Really, really uninstall it? As in "uninstall" will delete all the IE files off of your storage device? Or just make the links disappear and keep most, if not all, of the files around so that Windows 7 can keep functioning?
Removing IE removes the application, local libraries and wizards. It does not remove the rendering libraries since they are considered a component of the operating system. They are not used exclusively by Internet Explorer so they should be kept around for the many other applications which use them.
FireFox links to the USER32.DLL but I don't consider it part of FireFox and hope that won't be removed if I uninstall FF. That doesn't mean most of FireFox is still there, it just means that the parts of Windows are still there.
On the other hand, the vast majority of clueless ones, that had FF installed by someone else for example, will get back to IE8 without even realizing what happened, never able to go back to FF or anything else... This is just usual Microsoft monopoly abuse.
Of course the majority of those clueless people were only using FF because it was forced on them by the guy who installed it. If they don't notice the change it's because they just want to browse the web and don't care what they use. They probably did not choose to run Firefox in the first place.
Gah! The entire point of this is that if you've installed an alternative browser, and set it as your default, it might be precisely because you *don't* trust everything coming out of Microsoft.
If I click Next through the Firefox setup it pisses me off because it added an icon to the desktop that I didn't want. Most users who click through the install probably find it makes FireFox more accessible. I've setup the shortcuts on my desktop myself and since I don't trust Mozilla to manage my destop, they should remove that option for everyone.
He also made the universe appear 13.5 billion years old when upon creation 6000 years ago
It's pretty easy to have such a large gap in dates when ancient peoples had no clue what the heck numbers in the billions range were or how to express them. I don't even think Roman Numerals have a symbol for billions, how the heck could ancient peoples possibly know what number to write?
No, it shows that US society is screwed, not just suburbia, since nobody can trust anyone to not get shot in the face, in any kind of situation.
The reason above is also why people are less likely to pull out a gun, because they have to be damn sure that no one else around them is going to do the same.
Approaching people with caution is a smart and common practice used all over the world. Just because there's less risk of getting shot somewhere else, doesn't mean you can automatically trust everyone. People can still pull out a knife, pipe etc. and kill you in any kind of situatuion.
I think part of the problem is that when the JRE starts from browser (on my Windows box) it seems to allocate a lot of memory all at once. I think this is so it's internal memory management system will have contiguous pages to work with and not have to suddenly request more (from Windows) when working. There's a performance hit while Windows allocates that memory especially in the page file.
call the bluff. To run moonlight you need mono. Microsoft holds ALL the pattens on the dotNET programming environment. When you can show me an app that runs on Mono that Microsoft gives one of those royalty free licenses to, then come talk to me.
Actually if you look here you'll see that Microsoft (and sponsors Intel/HP) agreed to make most of the.NET patents royalty free. The only component which contains royaly patents is Windows.Forms, which is why it's not inclued as part of Mono.
That said, I'd love to figure out how to slipstream IE8 and WGA and so on, as the process I mentioned above *does* leave a few things out.
You could include the updates manually in the $OEM$ distribution folder. Of course this isn't true slipstreaming as the updates will be installed afterwards.
Tools such as RyanVM's Integrator and nLite also can provide an easier, automated way to slipstream updates and customize Windows installs. nLite also supports addons that people can create for things like WGA and IE8.
If I remember correctly, this is because the 32-bit Windows builds have a 2GB virtual memory size (per process?), whereas 64-bit increases it to 8GB (again, per process I think).
Windows uses PAE address memory over 4GB on 32-bit system. Under 32-bit Windows a process has a 4GB virtual address space which is divided into 2GB application and 2GB kernel address spaces. The problem was that a lot of drivers and software expect that configuration and end up doing things like truncating pointers which they expect to be a certain size. In order to avoid a lot of problems they left the limitaion in place for 32-bit Windows.
Next issue: the 3GB limit. If Windows uses 1 now, that only leaves 2 for the applications. If you were using 2 GB before, you would install 4 GB, and lose another GB because of the limit.
There is no set 1GB amount used by Vista. The 1GB is the reccommendation for running Vista comfortably (including applications). Vista can run decently under as low as 512MB and you can even boot it under 256MB (painfully). It's hard to gauge the memory usage and requirements for Windows because it's memory management is very complex.
Under 32-bit Windows each process is assigned 4GB of virtual address space which is split into 2GB for the application and 2GB for the kernel (unless you use the/3G switch which gives 3GB application/1GB kernel). The virtual address space is made up of physical and paged memory and there is no distinction between them for the process. Pages are constantly moved between physical memory and the pagefile. The technical memory limitation is pretty much the amount of physical memory and the swap file size combined. Windows also does a lot of caching.
The 3GB is a limitation of the 32-bit x86 architecture and the actual size can vary depending on how much of the 4GB address space is consumed by your chipset and hardware (which map into the 4GB address space). IIRC it is accounted for as part of the kernel address space...but cannot be used for anything else (and on XP it is not added to the available memory total in System Properties).
I have a server which has had minimal patching since 2002 and still runs fine with no rootkits. I have had no unavoidable downtime since 2002. Yes, I run Redhat Enterprise.
I have an old Debian server that never needs patching or reboots either. It exposes few services and unless there's a major security flaw in one of them nothing is ever upgraded or changed. The thing with servers is that you always automate and fine tune them so they can run without interaction and as securely as possible.
This is what disturbs me about the push for linux on the desktop. Most people can't be bothered to research and implement simple monitoring measures, then complain that everything's gone tits up.
Desktop Linux has the hype of being solid, fast and secure which comes from these finely tuned Linux servers. These rumours cause people to believe Linux will never have problems.
Actually, I remember reading a year or so ago about a program that would allow you to run a specified command via ssh on a list of machines. You could do this with a shell-script (pass arguments), but I think the program also did it all in parallel and showed some output as well.
I think many rootkits do the same thing. You can run a command (via irc) on a list of machines and return output to the channel (in parallel). The best update and control solution is to rootkit your own boxes and maintain them via IRC. Problem solved.
Having worked in the bar scene here in Canada for many years I have to comment...
Seriously, beer taps are COMPLETELY different to any other type of tap. They are designed for beer, and beer only. They are designed to keep beer (not juice, soft-drink (or as you Americans would call it pop or soda), or even water cold), reduce froth in beer, etc
It really depends on their setup...most of the bars I worked at all used a CO2 system for delivering pop, juice and highball liquor to a set of guns. Many restaurants use the same kind of system. If they keep their kegs centralized they may use CO2 to deliver draft as well.
Such a statement is so stupid it's not funny. The guy has obviously spent thousands of dollars fitting out the place to be a bar (fridges, taps, bar, furniture) that to refit to anything else would put him so far out of pocket he'd bankrupt himself.
It's not that stupid of an idea. When you get a liquor license here you are often technically classified as a restaurant and must comply to the same heath and fire regulations. Things like fridges, bar sinks, coolers and tables are used in bars and restaurants alike. He shouldn't be that far off and can sell off any equipent like beer fridges if he can't use them. The only difficulty may be the renovations involded in putting in a kitchen.
Not only that, but bar staff are different to wait staff. They are trained to do a different job, at least here in Australia they are. They require an RSA (Responsible Service of Alcohol) certification and need to know what drinks to mix, etc. Meanwhile, wait staff need to know the difference between various dishes, how long they can be left, how to make a decent coffee, etc.
That's pretty crazy because here bar staff don't require any sort of training at all. We used to literally hire people out of the crowd sometimes. Instead of certifications the liquor control board simply fines the business when they catch the staff doing something wrong (like serving liquor after close). Wait staff don't need any more trained than a server at a bar, if you can read a screen or paper slip you can determine the difference between items.
It seems the owner's best avenue would be to sue, but unfortunately MS will fight that until he's broke. So either way, he's fucked 6 ways from Sunday.
If he tries to sue he won't have much of a case, if Microsoft owns the property they can do what they want with it. Even if there's a lease it probably contains a clause which they can use to kick businesses off their campus if they decide to. And yea even then Microsoft's lawyers would erode his money away to nothing.
Instead you must INSTALL the application, or try to figure out all the places in the registry used by the application, and copy those as well
The program should install it's settings to it's own key under HKLM or HKCU. Simply export the key to a reg file and the settings are saved. Programs shouldn't be storing settings in many places...
There are also applications like RegFromApp that you can use to obtain all the registry changes made by an application or installer and packages them into a reg file.
Of course you'll have to copy over the shared components as well and re-register them. I think is the cause of most people's problems when they copy over apps.
At least in the Unix world, system-wide configuration is stored in/etc (or/Library/Preferences) and has protection via the Unix permission set.
In Windows the registry uses ACL's which can be applied to keys and values just like you can do to any file on the filesystem. Standard users are obviously restricted from writing hives that they shouldn't, like HKLM\SYSTEM. The problem is that most people run as part of Administrators, which of course can write to anywhere.
The real issue is how powerful the registry is. Viruses have spread and manipulated entire systems with use of the registry alone.
The registry simply contains configuration data and state information. True the configuration can be leveraged to run harmful code, the same thing can happen if they edit init scripts or configs in/etc. If someone can manipulate the configuration there are always ways to make it do things that are harmful.
Safe mode is a good idea until you screw up the registry value that lets you boot into it
I think a key idea of the Windows recovery options is that people typically won't screw with those values. Windows does copy your CurrentControlSet every successful boot just in case, so you should be able to use Last Known Good in that situation.
...But I understand what you mean...there are times when the SYSTEM hive is damaged or the SafeBoot settings are broken. The only way to fix it is with Recovery Console.
You can install Recovery Console to your hard disk by running winnt32.exe/cmdcons from the source folder of the Windows disk and it keeps a separate set of files/settings so you can almost always boot it when you break your Windows install.
The registry is a good system but when Windows fails it becomes a big pain to work with...
You mean similar to how Chrome can run native x86 code in the browser, cross-platform, which would dilute Microsoft's monopoly on the DeskTop..
Correct me if I'm wrong...but don't we want to avoid having native code execute in the browser? True it might speed up rendering if pages could leverage the processor and access the API directly but isn't that what caused the whole mess with ActiveX?
If the base install is minimal and leaves the user to install "options" like X and a window manager, then, yeah, you need to use a CLI for apt before you can even get to a position where you can use Synaptic.
From a minimal install people could also always manage apt through dselect...it's more "user friendly" than plain CLI...sorta
In fact, there are environmentalists who do claim they think the world would be better off without people. There is a point where environmentalism changes from prudent concern to misanthropy.
Life is very resilient. Even if we change things, destroy the current ecosystem and end all humanity...life on Earth would continue. A new ecosystem would develop and thrive, and eventually things may change again and end that one too.
The Earth has gone through many phases. From an atmosphere with little oxygen and mostly sea life, to plants changing the atmosphere to Oxygen, then the age of the dinosaurs, the ice age and eventually to the age of humans and our modern ecosystem.
The world hasn't had humans for a long time, and it didn't make the planet any better. The dinosaurs and ice age species still became extinct. The atmosphere and weather still changed. In fact humans have reversed an ice age which would probably have killed most of our current species anyway.
In a billion years the sun will heat up and vaporize all water on earth. Eventually the sun will expand and destroy the inner planets. By then humans may be able to move to other planets, and they'll be the only chance that Earth based life has to continue existing.
The bigger problem with that idea is that there are plenty of users on the internet who are happily using old un-patched systems running windows 9x, or even win2k or XP logged in as admin (also unpatched).
Luckily many bots need newer libraries that the ones installed in the older versions of Windows. I've seen a few 98, NT4 and 2K boxes where the bot exploited and installed itself but couldn't run.
Many of these people don't care how great your latest OS is. They are fine with what they have and they don't want anything else. You can propose all the OS-level security changes you want and you'll never get those changes out to those legions of users.
My grandfather is a good example of that. He started out using Windows 2.0 and worked his way through each release finally arriving at NT Workstation 4.0. At that point he told me that was the last system he was going to learn, and that was the end of it. He would have been content to run NT workstation till the end of time. Luckily, his ISP gave him a new Vista system last year which he decided he would learn.
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Really, really uninstall it? As in "uninstall" will delete all the IE files off of your storage device? Or just make the links disappear and keep most, if not all, of the files around so that Windows 7 can keep functioning?
Removing IE removes the application, local libraries and wizards. It does not remove the rendering libraries since they are considered a component of the operating system. They are not used exclusively by Internet Explorer so they should be kept around for the many other applications which use them.
FireFox links to the USER32.DLL but I don't consider it part of FireFox and hope that won't be removed if I uninstall FF. That doesn't mean most of FireFox is still there, it just means that the parts of Windows are still there.
On the other hand, the vast majority of clueless ones, that had FF installed by someone else for example, will get back to IE8 without even realizing what happened, never able to go back to FF or anything else ... This is just usual Microsoft monopoly abuse.
Of course the majority of those clueless people were only using FF because it was forced on them by the guy who installed it. If they don't notice the change it's because they just want to browse the web and don't care what they use. They probably did not choose to run Firefox in the first place.
Gah! The entire point of this is that if you've installed an alternative browser, and set it as your default, it might be precisely because you *don't* trust everything coming out of Microsoft.
If I click Next through the Firefox setup it pisses me off because it added an icon to the desktop that I didn't want. Most users who click through the install probably find it makes FireFox more accessible. I've setup the shortcuts on my desktop myself and since I don't trust Mozilla to manage my destop, they should remove that option for everyone.
He also made the universe appear 13.5 billion years old when upon creation 6000 years ago
It's pretty easy to have such a large gap in dates when ancient peoples had no clue what the heck numbers in the billions range were or how to express them. I don't even think Roman Numerals have a symbol for billions, how the heck could ancient peoples possibly know what number to write?
No, it shows that US society is screwed, not just suburbia, since nobody can trust anyone to not get shot in the face, in any kind of situation.
The reason above is also why people are less likely to pull out a gun, because they have to be damn sure that no one else around them is going to do the same.
Approaching people with caution is a smart and common practice used all over the world. Just because there's less risk of getting shot somewhere else, doesn't mean you can automatically trust everyone. People can still pull out a knife, pipe etc. and kill you in any kind of situatuion.
Aren't there planets that do have magnetic fields, but don't have oceans?
IIRC Venus has a weak magnetic field and does not have an ocean.
I think part of the problem is that when the JRE starts from browser (on my Windows box) it seems to allocate a lot of memory all at once. I think this is so it's internal memory management system will have contiguous pages to work with and not have to suddenly request more (from Windows) when working. There's a performance hit while Windows allocates that memory especially in the page file.
Correction to your latest statement, not even Silverlight 2 is multi-O/S.
Silverlight 2 seems to have a Windows and OS X version.
call the bluff. To run moonlight you need mono. Microsoft holds ALL the pattens on the dotNET programming environment. When you can show me an app that runs on Mono that Microsoft gives one of those royalty free licenses to, then come talk to me.
Actually if you look here you'll see that Microsoft (and sponsors Intel/HP) agreed to make most of the .NET patents royalty free. The only component which contains royaly patents is Windows.Forms, which is why it's not inclued as part of Mono.
FWIW I actually spent a LOT of time getting Windows XP to the state I like
You might be interested in building a custom XP install disk with your registry changes integrated into the install.
That said, I'd love to figure out how to slipstream IE8 and WGA and so on, as the process I mentioned above *does* leave a few things out.
You could include the updates manually in the $OEM$ distribution folder. Of course this isn't true slipstreaming as the updates will be installed afterwards.
Tools such as RyanVM's Integrator and nLite also can provide an easier, automated way to slipstream updates and customize Windows installs. nLite also supports addons that people can create for things like WGA and IE8.
A good source of information and downloads for custom Windows installs is the MSFN forums,Unattended Windows install guide, and WinCert.net forums.
Such as?
Such as not using the antiquated NT4 domain model.
If I remember correctly, this is because the 32-bit Windows builds have a 2GB virtual memory size (per process?), whereas 64-bit increases it to 8GB (again, per process I think).
Windows uses PAE address memory over 4GB on 32-bit system. Under 32-bit Windows a process has a 4GB virtual address space which is divided into 2GB application and 2GB kernel address spaces. The problem was that a lot of drivers and software expect that configuration and end up doing things like truncating pointers which they expect to be a certain size. In order to avoid a lot of problems they left the limitaion in place for 32-bit Windows.
Next issue: the 3GB limit. If Windows uses 1 now, that only leaves 2 for the applications. If you were using 2 GB before, you would install 4 GB, and lose another GB because of the limit.
There is no set 1GB amount used by Vista. The 1GB is the reccommendation for running Vista comfortably (including applications). Vista can run decently under as low as 512MB and you can even boot it under 256MB (painfully). It's hard to gauge the memory usage and requirements for Windows because it's memory management is very complex.
Under 32-bit Windows each process is assigned 4GB of virtual address space which is split into 2GB for the application and 2GB for the kernel (unless you use the /3G switch which gives 3GB application/1GB kernel). The virtual address space is made up of physical and paged memory and there is no distinction between them for the process. Pages are constantly moved between physical memory and the pagefile. The technical memory limitation is pretty much the amount of physical memory and the swap file size combined. Windows also does a lot of caching.
The 3GB is a limitation of the 32-bit x86 architecture and the actual size can vary depending on how much of the 4GB address space is consumed by your chipset and hardware (which map into the 4GB address space). IIRC it is accounted for as part of the kernel address space...but cannot be used for anything else (and on XP it is not added to the available memory total in System Properties).
I have a server which has had minimal patching since 2002 and still runs fine with no rootkits. I have had no unavoidable downtime since 2002. Yes, I run Redhat Enterprise.
I have an old Debian server that never needs patching or reboots either. It exposes few services and unless there's a major security flaw in one of them nothing is ever upgraded or changed. The thing with servers is that you always automate and fine tune them so they can run without interaction and as securely as possible.
This is what disturbs me about the push for linux on the desktop. Most people can't be bothered to research and implement simple monitoring measures, then complain that everything's gone tits up.
Desktop Linux has the hype of being solid, fast and secure which comes from these finely tuned Linux servers. These rumours cause people to believe Linux will never have problems.
Actually, I remember reading a year or so ago about a program that would allow you to run a specified command via ssh on a list of machines. You could do this with a shell-script (pass arguments), but I think the program also did it all in parallel and showed some output as well.
I think many rootkits do the same thing. You can run a command (via irc) on a list of machines and return output to the channel (in parallel). The best update and control solution is to rootkit your own boxes and maintain them via IRC. Problem solved.
Having worked in the bar scene here in Canada for many years I have to comment...
Seriously, beer taps are COMPLETELY different to any other type of tap. They are designed for beer, and beer only. They are designed to keep beer (not juice, soft-drink (or as you Americans would call it pop or soda), or even water cold), reduce froth in beer, etc
It really depends on their setup...most of the bars I worked at all used a CO2 system for delivering pop, juice and highball liquor to a set of guns. Many restaurants use the same kind of system. If they keep their kegs centralized they may use CO2 to deliver draft as well.
Such a statement is so stupid it's not funny. The guy has obviously spent thousands of dollars fitting out the place to be a bar (fridges, taps, bar, furniture) that to refit to anything else would put him so far out of pocket he'd bankrupt himself.
It's not that stupid of an idea. When you get a liquor license here you are often technically classified as a restaurant and must comply to the same heath and fire regulations. Things like fridges, bar sinks, coolers and tables are used in bars and restaurants alike. He shouldn't be that far off and can sell off any equipent like beer fridges if he can't use them. The only difficulty may be the renovations involded in putting in a kitchen.
Not only that, but bar staff are different to wait staff. They are trained to do a different job, at least here in Australia they are. They require an RSA (Responsible Service of Alcohol) certification and need to know what drinks to mix, etc. Meanwhile, wait staff need to know the difference between various dishes, how long they can be left, how to make a decent coffee, etc.
That's pretty crazy because here bar staff don't require any sort of training at all. We used to literally hire people out of the crowd sometimes. Instead of certifications the liquor control board simply fines the business when they catch the staff doing something wrong (like serving liquor after close). Wait staff don't need any more trained than a server at a bar, if you can read a screen or paper slip you can determine the difference between items.
It seems the owner's best avenue would be to sue, but unfortunately MS will fight that until he's broke. So either way, he's fucked 6 ways from Sunday.
If he tries to sue he won't have much of a case, if Microsoft owns the property they can do what they want with it. Even if there's a lease it probably contains a clause which they can use to kick businesses off their campus if they decide to. And yea even then Microsoft's lawyers would erode his money away to nothing.
Instead you must INSTALL the application, or try to figure out all the places in the registry used by the application, and copy those as well
The program should install it's settings to it's own key under HKLM or HKCU. Simply export the key to a reg file and the settings are saved. Programs shouldn't be storing settings in many places...
There are also applications like RegFromApp that you can use to obtain all the registry changes made by an application or installer and packages them into a reg file.
Of course you'll have to copy over the shared components as well and re-register them. I think is the cause of most people's problems when they copy over apps.
At least in the Unix world, system-wide configuration is stored in /etc (or /Library/Preferences) and has protection via the Unix permission set.
In Windows the registry uses ACL's which can be applied to keys and values just like you can do to any file on the filesystem. Standard users are obviously restricted from writing hives that they shouldn't, like HKLM\SYSTEM. The problem is that most people run as part of Administrators, which of course can write to anywhere.
The real issue is how powerful the registry is. Viruses have spread and manipulated entire systems with use of the registry alone.
The registry simply contains configuration data and state information. True the configuration can be leveraged to run harmful code, the same thing can happen if they edit init scripts or configs in /etc. If someone can manipulate the configuration there are always ways to make it do things that are harmful.
Safe mode is a good idea until you screw up the registry value that lets you boot into it
I think a key idea of the Windows recovery options is that people typically won't screw with those values. Windows does copy your CurrentControlSet every successful boot just in case, so you should be able to use Last Known Good in that situation.
...But I understand what you mean...there are times when the SYSTEM hive is damaged or the SafeBoot settings are broken. The only way to fix it is with Recovery Console.
You can install Recovery Console to your hard disk by running winnt32.exe /cmdcons from the source folder of the Windows disk and it keeps a separate set of files/settings so you can almost always boot it when you break your Windows install.
The registry is a good system but when Windows fails it becomes a big pain to work with...
You mean similar to how Chrome can run native x86 code in the browser, cross-platform, which would dilute Microsoft's monopoly on the DeskTop ..
Correct me if I'm wrong...but don't we want to avoid having native code execute in the browser? True it might speed up rendering if pages could leverage the processor and access the API directly but isn't that what caused the whole mess with ActiveX?
If the base install is minimal and leaves the user to install "options" like X and a window manager, then, yeah, you need to use a CLI for apt before you can even get to a position where you can use Synaptic.
From a minimal install people could also always manage apt through dselect...it's more "user friendly" than plain CLI...sorta
In fact, there are environmentalists who do claim they think the world would be better off without people. There is a point where environmentalism changes from prudent concern to misanthropy.
Life is very resilient. Even if we change things, destroy the current ecosystem and end all humanity...life on Earth would continue. A new ecosystem would develop and thrive, and eventually things may change again and end that one too.
The Earth has gone through many phases. From an atmosphere with little oxygen and mostly sea life, to plants changing the atmosphere to Oxygen, then the age of the dinosaurs, the ice age and eventually to the age of humans and our modern ecosystem.
The world hasn't had humans for a long time, and it didn't make the planet any better. The dinosaurs and ice age species still became extinct. The atmosphere and weather still changed. In fact humans have reversed an ice age which would probably have killed most of our current species anyway.
In a billion years the sun will heat up and vaporize all water on earth. Eventually the sun will expand and destroy the inner planets. By then humans may be able to move to other planets, and they'll be the only chance that Earth based life has to continue existing.
If you mean million, say million, not meters. Are you recommending the search field be restricted in size?
Yes. 200m ought to be enough for anybody.
The bigger problem with that idea is that there are plenty of users on the internet who are happily using old un-patched systems running windows 9x, or even win2k or XP logged in as admin (also unpatched).
Luckily many bots need newer libraries that the ones installed in the older versions of Windows. I've seen a few 98, NT4 and 2K boxes where the bot exploited and installed itself but couldn't run.
Many of these people don't care how great your latest OS is. They are fine with what they have and they don't want anything else. You can propose all the OS-level security changes you want and you'll never get those changes out to those legions of users.
My grandfather is a good example of that. He started out using Windows 2.0 and worked his way through each release finally arriving at NT Workstation 4.0. At that point he told me that was the last system he was going to learn, and that was the end of it. He would have been content to run NT workstation till the end of time. Luckily, his ISP gave him a new Vista system last year which he decided he would learn.