Posts by Peter Kay

Insecure desktops can have keystrokes intercepted, etc

The problem with the historical design of Windows is that it's difficult to fully isolate one application from another, in terms of window message and key stroke and mouse interception. Secure desktop manages this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uac/archive/2006/05/03/589561.aspx

It's not the same

Steam were one of the first companies to provide a service that was secure, yet did not inconvenience the customer. Frequent sales and new titles help drive its popularity too.

Since Steam started up, other competitors have started to offer services that don't persecute the user when they want to download an app.

Still, a OS vendor lead app store may be a game changer. Productivity application vendors are probably a bit more clued up than the awkward invasive DRM that characterised the early attempts to sell games, but not all of them are perfect. Despite any approval issues that might exist with the new app store it should at least offer an incentive for the less functional software stores to improve their offerings a little.

It's a fair point, but..

mostly it only works if you run old software on old kit. NTP is terribly undemanding so I can see that you might get away with it.

Try new software on old kit and it struggles. For instance I fairly happily ran uTorrent on an 486DX33 20MB under NT4 with the large disk driver installed. You'll struggle to provide that level of functionality even in a stripped down BSD Unix these days.

I do have a 300 MHz embedded AMD box that's fine for running an OpenBSD firewall, but the same kit is barely adequate for running a NetBSD shell box (perl is grindingly slow). Debian (or indeed XP) was quite happy on a PII 300, though, provided I didn't ask it to do anything ridiculous.

Quake, and Tomb Raider

The killer game for the Voodoo2 was most definitely Quake 2. For the original Voodoo things were a bit more complex as there were a number of competitors to 3dfx at the time. Tomb Raider had at least three different versions with specific hardware support. I also remember Screamer (racing game) as being particularly good.

Yes, you're reading it correctly

Once you've upgraded your XP or Vista license what you now hold is a full transferable Windows 7 license. It can be serially transferred to any number of machines, and ownership can if I remember correctly, be transferred to one other person.

The old XP/Vista license, however, is now no longer valid.

Appropriate for the time

A small nitpick : NetBIOS is the controlling protocol, NetBEUI is one of the underlying network transports, NetBIOS name servers/WINS being required when running NetBIOS over TCP/IP. I never tried it over SPX.

Anyway, for the time the technology was appropriate. IP in the mid to late eighties was not always bundled in operating systems, was of variable quality, more difficult to set up and harder to maintain. Lan Manager/Server were used by some SMEs, many more used Netware.

At that time script kiddies were not so prevalent, comparatively few people were connected to the Internet, and like many Internet protocols (i.e. FTP), the system was not designed to protect itself from deliberate concerted attacks.

From there the future is easy to understand. Any significant new product (NT, OS/2 32 bit) had to retain compatibility with existing products to gain market share. They have made changes over time but people are resistant to change.

A more significant question is what the sensible alternative is. NFS has had its own issues and was vastly less reliable than SMB for a long while (timing issues with file movement were a particular problem).

Your maths and reasoning is off

550-50-120/2=190 - and note that fuel is 'more than 120lb' and luggage may be more than 50lb.

I'm 5'10" - so an average height for a man. The BMI charts note that overweight for 5'10 starts at 12st 7lb. 190lb=13st 8lb. A margin of one stone over average is really not a lot.

Not that it's particularly relevant, but in case you think this is from the viewpoint of a fatty, last time I looked I was 11 stone, a fair bit of it muscle.

Bash is not a good OS differentiator

Bash? Well, you could use that, but I suspect sh and ksh are a lot more common overall.

In any case Windows has powershell, the Unix subsystem SUA (Server, Pro and Ultimate editions only) and the free cygwin utilities from a third party.

If you're going to look at advantages of Unix over Windows you'll have to do better than bash. Both systems have advantages over the other, and it's also important not to confuse OS capabilities with the defaults chosen for the system. XP allowed for quite a secure system, and includes runas (su alternative). Unfortunately the default of a user being root was abused. Unix isn't perfect here either - it took years for Nero to allow running their CD burning software as anything other than administrator, but they did manage it. Various Unixes still run cd burning suid root, and haven't caught up to capability bits offered in old systems like Irix for example.

The Core is a fun film

The keys to watching The Core are 1) alcohol 2) not taking

it seriously and 3) predicting what will obviously happen.

Yes, it's completely unscientific and predictable, but thats

the point. It's very clear from watching it that the writers

know that it's completely un-scientific and decided to ham

it up to annoy pedants anyway.

C'mon Alex, do your job..

You should be reading the security bulletins and using WSUS

- not expecting thereg to do everything.

In any case, as you really should know, anything earlier

than XP SP3 (which includes 2000) is now completely

unsupported.

Pretty much, yes

I'm not a HPC guru either, but I do have a couple of SGI boxes, and you can't have those without learning about picking the right computer for the right job.

For instance, the R8000 MIPS processor was at the time scorchingly fast at floating point and featured a large level 2 cache, making it ideal for numeric analysis. At between 75 and 90MHz it could be up to ten times the speed of x86, but integer performance was poor.

Likewise, if you take the Indigo vs the O2, the Indigo features some fairly fancy (for the time) hardware OpenGL support, whilst the O2 does most things in software. As long as a fully speced Indigo kept within the hardware constraints (geometry and lighting limits) it'll beat anything but an O2 with a top end processor. Go beyond those limits, or play to the O2's strengths such as the unified memory architecture that let it use all of the main memory (up to 1GB) for textures, or the ability to do real time full frame compression via the ICE chipset and it gets trounced.

Fine here

Fine both on my main desktop at home and at work. Probably a bit better at home, at work my productivity has definitely improved - there's some quite neat touches in 7.

The only issues I've had was with using the crap bundled drivers, after replacing the SATA and display drivers my problems disappeared.

I didn't have a problem with Vista (SP1 or later) either, although it is a memory hog.

A fiver?

Blimey. Instead I'd rather set up the train times for a station web page with WAP, and assign it to a hotkey on my phone (Nokia).

Cost : free

Ease of use, speed : Hold down one key

A fiver for more than that? I don't think so.

Seeing as you mentioned it..

I ran Google Earth on my work PC which contains a less than inspiring 82945G chipset. It needs to be run in DirectX in safe mode to avoid some graphics corruption, and the drivers aren't fantastic (Windows 7, but WDDM 1.0). Nevertheless, it works and the framerate is usable albeit jumpy rather than smooth.

HD does work, providing you have the right chipset, the right driver (i.e. Windows - forget it in anything else) and the right software. That's exactly the same as ATI and Nvidia, though - they'll do a full decode, but only for certain codecs.

My Thinkpad X61 has a somewhat better X3100 which manages to run some (older) 3D games quite well.

Don't get me wrong, my main system has an 8800GTX and a 7600GT; an upgrade will no doubt be an ATI 5+ series when they die. For work, I really don't mind the Intel chipsets, though.

Not likely

Zen has only recently become vaguely competitive. For well over a year after I moved to Be, Zen were still stuck on a more expensive, capped, slower service. It's still a tenner more expensive than Be's top product and has a slower upload speed.

Be's higher end products are definitely not too good to be true.

It had everything except..

USB, modern DirectX, Firewire, IPv6, Active Directory, large disk support, large memory support, x64 support, CIFS, updated scripting, a patch management server, a half decent web server, support for GUID disks, integrated (not a separate product) terminal services and much improved group policy and deployment tools.

Yep, you're right, NT 4 had absolutely everything we require in the present day..

No

I think you may be confusing 'mancunian' with 'scally', and even then, there's plenty of queer chavs.

You might have a point if a program could be created in a day - but not even then

If you fancy playing a copy of the latest RPG, are you prepared to pay the salaries of upwards of a hundred programmers for a year? If not, perhaps other methods apply.

Likewise, every time I play a copy of Sibelius, I'm not fond of hiring an entire orchestra for an hour..

A brickie is fully entitled to try selling his services on a royalty basis, but unsurprisingly the market doesn't support it. Who knows, maybe someone will one day create houses sold on a royalty basis, where all contractors have ongoing royalty payments.

All things considered, I think people paying for a recording are doing quite well. I still prefer physical media, but given that it's possible to buy single tracks now, consumers are managing to avoid paying over the odds for albums mostly filled with crap.

Personally I'd rather pay for recordings - it's very convenient, and often cheaper than dashing all around the country after music I like.