I'm seriously starting to look at Macs as well. Linux needs constant tweaking to keep it running properly, and Windows 10 is ugly and filled with spying features.
I doubt anyone is suggesting blinking LEDs actually cause the problem (dear God, I hope not).
The LEDs can make the people imagine that there are "harmful electromagnetic waves" present. Thus, the LEDs would actually cause the problem, but mentally.
Solution: make devices with just a simple power LED in concealment somewhere back of the device, or allow the blinking LEDs to be toggled on/off.
We forget now, but it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code. They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink, as the animation would have increased the memory usage of the OS!
What the heck are you talking about.:)
You needed at least 32 MB to not lose your mental sanity, and Windows 95 is one of the most bloated monsters in the history of computer software.
Or, how about open source food? How can I know if the restaurant puts malicious components in the food? I can't, unless I can see the original precise recipe and audit it before ordering anything. Also, I must be able to trust the packager (the cook) to not slip anything nasty in.
Yes, but it can do more damage to compressed memory. Let's say that your compressed memory says "repeat number 126 seven times". Now that value 126 gets corrupted, and it becomes, say 94. Now when the memory is uncompressed, you get 94 seven times. The error is expanded sevenfold.
Okay, do this experiment. Install a Linux distro on any PC. From the very beginning, keep a notebook on every little glitch you meet over the months. Anything that you have to manually hack together, every bug report that you have to send, and every weird error message that occurs. You'd be surprised.
Look, I don't care a dime about the repetitious Secure Boot rants. They are a secondary issue. I first want proper QA on the Linux desktop.
Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
It's really bad that one has to explicitly turn off things. At any point Microsoft can introduce a new evil feature and the user must be knowledgeable enough to go turn it off, or else he is screwed.
No. All datamining should be only enabled with my consent. In other words, it should be a whitelist, not a blacklist. I don't want to be turning knobs and plugging holes all the time.
"This paper describes the format of a Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT). The WPBT is a fixed Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) table that enables boot firmware to provide Windows with a platform binary that the operating system can execute. The binary handoff medium is physical memory, allowing the boot firmware to provide the platform binary without modifying the Windows image on disk. In the initial version, the WPBT simply contains a physical address pointer to a flat, Portable Executable (PE) image that has been copied to physical memory. The WPBT is extensible, allowing the layout of published platform binaries to be more complex in future versions and allowing the support of more than one binary type.
It is expected that the binary pointed to by the WPBT is part of the boot firmware ROM image. The binary can be shadowed to physical memory as part of the initial bootstrap of the boot firmware, or it can be loaded into physical memory by extensible boot firmware code prior to executing any operating system code. A boot firmware component would create the WPBT based on the location of the platform binary. During operating system initialization, Windows will read the WPBT to obtain the physical memory location of the platform binary. In the first version, the binary is required to be a native, user-mode application that is executed by the Windows Session Manager during operating system initialization. Windows will write the flat image to disk, and the Session Manager will launch the process. Windows may reclaim the physical memory described in the WPBT.
If Windows observes a WPBT during operating system initialization, it will attempt to use an ACPI control method to communicate binary execution status back to the platform."
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh...Twitter is about following celebrities
Works great for keeping up on news headlines as well. It's like a modernized RSS reader.
Microsoft didn't shun back from destroying the then largest mobile phone vendor, Nokia.
Nokia destroyed itself by trucking on with crusty Symbian for too long. The Microsoft deal happened long time after that.
I'm seriously starting to look at Macs as well. Linux needs constant tweaking to keep it running properly, and Windows 10 is ugly and filled with spying features.
It's just a WebView component embedded inside a web page.
No disagreement there, but it still is higher quality than Linux.
On the desktop Windows 10 is much higher quality than Linux.
Works every time, eh? Sure, if you fix a million of glitches first and after that babysit the constantly breaking system.
I doubt anyone is suggesting blinking LEDs actually cause the problem (dear God, I hope not).
The LEDs can make the people imagine that there are "harmful electromagnetic waves" present. Thus, the LEDs would actually cause the problem, but mentally.
Solution: make devices with just a simple power LED in concealment somewhere back of the device, or allow the blinking LEDs to be toggled on/off.
I had 16MB RAM and it ran like complete garbage.
We forget now, but it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code. They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink, as the animation would have increased the memory usage of the OS!
What the heck are you talking about. :)
You needed at least 32 MB to not lose your mental sanity, and Windows 95 is one of the most bloated monsters in the history of computer software.
Can't help it, bub.
Where is this classic ALT-xxx functionality handled, BTW?
OS, BIOS, KB controller?
As long as you type fast enough for your needs, who cares? I've known a couple of two finger typists who were plenty fast.
Yeah, but it looks kind of amateurish. It's like eating with chopsticks so that you hold one stick with left hand and the other one with right hand.
Or, how about open source food? How can I know if the restaurant puts malicious components in the food? I can't, unless I can see the original precise recipe and audit it before ordering anything. Also, I must be able to trust the packager (the cook) to not slip anything nasty in.
Hahhah! Man, that sounds ridiculous. :D Create a video of you doing that and put it up in YouTube.
Any experiences on WPS Office for Linux? Better or worse than LibreOffice?
Yes, but it can do more damage to compressed memory. Let's say that your compressed memory says "repeat number 126 seven times". Now that value 126 gets corrupted, and it becomes, say 94. Now when the memory is uncompressed, you get 94 seven times. The error is expanded sevenfold.
Wouldn't the sandbox mechanism protect the user in more recent versions of IE?
Okay, do this experiment. Install a Linux distro on any PC. From the very beginning, keep a notebook on every little glitch you meet over the months. Anything that you have to manually hack together, every bug report that you have to send, and every weird error message that occurs. You'd be surprised.
Look, I don't care a dime about the repetitious Secure Boot rants. They are a secondary issue. I first want proper QA on the Linux desktop.
I do not think that the latest version of Windows can be called "predictable", as it forces all updates to its users.
That does not make Linux any better!
Linux is too glitchy and unpredictable to be a realistic competitor on the x86 desktop PC market.
Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
It's really bad that one has to explicitly turn off things. At any point Microsoft can introduce a new evil feature and the user must be knowledgeable enough to go turn it off, or else he is screwed.
No. All datamining should be only enabled with my consent. In other words, it should be a whitelist, not a blacklist. I don't want to be turning knobs and plugging holes all the time.
Is the datamining crap turned off in the Enterprise edition of Windows 10?
This is actually a mechanism called Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT).
More information can be found in the Microsoft WPBT whitepaper:
"This paper describes the format of a Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT). The WPBT is a fixed Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) table that enables boot firmware to provide Windows with a platform binary that the operating system can execute. The binary handoff medium is physical memory, allowing the boot firmware to provide the platform binary without modifying the Windows image on disk. In the initial version, the WPBT simply contains a physical address pointer to a flat, Portable Executable (PE) image that has been copied to physical memory. The WPBT is extensible, allowing the layout of published platform binaries to be more complex in future versions and allowing the support of more than one binary type.
It is expected that the binary pointed to by the WPBT is part of the boot firmware ROM image. The binary can be shadowed to physical memory as part of the initial bootstrap of the boot firmware, or it can be loaded into physical memory by extensible boot firmware code prior to executing any operating system code. A boot firmware component would create the WPBT based on the location of the platform binary. During operating system initialization, Windows will read the WPBT to obtain the physical memory location of the platform binary. In the first version, the binary is required to be a native, user-mode application that is executed by the Windows Session Manager during operating system initialization. Windows will write the flat image to disk, and the Session Manager will launch the process. Windows may reclaim the physical memory described in the WPBT.
If Windows observes a WPBT during operating system initialization, it will attempt to use an ACPI control method to communicate binary execution status back to the platform."
The headline clearly says that the problem only affects some users.