I'm more concerned about the animal. We kill them for food, but usually we don't do it for entertainment. On the other hand I don't want to be the one sleeping in a bleeding corpse at all, but as you said, those are just interns;)
Exactly my thought. However, I'm wondering how they could imitate this kind of situation. Afterall there's no chance they'll kill some animal in some cold place and put one of their interns in it over night. That would be pretty cruel taking into account that it's just done "to be sure"...
sorry, forgot to mention that I was talking about Antivir Personal Edition in the second paragraph. There's an English version available btw. I should pay more attention to the preview button I guess...
Whoever modded this funny doesn't run Windows for sure. On the other hand I wouldn't believe that "dumb consumers" will subscribe to Microsoft after realising that MS' security claims regarding Vista were bogus (if you haven't noticed, I still don't buy MS new focus on security).
On a related note there are some antivirus solutions available for free if the computer is only used for personal matters. I've deployed it on various occasions and it works quite reliably. The only drawback is that there's no automatic update process I know of, but users are reminded by some fancy balloon if they haven't updated since 2 weeks.
4) Since everybody would have this software pre-installed only a virus being able to circumvent the protection would have any impact, resulting in even bigger problems if there is a bug in the antivirus software (no doubt about that IMO), because most of the users would rely on the protection coming with Vista, so it would spread even faster/further than anything we have seen before.
See patent #6,990,339 for non-moving platforms;)
But seriously, haven't they heard of prior art or is there something revolutionary in the abstract I'm missing? Especially this sentence surprises me:
The RF characteristics of this wireless network are specifically tailored to meet applicable standards for electromagnetic compatibility with aircraft systems and RF exposure levels for passengers and flight crews.
Is there any device being used in airplanes (not taking gadgets of passengers in account), which isn't designed not to interfere with other components? Maybe this sounds perfectly reasonable for someone being used to filing patents for big companies, but to me it sounds rather redundant.
On a related note, google video isn't officially available in Germany yet (at least when I checked last week).
I know this offer is lame, but compared to the US we're used to less choice and higher prices, so it's not a bad idea to pull this stunt in Germany. If anyone thinks that this is not true just visit amazon.de and.com and compare the prize/availability of some CDs and DVDs. Since I've given up buying DVDs in stores (another issue, but I'll spare you a rant), I basically have the choice between going to my rental, which is closed on Sundays btw, or buying it at Amazon. So if I feel like I really want to watch a WB movie the same day and it's not available at my rental (or the rental is simply closed), I might consider getting it directly depending on how desperate I am.
If a 400Mhz CPU is too slow to do simple analogue audio D-A and A-D
converstion then the software is *seriously* badly written.
Keep in mind that Skype-to-Skype calls are encrypted, which requires a lot of processing power. Not a problem for modern PCs, but it could be too much for this ipaq model. On a related note: Skype doesn't seem to care much about optimizing their software. I'm sometimes calling a friend who has a G4 600 Mhz and he told me that whenenver he is having a conversation Skype consumes more than 80% of the CPU power... It's not that bad with older versions of Skype btw.
That's true, but the vast majority of people is obviously too lazy to do this. We had campaigns in my country every few years since the early '80s to switch off standby devices and even though people know that this is a huge factor on their energy bill they keep everything running.
In my opinion this is not going to change anytime soon. It might be a better approach to label devices in the stores, so consumers can see the added value immediately. Afterall the problem isn't standby itself, but an unreasonable tradeoff between efficency and production cost. If my TV/stereo/whatever only wasted 1W in standby, energy consumption and cost would be negligible. From a technical standpoint, this is perfectly doable.
That would be extremely inconvenient. Maybe it's better to define limits for power consumption and label devices in stores accordingly, just like they do it with refridgerators for years (at least in many (all?) EU countries). I guess this would encourage many companies to invest a few bucks more into energy efficiency when it comes to standby. Even if devices get a little more expensive, consumers and the environment will benefit in the long run.
You could also use suspend-to-disk, but IIRC it's some sort of failsafe feature for the PowerBooks. The computer writes an image of the RAM to the harddisk before going to sleep, so in case the battery runs empty the computer can start without potential data loss. As it turns out it's not hardware specific, so you can enable it on your iMac with some commandline magic. The problem is, that you would have to go into sleep mode *and* pull the plug afterwards, so it's way too inconvenient for most people to use.
I was pretty confused today when I tried to access the German version of wikipedia through www.wikipedia.de, because they merely stated that some court in Berlin ordered them to abandon this URL. After a brief moment of shock I just went to www.wikipedia.org and clicked on the link for the German version (which worked). It's just a small detour and actually it's just fair if you take into account that the.com URL always redirected you to.org (if you type in www.wikipedia.co.uk you end up on the English version directly on the other hand).
First of all it might be a good idea to display the blue screens again by default. Should be possible to sell it as a new feature . Afterall you never think of turning this behavior off *before* you have a non booting system and the current solution is like playing a.wav saying "It's not Steve, the hardware did it" in an infinite loop.
Exactly what I was thinking. They'll bring out Vista and then they'll make a package with all the patches which came out since SP2 + some features that are new in Vista (not the shiny stuff, just things needed for compatibility). This doesn't surprise me at all, but on the other hand there's not really a need for a sp meanwhile, because the patches just do the same job (and they can be bootstraped just like a sp). I never understood some of my co-workers installing beta versions of SP2 before it came out (at home). Consequently I'm not really looking forward to the next SP with excitement, because I don't believe that it will bring any true advantage over the current situation.
I guess it really depends on how you define adequate. Software developers are always going to use/waste (depends on the point of view) additional processing power and there are still examples where added power brings additional use. HDTV comes to mind - most computers around right now are simply not able to play them in software
But in most fields nowadays faster computers just bring more convenience to the end users. It would be cool if I could reencode DVDs in 5 minutes to XVID, but it's totally acceptable that it takes about 5 hours on my rather slow system, because I rarely rip movies and the computer can do the task over night. Furthermore most people owning a PC don't do this anyways. Back in the early 90's I had completely different problems like not having the money for additional 4 MB of RAM, which I really needed in order to run some essential apps on my SX-25 and when Win95 came out I couldn't play mp3s in realtime on the P100, which I just bought to run win95 in the first place (I know that mp3s can be played on much slower machines, but not with win95 and winamp 1.0). Compared to the minor upgrades I had recently just for snappiness, those were major obstacles.
The Euro isn't of much help when the U.S. economy goes down the drain. Afterall Europe is the world largest exporter and a strong Euro is not desirable if you want to trade with foreign countries.
Spend some time trying to look up exact numbers. I guess they are not available to the public, so we can only guess. According to Microsoft you only have to sign up to some programs (costing less than 500$ in total) and you can self evaluate your product with some software they supply. After that you can send the test results to Microsoft and they give you a certificate. However, that's just how I see it after having read their description at microsoft.com. Maybe there is an additional fee for filing in reports after evaluation (very likely), but I simply don't know because I couldn't find information.
If I walk downtown and there is some "message" on a sidewall I don't really have a chance not to waste at least a glance. But if some boring person has a blog online sharing his/her trivialities of live chances are quite low that I will actually end up there. I don't really see the problem here.
On the one hand it takes a lot of effort and expertise to build such systems, on the other hand both can and have to be bought usually, so I definitely see your point.
So you could argue that they could slap each other with their wallets instead of building those supercomputers. But first of all it's quite impressive that some entities are willing to invest so much money into computing power. And afterall they are not doing this because it's some kind of game - they believe that they need the processing power. Furthermore money is the dominating aspect in so many fields nowadays (especially those most people assume to be innovation driven): Cars, airplanes, watches or even sports. Just about anything related to reputation is strictly connected to a factor called money. One might argue that a Veyron is just an ordinary car powered by two upper level engines combined to a beast plus some added technology being in use since decades in other fields. What factor makes it possible to assemble such a car? Money! But still many people (even though most of them could never afford it) are fascinated by the concept. Apart from that (right here I'm not comparing cars to supercomputers anymore) they don't even question the idea of haveing a car being able to drive multiple times as fast as your average highway speed limit. They don't even care that they would run out of fuel in minutes at maximum speed. I guess that's just human nature...
Hey, even if no one reads it it's a good mental exercise to write about yourself. You might argue however, that in some cases it's better not to publish it, but that's a different story...
Re:Causing Panic
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well if I would "deal with desease for a living" I'd be serious about bird flu as hell, especially since Bush anounced his new program pumping billions into research and prevention. Afterall it's hard to tell in such cases if there's a valid reason to be worried, because the topic contains a scientific and a media-related component and the scientists are not neutral at all, because they've got financial interest and it's also about reputation. There are many valid reasons to be worried about H5N1, but at least here in Europe some people get quite hysteric about it (heard of people calling the cops because they found a dead bird in their garden). In the US it might be a different story, especially since the "threat" isn't as direct...
We might face a pandemic, but it could also be another topic like anthrax - something we smile about afterwards. Who knows.
ok, might be a hurdle. But it happens quite often, that a certified driver is offered from a vendor along with uncertified ones. Hauppauge, Creative and Nvidia come to mind. Because the certification process doesn't work in realtime, some of them will be qualified later. Others won't. In general I just trust vendors more if they took some measures to get qualified, but I must admit that I haven't used Windows personally for quite some time, so it might be a different story nowadays. Like I said, it's just an indication, but in my opinion it's a good step in the right direction. "Bad" drivers are the stability concern #1 when it comes to XP and 2000, because those are quite stable in every other regard.
What were they thinking!?! We should line the designers up and shoot them
Agreed;)
But all joking aside there's a problem affecting every security measure Microsoft has established: If there is any hole in this system (by definition there are at least several) it will likely be exploited and since the vast majority of Vista users will rely on this software we'll end up with another massive breakdown. That's just what happens if everyone relies on the same software vendor for the OS, browser, mail-client, anti-spyware...
It doesn't mean much formally, but if a vendor doesn't bother to certify the driver (it's not that expensive after all) it's a good indication that they might not care about driver improvement as well. Or to put it in different words: Would you believe that a company which can't afford certification would invest more than necessary into driver development? I know that this doesn't apply in many cases, but it's a good rule of thumb. I never had significant problems with certified drivers, but I guess that some of you know good examples.
... Which is quite a bit cheaper than a copy for 8 machines running OS X
You can't beat Ubuntu in price I guess, but on the other hand you can buy 5 OSX licenses for 200$, so that's just 40 bucks a box (if you need x*5 licenses). I know it's still money, but compared to Microsoft's pricelist it's quite fair afterall.
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I'm more concerned about the animal. We kill them for food, but usually we don't do it for entertainment. On the other hand I don't want to be the one sleeping in a bleeding corpse at all, but as you said, those are just interns ;)
Exactly my thought. However, I'm wondering how they could imitate this kind of situation. Afterall there's no chance they'll kill some animal in some cold place and put one of their interns in it over night. That would be pretty cruel taking into account that it's just done "to be sure"...
sorry, forgot to mention that I was talking about Antivir Personal Edition in the second paragraph. There's an English version available btw. I should pay more attention to the preview button I guess...
Whoever modded this funny doesn't run Windows for sure. On the other hand I wouldn't believe that "dumb consumers" will subscribe to Microsoft after realising that MS' security claims regarding Vista were bogus (if you haven't noticed, I still don't buy MS new focus on security).
On a related note there are some antivirus solutions available for free if the computer is only used for personal matters. I've deployed it on various occasions and it works quite reliably. The only drawback is that there's no automatic update process I know of, but users are reminded by some fancy balloon if they haven't updated since 2 weeks.
4) Since everybody would have this software pre-installed only a virus being able to circumvent the protection would have any impact, resulting in even bigger problems if there is a bug in the antivirus software (no doubt about that IMO), because most of the users would rely on the protection coming with Vista, so it would spread even faster/further than anything we have seen before.
Is there any device being used in airplanes (not taking gadgets of passengers in account), which isn't designed not to interfere with other components? Maybe this sounds perfectly reasonable for someone being used to filing patents for big companies, but to me it sounds rather redundant.
On a related note, google video isn't officially available in Germany yet (at least when I checked last week).
.com and compare the prize/availability of some CDs and DVDs.
I know this offer is lame, but compared to the US we're used to less choice and higher prices, so it's not a bad idea to pull this stunt in Germany. If anyone thinks that this is not true just visit amazon.de and
Since I've given up buying DVDs in stores (another issue, but I'll spare you a rant), I basically have the choice between going to my rental, which is closed on Sundays btw, or buying it at Amazon. So if I feel like I really want to watch a WB movie the same day and it's not available at my rental (or the rental is simply closed), I might consider getting it directly depending on how desperate I am.
On a related note: Skype doesn't seem to care much about optimizing their software. I'm sometimes calling a friend who has a G4 600 Mhz and he told me that whenenver he is having a conversation Skype consumes more than 80% of the CPU power... It's not that bad with older versions of Skype btw.
That's true, but the vast majority of people is obviously too lazy to do this. We had campaigns in my country every few years since the early '80s to switch off standby devices and even though people know that this is a huge factor on their energy bill they keep everything running.
In my opinion this is not going to change anytime soon. It might be a better approach to label devices in the stores, so consumers can see the added value immediately. Afterall the problem isn't standby itself, but an unreasonable tradeoff between efficency and production cost. If my TV/stereo/whatever only wasted 1W in standby, energy consumption and cost would be negligible. From a technical standpoint, this is perfectly doable.
That would be extremely inconvenient. Maybe it's better to define limits for power consumption and label devices in stores accordingly, just like they do it with refridgerators for years (at least in many (all?) EU countries).
I guess this would encourage many companies to invest a few bucks more into energy efficiency when it comes to standby. Even if devices get a little more expensive, consumers and the environment will benefit in the long run.
You could also use suspend-to-disk, but IIRC it's some sort of failsafe feature for the PowerBooks. The computer writes an image of the RAM to the harddisk before going to sleep, so in case the battery runs empty the computer can start without potential data loss. As it turns out it's not hardware specific, so you can enable it on your iMac with some commandline magic.
The problem is, that you would have to go into sleep mode *and* pull the plug afterwards, so it's way too inconvenient for most people to use.
I was pretty confused today when I tried to access the German version of wikipedia through www.wikipedia.de, because they merely stated that some court in Berlin ordered them to abandon this URL. After a brief moment of shock I just went to www.wikipedia.org and clicked on the link for the German version (which worked). It's just a small detour and actually it's just fair if you take into account that the .com URL always redirected you to .org (if you type in www.wikipedia.co.uk you end up on the English version directly on the other hand).
First of all it might be a good idea to display the blue screens again by default. Should be possible to sell it as a new feature . .wav saying "It's not Steve, the hardware did it" in an infinite loop.
Afterall you never think of turning this behavior off *before* you have a non booting system and the current solution is like playing a
Exactly what I was thinking. They'll bring out Vista and then they'll make a package with all the patches which came out since SP2 + some features that are new in Vista (not the shiny stuff, just things needed for compatibility). This doesn't surprise me at all, but on the other hand there's not really a need for a sp meanwhile, because the patches just do the same job (and they can be bootstraped just like a sp).
I never understood some of my co-workers installing beta versions of SP2 before it came out (at home). Consequently I'm not really looking forward to the next SP with excitement, because I don't believe that it will bring any true advantage over the current situation.
I guess it really depends on how you define adequate. Software developers are always going to use/waste (depends on the point of view) additional processing power and there are still examples where added power brings additional use. HDTV comes to mind - most computers around right now are simply not able to play them in software
But in most fields nowadays faster computers just bring more convenience to the end users. It would be cool if I could reencode DVDs in 5 minutes to XVID, but it's totally acceptable that it takes about 5 hours on my rather slow system, because I rarely rip movies and the computer can do the task over night. Furthermore most people owning a PC don't do this anyways.
Back in the early 90's I had completely different problems like not having the money for additional 4 MB of RAM, which I really needed in order to run some essential apps on my SX-25 and when Win95 came out I couldn't play mp3s in realtime on the P100, which I just bought to run win95 in the first place (I know that mp3s can be played on much slower machines, but not with win95 and winamp 1.0). Compared to the minor upgrades I had recently just for snappiness, those were major obstacles.
The Euro isn't of much help when the U.S. economy goes down the drain. Afterall Europe is the world largest exporter and a strong Euro is not desirable if you want to trade with foreign countries.
Spend some time trying to look up exact numbers. I guess they are not available to the public, so we can only guess. According to Microsoft you only have to sign up to some programs (costing less than 500$ in total) and you can self evaluate your product with some software they supply. After that you can send the test results to Microsoft and they give you a certificate. However, that's just how I see it after having read their description at microsoft.com. Maybe there is an additional fee for filing in reports after evaluation (very likely), but I simply don't know because I couldn't find information.
If I walk downtown and there is some "message" on a sidewall I don't really have a chance not to waste at least a glance. But if some boring person has a blog online sharing his/her trivialities of live chances are quite low that I will actually end up there. I don't really see the problem here.
On the one hand it takes a lot of effort and expertise to build such systems, on the other hand both can and have to be bought usually, so I definitely see your point.
So you could argue that they could slap each other with their wallets instead of building those supercomputers. But first of all it's quite impressive that some entities are willing to invest so much money into computing power. And afterall they are not doing this because it's some kind of game - they believe that they need the processing power. Furthermore money is the dominating aspect in so many fields nowadays (especially those most people assume to be innovation driven): Cars, airplanes, watches or even sports. Just about anything related to reputation is strictly connected to a factor called money. One might argue that a Veyron is just an ordinary car powered by two upper level engines combined to a beast plus some added technology being in use since decades in other fields. What factor makes it possible to assemble such a car? Money! But still many people (even though most of them could never afford it) are fascinated by the concept. Apart from that (right here I'm not comparing cars to supercomputers anymore) they don't even question the idea of haveing a car being able to drive multiple times as fast as your average highway speed limit. They don't even care that they would run out of fuel in minutes at maximum speed. I guess that's just human nature...
Hey, even if no one reads it it's a good mental exercise to write about yourself. You might argue however, that in some cases it's better not to publish it, but that's a different story...
Well if I would "deal with desease for a living" I'd be serious about bird flu as hell, especially since Bush anounced his new program pumping billions into research and prevention. Afterall it's hard to tell in such cases if there's a valid reason to be worried, because the topic contains a scientific and a media-related component and the scientists are not neutral at all, because they've got financial interest and it's also about reputation.
There are many valid reasons to be worried about H5N1, but at least here in Europe some people get quite hysteric about it (heard of people calling the cops because they found a dead bird in their garden). In the US it might be a different story, especially since the "threat" isn't as direct...
We might face a pandemic, but it could also be another topic like anthrax - something we smile about afterwards. Who knows.
ok, might be a hurdle. But it happens quite often, that a certified driver is offered from a vendor along with uncertified ones. Hauppauge, Creative and Nvidia come to mind. Because the certification process doesn't work in realtime, some of them will be qualified later. Others won't. In general I just trust vendors more if they took some measures to get qualified, but I must admit that I haven't used Windows personally for quite some time, so it might be a different story nowadays. Like I said, it's just an indication, but in my opinion it's a good step in the right direction. "Bad" drivers are the stability concern #1 when it comes to XP and 2000, because those are quite stable in every other regard.
But all joking aside there's a problem affecting every security measure Microsoft has established: If there is any hole in this system (by definition there are at least several) it will likely be exploited and since the vast majority of Vista users will rely on this software we'll end up with another massive breakdown. That's just what happens if everyone relies on the same software vendor for the OS, browser, mail-client, anti-spyware...
It doesn't mean much formally, but if a vendor doesn't bother to certify the driver (it's not that expensive after all) it's a good indication that they might not care about driver improvement as well. Or to put it in different words: Would you believe that a company which can't afford certification would invest more than necessary into driver development? I know that this doesn't apply in many cases, but it's a good rule of thumb.
I never had significant problems with certified drivers, but I guess that some of you know good examples.