Yes! Science must be made as sterile and boring as possible in order to prevent its contamination by the lesser peoples of the Earth! The human sense of wonder is an irrelevant illusion and does nothing to further the cause of collecting as much non-soundwave data as possible, then rendering it in the least exciting way that can be achieved by modern technology!
I don't think it would be too hard for Apple to change the configurable-toolbar to create a copy of the application menu in-place at the top of the application window. That would work best for me, but unfortunately they don't do that.
Yeah, that would be ideal. Let the user decide if they want the old-style single menu, or for it to attach to the application windows.
I can see one problem with this. My understanding is that the Mac UI is based around the idea of only being able to run one instance of an application, and any files you have open in it get their own window. So I may have five spreadsheets open in five windows, but they're all children of the single spreadsheet application process. Furthermore, if I close all five windows, the spreadsheet is still running because I didn't explicitly exit it from the File menu.
So if each window gets the menu bar, does File -> Close kill the entire process and therefore the other four spreadsheet files? If not, how do I exit the application entirely, unless the OS assumes that the process should end when there are no more open windows?
Something like Photoshop that has a bunch of independent windows would be a hassle too, and the Windows kludge of putting it all inside an MDI window is kind of ugly.
I'm surprised to read about people having accuracy trouble with menus. I run at 1600x1200 too, and I drink tons of coffee as well as taking prescription stimulants for my ADHD, and it's never been a problem.
You picked up on something that really bothers me with Mac OS - the dialog dilema.
The *only* complaints I have about OS X are that kind of dialogue issue, and the one-menubar-at-top-of-screen thing. I believe both are holdovers from MacOS X.
Apple got nearly everything right with X - which impresses me because I **HATED** the older MacOS, and the initial release of OS X Server was a joke. I really wish they'd realize that it's okay to get rid of things that are completely unintuitive.
A single menubar at the top of the screen which changes based on what window is active. That made some sense in 1985, because people were generally only using one application at a time. If I'm running five applications at once, switching between them, it breaks the immersion and the desktop metaphor. If I'm at my workbench with a soldering iron, wire strippers, and multimeter, each one of those tools has its own distinct interface. If I'm using the multimeter and want to turn off the soldering iron, I reach over and use its power switch. I don't put down the multimeter, pick up the soldering iron, then push a single "Power" button that sits in the middle of the workbench and operates on whichever tool I have in my hand.
The dialogue thing for me is an issue of not getting any feedback when I make a change. Okay OS X - did I just successfully tell you to use DHCP instead of a static configuration, or are my changes going away now that I closed the window with no "apply" or "OK" button? Did you make the changes in realtime as I switched radio button options? If there's no "OK" button, what if I want to cancel the changes I made?
I would question what it is they're doing that's using so much space. My guess is high-res FMVs, which they should be doing as in-engine realtime animations IMO. I don't like switching to FMV because it breaks the immersion for me.
If I remember correctly from the audio commentary for the (AWESOME) mirror universe Enterprise episodes, the New Voyages crew loaned Paramount the motorized pop-up Viewmaster thing for the bridge of the Defiant.
Assuming I'm not completely making that up, it sounds like relations between the two groups are pretty good.
but a petawatt laser is not something you can fit on a kitchen bench
Is this a physical limitation, or just something we can't do now? I remember reading about how much chirped-pulsing increased the power of tabletop lasers, and I'm curious if that could eventually lead to tabletop petawatt systems.
I tried doing some research online, but there wasn't anything that gave an obvious answer to my question.
X-Wing and Wing Commander series: Freespace was nothing more than an inferior knock-off of these.
Wing Commander was before I got into PC gaming (Apple IIe/Amiga Forever). I did play X-Wing/TIE Fighter though, and I thought exactly the opposite. Freespace was superior to them both. It had a better story (because it didn't have to fit in-between SW movies), it had better design (the ships designed specifically for the XW/TF games are AWFUL, and lack all of the artistry of the film designs), and it was more fun to play.
we had always wondered why our cats were going into the room and jumping about.
Hah. I imagine a flying rodent would be a cat's idea of great fun. Smells like a mouse, flits about like a small bird, add some catnip and it might just be too much to handle altogether.
It *is* more common there though, because countries like Russia and China have more important things to deal with than someone swindling a US bank or software company.
Actually, my neighbour is from Romania, and she said the reason computer hackers are so prevalent over there is that until the Soviet Union collapsed, kids and teenagers weren't allowed to use computers. Also, their education system was VERY strict, so they had good learning habits. Now that they have computers, everyone is interested, and very good at learning.
Because their economies aren't really strong, they can only live a Western-style life if they bootleg software and media. So a lot more of them end up as hackers.
It's kind of cool, actually. 80s cyberpunk comes to life, only it's in 2005 Eastern Europe instead of 2019 Los Angeles.
but doesnt it make sense to have them manuever in space the same as in the atmosphere? that way a pilot doesnt have to think about what medium he is in. i think it would be easier for the pilot if both are the same.
It would take a ludicrous amount of fuel to make a spacecraft fly like a jet fighter.
It would also prevent the pilot from doing many maneuvers that can only be performed in space.
Of course, by the time we have genuine spacefighters, piloted fightercraft will be a thing of the distant past. Remote-piloted and autonomous vehicles can perform many feats that would kill a pilot.
Movies that have piloted spacefighters are like the old sci-fi books where computers still use vacuum tubes. It's storytelling based on what we're familiar with, and because piloted fighters give us a sense of chivalry and danger.
Maybe in the FAR distant future, if the human race survives and advances enough, it might be technically possible to have piloted craft like in Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars, where they're protected from G-forces by advanced physics, and their mental functions are sped up by other systems that create "virtual neurons" closer together than the real ones. But it will still be more practical to use AI systems designed for that task.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).
It takes a little getting used to, but it lets you do all the things you *think* you should be able to.
For example, using tr I can replace characters or strings in a file or text stream as part of a batch process. On Windows I'd have to write a script or a program to do that.
Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it. Some GUI apps like Photoshop might be able to do the same thing, but it would take more time to set up, and I may not have an app with that capability.
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
That I'll agree with you on. I've never been fond of man pages, even though I can usually dig out what I'm after eventually.
There are a lot of situations where a GUI is preferable, but a powerful command line is a great tool to have at your disposal.
Another example: For a personal hobby project, I needed to make some tools to help me figure out how some text was encoded. I wrote some command-line tools using.NET that did things like statistical analysis of characters in large text files, because the input was minimal and it took less time than making a GUI. For the analysis of the actual encrypted text though, I wanted a GUI because it let me make changes in the decryption options and see the changes update across the screen, rather than comparing two text files of output from a command line tool.
I ended up doing a quick and dirty solution in Excel (quick and dirty being relative since I had to implement binary XOR in VBA =P), but if this were something I'd be using frequently I'd make a proper GUI app out of it.
There was also an Alien vs Preditor video game. Since I suspect the comic book was only found at the specialty comic and fantasy stores and the video game was available everywhere games were sold I stand by my statement. AvP was a video game.
You would be incorrect in this case.
AvP was pitched as a film idea back in the early 90s, long before the AvP game. It took over a decade to actually make it because they needed to find a screenwriter to write a stupid script (see below), and a mediocre director with awesome visual style to make it look pretty (see previous efforts Soldier, Resident Evil, Event Horizon).
Amusingly enough, *none* of the different products bearing the AvP moniker relate to each other meaningfully:
- AvP the comic book features (IIRC) the space Marines joining forces with red Aliens to fight the black Aliens. I can't remember how the Predators fit in. - AvP the original script was more or less a followup to Aliens, with a different colony on a more developed world, space Marines, etc. No red Aliens. I believe at least one Predator ends up fighting on the human side. - AvP the videogame (the first one at least) is sort of a spiritual sequel to the unused original movie script, except all three races fight each other. I never played the sequel. - AvP the film took place in the modern era and rewrote the history of the Alien films so that not only does it end stupidly with Resurrection, but begins that way as well.
I believe the original AvP concept came after people saw the Alien skull that the prop department put in the Predator ship in Predator 2.
The videogames came a decade or more after the comic books too.
I can imagine that after being excessively awake some people might start suffering psychosis and other maladies.
I was wondering about a related question.
The psychosis caused by psych issues like schizophrenia is the same effect that you get from extreme sleep deprivation.
I would be curious to see if this drug had any beneficial effect on people with those disorders. It seems unlikely, but the more options for treating them, the better.
Or is it more like going on speed for a week, until you collapse and die cause you don't feel your body is over-performing?
No. This is a new class of non-stimulant drugs. The effect is very different.
That is true in some cases, but if you look at the chemical structure of the various neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, and compare them to the amphetamine class of stimulants, they're virtually identical as a whole, not isolated examples.
I've seen you repeat this several times now - in what way does Ritalin "have the same effects" as speed?
Ritalin's chemical structure is based on Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine). All of the stimulant-based ADHD medications are. The Concerta I take is basically Dexedrine with an extra carbon ring or phenyl group, I can't remember which offhand.
Prescription doses for ADHD are below the recreational threshold for stimulants, but if they're abused (as I've seen people do), the effects are the same as with e.g. crystal meth.
As a side note: the first time I took Concerta (a higher dose than I settled on eventually), I really understood why the Air Force gives it to pilots. It turned me into an emotionless robot focused on the goal I'd set before I took it, and willing to do anything to accomplish it. The difference was that instead of flying a fighter jet or a bomber, I was studying for my chemistry final, Grammaton Cleric-style.
I'm sure the new chips will be decent, but the Anandtech article really reminded me why I hate "conferences" run by a single vendor, or at least non-competing vendors.
Let's see. We have:
- A line graph showing an AMAZING upsurge in laptop purchases, until you realize that it's only showing 45%-65%, and that laptops just passed desktops at 50%.
- Intel claiming that SF is covered in WiFi because of Centrino, rather than =$50 access points.
- A slide claiming "10x lower power," and then showing a desktop marked "65 watts." Right. So either P4s use 650 watts on their own, or using one of these new CPUs is going to magically make the rest of the system components use less power.
-...followed by a claim of saving $1 billion/year/100 million machines. Sure.
Every presentation I've seen by a single vendor is like this. I remember Apple trumpeting that an iMac would network boot faster from an OS X server than from its own hard drive... provided your server had top-of-the-line ultrawide SCSI, the iMac had the slowest IDE drive possible, and you were running gigabit ethernet between them.
I do like the focus on lower power (despite the ludicrous claims), and that Intel might have something competitive with AMD again.
The only thing it achieves is to make pointy-haired cretin bosses warm and fuzzy and the admin's life miserable.
Oh, I know. But in my experience, most people who work in corporate IT can't see past that mentality anyway. That's part of why MS is so pervasive - they design their products for the majority of the population that can't understand that there's always a way to subvert security.
If software requires that the admin knows the user's password to do basic administration, then you need to consider alternative technologies.
I can see both sides of this issue.
The reason Windows doesn't allow superusers to su to other accounts without their password is for accountability. It's a lot harder to notice a rogue admin reading and modifying files of execs when he/she can do it without knowing their password.
There are ways around the restriction in terms of necessary administration. If someone is fired or leaves the company, an administrator can transfer ownership of their files to another user, giving them access. If an admin really needs to log in as someone else without their consent (maybe for legal investigative reasons?) they can change the password on the user's account.
Now, where this breaks down is something like Exchange. My admin account at work is a member of the Exchange administrators' group, meaning I can read anyone's email in the company without knowing their password. That's frequently the information that should be the *hardest* to get to.
OTOH, logically I believe that *ix has it right when it lets the superuser do *anything*. Dear Microsoft: I'm not really an administrator if there are processes I can't kill, and files I can't delete.
The ownership stuff I mention above is an illusion anyway, since as an administrator I could install a keylogger on someone's workstation to get their password.
Anyway, that was kind of a ramble, but my point is that it's a philosophical difference. Windows is designed in most ways to be Nerfed so that you don't shoot your eye out, and most of your admins don't know how to access restricted information without leaving a trail.
Nexus is a magazine devoted to printing what nobody else will publish despite glaring scientific inaccuracies and holes in logic. that is part why they publish what they do.
"BRITAIN'S SECRET WAR IN ANTARCTICA--Part 1 By James Roberts. At the end of World War II, Britain sent a covert mission to Antarctica to seek out and destroy a subterranean Nazi haven."
"Exactly 50 years after UFOs buzzed Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in July 1952, gravity-defying objects penetrated restricted airspace and even landed on the Capitol Building."
And from previous, obviously peer-reviewed scientifically sound issues:
"TUNGUSKA & THE ANCIENT MYSTERY INSTALLATION IN SIBERIA"
"THE HENOCH PROPHECIES"
"OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE & SELF-RESEARCH"
"UFOs & THE DRAGON SNAKE"
Next time put down your healing crystals and anti-Reptoid force shields before moderating please.
Basically if you have total mass -> energy conversion (like a matter/antimatter reaction), you get the same energy release as about 21.5 million tons of TNT.
Security updates are still downloaded to pirated copies.
Actually, they're not, although my understanding was that MS claimed they were.
One of my neighbours asked for help with her PC a few days ago. One of the problems turned out to be that she was running the original version of XP. I tried to service pack it, and it said the license key used was invalid, and therefore the service pack wouldn't apply.
Unless you have at least SP1, you can't get security updates anymore.
I'm sure there are tons of people in a similar situation.
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop.
It's close enough, and I'm formerly a member of the "not ready for the desktop" camp.
I installed Ubuntu on a laptop last weekend. It configured everything automatically except the sound, which I had to tweak some config files for (no worse than when I've had sound problems in Windows).
The only reason I had to do cliched Linux stuff like recompiling the kernel was to get my Orinoco card working in monitor mode. Desktop users don't care about that, only people who want to run WiFi hacking utilities.
Keeping the system up to date is actually easier than Windows, since I can run a single apt-get and upgrade everything (OS components + apps) to the current version.
There are definitely some gaps in terms of things like no Photoshop on Linux, but the OS itself is fine for desktop use now IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Science must be made as sterile and boring as possible in order to prevent its contamination by the lesser peoples of the Earth! The human sense of wonder is an irrelevant illusion and does nothing to further the cause of collecting as much non-soundwave data as possible, then rendering it in the least exciting way that can be achieved by modern technology!
I don't think it would be too hard for Apple to change the configurable-toolbar to create a copy of the application menu in-place at the top of the application window. That would work best for me, but unfortunately they don't do that.
Yeah, that would be ideal. Let the user decide if they want the old-style single menu, or for it to attach to the application windows.
I can see one problem with this. My understanding is that the Mac UI is based around the idea of only being able to run one instance of an application, and any files you have open in it get their own window. So I may have five spreadsheets open in five windows, but they're all children of the single spreadsheet application process. Furthermore, if I close all five windows, the spreadsheet is still running because I didn't explicitly exit it from the File menu.
So if each window gets the menu bar, does File -> Close kill the entire process and therefore the other four spreadsheet files? If not, how do I exit the application entirely, unless the OS assumes that the process should end when there are no more open windows?
Something like Photoshop that has a bunch of independent windows would be a hassle too, and the Windows kludge of putting it all inside an MDI window is kind of ugly.
I'm surprised to read about people having accuracy trouble with menus. I run at 1600x1200 too, and I drink tons of coffee as well as taking prescription stimulants for my ADHD, and it's never been a problem.
You picked up on something that really bothers me with Mac OS - the dialog dilema.
The *only* complaints I have about OS X are that kind of dialogue issue, and the one-menubar-at-top-of-screen thing. I believe both are holdovers from MacOS X.
Apple got nearly everything right with X - which impresses me because I **HATED** the older MacOS, and the initial release of OS X Server was a joke. I really wish they'd realize that it's okay to get rid of things that are completely unintuitive.
A single menubar at the top of the screen which changes based on what window is active. That made some sense in 1985, because people were generally only using one application at a time. If I'm running five applications at once, switching between them, it breaks the immersion and the desktop metaphor. If I'm at my workbench with a soldering iron, wire strippers, and multimeter, each one of those tools has its own distinct interface. If I'm using the multimeter and want to turn off the soldering iron, I reach over and use its power switch. I don't put down the multimeter, pick up the soldering iron, then push a single "Power" button that sits in the middle of the workbench and operates on whichever tool I have in my hand.
The dialogue thing for me is an issue of not getting any feedback when I make a change. Okay OS X - did I just successfully tell you to use DHCP instead of a static configuration, or are my changes going away now that I closed the window with no "apply" or "OK" button? Did you make the changes in realtime as I switched radio button options? If there's no "OK" button, what if I want to cancel the changes I made?
I would question what it is they're doing that's using so much space. My guess is high-res FMVs, which they should be doing as in-engine realtime animations IMO. I don't like switching to FMV because it breaks the immersion for me.
If I remember correctly from the audio commentary for the (AWESOME) mirror universe Enterprise episodes, the New Voyages crew loaned Paramount the motorized pop-up Viewmaster thing for the bridge of the Defiant.
Assuming I'm not completely making that up, it sounds like relations between the two groups are pretty good.
but a petawatt laser is not something you can fit on a kitchen bench
Is this a physical limitation, or just something we can't do now? I remember reading about how much chirped-pulsing increased the power of tabletop lasers, and I'm curious if that could eventually lead to tabletop petawatt systems.
I tried doing some research online, but there wasn't anything that gave an obvious answer to my question.
X-Wing and Wing Commander series: Freespace was nothing more than an inferior knock-off of these.
Wing Commander was before I got into PC gaming (Apple IIe/Amiga Forever). I did play X-Wing/TIE Fighter though, and I thought exactly the opposite. Freespace was superior to them both. It had a better story (because it didn't have to fit in-between SW movies), it had better design (the ships designed specifically for the XW/TF games are AWFUL, and lack all of the artistry of the film designs), and it was more fun to play.
we had always wondered why our cats were going into the room and jumping about.
Hah. I imagine a flying rodent would be a cat's idea of great fun. Smells like a mouse, flits about like a small bird, add some catnip and it might just be too much to handle altogether.
Every programmer in Eastern Europe is a crook.
It *is* more common there though, because countries like Russia and China have more important things to deal with than someone swindling a US bank or software company.
Actually, my neighbour is from Romania, and she said the reason computer hackers are so prevalent over there is that until the Soviet Union collapsed, kids and teenagers weren't allowed to use computers. Also, their education system was VERY strict, so they had good learning habits. Now that they have computers, everyone is interested, and very good at learning.
Because their economies aren't really strong, they can only live a Western-style life if they bootleg software and media. So a lot more of them end up as hackers.
It's kind of cool, actually. 80s cyberpunk comes to life, only it's in 2005 Eastern Europe instead of 2019 Los Angeles.
but doesnt it make sense to have them manuever in space the same as in the atmosphere? that way a pilot doesnt have to think about what medium he is in. i think it would be easier for the pilot if both are the same.
It would take a ludicrous amount of fuel to make a spacecraft fly like a jet fighter.
It would also prevent the pilot from doing many maneuvers that can only be performed in space.
Of course, by the time we have genuine spacefighters, piloted fightercraft will be a thing of the distant past. Remote-piloted and autonomous vehicles can perform many feats that would kill a pilot.
Movies that have piloted spacefighters are like the old sci-fi books where computers still use vacuum tubes. It's storytelling based on what we're familiar with, and because piloted fighters give us a sense of chivalry and danger.
Maybe in the FAR distant future, if the human race survives and advances enough, it might be technically possible to have piloted craft like in Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars, where they're protected from G-forces by advanced physics, and their mental functions are sped up by other systems that create "virtual neurons" closer together than the real ones. But it will still be more practical to use AI systems designed for that task.
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
.NET that did things like statistical analysis of characters in large text files, because the input was minimal and it took less time than making a GUI. For the analysis of the actual encrypted text though, I wanted a GUI because it let me make changes in the decryption options and see the changes update across the screen, rather than comparing two text files of output from a command line tool.
The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).
It takes a little getting used to, but it lets you do all the things you *think* you should be able to.
For example, using tr I can replace characters or strings in a file or text stream as part of a batch process. On Windows I'd have to write a script or a program to do that.
Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it. Some GUI apps like Photoshop might be able to do the same thing, but it would take more time to set up, and I may not have an app with that capability.
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
That I'll agree with you on. I've never been fond of man pages, even though I can usually dig out what I'm after eventually.
There are a lot of situations where a GUI is preferable, but a powerful command line is a great tool to have at your disposal.
Another example: For a personal hobby project, I needed to make some tools to help me figure out how some text was encoded. I wrote some command-line tools using
I ended up doing a quick and dirty solution in Excel (quick and dirty being relative since I had to implement binary XOR in VBA =P), but if this were something I'd be using frequently I'd make a proper GUI app out of it.
Yep, no similarities there in terms of molecular structure.
There was also an Alien vs Preditor video game. Since I suspect the comic book was only found at the specialty comic and fantasy stores and the video game was available everywhere games were sold I stand by my statement. AvP was a video game.
You would be incorrect in this case.
AvP was pitched as a film idea back in the early 90s, long before the AvP game. It took over a decade to actually make it because they needed to find a screenwriter to write a stupid script (see below), and a mediocre director with awesome visual style to make it look pretty (see previous efforts Soldier, Resident Evil, Event Horizon).
Amusingly enough, *none* of the different products bearing the AvP moniker relate to each other meaningfully:
- AvP the comic book features (IIRC) the space Marines joining forces with red Aliens to fight the black Aliens. I can't remember how the Predators fit in.
- AvP the original script was more or less a followup to Aliens, with a different colony on a more developed world, space Marines, etc. No red Aliens. I believe at least one Predator ends up fighting on the human side.
- AvP the videogame (the first one at least) is sort of a spiritual sequel to the unused original movie script, except all three races fight each other. I never played the sequel.
- AvP the film took place in the modern era and rewrote the history of the Alien films so that not only does it end stupidly with Resurrection, but begins that way as well.
I believe the original AvP concept came after people saw the Alien skull that the prop department put in the Predator ship in Predator 2.
The videogames came a decade or more after the comic books too.
Set "Everyone" to no privilege at all on a Windows 2000 box. I found out that included Admin.
Only if you explicitly deny privileges instead of not allowing them.
Explicit deny should be rarely used in Windows. No jokes about how Windows should be rarely used either, please =P.
I can imagine that after being excessively awake some people might start suffering psychosis and other maladies.
I was wondering about a related question.
The psychosis caused by psych issues like schizophrenia is the same effect that you get from extreme sleep deprivation.
I would be curious to see if this drug had any beneficial effect on people with those disorders. It seems unlikely, but the more options for treating them, the better.
Or is it more like going on speed for a week, until you collapse and die cause you don't feel your body is over-performing?
No. This is a new class of non-stimulant drugs. The effect is very different.
That is true in some cases, but if you look at the chemical structure of the various neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, and compare them to the amphetamine class of stimulants, they're virtually identical as a whole, not isolated examples.
I've seen you repeat this several times now - in what way does Ritalin "have the same effects" as speed?
Ritalin's chemical structure is based on Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine). All of the stimulant-based ADHD medications are. The Concerta I take is basically Dexedrine with an extra carbon ring or phenyl group, I can't remember which offhand.
Prescription doses for ADHD are below the recreational threshold for stimulants, but if they're abused (as I've seen people do), the effects are the same as with e.g. crystal meth.
As a side note: the first time I took Concerta (a higher dose than I settled on eventually), I really understood why the Air Force gives it to pilots. It turned me into an emotionless robot focused on the goal I'd set before I took it, and willing to do anything to accomplish it. The difference was that instead of flying a fighter jet or a bomber, I was studying for my chemistry final, Grammaton Cleric-style.
I'm sure the new chips will be decent, but the Anandtech article really reminded me why I hate "conferences" run by a single vendor, or at least non-competing vendors.
...followed by a claim of saving $1 billion/year /100 million machines. Sure.
Let's see. We have:
- A line graph showing an AMAZING upsurge in laptop purchases, until you realize that it's only showing 45%-65%, and that laptops just passed desktops at 50%.
- Intel claiming that SF is covered in WiFi because of Centrino, rather than =$50 access points.
- A slide claiming "10x lower power," and then showing a desktop marked "65 watts." Right. So either P4s use 650 watts on their own, or using one of these new CPUs is going to magically make the rest of the system components use less power.
-
Every presentation I've seen by a single vendor is like this. I remember Apple trumpeting that an iMac would network boot faster from an OS X server than from its own hard drive... provided your server had top-of-the-line ultrawide SCSI, the iMac had the slowest IDE drive possible, and you were running gigabit ethernet between them.
I do like the focus on lower power (despite the ludicrous claims), and that Intel might have something competitive with AMD again.
The only thing it achieves is to make pointy-haired cretin bosses warm and fuzzy and the admin's life miserable.
Oh, I know. But in my experience, most people who work in corporate IT can't see past that mentality anyway. That's part of why MS is so pervasive - they design their products for the majority of the population that can't understand that there's always a way to subvert security.
If software requires that the admin knows the user's password to do basic administration, then you need to consider alternative technologies.
I can see both sides of this issue.
The reason Windows doesn't allow superusers to su to other accounts without their password is for accountability. It's a lot harder to notice a rogue admin reading and modifying files of execs when he/she can do it without knowing their password.
There are ways around the restriction in terms of necessary administration. If someone is fired or leaves the company, an administrator can transfer ownership of their files to another user, giving them access. If an admin really needs to log in as someone else without their consent (maybe for legal investigative reasons?) they can change the password on the user's account.
Now, where this breaks down is something like Exchange. My admin account at work is a member of the Exchange administrators' group, meaning I can read anyone's email in the company without knowing their password. That's frequently the information that should be the *hardest* to get to.
OTOH, logically I believe that *ix has it right when it lets the superuser do *anything*. Dear Microsoft: I'm not really an administrator if there are processes I can't kill, and files I can't delete.
The ownership stuff I mention above is an illusion anyway, since as an administrator I could install a keylogger on someone's workstation to get their password.
Anyway, that was kind of a ramble, but my point is that it's a philosophical difference. Windows is designed in most ways to be Nerfed so that you don't shoot your eye out, and most of your admins don't know how to access restricted information without leaving a trail.
Nexus is a magazine devoted to printing what nobody else will publish despite glaring scientific inaccuracies and holes in logic. that is part why they publish what they do.
The parent post is not a troll. Check out these SHOCKING and AMAZING stories from the current issue!
"BRITAIN'S SECRET WAR IN ANTARCTICA--Part 1
By James Roberts. At the end of World War II, Britain sent a covert mission to Antarctica to seek out and destroy a subterranean Nazi haven."
"Exactly 50 years after UFOs buzzed Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in July 1952, gravity-defying objects penetrated restricted airspace and even landed on the Capitol Building."
And from previous, obviously peer-reviewed scientifically sound issues:
"TUNGUSKA & THE ANCIENT MYSTERY INSTALLATION IN SIBERIA"
"THE HENOCH PROPHECIES"
"OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE & SELF-RESEARCH"
"UFOs & THE DRAGON SNAKE"
Next time put down your healing crystals and anti-Reptoid force shields before moderating please.
The Wikipedia entry is a good place to start.
Basically if you have total mass -> energy conversion (like a matter/antimatter reaction), you get the same energy release as about 21.5 million tons of TNT.
The article ties it into his theory as a whole.
? Do you think I don't know how to download the network install for MS service packs?
Security updates are still downloaded to pirated copies.
Actually, they're not, although my understanding was that MS claimed they were.
One of my neighbours asked for help with her PC a few days ago. One of the problems turned out to be that she was running the original version of XP. I tried to service pack it, and it said the license key used was invalid, and therefore the service pack wouldn't apply.
Unless you have at least SP1, you can't get security updates anymore.
I'm sure there are tons of people in a similar situation.
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop.
It's close enough, and I'm formerly a member of the "not ready for the desktop" camp.
I installed Ubuntu on a laptop last weekend. It configured everything automatically except the sound, which I had to tweak some config files for (no worse than when I've had sound problems in Windows).
The only reason I had to do cliched Linux stuff like recompiling the kernel was to get my Orinoco card working in monitor mode. Desktop users don't care about that, only people who want to run WiFi hacking utilities.
Keeping the system up to date is actually easier than Windows, since I can run a single apt-get and upgrade everything (OS components + apps) to the current version.
There are definitely some gaps in terms of things like no Photoshop on Linux, but the OS itself is fine for desktop use now IMO.