I know this will make me unpopular here, but a feature primarily useful to gamers also falls under the category of not very interesting. Go outside and play some ball or something instead.
Okay, maybe some GIS folks want DirectX10 too, but that's it. Other graphics goons all use Macs already anyway.
> "The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is being stripped away." Who is this Bill Thompson bozo anyway? Does he even have the vaguest idea of what IP is? It's just pure idocy to even mention IP unless he thinks Vista is somehow not fully supporting it (which TFA doesn't).
And as for our freedoms, Vista attempts (probably unsuccessfully) to enforce copyrights on content protected with DRM. It doesn't refuse to play non-DRM protected content though, does it? If consumers want to purchase DRM-protected content and purchase Vista and overpriced hardware to view it, that's just the market at work. Likely both Microsoft and the record/movie industries will lose a few customers who switch to linux/mac or simply delay upgrading. And considering Vista doesn't seem to have any remotely interesting new features (no, the flashy mac-like GUI isn't remotely interesting), it's not like Microsoft is forcing customers to accept DRM in order to get other stuff they actually want.
Not that I don't suspect Vista might not also send your personal information over the internet without your consent or even send information about the content you play to the MPAA/RIAA to attempt to detect piracy, but until someone posts tcpdump logs demonstrating something like that, this is all just bullshit.
TFA is just an alarmist piece trying to rally the support of those who don't understand technology. It's crap like this that makes the MPAA/RIAA's case for them. Vista still supports all the IP-based communication that every other OS supports. It simply supports some new content 'features' that customers probably don't consider 'features' at all. The alternative, of course, is simply not supporting such content, but shouldn't the user get to decide if they want to purchase DRM-protected content in the first place? It's really not Microsoft's job to oppose DRM, it's that of the consumer.
It sounds to me like it all boils down to 1 misstep: sending spam! While the official definition of spam under the CAN-SPAM act and other regulations may be a bit more hazey, most businesses sending mass mailings pretty much know that 90% of the recipients don't want it.
1. Ignoring "unsubscribe" requests.
90% of the time, when I sned an unsubscribe request it's because I never subscribed in the first place and that message gets the "This Is Spam" flag even after I've sent my unsubscribe request. 2. List "repurposing."
That's not mistakenly being labeled spam. That's real, honest-to-goodnes spam. 3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users' responses.
Opt-out isn't the default? Yup, that's spam. 4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
Okay, so this one really is a bit unfortunate if the company's machine got hacked and they weren't the ones sending the spam from that IP. But why didn't the firewall block SMTP outbout except for specified mail servers? 5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
Old mailing list? Spam necessarily involves computers. Use them for a bit of change control. If you sent it and I didn't want it, that's spam! 6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
Just like number 4, if you've got enough money to run a commercial mailing list, you've got enough money to pay your web programmers to do it right. This would be an unfortunate mistake, but hardley unavoidable. 7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.
Also unfortunate, but isn't there an implied warrenty of merchantability on services? If you pay a company to manage mailings and they ruin your good name/e-mail address/IP, wouldn't you be entitled to at least a refund and possibly damages?
More importantly, how do you think your neighbors would feel knowing you have a large tank of highly explosive hydrogen gas in a silo next to their house?
> Oops, you blew it!
Actually, I bought a house recently, so I'm not opposed to an influx of demand for property. Despite my ulterior motives and recent weather, CO really is a nice place to live.
> Yes. Its called vmware server the paid version:)
What? No. Shutup. VMWare Server let's an administrator such as myself do that, but what I need is a nice, friendly UI for users. Something like a web form where a user tells it that she needs a cluster with 16 nodes for production. The software then provisions 16 VMs with exclusive access to the hardware, boots them, and opens an NX session to the fisrt on. If the user asked for a development cluster instead, they'd it would do the same thing, except it would let multiple nodes run on the same hardware. I can't have users messing with all the complexity of VMWare server. Actually, that doesn't sound to hard to write. XEN would be scriptable via a CGI. I assume the KVM userspace tools are likewise scritable.
> I'm wondering what effect this will have on paralell computing / clustering. Probably none, as VMs and clustering are bascially opposites. Clustering is using multiple computers as one, virtualization is using one computer as many.
The two uses for clusters are high-performance computing (MPI/OpenMP) and high availability through redundancy (Microsoft Cluster Services). In the first case, 2 VMs running on the same hardware don't have any more computing cycles than a single node. (Acutally, it has less since virtualization introduces some overhead even with hardware support.) In the second case, 2 VMs running on the same hardware aren't any more tollerant of hardware failures than one.
The one cross-over use I can think of is provisioning. Right now I support multiple groups that use clusters. Each group has their own cluster because they don't like to share. We don't even use batch scheduling like PBS because users find it too complicated and prefer to have their own hardware and coordinate by e-mail within a group. This means we have a lot of idle CPUs at times. If there was a nice piece of software that could let me run all of my nodes as VM servers and let users dynamically provision VMs and boot specified images as cluster nodes with different specs for development and production runs, that would be great. Anyone know of such software?
Can anyone think of any other useful examples where you'd use clustering and virtualization together?
> But in my 25 years of living in Colorado, this is the first time that I have seen this much snow on the ground at this time of year.
Actually, we got a big airport-closing dump back in 2003 (I think) that wasn't much later in the year, was it? What's really strange about this year is that we keep getting more storms and cold weather, so the snow stays on the ground. Usually Denver and the Front Range only gets a big dump every few years, but it's 60+ for the week afterwards and it melts quickly. Most of the snow stays in the mountains. That's why Colorado is so great. (Ssh, don't tell.)
As for the skiing, I haven't been since the first big storm two weeks ago, but but it was fabulous in early December, especially for that time of the year.
yes, but until IE6 has 0%, you still need a windows box to text IE6, so you may as well just use IE7 on windows. No serious web developer can get away with only one platform.
The next model will be neither brown nor yellow, but a sort of skin-colored combination. It will also be longer and thicker. It will still have the ability to squirt, but the UI will require that you push the same button repeatedly and rapidly for it to work. Kind of like a double-click, but with a lot more clicks.
This review seemed to overlook two important factors:
1) PostgreSQL has what at first appears to be a very cool "Oject Oriented" feature where one table can inherit from another. Once you spend some time investigate this feature, you find out that referential integrity and derived tables are mutually exclusive. (i.e. if you have a Produce table with a foreign key referencing the Fruit table, but Fruit has two children (Apples and Oranges), the foreign key constraint will prevent you from ever inserting anything into Produce that references a row in Apples or Oranges). This really pisses me off because save that SNAFU, OO would be a really useful feature in Postgre.
2) PostgreSQL support OS account integration. I don't have to have a completely separate set of user account for my database. Even though MySQL gives me fine-grained security, to use it I have to implement and maintain a whole new set of user acconts, which makes it easier to just have the anonymous "ABCApp" account that my app uses to accese the database. I know this is how 99% of database driven apps out there work, but it doesn't change the fact that it's just plain wrong.
In the end, I still use MySQL because I just find that it has better documentation and community support.
So, while the US is facing terrorism that we fund ourselves via our addiction to foreign oil, the president is going on and on about switchgrass, and the entire world may be facing declining oil production while demand continues to increas, technologies that turn trash into power, cheaper solar pannels, and more secure passports will have a LOW impact?
At the same time TV and file sharing over the internet, both problems we already have perfectly good solutions for (Cable, Satellite, movie rental stors, Netflicks, HTTP/FTP protocols) will have a HIGH impact?
Something just doesn't add up.
Why why aren't all the sites that try to make girls who are supposidly just 18 as if they were younger illegal. Even if she really is 18, wouldn't that fit the description of "appears to be, of a mintor engaging in...".
Okay, someone's missing the point here. First off, given the subject, it may have been a bit disrespectful for my original comment to make ANY joke at all, but the joke DID express sympathy for the event of an extinction. I just rolled it up into a/. standard because I wanted something slightly more interesting than "First Post". Doesn't the supposition that the white dolphins are advanced enough to possibly have become our overlords show at least a bit of reverence?
As for a joke over your mother's grave, you might not find it funny because she was your mother, but others (humans of the same species) walking by would probably laugh. Likewise, I think it's not unreasonable that we feel a bit of detachment from the tragic event of an extinction since it's another species on the far side of the world (I'm assuming many of us are from North America). Furthermore, a species is very different than an individual. There are individuals of probably every species that die all the time, far too many to morn. The tragedy of an extinction, especially an intelligent mammal with similarities to ourselves, is less tragic than it is scary, since begs the question about the potential future consequences of human activity on the environment and our own species.
As for the intelligence of the/. reader, I'd have to vote that it's lacking. Every time I post something serious, I'm lucky to get one or two replies. When I post a stupid joke, the thread is huge.
> I keep on assuming the TSA isn't a government agency run by the retarded and/or blind.
Associating blindness and retardation with a simple lack of common sense is insulting to the retarded and blind. And in the TSA's defence, even though I don't like their policies and I don't think they're effective, I haven't got any better ideas about how to keep bombs of planes. Do you?
I don't believe it, but if it were true, imagine the disparity in google rankings after Deano's web site get's slashdotted. And as for "protecting" the business, by NOT mentioning them, he's making the problem worse, since his high-ranked site linking to theirs would probably help the business's rankings.
It's true that we need water to produce Hydrogen, and that it's inefficient, and that using salty sea water may be even more inefficient, but if we have hundreds of thousands of cars spewing out steam instead of CO/CO2, wouldn't that help SOLVE the water scarcity problem? Isn't all that steam going to come down as rain. And since we've transorted it from the coast inland, isn't it more likely to come down over land? Someone will probably chime in with a scathing reply about it not being enought water to be to make a difference, but isn't that what we though about oil-based combustion products.
As long as I have a free program to read/MY/ data, I don't care what the underlying format is. Plus, one thing MS does well is Office, so I think this is a good thing. I'd trust OpenXML over ODF for reliability and speed, just so long as this isn't an attempt to "undo" the opensourceness of OOO.
It may be true that it's just a "Stay in the game" measure, but that won't stop me from buying Intel from now on. I've had horrible heat problems with AMD's 280 and 285 dual-core CPUs and 854 single-core CPUs (at least on Tyan boards, the only ones I've tried), and now they're asking me to pick up a quad core that's slower, hotter, and has to run on a linux-hating (try temp monitoring) Asus board? I think not. This is enough to make me switch to Intel. And when AMD's ahead in the benchmarks, I'm not going to make the mistake of switching back again. Once bitten, twice shy.
Shouldn't they be working on the bandwidth problem first? What's the point of being ABLE to store everything ever made when my bandwidth will be more than saturated just downloading everything as it's released.
That's a great idea. Using a 3D engine to generate fake pictures of Man landing on the moon should be much easier than the last time when they actually filmed the whole thing on earth. Plus, when the uncooperative truth tellers stick evidence of the fake in the video, they can just regenerate it!
Slashdot Mirror
I know this will make me unpopular here, but a feature primarily useful to gamers also falls under the category of not very interesting. Go outside and play some ball or something instead.
Okay, maybe some GIS folks want DirectX10 too, but that's it. Other graphics goons all use Macs already anyway.
> "The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is being stripped away."
Who is this Bill Thompson bozo anyway? Does he even have the vaguest idea of what IP is? It's just pure idocy to even mention IP unless he thinks Vista is somehow not fully supporting it (which TFA doesn't).
And as for our freedoms, Vista attempts (probably unsuccessfully) to enforce copyrights on content protected with DRM. It doesn't refuse to play non-DRM protected content though, does it? If consumers want to purchase DRM-protected content and purchase Vista and overpriced hardware to view it, that's just the market at work. Likely both Microsoft and the record/movie industries will lose a few customers who switch to linux/mac or simply delay upgrading. And considering Vista doesn't seem to have any remotely interesting new features (no, the flashy mac-like GUI isn't remotely interesting), it's not like Microsoft is forcing customers to accept DRM in order to get other stuff they actually want.
Not that I don't suspect Vista might not also send your personal information over the internet without your consent or even send information about the content you play to the MPAA/RIAA to attempt to detect piracy, but until someone posts tcpdump logs demonstrating something like that, this is all just bullshit.
TFA is just an alarmist piece trying to rally the support of those who don't understand technology. It's crap like this that makes the MPAA/RIAA's case for them. Vista still supports all the IP-based communication that every other OS supports. It simply supports some new content 'features' that customers probably don't consider 'features' at all. The alternative, of course, is simply not supporting such content, but shouldn't the user get to decide if they want to purchase DRM-protected content in the first place? It's really not Microsoft's job to oppose DRM, it's that of the consumer.
It sounds to me like it all boils down to 1 misstep: sending spam! While the official definition of spam under the CAN-SPAM act and other regulations may be a bit more hazey, most businesses sending mass mailings pretty much know that 90% of the recipients don't want it.
1. Ignoring "unsubscribe" requests.
90% of the time, when I sned an unsubscribe request it's because I never subscribed in the first place and that message gets the "This Is Spam" flag even after I've sent my unsubscribe request.
2. List "repurposing."
That's not mistakenly being labeled spam. That's real, honest-to-goodnes spam.
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users' responses.
Opt-out isn't the default? Yup, that's spam.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
Okay, so this one really is a bit unfortunate if the company's machine got hacked and they weren't the ones sending the spam from that IP. But why didn't the firewall block SMTP outbout except for specified mail servers?
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
Old mailing list? Spam necessarily involves computers. Use them for a bit of change control. If you sent it and I didn't want it, that's spam!
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
Just like number 4, if you've got enough money to run a commercial mailing list, you've got enough money to pay your web programmers to do it right. This would be an unfortunate mistake, but hardley unavoidable.
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.
Also unfortunate, but isn't there an implied warrenty of merchantability on services? If you pay a company to manage mailings and they ruin your good name/e-mail address/IP, wouldn't you be entitled to at least a refund and possibly damages?
More importantly, how do you think your neighbors would feel knowing you have a large tank of highly explosive hydrogen gas in a silo next to their house?
> Oops, you blew it! Actually, I bought a house recently, so I'm not opposed to an influx of demand for property. Despite my ulterior motives and recent weather, CO really is a nice place to live.
> Yes. Its called vmware server the paid version :)
What? No. Shutup. VMWare Server let's an administrator such as myself do that, but what I need is a nice, friendly UI for users. Something like a web form where a user tells it that she needs a cluster with 16 nodes for production. The software then provisions 16 VMs with exclusive access to the hardware, boots them, and opens an NX session to the fisrt on. If the user asked for a development cluster instead, they'd it would do the same thing, except it would let multiple nodes run on the same hardware. I can't have users messing with all the complexity of VMWare server. Actually, that doesn't sound to hard to write. XEN would be scriptable via a CGI. I assume the KVM userspace tools are likewise scritable.
> I'm wondering what effect this will have on paralell computing / clustering.
Probably none, as VMs and clustering are bascially opposites. Clustering is using multiple computers as one, virtualization is using one computer as many.
The two uses for clusters are high-performance computing (MPI/OpenMP) and high availability through redundancy (Microsoft Cluster Services). In the first case, 2 VMs running on the same hardware don't have any more computing cycles than a single node. (Acutally, it has less since virtualization introduces some overhead even with hardware support.) In the second case, 2 VMs running on the same hardware aren't any more tollerant of hardware failures than one.
The one cross-over use I can think of is provisioning. Right now I support multiple groups that use clusters. Each group has their own cluster because they don't like to share. We don't even use batch scheduling like PBS because users find it too complicated and prefer to have their own hardware and coordinate by e-mail within a group. This means we have a lot of idle CPUs at times. If there was a nice piece of software that could let me run all of my nodes as VM servers and let users dynamically provision VMs and boot specified images as cluster nodes with different specs for development and production runs, that would be great. Anyone know of such software?
Can anyone think of any other useful examples where you'd use clustering and virtualization together?
> But in my 25 years of living in Colorado, this is the first time that I have seen this much snow on the ground at this time of year.
Actually, we got a big airport-closing dump back in 2003 (I think) that wasn't much later in the year, was it? What's really strange about this year is that we keep getting more storms and cold weather, so the snow stays on the ground. Usually Denver and the Front Range only gets a big dump every few years, but it's 60+ for the week afterwards and it melts quickly. Most of the snow stays in the mountains. That's why Colorado is so great. (Ssh, don't tell.)
As for the skiing, I haven't been since the first big storm two weeks ago, but but it was fabulous in early December, especially for that time of the year.
> ...IE7, which has about 50%...
yes, but until IE6 has 0%, you still need a windows box to text IE6, so you may as well just use IE7 on windows. No serious web developer can get away with only one platform.
If you want a bigger list of such tools, type ls /usr/portage/app-forensics/ on any gentoo machine.
The next model will be neither brown nor yellow, but a sort of skin-colored combination. It will also be longer and thicker. It will still have the ability to squirt, but the UI will require that you push the same button repeatedly and rapidly for it to work. Kind of like a double-click, but with a lot more clicks.
This review seemed to overlook two important factors:
1) PostgreSQL has what at first appears to be a very cool "Oject Oriented" feature where one table can inherit from another. Once you spend some time investigate this feature, you find out that referential integrity and derived tables are mutually exclusive. (i.e. if you have a Produce table with a foreign key referencing the Fruit table, but Fruit has two children (Apples and Oranges), the foreign key constraint will prevent you from ever inserting anything into Produce that references a row in Apples or Oranges). This really pisses me off because save that SNAFU, OO would be a really useful feature in Postgre.
2) PostgreSQL support OS account integration. I don't have to have a completely separate set of user account for my database. Even though MySQL gives me fine-grained security, to use it I have to implement and maintain a whole new set of user acconts, which makes it easier to just have the anonymous "ABCApp" account that my app uses to accese the database. I know this is how 99% of database driven apps out there work, but it doesn't change the fact that it's just plain wrong.
In the end, I still use MySQL because I just find that it has better documentation and community support.
So, while the US is facing terrorism that we fund ourselves via our addiction to foreign oil, the president is going on and on about switchgrass, and the entire world may be facing declining oil production while demand continues to increas, technologies that turn trash into power, cheaper solar pannels, and more secure passports will have a LOW impact? At the same time TV and file sharing over the internet, both problems we already have perfectly good solutions for (Cable, Satellite, movie rental stors, Netflicks, HTTP/FTP protocols) will have a HIGH impact? Something just doesn't add up.
Why why aren't all the sites that try to make girls who are supposidly just 18 as if they were younger illegal. Even if she really is 18, wouldn't that fit the description of "appears to be, of a mintor engaging in...".
Okay, someone's missing the point here. First off, given the subject, it may have been a bit disrespectful for my original comment to make ANY joke at all, but the joke DID express sympathy for the event of an extinction. I just rolled it up into a /. standard because I wanted something slightly more interesting than "First Post". Doesn't the supposition that the white dolphins are advanced enough to possibly have become our overlords show at least a bit of reverence?
As for a joke over your mother's grave, you might not find it funny because she was your mother, but others (humans of the same species) walking by would probably laugh. Likewise, I think it's not unreasonable that we feel a bit of detachment from the tragic event of an extinction since it's another species on the far side of the world (I'm assuming many of us are from North America). Furthermore, a species is very different than an individual. There are individuals of probably every species that die all the time, far too many to morn. The tragedy of an extinction, especially an intelligent mammal with similarities to ourselves, is less tragic than it is scary, since begs the question about the potential future consequences of human activity on the environment and our own species.
As for the intelligence of the /. reader, I'd have to vote that it's lacking. Every time I post something serious, I'm lucky to get one or two replies. When I post a stupid joke, the thread is huge.
> I keep on assuming the TSA isn't a government agency run by the retarded and/or blind. Associating blindness and retardation with a simple lack of common sense is insulting to the retarded and blind. And in the TSA's defence, even though I don't like their policies and I don't think they're effective, I haven't got any better ideas about how to keep bombs of planes. Do you?
Sorry, it was a vein attempt at a firstpost and all I could think of on short notice. Feel free to mod it into the abyss.
I, for one, morn the loss of our potential aquatic overlords.
I don't believe it, but if it were true, imagine the disparity in google rankings after Deano's web site get's slashdotted. And as for "protecting" the business, by NOT mentioning them, he's making the problem worse, since his high-ranked site linking to theirs would probably help the business's rankings.
It's true that we need water to produce Hydrogen, and that it's inefficient, and that using salty sea water may be even more inefficient, but if we have hundreds of thousands of cars spewing out steam instead of CO/CO2, wouldn't that help SOLVE the water scarcity problem? Isn't all that steam going to come down as rain. And since we've transorted it from the coast inland, isn't it more likely to come down over land? Someone will probably chime in with a scathing reply about it not being enought water to be to make a difference, but isn't that what we though about oil-based combustion products.
I don't get it. How did you tie the silly string around your gun barrel? Every time I've tried to tie silly string, it breaks.
As long as I have a free program to read /MY/ data, I don't care what the underlying format is. Plus, one thing MS does well is Office, so I think this is a good thing. I'd trust OpenXML over ODF for reliability and speed, just so long as this isn't an attempt to "undo" the opensourceness of OOO.
It may be true that it's just a "Stay in the game" measure, but that won't stop me from buying Intel from now on. I've had horrible heat problems with AMD's 280 and 285 dual-core CPUs and 854 single-core CPUs (at least on Tyan boards, the only ones I've tried), and now they're asking me to pick up a quad core that's slower, hotter, and has to run on a linux-hating (try temp monitoring) Asus board? I think not. This is enough to make me switch to Intel. And when AMD's ahead in the benchmarks, I'm not going to make the mistake of switching back again. Once bitten, twice shy.
Shouldn't they be working on the bandwidth problem first? What's the point of being ABLE to store everything ever made when my bandwidth will be more than saturated just downloading everything as it's released.
That's a great idea. Using a 3D engine to generate fake pictures of Man landing on the moon should be much easier than the last time when they actually filmed the whole thing on earth. Plus, when the uncooperative truth tellers stick evidence of the fake in the video, they can just regenerate it!