Outlook 2007 has some rather interesting features. Typing in the middle of a paragraph - when the cursor crosses the line wrap the cursor is sometimes moved to a semi-random place in the text. That took a little getting used to. The last editor I used that had that problem -- well, I wrote it myself.:-(
The "invisible text" in HTML emails bug is still present too. It's a holdover from O97. You would think they would fix that. Some people feel that having some of the text of their emails randomly deleted or rendered invisible somewhat hampers their productivity.
And, like Microsoft Works, Office2007 cannot be completely uninstalled. If you get the trial version or ad supported version as crudware you're stuck with it forever.
It's shocking that quality like this became the market standard.
The first step is to put down our Slashdot fetish and (excuse the term) troll the sites the common folk frequent. They need to know. We can tell them. If we don't there are plenty of astoturfers in a Bangalore web center where people get a few bucks a day to post the same lame FUD every day.
Those of you who frequent the informed corners of the www may be shocked to discover the information more common folk are offered as fact. It's apalling.
Hell, make it a game. Make a website where you get points for correcting disinformation on popular websites, with moderation and prizes. Share donations with the best posters. That would work.
Using Preload your linux apps can be preloaded much like Vista's SuperFetch. Start times will go down by about half with larger apps you use a lot. You can also use the tips below. People on Ubuntu Forums seem to like it. Preload is in most libraries so you would install it the same way you install all your free software.
The Enterprise version of your Linux Server OS comes with unlimited client licenses. As many clients can access the server as it's capable of serving. Also the Linux Datacenter Edition comes with unlimited CPU licenses, so you can run it on a server with as many processors as you like.
Sure, the server Enterprise version costs four times as much and the Datacenter version eight times as much, but when the base price is zero that's not too bad.
2) Patch Encryption: basically distributing the patch in an encrypted format, waiting until it is reasonable to assume that everyone has the patch, and then transmitting a decryption key to decrypt and apply the patch more or less "simultaneously". Problems: this only pushes the problem back one level; meaning the same method of exploitation is just as possible, while this also creates an unacceptable time lag for patches to be applied, which hackers who write exploits the old-fashioned way can exploit to their considerable benefit.
The result of a bad patch: Global instant borkensystem. With option 3 it's similar -- Fast Global Hosenboxen. Nobody would consider option 1. It too obviously won't work.
We used different releases of three web browsers, resulting in a total of eight different browser versions. The results indicate that Storm exploits only web browsers with a specific User-Agent, a HTTP request header field specifying the browser version. If this header field specifies a non-vulnerable browser, the malicious server does not send the exploit to the client. However, if the client seems to be vulnerable, the server sends between three and six different exploits for vulnerabilities commonly found in this browser or in common browser-addons. The goal of all these exploits is to install a copy of the Storm binary on the visitor's machine. We observed that the actual exploit used in the malicious Web sites is polymorphic, i.e., the exploit code changes periodically, in this case every minute, which complicates signature-based detection of these malicious sites.
So... three guesses what user-agent it's looking for.
But that does not excuse ISO. On receipt of this monster ISO could have laughed, refused it, and revoked their recognition of ECMA as a standard setting body for cause. They could have used a less harsh method of censure amounting to "get away from me kid, I've got work to do."
ISO didn't do that. Instead it went through the drama in three acts that was the validation of this garbage. Now in this FAQ they tell us they monitored the process quite closely all the way through. That means they observed all of the shenanigans in real time and allowed them complicitly. At the end they tell us how proud they are of their process. Since the whole way through the rules changed at every step dynamically to force the approval and silence dissent they imply that was their intent and the result is the one they desired: approval at any cost.
The price of "approve at any cost" appears to be their credibility. Now they've no credibility left and ECMA has none to lend them.
The status of international standards body of record is a prestigious one. With it comes a hefty responsibility. You don't get to blame the other guy. The other guy is not ISO.
The FAQ is all about not fixing it. They're rationalizing about how they have great process and how they have to accept the result of that process. The fix is in.
And Microsoft? Now that they've built this grand machine for subverting ISO do you expect them to use it once and then throw it away? Not likely. Their duty to their shareholders and all that...
unless the mistress puts a bullet in the wifes head the husband isn't voluntarily divorcing his wife anytime soon.
... or the wife does herself in. The product we're talking about does move in that direction a good distance. We should all buy it and show it off for what it is.
Compared to an eee PC with compiz and OO.o this thing is a joke. Nothing could do more damage to the leaning M brand than to hold it up as the best they can do.
It would seem that Mono could be a runtime for apps also. Anybody know why that might not work?
Jesus, why don't you just run Vista on it if you want to fit your Microsoft crud into everything. Yeah... Vista -- in your router! Two gigs of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor, plenty of storage! Vista oughta run just fine, eh?
"It looks like you're issuing a dynamic IP address. [cancel] [allow]?"
The realism of individual images/frames is getting pretty good but it is still a far cry from being convincing and the reason for that is that reality is very noisy and very rough, it is physically and visually complex. Take a look at someone's face...well at least one that hasn't been spackled over with make-up... craters, mountains, hairs and so on, all essentially randomly distributed and that is a very simple case. Clothing, bricks, rocks etc. - in general reality does not tend to be very smooth and it does not tend to be very regular (at least not obviously so at the level we are usually watching)... texture maps just don't go that far in dealing with such and generating a model with detail sufficient to be convincing involves huge amounts of data... rendering that data is only part of the problem - generating it in the first place is also a big problem.
I'm agreeing with you. You will find that fractal geometries when carefully applied as deformation structures on regular forms create a computable pseudorandom difference sufficient to transform them to "realistic" looking irregular forms. The deformation can be baked into the construction of the model with a tool.
You seem to have a sound understanding of the issues involved here. That's good.
Realtime raytracing hasn't been held back by patents, it has been held back by computational complexity.
You scored a clean miss here though. If you read back, you'll see I agree with this thoroughly. It's the specialized hardware and software and the methods employed in raster approaches that are more recent tech and so more vulnerable to patent trolls. This has been the main impediment to getting the interfaces published to the point where open developers can work with them. It is the ancient and elegant ray tracing solutions where so much prior art exists from the dawn of the computer era, and the fact that it's a computational simulation of a physical process that make their use as an open platform possible now that the hardware is finally emerging that can deliver real time ray tracing.
In the end we'll see. Until then watching the events unfold will be interesting.
A system capable of ray tracing, however, is also capable of raster. When the tech is here we'll see what wins out. Perhaps as you point out some hybrid will take the day.
You know that's not what I meant by edge effects. In raster based systems collision points create areas where the proper pixel to display is indeterminate. That's the basic cost of rasterization and one reason why it will always look fake. An animated picture of a wave lapping a hull is never going to look like a model of a wave lapping a hull no matter what you do to refine your raster model.
Others have pointed out that photorealism isn't always the goal. That's true, but ray is also capable of doing the cartoony things without the issues you see with raster. It's all up to the game designer. One person mentioned that John Carmack prefers raster. That may be. It also may be that John Carmack is a really smart guy and isn't going to tell you what he's up to until he releases the Carmack Ray Game Engine (R)(tm)(really cool).
One major benefit of ray is that it's embarassingly parallel. Performance scales linearly across multiple cores. Each core does not have to be very fast -- its load just has to be no more rays than it can handle in each refresh cycle. Multiplying cores does not increase latency. Current raster models require maximum clocks for each GPU for good results. This is a problem because for a given GPU architecture power dissipation as a function of clock speed is definitely non-linear. This means that at some point your triple core per card, 3 card GPU system is going to require 1200 Watts at least and all of the requisite cooling, noise and physical volume required to serve that issue. OTOH, 1024 250mW cores only take 250 Watts.
And let's not forget about the fact that there might be other uses for a system with 1024 microcores that would help drive up demand and help hit the economy of scale metrics that make such a thing profitable.
Oh, and when you're not using all of those cores you can turn them off. That's a handy feature right there.
My preference is straight to the point: raytracing technology is so mature that enough of the patents to make it useful have long expired. That makes these beautiful effects open to everyone and it's unnecessary to hide the technology behind proprietary interfaces in order to avoid endless patent troll lawsuits. It's a general purpose CPU and what people run on it is not the business or responsibility of the hardware vendor. Raytracing video architecture will be open. From there progress is inevitable.
Satellite phones. When you made a call it was always long distance and always billed both ways. At hideous rates.
Hey, whatever happened to the ubiquitous satellite phone anyway? That didn't seem to come about. It's like they all died out from competition or something.
Ray vs raster. The reason we have so much tech in Raster is because processing was not sufficient to do ray. If it had been we'd have never started down the raster branch of development because it just doesn't work as well. The results are not as realistic with raster. Shadows don't look right. You can't do csg. You get edge effects. There are a thousand work-arounds for things like reflections of reflections, lens effects and audio reflections. Raster is a hack and when we have the CPU to do the real time ray tracing rendering raster composition will go away.
Raster was a way to make some fairly believable (if cartoonish) video games. They still require some deliberate suspension-of-disbelief. Only with raytracing do you get the surreal Live-or-memorex feeling of not being able to tell a rendered scene from a photo, except for the fact that the realistic scene depicts something that might be physically impossible.
Once you know the PC is compromised you cannot get it back to a known good state. The best you can hope for with the various utilities is to get it workable enough to offload your data, build your recovery media and record your settings. You're actually better off removing the hdd to an external enclosure and installing fresh on a new one. You could then scan the removable device before carefully recovering the data from it. The worst possible thing you could do is eliminate the visible problems and pretend that means you have a good PC on which to do work.
What is pwned cannot be unpwned. Reinstall. Somewhere in my journal may be some helpful instructions for getting the reinstall done without becoming compromised in the process. You're not the first (or the ten thosandth) person here this has happened to.
Somebody else here will have suggested you try Linux by now, or Apple. There are no Linux or Apple botnets so they don't have this problem. The do have security vulnerabilities too, but compromising one of them is a retail, rather than a wholesale, endeavor and so less fruitful for the botmasters.
Slashdot Mirror
Outlook 2007 has some rather interesting features. Typing in the middle of a paragraph - when the cursor crosses the line wrap the cursor is sometimes moved to a semi-random place in the text. That took a little getting used to. The last editor I used that had that problem -- well, I wrote it myself. :-(
The "invisible text" in HTML emails bug is still present too. It's a holdover from O97. You would think they would fix that. Some people feel that having some of the text of their emails randomly deleted or rendered invisible somewhat hampers their productivity.
And, like Microsoft Works, Office2007 cannot be completely uninstalled. If you get the trial version or ad supported version as crudware you're stuck with it forever.
It's shocking that quality like this became the market standard.
The first step is to put down our Slashdot fetish and (excuse the term) troll the sites the common folk frequent. They need to know. We can tell them. If we don't there are plenty of astoturfers in a Bangalore web center where people get a few bucks a day to post the same lame FUD every day.
Those of you who frequent the informed corners of the www may be shocked to discover the information more common folk are offered as fact. It's apalling.
Hell, make it a game. Make a website where you get points for correcting disinformation on popular websites, with moderation and prizes. Share donations with the best posters. That would work.
Using Preload your linux apps can be preloaded much like Vista's SuperFetch. Start times will go down by about half with larger apps you use a lot. You can also use the tips below. People on Ubuntu Forums seem to like it. Preload is in most libraries so you would install it the same way you install all your free software.
On Windows you may want to try these helpful tips.
In either case you've saved a rental fee.
The Enterprise version of your Linux Server OS comes with unlimited client licenses . As many clients can access the server as it's capable of serving. Also the Linux Datacenter Edition comes with unlimited CPU licenses, so you can run it on a server with as many processors as you like.
Sure, the server Enterprise version costs four times as much and the Datacenter version eight times as much, but when the base price is zero that's not too bad.
That you don't "own" the documents you create with "their" software, either.
You only license access to them, for a limited time.
The result of a bad patch: Global instant borkensystem. With option 3 it's similar -- Fast Global Hosenboxen. Nobody would consider option 1. It too obviously won't work.
Nope... it's time for the Bazaar.
So... three guesses what user-agent it's looking for.
But that does not excuse ISO. On receipt of this monster ISO could have laughed, refused it, and revoked their recognition of ECMA as a standard setting body for cause. They could have used a less harsh method of censure amounting to "get away from me kid, I've got work to do."
ISO didn't do that. Instead it went through the drama in three acts that was the validation of this garbage. Now in this FAQ they tell us they monitored the process quite closely all the way through. That means they observed all of the shenanigans in real time and allowed them complicitly. At the end they tell us how proud they are of their process. Since the whole way through the rules changed at every step dynamically to force the approval and silence dissent they imply that was their intent and the result is the one they desired: approval at any cost.
The price of "approve at any cost" appears to be their credibility. Now they've no credibility left and ECMA has none to lend them.
The status of international standards body of record is a prestigious one. With it comes a hefty responsibility. You don't get to blame the other guy. The other guy is not ISO.
They're toast.
The FAQ is all about not fixing it. They're rationalizing about how they have great process and how they have to accept the result of that process. The fix is in.
And Microsoft? Now that they've built this grand machine for subverting ISO do you expect them to use it once and then throw it away? Not likely. Their duty to their shareholders and all that...
You can stick a fork in the ISO. They're done.
... or the wife does herself in. The product we're talking about does move in that direction a good distance. We should all buy it and show it off for what it is.
Compared to an eee PC with compiz and OO.o this thing is a joke. Nothing could do more damage to the leaning M brand than to hold it up as the best they can do.
Jesus, why don't you just run Vista on it if you want to fit your Microsoft crud into everything. Yeah... Vista -- in your router! Two gigs of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor, plenty of storage! Vista oughta run just fine, eh?
"It looks like you're issuing a dynamic IP address. [cancel] [allow]?"
It might be interesting to read the data sheet.
meh.
That was routers, not switches.
Err in haste, repent at leisure.
Yes, it runs linux.
Yes, I know they're switches, not routers.
Now... anybody got any interesting applications for this?
The commonality of brilliance is one of the things that makes posting to /. So much fun.
Let's see what folks make of this then.
Every deathbot needs a media player so you can play "Ride of the Valkries" when it's deployed.
Also some sort of beverage delivery mechanism would be nice.
I'm agreeing with you. You will find that fractal geometries when carefully applied as deformation structures on regular forms create a computable pseudorandom difference sufficient to transform them to "realistic" looking irregular forms. The deformation can be baked into the construction of the model with a tool.
If you apply this idea, remember to quote me.
I think if I had put so much thought and forethought into a post I'd log in to post it.
Slashdot is attracting a higher quality of Anonymous Coward these days.
You seem to have a sound understanding of the issues involved here. That's good.
You scored a clean miss here though. If you read back, you'll see I agree with this thoroughly. It's the specialized hardware and software and the methods employed in raster approaches that are more recent tech and so more vulnerable to patent trolls. This has been the main impediment to getting the interfaces published to the point where open developers can work with them. It is the ancient and elegant ray tracing solutions where so much prior art exists from the dawn of the computer era, and the fact that it's a computational simulation of a physical process that make their use as an open platform possible now that the hardware is finally emerging that can deliver real time ray tracing.
In the end we'll see. Until then watching the events unfold will be interesting.
A system capable of ray tracing, however, is also capable of raster. When the tech is here we'll see what wins out. Perhaps as you point out some hybrid will take the day.
You know that's not what I meant by edge effects. In raster based systems collision points create areas where the proper pixel to display is indeterminate. That's the basic cost of rasterization and one reason why it will always look fake. An animated picture of a wave lapping a hull is never going to look like a model of a wave lapping a hull no matter what you do to refine your raster model.
Others have pointed out that photorealism isn't always the goal. That's true, but ray is also capable of doing the cartoony things without the issues you see with raster. It's all up to the game designer. One person mentioned that John Carmack prefers raster. That may be. It also may be that John Carmack is a really smart guy and isn't going to tell you what he's up to until he releases the Carmack Ray Game Engine (R)(tm)(really cool).
One major benefit of ray is that it's embarassingly parallel. Performance scales linearly across multiple cores. Each core does not have to be very fast -- its load just has to be no more rays than it can handle in each refresh cycle. Multiplying cores does not increase latency. Current raster models require maximum clocks for each GPU for good results. This is a problem because for a given GPU architecture power dissipation as a function of clock speed is definitely non-linear. This means that at some point your triple core per card, 3 card GPU system is going to require 1200 Watts at least and all of the requisite cooling, noise and physical volume required to serve that issue. OTOH, 1024 250mW cores only take 250 Watts.
And let's not forget about the fact that there might be other uses for a system with 1024 microcores that would help drive up demand and help hit the economy of scale metrics that make such a thing profitable.
Oh, and when you're not using all of those cores you can turn them off. That's a handy feature right there.
My preference is straight to the point: raytracing technology is so mature that enough of the patents to make it useful have long expired. That makes these beautiful effects open to everyone and it's unnecessary to hide the technology behind proprietary interfaces in order to avoid endless patent troll lawsuits. It's a general purpose CPU and what people run on it is not the business or responsibility of the hardware vendor. Raytracing video architecture will be open. From there progress is inevitable.
So how long before these are available at Army Surplus? I have some cute ideas for mods.
Satellite phones. When you made a call it was always long distance and always billed both ways. At hideous rates.
Hey, whatever happened to the ubiquitous satellite phone anyway? That didn't seem to come about. It's like they all died out from competition or something.
Ray vs raster. The reason we have so much tech in Raster is because processing was not sufficient to do ray. If it had been we'd have never started down the raster branch of development because it just doesn't work as well. The results are not as realistic with raster. Shadows don't look right. You can't do csg. You get edge effects. There are a thousand work-arounds for things like reflections of reflections, lens effects and audio reflections. Raster is a hack and when we have the CPU to do the real time ray tracing rendering raster composition will go away.
Raster was a way to make some fairly believable (if cartoonish) video games. They still require some deliberate suspension-of-disbelief. Only with raytracing do you get the surreal Live-or-memorex feeling of not being able to tell a rendered scene from a photo, except for the fact that the realistic scene depicts something that might be physically impossible.
Or send my son. He's four. I'll consent for him.
With food riots in Haiti you'll not lack for volunteers.
It's a small lifeboat after all. There's not room enough in it for everybody.
Hey, I'm smart, educated, resourceful and healthy. If you won't go send me!
Once you know the PC is compromised you cannot get it back to a known good state. The best you can hope for with the various utilities is to get it workable enough to offload your data, build your recovery media and record your settings. You're actually better off removing the hdd to an external enclosure and installing fresh on a new one. You could then scan the removable device before carefully recovering the data from it. The worst possible thing you could do is eliminate the visible problems and pretend that means you have a good PC on which to do work.
What is pwned cannot be unpwned. Reinstall. Somewhere in my journal may be some helpful instructions for getting the reinstall done without becoming compromised in the process. You're not the first (or the ten thosandth) person here this has happened to.
Somebody else here will have suggested you try Linux by now, or Apple. There are no Linux or Apple botnets so they don't have this problem. The do have security vulnerabilities too, but compromising one of them is a retail, rather than a wholesale, endeavor and so less fruitful for the botmasters.