There really isn't any major difference other than that Google Movies doesn't have a front page like RT does, rather it's just a huge DB of reviews. That said however, RT has become increasingly cluttered/ad-riddled since they were picked up by the IGN/GameSpy group, so I see this as a positive thing both for the lack of distractions, and hopefully encouraging RT(and by reflection, Google) in to improving these services.
Is anyone else noticing an interesting trend here as far as company location goes? Though Oregon already has a ton of high-tech companies(including Intel R&D), this is the second major Microsoft competitor to set up shop there in a year(the first being the OSDL). As an Oregonian I certainly welcome this, though I'm starting to wonder if I should get a bomb shelter should MS want to obliterate the competition in more ways than one.
Re:Bittorrent?
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think it's practical right now, but that doesn't mean it will hold true for too much longer. As it stands right now, BitTorrent files have 2 hashes: each chunk has a hash, and then the file as a whole has its own hash. This means that for a torrent to be perfectly polluted(that is, polluted without anyone knowing), the garbage data needs to fit both hashes, which will be harder, though breaking a chunk hash is enough to kill a torrent swarm, even if users know about it. However, the **AA organizations aren't exactly poor, and as unlikely as it is, they do have the finances to get access to a large computing cluster, which would allow them to cause some damage.
Judging from what's been said about how difficult it is to break SHA-1 even with this discovery, I would think it's fine for now, but a new hash should probably be included with BitTorrent2.
With only 3 regional companies left, there's going to be significant pressure to reduce that to 2, since it's far easier to hold a virtual monopoly when you only have 1 competitor to deal with. Look for Qwest, the smallest company right now, to be the victim and swallowed up by one of the others, probably SBC. I doubt we'll see 2 become 1 in the short-term though, since the burden of proof on the survivors that it's acceptable for them to be 1 company is going to be too high. In the long term however, if VoIP services take off and empower the cable companies and otherwise further detract from the POTS's relevance, then we could see a final merger.
Speaking of the cable companies, look for a continuation of their tendency to merge every few years. With the exception of TW and Comcast merging, almost anything can and probably will happen.
I know the OP was just trying to be funny, but seriously, from TFA:
Computers are at risk if they run an unpatched version of a Symantec product that scans files to detect malicious code and if they use the Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and AIX operating systems, Symantec said.
So as unlikely as it is that many Linux users are using a Symantec product, or that someone will target a Linux box, anything that is running a scanner(such as an email server) is vulnerable. Everyone needs to patch on this, not just the Windows guys.
I'm not terribly surprised to see this happening. After the plot developments that have occurred so far in season 4, it's fairly obvious that the stage is being set for the Romulan Wars later on. Considering that if Enterprise indeed doesn't make it to a 5th season we'll likely never see the wars(nor the birth of the Federation), I can't say I blame the fans; the only way to really complete the Enterprise arc is for these events to happen. Let's hope the fans are successful enough to see this through.
You're sort of close, but PPG wasn't created by Genndy Tartakovski, it was created by Craig McCracken. Genndy created Dexter's Laboratory, which McCracken also worked on however. Personally, I find that Grievous is more closely related to Samurai Jack anyway, another Tartakovski show.
I'm far more afraid of what Microsoft is going to do about this. I mean, wouldn't it be convenient to have a Windows powered missile accidentally mis-fire and land in Beaverton? All I know is that we need more bomb shelters before the OS holy wars become literal.;-)
The problem arises from the fact that Hubble will die without servicing before then.
Not to mention Hubble and JWST don't see all the same frequencies on the radiation spectrum, so even once JWST goes up, we won't be able to see everything Hubble could.
Do you have a link or other source confirming that this upgrade requires a newer DOCSIS standard? The idea of giving up my Surfboard 4200 does not sit well with me.
I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac. The X Windows version is completely ignorable, since even with good X11 support, X11 is not what the Mac is about. Now the Carbon/Aqua versions are a somewhat different beast, but emacs still brings in things like shortcuts that were developed in the PC world and don't make any sense in the Mac world.
On the flip side there's BBEdit/TextWragler, apps written by guys who have been doing Mac stuff for years(Apple users are unusually loyal to Mac developers; it's one of the last markets where Shareware still works), and their products have been built from the ground up for the Mac because of that. In that respect, it works very well for the environment by doing what users expect out of Mac shortcuts, though it's really one of those "you have to use it to understand it" sort of things, it's hard to describe things that you do instinctively without thought.
Though this could have changed somewhat by now, I haven't used a Mac version of emacs in over a year...
While we're on the subject of Knoppix, I love this tool(kudos to the dev team), but at the end of the day I don't have the damned clue how to use half the functionality of it, and I'm going to take a guess that it's that way for a lot of other techies, too. Someone really needs to get on the ball, and write up some documentation for it, talking about what the different tools are, what the best ones are for specific problems, etc. Though this thing really begs for a whole O'Reilly book on it just due to depth, the current lack of documentation really seems to be the biggest problem with it at the moment.
Credit to Microsoft for finally taking the plunge and not supporting obsolete code. Nobody *has* to use 64-bit Windows, and frankly, using a 64-bit box to run 16-bit software is... a waste. Legacy support has bitten Microsoft in the ass more than a few times when it came to security problems with Windows. Besides, if you need to, you can always run old code using a product like VMware, as well.
If I may, there's something that should be pointed out to you and the OP: the AMD64 specification does not include a 16bit mode when running in 64bit mode. The two 64bit modes available are "pure"(which is literally pure 64bit mode) and "compatibility" which lets the processor run in 64bit mode while being able to run specific threads in 32bit mode, hence allowing 32bit programs to run with almost no performance hit, save some DLL Hell from needing the 32bit DLLs. Compatibility mode doesn't support 16bit threads however(you must be running pure 32bit mode to run 16bit threads), so there are two points I'd like to make: 1) It's not MS's fault that there isn't 16bit support, this is a hardware limitation, as they'd need a full emulator to get any sort of 16 bit support. And 2) AMD deserves the credit for killing 16bit, not MS.
Yes, of course I know, but Cygwin doesn't know that. Cygwin will not work on an out-of-box install because it tries to launch the XP64 CMD.exe, and this is something that needs to be fixed one way or another.
For the record, I only mention Sun and Java because I feel sorry for Sun going through all this work to get Java up and running on XP64, only for the Eclipse project's SWT to not be ready, locking people out of two of the most popular Java apps out there. I'm plenty aware of how SWT has nothing to do with Sun, and vice versa.;-)
I second the parent's assertion, it really is just like XP32. With RC1, Microsoft has finally turned off debugging and cleaned up the memory management code so that memory usage is more or less exactly in line with XP32(the previous Beta builds ate memory like Roseanne Barr at a buffet), and ZDNet has a good point about the driver stuff, since RC1 includes support for such new stuff as ATI's Radeon X-series cards right out of the box.
I really only have a handful of complaints at this point, and they're mostly F/OSS related actually. Cygwin has not been patched in any way to deal with XP64(which it needs to, as 32bit Cygwin and the 64bit CMD.exe do not get along), which is hindering other software ports since a lot of F/OSS stuff for Windows is built with Cygwin. My other issue is that the Java Standard Widget Toolkit(SWT) has not been ported to XP64(nor to the devs seem to have a plan to do so at the moment) which means no Eclipse or Azureus in spite of the whole write-once, run-anywhere Java mentality(and it's a shame, poor Sun actually has had a version of Java ready for XP64 for some time now). I also have a complaint of Microsoft: they didn't port Windows Media Player of all things to 64bit. 32bit WMP runs just fine, so it's not a problem, but the included software should all be 64bit, in my opinion.
Still, don't get me wrong, those are the biggest issues I have, and they're overall a.1 on a 1-10 scale of severity. As far as an architecture change goes, XP64 as it is right now is about as clean of a change as I could see happening. It's going to be a good OS, and I'm looking forward to having the chance to use some more 64bit software on it.
At this point, the definition of Vaperware is going to be splitting hairs. Alienware is no longer going to produce a Video Array solution on their own, as Nvidia's SLI was announced after VA was, and for obvious technical/practical reasons, Alienware has adopted SLI and dropped end-user VA. At this point, all they're doing is shopping around, seeing if any video card company is interested in the tech(ATI, anyone?). So is something vaporware if it's replaced by a better technology ahead of time? The answer to that is going to be the answer on if it's Vaporware or not.
Re:Graphics card's driver must support the game?!?
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 1
You have to keep in mind that just because everything should doesn't mean it does work, or that it works as well as it should. With GPUs exceeding CPU complexity, the drivers are ungodly complex, and are littered with bugs, many of which won't be found until someone tries to do a specific thing that reveals the bug, which in turn requires a new driver revision to fix it.
As for speed, this is a hot-button issue in the PC game world right now so there are a lot of ways to go on this, but in general it's possible to boost a game's performance by sometimes insane amounts by optimizing the driver against the game in question, which is something gamers demand. It doesn't do anyone any good if every PC game ends up like the port of Halo, where the damn thing is always too slow considering how light it is on technology, and although this is the dev's fault in this case(Gearbox had to rewrite some of Bungie's stuff for Halo CE, but it's too late to put it back in the main Halo executable for SP), similar slowdowns would happen to other games if drivers weren't optimized against them.
If we want to take a look at why Linux doesn't "have game," just take a look at DirectX+VisualBasic. It's slow, parts of it are nearly archaic, and it's not very system/bandwidth efficient in any way, but it's past simple to use, it's stupid-simple. Even if VB is bypassed by the major dev houses for C/C++ and skip some parts of DirectX to use their own stuff to meet their own needs, there are armies of single/small-team n00b devs like this guy who are programming tiny games in DirectX+VB. These guys need something stupid-simple for their games since they don't need performance, portability, or modern features - they need simplicity to match their relative newness with programming, and they need to know about what does exist because of their newness.
Even though 99% of these guys will never go on to make a major commercial game, their existence along with the 1% that do move on are a critical part of the equation about what direction devs will want to do in the future. If you can't convince these n00b devs to design for cross-platform stuff now, either due to a lack of convincing/knowledge or good tools, what will make them want to use anything besides Windows in future(besides the money related to market share)? Linux needs these guys and their nearly inconsequential games if it wants the mass-market stuff in the future.
If you RTA, there's a link at the bottom linking back to a blog post here on Slashdot by him, where he talked about quitting arena. It's a very similar story.
When the Web was introduced to the masses, everyone down to the last AOLer talked about building their own websites. But up until now many of those sites have been poorly updated piles of rubbish, a far cry from the web of individual voices and opinions around the world that many people thought the Web would bring.
So here we are in 2004, where blogers are now "people of the year" and when we look back at what's changed, it's almost nothing except for one thing: content management systems. You give people Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and they'll put out a poorly done site that's too complex for them to convienently update, but all of a sudden the simple blog-style of content management is introduced, and all of a sudden that vision of voices around the world is coming true. Was this the only thing we were missing the whole damn time?
I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.
So if all the WMA file is doing is causing IE to pull up a webpage, then this is somewhat benign on the WMA's part. The only thing Overpeer can do is pop up ad windows, and can only install adware if (and only if) the user clicks yes on an install box, or they use an IE exploit to automatically install it. Not that this is a good thing in any way, but it's a hell of a lot better than the WMA carrying the payload itself, since now people who follow directions and keep their boxen updated in the first place likely can't be attacked as Overpeer would like. Still, something needs to be done about this; using a true exploit like an IE bug to install something should not be something Overpeer can legally do.
Slashdot Mirror
There really isn't any major difference other than that Google Movies doesn't have a front page like RT does, rather it's just a huge DB of reviews. That said however, RT has become increasingly cluttered/ad-riddled since they were picked up by the IGN/GameSpy group, so I see this as a positive thing both for the lack of distractions, and hopefully encouraging RT(and by reflection, Google) in to improving these services.
Is anyone else noticing an interesting trend here as far as company location goes? Though Oregon already has a ton of high-tech companies(including Intel R&D), this is the second major Microsoft competitor to set up shop there in a year(the first being the OSDL). As an Oregonian I certainly welcome this, though I'm starting to wonder if I should get a bomb shelter should MS want to obliterate the competition in more ways than one.
Judging from what's been said about how difficult it is to break SHA-1 even with this discovery, I would think it's fine for now, but a new hash should probably be included with BitTorrent2.
Speaking of the cable companies, look for a continuation of their tendency to merge every few years. With the exception of TW and Comcast merging, almost anything can and probably will happen.
So as unlikely as it is that many Linux users are using a Symantec product, or that someone will target a Linux box, anything that is running a scanner(such as an email server) is vulnerable. Everyone needs to patch on this, not just the Windows guys.
I'm not terribly surprised to see this happening. After the plot developments that have occurred so far in season 4, it's fairly obvious that the stage is being set for the Romulan Wars later on. Considering that if Enterprise indeed doesn't make it to a 5th season we'll likely never see the wars(nor the birth of the Federation), I can't say I blame the fans; the only way to really complete the Enterprise arc is for these events to happen. Let's hope the fans are successful enough to see this through.
You're sort of close, but PPG wasn't created by Genndy Tartakovski, it was created by Craig McCracken. Genndy created Dexter's Laboratory, which McCracken also worked on however. Personally, I find that Grievous is more closely related to Samurai Jack anyway, another Tartakovski show.
I'm far more afraid of what Microsoft is going to do about this. I mean, wouldn't it be convenient to have a Windows powered missile accidentally mis-fire and land in Beaverton? All I know is that we need more bomb shelters before the OS holy wars become literal.;-)
Not to mention Hubble and JWST don't see all the same frequencies on the radiation spectrum, so even once JWST goes up, we won't be able to see everything Hubble could.
Do you have a link or other source confirming that this upgrade requires a newer DOCSIS standard? The idea of giving up my Surfboard 4200 does not sit well with me.
Uh oh, looks like we need another Timmy!
I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac. The X Windows version is completely ignorable, since even with good X11 support, X11 is not what the Mac is about. Now the Carbon/Aqua versions are a somewhat different beast, but emacs still brings in things like shortcuts that were developed in the PC world and don't make any sense in the Mac world.
On the flip side there's BBEdit/TextWragler, apps written by guys who have been doing Mac stuff for years(Apple users are unusually loyal to Mac developers; it's one of the last markets where Shareware still works), and their products have been built from the ground up for the Mac because of that. In that respect, it works very well for the environment by doing what users expect out of Mac shortcuts, though it's really one of those "you have to use it to understand it" sort of things, it's hard to describe things that you do instinctively without thought.
Though this could have changed somewhat by now, I haven't used a Mac version of emacs in over a year...
While we're on the subject of Knoppix, I love this tool(kudos to the dev team), but at the end of the day I don't have the damned clue how to use half the functionality of it, and I'm going to take a guess that it's that way for a lot of other techies, too. Someone really needs to get on the ball, and write up some documentation for it, talking about what the different tools are, what the best ones are for specific problems, etc. Though this thing really begs for a whole O'Reilly book on it just due to depth, the current lack of documentation really seems to be the biggest problem with it at the moment.
If I may, there's something that should be pointed out to you and the OP: the AMD64 specification does not include a 16bit mode when running in 64bit mode. The two 64bit modes available are "pure"(which is literally pure 64bit mode) and "compatibility" which lets the processor run in 64bit mode while being able to run specific threads in 32bit mode, hence allowing 32bit programs to run with almost no performance hit, save some DLL Hell from needing the 32bit DLLs. Compatibility mode doesn't support 16bit threads however(you must be running pure 32bit mode to run 16bit threads), so there are two points I'd like to make: 1) It's not MS's fault that there isn't 16bit support, this is a hardware limitation, as they'd need a full emulator to get any sort of 16 bit support. And 2) AMD deserves the credit for killing 16bit, not MS.
What are your system specs(i.e. the video card and NIC)?
Yes, of course I know, but Cygwin doesn't know that. Cygwin will not work on an out-of-box install because it tries to launch the XP64 CMD.exe, and this is something that needs to be fixed one way or another.
For the record, I only mention Sun and Java because I feel sorry for Sun going through all this work to get Java up and running on XP64, only for the Eclipse project's SWT to not be ready, locking people out of two of the most popular Java apps out there. I'm plenty aware of how SWT has nothing to do with Sun, and vice versa.;-)
I really only have a handful of complaints at this point, and they're mostly F/OSS related actually. Cygwin has not been patched in any way to deal with XP64(which it needs to, as 32bit Cygwin and the 64bit CMD.exe do not get along), which is hindering other software ports since a lot of F/OSS stuff for Windows is built with Cygwin. My other issue is that the Java Standard Widget Toolkit(SWT) has not been ported to XP64(nor to the devs seem to have a plan to do so at the moment) which means no Eclipse or Azureus in spite of the whole write-once, run-anywhere Java mentality(and it's a shame, poor Sun actually has had a version of Java ready for XP64 for some time now). I also have a complaint of Microsoft: they didn't port Windows Media Player of all things to 64bit. 32bit WMP runs just fine, so it's not a problem, but the included software should all be 64bit, in my opinion.
Still, don't get me wrong, those are the biggest issues I have, and they're overall a .1 on a 1-10 scale of severity. As far as an architecture change goes, XP64 as it is right now is about as clean of a change as I could see happening. It's going to be a good OS, and I'm looking forward to having the chance to use some more 64bit software on it.
At this point, the definition of Vaperware is going to be splitting hairs. Alienware is no longer going to produce a Video Array solution on their own, as Nvidia's SLI was announced after VA was, and for obvious technical/practical reasons, Alienware has adopted SLI and dropped end-user VA. At this point, all they're doing is shopping around, seeing if any video card company is interested in the tech(ATI, anyone?). So is something vaporware if it's replaced by a better technology ahead of time? The answer to that is going to be the answer on if it's Vaporware or not.
As for speed, this is a hot-button issue in the PC game world right now so there are a lot of ways to go on this, but in general it's possible to boost a game's performance by sometimes insane amounts by optimizing the driver against the game in question, which is something gamers demand. It doesn't do anyone any good if every PC game ends up like the port of Halo, where the damn thing is always too slow considering how light it is on technology, and although this is the dev's fault in this case(Gearbox had to rewrite some of Bungie's stuff for Halo CE, but it's too late to put it back in the main Halo executable for SP), similar slowdowns would happen to other games if drivers weren't optimized against them.
Even though 99% of these guys will never go on to make a major commercial game, their existence along with the 1% that do move on are a critical part of the equation about what direction devs will want to do in the future. If you can't convince these n00b devs to design for cross-platform stuff now, either due to a lack of convincing/knowledge or good tools, what will make them want to use anything besides Windows in future(besides the money related to market share)? Linux needs these guys and their nearly inconsequential games if it wants the mass-market stuff in the future.
If you RTA, there's a link at the bottom linking back to a blog post here on Slashdot by him, where he talked about quitting arena. It's a very similar story.
When the Web was introduced to the masses, everyone down to the last AOLer talked about building their own websites. But up until now many of those sites have been poorly updated piles of rubbish, a far cry from the web of individual voices and opinions around the world that many people thought the Web would bring.
So here we are in 2004, where blogers are now "people of the year" and when we look back at what's changed, it's almost nothing except for one thing: content management systems. You give people Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and they'll put out a poorly done site that's too complex for them to convienently update, but all of a sudden the simple blog-style of content management is introduced, and all of a sudden that vision of voices around the world is coming true. Was this the only thing we were missing the whole damn time?
I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.
So if all the WMA file is doing is causing IE to pull up a webpage, then this is somewhat benign on the WMA's part. The only thing Overpeer can do is pop up ad windows, and can only install adware if (and only if) the user clicks yes on an install box, or they use an IE exploit to automatically install it. Not that this is a good thing in any way, but it's a hell of a lot better than the WMA carrying the payload itself, since now people who follow directions and keep their boxen updated in the first place likely can't be attacked as Overpeer would like. Still, something needs to be done about this; using a true exploit like an IE bug to install something should not be something Overpeer can legally do.