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MS 'Whistler' Looks Solid To ZDNET
dynoman7 writes: "eWEEK Labs has tested the first public beta release of Whistler, which became available Oct. 31. They think it is 'stable.'" He points to a review at eWEEK, also playing on MSNBC. It's a bit of a mixed review, actually -- the review points out that by "leaving its Windows 9x code base behind, [Microsoft is] creating many potential Windows platform compatibility problems in the process," and notes of the included "remote help" feature, "[G]iven Microsoft's well-documented security gaffes, sites will have to carefully evaluate the potential security risks of such a widely deployed remote-control feature." Whatever its faults, this Windows-to-come is supposed to have improved type handling and other goodies which every other OS will inevitably be scrutinized for, including [your favorite].
But.. I don't like Linux :( It takes too much thinking (and actually, I'm pretty serious here). I want my computer to do 90% of my work for me. It is isolated from the network (mmm..firewall) and its only purpose in life is to play games and log onto mushes. Occasionally it does word processing and map generation for my DnD3 campaign. Heck, it even auto-logins for me ^.^
/3/.
Right now I run Windows ME. It is the greatest thing in the universe. If I loved it anymore, I would probably be required to marry it or something. I have but two issues with it, one serious and one not-so-serious.
Serious: some DirectX apps don't quit DirectX mode when they quit, meaning I have to restart my machine.
Not-so-serious: Setting a button to 'Back' on my Intellimouse Explorer goes back
It pleases me immensely that DOS mode has gone the way of the Dodo, though.
> but on the NT4 CD is something called the HQTool :)
DOH. _NOW_ I learn about this util, after I've upgraded to Win2K
> You have to use rawrite.exe to copy an image to a floppy,
Actually you can use FD144.exe since it has the same functionality as rawrite.exe. (See paragraph below.)
> and lo and behold, the OS on the floppy is MS DOS 6.22
On the NT4 CD it can be found in \SUPPORT\HQTOOL\
Which has these 3 files:
10,891 FD144.EXE
332 MAKEDISK.BAT
1,474,560 NTHQ
Thx again for the cool NT4 tip!
can someone please tell me how this guy got "insightful" and "interesting"? hi? it's none of the above.
Voting Moo Anyway!
Please go back and look up what FUD means!
Pick one of the following:
1) A new standard in software!!! More features, more stable, & runs faster!!!
2) Apple is still dead.
3) Linux doesn't have a modern interface. And it's too hard to use.
4) Jesse Berst: ``Hey, the hits on my column are down, so what brain dead thing can I say today?"
5) There's another operating system out there?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
You've misunderstood. All it means is that instead of seeing 15 IE buttons in the taskbar, you'll see one. God knows how you're expected to choose which window you want - do they behave like the Start button and pop up a vertical menu?
Yes, but Microsoft will probably require you to install MSBalls to run whistler :-p
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The whole "task bar" thing in general drives me a little buggy ... I usually end up with a lot of tiny rectangles at the bottom of my screen that say "mozi" "mozi" "mozi" etc. because that's as much room as they have space for text. Which removes all the alleged helpfulness of having those taskbar buttons at all.
That's one of the reasons why Microsoft's UI Style Guide shifted from "app-centric" to "doc-centric": the browsers give the doc/page's title followed by the app's title. It avoids buttons that read "Micr...", "Micr...", "Micr..."
I don't know if computer interfaces ever will really achieve data centrism, but I think it's the right way to go. Give me a file, and if I don't have the widget that lets me view or edit it, let me get it.
Of course, it's exactly this trend that has also put Microsoft's security in the crapper: automatic installations of who-knows-what code.
[
Tried it on 2k, -and- 98.
Nuh-uh.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
wonder if it would violate anyone's patent to use it in Gnome, KDE, etc.
... I usually end up with a lot of tiny rectangles at the bottom of my screen that say "mozi" "mozi" "mozi" etc. because that's as much room as they have space for text. Which removes all the alleged helpfulness of having those taskbar buttons at all. (I must admit I like them better than I used to, though ... when there are just a few windows open, they work ok.)
...
The whole "task bar" thing in general drives me a little buggy
If I had open windows subcategorized by application, that would definitely be a plus.
Thinking broadly , this also seems very similar to what MacOS has done for years (you click on the application menu and get to a list of all the running apps; while it doesn't distinguish between windows of the same application, it also doens't clutter the screen with a list of them). But then, I've been a Mac user for far longer, so maybe it seems "nicer" to me simply for its familiarity
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Not a lie in the slightest. I might direct your attention to the IRC channel #warezguild on EFnet, where I obtained it. :)
One important improvement to the Windows task bar is the option of having the operating system group multiple
iterations of the same application such as multiple Internet Explorer windows into a single task-bar item. The user then clicks on the IE task-bar item to see a vertical list of open IE windows.
Wow, nice to see that BeOS is getting enough attention from MS that they'll steal their interface ideas(this is the default BeOS behaviour). Not that any OS vendor isn't guilty of stealing interface ideas. Win95 looked remarkably like NeXT in a lot of ways...
-lx
Yeah, I know about the coding syntax... the /. filters didn't like like some of the chars and stripped them out... I'll have to fix that.
Homophobic? no.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I can't speak for WordPerfect, but Netscape is specifically listed in the release notes as causing severe problems with beta 1 of Whistler. I also seem to remember a mention of problems with Notes.
Somehow I doubt MS sees WordPerfect as a threat anymore.
Option 1: Click start menu. Select 'run' option. Into the resulting dialouge box, type 'telnet myclient.com' where myclient.com is your target host. Hit the enter key, or click the OK button. Boom, done. Option 2: Click start menu. Select 'run' option. Into the resulting dialouge box, type 'cmd' and hit enter key, or click OK button. This dumps you into the WinNT command prompt (as opposed to typing 'command', which would dump you into the Win9x command prompt.) At the prompt, type 'telnet myhost.com'. Or, for that matter, FTP, traceroute, ping, nslookup, and all the other standard TCP/IP apps. Try it for pretty much any app. GUI apps will launch normally. I usually use this to run things like Windows Explorer, etc etc. Also, type the names (and fully qualified paths, if the file isn't in the search path) of documents, to auto-launch the app. For example, typing a fully qualified http://www.mycorp.com URL will launch it in the registered web browser. By the same token, BTW, I don't think there's a 'telnet' option anywhere in my KDE desktop (don't have it handy to check) so I guess it doesn't have a telnet client. :-)
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Oh come on you HAD to use the microsoft quotes? ?Whistler?
-Stype
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
AMEN. Code to - and on - W2k, and screw the crappy 16-bit pieces of shi^h^h^hcrap that have my OS of choice a bad name.
meh.
Does that make Microsoft Whistler's mother?
Make affiliate bucks
Non-firewalled home users run them for a few hours in the evening (if that), connect to the internet for part of that time, then turn them off.
Linux users, OTOH, tend to spring for high-speed permanent internet connections on the best hardware they can afford, and leave their computers on for months at a time. And, of course, only a minority of Linux home users know anything about security, and plenty of default installations are full of holes. Furthermore, the Linux boxes are full of toys like compilers and network utilities.
Which sounds more tempting for someone who wants to subvert other people's equipment for their own purposes? An unstable mishmash of proprietary apps, or a perfectly stable long-term hacking platform where every application has the source available so he can control all local displays to hide the fact that he's in there?
Cable-modem, static IP, default install, Redhat Linux boxes are a cracker's bonanza.
--------
Why do I get the feeling this is "stable" as in: "Finally, my house of cards is stable!"
They'll have to really push the MSCEs to recertify. That won't be cheap for a lot of organizations who are going to have to pay for training. And the change between NT4 domains and AD is not a trivial one..
Hey lets get some patches for win2k first... Common now put at least a few programmers back on the service pack group MS. Oohhh wait a minute I guess those Russians are doing that for you now since they have the source.
About time someone corrected this. I hear people all the time saying, "I could care less." It's COULDN'T.
Connah
Connah
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
Didn't Microsoft at one point say that the remote administration capabilities of Unix-based systems constituted a security flaw? They better lock their code down REALLY WELL or else we'll start seeing a surge in Windows exploits. If you thought it was bad with Linux, just imagine what it would be like if every desktop system, run by completely clueless users in a majority of cases, had this kind of remote control built in, without the need for sneaking in BO or Netbus.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Unfortunately, Microsoft's telnet client continues to suck rocks through a straw. Try running "pine" using MS Telnet. You'll be hitting ctrl-L a lot. I actually use VNC to connect to an X session on my linux gateway to use telnet.
You're not running Win2K though, are you?
telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
[login]
^]
unset LOCAL_ECHO
set TERM VT100
^M
set term=vt100
pine
... works great for me. What problems are you seeing?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Sorry, by the way. Honest ignorance is something to be corrected, not insulted. I tend to assume that everybody has the same skills, knowledge, and experience that I do, and react accordingly. No SSH client, though.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I think the missing word is "justify"
While it may not be the same thing, you can download the Speech API from MS Research's web site (I don't feel like putting up a URL -- trust me, it's simple to find), which includes sample tools for voice control of the OS, voice dictation, and even screen reading. For the small amount I've used it, it works beautifully, though you'll certainly want a head-mount microphone. If I were blind, this would be a set of extremely useful tools. As it is, they're just toys for me to play with.
Still, it's fun to give your computers orders vocally and watch stuff happen.
Seriously, I don't think there's anything wrong with Windows itself, it's the drivers! A unified driver model might help. Hell, it will help.
.NET is interpreted. Is MS moving to fully interpreted OSes? Ai yi yi, that's wacky stuff. Maybe they'll just focus on getting their underlying stuff to run quicker and stabler. Hm.
The tile-able thingees in the start menu? I think they came from BeOS 5... (were they in BeOSes before that? I dunno...) It's innovation! Yay!
Is this really a consumer class OS? The article makes it sound like a ridiculous number of things are customizable Win98 style. Don't like the UI? Revert it. Kinda like the original Win95 where you could make everything look like Program Manager. ^^;; that went away eventually, will this?
Well, they have a Win98 compatibility mode huh? Tweakable? And
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I have one of these (a combo 10/100 & 56K modem). It works fine, under both Windows and Linux.
wrt what do you make that suggestion?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If I'm running a 100% Linux shop, where I am supposed to get a DOS boot disk? Take this up with your OEM's and mobo manufacturers. You can't blame MS because these people decide to rely on DOS boot disks to update a BIOS.
ÕÕ
Thanks for the link, I had been using linux for a quite a while at work and a shift in my responsibilities prompted the need to use Win2k (bleh). I've really missed having many desktops as I generally have about 15 windows open and can't stand making the taskbar larger. This is a GREAT way to get around that problem.
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
---------
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
Further: If you are a Win2K user, when you do go about upgrading to Whistler, you will want the Pro version. The Whistler Home version (MS' expected migration destination for Win9x/ME users) will be uniprocessor only. Dual processor goodness, as found in Win2K, will be in Whistler Pro and greater. MP where P>2 will be found in the higher end versions.
"Type handling" refers to standard C, Java, C++ etc. language types.
Badly typed languages allow the programmer to skip out and change types on a whim, causing OS instability. Strongly typed languages force a programmer to specify a long int or double float and stick with it.
Since Windows has relied on types since Win95's exception (nearly every GUI function call and return variable is typed) it makes sense that the OS would begin to focus more on strong types.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The only incompatibilities i've ever seen in win2k, have been related to direct-to-hardware programming (drivers, old dos games, dos4gw-apps etc). everything else works JUST fine here, so what are you whining about?
Voting Moo Anyway!
Make no mistake about it - M$ will have all whistler users by the balls!
I'm not planning on running whistler, but if I did, I'd dare them to try to find any to have me by. We are the future; for we are immune to their nefarious ways.
-- Anne Marie
for me HP devices give me the most grief. I have struggled with HP scanners, printers, and CD writers on Win2k. None of them are easy to install.
For example (not really an HP example), trying to install Easy CD Creator + Direct CD is a nightmare on win2k. If you install the wrong version of direct CD and reboot the system, you'll be in for a surprise. better get your recovery disks...
It just didn't seem that HP was ready for Windows 2000. At least they could tell us that their hardware was incompatible instead of claiming 'windows 2000 compatibility'. When I plug in a scanner into a Windows 2000 computer, I don't want to see the BSOD just because the HP drivers suck.
From what I've seen, a lot of small companies' survival depends on the continued functioning of a cheap IDE disk.
I hate to break it to ya, but SCSI and IDE drives are the same these days. They just put different controllers on them.
--fatboy
Out of curiosity, does this look to anyone else (at least from the screen shots) like a version of WinCE (Or windows powered if you can stomach calling it that)? Dunno, that's just what it struck me as looking like. I don't know about anyone else, but it seems terribly plain on my "pocket pc", I don't think I'd want that on main computer, stable or not stable.
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
0 1 - just my two bits
Well, actually, these are of course only two possible values of the same bit. So it's basically just your 1 bit. Just like your one cent would have heads and tails.
Two bits would be
00 01 10 11
</anal> JdV!!
<Enter any 12-digit prime to continue>
Yep, the last few I have done created a boot floppy using DR-DOS, now owned by Novell. There was an advertisement on the screen while it was booting.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Some people want to know... :) Anyway, now that M$ is for sure going all 32-bit (and other OSes, like our favorate, already have) lusers are really going to complain over how they can't use their ancient DoS programs...
Otherwise the security part doesn't suprise me... I'm sure this beta will strongly represent the final verson, bugs and all.
Karma whorin' since 1999
the one thing I have windows on this machine for, practically speaking,* is to use my Merlin modem.
... turns out there is just a subtle breakage. (The guy on the phone heard my error message and instantly said "You're using windows 2000, aren't you?") The software works, you simply have to alias the launching program and put it on your desktop, now it works fine. OK. I think this falls into your category of kludgey UI apps andd drivers;)
/artists / casual householders ...) Which is why I'm interested in Helix, Eazel and others who are actually paying attention to such folks.
However, the software for the Merlin, though it is in fact "compatible" with W2k, does not work quite as the included directions imply. When I installed it, the modem refused to connect, citing a "rasdial error 668" or similarly informative, user-friendly, somethin'-to-go on message.
I repeated the directions several times (hey, waiting on hold for first Verizon and then Novatel is plenty of time to write a novel or three), thinking I was doing something wrong
So, Yes, I am a non-intuitive computer user in general, point taken. But without more than an hour in total hold time to tech support (and not at a busy time of day, either) I would have no clue how to make this (actually, but awkwardly) compatible software work with my win2k install.
Could one make the same complaint about software distribution (and about font installation) under Linux? Yup. I think those are easily it's weakest points for certain categories of current / potential users. (students
timothy
*Unpractically speaking, the machine also came with a DVD drive and software.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I don't know if this trick works in W2k, but on the NT4 CD is something called the HQTool (Hardware Query Tool) that is supposed to check your hardware for compatibility with NT before you attempt to intall it. You have to use rawrite.exe to copy an image to a floppy, and lo and behold, the OS on the floppy is MS DOS 6.22. That trick has saved me numerous times when I needed a DOS boot floppy.
that those without balls, i.e. women and unix (with a good CLI, the only ball on the system, the one in the mouse, is not needed), are the only ones who can stand against the creeping forces of invasion of their personal computers.
Maybe there's a promotional campaign in this...
Fight Microsoft! Be more like a woman! You don't really need your balls, so join the ranks of Unix!
Hmm, I don't think those slogans are going to make Linux much more popular.
--------
When I foolishly installed ME, thinking it was like 98 with sprinkles, it pissed all over my system. First I lost some .DLLs that I had to restore by hand. Then I discovered that lo and behold, they had killed off pure DOS mode. So no more old DOS games that can't run in a box. Sure, fine, I'll resurrenct an old P-166 and install DOS. Then I had the !*!*!ing "most recent programs in your Start Menu" feature rear its ugly head, and like Krusty the Klown after viewing the Soviet version of Itchy & Scratchy, "Worker and Parasite", I said "What the hell is that?!" So I turned off pretty much every new feature I could fine to make it work less sucky.
... nothing! Windows sucks! +1 insightful! YEAH! Thank you for your pity.
The point is
In te Fusion review,
"And to combat the relatively tiny amount of disk space that would likely be available, the early designers of Windows invented DLLs, or dynamic link libraries, which are files that simply contain code that can be shared between multiple applications and the operating system, simultaneously, so that this code wouldn't need to exist on the system in numerous locations."
So, he is in fact claiming that MS invented DLLs.
-----------------------------------------
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
(sort of like various distros of Linux with subtle incompatibilities because of differently located libraries etc.
I didn't mean to distort the point of that sentence; the review I think is a little glib in accepting that a list of compatibilies for tons of applications will work correctly in all cases it covers.
It sounds like for many applications (perhaps even all but a handful, but I dunno which ones or how important they are) the built-in database should be sufficient (is it built in? is it internet-available and constantly updated? not clear from article
All versioning does this (at least potentially), but the larger the leap the greater the risk
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Assuming MSFT is able to deliver on what it promises (friendly, relatively easy to use OS, built on top of stable, secure code), we're finally getting somewhere. Fsck MS DOS and all the age old compatibility hierarchy, build something that makes sense now and will make sense in the foreseeable future, and go from there. All I want is something i can run a webserver on if i need, but plays quake hella quick, and doesn't need rebooting every 4 hours while i work in photoshop! Throw in a decent TCP/IP stack, and they may (finally) have a decent OS.
"I don't want you to be true, I just want to make love to you!" - Foghat
Gee... I'm very surprised that a beta tested would complain about beta software... Keep in mind that this is not "Release Candidate 1". Anything that actually works in a beta version is a bonus, and you can't make judgements on the outcome of the final product based solely on the beta. Remember, if it were perfect, they would have released it already...
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
No there was A, B & C
Win 95 Service Pack 1 = A
OSR2 = B
OSR2.1 = B, added USB support
OSR2.5 = C, added Internet Explorer 4
Having installed the various releases literally hundreds of times, I 've gotten to know the subtleties.
I just sent the following email to my coworkers for a chuckle:
e ssional/reviews/zdwindows.asp
Subject: Notice from the management
It has come to our attention that according to a study commissioned by
Microsoft, under normal use, Windows 98 will require a reboot every 1.8
working days. With this in mind, we will be monitoring each of your
workstations for the next month. Anyone who does not reboot every 4 days
or less on average is assumed not to be using their computer to its
potential and will have to justify the continued maintenance of their
computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/prof
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This is typical ZDNET...M$ is good, the latest from Redmond is the greatest - even if it doesn't work....M$ just as well could buy ZDNET, since ZDNET and M$ appear to be but buddies anyway...I have only seen a small handfull of unbiased editorials in any of their content.....
Now don't get me started on that microsquish marketing person Kim Komando...
Netscape 4.x is misdesigned as a single user program
Well, netscape 4.x was written back when Winblows was misdesigned as a single user OS. You can't really expect a retroactive fix; it would require a lot of rewriting.
You would consider a user level Unix program that required elevated privs a bug, right?
Yes, but I would also consider a kernel that mindlessly forbids me to use insecure (or more likely non-GPL) software a bug too. The option should be there, regardless of if it's a bad idea. Otherwise, it seems like political policy rather than security. Microsoft is treading dangerous ground if this is true. They're already in trouble for unfairly pusing IE on win9x users. Disabling it altogether in the next release will look very bad.
0 1 - just my two bits
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Lots of code that does funky stuff with network interfaces has to rewritten for w2k. A couple of utilities had to be upgraded when I switched from w98. Nothing to do with winsock2 either, since I already had that on the w98 install. I don't know any details since I'm not a windows programmer, so it could be just sloppy programming on the authors' part.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Help make the world a little more like 1930's Germany.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The currently available, (whether still being sold by MS itself or not, these are still comercially available) Microsoft OSes are as follows: Windows 3.11 for Work Groups Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Windows NT 4.0 Server Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Server Windows 95 Windows 95A Windows 95B Windows 95B+ Windows 95C Windows 98 Windows 98 Upgrade Windows 98SE Windows 98SE Upgrade Windows ME Windows ME Upgrade Windows 2000 Professional Windows 2000 Server Windows 2000 Advanced Server Windows 2000 Datacenter Windows CE (I even have a copy hehehe dont ask me how cause I don't even know!) PocketPC (or whatever they changed CE into!) the 98-ME upgrades editions count as seperate OSes due to their MAJOR differences! (The fact that they screw up even more thant he full-versions is another matter. :-)
That's 21 OS products by my count!
Then we have linux which covers all of those bases pretty much in one package. Oh RedHAt and allt hem have special packages for special purposes but download their distro off the net and it will do whatever you want!
Derek Greene
I'm complaining about drivers. They really aren't written very well and it seems like major companies were not ready to support windows 2000. HP is a good example, when windows 2000 was released, installing every piece of hardware from HP on a windows 2000 box was an adventure. But this may be fixed now.
This doesn't really matter in a business environment, but at home I don't want to deal with the hardware incompatibilities.
Dear Slashdot:
My computer runs a somewhat non-standard operating system called "Linux." This "Linux" operating system does not come with Microsoft Windows fonts. Hence, I cannot see the Microsoft "smart quotes" that appear in the "MS 'Whistler' Looks Solid To ZDNET" story. If you could be so kind as to fix the headline, me and my fellow "Linux" users would appreciate it.
Thanks.
Ha! The lameasses from HP won't support their hw under 2000. I had an HP burner (7200i) and you have to _PAY_ to get the 2000 drivers! Excuse me? Idiots, that's the last they'll see of my money. Plextor however, works great for me...
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
buying a copy of w98se just to boot to the dos prompt legally seems kind of... well, if not silly, at least overly anal. if it's that important, freedos works too.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's telnet client continues to suck rocks through a straw. Try running "pine" using MS Telnet. You'll be hitting ctrl-L a lot. I actually use VNC to connect to an X session on my linux gateway to use telnet.
I recall that ZDNET, at the time of Windows 98, considered Windows 98 quite stable. If an individual has never experienced the thrill of Wild Thing or various other large rollercoasters, the rides at the local carnival are 'quite thrilling,' while in retrospect, they're quite dull compared to the thrill aquired from Wild Thing/Space Mountain/etc... The same thing here applies for stability. If you consider 3 days uptime, with no crashing, stable, then something that provides a week of decent uptime w/o crashing would be considered potentially rock solid. Likewise, someone who considers a year of uptime without crashes solid would consider such uptime as a week, or even several months, potentially laughable.
It's my opinion that MS may have possibly made the initial releases of Windows less stable on purpose - they could get away with it, because their marketing was so efficient. Then, as later versions were released, each subsequent release would look increasingly more 'rock solid,' based on the previous version's vantage of 'stable,' which in turn was based on the version previous to that being less stable. The reason I believe they did this was because they knew they didn't have the ability to compete with the big boys - all the various UNIX varients - based on stability. Eventually, the hype of their OS becoming more stable, and being even more rock solid, and such, would weaken the minds of the already weak, thus bringing them more market share...
Just my .035$
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
And what's with this "Power off my computer." option? This will undoubtedly cause confusion when you try to reboot it. Or can you not reboot it? That would be a MAJOR flaw... ;-)
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
The Epox EP-8KTA (Socket A as opposed to the 7KXA's Slot A) also has this feature, although I haven't used it yet...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
g_mcbay wrote:
...
:) Actually, Linux has always seemed to run pretty well, and Windows 2000 seems like the nicest Windows version I've used so far. It's been a pain to re-install but in everyday use not that bad, at least for several weeks. (Computer software is measured on the scale "horrible" to "almost acceptable" and "not that bad" is I think a positive statement.)
...
"Clearly your problems are laptop related. Poorly supported crappy components, I'd wager..."
Well, yes, clearly laptop-related. True -- this *is* a laptop! And I can't easily replace it with a large tower system strapped to my back. But poorly supported crappy components? I doubt it. This is a pretty high-end laptop in general (ok, high medium-end maybe), and HP is not too shabby in general. (At least the OmniBooks) It even has a cute little sticker that says it's "Designed for MS Windows 2000 Professional / Windows 98"
"Why bother writing anti-Microsoft FUD focusing on the fact that Windows runs poorly on that system and then, at the end, barely mention in passing that Linux also runs pretty poorly?"
Hey, that's not what I said!
What I did say is that the *combination* somehow screws things up; perhaps loading Linux on here in a dual-boot config screws up Windows somehow, but it's not yet been the Linux install which has failed to start. I'm open to explanations of whatever variety.
I'd be happy to get rid of Windows altogether, as soon as I can get Merlin to work with it; I know this is possible, I just haven't figured it out yet for myself. It sure would be nice if companies like Novatel said "Heck, we don't care if you run CP/M on it -- here's a driver, now buy our modem!"
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
tried it out, works acceptably. It's no Eterm, and it's not ssh as you say, but it's there.
... it's something I've never really caught onto very well. Different strokes, all that.
I have some issues with the MS UI folks though, with the whole "run" dialogue thing
Thanks for the info.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
no thanks. I'm happy with by dual-booting (win98se & rh6.2) system. I really don't want to deal with windows 2000 incompatibilities at home. It's bad enough I have to do it at work.
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (Huge mainframe replacement dedicated servers)
Mainframe replacement hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
The reason for this is simple: a significant reason for upgrading your Windows PC is that Windows runs all the latest games, which rely on ever-faster CPUs, RAM and video cards. As a result, people wanting to play Quake, Quake 2, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, Tribes and the multitude of cutting-edge games in their full glory and at maximum speed, upgrade. The single most popular multiplayer game (mod) in history, Counter-Strike, does not have a linux client (as it uses the HL engine). Only several of the latest games are available under Linux, and those that are do not generally run as fast under the latest hardware as they do in Windows, due to sub-par driver support.
... heck, where's decent USB support?!?
Remember, that as well as being the mainstream office productivity platform, Windows has DirectX and the attendant hardware drivers that make it the only serious gamers' platform around.
btw, yes, I know NVIDIA cards run under X. Are the drivers as good as under Win32? No. What about my Vortex2 sound card for linux driver support? Not even close. And my force feedback steering wheel? Nope. And my digital joystick? Nah, mine's not listed amongst those supported. And my ultra-smooth intellimouse?
Linux needs a lot of work before it finds a home on my home desktop. You can bet Microsoft won't stop improving Windows, either.
Now, how is this relevant, and not entirely a rant? Simple: Linux, and the Open Source/Free Software development models rely on the end-user performing the development work. This generally means programmers. Are programmers as likely as Joe User to want good gaming support under linux. Not likely. They'd rather have new Apache modules, new SAMBA features, and a better GNOME. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, as long as this is the case, linux will continue to be a fringe OS. Frankly, Joe User could care less about the occasional cost of upgrades, as long as Team Fortress 2, Wolfenstein 2000, Halo, Tribes 2, Pool of Radiance and Need for Speed VI run well when they are released, and as long as Word and Excel continue to look "cooler" with each upgrade whilst being backward-compatible.
I won't even go into the whole web browser (in)compatibility thing, as it is not really directly related to Linux, although it does contribute to linux being less that ideal as a desktop platform.
All that said, keep up the good work, those folks who do actual open source or Free Software development. You're the reason my firewall/gateway doesn't need rebooting, and runs on my Pentium ex-doorstop.
...sounds like a pretty good reason for hardware vendors to support linux to me. Little by little, tooth by tooth, Linux gains ground.
I can imagine some Russian hacker laughing his ass off right about now.
... [it's very] Stable."
Announcer: "We've secretly switched the Win2K Whistler kernel with Linux 2.4, let's see if anyone notices."
eWeek: "Amazing
Announcer: "We've also secretly switched the Win2K Whistler GUI with BeOS."
eWeek: "...the option of having the operating system group multiple iterations of the same application..."
Announcer: "And because we had full access to the source code for 2 weeks, we also added our own backdoor so we could do it again, to your machine."
eWeek: "...a widely deployed remote-control feature..."
Announcer: "Ok, just kidding, the backdoor was added by Microsoft, even we aren't that evil."
Hammer of Truth
Yes. And my Palm is also a PC that fits in a my pocket, but it is not a PocketPC.
;)
Oh, the confusion.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Stick with W2K - its good.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
No scrollable buffer. Honestly, I can't figure out why someone would use telnet.exe when they have HyperTerminal on their system. (Except for the NTLM authentication.)
No, it has a scrollable buffer.
Start Menu->Run: telnet xxx.xx.xxx.xxx
Click the Icon (top right of window), select Properties from the Menu.
Select the Layout tab.
Change Screen Buffer - Height to however long you want it to be. The default is 300 lines.
Use the scrollbar then to scroll.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
http://telneat.lipetsk.ru/
~ppppppppö
Last time I checked, reading or writing disks larger than 512 MB under FreeDOS caused irreparable damage to their filesystems (format c: anyone?). Patches Are Welcome.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wonder applications may not run properly. Lotus? Probably. Corel WordPerfect? Probably. Netscape? Probably.
Whistler does have built-in Voice Recognition...this is pretty cool.
Damn, I have had voice recognition installed with my OS for about five years now. Innovations from Microsoft? Nope.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
DR DOS is a $39 shareware clone of DOS. FreeDOS is a GPL'd clone of DOS with a few bugs (e.g. it irreparably corrupts any drive larger than 512 MB).
Will I retire or break 10K?
god forbid my favorite OS _ever_ be examined for its 'type handling.' is that some sort of sick joke? just because M$ makes fonts an operating system priority, everyone else to, as well?
.3 cm tall anyways, so serifs are just plain out of the question.
fuck that! you want purty fonts, go use BeOS. i don't like anything on my screen to be larger than about
fixed fonts, kids, they get work done.
Yeah, it's SlashDot all right.
Original post: I've had problems with Windows 2000 on my laptop, but none with Linux-Mandrake except one caused by Windows 2000 hosing a partition.
This reply: Hey, if you say an MS product sucks, you have to say Linux sucks too (despite a total lack of any mention of this in the original post, and presumably in the original poster's experience).
Moderators: Oh look, a different point of view. If it's different, it must be good (things like "actually reading the original post" be damned!). Mod it up!!!
To reiterate: all the original poster said at the end of his post was that a "combination of Windows 2000, Linux and this Laptop has been unhappy overall". Nothing about Linux actually being the problem, mind you -- just a mention that it is there.
Be afraid, be very afraid!
One more very good reason to switch to Linux.
www.enthea.org
It's a ripoff of BeOS's Tracker
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Windows 9.x line as quickly as possible. From what I remember this the quickest I ever seen microsoft turn around a new OS one year. This is going to kill alot people folks out there that has to keep up with the newest os but at the same time keep old apps running I do not envy these people. Have fun
I've found win2k to be pretty damned stable. Uptimes of 20-30 days on a windows box isn't really bad in my opinion. Of course My linux box has uptimes of exactly what my power companies uptime is. :) Who's actually going to want "whistler"? besides the guy who ended up gettting it w/a new machine? of course that's the same as debating getting 95->98->ME.
Suckas!!!
your OS has very little to do with your FPS in quake3. Last I heard, the drivers for most video cards will allow higher FPS in win9x compared to windows nt / 2000. The reason is that they are more mature and optimized. The fact that Windows 2000 is stable under a load is nice, but every OS can do that. I have never had any problems with my gaming system running Windows 98SE either, but that doesn't mean Windows 98SE it is a good OS :)
That wasn't the only reason. I wanted something to fall back on for the several apps that I expected to have trouble running from Win2K, such as Adaptec EZCD Creator 3.x, which came bundled with my Plexwriter CDRW, and Bay Networks VPN client (for logging into my employer's network from home via my cable modem). And since both OS's were being paid for by my doctoral thesis advisor out of his research budget that he's having trouble spending, I wasn't too concerned :-).
Glad to hear your system vendor provided DOS disks. This is, however, not the norm. Yet.
"I don't mean to sound like an ass, but that kinda is the point of a beta."
Don't worry, sometimes when pointing out the obvious you just can't avoid it.
No surprise there--they haven't written an unbiased article in years. I'm just amazed that they still have _any_ elasticity left in their anal sphincter.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Indeed, this is a very good point. I wonder if this will prompt hardware manufacturers to produce a Linux flashing program. You could have a basic GNU/Linux system on a floppy with the flashing program. An image could be available for download from the manufacturers' website,ftp, etc. You would then rawrite/dd this to a floppy, boot off it, and point it to where the new BIOS is that you've downloaded to your harddrive.
The main problem I see with this is Linux support for NTFS - not much use if you can't read the partition with the BIOS image on. OK, NTFS read support is there (though does it work on Win2k/Whistler?) but hardware manufacturers can't rely on a method that may stop working if MS change NTFS again.
--
i read some replies and i get the feeling that most posters of slashdot ..would hate to see a stable MS OS
..not windows ..i am..what i am HAHAAAA
which i think is weird
linus trovald as far as i know made linux for as a replacement for unix
so that students get a free unix experience
and linux is doing very well in that
linux is already replacing unix machines
anyway
i think MS will manage in few years to make a stable OS
and linux will become more popular in education
apple will continue to be a snob product
and sun will go bankrupt
i would also like to say
sheep for the sheep human for the human i just wonna keep my soul alive
It seems there is a Windoze for everyone.
Xbox for gamers.
Win2000 Server
Win2000 pro
Win2000
Win98
WinME
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Interesting - do you have proof that it would cost $200K or are you just using some number that you think sounded nice and big?
Having both MS and Linux on my site today, I'm going to make a big guess that you really have no idea what Linux costs to implement.
Gee, it's free, right?
He may be claiming to invent DLLs, which may in fact be true.
DLL, or dynamic link library, is a term and concept unique to Windows users.
Mmm, I'm not sure about the cronology but I think that OS/2 1.0 had DLLs and that was before Windows 1.0.
Of course, OS/2 1.0 was a joint product of IBM and Microsoft, so maybe it was Microsoft who called them DLLs.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You can still buy WIndows 95... You can also still buy NT4 Server and Workstation. Might want to add those to your list.
Well yeah, what do you think allowed the DDOS attacks to happen?
:)
I find it funny that an OOTB install of Linux is far more remotely-useful then the equivelant NT install. Hell, Terminal Server is expensive and actually not that popular for l33t kiddies. Funny, that's one of Linux's big advantages, the lower inital cost of deployment (RH boxed has enough utilities to equal up to over $20k of NT licenses).
There are thousands of boxes to own out there to have, I've just never found enough incentive to want all em. Unless I wanted a bitchin d.net rank..
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
: I read somewhere that Whistler will feature a new feature
:)
to finally cure "DLL hell". Is this true?
A: It sure is. Back in the early days of Windows, before hard drives
were even widely available, Microsoft introduced the concept of
a shared code library called a "DLL" (Dynamic Link Library).
This sounds as if he's claiming dynamic linking as an innovation by Microsoft... hmmm... I'm no expert, so I could be wrong, but, did they REALLY?
- What exactly has Microsoft built atop Whistler? I though the article dealt with Whistler itself.
- Is there a word missing between "to" and "the"? I sense that the author was groping for something like "incentivize". Or perhaps "ease". It may seem a minor point, but the difficulty of choosing this word illuminates the shaky premise of the article, of which I'll say more below.
- This sentence cites "compatibility improvements" while the rest of the article warns that consumers will experience jarring incompatibility with the Win95 family. In fact, this incompatibility is cited at the end of the article as the sole disadvantage of Whistler.
I'm starting to notice a pattern to these articles which appear in the MS-centric press whenever MS flogs a new product. The reviewers try to sound objective, hence the gravely cautious weighing of advantages and disadvantages. But the writer is trapped in a conceptual framework in which the consumer's only choice is to upgrade now or upgrade later. Rather like an election in a one-party state, where you're free to vote for the dictator or not.It's striking how different this article is from anything reviewing goods or services available in a free market. The sense that the consumer is king, which has been such a great blessing of our capitalist system, is quite absent. In its place we see the harsh fiats of an all-powerful bureaucracy, such as the warning that Win98 (so recently announced!) will soon be unsupported.
Woooow..... I just took a peek at those screen shots can't they make that start bar a tad smaller?
"Quake 3 (@ 89 fps, 1024x768, 32 bit, everything turned up high)"
It reports about 90fps on my machine no matter how I configure it. 1280x1024 certainly looks and feels slower than 640x480. It must be a bug in the SMP code.
How can someone say that about any OS after only one week of actual use !!!
Hmmm, are you a clueless AC or intentionally trolling?
Anyway, OpenType (a font format) is orthogonal to ClearType (a font rendering algorithm tweak), so one can't be better than the other.
Sounds almost like they are moving in the general direction of virtual desktops (half assed and no where near as usefull of course ;-)
I've got to say this will make my life at work a little less painfull. The thing i notice more than anthing else when using windows (besides BSOD etc) is the lack of virtual desktops. It dives me nuts to have to put every single window in the same space.
btw. no chance of running linux at work, control room, shared PC (must be considerate to others for when i need a night off).
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ridiculopathy.com -> last-minute gore press-release: Bush eats babies
So now MICRO$QUISH gets to choose which "legacy" programs Whistler will support, and which ones it WILL NOT support, just by what it includes in this database? I can see it now, the companies that kiss Bill Gates' butt will be "in", and those that try to go it alone, especially those who manage to piss off Micro$squish, will be "out".
Micro$quish has FAR TOO MUCH POWER ALREADY. And I'll bet they don't have any plans to allow users to supplement this database to make their own favorites easier to use, either. Somebody needs to figure out how to hack into that compatibility database SOON!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Apple fell back to a very simple lineup and now it's Microsoft that has five different various options for everything. I hope they choke on it :)
Think about it- logically for every user there are four sorts of Windows that are _wrong_, correct? How much of a jump would it be to decide that all six are wrong and go with Linux, or Macintoshes? :)
Cut off Xbox (because it's not real and we'll never see it) and 98 (obsolete) and we still have four sorts of Windowses, of which three are wrong ;)
Win Ce for handhelds
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
A: It sure is. [...] In Whistler, applications will think they're copying their [DLL] files as usual, but the OS will manage the process so that they don't actually overwrite any existing files. Then, each time the application is run, Whistler will ensure that it only uses its copies of the files, ensuring that all apps run correctly and none of them are able to get in the way of other applications. Microsoft says that this feature will "isolate applications from each other, providing users with a 'run once, run forever' environment.
So basically M$ is negating the whole point of DLLs here. Great. Instead of one copy of BLOAT32.DLL, you'll have BLOAT32.DLL 4.0.1, 4.0.2, etc. all taking up disk space and RAM! Woohoo! Thanks, Bill!
No really. MSNBC dos-covers that Whistler is great. OK I'll stop chortling now.
Anyway if you go back to the other article you'll find that:
MS unified consumer and corporate code bases? Who broke them apart to begin with?
Has a new OS that's just as stable as 2K and is also usable. Is this a rousing endorsement? Which is worse, that everything other than 2K is not stable or 2K is not usable?
WTF is the PROFESSIONAL CLIENT? Isn't that precisely what MS in the first sentence of the article is getting away from? What is this >> more better faster good Whistler? The Real Whistler?
Can also run W9x apps? And it's more stable running them than native Win9x? Uh, you buy this? And there is a database of tweaks to help the now unified corporateconsumer (tm) run stuff? Yeah we used to call this the read me file.
And there is a Win9x compatibility mode. We have that now its called a DOSBOX and the drivers don't work the same way. Alternatively you can DOSBOOT now if you don't mind filename problems.
What kind of applications don't work well or at all with Whitlesser? Are these MS logoed apps?
The driver DB will be unified? When will that occur? When MS forces the application houses to scrap or rewrite all of their applications to fit yet another arbitrary MS requirement?
The reason MS is not a player in the handheld market is not because of a distinction between NT and Win9x that is blurred by PDA's. Who writes this shit? MS is not a player in the PDA market because Wince is shit plain and simple. Nobody likes it, it doesn't work and the hardware vendors can't keep up with the hamster wheel changes from MS.
YAAAAAAAAY the GUI is different. The windows appear "flatter". Uh sounds like BeOS or Gnome. Wooopeeeee! I gues this is what they mean when they say INNOVA-SHUN.
Clear Type - wow that's great.
Stacked buttons on the task bar that explode to cascading lists. I'm shocked that they didn't patent this. After all anything that slows you down should be fiercely protected as a unique enhancement. Why do they have this? Couldn't they just make the buttons smaller using the new easy to read clear type fonts. Ug - smack on head. I forgot, Clear Type doesn't actually work except with MS Office.
Requesting remote takeover using email? So I send a request to tech support allowing them to take over my machine and fix it when I SAY SO. Ok I guess they'll just respond immediately and jump on that while I watch. Yeah sure, they are just waiting around now for the phone to ring.
I didn't hear the hardware requirements so here is my guess:
700Mhz P3 or better (1Ghz recommended)
256MB SDRAM or more (half gig recommended)
700MB disk space (not inclding 500MB Swap space)
Voodoo3 or similar video or better.
And let's not forget:
There is no migration from Win9x, no tools to do so w/o a complete tear down and rebuild.
There is no possible migration path from W2k to Whistler because the cost of 2k is so much higher.
There is no possible integration of Whistler clients an 2K clients on the same MS network because the security model is different. The tools to do that integration will be made available on a later version of 2K server that will require new licenses and completely different network topology using a new and improved version of Active Directory.
Well maybe some of this will not occur, but is none of it true? Does 25 years of glarking this gronked crud not tell you anything????
MS 'improvements' are the IUDs of computer code - - - for the truly unloved.
I wonder if the MS secret police... er BSA... will scan registries for illegal sofware installs. ( licensce for 1 machine running on N boxes for example )
Also this will be great for gathering marketing data. Oh goodie, let's send 13 year olds to prison, they're 'hacker' us with VBA 'trojan worm viruses' if MS doesn't save us. Oh, wait I only run unices. =)
Operating Systems for desktops:
- Windows ME (for homes)
- Windows 2000 Professional (for corporate desktops)
Operating Systems for dedicated servers:Oddly enough it works under Win2K.
God, I can't wait for the election to be over. The campaign ads are going to peoples' heads!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You don't get his point [and neither did the moderator]. He's being sarcastic. The first guy said Windows 2000 didn't have a tlenet client [because he couldn't find it in his start menu]. The second guy said there is one, and by the same logic as the first guy, Linux didn't have a telnet client either because the KDE menu doesn't specifically say `telnet client'
either.
Yeah, but you can get a 60 gig drive for $250. Who cares about disk space?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Wow! You can upgrade your Linux kernel without rebooting? How do you do it?
He wrote about modularly upgrading the system... as long as he doesn't change the kernel version, he might be able to do it w/o rebooting...;)
Cthulhu fhtagn!
The OS does matter... especially WinNT based products. This is becuz Microsoft does not allow direct access to the hardware in WinNT based products. All games and software cannot access hardware directly, unless the driver works through the kernel. This is supposed to be a helpful thing to allow WinNT based products to be more stable (i.e. When Win9x products would crash, sometimes it would be due to the OS allowing writing to hardware that was already in use). This also constitutes new driver revisions and directx.
The biggest security hole sits between the keyboard and chair.
-Andrew McAllister
there is a reason that they have to do that... i know people who have been there too... and for anyone with any talent it is really boring... all busy-work nothing of any challange
Congratulations. You're having a pissing contest over a legacy app that sends password hashes in clear text over your network, has no redeeming features, has been completely replaced on all platforms free of charge by SSH, and is generally regarded as a flaming pile of insecure poo.
Keep arguing. Whichever of your operating systems encourages Telnet servers more, I'll make a note NOT to use.
"..and they'll fix it, like they did with the six things I found during the three years I tested Win2K. If every one of the "beta" testers did this, the product would be a far better product for it."
Unless you can point out otherwise for your particular case, only finding six things in three years is quite poor testing. That's two things per twelve monthes!
When I tested for Corel's Draw 7 Suite years back, we were -expected- to find atleast three things in a few weeks and then in later testing periods every week. People who could not find anything were slowly dropped from the program.
Where's the "My Porno" icon? I couldn't find it anywhere.
Slightly OT, but slightly related... Tell me this: how is it that I can have a FULLY functioning X11 server in win32 in about 2 megs of RAM when XFree86 takes like 30? What a piece of shit.
Because in Windows all system memory is accounted separately, plus you are looking at it with no bitmaps loaded. Think of it, if you have loaded a fullscreen background, how much memory will be 1024x768x24bpp? That's more than 2M already.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Which would seem a little dubious, since the OS itself refers to itself as a beta. Fucking idiot.
Actually if you ever heard from the MS people recuiting on campus you'll have to go "WTF?!!!". Cause work this out... they'll pay for your relocation, find you a place to stay, give you full health and benifits and other money eating shit. All for interns that stays for one summer. And you know what these interns do? We had a girl from Queen's who went and she tested encarta. In another word she used encarta and write up on bugs.
So that my friends is why it cost so damn much to get and run windows. Cause MS has to pay for all these extras and still make Billy millions every hour.
There can hardly be a reason to say MS isn't a monopoly. There isn't another way a company can afford to do this for each and every intern, they say about 700 each summer, they take in. The economics just don't work that way.
the review points out that by "leaving its Windows 9x code base behind, [Microsoft is] creating many potential Windows platform compatibility problems in the process,"
This is a distortion of what the point of that sentence was in the first place. If one takes in to account the sentence just before it in the actual article, the point that there will be compatibility problems is negated:
Whistler contains an application compatibility environment designed to allow the operating system to run many applications intended for Windows 98. This is particularly important because, with Whistler, Microsoft is leaving its Windows 9x code base behind, creating many potential Windows platform compatibility problems in the process.
don't mod me down just because I disagree with the post. I'm just clarifying something.
What MS probably imagines is a situation where Whistler users at home are connecting to the net through MSN, where all the access to the actual internet they will have will be through proxies (although I don't know what it's like now) and the internal network will be somehow monitored constantly or user's computers will be protected by the MSN software with exploit fixes released periodically, etc....
The canonical number for NT 4.0 is just under $5,000, but it's really hard to compare once you start talking about Terminal Server, and Licensing.
:)
Anything that comes with a standard Red Hat installation won't have anything like a per-seat (or per-ponnection or per-whatever) license fee; that model doesn't exist. So figure out what is the maximum amount of traffic or users that box can handle, and charge the equivalent amount on NT.
Of course they *both* cost something to implement. The difference under Linux is that if you do it right, it should cost significantly less to maintain. I've seen both boxes in use, and it's pretty hard to debug an NT bluescreen from the ColdFusion service because of some user that calls it with a Perl application... Under Linux, the box tends to stay up, and the users call if they have a problem...
But of course, that's just *my* experience with it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It uses the code base from Win2000, it's just being focues on home users, i.e. probably has fewer enterprise functionality, like WMI, servers etc.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I've been running Win2K since SP1 came out, and on my dual-Celeron box, it runs like a champ. A little memory hungry, but it responds gracefully under load. It has DirectX, USB, interrupt sharing, reparse points (think "symlink") and many other long-overdue goodies. AND it supports multiple processors.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Reminder to all trollers:
Do not attempt first post if you have a 28.8k modem.
//afree
--
Whoops, typo.. $200K is what i meant to say.
If anybody wants to check out (or make fun of) the new "flat" theme in Whistler, head over to Paul Thurrott's Windows SuperSite. He also has pictures of an older build.
Many flaws: such as winnuke? maybe it will be that big.
ETRN x
True. And if you go to some of our local car dealers you can still buy a 2000 model. That doesn't mean they're still in production. All it means is that the old inventory hasn't been cleared yet.
I've seen more functionality and stability in a piece of OSS at version 0.2 than in a final release of Windows.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
My .sig refers to BLIND REDIRECTS. I'm not dumb enough to click on links on untrusted sites without previewing the address. By "Blind Redirect" I mean something that has a page refresh to file:///c|/nul/nul/ Embedded images and javascript that fakes the address also piss me off.
All that aside, it also pisses me off when I'm helping other people out in the lab and they're using one of the Win95 machines and they don't understand why they keep getting a BSOD on a certain page.
Bite me.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I was a little nervous about using it, and I wouldn't use it on an unstable or overclocked system, just to be safe, but I have had zero problems with it.
The nice thing about it is that if you muff up the flash (used the wrong image, program crashed, etc) you can reflash, provided you don't reboot your machine.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
I just think the convergence of these technologies into the Operating System is a key to usability.
As I said in my previous post...this is a pretty cool feature to have 'right out of the box.'
I know it's not a technical innovation; however, it is a great innovation in the sense of user experience out of the box...a key to getting people to use and like your OS.
Jeff -- skibum, among other things
Another thing was the change from a.out to elf binary format. That caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people. Especially with shared libraries. People used a lot of tricks to make shared libraries and dynamic loading to work. Of course, with elf, there was a standard straightforward relatively simple way to do it and none of the old tricks would work anymore. So people had to rewrite parts of applications that used dynamic loading.
Wa-la, no more worries -- you now have a telnet that can handle ssh, that cuts & pastes simply by highlighting, has an unlimited scrollback buffer, and is supa-configurable.
Pull the same trick with, say, notepad.exe <-> gvim.exe, cmd.exe (or command.exe) <-> bash.exe, and install a few GNU programs (sed, grep, etc) in c:\winnt\system and you're well on your way to having a useful computer.
Have fun!
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Probably the user won't even have to open the malicious file any more because of some new cool feature of Outlook or IE... or .NET
Windows 2000 comes in 4 variations (plus an embedded version for hardware manufacturers - but we're talking about commercial OS's here)
- Windows 2000 Professional (Desktop OS)
- Windows 2000 Server (Small dedicated servers)
- Windows 2000 Advanced Server (Large dedicated servers)
- Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (Huge mainframe replacement dedicated servers)
Datacenter Server is only sold with hardware that supports it like the Unisys 32 processor systems.The Windows 98 family currently has one member
- Windows Millenium Edition (ME)
So, two Operating Systems with the same API and same device driver model with five total commercial distributions for different audiences. Is that too hard to remember?Yup... Solid as silly puddy.
MacOS X? I woul really like to see a comparison between both future OS's...
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
Where does one get "rawrite.exe"?
I'm a Linux/BSD sysadmin for an ASP here in town (Grand Rapids, Michigan). I can tell you for a fact that the total cost for setting up the Linux servers was $20 plus my weekly salary. I'm one person, I maintain 8 Linux servers and assist in developing new applications to run on 'em.(Got a little help from NDS I must admit.)
Why is the cost so low? Because I got my head outta my ass and read the fucking books. Anything that needs to be done on those machines, I can do. Because I got the knowledge, and most importantly, I got the source.
Now, we also have a cadre of +/- 5 NT/2000 admins here on any given week. For 5 NT servers. The licenses have cost $10,000+(at last estimate) including all apps, OS, and whatever else we got stuck with. I have no clue what the hell they run on those things, but it must be important for all the screaming they do. Unfortunately, only one of them seems to know anything about Partitioning and Networked file systems. In a nutshell, they've got thier heads up thier asses because the environment theyre working in encourages it. Hence they are less productive and they drive the costs way up.
Hence, as far as Linux and Whistler go in the server environment...BillyG is whistling past the graveyard. Linux TCO is NULL for those who take thier head outta thier ass and learn how it works. For those who dont wanna learn how to operate thier shit, I say FIRE THEM.
As far as home users go, maybe it'll work for them, maybe it wont. I dont care. As long as the servers remain free, I'm happy.
Laters.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've gotten dropped from one Corel beta for forgetting to put in my bugs before the deadline... very smart of them.
I got both W2K and 98SE OEM versions from software vendors I found on PriceWatch. Not pirated. Both were shrinkwrapped and had certificates of authenticity with anti-counterfeitting measures that would put the treasury department to shame.
You are barking down the wrong tree on this one. His problems clearly revolved around Win2k and other than a compatibility issue with his modem and Windows blowing away his Linux partition, his linux installation sounds like it is working fine.
While I personally expect laptops to be less stable than desktops, I do not think in this case his HP laptop was so much an issue as his installation and configuration of Win2k for it.
the Windows 98 family also has Windows 98SE,
I purchased a laptop (an IBM ThinkPad in which every piece of hw is supported by Linux:) less than a month ago and it came with w98se on it, so you're just dead wrong.
You did forget to mention that, in the cmd line interface, he needn't put an & sign at the end of his commands =)
tf-
Windows 2000 Data Center comes above Windows 2000 Adnvaced server. I think it's called Data center.
S.t.e.v.e.
Hate to say it, but Corel in my experience has been very fair in handling the deadlines. There was one week I knew I probably would not have made the required submittion count due to travel where I had no computer access. I contacted them well in advance of the deadline and was granted a reprieve.
Most testers were not dropped right away. After a few times of people failing to make the criteria, a warning was issued to all beta testers to start meeting the requirements and to make sure you do not miss the deadline otherwise you will be dropped after the next cycle.
If you can't meet deadlines and handle it in a professional manner, yeah, they probably did the "smart" thing. *shrug*
do you think microsoft just doesnt care about designing a secure OS and just waits for the public to do the security analysis for them?
this wouldnt surprise me at all..since i believe ms is all about pushing an os out the door than doing years of code reviews on it
Pretty disgusting to see a lighthearted joke used as a thread for hateful ones.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
...and here's what I think.
I hate the dumbed-down interface. Period. The new start menu is no more intuitive than the old one, and I'm thankful that there's at least a way to switch back.
I also -hate- the new "View as Tiles" mode in Explorer. It scales the icons up hugely with no anti-aliasing - and then makes the clickable area extend to the side. Can you imagine how confusing that'll be to a complete novice?
Theme support is spotty and inconsistant - Explorer remains unthemed, as does IE. (Same thing happens with Windowblinds, both these apps bypass the normal Win32 widget stuff)
Besides the modified UI, it's just plain ol' Win2k with a few added services and minor tweaks.
I realize most of this may be due to the fact that it's a beta, but I'm rather disappointed with what I've seen of it so far.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
When Windows 2k came out M$ pretty much cancelled MCSE for NT 4.0 (yes, I know that you could take the test once for free etc, etc, etc, but it was still an Atomic Wedgie to the Tech-world). Does this mean we can expect another pantsing come this time next year when they start requiring a new piece of paper to say you know how to use Windows (and that you're M$'s butt-monkey)? "We know that you paid $x to get your MCSE for NT and 2*$x for your Windows 2k MCSE, but you're just going to have to pay out of the nose like everyone else to get your Whistler Professional MCSE. But we're not in it for the money. We're just trying to keep the standard up to date."
I'm using a laptop which dual-boots Windows 2000 and Linux Mandrake. It's an HP OmniBook 4150, with 128MB of RAM and a 650MHz PIII (ridiculously overpowered, in other words). [Overall, btw, I like it -- better keyboard than most laptops, decent screen, dual pointers, not *too* heavy ... free plug, HP, now send me my free laserjet;) ]
;) All I need is a little page of handy instructions ...
I've had it now for I think 2.5 months. The machine came with Windows 2000, and almost as soon as the battery was charged, I installed Mandrake 7.1 (thanks Eugene), which went on hitch-free.
Within weeks though, Windows became unusable, first with small glitches, then increasing instability, then crashing at startup. [Aside: I should explain why I have it at all -- because, like Roblimo, I can't get my Merlin wireless modem to work friendly with Linux. Eternal gratitude and a cool T-shirt to anyone successful in giving me a dummy-level walkthrough which *works* to get it going -- I've had some of the smartest people in the world try and fail thus far;)]
So I re-installed, from scratch, using the included "recovery disks." Like most people, I imagine, I did not backup any more than the few files I'd managed to get on a floppy when the system started to go flakey. (C'mon now, show of hands, how many people have reliable backups of the contents of their laptop?) I found that the recovery disks barely qualify for that name, since they certainly don't allow you to recover much of your sanity. The likeable IRC client I'd finally managed to find (not as good as Xchat, but passable), putty (since MS does not include any SSH client, nor even a telnet client, Mozilla M18 (downloaded *by modem*!!!) -- all gone.
At that point I had to re-install Linux, too, since the rescue procedure considerately hoses *all* your partitions, not just the ones with the problem-child Windows. In fact, the rescue disk has remarkably few options -- it's Wipe Completely or Cancel and Fume at the Brokeness;)
This Friday it happened again, with even less warning -- screen went crazy, then system refused to so much as *boot* Windows. Linux still came up happily, though. So I was able to rescue some things by openeing the windows partition under Linux, grabbing the files and sticking them on a floppy. So at least I'll be able to get them soon. [Note: MS should bundle Linux with Windows as -- and I've seen it labeled this way at some computer stores -- a "utility program."]
I have not used Windows all that much in my life, but for what it's worth my experience with the particular combination of my laptop, Windows 2000 (and note, Linux as well) has not been happy overall. Maybe Whistler will improve on this, but so far it'd have to, IMO;)
Perhaps I'm doing something funny, but that's the truth. (Of course, I can crash any computer, simply by being near it.)
Please can't somebody help with the merlin?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The taskbar thing has been available on BeOS for years. Whos following who?
Mods away!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Everybody's got one, but I'll inject mine here at the risk of being a bit OT.
It seems that Microsoft is pushing towards the ultimate appliance interface. They do not want (nor do most people want) a computer in your home. They want an appliance. You turn it on and do what you have to do through their interface and you pay them for the service they are providing you. Now, I and many others do not find this appealing or even think it is a "GOOD THING" with respect to computing. However, the majority of people do not know, nor do they desire to know much about the internals of a computer or its operating system.
I think Microsoft is actually providing a useful service to those people who do not wish to learn about computers and merely are looking for an appliance to play games and write emails on.
Those of us who do have a desire to learn about the internals of a computer, its OS, and the general administration of a server will benefit from the many other options we have available to us. There is Linux, FreeBSD, OPENBSD, Solaris, TruUnix64, MacOS X, ad naseum.
I think in the long run however, this computer as an appliance mentality will undermine the growth of the future Computer Science majors and Software Engineers. People become to accustomed to the computer==appliance model of thought, there *could* be a serious decline in the interest of computing (where computing equals programming and general hackery.)
I see nothing wrong with providing a service people want as long as it *does not* infringe on the rights of others who do wish to learn more than how to use an appliance.
Computers should be easier for people to use, but consumers should also have the choice to own a computer and not an appliance.
Hope that wasn't too much of a rant.
Regards,
Dan
I don't know about you, but methinks the LSB needs to grow some balls!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Is it just me, or is MS releasing AOL 5.0? Take a look at this screenshot and decide for yourself.
Did anyone notice that GUIs are getting flatter everyday (kinda like models.) Back during the Motif days you had these huge, thick window panes and these massivly raised buttons. Then you got into Win9x/NT4/2K with its more delicate features, and now you can barely see the raised effects in in Whistler.
PS> Since nobody uses AOL, I'll just tell you. The Control Panel art-style is awefully similar to the style of the AOL icons.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, there's some problems in the Be scene at the moment, there always have been. Personally, I'm just crossing my fingers Be knows what it's doing, and in the meantime, keeping a close eye on Atheos.
-lx
I know. I just got very busy (lucky me), and they just plain dropped me. Oh, well. I didn't want it anyway. WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux is a slow, bug-infested piece of crap. No amount of beta testing will fix that.
The NT/2K/Whistler product line will never be a standalone complete end-user system solution until MS provides the ability to create a bootable DOS floppy from within this product line. Just about every BIOS flashing utility (not just system BIOS, but peripheral card BIOSes and possibly even some CDRW device firmware) requires booting to a DOS prompt in order to run the flashing utility. What does every NT-based system vendor tell their clients to do when they need to flash their BIOS? Find somebody with a W9X machine and format a bootable floppy. When I built my W2K system, not only did I buy an OEM copy of W2K, but I also picked up a copy of W98SE, just to make sure I had a (legal) way to boot to a DOS prompt for these situations.
Isn't there a problem with the new Windows 2000 directory service? I got the impression that it requires all of the servers to be running Windows 2000.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Doesn't MS own the PC-software magazine industry?
Of course it looks "stable" to them. Like they even know what to look for.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Open up a console window, type telnet mysite.com.
What's so hard about that?
*fffwwoooooo....*!
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Honestly, this isn't specific to Microsoft. Just about all of the big companies (Intel, IBM, Motorola, Lucent, Cisco, Sun, etc..) do something like this. High tech companies will do anything to get good people. The company that I interned for offered me $3K just to come back as an intern for the next summer. It would have been $5K if I was going to be a senior.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you think I run Win98 by choice, you're gravely mistaken. We don't all have the option of our preferred OS when we're at school or at work. Hence my point. They've stopped being funny. That's all.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Yeah. While Apple is going for photo-realistic in its new OS X, MS seems to be going for "cartoony" with Whistler and the new MSN Explorer, etc.
I really don't like it. There are so many UI improvements they could make that would be functional and useful... instead they dumb-down things and blow up the size of everything. I spent an hour just turning off and reconfiguring crap on Win2k... stupid 'fade in' menus that wasted time, and the stupid "big icon" default display in Explorer windows to name two things. Gads.
I don't WANT a cartoony Nickelodean style dumbed-down big type huge icon interface. I need to get some work done. The clear-crispness of the OS X is vastly superior to anything I've seen come out of MS (and I'm not generally a Mac person).
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
IANAMCSE, but you can run 2000 servers in mixed mode, which supposedly allows them to integrate with NT 4.0. In my limited experience (a single subnet with 1 Win2K DC and 1 NT 4.0 member server) it was reasonably OK, but my application was far from critical. Not sure about what would happen if you tried to integrate an NT 4.0 domain controller. I know that it didn't like my Samba "domain controller", but that could just have been lack of knowledge on my part.
I have no use for M$ products.
They can't do jack shit in what im doing.
and don't support half the hardware on my
machines. Please explain to me HOW
i can run postscript docs etc.. on win?
BLAH, you can't. Win doesn't support jack
shit. Doesn't support my hardware either.
Not only that but im not spending $200 on a peice
of shit that won't be able to stay running for 2 weeks.
You seem like the type that is fucking stupid enough
to rely on a company to provide your security as well
as your code. You are a lemming, a sheep, and
bill gates is your fucking shepard. You are a pawn
in a game being played by a monopoly. You are a follower
not a leader. You are a lazy man, not a worker.
You are a person who is easily mislead, and too trusting.
If M$ can't protect their own fucking machines......
what makes your dumbass think you can? You
don't even have the source. They do. And they
still can't protect their own shit.
Your rantings are childish, illogical, and
out right stupid.
You are afraid to show yourself for fear you might
be overtaken and conquered. You are afraid for
people to see who you really are because you are
afraid they will laugh at your dumbass. Well, you
are right, if you play with fire you get burned . Well, im
sitting here laughing my ass off at you now. The
people at slashdot are laughing at you, not with you.
Your too fucking stupid to know.
There is a special place in hell for people
who follow others, and 'do what they do'
and jump off the bridge when they do.
So BURN you damned lemming. BURN.
ETRN x
The last few BIOS upgrades I have performed were done with vendor disks that included their own copy of DOS. And that's good: I shouldn't have to depend on any particular OS installation to upgrade the hardware. All I want from the vendor is a bootable floppy or CD, and that's what vendors increasingly provide.
On the topic of OSes, there's this one real funny site I went to recently which tells us about Microsoft's next generation of Os's. Its funny but a scary thought Anyways go to MS Linux !!
The duality weakens
You're thinking of Star Trek and the Enterprise A, B, C, D, E, etc. With Windows 95 there was Win95, Win95A, Win95b, and Win95b can be broken down further to OSR2, OSR2.1, and OSR 2.5 (which only added USB to OSR2.1).
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
A Security risk to the system, or Microsoft?
This sig intentionally left blank.
Whistler Pro - I turned off moron mode as I found it difficult to live with the new interface, which might be fine for my mum, but useless for me. Remember, this is a Microsoft beta (equivalent to 0.4-0.7 or therabouts in most open source software). When I was beta'ing Win2K, Win2K went from NT 4.0 look with new barely new color schemes and Win98 pop outs in build 1477 through to Win2K's look and feel in about six hundred new builds. Expect Whistler's appearance to change until about April next year.
It seems stable enough. It has ATA-100 support (something that I had to retroactively add to Win2K when I got my Dell) and the screen drivers seem snappy enough. I'm intrigued to find that people are already reporting stuff doesn't work as everything I've tried (including a couple of games) works fine for me. My Logitech USB joystick just worked, and my USB Canon Ixus similarly just worked (in fact, the new features in Whistler for this stuff is just fantastic).
I like the new user "disconnect" feature. It allows multiple users to remain logged on and you can quickly move between them (if you have adequate memory).
I like the way print drivers seem to be kicked out of kernel mode. My 710c never gave me grief in Win2K, but now there's even less chance with Whistler.
Other than that, it's too early to make a full judgement. I've already found one potential security flaw and I have a negative installation experience during the express upgrade, but as I'm a tester and this is a beta, I've told Microsoft about both issues, and they'll fix it, like they did with the six things I found during the three years I tested Win2K. If every one of the "beta" testers did this, the product would be a far better product for it.
Andrew van der Stock
I don't like them simply because of their position.
I don't use them, and I fail to see the reason why
anyone should. Its simply wrong to pay $200 for
a product that doesn't even include the source.
Maybe if M$ would make a decent product (like Win 3.11)
then maybe I would use them again. But untill that day I will
not. I have yet to see a product made by them as stable as
their 3.11. No, 2000 doesn't come close. Reboot this,
and that. Its outright dumb the way it was made. reboot
to install a driver? heh. No other OS does that accept
Mac. Reboot for machine-local security policy. Duh.
that makes a lotta sense. Win is just badly engineered.
It is very limited to what it can do, and is only good for
1 thing. A desktop. But even at that position, it won't
work with half the equipment on my LAN.
If you would quit being such a dumbass we could talk
like 2 people, instead of you drifting off the subject
with stupid remarks.
ETRN x
Why do you keep sayingthat Microsoft/BillG claimed to have invented DLLs?
Of course, it was Al Gore who claimed the invention.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Some more good rants on this topic:
Ellen Ullman in Salon - The Dumbing Down of Programming
Peter Merholz in Stating the Obvious - Whose "My" Is It Anyway?
Whister is just more needless moneygrubbing from Microsoft.
MS has these current distributions:
Windows 2000 Professional (successor to NT 4 workstation)
Windows 2000 Server (successor to NT 4 server)
Windows 2000 Advanced Server (above + backoffice + other new shit). Terminal services are now included, rather than in a separate package (NT 4 terminal server edition, etc)
And windows ME (successor to windows 98).
The rest are OLD and deprecated.
And we don't count 'CE' because that's not really windows.
The new OS seems to be coming at a lightning pace. This might be fine for home users in the 9x train, since they'll likely not bother with a new OS unless they are buying a new machine. However, is the corporate world really going to buy into a new iteration of Windows so quickly? My unscientific survey of local businesses (places that friends work) seems to indicate that the corporate world is just now starting to stick it's toe into the Win2K product. One multinational I know of that is headquartered locally (and not in any way backwards, IT-wise) is just now setting up scripts for a rollout of 2000 professional, and even that is only for limited release. Admittedly, I don't live in a high tech hotbed, but I don't think this quick turnaround is going to sell very well.
Every day, I'm more and more happy I use Linux.
MS is cutting user security *extremely* close here. First, they made the job of crackers twice as easy by adding scripting to Outlook and Word. Now, they've finished the job by adding a shoddy remote access feature. They're placing a huge bet that there will never be another hole in Outlook Express, that word viruses will somehow go away, and that users will learn not to run programs out of e-mail messages, even though their own people can't get that one right.
Those of you who work in computer support, think about this: How many times have you seen Word viruses on a user's computer? Now imagine that each one of those cases was a full-blown remote exploit. Now shudder.
How many computers need to be owned before people wise up to MS's security failures? Why was it that MELISSA and ILOVEYOU were covered as stories about dangerous "computer criminals", rather than stories about Windows' security failings?
Is probably a really stupid, useless enhancement to most ./ers... The improved anti-aliasing of fonts in Whistler make my laptop screen absolutely beautiful. The AA goes much further than any previous OS, window manager, or app that I've ever seen, and with laptop specific enhancement turned on, it is sooooo much easier on my eyes I can hardly look at Moz in X-Win anymore.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
from Merholz:
"Think about it. What products, in the real world, use the possessive "My" in their names? Products for small children, like "My First Sony." How foolish would it sound, say, to buy something called "My Telephone" or "My VCR". Obviously, they're yours--you own it! Using "My" on a Web site encourages this childish sense of propriety, a propriety which, as was pointed out earlier, is already unfounded."
from Perl:
my $computer="Wintel";
my $documents="MS-Office";
---------------------------------------
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
OpenType is a very cool technology. Fortunately, it has been part of Freetype for some time. :)
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I'd be happy to be wrong about this. As I've said, I'm no Windows expert. But if there's an included telnet client, I haven't noticed it (pokes about) ... Ah. I find something called HyperTerminal, which seems like a telnet app. Cool, thanks for the info.
:) Am I (hopefully) also missing an included ssh client, since that's what I'm actually after anyhow?
wrt the rest, well, I dunno. What else am I "wrong or lying about"?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I bought NT4 less than a month ago (for work). I could also have bought Win98 had that been my weakness.
"Microsoft has built into Whistler a feature that allows a user to request assistance from another user via e-mail, specifying a window of time in which the request must be answered. The user providing help may then take control of the problem system, fixing the problem while the user watches."
I think there is already a third party solution to this feature...It's called back orifice.
Whistler does have built-in Voice Recognition...this is pretty cool.
Jeff -- skibum, among other things