And then 3-4 years for it to reach the majority of installed computers, if home users EVER bother to run Windows update - and six months before any large corporate types will accept such a patch due to bureaucratic red tape.
If they can force, er, "encourage" microserfs to pull 60 to 100 hour workweeks away from their families for months at a time to squeeze more features into Winbloat Vista and Microsoft Office, certainly they can ask one or two developers and QA folks to implement a security patch and roll it out quickly as at least a BETA release?
If all you need to do is compile a project the Visual Studio express edition ought to be good enough. It's free but doesn't come with all of the extras that Visual Studio Architect comes with.
If you find KDE bloated, you need to quit loading 3,281 programs in your system tray and turn off the eye candy. I found KDE 3.1 and later ran just fine on a dual Pentium III (which has since burnt up - literally. A power supply took it out) and KDE 3.5 runs just fine on a dual Celeron. Of course I can't enable the composite extension and alpha blending on the Celery but then, having half a clue, I know better than to turn on eye candy and expect great performance on a older, slower system.
Try running the Gnome desktop with all the eye candy and background applets and see how well THAT desktop runs on an older system - you'll then be saying that Gnome is bloated and we should all go back to fvwm2 (and the associated pain of customizing menus by editing.rc files).
The clones failed for Apple because Apple was bent on continuing their existing model (almost giving away the OS, but charging high prices for the hardware). If they had a more sensible plan - that is, following Microsoft's model by being OS-and-app-centric for their revenue, where the hardware is a means to sell that software solution, there's a good chance that they'd have gained more of the installed market share back. Back when they killed the clones I was about to buy a dual processor clone. Good thing I didn't. I have one Mac - one G3 a customer gave me because the NIC died on it. I do a lot of work on Macs, but would never pay Apple prices on the hardware because they simply are not worth the money for a new one (well, aside from the Mac Mini). They're great machines but given a choice between a dual G5 and a dual Opteron, a dual Xeon, or even a dual core (Opteron/Pentium D) PC, I'd go PC/Linux. I'd get far better value for my money, and a much faster video card in the deal.
If Apple gets a clue between now and the OS/X x86 release, I might switch from Linux to OS/X but I doubt they will see the light and will do everything they possibly can to break compatibility between OS/X and standard PC motherboards.
Well the idiotic thing is that "Leap Ahead" is lame on all counts.
"Intel Inside" is widely recognized and would work just as well for consumer electronics, appliances, etc. as it does for processors and motherboards.
I think Intel goofed. I like the logo but the slogan reeks. Also, $2.5bil on the awareness campaign for the new logo? If they had left well enough alone they wouldn't have had to spend a dime. Were I an Intel shareholder I'd be pissed and would be dumping the stock because it's a waste of money.
I have yet to figure out why ANY company with a world-known instantly-recognizable and well-designed corporate logo would EVER change it. It'd be like Ford abandoning the script Henry Ford designed, or Chevrolet completely abandoning the bow tie.
Apache does run well on Windows, however you only get a subset of functionality for some modules (notably php, ruby) plus unless you know how to enable NTFS case sensitivity in Windows (yes, Windows CAN be configured to be case-sensitive rather than merely case-retentive), you're further limited.
{ Finally, could your or I figure out that the earth orbits the sun? Sure... I did. Didn't you ever have a physics class that challenged you to prove which was true? It's not that hard. }
Again, you're basing your conclusion on the possession of many generations' worth of accumulated knowledge between then and now. I am asking that in GALILEO's shoes - that is, in his time, place, and situation in the dark ages (don't tell me the dark ages were over then - read up on Catholics persecuting him and other scientists of the time), would you have been able to arrive at the same correct conclusions that he did?
Galileo didn't have a physics class in the sense that you or I did. He didn't have access to countless books at the local Borders, Barnes & Noble, or free public library. He didn't have high speed internet access. Heck, he didn't even have dialup!;) And yet, he was an accomplished chemist and pharmacist, optics engineer, physician, physicist and astronomer. Like Da Vinci, he covered a lot of ground, a lot of it through his own discovery. He was known for bucking the trends and studying things contrary to what was thought to be common knowledge of the time - in medicine, in pysics, and in chemistry.
But the problem here is that the default user account you create has administrator privileges. Sure, the actual Administrator account may be locked outside of safe mode by default, but with the default user being a computer administrator any virus/worm/scumware has access to the group policy editor - or even just the relavent registry keys - and can enable administrator login with no password, leaving two holes in place.
Until Microsoft further locks down Windows and takes on a more *nix-like approach, this problem will continue to exist - and the unfortunate thing is that doing so would break so many business apps and games (affecting corporate and home enviromments alike) that doing so is impractical.
However if Microsoft is switching to a *nix-like kernel after Vista (I've read rumors that they are - I tend to disbelieve the rumors but it would be a great thing for M$ to do) then it will be a good time to cut the cord on backwards compatibility - or at least sandbox compatibility in a VirtualPC instance.
1. You back up ~ regularly - at least you have a cron job to tar or dar it frequently (if you don't, do it now) 2. You are not a member of root and you don't log in as root for anything but admin-type things, right? 3. you don't have/etc set to oh, say, 777, do you?
So ~/.bashrc gets hit. BFD - restore your latest backup.
Or, if you don't have a backup but you know your home directory got exploited. Easy solution:
mv/home/foo/bar mkdir/home/foo log in copy known-good files over, after scanning with chkrootkit, rkhunter, clamav, and perhaps even trend micro's java-based house call
Even worse than that is business applications. Take Quickbooks for example. Install it as a limited user. It will install just fine. Now try to run it. Bzzzt! You get a dialog saying effectively "Hi, we are lazy sacks so you have to be root so you can enjoy easy infestation of viruses and spyware. Thanks for buying our product." (okay, it just tells you that you need to be an Administrator to run but the end result is the same)
This is bad for corporate environments, especially since nontechnical folks invariably ignore IT/MIS and open every. single. attachment. that comes their way.
Yes but the great thing about *nix, as I'm sure you're well aware, is that even if the WINE environment is vulnerable to any such exploit due to the presence of those DLLs, those exploits will be nicely confined to ~/ just like any other exploit run as non-root.
Of course, if you run WINE as root and make your whole system vulnerable, you deserve to get hit by the exploit.
There are lots of books on the subject - any Borders or Barns & Noble will have many. They won't be 100% accurate as the authors have to look from the outside-in for the parts M$ hasn't publicly documented.
Heck, even the Linux books aren't 100% accurate by the time the books are published because the OS is "evolving" so quickly.
Yes but what you and I know about how the universe (really, the solar system) works is based on memorizing factoids that Galileo discovered on his own working out his theories mathematically and observing his predictions on planetary movement.
That doesn't mean you or I are as intelligent as Galileo - in his place would you or I have been able to figure out that gee, yes, the Earth DOES in fact orbit the sun, and not the other way around, etc.
Knowing facts does not make you intelligent; it makes you knowledgeable. There is a difference.
Even more basic principles than prior art will invalidate this patent:
"Obvious"
Now pardon me while I go patent the process of using steel or iron cylindrical or square rods to secure pieces of wood (be they studs, trusses, planks, or any combination thereof) together for the purpose of building a structure.
{ The two patents in question date back to 2001 and 1995, and RTI claims to have over 700 licensees of various telecommunications patents that it owns. }
Er, there is scads of VOIP prior art even for the 1995 patent to be invalidated - open source projects at that.
Even a worthless A+ certification will teach you that much.
You do not even need to zero-fill the hard drive (which is NOT a low-level format) to wipe out a virus. If you reformat it at the OS level (again, a "high level" format) you're removing the FAT/MFT/inodes/btree pointers to the files on the disk, and without those pointers the data is pretty much inaccessible by the operating system, unless there is software in place to specifically go to each sector and read it - and because you've removed the pointers to the files that can kickstart that process when you do the reformat/reinstall, there is no way in hell that any such hidden virus code is going to be executed - you've removed the possibility.
Also: resorting to reformat/reinstall at the drop of a hat is a sure sign of incompetence. $.02 and then some. SOME spyware or viruses which include rootkits or other exploits are so intrusive that a reformat/reinstall may be recommended but it's not going to be every case. Hell, even Windows' "System Volume Information" (restore points) can be purged of infection by changing permissions on the directory and then scanning them- or you can even turn off System Restore to simply blow away the restore points and prevent automatic reinstallation of the scumware
Read. Learn. Stop scamming customers with technical terms you don't understand.
{ And we weren't even able to find anybody to sell us dual-layer DVD-Rs! }
Guess he didn't bother to check:
- Sprawl*Mart
- Target
- Office Max
- Comp USA
They all have DL media on the shelf.
Tom, get with the program! Also, where was Lite-On in the test? I used to pay the premium for Pioneer drives but with Pioneer's fussy appetite for "approved" media (when I bought my first DVD writer at $500 it wouldn't work with just ANY old 2X DVD media. If it wasn't on Pioneer's approved list, it would burn only at 1x. Bastards. That was NOT mentioned anywhere on the packaging, their web site, or anywhere else unless you downloaded TFM to R it before buying the product) I tried Lite-On and was surprised that such a cheap drive worked so damn well.
and you need to low-level format because ________?
Really. I want to know. What will a low-level format accomplish in this case? Does Sony's DRM somehow mess up the defect map on the hard drive? Or, more likely, is this a snake-oil service you're selling to your customers? You know, throw some geek speak at them so that they'll think "oh shit" and then fork over more dough.
Trust me when I tell you that there is nothing Sony's or anyone else's rootkit/virus/trojan horse does which will necessitate a low-level format. You MIGHT need to run a fixmbr or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd(x) bs=512 count=1 if the MBR gets sufficiently corrupt that the Windows installer chokes on it, but you do not have to low-level format a drive, particularly not an ATAPI drive.
Also note: Powermax does not technically perform a low-level format, it just checks for bad block and updates the SmART tables' defect map.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't record with an iPod?
i pod_recorder.html_ 0423tentech.html5 &mode=threadm _content&task=view&id=130
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/06/22/
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/04/23/cx_ah
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/11824
http://createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=co
And then 3-4 years for it to reach the majority of installed computers, if home users EVER bother to run Windows update - and six months before any large corporate types will accept such a patch due to bureaucratic red tape.
{
I think the problem is the timing: Holiays.
}
If they can force, er, "encourage" microserfs to pull 60 to 100 hour workweeks away from their families for months at a time to squeeze more features into Winbloat Vista and Microsoft Office, certainly they can ask one or two developers and QA folks to implement a security patch and roll it out quickly as at least a BETA release?
reason 8,181,842 I quit running Windows.
If all you need to do is compile a project the Visual Studio express edition ought to be good enough. It's free but doesn't come with all of the extras that Visual Studio Architect comes with.
. aspx
It can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default
If you find KDE bloated, you need to quit loading 3,281 programs in your system tray and turn off the eye candy. I found KDE 3.1 and later ran just fine on a dual Pentium III (which has since burnt up - literally. A power supply took it out) and KDE 3.5 runs just fine on a dual Celeron. Of course I can't enable the composite extension and alpha blending on the Celery but then, having half a clue, I know better than to turn on eye candy and expect great performance on a older, slower system.
.rc files).
Try running the Gnome desktop with all the eye candy and background applets and see how well THAT desktop runs on an older system - you'll then be saying that Gnome is bloated and we should all go back to fvwm2 (and the associated pain of customizing menus by editing
The clones failed for Apple because Apple was bent on continuing their existing model (almost giving away the OS, but charging high prices for the hardware). If they had a more sensible plan - that is, following Microsoft's model by being OS-and-app-centric for their revenue, where the hardware is a means to sell that software solution, there's a good chance that they'd have gained more of the installed market share back. Back when they killed the clones I was about to buy a dual processor clone. Good thing I didn't. I have one Mac - one G3 a customer gave me because the NIC died on it. I do a lot of work on Macs, but would never pay Apple prices on the hardware because they simply are not worth the money for a new one (well, aside from the Mac Mini). They're great machines but given a choice between a dual G5 and a dual Opteron, a dual Xeon, or even a dual core (Opteron/Pentium D) PC, I'd go PC/Linux. I'd get far better value for my money, and a much faster video card in the deal.
If Apple gets a clue between now and the OS/X x86 release, I might switch from Linux to OS/X but I doubt they will see the light and will do everything they possibly can to break compatibility between OS/X and standard PC motherboards.
Well the idiotic thing is that "Leap Ahead" is lame on all counts.
"Intel Inside" is widely recognized and would work just as well for consumer electronics, appliances, etc. as it does for processors and motherboards.
I think Intel goofed. I like the logo but the slogan reeks. Also, $2.5bil on the awareness campaign for the new logo? If they had left well enough alone they wouldn't have had to spend a dime. Were I an Intel shareholder I'd be pissed and would be dumping the stock because it's a waste of money.
I have yet to figure out why ANY company with a world-known instantly-recognizable and well-designed corporate logo would EVER change it. It'd be like Ford abandoning the script Henry Ford designed, or Chevrolet completely abandoning the bow tie.
Score is only 1, funny? Come on, that AC post was worth more than a 1.
If you can't produce CPUs to outperform processors made by AMD, your chief rival, change your logo and slogan to imply that you really aren't slower.
(I'm no anti-Intel bigot, fwiw - I stick with Intel due to most apps' still being compiled using Intel optimizations)
Apache does run well on Windows, however you only get a subset of functionality for some modules (notably php, ruby) plus unless you know how to enable NTFS case sensitivity in Windows (yes, Windows CAN be configured to be case-sensitive rather than merely case-retentive), you're further limited.
{
Linux doesn't have autorun.
}
"Linux" doesn't but KDE most certainly does offer autorun as a feature. I believe Gnome does as well.
autorun.sh is supported, but not widely used for obvious reasons.
{ ... I did. Didn't you ever have a physics class that challenged you to prove which was true? It's not that hard.
;) And yet, he was an accomplished chemist and pharmacist, optics engineer, physician, physicist and astronomer. Like Da Vinci, he covered a lot of ground, a lot of it through his own discovery. He was known for bucking the trends and studying things contrary to what was thought to be common knowledge of the time - in medicine, in pysics, and in chemistry.
Finally, could your or I figure out that the earth orbits the sun? Sure
}
Again, you're basing your conclusion on the possession of many generations' worth of accumulated knowledge between then and now. I am asking that in GALILEO's shoes - that is, in his time, place, and situation in the dark ages (don't tell me the dark ages were over then - read up on Catholics persecuting him and other scientists of the time), would you have been able to arrive at the same correct conclusions that he did?
Galileo didn't have a physics class in the sense that you or I did. He didn't have access to countless books at the local Borders, Barnes & Noble, or free public library. He didn't have high speed internet access. Heck, he didn't even have dialup!
But the problem here is that the default user account you create has administrator privileges. Sure, the actual Administrator account may be locked outside of safe mode by default, but with the default user being a computer administrator any virus/worm/scumware has access to the group policy editor - or even just the relavent registry keys - and can enable administrator login with no password, leaving two holes in place.
Until Microsoft further locks down Windows and takes on a more *nix-like approach, this problem will continue to exist - and the unfortunate thing is that doing so would break so many business apps and games (affecting corporate and home enviromments alike) that doing so is impractical.
However if Microsoft is switching to a *nix-like kernel after Vista (I've read rumors that they are - I tend to disbelieve the rumors but it would be a great thing for M$ to do) then it will be a good time to cut the cord on backwards compatibility - or at least sandbox compatibility in a VirtualPC instance.
1. You back up ~ regularly - at least you have a cron job to tar or dar it frequently (if you don't, do it now) /etc set to oh, say, 777, do you?
/home/foo /bar /home/foo
2. You are not a member of root and you don't log in as root for anything but admin-type things, right?
3. you don't have
So ~/.bashrc gets hit. BFD - restore your latest backup.
Or, if you don't have a backup but you know your home directory got exploited. Easy solution:
mv
mkdir
log in
copy known-good files over, after scanning with chkrootkit, rkhunter, clamav, and perhaps even trend micro's java-based house call
Problem solved.
Even worse than that is business applications. Take Quickbooks for example. Install it as a limited user. It will install just fine. Now try to run it. Bzzzt! You get a dialog saying effectively "Hi, we are lazy sacks so you have to be root so you can enjoy easy infestation of viruses and spyware. Thanks for buying our product." (okay, it just tells you that you need to be an Administrator to run but the end result is the same)
This is bad for corporate environments, especially since nontechnical folks invariably ignore IT/MIS and open every. single. attachment. that comes their way.
Yes but the great thing about *nix, as I'm sure you're well aware, is that even if the WINE environment is vulnerable to any such exploit due to the presence of those DLLs, those exploits will be nicely confined to ~/ just like any other exploit run as non-root. Of course, if you run WINE as root and make your whole system vulnerable, you deserve to get hit by the exploit.
There are lots of books on the subject - any Borders or Barns & Noble will have many. They won't be 100% accurate as the authors have to look from the outside-in for the parts M$ hasn't publicly documented.
Heck, even the Linux books aren't 100% accurate by the time the books are published because the OS is "evolving" so quickly.
Yes but what you and I know about how the universe (really, the solar system) works is based on memorizing factoids that Galileo discovered on his own working out his theories mathematically and observing his predictions on planetary movement.
That doesn't mean you or I are as intelligent as Galileo - in his place would you or I have been able to figure out that gee, yes, the Earth DOES in fact orbit the sun, and not the other way around, etc.
Knowing facts does not make you intelligent; it makes you knowledgeable. There is a difference.
I am hoping that Google can use RICO to spank these jerkwads and have a nice precedent set on patent litigation. :)
be sure to patent that process for patent reform! :D
Even more basic principles than prior art will invalidate this patent:
"Obvious"
Now pardon me while I go patent the process of using steel or iron cylindrical or square rods to secure pieces of wood (be they studs, trusses, planks, or any combination thereof) together for the purpose of building a structure.
{
The two patents in question date back to 2001 and 1995, and RTI claims to have over 700 licensees of various telecommunications patents that it owns.
}
Er, there is scads of VOIP prior art even for the 1995 patent to be invalidated - open source projects at that.
Fuckers.
A filesystem format ("high-level" format) of a hard drive is much different than a low-level format.
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/ata_llhttp://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatUtiliti
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatHigh-c.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/LLF.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_formatting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_formatting
Even a worthless A+ certification will teach you that much.
You do not even need to zero-fill the hard drive (which is NOT a low-level format) to wipe out a virus. If you reformat it at the OS level (again, a "high level" format) you're removing the FAT/MFT/inodes/btree pointers to the files on the disk, and without those pointers the data is pretty much inaccessible by the operating system, unless there is software in place to specifically go to each sector and read it - and because you've removed the pointers to the files that can kickstart that process when you do the reformat/reinstall, there is no way in hell that any such hidden virus code is going to be executed - you've removed the possibility.
Also: resorting to reformat/reinstall at the drop of a hat is a sure sign of incompetence. $.02 and then some. SOME spyware or viruses which include rootkits or other exploits are so intrusive that a reformat/reinstall may be recommended but it's not going to be every case. Hell, even Windows' "System Volume Information" (restore points) can be purged of infection by changing permissions on the directory and then scanning them- or you can even turn off System Restore to simply blow away the restore points and prevent automatic reinstallation of the scumware
Read. Learn. Stop scamming customers with technical terms you don't understand.
{
And we weren't even able to find anybody to sell us dual-layer DVD-Rs!
}
Guess he didn't bother to check:
- Sprawl*Mart
- Target
- Office Max
- Comp USA
They all have DL media on the shelf.
Tom, get with the program! Also, where was Lite-On in the test? I used to pay the premium for Pioneer drives but with Pioneer's fussy appetite for "approved" media (when I bought my first DVD writer at $500 it wouldn't work with just ANY old 2X DVD media. If it wasn't on Pioneer's approved list, it would burn only at 1x. Bastards. That was NOT mentioned anywhere on the packaging, their web site, or anywhere else unless you downloaded TFM to R it before buying the product) I tried Lite-On and was surprised that such a cheap drive worked so damn well.
and you need to low-level format because ________?
Really. I want to know. What will a low-level format accomplish in this case? Does Sony's DRM somehow mess up the defect map on the hard drive? Or, more likely, is this a snake-oil service you're selling to your customers? You know, throw some geek speak at them so that they'll think "oh shit" and then fork over more dough.
Trust me when I tell you that there is nothing Sony's or anyone else's rootkit/virus/trojan horse does which will necessitate a low-level format. You MIGHT need to run a fixmbr or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd(x) bs=512 count=1 if the MBR gets sufficiently corrupt that the Windows installer chokes on it, but you do not have to low-level format a drive, particularly not an ATAPI drive.
Also note: Powermax does not technically perform a low-level format, it just checks for bad block and updates the SmART tables' defect map.