Vimeo allows the video uploader to choose whether or not to permit downloads. If the uploader allows downloads, links to download the video appear right below the video.
However, it is trivially easy to download videos even if downloads are not allowed. Just use the HTML5 player and the link to the video in MP4 format is right there in the video tag on the page, easily obtained by viewing the source of the page or using a browser extension.
Now Youtube uses a totally different system and is a bit more complicated but not much. There are quite a few browser extensions that work well to download the videos.
In most cases you have to download the video and audio streams separately and then mux them together since most new videos are using DASH, but that is easily done using ffmpeg or any other MPEG4 compatible muxer.
LocalLow has a much more restrictive set of permissions than Local and is designed is for low integrity processes that have a high likelihood of being compromised and could pose a security risk.
Normally Low Integrity processes are restricted to being able to access only a handful of folders and registry keys. The LocalLow folder is one of the few locations that these types of programs are allowed to read and write.
By default Internet Explorer is an example of a process that is marked as Low Integrity. Later versions of Adobe Reader are also marked as Low Integrity processes.
I still like the old Commando interface in Apple's MPW. You could highlight any text command in a window and popup the Commando interface. It was pre-populated with radio buttons, check boxes, text fields, etc. for everything that command could do.
Have you tried using the Powershell ISE? A feature very much like what you are describing is built-in to ISE (a GUI-based interface for Powershell installed by default on Windows 7 and later and available as free optional download for XP and later.)
You can launch it from the start menu or open a powershell prompt and type ise
In the ISE you can search for and select a command from the commands panel. Selecting a command reveals a list of text boxes, check boxes, etc for the commonly used parameters for the selected command with an option at the bottom of the window to show all possible parameters.
You can fill in the appropriate parameters and then either click Run to execute the command or Insert to insert it into the currently active script or Copy to copy the command to the clipboard.
The ISE also includes some other nice features such as floating help windows for Powershell commands, tab completion, script debugging tools, etc.
An iMac does need to be powered on to act as an external display, however it doesn't need to have a working OS (or at least the ones I have played with don't).
Beware, I haven't actually tested the power consumption so this is just speculation on my part, but since the processor and GPU in iMac aren't really doing anything I suspect they are running at their idle frequencies. If so, the power consumption of the machine should be fairly low - since many modern CPUs and GPUs have fairly low idle power requirements.
As other posters have pointed out though, Apple appears to have used their own custom display interface for the new 5k model and it looks like they have dropped Target Display Mode from the spec sheet, so it looks like using the 5k model as a dumb monitor isn't really an option.
No. This is what I hate about these iMacs. And especially more since this high-res display. You get a good, expensive display, which you could easily keep for 10-15 years, but are forced to throw it away when you want to upgrade the computer, after say 2-8 years. A Mac mini duck-taped on the back of a monitor takes about the same space anyways.
Are you sure about that? The current generation of iMacs can act as a standard monitor when connected to another machine. Up until a few weeks ago, I was using one that had a failed hard drive in it as a monitor for a desktop PC via a simple mini Displayport to Displayport cable connected to the PC's graphics card.
There is a good possibility that the new iMacs can also be used as a monitor as well.
The only complaint I have is one particular sender on on particular email list whose emails are consistently misclassed as spam.
I have the same problem with multiple email discussion lists that I am on. I would always flag the messages as Not Spam and that would work for a few weeks and then the messages would start going into the Spam folder again.
Several other Gmail users had the same problem with those lists. The List admins finally figured out that what was happening was that some users were hitting the Spam button instead of unsubscribing from the list. When enough people did this, Google starting flagging all messages from the list as spam even for users who had previously marked the messages as Not Spam.
Ultimately I ended up creating a set of rules for those lists using the option to bypass spam filtering for messages that matched the rules.
3-year warranty. Not even Apple offers that kind of support.
Actually Apple does offer a 3 year warranty (called AppleCare) for an additional fee. However, HP actually offers a 5 year warranty on their enterprise desktops, laptops, tablets, and servers as an option.
This works really well for the college that I work for because we can replace our hardware on a 5 year replacement cycle and yet still ensure almost everything is covered under warranty.
HP's enterprise service divisions are also very good about just shipping out replacement parts on request rather than requiring the entire system to be shipped back for service.
Apple iPhone 3S July 2008, iPhone 4 October 2011, iPhone 5 September 2012, 6S September 2014.
Apple tends to release a new phone roughly once a year. In your list you left out the 3GS (June 2009), iPhone 4S (October 2011), 5C and 5S (September 2013).
iTunes simply offers to erase the phone when you plug it in since the phone predates the iTunes installation.
iTunes can be a pain at times and it's interface can be difficult to navigate if you don't know what you are doing but it is possible to use it to backup a phone even if that phone was previously synced with another PC or installation of iTunes.
iTunes will want to erase the phone (or any other iOS device for that matter) if you choose to synchronize the phone with the existing iTunes library on the PC, however that is not what you want to do.
Instead, if you have iTunes configured to sync automatically - cancel the sync and then select the device and use the Backup option which will backup all of the apps, user data, and settings from the device - including SMS messages and voicemail messages (if your carrier has enhanced voicemail).
Be sure to set it to encrypt the backup and set a passphrase on the backup - otherwise the backup will not include account usernames and passwords or data from apps that is marked as "high security". Beware that this can take quite a while if the user has a lot of apps or data on the phone but it will get pretty much everything as long as the backup is encrypted.
That backup can then be restored to another iOS device running the same OS version or newer. (In a few limited cases you can restore to a device running an older version of iOS but this is generally not recommended and can cause some major problems. If needed, update the OS on the new device before restoring the backup.) Plug in the new device, select it in iTunes and select Restore from Backup.
Restoring the backup will erase the target device in the process but after the process is complete the new device will be configured almost exactly like the previous device was.
The stuttering I can attribute to an ISP or the raw demand. But the ISP didn't stick crosstalk of a Cantonese interpreter over the English audio for the first 20 minutes.
Actually the audio problems appeared to be an issue with the video playback in Safari (and perhaps other players as well). When this happened I looked at some of the chunks of the stream and found that there were 2 audio channels in the stream, one for each language.
For some reason Safari decided to play both audio streams at the same time instead of offering a choice of which audio stream to play. This is most definitely a player bug and not a problem with the live stream itself but it is sad that in 2014 Apple's players don't handle multiple audio streams properly.
I don't know which is worse, the player bugs or the fact that Apple attempted to use multiple audio tracks in their stream which their own players don't support!
That particular screen was used in Windows 3.1 which used cooperative multitasking. The message was displayed when an application stopped responding to messages for a period of time (indicating that the application may be hung for some reason and could be preventing other applications from getting any CPU time.
The screen allows the user to kill the offending application, allowing any other applications to continue to run (that is as long as the hung application hadn't corrupted the contents of RAM in some way).
(Ok, for the FB app, there is a setting to disable this, but the fact that people haven't heard of this without multiple news articles on the topic says that FB's default caught a good fraction of their users by surprise.)
I have an iPad and and Android phone and on both devices when the app was updated with the autoplay feature the app displayed an alert the first time to was launched post-update that talked about the autoplay feature and explained exactly how to turn it off in the settings of the app.
In my opinion, Facebook is not really the one to blame here because although the default is to autoplay videos, users were clearly informed when the feature was added and given clear instructions on how to change the setting.
Speaking as a guy who works in educational technology, send her to a CC instead of trying to find stuff online
I also recommend looking community colleges. Most are accredited by the college accreditation agency in their region of the country and their courses will easily transfer to most other institutions should she wish to pursue a 4 year (or higher) degree later on.
Also, some community colleges have an extensive distance learning program, many of which offer classes that are either entirely online or require a handful of on-campus sessions (usually for things like lab time for certain classes.) The community college where I work offers about half of their classes online.
Don't forget this thing is all locked down at the BIOS (UEFI) level
This is almost certainly wrong. The Surface Pro line is x86 and x86 PCs that carry the Windows 8 logo are required to support Secure Boot and allow the user to disable secure boot if desired.
The Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 made this really easy - the option to disable Secure Boot was clearly labeled on the first page of settings.
Also if you are using a PC imaging system such as WDS, SCCM or Altiris then you probably want the default boot device to be PXE and not the internal hard drive.
That way you can just unbox the machine, plug in power and a network cable, and turn it on. The PC will then automatically PXE boot and start installing your custom OS image and applications with no user interaction required if you have things set up properly.
Most of your problems are probably from applications that still don't properly support high DPI settings (which unfortunately is a lot even though high DPI support has been built-in to Windows since at least XP ).
Go to the Change Display Settings option in control panel and select "Make text and other items larger or smaller." Select "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" option and then set the scaling level to Smaller (100%). That disables all DPI-based scaling so application windows will no longer be resized regardless of their support for high-DPI modes.
Depending on your graphics chipset and drivers, it may require a log off/log in cycle to take full effect. There should be a message at the bottom of the dialog box telling you if you will need to log off to apply the changes or not.
Be warned that if one of your displays is a high-dpi display then everything will appear to be very small on that display due to the fact that fonts and controls will no longer be scaled.
The first time you log into a Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 system there is a brief video tutorial that shows you the charms and how to access them. It also shows you where the hot corners are and what they do.
The tutorial is per user, so on systems with multiple user accounts it is shown the first time each user logs in. I believe there is a flag in the user profile that stores whether or not the tutorial has been shown because in a domain environment with roaming profiles is is only shown the first time a user logs into a Windows 8 machine and it is not shown again if the user later logs into another Windows 8 machine that they have never logged into before.
How the fuck am I supposed to know that Charms exist, let alone that that's what they're called? Hilariously, this is about as obvious (i.e. not at all) as emacs keybindings mostly starting with Ctrl+X. But anyone who starts using emacs is a masochist anyway, so they deserve it;)
Newer iPhones (and i think a few other iOS devices) do have a flash and in fact a flashlight toggle is built into the lock screen on devices running iOS 7 or later.
I'm not sure why people keep saying they took it down. Maybe they did, but it's there and available now and the ratings on it are still horrible.
Amazon did take it down for a few hours but they put it back up and added a notice to the page stating that EA was having server problems and was working to resolve them and that customers who purchase the game may be unable to play until those problems are resolved.
Now I see that Amazon has since removed that notice and replaced it with a note saying that owners of SimCity are entitled to a free game from EA.
2) I don't have a motherboard that supports an SSD. So I need a new motherboard
Pardon my ignorance, but why couldn't you use an SSD with your existing motherboard? An typical SSD is presents itself like any other SATA drive so as long as your motherboard has SATA ports it should have worked fine.
Even if you didn't have any SATA ports you could use, basic SATA controller cards are very inexpensive (unless you want to do hardware-based RAID but if that were the case you would have probably already had a card you could use.)
Of course based on the rest of your post, it sounds like the most of the components in the system you were upgrading were fairly old anyway and a complete motherboard, CPU, and RAM replacement was probably needed anyway to get decent performance in most modern games.
Under windows you just need to launch the application using the runas command that has been built into the OS since at least Windows 2000 (possibly as far back as some versions of NT, not sure.)
Also UAC introduced in Vista and later allow applications to run at a special reduced privileged level which gives them a set of permissions below a normal user account which prevents them from accessing many parts of the user's profile. IE, Chrome, and later versions of Acrobat will run in reduced privileged mode by default. However last I checked Firefox doesn't support this feature and always runs with the same permissions as the user that launched it.
Well that's only for DirectX. And there are hacks to get DX10/11 to run under XP.
Those hacks simply cause XP to lie about the version of DirectX that is currently installed and some of the better ones have simple stubs for some the new API calls introduced in DirectX 10 and 11. The do NOT actually implement the new features found in the later versions of DirectX.
While this means that applications that require newer versions of DirectX can "run" it also means that the moment an application tries to use any of the new features are used there will be rendering errors and other unexpected behaviors.
I have a similar setup (128GB SSD). You make it sound easy. I tried several ways to move everything over to a hard drive so that nothing user-related was stored on the system/boot SSD. I tried hard links, fiddling with the registry, changing environment variables, but in the end I gave up and kept the stub of my user directory on C: where Windows seemed to want it, and moved all the individual directories (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.) using the "right-click and use Location tab" approach. Microsoft does NOT make it easy to do this elegantly for all users. Everything I tried either didn't work in the end (e.g., trying to do it via a hard link for the whole Users directory), or was a horrible kludge that left dribbles of user profile stuff on C:, or it didn't recognize things had moved when you try to create new users, or similar "close but not quite" breakage. Either I'm dumb, or you found a magical way to do it easily and effectively. Do share.
It is actually fairly easy to configure Windows to put user profiles for all users on a different drive than the boot (system) drive, however it must be done when first installing Windows.
As far as I am aware Microsoft does not officially support moving user profiles after the OS is installed. There are ways to do it, but as you found they all have their problems. By doing it during the OS install pretty much all of the problems are avoided.
The option to change the location for user profiles is not exposed through the graphical installer for Windows but it can be configured by using an Unattend.xml file by setting the FolderLocations key to point to the drive you want the data to reside on. You can either create the file manually or use the free Windows AIK to do it.
You can use the FolderLocations key to move several key folders and one of which is the User profile folder.
If you have never installed Windows using the unattended setup before you may want to experiment using a VM before doing it on real hardware just to make sure you have your Unattend.xml file doing what you want it to.
The only problem with this is some of the junctions created on the system drive will continue to point to the wrong location. You can find more information on this in MS KB929831. An easy way to fix this is to create a junction at c:\Users pointing to the new user profile location. (For instance on one of my systems I have a junction at C:\Users pointing to F:\Users). This neatly fixes this issue and as a bonus fixes any applications that have hard-coded paths for user profiles.
I have been running my home system like this for the past 2 years and have not encountered any problems.
From TFA, the specific configurations that allow this to happen: "Anyone who used FileVault encryption on their Mac prior to Lion, upgraded to Lion, but kept the folders encrypted using the legacy version of FileVault is vulnerable. FileVault 2 (whole disk encryption) is unaffected."
The problem is actually far more widespread than that. I have some Macs running Lion here that have never had FileVault enabled that have this problem. People on the MacEnterprise list have been discussing this bug for about a week now.
Using the legacy version of FileVault may be one method to trigger the bug but it definitely isn't the only one. Many are seeing the same bug when Lion is joined to an AD domain and some are also seeing it when using OD as well (Especially when using mobile home directories).
So far no one has been able to determine exactly what configurations trigger the bug since not all systems appear to be impacted, but the problem is definitely far more widespread than the article indicates.
Really? I've always found VLC to be better. MS-WMP won't even play mkv files.
Perhaps there is a setting that I am overlooking but on my system VLC appears to totally ignore the color space the video was encoded with and makes no attempt to convert the color space to the one currently being used by the display device. As a result most videos are displayed in a totally wrong color space.
WMP gets it right and always converts the color space as long as the file was properly encoded.
WMP can play video and audio from any container as long as the appropriate splitter is installed. If you can't play MKV files with WMP then I'm guessing you probably can't play them with any Direct Show-based players either.
All you need to do is download and install the Haali Media Splitter and they should play just fine both in WMP and all Direct Show-based players.
Slashdot Mirror
Vimeo allows the video uploader to choose whether or not to permit downloads. If the uploader allows downloads, links to download the video appear right below the video.
However, it is trivially easy to download videos even if downloads are not allowed. Just use the HTML5 player and the link to the video in MP4 format is right there in the video tag on the page, easily obtained by viewing the source of the page or using a browser extension.
Now Youtube uses a totally different system and is a bit more complicated but not much. There are quite a few browser extensions that work well to download the videos.
In most cases you have to download the video and audio streams separately and then mux them together since most new videos are using DASH, but that is easily done using ffmpeg or any other MPEG4 compatible muxer.
LocalLow has a much more restrictive set of permissions than Local and is designed is for low integrity processes that have a high likelihood of being compromised and could pose a security risk.
Normally Low Integrity processes are restricted to being able to access only a handful of folders and registry keys. The LocalLow folder is one of the few locations that these types of programs are allowed to read and write.
By default Internet Explorer is an example of a process that is marked as Low Integrity. Later versions of Adobe Reader are also marked as Low Integrity processes.
Have you tried using the Powershell ISE? A feature very much like what you are describing is built-in to ISE (a GUI-based interface for Powershell installed by default on Windows 7 and later and available as free optional download for XP and later.)
You can launch it from the start menu or open a powershell prompt and type ise
In the ISE you can search for and select a command from the commands panel. Selecting a command reveals a list of text boxes, check boxes, etc for the commonly used parameters for the selected command with an option at the bottom of the window to show all possible parameters.
You can fill in the appropriate parameters and then either click Run to execute the command or Insert to insert it into the currently active script or Copy to copy the command to the clipboard.
The ISE also includes some other nice features such as floating help windows for Powershell commands, tab completion, script debugging tools, etc.
An iMac does need to be powered on to act as an external display, however it doesn't need to have a working OS (or at least the ones I have played with don't).
Beware, I haven't actually tested the power consumption so this is just speculation on my part, but since the processor and GPU in iMac aren't really doing anything I suspect they are running at their idle frequencies. If so, the power consumption of the machine should be fairly low - since many modern CPUs and GPUs have fairly low idle power requirements.
As other posters have pointed out though, Apple appears to have used their own custom display interface for the new 5k model and it looks like they have dropped Target Display Mode from the spec sheet, so it looks like using the 5k model as a dumb monitor isn't really an option.
Are you sure about that? The current generation of iMacs can act as a standard monitor when connected to another machine. Up until a few weeks ago, I was using one that had a failed hard drive in it as a monitor for a desktop PC via a simple mini Displayport to Displayport cable connected to the PC's graphics card.
There is a good possibility that the new iMacs can also be used as a monitor as well.
I have the same problem with multiple email discussion lists that I am on. I would always flag the messages as Not Spam and that would work for a few weeks and then the messages would start going into the Spam folder again.
Several other Gmail users had the same problem with those lists. The List admins finally figured out that what was happening was that some users were hitting the Spam button instead of unsubscribing from the list. When enough people did this, Google starting flagging all messages from the list as spam even for users who had previously marked the messages as Not Spam.
Ultimately I ended up creating a set of rules for those lists using the option to bypass spam filtering for messages that matched the rules.
Actually Apple does offer a 3 year warranty (called AppleCare) for an additional fee. However, HP actually offers a 5 year warranty on their enterprise desktops, laptops, tablets, and servers as an option.
This works really well for the college that I work for because we can replace our hardware on a 5 year replacement cycle and yet still ensure almost everything is covered under warranty.
HP's enterprise service divisions are also very good about just shipping out replacement parts on request rather than requiring the entire system to be shipped back for service.
Apple tends to release a new phone roughly once a year. In your list you left out the 3GS (June 2009), iPhone 4S (October 2011), 5C and 5S (September 2013).
The actual releases look like this:
iTunes can be a pain at times and it's interface can be difficult to navigate if you don't know what you are doing but it is possible to use it to backup a phone even if that phone was previously synced with another PC or installation of iTunes.
iTunes will want to erase the phone (or any other iOS device for that matter) if you choose to synchronize the phone with the existing iTunes library on the PC, however that is not what you want to do.
Instead, if you have iTunes configured to sync automatically - cancel the sync and then select the device and use the Backup option which will backup all of the apps, user data, and settings from the device - including SMS messages and voicemail messages (if your carrier has enhanced voicemail).
Be sure to set it to encrypt the backup and set a passphrase on the backup - otherwise the backup will not include account usernames and passwords or data from apps that is marked as "high security". Beware that this can take quite a while if the user has a lot of apps or data on the phone but it will get pretty much everything as long as the backup is encrypted.
That backup can then be restored to another iOS device running the same OS version or newer. (In a few limited cases you can restore to a device running an older version of iOS but this is generally not recommended and can cause some major problems. If needed, update the OS on the new device before restoring the backup.) Plug in the new device, select it in iTunes and select Restore from Backup.
Restoring the backup will erase the target device in the process but after the process is complete the new device will be configured almost exactly like the previous device was.
Actually the audio problems appeared to be an issue with the video playback in Safari (and perhaps other players as well). When this happened I looked at some of the chunks of the stream and found that there were 2 audio channels in the stream, one for each language.
For some reason Safari decided to play both audio streams at the same time instead of offering a choice of which audio stream to play. This is most definitely a player bug and not a problem with the live stream itself but it is sad that in 2014 Apple's players don't handle multiple audio streams properly.
I don't know which is worse, the player bugs or the fact that Apple attempted to use multiple audio tracks in their stream which their own players don't support!
That particular screen was used in Windows 3.1 which used cooperative multitasking. The message was displayed when an application stopped responding to messages for a period of time (indicating that the application may be hung for some reason and could be preventing other applications from getting any CPU time.
The screen allows the user to kill the offending application, allowing any other applications to continue to run (that is as long as the hung application hadn't corrupted the contents of RAM in some way).
I have an iPad and and Android phone and on both devices when the app was updated with the autoplay feature the app displayed an alert the first time to was launched post-update that talked about the autoplay feature and explained exactly how to turn it off in the settings of the app.
In my opinion, Facebook is not really the one to blame here because although the default is to autoplay videos, users were clearly informed when the feature was added and given clear instructions on how to change the setting.
I also recommend looking community colleges. Most are accredited by the college accreditation agency in their region of the country and their courses will easily transfer to most other institutions should she wish to pursue a 4 year (or higher) degree later on.
Also, some community colleges have an extensive distance learning program, many of which offer classes that are either entirely online or require a handful of on-campus sessions (usually for things like lab time for certain classes.) The community college where I work offers about half of their classes online.
This is almost certainly wrong. The Surface Pro line is x86 and x86 PCs that carry the Windows 8 logo are required to support Secure Boot and allow the user to disable secure boot if desired.
The Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 made this really easy - the option to disable Secure Boot was clearly labeled on the first page of settings.
Also if you are using a PC imaging system such as WDS, SCCM or Altiris then you probably want the default boot device to be PXE and not the internal hard drive.
That way you can just unbox the machine, plug in power and a network cable, and turn it on. The PC will then automatically PXE boot and start installing your custom OS image and applications with no user interaction required if you have things set up properly.
Most of your problems are probably from applications that still don't properly support high DPI settings (which unfortunately is a lot even though high DPI support has been built-in to Windows since at least XP ).
Go to the Change Display Settings option in control panel and select "Make text and other items larger or smaller." Select "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" option and then set the scaling level to Smaller (100%). That disables all DPI-based scaling so application windows will no longer be resized regardless of their support for high-DPI modes.
Depending on your graphics chipset and drivers, it may require a log off/log in cycle to take full effect. There should be a message at the bottom of the dialog box telling you if you will need to log off to apply the changes or not.
Be warned that if one of your displays is a high-dpi display then everything will appear to be very small on that display due to the fact that fonts and controls will no longer be scaled.
The tutorial is per user, so on systems with multiple user accounts it is shown the first time each user logs in. I believe there is a flag in the user profile that stores whether or not the tutorial has been shown because in a domain environment with roaming profiles is is only shown the first time a user logs into a Windows 8 machine and it is not shown again if the user later logs into another Windows 8 machine that they have never logged into before.
Newer iPhones (and i think a few other iOS devices) do have a flash and in fact a flashlight toggle is built into the lock screen on devices running iOS 7 or later.
Amazon did take it down for a few hours but they put it back up and added a notice to the page stating that EA was having server problems and was working to resolve them and that customers who purchase the game may be unable to play until those problems are resolved.
Now I see that Amazon has since removed that notice and replaced it with a note saying that owners of SimCity are entitled to a free game from EA.
Pardon my ignorance, but why couldn't you use an SSD with your existing motherboard? An typical SSD is presents itself like any other SATA drive so as long as your motherboard has SATA ports it should have worked fine.
Even if you didn't have any SATA ports you could use, basic SATA controller cards are very inexpensive (unless you want to do hardware-based RAID but if that were the case you would have probably already had a card you could use.)
Of course based on the rest of your post, it sounds like the most of the components in the system you were upgrading were fairly old anyway and a complete motherboard, CPU, and RAM replacement was probably needed anyway to get decent performance in most modern games.
Under windows you just need to launch the application using the runas command that has been built into the OS since at least Windows 2000 (possibly as far back as some versions of NT, not sure.)
Also UAC introduced in Vista and later allow applications to run at a special reduced privileged level which gives them a set of permissions below a normal user account which prevents them from accessing many parts of the user's profile. IE, Chrome, and later versions of Acrobat will run in reduced privileged mode by default. However last I checked Firefox doesn't support this feature and always runs with the same permissions as the user that launched it.
Those hacks simply cause XP to lie about the version of DirectX that is currently installed and some of the better ones have simple stubs for some the new API calls introduced in DirectX 10 and 11. The do NOT actually implement the new features found in the later versions of DirectX.
While this means that applications that require newer versions of DirectX can "run" it also means that the moment an application tries to use any of the new features are used there will be rendering errors and other unexpected behaviors.
It is actually fairly easy to configure Windows to put user profiles for all users on a different drive than the boot (system) drive, however it must be done when first installing Windows.
As far as I am aware Microsoft does not officially support moving user profiles after the OS is installed. There are ways to do it, but as you found they all have their problems. By doing it during the OS install pretty much all of the problems are avoided.
The option to change the location for user profiles is not exposed through the graphical installer for Windows but it can be configured by using an Unattend.xml file by setting the FolderLocations key to point to the drive you want the data to reside on. You can either create the file manually or use the free Windows AIK to do it.
You can use the FolderLocations key to move several key folders and one of which is the User profile folder.
If you have never installed Windows using the unattended setup before you may want to experiment using a VM before doing it on real hardware just to make sure you have your Unattend.xml file doing what you want it to.
The only problem with this is some of the junctions created on the system drive will continue to point to the wrong location. You can find more information on this in MS KB929831. An easy way to fix this is to create a junction at c:\Users pointing to the new user profile location. (For instance on one of my systems I have a junction at C:\Users pointing to F:\Users). This neatly fixes this issue and as a bonus fixes any applications that have hard-coded paths for user profiles.
I have been running my home system like this for the past 2 years and have not encountered any problems.
The problem is actually far more widespread than that. I have some Macs running Lion here that have never had FileVault enabled that have this problem. People on the MacEnterprise list have been discussing this bug for about a week now.
Using the legacy version of FileVault may be one method to trigger the bug but it definitely isn't the only one. Many are seeing the same bug when Lion is joined to an AD domain and some are also seeing it when using OD as well (Especially when using mobile home directories).
So far no one has been able to determine exactly what configurations trigger the bug since not all systems appear to be impacted, but the problem is definitely far more widespread than the article indicates.
Perhaps there is a setting that I am overlooking but on my system VLC appears to totally ignore the color space the video was encoded with and makes no attempt to convert the color space to the one currently being used by the display device. As a result most videos are displayed in a totally wrong color space.
WMP gets it right and always converts the color space as long as the file was properly encoded.
WMP can play video and audio from any container as long as the appropriate splitter is installed. If you can't play MKV files with WMP then I'm guessing you probably can't play them with any Direct Show-based players either.
All you need to do is download and install the Haali Media Splitter and they should play just fine both in WMP and all Direct Show-based players.