This new system costs less than our current system which works and which we already paid for, and has many new features which we somehow lived without for all these years. I'm just so amazed by the complexity I can't wait to switch us over as soon as possible. Sure, there will be some downtime and migration costs, but there's no sense in worrying over short term expenses for something this important.
All you need is a large enough seed to produce a pseudo-random stream that will never be broken. A 128 bit key is strong enough to bet your life on and still sleep easy, Take what we can break now, and do it 2^56 times. You might as well use a 256 bit key though, since computers are fast, and you seem a little paranoid.
The only real question is what stream cipher (cryptographic PRNG) to use. They all strive to produce output that's random enough for cryptography, but they also try to do it as fast as possible. If you're concerned that they data will not be random enough, you can just trade speed for quality by combining the output of several completely different stream ciphers.
Those are very handy features, but I've already written small functions to do all that, and they'll work in any browser. I try to code for the greatest common denominator.
I've had that sort of problem. In my case there was an incompatibility with some intel video chipsets in combination with a bios which misreported the AGP aperture. The crashes happened whenever OpenGL was used for a couple minutes, which tends to happen when running OpenGL screensavers. A switch from an aging XFree86 to the latest X.org fixed the problem.
I see Windows systems crash under similar circumstances, but usually the manufacturers are pretty quick to release a patched driver.
Games that are made for Linux tend to install quickly and easily
- Reliable DVD playing support (Including menus)
I haven't had a DVD not work without the menu when played in mplayer, nor have I played DVD's on Windows. Windows doesn't come with a DVD player. OEM's install it themselves.
- Ability to detect and reliably set up the Audigy 2 NX
Driver problem I guess. Sometimes manufacturers support Linux, and other times we're on our own.
- Better sound quality as there's no need to resample
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Windows will often resample audio to improve quality in case the sound card's resampling isn't very good. In Linux it'd probably vary depending on the sound server, with the main problem I've had being that it's hard to have two programs play sound at once.
- Easy-to-use C++ IDE with integrated edit-and-continue debugging. (With no need to mess with various scripts to integrate them)
I'm looking for a Visual C++ clone too, as KDevelop and Anjuta seem to be hard to learn, but if I remember right Visual C++ was a real pain to learn to use as well.
- More responsiveness using Firefox and Thunderbird
I've complained about that as well. The thing uses 100% cpu when idle but waiting. It's a bug. But I don't experience the problem in plain old Mozilla or other gecko based browsers.
- Only one binary package is needed for all systems
A lot of Linux software comes in the form of a binary package that works on most distributions, but most of it is closed source.
That last part is more of a 32 bit vs 64 bit compatibility issue. Of course some difficulties are expected. I wouldn't expect Wine to run well on a system I wouldn't trust Windows itself to run well on.
I had an ntfs formatted partition on hard disk attached to a ide-to-usb adapter that wouldn't mount in Windows XP. The best I could figure from the disk management control panel and the command line diskpart utility is that it was the result of a very old but well known, undocumented, unfixed bug. Linux automounted it and placed an icon on my desktop.
The other part was drivers. Windows has a very limited set of included drivers. If you do a fresh install of Windows XP, I guarantee that no hardware accelerated OpenGL games such as Quake 3 will run. Microsoft only ships video drivers with OpenGL support removed, in an attempt to lock game developers into using DirectX. You will have to locate a complete video driver yourself, usually online. You would hope that XP will have a driver for your ethernet card or modem, but often it won't. Sometimes you won't even have audio. My last couple Windows installs have been nightmares, even with older commodity hardware that should have been supported.
Most Linux distributions _do_ tend to work out of the box, and come with a full suite of applications pre-installed. Windows on the other hand is pretty bare aside from a small set of media-related apps, in hopes of earning a profit that's in direct proportion to the user's needs and ability to pay.
Lots and lots of embedded.HTA's. Even in XP, a lot of Windows.dll's are loaded with bits of html and javascript, but they give it a nice Windows look and feel.
I'm guessing they have three 200gb hard disks. Maybe they should make a RAID 1 and just hold onto the third disk as a spare. If they reencode everything as mp3 or ogg at a reasonably high bitrate, they should have room for at least 25-30 thousand songs.
What about the developers and artists, who's jobs actually involve months and months of WORK, and not just 10 minutes in front of a microphone? If the voice actors complain enough, we may start seeing more games with the voices of the developers themselves.
It's no longer enough to refer to it as simple criticism. Now whenever someone complains about someone else, it spreads to all the major news sites under the title "x blasts y".
I've always considered desktop search to be dead on arrival. One of the first thing I figured out how to do on XP was to disable the indexing service. I've tried the Google and Copernic desktop searches and ended up removing both. It's fun for about 10 minutes, but you don't want a lot of indexing going on in the background when you already know where everything is.
With their slow mechanical rotary modems (every knew it was stupid, but it was backed by a standard), good authentication would have taken way too much bandwidth.
With my highly throttled upstream bandwidth, my bittorrent download rate peaks when I cap the upload to 1-4k/s. Uploading more causes my download rate to drop significantly. I can hit my max upload, or max download, but I can't hit both at the same time.
Efforts to turn a great distributed download acceleration technology into a shady decentralized p2p search and file sharing system like Kazaa are bearing fruit.
That bugged me this morning as well. You could try a program like ClickOff, and set a really low scan interval so it'll close the dialog almost immediately. You still might lose a keystroke though.
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This new system costs less than our current system which works and which we already paid for, and has many new features which we somehow lived without for all these years. I'm just so amazed by the complexity I can't wait to switch us over as soon as possible. Sure, there will be some downtime and migration costs, but there's no sense in worrying over short term expenses for something this important.
All you need is a large enough seed to produce a pseudo-random stream that will never be broken. A 128 bit key is strong enough to bet your life on and still sleep easy, Take what we can break now, and do it 2^56 times. You might as well use a 256 bit key though, since computers are fast, and you seem a little paranoid.
The only real question is what stream cipher (cryptographic PRNG) to use. They all strive to produce output that's random enough for cryptography, but they also try to do it as fast as possible. If you're concerned that they data will not be random enough, you can just trade speed for quality by combining the output of several completely different stream ciphers.
Those are very handy features, but I've already written small functions to do all that, and they'll work in any browser. I try to code for the greatest common denominator.
I've had that sort of problem. In my case there was an incompatibility with some intel video chipsets in combination with a bios which misreported the AGP aperture. The crashes happened whenever OpenGL was used for a couple minutes, which tends to happen when running OpenGL screensavers. A switch from an aging XFree86 to the latest X.org fixed the problem.
I see Windows systems crash under similar circumstances, but usually the manufacturers are pretty quick to release a patched driver.
- Quick and easy game install
Games that are made for Linux tend to install quickly and easily
- Reliable DVD playing support (Including menus)
I haven't had a DVD not work without the menu when played in mplayer, nor have I played DVD's on Windows. Windows doesn't come with a DVD player. OEM's install it themselves.
- Ability to detect and reliably set up the Audigy 2 NX
Driver problem I guess. Sometimes manufacturers support Linux, and other times we're on our own.
- Better sound quality as there's no need to resample
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Windows will often resample audio to improve quality in case the sound card's resampling isn't very good. In Linux it'd probably vary depending on the sound server, with the main problem I've had being that it's hard to have two programs play sound at once.
- Easy-to-use C++ IDE with integrated edit-and-continue debugging. (With no need to mess with various scripts to integrate them)
I'm looking for a Visual C++ clone too, as KDevelop and Anjuta seem to be hard to learn, but if I remember right Visual C++ was a real pain to learn to use as well.
- More responsiveness using Firefox and Thunderbird
I've complained about that as well. The thing uses 100% cpu when idle but waiting. It's a bug. But I don't experience the problem in plain old Mozilla or other gecko based browsers.
- Only one binary package is needed for all systems
A lot of Linux software comes in the form of a binary package that works on most distributions, but most of it is closed source.
That last part is more of a 32 bit vs 64 bit compatibility issue. Of course some difficulties are expected. I wouldn't expect Wine to run well on a system I wouldn't trust Windows itself to run well on.
I had an ntfs formatted partition on hard disk attached to a ide-to-usb adapter that wouldn't mount in Windows XP. The best I could figure from the disk management control panel and the command line diskpart utility is that it was the result of a very old but well known, undocumented, unfixed bug. Linux automounted it and placed an icon on my desktop.
The other part was drivers. Windows has a very limited set of included drivers. If you do a fresh install of Windows XP, I guarantee that no hardware accelerated OpenGL games such as Quake 3 will run. Microsoft only ships video drivers with OpenGL support removed, in an attempt to lock game developers into using DirectX. You will have to locate a complete video driver yourself, usually online. You would hope that XP will have a driver for your ethernet card or modem, but often it won't. Sometimes you won't even have audio. My last couple Windows installs have been nightmares, even with older commodity hardware that should have been supported.
Most Linux distributions _do_ tend to work out of the box, and come with a full suite of applications pre-installed. Windows on the other hand is pretty bare aside from a small set of media-related apps, in hopes of earning a profit that's in direct proportion to the user's needs and ability to pay.
The safest web browser is the one nobody else is using.
Lots and lots of embedded .HTA's. Even in XP, a lot of Windows .dll's are loaded with bits of html and javascript, but they give it a nice Windows look and feel.
IE already renders a great number of XML pages as blank, without the help of Netscape.
She's probably downloading activex games and porn dialers.
I'm guessing they have three 200gb hard disks. Maybe they should make a RAID 1 and just hold onto the third disk as a spare. If they reencode everything as mp3 or ogg at a reasonably high bitrate, they should have room for at least 25-30 thousand songs.
I don't think we've ever managed to /. Google.
What about the developers and artists, who's jobs actually involve months and months of WORK, and not just 10 minutes in front of a microphone? If the voice actors complain enough, we may start seeing more games with the voices of the developers themselves.
It's no longer enough to refer to it as simple criticism. Now whenever someone complains about someone else, it spreads to all the major news sites under the title "x blasts y".
I've always considered desktop search to be dead on arrival. One of the first thing I figured out how to do on XP was to disable the indexing service. I've tried the Google and Copernic desktop searches and ended up removing both. It's fun for about 10 minutes, but you don't want a lot of indexing going on in the background when you already know where everything is.
They could have one ready by the end of the day, but it'll only run half as fast.
R2 didn't recognize Yoda when they met in the Empire Strikes Back. That or he just didn't care much for the old jedi master.
With their slow mechanical rotary modems (every knew it was stupid, but it was backed by a standard), good authentication would have taken way too much bandwidth.
Does that rule out Linux too?
The software RAIDs kicked ass in all of the random access benchmarks.
With my highly throttled upstream bandwidth, my bittorrent download rate peaks when I cap the upload to 1-4k/s. Uploading more causes my download rate to drop significantly. I can hit my max upload, or max download, but I can't hit both at the same time.
They'd be using something else. The purpose of every Internet protocol is to transfer information. Some just do it better than others.
If you're not blaming the criminals then you're blaming freedom.
Efforts to turn a great distributed download acceleration technology into a shady decentralized p2p search and file sharing system like Kazaa are bearing fruit.
That bugged me this morning as well. You could try a program like ClickOff, and set a really low scan interval so it'll close the dialog almost immediately. You still might lose a keystroke though.