Sure, except that bank logins aren't kept in the registry (at least not by any browser I know of).
My point wasn't that this isn't a big issue, it's that specifically the act of editing the hosts file to perform DNS spoofing isn't possible as you can't edit the file, only look at it. There are still plenty of bad things you can do given read access to system files:)
XP is still being supported, and MS haven't said they won't fix it. I was just responding to the assertion that this bug was somehow an evil ploy to force people to upgrade. It isn't, but if you insist on running old software which is about to become EOL, well you should understand the risks.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, if you're looking at desktop-oriented releases, most of them.
But I don't consider that a bad thing, assuming that the slowdown is due to useful features and is compensated by an increase in hardware performance. I don't believe that the latest Ubuntu desktop release will work particularly well on a 15 year old PC, and it will certainly feel slower than an OS from that time. Of course it does a lot more, and there's your tradeoff.
I'd say it's (yet another) reason to stop using a 9 year old OS. How many of the major linux distros still support versions that old? How many people would recommend continuing to run a version that old?
Here's a tip for Windows users. Take a look at task manager, and add the "number of threads" column. You'll see that pretty much everything has more than one thread. I'm seeing 12-24 for each IE instance, 16 for Excel, 54 for Outlook, 46 for IDEA, etc. A lot of developers (particularly on slashdot) seem to have a real issue with threading, I think they much be C++ coders, as other more modern languages make multi-threading much easier and more reliable. You still have to be careful, of course, but the benefits can be great.
The correct notation for an area of 240 square millimeters is very hard to type (it's 240mm^2), my guess is the OP just turned "^2" into "sq" (for "squared") leading to the confusion.
I said absolutely nothing about wants in the quoted text. Sure, I WANT a huge SSD array. However, I do not need one
I think it's very unlikely you NEED a computer at all. Let's say you do, does it NEED to be faster than a 486sx25? Or do you just WANT to be able to compile something in less than an hour? When people talk about computer "needs" it's usually understood that we mean "needs to fulfill some desire", because very few people can claim to need any kind of computation device in the same way they need food, water or shelter.
I don't NEED 4TB of disk space (well, not an extra 4TB anyway), as you correctly point out. And no I don't NEED my system to boot in half the time it used to, or firefox to come up in 1 second vs 15. The point I was trying to make is that the $200 I spend on an SSD made more difference to the day-to-day general performance of my machine than the $500 I spent upgrading the CPU and memory. So it's better value as an upgrade, IMHO. That runs contrary to most people's common sense (as demonstrated by this thread) making it all the more important to try and spread the word as far as I'm concerned.
Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Likewise declaring someone stupid when it turns out YOU are the one who needs to do a little learning. Quoting the Windows Engineering Blog:
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Read that last sentence to yourself a few times, let it sink in. Now you can say sorry.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant access to your apps/files, the SECOND time you open them
Indeed useful. I get the last 2-3GB's of accessed files at RAM speed, if I'm lucky. That doesn't help boot time, that doesn't help sleep time, and that doesn't help when I launch an app for the first time in a while. All of which ARE helped greatly by using an SSD. Why can't I have both?
and it's not hard to make the case that more RAM is more beneficial for most common usage patterns.
Yeah, except I have one, and you're wrong. Caching is great for files you hit a lot, but you know what? My system drive has 40-50GB on it, and adding 40-50GB of RAM isn't really an option for most people, certainly not an economical one. You'll be lucky to get 10% of that in the cache - VERY lucky (seeing as all those media and data files will be pushing out the useful stuff you actually stand a chance of wanting to read again).
You seem to have a problem with SSDs, that's great, don't buy one. I wouldn't trade mine for 16GBs of RAM, never mind 8 (which is the equivalent cost).
Well... it looks like there finally might be a reason to spend the money on an SSD. Up until now, it would be a nice speed boost, but the cost:performance ratio is so out of whack for SSDs, it just makes purchasing one ridiculous unless you have some very specific needs
"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
I use my phone for texting, web, facebook, twitter, maps/navigation, ssh, games, exercise/nutrition tracking, barcode scanning, comparison shopping and whatever else takes my fancy. I make an actual voice call maybe once a week, so it's one of the least important features for me (although it does have to work of course).
People are different and have different needs. Although to be honest there's very little chance I'd buy some kind of specialised gaming phone.
These banks used the money in large part to buy out their competitors
Really? Name one.
The federal government has no right what so ever to use taxpayer money to bail out failed banks! It is the worst possible wealth transfer imaginable: one from the taxpayers to the wealthy.
It wasn't a "wealth transfer", it was a loan, which is largely paid back already. The objective was to improve the economy for the benefit of all. Or would you prefer 25+% unemployment? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Do you tell this to people who buy Picassos too? Those aren't all that easy to sell either.
Actually, they're very easy to sell. Got a $100m painting - try putting it up for sale for $50m and see how fast it sells. The very definition of market value is "what someone will pay for it" - so by definition if something's worth $100m then someone is willing to pay that. But you are right in a sense, all collectibles (including costumes and paintings) are basically equivalent, the difference is how many people are interested and how much they're willing to pay.
There's probably a lot more geeks on Slashdot who'd be interested in a Stargate prop for $2k or whatever than people able to buy a Picasso for its proper value
The problem is only one geek can get that prop, which pushes the price up beyond $2k until only one geek can afford it. The paintings work the same way...and the higher price is an indication of how many MORE people are interested in that than in the prop.
And the reason we have these economic problems is because of people like you, who "invested" their money in stupid places like the real estate market, creating a bubble that burst
Simple investment is not the issue. The problem comes when people cheat and try to sell something which isn't how it appears (i.e. fake Picasso's which can't be differentiated from the real deal, or crappy CDO's which don't have the rating they claim to have). If I put all my money into what I think is a real painting, and it turns out to be worthless, I've lost my money and the ability to continue investing. When that happens to enough people the markets seize up. The stock market is no different to the collectibles market in that respect.
People buying shit like Stargate props actually helps the economy; it doesn't create any kind of bubble, and helps to fund a productive venture (the creation of TV shows) that employs lots of people.
I doubt VERY MUCH that when the TV studios are planning a new show they take into account how much the props will sell for at auction in 15 years time. The sale of props has nothing to do with supporting the production.
I'm not sure where you get your information from, but it's wrong. There's no requirement for a network connection to play ME2 on 360, or for any kind of registration - you can just put the disc in and play. However, there is some (to be honest, absurd) registration hoops you have to go through to get access to the free/collectors edition DLC. As for stuff you have to buy, well there's nothing for sale yet so I have no idea what you're talking about or where you get $240 as a figure from. The only paid DLC currently available AFAIK is for people who don't have the Cerberus Network access code which comes bundled with new copies of the game (i.e. it's a used game tax).
Actually I'm British. My sig is simply an indication of my childish fascination with languages I can't hope to understand:) I think the manual gearbox point is a good one, most cars in europe are manual so you could cause a lot of trouble with a remote starter!
Makes sense for those areas I guess. I'm in NJ which gets cold, but not that cold! - they still seem popular. I see people walking towards their car in the parking lot and starting it a few seconds before they get in - that's what I never understood. Maybe just too lazy to turn the key!
I've only been in the US a few years and I see people with these remote start setups quite a bit. The only thing is I have no idea why they're useful? I've never had any real desire to start my car when I'm walking towards it (which is what most people seem to do with them) and in fact it would be illegal in my home country. If anyone could explain what they're for I'd appreciate it:)
As you say, it was the combination and the polish. There's no one thing (that I can think of) on the iPhone that you can't find on some previous device/software. But there's also no previous device with all (or even many) of those things, polished to such a high degree. From a feature list point of view it's certainly evolutionary - but I'd certainly say it was revolutionary from an overall user experience point of view.
As the Gizmodo article points out, the general UI idea of a page of icons which load full screen apps is just like Palm. And I was a big Palm fan back in the day - their problem was that although the UI was fine, it was hampered by the tech to the point where even if the concept worked it was so unattractive to use as to be very niche. Resistive touch screens required stylii, which suck. Early models were monochrome, even color models had nothing like the graphical fidelity of the iPhone. The graphics chips couldn't do things like full screen animations, fades, etc and of course there was no such thing as persistent wireless internet (and yes, I had the Palm III GSM modem, it blew chunks even then!). Apple waited until the tech existed to do what they knew would impress people, rather than try to make something they hoped would sell within the limits of the available tech. In the process they pretty much totally reinvented the highend cellphone market and IMHO brought the PDA concept back from the dead.
My personal story: I'm not an Apple fan. I do own a Mac, but it's my least used machine and I really don't like it very much. I grew up on Atari, DOS/Windows, Palm, Nokia and later Linux. When the iPhone came out I had no intention of buying one, until I happened to be by the Apple store in a mall on launch weekend and popped in to see what all the fuss was about. Within a couple of minutes of playing with it I was in line to buy one, and several upgrades later I have no regrets. I still detest iTunes, and am officially "meh" on OSX, but nothing is tempting me away from the iPhone. Android has potential, but it's not there yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, except that bank logins aren't kept in the registry (at least not by any browser I know of).
My point wasn't that this isn't a big issue, it's that specifically the act of editing the hosts file to perform DNS spoofing isn't possible as you can't edit the file, only look at it. There are still plenty of bad things you can do given read access to system files :)
XP is still being supported, and MS haven't said they won't fix it. I was just responding to the assertion that this bug was somehow an evil ploy to force people to upgrade. It isn't, but if you insist on running old software which is about to become EOL, well you should understand the risks.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, if you're looking at desktop-oriented releases, most of them.
But I don't consider that a bad thing, assuming that the slowdown is due to useful features and is compensated by an increase in hardware performance. I don't believe that the latest Ubuntu desktop release will work particularly well on a 15 year old PC, and it will certainly feel slower than an OS from that time. Of course it does a lot more, and there's your tradeoff.
I'd say it's (yet another) reason to stop using a 9 year old OS. How many of the major linux distros still support versions that old? How many people would recommend continuing to run a version that old?
Except as far as I can tell from the advisory, the files are read only.
Here's a tip for Windows users. Take a look at task manager, and add the "number of threads" column. You'll see that pretty much everything has more than one thread. I'm seeing 12-24 for each IE instance, 16 for Excel, 54 for Outlook, 46 for IDEA, etc. A lot of developers (particularly on slashdot) seem to have a real issue with threading, I think they much be C++ coders, as other more modern languages make multi-threading much easier and more reliable. You still have to be careful, of course, but the benefits can be great.
The correct notation for an area of 240 square millimeters is very hard to type (it's 240mm^2), my guess is the OP just turned "^2" into "sq" (for "squared") leading to the confusion.
What advantage does that have to the OS level disk cache? Why not just put more system RAM in for that to use than add a special device?
I think it's very unlikely you NEED a computer at all. Let's say you do, does it NEED to be faster than a 486sx25? Or do you just WANT to be able to compile something in less than an hour? When people talk about computer "needs" it's usually understood that we mean "needs to fulfill some desire", because very few people can claim to need any kind of computation device in the same way they need food, water or shelter.
I don't NEED 4TB of disk space (well, not an extra 4TB anyway), as you correctly point out. And no I don't NEED my system to boot in half the time it used to, or firefox to come up in 1 second vs 15. The point I was trying to make is that the $200 I spend on an SSD made more difference to the day-to-day general performance of my machine than the $500 I spent upgrading the CPU and memory. So it's better value as an upgrade, IMHO. That runs contrary to most people's common sense (as demonstrated by this thread) making it all the more important to try and spread the word as far as I'm concerned.
Likewise declaring someone stupid when it turns out YOU are the one who needs to do a little learning. Quoting the Windows Engineering Blog:
Read that last sentence to yourself a few times, let it sink in. Now you can say sorry.
Indeed useful. I get the last 2-3GB's of accessed files at RAM speed, if I'm lucky. That doesn't help boot time, that doesn't help sleep time, and that doesn't help when I launch an app for the first time in a while. All of which ARE helped greatly by using an SSD. Why can't I have both?
Yeah, except I have one, and you're wrong. Caching is great for files you hit a lot, but you know what? My system drive has 40-50GB on it, and adding 40-50GB of RAM isn't really an option for most people, certainly not an economical one. You'll be lucky to get 10% of that in the cache - VERY lucky (seeing as all those media and data files will be pushing out the useful stuff you actually stand a chance of wanting to read again).
You seem to have a problem with SSDs, that's great, don't buy one. I wouldn't trade mine for 16GBs of RAM, never mind 8 (which is the equivalent cost).
"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
You don't need to download anything from Steam, just copy the files. There are instructions on their site.
You have my condolences.
I use my phone for texting, web, facebook, twitter, maps/navigation, ssh, games, exercise/nutrition tracking, barcode scanning, comparison shopping and whatever else takes my fancy. I make an actual voice call maybe once a week, so it's one of the least important features for me (although it does have to work of course).
People are different and have different needs. Although to be honest there's very little chance I'd buy some kind of specialised gaming phone.
Well my Mac didn't have XCode installed on it out of the box, it was a download. Maybe that's changed recently or something, no idea.
A properly managed environment doesn't allow things to be run from a memory stick.
Really? Name one.
It wasn't a "wealth transfer", it was a loan, which is largely paid back already. The objective was to improve the economy for the benefit of all. Or would you prefer 25+% unemployment? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Dow is up something like 25% in the last 12 months. Is that your definition of "tanking"?
Right. Except that inflation (which is a measure of how fast cash loses value) is fairly low right now, and is predicted to decline in the short term.
Actually, they're very easy to sell. Got a $100m painting - try putting it up for sale for $50m and see how fast it sells. The very definition of market value is "what someone will pay for it" - so by definition if something's worth $100m then someone is willing to pay that. But you are right in a sense, all collectibles (including costumes and paintings) are basically equivalent, the difference is how many people are interested and how much they're willing to pay.
The problem is only one geek can get that prop, which pushes the price up beyond $2k until only one geek can afford it. The paintings work the same way...and the higher price is an indication of how many MORE people are interested in that than in the prop.
Simple investment is not the issue. The problem comes when people cheat and try to sell something which isn't how it appears (i.e. fake Picasso's which can't be differentiated from the real deal, or crappy CDO's which don't have the rating they claim to have). If I put all my money into what I think is a real painting, and it turns out to be worthless, I've lost my money and the ability to continue investing. When that happens to enough people the markets seize up. The stock market is no different to the collectibles market in that respect.
I doubt VERY MUCH that when the TV studios are planning a new show they take into account how much the props will sell for at auction in 15 years time. The sale of props has nothing to do with supporting the production.
Significant difference: banning drugs = "protecting people from themselves", banning guns = "protecting people from other people".
And your counter example? By which measure is Norway a crappy place to live?
I'm not sure where you get your information from, but it's wrong. There's no requirement for a network connection to play ME2 on 360, or for any kind of registration - you can just put the disc in and play. However, there is some (to be honest, absurd) registration hoops you have to go through to get access to the free/collectors edition DLC. As for stuff you have to buy, well there's nothing for sale yet so I have no idea what you're talking about or where you get $240 as a figure from. The only paid DLC currently available AFAIK is for people who don't have the Cerberus Network access code which comes bundled with new copies of the game (i.e. it's a used game tax).
Actually I'm British. My sig is simply an indication of my childish fascination with languages I can't hope to understand :) I think the manual gearbox point is a good one, most cars in europe are manual so you could cause a lot of trouble with a remote starter!
Makes sense for those areas I guess. I'm in NJ which gets cold, but not that cold! - they still seem popular. I see people walking towards their car in the parking lot and starting it a few seconds before they get in - that's what I never understood. Maybe just too lazy to turn the key!
I've only been in the US a few years and I see people with these remote start setups quite a bit. The only thing is I have no idea why they're useful? I've never had any real desire to start my car when I'm walking towards it (which is what most people seem to do with them) and in fact it would be illegal in my home country. If anyone could explain what they're for I'd appreciate it :)
As you say, it was the combination and the polish. There's no one thing (that I can think of) on the iPhone that you can't find on some previous device/software. But there's also no previous device with all (or even many) of those things, polished to such a high degree. From a feature list point of view it's certainly evolutionary - but I'd certainly say it was revolutionary from an overall user experience point of view.
As the Gizmodo article points out, the general UI idea of a page of icons which load full screen apps is just like Palm. And I was a big Palm fan back in the day - their problem was that although the UI was fine, it was hampered by the tech to the point where even if the concept worked it was so unattractive to use as to be very niche. Resistive touch screens required stylii, which suck. Early models were monochrome, even color models had nothing like the graphical fidelity of the iPhone. The graphics chips couldn't do things like full screen animations, fades, etc and of course there was no such thing as persistent wireless internet (and yes, I had the Palm III GSM modem, it blew chunks even then!). Apple waited until the tech existed to do what they knew would impress people, rather than try to make something they hoped would sell within the limits of the available tech. In the process they pretty much totally reinvented the highend cellphone market and IMHO brought the PDA concept back from the dead.
My personal story: I'm not an Apple fan. I do own a Mac, but it's my least used machine and I really don't like it very much. I grew up on Atari, DOS/Windows, Palm, Nokia and later Linux. When the iPhone came out I had no intention of buying one, until I happened to be by the Apple store in a mall on launch weekend and popped in to see what all the fuss was about. Within a couple of minutes of playing with it I was in line to buy one, and several upgrades later I have no regrets. I still detest iTunes, and am officially "meh" on OSX, but nothing is tempting me away from the iPhone. Android has potential, but it's not there yet.