Unless they had hardware MPEG decoders, the hell you do. You certainly couldn't run a fully fledged desktop OS while doing so, and you sure as hell weren't doing anything else on the machine while watching a DVD.
I hate to agree with the gp, but I know for a fact that a PII 266mhz would easily handle DVD in software. One of my companies specifically sold some of the first DVD laptops with PII 266mhz processors and although a hardware DVD chip was an 'option' it was NOT NEEDED on the PII processors for DVD playback.
These were standard Windows 98 machines running software from Cyberlink, etc.
I don't know where you get your math on what a processor will do, but this was 'easily' done, and I am speaking from experience with just low powered laptops using PII CPUs.
I'll go with you that offline files is not perfect.
But for it to 'continually' break or have problems as you suggest it would more likely be a situation where the infrastructure was not setup properly in the first place, with poor shares designs, trying to use Samba servers, etc...
If properly setup, even in high volume business environments we have dealt with clients with 1,000s of users all utilitizing offline files and even offline profiles (including desktops, etc), and the fail rate is virtually 0.
Also if you have the chance to work with Vista, the offline files is dramatically improved in areas where XP and 2003 lacked. For example Vista handles encrypting the offline content automatically, can handle multi-user workstations utilizing the same offline files without a structure share policy/design, and can also handle extremely large folders of data with very fast replication even over low bandwidth connections using remote differential compression.
I hope you have better luck in the future with offline files, and I suggest a better strategy in your network design, truly a good design with strong policies (computer and human) will ensure reliable offline file operation.
CableCard was supposed to be the savior for Windows Media Center, which has been held back by its inability to support high-def content.
This is incorrect. Windows Media Center has been handling HD content 'easily' now for a few years.
Just plug in any HD tuner and it works from over the air HD Signals, and if you want HD from DirectTV or even your cable company, using their box with the IR adapter and Windows Media Center it 'changes' the channels, and records just fine at HD resolutions.
Besides the fact the Windows Vista (with Media Center) is the ONLY OS that supports Cable Card inherently as an OS level feature.
So whoever wrote this crap is either trying to spread FUD or is really stupid.
You do understand that 'normally' watermarking with other technologies, they go after the person name 'Joe Smoo' that has files on his computer with OTHER people's names watermarked in the file? As the original owner can ALWAYS claim to be ignorant how the other person 'stole' their downloaded song.
This is a way to ACTUALLY go after the abusers of file sharing, not the consumers or the original downloaders.
BTW Digital watermarking has been in photos and video for a LONG LONG time now, you can open up most photo editing applications and 'embed' a non-visible 'digital' watermark into the photo. It is quite effective, as it has kept photo formats DRM free.
There already are systems which do exactly that (optimise dynamically C programs)
I don't disagree with the notion that any natively compiled language could be scaled to take advantage of this, a good solution would be an OS level scheduling mechanism for natively compiled applications that could make the decisions based on the information the AMD instructions would be offering.
However, the reference you cite is more about basic instruction changing and not the dynamics of testing to see what threads are busy, which ones need more time, and where they can shifted to run at runtime based on these needs. The Transmeta solution is a lot like a real-time in chip concept of many of the old translation tricks used in various products at a software level like the FX!32 used on WindowsNT Alpha version.
That must have been speculation or a SWAG from the poster to suggest it could be used to accelerate Java and/or.NET. There is nothing special about java or net that would allow this optimization.
Ok, sorry, wrong, and yes, wrong again...
The notes about.NET and JAVA come specifically from AMD themselves.
The reason it would benefits these environments is because they are processed on the fly and the environment could make the 'adjustments' to the code at runtime instead of it be 'locked' as natively compiled code is.
This is level 101 understanding and logic here, not sure how you are missing this.
And this is your 'opinion', as facts don't show this to be true for many years now.
I have read tons of articles about *nix break ins over the past year, ranging from several Govts around the world to even BSD at Berkley and other universities. Losing everything from secrets to consumer identity information.
The only Windows stories you hear anymore are when someone loses a non-encrypted laptop or a CD with names in unencrpyted MS Access format is stolen.
Windows Server 'compromises' are not as 'normal' as you seem to think they are. In fact not since 2001 has Windows Servers even 'registered' on the hack/compromise radar. So after six years of doing a rather good job with high-profile security on some of the most high-profiles sites on the internet, don't you think it is time to let go of the 2001 mentality?
To lock down such Windows server/workstation is much harder because of "black box" mentality such software has.
Since when? Windows 2003 server installs by default locked tighter than almost any default *nix distribution, with less active server services. And this is a point and click Server OS, that is so easy to setup, idiots are literally getting by with normal installations without being hacked. Go talk to a company like ServerBeach, Rackspace or other large unmanaged hosting companies that offer both Windows and Linux servers. They confirm that any idiot can turn on Windows Server and be fairly safe.
Linux has not proven itself to be 'inherently' or 'logistically' more secure than any other OS. Nothing in its design is ANYMORE evolved than any other OS.
Says something about the 'rights being incompatible' or something like that. I only got it so my wife could have her MS office, so I don't really care, but it's funny that I never had that problem with XP.
Unless you are using HD content or PVP via CableCard, you are NOT using any more DRM than was in XP, Win2k, etc...
Sounds like your DVD region code is messed up, just like on all OSes and all DVD drives have had since 1995.
Ehmm, I experienced it myself, with my Sony HD cam, so this story is genuine. I did get a downgraded resolution on my TFT-screen, which only has a VGA connector. I could play the video in Full HD though on my Media Center 2005 PC, connected to the same screen.
Something is wrong here, Vista DOES NOT downgrade Analog signals like a VGA connector. And yes, this is something that is stated in the design specs and even something we have tested in our labs.
It only will downgrade 'DIGITAL' connections if the HDCP flag is on.
So if Vista downgraded the quality, something else is wrong... Also if it is downgrading non-HDCP content HD, there is something seriously wrong.
Contact MS and Sony and make sure they know, incase there is something truly up with your experience, maybe Sony's HD is accidentally turning on a flag it shouldn't, but also let MS know about you getting a downgraded signal over VGA.
(If the computer has a DVI-VGA adapter, that might screw with the 'analog' only concept as well, and something your Video Card MFR should be notified of so that it knows it is not a digital signal.)
I'm so glad I bought a Mac so I don't have to be bothered with the constant update and restart warnings; and no more clumsy virus scans and adware.
How much does the OS X service packs cost again, oh ya $129 every two years.
BTW how do you run a Mac without 'constant' update and restart warnings? Apple has released 5x the amount of updates and security fixes in the past few months as Windows XP, Vista, and Linux combined.
Is the article really saying that ALL HD content, regardless of if it is indicated to be copyrighted or not, is degrade? IE if I take a video with my HD camera, I can't play it on Vista? It sounds like the article is saying that...but...wow
Yes this is one of the things he is trying to say. And sadly is one of the biggest indicators that he is full of crap.
Who gives idiots like this guy a stage when they don't even understand the subject themselves?
From our tech lab, I can confirm that NONE of what he is saying is true. From everything about HD Audio being downgraded, to non flagged HD content EVER being down sampled. He is either lying for a reason or really has no personal experience whatsoever.
Even the sugggestion that the problems with powering down/suspend/hibernation have to do with DRM or HD protection is insane. 99% of the power down issues have to do with the switch to ACPI S4 in Vista or problems with USB drivers (USB drivers are NOT even part of the HDCP scheme in Vista).
As for the CPU running at 100%, that is a new one. In fact if you have a new video card and run either type of HD Content from VC1 or MPEG4, your GPU handles most of the work, and your CPU might hit 30% if you are using NVidia as they don't seem to be offsetting as much of the decoding as ATI does.
This whole article is crap, and full of crap. We have too many test systems and have ran too many of these types of tests and have to date not found ONE issue even close to what people like him try to use to scare people about DRM in Vista. Sounds plausible, but simply it is just NOT true.
Even when the 'protected content' flag DRM issue was raised with Vista Media center, our test found that it was a specific Flag from a couple of cable companies, on a couple of channels marking them as PPV even though they weren't. Which would have have affected even a TiVO box, and was not a Vista issue whatsoever. But the press made it seem like Vista's evil DRM was at play.
I guess that since we can't expect real journalism in the mainstream regarding world issues, it is also too much to expect any journalism in the tech idustry.
Why would sites report this person's claims without proof of concept, or at least testing it for themselves?
Shameful, and yes I know SlashDot is anti-MS, but even here people can have some level of technical understanding and actually want to be informed of what is right and what is made up for press.
This DRM Vista crap has to truly stop at some point. 99% of it is myth.
Sorry, this is a load of crap. Human beings are the most adaptable species on the whole planet
But we adapt through invention and intellectually 'evolving' to solve problems.
You act like we just 'adapt' through some magical evolution process or physically 'adapt'. In a way you are making my point, but sadly you are not smart enough to realize you are arguing the same point.
Rome didn't die off cause of water shortages, they brought the water to them. We won't die off because of climate change, we will SOLVE the problem as well, and if we aren't smart enough to get idiots like you to support fixing the problem, maybe we should die off.
Perhaps one of the most ego centric(towards humans as a whole) thing I have ever heard. We don't know shit about climatology in the grand scheme of things let alone how to control it at all, and you want us to actively go out of our way to change the direction the climate is going? That's so fucking stupid my mind is truly boggled.
Actually we 'do' know more than a little bit about controlling climate than you seem to realize. And this is not even dealing with what mankind is adding to the mix.
For example, we could drop huge reflective panels and control them like a thermostat. We could also seed the atmosphere with reflecting particles, that would allow us to control environmental effects by the rate of replenishing them.
The problem is, while people are bitching about our climate being political and waiting until 'all' the evidence is in, time is slipping by and things WE DO KNOW how to use are not being funded by our governments. And as we have these 'whose fault is it' debates, our freaking glaciers and ice caps are melting.
And while this crap is melting, the possibility of our ocean streams of being disrupted are very real, shifting parts of the planet into hot zones and others into frigid wastelands. You know, places like Europe for example being covered by 2 meters of snow for a few hundred years.
You do seem to under-estimate the 'understanding' the non-Texaco paid scientists do understand, can predict, and know how climate works fairly intimately. Just because there is conflicting FUD science, doesn't make all the other science wrong or the scientists ignorant on the subject.
You are right about DirectSound putting a pinch on some games, but a little over the top in how it works and why it came to be.
MS found many advantages of moving sound from hardware API sets during the XBox 360 development cycle. And even though the XBox 360 does have 3 cores, even in single core situations, the sound performance impact was virtually non-existent on CPUs running over 1.0ghz. And today, most CPUs are running at least that.
So when MS moved to mimic what they learned from the XBox 360 development, they knew that DirectSound had to be axed, as it did not fit into the new Audio Stack model whatsoever, as all the DirectSound features implemented by people like Creative no longer were as useful as they were under the XP audio stack model.
So it was a gamble to rewrite the Audio subsystem in Vista, but the gains far outweigh the losses. Vista can do some amazing stuff with audio, from inherent environmental controls, to pitch shifting, to even self configuring a 7.1 audio environment with a microphone.
There are other aspects to this as well, Vista can individually control and direct sound to each speaker in a 7.1 enviroment. Which is not so important for desktop use, but for games is great for developers. Instead of having to simulation sound environments, they can control each speaker and level independently.
This type of control and 'richness' is what makes EAX old school, as it didn't offer this level of control, even with the latest and greatest Creative sound card.
Also by shifting the audio back through the CPU, it left open not only these features, but room for many more, especially in gaming, and this is where the new DX10.1 audio API comes in, as it STILL pushes sound through the CPU.
As for this screwing over game developers, yes and no. For most developers, all it took was implementing a simple adaptation to the gaming audio stack to hand off sound to the new Vista audio subsystem, and let Vista handle the surround, etc. If you look at MMO games from SOE, they even took out their EAX and miles drivers and replaced them Vista native drivers that hand off sound to Vista, letting Vista worry about 5.1/7.1/surround/stereo/etc.
So, ya some games got hurt if the developers didn't hand out an update that integrated with Vista's audio, but this mainly only hurt Creative users, and Creative has done a good job of handling this transition for a lot of these games, and maybe the developers will issue updates so the Creative project won't even be needed.
The worst thing is the suspicion is that it was done not to improve the OS, but to make it harder to work round the embedded DRM protecting secure windows media files - in effect, crippling gamers to keep the music studios happy by try to provide a 'secure audio path' from DRM file to speakers, to at least prevent digital copies.
This is ONLY for HD protected content. Ya, it sucks that HD players and Vista being a HD player OS has to conform to this crap, but it doesn't affect anything past HD content. If you want to loop analog audio back in and record it, you still can, nothing is keeping you from doing this, and in fact Vista even makes it easier when it comes to managing line in/out.
New Audio devices that have native Vista support know when you plug in a headphone, line-in, etc, and you can independently control each plug on your system, even if you aren't doing 7.1. So basically your front line-in and headphone jacks are 'independent' of the rear audio jacks. And you can tell Vista to ship sound from application A to this out and record in Application B from this line in.
However, you can't do the internal digital looping that you could in XP, but most people didn't realize that by doing this on MOST soundcards, you were multi-plexing the sound quality to do so, and if you were recording a CD quality source via the Stereo Mixer input, you were in fact not getting CD quality sampling. It was a multi-plexing trick, just as when you play two sound sources at the
Nvidia & Creative Labs drivers, that were made for Vista, will drop your FPS in half
The Creative drivers were horrible, and the initial ATI and NVidia drivers also were horrible, ATI not even having proper OpenGL acceleration.
However, dropping FPS in half is a bit over the top. Most reviews from the time show Vista running at worse 10-15% slower in games, and in some games better regarding FPS. And even 10-15% is pretty small when average users are pushing 30-60fps in most games, this is 3-8fps loss, not really something to cry over.
I'm sure there are some games that had 'extensive' problems at first with the new drivers and possibly did drop performance to unusable levels, but on average it wasn't that bad, it just wasn't as fast as XP at the time and people were expecting faster with Vista, so it was more of a disappointment then flat out sucking.
Installing a motor in every wheel is intuitively a nice idea
This was the subject of a few papers and subsequent articles in popular automotive and popular mechanics type magazines.
The conclusion was that technology would be needed to offset these effects and even at the time of the articles/papers 20years ago, it was not too farfetched.
With today's high response computers already in cars with active suspension, linear traction, etc. the computer technology to offset these problems is something that can easily be tuned using today's technology.
Some aspects of independent motors, or 'drive trains' to each wheel is 'enhanced' stability and traction control, as well as rotational tricks that would allow the car to rotate one wheel backwards while rotating the others forward. This would give a performance car incredible cornering, handling, as well as make available some interesting turning radius effects.
I can remember back when 'performance' car people hated the idea of 'alternative' energy or electric powered cars and saw them as the death of the sports/muscle cars. At the time I spoke up and tried to explain how wrong they were, as alternative technology could yield faster, better performing and safer sports cars. This is just one area and example of how new technology would achieve these results.
The planet has been through many changes in climate before, both high extremes and low. And if you believe that the current situation is any worse than past events, you are not seeing any more than the climate terrorists are telling you.
They are worse in terms of the existence of humans on this planet with consideration to the population affected by the changes.
This is just like the huge midwest earthquake, it was massive, ringing bells in boston, but virtually no life was loss because there were not as many structures to crumble on people.
Today even a smaller earthquake in the same area would bring cities like Nashville to a pile of rubble, as their skycrappers are not designed for earthquakes.
So you have to keep some perspective on this.
As for science 'fixing' the problem, this doesn't necessarily mean a plan on the scale of Dr Evil to alter the world. It could be as simple as dusting the upper atmosphere with reflect particles or even droppping a few large scale reflective panels in space that could be controlled to regulate the climate, both of which could be adjusted, changed or removed if they had negative impacts that science doesn't foresee.
If mankind is causing the increase, we can curb it by stopping the things that cause it. If we aren't, stopping them won't matter a whit!
Whether mankind is responsible or NOT, by REDUCING what we are doing, even if it is such a tiny impact that it isn't the problem, it might help 'slow' the process of warming, even a little bit to buy us time to save a lot of lives.
One thing that 10.1 DX addresses is the Sound APIs that developers felt lost without, MS's Sound technology that is used on the Xbox 360 is being added into 10.1 DX, and this is more of what DX 10.1 is about than anything else.
Sadly though, sound is one area Vista gets no credit, yet is one of the best selling points of Vista.
With the new Audio subsystem in Vista, if you are running 5.1 or higher you can turn on your Mic and it will auto tune the speakers and environment sounds for an outstanding experience.
Another great thing about Sound in Vista is that even with an old AC'97 sound card and just stereo speakers on a desktop or laptop, the sound fidelity is significantly better than XP or OS X by several factors. For example a Wav,mp3,wma played on the same hardware and same speakers will sound incredibly more rich and defined on Vista than when you are playing it in XP. Even putting the same speakers on a Mac and 'trying' get the fidelity up, the sound quality was NOT even close to what Vista was doing with an old sound card.
And DX10.1 adds back in DirectX level APIs for game developers.
If anyone really wants to understand the Audio in Vista, do a search on Vista Audio Subsystem, or Sonar Vista. There are great technical pieces on why Vista redid the Audio system and also some good examples of why developers of audio products like Sonar continue to choose MS and Vista as their platform of choice for high quality production.
All serious gamers are happily running Windows XP with latest service pack. I have not yet seen a single gamer liking Vista unless he/she got a true monster machine which you can't tell difference whatever you do. Some game companies have guts to say "We do NOT support Vista at least until SP1 ships".
Actually this is changing with the drivers from NVidia and ATI from the past few months. The Vista gaming performance even at launch with CRAP drivers was only doing about 3-6fps slower than XP, and when you are running 30-60fps, the difference is NOT noticeable.
However with the current generation of drivers, Vista is out performing XP in gaming, not only in Video performance but in load times, etc.
And this is JUST NOT people with monster systems. We have test 'gaming' machines here that our techs use that have everything from Athlon +2000 and an NVidia Geforce 6600 that conquers all of today's games with acceptable performance. And YES faster in Vista with better overall performance than running XP on the same system.
The only catch to good gaming results in Vista is 1GB of RAM, and since MOST gamers already have 1GB, this is not a big requirement.
As for newer systems and higher end GPUs, the results are even more dramatic, as Vista utilizing dual-cores more efficiently and RAM more efficiently to cut down the Hard Drive and other bottlenecks, the games not only perform but load and 'instance' at 5 to 10x as fast as they do on XP with the same hardware.
I am actually kind of tired of the Gamers hate Vista Myth, as it is a bunch of crap. And 99% of the gamers that continue this myth, have never used Vista to even know what the hell they are talking about.
Considering that the entire Vista video subsystem is NEW, it is quite astounding that games and applications run as seamless as they do in comparison to XP, and then add on the fact it has more features, and gives users better quality in games and now is giving them better performance with the latest drivers.
(Yes I am specifically talking about DX7-9 and OpenGL games here, this doesn't even bring into account what DX10 will bring to games for more performance and quality.)
This also doesn't even factor in some of the things Vista can do with games that are impossible on XP or other OSes, since it pre-emptively multi-tasks the GPU and does do VRAM Virtualization.
On a Vista machine you can open a high performance OpenGL game (in a window) and a couple of DX8 or DX9 games in a Window as well, and they will all run side by side with virtually less than 2% FPS drop in all games because of Vista flipping GPU control between the games and even the Aero desktop. You can even Flip3D the games and not lose FPS while they are running in a perspective Window in Flip3D mode on Aero.
You can also do other 'cute' tricks, like grab a tranparency utility and set the game's Window Transparency to 75% and see the desktop and other games running behind while you are actively playing, again without FPS loss in the game.
Our techs even leave a 1080HD wallpaper running on the desktop while doing this with games that are set to 75% transparent, and neither the games nor the desktop Video wallpaper glitch or lose performance. And again this is possible even on medium end systems like a system with 2GB of RAM a 3Ghz processor P4 and an NVidia 6800 GPU. (Oh and have Windows Media Center playing a Show or Movie on the other monitor at the same time.)
Vista is actually a gamer's dream architecture, especially if you run multiple instances of a MMO or run in a Window so you can use Vent and Messenger, etc while playing. It also rocks for single player games like Oblivion that is damn demanding on a system.
In graphics cards that is. Is that required in 10 or 10.1?
Required in DX10, and ALL WDDM drivers in Vista support GPU RAM Virtualization. (Even though NVidia didn't want to support this feature, they have implemented it quite well after some help from MS in the past few months, catching up to XP in gaming performance with it left on, which NVidia didn't think was possible at first.)
GPU RAM virtualization is also used by all WDDM drivers for DX9 hardware and current DirectX games (even 7 & 8), as Vista is in control of the VRAM and also the GPU for scheduling.
This allows gamers with 64mb or 128mb video cards to crank up texture settings in existing games without overloading the VRAM and yet giving them the same performance as XP with the lower quality Texture settings.
So you two will sit here and argue over whether the CO2 is mankind's fault or not, and yet both acknowledge that CO2 will increase global temperatures.
Bottom line, if this is the end of an ice age, or mankind screwing up the earth it doesn't matter. Scientists need to find a way to MAINTAIN the 'sweet' spot that humans need for survival.
This is no longer about who's fault it is, nor saving the earth, this is about saving a large population of people.
1) If mankind is 'adding' to the problem, we need to stop accelerating it. 2) If mankind has nothing to do with it, we need to find a way to artificially slow it down.
Here are the ramifications of either scenario, the caps are melting. Yes, this is FACT, no matter how much people want to bitch about whose fault it is.
The shelf that dropped off a couple of years ago at the South Pole was a dramatic indicator. The fact that Greenland is 'becoming' green again is another major problem.
The fact that US subs at the north pole have measured the ice thickness go from 10s of meters, where they couldn't surface, to under 1 meter where they can surface should be enough evidence to scare the hell out of people.
So after you two and people like you get worrying about who's fault all of this is, it is time to get together and work on a solution. An asteroid collision would not be manmade, but if one comes hurling at the earth, we would need to take action to deflect it. And this is the same freaking thing. PERIOD.
All this recent bitching about whether the temperatures are going up 5 degrees or only 2 degrees DOESN'T MAKE A FREAKING DIFFERENCE, they are going up, or the caps would not be melting.
What happens when the caps melt? Well first the ocean streams are messed up as fresh water is added in large amounts to crucial areas that salinization are needed to return heavy water back to the equator. In effect Europe and parts of North America freeze over.
The second problem is even if the streams in the ocean somehow keep working as needed to keep mankind alive, sea levels WILL continue to RAISE. This means bye, bye Miami, most of New York City, the Netherlands, and a large portion of Asia areas and islands.
And we are only talking a meter or two difference to affect 100s of millions of people on the coastlines everywhere.
So go back to your bitching about who is at fault, while the rest of the scientific community tries to find solutions to save your ass.
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Unless they had hardware MPEG decoders, the hell you do. You certainly couldn't run a fully fledged desktop OS while doing so, and you sure as hell weren't doing anything else on the machine while watching a DVD.
I hate to agree with the gp, but I know for a fact that a PII 266mhz would easily handle DVD in software. One of my companies specifically sold some of the first DVD laptops with PII 266mhz processors and although a hardware DVD chip was an 'option' it was NOT NEEDED on the PII processors for DVD playback.
These were standard Windows 98 machines running software from Cyberlink, etc.
I don't know where you get your math on what a processor will do, but this was 'easily' done, and I am speaking from experience with just low powered laptops using PII CPUs.
I'll go with you that offline files is not perfect.
But for it to 'continually' break or have problems as you suggest it would more likely be a situation where the infrastructure was not setup properly in the first place, with poor shares designs, trying to use Samba servers, etc...
If properly setup, even in high volume business environments we have dealt with clients with 1,000s of users all utilitizing offline files and even offline profiles (including desktops, etc), and the fail rate is virtually 0.
Also if you have the chance to work with Vista, the offline files is dramatically improved in areas where XP and 2003 lacked. For example Vista handles encrypting the offline content automatically, can handle multi-user workstations utilizing the same offline files without a structure share policy/design, and can also handle extremely large folders of data with very fast replication even over low bandwidth connections using remote differential compression.
I hope you have better luck in the future with offline files, and I suggest a better strategy in your network design, truly a good design with strong policies (computer and human) will ensure reliable offline file operation.
CableCard was supposed to be the savior for Windows Media Center, which has been held back by its inability to support high-def content.
This is incorrect. Windows Media Center has been handling HD content 'easily' now for a few years.
Just plug in any HD tuner and it works from over the air HD Signals, and if you want HD from DirectTV or even your cable company, using their box with the IR adapter and Windows Media Center it 'changes' the channels, and records just fine at HD resolutions.
Besides the fact the Windows Vista (with Media Center) is the ONLY OS that supports Cable Card inherently as an OS level feature.
So whoever wrote this crap is either trying to spread FUD or is really stupid.
Just to follow from my post marked 'troll' stating that Linux is NOT MORE SECURE...
/ 16/july-2007-operating-system-vulnerability-scorec ard.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/2007/08
You do understand that 'normally' watermarking with other technologies, they go after the person name 'Joe Smoo' that has files on his computer with OTHER people's names watermarked in the file? As the original owner can ALWAYS claim to be ignorant how the other person 'stole' their downloaded song.
This is a way to ACTUALLY go after the abusers of file sharing, not the consumers or the original downloaders.
BTW Digital watermarking has been in photos and video for a LONG LONG time now, you can open up most photo editing applications and 'embed' a non-visible 'digital' watermark into the photo. It is quite effective, as it has kept photo formats DRM free.
There already are systems which do exactly that (optimise dynamically C programs)
I don't disagree with the notion that any natively compiled language could be scaled to take advantage of this, a good solution would be an OS level scheduling mechanism for natively compiled applications that could make the decisions based on the information the AMD instructions would be offering.
However, the reference you cite is more about basic instruction changing and not the dynamics of testing to see what threads are busy, which ones need more time, and where they can shifted to run at runtime based on these needs. The Transmeta solution is a lot like a real-time in chip concept of many of the old translation tricks used in various products at a software level like the FX!32 used on WindowsNT Alpha version.
That must have been speculation or a SWAG from the poster to suggest it could be used to accelerate Java and/or .NET. There is nothing special about java or net that would allow this optimization.
.NET and JAVA come specifically from AMD themselves.
Ok, sorry, wrong, and yes, wrong again...
The notes about
The reason it would benefits these environments is because they are processed on the fly and the environment could make the 'adjustments' to the code at runtime instead of it be 'locked' as natively compiled code is.
This is level 101 understanding and logic here, not sure how you are missing this.
So Linux is more secure than Windows? You bet
And this is your 'opinion', as facts don't show this to be true for many years now.
I have read tons of articles about *nix break ins over the past year, ranging from several Govts around the world to even BSD at Berkley and other universities. Losing everything from secrets to consumer identity information.
The only Windows stories you hear anymore are when someone loses a non-encrypted laptop or a CD with names in unencrpyted MS Access format is stolen.
Windows Server 'compromises' are not as 'normal' as you seem to think they are. In fact not since 2001 has Windows Servers even 'registered' on the hack/compromise radar. So after six years of doing a rather good job with high-profile security on some of the most high-profiles sites on the internet, don't you think it is time to let go of the 2001 mentality?
To lock down such Windows server/workstation is much harder because of "black box" mentality such software has.
Since when? Windows 2003 server installs by default locked tighter than almost any default *nix distribution, with less active server services. And this is a point and click Server OS, that is so easy to setup, idiots are literally getting by with normal installations without being hacked. Go talk to a company like ServerBeach, Rackspace or other large unmanaged hosting companies that offer both Windows and Linux servers. They confirm that any idiot can turn on Windows Server and be fairly safe.
Linux has not proven itself to be 'inherently' or 'logistically' more secure than any other OS. Nothing in its design is ANYMORE evolved than any other OS.
PERIOD.
Says something about the 'rights being incompatible' or something like that. I only got it so my wife could have her MS office, so I don't really care, but it's funny that I never had that problem with XP.
Unless you are using HD content or PVP via CableCard, you are NOT using any more DRM than was in XP, Win2k, etc...
Sounds like your DVD region code is messed up, just like on all OSes and all DVD drives have had since 1995.
Ehmm, I experienced it myself, with my Sony HD cam, so this story is genuine. I did get a downgraded resolution on my TFT-screen, which only has a VGA connector. I could play the video in Full HD though on my Media Center 2005 PC, connected to the same screen.
Something is wrong here, Vista DOES NOT downgrade Analog signals like a VGA connector. And yes, this is something that is stated in the design specs and even something we have tested in our labs.
It only will downgrade 'DIGITAL' connections if the HDCP flag is on.
So if Vista downgraded the quality, something else is wrong... Also if it is downgrading non-HDCP content HD, there is something seriously wrong.
Contact MS and Sony and make sure they know, incase there is something truly up with your experience, maybe Sony's HD is accidentally turning on a flag it shouldn't, but also let MS know about you getting a downgraded signal over VGA.
(If the computer has a DVI-VGA adapter, that might screw with the 'analog' only concept as well, and something your Video Card MFR should be notified of so that it knows it is not a digital signal.)
I'm so glad I bought a Mac so I don't have to be bothered with the constant update and restart warnings; and no more clumsy virus scans and adware.
How much does the OS X service packs cost again, oh ya $129 every two years.
BTW how do you run a Mac without 'constant' update and restart warnings? Apple has released 5x the amount of updates and security fixes in the past few months as Windows XP, Vista, and Linux combined.
I'm glad you bought a Mac too...
Is the article really saying that ALL HD content, regardless of if it is indicated to be copyrighted or not, is degrade? IE if I take a video with my HD camera, I can't play it on Vista? It sounds like the article is saying that...but...wow
Yes this is one of the things he is trying to say. And sadly is one of the biggest indicators that he is full of crap.
Who gives idiots like this guy a stage when they don't even understand the subject themselves?
From our tech lab, I can confirm that NONE of what he is saying is true. From everything about HD Audio being downgraded, to non flagged HD content EVER being down sampled. He is either lying for a reason or really has no personal experience whatsoever.
Even the sugggestion that the problems with powering down/suspend/hibernation have to do with DRM or HD protection is insane. 99% of the power down issues have to do with the switch to ACPI S4 in Vista or problems with USB drivers (USB drivers are NOT even part of the HDCP scheme in Vista).
As for the CPU running at 100%, that is a new one. In fact if you have a new video card and run either type of HD Content from VC1 or MPEG4, your GPU handles most of the work, and your CPU might hit 30% if you are using NVidia as they don't seem to be offsetting as much of the decoding as ATI does.
This whole article is crap, and full of crap. We have too many test systems and have ran too many of these types of tests and have to date not found ONE issue even close to what people like him try to use to scare people about DRM in Vista. Sounds plausible, but simply it is just NOT true.
Even when the 'protected content' flag DRM issue was raised with Vista Media center, our test found that it was a specific Flag from a couple of cable companies, on a couple of channels marking them as PPV even though they weren't. Which would have have affected even a TiVO box, and was not a Vista issue whatsoever. But the press made it seem like Vista's evil DRM was at play.
I guess that since we can't expect real journalism in the mainstream regarding world issues, it is also too much to expect any journalism in the tech idustry.
Why would sites report this person's claims without proof of concept, or at least testing it for themselves?
Shameful, and yes I know SlashDot is anti-MS, but even here people can have some level of technical understanding and actually want to be informed of what is right and what is made up for press.
This DRM Vista crap has to truly stop at some point. 99% of it is myth.
In summary of your post...
Blah, Blah, Talking Point, Blah, Blah, Talking Point, Blah, Drink a sip of kool-aid.
Then return to watching only Fox News...
Sorry, this is a load of crap. Human beings are the most adaptable species on the whole planet
But we adapt through invention and intellectually 'evolving' to solve problems.
You act like we just 'adapt' through some magical evolution process or physically 'adapt'. In a way you are making my point, but sadly you are not smart enough to realize you are arguing the same point.
Rome didn't die off cause of water shortages, they brought the water to them. We won't die off because of climate change, we will SOLVE the problem as well, and if we aren't smart enough to get idiots like you to support fixing the problem, maybe we should die off.
Perhaps one of the most ego centric(towards humans as a whole) thing I have ever heard. We don't know shit about climatology in the grand scheme of things let alone how to control it at all, and you want us to actively go out of our way to change the direction the climate is going? That's so fucking stupid my mind is truly boggled.
Actually we 'do' know more than a little bit about controlling climate than you seem to realize. And this is not even dealing with what mankind is adding to the mix.
For example, we could drop huge reflective panels and control them like a thermostat. We could also seed the atmosphere with reflecting particles, that would allow us to control environmental effects by the rate of replenishing them.
The problem is, while people are bitching about our climate being political and waiting until 'all' the evidence is in, time is slipping by and things WE DO KNOW how to use are not being funded by our governments. And as we have these 'whose fault is it' debates, our freaking glaciers and ice caps are melting.
And while this crap is melting, the possibility of our ocean streams of being disrupted are very real, shifting parts of the planet into hot zones and others into frigid wastelands. You know, places like Europe for example being covered by 2 meters of snow for a few hundred years.
You do seem to under-estimate the 'understanding' the non-Texaco paid scientists do understand, can predict, and know how climate works fairly intimately. Just because there is conflicting FUD science, doesn't make all the other science wrong or the scientists ignorant on the subject.
You are right about DirectSound putting a pinch on some games, but a little over the top in how it works and why it came to be.
MS found many advantages of moving sound from hardware API sets during the XBox 360 development cycle. And even though the XBox 360 does have 3 cores, even in single core situations, the sound performance impact was virtually non-existent on CPUs running over 1.0ghz. And today, most CPUs are running at least that.
So when MS moved to mimic what they learned from the XBox 360 development, they knew that DirectSound had to be axed, as it did not fit into the new Audio Stack model whatsoever, as all the DirectSound features implemented by people like Creative no longer were as useful as they were under the XP audio stack model.
So it was a gamble to rewrite the Audio subsystem in Vista, but the gains far outweigh the losses. Vista can do some amazing stuff with audio, from inherent environmental controls, to pitch shifting, to even self configuring a 7.1 audio environment with a microphone.
There are other aspects to this as well, Vista can individually control and direct sound to each speaker in a 7.1 enviroment. Which is not so important for desktop use, but for games is great for developers. Instead of having to simulation sound environments, they can control each speaker and level independently.
This type of control and 'richness' is what makes EAX old school, as it didn't offer this level of control, even with the latest and greatest Creative sound card.
Also by shifting the audio back through the CPU, it left open not only these features, but room for many more, especially in gaming, and this is where the new DX10.1 audio API comes in, as it STILL pushes sound through the CPU.
As for this screwing over game developers, yes and no. For most developers, all it took was implementing a simple adaptation to the gaming audio stack to hand off sound to the new Vista audio subsystem, and let Vista handle the surround, etc. If you look at MMO games from SOE, they even took out their EAX and miles drivers and replaced them Vista native drivers that hand off sound to Vista, letting Vista worry about 5.1/7.1/surround/stereo/etc.
So, ya some games got hurt if the developers didn't hand out an update that integrated with Vista's audio, but this mainly only hurt Creative users, and Creative has done a good job of handling this transition for a lot of these games, and maybe the developers will issue updates so the Creative project won't even be needed.
The worst thing is the suspicion is that it was done not to improve the OS, but to make it harder to work round the embedded DRM protecting secure windows media files - in effect, crippling gamers to keep the music studios happy by try to provide a 'secure audio path' from DRM file to speakers, to at least prevent digital copies.
This is ONLY for HD protected content. Ya, it sucks that HD players and Vista being a HD player OS has to conform to this crap, but it doesn't affect anything past HD content. If you want to loop analog audio back in and record it, you still can, nothing is keeping you from doing this, and in fact Vista even makes it easier when it comes to managing line in/out.
New Audio devices that have native Vista support know when you plug in a headphone, line-in, etc, and you can independently control each plug on your system, even if you aren't doing 7.1. So basically your front line-in and headphone jacks are 'independent' of the rear audio jacks. And you can tell Vista to ship sound from application A to this out and record in Application B from this line in.
However, you can't do the internal digital looping that you could in XP, but most people didn't realize that by doing this on MOST soundcards, you were multi-plexing the sound quality to do so, and if you were recording a CD quality source via the Stereo Mixer input, you were in fact not getting CD quality sampling. It was a multi-plexing trick, just as when you play two sound sources at the
Nvidia & Creative Labs drivers, that were made for Vista, will drop your FPS in half
The Creative drivers were horrible, and the initial ATI and NVidia drivers also were horrible, ATI not even having proper OpenGL acceleration.
However, dropping FPS in half is a bit over the top. Most reviews from the time show Vista running at worse 10-15% slower in games, and in some games better regarding FPS. And even 10-15% is pretty small when average users are pushing 30-60fps in most games, this is 3-8fps loss, not really something to cry over.
I'm sure there are some games that had 'extensive' problems at first with the new drivers and possibly did drop performance to unusable levels, but on average it wasn't that bad, it just wasn't as fast as XP at the time and people were expecting faster with Vista, so it was more of a disappointment then flat out sucking.
Take Care...
Installing a motor in every wheel is intuitively a nice idea
This was the subject of a few papers and subsequent articles in popular automotive and popular mechanics type magazines.
The conclusion was that technology would be needed to offset these effects and even at the time of the articles/papers 20years ago, it was not too farfetched.
With today's high response computers already in cars with active suspension, linear traction, etc. the computer technology to offset these problems is something that can easily be tuned using today's technology.
Some aspects of independent motors, or 'drive trains' to each wheel is 'enhanced' stability and traction control, as well as rotational tricks that would allow the car to rotate one wheel backwards while rotating the others forward. This would give a performance car incredible cornering, handling, as well as make available some interesting turning radius effects.
I can remember back when 'performance' car people hated the idea of 'alternative' energy or electric powered cars and saw them as the death of the sports/muscle cars. At the time I spoke up and tried to explain how wrong they were, as alternative technology could yield faster, better performing and safer sports cars. This is just one area and example of how new technology would achieve these results.
IF we decide we want to. Global warming, see, has lots of advantages, not the least of which is a massive increase in arable land.
You do realize the majority of the earth's population lives in coastal regions or areas that would be below the 'new' sea level?
So ya, great we get better summers and growing seasons in Minnesota, but of course 2 or 3 billion people have to die or relocate.
This whole, 'warming is good crap' is nothing but crap and something you only find 'credibly' discussed on Fox News or other propaganda outlets.
The planet has been through many changes in climate before, both high extremes and low. And if you believe that the current situation is any worse than past events, you are not seeing any more than the climate terrorists are telling you.
They are worse in terms of the existence of humans on this planet with consideration to the population affected by the changes.
This is just like the huge midwest earthquake, it was massive, ringing bells in boston, but virtually no life was loss because there were not as many structures to crumble on people.
Today even a smaller earthquake in the same area would bring cities like Nashville to a pile of rubble, as their skycrappers are not designed for earthquakes.
So you have to keep some perspective on this.
As for science 'fixing' the problem, this doesn't necessarily mean a plan on the scale of Dr Evil to alter the world. It could be as simple as dusting the upper atmosphere with reflect particles or even droppping a few large scale reflective panels in space that could be controlled to regulate the climate, both of which could be adjusted, changed or removed if they had negative impacts that science doesn't foresee.
If mankind is causing the increase, we can curb it by stopping the things that cause it. If we aren't, stopping them won't matter a whit!
Whether mankind is responsible or NOT, by REDUCING what we are doing, even if it is such a tiny impact that it isn't the problem, it might help 'slow' the process of warming, even a little bit to buy us time to save a lot of lives.
One thing that 10.1 DX addresses is the Sound APIs that developers felt lost without, MS's Sound technology that is used on the Xbox 360 is being added into 10.1 DX, and this is more of what DX 10.1 is about than anything else.
Sadly though, sound is one area Vista gets no credit, yet is one of the best selling points of Vista.
With the new Audio subsystem in Vista, if you are running 5.1 or higher you can turn on your Mic and it will auto tune the speakers and environment sounds for an outstanding experience.
Another great thing about Sound in Vista is that even with an old AC'97 sound card and just stereo speakers on a desktop or laptop, the sound fidelity is significantly better than XP or OS X by several factors. For example a Wav,mp3,wma played on the same hardware and same speakers will sound incredibly more rich and defined on Vista than when you are playing it in XP. Even putting the same speakers on a Mac and 'trying' get the fidelity up, the sound quality was NOT even close to what Vista was doing with an old sound card.
And DX10.1 adds back in DirectX level APIs for game developers.
If anyone really wants to understand the Audio in Vista, do a search on Vista Audio Subsystem, or Sonar Vista. There are great technical pieces on why Vista redid the Audio system and also some good examples of why developers of audio products like Sonar continue to choose MS and Vista as their platform of choice for high quality production.
All serious gamers are happily running Windows XP with latest service pack. I have not yet seen a single gamer liking Vista unless he/she got a true monster machine which you can't tell difference whatever you do. Some game companies have guts to say "We do NOT support Vista at least until SP1 ships".
Actually this is changing with the drivers from NVidia and ATI from the past few months. The Vista gaming performance even at launch with CRAP drivers was only doing about 3-6fps slower than XP, and when you are running 30-60fps, the difference is NOT noticeable.
However with the current generation of drivers, Vista is out performing XP in gaming, not only in Video performance but in load times, etc.
And this is JUST NOT people with monster systems. We have test 'gaming' machines here that our techs use that have everything from Athlon +2000 and an NVidia Geforce 6600 that conquers all of today's games with acceptable performance. And YES faster in Vista with better overall performance than running XP on the same system.
The only catch to good gaming results in Vista is 1GB of RAM, and since MOST gamers already have 1GB, this is not a big requirement.
As for newer systems and higher end GPUs, the results are even more dramatic, as Vista utilizing dual-cores more efficiently and RAM more efficiently to cut down the Hard Drive and other bottlenecks, the games not only perform but load and 'instance' at 5 to 10x as fast as they do on XP with the same hardware.
I am actually kind of tired of the Gamers hate Vista Myth, as it is a bunch of crap. And 99% of the gamers that continue this myth, have never used Vista to even know what the hell they are talking about.
Considering that the entire Vista video subsystem is NEW, it is quite astounding that games and applications run as seamless as they do in comparison to XP, and then add on the fact it has more features, and gives users better quality in games and now is giving them better performance with the latest drivers.
(Yes I am specifically talking about DX7-9 and OpenGL games here, this doesn't even bring into account what DX10 will bring to games for more performance and quality.)
This also doesn't even factor in some of the things Vista can do with games that are impossible on XP or other OSes, since it pre-emptively multi-tasks the GPU and does do VRAM Virtualization.
On a Vista machine you can open a high performance OpenGL game (in a window) and a couple of DX8 or DX9 games in a Window as well, and they will all run side by side with virtually less than 2% FPS drop in all games because of Vista flipping GPU control between the games and even the Aero desktop. You can even Flip3D the games and not lose FPS while they are running in a perspective Window in Flip3D mode on Aero.
You can also do other 'cute' tricks, like grab a tranparency utility and set the game's Window Transparency to 75% and see the desktop and other games running behind while you are actively playing, again without FPS loss in the game.
Our techs even leave a 1080HD wallpaper running on the desktop while doing this with games that are set to 75% transparent, and neither the games nor the desktop Video wallpaper glitch or lose performance. And again this is possible even on medium end systems like a system with 2GB of RAM a 3Ghz processor P4 and an NVidia 6800 GPU. (Oh and have Windows Media Center playing a Show or Movie on the other monitor at the same time.)
Vista is actually a gamer's dream architecture, especially if you run multiple instances of a MMO or run in a Window so you can use Vent and Messenger, etc while playing. It also rocks for single player games like Oblivion that is damn demanding on a system.
In graphics cards that is. Is that required in 10 or 10.1?
Required in DX10, and ALL WDDM drivers in Vista support GPU RAM Virtualization. (Even though NVidia didn't want to support this feature, they have implemented it quite well after some help from MS in the past few months, catching up to XP in gaming performance with it left on, which NVidia didn't think was possible at first.)
GPU RAM virtualization is also used by all WDDM drivers for DX9 hardware and current DirectX games (even 7 & 8), as Vista is in control of the VRAM and also the GPU for scheduling.
This allows gamers with 64mb or 128mb video cards to crank up texture settings in existing games without overloading the VRAM and yet giving them the same performance as XP with the lower quality Texture settings.
So you two will sit here and argue over whether the CO2 is mankind's fault or not, and yet both acknowledge that CO2 will increase global temperatures.
Bottom line, if this is the end of an ice age, or mankind screwing up the earth it doesn't matter. Scientists need to find a way to MAINTAIN the 'sweet' spot that humans need for survival.
This is no longer about who's fault it is, nor saving the earth, this is about saving a large population of people.
1) If mankind is 'adding' to the problem, we need to stop accelerating it.
2) If mankind has nothing to do with it, we need to find a way to artificially slow it down.
Here are the ramifications of either scenario, the caps are melting. Yes, this is FACT, no matter how much people want to bitch about whose fault it is.
The shelf that dropped off a couple of years ago at the South Pole was a dramatic indicator.
The fact that Greenland is 'becoming' green again is another major problem.
The fact that US subs at the north pole have measured the ice thickness go from 10s of meters, where they couldn't surface, to under 1 meter where they can surface should be enough evidence to scare the hell out of people.
So after you two and people like you get worrying about who's fault all of this is, it is time to get together and work on a solution. An asteroid collision would not be manmade, but if one comes hurling at the earth, we would need to take action to deflect it. And this is the same freaking thing. PERIOD.
All this recent bitching about whether the temperatures are going up 5 degrees or only 2 degrees DOESN'T MAKE A FREAKING DIFFERENCE, they are going up, or the caps would not be melting.
What happens when the caps melt? Well first the ocean streams are messed up as fresh water is added in large amounts to crucial areas that salinization are needed to return heavy water back to the equator. In effect Europe and parts of North America freeze over.
The second problem is even if the streams in the ocean somehow keep working as needed to keep mankind alive, sea levels WILL continue to RAISE. This means bye, bye Miami, most of New York City, the Netherlands, and a large portion of Asia areas and islands.
And we are only talking a meter or two difference to affect 100s of millions of people on the coastlines everywhere.
So go back to your bitching about who is at fault, while the rest of the scientific community tries to find solutions to save your ass.