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Getting A Handle On Vista
visination.com wrote to mention a news.com article which runs down some of the basics on MS's new Operating System. From the article: "Among the key features of Vista as it currently stands are: security enhancements, a new searching mechanism, lots of new laptop features, parental controls and better home networking. There will also be visual changes, thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that are tiny representations of a document itself. On the business side, Microsoft said Vista will be easier for businesses to deploy on multiple PCs and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted."
In other words, they're giving Windows users the neat eye candy that KDE users have had for years!
And people say Linux isn't ready for the desktop...
Which have been available just as long on Windows via a third party http://www.stardock.com/
Done.
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iTunes
And it's instantaneous. No indexing when your computer has some idle time to spare. You create the file and BAM!, it shows up in Spotlight (system wide search engine vis-a-vis Google Desktop) and any Smart Folder that its criteria has met.
You're not kidding. Acrobat 7 still asks you to reboot -- I suspect because they're too lazy to detect what version of Windows you're running.
The other possibility, of course, is that Acrobat actually *does* require a reboot... a fact which I would find scary, indeed.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
All Adobe products make you reboot if you have any of the associated libraries with their other products being accessed at the time you install the new software. You cannot have an install program remove a dll that is loaded by the OS without causing a possible kernel panic/BSOD, so either unload other adobe products (you'd be surprised what is running in the background) or reboot. Not to difficult a choice. I turn off my computer every night, guess I just don't see the need for leaving it on all the time.
Device drivers are still basically WDM, but there is this new Windows Driver Foundation that is basically an MFC for drivers.
So under the hood it's still good ol' NT, but a lot of code has been moved from the developers hands into the DDK via the new WDF.
DevStudio will probably have new wizards added by the DDK to create drivers, like NuMega Driver studio does now.
IIRC MacOS8 or 9 had it, too... I seem to remember working with Photoshop on an old Quadra and having the image file icons be a preview.
Sort of like "Smart Folders"? Yeah, that would be really cool to have in Windows one day.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/
Ten years from now, you're going to find yourself digging through the backups anyway.
If you have so many things going on that you can't remember where you put it all, you need to either lighten your load or learn better organization skills.
Spotlight may have some uses, but it is no substitute for organization. If you get it organized now, it's far more likely to be in an organized state in your backups in ten years.
Well, that said, without something like Spotlight and very good incremental backup software, aliases do tend to break. However, if you expect Spotlight (or the MSLonghorn equivalent) to organize for you, you're going to be disappointed.
It's the brain-damaged file system's fault. Contrast this to Linux/UNIX file systems which can typically unlink a file (delete) without freeing the associated inode until the file is actually unloaded by all users of the file. The upside is that the upgrade can take effect without a reboot, the downside is that you may not be fully upgraded unless you restart all applications that use that file you're upgrading. When you upgrade apache, making sure all relavent services are restarted is easy. When you upgrade glibc, it's far from easy.
And the real kicker out of all of this is that Microsoft is unlikely to ever change this. I would prefer a system that worked more like Linux in this regard, but unfortunately many programs on Windows require this annoying file locking scheme to exist exactly as it does right now. If Microsoft changes this, it will break some software, and people will blame Microsoft for the breakage. Even people within Microsoft understand the problems this exectuable locking causes, which is why .NET programs for IIS use this strange shadow copy (different from W2K3's shadow copy feature!) method to allow you to update your website, despite the fact the executables in the target directory should be in use.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Microsoft Office 2003 actually requires a reboot. It simply doesn't work otherwise. I was flabberghasted when I saw the error message and it took literally five minutes to figure out that it didn't work because I was working on something while installing and pressed "no" for "would you like to reboot?". Same with installing most sorts of drivers. Not to mention the seeming need to reboot every single time Windows XP updates... The damn thing keeps bugging me as well.
That's called incompetence on the part of the people writing ZipGenius.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
Google image search for 'KDE composite'. There is a lot of work being done in this area (transparency, shadows, etc.). This is in X.org, not just KDE.
IRIX & Indigo Magic did this before KDE. I'm sure someone else can point out an earlier instance.
As much as I *heart* KDE (and I used to hate and I mean ***HATE*** KDE), credit needs to be given where credit is due.
Definitely not a Micro$oft innovation, unless by "innovate" they mean "copy what others have done for years and years already and bill it as something brand new"
I can see it coming with their new command shell, the bash ripoff. "Now a better solution for administrative tasks: take control of your servers and automate tasks via the command line, a new innovation brought to you by your 'friend$' at Micro$oft."
Never mind that to believe this you have to practice doublethink and disregard that their mantra ever since NT 3.1 has been "GUI good, CLI bad, if you NEED to automate, use WSH or VB"
Luckily the system is generally smart enough so that it will look at the file extension if it can't figure out what it is. So losing a resource fork just means that any fancy forks are lost, and you default to "basic" ones.
"There will also be visual changes, thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that are tiny representations of a document itself. On the business side, Microsoft said Vista will be easier for businesses to deploy on multiple PCs and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted." ....
Hasn't KDE had icons like that for quite some time now? And when was the last time you rebooted your linux boxen?
Looks like M$ has started taking tips from Linux
Then use "end process", not "end task". End Task sends a message to the target window then waits 5 seconds or so for the app to exit gracefully. End Process kills the process right away.
Really, the point here is that 99.9% of the time a kill or kill -9 pid will kill a process dead, as quickly as possible. Which clearly isn't the case for Windows.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
The thing is, on Win{16,32,64}, there is no way to delete or replace a file when the file is open by any process. Same applies to executables when any instance of them is running.
In the Unix world, deleting a file simply unlinks it from the directory it is in. It won't be actually deleted until no process needs it anymore; however, you are free to replace the file with a new version.
It is something which could be added to Windows without breaking compatibility. It's a kernel-level change that doesn't need any user-space changes at all. Fixing this would make it possible to replace drivers and running programs just fine.
Of course, you still will be unable to restart certain vital systems without a reboot, the monolithic design of Win32 and the GUI-is-everything principle bog them down.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
On OSX, I force quit something, and it's gone in a half second. On Linux, I kill -9 something, it's gone in the next screen refresh. On Windows, I ctrl-alt-delete, end process, wait, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, wait, click "yes, really kill it", repeat, wait, wait as progress bar fills in, repeat, and it's gone. Or not. Yeah, obviously this is NOT Windows' fault!
You're not doing an End Process. You're doing an End Task. End Task tries to shut down the app in an orderly fashion. End Process shuts it down immediately regardless. Go to the processes tab instead of the applications tab to kill the process.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Heh! Exactly.
...Promises also said
the idea of giving laptops the ability to turn on
quickly is something customers want and a quality that is arguably
better delivered today by the rival Linux operating system.
Looky:
RTFA'd (Among the key features of Vista as it currently stands are:security enhancements:)
Don't make me laugh!!! Still broadcasting on netbios. Still using ActiveX! Still running Internet Explorer. Still using that ridiculous firewall that Nessus plugins can easily bypass.
RTFA'd( a new searching mechanism )
Big deal. Linux has had that for a while now:
https://infserver.unibz.it/kat/
RTFA's( parental controls and better home networking )
squid proxy caching and good old ifconfig guis: all on Linux/FreeBSD/Whatever
RTFA"d(
here will also be visual changes, thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that are tiny representations of a document itself.
)
shiny transluscent windows. Like this (Composite Extension in xorg + KDE 3.4)??? Hah!
icons that are tiny representations of a document itself. Like this (any recent KDE or GNOME version) ??
RTFA'd (
)
Hate to say I told you so, but...
RTFA'd(
The company is also considering setting up a "mobility center" within the Longhorn software that would be a centralized place to adjust settings, such as power management, display and networking.
)
And this is new???
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
I get the usual "the file is in use" error when I try it on NTFS (XP).
That's because of 2 things:
1. You need to have Admin rights to perform a "replace file on reboot" operation.
2. You can't delete/replace file on reboot from Explorer. You have to do it from code. You know, the kind of code that people like Installshield write.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I believe the reboots are due to the .NET framework. If you've already got it installed and have taken the time to do all the updates, it may not require a reboot. I figured this out after completely fucking my Office 2003 install somehow, uninstalling it, rebooting, deleting it's leftover crap in C:/Program Files/ and redoing the install. The reinstall was one pass no reboots.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
On HFS you had a resource fork and a data fork. On HFS+ you have an arbitrary number of forks, however most applications only use one for compatibility with UFS/FAT filesystems.
NTFS also supports forks (not sure how many), but no one actually uses them. You can use the standard terminal commands to put things in them and access them, but not to enumerate them. In this way, you can hide data quite easily in an NTFS system.
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