There are a two workarounds for those kinds of installers which may be more convenient...
If the installer only works with files (ie. copies or created them on the disk) then you can use Disk Management to assign another volume's drive letter to A:. For example, if you have a USB key mapped to E:, you would open disk management (diskmgmt.msc), right click on the USB key's partion, and use "Change drive letters and paths" to remap E: to A:. You can also use the "subst" command to map a folder to A: as well.
If the installer writes raw blocks of disk information then you need to use a virtual floppy disk driver which uses am image file instead of a physical floppy disk.
I know! This is a very frusterating problem if you need something like a SATA driver and the system doesn't have a floppy drive or even a floppy controller. There's no other way to load the driver from any other source. The only solution is to build an entirely new custom installation disk with the driver slipstreamed into it.
It is definitely the quality that has declined. During the era where you had to boot the system from and store everything on floppies, they seemed to last forever. I would boot my Mac SE every day with the same system startup disk and it was years before it actually failed. Same with the various other disks which I stored applications and documents on.
Years later when I was working as a computer tech and needed to use floppies for boot disks, copying drivers, BIOS flashes etc. I noticed that the disks would often start to fail after a few uses. I did notice a pattern between the disk failures that leads me to believe it is caused by the quality of the disk media.
We would often reformat and recycle disks from a large box we had. When I would recycle a Microsoft setup disk (like "Windows 95 Disk 4" for example), I would be able to use it for a very long time. When I would recycle an OEM driver disk (like "Canon BJC-250 Disk 1") they would have much shorter lifetimes. The Oki driver disks especially, would fail in their first or second use.
Even like 15 years ago the Apple would tell you to use the MacOS SDK with either MPW or CodeWarrior. Similarily, the Windows SDK recommends using Visual Studio. That's what they've tested with and the can they confirm that everything will work properly on them. They're just saying, if you want to use other tools your welcome to try, but they won't be able to support you.
Windows Mobile is enough of a headache on mobile devices, I don't even want to think of it running as a server. I think to handle something like Bing, they'll need Windows Server. If they've kept true to NT's platform independant designs they should be able to port it easily enough.
You're right that it's not the firewall's job to do that kind of thing. I think he's saying he would like to see that kind of functionality integrated into the firewall, where it's aware of new hosts which have been added to DHCP, and shows them on the firewall's configuration interface.
It's a criticism of both. GUIs by nature are ad-hoc tools that allow individual tweaking - that's their purpose in life. Granted, you could create a tool that would allow for a creation of settings that could then be applied across multiple systems, but that would be much more than a mere GUI tool.
A GUI is an inteface not a philosophy. There's nothing that says that they're only for individual tweaking, or that making a tool that applies settings across multiple systems would be beyond what a GUI tool can do.
No, it doesn't. While scripts can be run by individuals with no sense or knowledge, at least the initial creation and testing of such scripts were done by someone that knew enough to create them. (Granted, there's an assumption here that the script result is meaningful and that the script itself was written by someone with knowledge)
There's also nothing that says that whoever created the GUI interface won't be knowledgeable or able to encapsulate a scipt's function withing a graphical design.
Really? GUIs are repeatable? Have you ever done web QA? The only time it's repeatable is when the system is completely locked down and nothing changes outside of your control. And even then....
Again you are confusing the fact that a GUI is simply an interface. There's no additional random or uncontrollable things happening on the side. If you have a set of buttons they can only be clicked or left alone, they're not going to suddenly do anything else.
When the system behind a GUI has deep dependencies that the GUI glosses over or "flattens" for "ease of understanding", then there's plenty of openings for new unexpected behavior to crop up.
The GUI just allows you to view a problem in a different way, it doesn't make the problem more or less complex. Once a script or configuration becomes very large and complex it can be just as hard to find out what's going on and just as easy to introduce unexpected problems. You can have the data in a flat file, or you can have it in a tree view, it doesn't change the data, only how it is represented to the user.
That is hell, even without administrator access, since it can still delete your documents or hold them for ransom, or log into the source control system pretending to be you and send whatever it finds there to a remote server.
No, it can't. With UAC Internet Explorer runs at a lower integrity level which doesn't have high enough privileges to access your user files. It can only write to a few locations, and even those are abstracted to "Low" versions. But none of that matters, since the person in question was running IE6.
I don't get it though...why would you want to write a cross platform app between a desktop OS and a smart phone with the same UI? That what made Windows Mobile a disaster, having to navigate apps designed for a desktop UI on a small screen with a stylus.
Sure there will always be pirates and students who won't pay for anything. I think some people would pay if the price was low enought. Sure they have the expertise to download and crack Photoshop. But if it was like $50. it could be worth it to avoid having to crack it, be able to install updates, and just have a legit copy.
Even when I'm buying books. I'd have no problem paying $30-50 to get a useful programming book. When it comes to a $300 copy of something like Windows Internals, you can bet I'm going to seek other means of obtaining it! How could I justify buying a single book for the price of a playstation?
Windows 7 will be no problem. I've got it running on a system with a similar configuration to yours (3GHz chip though) and it's fine. Visual Studio will be another story. With lower amounts of memory I've found that it takes a lot longer to start up and do some things, usually it's usable but not comfortable. You can try a ReadyBoost drive too and see if it helps any.
You should really integrate all of the drivers into your Windows installation. Windows will install the drivers the same as the drivers that come with the OS. It's not too hard and it's probably better than using VM's.
Basically you can create a directory tree in your existing installation and add the path to the "DevicePath" string value under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion". Windows will expand it's search for matching hardware INF files to include the extra directories. There are two good articles on doing it: MSDN Article,MSKB Article.
Another method I have used (if you know how to edit INF files) is to manually edit the INF's to use a specific cab file as the copy source (under the SourceDiskNames section). You can also combine and streamline them also. Then just copy the edited INF files into "%WinDir%\INF", and the driver files into the CAB and Windows will use them.
Once you are done just make sure you have Windows update it's INF indexes, which will speed up the driver installation for your driver packages. Open Add Hardware from the control panel, tell it to install manually from a list, and then select "Show All Devices". It will take a while to build the indexes, and then you can just cancel the wizard.
HDSC Setup and Drive Setup both would also install/update them when you formatted the drive (and had the option to update/install the Apple disk drivers manually). The probem he describes was often caused when people would clone IDE drives to SCSI since the IDE drives didn't have the driver, it wouldn't be copied to the SCSI disk. There were also issues sometimes where the drive had an older Apple driver, or third party driver which was incompatible with the SCSI Manager on the system.
WDM does divide drivers into class drivers that handle the common device functionality. You then can develop minidrivers or filter drivers which provide device specific functionality. This creates a set of generic driver classes and sort of controls the types of drivers you can create, but you aren't restricted from creating monolithic or legacy drivers which don't fall under the that model. I'm sure about WDF, it may be more standardized.
I do agree that WHQL is a good thing and probably catches a large amount of buggy drivers. Microsoft also includes the verifier.exe tool with Windows which you can use to perform the same tests as WHQL.
RealBasic is a decent RAD tool (similar to VB) which can compile across platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS). It's not free but it definitely makes developing apps easier and removes the need to choose.
or too complicated to really go on (remember how easy it was to use CGA or even later mode 10h?)
I think things unfortunately have to become more complex as they grow in capability. Remember how much of a pain it was to poke bits into mode 12h? They wanted a 640x480 display mode but they had to deal with things like segment boundaries and the memory limitation of VGA (256K). I'm sure they would have loved to have it as easy to manipulate as the planar modes, but instead they had to come up with a complex scheme of splitting it across planes.
When you think of it, manipulating a pixed with GDI is probably less complex than working with screen modes and video memory.
I still remember my dad doing his taxes by hand coding programs in BASIC to the all of the calculations. I'm sure he's much happier double clicking TurboTax.
Its just a new engine MS have been clever in that since they have used DirectX which their competitors cant use with out annoying the Linux crowd who also they also support.
Their competitors can use DirectX too, check out this link.
ie's 'protected mode' is an advantage ? what makes you think that firefox cant do that with plugins ?
Because it is not some stupid plugin hack, it leverages features which are implemented at the kernel level. It actually runs the parts of the browser in lower intregrity levels which restrict their access to areas of the system. Everything that requires a higher level of access must be done through a broker. This means that if the browser was exploited they wouldn't even be able to read the items in your documents folder, because it is running with even lower privileges than your user account. It is an advantage and has mitigated almost every IE exploit that has surfaced since it was introduced.
Of course FireFox could also implement this functionality. It just would require some significant changes to the application's code to support the security model.
so 32 bit apps in windows xp work in 64 bit windows 7 ?
Uh yeah, even a 32-bit app from Windows NT 3.1 or Windows 3.1 (Win32s) will run on 64-bit windows 7. It runs the applications under the 32-bit subsystem (WOW64), similar to how Windows XP would run 16-bit apps under the a 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM).
Stop spreading FUD. The whole point of hardware acceleration is to offload the processing from the CPU to the additional hardware. There is no additional CPU load at all, it actually reduces the CPU load. Unless the graphics driver is using interrupts to perform the hardware acceleration I doubt it's using more processing power.
Stupid name. Every time I hear "Bing" I think of Ned Ryserson from the film Groundhog Day.
Around here bing is a commonly used slang for coke. I'm not sure if Microsoft realized that telling people to "bing it" could be interpreted as encouragement to do drugs in some circles...
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There are a two workarounds for those kinds of installers which may be more convenient...
If the installer only works with files (ie. copies or created them on the disk) then you can use Disk Management to assign another volume's drive letter to A:. For example, if you have a USB key mapped to E:, you would open disk management (diskmgmt.msc), right click on the USB key's partion, and use "Change drive letters and paths" to remap E: to A:. You can also use the "subst" command to map a folder to A: as well.
If the installer writes raw blocks of disk information then you need to use a virtual floppy disk driver which uses am image file instead of a physical floppy disk.
I know! This is a very frusterating problem if you need something like a SATA driver and the system doesn't have a floppy drive or even a floppy controller. There's no other way to load the driver from any other source. The only solution is to build an entirely new custom installation disk with the driver slipstreamed into it.
It is definitely the quality that has declined. During the era where you had to boot the system from and store everything on floppies, they seemed to last forever. I would boot my Mac SE every day with the same system startup disk and it was years before it actually failed. Same with the various other disks which I stored applications and documents on.
Years later when I was working as a computer tech and needed to use floppies for boot disks, copying drivers, BIOS flashes etc. I noticed that the disks would often start to fail after a few uses. I did notice a pattern between the disk failures that leads me to believe it is caused by the quality of the disk media.
We would often reformat and recycle disks from a large box we had. When I would recycle a Microsoft setup disk (like "Windows 95 Disk 4" for example), I would be able to use it for a very long time. When I would recycle an OEM driver disk (like "Canon BJC-250 Disk 1") they would have much shorter lifetimes. The Oki driver disks especially, would fail in their first or second use.
Yet Sony released an internet startup disc and a version of Linux for the PS2.
Even like 15 years ago the Apple would tell you to use the MacOS SDK with either MPW or CodeWarrior. Similarily, the Windows SDK recommends using Visual Studio. That's what they've tested with and the can they confirm that everything will work properly on them. They're just saying, if you want to use other tools your welcome to try, but they won't be able to support you.
Windows Mobile is enough of a headache on mobile devices, I don't even want to think of it running as a server. I think to handle something like Bing, they'll need Windows Server. If they've kept true to NT's platform independant designs they should be able to port it easily enough.
You're right that it's not the firewall's job to do that kind of thing. I think he's saying he would like to see that kind of functionality integrated into the firewall, where it's aware of new hosts which have been added to DHCP, and shows them on the firewall's configuration interface.
A GUI is an inteface not a philosophy. There's nothing that says that they're only for individual tweaking, or that making a tool that applies settings across multiple systems would be beyond what a GUI tool can do.
There's also nothing that says that whoever created the GUI interface won't be knowledgeable or able to encapsulate a scipt's function withing a graphical design.
Again you are confusing the fact that a GUI is simply an interface. There's no additional random or uncontrollable things happening on the side. If you have a set of buttons they can only be clicked or left alone, they're not going to suddenly do anything else.
The GUI just allows you to view a problem in a different way, it doesn't make the problem more or less complex. Once a script or configuration becomes very large and complex it can be just as hard to find out what's going on and just as easy to introduce unexpected problems. You can have the data in a flat file, or you can have it in a tree view, it doesn't change the data, only how it is represented to the user.
No, it can't. With UAC Internet Explorer runs at a lower integrity level which doesn't have high enough privileges to access your user files. It can only write to a few locations, and even those are abstracted to "Low" versions. But none of that matters, since the person in question was running IE6.
I don't get it though...why would you want to write a cross platform app between a desktop OS and a smart phone with the same UI? That what made Windows Mobile a disaster, having to navigate apps designed for a desktop UI on a small screen with a stylus.
Sure there will always be pirates and students who won't pay for anything. I think some people would pay if the price was low enought. Sure they have the expertise to download and crack Photoshop. But if it was like $50. it could be worth it to avoid having to crack it, be able to install updates, and just have a legit copy.
Even when I'm buying books. I'd have no problem paying $30-50 to get a useful programming book. When it comes to a $300 copy of something like Windows Internals, you can bet I'm going to seek other means of obtaining it! How could I justify buying a single book for the price of a playstation?
Windows 7 will be no problem. I've got it running on a system with a similar configuration to yours (3GHz chip though) and it's fine. Visual Studio will be another story. With lower amounts of memory I've found that it takes a lot longer to start up and do some things, usually it's usable but not comfortable. You can try a ReadyBoost drive too and see if it helps any.
You should really integrate all of the drivers into your Windows installation. Windows will install the drivers the same as the drivers that come with the OS. It's not too hard and it's probably better than using VM's.
Basically you can create a directory tree in your existing installation and add the path to the "DevicePath" string value under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion". Windows will expand it's search for matching hardware INF files to include the extra directories. There are two good articles on doing it: MSDN Article,MSKB Article.
Another method I have used (if you know how to edit INF files) is to manually edit the INF's to use a specific cab file as the copy source (under the SourceDiskNames section). You can also combine and streamline them also. Then just copy the edited INF files into "%WinDir%\INF", and the driver files into the CAB and Windows will use them.
Once you are done just make sure you have Windows update it's INF indexes, which will speed up the driver installation for your driver packages. Open Add Hardware from the control panel, tell it to install manually from a list, and then select "Show All Devices". It will take a while to build the indexes, and then you can just cancel the wizard.
HDSC Setup and Drive Setup both would also install/update them when you formatted the drive (and had the option to update/install the Apple disk drivers manually). The probem he describes was often caused when people would clone IDE drives to SCSI since the IDE drives didn't have the driver, it wouldn't be copied to the SCSI disk. There were also issues sometimes where the drive had an older Apple driver, or third party driver which was incompatible with the SCSI Manager on the system.
WDM does divide drivers into class drivers that handle the common device functionality. You then can develop minidrivers or filter drivers which provide device specific functionality. This creates a set of generic driver classes and sort of controls the types of drivers you can create, but you aren't restricted from creating monolithic or legacy drivers which don't fall under the that model. I'm sure about WDF, it may be more standardized.
I do agree that WHQL is a good thing and probably catches a large amount of buggy drivers. Microsoft also includes the verifier.exe tool with Windows which you can use to perform the same tests as WHQL.
RealBasic is a decent RAD tool (similar to VB) which can compile across platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS). It's not free but it definitely makes developing apps easier and removes the need to choose.
I think things unfortunately have to become more complex as they grow in capability. Remember how much of a pain it was to poke bits into mode 12h? They wanted a 640x480 display mode but they had to deal with things like segment boundaries and the memory limitation of VGA (256K). I'm sure they would have loved to have it as easy to manipulate as the planar modes, but instead they had to come up with a complex scheme of splitting it across planes.
When you think of it, manipulating a pixed with GDI is probably less complex than working with screen modes and video memory.
Actually I think thats more of a case of the "what if it breaks something, who can we go after?" mentality.
I still remember my dad doing his taxes by hand coding programs in BASIC to the all of the calculations. I'm sure he's much happier double clicking TurboTax.
Their competitors can use DirectX too, check out this link.
Because it is not some stupid plugin hack, it leverages features which are implemented at the kernel level. It actually runs the parts of the browser in lower intregrity levels which restrict their access to areas of the system. Everything that requires a higher level of access must be done through a broker. This means that if the browser was exploited they wouldn't even be able to read the items in your documents folder, because it is running with even lower privileges than your user account. It is an advantage and has mitigated almost every IE exploit that has surfaced since it was introduced.
Of course FireFox could also implement this functionality. It just would require some significant changes to the application's code to support the security model.
Uh yeah, even a 32-bit app from Windows NT 3.1 or Windows 3.1 (Win32s) will run on 64-bit windows 7. It runs the applications under the 32-bit subsystem (WOW64), similar to how Windows XP would run 16-bit apps under the a 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM).
Stop spreading FUD. The whole point of hardware acceleration is to offload the processing from the CPU to the additional hardware. There is no additional CPU load at all, it actually reduces the CPU load. Unless the graphics driver is using interrupts to perform the hardware acceleration I doubt it's using more processing power.
Around here bing is a commonly used slang for coke. I'm not sure if Microsoft realized that telling people to "bing it" could be interpreted as encouragement to do drugs in some circles...
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