Posts by Nexox Enigma 852 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2007
@Pyros:
The entire idea of FF is that it is a minimal browser which is then extensible. If they just started shipping all the extensions with the installer, their whole mission would be for nothing. Not that it really got them all that far, since their minimal, stripped browser has been larger and slower than a certain other full featured browser/mail client/irc client/etc for quite some time now.
@Darryl:
Bashing Mozilla got tiring a long time ago. I think people tend to bash IE because it makes their lives so terrible, with the non-standard compliance, spyware auto-downloading, etc. Mozilla is just somewhat annoying.
Everyone seems mad about a new init system or a new sort of package. If you don't like change, then stick with some other distro. One of the nice things about the whole Linux thing is that if you think something sucks, you can try to fix it. Plus you don't need to be tied down to standards and things that someone else came up with in the early 90s.
It's about time that there's a completely new distro out there, not just a derived project. I love Slackware, but I'd be willing to give this a try once it gets stable.
There's no point in super loyalty to some distro or browser - you just prevent yourself from trying out those new and possibly better options out there. And if you don't want to try new things, that isn't a good reason to complain that new things exist.
And egos and writing ability don't have a lot to do with a person's qualifications to make and maintain a distro. I'll listen to music made by people that I completely hate, because I can seperate the art from the artist.
Looks far better. It's got a smaller screen with higher resolution (1024x600 on a 10.2 inch screen is nearly criminal) and it's cheaper. And it comes with Linux (not that anyone is expected to use Suse, but you can format that off easily enough,) for a handy discount.
Really anything with less than 1280x768 res is a useless toy, not a real computer.
There is a difference between 'adware' and 'ad supported.' If people didn't feel the need to pay for Opera, then they could have the pleasure of looking at ads while they browsed, but that isn't adware, which is normally software that installs silently and does nothing but spam you with ads. The idea that it is some how wrong to sell software just because it happens to be a browser is insane.
Anyway, anyone that wants to try something really quick should give the newest Opera 9.5 beta a whirl.
And how was a browser so damned popular when it had 14,000 things to fix?
Yes, AMD is behind Intel, who is still selling chips based on that Pentium Pro they came up with in the mid 90s, while AMD have more or less completely designed a couple new cores since then. Remember the last core Intel designed from the ground up? Netburst it was called, and my, did it blow.
Also I believe you miss the point of what that AC was saying about SP3. Microsoft doesn't need to have done anything at all, since the common story is that OEMs are to blame, since they use the same image for Intel and AMD machines, thanks to a cpu-ralated driver. Now Intel could very well done nearly anything to their driver to make AMD chips malfunction. SP3 could have accidentally made things worse, or Intel could have gotten some pre-releases of SP3 and designed the flaw intentionally. Not that I really think any of that happened, but thats what the AC was trying to point out.
And to everyone complaining that this is just a lawsuit about bigger discounts - it is blatantly anti-competitive to offer discounts for exclusivity. What AMD has mostly said on that topic is that Intel offered chip volume discounts based on number of units shipped, and the numbers were tailored such that it was impossible for Tier 1s to sell many / any AMD chips. If AMD managed to find evidence to show that did happen, then it's the same as offering exclusivity agreements.
Also AMD claims that Intel did all sorts of other things, like having AMD signs removed at conventions and things. Hard to say that you'd remove a competitor's marketing in order to maintain a competitive market,. eh?
I've heard before that ants are occasionally attracted to electromagnetic emissions, I believe someone had a while ant colony move into his powerbook or some such. Plus ants are pretty conductive, and when they die they release a chemical that signals all the other ants in the area to come help out.
I've heard of traffic signals and things getting totally filled to the breaking point with larger ants.
This just sounds like no fun at all...
It isn't just your home router that needs to support IPv6, every router between your ADSL line and the host you want to connect to needs to support it as well. That makes for a rather huge number of hardware upgrade / replacements.
Plus there'll inevitably be a very long nightmare period where every service will need to have both v4 and v6 addresses, and any users that upgrade to v6 will need some ability to encapsulate v4 within v6, or similarly have one of each address.
Plus, ipv6 addresses seem like they'll be quite a bit harder to remember, type, say over the phone, etc. Thank the gods that I'll be out of the IT industry really soon, becuase this is just one of those things that I don't want to have to deal with on a large scale.
Does this seem like A) A good idea or B) Something which is remotely possible?
Why even have different distros if they all use the same software? This can only lead to intra-distro politics and standards which will ultimately just waste a hell of a lot of time.
Does it seem to anyone else that the Linux community is sort of losing focus on the things that once made it awesome?
Seems as though I remember plugging a fully patched 2k box into the Internet with no firewall and having it owned within 20 seconds. Then again that was a while ago, but they haven't released any new service since then. XP stays connected to the internet with minimal firewalling and no magic infections. Until the users click those damned links in spam...
The chipset should have a rather nice mpeg4 decoder on there, and via is supposed to be releasing decent Linux drivers for that eventually. If the drivers were there you should be able to play full on 1080p x264 w/ minimal CPU useage. Otherwise you're completely screwed because that is a slow cpu. I've got a Via Mini-ITX 800MHz from years ago, and that chip is only slight faster than a 400MHz PII. Then again, my whole Mini-ITX system uses less power than the PII does by itself...
Kit like this makes for a nice little vpn/ssh server. I'd rather go for MSI's Geode board - the cpu creates so little heat that they don't even put a heatsink on there.
And I imagine the reason that they left all the ports on the box is because they just used one of their standard MiniITX boards, and those are designed to go in all sorts of embedded / retail / industrial environments, where those things are important.
If there exists today a single national governing body that isn't completely ass backwards in most of their decisions? Seems like probably no. Good thing countries are run by popularity contests instead of sound reasoning. I really need to start my own country one of these days. At least if I was dictator I wouldn't have to worry about whether my citizens (If I decide to have those) like me!
In any case, I wish a visit from Twoflower's Luggage on Jacqui.
I imagine that loads of people don't even have the chance to see the virus at all, since Operating Systems are all to eager to hide file extensions for us. In some situations the dialog box might have just said something to the effect of "PLAY_MP3? Yes/No" That isn't helpful to anyone at all.
And I highly doubt that this trojan /just/ displays ads. Trojan writers realized a long time ago that it was fun to download 400 friends as soon as they have a foothold on a machine. That more or less renders a computer useless, and provided me with a nice stream of income to fix them for a few years.
But yeah if you pay just a tiny bit of attention when stealing your files, it isn't exactly hard to pull off. I personally do all of my downloading on my Slackware file server, then automatically scan completed downloads with ClamAV. That combined with a little common sense allows me to safely avoid wasting the resources to run a virus scanner on my last Windows computer.
And to whomever said hard drives couldn't be backed up... Magnetic storage is quite cheap, and they make these things called Redundant Arrays... If you're just worried about the quoted 'Hundreds of GB' then you really have no problems at all. I believe that my ~4.5 TB (after raid5 losses) is rather trustworthy. Probably more so than the equivalent stored on fragile and low-density optical media. I'd have to keep an entire room just to store the stuff, and then I wouldn't have a chance in hell of keeping it organized or finding things that I wanted.
Honestly even if I liked recent music and had money to buy CDs, getting out to a music store, dealing with their employees and other customers, and then ripping the CD is far too much of a pain in the ass. It takes me all of about 90 seconds to find and download a decently high quality mp3 version of an album, so anything else just isn't worth the effort.
And I don't know how new this is... I've seen wmv/wma files on sketchy P2P years ago that tried to open a link to download an executable when it finished playing. It might not have been a trojan, because I didn't check, but I highly doubt that it was something good. I figured that MS would have taken some steps to prevent abuse of that particular 'feature' by now.
Why would anyone want to compete in such a small, pointless market?
Plus even if someone does manage to make hardware that has a significant edge over and Apple device, most of that market segment is populated by Apple lemmings, who will never switch over to a non-Apple product. Seems that Apple's marketing is good enough that it even distracts the boards of other companies.
Most people here seem to underestimate the durability of the average harddrive. It is easy to make sure that a drive isn't readable in a computer - just snap off a few of the surface mount components near the power jack. If you want to make sure that someone with some actual money to spend doesn't read them, you have to beat them up pretty hard.
I've heard that platters are pretty heat and chemical resistant, plus I doubt a microwave would even be able to penetrate the case (probably just damaged the external circutry in the above example.)
I don't know how these ripples work in the presented device, but I imagine that they wouldn't make recovery completely impossible. I do like the thermite ideas, or any other heat enough to actually melt the platters (could be difficult, those are made from some serious materials.) Nobody has suggested shaped charges though - just bend the drive into a doughnut, then melt it, within a fraction of a second. You could probably nail a few at a time too.
And explosives are far more fun than drills or hammers : -)
Some professor ordered one, so it's sitting on a table by my desk. It seems like a nice enough machine, but it just isn't all that impressive feeling. I expected when I hefted it for the first time some clouds would part and a ray of sun would spotlight me and the laptop. But it felt like lifting a laptop, not a smallish slice of a diety. Other than that the features that struck me were a massive border around the screen, and the wlan switch it on the back.
At least it's far better than the Air (Obviously.)
So it looks like they tried to use the same keyboard underside as the US layout to save some pennies, then just didn't realize that there was a placement issue.
And yeah there have been bad keyboards before (frequently from Dell) where people will put Delete by the space bar and the Windows key by the page up/down keys. And putting the Fn key in the lower left spot is irritating as hell, because things don't close when I hit Fn-C, and by the time I figure out that I haven't hit Ctrl, I'm generally pissed.
Then again I've gotten so used to 92% sized keyboards on laptops that I have trouble with any full sized models. Guess I'll have to live with Fujitsu ultra portables and that HP 2133 sexmotron...
I thought these next gen consoles were powerful. My 2+ year old mid-range desktop can play even the newest games at 1280x720, with 70+FPS. And it will play older ones at full 2304x1440 at 80FPS. I could never stand many console games because of the low res (4 player halo on a standard tv? I can't tell the difference between a rock and a player at 12 feet) and I thought the HDTV thing would make it all better. But it seems that they just bumped the pixel count a little bit.
Guess I'll stick to playing games like Rockband (Works great on a crappy tv) on my friends' equipment. No need to have another set of consumer electronics draining my wallett anyway...
Everthing in Leopard and forward is supposed to be Universal Binary, which is to say that its got 4 copies of everything - x86, x86x64, PPC, anc PPCx64. It seems like it'd be pretty easy to make laptops and such out of these PA cpus - then maybe we'd see some actual performance instead of this Intel crap. And maybe we'd see some hardware that wasn't internally the exact same as every HP and Dell out there on the market.
It'd be nice to have cheapish PPC workstations on the market, though I don't really like the idea of paying for OSX when I'd just have to format that off as soon as I opened the kit.
So it looks like this service uses 3rd party cookies to opt you out. I block those to /avoid/ some of those services which profile browsing, but now it seems that one would have to enable them (and profiling) to opt out of the ISP type snooping.
Really looking forward to a colo so I can vpn all my internet traffic to a datacenter - I imagine that one of those could actually lose customers if they implimented something this backwards and wrong.
Everyone forgets that peak oil is actually a function of oil price - the more oil costs, the more fields become economic to extract oil from. Most of the reserves out there never get more than 30-40% of their oil pumped out since at some point it will cost more to take the stuff out than it's worth.
But oil companies don't forget where those 60% full reservoirs are, and people do make the technology to get significantly more oil out of the ground.
Part of the problem with the whole situation is that big oil companies are buisnesses, and to get people to invest, they need assets. The singular important asset for an oil company is oil in the ground - once they sell it they're down in assets. So oil companies are highly motivated not to sell anyone oil.
And yes, there have been scares about oil running out since forever ago. In the 70's everyone thought that there would be no more oil by this century... and they were wrong. I suspect that the current predictions are getting more attention because they help the whole 'green' movement PR.
Also keep in mind that most fertilizer comes from natrual gas, so if that were to run out, our bio fuels would be done for. Hows about some fusion, eh?
I played with 2k8 on my desktop for a couple weeks recently. I loved 2k3 as a desktop OS, until sp1 made it kind of irritating (couldn't play quake anymore...) I haven't run (or wanted to run) Vista on any of my hardware, but 2k8 seemed fast even compared to my previous copy of XP.
I love some of the things that they've done with Explorer - namely the auto-sizing columns in details view, the actually useful error messages that show up during file copies or delete actions, and the speed boost to just about everything.
I have all of my moderate collection of music in one large directory, because I'm far too lazy to organize things. It takes XP a while just to show the directory each time I open it, even with the media details disabled. 2k8 not only reads and displays the directory rapidly, but it'll cache the results somewhere, so the second time around is much faster, and that's with the media details displayed.
I also got approximately double the speed for file copies over gigabit from my samba server (from 40 to 80 MB/s) in addidion to many fewer random pauses and glitches using samba.
I didn't have Aero on (I'm a fan of the win 2k look,) but my hardware isn't particularly fast or new, and I was impressed with the responsiveness of everything.
Of course the CAD program that I absolutely need to have didn't want to run on 2k8, so now I'm back on XP. I'm no fan of MS, but it seems like they did a lot of things right. Except that whole snafu with the protected content stuff ruining all the audio and video drivers, it seems like they're on the right track.
...as they always have been my favourite mobile hdd maker.
And to all those that say it's a problem to put a lot of data on one drive... How is 1TB not a lot of data to lose in one failure? Even 250GB can be completely priceless, which is why you run a raid if you have large discs. 3 10TB drives in raid5 are still better than 3 1TB drives in raid5. Segmenting your data to make sure you only lose a fraction of it in the event of a hdd failure is one of the more nonsensical methods that I've heard of.
That blustering was taken seriously in congress and on the news, if I do recall. And some how the ATT/ Bell South merger snuck by during the same time period without anyone noticing. The entire net neutrality debate was invented as a PR smoke screen so that Ma Bell could continue reassembling.
Doesn't this sound exactly like those Divx discs that came out in the late 90s? They were supposed to expire after a week or two somehow, and they crashed completely. Probably because they wouldn't play in normal DVD players.
But yeah I hope that theres a method for recycling these things. 48 hours is plenty of time to rip a dvd : -)
I have one of the 60GB drives from 2001, a 60GXP. I had to send it in 3 times in about 18 momths because each one they sent me kept coming up with bad sectors. The last time I sent it in Hitachi had just bought the company, so they handled my warranty. The drive has been spinning pretty much 24/7 since early 2003 without any problems at all. Of course it is massively loud and slow, and it does run kinda hot, but thats what 7 years of hdd development is worth, I guess.
I have another 250gb deskstar thats been powered on for 31k hours (3.5 years) and I've only owned it for about 4 years. It's still going strong.
I've personally had IBM, WD, Maxtor, Seagate, and Fujitsu drives die on me over the years - so far Samsung is the only brand that hasn't, probably just because I haven't had any of them for more than a couple years.
Harddrives die, that's why we have raid5. And active cooling. Keep your data redundant and your drives cool, and you should have reasonably good results.
Not many phones in schools?
I seem to remember that just about everyone in my highschool had one, and that was half a decade ago. Hell I've seen plenty of pre-teens with their own cell phones, and they aren't the barely-sending-text message variety, they're the mp3-playing, picture-taking, shiny, expensive types of phones that all of their friends have.
In my university, everyone that I know has a cell phone. I doubt that most of them will ever even own a landline phone, since they're more or less useless these days.
I know our networks are crap, but the people that live here are plenty happy to pay for whatever new razor / iphone / blackberry is out this month. And they're happy to pay for service for their 11 year old children too.
You'll find that a researcher will often spend years working on some really neat analysis, inventing, modeling, etc, mostly just because it was interesting to them at the time and nobody had done it before. Then it comes time to make a presentation or a lecture tour, and they have to figure out how their research is applicable to anything that anyone in the audience would care about.
So much research is useful, but focused on an incredably narrow field, with assumptions that limit the effects of things that the researcher isn't studying, but which are important in the real world.
These researchers probably did some incredably neat things with the metal oxide matrix thing, characterizing behaviour of atoms in regards to some kind of input, but there is a large difference between discovering and characterizing a useful phenomenon and actually using it.
But if they hadn't said anything about a 500TB iPod then they probably wouldn't have made it on El Reg... so you can see why they'd do it.
Everyone says that they doubt these people will be around for 6 months. Do you think they haven't realized that? Honestly their strategy could be to just make a lot of profit for those 6 months. Whatever works.
And to those that say Apple chooses nice hardware and designs things well... Apple chooses what makes them the most profit. And they can typically get away with using the exact same components every other manufacturer uses, put into a case which is halfway engineered. They typically get their designs to look the way they do by cutting corners and using a lower safety factor than other companies are willing to.
Apple has good PR, not good engineering or parts selection. I've seen Dell cases that are better designed (on the inside) than a Macpro, and how many laptops have they released that didn't need a firmware update to keep them from overheating? If you believe that Apple's hardware is better than anything else with Intel Inside, you've been drinking too much of their coolaid.
I'd honestly rather run OS X on parts that I picked out than anything that Apple put together. But then again I'd also rather run Linux on a 4 year old Pentium 4.
Statistics may be used to lie quite frequently, but they play a different role in science and engineering, where they may be used quite accurately. What you see as a 1/45000 chance is just the way uncertainty is written for plebs.
"""At the end of the day, who knows what might happen, statistics cannot foretell the future, and I very much doubt anyone has done a controlled experiment on an asteroid to be able to make such a prediction."""
Statistics don't tell the future at all, and they don't even pretend to. They give odds of events, which is actually pretty useful. No controlled experiment predicts the future either - if you looked at the actual data generated from such things, you would notices uncertanties introduced from each instrument used to measure and each assumption used to control the experiment. What you get isn't a prediction, but a probability. Like a statistic.
Furthermore, nobody needs to experiment with an actual asteroid, since we know the way gravity works pretty well. An asteroid is actually a really easy problem since it happens to be in a vaccuum, which reduces all the problems of fluid flow over the thing causing drag and turbulence, which is really hard to predict for short time scales, and impossible to predict for long time scales. It would be rather easy to write a computer simulation for the trajectory of an asteroid, given enough data about it's current trajectory and trajectories of all the gravitational and light-emitting bodies. If you have that information (Which Astrophysicists know pretty well) the program is straight forward.
Who would shell out that much cash for a gaming laptop at all? For that much you could get an exceptionally ridiculous amount of gaming desktop. Have you ever tried loading levels off a raid 1+0 of 15krpm SAS drives on a really high end controller? You could get that kind of hardware, plus all the crazy video cards and a quad core for the price of this laptop.
Or you could pay probably 1/4 the amount of the laptop to get a desktop with similar specs.
Portables and games just don't go together. Doesn't make any sense.
I think the SSDs are going into the ultra portable laptops because the market has demonstrated many times that people can charge a whole lot for features that make them more portable. Increased durability and battery life with lower weight are far more valuable in a small notebook than the average Dell Latitude. I think a lot of manufacturers realize that SSDs aren't yet ready for a full market release, and are waiting until the specs come up some more and the price goes down. I expect we'll see more mainstream SSDs in the not-too-distant future.
Ahahahahahaha, thats a good one. After you get every single MTA out there to work out some method of charging each other, you'll probably still wonder to whom to give the profits. I'll volunteer for that part.
Plus it wouldn't stop spam at all, it'd just make spammers try to hack real accounts more, which would result in gigantic charges to helpless users. Also if you didn't get the drift from my first paragraph, this is less feasable than faster than light travel. And probably less useful.
First off, congrats Verity on one extremely hilarious article.
Windows tends to pause on registry action a lot. As Windows ages it builds up a whole lot of links within the registry which often lead it in awesome little loops. I've seen a single right-click action spawn ~50k registry actions before the menu pops up. Same goes for more or less any other action. Some of the problem here is that the registry was a bad idea from the start, but mostly it's from extensions to the original functionality. Something like the registry needs a lot of hacking to add functions, and it hasn't fared well.
Also, whats wrong with compiling kernels? First off, you only rarely need to actually do it, mostly because the kernel that your distro comes with wasn't complete. I personally customize all of my kernels to support only the hardware that they need to, to make them nice and small. It is irritating to use distros that have patched up their kernels, since you have more or less no idea what the hell is going on with that.
Vim is awesome. Sure it's more complex than notepad, but gods is it faster. If you use it for a bit you might realize that the commands aren't just nonsense, but rather a combinations of actions and specification of where the actions should act. You can just slowly learn new actions and region designations, then mix them together and get some awesomeness going on. Plus, as others have noted, it's trivial to get the exact same editor on any platform you use, which is a complete plus.
Linux isn't Windows. Which is why I like it. I can't stand wizards and config menus for OS and daemon configuration. Text files for configs, if they are properly commented (Any decent distro should have comments in the default configs, otherwise it isn't worth using at all) are completely easy to use. You can search, and change config settings with just a few keystrokes. And you can do it trivially from across the globe.
How much easier is it to write out firewall rules in a bash script than going through a wizard for each and every one? I can open 15 ports in 45 seconds in iptables, or about 10 minutes with the built in Windows firewall, which is completely primitive.
I don't use repositories at all, and the vast majority of the software that I install works with a simple script that downloads, untars, configures, compiles, and installs. I just have to pass a url to a short command and it's done.
Feel free to stick with Windows if you like the way it operates. If you want something that doesn't quite suck so hard, then try something different. I kinda feel like distros lose a lot of their useability if they pander too hard to the Windows users out there.
Lots of people have this thinking that "The Windows way is the easy way," when Windows can easily take far more time and effort, just less brain power. I find Slackware to be simple for everything that I want to do, which is why I run it on my laptop, fileserver, router, htpc, mini-itx machine, my parents' htpc, my work desktop, and whatever computer people let me get my hands on. Of course I'm still bound to Windows on my desktop thanks to CAD software that refuses to run well virtualized...
Last time I checked thats an insane amount of bandwidth for audio. Blueray video tops out at 40 Mbit, and it seems like there would be significantly more data in a 1080p stream than in 8 speakers.
And storing audio data at 96KHz is completely ridiculous - all this does is cut down on the complexity of the decoding hardware / software while using twice the data as 48 KHz. For the range of frequencies that the human ear can detect the two sampling rates should be just about perfectly identical.
So yeah, this is just porn. "My audio numbers are higher than yours!" Meh.
Really the price for this thing isn't all that high. If you look at ultra portables from Fujitsu and Sony, you are going to spend something like $2200 for a reasonably spec'd machine. And that'll have a slower cpu.
Of course the use of a 1280x800 13 inch wide screen is crazy. You rarely sit far away from a laptop like this, so you can easily fit that many pixels on a much smaller screen (Been using 1280x768 on a 10.6 inch screen for 4 years now) or you can put more pixels on the same size. 13 inches really isn't much better than 10.6 if you can't actually fit more stuff on the screen.
I'd say if anything, the screen is too large, the cpu is too fast, and the graphics card is overkill. If you just want to do your productivity and communications apps, then you don't need that stuff. You do need that much power to run OS X, though, so maybe it's just best not to use an Apple for anything which approaches minimal functionality.
I work at a university helpdesk, and once this came out one of the well-funded professors called and asked us to get him one. Then we explained the lack of usb, ethernet (we won't have wifi for 2+ years,) and optical drive. He immediately changed his mind and went with a MBP. This is one of those guys that has to have at least one of every product that Apple puts to market, and even he didn't think it would be useful. And since he has two desktops and a MacBook already, he is the target market for this device, as far as I can tell.
I think this is just a ploy to get other manufacturers to copy Apple, so they can say they invented another new trend. I honestly believed that Apple could do a much better ultra portable than this. Oh well. And yes, my laptop fits easily into a manilla envelope, even though it was released 4+ years ago.
...and I still love El Reg.
How else would I stock up on hilarious stories to tell at the bar later on? I could scour the interwebs for gems like the Bulgarian Airbag Incident, or I could let someone else filter through all that, and just read the comically enhanced versions.
So I think I'd have to delete my reg bookmark (well, I'd close the tab that stays open all the time) if they stuck to 100% IT news. Especially on Fridays.
Just to comment, any thermodynamic cycle (IE what they use to generate electricity in a conventional power plant) is limited by Carnot Efficiency, which less than 40% in almost every case (combined cycle natural gas plants might get 60%, but are quite pricy.) Add to that transmission losses and electricity at the car-charging location is probably contains less than 30% of the energy that was originally burned. Plus charging batteries generally creates heat and means more energy lost.
And cars run on petrol, which releases much less carbon than coal does (And most of the world's power still comes from coal.)
So the solution to electric cars isn't just to make the batteries work better.
The last phone I liked from them (Which is still functioning 2+ years later) is their L2. They took the SLVR or whatever, then took off the stupid bits (Downloadable music, camera, over spec'd screen, etc) and made a phone that performed very well, whilst maintaing a small form and light weight.
But these days it seems that phones are either A) Loaded with useless features that I'd never use or B) Budget crap models that are large and plasticy and seem rather less than durable.
This isn't just Moto, of course, it's more or less common over all of the portable electronics industry. I wish designers would pay attention to function instead of frills... But obviously people buy for frills, so they must be present in order to sell product.
Gods I hope they stick around too. Intel showed what it can/would do if they don't feel like they've got any competition. Anyone remember the near disaster that was Prescott?
Plus they'd inevitably charge insane amounts of money for the crap they'd end up producing. If nothing else, AMD needs to be around to make sure the x86 market doesn't stagnate.
But yeah AMD goes into every computer that I build for myself.
So far all Firewire has been completely backwards compatable - you just need to get a cable with the right ends on it. That isn't exactly difficult or expensive, and as it stands there are far fewer firewire connectors than there are usb connectors. From what I understand Firewire devices should all be backwards compatable to FW400 until they go optical, which obviously presents a problem connector-wise.
And I doubt firewire will ever truely die out, since it has caught on a bit in the industrual control market, where they actually value the ability to chain devices to a high speed bus easily and cheaply.
It looks like nobody here actually understands the concept of a rebind. The idea is that a dns reply may have more than one address on it, so if I tricked you (or your browser) into resolving ftp.bar.com (suppose I control the dns server there) I can respond with an IP for ftp.bar.com /and/ an IP for google.com. Obviously I do not control google's dns, but many OSs and DNS proxies will cache these gratuitous replies, so that the next time you try to visit google, you get sent to an IP of my choice. And you can get them to virtually never expire.
And that is only the beginning. Clearly this is above the heads of everyone that said "I control my DNS server, nobody can own me." Fact is that as of Kaminsky's DC15 presentation, there were just about no servers out there that protected against this sort of attack. I hope that has changed by now, but I wouldn't count on it.
I don't see anything here that Kaminsky didn't show at Defcon last summer, except maybe specifically attacking the home gateway. And that was by far the least interesting thing that he managed to come up with for his presentation. Too bad I have to miss DC this year - Dan's talk makes the whole thing worth it. That and watching hacker jeopardy whilst getting plastered.
I forgot to mention in my recent comment that DNS rebinding is, in fact, incredably scary / awesome. And for the most part all you have to do is write yourself a DNS server (Probably about 1/2 a line of Perl now) and get someone to query your domain. And then the things you can do are limited only by your imagination. There is some seriously scary potential there.
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