The two-disc rerelease of Disney's 'The Little Mermaid' now retails for $14.87 at Wal-Mart and $14.99 at Target. The movie can be bought for $12.99 on iTunes.
So for $14.87 you can get 2 already made discs at Walmart, in a nice storage case, with plenty of extra bonus material, that will play on any (region 1) DVD player, or for less than 2 dollars less you can spend your own bandwidth to deliver a copy to you, and provide your own packaging and media, that contains only the movie, is of a much poorer quality, has a DRM infestation that will keep you from using it where you want to use it, and eventually you will not be able to play back on the system you want to play it back on. If you buy the Wal-Mart version you ratain right of first sale and you are free to resell it if you want, or lend it to friends, or even give it away. If you have the downloaded version you can't legally do any of these. And somehow Wal-mart wants to claim that this alternate outlet puts them at a disadvantage? I'm sure they would like to have a complete monopoly of distribution, but any argument that cheaper on-line sales unjustly undercuts them is completely bogus, and if anything it might even improve their sales when the on-line mark realizes what a bad purchase they made. It certainly makes the Wal-mart price for a couple of mass produced and packaged discs look like a great deal in comparison to on-line pricing.
If anything I'm more confused than ever. I've been shopping for a new system and was thinking AM2, but this article seems to say that one could upgrade an existing 939 system very cheaply and that consumers get more bang for the buck going with 939.. That seems to contradict other things it says. So if anyone really knows these devices, here is what I'm wondering:
I have to go with AM2 to use a dual core processor from AMD, right? Or can I use an affordable dual core cpu in 939? And if I can, what do I need to buy?
This new hardware virtualization support - is it available in 939 or do I have to go for AM2 to get it? If available on 939 what do I need to buy to be sure I get it? And can anyone point me to some good information that actually tells me more about it than a one-line marketing discription?
What you may want may not be a portable dead man's switch, and certainly not one that you need to die to triger. What might be a big help to you (and many other people) is software running on your computer that alerts people and does other things if you fail to check in on a regular basis.
There is already one program that I know of that attempts to do this. It is called DMS, but I can not recommend it, it is very flawed. Among the issues I have with the program: It gives no warning before sending out the death notices that you program, no chance for the user to abort it. It will send out the notices and take other actions (such as deleting files) even if the computer has been down for a long time and then is rebooted (assuming that dms is in the start-up directory where it should be), such as caused by hardware failure or even extended power failure. And it needs manual attention to restart it's count down times, it doesn't recognize from keyboard or mouse activity that you are still alive and restart the countdown, so if you ever forget to reset the counter the messages go out with no warning and no chance to stop them.
While the program is flawed, the concept is not. I keep hoping that I will find another version that addresses these problems and can be used for this purpose. I can see that this would be a big help to anyone concerned about the elderly living alone, anyone with a dependent child (or even a pet) who shares your concerns, and many other people.
Perhaps, but until someone can show real data that confirms that this is due to the speed of the connection, and not just due to wired ethernet's much lower overhead than wireless, I'm not convinced that any wireless speed "improvements" over 802.11g really affect anything when connecting to the Internet on normal "high speed" services".
What amazes me is that by far the majority of the public who think they have to have the fastest technology out there will be using it exclusively to access the Internet with their 1.5 meg DSL or 3 to 5 meg cable connection, a situation where they will see no improvemnent over existing, compatablle, and less costly 802-11g technology, in may cases that they already own. Sure, high speed wireless access is nice if you frequently move huge files across the wireless link between local machines, but in my experience talking to users who have bought into high speed, the average smuck that just has to have the newest fastest technology has no clue where his bottleneck is.
Right from the article: "used by hundreds if not thousands of users on a daily basis".
This pretty much sums it up, there is an old technology that needs a special extra receiver that is used by hundreds of people (or maybe more) and costing millions of tax dollars, while there is now a widely deployed WAAS system that uses the same satellite receiver as GPS (no extra receiver required), is used by vastly more people, covers the country, and somehow the politicans have caught on that the old system is a waste. Although we may not be able to stop paying billions for bridges in Alaska that go to islands with 50 people and will admittedly help only realestate investors, at least they see the folly in supporting this old system. It should be shut down, in spite of any private agenda the original poster has.
On top of this, WAAS isn't the end of the line, there are more systems coming on-line that will improve GPS acuracy even more. The old system was OK for what it was, but the need for extra receivers by each user certainly limited it's adoption. It should be phased out.
And one thing I just have to comment on from the article and even the/. blurb: "Positive Train Control"! Are we really to believe we need taxpayer funded meter accuracy for GPS for train control? Do these trains really wander from from the tracks we know the location of? Isn't normal GPS accuracy just fine for choo-choo trains? And in the rare cases where higher accuracy might come in handy (although should hardly be needed), such as a switchyard, couldn't the location itself provide a small simple system for far less cost than asking the taxpayers to support it for this special use? You don't even need Internet data for this, you just have to agree on the location of the stationary differential receiver site and put a receiver without WASS there, it's error from it's known location is the same or better correction information than you could get from the Internet.
Perhaps you don't understand the game.
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You seem to be assuming that the world is motivated by "points". Maybe some of those "retarded" people that you talk about have realized that "points" are meaningless, and are trying to send you a message. Could it be that they are thinking "this other player is really retarded, he still doesn't get it, the only right way to play this game is for us to both send Google the message that we are not motivated by meaningless 'points' by both passing on everything until they get it". And if they can't convince Google of that, maybe they are at least trying to enlighten the other player.
It's a good thing that no one at Radio Shack has any technical skill or understands the Internet. Otherwise, someone who worked there and resents this happening this way might forge an e-mail header and fire everyone that didn't get the first e-mail. Not that I'm advocationg that, because that would be wrong.
In Huntsville, AL there's a gaming/card shop that I've been going to since I was 6.
Are you under the impression that this statement conveys some information? Like are we intended to know if that is a week, a year, a decade, or 50 years or more?
There are some programs, like SSH and remote desktop, that send packets to the internet as soon as keypresses are received.
No, you are wrong. No program sends packets as soon as keypresses are received. All programs and all operating systems have latency. Even a true real time OS would be hard pressed to be exploited this way, as the latency would likely be enough to mask the impossed "jitter". But Windows is far from a real time operating system, it gaurantees no maximum latency between when the keypress is received by the hardware and when the software will run that understands it. And with Windows this latency can be and often is quite long. There is also latency that comes in after the program creates the packet and tries to send it out the network port. And there are other potential delays too (the OS can and often does snatch control from the program making that packet after it has received the keypress but before the packet can be sent so that it can do something else, for example). All together this makes it absurd that Windows could be exploited this way, it's just too poor of an OS to sneak information through by imposing jitter on the keyboard input, even if the user were typing through software that does one packet per keystroke (and most such software imposes it's own variable delays there too, so that if multiple characters are received back-to-back they can be sent out in one packet). Which is not to say that I believe that normal desktop versions of Linux could be exploited this way either, as they are also designed to be multi-process highly responsive desktop systems, and not real time systems that would allow a designer to impose latency limits on events like this. Add all of this to other network traffic (which certainly imposes delays for any packet sent or received), and you'll see why I have been sayiing this and people seem to show their agreement by giving karma to my comments against this hype.
Sure, the keyboard has control over when it sends the key strokes. But that is only key presses, it is not packets going out the network connection. Without special software in the computer to receive and decode those keypress delays, the keyboard can't control packet timing. It can't even know what keypresses relate to outgoing packets and what do not, what types of packets they are, what other network trafic there is at the same time that has real effect on packet timing, and so on. If there was special software in the local computer to interpret that magic keypress "jitter" then indeed it might be able to sneak out on the network any data that it manages to decode from the keyboard jitter (not that that data would likely retain it's own secret jitter information beyond the first router), but if you have compromised the computer enough to install such special software that the keyboard needs to communicate it's secret data then you hardly need this bogus keyboard hardware in the first place, and you don't need packet jitter to hide data (I can show you a lot of better ways that would still not show anything funny if the packets were inspected). This is hype, snake oil! Maybe you want to get one of those really really fast $279 gamer network cards that was talked about previously on Tuesday to zip your packets down the Internet quicker than all the other NICs do, so that you can protect yourself from packet jitter and any keyboards that my have this big brother hardware built in. After all, if you believe a keyboard can impose information carrying packet jitter then you likely will believe that the gamer NIC is going to live up to it's claims too.
That makes no sense at all. Remember, and this is something that you seem to be completely ignoring, This is a keyboard, it sends keystrokes to the motherboard, it does not send packets to the Internet! Packets would be sent by some software that was in the computer after the keystrokes are reeceived. SO, ok, lets pretend that the keyboard can indeed slightly delay packets and know how long ago in milliseconds it was since the last key press, even if it was several minutes. Then yes, the keyboard could convey one bit of data with each keypress. But it can only convey it as far as the local computer that is receiving keystrokes. If that computer is not in on the game and is not running special software to detect the delays, then this whole thing is meaningless! And if it is compromised, then there are far simpler ways to capture and send passwords than to have a hardware hack keyboard that uses this bogus "jitter" nonsense.
No, you are believibg that a keyboard can somehow do anything more than change the timing on keypresses. If the keyboard could somehow play games with the packets beyond just delaying keystrokes then, sure, it might be able to do a lot of things. But since all the keyboard can do is affect the input to the keyboard logic, and this is all they are claiming it can do, it can hardly use a bunch of packets to sneak out information on a password, even if it knew which keystrokes were the password, which it obviously does not.
Sure, you could add your own jitter, but it's not really needed. My bullshit detector went off right as I hit the text reading "adding imperceptible delays to keypresses as people". Come on! People add their own imperceptable delays to keypresses, particularly when typing passwords. Other system and network activity adds timing discrepencies to packets that would mask this "jitter". And in most cases when a password is sent, it is sent in a packet, not as individual packets for each character, meaning that the keyboard can't really influence the between letter spacing at all. Plus the keyboard has no comprehension of what is going on upon the screen, it has no way to know if what is being typed is a password or not, so there is no way it can detect and specially encode passwords, it would have to somehow influence the system in a way that allowed it to encode every single keypress as this magic keypress jitter. Because of other packet "jitter" already affecting traffic, I don't believe it could even work if robots were doing all the typing, but certainly not for humanas.
Sure, there is valid reason to be concerned about spying hardware and software being built into computers.But unfortunatey bullshit hype like this just clouds the issue, when it is finally discredited it will just make it that much harder for people who are warning of valid concerns.
I don't know what's sadder, that some fools would actually hand over money to a bunch of MBA who claim to someow have designed a better network interface than engineers, and who can't understand that these claim are completely bogus, or that Slashdot actually gives them a soapbox to further pitch their snakeoil from (perhaps because of the use of the term Linux in the hype).
No wonder you post as an AC, with insight like that! Sure it's simulated traffic, that would hardly stop the law from breaking down your door, destroying your stuff and generally making your life miserable if the RIAA asked them too. Would the RIAA hacking be illegal? Sure, there are plenty of cases of that and worse on record, but the law applies to you and somehow not to them, or have you not been paying attention. And of course you are just setting yourself up for extreme legal fees, the ones that RIAA racketeering typically threatens people with as part of their "pay us five figures now, or even if you are innocent we'll run your legal fees up so high that you'll wish you did" approach to filing suits on people. Is that approach itself illegal? Yup. Do they get away with it? They sure do.
Simulated traffic can be used in conjunction with simulated targets....If you want to really see what the attacker is all about, simulate traffic that looks like someone trading MP3s, or traffic that looks like someone transferring business documents. If the attacker spends most of his time looking at the MP3 traffic, he is probably pretty harmless. If he spends his time looking at the documents, he is probably pretty dangerous.
Yea, right. Great advice, right up to the day that the RIAA and their FBI thugs come breaking down your door and taking every computer that you own and anything else they want too, because the hacker that broke into your system and saw all that traffice was an RIAA hacker.
Nonesense. You don't have to create your own question, you just need the ability to do what the site already lest you do, create your own answer. Mother's maiden name? Qgxyz7rtl. First pets name? Qgxyz7rtl. My Highschool? Qgxyz7rtl. Favorite TV show? Qgxyz7rtl. The only problem is coming up with a system where every minimum wage help desk monkey doesn't know your answer to every website that you have a password on, but that's not too hard to come up with.
My rule is "stable whenever it matters to someone else".
Unfortunately, stable and untesting are just terms that Debian uses to refer to the different releases. Debian testing is by far more stable than any version of Windows I have ever used, and for all pratical purposes it is Stable. They could just as well have labeled the Debian versions "new", "stable" and "old" than "unstable","testing" and "stable".
I like the Etch installer, greatly improved over Sarge. You can try it now, just install "testing". Only problem that I had with it was that on a 4 partition system it refused to install Grub to the Linux partition where I wanted it and insisted in putting it in the MBR (clearly no good reason for this, since the older Debian Sarge install it replaced had Grub where I wanted it).
More like get it from the Debian website, wehere it has long been available as the "testing" version. Other than adding an occasional driver and a lot of hype, I don't see any real benefit to Unbutu, which is based on Debian anyway. The "live CD" sucks (relatively speaking to other Live CDs), and I have found no reason to install it instead of Etch, which I already have installed on a couple of systems.
They are not pushing a volume of changes into the distro all at once. They are just saying that in December, Etch, which you can download and install right now (or better yet, do a "net install") will be called the official Stable release. Sarge, the current stable release will be retired (well past time). Newer versions will become "testing" and "unstable". I've been using Etch, it is pretty nice. But I expect that with it's "release" in December I'll stop using it and move on to the new "testing" version. The official Debian release tends to show it's age too much and the testing version is actually very stable.
Sure. You can get Etch now. It's also called testing, and is very stable. There is also a newer "unstable" version that you can download and use, it is changing almost daily, but overall it is pretty stable in spite of the name. So by the time a version like Etch is officially "released" it is extremely stable, and somewhat out of date. I find that unless you are building mission critical process control systems that need to be extremely bug free, you are better off using the Debian testing version than the official release, particularly if you have newer hardware that you want to be able to use.
the company will be subject to civil penalties of $11,000 for future violations
No fine this time and $11,000 in the future? They couldn't buy publicity this cheap! They would be fools not to put something in future releases that was intended to get them fined.
I agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't go far enough. From Microsoft's own website: Save time and money as Virtual PC allows you to maintain the compatibility of legacy and custom applications during migration to new operating systems and increases the efficiency of support, development, and training staffs. So they come out and say that this can be used to maintain conpatability with legacy programs. But how do I do that if I have a Vista system and want to install a copy of XP? Or even if I want to install a copy of Win98 or Win95 or Win3.1, no longer sold. The same question exists if I have an XP system and I want to install an XP virtual machine on it. In theory I've already paid to run XP on that system, but all of the phone-home technology, WGA and the rest, it would seem that there will be serious problems trying to run the OS's that we actually want to run and the OS's that would indeed let us maintain the compatibility of legacy and custom applications as claimed.
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So for $14.87 you can get 2 already made discs at Walmart, in a nice storage case, with plenty of extra bonus material, that will play on any (region 1) DVD player, or for less than 2 dollars less you can spend your own bandwidth to deliver a copy to you, and provide your own packaging and media, that contains only the movie, is of a much poorer quality, has a DRM infestation that will keep you from using it where you want to use it, and eventually you will not be able to play back on the system you want to play it back on. If you buy the Wal-Mart version you ratain right of first sale and you are free to resell it if you want, or lend it to friends, or even give it away. If you have the downloaded version you can't legally do any of these. And somehow Wal-mart wants to claim that this alternate outlet puts them at a disadvantage? I'm sure they would like to have a complete monopoly of distribution, but any argument that cheaper on-line sales unjustly undercuts them is completely bogus, and if anything it might even improve their sales when the on-line mark realizes what a bad purchase they made. It certainly makes the Wal-mart price for a couple of mass produced and packaged discs look like a great deal in comparison to on-line pricing.
I have to go with AM2 to use a dual core processor from AMD, right? Or can I use an affordable dual core cpu in 939? And if I can, what do I need to buy?
This new hardware virtualization support - is it available in 939 or do I have to go for AM2 to get it? If available on 939 what do I need to buy to be sure I get it? And can anyone point me to some good information that actually tells me more about it than a one-line marketing discription?
Thanks in advance for any useful feedback.
There is already one program that I know of that attempts to do this. It is called DMS, but I can not recommend it, it is very flawed. Among the issues I have with the program: It gives no warning before sending out the death notices that you program, no chance for the user to abort it. It will send out the notices and take other actions (such as deleting files) even if the computer has been down for a long time and then is rebooted (assuming that dms is in the start-up directory where it should be), such as caused by hardware failure or even extended power failure. And it needs manual attention to restart it's count down times, it doesn't recognize from keyboard or mouse activity that you are still alive and restart the countdown, so if you ever forget to reset the counter the messages go out with no warning and no chance to stop them.
While the program is flawed, the concept is not. I keep hoping that I will find another version that addresses these problems and can be used for this purpose. I can see that this would be a big help to anyone concerned about the elderly living alone, anyone with a dependent child (or even a pet) who shares your concerns, and many other people.
Perhaps, but until someone can show real data that confirms that this is due to the speed of the connection, and not just due to wired ethernet's much lower overhead than wireless, I'm not convinced that any wireless speed "improvements" over 802.11g really affect anything when connecting to the Internet on normal "high speed" services".
What amazes me is that by far the majority of the public who think they have to have the fastest technology out there will be using it exclusively to access the Internet with their 1.5 meg DSL or 3 to 5 meg cable connection, a situation where they will see no improvemnent over existing, compatablle, and less costly 802-11g technology, in may cases that they already own. Sure, high speed wireless access is nice if you frequently move huge files across the wireless link between local machines, but in my experience talking to users who have bought into high speed, the average smuck that just has to have the newest fastest technology has no clue where his bottleneck is.
On top of this, WAAS isn't the end of the line, there are more systems coming on-line that will improve GPS acuracy even more. The old system was OK for what it was, but the need for extra receivers by each user certainly limited it's adoption. It should be phased out.
And one thing I just have to comment on from the article and even the /. blurb: "Positive Train Control"! Are we really to believe we need taxpayer funded meter accuracy for GPS for train control? Do these trains really wander from from the tracks we know the location of? Isn't normal GPS accuracy just fine for choo-choo trains? And in the rare cases where higher accuracy might come in handy (although should hardly be needed), such as a switchyard, couldn't the location itself provide a small simple system for far less cost than asking the taxpayers to support it for this special use? You don't even need Internet data for this, you just have to agree on the location of the stationary differential receiver site and put a receiver without WASS there, it's error from it's known location is the same or better correction information than you could get from the Internet.
You seem to be assuming that the world is motivated by "points". Maybe some of those "retarded" people that you talk about have realized that "points" are meaningless, and are trying to send you a message. Could it be that they are thinking "this other player is really retarded, he still doesn't get it, the only right way to play this game is for us to both send Google the message that we are not motivated by meaningless 'points' by both passing on everything until they get it". And if they can't convince Google of that, maybe they are at least trying to enlighten the other player.
It's a good thing that no one at Radio Shack has any technical skill or understands the Internet. Otherwise, someone who worked there and resents this happening this way might forge an e-mail header and fire everyone that didn't get the first e-mail. Not that I'm advocationg that, because that would be wrong.
Are you under the impression that this statement conveys some information? Like are we intended to know if that is a week, a year, a decade, or 50 years or more?
No, you are wrong. No program sends packets as soon as keypresses are received. All programs and all operating systems have latency. Even a true real time OS would be hard pressed to be exploited this way, as the latency would likely be enough to mask the impossed "jitter". But Windows is far from a real time operating system, it gaurantees no maximum latency between when the keypress is received by the hardware and when the software will run that understands it. And with Windows this latency can be and often is quite long. There is also latency that comes in after the program creates the packet and tries to send it out the network port. And there are other potential delays too (the OS can and often does snatch control from the program making that packet after it has received the keypress but before the packet can be sent so that it can do something else, for example). All together this makes it absurd that Windows could be exploited this way, it's just too poor of an OS to sneak information through by imposing jitter on the keyboard input, even if the user were typing through software that does one packet per keystroke (and most such software imposes it's own variable delays there too, so that if multiple characters are received back-to-back they can be sent out in one packet). Which is not to say that I believe that normal desktop versions of Linux could be exploited this way either, as they are also designed to be multi-process highly responsive desktop systems, and not real time systems that would allow a designer to impose latency limits on events like this. Add all of this to other network traffic (which certainly imposes delays for any packet sent or received), and you'll see why I have been sayiing this and people seem to show their agreement by giving karma to my comments against this hype.
Sure, the keyboard has control over when it sends the key strokes. But that is only key presses, it is not packets going out the network connection. Without special software in the computer to receive and decode those keypress delays, the keyboard can't control packet timing. It can't even know what keypresses relate to outgoing packets and what do not, what types of packets they are, what other network trafic there is at the same time that has real effect on packet timing, and so on. If there was special software in the local computer to interpret that magic keypress "jitter" then indeed it might be able to sneak out on the network any data that it manages to decode from the keyboard jitter (not that that data would likely retain it's own secret jitter information beyond the first router), but if you have compromised the computer enough to install such special software that the keyboard needs to communicate it's secret data then you hardly need this bogus keyboard hardware in the first place, and you don't need packet jitter to hide data (I can show you a lot of better ways that would still not show anything funny if the packets were inspected). This is hype, snake oil! Maybe you want to get one of those really really fast $279 gamer network cards that was talked about previously on Tuesday to zip your packets down the Internet quicker than all the other NICs do, so that you can protect yourself from packet jitter and any keyboards that my have this big brother hardware built in. After all, if you believe a keyboard can impose information carrying packet jitter then you likely will believe that the gamer NIC is going to live up to it's claims too.
That makes no sense at all. Remember, and this is something that you seem to be completely ignoring, This is a keyboard, it sends keystrokes to the motherboard, it does not send packets to the Internet! Packets would be sent by some software that was in the computer after the keystrokes are reeceived. SO, ok, lets pretend that the keyboard can indeed slightly delay packets and know how long ago in milliseconds it was since the last key press, even if it was several minutes. Then yes, the keyboard could convey one bit of data with each keypress. But it can only convey it as far as the local computer that is receiving keystrokes. If that computer is not in on the game and is not running special software to detect the delays, then this whole thing is meaningless! And if it is compromised, then there are far simpler ways to capture and send passwords than to have a hardware hack keyboard that uses this bogus "jitter" nonsense.
No, you are believibg that a keyboard can somehow do anything more than change the timing on keypresses. If the keyboard could somehow play games with the packets beyond just delaying keystrokes then, sure, it might be able to do a lot of things. But since all the keyboard can do is affect the input to the keyboard logic, and this is all they are claiming it can do, it can hardly use a bunch of packets to sneak out information on a password, even if it knew which keystrokes were the password, which it obviously does not.
Sure, there is valid reason to be concerned about spying hardware and software being built into computers.But unfortunatey bullshit hype like this just clouds the issue, when it is finally discredited it will just make it that much harder for people who are warning of valid concerns.
I don't know what's sadder, that some fools would actually hand over money to a bunch of MBA who claim to someow have designed a better network interface than engineers, and who can't understand that these claim are completely bogus, or that Slashdot actually gives them a soapbox to further pitch their snakeoil from (perhaps because of the use of the term Linux in the hype).
No wonder you post as an AC, with insight like that! Sure it's simulated traffic, that would hardly stop the law from breaking down your door, destroying your stuff and generally making your life miserable if the RIAA asked them too. Would the RIAA hacking be illegal? Sure, there are plenty of cases of that and worse on record, but the law applies to you and somehow not to them, or have you not been paying attention. And of course you are just setting yourself up for extreme legal fees, the ones that RIAA racketeering typically threatens people with as part of their "pay us five figures now, or even if you are innocent we'll run your legal fees up so high that you'll wish you did" approach to filing suits on people. Is that approach itself illegal? Yup. Do they get away with it? They sure do.
Simulated traffic can be used in conjunction with simulated targets....If you want to really see what the attacker is all about, simulate traffic that looks like someone trading MP3s, or traffic that looks like someone transferring business documents. If the attacker spends most of his time looking at the MP3 traffic, he is probably pretty harmless. If he spends his time looking at the documents, he is probably pretty dangerous.
Yea, right. Great advice, right up to the day that the RIAA and their FBI thugs come breaking down your door and taking every computer that you own and anything else they want too, because the hacker that broke into your system and saw all that traffice was an RIAA hacker.
Nonesense. You don't have to create your own question, you just need the ability to do what the site already lest you do, create your own answer. Mother's maiden name? Qgxyz7rtl. First pets name? Qgxyz7rtl. My Highschool? Qgxyz7rtl. Favorite TV show? Qgxyz7rtl. The only problem is coming up with a system where every minimum wage help desk monkey doesn't know your answer to every website that you have a password on, but that's not too hard to come up with.
Unfortunately, stable and untesting are just terms that Debian uses to refer to the different releases. Debian testing is by far more stable than any version of Windows I have ever used, and for all pratical purposes it is Stable. They could just as well have labeled the Debian versions "new", "stable" and "old" than "unstable","testing" and "stable".
I like the Etch installer, greatly improved over Sarge. You can try it now, just install "testing". Only problem that I had with it was that on a 4 partition system it refused to install Grub to the Linux partition where I wanted it and insisted in putting it in the MBR (clearly no good reason for this, since the older Debian Sarge install it replaced had Grub where I wanted it).
More like get it from the Debian website, wehere it has long been available as the "testing" version. Other than adding an occasional driver and a lot of hype, I don't see any real benefit to Unbutu, which is based on Debian anyway. The "live CD" sucks (relatively speaking to other Live CDs), and I have found no reason to install it instead of Etch, which I already have installed on a couple of systems.
They are not pushing a volume of changes into the distro all at once. They are just saying that in December, Etch, which you can download and install right now (or better yet, do a "net install") will be called the official Stable release. Sarge, the current stable release will be retired (well past time). Newer versions will become "testing" and "unstable". I've been using Etch, it is pretty nice. But I expect that with it's "release" in December I'll stop using it and move on to the new "testing" version. The official Debian release tends to show it's age too much and the testing version is actually very stable.
Sure. You can get Etch now. It's also called testing, and is very stable. There is also a newer "unstable" version that you can download and use, it is changing almost daily, but overall it is pretty stable in spite of the name. So by the time a version like Etch is officially "released" it is extremely stable, and somewhat out of date. I find that unless you are building mission critical process control systems that need to be extremely bug free, you are better off using the Debian testing version than the official release, particularly if you have newer hardware that you want to be able to use.
No fine this time and $11,000 in the future? They couldn't buy publicity this cheap! They would be fools not to put something in future releases that was intended to get them fined.
I agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't go far enough. From Microsoft's own website: Save time and money as Virtual PC allows you to maintain the compatibility of legacy and custom applications during migration to new operating systems and increases the efficiency of support, development, and training staffs. So they come out and say that this can be used to maintain conpatability with legacy programs. But how do I do that if I have a Vista system and want to install a copy of XP? Or even if I want to install a copy of Win98 or Win95 or Win3.1, no longer sold. The same question exists if I have an XP system and I want to install an XP virtual machine on it. In theory I've already paid to run XP on that system, but all of the phone-home technology, WGA and the rest, it would seem that there will be serious problems trying to run the OS's that we actually want to run and the OS's that would indeed let us maintain the compatibility of legacy and custom applications as claimed.