SAS and Flash need write access to their application folders (Program Files/whatever) in order to function properly. Which means that normal 'Users' get errors when the applications start.
You can install Microsoft Office as an Administrator, but when each user runs Office for the first time, it runs a "finishing installation" type thing that won't run without Administrator privileges. That means you have to make each user an Administrator, start Office from within each user account one by one and then change the account back to a regular user. And you have to repeat the process every time you add a new user.
These are the things that make it really difficult to have multiple user Windows systems where users aren't administrators or power users.
So, if the user doesn't have sufficient privileges, some worms don't work. Sure, this one would because it runs in userland, but the user still executed it! Besides, they should have a virus scanner anyway. Again - it's their fault.
Here's the thing: It's really, really hard to set up a Windows box that functions properly for users without Administrator privileges. It's even harder for users without Power User privileges.
I'm not talking about using Internet Explorer and Notepad. I'm talking about running Macromedia Flash (the application, not the plugin), SAS, Microsoft Office, etc. Try installing those applications and setting up Windows so that multiple 'User' class accounts can run them and so that any new 'User' account that is added can run them too.
It's not easy. Now try setting up a Linux box with even fewer privileges (write access only in the home folder). It's really easy. In fact, it's difficult to give the user more privileges. And they don't need them!
The problem with the "user error" argument is that even if you agree that Windows NT was designed for multiple users (which is a stretch,) the applications just plain aren't, even in 2003. And that's not Macromedia's fault, it's Microsoft's. The app vendors have just been using the APIs and following the conventions all along. The problem is that Microsoft bolted multi-user capabilities onto a single-user architecture late in the game, and things still aren't working right.
Why doesn't some hot-shot newspaper hire some hot-shot security expert to probe these systems and identify (but not expoit) the weaknesses? There have to be dozens. There are killer headlines there, and it'd be dead easy for a paper to do. Newspeople take risks like this all the time.
Are you really going to store a new copy of that 5meg presentation every time you hit save?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't saving a file and creating a new file roughly the same operation? Instead of saving over the old file, you could save to this "old version buffer" and then just swap the filesystem pointers.
They then sit down, go "doh...!?" for about ten minutes, click half-heartedly a few times and proclaim it an abject failure because it doesn't have precisely the same user interface as PS6.
I'm not going to disagree with you, but I'm not going to agree either. I used Photoshop 3.x through 6.x (whatever time frame that is, five or six years, I think) and have since switched to Linux. I have been using the GIMP for my photo manipulation and every-now-and-then web graphics work for about two years now. Not all the time, but a few times a month.
I still make a lot of mistakes, and things still take a lot longer to do. I'm not sure how v1.3 is coming along, but in the newest release version there are a lot of interface slowdowns. Here's a concrete example: in Photoshop, to rotate an object so it is square:
1) CTRL+T
2) Click and drag until the object is square
This works for all of those actions. In the GIMP, to do the same task, I must
1) SHIFT+T
2) Find the tool options dialog (could be obscured, or not open at all)
3) Select tiny "Rotate" radio button
4) Click+drag, making note of the numerical rotation
5) See if I guessed correctly and the object is square.
6) If not, undo (CTRL+Z) and go back to 5 with a slightly adjusted rotation. Repeat until object is square.
In my experience, this is somewhat representative of the GIMP's user experience. But hey! It's free! And maybe I'm just not used to it yet. My workflow was highly tied into Adobe's way of doing things so I'm perfectly willing to admit that I am stuck in my ways.
And I hear 1.3 solves a lot of these issues.
Erik
P.S. Here are some other UI slowdowns I just noticed playing around with the GIMP:
* I sometimes accidentally tear off a menu instead of hitting the first menu item
* There is no shortcut to accept a dialog (like Enter,) so I have to use my trackpoint, which is very slow.
* Since there are so many windows it's difficult to tab back and forth between other programs (I lose GIMP windows)
* Photoshop keeps common tool options (like brushes, opacity, feather, etc) in a small "always there" bar at the top of the screen. In the GIMP I feel like I am always hunting for a dialog which either wasn't open or is behind some other window or something.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Sun Java is non-free, right? They don't make source releases and their license certainly isn't OSI approved. I thought Red Hat was all about squeezing non-free software out of its distro? From their mission statement:
"Red Hat believes that software infrastructure should be free. To that end, we are sharing our infrastructure technologies with the intention of establishing a common, open standard platform for software developers." [1]
Is Java really a free, open software infrastructure?
I expect that by this time next year the Samba team will be saying "yeah, we got a faster SMB server than the one in Windows 2003
No, you misunderstood what Ballmer said:
we didn't have the fastest one around... So we took our performance team and said "your mission is to make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market."
At Microsoft, "Performance Team" is another name for "Marketing Statistics and Analysis Group". So when they say "make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market" they mean, "make the graphs highlight the fact that our server is faster than JLAN Sever."
MSN web search just plain sucks. I was using a windows box the other day, typed "java api" into the msn search bar because it was there. I figured "that one's easy, msn should be able to handle it."
The correct answer, which is of course Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.1 and is #1 in google's results[1]. It is #8 in MSN. That was the last time I will ever bother with msn search.
Erik
[1] Well, google gives you 1.3.1, which is pretty much the same thing. That is probably google's biggest fault. When new content comes out, google is only as fast to adapt as the rest of the web is when it comes to updating their links.
Have you even tried running anything besides linux?
I started running Linux about two years ago. I ran DOS/Windows exclusively for the 10 or so years before that. I switched from Windows XP to Red Hat Linux 7.3.
I found the pace of Windows development slow and boring. There's a lot more interesting stuff going on in the Linux world.
How do you copy URLs into a browser? I usually end up doing something like this:
1) Select URL 2) Switch to browser window 3) Click on location bar in browser, being careful not to select anything 4) Hold down Delete for a while 5) Hold down Backspace for a while 6) Middle click in the location bar
Which takes forever. I suppose I could:
1) Switch to browser window 2) Select location bar contents 3) Press delete 4) Switch back to source window 5) Select url 6) Switch back to browser window 7) Middle click in location bar
Which is even more steps, but there's no "hold down delete and wait" step, which speeds things up a bit. But still, the other way:
1) Select URL 2) CTRL+C 3) Switch to browser window 4) Select location bar contents 5) CTRL+V
Make is very easy. I still can't figure out how to do this in a reasonable amount of time in Linux (assuming the apps are broken. Like, say, Evolution->Galeon)
That's why they wouldn't fly it back. They'd just head up there with canons and take big chunks of gold and fire them at the earth. Then we'd have big aircraft carriers with gigantic nets strung between them in the ocean waiting to catch them.
Or if you made them just the right size so after the burn up they are only a few inches across, we could all just sit outside in our lawns and catch them with baseball mitts. We'd never have to work a day again.
Sheesh. What kind of idiot would use a space shuttle?
I was drooling over the Sharp PC-UM10/30 ultra-lights a few months ago. That was before I met one in the flesh at Circuit City.
These machines are amazingly thin and amazingly light. I'm sure they are a joy to have in your lap. That is, as long as you don't have to type. The keyboard is disgusting. I'm a little spoiled because I'm used to my Thinkpad 600x, but my hands started to cramp up within minutes of typing on the Sharp. After typing a half a page of text, my fingers were crying for me to go back to my Thinkpad.
That, and the thing feels pretty flimsy (price you pay for 0.7" thickness). My love affair with the Actius line is over.
The thing that drives me batty about Tom's Hardware is that he spends hours and hours running all these benchmarks and then presents his data in the most asinine way. He has 65 data points on a slew of scales and all he can think of to represent this is a dozen bar charts. Yippee.
Tom, how about a scatter plot comparing release date with performance? Or a line plot comparing Intel's top performance with AMD's over the years? Maybe put the theoretical Moore's law curve in there for comparison too. The gentle sloping curve of your performance-sorted bar chart is meaningless. It's a waste of our time and yours.
Another example of Tom being a graph ass is last years printer roundup. He created one graph per printer per group of scales. So we get to compare the hp deskjet's speed at standard resolution with it's maximum motor speed, but we can't compare the speed with that of the canon i850 without flipping back and forth to a different page.
Slashdot Mirror
- SAS and Flash need write access to their application folders (Program Files/whatever) in order to function properly. Which means that normal 'Users' get errors when the applications start.
- You can install Microsoft Office as an Administrator, but when each user runs Office for the first time, it runs a "finishing installation" type thing that won't run without Administrator privileges. That means you have to make each user an Administrator, start Office from within each user account one by one and then change the account back to a regular user. And you have to repeat the process every time you add a new user.
These are the things that make it really difficult to have multiple user Windows systems where users aren't administrators or power users.Erik
So, if the user doesn't have sufficient privileges, some worms don't work. Sure, this one would because it runs in userland, but the user still executed it! Besides, they should have a virus scanner anyway. Again - it's their fault.
Here's the thing: It's really, really hard to set up a Windows box that functions properly for users without Administrator privileges. It's even harder for users without Power User privileges.
I'm not talking about using Internet Explorer and Notepad. I'm talking about running Macromedia Flash (the application, not the plugin), SAS, Microsoft Office, etc. Try installing those applications and setting up Windows so that multiple 'User' class accounts can run them and so that any new 'User' account that is added can run them too.
It's not easy. Now try setting up a Linux box with even fewer privileges (write access only in the home folder). It's really easy. In fact, it's difficult to give the user more privileges. And they don't need them!
The problem with the "user error" argument is that even if you agree that Windows NT was designed for multiple users (which is a stretch,) the applications just plain aren't, even in 2003. And that's not Macromedia's fault, it's Microsoft's. The app vendors have just been using the APIs and following the conventions all along. The problem is that Microsoft bolted multi-user capabilities onto a single-user architecture late in the game, and things still aren't working right.
Erik
it's small, fast, innovative and feature-packed. Try saying that about any other browser available on all the major platforms.
Firebird is small, fast, innovative and feature-packed.
Whew. That wasn't so hard.
Erik
Apache only represents a user level security issue.
This is entirely true, but if we are talking about a machine which is a web server and only a web server, the kernel/userland issue is moot.
If a bank robber gets into the vault, what the hell does it matter that the restrooms are still secure?
Erik
Why doesn't some hot-shot newspaper hire some hot-shot security expert to probe these systems and identify (but not expoit) the weaknesses? There have to be dozens. There are killer headlines there, and it'd be dead easy for a paper to do. Newspeople take risks like this all the time.
Erik
Are you really going to store a new copy of that 5meg presentation every time you hit save?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't saving a file and creating a new file roughly the same operation? Instead of saving over the old file, you could save to this "old version buffer" and then just swap the filesystem pointers.
Erik
They then sit down, go "doh...!?" for about ten minutes, click half-heartedly a few times and proclaim it an abject failure because it doesn't have precisely the same user interface as PS6.
I'm not going to disagree with you, but I'm not going to agree either. I used Photoshop 3.x through 6.x (whatever time frame that is, five or six years, I think) and have since switched to Linux. I have been using the GIMP for my photo manipulation and every-now-and-then web graphics work for about two years now. Not all the time, but a few times a month.
I still make a lot of mistakes, and things still take a lot longer to do. I'm not sure how v1.3 is coming along, but in the newest release version there are a lot of interface slowdowns. Here's a concrete example: in Photoshop, to rotate an object so it is square:
1) CTRL+T
2) Click and drag until the object is square
This works for all of those actions. In the GIMP, to do the same task, I must
1) SHIFT+T
2) Find the tool options dialog (could be obscured, or not open at all)
3) Select tiny "Rotate" radio button
4) Click+drag, making note of the numerical rotation
5) See if I guessed correctly and the object is square.
6) If not, undo (CTRL+Z) and go back to 5 with a slightly adjusted rotation. Repeat until object is square.
In my experience, this is somewhat representative of the GIMP's user experience. But hey! It's free! And maybe I'm just not used to it yet. My workflow was highly tied into Adobe's way of doing things so I'm perfectly willing to admit that I am stuck in my ways.
And I hear 1.3 solves a lot of these issues.
Erik
P.S. Here are some other UI slowdowns I just noticed playing around with the GIMP:
* I sometimes accidentally tear off a menu instead of hitting the first menu item
* There is no shortcut to accept a dialog (like Enter,) so I have to use my trackpoint, which is very slow.
* Since there are so many windows it's difficult to tab back and forth between other programs (I lose GIMP windows)
* Photoshop keeps common tool options (like brushes, opacity, feather, etc) in a small "always there" bar at the top of the screen. In the GIMP I feel like I am always hunting for a dialog which either wasn't open or is behind some other window or something.
Erik
[1] http://sources.redhat.com/mission.html
I expect that by this time next year the Samba team will be saying "yeah, we got a faster SMB server than the one in Windows 2003
No, you misunderstood what Ballmer said:
we didn't have the fastest one around
At Microsoft, "Performance Team" is another name for "Marketing Statistics and Analysis Group". So when they say "make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market" they mean, "make the graphs highlight the fact that our server is faster than JLAN Sever."
It sure sounds good when Ballmer says it, though!
Erik
MSN web search just plain sucks. I was using a windows box the other day, typed "java api" into the msn search bar because it was there. I figured "that one's easy, msn should be able to handle it."
MSN returns University of Bristol ILRT - Redland RDF Application Framework
The correct answer, which is of course Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.1 and is #1 in google's results[1]. It is #8 in MSN. That was the last time I will ever bother with msn search.
Erik
[1] Well, google gives you 1.3.1, which is pretty much the same thing. That is probably google's biggest fault. When new content comes out, google is only as fast to adapt as the rest of the web is when it comes to updating their links.
I don't bother to turn it off most of the time. I suppose that is shameless.
Erik
Yeah, that's it.
Erik
What would you recommend instead of Linux?
Erik
Have you even tried running anything besides linux?
I started running Linux about two years ago. I ran DOS/Windows exclusively for the 10 or so years before that. I switched from Windows XP to Red Hat Linux 7.3.
I found the pace of Windows development slow and boring. There's a lot more interesting stuff going on in the Linux world.
Erik
Calm down, dude.
Erik
we still don't have a decent graphical user interface desktop solution for Linux.
Dude, you need to put down the glue. We have two kickass graphical interface desktop solutions.
Have you even tried running Linux?
Erik
That's sweet. Thanks for the tip.
Erik
My browser window almost always already has a URL in the location bar. Basically, I'm wondering how you replace text? (like a url in the location bar)
Erik
How do you copy URLs into a browser? I usually end up doing something like this:
1) Select URL
2) Switch to browser window
3) Click on location bar in browser, being careful not to select anything
4) Hold down Delete for a while
5) Hold down Backspace for a while
6) Middle click in the location bar
Which takes forever. I suppose I could:
1) Switch to browser window
2) Select location bar contents
3) Press delete
4) Switch back to source window
5) Select url
6) Switch back to browser window
7) Middle click in location bar
Which is even more steps, but there's no "hold down delete and wait" step, which speeds things up a bit. But still, the other way:
1) Select URL
2) CTRL+C
3) Switch to browser window
4) Select location bar contents
5) CTRL+V
Make is very easy. I still can't figure out how to do this in a reasonable amount of time in Linux (assuming the apps are broken. Like, say, Evolution->Galeon)
Erik
This is an isotope of helium which, if available in abundance, would be a perfect fuel for clean fusion power generation.
s/power/bomb
That's why they wouldn't fly it back. They'd just head up there with canons and take big chunks of gold and fire them at the earth. Then we'd have big aircraft carriers with gigantic nets strung between them in the ocean waiting to catch them.
Or if you made them just the right size so after the burn up they are only a few inches across, we could all just sit outside in our lawns and catch them with baseball mitts. We'd never have to work a day again.
Sheesh. What kind of idiot would use a space shuttle?
Erik
the production of inferior quality candles to be used in Catholic rituals.
Ashcroft is a protestant.
It's a combination of the resistance gradient as you depress and release the keys, the shape of the keys and the travel.
Whatever it was, it just wasn't fun to type on like the Thinkpads are.
Erik
I was drooling over the Sharp PC-UM10/30 ultra-lights a few months ago. That was before I met one in the flesh at Circuit City.
These machines are amazingly thin and amazingly light. I'm sure they are a joy to have in your lap. That is, as long as you don't have to type. The keyboard is disgusting. I'm a little spoiled because I'm used to my Thinkpad 600x, but my hands started to cramp up within minutes of typing on the Sharp. After typing a half a page of text, my fingers were crying for me to go back to my Thinkpad.
That, and the thing feels pretty flimsy (price you pay for 0.7" thickness). My love affair with the Actius line is over.
Erik
The thing that drives me batty about Tom's Hardware is that he spends hours and hours running all these benchmarks and then presents his data in the most asinine way. He has 65 data points on a slew of scales and all he can think of to represent this is a dozen bar charts. Yippee.
Tom, how about a scatter plot comparing release date with performance? Or a line plot comparing Intel's top performance with AMD's over the years? Maybe put the theoretical Moore's law curve in there for comparison too. The gentle sloping curve of your performance-sorted bar chart is meaningless. It's a waste of our time and yours.
Another example of Tom being a graph ass is last years printer roundup. He created one graph per printer per group of scales. So we get to compare the hp deskjet's speed at standard resolution with it's maximum motor speed, but we can't compare the speed with that of the canon i850 without flipping back and forth to a different page.
What a waste of good data.
Erik