Well, I thought anti-virus software vendors already failed at similar effort. Every new virus out there first disables all known anti-virus software.
It all boils down to question: how could you tell malicious content from good one??? You would have to resort to signatures. That wouldn't help against 0day exploits in no way, since on that day 0 most signatures are not yet updated.
From the article it sounds more like standard corporate firewall functionality: "block all what looks like HTTP redirect, since that can IE exploit", "block all.exe attachments since that might be Outlook exploit", "block.wmf since that might be IE/Outlook exploit", etc. Nothing new.
Malicious hackers typically embed scripts on Web sites and then use social engineering techniques to trick unsuspecting visitors into downloading Trojans, bots, spyware programs and other harmful forms of malware.
With BrowserShield, Wang argues, many such attacks could be blocked. BrowserShield can be used as a framework that rewrites HTML pages to deny any attempt at executing harmful code on browsers.
Buhahaha! Very funny!! They at Redmond take Windows security very very seriously - they have put best PR people on it!!!
Good luck at identifying that "harmful code," darling!
P.S. And for that "rewrites HTML pages" bit be sure to have M$' lawyers ready. Few content providers would like idea that their pages may be rewritten by the software monopolist.
P.P.S. Would M$ ever learn? How long they intend to have that "ActiveX" crap enabled in their browsers by default?? How many sacrifices they intended to make???
P.P.P.S. On related news from Germany, my employer (about 150 desktops) 1.5 year ago has banned M$IE. Firefox and Opera must be used to access inter/intranets.
How often Windows update break system and applications? Very often. In my mail box there are at least 2-3 mails per year from our admins telling us to not install particular Windows updates since they would break some applications. We have to wait for patches from other software vendors. (And I'm not even talking about SP2: we were waiting for about one year for all applications to be updated to be compatible with WinXPsp2. And at least three systems in my department were crashed/rendered unusable by SP2 installation.)
How often Mac OS update break system? I have had problem only once when Mac OS update installed new ATI drivers and one 3D game started hanging my notebook. (Next update which came two weeks later fixed that issue.) One update problem for two years. And fixed by Apple itself. That damm good results I'd say. Stability of Debian with nice polished GUI.;)
Mac OS is magnitude more stable: Apple doesn't have to check backward compatibility cruft M$Windows plagued with.
Primary goal of Linux is to be free as in "free beer". (The Linux is not GNU/FSF - which are free as in "free speech".)
Many might have chosen Apple - if not the price tag. Video editing you say? I'd love to do it but somehow I am not ready to fork $1300 for FinalCut/iDVD just to be able to author DVD with my summer vacations. Yes, it's very easy with FinalCut - but not for that price. In fact, only geeks with US salaries can afford most of the fun part of Mac. Over here in Europe Macs is very very very little overpriced niche. (We here do not have the nice deals from Apple US market enjoys couple of times per year.) Rest of the world - very close to zero/non-existent.
When you offset positive experience by the price - Apple looks really not all that well. And Linux systems suddenly start looking not all that bad. With Windows systems hanging about at the same level as Linux.
Apple is all about good experience. Linux - is all about price. If you ever observed Linus in action you might have noticed his approach: he is huge fan of free stuff - developer-wise. If some OS functionality can be made cheaply w/o any additional overhead that would boost particular application performance by 5% - so why not? it's free! Apple in the very situation would try to charge you premium - for every bit of performance you get out of your Mac.
For me beef of the story was Sun's revelation that CDDL is intentionally incompatible with GPL. MPL were needed to be that way to be able to protect Netscape/Mozilla/etc trademarks and names. But CDDL?? What Sun has to lose???
There is nothing wrong to be incompatible. But on Sun's part it really looks like holy war on GPL. But that's understandable - from their proprietary software vendor perspective.
But the Schilling person really makes fool out of himself all the time. All the discussions I have read that guy had no single technical argument. It all were coming down to "you do not understand" and "people I trust told me." You hardly can argue with such guy. But as long as cdrtools were working as expected that was tolerated. But now he really did it: he screwed licensing. (In a way he remind me ex-Linux-IDE maintainer Andre Hedrick - he also had problems with argumentation.)
P.S. I guess for Sun GPL is real eyesore, since first thing most of the users do with Solaris of theirs is installing GNU tools. And CDE was replaced recently with GNOME. Not that it helped Solaris somehow.
Well, all I can say you have to try it once. There is no "Service Pack" for Mac OS. There is no "breaking features". It just works.
I have used Mac OS X 10.3 for two years now. I'm using M$Windows starting from 1996. I'm using Linux starting from 1999.
Of all OSs I have tried, Mac OS X even with limited customization capabilities is the most pleasant system to work with. It's not as functional as Linux. It doesn't have the load of 3rd party applications Windows has. But it has all what I ever wanted.
There is no killer feature. Mac OS X is really platform which helps developers to make good applications for users. It doesn't try to show off with *BIG* features like Windows (DirectX, OLE/COM/DCOM/COM+, NTFS,.Net, etc). It doesn't require as much tuning as Linux does. It allows me to concentrate on my work - and my work alone. If Apple said "feature X is supported" - you can rest assured that it would work w/o any hiccups. If Apple did say "not supported" - well, bad luck, can give up.
To really understand the strengths and weaknesses you really have to try it once.
vim-tk/gtk is missing in Ubuntu. Major pain for me to have NNN extra megabytes of GNOME installed for plain text editor. Debian has vim-gtk.
Also, (K)Ubuntu has some weird problems detecting screen resolution of my wide screen Dell 2005fpw - hardware-wise poor Debian found my 1680x1050 tft panel resolution w/o any problems.
I have tried Kubuntu several times but since it doesn't have mplayer and vim-gtk bundled (but have lots of stuff I do not need bundled) - using rule "choose by best fit defaults" - I'm still with Debian. (Debian Sid - to be more precise - or whatever name testing has now.)
I honestly do not understand all that hype about distros/etc. And it seems that it's only USA which is affected: since it's only there are people thinking "Linux" == "RedHat". They download RedHat, hit problems, come to forums, get response a-la [self-censored] off and then write emotional articles for major US newspapers on how Linux isn't desktop ready.
On-topic. Debian is dying. Well, in distro with focus set on stability, absence of action can be interpreted as sign of stability. How fit Debian with general OSS movement? For me it is good sign when package comes unpatched and with defaults of its developers. How much packages in Fedora haven't been patched by RedHat? In SUSE? You can barely find such package there. In Debian most packages come with minimal changes to fit into Debian's build system. And the changes are well documented in/usr/share/doc/. How many distros can boast such level of integration with OSS movement?
Here comes my point. OSS in general maturing. Debian was one of the first and oldest to show the signs of maturing. All the problems of Debian - due to openness - were well understood and were avoided/solved. Many problems in past attracted many people willing to provide solutions. Now there are no more problems and that itself becomes problem. For me it's good sign: problem-solvers have no work - means there are no major problems. It's time for the people to move on. That's it. Debian had grown and now needs new people. If you think about Linspire, UserLinux, LibraNet and Ubuntu as offsprings of Debian - you would see that Debian isn't dying but going thru normal evolutionary cycle: change of generations. Having so many forks (along with viral GPL) guaranties that Debian would live on.
Where are my mod points when I need them? +10. Mac OS X (10.3 at least) is stable performer. Not ideal - but over all Okay. Unix side of theirs is quite compatible with BSD.
Most of the Linux stuff I did compiled and worked w/o any problems on Mac OS X. I often used my iBook as additional portability test bed.
It's still more Open Source than Windows.
That's especially looks true when one compares Fink with the bastard CygWin or SFU. Under Fink I had no problems at all. CygWin with it's funny on-the-fly conversions (between Unix-way and Windows-way doing things) never stop me surprising.
On-topic. The article actually surprised me. Linux just reached mainstream - and journalists already try to send it back to nerd's underground. Or it's probably just change of target: before the very same kind of journalists claimed for whole decade that Apple is dead. It's just now they have more scapegoats for the cheap shot journalism. In the end, no way I would even consider informative the article filled so carelessly with lots of technical info - but without any decent references. The sentences like "[...] flip this switch, it'll unpack itself [...]" just highlight that the guy never left his desk for real IT back rooms.
Re:The new FireFox 2 Marketing Slogan
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
C'mon. The problem was beaten to death all over the Internet. Just disable caching of recently viewed pages, remove most extension - and you'll be fine.
Parsed web page cache take quite space. You can't avoid that.
Extensions use lots of JavaScript. JavaScript utilizes Garbage Collection. Many extension writers do not even consider memory consumption. Every new variable, every dynamic array - all that eats memory up.
In other words, the most memory consuming features of Firefox - are the features we like it most for.
P.S. And more memory conservative Opera doesn't allow for any kind of extensions. And very limited in a way you can configure it - compared to Firefox. Flexibility always comes with price.
'We've been asked by a lot of customers to provide tools to do mass migrations,'
ZOMG! When they are asked about ODF support - they have not enough customer's demand. But when bunch of higher-ups are going to shoot themselves publicly in heads - they hear that voice very strongly.
Whoever might have made up that "mass migration" demand - s/he just doesn't have clue how it works. People shiver whenever they recall last M$Office transition they have been responsible for - but now M$ want to automate that.
But seriously, how many people think that M$ brand new DOCX xml file format would fly? After all it is not backward compatible - so more or less everybody would still use old and tried RTF/DOC files. Buying into brand new M$Office licensing to be able to use the documents internally only? - make no sense. My company for about 3 last years uses internally OO.o1/2: not the greatest stuff - but it just works most of the time. Documents for external use are still old DOC/RTF or PDFs. What would we gain by adopting the DOCX??
Games suffer from latencies. Servers are Ok with latencies - they are made so and pipelining (used to improve overall performance) is the cause of the latencies.
Another point, nobody payed attention to, is that KillerNIC "literally bypasses the Windows network stack and uses hardware interrupts to get data directly to the game". That might sound find (in fact I was personally doing something similar with Intel's e1000 adapters) but with one major problem: the network traffic reaches the game directly, bypassing all the security, firewalls, anti-virii software you might happen to have. In other words, before attackers were needed to find a hole in Windows, now they would start looking into holes in games. With advent of MMO games, how many millions of people would be exposed to the risks??
To conclude. No miracles, KillerNIC traded security for performance. Well, nothing new really. Moving on.
What I meant was that if you have a piece of software you need, and it requires Windows+Admin privs, then Apple don't have a solution for you.
Instead they choose to ignore the problem and hope it goes away - making them look better at the expense of poor old Microsoft who are sort of expected to keep that incredibly expensive electronics design package that wasn't updated since 2000 working.
Sorry for going personal, but you are an idiot.
M$Windows for many tasks requires many hacks. The hacks require serious meddling with system. (E.g. audio/video codecs/DirectShow filters installation and functioning.) And you need admin privileges so that application (or part of it) would be able to hack the OS.
Under Mac OS X, you do not need to do that. Period. There is no need for application to play some dirty trick on system. Apple is pretty straight forward here. You need to install driver? You need to install system library? You need to install QuickTime component? You need to update system library? You need to update system application or replace file there? Mac OS has dedicated functions for that. Not hacks - but functions. Documented on http://developer.apple.com/ - not in M$ issue tracking system well known as "Knowledge Base" (now part of MSDN).
Application performs particular function. Some people pay attention to how it does it, some don't. Apple pays attention to what and how people do with its OS - and improve OS correspondently. M$ - does not. Mac OS X has functions - M$WinAPI has hacks. Feel the difference.
Why can't 3rd parties use a different location than MS... at least that would help a little (would help me anyway, if not the actual problem being discussed)
Because some DLLs are loaded in context of other applications. For example hooks: global keyboard shortcuts, creation of processes, creation of windows. This requirement from from M$ itself - so inevitably all the crap is landing in %SysDir%. Also, dynamic linker on M$Windows look for DLLs exclusively by %PATH% - and %WinDir%/%SysDir% are always there.
Mac OS X uses concept of frameworks (which are set of libraries) and no such problem exists. The core OS frameworks go to one folder - applications keep their frameworks in bundle or install copy to analogue of Unix/usr/lib (have no Mac at hand - can't name the folders, sorry). The dynamic linker is made to properly resolve such run-time dependencies. Sort of just like on Unix with difference that Mac OS linker also looks into application bundle, while Unix one looks only in standard prescribed directories (/lib:/usr/lib:... - see/etc/ld.conf).
"buggy" software? I think you mean to say legacy OR poorly coded... this is one of those side effects that windows carries from version to version (like the registry) because MS refuses to leave customers high and dry for old software. Back in the old days this was the right way to do things, store configs in programdirectory/conf... we didn't have an appdata directory like we do now. Same with registry hives, they weren't setup in the same way they are now where certain users could do certain things. Calling it buggy implies the software is behaving contrary to design, it's not, it's just that the target has moved and the software hasn't all moved with it.
Sansa doesn't support Unicode (doesn't have fonts), doesn't support lossless codecs and doesn't support MPEG4. For me usual "WMA-only" profile (that come with that stinky "PlaysForSure" label) is quite limiting. (The Sansas also do NOT support WMA Lossless).
Though I found my e260 (4GB model) being pretty usable when used with good ol' MP3s. Recoding from FLAC/AAC can be pain at times - but not much. For me absence of Unicode fonts is more visible: I have lots of tracks with Cyrillic names.
Absence of any decent modern file format support though bothers me. WMA is hardly anything fitting for jazz, alternative or classics: quality just plainly sucks. WMA so obviously optimized for pop that it hardly makes any sense to me. I have sent question to SanDisk and got flat out negative response: no other file format would be ever supported. Unicode request also got the same "we do not care" kind of response.
P.S. Needless to mention, that iPod does support both Unicode fonts (for international tags) and lossless format (Apple's own Apple Lossless). "Why I still do experiment? Why I just do not buy iPod?" the two most common questions I have popping up when I hit track with Cyrillic name or bunch of OGGs from my friends...:-|
He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago.
Google Froogle anyone? You can list there for free. As customer I in fact use it quite often.
Sticking exclusively with eBay was guarantied to screw you someday. It seems that day is nearing. And as customer I find it pretty stupid for vendor being eBay-only anyway. Now PayPal have eased most of the problems, but I just feel myself uncomfortable being so much in eBay's land.
Get real people. eBay provided you with the "shelfs". But it still owns the shelfs and can do pretty much anything with the shelfs. (Just like ordinary public market.) eBay after all has to make money too. With many crackers' attacks, tightened security and audit, eBay I expect has pretty high operational costs. What I'm getting too: you have to pay for better security higher price.
I don't know if American programming students can do any better. I will find out this semester, as I am teaching such a subject with students from the USA; I am curious.
US students often do very good. On average the math skills are low. But most my colleagues from US are very fluent with all aspects of math required for programming.
In other words, we were taught lots of general math. US uses more specialized approach and students are taught things they will really need in their careers.
The schools in the USSR might have been awesome, but that was awhile back now.
That's true. But it started long ago in USSR itself. Starting from 80ties, education in USSR was fading - just like Soviet regime itself. School books of my older sister (7 years difference) were about 10-15% thicker than mine. Most teachers I have spoken with (on course of developing educational software) also complained that many things were just removed from educational plans and many subjects - like math, physics & chemistry - were greatly simplified. All that without anything new added back in exchange.
Though most children of my friends emigrated to US have complained that average education in US is really really poor. So gap is still there. IOW ex-USSR is only catching up.
From all what you have said, I'd rather buy Plasma display for my PC.;-) Honestly, TV is the last place where I would look for anything colorful/vivid worth watching. (Me is anime guy.) By choosing LCD I am just pragmatical. It's cheap and it consumes less power.
I'm no advocate of LCD, do not take me wrong. But after last three visits to shops, I realized that I have seen only single plasma TV - and bunch of LCD ones. And it stood in studio where it was impossible to compare it to others. Visually, I haven't noticed any difference, that mean that I would not pay more for something I cannot really experience.
Probably 3-4 years ago, provided sufficient moneys, plasmas were really good deal. But now they just can't beat LCD price/performance ratio. Not that LCDs improved quality - but they definitely improved price side of the equation. Plasmas unfortunately remained expensive (power consumption included, "HD-Ready" filtered).
P.S. Just checked. I can get decent 32" LCD for €900 - compared to €1300 of 42" Plasma (there are no smaller plasmas). LCD needs about 120W compared to 450W of cheap Plasma. Expensive Plasmas - running into €2000 - consume about 230W. But still it's too expensive.
Several LCD panels I have programmed claimed 2.5 years of interruptible function w/o degradation of quality. Since the panels were insanely cheap I presume that better panels live even longer.
Presuming one watches TV on average 6 hours a day - with 2.5 years guaranty - that would make 10 years of lifetime. 10 years later I'm sure it would be possible to replace cheaply the panel with new one - just like it is happening now with CRTs.
CRTs are also prone to degradation - just like plasma and LCD. It's just the quality of CRT sucks (HD LCD/Plasma really provide better viewing experience) so nobody watches them too much. (After coming to IT, I barely can look at CRT TV at all: 50Hz just hurt my eyes too much.)
P.S. And with new developments like LED (light emitting diodes) back light - that would move the problem even further.
In situations like that I go to shop and buy first thing I like.
It's pointless to worry about future problems. Solve problems when they come: burned out plasma or dimmed back light both are not lethal to human life;-)
I sort'a can relate to your problems. I'm going to buy TV that autumn. And most likely it would LCD: prices are now start at €800 for 32". Since I haven't found decent review I would just buy cheapest one of my preferred brands - Philips or Panasonic. And then will face the music.
P.S. Honestly I more worried about that "HD-ready" v. "HDMI" thing. It's kind'a scary to have thing at home you do not control. In VHS time, I successfully avoided that braindamaged Macrovision, but now with HD it seems that I have not much choices left.
Which terrorists want "kill as many infidels as possible, with the final objective of wiping out the US and Israel?" Please let us know.
Al-Qaida had a stated mission to get the US military out of 'the [Islamic] Holy Lands'. And it appears the US military has indeed left Saudi Arabia within the past few years.
Thanks for highlighting the collision. Most people scared of terrorists coming to their homes and causing devastations.
But when we see our very own army do the same in distant land on TV - well, it's just 9 hours news block and all you need to get rid off of that problems is to flip the channel.
Can't help myself but rechant constantly "ignorance is bliss".
he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown.
Any proprietary software vendor "takes contributions from all comers" - especially when they free.
Check Apple and you will also see "public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities".
In other words he claim openness in a sense of Java: look openly but do not touch. Wanna touch it? Ask us and we will touch it for you any way you like it!
Sun just have to feed something to its PR machine - to differentiate itself from Dell. There is nothing more to the story of openness coming from Sun.
P.S. IBM's AIX isn't open. Modern AIX is quite compatible with Linux. "L" in "AIX5L" stands for Linux. Linux application can be ported or even run natively on AIX w/o any quirks. In other words, plan of IBM to open up AIX was to make it compatible with Linux so that customers will be able to move their applications anyway they like.
My friend had setup Windows for his girlfriend as guest OS under Linux host. He was using VMWare.
His girlfriend was forced to use IE to access her University Intranet. Also she needed M$Office for documents from profs. The notebook was constantly plagued by malware/spyware/etc making it barely usable.
My friend installed Linux (Gentoo one) and VMWare Workstation. Inside the VMWare he installed the OEM Windows off the notebook. State of Windows - fully updated and with M$Office installed - was saved on backup image. In guest Windows, all work was done on SMB/CIFS drive of host Linux.
The only problem was video performance - e.g. macromedia flash animations at times were making the notebook to melt. Also there were some sporadic network problems - mostly attributed to poor Windows network stack implementation. (IOW, the network problems occurring with normal Windows installation under VMWare were occurring more often. E.g. Windows DHCP client was at times failing to get address from host Linux. That IE thing was at times failing to load pages properly or simply hanging. The usual WinXP/IE problems.)
Advantages were clear. Spyware/malware got to notebook? - recover from backup image. Something crashed? - data are most likely are Okay on host Linux hard drive. Also, gradually girlfriend ha been taught how to use Linux and how to get around the University Intranet with Linux and Firefox/Konqueror. Though most documents she used still required M$Office under Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
USPTO doesn't have one! ;)
Well, I thought anti-virus software vendors already failed at similar effort. Every new virus out there first disables all known anti-virus software.
It all boils down to question: how could you tell malicious content from good one??? You would have to resort to signatures. That wouldn't help against 0day exploits in no way, since on that day 0 most signatures are not yet updated.
From the article it sounds more like standard corporate firewall functionality: "block all what looks like HTTP redirect, since that can IE exploit", "block all .exe attachments since that might be Outlook exploit", "block .wmf since that might be IE/Outlook exploit", etc. Nothing new.
Buhahaha! Very funny!! They at Redmond take Windows security very very seriously - they have put best PR people on it!!!
Good luck at identifying that "harmful code," darling!
P.S. And for that "rewrites HTML pages" bit be sure to have M$' lawyers ready. Few content providers would like idea that their pages may be rewritten by the software monopolist.
P.P.S. Would M$ ever learn? How long they intend to have that "ActiveX" crap enabled in their browsers by default?? How many sacrifices they intended to make???
P.P.P.S. On related news from Germany, my employer (about 150 desktops) 1.5 year ago has banned M$IE. Firefox and Opera must be used to access inter/intranets.
How often Windows update break system and applications? Very often. In my mail box there are at least 2-3 mails per year from our admins telling us to not install particular Windows updates since they would break some applications. We have to wait for patches from other software vendors. (And I'm not even talking about SP2: we were waiting for about one year for all applications to be updated to be compatible with WinXPsp2. And at least three systems in my department were crashed/rendered unusable by SP2 installation.)
How often Mac OS update break system? I have had problem only once when Mac OS update installed new ATI drivers and one 3D game started hanging my notebook. (Next update which came two weeks later fixed that issue.) One update problem for two years. And fixed by Apple itself. That damm good results I'd say. Stability of Debian with nice polished GUI. ;)
Mac OS is magnitude more stable: Apple doesn't have to check backward compatibility cruft M$Windows plagued with.
You kind of right. But bit off target.
Primary goal of Linux is to be free as in "free beer". (The Linux is not GNU/FSF - which are free as in "free speech".)
Many might have chosen Apple - if not the price tag. Video editing you say? I'd love to do it but somehow I am not ready to fork $1300 for FinalCut/iDVD just to be able to author DVD with my summer vacations. Yes, it's very easy with FinalCut - but not for that price. In fact, only geeks with US salaries can afford most of the fun part of Mac. Over here in Europe Macs is very very very little overpriced niche. (We here do not have the nice deals from Apple US market enjoys couple of times per year.) Rest of the world - very close to zero/non-existent.
When you offset positive experience by the price - Apple looks really not all that well. And Linux systems suddenly start looking not all that bad. With Windows systems hanging about at the same level as Linux.
Apple is all about good experience. Linux - is all about price. If you ever observed Linus in action you might have noticed his approach: he is huge fan of free stuff - developer-wise. If some OS functionality can be made cheaply w/o any additional overhead that would boost particular application performance by 5% - so why not? it's free! Apple in the very situation would try to charge you premium - for every bit of performance you get out of your Mac.
For me beef of the story was Sun's revelation that CDDL is intentionally incompatible with GPL. MPL were needed to be that way to be able to protect Netscape/Mozilla/etc trademarks and names. But CDDL?? What Sun has to lose???
There is nothing wrong to be incompatible. But on Sun's part it really looks like holy war on GPL. But that's understandable - from their proprietary software vendor perspective.
But the Schilling person really makes fool out of himself all the time. All the discussions I have read that guy had no single technical argument. It all were coming down to "you do not understand" and "people I trust told me." You hardly can argue with such guy. But as long as cdrtools were working as expected that was tolerated. But now he really did it: he screwed licensing. (In a way he remind me ex-Linux-IDE maintainer Andre Hedrick - he also had problems with argumentation.)
P.S. I guess for Sun GPL is real eyesore, since first thing most of the users do with Solaris of theirs is installing GNU tools. And CDE was replaced recently with GNOME. Not that it helped Solaris somehow.
Well, all I can say you have to try it once. There is no "Service Pack" for Mac OS. There is no "breaking features". It just works.
.Net, etc). It doesn't require as much tuning as Linux does. It allows me to concentrate on my work - and my work alone. If Apple said "feature X is supported" - you can rest assured that it would work w/o any hiccups. If Apple did say "not supported" - well, bad luck, can give up.
I have used Mac OS X 10.3 for two years now. I'm using M$Windows starting from 1996. I'm using Linux starting from 1999.
Of all OSs I have tried, Mac OS X even with limited customization capabilities is the most pleasant system to work with. It's not as functional as Linux. It doesn't have the load of 3rd party applications Windows has. But it has all what I ever wanted.
There is no killer feature. Mac OS X is really platform which helps developers to make good applications for users. It doesn't try to show off with *BIG* features like Windows (DirectX, OLE/COM/DCOM/COM+, NTFS,
To really understand the strengths and weaknesses you really have to try it once.
vim-tk/gtk is missing in Ubuntu. Major pain for me to have NNN extra megabytes of GNOME installed for plain text editor. Debian has vim-gtk.
/usr/share/doc/. How many distros can boast such level of integration with OSS movement?
Also, (K)Ubuntu has some weird problems detecting screen resolution of my wide screen Dell 2005fpw - hardware-wise poor Debian found my 1680x1050 tft panel resolution w/o any problems.
I have tried Kubuntu several times but since it doesn't have mplayer and vim-gtk bundled (but have lots of stuff I do not need bundled) - using rule "choose by best fit defaults" - I'm still with Debian. (Debian Sid - to be more precise - or whatever name testing has now.)
I honestly do not understand all that hype about distros/etc. And it seems that it's only USA which is affected: since it's only there are people thinking "Linux" == "RedHat". They download RedHat, hit problems, come to forums, get response a-la [self-censored] off and then write emotional articles for major US newspapers on how Linux isn't desktop ready.
On-topic. Debian is dying. Well, in distro with focus set on stability, absence of action can be interpreted as sign of stability. How fit Debian with general OSS movement? For me it is good sign when package comes unpatched and with defaults of its developers. How much packages in Fedora haven't been patched by RedHat? In SUSE? You can barely find such package there. In Debian most packages come with minimal changes to fit into Debian's build system. And the changes are well documented in
Here comes my point. OSS in general maturing. Debian was one of the first and oldest to show the signs of maturing. All the problems of Debian - due to openness - were well understood and were avoided/solved. Many problems in past attracted many people willing to provide solutions. Now there are no more problems and that itself becomes problem. For me it's good sign: problem-solvers have no work - means there are no major problems. It's time for the people to move on. That's it. Debian had grown and now needs new people. If you think about Linspire, UserLinux, LibraNet and Ubuntu as offsprings of Debian - you would see that Debian isn't dying but going thru normal evolutionary cycle: change of generations. Having so many forks (along with viral GPL) guaranties that Debian would live on.
Where are my mod points when I need them? +10. Mac OS X (10.3 at least) is stable performer. Not ideal - but over all Okay. Unix side of theirs is quite compatible with BSD.
Most of the Linux stuff I did compiled and worked w/o any problems on Mac OS X. I often used my iBook as additional portability test bed.
That's especially looks true when one compares Fink with the bastard CygWin or SFU. Under Fink I had no problems at all. CygWin with it's funny on-the-fly conversions (between Unix-way and Windows-way doing things) never stop me surprising.
On-topic. The article actually surprised me. Linux just reached mainstream - and journalists already try to send it back to nerd's underground. Or it's probably just change of target: before the very same kind of journalists claimed for whole decade that Apple is dead. It's just now they have more scapegoats for the cheap shot journalism. In the end, no way I would even consider informative the article filled so carelessly with lots of technical info - but without any decent references. The sentences like "[...] flip this switch, it'll unpack itself [...]" just highlight that the guy never left his desk for real IT back rooms.
C'mon. The problem was beaten to death all over the Internet. Just disable caching of recently viewed pages, remove most extension - and you'll be fine.
Parsed web page cache take quite space. You can't avoid that.
Extensions use lots of JavaScript. JavaScript utilizes Garbage Collection. Many extension writers do not even consider memory consumption. Every new variable, every dynamic array - all that eats memory up.
In other words, the most memory consuming features of Firefox - are the features we like it most for.
P.S. And more memory conservative Opera doesn't allow for any kind of extensions. And very limited in a way you can configure it - compared to Firefox. Flexibility always comes with price.
ZOMG! When they are asked about ODF support - they have not enough customer's demand. But when bunch of higher-ups are going to shoot themselves publicly in heads - they hear that voice very strongly.
Whoever might have made up that "mass migration" demand - s/he just doesn't have clue how it works. People shiver whenever they recall last M$Office transition they have been responsible for - but now M$ want to automate that.
But seriously, how many people think that M$ brand new DOCX xml file format would fly? After all it is not backward compatible - so more or less everybody would still use old and tried RTF/DOC files. Buying into brand new M$Office licensing to be able to use the documents internally only? - make no sense. My company for about 3 last years uses internally OO.o1/2: not the greatest stuff - but it just works most of the time. Documents for external use are still old DOC/RTF or PDFs. What would we gain by adopting the DOCX??
Games suffer from latencies. Servers are Ok with latencies - they are made so and pipelining (used to improve overall performance) is the cause of the latencies.
Another point, nobody payed attention to, is that KillerNIC "literally bypasses the Windows network stack and uses hardware interrupts to get data directly to the game". That might sound find (in fact I was personally doing something similar with Intel's e1000 adapters) but with one major problem: the network traffic reaches the game directly, bypassing all the security, firewalls, anti-virii software you might happen to have. In other words, before attackers were needed to find a hole in Windows, now they would start looking into holes in games. With advent of MMO games, how many millions of people would be exposed to the risks??
To conclude. No miracles, KillerNIC traded security for performance. Well, nothing new really. Moving on.
Sorry for going personal, but you are an idiot.
M$Windows for many tasks requires many hacks. The hacks require serious meddling with system. (E.g. audio/video codecs/DirectShow filters installation and functioning.) And you need admin privileges so that application (or part of it) would be able to hack the OS.
Under Mac OS X, you do not need to do that. Period. There is no need for application to play some dirty trick on system. Apple is pretty straight forward here. You need to install driver? You need to install system library? You need to install QuickTime component? You need to update system library? You need to update system application or replace file there? Mac OS has dedicated functions for that. Not hacks - but functions. Documented on http://developer.apple.com/ - not in M$ issue tracking system well known as "Knowledge Base" (now part of MSDN).
Application performs particular function. Some people pay attention to how it does it, some don't. Apple pays attention to what and how people do with its OS - and improve OS correspondently. M$ - does not. Mac OS X has functions - M$WinAPI has hacks. Feel the difference.
Because some DLLs are loaded in context of other applications. For example hooks: global keyboard shortcuts, creation of processes, creation of windows. This requirement from from M$ itself - so inevitably all the crap is landing in %SysDir%. Also, dynamic linker on M$Windows look for DLLs exclusively by %PATH% - and %WinDir%/%SysDir% are always there.
Mac OS X uses concept of frameworks (which are set of libraries) and no such problem exists. The core OS frameworks go to one folder - applications keep their frameworks in bundle or install copy to analogue of Unix /usr/lib (have no Mac at hand - can't name the folders, sorry). The dynamic linker is made to properly resolve such run-time dependencies. Sort of just like on Unix with difference that Mac OS linker also looks into application bundle, while Unix one looks only in standard prescribed directories (/lib:/usr/lib:... - see /etc/ld.conf).
+100. Quote again just to reread. Well said.
ZOMG!
SanDisk itself asked RockBox people to port it to Sansa. Are SanDisk really good guys?
Sansa doesn't support Unicode (doesn't have fonts), doesn't support lossless codecs and doesn't support MPEG4. For me usual "WMA-only" profile (that come with that stinky "PlaysForSure" label) is quite limiting. (The Sansas also do NOT support WMA Lossless).
Though I found my e260 (4GB model) being pretty usable when used with good ol' MP3s. Recoding from FLAC/AAC can be pain at times - but not much. For me absence of Unicode fonts is more visible: I have lots of tracks with Cyrillic names.
Absence of any decent modern file format support though bothers me. WMA is hardly anything fitting for jazz, alternative or classics: quality just plainly sucks. WMA so obviously optimized for pop that it hardly makes any sense to me. I have sent question to SanDisk and got flat out negative response: no other file format would be ever supported. Unicode request also got the same "we do not care" kind of response.
P.S. Needless to mention, that iPod does support both Unicode fonts (for international tags) and lossless format (Apple's own Apple Lossless). "Why I still do experiment? Why I just do not buy iPod?" the two most common questions I have popping up when I hit track with Cyrillic name or bunch of OGGs from my friends... :-|
Google Froogle anyone? You can list there for free. As customer I in fact use it quite often.
Sticking exclusively with eBay was guarantied to screw you someday. It seems that day is nearing. And as customer I find it pretty stupid for vendor being eBay-only anyway. Now PayPal have eased most of the problems, but I just feel myself uncomfortable being so much in eBay's land.
Get real people. eBay provided you with the "shelfs". But it still owns the shelfs and can do pretty much anything with the shelfs. (Just like ordinary public market.) eBay after all has to make money too. With many crackers' attacks, tightened security and audit, eBay I expect has pretty high operational costs. What I'm getting too: you have to pay for better security higher price.
US students often do very good. On average the math skills are low. But most my colleagues from US are very fluent with all aspects of math required for programming.
In other words, we were taught lots of general math. US uses more specialized approach and students are taught things they will really need in their careers.
That's true. But it started long ago in USSR itself. Starting from 80ties, education in USSR was fading - just like Soviet regime itself. School books of my older sister (7 years difference) were about 10-15% thicker than mine. Most teachers I have spoken with (on course of developing educational software) also complained that many things were just removed from educational plans and many subjects - like math, physics & chemistry - were greatly simplified. All that without anything new added back in exchange.
Though most children of my friends emigrated to US have complained that average education in US is really really poor. So gap is still there. IOW ex-USSR is only catching up.
Because snapshot is in internal VMWare format. Image you can mount just like plain partition under Linux.
From all what you have said, I'd rather buy Plasma display for my PC. ;-) Honestly, TV is the last place where I would look for anything colorful/vivid worth watching. (Me is anime guy.) By choosing LCD I am just pragmatical. It's cheap and it consumes less power.
I'm no advocate of LCD, do not take me wrong. But after last three visits to shops, I realized that I have seen only single plasma TV - and bunch of LCD ones. And it stood in studio where it was impossible to compare it to others. Visually, I haven't noticed any difference, that mean that I would not pay more for something I cannot really experience.
Probably 3-4 years ago, provided sufficient moneys, plasmas were really good deal. But now they just can't beat LCD price/performance ratio. Not that LCDs improved quality - but they definitely improved price side of the equation. Plasmas unfortunately remained expensive (power consumption included, "HD-Ready" filtered).
P.S. Just checked. I can get decent 32" LCD for €900 - compared to €1300 of 42" Plasma (there are no smaller plasmas). LCD needs about 120W compared to 450W of cheap Plasma. Expensive Plasmas - running into €2000 - consume about 230W. But still it's too expensive.
Several LCD panels I have programmed claimed 2.5 years of interruptible function w/o degradation of quality. Since the panels were insanely cheap I presume that better panels live even longer.
Presuming one watches TV on average 6 hours a day - with 2.5 years guaranty - that would make 10 years of lifetime. 10 years later I'm sure it would be possible to replace cheaply the panel with new one - just like it is happening now with CRTs.
CRTs are also prone to degradation - just like plasma and LCD. It's just the quality of CRT sucks (HD LCD/Plasma really provide better viewing experience) so nobody watches them too much. (After coming to IT, I barely can look at CRT TV at all: 50Hz just hurt my eyes too much.)
P.S. And with new developments like LED (light emitting diodes) back light - that would move the problem even further.
In situations like that I go to shop and buy first thing I like.
It's pointless to worry about future problems. Solve problems when they come: burned out plasma or dimmed back light both are not lethal to human life ;-)
I sort'a can relate to your problems. I'm going to buy TV that autumn. And most likely it would LCD: prices are now start at €800 for 32". Since I haven't found decent review I would just buy cheapest one of my preferred brands - Philips or Panasonic. And then will face the music.
P.S. Honestly I more worried about that "HD-ready" v. "HDMI" thing. It's kind'a scary to have thing at home you do not control. In VHS time, I successfully avoided that braindamaged Macrovision, but now with HD it seems that I have not much choices left.
Thanks for highlighting the collision. Most people scared of terrorists coming to their homes and causing devastations.
But when we see our very own army do the same in distant land on TV - well, it's just 9 hours news block and all you need to get rid off of that problems is to flip the channel.
Can't help myself but rechant constantly "ignorance is bliss".
Behavior of modern "democratically elected politician" described with one simple word: populism.
Any proprietary software vendor "takes contributions from all comers" - especially when they free.
Check Apple and you will also see "public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities".
In other words he claim openness in a sense of Java: look openly but do not touch. Wanna touch it? Ask us and we will touch it for you any way you like it!
Sun just have to feed something to its PR machine - to differentiate itself from Dell. There is nothing more to the story of openness coming from Sun.
P.S. IBM's AIX isn't open. Modern AIX is quite compatible with Linux. "L" in "AIX5L" stands for Linux. Linux application can be ported or even run natively on AIX w/o any quirks. In other words, plan of IBM to open up AIX was to make it compatible with Linux so that customers will be able to move their applications anyway they like.
My friend had setup Windows for his girlfriend as guest OS under Linux host. He was using VMWare. His girlfriend was forced to use IE to access her University Intranet. Also she needed M$Office for documents from profs. The notebook was constantly plagued by malware/spyware/etc making it barely usable.
My friend installed Linux (Gentoo one) and VMWare Workstation. Inside the VMWare he installed the OEM Windows off the notebook. State of Windows - fully updated and with M$Office installed - was saved on backup image. In guest Windows, all work was done on SMB/CIFS drive of host Linux.
The only problem was video performance - e.g. macromedia flash animations at times were making the notebook to melt. Also there were some sporadic network problems - mostly attributed to poor Windows network stack implementation. (IOW, the network problems occurring with normal Windows installation under VMWare were occurring more often. E.g. Windows DHCP client was at times failing to get address from host Linux. That IE thing was at times failing to load pages properly or simply hanging. The usual WinXP/IE problems.)
Advantages were clear. Spyware/malware got to notebook? - recover from backup image. Something crashed? - data are most likely are Okay on host Linux hard drive. Also, gradually girlfriend ha been taught how to use Linux and how to get around the University Intranet with Linux and Firefox/Konqueror. Though most documents she used still required M$Office under Windows.