I should clarify; The Gap is about 10km outside of the Brisbane CBD. Work is at Milton, maybe 2km outside the CBD.

I seem to average about 10Mbps on my ADSL2+ at The Gap.

At work, it's a 10Mbps (both up and down) via Ethernet.

Re: Not so nice when the shoe's on the other foot is it Microsoft?

> Stuart wrote some rubbish: >Take the Microsoft Office format for example. Did they actually open up the

> legacy format for people to implement? No

> Yes they did actually, Office legacy document format has been fully documented for at least five years

And the format has been in existence for how long? Basically they did so when coerced to do it, and I'll bet there are at least a few patents pending on those docs.

I'll admit, I wasn't actually aware of the existence of those specifications in the public until now, so it's pleasing to know that they're reforming their old ways. The fact that it's only been in the last 5 years that they've started doing it though, says a lot.

I think it's only because of browsers like Chrome and Firefox gaining speed that we actually saw the web move away from IE6 … we were staring down the barrel of a overglorified BBS served up by proprietary ActiveX components for a while there at one point.

The crux of my argument is that Microsoft has been guilty of the exact thing that they are crying about now. I have no sympathy for them. I suspect Google will eventually release their APIs, if not willingly, it'll be by force of law, but either way, it's Google just doing to Microsoft what Microsoft has been doing to others for decades.

Do I support either side? No. I think companies should just grow up and stop playing silly proprietary games, but that wouldn't be so much fun for the lawyers now would it?

Re: Panic from within Microsoft.

I'm in contact with the husband of a Microsoft employee... and apparently, even in certain Microsoft offics, you find Windows 8 haters.

Sorry Steve, but when you claim that all Microsoft employees are behind Windows 8, either you're naïve, delusional, or a bullshit artist. Maybe all three.

Re: but...

Then you're like me, and won't be buying that way. I can't anyway … no credit card either. I have a 18+ proof-of-age card, that's it. My bank account relies on a passbook.

My one and only Apple device, a 2008-model MacBook, was bought second hand. So I had none of this nonsense.

As for handing this sort of identity information out … I do hope for consumers' sake they provide the individuals with a GPG or S/MIME key to encrypt it with. I'll bet they don't though!

Re: Self Inflicted

> They possess no clues. None of them. None of the goddamned clues.

Yes, we know.

Not the first machine with a trackpad that side of the keyboard though.

I recall an old Olivetti 386 which had its trackpad pointing device (an early one) on the top-right above the keyboard.

So the idea is not new.

Re: Interesting story, but...

Meh... MOSFETs smell better.

Especially when they're pushing 400A (48V) through a 3-phase H-bridge inverter and the DSP decides to turn on the wrong pair of MOSFETs. Then you watch 6" high flames jump off them.

It could have an impact if the software is written to take advantage of it.

What concerns me though, I recall some time back (a couple of years ago) there being a WebGL exploit that could extract pieces of video RAM. Admittedly, the exact problem occurred nearly 2 years ago, and a lot has changed since then, however this isn't to say the same vulnerability can't exist in future software.

What makes this kind of vulnerability dangerous here though is that this sort of architecture potentially opens up your entire system memory to attack via the same vector, since video RAM is essentially your main system RAM.

The idea is not new though... the SGI O2 has a similar design, as did a lot of late 90's era desktop boards which had integrated video devices.

Re: Trumpet Winsock

Yes, Trumpet Winsock, NCSA Mosaic, Trumpet Mail & News Reader, and some GIF image viewer supplied on a 3½" floppy disk, and a ring-bound A4 book about 10mm thick with instructions on how to install it on Windows 3.1 and configure it for our ISP of the day, along with instructions for Macintosh and Windows 95.

I've got the booklet still somewhere here, probably still have the floppy too. We were with that ISP from about 1996 on dialup until 2002 when we moved to 512/128kbps ADSL on a static IP, and stayed on that service until late last year when the said ISP decided they were going to move us to a dynamic IP for force us onto a business plan which shaped peer-to-peer traffic to 64kbps.

So we were customers of that ISP from 1996 to 2012. Still, that screenshot does take me back... and yes, I remember the modem handshake too — in fact, I still do use dial-up modems from time to time, as some of the customers I support at my work use good ol'e 33.6kbps dial-up for remote site access.

Re: it's 2013. Where's my copy-on-write disk storage?

> It's 2013, isn't it? Is there really no simpler (better?) way of getting copy-on-write storage than putting the whole thing in a VM?

Well, some OSes do support COW filesystems. BtrFS in Linux is one such file system, but it's still in development.

The other problem with running Windows XP on modern hardware is tracking down drivers. Hardware makers aren't producing Windows XP drivers these days, and so making your new piece of kit work with the older OS is going to become an uphill battle, especially for things like motherboards and video cards. The VM, although it'll have some overhead, will insulate you from a lot of this change since the VM's hardware is emulated to mimic some older hardware, and will probably work better with Windows XP.

QEMU can emulate ISA hardware if needed for example. Good luck finding a new motherboard with an ISA slot today.

Re: Plan 9 from Planet Obvious: XP -> Linux Mint + sandboxed XP VM

> How does running XP In a VM avoid the problem of XP EOL? If it is unsupported on physical hardware it will be just as unsupported in a VM.

Yes, it'll be unsupported, with no patches, and probably will get hosed with malware on a periodic basis, but VMs have one big edge over a physical machine running the same OS: copy-on-write block devices.

You can set up your virtual machine, install the applications you need, then, set up a new virtual disk, which references the pristine set-up. Changes are written to the "overlay" disk image, leaving your original alone. Any documents and files are accessed via a network drive or persistent disk image which can be frequently and easily backed up.

Ideally, when you shut down the VM, the overlay image is chucked out. So if malware infects, simply shut down the VM, toss out the infected overlay disk, create a new one (which will take mere seconds) and voilà, you're back up again.

This solution does not require Linux of course, you can do it in Windows or MacOS X too. Easily. However, if your problem is a lack of a viable OS for the host, then Linux is a reasonable choice.

Re: Don't make me laugh........

"I can assure you, if Microsoft goes under, we're in for one hell of a rough ride! "... ......I just think MS will be become much less relevant as time goes on, especially if they keep throwing their developer tools under the bus.

Have to agree here. What I was saying is that having Microsoft suddenly go belly up would be catastrophic. More likely however, is they'll slowly wither away and fade into history like so many monstrosities before them.

It happened to Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It happened to Sony's portable music division. It's happening to Microsoft on a few fronts now.

Microsoft's peak was in 2000. IIRC Microsoft originally started in the 70's, so maybe 25-30 years they've been ramping up to this peak. There might be a second peak, but I doubt it. Likely over the next 10 years they'll start to fade.

And the furniture business in the Redmond area will start to get very lucrative.

Re: Beautifully damaged!

For reference, the mining company was using a solution based on F5 Networks VPN.

There might be other bits intertwined with it as well. I recall it also being flakey as hell.

Re: Don't make me laugh........

I was interested to learn that Rockwell Automation, who are quite big users of Microsoft-based technology, have started moving towards putting the features of their SCADA package in their hardware and serving up the system as a cross-platform environment using embedded web servers.

Story goes that they approached Microsoft to get an idea what their plans were — to Rockwell's horror, Microsoft didn't have any. Hence they've pushed forward with the intention of effectively detaching themselves from being dependent on Microsoft.

That said, there's still a lot of shops that know nothing outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. These are companies that only know how to develop software and solutions using Microsoft products. They're wholly dependent on the platform, and will be completely lost outside of their cosy home of .NET.

Manufacturers will be thust out of the status quo where they write a device driver for maybe 2 or 3 kernels, bundle it up with some bloatware in some monolothic propretary blob, into this world where you're expected to contribute your driver as source code that anyone (including competitors) can look at it, and the driver then gets bundled up by other vendors and incorporated into peoples' operating systems.

That'll be a big culture shock for them. We're seeing this now with Android -- a lot of makers of these trinkets haven't quite groked that the GPL ≠ public domain, and that the contributions are a two-way street.

I can assure you, if Microsoft goes under, we're in for one hell of a rough ride! There'll be a lot of disollusioned folk out there with no idea where to go, and it'll be the rest of us that will have to pick up the pieces.

I for one, would rather see Microsoft continue on and collaborate with us, then disappear in a puff of smoke.

Re: In it for the kill

I have to agree here. Microsoft going belly up would be a very ugly prospect.

Yes, I despise them as much as the next person, but I also realise that big portions of the world economy are funded/run by people who know nothing else.

No Microsoft would put a lot of people out of work, and that, would have knock-on effects globally.

Plus, the rest of us need something to poke fun at. :-)

Re: Statistical fluctuation, IE is on a Dead Cat Death Spiral

w3schools is a web-design focussed site, where the audience care more for web standards than the general public.

Thus it will see disproportionately more Gecko and Webkit based browsers which have traditionally been better at web services. It is true though that IE is nowhere near as strong as it used to be.

Comparisons with mobile are not reasonable as I'm pretty sure IE is not available for iOS, Android, Symbian or BlackBerry's OS. Microsoft could port IE to Android but in all likelihood, won't. iOS would be out of the question though.

As to my earlier remark, it was more to do with Windows Phone 8, which in the scheme of things has not been around long. Microsoft didn't do anyone any favours by bringing out Phone 7 then practically killing it barely 6 months later by announcing its (hardware-incompatible) successor.

Windows Phone 8 in fact wasn't supposed to exist, I seem to recall it was going to be Windows 8 on the phone (as in full-blooded, just compiled for ARM) and that the APIs would be compatible with Windows RT, just recompile and away you go.

Whatever happened to that broken promise? I digress though.

IE certainly has improved … it had no other choice though. It was improve or die. Unfortunately the thing that hampers IE10 is the very same thing that keeps IE6 alive — (broken) "web" applications that won't work in anything else. That will continue to bolster the popularity of other browsers in institutions that require a workable browser for the web, but still need these older browsers for intranet applications, since it is impossible to run two versions of IE (e.g. 7 and 10) on the same host.

Re: Statistical fluctuation, IE is on a Dead Cat Death Spiral

To be fair, Windows 8 really hasn't been in the market all that long to have truly "fallen off a cliff".

Perhaps stillborn might've been a better description. That said, IE is not dead yet.

Re: I may be downvoted, but...

IMO people should learn the road rules on a bicycle and have to ride on-road for a year or two without incident before moving on to driving cars, as a lot have a major flaw in their understanding of physics. In particular, they develop this bad habit of just flooring it to the next lights then screeching to a halt, or totally failing in judging stopping distances.

Plus, you'd be learning the road rules on a vehicle which most learn to master before puberty. You're not trying to learn road rules and the operation of a vehicle simultaneously.

Having to supply the grunt for a while or having to nurse a few bruises might teach them some better driving habits rather than alternately stomping on brake and accelerator, and has the bonus of them maybe respecting vehicles smaller than them.

This said, it won't happen, as it'll require vastly more work administering the system, and there'd be very little gain in the scheme of things.

But I digress…

It has been mentioned that some people should take some sort of license test to use a computer. Not sure that'd be a good idea, because let's face it, what would the content be? What platform would they teach on? How would it be administered and policed? It'd be a nightmare to manage, and probably more trouble than its worth.

100Gbps Ethernet would be nice

At our workplace we were looking at 10GbE networking for a couple of machines. We may yet go that way, since the switches we have support it, and on a couple of our machines, it'll make sense. (Think OpenStack Swift Proxies, Rados Gateway, etc.)

The cheapest card we can get though is nearly AU$600.

If this technology moves ahead, I could see us not bothering with 10GbE and using 100GbE instead.

Re: M*A*S*H*

I wonder who would play Hawkeye, Alan Alda is getting a little long in the tooth.

Not to mention the fact they'll still be playing the "new" series a good 50 years from now. (We still have the original showing on television here today, and the series was shot in the 70's.)

Re: I have nothing against

Good to know you've got nothing against drivers, since there's rather too many of them to argue with on the road.

Re: Make mine plain text as well.

> I happen to be a UTF-8 luddite. I don't mind Unicode emails, but I don't like HTML emails.

UTF-8 is fine, however I find that its suitability is highly dependent on the fonts one uses at the other end. What looks perfectly fine is going to come out as mojibake on the other end.

Re: " because it may easily be used to lute users into visiting malware-tainted websites."

Exactly. Time to face the music.

On that note, I'm off.

Re: You might want to check your map there, mate

It depends, are you talking an African or a European crow?