Just upgraded a machine, network & sound works, but when I scroll in Firefox, I get choppy audio playback in Winamp; in the process of trying to figure out if it's Winamp at fault or the audio driver.
Does your AGP bus run under the PCI to PCI bridge like my Nforce 1 does? If so that could easily be the problem. Nvidia decided to not write drivers for the AGP bus. To check look under Device manager, system devices and look for PCI Standard PCI to PCI Bridge.
I'm not terribly happy with Nvidia, but of course I don't have any basis to sue them either.
Considering Microsoft is still in the process of patching Vista, including a major patch issued just as Vista went out the door, can we really stick all the blame on Nvidia?
Did the patches affect the video driver layer? If they did, then maybe Microsoft should share some of the blame. If not, then the blame is squarely on nVidia. It's not like nVidia hasn't had plenty of time to develop drivers for Vista.
The number one advantage of Linux to a home user is simply the free (as in beer) software that's integrated with the OS and installs cleanly.
For some people, this doesn't matter at all. They'll just buy software at the local Best Buy or target and be happy with it. You're not going to convince these people to switch to Linux, nor should they. If they're happy with the pay-software model, that's great.
For other people, free software that's a click away from being available is a miracle! They don't have to go hunt for it on some website, they don't have to run some installer, they don't have to worry that it's not going to work, or it will work and it's laden with spyware, they just read the description and try it. Cool.
The best distribution I've tried that emphasizes ability to try new software is Ubuntu. It's easy as hell to download and install packages created for Ubuntu, more so than any other distribution I've used.
I agree with everything you've said. It pissed me off that people are taking this to some big extreme and sending the guy death threats for being a bit rude to someone. It's kind of frightening that the internet can create this instant mob of people against one guy who made one small mistake.
The only thing I'd like to add is that while I always try to be polite to support reps, it doesn't always work just being polite. Most of the time it fails when the rep start being unreasonable in what they'll offer in exchange to resolve your problem. You don't have to be rude or anything, just polite but firm. My point is that being polite doesn't mean you have to let the reps do whatever they think they can get away with. The Verizon.002 cents and.002 dollars incident comes to mind. The guy was very polite and patient, but he didn't ultimately get anywhere until the incident went public. (He also didn't act like a baby like this woman did, nor did he single out some support rep).
The problem, I think is that too many people assume that being polite also means you can't be firm in what you're asking for (i.e. polite=nice=weak). They take the opposite extreme and assume that they need to get all tee'd off to get what they ask for, otherwise the rep is just going to take advantage of their niceness. You can certainly be nice, polite, and firm at the same time.
I think that these ads might offend Windows users instead of getting them to switch to the cool side. These ads do not show the strength of Macs. These focus more on insulting Windows based PCs.
I think that's a good point. But I don't think the ads are really aimed at making people switch to Mac. The ads are really more designed to make people who bought a Mac think they made the right decision, so they'll keep buying Macs. i.e. "You don't want to buy a PC and be one of those NERDY people do you?"
I'm not sure if it's effective though. The PC guy (John Hodgeman) is a lot more appealing as a person than the snobbish Mac guy. There's certainly "the faithful" who that ad appeals to, but I'm not sure if the rest of the people who buy Macs want to be identified with a prickish looking, snobby, "better than thou" character.
And this includes the pharmaceutical companies. But the won't stop. Why? Because drug ads are like a weapon the pharma companies use against each other. If the competition has them, you have to have them too to compete. Right now the drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than they do on actual drug development.
If drug ads were banned again like they used to be, everyone would benefit. The drug companies could all spend more money on drug development, consumers would stop getting misleading information, and Doctors would stop being put in the position of being a high-paid pharmacist.
The problem was that he couldn't get Evolution to work with Exchange Server which it was designed to do.
Yes, that's true. The problem is the guy draws a huge circle around the evolution+Exchange problem, which includes all of Linux in it's many distributions, different solutions to problems, etc. Then he points to his circle and says "look, Linux on the desktop isn't ready for the enterprise!"
To generalize his problems with Evolution working with Exchange to all of Linux is either dishonest, or (more likely) idiocy. Basically he tried to (on his own) get Linux working with existing infra-structure. It wasn't a company wide decision that investigated the possibilities, he just tried to do it himself, and failed. That's fine, we've all tried to accomplish some task and wound up not getting it to work, or giving up. The problem here is he's taken his experience to be some universal prognostication. He's by his own admission not an expert (he says he's tried Linux time to time). He also thinks his experience with StarOffice more than 8 years ago is somehow relevant to today. Not exactly evidence of high thinking abilities.
The problem with this article is the guy who wrote it doesn't have much of a lick of sense. The facts aren't really out of order, it's the conclusions he draws from them. If he had simply said "Evolution isn't ready for the Enterprise", or "boy, Star/Open Office sure did suck 8 years ago!" it might be a informative article.
He seems to think that he can switch to linux and not have anything on the server end change.
Sorry, buddy, it's not a drop in replacement for Windows and never will be. You CAN support linux on the desktop in the enterprise, you just have to have your systems guys on-board, and it has to be a conscious choice made by the company, not a lone effort by one end user. Exchange is a proprietary product that's all but sewn up from one end to the other by Microsoft. Should you really be surprised when Linux doesn't want to operate properly with it? His experience with Open/Star Office was from 1998... or shortly after it came out.
Hell, it doesn't even sound like he's even very familiar with Linux. He says "I've used Linux from time to time". Uhh.. and this qualifies you to make a judgment on whether linux is "ready for the enterprise"? Implementing Enterprise level products isn't rocket science, but it's not something you should really be commenting on if you've tried an OS "from time time to time". I kind of suspect that someone who claims to have used Windows "from time to time" wouldn't be all that successful trying to implement Windows in even a Windows server environment.
Just keep feeding that fear. It gets hungrier every minute doesn't it?
The less we know, the more people's imaginations go wild, like apparently yours did.
If you're comparing a frickin plane crashing into the WTC to someone finding a lite-brite connected to a battery, I guess I can't help you. The media now goes on full-alert anytime there's ANYTHING that's not immediately explainable as not-terrorism. Are you really trying to tell me you're still willing to keep believing them at this point because "it might just be real"? Exactly how does getting all paranoid and frightened help anyone?
I live in Boston, and I can say that the day was very tense.
Why? Because the media put out a big scare story that turned out to be nothing? which you'd expect no matter what when dealing with batteries and unknown electronics in a sneaky location in a heavy traffic area
Maybe you should just stop paying attention to every little scare mongering story that gets released. Personally I'd direct some attention over to the media outlets for publishing a story with no information, who's only result was to un-necessarily scare people. A few weeks ago it was a strange smell in NYC that everyone assumed was the work of terrorists. I'm sure there's about 20 other stories I'm missing because...I've stopped paying attention to these junk stories.
Yeah, especially since I can never get my Belkin KVM switch to work properly with Linux, I always lose the mouse or keyboard
I had this problem for years until I decided to finally ditch the Belkin KVM switch. Eventually the trick of switching to the text console and back stopped working, so that was the end of the line for the Belkin KVM.
I doubt it's ever going to be fixed. You can buy a good KVM switch these days for $40, I'd do that.
Can the creators of this technology choose a better word for it? KVM is already widely known as a KVM switch, Keyboard, Video, Mouse. It lets you connect multiple computers to the same monitor,keyboard and mouse and switch between them.
Choosing the same acronym for this new technology is only bound to cause confusion.
I got Vista as a free trial a few days ago, and it's the first Microsoft OS I've run on a desktop that actually supports sleep/suspend mode properly. I keep my PC on 24/7 because I don't want to wait for it to boot to get some simple task done. Until now that's meant full power on at about 110 watts idle. But Vista actually supports sleep mode properly. Sleep mode, if you didn't know, turns off the processor, hard drive, and suspends everything to memory. It consumes about 10 watts. My PC comes back to a fully operational state in about 2-3 seconds. It's also on by default in Vista. Previously there's always been some component (usually my video card) that didn't support it properly.
So the dumb-ass greens should be ENCOURAGING Vista use, because there's a LOT of people that just keep their machines on 24/7 for the same reasons I do. Instead they get all caught up about DRM on HD-DVD and Blueray (which almost no one has anyway, so no one is going to throw away) and a little more power usage from Aero. If you don't like the increased power usage from Aero, turn it off.
Many reboots in Windows 2000 and XP were unnecessary and were nothing more then self-imposed "suggestions" by the software developer built into the installer routine. I also don't know if I'd consider a reboot caused by a beta driver indicative of the way things work in general.
And if that were my only data point, I'd agree with you. Unfortunately all the other reboots I encountered were from Microsoft software or updates that's an integral part of Vista.
As far as the unnecessary reboots, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much. How are you supposed to know if you "really" have to reboot or not? I tried the whole "don't reboot even when the software tells you too" before, and it only caused me problems. Eventually I ran into some piece of software that screwed up my Windows install when I eventually DID reboot the machine later. Which software was it? Who knows.
The software devs don't put in reboot suggestions just for fun. They put them in because it leads to less problems for them, and the end user.
What about a P4 2.8 GHz without hyper threating with 512mb of ram and a ATI Radeon with 128 video ram?;)
Your system isn't Uber compared to many high end rigs, but it is far from average with the low end systems.
I'll do better than that. I've got a Athlon 2000XP with 512 megs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600XT with 128 megs of RAM (about 3 years old). The processor idles at maybe 4%, and 2% of that is task-manager itself.
The people that're claiming 20-30% idle processor usage are either lying, aren't making accurate tests, or have something wrong with their PC (bad driver, app, etc).
I will say that there's a LOT of business machines out there that have no 3-d graphics capability to speak of, even newly purchased systems. So those systems aren't going to be able to get the eye-candy Aero interface stuff. I suspect Vista will finally make lower end 3-d graphics a requirement for a PC, even in the low cost onboard video market.
That's interesting. I've had an experience very different than yours with running Vista. I've got hardware that's 4-5 years old, a video card that's probably 3 years old (ATI 9600XT), and I've had good performance with it. The AGP bus isn't supported by Nvidia (original NForce), so I don't expect good gaming performance, but Aero runs speedily.
I actually like the interface. It does take some getting used to, but I like it a lot better than the crappy XP menus. The search function is great. I don't know if the flip-3d feature is useful or not, but I haven't really had 10 applications open at once. I can see how it might be.
One of the features of Vista I was looking forward too was less rebooting. The driver model is vastly different, so driver replacement should (in theory) result in no reboots. There's also a manager that's supposed to handle services better, so there's another area where reboots should be lessened.
Unfortunately, I haven't really seen much change in the number of reboots. I uninstalled fax and scan manager along with installing the new games. Reboot. I installed a new beta driver for my video card. Reboot. I installed the updates that came though today. Reboot. Not a great track record MS.
I've also been unfortunate enough to have a motherboard that has AGP drivers unsupported by Vista (nforce). So the video card runs on a PCI-PCI driver at reduced performance. Some may argue that this machine is "too old" to expect support for it. Maybe, I've got a video card that supports Aero, 1 gig of RAM, and a speedy HD, so the rest of the hardware is up to snuff. I guess you can put the blame for this one on Nvidia, as it's not Microsoft's responsibility to write drivers for the AGP bus. Aero is speed enough, I'm just not expecting good gaming performance with no support for my AGP bus.
So that's the bad side. The upside is that the new interface is pretty usefull. I really like the search function, no hunting around for different apps, or hidden control panels. The menu structure seems a lot more intuitive. The sleep function actually works! I haven't seen sleep/suspend actually work properly on a non-laptop running Windows before. It'll certainly save me some money on electric bills. I'm also glad to see they ditched the stupid IE interface for Windows Update. Ugh, that POS was nothing but trouble. It CONSTANTLY broke on my various windows machines. Hopefully this new non-IE based Windows Update will work properly. I also like the Aero theme. I'm quite glad the decided to ditch the Fisher-Price themed XP. I could never figure it out, and was a major reason why I never bothered with XP. I know you can switch the theme to Windows 2000 (and I did), but XP was actually less reliable for me than 2000.
I could work for a year at minimum wage in a high-tech job and then get "paid" with a luxury car.
A luxury car is a tangible asset that can be sold, and holds it's value. A trip to space is likely not transferable (you can't sell it), and has no value once you actually take the trip. It's not the same thing at all. That's the basic problem I have with taxing this trip. The government wants a cut of "income" that's not really income. Sure it's something that you were given by someone that costs someone else money.. but how is it income if you're not benefitting from in financially?
It's not a profit tax, or an assets tax, it's an income tax.
I agree with the original poster. This is really a service that he's won, not something he's actually gaining in income. Why is an experience going into space considered income? My opinion may not stand up to former tax rulings by the courts, but it sure doesn't jive well with the reasons why we tax people (to support the government). He's not going to gain one dollar in tangible assets from having this experience. Why does the government feel they need to gain something from it, when this guy isn't even gaining anything monetarily from it?
We don't tax other experiences that cost someone money. If he had been a reporter on an assignment to take one of these trips, the reporter would never have been taxed on the cost of the trip. Is there really some justifiable difference between the two? Like I say, maybe it doesn't fit within previous rulings by the courts, but that doesn't make it right to tax something like this.
Here's why I think what the content producers (Viacom, Sci-Fi, etc) don't want a per-episode model. Currently they get you to subscribe to the whole she-bang. You find new content through their promos and advertising. The content producers like this model because they can keep you around (and they get guaranteed income) even if they produce stuff you really don't like that much. Basically they keep you "hooked" (an admittedly divisive term) paying every month to watch some stuff you REALLY want to see, but keep you interested with other stuff you might not be willing to pay for, but will watch anyway because there's nothing else on.
With a pay-per-episode model, they'd lose the market of people that aren't willing to pay for junk movies and other stuff people aren't willing to pay for. They make a bit of money off the advertising of the junk, so losing you as a viewer is bad for them. Plus, they might suddenly not have some shows that you REALLY want to pay for, so they lose the ability to keep you on as a customer. They'd also have a lesser ability to advertise new shows to you, since a lot of finding a new show to watch is to just turn on the TV and see what you like (plus advertising when you're watching something else and think "hey, I should try that show". If you have to PAY to try some new show.. you're going to be a lot less adventurous. My point is a lot of the marketing of TV is centered around it being "free" to try something new.
So why do the cable channels allow per-episode content at all? Because they've seen the whole "download individual episodes over the internet" phenomenon, and realized there's this large market of people that only want to watch one show, but don't want to pay the $40 a month for basic cable. So they want to tap this market, but not let it affect the market of loyal cable subscribers. Thus they set the per-episode cost high to try to get the downloaders and potential downloaders, but the loyal subscribers would never want to pay such a high fee. They also figure it might be a way to get new subscribers. Set the fee high enough that if you like the content enough and buy enough of it, you might eventually just decide to subscribe to basic cable instead because it's cheaper, or the same price.
That said, creating the key required to re-encrypt would be quite difficult, as it would
a) have to be signed by an appropriate CA
and
b) reference the proper domain
You misunderstand. Since you start out at the site via http (I misstyped), the attacker only need change https:/// links to http://./ The victim goes to the website, and clicks on an http:/// link (which should have been https on the REAL non-proxied site). Thus the victim NEVER GOES TO THE SECURE SIGHT, so there's no need to spoof an SSL certificates. It still looks exactly like the real sight because it's proxied. The only difference is you're connecting to the attackers proxy via http, not https.
Which is to say, of course not, since man-in-the-middle isn't what's being discussed in the article
The article is quite confused about exactly what it's talking about. If the article was worried about packet sniffing, then which SSID you connect to, or if it's ad-hoc or infrastructure mode would means nothing. The vast majority of public wireless networks are unencrypted, so anyone can sniff them at anytime. That's why I assumed the author is worried about MiM attacks. Really I think the problem is the author of the article doesn't understand what's going on much at all, but has a rather simple understanding of how networking, computers, and encryption work.
I think citing sources is vastly overrated. So what if I can find a source that states the first one was built in 1768?
Well, I'm not sure what "vastly overrated" means in your context, but I think citing sources is certainly something that needs to be done. Will you ever find out that the vast majority of scholars actually agree that the first one was built in 1762? No, because the cited reference won't tell you that. Only a thorough and comprehensive study of the literature in the field will tell you that.
That's a problem with ANY cited source in any source of information. Why cite sources at all then if referencing the source doesn't immediately give you the "right" answer?
You've missunderstood the purpose of checking sources. It's not to give you the perfect answer, but to give someone who cares about accuracy the chance to check (and possibly correct) your sources of information. Without a source to the "The first one was made in 1762" fact, where are you going to even start in trying to verify that?
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
I learned the same thing in elementary school, and now consider it an idiotic rule. In fact I had teachers later on in elementary school that were fine with citing encyclopedias.
Basically, there's a world of difference between an elementary school and a serious research paper. The two purposes of citing sources is quite different. In elementary school it's to educate students about telling people where they got information from. In an academic research paper, it's so the reader can actually go to a definitive source and find the same information. Holding elementary or middle school students to the high standards of a research paper is just foolish and misses the point.
Anyway, I don't think citing Wikipedia is something that's completely out of bounds and should NEVER be done in an academic environment. You might want to do it where no other source exists, like in an for an episode guide to a TV show. It'd certainly be better than citing "Bob Johnson's "The Prisoner" episode guide, which may disapear tomorrow because Bob is tired of the site taking up so much of his time.
I've always used joker.com. I've never had a problem with them, and they offer free DNS and email forwarding. They're also inexpensive ($12 a year). They're based in either Germany or Switzerland, so they might be less willing to do whatever a US based company says.
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Just upgraded a machine, network & sound works, but when I scroll in Firefox, I get choppy audio playback in Winamp; in the process of trying to figure out if it's Winamp at fault or the audio driver.
Does your AGP bus run under the PCI to PCI bridge like my Nforce 1 does? If so that could easily be the problem. Nvidia decided to not write drivers for the AGP bus. To check look under Device manager, system devices and look for PCI Standard PCI to PCI Bridge.
I'm not terribly happy with Nvidia, but of course I don't have any basis to sue them either.
Considering Microsoft is still in the process of patching Vista, including a major patch issued just as Vista went out the door, can we really stick all the blame on Nvidia?
Did the patches affect the video driver layer? If they did, then maybe Microsoft should share some of the blame. If not, then the blame is squarely on nVidia. It's not like nVidia hasn't had plenty of time to develop drivers for Vista.
The number one advantage of Linux to a home user is simply the free (as in beer) software that's integrated with the OS and installs cleanly.
For some people, this doesn't matter at all. They'll just buy software at the local Best Buy or target and be happy with it. You're not going to convince these people to switch to Linux, nor should they. If they're happy with the pay-software model, that's great.
For other people, free software that's a click away from being available is a miracle! They don't have to go hunt for it on some website, they don't have to run some installer, they don't have to worry that it's not going to work, or it will work and it's laden with spyware, they just read the description and try it. Cool.
The best distribution I've tried that emphasizes ability to try new software is Ubuntu. It's easy as hell to download and install packages created for Ubuntu, more so than any other distribution I've used.
I agree with everything you've said. It pissed me off that people are taking this to some big extreme and sending the guy death threats for being a bit rude to someone. It's kind of frightening that the internet can create this instant mob of people against one guy who made one small mistake.
.002 cents and .002 dollars incident comes to mind. The guy was very polite and patient, but he didn't ultimately get anywhere until the incident went public. (He also didn't act like a baby like this woman did, nor did he single out some support rep).
The only thing I'd like to add is that while I always try to be polite to support reps, it doesn't always work just being polite. Most of the time it fails when the rep start being unreasonable in what they'll offer in exchange to resolve your problem. You don't have to be rude or anything, just polite but firm. My point is that being polite doesn't mean you have to let the reps do whatever they think they can get away with. The Verizon
The problem, I think is that too many people assume that being polite also means you can't be firm in what you're asking for (i.e. polite=nice=weak). They take the opposite extreme and assume that they need to get all tee'd off to get what they ask for, otherwise the rep is just going to take advantage of their niceness. You can certainly be nice, polite, and firm at the same time.
I think that these ads might offend Windows users instead of getting them to switch to the cool side. These ads do not show the strength of Macs. These focus more on insulting Windows based PCs.
I think that's a good point. But I don't think the ads are really aimed at making people switch to Mac. The ads are really more designed to make people who bought a Mac think they made the right decision, so they'll keep buying Macs. i.e. "You don't want to buy a PC and be one of those NERDY people do you?"
I'm not sure if it's effective though. The PC guy (John Hodgeman) is a lot more appealing as a person than the snobbish Mac guy. There's certainly "the faithful" who that ad appeals to, but I'm not sure if the rest of the people who buy Macs want to be identified with a prickish looking, snobby, "better than thou" character.
And this includes the pharmaceutical companies. But the won't stop. Why? Because drug ads are like a weapon the pharma companies use against each other. If the competition has them, you have to have them too to compete. Right now the drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than they do on actual drug development.
If drug ads were banned again like they used to be, everyone would benefit. The drug companies could all spend more money on drug development, consumers would stop getting misleading information, and Doctors would stop being put in the position of being a high-paid pharmacist.
The problem was that he couldn't get Evolution to work with Exchange Server which it was designed to do.
Yes, that's true. The problem is the guy draws a huge circle around the evolution+Exchange problem, which includes all of Linux in it's many distributions, different solutions to problems, etc. Then he points to his circle and says "look, Linux on the desktop isn't ready for the enterprise!"
To generalize his problems with Evolution working with Exchange to all of Linux is either dishonest, or (more likely) idiocy. Basically he tried to (on his own) get Linux working with existing infra-structure. It wasn't a company wide decision that investigated the possibilities, he just tried to do it himself, and failed. That's fine, we've all tried to accomplish some task and wound up not getting it to work, or giving up. The problem here is he's taken his experience to be some universal prognostication. He's by his own admission not an expert (he says he's tried Linux time to time). He also thinks his experience with StarOffice more than 8 years ago is somehow relevant to today. Not exactly evidence of high thinking abilities.
The problem with this article is the guy who wrote it doesn't have much of a lick of sense. The facts aren't really out of order, it's the conclusions he draws from them. If he had simply said "Evolution isn't ready for the Enterprise", or "boy, Star/Open Office sure did suck 8 years ago!" it might be a informative article.
He seems to think that he can switch to linux and not have anything on the server end change.
Sorry, buddy, it's not a drop in replacement for Windows and never will be. You CAN support linux on the desktop in the enterprise, you just have to have your systems guys on-board, and it has to be a conscious choice made by the company, not a lone effort by one end user. Exchange is a proprietary product that's all but sewn up from one end to the other by Microsoft. Should you really be surprised when Linux doesn't want to operate properly with it? His experience with Open/Star Office was from 1998... or shortly after it came out.
Hell, it doesn't even sound like he's even very familiar with Linux. He says "I've used Linux from time to time". Uhh.. and this qualifies you to make a judgment on whether linux is "ready for the enterprise"? Implementing Enterprise level products isn't rocket science, but it's not something you should really be commenting on if you've tried an OS "from time time to time". I kind of suspect that someone who claims to have used Windows "from time to time" wouldn't be all that successful trying to implement Windows in even a Windows server environment.
Just keep feeding that fear. It gets hungrier every minute doesn't it?
The less we know, the more people's imaginations go wild, like apparently yours did.
If you're comparing a frickin plane crashing into the WTC to someone finding a lite-brite connected to a battery, I guess I can't help you. The media now goes on full-alert anytime there's ANYTHING that's not immediately explainable as not-terrorism. Are you really trying to tell me you're still willing to keep believing them at this point because "it might just be real"? Exactly how does getting all paranoid and frightened help anyone?
I live in Boston, and I can say that the day was very tense.
Why? Because the media put out a big scare story that turned out to be nothing?
which you'd expect no matter what when dealing with batteries and unknown electronics in a sneaky location in a heavy traffic area
Maybe you should just stop paying attention to every little scare mongering story that gets released. Personally I'd direct some attention over to the media outlets for publishing a story with no information, who's only result was to un-necessarily scare people. A few weeks ago it was a strange smell in NYC that everyone assumed was the work of terrorists. I'm sure there's about 20 other stories I'm missing because...I've stopped paying attention to these junk stories.
Yeah, especially since I can never get my Belkin KVM switch to work properly with Linux, I always lose the mouse or keyboard
I had this problem for years until I decided to finally ditch the Belkin KVM switch. Eventually the trick of switching to the text console and back stopped working, so that was the end of the line for the Belkin KVM.
I doubt it's ever going to be fixed. You can buy a good KVM switch these days for $40, I'd do that.
Can the creators of this technology choose a better word for it? KVM is already widely known as a KVM switch, Keyboard, Video, Mouse. It lets you connect multiple computers to the same monitor,keyboard and mouse and switch between them.
Choosing the same acronym for this new technology is only bound to cause confusion.
I got Vista as a free trial a few days ago, and it's the first Microsoft OS I've run on a desktop that actually supports sleep/suspend mode properly. I keep my PC on 24/7 because I don't want to wait for it to boot to get some simple task done. Until now that's meant full power on at about 110 watts idle. But Vista actually supports sleep mode properly. Sleep mode, if you didn't know, turns off the processor, hard drive, and suspends everything to memory. It consumes about 10 watts. My PC comes back to a fully operational state in about 2-3 seconds. It's also on by default in Vista. Previously there's always been some component (usually my video card) that didn't support it properly.
So the dumb-ass greens should be ENCOURAGING Vista use, because there's a LOT of people that just keep their machines on 24/7 for the same reasons I do. Instead they get all caught up about DRM on HD-DVD and Blueray (which almost no one has anyway, so no one is going to throw away) and a little more power usage from Aero. If you don't like the increased power usage from Aero, turn it off.
Many reboots in Windows 2000 and XP were unnecessary and were nothing more then self-imposed "suggestions" by the software developer built into the installer routine. I also don't know if I'd consider a reboot caused by a beta driver indicative of the way things work in general.
And if that were my only data point, I'd agree with you. Unfortunately all the other reboots I encountered were from Microsoft software or updates that's an integral part of Vista.
As far as the unnecessary reboots, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much. How are you supposed to know if you "really" have to reboot or not? I tried the whole "don't reboot even when the software tells you too" before, and it only caused me problems. Eventually I ran into some piece of software that screwed up my Windows install when I eventually DID reboot the machine later. Which software was it? Who knows.
The software devs don't put in reboot suggestions just for fun. They put them in because it leads to less problems for them, and the end user.
What about a P4 2.8 GHz without hyper threating with 512mb of ram and a ATI Radeon with 128 video ram? ;)
Your system isn't Uber compared to many high end rigs, but it is far from average with the low end systems.
I'll do better than that. I've got a Athlon 2000XP with 512 megs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600XT with 128 megs of RAM (about 3 years old). The processor idles at maybe 4%, and 2% of that is task-manager itself.
The people that're claiming 20-30% idle processor usage are either lying, aren't making accurate tests, or have something wrong with their PC (bad driver, app, etc).
I will say that there's a LOT of business machines out there that have no 3-d graphics capability to speak of, even newly purchased systems. So those systems aren't going to be able to get the eye-candy Aero interface stuff. I suspect Vista will finally make lower end 3-d graphics a requirement for a PC, even in the low cost onboard video market.
That's interesting. I've had an experience very different than yours with running Vista. I've got hardware that's 4-5 years old, a video card that's probably 3 years old (ATI 9600XT), and I've had good performance with it. The AGP bus isn't supported by Nvidia (original NForce), so I don't expect good gaming performance, but Aero runs speedily.
I actually like the interface. It does take some getting used to, but I like it a lot better than the crappy XP menus. The search function is great. I don't know if the flip-3d feature is useful or not, but I haven't really had 10 applications open at once. I can see how it might be.
One of the features of Vista I was looking forward too was less rebooting. The driver model is vastly different, so driver replacement should (in theory) result in no reboots. There's also a manager that's supposed to handle services better, so there's another area where reboots should be lessened.
Unfortunately, I haven't really seen much change in the number of reboots. I uninstalled fax and scan manager along with installing the new games. Reboot. I installed a new beta driver for my video card. Reboot. I installed the updates that came though today. Reboot. Not a great track record MS.
I've also been unfortunate enough to have a motherboard that has AGP drivers unsupported by Vista (nforce). So the video card runs on a PCI-PCI driver at reduced performance. Some may argue that this machine is "too old" to expect support for it. Maybe, I've got a video card that supports Aero, 1 gig of RAM, and a speedy HD, so the rest of the hardware is up to snuff. I guess you can put the blame for this one on Nvidia, as it's not Microsoft's responsibility to write drivers for the AGP bus. Aero is speed enough, I'm just not expecting good gaming performance with no support for my AGP bus.
So that's the bad side. The upside is that the new interface is pretty usefull. I really like the search function, no hunting around for different apps, or hidden control panels. The menu structure seems a lot more intuitive. The sleep function actually works! I haven't seen sleep/suspend actually work properly on a non-laptop running Windows before. It'll certainly save me some money on electric bills. I'm also glad to see they ditched the stupid IE interface for Windows Update. Ugh, that POS was nothing but trouble. It CONSTANTLY broke on my various windows machines. Hopefully this new non-IE based Windows Update will work properly. I also like the Aero theme. I'm quite glad the decided to ditch the Fisher-Price themed XP. I could never figure it out, and was a major reason why I never bothered with XP. I know you can switch the theme to Windows 2000 (and I did), but XP was actually less reliable for me than 2000.
I could work for a year at minimum wage in a high-tech job and then get "paid" with a luxury car.
A luxury car is a tangible asset that can be sold, and holds it's value. A trip to space is likely not transferable (you can't sell it), and has no value once you actually take the trip. It's not the same thing at all. That's the basic problem I have with taxing this trip. The government wants a cut of "income" that's not really income. Sure it's something that you were given by someone that costs someone else money.. but how is it income if you're not benefitting from in financially?
It's not a profit tax, or an assets tax, it's an income tax.
I agree with the original poster. This is really a service that he's won, not something he's actually gaining in income. Why is an experience going into space considered income? My opinion may not stand up to former tax rulings by the courts, but it sure doesn't jive well with the reasons why we tax people (to support the government). He's not going to gain one dollar in tangible assets from having this experience. Why does the government feel they need to gain something from it, when this guy isn't even gaining anything monetarily from it?
We don't tax other experiences that cost someone money. If he had been a reporter on an assignment to take one of these trips, the reporter would never have been taxed on the cost of the trip. Is there really some justifiable difference between the two? Like I say, maybe it doesn't fit within previous rulings by the courts, but that doesn't make it right to tax something like this.
Here's why I think what the content producers (Viacom, Sci-Fi, etc) don't want a per-episode model. Currently they get you to subscribe to the whole she-bang. You find new content through their promos and advertising. The content producers like this model because they can keep you around (and they get guaranteed income) even if they produce stuff you really don't like that much. Basically they keep you "hooked" (an admittedly divisive term) paying every month to watch some stuff you REALLY want to see, but keep you interested with other stuff you might not be willing to pay for, but will watch anyway because there's nothing else on.
With a pay-per-episode model, they'd lose the market of people that aren't willing to pay for junk movies and other stuff people aren't willing to pay for. They make a bit of money off the advertising of the junk, so losing you as a viewer is bad for them. Plus, they might suddenly not have some shows that you REALLY want to pay for, so they lose the ability to keep you on as a customer. They'd also have a lesser ability to advertise new shows to you, since a lot of finding a new show to watch is to just turn on the TV and see what you like (plus advertising when you're watching something else and think "hey, I should try that show". If you have to PAY to try some new show.. you're going to be a lot less adventurous. My point is a lot of the marketing of TV is centered around it being "free" to try something new.
So why do the cable channels allow per-episode content at all? Because they've seen the whole "download individual episodes over the internet" phenomenon, and realized there's this large market of people that only want to watch one show, but don't want to pay the $40 a month for basic cable. So they want to tap this market, but not let it affect the market of loyal cable subscribers. Thus they set the per-episode cost high to try to get the downloaders and potential downloaders, but the loyal subscribers would never want to pay such a high fee. They also figure it might be a way to get new subscribers. Set the fee high enough that if you like the content enough and buy enough of it, you might eventually just decide to subscribe to basic cable instead because it's cheaper, or the same price.
That said, creating the key required to re-encrypt would be quite difficult, as it would
a) have to be signed by an appropriate CA
and
b) reference the proper domain
You misunderstand. Since you start out at the site via http (I misstyped), the attacker only need change https:/// links to http://./ The victim goes to the website, and clicks on an http:/// link (which should have been https on the REAL non-proxied site). Thus the victim NEVER GOES TO THE SECURE SIGHT, so there's no need to spoof an SSL certificates. It still looks exactly like the real sight because it's proxied. The only difference is you're connecting to the attackers proxy via http, not https.
Which is to say, of course not, since man-in-the-middle isn't what's being discussed in the article
The article is quite confused about exactly what it's talking about. If the article was worried about packet sniffing, then which SSID you connect to, or if it's ad-hoc or infrastructure mode would means nothing. The vast majority of public wireless networks are unencrypted, so anyone can sniff them at anytime. That's why I assumed the author is worried about MiM attacks. Really I think the problem is the author of the article doesn't understand what's going on much at all, but has a rather simple understanding of how networking, computers, and encryption work.
I think citing sources is vastly overrated. So what if I can find a source that states the first one was built in 1768?
Well, I'm not sure what "vastly overrated" means in your context, but I think citing sources is certainly something that needs to be done.
Will you ever find out that the vast majority of scholars actually agree that the first one was built in 1762? No, because the cited reference won't tell you that. Only a thorough and comprehensive study of the literature in the field will tell you that.
That's a problem with ANY cited source in any source of information. Why cite sources at all then if referencing the source doesn't immediately give you the "right" answer?
You've missunderstood the purpose of checking sources. It's not to give you the perfect answer, but to give someone who cares about accuracy the chance to check (and possibly correct) your sources of information. Without a source to the "The first one was made in 1762" fact, where are you going to even start in trying to verify that?
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
I learned the same thing in elementary school, and now consider it an idiotic rule. In fact I had teachers later on in elementary school that were fine with citing encyclopedias.
Basically, there's a world of difference between an elementary school and a serious research paper. The two purposes of citing sources is quite different. In elementary school it's to educate students about telling people where they got information from. In an academic research paper, it's so the reader can actually go to a definitive source and find the same information. Holding elementary or middle school students to the high standards of a research paper is just foolish and misses the point.
Anyway, I don't think citing Wikipedia is something that's completely out of bounds and should NEVER be done in an academic environment. You might want to do it where no other source exists, like in an for an episode guide to a TV show. It'd certainly be better than citing "Bob Johnson's "The Prisoner" episode guide, which may disapear tomorrow because Bob is tired of the site taking up so much of his time.
I've always used joker.com. I've never had a problem with them, and they offer free DNS and email forwarding. They're also inexpensive ($12 a year). They're based in either Germany or Switzerland, so they might be less willing to do whatever a US based company says.