Wow that looks good. I'd really enjoy watching my virtual traffic flow (well, maybe for about a half hour), but I'd rather not pay for this. I guess it tracks using javascript or hidden images or something, sending the data on referals etc. to a central server (like SiteMeter), then I guess that server sends UDP packets to the client to direct vehicles and people in the virtual world. It would actually be quite simple to do this kind of thing on ones own (well, at least to create the server, the client would need some more work). It's such a shame the prices are quite insane (I mean, an unplayable SC3000 for ~$40/month dependent on # visitors, no thank you). Hope to see a free alternative soon, I might even work on it:)
Absolutely great idea, though. More of this innovation would be appreciated.
1. Temperature sensor "Laser" indicator is not blinking when measuring temperatures of the Intel chips.
2. Intel chips do contain temperature monitoring circuitry but this must be enabled. Most motherboards probably do not allow you to disable it. Both motherboards used by Toms Hardware for the Intel tests had CPU speed throttling capabilities, the motherboard used for the AMD tests did not have this capability.
3. Intel's tech docs state: "In
addition, a thermal solution [read: fan] that is significantly under-designed [read: removed by an idiot] may not be capable of cooling the
processor even when the TCC is active continuously.", in other words, it'll still burn up.
4. There are some very convenient edits in the Toms Hardware video, for instance a cut from intel board with a temperature probe above it to the same shot of the board but without the probe...
5. On one test, the heatsink and fan are replaced but the fan is not turning, and the immediate speed increase seen in Q3 in the background leaves me particularly dubious.
6. When heatsinks are removed, the Intel CPUs read just above room temperature. This is ludicrous for a 2ghz CPU running Q3 that has just had it's heatsink and fan removed. Especially when the heatsink has no thermal conductive grease on it
7. In fact, neither of the Intel cpus have any grease or grease residue on the heatsink or chip. Forgetting this can make your heatsink as good as useless
8. In the P4 video, why is the fan running when removed but not running when it is replaced? Why unplug the fan? Surely this would cause the system to notice a fan failure and shut down?
9. Your motherboard has thermal protection. Turn it on. Sit back. Don't worry about this nonsense.
What with Tom's Hardware's pro-intel stance of late, and this video that's done AMD so much damage by making everyone believe that Intel chips somehow better because they don't die when you remove the heatsink, I really don't trust them as an impartial resource.
If you don't believe me, why not disable all the monitoring stuff in your BIOS and take the cooler off your Intel CPU? It'll do it no harm! It's protected: Tom's Hardware says it is. So do you really trust him?
What is your evidence for this? This year, everyone looked promising but failed at the first hurdle. Nobody even got to the halfway point, and the whole thing was badly presented to the public as well. Anyway, lets hope things go better next year:)
Look, is this any surprise at all when approximately 80% of home computers out there run Windows?
The MS bashing in this thread is ridiculous. Even if you run Windows, you could be running Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, Phoenix, M2, the list goes on, instead of Outlook/Outlook Express. It's not the OS's fault or the mail clients fault, it's the users fault and most dumb people use Windows or Macs because everything else is too difficult. Keeping Windows secure is comparatively easy compared to other Operating Systems, just let Auto-Update take care of it and you don't even notice the patches happen if you don't want to notice them.
I'm quite sure that Windows 2000/XP has become one of the easiest to patch operating systems. It is also fast on route to becoming one of the most secure operating systems for the desktop, and this is controversial, but with the number of holes that have been discovered, made massively public and fixed quickly make it likely to be more secure than other Operating Systems. If every Windows machine suddenly booted up with a different OS one morning, I'm sure that OS would have to go through the same level of patches as Windows has had to go through. Whether those patches would be released quicker or slower than with Windows is impossible to say, but I can say pretty safely that they would not be installed as soon after release on those other OSes as they would be on Windows.
Microsoft has managed to build security and a smooth simple patching system out of the fact that it is the dominant OS for desktops and gets targeted a lot by crackers. I doubt other operating systems would stand up to the same onslaught and keep up with patches (both on the developer side and the user side), especially since they tend not to even have automatic updates.
One last point: It's very easy to say that "open source is more secure", actually it's not necessarilly true. Open source projects (like the kind I work on) tend to have bugs that people searching for exploits can find, but the original programmers do not even look at. Sections of code such as a method that has always worked fine could be an exploitable flaw, but that method would never be studied by the developers until it has been exploited and had attention drawn to it, just like in closed-source. Companies that sell closed source software often also have QA teams who's JOB involves looking at those lesser used functions for security flaws, these guys get paid and their whole employment revolves around checking for holes, but even they miss them. I don't see what the argument is for Open Source software being any less full of holes than closed source software, when open source software groups usually don't even employ those kind of people. Sure with OSS, the bugs are fixed quickly by the whole community, but does that mean the users apply the patches any quicker, or that there are less bugs in the first place? I don't think so.
Is there a checksum or CRC check in the firmware loader on the router that keeps you from being able to do that?
Almost certainly. Vendors normally checksum firmware to avoid the possibility of flashing the hardware with corrupt firmware data. However, given Netgear's track record, you could probably flash it with a JPEG file and it'd accept it OK.
This sort of thing makes me wonder what backdoors are in other firmware and software that have not yet been discovered. I'm glad that there are people like SecurityFocus looking out for these exploits. Endless numbers of ADSL modems, routers and other equipment seem to have backdoors in them. I'm glad I route my ADSL through a switch and Slackware:)
This was invented about the same time as dinner mats and coasters. Duct tape a table mat to the bottom of your laptop for a similar and cheaper effect.
The fact that they went right in Deux Ex 2 was because they were disappointed and frustrated by a game that wasnt anything like as good as it's forebear.
I think game developers should stop worrying about this kind of rubbish and get to worrying about making games entertaining and enthrawling again. The very fact that this sort of thing gets a story is a blatant sign of the times. All is not peachy in the game industry. Give us some novel and interesting games, please.
I happen to like my caps lock key. I still yearn sometimes that shift-lock would come back.
Not only is it a handy key for typing in UPPER CASE LETTERS (duh), which some languages require or advise, but it's also useful in games and things, I like it there around WASD.
You may as well say "Bin the scroll lock key for windows OSes as it's never used! get rid of insert since that's just annoying! Pause/break annoys me too! get rid of that one!"
I like my capslock key. What I don't like is these god damn new keys that I have on this keyboard, where PrintScreen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Insert, Home, PgUp, Delete, End and pgdown are moved down a block so they could fit these damn "suspend", "wake up" and "power" keys in the place of the original printscreen, scroll lock and pause keys. This is SO annoying when I hit printscreen and my machine suspends, or if i hit ctrl+break and it fucking shuts down. Don't screw with my keyboard layout, bastards.
Apple will probably not support ogg. Ogg has no DRM, and iTunes etc. is based around buying stuff before playing it. I don't own an iPod but I assume I know it plays MP3, I just doubt strongly that apple will add ogg support to it when they probably want to push more people towards iTunes and thus earn more revenue. Ogg doesn't really match up with "revenue", so Apple will probably not support it.
That doesn't mean to say that 3rd party hackers won't find a way to put ogg on an iPod, of course.
Ultimately, Microsoft won the study and the CIO of 7-11 is quoted (in the ad that is running on Linux Today!) as saying: "...the TCO for the Windows Server System approach was 20% less expensive than Linux." The fact that this ad is appearing on a cornerstone Linux community website is an absolute outrage.
This is not an outrage. Here are the reasons:
1. The site has to get its money from somewhere.
2. Anything Microsoft says is ignored by the Linux community. Look at/.
3. Most importantly, the particular ad mentioned here boasts a fair point, and I believe these ads probably provoke more anti-Microsoft sentiment than they stamp out. These ads are just as bad as Linux Today reporting that "Microsoft says this and that, oh no!". It should hopefully spur the Linux community to resolve whatever issue caused Linux to be more expensive to run for 7-11 than a Microsoft OS.
Really, you might as well resent ads for Microsoft products on OSDN. They're there, and as a Microsoft and Linux user who is entitled to his opinion, I like them to be there. It's pointless for Microsoft to advertise on Linux Today because the ads are probably treated with hatred and bile.
Also, Linux Today and the other sites run by internet.com probably use the same ad-cycling routines and show the same ads on every internet.com-owned site.
What I'm trying to say is, I don't read Linux Today and I, as well as most of it's regular readers, probably could not care less about this issue and certainly aren't going to bother to boycott it IF the information that Linux Today publishes is more valuable than Microsoft's dumb ads. If Linux Today publishes worthless articles, people will be happy to go elsewhere, but for some reason people still frequent the site. Maybe the author should not have sold out.
I love this stuff. 2Gb at 22.5mb/s is incredible - you could easilly do a high-res movie on that.
I'm yearning for the absence of all of the moving parts in my machine except for possibly CD/DVD drives. I can't bear the fact that my hard disk has spinning platters and incredibly fine-precision moving heads which could fail at any time (I leave my machine on all the time and consequently I'm now terrified to turn it off in case it'll fail when I power it up again). I want peltier coolers instead of fans, and I want solid state memory instead of hard disks. Once this happens, not only will my machine be ultra-silent, it'll also be much more robust.
It's a shame flash memory still costs so much, but the prices are pretty much where similar sized hard disks were several years ago, so I'm confident that we'll get 40gb flash memory in the next four or five years. God knows where hard disks will be then.
The world really needs a new storage paradigm. Mechanical magnetic storage is the oldest concept still alive in home computing, and is as archaic as the system BIOS. Intel are busy with getting rid of the currently outdated and rubbish BIOS and replacing it with something fancy and new, I just ooze over the same thing happening to data storage. For gods sake, the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in any modern home computer.
Thankfully my significant other plays more games more often than I do. I'm very lucky in this respect. It's great to have a digitally aware relationship.
What happened at Chernobyl was an avoidable disaster. The design wasn't "old" per-se, it was perfectly rational. Investigation of the disaster revealed that the meltdown was caused by the operators testing whether - in the event of a reactor shutdown - there would be enough electrical power to operate the reactor safety mechanisms (cooling pumps, etc) before the backup generators were started. They began shut-down of the reactor but it could not be completely shut-down without disabling the emergency core cooling system. So they did that. It was expected that Nothing Bad Would Happen. And probably, nothing bad would have happened, if it wasn't for the fact that the operators then made a sequence of mistakes (which they would have known about had the safety systems been live, or wouldn't have to bother with had they not disabled the automatic shutdown system) that caused the reactor to go critical.
The media forces us to believe that it's real easy to make fission reactors explode, like if you go off for a donut and stop looking at the blinking lights, the thing will blow you, the city and most of the donut clean away while you're out. This is untrue. It takes considerable effort to cause a disaster on the scale of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. A reactor can go for weeks unattended, the reaction is as good as self-regulated due to good design. Safety systems are not based around some huge computer and sensors all over the place, they're an implicit part of the reactor design (although computer monitoring is used on top of that).
Like I said, Chernobyl was the result of some stupid assholes trying to fly a reactor blind. There were emergency cooling systems, emergency monitoring systems, automatic shutdown procedures, all of which were disabled by the operators. Reactors don't just explode at random.
Zealots aside, I agree with this article and the former article. It's been a frequent issue for me when installing many different Linux distributions that:
1. It's not a surprise if my network card works.
2. It's a mild surprise if my sound card works.
3. (up until recently) It'd amaze me if my graphics card worked to its full potential.
Net, sound and graphics are the most important peripherals that should work flawlessly. Sound and graphics especially, as they're the sensory output of your computer, without them you don't know what's going on.
Linux does not have the same quality of driver database as Microsoft's OSes do. This is merely because Microsoft is dominant. Perhaps a sweet way to handle the problem would be to create some kind of abstraction layer that allowed you to use vendor-supplied Windows drivers under Linux, but that is extremely unrealistic, and it'd be slow and bloated (someone will now pipe up and tell me that it is being worked on).
Linux has been given a boost by the recent dominance of particular audio chips from Creative (such as the EMU10K1) and graphics chipsets from ATI and nVidia.
Sadly, Linux drivers are provided mainly by people who have some hardware that doesn't work under Linux. So they start a driver for it, get far enough for the driver to work well enough for their needs, and then leave it to deteriorate over time without any attention paid to it, as they change hardware. End users then get some kind of beta thing that hasnt been worked on for 3 years but still have to use it. This is the hardware manufacturers fault -- Linux devrs dont have the money to buy and reverse-engineer every piece of hardware. They need the specs, and ultimately they need the vendor to make a Linux driver by proxy, as vendors do for Windows.
Currently though, you don't look bad for not making a Linux driver. People don't open the box and say "wtf is this? No linux driver?!", because they morbidly expect Linux support to be limited. In the domain of onboard sound or graphics, or newer hardware, Linux support is the exception rather than the rule. Vendors need some good reason to add Linux support, and it's not up to me to decide what that reason would be. "Thanks" is not good enough.
I should also mention that even if most home Linux users do obtain a driver for some hardware, they'd be at pains to find out how to install/compile the damn thing, especially if it involves recompiling the kernel.
I'm not flaming Linux, I don't need a crock of shit from the zealot crowd telling me I'm an idiot faggot and so on, I'm just being realistic and saying there is work to be done.
What I'd like to see in the future is a Universal Driver Abstraction Layer, some kind of compile-once-run-many virtual machine that allows the same drivers to work on any OS that supports it, the only problem is that OSes make very different demands of the drivers so this may never come into fruition.
A lot of gas stations advise you to switch off your phone before filling up. It is indeed true that they can spark on transmit. The sparks are of course invisible, you won't ever see huge arcs coming off your mobile, but a call in a fuel station is really not a good idea (unless you're filling up with diesel of course:) )
David Deutsch, physicist at Oxford University, today discovered that when directional monochromatic coherent beams of light, amplified by stimulated emission of radiation, are directed through pinholes and caused to overlap, a "mysterious shadowy nonsense pattern" is observed. He commented that as one adds more pinholes, the shadowy nonsense becomes even more mystical.
His highschool Physics tutor, known to his students Mr. Bradshaw and to his friends and family as Mr. Bradshaw, commented: "Dave was always into physics and all that stuff. He thought it was ace, but the school couldn't afford as much as a light bulb in them days and he was off sick with rubella on the day of our school trip to CERN, and so never got into those laser thingumyjiggies". Until now; The UK government has recently granted Deutsch a $17 million research budget for the further investigation of things people are already aware of, a sum that is belittled by the sales figures for his book "Amazing things to do and then fail to understand", which has shot to position 1,237 in best seller listings and is heralded as "bewilderingly unfounded and lacklustre".
They spent too long on HL2. It should have been released already. They've missed the boat bigtime. The game looks incredible but by the time it comes out it will be
a) Probably an anticlimax
b) Compared with all the other similarly pretty or prettier games that will be out there at the time
Everyone's already masturbating over Far Cry, because it never got the kind of hype that HL2 got and somewhat surprised us, plus it's beautiful. So, will HL2 be worth the wait? And when will we stop hearing hype about it? At this rate it'll turn into Duke Nukem Forever.
The recent "vulnerability" in TCP was not a vulnerability at all -- it was a fault in most implementations of the TCP stack (including the one in Cisco's IOS).
TCP isn't broken. It's just the implementations that are. When a RST is received in the SYN-SENT state, both the sequence number and the acknowledgement number should be tested for validity (ACK field must acknowledge the SYN). Most TCP stacks totally ignore this, some re-use SEQ numbers frequently making it easy to guess the window's position. The hole can be closed with decent validation.
I'm much more for an elegant solution to this, rather than a brainless "hurl encryption at it!" plan which doesn't sound particularly future-proof. There are already reserved fields in TCP which could be adopted to provide better validation of packets to those systems that require more certainty of the legitimacy of a RST. Perhaps we should be using those instead, at least that way we don't have to re-jig the whole thing.
Honestly i doubt the effects of any of this "high technology 10KHz chip" stuff would be noticeable to anybody using the shoes. It's just a gimmick and if they crash or break or whatever they won't suddenly go rock solid or anything. That'd require some kind of extremely clever membrane technology. Not a dumb pump with a vibe motor powering it.
Oh no, how will we survive? Better just not push the hardware market anywhere and let the whole IT industry die on its arse even more than it is already. Gimme a break and wake up. Supply and demand.
I have been informed that Microsoft have made substantial improvements to Microsoft Networking (what was once SMB, but not anymore I guess) to make it several times faster than before. I realise that for people like Samba to implement this new technology may cause them to infringe on patents. But Samba aren't doing it for monetary gain, Microsoft rarely stamps on interoperability between foreign OSes and its own on purpose (in fact, with the release of NT it substantially improved intercompatibility). What I disagree with in your post is the assertion that Microsoft will force companies to migrate to an all-Microsoft system simply to increase communication speeds for Windows clients. I doubt this will happen. This would require a massive outlay, and any company that currently uses a heavy amount of Windows Networking is currently using Microsoft Domain Controllers and Exchange servers anyway, so no gains for MS there.
Your point is well made, the capability for better interoperability will make users and system administrators want to create systems that can benefit from it, however I'm unsure of the real gains when we factor in the migration costs (not just monetary, but time and resources). It is more likely that companies would choose not to upgrade while Microsoft is still supporting their current software, and would use a system that provides the highest interoperability between all client operating systems. If Longhorn can provide services to Macs and Linux then it would be beneficial to migrate to Longhorn. However, if Longhorn can provide services to Macs and Linux then it completely invalidates the argument about Microsoft locking down interoperability.
Despite what you say, it doesn't make the article any less FUDdy or reactionist. I can't stand eWeek, where they talk computers and call XML a powerful "scripting language".
Slashdot Mirror
Wow that looks good. I'd really enjoy watching my virtual traffic flow (well, maybe for about a half hour), but I'd rather not pay for this. I guess it tracks using javascript or hidden images or something, sending the data on referals etc. to a central server (like SiteMeter), then I guess that server sends UDP packets to the client to direct vehicles and people in the virtual world. It would actually be quite simple to do this kind of thing on ones own (well, at least to create the server, the client would need some more work). It's such a shame the prices are quite insane (I mean, an unplayable SC3000 for ~$40/month dependent on # visitors, no thank you). Hope to see a free alternative soon, I might even work on it :)
Absolutely great idea, though. More of this innovation would be appreciated.
The Tom's Hardware video lies to you.
1. Temperature sensor "Laser" indicator is not blinking when measuring temperatures of the Intel chips.
2. Intel chips do contain temperature monitoring circuitry but this must be enabled. Most motherboards probably do not allow you to disable it. Both motherboards used by Toms Hardware for the Intel tests had CPU speed throttling capabilities, the motherboard used for the AMD tests did not have this capability.
3. Intel's tech docs state: "In addition, a thermal solution [read: fan] that is significantly under-designed [read: removed by an idiot] may not be capable of cooling the processor even when the TCC is active continuously.", in other words, it'll still burn up.
4. There are some very convenient edits in the Toms Hardware video, for instance a cut from intel board with a temperature probe above it to the same shot of the board but without the probe...
5. On one test, the heatsink and fan are replaced but the fan is not turning, and the immediate speed increase seen in Q3 in the background leaves me particularly dubious.
6. When heatsinks are removed, the Intel CPUs read just above room temperature. This is ludicrous for a 2ghz CPU running Q3 that has just had it's heatsink and fan removed. Especially when the heatsink has no thermal conductive grease on it
7. In fact, neither of the Intel cpus have any grease or grease residue on the heatsink or chip. Forgetting this can make your heatsink as good as useless
8. In the P4 video, why is the fan running when removed but not running when it is replaced? Why unplug the fan? Surely this would cause the system to notice a fan failure and shut down?
9. Your motherboard has thermal protection. Turn it on. Sit back. Don't worry about this nonsense.
What with Tom's Hardware's pro-intel stance of late, and this video that's done AMD so much damage by making everyone believe that Intel chips somehow better because they don't die when you remove the heatsink, I really don't trust them as an impartial resource.
If you don't believe me, why not disable all the monitoring stuff in your BIOS and take the cooler off your Intel CPU? It'll do it no harm! It's protected: Tom's Hardware says it is. So do you really trust him?
Should be a very interesting Challenge next year!
:)
What is your evidence for this? This year, everyone looked promising but failed at the first hurdle. Nobody even got to the halfway point, and the whole thing was badly presented to the public as well. Anyway, lets hope things go better next year
Look, is this any surprise at all when approximately 80% of home computers out there run Windows?
The MS bashing in this thread is ridiculous. Even if you run Windows, you could be running Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, Phoenix, M2, the list goes on, instead of Outlook/Outlook Express. It's not the OS's fault or the mail clients fault, it's the users fault and most dumb people use Windows or Macs because everything else is too difficult. Keeping Windows secure is comparatively easy compared to other Operating Systems, just let Auto-Update take care of it and you don't even notice the patches happen if you don't want to notice them.
I'm quite sure that Windows 2000/XP has become one of the easiest to patch operating systems. It is also fast on route to becoming one of the most secure operating systems for the desktop, and this is controversial, but with the number of holes that have been discovered, made massively public and fixed quickly make it likely to be more secure than other Operating Systems. If every Windows machine suddenly booted up with a different OS one morning, I'm sure that OS would have to go through the same level of patches as Windows has had to go through. Whether those patches would be released quicker or slower than with Windows is impossible to say, but I can say pretty safely that they would not be installed as soon after release on those other OSes as they would be on Windows.
Microsoft has managed to build security and a smooth simple patching system out of the fact that it is the dominant OS for desktops and gets targeted a lot by crackers. I doubt other operating systems would stand up to the same onslaught and keep up with patches (both on the developer side and the user side), especially since they tend not to even have automatic updates.
One last point: It's very easy to say that "open source is more secure", actually it's not necessarilly true. Open source projects (like the kind I work on) tend to have bugs that people searching for exploits can find, but the original programmers do not even look at. Sections of code such as a method that has always worked fine could be an exploitable flaw, but that method would never be studied by the developers until it has been exploited and had attention drawn to it, just like in closed-source. Companies that sell closed source software often also have QA teams who's JOB involves looking at those lesser used functions for security flaws, these guys get paid and their whole employment revolves around checking for holes, but even they miss them. I don't see what the argument is for Open Source software being any less full of holes than closed source software, when open source software groups usually don't even employ those kind of people. Sure with OSS, the bugs are fixed quickly by the whole community, but does that mean the users apply the patches any quicker, or that there are less bugs in the first place? I don't think so.
Is there a checksum or CRC check in the firmware loader on the router that keeps you from being able to do that?
:)
Almost certainly. Vendors normally checksum firmware to avoid the possibility of flashing the hardware with corrupt firmware data. However, given Netgear's track record, you could probably flash it with a JPEG file and it'd accept it OK.
This sort of thing makes me wonder what backdoors are in other firmware and software that have not yet been discovered. I'm glad that there are people like SecurityFocus looking out for these exploits. Endless numbers of ADSL modems, routers and other equipment seem to have backdoors in them. I'm glad I route my ADSL through a switch and Slackware
This was invented about the same time as dinner mats and coasters. Duct tape a table mat to the bottom of your laptop for a similar and cheaper effect.
The fact that they went right in Deux Ex 2 was because they were disappointed and frustrated by a game that wasnt anything like as good as it's forebear.
I think game developers should stop worrying about this kind of rubbish and get to worrying about making games entertaining and enthrawling again. The very fact that this sort of thing gets a story is a blatant sign of the times. All is not peachy in the game industry. Give us some novel and interesting games, please.
I happen to like my caps lock key. I still yearn sometimes that shift-lock would come back.
Not only is it a handy key for typing in UPPER CASE LETTERS (duh), which some languages require or advise, but it's also useful in games and things, I like it there around WASD.
You may as well say "Bin the scroll lock key for windows OSes as it's never used! get rid of insert since that's just annoying! Pause/break annoys me too! get rid of that one!"
I like my capslock key. What I don't like is these god damn new keys that I have on this keyboard, where PrintScreen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Insert, Home, PgUp, Delete, End and pgdown are moved down a block so they could fit these damn "suspend", "wake up" and "power" keys in the place of the original printscreen, scroll lock and pause keys. This is SO annoying when I hit printscreen and my machine suspends, or if i hit ctrl+break and it fucking shuts down. Don't screw with my keyboard layout, bastards.
Apple will probably not support ogg. Ogg has no DRM, and iTunes etc. is based around buying stuff before playing it. I don't own an iPod but I assume I know it plays MP3, I just doubt strongly that apple will add ogg support to it when they probably want to push more people towards iTunes and thus earn more revenue. Ogg doesn't really match up with "revenue", so Apple will probably not support it.
That doesn't mean to say that 3rd party hackers won't find a way to put ogg on an iPod, of course.
This is not an outrage. Here are the reasons:
1. The site has to get its money from somewhere.
2. Anything Microsoft says is ignored by the Linux community. Look at
3. Most importantly, the particular ad mentioned here boasts a fair point, and I believe these ads probably provoke more anti-Microsoft sentiment than they stamp out. These ads are just as bad as Linux Today reporting that "Microsoft says this and that, oh no!". It should hopefully spur the Linux community to resolve whatever issue caused Linux to be more expensive to run for 7-11 than a Microsoft OS.
Really, you might as well resent ads for Microsoft products on OSDN. They're there, and as a Microsoft and Linux user who is entitled to his opinion, I like them to be there. It's pointless for Microsoft to advertise on Linux Today because the ads are probably treated with hatred and bile.
Also, Linux Today and the other sites run by internet.com probably use the same ad-cycling routines and show the same ads on every internet.com-owned site.
What I'm trying to say is, I don't read Linux Today and I, as well as most of it's regular readers, probably could not care less about this issue and certainly aren't going to bother to boycott it IF the information that Linux Today publishes is more valuable than Microsoft's dumb ads. If Linux Today publishes worthless articles, people will be happy to go elsewhere, but for some reason people still frequent the site. Maybe the author should not have sold out.
I love this stuff. 2Gb at 22.5mb/s is incredible - you could easilly do a high-res movie on that.
I'm yearning for the absence of all of the moving parts in my machine except for possibly CD/DVD drives. I can't bear the fact that my hard disk has spinning platters and incredibly fine-precision moving heads which could fail at any time (I leave my machine on all the time and consequently I'm now terrified to turn it off in case it'll fail when I power it up again). I want peltier coolers instead of fans, and I want solid state memory instead of hard disks. Once this happens, not only will my machine be ultra-silent, it'll also be much more robust.
It's a shame flash memory still costs so much, but the prices are pretty much where similar sized hard disks were several years ago, so I'm confident that we'll get 40gb flash memory in the next four or five years. God knows where hard disks will be then.
The world really needs a new storage paradigm. Mechanical magnetic storage is the oldest concept still alive in home computing, and is as archaic as the system BIOS. Intel are busy with getting rid of the currently outdated and rubbish BIOS and replacing it with something fancy and new, I just ooze over the same thing happening to data storage. For gods sake, the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in any modern home computer.
Thankfully my significant other plays more games more often than I do. I'm very lucky in this respect. It's great to have a digitally aware relationship.
http://212.61.68.34/rebels/hl2/blackmesa240.jpg
My keyboard looks like this already.
What happened at Chernobyl was an avoidable disaster. The design wasn't "old" per-se, it was perfectly rational. Investigation of the disaster revealed that the meltdown was caused by the operators testing whether - in the event of a reactor shutdown - there would be enough electrical power to operate the reactor safety mechanisms (cooling pumps, etc) before the backup generators were started. They began shut-down of the reactor but it could not be completely shut-down without disabling the emergency core cooling system. So they did that. It was expected that Nothing Bad Would Happen. And probably, nothing bad would have happened, if it wasn't for the fact that the operators then made a sequence of mistakes (which they would have known about had the safety systems been live, or wouldn't have to bother with had they not disabled the automatic shutdown system) that caused the reactor to go critical.
The media forces us to believe that it's real easy to make fission reactors explode, like if you go off for a donut and stop looking at the blinking lights, the thing will blow you, the city and most of the donut clean away while you're out. This is untrue. It takes considerable effort to cause a disaster on the scale of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. A reactor can go for weeks unattended, the reaction is as good as self-regulated due to good design. Safety systems are not based around some huge computer and sensors all over the place, they're an implicit part of the reactor design (although computer monitoring is used on top of that).
Like I said, Chernobyl was the result of some stupid assholes trying to fly a reactor blind. There were emergency cooling systems, emergency monitoring systems, automatic shutdown procedures, all of which were disabled by the operators. Reactors don't just explode at random.
Zealots aside, I agree with this article and the former article. It's been a frequent issue for me when installing many different Linux distributions that:
1. It's not a surprise if my network card works.
2. It's a mild surprise if my sound card works.
3. (up until recently) It'd amaze me if my graphics card worked to its full potential.
Net, sound and graphics are the most important peripherals that should work flawlessly. Sound and graphics especially, as they're the sensory output of your computer, without them you don't know what's going on.
Linux does not have the same quality of driver database as Microsoft's OSes do. This is merely because Microsoft is dominant. Perhaps a sweet way to handle the problem would be to create some kind of abstraction layer that allowed you to use vendor-supplied Windows drivers under Linux, but that is extremely unrealistic, and it'd be slow and bloated (someone will now pipe up and tell me that it is being worked on).
Linux has been given a boost by the recent dominance of particular audio chips from Creative (such as the EMU10K1) and graphics chipsets from ATI and nVidia.
Sadly, Linux drivers are provided mainly by people who have some hardware that doesn't work under Linux. So they start a driver for it, get far enough for the driver to work well enough for their needs, and then leave it to deteriorate over time without any attention paid to it, as they change hardware. End users then get some kind of beta thing that hasnt been worked on for 3 years but still have to use it. This is the hardware manufacturers fault -- Linux devrs dont have the money to buy and reverse-engineer every piece of hardware. They need the specs, and ultimately they need the vendor to make a Linux driver by proxy, as vendors do for Windows.
Currently though, you don't look bad for not making a Linux driver. People don't open the box and say "wtf is this? No linux driver?!", because they morbidly expect Linux support to be limited. In the domain of onboard sound or graphics, or newer hardware, Linux support is the exception rather than the rule. Vendors need some good reason to add Linux support, and it's not up to me to decide what that reason would be. "Thanks" is not good enough.
I should also mention that even if most home Linux users do obtain a driver for some hardware, they'd be at pains to find out how to install/compile the damn thing, especially if it involves recompiling the kernel.
I'm not flaming Linux, I don't need a crock of shit from the zealot crowd telling me I'm an idiot faggot and so on, I'm just being realistic and saying there is work to be done.
What I'd like to see in the future is a Universal Driver Abstraction Layer, some kind of compile-once-run-many virtual machine that allows the same drivers to work on any OS that supports it, the only problem is that OSes make very different demands of the drivers so this may never come into fruition.
A lot of gas stations advise you to switch off your phone before filling up. It is indeed true that they can spark on transmit. The sparks are of course invisible, you won't ever see huge arcs coming off your mobile, but a call in a fuel station is really not a good idea (unless you're filling up with diesel of course :) )
"Scientist" Discovers Light Interference Patterns - Claims Miracle
David Deutsch, physicist at Oxford University, today discovered that when directional monochromatic coherent beams of light, amplified by stimulated emission of radiation, are directed through pinholes and caused to overlap, a "mysterious shadowy nonsense pattern" is observed. He commented that as one adds more pinholes, the shadowy nonsense becomes even more mystical.
His highschool Physics tutor, known to his students Mr. Bradshaw and to his friends and family as Mr. Bradshaw, commented: "Dave was always into physics and all that stuff. He thought it was ace, but the school couldn't afford as much as a light bulb in them days and he was off sick with rubella on the day of our school trip to CERN, and so never got into those laser thingumyjiggies". Until now; The UK government has recently granted Deutsch a $17 million research budget for the further investigation of things people are already aware of, a sum that is belittled by the sales figures for his book "Amazing things to do and then fail to understand", which has shot to position 1,237 in best seller listings and is heralded as "bewilderingly unfounded and lacklustre".
They spent too long on HL2. It should have been released already. They've missed the boat bigtime. The game looks incredible but by the time it comes out it will be
a) Probably an anticlimax
b) Compared with all the other similarly pretty or prettier games that will be out there at the time
Everyone's already masturbating over Far Cry, because it never got the kind of hype that HL2 got and somewhat surprised us, plus it's beautiful. So, will HL2 be worth the wait? And when will we stop hearing hype about it? At this rate it'll turn into Duke Nukem Forever.
The recent "vulnerability" in TCP was not a vulnerability at all -- it was a fault in most implementations of the TCP stack (including the one in Cisco's IOS).
TCP isn't broken. It's just the implementations that are. When a RST is received in the SYN-SENT state, both the sequence number and the acknowledgement number should be tested for validity (ACK field must acknowledge the SYN). Most TCP stacks totally ignore this, some re-use SEQ numbers frequently making it easy to guess the window's position. The hole can be closed with decent validation.
I'm much more for an elegant solution to this, rather than a brainless "hurl encryption at it!" plan which doesn't sound particularly future-proof. There are already reserved fields in TCP which could be adopted to provide better validation of packets to those systems that require more certainty of the legitimacy of a RST. Perhaps we should be using those instead, at least that way we don't have to re-jig the whole thing.
Honestly i doubt the effects of any of this "high technology 10KHz chip" stuff would be noticeable to anybody using the shoes. It's just a gimmick and if they crash or break or whatever they won't suddenly go rock solid or anything. That'd require some kind of extremely clever membrane technology. Not a dumb pump with a vibe motor powering it.
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There's some bloody punctuation. Come back when you've learned to use it mIRCboy.
Oh no, how will we survive? Better just not push the hardware market anywhere and let the whole IT industry die on its arse even more than it is already. Gimme a break and wake up. Supply and demand.
IE starts up and renders faster than mozilla. Do a benchmark. Hell, my computer starts up faster than mozilla.
And mozilla needs 4 gigs and a hyperthreading P4 to start in under 4 seconds.
Thanks for a good reply, it's rare I get these :)
I have been informed that Microsoft have made substantial improvements to Microsoft Networking (what was once SMB, but not anymore I guess) to make it several times faster than before. I realise that for people like Samba to implement this new technology may cause them to infringe on patents. But Samba aren't doing it for monetary gain, Microsoft rarely stamps on interoperability between foreign OSes and its own on purpose (in fact, with the release of NT it substantially improved intercompatibility). What I disagree with in your post is the assertion that Microsoft will force companies to migrate to an all-Microsoft system simply to increase communication speeds for Windows clients. I doubt this will happen. This would require a massive outlay, and any company that currently uses a heavy amount of Windows Networking is currently using Microsoft Domain Controllers and Exchange servers anyway, so no gains for MS there.
Your point is well made, the capability for better interoperability will make users and system administrators want to create systems that can benefit from it, however I'm unsure of the real gains when we factor in the migration costs (not just monetary, but time and resources). It is more likely that companies would choose not to upgrade while Microsoft is still supporting their current software, and would use a system that provides the highest interoperability between all client operating systems. If Longhorn can provide services to Macs and Linux then it would be beneficial to migrate to Longhorn. However, if Longhorn can provide services to Macs and Linux then it completely invalidates the argument about Microsoft locking down interoperability.
Despite what you say, it doesn't make the article any less FUDdy or reactionist. I can't stand eWeek, where they talk computers and call XML a powerful "scripting language".