I think the really big news will be that we find out just how frakking evil
microsoft is, or isn't.
Please, take a moment to think about Vista, and how reliable, quick, stable and
trouble free it has proven to be. I'll wait.
dum-de-dum.
do-waaa. dum-de.
OK, back from throwing up? sorry, I'm a jerk. OK, now think of the position
Microsoft is in; there are millions of XP users out there, and more every time
most people with Vista manage to get hold of a XP license (as with everything,
there are exceptions. I understand Vista works better than XP on Tablet PC's.
And if you have one of those experimental Cray Quantum Core(tm) massively
parallel systems, Vista runs fine).
Lets see, what could they do to get people to stop using XP, and START using
those Vista licenses they have been giving away to make it look like they have
been actually selling it?
They could maybe...
leak the source code? nah. been done.
They could make a deal with game developers so that new games
would only run on
Vista. Hmmm. Might work.
Regardless, if they are Evil, they will throw something in the service pack
which makes Vista more attractive or the lesser evil.
Firepower rocked. I liked Black Knight, but it was too much of a one-trick pony; I still drove 45 minutes to play it on the weekends for about 6 months, though. Other personal favorites are Captain Fantastic, and Black Knight:2000. there was one early 70's game I loved to death that had a circus & clowns theme & 3 flippers, but I've not seen it since about 1980.
Not too well written, I agree; but thats the first time I've read something that kinda explains to me my own feelings about IM. I've currently got problems with it. I leave Skype on full time these days for Biz purposes, and my GF wants to pop up a chat window every 10 freaking minutes, breaking my concentration, effectively ending my ability to do any meaningful work; I end up just surfing instead of trying to do anything, because I know I'm just going to get interrupted anyway.
I just tried it. I discovered that, completely blowing my mind, StarBucks is available about 60 miles closer than I thought it was, and Krispie Kreme is totally out of my reach.
Just about very game that fails to install on Win2k has a fix to allow it to work on win2k; usually it's just a version check in the installer, there is no actual reason it won't work on win2k. Some of the Vista-only games are a real pain to get to work on it, but people are working on the problem.
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the Entropy Network was an attempt to rewrite Freenet in C. That might not be the truth this week, though. Pretty sure it was a couple years ago.
um, no. OpenNet requires that you have access to one other node. thats it. the "Spread Freenet" utility bundled with 0.5 distro's makes use of this. Most people get lazy and just use a seeds.ref file downloaded from one of the distribution sites, but you only need one ref, and you can get that for the asking on IRC or I2p or TOR or USENET or wherever.
Please, PLEASE don't lump Windows 2000 in with XP & Vista. It's still one of the best operating systems around as long as you use windiz instead of windows update (to keep the DRM & crippleware out). it plays all the games written for windows, and with VirtualPC, everything else. OpenOffice runs on it just fine. and it has a tiny hardware footprint. It's not as secure as Debian, but Debian has never been a Prime Target of every virus writer in the world, either.
it's a darknet. The big draw of the Darknet system, to the best of my knowledge, is that it makes you less likely to be noticed in the first place, and you can sort of "pick & choose" which nodes your computer talks to. Lets put this in a real world situation: You are A tibetan, living in the U.S.; you have a Darknet made up of other Tibetans, some of them living in China, some in Tibet. You use Freenet 0.7 to plan protests. If one of your darknet members gets caught by the chinese government, for whatever reason, they will take that persons computer and analyze it. assuming the person did not put the Freenet 0.7 files in a encrypted volume, they then have the IP address of each computer that persons Freenet 0.7 node talked to; since it's a Darknet, they know that those computers are probably involved with the same thing the person they caught was involved in. In a Open Net (Freenet 0.5), no matter how they analyze the persons computer, they can't say anything about the other nodes the examined computer talked to except that they are running Freenet 0.5; they are still most likely screwed if they live in China or Tibet, but they could conceivably be a little less screwed.
There are some other security improvements in 0.7; nothing is stopping the Freenet developers from putting those improvements on the 0.5 system.
I bet I'm going to get labeled troll. Freenet 0.7+ is not secure. they gave anonymity and privacy up when they went with the Darknet concept. With a Darknet, if you compromise one machine, or even just do traffic monitoring, you can easily determine other members of the Darknet; anonymity is just not there. The old system, Freenet up to 0.5 (which is still alive and well, and might even have more users than 0.7) is an OpenNet; all you can tell about a person by monitoring traffic is that they are, indeed, using Freenet. even on a seized computer, You can not really tell who the people that person talks to are; you can only tell which other freenet nodes the persons computer has talked to, and that gives no clue as to the person identity. it can, theoretically, give clues (assuming a vast network of computers is trying to track someones identity) that a node is statistically likely to be someone you are looking for. But thats it. No one who is sticking with 0.5 has a clue why the Freenet Developers are doing this, when it's so obviously a flawed concept. Conspiracy theories abound.
It is a fabrication. I've been using freenet for a long, long, log time, since 0.3 was freshly released. The truth is that Pedophiles do NOT use Freenet 0.7; it's insecure, and their identity would be too easily compromised. This means it's also not smart for whistle blowers, activists, freedom fighters, or anyone else to trust it's anonymity & privacy. You seize the computer of one Darknet user, and all the members of that darknet are compromised. other insecurities abound. A good rule of thumb; if Pedophiles can use a system with impunity, it's probably safe to talk about your boss ripping off the government. Freenet 0.5 is still active, still has thousands (at least) of users, and is still private and anonymous; the only thing anyone can say about a user without using a keylogger is that they are, indeed, a user. and thats not necessarily easy to say with total certainty. Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both.
I don't have any mod points right now, Or I would have modded it down. I'll rant instead. From first-hand experience, I know that Vista has draconian DRM that not only cripples system performance, but exposes your private data better than a malware rootkit. unless sp1 removes the DRM, lock, stock & barrel, the service pack sucks, and Vista still sucks. Saying that it does something less sucky than it used to is very similar to saying that the Sudan is a great place to raise a daughter because they have stopped stoning woman to death for religious violations; it overlooks the fact that Woman are still stoned for other violations (analogy congruence: bad overall performance), and doesn't even touch on clitoral mutilation (analogy congruence: DRM in general). So, what I'm saying here, is that by saying something good about Vista (Womans rights in Sudan), and even implying that its usable (woman can be happy in Sudan), you are encouraging people to accept something Evil (thinly veiled religious punishment of women & genital mutilation). If you use or encourage the use of Vista, you are Anti-freedom. its plain and simple.
Windows 2000 never encouraged the stoning of women. And Windows XP only encouraged if if they were really, really bad.
Thats just barely more weird than what they have found in the area. I mean seriously, that is a totally freaky-deaky area. One of the lesser things is Palau money beads; they have found these beads, which were used as currency by the islanders, in burial sites that are from 600-900AD. The Exact Same type of bead can be found in Roman Jewelry of the Republican period. Other finds of these beads on surrounding islands gives a little validity to the idea that there was an ancient Micronesian Kingdom that had Pohnpei as it's capital, and included Flores (um, Bree to slashdotters). Some of the big stone disc money found on yap has been proven to have come from from Palau. It was on Yap that evidence was first found of an ancient Alphabet & writing system; examples of it have since been found on The Marianas, Palau, Pohnpei & Kosrae. And Pohnpei is perhaps the freakiest place of all. out in the middle of nowhere there are gigantic ruins of an immense stone city called Nan Madol, built out of gigantic magnetized crystalline basalt and carbon dated to at least 200BC. There are man-made tunnels honeycombing the area. After that you get into the areas influence on HP Lovecraft, Japanese Platinum Coffins, underwater cities at the end of some of the tunnels, etc. But hearing that there are remnants of an unknown subspecies of man, or even a separate branch, in that area isn't very surprising. Finding an actual yellow brick road there wouldn't even surprise me that much.
There has to be the possibility of a "score: 6, schooled the idiot parent post" possibility here; come on, cowboy neal and other slashdot mods, would we have a geek culture even slightly similar to the present one without Gary?
Some time in the distant hazy past I was listening to a interview with a Brit computer pioneer who came up with something like this, but as far as i know never implemented it. Put a Lower-end CPU, a Lower-end GPU, and (correcting for era) 512MB of RAM in one package. Need more power? add another package. As long as the upper limit of the number of packages was high enough, it would be pretty flipping cool. I imagine a AMD 1ghz CPU, the ATI equivilant of a 7000 series GPU (I dislike ATI, so have no clue), and 512MB of RAM that is hardwired to the GPU making sharing not such a sucky proposition would be about right.
The power of a stack or cluster of 4 units would be pretty impressive. Get some multiprocessor-friendly games released. Even Vista might run decently.
Which Vista features do you benefit from? Do you have a Tablet PC? I know the Vista support for Tablet PC's is pretty nice, in comparison to Previous Windows OS's.
actually, the plateau is around Win2k, and is slowly moving towards WinXP pro 64. Dos is sometimes difficult to run on modern hardware, and while Win95 OSR2 is still pretty usable, it's not a good overall platform for applications and games and far from trouble free. So I guess you could say that going to win95 is a upgrade from Vista in terms of basic performance, but it's counter productive overall. Much better to stick with the best currently available, Win2k & WinXP Pro 64.
For some reason it still bothers me when people claim to have "downgraded" to Win2k. it's like saying you "Downgrade" from Vista to XP. How can it be a downgrade when your computer runs faster, you have less problems, etc?
Not quite clear enough; I already know what you are talking about, but the grandparent is completely clueless so would not, by definition almost, be able to understand. Just a couple quick points to clear things up, k? "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764). "And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms....The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants"
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787. Taken from Jefferson, On Democracy 20, S. Padover ed., 1939
If it was a serial port joystick, you could run it in VirtualPC on a real operating system, like win2k or, better for joystick gaming, Win98SE. I have been pushing VirtualPC for a lot of things lately; for something FREE, and from Microsoft, it is amazingly useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the really big news will be that we find out just how frakking evil microsoft is, or isn't.
Please, take a moment to think about Vista, and how reliable, quick, stable and trouble free it has proven to be. I'll wait.
dum-de-dum.
do-waaa. dum-de.
OK, back from throwing up? sorry, I'm a jerk. OK, now think of the position Microsoft is in; there are millions of XP users out there, and more every time most people with Vista manage to get hold of a XP license (as with everything, there are exceptions. I understand Vista works better than XP on Tablet PC's. And if you have one of those experimental Cray Quantum Core(tm) massively parallel systems, Vista runs fine).
Lets see, what could they do to get people to stop using XP, and START using those Vista licenses they have been giving away to make it look like they have been actually selling it?
They could maybe... leak the source code? nah. been done.
They could make a deal with game developers so that new games would only run on Vista. Hmmm. Might work.
Regardless, if they are Evil, they will throw something in the service pack which makes Vista more attractive or the lesser evil.
Firepower rocked. I liked Black Knight, but it was too much of a one-trick pony; I still drove 45 minutes to play it on the weekends for about 6 months, though.
Other personal favorites are Captain Fantastic, and Black Knight:2000. there was one early 70's game I loved to death that had a circus & clowns theme & 3 flippers, but I've not seen it since about 1980.
Not too well written, I agree; but thats the first time I've read something that kinda explains to me my own feelings about IM.
I've currently got problems with it. I leave Skype on full time these days for Biz purposes, and my GF wants to pop up a chat window every 10 freaking minutes, breaking my concentration, effectively ending my ability to do any meaningful work; I end up just surfing instead of trying to do anything, because I know I'm just going to get interrupted anyway.
I just tried it. I discovered that, completely blowing my mind, StarBucks is available about 60 miles closer than I thought it was, and Krispie Kreme is totally out of my reach.
Just about very game that fails to install on Win2k has a fix to allow it to work on win2k; usually it's just a version check in the installer, there is no actual reason it won't work on win2k. Some of the Vista-only games are a real pain to get to work on it, but people are working on the problem.
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the Entropy Network was an attempt to rewrite Freenet in C.
That might not be the truth this week, though. Pretty sure it was a couple years ago.
um, no.
OpenNet requires that you have access to one other node. thats it. the "Spread Freenet" utility bundled with 0.5 distro's makes use of this.
Most people get lazy and just use a seeds.ref file downloaded from one of the distribution sites, but you only need one ref, and you can get that for the asking on IRC or I2p or TOR or USENET or wherever.
Please, PLEASE don't lump Windows 2000 in with XP & Vista. It's still one of the best operating systems around as long as you use windiz instead of windows update (to keep the DRM & crippleware out). it plays all the games written for windows, and with VirtualPC, everything else. OpenOffice runs on it just fine. and it has a tiny hardware footprint.
It's not as secure as Debian, but Debian has never been a Prime Target of every virus writer in the world, either.
How does that make it less easily blocked?
Very good point. Can't argue that one.
it's a darknet.
The big draw of the Darknet system, to the best of my knowledge, is that it makes you less likely to be noticed in the first place, and you can sort of "pick & choose" which nodes your computer talks to.
Lets put this in a real world situation:
You are A tibetan, living in the U.S.; you have a Darknet made up of other Tibetans, some of them living in China, some in Tibet. You use Freenet 0.7 to plan protests.
If one of your darknet members gets caught by the chinese government, for whatever reason, they will take that persons computer and analyze it. assuming the person did not put the Freenet 0.7 files in a encrypted volume, they then have the IP address of each computer that persons Freenet 0.7 node talked to; since it's a Darknet, they know that those computers are probably involved with the same thing the person they caught was involved in.
In a Open Net (Freenet 0.5), no matter how they analyze the persons computer, they can't say anything about the other nodes the examined computer talked to except that they are running Freenet 0.5; they are still most likely screwed if they live in China or Tibet, but they could conceivably be a little less screwed.
There are some other security improvements in 0.7; nothing is stopping the Freenet developers from putting those improvements on the 0.5 system.
I bet I'm going to get labeled troll.
Freenet 0.7+ is not secure. they gave anonymity and privacy up when they went with the Darknet concept.
With a Darknet, if you compromise one machine, or even just do traffic monitoring, you can easily determine other members of the Darknet; anonymity is just not there.
The old system, Freenet up to 0.5 (which is still alive and well, and might even have more users than 0.7) is an OpenNet; all you can tell about a person by monitoring traffic is that they are, indeed, using Freenet. even on a seized computer, You can not really tell who the people that person talks to are; you can only tell which other freenet nodes the persons computer has talked to, and that gives no clue as to the person identity. it can, theoretically, give clues (assuming a vast network of computers is trying to track someones identity) that a node is statistically likely to be someone you are looking for. But thats it.
No one who is sticking with 0.5 has a clue why the Freenet Developers are doing this, when it's so obviously a flawed concept. Conspiracy theories abound.
"Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both."
note to self: use the frakking preview button!!
try "Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's NOT anonymous or private; you can't have it both ways"
It is a fabrication.
I've been using freenet for a long, long, log time, since 0.3 was freshly released.
The truth is that Pedophiles do NOT use Freenet 0.7; it's insecure, and their identity would be too easily compromised.
This means it's also not smart for whistle blowers, activists, freedom fighters, or anyone else to trust it's anonymity & privacy. You seize the computer of one Darknet user, and all the members of that darknet are compromised. other insecurities abound.
A good rule of thumb; if Pedophiles can use a system with impunity, it's probably safe to talk about your boss ripping off the government.
Freenet 0.5 is still active, still has thousands (at least) of users, and is still private and anonymous; the only thing anyone can say about a user without using a keylogger is that they are, indeed, a user. and thats not necessarily easy to say with total certainty.
Freenet is either going to have Pedo's and other sick farks, or it's anonymous & private; you can't have both.
I don't have any mod points right now, Or I would have modded it down. I'll rant instead.
From first-hand experience, I know that Vista has draconian DRM that not only cripples system performance, but exposes your private data better than a malware rootkit. unless sp1 removes the DRM, lock, stock & barrel, the service pack sucks, and Vista still sucks. Saying that it does something less sucky than it used to is very similar to saying that the Sudan is a great place to raise a daughter because they have stopped stoning woman to death for religious violations; it overlooks the fact that Woman are still stoned for other violations (analogy congruence: bad overall performance), and doesn't even touch on clitoral mutilation (analogy congruence: DRM in general).
So, what I'm saying here, is that by saying something good about Vista (Womans rights in Sudan), and even implying that its usable (woman can be happy in Sudan), you are encouraging people to accept something Evil (thinly veiled religious punishment of women & genital mutilation).
If you use or encourage the use of Vista, you are Anti-freedom. its plain and simple.
Windows 2000 never encouraged the stoning of women. And Windows XP only encouraged if if they were really, really bad.
anyone have the Freenet 0.5 key? My ISP doesn't like torrents.
Thats just barely more weird than what they have found in the area. I mean seriously, that is a totally freaky-deaky area.
One of the lesser things is Palau money beads; they have found these beads, which were used as currency by the islanders, in burial sites that are from 600-900AD. The Exact Same type of bead can be found in Roman Jewelry of the Republican period.
Other finds of these beads on surrounding islands gives a little validity to the idea that there was an ancient Micronesian Kingdom that had Pohnpei as it's capital, and included Flores (um, Bree to slashdotters).
Some of the big stone disc money found on yap has been proven to have come from from Palau. It was on Yap that evidence was first found of an ancient Alphabet & writing system; examples of it have since been found on The Marianas, Palau, Pohnpei & Kosrae.
And Pohnpei is perhaps the freakiest place of all. out in the middle of nowhere there are gigantic ruins of an immense stone city called Nan Madol, built out of gigantic magnetized crystalline basalt and carbon dated to at least 200BC. There are man-made tunnels honeycombing the area.
After that you get into the areas influence on HP Lovecraft, Japanese Platinum Coffins, underwater cities at the end of some of the tunnels, etc.
But hearing that there are remnants of an unknown subspecies of man, or even a separate branch, in that area isn't very surprising.
Finding an actual yellow brick road there wouldn't even surprise me that much.
There has to be the possibility of a "score: 6, schooled the idiot parent post" possibility here; come on, cowboy neal and other slashdot mods, would we have a geek culture even slightly similar to the present one without Gary?
Some time in the distant hazy past I was listening to a interview with a Brit computer pioneer who came up with something like this, but as far as i know never implemented it. Put a Lower-end CPU, a Lower-end GPU, and (correcting for era) 512MB of RAM in one package. Need more power? add another package.
As long as the upper limit of the number of packages was high enough, it would be pretty flipping cool. I imagine a AMD 1ghz CPU, the ATI equivilant of a 7000 series GPU (I dislike ATI, so have no clue), and 512MB of RAM that is hardwired to the GPU making sharing not such a sucky proposition would be about right.
The power of a stack or cluster of 4 units would be pretty impressive. Get some multiprocessor-friendly games released. Even Vista might run decently.
Which Vista features do you benefit from? Do you have a Tablet PC? I know the Vista support for Tablet PC's is pretty nice, in comparison to Previous Windows OS's.
actually, the plateau is around Win2k, and is slowly moving towards WinXP pro 64. Dos is sometimes difficult to run on modern hardware, and while Win95 OSR2 is still pretty usable, it's not a good overall platform for applications and games and far from trouble free. So I guess you could say that going to win95 is a upgrade from Vista in terms of basic performance, but it's counter productive overall. Much better to stick with the best currently available, Win2k & WinXP Pro 64.
For some reason it still bothers me when people claim to have "downgraded" to Win2k. it's like saying you "Downgrade" from Vista to XP. How can it be a downgrade when your computer runs faster, you have less problems, etc?
Not quite clear enough; I already know what you are talking about, but the grandparent is completely clueless so would not, by definition almost, be able to understand.
Just a couple quick points to clear things up, k?
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
--Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms....The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants"
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787. Taken from Jefferson, On Democracy 20, S. Padover ed., 1939
I would argue that my Gravis Phoenix was, and is, the Ultimate Joystick.
If it was a serial port joystick, you could run it in VirtualPC on a real operating system, like win2k or, better for joystick gaming, Win98SE.
I have been pushing VirtualPC for a lot of things lately; for something FREE, and from Microsoft, it is amazingly useful.