The other nasty one I've seen U3 thumb drives do is have a really weird formatting to them so that it makes the computer think it has a CD-ROM also on it for all the autorun stuff, "safetly" in a read-only partition, with the rest of the media being for storage, and the only way to fix it is to use said software in the read-only part to format the whole drive as storage media. cant even use any OS utilities to do it.
so theres a loophole to get around the autorun already
This is actually why i like the model that the pfSense developers use. the entire program is free and opensource. they have a couple plugins that they made, and other authors are more than welcome to write their own plugin also.
for those that cannot write a plugin, there is a bounty system in which you can offer money for someone else to write it for you. and beyond that, if there is a major change or a business level plugin that needs to be made, the core developers offer paid support that means they will dedicate time to working on the request with the final product rolling back to the free version of the product. EVERYONE benefits from the deal and actually I find it helps make a tighter support community in general.
at that point, its the admins fault for running an enterprise with split-horizon DNS setup yet maintaining a crappy NAT firewall. there are free firewalls (software is free, still need hardware) that are enterprise level such as pfSense, so no excuse for the admin.
whether or not you have a NAT firewall is irrelevant to the setup i described. It does not have any effect on a split-horizon DNS setup.
and OpenDNS is a no more bigger target than nailing the DNS servers for comcast or even a root level system. OpenDNS actively scrubs their records of malicious websites and malsites.
whatever DNS server you are using for inside your corporate network to resolve internet domains should be set up to forward to OpenDNS instead of your ISP's DNS servers so that your employees will benefit from the overall idea behind OpenDNS as well as the fact of having an almost 100% guaranteed secure DNS system. Your external DNS servers should be patched so that they do not become hijacked.
they got rid of the 'My' prefix in Vista. I guess they treat it like the unwelcome stepchild.
"98, yeah that's My Computer, same for 2000 and XP. Now Vista.......um....they can have that one"
according to my wife, the 'i' in all the apple products stands for "idiot" since the consumer is stupid enough to pay more money for less hardware than the other competitors in the market.
I use pfSense as my firewall. its FreeBSD based software that uses OpenBSD'd pf to handle connections. I used this to replace a linksys router that would die under the load that BitTorrent would stress on it. I now have QoS set up so that BitTorrent and other file sharing protocols are given THE lowest priority. you can also dedicate bandwidth for VoIP. Have had zero issues since switching over.
comcast where I live broadcasts in both digital and analog. any analog cable ready tv will work, but if you have a digi-cable ready tv or a digital box, you get the same channels completely interference free. I noticed this when the cable box was showing the sub 100 channels a whole 2 seconds ahead of cable ready.
since the PS2, to play PS1 games on the newer systems it wa entirely a software emulation. there is no hardware emulation hence why PS1 games should play identically between the hardware and software based PS3. the hardware emulation was that the PS3 had an Emotion Engine Chip (PS2 processor) next to the Cell proc. Every system software update, it makes the software emulation better anyway so just because you cant play a PS2 game on it now doesnt mean you will never be able to. Many of us still have our PS2's anyway.
the only reason was that sony said they didnt want "questionable stuff" on their format. there are pornos being released on both. actually the FIRST video released on both formats was a porno.
amazing what lengths they will go thru to try and push a peripheral that uses a dying format. more and more places are going bluray only and microsofts effort to fight back is with a $20 pricebreak. this would go right on my self next to my Sega Genesis-32x-CD.
i think what most people arent getting is that 8 bit color supports 256 shades or levels of each color.
256Red*256Green*256Blue=16777216colors. 6 bit color only supports 64 shades for each color 64R*64G*64B=262114 colors.
using dithering is a cheapo way to fix the problem like they said with an illusion by screwing up the surrounding pixels to make it blend better and turning them more into macro pixels, in essence, lowering the total color resolution. the 8 bit alpha blending doesnt really play a part in the number of colors the monitor can display. what i like is my videocards support of 10 bit colors for 1073741824 possible colors with DVI stemming from the 1024 levels of color shading. if yer gonna dither, do it on a 8 bit display.
the school system i used to work for had it solved pretty smartly. the bulk of the elementary schools were divided between admins. about 4-5 schools were the responsability of one admin from the central office. if work became heavy he could pull a fellow admin from another set of schools to help cover/assist. for bigger elementary schools, all middle and high schools, they have a dedicated on site admin.
back to the multi-school admins. they usually had someone onsite, usually a media librarian, who had basic tech knowledge to do a preliminary level of service, mostly for stuff like basic desktops, leaving the more serious computer/server problems for the main admin.
you wont get an immediate response, but it does lend to a pretty balanced response time with lower budget costs.
your best bet is to try and justify the cost of someone who works at the school full time to solve the problems over someone whos there on a very limited time basis
they only offered the drivers, and never the bundled software. I guess they figure drivers are enough to get it to work..if you really want the other software, you'll call and pay the 12 bucks for a replacement CD.
Straight from Wikipedia (which we all know is made up by 22 yr olds pretending to be doctors)
Sound Blaster PCI512
The Sound Blaster PCI512 was basically a lower-priced version of the Sound Blaster Live! Series, without the reprogramable ROM. Drivers are the same as the SB LIVE!.
The changes did not bypass the acceleration, it flat out removed the DirectX control links to said hardware acceleration due to the new sound subsystem. they pushed a lot of the acceleration back into software for the end effect of increasing the sound quality of cheapo onboard sound and the like. with the new subsystem, AC'97 chipsets have the ability to recreate full EAX type environments even though the drivers nor the hardware have EAX features in them. The end result is the sound subsystem can make better sound overall.
The downside is most older games only output crappy mid level sound if it cant do acceleration in DirectSound. OpenAL is a direct control of the soundcard that bypases all the sound subsystem controls and DirectX filters so it will still have full acceleration like the game developer wanted. Creative was at least smart enough to offer a nice Hack with ALchemy that will "transmute" the Direct3DSound calls to native OpenAL, giving games that did not originally have OAL support the ability to still offer hardware acceleration. it works for most games and the list keeps growing but it is literally nothing more than a hack. If creative got smart, they would include a D3dSound filter in their drivers that would do it automatically so it would do the transmute process automatically on the fly.
Not sure what time frame you're basing this off of but I know that the USA creative site has had drivers on their website for their current-at-the-time products since before XP came out. If yer referencing the Vista drivers for the X-fi, the beta drivers have been available since Vista Beta 1 and the retail drivers are out now. I definitely reccomend checking the forums on their site for workaround by other users. theres already a link on there to get the X-fi software for Vista from a 3rd party site that even Creative doesnt even provide yet (they just state that the software on the CD is incompatible.
also any backend development can be traced at http://preview.creative.com/
Slashdot Mirror
The other nasty one I've seen U3 thumb drives do is have a really weird formatting to them so that it makes the computer think it has a CD-ROM also on it for all the autorun stuff, "safetly" in a read-only partition, with the rest of the media being for storage, and the only way to fix it is to use said software in the read-only part to format the whole drive as storage media. cant even use any OS utilities to do it. so theres a loophole to get around the autorun already
I actually do look at slashdot with lynx sometimes. especially when im bogging my computer down with needless compiling.
look up the Moonlight project. its a Silverlight implementation for *nix that is being partially supported by MS.
If you use NTFS, it already supports encryption all the way down to the file level.
I find it odd that they used the linux implementation to mount UFS instead of the FreeBSD version which OSX(Darwin) is based upon already
This is actually why i like the model that the pfSense developers use. the entire program is free and opensource. they have a couple plugins that they made, and other authors are more than welcome to write their own plugin also. for those that cannot write a plugin, there is a bounty system in which you can offer money for someone else to write it for you. and beyond that, if there is a major change or a business level plugin that needs to be made, the core developers offer paid support that means they will dedicate time to working on the request with the final product rolling back to the free version of the product. EVERYONE benefits from the deal and actually I find it helps make a tighter support community in general.
at that point, its the admins fault for running an enterprise with split-horizon DNS setup yet maintaining a crappy NAT firewall. there are free firewalls (software is free, still need hardware) that are enterprise level such as pfSense, so no excuse for the admin.
whether or not you have a NAT firewall is irrelevant to the setup i described. It does not have any effect on a split-horizon DNS setup. and OpenDNS is a no more bigger target than nailing the DNS servers for comcast or even a root level system. OpenDNS actively scrubs their records of malicious websites and malsites.
whatever DNS server you are using for inside your corporate network to resolve internet domains should be set up to forward to OpenDNS instead of your ISP's DNS servers so that your employees will benefit from the overall idea behind OpenDNS as well as the fact of having an almost 100% guaranteed secure DNS system. Your external DNS servers should be patched so that they do not become hijacked.
they got rid of the 'My' prefix in Vista. I guess they treat it like the unwelcome stepchild. "98, yeah that's My Computer, same for 2000 and XP. Now Vista.......um....they can have that one"
according to my wife, the 'i' in all the apple products stands for "idiot" since the consumer is stupid enough to pay more money for less hardware than the other competitors in the market.
I use pfSense as my firewall. its FreeBSD based software that uses OpenBSD'd pf to handle connections. I used this to replace a linksys router that would die under the load that BitTorrent would stress on it. I now have QoS set up so that BitTorrent and other file sharing protocols are given THE lowest priority. you can also dedicate bandwidth for VoIP. Have had zero issues since switching over.
comcast where I live broadcasts in both digital and analog. any analog cable ready tv will work, but if you have a digi-cable ready tv or a digital box, you get the same channels completely interference free. I noticed this when the cable box was showing the sub 100 channels a whole 2 seconds ahead of cable ready.
since the PS2, to play PS1 games on the newer systems it wa entirely a software emulation. there is no hardware emulation hence why PS1 games should play identically between the hardware and software based PS3. the hardware emulation was that the PS3 had an Emotion Engine Chip (PS2 processor) next to the Cell proc. Every system software update, it makes the software emulation better anyway so just because you cant play a PS2 game on it now doesnt mean you will never be able to. Many of us still have our PS2's anyway.
the only reason was that sony said they didnt want "questionable stuff" on their format. there are pornos being released on both. actually the FIRST video released on both formats was a porno.
i dont really care as my tv upconverts EVERYTHING to 1080p for display. more and more GOOD modern HDTVs do this also.
amazing what lengths they will go thru to try and push a peripheral that uses a dying format. more and more places are going bluray only and microsofts effort to fight back is with a $20 pricebreak. this would go right on my self next to my Sega Genesis-32x-CD.
i think what most people arent getting is that 8 bit color supports 256 shades or levels of each color. 256Red*256Green*256Blue=16777216colors. 6 bit color only supports 64 shades for each color 64R*64G*64B=262114 colors. using dithering is a cheapo way to fix the problem like they said with an illusion by screwing up the surrounding pixels to make it blend better and turning them more into macro pixels, in essence, lowering the total color resolution. the 8 bit alpha blending doesnt really play a part in the number of colors the monitor can display. what i like is my videocards support of 10 bit colors for 1073741824 possible colors with DVI stemming from the 1024 levels of color shading. if yer gonna dither, do it on a 8 bit display.
the school system i used to work for had it solved pretty smartly. the bulk of the elementary schools were divided between admins. about 4-5 schools were the responsability of one admin from the central office. if work became heavy he could pull a fellow admin from another set of schools to help cover/assist. for bigger elementary schools, all middle and high schools, they have a dedicated on site admin. back to the multi-school admins. they usually had someone onsite, usually a media librarian, who had basic tech knowledge to do a preliminary level of service, mostly for stuff like basic desktops, leaving the more serious computer/server problems for the main admin. you wont get an immediate response, but it does lend to a pretty balanced response time with lower budget costs. your best bet is to try and justify the cost of someone who works at the school full time to solve the problems over someone whos there on a very limited time basis
in BeOS, there were some creative kernel system calls. My favorite was to check is_computer_on_fire() http://www.eeggs.com/items/15121.html
they only offered the drivers, and never the bundled software. I guess they figure drivers are enough to get it to work..if you really want the other software, you'll call and pay the 12 bucks for a replacement CD.
was there a difference between the PCI 512 and a PCI Live 512?
The changes did not bypass the acceleration, it flat out removed the DirectX control links to said hardware acceleration due to the new sound subsystem. they pushed a lot of the acceleration back into software for the end effect of increasing the sound quality of cheapo onboard sound and the like. with the new subsystem, AC'97 chipsets have the ability to recreate full EAX type environments even though the drivers nor the hardware have EAX features in them. The end result is the sound subsystem can make better sound overall. The downside is most older games only output crappy mid level sound if it cant do acceleration in DirectSound. OpenAL is a direct control of the soundcard that bypases all the sound subsystem controls and DirectX filters so it will still have full acceleration like the game developer wanted. Creative was at least smart enough to offer a nice Hack with ALchemy that will "transmute" the Direct3DSound calls to native OpenAL, giving games that did not originally have OAL support the ability to still offer hardware acceleration. it works for most games and the list keeps growing but it is literally nothing more than a hack. If creative got smart, they would include a D3dSound filter in their drivers that would do it automatically so it would do the transmute process automatically on the fly.
Not sure what time frame you're basing this off of but I know that the USA creative site has had drivers on their website for their current-at-the-time products since before XP came out. If yer referencing the Vista drivers for the X-fi, the beta drivers have been available since Vista Beta 1 and the retail drivers are out now. I definitely reccomend checking the forums on their site for workaround by other users. theres already a link on there to get the X-fi software for Vista from a 3rd party site that even Creative doesnt even provide yet (they just state that the software on the CD is incompatible. also any backend development can be traced at http://preview.creative.com/