I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of 3 Ghz white box loaded with KDE for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one directory on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Sounds to me like your system is obviously misconfigured.
Let me guess, you didn't just kill KDE and try to copy the file using cp, right? (That would be the obvious thing to do BEFORE blaming KDE.)
Try this, boot a Knoppix CD and try the same copy. Chances are pretty good that it will work fine.
Will this mean that if processor and read latency speeds are acceptible, that the file system could be encrypted in future versions?
Great idea! This way, without the key, nobody will be able to boot their Xbox.
Wait that sounds like they're going to have to give you the key....:)
This is why satellite TV boxes have smartcard readers on them. The issuse isn't one of hardware speed, but rather making it really freakin hard to pull the key out of the box.
You have to have somewhere to store the key that's orders of magnitude harder to get access to than the data you've encrypted. That's where you start spending millions of dollars.
This sounds very good in theory, but it may be difficult to implement securely.
I don't think it even sounds good in theory.
It looks like time and distance are being left out of the equation here.
It there is zero distance, then this might work, but then it's not actually accomplishing anything. If you add in the constraint that this secure channel has a length equal to some finite distance, then you must account for the relative positions of the sender, receiver and interceptor. Unless you put Mr. Interceptor exactly in the middle of the line and only let him tap in at ONE POINT, then he can take measurements at multiple points and multiple times then compare them. (Even if Mr. Kish did get a magical, zero-resistance wire.)
In order for this to work the state of the entire transmission line must switch in ZERO time. If that does not happen, there will be multiple states on the transmission line at once, which I believe would break everything.
Think about it like a wire with a Bunsen burner at each end. We adjust the flame temperature at each end. We observe the resulting temperature at each end.
Sure we can't determine the direction of heat flow in the wire by measuring the temperature at one point, but that's a crazy constraint to place on your attacker. It does not make sense. In the real world I can use two thermometers and take advantage of either:
A) The wire's resistance to heat transfer
B) The issue that is actually takes time for the system to reach equlibrium
As far as I can see, either one of these will break the system and an attacker gets to use both.
To drive a car, you need a license, right?
Now, if you drive badly, they pull your license, right?
Therefore, driving is a privilege, not a right.
So your whole argument is one where you haven't thought for yourself at all.
List the first dozen "rights" you can think of. They will have at some point in history been denied by a government. Does this mean they aren't actually rights?
If you say yes, then you really have nothing to contribute here. You aren't even thinking.
If you say no, you just invalidated your argument.
On top of that, your example does not work because people can loose not just "privileges" but rights as well if they piss off the gov't enough. Ever heard of jail?
Driving is a ***PRIVILEGE***, not a right, so your licenses can be pulled at will if you drive like stupid monkeys on drugs.
This argument is silly. It shows a real lack of insight into the situation.
Do we not have a fundamental right to freedom of travel?
Does freedom of speech being a "right" therefore make us unaccontable for what we do with it?
The real situation is a lot more nuanced than silly slogans. One that should be discussed in a manner that uses actual reasoning, as opposed to repetition of something you heard someone else say but never really examined in detail.
There are some reviews of it on HAM sites and stuff, that are probably worth reading. It don't remember their being anything terrible about it, but think there were so gotchas. (Onlike my dollar-store soldering iron that actually managed to melf itself!)
How's this for perspective? US, British, and Dutch oil companies may be evil or benign, but no one except the most evil or idiotic think that Khomeini, Hussein, and Chavez are a better alternative.
Very poor indeed, that's how it is.
It actually shows a marked lack of perspective. Do you just have no idea at all how some of the people you're mentioning rose to power?
It's a poor argument you're making in general, but it rates especially low on the perspective side of things, given that some of those people got to be where they are directly due to the influence of oil companies.
What is funny about your reply is that you claim that there are all sorts of problems, and yet you mention an issue, anonymity, which was addressed in the original post, i.e., it is not a problem, as anonymity is optionally available.
You miss the point. Anonymity must be the ONLY option or I will simply coerce you into not being anonymous at the same time as I coerce you into voting a certain way.
Many people register their party affiliation, and these types of people typically vote straight party tickets.
This is true, but they can never PROVE who they voted for unless 100% of the votes go towards one canidate. Here's an obvious example where that's important:
I want to pay you money to vote a certain way. If you can't prove who you voted for, then you can just take my money and vote however you want. It wouldn't make sense to pay.
The above are really big problems that you don't have solved, and generally don't exist now. You would actually be creating new problems.
There are other significant problems with your scheme as well.
The public/private key pair must be generated by the voter in order for this thing to make any sense at all. Now all of a sudden you're demanding that the voter have the expertise to generate secure cryptographic keys....but they're not going to generate the keys in their head, they're going to use a computer. So now you have to trust that computer and all the software running on it. You're actually creating a scenario where someone could rig an election by infecting people's home PC's.
The encryption itself is also a problem. People aren't going to be doing the encryption in their heads. They will be using a machine. This is left out of your postings but is another really big deal.
Crypto is a really cool technology, and I strong advocate its use, but only in places where it makes sense. Voting doesn't NEED crypto. You're not trying to hide who a vote is for, and you want to be sure that you cannot trace votes back to the people who cast them.
At the same time, you're adding unnecessary complexity and equiment, which just creates more ways to compromise the system.
I think if e-voting is to be done (and as an electrical engineer I believe it shouldn't) the best way to do it is with a paper trail as follows:
I walk into the booth, close the door and press the button for who I want. The computer prints out a paper card with my vote(s) on it that I can view from behind a glass window. Once I've read the card and agree with what it says, I press a button and it drops into a locked box.
In order to rig a paper trail, all that is needed is for the computer to print a receipt with incorrect data.
This is only true for the stupidest possible implementation of a paper trail. IMO, it's actually not an implementation of a paper trail, it's just a printer wasting paper. For a paper trail to have value, the piece of paper recording my vote must be visible to me when it records my vote.
1. Any person should be able to re-count the votes.
Well duh. They open up the box full of paper ballots and count them. That should be obvious.
2. Any person should be able to confirm that their vote is properly recorded.
This is one you seem to have a hard time getting. Bob and Alice should not be able to prove WHO they voted for. The ballot should be resistant to tampering, but it is important that I can't prove to you who I voted for.
3. Any person should be able to remain completely anonymous.
Completely is impossible, and I would say you'd typically be LESS anonymous in your scheme. (There are all sorts of real would implementation details that make it impossible to be completely anonymous.) And there's always that nasty special case where everybody votes for the same guy. Consider that in your example, the votes are being received from a source and that traffic
Many people in the U.S. want their government to protect their interests. An assured energy supply is one of those interests. Did you type your post on a computer? Did you drive today? What about those lights all over your neighborhood, burning away all night -- they make you feel safer, right?
This is pretty silly. In order to have this it's necessary to overthrow governments of third world countries and replace them with people like Saddam Hussein? (We gave him the key to the city of Detroit when he was our friend). Or is it necessary to overthrow Saddam?
The fact of the matter is, no matter how much you can get diplomats together to talk and hold hands, there will always be a need to use the military in more than a defensive role to protect our interests.
You can say this as much as you want, but you don't actually have any proof.
The thing is, America is blessed with lots of natural resources and know-how. We don't need places like China to make our stuff for us. We can do it ourselves. It just means we would have LESS stuff. And that's what it really comes down to is greed.
You try to make it sound as if we don't have any choice. We HAVE TO attack other countries because we NEED their stuff. But it's not true.
The US has a long history of propping up nasty dictators that later comes back to bite them in the ass. Even if we were to go around influencing the governance of other nations, we should be doing in accordance with good sense. We should be creating governments that americans would be willing to live under, not arming nutjob dictators.
Have you been living under a rock for the last five years? Dell, HP, and thousands of independant system builders are happy to sell you a PC without Windows. Even Fry's and Wal-Mart have PCs without Windows.
The fact that those products sell poorly indicates that people want Windows.
Can I walk into a Walmart and walk out with a PC without windows?
Fuck no.
The fact that these products sell poorly is due to the action of many factors. Your implication that it is soley due to an active choice in a fair market is intellectually dishonest.
Well, "good" is the best any software will ever get. It will never be perfect.
Actually, it's possible to write software that is provably perfect.
Are we talking about cars or operating systems? And, while we're at it, why 5%?
You're just trying to sidestep my point:
An "improved" product doesn't necessarily mean it's actually a good product.
A car is an obvious example to illustrate the failure of that argument.
It might surprise you to learn that the people who build the OS aren't the same people who work on business strategy.
That's a nonsense argument to make. It might suprise you to know that Ballmer is actually your CEO or CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER. This means that he's responsible for everything, both shipping product and deciding business strattegy. This means he's your boss, not just the "strategists". ("Conspirators" might be a better term.) Ballmer decides how many coders, conspirators and evil monkeys to keep on the payroll.
You wanted to talk about cars earlier. Tell you what - go figure out which major auto manufacturers in the past ten years have had recalls, and which ones haven't. I think you'll find that part of reality is that not everything goes according to plan.
Yes, but the automakers typically recall the part that's the problem. For example, if a fuel level sender was known to short out and cause cars to explode, they would actually replace it... not tell you to replace a fuse in your car with a lower value.
So far your argument pretty much boils down to, "Everyone has problems, therefore ours are no big deal."
Which is sorta my point, Microsoft doesn't take problems with its product seriously.
How much do you *know* about management at Microsoft? How much do you *know* about what they're allowing to happen? How much do you *know* about our techs?
I'm serious. I'd love to know what your sources are.
I don't need to know anything about your techs, because the techs don't make any of the important decisions. People like Gates and Ballmer do.
I don't care about your internal processes because I can see the final product.
If that's true, then you shouldn't put up with it. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I can't speak from experience (see how easy it is to admit that you don't know everything?), but if we really did give you a power cable that could shorten the life of your Xbox, then you ought to call customer service and notify them. Seriously. You shouldn't have to do it, but if you don't say something, then it's going to be tougher for us to correct the situation.
You missed my point on this one. The problem isn't the cable, it's the xbox itself. Microsoft is refusing to fix the real problem and is issuing a band-aid to prevent the problem from buring your house down.
The Xbox is still just as likely to fail as before, you just won't be suing Microsoft for burning your house down. They're covering their ass is the cheapest possible way, while leaving all their early adopters with a busted Xbox.
I will agree that things have changed since 95, 98 and the abomination that was ME, but that doesn't mean all the problems are fixed.
I can understand why, based on previous experiences, people like yourself still have strong feelings about BSODs, but, again, things are different now.
Things may be different and improved, but that does not necessarily mean they've reached an acceptible level of quality. A car where the wheels fall off "only" once a year for only 5% of users is still pretty crappy in my book.
It would also help if leadership at Microsoft spent less time trying to figure out how to "bury" competitors and more time producing quality product.
BTW, thanks for that nice power cord for my first generation Xbox. It speaks volumes about what you guys think about "quality".
Look... deep down, most engineers want to make good products, but that doesn't matter if management won't let them. Even if you have a commitment to quality, the company you work for has demonstrated time and time again that they are only interested in the bare minimum.
As an EE, I feel your nifty Xbox power cord makes a great example. Somebody screwed up and old Xboxes are toasting themselves and the house in which they reside. Rather than actually fixing the problem, you gave me a power cord with some protection circuitry, so my Xbox will still die an untimely death, but won't take my house with it.
If it were up to you, maybe you would have made a different decision, but obviously it's not and the people in charge don't seem to think like you.
I have yet to come across a BSOD joke "in the wild." A quick search of Google returned 81 pages of what passes for Geek humor. But damn few questions from end-users, and nothing from sources like "Consumer Reports."
GPs claim is not bold -- parent is just uneducated. Most research suggests that roughly 80% of BSODs in Windows XP are due to 3rd party driver issues. Go over to cs295.stanford.edu and look at some of the fault isolation papers for reference.
First off Mr. A.C., you have no knowedge of my level of education. Second, if any mentions of BSOD's are FUD, then why the hell are people studying them?
Third, your argument doesn't make sense. If 80% of BSOD's are due to driver issues, then 20% aren't. Therefore BSOD's ARE STILL A PROBLEM, therefore you just proved my point.
It's like saying: 80% of house fires are due to arson, so any mention of them happening from any other means is just FUD.
It does not make sense. Not only does it prove that house fires happen as a result of causes other than arson, but the statistic itself is meaningless. What happens if the number drops to 40%? Are houses more likely to go up in flames of their own accord or has the number of arsonists changed?
"why is kde so unloved here in the USA?"
I'm guessing it's the very american "Not invented here" syndrome.
I'm guessing it's a couple people with very small sample sizes talking about what they perceive to be reality. I use KDE. I'm in the USA. 'nuff said.
If you still see the BSOD then very likely your hardware is at fault. Although a 100% windows user and habitual upgrader/overclocker/gamer I have not seen once since last time I tried to use a Soundblaster in a VIA-based mainboard - 2001, or was it 2000?
That's a pretty bold claim, with a very tiny amount of anecdotal evidence to back it up. One person using maybe (let's be generous) five systems for who-knows-what use hasn't seen a blue screen for about five years, therefore everyone else who has is a liar?
If you want to get that pedantic, even boats or nuclear power plants are ultimately air cooled. The ocean for a boat is merely a very big heatsink that gives up the heat to the air, same for a power plant's cooling lake or cooling towers.
Except that lakes/oceans also transfer heat to the significantly massive rock that we live on:)
(Significant because 17% of the earth's cooling is by radiation from the surface that passes right through the atmosphere into space.)
Modern electronics use cooling fans because they are cheap, and because they work good enough. For serious heat management, you are back to liquids (look at car engines, for example.)
Unless you're taling about a boat, a nuclear plant or something else similar, everything uses air cooling.
The difference between a car engine and a CPU heatsink is simply this size of the heatsink and the method of transport of the heat to that heatsink. Water cooling as it is typically described is a misnomer. The real cooling is still being done by the air. The water is simply a transport mechanism for the heat, for example moving it from the engine block of your car to the radiator.
The point is, it's all air cooling. What makes "water cooling" so much more effective, is not the use of water or any properties of water, but the ability to use a nice big radiator mounted is a place that is pretty much optimal as opposed to trying to fit cooling fins in wherever you can.
The real number to care about is thermal resistance to ambient air. (That is unless you plan on providing an EXTERNAL source of chilled water to your xbox.)
If American citizens are frustrated and annoyed with their government's behavior, can someone please explain how expatriating will do anything but make the problem worse?
It's simple:
The government's power is derived from the people.
Less people => less taxes => less power
The government gets a five-figure sum of money from me every year. By moving to a different country, I give that money to a different government.
Think of it like changing ISPs or cellphone providers.:)
Really, I don't think leaving this country is probably the best solution, but it seems a stretch to say it's counterproductive.
Heck, it's how America got founded in the first place.
I am disappointed that edjucated engineers are crying out for a paper trail on for voting machines. We can use an all computerized system that lets everybody count the votes, and is secured via asymmetric encryption.
There are all sorts of problems with this idea. Just off the top of my head, here's one that makes it a non-starter:
All votes MUST be anonymous. This is the only way to prevent me from paying you or threatening you into voting a particular way. It's actually quite important for you NOT to be able to prove who you voted for.
Ok, supposed that you were provided source code. So how do you know that this is the actual source code that generated the code that's actually being used?
It's even worse than that.
What's to stop me from fabbing a custom bios, that ALTERS that known good code?
As an electrical engineer, I believe electrons and voting just don't mix. It's simply not possible to depackage every chip in the system, examine it under an SEM to verify it isn't a custom hacked version of the chip, and repackage it. The cost would be astronomical.
We should be sticking with old-school paper ballots, or mechincal machines. It's much more obvious and harder to cover up tampering when the evidence is visible to the naked human eye. It's much easier to have confidence that a box full of gears with no clock and no internal power source is not going to have a logic bomb that will be actived only on election day.
It would be VERY had not to leave lasting physical evidence in a machincal machine, and you would have to gain physical access to all the machines as opposed to just hacking them via a software update.
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I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of 3 Ghz white box loaded with KDE for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one directory on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Sounds to me like your system is obviously misconfigured.
Let me guess, you didn't just kill KDE and try to copy the file using cp, right? (That would be the obvious thing to do BEFORE blaming KDE.)
Try this, boot a Knoppix CD and try the same copy. Chances are pretty good that it will work fine.
Will this mean that if processor and read latency speeds are acceptible, that the file system could be encrypted in future versions?
:)
Great idea! This way, without the key, nobody will be able to boot their Xbox.
Wait that sounds like they're going to have to give you the key....
This is why satellite TV boxes have smartcard readers on them. The issuse isn't one of hardware speed, but rather making it really freakin hard to pull the key out of the box.
You have to have somewhere to store the key that's orders of magnitude harder to get access to than the data you've encrypted. That's where you start spending millions of dollars.
This sounds very good in theory, but it may be difficult to implement securely.
I don't think it even sounds good in theory.
It looks like time and distance are being left out of the equation here.
It there is zero distance, then this might work, but then it's not actually accomplishing anything. If you add in the constraint that this secure channel has a length equal to some finite distance, then you must account for the relative positions of the sender, receiver and interceptor. Unless you put Mr. Interceptor exactly in the middle of the line and only let him tap in at ONE POINT, then he can take measurements at multiple points and multiple times then compare them. (Even if Mr. Kish did get a magical, zero-resistance wire.)
In order for this to work the state of the entire transmission line must switch in ZERO time. If that does not happen, there will be multiple states on the transmission line at once, which I believe would break everything.
Think about it like a wire with a Bunsen burner at each end. We adjust the flame temperature at each end. We observe the resulting temperature at each end.
Sure we can't determine the direction of heat flow in the wire by measuring the temperature at one point, but that's a crazy constraint to place on your attacker. It does not make sense. In the real world I can use two thermometers and take advantage of either:
A) The wire's resistance to heat transfer
B) The issue that is actually takes time for the system to reach equlibrium
As far as I can see, either one of these will break the system and an attacker gets to use both.
Any day now someone is going to figure out that the current rules let you patent the circle.
Actually, somebody already did.
No matter how you try to wiggle your argument, driving a car is **NOT** a human right. You haven't been able to prove this, and no one ever will.
That wasn't my aim.
My aim was to point out that YOUR argument was foolish.
Since you've now stopped trying to defend it, it looks like I've been successful.
The whole black-and-white, "It's not a right because the gov't says it isn't" argument is a silly, non-persuasive tautology.
To drive a car, you need a license, right? Now, if you drive badly, they pull your license, right? Therefore, driving is a privilege, not a right.
So your whole argument is one where you haven't thought for yourself at all.
List the first dozen "rights" you can think of. They will have at some point in history been denied by a government. Does this mean they aren't actually rights?
If you say yes, then you really have nothing to contribute here. You aren't even thinking.
If you say no, you just invalidated your argument.
On top of that, your example does not work because people can loose not just "privileges" but rights as well if they piss off the gov't enough. Ever heard of jail?
Driving is a ***PRIVILEGE***, not a right, so your licenses can be pulled at will if you drive like stupid monkeys on drugs.
This argument is silly. It shows a real lack of insight into the situation.
Do we not have a fundamental right to freedom of travel?
Does freedom of speech being a "right" therefore make us unaccontable for what we do with it?
The real situation is a lot more nuanced than silly slogans. One that should be discussed in a manner that uses actual reasoning, as opposed to repetition of something you heard someone else say but never really examined in detail.
A variable 40W grounded soldering iron with replaceable element and a 0.8mm tip? FOR $35?! Where do I sign up?
I looked at that one too. It's a ripoff of the Hakko 936 model, which I ended up buying instead.
There are some reviews of it on HAM sites and stuff, that are probably worth reading. It don't remember their being anything terrible about it, but think there were so gotchas. (Onlike my dollar-store soldering iron that actually managed to melf itself!)
How's this for perspective? US, British, and Dutch oil companies may be evil or benign, but no one except the most evil or idiotic think that Khomeini, Hussein, and Chavez are a better alternative.
Very poor indeed, that's how it is.
It actually shows a marked lack of perspective. Do you just have no idea at all how some of the people you're mentioning rose to power?
It's a poor argument you're making in general, but it rates especially low on the perspective side of things, given that some of those people got to be where they are directly due to the influence of oil companies.
What is funny about your reply is that you claim that there are all sorts of problems, and yet you mention an issue, anonymity, which was addressed in the original post, i.e., it is not a problem, as anonymity is optionally available.
...but they're not going to generate the keys in their head, they're going to use a computer. So now you have to trust that computer and all the software running on it. You're actually creating a scenario where someone could rig an election by infecting people's home PC's.
You miss the point. Anonymity must be the ONLY option or I will simply coerce you into not being anonymous at the same time as I coerce you into voting a certain way.
Many people register their party affiliation, and these types of people typically vote straight party tickets.
This is true, but they can never PROVE who they voted for unless 100% of the votes go towards one canidate. Here's an obvious example where that's important:
I want to pay you money to vote a certain way. If you can't prove who you voted for, then you can just take my money and vote however you want. It wouldn't make sense to pay.
The above are really big problems that you don't have solved, and generally don't exist now. You would actually be creating new problems.
There are other significant problems with your scheme as well.
The public/private key pair must be generated by the voter in order for this thing to make any sense at all. Now all of a sudden you're demanding that the voter have the expertise to generate secure cryptographic keys.
The encryption itself is also a problem. People aren't going to be doing the encryption in their heads. They will be using a machine. This is left out of your postings but is another really big deal.
Crypto is a really cool technology, and I strong advocate its use, but only in places where it makes sense. Voting doesn't NEED crypto. You're not trying to hide who a vote is for, and you want to be sure that you cannot trace votes back to the people who cast them.
At the same time, you're adding unnecessary complexity and equiment, which just creates more ways to compromise the system.
I think if e-voting is to be done (and as an electrical engineer I believe it shouldn't) the best way to do it is with a paper trail as follows:
I walk into the booth, close the door and press the button for who I want. The computer prints out a paper card with my vote(s) on it that I can view from behind a glass window. Once I've read the card and agree with what it says, I press a button and it drops into a locked box.
In order to rig a paper trail, all that is needed is for the computer to print a receipt with incorrect data.
This is only true for the stupidest possible implementation of a paper trail. IMO, it's actually not an implementation of a paper trail, it's just a printer wasting paper. For a paper trail to have value, the piece of paper recording my vote must be visible to me when it records my vote.
1. Any person should be able to re-count the votes.
Well duh. They open up the box full of paper ballots and count them. That should be obvious.
2. Any person should be able to confirm that their vote is properly recorded.
This is one you seem to have a hard time getting. Bob and Alice should not be able to prove WHO they voted for. The ballot should be resistant to tampering, but it is important that I can't prove to you who I voted for.
3. Any person should be able to remain completely anonymous.
Completely is impossible, and I would say you'd typically be LESS anonymous in your scheme. (There are all sorts of real would implementation details that make it impossible to be completely anonymous.) And there's always that nasty special case where everybody votes for the same guy. Consider that in your example, the votes are being received from a source and that traffic
Many people in the U.S. want their government to protect their interests. An assured energy supply is one of those interests. Did you type your post on a computer? Did you drive today? What about those lights all over your neighborhood, burning away all night -- they make you feel safer, right?
This is pretty silly. In order to have this it's necessary to overthrow governments of third world countries and replace them with people like Saddam Hussein? (We gave him the key to the city of Detroit when he was our friend). Or is it necessary to overthrow Saddam?
The fact of the matter is, no matter how much you can get diplomats together to talk and hold hands, there will always be a need to use the military in more than a defensive role to protect our interests.
You can say this as much as you want, but you don't actually have any proof.
The thing is, America is blessed with lots of natural resources and know-how. We don't need places like China to make our stuff for us. We can do it ourselves. It just means we would have LESS stuff. And that's what it really comes down to is greed.
You try to make it sound as if we don't have any choice. We HAVE TO attack other countries because we NEED their stuff. But it's not true.
The US has a long history of propping up nasty dictators that later comes back to bite them in the ass. Even if we were to go around influencing the governance of other nations, we should be doing in accordance with good sense. We should be creating governments that americans would be willing to live under, not arming nutjob dictators.
Well put.
...nothing else to say really, it's nice to see someone have some perspective about the situation.
Have you been living under a rock for the last five years? Dell, HP, and thousands of independant system builders are happy to sell you a PC without Windows. Even Fry's and Wal-Mart have PCs without Windows. The fact that those products sell poorly indicates that people want Windows.
Can I walk into a Walmart and walk out with a PC without windows?
Fuck no.
The fact that these products sell poorly is due to the action of many factors. Your implication that it is soley due to an active choice in a fair market is intellectually dishonest.
Well, "good" is the best any software will ever get. It will never be perfect.
Actually, it's possible to write software that is provably perfect.
Are we talking about cars or operating systems? And, while we're at it, why 5%?
You're just trying to sidestep my point:
An "improved" product doesn't necessarily mean it's actually a good product.
A car is an obvious example to illustrate the failure of that argument.
It might surprise you to learn that the people who build the OS aren't the same people who work on business strategy.
That's a nonsense argument to make. It might suprise you to know that Ballmer is actually your CEO or CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER. This means that he's responsible for everything, both shipping product and deciding business strattegy. This means he's your boss, not just the "strategists". ("Conspirators" might be a better term.) Ballmer decides how many coders, conspirators and evil monkeys to keep on the payroll.
You wanted to talk about cars earlier. Tell you what - go figure out which major auto manufacturers in the past ten years have had recalls, and which ones haven't. I think you'll find that part of reality is that not everything goes according to plan.
Yes, but the automakers typically recall the part that's the problem. For example, if a fuel level sender was known to short out and cause cars to explode, they would actually replace it... not tell you to replace a fuse in your car with a lower value.
So far your argument pretty much boils down to, "Everyone has problems, therefore ours are no big deal."
Which is sorta my point, Microsoft doesn't take problems with its product seriously.
How much do you *know* about management at Microsoft? How much do you *know* about what they're allowing to happen? How much do you *know* about our techs? I'm serious. I'd love to know what your sources are.
I don't need to know anything about your techs, because the techs don't make any of the important decisions. People like Gates and Ballmer do.
I don't care about your internal processes because I can see the final product.
If that's true, then you shouldn't put up with it. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I can't speak from experience (see how easy it is to admit that you don't know everything?), but if we really did give you a power cable that could shorten the life of your Xbox, then you ought to call customer service and notify them. Seriously. You shouldn't have to do it, but if you don't say something, then it's going to be tougher for us to correct the situation.
You missed my point on this one. The problem isn't the cable, it's the xbox itself. Microsoft is refusing to fix the real problem and is issuing a band-aid to prevent the problem from buring your house down.
The Xbox is still just as likely to fail as before, you just won't be suing Microsoft for burning your house down. They're covering their ass is the cheapest possible way, while leaving all their early adopters with a busted Xbox.
20% of BSODs are not due to third party drivers - therefore 20% of BSODs are the fault of Windows?
I never said that.
Oh you are an idiot, there is no doubt, no matter how much time you spent drooling on the desk in college.
High class all the way.
Can't find anything wrong with what I ACTUALLY said?
I will agree that things have changed since 95, 98 and the abomination that was ME, but that doesn't mean all the problems are fixed.
I can understand why, based on previous experiences, people like yourself still have strong feelings about BSODs, but, again, things are different now.
Things may be different and improved, but that does not necessarily mean they've reached an acceptible level of quality. A car where the wheels fall off "only" once a year for only 5% of users is still pretty crappy in my book.
It would also help if leadership at Microsoft spent less time trying to figure out how to "bury" competitors and more time producing quality product.
BTW, thanks for that nice power cord for my first generation Xbox. It speaks volumes about what you guys think about "quality".
Look... deep down, most engineers want to make good products, but that doesn't matter if management won't let them. Even if you have a commitment to quality, the company you work for has demonstrated time and time again that they are only interested in the bare minimum.
As an EE, I feel your nifty Xbox power cord makes a great example. Somebody screwed up and old Xboxes are toasting themselves and the house in which they reside. Rather than actually fixing the problem, you gave me a power cord with some protection circuitry, so my Xbox will still die an untimely death, but won't take my house with it.
If it were up to you, maybe you would have made a different decision, but obviously it's not and the people in charge don't seem to think like you.
They may fall like snowflakes on Buffalo here,
1 647 u pport/learnmore/russel_july09.mspx d f d f s iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm s iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm
Maybe if you mean Buffalo, NY
I have yet to come across a BSOD joke "in the wild." A quick search of Google returned 81 pages of what passes for Geek humor. But damn few questions from end-users, and nothing from sources like "Consumer Reports."
That's funny, my Google search for BSOD yielded all sorts of links:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=
http://www.ntbrad.com/bsod.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpands
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.p
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.p
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu
GPs claim is not bold -- parent is just uneducated. Most research suggests that roughly 80% of BSODs in Windows XP are due to 3rd party driver issues. Go over to cs295.stanford.edu and look at some of the fault isolation papers for reference.
First off Mr. A.C., you have no knowedge of my level of education. Second, if any mentions of BSOD's are FUD, then why the hell are people studying them?
Third, your argument doesn't make sense. If 80% of BSOD's are due to driver issues, then 20% aren't. Therefore BSOD's ARE STILL A PROBLEM, therefore you just proved my point.
It's like saying:
80% of house fires are due to arson, so any mention of them happening from any other means is just FUD.
It does not make sense. Not only does it prove that house fires happen as a result of causes other than arson, but the statistic itself is meaningless. What happens if the number drops to 40%? Are houses more likely to go up in flames of their own accord or has the number of arsonists changed?
"why is kde so unloved here in the USA?" I'm guessing it's the very american "Not invented here" syndrome.
I'm guessing it's a couple people with very small sample sizes talking about what they perceive to be reality. I use KDE. I'm in the USA. 'nuff said.
If you still see the BSOD then very likely your hardware is at fault. Although a 100% windows user and habitual upgrader/overclocker/gamer I have not seen once since last time I tried to use a Soundblaster in a VIA-based mainboard - 2001, or was it 2000?
That's a pretty bold claim, with a very tiny amount of anecdotal evidence to back it up. One person using maybe (let's be generous) five systems for who-knows-what use hasn't seen a blue screen for about five years, therefore everyone else who has is a liar?
If you want to get that pedantic, even boats or nuclear power plants are ultimately air cooled. The ocean for a boat is merely a very big heatsink that gives up the heat to the air, same for a power plant's cooling lake or cooling towers.
:)
Except that lakes/oceans also transfer heat to the significantly massive rock that we live on
(Significant because 17% of the earth's cooling is by radiation from the surface that passes right through the atmosphere into space.)
Modern electronics use cooling fans because they are cheap, and because they work good enough. For serious heat management, you are back to liquids (look at car engines, for example.)
Unless you're taling about a boat, a nuclear plant or something else similar, everything uses air cooling.
The difference between a car engine and a CPU heatsink is simply this size of the heatsink and the method of transport of the heat to that heatsink. Water cooling as it is typically described is a misnomer. The real cooling is still being done by the air. The water is simply a transport mechanism for the heat, for example moving it from the engine block of your car to the radiator.
The point is, it's all air cooling. What makes "water cooling" so much more effective, is not the use of water or any properties of water, but the ability to use a nice big radiator mounted is a place that is pretty much optimal as opposed to trying to fit cooling fins in wherever you can.
The real number to care about is thermal resistance to ambient air. (That is unless you plan on providing an EXTERNAL source of chilled water to your xbox.)
If American citizens are frustrated and annoyed with their government's behavior, can someone please explain how expatriating will do anything but make the problem worse?
:)
It's simple:
The government's power is derived from the people.
Less people => less taxes => less power
The government gets a five-figure sum of money from me every year. By moving to a different country, I give that money to a different government.
Think of it like changing ISPs or cellphone providers.
Really, I don't think leaving this country is probably the best solution, but it seems a stretch to say it's counterproductive. Heck, it's how America got founded in the first place.
I am disappointed that edjucated engineers are crying out for a paper trail on for voting machines. We can use an all computerized system that lets everybody count the votes, and is secured via asymmetric encryption.
There are all sorts of problems with this idea. Just off the top of my head, here's one that makes it a non-starter:
All votes MUST be anonymous. This is the only way to prevent me from paying you or threatening you into voting a particular way. It's actually quite important for you NOT to be able to prove who you voted for.
Ok, supposed that you were provided source code. So how do you know that this is the actual source code that generated the code that's actually being used?
It's even worse than that.
What's to stop me from fabbing a custom bios, that ALTERS that known good code?
As an electrical engineer, I believe electrons and voting just don't mix. It's simply not possible to depackage every chip in the system, examine it under an SEM to verify it isn't a custom hacked version of the chip, and repackage it. The cost would be astronomical.
We should be sticking with old-school paper ballots, or mechincal machines. It's much more obvious and harder to cover up tampering when the evidence is visible to the naked human eye. It's much easier to have confidence that a box full of gears with no clock and no internal power source is not going to have a logic bomb that will be actived only on election day.
It would be VERY had not to leave lasting physical evidence in a machincal machine, and you would have to gain physical access to all the machines as opposed to just hacking them via a software update.