Speaking as a European, I'd just like to say that you're talking out of your arse. Yes, some europeans oppose the EU, however the majority aren't that idiotic and see it for what it is - good for everyone involved. If it wasn't for the EU, the economic crisis would have been 10x worse.
Just FYI, far more than 100 people were affected by this. I don't know where that number came from, but it's probably more like 100 calls about it came in and were booked against accounts, rather than the actual number of people affected. Internally, it was treated as an MSO (Major System Outage), which means it was affecting at least 2000 people.
Not that I want to agree with what is basically a trolling comment, but he didn't actually say anything about RMS's intellect, just his personal hygiene. Which, let's be honest, isn't too far from the truth - http://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ?t=1m46s
40Gb is possibly the smallest SSD you can get and by your own admission, it "just about fits". You can get 128Gb SSD's for about 2$ per GB and 256GB SSD's aren't far off that. By the time Windows 8 comes out, those prices should have dropped further.
No, but the memory optimisations are clearly a core part of the OS, so they did it first and it has been working for 2 years. Vista was a clusterfuck for all sorts of reasons, we know that, however unless they manage to find a bug in the optimisations that causes your PC to burst into flames, I doubt they'll be removing anything.
If you actually bothered to read the blog, you'd see that these memory optimisations were one of the very first things they did and have, in fact, been in the code for about 2 years now.
You can upload more than that, just that when you hit 6GB, your upload speed drops to 1.75Mbit instead of 5Mbit. SO it's not really a "Cap" and it's still a pretty generous one if it is.
If you press the winkey, you can just start typing to bring up the program you want. "cmd" even brings up the command line. I find this easier than clicking anything, does this not work for you or have I missed something?
There's a difference between supporting the system and not caring about what happens to the system but using it anyway.
If Slashdot shut down tomorrow, I'd go to some other Tech news site. In a way, I don't care what happens to Slashdot but while it's here and is a reasonable source for geek news, I'll visit it and use it.
Because in London a lot of buildings don't have direct fibre. There is the odd spot, but the majority simply don't. Most people are connected via ADSL, syncing at the maximum possible speed (the average is something like 6mbit on an "up-to" 24mbit ADSL2+ connection) so there is no left over bandwidth. However, BT do offer a service whereby their own home routers create a separate wireless network in which they allow other BT customers to use when they're not at home, so the idea isn't completely lost.
I may be ignorant on the subject, but how much bandwidth do you actually need to stream to your graphics card for a Blu-ray film? What I mean is, I realise that an uncompressed stream is possibly hundreds of megabits, but the compressed stream is substantially less than this and it's the graphics card itself that does the decompression, right?. After this stage, does the data get fed back along the PCI bus or does it get blitted to the screen directly from the graphics card's memory?
The thing is, and I do want to make this absolutely clear, is that the reason I'm so rigidly "defending" Microsoft is because there is a genuine issue here that needs to be addressed, with the OEMs, that's being completely and utterly overshadowed by everyone pointing the finger at Microsoft.
If any of the apocalyptically bad things were to happen here, it would be because of the OEMs, either because they're lazy, cheap (don't want to spend money on support costs, so "limit" the amount of things a user can mess with) or gave into some hidden pressure from Microsoft that has yet to be discovered. I wish the secure boot thing came to light years ago when it first appeared as part of the UEFI spec, because the ability to utilise it would be a great way to add additional security to machines. Ideally, you should be able to add your own keys to the UEFI partition, public keys based on a private key you made yourself. A company can have its own keys that it distributes on all of its machines, making them secure from anything but an outside attack (at least where the bootloader is concerned). This is how it should work, but OEMs haven't bothered to implement it, so the technology goes to waste. With Microsoft mandating that all future machines support it, we have a great opportunity to take advantage of it ourselves, yet everyone is getting pissy with Microsoft instead of getting onto their Manufacturer of choice and ensuring that future products will be fully customisable. This is the real issue at hand and the thing we should all focus on.
Some vendors omit options regardless (like disabling VT-x.)
Which is why I say we should pressure OEMs. This decision has nothing to do with Microsoft so people are ignoring it, despite the fact that it is still an issue that people should be concerned with.
Yep, we're heading into THOSE days where only a select handful of operating systems are allowed to boot. If we're lucky, we'll be able to boot Fedora and Ubuntu. Gentoo users? Fuck you.
No, we're not. The thing to keep in mind is that there's a distinction between simply booting and secure booting. Right now, no operating system can secure boot (as far as I'm aware, anyway - if there is hardware+software out there that can utilise this, please let me know) and Microsoft wants to push it for Windows 8. It would be nice if we can also utilise this for other operating systems as well (or rather, other boot loaders, like GRUB), however that task lies with the OEMs and their willingness to let us add our own keys. Like I said before - this is the OEM decision, not Microsoft's.
Do you seriously think that users can pressure OEMs harder than MS can? MS can kill their business overnight, and I don't doubt they've learned a LOT about how to act in unethical manner even under the eye of the DoJ. No, this is MS pursuing something and, much like Apple, hoping the inertia of the masses who don't care can overwhelm the complaints of the minority that understand why such unilateral, non-disablable lock down is bad.
And there it is again! The assumption that you won't be able to disable secure boot. This assumption lies squarely with OEMs and not Microsoft. Consumers don't need to pressure OEMs more than Microsoft, they just need to pressure them. Microsoft is pushing to enable secure boot by default, while us users should be pressuring OEMs to give us control over secure boot. They are two entirely different things. Even if Microsoft changed their mind on the secure boot by default thing, we should still pressure OEMs to give us this control as it's a very useful security feature to have.
Now, of course there's that idea that Microsoft might be in the background pressuring OEMs to remove the option to disable it, but so far this is based entirely on conjecture and speculation. If Microsoft does try it, they'll be liable for a massive class-action lawsuit, something that would cost them a lot more than the 1-2% of the marketshare they could possibly gain by blocking Linux. Until that happens, it's a non-issue. Rather than moaning at Microsoft, we should be moaning at the OEMs because they're the ones that will be taking these options from us.
In the technology world, we shouldn't let the "maybes" get in the way of innovation. Secure boot would outrightly kill a lot of malware attacks, something that plagues windows a lot more than it does Linux.
..It's the OEM's. Nowhere does Microsoft mandate that OEMs must remove the option to disable UEFI secure boot, only that it's enabled by default. For someone that's supposedly calling Microsoft out for misinformation, Matthew Garret does a great job of it himself. Here's a few points I noticed:
Windows 8 certification does not require that the user be able to disable UEFI secure boot, and we've already been informed by hardware vendors that some hardware will not have this option.
Which hardware vendors? Who? What hardware? Why? And what has that got to do with Microsoft?
Windows 8 certification does not require that the system ship with any keys other than Microsoft's.
And why shouldn't it? It also doesn't state that you can only ship Microsoft's keys. Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to get keys other than its own installed?
A system that ships with UEFI secure boot enabled and only includes Microsoft's signing keys will only securely boot Microsoft operating systems.
Exactly, however a system that ships with UEFI secure boot and only includes a linux distribution's signing keys will only securely boot that linux distribution. Why is the latter ok, but the former not? Oh wait, because Microsoft is the big, bad buy? Once again - Microsoft doesn't mandate that UEFI secure boot be forced, its the OEM's decision to remove the option to disable it.
Vendors who choose not to follow the certification requirements will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace. So while it's up to vendors to choose whether or not to follow the certification requirements, Microsoft's dominant position means that they'd be losing sales by doing so.
Of course, this fails to mention (again) that OEMs are in no way forced to remove UEFI secure boot and by doing so, they'll be at a disadvantage in the marketplace and lose sales from people like this very writer....
Why is this a problem? Because there's no central certification authority for UEFI signing keys. Microsoft can require that hardware vendors include their keys. Their competition can't. A system that ships with Microsoft's signing keys and no others will be unable to perform secure boot of any operating system other than Microsoft's. No other vendor has the same position of power over the hardware vendors. Red Hat is unable to ensure that every OEM carries their signing key. Nor is Canonical. Nor is Nvidia, or AMD or any other PC component manufacturer. Microsoft's influence here is greater than even Intel's.
In short: Because Nobody else can have secure boot, why should Microsoft get to have it? Apparently that's bad for even the likes of AMD and Intel. Nevermind that 99.99% of malware targets windows, that most "zombies" on the internet are Windows machines, that most spam is sent from windows machines, which affects everyone. In that instance, giving Windows machines that extra blip of security by default hardly seems like a bad thing.
What does this mean for the end user? Microsoft claim that the customer is in control of their PC. That's true, if by "customer" they mean "hardware manufacturer". The end user is not guaranteed the ability to install extra signing keys in order to securely boot the operating system of their choice. The end user is not guaranteed the ability to disable this functionality. The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor, or replace their network card and still be able to netboot, or install a newer SATA controller and have it recognise their hard drive in the firmware.
Woah woah woah! Didn't you just say that Microsoft were the only ones capable of forcing Manufacturers to include their signing keys? That the likes of AMD,
If you're on Windows, Pale Moon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) has a 64bit version. It's firefox with optimisations (and I mean actual optimisations, not "feature optimisations" which effectively mean bloat).
What and I can't do a "nothing to see here yet? We can debate all day on the future and what Microsoft may do or we can stick to the here and now and stick to the facts at hand.
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Speaking as a European, I'd just like to say that you're talking out of your arse. Yes, some europeans oppose the EU, however the majority aren't that idiotic and see it for what it is - good for everyone involved. If it wasn't for the EU, the economic crisis would have been 10x worse.
The point I was trying to make (possibly rather poorly) was that whomever invented it tends to get overshadowed by whomever makes it popular
And I'm pretty sure when apple releases a similar device in a few years time, people will think they invented it, too.
Just FYI, far more than 100 people were affected by this. I don't know where that number came from, but it's probably more like 100 calls about it came in and were booked against accounts, rather than the actual number of people affected. Internally, it was treated as an MSO (Major System Outage), which means it was affecting at least 2000 people.
Apple and Sony came up with their own names for IEEE1394, iLink and Firewire, yet iLink was Sony's name? I think my brain just coughed.
http://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ?t=1m46s
I love the idea of free software, I love open-source, but my god, this man is too much.
Not that I want to agree with what is basically a trolling comment, but he didn't actually say anything about RMS's intellect, just his personal hygiene. Which, let's be honest, isn't too far from the truth - http://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ?t=1m46s
40Gb is possibly the smallest SSD you can get and by your own admission, it "just about fits". You can get 128Gb SSD's for about 2$ per GB and 256GB SSD's aren't far off that. By the time Windows 8 comes out, those prices should have dropped further.
No, but the memory optimisations are clearly a core part of the OS, so they did it first and it has been working for 2 years. Vista was a clusterfuck for all sorts of reasons, we know that, however unless they manage to find a bug in the optimisations that causes your PC to burst into flames, I doubt they'll be removing anything.
If you actually bothered to read the blog, you'd see that these memory optimisations were one of the very first things they did and have, in fact, been in the code for about 2 years now.
Because your disk space is at a massive premium, yes?
You can upload more than that, just that when you hit 6GB, your upload speed drops to 1.75Mbit instead of 5Mbit. SO it's not really a "Cap" and it's still a pretty generous one if it is.
If you press the winkey, you can just start typing to bring up the program you want. "cmd" even brings up the command line. I find this easier than clicking anything, does this not work for you or have I missed something?
There's a difference between supporting the system and not caring about what happens to the system but using it anyway.
If Slashdot shut down tomorrow, I'd go to some other Tech news site. In a way, I don't care what happens to Slashdot but while it's here and is a reasonable source for geek news, I'll visit it and use it.
BerliOS we Berli knew ye.
That might be why the term is in quotes.
Because in London a lot of buildings don't have direct fibre. There is the odd spot, but the majority simply don't. Most people are connected via ADSL, syncing at the maximum possible speed (the average is something like 6mbit on an "up-to" 24mbit ADSL2+ connection) so there is no left over bandwidth.
However, BT do offer a service whereby their own home routers create a separate wireless network in which they allow other BT customers to use when they're not at home, so the idea isn't completely lost.
I may be ignorant on the subject, but how much bandwidth do you actually need to stream to your graphics card for a Blu-ray film? What I mean is, I realise that an uncompressed stream is possibly hundreds of megabits, but the compressed stream is substantially less than this and it's the graphics card itself that does the decompression, right?. After this stage, does the data get fed back along the PCI bus or does it get blitted to the screen directly from the graphics card's memory?
The thing is, and I do want to make this absolutely clear, is that the reason I'm so rigidly "defending" Microsoft is because there is a genuine issue here that needs to be addressed, with the OEMs, that's being completely and utterly overshadowed by everyone pointing the finger at Microsoft.
If any of the apocalyptically bad things were to happen here, it would be because of the OEMs, either because they're lazy, cheap (don't want to spend money on support costs, so "limit" the amount of things a user can mess with) or gave into some hidden pressure from Microsoft that has yet to be discovered.
I wish the secure boot thing came to light years ago when it first appeared as part of the UEFI spec, because the ability to utilise it would be a great way to add additional security to machines. Ideally, you should be able to add your own keys to the UEFI partition, public keys based on a private key you made yourself. A company can have its own keys that it distributes on all of its machines, making them secure from anything but an outside attack (at least where the bootloader is concerned).
This is how it should work, but OEMs haven't bothered to implement it, so the technology goes to waste. With Microsoft mandating that all future machines support it, we have a great opportunity to take advantage of it ourselves, yet everyone is getting pissy with Microsoft instead of getting onto their Manufacturer of choice and ensuring that future products will be fully customisable.
This is the real issue at hand and the thing we should all focus on.
Which is why I say we should pressure OEMs. This decision has nothing to do with Microsoft so people are ignoring it, despite the fact that it is still an issue that people should be concerned with.
No, we're not. The thing to keep in mind is that there's a distinction between simply booting and secure booting. Right now, no operating system can secure boot (as far as I'm aware, anyway - if there is hardware+software out there that can utilise this, please let me know) and Microsoft wants to push it for Windows 8. It would be nice if we can also utilise this for other operating systems as well (or rather, other boot loaders, like GRUB), however that task lies with the OEMs and their willingness to let us add our own keys. Like I said before - this is the OEM decision, not Microsoft's.
And there it is again! The assumption that you won't be able to disable secure boot. This assumption lies squarely with OEMs and not Microsoft.
Consumers don't need to pressure OEMs more than Microsoft, they just need to pressure them. Microsoft is pushing to enable secure boot by default, while us users should be pressuring OEMs to give us control over secure boot. They are two entirely different things.
Even if Microsoft changed their mind on the secure boot by default thing, we should still pressure OEMs to give us this control as it's a very useful security feature to have.
Now, of course there's that idea that Microsoft might be in the background pressuring OEMs to remove the option to disable it, but so far this is based entirely on conjecture and speculation. If Microsoft does try it, they'll be liable for a massive class-action lawsuit, something that would cost them a lot more than the 1-2% of the marketshare they could possibly gain by blocking Linux. Until that happens, it's a non-issue. Rather than moaning at Microsoft, we should be moaning at the OEMs because they're the ones that will be taking these options from us.
In the technology world, we shouldn't let the "maybes" get in the way of innovation. Secure boot would outrightly kill a lot of malware attacks, something that plagues windows a lot more than it does Linux.
..It's the OEM's. Nowhere does Microsoft mandate that OEMs must remove the option to disable UEFI secure boot, only that it's enabled by default.
For someone that's supposedly calling Microsoft out for misinformation, Matthew Garret does a great job of it himself. Here's a few points I noticed:
Which hardware vendors? Who? What hardware? Why? And what has that got to do with Microsoft?
And why shouldn't it? It also doesn't state that you can only ship Microsoft's keys. Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to get keys other than its own installed?
Exactly, however a system that ships with UEFI secure boot and only includes a linux distribution's signing keys will only securely boot that linux distribution. Why is the latter ok, but the former not? Oh wait, because Microsoft is the big, bad buy? Once again - Microsoft doesn't mandate that UEFI secure boot be forced, its the OEM's decision to remove the option to disable it.
Of course, this fails to mention (again) that OEMs are in no way forced to remove UEFI secure boot and by doing so, they'll be at a disadvantage in the marketplace and lose sales from people like this very writer....
In short: Because Nobody else can have secure boot, why should Microsoft get to have it? Apparently that's bad for even the likes of AMD and Intel.
Nevermind that 99.99% of malware targets windows, that most "zombies" on the internet are Windows machines, that most spam is sent from windows machines, which affects everyone. In that instance, giving Windows machines that extra blip of security by default hardly seems like a bad thing.
Woah woah woah! Didn't you just say that Microsoft were the only ones capable of forcing Manufacturers to include their signing keys? That the likes of AMD,
If you're on Windows, Pale Moon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) has a 64bit version. It's firefox with optimisations (and I mean actual optimisations, not "feature optimisations" which effectively mean bloat).
8 tabs open and hovering at around 400Mb here. Still doesn't seem "half" the memory usage.
Well that's nice. Good for Oracle.
What and I can't do a "nothing to see here yet?
We can debate all day on the future and what Microsoft may do or we can stick to the here and now and stick to the facts at hand.