Eh? You must be joking. Installing from the CD is the least of your problems (although even that can be a pain on some SATA machines).
Assuming you've installed a retail XP with SP2 you now need to do about 60-70 updates or install SP3.
(Not to mention finding the correct drivers for the installed hardware unless like me you are using an ancient Toshiba notebook. Even then, the Microsoft display drivers (notably for S3 in general and some NVidia) are such a POS that you need to find better ones if you want games to work).
Then it gets to be more fun - PDF reader, browser, anti-virus , codecs, real alternative, qtlite etc. etc.
You're lucky if you get change from 4-5 hours installing even on a fast machine.
It gets even more interesting upgrading from Vista especially for Acer, HP, Sony notebooks.
I see a lot of new notebook machines with Vista (and the usual crapware bundle - no names mentioned but you can guess). Often, with Greek
Vista. Quite a few requests to ahem upgrade to English XP - and not just because it's English. You see many first time users were already using
XP in an internet cafe environment - and also want Yahoo Messenger, Skype etc. installed.
I've yet to see *any* internet cafe running Vista. The difference might be trivial to most slashdotters but Joe Public finds *any* change difficult.
OK, if you saw the following I may have an answer for you. If you installed FF3 and around a day or two later mysteriously it seemed to put up the
hourglass cursor with the disk thrashing a lot, then you got bitten by the urlclassifier db (anti-phishing sqlite database) being downloaded. After
a day or so things go back to normal. (It would look more like a temporary freeze of the program
rather than a crash to the desktop).
For anyone on a slow connection or with an old machine (like me) that was almost a showstopper. Thankfully, *seems* to be fixed now.Haven't seen
any real crashes to the desktop even with the betas...
A workaround is to go Tools->Options-> Security and turn off the attack site and forgery options.
I have a gmail account which I don't use (at all) yet. Really puzzled me when some spam landed in it
since I haven't quoted that address *anywhere*.
This happened a couple of weeks ago. The *only*
way spammers could get the address is if it leaked directly from Google. So what other stuff
is being leaked buggily or sold on the side by maverick employees of Google eh?
I'm a great admirer of Blizzard for producing some great games, but seriously on this one I think they have their corporate heads stuffed up their emergency exits.
There wouldn't be any Unreal Tournament if it hadn't been for the Reaper Bot. Surely it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have bots in WoW , but allocate "bot only" servers.
It works with Chess, so why not with MMORPGS? Hold competitions, hire the best bot developers.
Geez. Get a grip on the future Blizzard! (before someone else does).
For XP/Office/Vista, you owe it to yourself to use the Heise offline updates.
Back in '04 the time to live was (claimed to be) around 20 minutes. I wonder what the time is for
an unpatched Vista (the figures in the article are for XP). Heh - I bet '98SE survives forever (nobody would want to exploit that).
Andy
Re:Kernel debugger considered harmful by Linus
on
Linux 2.6.26 Out
·
· Score: 5, Informative
These days I'm too lazy to bang around fiddling with OS's, but back in the early 80's when I
ported the UCSD p-system to many machines, we
didn't usually have *any* kind of debugger except
our own log statements.
So, one day I got given an Orion Instruments logic analyser (which could do hardware debugging
for MC68000). Beautiful. Best productivity
disabler I've ever seen. On the other hand, because of a really bad experience on my first
p-system port, my own diagnostic code for a later
port made me screw up my deadlines badly.
With high level code, a decent debugger is really really useful. With low level code, not so much.
(It's amazing though how many high level programmers don't understand the way debugging
changes program behaviour (variable initialization etc - don't even mention
heisenbugs)).
The best ever debugger is the "cardboard man". If you really get stuck you explain the code to
anyone (including the cleaner). That way, (even though the cleaner doesn't understand anything) you exercise another part of your mind and *see*
the problem (... well here we shift left (wtf? right?) oops).
What you need is a reference (clean room) implementation which implements all the defined behaviour of the standard. This becomes the
"gold" standard to test real world implementations. (Also it serves as a testbed to refine the standard and get the warts out).
In practice though, it's really hard to do this - I used to know someone who spent a long time doing a real ISO reference C compiler. (Standards
are mind numbing stuff - particularly the corner cases).
If the company is big enough, and the number of projects, egos, groups enough, then your biggest problem is the "philosophy of the group", not the
tools. Not to mention all the little in-house
(group) folklore that works its way into project XYZZY over any stretch of time. Documentation - Hah! (always a lie).
You might understand e.g. the GNU tool chain backwards, sideways and upside down but still be totally at a loss moving from a nice clean
project to a cookie cutter one. (closes eyes and
thinks of all those one line shell scripts on a project I picked up ages ago).
In any case, expecting to hot desk developers from Project A to B with instant results is totally totally insane. Go make your managers or
PHB read Brooke's (still relevant even today).
Programmers (even the code slaves) are not cattle.
Unless the projects are very closely related in philosophy, style and substance expect anyone moved to be unproductive for at least 2-3 weeks.
It gets worse though. There is a vast army of Sheeple programmers out there who only know one tool chain, won't learn anything else, and
depending on the range of tools you now use you may be faced with the cost of re-training (or major use of throwing axes).
Before virtualization I would have said yes. These days they could easily switch OS even to a BSD variant and *host* the legacy system. It's much
easier for them given that they have the host OS source anyway - c.f. Xen
(They might even host on themselves on a stripped down core Windows server 2008. Given their preocupation with DRM I'm guessing that's their future direction).
It's not only the easy part, in some facilities there are metric shitloads of the stuff. Back in the 80's when I visited Springfields (formerly a
BNFL uranium processing facility) doing some consultancy work for a UK software house I had a really interesting chat with one of the managers
doing CAD/CAM. Apparently, there was trade from (the then) Apartheid South Africa via Springfields to the Russians (then the Soviet
Union). Yep, dirty secrets in the middle of the Cold War.
Couldn't believe that, but 6 months later there was a big expose in "The Observer"...
So aside from the OMG it's nuklear panic most laymen have about this stuff it's no big deal.
One interesting fact though - in facilities like that they have a novel system of alarms. Most of us are familiar with alarms which "go off" when
there's a problem. Not so (at least in this one).
The alarm went "beep bop" all the time. If it
*changed* then you really really had to panic.
(You were supposed to run along the pavement (sidewalk) in the direction of the little green arrows and wait at the green painted area).
Big warning signs "Danger you are now entering a criticality evacuation area" all over the place.
Oh, and nice English "Bobbies" with sub-machineguns and a shoot first , ask later policy.
Yes, but it seems less appropriate for low end machines than the old 7.5 version. In particular, it seems to spike the CPU usage much more.
Had a couple of BSOD's in pci.sys upgrading from 7.5 and removing 8.0 to try some other av products. 1 in a 100 - I had to re-install XP.
Tried out Avira, but the resident is a PIG at around 70MB (and you can't slim it down like
AVG). So right now I'm using Avast (just the std. provider) and RegProt rather than TeaTimer (from
Spybot-SD) to track registry changes.
Don't recommend that for Joe Public - AVG out of the box is probably better for them, but in the last 6-7 years i've only been pwned twice (both
times trivial to even manually cleanup).
For backups, I use ClamWin (portable) and Spybot-SD (both live on a memory stick).
You don't say which country you're in. But most police forces these days should have specialist hitech crime units. For the UK you can get info about these by downloading the document (PDF) on this page. (Worth reading anyway BTW).
But, watch out. Doing investigation yourself may get you into very big trouble if you don't have a P.I. licence in the appropriate jurisdiction. YMMV so check with a lawyer.
Long ago, SciAm had an article about that. About all I can remember is that his young friend Leo Szilard was about to become a professor. The problem was that in German Universities, teaching assistants were paid by the university, but professors were paid by the students who attended their course. Here's the bad news - Leo was teaching statistical thermodynamics which as anyone who has ever suffered it will tell you has all the magnetic attraction of a lead balloon.
So Leo would have starved to death, which ticked off Einstein. People croaking because of ammonia leaking fridges ticked him off as well, so he decided to play with the idea of making a better fridge.
... density of galaxies at a given red shift? You see the repulsive effect by what it does to the galaxy distribution looking back in time (and out
in space). So really this is yet another galaxy survey, just more comprehensive. With bells on it if the stub article in wikipedia is to be
believed. (Your mileage may vary).
Dark matter = crap needed by the auditors to explain galaxy rotation etc. (Bookkeeping in other words).
Dark energy = Einstein's big mistake aka the cosmological constant. The big problem is that
it's too darned small. Should be at least 80
orders of magnitude bigger (if you believe the
'shroom eating quantum folks).
Not an astronomer and deeply unhappy with this stuff which strikes this ex chemist as being very
phlogiston or caloric or aether. Still at least
it isn't Great A'Tuin...
(sorry re-reading some Terry Pratchett right now).
... which I understand was "bought in" technology. The only reason I've switched (for a while back to Avira (old name Antivir-PE) and now
to a lean and mean Avast setup is my ancient
Toshiba (192MB mem, celeron 500).
Minimal AVG setup with just the resident protection (but no tray icon) is roughly the same footprint as Avast with just the standard
provider. Avira, sadly uses about 50MB more and
can't be slimmed down - which is a killer for my
old machine.
Seriously, someone should clunk the marketing people at Grisoft over the head with a large wrench. The adverse publicity (here and over at
vulture central (note the date) will cause
them big problems). At the very least they need
to set the defaults so that safesearch is *turned
off* (and send this as part of their automatic
updates so the problem doesn't simply keep on
growing).
a). A Reference implementation conforming 100% to ODF 1.1 . Open source, freely reusable.
b). Requirement for any conforming implementation which wishes to be known as ISO ODF to be certified to pass a standard test suite.
c). Any "extensions" introduced after MS does the "embrace" to be by some standard mechanism which enables other implementations to quickly adapt to
it.
Since (c) is practically a given where MS is concerned I'm most worried about that one.
Over at netcraft.com, they have a little information about what is happening with the record attempt. Guinness are counting all downloads up until 18:16 UTC 18th June.
Spreadfirefox still seems to be down, although I saw it (and the world map) about an hour ago. Sadly, the "download firefox 3" button pointed to the 2.0.0.14 download!
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you've installed a retail XP with SP2 you now need to do about 60-70 updates or install SP3.
(Not to mention finding the correct drivers for the installed hardware unless like me you are using an ancient Toshiba notebook. Even then, the Microsoft display drivers (notably for S3 in general and some NVidia) are such a POS that you need to find better ones if you want games to work). Then it gets to be more fun - PDF reader, browser, anti-virus , codecs, real alternative, qtlite etc. etc.
You're lucky if you get change from 4-5 hours installing even on a fast machine.
It gets even more interesting upgrading from Vista especially for Acer, HP, Sony notebooks.
Andy
I've yet to see *any* internet cafe running Vista. The difference might be trivial to most slashdotters but Joe Public finds *any* change difficult.
(I'm in Athens, Greece).
Andy
For anyone on a slow connection or with an old machine (like me) that was almost a showstopper. Thankfully, *seems* to be fixed now.Haven't seen any real crashes to the desktop even with the betas...
A workaround is to go Tools->Options-> Security and turn off the attack site and forgery options.
Andy
Andy
When I add a 512MB Kingston mem stick, I can copy from the big HD fine.
When I put my newer 1GB MiniTraveller (Kingston) and try to write the HD goes offline - too much power draw from the Hub.
Had the same problem with an Exigo 4GB.
Also have a 6GB WD Pocketdrive (real hard disk, tiny). Never have any problem doing copies from the big disk to that.
So, my guess is that SSD's are fine, but may pull more juice for write ops.
Andy
Andy
There wouldn't be any Unreal Tournament if it hadn't been for the Reaper Bot. Surely it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have bots in WoW , but allocate "bot only" servers.
It works with Chess, so why not with MMORPGS? Hold competitions, hire the best bot developers. Geez. Get a grip on the future Blizzard! (before someone else does).
Andy
Back in '04 the time to live was (claimed to be) around 20 minutes. I wonder what the time is for an unpatched Vista (the figures in the article are for XP). Heh - I bet '98SE survives forever (nobody would want to exploit that).
Andy
With high level code, a decent debugger is really really useful. With low level code, not so much.
(It's amazing though how many high level programmers don't understand the way debugging changes program behaviour (variable initialization etc - don't even mention heisenbugs)).
The best ever debugger is the "cardboard man". If you really get stuck you explain the code to anyone (including the cleaner). That way, (even though the cleaner doesn't understand anything) you exercise another part of your mind and *see* the problem (... well here we shift left (wtf? right?) oops).
Andy
In practice though, it's really hard to do this - I used to know someone who spent a long time doing a real ISO reference C compiler. (Standards are mind numbing stuff - particularly the corner cases).
Andy
You might understand e.g. the GNU tool chain backwards, sideways and upside down but still be totally at a loss moving from a nice clean project to a cookie cutter one. (closes eyes and thinks of all those one line shell scripts on a project I picked up ages ago).
In any case, expecting to hot desk developers from Project A to B with instant results is totally totally insane. Go make your managers or PHB read Brooke's (still relevant even today). Programmers (even the code slaves) are not cattle.
Unless the projects are very closely related in philosophy, style and substance expect anyone moved to be unproductive for at least 2-3 weeks.
It gets worse though. There is a vast army of Sheeple programmers out there who only know one tool chain, won't learn anything else, and depending on the range of tools you now use you may be faced with the cost of re-training (or major use of throwing axes).
Andy
(They might even host on themselves on a stripped down core Windows server 2008. Given their preocupation with DRM I'm guessing that's their future direction).
Andy
Couldn't believe that, but 6 months later there was a big expose in "The Observer"...
So aside from the OMG it's nuklear panic most laymen have about this stuff it's no big deal.
One interesting fact though - in facilities like that they have a novel system of alarms. Most of us are familiar with alarms which "go off" when there's a problem. Not so (at least in this one). The alarm went "beep bop" all the time. If it *changed* then you really really had to panic.
(You were supposed to run along the pavement (sidewalk) in the direction of the little green arrows and wait at the green painted area).
Big warning signs "Danger you are now entering a criticality evacuation area" all over the place.
Oh, and nice English "Bobbies" with sub-machineguns and a shoot first , ask later policy.
One of my more fun assignments :-)
Andy
Andy
Had a couple of BSOD's in pci.sys upgrading from 7.5 and removing 8.0 to try some other av products. 1 in a 100 - I had to re-install XP.
Tried out Avira, but the resident is a PIG at around 70MB (and you can't slim it down like AVG). So right now I'm using Avast (just the std. provider) and RegProt rather than TeaTimer (from Spybot-SD) to track registry changes. Don't recommend that for Joe Public - AVG out of the box is probably better for them, but in the last 6-7 years i've only been pwned twice (both times trivial to even manually cleanup). For backups, I use ClamWin (portable) and Spybot-SD (both live on a memory stick).
Andy
But, watch out. Doing investigation yourself may get you into very big trouble if you don't have a P.I. licence in the appropriate jurisdiction. YMMV so check with a lawyer.
Andy
So Leo would have starved to death, which ticked off Einstein. People croaking because of ammonia leaking fridges ticked him off as well, so he decided to play with the idea of making a better fridge.
Andy
Dark matter = crap needed by the auditors to explain galaxy rotation etc. (Bookkeeping in other words).
Dark energy = Einstein's big mistake aka the cosmological constant. The big problem is that it's too darned small. Should be at least 80 orders of magnitude bigger (if you believe the 'shroom eating quantum folks). Not an astronomer and deeply unhappy with this stuff which strikes this ex chemist as being very phlogiston or caloric or aether. Still at least it isn't Great A'Tuin... (sorry re-reading some Terry Pratchett right now).
Andy
Andy
Seriously, someone should clunk the marketing people at Grisoft over the head with a large wrench. The adverse publicity (here and over at vulture central (note the date) will cause them big problems). At the very least they need to set the defaults so that safesearch is *turned off* (and send this as part of their automatic updates so the problem doesn't simply keep on growing).
Andy
You could try uploading the version you have to virustotal.
Andy
Andy
a). A Reference implementation conforming 100% to ODF 1.1 . Open source, freely reusable.
b). Requirement for any conforming implementation which wishes to be known as ISO ODF to be certified to pass a standard test suite.
c). Any "extensions" introduced after MS does the "embrace" to be by some standard mechanism which enables other implementations to quickly adapt to it.
Since (c) is practically a given where MS is concerned I'm most worried about that one.
Andy
Better still, tie it in to the mechanism used in the current rounds of SQL injection attacks.
Idiots. All they'll end up with is a DDOS attack on their legal system...
Andy
Spreadfirefox still seems to be down, although I saw it (and the world map) about an hour ago. Sadly, the "download firefox 3" button pointed to the 2.0.0.14 download!
(19:50 UTC - mozilla.com is up and live).
Andy