I know about msconfig, and I would recommend Soluto above it for 50% of the cases, and sysinternals Autoruns for the other 50% (especially since it can be downloaded straight from http://live.sysinternals.com/
MSConfig is a hammer that breaks a lot of things, and shouldnt be used the way people are using it. It is possible to leave a computer unbootable by disabling services that AV relies upon for example-- see my post above.
And MSConfig does NOTHING to tell you how long each service takes to load, which is what bootvis and soluto both do. For example, I had Eraser on my laptop, and found out that that service takes 15 seconds to load. I sort of wanted the program, but not that badly, so out it went. MSConfig wouldnt have given me that info, and I dont think bootvis works on Win7 x64.
If you want a replacement for msconfig, you should REALLY be looking at sysinternals Autoruns, which does way way more than MSConfig (drivers, winsock stack, services, startup list, codecs, etc).
Honestly, MSConfig is a poor piece of software to use in the way you are using it for a large number of reasons:
* It will pop up a scary warning the next time that user boots
* A lot of MS Articles ask you to switch to "minimal startup" for testing, and then set it back to normal. Any user following these instructions would undo all your work.
* It assumes that there are no vital 3rd party dependencies that will be broken by "disable all"
* It doesnt give you any way to check the digital signature on windows programs, which might lead to you leaving "Svchost.exe" (an infected copy) enabled
* And contrary to your belief, a lot of the time, no, it doesnt do the job, and will easily miss the commonest of viruses.
Its utility is mainly in troubleshooting, and not much else.
For instance: Drivers arent listed, and some drivers (antivirus, web filtering, etc) REQUIRE certain services to be running in order for things to work right. For example, Bluecoat labs web filter (k9) will simply end up blocking all of your internet access if you try to disable it that way (you need to fix the winsock stack, and remove the driver). Or some versions of Norton will simply end up bluescreening you if you do that.
So if you follow your plan, and it ends up bluescreening the person's laptop, what then? "Whoops, sorry, guess its time to reformat"?
Or what happens when you end up disabling their WiFi manager, and the next day they realize their laptop wont autoconnect to wifi, and they dont know the passwords? "whoops, i guess you should know all the wifi passwords by heart"?
Or when you end up disabling their Cisco VPN service, and now the GUI part simply doesnt launch before login, which is a requirement for connecting to their office network? "Oh well, at least your laptop is faster"?
Once again, it sounds like youre out of touch. MSConfig disable all is a shotgun approach that works some of the time, but you usually end up disabling some crap they actually WANTED. Why havent you heard about it? Probably because they now think A) they dont want to keep bothering you about it and B) you sort of made it worse and they feel bad telling you that.
The fact that you havent run windows on your boxes for 10 years is maybe an indicator that you shouldnt be pretending you ARENT out of touch, either. Maybe you should consider using it occasionally rather than assuming that you need to make all windows boxes resemble your version of Zen computing-- some users actually LIKE google toolbar or whatever.
I dunno what youre talking about, this is wonderful news for those of us who no longer use ubuntu. It means more testing on bleeding edge features, and quicker stabilization.
I do feel bad for all the ubuntu users who are doing the testing for me tho.
By the way, if you feel so strongly about this (as evidenced by your slavery comment), why are you hiding behind an AC monkier? Why not stand by your statements under your actual handle?
Im not going to continue the discussion unless you can own your statements.
And justified with the same logic -- that that's how it's "always" been, and that I as a plantation owner must be able to make a living the same way plantation owners before me have.
Now this is a new argument-- Copyright is comparable to slavery? Somehow you are entitled to the fruits of the work I do writing a book or a song, irregardless of my wishes?
Im sorry, but thats a real stretch. A lot of people will agree that the current system goes to ridiculous excess, but the idea itself is not bad, and I dont think most of the people producing the content (you know, the people's whose opinion on this actually matters) would say it is bad. And if its a real issue, the proper response is to push for an amendment that abolishes copyright, not to just ignore the cornerstone of our government (the constitution).
We get you to sign a contract, we give you the $1, and when you dont follow through we meet you in the courts for breach of contract, fraud, and all the rest.
Care to see it in action? You should totally bid against Lockheed and Boeing for the next fighter, try your $1 bid.
Do you have a better recommendation for software which does what Bootvis did before it was discontinued ages ago? And includes a wiki-style database of apps and what the recommended setting is for them? And that is both free, and free for commercial use?
No? Oh, ok then. Im sure I can just recommend to my parents or friends that they fire up Autoruns-- Ill just warn them to be careful not to do anything that will absolutely hose the system.
Myself, I was impressed by the program, because it allowed startup editing in a way that even non-tech literate folks could understand, while not allowing them to do anything super terrible to their machine (like disabling those system drivers-- GP should have his head checked if he thinks a "general user" utility should allow access to those). It also has support for at least IE, Firefox, and Chrome, for disabling plugins-- again, in a way that the average joe could use, without needing to understand "about:plugins", and "tools -->extensions --> plugins".
I think most of the people complaining about Soluto are folks who are upset that its not another Sysinternals Autoruns, which is fine, because we dont need another one of those. This is meant to be used by folks who DONT know what all the various windows services are and which are safe to disable. I think its a fine piece of software, and nowhere near as bloated as is being implied (50mb of RAM at worst). And as for disk space, are you REALLY complaining that it uses 33MB of disk space on install? Oh the horror. And its startup time!! A terrible ~1 second! Oh noes!
I really hope you dont do any support for friends and family, because it sounds like youre really out of touch.
Yours is probably the only definition by which I would concede that gold has "intrinsic value". Bonus points for not making Gold some perfect economic standard by which all other standards should be judged (since one could easily argue that eg Iridium fits a number of those better).
The article is actually a good piece on why Bitcoins are rubbish-- to quote, So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment.
But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
Seems like a fair assessment to me. I would be satisfied if this were the last article on Bitcoin Slashdot were to post.
Typically, you would say "here are my requirements" (one of which is generally "will not catastrophically fail"), and ask for some kind of maintenance and / or guarantee, and then various vendors would bid for THAT.
And yes, you should absolutely take the cheapest vendor who can meet all of your requirements.
Why do you conclude a child (or anyone else) who finds that distinction significant must be rationalizing, rather than having an honest disagreement with you?
For starters, to be clear, I didnt call it theft, since I know a lot of people like to split hairs over that; I made the general point that in either theft or copyright infringement, you infringe on the vendor's right to set his own prices for his own services / goods. Call it "theft of service" if you like; the principle is the same-- you are preventing the person from earning money by taking their good/service without payment.
And I generally say they are rationalizing because most people would object strongly to not being paid for the work they do, and yet thats EXACTLY what chronic P2P infringers do with the music/movies they download-- they decide that in THEIR value system, such things should be free (never mind that neither our country nor the money spent on production agrees with them), and so it is ok to download.
Im not defending the "worshipful company" of anything here. I have no love for the MPAA or RIAA, but that doesnt mean that theyre wrong about infringement being against the law, nor does it mean that copyright is bad (protip-- copyright is backed up in the Constitution).
Let me put it this way: the cost of mastering a CD is in the pennies. So does that mean its ok to go into Best Buy, take a rack of CDs, and leave them money to pay for the costs of physical distribution? Why or why not, and why would not a similar principle apply to downloading songs illegally?
The hypocrisy and rationalizing of it all just makes me sick. As angry as I get about multimillion dollar judgements over a few songs, it makes me ashamed of my generation to hear people honestly try to defend a wild free for all on the internet simply because they can get away with it.
I was going to reply point by point to your complaints, but then I realized: A) youre an AC, and probably trolling, and know that if you posted under your real handle your karma would tank because.. B) most of your complaints are garbage because... C) they have all been addressed before in about a zillion threads, and D) your entire post is off topic anyways.
At some point you will be downloading either a binary browser, or its source code, or an OS distribution with the browser on it. You MUST be able to trust whatever channel you got them from, otherwise neither SSL nor anything else can work.
Ditto here, you need to have some initial way to get the keys, which is generally with current browsers visiting the site and manually importing its cert, or with the keys being preinstalled on various browsers, and the browser's hash available on the site for comparison to make sure that the binary wasnt modified. Of course, if you cannot trust that the site wasnt hacked, or that your communication with the site tampered with....
Youre right that there is a fundamental problem if you can never trust any mediums ever, then you cant have any kind of workable security-- how do you know a CA wasnt compromised, and DNS compromised, and that youre actually at Gmail.com? Well, in that case, SSL doesnt work. How do you know that GPG key youre importing wasnt tampered with? Well, i guess at that point you cant have a secure GPG setup.
Yes, because A) its the government B) theyre using laws C) Obama was mentioned, which is a delicious opportunity to rail against Obama, Bush, republicans, democrats, and all the rest.
If you want to know if something is fair or doing justice? Ask a child! They know!
Only on some things. Children are also blindered by their own wants and their immaturity.
For example, ask a 15 year old whether it is wrong to take something that is not theirs-- likely they will say "yes". Then ask them if there's anything wrong with downloading music from an artist without giving restitution-- likely they will say "no". Never mind the fact that at the end of the day, each scenario denies the "vendor" their ability to make money for their work.
This is why I love political stories on slashdot-- As soon as the phrase "Obama administration wants to..." is used, you know youre going to get about a zillion comments on the administration and how bad it is and how bad bush was and all the rest, with less than 5% of people having read the article and less than 5% of the comments being relevant to the topic.
Flame on, this is why slashdot remains a source of entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
I know about msconfig, and I would recommend Soluto above it for 50% of the cases, and sysinternals Autoruns for the other 50% (especially since it can be downloaded straight from http://live.sysinternals.com/
MSConfig is a hammer that breaks a lot of things, and shouldnt be used the way people are using it. It is possible to leave a computer unbootable by disabling services that AV relies upon for example-- see my post above.
And MSConfig does NOTHING to tell you how long each service takes to load, which is what bootvis and soluto both do. For example, I had Eraser on my laptop, and found out that that service takes 15 seconds to load. I sort of wanted the program, but not that badly, so out it went. MSConfig wouldnt have given me that info, and I dont think bootvis works on Win7 x64.
If you want a replacement for msconfig, you should REALLY be looking at sysinternals Autoruns, which does way way more than MSConfig (drivers, winsock stack, services, startup list, codecs, etc).
Honestly, MSConfig is a poor piece of software to use in the way you are using it for a large number of reasons:
* It will pop up a scary warning the next time that user boots
* A lot of MS Articles ask you to switch to "minimal startup" for testing, and then set it back to normal. Any user following these instructions would undo all your work.
* It assumes that there are no vital 3rd party dependencies that will be broken by "disable all"
* It doesnt give you any way to check the digital signature on windows programs, which might lead to you leaving "Svchost.exe" (an infected copy) enabled
* And contrary to your belief, a lot of the time, no, it doesnt do the job, and will easily miss the commonest of viruses.
Its utility is mainly in troubleshooting, and not much else.
Grats, that breaks a lot of things.
For instance: Drivers arent listed, and some drivers (antivirus, web filtering, etc) REQUIRE certain services to be running in order for things to work right. For example, Bluecoat labs web filter (k9) will simply end up blocking all of your internet access if you try to disable it that way (you need to fix the winsock stack, and remove the driver). Or some versions of Norton will simply end up bluescreening you if you do that.
So if you follow your plan, and it ends up bluescreening the person's laptop, what then? "Whoops, sorry, guess its time to reformat"?
Or what happens when you end up disabling their WiFi manager, and the next day they realize their laptop wont autoconnect to wifi, and they dont know the passwords? "whoops, i guess you should know all the wifi passwords by heart"?
Or when you end up disabling their Cisco VPN service, and now the GUI part simply doesnt launch before login, which is a requirement for connecting to their office network? "Oh well, at least your laptop is faster"?
Once again, it sounds like youre out of touch. MSConfig disable all is a shotgun approach that works some of the time, but you usually end up disabling some crap they actually WANTED. Why havent you heard about it? Probably because they now think A) they dont want to keep bothering you about it and B) you sort of made it worse and they feel bad telling you that.
The fact that you havent run windows on your boxes for 10 years is maybe an indicator that you shouldnt be pretending you ARENT out of touch, either. Maybe you should consider using it occasionally rather than assuming that you need to make all windows boxes resemble your version of Zen computing-- some users actually LIKE google toolbar or whatever.
I dunno what youre talking about, this is wonderful news for those of us who no longer use ubuntu. It means more testing on bleeding edge features, and quicker stabilization.
I do feel bad for all the ubuntu users who are doing the testing for me tho.
Quiet you, youre screwing up the angst vibe around here. People want to be outraged about things, not listen to "reason".
By the way, if you feel so strongly about this (as evidenced by your slavery comment), why are you hiding behind an AC monkier? Why not stand by your statements under your actual handle?
Im not going to continue the discussion unless you can own your statements.
And justified with the same logic -- that that's how it's "always" been, and that I as a plantation owner must be able to make a living the same way plantation owners before me have.
Now this is a new argument-- Copyright is comparable to slavery? Somehow you are entitled to the fruits of the work I do writing a book or a song, irregardless of my wishes?
Im sorry, but thats a real stretch. A lot of people will agree that the current system goes to ridiculous excess, but the idea itself is not bad, and I dont think most of the people producing the content (you know, the people's whose opinion on this actually matters) would say it is bad. And if its a real issue, the proper response is to push for an amendment that abolishes copyright, not to just ignore the cornerstone of our government (the constitution).
We get you to sign a contract, we give you the $1, and when you dont follow through we meet you in the courts for breach of contract, fraud, and all the rest.
Care to see it in action? You should totally bid against Lockheed and Boeing for the next fighter, try your $1 bid.
Um, Usually the bidder is obligated to meet the requirements the posted. Youd have to be retarded not to hold them to such a contract.
Do you have a better recommendation for software which does what Bootvis did before it was discontinued ages ago? And includes a wiki-style database of apps and what the recommended setting is for them? And that is both free, and free for commercial use?
No? Oh, ok then. Im sure I can just recommend to my parents or friends that they fire up Autoruns-- Ill just warn them to be careful not to do anything that will absolutely hose the system.
Myself, I was impressed by the program, because it allowed startup editing in a way that even non-tech literate folks could understand, while not allowing them to do anything super terrible to their machine (like disabling those system drivers-- GP should have his head checked if he thinks a "general user" utility should allow access to those). It also has support for at least IE, Firefox, and Chrome, for disabling plugins-- again, in a way that the average joe could use, without needing to understand "about:plugins", and "tools -->extensions --> plugins".
I think most of the people complaining about Soluto are folks who are upset that its not another Sysinternals Autoruns, which is fine, because we dont need another one of those. This is meant to be used by folks who DONT know what all the various windows services are and which are safe to disable. I think its a fine piece of software, and nowhere near as bloated as is being implied (50mb of RAM at worst). And as for disk space, are you REALLY complaining that it uses 33MB of disk space on install? Oh the horror. And its startup time!! A terrible ~1 second! Oh noes!
I really hope you dont do any support for friends and family, because it sounds like youre really out of touch.
Yours is probably the only definition by which I would concede that gold has "intrinsic value". Bonus points for not making Gold some perfect economic standard by which all other standards should be judged (since one could easily argue that eg Iridium fits a number of those better).
The article is actually a good piece on why Bitcoins are rubbish-- to quote,
So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment.
But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
Seems like a fair assessment to me. I would be satisfied if this were the last article on Bitcoin Slashdot were to post.
I dont think you understand how bidding works.
Typically, you would say "here are my requirements" (one of which is generally "will not catastrophically fail"), and ask for some kind of maintenance and / or guarantee, and then various vendors would bid for THAT.
And yes, you should absolutely take the cheapest vendor who can meet all of your requirements.
Why do you conclude a child (or anyone else) who finds that distinction significant must be rationalizing, rather than having an honest disagreement with you?
For starters, to be clear, I didnt call it theft, since I know a lot of people like to split hairs over that; I made the general point that in either theft or copyright infringement, you infringe on the vendor's right to set his own prices for his own services / goods. Call it "theft of service" if you like; the principle is the same-- you are preventing the person from earning money by taking their good/service without payment.
And I generally say they are rationalizing because most people would object strongly to not being paid for the work they do, and yet thats EXACTLY what chronic P2P infringers do with the music/movies they download-- they decide that in THEIR value system, such things should be free (never mind that neither our country nor the money spent on production agrees with them), and so it is ok to download.
Im not defending the "worshipful company" of anything here. I have no love for the MPAA or RIAA, but that doesnt mean that theyre wrong about infringement being against the law, nor does it mean that copyright is bad (protip-- copyright is backed up in the Constitution).
Let me put it this way: the cost of mastering a CD is in the pennies. So does that mean its ok to go into Best Buy, take a rack of CDs, and leave them money to pay for the costs of physical distribution? Why or why not, and why would not a similar principle apply to downloading songs illegally?
The hypocrisy and rationalizing of it all just makes me sick. As angry as I get about multimillion dollar judgements over a few songs, it makes me ashamed of my generation to hear people honestly try to defend a wild free for all on the internet simply because they can get away with it.
I was going to reply point by point to your complaints, but then I realized:
A) youre an AC, and probably trolling, and know that if you posted under your real handle your karma would tank because..
B) most of your complaints are garbage because...
C) they have all been addressed before in about a zillion threads, and
D) your entire post is off topic anyways.
I also noted "for certain values of stellar". In this case, the value of "stellar" was "terrible".
It was an attempt at humor / sarcasm.
Nothing less than stellar meaning that it is fully "stellar". In other words, its not partly stellar, 3/4ths stellar, etc.
Its not a mistake, its both grammatically correct and a common usage of the phrase. Quit trying to be pedantic.
At some point you will be downloading either a binary browser, or its source code, or an OS distribution with the browser on it. You MUST be able to trust whatever channel you got them from, otherwise neither SSL nor anything else can work.
Ditto here, you need to have some initial way to get the keys, which is generally with current browsers visiting the site and manually importing its cert, or with the keys being preinstalled on various browsers, and the browser's hash available on the site for comparison to make sure that the binary wasnt modified. Of course, if you cannot trust that the site wasnt hacked, or that your communication with the site tampered with....
Youre right that there is a fundamental problem if you can never trust any mediums ever, then you cant have any kind of workable security-- how do you know a CA wasnt compromised, and DNS compromised, and that youre actually at Gmail.com? Well, in that case, SSL doesnt work. How do you know that GPG key youre importing wasnt tampered with? Well, i guess at that point you cant have a secure GPG setup.
I dont know that you can really apply the label "hacker" to either Manning or Assange, which makes your punchline fail.
Yes, because
A) its the government
B) theyre using laws
C) Obama was mentioned, which is a delicious opportunity to rail against Obama, Bush, republicans, democrats, and all the rest.
This is slashdot, did you expect any different?
If you want to know if something is fair or doing justice? Ask a child! They know!
Only on some things. Children are also blindered by their own wants and their immaturity.
For example, ask a 15 year old whether it is wrong to take something that is not theirs-- likely they will say "yes". Then ask them if there's anything wrong with downloading music from an artist without giving restitution-- likely they will say "no". Never mind the fact that at the end of the day, each scenario denies the "vendor" their ability to make money for their work.
So has breathing air.
This is why I love political stories on slashdot-- As soon as the phrase "Obama administration wants to..." is used, you know youre going to get about a zillion comments on the administration and how bad it is and how bad bush was and all the rest, with less than 5% of people having read the article and less than 5% of the comments being relevant to the topic.
Flame on, this is why slashdot remains a source of entertainment.
Breaking news: This isnt unix, and Windows doesnt use the Unix design philosophies. Details at eleven.
WoW also runs faster in OpenGL on Linux than in OpenGL on Vista, last time I compared them (about 2.5 years ago).
Then again, IIRC Vistas OpenGL support is nothing less than "stellar" (for certain values of stellar).