Posts by Marco van de Voort
86 posts • joined Tuesday 17th June 2008 11:23 GMT
Updates
Basically it will get tricky when the first major vulnerability is left unpatched by MS.
Afaik MS did some fixes to win2000 after the expiry date, and since much larger XP user numbers won't be ready by April 2013, leaving something that is actively exploited or otherwise extremely dangerous would lead to big trouble and a bad publicity for MS.
So my guess is that they will continue fixes for the worst vulnerabilities a while longer, and in as many ways as possible give you a "subtle" hint to upgrade.
Apple OEM version?
The article compares cheap Apple's OS X with the retail price. Shouldn't it compare to the OEM/system builder price?
We come in peace ! (Shoot to kill, shoot to kill)
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: The writing was on the wall
9 times out of ten that you run such old systems, it is also attached to other hardware (read: cards) and software that are hard to replace.
If the 386 was a database server it had been virtualized or migrated eons ago.
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: 486?
The 486 also introduced some other instructions iirc, bound and bswap. (though for bulk swapping SSE solutions are faster)
Note that this might not only kill 386s, but also 3rd party x86 chips that are not entirely 486 compatible in the sense that matters for the kernel. Cyrix and UMC among others had 486 alikes.
Lazarus 1.0 ?
I had expected a remark about Lazarus going gold (1.0)
Posted in The best e-readers for Christmas
Re: Bedtime reading...?
Afaik the retina has some cells that are triggered by blue light that also play a part in day-night rhythm.
IOW it should be fixable by setting your tablet background to red :)
Posted in The best e-readers for Christmas
EInk: Battery and readability
In addition to Nightfox's battery remark, for me EInk (I have a iRiver story HD) is way better.
While backlit tablets read better in low lighting, reading a lit surface in a dark area is more fatiguing. So unless you specifically target places with bad lighting (planes mostly), I'd go for EInk.
Between EInk devices, ask around, battery life and startup time can be worth shelling out a few tenners extra if you are a heavy user. (my old story HD takes nearly a minute to come from sleep and load the book. Not a dealbreaker, but any improvement would be great, as long as it doesn't reduce battery life too much)
Posted in Coffee next on climate chopping-block
Robusta, Chicory anyone?
The prospect of drinking Robusta your whole life isn't terribly attractive ;-)
Or worse, chicory.
AMD or ATI
Article seems to assume the license is for the traditional AMD biz. Maybe it is for the ATI part (a controlling CPU core on GPGPU cards?)
Lovelace day: general beta science or math/computing.
What struck me when I read the site of Ada Lovelace day is that it doesn't pretend to be just about mathematics or computing. It seems to target more beta science and engineering as a whole.
And if I then have to pick a female figurehead, then my vote goes to Marie Curie (-Skłodowska), not Lady Ada.
Pascal
Does it work with Pascal?
Re: Yes please!
I think Imperial unit standardization already went a step to far, let alone the even more radical SI.
Every town should have its own measurements again! It's like insane that a mile in London is the same as a mile in Brighton! Reverting to the old tried and tested practice from before all this standardization nonsense will encourage thinking local again !
Choice of metric
Why is this an interesting metric at all?
Live objects per day/week/month is the interesting metric to gauge the real use, and profit (since people using Azure as a backup serivce at least pay)
Legal torrents
What does this spell for legal torrents? Most *nix distributions have torrents mentioned on their main download page.
I personally don't want to go back to the days that *nix sites were unreachable for at least a week after every download. Torrent solves that, despite some minor Hollywood collateral damage,
next bad thing
Seems NXP is suing RIM for infringement of 6 patents relating to integrated circuitry and communicationtechnology:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/telecom/NXP-sues-BlackBerry-maker-RIM/articleshow/12528939.cms
Spanish Inquisition
I assume
""who must have substantial discretion to devise reasonable solutions to problems."
was part of the mandate of the Spanish Inquisition too.
long term
Fedora simply excludes itself for server use due to its 18 months support policy.
The more popular ones (Debian, Centos, Ubuntu (Server which are LTS)) all have long support periods.
Great article
Great article. An island in an ocean of media insanity.
Seems that the media (and Microsoft) are still writing for a time when 80% of the people still had to get acqainted with computers.
Kobe earthquake all over again
But then it was for DRAM, not HDDs.
Seems overreacting runs in the family.
Seems overreacting runs in the family.
And line of sight?
Besides the distance already mentioned, it doesn't mention if the said frequencies will penetrate walls, floors etc.
This is quite useful for wireless usage :-)
SSID not logged, mac is.
As far as I know they log your mac address, not your SSID. The SSID is only used for the opt-out feature.
I already had thought about rotating the SSID monthly, but that will be pointless, since nothing is attached to it.
DDOS google.com tilll they rename it to www.google_noddos.com
DDOS google.com tilll they rename it to www.google_noddos.com
Companies that don't want to be a testsubject for ddos tools should opt out by appending "_noddos" to their domain.
openslowaris
If they open up a new opensolaris, at least its ZFS implementation will see many x86 based systems
Yes, and this new versioning will just cause them to restate that as "never use the first release of a new series".
Touchscreen tablets
... and it will depend even more on the fact if those tablets will run Windows. That's not a done deal yet.
I don't see the PCs with touch screens (or normal laptops for that matter) in the shops, and Dell and HP are not offering them for businesses either.
Tell it to Louis XIV
I miss the word "revolt" in this article :-)
Silverlight
So Metro doesn't support Silverlight?
teletext
I was at work at the time, so no television. We mostly survived on webbased teletext pages.
While the main websites crashed down, a lot of webbased portals to teletext remained up, probably because they were lowbandwidth and static.
Posted in Wikipedia: It's not for girls
"critical information resource". Apparently not to women.
"As Wikipedia continues to be a critical information resource,..."
That's a very male centric view :-)
Powerpc
Does that mean they finally going to provide PowerPC/ OS X builds of modern versions?
Otherwise I would say this is over their heads. They can't even manage reasonably open platforms yet, let alone they want to attack walled gardens
Not really fair to consumers
On the other hand, larger businesses have licenses to run any version of Windows. Consumers actually have up to cough up extra cash.
Diablo II
Sorry, still playing Diablo II from time to time :-)
Conclusion?
That English tins are apparently inferior to German engineered ones?
OS/2
I always had the feeling OS/2 failed as much on memory requirements than on apps.
Microsoft hasn't inserted two other Windows lines (16-bit Windows 3.x and 16/32 hybrid Windows 9x) before OS/2's sister NT was made the only Windows version.
In short, OS/2 was too early, and IBM didn't have a decent transition horse.
What is legacy ?
The problem is what they define as legacy ? In increasing magnitude of evilness:
Dos apps? Win16 Native apps? Apps not adhering to Win8 HIG ? Win32/64 apps ? Native code ?
Apple != Laptop market
Apple is the part of the laptop market that _is_ movable. If you count 64-bit versions, it will just be Apple's 6th (m68k, ppc,ppc64, x86,x86_64,Arm) architecture change.
I think the early netbook situation demonstrated that the PC crowd is not very appreciative to everything which is not dog standaard and Windows based.
So even if Apple makes this move, I don't think it is a telltale for laptops as a whole
Inflation
It is interesting that in an article like this you factor in technological inflation, but not monetary inflation.
Specially if you have productivity/worker charts in dollars.
1024 MB required.
Pity it requires a one GB. My test machines are using still relatively expensive DDR-1, and the one that is free is only 512MB.
Ubuntu useless, Fedora useless, what next?
Did I just leave Ubuntu for Fedora to escape experimentalism, if I understood this correctly, now Fedora starts with it.
Does Slackware still exist?
Does it have a place at all?
The average mobile phone cycle is 2 years or so. One can wonder if relatively slow moving Open Source has a place there at all.
At last 2
Well at least they fixed that url hover problem. The url bar thingy looked sharp, but there was less room to view large urls.
Actually I kind of like the compromise they made. One can now view long urls, and the space at the bottom of the screen is not lost.
And... more importantly, they do seem to listen to feedback.
Orval on campus
The Orval on Campus was Eur 2 :-)
Anyway, did you also see the LLVM talk of the BSDs ? (end of saturday, BSD room? Can't remember the exact title). Nice practical information on porting , though the keynote was way more informative.
Posted in Your call is not important to us
Not the conduit, but the person
While I can see you experience, my conclusion would be diffierent:
Most companies need simply more FTEs for customer communication. Not other forms of contact conduits.
Since years, companies have tried to suppress support costs by issueing faqs, refering to "community" forums etc, which all have one thing in common: less people to do the actual communication.
It's that where the problem lies, not technology. The "Sales brings in the cash", "aftersales costs money" mentality.
Always though that Utah was a bit behind
Even if they are guncrazed, couldn't they take something modern? Or did nothing happen in Utah after 1911?
Is it really a problem?
Retailer sites often already have user comment groups, and they are on average already way,way to positive to be useful (except a few that mention details).
These comment forums with products don't compare with 3rd party reviews, and Apple giving out a few trinkers here and there won't change that.
US interest in redefining.
> US : which DOES NOT use SI
The US imperial system is specified in SI base units much longer than the UK one. Stronger even, some of the so called Founding Fathers already made a case for SI (because they could get better standards info from their ally France than from the Brits that were still fumigating because of some lost tea).
IIRC the American Imperial System is defined in SI base units since the 1870s. Like the UK, it is the plebs that can't deal with it.
Posted in Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice
Market Share != revenue
The article is not bad, and I like the general tenure (why does Microsoft think such horribly unspecific scraremonger is effective? It indeed makes them look petty).
However there is one big problem. Market share is not equal to (regular) revenue.
The biggest competitors of Office are not Google Docs and/or Open Office, but Office in the previous version and to a lesser extend, piracy. I think the article could have stressed that more.
Project failed
The worm's larvae couldn't break out of their cocoon anymore, so procreation halted.
Scientists are now looking for ways to clone the worm.
