Heh, I knew that they tried to disallow unsigned drivers--in normal mode, at least. In safe mode (or some other mode, maybe) you can load them just fine, from what I understand.
I like the idea of signed drivers, but generally speaking, I dislike things that prevent me from using my computer as I see fit.
In my opinion, part of the signing enforcement is also probably to stop the current known bypass to the activation time limit. Did they fix the bug that let you just set your BIOS clock to 2012 before installing Vista, in order to get a 5 year activation window?
I've never used any version of Windows that wasn't buggy and unstable, why should I assume that this one would be different? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice (or ten times with Windows) shame on me. Stability reports of XP are pretty much all over the map. Lots of people have no problems whatsoever. Remember that you only ever hear about the problems. You don't hear about the millions who have no problems.
I do think that Windows typically has a problem with robustness. Bad hardware/drivers can all too easily take the system down. This is a place where people perceive OS X to have an advantage--driver stability is much higher because driver development is tightly coupled with OS development, and the hardware is very controlled.
Robustness issues have been addressed in Vista, where more drivers are handled in userspace. In theory, this means that a bad driver shouldn't cause a hard crash. We'll see how that works out in practice.
The poster was obviously confused as to what "multiple desktops" are. That or s/he was making a very dry joke.
I tend to find multiple desktops pretty cumbersome, but then, I rarely need to work in multiple applications at once. More often, I want to be able to monitor other windows (xterms, mostly) while working in another application (web browser, Open Office, etc.) Multiple desktops aren't really suited to this--rather, a very large desktop or multiple monitors is the way to go.
Then again, I use screen extensively, and it's basically just a terminal version of multiple desktops.... When I need to monitor multiple sessions in a single screen, though, so I'll open up multiple xterms and 'screen -x'.
You can find Home Premium Upgrade for $145, even. And if you don't mind tying the OS to your system for life, you can get an OEM version for $105.
I definitely think that the version hell we're seeing with Vista was a bad marketing decision, particularly since "Ultimate" is so absurdly expensive. I know people who are holding out on moving to Vista simply because they don't want to plop down that chunk of change, and there is a perceived loss of value in buying the non-ultimate version (even though they'll use almost none of the features of Ultimate over Home Premium.) Too much choice leads to customer confusion and aversion.
Apple definitely got it right on the versioning, but then again, their product is a whole computer, not JUST an operating system. If they sold OS X for generic PCs, they'd probably have to bump the price up considerably in order to stay afloat.
Note that Vista Ultimate comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. So really, they're probably trying to push people like you into buying the more expensive version (rather than two versions of Premium or something.)
I like how Apple didn't distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit. They just smoothly moved to 64-bit, and if you buy a new OS, it will determine which version to install and do it all automatically. And by all appearances, application compatibility is extremely high (something you can't say for Windows at all.)
Do you have a citation that Windows Vista Ultimate is the only thing that runs DX10? I'm pretty sure Vista Home Premium runs it, and that is a much, much cheaper price.
Made a bit of an error there.
If you don't want the version that can be transferred to another PC, you'll want to buy one of the non-OEM versions. should have read
If you want the version that can be transferred to another PC, you'll want to buy one of the non-OEM versions. How silly would it be for a less featureful version to be more expensive?:)
Newegg thinks that you can get Vista Ultimate for as low as $169. And the truth is, you don't even need Ultimate to game. Most people will never need more than Vista Home Premium, which can be had for as low as $105. If you don't want the version that can be transferred to another PC, you'll want to buy one of the non-OEM versions. Ultimate will run you $320, according to that site, and Home Premium (upgrade) will run you $145. Hardly "over $400."
As for any other Vista only titles coming out, check how well they are selling. Shadowrun was Vista only and it sold so badly they had to close the game studio! It was also, by most accounts, a terrible game. I'm sure that it would have sold more if it was available for XP natively, but I'm not sure that it would have sold much more. Most of the press it got was because it was Vista-only--without that, it would have been just another game on the shelf.
There was a story not all that long ago about people who just buy a new computer when their old one gets so many viruses that it barely functions anymore. They don't understand that there's an option to fix the old computer, so they buy a new one. Also, laptops are a huge part of the market these days, and they tend to break more frequently than desktops (simply because they are carried around, and desktops typically aren't.)
Sorry MS but I'd rather have a skeleton menu structure that simply duplicates all of the icons/shortcuts because it then means I have the ability to restore a fragged menu simply by copying the default back in. It's not obvious that this is the best mechanism, though. There is definitely an argument that a centralized list is better, due to the fact that it's easier to manage. Under Linux, what happens if I add a program to the system? Does my menu get updated, or just the skeleton?
Like it or not, most users are going to want the individual menu to be updated as well. Otherwise, they're going to be looking around in the start menu for the program that they just installed, and they're not going to find it.
Generally speaking, they believe that God's hand was on every pen and His mind was in every decision made regarding the Bible. It's an argument that's impossible to argue with, but not because it's logically sound.
The US has a little-known comsumer protection law that prohibits voiding warranties based upon modifications to the product unless it can be proven that the mod caused the malfunction.
I find it very hard to believe that Vista wouldn't work with any router. A router just routes packets, it doesn't care where they come from. Maybe you meant your wireless network adapter. Which one was it? There were actually many reports of wireless routers being incompatible with Vista. It's entirely possible that it was an actual incompatibility. No vendor implements the spec perfectly, and no two vendors are likely to do it in the exact same way. Usually it's good enough for compatibility, but with all the various combinations of hardware and software, there are bound to be issues.
Vista works fine with all versions of Office AFAIK. I've definitely used Office XP and 2000 on it. Yeah, I really wondered about this, so I looked it up. It looks like the issue is that early version sof Office are in extended support, so Microsoft doesn't feel obligated to maintain compatibility with Vista. It works--currently--but nothing guarantees that a future Vista update won't cause problems, and they won't necessarily fix it if it does.
Look, the fact of the matter is, there's going to be pain involved with major change. It sucks, but it's necessary to move on to a more secure environment. In a few years time, most of these issues will be forgotten. Yeah. I remember choosing NT 4.0 for a lab instead of Windows 2000 because there were a ton of device incompatibilities, and quite a few software ones. Going from 2K to XP was much easier, though XP was pretty bloated, so lots of people held off on the switch.
I don't know much about the Vista memory manager, but my guess is that a huge portion of the memory that is "in use" is caching. More caching often yields a performance improvement. If Vista is using the memory for caching right from the base OS, that's probably a good thing.
Put another way, unused memory is basically wasted. If Vista is programmed to use more memory when that memory is available, that's a good thing.
Honestly, you show all the sighs of feeling entitled. Even in this post, you're suggesting that you're entitled to watch old episodes of The Daily Show, and if they won't put it out on DVD or an online archive, you'll just trade them around your P2P network.
And yeah, I'm slightly threadjacking. I'm pointing out the mentality of today's youth. "I deserve it, and I'm going to take it any way I can." The effects of blocking local filesharing are largely unimportant--in fact, it will probably just lead to an escalation of blocking/circumventing that will ultimately lead to an extremely locked down network.
Back when I was at University, it was the same thing. People were on Napster and KaZaA and whatnot, completely eating up the bandwidth. All traffic (including non-P2P traffic) was extremely slow, despite a fairly beefy connection. Any controls put in place to try to curb P2P were circumvented, over and over, until the residence networks were simply rate-limited. The entire dorm network was limited to 10mbps. If you wanted to do anything that wasn't P2P, you basically just went to the computer lab. It was a compromise--the rest of campus wasn't punished for a few jackasses, but the dorm network was effectively worthless for low-latency Internet usage.
High horse? Yeah. I guess I just feel sorry for the kids who can't use the network for legitimate reasons. Get off your entitlement horse.
They want to monitor future encrypted connections. That was the whole point--they can't break the encryption, so they want to install a trojan to send the plaintext before or after it is encrypted.
Re:No expectation of anonymity
on
Spying On Tor
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· Score: 1
However, if enough people on the chain of blind senders/recipients decided to not follow the rules and started telling more info than the should then the ISP and or powers that be can start tracking who is who. I'm not sure how true that is. The recipient of the message never knows whether the previous node was the originator of the message. The government or ISP would only be able to trace the connection back to the last host that they controlled. Beyond that, they don't know whether the message originated there or at a prior node.
Last time I checked, it only comes with a USB 2.0 interface. That means that you've got to have a computer plugged into it in order for it to be much of a NAS. It also means fairly slow read/write speeds.
Oh man.. I really doubt that that old case is going to provide adequate cooling for those 4 drives. I've seen too many drives die from a heat death to trust this solution.
RAID doesn't open you up to data loss from accidental deletion, it just doesn't help prevent it. ZFS, however, does. You can check it out on FreeBSD (which has much better SATA controller support than OpenSolaris).
Although FreeBSD 7.0 (the version with ZFS) is still in Beta, it's been in a feature-freeze for a long time, and it's generally rock-solid. Just read the ZFS guides from OpenSolaris and the tuning guide for FreeBSD:
Note that ZFS really wants to be run on a 64-bit OS, and it wants a lot of RAM. If you've got that, though, it's fantastic, and it allows for easy snapshots (which helps protect against accidental deletion.)
I understand. I typically feel the same way when people blame Windows for, say, the Storm Worm outbreak (which is distributed through trojans as well as through exploits in unpatched browsers.) There's still a huge 'trust the computer to protect me' mentality amongst Windows users, so anything they get in e-mail or from the web is likely to be opened (at least, by a lot of them.)
Of course, working in computer support, I tend to see all of the bad users, and so it probably colors my opinion.
I'd like to use S3, but I'd really want rsync and versioning. It's possible to approximate these using metadata (store a checksum for each object, and use multiple buckets for "versions" of files.) So far, though, I don't think anyone's packaged any software up to do something like this.
Even better would be if the files could be encrypted.
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I like the idea of signed drivers, but generally speaking, I dislike things that prevent me from using my computer as I see fit. In my opinion, part of the signing enforcement is also probably to stop the current known bypass to the activation time limit. Did they fix the bug that let you just set your BIOS clock to 2012 before installing Vista, in order to get a 5 year activation window?
I do think that Windows typically has a problem with robustness. Bad hardware/drivers can all too easily take the system down. This is a place where people perceive OS X to have an advantage--driver stability is much higher because driver development is tightly coupled with OS development, and the hardware is very controlled.
Robustness issues have been addressed in Vista, where more drivers are handled in userspace. In theory, this means that a bad driver shouldn't cause a hard crash. We'll see how that works out in practice.
The poster was obviously confused as to what "multiple desktops" are. That or s/he was making a very dry joke.
I tend to find multiple desktops pretty cumbersome, but then, I rarely need to work in multiple applications at once. More often, I want to be able to monitor other windows (xterms, mostly) while working in another application (web browser, Open Office, etc.) Multiple desktops aren't really suited to this--rather, a very large desktop or multiple monitors is the way to go.
Then again, I use screen extensively, and it's basically just a terminal version of multiple desktops.... When I need to monitor multiple sessions in a single screen, though, so I'll open up multiple xterms and 'screen -x'.
You can find Home Premium Upgrade for $145, even. And if you don't mind tying the OS to your system for life, you can get an OEM version for $105.
I definitely think that the version hell we're seeing with Vista was a bad marketing decision, particularly since "Ultimate" is so absurdly expensive. I know people who are holding out on moving to Vista simply because they don't want to plop down that chunk of change, and there is a perceived loss of value in buying the non-ultimate version (even though they'll use almost none of the features of Ultimate over Home Premium.) Too much choice leads to customer confusion and aversion.
Apple definitely got it right on the versioning, but then again, their product is a whole computer, not JUST an operating system. If they sold OS X for generic PCs, they'd probably have to bump the price up considerably in order to stay afloat.
Yes, this is definitely a problem.
Note that Vista Ultimate comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. So really, they're probably trying to push people like you into buying the more expensive version (rather than two versions of Premium or something.)
I like how Apple didn't distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit. They just smoothly moved to 64-bit, and if you buy a new OS, it will determine which version to install and do it all automatically. And by all appearances, application compatibility is extremely high (something you can't say for Windows at all.)
Sounds like a great design! You should code that up and submit it to Gnome/KDE. :)
Do you have a citation that Windows Vista Ultimate is the only thing that runs DX10? I'm pretty sure Vista Home Premium runs it, and that is a much, much cheaper price.
Newegg thinks that you can get Vista Ultimate for as low as $169. And the truth is, you don't even need Ultimate to game. Most people will never need more than Vista Home Premium, which can be had for as low as $105. If you don't want the version that can be transferred to another PC, you'll want to buy one of the non-OEM versions. Ultimate will run you $320, according to that site, and Home Premium (upgrade) will run you $145. Hardly "over $400." As for any other Vista only titles coming out, check how well they are selling. Shadowrun was Vista only and it sold so badly they had to close the game studio! It was also, by most accounts, a terrible game. I'm sure that it would have sold more if it was available for XP natively, but I'm not sure that it would have sold much more. Most of the press it got was because it was Vista-only--without that, it would have been just another game on the shelf.
There was a story not all that long ago about people who just buy a new computer when their old one gets so many viruses that it barely functions anymore. They don't understand that there's an option to fix the old computer, so they buy a new one. Also, laptops are a huge part of the market these days, and they tend to break more frequently than desktops (simply because they are carried around, and desktops typically aren't.)
Like it or not, most users are going to want the individual menu to be updated as well. Otherwise, they're going to be looking around in the start menu for the program that they just installed, and they're not going to find it.
Generally speaking, they believe that God's hand was on every pen and His mind was in every decision made regarding the Bible. It's an argument that's impossible to argue with, but not because it's logically sound.
The US has a little-known comsumer protection law that prohibits voiding warranties based upon modifications to the product unless it can be proven that the mod caused the malfunction.
I don't know much about the Vista memory manager, but my guess is that a huge portion of the memory that is "in use" is caching. More caching often yields a performance improvement. If Vista is using the memory for caching right from the base OS, that's probably a good thing.
Put another way, unused memory is basically wasted. If Vista is programmed to use more memory when that memory is available, that's a good thing.
Honestly, you show all the sighs of feeling entitled. Even in this post, you're suggesting that you're entitled to watch old episodes of The Daily Show, and if they won't put it out on DVD or an online archive, you'll just trade them around your P2P network.
And yeah, I'm slightly threadjacking. I'm pointing out the mentality of today's youth. "I deserve it, and I'm going to take it any way I can." The effects of blocking local filesharing are largely unimportant--in fact, it will probably just lead to an escalation of blocking/circumventing that will ultimately lead to an extremely locked down network.
Back when I was at University, it was the same thing. People were on Napster and KaZaA and whatnot, completely eating up the bandwidth. All traffic (including non-P2P traffic) was extremely slow, despite a fairly beefy connection. Any controls put in place to try to curb P2P were circumvented, over and over, until the residence networks were simply rate-limited. The entire dorm network was limited to 10mbps. If you wanted to do anything that wasn't P2P, you basically just went to the computer lab. It was a compromise--the rest of campus wasn't punished for a few jackasses, but the dorm network was effectively worthless for low-latency Internet usage.
High horse? Yeah. I guess I just feel sorry for the kids who can't use the network for legitimate reasons. Get off your entitlement horse.
You had me up until, ".... were now forced to use torrents ..."
That's when I realized that you were one of those entitlement bitches, and I discounted your post entirely.
They want to monitor future encrypted connections. That was the whole point--they can't break the encryption, so they want to install a trojan to send the plaintext before or after it is encrypted.
Last time I checked, it only comes with a USB 2.0 interface. That means that you've got to have a computer plugged into it in order for it to be much of a NAS. It also means fairly slow read/write speeds.
Oh man.. I really doubt that that old case is going to provide adequate cooling for those 4 drives. I've seen too many drives die from a heat death to trust this solution.
RAID doesn't open you up to data loss from accidental deletion, it just doesn't help prevent it. ZFS, however, does. You can check it out on FreeBSD (which has much better SATA controller support than OpenSolaris).
Although FreeBSD 7.0 (the version with ZFS) is still in Beta, it's been in a feature-freeze for a long time, and it's generally rock-solid. Just read the ZFS guides from OpenSolaris and the tuning guide for FreeBSD:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide
Note that ZFS really wants to be run on a 64-bit OS, and it wants a lot of RAM. If you've got that, though, it's fantastic, and it allows for easy snapshots (which helps protect against accidental deletion.)
I understand. I typically feel the same way when people blame Windows for, say, the Storm Worm outbreak (which is distributed through trojans as well as through exploits in unpatched browsers.) There's still a huge 'trust the computer to protect me' mentality amongst Windows users, so anything they get in e-mail or from the web is likely to be opened (at least, by a lot of them.)
Of course, working in computer support, I tend to see all of the bad users, and so it probably colors my opinion.
I'd like to use S3, but I'd really want rsync and versioning. It's possible to approximate these using metadata (store a checksum for each object, and use multiple buckets for "versions" of files.) So far, though, I don't think anyone's packaged any software up to do something like this.
Even better would be if the files could be encrypted.
At this point, it's probably easier to use a commercial off-site backup solution, or even something like Amazon's S3.