The original TCP/IP stack was taken out of the BSD sources (which is entirely legal to do). It was later removed and rewritten, with the exception of a few headers and things that there is absolutely no point in rewriting.
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN.
Just because you assume that's what MS would do because they are The Root Of All Evil (or so the people around here would have you believe) does not mean that's what they actually did. In fact, this is the list of providers that are installed by default with IE7 beta 2 for XP (version 7.0.5346.5):
eBay.com
Google
MSN Search (default)
Wikipedia
Filmmakers must sidestep delicate trademark issues when setting a scene. Prominently showing an AOL email screen or Google search page, for example, requires approval from the companies, so some production designers create a variation that avoids the red tape.
Yet showing a coke can prominently is ok? Well duh, coke paid them for it. So why can't Google pay to show up on a computer screen in 24 or something?
Why isn't this Ask Slashdot? The post doesn't say anything about...anything. It's just the poster asking a (dumb) question and linking every other word to make it look legitimate.
Drive encryption is optional. It's something you may configure while setting up the system for systems carrying sensitive or important data. It's not like a standard Vista install automatically encrypts the entire drive. That would be ludicrous.
Bruce Schneier may be a brilliant security guy, but like every other person (and company) on the planet, he has an agenda. Don't automatically trust the guy telling you stuff because it's embarassing to the person he's telling you about.
More importantly, the reported difference is 0.2%. You can't honestly expect me to believe that's a statistically significant difference; you'd need much more data to even get 1% margin of error.
The parent is of course comic, but readers going down the replies will find two posts (at least one from an Apple employee) indicating that none of the engineering team was fired. The people who were fired were middle management, and let's face it, nobody likes the managers anyway. They're there because they need to be, however incompetent and useless. And the same applies to MS. They could stand to lose some of management too.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they were internally serializing to SOAP to do the actual communication. There's a SOAP serializer built into the class library; it'd be a really easy way of implementing it.
Prepare yourself, this may come as a shock...It supports text based communication. Amongst the vast array of.NET objects is the ever popular System.String, which is of course an object representing plain text. Pipe it to a program and guess what happens? That's right, the.NET part is stripped away and the plain old text is sent to the app.
Microsoft gets it just fine. They get that *nix's text based communication is a crude and outdated way of doing things, and they provide a vastly more powerful interface, while keeping the old ones perfectly intact. I've been using MSH for several months now, and I'm amazed at how much more powerful it is than bash (which was previously a god in my eyes).
1) There is no way in hell Microsoft would document their API to the level necessary to allow Apple to duplicate it.
It's already documented well enough, save for the couple places where the docs don't match behavior. The problem here is the sheer size of the damn thing. Win32 is huge. Doing the implementation, and more importantly the QA, is an incredible task.
When the processor begins to overheat or encounters other conditions that could threaten the motherboard, the computer interrupts its normal operation, momentarily freezes and stores its activity, Ok, fine. Every computer that runs on x86 chip architecture may be vulnerable to this attack
Wait. How did we get here?
Let's go through this, again. Intel Pentium 4s are hot. No surprise there. They enter special modes when overheating that may introduce a security vulnerability. Fine. How does this cross over to AMD and Via chips again? AMD and Via processors don't have special modes like that. If system heat becomes critical they will simply shut the system down flat out. On a Pentium 4, overheating is not entirely unexpected, particularly on the high edge of the clock speeds. On an AMD or Via, overheating is a major failure condition, probably caused by a heatsink falling off.
So, how are all x86 chips vulnerable, exactly? (Incidentally, between this and this, AMD is really looking to be a much safer deal, not to mention faster, cooler, more power efficient, etc.)
Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?
Probably because LAMP applications are not robust or secure without sinking a lot of effort. If we're talking LAPJ (Postgres, Java) then maybe you've got a case, but LAMP is a joke with anyone who knows what they're doing.
The problem is that the gameboy wasn't one console, it was half a dozen different editions. Original, pocket, color, light, etc. So adding up all of those sales numbers to beat just one of two Sony consoles is still questionable.
Certainly Nintendo is making quite a gambit here. But they have a long way to fight back up. They haven't really been the market leader since the day the PSX came out*. Looking at the Nintendo DS, I see a ton of rehashes (animal crossing is harvest moon damnit), Nintendogs, Warioware, and some misc games that aren't worth mentioning. So will the Revolution see innovation? Obviously it will. Will it see a lot of innovation? Make your own answer, but I choose no. You can't create a "revolution" by simply changing the control scheme and reselling decade old games. More likely than not, we're going to see the same old (and admittedly quite good) games: Zelda, Mario, DK, SSB, et al. Only difference it's they're coupled with a new (and potentially carpel tunnel causing?) controller that will ultimately have little or no impact on the gameplay.
* Since somebody is probably going to feel the need to object to this, I will direct you to wikipedia and the sales figures. Both the PSX and PS2 have topped 100 million sales each, a feat no Nintendo console has even come close to. All editions of the GBA together have accomplished about 75 million sales.
The problem is that MS has already given tons of technical documentation in great detail. The EU gave the response that the documentation was too much and/or too complex, which is bullshit. Corporations reverse engineer each other's things from scratch constantly, it's part of the game, and the source code is too complex to follow? Are they asking BASIC programmers to do the compat work in the EU or something?
It's fair for the EU to ask for documentation, but every attempt by MS to give them anything has resulted in the EU throwing it away. At the moment, it looks like the EU have already decided to fine MS no matter what they do, which isn't fair even for a company with a bad history.
The totality of the Windows code is about 50M LOC, which means that 60% changed would be 30 million lines of code. You cannot develop a system that big that fast, period, no matter how many engineers you throw at it. Things will just plain fall apart. That's a pretty good hint that the story is bogus.
The chart features in OpenOffice are like a mystery-lover's dream vacation: a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets.
Hint #2: This is also an average consumer's worst nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
The original TCP/IP stack was taken out of the BSD sources (which is entirely legal to do). It was later removed and rewritten, with the exception of a few headers and things that there is absolutely no point in rewriting.
Besides, were this actually true these guys would have already been sued by Apple for divulging trade secrets.
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN.
Just because you assume that's what MS would do because they are The Root Of All Evil (or so the people around here would have you believe) does not mean that's what they actually did. In fact, this is the list of providers that are installed by default with IE7 beta 2 for XP (version 7.0.5346.5):
eBay.com
Google
MSN Search (default)
Wikipedia
On a related note, from TFA:
Filmmakers must sidestep delicate trademark issues when setting a scene. Prominently showing an AOL email screen or Google search page, for example, requires approval from the companies, so some production designers create a variation that avoids the red tape.
Yet showing a coke can prominently is ok? Well duh, coke paid them for it. So why can't Google pay to show up on a computer screen in 24 or something?
Why isn't this Ask Slashdot? The post doesn't say anything about...anything. It's just the poster asking a (dumb) question and linking every other word to make it look legitimate.
Ah, I almost forgot. This document is the Microsoft whitepaper on setting up and using drive encryption for Vista. Skim through it. Notice that it's freaking huge. The setup procedure is involved and low level. This isn't the sort of thing that will automatically be put on by a ignorant user blindly clicking "Next".
One slight detail.
Drive encryption is optional. It's something you may configure while setting up the system for systems carrying sensitive or important data. It's not like a standard Vista install automatically encrypts the entire drive. That would be ludicrous.
Bruce Schneier may be a brilliant security guy, but like every other person (and company) on the planet, he has an agenda. Don't automatically trust the guy telling you stuff because it's embarassing to the person he's telling you about.
More importantly, the reported difference is 0.2%. You can't honestly expect me to believe that's a statistically significant difference; you'd need much more data to even get 1% margin of error.
The parent is of course comic, but readers going down the replies will find two posts (at least one from an Apple employee) indicating that none of the engineering team was fired. The people who were fired were middle management, and let's face it, nobody likes the managers anyway. They're there because they need to be, however incompetent and useless. And the same applies to MS. They could stand to lose some of management too.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they were internally serializing to SOAP to do the actual communication. There's a SOAP serializer built into the class library; it'd be a really easy way of implementing it.
Prepare yourself, this may come as a shock...It supports text based communication. Amongst the vast array of .NET objects is the ever popular System.String, which is of course an object representing plain text. Pipe it to a program and guess what happens? That's right, the .NET part is stripped away and the plain old text is sent to the app.
Microsoft gets it just fine. They get that *nix's text based communication is a crude and outdated way of doing things, and they provide a vastly more powerful interface, while keeping the old ones perfectly intact. I've been using MSH for several months now, and I'm amazed at how much more powerful it is than bash (which was previously a god in my eyes).
Socket 754 has benn phased out. Semprons are now socket 939. I'm not clear on how AM2 affects this situation, though.
This article examines the question in depth. Hope that helps.
1) There is no way in hell Microsoft would document their API to the level necessary to allow Apple to duplicate it.
It's already documented well enough, save for the couple places where the docs don't match behavior. The problem here is the sheer size of the damn thing. Win32 is huge. Doing the implementation, and more importantly the QA, is an incredible task.
That's where this article gets a little sketchy.
When the processor begins to overheat or encounters other conditions that could threaten the motherboard, the computer interrupts its normal operation, momentarily freezes and stores its activity,
Ok, fine.
Every computer that runs on x86 chip architecture may be vulnerable to this attack
Wait. How did we get here?
Let's go through this, again. Intel Pentium 4s are hot. No surprise there. They enter special modes when overheating that may introduce a security vulnerability. Fine. How does this cross over to AMD and Via chips again? AMD and Via processors don't have special modes like that. If system heat becomes critical they will simply shut the system down flat out. On a Pentium 4, overheating is not entirely unexpected, particularly on the high edge of the clock speeds. On an AMD or Via, overheating is a major failure condition, probably caused by a heatsink falling off.
So, how are all x86 chips vulnerable, exactly? (Incidentally, between this and this, AMD is really looking to be a much safer deal, not to mention faster, cooler, more power efficient, etc.)
Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?
Probably because LAMP applications are not robust or secure without sinking a lot of effort. If we're talking LAPJ (Postgres, Java) then maybe you've got a case, but LAMP is a joke with anyone who knows what they're doing.
The problem is that the gameboy wasn't one console, it was half a dozen different editions. Original, pocket, color, light, etc. So adding up all of those sales numbers to beat just one of two Sony consoles is still questionable.
Certainly Nintendo is making quite a gambit here. But they have a long way to fight back up. They haven't really been the market leader since the day the PSX came out*. Looking at the Nintendo DS, I see a ton of rehashes (animal crossing is harvest moon damnit), Nintendogs, Warioware, and some misc games that aren't worth mentioning. So will the Revolution see innovation? Obviously it will. Will it see a lot of innovation? Make your own answer, but I choose no. You can't create a "revolution" by simply changing the control scheme and reselling decade old games. More likely than not, we're going to see the same old (and admittedly quite good) games: Zelda, Mario, DK, SSB, et al. Only difference it's they're coupled with a new (and potentially carpel tunnel causing?) controller that will ultimately have little or no impact on the gameplay.
* Since somebody is probably going to feel the need to object to this, I will direct you to wikipedia and the sales figures. Both the PSX and PS2 have topped 100 million sales each, a feat no Nintendo console has even come close to. All editions of the GBA together have accomplished about 75 million sales.
The problem is that MS has already given tons of technical documentation in great detail. The EU gave the response that the documentation was too much and/or too complex, which is bullshit. Corporations reverse engineer each other's things from scratch constantly, it's part of the game, and the source code is too complex to follow? Are they asking BASIC programmers to do the compat work in the EU or something?
It's fair for the EU to ask for documentation, but every attempt by MS to give them anything has resulted in the EU throwing it away. At the moment, it looks like the EU have already decided to fine MS no matter what they do, which isn't fair even for a company with a bad history.
The totality of the Windows code is about 50M LOC, which means that 60% changed would be 30 million lines of code. You cannot develop a system that big that fast, period, no matter how many engineers you throw at it. Things will just plain fall apart. That's a pretty good hint that the story is bogus.
I eat styrofoam too. I didn't realize that I could get articles written about it! I guess it's time to author a new slashdot story.
The chart features in OpenOffice are like a mystery-lover's dream vacation: a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets.
Hint #2: This is also an average consumer's worst nightmare.
or all of the clock painters who 'sharpened' their radium paint brushes by licking them.
Wait, are we not supposed to do that anymore?
Actually a VGA display uses 16 bits per character, not 8. The upper 8 are control codes. Wasteful bastards.
As much as all us hate spam, child porno, junk mail, ads, laywers, etc,
I think one of those might be illegal, actually...not sure.