You can trim start-up times by disabling the use of a Java Runtime Environment by going to the "Options" menu and then clicking on "Java" in the option tree. It trimmed my start-up times down from about 10 seconds to about 6 seconds (I have old hardware.) If Java is broken, it takes 60-90 seconds to start OpenOffice and this fix will trim that down to less than a tenth of that.
I see it as simply Microsoft saying what they need to improve on. And they are pretty much right with what they say, but it will be a looooong road to get there. I believe that they should have put a big security goal in there- if not for Vista (it is pretty much already finalized), then for the next version, "Blackcomb," to meet certain security goals. There should be enough time to thoroughly rewrite the OS between now and 2008-2009 when it is supposed to ship. I firmly belive that needs to be done or Microsoft will never solve their security problems. Major rewrites have been successfully done before- Macintosh switched to UNIX and kept nothing from OS 9 and they did fine. The same holds true with Windows NT- it doesn't share than much with Windows 9x/DOS.
Then get a notebook that is the right screen size and do not worry about it. If you want a smaller notebook, get one with a 12," 13.3," 14," or even 15.4" screen and not a huge 17" one. And also, the Dell has two screen options: 1440x900 and 1920x1200. The latter is much higher than the Apple offers.
Heck, my 3-year-old, 8.6-pound Gateway can surf the web wirelessly for nearly four hours on a single charge too and it has a frigging P4 and a 15.7" display in it. If you said six or seven hours, that would be more respectable. 4-5 hours is pretty much standard anymore.
Well, what your laptop says about your sense of style really does not matter if you show up to class in an old faded T-shirt and sweatpants now, does it?
Re:I thought iPod was the lesser player...
on
iPod Owners Not Thieves
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It also can't play a single one of the ~20GB of FLAC files on my hard drive. AFAIK, the only player that can without a FW hack is the Rio Karma. The playback of FLAC Audio files requires the use of a floating-point processor in the player,which computers have had since the Intel 80486DX but most portables do not since MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC does not require it. It adds cost to add the FPU to the embedded chip, so FLAC (and Ogg Vorbis) support has been slow.
But ya know what? It's what I want and I'd never get a player that does not support the format. And before you say "Why don't you just re-encode to MP3 like everybody else," I use the format because it is of excellent quality, you can get the codecs for nothing (no licensing fees), you'll always be able to find some player or plugin to play it, and it does not have DRM.
I would be willing to bet it was somebody who was disgruntled over somebody who was paid to do so. And I would also think it more likely for somebody to do this on their own accord that if they were paid to. I say this because first, the coder is much more likely to get caught if there are multiple parties involved AND he would probably get a big reward from MSFT for turning the briber into the authorities. Also, there is a "kill switch" to the plans for the backdoor if only the coder knows. He can easily back out by just doing nothing, unless the backdoor happens to get discovered. And if it does, the odds he is linked to it are small and even then, he can deny everything as an error because there are no witnesses to say otherwise.
Well, you can have local root access without human (legitimate user) intervention by sticking in a live CD. You get root access to the hard drive with no apps running (the installed OS is off) and no legitimate user interaction (because they are not there.)
But yes, I would agree with you that the security landscape changes a lot when the exploits are local-only and almost remote exploits that give the attacker any control on the system are worse than almost any local vulnerability. It becomes an inside job and is *much* easier to catch the perpetrator than if it's somebody sitting in an apartment in Hong Kong on a stolen Net connection cracking your computer.
You have an interesting point with the dedicated DRM appliance. I actually see the entertainment PCs and HTPCs becoming appliances like a cable box: a sealed box that you don't own and aren't to modify. You pay for access to the content like you do for cable TV or satellite- per month or possibly per-view and the content comes in through an encrypted channel like it does to the satellite or cable box. I don't have too big of a problem with that as I couldn't care less about one and would never get one. If people don't like it, they can get no-DRM files from an alternate provider that they can play on a computer than has no DRM.
That would be a good use of the technology, but it is sadly incompatible with the TPM standard. Why? Because then you could block all of the authentication used to verify your box is compliant and thus use a "hacked" box on the secure network. That would totally defeat the entire reason for TPM because you could defeat the copy protection.
I sure hope that if the TPM/DRM stuff gets passed, those who benefit from it (and it isn't the consumers) have to take responsibility for it as otherwise it would NEVER be on the users' machines in the first place. It is ridiculous to think that all of the consequences and none of the benefits should fall on the user. I'd think the first time that got challenged in court, it would fall down like a paper wall getting blasted with a fire hose.
Otherwise I am going to steal your new plasma TV from your house and if you don't have adequate security in your house to keep me from doing so, it's your fault and I get to keep the TV and not spend a second in jail for it.
The digital tax is a bad idea. They do that in Canada with all recordable CDs. But I use almost all of my CD-Rs to burn things like data backups and Linux ISOs- things that have nothing to do with music. I am not going to pay a tax for something that I am not using. The tax is a flawed idea because it assumes that all burnable CDs are being used to copy or burn music illegally, which is not true.
The only way DRM will increase music sales is by more or less guaranteeing the producer of the music 100% license enforcement on all computers that will play the music. This makes for a better environment to sell music in, but a worse one to buy it in. So I predict that if the DRM is very hard to crack, people will do a few things:
1. Download illegal copies that have been cracked. We're already starting to see this.
2. Buy fewer CDs if they don't work "correctly," i.e. you can't transfer them to an iPod or rip them to a hard drive or they damage your computer like the Sony discs.
3. Listen to music that has fewer restrictions on it, like online radio.
Either way, the studios shoot themselves in the foot. The fact of the matter is that fewer people will illegally procure music if the legal stuff is reasonably priced than if the penalties and restrictions keep going up. It's called the black market and it always gets a mention in the economics textbooks, which I suggest the **AAs read. And you can't simply arrest everybody that breaks the law by copying music because if you do, they will simply vote the laws down in one way or the other. The best way to make a buck is to make the customer want to buy your goods, not to threaten them into doing so.
a. A credit card disabling button for when she's at the mall.
b. A fast-forward button for when she's getting ready.
c. A mute button.
d. A stop button for when she's chewing you out.
e. A stop button for when she's nagging on you.
f. A temperature control to make her feel as warm as it actually is in the room.
g. A stop button for when she's gossiping with her girlfriends about how you have a hairy back or something else you'd rather not have everyone know.
h. Yes, that "on" button.
i. And finally, a rewind button to make her look as good as she did when she was 20.
I trust you that Dell has no preferred OS. They only sell hardware and couldn't care less if the computers had Windows, Linux, MacOS, no OS, or even Microsoft Bob pre-installed on them, as long as it was what people wanted. The only reason that you don't see them ship a whole lot of computers without Windows is that:
a. ***Most people use Windows and would not buy a computer without it on there.*** This is >90% of all people.
b. Most people who would run Linux would go find, get, and install their distribution of choice on their computer, so why would Dell make more costs for themselves by installing another OS for people who would do it anyway?
c. Microsoft makes almost all of its consumer sales dollars from OEM licensing agreements. Because (a) is true, MS could very easily raise per-unit licenses for Dell if they started shipping many no-OS making them less competitive with HP, et al.
d. MS could possibly sue Dell for inducing piracy because there would certainly be people who would buy a no-OS unit to save money and put a pirated Windows on it instead of a legal OS. I wouldn't put it past MS to do that and with the current legal climate being what it is, I bet they might even win.
e. On a smaller note, if Dell did ship Linux PCs, they would likely ship ones that come with support (i.e. SuSE, RHEL) so that they do not get saddled with trying to support it if they can at all help it. They would only ship one or two distros so they can avoid having to install each and every distro on each and every computer and make sure it works.The support is not free and so there would be a "SuSE tax" or a "Red Hat tax" that people would have to pay instead of a "Microsoft tax" if they wanted to run another distribution like Ubuntu or Debian.
So folks, if you buy from a big OEM, you're going to have to pay some sort of "tax" unless the DMCA and the Induce Act get repealed and everybody stops installing illegal copies of OSes onto computers. If you don't like it, build your own computer, buy one that is custom-built by a mom-and-pop store, or start your own shop.
I have a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine, but I only keep Windows around for two reasons:
1. File formats. Most of the Linux programs are very, very good about using formats correctly, but every so often there is a format (such as Quicktime, DRMed WMAs, or ActiveX scripts) that are expressly not compatible and require Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player, or Internet Explorer specifically to run. In the year and a half I have run Linux, I have had to do this about once.
2. Support issues- this is the big one. If there is ever a broken website, corrupted file, dead peripheral, Internet went out, or anything that you get and say, "hey this is broken," I GUARANTEE you if you mention Linux anywhere, it will be automatically a "Linux problem" regardless of what you say next. So I have to start up Windows and PROVE that it's not a "Linux problem." I will also group things that say "You must have Internet Explorer or Windows or Office to run" when it runs fine on Firefox, Linux, and OpenOffice into this category too. I have lost count of the number of websites that are "broken" when the default identification is set but miraculously work when I put the user agent as "IE 6.0 on XP."
Basically, I have a Windows partition around just so that people who have no clue will actually listen to me and not eye me like I'm in the bank with a black trenchcoat, a ski mask, and a piece of paper in my hand.
I bet most of that time you spent trying to get your ATI card to work in SuSE. I have the same distro and a supposedly "supported" Mobility M9 card and it does not work with the ATI drivers. I'd have gotten an nVidia card if I were you.
They would do much better to have separate copies of Windows optimized for each type of CPU sold today than to have a separate Mac version. There are a lot more Pentium Ms and Athlon 64s out there than there will be Macs...and if the OS was optimized for each architecture, it would run faster. Since we can't compile Windows ourselves, MS must do it for us. Just ask a Gentoo guy if his Linux runs faster than a default i586 version.
The biggest reason not to use IMAP is if you have/get/want to keep a lot of e-mails, especially if you have a quota on your account that isn't huge. I have the choice of IMAP or POP on my account and I always use POP as there is a 20MB limit on messages. I will generally get 20MB in a few weeks, sometimes in a few days. And I always seem to have to look for a message that I got a few months ago and had to delete because my inbox was too full, so I use POP.
However, I "cheat" with how I keep my e-mails. I have the OS installed on one partition and my documents on another. So if the OS needs to go bye-bye, I just reformat its partition (not the whole disk) and reinstall it. My files are still there safe and sound.
I use Kontact because I use KDE. You have to install half of KDE to get Kontact as it uses a *lot* of accessory apps, daemons, and the like. If I used Gnome or XFCE, I'd use Evolution. They are fairly similar- Evolution being a little bit more like Outlook and a little more professional (in my opinion) and Kontact is much more feature-filled as it has an RSS reader, built-in PDA sync program, a weather applet, etc. Both work very well, as does Thunderbird.
It seems very reasonable. My brother has a 1280x800 (16:10) display on a 12" widescreen and that's about as tiny as I would want. So would correlate to about 1440x900 in a 14" widescreen, and 1680x1050 in a 15.4" display as my maximum resolutions. I have a 15.7" 4:3 LCD on this laptop, and with it running at its native 1280x1024, it looks plenty big.
So, 1440x900 is very reasonable on that 15.4" widescreen display. If you want more, Dell has one 15.4" LCD that is 19**x14** for the really-want-to-squint crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
You can trim start-up times by disabling the use of a Java Runtime Environment by going to the "Options" menu and then clicking on "Java" in the option tree. It trimmed my start-up times down from about 10 seconds to about 6 seconds (I have old hardware.) If Java is broken, it takes 60-90 seconds to start OpenOffice and this fix will trim that down to less than a tenth of that.
I see it as simply Microsoft saying what they need to improve on. And they are pretty much right with what they say, but it will be a looooong road to get there. I believe that they should have put a big security goal in there- if not for Vista (it is pretty much already finalized), then for the next version, "Blackcomb," to meet certain security goals. There should be enough time to thoroughly rewrite the OS between now and 2008-2009 when it is supposed to ship. I firmly belive that needs to be done or Microsoft will never solve their security problems. Major rewrites have been successfully done before- Macintosh switched to UNIX and kept nothing from OS 9 and they did fine. The same holds true with Windows NT- it doesn't share than much with Windows 9x/DOS.
Hey, the government gets to do that with government employees and the GDP, why can't IBM say pretty much the same thing?
Yeah. You have to install lame and a bunch of libmad files to get things to work. But Ogg works out of the box and FLAC does too.
Then get a notebook that is the right screen size and do not worry about it. If you want a smaller notebook, get one with a 12," 13.3," 14," or even 15.4" screen and not a huge 17" one. And also, the Dell has two screen options: 1440x900 and 1920x1200. The latter is much higher than the Apple offers.
Heck, my 3-year-old, 8.6-pound Gateway can surf the web wirelessly for nearly four hours on a single charge too and it has a frigging P4 and a 15.7" display in it. If you said six or seven hours, that would be more respectable. 4-5 hours is pretty much standard anymore.
Well, what your laptop says about your sense of style really does not matter if you show up to class in an old faded T-shirt and sweatpants now, does it?
It also can't play a single one of the ~20GB of FLAC files on my hard drive. AFAIK, the only player that can without a FW hack is the Rio Karma. The playback of FLAC Audio files requires the use of a floating-point processor in the player ,which computers have had since the Intel 80486DX but most portables do not since MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC does not require it. It adds cost to add the FPU to the embedded chip, so FLAC (and Ogg Vorbis) support has been slow.
But ya know what? It's what I want and I'd never get a player that does not support the format. And before you say "Why don't you just re-encode to MP3 like everybody else," I use the format because it is of excellent quality, you can get the codecs for nothing (no licensing fees), you'll always be able to find some player or plugin to play it, and it does not have DRM.
Lame ain't an Apple product. Heck, Lame ain't even an MP3 encoder...
I would be willing to bet it was somebody who was disgruntled over somebody who was paid to do so. And I would also think it more likely for somebody to do this on their own accord that if they were paid to. I say this because first, the coder is much more likely to get caught if there are multiple parties involved AND he would probably get a big reward from MSFT for turning the briber into the authorities. Also, there is a "kill switch" to the plans for the backdoor if only the coder knows. He can easily back out by just doing nothing, unless the backdoor happens to get discovered. And if it does, the odds he is linked to it are small and even then, he can deny everything as an error because there are no witnesses to say otherwise.
Well, you can have local root access without human (legitimate user) intervention by sticking in a live CD. You get root access to the hard drive with no apps running (the installed OS is off) and no legitimate user interaction (because they are not there.)
But yes, I would agree with you that the security landscape changes a lot when the exploits are local-only and almost remote exploits that give the attacker any control on the system are worse than almost any local vulnerability. It becomes an inside job and is *much* easier to catch the perpetrator than if it's somebody sitting in an apartment in Hong Kong on a stolen Net connection cracking your computer.
You have an interesting point with the dedicated DRM appliance. I actually see the entertainment PCs and HTPCs becoming appliances like a cable box: a sealed box that you don't own and aren't to modify. You pay for access to the content like you do for cable TV or satellite- per month or possibly per-view and the content comes in through an encrypted channel like it does to the satellite or cable box. I don't have too big of a problem with that as I couldn't care less about one and would never get one. If people don't like it, they can get no-DRM files from an alternate provider that they can play on a computer than has no DRM.
That would be a good use of the technology, but it is sadly incompatible with the TPM standard. Why? Because then you could block all of the authentication used to verify your box is compliant and thus use a "hacked" box on the secure network. That would totally defeat the entire reason for TPM because you could defeat the copy protection.
I sure hope that if the TPM/DRM stuff gets passed, those who benefit from it (and it isn't the consumers) have to take responsibility for it as otherwise it would NEVER be on the users' machines in the first place. It is ridiculous to think that all of the consequences and none of the benefits should fall on the user. I'd think the first time that got challenged in court, it would fall down like a paper wall getting blasted with a fire hose.
Otherwise I am going to steal your new plasma TV from your house and if you don't have adequate security in your house to keep me from doing so, it's your fault and I get to keep the TV and not spend a second in jail for it.
The digital tax is a bad idea. They do that in Canada with all recordable CDs. But I use almost all of my CD-Rs to burn things like data backups and Linux ISOs- things that have nothing to do with music. I am not going to pay a tax for something that I am not using. The tax is a flawed idea because it assumes that all burnable CDs are being used to copy or burn music illegally, which is not true.
I think a few states' attorneys general went and tried to do just that with Sony.
The only way DRM will increase music sales is by more or less guaranteeing the producer of the music 100% license enforcement on all computers that will play the music. This makes for a better environment to sell music in, but a worse one to buy it in. So I predict that if the DRM is very hard to crack, people will do a few things:
1. Download illegal copies that have been cracked. We're already starting to see this.
2. Buy fewer CDs if they don't work "correctly," i.e. you can't transfer them to an iPod or rip them to a hard drive or they damage your computer like the Sony discs.
3. Listen to music that has fewer restrictions on it, like online radio.
Either way, the studios shoot themselves in the foot. The fact of the matter is that fewer people will illegally procure music if the legal stuff is reasonably priced than if the penalties and restrictions keep going up. It's called the black market and it always gets a mention in the economics textbooks, which I suggest the **AAs read. And you can't simply arrest everybody that breaks the law by copying music because if you do, they will simply vote the laws down in one way or the other. The best way to make a buck is to make the customer want to buy your goods, not to threaten them into doing so.
No, there needs to be several buttons:
a. A credit card disabling button for when she's at the mall.
b. A fast-forward button for when she's getting ready.
c. A mute button.
d. A stop button for when she's chewing you out.
e. A stop button for when she's nagging on you.
f. A temperature control to make her feel as warm as it actually is in the room.
g. A stop button for when she's gossiping with her girlfriends about how you have a hairy back or something else you'd rather not have everyone know.
h. Yes, that "on" button.
i. And finally, a rewind button to make her look as good as she did when she was 20.
I trust you that Dell has no preferred OS. They only sell hardware and couldn't care less if the computers had Windows, Linux, MacOS, no OS, or even Microsoft Bob pre-installed on them, as long as it was what people wanted. The only reason that you don't see them ship a whole lot of computers without Windows is that:
a. ***Most people use Windows and would not buy a computer without it on there.*** This is >90% of all people.
b. Most people who would run Linux would go find, get, and install their distribution of choice on their computer, so why would Dell make more costs for themselves by installing another OS for people who would do it anyway?
c. Microsoft makes almost all of its consumer sales dollars from OEM licensing agreements. Because (a) is true, MS could very easily raise per-unit licenses for Dell if they started shipping many no-OS making them less competitive with HP, et al.
d. MS could possibly sue Dell for inducing piracy because there would certainly be people who would buy a no-OS unit to save money and put a pirated Windows on it instead of a legal OS. I wouldn't put it past MS to do that and with the current legal climate being what it is, I bet they might even win.
e. On a smaller note, if Dell did ship Linux PCs, they would likely ship ones that come with support (i.e. SuSE, RHEL) so that they do not get saddled with trying to support it if they can at all help it. They would only ship one or two distros so they can avoid having to install each and every distro on each and every computer and make sure it works.The support is not free and so there would be a "SuSE tax" or a "Red Hat tax" that people would have to pay instead of a "Microsoft tax" if they wanted to run another distribution like Ubuntu or Debian.
So folks, if you buy from a big OEM, you're going to have to pay some sort of "tax" unless the DMCA and the Induce Act get repealed and everybody stops installing illegal copies of OSes onto computers. If you don't like it, build your own computer, buy one that is custom-built by a mom-and-pop store, or start your own shop.
I have a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine, but I only keep Windows around for two reasons:
1. File formats. Most of the Linux programs are very, very good about using formats correctly, but every so often there is a format (such as Quicktime, DRMed WMAs, or ActiveX scripts) that are expressly not compatible and require Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player, or Internet Explorer specifically to run. In the year and a half I have run Linux, I have had to do this about once.
2. Support issues- this is the big one. If there is ever a broken website, corrupted file, dead peripheral, Internet went out, or anything that you get and say, "hey this is broken," I GUARANTEE you if you mention Linux anywhere, it will be automatically a "Linux problem" regardless of what you say next. So I have to start up Windows and PROVE that it's not a "Linux problem." I will also group things that say "You must have Internet Explorer or Windows or Office to run" when it runs fine on Firefox, Linux, and OpenOffice into this category too. I have lost count of the number of websites that are "broken" when the default identification is set but miraculously work when I put the user agent as "IE 6.0 on XP."
Basically, I have a Windows partition around just so that people who have no clue will actually listen to me and not eye me like I'm in the bank with a black trenchcoat, a ski mask, and a piece of paper in my hand.
I bet most of that time you spent trying to get your ATI card to work in SuSE. I have the same distro and a supposedly "supported" Mobility M9 card and it does not work with the ATI drivers. I'd have gotten an nVidia card if I were you.
They would do much better to have separate copies of Windows optimized for each type of CPU sold today than to have a separate Mac version. There are a lot more Pentium Ms and Athlon 64s out there than there will be Macs...and if the OS was optimized for each architecture, it would run faster. Since we can't compile Windows ourselves, MS must do it for us. Just ask a Gentoo guy if his Linux runs faster than a default i586 version.
The biggest reason not to use IMAP is if you have/get/want to keep a lot of e-mails, especially if you have a quota on your account that isn't huge. I have the choice of IMAP or POP on my account and I always use POP as there is a 20MB limit on messages. I will generally get 20MB in a few weeks, sometimes in a few days. And I always seem to have to look for a message that I got a few months ago and had to delete because my inbox was too full, so I use POP.
However, I "cheat" with how I keep my e-mails. I have the OS installed on one partition and my documents on another. So if the OS needs to go bye-bye, I just reformat its partition (not the whole disk) and reinstall it. My files are still there safe and sound.
I use Kontact because I use KDE. You have to install half of KDE to get Kontact as it uses a *lot* of accessory apps, daemons, and the like. If I used Gnome or XFCE, I'd use Evolution. They are fairly similar- Evolution being a little bit more like Outlook and a little more professional (in my opinion) and Kontact is much more feature-filled as it has an RSS reader, built-in PDA sync program, a weather applet, etc. Both work very well, as does Thunderbird.
It seems very reasonable. My brother has a 1280x800 (16:10) display on a 12" widescreen and that's about as tiny as I would want. So would correlate to about 1440x900 in a 14" widescreen, and 1680x1050 in a 15.4" display as my maximum resolutions. I have a 15.7" 4:3 LCD on this laptop, and with it running at its native 1280x1024, it looks plenty big.
So, 1440x900 is very reasonable on that 15.4" widescreen display. If you want more, Dell has one 15.4" LCD that is 19**x14** for the really-want-to-squint crowd.