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Heck, Windows 8 doesn't even have a keyboard shortcut for Shut Down. Sure, you can DO it; but it's a multi-step procedure...

AFAIK Alt+F4 works on Windows 8 too.

Desktop should have touch as an user Interface OPTION. I can see uses for touch on the desktop just not all the time.

Bingo!

One of the things that helped Windows in its early days was that a mouse was optional. You could do a lot of GUI-based work without buying a mouse at all, just by using the helpful command keys and tabs. Something, that, alas, pretty well went out the window (no pun intended) with the advent of pixel-graphic web browser applications.

You can get much better traction when a new feature is an enhancement to what people are used to than when you force them to start all over.

I'm seriously NOT trolling; but I've personally always found it fascinating that Apple, THE company that, if nothing else, POPULARIZED the GUI interface (see that trick for avoiding the "Apple ripped-off Xerox" flamewars?), not only is REFUSING to buy-into the "Touch desktop/laptop" drumbeat, but significantly, actually has a MUCH more robust set of "Keyboard Shortcuts" than Windows (See this eye-popping list. Shades of Emacs!!!). I have scoured the web (admittedly for only 5 minutes), and I can't come up with a list of Windows OS Shortcuts (that doesn't include application-specific shortcuts) that is nearly as lengthy. Heck, Windows 8 doesn't even have a keyboard shortcut for Shut Down. Sure, you can DO it; but it's a multi-step procedure...

Point is, Apple realizes that not everyone can/will interact with their COMPUTER the same way (leave tablets out of this discussion, please!), and has provided several ways to do so.

Microsoft would do well to study that philosophy.

so when I need to use large files on multiple computers it's faster to carry an external hard drive arround than to try and use the network.

And that external hard drive can be formatted UDF, as long as you don't need to write to the drive from a Windows XP machine.

I guess I could carry a laptop arround and setup a network connection directly with the machine I wanted to use the file on but that is a lot bulikier and more hassle than just plugging in an external hard drive.

That or an external hard drive in a NAS enclosure, so that any computer that speaks FTP or SMB can read and write its files. Or an external hard drive in a USB enclosure that speaks MTP, so that any computer that speaks MTP (such as any Windows PC or any Mac with the MTP class driver) can read and write its files. The difference is that both NAS and MTP work on the level of files, unlike Mass Storage that works on the level of disk blocks, and the host OS need not be aware that the enclosure is using Ext behind the scenes.

So flip the removable bit.

I thought removability was part of the USB device controller, not something stored in the file system, and there was no standard way to "flip the removable bit" that works across brands of flash drive. This answer confirms my suspicion. Or were you recommending that people investigate which USB flash drive brands support end-user control of the removable bit before buying the drive in the first place?

Or use FAT32 instead.

Windows won't format FAT32 bigger than 32 GB, and surpassing the 32 GB limit is SDXC's reason for existence. As I understand it, the only technical difference between SDHC and SDXC is the file system that a device is required to support.

Searching Google

How should one discover the appropriate keywords that will lead to a discovery that running Windows Store apps in a window is even possible?

advertising

I've never happened to see an advertisement for a product that allows running Windows Store apps in a window.

articles

Which don't always end up posted to the same sites that one reads. For example, an article about this product appears not to have been posted to Slashdot.

word of mouth

If everybody else in one's family is on XP, Windows 7, Mac OS X, or Xubuntu, how should one learn about Windows 8-specific utilities through word of mouth?

There are plenty of free alternatives available.

Google free run windows store app in window brought me Visual Studio Express after nine irrelevant results. I imagine that most users are likely to get discouraged by the irrelevant results.

That reminds me of the clusterfuck that is the copy-replace dialog in Windows 7.
Who don't know what I'm talking about, try to copy files in a directory that already contains the files:
http://www.smith.edu/tara/smith_network/2007_word.html (scroll little bit down there is a screenshot)

First of all, it's huge. I mean really huge. For such a simple file operation it's so freaking huge.
Second, there are no simple buttons like "Ok", "Replace", "Cancel". The only buttons you see are "Skip" and "Cancel" and you don't really want them because you want to copy files.
Third, too many choices. a) copy and replace, b) don't copy, c) copy, but keep files, d) skip (which is the same as b)), and e) cancel.
Fourth, you need to check [] do this for the next x conflicts. So you need first to check the radio button, then you need to choose one action. Why not just a "replace all" button.

Compare it with the Copy&Replace dialog from Windows XP:
http://superuser.com/questions/104908/windows-7-copy-file-dialog-keyboard-accelerators
Simple, small, compact. Few choices. One click actions.
It would be better if the buttons would be "Replace", "Replace All", "Skip" and "Cancel" so you don't have to read the pre-text, but "Yes", "Yes to All", "No" and "Cancel" are just as fine.

I don't even really want to think about how much money and man-hours Microsoft spend on the design of the Copy&Replace dialog for Windows 7. Only to come up with that clusterfuck. And it don't even have keyboard accelerators.

For a 60fps game there's about 16ms per frame and with current gen consoles about 8ms is lost to API call overhead on the render thread. Of course current gen consoles are years behind and constrain rendering APIs to be called from a single thread but I'd still be very surprised if there was a console that could support a triple A game above 70fps in the next 10 years (for resolutions 720p and above).

You've barely scratched the surface of input to perception lag, here's an answer by Carmack to people questioning another one of his tweets:
http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen
Of course most engines come from a single threaded game mentality where they'd poll for input, apply input to game state, do some AI, do some animations, calculate physics, then render everything and repeat. Current gen consoles has freed that up some but most engines didn't go above 2 or 3 major threads because it's a difficult problem to re-architect an entire engine while it's being used to make a game at the same time. Sadly the better games gave user input it's own thread and polled input every 15ms or so, queued it up, and then passed it on to the game thread when the game thread asked for it. Input wasn't lost as often but it didn't get to the game any faster.

Issue 3 annoyed me for too long until I finally looked for a solution

Not sure if this is of any use but the Windows 7 32bit Kernel can be hacked to properly support PAE and allow 64GB accessible memory under W7 32bit. W7 32bit was supposed include full PAE support but was nurfed at the last moment due to third party device drivers getting confused over the > 4GB memory space (I never had this issue).

A couple caveats come to mind:

# You have to patch the 32bit Kernel. Linky: http://superuser.com/a/95309
# Although you have access to >4GB of memory, no single process can use more than 4GB (minus graphics card memory)

I have used such a setup under W7 32bit SP1 for the last six months without issue as I needed the extra memory to run multiple VMs simultaneously.

HTH and good luck!

What, pray tell, is the purpose of education if each person has to find out everything by themselves, and no one can take advantage of the collective wisdom of society, and the accumulated learning built up over history?

They don't have to find out everything by themselves. Chances are people have done what this guy is trying to do and have written about their experiences. If only there was some way to find this information, perhaps someone has asked the question before?

HOWTO: Get rid of Unity and switch back to Gnome in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

This is simply not true. Only one end of the chargers Apple uses is USB.

It is true because ANY USB charger will work with that Apple cable to charge an iPhone 5.

If they would have made their new connector compatible with micro usb by taking the form factor and adding proprietary features they desired

Then we would have a cable with a worse connector at one end. To me it's absurd to settle for a USB micro connector, in the future that connector will limit speed of transfer and other things devices can do even if you attach proprietary meanings to some pins... the connectors are simple smaller than on the new Apple connector.

You'll find there are two classes or chargers; chargers that charge everything and chargers that charge everything but idevices.

This is not an iPhone problem.

And further shows why USB SUCKS as a standard for anything.

Generally though, iPhones will charge with ANY USB charger. It's iPads that have more issues as they need more power.

Apple having these proprietary connectors is all about milking their captive market out of every last dime they have.

And has nothing at all do to with having a more capable connector with the capacity for much higher data transfer speeds, of course. It's purely to screw YOU even though it represents a tremendous amount of extra work for them.

Mission accomplished Apple! Toadlife considers himself screwed.

If you don't mind being nickle and dimed like that

Nickel and dimed how? I have a cable, perhaps two that I use for the life of the device. For the new connector I have an adaptor I use when I need an adaptor, the need for which diminishes over time. This is not a "nickel and dime" recurring bleed, this is a one time charge to adapt to a connector that is is better and simpler - than either the older iPhone connector OR Micro-USB.

> I also waste a lot more time reconfiguring Windows 7 to the way I like it than XP.

Completely agreed. That is one area where MS constantly fucks it up.

Some power users use spatial organization.
i.e. Taskbar looks like:
app1 web1,2 cmd1,2,3 app2 web4,5 cmd4,5,6 web6

Where cmd# is the command prompt, and web# is the web browser tab #.

By using the *position* of the app on the Taskbar it server to help as a visual mnemonic for different tasks.

Windows has 2 brain-dead options
* Group no windows
* Group all windows

Power users want:
* Group *some* windows together

The second area MS screws up in Win 7 is UI scaling. In the Control Panel, Appearance & Personalization, Display, "Make Text And Other Items Larger or Smaller" I can set percent scaling to be one:
* 100%
* 125%
* 150%

Why the fuck is there no X% *smaller* options, like 50%, 75%, or heck *user-defined* percentages. Instead, they are hard-coded values.

Third, there is no way to use different DPI on separate monitors, you know because sometimes you have different sized monitors and want the text to be displayed bigger or smaller. The Windows 7 DPI scaling is global -- it is all or nothing.

Typical example that Microsoft doesn't have a clue what *actual* users want; instead it is focused on some imaginary case.

Also see Custom DPI below 100%
http://superuser.com/questions/80151/how-to-setup-custom-dpi-below-100-on-windows-7

Thankfully, Google led me to a nice Stack Overflow question asking the same thing, and the first response is pretty helpful.
http://superuser.com/questions/318103/what-is-openstack-and-how-can-it-be-used

"Openstack is basically a bunch of tools to setup a large-scale virtualization environment... where you can quickly create & manage virtual machines through a GUI, and keep track of what is going on. It's another framework similar to Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. There are others similar to this, like Eucalyptus and CloudStack."

It's my understanding that 'story' is the magical tag that promotes submissions to post status.

I guess maybe what I need is a custom rss feed reader that can tag each article as 'interesting' or 'crap'. Maybe I'll write a bayesian filter.

Has anyone already done that, I wonder...
http://superuser.com/questions/188036/bayesian-filter-for-rss-feeds

Damn if Google hasn't already done it:
https://support.google.com/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=69980
A third option, Sort by magic will rank items by "magic." Personalized magic ranking is automatically generated, taking into account your past reading behavior (including liking and starring) and global signals. We'll do our best to display items in the most relevant and interesting order -- click the Like button on things you think are important or enjoy reading, and we'll learn to put items like that first.

Guess I'll have to check it out. I already use reader.

Who the hell grants these patents?

http://superuser.com/questions/42263/how-to-install-windows-7-from-the-network

"I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?"

There are concerns that first generation SSDs fail after a couple thousand writes. There is a bit of controversy over it, and it may be FUD or just outdated re: modern SSDs, but operating systems and programs have come up with optimizations for SSDs, and users continue to come up with their own solutions.

I'm (just this week) building a custom and paid $180something per 256fakeGB drive on Newegg. (I'm sure someone will come along and shatter the price I'm bragging about.) A couple years ago the prices just didn't seem worth it -- something like $3-5/gb.

I'm actually glad this topic came up. I bought two SSDs and plan to install both Windows and Linux. On Linux it's easy to stick user data on the whirly drive I got, but with Windows I'm not sure how I'll be able to stick user data, system logs, etc on said drive. I might just stick the entire OS on the whirly drive and put games (since it's a gaming rig) for both OSes on my SSDs.

Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. You're making the flawed assumption that current PRM technology can continue at that pace and that HAMR will not be a disruptive technology resulting in a "bump" in the density. HAMR will be a bump in density just like PRM was only a bump in density over the older recording methods.

You're exactly right: perpendicular recording (PRM) was a bump in recording methods. Before perpendicular recording the largest hard drive was 400gb and perpendicular recording did exactly what slashdot predicted, offer 10x the storage, with 4tb hard drives now available only 7 years after PRM came out in 2005.

But it took 10 full years to reach that 10x prediction, and hard drive capacity has been increasing at the same exponential growth for 30 years. What they're calling for is a huge leap, 15x the storage in 4 years, from 4tb to 60tb, and that's just not going to happen.

I would predict 10-20tb, but I'm not sure anyone will care since we'll all be using multiple terabyte SSDs by 2016 anyway, they're increasing at a much faster growth rate than hard drives and who wants to wait milliseconds to transfer date at mBps when you can wait nanoseconds to transfer at gBps? Hard drives will be almost as useful in 2016 as tape drives are in 2012.

For example take microSD cards, they're at 64gb now. 100 of those would be 55mm by 15mm by 20mm = 16,500 mm3, much smaller than a 3.5" hard drive at 101.6 mm × 25.4 mm × 146 mm = 368,650 mm3, yet a hundred 64gb microSD cards would provide 6.4tb of storage, far more than any hard drive and it could fit in a cellphone and weigh only 50grams (0.1 lbs) compared to the 1.5 lbs a hard drive weighs. Of course at $87 each that would be almost $9,000, but flash memory prices are dropping faster than any other technology related item so I have no doubt that $9k will be ~$200 within a few years.

Yeah I think that is the way to go... for the extra paranoid, how do you know you can trust Truecrypt?

http://superuser.com/questions/164162/is-truecrypt-truly-safe

I'm sure (well, actually not really) rumours are just FUD (by whom and for what purpose?) but that's the thing, you're through Alice's Looking Glass now... is it FUD disseminated by people who don't want use to use Truecrypt just because it is iuin fact unbreakable or is it someone who's hit on truly suspect facts about Truecrypt? How do you actually know?

This much is certain- we live in a world in which it's guaranteed that intelligence agencies have a keen, legitimate and abiding interest in being able to decrypt and otherwise ascertain the information in any given file since in point of fact Super Bad Guys determined to do Super Bad Things will avail themselves of the same technology to secure their Evil Plot as you will use to secure your discovery of the missing second step in the underwear gnome riddle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)

So is TrueCrypt (or other) backdoored and is that a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Or is it totally impenetrable and therefore a Big PITA and Threat to us all in some way and who wants you to think it's one way and who wants you to think it's another?

Like I said, you're through the Looking Glass where you can't be sure of anything you "know". This is where us regular folk accidentally bump up against spooks and their ways....

You can use a software ram drive to access memory above the 4GB limit in XP 32-bit. See http://superuser.com/questions/292207/is-there-any-way-to-use-memory-above-3-25gb-using-windows-xp

Your option 3 is definitely possible, as people have done it, although only WHCL-certified drivers are likely to work once you've done it (a lot of drivers fail when passed addresses beyond 4GB, apparently, which is why MS disabled PAE in consumer versions of Windows).

Actually, you can wipe a failed drive. It's not always easy or cheap, but it is possible, and is probably a good idea because of situations exactly like this one. That being said, the average person indeed wouldn't know how to do this, and it should be the company's responsibility to clear it out.

Forwarding from superuser.com:

http://superuser.com/questions/183105/hotel-like-wifi-manager (recommends AnchorFree, SputNik)
http://www.macinstruct.com/node/188
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal

Here, http://superuser.com/. Or you could pray and wait for God to answer your wifi questions, idiot.

Good point. I heard about that around may when I got this new PC.

A quick search led me to stackexchange. I know I read discussions on elsewhere about how google fails to honor it 120dpi rendering. Or maybe it my having to go under the hood for a config file where a simple "DO NOT let pages go under x point fonts" a la Firefox and Safari should be provided (Supposedly Chrome 13 or so came out with a fix, but like I promised, I'm still on FF3 at home.) Or perhaps the issue with text is that hardware-accelerated blurry-fonts a la Safari|Firefox/Vista+ are also not Chrome's goal.

This is starting to be too much work for those of us that must poke at fonts for older people or ourselves. The stock Widescreens we get at 720p aren't tall enough to comfortably read text at their max resolutions.

It will be at least another 5 years for displays to kill this plague of mere 800 pixels tall (to provide a bogus satisfaction for 720p checklists) in favor of real 1080p. 72 and 96dpis are still the only output configurations desktop developers test GUIs on, ever. Some day entry-level smartphone resolutions will reach "retina" levels. Thence, half-blind older geeks will finally be delivered a good out-of-box compromise between unreadably tiny menus and large, multi-pixel glyph strokes that your OS loves to silently truncate text from.

BTW http://meta.superuser.com/ has a similar interface to stackoverflow and is very helpful too.

nope, as you can also change the your ipv6 address, specially if you use the ipv6 privacy extension... your ISP will not know when its the same device or another device

to do that, they would need to deliver just ONE ipv6 address for you... and that goes against the goal of the IPV6 and would probably force the ISP to have a lot more work to deliver ipv6 that way than to allow a normal ipv6 range to the user...

a short summary: http://superuser.com/questions/329375/how-is-this-operating-system-switching-done/330926#330926

the presentation by AI at ELC 2011: http://elinux.org/images/5/5c/ELC-AlwaysInnovating-Gentil.pdf

Troubles start when each operating system wants to get control over wireless, the display or any other resource they all share and expect to have exclusive control over. So considering how many bugs we already have in current operating systems I can hardly imagine the amount of hacks required to android or GNU/Linux to make them at least cooperate enough for basic functionality is worth the benefits of having multiple OS at the same time. I dont really see the advantage of such a feature.

Well according to this answer by a developer you CAN use an SSD for readyboost, its just isn't as straight forward and you can't use the whole drive. personally I've been avoiding SSDs until they get the bugs out as the experience from my gamer customers (who spent waaaay more than i would have for top o' the line SSDs) is that Jeff Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as while they are crazy fast the fail crazy often.

To me it isn't THAT they fail it is HOW they fail that has me avoiding them. With HDDs I can't remember the last time I had an HDD that failed without plenty of clear warnings something was up. Windows delayed write fails, or SMART errors, temp going nuts, there was ALWAYS a clear warning that there was trouble in HDD town. With both of the gamers there was NO WARNING with the SSDs, they just flipped the switch and....nothing. With the HDDs I was always able to get the data off before they bought the farm, minus a few bad sectors of course, but with the SSDs it was like they didn't exist, it was just...nothing.

so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.

It is well known in time synchronization circles that by default Windows stores the time in the BIOS/RTC in the local time zone but there is a registry hack for Vista and above to make Windows use UTC in BIOS/RTC. However Windows uses UTC internally.

Since getting moderation for helping is not guaranteed, Slashdotters do not generally care about our personal problems,

Your question might be better suited for the likes of superuser.com. It's not kosher, but I just went ahead and asked it for you (after a slight cleanup... those guys are good geeks but their standards are a little on the Wikipedian side.)

Let me start by saying every time you boot your system on Windows 7, data is sent to Microsoft to check whether your are online and for internet connectivity.

Now although you probably never gave it a second thought. NCSI is an active tool used by Microsoft to lead Boscovich to these comments.

I am not sure if this has been posted on /. before however this url http://blog.superuser.com/2011/05/16/windows-7-network-awareness maybe makes Boscovich feel all warm and fuzzy inside as they can do more with NCSI and cut out botnets. This can be defeated as in the URL above.

Whilst I am on a roll, http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/solutions/cofee/default.aspx is nothing special the commands in COFEE with some extra switches are;

arp.exe -a
at.exe
autorunsc.exe
getmac.exe
handle.exe -a
hostname.exe
ipconfig.exe /all
msinfo32.exe /report %OUTFILE%
nbtstat.exe -n
nbtstat.exe -A 127.0.0.1
nbtstat.exe -S
nbtstat.exe -c
net.exe share
net.exe use
net.exe file
net.exe user
net.exe accounts
net.exe view
net.exe start
net.exe Session
net.exe localgroup administrators /domain
net.exe localgroup
net.exe localgroup administrators
net.exe group
netdom.exe query DC
netstat.exe -ao
netstat.exe -no
openfiles.exe /query/v
psfile.exe
pslist.exe
pslist.exe -t
psloggedon.exe
psservice.exe
pstat.exe
psuptime.exe
quser.exe
route.exe print
sc.exe query
sc.exe queryex
sclist.exe
showgrps.exe
srvcheck \127.0.0.1
tasklist.exe /svc
whoami.exe

Awww how 31337 M$

And in 2011, Linux still has such fundamental issues such as Ctrl-V and RightClick+Paste not giving the same result.

For KDE terminal apps, it's [Shift]+[Ins], which is easy enough to find out from the context menus.

  Or such ridiculous things like when you have copied something to the clipboard, it disappears if you quit before pasting. It was probably written down in some POSIX standard 40 years ago that this should forever be absurd, and so no amount of sanity can prevail.

Agreed, this "clear the *system* clipboard when shutting down any app" behaviour is beyond stupid.

Go ahead and enjoy your Windows 7. It's not so bad, really -- first decent thing to come out of the MS OS mill since Win2K. Just always remember that Microsoft don't consider it "your" computer, and you'll be just fine.

You were deprived of a proper desktop as a child. You know nothing of multiple workspaces, the ability of your applications to share their data with each other, even the simplest things like changing the color of your window decorations is beyond your ken. It's like you were raised in a cage.

And in 2011, Linux still has such fundamental issues such as Ctrl-V and RightClick+Paste not giving the same result. Or such ridiculous things like when you have copied something to the clipboard, it disappears if you quit before pasting. It was probably written down in some POSIX standard 40 years ago that this should forever be absurd, and so no amount of sanity can prevail.

"foo n-1 was the best thing ever, new is crap, Windows 7 is shiny." Okay then. Use Windows 7.

I do. Three and a half years of struggling with Linux was enough, thank you.

I'd also recommend having a Linux box; you can work in a familiar environment, then share out batch scripts you write via Samba -- read-only for binaries dirs that don't mind being unable to write out config files; writeable (but perhaps not listable) for a centralized location for saving off output from your various scripts, and so forth.

Some Linuxes/Unixes have unified ping and trace tools. Others have IPv6 versions such as ping6, traceroute6 or tracepath6. Try those.

For hiding your MAC address iptables is absolutely the wrong tool. You want IPv6 temporary addresses. See here: http://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing-my-mac-address-when-using-ipv6

For a Mac you'd need to run this command: sysctl -w net.inet6.ip6.use_tempaddr=1

As far as I know, they are. Are you using a web proxy? Because if so, unless you are also using a proxy autoconfig ("PAC") javascript file, you are implicitly delegating DNS lookups to that proxy.

Oddly enough, this is not the case with Firefox unless you explicitly tell it to. Which is done by setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true in about:config.

Well, 17 in laptops do have dedicated numpads.

But, strangely, ever so strangely, regardless of the huge amount of horizontal space 17inchers have, they add a numpad, but then delete the menu key.

That's that key to the left of the Ctrl key on most (desktop) keyboards with a picture of a menu on it and a mouse arrow. Yeah, it was added by Microsoft with their PC 95 specifications, but it's all kinds of handy.

For people who know how to type, and prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard, it brings up what would otherwise be the "right-click menu". It works in Nautilus, Thunderbird, gedit, gnome-terminal, many/most Windows programs, etc.

Anyway, different people have different ways of working. But there's no excuse to not have it on a 17 inch laptop.

I'm looking at you, Dell Studio 17, but there are others with the same disease.

I don't know about that considering that IE and Webkit are currently safer than Firefox for all of those running a modern version of Windows (Vista and 7) thanks to the fact that both IE and Webkit support low rights mode and Firefox doesn't. In fact the only way to get Firefox to actually function with lower rights is to disable the security features that makes low rights mode secure in the first place!

Now will I ever go back to IE, or offer it to my customers as a recommendation? Not a chance in hell, after spending years cleaning up the mess that was the abandoned IE6 there is too much bad blood there, and thanks to Webkit I don't have to. But there are millions on modern Windows versions and for ALL of them currently IE is safer than FF by a long shot and if they promote that? I could see many simply sticking with IE rather than switching.

It is just common sense, why would you run the browser at a higher permission level than required? The browser is running unsigned third party code from the wild and wooly web, the lower the rights it has the better. Why Mozilla can't manage to add support after 4 years is just ridiculous. I'm currently typing this on FF 4 (which looks like a bad Chrome ripoff to me) but without low rights mode and now that the Chrome extensions have all my must haves like ABP and Forecastfox means this will probably be the last time I use FF or hand it to my customers.

It is a shame, as I've been a FF users since the early days, but what good is having a modern OS with enhanced security if the programs that benefit from it don't actually use it? So while I won't be going to IE I will be saying goodbye to FF for Comodo Dragon which gives me all the speed of Chrome and low rights mode without phoning home to Google.

I really had hopes for FF 4, but it seems like they are spending their time aping Chrome instead of simply making FF better. As XP dies out more and more people will be able to use the security features that FF simply doesn't support. What is the point of aping Chrome (such as tabs on top, no file/edit/view, bookmarks on the right corner) if you don't copy the important stuff like the increased security? Feels like cargo cult usability at play to me.

And I'm sure the fanbois will waste their mod points, but it doesn't make 2+2=5 nor will it change reality. You wouldn't run your OS as admin, would you? You agree that least permissions for the task is simply best secvurity practices, yes? Then why would you insist on running a browser that runs at higher permissions and in fact dies hard if you try to run it with less permissions than the user? Seems like a bad design problem to me, maybe that is why Moz still hasn't added it even after 4 years, Gecko is simply not capable of running with lower permissions.

Hadn't heard of it, so I just did: http://superuser.com/questions/248957/ega-graphics-on-windows-3-0-on-8086

Wouldn't let me tag it as Windows-3.0 though, new users can't make tags and there wasn't one already.

I can't get Windows 3.0 to run in colour on my 8086 with EGA graphics. Anyone help?

I'm serious. Best I can find out is that Windows 3.0's colour drivers require at least a 286, so I'm stuck with monochrome for now.

Hast thou considered asking thy question on SuperUser?

ok, above post may be a bit rough... So I better clarify.

truecrypt has some skeptics out there, see:

http://superuser.com/questions/164162/is-truecrypt-truly-safe

the built in search in windows 7 is actually a drastic improvement over what used to be. It will work with thunderbird as well: http://superuser.com/questions/80848/how-to-have-windows-7-index-thunderbird-3-messages

You should give it a try. Its especially handy when searching network drives. If the server has indexing running, it will hand off the search to the remote server, and you'll get the results back instantly.

OR worse yet... what about the annoying message of You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it. It is so annoying that everytime I want to plug a HDD with half ext3 half ntfs partitions I have to see that annoying message.

Yes. There's a nice answer to essentially the same question that someone (not me) wrote about 6 months ago here:

http://superuser.com/questions/163567/why-does-the-heat-production-increase-as-the-clockrate-of-a-cpu-increases/163570#163570

>>The things that annoy me is that it uses shift + ctrl to open a new tab instead of the defacto standard ctrl

>Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> (Keyboard Setup) Edit

No, it doesn't.

You have to do a hack with User Javascript, which then means your UI changes depending on whether you have Javascript turned on or off.

I thought they would have added UI shortcuts from other browsers for the 11 release if they wanted to make a play for a wider audience.

Yes, I know there's the middle-click thing, but people still want Ctrl+Click because it's more ergonomic for them.

No, you're the idiot for posting a "solution" that doesn't actually work. You can't drop files onto a notepad window run as administrator in Windows 7:

http://superuser.com/questions/59051/drag-and-drop-file-into-application-under-run-as-administrator

Google found:
http://superuser.com/questions/10347/what-tiling-window-manager-for-windows-do-you-recommend

They recommend several programs that I think do what you want.

ZFS is used in production on FreeBSD by some people and I generally like the ZFS features, but I don't view ZFS as really production ready on any OS.

This is because ZFS on any OS does sometimes lose all access to the zpool (i.e. you lose the entire set of RAID volumes and filesystems on them, all at once) due to ZFS bugs, and there is no fsck. I can't think of another filesystem where you can (a) lose all access to your files and (b) there is no fsck. Same goes for RAID - even if you use RAID-1 with ZFS you can still lose your entire zpool due to a ZFS bug.

Given that the "no data loss by design" (can't find the reference for this, perhaps Sun/Oracle has stopped saying this) hasn't really worked out for ZFS on Solaris or FreeBSD, there is still a need to have a complete backup of any ZFS zpool (as with any other RAID / filesystem). The checksumming, COW, snapshots, and self-healing data (for RAID) are very nice, but losing your whole pool due to a ZFS bug means it isn't really a high availability solution. On the plus side, it does make it very easy to snapshot in order to take a backup, and makes incremental backups easy with zfs send.

Here are a few samples of complete zpool loss:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=132089&tstart=120

http://superuser.com/posts/130822/revisions - FreeBSD

http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg39578.html

My point is not that ZFS is a bad idea, but it really needs an fsck (see http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ ) and anyone using ZFS must have full backups onto another server of the whole zpool, perhaps into a non-ZFS filesystem to avoid software bugs that hit both the main and backup zpool. The need for backups isn't unique to ZFS but I haven't seen other filesystems/RAID implementations promising "no data loss by design"

http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/01/home-fileserver-a-year-in-zfs/ has some good info on using ZFS for a home NAS, with a separate backup server also using ZFS.

btrfs isn't mature yet, but its designer has said he will always make fsck a priority over new features: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.2/1284.html

They're still looking for enough users to commit to open up the beta, but Stack Exchange (the folks behind Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User) have a proposal up for an question & answer astronomy site:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/astronomy