Windows XP Media Center Edition is Windows XP Home with:
A single extra app, Media Center, with big widgets suitable for a tv and remote, and an optional exclusive lock so you need a password to alt-tab or close it. It's not very good.
A slightly updated theme
Terminal Services -- this is the reason I spent the extra 10 bucks to get XP MCE instead of XP Home.
MCE will not likely flop, since there's not much to actually flop. It's a way to differentiate product lines is all. They might even just make Media Center a free download (if it isn't already) at which point it'll merely be a minor configuration difference.
> Yeah, stolen right from Homestar runner: "get the frickn' duck away from me," says Strong Bad.
There you go making me feel old again. My brother was making cracks about the adventure dragons looking like ducks some 20 odd years ago. Believe it or not, Homestar Runner's jokes aren't all formed from some Tabula Rasa of comedy.
I second that, world could be so much easier already if we just had wildchard support in PATH and other environment variables.
PATH=$PATH:/opt/*/bin/
for dir in/opt/*/bin; PATH=$PATH:$dir; done
Ah, but I suppose you want it to update automatically when new directories are added to/opt. Heck, I'd like it if Windows had this feature too. Or any interface but the awful GUI one to change it for explorer.exe's environment. Maybe something with WMI... there's of course loads of documentation on that:p
From reading stuff and watching discussions what I got is that the problem with microkernels is that they're hard to properly implement and still have fairly bad performance. In fact, I hit those same problems when trying to code an extremely modular application, that I tried to write as an experiment.
BeOS is a microkernel. OSX is a microkernel... er ok it's performance isn't fabulous. NT is sorta a microkernel (with a lot of rules broken), and its I/O still spanks everyone else (owing to its VMS-inspired design). Plan9 is a microkernel.
Now, of course I'm not a programming genius, perhaps somebody can pull this stuff off with good performance and make it look good, but the point is that I finally realized that I could write a very basic chat with shell script and named pipes, while this thing would need thousands of lines of code before starting to do anything at all. Linus' quote about message passing and masturbation seems to fit here quite well.
Linus, to put it mildly, doesn't know a fucking thing about microkernels, yet feels qualified to spout off on them every chance he gets. Thankfully, most microkernels are written by people who are at least pretty close to being actual programming geniuses, and astonishingly enough aren't a bunch of shell scripts cobbled together with pipes. Go put down the Mach book and try taking a look at L4 sometime.
"If you include the MySQL server with an application that is not licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible license, you need a commercial license for the MySQL server."
It's obnoxious, but they're asserting distribution rights that are indeed their prerogative. Now presumably, said application they're referring to would actually use MySQL, so they're probably not talking about including MySQL on a CD of database software along with, say a trial copy of Oracle (ok, make that a DVD). Probably. They'd have a hard time asserting any kind of rights over the distribution of a compilation, but they could prevail. Copyright is all about controlling the right to copy after all.
"If you develop and distribute a commercial application and as part of utilizing your application, the end-user must download a copy of MySQL; for each derivative work, you (or, in some cases, your end-user) need a commercial license for the MySQL server and/or MySQL client libraries."
Right, or your app is GPL, because the client libs are GPL as well. This is not a variance, it's merely a clarification.
> Well, if someone sends me the source code, it seems like open source to me, even if it isn't officially "Open Source (tm)"
No, it's source. Not Open source, it's just source for which you're part of the closed group. Even Microsoft lets some developers have source (mostly hardware developers).
2. CYGWIN1.DLL is GPL'd. If anything calls for LGPL, this is it, RMS's protestations notwithstanding. The supposed exemptions granted in cygwin's modified GPL aren't very clear either. This shouldn't be taken as typical of GPL'd software, most of which is NOT a library. However, the GPL simply says you have to make the source available to anyone you distribute the app to -- it suggests you bundle it, but doesn't say you have to do so, or even make it publicly available to anyone but your users (of course you can't stop them from distributing it how they like, but that's not your logistical problem). A pointer is actually just fine.
* NOT the filesystem organization. It indeed sucks mightily, but it's all convention that a sufficiently bold distro could change... and become instantly despised and obscure for it, but it's still possible. It's a "softcoded" problem, if you will.
* All IPC except shared memory is mediated through the kernel, requiring several context switches. Signals are especially heinous, but it also made message queues, which would have been the answer to BeOS (before beos came around), practically useless.
* All I/O is synchronous. Combine this with the lack of decent threading. Linux made processes so cheap they could be used instead of threads, but never evolved the process APIs to include process subgroups -- hell, it still has zombies. Now it's given up and just copped the awful pthreads API instead.
* Way too many assumptions about simple numeric values, from errno to file modes, are coded right into the standards. This primitive interface becomes pretty much unextendable.
* No process metadata model. It's still possible to obscure the full command line for instance, even if you wanted to keep it./proc is a disgusting hack to use in anything but scripts.
* Absolutely no dynamic instrumentation model. I guess Solaris went and did their own thing, but I had this gripe for a long time.
They uh also sound a lot more intelligent cuz like they uh edited down the filler kinda stuff that kids like to use yunno. And adults too kinda. I'm sorta like exaggerating for effect and stuff but you get the idea right? Same words and all that but when the editors want to get all concise and shit to save column space, then the stuff they edit out sounds like a lot more intelligent.
Maybe your motherboards are flakey. I run it on my XP machine at work just fine (yes of course it's a Dell), and I rather enjoy that my system remains responsive enough for me to kill off berzerk processes at the cost of a smidge more sluggishness overall (who cares, I only run emacs and outlook all day. My home gaming box is an athlon64).
I also run all kinds of crap on a fairly old linux kernel (redhat 7) on a dual HT Xeon, and aside from the scheduler occasionally being stupid and deciding to put two CPU-bound processes on the same CPU, it runs smooth as butter.
True, this is all just anecdote, but I would claim that there's no fault in XP or Linux concerning HT that I've ever noticed.
If Edison himself had just now invented the light bulb, the only way investors would risk capitalizing it these days it would be if a design engineer had aestetically critiqued the final shape, a safety engineer had figured out a better alternative than those open sockets, and a process engineer had figured out how to make them with the maximum ratio of unskilled to skilled labor.
Pish posh, it just wouldn't be productized. And let's not forget, Edison was a big proponent of direct current (DC), had patents and financial interests in DC power generation and all the expensive hardware that went with it, suppressed findings about the safety problems of DC, and went so far to smear his nemesis Westinghouse by putting on ghastly demonstrations of the dangers of AC using Thomas Edison's Fantabulous Newfangled Invention: the Electric Chair.
Edison still lost. The real irony is that so many states actually liked the electric chair, and bought them.
Lone inventors are all over the place,m but they just work for larger companies, and the invention gets owned by the company, and absolutely nothing happens to it. The inventor gets a check for a few grand if he's lucky.
> One wonders how something like Amazon, CNN, Fox News, or Ebay makes it here.
They're probably common substrings. If I want to search for a Black & Decker hand saw on Amazon, I'll google for "black decker hand saw amazon". I can just type it straight into my address bar, or for many other users, the google toolbar. Sure enough, first link, there it is. Searching amazon itself is an extra step with an annoying interface involving looking around for a search bar, followed by search output with an equally cluttered annoying interface, and the search usually isn't even as fast.
At least you had some creativity and variety -- tell me you didn't pick on the same newb day after day or get your friends to? If I were there, I'd say "damn, evil trick dude" -- I'm perpetually a newb, see, because the game is mechanical and boring otherwise. I suppose I'd turn to griefing too, especially if I started seeing drivel like "whos the faggot who ___?!?!?!" from my victims.
The griefers I can't stand are the ones who do the same damn things every time to the same people, or social griefers who deliberately disrupt RP and teleport in and just start in with childish profanity. Too much of a culture of it, and it's why I just don't do online games in general now (or I play pure action type games like RTS's, which are after all built on giving as much grief to the other as possible)
> Errr... You'd wish it was like that. Many phones don't have this much security (most Nokia, some Sony Erricson, and more)
I'm describing my Nokia 6600 actually, but the security is part of Symbian, so anyone running that release is going to have similar prompts. No doubt there may be vulnerabilities that may bypass one or more security layers, but it seems somewhat unlikely to get past them all, at least for now. I do feel somewhat sorry for folks running PocketPC phones though...
> Uhm, I don't think you can use a proxy server to send spam AFAIK.
With an open proxy, you certainly can. Use the proxy to open an arbitrary socket connection direct to your victim's ISP. More cleverly, have it relay through the ISP of the open proxy (not an easy problem, so most don't). Many billions of spam messages are sent this way. Even a lot of HTTP proxies allow this. Good proxies don't, but the proxies being exploited aren't good ones.
> I'm not attempting to play the "won't you think of the children?" card.
Well, yes you are, actually, otherwise you could have come up with some other kind of content. Free speech isn't about protecting illegal acts or content that results solely from illegal acts. It's about protecting the means of speech regardless of what it might be used for.
> I'm a free speech supporter, but child porn on my computer? I just can't get there.
It's quite unlikely that neither will the pornographers. TOR simply won't stand up to large downloads like that. You're perfectly free to pass by this technology, but where does a technology get too generic to apply the objection? Any encrypted store-and-forward system, like remailers? Cryptography in general? Common carrier status? It sounds to me like you're doing your part already, but you need to keep your perspective -- you are not the victim, and the kids are better served by you keeping a clear head, not tilting at windmills. Think of how many lives could be saved if the opponents of violent videogames focused their energies on mentoring some "at risk" kids instead.
Yes, someone should think of the children. People like yourself should, because any one particular technology can't. Judging that technology on what it could do is not helpful to anyone.
> Only the flexibility, complexity and scale of the public is enough to compensate for the advantages that centralized corporate media has in lying to us.
And only another tier of that public could possibly filter out the reams of inaccuracy, flaming, trolling, and other dross that would no doubt accumulate, a population limited by the fact that few actually want to. It's like moderating slashdot at -1. I don't necessarily like what I read in my newspaper, but I don't think I want to read the comments of every indymedia brat with an axe to grind either, let alone every last racist moron with a diatribe about Arabs or ZOG and whatnot.
The great thing about the internet is how everyone gets a voice. The lousy thing about the internet is how everyone uses it.
> People laughed at me when Bluetooth was first announced.
I'm still laughing at you. Why some geeks choose to remain ignorant is beyond me. If you don't want to use it, fine. I like using my ericsson bluetooth headset on my nokia phone thankyouverymuch. If a crooked cop wants to plant evidence, they can just drop a kilo into my trunk. Jesus.
Bluetooth is normally off by default. Even if it's on, it's going to prompt you multiple times if an unknown device tries to connect -- once to establish the connection, again to receive anything, then you have to explicitly open the attachment and go through yet another warning about installing software. Spreading via bluetooth is probably more effective via trusted paired devices. my gf and I have 6600's and we have them paired so we can share pictures more or less instantly. So if for some reason one of our phones got this worm, then it would transmit to the other phone pretty much silently -- still wouldn't auto-install though.
In other words, if you have a brain, you're safe. Watch out for bluesnarf attacks though, which can read all your data off your phone if you have an older bluetooth stack.
An activist group's pringles can (pointed at the road) also picks up the signal, collects my information, and archives it. From there...what? If I drive an SUV, will I be targeted and listed on an environmentalist equivalent of the "Nuremburg Files" website?
Yunno, if such nutcases actually existed, they'd just point cameras at the license plates. But don't let me keep you from setting up ridiculous straw men.
The sad thing is, most people in this idiotic country will take you seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
A single extra app, Media Center, with big widgets suitable for a tv and remote, and an optional exclusive lock so you need a password to alt-tab or close it. It's not very good.
A slightly updated theme
Terminal Services -- this is the reason I spent the extra 10 bucks to get XP MCE instead of XP Home.
MCE will not likely flop, since there's not much to actually flop. It's a way to differentiate product lines is all. They might even just make Media Center a free download (if it isn't already) at which point it'll merely be a minor configuration difference.
> Yeah, stolen right from Homestar runner: "get the frickn' duck away from me," says Strong Bad.
There you go making me feel old again. My brother was making cracks about the adventure dragons looking like ducks some 20 odd years ago. Believe it or not, Homestar Runner's jokes aren't all formed from some Tabula Rasa of comedy.
PATH=$PATH:/opt/*/bin/ Ah, but I suppose you want it to update automatically when new directories are added to
From reading stuff and watching discussions what I got is that the problem with microkernels is that they're hard to properly implement and still have fairly bad performance. In fact, I hit those same problems when trying to code an extremely modular application, that I tried to write as an experiment.
... er ok it's performance isn't fabulous. NT is sorta a microkernel (with a lot of rules broken), and its I/O still spanks everyone else (owing to its VMS-inspired design). Plan9 is a microkernel.
BeOS is a microkernel. OSX is a microkernel
Now, of course I'm not a programming genius, perhaps somebody can pull this stuff off with good performance and make it look good, but the point is that I finally realized that I could write a very basic chat with shell script and named pipes, while this thing would need thousands of lines of code before starting to do anything at all. Linus' quote about message passing and masturbation seems to fit here quite well.
Linus, to put it mildly, doesn't know a fucking thing about microkernels, yet feels qualified to spout off on them every chance he gets. Thankfully, most microkernels are written by people who are at least pretty close to being actual programming geniuses, and astonishingly enough aren't a bunch of shell scripts cobbled together with pipes. Go put down the Mach book and try taking a look at L4 sometime.
"If you include the MySQL server with an application that is not licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible license, you need a commercial license for the MySQL server."
It's obnoxious, but they're asserting distribution rights that are indeed their prerogative. Now presumably, said application they're referring to would actually use MySQL, so they're probably not talking about including MySQL on a CD of database software along with, say a trial copy of Oracle (ok, make that a DVD). Probably. They'd have a hard time asserting any kind of rights over the distribution of a compilation, but they could prevail. Copyright is all about controlling the right to copy after all.
"If you develop and distribute a commercial application and as part of utilizing your application, the end-user must download a copy of MySQL; for each derivative work, you (or, in some cases, your end-user) need a commercial license for the MySQL server and/or MySQL client libraries."
Right, or your app is GPL, because the client libs are GPL as well. This is not a variance, it's merely a clarification.
> Well, if someone sends me the source code, it seems like open source to me, even if it isn't officially "Open Source (tm)"
No, it's source. Not Open source, it's just source for which you're part of the closed group. Even Microsoft lets some developers have source (mostly hardware developers).
Well, there's a few strikes against Cygwin:
1. Cygwin is godawful slow.
2. CYGWIN1.DLL is GPL'd. If anything calls for LGPL, this is it, RMS's protestations notwithstanding. The supposed exemptions granted in cygwin's modified GPL aren't very clear either. This shouldn't be taken as typical of GPL'd software, most of which is NOT a library. However, the GPL simply says you have to make the source available to anyone you distribute the app to -- it suggests you bundle it, but doesn't say you have to do so, or even make it publicly available to anyone but your users (of course you can't stop them from distributing it how they like, but that's not your logistical problem). A pointer is actually just fine.
3. Cygwin is godawful slow.
* NOT the filesystem organization. It indeed sucks mightily, but it's all convention that a sufficiently bold distro could change ... and become instantly despised and obscure for it, but it's still possible. It's a "softcoded" problem, if you will.
/proc is a disgusting hack to use in anything but scripts.
* All IPC except shared memory is mediated through the kernel, requiring several context switches. Signals are especially heinous, but it also made message queues, which would have been the answer to BeOS (before beos came around), practically useless.
* All I/O is synchronous. Combine this with the lack of decent threading. Linux made processes so cheap they could be used instead of threads, but never evolved the process APIs to include process subgroups -- hell, it still has zombies. Now it's given up and just copped the awful pthreads API instead.
* Way too many assumptions about simple numeric values, from errno to file modes, are coded right into the standards. This primitive interface becomes pretty much unextendable.
* No process metadata model. It's still possible to obscure the full command line for instance, even if you wanted to keep it.
* Absolutely no dynamic instrumentation model. I guess Solaris went and did their own thing, but I had this gripe for a long time.
They uh also sound a lot more intelligent cuz like they uh edited down the filler kinda stuff that kids like to use yunno. And adults too kinda. I'm sorta like exaggerating for effect and stuff but you get the idea right? Same words and all that but when the editors want to get all concise and shit to save column space, then the stuff they edit out sounds like a lot more intelligent.
C'mon, nothing compares to the cracks about Adventure:
Bobby: A duck ate me.
EGM: A what ate you?
Parker: A pink duck.
EGM: What do you think this character's name is?
Parker: Dot. Or Adventure? That's what this game is, isn't it? Go up, go up, go up.
Bobby: Stupid duck. I hate the duck. The duck is evil.
Parker: Go left, go left. Grab the arrow. That's the only way you can kill the duck. You have to run that into the duck.
Garret: It's a spear or something.
Bobby: [Enters castle] I'm just going to store all my keys and useless stuff in here. I'm going to store my duck in there.
EGM: Do you identify with this dot?
Garret: No. The dot is small. I am not.
Bobby: Yeah. My best friend, he looks just like this dot: small, handsome, and adventurous.
EGM: How long would you put up with this game?
Garret: Five more minutes.
Maybe your motherboards are flakey. I run it on my XP machine at work just fine (yes of course it's a Dell), and I rather enjoy that my system remains responsive enough for me to kill off berzerk processes at the cost of a smidge more sluggishness overall (who cares, I only run emacs and outlook all day. My home gaming box is an athlon64).
I also run all kinds of crap on a fairly old linux kernel (redhat 7) on a dual HT Xeon, and aside from the scheduler occasionally being stupid and deciding to put two CPU-bound processes on the same CPU, it runs smooth as butter.
True, this is all just anecdote, but I would claim that there's no fault in XP or Linux concerning HT that I've ever noticed.
If Edison himself had just now invented the light bulb, the only way investors would risk capitalizing it these days it would be if a design engineer had aestetically critiqued the final shape, a safety engineer had figured out a better alternative than those open sockets, and a process engineer had figured out how to make them with the maximum ratio of unskilled to skilled labor.
Pish posh, it just wouldn't be productized. And let's not forget, Edison was a big proponent of direct current (DC), had patents and financial interests in DC power generation and all the expensive hardware that went with it, suppressed findings about the safety problems of DC, and went so far to smear his nemesis Westinghouse by putting on ghastly demonstrations of the dangers of AC using Thomas Edison's Fantabulous Newfangled Invention: the Electric Chair.
Edison still lost. The real irony is that so many states actually liked the electric chair, and bought them.
Lone inventors are all over the place,m but they just work for larger companies, and the invention gets owned by the company, and absolutely nothing happens to it. The inventor gets a check for a few grand if he's lucky.
Don't agree with me or Troltech?
Don't USE IT!
And hey guess what, no one did. The fact that a single license cost more than a MSDN Universal subscription might have something to do with it.
Gee, wonder why I can't sell any cars? They're only a million a piece. All I gotta do is sell one. Cheap bastards...
> One wonders how something like Amazon, CNN, Fox News, or Ebay makes it here.
They're probably common substrings. If I want to search for a Black & Decker hand saw on Amazon, I'll google for "black decker hand saw amazon". I can just type it straight into my address bar, or for many other users, the google toolbar. Sure enough, first link, there it is. Searching amazon itself is an extra step with an annoying interface involving looking around for a search bar, followed by search output with an equally cluttered annoying interface, and the search usually isn't even as fast.
At least you had some creativity and variety -- tell me you didn't pick on the same newb day after day or get your friends to? If I were there, I'd say "damn, evil trick dude" -- I'm perpetually a newb, see, because the game is mechanical and boring otherwise. I suppose I'd turn to griefing too, especially if I started seeing drivel like "whos the faggot who ___?!?!?!" from my victims.
The griefers I can't stand are the ones who do the same damn things every time to the same people, or social griefers who deliberately disrupt RP and teleport in and just start in with childish profanity. Too much of a culture of it, and it's why I just don't do online games in general now (or I play pure action type games like RTS's, which are after all built on giving as much grief to the other as possible)
Buggy driver? Bah, it's Linux's fault. Damn thing bluescreens^Wpanics all the time. Don't "buggy driver" me, I don't even own a buggy.
Windows might have more holes than a strainer, but these days it is stable.
by Jerrold H. Zar
> Errr... You'd wish it was like that. Many phones don't have this much security (most Nokia, some Sony Erricson, and more)
I'm describing my Nokia 6600 actually, but the security is part of Symbian, so anyone running that release is going to have similar prompts. No doubt there may be vulnerabilities that may bypass one or more security layers, but it seems somewhat unlikely to get past them all, at least for now. I do feel somewhat sorry for folks running PocketPC phones though...
> Uhm, I don't think you can use a proxy server to send spam AFAIK.
With an open proxy, you certainly can. Use the proxy to open an arbitrary socket connection direct to your victim's ISP. More cleverly, have it relay through the ISP of the open proxy (not an easy problem, so most don't). Many billions of spam messages are sent this way. Even a lot of HTTP proxies allow this. Good proxies don't, but the proxies being exploited aren't good ones.
> I'm not attempting to play the "won't you think of the children?" card.
Well, yes you are, actually, otherwise you could have come up with some other kind of content. Free speech isn't about protecting illegal acts or content that results solely from illegal acts. It's about protecting the means of speech regardless of what it might be used for.
> I'm a free speech supporter, but child porn on my computer? I just can't get there.
It's quite unlikely that neither will the pornographers. TOR simply won't stand up to large downloads like that. You're perfectly free to pass by this technology, but where does a technology get too generic to apply the objection? Any encrypted store-and-forward system, like remailers? Cryptography in general? Common carrier status? It sounds to me like you're doing your part already, but you need to keep your perspective -- you are not the victim, and the kids are better served by you keeping a clear head, not tilting at windmills. Think of how many lives could be saved if the opponents of violent videogames focused their energies on mentoring some "at risk" kids instead.
Yes, someone should think of the children. People like yourself should, because any one particular technology can't. Judging that technology on what it could do is not helpful to anyone.
> Only the flexibility, complexity and scale of the public is enough to compensate for the advantages that centralized corporate media has in lying to us.
And only another tier of that public could possibly filter out the reams of inaccuracy, flaming, trolling, and other dross that would no doubt accumulate, a population limited by the fact that few actually want to. It's like moderating slashdot at -1. I don't necessarily like what I read in my newspaper, but I don't think I want to read the comments of every indymedia brat with an axe to grind either, let alone every last racist moron with a diatribe about Arabs or ZOG and whatnot.
The great thing about the internet is how everyone gets a voice. The lousy thing about the internet is how everyone uses it.
> People laughed at me when Bluetooth was first announced.
I'm still laughing at you. Why some geeks choose to remain ignorant is beyond me. If you don't want to use it, fine. I like using my ericsson bluetooth headset on my nokia phone thankyouverymuch. If a crooked cop wants to plant evidence, they can just drop a kilo into my trunk. Jesus.
Bluetooth is normally off by default. Even if it's on, it's going to prompt you multiple times if an unknown device tries to connect -- once to establish the connection, again to receive anything, then you have to explicitly open the attachment and go through yet another warning about installing software. Spreading via bluetooth is probably more effective via trusted paired devices. my gf and I have 6600's and we have them paired so we can share pictures more or less instantly. So if for some reason one of our phones got this worm, then it would transmit to the other phone pretty much silently -- still wouldn't auto-install though.
In other words, if you have a brain, you're safe. Watch out for bluesnarf attacks though, which can read all your data off your phone if you have an older bluetooth stack.
An activist group's pringles can (pointed at the road) also picks up the signal, collects my information, and archives it. From there...what? If I drive an SUV, will I be targeted and listed on an environmentalist equivalent of the "Nuremburg Files" website?
Yunno, if such nutcases actually existed, they'd just point cameras at the license plates. But don't let me keep you from setting up ridiculous straw men.
The sad thing is, most people in this idiotic country will take you seriously.
If you were to inclube porn in with movies
Paging Dr. Freud, Dr Freud, please dick up the white courtesy phone.