You'll need to remove some spurious spaces added by Slashcode (in "Keyboard" and before "3a"). Note that this works on the scancode level and will affect all users and applications, including DirectX ones. It's as close as you can get to physically rewiring the key. You need to reboot for it to take effect. (Stolen from here and here.)
The first spam was actually an advertisement for a law firm, IIRC.
Indeed, this sleazy law firm one of whose partners has since been disbarred. Yes, it's marginally more reputable than today's spams but not by much. Nor was it viewed as an ordinary advertising venue: it resulted in an immediate outcry and a wave of spam blocking measures were taken.
1. Spam has never been used to advertise respectable products.
2. The motive for virus writing nowadays is profit, same as spam. Viruses let you put up adware and create zombie hordes for spam forwarding or DDoS blackmailing.
3. In the past, the motive for virus writing was not to hurt other people, but simply a kind of power trip or experiment. For proof, look at how very small the proportion of viruses that intentionally delete data is. The psychopathic "hurt as many people as possible" mindset is extremely rare.
Why risk getting 99% through an install before finding out the disk is faulty than doing a much quicker format to do the check?
CHKDSK/R will attempt to read every sector on the disk four times to find bad sectors. As far as I know, formatting won't yield any additional information.
It just means that I can reasonably expect most of his files to be on D: but probably still need to double check C: first just to be safe.
How can you be so sure you won't miss anything during the double check? The safest policy is not to delete anything at all.
My view is to use NTFS for the C: drive and FAT32 for the D: drive.
Yeah, agreed about the annoyance of rescuing NTFS partitions. But FAT32 is crap in far more respects than just security features. You say you're concerned about fragmentation, but FAT32 will get naturally much more fragmented and inefficient than NTFS. It has less consistency checks and is hence more likely to get corrupted by software problems. Finally and most importantly, the fixed index size of FAT32 means slack waste grows to ridiculous levels on large hard drives. Naturally it's not on the level of FAT16 but still beyond the pale for today's hard drive sizes. I don't remember the exact numbers but it's something like on a 200Gb partition, every file takes up a minimum of 16Mb. If you have large numbers of tiny files, such as source code for a large program, that alone will easily fill up the entire drive. FAT32 just isn't acceptable as a modern workstation filesystem.
You'd be well advised spending your time keeping yourself better informed rather than telling everyone else they're talking crap
You tell me this but earlier you say you've never tested to see how Windows XP behaves when reinstalling. It's completely independent from other installs if you don't specify "upgrade".
Besides, if your previous installation of Windows was trashed or suffering from some bad file errors, how do you KNOW it wasn't possibly caused by a disk problem?
Er, if something in any way leads you to suspect the hard disk is faulty, then reformatting is no better than a no-format reinstall. You buy a new hard drive and copy the data over, because it risks crashing in the future and reformatting does nothing to cure that.
Why is partitioning relevant to this??? If I've told my user to use a D: drive for all of his files, the chances are that his file is on there anyway
You mentioned ghosting on the side, it doesn't have much to do with partitioning no. The problem is, just because you told the user to use the D: drive for everything you think it's fine to wipe out C: and then blame him if your action destroys his files. That's bad sysadminning. Your job is to preserve his data as much as possible even if he makes an error.
You'd be well advised spending your time keeping yourself better informed rather than telling everyone else they're talking crap - EVERY BOOK you choose to read on operating systems will explain the ADVANTAGES of partitioning - GO READ SOME OF THEM!!!
It sounds like you're talking about CS-oriented books on operating systems. Yes I've read at least two, and while they're excellent for things like learning about virtual memory and round-robin multitasking, their authors are CS professors/researchers and don't keep up to date on day-to-day sysadmininning, and you shouldn't listen too closely to their recommendations on such matters. There are advantages for partition support to exist yes (what such books will typically emphasize) and I use them in some situations, but a single-user workstation is not one of them.
My advice to anyone with a Windows PC is to get it right from the word go. I still cannot believe PC vendors will sell a PC with a 300GB drive in it with just ONE (C:) partition - educate users to use D: and E: drives for their personal programs and files, then when Windows needs to be reinstalled, the process is less painful.
This is 100% useless. Reinstalling Windows != reformatting a partition. All that needs to be deleted is the Windows directory, and a few applications like Office that are too tightly integrated with Windows. I've reinstalled Windows on computers with only a C: drive plenty of times without deleting any user data. You can even have two installs of Windows in two different directories on the same drive and dual-boot. You're not very experienced at all if you don't know how easy it is to do this.
I know how it is to work on drives split into several partitions for no reason. You run out of space on one drive, and then you need to waste time moving files over from one to the other. Please don't inflict this crap on your users.
(Also, when you have any problem you ghost over the whole drive? Are you crazy? What if the user forgot to back up an important file?)
Reliability is. Most of the wireless networks and peripherals I've seen have been randomly unreliable at some point or at least more difficult to configure such that they work reliably. Much of this is due to the immaturity of the technology, but the bottom line is that wireless connections are intrinsically more flakiness-prone than wired ones.
Replying again to elaborate on my throwaway comment, that's a silly view of what makes good literature. Many great authors are extremely cold and clinical: for example, Franz Kafka or J.M. Coetzee. And even those who strive for strong feelings often achieve it through understated and superficially unemotional language --- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a good example. Lyricism is neither necessary nor sufficient to make good literature.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but that's hardly a good way to measure the amount of work involved. On large projects it can take a week to write a single line, if that line is (say) a bugfix for an bizarre race condition emerging from the interaction of several components.
Those are minor factors affecting market share, yes, but the real issue is AMD's production capacity. AMD just doesn't have the fabs at present to supply 90% of the market. Large vendors know this, and they also bitterly remember having made large orders with AMD in the past that they weren't able to deliver. And even if AMD was able to ramp up production, vendors' existing contracts with Intel can't be broken overnight.
Er, I think you're confused as to who's in a position of power here. If Linux devs go out of their way to make life difficult for Nvidia and ATI, they'll just give Linux the finger and stop producing drivers for it altogether.
From the point of view of the management of these companies, providing Linux drivers is a thing they do on the side to get good PR with open-source devs and on the off chance the OS becomes a significant market in the future. But force them to do extra work or put them at risk of exposing their proprietary tricks to competitors by opening their drivers, and bam they're outta here.
It's not *technically* stealing - it IS stealing, and it makes you a criminal. The law is not at all ambiguous in regards to this.
Oh is it? Show me a passage in any lawbook that equates copyright infringement with theft.
Also, in many jurisdictions copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.
Re:I have an honest question.
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Certainly. Your problem is that you're only thinking of consumer desktop software. IIS sucks compared to Apache. Windows CE sucks compared to embedded Linux. CMD.EXE sucks compared to Bash. ASP sucks compared to Perl or PHP. Windows Terminal Server sucks compared to Openssh.
Uhh, the first paragraph has zilch to do with the second paragraph you quoted. Windows NT-based systems don't use the BIOS at all for input. Any combination could've been chosen as one capturable only by the WinLogon process. The real reason is explained a little bit later, if you had bothered to read the whole thing:
It was chosen as the secure attention key in Windows (instead of, for example, the System Request key), because on the PC platform no program could reasonably expect to redefine this keystroke combination for its own purposes.
Actually, I understand what mostly pissed off Tycho was that his article was put for deletion voting on AFD (Articles for Deletion), where a dozen people ("phalanx of pedants" in Tycho's memorable phrasing) made snide comments about it. So he did hit a problem with Wikipedia: it's well-known that AFD tends to anger newbies to the site and generally cause conflict.
Note that nowadays the much friendlier Proposed Deletion system is in place for articles which obviously don't fit the guidelines. It's likely that if Tycho had put up his article a few months later than he did it would've been peacefully deleted and he probably wouldn't have this anger against the site.
Impossible. Microsoft doesn't have the source to third-party Xbox games. How exactly would they go about convincing all these developers to send them the source to their old games? It would be a logistical and legal nightmare.
Not to mention, a backwards-compatibility update for 200 games took only about 4 meg. Each recompiled executable would be at least 1mb, making a 200mb+ update with the method you're proposing.
This article would have been interesting if the PS3 and Wii had been out, but with only the 360 available to examine, we don't really know too much about the true power usage of the next-gen systems. The 360 might be the most energy efficient...
Considering that the Wii will have a relatively simple and weak one-core processor, it's a safe bet that its power consumption will be the lowest, probably by a large margin. As for how power-efficient the Cell will be relative to the 360, that remains to be seen.
Er, you need to do a bit of reading on this. Production-tied farm subsidies are incredibly harmful, more so than regular subsidies. When the market is inundated with food that's free or below the cost of production, it makes everyone not getting subsidies -- such as African farmers -- go out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Copy the following into a .reg file (not including the --- lines) and run it to replace Caps Lock with Left-Ctrl:
K eyboard Layout]0 ,3a,00,00,00,00,00
K eyboard Layout]0 ,3a,00,00,00,00,00
------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,0
------------
If you want to replace it with Escape instead, use this:
------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,0
------------
You'll need to remove some spurious spaces added by Slashcode (in "Keyboard" and before "3a"). Note that this works on the scancode level and will affect all users and applications, including DirectX ones. It's as close as you can get to physically rewiring the key. You need to reboot for it to take effect. (Stolen from here and here.)
So... who are you hoping to convince exactly with this straw man?
Um.
1. Spam has never been used to advertise respectable products.
2. The motive for virus writing nowadays is profit, same as spam. Viruses let you put up adware and create zombie hordes for spam forwarding or DDoS blackmailing.
3. In the past, the motive for virus writing was not to hurt other people, but simply a kind of power trip or experiment. For proof, look at how very small the proportion of viruses that intentionally delete data is. The psychopathic "hurt as many people as possible" mindset is extremely rare.
CHKDSK /R will attempt to read every sector on the disk four times to find bad sectors. As far as I know, formatting won't yield any additional information.
It just means that I can reasonably expect most of his files to be on D: but probably still need to double check C: first just to be safe.
How can you be so sure you won't miss anything during the double check? The safest policy is not to delete anything at all.
My view is to use NTFS for the C: drive and FAT32 for the D: drive.
Yeah, agreed about the annoyance of rescuing NTFS partitions. But FAT32 is crap in far more respects than just security features. You say you're concerned about fragmentation, but FAT32 will get naturally much more fragmented and inefficient than NTFS. It has less consistency checks and is hence more likely to get corrupted by software problems. Finally and most importantly, the fixed index size of FAT32 means slack waste grows to ridiculous levels on large hard drives. Naturally it's not on the level of FAT16 but still beyond the pale for today's hard drive sizes. I don't remember the exact numbers but it's something like on a 200Gb partition, every file takes up a minimum of 16Mb. If you have large numbers of tiny files, such as source code for a large program, that alone will easily fill up the entire drive. FAT32 just isn't acceptable as a modern workstation filesystem.
You'd be well advised spending your time keeping yourself better informed rather than telling everyone else they're talking crap
You tell me this but earlier you say you've never tested to see how Windows XP behaves when reinstalling. It's completely independent from other installs if you don't specify "upgrade".
Besides, if your previous installation of Windows was trashed or suffering from some bad file errors, how do you KNOW it wasn't possibly caused by a disk problem?
Er, if something in any way leads you to suspect the hard disk is faulty, then reformatting is no better than a no-format reinstall. You buy a new hard drive and copy the data over, because it risks crashing in the future and reformatting does nothing to cure that.
Why is partitioning relevant to this??? If I've told my user to use a D: drive for all of his files, the chances are that his file is on there anyway
You mentioned ghosting on the side, it doesn't have much to do with partitioning no. The problem is, just because you told the user to use the D: drive for everything you think it's fine to wipe out C: and then blame him if your action destroys his files. That's bad sysadminning. Your job is to preserve his data as much as possible even if he makes an error.
You'd be well advised spending your time keeping yourself better informed rather than telling everyone else they're talking crap - EVERY BOOK you choose to read on operating systems will explain the ADVANTAGES of partitioning - GO READ SOME OF THEM!!!
It sounds like you're talking about CS-oriented books on operating systems. Yes I've read at least two, and while they're excellent for things like learning about virtual memory and round-robin multitasking, their authors are CS professors/researchers and don't keep up to date on day-to-day sysadmininning, and you shouldn't listen too closely to their recommendations on such matters. There are advantages for partition support to exist yes (what such books will typically emphasize) and I use them in some situations, but a single-user workstation is not one of them.
My advice to anyone with a Windows PC is to get it right from the word go. I still cannot believe PC vendors will sell a PC with a 300GB drive in it with just ONE (C:) partition - educate users to use D: and E: drives for their personal programs and files, then when Windows needs to be reinstalled, the process is less painful.
This is 100% useless. Reinstalling Windows != reformatting a partition. All that needs to be deleted is the Windows directory, and a few applications like Office that are too tightly integrated with Windows. I've reinstalled Windows on computers with only a C: drive plenty of times without deleting any user data. You can even have two installs of Windows in two different directories on the same drive and dual-boot. You're not very experienced at all if you don't know how easy it is to do this.
I know how it is to work on drives split into several partitions for no reason. You run out of space on one drive, and then you need to waste time moving files over from one to the other. Please don't inflict this crap on your users.
(Also, when you have any problem you ghost over the whole drive? Are you crazy? What if the user forgot to back up an important file?)
Reliability is. Most of the wireless networks and peripherals I've seen have been randomly unreliable at some point or at least more difficult to configure such that they work reliably. Much of this is due to the immaturity of the technology, but the bottom line is that wireless connections are intrinsically more flakiness-prone than wired ones.
Replying again to elaborate on my throwaway comment, that's a silly view of what makes good literature. Many great authors are extremely cold and clinical: for example, Franz Kafka or J.M. Coetzee. And even those who strive for strong feelings often achieve it through understated and superficially unemotional language --- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a good example. Lyricism is neither necessary nor sufficient to make good literature.
You must feel shivers of aesthetic bliss when you read Livejournal.
Just run them in an emulator.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but that's hardly a good way to measure the amount of work involved. On large projects it can take a week to write a single line, if that line is (say) a bugfix for an bizarre race condition emerging from the interaction of several components.
Those are minor factors affecting market share, yes, but the real issue is AMD's production capacity. AMD just doesn't have the fabs at present to supply 90% of the market. Large vendors know this, and they also bitterly remember having made large orders with AMD in the past that they weren't able to deliver. And even if AMD was able to ramp up production, vendors' existing contracts with Intel can't be broken overnight.
Er, I think you're confused as to who's in a position of power here. If Linux devs go out of their way to make life difficult for Nvidia and ATI, they'll just give Linux the finger and stop producing drivers for it altogether.
From the point of view of the management of these companies, providing Linux drivers is a thing they do on the side to get good PR with open-source devs and on the off chance the OS becomes a significant market in the future. But force them to do extra work or put them at risk of exposing their proprietary tricks to competitors by opening their drivers, and bam they're outta here.
Oh is it? Show me a passage in any lawbook that equates copyright infringement with theft.
Also, in many jurisdictions copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.
Certainly. Your problem is that you're only thinking of consumer desktop software. IIS sucks compared to Apache. Windows CE sucks compared to embedded Linux. CMD.EXE sucks compared to Bash. ASP sucks compared to Perl or PHP. Windows Terminal Server sucks compared to Openssh.
Ha! One of the rare slashdot funny-modded comments that actually contains cleverness. I salute you, sir.
You might be interested in a new proposal aiming to address this.
Actually, I understand what mostly pissed off Tycho was that his article was put for deletion voting on AFD (Articles for Deletion), where a dozen people ("phalanx of pedants" in Tycho's memorable phrasing) made snide comments about it. So he did hit a problem with Wikipedia: it's well-known that AFD tends to anger newbies to the site and generally cause conflict.
Note that nowadays the much friendlier Proposed Deletion system is in place for articles which obviously don't fit the guidelines. It's likely that if Tycho had put up his article a few months later than he did it would've been peacefully deleted and he probably wouldn't have this anger against the site.
Impossible. Microsoft doesn't have the source to third-party Xbox games. How exactly would they go about convincing all these developers to send them the source to their old games? It would be a logistical and legal nightmare.
Not to mention, a backwards-compatibility update for 200 games took only about 4 meg. Each recompiled executable would be at least 1mb, making a 200mb+ update with the method you're proposing.
Eh, probably. It's not like writers are always overwhelmed with lucrative commitments and have to turn down job offers.
This article would have been interesting if the PS3 and Wii had been out, but with only the 360 available to examine, we don't really know too much about the true power usage of the next-gen systems. The 360 might be the most energy efficient...
Considering that the Wii will have a relatively simple and weak one-core processor, it's a safe bet that its power consumption will be the lowest, probably by a large margin. As for how power-efficient the Cell will be relative to the 360, that remains to be seen.
They're often put in for that reason initially, but if they're left in the final game it's for the players (this kind of code is very easy to remove).
Er, you need to do a bit of reading on this. Production-tied farm subsidies are incredibly harmful, more so than regular subsidies. When the market is inundated with food that's free or below the cost of production, it makes everyone not getting subsidies -- such as African farmers -- go out of business.