...something's wrong, either with the JVM, or with Windows itself... but something is seriously messed up.
IIRC, Vista runs untrusted processes in their own VMs (IE7, for instance). I wonder if they did this to the JVM. Seems kinda silly to put a VM within another VM, but I wouldn't put it past MS.
For this round-up we had used a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook (PM965 + ICH8M Chipset) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, 3GB of DDR2 memory, 250GB Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 HDD, integrated Intel 965 graphics, and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800.
I'm shopping for a new laptop and I settled on the 1525 with this exact configuration. Ironically, I can't decide if I want Ubuntu or Vista Home Premium on it. I don't really use much Java so this article doesn't really help me... What a weird coincidence, though.
Most users aren't really clear on the concept of an operating system. They know Windows is on their PC, but don't really understand what it does (and what it doesn't do) or that there are alternatives. They probably don't even realize they're paying for it when they buy a computer.
It's a platform, and platforms generally have a low barrier to entry. Java is free..NET is free (as in beer). The web is free. Console makers sell consoles at a loss (at first, anyway) because the real money is in software sales. MS never charged me for my Xbox dashboard update, so why would I want to pay for the same thing on my computer?
Who knows, if Microsoft can't convince people to move on from XP, it very well might end up free. Of course, I would also like to see Windows open-sourced, and that's never gonna happen, so hey. In a perfect world, anyway...
Fiction is easier on the both of us. It's a good book, and Crighton was only critical of bad science. Seriously, just try being open-minded about it. Like I said, it might not change your mind, but it will at least offer you some perspective.
I strongly recommend Michael Crighton's State of Fear. Well researched, cites sources, and a plain good read on top of everything. It may not change your mind, but it might at least shed some light on why some of us ostriches are not so Chicken Little about temperature fluctuations.
I guess the converse is possibly true, that lack of correlation does not indicate lack of causation per se.
Actually lack of correlation is logically stronger than actual correlation. I'm going to simplify this a little bit, but it should stand. Let H = "Fewer cosmic rays causes fewer clouds." That's our hypothesis. Let O = "In periods where fewer cosmic rays are present, we would expect to observe fewer clouds." That's our expected observation. The statement H->O (H implies O) is TRUE: it literally states if fewer cosmic rays causes fewer clouds, then when we have a decline in cosmic rays we expect to see fewer clouds. Obviously true.
Now, H->O can be translated to ~H OR O (using ~ for not). They tested and found ~O (there was no reduction in cloud cover), so we get ~H OR FALSE. It should be trivial to see that the only way this statement is TRUE is if H is also FALSE.
(As an aside, notice that when O is true, the value of H doesn't matter. This is why correlation does not equal causation. H might cause O, or something else might cause O. )
Point being H is FALSE: fewer cosmic rays does not result in less cloud cover. The study didn't actually address the global warming aspect of it; they merely disproved the notion that fewer cosmic rays result in fewer clouds.
Too bad the new Firefox update still gets 71 on the acid3 test. I was all excited to see if it went up with the latest patch.:(
I'm using the new Opera (unless you're a web dev, my company only allows IE6 or Opera). It supposedly aced the acid test and I've gotta tell you,/. sure works a lot better in Firefox.
Probably not. The article specifically mentions renaming Word documents to have a.wri extension. Sounds like the formats are the same, and it takes no stretch of the imagination to think that a Word documents might house malicious code.
You'd be so freaking rich, it's ridiculous. Reminds me of two sci-fi jokes. The first is from Futurama (paraphrased)...
Bank teller: Ok, you had a balance of 93 cents.
Fry: All right!
Teller: At an average of two and a quarter percent interest over a thousand years, that brings your account balance to... 4.3 billion dollars.
Fry hyperventilates and passes out.
---
A similar joke from Red Dwarf (also paraphrased)...
Holly: When you left Earth, you had five pounds in your bank account. Thanks to a million years of interest, you now control 95% of the world's wealth. Now, nobody has any money except for you and NORWEB [the power company].
We use sametime at my office and it's just like any other IM client I've used. Two points of note - it offers encrypted chats, and the collaboration tools (screensharing, etc.) work better than Microsoft's Messenger products. I don't doubt, however, that OSS can compete with this - I'd only go ST if you're already using Lotus Notes.
Of course. There are 60,000,000 people in the UK. ...which, if I'm not mistaken, is roughly the number of times the "insensitive clod" joke has been made on slashdot...
Well, with recent court rulings in favor of consumers concerning binding arbitration in cell phone contracts (I think The Consumerist covered this, but I don't have a link to the article), I'm not so worried as I once was. Basically, the play goes as follows:
I post content.
Google steals said content.
I sue Google for infringement.
Google moves for summary judgment because I agreed to that behavior in the user agreement.
Move that that part of the agreement is unconscionable, and, if possible, try to get class status.
Court rules in my favor, Google pays me.
It is my opinion that Google put the clause there to allow them to do what they do: host, index and cache content, and, in some cases, display ads associated with that content for which they receive all revenue. That is a very reasonable use of my still-protected and uninfringed copyrighted work. Should Google ever become evil, it seems like the courts are finally waking up to the fact that recent laws and contracts are stacked deeply in favor of corporations and are starting to pay more attention to consumers' and the general public's rights. Just my 2 cents. Cheers.
"Under exponential-Everett, as I understand it, almost everybody is 10E-43 seconds from death. It is only in very rare circumstances that we continue to exist from one Planck-time to the next. But that is our history and we do not experience those universes in which we are dead." -- James Higgo I was wondering if anybody was going to mention QTI or Higgo (btw, good read: Four reasons why you don't exist)... Cheers.
All security is ultimately security by obscurity. Things get more secure the less you have less to obscure. If you have to obscure your whole codebase (much less your entire operating system configuration), you're asking for trouble. It's much safer to just obscure the 1024 bits that make up a private encryption key (which doesn't actually even need to be recorded anywhere to verify whether a correct key is supplied).
It's fairly obvious the GP you were replying to was trolling, but that doesn't change the fact he's technically correct, and, this is slashdot, where 'technically correct' is the best kind of correct;). Cheers.
The human eye can distinguish about 3,000,000 distinct shades (Wikipedia pegs the estimate at closer to 10,000,000). 24-bit color is 16,777,216 distinct shades, which is why 32-bit color gives the 8 extra bits it has over 24-bit color exclusively to alpha blending. That's also why when we hit 16-bit color, we kept going. If you can't tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit color, you need to hand in your driver's license and have somebody take you to an optometrist, because your vision is going. But 16,000 colors? That's just flat out wrong.
I don't remember them ever saying it would cost $100, I knew it was going to be cheap, and was sure they mentioned the price would be around $200-$300, which I admit is is still not cheap, but no where near the extortionate price they are charging for it. According to the last/. story, it was "a little less than a good cellphone," I think the editors guessed under $400, but I'm not sure. But if you think about it, people spending even $100 for a keyboard is pretty unusual. The idea of a keyboard in the $200-300 range probably does not sit well with anybody with the ability to invest in the manufacture and packaging of something like this, which is no doubt what these guys are looking for (I doubt they have their own factory). The few that can be pre-ordered are probably all hand-built at this point, in which case a $1500 price tag is not bad for what is essentially a prototype. But if they post their count-down, it hits/. and of those readers, 200 geeks pay $1500 each for one of these, that's probably a pretty big indicator that something like this just might do well at $200-300 on Best Buy's shelves, and this outfit can probably convince somebody to invest in mass-producing them for the rest of us. Just a thought, tho. Cheers.
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I wouldn't put it past MS
Come to think of it, I don't think I can blame this one on MS. If it's running in a VM, I think that's a setup issue...
...something's wrong, either with the JVM, or with Windows itself... but something is seriously messed up.
IIRC, Vista runs untrusted processes in their own VMs (IE7, for instance). I wonder if they did this to the JVM. Seems kinda silly to put a VM within another VM, but I wouldn't put it past MS.
For this round-up we had used a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook (PM965 + ICH8M Chipset) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, 3GB of DDR2 memory, 250GB Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 HDD, integrated Intel 965 graphics, and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800.
I'm shopping for a new laptop and I settled on the 1525 with this exact configuration. Ironically, I can't decide if I want Ubuntu or Vista Home Premium on it. I don't really use much Java so this article doesn't really help me... What a weird coincidence, though.
They might even give the OS away free
Frankly, I've always wondered why they don't.
Who knows, if Microsoft can't convince people to move on from XP, it very well might end up free. Of course, I would also like to see Windows open-sourced, and that's never gonna happen, so hey. In a perfect world, anyway...
Fiction is easier on the both of us. It's a good book, and Crighton was only critical of bad science. Seriously, just try being open-minded about it. Like I said, it might not change your mind, but it will at least offer you some perspective.
Sadly that was not meant to be a joke... I fail it.
... didn't I read something about SSDs working best in Windows 2000?
I strongly recommend Michael Crighton's State of Fear. Well researched, cites sources, and a plain good read on top of everything. It may not change your mind, but it might at least shed some light on why some of us ostriches are not so Chicken Little about temperature fluctuations.
I guess the converse is possibly true, that lack of correlation does not indicate lack of causation per se.
Actually lack of correlation is logically stronger than actual correlation. I'm going to simplify this a little bit, but it should stand. Let H = "Fewer cosmic rays causes fewer clouds." That's our hypothesis. Let O = "In periods where fewer cosmic rays are present, we would expect to observe fewer clouds." That's our expected observation. The statement H->O (H implies O) is TRUE: it literally states if fewer cosmic rays causes fewer clouds, then when we have a decline in cosmic rays we expect to see fewer clouds. Obviously true.
Now, H->O can be translated to ~H OR O (using ~ for not). They tested and found ~O (there was no reduction in cloud cover), so we get ~H OR FALSE. It should be trivial to see that the only way this statement is TRUE is if H is also FALSE.
(As an aside, notice that when O is true, the value of H doesn't matter. This is why correlation does not equal causation. H might cause O, or something else might cause O. )
Point being H is FALSE: fewer cosmic rays does not result in less cloud cover. The study didn't actually address the global warming aspect of it; they merely disproved the notion that fewer cosmic rays result in fewer clouds.
The automatic update system in Windows is far from perfect...
I'll agree with you there. A lot of times it forces a reboot when really all it needs to do is restart a program or service.
[It] doesn't allow users the granularity of saying "yes, update my browser but no, leave the rest of my system alone."
Mine does. Go to Control Panel > Automatic Updates and pick "Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them."
Too bad the new Firefox update still gets 71 on the acid3 test. I was all excited to see if it went up with the latest patch. :(
I'm using the new Opera (unless you're a web dev, my company only allows IE6 or Opera). It supposedly aced the acid test and I've gotta tell you, /. sure works a lot better in Firefox.
(I won't even get started on your grammar.
Lest anyone else gets started on your punctuation... ;)
Blame Kdawson, he's our version of the liberal media bias.
Hey! Give moderators some credit too! ;)
How they get composition I am not entirely sure.
If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd guess spectrum analysis. This is /. though so I naturally have not read the article before replying. :)
Are .rtf files now unsafe on Windows?
Probably not. The article specifically mentions renaming Word documents to have a .wri extension. Sounds like the formats are the same, and it takes no stretch of the imagination to think that a Word documents might house malicious code.
Put me into hibernation for 10k years.
You'd be so freaking rich, it's ridiculous. Reminds me of two sci-fi jokes. The first is from Futurama (paraphrased)...
Bank teller: Ok, you had a balance of 93 cents.
Fry: All right!
Teller: At an average of two and a quarter percent interest over a thousand years, that brings your account balance to ... 4.3 billion dollars.
Fry hyperventilates and passes out.
---
A similar joke from Red Dwarf (also paraphrased)...
Holly: When you left Earth, you had five pounds in your bank account. Thanks to a million years of interest, you now control 95% of the world's wealth. Now, nobody has any money except for you and NORWEB [the power company].
Dave: Why NORWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom.
We use sametime at my office and it's just like any other IM client I've used. Two points of note - it offers encrypted chats, and the collaboration tools (screensharing, etc.) work better than Microsoft's Messenger products. I don't doubt, however, that OSS can compete with this - I'd only go ST if you're already using Lotus Notes.
I guess this means liberalism is a mental disorder. ;)
- I post content.
- Google steals said content.
- I sue Google for infringement.
- Google moves for summary judgment because I agreed to that behavior in the user agreement.
- Move that that part of the agreement is unconscionable, and, if possible, try to get class status.
- Court rules in my favor, Google pays me.
It is my opinion that Google put the clause there to allow them to do what they do: host, index and cache content, and, in some cases, display ads associated with that content for which they receive all revenue. That is a very reasonable use of my still-protected and uninfringed copyrighted work. Should Google ever become evil, it seems like the courts are finally waking up to the fact that recent laws and contracts are stacked deeply in favor of corporations and are starting to pay more attention to consumers' and the general public's rights. Just my 2 cents. Cheers.Actually, it's the word "netspeak," you puppy killer!
(Yes, I'm aware I used the word twice just now, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't count when you quote it.)
All security is ultimately security by obscurity. Things get more secure the less you have less to obscure. If you have to obscure your whole codebase (much less your entire operating system configuration), you're asking for trouble. It's much safer to just obscure the 1024 bits that make up a private encryption key (which doesn't actually even need to be recorded anywhere to verify whether a correct key is supplied).
It's fairly obvious the GP you were replying to was trolling, but that doesn't change the fact he's technically correct, and, this is slashdot, where 'technically correct' is the best kind of correct ;). Cheers.
The human eye can distinguish about 3,000,000 distinct shades (Wikipedia pegs the estimate at closer to 10,000,000). 24-bit color is 16,777,216 distinct shades, which is why 32-bit color gives the 8 extra bits it has over 24-bit color exclusively to alpha blending. That's also why when we hit 16-bit color, we kept going. If you can't tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit color, you need to hand in your driver's license and have somebody take you to an optometrist, because your vision is going. But 16,000 colors? That's just flat out wrong.