I've been looking at various BIOS things lately, from the "why can't I boot from USB disk" questions, to the Mepis bootloader not working on my BIOS, to the new motherboards in the shop and wondering how far they've gone to support WindowsXP DRM.
As much as I'd distrust flashing some BIOS I downloaded from "Random Chinese company 483" who make my motherboard, it would be really nice to see a Free-Software level of hardware support available as a BIOS.
I'm sure everyone knows the neat tricks that seem to happen mostly when Free Software people are playing - all the cool ideas you never thought possible, and support for all the hardware that proprietary vendors have long since given-up on. In the BIOS world, that sort of attitude would probably get quite useful quite quickly.
"Yes, I agree. Bill Gates definitely deserves an award, too!:)"
Microsoft won the "Best Linux advocacy" award (Linux Format, May 2003) for their "Licensing 6.0" scheme and the number of business customers it alienated
From the article, it sounds like AMD stand to gain a lot from Microsoft allowing their dual-core chips to run using a "single-processor" Windows license, reducing the apparent software cost for AMD users.
Dell of course, are famous for selling lots of copies of Windows, even to the extent that it costs more to buy linux from them than it does Windows (if you can even find a computer they'll supply it with)
So Microsoft can effectively control the apparent price of AMD machines, just like they prevented people from buying 64-bit AMD CPUs by delaying a version of Windows which supported it, even as people were waiting to buy the 64-way CPUs for use with non-Windows systems. So does AMD not argue with Dell for fear of annoying Microsoft?
"I liked the way how he subtly hinted at the folly of using identifiers as passwords."
Have you seen "Chip and PIN"? The PIN which is used with a credit or debit card to gain complete access to your bank account, you now have to type in, in plain view, in front of a queue of customers, every time you want to use that card to pay for groceries.
Secure? Betcha.
And now of course, there are no signatures. So when authentication fails, the bank doesn't have to prove that the transaction is valid (because "you" typed your "secret" PIN, rather than signing a slip of paper)
"This is just another example of how the DRM mind set values profit over innovation. Expect to see more of this type of thing as the DRM philosophy permeates society and business culture."
The good thing about that (well, not from the company's point of view) is that DRM-style add-ons can be extremely intensive in terms of programmer time, fault tolerances, testing, and management. A lot more time-consuming than adding features or removing normal bugs. So any company with a Free Software product can spend proportionally a lot more of their time implementing stuff that benefits the customer, as they literally don't need to care at all about policing the customers.
Taken to the extreme (because we have a convenient example), you end up with the current "shareware"/crippleware situation, where authors are so absolutely paranoid about people using the program without paying them that they spend almost all their time devising ways to "get back at" the people who use their program. Equivalent free software is doing stuff to improve the product, while shareware authors are adding another license manager, registry key, NTP date check, online activation, spyware code, or other stuff which actually makes their product less likely to sell.
Microsoft looks to be pretty much the same. Compare the last few versions of MS products, and it looks like 10%+ of the effort has gone into licenses, product activation, license-checking on updates, ways to stop the computer being used if you don't click an EULA, etc. etc. Even Word documents have got your license information in them now, and goodness knows how long they spent converting their "CD ripper" to "CD ripper which creates a license file and authorises it on the net and locks the audio file to your PC and counts the number of people who've accessed it".
When they're fixing bugs on that monstrosity, I have to say I'd rather be editing CDEX code than WMP code anyday...
"actually, how how, do they make money by giving their product away for free?"
They sell their product. For between $30 and $150 per box. And people like me buy it, so they make money.
It might sound odd to buy something that you can download without charge (or buy CDs for $6), but really that's just a convenient aspect of the distribution mechanism. If I lose my boxed copy of Mandrake, I can make a copy, download, or buy a cheap copy. (Compare that to other operating-systems, where if you so much as change a hard-drive, you have to beg for permission to continue using the OS)
It might still seem odd to pay when you can freeload, but my opinion of that is that I'm paying for the future availability of Mandrake. (just like I pay for wikipedia even though it's free) -- we're buying the ability for anyone in the world to use the best OS without charge. And that's quite different to paying for just a license.
"Can someone please explain to me something? I'm not trying to be a troll, but why is overwriting my documents/home/user directory seen as something minor?"
Because it allows people on here to say that OSen with usernames (i.e. theirs) are inherantly more secure than OSen without usernames (i.e. Microsoft, ignoring obvious factual errors in that comparaison)
It's a nice simplification. Linux good, Windows bad. Conveniently Apple has usernames too now, which means we get support from the latte-sipping black-cloaked artists and webdesigners (very fashionable, you see) by including them in the list of "secure" operating systems. It's based on BSD, which has never had a remote bug in its 38 years of existance.
It also means that if anything bad happens to your files, people can chastise you about your lack of an hourly-backup, and spend the rest of the comment lecturing you on their own intricate backup scheme, firewall policy, or whatever.
You're such a lamer you see, storing files on your computer when you could SSH into a networked BSD box at home and store them on a battery-backed journaling deniable steganographic filesystem with a 48-character password and IDS. Of course, the person who told you that is a complete idiot who has never been in the corporate world of enterprise-class Business applications where my IIS server has to be running 24/7 and I always know there's a support telephone number and someone to sue if it goes wrong...
Were you expecting something different? Like people who start with facts and proceed logically to a conclusion?
"Just a simple bit of advice, but have a close look at the company's portfolio."
Unfortunately, that tells you more about their clients' [lack of] taste than about the designer himself. It's one of the reasons I'm not doing webdesign for my company ("it must use flash, and it must be 500px wide, and images must be unreadably small, and we can't put any useful information on it, and we have to show how innovative we are with unique "features" and navigation systems and non-underlined links, and borderless linked images, and fixed 8-point text, and text-in-graphics...)
It might be better to look at the designer's personal site, although webdesign companies don't seem to spend much/any time updating those.
Seriously, the only way these companies are not going to lose a boatload of R&D money from HDTV is if we all forget the restrictions, forget who we're dealing with, and buy new TVs.
In my case at least, it's not going to happen. I'll skip this round of the upgrade cycle, just like with DVDs. The old stuff is still around, and newer, more open stuff will replace it before it becomes inconvenient.
If passive entertainment means eroding of the right to copy, then it's not worth it.
"you got one shitty setup for zalman to sound like a hoovering machine."
The Zalman makes (as expected) zero difference to a case containing a graphics card and two hard drives
- Graphics cards are either noisy because they contain a cheap 40mm fan, or noisy because they contain a super-expensive high-performance fan.
- You (I) could get a passively-cooled graphics card, but that means spending enough money to get a good graphics card, and receiving a crappy graphics card with an expensive block of aluminum bolted to it.
- Hard drives are noisy, well I couldn't say why. But it doesn't seem to vary when you compare new drives, old drives, cheap drives, expensive drives. I don't want to spend twice the normal price on a "silent" hard drive because I know manufacturers blatantly lie about such things.
- ok, I could read all the reviews at some intolerable one-page-per-paragraph 160-pixel-wide "hardware review site" with flash animations both sides and an utter disinterest in what doesn't work with Linux. But again, they just publish the manufacturer's specifications because (a) they're lazy, or (b) they want more free samples, or (c) they want advertising.
- DansData seems more likely. But the chances of him reviewing the same item I'm trying to buy are negligble enough that it's only happened once so far. Everyone here who works at a hardware company, tell your PR department to send review kit to Dan!
- PSUs again, seem to be just as noisy whether they're old, new, cheap, expensive... ok so I can take it apart and put an even quieter fan in, but mixing my soldering in a difficult-to-reach location with high-frequency high-voltage switchgear doesn't sound ideal in an area which would be expensive to set fire to...
Goodness knows what else in there is making the noise - you can't really isolate things to test when so much stuff threatens to overheat at the first fan-stoppage, and you need at least the PSU fan and hard-disk powered to even boot the thing.
"My Dell 400SC has a single 120mm fan in the back. Most of the time, I can't even tell the machine is powered on. It get a little louder when it's doing something CPU intensive. It's the quietest PC I've ever owned."
We have various racks of Dell desktop machines at work. When you turn the whole lot on at the power supply, it creates a gale that blows papers in adjacent rooms, as all 16 computers startup with their fans set to maximum.
At another building, we have 16 server-style (big, lockable, etc.) dell machines. It's only marginally below the legal limits for noise that people are allowed to work in.
Another similar installation (PCs, not Dells) was found to be "okay if you stood at least 4 meters away" in terms of harmful volume of noise.
My home PC (zalman flower-CPU, new PSU, etc.) ranges from "annoying" (most of the time) to "people think you've left the hoover on" when it detects that it's too hot.
So yeah, if Macs are better than that, I might get one. Dell sure as hell isn't the answer.
Why do you say "Macs are expensive" when they supply not only the cheapest decent computer around, but the iMac which (after all the initial PC puffery) was found to be cheaper than building a similarly-specc'd PC, and the G4 which is so much cheaper than equivalent PCs that they built a cluster supercomputer out of them. And this is comparing them to the price of Dells, of all computers?!?
"To see this, get two friends to help test this sense. You will sit in the middle of the room, blindfolded and wearing ear plugs... then retest while wearing a coat with a hood, or something else to completely cover your arms, back, and neck"
"Because most people use Windows as a "root" user and most would not run Linux as a root user (Lindows being the exception) there are very big differences in the possible effects."
A linux virus running as a user could store data, open network connections, run portscans, read email, email passwords, IM logs and SSH keys, read and modify personal documents -- what more does it need to do?
It can also try one of the many local-root vulnerabilities. And I'm guessing (from the fact that MandrakeUpdate had hundreds of megabytes to download, and I have dial-up) that most systems will be even less patched than Windows.
"Remember too, they are talking desktops, not servers."
They're also talking engineers' desktops at an embedded-hardware company, so most of the usual stories about "we'll give everyone a word processor and a web browser and that will be that" probably change a lot.
Our company is completely different to that of course. Every software engineer maintains their own machine. The amount of time we spend on application or OS problems easily exceeds 1/200 of working hours.
Because the cracker is going through the courts, while the company which allowed other peoples' information to be released, and did nothing about it when they were found out isn't...?
"I have an older PIII 700, 256MB ram.. Running BSD + kde 3.3, Works fine.. XP would be dismal on the same hardware."
My machine is almost identical but with 124MB RAM (wouldn't call it "old"), and KDE is so much slower that I ended up using WindowMaker exclusively. Window98 also runs fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking at various BIOS things lately, from the "why can't I boot from USB disk" questions, to the Mepis bootloader not working on my BIOS, to the new motherboards in the shop and wondering how far they've gone to support WindowsXP DRM.
As much as I'd distrust flashing some BIOS I downloaded from "Random Chinese company 483" who make my motherboard, it would be really nice to see a Free-Software level of hardware support available as a BIOS.
I'm sure everyone knows the neat tricks that seem to happen mostly when Free Software people are playing - all the cool ideas you never thought possible, and support for all the hardware that proprietary vendors have long since given-up on. In the BIOS world, that sort of attitude would probably get quite useful quite quickly.
"Attorneys can only sue you if you've broken a law."
If that were true, then no court case would ever be lost by the person bringing it
285 mph - does that sound like an 87-hour trip when you do the calculations?
"if you post to a thread, your moderation is undone."
If you have only one account.
"Yes, I agree. Bill Gates definitely deserves an award, too! :)"
Microsoft won the "Best Linux advocacy" award (Linux Format, May 2003) for their "Licensing 6.0" scheme and the number of business customers it alienated
From the article, it sounds like AMD stand to gain a lot from Microsoft allowing their dual-core chips to run using a "single-processor" Windows license, reducing the apparent software cost for AMD users.
Dell of course, are famous for selling lots of copies of Windows, even to the extent that it costs more to buy linux from them than it does Windows (if you can even find a computer they'll supply it with)
So Microsoft can effectively control the apparent price of AMD machines, just like they prevented people from buying 64-bit AMD CPUs by delaying a version of Windows which supported it, even as people were waiting to buy the 64-way CPUs for use with non-Windows systems. So does AMD not argue with Dell for fear of annoying Microsoft?
Remember, Richard isn't unsung...
"Even as such, they're a waste - there are far more impressive things upon which a group of talented young engineers could focus their efforts."
Like researching autonomous vehicles for the military...
"Chairman Powell was nominated by President William J. Clinton to a Republican seat on the Commission"
Slashdot rule #13: if the government does anything bad, make it degenerate into a republican/democrat mudslinging match.
It the same government folks, no matter which figurehead is trying to run it this year.
"How about making Management accountable."
Indeed.
"High risk change. Requested at 6.30pm one day, needs to be available by the following morning."
Hmmm, wonder why there's no high-quality code on that project...?
"How long until a major government database gets hacked?"
When?
When they get hacked?
How about "when they get hacked so frequently that a court of law forces them to close their website to stop the deluge of leaked information"?
3 times.
"I liked the way how he subtly hinted at the folly of using identifiers as passwords."
Have you seen "Chip and PIN"? The PIN which is used with a credit or debit card to gain complete access to your bank account, you now have to type in, in plain view, in front of a queue of customers, every time you want to use that card to pay for groceries.
Secure? Betcha.
And now of course, there are no signatures. So when authentication fails, the bank doesn't have to prove that the transaction is valid (because "you" typed your "secret" PIN, rather than signing a slip of paper)
Time to revert to cash, I think...
"This is just another example of how the DRM mind set values profit over innovation. Expect to see more of this type of thing as the DRM philosophy permeates society and business culture."
The good thing about that (well, not from the company's point of view) is that DRM-style add-ons can be extremely intensive in terms of programmer time, fault tolerances, testing, and management. A lot more time-consuming than adding features or removing normal bugs. So any company with a Free Software product can spend proportionally a lot more of their time implementing stuff that benefits the customer, as they literally don't need to care at all about policing the customers.
Taken to the extreme (because we have a convenient example), you end up with the current "shareware"/crippleware situation, where authors are so absolutely paranoid about people using the program without paying them that they spend almost all their time devising ways to "get back at" the people who use their program. Equivalent free software is doing stuff to improve the product, while shareware authors are adding another license manager, registry key, NTP date check, online activation, spyware code, or other stuff which actually makes their product less likely to sell.
Microsoft looks to be pretty much the same. Compare the last few versions of MS products, and it looks like 10%+ of the effort has gone into licenses, product activation, license-checking on updates, ways to stop the computer being used if you don't click an EULA, etc. etc. Even Word documents have got your license information in them now, and goodness knows how long they spent converting their "CD ripper" to "CD ripper which creates a license file and authorises it on the net and locks the audio file to your PC and counts the number of people who've accessed it".
When they're fixing bugs on that monstrosity, I have to say I'd rather be editing CDEX code than WMP code anyday...
"actually, how how, do they make money by giving their product away for free?"
They sell their product. For between $30 and $150 per box. And people like me buy it, so they make money.
It might sound odd to buy something that you can download without charge (or buy CDs for $6), but really that's just a convenient aspect of the distribution mechanism. If I lose my boxed copy of Mandrake, I can make a copy, download, or buy a cheap copy. (Compare that to other operating-systems, where if you so much as change a hard-drive, you have to beg for permission to continue using the OS)
It might still seem odd to pay when you can freeload, but my opinion of that is that I'm paying for the future availability of Mandrake. (just like I pay for wikipedia even though it's free) -- we're buying the ability for anyone in the world to use the best OS without charge. And that's quite different to paying for just a license.
"Can someone please explain to me something? I'm not trying to be a troll, but why is overwriting my documents/home/user directory seen as something minor?"
Because it allows people on here to say that OSen with usernames (i.e. theirs) are inherantly more secure than OSen without usernames (i.e. Microsoft, ignoring obvious factual errors in that comparaison)
It's a nice simplification. Linux good, Windows bad. Conveniently Apple has usernames too now, which means we get support from the latte-sipping black-cloaked artists and webdesigners (very fashionable, you see) by including them in the list of "secure" operating systems. It's based on BSD, which has never had a remote bug in its 38 years of existance.
It also means that if anything bad happens to your files, people can chastise you about your lack of an hourly-backup, and spend the rest of the comment lecturing you on their own intricate backup scheme, firewall policy, or whatever.
You're such a lamer you see, storing files on your computer when you could SSH into a networked BSD box at home and store them on a battery-backed journaling deniable steganographic filesystem with a 48-character password and IDS. Of course, the person who told you that is a complete idiot who has never been in the corporate world of enterprise-class Business applications where my IIS server has to be running 24/7 and I always know there's a support telephone number and someone to sue if it goes wrong...
Were you expecting something different? Like people who start with facts and proceed logically to a conclusion?
"Just a simple bit of advice, but have a close look at the company's portfolio."
Unfortunately, that tells you more about their clients' [lack of] taste than about the designer himself. It's one of the reasons I'm not doing webdesign for my company ("it must use flash, and it must be 500px wide, and images must be unreadably small, and we can't put any useful information on it, and we have to show how innovative we are with unique "features" and navigation systems and non-underlined links, and borderless linked images, and fixed 8-point text, and text-in-graphics...)
It might be better to look at the designer's personal site, although webdesign companies don't seem to spend much/any time updating those.
Don't buy HDTV?
Seriously, the only way these companies are not going to lose a boatload of R&D money from HDTV is if we all forget the restrictions, forget who we're dealing with, and buy new TVs.
In my case at least, it's not going to happen. I'll skip this round of the upgrade cycle, just like with DVDs. The old stuff is still around, and newer, more open stuff will replace it before it becomes inconvenient.
If passive entertainment means eroding of the right to copy, then it's not worth it.
"Same League as Windows 2000"
I think you misspelled "produced with as much paperwork as Windows 2000"
"you got one shitty setup for zalman to sound like a hoovering machine."
The Zalman makes (as expected) zero difference to a case containing a graphics card and two hard drives
- Graphics cards are either noisy because they contain a cheap 40mm fan, or noisy because they contain a super-expensive high-performance fan.
- You (I) could get a passively-cooled graphics card, but that means spending enough money to get a good graphics card, and receiving a crappy graphics card with an expensive block of aluminum bolted to it.
- Hard drives are noisy, well I couldn't say why. But it doesn't seem to vary when you compare new drives, old drives, cheap drives, expensive drives. I don't want to spend twice the normal price on a "silent" hard drive because I know manufacturers blatantly lie about such things.
- ok, I could read all the reviews at some intolerable one-page-per-paragraph 160-pixel-wide "hardware review site" with flash animations both sides and an utter disinterest in what doesn't work with Linux. But again, they just publish the manufacturer's specifications because (a) they're lazy, or (b) they want more free samples, or (c) they want advertising.
- DansData seems more likely. But the chances of him reviewing the same item I'm trying to buy are negligble enough that it's only happened once so far. Everyone here who works at a hardware company, tell your PR department to send review kit to Dan!
- PSUs again, seem to be just as noisy whether they're old, new, cheap, expensive... ok so I can take it apart and put an even quieter fan in, but mixing my soldering in a difficult-to-reach location with high-frequency high-voltage switchgear doesn't sound ideal in an area which would be expensive to set fire to...
Goodness knows what else in there is making the noise - you can't really isolate things to test when so much stuff threatens to overheat at the first fan-stoppage, and you need at least the PSU fan and hard-disk powered to even boot the thing.
"My Dell 400SC has a single 120mm fan in the back. Most of the time, I can't even tell the machine is powered on. It get a little louder when it's doing something CPU intensive. It's the quietest PC I've ever owned."
We have various racks of Dell desktop machines at work. When you turn the whole lot on at the power supply, it creates a gale that blows papers in adjacent rooms, as all 16 computers startup with their fans set to maximum.
At another building, we have 16 server-style (big, lockable, etc.) dell machines. It's only marginally below the legal limits for noise that people are allowed to work in.
Another similar installation (PCs, not Dells) was found to be "okay if you stood at least 4 meters away" in terms of harmful volume of noise.
My home PC (zalman flower-CPU, new PSU, etc.) ranges from "annoying" (most of the time) to "people think you've left the hoover on" when it detects that it's too hot.
So yeah, if Macs are better than that, I might get one. Dell sure as hell isn't the answer.
Why do you say "Macs are expensive" when they supply not only the cheapest decent computer around, but the iMac which (after all the initial PC puffery) was found to be cheaper than building a similarly-specc'd PC, and the G4 which is so much cheaper than equivalent PCs that they built a cluster supercomputer out of them. And this is comparing them to the price of Dells, of all computers?!?
"To see this, get two friends to help test this sense. You will sit in the middle of the room, blindfolded and wearing ear plugs... then retest while wearing a coat with a hood, or something else to completely cover your arms, back, and neck"
You don't work for the US Navy do you?
"Because most people use Windows as a "root" user and most would not run Linux as a root user (Lindows being the exception) there are very big differences in the possible effects."
A linux virus running as a user could store data, open network connections, run portscans, read email, email passwords, IM logs and SSH keys, read and modify personal documents -- what more does it need to do?
It can also try one of the many local-root vulnerabilities. And I'm guessing (from the fact that MandrakeUpdate had hundreds of megabytes to download, and I have dial-up) that most systems will be even less patched than Windows.
"Remember too, they are talking desktops, not servers."
They're also talking engineers' desktops at an embedded-hardware company, so most of the usual stories about "we'll give everyone a word processor and a web browser and that will be that" probably change a lot.
Our company is completely different to that of course. Every software engineer maintains their own machine. The amount of time we spend on application or OS problems easily exceeds 1/200 of working hours.
"Can someone explain why this is a big deal?"
Because the cracker is going through the courts, while the company which allowed other peoples' information to be released, and did nothing about it when they were found out isn't...?
"I have an older PIII 700, 256MB ram.. Running BSD + kde 3.3, Works fine.. XP would be dismal on the same hardware."
My machine is almost identical but with 124MB RAM (wouldn't call it "old"), and KDE is so much slower that I ended up using WindowMaker exclusively. Window98 also runs fine.