if Macs are 5% of the computer market, why aren't 5% of the viruses and spyware on Macs?
Because someone has to develop the virus, and there are two main reasons people do that: 1) to be famous / 'leet 2) to make money (selling botnets)
If you're going to put time into developing a virus, you gonna target the 4% market share OS, or the 90+% market share? Even assuming some Mac vulnerabilities, it just doesn't make sense to not shoot the easier target, when the payout is 20X as big for hitting the easy target as the harder one.
I've never given Microsoft any money if I could help it, but I'd be happy to pay for an OS X that would run on the computers I have. But that's just it, I HAVE hardware. I don't want to buy any more. I like having hardware that will run whatever OS I care to boot to.
I suppose the question is whether Apple's X86 hardware will boot Windows (not just run it in a window or emulate it) - then the apple hardware might be the generic platform to run Win/Linux/OS X.
I understand NECs are rebadges but am not sure who makes them... sometimes the rebadges have better firmware than the mfgr's brand, sometimes the reverse.
I think NEC drives are often rebadged, I think they are the manufacturer. The Memorex True8X I had last year was a rebadged NEC.
I've had seriously good luck with my pack of LiteOn CDRWs (thousands of disks, marathon sessions, almost no coasters, no failed drives) and on that basis, and the $40 almost-disposable price, last month I got a LiteOn DVD writer. Hopefully it'll be a credit to its kinfolk.:)
The other drive I have in service right now is a Lite-On, probably the same model. It's pretty good, but I do get an occasional coaster. The NEC blows it away.
Check the media code on those CDRWs. I don't think LiteOn makes media, they just rebadge, so who knows what it is, and whether it'll be the same thing next month.
If you brake with the front all the time, you'll know how to do it, and you will stop in the shortest possible distance. If you only use it in emergencies, you'll just clamp down, and you'll get hurt.
Good: I use nothing but Taiyo Yuiden 4x DVDs these days. I currently use NEC-3550A, $40 at NewEgg. A bunch of guys here at work have the same drive, and we all love it.
Bad: I don't think I have a single Optodisc DVD that's more than 18 months old that I can read fully. Don't know if their quality has improved recently, I haven't bought them for > 1 year.
I've had failures on other brands but I attribute them mostly to the writer: I had a Sony DRU-500 writer back in '03. It was fine to start with but flaked out and nothing I wrote on was good after a few months. I don't think this is a good sample of Sony in general, just one bad drive.
That's because you're not supposed to "SLAM" on your brakes on a bike, any more than you are in a car. You lose control doing that.
The front brake is by far more effective than the rear, and it's the one that should be used most. But you have to actually practice and learn to use it, not just slam it on when you want to stop. You practice until you can apply exactly the amount of brakes on the front wheel to stop as quickly as possible, without your rear wheel lifting.
Think about it. You put on brakes, what happens? Your weight shifts forwards. If you're using your rear brakes, that means that as soon as the brakes start to work, you just shifted all the weight off the braking wheel, and have almost no braking power. Use the front brake, and you actually ADD to your braking power as your weight shifts.
I ride 20 miles to work and back in traffic every day, and rarely use my rear brakes. The only time that rear brakes are preferred is if you are on a slippery surface such as gravel or ice, and skidding the front wheel is a possibility. Any good book, web article or course in proper bicycle riding will cover this. Driving any vehicle requires practice.
AND you will still have a working camera after 3 years, if you buy a film camera. In 3 years, you will still be able to get the film developed. Not so sure about 10 years, very doubtful in 20.
My wife currently shoots with a Pentax K1000. It's a great camera. The design is probably pushing 50 years old at this point and it still works very well.
I have no doubt that the camera would continue to work for another 50 years. But it won't be USABLE for more than about 10 at the outside, because you won't be able to get the film developed, except by the same weird hobbiests hanging out in espresso shops in NYC that will develop daguerrotypes for you these days.
Don't buy name brand media. They're just rebranding, and they can switch suppliers on you.
Go right to the asian source, buy from a reputable importer. I use supermediastore.com, and I buy nothing but Taiyo Yuiden media.
The place where I work has a high-speed multispindle CD-R duplication station, and goes through CD-Rs by the thousands per month. I asked a while ago and they have tried everything, and now use NOTHING but Taiyo Yuiden media also. If they have a failure, we have to ship a replacement overnight; so a single disc failure, by the time you count all the people who have to handle a complaint and the postage, can easily cost $50, so they buy what WORKS.
I find hard discs insanely more reliable than they used to be. I was building PCs in the 80's and I experienced the wonder of buying a full 20-count box of Seagate hard discs, and have EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM FAIL IN 3 MONTHS.
I currently have 8 Maxtors and Hitachis of between 160 and 250 GB spinning in 3 machines at home. Most are > 2 years old. No problems. My older 40 and 80 GB machines have been given to friends to use in their older machines. They haven't had any failures either. I can't remember the last time I had a hard drive fail.
If your case is such that your hard drives are hot to the touch, don't blame the drive for failing. I think that's what causes most of the failures.
I have had many problems with DVDs. I've had media that degrade quickly, and also writers that cause discs to degrade quickly. Every disc I wrote in late 2003 is bad. They started going bad after only a few months (in some cases, days).
I switched both burners and media and now have no problems. However, I still do a 100% verify, and don't totally trust DVD-R. For stuff I *really* want backed up, I put a PAR2 set on the disc, and I burn both DVD and at least one CD copy for offsite.
BTW I found that some really crappy DVD-ROM drives will read almost anything. All of those hundreds of bad discs that I have? I bought a shitty CompUSA DVD-ROM drive for $35, and it will read them all, even though NO other drive I own will read them (I tried Sony, 2 NEC, 1 Pioneer and 1 Lite-On DVD-R drives, plus Teac, Pioneer DVD-ROM drives). I have NO reasonable theory why this is, but the damn thing just reads anything. I'm glad of it too. I discovered this when I realized that my shitty $40 mintek set-top DVD player would play the discs and "better" players choked, so I decided to try a crappy DVD-ROM drive. So I can now make new copies of the messed-up discs.
I call bullshit. I have about 10 spindles of 50 discs in my basement that are all > 5 years old, some are approaching 10.
I recently ran every disc in the oldest spindle through Nero CD Speed, which detects errors even if they are corrected. I found no more errors than I did in a similar sample of discs burned in the last month.
Tape is no good either; there are warehouses full of them rotting faster than they can be read, as we speak.
Regardless, "deserves to die" is a bit strong, don't you think? There are very few people in human history who "deserve to die".
I'm not saying that these people should be protected by the government. I'm just saying that making a poor choice in buying tires does not mean that your life is now forfeit, and the world would be better off without you.
THAT attitude leads to far worse problems than thinking that perhaps a person's life is worth more than a set of tires.
If you put 20 dollar Wal Mart tires on your car, you deserve to die horribly in a no-grip accident.
Nobody "deserves to die" because of something they bought, or failed to buy. Particularly if they can't afford expensive tires.
Perhaps Charles Manson deserves to die. Probably Hitler deserved to die. Some guy making $12000 at McDonalds who can't afford Pirelli's on his beater doesn't "deserve to die".
F'in TV? We have a basic human right to bleed our brains out through our eyeballs now? Sheesh. We can have people starving, we can underfund education, but we can't have people without their TV.
I have run grammar checkers from time to time. I almost always switch them off. It's pretty rare that they come up with a suggestion that I agree with. For the most part, these days I run the grammar checker on a document if I need a good laugh.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most about them is that they're constantly trying to get me to write at about a 4th grade level. Sorry, I'm not going to do that.
However, I do understand that some people like the crutch, and will whine if someone tries to take it away, so it's probably worth at least licensing a plugin. If someone wants to buy a 3rd party plugin grammar checker for $25, that should be OK, and OO.org should make an effort to smoothly integrate the plugin.
He used a pringles can as an extension tube. I did the same with a cardboard tube back in the 70's, I was 13 at the time. Not rocket science. Official: ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING can make it to slashdot.
Pretty much all of the users I've scrubbed machines for had the default free McAffe antivirus installed. They hadn't been updated, ever. No new virus defs downloaded, ever. Definition files were years old.
The users had no idea that they were supposed to be doing this. They don't read the instructions, they just see an antivirus program running, and figure they're protected.
I had the same problem. Under medium P2P load (several dozen to a hundred or so connections) the WRT54G would get bogged down and eventually stop. I tried several firmwares; 2 or 3 different factory revisions, Sveasoft, HyperWRT. All showed the same problem.
Eventually I gave up and bought a Netgear 614 for $30, and it's been a champ since then. There's no hack community for it, but I only wanted the hacking to make it work. If it works in the first place, then I don't need to hack it (though QoS would be nice...)
1st- sometimes when a firmware flash goes bad, the hardware is DEAD. not repairable. trash.
Not true, most of the time. You can open the box up and short a couple of wires, causing the bootstrap to decide the FLASH is corrupt, and TFTP a new firmware in.
I bricked my 54G last month, and got it back via this method. From reading the forums, at least 90% of failed flash upgrades can be recovered from. There's a reason there are people out on eBay and other places buying bricked routers. They're de-bricking them and reselling them.
Give me an app that plays DVDs, REALLY plays them, properly, with menus and multi-angle and playing the games on the extras discs and everything implemented properly. All I've seen so far requires me to hunt through audio and video tracks and it just plays tracks from beginning to end. That's just puking data to the screen, not playing a DVD.
I have other things that I need (IE photoshop, NO GIMP IS NOT ACCEPTABLE) but DVD playing has become my benchmark; until that's done, Linux is for servers only for me (though it's far and away my choice there).
I've done side-by-side comparisons and have been unable to tell the difference on printed photos.
My durability tests indicate that the aftermarket inks are far more resistant to fading than OEM inks, either Epson or Canon, though the OEMs have pretty much caught up in the last year.
If I really want GOOD quality photos, I have them printed at a photofinisher. Anything I print will only look good for a few months until it starts to fade, claims by the manufacturer not withstanding.
$10-$15 is for ONE COLOR ONLY. You need all 5 to equal the same as the HP cartridge. I'm paying about 75 cents each to fill them, I have had zero problems and can't tell the difference or in some ways the aftermarket inks are better.
4x6's are 17 cents at the local supermarket (actually 10 cents when on sale, like right now). 5x7's are 99 cents, 8x10's $2.49. I can probably match the price on the bigger prints, but no way on the 4x6's.
Any photo that I want to print bigger than 4x6, it's probably because I want to frame it. If I want to frame it, I probably want it to last a long time while being exposed to sunlight and airborne pollutants. That calls for chemical photofinishing. So whether it's price-competitive or not, I probably want to get it printed chemically.
I don't have to pay shipping; I upload them to their website, then stop by on the way home from work and pick them up. If this kind of service isn't available to you locally, it will be soon.
Slashdot Mirror
if Macs are 5% of the computer market, why aren't 5% of the viruses and spyware on Macs?
Because someone has to develop the virus, and there are two main reasons people do that:
1) to be famous / 'leet
2) to make money (selling botnets)
If you're going to put time into developing a virus, you gonna target the 4% market share OS, or the 90+% market share? Even assuming some Mac vulnerabilities, it just doesn't make sense to not shoot the easier target, when the payout is 20X as big for hitting the easy target as the harder one.
I've never given Microsoft any money if I could help it, but I'd be happy to pay for an OS X that would run on the computers I have. But that's just it, I HAVE hardware. I don't want to buy any more. I like having hardware that will run whatever OS I care to boot to.
I suppose the question is whether Apple's X86 hardware will boot Windows (not just run it in a window or emulate it) - then the apple hardware might be the generic platform to run Win/Linux/OS X.
I understand NECs are rebadges but am not sure who makes them... sometimes the rebadges have better firmware than the mfgr's brand, sometimes the reverse.
:)
I think NEC drives are often rebadged, I think they are the manufacturer. The Memorex True8X I had last year was a rebadged NEC.
I've had seriously good luck with my pack of LiteOn CDRWs (thousands of disks, marathon sessions, almost no coasters, no failed drives) and on that basis, and the $40 almost-disposable price, last month I got a LiteOn DVD writer. Hopefully it'll be a credit to its kinfolk.
The other drive I have in service right now is a Lite-On, probably the same model. It's pretty good, but I do get an occasional coaster. The NEC blows it away.
Check the media code on those CDRWs. I don't think LiteOn makes media, they just rebadge, so who knows what it is, and whether it'll be the same thing next month.
Yup. He didn't practice braking enough.
If you brake with the front all the time, you'll know how to do it, and you will stop in the shortest possible distance. If you only use it in emergencies, you'll just clamp down, and you'll get hurt.
Good:
I use nothing but Taiyo Yuiden 4x DVDs these days.
I currently use NEC-3550A, $40 at NewEgg. A bunch of guys here at work have the same drive, and we all love it.
Bad:
I don't think I have a single Optodisc DVD that's more than 18 months old that I can read fully. Don't know if their quality has improved recently, I haven't bought them for > 1 year.
I've had failures on other brands but I attribute them mostly to the writer:
I had a Sony DRU-500 writer back in '03. It was fine to start with but flaked out and nothing I wrote on was good after a few months. I don't think this is a good sample of Sony in general, just one bad drive.
That's because you're not supposed to "SLAM" on your brakes on a bike, any more than you are in a car. You lose control doing that.
The front brake is by far more effective than the rear, and it's the one that should be used most. But you have to actually practice and learn to use it, not just slam it on when you want to stop. You practice until you can apply exactly the amount of brakes on the front wheel to stop as quickly as possible, without your rear wheel lifting.
Think about it. You put on brakes, what happens? Your weight shifts forwards. If you're using your rear brakes, that means that as soon as the brakes start to work, you just shifted all the weight off the braking wheel, and have almost no braking power. Use the front brake, and you actually ADD to your braking power as your weight shifts.
I ride 20 miles to work and back in traffic every day, and rarely use my rear brakes. The only time that rear brakes are preferred is if you are on a slippery surface such as gravel or ice, and skidding the front wheel is a possibility.
Any good book, web article or course in proper bicycle riding will cover this.
Driving any vehicle requires practice.
AND you will still have a working camera after 3 years, if you buy a film camera.
In 3 years, you will still be able to get the film developed. Not so sure about 10 years, very doubtful in 20.
My wife currently shoots with a Pentax K1000. It's a great camera. The design is probably pushing 50 years old at this point and it still works very well.
I have no doubt that the camera would continue to work for another 50 years. But it won't be USABLE for more than about 10 at the outside, because you won't be able to get the film developed, except by the same weird hobbiests hanging out in espresso shops in NYC that will develop daguerrotypes for you these days.
Don't buy name brand media. They're just rebranding, and they can switch suppliers on you.
Go right to the asian source, buy from a reputable importer. I use supermediastore.com, and I buy nothing but Taiyo Yuiden media.
The place where I work has a high-speed multispindle CD-R duplication station, and goes through CD-Rs by the thousands per month. I asked a while ago and they have tried everything, and now use NOTHING but Taiyo Yuiden media also. If they have a failure, we have to ship a replacement overnight; so a single disc failure, by the time you count all the people who have to handle a complaint and the postage, can easily cost $50, so they buy what WORKS.
1. depressingly high failure rate of hard disks
I find hard discs insanely more reliable than they used to be. I was building PCs in the 80's and I experienced the wonder of buying a full 20-count box of Seagate hard discs, and have EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM FAIL IN 3 MONTHS.
I currently have 8 Maxtors and Hitachis of between 160 and 250 GB spinning in 3 machines at home. Most are > 2 years old. No problems. My older 40 and 80 GB machines have been given to friends to use in their older machines. They haven't had any failures either. I can't remember the last time I had a hard drive fail.
If your case is such that your hard drives are hot to the touch, don't blame the drive for failing. I think that's what causes most of the failures.
I bet if you kept the CDs, they'll still be readable after the DVDs that you made of them stops working.
I have had many problems with DVDs. I've had media that degrade quickly, and also writers that cause discs to degrade quickly. Every disc I wrote in late 2003 is bad. They started going bad after only a few months (in some cases, days).
I switched both burners and media and now have no problems. However, I still do a 100% verify, and don't totally trust DVD-R. For stuff I *really* want backed up, I put a PAR2 set on the disc, and I burn both DVD and at least one CD copy for offsite.
BTW I found that some really crappy DVD-ROM drives will read almost anything. All of those hundreds of bad discs that I have? I bought a shitty CompUSA DVD-ROM drive for $35, and it will read them all, even though NO other drive I own will read them (I tried Sony, 2 NEC, 1 Pioneer and 1 Lite-On DVD-R drives, plus Teac, Pioneer DVD-ROM drives). I have NO reasonable theory why this is, but the damn thing just reads anything. I'm glad of it too. I discovered this when I realized that my shitty $40 mintek set-top DVD player would play the discs and "better" players choked, so I decided to try a crappy DVD-ROM drive. So I can now make new copies of the messed-up discs.
I call bullshit. I have about 10 spindles of 50 discs in my basement that are all > 5 years old, some are approaching 10.
I recently ran every disc in the oldest spindle through Nero CD Speed, which detects errors even if they are corrected. I found no more errors than I did in a similar sample of discs burned in the last month.
Tape is no good either; there are warehouses full of them rotting faster than they can be read, as we speak.
Regardless, "deserves to die" is a bit strong, don't you think? There are very few people in human history who "deserve to die".
I'm not saying that these people should be protected by the government. I'm just saying that making a poor choice in buying tires does not mean that your life is now forfeit, and the world would be better off without you.
THAT attitude leads to far worse problems than thinking that perhaps a person's life is worth more than a set of tires.
If you put 20 dollar Wal Mart tires on your car, you deserve to die horribly in a no-grip accident.
Nobody "deserves to die" because of something they bought, or failed to buy. Particularly if they can't afford expensive tires.
Perhaps Charles Manson deserves to die. Probably Hitler deserved to die. Some guy making $12000 at McDonalds who can't afford Pirelli's on his beater doesn't "deserve to die".
F'in TV? We have a basic human right to bleed our brains out through our eyeballs now?
Sheesh. We can have people starving, we can underfund education, but we can't have people without their TV.
I have run grammar checkers from time to time. I almost always switch them off. It's pretty rare that they come up with a suggestion that I agree with. For the most part, these days I run the grammar checker on a document if I need a good laugh.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most about them is that they're constantly trying to get me to write at about a 4th grade level. Sorry, I'm not going to do that.
However, I do understand that some people like the crutch, and will whine if someone tries to take it away, so it's probably worth at least licensing a plugin. If someone wants to buy a 3rd party plugin grammar checker for $25, that should be OK, and OO.org should make an effort to smoothly integrate the plugin.
Slashdot. News you've heard before. Stuff when we get around to it.
He used a pringles can as an extension tube. I did the same with a cardboard tube back in the 70's, I was 13 at the time. Not rocket science. Official: ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING can make it to slashdot.
Pretty much all of the users I've scrubbed machines for had the default free McAffe antivirus installed. They hadn't been updated, ever. No new virus defs downloaded, ever. Definition files were years old.
The users had no idea that they were supposed to be doing this. They don't read the instructions, they just see an antivirus program running, and figure they're protected.
I had the same problem. Under medium P2P load (several dozen to a hundred or so connections) the WRT54G would get bogged down and eventually stop. I tried several firmwares; 2 or 3 different factory revisions, Sveasoft, HyperWRT. All showed the same problem.
Eventually I gave up and bought a Netgear 614 for $30, and it's been a champ since then. There's no hack community for it, but I only wanted the hacking to make it work. If it works in the first place, then I don't need to hack it (though QoS would be nice...)
1st- sometimes when a firmware flash goes bad, the hardware is DEAD. not repairable. trash.
Not true, most of the time. You can open the box up and short a couple of wires, causing the bootstrap to decide the FLASH is corrupt, and TFTP a new firmware in.
I bricked my 54G last month, and got it back via this method. From reading the forums, at least 90% of failed flash upgrades can be recovered from. There's a reason there are people out on eBay and other places buying bricked routers. They're de-bricking them and reselling them.
Sorry, didn't use the correct punctuation.
(I.E. photoshop)
not
Internet Explorer, photoshop
Give me an app that plays DVDs, REALLY plays them, properly, with menus and multi-angle and playing the games on the extras discs and everything implemented properly. All I've seen so far requires me to hunt through audio and video tracks and it just plays tracks from beginning to end. That's just puking data to the screen, not playing a DVD.
I have other things that I need (IE photoshop, NO GIMP IS NOT ACCEPTABLE) but DVD playing has become my benchmark; until that's done, Linux is for servers only for me (though it's far and away my choice there).
I've done side-by-side comparisons and have been unable to tell the difference on printed photos.
My durability tests indicate that the aftermarket inks are far more resistant to fading than OEM inks, either Epson or Canon, though the OEMs have pretty much caught up in the last year.
If I really want GOOD quality photos, I have them printed at a photofinisher. Anything I print will only look good for a few months until it starts to fade, claims by the manufacturer not withstanding.
$10-$15 is for ONE COLOR ONLY. You need all 5 to equal the same as the HP cartridge. I'm paying about 75 cents each to fill them, I have had zero problems and can't tell the difference or in some ways the aftermarket inks are better.
4x6's are 17 cents at the local supermarket (actually 10 cents when on sale, like right now). 5x7's are 99 cents, 8x10's $2.49. I can probably match the price on the bigger prints, but no way on the 4x6's.
Any photo that I want to print bigger than 4x6, it's probably because I want to frame it. If I want to frame it, I probably want it to last a long time while being exposed to sunlight and airborne pollutants. That calls for chemical photofinishing. So whether it's price-competitive or not, I probably want to get it printed chemically.
I don't have to pay shipping; I upload them to their website, then stop by on the way home from work and pick them up. If this kind of service isn't available to you locally, it will be soon.