It seems to me like it's mostly the HDD or Motherboard that triggers a reactivation. Or reinstalling, which seems to happen all the time at work, as the effin things keep getting corrupt drivers or whatever.
Also, there are different rules for OEM XP than retail. Technically (if you read the EULA, which no-one does) OEM editions of XP are forbidden from being moved to new hardware more than 0 times. ie, it's licensed only for the hardware it was sold with. yeak. Or was that Office.:-/ Can't remember. But of course there's always been a huge gap between licensing terms and practise.
lol, without patching wine I could get it running on an old lappy that flat out refused to run when it had a windows install. The joys of emulated graphics drivers.
Yeah, wine will slow some stuff down, but so does Windows.
OK, so this flame war is starting to rage out of control.
First up, I didn't cast the first stone. I was replying to one who was mindlessly bashing compulsory voting, and I was trying to indicate that there were multiple factors involved. The Literacy bit is small (Media ownership being IMHO far more important) but it just one of a host of issues that all democracies need to take a look at. Americans are Pro idea-of-democracy but tend to needlessly associate democracy with capitalism instead of government by and for the people.
And, socio-economic mobility is not a concept that is either exclusive or invented by Americans. Maybe you guys came up with the buzz-word. I dare say you came up with buzz-word. There are many countries with far less class division than the US. In fact the US has been getting steadily more and more pyramidical in it's economic-population spread, which (usually) leads to the establishment of either classes, or something that an outsider might very well label classes. So, Not only in America, in fact harder in America than many other places.
Spell-checkers: I don't tend to use spell-checkers for various reasons. They tend to be dreadful with grammar. They don't tend to have a lot of the words I use (mostly tech stuff, which wouldn't be the case while posting to a political rant), and they keep trying to spell things like Favour as Favor. I prefer instead to proof-read posts using that brain thing that I stumbled on, and yes, sometimes I skip that step and typos etc sneak in. BUT. I never once said I was unltra literate. You're taking this a tiny bit personal. I still believe that Australians are more literate on average. To be totally fair, there seems to be a higher deviation in Americans, ie, their very literate people do tend to be very much more literate than the literate Aussies.
Side-line rant: And I've never entered a spelling bee in my life. That's a (IMHO) debasement of languistics to the details that don't really matter to make brainless people with good memories feel better about themselves.
If you look at those numbers turned around you will see we have a 0.1% illiteracy, while the US have a 3% illiteracy. (must make sure I speel everything coreectly). That's 30 times the proportion. And, although those figures (cia?) don't show it, I would guess tha literate Australians are more literate (on average) than literate Americans. This is based purely on speculation and personal experience (which is always a VERY low sample set) however.
Also, the US are heavily dependant on their media, which is massively cross owned. etc etc...
Basically, I feel the Aust people are slightly better informed. And as we have the evil compulsory voting, the extremists have a hell of a hard time getting into power.
Do we need to keep this up?
Hey, I didn't say Smarter, I said more literate. BIG difference. I'm not a subscriber to the myth of knowledge equals intelligence. But democracy depends on an informed populace. Information is a key element in people voting for the people they actually want. So, without literacy, you can have a population of Einsteins, but they just won't know anything about the candidates, and you'll thus get crap voting. And, I tried (don't know if I suceeded) to make it clear that I don't think Australia's done horribly brilliantly with it. We've got one of the worst bunches of monkeys in power we've ever had. J Howie was responsible for the great "That was a non-core promise" quote. That said, we have done better than the US. And we definately haven't just voted for the person with the biggest media campaign.
Well, off the top of my head, for a Hybrid car you'd measure how much pertolium it uses to go a certain distance. I suspect you meant for Purely electric cars. For them you need to assign either a CO2 or equivalent cost to mains power, and rate that against petroleum. Then compare the energy use. Generally both Hybrid and Electric cars do much better on economy due to the joys of regenerative braking and a few other "neat tricks".
Aussies (myself included) do tend to be defensive about our voting system. Because it works (even if we do currently have the government who coined the terms, "core and non-core promises"). And the reasons why it works for us maybe wouldn't work for other countries.
For one, Australia has pretty damned close to 100% literacy. I've seen what this means, and it's not literacy as in read shakespeare fluently, but from what I've seen of else-where it still translates into a population massively more informed than (for example) the US.
Media ownership control laws (which are currently in jeopardy) provide a slightly wider set of views, esp coupled with the government run media. (That sounds really stupid to anyone from a totalitarian country, but sadly, the most bipartisan media in Aust is the Australian Broadcasting Channel).
There are several other factors like disallowing massive media campaigns that assist.
Either way, your post was misinformed (or likely un-informed).
And to add my 2c on America's issues.
There are worse issues than the voting system. Population education being significant, which hinges again on media ownership. And lobby groups need to die. I have serious troubles believing that Americans can blindly accept such an institutionalised corruption. :-P
Well, I did kinda mean half of the general population I guess. It makes me wonder what sort of proportions there are on slashdot. Doesn't take a lot of brain power to see it's less than 50% female, but how much less might be an interesting waste of user polling.
The communication thing would eventually frustrate the most calm of us. I think most slashdotters could (if forced, I doubt many would choose) deal with quadraplegia. To loose even the ability to (easily) communicate must be incredibly frustrating.
But, as for reading eye movements and guessing words etc, he's obviously after a male who's been married for years. That should get me modded down by half the population.:-).
But seriously, eye and facial (of which, SH must be slowly loosing both) movement is a significant slice of communication and more so with people who know each other well/long. What's gotta be troublesome is communicating complex ideas like physics. Baffled as to how he can continue to work.
So if not clearing nearby objects out of it's orbit discounts a planet from being "planet", and makes it instead a "dwarf planet", how can we count planets with moons? Or have we just redefined planets to being limited to Mercury and Venus?
My first thought would be that the moons orbit the planets, but there's only really a quantative difference between earth-moon co-orbit and say pluto-charon orbit.
Mostly just devil's advocating, but doesn't this strike anyone else as a really stupid planet definition?
I agree that talking on the phone (also fumbling for it, checking CID etc) are bad. But drivers need to put driving first, and that means not answering the stupid thing when you're driving. You don't need to turn it off for that.
Too any people seem to think that phones demand attention. A ring is a request, nothing more. Anyone who's been "on-call" should have worked that out.:-)
????
What planet are you on?
Since when does having a phone turned on, but not in use, constitute a safety issue?
Using a phone (hell, talking to the passenger, eating, pretty much anything) diverts your concentration and possibly your hands, and thus represents a danger as far as that goes. In some estimates it's as bad or worse than being drunk. However, I can see no reason having a phone turned on is going to cause this sort of trouble.
Well, we could post articles with inventive links to see which servers we can overload. A kind of slashdot nerd powered DoS with a game behind it.
Of course coming up with suitable text to get enough people to follow the links would be the hard part of the game.
I think I have a start on some rules at www.knifey.org.:-)
Tis a very spiffy feature. I use ASSP (and strongly recommend it) as one of my filters (also have two AV filters, one of which includes a bonus spam filter). However, as I have to accept a vast collection of email from web-forms and various cgi stuff hosted externally, I can't say my good emails will be tried again. Which is a shame, because it did look like a good feature.
On a similar topic, did you end up turning off (or massively adjusting) the penalty box? Within a few hours I'd penalty boxed hotmail and yahoo and then assorted gits couldn't get emails from their pals who shouldn't be emailing them at work, and I had to disable the penalty box.:-(
Yeah, Bayesian filters are not perfect. Most other systems would put a higher load on the server though, and really, there is a trade-off between human time and server time.
At some point you accept the 1-3% (or whatever) of spam getting through and just tell the users to manually send it to your spam collection system, and be done with it. Adding servers and processing to filter spam slightly more effectively is a waste of money after a certain point. While Bayes filters are still catching the majority that gets through the block lists and header checks, then it takes an unreasonable dislike of spam to bother implimenting something of that order.
On the other hand, I think a simple spelling and grammar check would get rid of 99% of both spam and virus emails in one go. Sure you'd kill off a lot of user emails, but they need to be told their language use is crap anyway.
Ages back we had some very spam subscribing employees, who have now left the building. Since then we've been receiving spam for them in massive buckets. No legitimate contact to their mailboxes has been noted for donkey's, and so they now do nothing but collect example spam. I should add all the IPs to a black list too, but I can't be bothered.
Anyway, to assist this, I thought nickm@manac.com.au needs some further exposure, as does ianc@manac.com.au
Not all filters use a good vs bad Bayesian scheme (unfortunately). Some go for spotting bad elements only, esp some of the commercial ones. Either way, overloading with seemingly inoccuous "good" elements will throw a bayesian filter as the system is based on the relative frequency of bad words, vs the relative frequency of good words.
EG: "Company name discuss with for customer decide supply buy my viagra" gets through easier than "Buy my viagra".
Even if those other words are not in the good lists.
Not that this is training the filter as such.
But then, bayes filters should probably be the last line of defense. Check some RBLs etc first.
And to add some extra details, although many of these have very "Gutenberg" text elements, some are quite clearly ripped out of random text files on the probably zombied computer.
I used to be firmly in the camp of "just use common sense you moron" users. Until NIMDA. There are too many virus vectors these days that require no action from the user. Just common sense isn't enough.
Yes, if you're running a Linux machine with sensible security there's no issue unless you are persistantly and maliciously stupid, but most people aren't. And (dang it) a lot of work machines aren't allowed to be. Which leaves the question of how does one protect a Windows machine.
On the other hand people do need to be made aware that AV software does not make them immune. Even the best AV companies (and no, symantec isn't one of them) need time to add new viruses into their dB (and have the user download the update) before their system is going to pick up new malware. I've seen many attempts at alternative virus checking algorithms that don't work on patern matching, but the problem with these is that resource hogging that is already annoying with Symantec's monstrosity.
Having been on a phone support desk (past tense thank god) for another AV package, there's a few pieces of wisdom/opinion I'd like to pass on.
Most viruses are crap, and a the emails can be spotted by throwing out emails with bad grammer/spelling.
Some viruses are cunning little bastards written by freaks. And these are the ones to watch out for. And the virus writers are often finding the holes in Windows first, which means you get the virus before the windows bug fix is available.
There are less resource intensive packages than symantec's, in fact I'd say 99.9% of users that have had more than one package say that Symantec's was the slower more annoying beast of the two/3/4/etc...
And I haven't started on the evil that is spyware.
Well, the Windows machine would report 432000 seconds. Which is a much bigger number than 5 days. Maybe the people doing the report just have maths issues, as is already suggested by the 20% more uptime.
PS, as someone who administers both Win and Linux servers, I gotta say the report is so full of sh!t it's scary. 233MHz half dead Fedora C3 machine has about a 99.95% uptime. Win2K3 machine with latest hardware, ~99.2%. Um, lemme think about this.
But they'd have amazingly dextrous trigger fingers.
Only hitmen and Americans shoot people in the face?:. lock up all Americans?
Only people with guns shoot people in the face?:. Lock up all the gun owners (more fun than just locking up the guns).
Poppycock
We've evolved several physiological and biochemical events that don't happen until we're fifty.
Humans' long life is critical to our social structure, and has been since we had something significantly different than Chimps. Everyone else has pointed out that you shoun't have used the word "designed" so I won't beat you up over that.
It is true that some physical systems in humans don't seem to last the distance, but in many other people they do. Myself, I've got more degenarating bits of joint and bone, assorted cysts, nerve problems etc etc than I can poke a stick at, but I'm quite aware that that is me (guess I was a friday build). Not Humanity. In gerenal, humans are quite well put together, we've just developed this tendency of wrecking our bodies.
It's quite a common misconception that life spans have been rising since "stone-age". The closest estimate to a "natural" lifespan is around the 60-70 years, and pre-agriculture humans managed that. The advent of agriculture and the joys of packing people together where they share their goodies dropped the life-span by 20-30 years. Since then, it has been getting slowly better, in leaps and bounds, and fall-backs. Sometime around the invention of Penicillin, average world human life-expectancy finally managed to crack the old average limit set by them hunter-gatherers from way back.
So why do current hunter gatherers not have good life-spans? Look at where they live. Us "civilized" people have pushed them out to the junk areas, where it's too damned hard to grow anything. And we give them some lovely diseases too, that couldn't have evolved (or spread anyway) if everyone was a hunter gatherer.
The usual M$ trick is to sell the "Windows logo" badging to the hardware vendors, up the sys reqs, forcing people to buy more hardware. The hardware vendors think it's great, and pay their tithe to the church of Gates, and you end up with a prettier, but somehow slower machine, less money and a vague feeling of being yet another patsy.
M$ don't make their money on the OEM Vindows sales, but on the hardware itself.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me like it's mostly the HDD or Motherboard that triggers a reactivation. Or reinstalling, which seems to happen all the time at work, as the effin things keep getting corrupt drivers or whatever. :-/ Can't remember. But of course there's always been a huge gap between licensing terms and practise.
Also, there are different rules for OEM XP than retail. Technically (if you read the EULA, which no-one does) OEM editions of XP are forbidden from being moved to new hardware more than 0 times. ie, it's licensed only for the hardware it was sold with. yeak. Or was that Office.
lol, without patching wine I could get it running on an old lappy that flat out refused to run when it had a windows install. The joys of emulated graphics drivers. Yeah, wine will slow some stuff down, but so does Windows.
OK, so this flame war is starting to rage out of control.
First up, I didn't cast the first stone. I was replying to one who was mindlessly bashing compulsory voting, and I was trying to indicate that there were multiple factors involved. The Literacy bit is small (Media ownership being IMHO far more important) but it just one of a host of issues that all democracies need to take a look at.
Americans are Pro idea-of-democracy but tend to needlessly associate democracy with capitalism instead of government by and for the people.
And, socio-economic mobility is not a concept that is either exclusive or invented by Americans. Maybe you guys came up with the buzz-word. I dare say you came up with buzz-word. There are many countries with far less class division than the US. In fact the US has been getting steadily more and more pyramidical in it's economic-population spread, which (usually) leads to the establishment of either classes, or something that an outsider might very well label classes. So, Not only in America, in fact harder in America than many other places.
Spell-checkers: I don't tend to use spell-checkers for various reasons. They tend to be dreadful with grammar. They don't tend to have a lot of the words I use (mostly tech stuff, which wouldn't be the case while posting to a political rant), and they keep trying to spell things like Favour as Favor. I prefer instead to proof-read posts using that brain thing that I stumbled on, and yes, sometimes I skip that step and typos etc sneak in.
BUT. I never once said I was unltra literate. You're taking this a tiny bit personal. I still believe that Australians are more literate on average. To be totally fair, there seems to be a higher deviation in Americans, ie, their very literate people do tend to be very much more literate than the literate Aussies.
Side-line rant: And I've never entered a spelling bee in my life. That's a (IMHO) debasement of languistics to the details that don't really matter to make brainless people with good memories feel better about themselves.
If you look at those numbers turned around you will see we have a 0.1% illiteracy, while the US have a 3% illiteracy. (must make sure I speel everything coreectly). That's 30 times the proportion. And, although those figures (cia?) don't show it, I would guess tha literate Australians are more literate (on average) than literate Americans. This is based purely on speculation and personal experience (which is always a VERY low sample set) however. Also, the US are heavily dependant on their media, which is massively cross owned. etc etc... Basically, I feel the Aust people are slightly better informed. And as we have the evil compulsory voting, the extremists have a hell of a hard time getting into power. Do we need to keep this up?
Hey, I didn't say Smarter, I said more literate. BIG difference.
I'm not a subscriber to the myth of knowledge equals intelligence. But democracy depends on an informed populace. Information is a key element in people voting for the people they actually want. So, without literacy, you can have a population of Einsteins, but they just won't know anything about the candidates, and you'll thus get crap voting.
And, I tried (don't know if I suceeded) to make it clear that I don't think Australia's done horribly brilliantly with it. We've got one of the worst bunches of monkeys in power we've ever had. J Howie was responsible for the great "That was a non-core promise" quote.
That said, we have done better than the US. And we definately haven't just voted for the person with the biggest media campaign.
Well, off the top of my head, for a Hybrid car you'd measure how much pertolium it uses to go a certain distance.
I suspect you meant for Purely electric cars. For them you need to assign either a CO2 or equivalent cost to mains power, and rate that against petroleum. Then compare the energy use.
Generally both Hybrid and Electric cars do much better on economy due to the joys of regenerative braking and a few other "neat tricks".
Aussies (myself included) do tend to be defensive about our voting system. Because it works (even if we do currently have the government who coined the terms, "core and non-core promises"). And the reasons why it works for us maybe wouldn't work for other countries.
:-P
For one, Australia has pretty damned close to 100% literacy. I've seen what this means, and it's not literacy as in read shakespeare fluently, but from what I've seen of else-where it still translates into a population massively more informed than (for example) the US.
Media ownership control laws (which are currently in jeopardy) provide a slightly wider set of views, esp coupled with the government run media. (That sounds really stupid to anyone from a totalitarian country, but sadly, the most bipartisan media in Aust is the Australian Broadcasting Channel).
There are several other factors like disallowing massive media campaigns that assist.
Either way, your post was misinformed (or likely un-informed).
And to add my 2c on America's issues.
There are worse issues than the voting system. Population education being significant, which hinges again on media ownership. And lobby groups need to die. I have serious troubles believing that Americans can blindly accept such an institutionalised corruption.
:-)
But, as for reading eye movements and guessing words etc, he's obviously after a male who's been married for years. That should get me modded down by half the population. :-).
But seriously, eye and facial (of which, SH must be slowly loosing both) movement is a significant slice of communication and more so with people who know each other well/long. What's gotta be troublesome is communicating complex ideas like physics. Baffled as to how he can continue to work.
My first thought would be that the moons orbit the planets, but there's only really a quantative difference between earth-moon co-orbit and say pluto-charon orbit.
Mostly just devil's advocating, but doesn't this strike anyone else as a really stupid planet definition?
I hope so. That'll be the only way to get the multiplayer FPS games working nicely.
I agree that talking on the phone (also fumbling for it, checking CID etc) are bad. But drivers need to put driving first, and that means not answering the stupid thing when you're driving. You don't need to turn it off for that. :-)
Too any people seem to think that phones demand attention. A ring is a request, nothing more. Anyone who's been "on-call" should have worked that out.
What planet are you on?
Since when does having a phone turned on, but not in use, constitute a safety issue?
Using a phone (hell, talking to the passenger, eating, pretty much anything) diverts your concentration and possibly your hands, and thus represents a danger as far as that goes. In some estimates it's as bad or worse than being drunk. However, I can see no reason having a phone turned on is going to cause this sort of trouble.
Well, we could post articles with inventive links to see which servers we can overload. A kind of slashdot nerd powered DoS with a game behind it. :-)
Of course coming up with suitable text to get enough people to follow the links would be the hard part of the game.
I think I have a start on some rules at www.knifey.org.
Tis a very spiffy feature. I use ASSP (and strongly recommend it) as one of my filters (also have two AV filters, one of which includes a bonus spam filter). However, as I have to accept a vast collection of email from web-forms and various cgi stuff hosted externally, I can't say my good emails will be tried again. Which is a shame, because it did look like a good feature. :-(
On a similar topic, did you end up turning off (or massively adjusting) the penalty box? Within a few hours I'd penalty boxed hotmail and yahoo and then assorted gits couldn't get emails from their pals who shouldn't be emailing them at work, and I had to disable the penalty box.
At some point you accept the 1-3% (or whatever) of spam getting through and just tell the users to manually send it to your spam collection system, and be done with it. Adding servers and processing to filter spam slightly more effectively is a waste of money after a certain point. While Bayes filters are still catching the majority that gets through the block lists and header checks, then it takes an unreasonable dislike of spam to bother implimenting something of that order.
On the other hand, I think a simple spelling and grammar check would get rid of 99% of both spam and virus emails in one go. Sure you'd kill off a lot of user emails, but they need to be told their language use is crap anyway.
Ages back we had some very spam subscribing employees, who have now left the building. Since then we've been receiving spam for them in massive buckets. No legitimate contact to their mailboxes has been noted for donkey's, and so they now do nothing but collect example spam. I should add all the IPs to a black list too, but I can't be bothered.
Anyway, to assist this, I thought nickm@manac.com.au needs some further exposure, as does ianc@manac.com.au
EG: "Company name discuss with for customer decide supply buy my viagra" gets through easier than "Buy my viagra".
Even if those other words are not in the good lists.
Not that this is training the filter as such.
But then, bayes filters should probably be the last line of defense. Check some RBLs etc first.
And to add some extra details, although many of these have very "Gutenberg" text elements, some are quite clearly ripped out of random text files on the probably zombied computer.
/ / end of my two cents
Yes, if you're running a Linux machine with sensible security there's no issue unless you are persistantly and maliciously stupid, but most people aren't. And (dang it) a lot of work machines aren't allowed to be. Which leaves the question of how does one protect a Windows machine.
On the other hand people do need to be made aware that AV software does not make them immune. Even the best AV companies (and no, symantec isn't one of them) need time to add new viruses into their dB (and have the user download the update) before their system is going to pick up new malware. I've seen many attempts at alternative virus checking algorithms that don't work on patern matching, but the problem with these is that resource hogging that is already annoying with Symantec's monstrosity.
Having been on a phone support desk (past tense thank god) for another AV package, there's a few pieces of wisdom/opinion I'd like to pass on.
Most viruses are crap, and a the emails can be spotted by throwing out emails with bad grammer/spelling.
Some viruses are cunning little bastards written by freaks. And these are the ones to watch out for. And the virus writers are often finding the holes in Windows first, which means you get the virus before the windows bug fix is available.
There are less resource intensive packages than symantec's, in fact I'd say 99.9% of users that have had more than one package say that Symantec's was the slower more annoying beast of the two/3/4/etc...
And I haven't started on the evil that is spyware.
PS, as someone who administers both Win and Linux servers, I gotta say the report is so full of sh!t it's scary. 233MHz half dead Fedora C3 machine has about a 99.95% uptime. Win2K3 machine with latest hardware, ~99.2%. Um, lemme think about this.
But they'd have amazingly dextrous trigger fingers. Only hitmen and Americans shoot people in the face? :. lock up all Americans?
Only people with guns shoot people in the face? :. Lock up all the gun owners (more fun than just locking up the guns).
Poppycock We've evolved several physiological and biochemical events that don't happen until we're fifty. Humans' long life is critical to our social structure, and has been since we had something significantly different than Chimps. Everyone else has pointed out that you shoun't have used the word "designed" so I won't beat you up over that. It is true that some physical systems in humans don't seem to last the distance, but in many other people they do. Myself, I've got more degenarating bits of joint and bone, assorted cysts, nerve problems etc etc than I can poke a stick at, but I'm quite aware that that is me (guess I was a friday build). Not Humanity. In gerenal, humans are quite well put together, we've just developed this tendency of wrecking our bodies.
It's quite a common misconception that life spans have been rising since "stone-age". The closest estimate to a "natural" lifespan is around the 60-70 years, and pre-agriculture humans managed that. The advent of agriculture and the joys of packing people together where they share their goodies dropped the life-span by 20-30 years. Since then, it has been getting slowly better, in leaps and bounds, and fall-backs. Sometime around the invention of Penicillin, average world human life-expectancy finally managed to crack the old average limit set by them hunter-gatherers from way back. So why do current hunter gatherers not have good life-spans? Look at where they live. Us "civilized" people have pushed them out to the junk areas, where it's too damned hard to grow anything. And we give them some lovely diseases too, that couldn't have evolved (or spread anyway) if everyone was a hunter gatherer.
The usual M$ trick is to sell the "Windows logo" badging to the hardware vendors, up the sys reqs, forcing people to buy more hardware. The hardware vendors think it's great, and pay their tithe to the church of Gates, and you end up with a prettier, but somehow slower machine, less money and a vague feeling of being yet another patsy.
M$ don't make their money on the OEM Vindows sales, but on the hardware itself.