Silently skipping the copying of equal files is only valid of the file metadata is equal and would not be modified by the operation. File copying adjusts creation/modification times, so for that reason alone the user needs to be prompted.
No. Have you ever tried to do anything on a Windows desktop with your finger instead of a mouse? It sucks. Full-screen only (or very, very limited window management) is a sane choice for touch only devices where you can't hit targets (or move them) precisely enough.
This is the reason why MS wants to switch to UEFI and its support for signed binaries. That way, the operating system can be reasonably sure that no malicious software was executed before it got control. Having that assurance is actually a good thing. Removing user control over it is not, however.
I will not comment on the war in Japan. I know too little of it. I just wanted to reply to the notion that the Germans would have used the bomb if the US had not. This is wrong.
Now that's a bad case of misrepresenting history: the Germans capitulated before any nuclear bomb was ready for use. They were defeated by conventional means. The bombs, although intended for Germany, were therefore ultimately used in Japan. The war in Europe was not in any way influenced by the development of the bomb.
Seems you almost got it right. A quick Google search turned up the information that ring 1 was unused and ring 2 was home for parts of the graphics and printing system.
They still supported non-x86 architectures back then. And on those, there is only a kernel mode and a user mode. Rings 1 and 2 don't exist there. So putting the graphics in ring 1 or 2 would have hurt portability. OS/2, on the other hand, actually started to put stuff in all 4 rings because it was designed to run only on 386 and up.
Well, the graphics drivers were moved out of the kernel and into a special user-space-like environment with Vista. This allows Windows to restart crashed graphics drivers on the fly (and this even works most of the time). Looks like other parts of the graphics subsystem are still where the don't belong, though.
This may have been part of a scheme to decrease the (black market) resale value of these units in order to minimize theft. I think they were pretty concerned about that when designing these computers.
But boot sector viruses still happen. I remember a piece (by Kapersky people, I think) on an incredibly well crafted worm that would start out using an own boot sector, propagate the system infection from boot stage to boot stage by patching the newly loaded stage on the fly using data that was stored in a hidden miniature file system. It would even foul up the hard disk driver to redirect accesses to the true boot sector to a copy of the original one that was created during the initial infection.
Ultimately, if such a malicious piece of software is engineered well enough it cannot possibly be detected from within the running operating system (Blue Pill was a good demonstrator for that). So the signature checks in UEFI are the only viable concept to detect if someone wants to mess with your system boot and the checks were obviously designed with that in mind. As far as I understood things, the UEFI spec puts the user in control of signing key management. In this scenario, nothing would prevent Linux from enabling the same checks - and work. The recently published white papers from Canonical and Red Hat explained that nicely.
How do you know that reopening the same file in a different app is the right way to do it? Not having seen the actual interface I'm inclined to call that step very, very non-obvious.
Second Life is the closest we got to cyberspace, but look at how long it lasted. It ended up being a hodgepodge of not quite interesting stuff that got most people bored after a while. What do you do once you've seen everything and chatted and chatted and *yawn* chatted? WoW is different: there is stuff to do. There are attractive areas to roam in, monsters to kill, there is loot to find, there are quests to complete. And from time to time you stop and chat, trade and socialize. This is why WoW actually attracts people. And Stephenson now admits that he underestimated the number of people that actually prefer such a directed, Disneyland-like experience.
Actually, this hits the nail on the head. The current state of the system is exactly the hybrid that you fear.
The overall behaviour of the new UI is a trainwreck in its current form, although some some aspects are quite OK. The problem is that is the frequent switching between Metro and the normal desktop that gets forced on the user. Sometimes you get thrown out of Metro onto the desktop because the system wants to ask you a trivial question and brings up a regular window for that. Other times you are forced from the desktop into the Metro UI, for example when you want to start a new program. The end result feels very inconsistent.
Oh, and if you open the task manager, it exists as a window on top of everything else, including the Metro screens. Weird.
The Metro IE has a button (second or third one from the right in the lower bar) which allows to move the IE as it is into the desktop. You then end up with your website in the same IE window that you already know from Windows 7. And if you launch it from the desktop I believe it starts in that mode immediately, not in the Metro UI.
The fact that it just lacks knowledge of context is a dead giveaway. It does not even give you the illusion that it remembers what it previously told you. Kind of sad really.
They weren't using a lot of CG back then. Instead, they used a good many practical elements for their effects. Video compositing was also done using analog electronics hardware in these days. So it's not like you just push a render button and you've got that effects element updated for HD. They will either have to live with the SD effects shots or recreate them entirely from the original film material.
The point here being that the operating system is written entirely in a language that was designed to run in a virtual machine environment (relying on garbage collection and lots of other stuff). Turns out you can still compile the code to native binary code that does not need an operating system around it to run. This is an interesting achievement. Microsoft did something similar with Singularity, but they invented an extended variant of C# for their kernel.
Yet, no time has passed for the traveling light. Or more precisely: if an observer had followed the light emitted from the supernova at almost the speed of light, very little time would have passed in his frame of reference. So what we take as 21 million years would have been nearly instantaneous for our traveling observer. Simultaneity is a weird thing when time is relative.
system.what? system.ini is gone for more than a decade now. I have not seen any viable shell replacement for Windows in the last couple of years, only half-baked unfinished solutions so far.
Well, as someone who tried to embed Lua and CPython I found the embedding interface in Lua much, much easier to use than CPython's for simple use cases. However, if you are able to deal with the complexities and effort to get it running, CPython seems to be much more flexible and thus better suited for complex interfaces to the scripting environment.
Jython, on the other hand, is dead simple to integrate: for the most part you just have to drop it in and it exports all public classes and methods automatically. No glue code required.
What do you mean by "known to be secure"? Do you mean that nobody knows how to break it or that there is a formal proof that no shortcuts for brute force attacks exist?
But wasn't AES chosen from a hos of candidates by the NSA? As far as I remember, they had external cryptography experts on that.
If you are a guy who thinks tinfoil hats are fashionable, you might come to think that the NSA might have chosen AES because they knew how to break it all along, but none of the civilian experts saw flaws in it. Now, the first one of the deliberate flaws actually showed up. While I believe that any such organization would pull that kind of stunt in an instant, I do not believe that they have quite that much advanced knowledge about cryptography. These people are there to spy and coerce, so they are also as Machiavellian and manipulative as they can get.
FarCry 2 was not created by Crytek. Ubisoft owns the FarCry franchise, but lost Crytek to EA after FarCry was published. FarCry 2 and the upcoming FarCry 3 are made by completely different studios.
Mybe Crytek was in a hurry to rush out these features and the team was confident to reach acceptable framerates on a hurry.
I've seen a presentation of a lot of the features the Crysis 2 DX11 patch adds to the game in action in the engine over a year ago. But I get the impression that the Crysis 2 art assets were not initially created to support them. So they took some assets after the fact and touched them up.
Maybe the water was so low on polys before they added tesselation that they didn't bother to cull it more intelligently? So some guy later added a tesselation shader to it without changing the engine at a higher level. These kinds of things happen, especially in a hurry.
Having nVidia as an active supporter likely also means that most or all of the developers have nice nVidia GPUs to work with and not so many ATI ones. Even without further incentive this means that the end product will run better on nVidia because that's the target that the devs focus on initially. No need to theorize about additional incentives of any kind here.
There is plenty of ways to justify stupidity here instead of downright malice. But a complete conspiracy theory is always more attractive on/.
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Silently skipping the copying of equal files is only valid of the file metadata is equal and would not be modified by the operation. File copying adjusts creation/modification times, so for that reason alone the user needs to be prompted.
No. Have you ever tried to do anything on a Windows desktop with your finger instead of a mouse? It sucks. Full-screen only (or very, very limited window management) is a sane choice for touch only devices where you can't hit targets (or move them) precisely enough.
This is the reason why MS wants to switch to UEFI and its support for signed binaries. That way, the operating system can be reasonably sure that no malicious software was executed before it got control. Having that assurance is actually a good thing. Removing user control over it is not, however.
Thanks! That's what I meant to say. My previous post came out wrong and I didn't notice :(. Sorry.
I will not comment on the war in Japan. I know too little of it. I just wanted to reply to the notion that the Germans would have used the bomb if the US had not. This is wrong.
Now that's a bad case of misrepresenting history: the Germans capitulated before any nuclear bomb was ready for use. They were defeated by conventional means. The bombs, although intended for Germany, were therefore ultimately used in Japan. The war in Europe was not in any way influenced by the development of the bomb.
Seems you almost got it right. A quick Google search turned up the information that ring 1 was unused and ring 2 was home for parts of the graphics and printing system.
They still supported non-x86 architectures back then. And on those, there is only a kernel mode and a user mode. Rings 1 and 2 don't exist there. So putting the graphics in ring 1 or 2 would have hurt portability. OS/2, on the other hand, actually started to put stuff in all 4 rings because it was designed to run only on 386 and up.
Well, the graphics drivers were moved out of the kernel and into a special user-space-like environment with Vista. This allows Windows to restart crashed graphics drivers on the fly (and this even works most of the time). Looks like other parts of the graphics subsystem are still where the don't belong, though.
This may have been part of a scheme to decrease the (black market) resale value of these units in order to minimize theft. I think they were pretty concerned about that when designing these computers.
But boot sector viruses still happen. I remember a piece (by Kapersky people, I think) on an incredibly well crafted worm that would start out using an own boot sector, propagate the system infection from boot stage to boot stage by patching the newly loaded stage on the fly using data that was stored in a hidden miniature file system. It would even foul up the hard disk driver to redirect accesses to the true boot sector to a copy of the original one that was created during the initial infection.
Ultimately, if such a malicious piece of software is engineered well enough it cannot possibly be detected from within the running operating system (Blue Pill was a good demonstrator for that). So the signature checks in UEFI are the only viable concept to detect if someone wants to mess with your system boot and the checks were obviously designed with that in mind. As far as I understood things, the UEFI spec puts the user in control of signing key management. In this scenario, nothing would prevent Linux from enabling the same checks - and work. The recently published white papers from Canonical and Red Hat explained that nicely.
How do you know that reopening the same file in a different app is the right way to do it? Not having seen the actual interface I'm inclined to call that step very, very non-obvious.
Second Life is the closest we got to cyberspace, but look at how long it lasted. It ended up being a hodgepodge of not quite interesting stuff that got most people bored after a while. What do you do once you've seen everything and chatted and chatted and *yawn* chatted? WoW is different: there is stuff to do. There are attractive areas to roam in, monsters to kill, there is loot to find, there are quests to complete. And from time to time you stop and chat, trade and socialize. This is why WoW actually attracts people. And Stephenson now admits that he underestimated the number of people that actually prefer such a directed, Disneyland-like experience.
Actually, this hits the nail on the head. The current state of the system is exactly the hybrid that you fear.
The overall behaviour of the new UI is a trainwreck in its current form, although some some aspects are quite OK. The problem is that is the frequent switching between Metro and the normal desktop that gets forced on the user. Sometimes you get thrown out of Metro onto the desktop because the system wants to ask you a trivial question and brings up a regular window for that. Other times you are forced from the desktop into the Metro UI, for example when you want to start a new program. The end result feels very inconsistent.
Oh, and if you open the task manager, it exists as a window on top of everything else, including the Metro screens. Weird.
The Metro IE has a button (second or third one from the right in the lower bar) which allows to move the IE as it is into the desktop. You then end up with your website in the same IE window that you already know from Windows 7. And if you launch it from the desktop I believe it starts in that mode immediately, not in the Metro UI.
The fact that it just lacks knowledge of context is a dead giveaway. It does not even give you the illusion that it remembers what it previously told you. Kind of sad really.
They weren't using a lot of CG back then. Instead, they used a good many practical elements for their effects. Video compositing was also done using analog electronics hardware in these days. So it's not like you just push a render button and you've got that effects element updated for HD. They will either have to live with the SD effects shots or recreate them entirely from the original film material.
The point here being that the operating system is written entirely in a language that was designed to run in a virtual machine environment (relying on garbage collection and lots of other stuff). Turns out you can still compile the code to native binary code that does not need an operating system around it to run. This is an interesting achievement. Microsoft did something similar with Singularity, but they invented an extended variant of C# for their kernel.
Yet, no time has passed for the traveling light. Or more precisely: if an observer had followed the light emitted from the supernova at almost the speed of light, very little time would have passed in his frame of reference. So what we take as 21 million years would have been nearly instantaneous for our traveling observer. Simultaneity is a weird thing when time is relative.
system.what? system.ini is gone for more than a decade now. I have not seen any viable shell replacement for Windows in the last couple of years, only half-baked unfinished solutions so far.
Well, as someone who tried to embed Lua and CPython I found the embedding interface in Lua much, much easier to use than CPython's for simple use cases. However, if you are able to deal with the complexities and effort to get it running, CPython seems to be much more flexible and thus better suited for complex interfaces to the scripting environment.
Jython, on the other hand, is dead simple to integrate: for the most part you just have to drop it in and it exports all public classes and methods automatically. No glue code required.
What do you mean by "known to be secure"? Do you mean that nobody knows how to break it or that there is a formal proof that no shortcuts for brute force attacks exist?
But wasn't AES chosen from a hos of candidates by the NSA? As far as I remember, they had external cryptography experts on that.
If you are a guy who thinks tinfoil hats are fashionable, you might come to think that the NSA might have chosen AES because they knew how to break it all along, but none of the civilian experts saw flaws in it. Now, the first one of the deliberate flaws actually showed up. While I believe that any such organization would pull that kind of stunt in an instant, I do not believe that they have quite that much advanced knowledge about cryptography. These people are there to spy and coerce, so they are also as Machiavellian and manipulative as they can get.
FarCry 2 was not created by Crytek. Ubisoft owns the FarCry franchise, but lost Crytek to EA after FarCry was published. FarCry 2 and the upcoming FarCry 3 are made by completely different studios.
Mybe Crytek was in a hurry to rush out these features and the team was confident to reach acceptable framerates on a hurry.
I've seen a presentation of a lot of the features the Crysis 2 DX11 patch adds to the game in action in the engine over a year ago. But I get the impression that the Crysis 2 art assets were not initially created to support them. So they took some assets after the fact and touched them up.
Maybe the water was so low on polys before they added tesselation that they didn't bother to cull it more intelligently? So some guy later added a tesselation shader to it without changing the engine at a higher level. These kinds of things happen, especially in a hurry.
Having nVidia as an active supporter likely also means that most or all of the developers have nice nVidia GPUs to work with and not so many ATI ones. Even without further incentive this means that the end product will run better on nVidia because that's the target that the devs focus on initially. No need to theorize about additional incentives of any kind here.
There is plenty of ways to justify stupidity here instead of downright malice. But a complete conspiracy theory is always more attractive on /.