I mean why would a person NOT use the fan provided by Intel in the retail package?
Because the stock Intel HSF is too damned loud? And because this has varied over time, the Intel fans used to be quiet but recent ones are noisy. Yes, you can buy an OEM CPU without a fan if you want, but the price difference is often only a couple of bucks--which is more than what the Intel HSF is worth. I buy whatever is in stock, and lately have been throwing out a lot of those noisy pieces of junk.
The post-WW2 era has resulted in communities that make cars just about mandatory. Occasionally a small town or city will ban cars from its city center, or create safe bike paths and pedestrian walkways, but those are exceptions. Most suburbanites don't like the idea of having any commercial activity whatever in their view, so that tends to put even the small local stores in strip malls on busy highways. That is not friendly to pedestrians or bicycles.
There are so many other blogging packages out there that I fail to see how they can possibly manage to make money selling one, especially for more than just a couple bucks.
Well, I fail to see how they can make money if they don't sell it. Many non-open-source projects that want to stay free end up either selling the software or bundling it with adware to carry the costs. Most people don't donate money even if you ask them nicely. Selling services won't work for this model either, the users are mostly cheap people who just don't want to pay, period. If they have a good product then why shouldn't they be able to make money from it?
Agreed, simple. Google made the image ads opt-in, so publishers like you don't need to do anything. I am going to give them a try though. Isn't choice a good thing?
I agree, my Prius has 48MPG over its 14,000 mile lifetime, most of that being trips of less than ten miles. Even with the penalty for warming up the engine (done to reduce EMISSIONS at the expense of some fuel economy as I understand it) I have never had any tankful with less than 44MPG.
My experience is that ambient temperature plays a big role. On a 65-degree day there's very little engine warmup and no need for running the A/C.
That's funny. I run Mozilla/Firefox when I'm forced to boot into XP because of work. Doesn't seem to have the problems with allowing software to be installed just by visiting a site.
Right, and having everyone switch browsers would solve the problem. Not. The preferred spyware delivery method would just switch to email, bundling, or social engineering tricks that work well for FireFox. The FireFox download dialog is much less informative than the IE one, for example.
You're talking about viruses, and of course anyone who wants to break the law can do so. Right now though, there is a large class of software created by companies that say what they are doing is perfectly legal. They claim that by having a user click OK on a dialog box they can do pretty much anything they want on that user's PC. And they are doing this brazenly, out in the open, and in the clear view of the governing agencies. LOP.COM is one of the most-despised pieces of spyware around and still the guy from C2/LOP has the ballz to file a comment for the upcoming FTC spyware conference saying LOP is the future of Internet advertising!
Most spyware/adware makers feel the same way, they don't have to hide because they are not breaking any laws. And if you download the software directly from their web sites you will be presented with various screens and buttons you have to click to agree. However, the details of what you are agreeing to is anything but clear. The Claria license is 20 pages for example, and to paraphrase: "Once you click YES we can automatically download and install new software, even new versions of other vendor's software like Media Player or Flash if we need it to display ads. We can even send back an list of all the software installed on your system."
Should it be legal to bury that in a 20-page document and then say that clicking YES on a dialog box is legally binding?
You missed the point, or more likely did not read the article. Having one of these icons doesn't mean your program is "spyware". It means that your program performs one or more of these functions. Other programs such as virus scanners or keyboard drivers might have them too. The point is to inform users in a concise way of program behaviors that may cause some sort of trouble. The more of these things a program does (like autoupdate or sending back click data) the harder a user should look at the license to be sure they really trust what is going on.
As that article says, most of the proposals to control spyware get bogged down in trying to define spyware without catching sofware that is clearly legitimate, such as an antivirus program trying to "phone home" automatically to update its virus signatures.
I would much rather see regulation that required all software to clearly declare its intentions, and to get explicit and verified permission to install.
"Tons of choices can be annoying - going to a restaurant and being forced to select from a huge list of foods can be overwhelming. Usually, all I end up doing is finding one thing I like and then ordering that all the time, without checking out other stuff."
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but assuming you are not...
It's not only choices, but the way it's described. When you order something and it is described in explicit detail on the menu, you are already expecting a particular thing based on that description. If the actual food doesn't match your imagined meal, it's disconcerting even if the food is good.
It's not just an issue of choosing something from the menu, either. At one nearby Mexican restaurant there are four sub-choices for most entrees: corn/flour tortilla, black/refried beans, type of meat if any, and heat level. By the time I've described it I could have cooked it!
Doesn't customer acceptance of a feature decide whether it continues to be supported? Like any company, Microsoft comes up with a lot of things it thinks are good ideas. The customer doesn't always agree. But even the bad ideas are an important part of the process.
Here's another way to look at it. Go to SourceForge and take a look at all the projects. Why is it that so many of them are basically inactive, and a few are extremely active? Is the fact that those inactive projects exist a bad thing? Why?
I think you may have the right idea but I can't tell from the description. Here's how I'd put it:
NX protection applied to the stack prevents the situation where an exploit can overflow a stack-based buffer and clobber the return address to have it "return" to some exploit code, usually placed in the same stack-based buffer that was just overflowed. Since code now cannot be executed on the stack, these exploits won't work because the CPU will throw an exception.
Even with NX, it would still be possible to overflow a buffer to clobber adjacent data values, and that might have the effect of making the program take a different code path that was advantageous to the attacker. Or it might, for example, allow an attacker to inject otherwise-prohibited data into adjacent variables, such as HTML where only text was expected.
Any application that creates code in stack-based memory such as a local (auto) variable, or in one of the standard heaps (from which malloc and "new" memory come) will be affected. This memory is no longer executable and cannot be made executable by an application. Some existing JIT compilers are affected and will need rework.
To work with memory protection enabled, applications will need to allocate memory using VirtualAlloc and specify the memory options to make it executable. Then they can generate and run the code there.
I am assuming that Linux could incorporate some similar functionality, anybody know if someone is working on it?
It comes from lots of people actively working on the source. Tell me, how many random hackers do you think will work on the Windows codebase?
I think a lot of hackers would "work on" Windows code. Unfortunately, for most their goal would be to spread viruses and spyware for financial gain, not to improve the code.
Cats? What about other birds? I live on the edge of a park and there is a red-tailed hawk that I am convinced is taking advantage of the glass on our building. Every week or two I will here the plonk of a bird hitting the window. Twice I have looked out and seen that hawk swoop down and grab the stunned bird.
Congress regularly exempts itself from being bound by its own laws. Although there are laws on the books in the U.S. that might apply, it might be impossible to enforce them if an elected official was found to be the "mastermind" (term used loosely of course) behind this caper. Each house has its own ethics and rules committees but I suspect they would just slap wrists.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps capitalism IS working, and this is the way for people to choose the projects they think are worth supporting.
The post-WW2 era has resulted in communities that make cars just about mandatory. Occasionally a small town or city will ban cars from its city center, or create safe bike paths and pedestrian walkways, but those are exceptions. Most suburbanites don't like the idea of having any commercial activity whatever in their view, so that tends to put even the small local stores in strip malls on busy highways. That is not friendly to pedestrians or bicycles.
Throwaway domains are the next step in the arms race. We can counter with:
Agreed, simple. Google made the image ads opt-in, so publishers like you don't need to do anything. I am going to give them a try though. Isn't choice a good thing?
I agree, my Prius has 48MPG over its 14,000 mile lifetime, most of that being trips of less than ten miles. Even with the penalty for warming up the engine (done to reduce EMISSIONS at the expense of some fuel economy as I understand it) I have never had any tankful with less than 44MPG.
My experience is that ambient temperature plays a big role. On a 65-degree day there's very little engine warmup and no need for running the A/C.
What campaign? Since commissioners are appointed, why do they need to campaign? Or was this for some earlier run for office?
You're talking about viruses, and of course anyone who wants to break the law can do so. Right now though, there is a large class of software created by companies that say what they are doing is perfectly legal. They claim that by having a user click OK on a dialog box they can do pretty much anything they want on that user's PC. And they are doing this brazenly, out in the open, and in the clear view of the governing agencies. LOP.COM is one of the most-despised pieces of spyware around and still the guy from C2/LOP has the ballz to file a comment for the upcoming FTC spyware conference saying LOP is the future of Internet advertising!
Most spyware/adware makers feel the same way, they don't have to hide because they are not breaking any laws. And if you download the software directly from their web sites you will be presented with various screens and buttons you have to click to agree. However, the details of what you are agreeing to is anything but clear. The Claria license is 20 pages for example, and to paraphrase: "Once you click YES we can automatically download and install new software, even new versions of other vendor's software like Media Player or Flash if we need it to display ads. We can even send back an list of all the software installed on your system."
Should it be legal to bury that in a 20-page document and then say that clicking YES on a dialog box is legally binding?
You missed the point, or more likely did not read the article. Having one of these icons doesn't mean your program is "spyware". It means that your program performs one or more of these functions. Other programs such as virus scanners or keyboard drivers might have them too. The point is to inform users in a concise way of program behaviors that may cause some sort of trouble. The more of these things a program does (like autoupdate or sending back click data) the harder a user should look at the license to be sure they really trust what is going on.
As that article says, most of the proposals to control spyware get bogged down in trying to define spyware without catching sofware that is clearly legitimate, such as an antivirus program trying to "phone home" automatically to update its virus signatures.
I would much rather see regulation that required all software to clearly declare its intentions, and to get explicit and verified permission to install.
It's not only choices, but the way it's described. When you order something and it is described in explicit detail on the menu, you are already expecting a particular thing based on that description. If the actual food doesn't match your imagined meal, it's disconcerting even if the food is good.
It's not just an issue of choosing something from the menu, either. At one nearby Mexican restaurant there are four sub-choices for most entrees: corn/flour tortilla, black/refried beans, type of meat if any, and heat level. By the time I've described it I could have cooked it!
"Erections lasting longer than three hours require immediate medical attention."
That's really f-ing brilliant!
Let's build this and send it to those overproductive types in India and China.
Transparent aluminum? Don't you read Slashdot?
Doesn't customer acceptance of a feature decide whether it continues to be supported? Like any company, Microsoft comes up with a lot of things it thinks are good ideas. The customer doesn't always agree. But even the bad ideas are an important part of the process.
Here's another way to look at it. Go to SourceForge and take a look at all the projects. Why is it that so many of them are basically inactive, and a few are extremely active? Is the fact that those inactive projects exist a bad thing? Why?
I think you may have the right idea but I can't tell from the description. Here's how I'd put it:
NX protection applied to the stack prevents the situation where an exploit can overflow a stack-based buffer and clobber the return address to have it "return" to some exploit code, usually placed in the same stack-based buffer that was just overflowed. Since code now cannot be executed on the stack, these exploits won't work because the CPU will throw an exception.
Even with NX, it would still be possible to overflow a buffer to clobber adjacent data values, and that might have the effect of making the program take a different code path that was advantageous to the attacker. Or it might, for example, allow an attacker to inject otherwise-prohibited data into adjacent variables, such as HTML where only text was expected.
Any application that creates code in stack-based memory such as a local (auto) variable, or in one of the standard heaps (from which malloc and "new" memory come) will be affected. This memory is no longer executable and cannot be made executable by an application. Some existing JIT compilers are affected and will need rework.
To work with memory protection enabled, applications will need to allocate memory using VirtualAlloc and specify the memory options to make it executable. Then they can generate and run the code there.
I am assuming that Linux could incorporate some similar functionality, anybody know if someone is working on it?
Cats? What about other birds? I live on the edge of a park and there is a red-tailed hawk that I am convinced is taking advantage of the glass on our building. Every week or two I will here the plonk of a bird hitting the window. Twice I have looked out and seen that hawk swoop down and grab the stunned bird.
I can't think of one situation where Microsoft has tried to sue some company for patent infringement. Many have sued Microsoft though.
Congress regularly exempts itself from being bound by its own laws. Although there are laws on the books in the U.S. that might apply, it might be impossible to enforce them if an elected official was found to be the "mastermind" (term used loosely of course) behind this caper. Each house has its own ethics and rules committees but I suspect they would just slap wrists.
It's just a commentary, it's not a comparison. The OP got it wrong. Don't take this any more seriously than you would a Dvorak rant.