IMHO, the biggest problem with bootable distributions is getting WiFi to work automatically -- never mind for your "grandma". For desktop PC's this might work OK.
I'm of the camp that says that the recent AMD Turion's are relatively close to a Pentium M in battery life, the #1 feature in a laptop for many people, including me. Six months ago, before Turions hit retail, Intel Pentium M's were clearly better than anything from AMD in the mobile space that was readily available for purchase -- which, IMHO, is why Apple choose Intel over AMD.
It's important to remember, though, that the Celeron M's are very hamstrung in power consumption compared to their Pentium brothers. They don't scale their CPU frequency -- so my cheap Celeron M laptop only gets 1.5-2.5 hours of battery life, whereas, a Pentium M chip might get me an extra hour or two (for light office / web work) of battery time.
Compare a Turion to a Celeron M and I'm pretty sure that the AMD chip will be miles ahead on power use, and at a similar price.
It's true that this will inconvenience some OSS projects, and it will put a relatively small barrier up for small hardware vendors; however, don't forget about the benefits to end-users of Windows.
The vast majority of blue screens on a Windows 2000/XP system today are from (kernel) mode drivers. With protected memory, programs and user level drivers are not a big problem anymore -- not like the bad old days of Windows 9x. If programs misbehave, they don't bring down the whole system (typically).
Say what you will about this, but don't forget that there are benefits to locking down critical parts of the operating system.
Lately, every Apple story attracts a few of these "should have gone AMD" posts. IMHO, at the time of the choice, ~ 1 year ago, there were two legitimate reasons to choose Intel over AMD.
First and most importantly, Apple needed better laptop chips. And at the time, the Pentium M was miles ahead of the AMD mobile chips (and the IBM PowerPC chips) -- the difference has narrowed, but even then, the Turion 64 chips are relatively untested, relatively unavailable, and relatively higher in power consumption, even today.
Second, is security of supply. AMD is a bit of a risky bet as a sole supplier. With only one active fab, and with AMD running at pretty high utilization, there was and is a much higher risk for Apple that they would not have enough chip supply. Plus, chip supply was one of the major problems with their last chip supplier, IBM.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD fan (and minor stock holder). But at the time, Apple's best choice was Intel, the Pentium M, and the rest of the Centrino package. When Apple starts looking closly at migrating their server lineup to x86; however, I would not be surprised if Opterons started showing up.
I think that it depends entirely on the type of site.
I like to give the example of a local company that was offering some sort of website video streaming software for smaller retail firms. About a year ago, I was forwarded an introductory letter with a demo URL. My default browser, Mozilla, did not load the page properly at all -- I didn't bother to see if it would work in IE or not. Simply put, if you are trying to sell web based software to technical users, you better have the site work in more than just IE.
However, if it's a website of a smaller organization (that isn't technically orientated) that doesn't have the resources to spend on extensive compatibility testing, I will often cut them some slack and try IE.
My virtual private server runs on VZ (which, I gather, is some sort of management suite that runs on top of OpenVZ). It works fine for me; however, I can see that Xen will be the future. As you say, the community is bigger and there are situations where Xen is useful and VZ isn't. For that matter, my VPS host has stopped pushing new VZ licenses and they have instead promoted their new Xen packages. True, there is probably a small hit to resources in going to Xen from VS; but compared to the rest of the crap that runs inside a VPS, the "extra" few MBs used to run the extra kernel is minimal. For my web host, it makes sense since the VZ licenses are not cheap; whereas Xen is free (they've hacked up their own management suite).
It doesn't really matter anymore. Modern flash supposedly supports so many read-write cycles that it would take years of heavy, constant, writes to wear out the flash chips. (Sorry, can't be bothered to dig up a link -- especially while at work. =) ) Other than a swap file, for all practical purposes, it just doesn't matter. Besides, for Windows users, NTFS gives you benefits besides journalling such as security, encryption, and compression.
I read an idea on some forum (maybe here) that suggested that Dell could get the AMD chips that it needs a lot more easily for all parties by buying someone that specializes in Opteron based servers -- the company suggested by the poster was Rackable.
I doubt that Dell will "tarnish" their relationship with Intel by directly selling AMD machines; however, a back-door approach does seem possible to me. Heck, they already sell the CPUs out of their parts store.
Why is "will you Open Source?" one of the top ten questions? Opera has been around for quite a few years, so I assume that they're able to generate a few bucks to pay the bills as a closed source shop. Meanwhile, we already have an excellent open source browser (more like 2-10 depending on exactly what counts as a unique browser). With yet-another-open-source browser, what would be accomplished besides splitting the efforst of OSS-web-browser developers?
You can also receive most local radio stations over FM on the cable company's signal -- at least in my part of the woods. It's pretty good quality -- far better than over the air, and probably better than the low-bit rate MP3 streams.
I suspect that the target user is the home user. Corporate computers already have AV and PDF software, and the bulk of the other stuff is unnecessary.
If one was to only support NT/2K/XP systems (which is pretty reasonable these days) and it was aimed at home users, there's little point in officially supporting (and therefore testing) Windows 2000. Especially since very few home users run Windows 2000 -- and the few that do run W2K probably don't need the Google Pack anyways.
Will Windows Update be able to overwrite the unofficial patch when the official one is released? Does WU do a hash check of some sort to verify if the files that is is replacing are versions that it is allowed to replace?
With the scant details provided, it sounds almost like an SQL Injection vulnerability. It doesn't sound like a problem with SQL Server directly, or else it wouldn't be a RIM specific problem.
Anyway, can't administrators just filter all image attachments out through their AV or other software for the time being?
The (big) computer manufacturers can offset most of the price of an OEM XP Home license with the software that they cram onto the PCs. Have you ever wondered why Gateway, Dell, HP and probably IBM preinstall so much crap that new PC's run slower than my 5 year old celeron? It's because they get a commission (and maybe even a payment per installation) everytime someone upgrades or renews the software.
How much of a commission? I don't know, but I can tell you that sales commissions through the pay-per-referral type web advertising networks are easily 10% on software (more like 25%). I would imagine that the rate for preinstalled software is in the same ballpark.
Do people really upgrade? Well, I would bet that a good % renew the antivirus software.
Can you preinstall 10 pieces of trialware on a Linux box or a non-existant "google box"? Nope. Or, at the least, not nearly as much. So, Windows for Home PCs is a win from the hardware vendors point of view. It's easier to support, "everyone" knows it, it has the "brand" name, and the net cost isn't that high after the potential commissions are factored in.
I don't see why so many people are making anything but positive comments to this action. The wikipedia semi-protecting pages is a great idea. It uses some reason able steps to keep the noise level down -- and it also saves great amounts of admin time, which is (probably) greatly limited. I think of it like/.'s moderation system -- if there was NO moderation, I probably wouldn't read past the articles on/. There is just too much crap that is posted to bother filtering it myself.
This sounds great for generating power where getting a power feed is impractical (and solar wouldn't provide enough or consistent enough power). I think folks are getting caught up in the fact that this is most likely NOT efficient compared to other forms of power generation. How many highways have no lights at night? (Pretty much ALL once you leave the big city). Wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of lighting around tricky and dangerous corners? I know that I'd appreciate it.
It's quite neat to see a full web browser in a cell-phone. However, given the data rates for cell providers in Canada (and the US, I think) it just isn't affordable to load, say, Slashdot on a cell-phone -- few people are THAT addicted to/. =)
Sadly, I'll have to keep saving up for a WiFi capable phone... at least I'll be able to play with it at home.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was directly related to newer versions of Windows. I get the impression from your post that your company uses some sort of semi-standard image. There are a lot more network aware/active bits of software nowadays. Multiple programs checking updates online. Windows probing for new printers and neighbours. Antivirus chatter. Etc.
Or it could be a misconfigured DHCP setup that doesn't provide the correct or enough information causing the machines to send broadcasts. Looking at the specific traffic with a sniffer would probably point out the source quickly.
The connections in are already there. Windows NT/2K/XP all have a telnet service available (but not enabled by default). Yes, it's cleartext, so use a VPN outside your LAN. There is also http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsExec.html" >the psExec utility by sysinternals which is similar and it has some way of easily installing itself over a LAN. I've managed to kill apps remotely that have effectively locked up the Windows GUI by way of an infinite loop or other problem. Granted, this requires a 2nd computer to login remotely.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the biggest problem with bootable distributions is getting WiFi to work automatically -- never mind for your "grandma". For desktop PC's this might work OK.
I'm of the camp that says that the recent AMD Turion's are relatively close to a Pentium M in battery life, the #1 feature in a laptop for many people, including me. Six months ago, before Turions hit retail, Intel Pentium M's were clearly better than anything from AMD in the mobile space that was readily available for purchase -- which, IMHO, is why Apple choose Intel over AMD.
It's important to remember, though, that the Celeron M's are very hamstrung in power consumption compared to their Pentium brothers. They don't scale their CPU frequency -- so my cheap Celeron M laptop only gets 1.5-2.5 hours of battery life, whereas, a Pentium M chip might get me an extra hour or two (for light office / web work) of battery time.
Compare a Turion to a Celeron M and I'm pretty sure that the AMD chip will be miles ahead on power use, and at a similar price.
It's true that this will inconvenience some OSS projects, and it will put a relatively small barrier up for small hardware vendors; however, don't forget about the benefits to end-users of Windows.
The vast majority of blue screens on a Windows 2000/XP system today are from (kernel) mode drivers. With protected memory, programs and user level drivers are not a big problem anymore -- not like the bad old days of Windows 9x. If programs misbehave, they don't bring down the whole system (typically).
Say what you will about this, but don't forget that there are benefits to locking down critical parts of the operating system.
Lately, every Apple story attracts a few of these "should have gone AMD" posts. IMHO, at the time of the choice, ~ 1 year ago, there were two legitimate reasons to choose Intel over AMD.
First and most importantly, Apple needed better laptop chips. And at the time, the Pentium M was miles ahead of the AMD mobile chips (and the IBM PowerPC chips) -- the difference has narrowed, but even then, the Turion 64 chips are relatively untested, relatively unavailable, and relatively higher in power consumption, even today.
Second, is security of supply. AMD is a bit of a risky bet as a sole supplier. With only one active fab, and with AMD running at pretty high utilization, there was and is a much higher risk for Apple that they would not have enough chip supply. Plus, chip supply was one of the major problems with their last chip supplier, IBM.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD fan (and minor stock holder). But at the time, Apple's best choice was Intel, the Pentium M, and the rest of the Centrino package. When Apple starts looking closly at migrating their server lineup to x86; however, I would not be surprised if Opterons started showing up.
I think that it depends entirely on the type of site.
I like to give the example of a local company that was offering some sort of website video streaming software for smaller retail firms. About a year ago, I was forwarded an introductory letter with a demo URL. My default browser, Mozilla, did not load the page properly at all -- I didn't bother to see if it would work in IE or not. Simply put, if you are trying to sell web based software to technical users, you better have the site work in more than just IE.
However, if it's a website of a smaller organization (that isn't technically orientated) that doesn't have the resources to spend on extensive compatibility testing, I will often cut them some slack and try IE.
My virtual private server runs on VZ (which, I gather, is some sort of management suite that runs on top of OpenVZ). It works fine for me; however, I can see that Xen will be the future. As you say, the community is bigger and there are situations where Xen is useful and VZ isn't. For that matter, my VPS host has stopped pushing new VZ licenses and they have instead promoted their new Xen packages. True, there is probably a small hit to resources in going to Xen from VS; but compared to the rest of the crap that runs inside a VPS, the "extra" few MBs used to run the extra kernel is minimal. For my web host, it makes sense since the VZ licenses are not cheap; whereas Xen is free (they've hacked up their own management suite).
Interesting, but who's web connection or web server can load a page in 50 ms? Prety much none.
It doesn't really matter anymore. Modern flash supposedly supports so many read-write cycles that it would take years of heavy, constant, writes to wear out the flash chips. (Sorry, can't be bothered to dig up a link -- especially while at work. =) ) Other than a swap file, for all practical purposes, it just doesn't matter. Besides, for Windows users, NTFS gives you benefits besides journalling such as security, encryption, and compression.
Wow. Crawling video will suck up bandwidth -- for both the search engine and the host. I hope it's worth the effort...
I read an idea on some forum (maybe here) that suggested that Dell could get the AMD chips that it needs a lot more easily for all parties by buying someone that specializes in Opteron based servers -- the company suggested by the poster was Rackable.
I doubt that Dell will "tarnish" their relationship with Intel by directly selling AMD machines; however, a back-door approach does seem possible to me. Heck, they already sell the CPUs out of their parts store.
Why is "will you Open Source?" one of the top ten questions? Opera has been around for quite a few years, so I assume that they're able to generate a few bucks to pay the bills as a closed source shop. Meanwhile, we already have an excellent open source browser (more like 2-10 depending on exactly what counts as a unique browser). With yet-another-open-source browser, what would be accomplished besides splitting the efforst of OSS-web-browser developers?
You can also receive most local radio stations over FM on the cable company's signal -- at least in my part of the woods. It's pretty good quality -- far better than over the air, and probably better than the low-bit rate MP3 streams.
I suspect that the target user is the home user. Corporate computers already have AV and PDF software, and the bulk of the other stuff is unnecessary.
If one was to only support NT/2K/XP systems (which is pretty reasonable these days) and it was aimed at home users, there's little point in officially supporting (and therefore testing) Windows 2000. Especially since very few home users run Windows 2000 -- and the few that do run W2K probably don't need the Google Pack anyways.
Any word if Tivo will EVER come to Canada? I'm itching to get either a DVD Recorder or something similar.... but I want a TIVO!
Would this be easily ported to other BSDs, Linux, or even Windows?
Will Windows Update be able to overwrite the unofficial patch when the official one is released? Does WU do a hash check of some sort to verify if the files that is is replacing are versions that it is allowed to replace?
With the scant details provided, it sounds almost like an SQL Injection vulnerability. It doesn't sound like a problem with SQL Server directly, or else it wouldn't be a RIM specific problem.
Anyway, can't administrators just filter all image attachments out through their AV or other software for the time being?
The (big) computer manufacturers can offset most of the price of an OEM XP Home license with the software that they cram onto the PCs. Have you ever wondered why Gateway, Dell, HP and probably IBM preinstall so much crap that new PC's run slower than my 5 year old celeron? It's because they get a commission (and maybe even a payment per installation) everytime someone upgrades or renews the software.
How much of a commission? I don't know, but I can tell you that sales commissions through the pay-per-referral type web advertising networks are easily 10% on software (more like 25%). I would imagine that the rate for preinstalled software is in the same ballpark.
Do people really upgrade? Well, I would bet that a good % renew the antivirus software.
Can you preinstall 10 pieces of trialware on a Linux box or a non-existant "google box"? Nope. Or, at the least, not nearly as much. So, Windows for Home PCs is a win from the hardware vendors point of view. It's easier to support, "everyone" knows it, it has the "brand" name, and the net cost isn't that high after the potential commissions are factored in.
I don't see why so many people are making anything but positive comments to this action. The wikipedia semi-protecting pages is a great idea. It uses some reason able steps to keep the noise level down -- and it also saves great amounts of admin time, which is (probably) greatly limited. I think of it like /.'s moderation system -- if there was NO moderation, I probably wouldn't read past the articles on /. There is just too much crap that is posted to bother filtering it myself.
What exactly does one do w/a Dreamcast running BSD anyways?
Just an idea... an Xbox has the proper hardware for the job. Is there a VLC port for it? Plus it's relatively cheap, though rather bulky.
This sounds great for generating power where getting a power feed is impractical (and solar wouldn't provide enough or consistent enough power). I think folks are getting caught up in the fact that this is most likely NOT efficient compared to other forms of power generation. How many highways have no lights at night? (Pretty much ALL once you leave the big city). Wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of lighting around tricky and dangerous corners? I know that I'd appreciate it.
It's quite neat to see a full web browser in a cell-phone. However, given the data rates for cell providers in Canada (and the US, I think) it just isn't affordable to load, say, Slashdot on a cell-phone -- few people are THAT addicted to /. =)
Sadly, I'll have to keep saving up for a WiFi capable phone... at least I'll be able to play with it at home.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was directly related to newer versions of Windows. I get the impression from your post that your company uses some sort of semi-standard image. There are a lot more network aware/active bits of software nowadays. Multiple programs checking updates online. Windows probing for new printers and neighbours. Antivirus chatter. Etc.
Or it could be a misconfigured DHCP setup that doesn't provide the correct or enough information causing the machines to send broadcasts. Looking at the specific traffic with a sniffer would probably point out the source quickly.
The connections in are already there. Windows NT/2K/XP all have a telnet service available (but not enabled by default). Yes, it's cleartext, so use a VPN outside your LAN. There is also http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsExec.html" >the psExec utility by sysinternals which is similar and it has some way of easily installing itself over a LAN. I've managed to kill apps remotely that have effectively locked up the Windows GUI by way of an infinite loop or other problem. Granted, this requires a 2nd computer to login remotely.