There's no 64 bit version? At least the last time I tried, and had to dick around with ndiswrapper. I still don't know exactly what I did, but for now it works. I don't want to try and explain how to do it to anyone. And I'm not sure I want to try it again-- I don't even know if I'm using the swf alternative or the Adobe version. But for now, Fedora 8 works pretty fine for me.
Part of my comments to the Representative from KY:
...Go to nearly any news site (e.g. New York Times, Washington Post, the TV networks) and you will find a comments section after almost every article. Many, many websites, most blogs, and many others allow quick, ad hoc comments and interactions among readers-- tech sites, instructional sites, hobby sites, social sites, health sites. This represents a vibrant and diverse "community of communities." They (the site owners or their service providers) should not be forced to adopt a policy of identifying everyone who is allowed to post-- they'll just disallow posting. That's not a good outcome, Mr. Couch. Please educate yourself on this.
For every nasty, bullying, and calumnious comment on the internet there are thousands or millions which are thoughtful, helpful, supportive, funny, and promoting of good social values in general. Please note, I have identified myself in this email. I could just as easily have posted a false name and address. I don't choose to. Please think about this.
Respectfully,
(my real name)
Of course, his crappy software had no preview, and swallowed all the line breaks, but at least he got all the text. I have my doubts whether he'll heed (or can even read) the words. *sigh*
I happened to be interested in this, so took the opportunity to see what man had to say about update-rc.d.
Please note that this program was designed for use in package main- tainer scripts and, accordingly, has only the very limited functional- ity required by such scripts. System administrators are not encouraged to use update-rc.d to manage runlevels. They should edit the links directly or use runlevel editors such as sysv-rc-conf and bum instead.
You're spot on about the media caving in. In this case there's an interesting twist-- the major US media outlets are all parts of conglomerates that also own record and movie companies. They are all aware that reporting this kind of shenanigans would be against their other business interests. C|Net can report it, and Slashdot can bring it to people's attention, but you won't see it on cable or the networks or in the major city newspapers, because they're all paying into the MPAA and RIAA.
This makes Ron Paul's proposal to abolish the Department of Education seem very wise indeed!
From the office of naming-things-for-exactly-the-opposite-of-what-they-do:
That is a deep observation. I've been noticing this more and more lately, and also something else which is related. By giving the bill a false name, when the vote comes to the floor the media can accuse the people who vote against it of voting against "College Opportunity and Affordability." They did the same with the SCHIP bill-- vote against the bill and you're automatically tagged as "against health insurance for poor children," even though you may have been voting against it because it would hurt the current health insurance system (or the economy) in general. This is so blatantly cynical it is sickening, and it rings vaguely of 1984 newspeak.
I'll bet a big, multi-port Cicso router might be a better target, pound-for-pound, than a dell server. So the hosting company might have been telling the truth. "The router failed because, ummm, it's no longer connected!"
My second thought on this-- it seems like a lot of work to go to (and huge legal risk) for a few dual Xeon servers. I wonder who (or what) was hosting on those boxes. Cutting through the walls and roughing up the security guard will add a lot of years to a conviction. Maybe there's more to the story we're not hearing, and will never know.
The two MB's they reviewed are going to be incredibly expensive (over $300) when they hit the streets,
the only one that survived overclocking the already insanely fast CPU (the other one died and could not be revived), takes ridiculously expensive DDR3 memory, and
when run at their max (optimal, i.e. stock) settings showed no difference in performance from their "hopelessly outdated" predecessors, the P35 chipset boards.
Only one game benchmark (F.E.A.R.) showed any measurable difference at all from one to the other.
All the video and audio encoding benchmark results were identical, which only proves those tasks are processor bound (all the test systems used the same CPU-- only the chipsets and/or memory differed).
I find it odd the reviewers even recommended the board (the survivor-- they were skeptical of the dead one). I don't understand the attraction of a board/chipset like this! It's going to take another generation of hardware to take advantage of the 32 simultaneous 32 bit video data "lanes" on each PCI-E (or X or whatever) slot. And eventually, maybe DDR3 will drop in price when there's some demand for it. And all the I/O (8 USB 2.0 ports and external SATA ports and optical and coax digital AV) seem like they could come in handy. But seriously, why are they making these now? Is it for the quad-core support? Do other chipsets support quad-core Intels? Or is it because they allow plugging in not one but two $500+ dollar video cards?
I look forward to lots of serious gamers buying these, devising new benchmarks to prove their efficacy, and bringing down the cost for this point of entry into the market for the rest of us. But gamers! Read the review and benchmarks. This chipset does not, at least based on this review, demonstrate a big leap forward.
I'm sorry, but this article fails on it's own premises. Following the argument to its logical conclusion requires accepting that conservatives have functioning minds, and that's obviously a fallacy. Sorry folks. The researchers have to go back to the drawing board.
Thank you sir, for your clear explanation. I could not agree more. This is not about morality! If it's possible to define ad blocking as immoral behavior, the next step will be to define not buying the product as immoral! This whining, frustrated web site owner is welcome to block my browser all he wants. He's already called me "immoral" and won't get into my bookmarks, or even my attention span. It's not unlike the sites that are so ad-riddled that it takes a minute or more to load the page in the first place-- I will click elsewhere. He's welcome to disappear... he can cross his arms and stomp his feet and hold his breath too, if he wants to.
This seems like bad government. It's frustrating when Mama's Delicatessen calls the police when their customers can't get to the restaurant, and the police can't do anything because the film crew who's encamped there aren't breaking any law. Every couple of years a movie crew decides to film in my city (Portland, Maine), and it's horribly disruptive. In Maine, though, everyone is so flattered they're shooting a movie here, they just overlook the inconvenience. In Manhattan, it happens every day, all over the city, and is likely a PITA for many. To set up a new licensing authority to try and regulate it is just a "big government" solution. It seems like they could just enforce the existing parking and public nuisance laws-- perhaps amending some interference-with-commerce laws so they better address the particular problem-- rather than setting up another department in an already bloated and corrupt City Government. The problem isn't photographers and film crews, the problem is the disruption they cause. So go after that.
It's interesting that this "law," which appears to be enforceable at the discretion of Paliament, will only effectively fend off the poor and powerless, i.e. those who can't afford lawyers to sort it out. I do not consider it a plus to have a questionable law on the books that can be only be sorted out by the lawyers (or whatever you call them in NZ).
All of the commercial database software packages (that I know of) have a specific part of the license which forbids publishing benchmarks. You'll never see head-to-head benchmarks of MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or any others, because they don't feel that any benchmarks would reflect the results of their product fully optimized.
In a sense, they're right. The "speed" of a database depends on many variables-- disk speed, network speed, CPU speed, contention from other processes, OS overhead, and countless configuration options-- and most vendors aim for (and achieve, in my opinion) "good enough" speed after applications and workloads stabilize and small performance tweaks are applied.
Right or wrong, the big software vendors don't believe a test scenario devised by a testing team, no matter how experienced or neutral, is going to reflect a real-world setup. What kind of workload is planned? Many small updates? A data warehouse/data mart where unchanging data is read often, but updates only once a day/week/month? Are reports quick reads of mostly unchanging data? Is this an OLTP system with many simultaneous changes from many users? Do queries have to be guaranteed to only return committed data? How much data will be involved, and what are the backup strategies? What are the connection interfaces? TCP/IP? ODBC? Java Beans? C++?
There's just no way to standardize the configuration of one single database product (that's why Oracle is legendary for all the configuration options), to say nothing of setting up several databases for a head-to-head test that's fair or particularly informative. Sad but true, it is unlikely that you'll ever see head-to-head comparisons of commercial databases, and the ones I've read of open source offerings are rarely that useful, because of the variability of real world requirements.
If MS is contemplating a lawsuit (nothing in TFA indicates that), it's not because of one user coding up macros to make their lives easier. MS doesn't make (much) money from individual users, they make their money on corporations, some of which have an infrastructure investment in Excel macros (I know, I know, it's a horrible idea... but it's true). Those macros represent a huge moment of inertia for an organization to overcome before they can switch to another spreadsheet-- that's why it's "cheaper" to pay the massive licensing fees for MS Office than to change to free software. Changing platforms requires planning, controlled conversion, and meticulous testing of code that does something that in many cases no one even remembers precisely. Many users don't even know they're running macros, they just know to 1) load the spreadsheet, 2) press Ctrl-X or something, and 3) type in some new numbers. That creates a very difficult situation for someone planning to change platforms.
If OOo includes transparent VBA support, which can be demonstrated to be reliable, much of that inertia is overcome. MS doesn't care about an individual coder who wants to write spreadsheet macros, whether they're in VBA or Haskell or Snobol or RPG-- they've already lost those users. It is very much in their interest to keep those 50-seat (or 20,000-seat) user licenses coming in. And protecting that revenue stream will pay for a lot of lawyers.
Check out the "Doomed" channel on http://www.somafm.com/ if you can feed your speakers from the computer. Last year they had a dedicated Halloween channel. This year, it appears they're using their spookiest channel for double-duty. It's not light-- mostly metal, industrial, techno-- and there probably won't be a lot you've heard before, but it's definitely scary and a good mix!
You may be onto something there-- doesn't Creative hold the patent on the click wheel interface? Maybe Microsoft has entered into some alliance with them. (No, I didnt' RTFA so I don't know if the thing actually has a click wheel).
The one thing I know is that Microsoft is more than willing and able to take the barely tolerable DRM scheme in iTunes and escalate into a horrible, ugly mess that no one in their right mind would pay for. Yay.
Hahaha... yes, you're right. I'm not into intelligent design.
I don't guess MySpace is criminally culpable in this case, since we're still trying to figure out the good guys from the bad guys. It seems if I subcontract some service to another company (as MySpace does for their advertising), and the other company messes up-- or does something despicable-- in the process of supplying the service, it's not my fault. And if the MySpace advertising agency subcontracts the actual ads to others, then it's not the ad agency's fault either. Ditto with the advertisers-- if I advertise my widget through an agency, and the ad my widget appears on infects a zillion computers, it's not my fault either-- paper trail, signed contracts, NDA's, good faith, non-compete, hold harmless, legal team-- the cufflink-popping, tassel-loafer crowd makes sure of that. If there were liability, they would do it differently.
But let's face it, corporations are making the decision that it's OK to infect computers for profit, and other corporations are making the decision to look away (even if they have to hold their nose-- or double check their contracts-- while doing so) while their sub-contractors do bad things. The laws against the practices are vague and ineffective. Money is the only object-- it's America's new "free market," and frankly it disgusts me. Naming names, and calling things bad which actually are wrong is perhaps a start.
Disclaimer-- I have a MySpace account, and my Windows Media Player has been patched for this particular vulnerability for months. And the video stuff is among the most annoying thing on MySpace.
if I had the flu but didn't realise because I wasn't showing symptoms, how does it make me ultimately responsible for spreading it? I couldn't have known I had it until people who I was in contact with got it too.
Bad metaphor. It's one of the problems I have with calling malware a "virus," because that implies that some more-or-less random thing happened to the computer which caused some inconvenience and problem with your computer.
It's not random or an unfortunate accident! Someone had to write the program, package it in such a way that it would infect the computers of unsuspecting users, often using poorly understood or undocumented vulnerabilities of popular software or backdoors installed by earlier malware, and someone had to engineer a distribution scheme to make that happen. Few of these programs are the products of script kiddies with attitude problems anymore. This isn't like catching a sniffle from a doorknob or an airborne virus! And worse, the really bad malware out there now was created commercially, paid for by some company who believes that the investment in paying programmers and engineers to come up with it will be handsomely rewarded, by delivering the keystroke logs and the spam forwarding zombies and the inadvertant hits on the websites of their clients caused by popups.
We have to stop thinking of this as some random "virus" that's like the common cold, and realize these are commercial ventures that have a commercial interest in fscking with your computer and software against your will, and will even fight with the anti-adware and anti-virus companies in court to avoid being called what they are (scum-sucking criminal dregs of the lowest sort), and it's all done for profit.
No one can hold you responsible for spreading a flu, but people can and should be held responsible for spreading computer malware, adware, and viruses for profit. If someone is making money from it, it's not a "virus", it's a crime.
Calm down Skippy. I know there's an almost uncontrollable reaction to do something here, but if the librarian had given up the lending lists, that idiot would have gotten off with any $100 dollar lawyer-- likely a public defender (who you, and I, have already paid for) could have gotten the case thrown out because of tainted evidence.
We are still a nation of laws. This isn't an Amber Alert-- the girl was home, unharmed, with her parents. This librarian made it possible for the police to gather useful, and legal, evidence to prosecute the bastard. I hope he rots in jail, but don't blame the librarian. She's doing her job, and keeping the local cops from blowing the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Ford owns a big piece of Mazda. Analogies are always a problem.
There's no 64 bit version? At least the last time I tried, and had to dick around with ndiswrapper. I still don't know exactly what I did, but for now it works. I don't want to try and explain how to do it to anyone. And I'm not sure I want to try it again-- I don't even know if I'm using the swf alternative or the Adobe version. But for now, Fedora 8 works pretty fine for me.
This is deep and thoughtful and true. You deserve lots of mod points.
Watch your step on the porch, there's broken glass there.
Of course, his crappy software had no preview, and swallowed all the line breaks, but at least he got all the text. I have my doubts whether he'll heed (or can even read) the words. *sigh*
This site will help to contact your representative. This one will work too, and I think it will find senators as well.
Google is our friend! And apparently non-partisan. Yessss...
You're spot on about the media caving in. In this case there's an interesting twist-- the major US media outlets are all parts of conglomerates that also own record and movie companies. They are all aware that reporting this kind of shenanigans would be against their other business interests. C|Net can report it, and Slashdot can bring it to people's attention, but you won't see it on cable or the networks or in the major city newspapers, because they're all paying into the MPAA and RIAA.
This makes Ron Paul's proposal to abolish the Department of Education seem very wise indeed!
That is a deep observation. I've been noticing this more and more lately, and also something else which is related. By giving the bill a false name, when the vote comes to the floor the media can accuse the people who vote against it of voting against "College Opportunity and Affordability." They did the same with the SCHIP bill-- vote against the bill and you're automatically tagged as "against health insurance for poor children," even though you may have been voting against it because it would hurt the current health insurance system (or the economy) in general. This is so blatantly cynical it is sickening, and it rings vaguely of 1984 newspeak.
I'll bet a big, multi-port Cicso router might be a better target, pound-for-pound, than a dell server. So the hosting company might have been telling the truth. "The router failed because, ummm, it's no longer connected!" My second thought on this-- it seems like a lot of work to go to (and huge legal risk) for a few dual Xeon servers. I wonder who (or what) was hosting on those boxes. Cutting through the walls and roughing up the security guard will add a lot of years to a conviction. Maybe there's more to the story we're not hearing, and will never know.
I find it odd the reviewers even recommended the board (the survivor-- they were skeptical of the dead one). I don't understand the attraction of a board/chipset like this! It's going to take another generation of hardware to take advantage of the 32 simultaneous 32 bit video data "lanes" on each PCI-E (or X or whatever) slot. And eventually, maybe DDR3 will drop in price when there's some demand for it. And all the I/O (8 USB 2.0 ports and external SATA ports and optical and coax digital AV) seem like they could come in handy. But seriously, why are they making these now? Is it for the quad-core support? Do other chipsets support quad-core Intels? Or is it because they allow plugging in not one but two $500+ dollar video cards?
I look forward to lots of serious gamers buying these, devising new benchmarks to prove their efficacy, and bringing down the cost for this point of entry into the market for the rest of us. But gamers! Read the review and benchmarks. This chipset does not, at least based on this review, demonstrate a big leap forward.
I'm sorry, but this article fails on it's own premises. Following the argument to its logical conclusion requires accepting that conservatives have functioning minds, and that's obviously a fallacy. Sorry folks. The researchers have to go back to the drawing board.
Thank you sir, for your clear explanation. I could not agree more. This is not about morality! If it's possible to define ad blocking as immoral behavior, the next step will be to define not buying the product as immoral! This whining, frustrated web site owner is welcome to block my browser all he wants. He's already called me "immoral" and won't get into my bookmarks, or even my attention span. It's not unlike the sites that are so ad-riddled that it takes a minute or more to load the page in the first place-- I will click elsewhere. He's welcome to disappear... he can cross his arms and stomp his feet and hold his breath too, if he wants to.
This seems like bad government. It's frustrating when Mama's Delicatessen calls the police when their customers can't get to the restaurant, and the police can't do anything because the film crew who's encamped there aren't breaking any law. Every couple of years a movie crew decides to film in my city (Portland, Maine), and it's horribly disruptive. In Maine, though, everyone is so flattered they're shooting a movie here, they just overlook the inconvenience. In Manhattan, it happens every day, all over the city, and is likely a PITA for many. To set up a new licensing authority to try and regulate it is just a "big government" solution. It seems like they could just enforce the existing parking and public nuisance laws-- perhaps amending some interference-with-commerce laws so they better address the particular problem-- rather than setting up another department in an already bloated and corrupt City Government. The problem isn't photographers and film crews, the problem is the disruption they cause. So go after that.
It's interesting that this "law," which appears to be enforceable at the discretion of Paliament, will only effectively fend off the poor and powerless, i.e. those who can't afford lawyers to sort it out. I do not consider it a plus to have a questionable law on the books that can be only be sorted out by the lawyers (or whatever you call them in NZ).
Thank you for saying that. I could not agree more.
You can benchmark to your heart's content. It's publishing the results that get you into trouble.
All of the commercial database software packages (that I know of) have a specific part of the license which forbids publishing benchmarks. You'll never see head-to-head benchmarks of MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or any others, because they don't feel that any benchmarks would reflect the results of their product fully optimized.
In a sense, they're right. The "speed" of a database depends on many variables-- disk speed, network speed, CPU speed, contention from other processes, OS overhead, and countless configuration options-- and most vendors aim for (and achieve, in my opinion) "good enough" speed after applications and workloads stabilize and small performance tweaks are applied.
Right or wrong, the big software vendors don't believe a test scenario devised by a testing team, no matter how experienced or neutral, is going to reflect a real-world setup. What kind of workload is planned? Many small updates? A data warehouse/data mart where unchanging data is read often, but updates only once a day/week/month? Are reports quick reads of mostly unchanging data? Is this an OLTP system with many simultaneous changes from many users? Do queries have to be guaranteed to only return committed data? How much data will be involved, and what are the backup strategies? What are the connection interfaces? TCP/IP? ODBC? Java Beans? C++?
There's just no way to standardize the configuration of one single database product (that's why Oracle is legendary for all the configuration options), to say nothing of setting up several databases for a head-to-head test that's fair or particularly informative. Sad but true, it is unlikely that you'll ever see head-to-head comparisons of commercial databases, and the ones I've read of open source offerings are rarely that useful, because of the variability of real world requirements.
If MS is contemplating a lawsuit (nothing in TFA indicates that), it's not because of one user coding up macros to make their lives easier. MS doesn't make (much) money from individual users, they make their money on corporations, some of which have an infrastructure investment in Excel macros (I know, I know, it's a horrible idea... but it's true). Those macros represent a huge moment of inertia for an organization to overcome before they can switch to another spreadsheet-- that's why it's "cheaper" to pay the massive licensing fees for MS Office than to change to free software. Changing platforms requires planning, controlled conversion, and meticulous testing of code that does something that in many cases no one even remembers precisely. Many users don't even know they're running macros, they just know to 1) load the spreadsheet, 2) press Ctrl-X or something, and 3) type in some new numbers. That creates a very difficult situation for someone planning to change platforms.
If OOo includes transparent VBA support, which can be demonstrated to be reliable, much of that inertia is overcome. MS doesn't care about an individual coder who wants to write spreadsheet macros, whether they're in VBA or Haskell or Snobol or RPG-- they've already lost those users. It is very much in their interest to keep those 50-seat (or 20,000-seat) user licenses coming in. And protecting that revenue stream will pay for a lot of lawyers.
But, hey... you got Foxfire 2. That's progress, maybe? Bummer about your upgrade. Mine's running now.
Check out the "Doomed" channel on http://www.somafm.com/ if you can feed your speakers from the computer. Last year they had a dedicated Halloween channel. This year, it appears they're using their spookiest channel for double-duty. It's not light-- mostly metal, industrial, techno-- and there probably won't be a lot you've heard before, but it's definitely scary and a good mix!
This is a brilliant post. Thank you for the laugh.
You may be onto something there-- doesn't Creative hold the patent on the click wheel interface? Maybe Microsoft has entered into some alliance with them. (No, I didnt' RTFA so I don't know if the thing actually has a click wheel).
The one thing I know is that Microsoft is more than willing and able to take the barely tolerable DRM scheme in iTunes and escalate into a horrible, ugly mess that no one in their right mind would pay for. Yay.
Hahaha... yes, you're right. I'm not into intelligent design.
I don't guess MySpace is criminally culpable in this case, since we're still trying to figure out the good guys from the bad guys. It seems if I subcontract some service to another company (as MySpace does for their advertising), and the other company messes up-- or does something despicable-- in the process of supplying the service, it's not my fault. And if the MySpace advertising agency subcontracts the actual ads to others, then it's not the ad agency's fault either. Ditto with the advertisers-- if I advertise my widget through an agency, and the ad my widget appears on infects a zillion computers, it's not my fault either-- paper trail, signed contracts, NDA's, good faith, non-compete, hold harmless, legal team-- the cufflink-popping, tassel-loafer crowd makes sure of that. If there were liability, they would do it differently.
But let's face it, corporations are making the decision that it's OK to infect computers for profit, and other corporations are making the decision to look away (even if they have to hold their nose-- or double check their contracts-- while doing so) while their sub-contractors do bad things. The laws against the practices are vague and ineffective. Money is the only object-- it's America's new "free market," and frankly it disgusts me. Naming names, and calling things bad which actually are wrong is perhaps a start.
Disclaimer-- I have a MySpace account, and my Windows Media Player has been patched for this particular vulnerability for months. And the video stuff is among the most annoying thing on MySpace.
Bad metaphor. It's one of the problems I have with calling malware a "virus," because that implies that some more-or-less random thing happened to the computer which caused some inconvenience and problem with your computer.
It's not random or an unfortunate accident! Someone had to write the program, package it in such a way that it would infect the computers of unsuspecting users, often using poorly understood or undocumented vulnerabilities of popular software or backdoors installed by earlier malware, and someone had to engineer a distribution scheme to make that happen. Few of these programs are the products of script kiddies with attitude problems anymore. This isn't like catching a sniffle from a doorknob or an airborne virus! And worse, the really bad malware out there now was created commercially, paid for by some company who believes that the investment in paying programmers and engineers to come up with it will be handsomely rewarded, by delivering the keystroke logs and the spam forwarding zombies and the inadvertant hits on the websites of their clients caused by popups.
We have to stop thinking of this as some random "virus" that's like the common cold, and realize these are commercial ventures that have a commercial interest in fscking with your computer and software against your will, and will even fight with the anti-adware and anti-virus companies in court to avoid being called what they are (scum-sucking criminal dregs of the lowest sort), and it's all done for profit.
No one can hold you responsible for spreading a flu, but people can and should be held responsible for spreading computer malware, adware, and viruses for profit. If someone is making money from it, it's not a "virus", it's a crime.
Calm down Skippy. I know there's an almost uncontrollable reaction to do something here, but if the librarian had given up the lending lists, that idiot would have gotten off with any $100 dollar lawyer-- likely a public defender (who you, and I, have already paid for) could have gotten the case thrown out because of tainted evidence.
We are still a nation of laws. This isn't an Amber Alert-- the girl was home, unharmed, with her parents. This librarian made it possible for the police to gather useful, and legal, evidence to prosecute the bastard. I hope he rots in jail, but don't blame the librarian. She's doing her job, and keeping the local cops from blowing the case.