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Vista Startup Sound to be Mandatory?
Toreo asesino writes "There has been lots of debate in the past few days over Microsoft's plan to make the startup sound in Windows Vista something that can't be specifically silenced by changing the sound settings in the control panel. Users would be able to avoid hearing it by manually turning down the speaker volume, but then they would have to turn that volume back up to hear anything else."
wait until everyone learns that the new start up sound is the microsoft eula, read out loud, in nonrepeating segments
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's the dumbest idea... ever. Hurrah. At least its not the corporation I work for doing it.
This is a typical case of product-focused vs. user-focused thinking.
Has it occured to anyone that a user might just wake up early morning and wants to turn on his/her computer without waking up sleeping family members?
For this very reason one of the first setup steps I always do on a new machine is to turn off the startup sign.
Bing!
Seems the least of our worries, we'll just await the first hack that makes sure the sample doesnt play.
Why would you want this "feature"?
Can't you just insert a blank wavfile in it the place of the startup sound?
Wait a second.. Does anyone actually care about this?
Delete or Rename the file? or has that functionality not made it into the filesystem yet?
The Mac startup sound has always been mandatory. Don't like it? Plug in your headphones for a second... The stuff that makes front page these days *sigh*
Do they seriously think annoying the users who care enough about their systems to turn off the Windows startup sound in the first place is really a good idea?
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
You can always replace the startup.wav file with Homer going "DOH!"
Why? What would be the reasoning behind this?
I guess its a feature Microsoft are going to make sure you get what you paid for!
They will have to come up with some kind of way to turn it off. The majority of broadcast automation applications still run on Windows. When I worked at KDKD, we had all the on-air PCs set to "No Sounds"... It's always funny to hear a Windows sound on the radio.
Here's the bottom line: If you have to ask the question, "Should the user be able to change this?" then the answer is: YES.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I try and try not to be ovelry criticize Microsoft, such as wasting shareholder dollars on Zune, but mandatory startup sounds for Vista? Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation. Manually turning down the volume each time, say in a library or lab, is the work around? Huh?
At least the article references Ze...
Okay, what a relief! For a second, I thought I was actually reading a story dedicated to a startup sound in an operating system, on a major news site. You nearly got me there, CowboyNeal!
This will put an end to that "(insert name here), you really know how to turn me on" joke.
I really don't think this is gonna happen.. even if it does, it's a matter of hours before someone else hacks the startup processes to modify it. Besides, if the sound makes the sound of sucking $$$ out of my wallet, it might be perfect for Vista.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
Okay, instead of just being critical of the standpoint they are taking with the startup sounds - how about that we find reasons to defend it? Makes for a more interesting and indepth line of thinking I would think.
I am personally drawing a blank on this subject, I can not imagine why they would want to make such a thing mandatory. But I am sure there are other people in this community that will have an understanding of this and be willing to share said understanding.
Seriously, what do they hope to achieve from this?
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Imagine an office where I can't expose people to the happy sound of elephants trumpeting every time I boot my PC?
Needle Nardle Noo
It will be something along the lines of this?
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting be
So VOTE REPUBLICAN !! which means VOTE MICROSOFT !! which means Do WHAT IT WANTS !! (you will be glad you did)
Seriously, though, you know what this makes me think of?
SAAAAYYYY-GAAAAAHHHHH
apologies to everyone who's going to hear that sound for the next week...
"You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
It's my freakin computer, you better let me silence it if I wish. Maybe I don't want to irritate people in a cafe, lobby, waiting room, whatever with noises coming from my laptop. Maybe I just don't want an "I'm ready to be used" noise. Maybe I don't care if you think it's convenient. Maybe I dont care if you think it's cool or pretty sounding. Maybe I just want the stupid thing to be quiet.
And Xbox or Playstation are not good excuses, those are for a different market. There's also a number of people out there using mod chips to regain control of those things if they don't like some decisions from the manufacturer. Just because my Xbox makes a startup noise doesn't mean that I want it to. And just because some Engineer at Microsoft or Sony decided their toy for kids should make a startup noise does not mean I want to hear it on my laptop, tower, or anything at the office in the morning.
Delete the wav file. Or replace it with a sound you want. Problem solved. However, it still is a stupid move if Microsoft decides to do this.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"...manually turning down the speaker volume, but then they would have to turn that volume back up to hear anything else."
No shit, Sherlock...
You will not, however, be required to speak into your mouse,
or input the formula for transparent aluminum.
- The 'Enter you Checking Account Number' Start up screen will confuse a few users,
but Microsoft must verify your identity and make sure to enforce the Genuine Advantage of Microsoft.
Five minutes after the product release, someone will have figured out how to turn the sound off, regardless of microsofts wishes.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
Nice to see Microsoft taking user interface design tips from the Gnome guys. We all know that users don't want to be able to change things anyway.
Customize startup sound to be a file full of silence. Now, if you can't customize the startup sound... that's just nuts. What are these guys smoking in Redmond?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You will be assimilated.
I still hold out hope...
Yes Steve a registry setting please...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\ShutTheFuckUp
make sure that dword is set to 1
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
This is so that when the NSA detects the sound they can start logging all your internet activity. Kind of like a wake up call to the NSA monitors. Oooops! Shouldn't have said that........
This shows how disconnected from the real world Microsofties have become.
Imagine being in a large university class with 100 or 200 students and half of them boot their laptops at the beginning of the class. The sound will be played 50-100 times, how much more annoying can it get!
the CivII wav file for fighter running out of fuel?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
OK, there's no silver lining. There's only M$ acting badly again. http://malfy.org/
The startup sound will be the voice of Steve Ballmer saying "Please bend over, this won't take long".
The Mac startup sound is also a nice short chord.
Microsoft's startup sounds have a length half as long as a standard symphony performance. The way Microsoft works, anything "unique" to them is going to be over the top and annoying to boot.
wow... that is the most retarded thing
thanx m$
vista may well cause me to say adios to windows... I'm not sure I can take much more of this kinda crap
I can't have Native HD DVD (32bit) or WinFS or..... errr what the hell all else did they junk from vista
but i can have the most annoying part of windows startup.... the fucking startup sound... forced on me regardless of if i want it or not ????
it would be FUCKING GREAT in the office too..... for 3hours i could hear the start up sounds as co-workers arrived and logged in....
vista may not be the next winME after all it may be much much worse than that.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Wonderful. This will be a real plus in seminars, as people can't turn on their damn laptops without making a stupid noise. Or on an airplane. Or any other situation (with the kid sleeping in the other side of the room, for example).
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Unbelievably dumb. A massive triumph of marketing people over reality. How can this can be presented as a 'I see both sides of this fascinating argument' in the article? The argument that lots of other systems do this too is irrelevant; currently, you don't have to do this in Windows - why start making this mistake now?
Is the startup sound on Macs customizable? I don't think it is. You turn on your computer and...
"BAHHHH."
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The startup sound has obviously become the ca-ching of a cash register.
It'd be pure microsoft...
I pretty much only run Windows in VMware these days (wish I didn't have to run it at all) and I normally have the sound card disconnected. Good luck sending out your tunes to a computer with no sound card you Microsoft bastards.
http://www.prangstgrup.com/startupsound/
1. Replace it with a file that causes a buffer overflow in the windows sound system and takes over the system.
2. Add that file as the deployment data for your favorite virus/exploit code.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Microsoft took a step forward by taking out autorun in the name of security. Now they take two steps back with this 'autosound' nonsense.
...sources close to those in charge of Vista's user interface development say the startup sound will be that of '...[M]illions of computer users crying out, and suddenly silenced...'
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Are they the same company, now? Vista and the PS3 are both heading the same direction, it seems.
PROMISES!!! YAY PROMISES!
Oh, wait, hold on.
Just a little more.
Yeah.. we took everything "useful" out, heh.
PROMISES!
$500, please.
Has it occured to anyone that a user might just wake up early morning and wants to turn on his/her computer without waking up sleeping family members?
Just today I walked into the "Maximum Quiet Study Area" for our univerisity's library, and popped open my laptop and turned it on. My gkrellm instance sounded my "alert" sound (which is actually very rare, the load was too high from the boot apparently), and I rushed to hit the mute button.
The startup sound on Vista would be before any multimedia keys are registered if it's at all like XP is, and that wouldn't have worked. Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window, no pun intended.
It just HAS to be a joke. They can't really be considering annoying their users in this way, right?
I suppose the system will REQUIRE the sound file, and it must be a signed/DRMed WMA10 file too, right? And ONLY Microsoft-signed sounds (e.g., Vista Plus! pack or whatever comes out alongside the OS next year) will be "allowed" to replace the default sound?
Meh. I won't be affected. When I have to run Windows (for legacy hardware not supported by Linux) it's Win98SE or Win2K, and I can customize SuSE and kubuntu linux to my heart's content. Fuck Windows Vista and the DRM fest and locked-down GUI that will come with it. Monad, you say? I already have that; it's called bash.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"Windows Vista: Cramming junk into your RAM like you crammed yourself and 10 friends into a VW beetle."
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Reason #1. It's from Microsoft
Reason #2. It's been delayed 5 times and still won't die
Reason #3: Fundamentally no better than XP
Reason #4: Still no shell
Reason #5: Or compiler
Reason #6: Takes more space then it really ought to
Reason #7: New added value bonus DRM compliance goodies!
...
Reason #76: It takes more memory than a weather simulation of Earth just to show the desktop
Reason #77: "Ultimate Edition"
Reason #78: Annoying Startup Sounds
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Robert Fripp to record the audio for vista they want to squeeze every last drop out of the use. If not at least ONE file.
I'll take a stab here and say that it will contain a subliminal message...
After a while they will begin leasing out the SubLim ad slot to Microsoft Prefered Partners via the windows update function every tuesday.
[/tinfoil hat]
Place a curse on Microsoft
OMG..they have a branded starup sound! Can we have a startup sound too! Please!
"A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react."
Spiritual side? WTF does that mean? Do we get Kool-aid if we format the drive?
"The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Let's say you muted your machine, and you don't hear your startup sound, you know you aren't ready to listen to stuff."
Maybe the power LED being off, the dial at 0 or the red 'no' symbol on the speaker icon might give it away after you hear absoulutely nothing coming from the speakers?
Of course there are the foot pedal mouse and coffee holder ROM drive crowd to think about. Maybe they can get an offical Vista helemt with a send in postcard.
"The Xbox has a hard-wired startup sound. "
Which makes sense. Your siting down to game and the sound system has a mojor role in that experience. It also happens as soon as the machine starts. You know exactly when it's going to happen. It's basically a "hey..it's this loud right now..get your volume set..we're getting ready to game". Not blast you out if you forget where your settings were the previous time and you walked away during boot up.
People get paid to "think" this crap up. It's amazing.
When WGA discovers a problem it will blare "You Are Running An Unlicenced Version of Microsoft Vista, Please Contact Microsoft to Upgrade Your Licence" over and over and over for as long as your machine is running.
You KNOW that's coming, don't you?
(See, the start up "noise" is not obviously controllable to new Mac users... Oh, never mind...)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
A public demo of the new Vista start up sound:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YOADbv1sgjA
=)
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
* Except when the user may undermine the marketing efforts of MS by deactivating features designed to enhance mindhsare of MS products, those of its partners, and the rights of big media crooks.
Next they'll bring back Clippy, except this time he'll be embedded in the kernel.
The problem with this is that it means that mobile users will be less likely to restart their computers - or power them up, for that matter - in meetings, etc., where you don't want to draw attention to yourself with an annoying startup sound. Now, I'm not sure if there's still an option for turning ALL windows alert sounds off, including the start up sound, which might mitigate this a bit. But on some computers, especially many laptops with softkeys for volume, you've got to ALREADY BE IN WINDOWS to turn the sound off. So say you were using your computer with sound on, say, gaming, turn it off, and boot up 2 hours later in a meeting - you'd have NO CHANCE of disabling a loud and annoying sound that draws the kind of attention to yourself that you REALLY don't want drawn to you.
It all just begs the question "why?" was the code that they have to turn off the start up sound now SO BADLY WRITTEN that they decided not to migrate it? C'mon guys. And also:
They've been working on this project as the "#1" priority in their group (past updates, etc.) for over half a decade now. I'd REALLY like to think that they'd have most of this kind of stuff decided already. Did somebody buy everyone in the Windows dev team an Xbox and then an XBox 360? Is that why its taken them 60 months to put together about as much of a feature upgrade as the OS X dev team usually puts together every 18 months? What have they been waiting for? Are they tailor-making Vista technologies to run Duke Nukem Forever? Is that the reason for the delay? Because I really can't find much of a better rationale anywhere else... other than maybe they've cut so many features of Vista in the past few years that no one left working on the project has any idea what code they're actually supposed to be writing.
Oy.
Tim
You mean everyone doesn't delete all the M$ noise files at the first boot? Find a winbox that I haven't deleted the media files from, I looked and there aren't any here.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Here are three major OS on the market:
OSX: built around experience, this OS is made to be simple to use, easy to market, look shiny and tie well with its accompanied Apple hardware. Apple's credo is that they are amazing as hell, and their users will be wowed at whatever they throw at them. As such, OSX provides features such as mandatory startup sounds, mandatory "hardware", mandatory skin and other mandatory "tuned to be kewl" stuff. They have some success, but their market share is still decreasing (currently at meager 2%) because they don't realize that unlike iPod, a PC is (yet) not just another consumer device.
Unix / BSD / Linux: it's made for professionals, for tinkerers and and people who like control over their machines. Those OS have their share of attempts at eye candy, but the main point of the OS is the ability to go down to the bone and tune it just like you like it, without excess fat and trash around. It doesn't have much adoption with casual folks as a desktop OS because the distros are rarely consistent, require low level knowledge of the underlying system to get the maximum out of it and hardware software doesn't target it a lot.
Windows: is sitting in the perfect spot. It's easy to use, has a lot of software written for it, works on commodity hardware, and is practical for business, entertainment and more. It's not perfect, and in fact was quite flaky when the consumer branch was based around the 9x core (for legacy reasons). These guys however get a lot of criticism that they are not enough like Apple and not enough like Unix. Windows has no cult status among its users, while *nix and Apple does.
I have no idea whether it's a complex or lack of confidence in their own strategy, but sometime around XP, Microsoft decided they wanna be more like OSX and Unix, which are dwarfed by Windows on the market of desktop OS. They are just doing it, for no apparent reason, they are not losing market to their competitors on the desktop market, but feel the urge to copy them and be "more like them".
XP and Vista are trying hard to build a branded experience much like OSX, while other projects like Channel 9, the new power shell, and tons of other admin-related utilities and technologies are targeted to the Unix crowd and appearing more opened.
Some of this has positive effects on the users of Windows, but some of it, is just plain stupid (like the glassy look of aero.. it's not easier to use at all, it's one of those gadgets you show off in the PC shops, like OSX's scaling icons on the dock bar). Their desire to preserve their "perfect" branding by locking and hardcoding everything in place is just a symptom of this much deeper problem.
I wish Microsoft would just accept its position in the market, keep the right balance between flexible and preconfigured, and swallow the criticisms, which will come no matter what, versus try and copy whatever fads come along.
Not just the startup sound, but all of the sounds, like I want to hear if I click my mouse, my mouse can make that sound on its own, and I don't need a sound every time one of those alert buttons pop up, they are on top anyway so I'll see them, right?
But then again, with OSX it isn't possible to disable the startup sound either (or so I've heard) so if people would make a fuss about this, then why not continue at apple?
OK, so it could be worse - it's Bob Fripp writing it, not some herbert just making a "lame synth noise". I suppose he could let his missus have a bit of a screech in the middle of it as well to really wake us up (when she's finished narrating the tellytubbies).
Presumably the article is a joke to keep Windows Vista in the news, but even if it wasn't, how hard would it be to rename / replace / delete the offending sound file?
Why did I just read all the comments for this stupid article? I have homework to do. That makes me as stupid as this article. Oh well at least I'm not alone, you're doing it too. What are you doing reading comments for this stupid article?
Pity the poor slob that get a royalty on the shutdown sound, only the startup sound is a moneymaker in windows.
Who?
What?
That's It! No Fuxoring Windows Vista for me then! I'll teach myself to do that stupid Lunix thing rather than sacrifice the Creative Thunder WAV sound from my old SB-Live! card.
That sound simply rocks - and it tells you if any of your speakers aren't working.
Plus, if I turn the PC on in the middle of the night (never!) or if Microsuck Autofuckdate reboots the PC all by itself (FUCK YOU BILL GATES!) - which happens a lot - then at least my neighbours will just think there's a storm coming!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
The hacked pirated version is looking more appealing the more I read about vista
it is just another sign that sales and marketing are now in complete control. Glad I finally made a full effort to switch, my Mac and my Ubuntu box fulfill all I need.
There has been lots of debate in the past few days over Microsoft's plan to make the startup sound in Windows Vista something that can't be specifically silenced
I'm guessing most of the debating has been done by the same people who argue over which Captain of the Enterprise was the best. You know.. master debaters.
Next up, the stunning results of the debate over whether my subject is comprised of uppercase I's, lowercase L's, or some bizzare combination of the two.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
don't know if they still do, but they recognized early on that macs in sound studios could blow your ears or speakers if you got that tone on startup. At one point they had a utility somewhere that would allow you to turn that off without having to mute the whole system.
I can't seem to find it, but It may be part of the Protools package.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
NO.
Sincerely,
That guy that fucking hates the startup noise.
I mean, what's so important about it anyway. It's not like the fate of the fucking world is at stake. It's not like irreversible filesystem corruption will occur if the sound is not played.
"You are booting your computer now". Sheesh, I know that. I pushed the damn button. You think I run Windows for the long uptimes?
Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
Cheap laptops don't have manual volume controls... better ones do.
I'd really like a startup sound on my linux machine but can't seem to find any drivers.
Dual booting (via floppy disk, of course) became a pain with the reliance on virtual volume control through software. Ditto for the "hoaxes" about self-serve gas pumps and temporary tax plans.
I already have a workaround for this. I just boot up my Mac! Presto.. no Windows startup (sound).
that Sony has a built in sound?" he said. "Did you know that Toshiba has one?"
Ill bet nobody knew the Mac has one. Just in case that hasn't been beaten to death already.
What?
how often does a Mac need to reboot? seriously..... it's like linux is that respect (as opposed to MS Windows).
personally i always have liked the Mac startup chimes. i'm not sure i have ever heard the microsoft windows one. i guess my housemate has his deactivated? i just hear a normal *BEEP* kind of thing when he gets home.
From TFA, it's suggested you turn on your pc, have something to eat, and then your box will let you know when it's ready to log you in ...
Will Vista REALLY take that long to boot up that you're going to need a sound to remind you ?
You've heard wrong. Just set the volume to 0. Shutdown. Press the power buttun and the machine starts silently (well, at least the laptops do -- I don't know about desktops).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Since my first Windows box (WfW 3.11, 1993), I've used an awful lot of different startup sounds, from the sound of breaking glass to the Mac Quadra-era System 7 "CHUNG!", to funny outtakes from voiceover sessions I've engineered.
My current system at work, which I built around an MSI Athlon 64+ motherboard, is housed in a case that looks like a Soviet-era toaster: dull silver-grey plastic and louvers on the front that look like they belong on the hood of a tractor. I festooned the case with hammer-and-sickle symbols and the letters "CCCP" in red type bordered in yellow. That computer's name is "katyusha".
Its startup sound is the Red Army Chorus singing the Soviet National Anthem. Just one verse, though. It annoys my employer to no end, but he'll be the first one up against the wall when the Revolution happens. Fucking capitalist pig dog.
What really annoys me is the faux "click" sound of an unaltered XP install, the one that's bound to Windows Explorer "Start Navigation" events. It's never in sync with the mouse click. Second most annoying is the crumpled paper sound when the "Recycle Bin" is emptied (are those bits really recycled? Hmmm?). I turn those off immediately after an install.
Somewhat less annoying (but all too common) are users that bind the sound of a toilet flushing to the "Empty Recycle Bin" event. Invariably, they're the sort of person for whom a fart joke is the pinnacle of humor. But they bitch like hell when you bind the sound of a lusty wet ripping flatus to each mouse click. "My computer's been hacked!" they complain. "I was humiliated in front of a client!"
How d'you like me now, bitch?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
They announce something asinine, bill it as a 'feature,' then when everyone screams bloody murder over it they will announce that they've changed their minds cause they're listening to their customers.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Will M$ update the sound via Windows Update, making it an audio advert on everyones PC?
I bet OEMs will be allowed to replace this with their own ads/sounds if they pay enough.
I'm guessing someone will eventually write a virus/trojan to replace this sound with a DRM'd one, so infected PCs would try to get a license(pass information/download something/notify the author this zombie is running) from a website.
This reminds me of the day when I & a few friends replaced the shutdown sounds on all the school PCs with a "15 minutes of silence" WAV.
.. and when you run out, you start employing idiots and they become management, then they rename the company to Micro* to reflect their micromanagement skillsets. I'm scared, because this is the second time i've used this comment today and it's ontopic.
Alex I'll take what's the most trivial story ever published on slashdot for $1000.
Need Mercedes parts ?
this is such a terrible idea, i disable extraneous sounds on everything i own, from my current windows install to my cell phone to the cd player in my car, the only time i want to hear sound is when i want it to be played, not when microsoft wants it to be played i hope that this "feature" is left out of the final release, it would be so irritating to hear a noise for every restart that i will have to make on a monthly basis because of the frequent windows updates that i will have to be installing for years to come
C7 C4 25 8A 11 BB 0D 40 8F 4E 4E 47 CA F0 BE 5B
That's one small step for the slownesday tag..
Those suggestions the music dork gave are sublimely ridiculous, as well. Just how long is this startup sound going to be, that you can reach over and fiddle with the controls on your speakers? Are we supposed to hard-reset over and over, until the sound runs optimally? Jesus, people, give your end-users some fucking credit.
Of course, none of this really matters. Someone will have a hack to remove the damned thing within days of release, if not hours.
In other Vista news, it was recently announced that the only folder with write access in the entire file system will be My Documents. User testing indicated that it was a good idea.
Just because others are doing it is no reason for MS to do it. Do it or don't do it because it's the right thing to do.
But OS X users don't restart their computers, so the point is moot.
I rarely shut down my MacBook Pro or the Powerbook I used before that - I just put it to sleep by closing the lid and open the lid the next time I want to use it.
I only have to restart because of the occasional system software update that requires a restart. Otherwise I'm golden.
The second or third thing I do with any OS installation is disable startup sounds, along with most other sounds. Some software company thinking that their product needs to trumpet it's existance throughout my home or workplace aggravates me to no end and is something I absolutely will not tolerate. Something this piddly would actually prevent me from using Vista... if I had any intentions of using it, which I don't.
Of course, I expect a hex editor will solve the problem of any "mandatory" startup sound, if a simple file-deletion doesn't.
Fact of the matter is: the massive target base of Windows users are stupid. They need and like this sort of thing. Like it or not. If you are the latter, then don't install it, use linux like i'm sure you already do. On the other hand if you still wish to install it, i'm sure there will be a fix/patch/whatever which will satisfy your needs.
Any average /.r might be able to change and customize the shutdown and startup logos from M$'s defaults to whatever they want but it is not easy and it is not straightforward for the average user. The average user knows how to change the wallpaper bitmap and that's it. If he is running something similar to Windows Shades, then he is no longer average.
If they pull this idiotic crap, be sure they will do the same. Make the sound a propietary format or a weird and obscure modification that HAS to be a sound of a particular 14.83 bit-depth and exactly 666 bits long with a non-standard extension, mark it with system privileges and make the OS whine about it if it doesn't find the sound. Unless they have become so incredibly retarded that they would rather have their most secure OS to date crash if you tamper or remove it.
If they really want to make it mandatory, they will do their best to make it difficult for the average user to take it away.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Thats just retarted! Turning off ALL sounds is one of the first things i do on a fresh windows install.
And annoyingly it resets itself on certeain updates & setting changes, go figure.
Suspend and sleep are also "features" in Windows, in case you didn't know. I believe Linux has decent support for those "features" as well.
At any rate, it's pretty dumb to implement this now.
It's more than possible, it's easy (disclaimer, I do not own an apple laptop). From what I heard, you just mute the laptop, and if you shut it down while it's muted, the startup sound will not play.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
When you turn on your Mac, it has that stupid sound before the boot device is even touched. It seems to be driven by the openfirmware. Unless there is some obscure firmware variable to disable it, you must turn off the sound not to hear it. It isn't anything that can be changed from within the OS.
It plays a video of Steve Ballmer doing the
monkey dance to the tune of 'Turkey in the Straw'.
Damn, that is one catchy tune.
Why is it that so much of Microsoft's 'innovation' seems to involve removing customer choice?
"Hey Steve, it's Friday and that's the 5th reboot I've heard this morning."
"Yeah. It's taking longer every month to roll out the Black Tuesday patches."
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Reason #1: People make software for it
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
You don't even have to mute it before you shut down. You can shut the laptop down with the sound on. When you press the power on button, start holding down the Audio Off/Mute button on the keyboard. Hold it until you see the Apple. Bingo. No startup chime, and sound is still enabled (or disabled, whatever it was before) once you get to the desktop.
Given the number of assholes who write web pages with annoying music that auto-plays, and the number of retarded programmers who think that every mouse click, every keyboard click, every tick of the system clock should make some kind of sound, are there really people out there who don't keep their speakers off by default?
The only time mine are one is when I am intentionally playing something I need the sound for.
And the phrase "remove vista startup sound" will become the most popular google search next to 'natalie portman'.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
At least for my PowerBook, you can alternately mute it before a (rare) shutdown, or quickly do fn+F3 (that's the key combo for mute) after turning on the power. Either will prevent the "baaahh" sound.
What about the annoying restart dialog from windows update (with the 5 min timeout)?
start->run->cmd.exe del -R c:\windows (now where did I put that Ubuntu CD???)
Watchin oWo
Your reason doesn't discount the very likely possibility that people make software for Linux. ... posted from a Gentoo workstation where I serve databases, host users [e.g. builds and computing], work on presentations, play games and write books ...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Don't know about the Kool-Aid, but i hear there's a bunch of guys trying to turn Windows into Wine...
Why can't you just replace the sound file with an empty file if you want to disable it?
What's Steve gonna do? Sit on him?
Obviously what he meant was that most modern laptops do not have potentiometers, but software volume controls. But then again, why am I feeding an AC troll?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This is an exciting opportunity for those wannabe Vista hackers. Tamper with the default sound, become a Slashdot hero!
Now, admittedly, I normally only work with Toshiba laptops, but every one I've ever seen has a volume wheel. That includes my brother's Tecra 9100, and my Satellite Pro. And come to think of it, my Dad's Compaq Armada has one too...
Yes. All you have to do to run said software is buy a whole new computer with a DirectX 10 compliant video card, 1G of Ram and you're good to go.
Oh, wait. That part above was just for the OS. You thought those were the system requirements for the software? No. That's what's needed to get Vista up and running bare bones. Sorry.
Seriously, though, I purchased Windows last week, actually. I bought a copy of Windows XP Pro. Reason being that I do need Windows from time to time, even though I run it virtually inside VMWare on top of Linux. I do need Windows for certain applications and software development. I was happy to pay for a copy, because I needed it. But I bought it now while XP Pro is still being sold, because XP Pro has a 7 year support cycle from the beginning of Vista. So sometime in 2014, if the world hasn't ended (it's after 2012 after all) and I still need Windows, only then will I have to contemplate buying a whole new machine/copy of VMWare just to run Vista.
Did you drink beer or something before posting? I have linux servers, desktops, and even a notebook. The servers have been up for 200+ days, the notebook for 4 days (I don't leave it on when I leave it at home). And the desktops for 17 days, 8hrs, and 53 minutes. You can do the same with a Mac. You CANNOT with Windows... Hell, Windows Server 2003 Server will crap out after ~ 25 - 30 days, and need a restart.
My $0.02
Christian
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
I think it will be something like this:
8 8077134461
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-77072640
-William Brendel
Force this upon each user at the next MSFT developer's conference. How many times will the keynote be interrupted before this feature is canned?
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
You complain about Microsoft putting startup sounds in Windows but what about Apple's famous startup chime?
Many people love Apple's startup chime. Some even look forward to it.
One day I will hear it again...
\
ok, what's the big deal? have some service that mutes the sound during logoff and then put a startoff service to unmute sound.
it seems that users can also mute the volume, a point that TFA mentions as a reason for the sound -- to know if sound is muted at boot.
as for the sleeping people argument, computers have been making beeps at POST for years. anyone with a computer (server) with no keyboard, mouse, or monitor will get quite a few beeps everytime a restart happens.
though i do predict whatever sound MS chooses to quickly become the most annoying sound in the world.
Apple was beta testing a mandatory statup tune but dropped it. Some MS folks must have witnessed it and thought it was a good idea.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Just for comparison, my brother's new Dell Inspiron doesn't have a volume wheel (just software-controlled buttons). Same for every Apple laptop ever made.
"You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in."
./configure --prefix=/opt/whatever
/opt/whatever/bin/whatever
Reminds me of the compilation howto's:
to build whatever:
make
*Go have a coffee*
sudo make install
*Go have another coffee*
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Ok, that's it, now their just fucking with us. Microsoft seems to be running out of features that they can police.
Do you then turn the sound back up if you want to hear other sounds? And then turn it back to zero before shutdown? If so, this sounds like a bogus solution to me.
the laptop I'm posting from has a wheel on the front that adjusts the volume of the internal speaker, it works in exactly the same way as volume wheels on old-fashioned 0-10 (or 11) volume wheels on amps. the biggest upside of this is that the PC speaker, being emulated on the internal speaker, can also be silenced. The noisest thing to come from this laptop is the fan spinning up. (assuming it doesn't have noisy encounters with windows, walls or pavement)
Well, not to rain on your parade, BUT:
:)
I worked for a non-profit when Windows 2003 was released to manufacturing. They were donated two new dell servers and two boxed copies of Win2k3 Standard edition for the purpose of running two databases that previously were hosted on one box that was seriously overloaded. Decent servers on the high end at the time - hot swap power, hot swap drives, dual proc, etc. These boxes are Internet facing (not for database access, that requires an IPSEC connection at the firewall level) and hosted at a big name co-lo facility. The database is Oracle 9i.
I remember well the day that I hardened them and finished the deployment. It was May 1st, 2003, a Thursday I believe. Win2k3 had just become available the previous week. Oracle had released a big set of patches for 9i not long before.
I still check in on those boxes. One has 994 days of uptime, and the other has, as of last week, 1190 days. The longer running of the two - DAEDALUS - runs close to 75% load from 6am-6pm, 5 days a week.
The only other box I have running that beats that is a Netware 4.x box. But that barely counts as a usuable OS
..that they are not planning a mandatory video as well.
Wincopy
What an amazing load of bullshit. Restarting is not a must as long as the OS properly handles memory. As memory is released, it should be reallocated by the virtual memory system. Fragmentation is not a problem on systems that make use of paged memory and virtual address space. Any program that leaks memory should eventually be killed by the OS when it exceeds system resources.
FreeBSD is one of many OSes that supports this, allowing it to have uptimes exceeding 6 years. I can't find a link at the moment, but there was a mailserver running an early version of FreeBSD that was up for about 11 years.
it's not that hard to find the wav file and replace it with 0.01 seconds of silence. and if i have to i will.
Supplies!
While that's a handy work-around for occasional use, I still find it amaziung that it would be necessary. Can't you just clobber the sound file or something?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... you'll always be able to disable the sound by changing your master boot record.
http://outcampaign.org/
Come on, why would anybody want to remove additional settings? If I want to turn it off, I should be able to, who are they to tell me what I want from my computer? Just think about how annoying it will be during college classes when every student's laptop makes some noise when they turn it on in the middle of a lecture... VERY ANNOYING!
Reason #79: Just to make #78 clear, if I want my computer to make a funny sound every time I reboot, I'll lick my finger and rub it across the screen, and if the squeaky sound doesn't amuse me enough, I'll shove it up Steve Ballmer's ass.
I don't have one on my Panasonic, and I've never seen a compact laptop (not a "multimedia machine"-type luggable) that does.
Also, is that really an electromechanical control you have, or is it just another software-controlled "multimedia button" in another mechanical package?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If this is the subject of debate.
Remember that windows 98 live demo where the blue screen comes up and bill gates says: "Uh Oh" Thats the first thing i want any vista virus to do, a personal request from me. yah... there's gotta be some way to work around this in the end.
I have the doomed life of a PC gamer and a MS hater...
You find item: AOL install disk
If you have a PowerPC Mac, this utility will let you reduce the volume of the startup sound or even turn it off. I've used it on some of our computers at work to reduce the noise of the startup sound.
n dex.en.html
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/i
Not sure if anyone has made something like this for Intel Macs, though.
That's the most clear difference to me. About half the people I know who use Windows shut down the pc when they are done with it, and power it back on when they want to use it again. However, my mom is the only person I know who has a Mac that does this. (I always tell her she doesn't need to do that but old habits die hard, it's her first Mac.)
thats not even the point. On my brand new Dell latitude D620, the XP start up sound plays before my mute button is registered. Trust me i've tried, when ive been in places that require silence and i find myself having to muffle my speakers physically.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Much as I would love to get into a 'my uptime is longer than yours' and 'I once saw a Windows system run for a whole week without BSODing' debates, the point here is about the behaviour of users.
Sure you can avoid rebooting on a Windows system - but the majority of users don't. They have been trained to act this way by the flakiness of Windows and the interminable lags that BIOS imposes on them (especially in laptops) so that, even when those problems have been overcome, they still shutdown and restart. Mac users, on the other hand, have taken advantage of the fact that their laptops startup from sleep more quickly than they can raise the laptops screen and don't have memory problems that kill their systems over time.
I'm sorry, but just because Apple does it is no reason for Microsoft to do it. Are they so slavishly dedicated to cloning Aqua that they're even copying the annoying mistakes???
There's one more aspect to this that pisses me off. The Mac startup sound is short. Just a couple of seconds. The current XP startup sound is several times longer, and I have a sinking suspicion that Microsoft will make a longer, louder and more annoying startup sound for Vista.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
http://www.zombo.com/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Explain this then.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html/
Will the startup sound be a compulsory (paid for) download from Micro$oft's Online Music Service with a limited DRM license which will require a (paid for) renewal every 3 months?
It's striking how different this proposal sounds to how the Mac startup chime works.
Scoble dances around giving a full description, and it sounds like things are still being fleshed out, but the clear implication is that the plan here is to play some kind of music at either the login screen or (presumably if auto-login is turned on) when the current user gets to a working desktop. Implicitly, this is going to take a while, so they encouraging you to go for a walk and come back when the chime plays.
With a Mac, on the other hand, you get a polyphonic startup chime right when the machine is turned on. This fills a couple of functions, including welcoming the user to start working on the computer soon, and proving that the machine passed POST tests. Next the hardware is initialized, and system services start loading. Up until 10.3/Panther, the user would be presented with a series of frequently-vaguely-understood system services one by one as they loaded, but with 10.4/Tiger, the whole startup process was re-thought and replaced with launchd , which in turn made it possible to boot the system boot much faster (don't load unneeded services, delay non-critical ones until later, run as many of the others in parallel, etc) so that now you just have a sham progress bar as the system boots as fast as possible up to the login screen or desktop.
What is the better use of resources: figuring out how to make the system boot so fast that you don't have time to get that cup of coffee, or hiring 70s rockers to compose a melody to play once you've finished brewing another pot? Hmm.....
And before you say that Microsoft doesn't have as much control over the hardware, that's baloney. Be didn't have control over the hardware, and they had a hell of a lot less resources than Microsoft, and yet they still figured out how to get BeOS to cold boot to a functional desktop in 15 seconds or so. No OS shipping today that I'm aware of -- Windows, OSX, Linux, etc -- manages to do that as well as BeOS did a decade ago, and the hardware has only gotten better in that time. Why not? It's obviously doable. Figuring out how to get computers to do that again would be wonderful.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I bet Windows Vista Pirated Edition.. and hell.. maybe Windows Vista Ultimate Pirated Edition will have features to disable the startup sound...
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I have read the derision, panic and hype about Windows becoming too bloated, but have always worried more about less control for Admins. A mandatory sound and built-in DRM are looking to be the beginning of the end to Windows as we know it. Now, Windows won't go away for a long time, but it could become more like a Mac where you can't modify it so extensively that it acts like a different OS. I will ditch windows when control is robbed from the users.
The government can't save you.
And this:
http://hellbound.ath.cx:8080/phpsysinfo/
That, the start navigation click, maximimize, minimize, etc.. They're so annoying especially if you have the volume cranked up for music. I really don't need bells and whistles for most things. Occasionally, I leave on sounds for error alerts.
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
I think that would maximize the annoyance factor of an unchangable, un-disablable startup sound.
Nathan
The 'cmd.exe' shell is more powerful than some people with memories of the limitations of 'command.com' know.
Visual C++ Express is a no-charge download. So is MinGW. And the JS and VBS interpreters come with Windows out of the box.
1st reason, if you mute the sound, the startup chime is also muted.
2nd reason, sleep actually works very well on Mac models, and most Mac laptop users don't shut their machines down often. This of course is not true of 100% of the population, but it is true of a very large portion. As one example the Macbook has a bug where if you shut it down and close the lid, it crashes and doesn't shut down. While this is a known issue, very few Macbook users report it or complain about it.
I have only shut down my Macbook once, and that was to upgrade the RAM, since then it has been sleep only when it was not in use.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Comon people, catch up. We need MORE reasons for people to not use vista. I'm a long time MS user and implementer and I was really hoping for a good upgrade from XP. But with all the crap going on and it being even more bloat then MS usually manages its out of control.
If MS force activation on VL customers and do stupid things like have an 8GB install plus forced startup sound and every other dumb thing they've got going on its GOOD for everyone. What we need now is a massive unparalleled backlash against MS that forces them to actualy wise up and put up a refined, fast, cut down to bare basics OS that has a sweet, completely optional, GUI on top.
I refuse to draw comparisons to the other majorly used OS out there as I am in fact a pro ms junkie. But yeah, its vaguely possible they've got it completely right. Go and get a real good OS and kerplunk your interface and goodies over it. Smart.
unabashadly steal it for all it's worth.
Thanks for making me laugh!
Blogging because I can...
Yo Gates! Jobs sorta did this years ago.
Yo Gates! Grab the starup sound from the iMac so I can watch Jobs sue you for DRM violations.
Never another Microsoft purchase. The way it ought to be.
That depends on how often you have to 'Cold Boot'...
If hibernation, instant on, power save mode, etc. are working, you shouldn't have to cold boot very often all all, even on a Laptop.
That's a pretty big if though. (hardware dependant as well)
credit to Krimson-News for this...
8 53
"You will be able to mute the sound on your computer speakers or in the volume control panel, so that the sound does not play if you do not wish to hear it during cold-boot.
Since the audio profile for that user will not have been loaded yet, if you try to mute the sound through the sound schemes "no sounds" setting in the Sound control panel in Windows, it will still play since the cold-boot sequence occurs before a user is logged on.
The user sound profile will not contain the option to modify the startup sound since, again, it is not a user specific setting.
They are currently assessing whether or not they will allow ability to programmatically disable (mute) the startup sound, however, if it is made possible, it will not be made possible via the control panel, rather via the registry or otherwise. Read: You will need to be a technical power user in order to make the change if it is possible."
Here's a link to the video of the good Mr Fripp recording those sounds at Microsoft:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=151
NOW I really want mod points, cause I would mod this into the afterlife.
How about something that is ACTUALY news, thats important!
CowboyNeal, OBVIOUSLY one of the editors because this post is remarkably content free.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
No, he'll hurl a chair at them from Redmond.
In a related story, Linus announced today that the 2.8 series kernel will play the theme from Three's Company over the PC speaker once the system is ready to use.
Come and knock on our dooooor.
It makes a good sound system test. :-)
This is a stretch, even coming from the anti-MS crowd usually in abundance here. What possible reason would MS have for making a system sound totally unique and non-standard? Do you hear MS startup sounds on the radio, selling ad space? Do you hear MS startup sounds as talk radio intro jingles, to make them more identifiable?
Really. Find something else to bash without making stuff up to support an already nebulous agenda.
Restarting, ignoring what hardware, is a must. If you don't, ram will get filled up with crap, thing will be running and errors will start to chain.... this will happen on any system, even BSD without any visual GUI.
I want what you're smoking.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well I guess this will lead to many people trying to get rid of this startup sound and eventually lead to chaos at Microsoft, since it seems like the startup sound is more important for them than the security holes and exploits.
*pout*
The first thing I do on any computer is turn off sound sets. They annoy me. I'm sure they annoy plenty of other people. I can't think of many worse tortures than being in an open plan coprorate environment and flocks of computers boot into Vista. :(
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I have a laptop with a very loud startup beep that can't be disabled (one of my roomates said when he first heard it go off he thought it was the fire alarm). I run FreeBSD on the laptop, and FreeBSD has an even longer startup beep that I only recently learned how to disable (you have to edit some assembly code and rebuild the first-stage bootloader). I always carried around one of those 1/8"-to-1/4" headphone converters and stuck it in the headphone jack when booting my computer to disable the startup beeps.
People saw it sticking out the back of the computer and asked me what it was. I came up with lots of funny answers.
Toss a chair.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
While that's a handy work-around for occasional use, I still find it amaziung that it would be necessary. Can't you just clobber the sound file or something?
The Mac chime is a part of the BIOS. It's basically like the single beep on a normal PC BIOS that says, "Your hardware appears to be working okay." As far as I know, it's imbedded in there and isn't just a normal file on the hard drive, though I could be wrong.
Hold down the mute key while it's booting and the start sound is disabled.
I hate garbage like this. I swear it's like the people who decide to do stuff like this are fascists and do it on purpose because they can. I mean when XP came out it was so stupid that you had to "hack" it to uninstall MSN messenger! Now this?! My list of reasons to keep using Linux keeps on growing and growing...
Gentoo Linux - Wouldn't have it any other way. And fuck beta.
My speakers have an off switch. :)
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
they make it mandatory, loud, and obnoxious. One more reason to switch to something else.
I look forward to intensified mocking of my Windows-using inferiors!
I'm pretty sure I heard that in Vista, the default option for shut down will actually be some sort of standby/hibernate hybrid, and that shutdown is somewhat hidden or something so most users won't even be experiencing this anyway. Hopefully, they will also get some way to not require reboots for updates, or else that feature is moot.
All your base are belong to Wii.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE&mode=re lated&search=
Actually, they should just play this entire video to truly enrich the login experience.
But Apple can do no wrong here on /., so the point is moot.
There. I fixed it for you.
Look, this is either an idiotic thing that should be an option controllable by the user or it's not, and whichever it is, it is regardless of how many times somebody might reboot their computer.
It never ceases to amaze me how many excuses people here can come up with for why their double standards aren't double standards. I expect no less than 5-6 more in reply to this post.
The suspend and sleep features are fairly crappy for Windows; at least not on par with Mac.
I used to use the sleep feature on my Win laptop (used to travel around and install and configure routers and such) and it's fine for a few awakenings but you can't keep a bunch of apps loaded without the system being buggy. I eventually would reboot in the morning and load the essential before venturing out and do it daily. Daily reboots that is.
My Mac has gone months without reboots and might add that it is operational within 2 seconds of opening the lid. I've only manually rebooted when it was time for security related patches that affected me. One thing that I use Windows for is the USB to serial for a console port which is why I use both platforms.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Almost all Toshiba machines (lkaptops anyway) have a genuine mechanical wheel attached directly to a pair of pots on the output. Once moe sanity triumphs over digital madness!
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
And, as hundreds of people in their cubicles turn on their computers, the startup sound is played again, and again, and again....
Somebody didn't think this through.
If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window, no pun intended.
Most Airlines frown upon things being thrown out the window in mid flight....
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Cool...I guess the fact that they have the time to do stuff like this means they're finished with all those "big" things like bugs and security. Release must be just a few weeks away!
Typically, to achieve that, one turns off one's speakers because thee are many other things that make beeps, etc... after the Windows startup sound.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Hopefully the sound will be that old wincrap.wav. You know how that went.... "Taaadaaaa...BOOOM! AH CRAP!"
playmoney.me - The free alternative to paper board game play money
About the only laptop manufacturer left that still includes an actual potentiometer volume control is Toshiba, AFAIK, for all their models. All the others are using software for volumes, dedicated volume key or not.
I have no idea why no other brands do this, but having an actual volume control is extremely useful. I hardly ever touch windows' horrible software volume control and just leave it at maximum.
Really? My Thinkpad has three.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
What the hell sense does this make? It's not advertising, an Eula, a licence agreement, a warning to not pirate windows, a threat; these would be horrible to have at start up, but I can at least see why they would be there (Microsoft doesn't like piracy, for example), but a sound clip? I'd like to know why Microsoft thinks people should have to hear the start up noise.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
There is this StartupSound Preferences Panel that allows for more control over the startup sound...
I do it because having some corny sound play every time I reboot is just too much to bear.
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
This isn't going to happen, of course. The "you have got to be kidding" emails must be already pouring in. But the fact that this is an issue says nasty things about the Redmond mentality.
And at least the Mac bootup sound has always been a simple, usually beautiful single instrument chord, not some crappy jingle a la Windows that often comes out sounding choppy as the bloodbath of all the startup services cause your IDE throughput to be floppy-like.
Mind you, the Windows tunes are nowhere near as horrifying or embarrasing as anything with the opensource desktops like KDE and Gnome. Fortunately, nobody had the gall to ship with them being played by default. Can't wait to read serious reasoning why Microsoft are doing this - it's pretty obvious a lot of people are going to be asking for this to fixed.
On any machine worth a dime, you can call it 'firmware' and keep a straight face.
Goes straight to the laptop's firmware, does not trigger a keyboard interrupt for handling by the OS (observe how the OSD shoes the same information if you're in windows or if you're in linux, or if you're booting off a USB floppy with no valid boot sector or if....)
Clue up, jizzmop.
I associate those Windows opening chimes with frustration. It's like having somebody punch you in the face every time a bell rings. Soon you're angry at just hearing the bell. I've realized that I feel a bit of anger at Microsoft just hearing that horrible chime even under benign circumstances like when I overhear it from the next table at Starbucks.
... read in James Earl Jones' voice...
Select which Microsoft thing you hate most:
(1) Clippy
(2) BSOD
(3) Unremovable Windows Vista Startup Sound *NEW*
(4) WGA
(5) DLL Hell
Same here. I run Windows to write my book only, which wasn't my choice and I'm not doing it again. My next book [though I dunno if Syngress will want to publish it] will be totally in LaTeX again so I can actually control what the book looks like as I write it. Well that and I can write the book in Win32, BSD, Linux, MacOS, whatever. I'm won't be tied to Windows to run ... shudder ... word.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Bad idea. It reminds me of Mac's chimp and PC's beep sound (assuming PC speaker is not disconnected). I like to customize my own sounds like using THX for Windows' startups. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation.
They should be annoyed they have to boot everyday. The advert noise is just icing on the top.
Who knows, they might make things a little better. I thought the current Windoze start up noise was bad. Coffee shops, book stores, libraries, anywhere people bring laptops you hear that God Damned noise because M$ power management blows and because they make it hard to turn the spam off. Now it will be impossible to turn the spam off. Hopefully there will be as many start up noises as "versions" of Vista. The "I just paid $400 for a second rate OS" noise will alert everyone that someone very stupid is in the room. Other bling noises will at least bring less monotony than the ever present XP noise. Oh, who am I kidding, M$ laptops have been getting nothing but more annoying and difficult to customize. Trust M$ to screw it up even more.
You have to love an OS that has uptime measured in months.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There's another scenario where the chime doesn't sound, and it doesn't involve holding down a key. If the system is booting up from a hibernate*, the chime never sounds. If I'm planning to go to the library in the morning and I don't want that pesky LED lighting up my entire room, I just make sure to suspend my OS X session to disk. No chime, no embarrassment.
*But wait! There's no "hibernate" option! For those who don't know (I had to dig a little to find this out), type in the terminal sudo pmset hibernatemode NUM, where NUM is either 1 for hibernate or 0 for normal sleep. With hibernatemode set to 1, I just close the lid of my MacBook (non-laptop users can go to Apple > Sleep) and OS X drifts off into blissful hibernation**.
**If you dual/triple boot, booting into Windows or Linux (or at least Ubuntu) wipes the hibernation data. I found this out the oops-I-did-something-stupid way. Durr.
No I think you'll find on most laptops that that Fn+F11/F12 or whatever it might be actually does generate a key event; they work exactly the same as multimedia keys on desktop keyboards, the only reason they do it with Fn key is to save keyboard area. This is certainly the case on my laptop (which is by no means cheap or offbrand), and on nearly all laptops that I've seen which lack the wee little potentiometre setups.
My laptop is permanently muted anyway; who the hell listens to sounds coming out of your laptop speakers? Sounds like arse. And even when the headphones are plugged in, you still get major interference from the integrated sound chip.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
Fixed that for you.
Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
Say what? The HP nc6000 on my desk (beside the monitor to this Linux box) has volume up/down buttons, AND a mute button, right on the front. Glances around office. One old IBM Thinkpad has a thumbwheel on the side, the other has it just above the keyboard. OK, the Twinhead uses (meta)-F8 and (meta)-F9, so that might not work at boot.
Not that any of those could run Vista (well, the HP might.)
-- Alastair
And then you have to unmute it to hear regular Mac sounds. Making it different from this Vista thing precisely how?
From the article: 1. A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react. You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in. You won't need to wait for your machine to startup, he says. Does it really take that long for Vista to boot up?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, my Tecra has a hardware dial that's software controlled. Same thing for their Qosmio line.
This way every my neighbours will know that I use Windows Vista and I will be the most coolest guy ever!
:(...
Oh, but you already see my sig
ghostbar page.
I own an IBM ThinkPad T42 (One of the last ThinkPad's before Lenovo bought them).
The volume control is three separate buttons, and they work immediately even while it's booting (shutdown unmuted, push mute on the IBM logo screen during POST, and it boots muted). Same with the Fn keys which adjust the LCD contrast and etc.
Also, the speakers on it actually sound pretty good (no bass, but very clear). They're in front of the keyboard, but they're actually under the very front edge of the case pointed at an angle at the table; the effect is, when it's on a table, you hear it even better. It still sounds nice and clear on other surfaces too, including your lap. They're good enough for playing games, as well as most music IMHO.
Yes with that method. But there are ways to do it otherwise. These two posts hit on four methods: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid=160 21938
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I also own a toshiba and yes, the wheel is an old vintage classic wheel which turns the volume down. None of that multimedia crap, and to be honest i love it! In fact its on thing i miss from my old walkman, no that these new cd/mp3 players have all digital volume control these days....
Just replace the startup sound with that sound no old people can hear. The librarian will think everybody except you is crazy, even though you're the one running Vista.
One has 994 days of uptime, and the other has, as of last week, 1190 days. The longer running of the two - DAEDALUS - runs close to 75% load from 6am-6pm, 5 days a week.
And unpatched. IIRC most of the "patch Tuesdays" for the past couple of years have involved a reboot.
meh
Several hundred million people use Windows. I'm not sure people would refuse to upgrade on the sole basis that the sound would wake their family members early in the morning... but it's evidence that perhaps it's not such a good idea, that maybe other scenarios (that nobody thought of) might occur in which an always-on startup sound greatly aggravates or inconveniences a user.
Here's one for you. I bought a used Carver M400 amplifier a long time ago. It's 200w x 2 channels, and is an excellent little amp. It's JUST an amp. There's no power switch, there's no volume or anything else (because it's expected that you have a nice preamp with sources plugged into that). Well, I didn't want to spend money on a preamp! So I just manage my mixer on Windows very well. I have occasional surprises, but for what I paid for everything, it works great.
I would most definitely not appreciate a startup sound that couldn't be disabled; but at the same time, it's very difficult to truly disable it. Those sound bytes are somewhere... their checksum & checked checksum are somewhere... they can (and will) be changed (for example).
Play inconsiderate like that enough with me, and I don't spend money on your product. I am most certainly not alone. This is pretty simple.
It certainly wouldn't be something Microsoft came up with. Come on, I'd even allow Intel to start me up. At least that is innocent and quick.
The screen or your finger?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Cant we all ask the computer manufacturers to implement a landmine into the powerunit. That detonate on the sound of Vista booting? We only need say 50% of sales to realy change Microsofts opinion here.
That's something I've never understood though. Why don't more people disable that? What function does a start up sound serve?
Doesn't have to be mechanical either. My Thinkpad T43p hsa a hardware mixer accessed via media buttons that bypass the OS, so I feel safe knowing that I always have a mute button to fall back on.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
And if users play the Vista start up sound backwards they hear Steve Ballmer whispering "please don't use Linux".
Mandatory like paying for music? Mandatory like reading EULAs? Or is it mandatory like having a "genuine" copy of Windows to download updates? Gimme a break.
The great sig in the sky!
Mine mostly works, but after about 8 suspend-resume (or hibernate-resume) cycles I get a warning message saying "The API failed to complete because of a lack of system resources" and after that the machine pretends it doesn't know how to hibernate or suspend.
+++ATH0
Admittedly, my home computers are not quick, but my work machine is (3.8GHz processor, 2GB RAM etc...)
One thing that has always mystified me is that when XP plays it's startup noise, the computer IS STILL NOT READY TO BE USED. I find that I am waiting another 30s to a minute before I can click on the 'Start' button and have it respond within 5 seconds.
Wanted: A better sig than this one. I have neither the wit nor motivation...
That's why I use Ubuntu, so I have the *freedom* to disable those silly bongo drums in the GDM. And what if Canonical decided to remove the ability to disable the startup sound? Well, it's open source - I can freely code the functionality back in. You can't do that in Windows!
When will people understand that sounds can be annoying?
Sounds on web-pages are annoying, sounds when you start your computer or just use it normally are annoying, even in games sounds can be annoying, most of the time you just don't want to hear a sound, either because you don't want to make any noises or because you're listening to music.
When is the last time that you were listening to music and some awefull piece of music emanating from your speakers 3 times louder than the music you were listening to all of this because someone on myspace tought it was cool to put music on their main page?
My point is, make this a commandement : Thou shalt not make any sounds unless necessary. I mean really necessary, what's the point of having your computer make some pseudo-zen chime when it gets started up?
Oh well, it gives you a couple of coolness points if your start up sound sounds like "SEGAAA!!!"
You just got troll'd!
Consider yourself lucky. Either that, or you're a pro at maintaining an XP install. Most of the XP users in my office complain of the same problems with suspend/hibernate, and are slowly switching to MacBook Pros. This has been the case with every other job I've had. I loved my old Thinkpad, and the suspend/hibernate worked moderately well, but it's not nearly as smooth as a Powerbook. It literally does take 2-3 seconds to get back to work wherever you left off.
"FUD. I use sleep and hibernate on my XP laptop all the time without any issues. I reboot maybe once a month."
Not FUD. Sorry. I'm one of those peeps who has used Win2k and XP with virtually no probs. I have excellent up-times, no infections, yadda yadda yadda. However, I've yet to have an XP or 2K laptop that had a working sleep or hibernate function. Either would work after a fresh installation, but after a few months, the machine would either refuse to come out or just plain act funny when it finally did revive itself. This is across 4 laptops I've personally owned. I personally blame Registry Rot, but have never really been able to prove it. I'm glad you're not having problems, but I'm also quite envious.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Do you remember the sound the Sega Genesis made when booting up? It was two chords and someone singing the word Sega.
I always wished someone would make a Windows startup sound with those same chords except singing Windows. It would also need to be lo-fi like the Genesis one.
Anybody know if anyone ever made something like that?
Haha, this reminds me a of a great episode in college: I visited a friend's dorm room around 1996; he lived in one of four highrises arranged around a central quad. As it was a warm sunny afternoon in September, quite a few people had their windows open.
All of a sudden, the (very loud) Windows 95 startup sound comes out of someone's room across the way.
Followed immediately by shouts from about 30 windows of "DON'T DO IT!" "NOOO!" "GET A MAC!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Clear back in the 90's I worked for BSDI. We had customers using out BSD/OS with uptimes of more than 3 years. Back then you couldn't get a Windows box to stay up more then 40 days (remember the bug?), but it took MS years to find that problem because no one could keep one of the damn things up for long enough to find out that it would crap out at 40 days.
So back then it was 40 days vs. 1100+ days. MS has come a long way, but I'd still put my money on some of the competition.
Just replace the .wav file with anything you want, or even no sound.
I can't really argue against that. OS/X beats Windows hands down from a user-friendly point of view, and also from an eye candy point of view. It just looks better, and for the average user, it works better. I do, however, know a few Windows evangelists. Annoying, but you do have to understand that in a well-managed system, Windows can be just as stable as Linux or OS/X. In a well-managed system. With properly written drivers, and stable hardware. Hey wait... that's exactly why OS/X and Linux tend to be stable.... The real stability problem with Windows comes from MS's decision to run drivers in kernel space instead of userspace, and they've finally fixed that screwup with Vista. It's about frigging time, but I'm not going to run to the store to buy a copy when it's released.
Yeah. Have you looked at what they did with Vista? Back around 1998, MS realised that the 9X kernel was a piece of crap. That's why ME was the last piece of junk they ever released on that kernel (NT 5 wasn't ready when they released ME). XP had the same kernel as 2K: NT 5. That's why you couldn't install XP Home as an upgrade over 2K Pro: XP Home has a single CPU build of NT 5.1, and 2K Pro has a SMP build of the same kernel. They realized that NT wasn't really much better either, because the problem was having a macrokernel and running drivers in kernel space. It's great, when the drivers are stable. But MS wasn't writing the drivers, vendors were. And many hardware vendors have a nasty habit of producing crappy drivers, which caused all kinds of stability problems in their OS that couldn't legitimately be attributed to their own code; except that they'd elected to run 3rd party code with the same privilege as the kernel. The prevailing wisdom when they came up with that braindead idea was that it was faster to run a macrokernel with support for everything, because you didn't need to load drivers. Try running Windows using only WHQL-signed drivers, and it's a completely different experience from using unsigned drivers.
In order to change the driver architecture, though, MS had to rewrite the kernel. They went with a modular kernel that runs drivers in userspace. It's much easier to maintain such a kernel, because there's less crap that can go wrong at the kernel level. I've seen errors that would cause a BSOD in NT happen to a Vista machine. A fatal exception OE caused by a crappy video driver, actually. That would take down anything currently commercially available from MS. But Vista shrugged. It gave me an error message, I clicked OK, and it restarted the video driver. The screen didn't even flicker, and the streaming music from Club977 that I was listening to at the time didn't even stutter.
It's a *huge* improvement. But it's also a *huge* rewrite from their previous kernel architecture. And that's why it's been so long. They probably plan on taking a page from Apple's book when they say that new versions won't be that long between again. Assuming that Vista's kernel doesn't develop some horribly crippling quirks (and the jury's still out on that), they won't need to do a complete rewrite again. They'll be in the same place Apple has been for the la
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Might be easier for King Crimson and Robert Fripp fans I suppose, as Fripp is responsible for "Windows sounds" according to http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1518 53
and
http://www.krimson-news.com/2006/08/25/the-fripp-s ound-in-windows-vista/
It sounds like the BBC World News interlude music.
It's my favourite startup sound yet, and still manages to come across as professional.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
The same thing as opening theme music for a TV show. It sets the mood for the entire show/session.
For Vista, I'm torn. A giant sucking sound would be pretty apt, but the sound of the Windows 95/98 intro music stuttering is pretty freaking funny, too....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The sound of MS X-box division is that of money going down a drain.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm a college student, and I imagine this 'feature' going over very poorly in lecture halls. Students often start their computers shortly after the lecture has started, or sometimes start or reboot in the middle of class. Usually it's no big deal, but on occasion the sound is turned on and the volume is cranked way up. It's extremely disruptive. I used to take my computer to class to take notes, and for a while I had a stereo headphone plug (just the plug, no headphones or speakers connected) in my computer bag so if I'd forgotten to mute my sound before I shut down, I could stick that in the headphone port and mute the sound long enough to get into Windows where I could adjust the volume. I have since disabled that and a few other sounds on my system, and I'm quite happy this way.
Another problem situation would be at home, when other family members are sleeping or otherwise would rather not be disturbed, having the sound play at each startup can be a bit irritating.
If I were Microsoft, I'd go ahead and put the forced sounds in the first boot/registration section, and from there on out make it switchable. I can understand their desire to keep it uniform, to an extent - so no control panel for sounds which gives users the option to use their own sound for boot - but there should at least be an on/off radio button somewhere.
Computers need to explode more often.
Even if the hibernation would work perfectly, you've got a dozen applications that use constant internet connections, those are not there after resume and apps start to act funny. :p).
:)
Moreover, there are applications that work as daemons with listening network sockets, if they are revived in a new environment with new ip coming from the hotspot over dhcp quite a bunch of them just fail to resume the work (lazy programmers
You'd just have to redesign the whole logic of an operating system and networking to make it really usable with suspend/resume. Current development standards are usually based on the continious ideology and on a static environment, but that just doesn't apply in the resuming world
Sure, your notepad will manage to resume after suspend, but users would expect more.
As for the original topic, startup sounds are just plain annoyments made up by the marketing team. My laptop isn't a cheap one either, but it doesn't have hardware sound control, just software based buttons. Am i supposed to be annoying everyone else everywhere i got with some gling-glang-bling-blang ? Don't think so. I'll stay with the penguins, i want control.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Like everything else.
Yes, and remember that the best way to accelerate your Vista-based system is 9.8 m/s^2!
It looks like you're trying to boot Windows!
www.linuxpenguin.net
I've never heard of anyone with this particular problem. Ever. And my laptop is up and running in less than 2 seconds. Fully functional.
Guess you need to learn how to keep your XP install clean. Like not installing Kaaza and stuff.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
That, the start navigation click, maximimize, minimize, etc.. They're so annoying especially if you have the volume cranked up for music. I really don't need bells and whistles for most things. Occasionally, I leave on sounds for error alerts.
What's even worse (to my mind) is that if you set "No Sounds" then XP will beep the internal PC speaker for an alert. Where this is *incredibly* annoying is when you adjust the volume, and Windows plays a sound so you can hear what the volume is like now. Yeah, what a great idea *that* is.
I expect no less than 5-6 more in reply to this post.
Will one post do? :P
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
In case any one is wondering about the nature of the sounds in question, there are samples of Robert Fripp's work online. One of my favourites is a recording from a building that still exists, but saw so much tragedy: the World Financial Center.
Much as I like RF's work, I still expect people will be able to turn the startup sound off, without having to hack anything. The way computers are used in quiet environments such as libraries and classrooms, that would be very inconsiderate of M$. No sound is that good.
(this is not a
Or perhaps, along with all the other posters on this thread, they have experienced problems with suspend/hibernate in Windows and now avoid it. Several people I know have also had this issue, also with desktops - I've never seen *or* heard of it on OS X, so I think the comparison is fair. It probably depends on a lot of things, and given all the variety of PC hardware out there I'm not surprised they're having a tough time making it a reliable feature.
Just because it works in your experience doesn't make that experience universal, so there's no need to stoop to insulting other posters because they have problems you haven't seen.
You are boasting or very lucky, but in my experience a heavily used laptop cannot survive a lot of sleeping/waking up. Mine is an Acer (perhaps that explains it), but after my wife has played The Sims 2 on it, it gets really sluggish. When you hibernate it and wake it up again, the wireless connection is usually gone (not always, mind you, that would be too simple), plus I've noticed a few crashes after forcing a network connection. So it's shut-down after the Sims...
"Guess you need to learn how to keep your XP install clean. Like not installing Kaaza and stuff."
Yeesh. Going for the quick way out, eh? No Kazza or anything like it, sorry. My laptops are used mainly for web-browsing and some Photoshop work. My current laptop, for example, is up for weeks at a time. (I don't take it anywhere, so it's always on AC, never goes into standby.) It behaves just fine. Standby is unreliable and it has been on all of the latops I've encountered. If Windows is that delicate, I'm not accepting the blame. I guess you have a better laptop than I do. Whatever.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
How freakin' long are they saying that Vista is going to take to boot?
This, from an operating system whose predecessors traditionally require you to reboot after almost every new program install.
Be afraid... be very afraid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's a relatively minor annoyance but a terrific demonstration of Microsoft's arrogance and emphasis on marketing fluff over substance. Fortunately, I've been 100% Microsoft free for two years and have no intention of ever running Vista. Good riddance to bad garbage.
On my Mac it's all controllable by the user.. indeed any mac running os x afaik (haven't checked out os 9 and before to this depth). And there's even a beaufitul simple preference pane you can install at http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/index.en.html
:D
It's not that Apple can do no wrong, but that they don't try to imo.
I think I'll wait for the pirated version. It's more tweakable, doesn't randomly lock me out of system functions or media files, doesn't come preloaded with fifty gigs of crap, doesn't push third-party advertising at me, and I can get it over the internet.
:)
Oh, and it's cheaper
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Just never reboot!
I'm pretty sure that my Thinkpad T42 volume keys work before the OS loads... It's probably not completely hardware, but at least it works without having any drivers installed in Windows.
Possible Vista startup sound files:
1. Ballmer screaming, "I-LOVE-THIS-COMPANY!"
2. Gates laughing hysterically that you even purchased Vista.
3. Gates clip from the 80's praising the Mac.
4. Gates laughing hysterically because he's so rich he now doesn't care WHAT you like in Windows.
5. "Cha-CHING!"
I'm sure there are lots of others that would be appropriate...
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Is this what the Vista bashing has come down to?
We're all capable of swapping the startup.wav for an empty file, should we so wish.
'Think of the children' has reached a new low as we wring out hands over the harm that others listening to a jingle might cause.
Fun prank: change your air-traveler friend's Windows starup sound
Laptop:"This laptop will expode in 10, 9, 8 ..."
Federal Air Marshall:"Sir! Turn that off NOW or I WILL SHOOT!"
Hapless Prankee:"Uh, I can't! It's Windows!"
Hee hee!
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
He's going to be forever known as "the guy who made that awful Vista startup sound".
That's a known problem with laptops with more that 1G RAM.
IIRC there is a fix from Microsoft, but it's not freely available.
For people like us who don't turn off PCs... nothing.
For my dad who turns on his laptop and goes to make a cup of tea, it tells him that the laptop is ready.
Of course this usefulness pales on any windows with a login prompt because it doesn't sound until after you've returned to the PC to log in.
I'd like to run a few (cough) innocent (cough) security (cough) tests... (cough)
I lied, it looks like it's now available.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909095/
but I don't think a large percentage of the population is going to be too happy to have to listen to "21st Century Schiziod Man" every time they turn on their computer!
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
...to show the world that they now have a licenced sound forge. http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/13/0036243.shtm l?tid=133&tid=201&tid=109&tid=1
Because, if it can, a 3 second sample of John Cage's most fampous composition/a? should do the trick
What do you care? Weren't you all supposed to be running Linux or Mac? ;-)
5-1 It'll be the sound of Satanical laughter.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window
Interesting solution. I would suggest doing a status-check on the physical size of the offending person before throwing said laptop out of said window, however.
I'm curious, are you fond of similar reactions to other annoyances?
Example: If someone slams a car door with a bit of force, do you subsequently dent their hood and break a light or two?
Suggestion: These reactions may not be conducive to sustained friendship. You might try clenching your fists and counting to ten if the urge to smash things arises in certain situations.
I dont think it will be worth getting kicked out of class for turning on my laptop.
/me looks at calendar
:D
No it's not april fools day...
This can't be serious guys, just imagine booting your laptop during some meeting (happens all the time), conference, whatever, and being unable to disable that sound. That would piss off so many people that just this would be reason enough to switch back to XP.
Nah, Microsoft is doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot lately, but this is too much...I think Scobleizer is pulling our legs here
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Why don't you just plug in a set of headphones? On all laptops i've come across, the internal speakers are muted, when something is plugged into the headphones plug.
I think I'll try this with my old T21 Thinkpad. Stick a pair of headphones in the appropriate socket. Sure, there will be some tiny sound, but for all intents and purposes, silence.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
Likewise, I've used both for years on many different laptops without issue. If you have problems it's because a driver doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Nowt to do with M$ I'm afraid, can't blame 'em for this one.
Huh? I'm running a Thinkpad R52 with no more room for future expansion (2G of ram), and I've NEVER EVER seen that message. However, on several machines (not my own) I've seen a lot of other suspend/resume issues. Normally these aren't caused by network applications that discover they're no longer on the correct network, but by simple "office"-products and lookalikes that sets up "hotkeys" and messes up the keyboard control. Thus adding more interrupts to the suspend process, and sometimes totally blocking a resume, since the keyboard in a laptop is always re-initialized upon resume, and a lot of these small critters severly dislikes having the keyboard in the hardware enumeration disappear, then reappear. The normal solution to this, is to run software that actally works, and to work as an END USER, not a USER WITH ADMIN PRIVILEGES. Running your windows box in admin-mode is pretty stupid anyways, about the same level as using "root" for a primary account in unix. If you really needs admin privileges, use "run as" instead. //Svein (Who has never had suspend/resume problems on a non-apple machine)
Hi, I'm a signature virus. Copy my to your ~/.signature to help me spread.
Now that's a very important feature, that adds so much to Vista.
I can't believe we're going to pay to get that feature.
I hope we get a serious rebate. That may damage my ears or my THX speakers.
Vincent.
Actually, Windows Server 2k3 is fine for longer than that. I've seen it run for upwards of three months at a time before being rebooted, not for performance issues, but as part of a patch. Now, if you're running Windows Media Player and Kazaa on you server...
You are standing in an open server west of a blue house, with a boarded front door. There is an Exchange mailbox here.
And I'd definitely avoid trying to flush it as an alternative.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
The only other box I have running that beats that is a Netware 4.x box. But that barely counts as a usuable OS :)
;-) At least that was a reliable OS that didn't need patches every other day. Well, ok, you didn't need to patch anymore as soon as you had some version x.1... any Netware x.0 was always buggy as hell.
Hey, now don't you put Netware down
The last couple of NW 4.1 boxes I shut off last year at $ORK had uptimes of 400 to 900 days.
It was just like the song goes:
"They did what they were supposed to do,
it wasn't much, but it was enough."
(Every OS sucks, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie)
Well, if people manage to change the boot/login screen of Windows XP, they're sure as hell gonna be able to locate the small bit of code relating to the startup sound.
Hell, I'd learn how to crack just to get rid of it. Personally I like Windows making no sound at all, no boot up sound, no shutdown sound, no bloody minimize or maximize sounds.
The only reason I'm considering getting Vista is because of DirectX 10. If any of you have seen the Crysis CryEngine videos you'll know why (Linky [video.google.com]).
Android Software Engineer
And you chose Windows, you even agreed to the license agreement. What're you complaining about?
Deleted
Ah, you don't want the startup sound, or you want to change it, then you are obviously an Advanced User. You should upgrade to Windows Vista Advanced User. Ofcourse it will be a little bit more expensive than the basic version... but it allows you to do amazing stuff never seen on computer ever before, like, errr, it comes with really cool wallpapers. But be careful, if you use a startup sound that is not MS certified, your computer may stop functioning properly. Actually, if you want to use non certified startup sound files, you must get the Windows Vista Super Advanced Administrator version, which is quite expensive, but it comes with even more cool wallpapers. WARNING: changing Vista's settings without paying big fees to MS is dangerous and illegal. MS hold the right to change the settings of your Vista installation at any time for your own good.
assignment != equality != identity
A computer feature that actually works? All the time?
Oh, well, there's a pretty good chance that Apple's switching to Intel CPUs and the associated hardware architecture will fix that and you'll get to enjoy the pleasure of full reboots a lot more often just as we fortunate PC owners do
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Or whatever it's called.
If you try to delete a system file under Windows XP, it is simply restored from a backup copy. I suppose Vista will do this as well.
In Windows 95/98, there was a file for the bootup screen. If you deleted that, Windows would find the standard bootup screen from somewhere.
WWTTD?
Wow, a joke nearly hit you!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
A complete bullshit answer. The same could be said of ANY custom sound that I decide to put on my Winblows machine.
Again, a bullshit answer. You are telling me that Vista is going to play this "delightful" little tune at a volume that Winblows "decides" is better than what THE USER has set in preferences? My God the ego of these people.
I'm sorry but I want a computer that does what I tell it to do, not what Microsoft ALLOWS me to do!
No no no. It's got to be a USB peripheral.
If it's like the other 'system sounds' in Windows, they'll be recorded at full volume, unlike your music which is at -20 dB average. So you've got your computer connected to a nice sound system, you set your volume so the music (movie, etc.) is audible, and the system sounds will be loud enough to wake the dead.
At least the systems sounds can be shut off.
Please Microsoft, copy Apple's Sounds control panel which has a separate volume setting for system sounds.
I've NEVER EVER seen that message
Lucky you. Would you like a medal?
Just because you haven't seen an error, doesn't mean it isn't a known problem.
I'm Four! Anyone else? Btw, simple solution: Shutdown Item which turns of volume, Startup Item which turns it back on. Voilà, no startup chime or whatever.
Well, in the Mac side of life, it was a sign that the ROM had loaded properly, that the RAM test was successful, all that wonderful stuff that appears as text on BIOS-based computers. If one of the tests failed, then a different noise was heard.
Historically, the startup sound is due to the legacy of a bell or beeper being more reliable than a monitor. The beep was available as soon as power was turned on, but monitors had a few seconds until the tube warmed up, et cetera. The bell and later the speaker were more robust, so you knew the computer was running even if you didn't get a picture on the CRT screen.
I think if the startup sound in Vista is non-deactivatable, then the most likely cause is due to programmers capitulating at getting the sound controls activated before the sound starts, or because somebody insisted that since Microsoft payed some bigname composer to make this one sound, they want to make sure everybody hears it (maybe Jim Composer insisted upon it in his contract).
Likewise. Even on clean installs (I keep a disc with no crud and all the latest patches slipstreamed in) hibernate and sleep are touch-and-go at the best of times. Generally it hangs at the 'revive' stage. It also plays silly buggers with docking and undocking, and can't seem to survive between the two without a reboot even if I use the undock function.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window, no pun intended.
That's not a pun, it's hyperbole. And I certainly hope that you did intend it to be hyperbole, because if you did anything like that to me, I'd sure as hell be filing charges against you for property damage.
Of course, my laptop never has that problem - Windows persists mixer settings accross reboots, unlike, say, Ubuntu 6.06.
The suspend and sleep features are fairly crappy for Windows; at least not on par with Mac.
I used to use the sleep feature on my Win laptop (used to travel around and install and configure routers and such) and it's fine for a few awakenings but you can't keep a bunch of apps loaded without the system being buggy. I eventually would reboot in the morning and load the essential before venturing out and do it daily. Daily reboots that is.
My Mac has gone months without reboots and might add that it is operational within 2 seconds of opening the lid. I've only manually rebooted when it was time for security related patches that affected me. One thing that I use Windows for is the USB to serial for a console port which is why I use both platforms.
My Windows Laptop has been going for weeks without problems. When it's not suspended, it's hibernated (suspend-to-disk). Not once has it ever failed to resume (except for the time that it ran out of battery power beecause I forgot about it for 6 days).
My Windows Laptop resumes in about 2.5 seconds. My friend's PowerBook G4 takes about twice as long. And, yes, I tested this while writing this post.
You see, the thing about anecdotal evidince is that it's not reliabile.
The macintosh has had, as a basic component, and troubleshooting diagnostic, a *stoopid* startup sound for years. Why is this such a big deal?
1, "I see you are using OpenOffice.org or StarOffice. Microsoft does not recommend the use of this software."
2, "We're sorry but your time credit to use Microsoft Word has expired. Please purchase additional
Microsoft Points to continue." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points)
3. Your hardware vendor has made available an improved successor product to following system component in
your computer: Enrage Winforce 3000. Microsoft has been requested to disable the driver support of
this obsolete component. You have 13 days of operation left.
4. Your harddisk contents have been subpoenaed by an authorized entity: Ministry of Folklore and Culture of
the Republic of Bulgaria.
5. Your computer is about to access the internet on your behalf. Please thumbscan.
6. The DRM permission database has not been updated in 7 days. Please connect to the internet to continue
with playback.
7. The Department of Homeland Security has revoked your access to the internet.
8. How do you wish to pay for printing Microsoft Word documents? Select one of the following:
One month of unlimited access for 400 Microsoft Points
10 Microsoft Points per printed page
9. I see you have started Microsoft Word. Would you like to participate in a customer survey?
10. This mobile computer has detected a wireless computing device in your vicinity that has
not been registered with Microsoft.
Can't you just plugin a headset before startup? That should mute the onboard speakers.
Klingons are something one finds around one's anus.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm holding out for: "Your copy of Windows is genuine/pirate" ...with the volume set to XXX-loud if it's pirate.
No sig today...
computershave "forced" the start sounder for like 20 years and I have never seen a complaint, why is it ok for Apple and not for Windows?
This is the most rediculous thing I've ever heard! Who makes a sound mandatory? Are they TRYING to lose customers? If the sound does become mandatory... you can say goodbye to Vista being used for any radio station or on-air use where protocol is to silence ALL system sounds.
You can stop the "PC Speaker Beep" too -- "sc stop beep".
You can even disable it with "sc config beep start= disabled"
And "sc start beep" works for making it go again, and "sc config beep start= auto" re-enables it after a disable.
Learning about hardware is a must for you it seems.
If what you said was even remotley the case you would see the huge datacenters constantly rebooting...and they dont...for good reason. First I will touch on your ram gets filled with crap thing...ram is not a bucket that needs to be washed out...nor is the internet a series of pipes that gets clogged. When a program grabs a chunk of memory to do stuff there may or may not be stuff there...that is irrelevant and expected...that is why you initialize your variables before using them. If your program is grabbing memory that is already in use by another program...well you have problems...and that has nothing to do with hardware or "ram being filled" it has to do with crappy memory management at the software level.
Now for your hardware stuff... Hardware has a limited life, and startup/shutdowns drain the most life from your hardware.
Crappy hardware lesson 1. HP decided to fix some stupid USB bug they would cause a hard reboot during every soft boot on a particular model of laptop. Well this is all well and good except your display only has a limited number of hard boots it can handle before it starts to die...so...HP forced you to do more damage to your display on every boot to fix a shitty usb/bios error in their hardware. Bad juju.
Crappy hardware lesson 2. Physics says that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion...so guess what you are doing to all the mechanical parts of your harddrives with constant start and stops....stress (this applies more to the datacenter type things that rarely stop spinning at 10-20k rpm rather than things like laptops which will more frequently park drives spinning at 3,600-7,200rpm for the heat/energy savings)
Crappy hardware lesson 3. Physics again...laws of thermodynamics and all that good stuff...things heating up and cooling down causes material stress. So guess what you do to all those electronic parts every time you fire up that cold computer...heat em up quickly...and then shut em down...cool em off quickly. Throw some hot coffee on an iced window some day and see what happens. If you are running decent hardware and cooling then the temp of a running computer is generally not enough to cause itself to fail and causes less damage than constant power up/power down cycles. Bad cooling systems is another problem entirely.
Final lesson. Don't make up some ridiculous crap just to justify your hate for Apple. With your nice "OMG PC SUX" and nerfing your already nerfed mac crap...you kinda let on that either aren't aware, or are just making Apple hate noise...because well...the latest MacBooks run TADA PC hardware. Even when they were on their own hardware it was still pretty impressive hardware, but now its just an OS.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple Fanboy. I don't own a Mac, nor will I because my Dell laptop has roughly the same hardware specs for about 1/2 the price.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Just stick an adapter (1/8" plug--1/4" jack would be good) into it. Pick one up at your local Radio Shack. Cheaper, less clumsy, and no noise whatsoever.
Chris Mattern
As if making the startup sound maditory wasn't bad enough, The startup sound is going to be the entire 1988 Milli Vanilli album `All or Nothing`.
God Be Gone
I make five! And we're done.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Defenestration? Is that the process where you replace a Windows installation with Linux?
Fortunately my laptop was made on earth, so it has at least two ways to control volume -- systray icon and buttons on the side. I also carry a sub-mini plug (a short section of bamboo skewer would work as well) to stuff into the earphone jack if I'm going to be in a library or other place where I don't want to piss people off. No one needs to know how many typing errors I make.
As I recall, the start and end sounds played (at least on NT and W2K) at full volume regardless of the control setting.
It made it easy to tell when my lamer of a boss was getting ready to go home so I could get ready to bail, too, all without leaving my chair to check on him.
I used to work on laptops in a job and you have no idea how much money was spent warrantee repairing laptops because people turned down the volume on the potentiometer, and didn't know it. The company I worked for made a lot of money off of that. All we would do is turn up the volume again, and say we repaired it.
I have no idea whether it's an urban legend or not, but I once heard of an outfit that had a Novell server that showed as running on the system, but they couldn't locate it. After much cable tracing, they found it in a space that had been sheetrocked over some three years in the past.
If it ain't true, it should be.
To be more precise, it is part of the Open Firmware. The word "Open" in Open Firmware doesn't mean the firmware is open source, but that it has an open API. Thus one can manipulate the firmware using this API without having to deal with a proprietary BIOS screen. E.g. the
command line tool on Mac OS X uses this API to manipulate settings of the firmware while the operating system is running.To disable the startup chime just execute
on the command line, e.g. in the Mac OS X Terminal application. StartupSound.prefPane and TinkerTool System use similar techniques to disable the startup chime.So the startup chime of the Open Firmware isn't mandatory, but it is not very well documented, how to disable it. From a sophisticated platform like the Mac, I would expect an easily accessible control in the system preferences, not some thirdpary add-ons or obscure acrobatic on the command line; but perhaps I'm just spoiled over the years with OS X.
Same here. I believe it is EA GAMES that has this annoying "challenge everything" tagline each time you start the gate. Its so annoying that I scoured the internet to find the switch to turn it off...
Who do they think they are? Intel?
I love fast paced commercials with some dance-ish music playing and then it gets silent for a second to display the Intel logo with the 4-tone brand ID and then the dance-ish music comes back. Hilarious.
Xserv
"I love lamp."
why does this put me in mind of Brazil.
could it be the that it's a case of the user having to conform to the system - no matter how obviously wrong it is.
except there is an alternative, Linux.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
For my dad who turns on his laptop and goes to make a cup of tea, it tells him that the laptop is ready.
At which point he drops the kettle and rushes back to use it?
Sorry, but I still don't get the point of this. Either the laptop will have booted by the time he finishes making the cup of tea, in which case he doesn't need notifying because he'll get back and be able to see it's ready, or the laptop won't have booted by the time he finishes, in which case he's got a cup of tea to drink while it finishes. Either way, what's the point of having a sound to tell him something that will be blatantly obvious when he looks at the screen?
"You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in. You won't need to wait for your machine to startup, he says." It seems that the boot process is going to take a long time... long enough to have breakfast. You don't need to wait for your machine to start up - better go do something else - we'll call you when we are up and running. Next thing you know they will be telling you to boot up just before you go to bed and you can use it as an alarm to wake you up the next morning when it has finally booted up.
Well, in the Mac side of life, it was a sign that the ROM had loaded properly, that the RAM test was successful, all that wonderful stuff that appears as text on BIOS-based computers. If one of the tests failed, then a different noise was heard.
This is not Mac-specific in the slightest. Historically, PCs did exactly the same. Beep once if the BIOS self-test succeeded; if there was an error, emit various other sequences of beeps to indicate what the problem was. They only stopped doing that when manufacturers stopped building speakers into the case.
However, that reason is quite irrelevant in this case, where the startup sound is apparently going to be played to tell you that the reason the computer is displaying a login screen is that it's ready for you to log in. That is to say, after the computer has finished booting, and long after the monitor has begun displaying useful information.
An optional sound makes sense in such a context, since some people find audio cues useful. A mandatory sound, with the inevitable backlash from hordes of enraged customers, is simply incomprehensible.
I couldn't agree with you more, Mac, Linux, Apricot - I don't give a shit, this should be a user controlled option, but.. it's ok because hey you don't need to re-boot with a mac!
I've never been able to silence my OSX G4's startup sound. One of the reasons I'm using Linux on it.
Res publica non dominetur
I have had a similar experience -- laptop suspended and resumed fine for the first six months or so, following which one day on hitting the resume button the thing spends five minutes making painful noises, followed by a message explaining that XP had 'recovered from a serious error'. Following that, it never agreed to hibernate again, although sleep still worked. No weird software involved other than Visual Studio.
I'm inclined to blame hardware for part of it, since the laptop was also the only one I've ever seen to provide a blue screen of death upon plugging in a standard Microsoft PS/2 mouse using the microsoft signed mouse driver. But still, wiping and replacing XP actually fixed the hibernate, so even if it was poor hardware that caused the issue I'm not too impressed with the solution.
Maybe it's a mixture of hardware, drivers and luck.
Sure, but unfortunately EFI may be worse in some respects. Read this for more info. (Note: I'm a recent Mac convert and would love to be able to say that Apple has a perfect solution here...)
This unimaginably great sound took months of R&D effort to develop and was the cause of numerous delays.
In an attempt to minimize the per-unit cost of this new technology, Microsoft has made listening to their sound mandatory.
Is the new sound accessible? will my deaf grandmother be able to hear it?
You can stop the "PC Speaker Beep" too -- "sc stop beep"
Ah but in Vista when you try that it'll just say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" before trying to kill you.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Yup, even opening the window tends to get you some funny looks.
I just set up a new Dell at a dentists office the other day, and during the Windows setup producedure, it was playing that awful music. Unfortunately, the mute or other volume buttons did NOT work because Windows hadn't finished booting to run the program that controls the all the extra buttons. Anyone know a way to kill that music?
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
Just today I walked into the "Maximum Quiet Study Area" for our univerisity's library, and popped open my laptop and turned it on. My gkrellm instance sounded my "alert" sound (which is actually very rare, the load was too high from the boot apparently), and I rushed to hit the mute button.
The startup sound on Vista would be before any multimedia keys are registered if it's at all like XP is, and that wouldn't have worked. Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
Get yourself a bare 3.5mm jack plug connector to insert into the headphones socket. Then if you want to mute, just insert it into the socket and it will mute the main speakers and send the sound the headphones it thinks are connected to the connector.
Surely this is not a problem for /. readers? Just rename or remove the .wav file.
If mac users never reboot then how do they remember to mute the sound or turn it down before rebooting?
If I fiddle the with volume keys on my T43 (which otherwise is a piece of crap) before it clears the POST, they do change the volume.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Laptop Speakers don't have volume control, WHAT?
Every laptop I've ever owned has had a volume potentiometer, usually RIGHT next to the headphone jack, for controlling volume.
That includes my brand new Toshiba laptop. That volume potentiometer sits right next to the microphone jack.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Actually, that's just for the home edition. There are other sounds to let you know which edition you're using (all spoken by Steve Ballmer):
For the Windows Professional edition the startup is:
"Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers."
For the Windows Corporate edition the startup is:
"Give it up for **me**! I **love** this **company*."
For the Windows Sales and Marketting edition the startup is:
**Sound of a chair being thrown at the wall** followed by "I'm gonna fucking kill Google"
For the Windows Legal edition the startup is:
"We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference."
For the Windows Parenting edition the startup is:
"My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."
There are others for other editions, but I don't have them handy at the moment.
I thought "windows uptime" was defined as the cumulative uptime between planned reboots?
/me ducks
If you are speaking of the bug in Internet Explorer (and consequently, Windows Explorer) in Brazilian versions of Windows XP that does not display the "selective text on right" for toolbars buttons, I've patched manually all my Windows boxes. Kudos to ResHack.
- Please, ignore everything written above.
How about the fact that you CAN'T turn it off in WinXP either?
Changing the sound scheme doesn't matter, a few reboots later and it's all back again. Creating a NEW scheme... No dice, reverts back to the default scheme again in a couple of days.
My solution?
remove the frikkin' soundfiles!
Blog -
Apple's is for diagnostics. MS's is, by admission, pure marketing.
Simple really.
Suspend and sleep are also "features" in Windows, in case you didn't know. I believe Linux has decent support for those "features" as well.
Yes, but not like Mac's. When you put the machine to sleep, it consumes next to no battery power and goes to sleep and wakes up very quickly. (ie. usually by the time I get the laptop lid all the way open, it's already up) I know when I had my old toshiba, when I put it to sleep I was lucky if it lasted through the day on the battery. (ie. sleeping most of the time, not using it obviously)
In fact, the one downside to apple switching to the intel chips is the new MBP's can't swap the battery out while sleeping. I don't know why this is but this was an awesome feature of the old powerbooks. Close the lid (which puts the computer to sleep), flip it over, swap the battery, open it up... no reboot required.
At any rate, it's pretty dumb to implement this now.
Who's implementing it now? Apple's had it for quite some time now and as you said, linux and windows also have this feature. I'm confused.
Heh.. I always thought that one was true..
f lash.20010521.3.xml
But when I was trying to find a source for you, I found this:
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-05/sun
I preferred it when I thought it was true.
It tells him that the laptop MIGHT be ready, or might be loading another 20 minutes worth of tray icon startup garbage. At least the teapot is pretty accurate when it's "startup sound" blares out, and you can disable it, just stick something in the little hole :P
"Why don't you just plug in a set of headphones? On all laptops i've come across, the internal speakers are muted, when something is plugged into the headphones plug." Because my pc is not a laptop and it's wired into my hi-fi... thus with vista I have to remember to run across the room to my amp... drop the volume til it's booted then put the volume back and then go back to my pc... which can be a right bloody pain esp when install various software that requires a re-start. Also I have my volume on most pc apps set to run about half as std thus I can turn it up if something is rockin from the pc without having to use the amp across the room... thus the startup sound comes out at full volume... not nice at all
Windows 2000 server, non-internet facing ~ 110 days uptime
to see 40 machines in my office boot up in the morning and start chanting "Developers, developers, developers" together :D
There you go - never heard a startup sound since.
From the registry. C'mon, who cares?
JoloK
What a load of crap. I support Macs and PCs, with various notebooks from both camps, and my users don't seem to have any issues with Windows or Mac OS X going to sleep and waking back up.
From my experience, they both work fairly reliably, and that's not just talking about the hardware that I personally use every day.
So apparently, whoever thought this up doesn't ever, ever, ever use their laptop/computer in:
1) Schools, Colleges, Universities
2) Offices
3) Libraries
4) Home use at night
5) Conferences
6) Broadcast applications
7) Confined areas (trains, planes, wifi hotspots, cafes)
8) With an amplifier
Apart from the obvious waste of MY money that I gave MS with my purchases, which they have spent to hire someone to make a sound that I don't want and will never want to hear (no matter what MS say), this is a mind-trick.
Soon, the execs will "realise" that their customers have concerns and provide an off switch, thus putting into people's minds that they "listen to their customers". They were thinking that all along, it's just another way for people to continue talking about Vista that they will "remedy" by the time it comes out. It stops people thinking "But is it secure, is it easy to use, is it cheap, is it compatible?" and instead make them think "Well, they solved the worst problem, that stupid startup sound can be turned off". I don't want an "experience" with an OS. I would want to get some work done. I don't want it all to be integrated and matching - I would want it to boot fast, get on the Internet securely and not get in my way.
I turn off ALL sounds, no matter what the OS. And I usually have my speakers off except when I'm anticipating an IM and have turned its notification sound on, or when I choose to have sound (DVD's, MP3's etc.).
This is what used to wind me up about Windows - I have little to no control over the OS without bundling it full of freeware to do the job. I don't WANT Adobe Acrobat pre-loading at startup - I use it on less than 5% of my boots. In order to GET ASKED whether I want it to happen or not I have to install things like Startup Monitor from www.mlin.net. And still Adobe insists on re-trying every time I update it. I don't WANT it to, ever, at all, in any way, but there's no option for that.
I don't WANT program X to access the Internet - at all, ever, under any circumstances. It might be a game that has absolutely no need to, or that I only use on the LAN, or it might be trying to act as a server all the time, thus giving me an instant security hole. But it's going to take until Vista for me to get a choice of whether or not I will allow it unless I install ZoneAlarm or something similar (which I've been using for this purpose for many years now).
I don't WANT program X to install itself under some silly subdirectory - I really don't. Program Files is possibly the worst organised folder on any Windows drive because everything that ends up there chooses it's own structure - by company name, by product name, by some weird abbreviation - I don't WANT that. I CAN and WILL choose where this stuff goes, given half a chance. I have systems that differ from the software authors idea for a good place... I have categories - Audio/Video, Internet, Games, Graphics, Hardware, Utilities, all of which I have a perfectly clear idea of what should be where - I can organise my start menu in this way but rarely do you get a choice of where a game sticks its icons. Even rarer is the program that lets you CHOOSE where you install on the hard drive.
I also WANT to be able to move any folder without breaking anything and having to regedit to fix it (if its possible to move it at all). I don't WANT My Documents or My Music or My Pictures or anything My, I have a perfectly well organised file structure myself and don't want every program creating a "My" directory and putting its stuff in there.
I don't WANT to have to use five-thousand user-land applications that all put an icon in my system tray that I cannot remove without breaking stuff, cannot hide without a load of freeware and do not ever WANT just to use a poxy mouse or a hotkey or a wifi card. I don't WANT stuff to Auto-Update without my say-so, no matter how important someone else deems it is - I will choose WHEN and WHAT updates I install after carefully readi
Here's a no shitter.
TIME: Post-9/11.
Location: Major Metropolitan airport
Me: I just purchased a new LT that was about 3 days new to me. Being on the road I didn't have much time to 'play' with it. I arrive at the airport, get my tickets and proceed to my terminal. I'm early. I decide to sit and have a look-see at what was preinstalled on my LT. I sit next to the check-in counter. I open windows explorer. yadda yadda yadda, I open the windows folder and find an executable named 'clock.avi.' I double-click it.
The face of a clock take up most of the screen. It begins to Beep. LOUDLY. The clock is counting down. From 10.
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
I'll guarantee they've contracted work to some "user experience" guru who says some crap about how sound is a more primal sense than sight, and that to properly brand Windows you have to associate it with a sound, and that this sound must always be associated with Windows.
Of course, what they haven't thought of is that you don't want to associate your OS with a reboot these days. So this might backfire on them.
I own an HP Pavilion. It has 3 distinct MPBs for volume (down, mute, up - in that order). However, they're software controlled. If I'm starting up and the windows sound plays I've got to wait until the load is done in order to change the volume. Very annoying.
(Wikipedia) An alternative modern usage of the word:
Defenestration has become popular as a term for switching from MS Windows to Linux or another operating system [5]. It is claimed that this usage originated in the University of Helsinki in the mid-1990s.
Steve Ball, Group Program manager: "...Windows Vista should present a common, and beautiful, face to the world."
Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer: (Paraphrased) "...Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate, Defenestrate."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My laptop is a 3 and a half year OLD Compaq Evo1015v.. Its still running its original installation of Windows XP Pro that it was shipped with. I haev NEVER reinstalled XP (only kept it updated, and occassionally clean up the drivers, using the Show ALL hidden devices). The baby still hibernates, and sleeps liek there is no tommorrow.. I will be rebotting for the first time in a month tonight (some updates were installed which require a reboot)
Have a nice day!
Actually in current betas, there is a startup sound *at* the login prompt, and the user-defined one after you log on.
By default (for now anyway) they use the same sound for both, so it's kinda weird.
gcc: no input sig
This is another attempt of making PC as dumb as household appliances, ironically appliances are becoming more like PC's.
Windows is also becoming less friendly toward power users. I'll have to do my own windows setup script, or a program to do many things like: turn off useless GUI animations, destroy Accessibility, annihilate Windows themes, obliterate the menu delay, eradicate many useless windows services, turn off Auto Insert, Tab auto complete, and... Oh... there is more, I'll remember when I reinstall Windows. The stupid search needs a whole section: Turn off the stupid search dog, turn on advanced search, destroy windows zip support (there's no option to avoid searching into zip files), and search on all files when I write something on "containing text" (for example, it skips *.sql files!). I do miss the older search screen, if it hadn't a limitation on the number of entries found.
I always knew we would be using MS Bob against our will sooner or later!
It is like most modern audio equipment, you can't control the EQ, they just have stupid presets. It's about giving people less freedom, but that makes things easier to market and sell to most consumers. Maybe even makes it easier to translate, document and support. The iPod is a perfect example: simplicity sells.
He's then also saying you need a preset sound that can't be changed to realize your computer is on, and you won't hear this equally well with a custom sound that you've picked yourself. In what tragic accident did this guy lose his brain cells?
Good point. This is useful for a one-time startup sound indeed, or a sound you can keep on for as long as you wish yourself. When you're happy with your sound settings, you're then forced to keep it o... whaa, wait a minute, why is that? My sound effects are already OK, why should I keep hearing it? This can't be anything else than a cover up reason for the real object:
Make the Windows startup an annoying and enforced branding sound so people will hear "oh, this is Vista!"
Maybe a kind of cool thought the first 2 minutes or so of Vista user installs at a company or home, but hardly after 2 years.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
!!! all ebuilds that could satisfy "girlfriend" have been masked.
!!! possible candidates are:
- jen/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~taken)
- mary/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~uninterested)
- karen/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~uninterested)
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
The simplest way is to just mute the computer, now you would have had to do this before you shut down...it's not really an issue since Mac OSX users rarely need to re-boot.
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
My Vaio has a mute button that works now matter when or where in the boot process it is pressed. Too bad the volume buttons dont as well. But at least I can mute the damn thing.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
As a longtime Linux user I find the whole debate kind of funny. (Anti-flame disclaimer: I don't mean to 'should' or 'shouldn't' anyone regarding their choice of operating system.) It's kind of a stragne scenario, isn't it? In the end, Microsoft will probably put a checkbox in a Control Panel GUI that lets you turn off this sound, or even (if the marketing people can be distracted with something else for long enough) change the sound to something else. At the very least they'll have a Registry setting for it. But in the mean time there's a guy at Microsoft trying to make a decision about whether Windows users should be allowed to turn off a noise their computer makes. A pleasant-sounding noise, to be sure. But the decision is entirely in the hands of a person who, if the marketing people have strong enough control over Vista's brand image, might decide there's nothing Windows users should be allowed to do about it. Short of getting their hands very dirty with a hex editor, that is.
A very foreign idea to me. My current distribution of choice, Ubuntu, has some sounds enabled, and they do add to the brand image. And I do turn them off. And no one, not even the designers at Canonical, can ever tell me that I can't.
This is easily solved.
Take one of your old (probably broken wired) headsets you have lying around. Preferably one with the L-shaped 3.5mm mini-plug. Cut the wires to the quick. Plug it into the side of the laptop as part of the *unpacking* process.
Now when your laptop boots up, and starts to make it's sounds - it's routed out the headphone jack (electrical circuit open) - and no sound is made.
Is this worth it? No.
Should we add it to the list of reasons we WON'T buy Vista? Yes.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
NT 3 was a fully microkernal architecture; all drivers were run in userspace. This, of course, was back in the days of the 386 and 486, and was deemed too slow. So, for NT 4, drivers were moved back into kernel space.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My Averatec Laptop had a volume adjustment scroll wheel..
I've always understood the term "sleep" (or "standby") to mean save the machine's state to RAM, and go into a very low power mode.
"Hibernate" was when the machine saved its state to the hard disk, and completely powered off. This would allow you to remove the battery, and still resume from where you left off, even on Windows machines.
Intel hardware can suspend/hibernate to disk (has been able to for years), which would allow you to remove the battery.
In fact, just to make sure I wasn't going to post an outright lie on
I was referring to the sound at startup topic, not putting a machine into sleep/standby/hibernation.
Your Mac will start up silently if you had it's volume muted before shutting it down or restarting it.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Yea, but have you every seen the patch job done to drywall by somone with an IT background...
It's absurd to even see this story on Slashdot as a fully fleged entry. Are you all so desperate to pick and poke at Windows that you'll put rediculous stories that complain about a "mandatory sound"? Give me a break! Don't get me wrong, I'm a hardcore OS X user, but what benefit do I get by transforming this random drivel into a substanative "news" story? Turn your freaking speakers down (or off). Even laptops have mute commands via the manual sound control.
You people should be ashamed of yourself. Don't you have better news to cover than this?
"I am Jack's complete lack of suprise." -Fight Club
Yeah, what is this "off" you speak of? Even my laptop I usually just suspend to RAM.
OS X doesn't have a startup sound per se, it's part of the boot loader. It happens whether I'm going to boot into OS X or Windows. I believe you can bypass this by holding the mute key (if you have one) during startup but I don't have mine with me to test. Also there are third party utilities to turn it off.
I actually prefer it the other way around: Be quiet if nothing's wrong, and only beep at me if you have an error. Actually, that seems to be more common now, though some of my older PCs did beep if it POSTed successfully.
Now I have this weird newfangled motherboard that actually talks to me when there's an error. Scared the shit out of me the first time there was a keyboard error. It actually shouted "Keyboard not found!" at me or something like that.
no surprise to me, MS has been intruding in user customization of the experience for years. it's all downhill since NT 3.1... viruses, bluescreens, and Usage Cop telling you what you can and cannot do. you can't even whole-chop backup a machine any more, all the service packs get in the way and it's impossible to get your whole machine back.
which is why I have gone Mac, and my third son is going Mac in his business and at home. including the plasma display screen for training stuff, which will be fed by a mini as it stands right now.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I think I'll try this with my old T21 Thinkpad. Stick a pair of headphones in the appropriate socket. Sure, there will be some tiny sound, but for all intents and purposes, silence.
Why on earth would you even want to install Vista on a P-III laptop!?
I just volunteer now.. ..but, let's think about "critical patches".
What makes then critical? MS says so, because they expose some flaw or insecurity in the product.
Well, if you are running a really hardened box, with no excess services, why does an insecurity in an unused service matter?
If I am not running any or many desktop sessions, why do I care about a GDI+ plus bug?
This box is unpatched - no patches from MS - from that original installation. But so what? The only ports exposed are from a 3rd party app that is itself secured and harnded. Traffic is firewalled by some nice equipment and the install of Windows was properly hardened. Each box lives in a little "DMZ" at a co-lo facility.
What's the risk vector you see to justify installing some patch that is "critical"?
I'm sure its the same if you need to patch RHL, OSX etc. Some people (myself included) only consider downtime if it's unplanned, i.e. crash, reboot due to unresponsiveness, etc.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
In my many years of experience with large scale conversations I have never heard unreliable anecdotal evidence! Anecdotal evidence is therefore completely reliable!
they are copying from apple. Apple has been doing the unmodifiable chime for eons on their macs, so ow vista wants to do it again... whoop de doo.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Especially since the start up sound will be 15 minutes of Robert Fripp noodling on his guitar
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
It's fine, but the only ports exposed are for Oracle access. It's got a bad ass firewall in front of it, and it's DMZ'd from the rest of the co-lo.
Mac OS X has no startup sound. All Macintosh computers have a startup sound built into their hardware. It plays before the OS ever loads. That's why you'll hear it on an Intel Mac, even if you're using Boot Camp to go directly to Windows.
odd, on my computer, it counts up to twelve...
Don't ask me, ask him.
The names are similar, and that's where the confusion is coming in. But OSX Sleep is equivalent to XP Standby, which I've yet to have a major problem with. I close the lid to my laptop to enter standby; open it back up and everything's running again after a few seconds.
XP Hibernate is a whole 'nother beast. I believed Hibernate also killed my old laptop hard-drive, but that laptop was also running WinME, so it may have just committed suicide on its own.
would you imagine he would say "Please"?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
If you have a machine that is in a DMZ or configured to "internet facing", I think it is naive to think that you don't need to install security patches. Even if you hate MS and don't want to install them "because MS says so" doesn't mean that someone more skilled cannot get through your hardening to compromise those boxes. Uptime in this case is pretty meaningless. Regardless, uptime has nothing to do with the startup sound in Vista. If the above is true, then it's another genius idea from the boys in Redmond...
is an oxymoron,it is common knwoledge that marketing, like it's evil twin sales, is performed by droids or dweebs.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I knew there would be a use for thier rootkit tech! Now all we have to do it write a program that constantly rewrites the files you want changed everytime windows repairs itself! Just make sure you have a dual proc with plenty of disk bandwidth so your normal apps can still run.
if this is for real, it would certainly be annoying and cumbersome to change but i don't really think it's much different from a dvd not letting you skip the opening trailers or a pc game making you watch the intro movie every time you launch it. sure these things can be circumvented--burning your own copy of the dvd without trailers or menus, zeroing out the video files in a game or deleting them, but most of the time these things take a lot of extra work on the user's part.
cowgod Esc:wq
What apple does is not justification for what microsoft does.
It's inspiration for what microsoft does.
So it will be just like Mac OS X?
Maybe it is for security. Hackers will be busy trying to change the startup sound. Plus as soon as security has been breeched it will be completely obvious even to Joe Sixpack.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
My new Mac Pro will make its startup sound through the internal speaker regardless of having external speakers plugged into it.
Though, come to think of it, I thought the B&W G3 would play it to external speakers, but it hasn't made that sound in awhile. I'd removed its internal speaker to make more space for hard drives. Is the faint chime I've been hearing from the G3 only in my mind?
The G4 Cube has no internal speaker, sending its startup sound to its external USB speakers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My Macs have done this for years. You can't change the Apple machine startup sound, and no one has ever complained about it. Yes, you have to turn down the sound and then turn it back up. It's been a horribly crippling flaw in design for years. Now all those Vista users are going to suffer just like the Mac users. Whatever will they do?
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I'll just leave my speakers off. Ha! Take that Microsoft- your move!
Support the FairTax
This will of course have to be followed by a patch to correct "windows save you time" to "Windows saves you time":
MS Vista Patch MSV1447: Patch to correct Vista startup subliminal message to prevent users defenestrating themselves or their colleagues.
"Guniune" may be patched to "Genuine" in Service Pack 1, but only if the NRA refuses to pay Microsoft the requested ad fees!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Same on my T42, works in linux, without even moving the software volume sliders. It's a hardware mixer/dial. Just not old fashioned potentiometer. So to say toshiba is the only with an analogue potentiometer, maybe, as along as you dont' claim it to be the only with hardware volume control.
Was that sarcastic?
> Why on earth would you even want to install Vista on a P-III laptop!?
It'd be much more interesting to find out what drugs is he taking to think that he'd even succeed!
People probably would make a fuss if it were true, but thankfully it's not. StartupSound.prefpane.
The current line of Apple laptops, back through the last one or two generation of G4, do hibernate as well, although it is in a slightly modified fashion.
When the Mac goes to sleep, it goes into standby mode and also saves the RAM contents to disk to set up hibernate mode.
If power is lost, the Mac boots and uses the hibernate files to instantly go back to where it was when it went to sleep. Apple calls this 'Safe Sleep'
If one is adventurous they can find 3rd party utilities to do hibernate be default on the Macs, but when the Mac is asleep it uses so little power I haven't had a need for that yet.
Also, I did have a Gateway laptop at one point that Hibernate worked fine in Windows, but puked in Suse.
Shawn's Tech Articles
... beeps when PCMCIA devices or USB devices are being added or removed. Motherboards that can give this feedback aurally are nice because then you know you've got a good connection.
This is especially infuriating when dealing with USB memory sticks that are bulky or oddly shaped being plugged into a recessed front panel in a computer case. Without sound feedback, you don't know whether its plugged in correctly or if you need an extension cable to give it physical clearence.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I can see it now...
Date: the not too distant future
Location: deep behind enemy lines
A SEAL team hiding from the enemy boots up their laptop to relay their situation back to command...
you fill in the rest.
My big HP laptop beeps twice on boot and there is no way to silence it.
I do have a big obvious mute button, which is nice for sound. But sneaking into a meeting or at a conference, I want silent boot.
BEEP BEEP, press F2 to boot.
What a bunch of garbage.
Well, an awful lot of people are saying that they have similar issues, so maybe you're just one of the incredibly lucky ones never to have a problem.
For the record, I use win2k on my work Dell laptop which has a pretty restricted set of pre-installed apps (and nothing in the realm of p2p/spy/malware on there) and on my Vaio with XP at home I only have (apart from the basic windows stuff) Firefox (with adblock, no other extensions) and a belkin wireless pcmcia network card, and I have massive problems with hibernating either of them.
The Vaio will (as another user has experienced) intermittently fail to detect the pcmcia card when it wakes up (about 8 out of 10 start ups result in a failure to recognise the card, whereas if I do a shutdown, the card is picked up every time without fail). In addition it takes a long time to start (as long if not longer that just doing a restart from a full shutdown) and once or twice has refused to hibernate at all. It's so bad that I don't even try now, I've conditioned myself to just do a full shutdown knowing that it will save me hassle.
The Dell is even worse. I use hibernate a lot as I usually have several apps/documents open at once which I'm often using over the course of several days and it's annoying to have to close them all down and re-open them. The amount of time it takes the system to wake up is ridiculous, and about once a week it will refuse to wake up, it just sits at a black screen until I do a hard reset, and then any tabs I had open are lost and I have to go through opening all my apps/documents again.
I also use a Macbook at work and, although I don't really use it for anything more advanced that checking sites in Safari, it really is blazingly fast to wake up. I've never had that with Windows, even immediately after a full, clean install. So, I guess you need to learn how to not jump to conclusions, or not assume that your trouble-free experience means anyone who claims to have trouble is either doing something wrong or just plain FUD-spreading.
That's pretty typical from what I hear from other writers (I write in my free time, so I have an interest in this). In my case I need Windows for some software dev, but mostly because my company's VPN is quite useful, but Windows-only.
mine cranks to eleven
This is surely the mistake that will topple the giant, and let the true computing experience be reborn from the ashes!
Amgia will rise again!
(insert maniacal laughter)
I know on the new MacBooks, that the startup sound is muteable with the keyboard mute key, even during startup. Plus, it is written into pram, because if I press the mute key, use the computer, then restart it, it stays muted unless I press the speaker-up key.
Works pretty well for those must-be-quiet situations or places!
(On Mac desktops, the startup sound is not muteable, at least not as of the G4s. I don't have a G5, so I can't speak for that.)
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
He's probably talking about the dystopian, 1984-ish movie Brazil, not the country.
Apple's is for diagnostics. MS's is, by admission, pure marketing.
Did you read the article you dumbass?
The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine.
Diagnostic tool. Just the same as an Apple. The only difference between MS & Apple's attempts to restrict user choice, is that Apple was first.
I came up with lots of funny answers.
Such as? Let's hear the jokes. This is a joke thread, after all.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
I like the reasoning behind the startup sound and it will be very cool to listen to the first 20 or 30 times. The programmers over at Microsoft will realize it first after they have heard the same startup sound for the 10,000th time and deem an off button a must have.
There is an app, that enables you to set the volume of the Startup sound. It's called Psst! http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 25458
This is actually a good thing, as people will be able to tell if the computer is actually working, even if the monitor is not working or it's plugged into the wrong video card.
Sounds nothing more than something to help people make sure their windows is working.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
And just because you have, doesn't mean it's widespread.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Anything that requires the user to repeatedly "do stupid action (a)" to bypass "annoying function (b)" indicates that perhaps "annoying function (b)" should either not exist, period, or have a mechanism to be bypassed/disabled automatically.
And for the record, a previous posted already showed how to turn off the mac startup sound.
that idea is sauteed in wrong sauce.
It's like "looking busy" at your employment - it's actually easier to do real work than to fake it. - bmo
There has been debate about a feature that might make it into the final version of a product and most users couldn't care less about this "issue". I haven't heard the XP startup sound in weeks. 'Normal' users will use standby/hibernate and/or will unquestioningly (that a word?) accept the startup sound like any other feature or bug the OS will ship with. 'Power' users will have their machines run 24/7 anyway or just replace the sound.
Since the debate has been slashdotted (and I'm too lazy for mirrordot) I may never know what those people are really debating about, but I have the feeling TFA isn't really worth reading anyways.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
According to Steve Ball, this is what's going on with the startup sound.
You will be able to mute the sound on your computer speakers or in the volume control panel, so that the sound does not play if you do not wish to hear it during cold-boot.
Since the audio profile for that user will not have been loaded yet, if you try to mute the sound through the sound schemes "no sounds" setting in the Sound control panel in Windows, it will still play since the cold-boot sequence occurs before a user is logged on.
The user sound profile will not contain the option to modify the startup sound since, again, it is not a user specific setting.
They are currently assessing whether or not they will allow ability to programmatically disable (mute) the startup sound, however, if it is made possible, it will not be made possible via the control panel, rather via the registry or otherwise. Read: You will need to be a technical power user in order to make the change if it is possible.
Since when do executables end in .avi?
:P )
What kind of bizarre laptop do you have?
(And it counts up. To twelve.
And to think MS claimed to give the consumers what they want.
They told that to the court in the anti-trust case.
Guess what, Microsoft. We want to choose whether to listen to your shit, or not.
I hope I can retire before my employer decides to buy Vista.
"Well, if you are running a really hardened box, with no excess services, why does an insecurity in an unused service matter?"
because there is some flaw or insecurity in the product that wasn't previously known. So you stand a good chance of not being 'hardened' against them.
"..why do I care about a GDI+ plus bug?"
That depends on the Bug. Some bugs allow access to services outside their expected area.
If a driver exploit allows access to root, you should care.
This may not apply to the GDI+ bug, but it has applied to other pieces.
You confidence in a 3rd party app is disturbing.
As is your confidence in the users.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There seems to be a lot of concern about how much trouble this is when your computer boots.
But, right now, I haven't rebooted my computer for four months.
But then, of course, I am using Linux.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Not all their model's. I've got a Sat Pro L20 bought earlier this year and the volume control is via Fn-up and down, and Fn-esc for mute. No hardware dial :(
I'm a bit pissed off with this machine actually. I bought it with XP Home with every intention of setting up a dual boot of Linux and Windows 2000. But the graphics are ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, which the ATI (reference) driver's don't work with! (nor do the things like omega). So I have to install the Toshiba OEM'd ones, which will only install on XP. (So corp XP Pro it is then). I'm yet to give Linux a proper go on this machine, but from what I've tried the ATI binary driver won't work with my graphics, I was just getting a black screen (same even during the install of Ubuntu IIRC). It appears that the ATI driver doesn't work with X.org, but xgl will work, from what I saw on some forum post!
Wow, I got side-tracked!
Car analogies break down.
Just hit the mute key after pressing the power button, and you won't hear the chime.
Pleease, how hard is that??
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
But only if it is a kernel update. Otherwise, you just restart the service/application, and are good.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Should be the default, IMO.
[javac] 100 errors
It's not an issue of how hard, it's an issue of how permanent.
As somebody already said, OS X users don't restart or shutdown. But when we do, we can just mute sound before shutting down and restarting, and there won't be any startup sound. There are also some utilities to disable the startup chime if you don't want to mute before restarting.
The startup sound is there for debug purposes, I suppose, because it indicates the moment the computer will start booting its operating system. For instance if you want to boot a CD without using the OS, you need to hold on 'C' until you hear the chime. Same goes with Firewire target-disk mode, OpenFirmware etc. Just to be clear, the startup sound is built into the firmware, not OS X.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
This is before you can log in... its the OEM setup that you have to run through to set up users and networking and what not.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
Microsoft stores all of it's system sounds as .wav files. Nothing is in the kernel or .dll's. You can easily substitute your own .wav with a custom startup sound but having the original vista filename, you could modify the registry, any number of things.
If you can hack the kernel and explorer to make the start menu look like a Mac then you can certainly remove or modify a sound.
Ok, then I will lay it out for you on how to proceed exactly:
Problem solved.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
At least let your finger dry off before doing so. No reason for any extra lubricant.
That goes back at least as far as the Powerbook G3 (mine does it too.) Also, if your volume was muted when the computer was shut down, it is silent when you power it back on. The "Vista sound" will play regardless of your volume or mute setting.
So, I've used both Windows and Linux for years. I'm a game programmer, so Windows is a necessary evil. Anyway, one day I showed up to a LUG codefest with my Windows laptop in tow, to work on some open source (cross-platform) stuff, along with the gang. I popped open my laptop, booted it up, and WINCED as the Windows startup sound played. I looked up, and nobody seemed to notice -- except for our vision-impaired buddy, who tilted his head up from his laptop, and said, "I hear... WINDOWS." All eyes turned towards me.
So, um, yeah. I'm very much in favor of being able to disable boot-up sounds. There are times when you DON'T want the whole damn room hearing your machine boot.
Did you read the last post? It's not an issue of ease, it's an issue of permanance.
Or is a revised 4 button press boot sequence something you just consider normal?
Hold the mute button when powering up, and it doesn't make any sound.
Hardened usually means "externally" so. The Windows install is hardened, but the whole thing is shieled from the outside by a nicely done firewall. On the network side for windows IPSEC is reliable and has proven to be pretty well done. Few patches are released for it on Win2k3. You confidence in a 3rd party app is disturbing. As is your confidence in the users. It's not like that app isn't updated and patched. It just doens't require a reboot or taking the box offline! Plus, it's a high quality piece of software. As far as the users go, the only users getting to the box are doing so through the 3rd party app. The vector for risk are very small. There is very little surface space to attack the box.
In my post above I linked to 4 ways you can automate the process so all you do is turn on the machine and get a silent boot. The issue is truly a non issue.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Damn. That sounds like a real Depends moment...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
an internet opportunity.
He should records several phrases and then sell then via iTunes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You caught me. It indeed counts up to 12.
:P
As for catching my editing mistake...bravo. I initially wrote clock.exe, changed it clock.avi but missed the word 'executable.' Oh well.
However, sitting in a crowded airport terminal (in a hit-shy population fearful of their own shadows) one doesn't take more than a micro-second to clear the screen. I'm not too sure I'd appreciate watching my laptop being blown up on TV while I sit in a cell in Cuba listening to Mahat Macoat pray every four hours.
Sam, I'm sure you'll remember Richard's laptop starting with 'Good Morning Vietnaaaaaam' every day... need I say more?
Matt.
Hitting unmute makes the mute non-permanent. Quite easy.
And, no, I never reboot my laptop except after system updates which require it. Which makes it once in about two months or something.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
you can get a laptop that isn't electronic based, and fits in a clear plastic bag?
That is an interesting way to clasify downtime, but downtime means the machine is unavailable. It doesn't mean you planned for it to be unavailable.
Anway I run a few debian servers at work (about the same number as I have windows servers), and as the sibling comment said, a reboot only needs to occur if there is an update to the kernel. Downtime for my debian boxes only occurs when either there is a kernel update or an update to some of the daemons (service) they run. Typically it takes only a few seconds update the daemon and restart it. I've also noticed that my debian servers seem to boot up faster than my windows servers. YMMV.
meh
Lets make it quite clear - ever since the days of win95, when Windows stopped being a limited program and became a limiting program, Microsoft OSes are not, and have not been, your friend. The priority order for Microsoft is approximately: themselves, then OEMs, then the entertainment industry, then other software companies, then business users, and finally you, the home PC consumer, right at the bottom of the heap. In fact, if you're a techie, you're below that, because they aim at the nontechnical consumers first.
None of the above is "personal". It's just business, because that's where the money is.
None the less, it should truly suprise nobody when Windows f*cks you up the ass, or holds you down for somebody else. Your happiness is simply not their priority. Often as not, you're the product.
If you don't own your OS, right down to the source code, then your OS 0wnz you. This is truly the reason I use linux. It's the only way to know that my computer is mine.
hahahaha
you suck.
The Thinkpads have been pretty good about this, I remember from back when I had a T21... But I've currently had access to Acer, HP and Asus laptops, and for all of them the Fn-VolumeKeys do nothing in firmware... Actually, from poking around on my Asus, it appears that they don't even send keyboard events, they send ACPI button-press events!
Fortunately for me, my Asus comes with a hardware potentiometer/mute function, but the Acers and HP machines I've seen don't have that, and you can't do volume control until after the OS is up. On the Acers, the mute is actually not activated until after boot (in Windows, at least), so if you have the volume above minimum, mute, then power off, the startup sounds are played before the muting is applied...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I have no idea why no other brands do this, but having an actual volume control is extremely useful. I hardly ever touch windows' horrible software volume control and just leave it at maximum.
... no more getting an earsplitting jingle when your mail arrives because you set the volume to max on that movie you were playing.
Which is why Vista's volume control is actually useful - it can control volume per app (thanks to its new audio stack)
Go somewhere random
> I think if the startup sound in Vista is non-deactivatable, then the most likely cause is due to programmers capitulating at getting the sound controls activated before the sound starts
No, it's because someone at Microsoft wanted to make the audio bits part of the Vista 'experience'. The thinking behind making the sound compulsory is that most laptops and desktops are supposed to have hardware mute buttons (and most do -- except for some sorry-ass HP/Dell owners). What'll probably happen is that they'll add a registry/powertoy override in the end.
> or because somebody insisted that since Microsoft payed some bigname composer to make this one sound
Actually, they got Robert Fripp. And not just for the startup sound -- he's doing all the sounds in Vista.
Go somewhere random
This must be the stupidest idea from someone that has never had to earn a living as a road warrier. Most of us turn off the sound for a very simple reason, thin walls in homes and hotels. If you are working late, or in an unfamilure time zone, the one thing you do not want is to wake up those around you at some un-godly hour simply because you have work to do, a note to make about a meeting that went on into the early hours,because you cannot sleep and want to surf, you have a sudden idea that has woken you up and you want to set it down in Word. A lifetime of Karma to the person that finds a way to stop that, regardless of the stupidity and ridgidity of the minds of Microsoft.
Damn that sucks. Usually Toshiba's stuff is very expensive, but it's obvious that they spend a little time on making that money well spent. Even my old 486s are still in perfect working order after all this time (with hardware volume control, no less). I have to say though, none of the Toshibas look as sexy as Vaios or Apples, but their insides are a delight.
You know what, I totally despise having to use Fn key for anything. I can understand that in a small subnotebook where nothing else will fit there's no other choice, but in a freakin 15 inch laptop they should have space for many keys and do away with that Fn bullshit.
In fact, one of my friend just got a monstrous 17 inch Dell recently, and his keyboard have almost exact functionality as my 13 inch one. And he got that software volume control as well. I mean, how hard is it to put an extra potentiometer on the cabling that goes to the speaker with all that space inside that monster.
Oh well it seems that I'm taking the bait and start ranting, so might as well. Another thing is, why oh why can't I upgrade the video card on any laptop. I believe we're in the 21st century now. I know that some model from some brand have an interchangeable video card, but it's still a far cry from the standard desktop PCI-E/AGP/whatever cards. Some of us don't have the luxury of using a desktop computer all the time since we're constantly on the move, so that laptop should have the upgradeability of a desktop when I want to play some Doom 3.
Give me a laptop that's small enough with a reasonable power, with a hardware volume control, upgradeable video card, and pack it in a reasonable weight and I'll grab it in an instant. I can live with Fn keys when there's a space constraint.
And doesnt get called out in the middle of the night. But perhaps he has outsourced his child minding duties.
It's exactly the same problem/scenario that Mac owners have had since 1984- extremely quiet area/loud startup bong/chord/chime.
The big difference is that on the Mac, it's a single chord. With Vista, it will be some vaguely annoying musical passage designed to evoke nostalgia.
(BTW, anyone else think that the Win2K/ME startup music sounds a bit like the Star Trek theme?)
Make a WAV or WMA file (or whatever format they are using) and just have it blank (and if necessary, the same length, encoding rate, etc) so it can play it's startup sound. And if it's in a DLL, it should be not too difficult to determine where the resource is and change it in a somewhat "similar" fashion.
I can hear it now: 100-odd people in the same cube farm, all logging on roughly simultaneously when they arrive for work.
:)
Monday can't get any better than that
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
I wasn't considering the newer Apple computers, as they now take the environment into account. I do remember plugging a headset adapter into a PowerBook 100 as a kludge workaround. My thoughts were on the original 128k Macs.
Like another replyer to my post said, the beep was also there on other computers. I remember it on the Apple II and on some Wang desktop models, but not on the Ataris and Commodore 64's my friends and I owned at home. I also remember using a terminal that only printed to paper and had no monitor back in 1978 or so, just before my school got its first Apple II+ computers. It also rang its carriage return bell to indicate that it was working. Still, it was only the mac that I could authoritively say that it was a sign that the ROM/PRAM had loaded.
I hadn't gotten my headphones out of my bag yet, for starters...
But that is completely unrelated to if someone ELSE sits next to me and does the same, or doesn't even think of the startup sound while I'm trying to work. I'm not going to pass a law stating you must have headphones plugged in to any laptop in that area, or at least muted, I'm just going to act on my own and throw the damn thing out the window like I previously stated.