, there's been a few researchers here and there claiming to have broken part of the cards security, sometimes rightly so. However, the system has remained quite sturdy considering the huge amount of transactions done every day.
I type my PIN almost every time I use my card, and I use my card a lot. Cheques are an almost exctinct species here. It's money or card, mostly. The only place where PIN is not requested is at the highway tollbooths. That would slow the traffic too much, the transaction amount is rather small, and they probably take note of the cars' immatriculations, so the risk is small and I don't mind using the magnetic stripe for that purpose. Apart from that, in the past few days, I've typed my PIN to: withdraw money from my bank, pay at the supermarket, pay for a few clothes, pay for the New Year's Eve food, pay for the Christmas gifts, pay for my monthly tram pass, pay at the gas station... That's just from the top of my head. And I've been doing it for more than ten years.
Frankly, I don't see the problem with requesting the PIN at retail outlets. The article sounds like FUD and fearmongering.
However, here's the part that weirds me out, maybe just an error in the writeup: what about this bank account pin number? Does this mean that in England they have some kind of all-powerful PIN that unlocks whole bank accounts? In France the PIN is specific to the card, the bank wouldn't know what to do with it.
1. French have done it. See this. Microsoft was one of the driving factors.
LOL. Do you know what you're talking about? Have you read the Wikipedia article you're linking to? This ten-modification-rules reform was about the finer points of French orthography, has generated a lot of public outcry, is not enforced, and is mostly ignored. Some of the rules were mere formalization of informal common usage, so these ones are often "applied" even though the people who apply them are not aware they are part of a reform. They just write as they've always done.
By the way, the reform took effect in 1991, and Microsoft products were made compliant in 2005. I wonder why and how you equal being 14-years late with being a "driving factor".
Anyway we're debating fine points of orthography that, just as in the U.S., most of the population ignores. The spelling horrors you can see online and which slowly make their way into other media are just as prevalent and horrible in France.
xrick is an excellent Rick Dangerous reimplementation
REminiscence is an excellent reimplementation of the Flashback engine
raw is an excellent reimplementation of the Another World engine. Its author has stopped distributing it at the request of Eric Chahi, the author of Another World, who has started selling a high-res version. There's a very interesting making-of on that website, by the way.
Check out DOSBox (...) You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.
Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.
Your $30 hardware router probably runs Linux and can be targetted by attackers (all the more easy because they have access to the firmware and can study the flaws).
The major argument of the opinion piece (besides claiming with authority that the book is full of shit), is that its ideas are just plain old. They date back to the 19th century. The language has moved on.
I just laughed out loud at the last sentence in the argument, where the author tries to show concretely that the book is full of dust:
But what I'm saying about the extreme age of the outdated nonsense in Strunk & White can perhaps best be put like this: White's formative experience in Strunk's class was so long ago that the Red Sox had just won the World Series the year before.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks pretty much like the version you can download straight from the Adobe FTP server (yeah, they still have one):
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/
I've been a customer for five years, and have never suffered from the alleged traffic shaping you mention. I've always been able to use my line to the max, doing BitTorrent, newsgroup, and link encryption, among others.
The only time my traffic was severely affected was after a tempest, when my line would only synchronize to 100 kbps for a few days, before they made some kind of repair.
> Despite the numerous slashdot articles and buzz about it, I'm seeing scant actual details.
That's probably because you're not getting your news at the right place. Here's the detailed technical analysis released last week:
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf
It's quite an impressive read.
Bullshit. I've lost 26 pounds last year over the course of 7 months, and have not regained them in the 12 months since I reached my chosen weight (and I see no reason this should change). I now oscillate by 2 pounds around my chosen weight, depending on whether I'm indulging in some rich tasty food for a couple of days, or make a slight effort to go back to my chosen weight.
Losing 26 pounds wasn't that hard by the way (thankfully). I reduced or stopped the obvious bad habits (soda and pastry at noon every day, too rich breakfast, too many restaurants), monitored my weight (the most important part), did some light exercice (to ensure the few muscles I had would not disappear during the diet), and that's it. I was helped by the fact that I had quite a lot of work to do at the same time, so I could concentrate on it and forget the slight hunger I sometimes felt.
You should read The Hacker's Diet.
And unless Google *forces* updates to the plugin, security patches will never be applied
As far as I know, most if not all Google desktop apps use an auto-updater that does its job in utter silence (to the fury of control freaks, of course). This is definitely the case for Google Chrome, Google Talk, and Google Gears (which is a browser plugin).
It's been well documented for seven years now: http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
Your comment is hard to understand. Apparently, from three persons you know, two were great problem solvers, one became an engineer, the other did medicine. The third one was not a great problem solver, and you won't tell what became of him. Weird.
My anecdotal evidence is that one of my friends is a great problem solver (and tinkerer), and is a dentist. Several of his dentist friends are good problem solvers. I believe he's a better problem solver than me, and I'm an engineer. Several of my engineer coworkers are not that good at problem solving, but can cram quite a lot.
Let me guess. You are not a doctor, and you are a natural engineer, whatever that means. You are so prejudiced, it's not funny.
> Computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response.
No. It all depends on what you run on the computer. Maybe you used to run programs that were (relatively) more demanding than what you run now, maybe most programs are now relatively less demanding than most programs were, but it is not the general case that computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response. They've mostly stagnated, barely improved.
> these days the printer has it's own processor and RAM
They've always had that. Actually in the mid-90s my printer was more powerful than my computer. It's just that the printers processors and RAM have vastly improved, too.
I just bought a new PC, and was absolutely dismayed when I activated the AHCI (SATA) firmware to discover it added about ten full seconds to the boot time. I have no idea what it performs during that time (some kind of calibration? I sure hope it's not a stupid just-to-be-safe timeout).
Conversely, I have desactivated IDE support, and it has now become very hard to enter the BIOS since the initial screen goes by so fast. I get about a quarter of a second to press the right key.
The usability of the BIOS is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. It's a shame no progress has occurred in that area in such a long time. I want it to go as fast as possible when everything is settled, but I also want to be able to pause and look at everything step by step while I am installing hardware. Apparently no one cares about that. :(
That said, I believe this is the first time I see a "300 Multiple Choices" page! :-D
This paper provides a great explanation of the current state of the data recovery industry. How modern hard drives work, how they fail, how they can be recovered, myths and realities.
[PDF] Recovering Unrecoverable Data
Unless the company has made great advances in the product they advertise at the end of the paper, you can be sure that two passes are more than enough to prevent anyone from recovering your data. Intelligence agencies are more likely to kidnap and torture you than invest the extraordinary time and money to get your bits back.
Same for the DGSE in France.
I did that a few weeks ago, to get Ecstatica II to play its music under Windows XP. I am not an über programmer, and spent way too much time on this task (but it was fun, and instructive!). Actually, had the creators of the game not left the debugging info in the executable, I would not have been able to do it.
;-)) to help people do just that.
So, even though it sounds impressive, I don't think the ability to dump assembly code and correct binary images is a good indicator of überness. Actually, this is what crackers do all day long. This is so common that great tools have been developed (by über programmers?
Überness is mostly about how you solve a problem, and mostly not about the problems you solve.
Your comment has been submitted to Reddit, and is currently at the top of its home page :
http://programming.reddit.com/info/2d2e0/comments
I think you missed the point. The distinction between continuous commands (best done with a mouse) and the discrete commands (best done with a switch, aka button) is very important. I do not believe that half the point of a GUI is the ability to use the mouse. I'd say it's mostly about using graphics to present a cleaner, more enjoyable, more engaging, more understandable view of the program.
(By the way, do you know that there are 16-buttons CAD mouses? Seems like some professionals like to be able to issue continuous and discrete commands almost at the same time.)
The reason vi and emacs arent't in common use is because they are ugly/cryptic and difficult to learn. Of course this is all subjective, but subjectivity really matters. The blogger says that long-time users tend to learn keyboard shortcuts anyway, and I have seen that. He says that with a more modern approach (e.g. using nicely designed translucent overlays), you can help users learn the system as they use it. I definitely believe that. Maybe his illustration is not the most convincing, but with more animations, and a more spacial approach to menus, I believe you can approach the power of Vi while keeping the intuitiveness of GUIs.
Maybe you should read the article then, especially the first part.
If a nuclear missile could be launched with the push of one button, it probably would've happened. Good thing the missiles require several keys, codes, and such like.
Or maybe they do not. Or did not.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=167
(Yes, I have read the comments there.)
First, we've been using chip-and-pin smartcard-based credit and debit cards for years in France, without significant problems. Of course, there's been a few researchers here and there claiming to have broken part of the cards security, sometimes rightly so. However, the system has remained quite sturdy considering the huge amount of transactions done every day.
I type my PIN almost every time I use my card, and I use my card a lot. Cheques are an almost exctinct species here. It's money or card, mostly. The only place where PIN is not requested is at the highway tollbooths. That would slow the traffic too much, the transaction amount is rather small, and they probably take note of the cars' immatriculations, so the risk is small and I don't mind using the magnetic stripe for that purpose. Apart from that, in the past few days, I've typed my PIN to: withdraw money from my bank, pay at the supermarket, pay for a few clothes, pay for the New Year's Eve food, pay for the Christmas gifts, pay for my monthly tram pass, pay at the gas station... That's just from the top of my head. And I've been doing it for more than ten years.
Frankly, I don't see the problem with requesting the PIN at retail outlets. The article sounds like FUD and fearmongering.
However, here's the part that weirds me out, maybe just an error in the writeup: what about this bank account pin number? Does this mean that in England they have some kind of all-powerful PIN that unlocks whole bank accounts? In France the PIN is specific to the card, the bank wouldn't know what to do with it.
And that is why I keep reading Slashdot. Thank you, sir.
1. French have done it. See this. Microsoft was one of the driving factors.
LOL. Do you know what you're talking about? Have you read the Wikipedia article you're linking to? This ten-modification-rules reform was about the finer points of French orthography, has generated a lot of public outcry, is not enforced, and is mostly ignored. Some of the rules were mere formalization of informal common usage, so these ones are often "applied" even though the people who apply them are not aware they are part of a reform. They just write as they've always done.
By the way, the reform took effect in 1991, and Microsoft products were made compliant in 2005. I wonder why and how you equal being 14-years late with being a "driving factor".
Anyway we're debating fine points of orthography that, just as in the U.S., most of the population ignores. The spelling horrors you can see online and which slowly make their way into other media are just as prevalent and horrible in France.
Check out DOSBox (...) You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.
Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.
Your $30 hardware router probably runs Linux and can be targetted by attackers (all the more easy because they have access to the firmware and can study the flaws).
I just laughed out loud at the last sentence in the argument, where the author tries to show concretely that the book is full of dust: