With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.
It's a good point.
All the BS about piracy impacting sales at the box office for the 2005 year were a complete joke. Take a look at a list of box office revenues by year.
The movie industry was all up in arms just because the trend showing up to yearly 10% increase in sales wasn't continued. While the increase streak came close to ending in 2003, it is interesting to note that 2005 will be the first year since 1991 that movie sales haven't increased.
Damnable pirates! It's just not possible that rising ticket prices and poor movies have anything to do with it! The public is stupid. We tell them to go see movies and they do. It must be pirates, and draconian DRM is the only thing that can save us!
Logic escapes the morons that run the RIAA. Either CD sales show an increasing trend all year long or it means that the dirty pirates are running rampant and it's time to lobby for Orin Hatch's exploding computers again.
Me? I stopped buying CDs a while ago and don't plan to start up again anytime soon. With all the problems with DRM, malformed discs, and the tactics the RIAA and it's labels are using, why would anybody?
You want to see this fixed? Get everybody you can to STOP BUYING CDs. It's that simple.
Well, if you want to talk the best of the best, Infinium Labs is one. Thinking of the great stuff that's come out of there it's a good thing they've got the power of a Dell!
BTW: Has anyone else looked at their stock price? Holy crap... if they ever really did release something besides hype you might make a chunk of change. You can all laugh, but when they release the Phantom with Duke Nukem Forever as a launch title I'll be rolling in the dough while all of Slashdot tries to think of replacement vaporware to fill the sudden void.
PS: Can anyone here decipher their SEC filings to get an idea of how much money they are making/spending? The form I normally look for are not present (the 10-K annual filing), though I do see a number of "Notification of inability to timely file" entries.
Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.
Are you sure it comes from your gut?
I think that special feeling might come from the cockles of our hearts, or maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. We don't know.
Don't jump to conclusions that these feelings come from the gut. My colon tells me you could be wrong.
Give us a break. It's real cute how you go to all the effort to capitalize and make all the Linux program shortcuts real pretty and then use the executable filenames for the Windows equivalents. How many users go mucking around the filesystem hunting for the executable to use? None, and that's why so many Linux distros have blatantly copied the concept of the Start Menu and Taskbar.
If you use the shortcut names found in the Start Menu it's a lot more of a fair game. Also, almost all MS-installed shortcuts have a description as a tool-tip, found when you hover your mouse for a few seconds:
Internet Internet Explorer
Windows Media Player Plays your digital media including music, videos, CDs, DVDs, and Internet Radio.
Windows Movie Maker Capture and edit digital media on your computer and then share your saved movies by e-mail, the Internet, recordable CD, or on a DV video tape.
Notepad Creates and edits text files using basic text formatting.
Word Pad Creates and edits text documents with complex formatting.
(AIM? There are still fools who use AIM? Do you use ICQ still too?)
MSN Messenger Shows whether your friends are online and lets you have online conversations.
Paint Creates and edits drawings, and displays and edits scanned photos.
I'm not going to bother going further. Besides, you even help me with your "argument". Just how intuitive are the "polished" Linux app names of "Xine", "MPlayer", "Gnome Toaster"? Let's also forget that most of the applications you list (iTunes, Nero, Photoshop, WinAMP, WinDVD, etc) are not even native Windows applications. They are third-party and if the user went and bought or downloaded them they did so for a reason and obviously know what they do.
Guess you missed the memo. Slashdot zealotism is happily on the decline, partially evidenced by the Funny mod you received. "Oh look honey! It's one of those cute/. zealots! Isn't he precious?"
Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?
Ah, yes. Just what we all want. Command-line administration of Active Directory and Exchange.
Windows Server 2003's GUI overhead is extremely small in comparison to the other tasks it's performing. Besides, it's not a matter of being "scared" of a CLI, in fact pretty much all the Windows sysadmins I know (including myself) use the Windows command line on a regular basis. Believe it or not, but a GUI really can give a boost to speed and efficiency when it comes to server management, regardless of what the zealots here might say.
I don't know about your country, but Spanish's constitution says:
Spanish's constitution? Remind me again where the country "Spanish" is located.
It was Bush and all those ultra-right-wing politicians who started all this crap
You're well on your way to getting modded Insightful for that gem right there. Unfortunately there's no way you can even come close to blaming Bush for the situation in Europe. Remember, the EU was the bunch that has been against Bush for some time. What the EU has done regarding privacy is Europe's own making. After all, it seems obvious that when a bunch of countries decide to give up a good chunk of their sovereignty you're just asking for local laws to be rewritten to fit the agenda of the new and improved value-sized Big Brother. Spanish and the others are getting what they asked for methinks.
Although I use Pricewatch all the time, I am not sure why it does not have the popularity that pricegrabber got.
It's because Pricewatch sucks. Their menu sucks, their search sucks, their display sucks, their categorization sucks, and their filtering sucks.
Have you ever tried Pricegrabber? It has a very intuitive interface and search as well as a good layout for finding either an exact product, or browsing a category trying to decide what you want.
Let's compare a search, something common and easy like 'WRT54G'. Pricewatch vs. Pricegrabber.
Both display a list of matches, but with the model I'm looking for at the top in PG and not in PW. Not a big deal. The real nice part of PG is the way you can do a filter based on a search or category. That sidebar on the left lets you do a ton of filtering to get exactly what you want. Don't see much like that on PW.
PW gives each seller an individual entry in the results. Talk about a pain in the butt. With PG it's sorted by product so I can click a product and see all the sellers for it, as well as their prices before and after shipping. There are user and commercial reviews and ratings as well as detailed specs, more features missing on PW.
There's other issues, but I don't want to write a book. The fact of the matter is that Pricegrabber is significantly better resource than Pricewatch. This acquisition may change that, but until it does I will continue to use Pricegrabber because it is simply superior. Don't take my word for it, go look for yourself.
I just recently installed both MS Office 2003 Professional and Visual Studio 2003 and neither one required a reboot. This is on WinXP SP2.
As for you, I dunno. It likely depends on what you were doing at the time. Recent MS installers don't just arbitrarily require a reboot anymore. They are designed to install without if possible, and request a reboot if needed for some reason.
Besides, how does FUD even come into this? I wasn't claiming anything negative about anybody nor proclaiming gloom and doom, but rather telling of my own experiences. If you don't agree you can just say so without throwing inapplicable acronyms around as some sort of an attempt at justification.
I've installed Office 2003, VirtualPC, Windows Media Player 10, Visual Studio 2005, and more... all without rebooting. Even the last version of Symantec Anti-virus I installed didn't want to reboot until after I had run LiveUpdate, and that was because it couldn't replace some Symantec files because they were in use. Nothing to do with Windows.
Most (decent) installers don't require a reboot anymore. The place where you'll still see them are when the program intertwines with the OS or is trying to modify something which is locked by the OS or another (misbehaving really) application. Even most newer Windows Updates don't require a reboot, depending on what you're doing when you run the update. If you've done as suggested and closed all running apps then the odds of needing to reboot are less.
It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.
I saw a comparison once (can't find it now) showing what happens if you run the commands "rm -rf/" and "del/F/S/Q C:\*.*". Both command do essentially the same thing, except that while the RM command pretty much wipes the linux box, the DEL command left a lot of files behind, ones the OS and other apps were using. The linux box started acting pretty oddly and quickly crashed. The Windows box continued to run, though with severely degraded abilities. They rebooted both boxes and the Linux box was completely borked. The Windows box gave the well known "NTLDR is missing" error. However, once NTLDR was replaced, the box actually booted up to a login prompt.
Anyway, the point is that as the consumer line of Windows has grown into the NT kernel it's gotten better and a lot of things including stability, uptime, and rebooting. Unfortunately the old 9x, NT, and 2000 claims of all these problems simply won't go away along with the old versions of Windows to which they were tied.
When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.
Now, I might have it a little unfair. I'm competent enough when it comes to Windows that unless I do something dumb to screw it up, (details we can leave out) I rarely have to reboot. Well, hum, let's see:
C:\>uptime \\Q has been up for: 23 day(s), 23 hour(s), 23 minute(s), 42 second(s)
Now, ignoring those eerie numbers, my XP Pro SP2 system has been up for almost 24 days and this isn't a record by any stretch. My work PC has been up for several months before. It was only rebooted because an annoying cow-worker remotely rebooted it when I gloated about my uptime. Our department's servers have been up even longer before.
I guess I'm just on some magical island because I hear all these horror stories and yet I rarely face any serious problems that are not user related. When that's the case they are nearly always hardware related. I don't think Windows XP has ever simply gone *bork* out of the blue and stopped working.
So it looks like I'm special, just like my mom always told me.
Root kits have been around since the early 1990s but were solely the domain of Unix variants until the late '90s, when the Windows developer community began exploring root kit techniques and several programmers published root kit toolkits that other programmers could modify and extend.
This was written by Mark Russinovich, the guy that found the Sony rootkit.
Also, Wikipedia has some good info on rootkits, like this:
The term "rootkit" (also written as "root kit") originally referred to a set of recompiled Unix tools such as "ps", "netstat", "w" and "passwd" that would carefully hide any trace of the intruder that those commands would normally display, thus allowing the intruders to maintain "root" on the system without the system administrator even seeing them.
Generally now the term is not restricted to Unix based operating systems, as tools that perform a similar set of tasks now exist for non-Unix operating systems such as Microsoft Windows (even though such operating systems may not have a "root" account).
Hmmm, it appears this is a *nix problem that has migrated to Windows.
Confusing? Not this time around! Intel marketing has learned it's lesson. These new processors will all have distinct and different names, including:
Pentium I Pentium Ì Pentium Í Pentium Ï Pentium Î
The new line features the standard, grave, acute, diaeresis, and circumflex models. Very different from one another!
Each processor will serve it's own special purpose and will have the exact same socket configuration. Unfortunately the processors are incompatible from a power standpoint and the mismatching of a processor and motherboard will result in the loss of both.
It might not be quite as fancy, but there's a free and OSS PHP-based barcode maker called Barcode (which does work, and pretty well). I've used it in the past to steal^Wcreate barcodes for inventory at work.
An interesting aside is that if you have an LCD monitor, you can actually scan the barcode off the screen (at least with an older Symbol RS232 scanner I had).
By the way, I figured "what the hey" and took a look at the link in your.sig. I'm not sure if you're a dev, but the demo page is pretty borked, and the login provided doesn't work. Not a very attractive CRM suite just yet:)
Funniest post I've seen on Slashdot in a fair while.
For anyone who didn't get it you might read the wiki page for Scientology. However, to spare you from going through an entire page on that "religion", here's the related excerpt:
...the story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who first kidnapped certain individuals who were deemed "excess population" and loaded these individuals into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). These space planes were supposedly exact copies of Douglas DC-8s except with rocket engines. He then stacked hundreds of billions of these frozen victims around Earth's volcanoes 75 million years ago before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and brainwashing them with a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days, telling them lies of what they are and what the universe should be like and telling them that they are 3 different things: 'Jesus, God, and The Devil. The traumatized thetans subsequently clustered around human bodies because they watched the motion picture together, making them think they are all the same thing, in effect acting as invisible spiritual parasites known as "body thetans" that can only be removed using advanced Scientology techniques. Xenu is allegedly imprisoned in a mountain by a force field powered by an eternal battery. He is said to be still alive today.
Space planes and nuclear weapons. The basis for any worthwhile religion.
[insert comments about WMDs and Bush searching for Xenu here:)]
2002--Communism fails utterly at the North Pole due to the nature of the elves. Claus VII, flying clockwise around the earth making the Christmas rounds, collides with Anti-Claus, who was flying counterclockwise. A huge explosion and blinding flash of light occurs, leading scientists to believe that they annihilated each other.
2007--The North Pole becomes a democracy, run wholly by the elves. Christmas is no longer commercialized or exploited. Happiness is finally achieved throughout the kingdom.
2011--It is discovered that Claus VII did not die in the explosion, but merely made it appear so. From there he went to live in the Bahamas. He is later found, dead of a heart attack, in a jacuzzi with two and a half dozen nymphets.
--
Anyone know the origin of this? I found it on a few sites, but this one is the only one that mentions any form of credit (using the word lightly there).
Is it just me or do all media players really seem to suck ass these days?
I've started to wonder the same thing. It seems like developers have lost the focus that you used to see. Instead of just a good and efficient audio or video player, they all have to play video, audio, and DVDs, have 1000 visualizations, a big media library, burn CDs and DVDs, use a gaudy GUI that eats CPU cycles like candy, and make hot pockets.
On XP I personally use:
Winamp 2.91 for my audio needs
Nullsoft is an example of a group that seems to have lost focus. I suppose that the "all-in-one" media app is the big thing now, but I still like being able to use Winamp all day playing audio and see it averages around 0.5% CPU usage (2GHz P4) while playing MP3s. 2.91 was the best version of Winamp yet in my opinion. Windowshade mode with always-on-top placed centered at the top of the screen with a 40 hour playlist = perfect.
WMP 10 for generic video playback
I like WMP 10 a fair bit actually. It's pretty fast and responsive when playing videos and audio, and it has all the options I need in a video player. The only things I find irritating are that it sometimes has problems with videos that have been encoded oddly, and it's DRM support is annoying.
PowerDVD for playing DVDs (though VLC comes in handy if I just want to jump to a scene real quick).
PowerDVD is a great DVD player for Windows. Lots of options and it does a great job of scaling and adjusting DVD video and audio for desktops and laptops.
I guess I prefer specialized versus generalized applications.
I'm not sure exactly what you're shooting for, but you can "split" a screen session like this:
In a console, run screen. This will create a new session inside screen. Tell screen to split the window by sending the keystrokes CTRL+a S (that's a capital 's'. If you send a lowercase 's' you will freeze the display. Resume it by sending CTRL+a q).
The screen should split into two vertical windows. Tab into the lower window by sending CTRL+a <TAB> . Now create a new shell by sending CTRL+a c. You can go back and forth using CTRL+a <TAB> . Once you have a shell running in each you can do and/or run anything you want to. To close a split session, give it focus and send CTRL+a X (note the capital 'x').
Gentoo's Wiki site has a nice writeup of screen. It makes it real easy to get up and running with screen. It includes the above example as well as instructions on how to resize the split and do many other things.
They're welcome to retain their intellectual "property," they just have to allow public inspection.
But isn't that part of the problem? Who would pick the "inspectors"? Diebold can't if it's supposed to be a fair study. The government, as a client of Diebold really shouldn't either. In addition, who would pay these inspectors for their time?
Also, the only ways I can see to protect their IP is to keep the number of inspectors small and to force them to sign NDAs. I guarantee this would raise a ruckus and questions about the real legitimacy of the study (I know it would on Slashdot in any case).
How would you protect the company's IP but allow an independent and honest study of the code to take place?
Any objection to a release of source code is utter lawyer bullshit.
You mean like a company wanting to protect it's investments?
People on Slashdot tend to forget that companies spend a LOT of time and money writing software. It makes absolutely no sense for them to do this and then go release it all for free to the public. Microsoft doesn't, IBM doesn't, and even the ever-pure Google doesn't. There really are good reasons why.
Say, for example, that Diebold does what you say. They go and release the source under the GPL and the Slashdot peasants rejoice! Huzzah! Suddenly everybody has access to the code that Diebold spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars writing. All of a sudden there's a whole bunch of other electronic voting companies that start up and offer their machines for less than Diebold because they aren't trying to recoup the costs of writing the voting software.
End result? Diebold either goes out of business or leaves that market because Bob's Voting Machines was able to sell for less and still make a profit.
So remind me, why in the world would they want to do what you're asking?
It also raises the question: How will this interact with the Do Not Call bill that was passed a while ago? According to the bill, companies that have a past relationship with you are exempt from the blacklist. If you put your number into one of these boxes are you opening yourself up to get calls from hundreds of telemarketing companies all under one big corporate umbrella?
This is Slashdot, yet I haven't seen anyone concerned about privacy yet. I guess that since we're talking about Google, all anyone can do is "Oooh" and "Aaah" over this. Depending on how this is implemented, it could open the door for all sorts of problems with privacy and annoying telemarketers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but can they overcome... stairs?!
Don't you know?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building.
With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.
It's a good point.
All the BS about piracy impacting sales at the box office for the 2005 year were a complete joke. Take a look at a list of box office revenues by year.
The movie industry was all up in arms just because the trend showing up to yearly 10% increase in sales wasn't continued. While the increase streak came close to ending in 2003, it is interesting to note that 2005 will be the first year since 1991 that movie sales haven't increased.
Damnable pirates! It's just not possible that rising ticket prices and poor movies have anything to do with it! The public is stupid. We tell them to go see movies and they do. It must be pirates, and draconian DRM is the only thing that can save us!
Pretty easily.
Logic escapes the morons that run the RIAA. Either CD sales show an increasing trend all year long or it means that the dirty pirates are running rampant and it's time to lobby for Orin Hatch's exploding computers again.
Me? I stopped buying CDs a while ago and don't plan to start up again anytime soon. With all the problems with DRM, malformed discs, and the tactics the RIAA and it's labels are using, why would anybody?
You want to see this fixed? Get everybody you can to STOP BUYING CDs. It's that simple.
Could you be a little more specific?
Well, if you want to talk the best of the best, Infinium Labs is one. Thinking of the great stuff that's come out of there it's a good thing they've got the power of a Dell!
BTW: Has anyone else looked at their stock price? Holy crap... if they ever really did release something besides hype you might make a chunk of change. You can all laugh, but when they release the Phantom with Duke Nukem Forever as a launch title I'll be rolling in the dough while all of Slashdot tries to think of replacement vaporware to fill the sudden void.
PS: Can anyone here decipher their SEC filings to get an idea of how much money they are making/spending? The form I normally look for are not present (the 10-K annual filing), though I do see a number of "Notification of inability to timely file" entries.
Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.
Are you sure it comes from your gut?
I think that special feeling might come from the cockles of our hearts, or maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. We don't know.
Don't jump to conclusions that these feelings come from the gut. My colon tells me you could be wrong.
I agree.
MOD EINSTEIN UP!!!
Ho. Ly. Crap.
/. zealots! Isn't he precious?"
Give us a break. It's real cute how you go to all the effort to capitalize and make all the Linux program shortcuts real pretty and then use the executable filenames for the Windows equivalents. How many users go mucking around the filesystem hunting for the executable to use? None, and that's why so many Linux distros have blatantly copied the concept of the Start Menu and Taskbar.
If you use the shortcut names found in the Start Menu it's a lot more of a fair game. Also, almost all MS-installed shortcuts have a description as a tool-tip, found when you hover your mouse for a few seconds:
Internet
Internet Explorer
Windows Media Player
Plays your digital media including music, videos, CDs, DVDs, and Internet Radio.
Windows Movie Maker
Capture and edit digital media on your computer and then share your saved movies by e-mail, the Internet, recordable CD, or on a DV video tape.
Notepad
Creates and edits text files using basic text formatting.
Word Pad
Creates and edits text documents with complex formatting.
(AIM? There are still fools who use AIM? Do you use ICQ still too?)
MSN Messenger
Shows whether your friends are online and lets you have online conversations.
Paint
Creates and edits drawings, and displays and edits scanned photos.
I'm not going to bother going further. Besides, you even help me with your "argument". Just how intuitive are the "polished" Linux app names of "Xine", "MPlayer", "Gnome Toaster"? Let's also forget that most of the applications you list (iTunes, Nero, Photoshop, WinAMP, WinDVD, etc) are not even native Windows applications. They are third-party and if the user went and bought or downloaded them they did so for a reason and obviously know what they do.
Guess you missed the memo. Slashdot zealotism is happily on the decline, partially evidenced by the Funny mod you received. "Oh look honey! It's one of those cute
Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?
Ah, yes. Just what we all want. Command-line administration of Active Directory and Exchange.
Windows Server 2003's GUI overhead is extremely small in comparison to the other tasks it's performing. Besides, it's not a matter of being "scared" of a CLI, in fact pretty much all the Windows sysadmins I know (including myself) use the Windows command line on a regular basis. Believe it or not, but a GUI really can give a boost to speed and efficiency when it comes to server management, regardless of what the zealots here might say.
I don't know about your country, but Spanish's constitution says:
Spanish's constitution? Remind me again where the country "Spanish" is located.
It was Bush and all those ultra-right-wing politicians who started all this crap
You're well on your way to getting modded Insightful for that gem right there. Unfortunately there's no way you can even come close to blaming Bush for the situation in Europe. Remember, the EU was the bunch that has been against Bush for some time. What the EU has done regarding privacy is Europe's own making. After all, it seems obvious that when a bunch of countries decide to give up a good chunk of their sovereignty you're just asking for local laws to be rewritten to fit the agenda of the new and improved value-sized Big Brother. Spanish and the others are getting what they asked for methinks.
Although I use Pricewatch all the time, I am not sure why it does not have the popularity that pricegrabber got.
It's because Pricewatch sucks. Their menu sucks, their search sucks, their display sucks, their categorization sucks, and their filtering sucks.
Have you ever tried Pricegrabber? It has a very intuitive interface and search as well as a good layout for finding either an exact product, or browsing a category trying to decide what you want.
Let's compare a search, something common and easy like 'WRT54G'. Pricewatch vs. Pricegrabber.
Both display a list of matches, but with the model I'm looking for at the top in PG and not in PW. Not a big deal. The real nice part of PG is the way you can do a filter based on a search or category. That sidebar on the left lets you do a ton of filtering to get exactly what you want. Don't see much like that on PW.
PW gives each seller an individual entry in the results. Talk about a pain in the butt. With PG it's sorted by product so I can click a product and see all the sellers for it, as well as their prices before and after shipping. There are user and commercial reviews and ratings as well as detailed specs, more features missing on PW.
There's other issues, but I don't want to write a book. The fact of the matter is that Pricegrabber is significantly better resource than Pricewatch. This acquisition may change that, but until it does I will continue to use Pricegrabber because it is simply superior. Don't take my word for it, go look for yourself.
Let me be very clear on this.
I just recently installed both MS Office 2003 Professional and Visual Studio 2003 and neither one required a reboot. This is on WinXP SP2.
As for you, I dunno. It likely depends on what you were doing at the time. Recent MS installers don't just arbitrarily require a reboot anymore. They are designed to install without if possible, and request a reboot if needed for some reason.
Besides, how does FUD even come into this? I wasn't claiming anything negative about anybody nor proclaiming gloom and doom, but rather telling of my own experiences. If you don't agree you can just say so without throwing inapplicable acronyms around as some sort of an attempt at justification.
And what exactly is a "non-trivial" program?
/" and "del /F /S /Q C:\*.*". Both command do essentially the same thing, except that while the RM command pretty much wipes the linux box, the DEL command left a lot of files behind, ones the OS and other apps were using. The linux box started acting pretty oddly and quickly crashed. The Windows box continued to run, though with severely degraded abilities. They rebooted both boxes and the Linux box was completely borked. The Windows box gave the well known "NTLDR is missing" error. However, once NTLDR was replaced, the box actually booted up to a login prompt.
I've installed Office 2003, VirtualPC, Windows Media Player 10, Visual Studio 2005, and more... all without rebooting. Even the last version of Symantec Anti-virus I installed didn't want to reboot until after I had run LiveUpdate, and that was because it couldn't replace some Symantec files because they were in use. Nothing to do with Windows.
Most (decent) installers don't require a reboot anymore. The place where you'll still see them are when the program intertwines with the OS or is trying to modify something which is locked by the OS or another (misbehaving really) application. Even most newer Windows Updates don't require a reboot, depending on what you're doing when you run the update. If you've done as suggested and closed all running apps then the odds of needing to reboot are less.
It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.
I saw a comparison once (can't find it now) showing what happens if you run the commands "rm -rf
Anyway, the point is that as the consumer line of Windows has grown into the NT kernel it's gotten better and a lot of things including stability, uptime, and rebooting. Unfortunately the old 9x, NT, and 2000 claims of all these problems simply won't go away along with the old versions of Windows to which they were tied.
Now, I might have it a little unfair. I'm competent enough when it comes to Windows that unless I do something dumb to screw it up, (details we can leave out) I rarely have to reboot. Well, hum, let's see:Now, ignoring those eerie numbers, my XP Pro SP2 system has been up for almost 24 days and this isn't a record by any stretch. My work PC has been up for several months before. It was only rebooted because an annoying cow-worker remotely rebooted it when I gloated about my uptime. Our department's servers have been up even longer before.
I guess I'm just on some magical island because I hear all these horror stories and yet I rarely face any serious problems that are not user related. When that's the case they are nearly always hardware related. I don't think Windows XP has ever simply gone *bork* out of the blue and stopped working.
So it looks like I'm special, just like my mom always told me.
You're being dumb on purpose, right? Why in the world are you making such definitive statements that are so definitively false?
Anyway, look here, or if not:This was written by Mark Russinovich, the guy that found the Sony rootkit.
Also, Wikipedia has some good info on rootkits, like this:Hmmm, it appears this is a *nix problem that has migrated to Windows.
Confusing? Not this time around! Intel marketing has learned it's lesson. These new processors will all have distinct and different names, including:
Pentium I
Pentium Ì
Pentium Í
Pentium Ï
Pentium Î
The new line features the standard, grave, acute, diaeresis, and circumflex models. Very different from one another!
Each processor will serve it's own special purpose and will have the exact same socket configuration. Unfortunately the processors are incompatible from a power standpoint and the mismatching of a processor and motherboard will result in the loss of both.
It might not be quite as fancy, but there's a free and OSS PHP-based barcode maker called Barcode (which does work, and pretty well). I've used it in the past to steal^Wcreate barcodes for inventory at work.
Here's an implementation and here's the homepage for the program.
An interesting aside is that if you have an LCD monitor, you can actually scan the barcode off the screen (at least with an older Symbol RS232 scanner I had).
What? You're saying this isn't very likely? :)
.sig. I'm not sure if you're a dev, but the demo page is pretty borked, and the login provided doesn't work. Not a very attractive CRM suite just yet :)
By the way, I figured "what the hey" and took a look at the link in your
For anyone who didn't get it you might read the wiki page for Scientology. However, to spare you from going through an entire page on that "religion", here's the related excerpt:
Space planes and nuclear weapons. The basis for any worthwhile religion.
[insert comments about WMDs and Bush searching for Xenu here
You're missing the latest history!
2002--Communism fails utterly at the North Pole due to the nature of the elves. Claus VII, flying clockwise around the earth making the Christmas rounds, collides with Anti-Claus, who was flying counterclockwise. A huge explosion and blinding flash of light occurs, leading scientists to believe that they annihilated each other.
2007--The North Pole becomes a democracy, run wholly by the elves. Christmas is no longer commercialized or exploited. Happiness is finally achieved throughout the kingdom.
2011--It is discovered that Claus VII did not die in the explosion, but merely made it appear so. From there he went to live in the Bahamas. He is later found, dead of a heart attack, in a jacuzzi with two and a half dozen nymphets.
--
Anyone know the origin of this? I found it on a few sites, but this one is the only one that mentions any form of credit (using the word lightly there).
I've started to wonder the same thing. It seems like developers have lost the focus that you used to see. Instead of just a good and efficient audio or video player, they all have to play video, audio, and DVDs, have 1000 visualizations, a big media library, burn CDs and DVDs, use a gaudy GUI that eats CPU cycles like candy, and make hot pockets.
On XP I personally use:
- Winamp 2.91 for my audio needs
- WMP 10 for generic video playback
- PowerDVD for playing DVDs (though VLC comes in handy if I just want to jump to a scene real quick).
I guess I prefer specialized versus generalized applications.Can you really do this with screen?
Of course! Screen can do anything!
I'm not sure exactly what you're shooting for, but you can "split" a screen session like this:
In a console, run screen. This will create a new session inside screen. Tell screen to split the window by sending the keystrokes CTRL+a S (that's a capital 's'. If you send a lowercase 's' you will freeze the display. Resume it by sending CTRL+a q).
The screen should split into two vertical windows. Tab into the lower window by sending CTRL+a <TAB> . Now create a new shell by sending CTRL+a c. You can go back and forth using CTRL+a <TAB> . Once you have a shell running in each you can do and/or run anything you want to. To close a split session, give it focus and send CTRL+a X (note the capital 'x').
Gentoo's Wiki site has a nice writeup of screen. It makes it real easy to get up and running with screen. It includes the above example as well as instructions on how to resize the split and do many other things.
They're welcome to retain their intellectual "property," they just have to allow public inspection.
But isn't that part of the problem? Who would pick the "inspectors"? Diebold can't if it's supposed to be a fair study. The government, as a client of Diebold really shouldn't either. In addition, who would pay these inspectors for their time?
Also, the only ways I can see to protect their IP is to keep the number of inspectors small and to force them to sign NDAs. I guarantee this would raise a ruckus and questions about the real legitimacy of the study (I know it would on Slashdot in any case).
How would you protect the company's IP but allow an independent and honest study of the code to take place?
Bev Harris is NOT a Communist.
He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a Communist... but he is *NOT* a porn star.
Any objection to a release of source code is utter lawyer bullshit.
You mean like a company wanting to protect it's investments?
People on Slashdot tend to forget that companies spend a LOT of time and money writing software. It makes absolutely no sense for them to do this and then go release it all for free to the public. Microsoft doesn't, IBM doesn't, and even the ever-pure Google doesn't. There really are good reasons why.
Say, for example, that Diebold does what you say. They go and release the source under the GPL and the Slashdot peasants rejoice! Huzzah! Suddenly everybody has access to the code that Diebold spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars writing. All of a sudden there's a whole bunch of other electronic voting companies that start up and offer their machines for less than Diebold because they aren't trying to recoup the costs of writing the voting software.
End result? Diebold either goes out of business or leaves that market because Bob's Voting Machines was able to sell for less and still make a profit.
So remind me, why in the world would they want to do what you're asking?
I can see someone abusing this
That's a good point.
It also raises the question: How will this interact with the Do Not Call bill that was passed a while ago? According to the bill, companies that have a past relationship with you are exempt from the blacklist. If you put your number into one of these boxes are you opening yourself up to get calls from hundreds of telemarketing companies all under one big corporate umbrella?
This is Slashdot, yet I haven't seen anyone concerned about privacy yet. I guess that since we're talking about Google, all anyone can do is "Oooh" and "Aaah" over this. Depending on how this is implemented, it could open the door for all sorts of problems with privacy and annoying telemarketers.