Interestingly (and necessary, with 4 GB of RAM), the system comes with 64-bit Vista installed by default, but 32-bit Vista ships as an option as well. .
Vista 32 with 4 GB installed will reserve about 1 GB of RAM for the OS, GPU. etc.
I would expect Vista 64 to do the same.
I would also expect an NVIDIA 9600M to be reasonably competent as a media player. What am I missing here?
Every quarter or so I do the Valve hardware survey .
It's easy to imagine the geek choking on the thought that 15% of your users are running Vista. Which tracks closely with the webstats from Net Applications.
I am curious how this plays out long-term:
Do your customers stick with their original OEM cards or on-board video until they replace or upgrade their systems as a whole? How often do they upgrade? Do they - as households - keep an oddball mix of older and newer hardware online?
The Baldur's Gate games for the PC, though I might be a little early with those. .
I'll admit to a liking for the isometric 2D RPG. Your characters are easy to manipulate. The environments have a spaciousness - if that is the right word - and detail that would take a lot of horsepower to render in 3D. But I wouldn't call the graphics and animation in these classic games primitive or simplistic.
Windows firewall sucks at outbound protection, a lot .
This is what Microsoft's Steve Riley had to say about outbound protection:
There's an important axiom of security that you must understand: protection belongs on the asset you want to protect, not on the thing you're trying to protect against. The correct approach is to run the lean yet effective Windows firewall on every computer in your organization, to protect each one from every other computer in the world. If you try to block outbound connections from a computer that's already compromised, how can you be sure that the computer is really doing what you ask? The answer: you can't. Outbound protection is security theater--it's a gimmick that only gives the impression of improving your security without doing anything that actually does improve your security. This is why outbound protection didn't exist in the Windows XP firewall and why it doesn't exist in the Windows Vista(TM) firewall.
Earlier, I said that the typical form of outbound protection in client firewalls is just security theater. However, one form of outbound control is very useful: administratively controlling certain types of traffic that you know you don't want to permit. The Windows Vista firewall already does this for service restrictions. The firewall allows a service to communicate only on the ports it says it needs and blocks anything else that the service attempts to do. You can build on this by writing additional rules that allow or block specific traffic to match your organization's security policy.Exploring The Windows Firewall
The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive. .
I don't see economies in art design and modeling.
You might not be producing for Pixar and IMAX projection. But you are still building characters, props and stage sets. You need the background artist, the specialist in visual effects.
You need someone who understands the texture of cloth, grass and tree, fur and flame and water.
You need someone who understands movement and expression. Art and animation were never easy or cheap even when games were as low res as Monkey Island or The Dig.
Now consider that there are millions of people using Linux who potentially could read the code .
It is a bit off topic, I suppose.
But "millions of users" surely doesn't translate into "millions of people who can read code---" and not only read code but read it critically.
COBOL was designed to be intelligible to an accountant.
BASIC was accessible to kids who were writing fun stuff for their Apple II, C-64 or Atari.
The XO exposes "source," but sales have been lukewarm at best. Summary of laptop orders The future of the OLPC is likely to be a much less ambitious e-book reader.
He's probably had an extensive disciplinary history to reach this point, which means he had ample time to see it coming and set this all up in advance. .
Which means that all "the worst case scenarios" become plausible. You can't take any shortcuts in rebuilding the system or repairing the files.
The new law will speed the exit of someone in a position to do serious damage. It will make prosecution easier on the felony charge. The geek who doesn't get the message can expect to serve hard time.
The government can arrest you and put you in prison. In fact, if a judge ordered him to provide the passwords and he refused, he could be found in contempt of court and jailed until he complied. .
It would be within bounds for a judge in a civil action by a private employer to have him confined indefinitely for contempt of court.
Read the XP SP3 white paper.
Steps to take before you install SP3
Download SP3 from Windows Update
Order SP3 on CD-ROM
Download and deploy SP3 to multiple computers [Network Installation for the IT Professional]
Free [basic] unlimited installation and compatibility support
---your choice of e-mail, online chat, or toll-free telephone. TTY/TDO service for the hearing-impaired
Vista has grown from a 6% share in August 07 to a 16% share in June 08. OSX from 6% to 8% Linux from 0.5% to 0.8%.
Overall, Windows is down about 2% and OSX up about 2%. But Windows still has 90% of the market and Vista seems to be doing quite well in direct competition against the Mac.
Since when does a contract allow you to essentially re-write law? .
Withe very few exception, the law simply treats you as a responsible adult whose contractual commitments are binding.
Could glider have destroyed warcraft?...perhaps... but that's survival of the fittest. If the WoW community turned to crap it wouldn't be the first time a product ran it's popular life and died out. They're no better than the MAFIAA in some regards.
It doesn't matter what pleasure others find WoW.
The game deserves to die, because I have the power to kill it. The is the argument of a sociopath. The geek as god or a force of nature.
Microsoft was just riding the wave, There was far better software available at the time than anything from Microsoft. The only reason Microsoft became part of the PC revolution was because IBM handed them a monopoly and they illegally exploited it. .
Let's all stop for the moment and consider the utility and sales potential of a mass market PC that ships without an operating system or high level languages.
In an era when the enthusiast's "access to source" meant reading the BASIC program listings in "Creative Computing."
1975 BASIC for the Altair. Microsoft has three employees and revenues of $16,000.
1976 Microsoft sells an enhanced basic to GE, NCR and Citibank. Seven employees and revenues of $22,00
1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. MBASIC for the Commodore PET and TRS-80. Applesoft BASIC. Nine employees and revenues of $382,000.
1978 COBOL-80. Microsoft enters the world market with ASCII Microsoft - Japan. Thirteen employees and revenues of $1,400,000.
1979 Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first product for the micro to win the ICP Million Dollar Award. MBASIC for the 8086. The first high level language for the new 16-bit micro. Twenty-eight employees and revenues of $2,400,000.
1980 The Z-80 SoftCard. Microsoft XENIX OS for 16 bit CPUs. Forty employees and revenues of $7,500,000.
1981 MS-DOS for the IBM PC and anyone else who wants it. There is an MS-DOS universe before the birth of the clones. There is also MBASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL and Pascal. 128 employees and revenues of $16,000,000.
He who owns the buck also tends to be the creator. The big budget movie - WALL-E or The Dark Knight - doesn't happen until somesone finds the $100 or $200 million needed to make it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Vista 32 with 4 GB installed will reserve about 1 GB of RAM for the OS, GPU. etc.
I would expect Vista 64 to do the same.
I would also expect an NVIDIA 9600M to be reasonably competent as a media player. What am I missing here?
.
Sources, please.
.
It's easy to imagine the geek choking on the thought that 15% of your users are running Vista. Which tracks closely with the webstats from Net Applications.
I am curious how this plays out long-term:
Do your customers stick with their original OEM cards or on-board video until they replace or upgrade their systems as a whole? How often do they upgrade?
Do they - as households - keep an oddball mix of older and newer hardware online?
.
I'll admit to a liking for the isometric 2D RPG. Your characters are easy to manipulate. The environments have a spaciousness - if that is the right word - and detail that would take a lot of horsepower to render in 3D. But I wouldn't call the graphics and animation in these classic games primitive or simplistic.
.
You could, of course, simply enable the firewall that shipped with XP before connecting to the net.
.
The firewall was in Win XP from Day 1 - just a little hard to find and not enabled by default.
.
This is what Microsoft's Steve Riley had to say about outbound protection:
There's an important axiom of security that you must understand: protection belongs on the asset you want to protect, not on the thing you're trying to protect against. The correct approach is to run the lean yet effective Windows firewall on every computer in your organization, to protect each one from every other computer in the world. If you try to block outbound connections from a computer that's already compromised, how can you be sure that the computer is really doing what you ask? The answer: you can't. Outbound protection is security theater--it's a gimmick that only gives the impression of improving your security without doing anything that actually does improve your security. This is why outbound protection didn't exist in the Windows XP firewall and why it doesn't exist in the Windows Vista(TM) firewall.
Earlier, I said that the typical form of outbound protection in client firewalls is just security theater. However, one form of outbound control is very useful: administratively controlling certain types of traffic that you know you don't want to permit. The Windows Vista firewall already does this for service restrictions. The firewall allows a service to communicate only on the ports it says it needs and blocks anything else that the service attempts to do. You can build on this by writing additional rules that allow or block specific traffic to match your organization's security policy. Exploring The Windows Firewall
In one page, Riley covers quite a bit of ground.
.
I don't see economies in art design and modeling.
You might not be producing for Pixar and IMAX projection. But you are still building characters, props and stage sets. You need the background artist, the specialist in visual effects.
You need someone who understands the texture of cloth, grass and tree, fur and flame and water.
You need someone who understands movement and expression. Art and animation were never easy or cheap even when games were as low res as Monkey Island or The Dig.
.
Examples?
Post-1998, if you please.
.
It is a bit off topic, I suppose.
But "millions of users" surely doesn't translate into "millions of people who can read code---" and not only read code but read it critically.
COBOL was designed to be intelligible to an accountant.
BASIC was accessible to kids who were writing fun stuff for their Apple II, C-64 or Atari.
The XO exposes "source," but sales have been lukewarm at best. Summary of laptop orders The future of the OLPC is likely to be a much less ambitious e-book reader.
.
Which means that all "the worst case scenarios" become plausible. You can't take any shortcuts in rebuilding the system or repairing the files.
.
This assumes that the motive is extortion and that the blackmailer will be satisfied with only one bite.
.
The Wii may have the larger base.
But buyers tend to be content with fewer and simpler games.
.
The new law will speed the exit of someone in a position to do serious damage. It will make prosecution easier on the felony charge. The geek who doesn't get the message can expect to serve hard time.
.
It would be within bounds for a judge in a civil action by a private employer to have him confined indefinitely for contempt of court.
.
or sued. or jailed.
or would rather not spend the remainder of our prime earning years shelving stock at WalMart or flipping burgers for McD.
Please explain to me why you had a live network connection during the install.
.
I don't think it gets much easier than this:
What Is Service Pack 3?
Read the XP SP3 white paper.
Steps to take before you install SP3
Download SP3 from Windows Update
Order SP3 on CD-ROM
Download and deploy SP3 to multiple computers [Network Installation for the IT Professional]
Free [basic] unlimited installation and compatibility support
---your choice of e-mail, online chat, or toll-free telephone.
TTY/TDO service for the hearing-impaired
.
The Slashdot geek lives in an echo chamber.
In the Net Applications stats:
Vista has grown from a 6% share in August 07 to a 16% share in June 08.
OSX from 6% to 8%
Linux from 0.5% to 0.8%.
Overall, Windows is down about 2% and OSX up about 2%.
But Windows still has 90% of the market and Vista seems to be doing quite well in direct competition against the Mac.
.
Withe very few exception, the law simply treats you as a responsible adult whose contractual commitments are binding.
Could glider have destroyed warcraft? ...perhaps... but that's survival of the fittest. If the WoW community turned to crap it wouldn't be the first time a product ran it's popular life and died out. They're no better than the MAFIAA in some regards.
It doesn't matter what pleasure others find WoW.
The game deserves to die, because I have the power to kill it. The is the argument of a sociopath. The geek as god or a force of nature.
.
Let's all stop for the moment and consider the utility and sales potential of a mass market PC that ships without an operating system or high level languages.
In an era when the enthusiast's "access to source" meant reading the BASIC program listings in "Creative Computing."
1975 BASIC for the Altair.
Microsoft has three employees and revenues of $16,000.
1976 Microsoft sells an enhanced basic to GE, NCR and Citibank.
Seven employees and revenues of $22,00
1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. MBASIC for the Commodore PET and TRS-80. Applesoft BASIC.
Nine employees and revenues of $382,000.
1978 COBOL-80. Microsoft enters the world market with ASCII Microsoft - Japan.
Thirteen employees and revenues of $1,400,000.
1979 Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first product for the micro to win the ICP Million Dollar Award.
MBASIC for the 8086. The first high level language for the new 16-bit micro.
Twenty-eight employees and revenues of $2,400,000.
1980 The Z-80 SoftCard. Microsoft XENIX OS for 16 bit CPUs.
Forty employees and revenues of $7,500,000.
1981 MS-DOS for the IBM PC and anyone else who wants it. There is an MS-DOS universe before the birth of the clones. There is also MBASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL and Pascal.
128 employees and revenues of $16,000,000.
Microsoft's Timeline from 1975
.
I suggest as a quick corrective Len Deighton's 1978 book Airshipwreak. - a 74 page photo book of crashes with brief explanations of their cause.
Rich Archbold and Ken Marschall's The Hindenburg: An Illustrated History is less scathing an overview, but doesn't gloss over the problems.
It would be more truthful to say that only the Graf survived until retirement.
The structural integrity of the rigid airship was always questionable.
That is why Moffat wanted airships like Macon and Shenandoah as a picket line over the relatively benign waters of the Pacific.
The dirigible had range and endurance. It could not fly above the weather. It could not evade the weather.
.
He who owns the buck also tends to be the creator. The big budget movie - WALL-E or The Dark Knight - doesn't happen until somesone finds the $100 or $200 million needed to make it happen.
.
It's what put the PC into every home and office.
Working means getting the job done on time and on budget.
No one is going hold off until the geek finds perfection in an OS or an app.
Not so long as GNU Herd remains as much an existential fantasy as "Waiting for Godot" - or "Duke Nukem Forever."
.
It's the "important" people in open source who are getting the boot.
The guy chosing Skype is telling RMS to shove it - and there are a million other guys out there just like him.
This guy is not a geek.
He will never share your values - he will never learn to speak your language - but the closed source vendor can and will speak his.