does you linux vendor have to handle a support call when you screw up and install some unsupported device or driver? microsoft does, and they don't want to. that's the driving force behind this. i doubt any of the drivers you currently use will be blacklisted as long as they work okay on XP. i'm running xp rc2 and using a whole bunch of 3rd party drivers and mostly they work fine. one of them didn't and it caused me a whole bunch of trouble when it blue-screened on boot and corrupted by drive (not unrecoverably so, but still...). I eventually got an updated driver, I wish that XP had warned me about it first, but I guess that Microsoft hasn't gotten around to testing it yet.
yeah, the best strategy for this one is not to install 3rd party drivers unless you really have to. sometimes devices like digital cameras will be regognized by windows without the driver as USB mass storage devices that you can use through the generic explorer interface. I don't trust most hardware vendors to code themselves out of a paper bag, especially when it comes to devices like cameras whose primary use isn't connection to a computer.
sure, Micrsoft could put code in windows to automatically transfer funds from your back account to them when you log onto your online banking system. will they do this? i don't think so. are you being paranoid? why, only you can answer that one. careful though...
yeah the problem with this is that when the operating system crashes because of a 3rd party driver Microsoft often has to take the cost of a support call. This cost effecively means they may as well not have sold that copy of windows - it's a huge hit. anything they can do to reduce the number of support calls - especially when it's not their fault - it a big win for them and their stock-holders.
yeah, basically the only way the operating system can crash is if an expcetion raised in a thread running in kernel mode is unhandled. this leads to a BugCheck (aka blue-screen). however, sometimes a kernel thread can cause the OS to hang if it's running at a particular interrupt level and doesn't yield, or otherwise prevents user threads from running (maybe by holding a mutex when it shouldn't). bad driver code is the most common cause of problems on any operating system and I'm sure that this move by Microsoft is just them trying to improve the percieved stability of their OS. The problem with writing drivers is that often the code is specific to one version of the OS. I'm not surprised that vertain driver no longer run correctly on XP. I woudln't want to upgrade to XP and find that I get a blue-screen on boot just because I had some bad driver installed. Maybe the win2k versions of the ZoneAlarm drivers work fine on XP, if so this is a bad move on Microsoft's part, but I wouldn't be surpised of they need updating to a newer version.
Thanks for posting the links. I've read some of the news articles on the bbc web site about the uproar over this and now that I've seen it I have one thing to say:
Anyone who takes this seriously is in desparate need of a humor transplant.
actually you didn't pay for the software, you paid for a license to use that software. The usage of the software that you install is legally bound by that license agreement. the license is mostly designed to prevent crime, such as copyright theft. if you don'y like it, you don't have to buy it. it's quite simple really.
Actually, we saw a drastic improvement in performance moving from the expensive Sun boxes to the cheaper Dell servers. I'm not sure if it's the boxes themselves or the fact that IIS serves static content faster than apache. The CGI part isn't performance critical so I'm not bothered if that's slower, but it seems to be just as fast in my preliminary tests.
FYI: ActiveState has an excellent set of Perl, Python and Tcl Win32/ASP packages available for free from their site.
When we moved from Solaris/Apache to Win2K/IIS, I moved all our old Perl/CGI stuff straight over without a hitch (although I did have to redo the sendmail stuff to use CDO).
Surely they contain a whole bunch of stuff you're just not going to use?
Personally, I just download the Debian boot disks and 'apt-get' just the packages I want. The downloads are much quicker since I don't have to download all that stuff I'm not interested in.
But,.NET is a development platform. This implies that 3rd party developers will be developing and deploying systems based on.NET. If Microsoft changes its underlying protocols then either:
all existing code using those protocols will be broken, thus making open-source solutions more attractive. This is very unlikely, since Microsoft won't want to force all the developers and website manager to download new bits just to support old code. That's one easy way to turn away the faithful.
the updates will be backwardly compatible. this is most likely the case since XML/SOAP makes this easy and it will piss off the developers less. in this case either:
the open-source systems will already have support for backwards compatiblity built in and will handle the protocol changes gracefully. No problem.
the open-source systems do not gracefully handle backwards compatibility. this should not be a hard problem to solve.
the open-source systems must be updated to handle the new protocols. it is unlikely that a v2 system will refuse to talk to a v1-compatible system, but still, this may be where the problem lies...
If they break open-source.NET, they will cause managers to fire their open-source people and wildly embrace Microsoft's compatible-by-default products.
If Microsoft changes the.NET APIs too much then existing code that was written to the 'old' specification will work better on the open-source clones. I doubt that Microsoft will want to do anything that will invite developers to move to a competing system.
there's also the problems that in order to store one bit of information you need a bit to store it in. so in order to store all the information in the universe, your computer has to be the universe. reading the results from this program would not only be impossible (since you'd have to also be part of the computer/universe) but would also not be very useful, since what you were trying to predict would aredy have happened.
these guys are complaining about nothing. Hotmail, MSN messenger, MSN communities (hell, most community/vendor websites, including slashdot) already have password sign-ins.
All XP does is add the facility to save this password in your windows login info (just like most websites (yes, slashdot too) allow you to save that info in your cookies).
You don't need to enter your real name, or your credit card info, just make up an email address and password and you're off. Of course, if you don't want to use these sites then you don't need to provide a username/password, it's competely optional.
this is what this whole thing is about, companies buying off politicians (the ones with the real monopohelies) to get them to sway the balance of the market. they can't play on a level playing field so the have to get the law involved/changed.
Slashdot Mirror
does you linux vendor have to handle a support call when you screw up and install some unsupported device or driver? microsoft does, and they don't want to. that's the driving force behind this. i doubt any of the drivers you currently use will be blacklisted as long as they work okay on XP. i'm running xp rc2 and using a whole bunch of 3rd party drivers and mostly they work fine. one of them didn't and it caused me a whole bunch of trouble when it blue-screened on boot and corrupted by drive (not unrecoverably so, but still...). I eventually got an updated driver, I wish that XP had warned me about it first, but I guess that Microsoft hasn't gotten around to testing it yet.
yeah, the best strategy for this one is not to install 3rd party drivers unless you really have to. sometimes devices like digital cameras will be regognized by windows without the driver as USB mass storage devices that you can use through the generic explorer interface. I don't trust most hardware vendors to code themselves out of a paper bag, especially when it comes to devices like cameras whose primary use isn't connection to a computer.
sure, Micrsoft could put code in windows to automatically transfer funds from your back account to them when you log onto your online banking system. will they do this? i don't think so. are you being paranoid? why, only you can answer that one. careful though...
i installed the divx driver on windows XP RC2 without any warnings. I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure you don't either.
yeah the problem with this is that when the operating system crashes because of a 3rd party driver Microsoft often has to take the cost of a support call. This cost effecively means they may as well not have sold that copy of windows - it's a huge hit. anything they can do to reduce the number of support calls - especially when it's not their fault - it a big win for them and their stock-holders.
yeah, basically the only way the operating system can crash is if an expcetion raised in a thread running in kernel mode is unhandled. this leads to a BugCheck (aka blue-screen). however, sometimes a kernel thread can cause the OS to hang if it's running at a particular interrupt level and doesn't yield, or otherwise prevents user threads from running (maybe by holding a mutex when it shouldn't). bad driver code is the most common cause of problems on any operating system and I'm sure that this move by Microsoft is just them trying to improve the percieved stability of their OS. The problem with writing drivers is that often the code is specific to one version of the OS. I'm not surprised that vertain driver no longer run correctly on XP. I woudln't want to upgrade to XP and find that I get a blue-screen on boot just because I had some bad driver installed. Maybe the win2k versions of the ZoneAlarm drivers work fine on XP, if so this is a bad move on Microsoft's part, but I wouldn't be surpised of they need updating to a newer version.
actually you didn't pay for the software, you paid for a license to use that software. The usage of the software that you install is legally bound by that license agreement. the license is mostly designed to prevent crime, such as copyright theft. if you don'y like it, you don't have to buy it. it's quite simple really.
Actually, we saw a drastic improvement in performance moving from the expensive Sun boxes to the cheaper Dell servers. I'm not sure if it's the boxes themselves or the fact that IIS serves static content faster than apache. The CGI part isn't performance critical so I'm not bothered if that's slower, but it seems to be just as fast in my preliminary tests.
When we moved from Solaris/Apache to Win2K/IIS, I moved all our old Perl/CGI stuff straight over without a hitch (although I did have to redo the sendmail stuff to use CDO).
The BBC is running a story about how the bandwidth loss during the first Code Red attack was actually due to a train crash.
I haven't seen this anywhere else, can anyone corroborate?
Surely they contain a whole bunch of stuff you're just not going to use?
Personally, I just download the Debian boot disks and 'apt-get' just the packages I want. The downloads are much quicker since I don't have to download all that stuff I'm not interested in.
my $0.00
Alternatively, read this.
<a href="friskit.com"> <img border=0 src="http://friskit.com/site/images/logo.gif"> </a> <script> document.body.style.filter= "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Blur (pixelradius=3)"; </script>
Try the Mono FAQ .
Parts of .NET, on the other hand, are draft standards submitted to ECMA.
there's also the problems that in order to store one bit of information you need a bit to store it in. so in order to store all the information in the universe, your computer has to be the universe. reading the results from this program would not only be impossible (since you'd have to also be part of the computer/universe) but would also not be very useful, since what you were trying to predict would aredy have happened.
All XP does is add the facility to save this password in your windows login info (just like most websites (yes, slashdot too) allow you to save that info in your cookies).
You don't need to enter your real name, or your credit card info, just make up an email address and password and you're off. Of course, if you don't want to use these sites then you don't need to provide a username/password, it's competely optional.
I don't understand what the fuss is about.
err... like Mozilla's XPCOM or Gnome's Bonobo (heavily inspired by Microsoft's OLE2)
this is what this whole thing is about, companies buying off politicians (the ones with the real monopohelies) to get them to sway the balance of the market. they can't play on a level playing field so the have to get the law involved/changed.
hang on, if winXP doesn't introduce any useful new features then how can it adversely affect microsoft's competitors?