Sun may be on its last legs. It's certainly not the juggernaut it was before the dot com bust. It is an advocate of open source, which is great, but they used to have a market capitalization of $130B, now they're trying to hold on to $13B http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=5y&l=on&z=m &q=l&c= and not having an easy time as their stock is in the single digits and investors are weary to put too much faith in to a company that may not have a bright future.
I personally hope this isn't the case, I have an old Ultra 10, Ultra 5, a few sparcstations and a sparcbook.. they're great machines. Perhaps a bit overpriced when they were shiny and new, but most exotic hardware is and that's one reason (others: see application availability) that x86 has been so successful- it's cheap. You can build a reliable, stable and fast server for pennies on the dollar on what you might spend on a Sunfire. Good luck, Scott.. you know better than any of us that Microsoft is a difficult company to deal with.. even in the mutual desperation both of your corporations are facing.
Why don't they send some crews to clean it up or notify the respective countries responsible for it to do that. I find it unnerving how much pollution there is in the form of litter, toxins in the air, land and sea and yet most of those responsible are completely apathetic because it is more monetarily efficient.
Are very flawed forms of identification. With them you can find the associated name, birth date, bank accounts, loans, credit cards, properties, etc. They are extremely exploitable and yet the security that surrounds them is minimal. What a lot of people may not know is you ARE NOT required to give your social security number to utilities, banks, creditors, etc. Sure, it helps your standing with them and they can probably find them on their own, but I personally think with the amount of abuse of this central identification number there needs to be a new, more secure system with safe guards to prevent this sort of rampent abuse. The first step is for financial institutions to limit the customer's liability for identity theft related fraud, because they're insured by the FDIC. After that, perhaps a biometric or RFID identification system could eventually be implemented. I know it sounds very big brotherish, but the current system is horrible.
I think the situation is definitely getting worse AND the open source community is becoming more adament about exposing this sort of behavior. The problem is that all open source licensing relies on honesty and many commercial vendors don't know the meaning of it, so when the two sides clash, open source may get the short end of the stick.
That regardless of the intent, this sort of conduct is at the very least considered immoral and possibly bordering on illegality. It sounds like fraud to me. Simply posing as someone else to get certain private information seems innocent enough if the goal is to warn their fellow students of their vulnerability to social engineering, since the weakest link in computer security is the person. I would imagine they are going to feel some heat from the university at the very least for this, though.
There's a growing trend of automated attacks by worms, 'hackers', spammers and the like. This isn't limited to just web sites, it's also increasing against services like SSH, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP and so on. However, some of the web site attacks we saw between 2000 and 2002 between NIMDA and the SQL Slammer were a lot more crippling then some of the attacks we're seeing now (see major backbone slowdowns from the amount of infected systems attempting to deliver their payload to neighboring networks). Most of the attacks against non-web services seem to be generic exploit attempts and brute force password cracking. Not very effective if your network is relatively secure, but one slip up by a careless user can lead to a lot of potential problems.
Projectors aren't nearly as ubiquitous as laptops, since everyone with a laptop can't afford to buy or carry a projector everywhere. This is nice for a small conference room setting or a person to person meeting.
For open source users the ThinkPad delivers a welcome change, in that the majority of the hardware is supported without special patches or drivers. I know the X40 ThinkPads were a favorite among the Linux and *BSD community because of how well they operated. On a side note, a lot of the Dell Inspiron and Lattitude laptops tend to work about as well.
I think that's a pretty innovative feature. Instead of cramming people over your shoulder you can simply turn the screen and show 'em what you're doing or looking at. Certainly beats back seat users imho.
None of my pages have any problem ranking well on MSN Search and I've never served a web page off of IIS. What defines "several percent" anyway? If someone forges their web server header information only to gain a 5% chance of increasing their ranking, I hardly think that's worth it. In my experience the MSN search engine seems to value keywords, page titles and the number of pages that link to the target page much more heavily than the type of web server. I'm not a fan of MSN, nor would I advocate using it on a regular basis.. but this type of story seems to be a bit of anti-MS FUD if you ask me.
I agree this is quite unfortunate for a lot of the users and software that depends on 16-bit applications, however there is always VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC.:-/
There is a slight amount of increased overhead because they are running in an emulated environment called Windows on Windows (WoW), but the performance decrease, if any, is speculated to be around 5%.
I'm sure they're already on the way. Microsoft has been working with programmers, vendors and other partners for quite some time to coordinate this release. In short time you'll see 64-bit enabled video games, graphics applications, scientific applications, etc, etc. Be patient as this is new territory for Microsoft that some would say is long overdue.:-)
Likely the way they'll be handled is through (somethign like) SMP. In that the fact that there are two cores in the actual CPU will be completely transparent to the operating system which will see the CPUs as seperate. That's what I'm guessing, because I doubt that would be delegated to the hardware layer since it isn't at all practical to do it that way.
If it is all handled through the operating system than the operating system or application must be designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs in order for the end user to gain any performance increase. Microsoft will likely charge extra money for licenses that cover an extra CPU core as they do charge extra for extra CPUs.
I think this is a good step forward. The actual performance improvements will likely be quite marginal until there are native 64-bit applications. Currently Windows XP and 2003 64-bit editions run 32-bit applications perfectly, but under an emulation layer called WoW (no not World of Warcraft, but Windows on Windows).
I'm not sure how many people remember this, but back when Digital Equipment Corporation's famed Alpha processor was "supported" by Windows NT, the 64-bit environment was infact not much more than a cheap hack. Microsoft designed Windows NT to not actually execute 64-bit instructions, but 32-bit instructions in parallel. I'm glad to see Microsoft is doing a better job supporting the AMD and Intel 64-bit processor lines.
Sure, this is great news for a good portion of the American population, a country with a ridiculously high rate of obesity and overweight individuals. However, one has to question its objectivity and scientific basis. As one poster already pointed out, the story merely suggests that somewhat fat people are more "healthy" than obese people. I for one am not the skinniest geek, but I don't really think this is the right kind of motivation for me to read in wanting to shed a few 'extra' pounds.:)
I maintain a reasonbly healthy diet, try to balance my nutrition and exercize when I can.. but in this fast-paced go-go-go environment of urban America it's very difficult to stay ahead physically, financially and maintain one's sanity. While I don't doubt that I'm relatively healthy, I also think that I could be more healthy.
We geeks tend to sit down for the majority of the day and feel our asses grow as we're emmersed in various technological endeavors. This is all fine and dandy, but as my doctor pointed out recently, it's best to shed those extra pounds while we're still young as the older we get the harder it gets to rid ourselves of them as our metabolic rate slows down. So I would suggest to my fellow geeks to do what you can when you can and take articles such as these with no more than a grain of salt. In two weeks there may be another study that says otherwise. Besides, who can believe any story about how much food we should eat that's posted on a site whose founder is some random taco!
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I believe there are a couple, actually and this is one of them: http://www.centipaid.com/
Sounds like it has a bit more features and perhaps some better security enhancements than the vanilla Firefox installation.
Sun may be on its last legs. It's certainly not the juggernaut it was before the dot com bust. It is an advocate of open source, which is great, but they used to have a market capitalization of $130B, now they're trying to hold on to $13B http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=5y&l=on&z=m &q=l&c= and not having an easy time as their stock is in the single digits and investors are weary to put too much faith in to a company that may not have a bright future.
I personally hope this isn't the case, I have an old Ultra 10, Ultra 5, a few sparcstations and a sparcbook.. they're great machines. Perhaps a bit overpriced when they were shiny and new, but most exotic hardware is and that's one reason (others: see application availability) that x86 has been so successful- it's cheap. You can build a reliable, stable and fast server for pennies on the dollar on what you might spend on a Sunfire. Good luck, Scott.. you know better than any of us that Microsoft is a difficult company to deal with.. even in the mutual desperation both of your corporations are facing.
But the recently discovered fossil, the most primitive therizinosauroid found so far, seems to have survived on a mixed diet of meat and vegtables...
If they were originally eating a diet of meat and vegetation I believe the proper terminology is "omnivore".
That's okay.. they're left handed!
What good is broadband if your government censors nearly everything? Do you really want high speed propaganda?
Why don't they send some crews to clean it up or notify the respective countries responsible for it to do that. I find it unnerving how much pollution there is in the form of litter, toxins in the air, land and sea and yet most of those responsible are completely apathetic because it is more monetarily efficient.
Are very flawed forms of identification. With them you can find the associated name, birth date, bank accounts, loans, credit cards, properties, etc. They are extremely exploitable and yet the security that surrounds them is minimal. What a lot of people may not know is you ARE NOT required to give your social security number to utilities, banks, creditors, etc. Sure, it helps your standing with them and they can probably find them on their own, but I personally think with the amount of abuse of this central identification number there needs to be a new, more secure system with safe guards to prevent this sort of rampent abuse. The first step is for financial institutions to limit the customer's liability for identity theft related fraud, because they're insured by the FDIC. After that, perhaps a biometric or RFID identification system could eventually be implemented. I know it sounds very big brotherish, but the current system is horrible.
I think the situation is definitely getting worse AND the open source community is becoming more adament about exposing this sort of behavior. The problem is that all open source licensing relies on honesty and many commercial vendors don't know the meaning of it, so when the two sides clash, open source may get the short end of the stick.
How long will it be until Alan Cox makes a real world implementation for Linux? :-P
That regardless of the intent, this sort of conduct is at the very least considered immoral and possibly bordering on illegality. It sounds like fraud to me. Simply posing as someone else to get certain private information seems innocent enough if the goal is to warn their fellow students of their vulnerability to social engineering, since the weakest link in computer security is the person. I would imagine they are going to feel some heat from the university at the very least for this, though.
There's a growing trend of automated attacks by worms, 'hackers', spammers and the like. This isn't limited to just web sites, it's also increasing against services like SSH, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP and so on. However, some of the web site attacks we saw between 2000 and 2002 between NIMDA and the SQL Slammer were a lot more crippling then some of the attacks we're seeing now (see major backbone slowdowns from the amount of infected systems attempting to deliver their payload to neighboring networks). Most of the attacks against non-web services seem to be generic exploit attempts and brute force password cracking. Not very effective if your network is relatively secure, but one slip up by a careless user can lead to a lot of potential problems.
If it was a prepared automated sort of presentation to a small group of people you wouldn't necessarily need to see the (entire) screen.
Projectors aren't nearly as ubiquitous as laptops, since everyone with a laptop can't afford to buy or carry a projector everywhere. This is nice for a small conference room setting or a person to person meeting.
For open source users the ThinkPad delivers a welcome change, in that the majority of the hardware is supported without special patches or drivers. I know the X40 ThinkPads were a favorite among the Linux and *BSD community because of how well they operated. On a side note, a lot of the Dell Inspiron and Lattitude laptops tend to work about as well.
I think that's a pretty innovative feature. Instead of cramming people over your shoulder you can simply turn the screen and show 'em what you're doing or looking at. Certainly beats back seat users imho.
None of my pages have any problem ranking well on MSN Search and I've never served a web page off of IIS. What defines "several percent" anyway? If someone forges their web server header information only to gain a 5% chance of increasing their ranking, I hardly think that's worth it. In my experience the MSN search engine seems to value keywords, page titles and the number of pages that link to the target page much more heavily than the type of web server. I'm not a fan of MSN, nor would I advocate using it on a regular basis.. but this type of story seems to be a bit of anti-MS FUD if you ask me.
Windows NT on the DEC Alpha was not truly 64-bit either, it used 32-bit instructions executed in parallel as I recall.
I agree this is quite unfortunate for a lot of the users and software that depends on 16-bit applications, however there is always VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC. :-/
There is a slight amount of increased overhead because they are running in an emulated environment called Windows on Windows (WoW), but the performance decrease, if any, is speculated to be around 5%.
I'm sure they're already on the way. Microsoft has been working with programmers, vendors and other partners for quite some time to coordinate this release. In short time you'll see 64-bit enabled video games, graphics applications, scientific applications, etc, etc. Be patient as this is new territory for Microsoft that some would say is long overdue. :-)
Likely the way they'll be handled is through (somethign like) SMP. In that the fact that there are two cores in the actual CPU will be completely transparent to the operating system which will see the CPUs as seperate. That's what I'm guessing, because I doubt that would be delegated to the hardware layer since it isn't at all practical to do it that way. If it is all handled through the operating system than the operating system or application must be designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs in order for the end user to gain any performance increase. Microsoft will likely charge extra money for licenses that cover an extra CPU core as they do charge extra for extra CPUs.
I believe it's actually called Wowexec.exe (a bit redundant if you ask me), at least on Windows XP.
I think this is a good step forward. The actual performance improvements will likely be quite marginal until there are native 64-bit applications. Currently Windows XP and 2003 64-bit editions run 32-bit applications perfectly, but under an emulation layer called WoW (no not World of Warcraft, but Windows on Windows).
I'm not sure how many people remember this, but back when Digital Equipment Corporation's famed Alpha processor was "supported" by Windows NT, the 64-bit environment was infact not much more than a cheap hack. Microsoft designed Windows NT to not actually execute 64-bit instructions, but 32-bit instructions in parallel. I'm glad to see Microsoft is doing a better job supporting the AMD and Intel 64-bit processor lines.Sure, this is great news for a good portion of the American population, a country with a ridiculously high rate of obesity and overweight individuals. However, one has to question its objectivity and scientific basis. As one poster already pointed out, the story merely suggests that somewhat fat people are more "healthy" than obese people. I for one am not the skinniest geek, but I don't really think this is the right kind of motivation for me to read in wanting to shed a few 'extra' pounds. :)
I maintain a reasonbly healthy diet, try to balance my nutrition and exercize when I can.. but in this fast-paced go-go-go environment of urban America it's very difficult to stay ahead physically, financially and maintain one's sanity. While I don't doubt that I'm relatively healthy, I also think that I could be more healthy.
We geeks tend to sit down for the majority of the day and feel our asses grow as we're emmersed in various technological endeavors. This is all fine and dandy, but as my doctor pointed out recently, it's best to shed those extra pounds while we're still young as the older we get the harder it gets to rid ourselves of them as our metabolic rate slows down. So I would suggest to my fellow geeks to do what you can when you can and take articles such as these with no more than a grain of salt. In two weeks there may be another study that says otherwise. Besides, who can believe any story about how much food we should eat that's posted on a site whose founder is some random taco!