> I am currently of the mind that it is buggy bloatware
Why do people keep saying that Windows is bloatware? It still fits on one CD, which is more than can be said for most common linux distributions. What features does it have that you think they should not have put in? Personally the less software I have to pay for, the better. Most of the "bloat" tends to be programs and utilites that you load on demand and do not slow the machine down. I wish it came with free anti-virus and a decent image editing package.
Most common Linux distributions like Slackware come with a whole shit load of stuff that the vast majority of people will never use and a lot of the programs require more work to get them running properly.
At least most the features in XP and Vista will get used. If they didn't, they wouldn't have put them in. I don't think there's a lot in Vista that isn't in MacOS X for example - and people don't keep calling that "bloated".
Yes, but PNG files are only of use for flat color images with a VERY limited range of colors (as with GIF). They are totally useless for pretty much everything else - eg photographs, game screen shots, etc.
You can get PNG-24 which allows 24 bit color, but it's basically an uncompressed bitmap and therefore useless for the web or any large images as the files are all way too big.
> You can compile the linux kernel without the stuff you on't want.
I'm guessing their talking about users. Not software developers.
> You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc. > A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them. > But a Linux user can.
No you can't. You have to recompile the kernel to do that, which 95% of computer users couldn't do and 99.9% wouldn't want to or couldn't be bothered.
Recompiling is NEVER a solution to any USER-level problem. Unforunately too much open source software relies on recompilation and/or patching to get the setup you need, whereas the Windows equivalent software can be reconfigured in 10 seconds using a GUI.
Why? Music is very low data rate. It's also a constant stream meaning access times are totally irrelevant. I can't see why faster read and write times would help at all. High definition video maybe, but certainly not music.
> What they ought to do is give the HDs an airtight seal, so the pressure > around the actual disk stays constant.
Err, no, definitely not a good plan! If you change the temperature by just a couple of degrees, the pressure changes dramatically. The temperature of a hard disk goes up enormously over the first few minutes after you power it up. If you completely sealed it, the pressure in the disk would be very high after a few minutes but would be too low if you cooled it down a bit or turned it on when it was very cold (eg in an aircraft). All hard disks have a small vent hole somewhere that usually says "do not cover". When you've got a spare hard disk, try covering that hole and seeing what happens (hint: data loss will occur, to put it mildly).
> From what i've heard, the actual limit is so high that it might as well be the same as a reg. HD
Not in my experience. I've been using hardware firewalls which are basically a mini PC motherboard but with an SSD device which emulates an IDE hard disk. All three of these devices suffered a failure of the SSD within a year. Since I replaced the SSD with a REAL laptop hard disk, the device has been running fine for nearly 3 years. I've heard that some of the non-persistant devices can take more read/write cycles, but they are non-persistant and therefore require a hard disk to backup to anyway - negating most of the point of them.
Who cares about the stupid ACID 2 test? I'm fed up of hearing about it. In the same way that IQ tests are only a way to measure your IQ - not your intelligence or knowledge, the ACID 2 test is only a measure of the ability of a browser to pass the ACID 2 test. Safari for example passes the ACID 2 test, yet has several rendering bugs which make many websites render incorrectly which are fine in Firefox, Opera AND IE7.
As stated on the ACID 2 test webpage: "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"
What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version, and shows that Microsoft is clearly making a commitment towards standards compliance in their browser. Perhaps IE7 won't be perfect by launch, but no other browsers are yet either (including Safari).
> DVD is a flash in the pan compared to VHS, which is still in wide use today.
Perhaps in your country, but in many western countries it's difficult to even buy a VHS recorder now. In the UK, many high street chains such as Dixons don't even sell VHS equipment anymore - only DVD players and recorders.
Can somebody please confirm the rumour that if you buy a collection of blu-ray discs, and then upgrade or replace your player, that none of your discs will work? This seems madness to me but I've read it in at least three different places now. Does this mean that if I upgrade my player (or if it breaks) I will have the right to get them exchanged at the shop because they no longer work? If this is right, all I can say is, keep your receipts!
> I write a program in.Net that is used by 60 people to do some processing > and that processing takes 10 minutes. The same application in C/Win32 does > the same task in 8 minutes.
GRRRR. Why would it be slower? What rubbish have you read that shows that in real world tests,.NET is slower? Most of the tests I've seen show that.NET is no slower than native code. In fact it's often FASTER. Your entire argument falls flat on it's face unless you can explain why your app would be slower under.NET when many people have proven the opposite.
> Even if it took me an extra 100 hours to write the app in C/Win32
Also, I tend to find that the extra time taken to develop an app in C/Win32 instead of.NET is measured in days weeks or months rather than hours. It's MUCH MUCH faster to write applications in.NET than Win32 (that being almost the entire point of it) and I don't think you'll ever convince anyone otherwise. Combine that with the fact the software will NOT necessarily be any slower as you suggest and your argument fails. If the app did take a few extra days or weeks to write, that would be charged out to the company at hundreds of dollars a day and your savings would be undone unless the app was in use for decades.
> What kind of abuse since both parties need to become > into an agreement to setup the system?
No you don't - you simply need both parties' PHONES. Big difference. Who doesn't have access to their wifes/girlfriends/child's phone for the purposes of sending the "ok to track me" text message?
A decent system should tell the tracked user that they are being tracked (and by whom) each time their position is requested by the tracking party.
"Game" in the UK included it in nearly every bundle from what I could tell. You're maybe forgetting that most of the bundles are put together by stores - not Microsoft. Therefore unless you've been to all the stores in all countries, you can't really assert that the only halo pack was in Japan.
Who wants to bet that the final version will have compulsory adsense or sponsored links down the right hand side?
The HTML/CSS code is appauling. They haven't even bothered to put the CSS in a seperate file, so if you create a multipage site, it's going to keep downloading the came old crap again and again.
> I keep my computers running in the winter. It's free.
Free electricity? I doubt it. Are you on geothermal, solar or hydropower?
> Rather get some use out of that energy other than heating up a hunk of ceramic.
A computer is a very inefficient way to heat a house. The amount of power it uses up will NOT simply come off your heating bill. Certainly not if your heating is anything other than electricity (which is currently about the least inefficient way to produce heat that there is). Heating with natural gas or oil is way cheaper than electricity in most countries (probably apart from those with lots of hydropower available).
> This working out when the computers ought to be on sounds > like a lot of flailing around being overly proactive.
If you're clever enough to switch on a computer, you can probably handle the mental agility of knowing when you need to use it or not. I'm glad everyone doesn't think like you. You must be an American to have that kind of attitude towards power conservation?
> Humidified the place too.
Humidity is bad and causes damp, mould, respiratory and other health problems. Why do you think people spend so much money on dehumidifiers? Only if you live in an extrememly cold or high place (mountains) will you need to humidify. Humidity should be about 40-50%.
> IDE bus being a very slow 66mhz single data rate.
This is still WAY more than any current laptop HDD requires.
> Why we dont have SATA in a laptop with SATA 7200 or 10,000 rpm drives
You don't need SATA in a laptop disk yet. They're far slower (due to the reduced size and thus slower platter edge speed) than a 3.5" drive so why bother upgrading the interfaces to SATA when normal ATA is easily fast enough? It wouldn't make any difference.
> I would rather have a 20 gig high speed drive over a 100 gig slow as hell current drive any day.
Um, a 100G drive will be FASTER than the 20gb equivalent in the same range due to higher data density. A bigger drive (bytes wise) is almost always faster than a smaller one, yet you're implying you expect them to be able to make the disk faster by giving you less space? How/why would that work exactly?
Feedback, for the purposes of spotting fraud, is, believe it or not irrelevant. On MOST of the transactions that I've seen that are fraudulent, the seller is using a hijacked account. This means, you could have a seller who is +10000 with 99% positive feedback, but find that it's just a hijacked account and the next 10-20 feedbacks are all negative because none of the users ever got their items. Between hijacking an account and receiving enough negatives to have his account shut down, a seller could have easily duped dozens of people who thought that the +10000 actually meant something. It doesn't. Once you get above about +10 with no negs, the feedback really doesn't make ANY difference to how likely you are to not get ripped off when you buy.
Feedback can also be totally faked - by creating lots of accounts and then automating circular feedback between all the accounts. I've seen this twice on ebay and both times I managed to get eBay to remove ALL the accounts used in the process, but it took WEEKS and dozens of e-mails.
There is pretty much no security at all on eBay. You can easily hijack an account just by guessing the password or performing a dictionary attack. Tools are out on the internet to automate this process so any old clueless script kiddie can do this in one evening. In fact we were even shown in a security lecture at university how easy it is compromise simple user/password login systems and they used eBay as an example.
The problem with hijacked accounts is rife. Often when I'm checking out feedback, I notice several lines of feedback like this:
greatsoundingseller(14682) (no longer a registered user)..and I think, why the hell has a user with +14000 feedback been chucked off ebay. Answer: account hijacking. It can take weeks or months to pursuade e-bay that your account was hijacked that they should reinstate it.
My advice if you use eBay is to use a very strong password. Do NOT under any circumstances use a known word (that includes names, places and non-dictionary words). Pick a completely random set of letters and numbers. Write it down if you have to! It's not like they're going to break into your house to try and find it. After a few logins you'll have remembered it anyway - no matter how weird it is. If your password resembles a word: eg "h4x0r", "spyder" or "a1rplane" - chances are it's no more secure than a dictionary word.
> the buyer instructed his credit card agency to cancel the transaction, > leaving PayPal 250 pounds out of pocket,
This should have never happened. The problem is not with PayPal but the final seller. A credit card company should never do a chargeback on Paypal unless paypal are the ones at fault.
Most credit card companies (mine included) would NOT allow you to do a chargeback against paypal.
> There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques. > Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item.
Money orders OK. Cheques - hell no!
The fact that spelt it cheque probably means you're UK. In the UK, a cheque can cause a charge-back weeks after it's successfully clears (for example, I read my statement, I see a dodgy cheque on there from a chequebook I never received, I report it to the bank and a few weeks later I get my money back, and the individual that was paid, finds their account has been debited). Fundamentally even a STOPPED cheque can clear into your account (according to your online-banking) and then subsequently be revoked from your account! I didn't believe this until I saw it myself on my NatWest account.
Never use cheques. For small amounts, ask for cash sent recorded or postal orders. I know paypal are evil and charge far too much, but they're still better than a cheque.
A lot of my friends and colleagues who know I've used ebay a lot have asked me if eBay is safe. I've had to be honest and say "no not really". You've got to be an expert user to spot some types of fraud and even after having done over 100 transactions, I still nearly fell for a scam quite recently after the seller had quite obviously gone to some lengths to fabricate a lot of feedback using many hijacked accounts.
On another day, my friend sent me the link of an auction and asked me to check it out for them. The seller had only ever been a buyer for several transactions, and then all of a sudden, the next 10 feedbacks were from sales to people with usernames ALL starting with "an". I'm not quite sure what was going on there, but I'm pretty sure the chances of that happening naturally are billions to one.
If you report these people to eBay they do NOTHING. They take days or weeks to respond, and in the meantime, you see that the auction ended in a sale to someone who obviously hasn't used eBay very much. They probably sent the money and got nothing back.
eBay is a FINANTIAL website. It should have an online-banking level of security. It should not be possible for any old script kiddie to hijack several accounts with weak passwords in one evening. It should be an SSL sign-in only site which never asks for your full password and forces you to use your mouse for part of the login process (to defy keyboard recorders and trojans). After all, a hijacked eBay account is just as good to a criminal as a hijacked bank account. The user/pass system just doesn't cut it.
eBay does not seem to CARE one bit about the level of security or fraud on their site.
Slashdot Mirror
> I am currently of the mind that it is buggy bloatware
Why do people keep saying that Windows is bloatware? It still fits on one CD, which is more than can be said for most common linux distributions. What features does it have that you think they should not have put in? Personally the less software I have to pay for, the better. Most of the "bloat" tends to be programs and utilites that you load on demand and do not slow the machine down. I wish it came with free anti-virus and a decent image editing package.
Most common Linux distributions like Slackware come with a whole shit load of stuff that the vast majority of people will never use and a lot of the programs require more work to get them running properly.
At least most the features in XP and Vista will get used. If they didn't, they wouldn't have put them in. I don't think there's a lot in Vista that isn't in MacOS X for example - and people don't keep calling that "bloated".
> So basically, it's free for the moment
No it's not free at all. It's only free to contributors - as you said yourself:
> licenses for its first part - the core coding system - can be obtained
> free of charge from all contributors.
It's only free in the same way that Windows is free to Microsoft.
Yes, but PNG files are only of use for flat color images with a VERY limited range of colors (as with GIF). They are totally useless for pretty much everything else - eg photographs, game screen shots, etc.
You can get PNG-24 which allows 24 bit color, but it's basically an uncompressed bitmap and therefore useless for the web or any large images as the files are all way too big.
> You can compile the linux kernel without the stuff you on't want.
I'm guessing their talking about users. Not software developers.
> You can easily adjust things like file system buffers, memory management, tcp buffers, etc, etc.
> A 300lb person can't decide each morning how much fat they want to take with them.
> But a Linux user can.
No you can't. You have to recompile the kernel to do that, which 95% of computer users couldn't do and 99.9% wouldn't want to or couldn't be bothered.
Recompiling is NEVER a solution to any USER-level problem. Unforunately too much open source software relies on recompilation and/or patching to get the setup you need, whereas the Windows equivalent software can be reconfigured in 10 seconds using a GUI.
> But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done,
> and nobody wants to launch that many sats again.
Um, what about the Gallileo GPS system?.
30 satellites to launch in the next few years.
Sorry - my mistake.
> Those are real hard drives, with flash memory interfaces
Er no. They're clearly stated as SSD devices. ie solid state. RTFA.
What your describing is IBM MicroDrives, which obviously don't cost $6400 or nobody would buy them.
Why? Music is very low data rate. It's also a constant stream meaning access times are totally irrelevant. I can't see why faster read and write times would help at all. High definition video maybe, but certainly not music.
> What they ought to do is give the HDs an airtight seal, so the pressure
> around the actual disk stays constant.
Err, no, definitely not a good plan! If you change the temperature by just a couple of degrees, the pressure changes dramatically. The temperature of a hard disk goes up enormously over the first few minutes after you power it up. If you completely sealed it, the pressure in the disk would be very high after a few minutes but would be too low if you cooled it down a bit or turned it on when it was very cold (eg in an aircraft). All hard disks have a small vent hole somewhere that usually says "do not cover". When you've got a spare hard disk, try covering that hole and seeing what happens (hint: data loss will occur, to put it mildly).
> From what i've heard, the actual limit is so high that it might as well be the same as a reg. HD
Not in my experience. I've been using hardware firewalls which are basically a mini PC motherboard but with an SSD device which emulates an IDE hard disk. All three of these devices suffered a failure of the SSD within a year. Since I replaced the SSD with a REAL laptop hard disk, the device has been running fine for nearly 3 years. I've heard that some of the non-persistant devices can take more read/write cycles, but they are non-persistant and therefore require a hard disk to backup to anyway - negating most of the point of them.
Who cares about the stupid ACID 2 test? I'm fed up of hearing about it. In the same way that IQ tests are only a way to measure your IQ - not your intelligence or knowledge, the ACID 2 test is only a measure of the ability of a browser to pass the ACID 2 test. Safari for example passes the ACID 2 test, yet has several rendering bugs which make many websites render incorrectly which are fine in Firefox, Opera AND IE7.
As stated on the ACID 2 test webpage:
"Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"
What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version, and shows that Microsoft is clearly making a commitment towards standards compliance in their browser. Perhaps IE7 won't be perfect by launch, but no other browsers are yet either (including Safari).
> DVD is a flash in the pan compared to VHS, which is still in wide use today.
Perhaps in your country, but in many western countries it's difficult to even buy a VHS recorder now. In the UK, many high street chains such as Dixons don't even sell VHS equipment anymore - only DVD players and recorders.
Can somebody please confirm the rumour that if you buy a collection of blu-ray discs, and then upgrade or replace your player, that none of your discs will work? This seems madness to me but I've read it in at least three different places now. Does this mean that if I upgrade my player (or if it breaks) I will have the right to get them exchanged at the shop because they no longer work? If this is right, all I can say is, keep your receipts!
> I write a program in .Net that is used by 60 people to do some processing
.NET is slower? Most of the tests I've seen show that .NET is no slower than native code. In fact it's often FASTER. Your entire argument falls flat on it's face unless you can explain why your app would be slower under .NET when many people have proven the opposite.
.NET is measured in days weeks or months rather than hours. It's MUCH MUCH faster to write applications in .NET than Win32 (that being almost the entire point of it) and I don't think you'll ever convince anyone otherwise. Combine that with the fact the software will NOT necessarily be any slower as you suggest and your argument fails. If the app did take a few extra days or weeks to write, that would be charged out to the company at hundreds of dollars a day and your savings would be undone unless the app was in use for decades.
> and that processing takes 10 minutes. The same application in C/Win32 does
> the same task in 8 minutes.
GRRRR. Why would it be slower? What rubbish have you read that shows that in real world tests,
> Even if it took me an extra 100 hours to write the app in C/Win32
Also, I tend to find that the extra time taken to develop an app in C/Win32 instead of
> Email is designed for small file transfer.
Um, nope! -1, Wrong
I think you'll find that attachments were bolted on WAY after the e-mail system had got up and running.
> What kind of abuse since both parties need to become
> into an agreement to setup the system?
No you don't - you simply need both parties' PHONES. Big difference. Who doesn't have access to their wifes/girlfriends/child's phone for the purposes of sending the "ok to track me" text message?
A decent system should tell the tracked user that they are being tracked (and by whom) each time their position is requested by the tracking party.
I wasn't complaining.. just expecting. I'm perfectly happy to see the ads - I click through them quite a lot.
-1, Wrong
"Game" in the UK included it in nearly every bundle from what I could tell. You're maybe forgetting that most of the bundles are put together by stores - not Microsoft. Therefore unless you've been to all the stores in all countries, you can't really assert that the only halo pack was in Japan.
Who wants to bet that the final version will have compulsory adsense or sponsored links down the right hand side?
The HTML/CSS code is appauling. They haven't even bothered to put the CSS in a seperate file, so if you create a multipage site, it's going to keep downloading the came old crap again and again.
> I keep my computers running in the winter. It's free.
Free electricity? I doubt it. Are you on geothermal, solar or hydropower?
> Rather get some use out of that energy other than heating up a hunk of ceramic.
A computer is a very inefficient way to heat a house. The amount of power it uses up will NOT simply come off your heating bill. Certainly not if your heating is anything other than electricity (which is currently about the least inefficient way to produce heat that there is). Heating with natural gas or oil is way cheaper than electricity in most countries (probably apart from those with lots of hydropower available).
> This working out when the computers ought to be on sounds
> like a lot of flailing around being overly proactive.
If you're clever enough to switch on a computer, you can probably handle the mental agility of knowing when you need to use it or not. I'm glad everyone doesn't think like you. You must be an American to have that kind of attitude towards power conservation?
> Humidified the place too.
Humidity is bad and causes damp, mould, respiratory and other health problems. Why do you think people spend so much money on dehumidifiers? Only if you live in an extrememly cold or high place (mountains) will you need to humidify. Humidity should be about 40-50%.
> IDE bus being a very slow 66mhz single data rate.
This is still WAY more than any current laptop HDD requires.
> Why we dont have SATA in a laptop with SATA 7200 or 10,000 rpm drives
You don't need SATA in a laptop disk yet. They're far slower (due to the reduced size and thus slower platter edge speed) than a 3.5" drive so why bother upgrading the interfaces to SATA when normal ATA is easily fast enough? It wouldn't make any difference.
> I would rather have a 20 gig high speed drive over a 100 gig slow as hell current drive any day.
Um, a 100G drive will be FASTER than the 20gb equivalent in the same range due to higher data density. A bigger drive (bytes wise) is almost always faster than a smaller one, yet you're implying you expect them to be able to make the disk faster by giving you less space? How/why would that work exactly?
Feedback, for the purposes of spotting fraud, is, believe it or not irrelevant. On MOST of the transactions that I've seen that are fraudulent, the seller is using a hijacked account. This means, you could have a seller who is +10000 with 99% positive feedback, but find that it's just a hijacked account and the next 10-20 feedbacks are all negative because none of the users ever got their items. Between hijacking an account and receiving enough negatives to have his account shut down, a seller could have easily duped dozens of people who thought that the +10000 actually meant something. It doesn't. Once you get above about +10 with no negs, the feedback really doesn't make ANY difference to how likely you are to not get ripped off when you buy.
..and I think, why the hell has a user with +14000 feedback been chucked off ebay. Answer: account hijacking. It can take weeks or months to pursuade e-bay that your account was hijacked that they should reinstate it.
Feedback can also be totally faked - by creating lots of accounts and then automating circular feedback between all the accounts. I've seen this twice on ebay and both times I managed to get eBay to remove ALL the accounts used in the process, but it took WEEKS and dozens of e-mails.
There is pretty much no security at all on eBay. You can easily hijack an account just by guessing the password or performing a dictionary attack. Tools are out on the internet to automate this process so any old clueless script kiddie can do this in one evening. In fact we were even shown in a security lecture at university how easy it is compromise simple user/password login systems and they used eBay as an example.
The problem with hijacked accounts is rife. Often when I'm checking out feedback, I notice several lines of feedback like this:
greatsoundingseller(14682) (no longer a registered user)
My advice if you use eBay is to use a very strong password. Do NOT under any circumstances use a known word (that includes names, places and non-dictionary words). Pick a completely random set of letters and numbers. Write it down if you have to! It's not like they're going to break into your house to try and find it. After a few logins you'll have remembered it anyway - no matter how weird it is. If your password resembles a word: eg "h4x0r", "spyder" or "a1rplane" - chances are it's no more secure than a dictionary word.
> the buyer instructed his credit card agency to cancel the transaction,
> leaving PayPal 250 pounds out of pocket,
This should have never happened. The problem is not with PayPal but the final seller. A credit card company should never do a chargeback on Paypal unless paypal are the ones at fault.
Most credit card companies (mine included) would NOT allow you to do a chargeback against paypal.
> There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques.
> Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item.
Money orders OK.
Cheques - hell no!
The fact that spelt it cheque probably means you're UK. In the UK, a cheque can cause a charge-back weeks after it's successfully clears (for example, I read my statement, I see a dodgy cheque on there from a chequebook I never received, I report it to the bank and a few weeks later I get my money back, and the individual that was paid, finds their account has been debited). Fundamentally even a STOPPED cheque can clear into your account (according to your online-banking) and then subsequently be revoked from your account! I didn't believe this until I saw it myself on my NatWest account.
Never use cheques. For small amounts, ask for cash sent recorded or postal orders. I know paypal are evil and charge far too much, but they're still better than a cheque.
A lot of my friends and colleagues who know I've used ebay a lot have asked me if eBay is safe. I've had to be honest and say "no not really". You've got to be an expert user to spot some types of fraud and even after having done over 100 transactions, I still nearly fell for a scam quite recently after the seller had quite obviously gone to some lengths to fabricate a lot of feedback using many hijacked accounts.
On another day, my friend sent me the link of an auction and asked me to check it out for them. The seller had only ever been a buyer for several transactions, and then all of a sudden, the next 10 feedbacks were from sales to people with usernames ALL starting with "an". I'm not quite sure what was going on there, but I'm pretty sure the chances of that happening naturally are billions to one.
If you report these people to eBay they do NOTHING. They take days or weeks to respond, and in the meantime, you see that the auction ended in a sale to someone who obviously hasn't used eBay very much. They probably sent the money and got nothing back.
eBay is a FINANTIAL website. It should have an online-banking level of security. It should not be possible for any old script kiddie to hijack several accounts with weak passwords in one evening. It should be an SSL sign-in only site which never asks for your full password and forces you to use your mouse for part of the login process (to defy keyboard recorders and trojans). After all, a hijacked eBay account is just as good to a criminal as a hijacked bank account. The user/pass system just doesn't cut it.
eBay does not seem to CARE one bit about the level of security or fraud on their site.