I think that even though the anti-malware industry surely tries to play fast and loose with the virus statistics and spread FUD for the less-vulnerable-by-design OSes (as we have seen in this article) that is not malicious at all- it's simply marketing. Just about every company (and especially politicians) everywhere will spin the facts to "create the need" for their products or services. However, I do not think that any anti-malware companies make viruses. That's a very good one for the conspiracy theorists as it certainly is possible and would be extremely lucrative, but the writers sometimes get caught. If a McAfee or Symantec got caught writing and releasing viruses, that would be all she wrote for the company's future- and not to mention that they are liable for any and all damages and lost time/income due to their virus infecting computer systems. Bottom line is that it's too big of a liability for them to make viruses. Besides, there are MORE than enough bored 28-year-olds living in their parents' basements to supply the world with viruses.
Huh, I wonder how long until somebody takes the AACS decryption method off of that 256MB flash disk on that embedded Red Hat-based HD-DVD controller and lets the rest of us not running embedded Linux on that particular hardware play HD-DVDs?
If you remember, there used to be two DVD formats too, and each required a different player. Today's combo drives simply can use either format at a time, and be able to work with both formats, not using a mixture of both of them.
However, I do bet that in a couple of years, there will be combination Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drives unless one format really wins out. But I think that won't happen as there are too many companies on both sides that are getting royalties from discs and players to let "their format" die off.
Well, since there aren't even sanctioned ways to play *regular* DVDs on a Linux computer, expect the lack of support to continue. The *AAs want to be able to dictate what you can and cannot do with digital media down to the last inch with DRM, and most of the FS/OSS people are vehemently against these imposed restrictions (read: GPL v3.) Both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are expected to be encumbered extremely heavily with DRM, so the most the FS/OSS crowd will do is possibly be able to read and write blank Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, mush like current DVDs.
There are a lot of regular ATX-format DP boards. I have built computers with them, and they do fit in a regular mid-tower ATX case. Granted, it may be a pretty tight fit dependent on the board layout, size of the GPU (if present) HDDs and optical drives, but they do fit.
I hear you there, buddy. When you are installing X and your WM (or have to recompile everything after a major GCC upgrade) the more cores the merrier. I have an X2 4200+ and it is fast- but it's more fast in it only takes me 12 hours to recompile everything instead of 2-3 days on my old P4 2.2A machine. I'd have gotten an Opteron DP board and two 265s or 270s, but I'd have spent more just on the CPUs and board than I spent on my whole machine, $530 20" LCD included:(
Something like this would have been a godsend. But hey, maybe when I upgrade in a few years, I can get a pair of 8-core chips in a DP setup like this 4x4 platform. Then I can compile the system in an hour and life will be good. Not to mention it will send me to the top of my FAH team in a week:)
The writers at Toms' get paid by the page. They routinely write 30-page-plus novels about tech topics. Their most lengthy that I could remember is a 61-page yarn about overclocking a Pentium D 805 to 4.1 GHz.
Ubuntu's installer pretty much *IS* Debian's, save for a few slightly different options (Ubuntu doesn't use select packages or set a root password.) It is similar down to the little yellow "Debian Installer" text at the upper right corner being changed to "Ubuntu Installer." It's an okay installer, so I guess why muck around a lot with it?
I've installed and am running Gentoo. If you can see the handbook, it's not that bad to install. It maybe takes 45 minutes if you use a stage on your install CD (I run the AMD64 version, I don't think x86 has the stages on the Universal CD.) Probably the hardest thing about Gentoo is that it seems as if it could be very easy to foul up your installation if you goof with Portage too much, especially the etc-update and emerge --depclean tools. I'm careful and haven't broken anything, and I haven't heard of anybody crapping up their installation that way, but it's like a chainsaw- you know that it can cause damage if you're not careful but the odds are low that you'll get hurt if you're not being stupid or unaware. I imagine that compile times on older machines would be pretty long- my Athlon X2 4200+ took roughly a day from start to pretty much full-on KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, the whole shebang, and that's with MAKEOPTS="-j3."
Even with those things, Gentoo is probably the best OS I have ever used. I have not used any of the BSDs as I, well, just haven't used any of them. They have many of the same traits as Linux- they use the same KDE, similar tools, etc., so I never really looked at them as I came from Windows looking for a better OS, and Linux was the first thing I found and I was happy with it.
Hmm. Most of the people I know that got DWI'd spent at least a few months in the pokey. One, who got DWI'd twice, spent over a year in jail as this was just after a spate of drunk-driving deaths in my community.
And what kind of sentences did Stewart and Michelle Rodriguez get compared to if you or I did insider trading or were DWI? My point exactly. At least Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, even though they are well-known, are reviled enough to be up for >200 and ~40 years of jail time, respectively.
Well, apparently just by reading it, you agree to the license:
Microsoft Confidential (c) 2005-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. By accessing, using, or providing feedback on these materials, you agree to the attached license agreement.
I learned the same way- by doing. I have probably ruined installs of most every OS from DOS 4.00 on a 286 on up to 2.6-kernel Linux distribution this way, but since I knew how to back up data, I learned from every mistake and was able to recover quickly.
There are only a few rules to using a computer: 1. Back up anything and everything that want to keep if anything happened. 2. Make sure you have copies of your OS and also programs and their reg keys (if you use proprietary apps) on hand. 3. Don't click on popups and keep your OS patched and have a firewall, etc. 4. If you are doing something that messes around with the OS or programs, read the instructions. 5. If you screw up anything, it's okay as long as you followed Rules #1 and 2 as you are only out a little bit of time as you can recover!
I have had good luck with both several Intel chipsets (845MP, 855GM, E7530) and NVIDIA's Nforce4 chipset in Linux. Some earlier versions of the "forcedeth" driver had issues, but the current one is very stable. I have never had chipset-related troubles in Linux. The only problem I have ever even had with hardware is a Windows PocketPC that won't sync with SynCE, but that's probably a different case...
You won't see a card with a non-OTA HDTV tuner in it because HDTV is the Sacred Cash Cow of the Networks and needs to be protected at all costs from the Evil Computer Pirates by loads of DRM. You might see them as standalone boxes that require authentication tokens like CableCards and such, but they will probably use an encrypted cable connection to a proprietary app on the computer with a TPM that only makes DRMed files.
I only have one card in my computer, a little PCIe GeForce 6200TC running my two monitors in spanned dual-head mode. The NF4 chipset provides about everything else I need- 4 SATA-300 ports, 2 IDE channels, GigE, 8 USB ports, IEEE 1394a, and fairly decent AC97 audio. I have no complaints with it as everything works fine with it as any kernel >= 2.6.10 will detect and properly set up and run all of the parts.
Just about every station I pass has both gasoline and diesel fuel. Only the Casey's do not have diesel. About half a dozen stations in town even have E85 ethanol fuel, but that isn't very common outside of the rural or butting-up-against-rural-areas of the Midwest. One even has propane, but that's REALLY uncommon.
This is true. My brother was in China and got some (legal) DVDs that are Region 6. They would not play in my DVD player nor in his Windows computer. They played perfectly in my Linux box with Kaffeine (Xine engine.) This is a very new computer, so I guess the drives are RPC2, but the DVDs played perfectly nonetheless with no firmware flashing or other nonsense.
I can achieve a 55-60MB sustained write speed (granted, it was in making/transferring large files, not a lot of little ones) and ~70MB read speed on a single 74GB WD Raptor. RAID0 does help with the speed, but it also 1/n the MTBF of the drives, so I wouldn't do it. But if I wanted to, I could simply get two more Raptors and hook them into the spare two SATA ports on my board and let my NForce4 chipset control them in RAID 0 and do so with a much higher transfer rate than a PCI bus can support. 2 WD Raptors will saturate a PCI bus, the NF4 SATA controller runs off of PCIe lanes, which are much faster.
Why is this post marked a troll? I think the parent makes a very good point about the fact that it could happen. Do I think that the Chinese might try to bug a computer that they ship to the U.S. government? Maybe. Do I think it would be successful? Nope. It would have to "call home" and the admins on the government's network would see it if it wasn't already blocked by the firewalls. So the likelihood of this happening is slim, but it *could* happen.
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I think that even though the anti-malware industry surely tries to play fast and loose with the virus statistics and spread FUD for the less-vulnerable-by-design OSes (as we have seen in this article) that is not malicious at all- it's simply marketing. Just about every company (and especially politicians) everywhere will spin the facts to "create the need" for their products or services. However, I do not think that any anti-malware companies make viruses. That's a very good one for the conspiracy theorists as it certainly is possible and would be extremely lucrative, but the writers sometimes get caught. If a McAfee or Symantec got caught writing and releasing viruses, that would be all she wrote for the company's future- and not to mention that they are liable for any and all damages and lost time/income due to their virus infecting computer systems. Bottom line is that it's too big of a liability for them to make viruses. Besides, there are MORE than enough bored 28-year-olds living in their parents' basements to supply the world with viruses.
Huh, I wonder how long until somebody takes the AACS decryption method off of that 256MB flash disk on that embedded Red Hat-based HD-DVD controller and lets the rest of us not running embedded Linux on that particular hardware play HD-DVDs?
If you remember, there used to be two DVD formats too, and each required a different player. Today's combo drives simply can use either format at a time, and be able to work with both formats, not using a mixture of both of them.
However, I do bet that in a couple of years, there will be combination Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drives unless one format really wins out. But I think that won't happen as there are too many companies on both sides that are getting royalties from discs and players to let "their format" die off.
Well, since there aren't even sanctioned ways to play *regular* DVDs on a Linux computer, expect the lack of support to continue. The *AAs want to be able to dictate what you can and cannot do with digital media down to the last inch with DRM, and most of the FS/OSS people are vehemently against these imposed restrictions (read: GPL v3.) Both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are expected to be encumbered extremely heavily with DRM, so the most the FS/OSS crowd will do is possibly be able to read and write blank Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, mush like current DVDs.
The first Xeon was a Pentium 2, not a Pentium 3. The P2 Xeon was a P2 with 1MB or 2MB L2 cache.
There are a lot of regular ATX-format DP boards. I have built computers with them, and they do fit in a regular mid-tower ATX case. Granted, it may be a pretty tight fit dependent on the board layout, size of the GPU (if present) HDDs and optical drives, but they do fit.
I hear you there, buddy. When you are installing X and your WM (or have to recompile everything after a major GCC upgrade) the more cores the merrier. I have an X2 4200+ and it is fast- but it's more fast in it only takes me 12 hours to recompile everything instead of 2-3 days on my old P4 2.2A machine. I'd have gotten an Opteron DP board and two 265s or 270s, but I'd have spent more just on the CPUs and board than I spent on my whole machine, $530 20" LCD included :(
:)
Something like this would have been a godsend. But hey, maybe when I upgrade in a few years, I can get a pair of 8-core chips in a DP setup like this 4x4 platform. Then I can compile the system in an hour and life will be good. Not to mention it will send me to the top of my FAH team in a week
What, a Cray?
The writers at Toms' get paid by the page. They routinely write 30-page-plus novels about tech topics. Their most lengthy that I could remember is a 61-page yarn about overclocking a Pentium D 805 to 4.1 GHz.
Ubuntu's installer pretty much *IS* Debian's, save for a few slightly different options (Ubuntu doesn't use select packages or set a root password.) It is similar down to the little yellow "Debian Installer" text at the upper right corner being changed to "Ubuntu Installer." It's an okay installer, so I guess why muck around a lot with it?
I've installed and am running Gentoo. If you can see the handbook, it's not that bad to install. It maybe takes 45 minutes if you use a stage on your install CD (I run the AMD64 version, I don't think x86 has the stages on the Universal CD.) Probably the hardest thing about Gentoo is that it seems as if it could be very easy to foul up your installation if you goof with Portage too much, especially the etc-update and emerge --depclean tools. I'm careful and haven't broken anything, and I haven't heard of anybody crapping up their installation that way, but it's like a chainsaw- you know that it can cause damage if you're not careful but the odds are low that you'll get hurt if you're not being stupid or unaware. I imagine that compile times on older machines would be pretty long- my Athlon X2 4200+ took roughly a day from start to pretty much full-on KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, the whole shebang, and that's with MAKEOPTS="-j3."
Even with those things, Gentoo is probably the best OS I have ever used. I have not used any of the BSDs as I, well, just haven't used any of them. They have many of the same traits as Linux- they use the same KDE, similar tools, etc., so I never really looked at them as I came from Windows looking for a better OS, and Linux was the first thing I found and I was happy with it.
Because the FBI is busy looking for Jimmy Hoffa.
Hmm. Most of the people I know that got DWI'd spent at least a few months in the pokey. One, who got DWI'd twice, spent over a year in jail as this was just after a spate of drunk-driving deaths in my community.
And what kind of sentences did Stewart and Michelle Rodriguez get compared to if you or I did insider trading or were DWI? My point exactly. At least Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, even though they are well-known, are reviled enough to be up for >200 and ~40 years of jail time, respectively.
Well, apparently just by reading it, you agree to the license:
Microsoft Confidential (c) 2005-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. By accessing, using, or providing feedback on these materials, you agree to the attached license agreement.
The parent's statement sounds eerily familiar, except "Vista" is substituted for "Linux."
I learned the same way- by doing. I have probably ruined installs of most every OS from DOS 4.00 on a 286 on up to 2.6-kernel Linux distribution this way, but since I knew how to back up data, I learned from every mistake and was able to recover quickly.
There are only a few rules to using a computer:
1. Back up anything and everything that want to keep if anything happened.
2. Make sure you have copies of your OS and also programs and their reg keys (if you use proprietary apps) on hand.
3. Don't click on popups and keep your OS patched and have a firewall, etc.
4. If you are doing something that messes around with the OS or programs, read the instructions.
5. If you screw up anything, it's okay as long as you followed Rules #1 and 2 as you are only out a little bit of time as you can recover!
Emacs? Come on- everybody who's computer-literate uses vi.
Oh, somebody had to say it. I actually use GNU Nano as my console-based text editor.
I have had good luck with both several Intel chipsets (845MP, 855GM, E7530) and NVIDIA's Nforce4 chipset in Linux. Some earlier versions of the "forcedeth" driver had issues, but the current one is very stable. I have never had chipset-related troubles in Linux. The only problem I have ever even had with hardware is a Windows PocketPC that won't sync with SynCE, but that's probably a different case...
You won't see a card with a non-OTA HDTV tuner in it because HDTV is the Sacred Cash Cow of the Networks and needs to be protected at all costs from the Evil Computer Pirates by loads of DRM. You might see them as standalone boxes that require authentication tokens like CableCards and such, but they will probably use an encrypted cable connection to a proprietary app on the computer with a TPM that only makes DRMed files.
I only have one card in my computer, a little PCIe GeForce 6200TC running my two monitors in spanned dual-head mode. The NF4 chipset provides about everything else I need- 4 SATA-300 ports, 2 IDE channels, GigE, 8 USB ports, IEEE 1394a, and fairly decent AC97 audio. I have no complaints with it as everything works fine with it as any kernel >= 2.6.10 will detect and properly set up and run all of the parts.
Just about every station I pass has both gasoline and diesel fuel. Only the Casey's do not have diesel. About half a dozen stations in town even have E85 ethanol fuel, but that isn't very common outside of the rural or butting-up-against-rural-areas of the Midwest. One even has propane, but that's REALLY uncommon.
This is true. My brother was in China and got some (legal) DVDs that are Region 6. They would not play in my DVD player nor in his Windows computer. They played perfectly in my Linux box with Kaffeine (Xine engine.) This is a very new computer, so I guess the drives are RPC2, but the DVDs played perfectly nonetheless with no firmware flashing or other nonsense.
I run the AMD64 version of Gentoo 2006.0. The controller works flawlessly.
I can achieve a 55-60MB sustained write speed (granted, it was in making/transferring large files, not a lot of little ones) and ~70MB read speed on a single 74GB WD Raptor. RAID0 does help with the speed, but it also 1/n the MTBF of the drives, so I wouldn't do it. But if I wanted to, I could simply get two more Raptors and hook them into the spare two SATA ports on my board and let my NForce4 chipset control them in RAID 0 and do so with a much higher transfer rate than a PCI bus can support. 2 WD Raptors will saturate a PCI bus, the NF4 SATA controller runs off of PCIe lanes, which are much faster.
Why is this post marked a troll? I think the parent makes a very good point about the fact that it could happen. Do I think that the Chinese might try to bug a computer that they ship to the U.S. government? Maybe. Do I think it would be successful? Nope. It would have to "call home" and the admins on the government's network would see it if it wasn't already blocked by the firewalls. So the likelihood of this happening is slim, but it *could* happen.