> In that case, it's probably much cheaper to get a laptop with a 15" > screen and buy a seperate 19" monitor.
Cheaper, yes, but...
> You've got a laptop thats actually portable, and the big screen for when > you're ready to sit down and work for a while.
Yeah, but then you're stuck with the dinky little screen half the time, and the hand-cramp-inducing, RSI-aggravating, profanity-provoking reduced-size keyboard all of the time, which is just plain wrong.
With a 19-inch "laptop", you've basically got an ultra-portable mini-desktop that you can use *anywhere* (well, anywhere with a chair and a table or desk), that takes three seconds to set up and three seconds to take down and can also double as your main workstation so you don't have to worry about syncing. Going to visit your parents for the weekend? You just fold the thing and stick it in the car: no cables to unwind, no separate pieces to lug (except maybe a mouse, which weighs nothing and fits in a pocket), just grab it and go. You can use it at work, at home, at the relatives' place, at the hotel,... anywhere. Well, not *anywhere* in the standing-in-line-for-the-waterslides sense, but anywhere with a table and chair, i.e., pretty much anywhere it's practical to use a computer anyway. (Okay, airplanes... but what percentage of the laptop-buying population *really* flies more often than three times a year or so?)
This is not intended to displace the sub-14" laptop for people who really want to be able to use the thing balanced on one knee while horseback riding and are willing to maintain a separate desktop for indoor use. That's what nine-inch subnotebooks are for, or handhelds. The super-sized laptop on the other hand is aimed to displace desktops for people who would like to be able to move the thing much more easily.
> I thought the idea of a "laptop" or "notebook PC" was so that it was portable.
There's portable, and then there's portable, and then there's portable. My prediction is that it's the average-sized laptops (14.something-inch display) that will eventually fall by the wayside, because they're a poor compromise. They're not portable enough to use while standing in line, for instance. You can't balance the thing on one knee, either. And the keyboard isn't suitable for prolonged typing sessions. And you have very little screen real-estate. It is good for some things, but a subnotebook in the 9-inch range is almost as good for most of those purposes.
If you're going to need to sit down and set the thing up on a table to use it anyway, you might as well use a 17"+ model, especially if the weight-to-diagonal ratio keeps dropping. Among other things, this gives you a full-size keyboard, so that you can touch-type and not need reconstructive surgery on your hands as a result. But it's *way* more conveniently portable than most desktops. For trips, you can easily pick the thing up, toss it in the car, and use it in the hotel when you get there. College students can take it home for the weekend. There's no rat's nest of cables to plug and unplug (with the accompanying end-user concern about getting things hooked back up correctly). Also, it's not so heavy that a small woman would be afraid she'd drop it (a common concern with moving desktop systems).
There are still going to be some niches that the 14-15" laptop would still fill. It would fit on an airplane tray table, for instance, so people who fly a lot might want one for that. But for most people I would expect either a larger or a smaller option to be preferable, depending on their needs. Indeed, some people mind decide they want both, a 19"+ portable desktop replacement that they can carry into hotels and things and use at any table or desk, and an 8"-or-so subnotebook that they can carry in a large pocket and hold on an open palm in a pinch while hunt-and-peck typing with the other hand (or use a stylus or whatever). Plus maybe also a tiny model that also has a cellphone feature or can be worn as a wristwatch, for very simple on-the-fly tasks that don't require a lot of I/O. (Remember the calculator wristwatches that were popular in the 1980s? Imagine one that can also look up weather and stock quotes and stuff on the web, sync with your appointments calculator, and beep at you when you have an appointment coming up.)
Back in my day, I had CGA. 600x200 was high resolution, and it was only available in black and white. (Not greyscale; not even monochrome where you can choose the two colors. Black and white only.) Medium resolution was 320x200, and with that you could get up to four colors on the screen at once: one background color (choosen from the 16 available) plus your choice of one of three pallettes of three foreground colors. (The documentation only mentioned two palettes, numbered 1 and 2, but there was a third, numbered 0, which had two of the same colors as one of the others, but the third color was taken from the other one.) If you wanted more than four colors, you could always use 80x25 text mode, which boasted the ability to use all sixteen available colors at *once*. By using half-height characters and setting the background colors for individual characters, you could effectively get an 80x50 mode with 4 bpp. And we liked it, because it was better than the amber or green monochrome text-only screens older systems had. Momentarily, someone who got involved with computers at a younger age than I did, or who is just older, will pipe up about using a terminal with no screen at all...
> Next you'll probably want me to go ask the Bush camp if we should invade Iran
I suspect they'd say, "Maybe later; right now, we're already doing what we can handle in the countries where we've already intervened." They may view the world quite a lot differently than you do, but they're not utter morons.
> or the Democrats if we should repeal the two term law and re-elect Clinton
Technically, there's no need for any adjustments to the term law, because it was her husband who was elected the other two times.</rimshot> The more relevant question for a 2008 Clinton campaign is whether she can defeat Rice (assuming Cheney opts not to run due to age, which seems likely, although Reagan was older than was thought sensible at the time and yet won his elections cleanly).
> > Lets tar and feather him! > Proper custom asks for him to be tarred and bzip2ed.
Ah, but feather is lighter-weight than bzip2 and more aerodynamic and streamlined, so it uses fewer system resources (especially RAM). Also, due to the way the strands interlock, it gets a slightly higher compression rate. Finally, it's designed so that if parts of the file get corrupted, the other parts can still be unfeathered and recovered; only the corrupted parts are lost. This is especially useful in the case of tarballs, which may contain numerous files, most of which may be recoverable in the event the whole thing gets truncated or corrupted.
Also, feather comes with a kernel module that works with tar and GPG to create a compressed and encrypted loopback filesystem; this module also does software RAID levels 5 and/or 10, splitting the files redundantly across multiple feathered tarballs which can be on multiple physical disks or even mounted over the network.
> As someone who is responsible for 600+ computers I...
As someone who is responsible for 600+ computers, you can't possibly have any clue what he is talking about, because your 600+ computers are obviously on a LAN, probably have a reliable network connection, and hopefully are maintained by someone who knows the difference between a website and an email account. The other poster was talking about home-user systems on unreliable (and probably limited-hours-per-month more often than not) dialup, which is a completely different universe. In that scenerio, Windows Update is a *lot* less useable than in a corporate LAN scenerio.
> Log on to Linux as root, which is in effect what most people do with > Windows, and you - or something that you run - can do just as much damage.
This is where safe computing practices come in. I run as root all the time, but I don't run software I don't trust as root; if I'm running something dangerous, I throw it in an account with no privileges and, importantly, no read or write access to the data in my home directory.
Safe computing practices work on Windows too, incidentally. I used Windows 95 OSR2 for years and never had any problem -- but, of course, I didn't use vulnerable client software (e.g., Outlook), and Win95 doesn't have a lot of ports open by default; I used NetBEUI for SMB/CIFS, so it wasn't routed over the modem, got my mail with Pegasus Mail (later Gnus), used a safe web browser, didn't execute executable attachments, downloaded software only directly from the authors themselves (no warez or cetera), and so on and so forth. In general, I used my head for something other than holding down my neck.
This is, of course, substantially harder when you're going to let end users touch the computer, but even then, a certain degree of safety is possible. The computer my parents use, with Win98SE, has been running for going on five years now, and the worst thing it ever got was Gator -- and that only happened once. Of course, Outlook Express is not present on the system, and there's no desktop or start menu shortcut for IE, and a registry merge in autoexec.bat cleans certain unwanted things out of the Run keys, and I look the thing over from time to time. Oh, and it's behind IP Masquerade, so worms are a non-issue, and does not have a floppy drive, so no boot viruses either. For a home-user system, this is adequate.
Of course, a corporate LAN is entirely another thing. But the other poster wasn't talking about that scenerio.
Indeed. Any time an end user asks me about security-related issues, the first thing I always ask is, "What program do you use to get your email?" (They don't know, of course, but I'm not asking to get an answer.) Then I discuss the fact that most mail clients don't automatically _do_ anything when they receive an attachment, except for display it on the screen (e.g., if it's a picture); they don't follow any instructions the attachment contains, so the virus doesn't get activated. Then I tell them that the exception to this is Outlook or Outlook Express, which automatically launches certain kinds of potentially dangerous attachments. Most of them shrug and say "Huh", presumably figuring that if they get infected they'll take the thing in for service, but occasionally someone is concerned enough about the issue to ask me how to find out what mailreader they're using (so I tell them about Help->About) and what ones are safe (I always mention Pegasus Mail, which is easier to use than OE and, if you don't count the collaborative calendaring stuff that home users have no use for, more featureful than Outlook; its source is closed, but end users wouldn't know what to do with source code anyway (if you show them a command prompt and type dir/s they think you're hacking); it does cost nothing, which *is* a selling point for end users; it has the downside of only being available for Windows, but people who were formerly using MSOE don't care about that).
Of course, about a third of all end users get their email in a web browser, which is not *entirely* safe if it's IE, but is still much safer than Outlook. I've been fighting Outlook mindshare since I first heard the announcement that it would support Javascript in email, back in the mid nineties. I was flabbergasted that such a feature would even be considered, much less announced and implemented. What were they *thinking*? I mean, there are exactly *zero* possible legitimate useful purposes for such a feature, and any first-year computer science student can tell you the security implications are, basically, that you're totally hosed.
I'm not really anti-Microsoft. I don't use all their products, and prefer an OS that's a little more configurable than theirs, but they make some cool stuff, and their OS is, on the whole, really not a bad choice for most users. But of all their products, Outlook is the one that makes my blood boil. There is absolutely no question that the world would be a better place if Outlook had never been developed. It is a plague and a nuissance, the foremost bane of the administrator's existence, and the difficulty of uninstalling (the Express version of) it is hands-down the worst thing about Windows XP. I have nothing positive to say about Outlook or Outlook Express, nothing positive at all. It is a steaming jumbo vat of liquified rancid rabbit excrement with a fountain "feature".
> So in a very real way, the DDoS extortionists are terrorists and everyone > who leaves their systems unpatched is helping support terrorism.
That may be overstating the issue. "Helping support" implies some sort of active assistance. This is more passive. "Being used by" might be more level-headed wording. Not that being used by extortionists is exactly an indication of responsibility, or anything... but having an unpatched system is more like negligence than active participation.
> So why doesn't MS offer a monthly CD update subscription? Why aren't there > CDs at Best Buy, Circuit City, WalMart, etc. that have SP2 and updates on > it? Heck, AOL can get their CDs there to get people to sign up for service.
You know, that's a good idea. They're making the updates anyway, right? They could hire an intern for virtually nothing to slap together the autorun code to start the thing installing, and then they could charge the retailers about twice what it costs to mass-produce the things (i.e., peanuts), and let the retailers mark 'em up another 100%, and they'd still cost pocket change. They could print the year and month on the thing (it would, of course, only work with the latest desktop OS release -- but would contain all the free patches; so, for the current one you'd need any version of Windows XP) and issue a new one every month. It would be dated forward when produced so that after shipping the stores could put it on the shelves (or in the checkout line) a couple of days before the month printed on 'em; the turnaround time would still be a marked improvement over the current average. You pick the thing up along with your groceries, stick it in the CD-ROM drive, and no further user action is necessary; it runs in the background, determines which updates you don't already have installed, installs them, and then gives you a dialog that says the update will take effect the next time you restart your computer.
That could actually work fairly well. In theory, anyway.
Yeah, but it doesn't work when you disconnect after two minutes so your phone line isn't tied up, because you don't want to spend the extra $25/month on a second phone line. I estimate that usage pattern is about 45% of all internet users in the US. Not 45% of internet *use*, not even close, and not 45% of computers either, just 45% of *users*. Households who spend more time on the internet have fewer users per computer, on average; it is not unusual in the lower income brackets for families to maintain one computer with internet between three geographically-close houses; some kids have internet at mom's house, but not at dad's house, or only at grandma's, or cetera, and even many adults go to another person's house to use the internet; these computers generally are only turned on for a few minutes a day, even though they may have 10+ different users per seat. They also spend up to 25% of the time in a non-working state, sometimes for several weeks at a time, usually due to configuration issues, but also malware, hardware failures, the phone being disconnected for weeks at a time due to billing issues, and other factors.
Windows Update is *not* a viable option for these sorts of setups.
Another significant percentage of users turn off Windows Update to avoid being bugged, because it's easier to get rid of the dialog boxes by turning it off than to make it fully automatic when turned on. And a further significant percentage of those remaining just keep hitting the Later button.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but Windows Update as it stands now is not a complete solution. Making it easy (or the default even, but definitely not the *only* option) to have Windows Update not just download in the background but also *install* silently in the background fully automatically without ever prompting the user at all would help some, but it still doesn't deal well with the bandwidth issue. I don't know what the solution is for that one, but I know it's not going to go away very soon.
> It's too bad you can't just buy a can of smoke, and refill the motherboard.
Well, not just any smoke will do; it has to be exactly the right kind. (That's part of why it smells so foul; normal-smelling smoke won't work.) Also, once your motherboard has a smoke leak, it's difficult to get it resealed with the new smoke inside, and chances are it'll just leak again in a couple of months anyway. In the long run, it's cheaper to just buy a new motherboard.
> There's a good chance that the integrated stuff he's going to get for > free anyway is actually BETTER than the expansion cards he's so insanely > keen on continuing to use.
Haha.
Every time I get a new motherboard these days, it comes with onboard video. Like an idiot, I always attempt initially to use the onboard video. It never takes me more than a week to disable it and put in my old Matrox Mystique that came in the computer I bought in January of 1998. The onboard video may have super-hip 3D acceleration, which I suppose is great if your primary PC activity involves wandering around mazes collecting weapons powerups and shooting things with them, but the display glitches you get with most onboard video "cards" make them unusable for anything *other* than games, as far as I'm concerned. The first time the mouse pointer causes whatever's under it to shift leftward one pixel, or changing resolutions results in odd artifacts, or whatever, I ditch the new video and go back to the 1998 technology that *works*, darnit.
Onboard sound is typically similarly hideous, usually lacking features that have been standard on soundcards during the 486 era, such as hardware general MIDI playback and a decent wavetable. (Though I suppose the quality of the sound card output doesn't matter one way or the other if you use the speakers they ship with most PCs.)
Then the are onboard "modems", which typically rely on (usually buggy) driver software to do what a real modem is supposed to do in hardware.
I have had decent luck with onboard network interfaces. Not that that's a big deal, considering the piles of cash a high-quality NIC doesn't cost.
Exactly *which* onboard components were you supposing would be superior to the add-on-card versions?
> Actually, the blind spots are an artifact of the physical construction of > the human eye. It's where your nerves leave the eyeball.
*Those* blind spots are only actually blind spots as long as you keep your gaze focused in one spot without looking around -- which you generally don't do, except when you're very sleepy, drugged, or deliberatly focusing your vision on a particular thing that's stationary (and normally when you focus your vision on one thing, it's a thing in motion, so this doesn't come into play then). Otherwise, those "blind" spots have almost no impact on your vision. As your gaze passes over something, it theoretically blinks out for an instant (if it's the right combination of small enough and far enough away), in that your retina is not perceiving it for that instant, but as your cerebral cortex processes and intereprets the informatin it is receiving, it smoothes that over automatically and fills in the blanks for you. The retinal blind spot makes a fascinating "optical illusion" science demo at places like COSI, but as long as you don't stare straight ahead like a zombie, it presents no very significant problem to your vision in practice.
However, the other poster was talking about the rather larger blind spots that result from the limits on your peripheral vision (both horizontally and vertically): in a nutshell, you don't normally see behind your head. Since your head (and whole body) don't generally move *nearly* as often as your eyes, this larger blind area has a much more significant impact on your visual perception.
> The reason for doing beta testing would be what?
As a general rule, alpha testing (what the programmers themselves do in house) catches bugs that happen pretty much every time, on pretty much every setup; beta testing catches bugs that happen more often than not. The rest don't show up until you ship the thing.
Of course, beta testing can be more or less extensive, and the more extensive it is, the more it is likely to catch. For really heavy-duty beta testing, you need to release the beta publicly, on the internet, for free. I'll leave you to employ your imagination as to what why Apple might not desire that approach.
It is just conceivable that the 90+-year-old dude has more years of experience sending out morse code than the 13-year-old girl has sending out text messages. I assume the speed of either method would improve significantly after 20+ years of experience doing it, versus if you were just handed the thing for your thirteenth birthday a couple of months ago.
> If you actually looked at the maps of inundation, you'd see it's mostly > around 2024 to 2048 that Florida starts going underwater.
That's what they're saying *now* maybe. When I was in high school, TV network news stories about global warming were all saying Florida could be pretty much totally under water in ten years, if nothing changed. That was about ten years ago. (They were, of course, exaggerating, because that makes for more exciting news; real respectable climatologists were not the source of that timeframe; but that's not the point. The point is, the media exaggerate. Remember how all electronic devices were going to stop working at midnight Jan 1, 2000? Anything you read in a newspaper or see on TV news, you should take cum shakero salis.)
> When you can buy media wholesale (or own it) as those who deny global > warming can
Is that why, based on everything that was published by the major media regarding about global warming in the early nineties, Florida should be underwater by now, but it's, like, not? The media, as near as I can tell, are all so gung-ho about how big a deal global warming is, they exaggerate it out of all proportion.
This isn't to say I don't believe climactic patterns can shift; they can and they (gradually) do. I'm just saying the media exaggerates -- and some scientists exaggerate too, perhaps inadvertently, in an overzealous effort to produce groundbreaking research.
> I don't understand why Scotland Yard bothered with him.
One supposes they already had an ongoing investigation into the matter (due to undisclosed similar incidents involving other sites), and the information from this incident just went into the existing file. The article seems to indicate that there were other victims, but most had not made the matter public. It is not difficult to imagine that one of the other extortion victims might have been a legit UK business and that Scottland Yard might see it as their duty to investigate the matter as a result of that. The Central American offshore gambling business and its US-based consultant just happened to provide useful information pertaining to their case.
> Very true, this post could have much worse consequences than they > could ever throw at you.
I doubt it. As near as I can figure, a solid slashdotting comes to at most a two-digit MBPS figure, and that can only be kept up for a day or so. If you RTFA, it was talking about attacks of over 1GBPS sustained for weeks. That's something like fifty slashdottings at a time, more than once a day. The article didn't say what kinds of packets these were (forged-source SYN, reflected ACK, or what), but you get the idea that it was different kinds at different points.
In any event, the attack was apparently more bandwidth-consumptive brute-force than any particular cleverness. In practice, that's probably the most effective type of attack, because a clever attack (such as a traditional SYN flood) is subject to being thwarted by greater cleverness on the defensive end (e.g., SYN cookies). But a bandwidth-consumptive distributed attack is hard to defend against without having a bigger pipe than the aggregate bandwidth of the zombies.
(In the short term, that is; in the long term, given adequate resources and expertise, you eventually track the whole thing down and set the authorities on the perp, or failing that (e.g., if the whole operation is being run from the Federated People's Democratic Republic of Bob's Two-Acre One-Inch-Above-Sea-Level South-Pacific Coral Atol In International Waters (FPDRBTAOIASLSPCAIIW)) get his ISP to shut him down, but that all takes time, and meanwhile you want to keep your network online as much as possible.)
Yep. It does nasty things to gold, too, a property that has greatly dismayed many women over the decades, when they (accidentally) break a thermometer while wearing a wedding ring. Oops!
On the whole, there's a good reason most people on the street don't think of metals as liquids: the normal sorts of metals that sane people use every day *aren't* liquids at standard temperature and pressure. The metals that *are* liquid under normal conditions are unpleasant to be around in various ways.
> By the time Longhorn is actually released, Windows 2000 will be 6 - > going on 7 - years old.
I wouldn't put money on any number smaller than 8. It *could* come out in 2006, as is currently projected, but I don't recommend holding your breath. Remember that 2006 is already at least the second year it's been pushed back to, after having been previously scheduled to come out in an earlier year. The *strongest* argument for a 2006 release date's being realistic is the leaked-beta screenshots that have been seen around the web on several occasions in 2004 and 2005, but going from leaked-screenshot stage to production can take (and sometimes has taken, at various times for various companies with various products) significantly more time than planned.
Granted, I'm an acknowledge pessimist. I'm not saying it *can't* come out in 2006, or that it *necessarily* won't; I'm just saying, don't make your life's plans around it at this point.
My considered opinion on this is that Tolkien intended Hobbits to have a rather English flavour to their culture, and for the Shire to be located in (the ancient past of) the English countryside. Also Harad is clearly supposed to be in what is now Africa. But as for the other races (Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs, the men of Numenor and later Gondor,...) I do not believe they were intended to line up with any *specific* nationality or ethnicity that we know in the modern world. It is tempting to try to line up a map of all Middle Earth with a map of (part of) the modern world, but I am convinced that any attempt to do so will fail to produce results that make good sense across the board and are consistent with the books. One supposes that the geography of the world changed rather a lot during the fourth or fifth age, or something. (This is not outside the realm of what is known in Tolkien's universe, after all; there are quite significant geographical changes between the Middle Earth of the first age and that of the third.)
> I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP
You apparently have never seen Xaw. It truly makes WinXP look like real art. (Fortunately, I only know of one application that still uses the Xaw widgets, and it's an app that end users, as a general rule, won't touch anyway.)
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> In that case, it's probably much cheaper to get a laptop with a 15"
... anywhere. Well, not *anywhere* in the standing-in-line-for-the-waterslides sense, but anywhere with a table and chair, i.e., pretty much anywhere it's practical to use a computer anyway. (Okay, airplanes... but what percentage of the laptop-buying population *really* flies more often than three times a year or so?)
> screen and buy a seperate 19" monitor.
Cheaper, yes, but...
> You've got a laptop thats actually portable, and the big screen for when
> you're ready to sit down and work for a while.
Yeah, but then you're stuck with the dinky little screen half the time, and the hand-cramp-inducing, RSI-aggravating, profanity-provoking reduced-size keyboard all of the time, which is just plain wrong.
With a 19-inch "laptop", you've basically got an ultra-portable mini-desktop that you can use *anywhere* (well, anywhere with a chair and a table or desk), that takes three seconds to set up and three seconds to take down and can also double as your main workstation so you don't have to worry about syncing. Going to visit your parents for the weekend? You just fold the thing and stick it in the car: no cables to unwind, no separate pieces to lug (except maybe a mouse, which weighs nothing and fits in a pocket), just grab it and go. You can use it at work, at home, at the relatives' place, at the hotel,
This is not intended to displace the sub-14" laptop for people who really want to be able to use the thing balanced on one knee while horseback riding and are willing to maintain a separate desktop for indoor use. That's what nine-inch subnotebooks are for, or handhelds. The super-sized laptop on the other hand is aimed to displace desktops for people who would like to be able to move the thing much more easily.
> I thought the idea of a "laptop" or "notebook PC" was so that it was portable.
There's portable, and then there's portable, and then there's portable. My prediction is that it's the average-sized laptops (14.something-inch display) that will eventually fall by the wayside, because they're a poor compromise. They're not portable enough to use while standing in line, for instance. You can't balance the thing on one knee, either. And the keyboard isn't suitable for prolonged typing sessions. And you have very little screen real-estate. It is good for some things, but a subnotebook in the 9-inch range is almost as good for most of those purposes.
If you're going to need to sit down and set the thing up on a table to use it anyway, you might as well use a 17"+ model, especially if the weight-to-diagonal ratio keeps dropping. Among other things, this gives you a full-size keyboard, so that you can touch-type and not need reconstructive surgery on your hands as a result. But it's *way* more conveniently portable than most desktops. For trips, you can easily pick the thing up, toss it in the car, and use it in the hotel when you get there. College students can take it home for the weekend. There's no rat's nest of cables to plug and unplug (with the accompanying end-user concern about getting things hooked back up correctly). Also, it's not so heavy that a small woman would be afraid she'd drop it (a common concern with moving desktop systems).
There are still going to be some niches that the 14-15" laptop would still fill. It would fit on an airplane tray table, for instance, so people who fly a lot might want one for that. But for most people I would expect either a larger or a smaller option to be preferable, depending on their needs. Indeed, some people mind decide they want both, a 19"+ portable desktop replacement that they can carry into hotels and things and use at any table or desk, and an 8"-or-so subnotebook that they can carry in a large pocket and hold on an open palm in a pinch while hunt-and-peck typing with the other hand (or use a stylus or whatever). Plus maybe also a tiny model that also has a cellphone feature or can be worn as a wristwatch, for very simple on-the-fly tasks that don't require a lot of I/O. (Remember the calculator wristwatches that were popular in the 1980s? Imagine one that can also look up weather and stock quotes and stuff on the web, sync with your appointments calculator, and beep at you when you have an appointment coming up.)
Back in my day, I had CGA. 600x200 was high resolution, and it was only available in black and white. (Not greyscale; not even monochrome where you can choose the two colors. Black and white only.) Medium resolution was 320x200, and with that you could get up to four colors on the screen at once: one background color (choosen from the 16 available) plus your choice of one of three pallettes of three foreground colors. (The documentation only mentioned two palettes, numbered 1 and 2, but there was a third, numbered 0, which had two of the same colors as one of the others, but the third color was taken from the other one.) If you wanted more than four colors, you could always use 80x25 text mode, which boasted the ability to use all sixteen available colors at *once*. By using half-height characters and setting the background colors for individual characters, you could effectively get an 80x50 mode with 4 bpp. And we liked it, because it was better than the amber or green monochrome text-only screens older systems had. Momentarily, someone who got involved with computers at a younger age than I did, or who is just older, will pipe up about using a terminal with no screen at all...
> Next you'll probably want me to go ask the Bush camp if we should invade Iran
I suspect they'd say, "Maybe later; right now, we're already doing what we can handle in the countries where we've already intervened." They may view the world quite a lot differently than you do, but they're not utter morons.
> or the Democrats if we should repeal the two term law and re-elect Clinton
Technically, there's no need for any adjustments to the term law, because it was her husband who was elected the other two times.</rimshot> The more relevant question for a 2008 Clinton campaign is whether she can defeat Rice (assuming Cheney opts not to run due to age, which seems likely, although Reagan was older than was thought sensible at the time and yet won his elections cleanly).
> Am I the only one that liked the first two?
No. But the other people who liked them don't comment vocally about it in every relevant slashdot thread.
> > Lets tar and feather him!
> Proper custom asks for him to be tarred and bzip2ed.
Ah, but feather is lighter-weight than bzip2 and more aerodynamic and streamlined, so it uses fewer system resources (especially RAM). Also, due to the way the strands interlock, it gets a slightly higher compression rate. Finally, it's designed so that if parts of the file get corrupted, the other parts can still be unfeathered and recovered; only the corrupted parts are lost. This is especially useful in the case of tarballs, which may contain numerous files, most of which may be recoverable in the event the whole thing gets truncated or corrupted.
Also, feather comes with a kernel module that works with tar and GPG to create a compressed and encrypted loopback filesystem; this module also does software RAID levels 5 and/or 10, splitting the files redundantly across multiple feathered tarballs which can be on multiple physical disks or even mounted over the network.
> As someone who is responsible for 600+ computers I...
As someone who is responsible for 600+ computers, you can't possibly have any clue what he is talking about, because your 600+ computers are obviously on a LAN, probably have a reliable network connection, and hopefully are maintained by someone who knows the difference between a website and an email account. The other poster was talking about home-user systems on unreliable (and probably limited-hours-per-month more often than not) dialup, which is a completely different universe. In that scenerio, Windows Update is a *lot* less useable than in a corporate LAN scenerio.
> Log on to Linux as root, which is in effect what most people do with
> Windows, and you - or something that you run - can do just as much damage.
This is where safe computing practices come in. I run as root all the time, but I don't run software I don't trust as root; if I'm running something dangerous, I throw it in an account with no privileges and, importantly, no read or write access to the data in my home directory.
Safe computing practices work on Windows too, incidentally. I used Windows 95 OSR2 for years and never had any problem -- but, of course, I didn't use vulnerable client software (e.g., Outlook), and Win95 doesn't have a lot of ports open by default; I used NetBEUI for SMB/CIFS, so it wasn't routed over the modem, got my mail with Pegasus Mail (later Gnus), used a safe web browser, didn't execute executable attachments, downloaded software only directly from the authors themselves (no warez or cetera), and so on and so forth. In general, I used my head for something other than holding down my neck.
This is, of course, substantially harder when you're going to let end users touch the computer, but even then, a certain degree of safety is possible. The computer my parents use, with Win98SE, has been running for going on five years now, and the worst thing it ever got was Gator -- and that only happened once. Of course, Outlook Express is not present on the system, and there's no desktop or start menu shortcut for IE, and a registry merge in autoexec.bat cleans certain unwanted things out of the Run keys, and I look the thing over from time to time. Oh, and it's behind IP Masquerade, so worms are a non-issue, and does not have a floppy drive, so no boot viruses either. For a home-user system, this is adequate.
Of course, a corporate LAN is entirely another thing. But the other poster wasn't talking about that scenerio.
Indeed. Any time an end user asks me about security-related issues, the first thing I always ask is, "What program do you use to get your email?" (They don't know, of course, but I'm not asking to get an answer.) Then I discuss the fact that most mail clients don't automatically _do_ anything when they receive an attachment, except for display it on the screen (e.g., if it's a picture); they don't follow any instructions the attachment contains, so the virus doesn't get activated. Then I tell them that the exception to this is Outlook or Outlook Express, which automatically launches certain kinds of potentially dangerous attachments. Most of them shrug and say "Huh", presumably figuring that if they get infected they'll take the thing in for service, but occasionally someone is concerned enough about the issue to ask me how to find out what mailreader they're using (so I tell them about Help->About) and what ones are safe (I always mention Pegasus Mail, which is easier to use than OE and, if you don't count the collaborative calendaring stuff that home users have no use for, more featureful than Outlook; its source is closed, but end users wouldn't know what to do with source code anyway (if you show them a command prompt and type dir /s they think you're hacking); it does cost nothing, which *is* a selling point for end users; it has the downside of only being available for Windows, but people who were formerly using MSOE don't care about that).
Of course, about a third of all end users get their email in a web browser, which is not *entirely* safe if it's IE, but is still much safer than Outlook. I've been fighting Outlook mindshare since I first heard the announcement that it would support Javascript in email, back in the mid nineties. I was flabbergasted that such a feature would even be considered, much less announced and implemented. What were they *thinking*? I mean, there are exactly *zero* possible legitimate useful purposes for such a feature, and any first-year computer science student can tell you the security implications are, basically, that you're totally hosed.
I'm not really anti-Microsoft. I don't use all their products, and prefer an OS that's a little more configurable than theirs, but they make some cool stuff, and their OS is, on the whole, really not a bad choice for most users. But of all their products, Outlook is the one that makes my blood boil. There is absolutely no question that the world would be a better place if Outlook had never been developed. It is a plague and a nuissance, the foremost bane of the administrator's existence, and the difficulty of uninstalling (the Express version of) it is hands-down the worst thing about Windows XP. I have nothing positive to say about Outlook or Outlook Express, nothing positive at all. It is a steaming jumbo vat of liquified rancid rabbit excrement with a fountain "feature".
> So in a very real way, the DDoS extortionists are terrorists and everyone
> who leaves their systems unpatched is helping support terrorism.
That may be overstating the issue. "Helping support" implies some sort of active assistance. This is more passive. "Being used by" might be more level-headed wording. Not that being used by extortionists is exactly an indication of responsibility, or anything... but having an unpatched system is more like negligence than active participation.
> So why doesn't MS offer a monthly CD update subscription? Why aren't there
> CDs at Best Buy, Circuit City, WalMart, etc. that have SP2 and updates on
> it? Heck, AOL can get their CDs there to get people to sign up for service.
You know, that's a good idea. They're making the updates anyway, right? They could hire an intern for virtually nothing to slap together the autorun code to start the thing installing, and then they could charge the retailers about twice what it costs to mass-produce the things (i.e., peanuts), and let the retailers mark 'em up another 100%, and they'd still cost pocket change. They could print the year and month on the thing (it would, of course, only work with the latest desktop OS release -- but would contain all the free patches; so, for the current one you'd need any version of Windows XP) and issue a new one every month. It would be dated forward when produced so that after shipping the stores could put it on the shelves (or in the checkout line) a couple of days before the month printed on 'em; the turnaround time would still be a marked improvement over the current average. You pick the thing up along with your groceries, stick it in the CD-ROM drive, and no further user action is necessary; it runs in the background, determines which updates you don't already have installed, installs them, and then gives you a dialog that says the update will take effect the next time you restart your computer.
That could actually work fairly well. In theory, anyway.
> Windows Update downloads in the background
Yeah, but it doesn't work when you disconnect after two minutes so your phone line isn't tied up, because you don't want to spend the extra $25/month on a second phone line. I estimate that usage pattern is about 45% of all internet users in the US. Not 45% of internet *use*, not even close, and not 45% of computers either, just 45% of *users*. Households who spend more time on the internet have fewer users per computer, on average; it is not unusual in the lower income brackets for families to maintain one computer with internet between three geographically-close houses; some kids have internet at mom's house, but not at dad's house, or only at grandma's, or cetera, and even many adults go to another person's house to use the internet; these computers generally are only turned on for a few minutes a day, even though they may have 10+ different users per seat. They also spend up to 25% of the time in a non-working state, sometimes for several weeks at a time, usually due to configuration issues, but also malware, hardware failures, the phone being disconnected for weeks at a time due to billing issues, and other factors.
Windows Update is *not* a viable option for these sorts of setups.
Another significant percentage of users turn off Windows Update to avoid being bugged, because it's easier to get rid of the dialog boxes by turning it off than to make it fully automatic when turned on. And a further significant percentage of those remaining just keep hitting the Later button.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but Windows Update as it stands now is not a complete solution. Making it easy (or the default even, but definitely not the *only* option) to have Windows Update not just download in the background but also *install* silently in the background fully automatically without ever prompting the user at all would help some, but it still doesn't deal well with the bandwidth issue. I don't know what the solution is for that one, but I know it's not going to go away very soon.
> It's too bad you can't just buy a can of smoke, and refill the motherboard.
Well, not just any smoke will do; it has to be exactly the right kind. (That's part of why it smells so foul; normal-smelling smoke won't work.) Also, once your motherboard has a smoke leak, it's difficult to get it resealed with the new smoke inside, and chances are it'll just leak again in a couple of months anyway. In the long run, it's cheaper to just buy a new motherboard.
> There's a good chance that the integrated stuff he's going to get for
> free anyway is actually BETTER than the expansion cards he's so insanely
> keen on continuing to use.
Haha.
Every time I get a new motherboard these days, it comes with onboard video. Like an idiot, I always attempt initially to use the onboard video. It never takes me more than a week to disable it and put in my old Matrox Mystique that came in the computer I bought in January of 1998. The onboard video may have super-hip 3D acceleration, which I suppose is great if your primary PC activity involves wandering around mazes collecting weapons powerups and shooting things with them, but the display glitches you get with most onboard video "cards" make them unusable for anything *other* than games, as far as I'm concerned. The first time the mouse pointer causes whatever's under it to shift leftward one pixel, or changing resolutions results in odd artifacts, or whatever, I ditch the new video and go back to the 1998 technology that *works*, darnit.
Onboard sound is typically similarly hideous, usually lacking features that have been standard on soundcards during the 486 era, such as hardware general MIDI playback and a decent wavetable. (Though I suppose the quality of the sound card output doesn't matter one way or the other if you use the speakers they ship with most PCs.)
Then the are onboard "modems", which typically rely on (usually buggy) driver software to do what a real modem is supposed to do in hardware.
I have had decent luck with onboard network interfaces. Not that that's a big deal, considering the piles of cash a high-quality NIC doesn't cost.
Exactly *which* onboard components were you supposing would be superior to the add-on-card versions?
> Actually, the blind spots are an artifact of the physical construction of
> the human eye. It's where your nerves leave the eyeball.
*Those* blind spots are only actually blind spots as long as you keep your gaze focused in one spot without looking around -- which you generally don't do, except when you're very sleepy, drugged, or deliberatly focusing your vision on a particular thing that's stationary (and normally when you focus your vision on one thing, it's a thing in motion, so this doesn't come into play then). Otherwise, those "blind" spots have almost no impact on your vision. As your gaze passes over something, it theoretically blinks out for an instant (if it's the right combination of small enough and far enough away), in that your retina is not perceiving it for that instant, but as your cerebral cortex processes and intereprets the informatin it is receiving, it smoothes that over automatically and fills in the blanks for you. The retinal blind spot makes a fascinating "optical illusion" science demo at places like COSI, but as long as you don't stare straight ahead like a zombie, it presents no very significant problem to your vision in practice.
However, the other poster was talking about the rather larger blind spots that result from the limits on your peripheral vision (both horizontally and vertically): in a nutshell, you don't normally see behind your head. Since your head (and whole body) don't generally move *nearly* as often as your eyes, this larger blind area has a much more significant impact on your visual perception.
> The reason for doing beta testing would be what?
As a general rule, alpha testing (what the programmers themselves do in house) catches bugs that happen pretty much every time, on pretty much every setup; beta testing catches bugs that happen more often than not. The rest don't show up until you ship the thing.
Of course, beta testing can be more or less extensive, and the more extensive it is, the more it is likely to catch. For really heavy-duty beta testing, you need to release the beta publicly, on the internet, for free. I'll leave you to employ your imagination as to what why Apple might not desire that approach.
It is just conceivable that the 90+-year-old dude has more years of experience sending out morse code than the 13-year-old girl has sending out text messages. I assume the speed of either method would improve significantly after 20+ years of experience doing it, versus if you were just handed the thing for your thirteenth birthday a couple of months ago.
> If you actually looked at the maps of inundation, you'd see it's mostly
> around 2024 to 2048 that Florida starts going underwater.
That's what they're saying *now* maybe. When I was in high school, TV network news stories about global warming were all saying Florida could be pretty much totally under water in ten years, if nothing changed. That was about ten years ago. (They were, of course, exaggerating, because that makes for more exciting news; real respectable climatologists were not the source of that timeframe; but that's not the point. The point is, the media exaggerate. Remember how all electronic devices were going to stop working at midnight Jan 1, 2000? Anything you read in a newspaper or see on TV news, you should take cum shakero salis.)
> When you can buy media wholesale (or own it) as those who deny global
> warming can
Is that why, based on everything that was published by the major media regarding about global warming in the early nineties, Florida should be underwater by now, but it's, like, not? The media, as near as I can tell, are all so gung-ho about how big a deal global warming is, they exaggerate it out of all proportion.
This isn't to say I don't believe climactic patterns can shift; they can and they (gradually) do. I'm just saying the media exaggerates -- and some scientists exaggerate too, perhaps inadvertently, in an overzealous effort to produce groundbreaking research.
> I don't understand why Scotland Yard bothered with him.
One supposes they already had an ongoing investigation into the matter (due to undisclosed similar incidents involving other sites), and the information from this incident just went into the existing file. The article seems to indicate that there were other victims, but most had not made the matter public. It is not difficult to imagine that one of the other extortion victims might have been a legit UK business and that Scottland Yard might see it as their duty to investigate the matter as a result of that. The Central American offshore gambling business and its US-based consultant just happened to provide useful information pertaining to their case.
> Very true, this post could have much worse consequences than they
> could ever throw at you.
I doubt it. As near as I can figure, a solid slashdotting comes to at most a two-digit MBPS figure, and that can only be kept up for a day or so. If you RTFA, it was talking about attacks of over 1GBPS sustained for weeks. That's something like fifty slashdottings at a time, more than once a day. The article didn't say what kinds of packets these were (forged-source SYN, reflected ACK, or what), but you get the idea that it was different kinds at different points.
In any event, the attack was apparently more bandwidth-consumptive brute-force than any particular cleverness. In practice, that's probably the most effective type of attack, because a clever attack (such as a traditional SYN flood) is subject to being thwarted by greater cleverness on the defensive end (e.g., SYN cookies). But a bandwidth-consumptive distributed attack is hard to defend against without having a bigger pipe than the aggregate bandwidth of the zombies.
(In the short term, that is; in the long term, given adequate resources and expertise, you eventually track the whole thing down and set the authorities on the perp, or failing that (e.g., if the whole operation is being run from the Federated People's Democratic Republic of Bob's Two-Acre One-Inch-Above-Sea-Level South-Pacific Coral Atol In International Waters (FPDRBTAOIASLSPCAIIW)) get his ISP to shut him down, but that all takes time, and meanwhile you want to keep your network online as much as possible.)
Yep. It does nasty things to gold, too, a property that has greatly dismayed many women over the decades, when they (accidentally) break a thermometer while wearing a wedding ring. Oops!
On the whole, there's a good reason most people on the street don't think of metals as liquids: the normal sorts of metals that sane people use every day *aren't* liquids at standard temperature and pressure. The metals that *are* liquid under normal conditions are unpleasant to be around in various ways.
> By the time Longhorn is actually released, Windows 2000 will be 6 -
> going on 7 - years old.
I wouldn't put money on any number smaller than 8. It *could* come out in
2006, as is currently projected, but I don't recommend holding your breath.
Remember that 2006 is already at least the second year it's been pushed back
to, after having been previously scheduled to come out in an earlier year.
The *strongest* argument for a 2006 release date's being realistic is the
leaked-beta screenshots that have been seen around the web on several
occasions in 2004 and 2005, but going from leaked-screenshot stage to
production can take (and sometimes has taken, at various times for various
companies with various products) significantly more time than planned.
Granted, I'm an acknowledge pessimist. I'm not saying it *can't* come out
in 2006, or that it *necessarily* won't; I'm just saying, don't make your
life's plans around it at this point.
My considered opinion on this is that Tolkien intended Hobbits to have a ...) I do not believe
rather English flavour to their culture, and for the Shire to be located in
(the ancient past of) the English countryside. Also Harad is clearly supposed
to be in what is now Africa. But as for the other races (Elves, Dwarves,
Trolls, Orcs, the men of Numenor and later Gondor,
they were intended to line up with any *specific* nationality or ethnicity
that we know in the modern world. It is tempting to try to line up a map
of all Middle Earth with a map of (part of) the modern world, but I am
convinced that any attempt to do so will fail to produce results that make
good sense across the board and are consistent with the books. One supposes
that the geography of the world changed rather a lot during the fourth or
fifth age, or something. (This is not outside the realm of what is known
in Tolkien's universe, after all; there are quite significant geographical
changes between the Middle Earth of the first age and that of the third.)
Cat5? Bah! *Real* men use broadband-over-power-line the way you describe!
> I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP
You apparently have never seen Xaw. It truly makes WinXP look like real art.
(Fortunately, I only know of one application that still uses the Xaw widgets,
and it's an app that end users, as a general rule, won't touch anyway.)