Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system.
Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.
Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.
Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.
Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx.
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."
I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than
It's not just Vista, and it's not just retail. I've got a couple non-profit companies I support who are accustomed to buying Office 2k3 Pro volume license keys at charity pricing for $99 a license. Well, now Office 2k7 went gold, and you can't buy 2k3 VLK. Now you abruptly have to order the 2k7 VLK. The charity price for Office 2007 Pro charity is... $299.
Must be some good stuff in there to justify blowing the hell out of these social-services organizations' budgets.
Maybe if there'd been some sort of warning the price was going to triple overnight we could've warned the customer and they could've bought twenty or fifty license ahead of their growth curve. But no.
I'd love to attribute a reference, but I've failed. Within the last two years I read a medical release that showed results along the following general lines: 5 years after vasectomy something like 20% of men were firing live rounds and after 10 years, it was something like 70%. The study stated that the actual ammunition count wasn't as high as prior to the operation, but basically the operation evidently frequently heals, at least to some degree.
Like I say, I wish to heck I could point at the source. It was... frightening.
That all being dropped, I can offer an entertaining anecdote that I know is true.
My uncle and his wife pumped out a kid and decided they were done. She got fixed. No more puppies, right? Wrong. Bad hackjob, and she ended up pregnant within two years, and kid # 2 arrived. Okay, well, lesson learned. So he got fixed. No more puppies, right? Wrong. With both parents spayed or neutered where appropriate, they popped out a third litter of one, something like two years later. Now, I was kind of young at the time and for all I know they had the operations done by some guy in his basement, but let's just say that I've acquired a healthy respectful paranoia about birth-control.
When and if my wife and I decide it's time, that's fine. But for now... she's on the pill and I'd very likely break my personal "no medication is good for you" ethic if this product makes it to market. And I don't even really trust asprin.
I suppose it's worth mentioning that TLA isn't a TLA. Well, it's not the TLA you think it is. It's a Three-Letter-Abbreviation. See, the amusing thing is that an acronym is a word. It's pronounced. FBI and CIA are examples of non-acronyms. FUBAR and SCSI are examples of acronyms. Abbreviations on the other hand are simple short versions of things.
That'd be Zango. Anyway, why wouldn't they release malware through myspace? It's userbase is huge. From the point of view of the mal..ware..ist(?), it's the ultimate distribution medium.
No. You can continue to apply patches manually to your heart's content. You just can't use the Windows Update or Microsoft Update site fully.
For your habit, by the way, I'd suggest you look at Autopatcher. www.autopatcher.com Nice monthly torrent download contains all the latest patches, plus updates of other useful Windows gems. Java, Flash, Shockwave, TweakUI, Cleartype Tuner. That sort of thing.
That's funny and all, but overall there's quite a bit of these guidelines to disagree with...
While not everyone is going to agree with all of my critique, I suspect we're going to be fairly united overall. I'd like to question why the Start Button is now the "circular shape with the four-color windowpane kind of shape in it that was in the bottom left when you got your computer but might have been moved to any of the other three corners". I'd like to know why in MMC windows and Explorer windows the plus-sign/minus-sign symbols to expand/collapse nodes is now the "hollow arrow pointing to the right" and the "solid arrow pointing fourty-five degrees downwards from the right". I'd like to know why in a world where Citrix and Terminal Services are increasingly predominantly used, we get things like swirling colour effects moving through progress bars to tell you the processor hasn't halted, just to slow down the interface. These are my initial impressions of Vista, from the perspective of an IT professional who has hundreds of users he needs to train, support, and troubleshoot.
Don't provide unnecessary details. A well-labeled progress bar provides sufficient information, so provide additional progress information only if users can do something with it.
And there, in a nutshell is MS' philosophy. Assume things are going to go right. I call bullshit. If you provide scads of additional information, such as what file is being copied, or how many [giga/mega/kilo]bytes remain, or what registry key is being written, or what dll is being registered, normal users will ignore it. Those who know things will be able to help when things go wrong.
Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology.
I understand the goal of making users feel squishy and loved, but this is a support headache in the making. Now instead of helpdesk/IT people being able to train that users should look for "duplexing" and turn it on, they have to look for whatever variant of "print on both sides of the paper" or "flip paper and print on other side" each manufacturer chooses to use for their drivers/programs. Technology-based description of options tend to be predictable because a precise, definitive word or phrase is applied to the option.
While the minimum Windows Vista screen resolution remains at 800 x 600 pixels, resizable window layouts should be optimized for 1024 x 768 pixels.
And there you have it. Shouldn't this read "window layouts should always be scalable down to a minimum of 800x600 and should be resizable by users"? Sure, an OK/Cancel box could arguably not be resizable... but then too it's harmless if it is.
Never use confirmations as a form of user education.
Are you sure you really want to reformat your hard drive? You should pick 'no' unless you are absolutely certain that you want to erase all of your data on [drive letter]. Picking 'yes' will delete all information without hope of recovery. Proceed with extreme caution.
Make sure the properties are necessary. Don't clutter your pages with unnecessary properties just to avoid making hard design decisions.
Because hard design decisions don't generally correspond to the simple fact that some people prefer Coke and some Pepsi. Right. Give the user options. Any time you're not sure which design or option is better, let them make the choice. Except the Taskbar which should always be along the bottom, period. Whoever let users move the singlemost fundamental Windows95+ UI element should be shot.
Don't accompany error messages with sound effects. Doing so is jarring and unnecessary.
Thanks. I'll keep the person who made this choice in mind next time I've got a massive file copy going and I elect to read a book or something and it stops 10% in because the destination runs out of room, or I lack perms to a source file or something and it's just sitting there waiting for me to click 'ignore' or something. If I want it to b
Canadian ISP Sympatico actually distributes 802.11g routers to its customers who request them. Those routers run a customized firmware that steps the user through some basic settings. (Ie. what is your account name... what is your password...) It also mandatorily activates WEP during this process, so once you're done and the router goes fully live, you either must be using a wired connection or using the WEP key the router randomly assigns you. You can web in to the router's admin screens and disable WEP afterwards if you really desire to do so.
The intent of course is to protect against undesired casual use. Stop the punk next door from using 99% of your bandwidth doing bittorrent transfers day in and day out. I commend Sympatico for this effort. Sure, if someone REALLY wants in, they can get in. But there's no reason to make it any easier than you, the customer, intend it to be within the limits of the available technology.
Your experiences make you a lucky fellow. I do 3rd-party corporate IT, so unlike you I _do_ have hundreds of users without changing jobs.
While some of my customers are exactly the casual users that you describe, who don't really "need" Office, there's more at stake than you're really seeing. First, users and businesses evolve. Sally the Secretary might not actually need Word right now, but if she develops a need for Word at any point during the life-cycle of the computer she uses, there's going to be a problem. That problem: OEM software is cheaper than retail and only purchasable with hardware. Ooops. Okay, how about Volume Licensing? Sure, that's do-able, but there's a minimum number of licenses that have to be bought at once to qualify to open a VL account, which only lasts TWO YEARS. It's often -- not always -- a good idea to set up the PC with the functionality it's likely to aquire during its life cycle on day 0.
Next, all it takes is one feature not present in "the industry standard", a.k.a. MS Office, to throw into fairly severe scrutiny any advice to use an alternate product, free or not. Want to know how many tool-and-mold programs that render cutter-paths link to Excel? Excel. Not "something functionally equivalent to Excel." Want to know how many insurance industry programs that do either client-management or quote-generation link to Word or Outlook? Not "something functionally equivalent to Word or Outlook." It's common. Not universal, but common. And again, if you impliment something "nonstandard" day 0 and have to come back later to retrain and rework even a small department, it's easy for accounting departments (the guys who often link their software to Excel or Access) to wonder why things weren't just done "right" in the first place. You're the IT guy. You should've seen this coming.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that there's a reason why I have been unable to recommend Firefox (for instance) to even a single customer, despite being firmly addicted and a True Believer. One site that doesn't render "right" or even "the same" and my recommendation becomes suspect. One call to the support desk at whatever-business-partner-whose-site-doesn't-SEEM- to-be-working-right and they throw up their hands in the air saying "oh, Firefox...? We don't support that." One reluctant business-owner who can barely turn his computer on who wants to know why everyone else gets something different.
It's hard. It's very hard in a LOT of cases to recommend anything other than MS' products. And that's the ugly truth.
>> It's more like reading books in the store without buying them. >It's more like photocopying the entire book and taking the copy home with you. You get to >enjoy the content any time you want without going back to the store. And although reading >the book in the store might be legal (but rude), photocopying the whole thing is certainly >copyright infringement and against the law.
What if you just memorize what you read in the store?
I ask this before I go all prophetic, but it's important. We are realistically on the brink of massive advancements in technology that will dramatically change the nature of retention of experience. It's almost possible to manufacture cameras so small that they could realistically be implanted in the body comfortably. It's definitely possible to do the same with microphones. We have successfully performed experiments that intercept signals coming from a cat's eye via the optic nerve and display some of what's seen on a flat screen. We've got low multipixel displays being injected onto the optic nerve of some blind patients, enabling them to "see" things.
It is only the matter of a very short amount of time before Joe Average will realistically be able to digitally "remember" anything he ever sees or hears. He will be able to retain any sight or sound and replay it in perfect fidelity at will. I'm not talking about VR, but RR; replayed reality.
It's your experience. You had it once. Just because your grey cells alone can't retain it perfectly isn't a long-term profit market.
It may be a generation, or two, or even three, but it's going to happen that the entertainment industry won't be able to sell you an experience twice. Books, music, live performances of plays or concerts and virtually all other audio/visual markets will radically change. Forget peer-to-peer. This is just the start.
As an aside, really, strip clubs will be able to maintain themselves, happily, since consumers of pr0n tend to want to see NEW things each time.
>I guess the misconception is that the engineers are also overseas and therefore >the quality of the goods are going to go down. [sarcasm]You see, the Chinese are >only good at following instructions given to them by the Americans.[/sarcasm] But >look at the Thinkpad/Lenovo T60: they are still very well-built machines, when >compared to even the Powerbooks.
>It's terrible to think that a great brand is going to go out of existence because >of unwarranted xenophobia. Imagine if we're stuck with Dell!
I'm an IBM/Lenovo reseller. I can't comment on the Thinkpad line in particular as I haven't moved very many of that product since the transition of brand ownership, but I can comment on the other product lines.
IBM has traditionally been a product line that I have been very, very comfortable selling. The manufacturing tolerances have been very high, and a lot of engineering effort was clearly invested in the design of the systems they sold. The NetVista, and ThinkCenter lines were both very high quality machines. All bays were prepped with screw-less mounting, sound-dampening studs, and the cases were designed to be easy-access, yet trivially securable. Internal cages were designed to swing clear of other parts, and additional mounting points were provided for user-added fans. Screws were placed into the pre-placed screw-holes, for the event a user ever needed them.
Now? Now Lenovo has managed to introduce _blue LEDs_ into the power-button so we know the unit is on. The cases have nice sturdy thumbscrews. Four of them. At opposite corners so you can't simply take off one side panel. The CD-ROM drive is often a slave on the same PATA controller as the hard drive, unless you're looking at one of the SATA models. Screws are required to mount any add-on hard drives or optical drives, and are certainly not provided anywhere in the chassis. But at least the face-plates are now a cheerful mix of black and grey. A whole 100% increase in plastic shades from the old all-black.
The fact is that Lenovo, in the admittedly lower-end brands has definitely sacrificed engineering efforts in order to do two things: 1} drop the manufacturing price and 2} make the machines LOOK sexier.
People who buy IBM usually don't buy IBM for sexy looks, or for price. They buy for brand-recognition (which isn't a good enough reason to buy something), and quality of product (which is). Lenovo has started CLEARLY transitioning away from that market.
IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo because it wasn't profitable enough to them. I get that. This won't help.
Final statement: the Intellistation series of workstation-class desktops remains owned by IBM. The machines continue to be manufactured for IBM by Lenovo. And continue to be stellar. Still, I can only assume the Thinkpad brand will follow the Netvista and Thinkcenter brands into mass-market blue LED mediocrity.
>This will like set an important precedent w.r.t. rootkits and other >commercial malware (Starforce anyone?). I only hope the result will >be good for the customer and not the corporations. If Sony don't get >the punishment they deserve for this, everyone else will jump on >the bandwagon.
I just bought a Sony/BMG CD this week. I doubt it has a rootkit installer on it but I don't KNOW that it doesn't. More to the point, I can't ever know for sure that future purchases from Sony or any other mass-media distributor is clean of things other than what the package claims they're selling me.
My solution? 100% piracy. I bought David Gilmour's "On an Island". I also downloaded a torrent of it, encoded in 320kbps mp3. The CD and packaging sits on my shelf and will NEVER be placed in a reader. I consider it my certificate of authenticity. And on my hard drive sits the known-clean version. Problem solved.
If this is technically illegal, so too is the DRM fiasco Sony got caught at. I am protecting myself. End of story.
I make a point not to have something like EMule open publishing a folder full of things, flaunting my policy at the ??AA guys, but I'll gladly pull down a torrent of something I buy, and share it out to 1:1. You should see the convenient portable copy of my BSG Season 1 DVDs that reside on my laptop. Now I don't have to carry the 6 DVDs around with me. Win-win.
Yank it all out, and at the very least TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT. Let the boys with the enterprise management tools use said tools to build systems with the stuff installed + turned on.
Strongly disagree. Not surprisingly, I do mostly corporate IT. I can safely say that the division of features available even between Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Home is annoying enough to act as suggestion that what you're asking for is a bad idea.
I don't have a problem with many things being shut off by default. On activation, a simple wizard could ask the user what sort of role the PC is expected to be used for. But even there you and I are going to disagree as to what should and shouldn't be on by default.
Remote Registry. On. Why? Because the ability to fix your semi-non-responsive residential PC from say... my laptop, without having to dig out the hard drive, or use other expen$ive utilities is valuable.
RPC. On. Why? Read the previous. I can do things like remote Task Manager, ending tasks, stopping and starting services and accessing your event logs.
Remote Desktop. On. Why? Because I'm not always at your house. That WinXP Home doesn't HAVE this is absurdity.
Speaking of absurdity, WinXP Home doesn't have the concept of a non-administrative user. Staggeringly mind-numbingly idiotic. That's the market segment that needs that feature the most.
My point is simply that the features YOU value aren't necessarily the features I value, regardless of the market. Corporate, residential. Whatever. We should have (in the Windows segment) ONE and only ONE client OS. And that client OS should be easily and remotely converted to whatever role it needs to be used in.
Sure, Messenger had a flaw. Sure, it'd be nice if fewer people had been vulnerable to that flaw. But simply removing feature availability is philosophically WRONG.
> (i've never ever seen it sync beyond 608 kbps. strangly the upstream is steady between 608 and 640 kbps...)
It's not strange at all. Residential DSL these days tends to follow the g.DMT spec. That specification places the upchannel frequencies at the lower end of the spectrum allocated for the DSL connection. It happens that lower frequencies survive longer distances for DSL purposes. Effectively, this means that the downchannel suffers first due to length/line conditions, degrading from 8Mbps down to no sync. Through most of that downchannel degredation, the frequencies reserved at the bottom for upchannel remain fully/mostly available. It's not until your downchannel is really suffering that the upchannel starts to degrade.
Other DSL implimentations interlaced upchannel and downchannel frequencies throughout the allocated spectrum.
I bought DMG2, and I'm a new DM so I suppose I'm reasonably qualified to comment.
I used to role-play, back 20 years go, during the days of 1st Ed. Then I fell out of it. Now, a friend and I play again, using 3.5e rules. He's massively more experienced than I am. He's great at presenting material to me smoothly, and as a player, I quite like 3.5e ("we" started with 3.0) However, when I try to spin the table around and run a campaign trying to challenge and engage him, an experienced player, it's really not an easy task. The original DMG helps in terms of providing quick & dirty sample NPCs and tables, but the DMG2 covers more important matters: when and how to use those things. It's not so much a rulebook as a style book. And having read the thing, I found myself repeatedly saying "hey, I do that" or "hey, I SHOULD do that". DMG2 provides content that is valuable to me, the newbie DM. And I, surprisingly, am the target market. Go figure.
As an aside, on the topic of a moneygrab, I think you're missing the point. Those people who own 3.0e manuals don't HAVE to purchase 3.5e materials. There's enough similarity that adventures and other supplemental materials make complete sense to someone using 3.0e core rules. To people who don't already have 3.0e manuals, given that 3.5e offers more content at the same price-point, how can this possibly be construed as a moneygrab?
My point: if you, an experienced RPG player feel the compulsion to buy manuals you don't like or feel give you value, you've got a sickness, just like the guy who has to pick up the copy of Dark Side of the Moon with "new" cover-art, just because it exists.
The difference between 7200 and 5400 RPM may less than you would guess: above vs Maxline Plus II (250mb) is 10 vs 9 ms (transfer rate is same 133 MB/s for both).
This sort of assumption is what you get when you read the side of the box. The interface between the back of the drive and the controller interface on the motherboard is 133MB/s in both cases. The transfer rate from the surface of the platters to the heads, unfortunately will have rating lower than the interface rate. Said rating will be still lower on a 5400RPM drive. As it happens, most marketing literature only addresses a couple of stats, and platter-to-head isn't generally one of them.
When in comes to filtering at rest stops, it has little to do with whether people like porn or not. It comes down to the fact that many people don't want to pay for someone else to download porn or commit copyright infringement.
Perhaps it's high time that "many people" decide they don't want to pay for someone else to download religious indoctrination material.
Stop. Think. That's right. Pr0n is legal. So is pro-Christianity material. A trucker has every bit as much right to access erotic stories online as any religious citizen has to download scripture.
There is NO difference. Information is information, in the sense that this information is legal to distribute, posess, and use. While there are restrictions to distribution regarding age, it has already been argued successfully in this thread that most truckers are legally of age to have pr0n.
If the religious prudes are going to decide that it's time to prevent access to materials they find objectionable, perhaps it's time for the unwashed masses who obviously like pr0n and sin and other fun stuff to decide it's time to prevent access to religious content that leads to censorship.
No, they are not. They are imperfections in the product. I can claim that I won't buy a new Mercedes car unless every detail is manufactured with micron precision, but that would obviously be stupid. Just as stupid is claiming that dead pixels are defects. They are a side effect of the manufacturing process. If it was so easy to get rid of them, it would be done years ago.
This is something I fundamentally disagree with. A LCD has precisely one function: to accurately display the data being sent to it (within the stated specifications of the screen's ability to do so [ie. resolution, colour-accuracy, brightness etc.]) To have a pixel which fails to render the expected result is a flaw in the core purpose of the product. If anything deserves the term "defect", I'd think this is it.
Making an analogy with a car, where most failures in its core purpose are dangerous to life is difficult at best. Instead think of a roof on your house, which is perfect... excepting just one little leak, amounting to a tiny percentage of the square footage. Tell me as the water seeps into your drywall that your roof isn't defective.
The producers probably found out that the customers are not willing to pay a premium for dead-pixel-free displays, so they can't sell "good" and "bad" displays at different price. One option is to throw away all non-perfect panels, but that would drive prices for good ones up. So the only remaining option is to say that since you aren't willing to pay more for a perfect display, learn to live with a risk that a few dead pixels may appear, or buy a CRT.
I dispute this as well. Without there ever having been a choice to buy a "guaranteed 100% pixel version" of LCDs, there never was a choice. What really happened was that manufacturers decided that they didn't want to take a loss on manufactured items that weren't functionally flawless, and decided for us what is good enough. Mind you, I'll agree that if there was a significant dollar difference between "100% pixel" and "1-3 dead pixel" versions, most people would SEEK the cheaper version. I myself may be one of those people. But as long as there is one version, which may, or may not, be properly working, I will continue to insist that I physically end up with the better product.
> most customers probably wont even notice 1 or 2 dead pixels..happy 2005
Sorry, but that's just not true. "dead" pixels do one of two things. They either stick open or stick closed. The end result is that you have a dot on the screen that either is very obviously dark when the surrounding material is light, or vice-versa.
While this isn't terribly noticible when playing movies or video games, it is quite noticible when using most traditional 2D desktop apps. A dark pixel in the middle of your otherwise mostly white word-processing session becomes obvious.
Case-in-point is the support wires in Sony Trinitron monitors. Very, very fine horizontal lines at the 1/3 and 2/3 levels on the screen are used to hold a mesh in place which gives the Trinitron series a great display. Every Trinitron style screen I've ever sold, I got asked, immediately, what the story was with the lines. Most customers balked somewhat, but all eventually agreed to live with it.
Dead pixels are, in fact, defects. I don't intend to purchase a defective product out of the box. A product should be free of manufacturing faults for the period of its warranty, or be replaced/repaired. Cosmetic damage to say a bezel, or a power cord is trivial to ignore, but a dead pixel is a flaw in the display's ability to display accurately what it's told to.
As such, I will never buy a laptop or LCD without being allowed to first verify its display is without flaw. A retailer who refuses to allow me to confirm the proper functioning of the device before purchase/departure is a retailer who loses my business. Period.
Re:More pages v.s more relevant pages
on
Google Index Doubles
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What I've read on the Google help pages seems to indicate that they don't index punctuation or capitalization. When you search for something, your string is looked for within an existing index, and appropriate reference materials are shown. Including punctuation wouldn't result in any hits within their index, meaning no results.
Now, obviously, it is theoretically possible to do just about anything. But in this case, with the architecture they have in place, anyone ever doing what you're asking would require a full-text search through their multi-TB dataset, which I suspect is highly impractical.
My point is that as I understand it, Google has coded a number of shortcut tricks which allow reasonable search times, and full-text string-exact searching would prevent them from using those shortcuts, resulting in search times they don't seem to think is reasonable.
On Win2k Server (the only Win2k with Remote Desktop/Terminal Services), Remote Desktop allows two RDP "sessions" plus the local console. No provision is made to EVER remote-control the console session. Remote sessions are limited to Administrator users.
On Win2k3 Server, as in Win2k, you are limited to two simultaneous RDP sessions, but you are now able to/console and remote the console 0 session itself, if you so desire. This is optional.
These two above are _without_ having purchased any Terminal Services CALS or any additional software.
Finally, with WinXP SP2, it is entirely possible to configure (via a registry setting) the OS to allow a RDP session separate from the console 0 session. There is significant discussion over the topic of if this feature made it into SP2 release, or was pulled in late beta. I can say that I have seen it work on a SP2 release system. There may be specific caveats such as the PC not being in a domain, and having "Fast User Switching" enabled (as the one, peculiar PC where this happened to me would have been configured), but the functionality is definitely there.
Finally with regards to WinXP, given another system, it is possible to use the command-line shadow command (ex. shadow 0/server:COMPUTERNAME) to shadow the console session of a logged-in user and leave them logged in and able to control the session as you do with PCAnywhere/VNC. This must be done from an existing Remote session (good for remoting to a customer's server, then shadowing a desktop to work on things). There is a Group Policy setting (SP2 ADMs, folks) that lets you set permissions-requirements, so the user is not required to ALLOW you to do this.
The point is that there is much more to the Remote Desktop remote administrator and XP RDC functionality than meets the eye if you merely click the icon.
in such a way that a short filename (microso~1.txt et al) is persistently perserved for old DOS apps.
Really? I always figured the shortname was preserved so I wouldn't have to type the idiotic filenames folks save their crap as when I'm working on the command-line. That and have to back-track to insert quotations when folks use syntactically reserved characters like SPACE in their filenames.
copy "the accounting spreadsheet that I created while high on diet pills that contains the budget for six out of seven of our shell companies from august to november of the year of the rat that I got off www.i_am_a_jerkoff.com.xls" a:\
Give me a break. 8.3 was, and remains reasonable. While I'd advocate allowing as much as 12.3 without spaces or additional dots, I'm sure the open-source crowd with kernel 2.5.7.102 build 5 are going to disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system.
Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.
Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.
Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.
Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx.
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."
I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than
It's not just Vista, and it's not just retail. I've got a couple non-profit companies I support who are accustomed to buying Office 2k3 Pro volume license keys at charity pricing for $99 a license. Well, now Office 2k7 went gold, and you can't buy 2k3 VLK. Now you abruptly have to order the 2k7 VLK. The charity price for Office 2007 Pro charity is... $299.
Must be some good stuff in there to justify blowing the hell out of these social-services organizations' budgets.
Maybe if there'd been some sort of warning the price was going to triple overnight we could've warned the customer and they could've bought twenty or fifty license ahead of their growth curve. But no.
I'd love to attribute a reference, but I've failed. Within the last two years I read a medical release that showed results along the following general lines: 5 years after vasectomy something like 20% of men were firing live rounds and after 10 years, it was something like 70%. The study stated that the actual ammunition count wasn't as high as prior to the operation, but basically the operation evidently frequently heals, at least to some degree.
Like I say, I wish to heck I could point at the source. It was... frightening.
That all being dropped, I can offer an entertaining anecdote that I know is true.
My uncle and his wife pumped out a kid and decided they were done. She got fixed. No more puppies, right? Wrong. Bad hackjob, and she ended up pregnant within two years, and kid # 2 arrived. Okay, well, lesson learned. So he got fixed. No more puppies, right? Wrong. With both parents spayed or neutered where appropriate, they popped out a third litter of one, something like two years later. Now, I was kind of young at the time and for all I know they had the operations done by some guy in his basement, but let's just say that I've acquired a healthy respectful paranoia about birth-control.
When and if my wife and I decide it's time, that's fine. But for now... she's on the pill and I'd very likely break my personal "no medication is good for you" ethic if this product makes it to market. And I don't even really trust asprin.
I suppose it's worth mentioning that TLA isn't a TLA. Well, it's not the TLA you think it is. It's a Three-Letter-Abbreviation. See, the amusing thing is that an acronym is a word. It's pronounced. FBI and CIA are examples of non-acronyms. FUBAR and SCSI are examples of acronyms. Abbreviations on the other hand are simple short versions of things.
That'd be Zango. Anyway, why wouldn't they release malware through myspace? It's userbase is huge. From the point of view of the mal..ware..ist(?), it's the ultimate distribution medium.
The word you're looking for is malwareorist.
No. You can continue to apply patches manually to your heart's content. You just can't use the Windows Update or Microsoft Update site fully.
For your habit, by the way, I'd suggest you look at Autopatcher. www.autopatcher.com Nice monthly torrent download contains all the latest patches, plus updates of other useful Windows gems. Java, Flash, Shockwave, TweakUI, Cleartype Tuner. That sort of thing.
That's funny and all, but overall there's quite a bit of these guidelines to disagree with...
While not everyone is going to agree with all of my critique, I suspect we're going to be fairly united overall. I'd like to question why the Start Button is now the "circular shape with the four-color windowpane kind of shape in it that was in the bottom left when you got your computer but might have been moved to any of the other three corners". I'd like to know why in MMC windows and Explorer windows the plus-sign/minus-sign symbols to expand/collapse nodes is now the "hollow arrow pointing to the right" and the "solid arrow pointing fourty-five degrees downwards from the right". I'd like to know why in a world where Citrix and Terminal Services are increasingly predominantly used, we get things like swirling colour effects moving through progress bars to tell you the processor hasn't halted, just to slow down the interface. These are my initial impressions of Vista, from the perspective of an IT professional who has hundreds of users he needs to train, support, and troubleshoot.
Don't provide unnecessary details. A well-labeled progress bar provides sufficient information, so provide additional progress information only if users can do something with it.
And there, in a nutshell is MS' philosophy. Assume things are going to go right. I call bullshit. If you provide scads of additional information, such as what file is being copied, or how many [giga/mega/kilo]bytes remain, or what registry key is being written, or what dll is being registered, normal users will ignore it. Those who know things will be able to help when things go wrong.
Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology.
I understand the goal of making users feel squishy and loved, but this is a support headache in the making. Now instead of helpdesk/IT people being able to train that users should look for "duplexing" and turn it on, they have to look for whatever variant of "print on both sides of the paper" or "flip paper and print on other side" each manufacturer chooses to use for their drivers/programs. Technology-based description of options tend to be predictable because a precise, definitive word or phrase is applied to the option.
While the minimum Windows Vista screen resolution remains at 800 x 600 pixels, resizable window layouts should be optimized for 1024 x 768 pixels.
And there you have it. Shouldn't this read "window layouts should always be scalable down to a minimum of 800x600 and should be resizable by users"? Sure, an OK/Cancel box could arguably not be resizable... but then too it's harmless if it is.
Never use confirmations as a form of user education.
Are you sure you really want to reformat your hard drive? You should pick 'no' unless you are absolutely certain that you want to erase all of your data on [drive letter]. Picking 'yes' will delete all information without hope of recovery. Proceed with extreme caution.
Make sure the properties are necessary. Don't clutter your pages with unnecessary properties just to avoid making hard design decisions.
Because hard design decisions don't generally correspond to the simple fact that some people prefer Coke and some Pepsi. Right. Give the user options. Any time you're not sure which design or option is better, let them make the choice. Except the Taskbar which should always be along the bottom, period. Whoever let users move the singlemost fundamental Windows95+ UI element should be shot.
Don't accompany error messages with sound effects. Doing so is jarring and unnecessary.
Thanks. I'll keep the person who made this choice in mind next time I've got a massive file copy going and I elect to read a book or something and it stops 10% in because the destination runs out of room, or I lack perms to a source file or something and it's just sitting there waiting for me to click 'ignore' or something. If I want it to b
Wait... isn't the server with the 1TB RAID array basically for hiding the pr0n?
Canadian ISP Sympatico actually distributes 802.11g routers to its customers who request them. Those routers run a customized firmware that steps the user through some basic settings. (Ie. what is your account name... what is your password...) It also mandatorily activates WEP during this process, so once you're done and the router goes fully live, you either must be using a wired connection or using the WEP key the router randomly assigns you. You can web in to the router's admin screens and disable WEP afterwards if you really desire to do so.
The intent of course is to protect against undesired casual use. Stop the punk next door from using 99% of your bandwidth doing bittorrent transfers day in and day out. I commend Sympatico for this effort. Sure, if someone REALLY wants in, they can get in. But there's no reason to make it any easier than you, the customer, intend it to be within the limits of the available technology.
Your experiences make you a lucky fellow. I do 3rd-party corporate IT, so unlike you I _do_ have hundreds of users without changing jobs.
- to-be-working-right and they throw up their hands in the air saying "oh, Firefox...? We don't support that." One reluctant business-owner who can barely turn his computer on who wants to know why everyone else gets something different.
While some of my customers are exactly the casual users that you describe, who don't really "need" Office, there's more at stake than you're really seeing. First, users and businesses evolve. Sally the Secretary might not actually need Word right now, but if she develops a need for Word at any point during the life-cycle of the computer she uses, there's going to be a problem. That problem: OEM software is cheaper than retail and only purchasable with hardware. Ooops. Okay, how about Volume Licensing? Sure, that's do-able, but there's a minimum number of licenses that have to be bought at once to qualify to open a VL account, which only lasts TWO YEARS. It's often -- not always -- a good idea to set up the PC with the functionality it's likely to aquire during its life cycle on day 0.
Next, all it takes is one feature not present in "the industry standard", a.k.a. MS Office, to throw into fairly severe scrutiny any advice to use an alternate product, free or not. Want to know how many tool-and-mold programs that render cutter-paths link to Excel? Excel. Not "something functionally equivalent to Excel." Want to know how many insurance industry programs that do either client-management or quote-generation link to Word or Outlook? Not "something functionally equivalent to Word or Outlook." It's common. Not universal, but common. And again, if you impliment something "nonstandard" day 0 and have to come back later to retrain and rework even a small department, it's easy for accounting departments (the guys who often link their software to Excel or Access) to wonder why things weren't just done "right" in the first place. You're the IT guy. You should've seen this coming.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that there's a reason why I have been unable to recommend Firefox (for instance) to even a single customer, despite being firmly addicted and a True Believer. One site that doesn't render "right" or even "the same" and my recommendation becomes suspect. One call to the support desk at whatever-business-partner-whose-site-doesn't-SEEM
It's hard. It's very hard in a LOT of cases to recommend anything other than MS' products. And that's the ugly truth.
>> It's more like reading books in the store without buying them.
>It's more like photocopying the entire book and taking the copy home with you. You get to
>enjoy the content any time you want without going back to the store. And although reading
>the book in the store might be legal (but rude), photocopying the whole thing is certainly
>copyright infringement and against the law.
What if you just memorize what you read in the store?
I ask this before I go all prophetic, but it's important. We are realistically on the brink of massive advancements in technology that will dramatically change the nature of retention of experience. It's almost possible to manufacture cameras so small that they could realistically be implanted in the body comfortably. It's definitely possible to do the same with microphones. We have successfully performed experiments that intercept signals coming from a cat's eye via the optic nerve and display some of what's seen on a flat screen. We've got low multipixel displays being injected onto the optic nerve of some blind patients, enabling them to "see" things.
It is only the matter of a very short amount of time before Joe Average will realistically be able to digitally "remember" anything he ever sees or hears. He will be able to retain any sight or sound and replay it in perfect fidelity at will. I'm not talking about VR, but RR; replayed reality.
It's your experience. You had it once. Just because your grey cells alone can't retain it perfectly isn't a long-term profit market.
It may be a generation, or two, or even three, but it's going to happen that the entertainment industry won't be able to sell you an experience twice. Books, music, live performances of plays or concerts and virtually all other audio/visual markets will radically change. Forget peer-to-peer. This is just the start.
As an aside, really, strip clubs will be able to maintain themselves, happily, since consumers of pr0n tend to want to see NEW things each time.
http://www.realultimatepower.net/
Just go and read. Or someone will flip out.
>I guess the misconception is that the engineers are also overseas and therefore
>the quality of the goods are going to go down. [sarcasm]You see, the Chinese are
>only good at following instructions given to them by the Americans.[/sarcasm] But
>look at the Thinkpad/Lenovo T60: they are still very well-built machines, when
>compared to even the Powerbooks.
>It's terrible to think that a great brand is going to go out of existence because
>of unwarranted xenophobia. Imagine if we're stuck with Dell!
I'm an IBM/Lenovo reseller. I can't comment on the Thinkpad line in particular as I haven't moved very many of that product since the transition of brand ownership, but I can comment on the other product lines.
IBM has traditionally been a product line that I have been very, very comfortable selling. The manufacturing tolerances have been very high, and a lot of engineering effort was clearly invested in the design of the systems they sold. The NetVista, and ThinkCenter lines were both very high quality machines. All bays were prepped with screw-less mounting, sound-dampening studs, and the cases were designed to be easy-access, yet trivially securable. Internal cages were designed to swing clear of other parts, and additional mounting points were provided for user-added fans. Screws were placed into the pre-placed screw-holes, for the event a user ever needed them.
Now? Now Lenovo has managed to introduce _blue LEDs_ into the power-button so we know the unit is on. The cases have nice sturdy thumbscrews. Four of them. At opposite corners so you can't simply take off one side panel. The CD-ROM drive is often a slave on the same PATA controller as the hard drive, unless you're looking at one of the SATA models. Screws are required to mount any add-on hard drives or optical drives, and are certainly not provided anywhere in the chassis. But at least the face-plates are now a cheerful mix of black and grey. A whole 100% increase in plastic shades from the old all-black.
The fact is that Lenovo, in the admittedly lower-end brands has definitely sacrificed engineering efforts in order to do two things: 1} drop the manufacturing price and 2} make the machines LOOK sexier.
People who buy IBM usually don't buy IBM for sexy looks, or for price. They buy for brand-recognition (which isn't a good enough reason to buy something), and quality of product (which is). Lenovo has started CLEARLY transitioning away from that market.
IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo because it wasn't profitable enough to them. I get that. This won't help.
Final statement: the Intellistation series of workstation-class desktops remains owned by IBM. The machines continue to be manufactured for IBM by Lenovo. And continue to be stellar. Still, I can only assume the Thinkpad brand will follow the Netvista and Thinkcenter brands into mass-market blue LED mediocrity.
>This will like set an important precedent w.r.t. rootkits and other
>commercial malware (Starforce anyone?). I only hope the result will
>be good for the customer and not the corporations. If Sony don't get
>the punishment they deserve for this, everyone else will jump on
>the bandwagon.
I just bought a Sony/BMG CD this week. I doubt it has a rootkit installer on it but I don't KNOW that it doesn't. More to the point, I can't ever know for sure that future purchases from Sony or any other mass-media distributor is clean of things other than what the package claims they're selling me.
My solution? 100% piracy. I bought David Gilmour's "On an Island". I also downloaded a torrent of it, encoded in 320kbps mp3. The CD and packaging sits on my shelf and will NEVER be placed in a reader. I consider it my certificate of authenticity. And on my hard drive sits the known-clean version. Problem solved.
If this is technically illegal, so too is the DRM fiasco Sony got caught at. I am protecting myself. End of story.
I make a point not to have something like EMule open publishing a folder full of things, flaunting my policy at the ??AA guys, but I'll gladly pull down a torrent of something I buy, and share it out to 1:1. You should see the convenient portable copy of my BSG Season 1 DVDs that reside on my laptop. Now I don't have to carry the 6 DVDs around with me. Win-win.
Yank it all out, and at the very least TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT. Let the boys with the enterprise management tools use said tools to build systems with the stuff installed + turned on.
Strongly disagree. Not surprisingly, I do mostly corporate IT. I can safely say that the division of features available even between Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Home is annoying enough to act as suggestion that what you're asking for is a bad idea.
I don't have a problem with many things being shut off by default. On activation, a simple wizard could ask the user what sort of role the PC is expected to be used for. But even there you and I are going to disagree as to what should and shouldn't be on by default.
Remote Registry. On. Why? Because the ability to fix your semi-non-responsive residential PC from say... my laptop, without having to dig out the hard drive, or use other expen$ive utilities is valuable.
RPC. On. Why? Read the previous. I can do things like remote Task Manager, ending tasks, stopping and starting services and accessing your event logs.
Remote Desktop. On. Why? Because I'm not always at your house. That WinXP Home doesn't HAVE this is absurdity.
Speaking of absurdity, WinXP Home doesn't have the concept of a non-administrative user. Staggeringly mind-numbingly idiotic. That's the market segment that needs that feature the most.
My point is simply that the features YOU value aren't necessarily the features I value, regardless of the market. Corporate, residential. Whatever. We should have (in the Windows segment) ONE and only ONE client OS. And that client OS should be easily and remotely converted to whatever role it needs to be used in.
Sure, Messenger had a flaw. Sure, it'd be nice if fewer people had been vulnerable to that flaw. But simply removing feature availability is philosophically WRONG.
> (i've never ever seen it sync beyond 608 kbps. strangly the upstream is steady between 608 and 640 kbps ...)
It's not strange at all. Residential DSL these days tends to follow the g.DMT spec. That specification places the upchannel frequencies at the lower end of the spectrum allocated for the DSL connection. It happens that lower frequencies survive longer distances for DSL purposes. Effectively, this means that the downchannel suffers first due to length/line conditions, degrading from 8Mbps down to no sync. Through most of that downchannel degredation, the frequencies reserved at the bottom for upchannel remain fully/mostly available. It's not until your downchannel is really suffering that the upchannel starts to degrade.
Other DSL implimentations interlaced upchannel and downchannel frequencies throughout the allocated spectrum.
I bought DMG2, and I'm a new DM so I suppose I'm reasonably qualified to comment.
I used to role-play, back 20 years go, during the days of 1st Ed. Then I fell out of it. Now, a friend and I play again, using 3.5e rules. He's massively more experienced than I am. He's great at presenting material to me smoothly, and as a player, I quite like 3.5e ("we" started with 3.0) However, when I try to spin the table around and run a campaign trying to challenge and engage him, an experienced player, it's really not an easy task. The original DMG helps in terms of providing quick & dirty sample NPCs and tables, but the DMG2 covers more important matters: when and how to use those things. It's not so much a rulebook as a style book. And having read the thing, I found myself repeatedly saying "hey, I do that" or "hey, I SHOULD do that". DMG2 provides content that is valuable to me, the newbie DM. And I, surprisingly, am the target market. Go figure.
As an aside, on the topic of a moneygrab, I think you're missing the point. Those people who own 3.0e manuals don't HAVE to purchase 3.5e materials. There's enough similarity that adventures and other supplemental materials make complete sense to someone using 3.0e core rules. To people who don't already have 3.0e manuals, given that 3.5e offers more content at the same price-point, how can this possibly be construed as a moneygrab?
My point: if you, an experienced RPG player feel the compulsion to buy manuals you don't like or feel give you value, you've got a sickness, just like the guy who has to pick up the copy of Dark Side of the Moon with "new" cover-art, just because it exists.
The difference between 7200 and 5400 RPM may less than you would guess: above vs Maxline Plus II (250mb) is 10 vs 9 ms (transfer rate is same 133 MB/s for both).
This sort of assumption is what you get when you read the side of the box. The interface between the back of the drive and the controller interface on the motherboard is 133MB/s in both cases. The transfer rate from the surface of the platters to the heads, unfortunately will have rating lower than the interface rate. Said rating will be still lower on a 5400RPM drive. As it happens, most marketing literature only addresses a couple of stats, and platter-to-head isn't generally one of them.
When in comes to filtering at rest stops, it has little to do with whether people like porn or not. It comes down to the fact that many people don't want to pay for someone else to download porn or commit copyright infringement.
Perhaps it's high time that "many people" decide they don't want to pay for someone else to download religious indoctrination material.
Stop. Think. That's right. Pr0n is legal. So is pro-Christianity material. A trucker has every bit as much right to access erotic stories online as any religious citizen has to download scripture.
There is NO difference. Information is information, in the sense that this information is legal to distribute, posess, and use. While there are restrictions to distribution regarding age, it has already been argued successfully in this thread that most truckers are legally of age to have pr0n.
If the religious prudes are going to decide that it's time to prevent access to materials they find objectionable, perhaps it's time for the unwashed masses who obviously like pr0n and sin and other fun stuff to decide it's time to prevent access to religious content that leads to censorship.
This is something I fundamentally disagree with. A LCD has precisely one function: to accurately display the data being sent to it (within the stated specifications of the screen's ability to do so [ie. resolution, colour-accuracy, brightness etc.]) To have a pixel which fails to render the expected result is a flaw in the core purpose of the product. If anything deserves the term "defect", I'd think this is it.
Making an analogy with a car, where most failures in its core purpose are dangerous to life is difficult at best. Instead think of a roof on your house, which is perfect... excepting just one little leak, amounting to a tiny percentage of the square footage. Tell me as the water seeps into your drywall that your roof isn't defective.
I dispute this as well. Without there ever having been a choice to buy a "guaranteed 100% pixel version" of LCDs, there never was a choice. What really happened was that manufacturers decided that they didn't want to take a loss on manufactured items that weren't functionally flawless, and decided for us what is good enough. Mind you, I'll agree that if there was a significant dollar difference between "100% pixel" and "1-3 dead pixel" versions, most people would SEEK the cheaper version. I myself may be one of those people. But as long as there is one version, which may, or may not, be properly working, I will continue to insist that I physically end up with the better product.
> most customers probably wont even notice 1 or 2 dead pixels..happy 2005
Sorry, but that's just not true. "dead" pixels do one of two things. They either stick open or stick closed. The end result is that you have a dot on the screen that either is very obviously dark when the surrounding material is light, or vice-versa.
While this isn't terribly noticible when playing movies or video games, it is quite noticible when using most traditional 2D desktop apps. A dark pixel in the middle of your otherwise mostly white word-processing session becomes obvious.
Case-in-point is the support wires in Sony Trinitron monitors. Very, very fine horizontal lines at the 1/3 and 2/3 levels on the screen are used to hold a mesh in place which gives the Trinitron series a great display. Every Trinitron style screen I've ever sold, I got asked, immediately, what the story was with the lines. Most customers balked somewhat, but all eventually agreed to live with it.
Dead pixels are, in fact, defects. I don't intend to purchase a defective product out of the box. A product should be free of manufacturing faults for the period of its warranty, or be replaced/repaired. Cosmetic damage to say a bezel, or a power cord is trivial to ignore, but a dead pixel is a flaw in the display's ability to display accurately what it's told to.
As such, I will never buy a laptop or LCD without being allowed to first verify its display is without flaw. A retailer who refuses to allow me to confirm the proper functioning of the device before purchase/departure is a retailer who loses my business. Period.
What I've read on the Google help pages seems to indicate that they don't index punctuation or capitalization. When you search for something, your string is looked for within an existing index, and appropriate reference materials are shown. Including punctuation wouldn't result in any hits within their index, meaning no results.
Now, obviously, it is theoretically possible to do just about anything. But in this case, with the architecture they have in place, anyone ever doing what you're asking would require a full-text search through their multi-TB dataset, which I suspect is highly impractical.
My point is that as I understand it, Google has coded a number of shortcut tricks which allow reasonable search times, and full-text string-exact searching would prevent them from using those shortcuts, resulting in search times they don't seem to think is reasonable.
>You also don't need to watch 'The Day After Tomorrow' now.
Believe me, they didn't need to watch it before either.
On Win2k Server (the only Win2k with Remote Desktop/Terminal Services), Remote Desktop allows two RDP "sessions" plus the local console. No provision is made to EVER remote-control the console session. Remote sessions are limited to Administrator users.
/console and remote the console 0 session itself, if you so desire. This is optional.
/server:COMPUTERNAME) to shadow the console session of a logged-in user and leave them logged in and able to control the session as you do with PCAnywhere/VNC. This must be done from an existing Remote session (good for remoting to a customer's server, then shadowing a desktop to work on things). There is a Group Policy setting (SP2 ADMs, folks) that lets you set permissions-requirements, so the user is not required to ALLOW you to do this.
On Win2k3 Server, as in Win2k, you are limited to two simultaneous RDP sessions, but you are now able to
These two above are _without_ having purchased any Terminal Services CALS or any additional software.
Finally, with WinXP SP2, it is entirely possible to configure (via a registry setting) the OS to allow a RDP session separate from the console 0 session. There is significant discussion over the topic of if this feature made it into SP2 release, or was pulled in late beta. I can say that I have seen it work on a SP2 release system. There may be specific caveats such as the PC not being in a domain, and having "Fast User Switching" enabled (as the one, peculiar PC where this happened to me would have been configured), but the functionality is definitely there.
Finally with regards to WinXP, given another system, it is possible to use the command-line shadow command (ex. shadow 0
The point is that there is much more to the Remote Desktop remote administrator and XP RDC functionality than meets the eye if you merely click the icon.
in such a way that a short filename (microso~1.txt et al) is persistently perserved for old DOS apps.
Really? I always figured the shortname was preserved so I wouldn't have to type the idiotic filenames folks save their crap as when I'm working on the command-line. That and have to back-track to insert quotations when folks use syntactically reserved characters like SPACE in their filenames.
copy "the accounting spreadsheet that I created while high on diet pills that contains the budget for six out of seven of our shell companies from august to november of the year of the rat that I got off www.i_am_a_jerkoff.com.xls" a:\
Give me a break. 8.3 was, and remains reasonable. While I'd advocate allowing as much as 12.3 without spaces or additional dots, I'm sure the open-source crowd with kernel 2.5.7.102 build 5 are going to disagree.