Mark Russinovich seems very knowledgeable to me, but I think he has made a mistake. There is general agreement that NewSID is necessary.
For example, we clone hard drives and leave the cloned drive in the system as a backup. For that, my understanding it that it is necessary to change the SID. Since those computers are cash registers, they are not attached to a domain. If they were attached to a domain, and the domain controller failed, the user might not be able to ring a sale. We could use Sysprep, but in this particular case, NewSID is more efficient. Or, is there some problem of which we are not aware? What other machine identifiers does Sysprep change, besides the SID? The lack of clear, concise documentation of Windows raises the cost of ownership.
The Windows XP Service Pack 3 Deployment Tools still mention changing the SID using Sysprep. Note that the help file for those tools still references XP service pack 2. That's typical Microsoft uncaring sloppiness, in my experience. The Sysprep Command-Line Options help file, in deploy.chm, still says that there are cases where changing the SID is necessary.
There may be many programs not supplied by Microsoft that depend on differing SIDs. This is not a decision that Microsoft should make unilaterally.
Do older Microsoft Windows operating systems require a unique SID in ways that Mark Russinovich is not considering?
Quote from the article by Mark Russinovich: "I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue. At that point the decision to retire NewSID became obvious."
Translation of that quote: "We didn't do any testing."
I think that at least some disk imaging and backup software, such as Acronis, changes the SID after a clone.
Some web sites are still offering NewSID 4.10 for download. For example, NewSID 4.10. But, is that a good copy? What is the MD5 or SHA1 or SHA256 of the latest version of NewSID.EXE?
Is it legal to download something that Microsoft supplied in the past? In the U.S., there is a law of Fitness for Merchantability. Does that law protect Microsoft's users, since in some cases we can't use what we bought without NewSID, or some other SID-changing utility?
What is the real reason NewSID was removed from availability for download? To me, Mark Russinovich has always seemed completely honest, and far more knowledgeable than any other programmer I know of at Microsoft. On the other hand, Microsoft managers have sometimes seemed to me to have chosen to do something that they think will be more profitable for Microsoft, but very much against the best interests of customers.
Note that the "markrussinovich" who posted comments in the Microsoft TechNet story does not have a TechNet biography.
Some people have had trouble with SID-changing utilities. Some of those troubles were caused by not letting the SID-changer finish scanning an entire partition or hard drive.
This is a BIG issue for us. Our experience is that Microsoft Windows has an extremely high cost of ownership, due partly to the sloppiness of the design. Mark Russinovich's SysInternals tools for Microsoft Windows have been very helpful for us in lowering that cost a little. Those tools should always have been supplied by Microsoft, in my opinion, and now that SysInternals is owned by Microsoft, they are.
Slashdot is a technology web site with editors who seemingly only know computer technology.
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive carefully.
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive very carefully. I adjusted for
the fact that Jennifer Edstrom is not knowledgeable about technology, and that
creates some confusion in the story. (She is the daughter of the woman who ran
Microsoft's P.R.
agency at the time. That agency told Bill Gates to shower and wear nice
clothes.) Jennifer's co-author was a former Microsoft manager.
Many people have become enthusiastic about computers when they were
young. The differences in the case of Bill Gates are that he had rich parents,
and that he wanted to start a business.
The later chapters in the book give a better understanding. If I
remember correctly what was in that particular book, it was quite clear that
Bill Gates was not particularly knowledgeable about technology. That's
something he apparently has in common with many technology company managers.
The Road Ahead is typical of the thinking of Bill Gates, it
appears to me. He was one of the authors, so it should be.
I agree with your statement. However, it doesn't apply in this case.
The internet existed long before it became a public utility. By a
different name, it was available to big companies and universities. When Bill
Gates decided that the internet was important, it had already been a very
popular public service among technology enthusiasts for perhaps two years.
Another issue: I asked Vint Cerf by
email if it was true that Al Gore was influential in creating the internet. He
said it was. He said Al Gore created the circumstances in the U.S. government
by which ARPAnet became the public utility known as the Internet. (I don't
mean to imply that I know Vint Cerf. I don't.)
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
See the comment just below with the username Orion Blastar.
Quoting: "Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but
rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving,
but nobody can prove that."
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe
surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in
technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most
innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system,
the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the
computer industry.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in
technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft failed to recognize the importance of the internet long
after it became important to myself and people I knew, like a friend at
Tektronix. I remember downloading something from a computer at a university in
Japan and being hugely impressed. Remember that there was an internet long
before there was a fully public internet.
Next sentence from the comment below: "Anyway Ballmer and Gates
wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft."
That program was very limited. It was, of course, NOT a "traffic
control program". It only counted switch closures and recorded the data for
later analysis.
Consider the history of Windows, as recounted in the books about
Microsoft, such as Hard Drive. Microsoft had supplied DOS, an OS
originally bought from someone else. According to that book, Microsoft
stopped competition by announcing Windows long before it was ready. The first
version of Windows was worthless, in my opinion. The second version was a toy.
The third version was the first that was actually useful. It crashed a lot,
and handled fonts badly. Windows version 3.1 was the first acceptable product.
Cable switches were placed on a road. Traf-o-Data counted closures of the switches.
There is little to suggest Gates knows technology.
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the
CP/M operating system.
"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech
companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."
The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in
technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind
cannot lead.
Read The
Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the
initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology.
The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.
SeaMonkey Composer is the best way to make WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, HTML files.
Unless, of course, you want to deal with the quirkiness and huge expense of Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has more features, but SeaMonkey is usually all you need.
ITER is a Tokamak reactor. There are 20 now in operation. Thirteen were operated before and are now shut down. None of them have ever produced more power than they used.
Even if they release source code, it is possible that the code they actually use in their voting machines is different than the code they release. It's entirely their choice which software is run on any given day, is that correct? They can do updates whenever they want. Their are apparently no dependable guarantees.
In the past, Sequoia Voting has not seemed especially knowledgeable: Sequoia e-voting machines disturbingly easy to hack. Quote: "Researchers from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy... were able to trivially circumvent the machine's physical security mechanisms and plant a hacked ROM that undetectably doctored the voting results."
Off topic: Be skeptical about flu reports. The reports about flu were so flawed I took the time to write my own, using information from The Atlantic magazine and CBS News, among other sources.
If you go from IT to nursing, you may be going from bad to worse. The medical profession is EXTREMELY corrupt. Here are just two of the many examples:
Rooney On Health Care. His doctor billed $250 just for saying hello, literally for only saying hello. (Short video)
Be skeptical about flu reports. The reports about flu were so flawed I took the time to write my own, using information from The Atlantic magazine and CBS News, among other sources.
If there is extreme corruption, there may be a collapse of some kind, and you could become involved in a way you didn't foresee and don't like. As in the financial industry, the top executives will profit enormously, but the average person may lose his job.
"Never do upgrades, it's the best opportunity to clean the trash out of the registry."
The best way to avoid Windows registry problems may be to use Linux.
The registry trashing problems could be easily fixed by Microsoft, if the company wanted to do that. For the apparent reason Microsoft doesn't fix the registry trashing problems, see the New York Times
article Corrupted PC's
Find New Home in the Dumpster. Corruption and vulnerability to malware is apparently very profitable
for Microsoft and its main customers, who are computer manufacturers.
You said, 'Business users don't "Upgrade" operating systems in the classical sense anyway. When it's time for an OS upgrade, the disk gets nuked and re-imaged.'
We are BOTH correct. In possibly every business, there are computers that are clones of each other, and there are computers that are very specialized. The accounting department needs a variety of special accounting programs. Administration needs a copy of anything installed anywhere else in the business, so they can manage the work of other people. Marketing needs image editing programs and page layout programs. The specialized images have perhaps hundreds of configuration differences. It is VERY expensive to develop all the specialized images again.
We might not want to do the work of developing the specialized images again immediately, especially if everything is already working well. We may be willing to move the more standard computers to Windows 7 by developing a new standard image. But, if we do that, we MUST update the specialized images, also, because we can't economically support two operating systems.
So, the fact that we can't just move all the special programs and configurations from Windows XP to Windows 7 automatically tends to prevent or delay our adoption of Windows 7 at all, because the cost of developing specialized images is so high.
Of course, the fact that it is extremely expensive to migrate programs is entirely because of the design of Windows. Apparently to accomplish copy protection, Microsoft designed Windows to put data and files in lots of places, making it very difficult or impossible to just migrate a program.
Also, in our experience Windows XP was not really ready for normal use until service pack 2 was released and installed and tested for more than a month. Before that there were terrible problems with imaging, for example. Sysprep had bugs. Windows has been crippled by Microsoft so that it cannot copy some of its own files!
Many people say Windows Vista was NEVER ready for general use. Many people say Windows ME was NEVER ready for general use. So it is reasonable, in our opinion, to wait to install Windows 7 until other people have experienced all the bugs and pain and expensive hassles. Microsoft has a history of releasing VERY buggy software.
Or maybe we will wait for Windows Really It's Amazing This Time, the version after Windows 7. There is no hurry.
Apparently Microsoft has always realized that if the company released one good version of Windows, most people would never want to "upgrade", particularly when "upgrades" also include methods of making Windows slower so that people and companies will need to buy new computers. Microsoft has always been much more attentive to the needs of the big computer manufacturers than to the actual users, in my opinion.
My experience with Dell is that the company is tricky. I try to avoid Dell because for me the company does not make a good business partner, which is the relationship you have when you buy something technologically complicated from a company.
Quote from the story: "He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old." [Should be businesses.]
That's a bit tricky, in my opinion. There is no migration path directly from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you are using Windows XP now, it is necessary to re-install ALL your applications, and re-configure ALL your settings. For us, that easily takes 40 hours. Windows XP has had a VERY high cost of ownership for us, and here we go again. Microsoft did not want to finish the work, apparently, and provide a way to convert automatically from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Also, Windows XP is not 8 years old, in my way of perceiving the matter. Windows XP was very troublesome until service pack 2 was released on August 25, 2004. So XP is actually 5 years old, because that is the date of what could be said to be the first release candidate.
It doesn't matter how old an OS is! We are not in the OS business. We are happy with what works for us.
In our experience it is better to buy components and build our own computers. The inside of a mass-market computer is amazing. Everywhere costs could have been cut, the components have been made a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheaper.
This article would be funny if it weren't so sad. What's the reason computer professionals don't understand SSL? Bad documentation. And neither the Slashdot summary or the article to which Slashdot links is willing to link to documentation.
If you mean this SGI, Synthetic Genomics, Inc., I note that the July 14, 2009 press release to
which I linked is not as positive as you: "Under the terms of the
agreement, SGI will work in a systematic approach to find, optimize, and/or
engineer superior strains of algae, and to define and develop the best systems
for large-scale cultivation of algae and conversion of their products into
useful biofuels."
I'm not the only one who thinks it may require years. Here is a quote
from an article subtitled, 'Restraint' an Unspoken Watchword of Algae Biomass Sessions: '... much of
the fundamental production technology is "immature," and that timelines of two
to four years from inception to production are unrealistic. Barclay says
flatly, "Commercially feasible biodiesel from photosynthetic algae is more
than 10 years away.'
This seems to be incorrect: "... the process of turning cellulose into fuel is well understood now and several companies are starting to implement it on an industrial scale. See e.g. http://www.gevo.com./".
Quote from the Gevo web site, 2009-10-11, 11:37 PDT: "Our team of biofuel experts is developing the next generation of biofuels. Gevo's GIFT® process will provide a sustainable path to the replacement of petrochemicals like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel." [My emphasis]
Gevo is apparently looking for money, not producing fuel. Those who run Gevo will apparently make money, even if the investors lose money.
Slashdot Mirror
Mark Russinovich seems very knowledgeable to me, but I think he has made a mistake. There is general agreement that NewSID is necessary.
For example, we clone hard drives and leave the cloned drive in the system as a backup. For that, my understanding it that it is necessary to change the SID. Since those computers are cash registers, they are not attached to a domain. If they were attached to a domain, and the domain controller failed, the user might not be able to ring a sale. We could use Sysprep, but in this particular case, NewSID is more efficient. Or, is there some problem of which we are not aware? What other machine identifiers does Sysprep change, besides the SID? The lack of clear, concise documentation of Windows raises the cost of ownership.
Here is official Microsoft policy as of 2009-11-04, 05:36 PDT: "Because the SID identifies both the computer or domain and the user, unique SIDs are essential to maintain support for current and future programs."
The Windows XP Service Pack 3 Deployment Tools still mention changing the SID using Sysprep. Note that the help file for those tools still references XP service pack 2. That's typical Microsoft uncaring sloppiness, in my experience. The Sysprep Command-Line Options help file, in deploy.chm, still says that there are cases where changing the SID is necessary.
There may be many programs not supplied by Microsoft that depend on differing SIDs. This is not a decision that Microsoft should make unilaterally.
Do older Microsoft Windows operating systems require a unique SID in ways that Mark Russinovich is not considering?
Quote from the article by Mark Russinovich: "I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue. At that point the decision to retire NewSID became obvious."
Translation of that quote: "We didn't do any testing."
I think that at least some disk imaging and backup software, such as Acronis, changes the SID after a clone.
Some web sites are still offering NewSID 4.10 for download. For example, NewSID 4.10. But, is that a good copy? What is the MD5 or SHA1 or SHA256 of the latest version of NewSID.EXE?
Is it legal to download something that Microsoft supplied in the past? In the U.S., there is a law of Fitness for Merchantability. Does that law protect Microsoft's users, since in some cases we can't use what we bought without NewSID, or some other SID-changing utility?
What is the real reason NewSID was removed from availability for download? To me, Mark Russinovich has always seemed completely honest, and far more knowledgeable than any other programmer I know of at Microsoft. On the other hand, Microsoft managers have sometimes seemed to me to have chosen to do something that they think will be more profitable for Microsoft, but very much against the best interests of customers.
Note that the "markrussinovich" who posted comments in the Microsoft TechNet story does not have a TechNet biography.
Some people have had trouble with SID-changing utilities. Some of those troubles were caused by not letting the SID-changer finish scanning an entire partition or hard drive.
This is a BIG issue for us. Our experience is that Microsoft Windows has an extremely high cost of ownership, due partly to the sloppiness of the design. Mark Russinovich's SysInternals tools for Microsoft Windows have been very helpful for us in lowering that cost a little. Those tools should always have been supplied by Microsoft, in my opinion, and now that SysInternals is owned by Microsoft, they are.
FRAUD? Plants always metabolize nitrogen. The extra humidity is not needed in humid Japan, and therefore provides little cooling.
This seems to be a P.R. blitz. Google lists an amazing number of references.
Slashdot is a technology web site with editors who seemingly only know computer technology.
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive very carefully. I adjusted for the fact that Jennifer Edstrom is not knowledgeable about technology, and that creates some confusion in the story. (She is the daughter of the woman who ran Microsoft's P.R. agency at the time. That agency told Bill Gates to shower and wear nice clothes.) Jennifer's co-author was a former Microsoft manager.
Many people have become enthusiastic about computers when they were young. The differences in the case of Bill Gates are that he had rich parents, and that he wanted to start a business.
The later chapters in the book give a better understanding. If I remember correctly what was in that particular book, it was quite clear that Bill Gates was not particularly knowledgeable about technology. That's something he apparently has in common with many technology company managers.
The Road Ahead is typical of the thinking of Bill Gates, it appears to me. He was one of the authors, so it should be.
I agree with your statement. However, it doesn't apply in this case.
The internet existed long before it became a public utility. By a different name, it was available to big companies and universities. When Bill Gates decided that the internet was important, it had already been a very popular public service among technology enthusiasts for perhaps two years.
Another issue: I asked Vint Cerf by email if it was true that Al Gore was influential in creating the internet. He said it was. He said Al Gore created the circumstances in the U.S. government by which ARPAnet became the public utility known as the Internet. (I don't mean to imply that I know Vint Cerf. I don't.)
See the comment just below with the username Orion Blastar.
Quoting: "Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that."
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft failed to recognize the importance of the internet long after it became important to myself and people I knew, like a friend at Tektronix. I remember downloading something from a computer at a university in Japan and being hugely impressed. Remember that there was an internet long before there was a fully public internet.
Next sentence from the comment below: "Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft."
That program was very limited. It was, of course, NOT a "traffic control program". It only counted switch closures and recorded the data for later analysis.
Consider the history of Windows, as recounted in the books about Microsoft, such as Hard Drive. Microsoft had supplied DOS, an OS originally bought from someone else. According to that book, Microsoft stopped competition by announcing Windows long before it was ready. The first version of Windows was worthless, in my opinion. The second version was a toy. The third version was the first that was actually useful. It crashed a lot, and handled fonts badly. Windows version 3.1 was the first acceptable product.
Cable switches were placed on a road. Traf-o-Data counted closures of the switches.
The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.
"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."
The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.
If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.
Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.
Yup. It looks like Slashdot readers are skeptical.
SeaMonkey Composer is the best way to make WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, HTML files.
Unless, of course, you want to deal with the quirkiness and huge expense of Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has more features, but SeaMonkey is usually all you need.
Use TsWebEditor for Tidying SeaMonkey HTML files.
Slashdotters seem to be skeptical.
ITER is a Tokamak reactor. There are 20 now in operation. Thirteen were operated before and are now shut down. None of them have ever produced more power than they used.
Even if they release source code, it is possible that the code they actually use in their voting machines is different than the code they release. It's entirely their choice which software is run on any given day, is that correct? They can do updates whenever they want. Their are apparently no dependable guarantees.
... were able to trivially circumvent the machine's physical security mechanisms and plant a hacked ROM that undetectably doctored the voting results."
In the past, Sequoia Voting has not seemed especially knowledgeable: Sequoia e-voting machines disturbingly easy to hack. Quote: "Researchers from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy
See this article, also, about a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine: Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies.
Off topic: Be skeptical about flu reports. The reports about flu were so flawed I took the time to write my own, using information from The Atlantic magazine and CBS News, among other sources.
Here's a direct link to The Atlantic magazine article, one of the sources for the article I wrote, linked above: Does the Vaccine Matter?.
Andy Rooney's medical bill is my source. In this case, Andy Rooney said is backed by plenty of evidence.
If you go from IT to nursing, you may be going from bad to worse. The medical profession is EXTREMELY corrupt. Here are just two of the many examples:
Rooney On Health Care. His doctor billed $250 just for saying hello, literally for only saying hello. (Short video)
Be skeptical about flu reports. The reports about flu were so flawed I took the time to write my own, using information from The Atlantic magazine and CBS News, among other sources.
If there is extreme corruption, there may be a collapse of some kind, and you could become involved in a way you didn't foresee and don't like. As in the financial industry, the top executives will profit enormously, but the average person may lose his job.
One idea is to take the hard drive out of your laptop and take it with you.
What can be done about TrueCrypt? It also "Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive."
Yes. Also, how did they decide the effort should cost exactly $31 million of taxpayer money?
"Never do upgrades, it's the best opportunity to clean the trash out of the registry."
The best way to avoid Windows registry problems may be to use Linux.
The registry trashing problems could be easily fixed by Microsoft, if the company wanted to do that. For the apparent reason Microsoft doesn't fix the registry trashing problems, see the New York Times article Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. Corruption and vulnerability to malware is apparently very profitable for Microsoft and its main customers, who are computer manufacturers.
You said, 'Business users don't "Upgrade" operating systems in the classical sense anyway. When it's time for an OS upgrade, the disk gets nuked and re-imaged.'
We are BOTH correct. In possibly every business, there are computers that are clones of each other, and there are computers that are very specialized. The accounting department needs a variety of special accounting programs. Administration needs a copy of anything installed anywhere else in the business, so they can manage the work of other people. Marketing needs image editing programs and page layout programs. The specialized images have perhaps hundreds of configuration differences. It is VERY expensive to develop all the specialized images again.
We might not want to do the work of developing the specialized images again immediately, especially if everything is already working well. We may be willing to move the more standard computers to Windows 7 by developing a new standard image. But, if we do that, we MUST update the specialized images, also, because we can't economically support two operating systems.
So, the fact that we can't just move all the special programs and configurations from Windows XP to Windows 7 automatically tends to prevent or delay our adoption of Windows 7 at all, because the cost of developing specialized images is so high.
Of course, the fact that it is extremely expensive to migrate programs is entirely because of the design of Windows. Apparently to accomplish copy protection, Microsoft designed Windows to put data and files in lots of places, making it very difficult or impossible to just migrate a program.
Also, in our experience Windows XP was not really ready for normal use until service pack 2 was released and installed and tested for more than a month. Before that there were terrible problems with imaging, for example. Sysprep had bugs. Windows has been crippled by Microsoft so that it cannot copy some of its own files!
Many people say Windows Vista was NEVER ready for general use. Many people say Windows ME was NEVER ready for general use. So it is reasonable, in our opinion, to wait to install Windows 7 until other people have experienced all the bugs and pain and expensive hassles. Microsoft has a history of releasing VERY buggy software.
Or maybe we will wait for Windows Really It's Amazing This Time, the version after Windows 7. There is no hurry.
Apparently Microsoft has always realized that if the company released one good version of Windows, most people would never want to "upgrade", particularly when "upgrades" also include methods of making Windows slower so that people and companies will need to buy new computers. Microsoft has always been much more attentive to the needs of the big computer manufacturers than to the actual users, in my opinion.
My experience with Dell is that the company is tricky. I try to avoid Dell because for me the company does not make a good business partner, which is the relationship you have when you buy something technologically complicated from a company.
Quote from the story: "He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old." [Should be businesses.]
That's a bit tricky, in my opinion. There is no migration path directly from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you are using Windows XP now, it is necessary to re-install ALL your applications, and re-configure ALL your settings. For us, that easily takes 40 hours. Windows XP has had a VERY high cost of ownership for us, and here we go again. Microsoft did not want to finish the work, apparently, and provide a way to convert automatically from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Also, Windows XP is not 8 years old, in my way of perceiving the matter. Windows XP was very troublesome until service pack 2 was released on August 25, 2004. So XP is actually 5 years old, because that is the date of what could be said to be the first release candidate.
It doesn't matter how old an OS is! We are not in the OS business. We are happy with what works for us.
In our experience it is better to buy components and build our own computers. The inside of a mass-market computer is amazing. Everywhere costs could have been cut, the components have been made a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheaper.
Yeah, I noticed that. Insufficient editing. I was in too much of a rush.
The OpenSSL web site lists "[STILL INCOMPLETE]" for each of its manuals.
This article would be funny if it weren't so sad. What's the reason computer professionals don't understand SSL? Bad documentation. And neither the Slashdot summary or the article to which Slashdot links is willing to link to documentation.
The Wikipedia explanation of SSL helps. This explanation helps, also.
The Do It Yourself SSL Guide is useful.
Please provide a link.
If you mean this SGI, Synthetic Genomics, Inc., I note that the July 14, 2009 press release to which I linked is not as positive as you: "Under the terms of the agreement, SGI will work in a systematic approach to find, optimize, and/or engineer superior strains of algae, and to define and develop the best systems for large-scale cultivation of algae and conversion of their products into useful biofuels."
I'm not the only one who thinks it may require years. Here is a quote from an article subtitled, 'Restraint' an Unspoken Watchword of Algae Biomass Sessions: '... much of the fundamental production technology is "immature," and that timelines of two to four years from inception to production are unrealistic. Barclay says flatly, "Commercially feasible biodiesel from photosynthetic algae is more than 10 years away.'
This seems to be incorrect: "... the process of turning cellulose into fuel is well understood now and several companies are starting to implement it on an industrial scale. See e.g. http://www.gevo.com./".
Quote from the Gevo web site, 2009-10-11, 11:37 PDT: "Our team of biofuel experts is developing the next generation of biofuels. Gevo's GIFT® process will provide a sustainable path to the replacement of petrochemicals like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel." [My emphasis]
Gevo is apparently looking for money, not producing fuel. Those who run Gevo will apparently make money, even if the investors lose money.