Application designed following guidelines of win95 (e.g. Office) will work properly in Vista and will not even require folder/registry virtualization Office 2000 has LUA (Limited User Account) bugs in it. The details are in my notes at work, but I remember one of them is if the "Photo Editor" application. If it can't write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\something\or\other, it can't open any files.
MSKB 260151 has details. I particularly like this gem from that KB article:
Microsoft Photo Editor is a minor auxiliary application that does not meet the requirements of the Windows 2000 Logo compliant program. Core Microsoft Office applications do not depend on this application for their functionality. In other words, Office fails the Windows 2000 Logo requirements, but Microsoft gave it approval anyway. One nice thing about being the one making the rules is that one can also make your own exceptions.
They rarely, if ever, do anything pro open source unless they're forced or they see a large benefit to their platforms As opposed to, say, Red Hat or Canonical, which produces so much software that doesn't benefit them.
"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." -- Babylon 5
Not that I think Microsoft is anyone's friend, just pointing out that that particular argument isn't really very good.
TFA said the typically-used plastic on these printers is PLA, polylactose acid, which is made from lactose, an ingredient in milk, human muscles, and various other biological sources... RepRap ink is people!
Dell - will argue to the enth degree about predicted drive failures alarms from their raid controllers... we just call them dead now so they'll send replacements. The drives take about two days to show up which is about enough time for the drive to finally fail. I guess you didn't buy a service contract, then. We always buy the "Gold" level contracts when buying Dell. For servers, that means on-site parts and service within four hours, and they've never failed to deliver. I was once working a consulting job in Boston, and the parts were at the door within 20 minutes -- before I got off the phone with Dell.
Dell makes this all quite clear when buying their stuff. Indeed, I think for servers, they select the mid-level contract by default, so you actually had to go out of your way to downgrade the level of service you were choosing.
Objective-C was around long before Apple took it up as the language of choice for Cocoa, and is also used for GNUstep and other OpenStep-derived environments. Well, now, I don't know much about OC, but I do know that NeXT was Steve Jobs's baby -- Apple Version 2.0. GNUstep is just a clone of NeXTSTEP. So pointing to them as examples of how OC isn't an Apple-only thing does more to suggest that OC is indeed an Apple-only thing.
And I just found this Wikipedia article, which claims that NeXT Inc. acquired the rights to OC from its original owner. And Apple, of course, has acquired NeXT.
Objective-C is most certainly not a "proprietary language". It is not as popular and widely known as C/C++ or Java, to be sure, but it is, as far as I understand it, completely open. I know basically nothing about Objective-C, but I was curious, so I went searching. I can find no information on any standardization of Objective-C. And this FAQ claims there is no such standard, that the only references are vendor implementations. That makes it as "open" as Visual Basic (Microsoft) or Object Pascal (Borland). In other words, not very.
This sub-thread cracks me up. Wow, different people get different results.
News flash: Internet not really one giant network, but a bunch of little ones connected together. Performance varies by source, destination, intermediate route, and concurrent demand. This discovery expected to cause imminent death of the 'net.
(Consider the obligatory "series of tube" joke already made.)
We hit a clusterfuck a couple weeks ago; one of the PST I use got over 10gig. Just because a PST ate itself doesn't mean you exceeded a particular size limit. Outlook stores are not the most stable things even at the best of times. PST corruption happens. That's one of the reasons PST=BAD. And large PSTs are more likely to get corrupted, just because more data means more opportunity for something to go bang.
There is a big battery in the ONT. How long it lasts is a function of what kind of phones you have and how long you talk on them. Somewhere between 8hrs and a week. You got a reference on that week figure? Everything I've read says ONT batteries last a few hours.
in Boston... I can't get FiOS. You think that's bad, try living in New Hampshire. I know people who can't even get Verizon DSL, let alone FiOS. And something like a year ago, Verizon halted all new fiber infrastructure deployments in NH. If FiOS isn't already available in the area, it never will be. They've neglected the copper infrastructure to the point where it's falling apart in places, and now they want to bail. They want to get out of the entire state -- everything, FTTP, DSL, even POTS -- and sell the mess they made to FairPoint for a pretty penny. And our fine PUC is okay with that.
Boston is being held hostage? At least that means you're wanted. Northern New England is just being abandoned by Verizon.
Exchange 2000 and 2003 are pretty similar, and SIS works the same in both. In Exchange 2007, from what I've read, newly-created Information Stores only do SIS on attachments, not message bodies. So if I send a 20 KB message with a 100 MB attachment to five people, it uses 20 KB * 5 = 100 KB + 100 MB, or 100.1 MB. Still a worthwhile gain, in my book, although I think Microsoft's decision to just drop SIS support for bodies is typical of their arrogance.
I don't know about about Louts Notes, but given that it's the "other big player" in the commercial email market, I was thinking it would do SIS, too. From what you say, I guess that's not cut-and-dry in Notes land, either.:)
One is ESE, Extensible Storage Engine, also called "Jet Blue". I think this was invented for Exchange. ESE is also used for Active Directory, Windows Desktop Search, and various other systemy things (like the DNS and WINS databases). ESE databases typically use an.EDB extension and have transaction logs in separate.LOG files.
The second engine is Jet Red. This is the one used by MS Access, and typically had an.MDB extension. Jet Had has been around forever, in Access and in MDAC (the embedded database technology that's part of Windows and/or Visual Studio, depending on who you asked and what year it was).
The third engine is the one used by MS SQL. It uses an.MDF file extension. Microsoft bought it from Sybase, along with the rest of what became MS SQL Server.
There was supposedly an effort inside Microsoft to adopt the MS-SQL engine as the storage backend for Exchange, but they found it didn't work very well for that. (Same situation as with MySQL and it's various database engines: One size does not fit all.)
The Microsoft party line is that eventually, Jet Red will go away, to be replaced by the MS-SQL engine. So eventually MS Access will end up using the MS-SQL engine. This may be here in Access 2007; I haven't been keeping track.
"Jet" may be an acronym for "Joint Engine Technology", or that may be a backroynm, and the word "Jet" was just used because it sounds cool.
And what is the default client to access Exchange? No competent Exchange admin uses PST files for anything. In the Exchange admin community, the shorthand explanation is "PST=BAD". Read about it, if you're so inclined.
I suppose you could cite incompetent admins, but an incompetent admin will always lead to data loss, sooner or later.
Microsoft deserves blame for the lack of limit checking in the PST code in Outlook, and the data loss which follows, but that is a problem which only affects stand-alone Outlook installations, not well-run Exchange systems.
it is not because it is a superior mail server. Exchange actually has some selling points when coupled with Outlook. I don't think I'd call it worth the costs in the big picture -- you can get much of the same 20% that people want using more lightweight, easier to manage, Free and free software. But Exchange does have some unique features. It's a resource hog, and touchy if mis-handled, but it's not entirely without merit.
What exactly is the safe load level for a PST file? There's been lots of replies to this, but I figured I'd organize a coherent and correct one.
Outlook has PST (Personal Store) and OST (Offline Store) files. PSTs are basically just local mail folder collections. OSTs are used to maintain local replicates of Exchange server mailboxes (so you can still use your email even if you're on the road). In Outlook 2003 "Cached Mode", Outlook also uses OSTs even when connected to the Exchange server, and synchronizes to the server in the background.
PST and OST files -- I'll call them "Outlook stores" -- are both built around the same file format. There are two variants. The original format, which Microsoft sometimes called "ANSI", is limited to 2 Gi byte total size, and 64 Ki items per table. The table limit affects the number of items you can have in a folder, as well as the total number of folders you can have in a PST. (Outlook stores from Outlook 97 and earlier also had a table limit of 16 Ki items, but could be auto-upgraded in place to large tables in newer Outlook versions.)
These store limits affected OST and PST alike, so even if you had a nice, capable Exchange server, you could still encounter problems with Outlook store limits.
With Outlook 2003, Microsoft introduced a new Outlook store format. It's sometimes called the "Unicode" format. I'm aware of no documented limits on the file format. I'm sure there are some, but Microsoft doesn't document them. Microsoft didn't document the ANSI PST limits until long after they started causing data loss, either.
In versions of Outlook prior to 2002, if you exceeded the store format limits, Outlook would give no immediate indication. The file would keep getting bigger, as the software didn't have checks for the limits. But it would corrupting things, too. In short, silently loosing data.
Eventually, the Outlook store would get so damaged it would stop working. Microsoft provided a utility to truncate the file to 2 GiB to make it work again, loosing more data in the process.
In Outlook 2003, along with the Unicode format, Microsoft added a parameter at which it would consider a Unicode store "full", even though the format can keep going. The stock limit is 20 GiB; you can increase it with a registry tweak.
"ANSI PST" does not mean PST is a standard file format; that refers to the character sets/encodings the file uses.
Exchange Server uses an entirely different on-disk storage format, called EDB. There are technical limits, but they're insanely huge (16 TiB per store, 5 stores per database group). Exchange starts to run out of hardware resources (memory, mainly) long before you hit the file size limits. There are license-based size limits in some versions/editions of Exchange. 16 GiB in 2000 Standard, and 75 GiB in 2000 Standard SP2.
Most email systems are poorly factored information because they duplicate a message for every last reader of a given message. What you describe is called Single Instance Storage (SIS). Somewhat ironically -- given what the White House is apparently using -- Microsoft Exchange is one of the few email systems on the market which does this.
When you crash a B-2 bomber does the government dock your paycheck? Burke: This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it. Ripley: "They can bill me. (Aliens )
Linux users will be able to use it [Silverlight] soon, although I don't know about licensing and patents. Yah, and Linux is also the first platform targeted for the release of Duke Nukem Forever, too.
What I was taking exception to was the idea that just because one can order the external peripherals, that's the same as having them built-in. In that case, you didn't make your point very well. What you actually said was:
Generally speaking, it's safe to assume that anyone wanting a super-mobile computer like an Air or this ThinkPad doesn't want to have wires and dongles they have to carry in their bag and/or hanging off the computer. And my point was that I never carry the stupid thing away from home. Okay, do you mean to imply that you actually don't mind encumbering your super-mobile computer with a variety of wires and equipment hanging off it? If so, why bother with the super-mobile in the first place? It's basically tied down to the work surface it's on at that point.
...I work in a corporate IT environment... Great, but not all ultra-portable users are corporate or business users. I'm fully aware of that. I only mentioned it because you were remarking on what I might use my optical drive for. You seemed to imply that the primary use of an optical drive is to install software on the local computer.
... the issue with the thumb drives is a general prohibition on uncontrolled magnetic media - for classified data. None of this stuff is classified or even FOUO. These laptops are not approved for classified data. But we encounter situations where floppies and CDs are somehow okay but USB flash drives are not. I actually suspect this is just local jurisdiction security people banning things instead of understanding the technology and managing risk, but we can't do anything to change them. We're just a measly subcontractor. And again, this isn't really related to the point I was originally making, but hey, it wouldn't be Slashdot if we stayed on one topic.:)
An even smaller percentage know that it actually stands for "Vertical Helical Scan," a technical acronym which describes the physical tape format and transport. I believe "helical scan" (used in VHS) is not vertical but diagonal. The read/write heads are at a diagonal to the tape, and spin to bring new sections of the tape under the heads more quickly. Hence "helical", meaning spiral. So why would "VHS" stand for something it isn't?
I want the smallest, lightest laptop that I can reasonably use. Righty. So, if your laptop has stuff hanging off it, does that make it small and light? If you have to drag wires and dongles around with it, does that help your goal? My "assumption" remark was about that mess, not about the presence or absence of an optical drive. And I'd lay odds it holds true for you as well. What I was taking exception to was the idea that just because one can order the external peripherals, that's the same as having them built-in.
There is no good reason for me to need an optical drive away from home. Good for you.
Do you travel about the country (or even your town) randomly installing software at each stop? I rarely use the optical drive for installation of software on any computer. (I work in a corporate IT environment, where most software is installed over the network -- even the OS.) I use the optical drive mainly for data interchange, and occasionally for generating install discs for other computers in the field.
The users at work use it for data interchange and watching DVD movies. As far as they're concerned, the whole point of them having a laptop with them on the airplane is to watch movies. Decadent, perhaps, but it's not my position to judge. And I'm pretty sure you need an optical drive to watch a movie on an optical disc. (If you're going to bring up ripping, please go back and read the "work" part again. Illegal activities are Not Allowed. (Whether ripping should be considered illegal is also irrelevant -- right now, it is. My employer is not in the business of fighting somebody else's legal battles.))
If I need a piece of your data, I have a thumb drive and I bet you do too. Thumb drives are great, but there's still a lot of optical disc usage going on, especially in US DoD circles, where they somehow see writable optical discs as different than writable USB flash drives. (I think that's bogus, too, but I don't make the rules.)
If I really need to use an optical disk while roaming, then it sounds like I am in the 5 lbs sub-notebook market (MacBook), and not the 3 lbs ultra-portable market (Air). Or perhaps you are in the 3.12 lbs ultra-portable-with-an-optical-drive market (this ThinkPad). Eh?
"I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read." Except for ending. Brin must have been smoking some pretty good stuff to come up with that. O_o
And, well looky there, you can configure the machine to include those features.
I think you mean "you can configure the box the machine ships in to include those features". Because all those devices are external to the machine.
Generally speaking, it's safe to assume that anyone wanting a super-mobile computer like an Air or this ThinkPad doesn't want to have wires and dongles they have to carry in their bag and/or hanging off the computer. I know with the Dell's we buy at work, the fact that the Latitude D400 series super-mobile only has an external optical drive is often a deal-breaker for the users. They'd rather a bigger/heavier unit that includes everything in one piece.
Slashdot Mirror
MSKB 260151 has details. I particularly like this gem from that KB article: Microsoft Photo Editor is a minor auxiliary application that does not meet the requirements of the Windows 2000 Logo compliant program. Core Microsoft Office applications do not depend on this application for their functionality. In other words, Office fails the Windows 2000 Logo requirements, but Microsoft gave it approval anyway. One nice thing about being the one making the rules is that one can also make your own exceptions.
FYI, "To Serve Man" was a short story written by Damon Knight before it became a Twilight Zone episode. I remember reading it in the sixth grade.
"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." -- Babylon 5
Not that I think Microsoft is anyone's friend, just pointing out that that particular argument isn't really very good.
Dell makes this all quite clear when buying their stuff. Indeed, I think for servers, they select the mid-level contract by default, so you actually had to go out of your way to downgrade the level of service you were choosing.
You got what you asked for, and now you complain.
And I just found this Wikipedia article, which claims that NeXT Inc. acquired the rights to OC from its original owner. And Apple, of course, has acquired NeXT.
And, hmmm, yes, the USPTO confirms Apple owns the trademark on Objective-C. So legally speaking, Apple does indeed own OC.
Do you have any sources to counter the information I'm finding?
Am I wrong?
Blame Apple? I didn't think we could do that, here.
This sub-thread cracks me up. Wow, different people get different results.
News flash: Internet not really one giant network, but a bunch of little ones connected together. Performance varies by source, destination, intermediate route, and concurrent demand. This discovery expected to cause imminent death of the 'net.
(Consider the obligatory "series of tube" joke already made.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=fios+ONT+battery
Boston is being held hostage? At least that means you're wanted. Northern New England is just being abandoned by Verizon.
Exchange 2000 and 2003 are pretty similar, and SIS works the same in both. In Exchange 2007, from what I've read, newly-created Information Stores only do SIS on attachments, not message bodies. So if I send a 20 KB message with a 100 MB attachment to five people, it uses 20 KB * 5 = 100 KB + 100 MB, or 100.1 MB. Still a worthwhile gain, in my book, although I think Microsoft's decision to just drop SIS support for bodies is typical of their arrogance.
:)
I don't know about about Louts Notes, but given that it's the "other big player" in the commercial email market, I was thinking it would do SIS, too. From what you say, I guess that's not cut-and-dry in Notes land, either.
Microsoft has three major database engines.
.EDB extension and have transaction logs in separate .LOG files.
.MDB extension. Jet Had has been around forever, in Access and in MDAC (the embedded database technology that's part of Windows and/or Visual Studio, depending on who you asked and what year it was).
.MDF file extension. Microsoft bought it from Sybase, along with the rest of what became MS SQL Server.
One is ESE, Extensible Storage Engine, also called "Jet Blue". I think this was invented for Exchange. ESE is also used for Active Directory, Windows Desktop Search, and various other systemy things (like the DNS and WINS databases). ESE databases typically use an
The second engine is Jet Red. This is the one used by MS Access, and typically had an
The third engine is the one used by MS SQL. It uses an
There was supposedly an effort inside Microsoft to adopt the MS-SQL engine as the storage backend for Exchange, but they found it didn't work very well for that. (Same situation as with MySQL and it's various database engines: One size does not fit all.)
The Microsoft party line is that eventually, Jet Red will go away, to be replaced by the MS-SQL engine. So eventually MS Access will end up using the MS-SQL engine. This may be here in Access 2007; I haven't been keeping track.
"Jet" may be an acronym for "Joint Engine Technology", or that may be a backroynm, and the word "Jet" was just used because it sounds cool.
I suppose you could cite incompetent admins, but an incompetent admin will always lead to data loss, sooner or later.
Microsoft deserves blame for the lack of limit checking in the PST code in Outlook, and the data loss which follows, but that is a problem which only affects stand-alone Outlook installations, not well-run Exchange systems. it is not because it is a superior mail server. Exchange actually has some selling points when coupled with Outlook. I don't think I'd call it worth the costs in the big picture -- you can get much of the same 20% that people want using more lightweight, easier to manage, Free and free software. But Exchange does have some unique features. It's a resource hog, and touchy if mis-handled, but it's not entirely without merit.
Outlook has PST (Personal Store) and OST (Offline Store) files. PSTs are basically just local mail folder collections. OSTs are used to maintain local replicates of Exchange server mailboxes (so you can still use your email even if you're on the road). In Outlook 2003 "Cached Mode", Outlook also uses OSTs even when connected to the Exchange server, and synchronizes to the server in the background.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208480
PST and OST files -- I'll call them "Outlook stores" -- are both built around the same file format. There are two variants. The original format, which Microsoft sometimes called "ANSI", is limited to 2 Gi byte total size, and 64 Ki items per table. The table limit affects the number of items you can have in a folder, as well as the total number of folders you can have in a PST. (Outlook stores from Outlook 97 and earlier also had a table limit of 16 Ki items, but could be auto-upgraded in place to large tables in newer Outlook versions.)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197430
These store limits affected OST and PST alike, so even if you had a nice, capable Exchange server, you could still encounter problems with Outlook store limits.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288283
With Outlook 2003, Microsoft introduced a new Outlook store format. It's sometimes called the "Unicode" format. I'm aware of no documented limits on the file format. I'm sure there are some, but Microsoft doesn't document them. Microsoft didn't document the ANSI PST limits until long after they started causing data loss, either.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336
In versions of Outlook prior to 2002, if you exceeded the store format limits, Outlook would give no immediate indication. The file would keep getting bigger, as the software didn't have checks for the limits. But it would corrupting things, too. In short, silently loosing data.
Eventually, the Outlook store would get so damaged it would stop working. Microsoft provided a utility to truncate the file to 2 GiB to make it work again, loosing more data in the process.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088
In Outlook 2002, Microsoft added some code to check the limits of the store, and warn/stop if you reach them.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305108
In Outlook 2003, along with the Unicode format, Microsoft added a parameter at which it would consider a Unicode store "full", even though the format can keep going. The stock limit is 20 GiB; you can increase it with a registry tweak.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925/
"ANSI PST" does not mean PST is a standard file format; that refers to the character sets/encodings the file uses.
Exchange Server uses an entirely different on-disk storage format, called EDB. There are technical limits, but they're insanely huge (16 TiB per store, 5 stores per database group). Exchange starts to run out of hardware resources (memory, mainly) long before you hit the file size limits. There are license-based size limits in some versions/editions of Exchange. 16 GiB in 2000 Standard, and 75 GiB in 2000 Standard SP2.
Ripley: "They can bill me.
(Aliens )
I think I speak for everyone here when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Over.
...I work in a corporate IT environment... Great, but not all ultra-portable users are corporate or business users. I'm fully aware of that. I only mentioned it because you were remarking on what I might use my optical drive for. You seemed to imply that the primary use of an optical drive is to install software on the local computer.
... the issue with the thumb drives is a general prohibition on uncontrolled magnetic media - for classified data. None of this stuff is classified or even FOUO. These laptops are not approved for classified data. But we encounter situations where floppies and CDs are somehow okay but USB flash drives are not. I actually suspect this is just local jurisdiction security people banning things instead of understanding the technology and managing risk, but we can't do anything to change them. We're just a measly subcontractor. And again, this isn't really related to the point I was originally making, but hey, it wouldn't be Slashdot if we stayed on one topic.The users at work use it for data interchange and watching DVD movies. As far as they're concerned, the whole point of them having a laptop with them on the airplane is to watch movies. Decadent, perhaps, but it's not my position to judge. And I'm pretty sure you need an optical drive to watch a movie on an optical disc. (If you're going to bring up ripping, please go back and read the "work" part again. Illegal activities are Not Allowed. (Whether ripping should be considered illegal is also irrelevant -- right now, it is. My employer is not in the business of fighting somebody else's legal battles.)) If I need a piece of your data, I have a thumb drive and I bet you do too. Thumb drives are great, but there's still a lot of optical disc usage going on, especially in US DoD circles, where they somehow see writable optical discs as different than writable USB flash drives. (I think that's bogus, too, but I don't make the rules.) If I really need to use an optical disk while roaming, then it sounds like I am in the 5 lbs sub-notebook market (MacBook), and not the 3 lbs ultra-portable market (Air). Or perhaps you are in the 3.12 lbs ultra-portable-with-an-optical-drive market (this ThinkPad). Eh?
"I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read."
Except for ending. Brin must have been smoking some pretty good stuff to come up with that. O_o
I think you mean "you can configure the box the machine ships in to include those features". Because all those devices are external to the machine.
Generally speaking, it's safe to assume that anyone wanting a super-mobile computer like an Air or this ThinkPad doesn't want to have wires and dongles they have to carry in their bag and/or hanging off the computer. I know with the Dell's we buy at work, the fact that the Latitude D400 series super-mobile only has an external optical drive is often a deal-breaker for the users. They'd rather a bigger/heavier unit that includes everything in one piece.