I'm in the same situation; I have win2k on my home workstation. Currently I use a SP4 image made from my brand-spanking-old SP0 CDROM which I install via a dd from my file server whenever I need a reinstall, but I'm still not going to be able to bring it up to date in 4 minutes (let alone install a software firewall).
Yes, I do install it and the patches offline (when I remember to pull out the network cable anyway), but there are still must be dozens of home and business users bringing systems up with new installs every day (win2k is very popular in business - it's all my company uses) who will be vulnerable.
(P.S. in reply to the GP AC, the article was/.ed when I made the post so I couldn't RTFA)
...statistics for all the other versions of windows in common use, particularly Windows 2000, as well as XP SP2. Last time I looked XP machines could only account for a maximum of ~50% of all the potential zombie bots in the world.
Spamming units typically have a morale of 9 or more, while most ISP's have only an average morale of 7 - and this screensaver only gives a +1 boost to leadership. I know who I'd rather roll my 2D6 against...;)
I modded by wireless mouse to use an RTG to power it. I just filled the battery cavity with plutonium 238, threw in a thermocouple and I was good to go.
The thing worked fine until it melted through the floor. Maybe I'll stick to go-fasta stripes next time...
I haven't had a TV for 6 years, and have finally got around to building myself a Myth box. Saw a couple of eps of Futurama on the recommendation of a friend, which I loved. Downloaded a few more from the net, loved them too. Bought the entire collection of 4 box sets on DVD... and I'm greeted to:
a) About eight dead trees worth of "Stop pirating stuff, you filthy child murderer!" propaganda falling out of the box, plus requisite product catalogue b) A full *three minutes* of unskippable copyright notices (I'm in the UK, so all the EU langs have to be catered for) before I can watch the actual episodes (Xine and Media Player Classic will of course let me skip them, but we've only got a PS2 hooked up to the TV at the moment, pending the next MythTV box)
And this is a country without the direct influence of the *AA's. And that is precisely why my terahertz althlons are busy transcoding their way through 15 DVD's worth of Futurama.
Perhaps this is an exception, but I'm scared it isn't. The only TV shows I've bought on DVD until now are from the BBC, who are pretty no-nonsense about their DVD's, which also appear ludicrously cheap once the initial "It's a new DVD so we need an 800% markup" has worn off. Got the entirity of Coupling s02 (nine 28min episodes) for £7.
I also downloaded about 60 movies frmo P2P when I was a student, all of which have now been replaced by DVD rips from my own collection (although this is still illegal in the UK), including about 20 movies I wouldn't have seen (Dark City, The Game, Brazil - lots of cool flicks) if my flatmates hadn't recommended them. Incidentally, my former flatmates are also busy legitamising their collections now that we have moolah, what with having jobs and stuff.
But I can tell you: if I ever get bombarded with crap like I did with those (excellent, I might add) Futurama DVD's, I'll be taking a long hard look at ever buying propag^H^H^H^H^H^H TV DVD's ever again.
I can't begin to state how much I agree with you. I switched to Opera in the 5.x days after my "don't use IE!" zealot flatmate convinced me to give it a whirl, and after running pretty much every browser I know of (IE, Nutscrape, FireFox and all it's forebears, Moz, Konq, etc etc) I still keep going back to Opera (and have two fully paid up licenses, one for Linux, one for windows).
It's lean, fast, small and uber-configurable to a degree that FF and Moz aren't (either that or I'm missing something about FF's configuration). Yes, the default UI and theme are a bit messy (how I wish they'd switch to Wonderland as the default skin), which I think will put alot of new users off.
FireFox is rapidly catching up with Opera in terms of functionality (and has some killer features like Live Bookmarks), but as a long time Opera user there's too many usability niggles; like the way the entire page is re-rendered when you gesture back, instead of it being pulled from RAM like in Opera. Ho-hum.
I'm not a FF basher by any means either - I have both installed on my home computers, and have standardised of FF at work (with Opera for those who prefer it). The "bad" press it gets on/. is a bit of a mystery to me; yes it's closed source, but it's one of very few closed source apps that, IMHO, is better then the OSS equivalents. Yes, the ads are irritating if you're used to not having them, but you quickly learn to zone them out.
If you don't like Opera, don't use it. But please don't continually post how Opera sucks cos of ads, or any one of the hundred other FUD's I've seen perpetrated against it's name. Until very recently, it was hands down the best alternative browser for the windows platform.
Seconded. I'd been using Linux for two years (progressing from MDK 8.2 to RH8 to RH9 to Debian)before I gave Gentoo a whirl. It made me realise how lazy I'd been, falling into the GUI trap and never really making the effort to see how it all worked under the skin. All I'd ever done on the CLI before was a few edits to fstab and suchlike, but now I'm fairly confident in mucking about with boot scripts and what have you.
I'd definitely recommend it for someone seeking to learn more about Linux, even if you prefer a less time-consuming distro for general use. Heck, even reading through the installation process can be very illuminating.
I use Gentoo for desktops, and Debian stable/testing for servers.
There are some advantages to the new release ISO's - almost entirely due to hardware support.
The Gentoo ISO's run pretty cutting-edge kernels, so you've got support for XYZ hardware as soon as the CD has booted. If, for instance, you want to install onto a 3ware 9500 SATA RAID card, you won't be able to do this with a 1.2 ISO, since the drivers weren't added to the kernel until 2.6.8.1. Same story for an awful lot of other hardware (SATA support, NIC's, that kinda thing). Bootstrapping a system from an installer that doesn't support your hardware is a complete PITA, even with the fairly complete dev environment the gentoo liveCD's give you.
I agree on the "this isn't really news" though. It might be worth a mention when the installation process gains support for a brand new piece of hardware that's had everyone putting off installing Linux, but for most people the gentoo updates are cosmetic.
I wish they did make more of their own chipsets. Although not the speediest, they're always incredibly stable IME, and IIRC have completely open spec - hence why you see support for esoteric little things like the RNG in the AMD 76x chipsets in the Linux kernel.
However, chipsets ain't AMD's business. They make the first "reference" chipsets to get the ball rolling, and open up the spec to allow the third parties to get in on it quickly. This saves AMD a fortune in R&D, not to mention the fact that their currents fabs are already working flat out just to keep up their current order load. All of their server/workstation boards all use the same 8111 chipset though (along with aux. devices like the AGP Pro tunnel).
Of course, one could argue that the chipset market for AMD has stagnated alot, since pretty much the only reason for chipset upgrades in the past was to allow access to faster memory. Now all the chipset does is provide I/O for the rest of the motherboard components, meaning a much more stabe feature set. However, nVidia seems determined to keep on pushing the envelope and add boatloads of useful features into the chipset as well. But the fact of the matter in the A64 world is that chipsets only have a tangential effect on performance now, whereas in the Athlon XP days they could make a bigger difference than the CPU.
Hehe, well done for pointing out my rather flaky knowledge of crypto and TLA's. I stand corrected, and thanks for explaining how it actually works!.
What I should have said was; everything gets thrown through SSH tunnels and I'd love to see an acceleration of whatever it is that SSH uses, as well as acceleration for creating those huge RSA/DSA keys we use all the time, which are slow to generate even on a dual Athlon 2000. And maybe better use of those RNG's that some of the VIA and AMD chipsets use.
I have a friend who worked (tangentially) with an Encipher box of some description... he said it was just a lump of aluminium with wires out the back and 3 blue LED's on the front, which later had another piece of aluminium welded over them since someone made a PoC that you could figure out the data being encrypted by the way the LED's blinked, or so the story goes. Not 100% convinced of that one myself, but you know what those crypto-genius people are like!
As I understood it, EMT's are just regular 32bit chips with 64bit memory addressing. As such, they don't have the extra general purpose registers that the AMD64's do, which go along way to speed up CPU-intensive code.
Wow, I didn't know that. Nice to see that VIA is taking the encryption market seriously, especially in the Linux arena (IIRC they opened the specs to their encryption engine, right? There's definitely support for it available in the kernel via a patch to the Crypto API). As you say, it's not full blown RSA, DSA and MD5 in hardware, but it's a start.
Now if only they'd be as nice with the damned CLE266 graphics drivers...
AFAIK, the VIA's *only* do AES, as they're designed to make good VPN endpoints. This is cos some hefty AES subroutines are built into the hardware (with software drivers doing the rest).
So whilst this is all very handy, if you want encryption other than AES (which, if there were ever any significant flaws found in AES' maths, is a certainty) you'd want to dump those VIA boards and get yourself either a dedicated encryption device like an Encipher box (like an expensive version of the VIA) or just a beast of a machine to do encryption entirely in software (like an Opteron).
I personally shunt everything through DSA stunnels, so a VIA isn't much use to me.
Too bad the same can be said for www.charcoal.com as well;) I guess we'll need an alternative fuel to cook with... sicne we've got outrselves a server, we might as well just fry eggs on the CPU...
...namechecks of the Suicide Girls appeared all over Nintendo's global website. Nintendo are hoping SG will sue, and then retract and offer free samples of their products by way of condolence.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the newer UK phone booths.
What with the huge uptake in mobiles over the last 5 years, phone boxes have become rather redundant neglected by the vast majority of the indiginous population, and BT have been reinventing them in order that they remain profitable.
As such, many of the phones in large cities and towns are DSL-enabled and have little embedded web kiosks that you use to browse the web using your change, phone or credit card on a pay-as-you-go basis. Never used one myself, but I can't imagine it'd take long to download some DRM-encrusted WMA offof some dedicated service. The only problem would be enabling the phone boxes with USB and firewire connections.
Granted, but it'd be nice to see it enabled in future core revisions and motherboards.
I too am one of those weird people who wants themselves a dual op workstation (I do lots of video work), and it'd be nice to know that, when I'm not crunching frames, my CPU's aren't melting a hole through the floor.
I'm sure even colo servers have "quiet" times when the revs could be dropped down, and save the server staff some power and and air-con bills. For opterons used for things like a national DB server (i.e. one that's primarily only in use for a 9 to 5 shift), it would also bring huge advantages.
Enabling cool'n'quiet on my home systems (and yes, it is supported in Linux* but only under 2.6 with the right kernel options enabled IIRC) has resulted in a much less toasty room whenever I get back from work:)
*FYI, I use the PowerNowd userspace daemon http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html to control CnQ under Linux. It's pretty much zero configuration, and works a treat.
I imagine it's true for most popular distros, in that it's recommended to use the distros package rather than the nvidia installer.
On gentoo at least, there are a multitude of scripts available that will check your foreign modules against the running kernel on bootup. If they find they were compiled against a different one, they will recompile pointing at your new kernel tree, and then restart the respective services (X, lircd, etc), making upgrades stupidly easy. I imagine people have made similar scripts or utils for pretty much every major mainstream distro.
I haven't used it since the RH9 days, but I am told if you run the nvidia installer, it also includes binaries for specific kernel versions from major distros, so if you're a n00b you don't even need the kernel source - it'll sense you're running the latest version of Fedora or whatever and plug the modules in without needing to compile anything.
Slashdot Mirror
"Funny how the bigger a company gets, the more it tends to suck."
;)
From the gravitational-physics-business-model-dept
I'm in the same situation; I have win2k on my home workstation. Currently I use a SP4 image made from my brand-spanking-old SP0 CDROM which I install via a dd from my file server whenever I need a reinstall, but I'm still not going to be able to bring it up to date in 4 minutes (let alone install a software firewall).
/.ed when I made the post so I couldn't RTFA)
Yes, I do install it and the patches offline (when I remember to pull out the network cable anyway), but there are still must be dozens of home and business users bringing systems up with new installs every day (win2k is very popular in business - it's all my company uses) who will be vulnerable.
(P.S. in reply to the GP AC, the article was
...statistics for all the other versions of windows in common use, particularly Windows 2000, as well as XP SP2. Last time I looked XP machines could only account for a maximum of ~50% of all the potential zombie bots in the world.
Spamming units typically have a morale of 9 or more, while most ISP's have only an average morale of 7 - and this screensaver only gives a +1 boost to leadership. I know who I'd rather roll my 2D6 against... ;)
Vanglis?
;)
Looks like someone's been getting their incorrectly titled music offof Kazaa...
I modded by wireless mouse to use an RTG to power it. I just filled the battery cavity with plutonium 238, threw in a thermocouple and I was good to go.
The thing worked fine until it melted through the floor. Maybe I'll stick to go-fasta stripes next time...
Amen, brother.
I haven't had a TV for 6 years, and have finally got around to building myself a Myth box. Saw a couple of eps of Futurama on the recommendation of a friend, which I loved. Downloaded a few more from the net, loved them too. Bought the entire collection of 4 box sets on DVD... and I'm greeted to:
a) About eight dead trees worth of "Stop pirating stuff, you filthy child murderer!" propaganda falling out of the box, plus requisite product catalogue
b) A full *three minutes* of unskippable copyright notices (I'm in the UK, so all the EU langs have to be catered for) before I can watch the actual episodes (Xine and Media Player Classic will of course let me skip them, but we've only got a PS2 hooked up to the TV at the moment, pending the next MythTV box)
And this is a country without the direct influence of the *AA's. And that is precisely why my terahertz althlons are busy transcoding their way through 15 DVD's worth of Futurama.
Perhaps this is an exception, but I'm scared it isn't. The only TV shows I've bought on DVD until now are from the BBC, who are pretty no-nonsense about their DVD's, which also appear ludicrously cheap once the initial "It's a new DVD so we need an 800% markup" has worn off. Got the entirity of Coupling s02 (nine 28min episodes) for £7.
I also downloaded about 60 movies frmo P2P when I was a student, all of which have now been replaced by DVD rips from my own collection (although this is still illegal in the UK), including about 20 movies I wouldn't have seen (Dark City, The Game, Brazil - lots of cool flicks) if my flatmates hadn't recommended them. Incidentally, my former flatmates are also busy legitamising their collections now that we have moolah, what with having jobs and stuff.
But I can tell you: if I ever get bombarded with crap like I did with those (excellent, I might add) Futurama DVD's, I'll be taking a long hard look at ever buying propag^H^H^H^H^H^H TV DVD's ever again.
Oh, to have mod points!
/. is a bit of a mystery to me; yes it's closed source, but it's one of very few closed source apps that, IMHO, is better then the OSS equivalents. Yes, the ads are irritating if you're used to not having them, but you quickly learn to zone them out.
I can't begin to state how much I agree with you. I switched to Opera in the 5.x days after my "don't use IE!" zealot flatmate convinced me to give it a whirl, and after running pretty much every browser I know of (IE, Nutscrape, FireFox and all it's forebears, Moz, Konq, etc etc) I still keep going back to Opera (and have two fully paid up licenses, one for Linux, one for windows).
It's lean, fast, small and uber-configurable to a degree that FF and Moz aren't (either that or I'm missing something about FF's configuration). Yes, the default UI and theme are a bit messy (how I wish they'd switch to Wonderland as the default skin), which I think will put alot of new users off.
FireFox is rapidly catching up with Opera in terms of functionality (and has some killer features like Live Bookmarks), but as a long time Opera user there's too many usability niggles; like the way the entire page is re-rendered when you gesture back, instead of it being pulled from RAM like in Opera. Ho-hum.
I'm not a FF basher by any means either - I have both installed on my home computers, and have standardised of FF at work (with Opera for those who prefer it). The "bad" press it gets on
If you don't like Opera, don't use it. But please don't continually post how Opera sucks cos of ads, or any one of the hundred other FUD's I've seen perpetrated against it's name. Until very recently, it was hands down the best alternative browser for the windows platform.
Seconded. I'd been using Linux for two years (progressing from MDK 8.2 to RH8 to RH9 to Debian)before I gave Gentoo a whirl. It made me realise how lazy I'd been, falling into the GUI trap and never really making the effort to see how it all worked under the skin. All I'd ever done on the CLI before was a few edits to fstab and suchlike, but now I'm fairly confident in mucking about with boot scripts and what have you.
I'd definitely recommend it for someone seeking to learn more about Linux, even if you prefer a less time-consuming distro for general use. Heck, even reading through the installation process can be very illuminating.
I use Gentoo for desktops, and Debian stable/testing for servers.
There are some advantages to the new release ISO's - almost entirely due to hardware support.
The Gentoo ISO's run pretty cutting-edge kernels, so you've got support for XYZ hardware as soon as the CD has booted. If, for instance, you want to install onto a 3ware 9500 SATA RAID card, you won't be able to do this with a 1.2 ISO, since the drivers weren't added to the kernel until 2.6.8.1. Same story for an awful lot of other hardware (SATA support, NIC's, that kinda thing). Bootstrapping a system from an installer that doesn't support your hardware is a complete PITA, even with the fairly complete dev environment the gentoo liveCD's give you.
I agree on the "this isn't really news" though. It might be worth a mention when the installation process gains support for a brand new piece of hardware that's had everyone putting off installing Linux, but for most people the gentoo updates are cosmetic.
I wish they did make more of their own chipsets. Although not the speediest, they're always incredibly stable IME, and IIRC have completely open spec - hence why you see support for esoteric little things like the RNG in the AMD 76x chipsets in the Linux kernel.
However, chipsets ain't AMD's business. They make the first "reference" chipsets to get the ball rolling, and open up the spec to allow the third parties to get in on it quickly. This saves AMD a fortune in R&D, not to mention the fact that their currents fabs are already working flat out just to keep up their current order load. All of their server/workstation boards all use the same 8111 chipset though (along with aux. devices like the AGP Pro tunnel).
Of course, one could argue that the chipset market for AMD has stagnated alot, since pretty much the only reason for chipset upgrades in the past was to allow access to faster memory. Now all the chipset does is provide I/O for the rest of the motherboard components, meaning a much more stabe feature set. However, nVidia seems determined to keep on pushing the envelope and add boatloads of useful features into the chipset as well. But the fact of the matter in the A64 world is that chipsets only have a tangential effect on performance now, whereas in the Athlon XP days they could make a bigger difference than the CPU.
Hehe, well done for pointing out my rather flaky knowledge of crypto and TLA's. I stand corrected, and thanks for explaining how it actually works!.
What I should have said was; everything gets thrown through SSH tunnels and I'd love to see an acceleration of whatever it is that SSH uses, as well as acceleration for creating those huge RSA/DSA keys we use all the time, which are slow to generate even on a dual Athlon 2000. And maybe better use of those RNG's that some of the VIA and AMD chipsets use.
I have a friend who worked (tangentially) with an Encipher box of some description... he said it was just a lump of aluminium with wires out the back and 3 blue LED's on the front, which later had another piece of aluminium welded over them since someone made a PoC that you could figure out the data being encrypted by the way the LED's blinked, or so the story goes. Not 100% convinced of that one myself, but you know what those crypto-genius people are like!
As I understood it, EMT's are just regular 32bit chips with 64bit memory addressing. As such, they don't have the extra general purpose registers that the AMD64's do, which go along way to speed up CPU-intensive code.
I could be wrong though...
Wow, I didn't know that. Nice to see that VIA is taking the encryption market seriously, especially in the Linux arena (IIRC they opened the specs to their encryption engine, right? There's definitely support for it available in the kernel via a patch to the Crypto API). As you say, it's not full blown RSA, DSA and MD5 in hardware, but it's a start.
Now if only they'd be as nice with the damned CLE266 graphics drivers...
AFAIK, the VIA's *only* do AES, as they're designed to make good VPN endpoints. This is cos some hefty AES subroutines are built into the hardware (with software drivers doing the rest).
So whilst this is all very handy, if you want encryption other than AES (which, if there were ever any significant flaws found in AES' maths, is a certainty) you'd want to dump those VIA boards and get yourself either a dedicated encryption device like an Encipher box (like an expensive version of the VIA) or just a beast of a machine to do encryption entirely in software (like an Opteron).
I personally shunt everything through DSA stunnels, so a VIA isn't much use to me.
Too bad the same can be said for www.charcoal.com as well ;) I guess we'll need an alternative fuel to cook with... sicne we've got outrselves a server, we might as well just fry eggs on the CPU...
But does Netcraft confirm it? ;)
...namechecks of the Suicide Girls appeared all over Nintendo's global website. Nintendo are hoping SG will sue, and then retract and offer free samples of their products by way of condolence.
It's the sound of a million /.'ers uploading their porn collections to their websites and namechecking every Nintendo franchise ever.
:)
I can't think of a better way to get free consoles. Terabytes of pr0n is *way* better than any pyramid scheme
"I'd like to know why Nintendo's Lawyers are looking at goth-porn."
;)
Surely you just answered your own question...?
Perhaps you're not familiar with the newer UK phone booths.
What with the huge uptake in mobiles over the last 5 years, phone boxes have become rather redundant neglected by the vast majority of the indiginous population, and BT have been reinventing them in order that they remain profitable.
As such, many of the phones in large cities and towns are DSL-enabled and have little embedded web kiosks that you use to browse the web using your change, phone or credit card on a pay-as-you-go basis. Never used one myself, but I can't imagine it'd take long to download some DRM-encrusted WMA offof some dedicated service. The only problem would be enabling the phone boxes with USB and firewire connections.
"they can't confiscate property unless some other law specifically allows it. I'm not sure what that law would be"
Latterly, and sadly, it seems to be "the (unwritten) law of doing whatever America tells us to do".
I wish they had called the thing TARDIS in a way; they're aiming on fitting an awful lot of stuff into a very small space ;)
Granted, but it'd be nice to see it enabled in future core revisions and motherboards.
:)
I too am one of those weird people who wants themselves a dual op workstation (I do lots of video work), and it'd be nice to know that, when I'm not crunching frames, my CPU's aren't melting a hole through the floor.
I'm sure even colo servers have "quiet" times when the revs could be dropped down, and save the server staff some power and and air-con bills. For opterons used for things like a national DB server (i.e. one that's primarily only in use for a 9 to 5 shift), it would also bring huge advantages.
Enabling cool'n'quiet on my home systems (and yes, it is supported in Linux* but only under 2.6 with the right kernel options enabled IIRC) has resulted in a much less toasty room whenever I get back from work
*FYI, I use the PowerNowd userspace daemon http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html to control CnQ under Linux. It's pretty much zero configuration, and works a treat.
I imagine it's true for most popular distros, in that it's recommended to use the distros package rather than the nvidia installer.
On gentoo at least, there are a multitude of scripts available that will check your foreign modules against the running kernel on bootup. If they find they were compiled against a different one, they will recompile pointing at your new kernel tree, and then restart the respective services (X, lircd, etc), making upgrades stupidly easy. I imagine people have made similar scripts or utils for pretty much every major mainstream distro.
I haven't used it since the RH9 days, but I am told if you run the nvidia installer, it also includes binaries for specific kernel versions from major distros, so if you're a n00b you don't even need the kernel source - it'll sense you're running the latest version of Fedora or whatever and plug the modules in without needing to compile anything.