Your points on the difficulty of porting games from the Xbox 360 to the PC versus Xbox to PC are valid, but your statements on the Xbox OS are just downright wrong.
The Xbox 360 is not based off of early versions of Windows NT in any way, shape, or form. The last version of NT to support the PowerPC architecture was NT 4.0, and the support it had was cut prematurely, long before the x86 and Alpha versions of NT 4.0 ended their lifecycle (sometime after SP3 but before SP4 for memory, the final SP for NT 4.0 x86 was SP6a).
Keeping in mind that despite being a gaming console, the OS needs to support many advanced OS features that NT 4.0 never supported, it's not only wrong, but doesn't make sense. For example, the Xbox 360 uses the DirectX 9.0c API, NT 4.0 had a crippled version of DirectX 3.0 (yes, seriously). That, and you'd be looking at other things like solid support for multi-core processors (the hardware is a tri-core PPC), which isn't identical to SMP support.
In actual fact, the Xbox OS was built from the ground up. It shares numerous design concepts with NT, much of the same nomenclature, but the OS itself is designed from the ground-up specifically for gaming, with anything not pertinent to gaming not included.
an attempt by Apple to say something that Apple politically couldn't say: Mac antivirus software primarily protects against Windows viruses.
Are you serious?
Apple has spent the last several years directly bashing Microsoft and especially Windows through something close at times to saturation advertising. There's been a complete and total lack of subtlety. This being the case, I can't see Apple being too worried about political correctness and not trodding on the toes of MS.;)
I'm sorry, but Peter Gutmann is not a reputable source for accurate information on Vista graphics, or anything related to Vista at all. Several of his claims have been widely proven to be exaggerated or downright false, and when asked to provide proof, he has refused. His claims have been picked apart on numerous sites both directly and indirectly through the sourcing of benchmarks.
Some of his points are admittedly valid, there are genuine flaws in the new graphics driver device spec., but he's clearly most concerned with pushing an anti-Vista agenda, even if that requires resorting to FUD.
People absolutely _have_ listened and changed their behaviour. Linux is in a far better position today than it was a decade ago. It is a major player, if not THE player in various key segments of the server market (e.g. internet facing servers, supercomputing, universities, etc...). It wasn't too long ago that this area was owned by the Unix's, often expensive and proprietary ones. It has made advances, though less significant, in the desktop market. But with distributions like Ubuntu evolving rapidly, I think desktop usage of Linux may well change significantly over the coming years.
There are now major OEM's offering Ubuntu as a Windows alternative pre-installed on machines. This would have been an absurd notion only years ago, but a major milestone has been reached. Finally, it has also forced competitors, like Microsoft, to lift their game in multiple areas due to their at times drastically inferior offerings, resulting in better software across the board.
I assure you, only a tiny minority of the people who did change were persuaded by fanboys calling Microsoft "M$".
I find it ironic that in many cases the staunchest supporters of Linux and OSS in general are also the ones that do the most harm. Seriously, we're talking Ballmer equivalents. If you want people to change, you need to get them on side. If all you can offer is lame abuse, you're at best doing nothing for the movement you support, and at worst, actively damaging it.
Nothing is wrong with "M$", in the same sense that nothing is wrong with someone referring to Linux as "linsux" and open-source as "open-sores". The thing is, it tends to make you look somewhat immature.
If you can present a compelling coherent argument, you don't need to use lame decade old snipes about whatever subject matter you are discussing. If you use them in a compelling argument, it usually just makes the people you are out to persuade have a lesser opinion of what you wrote, and thus, you have sacrificed persuasive power.
It comes down to maturity for the most part and just simply putting forward a good argument.
OpenSolaris has all the advantages of Solaris 10 and more. So you're looking at things such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, etc..., that are already in Solaris, as well as entirely new things not yet in Solaris, such as a much improved and more user friendly installation system.
OpenSolaris is basically to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's the cutting edge of Solaris development, with numerous Solaris devs contributing to it; it's an incubation ground. As the features mature and the bugs are ironed out, key features are then moved into Solaris, which is expected to be deployed on servers, mission critical systems, mainframes, and so on. Only recently did Solaris gain the ability to boot off a ZFS root fs for instance, but OpenSolaris has had that capability for quite some time.
If you're interested in Solaris, OpenSolaris is the way to go, as you're less likely to be worried about some minor bugs and more interested in seeing everything it has to offer, including the cutting edge. I'd recommend you review the Solaris and OpenSolaris wikipedia pages for a good overview, which can link to more in-depth information on some of the specific features I mentioned above.
What you're aiming to do is perfectly valid but the method you describe in order to achieve your goal is horribly inefficient; I'd be hard pushed to think of a more time-consuming and difficult way to achieve your goal. My tip:
This sounds like an absolutely ideal scenario where you could benefit from virtualisation technology. Install the system you wish to "monitor" in a virtual machine. I come from the VMware world, and I can say that the snapshots feature of VMware Workstation would do exactly what it sounds like you want. Whenever you wish to capture an image of the present state of the machine, take a snapshot. Further, you can take as many snapshots as you please, these snapshots can be built on previous snapshots, and you can even have branching snapshots. Icing on the cake: only the differences since the last snapshot will be saved, so you'll save a huge amount of data versus burning complete snapshots to DVD.
What next? Simple, mount the snapshots as a drive on the host machine and diff them using the tool of your choice. I use WinDiff for basic directory/file comparison, but there's a multitude of options out there. The only problem I can imagine would be you probably can't mount multiple snapshots simultaneously from the same virtual disk, but you could get around this by just making a copy of the VHD on your HD and mounting the second snapshot off that.
By the way, there's likely other virtualisation products out there (e.g. VirtualBox) that can achieve what I described above, I'm purely using VMware Workstation as an example as it's my virtualiser of choice. Further, VMware Workstation is not free, VBox is.
I have a hard time seeing the point of this, and the rationale behind other similar moves. Here's why:
Firstly, advances in computing power and security research are always going to result in security schemes being broken, but these broken security mechanisms will always be replaced and improved. Provided you keep up to date with current security practices, and as a Slashdot reader, I assume you can and will, you're really not in any danger at all.
Further, there's numerous other security options you can enable both at the wireless level and the network level to further protect your network, alongside good security practices with existing WPA2 (e.g. maximum length WPA key consisting of random characters and numbers). For example, MAC Address whitelisting, a strong password on the AP, and enabling AP configuration changes to occur only through wired connections. A half decent wireless AP should expose all of these options.
This is more than enough to deter all but the most dedicated hacker. I'm not going to pull random statistics out of my behind, but I would wager that only a ridiculously tiny amount of wireless intrusions are done by experienced hackers, and experienced hackers tend to have an agenda beyond "leeching your tubes". The above security options, if all enabled and correctly configured (as in my home network) goes above and beyond what is required to stop the casual or even experienced war driver in their tracks.
But let's say that somehow, they do manage to break your wireless security. Well, if your network is properly set up, they now have another round of security to get through that should be even tougher. Here, digital signing and encryption of all network communications between Windows machines on the domain is required by policy, no exceptions. This is one example of many.
If someone out there is really willing to go to all that effort to break into your HOME network and access your personal data, you have VERY serious problems. From a corporate network perspective, of course, things might be entirely different.
Bottom line: I have a hard time seeing the point of abandoning wireless due to security concerns in home networks, as a properly secured wireless network and home network will easily defeat all but the most determined and skilled hackers.
And finally, why did you buy into wireless at all in the first place if you were so concerned about security? Everyone knew that WEP was rubbish before it was even cracked (which didn't take long). WPA was a vast improvement over WEP, but even it had its flaws, and this was also well known among those concerned. I find it strange that you're getting out of wireless now, when a look at the whole picture shows that wireless security has improved immensely since the initial takeup of wireless. The real problem is people not moving to these new security setups, and staying with WEP or worse.
It's OK, I have a weird fetish for obsolete proprietary operating systems, mainly because they are much harder in general to find than OSS ones for obvious reasons. So, I know stupid crap like this.:)
As an Australian, I find this both hilarious and infuriating.
I just spent much of this week playing a game that revolves around surgically amputating the limbs off deformed people using such delightful weapons as plasma cutters. In fact, just before I completed my first play-through, I acquired the achievement for "1000 limbs amputated". The game, of course, has mass amounts of blood and gore.
Yet, a game that references a real-life drug? That crosses the line!!
Honestly, this just shows how out of date and simply stupid the Australian classification boards guidelines are. If you asked the average person what they find more offensive/disturbing, a game that has enormous amounts of blood and gore (and passed through the ratings process without issue), or a game that references a painkiller, I think the answer would be obvious.
Let me be blunt: timothy's editorial observation shook me to my very core. An operating system released a few days ago with an advanced compositing window manager with hardware acceleration enabled looks prettier than a 7 year old OS with no compositing window manager, little to no hardware acceleration of the desktop, and no fancy 3D desktop effects. Unbelievable, who would have thought this would be the case?
I've thought long and hard about this, but I think I can deliver an observation almost on par with timothy's: Windows XP looks prettier than Windows 95.
Seriously, can we stop with the idiotic editorial comments appended to Slashdot stories? This story was stupid enough for a variety of reasons without the editor adding his personal touch.
Reasons being two-fold: 1. Apple/MS I believe both have corporate policies of only allowing their files to be downloaded directly from their servers, I presume primarily for security/authenticity reasons. That's not to say Torrent is insecure; it's not, but there could conceivably be security issues with using it as a distribution mechanism. And:
2. Why bother? Microsoft has some of the largest datacenters and fattest pipes on the planet. Apple, relative to their customer base, is probably comparable. Microsoft's ability to push out bits is probably rivaled only by Google. Bluntly, you'd probably get a far slower download on average using P2P than downloading direct from MS. The biggest benefit would be to MS in dollars saved through bandwidth bills, not to the end-user.
What Microsoft (and Apple?) really need is to post some damn md5/sha1 sums for all their downloads. It would be nice if I could actually verify that the gigantuan service pack I just downloaded is not corrupt.
While I have no legal recognition as a Microsoft apologist, through contractual obligations or licensing terms, nevertheless, I would like to apologise on behalf of Microsoft.
Well, that certainly isn't vapourware that you're now referring to. And really, my mantra about which OS you should use is simple: "Use what you enjoy." It's as simple as that, use whichever OS you enjoy using, and is able to get the job done most comfortably.
But that being said, you're referring to an OS that was released over a decade ago; times change, software changes, and yes, even evil multi-national monopolies like Microsoft can change. Not only that, but Windows NT is fundamentally different in design from Windows 9x. It might have similarities at the GUI level, but internally, it's a completely different beast.
I guess all I'm trying to say is it doesn't hurt to keep an open mind about some of these things. Most of what you've said is either incorrect, and now, excessively pessimistic. A decade in IT is like a century in the real world, that's the rate of technological development, both in hardware and software. Keeping an open mind about the competition and what it can achieve isn't a bad thing, and in this case, at the end of the day, the worst that can happen is you find out your pessimism was warranted.
That being said, I'm a deep cynic as well, and it sounds like no matter what happens, you've already made up your mind...
The definition of vapourware disagrees with you. Windows 7 hasn't even had anything approaching a long development cycle yet, nor has it exceeded its forecast development cycle of around 3 years; and if they managed to eventually get Vista out, a major revision of the NT OS, I think they can manage to push out a minor revision.
Really, if you want to bash MS, go for it, there's lots of things you can bash them on that are entirely legitimate, but you aren't bashing these things, you're just throwing garbage around.
They (Microsoft & The Press) never claimed Vista would be an entirely new codebase either. It was always going to be the next major release of the Windows NT OS, namely, version 6.0. They did claim that many fundamental system components would be rewritten or undergo significant changes, which they did. The NT kernel had numerous changes implemented, for instance, and so did many other low-level system components, e.g. the GUI subsystem. These aren't down to perspective, these are facts.
I doubt Windows 7 will be vapour, it will be released, the quality of the release remains to be seen, but calling it "vapor" is ridiculous. Further, just because it is based on the Vista codebase doesn't instantly relegate it to the status of garbage. The Vista internals are on the whole very stable, now that the large video/audio hardware makers seem to have smoothed out their driver issues and got to grips with the new driver model. Windows 7 is aimed at giving Vista the sandpaper treatment, smoothing out the rough edges. Whether it's successful I have no idea, but if it is, you'll be left with a pretty decent OS on the whole.
The first research release is publicly available, and interestingly, comes with the full source code for the OS, which you can download and compile yourself here: http://www.codeplex.com/singularity
This is also what Midori is based on, but there's very little publicly known about that. Regardless, you might want to get your facts straight.
Can you name a single reputable source that stated that Windows 7 will be based on a "completely new codebase"?
Every single source I've read, internal and external to Microsoft, has explicitly stated it is based on the Vista codebase and is a minor revision of the OS. In fact, there will be no fundamental changes to the low-level OS internals, kernel inclusive, to the point that they are aiming for Vista drivers to work just fine on Windows 7, which should alleviate the driver migration woes that plauged Vista.
You misinterpret the reason why I posted that disclaimer; such debates on the value of human life are not only important but essential, but I wanted to make the point I wasn't posting my comment with the intent of starting a US foreign policy, Afghanistan/Iraq war ethics debate, as I think it could be fairly viewed as entirely off-topic.
Keeping in mind that the whole point of my post was my ethical objection to potentially monumental scientific discoveries being associated with a military research outfit, it should be pretty clear that I value human life to a significant extent;)
While solutions to any of these mathematical conundrums would be grand, I'm not sure I'd want to do so in the name of DARPA, or even have any association of my discoveries with DARPA.
At the end of the day, DARPA specialises in technology that is designed to benefit the military, and as a result, is frequently designed for either either killing people, or making it easier to do so. Yes, there's the whole "defence" argument; that the technology will be used for saving lives. But this is a half-truth, the lives being saved are almost always select (only lives belonging to a certain state(s) (the US and potentially its allies in this case)), and often at the cost of other lives.
This can of course degenerate into a whole ethics and morality debate on the value of human life, but ideally, I'd rather such findings published through an academic institute, e.g. a university, that doesn't have any ties to military technology, but rather, a persuasion to applying scientific breakthroughs in the advancement of the common good for humanity as a whole.
I know there have been advancements that DARPA has made that have benefited humanity as a whole, such as the Internet, but keep in mind this was not the primary intent. The Internet turned out to have enormous potential outside the military, but it was military benefits that were the primary focus of the project, and they no doubt got them; the military portion of the Internet split from the public domain and is now a highly classified network, possibly with numerous innovations that are not available to the public.
It's not like elections in the USA (or any country really, just to varying extents) are only participated in by educated people informed about the respective candidates' platforms. Realistically, a huge number of people who vote, and I'd honestly lean to the majority, don't really have a clue.
Their knowledge of the election will be somewhere between non-existant (e.g. voting for 'x' party because I always have, despite not having a clue what McCain's/Obama's policies are) and misinformation coupled with ignorance (McCain because Obama is a Muslim/Obama because McCain is a fascist).
I'd wager the number of people participating in the election who are well informed about both major parties presidential candidate would be a minority.
This has always been the case, and more to the point, isn't going to change unless you do something fundamentally undemocratic to restrict voter participation.
Yes, VMware provides a technology for its datacenter level products called VMotion that does exactly that, moving VM's between physical virtualised servers in a cluster while preserving all active networking connections.
I don't know the specifics of how it works and manages that feat, but I have seen tech demos that show it in action. I watched one a while ago published by Dell showing a VMotion task in progress, I'm sure you can find it on the web somewhere with some digging around.
Regardless, it does work and has been available as part of its enterprise products for some time.
HA = High Availability Technology that aims to ensure (high) availability of virtual machines across a virtualised cluster through intelligent monitoring of VM's and cluster resources. http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/ha.html
DR = Distributed Resource Scheduler (I assume that's what parent meant) Provides much more advanced and fine-grained control of the available resources in a virtualised cluster. http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html
BC = Consolidated Backup (guessing) Backup technology for virtualised clusters, providing backup features specific to virtualisation scenarios that conventional backup products don't traditionally offer, although, BC can integrate with them to an extent. http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/consolidated_backup.html
One of my main problems with VMWare is that a VM itself takes so much disk space that it takes a long time to work with (copy, archive etc) and I can't fit many on my laptop. Somewhat paradoxically, it must be possible to snapshot an application with its entire environment so you have a known working version.
Make sure to check the features tab for a more summarized and technical overview of what exactly ThinApp does and is capable of. Unfortunately, ThinApp is currently Windows only; I have no idea if they are intending to support Unix OS's in the future.
Is this the sort of functionality you are thinking about? Apologies if I've misintepreted your comment.
Actually, it makes a huge amount of money on its bare metal hypervisor. I haven't exactly analyzed their profits based on individual products, but I'd be willing to bet that their bare metal hypervisor and associated technologies is where the big money is made for them. For companies like VMware, it's the enterprise market where they traditionally reap the big profits, and VMware has been a major presence, if not THE presence until recently in the enterprise virtualisation market.
Also, I think you don't quite understand what VMware Infrastructure is. VMware Infrastructure IS their bare metal hypervisor, with various associated technologies included depending on which particular package you choose, all related to the hypervisor featureset; e.g. vSMP, DRS, VMotion, etc...
Finally, ESXi is just one flavour of their bare metal hypervisor, the newest. It's a stripped down version of ESX, their traditional bare metal hypervisor. ESXi is almost entirely remotely managed, and yes, it is free. ESX, on the other hand, is definitely not free, in any way, shape, or form. It differs, in that it is not designed for embedded hardware, but instead, includes not just the hypervisor but a full fledged local management console through a Linux system based off of RedHat Linux (I forget the specific version it is based off).
Each has pros and cons, but keep in mind that ESX has been in existence for many years, ESXi is a newcomer, and so, if you want to compare adoption, ESX will dwarf ESXi. I can't see existing companies that use ESX moving to ESXi, and even if they do, the free version of ESXi doesn't include other features such as VMotion, which must be seperately bought and enabled through license keys in ESXi.
Slashdot Mirror
Your points on the difficulty of porting games from the Xbox 360 to the PC versus Xbox to PC are valid, but your statements on the Xbox OS are just downright wrong.
The Xbox 360 is not based off of early versions of Windows NT in any way, shape, or form. The last version of NT to support the PowerPC architecture was NT 4.0, and the support it had was cut prematurely, long before the x86 and Alpha versions of NT 4.0 ended their lifecycle (sometime after SP3 but before SP4 for memory, the final SP for NT 4.0 x86 was SP6a).
Keeping in mind that despite being a gaming console, the OS needs to support many advanced OS features that NT 4.0 never supported, it's not only wrong, but doesn't make sense. For example, the Xbox 360 uses the DirectX 9.0c API, NT 4.0 had a crippled version of DirectX 3.0 (yes, seriously). That, and you'd be looking at other things like solid support for multi-core processors (the hardware is a tri-core PPC), which isn't identical to SMP support.
In actual fact, the Xbox OS was built from the ground up. It shares numerous design concepts with NT, much of the same nomenclature, but the OS itself is designed from the ground-up specifically for gaming, with anything not pertinent to gaming not included.
I highly recommend this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
an attempt by Apple to say something that Apple politically couldn't say: Mac antivirus software primarily protects against Windows viruses.
Are you serious?
Apple has spent the last several years directly bashing Microsoft and especially Windows through something close at times to saturation advertising. There's been a complete and total lack of subtlety. This being the case, I can't see Apple being too worried about political correctness and not trodding on the toes of MS. ;)
I'm sorry, but Peter Gutmann is not a reputable source for accurate information on Vista graphics, or anything related to Vista at all. Several of his claims have been widely proven to be exaggerated or downright false, and when asked to provide proof, he has refused. His claims have been picked apart on numerous sites both directly and indirectly through the sourcing of benchmarks.
I suggest you read these articles for instance, which provide a good overview:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=718
Some of his points are admittedly valid, there are genuine flaws in the new graphics driver device spec., but he's clearly most concerned with pushing an anti-Vista agenda, even if that requires resorting to FUD.
Choose your "experts" carefully.
and no one listening or changing their behavior
People absolutely _have_ listened and changed their behaviour. Linux is in a far better position today than it was a decade ago. It is a major player, if not THE player in various key segments of the server market (e.g. internet facing servers, supercomputing, universities, etc...). It wasn't too long ago that this area was owned by the Unix's, often expensive and proprietary ones. It has made advances, though less significant, in the desktop market. But with distributions like Ubuntu evolving rapidly, I think desktop usage of Linux may well change significantly over the coming years.
There are now major OEM's offering Ubuntu as a Windows alternative pre-installed on machines. This would have been an absurd notion only years ago, but a major milestone has been reached. Finally, it has also forced competitors, like Microsoft, to lift their game in multiple areas due to their at times drastically inferior offerings, resulting in better software across the board.
I assure you, only a tiny minority of the people who did change were persuaded by fanboys calling Microsoft "M$".
I find it ironic that in many cases the staunchest supporters of Linux and OSS in general are also the ones that do the most harm. Seriously, we're talking Ballmer equivalents. If you want people to change, you need to get them on side. If all you can offer is lame abuse, you're at best doing nothing for the movement you support, and at worst, actively damaging it.
What is wrong with " M$ "?
Nothing is wrong with "M$", in the same sense that nothing is wrong with someone referring to Linux as "linsux" and open-source as "open-sores". The thing is, it tends to make you look somewhat immature.
If you can present a compelling coherent argument, you don't need to use lame decade old snipes about whatever subject matter you are discussing. If you use them in a compelling argument, it usually just makes the people you are out to persuade have a lesser opinion of what you wrote, and thus, you have sacrificed persuasive power.
It comes down to maturity for the most part and just simply putting forward a good argument.
OpenSolaris has all the advantages of Solaris 10 and more. So you're looking at things such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, etc..., that are already in Solaris, as well as entirely new things not yet in Solaris, such as a much improved and more user friendly installation system.
OpenSolaris is basically to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's the cutting edge of Solaris development, with numerous Solaris devs contributing to it; it's an incubation ground. As the features mature and the bugs are ironed out, key features are then moved into Solaris, which is expected to be deployed on servers, mission critical systems, mainframes, and so on. Only recently did Solaris gain the ability to boot off a ZFS root fs for instance, but OpenSolaris has had that capability for quite some time.
If you're interested in Solaris, OpenSolaris is the way to go, as you're less likely to be worried about some minor bugs and more interested in seeing everything it has to offer, including the cutting edge. I'd recommend you review the Solaris and OpenSolaris wikipedia pages for a good overview, which can link to more in-depth information on some of the specific features I mentioned above.
What you're aiming to do is perfectly valid but the method you describe in order to achieve your goal is horribly inefficient; I'd be hard pushed to think of a more time-consuming and difficult way to achieve your goal. My tip:
This sounds like an absolutely ideal scenario where you could benefit from virtualisation technology. Install the system you wish to "monitor" in a virtual machine. I come from the VMware world, and I can say that the snapshots feature of VMware Workstation would do exactly what it sounds like you want. Whenever you wish to capture an image of the present state of the machine, take a snapshot. Further, you can take as many snapshots as you please, these snapshots can be built on previous snapshots, and you can even have branching snapshots. Icing on the cake: only the differences since the last snapshot will be saved, so you'll save a huge amount of data versus burning complete snapshots to DVD.
What next? Simple, mount the snapshots as a drive on the host machine and diff them using the tool of your choice. I use WinDiff for basic directory/file comparison, but there's a multitude of options out there. The only problem I can imagine would be you probably can't mount multiple snapshots simultaneously from the same virtual disk, but you could get around this by just making a copy of the VHD on your HD and mounting the second snapshot off that.
By the way, there's likely other virtualisation products out there (e.g. VirtualBox) that can achieve what I described above, I'm purely using VMware Workstation as an example as it's my virtualiser of choice. Further, VMware Workstation is not free, VBox is.
I have a hard time seeing the point of this, and the rationale behind other similar moves. Here's why:
Firstly, advances in computing power and security research are always going to result in security schemes being broken, but these broken security mechanisms will always be replaced and improved. Provided you keep up to date with current security practices, and as a Slashdot reader, I assume you can and will, you're really not in any danger at all.
Further, there's numerous other security options you can enable both at the wireless level and the network level to further protect your network, alongside good security practices with existing WPA2 (e.g. maximum length WPA key consisting of random characters and numbers). For example, MAC Address whitelisting, a strong password on the AP, and enabling AP configuration changes to occur only through wired connections. A half decent wireless AP should expose all of these options.
This is more than enough to deter all but the most dedicated hacker. I'm not going to pull random statistics out of my behind, but I would wager that only a ridiculously tiny amount of wireless intrusions are done by experienced hackers, and experienced hackers tend to have an agenda beyond "leeching your tubes". The above security options, if all enabled and correctly configured (as in my home network) goes above and beyond what is required to stop the casual or even experienced war driver in their tracks.
But let's say that somehow, they do manage to break your wireless security. Well, if your network is properly set up, they now have another round of security to get through that should be even tougher. Here, digital signing and encryption of all network communications between Windows machines on the domain is required by policy, no exceptions. This is one example of many.
If someone out there is really willing to go to all that effort to break into your HOME network and access your personal data, you have VERY serious problems. From a corporate network perspective, of course, things might be entirely different.
Bottom line: I have a hard time seeing the point of abandoning wireless due to security concerns in home networks, as a properly secured wireless network and home network will easily defeat all but the most determined and skilled hackers.
And finally, why did you buy into wireless at all in the first place if you were so concerned about security? Everyone knew that WEP was rubbish before it was even cracked (which didn't take long). WPA was a vast improvement over WEP, but even it had its flaws, and this was also well known among those concerned. I find it strange that you're getting out of wireless now, when a look at the whole picture shows that wireless security has improved immensely since the initial takeup of wireless. The real problem is people not moving to these new security setups, and staying with WEP or worse.
It's OK, I have a weird fetish for obsolete proprietary operating systems, mainly because they are much harder in general to find than OSS ones for obvious reasons. So, I know stupid crap like this. :)
Yes, I have no life.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on 8 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, while MS-DOS 6.22 came on 3 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, so, 11 all up.
So, either you were using some incredibly ass backwards OEM distribution, or, your memory has faded a little. ;)
Either way, care to explain?
As an Australian, I find this both hilarious and infuriating.
I just spent much of this week playing a game that revolves around surgically amputating the limbs off deformed people using such delightful weapons as plasma cutters. In fact, just before I completed my first play-through, I acquired the achievement for "1000 limbs amputated". The game, of course, has mass amounts of blood and gore.
Yet, a game that references a real-life drug? That crosses the line!!
Honestly, this just shows how out of date and simply stupid the Australian classification boards guidelines are. If you asked the average person what they find more offensive/disturbing, a game that has enormous amounts of blood and gore (and passed through the ratings process without issue), or a game that references a painkiller, I think the answer would be obvious.
Let me be blunt: timothy's editorial observation shook me to my very core. An operating system released a few days ago with an advanced compositing window manager with hardware acceleration enabled looks prettier than a 7 year old OS with no compositing window manager, little to no hardware acceleration of the desktop, and no fancy 3D desktop effects. Unbelievable, who would have thought this would be the case?
I've thought long and hard about this, but I think I can deliver an observation almost on par with timothy's: Windows XP looks prettier than Windows 95.
Seriously, can we stop with the idiotic editorial comments appended to Slashdot stories? This story was stupid enough for a variety of reasons without the editor adding his personal touch.
Reasons being two-fold:
1. Apple/MS I believe both have corporate policies of only allowing their files to be downloaded directly from their servers, I presume primarily for security/authenticity reasons. That's not to say Torrent is insecure; it's not, but there could conceivably be security issues with using it as a distribution mechanism. And:
2. Why bother? Microsoft has some of the largest datacenters and fattest pipes on the planet. Apple, relative to their customer base, is probably comparable. Microsoft's ability to push out bits is probably rivaled only by Google. Bluntly, you'd probably get a far slower download on average using P2P than downloading direct from MS. The biggest benefit would be to MS in dollars saved through bandwidth bills, not to the end-user.
What Microsoft (and Apple?) really need is to post some damn md5/sha1 sums for all their downloads. It would be nice if I could actually verify that the gigantuan service pack I just downloaded is not corrupt.
While I have no legal recognition as a Microsoft apologist, through contractual obligations or licensing terms, nevertheless, I would like to apologise on behalf of Microsoft.
Please accept my sincere apologies.
Well, that certainly isn't vapourware that you're now referring to. And really, my mantra about which OS you should use is simple: "Use what you enjoy." It's as simple as that, use whichever OS you enjoy using, and is able to get the job done most comfortably.
But that being said, you're referring to an OS that was released over a decade ago; times change, software changes, and yes, even evil multi-national monopolies like Microsoft can change. Not only that, but Windows NT is fundamentally different in design from Windows 9x. It might have similarities at the GUI level, but internally, it's a completely different beast.
I guess all I'm trying to say is it doesn't hurt to keep an open mind about some of these things. Most of what you've said is either incorrect, and now, excessively pessimistic. A decade in IT is like a century in the real world, that's the rate of technological development, both in hardware and software. Keeping an open mind about the competition and what it can achieve isn't a bad thing, and in this case, at the end of the day, the worst that can happen is you find out your pessimism was warranted.
That being said, I'm a deep cynic as well, and it sounds like no matter what happens, you've already made up your mind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
The definition of vapourware disagrees with you. Windows 7 hasn't even had anything approaching a long development cycle yet, nor has it exceeded its forecast development cycle of around 3 years; and if they managed to eventually get Vista out, a major revision of the NT OS, I think they can manage to push out a minor revision.
Really, if you want to bash MS, go for it, there's lots of things you can bash them on that are entirely legitimate, but you aren't bashing these things, you're just throwing garbage around.
They (Microsoft & The Press) never claimed Vista would be an entirely new codebase either. It was always going to be the next major release of the Windows NT OS, namely, version 6.0. They did claim that many fundamental system components would be rewritten or undergo significant changes, which they did. The NT kernel had numerous changes implemented, for instance, and so did many other low-level system components, e.g. the GUI subsystem. These aren't down to perspective, these are facts.
I doubt Windows 7 will be vapour, it will be released, the quality of the release remains to be seen, but calling it "vapor" is ridiculous. Further, just because it is based on the Vista codebase doesn't instantly relegate it to the status of garbage. The Vista internals are on the whole very stable, now that the large video/audio hardware makers seem to have smoothed out their driver issues and got to grips with the new driver model. Windows 7 is aimed at giving Vista the sandpaper treatment, smoothing out the rough edges. Whether it's successful I have no idea, but if it is, you'll be left with a pretty decent OS on the whole.
If you're after a legitimately entirely new codebase, I'd suggest you check out Singularity:
http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/
The first research release is publicly available, and interestingly, comes with the full source code for the OS, which you can download and compile yourself here:
http://www.codeplex.com/singularity
This is also what Midori is based on, but there's very little publicly known about that. Regardless, you might want to get your facts straight.
Can you name a single reputable source that stated that Windows 7 will be based on a "completely new codebase"?
Every single source I've read, internal and external to Microsoft, has explicitly stated it is based on the Vista codebase and is a minor revision of the OS. In fact, there will be no fundamental changes to the low-level OS internals, kernel inclusive, to the point that they are aiming for Vista drivers to work just fine on Windows 7, which should alleviate the driver migration woes that plauged Vista.
I think you should get better news sources.
You misinterpret the reason why I posted that disclaimer; such debates on the value of human life are not only important but essential, but I wanted to make the point I wasn't posting my comment with the intent of starting a US foreign policy, Afghanistan/Iraq war ethics debate, as I think it could be fairly viewed as entirely off-topic.
Keeping in mind that the whole point of my post was my ethical objection to potentially monumental scientific discoveries being associated with a military research outfit, it should be pretty clear that I value human life to a significant extent ;)
While solutions to any of these mathematical conundrums would be grand, I'm not sure I'd want to do so in the name of DARPA, or even have any association of my discoveries with DARPA.
At the end of the day, DARPA specialises in technology that is designed to benefit the military, and as a result, is frequently designed for either either killing people, or making it easier to do so. Yes, there's the whole "defence" argument; that the technology will be used for saving lives. But this is a half-truth, the lives being saved are almost always select (only lives belonging to a certain state(s) (the US and potentially its allies in this case)), and often at the cost of other lives.
This can of course degenerate into a whole ethics and morality debate on the value of human life, but ideally, I'd rather such findings published through an academic institute, e.g. a university, that doesn't have any ties to military technology, but rather, a persuasion to applying scientific breakthroughs in the advancement of the common good for humanity as a whole.
I know there have been advancements that DARPA has made that have benefited humanity as a whole, such as the Internet, but keep in mind this was not the primary intent. The Internet turned out to have enormous potential outside the military, but it was military benefits that were the primary focus of the project, and they no doubt got them; the military portion of the Internet split from the public domain and is now a highly classified network, possibly with numerous innovations that are not available to the public.
It's not like elections in the USA (or any country really, just to varying extents) are only participated in by educated people informed about the respective candidates' platforms. Realistically, a huge number of people who vote, and I'd honestly lean to the majority, don't really have a clue.
Their knowledge of the election will be somewhere between non-existant (e.g. voting for 'x' party because I always have, despite not having a clue what McCain's/Obama's policies are) and misinformation coupled with ignorance (McCain because Obama is a Muslim/Obama because McCain is a fascist).
I'd wager the number of people participating in the election who are well informed about both major parties presidential candidate would be a minority.
This has always been the case, and more to the point, isn't going to change unless you do something fundamentally undemocratic to restrict voter participation.
Yes, VMware provides a technology for its datacenter level products called VMotion that does exactly that, moving VM's between physical virtualised servers in a cluster while preserving all active networking connections.
I don't know the specifics of how it works and manages that feat, but I have seen tech demos that show it in action. I watched one a while ago published by Dell showing a VMotion task in progress, I'm sure you can find it on the web somewhere with some digging around.
Regardless, it does work and has been available as part of its enterprise products for some time.
If you want to know more:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/vmotion.html
To clear up the acronym soup a little:
HA = High Availability
Technology that aims to ensure (high) availability of virtual machines across a virtualised cluster through intelligent monitoring of VM's and cluster resources.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/ha.html
DR = Distributed Resource Scheduler (I assume that's what parent meant)
Provides much more advanced and fine-grained control of the available resources in a virtualised cluster.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html
BC = Consolidated Backup (guessing)
Backup technology for virtualised clusters, providing backup features specific to virtualisation scenarios that conventional backup products don't traditionally offer, although, BC can integrate with them to an extent.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/consolidated_backup.html
One of my main problems with VMWare is that a VM itself takes so much disk space that it takes a long time to work with (copy, archive etc) and I can't fit many on my laptop. Somewhat paradoxically, it must be possible to snapshot an application with its entire environment so you have a known working version.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the solution you are after is already offered by VMware:
http://vmware.com/products/thinapp/
Make sure to check the features tab for a more summarized and technical overview of what exactly ThinApp does and is capable of. Unfortunately, ThinApp is currently Windows only; I have no idea if they are intending to support Unix OS's in the future.
Is this the sort of functionality you are thinking about? Apologies if I've misintepreted your comment.
Actually, it makes a huge amount of money on its bare metal hypervisor. I haven't exactly analyzed their profits based on individual products, but I'd be willing to bet that their bare metal hypervisor and associated technologies is where the big money is made for them. For companies like VMware, it's the enterprise market where they traditionally reap the big profits, and VMware has been a major presence, if not THE presence until recently in the enterprise virtualisation market.
Also, I think you don't quite understand what VMware Infrastructure is. VMware Infrastructure IS their bare metal hypervisor, with various associated technologies included depending on which particular package you choose, all related to the hypervisor featureset; e.g. vSMP, DRS, VMotion, etc...
Finally, ESXi is just one flavour of their bare metal hypervisor, the newest. It's a stripped down version of ESX, their traditional bare metal hypervisor. ESXi is almost entirely remotely managed, and yes, it is free. ESX, on the other hand, is definitely not free, in any way, shape, or form. It differs, in that it is not designed for embedded hardware, but instead, includes not just the hypervisor but a full fledged local management console through a Linux system based off of RedHat Linux (I forget the specific version it is based off).
Each has pros and cons, but keep in mind that ESX has been in existence for many years, ESXi is a newcomer, and so, if you want to compare adoption, ESX will dwarf ESXi. I can't see existing companies that use ESX moving to ESXi, and even if they do, the free version of ESXi doesn't include other features such as VMotion, which must be seperately bought and enabled through license keys in ESXi.