Comparing Apache and Asterisk is difficult. The most often changed item of apache is the html. You can't make apache unstartable by having garbage html in your htdocs directory. Really, once the initial configuration of Apache is done, you probably won't make that many changes (for most sites). For asterisk, the thing you change the most is extensions. Extensions live in the Asterisk configuration. You _can_ break your Asterisk config this way and make it unstartable. The software itself is pretty rock solid, but because you will be activly making changes to the asterisk config (whether with vi or a front-end), it does lend itself to more human error. I tend to make any asterisk changes in batches at night because there's less "bitching factor" if the phone system is down for 30 seconds at 11pm than at 11am. If you are in a small business and will rarely add extensions, you could run your asterisk system for years without a problem.
The biggest thing you want is your hardware on multiple battery backups and make sure your extensions config to make e-911 calls. There'd be nothing worse than a power outage and resulting emergency, and not being able to call 911.
I can not even begin to describe how great asterisk has been to the telecom industry. Asterisk will be (and is currently) just as important to the telecom industry as VoIP itself. I've delt with propietary telecom stuff before. It sucks ass. Take Nortel and Cisco for example. If you are going to buy Nortel IP phones, be prepared to use a Nortel soft switch. Up until recently you couldn't use Cisco power over ethernet with Nortel phones because of Nortel's non-standard implementation. Basically, every switch maker has made it as difficult as they can to use other comapanies equipment with theirs. Everything is expensive, non-extensible, and non-interoperable.
Then there's asterisk. Asterisk uses open standards. Asterisk has an API for writing phone based applications. Asterisk has a clean code base to contribute to. Telecom has almost always wanted to stay as closed as possible. People thought VoIP would change this. It just brought new people to the secret game (Cisco and Nortel being the worst offenders). Asterisk has blown this door wide open. Now, I can use whatever SIP phone I want. I don't have to find a Unistim phone anymore. I can write my own programs to interact with callers. Waaaaaaaaay more than simple tree based IVR's. We're talking full fledged applications through the phone. Without paying a dime. Asterisk has blown the doors wide open on the secret game of telecom. Sure, there will be a lot of people who stick with their traditional telecom equipment. But for those of us willing to roll up our sleeves, Asterisk offers up a way more extensible and programmable soft switch than I've ever seen from the traditional guys.
This may apply to the free service, but it would never fly for their pay service (I think they still have a pay service anyway). Just because you write something doesn't make it legal or enforcable. Lawyers usually write this sort of garbage and write it in a manner which seems to obsolve them of any sort of legal responsibility ever. In the real world many of these terms don't stand up in court.
Horrible doesn't begin to describe the awful coding. I've seen bugs as amateur as off-by-1 bugs in their pagination code. It's like the don't check it at all. If you've got 25 posts, and the page size is 25, why am I seeing a next button? Oh well, *click* (blank page comes up).
Not to mention random bug after random bug that makes navigation difficult to impossible at times. They're extremely lax input validation makes it possible for spammers to set up camp and add 50,000 friends, while appearing to have only 12, and 0 comments.
And I really don't know how they get away with a 3 hour scheduled downtime every night.
All in all, it's one of the worst coded blogs I've ever seen, and seems to be the most popular.
You hit the nail right on the head. For most PC users, hardware speed doesn't matter that much anymore. It's all so damn fast you have to be doing something special to need more speed. Something more than email and web browsing anyway. The big culprit for slow computers is garbage on computers. And it's sad that you can buy a 4,000 dollar computer at best buy and in a week it be slower than a lean P III 1 gigahertz box. We get fast computers all the time of people who don't realize it's not the hardware, it's the 50 running apps from an OEM HP, Dell, whatever, install.
If your contribution to an article is nothing more than to point out the difference between too and to, then that's probably about as much as you contribute to society. I used to work as a consultant to a local organization. There was this one lady that ALWAYS did that. No one in that office really cared about spelling and grammer mistakes for stuff that stayed inter-office except her. It made everyone's job so much more laborious to have to go through this lady's emails and read about the proper usage of a semicolon. No one really gave a shit, because it never changed the message trying to be brought. And really, that's all she did. I never saw her actually contribute useful opinions or content to projects. Just sit back be critical of everyone's spelling and grammer. To this day I can't think of one useful contribution she ever made.
However, it _does_ mean that people who make a concious decision of the processor they want choose AMD over Intel. This is very important from an outlook prospective because it's basically saying "when people research it and are given a choice, they will usually pick AMD". The OEM's are usually bound by contract. They aren't choosing the best processor. They're choosing what they can get cheapest. Geeks have influence as to what their family/friends buy. I forsee in the next couple of years market demand will bring about more AMD chips on OEM's. 5 years ago very few OEM's sold AMD chips. We can see how that's changed today.
Historically flat-rate type music services have not let you transfer to mp3 players or burn CD's unless you pay the approx. 99 cents to buy the song fully. They assume once it's off your computer, it's pretty easy to exploit the analog loophole (it's still pretty easy to exploit anyway).
So I'm pretty confident that regardless, you wouldn't be able to transfer to your ipod with the unlimited service anyway.
However, they are lamey McLamersons, because there are programs out there that can do a sort of "high speed dubbing" digitally. They force the native app (say, windows media player) to play at 4x, 8x, whatever and listen right on the sound card (before it's analog). Then encode at the matching speed so the resulting mp3 is correct.
Details seem to be somewhat limited, but you are right. This seems to be malware that modifies the content IE presents. This is similiar to malware that goes through the pages you visit and looks for keywords such as "games" and automatically links them to whatever gambling site. These are difficult/impossible for website presenters to stop because the problem is with the infected machine, not the originating website.
It's somewhat refreshing that google seems to just fix problems instead of accepting any sort of blame. It's also sad to see that many google-haters take this as an acceptance of blame.
I'm a programmer, and I have to say, I probably would have just said "tough". I used to try and help the users of my sites with malware, but it just became a pointless battle. They didn't care and seem to put forth any effort. At one point I even forced them to do get scanned (forced is harsh. Automatically redirected to a anti-spyware online scan is better. They could close out the window at any time). I ended up supporting end users asking how to get the spyware off their computer and ended up taking blame for their spyware.
And sadly, I feel like a slashbot saying the same statements as 5 years ago, however... If users would get pissed and proactive at Microsoft instead of everyone but them, maybe something would happen. But so many people are complacent and keep buying their garbage and accept this bullshit as normal. Nothing will ever happen as long as the majority of users don't care. That is, until their credit card gets stolen. Then they get pissed at their bank.
First of all, their office of management and budget made this policy. A pencil pusher/bean counter policy that is hard to keep up with in the real world that their IT staff has to follow, not them. I agree 100% with the parent. They probably have a million regulations they have to follow, with many many employees spread all over the map, with software from 3rd parties, with countless people who probably don't even know this policy exists there.
The reality of it is, the CIA/NSA/Whatever has a billion other much more effective ways to track you. Their intention was obviously wasn't to track people, and they immediatly removed it after it was brought to their attention. I hate our current administration, but this is just some fucktard news reporter that is up 'n arms about the wire tapping escipade. I do not agree at all with the wire tapping, but this has ABSOLUTLY NOTHING TO FUCKING DO WITH THAT. I can't believe the reporter is such a fucktard that he couldn't spend 2 minutes to research cookies and what they are. Setting cookies far into the future is the de-facto way to keep a cookie on your computer a long time. Most cookies that aren't set as session cookies are set to dates 10 years or more in the future, way more than the computers expected lifetime. The reporter has no clue what he's talking about and should be slapped like a bitch. I hate reporting like this because then it takes away from things we should be legitimitly concerned with. People get an overflow of bullshit news and many can't pick out the real from the fucktards like this guy.
I would pay less than minimum wage if I could (and more of a bonus), because it forces workers to become more efficient, and we all benefit from this.
This was done during the industrial revolution. Workers were paid not on a wage, but by how many units of whatever they could produce. This left workers tired, worn out, and considerbly less effective.
Then the workers rights movement emerged. Unions formed to protect workers as a whole. Required breaks, 40 hour work weeks, and wage all came about because of this. It's kinda sad to see that a lot of the tech industry is not learning from the past.
It doesn't make them more efficient. It makes them feel like they've constantly got to work at 100%. This isn't sustainable and in the long term the total output of work is equal or lower than someone on set wage.
There was an article on this idea a few months back that actually one some awards from what I understand. Studies during the industrial were cited.
Was Thor Larholm ever assosiated with this company? As my memory recalls, he had an extensive list of his own, and I'm thinking maybe they are on in the same.
As I remember it, Windows XP was at the threshold of new technologies. I think that's right around the time USB 2.0 was coming out and the ability for home users to burn DVD's...
Microsoft favored DVD-ram as its DVD format and Firewire over USB 2.0. We all see how much effect they had on those outcomes.
Hardware makers have more say. What the OS supports out of box is almost irrevalent. What ever hardware you purchase is going to usually have drivers and software for at least Windows anyway. There are many factors as to who's going to win this war. Microsoft is on that list, but they are like number 348.
That has to be one of the smartest ideas I've ever seen on slashdot. Obviously dynamic content won't work, and the developer would have to be _very_ careful not to make available personal information. But both these problems have been solved by caching proxies years ago.
I remember at my college one day they severely locked down the network. Only a few ports were available. UDP and ICMP were cut off. Amazingly, our internet access FLEW after that. I talked with one of the admins, and he said at the height of unblocked access, 85% of the University's traffic was malware related. Something needs to be done. However, it does _not_ need to be government forced. This is really just smart business for the ISP. Want to create a network up to 4 times as effective without any pipe upgrades? Create an infastructure that can identify malware causing boxen and isolate them. Actively scanning boxes for software version X is impractical. Passivly listening to random samples of traffic and analyzing for common malware traffic and banning users who are actually infected is a better idea. I'm really suprised I haven't seen any prodcuts out there that do this.
From the answers that have appeared so far, obviously not many. The problem is, for the longest time game developers didn't benefit much from developing highly threaded games. Most PC's couldn't take advantage of it, so why make the game that much more complex to benefit a small subset of people. AMD is _really_ pushing dual core, and in another couple of years, dual core presence will be substantial. At that point, developers _will_ have reason to spend time threading their games.
From what I can remember, ID will thread their games (they are also one of the few left that will still use opengl, that's also why you can get ID games on Linux). I don't think many game companies at this point though do either.
I've had to deal with shit like this before. It probably has to do with the bean counters and pencil pushers. They say "we developed with arbitrary version X.XX. We will not support anything else". We run a fair amount of closed-source software on our Linux systems. It pisses me off so much because I get that answer on a weekly basis. "You can not install this update because we haven't certified our software with it". Even if it is purely security fixes. Even if the security hole is huge. Those bastards will fight you kicking and screaming.
So yes, they _should_ be shipping with 1.0.7. However, I'm willing to bet bullshit policies like the above mentioned keep them from doing so.
Here's my favorite example...
We run software that has little/no server side code of their own. Almost everything done on the server is Informix IDS 10 (Informix 95%, their software 5% of processing). The clients connect directly to the database. They won't support RHEL 4 (the most current and stable version. Has been out quite some time), however, they will support RHEL 3 w/ no patches. To throw in the mix, they _will_ support SLES 9, which release cycle wise, is very close to RHEL 4. In fact, from my experience Informix IDS 10 runs better on RHEL 4 than RHEL 3. Why won't they give us the ok? Because companies would rather there be huge security risks than take the time to setup a proper regression test process that can quickly identify possible issues. If you were cracked because of a security hole, they will make claims such as "well you should have set up your network this way blah blah blah hindsight blah blah".
I've seen your posts before raving about this 100 mbit connection (I think it was you. Or someone else in Tokyo). How much of this 100 mbits do you actually see? Is a good deal of the city on fiber? Tell us more...
I think this race of trying to pump insane download speeds to the end user isn't where the priorities should be. We need a decent pipe with extemely low latency. This is important for technologies like (buzzward alert) AJAX, but also for web applications and network enabled programs in general.
Also, give me a damn decent upload pipe. I know why they don't want to do it. It's a business thing. Home users shouldn't be sending large amounts of data blah blah blah but we need more than 256 kilobits up. My home one is freakin 6 megabit connection down, and 256 kilobits up! At least give me 2 megabits up. I'll host online games and it really helps when you've got 32 people in a room. Or if I'm sending friends illegal music (haha jk). But really, there are lot's of times I need a decent upload and just don't have it.
nyah, I once knew a needy doll. She had moxy I tell ya. Moxy! Then the coppers came. She said "you ain't gonna get me coppers! Nyah!!!". They shot her all to pieces, seeee. She was always callin me on the rotary seeee. That dame was a needy doll.
Thank ya Jesus! I'm not the only one! I mean there is some REALLY basic shit that some of these commercial Unices don't have. Command history anyone? This is probably the biggest annoyance. Is it that fucking hard to make my shell support the "up" key? Is it also that fucking hard to support an "insert mode" rather than always replacing? Tab completion? It's like living in the damn stone age working on these boxes I swear. I work in a mixed environment and have to switch back and forth a lot. I can tell you, 90% of my typing mistakes are because of one of the issues mentioned above.
One of our boxes is a dual 1ghz P3 SCO box w/ RAID 10 scsi disks. Sounds like it should have decent i/o, right? Fuck no. If you perform anything remotely disk intensive the box crawls to a snails pace. We have other open source operating systems on similiar hardware that never have this problem. The fucking thing loads more services on boot than an Open SuSe 10 full install with all services running at boot.
I think this myth that commercial Unices are somehow better is largely bullshit. Solaris is an exception, and there are maybe 1 or 2 other notables. But for the most part, commercial Unices are garbage. I've worked with all the Unices listed on the Unix rosetta stone and then some, and I can honestly say a good chunk didn't even attempt to make a decent commercial Unix.
I see so much retarded shit it'll make your head spin./etc/route is a binary executable. STILL using sysadm. Super fucked up device names. root can log in on the first and second virtual terminals, but anything after that is off limits to root. more? MORE!?! more is the most archiac pager on the face of the earth. Keep it there for compatability, but give me "less" if I need it. The original vi? lmao. The original vi was written 30 years ago with the intention of programming over extremely slow network connections. There is no reason not to include a vi clone or nano. Cups is miles ahead of the bullshit printing systems I see on a daily basis. For many of them, we have a choice of like 10 HP laserjet printers and that's it. Some of these backup systems... I'd be better off with tar and gzip some are so awful. It's 2005 and you don't support network backups? Telnet? TELNET?! You're telling me to remotely adminstrate this box I've got to use telnet!? And is it that fuckin hard to give me a -h option for human readable output? I have more important things to do with my day than squint at a screen and count how many numbers long 22349873463 is.
I remember when the point of a whole album actually meant something. Each song was carefully placed throughout the lineup to achieve the full effect of the album. That was also in the day that you didn't chop up parts of 75 takes of a song to get a good take and you didn't clean up. There were no pitch adjusters. Cats sold albums because they were good. Blue Train is a perfect example of this. It's only 5 songs, but I'd sure as hell pay 20 bucks for it. If you saw them at a concert you weren't left wondering how they sounded so good on that album. They sounded good on the album because they were that good.
Alas, there still is good music out there. I know of modern artists who I think are better than a lot of people 50 years ago. Kenny Garrett, Josh Redman, Arturo Sandoval are amazing. It's just the music making machine now has technology to help them turn out garbage at an amazing speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Apache and Asterisk is difficult. The most often changed item of apache is the html. You can't make apache unstartable by having garbage html in your htdocs directory. Really, once the initial configuration of Apache is done, you probably won't make that many changes (for most sites). For asterisk, the thing you change the most is extensions. Extensions live in the Asterisk configuration. You _can_ break your Asterisk config this way and make it unstartable. The software itself is pretty rock solid, but because you will be activly making changes to the asterisk config (whether with vi or a front-end), it does lend itself to more human error. I tend to make any asterisk changes in batches at night because there's less "bitching factor" if the phone system is down for 30 seconds at 11pm than at 11am. If you are in a small business and will rarely add extensions, you could run your asterisk system for years without a problem.
The biggest thing you want is your hardware on multiple battery backups and make sure your extensions config to make e-911 calls. There'd be nothing worse than a power outage and resulting emergency, and not being able to call 911.
I can not even begin to describe how great asterisk has been to the telecom industry. Asterisk will be (and is currently) just as important to the telecom industry as VoIP itself. I've delt with propietary telecom stuff before. It sucks ass. Take Nortel and Cisco for example. If you are going to buy Nortel IP phones, be prepared to use a Nortel soft switch. Up until recently you couldn't use Cisco power over ethernet with Nortel phones because of Nortel's non-standard implementation. Basically, every switch maker has made it as difficult as they can to use other comapanies equipment with theirs. Everything is expensive, non-extensible, and non-interoperable.
Then there's asterisk. Asterisk uses open standards. Asterisk has an API for writing phone based applications. Asterisk has a clean code base to contribute to. Telecom has almost always wanted to stay as closed as possible. People thought VoIP would change this. It just brought new people to the secret game (Cisco and Nortel being the worst offenders). Asterisk has blown this door wide open. Now, I can use whatever SIP phone I want. I don't have to find a Unistim phone anymore. I can write my own programs to interact with callers. Waaaaaaaaay more than simple tree based IVR's. We're talking full fledged applications through the phone. Without paying a dime. Asterisk has blown the doors wide open on the secret game of telecom. Sure, there will be a lot of people who stick with their traditional telecom equipment. But for those of us willing to roll up our sleeves, Asterisk offers up a way more extensible and programmable soft switch than I've ever seen from the traditional guys.
This may apply to the free service, but it would never fly for their pay service (I think they still have a pay service anyway). Just because you write something doesn't make it legal or enforcable. Lawyers usually write this sort of garbage and write it in a manner which seems to obsolve them of any sort of legal responsibility ever. In the real world many of these terms don't stand up in court.
Horrible doesn't begin to describe the awful coding. I've seen bugs as amateur as off-by-1 bugs in their pagination code. It's like the don't check it at all. If you've got 25 posts, and the page size is 25, why am I seeing a next button? Oh well, *click* (blank page comes up).
Not to mention random bug after random bug that makes navigation difficult to impossible at times. They're extremely lax input validation makes it possible for spammers to set up camp and add 50,000 friends, while appearing to have only 12, and 0 comments.
And I really don't know how they get away with a 3 hour scheduled downtime every night.
All in all, it's one of the worst coded blogs I've ever seen, and seems to be the most popular.
You hit the nail right on the head. For most PC users, hardware speed doesn't matter that much anymore. It's all so damn fast you have to be doing something special to need more speed. Something more than email and web browsing anyway. The big culprit for slow computers is garbage on computers. And it's sad that you can buy a 4,000 dollar computer at best buy and in a week it be slower than a lean P III 1 gigahertz box. We get fast computers all the time of people who don't realize it's not the hardware, it's the 50 running apps from an OEM HP, Dell, whatever, install.
If your contribution to an article is nothing more than to point out the difference between too and to, then that's probably about as much as you contribute to society. I used to work as a consultant to a local organization. There was this one lady that ALWAYS did that. No one in that office really cared about spelling and grammer mistakes for stuff that stayed inter-office except her. It made everyone's job so much more laborious to have to go through this lady's emails and read about the proper usage of a semicolon. No one really gave a shit, because it never changed the message trying to be brought. And really, that's all she did. I never saw her actually contribute useful opinions or content to projects. Just sit back be critical of everyone's spelling and grammer. To this day I can't think of one useful contribution she ever made.
However, it _does_ mean that people who make a concious decision of the processor they want choose AMD over Intel. This is very important from an outlook prospective because it's basically saying "when people research it and are given a choice, they will usually pick AMD". The OEM's are usually bound by contract. They aren't choosing the best processor. They're choosing what they can get cheapest. Geeks have influence as to what their family/friends buy. I forsee in the next couple of years market demand will bring about more AMD chips on OEM's. 5 years ago very few OEM's sold AMD chips. We can see how that's changed today.
Historically flat-rate type music services have not let you transfer to mp3 players or burn CD's unless you pay the approx. 99 cents to buy the song fully. They assume once it's off your computer, it's pretty easy to exploit the analog loophole (it's still pretty easy to exploit anyway).
So I'm pretty confident that regardless, you wouldn't be able to transfer to your ipod with the unlimited service anyway.
However, they are lamey McLamersons, because there are programs out there that can do a sort of "high speed dubbing" digitally. They force the native app (say, windows media player) to play at 4x, 8x, whatever and listen right on the sound card (before it's analog). Then encode at the matching speed so the resulting mp3 is correct.
Details seem to be somewhat limited, but you are right. This seems to be malware that modifies the content IE presents. This is similiar to malware that goes through the pages you visit and looks for keywords such as "games" and automatically links them to whatever gambling site. These are difficult/impossible for website presenters to stop because the problem is with the infected machine, not the originating website.
It's somewhat refreshing that google seems to just fix problems instead of accepting any sort of blame. It's also sad to see that many google-haters take this as an acceptance of blame.
I'm a programmer, and I have to say, I probably would have just said "tough". I used to try and help the users of my sites with malware, but it just became a pointless battle. They didn't care and seem to put forth any effort. At one point I even forced them to do get scanned (forced is harsh. Automatically redirected to a anti-spyware online scan is better. They could close out the window at any time). I ended up supporting end users asking how to get the spyware off their computer and ended up taking blame for their spyware.
And sadly, I feel like a slashbot saying the same statements as 5 years ago, however... If users would get pissed and proactive at Microsoft instead of everyone but them, maybe something would happen. But so many people are complacent and keep buying their garbage and accept this bullshit as normal. Nothing will ever happen as long as the majority of users don't care. That is, until their credit card gets stolen. Then they get pissed at their bank.
First of all, their office of management and budget made this policy. A pencil pusher/bean counter policy that is hard to keep up with in the real world that their IT staff has to follow, not them. I agree 100% with the parent. They probably have a million regulations they have to follow, with many many employees spread all over the map, with software from 3rd parties, with countless people who probably don't even know this policy exists there.
The reality of it is, the CIA/NSA/Whatever has a billion other much more effective ways to track you. Their intention was obviously wasn't to track people, and they immediatly removed it after it was brought to their attention. I hate our current administration, but this is just some fucktard news reporter that is up 'n arms about the wire tapping escipade. I do not agree at all with the wire tapping, but this has ABSOLUTLY NOTHING TO FUCKING DO WITH THAT. I can't believe the reporter is such a fucktard that he couldn't spend 2 minutes to research cookies and what they are. Setting cookies far into the future is the de-facto way to keep a cookie on your computer a long time. Most cookies that aren't set as session cookies are set to dates 10 years or more in the future, way more than the computers expected lifetime. The reporter has no clue what he's talking about and should be slapped like a bitch. I hate reporting like this because then it takes away from things we should be legitimitly concerned with. People get an overflow of bullshit news and many can't pick out the real from the fucktards like this guy.
I would pay less than minimum wage if I could (and more of a bonus), because it forces workers to become more efficient, and we all benefit from this.
This was done during the industrial revolution. Workers were paid not on a wage, but by how many units of whatever they could produce. This left workers tired, worn out, and considerbly less effective.
Then the workers rights movement emerged. Unions formed to protect workers as a whole. Required breaks, 40 hour work weeks, and wage all came about because of this. It's kinda sad to see that a lot of the tech industry is not learning from the past.
It doesn't make them more efficient. It makes them feel like they've constantly got to work at 100%. This isn't sustainable and in the long term the total output of work is equal or lower than someone on set wage.
There was an article on this idea a few months back that actually one some awards from what I understand. Studies during the industrial were cited.
Was Thor Larholm ever assosiated with this company? As my memory recalls, he had an extensive list of his own, and I'm thinking maybe they are on in the same.
As I remember it, Windows XP was at the threshold of new technologies. I think that's right around the time USB 2.0 was coming out and the ability for home users to burn DVD's...
Microsoft favored DVD-ram as its DVD format and Firewire over USB 2.0. We all see how much effect they had on those outcomes.
Hardware makers have more say. What the OS supports out of box is almost irrevalent. What ever hardware you purchase is going to usually have drivers and software for at least Windows anyway. There are many factors as to who's going to win this war. Microsoft is on that list, but they are like number 348.
If south park is any authority on the subject (and I think we all agree it is), these patients will be given dead featuses and drink the cells.
That has to be one of the smartest ideas I've ever seen on slashdot. Obviously dynamic content won't work, and the developer would have to be _very_ careful not to make available personal information. But both these problems have been solved by caching proxies years ago.
Pffft. Wake me up when you've got one that's 1.21 gigawatts. Then, and only then, can I power the flux capicator.
I remember at my college one day they severely locked down the network. Only a few ports were available. UDP and ICMP were cut off. Amazingly, our internet access FLEW after that. I talked with one of the admins, and he said at the height of unblocked access, 85% of the University's traffic was malware related. Something needs to be done. However, it does _not_ need to be government forced. This is really just smart business for the ISP. Want to create a network up to 4 times as effective without any pipe upgrades? Create an infastructure that can identify malware causing boxen and isolate them. Actively scanning boxes for software version X is impractical. Passivly listening to random samples of traffic and analyzing for common malware traffic and banning users who are actually infected is a better idea. I'm really suprised I haven't seen any prodcuts out there that do this.
From the answers that have appeared so far, obviously not many. The problem is, for the longest time game developers didn't benefit much from developing highly threaded games. Most PC's couldn't take advantage of it, so why make the game that much more complex to benefit a small subset of people. AMD is _really_ pushing dual core, and in another couple of years, dual core presence will be substantial. At that point, developers _will_ have reason to spend time threading their games.
From what I can remember, ID will thread their games (they are also one of the few left that will still use opengl, that's also why you can get ID games on Linux). I don't think many game companies at this point though do either.
I've had to deal with shit like this before. It probably has to do with the bean counters and pencil pushers. They say "we developed with arbitrary version X.XX. We will not support anything else". We run a fair amount of closed-source software on our Linux systems. It pisses me off so much because I get that answer on a weekly basis. "You can not install this update because we haven't certified our software with it". Even if it is purely security fixes. Even if the security hole is huge. Those bastards will fight you kicking and screaming.
So yes, they _should_ be shipping with 1.0.7. However, I'm willing to bet bullshit policies like the above mentioned keep them from doing so.
Here's my favorite example...
We run software that has little/no server side code of their own. Almost everything done on the server is Informix IDS 10 (Informix 95%, their software 5% of processing). The clients connect directly to the database. They won't support RHEL 4 (the most current and stable version. Has been out quite some time), however, they will support RHEL 3 w/ no patches. To throw in the mix, they _will_ support SLES 9, which release cycle wise, is very close to RHEL 4. In fact, from my experience Informix IDS 10 runs better on RHEL 4 than RHEL 3. Why won't they give us the ok? Because companies would rather there be huge security risks than take the time to setup a proper regression test process that can quickly identify possible issues. If you were cracked because of a security hole, they will make claims such as "well you should have set up your network this way blah blah blah hindsight blah blah".
I've seen your posts before raving about this 100 mbit connection (I think it was you. Or someone else in Tokyo). How much of this 100 mbits do you actually see? Is a good deal of the city on fiber? Tell us more...
I think this race of trying to pump insane download speeds to the end user isn't where the priorities should be. We need a decent pipe with extemely low latency. This is important for technologies like (buzzward alert) AJAX, but also for web applications and network enabled programs in general.
Also, give me a damn decent upload pipe. I know why they don't want to do it. It's a business thing. Home users shouldn't be sending large amounts of data blah blah blah but we need more than 256 kilobits up. My home one is freakin 6 megabit connection down, and 256 kilobits up! At least give me 2 megabits up. I'll host online games and it really helps when you've got 32 people in a room. Or if I'm sending friends illegal music (haha jk). But really, there are lot's of times I need a decent upload and just don't have it.
Damn, it's like right when they just give out the foot in mouth awards we get a gem like this.
nyah, I once knew a needy doll. She had moxy I tell ya. Moxy! Then the coppers came. She said "you ain't gonna get me coppers! Nyah!!!". They shot her all to pieces, seeee. She was always callin me on the rotary seeee. That dame was a needy doll.
Thank ya Jesus! I'm not the only one! I mean there is some REALLY basic shit that some of these commercial Unices don't have. Command history anyone? This is probably the biggest annoyance. Is it that fucking hard to make my shell support the "up" key? Is it also that fucking hard to support an "insert mode" rather than always replacing? Tab completion? It's like living in the damn stone age working on these boxes I swear. I work in a mixed environment and have to switch back and forth a lot. I can tell you, 90% of my typing mistakes are because of one of the issues mentioned above.
/etc/route is a binary executable. STILL using sysadm. Super fucked up device names. root can log in on the first and second virtual terminals, but anything after that is off limits to root. more? MORE!?! more is the most archiac pager on the face of the earth. Keep it there for compatability, but give me "less" if I need it. The original vi? lmao. The original vi was written 30 years ago with the intention of programming over extremely slow network connections. There is no reason not to include a vi clone or nano. Cups is miles ahead of the bullshit printing systems I see on a daily basis. For many of them, we have a choice of like 10 HP laserjet printers and that's it. Some of these backup systems... I'd be better off with tar and gzip some are so awful. It's 2005 and you don't support network backups? Telnet? TELNET?! You're telling me to remotely adminstrate this box I've got to use telnet!? And is it that fuckin hard to give me a -h option for human readable output? I have more important things to do with my day than squint at a screen and count how many numbers long 22349873463 is.
One of our boxes is a dual 1ghz P3 SCO box w/ RAID 10 scsi disks. Sounds like it should have decent i/o, right? Fuck no. If you perform anything remotely disk intensive the box crawls to a snails pace. We have other open source operating systems on similiar hardware that never have this problem. The fucking thing loads more services on boot than an Open SuSe 10 full install with all services running at boot.
I think this myth that commercial Unices are somehow better is largely bullshit. Solaris is an exception, and there are maybe 1 or 2 other notables. But for the most part, commercial Unices are garbage. I've worked with all the Unices listed on the Unix rosetta stone and then some, and I can honestly say a good chunk didn't even attempt to make a decent commercial Unix.
I see so much retarded shit it'll make your head spin.
I remember when the point of a whole album actually meant something. Each song was carefully placed throughout the lineup to achieve the full effect of the album. That was also in the day that you didn't chop up parts of 75 takes of a song to get a good take and you didn't clean up. There were no pitch adjusters. Cats sold albums because they were good. Blue Train is a perfect example of this. It's only 5 songs, but I'd sure as hell pay 20 bucks for it. If you saw them at a concert you weren't left wondering how they sounded so good on that album. They sounded good on the album because they were that good.
Alas, there still is good music out there. I know of modern artists who I think are better than a lot of people 50 years ago. Kenny Garrett, Josh Redman, Arturo Sandoval are amazing. It's just the music making machine now has technology to help them turn out garbage at an amazing speed.