You're willing to load malicious or misbehaving software all because Microsoft now lets you pull media types back to their products? (which does absolutely nothing to remove adware and spyware, by the way)
The "currently installed handler" means that if QuickTime is the default media player, thats what it uses - ie - honoring the exisiting standard!
That's right : The utility allows one to either keep the current config, or revert to Microsoft's handler. This utility, as it currently stands, only benefits Microsoft. The only use for this utility to most consumers at this point in time is to revert to Microsoft products as their handler. Is this so difficult to comprehend?
And you are lying about "start running late".. MS published the standard before the service pack!
Let's see: The utility offers a blanket "Use the Microsoft products", or alternative third party programs that implement the new standard, when and if they come out. Gee, Microsoft gets no headstart here now do they. Microsoft published the "standard" about a two months ago: Yeah, there's been a whole application refresh since then hasn't there. Of course, SP2 will introduce a new, err, "standard" that'll again put Microsoft products in the drivers seat while everyone else rushes to catch up to this great new innovation.
Plus, vendors are starting to write in the *trivial* support that is needed to interface with the new method. Netscape 7 already does this, as well as the most recent version of Winamp IIRC.
And it would be trivial for Microsoft to scan the harddrive and recognize products that can handle certain types of media. If they were good natured about it, you would think that this would be their FIRST approach. Don't force everyone to upgrade every piece of software to support the new, err, standard. I'd have a lot more faith in it if it did something as trivially easy as that. However, instead I now have the option of reverting from using Opera, or Mozilla, etc, to going to Microsoft's media handler. Kudos to Microsoft!
Mostly inaccurate? I have QuickTime, RealPlayer, and MediaPlayer all installed, and my options (before I uninstalled SP1) were "the currently installed handler", or the Microsoft handler. My post is entirely accurate. I'm not anti-Microsoft whatsoever, but I did get a laugh at the application as it ignores longstanding media association standards and, surprize surprize, sets up another one where everyone else has to start running late.
You do have to find it a little interesting how the program works though: You have an option between Microsoft's content handler, or the generic "What you have installed now" : It seems to me that if anything, the only ones this serves is Microsoft, as the only functionality is to reclaim file types back to the Microsoft application. I could be misinterpreting the utility, but that's the way it seems to me.
As a sidenote: I uninstall SP1 from XP shortly after installing it - Immediately several services failed, and for instance Outlook took approximately 4 minutes to start up.
It's one thing if someone has to break into your garage, or disable your bike lock, in order to steal your property. It's another thing if you're practically throwing your property out in the path of all and sundry.
No it isn't. Indeed, my example specifically mentioned the case where I didn't lock my bike, or I left my car unlocked, or maybe a prior crook had smashed the window: While I might be chastized for not taking appropriate security actions, in no way does this give others rights to my property. If I lay my bike at the side of a store while I run in to grab a chocolate bar, you will be stealing if you hop on and ride away. Again, the police might say "well you were kinda dumb not locking your bike up" (just as everyone on here says about WAPs that are insecure), but this doesn't excuse the criminal: If they are caught they are charged with the exact same offense as if they'd busted a lock to get it. Apart from the fact that any reasonable person knows that you can't just take things without permission, this is additionally protection against the supposedly secondary criminal: i.e. If the law said that all unlocked bikes are free for the taking, well then you can just claim that when you got there it was already unlocked-It must have been some sinister prior crook that did that.
If they're sending a signal to me, then that signal is fair game. And if I happen to emit signals in return that cause their network to do something, well, see next paragraph.
Admittingly this isn't as clear as property rights, however there are parallels. Back in the old days of "phreaking" all you were doing was receiving some signals and transmitting some signals on phone lines : A couple of DTMF tones never hurt anyone, right? Through this you could get free long distance from payphones, and home phones. Was this theft? You're damn right it was: Just because one can argue that the telco shouldn't have allowed such simple circumvention, it doesn't diminish the fact that they were illegally using someone else's resources without permission.
The general rule in society is one of implied denial, with permission having to be granted: If I put my bike aside my house, you can't presume that because I haven't explicitly denied you from taking it that therefore it's free for the taking. While locking said bike is encouraged, the reality is that locking isn't necessary: You can't presume any rights over someone elses goods or property without explicitly being given it. The reason for this, of course, is that it would be an open world for theft otherwise: "Oh, but officer the lock must have been cut off before I came along" or "Sorry sir, but when I came up the car window was already broken and the stereo system was detachable, so I presumed it was free for the taking".
If you are responsible for a site, you can keep people from accessing it wirelessly if you want to.
That's the sort of ploy that is commonly used to blame the victim. "Well she wouldn't have been raped if she hadn't dressed so suggestively". I completely agree that it is the responsibility of the network maintainers to maintain a good degree of security over their network, just as it's the responsibility of car owners not to leave their car idling outside the store while they run in, however in either case it does not diminish the responsibility of the thief.
You know what kind of speed increases I saw? Hardly any. My CPU usage while compiling has dropped slightly.
That makes no sense. Your CPU usage should remain at 100%, but the completion time decreases.
The disk hasn't been a major bottleneck ever since memory became so cheap that we now have 100MB+ disk caches (you recall back in the day of SMARTDRV? It was at that point that magazines started ignoring disk comparisons in actual benchmarks because caching equalized them all). Unless you're running an XP machine with 16MB and it's constantly paging, or you're compiling the source code to Windows 2000, I highly doubt you do anything where the disk is even marginally the bottleneck.
And as per faster RAM : Why would you rather have faster RAM than a faster CPU? RAM & CPU form a balance, and super octoclocked RAM isn't going to speed up a Celeron 300a any, and DDR400 has shown absolutely negligable benefits on anything but the absolute highest end processors. RAM and the CPU have to form a balance, and quad pumped RAM would be of no practical use to virtually any processor today, but rather represents expandability into the future.
Advertisers want to know about the demographics of the people who will be visiting the site. It would be difficult (although not impossible) to develop this information for a honeypot.
In this case they would automatically have a tremendously valuable demographic, which is "people in a certain area". Of course your advertisers wouldn't be Coca Cola (well...unless they had a coke machine near where you are...), but rather local restaurants, book stores, geek hangouts, coffee shops, retailers, computer stores, etc.
1. give something valuable out for free. 4. ??? 5. profit!
Actually, that's pretty much exactly what network television does, and they're rolling in the dough.
In fact, this is a great idea (if it weren't for the technical problems with it) because it solves the primary problem with internet advertisement: A lack of ability to target advertisements to a paricular group of consumers. In this case because it's a wireless network, you know that they are within a small geographical area, and hence it's a gold mine for stores and businesses in the area.
In any case, while we need to learn from history, history doesn't dictate with certainty: When the first airplane failed to get off the ground, they didn't give up and forget about it. History is full of examples where there are countless failures, followed by success.
he went back to 2k because the gui was too klunky slow...He's also one of those "In the know" people that cares about speed.
Apparently he's not "in the know" all that much, given that XP is basically a highly optimized version of Windows 2000 (with better device support to boot), and the GUI can be configured to be a virtual clone of Windows 2000. I cannot stand the visual effects of XP, and that's why I had them turned off pronto.
There is no reason whatsoever why XP couldn't run just fine on his laptop. In any case, the problems that he encountered were due to the usually subpar video processors on most laptops, which would make the video effects all the more intolerable.
Actually, I do have a program I wrote that requires dual 2+ GHz procs and 1+ GB RAM.
That is, if you want to see your results within a day...
Why is the metric "within a day"? What if I want my results in a minute? What if I want my results within a second? What if I want my results within a microsecond?
For non-realtime systems it becomes a subjective measure of what is tolerable, not what is possible, but of course "tolerable" entirely relates to "the conditions you are use to". There was a time, many years back, when I went start povray running to render a single frame before I went to bed, and I'd come down in the morning to find that I pointed the camera the wrong way, or forgot a light source, etc. Today that would be insane, but only because we become spoiled by better. If you state a minimum that'll create 10 rendered frames per minute (note that this isn't realtime being watched, but rather is generated to an animation) as some arbitrary minimum, then I would ask why it isn't 20 frames per minute? Why not 100 frames per minute? 1000 frames per minute? If you rewrite the minimum in a year, will you accordingly up the minimum just because of changes in the marketplace? It's likely, and it also points out the absurdity of said minimums.
So MS needs to think not only of what the OS will need, but what apps are likely to need too.
Again, I think memory limits are fine, presuming that they are actual metrics and not just "Well if 128MB is good, then 256MB is even better. If 256MB is even better, then 512MB is great. If 512MB is great, then 1GB is superb, etc.". Even with memory one gets into the fanciful arena of subjective measures: XP runs nicely with 256MB because it can basically use a hundred MB for a file system cache, reducing disk paging and increasing cache hits, leading to a smoother experience. Is it necessary though? Probably not: Back in the day of restricted memory they developed virtual memory specifically to deal with software that require more memory than one has, gracefully paging to disk : It's slower, but it works.
You mentioned "what apps you'll likely need too", and I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of apps are not CPU bound: Web browsers, reasonable media playback (not full screen high bitrate DIVX, which requires far more than a 300Mhz processor anyways) like Winamp, Word processing, etc. All of these would run perfectly fine on a 66Mhz Pentium 1 processor. When you get into the realm of CPU bound applications, then the application itself dictates it rather than the underlying operating system, and it's folly to think that Microsoft should take other apps into account too (especially given that, as mentioned, in actual operations XP runs at 0% cpu usage: There aren't CPU intensive system services running)? When Doom 3 comes out, should Microsoft state that XP requires a Athlon 2000+ and a GF4 or Radeon 9700? Of course they shouldn't.
Also I think all the bitching is pretty academic. It's hard to buy anything under 700mhz these days unless you are buying used
My point was that the software companies feed the hardware upgrade cycle by implying that products require minimums far beyond what they actually need (as I mentioned in another posting, they go so far as to claim minimum CDROM spin rates for applications which have absolutely no streaming media requirements or required throughput threshhold. It's just another useless requirement on a box). Even in the gaming market, many games are entirely video card bound, but what is "acceptable" is entirely subjective: Personally I find it hard to tolerate the frame rate ever dropping below 60fps, but a few years ago I was completely satisfied with 15fps. There are many today who are playing games at rates that I consider unacceptable, yet they're having an enjoyable time and don't know the difference. Are they wrong? Of course they aren't.
I may get the impression that I'm a luddite old sk001 UNIX guru, but in reality I do my day to day computing on an Athlon 1800+ with a GF4 4400, etc, however I recognize that this vicious cycle of forced obsolescence is largely artificial.
much of the complexity is being offloaded to the video card
I completely agree that the biggest bottleneck for most modern games is the video card, however the are exceptions that should be guiding the way for future games that'll require 10Ghz processors and beyond:
-Falcon 4 stutters (when I get near the FLOT) on my GF 4 4400+Athlon 1800+ system, despite being a game that is several years old. It stutters because that extremely innovative software group, that was shortly thereafter disbanded, tried to simulate a fairly complex war to have an actual, living world around the player. The CPU is definitely a massive limitation in this game.
-Operation Flashpoint, an otherwise generic "FPS" (it's actually a tremendous strategic war simulation, but I mean if someone quickly looked at it) is very CPU intensive because it, like Falcon, puts dozens or hundreds of units, all with AI, in close proximity. Even still, though, the world is incredibly limited versus what it could be: For instance in a particular mission enemy units will only exist in a small quadrant on a 100km2 map because it would be dramatically too computationally demanding to have the AI of an islands worth of units, yet I want that. I want to have games that are linear, but instead let me go off in whatever direction that I want without seeing the wizard behind the curtain: Immerse me.
It is a sad state that most people measure the computational requirements by something like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, games with only a couple of AI players that themselves live within very tightly bounded worlds (and hence have a limited number of permuatations to consider). Current games are just starting to touch the surface of what will one day be possible.
I think the software industry has already fueled the hardware market simply by putting grossly inflated "minimum specs" on their boxes. I will reiterate that anything that isn't realtime often has no minimum CPU limits. For those who don't know, realtime relates to some operation which must complete a certain operation in a prescribed period of time: For instance a PVR has to encode the video without falling behind. Anything that isn't realtime however then falls into the domain of "What are you willing to tolerate?".
Probably the most ludicrous requirements listed on boxes relate to CDs: Virtually all boxes will state something inane like "Minimum 4x CDROM", yet these are for products which do full installs and load absolutely nothing in a time sensitive manner from the CD. Is it absolutely imperative that the install finish in 15 minutes?
And while windows XP is processor greedy, the benchmark for good performance in XP was surpassed a while back.
I was actually writing a Slashdot submission some time ago that dealt with "minimum requirements" and how they are determined in the software industry. For instance, for Windows XP Microsoft states as the requirements "PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required". I offer up the opinion that they pulled these numbers out of their ass, and that is the general routine of the software industry in general. While items such as memory or hard drive space can be actually metered and truly quoted on in minimum configurations (recommended becomes more of a suggestion as it is completely subjective: If you're willing to tolerate endless paging, Windows NT 4.0 will run on, and was originally specified as for, 12MB. If Microsoft re-released Windows NT 4.0 pre SP1 today, they'd claim that it required a minimum of 128MB, and a 300Mhz+ processor). I believe that software manufacturers simply find the middle to low end in the current marketplace and stick that on their box with the hopes that more detailed "requirements" makes it appear that the QA department did a better job, when all it's really doing is needlessly muddling and implying metrics that don't actually exist. Minimum CPU requirements for non-realtime applications are a farce.
Why do I bring up XP? Firstly, I've found XP to actually be significantly less demanding than Windows 2000 (for instance startup times have dropped dramatically as they optimized the kernel and ancilliary code). Windows 2000 specifies a "minimum" processor of a 133Mhz Pentium, yet Windows XP specifies that you need a 233Mhz or higher processor. Why the jump of 100Mhz? Does it latently consume more resources? Checking my CPU meter I can see that it generally sits at 0%. Compare this to Windows NT 4.0, to which XP still shares a tremendous lineage (one can still run virtually all current software on an NT 4.0 machine) which only requires a 486 33Mhz. Claims that XP is a CPU hog are ridiculous: While it can be demanding from a video perspective if you have the "effects" on, and you should have lots of memory, it would likely run perfectly fine on a Pentium Pro 60Mhz, presuming you had the required memory.
Why do I say this little rant? Because I truly was interested some time back about the engineering foundation for determining and quoting on minimum, recommended, and optimal configurations, and how they are derived.
The ratio between console games and PC games is the same as it's been for years, with both making steady gains. I'm not claiming that PC gaming is more lucrative, but rather that the claim that Loki didn't do well because everyone abandoned the market is absurd: The computer gaming market continues to grow, not contract.
"What if someone would be producing good code but doesn't because his coworkers keep messaging him with mostly irrelevant information?"
Managing one's own time and information flows is one of the most important aspects of any worker, and is a personal responsibility. The same sort of issue could be brought up about any communication medium: phone, email, IM, or even in person (which is often the worst because it's totally synchronous).
Second problem: Suppose the worker would be producing good code if he wan't tempted to check on his wife and family.
Then the net effect is that he isn't a good worker, and needs to be dealt with. This is the "lowest denominator" factor that leads to most of the draconian, ridiculous policies in workplaces, and it quite frankly is horribly wrong. People have to take charge of themselves, and those who cannot multitask should know how to put the phone on DND, IM to "Busy", and close Outlook. Those who thrive in a multitasking jobplace might be IMing with friends while coding, and playing a game of minesweeper. Making a base set of rules to help people with no self restraint isn't the solution.
Do you have some metrics to back that ridiculous claim up? You know, something that refutes, for example, that PC games sold $6 billion worth last year, compared to $5.4 billion the year prior (I use last year as a) I'm too lazy to look for stats, but I found those immediately, and b) that was the period in which Loki operated).
And HTML is just gopher with better layouts. It isn't some big mystery that IM and email are very tightly related (and it isn't some great insight when people comment regarding IMs with the profound observation that IMs are quite a lot like email) however IM has some important differences:
-Most IM tools let you create adhoc conferences among people.
-Most IM tools allow you to send a file, knowing that the receiver has the option to deny it. This is useful when you're not sure if you sent it.
-IM is often perceived as useful for quick "off the cuff" questions that don't seem quite important enough for an email, yet if you were right beside the person you would likely ask them.
-IM shows people's status. Add this feature to email (allowing me to avoid sending the message in the first place) and then you'll have a better comparison.
The reality is it depends on the maturity of your team. All of my team members are mature enough to use IM as a tool. Those who were not mature enough were fired after a warning. This applies to ANY communication tool, any violation of company codes.
Any company that fires based upon the use of a communication tool deserves what will ultimately become of it, which is failure (apart from the criminal or sexually harrasing, of course). If someone is producing good quality whatever in good quantities, then it should be absolutely irrelevant if they are playing computer chess while chatting with their buddies about D&D. If, on the other hand, someone isn't producing, then it shouldn't matter that they put in 60 hour weeks (as is usually the case with non-producers: Martyrdom through incompetence), and that they sit starting hardcore at code from 8am until 6pm every day, they should be moved to a different job, or ultimately fired.
The way I manage is entirely output based, and no amount of ass kissing or excuse making can make me ignore a lack of contribution to the project, but on the flip side I don't care if someone works 12 hours a week and has slashdot on auto-reload: If the output is there, then how can they be faulted? Too many people bring a factory line mentality to software development, and unfortunately such a mentality is often based on envy: You have to keep everyone beaten down to the same level to ensure that the lowly doesn't feel green with envy.
Summary: They are not good work tools, if you want to keep productivity high.
Absurd. I'm a software developer, and like most software developers I'm an introvert. As such I have a desire to use forms of communications like email or instant messaging wherever possible, so I don't proclaim to speak for anyone and everyone, but rather for my "type": I would say, without the slightest ounce of doubt, that instant messaging (and its close cousin email) have been incredibly productive in the workplace. Why? While the reasons are several, the primary reasons are that they are instantaneous to send (no looking up a phone number, dialing, waiting for ringing...waiting...waiting for voicemail menu...talking for 35 seconds...hitting pound...1....2), they are asynchronous (they don't demand the time of the other person instantly, but rather effectively install queues in your workplace so that people can work most efficiently at given tasks. Of course every workplace has the work avoiding blamecaster who'll always be spinning his wheels idle, protesting to all who'll listen that he's "waiting on so and so". Such people should be fired immediately), and you can get to the root of the matter far quicker than you can using alternate methods of communication. I won't bother exploring any of these because they should be self evident.
Having said that, I have met some very firm resistant from "old schoolers", and alternately people who I would best describe as "bullshitters": I worked with one gentlemen (to loosely use that term) once who was a unbelievable pathological liar- He would spin such a web of bullshit that it was just baffling. However, I noticed that he would never reply to an email, or send an IM, or even leave a voicemail for that matter: It always had to be a "quick meeting". Social hackers love the control that physical or voice meetings allow them as well (a control that is lost in asynchronous messaging).
Take a look at the "NakedWireless" site from a couple of days ago: They use a completely useless Flash intro page, and they included the link to the actual body in the Flash. I happened to access the page in Opera without Flash, and there was no way at all to proceed without being able to view the extraneous Flash animation.
I live in Toronto, Ontario (Canada), and what does one of our newspapers emblazon on the cover? In big bold letters, with a picture of a dark day over the CN Tower: "TARGET: TORONTO", and some text explaining how people feel that Toronto is the next target for terrorists.
I saw that paper (one of the trash rags that I don't actually read) and was astounded, especially when you read the subtext that states "If a terrorist attacks Canada, most of a poll respondents believe that they would hit Toronto": Well that's just a stunning bit of the astoundingly obvious there. I can help them out if they have branches around the world:
TARGET BRITAIN: London!
TARGET FRANCE: Paris!
Mind you, I see nothing whatsoever wrong with news stations continuing to do what they do (with commercials and all). I mean, if you take commercials off the air, haven't you let the terrorist win? I'm actually playing on a common bunch of BS there, but really I don't see what the problem with networks doing what they do, if they're providing the information that people seek (for instance: One newscaster mentioned that people complained that they kept showing scary images on 2001-09-11-> Turn off the friggin' TV!).
September 11 2001 was a great tragedy. Too bad it took that to make people realize that it's a big world and shit can happen, without there being anything you can do.
I've seen a lot of comments, especially from people around the world, saying things along the lines of "yeah, well people die all the time: Get over it!". The WTC attack, and I single it out from the Pentagon for a reason, was unlike any attack that the West had ever seen: It hit everyday Joe, where he works (and where he lives), in peacetime. Because of this, the effect to all of us was dramatic (it put the serious bejebus' into hundreds of millions of people, as is generally the desire of terrorists). I would say, with pretty good sincerity, that this would not be even remotely as big of a deal if a US military installation were blown up with 3000 soldiers lost (PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU RANT OFF AT ME: I am not saying that that would not be a big deal-> It would be a huge deal, and would likely have also led to a country getting their asses kicked, but nothing like the effects of 9/11), because we could all separate ourselves from it and depersonalize it.
Komodo, much like Sun's Java platforms, totally kill me on the idea of middleware "platforms": Both are horrendously flakey, and horribly slow (I could tolerate Komodo for about 30 minutes before it got the uninstall treatment).
Slashdot Mirror
You're willing to load malicious or misbehaving software all because Microsoft now lets you pull media types back to their products? (which does absolutely nothing to remove adware and spyware, by the way)
The "currently installed handler" means that if QuickTime is the default media player, thats what it uses - ie - honoring the exisiting standard!
That's right : The utility allows one to either keep the current config, or revert to Microsoft's handler. This utility, as it currently stands, only benefits Microsoft. The only use for this utility to most consumers at this point in time is to revert to Microsoft products as their handler. Is this so difficult to comprehend?
And you are lying about "start running late".. MS published the standard before the service pack!
Let's see: The utility offers a blanket "Use the Microsoft products", or alternative third party programs that implement the new standard, when and if they come out. Gee, Microsoft gets no headstart here now do they. Microsoft published the "standard" about a two months ago: Yeah, there's been a whole application refresh since then hasn't there. Of course, SP2 will introduce a new, err, "standard" that'll again put Microsoft products in the drivers seat while everyone else rushes to catch up to this great new innovation.
Plus, vendors are starting to write in the *trivial* support that is needed to interface with the new method. Netscape 7 already does this, as well as the most recent version of Winamp IIRC.
And it would be trivial for Microsoft to scan the harddrive and recognize products that can handle certain types of media. If they were good natured about it, you would think that this would be their FIRST approach. Don't force everyone to upgrade every piece of software to support the new, err, standard. I'd have a lot more faith in it if it did something as trivially easy as that. However, instead I now have the option of reverting from using Opera, or Mozilla, etc, to going to Microsoft's media handler. Kudos to Microsoft!
Mostly inaccurate? I have QuickTime, RealPlayer, and MediaPlayer all installed, and my options (before I uninstalled SP1) were "the currently installed handler", or the Microsoft handler. My post is entirely accurate. I'm not anti-Microsoft whatsoever, but I did get a laugh at the application as it ignores longstanding media association standards and, surprize surprize, sets up another one where everyone else has to start running late.
You do have to find it a little interesting how the program works though: You have an option between Microsoft's content handler, or the generic "What you have installed now" : It seems to me that if anything, the only ones this serves is Microsoft, as the only functionality is to reclaim file types back to the Microsoft application. I could be misinterpreting the utility, but that's the way it seems to me.
As a sidenote: I uninstall SP1 from XP shortly after installing it - Immediately several services failed, and for instance Outlook took approximately 4 minutes to start up.
Not to mention that XP Professional only supports two processors.
It's one thing if someone has to break into your garage, or disable your bike lock, in order to steal your property. It's another thing if you're practically throwing your property out in the path of all and sundry.
No it isn't. Indeed, my example specifically mentioned the case where I didn't lock my bike, or I left my car unlocked, or maybe a prior crook had smashed the window: While I might be chastized for not taking appropriate security actions, in no way does this give others rights to my property. If I lay my bike at the side of a store while I run in to grab a chocolate bar, you will be stealing if you hop on and ride away. Again, the police might say "well you were kinda dumb not locking your bike up" (just as everyone on here says about WAPs that are insecure), but this doesn't excuse the criminal: If they are caught they are charged with the exact same offense as if they'd busted a lock to get it. Apart from the fact that any reasonable person knows that you can't just take things without permission, this is additionally protection against the supposedly secondary criminal: i.e. If the law said that all unlocked bikes are free for the taking, well then you can just claim that when you got there it was already unlocked-It must have been some sinister prior crook that did that.
If they're sending a signal to me, then that signal is fair game. And if I happen to emit signals in return that cause their network to do something, well, see next paragraph.
Admittingly this isn't as clear as property rights, however there are parallels. Back in the old days of "phreaking" all you were doing was receiving some signals and transmitting some signals on phone lines : A couple of DTMF tones never hurt anyone, right? Through this you could get free long distance from payphones, and home phones. Was this theft? You're damn right it was: Just because one can argue that the telco shouldn't have allowed such simple circumvention, it doesn't diminish the fact that they were illegally using someone else's resources without permission.
The general rule in society is one of implied denial, with permission having to be granted: If I put my bike aside my house, you can't presume that because I haven't explicitly denied you from taking it that therefore it's free for the taking. While locking said bike is encouraged, the reality is that locking isn't necessary: You can't presume any rights over someone elses goods or property without explicitly being given it. The reason for this, of course, is that it would be an open world for theft otherwise: "Oh, but officer the lock must have been cut off before I came along" or "Sorry sir, but when I came up the car window was already broken and the stereo system was detachable, so I presumed it was free for the taking".
If you are responsible for a site, you can keep people from accessing it wirelessly if you want to.
That's the sort of ploy that is commonly used to blame the victim. "Well she wouldn't have been raped if she hadn't dressed so suggestively". I completely agree that it is the responsibility of the network maintainers to maintain a good degree of security over their network, just as it's the responsibility of car owners not to leave their car idling outside the store while they run in, however in either case it does not diminish the responsibility of the thief.
You know what kind of speed increases I saw? Hardly any. My CPU usage while compiling has dropped slightly.
That makes no sense. Your CPU usage should remain at 100%, but the completion time decreases.
The disk hasn't been a major bottleneck ever since memory became so cheap that we now have 100MB+ disk caches (you recall back in the day of SMARTDRV? It was at that point that magazines started ignoring disk comparisons in actual benchmarks because caching equalized them all). Unless you're running an XP machine with 16MB and it's constantly paging, or you're compiling the source code to Windows 2000, I highly doubt you do anything where the disk is even marginally the bottleneck.
And as per faster RAM : Why would you rather have faster RAM than a faster CPU? RAM & CPU form a balance, and super octoclocked RAM isn't going to speed up a Celeron 300a any, and DDR400 has shown absolutely negligable benefits on anything but the absolute highest end processors. RAM and the CPU have to form a balance, and quad pumped RAM would be of no practical use to virtually any processor today, but rather represents expandability into the future.
Advertisers want to know about the demographics of the people who will be visiting the site. It would be difficult (although not impossible) to develop this information for a honeypot.
In this case they would automatically have a tremendously valuable demographic, which is "people in a certain area". Of course your advertisers wouldn't be Coca Cola (well...unless they had a coke machine near where you are...), but rather local restaurants, book stores, geek hangouts, coffee shops, retailers, computer stores, etc.
1. give something valuable out for free.
4. ???
5. profit!
Actually, that's pretty much exactly what network television does, and they're rolling in the dough.
In fact, this is a great idea (if it weren't for the technical problems with it) because it solves the primary problem with internet advertisement: A lack of ability to target advertisements to a paricular group of consumers. In this case because it's a wireless network, you know that they are within a small geographical area, and hence it's a gold mine for stores and businesses in the area.
In any case, while we need to learn from history, history doesn't dictate with certainty: When the first airplane failed to get off the ground, they didn't give up and forget about it. History is full of examples where there are countless failures, followed by success.
he went back to 2k because the gui was too klunky slow...He's also one of those "In the know" people that cares about speed.
Apparently he's not "in the know" all that much, given that XP is basically a highly optimized version of Windows 2000 (with better device support to boot), and the GUI can be configured to be a virtual clone of Windows 2000. I cannot stand the visual effects of XP, and that's why I had them turned off pronto.
There is no reason whatsoever why XP couldn't run just fine on his laptop. In any case, the problems that he encountered were due to the usually subpar video processors on most laptops, which would make the video effects all the more intolerable.
Actually, I do have a program I wrote that requires dual 2+ GHz procs and 1+ GB RAM.
That is, if you want to see your results within a day...
Why is the metric "within a day"? What if I want my results in a minute? What if I want my results within a second? What if I want my results within a microsecond?
For non-realtime systems it becomes a subjective measure of what is tolerable, not what is possible, but of course "tolerable" entirely relates to "the conditions you are use to". There was a time, many years back, when I went start povray running to render a single frame before I went to bed, and I'd come down in the morning to find that I pointed the camera the wrong way, or forgot a light source, etc. Today that would be insane, but only because we become spoiled by better. If you state a minimum that'll create 10 rendered frames per minute (note that this isn't realtime being watched, but rather is generated to an animation) as some arbitrary minimum, then I would ask why it isn't 20 frames per minute? Why not 100 frames per minute? 1000 frames per minute? If you rewrite the minimum in a year, will you accordingly up the minimum just because of changes in the marketplace? It's likely, and it also points out the absurdity of said minimums.
So MS needs to think not only of what the OS will need, but what apps are likely to need too.
Again, I think memory limits are fine, presuming that they are actual metrics and not just "Well if 128MB is good, then 256MB is even better. If 256MB is even better, then 512MB is great. If 512MB is great, then 1GB is superb, etc.". Even with memory one gets into the fanciful arena of subjective measures: XP runs nicely with 256MB because it can basically use a hundred MB for a file system cache, reducing disk paging and increasing cache hits, leading to a smoother experience. Is it necessary though? Probably not: Back in the day of restricted memory they developed virtual memory specifically to deal with software that require more memory than one has, gracefully paging to disk : It's slower, but it works.
You mentioned "what apps you'll likely need too", and I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of apps are not CPU bound: Web browsers, reasonable media playback (not full screen high bitrate DIVX, which requires far more than a 300Mhz processor anyways) like Winamp, Word processing, etc. All of these would run perfectly fine on a 66Mhz Pentium 1 processor. When you get into the realm of CPU bound applications, then the application itself dictates it rather than the underlying operating system, and it's folly to think that Microsoft should take other apps into account too (especially given that, as mentioned, in actual operations XP runs at 0% cpu usage: There aren't CPU intensive system services running)? When Doom 3 comes out, should Microsoft state that XP requires a Athlon 2000+ and a GF4 or Radeon 9700? Of course they shouldn't.
Also I think all the bitching is pretty academic. It's hard to buy anything under 700mhz these days unless you are buying used
My point was that the software companies feed the hardware upgrade cycle by implying that products require minimums far beyond what they actually need (as I mentioned in another posting, they go so far as to claim minimum CDROM spin rates for applications which have absolutely no streaming media requirements or required throughput threshhold. It's just another useless requirement on a box). Even in the gaming market, many games are entirely video card bound, but what is "acceptable" is entirely subjective: Personally I find it hard to tolerate the frame rate ever dropping below 60fps, but a few years ago I was completely satisfied with 15fps. There are many today who are playing games at rates that I consider unacceptable, yet they're having an enjoyable time and don't know the difference. Are they wrong? Of course they aren't.
I may get the impression that I'm a luddite old sk001 UNIX guru, but in reality I do my day to day computing on an Athlon 1800+ with a GF4 4400, etc, however I recognize that this vicious cycle of forced obsolescence is largely artificial.
much of the complexity is being offloaded to the video card
I completely agree that the biggest bottleneck for most modern games is the video card, however the are exceptions that should be guiding the way for future games that'll require 10Ghz processors and beyond:
-Falcon 4 stutters (when I get near the FLOT) on my GF 4 4400+Athlon 1800+ system, despite being a game that is several years old. It stutters because that extremely innovative software group, that was shortly thereafter disbanded, tried to simulate a fairly complex war to have an actual, living world around the player. The CPU is definitely a massive limitation in this game.
-Operation Flashpoint, an otherwise generic "FPS" (it's actually a tremendous strategic war simulation, but I mean if someone quickly looked at it) is very CPU intensive because it, like Falcon, puts dozens or hundreds of units, all with AI, in close proximity. Even still, though, the world is incredibly limited versus what it could be: For instance in a particular mission enemy units will only exist in a small quadrant on a 100km2 map because it would be dramatically too computationally demanding to have the AI of an islands worth of units, yet I want that. I want to have games that are linear, but instead let me go off in whatever direction that I want without seeing the wizard behind the curtain: Immerse me.
It is a sad state that most people measure the computational requirements by something like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, games with only a couple of AI players that themselves live within very tightly bounded worlds (and hence have a limited number of permuatations to consider). Current games are just starting to touch the surface of what will one day be possible.
I think the software industry has already fueled the hardware market simply by putting grossly inflated "minimum specs" on their boxes. I will reiterate that anything that isn't realtime often has no minimum CPU limits. For those who don't know, realtime relates to some operation which must complete a certain operation in a prescribed period of time: For instance a PVR has to encode the video without falling behind. Anything that isn't realtime however then falls into the domain of "What are you willing to tolerate?".
Probably the most ludicrous requirements listed on boxes relate to CDs: Virtually all boxes will state something inane like "Minimum 4x CDROM", yet these are for products which do full installs and load absolutely nothing in a time sensitive manner from the CD. Is it absolutely imperative that the install finish in 15 minutes?
And while windows XP is processor greedy, the benchmark for good performance in XP was surpassed a while back.
I was actually writing a Slashdot submission some time ago that dealt with "minimum requirements" and how they are determined in the software industry. For instance, for Windows XP Microsoft states as the requirements "PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required". I offer up the opinion that they pulled these numbers out of their ass, and that is the general routine of the software industry in general. While items such as memory or hard drive space can be actually metered and truly quoted on in minimum configurations (recommended becomes more of a suggestion as it is completely subjective: If you're willing to tolerate endless paging, Windows NT 4.0 will run on, and was originally specified as for, 12MB. If Microsoft re-released Windows NT 4.0 pre SP1 today, they'd claim that it required a minimum of 128MB, and a 300Mhz+ processor). I believe that software manufacturers simply find the middle to low end in the current marketplace and stick that on their box with the hopes that more detailed "requirements" makes it appear that the QA department did a better job, when all it's really doing is needlessly muddling and implying metrics that don't actually exist. Minimum CPU requirements for non-realtime applications are a farce.
Why do I bring up XP? Firstly, I've found XP to actually be significantly less demanding than Windows 2000 (for instance startup times have dropped dramatically as they optimized the kernel and ancilliary code). Windows 2000 specifies a "minimum" processor of a 133Mhz Pentium, yet Windows XP specifies that you need a 233Mhz or higher processor. Why the jump of 100Mhz? Does it latently consume more resources? Checking my CPU meter I can see that it generally sits at 0%. Compare this to Windows NT 4.0, to which XP still shares a tremendous lineage (one can still run virtually all current software on an NT 4.0 machine) which only requires a 486 33Mhz. Claims that XP is a CPU hog are ridiculous: While it can be demanding from a video perspective if you have the "effects" on, and you should have lots of memory, it would likely run perfectly fine on a Pentium Pro 60Mhz, presuming you had the required memory.
Why do I say this little rant? Because I truly was interested some time back about the engineering foundation for determining and quoting on minimum, recommended, and optimal configurations, and how they are derived.
The ratio between console games and PC games is the same as it's been for years, with both making steady gains. I'm not claiming that PC gaming is more lucrative, but rather that the claim that Loki didn't do well because everyone abandoned the market is absurd: The computer gaming market continues to grow, not contract.
"What if someone would be producing good code but doesn't because his coworkers keep messaging him with mostly irrelevant information?"
Managing one's own time and information flows is one of the most important aspects of any worker, and is a personal responsibility. The same sort of issue could be brought up about any communication medium: phone, email, IM, or even in person (which is often the worst because it's totally synchronous).
Second problem:
Suppose the worker would be producing good code if he wan't tempted to check on his wife and family.
Then the net effect is that he isn't a good worker, and needs to be dealt with. This is the "lowest denominator" factor that leads to most of the draconian, ridiculous policies in workplaces, and it quite frankly is horribly wrong. People have to take charge of themselves, and those who cannot multitask should know how to put the phone on DND, IM to "Busy", and close Outlook. Those who thrive in a multitasking jobplace might be IMing with friends while coding, and playing a game of minesweeper. Making a base set of rules to help people with no self restraint isn't the solution.
Do you have some metrics to back that ridiculous claim up? You know, something that refutes, for example, that PC games sold $6 billion worth last year, compared to $5.4 billion the year prior (I use last year as a) I'm too lazy to look for stats, but I found those immediately, and b) that was the period in which Loki operated).
And HTML is just gopher with better layouts. It isn't some big mystery that IM and email are very tightly related (and it isn't some great insight when people comment regarding IMs with the profound observation that IMs are quite a lot like email) however IM has some important differences:
-Most IM tools let you create adhoc conferences among people.
-Most IM tools allow you to send a file, knowing that the receiver has the option to deny it. This is useful when you're not sure if you sent it.
-IM is often perceived as useful for quick "off the cuff" questions that don't seem quite important enough for an email, yet if you were right beside the person you would likely ask them.
-IM shows people's status. Add this feature to email (allowing me to avoid sending the message in the first place) and then you'll have a better comparison.
The reality is it depends on the maturity of your team. All of my team members are mature enough to use IM as a tool. Those who were not mature enough were fired after a warning. This applies to ANY communication tool, any violation of company codes.
Any company that fires based upon the use of a communication tool deserves what will ultimately become of it, which is failure (apart from the criminal or sexually harrasing, of course). If someone is producing good quality whatever in good quantities, then it should be absolutely irrelevant if they are playing computer chess while chatting with their buddies about D&D. If, on the other hand, someone isn't producing, then it shouldn't matter that they put in 60 hour weeks (as is usually the case with non-producers: Martyrdom through incompetence), and that they sit starting hardcore at code from 8am until 6pm every day, they should be moved to a different job, or ultimately fired.
The way I manage is entirely output based, and no amount of ass kissing or excuse making can make me ignore a lack of contribution to the project, but on the flip side I don't care if someone works 12 hours a week and has slashdot on auto-reload: If the output is there, then how can they be faulted? Too many people bring a factory line mentality to software development, and unfortunately such a mentality is often based on envy: You have to keep everyone beaten down to the same level to ensure that the lowly doesn't feel green with envy.
Summary:
They are not good work tools, if you want to keep productivity high.
Absurd. I'm a software developer, and like most software developers I'm an introvert. As such I have a desire to use forms of communications like email or instant messaging wherever possible, so I don't proclaim to speak for anyone and everyone, but rather for my "type": I would say, without the slightest ounce of doubt, that instant messaging (and its close cousin email) have been incredibly productive in the workplace. Why? While the reasons are several, the primary reasons are that they are instantaneous to send (no looking up a phone number, dialing, waiting for ringing...waiting...waiting for voicemail menu...talking for 35 seconds...hitting pound...1....2), they are asynchronous (they don't demand the time of the other person instantly, but rather effectively install queues in your workplace so that people can work most efficiently at given tasks. Of course every workplace has the work avoiding blamecaster who'll always be spinning his wheels idle, protesting to all who'll listen that he's "waiting on so and so". Such people should be fired immediately), and you can get to the root of the matter far quicker than you can using alternate methods of communication. I won't bother exploring any of these because they should be self evident.
Having said that, I have met some very firm resistant from "old schoolers", and alternately people who I would best describe as "bullshitters": I worked with one gentlemen (to loosely use that term) once who was a unbelievable pathological liar- He would spin such a web of bullshit that it was just baffling. However, I noticed that he would never reply to an email, or send an IM, or even leave a voicemail for that matter: It always had to be a "quick meeting". Social hackers love the control that physical or voice meetings allow them as well (a control that is lost in asynchronous messaging).
Take a look at the "NakedWireless" site from a couple of days ago: They use a completely useless Flash intro page, and they included the link to the actual body in the Flash. I happened to access the page in Opera without Flash, and there was no way at all to proceed without being able to view the extraneous Flash animation.
I saw that paper (one of the trash rags that I don't actually read) and was astounded, especially when you read the subtext that states "If a terrorist attacks Canada, most of a poll respondents believe that they would hit Toronto": Well that's just a stunning bit of the astoundingly obvious there. I can help them out if they have branches around the world:
Mind you, I see nothing whatsoever wrong with news stations continuing to do what they do (with commercials and all). I mean, if you take commercials off the air, haven't you let the terrorist win? I'm actually playing on a common bunch of BS there, but really I don't see what the problem with networks doing what they do, if they're providing the information that people seek (for instance: One newscaster mentioned that people complained that they kept showing scary images on 2001-09-11-> Turn off the friggin' TV!).
September 11 2001 was a great tragedy. Too bad it took that to make people realize that it's a big world and shit can happen, without there being anything you can do.
I've seen a lot of comments, especially from people around the world, saying things along the lines of "yeah, well people die all the time: Get over it!". The WTC attack, and I single it out from the Pentagon for a reason, was unlike any attack that the West had ever seen: It hit everyday Joe, where he works (and where he lives), in peacetime. Because of this, the effect to all of us was dramatic (it put the serious bejebus' into hundreds of millions of people, as is generally the desire of terrorists). I would say, with pretty good sincerity, that this would not be even remotely as big of a deal if a US military installation were blown up with 3000 soldiers lost (PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU RANT OFF AT ME: I am not saying that that would not be a big deal-> It would be a huge deal, and would likely have also led to a country getting their asses kicked, but nothing like the effects of 9/11), because we could all separate ourselves from it and depersonalize it.
Komodo, much like Sun's Java platforms, totally kill me on the idea of middleware "platforms": Both are horrendously flakey, and horribly slow (I could tolerate Komodo for about 30 minutes before it got the uninstall treatment).