God, I'm so clumsy tonight. I had written a fair chunk, including a bunch of apps with comments, then managed to close the wrong tab. Of course, the undo did not include the work in progress text.
Quick recap then. I'm not saying the following cannot be accomplished in some way in Linux, but I found nothing that came even close to the Windows equivalents. For some I looked hard, for others not very.
Video editing (I looked at Ubuntu Studio and got flashback to the 80s). Hardware support (full support for my camera, including tethered shooting with live view, for example). Evernote. Sprite Backup (mobile). Backup program like Acronis TrueImage and similar (in-OS imaging app with decent GUI). SnagIt. Camtasia. Newsbin Pro. Spotify. LogMeIn. ObjectDock. Widgets. AnyDVD HD and all the other utils to rip and handle Blu-rays (with decent GUIs).
I could list almost every application I use, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird.
Yes, Evernote can be accessed via the web. No, it doesn't compare to a proper client. Yes you can do screen shots, no it doesn't compare to SnagIt (or any of the many other similar Windows products). Yes, you can use a collection of tools to accomplish most of what Newsbin Pro does (or have fun getting it to partially work in Wine), no, it's not worth it. You get the idea.
Whenever I've tried to use Linux exclusively, I always find myself longing back to Windows. The only thing I miss when I do boot back, is Compiz.
Until very recently, Linux has virtually only been for the hardcore nerd. You don't get a humongous selection of polished and user friendly applications from hackers making tools for themselves, then releasing them to be nice. Yes, free is nice, but I'd rather pay a few bucks for something that's polished.
None of this is Linux's fault. The operating system is there, happy to run whatever applications people wish to create.
The problem is that, as someone else mentioned, it only takes a single application a user might want or need that you can get in Windows but not in Linux. Or where the Windows version blows the Linux one away. True, there are Linux applications that do not exist in Windows. But the odds of average Joe wanting that app compared to wanting a Windows one that doesn't exist in Linux? I'll install Windows for anybody that needs anything beyond web browsing and email any day.
Good grief, I somehow managed to hit cancel here apparently. I'm too lazy to rewrite it all so this will be rather brief.
I haven't needed to reinstall Windows since Win98. XP sorted the "yearly reinstall" issue for me just fine. Any XP installation I've done, even on kids' computers, have just kept on trucking until the hardware was well overdue for an upgrade. I can't remember having a virus since the Amiga, nor have I had to do any cleanup on any of the machines I "support" (that being extended family and friends).
I totally agree with your final point. Pick whatever poison suits your needs. For the majority of people, that's still Windows.
What can I say, my experience is almost the exact opposite. We could go on and on with specific examples and ping pong back and forth. But it's nothing that hasn't been said before umpteen times on this site.
Whatever works for you, is what's the best option for you. For most people that's still Windows. I do hope it changes, but today is not the day it will happen.
And for the vast majority of people who really only use e-mail and chat, browse the web, download photos from their camera, put music on their iPod, etc., Linux has them covered and has for years.
That I totally agree with. As far as "Linux has got everything now", I don't. There are so many utilities and applications that I use in Windows that either doesn't exist in Linux, or are of pathetic quality in comparison. And that's even if ignoring how messy it can be to get things installed and working if you're not lucky enough to find it packaged for your distribution.
It has made enormous strides over the past few years, and it'll only get better. But anybody that claims it's on par with Windows in application support already, is either blind or a fanatic.
Personally I am a big fan of Linux. Yet I still picked an XP netbook. My desktop still runs XP. My laptop still runs XP. My laptop at work still runs XP.
The fact is simply that everything I need and want to do, I can do in XP. The same is not true for Linux. It has huge gaps in its software availability. The cost of Windows in order to get access to all that software is negligible.
It's a Catch-22. Linux won't get major commercial interest before enough people are using it, and it won't get enough people using it unless the software is there.
I do have hope though. The snowball is definitely forming. But we're still a long ways off it starting to roll.
Depends on what you view as competition. Old phone copper is open to other providers than the old telephone monopoly. They still have to pay that company for use of the copper, but in theory anybody that wants to can offer DSL, so we have a handful of providers (in most areas) to choose between when it comes to DSL.
For anything speedier, you're stuck with whatever TV cable provider you happen to have in your area. It's not like a dozen different cable companies are all going to spend millions installing fiber into your area's living rooms in hopes enough will switch to them to make it worth the investment.
Every 20 or whatever years the cable contracts for an area are up, and theoretically there's competition over whether to keep the old one or have a new one dig up the area. The competition in this case tends to be between a maximum of two providers. There just aren't that many cable companies around in any given area.
I'm not all against monopolies. It made sense to have one, and have the government add financing, when we built the phone network to begin with. To ensure everybody got access, not just the more profitable city centres. I'm a bit miffed what's left of the old monopoly company now gets to earn money on the copper our taxes paid for decades ago, but at least they're no longer a monopoly.
That it's even more monopolized in the US, the capitalist hub of the world, is surprising.
You seem to be having some issues that precludes you from rational discussion on this topic.
Your response doesn't really address anything I wrote. The one attempt you made (and that's being extremely accommodating), first involved you imagining me saying something I did not. This reply from you only makes you come across as whining about how unfair the world is.
I realize the issue is one you feel strongly about, but snap out of it. You're an adult. If you're going to bother responding at all, put a shred of effort into it. You're British and your grammar and spelling is worse than mine, for crying out loud. That's just lazy.
Hardcore gamers buy a lot of games. If hardcore gamers also pirate a lot, then this is a disaster for people making hardcore games.
Unless you have the kind of data to back up your assumption that hardcore gamers would otherwise have bought *more* games, you just made one of them unfounded correlations yourself.
If people want the option to ever be playing single-player games, they need to stop assuming they can get them for free
Yep. Games like The Sims has clearly proven there's no room for commercially successful single player games. Or Bioshock. Or Sins of a Solar Empire. Or (insert list of umpteen non-MMO games that has topped the sales charts the pasts few years).
*Lots* of people, millions of them, buy games. Your points aren't invalid, but neither are they gospel.
I'll tell you what makes me buy games. Them being good. And the price/availability equation. Steam was good, until they switched to Euro at a 1:1 ratio with USD and jacked up their prices some 40% effectively. Now they've priced themselves out of my interest. There's only Impulse left. That's the only DRM I accept. If your game isn't on there, you generally won't get a sale from me unless you're offering independent DRM-free distribution of your own.
Well, in your case you won't either way. I tried hard to find one of your games to buy to support you when you announced dropping DRM. I just couldn't find one that even remotely interested me enough to part with money for it. That's not meant as a slam. You just haven't made anything to my taste yet.
The sad fact is, there's no getting away from piracy. All one can do is try to mitigate it. By offering quality, by not overloading it with ineffective and annoying DRM, by pricing it right, and by catering extra to the people that are able to prove they purchased the product.
If there still aren't enough sales to make it worthwhile, then that's it really. We'll be back to indie one-man-with-a-passion made games and will have noone to blame but ourselves. Though those games will undoubtedly top any AAA game in originality, so the culture of gaming will endure regardless.
I guess it depends on what you are used to. The Cox web page doesn't seem to want to tell me much. The highest speed I found mention of is 15Mbit so I'll go with that.
If that is the case, they *are* ripping people off from my perspective. Unless they're offering it for very cheap prices, of course. In which case "you get what you pay for" applies, obviously.
No provider where I live even mentions throttling. I've never in the years I've had my current 20Mbit (14-15 effectively as it's ADSL and I'm a bit far out) experienced not getting it maxed out when downloading. They just don't seem to be overselling their bandwidth. And I hear no stories of any provider doing it.
I'm considering switching to my cable company's 50Mbit offering. Mainly for the upstream speed. No throttling of any kind there either, and I haven't found anything but praise for the delivered speed in forums.
No word about actually offering it commercially for a good while, but they currently have a customer up with a 1Gbit connection for testing purposes. They've been struggling with the capacity of the equipment at the residence, but have logged 920Mbit effective with it.
I guess comparing the US market to that of a small country like mine isn't really fair. But I can't quite get a grip on why it differs so much in this area. The speed is the major selling point here. They've been upping it gradually over the years, while keeping subscription rates static (though offering cheaper low speed subscriptions for those that want that). None of the commercials make a huge point about how cheap they are, but they do climb all over eachother yelling about the maximum speed they offer.
The point I originally quoted went to patents, not providing the physical product. I'd imagine those corrupted governments wouldn't care about patents to begin with and would produce the drug themselves for sale already if they were able.
If the companies are keen on providing these drugs pretty much for free, I would guess aid organizations would accept them gladly (or are already for all I know). There are no guarantees, but it would seem a lot safer than just handing it over to "the country" for distribution.
Did you overlook the "poor countries" part of that sentence, by any chance?
And, again, this was *his* point, not mine. Though if I were forced to take a stance on it, I suspect I would end up on his side of the fence.
Pharmaceutical companies produce drugs for the rich markets that can afford them. There's not a lot of cost to be recuperated from countries with no money or welfare system. Following that, there's no significant loss in waiving patent rights for saving lives in those countries either.
By seizing the server (and shutting down the service)
The service wasn't shut down. It was a mirror and its removal only caused some temporary issues (according to TFA).
the police blocked a potential source of further leads as to the identity of the person. In short, a panic reaction, rather than a reasoned reaction.
Yes, and no. It depends on your point of view.
If they felt the server might contain data relevant to the investigation, and that the hosters were sympathetic to the poster and might try to expunge that data, then quick seizure might be a valid attempt to preserve evidence.
I do agree with you, considering the police knew about their no logging policy. They would have been much better served by getting a warrant to make sure the next time that poster made a post, the IP was logged. Assuming the whole thing isn't anonymized to the point that there's no such thing as user names or accounts.
Now explain to me what law the server owners/operators broke, that resulting in their server (and service) being "thrown in jail"
I'm not much up on law, but if I took a picture of a crime in progress, I wouldn't be surprised if the police confiscated my memory card temporarily. I would be much more surprised if such a potential need isn't covered by law.
Such a law should, of course, also include provisions about limiting the impact on the owner of the seized property. Only time will tell if the police try to sit on that server for no good reason or not.
I can only speak for myself, but I wasn't overly worried about apps support myself. I was planning for Vista and was picking applications that claimed to work in Vista as soon as they started appearing. If desperate I could always keep XP around for dual boot for a while until the dust settled in the driver area.
It was just that the OS offered nothing I wanted or could see a need for, while having a good number of negatives to it. Come to think of it, that's not entirely true. I did think I'd need DX10 at some point. Luckily I was proven wrong.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure how we got onto the virtualization track here.
My post way back up there was about XP ceasing to be a viable OS due to Microsoft and vendors ending support for it in the not too distant future. And that if it weren't for that it could have kept on trucking along for a good many years longer.
Using a more recent host OS and virtualization for legacy support of XP apps is a different topic really.
I had no preconceived notion about Vista before I tried that. I'm usually an early adopter and tried Vista as soon as I could get my hands on it. I found it to be awful. It's the only MS OS since Me I've found cause to recommend against adopting.
I did get it pre-installed on a laptop a year or so ago. Since it had been a bit since release I thought I'd give it a go. That lasted a full evening before I gave it up. When explorer.exe blows up three times in the first evening, it's time to call it quits. The OEM install wasn't perfectly clean, but it wasn't by any means the worst I've seen. It just wasn't worth the hassle of a clean install to see if I could make it work properly, when I knew XP would.
The thing with Vista is, it offered no reason to change over from XP for me. It offered quite a few reasons *not* to (stability, speed, resource requirements, compatibility).
Currently Vista has matured enough that it would probably be usable for me. But at this point, why bother? Everything I need *still* works in XP, Vista offers me nothing of value to me, and it sure isn't free.
With Windows 7 almost certainly less than a year away, I see zero reasons for me to spend money on Vista at this point.
I don't design operating systems, so I have no idea how they would technically do it. But considering the drivers in Vista/Win7 are supposedly fairly locked off, it seems quite feasible for the OS to know what the user is physically doing as opposed to what is triggered by other applications.
Unfortunately, Windows does not support this, so it's a moot point. From an article someone linked elsewhere:
You see, today Windows doesnâ(TM)t have what some call âoeAuthentic User Gesturesâ â" the ability to differentiate between a real user clicking a mouse button which gets translated into a window message to click the button, and an application sending a window message to pretend that somebody clicked it. To the receiving application, they both look exactly the same.
Either way, I still see no excuse for there not being a "remember my choice" checkbox. If I said "go for it" to starting an application yesterday, I'll be equally cool with it today, as long as nothing has tampered with said application in the meantime.
I would guess the cause is the defragger includes a boot-time driver for its pre-boot defragmentation functionality. Every time it runs it'll verify that the driver is present and if not, add it.
My issue isn't with it triggering, it's with the lack of ability for me to say "this application is cool, I trust it, that's not going to change unless the application does".
If I could do that, all would be right in the world.
That's the default setting. And it still prompts me every time I start my (third party) defragger or manually tell my antivirus to update.
I can turn it off, as I could in Vista, but beyond that the only lower setting than default (except Off) is one that does not dim the screen when presenting the prompt.
They've made some effort in Win7, no denying that, but it's still too rough. There's no excuse not to have a "don't alert me again for this application" checkbox.
You missed my point, or I failed to make it clear.
When you, in a few years time, buy that fancy new multi-function printer with full holographic scanning mode, hooked to the computer's wireless gigadupabit streaming modulator interface, nothing will make your XP guest OS know what to do with it. It doesn't know the interface, even if VirtualBox presents it, or allows pass-through. And the bundled software for it will not install.
For new hardware, you're out of luck at some point unless you're on a recent OS.
It will continue to support whatever functionality of your hardware your virtualization application chooses to present to the guest OS (and the guest OS knows what to do with). That's a pretty big difference.
How much of security and stability is decided by the "core of the OS" as opposed to other layers, applications and company policies?
It'll depend on how narrowly you define "core", I suppose. XP seems to hold its own pretty well even though it's close to a decade old. We still run it. Our customers still run it (we don't support Vista). Those customers include security nuts (military, law enforcement and aviation).
How much worth upgrading for in Vista/Win7 would be perfectly possible to add to XP?
I don't know the answer, but I have a feeling it is closer to "a lot" than "very little".
If OS X and Linux had had anywhere near the application selection as Windows did when Vista hit the market, things may have been different. But Windows is still king of the hill in this area.
So, no, I don't think it'll be too little too late.
if you compare it with other platforms it doesn't actually offer anything revolutionary in the core of the OS.
Nobody cares about "the core of the OS". Apart, perhaps, from the media industry that needs it to be locked down for them. What people care about is what applications you can run on it.
I was ready to throw Vista out of the window within minutes of my first encounter with it. So far I've clocked a few hours in Win7 and, as of yet, the same compulsion has not struck me.
Only time will tell if that's going to last. UAC really *really* still needs a "remember my answer for this file" checkbox to avoid being turned off completely. It makes no sense what so ever that I should have to click "yes" every bloody time I start my defragmentation application. Sure, if something tries to start it without my direct interaction, tell me. But as long as I'm selecting the menu option to start it, and I've previously said "go ahead", and the file hasn't changed... Just bloody start it already!
The only reason XP will not be a feasible operating system for very much longer, is that Microsoft will not keep updating it and application and hardware vendors will also stop supporting it. Since nobody but Microsoft *can* update some of the parts in it, that's game over.
In the case of XP x64 one could argue the above happened within days of it shipping. But it's limping along on my system and still doing the job I need it to do. That being running my applications.
Slashdot Mirror
God, I'm so clumsy tonight. I had written a fair chunk, including a bunch of apps with comments, then managed to close the wrong tab. Of course, the undo did not include the work in progress text.
Quick recap then. I'm not saying the following cannot be accomplished in some way in Linux, but I found nothing that came even close to the Windows equivalents. For some I looked hard, for others not very.
Video editing (I looked at Ubuntu Studio and got flashback to the 80s). Hardware support (full support for my camera, including tethered shooting with live view, for example). Evernote. Sprite Backup (mobile). Backup program like Acronis TrueImage and similar (in-OS imaging app with decent GUI). SnagIt. Camtasia. Newsbin Pro. Spotify. LogMeIn. ObjectDock. Widgets. AnyDVD HD and all the other utils to rip and handle Blu-rays (with decent GUIs).
I could list almost every application I use, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird.
Yes, Evernote can be accessed via the web. No, it doesn't compare to a proper client. Yes you can do screen shots, no it doesn't compare to SnagIt (or any of the many other similar Windows products). Yes, you can use a collection of tools to accomplish most of what Newsbin Pro does (or have fun getting it to partially work in Wine), no, it's not worth it. You get the idea.
Whenever I've tried to use Linux exclusively, I always find myself longing back to Windows. The only thing I miss when I do boot back, is Compiz.
Until very recently, Linux has virtually only been for the hardcore nerd. You don't get a humongous selection of polished and user friendly applications from hackers making tools for themselves, then releasing them to be nice. Yes, free is nice, but I'd rather pay a few bucks for something that's polished.
None of this is Linux's fault. The operating system is there, happy to run whatever applications people wish to create.
The problem is that, as someone else mentioned, it only takes a single application a user might want or need that you can get in Windows but not in Linux. Or where the Windows version blows the Linux one away. True, there are Linux applications that do not exist in Windows. But the odds of average Joe wanting that app compared to wanting a Windows one that doesn't exist in Linux? I'll install Windows for anybody that needs anything beyond web browsing and email any day.
Good grief, I somehow managed to hit cancel here apparently. I'm too lazy to rewrite it all so this will be rather brief.
I haven't needed to reinstall Windows since Win98. XP sorted the "yearly reinstall" issue for me just fine. Any XP installation I've done, even on kids' computers, have just kept on trucking until the hardware was well overdue for an upgrade. I can't remember having a virus since the Amiga, nor have I had to do any cleanup on any of the machines I "support" (that being extended family and friends).
I totally agree with your final point. Pick whatever poison suits your needs. For the majority of people, that's still Windows.
What can I say, my experience is almost the exact opposite. We could go on and on with specific examples and ping pong back and forth. But it's nothing that hasn't been said before umpteen times on this site.
Whatever works for you, is what's the best option for you. For most people that's still Windows. I do hope it changes, but today is not the day it will happen.
And for the vast majority of people who really only use e-mail and chat, browse the web, download photos from their camera, put music on their iPod, etc., Linux has them covered and has for years.
That I totally agree with. As far as "Linux has got everything now", I don't. There are so many utilities and applications that I use in Windows that either doesn't exist in Linux, or are of pathetic quality in comparison. And that's even if ignoring how messy it can be to get things installed and working if you're not lucky enough to find it packaged for your distribution.
It has made enormous strides over the past few years, and it'll only get better. But anybody that claims it's on par with Windows in application support already, is either blind or a fanatic.
Personally I am a big fan of Linux. Yet I still picked an XP netbook. My desktop still runs XP. My laptop still runs XP. My laptop at work still runs XP.
The fact is simply that everything I need and want to do, I can do in XP. The same is not true for Linux. It has huge gaps in its software availability. The cost of Windows in order to get access to all that software is negligible.
It's a Catch-22. Linux won't get major commercial interest before enough people are using it, and it won't get enough people using it unless the software is there.
I do have hope though. The snowball is definitely forming. But we're still a long ways off it starting to roll.
Depends on what you view as competition. Old phone copper is open to other providers than the old telephone monopoly. They still have to pay that company for use of the copper, but in theory anybody that wants to can offer DSL, so we have a handful of providers (in most areas) to choose between when it comes to DSL.
For anything speedier, you're stuck with whatever TV cable provider you happen to have in your area. It's not like a dozen different cable companies are all going to spend millions installing fiber into your area's living rooms in hopes enough will switch to them to make it worth the investment.
Every 20 or whatever years the cable contracts for an area are up, and theoretically there's competition over whether to keep the old one or have a new one dig up the area. The competition in this case tends to be between a maximum of two providers. There just aren't that many cable companies around in any given area.
I'm not all against monopolies. It made sense to have one, and have the government add financing, when we built the phone network to begin with. To ensure everybody got access, not just the more profitable city centres. I'm a bit miffed what's left of the old monopoly company now gets to earn money on the copper our taxes paid for decades ago, but at least they're no longer a monopoly.
That it's even more monopolized in the US, the capitalist hub of the world, is surprising.
You seem to be having some issues that precludes you from rational discussion on this topic.
Your response doesn't really address anything I wrote. The one attempt you made (and that's being extremely accommodating), first involved you imagining me saying something I did not. This reply from you only makes you come across as whining about how unfair the world is.
I realize the issue is one you feel strongly about, but snap out of it. You're an adult. If you're going to bother responding at all, put a shred of effort into it. You're British and your grammar and spelling is worse than mine, for crying out loud. That's just lazy.
Hardcore gamers buy a lot of games. If hardcore gamers also pirate a lot, then this is a disaster for people making hardcore games.
Unless you have the kind of data to back up your assumption that hardcore gamers would otherwise have bought *more* games, you just made one of them unfounded correlations yourself.
If people want the option to ever be playing single-player games, they need to stop assuming they can get them for free
Yep. Games like The Sims has clearly proven there's no room for commercially successful single player games. Or Bioshock. Or Sins of a Solar Empire. Or (insert list of umpteen non-MMO games that has topped the sales charts the pasts few years).
*Lots* of people, millions of them, buy games. Your points aren't invalid, but neither are they gospel.
I'll tell you what makes me buy games. Them being good. And the price/availability equation. Steam was good, until they switched to Euro at a 1:1 ratio with USD and jacked up their prices some 40% effectively. Now they've priced themselves out of my interest. There's only Impulse left. That's the only DRM I accept. If your game isn't on there, you generally won't get a sale from me unless you're offering independent DRM-free distribution of your own.
Well, in your case you won't either way. I tried hard to find one of your games to buy to support you when you announced dropping DRM. I just couldn't find one that even remotely interested me enough to part with money for it. That's not meant as a slam. You just haven't made anything to my taste yet.
The sad fact is, there's no getting away from piracy. All one can do is try to mitigate it. By offering quality, by not overloading it with ineffective and annoying DRM, by pricing it right, and by catering extra to the people that are able to prove they purchased the product.
If there still aren't enough sales to make it worthwhile, then that's it really. We'll be back to indie one-man-with-a-passion made games and will have noone to blame but ourselves. Though those games will undoubtedly top any AAA game in originality, so the culture of gaming will endure regardless.
I guess it depends on what you are used to. The Cox web page doesn't seem to want to tell me much. The highest speed I found mention of is 15Mbit so I'll go with that.
If that is the case, they *are* ripping people off from my perspective. Unless they're offering it for very cheap prices, of course. In which case "you get what you pay for" applies, obviously.
No provider where I live even mentions throttling. I've never in the years I've had my current 20Mbit (14-15 effectively as it's ADSL and I'm a bit far out) experienced not getting it maxed out when downloading. They just don't seem to be overselling their bandwidth. And I hear no stories of any provider doing it.
I'm considering switching to my cable company's 50Mbit offering. Mainly for the upstream speed. No throttling of any kind there either, and I haven't found anything but praise for the delivered speed in forums.
No word about actually offering it commercially for a good while, but they currently have a customer up with a 1Gbit connection for testing purposes. They've been struggling with the capacity of the equipment at the residence, but have logged 920Mbit effective with it.
I guess comparing the US market to that of a small country like mine isn't really fair. But I can't quite get a grip on why it differs so much in this area. The speed is the major selling point here. They've been upping it gradually over the years, while keeping subscription rates static (though offering cheaper low speed subscriptions for those that want that). None of the commercials make a huge point about how cheap they are, but they do climb all over eachother yelling about the maximum speed they offer.
The point I originally quoted went to patents, not providing the physical product. I'd imagine those corrupted governments wouldn't care about patents to begin with and would produce the drug themselves for sale already if they were able.
If the companies are keen on providing these drugs pretty much for free, I would guess aid organizations would accept them gladly (or are already for all I know). There are no guarantees, but it would seem a lot safer than just handing it over to "the country" for distribution.
Yours is certainly a valid point either way.
Did you overlook the "poor countries" part of that sentence, by any chance?
And, again, this was *his* point, not mine. Though if I were forced to take a stance on it, I suspect I would end up on his side of the fence.
Pharmaceutical companies produce drugs for the rich markets that can afford them. There's not a lot of cost to be recuperated from countries with no money or welfare system. Following that, there's no significant loss in waiving patent rights for saving lives in those countries either.
That disgusting guy that eats stuff off of his own feet while lecturing made a point about this once.
That patents on life saving drugs in poor countries is tantamount to mass murder.
By seizing the server (and shutting down the service)
The service wasn't shut down. It was a mirror and its removal only caused some temporary issues (according to TFA).
the police blocked a potential source of further leads as to the identity of the person. In short, a panic reaction, rather than a reasoned reaction.
Yes, and no. It depends on your point of view.
If they felt the server might contain data relevant to the investigation, and that the hosters were sympathetic to the poster and might try to expunge that data, then quick seizure might be a valid attempt to preserve evidence.
I do agree with you, considering the police knew about their no logging policy. They would have been much better served by getting a warrant to make sure the next time that poster made a post, the IP was logged. Assuming the whole thing isn't anonymized to the point that there's no such thing as user names or accounts.
Now explain to me what law the server owners/operators broke, that resulting in their server (and service) being "thrown in jail"
I'm not much up on law, but if I took a picture of a crime in progress, I wouldn't be surprised if the police confiscated my memory card temporarily. I would be much more surprised if such a potential need isn't covered by law.
Such a law should, of course, also include provisions about limiting the impact on the owner of the seized property. Only time will tell if the police try to sit on that server for no good reason or not.
I can only speak for myself, but I wasn't overly worried about apps support myself. I was planning for Vista and was picking applications that claimed to work in Vista as soon as they started appearing. If desperate I could always keep XP around for dual boot for a while until the dust settled in the driver area.
It was just that the OS offered nothing I wanted or could see a need for, while having a good number of negatives to it. Come to think of it, that's not entirely true. I did think I'd need DX10 at some point. Luckily I was proven wrong.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure how we got onto the virtualization track here.
My post way back up there was about XP ceasing to be a viable OS due to Microsoft and vendors ending support for it in the not too distant future. And that if it weren't for that it could have kept on trucking along for a good many years longer.
Using a more recent host OS and virtualization for legacy support of XP apps is a different topic really.
I had no preconceived notion about Vista before I tried that. I'm usually an early adopter and tried Vista as soon as I could get my hands on it. I found it to be awful. It's the only MS OS since Me I've found cause to recommend against adopting.
I did get it pre-installed on a laptop a year or so ago. Since it had been a bit since release I thought I'd give it a go. That lasted a full evening before I gave it up. When explorer.exe blows up three times in the first evening, it's time to call it quits. The OEM install wasn't perfectly clean, but it wasn't by any means the worst I've seen. It just wasn't worth the hassle of a clean install to see if I could make it work properly, when I knew XP would.
The thing with Vista is, it offered no reason to change over from XP for me. It offered quite a few reasons *not* to (stability, speed, resource requirements, compatibility).
Currently Vista has matured enough that it would probably be usable for me. But at this point, why bother? Everything I need *still* works in XP, Vista offers me nothing of value to me, and it sure isn't free.
With Windows 7 almost certainly less than a year away, I see zero reasons for me to spend money on Vista at this point.
I don't design operating systems, so I have no idea how they would technically do it. But considering the drivers in Vista/Win7 are supposedly fairly locked off, it seems quite feasible for the OS to know what the user is physically doing as opposed to what is triggered by other applications.
Unfortunately, Windows does not support this, so it's a moot point. From an article someone linked elsewhere:
You see, today Windows doesnâ(TM)t have what some call âoeAuthentic User Gesturesâ â" the ability to differentiate between a real user clicking a mouse button which gets translated into a window message to click the button, and an application sending a window message to pretend that somebody clicked it. To the receiving application, they both look exactly the same.
Either way, I still see no excuse for there not being a "remember my choice" checkbox. If I said "go for it" to starting an application yesterday, I'll be equally cool with it today, as long as nothing has tampered with said application in the meantime.
I would guess the cause is the defragger includes a boot-time driver for its pre-boot defragmentation functionality. Every time it runs it'll verify that the driver is present and if not, add it.
My issue isn't with it triggering, it's with the lack of ability for me to say "this application is cool, I trust it, that's not going to change unless the application does".
If I could do that, all would be right in the world.
That's the default setting. And it still prompts me every time I start my (third party) defragger or manually tell my antivirus to update.
I can turn it off, as I could in Vista, but beyond that the only lower setting than default (except Off) is one that does not dim the screen when presenting the prompt.
They've made some effort in Win7, no denying that, but it's still too rough. There's no excuse not to have a "don't alert me again for this application" checkbox.
You missed my point, or I failed to make it clear.
When you, in a few years time, buy that fancy new multi-function printer with full holographic scanning mode, hooked to the computer's wireless gigadupabit streaming modulator interface, nothing will make your XP guest OS know what to do with it. It doesn't know the interface, even if VirtualBox presents it, or allows pass-through. And the bundled software for it will not install.
For new hardware, you're out of luck at some point unless you're on a recent OS.
It will continue to support whatever functionality of your hardware your virtualization application chooses to present to the guest OS (and the guest OS knows what to do with). That's a pretty big difference.
How much of security and stability is decided by the "core of the OS" as opposed to other layers, applications and company policies?
It'll depend on how narrowly you define "core", I suppose. XP seems to hold its own pretty well even though it's close to a decade old. We still run it. Our customers still run it (we don't support Vista). Those customers include security nuts (military, law enforcement and aviation).
How much worth upgrading for in Vista/Win7 would be perfectly possible to add to XP?
I don't know the answer, but I have a feeling it is closer to "a lot" than "very little".
If OS X and Linux had had anywhere near the application selection as Windows did when Vista hit the market, things may have been different. But Windows is still king of the hill in this area.
So, no, I don't think it'll be too little too late.
if you compare it with other platforms it doesn't actually offer anything revolutionary in the core of the OS.
Nobody cares about "the core of the OS". Apart, perhaps, from the media industry that needs it to be locked down for them. What people care about is what applications you can run on it.
I was ready to throw Vista out of the window within minutes of my first encounter with it. So far I've clocked a few hours in Win7 and, as of yet, the same compulsion has not struck me.
Only time will tell if that's going to last. UAC really *really* still needs a "remember my answer for this file" checkbox to avoid being turned off completely. It makes no sense what so ever that I should have to click "yes" every bloody time I start my defragmentation application. Sure, if something tries to start it without my direct interaction, tell me. But as long as I'm selecting the menu option to start it, and I've previously said "go ahead", and the file hasn't changed... Just bloody start it already!
XP x64 edition.
See above.
Included as of XP SP1.
The only reason XP will not be a feasible operating system for very much longer, is that Microsoft will not keep updating it and application and hardware vendors will also stop supporting it. Since nobody but Microsoft *can* update some of the parts in it, that's game over.
In the case of XP x64 one could argue the above happened within days of it shipping. But it's limping along on my system and still doing the job I need it to do. That being running my applications.