Windows was always designed to be a single user system, and although that's improving, it's still obviously just stapled on top of the OS, because they don't want to break backward compatibility.
So close, and yet so incredibly wrong. NT was designed from the ground up to be multi-user and has always supported running without Admin permissions (hell, you remember the old "Power Users" group on NT circa Windows 2000? The ability to install most software without the ability to change system files, for those who found standard user accounts too limiting.) The problem is not so much in Windows itself as it is in the third-part software vendors who assumed that their programs had full Administrative control at all times. While indirectly Microsoft's fault (since Win9x programs did have full control), anything other than administrative or installation software should work fine on NT-based systems with standard user permissions.
For example, I have an old XP laptop (don't use it much, but it runs fine - just old). My account on it is a standard user account, running on NTFS with mostly default permissions. Sure, I need to use Runas for most installers or to use most Control Panels, but I can play games just fine, browse the web with no problems and a fairly high degree of confidence, edit and print documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc. just fine, develop in C/C++, Java, C#, or any other language supported by Visual Studio or NetBeans, browse network drives or use Remote Desktop, connect and access removable storage devices or my MP3 player... you get the idea. UAC in Vista and Win7 makes running as a standard user a little easier, but XP works fine too.
For the record, Vista and 7 have pretty good backward compatibility in the driver ABI. It's not perfect - network drivers in particular are likely to fail - but I've leaded everything from printer drivers to video drivers, all meant for XP, into Vista and they worked fine. The catch is that the installer is usually looking for a specific kernel version (5) and when it sees the Vista kernel (6) it freaks out and claims that it won't work. Using the program compatibility mode to trick the installer into thinking it's on XP or 2000 generally solved this just fine.
As a side note, this is one of the main reasons that Win7 uses kernel version number 6.1 rather than 7.0 - they made the kernel ABI 100% compatible with Vista, and didn't want Vista driver installers to freak out at seeing a different major version number on the kernel.
Of course, then there's real-world things, like Broadcom wireless chipsets, where the reverse-engineered Linux drivers still don't even claim to have support for all variants of the chipset, and some of the ones they claim to support are still unreliable. Using ndiswrapper works for some of these particular cases (including most, though not all, network drivers) but only because a NT driver already exists. It's a case of making Linux able to load Windows drivers, not of Linux actually having a driver for the device.
In case you're curious, I ran into this just a few weeks ago - brand new distro with brand new kernel. Used the firmware cutter (which again required the Windows driver) and loaded it into the reverse engineered Linux driver for Broadcom wireless chipsets. The light came on, NetworkManager reported a new network interface, and... I still couldn't scan for or connect to an access point. Unloaded the native driver, installed ndiswrapper, loaded the Windows XP driver for my card, and it worked.
Hypothetically, if I'd been using a functional ReactOS, all I'd have needed to do would be download the Windows XP driver and install it. Sure, the driver wouldn't be open source, but it would actually, you know, work!
Why has not one of the highly-rated comments addressed the most important point thus far? One of the critical features of ReactOS is not that it runs Win32 programs (which most operating systems can do to a reasonable degree via wine) but that it runs NT drivers. This is a huge deal: you get full hardware compatibility with anything that has a driver for Windows, which means pretty nearly anything at all. Consider, for example, ndiswrapper (Linux kernel module that provides an NT5 Network Driver Interface for the Linux kernel); with ndiswrapper you can use most network devices in Linux even if there's no native driver, because you can just download a driver intended for XP and it works fine.
Now, take that same idea, and extend it to every driver, 100% compatiblity. It's not Linux underneath, of course - the driver stack has to be engineered for exact NT compatibility and who knows where they'll get their scheduler or memory manager from - but it's a completely open-source operating system that can run any Win32 program or any NT driver. In fact, if they implement the alternate subsystems (Win32 is a subsystem on top of NT, but there are others) you could get (for example) a Linux-compatible API on top of NT and run the best of both worlds (there actually already is a POSIX subsystem for NT, which I use to run bash, ssh, subversion, and more from within Win7).
You're out of date. Win7 supports DivX, XviD, h264, AAC, and a number of other formats right out of the box. I've used WMP (on a clean install) to play.mov files that were recorded by a digital camera and encoded as "QuickTime movies" in some MPEG 4 variant.
Perhaps the Handbrake folks just decided that the time to drop support for a format is when Microsoft includes support for it out of the box?
Another poster stated that RAND terms with regard to licensing only apply to RAND members, and that Apple is not a member. If true, this would appear to make Apple's argument invalid; RAND rules don't apply to them, for bettero or worse.
Out of curiosity, why shouldn't Nokia have the right to ask this? If there is a set price for something (think grocery store), you pay what it says on the price tag. On the other hand, licenses for intellectual property (and contracts in general, actually) are very often negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, Nokia sees Apple as a greater risk than other companies, and is pricing their technology accordingly. It's not like Nokia doesn't already have plenty of competition; they aren't trying to monopolize GSM phones. However, they own the patents and as best I can tell that means they can license them at whatever price they deem an additional competitor to be worth.
It started as a teaching college, then expanded into a full 4-year university + small Masters program. They're not a research university, which is part of why they're relatively uncommon in the news (compared to WSU, which for all its other faults has a substantial research program). However, they're decently large (~18k students I think) and have a moderately selective admissions program. As for rotary engines, their automotive engineering program was considered to be among the best in North America a few years ago, and I haven't heard anything to suggest otherwise recently.
They were my backup school when applying to university, and a few of my friends attended or are attending. Having visited the campus a few times, I'll grant you that while a unicycling clown would not occasion major comment, it's not exactly commonplace; I'd have expected people to notice.
Last I checked, COM is alive and well. There are additional technologies that MS is pushing and for some spaces they make more sense, but anybody who wants to write one embeddable component, make it a DLL, and use it from any other program on the system still tends to go with COM in my experience.
P4S is roughly as alive as Apple's FairPlay, which is to say devices which supported it (i.e. your music ever worked) still seem to do so, but (aside from subscription services) almost nothing uses it anymore. This is a huge win for DRM-free advocates in general.
Was anything of value lost by MS discontinuing their Java runtime? Sure, there's no longer an out-of-the-box Java runtime in Windows, but Sun's implementation is free and works quite well, and if you don't like it there are other options.
True, and worth pointing out. However, enabling DEP lowers this risk from a 0-day exploit to a known vulnerability. Conceptually they are essentially the same, but in practice it's better to be in a state that *could* be exploited than one that *is being* exploited.
Additionally, ASLR (Vista and Win7 only) combined with DEP makes it bery difficult to exploit this kind of bug. There are still some work-arounds for ASLR + DEP, but they're much more difficult and less reliable.
It is worth noting that unless you specifically exclude IE8 from DEP (or disable DEP globally) then it is not vulnerable to this attack. You can also enable DEP (either via opt-in or by switching the default behavior system-wide to opt-out) for the previous IE versions.
Nonetheless, it's possible that the vulnerability was discovered in the manner you suggest. I'm not sure they saw the IE8 code, but if the same vulnerability is used on all versions it's probably in code that hasn't changed in a while.
No, but you've entirely missed the point. The idea here is that lawyers represent a group of individuals who routinely carry sensitive data and stand to take substantial financial harm if it is seized ("without good reason" being implied here). As an added bonus, lawyers typically have money to fight things like this.
Basically, lawyers have a lot to lose if unreasonable laptop seizures continue, and they have the resources to fight it. There's no implication that they would try to get an exception for lawyers specifically, which seems to be what you thought the GP was talking about; rather the point is that the ACLU needs people who will fight this case for the sake of everybody, and lawyers can do that.
Indeed, the ability to fairly irrevocably destroy all data on the disk (by removing all recovery keys to the encryption) is one of many advantages to whole-disk encryption. Granted it's less secure than overwriting the platers with random data 17 times and then running a magnet over them for good measure, but it's a preventative measure and as you point out it's something that you can do before a disk dies, to ensure the data is irrecoverable even if you can't write to it anymore but somebody malicious with specilaized recovery hardware gets ahold of it.
Where the hell did you get that number from? Test with BitLocker show a loss of between 14% (old single-core CPU with lots of processes running) and under 1% (high-end quad-core system that could easily have devoted two cores to decryption if anything close to that much was needed - the loss in this case was due to the trivial increase in disk latency caused by running it through the decryption routine). Normal performance loss was under 5% on a typical system of about 18 months ago (dual-core, 2.0 to 2.5 GHz, 7200 RPM hard disk) since the disk access latency almost completely hid the CPU cost.
I'm not going to deny that there's a performance impact, but it's nowhere close to one half (or one quarter, depending on your core count) of your CPU. You can get by just fine on a single-core CPU even (seriously, I've seen it used on netbooks), if you're not trying to factor RSA keys at the same time. For typical email/spreadsheet/powerpoint/word processing/demo of beta product type stuff that most business machines get used for, it's an insignificant cost compared to the risk averted.
This is true, although many businesses are upgrading to Win7 and some already upgraded to Vista, both of which support BitLocker (7 moreso than Vista). What's more, a laptop that is intended to carry sensitive data and leave the premises may well have a higher edition of Windows installed specifically to enable BitLocker, even if it also then needs a virtual XP install in order to access some horribly legacy IE6-only ActiveX corporate intranet site.
BitLocker's ecnrypt/decrypt delay is almost entirely hidden in disk latency. The CPU can do encryption far faster than the disk can do I/O, so unless another program was heavily leaning on the CPU while you're accessing the disk, you won't even notice the slowdown.
BitLocker in Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 supports encryption of removable drives, but doesn't make it mandatory and certainly doesn't do it automatically. You (IT) *can* make it mandatory using Group Policy, but even then you don't have to use the encryption - un-encrypted volumes are simply mounted read-only, so you're not going to be encrypting your client's presentation by accident just because you plug it into your computer. However, one of the coolest tricks is BitLocker To Go, where when a removable drive is encrypted, BitLocker creates a small second partition on the device that is *not* encrypted, and stores there a Windows binary capable of decrypting the drive (on versions of Windows that don't support BitLocker). Obviously you need a key, which depending on how the drive was encrypted in the first place might require that the computer be currently connected to a domain (or it might require a password, or smart card, or any of a number of other things).
In any case, accidentally encrypting a flashdrive requires such a phenomenal degree of stupidity that I'd be amazed such a person could plug a flashdrive in correctly. A lot of people don't even see it since it's only avaialble on higher-end editions of Windows, but BitLocker in Win7 is extremely user-friendly and the interface is not at all ambiguous.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I think it's ridiculous, though; there are griefers, sure, but I've seen more instances of griefing in a few hours total of looking over the shoulders of friends playing WoW than I have in a few years of playing EVE.
I readily admit that EVE isn't for everybody, and that its learning curve is steep. I disagree with your assessment of the amount of griefing, but perhaps that's because I've long since learned to avoid the more obvious traps and I spend most of my time in space controlled by my alliance anyhow (where ships not known to be friendly are removed with extreme prejudice). As for the learning curve, they've done a lot to improve the tutorial portion of the game which makes it easier in the technical sense to get started, but it's still a dangerous world out there if you aren't careful (seriously, don't leave secure space until you know what you're doing). It helps to have a friend to guide you, but on the other hand I made it through most of my first few weeks unassisted before joining a player-run corporation with veterans who could help me out the rest of the way.
While by no means new, Allegiance is newer than most of the games you mentioned. It is also unusual in being a studio game that was released commercially, then later open-sourced. It is still receiving development and improvements today. While its graphics will probably always look severely dated to modern players, the gameplay is quite engaging and the engine is fairly advanced - the game runs fine on modern systems, supports high resolutions and a variety of input devices (all remappable - and note how joysticks seem to have gone out of style too), and the physics are actually quite cool (mass matters including stuff in your cargo, pushing slower ships like bombers from behind is a common tactic to get them into range of an enemy base faster, and you have to lead your shots based on how far the enemy is, how fast your projectiles fly, and how fast they're going in what direction).
The game is also very different from most in terms of gameplay - it's almost a "Team Fortress" type of game but with an even stronger emphasis on teamwork, longer games with more strategic goals, and RTS elements involving mining resources (via NPC ships), building bases, and researching technologies. Basically, you select a ship (many are free, but some require money that could go into base building or research instead), select a loadout (again, certain modules may add cost though most are free), and undock for to fight. Combat is very dogfighting-style, with guns and missiles, shields and armor and chaff, mines you can lure enemies onto and stationary turrets you can use to guard strategic points, nanite guns that repair allied ships' armor, asteroids you can hide behind and cloaking devices that conceal you from enemy sensors, afterburners that trade agility and stealth for raw speed, teleport systems to get you in or out of a fight at the risk of a couple seconds of flying straight, and more. Ships range from short-range interceptors through long-range scouts with good sensors and fighters with good weapons, to bombers with anti-base missiles and anti-fighter turrets manned by other players and capital ships with heavy defenses and weapons capable of engaging a small fleet successfully. You also have specialized ships, like stealth fighters that mount cloaking devices and sneak into the enemy territory to kill their pilots with long-range missiles or their miners and builders with special anti-utility cannon, or troop transports that mount no traditional weaponry but are capable of capturing an enemy base intact.
The community is fairly small but I found it to be welcoming of newcomers, and there are both training missions against NPCs and extensive online tutorials to help people get started. It's free to download and play. Check out the website, at least.
It requires a pretty hardcore mentality (death can *really* hurt) but EVE Online is easily the best Sci-Fi MMO I've seen (not coincidentally, it's also the most successful of mainstream sci-fi MMO games). It's not based on any existing world, which I consider a plus in most cases. The in-game economy and player-created content are serious components of the game, and while high-tier PvE content (requiring either some of the best ships in the game or a fleet of friends) does exist, most players I've met prefer the player-created content (either becoming an economic tycoon or building an empire in uncontrolled space - usually by taking it away from somebody else first).
Note that it's a bit short on story, so if that's what you're looking for it might disappoint. They've added more role-play elements in the last year or so (there are two major content expansions, always free, per year) but the game is really more centered on the player-generated content. On the other hand, in a way that provides a platform for much truer role-play: if you want to be a pirate, you don't choose a "pirate" class (there are no classes, really) and take "pirate" missions (you can take missions and build standing with NPC pirate organizations, but it's not true piracy as EVE sees it). Instead, you buy a ship, put some guns on it, and go find some nice industrial ship full of valuable loot and hit it. Maybe you blow it up and take what survives the explosion, maybe you simply disable its warp drive until they pay you a ransom, maybe you ransom it and then blow it up anyhow - the decision is yours. You can find other like-minded folks and build up a fleet so you can hit bigger or more protected targets. You can take over a star system by camping its stargates, you can roam through low-security space looking for careless travelers, or you can make suicide ganks in high security space (the police ships are guaranteed to kill you, but if you kill the target first and scoop it's loot before somebody else does, you can make a lot of money). Note that piracy is far from the only option, and in fact represents a fairly small portion of the population. You're also not locked into any path - you can be the CEO of your own industrial corporation, building ships and researching blueprints at your private starbase, and every now and then jump in a PvP ship and go looking for a fight. Or you can do any number of other things.
Although its player base is nowhere near that of WoW, the entire game runs on one server cluster. Everybody is connected to that cluster - there's no instancing, and your position is simply a set of coordinates - if two people go looking for a hidden NPC pirate base in the same system, they will find the same one and probably come out of warp within a few kilometers - easy combat range (compare with most MMOs, where they would end up in separate instances). The largest "fleet" structure is 255 (10 pilots per squad including a squad commander, 5 squads per wing plus one wing commander, 5 wings all under one fleet commander) and the biggest battles in EVE these days involve multiple such fleets per side.
Strictly speaking, the empire and the republic overlapped for a brief period (between episodes 3 and 4). Basically, the time that Luke spent growing up on Tatooine, the old republic was falling apart, the empire was taking over, and the rebellion against the empire was forming (in roughly that order). It was also during this time that the empire (mostly Vader) was hunting down and killing the Jedi. Remember also that Episode 4 starts off mentioning that the "Rebel Alliance has won their first battle against the Empire..." indicating room for plenty of fighting.
Mind you, I'm simply assuming a chronological setting for this based on the class list and my limited knowledge of Star Wars canon. It does sound like the game will be set further in the future (a not so very "long long time ago"?) than the KotOR games. Actually, this is a pretty good time for an MMO to be set - the empire is strong enough to have agents and some power, but the Senate is also still around (remember, the emperor dissolves the senate at the beginning of A New Hope) and presumably has agents of their own. Meanwhile, order is breaking down in the galaxy - ripe ground for smugglers, and bounty hunters who track them.
A point of curiosity: in most contexts, smugglers are bad and bounty hunters are good. Star Wars and Firefly are the only two major counterexamples that come to mind, though I'm sure there are others. Aside from Jedi and Sith, I wonder whether the other classes are meant to have a clear good vs. evil alignment or not. One assumes the republic to be good and the empire evil, although that's certainly subject to counterexample (Palpatine was part of the Senate and yet one of the most evil characters of the series) while smuggling, bounty hunting, and soldiering are all fairly morally gray areas.
EVE Online has an officially supported Mac client and unofficially supports running the Windows client through Wine (they distributed a Cedega-wrapped Linux client for a while, but it was actually lower quality than just using Wine and the Windows client, both of which are free downloads and don't place any extra cost on CCP).
I'm sure there's at least one other non-trivial MMO that has made an effort to be cross-platform, even if I can't think of one. EVE certainly wasn't at launch, and I think it was largely due to the fact that a section of the forums had already become unofficial support for people running the game via Wine that they released the non-Windows official client(s).
Amazing. Somehow, your 3-line (plus quote) accusation of immaturity on the part of Loki 1929 makes you look *LESS* mature than he does.
Granted, the "strong emotional investment" he mentions (*did* you even read his post?) definitely comes through, but no more so than in a lot of other responses, or threads in general, in fact. Hell, while I disagree with his wording somewhat I can definitely see his point - a large part of the Trek canon involves characters "going rogue" in one way or another (usually not the main characters unless you include Kirk, although there are exceptions elsewhere). Considering that there's only one set of rights to make a game set in that universe, and said game is ignoring a major portion of that universe, I think it is *completely* reasonable to hope that there comes to exist a game which does not have this failing, and a logical prerquisite to that happening is the current game failing.
Personal insults notwithstanding, what have you contributed to the discussion anyhow? You're the one who doesn't belong here.
Actually, it sounds more like Resource Monitor (think an improved Task Manager plus a decent portion of Process Monitor from Sysinternals) as found in Vista and up. Among other things, ResMon will not only show you the second-by-second CPU usage, it will also show (as a second line on the graph) the portion of maximum clock rate the CPU is running at. Many (not all, but many) tools report CPU usage as a fraction of current clock rate, in which case you will see 20% CPU usage reported when the CPU is running at 5% of its maximum utilization, but underclocked to 25% by the OS. It also leads to weird shifts in CPU usage - as usage increases the utilization display jumps to 100%, then drops down dramatically as the CPU speed increases (this may repeat a few times if the CPU didn't jump to maximum speed in one step).
Today, even among gadgets which correctly current usage out of maximum clock rate, almost none will show current clock rate out of maximum rate. It sounds like this ASUS gadget works around that. Furthermore, the CPU scaling tends to lag somewhat behind change in demand for CPU resources (producing the spikes and drops described above). In an ideal implementation, the CPU would utilize 100% of its current clock speed at all times, while instantaneously increasing the frequency as needed. The current implementations are definitely not ideal, which costs efficiency and therefore battery life.
To be slightly pedantic, you're missing some DirectX platforms (Zunes, particularly ZuneHDs since the original one lacks 3D capability) and OpenGL does *NOT* run on the Xbox (I suppose if you use a custom firmware for the original it does, but you really can't count that - it's not the same platform anymore then).
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So close, and yet so incredibly wrong. NT was designed from the ground up to be multi-user and has always supported running without Admin permissions (hell, you remember the old "Power Users" group on NT circa Windows 2000? The ability to install most software without the ability to change system files, for those who found standard user accounts too limiting.) The problem is not so much in Windows itself as it is in the third-part software vendors who assumed that their programs had full Administrative control at all times. While indirectly Microsoft's fault (since Win9x programs did have full control), anything other than administrative or installation software should work fine on NT-based systems with standard user permissions.
For example, I have an old XP laptop (don't use it much, but it runs fine - just old). My account on it is a standard user account, running on NTFS with mostly default permissions. Sure, I need to use Runas for most installers or to use most Control Panels, but I can play games just fine, browse the web with no problems and a fairly high degree of confidence, edit and print documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc. just fine, develop in C/C++, Java, C#, or any other language supported by Visual Studio or NetBeans, browse network drives or use Remote Desktop, connect and access removable storage devices or my MP3 player... you get the idea. UAC in Vista and Win7 makes running as a standard user a little easier, but XP works fine too.
For the record, Vista and 7 have pretty good backward compatibility in the driver ABI. It's not perfect - network drivers in particular are likely to fail - but I've leaded everything from printer drivers to video drivers, all meant for XP, into Vista and they worked fine. The catch is that the installer is usually looking for a specific kernel version (5) and when it sees the Vista kernel (6) it freaks out and claims that it won't work. Using the program compatibility mode to trick the installer into thinking it's on XP or 2000 generally solved this just fine.
As a side note, this is one of the main reasons that Win7 uses kernel version number 6.1 rather than 7.0 - they made the kernel ABI 100% compatible with Vista, and didn't want Vista driver installers to freak out at seeing a different major version number on the kernel.
Of course, then there's real-world things, like Broadcom wireless chipsets, where the reverse-engineered Linux drivers still don't even claim to have support for all variants of the chipset, and some of the ones they claim to support are still unreliable. Using ndiswrapper works for some of these particular cases (including most, though not all, network drivers) but only because a NT driver already exists. It's a case of making Linux able to load Windows drivers, not of Linux actually having a driver for the device.
In case you're curious, I ran into this just a few weeks ago - brand new distro with brand new kernel. Used the firmware cutter (which again required the Windows driver) and loaded it into the reverse engineered Linux driver for Broadcom wireless chipsets. The light came on, NetworkManager reported a new network interface, and... I still couldn't scan for or connect to an access point. Unloaded the native driver, installed ndiswrapper, loaded the Windows XP driver for my card, and it worked.
Hypothetically, if I'd been using a functional ReactOS, all I'd have needed to do would be download the Windows XP driver and install it. Sure, the driver wouldn't be open source, but it would actually, you know, work!
Why has not one of the highly-rated comments addressed the most important point thus far? One of the critical features of ReactOS is not that it runs Win32 programs (which most operating systems can do to a reasonable degree via wine) but that it runs NT drivers. This is a huge deal: you get full hardware compatibility with anything that has a driver for Windows, which means pretty nearly anything at all. Consider, for example, ndiswrapper (Linux kernel module that provides an NT5 Network Driver Interface for the Linux kernel); with ndiswrapper you can use most network devices in Linux even if there's no native driver, because you can just download a driver intended for XP and it works fine.
Now, take that same idea, and extend it to every driver, 100% compatiblity. It's not Linux underneath, of course - the driver stack has to be engineered for exact NT compatibility and who knows where they'll get their scheduler or memory manager from - but it's a completely open-source operating system that can run any Win32 program or any NT driver. In fact, if they implement the alternate subsystems (Win32 is a subsystem on top of NT, but there are others) you could get (for example) a Linux-compatible API on top of NT and run the best of both worlds (there actually already is a POSIX subsystem for NT, which I use to run bash, ssh, subversion, and more from within Win7).
You're out of date. Win7 supports DivX, XviD, h264, AAC, and a number of other formats right out of the box. I've used WMP (on a clean install) to play .mov files that were recorded by a digital camera and encoded as "QuickTime movies" in some MPEG 4 variant.
Perhaps the Handbrake folks just decided that the time to drop support for a format is when Microsoft includes support for it out of the box?
Another poster stated that RAND terms with regard to licensing only apply to RAND members, and that Apple is not a member. If true, this would appear to make Apple's argument invalid; RAND rules don't apply to them, for bettero or worse.
Do you have any response to this?
Out of curiosity, why shouldn't Nokia have the right to ask this? If there is a set price for something (think grocery store), you pay what it says on the price tag. On the other hand, licenses for intellectual property (and contracts in general, actually) are very often negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, Nokia sees Apple as a greater risk than other companies, and is pricing their technology accordingly. It's not like Nokia doesn't already have plenty of competition; they aren't trying to monopolize GSM phones. However, they own the patents and as best I can tell that means they can license them at whatever price they deem an additional competitor to be worth.
It started as a teaching college, then expanded into a full 4-year university + small Masters program. They're not a research university, which is part of why they're relatively uncommon in the news (compared to WSU, which for all its other faults has a substantial research program). However, they're decently large (~18k students I think) and have a moderately selective admissions program. As for rotary engines, their automotive engineering program was considered to be among the best in North America a few years ago, and I haven't heard anything to suggest otherwise recently.
They were my backup school when applying to university, and a few of my friends attended or are attending. Having visited the campus a few times, I'll grant you that while a unicycling clown would not occasion major comment, it's not exactly commonplace; I'd have expected people to notice.
Last I checked, COM is alive and well. There are additional technologies that MS is pushing and for some spaces they make more sense, but anybody who wants to write one embeddable component, make it a DLL, and use it from any other program on the system still tends to go with COM in my experience.
P4S is roughly as alive as Apple's FairPlay, which is to say devices which supported it (i.e. your music ever worked) still seem to do so, but (aside from subscription services) almost nothing uses it anymore. This is a huge win for DRM-free advocates in general.
Was anything of value lost by MS discontinuing their Java runtime? Sure, there's no longer an out-of-the-box Java runtime in Windows, but Sun's implementation is free and works quite well, and if you don't like it there are other options.
True, and worth pointing out. However, enabling DEP lowers this risk from a 0-day exploit to a known vulnerability. Conceptually they are essentially the same, but in practice it's better to be in a state that *could* be exploited than one that *is being* exploited.
Additionally, ASLR (Vista and Win7 only) combined with DEP makes it bery difficult to exploit this kind of bug. There are still some work-arounds for ASLR + DEP, but they're much more difficult and less reliable.
It is worth noting that unless you specifically exclude IE8 from DEP (or disable DEP globally) then it is not vulnerable to this attack. You can also enable DEP (either via opt-in or by switching the default behavior system-wide to opt-out) for the previous IE versions.
Nonetheless, it's possible that the vulnerability was discovered in the manner you suggest. I'm not sure they saw the IE8 code, but if the same vulnerability is used on all versions it's probably in code that hasn't changed in a while.
No, but you've entirely missed the point. The idea here is that lawyers represent a group of individuals who routinely carry sensitive data and stand to take substantial financial harm if it is seized ("without good reason" being implied here). As an added bonus, lawyers typically have money to fight things like this.
Basically, lawyers have a lot to lose if unreasonable laptop seizures continue, and they have the resources to fight it. There's no implication that they would try to get an exception for lawyers specifically, which seems to be what you thought the GP was talking about; rather the point is that the ACLU needs people who will fight this case for the sake of everybody, and lawyers can do that.
Indeed, the ability to fairly irrevocably destroy all data on the disk (by removing all recovery keys to the encryption) is one of many advantages to whole-disk encryption. Granted it's less secure than overwriting the platers with random data 17 times and then running a magnet over them for good measure, but it's a preventative measure and as you point out it's something that you can do before a disk dies, to ensure the data is irrecoverable even if you can't write to it anymore but somebody malicious with specilaized recovery hardware gets ahold of it.
Where the hell did you get that number from? Test with BitLocker show a loss of between 14% (old single-core CPU with lots of processes running) and under 1% (high-end quad-core system that could easily have devoted two cores to decryption if anything close to that much was needed - the loss in this case was due to the trivial increase in disk latency caused by running it through the decryption routine). Normal performance loss was under 5% on a typical system of about 18 months ago (dual-core, 2.0 to 2.5 GHz, 7200 RPM hard disk) since the disk access latency almost completely hid the CPU cost.
I'm not going to deny that there's a performance impact, but it's nowhere close to one half (or one quarter, depending on your core count) of your CPU. You can get by just fine on a single-core CPU even (seriously, I've seen it used on netbooks), if you're not trying to factor RSA keys at the same time. For typical email/spreadsheet/powerpoint/word processing/demo of beta product type stuff that most business machines get used for, it's an insignificant cost compared to the risk averted.
This is true, although many businesses are upgrading to Win7 and some already upgraded to Vista, both of which support BitLocker (7 moreso than Vista). What's more, a laptop that is intended to carry sensitive data and leave the premises may well have a higher edition of Windows installed specifically to enable BitLocker, even if it also then needs a virtual XP install in order to access some horribly legacy IE6-only ActiveX corporate intranet site.
No, it doesn't, he's either an idiot or a troll.
BitLocker's ecnrypt/decrypt delay is almost entirely hidden in disk latency. The CPU can do encryption far faster than the disk can do I/O, so unless another program was heavily leaning on the CPU while you're accessing the disk, you won't even notice the slowdown.
BitLocker in Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 supports encryption of removable drives, but doesn't make it mandatory and certainly doesn't do it automatically. You (IT) *can* make it mandatory using Group Policy, but even then you don't have to use the encryption - un-encrypted volumes are simply mounted read-only, so you're not going to be encrypting your client's presentation by accident just because you plug it into your computer. However, one of the coolest tricks is BitLocker To Go, where when a removable drive is encrypted, BitLocker creates a small second partition on the device that is *not* encrypted, and stores there a Windows binary capable of decrypting the drive (on versions of Windows that don't support BitLocker). Obviously you need a key, which depending on how the drive was encrypted in the first place might require that the computer be currently connected to a domain (or it might require a password, or smart card, or any of a number of other things).
In any case, accidentally encrypting a flashdrive requires such a phenomenal degree of stupidity that I'd be amazed such a person could plug a flashdrive in correctly. A lot of people don't even see it since it's only avaialble on higher-end editions of Windows, but BitLocker in Win7 is extremely user-friendly and the interface is not at all ambiguous.
Interestin... one does have to wonder what "empire" the agents or from, then.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I think it's ridiculous, though; there are griefers, sure, but I've seen more instances of griefing in a few hours total of looking over the shoulders of friends playing WoW than I have in a few years of playing EVE.
I readily admit that EVE isn't for everybody, and that its learning curve is steep. I disagree with your assessment of the amount of griefing, but perhaps that's because I've long since learned to avoid the more obvious traps and I spend most of my time in space controlled by my alliance anyhow (where ships not known to be friendly are removed with extreme prejudice). As for the learning curve, they've done a lot to improve the tutorial portion of the game which makes it easier in the technical sense to get started, but it's still a dangerous world out there if you aren't careful (seriously, don't leave secure space until you know what you're doing). It helps to have a friend to guide you, but on the other hand I made it through most of my first few weeks unassisted before joining a player-run corporation with veterans who could help me out the rest of the way.
While by no means new, Allegiance is newer than most of the games you mentioned. It is also unusual in being a studio game that was released commercially, then later open-sourced. It is still receiving development and improvements today. While its graphics will probably always look severely dated to modern players, the gameplay is quite engaging and the engine is fairly advanced - the game runs fine on modern systems, supports high resolutions and a variety of input devices (all remappable - and note how joysticks seem to have gone out of style too), and the physics are actually quite cool (mass matters including stuff in your cargo, pushing slower ships like bombers from behind is a common tactic to get them into range of an enemy base faster, and you have to lead your shots based on how far the enemy is, how fast your projectiles fly, and how fast they're going in what direction).
The game is also very different from most in terms of gameplay - it's almost a "Team Fortress" type of game but with an even stronger emphasis on teamwork, longer games with more strategic goals, and RTS elements involving mining resources (via NPC ships), building bases, and researching technologies. Basically, you select a ship (many are free, but some require money that could go into base building or research instead), select a loadout (again, certain modules may add cost though most are free), and undock for to fight. Combat is very dogfighting-style, with guns and missiles, shields and armor and chaff, mines you can lure enemies onto and stationary turrets you can use to guard strategic points, nanite guns that repair allied ships' armor, asteroids you can hide behind and cloaking devices that conceal you from enemy sensors, afterburners that trade agility and stealth for raw speed, teleport systems to get you in or out of a fight at the risk of a couple seconds of flying straight, and more. Ships range from short-range interceptors through long-range scouts with good sensors and fighters with good weapons, to bombers with anti-base missiles and anti-fighter turrets manned by other players and capital ships with heavy defenses and weapons capable of engaging a small fleet successfully. You also have specialized ships, like stealth fighters that mount cloaking devices and sneak into the enemy territory to kill their pilots with long-range missiles or their miners and builders with special anti-utility cannon, or troop transports that mount no traditional weaponry but are capable of capturing an enemy base intact.
The community is fairly small but I found it to be welcoming of newcomers, and there are both training missions against NPCs and extensive online tutorials to help people get started. It's free to download and play. Check out the website, at least.
http://freeallegiance.org/
It requires a pretty hardcore mentality (death can *really* hurt) but EVE Online is easily the best Sci-Fi MMO I've seen (not coincidentally, it's also the most successful of mainstream sci-fi MMO games). It's not based on any existing world, which I consider a plus in most cases. The in-game economy and player-created content are serious components of the game, and while high-tier PvE content (requiring either some of the best ships in the game or a fleet of friends) does exist, most players I've met prefer the player-created content (either becoming an economic tycoon or building an empire in uncontrolled space - usually by taking it away from somebody else first).
Note that it's a bit short on story, so if that's what you're looking for it might disappoint. They've added more role-play elements in the last year or so (there are two major content expansions, always free, per year) but the game is really more centered on the player-generated content. On the other hand, in a way that provides a platform for much truer role-play: if you want to be a pirate, you don't choose a "pirate" class (there are no classes, really) and take "pirate" missions (you can take missions and build standing with NPC pirate organizations, but it's not true piracy as EVE sees it). Instead, you buy a ship, put some guns on it, and go find some nice industrial ship full of valuable loot and hit it. Maybe you blow it up and take what survives the explosion, maybe you simply disable its warp drive until they pay you a ransom, maybe you ransom it and then blow it up anyhow - the decision is yours. You can find other like-minded folks and build up a fleet so you can hit bigger or more protected targets. You can take over a star system by camping its stargates, you can roam through low-security space looking for careless travelers, or you can make suicide ganks in high security space (the police ships are guaranteed to kill you, but if you kill the target first and scoop it's loot before somebody else does, you can make a lot of money). Note that piracy is far from the only option, and in fact represents a fairly small portion of the population. You're also not locked into any path - you can be the CEO of your own industrial corporation, building ships and researching blueprints at your private starbase, and every now and then jump in a PvP ship and go looking for a fight. Or you can do any number of other things.
Although its player base is nowhere near that of WoW, the entire game runs on one server cluster. Everybody is connected to that cluster - there's no instancing, and your position is simply a set of coordinates - if two people go looking for a hidden NPC pirate base in the same system, they will find the same one and probably come out of warp within a few kilometers - easy combat range (compare with most MMOs, where they would end up in separate instances). The largest "fleet" structure is 255 (10 pilots per squad including a squad commander, 5 squads per wing plus one wing commander, 5 wings all under one fleet commander) and the biggest battles in EVE these days involve multiple such fleets per side.
Strictly speaking, the empire and the republic overlapped for a brief period (between episodes 3 and 4). Basically, the time that Luke spent growing up on Tatooine, the old republic was falling apart, the empire was taking over, and the rebellion against the empire was forming (in roughly that order). It was also during this time that the empire (mostly Vader) was hunting down and killing the Jedi. Remember also that Episode 4 starts off mentioning that the "Rebel Alliance has won their first battle against the Empire..." indicating room for plenty of fighting.
Mind you, I'm simply assuming a chronological setting for this based on the class list and my limited knowledge of Star Wars canon. It does sound like the game will be set further in the future (a not so very "long long time ago"?) than the KotOR games. Actually, this is a pretty good time for an MMO to be set - the empire is strong enough to have agents and some power, but the Senate is also still around (remember, the emperor dissolves the senate at the beginning of A New Hope) and presumably has agents of their own. Meanwhile, order is breaking down in the galaxy - ripe ground for smugglers, and bounty hunters who track them.
A point of curiosity: in most contexts, smugglers are bad and bounty hunters are good. Star Wars and Firefly are the only two major counterexamples that come to mind, though I'm sure there are others. Aside from Jedi and Sith, I wonder whether the other classes are meant to have a clear good vs. evil alignment or not. One assumes the republic to be good and the empire evil, although that's certainly subject to counterexample (Palpatine was part of the Senate and yet one of the most evil characters of the series) while smuggling, bounty hunting, and soldiering are all fairly morally gray areas.
EVE Online has an officially supported Mac client and unofficially supports running the Windows client through Wine (they distributed a Cedega-wrapped Linux client for a while, but it was actually lower quality than just using Wine and the Windows client, both of which are free downloads and don't place any extra cost on CCP).
I'm sure there's at least one other non-trivial MMO that has made an effort to be cross-platform, even if I can't think of one. EVE certainly wasn't at launch, and I think it was largely due to the fact that a section of the forums had already become unofficial support for people running the game via Wine that they released the non-Windows official client(s).
Amazing. Somehow, your 3-line (plus quote) accusation of immaturity on the part of Loki 1929 makes you look *LESS* mature than he does.
Granted, the "strong emotional investment" he mentions (*did* you even read his post?) definitely comes through, but no more so than in a lot of other responses, or threads in general, in fact. Hell, while I disagree with his wording somewhat I can definitely see his point - a large part of the Trek canon involves characters "going rogue" in one way or another (usually not the main characters unless you include Kirk, although there are exceptions elsewhere). Considering that there's only one set of rights to make a game set in that universe, and said game is ignoring a major portion of that universe, I think it is *completely* reasonable to hope that there comes to exist a game which does not have this failing, and a logical prerquisite to that happening is the current game failing.
Personal insults notwithstanding, what have you contributed to the discussion anyhow? You're the one who doesn't belong here.
Actually, it sounds more like Resource Monitor (think an improved Task Manager plus a decent portion of Process Monitor from Sysinternals) as found in Vista and up. Among other things, ResMon will not only show you the second-by-second CPU usage, it will also show (as a second line on the graph) the portion of maximum clock rate the CPU is running at. Many (not all, but many) tools report CPU usage as a fraction of current clock rate, in which case you will see 20% CPU usage reported when the CPU is running at 5% of its maximum utilization, but underclocked to 25% by the OS. It also leads to weird shifts in CPU usage - as usage increases the utilization display jumps to 100%, then drops down dramatically as the CPU speed increases (this may repeat a few times if the CPU didn't jump to maximum speed in one step).
Today, even among gadgets which correctly current usage out of maximum clock rate, almost none will show current clock rate out of maximum rate. It sounds like this ASUS gadget works around that. Furthermore, the CPU scaling tends to lag somewhat behind change in demand for CPU resources (producing the spikes and drops described above). In an ideal implementation, the CPU would utilize 100% of its current clock speed at all times, while instantaneously increasing the frequency as needed. The current implementations are definitely not ideal, which costs efficiency and therefore battery life.
To be slightly pedantic, you're missing some DirectX platforms (Zunes, particularly ZuneHDs since the original one lacks 3D capability) and OpenGL does *NOT* run on the Xbox (I suppose if you use a custom firmware for the original it does, but you really can't count that - it's not the same platform anymore then).