For what it's worth, I wrote a password keeper app for myself a while back. I offer it on my website here if anyone is interested (first link). It's just a simple .NET winforms app, but I use the built-in support for AES to store the data using AES 256 bit encryption. Probably better tools out there, but I felt like this is some pretty heavy data to trust to a random app I found on the internet, and I didn't want to have to sift through a bunch of code in a FOSS app to make sure my password file wasn't getting periodically sent to Russia. Of course by that logic you shouldn't trust me either, which is fine too :-)

There's your problem right there.

I don't understand why, in this day and age, this shit is still happening. I can think of at least 3 free antivirus applications that anyone with a Windows PC can download and use at no cost, with little or no effort required. Most COTS PCs come with some kind of antivirus software (usually the dreaded Norton, which totally blows but is better than nothing for most average users). Is the problem that people don't know that there are free solutions out there? Is it that people are willingly not installing antivirus? Are these viruses particularly good at avoiding detection? It boggles my mind that that many machines are still being infected.

I'm pretty sure that MDU Communications has volunteered our condo building to test DTN for the last year or so. I guess they figure since they have an exclusive contract with our building and we don't have any other choice of ISP (besides dial-up and capped 3G cellular), we'd be perfect. I can report that Slashdot is working this morning, although Google is not. Maybe once the system is deployed to ISS, they'll stop injecting delays and disruptions!

In a semi-related note, one of the things I miss about the pre-GPS (and even pre-Internet days) was the adventure of driving around a new place and stumbling on hidden gems. I'd love to do that in this day and age, but my girlfriend absolutely refuses to go to any resturants (for example) without doing some kind of online/zagat research first. Her rationale is "why should we waste our time going to some crappy restaurant when the Internet could have told us it was crappy before we even went?" While I sort of agree, sometimes I love restaurants that many online reviewers don't, and vice-versa. When we moved to a more upscale neighborhood, the only restaurants getting good reviews were ones that cost $75+ for a couple, and now she doesn't want to go anywhere!

I know I know, sounds like a personal problem. Still, I see a lot of public perceptions changing based on information available online and in GPS units.

Seconded. We use MQ extensively at work, and it is an enormous pain in the ass, but once it is set up properly, it does what it advertises. Basically a transaction-based message queue that promises to "never lose a message".

Rolling Roads? We have one in my town already.

...I'm very excited by this. I've been using Mono in Linux and OS X for a long time now and it has been working great. I'm not sure what Microsoft will think of this, but from what I've read thus far (which is admittedly not a ton) they haven't been getting in Mono's way... in fact, I believe that they gave information to help the Mono project so that it could be leveraged for Silverlight.

Who knows what Microsoft is going to do in the future, but for now I'm excited for Mono.

I'm surprised I'm seeing not a lot of comments here about latency issues. I live in Baltimore and I also happen to live in an area where we're stuck with a single provider for broadband internet (a condo with an exclusive contract to a horrible, horrible ISP. No, not Comcast or Verizon... MDU Communications). Before WiMAX came along, I had no option but to stick with the horrible ISP or deal with dial up. When I found out WiMAX was available where I live, I was excited. I went to one of their booths at a mall and played with it, but I was a little concerned with the latency. I was pinging google and wasn't getting a response for ~250ms. This isn't horrible for such a service, but even MDU gives me less than half that for most sites.

You might want to stop by a WiMAX booth in a mall like I did and try and make a few calls and make sure everything works as expected. They let me do pretty much whatever I wanted (in fact, the sales guy pretty much left me alone).

Yeah, I was using playing Doom as an example. Replace Doom with just about any other application that isn't a total resource hog. The specific application I'm using for my example isn't part of the point.

I am a developer and I know what developers want. I'm not saying I don't see an advantage to using all cores some of the time, but what I took from the description (no, I didn't RTFA, this is /. after all) is that Apple is trying to make it easier for developers to do something that is typically considered difficult to "get right": multithreading. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't want everything to be multi-threaded. I see why this is useful for some applications, but I don't want this to be a widespread practice.

Let me go at this from two angles. First, as a developer, in my specific job, while I can write multithreaded apps, I typically don't for two reasons: first, it's more complex to write and to understand, not just for me but for anyone else maintaining my code, and second because we tend to write many small components that do little bits of work and run them on the same machine, so we're making good use of all of our processors/cores anyway. I'm not talking about GUIs (these apps are non-interactive services/daemons), and my apps tend to lend themselves to a single-threaded frame of mind anyway, but what I'm trying to say is that here is a case where I'm getting the most out of our hardware without unnecessarily complicating things. This leads me to my second angle, which is that of a user. I already covered this above... I like multi-tasking, and I generally prefer lots of tasks that only use a single thread to having a single process run a little bit faster.

So yes, sometimes developers want the ability to use all cores for a long-running non-interactive task, and that's fine and it does lend itself to some situations. But I don't know that I want this to become the standard, which is, perhaps, what Apple is trying to push towards.

Alright guys, I know the advantages (and challenges) of multi-threading. With almost all new processors coming with > 1 core, I can tell there's now a huge desire to start making apps that can take advantage of all cores. But my question is why? One thing I love about my quad-core Q6600 is the fact that I can be doing so many things at once. I can be streaming HD video to my TV while simultaneously playing DOOM, for example. However, when I fire up a multithreaded app that takes all 4 of my cores and I start doing something heavy, like video encoding for example, everything tends to slow down like it did back when I only had one core to play with. Yeah, my encoding gets done a lot faster, but honestly I'd rather it take longer than make my computer difficult to use for any period of time...

I realize I can throttle the video encoding to a single core, but I'm just using that as an example... if all apps start using all cores, aren't we right back where we started, just going a little faster? I love being able to do so much at once...

Dude, this is slashdot. Didn't you know that you should be able to run everything you'll ever need on that old-ass Pentium II with 64MB RAM in your basement? I mean, Linux runs fine on there, so why shouldn't everything else ever made? Graphical enhancements are entirely unnecessary. And any "improved feature set" provided by Microsoft is clearly going to be inferior to the way some ancient system did it 15 years ago.

Yes. I'm being sarcastic.

You should have continued reading. When did I say that Vista does a ton of stuff that XP can't? First off, by buying a new system, I'm getting a lot of advantages, not just a new OS. Even with the "horrible failure" of Vista, things go A LOT faster. Video encoding, for example, used to clobber my machine for hours at a time... now I can use my machine while it is encoding, and it still goes at least 4 times faster. For a more definite comparison, SuperPI 32M used to take over a minute... now it finishes in less than 20 seconds. If you are fine with your old machine, it's capabilities and speed, then stick with it. But I did see a significant performance advantage from the hardware upgrade, and this advantage is for the better. Secondly, for me, Vista DOES do stuff that my version of XP didn't. I had XP Pro, and I wanted to use Media Center. My options were to either buy XP Media Center or buy a 3rd party product that wouldn't work with my XBOX 360. With Vista Home Premium, Media Center is part of the package, and I use it all the time. Not to say I wasn't pissed about losing Remote Desktop... but I never implied there weren't tradeoffs or that Vista was perfect.

While I recognize that I am far from using my computer to do everything it is capable of, I really can't understand all the Vista bashing and I suspect that a large amount of the bashing I do see is from those who have either already made up their mind that they hate Vista, or those that haven't really given it a fair chance.

I run Vista on a powerful machine -- it's a Quad Core with 4GB of RAM and a decent video card. I knew when Vista came out that, if I wanted to run it, my 2001 P4 2GHz wasn't going to cut it. Was I upset about that? No. Try running Mac OS 10.5 on a 800 MHz PPC from that same era. Yeah, it'll work, but it won't be a fun experience. So I bought a new machine for less than $1000, the first major PC purchase I made since I purchased the previous machine in 2001. I expect to buy a new computer every 4 or 5 years.

While my experience with Vista hasn't been flawless, I fail to see any of these things that make Vista a "horrible mistake". In fact, it runs great for me. It's very fast, and I can multitask quite well. I have a Media Center PC that records HD video frequently, often when I'm using the machine, and aside from a Systray icon telling me it's recording, I never notice. I also run Linux via VMWare in the background all the time as a test bed for web development, and again this has never caused me problems or slowdowns. Nearly all of the applications that worked on my old XP box transferred over fine. I've never seen a Blue Screen of Death in Vista, and I've been running it now for over a year and a half.

I'd say I use my computer to do more than the average user, and I've had nothing but good experiences with Vista. I'm sorry to hear that others haven't had the same experience, but please, can we stop calling it a "horrible failure"?

I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason he downloaded it is that the released version of the album is widely known to sound like a total piece of garbage due to mixing problems. Fortunately, the Guitar Hero version didn't suffer from these issues, so some kid did their own home-mastering of the album and posted a torrent. Yeah, I actually bought the album. I noticed immediately that no matter what stereo I played it on, it sounded like it was coming out of blown out speakers from 1974. So it appears now that Metallica has turned the tables and is now stealing from their fans by releasing trash for full price.