"It seems Microsoft is realizing the flaws in its own development model and is trying to fix it"
Did you read the issues around Vista that were posted on Microsoft employee blogs by Microsoft employees?
And this was AFTER Jim Allchin told Gates the thing would never be done if they didn't change their methods.
So they changed their methods.
And what happened was that an incredibly broken testing system was put in place which was so badly broken that it delayed Vista release for months, while the development managers certified test builds as "Approved" even when they failed numerous - possibly even ALL - tests.
The problem with Microsoft is their PEOPLE - not their system. Their corporate culture is broken - and broken beyond repair as long as Gates and Ballmer are running the show. The stockholders should be in revolt - if they knew anything about the company.
The bottom line is that Vista has twice the code in it that Linux does - and does not do twice as much (unless you count the ridiculous DRM checking mechanisms, I suppose.) There's no way one company can develop a system with even more code in it and come up with something that works. I doubt it's even feasible for the Linux community unless the industry comes up with better development and testing methods. When Linux hits the amount of lines of code in Vista, it will be BETTER than Vista - but even I doubt whether it will be adequately reliable for normal use.
The problem is that the industry - especially Microsoft (and with an even worse attitude) - is pushing the limits of the current software development technology. The result is what we see everywhere: "Nothing works and nobody cares."
When it's released, it will only have 7 of the 9 major features that were promised when they announced it...
And six of them will have been gutted in capability.
OR there will be 7 to 9 times the different versions of the OS - from the "Kiddie Version" (for CEOs) to the "Teen Version" to the "Young Adult" version to "Home Basic" to "Home More Than Basic" to "Home Standard" to "Home Premium" to "Pro Basic" to "Pro More Than Basic" to "Pro Pro" to "Pro Extreme" to "Pro Ultimate" to "Pro Server Basic" to "Pro Server Better Than Basic" to "Pro Server Pro".
OR it will actually take 7 to 9 years to actually get it out the door and they're acknowledging that now but in a concealed way so they don't get sued for promising it in 3 years.
OR in some bizarre fashion, the letters "ME" somehow translate to the number 7 in Bill's twisted mind. Oh, wait, Vista is already "XP ME", isn't it?
If I remember correctly, I did look at the use of proxy POP utilities, but as I recall there was some issue that made it not feasible. And in any event, it wouldn't have helped in getting his Contacts out of Outlook, which is the second issue he had.
Also, the client was pinching pennies on me, so I couldn't go as far as to just write a VBA program to extract the stuff. There were a couple options I might have used but I didn't have the time. especially since there was no guarantee they would work.
We tried several commercial programs that promised to extract emails and contacts, but they weren't effective. Either the stuff wouldn't come out of Outlook and Outlook Express or come out properly and completely, or once out, it wouldn't import properly into Thunderbird for some unknown reason.
The Contacts in particular were a disaster. Thunderbird's contacts import method is utterly braindead. Trying to line up the fields between the two sides in the interface was nearly impossible. I don't know who thought up that interface, but they're complete idiots.
I'm contemplating taking the available Perl packages and trying to write a utility that does it right. Thunderbird really needs that capability to attract more users from Outlook.
and hasn't told Microsoft about it, this merely indicates that the FBI is either being inefficient again (unless of course they used the methods developed by the NSA) or is once again on the tail end of an intra-agency dispute - meaning that the NSA deliberately didn't tell them how to crack Windows because the NSA is using that method to crack the FBI's computers...:-)
In this current posting, however, the issue is/.'s inability to remember what's on the front page for 24 hours...
Or maybe the FBI just cracked/. and reposted the article themselves to let us know in order to make us FEEL THE FEAR...:-)
Or maybe the moron who reposted the article secretly works for the FBI, monitoring the rest of the morons on Slashdot....:-) And now, being a moron, he has blown his cover...:-)
most of the comments were already dealt with on the blog site in response to comments there.
Bottom line: the test was valid, if limited in geographical scope and number of network paths solely because the guy isn't capable of doing more.
Also, while he suspects Microsoft is doing this to save money, he cannot of course prove that it isn't simple stupidity with spam filters or whatever on the part of the traditionally moronic Microsoft staff.
Still, with Microsoft, stupidity tends to equate with Bill Gates desire to make money by cutting corners to his customers. So the guy may be right about the motivation and the methods being used.
The bottom line: Hotmail sucks. Like most Microsoft products.
I'm so surprised.
Like one couldn't tell by the simple fact that you can't get your email OUT of Hotmail when you want to switch to another method. I had a client who wanted me to do that. We managed to get Thunderbird to download new email from Hotmail, but getting the old stuff out via Outlook Express or Outlook was nearly impossible. (To be fair to Microsoft - barely, part of that was the screwed up Outlook installation he had.)
Don't store your passwords in ANY password manager, and especially do not allow Web site to "remember you." Enter your passwords every time you go to a site that needs them.
This means using passwords you can remember, rather than truly strong random passwords, which is a security problem in itself. But with some initial judicial selection of a manual password generation algorithm, this should be doable for most people. If you have a limited set of passwords you use frequently, especially for low value applications like Web sites, and they are generated by a manual algorithm that produces half decent strength passwords, you don't need a password manager.
Reserve your high strength passwords for your personal system, make sure they're different from anything you use externally to your system such as Web sites, and put them on an encrypted USB key or encrypted file on your system so they can't be obtained even by a hack.
"It applies to "U.S. persons," a category including American citizens. It had not previously been disclosed -- and still hasn't -- that U.S. persons are abetting the Iraqi insurgency, nor that Iraqi insurgents have property in the United States, raising questions about who in fact the order targets.
"The part where they reserve lots of discretion to themselves is the list of conditions that goes beyond determination of acts of violence. 'Threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq,' that could be anything," says Ken Mayer, an expert in executive orders and a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "Think of the possibilities: it could be charities that send a small amount of money (to groups linked to) the insurgency, or it could be the government of Iran that has assets in the U.S. and has money that flows through a U.S. bank or something like that."
The order permits the targeting of those who aid someone else whose assets have been blocked under the order -- wittingly or not. And under Section Five, the government does not have to disclose which organizations are subject to having their assets frozen..."
The scope of the order has raised civil-liberties concerns. "Certainly it is highly constitutionally questionable to empower the government to destroy someone economically without giving notice," says Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. "This is so sweeping it's staggering. I've never seen anything so broad that it expands beyond terrorism, beyond seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower or intimidate a population. This covers stabilization in Iraq. I suppose you could issue an executive order about stabilization in Afghanistan as well. And it goes beyond even attempting violence, to cover those who pose 'a significant risk' of violence. Suppose Congress passed a law saying you've committed a crime if there's significant risk that you might commit a crime."
Representatives from the ACLU are still studying the executive order. But preliminarily, says spokeswoman Liz Rose, the order appears to expand the assets-seizure provisions of the Patriot Act, known as Section 806, to organizations linked to Iraqi insurgent groups. Much like the order, Section 806 allows the government to seize assets of banned organizations without prior notice and without a conviction of involvement in banned activity. "It is by far the most significant change (in the law) of which political organizations need to be aware," the ACLU wrote in 2002, contending that the vagueness of Section 806 potentially implicates legitimate political protest as well as material support for terrorism. "
I buy a hammer, use it, then give it to someone as a gift - and go to jail because my "gift" prevents you from selling another hammer.
This is the ultimate logic of the concept of "intellectual property" - wherein it is revealed that the purpose of IP is the control of everybody else, not the improvement of the species by "stimulating invention".
The bottom line: human chimpanzees simply CANNOT allow anyone else freedom of action because they believe it threatens their existence.
This is what you get when you couple conceptual processing and imagination to a primate emotional structure.
Well, monkeys, you're right. We Transhumans DO threaten your existence - and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
What do they mean by "fail"? To me, hard drive failure means the frickin' thing won't start up at all or spin or function - i.e., hardware failure, either electronic or mechanical.
I don't understand what they're talking about. When was the last time your hard drive just "lost data"? Maybe there was a screwup in the file system, okay. Maybe that WAS caused by this "magnetic avalanche". But just "lost data"?
I don't know anybody who simply "loses files" WITHOUT the hard drive being on the verge of mechanical failure.
As I read this piece, they've determined a way to make hard drive recording more reliable. Fine. That has absolutely NOTHING to do with solving the "main cause of hard drive failure" which is and will remain electronic or mechanical failure resulting from age, heat, power disruptions and other gross physical causes.
I agree - this is a truly STUPID AND OLD argument.
Ninety nine percent of those distros nobody has ever heard of - even those who know Linux have never heard of them. That someone NEW to Linux would ever hear of them is equally unlikely.
The only Linux distros new users need to concern themselves with are those that provide significant repositories and support options.
And that means maybe five or ten distros at the most - those with enough clout to have any mindshare at all.
Anybody who pulls up this stupid argument as a reason why Linux is not on everybody's desktop is a Windows shill - plain and simple. That or simply an idiot (and there are no lack of idiots in the Linux community as well as the Windows community.)
From Spectrum-Computer here in San Francisco (and there are cheaper places down the peninsula - these guys are right in town):
Intel Basic Office Workstation $249:
INTEL CELERON 331 2.66GHz 256K LGA775 Mini Case Asus Main Board 512MB DDR2 Memory 80GB SATA 7200RPM HDD Onboard Intel Graphics Media Onboard Audio Onboard LAN 16x DVD-ROM Keyboard + Mouse
Granted you've got to pay extra for the OS - which adds another $100-150 to the price - unless of course you put Linux on it, or already have a Windows OS license you can use. And when you buy Windows from a white box dealer, you get a full OEM install CD - none of this "recovery partition" or "Recovery CD" crap you get from the big retailers.
And Spectrum will put a diskette drive in the box so you can flash your BIOS or flash a RAID BIOS or whatever.
PCs are commodities these days. Buy them that way. Screw the big retailers - whatever you save from their more massive purchasing power and reduced prices will end up costing you later in aggravation and problems when the system fails and you find it harder to recover because of the corners they cut and the customization they did over a white box to "differentiate" themselves.
They've been trying to nail George Galloway, the British MP and one of the leaders of the British antiwar movement, for years now. They've spent millions trying to prove he enriched himself from the oil-for-food program via his charity, the Mariam Appeal.
They've failed miserably.
You may remember Galloway when he testified before the US Congress and ripped them a new one. You can watch that performance here
Tuesday Parliament suspended Galloway for 18 days for defending himself against these spurious, neocon-produced charges. You can see his response to that here
This law is intended to enable George Bush to basically do anything he wants to someone he designates as "undermining the reconstruction of Iraq" - which is a phrase meaning absolutely nothing - and thus anything. While Galloway is not a US citizen and is not subject to this law, the concept clearly emerges directly from the attempted persecution of Galloway by neocons in the US Senate and elsewhere.
The essence of this law is that anyone opposing Bush and the neocons is by their definition a "criminal" and their property can be seized for the benefit of those same neocons.
We need to replace Bush and Cheney with George Galloway and Russia's Putin - we'd finally have two intelligent, straight-talking politicians in the White House instead of these lying, thieving pieces of shit we have now.
Microsoft LET the NSA attempt to crack Vista while it was being developed.
Undoubtedly something similar occurred with Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. This time they admitted it.
So the NSA finds X vulnerabilities - and tells Microsoft about X - n of them - thus insuring that the NSA can bypass Windows security any time (at least until somebody finds the vulnerability independently).
Anybody interested in security - or at least having any secrets some U.S. Federal agency would be interested in - in other words, just about any corporation and government in the world - would be nuts to use Vista now.
It was and is an entirely stupid concept - that the construct of a cell as an individual entity is relevant to the issue of consciousness.
You missed my point entirely - which is that no one questions how a bunch of cells can aggregate into something with more capability than any one cell.
Why, then, is this issue even being mentioned? It should be obvious to anyone with a brain and a comprehension of the relative intelligence levels of the animal kingdom, let alone current neuroscience, to recognize that conglomerations of cells result in increasing complexity and capability.
If he intended to suggest that consciousness is some sort of external physical phenomena - for which there is zero evidence adduced in the article except some individual's "gut feelings" - or that consciousness is an epiphenomena, he should have said so, rather than making a ridiculous statement which is so easily dismissed by simply noting the real world.
My point was that it is this sort of fuzzy thinking that should get him fired.
I will grant, however, that it might well have been the editing by the article writer that made him look THAT stupid. These sort of pieces are not noted for their technical accuracy or conceptual depth.
"Most places unfortunately have just enough IT staff to keep things running."
And there are two reasons for that:
1) First, companies won't pay for proactive support and organization of their systems so they fail less. They pay for "damage control" only.
2) The IT industry produces stuff that is incredibly easy to break due to poor engineering.
Although, as to the latter, I'd say if we produced bridges that were intended to accept connections from any other device on the planet (like cameras, printers, modems, phones, blah blah), and do five million different things other than stand there and carry traffic, we'd probably have bridge collapses every day.
Humans simply aren't good at producing complex devices with multiple purposes. They can produce simple devices with multiple purposes - like a knife - and they can produce a complex device with ONE purpose - like a car (and look at how often cars break) - but they cannot produce a complex device with multiple purposes.
They could if they'd realize their limitations (the Dirty Harry Principle) and start applying computer-aided design technology to engineering computer systems themselves.
But admitting their limitations is something else humans aren't good at. That would make them "inferior" to the next guy over - and that isn't allowed by their primate brains.
Having said all that, Microsoft producing a patch that turns off program uninstallation is clearly one of the dumber things they've done lately - even if it only affects 5% of systems. What next? 5% of systems simply go BSOD on the next patch?
Whoever said that if 5% of any other device failed it would be recalled is correct. Vista was rushed out the door to meet a corporate contract deadline - after it was late by, what, three years? - and clearly it shows.
These assholes know that people do not and have NEVER paid for music. They pay for ACCESS to music. As the Grateful Dead used to say, "The music is free, the concert costs."
The music industry got started by stealing the songs of live performers back in the early 20th Century, paying the performers a pittance, then copyrighting the songs and distributing them on records. Then they pressured the US Congress to pass laws giving them a license to extort money from everyone who listens to music. This is how the music industry started. It's how they operate today.
Now they see that the scam is up with the Internet and new technology, so now they want to go back and shut down EVERY PLACE where music is played so they can restrict everyone to getting music solely from them on their terms.
There's no question that this is extortion - state-sanctioned extortion (the only kind there is outside the Mafia.) An industry that relies on bribes (payola) and buying drugs and whores for their acts while simultaneously extorting money clearly is a criminal enterprise. It's no surprise that the Mafia has been closely connected to the music industry for the last century. Even rap music companies are organized mostly by notorious black drug dealers.
Nice tutorial. I KNOW what a disk cache is - Linux uses the same technology very aggressively. Although on my 512MB machine, I still get a fair amount of swapping periodically because I have a lot of very large directories.
Did you read the articles?
They said there was NO performance enhancement over XP even WITH the huge disk cache. They specifically stated they had given up the notion that performance would be better with Vista than XP. So why bother with Vista? Just to get a large disk cache? If you don't have twenty programs open at once - which most people don't - where is the benefit?
Also it's because there's too much crap going on with the rest of the OS - all that behind the scenes DRM checking, and other pointless "features" Microsoft insists on cramming into all their OS.
And as for the 4GB "sweet spot", sorry but I'll take the word of the IBM guy who's been testing Vista since day one over your "considered opinion".
And I call doubling the kernel size - for next to no benefit on the end user side - ridiculous. There are plenty of people out there who have reported well over 400MB memory use - as much as 800MB - on bootup with no applications running. In some cases, I suspect this is because they have various things running by default that could be turned off. But clearly the memory usage is excessive over XP even WITHOUT the disk cache.
The bottom line: anybody running a system with 512MB - which is the majority of small business users - cannot use Vista without upgrading to at LEAST 1GB and probably 2GB.
Give it up. Every study that's been done says 1GB is the absolute minimum to run Vista and 2GB for decent performance - and 4GB for "optimum" performance. Not everybody needs optimum performance, of course - that's for gamers and media buffs. But 2GB is the recommendation for Vista for normal use. Your 3GB is probably correct for most power users who aren't gamers or media users.
I've got plenty of babe pictures on my machine already. I don't need to steal anybody else's. Anybody who's in IT should know how to get their own porn and have the bandwidth and hard drive space to do so - not to mention the money to pay for it if they have to. And I don't know who has to - I don't know how these porn sites make any money given all the free samples out there - you could spend days just collecting free stuff - I know I have!
I charge low rates for tech support precisely because I know people don't like paying for tech support. So I don't jack my time up by wasting it searching for porn or anything else on people's machines. Do the job and get out. In some cases, I'm not that efficient in doing a particular task, so I even cut hours off my bill just for that. Clients appreciate that - or at least they don't mind taking advantage - which becomes a problem for me.
However, it is clear that being the cheapest is both not profitable and not respectable. I really should triple or quadruple my rates and engage in the same fraud everybody else does - that they're worth what they're charging.
As somebody once said, everybody is either overpaid or underpaid - and you know who you are. Geek Squad is clearly overpaid, and I'm clearly underpaid.
Slashdot Mirror
"It seems Microsoft is realizing the flaws in its own development model and is trying to fix it"
Did you read the issues around Vista that were posted on Microsoft employee blogs by Microsoft employees?
And this was AFTER Jim Allchin told Gates the thing would never be done if they didn't change their methods.
So they changed their methods.
And what happened was that an incredibly broken testing system was put in place which was so badly broken that it delayed Vista release for months, while the development managers certified test builds as "Approved" even when they failed numerous - possibly even ALL - tests.
The problem with Microsoft is their PEOPLE - not their system. Their corporate culture is broken - and broken beyond repair as long as Gates and Ballmer are running the show. The stockholders should be in revolt - if they knew anything about the company.
The bottom line is that Vista has twice the code in it that Linux does - and does not do twice as much (unless you count the ridiculous DRM checking mechanisms, I suppose.) There's no way one company can develop a system with even more code in it and come up with something that works. I doubt it's even feasible for the Linux community unless the industry comes up with better development and testing methods. When Linux hits the amount of lines of code in Vista, it will be BETTER than Vista - but even I doubt whether it will be adequately reliable for normal use.
The problem is that the industry - especially Microsoft (and with an even worse attitude) - is pushing the limits of the current software development technology. The result is what we see everywhere: "Nothing works and nobody cares."
Yeah, 7 of 9.
When it's released, it will only have 7 of the 9 major features that were promised when they announced it...
And six of them will have been gutted in capability.
OR there will be 7 to 9 times the different versions of the OS - from the "Kiddie Version" (for CEOs) to the "Teen Version" to the "Young Adult" version to "Home Basic" to "Home More Than Basic" to "Home Standard" to "Home Premium" to "Pro Basic" to "Pro More Than Basic" to "Pro Pro" to "Pro Extreme" to "Pro Ultimate" to "Pro Server Basic" to "Pro Server Better Than Basic" to "Pro Server Pro".
OR it will actually take 7 to 9 years to actually get it out the door and they're acknowledging that now but in a concealed way so they don't get sued for promising it in 3 years.
OR in some bizarre fashion, the letters "ME" somehow translate to the number 7 in Bill's twisted mind. Oh, wait, Vista is already "XP ME", isn't it?
If I remember correctly, I did look at the use of proxy POP utilities, but as I recall there was some issue that made it not feasible. And in any event, it wouldn't have helped in getting his Contacts out of Outlook, which is the second issue he had.
Also, the client was pinching pennies on me, so I couldn't go as far as to just write a VBA program to extract the stuff. There were a couple options I might have used but I didn't have the time. especially since there was no guarantee they would work.
We tried several commercial programs that promised to extract emails and contacts, but they weren't effective. Either the stuff wouldn't come out of Outlook and Outlook Express or come out properly and completely, or once out, it wouldn't import properly into Thunderbird for some unknown reason.
The Contacts in particular were a disaster. Thunderbird's contacts import method is utterly braindead. Trying to line up the fields between the two sides in the interface was nearly impossible. I don't know who thought up that interface, but they're complete idiots.
I'm contemplating taking the available Perl packages and trying to write a utility that does it right. Thunderbird really needs that capability to attract more users from Outlook.
and hasn't told Microsoft about it, this merely indicates that the FBI is either being inefficient again (unless of course they used the methods developed by the NSA) or is once again on the tail end of an intra-agency dispute - meaning that the NSA deliberately didn't tell them how to crack Windows because the NSA is using that method to crack the FBI's computers...:-)
/.'s inability to remember what's on the front page for 24 hours...
/. and reposted the article themselves to let us know in order to make us FEEL THE FEAR...:-)
In this current posting, however, the issue is
Or maybe the FBI just cracked
Or maybe the moron who reposted the article secretly works for the FBI, monitoring the rest of the morons on Slashdot....:-) And now, being a moron, he has blown his cover...:-)
most of the comments were already dealt with on the blog site in response to comments there.
Bottom line: the test was valid, if limited in geographical scope and number of network paths solely because the guy isn't capable of doing more.
Also, while he suspects Microsoft is doing this to save money, he cannot of course prove that it isn't simple stupidity with spam filters or whatever on the part of the traditionally moronic Microsoft staff.
Still, with Microsoft, stupidity tends to equate with Bill Gates desire to make money by cutting corners to his customers. So the guy may be right about the motivation and the methods being used.
The bottom line: Hotmail sucks. Like most Microsoft products.
I'm so surprised.
Like one couldn't tell by the simple fact that you can't get your email OUT of Hotmail when you want to switch to another method. I had a client who wanted me to do that. We managed to get Thunderbird to download new email from Hotmail, but getting the old stuff out via Outlook Express or Outlook was nearly impossible. (To be fair to Microsoft - barely, part of that was the screwed up Outlook installation he had.)
Don't store your passwords in ANY password manager, and especially do not allow Web site to "remember you." Enter your passwords every time you go to a site that needs them.
This means using passwords you can remember, rather than truly strong random passwords, which is a security problem in itself. But with some initial judicial selection of a manual password generation algorithm, this should be doable for most people. If you have a limited set of passwords you use frequently, especially for low value applications like Web sites, and they are generated by a manual algorithm that produces half decent strength passwords, you don't need a password manager.
Reserve your high strength passwords for your personal system, make sure they're different from anything you use externally to your system such as Web sites, and put them on an encrypted USB key or encrypted file on your system so they can't be obtained even by a hack.
here and here.
"It applies to "U.S. persons," a category including American citizens. It had not previously been disclosed -- and still hasn't -- that U.S. persons are abetting the Iraqi insurgency, nor that Iraqi insurgents have property in the United States, raising questions about who in fact the order targets.
"The part where they reserve lots of discretion to themselves is the list of conditions that goes beyond determination of acts of violence. 'Threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq,' that could be anything," says Ken Mayer, an expert in executive orders and a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "Think of the possibilities: it could be charities that send a small amount of money (to groups linked to) the insurgency, or it could be the government of Iran that has assets in the U.S. and has money that flows through a U.S. bank or something like that."
The order permits the targeting of those who aid someone else whose assets have been blocked under the order -- wittingly or not. And under Section Five, the government does not have to disclose which organizations are subject to having their assets frozen..."
The scope of the order has raised civil-liberties concerns. "Certainly it is highly constitutionally questionable to empower the government to destroy someone economically without giving notice," says Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. "This is so sweeping it's staggering. I've never seen anything so broad that it expands beyond terrorism, beyond seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower or intimidate a population. This covers stabilization in Iraq. I suppose you could issue an executive order about stabilization in Afghanistan as well. And it goes beyond even attempting violence, to cover those who pose 'a significant risk' of violence. Suppose Congress passed a law saying you've committed a crime if there's significant risk that you might commit a crime."
Representatives from the ACLU are still studying the executive order. But preliminarily, says spokeswoman Liz Rose, the order appears to expand the assets-seizure provisions of the Patriot Act, known as Section 806, to organizations linked to Iraqi insurgent groups. Much like the order, Section 806 allows the government to seize assets of banned organizations without prior notice and without a conviction of involvement in banned activity. "It is by far the most significant change (in the law) of which political organizations need to be aware," the ACLU wrote in 2002, contending that the vagueness of Section 806 potentially implicates legitimate political protest as well as material support for terrorism. "
I buy a hammer, use it, then give it to someone as a gift - and go to jail because my "gift" prevents you from selling another hammer.
This is the ultimate logic of the concept of "intellectual property" - wherein it is revealed that the purpose of IP is the control of everybody else, not the improvement of the species by "stimulating invention".
The bottom line: human chimpanzees simply CANNOT allow anyone else freedom of action because they believe it threatens their existence.
This is what you get when you couple conceptual processing and imagination to a primate emotional structure.
Well, monkeys, you're right. We Transhumans DO threaten your existence - and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
Have a nice day, Bonzo.
"Main causes of drive failure"?
What do they mean by "fail"? To me, hard drive failure means the frickin' thing won't start up at all or spin or function - i.e., hardware failure, either electronic or mechanical.
I don't understand what they're talking about. When was the last time your hard drive just "lost data"? Maybe there was a screwup in the file system, okay. Maybe that WAS caused by this "magnetic avalanche". But just "lost data"?
I don't know anybody who simply "loses files" WITHOUT the hard drive being on the verge of mechanical failure.
As I read this piece, they've determined a way to make hard drive recording more reliable. Fine. That has absolutely NOTHING to do with solving the "main cause of hard drive failure" which is and will remain electronic or mechanical failure resulting from age, heat, power disruptions and other gross physical causes.
I agree - this is a truly STUPID AND OLD argument.
Ninety nine percent of those distros nobody has ever heard of - even those who know Linux have never heard of them. That someone NEW to Linux would ever hear of them is equally unlikely.
The only Linux distros new users need to concern themselves with are those that provide significant repositories and support options.
And that means maybe five or ten distros at the most - those with enough clout to have any mindshare at all.
Anybody who pulls up this stupid argument as a reason why Linux is not on everybody's desktop is a Windows shill - plain and simple. That or simply an idiot (and there are no lack of idiots in the Linux community as well as the Windows community.)
From Spectrum-Computer here in San Francisco (and there are cheaper places down the peninsula - these guys are right in town):
Intel Basic Office Workstation $249:
INTEL CELERON 331 2.66GHz 256K LGA775
Mini Case
Asus Main Board
512MB DDR2 Memory
80GB SATA 7200RPM HDD
Onboard Intel Graphics Media
Onboard Audio
Onboard LAN
16x DVD-ROM
Keyboard + Mouse
Upgrades as:
Intel Pentium4 631 3.0Ghz 2M LGA775 $289
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz 800MHz 2MB LGA775 $350
Want something a little more powerful - try an AMD solution:
AMD Value and Performance 64-bit Solutions $309
AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.6GHz AM2 128K L2 Cache
Asus M2NBP-VM nVidia Quadro NVS 210S & nForce 430B AM2 Motherboard
Mid-Tower ATX Case
1G DDR2 Memory
160GB SATA2 7200RPM HDD
Onboard AMD Graphic support DVI
Onboard High Definition Sound
Onboard Gigabit LAN
16x DVD-ROM
Upgrades as:
AMD Athlon64 3500+ 2.2GHz AM2 512K L2 Cache $350
AMD Athlon64x2 3800+ 2.0GHz AM2 512K L2 Cache $399
Granted you've got to pay extra for the OS - which adds another $100-150 to the price - unless of course you put Linux on it, or already have a Windows OS license you can use. And when you buy Windows from a white box dealer, you get a full OEM install CD - none of this "recovery partition" or "Recovery CD" crap you get from the big retailers.
And Spectrum will put a diskette drive in the box so you can flash your BIOS or flash a RAID BIOS or whatever.
PCs are commodities these days. Buy them that way. Screw the big retailers - whatever you save from their more massive purchasing power and reduced prices will end up costing you later in aggravation and problems when the system fails and you find it harder to recover because of the corners they cut and the customization they did over a white box to "differentiate" themselves.
They've been trying to nail George Galloway, the British MP and one of the leaders of the British antiwar movement, for years now. They've spent millions trying to prove he enriched himself from the oil-for-food program via his charity, the Mariam Appeal.
They've failed miserably.
You may remember Galloway when he testified before the US Congress and ripped them a new one. You can watch that performance here
Tuesday Parliament suspended Galloway for 18 days for defending himself against these spurious, neocon-produced charges. You can see his response to that here
This law is intended to enable George Bush to basically do anything he wants to someone he designates as "undermining the reconstruction of Iraq" - which is a phrase meaning absolutely nothing - and thus anything. While Galloway is not a US citizen and is not subject to this law, the concept clearly emerges directly from the attempted persecution of Galloway by neocons in the US Senate and elsewhere.
The essence of this law is that anyone opposing Bush and the neocons is by their definition a "criminal" and their property can be seized for the benefit of those same neocons.
We need to replace Bush and Cheney with George Galloway and Russia's Putin - we'd finally have two intelligent, straight-talking politicians in the White House instead of these lying, thieving pieces of shit we have now.
Microsoft LET the NSA attempt to crack Vista while it was being developed.
Undoubtedly something similar occurred with Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. This time they admitted it.
So the NSA finds X vulnerabilities - and tells Microsoft about X - n of them - thus insuring that the NSA can bypass Windows security any time (at least until somebody finds the vulnerability independently).
Anybody interested in security - or at least having any secrets some U.S. Federal agency would be interested in - in other words, just about any corporation and government in the world - would be nuts to use Vista now.
I am entirely well aware of the issue.
It was and is an entirely stupid concept - that the construct of a cell as an individual entity is relevant to the issue of consciousness.
You missed my point entirely - which is that no one questions how a bunch of cells can aggregate into something with more capability than any one cell.
Why, then, is this issue even being mentioned? It should be obvious to anyone with a brain and a comprehension of the relative intelligence levels of the animal kingdom, let alone current neuroscience, to recognize that conglomerations of cells result in increasing complexity and capability.
If he intended to suggest that consciousness is some sort of external physical phenomena - for which there is zero evidence adduced in the article except some individual's "gut feelings" - or that consciousness is an epiphenomena, he should have said so, rather than making a ridiculous statement which is so easily dismissed by simply noting the real world.
My point was that it is this sort of fuzzy thinking that should get him fired.
I will grant, however, that it might well have been the editing by the article writer that made him look THAT stupid. These sort of pieces are not noted for their technical accuracy or conceptual depth.
"If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, it can't think. Why should two brain cells think? Or 2 million?"
How can they walk around on two legs, you moron?
Seriously, you have to wonder how someone this stupid has a job anywhere, let alone in science or medicine. He should be in Bush's Cabinet.
This is probably why the latest Microsoft patch disables the Program Uninstall capability of Vista...:-)
In other words, it's an UNPATCHED Vista bug.
Thank you for clarifying how good Vista is.
"Most places unfortunately have just enough IT staff to keep things running."
And there are two reasons for that:
1) First, companies won't pay for proactive support and organization of their systems so they fail less. They pay for "damage control" only.
2) The IT industry produces stuff that is incredibly easy to break due to poor engineering.
Although, as to the latter, I'd say if we produced bridges that were intended to accept connections from any other device on the planet (like cameras, printers, modems, phones, blah blah), and do five million different things other than stand there and carry traffic, we'd probably have bridge collapses every day.
Humans simply aren't good at producing complex devices with multiple purposes. They can produce simple devices with multiple purposes - like a knife - and they can produce a complex device with ONE purpose - like a car (and look at how often cars break) - but they cannot produce a complex device with multiple purposes.
They could if they'd realize their limitations (the Dirty Harry Principle) and start applying computer-aided design technology to engineering computer systems themselves.
But admitting their limitations is something else humans aren't good at. That would make them "inferior" to the next guy over - and that isn't allowed by their primate brains.
Having said all that, Microsoft producing a patch that turns off program uninstallation is clearly one of the dumber things they've done lately - even if it only affects 5% of systems. What next? 5% of systems simply go BSOD on the next patch?
Whoever said that if 5% of any other device failed it would be recalled is correct. Vista was rushed out the door to meet a corporate contract deadline - after it was late by, what, three years? - and clearly it shows.
Bill is SUCH a genius!
He looks at Google, sees how much bread they make off advertising.
Then he thinks, "Gee, if I embed advertising in the OS, I can exploit my desktop dominance!"
In other words, it's the "Internet Explorer" strategy again.
Bill has the imagination of a fucking rock.
And people wonder why Microsoft churns out such utter crap.
Look at who's running the store.
Major Disaster is a Special Operations soldier - he works undercover.
His code name is "Vista".
from the State.(Well, YOU are - I'm not.)
What's that line? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...shame on...won't get fooled again..."
Suckers.
It's not just about the royalty money.
These assholes know that people do not and have NEVER paid for music. They pay for ACCESS to music. As the Grateful Dead used to say, "The music is free, the concert costs."
The music industry got started by stealing the songs of live performers back in the early 20th Century, paying the performers a pittance, then copyrighting the songs and distributing them on records. Then they pressured the US Congress to pass laws giving them a license to extort money from everyone who listens to music. This is how the music industry started. It's how they operate today.
Now they see that the scam is up with the Internet and new technology, so now they want to go back and shut down EVERY PLACE where music is played so they can restrict everyone to getting music solely from them on their terms.
There's no question that this is extortion - state-sanctioned extortion (the only kind there is outside the Mafia.) An industry that relies on bribes (payola) and buying drugs and whores for their acts while simultaneously extorting money clearly is a criminal enterprise. It's no surprise that the Mafia has been closely connected to the music industry for the last century. Even rap music companies are organized mostly by notorious black drug dealers.
The music industry IS a criminal enterprise.
Nice tutorial. I KNOW what a disk cache is - Linux uses the same technology very aggressively. Although on my 512MB machine, I still get a fair amount of swapping periodically because I have a lot of very large directories.
Did you read the articles?
They said there was NO performance enhancement over XP even WITH the huge disk cache. They specifically stated they had given up the notion that performance would be better with Vista than XP. So why bother with Vista? Just to get a large disk cache? If you don't have twenty programs open at once - which most people don't - where is the benefit?
Also it's because there's too much crap going on with the rest of the OS - all that behind the scenes DRM checking, and other pointless "features" Microsoft insists on cramming into all their OS.
And as for the 4GB "sweet spot", sorry but I'll take the word of the IBM guy who's been testing Vista since day one over your "considered opinion".
And I call doubling the kernel size - for next to no benefit on the end user side - ridiculous. There are plenty of people out there who have reported well over 400MB memory use - as much as 800MB - on bootup with no applications running. In some cases, I suspect this is because they have various things running by default that could be turned off. But clearly the memory usage is excessive over XP even WITHOUT the disk cache.
The bottom line: anybody running a system with 512MB - which is the majority of small business users - cannot use Vista without upgrading to at LEAST 1GB and probably 2GB.
Give it up. Every study that's been done says 1GB is the absolute minimum to run Vista and 2GB for decent performance - and 4GB for "optimum" performance. Not everybody needs optimum performance, of course - that's for gamers and media buffs. But 2GB is the recommendation for Vista for normal use. Your 3GB is probably correct for most power users who aren't gamers or media users.
closed source is the only way to go.
Look at Microsoft. First it was the alleged "NSA key" - now they've ADMITTED LETTING the NSA break into Vista - allegedly to "improve the security".
So of course the NSA found X ways to break in - and told Microsoft about X minus n of them.
Morons.
Anybody with anything whatever to hide who uses Vista now has to be a complete moron.
I've got plenty of babe pictures on my machine already. I don't need to steal anybody else's. Anybody who's in IT should know how to get their own porn and have the bandwidth and hard drive space to do so - not to mention the money to pay for it if they have to. And I don't know who has to - I don't know how these porn sites make any money given all the free samples out there - you could spend days just collecting free stuff - I know I have!
I charge low rates for tech support precisely because I know people don't like paying for tech support. So I don't jack my time up by wasting it searching for porn or anything else on people's machines. Do the job and get out. In some cases, I'm not that efficient in doing a particular task, so I even cut hours off my bill just for that. Clients appreciate that - or at least they don't mind taking advantage - which becomes a problem for me.
However, it is clear that being the cheapest is both not profitable and not respectable. I really should triple or quadruple my rates and engage in the same fraud everybody else does - that they're worth what they're charging.
As somebody once said, everybody is either overpaid or underpaid - and you know who you are. Geek Squad is clearly overpaid, and I'm clearly underpaid.