You only see people bashing Windows, never praising it.
I'm actually really pleased with XP. The only thing I might wish for that it doesn't have is some kind of a 9x virtual machine to run a legacy game or two I have.
It's been stable, I've never gotten a virus or a worm, keeping it updated is easy, and it runs all the apps I want. It's far superior to any other version of Windows (yes, including 2k IMO), and I find it much easier to work with than *ix or MacOS = 9.x.
Imagine if Ford were to sell a car with a fundamental problem. One that potentially cost lives. They did and they had to recall it.
Imagine if Microsoft were to issue a patch for the worm a month in advance and advise all their customers to install it immediately......Like they did last month.
There are two parties at fault for the spread of this worm: the jerk who wrote it, and the people who didn't patch their systems. Most of the blame lies on the jerk, but the victims in this case weren't entirely faultless because they had ample warning along the lines of "we are expecting a worm that exploits this vulnerability in the next few weeks."
The only thing Microsoft could do that they haven't already is make updates like this automatic, so users of their OS wouldn't have control over whether or not it got installed. I prefer the current system.
I am reasonably sure that this is a hoax, but I'm disappointed that no one has *any* evidence that it is. Even Snopes just says it's not true, without providing links to any of the alleged original posts on Usenet from the alleged perpetrator of the hoax.
Isn't that how urban legends spread? By a bunch of people repeating what they think is true without referencing any authoritative sources?
MadCatz doesn't seem like they're really going to do much support for the old Gamesharks. You can get new codes for them (for current systems at least) from Datel though, since the Action Replay hardware is identical, and they've publicly announced support for owners of the old Gamesharks.
Datel also hired on all of the Interact game-hacking team, so MadCatz is basically starting from scratch. I figure they'll mostly be re-encrypting the codes that Datel (and to a lesser extent, Pelican) come up with for use on the V3, rather than coming up with their own.
I'm a big fan of the hardware - rather than the brand name - which is why I support Datel rather than MadCatz.
follow the link on that web site to the XPort, which does the same thing (and in fact probably is the same thing).
Yes, they're the same hardware. The Gameshark line of hardware (up until the V3) was made by a company called Datel in the UK and sold their under the Action Replay name. Interact just licensed it for North American sales. Their deal went sour, and now Datel sells it all here under their own brand.
Just to keep everyone confused, the Gameshark brand is now owned by MadCatz, and their "Gameshark V3" is actually closer to the Code Breaker that Pelican sells. Both were developed by a company called Fire.
Is that like the gaming equivalent of a soap opera or what?
I hadn't even thought about playing non-us games. Shoots a hole through my rant. Are US playstations able to output PAL?
Yes. I have a chipped PS2 so I can play import games (and my own hacked versions of games I own), and it outputs PAL just fine. Since my TV is NTSC, I have to hook it up to the video-in on my PC and play it on the screen there. I've got video-out too, so I could probably set up my PC as a very overpriced PAL->NTSC converter by using a capture program with a full-screen preview option.
This kind of am-an-admin-expert-because-i-have-two-boxes-at-hom e kind of talk should be left at score 1 or so, where it belongs, regardless of wether it praises or bashes M$ or *nix.
I'm work with an infrastructure that numbers in the tens of thousands, but we're not talking about me. As I said, one of my co-workers (who is much smarter than I am) used this as a stop-gap measure because it's humanly impossible for us to patch servers fast enough. It's not a perfect solution, but it will keep our network up in the interim. I figured it might do the same for others as well.
I do only have one machine at home though, at least that's in use at all.
Simply assign users to a restricted shell in their NIS profile and they'll be unable to run any programs not in their pre-assigned PATH.
That works at the user level, but is there a way to do it at the system level? The AD fix prevents the executable from running at all, even if no user is logged on.
This is a garden-variety buffer-overflow exploit of the sort that could just as easily still exist somewhere in Linux.
Active Directory also provides a way to block this type of worm that *ix doesn't. There wasn't time to patch all of our servers during the outbreak, so one of the guys here implemented a group policy that prevents execution of msblast.exe and teekids.exe on any machine on our network. Once they're all patched, the policy can be removed really easily.
It's really pathetetic that in the year 2000 - ALL of the free unixes had decent, available firewalls, and most of them fit under 60 Megs.
Windows 2000 was explicitly designed for the enterprise market, not the home. Most enterprises I know of don't need to have firewall software on desktops because they have dedicated devices for that function.
If someone really needs a firewall on a 2k machine, why not use Zonealarm? It's free, the download is fast, and the default configuration blocks connection attempts like this worm uses.
(as opposed to Enter The Matrix, a similar game to be honest that was killed by negative echo chamber)
I think EtM was killed by buggy releases and unpolished design.
I thought it was fun when I played through as Ghost, despite the bug that kept me from picking up explosives when I needed them unless I loaded an earlier save and ditched all my grenades before moving on to the area with the explosives.
A few weeks later I played through as Niobe, and was pretty underwhelmed. Her driving sections seem like filler, and in the last level I got stuck in a wall.
Those bugs are comparatively minor to others I've read about, including one whose official "solution" is to erase ALL savegames and start from scratch.
There were definitely some cool moments for both characters, and the exclusive film segments were fun, but I wish I'd waited until it hit the $20 price point.
Part of my point is that the difference in intent is irrelevant. Killing innocent civilians doesn't make a country less likely to fight, it makes them *more* likely.
Look at Israel and Palestine. Palestinian suicide bombers go out of their way to kill innocent civilians. This makes the Israelis want to take out their militant radicals. In the process they end up killing civilians, which makes the Palestinians want to send *more* suicide bombers.
Even if this weren't true, trying to make the case that killing non-combatants is a good thing is one of the most monstrous and inhuman positions a person can take. It is exactly the mentality that the US claims to oppose. Based on the moderation of my original post, I guess sadly I have to point that out explicitly rather than having it be implicit in a single sentence.
And the enemy should expect some collateral damage when they start a war, collaterall damage will in fact make them less willing to start a war next time.
That's funny. ~3000 pieces of "collateral damage" a few years ago didn't seem to make the US less willing to start a war.
I would recommend against Maxtor, myself. I was never a fan of them (I had a stack of dead 1GB Maxtor drives at a previous job), but a friend of mine convinced me that they'd turned over a new leaf, so I bought one of their DiamondMax series.
After about 5 months it started flaking out on me, so I got a replacement. 2-3 months later, the *replacement* is flaking out, and it clicks too.
Okay, I'll give you that 192 kbit or higher encoding sounds pretty good. Broad-spectrum sounds like snare drums and cymbal crashes still sound like they're underwater to me, but most people don't seem to notice.
How many mp3s traded on Kazaa are encoded at more than 128 kbit? That is what I'm talking about.
mp3s also don't give you the case or disc art, just like a photocopied book doesn't give you the real cover.
Never underestimate what a cheap-ass will put up with to keep from paying for something.
mp3s are basically the audio equivalent of "stapled stack of recycled copier paper in a fuzzy inkjet font," but that hasn't stopped them from becoming incredibly popular.
Back in 1995 or so when I was in high school, I got my first job doing web design under contract for a division of Hitachi.
I was mostly doing HTML monkey-work, copying text from brochures and so on. My manager would come up with graphics if the brochures didn't have anything to scan, which I'd put in the pages.
There was some point I thought should be illustrated, so I put "[ There should be a really cool graphic right here ]" in the middle of the page, and made a mental note to ask him to make one.
I never got around to it, and it ended up on their site. We had a dispute about another project and ended up not working for them anymore, so I never got to fix it. That text was up there for several years before they caught it.
"commie" derivatives come up a lot. I wonder why that is? I'm not communist.
I think it's an archaic (e.g. 1950s) idea that atheism supports communism because Marxists are supposed to be atheists. It would be kind of cute if it weren't for the neo-McCarthyist politics in the US right now.
I would be willing to deal with a less-polished UI, some incompatibilities and inconsistencies in an OS if it let me do something I want to do and can't do right now under XP.
Having access to the source code is a benefit for users who are interested in doing dev work, which I am not.
I want to be able to run Photoshop and Sonar, and play a specific handful of old and new games without using an emulator.
I already own a license for XP, so Linux being free isn't a benefit for me.
If I wanted to set up a web or mail server at home, I'd consider Linux, but really I do enough of that kind of thing at work without doing it here too.
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You only see people bashing Windows, never praising it.
I'm actually really pleased with XP. The only thing I might wish for that it doesn't have is some kind of a 9x virtual machine to run a legacy game or two I have.
It's been stable, I've never gotten a virus or a worm, keeping it updated is easy, and it runs all the apps I want. It's far superior to any other version of Windows (yes, including 2k IMO), and I find it much easier to work with than *ix or MacOS = 9.x.
Imagine if Ford were to sell a car with a fundamental problem. One that potentially cost lives. They did and they had to recall it.
...Like they did last month.
Imagine if Microsoft were to issue a patch for the worm a month in advance and advise all their customers to install it immediately...
There are two parties at fault for the spread of this worm: the jerk who wrote it, and the people who didn't patch their systems. Most of the blame lies on the jerk, but the victims in this case weren't entirely faultless because they had ample warning along the lines of "we are expecting a worm that exploits this vulnerability in the next few weeks."
The only thing Microsoft could do that they haven't already is make updates like this automatic, so users of their OS wouldn't have control over whether or not it got installed. I prefer the current system.
I am reasonably sure that this is a hoax, but I'm disappointed that no one has *any* evidence that it is. Even Snopes just says it's not true, without providing links to any of the alleged original posts on Usenet from the alleged perpetrator of the hoax.
Isn't that how urban legends spread? By a bunch of people repeating what they think is true without referencing any authoritative sources?
Not everyone is interested in flying the type of plane a regular person can afford.
MadCatz doesn't seem like they're really going to do much support for the old Gamesharks. You can get new codes for them (for current systems at least) from Datel though, since the Action Replay hardware is identical, and they've publicly announced support for owners of the old Gamesharks.
Datel also hired on all of the Interact game-hacking team, so MadCatz is basically starting from scratch. I figure they'll mostly be re-encrypting the codes that Datel (and to a lesser extent, Pelican) come up with for use on the V3, rather than coming up with their own.
I'm a big fan of the hardware - rather than the brand name - which is why I support Datel rather than MadCatz.
If someone doesn't buy this game and finish it off, I might have to organize a real apocalypse.
follow the link on that web site to the XPort, which does the same thing (and in fact probably is the same thing).
Yes, they're the same hardware. The Gameshark line of hardware (up until the V3) was made by a company called Datel in the UK and sold their under the Action Replay name. Interact just licensed it for North American sales. Their deal went sour, and now Datel sells it all here under their own brand.
Just to keep everyone confused, the Gameshark brand is now owned by MadCatz, and their "Gameshark V3" is actually closer to the Code Breaker that Pelican sells. Both were developed by a company called Fire.
Is that like the gaming equivalent of a soap opera or what?
I hadn't even thought about playing non-us games. Shoots a hole through my rant. Are US playstations able to output PAL?
Yes. I have a chipped PS2 so I can play import games (and my own hacked versions of games I own), and it outputs PAL just fine. Since my TV is NTSC, I have to hook it up to the video-in on my PC and play it on the screen there. I've got video-out too, so I could probably set up my PC as a very overpriced PAL->NTSC converter by using a capture program with a full-screen preview option.
This kind of am-an-admin-expert-because-i-have-two-boxes-at-hom e kind of talk should be left at score 1 or so, where it belongs, regardless of wether it praises or bashes M$ or *nix.
I'm work with an infrastructure that numbers in the tens of thousands, but we're not talking about me. As I said, one of my co-workers (who is much smarter than I am) used this as a stop-gap measure because it's humanly impossible for us to patch servers fast enough. It's not a perfect solution, but it will keep our network up in the interim. I figured it might do the same for others as well.
I do only have one machine at home though, at least that's in use at all.
but who cares about that?
As I said, "Once they're all patched, the policy can be removed really easily."
Simply assign users to a restricted shell in their NIS profile and they'll be unable to run any programs not in their pre-assigned PATH.
That works at the user level, but is there a way to do it at the system level? The AD fix prevents the executable from running at all, even if no user is logged on.
This is a garden-variety buffer-overflow exploit of the sort that could just as easily still exist somewhere in Linux.
Active Directory also provides a way to block this type of worm that *ix doesn't. There wasn't time to patch all of our servers during the outbreak, so one of the guys here implemented a group policy that prevents execution of msblast.exe and teekids.exe on any machine on our network. Once they're all patched, the policy can be removed really easily.
Where in any of those articles does it say that MS is taking down windowsupdate.com? It's always redirected me to windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
By the way, "microwave lasers" are usually called MASERs. The L in LASER only refers to visible light.
Visible to superhumans, maybe. What about infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray lasers?
It's really pathetetic that in the year 2000 - ALL of the free unixes had decent, available firewalls, and most of them fit under 60 Megs.
Windows 2000 was explicitly designed for the enterprise market, not the home. Most enterprises I know of don't need to have firewall software on desktops because they have dedicated devices for that function.
If someone really needs a firewall on a 2k machine, why not use Zonealarm? It's free, the download is fast, and the default configuration blocks connection attempts like this worm uses.
Those systems are both well past Nolan Bushnell's time.
(as opposed to Enter The Matrix, a similar game to be honest that was killed by negative echo chamber)
I think EtM was killed by buggy releases and unpolished design.
I thought it was fun when I played through as Ghost, despite the bug that kept me from picking up explosives when I needed them unless I loaded an earlier save and ditched all my grenades before moving on to the area with the explosives.
A few weeks later I played through as Niobe, and was pretty underwhelmed. Her driving sections seem like filler, and in the last level I got stuck in a wall.
Those bugs are comparatively minor to others I've read about, including one whose official "solution" is to erase ALL savegames and start from scratch.
There were definitely some cool moments for both characters, and the exclusive film segments were fun, but I wish I'd waited until it hit the $20 price point.
Part of my point is that the difference in intent is irrelevant. Killing innocent civilians doesn't make a country less likely to fight, it makes them *more* likely.
Look at Israel and Palestine. Palestinian suicide bombers go out of their way to kill innocent civilians. This makes the Israelis want to take out their militant radicals. In the process they end up killing civilians, which makes the Palestinians want to send *more* suicide bombers.
Even if this weren't true, trying to make the case that killing non-combatants is a good thing is one of the most monstrous and inhuman positions a person can take. It is exactly the mentality that the US claims to oppose. Based on the moderation of my original post, I guess sadly I have to point that out explicitly rather than having it be implicit in a single sentence.
And the enemy should expect some collateral damage when they start a war, collaterall damage will in fact make them less willing to start a war next time.
That's funny. ~3000 pieces of "collateral damage" a few years ago didn't seem to make the US less willing to start a war.
I would recommend against Maxtor, myself. I was never a fan of them (I had a stack of dead 1GB Maxtor drives at a previous job), but a friend of mine convinced me that they'd turned over a new leaf, so I bought one of their DiamondMax series.
After about 5 months it started flaking out on me, so I got a replacement. 2-3 months later, the *replacement* is flaking out, and it clicks too.
I have a Seagate coming my way next week.
Okay, I'll give you that 192 kbit or higher encoding sounds pretty good. Broad-spectrum sounds like snare drums and cymbal crashes still sound like they're underwater to me, but most people don't seem to notice.
How many mp3s traded on Kazaa are encoded at more than 128 kbit? That is what I'm talking about.
mp3s also don't give you the case or disc art, just like a photocopied book doesn't give you the real cover.
Never underestimate what a cheap-ass will put up with to keep from paying for something.
mp3s are basically the audio equivalent of "stapled stack of recycled copier paper in a fuzzy inkjet font," but that hasn't stopped them from becoming incredibly popular.
Back in 1995 or so when I was in high school, I got my first job doing web design under contract for a division of Hitachi.
I was mostly doing HTML monkey-work, copying text from brochures and so on. My manager would come up with graphics if the brochures didn't have anything to scan, which I'd put in the pages.
There was some point I thought should be illustrated, so I put "[ There should be a really cool graphic right here ]" in the middle of the page, and made a mental note to ask him to make one.
I never got around to it, and it ended up on their site. We had a dispute about another project and ended up not working for them anymore, so I never got to fix it. That text was up there for several years before they caught it.
"commie" derivatives come up a lot. I wonder why that is? I'm not communist.
I think it's an archaic (e.g. 1950s) idea that atheism supports communism because Marxists are supposed to be atheists. It would be kind of cute if it weren't for the neo-McCarthyist politics in the US right now.
Yes, that's it exactly.
I would be willing to deal with a less-polished UI, some incompatibilities and inconsistencies in an OS if it let me do something I want to do and can't do right now under XP.
Having access to the source code is a benefit for users who are interested in doing dev work, which I am not.
I want to be able to run Photoshop and Sonar, and play a specific handful of old and new games without using an emulator.
I already own a license for XP, so Linux being free isn't a benefit for me.
If I wanted to set up a web or mail server at home, I'd consider Linux, but really I do enough of that kind of thing at work without doing it here too.