Posts by Henry Wertz 438 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2008
OK.. this was the first I'd read the bailout got rejected.
A) I'm glad these guys that fantastically mismanaged money are not going to just get bailed out with my tax money.
B) Hopefully it doesn't collapse the economy.
C) At least the site is just slow and not dead. I certainly give more props to a site that slows down under load than one that goes straight from fast to dead.
Seriously, this is just petty. He's worth $1.4 bil, and he's complaining over a $62 million tax? Fuck. And the "my accountants told me it was OK" defense is NOT going to fly. This actually happens fairly often here, accountants will try the craziest shell-games to avoid as many taxes as possible (for their clients); if it works the rich guy gets richer. If not, they're SUPPOSED to suck it up and pay.
@Tim
"Those in the top 1% of income pay 40% of the income tax revenue in the U.S.,"
But I just wikipedia'd it, and the top 1% make 15% of the US income. And, at that, the top 1% starts at about $250,000/year... I'm wondering what the top 0.5% or top 0.1% make? I'm guessing the guys at $250,000 are not quite high enough to get into the serious tax dodges (and pay a lot of that 40%) while those making millions get out at quite a low tax rate.
Well, Kentucky did not get the goldencasino domain for long....
beta ~ # whois goldencasino.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
......
Domain Name: GOLDENCASINO.COM
Registrant:
Rosehip Ltd.
Steven Melkman (domains@rosehipnv.com)
Caribbean Suite
The Valley
Anguilla
null,TV1 11P
AI
Tel. +599.94611401
Creation Date: 27-Oct-1997
Expiration Date: 19-Nov-2010
.....
Status:LOCKED
"I personally belive that if you are dealing with Evolution in a teaching environment, you need to discuss the alternatives 'theories'"
Creationism isn't a theory. Theories have some kind of tests that can be done to possibly disprove them. Creationism doesn't. The current "intelligent design" argument to try to say they have a theory of irreducible complexity, but this is not a testable statement either; it just says basically "some things in biology are so complex they cannot be reduced into simpler parts, therefore they were created". Several specific examples have been *disproven* (one was the eye, there's plenty of basically proto-eyes around in nature). Every time one is disproven the intelligent design camp just pulls out other examples, one after another.
"...WHEN the the creationists have presented and proved their evidence."
They wouldn't have to PROVE it, theories aren't proven, they have tests that can falsify them and are assumed true until disproven. But, every theory creationists have brought up have been disproven, and at present they've simply tried to make a scientific-sounding statement or two that is not disprovable... which is the big problem.
I live in the US, but I don't know what these people's problem is.. if you want to believe in creationism on faith, do it, but it's not science.
See, this isn't a free speech issue, it's a network abuse issue. Sending spam is network abuse. Spreading malware is network abuse. Running a botnet command-and-control is network abuse. I think this alone is the shortest defense against spammers that want to pretend shutting them down is some free speech issue.
Personally, I don't run any spamhaus, etc. I've got a Bayesian filter running (spamprobe). My computer burns a few more cycles sorting the mail (than it would if I just used an IP blocklist), but it's never blocked a legit message, and blocks almost all spam (it'll block like 700 and let 5 or so through).
I like the changes. They aren't jarringly different on the desktop but look nice. The "Add your own comment" area looks nice I think, I like the change to it.
I'll tell you for sure, the new layout is MUCH nicer on my cellphone -- it's a VX9800 (with a WAP browser) so the layout's all shot either way, but the article is much nearer the top than it used to be.
To be honest, I personally thought the new icons were fine too. But, *shrug*, I guess people are used to the old ones so OK.
What you need to do to avoid these is to get some blackout plates. How about some of that glass that turns black when current is run through it? (Or is it black *without* current? Whichever..) If you are getting pulled over in person, flip the switch, "Huh, I didn't realize my plates were that dirty". (Hilarity then ensues when the officer sees the plates are quite legible.) I *would* have some, but here in the midwestern US, the 5-0 actually go out in person to pull people over -- if you're not paying enough attention too see a black Ford Crown Victoria (or Chevy Impala on newer ones) with police lights installed and stop speeding for a minute, probably a ticket is warranted. If we had speed cameras etc., I'd rig up this system in a second.
"Email appears to be nothing but a fad. Oh, it's very popular with the 30-50 year old set...very popular.... but I can't get any of my under-25 friends to use email. They sms, they chat, they sign on to fucking World of Wartcraft and sit around chatting... they do just about anything but email. Email is for fogies."
Hey, I saw someone under 25 using e-mail just a few days ago. I mean, admittedly, they were using it to send and receive texts to/from my phone (to save on texting fees) but other than that..umm...hmm... well, point taken 8-).
I've got to admit, I don't use E-Mail too much. I've sent/received over 100 texts so far this month, and as for my e-mail: 1) SPAM! (Like 500 a day or something similary ridiculous). Good thing I have a GOOD Bayesian spam filter. 2) securityfocus and a few related mailing lists. 3) "Your bill is due!" (even though I'm on autopay). 4) My sister sends out the odd E-Mail to a fat list of addresses, mainly to accomodate older relatives who aren't into texting.
"... the main problem I can see with this is the caps that ISPs deem reasonable at the moment. With a modest ten-fold increase in download speeds (say 80-100mbps for FTTC) could we expect a ten-fold increase in the caps too? At 100mbps it wouldn't take long to burn through 50GB (which to me seem to be the 'fair-use' cap most 'unlimited' ISPs impose)."
Who knows. I guess NTT in Japan (on it's 100mbit/second) service has a 900GB/month *upload* cap (actually, 30GB/day); downloads are not capped.
Personally, I'd like some competition. Where I live (midwestern USA), the cable costs $56 a month (8mbit or so down? no caps as yet though!). The phone line running to my house is 18,000 feet long, and the local phone co is downright allergic to remote DSLAMs so no DSL, fiber, etc.; the other choices are an EVDO air card ($60/month for a 5GB cap) or satellite ($??? for, I think, a cap where you're throttled way down after a few 100 MB). Oh, and dialup's right out, a modem on my line gets about 12kbps, no 56k for sure. I *don't* need more speed, but a reduction in price would be great.
"Apart from a couple of major cities hsupa is not available let alone first gen 3G"
Yeah, the majority of 3G rollouts in the the US are using EVDO. AT&T's several years behind in rollouts, and is the only large provider using WCDMA-based tech in the US. (T-Mobile is planning on it too, but last I heard, they had the 384kbps UMTS installed in one city.)
In the future though, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are planning to go LTE. VZW is in the process of buying Alltel (so their footprint will also get LTE, whether Alltel was planning to or not.) Sprint says they are planning WiMax, but really, they're going to HAVE to put some LTE in I think, unless they are planning to become some kind of wireless ISP instead of a phone provider.
" Also having 3G is slightly pointless without enriched content services. The avergae american usage of 3G is limited to browsing and video calls, "
Yeah, not even the video calls so much I think. Basically browsing. I think the US telcos have looked at 3G more to reduce congestion on the existing EDGE and 1X data channels (since WCDMA and EVDO are more efficient) -- the higher speeds are just a happy side-effect they can use to sell *some* data services.
"Make no mistake, the US telcos will eventually realise that their businedd model is restrictive and will eventually follow the european model."
I hope so! My phone service is good, but the phone's locked up tight! I'm hoping with LTE that the cell cos will HAVE to lighten up.
The situation in the US really is that on-phone data is pretty cheap -- typically $15 for unlimited use on the phone (but some companies have it for $5 or $10). But aircards are like $60 a month usually. (This can be combined, so $15 on phone data + $45 to be able to tether the phone to a computer.)
BUT, lots and lots of phones have "3G" (AT&T's term for WCDMA) or EVDO support.
Verizon Wireless has EVDO over probably 90% of their coverage area. EVDO Rev A does up to 3.1mbits/sec down and 1.8 up. Typical speed's like 1mbit down and 512 or so up. I have an older Rev 0 card (2.4 up and 144kbps down max) and get about 800kbps down and 128kbps up or so.
Sprint has a smaller coverage area, but has EVDO over most of it.
Alltel has physically the largest network in the country (they avoided buying expensive licenses for cities, and built out in rural areas.) They have a lot of EVDO, and I bet get a lot of business for the farmland where there's no DSL or cable available, and probably none in the future.
AT&T doesn't have a large area built with WCDMA, but has a large proportion of the population covered built out (i.e. they've built out more populated areas first.) I think they're mostly running the ~3mbps or so variety of WCDMA.
I think the aircard pricing actually helped -- I'd love a $20 aircard plan, but I suspect then they'd be oversubscribed and I'd be getting like 100kbps. (Although, AT&T's network is creaking a bit post-iPhone rollout.)
I use Ubuntu so I don't suffer from them much but....
I *HATE* those preload things Windows apps tend to have! Almost every machine, where someone's like "Why does it take so long to load?"/"Why does my disk thrash so much?" I end up turning off like 100MB of preloads. I'd rather wait 5 seconds for something to load then wait a full minute extra for startup while Acrobat, OpenOffice, Java, maybe RealPlayer, etc. etc. preload and then take up a bunch of RAM.
These sound to me like bad changes to.
"First thing first, yes Intranet and Internet should be treated differently."
No they shouldn't. Many have been defending Microsoft's decision, saying "Oh it's easy to turn off non-standard rendering mode via group policy." Well, in that case, it'll be easy to turn it ON via group policy; it should be off by default, rendering EVERYTHING in standards compliance mode, to be turned on for those intranets where they use non-standard web apps.
"Secondly, Microsoft did render all Internet websites in standard-compliant
mode. If you did not see the icon when visiting a website, it is even
better, because the webmaster has gone out of their way to tell IE to use
standard or quirks mode exclusively (I just coded my website to tell IE8 to
use compatibility mode by default and the icon did not appear anymore -
apparently Microsoft does this too to Hotmail). So, your claim that they
broke the promiose is misleading. Stop spreading FUD, it will only make you
(and Opera) look bad."
In other words, to make IE8 not show a broken page, "standard" pages are expected to have a non-standard, IE8 specific tag actively put in by the web page developer. I call bullshit on this (although it's par for the course for Microsoft). This button (or icon, I know several people flamed over which it was, but I don't care which..) should NOT be a broken page -- a broken key is used for sites that are insecure, a broken page implies the page is broken in some way. Personally, I would put a "IE7 mode" entry, or "standard mode" entry (DON'T call it compatibility mode, that's confusing, since IE7 is incompatible with so much stuff compared to standard browsers..) Pick that menu entry and you have a quick toggle, along with a place to add/remove URLs for standard versus non-standard rendering.
"In practice Microsoft is spreading out viruses with which they can control people machines claiming that they are using a pirated copy and everyone knows that thanks to many documented false positives that's going to happen to those that paid for the insanely priced OS license and not just using copies."
Yep, and it's all in the EULA -- Microsoft can put on, remove, or transmit to them, anything from your Windows system they want. They put this in with I believe Windows 2000 SP4 -- there's still hospitals etc. that run SP3 because SP4, XP, etc. violate HIPPA privacy regs.
"You have got to be kidding "Just as good as Windows, except faster, more powerful and less flashing districations.""
You won't hear me laughing. 8.04.1 seems rock stable. I'm even running the alpha version 8.10 on a PowerPC and IT'S stable. It IS faster, and it's not distracting -- you get a fairly unobtrusive thing saying when you have updates, not one per app, and you need your password to install apps (as opposed to the fairly overblown UAC). I suppose you can argue about "powerful", Ubuntu's pretty pointless if you're goal is to run like Visual Studio, but I think it's powerful to be able to install your OS and apps on whatever you want without a single care about licensing, and have a UNIX base when I want to get down and dirty.
"... would be to be able to suppress results from known link farms and, optionally, shopping sites."
Look up ---^ a few posts. It looks like www.givemebackmygoogle.com does just this. And, since it just goes to google and the syntax for blocking sites is visible, it looks easy to just add more sites and make your own custom block list.
So here in the US, we've got:
Verizon. I have service with them. Contrary to above poster, no, they don't claim 3gb/sec service. They claim something like 700-1200kbps if you have the newest cards (EVDO Rev A). I have a Rev 0 card, and I get typically 560-800kbits/sec. In my area, I've seen as high as 1.5mbits and about 256kbits/sec minimum, but it's not that slow very often. I can't complain, except about the price -- $60/month.
AT&T. Also $60/month. They don't have near the buildout of Verizon or Sprint for 3G. That is, they have some pockets of HSDPA, with the rest being EDGE. I've been hearing AT&T has some network troubles, but I can't comment.
Sprint. *ALSO* $60/month. Also EVDO Rev A. I've heard they tend to slightly edge out Verizon Wireless in data speeds.
T-Mobile. $40-50/month. EDGE, I think they have UMTS in 1 city but it's apparently voice-only.
Alltel -- covers a lot of the rural areas out west and the southeastern US. They've rolled out EVDO in very rural areas, $60 a month, no GB cap. I wonder if there aren't a lot of people buying it for in-home internet, because the choice would be dialup (slow at that -- those long phone lines won't do 56k, they'll do like 20 if you're lucky), satellite, or Alltel. Verizon is buying them out.
"Local option(s)" -- Usually a little cheaper than the big boys.
Several years back (when one of NASA's ISS-resident windows boxes dropped dead), I read the Russian side was running 486 notebooks with FreeBSD. FreeBSD because it's reliable, 486es because the Russian space agency found that Pentium, P2, P3, etc.'s die shrinks made them susceptible to cosmic rays.
Yeah. I've never heard of the Xileon, but the Theater is ATI's capture chip, and the NXT is a tuner. The older AIWs used a BT829 capture chip (BT for Brooktree, bought by Conexant a few years back.) I thought it was Rage128 and older with the BT829, but Google says it's odder. Apparently the *16MB* Rage128 AIW used the BT829 (and older RageII AIWs, Mach64 AIW, etc. did too)., while the *32MB* Rage128 AIW and the Rage128 Pro AIW used the Theater 100 (along with a bunch of Radeon models). And, they've been through a few revisions this last decade or so so they're up to the Theater 300.
(Note, I'm a USian...)
1) 24.. man what a bad show. I'm just worried that people will join the FBI or something to "be" Jack Bauer. He'd wrack up so many lawsuits.
2) To the Pirate Bay many will go. Most people I know just don't go to the theater any more -- those that do, are really unlikely to wait weeks to do it when the same movie's on the Bay. I go to the theater from time to time, but I don't know if I could wait weeks either.
"Oh no boo hoo it comes with Vista installed.
Big deal, install XP or Lunix if you're a nerd."
No, I refuse to pay the Microsoft tax on any more products. I luckily got a nice $90 check from the state of Iowa's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. But, I run Ubuntu, I will not pay for Vista, AND EVEN WORSE then be counted by Microsoft as a "Vista sale".
I live in the states, and I do not have a credit card. I do have an ATM card, and pay cash for all transactions. In the US at least, credit cards place responsibility for fraud on the vendor essentially... Debit cards (which are being pushed more and more) place the responsibility ON THE USER. The bank *can* be nice and reverse fraudulent charges, but they are not required to do anything. Some dude could simply drain my bank account if I had one of these, and the bank wouldn't have to do a thing about it.
A) The whole "Oh, someone in a wheechair is losing service" doesn't do it for me. It's not a wheelchair lift or something being shut down -- the one customer being in a wheelchair is 100% irrelevant.
B) As several have said, he's watching a camera outside his own house from inside his house -- just hook a cam up to the computer!
C) Other than possibly having to refund for the cameras, I don't think Be owes a thing. How tied into the service are the cameras? If it can be used as a normal camera, *shrug*, use it as a normal camera.
I don't know what all your comments about freevec are on about... If you look at the Linux kernel, you will find for x86 it basically uses MMX or SSE only for memcpy and I think calculating checksums for RAID stuff. It enables an Altivec bit (so apps can use it), and has Altivec emulation if an app decides to use it without checking if it's on the right CPU type. It's up to applications writers, GCC, and glibc beyond that.
None of this has much to do with virtualbox -- if they use altivec instructions in it, great. If not, the kernel can't help that.
I don't see a contradiciton between the CS flacky and IT guy's explanations -- I would suppose someone ran a wrong command doing DB work, which knocked it off for a few days. (For a production database, they should have had backups, or the ability to roll back any database changes, or both.. but *shrug*).
@Jonathan *shrug* Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, I've done it from time to time 8-)
Regarding first post, heh -- Ubuntu'll have *3* more releases out by the time Windows 7 comes out... IF it comes out in late 2009 (hah!) Ubuntu version is year.month BTW, I didn't relize this at first.. So 6.06 was released June 2006. 6.06 was 2 months late (i.e. it "should" have been 6.04); 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04 have come out since then. I wasn't impressed by 6.06. 7.04 was MUCH nicer. By 7.10 they finally had it so I think non-Linux user could set everything up without help (monitor resolution of all things, and nice printer setup, were the last two things needed for this to happen). 8.04 made quite a few nice tweaks, and added the desktop effects for some bling (among many other improvements). What do 8.10, 9.04, and 9.10 have in store? I don't know but I think Windows 7 is in for a hell of a fight.
@jeremy & Jonathan
NT3 is 3 (nobody used it basically..), NT4 is 4, 2000 is NT5, XP is 5.1, Vista is 6. If you go to a command prompt and run "ver", it'll say version 5.1.(bunch of digits) for XP for instance. (bunch of digits) might change depending on service pack.
A correction to "Microsoft has continued to insist that Windows 7 won't be available to customers until the start of 2010. But expectations are rising that it will make a crash landing in the second half of 2009." I'd say it's more like "Microsoft wants to start rumors it'll crash land in the second half of 2009." They've ALWAYS said new versions are coming out artificially early, to try to get anyone who doesn't like the CURRENT version of Windows to decide "well, the next one's coming shortly."
"The iPhone does support HSDPA "at high speeds" (why do all iPhone threads bring out the "MY N78/N95/N-whatever IS SUPERIOR TO YOUR PUNY JOBS DEVICE!!!1"?)"
Because they are superior... you can put your own software on an N95, instead of dealing with jailbreaking or having to get all software through Apple. And, iphone might technically support HSDPA "at high speeds", but when the RF is so much poorer than every other phone, it's fair to claim they are faster.
I like the situation here in the states better... it was found like 20 years ago that the FCC doesn't actually have any enforcement powers. So, they can confiscate your radio gear, but the sole consequence of not paying any fines they levy (for instance, fines for not having an FCC license) is... you might not be able to get an FCC license.
@Vendicar Decarian: Ubuntu 6.06 sucked, I used it and it was awful. 7.04, 7.10, 8.04 all made HUGE improvements. I don't expect you to try 8.04, but honestly it's lots better. 6.06 really showed it's old-school Debian roots, it didn't seem to "plug'n'play" jack, or make anything seamless... newer versions do.
@Nick H:
What a crock. Windows is absolutely NOT easier to install. You get it installed, you have 16 color VGA, no ethernet, no sound support out of the box. On newer systems, you also have no USB and perhaps not even a bootable system (depending on how the SATA and IDE is feeling.) You can see my huge list of hardware I've installed Ubuntu onto in my previous post, all out of the box. The *entire* install: boot the live CD, click the installer on the desktop. Screen 1: language (defaults to English). 2: Time zone. 3: Keyboard layout (defaults to USA). 4: hard disk partitioning (defaults to "Guided" which just does the right thing for both blank disks and for disks with an OS already on them). 5: username and password. 6: Shows what you told it, and asks "are you sure". 7: watch the install go by. 8: reboot 9: install "ubuntu-restricted-extras", this adds java, flash, etc. in one shot -- but, if you don't, it'll ask to install flash, java, etc. for you the first time you need them! Where I work, I have this fully automated, the steps are 1) go in BIOS and set the boot order to floppy, CD, hard disk, netboot. 2) Plug into network. 3) Go work on other computers or take a break -- it does a fully unattended network install. If the install fails, the machine's probably faulty. If the machine's too old to netboot, pop a CD in, take a break -- the CD ejects when it's done.
As for the distro problem -- you're right up to a point. But, I think Ubuntu's helping -- I've had a few people actually ask about Ubuntu, and when I mention it's a version of Linux, they're like "What the heck's Linux?" To be clear, though, there's NOTHING wrong with lots of distros -- Ubuntu (and the Debian base it's based on) cherry-picks the nice stuff from them, as does SuSE. Most of the hundreds of distros, almost noone uses them, you don't have to know they exist unless you go looking for them.
@vincent himpe
Yeah I looked at Gos, it looked pants. They really should just put Ubuntu or even SuSe on there.
Internet browsing: Check.
Word docs: Check (OpenOffice 2.4 DOES support Office 2007 stuff.. Gos just has some out-of-date version of OpenOffice)
Excel: Check
HP Printer: Yes, it definitely has a driver for the multifuncs
Scan and fax: Don't know. I think it'll scan at least?
Photoshop Elements: Well, no, you'd use some other photo management setup.
Smartphone sync: Don't know, I haven't looked into it.
That at least gets you up to like 5 or so out of 7, without having to install a single app even. Scanner functionality and smartphone sync, I'm sure there's software about to do this -- don't whinge that Ubuntu isn't viable because it doesn't do 7 out of 7 out of the box, you know as well as I do Windows does 1 out of 7 (if you're willing to risk using IE) out of the box.
As for your other, essentially, demands:
Both "Get rid of 200 distros" and "Get rid of 400 GUIs". No. It's free software, if people want to write more, they can, and it's not your place to tell them not to. It's not a big deal though -- 1) most people use some few major distros, so it's not diluting users so ridiculously as you'd think. (It's nice to have a single-floppy rescue distro when you need it, but it's not for normal use). 2) Bugs flow upstream to "owners" of individual programs, then the fixed apps flow downstream to distros -- so, it's not like using all these distros slows down progress like you might think. 3) Just tell people "use Ubuntu" rather than "use Linux" and they won't be confused by choice. GUIs -- same thing..gnome and KDE are the main ones (the rest are niche.) And most newer distros, the default install doesn't even give a choice, so there's no confusion for the user. If GUIs were restricted to one, the OSX-style desktop effects would have never happened, they were implemented first in a spinoff window manager.
"Make a unified self deploying installer that works on ALL distros". It'd be nice. The rest about this needing that that breaks that, however, is the reason distros DON'T all use the same packaging setup -- the good ones DON'T break like that, and the other distros that use bad packaging setups refuse to change to use a better one. My solution, don't use the distros with bad packaging systems.
"Stop bickering about vi vs emacs and gnome vs kde in all the forums and
blogs" No, just don't read them then. Geeks will be geeks, vi versus Emacs has 20 or 30 years of..umm.. rich history I suppose. gnome versus KDE, I don't know why people care (I've used both and they're fine) but they do, so let them bicker. Gimp's not half-finished junk, and if you want to write an app, you can call it what you want -- don't tell others what to call their apps. Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, are not descriptive names by any stretch either.
"Get some serious software companies on board to write applications" Well, there's the catch-22 that Microsoft forces Windows onto every PC as much as possible, then pretend those are legitimate sales. They then use those numbers to "prove" everyone's running Windows. I'd LOVE some serious software companies to write Linux apps. Your example though.. Microsoft Office for Mac is in SERIOUS trouble right now, they did not port VBScript etc. to the Intel Mac version of Office.. apparently it's such a sloppy mess it simply is not portable at all anymore (if Office is "ported" to Linux, it'll be ported by wrapping it in Wine basically.)
Well, this post got pretty long, but OK....
Product library: You're right. This is the MAJOR reason Windows isn't just dead by now -- it's simple inertia. "All" software's made for Windows, so people keep getting Windows; people get Windows, so "all" software is made for Windows.
As for Linux needing to be made more turnkey, this problem is more perception than reality. Take an Ubuntu install, or several other modern and complete distros*, and stuff plugs in and just works MUCH more frequently than under Windows. You don't even need to pop in a driver CD! As new hardware comes out, regular distro updates make that hardware also out-of-the-box supported. But, people read about the horror stories*2 where stuff DOESN'T work, assume that's normal, and conveniently overlook the horror stories of Windows setups gone wrong.
I've installed 1000's of copies of Ubuntu (7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and now 8.04.1, now using an automated network install, except on the few boxes that are too old to netboot, then I use a CD.) What didn't work out of the box? 1) Machines below the minimums -- just don't bother if you have a below a PII, or a machine you can't get 192MB into. It'll be too slow. Xubuntu *might* work. 2) Dell Optiplex GX1P and similarly old Dells, have a Crystal Sound 4236 sound card. cs_4236 has to be put in /etc/modules, it's a non plug'n'play ISA sound chip so it just isn't detected; when told to load the driver, it does work. *THAT'S IT*. We've had P2, P3, P4, Xeons, Dual Cores, all fine; ethernet? Broadcom 100 and gig, Intel 100 and gig, 3com cards, SiS, Via Rhine, NE2000 clones, Realtek, certainly others, no problems. Video? ATI, NVidia, S3, Via, Matrox, some Number Nines, Cirrus Logic, certainly some other oddballs, no sweat. Sound? The CS_4236 has to be manually set, but EMU10Ks, Soundblasters, the onboard Intel, NVidia, ATI, SiS, Via, basically all of them, all work fine. Firewire, USB, scanners, printers, webcams -- in the interest of full disclosure, I couldn't plug all 4 webcams in at once, two of them didn't seem to get along with each other. Wireless went from CRAP support in 7.10 to being almost 100% in 8.04.1 (ndiswrapper works for the rest.)
Windows? Heh. Plug it in some generic Dell that has Intel 810, let alone a 915... 16 color VGA. No ethernet support, either for Intel 100mbit or gigabit. No sound. No support for Broadcom ethernet either. Plug in a 3com ethernet card so it can get online -- oh, nice, the "search for drivers online" doesn't find any! Fancier machines? No SATA, no Firewire, no Bluetooth. Of course now, with the newest machines, the hardware vendors have been pushed into not even supplying XP drivers, for people who are ditching Vista (and not just ditching Windows entirely). And, as a bonus, get the drivers for one machine, and they won't work on another model with an identical chipset! Ouch.
*"Complete distros" meaning ones that aim for ease of use. Gentoo, for instance, it won't do a thing when you plug in some USB printer or whatever -- that's up to the user. I love gentoo, but I would NOT just give someone a gentoo setup and say "have at it". I've been churning out 1000's of Ubuntu installs where I work, and they just work out of the box.
*2 Usually wireless hardware. Which, can work with ndiswrapper if it doesn't go out of the box. I don't expect some random person to be able to setup ndiswrapper. But, it's easy and convenient for Windows fans to forget, "some random person" usually can't get new kit going under Windows either if it's any harder than "pop in the CD. You're done!"
"Obviously they won't be running windows on pc-like hardware cos' that's just asking for trouble..."
But they DO. Diebold's election systems were the shittiest, ghettoest, buggiest election systems ever. When a copy of the software leaked to researchers a few years ago, It used like some old version of SQL server, Windows -- a FULL install, even though it shouldn't need most of it. It had been shown to have a default password on every install. It literally will misrecord votes every so often. Once they are recorded, it manages to randomly miscount the votes. It was *supposed* to have the cards physically moved from voting machines into the main unit to count the votes, but for some reason, votes could also be sent to the server electronically -- again, using an insecure, hard-coded password.
Physical security? They initially used a generic bike key to hold the units shut. Take 2: They use a better lock, but they had a site where anyone could order keys -- WITH a detailed enough photo of the key on the site, that researchers were able to make a duplicate *just based on the photo*. Yes, every unit nationwide used the same key, and yes, the photo had a great view of the key cuts. Take 3: Some undisclosed electronic lock. Given the general attention to detail that's been shown in the past, probably pickable with a paper clip.
Diebold spun off the election system division because it was literally sullying the name of the entire company (too late to help though I think.)
"Don't see cartards directly paying for the use of the roads."
Umm, the Mass Turnpike? It's a *TOLL ROAD*. Where, the "cartards", ohh... you know... *directly pay for the use of the roads*. Wanker.
@Mark C. Ridership's a bad word, but it's used frequently in the US. Along with the horrible habit of big businesses telling us what they really think by referring to their customers as "consumers".
These guys should not be intimidated. They do have the right to free speech, they should fully disclose this security vulnerability. I recommend they don't comment "OK, now use it to get free rides!", but it's the transit authorities problem if they use insecure setups. These card vendors have had stronger cards all along, but "Oh no, they cost like $1.50 a card instead of $1" (versus the huge amounts of cash actually passing through these cards.)
Ironically given your smugness over this, OS X has it worse -- it's like the only system at all I've heard of that has STILL not patched the DNS client -- the patch they had to "fix" this only patches the BIND server. Linux/BSD/etc... all had vulnearble clients and servers, and patched them within the same day. Even Microsoft patched pretty fast.
"a) they're part of the vast corporate conspiracy to bring illegal file sharers to their knees
b) they're trying to keep 95% of their client base happy by knocking down bandwidth hogs so the rest of us can email and browse with decent response time"
I choose a. If it was b, they would A) Throttle, not forge packets that cause connection resets. B) They would have interfered with heavy bandwidth users, not just bittorrent users. (Incidentally, they have been found to kill bittorrent connections even if they are on one of those torrents that just pull a few KB/sec). C) They would vary this interference with bittorrent by time of day, actual congestion on the network, or something. Nope. It's 24/7. Incidentally, D) The cause of the real stink -- the solution they used misidentified some VPN solutions as bittorrent, and killed these connections as well.
Incidentally, one major complaint people have about this hamfisted interference with a single protocol, is it's been found it essentially may have delayed the necessity for actual network upgrades by about 6 months -- upgrades which would have cost less than the network interference hardware put in place to begin with.
@Horse's.. err.. mouth
"b) Comcast didn't "block" anything ... they "throttled" it. There is a difference. The packets ended up getting to their destination, just not at the speeds the users would have liked, and BitTorrent is crap at renegotiating transfers, so it suffers lots of dropped packets. That's a problem with the way BitTorrent works when facing delays in packet delivery. Web browsers, FTP programs and other "normal" tools are much more forgiving of packet delays and are not affected in the same way. There is nothing against the law, here, Metz, contrary to your statements to that effect."
Comcast is *LYING*. This is one of the reasons they are being fined and sued. They are ** NOT** delaying or dropping packets, they are forging reset packets to force connections closed.
Comcast would not have made such a stink if they were slowing down people's torrents. It's the forged packets (and then LYING about it) that is making this fuss.
I think it's sloppy. In the connect.microsoft.com link given, they're just like "Well, yeah, NewID etc. won't work, just don't use it with optimization." Documenting this is good, but it'd be much better to have the optimizer be conservative enough to not change semantics by default, and maybe a "dangerous" option that can change semantics. A database first and foremost is supposed to behave predictably.
I haven't done enough work with MySQL to know if he's dropping vital features, but from what I've seen from the webapp end of things, probably not. Increasing performance at the cost of features (that will slow the implementation down) makes perfectly good sense for a database just being used to back a web site (or cloud). SecondLife (a.k.a. Sadville) has a database at it's heart to track users, invetory, etc.; if Drizzle's not missing features SL needs it could probably help it too.
Windows: Right there too. Microsoft can bluster all they want that they aren't irrelevant, but for cloud computing they are. Why would ANYONE building a cloud pay $x *per machine* for Windows (or even worse, having to pay per machine per month like Microsoft's looking to do), when they can pay $0 for Linux, or pay a Linux vendor $y for tech support (with $y still not being per-machine.)
There's already been several good comments. But, I should like to add 2 comments:
1) US military getting 3.7%? It's like 50%. Maybe 3.7 towards the actual maiming, the rest goes towards pork-barrel billion dollar planes and such I suppose. This of course makes them an even BETTER target for some budget cuts to fund cancer.. like I say below though, there's definitely a limit to how much cash will do any good. It'd be great to use some of it to pay down the US's crippling debt though.
2) Researchers and cash are not 100% fungible. It literally doesn't take a rocket scientist to do cancer research -- it takes a biologist. If NASA were cut out, it's not like all these space researchers and rocket scientists would be like "Screw space, I'm doing cancer research". Economically, of course, it's just assumed that throwing 10x as much money at cancer research would get 10x as much research done but I just don't think that's the case. The research just isn't that costly and I think most researchers who want to work on cancer research already are.
"This again is pointless bashing of Apple when theres no need for it."
This again is pointless fanboi'ism of Apple when there's no need for it.
This is a serious security hole. OSX client ships with BIND. The BIND patch has been out since day one, and is dead simple to apply. Therefore, Apple is ridiculous after taking SOOO LONG to release a patch, not even releasing it for all instanced of BIND they are shipping.
As was shown in Microsoft's antitrust trial, they are very good at ermm... working up a video to show what they want 8-). I saw one of these clips -- it's like one of those HP ads where the pages, photos, and videos just FLY into the computer and arrange themselves into a nice slideshow and/or school report. Microsoft managed to edit out all the epic fail of Vista out of the video..good PR I guess but I don't think it'll trick anyone.
And, although you can certainly get 2GB dual-core machines, I think people now are seriously interested in using Moore's law the other way, getting say a single-core with 512MB for almost nothing and saving on electricity to boot. Which obviously Microsoft clearly didn't expect.
Yeah, I bet the job stays open too. Anyone interested in cracking phones, I think would not be interested in working to *strengthen* the phone security -- it's purely a mindset kind of thing. Also, I think anyone that would be into security research enough to develop a jailbreak, realizes the fallacy of trying to lock down a computer the person owns -- working for Apple on it would be a waste of time, anything they do would be cracked within days. It's the fallacy of DRM* writ large.
*Fallacy of DRM -- the owner has the algorithm, the encrypted file, AND the decryption key. So, if they're at all motivated they can do whatever they want with the supposedly restricted file. Similar with IPhone, the owner *owns* the phone, you can't lock them out of it. Incidentally, the above reasons for IPhone are I think why most DRM schemes are so laughable -- i.e., not well designed, weak crypto, etc... anyone into crypto knows "unbreakable" DRM is impossible anyway, so the DRM designers get whoever is left to come up with a "good" crypto methods, and they in fact come up with very poor ones.
First off, I'm not concerned. Who really gives a toss if 3 out of 4 (instead of 2 out of 4) fell asleep, in a secure room, with obsolete launch codes? Note me. Anyway..
I wonder how long they were awake? I have heard it is common in the military to have people up for very extended time, and have them take amphetamines to keep up. Maybe the uppers wore off and they fell dead asleep?
Well, I luckily don't live in Britain so I don't have to worry about this crap. But...
1) No, wankers, speed does not kill. There's plenty of statistics about showing that, when speeds have been artifically reduced, accident AND fatality rates increased. Going 120 on every road is a bad idea, but roads here in the states are statistically safer where the cops ignore speeders (up to a point) versus the same roads where they started laying down speed traps and making everyone go the (artificially low) 55 or 65MPH speed limit.
2) At least here in the US, and apparently also in Britain, speed limits ARE artifically low. In the states we use the euphanism "revenue generation" for the police.. police of course say it's for safety. Luckily, VERY few places here have those crap speed cameras; police actually have to be sitting there with a radar gun, so they can judge if the speed was unsafe or not.
3) To those who say it's easy to maintain constant speed: I call bullshit. It's easy to maintain *approximately* the same speed (within a few MPH), but if this average camera setup is going to ticket for like 1MPH over, then hell yes, I'd be looking excessively at my speedo. Some cars are all wound out and need lots of throttle to cruise; it'd be relatively easy to tell the speed's constant by hearing the engine, and hold it by throttle. My car, though 1) Does almost no revs.. like 1500RPM at 50. I'm not sure the extra revs when speeding would be noticeable. 2) You can't hear the engine anyway when cruising, it's too quiet. 3) I barely touch the pedal to cruise, it's harder to maintain speed (without checking the speedo) then some cars I've driven where you're doing like half-throttle to cruise.
Red light cameras, speed cameras, and indeed speed traps, have all been shown to increase accident rates. Both from people seeing it and slamming on the brakes.. people getting rear-ended at stoplights.. but also, from those people (mentioned by several commenters) that will start going like 35 in a 50 if there's a speedtrap, snarling up the other cars that were going 50 in the 50.
It should be noted, I guess they considered doing this (average speed measuring) in I think Illinois with the IPass system (IPass is a transponder in your car so you don't have to stop to pay a toll on the toll roads). They had literally thousands of people that said "Fine, I'll go back to paying cash".. realized they didn't have the infrastructure to handle that much cash any more, and had to drop it.
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