Yes and no. There is no VB.NET compiler for Mono, but you can compile on Windows and run a VB.NET app on Mono (with some limitations... VB.NET apps have a minor library dependancy issue which I'm not sure is ported under Mono yet).
I've heard there is a VB.NET compiler in development, but I don't know its status.
When I said OEM agreement, i was talking about MS's agreements with OEM's that the courts ruled illegal. Not EULA's. We're talking physical, signed contracts that lawyers have reviewed.
Not necessarily. Simply being a widely accepted contract doesn't mean the contract is legal. I'm not saying the GPL isn't, just that your argument is faulty.
As an example, Microsoft's OEM contracts were widely accepted. That didn't mean they were legal.
Maybe. But it appears the case was settled, not because of the GPL, but because the SAE couldn't legally lay copyright to code that was already copyrighted, GPL or not. It doesn't seem like it supports the GPL at all.
In any event, the article submitter (and Groklaw) claim this is a test of the GPL in court. It's not. There was no ruling.
Well, actually, there are some reasons why MS may not choose to support CSS.
Security seems to be their #1 priority. You're not seeing Gartner and the FBI and others telling people to stop using IE because it doesn't support CSS. You see them saying "don't use IE because it's insecure".
As such, Security is most likely at the very core of what they're doing. Lack of CSS, while MS clearly knows it's shortcomings, isn't going to send users to another platform. (Well, it might, but MS clearly doesn't believe that).
By that argument, Microsoft being in the BSA doesn't mean MS supports raiding corporations based on "tips", or that a "think tank" that is funded by MS isn't a MS mouthpiece.
I completely agree. But that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore who wrote the message. Do you ignore who the author of the book was? Or who wrote the article? I don't lend everyone the same credence. It is very different for the criminal to claim he is innocent than for his supposed victim to claim he is innocent. The author makes all the difference.
In the case of opinion, you're correct that the messenger is important. Deciding whether or not you agree with opinion, is in part a judgement call based on how well you respect or trust the source.
In the case of alleged facts, only the facts are important. Not the messenger. If the facts are bogus, so is the argument. If the facts are true, the argument is true, regardless of the messenger.
Now conclusions, is a little bit of a different story. A conclusion is often times an opinion based on facts, so you get a little of both.
Re:Latest Fedora-development has gcc 4.0
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I thought Red Hat had learned their lesson with the RH7/GCC3.96 debacle. I guess not.
While it's true that the GUI shells out to the compiler, there are hooks in the compiler to make certain operations more atomic from the GUI perspective. One really nice feature is the ability to pass multiple source files on the command line so that a new process need not be created for each source file (compile one file, exit, spawn new process cycle).
This makes it really easy for the GUI build system to drastically improve performance of the compile. I wish GCC would develop an option to do something similar.
I guess that depends on how things are configured. While I agree that it's unlikely that data from the specific time period only was missing, there are lots of reasons why emails in general would not be backed up.
1) If emails are deleted as they are read, then during a weekly or daily backup, the emails will not exist to be backed up.
2) If the email is downloaded to the local machines and off the server, no email on the server to back up. Of course there are "agents" and other kinds of ways to insure local backups take place, but in my experience these aren't used all that often.
3) A deliberate data retention policy, where email is not saved longer than x number of days. While this may be shady, it's commonplace in many corporations.
Now, again, I think it's odd that they can recover email from before and after, but not during... but there are legitimate reasons why mail would be missing.
Sometimes, having too many features does cause problems. When users stumble across them by accident, press the wrong key, or whatever. I
Besides, this behavior interferes with all kinds of other behviors. For example, several editors use Alt-Drag to do vertical highlight and select, for example.
The fact of the matter is, this kind of thing is best left to an add-on so that memory and system resources are not wasted by a feature most will not use.
Your configuration file has lots of "pages" as well, as soon as something scrolls off the screen, how do you remember what was on that previous screen? Same argument.
GUI based configuration is usually more intuitive, all the possible options are listed right there. Text configuration files can also have all the options listed, but it's not very often that this is the case in my experience. GUI's by their very nature require all those options to be listed. Now, knowing what that option does is maybe a little different argument, but at least it's a step up.
My point is not that GUI's are better or worse than text configs, but each has their advantages and disadvantages. For example, with text files, how do you know which text file to edit? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not.
It doesn't even display the freaking start dir of the search! If you have two of them active, which is which?
I'm not sure what copy of XP you're using, by mine shows quite clearly "- Looking in " during the search.
After the search is over, it doesn't, but you can infer that from the search results that show the path of the results.
Guess what: instead of starting your browse from your original start dir, it starts from the top level of "My computer" and your physical drives. Fucking bullshit. Is microsoft paid by the click?
I'm a little confused about your argument. Chances are, you're not going to want to start your new search from somewhere below your current search, because your current search will have already included it. Using your method would be MORE or just as much work for most people in my opinion, because now they have to navigate up the tree instead of down it.
And don't get me started on the decision to by default exclude files from search results based on their extension.
Uh.. it doesn't. It does, by default, exclude hidden and system files (Those with the +H and +S bits set) but it doesn't exclude files by extension. You can tell it to, but by default it's set to "All files and folders".
Apart from the fact that you just contradicted yourself (How can you grab anywhere with the alt key to move the window if grabbing a quadrant resizes it?) This kind of thing is very unintuitive and frankly, most users are not the two fisted power user that you are.
They can't remember when to right click to do things, double click everything (including buttons) because they're not sure when to double and when to single click, can't figure out how to pick up the mouse and move it to gain more mouse room. And don't even get me started on the Mac ctrl-menu's.
Yes, MS's UI's are "dumbed down" for the average user, but that's what makes it possible for the average user to learn them easily. A power user can change the UI to do much of what he wants (including your alt-drag functionality if they want) by any number of third party utilities.
The part most power users seem to forget is that if you don't know what you're doing, it should be easy to use. If you do, you have enough knowledge to change it.
It requires that your run TS to get a real multi-user environment? So I'd have to install WServer and TS and loopback the terminal connection on every client to get real multi-user support?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What does "loop back" supposed to mean in this context? You mean multiple users from the console? Simply use "RunAs". It's the equivelent of Sudo.
I'm talking about a clear division between system, shared user, and user. The last I checked, Windows sticks system and user binaries and libraries in the same folders together. In order to enforce a standard profile, you have to go through some bizarre process with altering a Default User profile. There is no easy way to go back and enforce the default profile without using some custom script or something like Deep Freeze.
Again, i'm not sure what you're geting at. What does "enforce a standard profile" mean in this context? How is a default profile "bizarre" where something like skel is not? You need only copy files to the default user home directory, or load that users registry hive and import the changed settings.
Forgive my ignorace, how does one do this from the shell, either with Explorer or a CLI command? Does this function allow me to prevent the mounting of selected volumes? Can I mount network shares on the local filesystem?
Lookup mountvol.exe
No, you can't mount network shares. that's what Distributed File System is for.
You can only do this to the native registry that is currently open on your boot disk.
No, not true. You can edit any registry you like by opening the hive. You can also export any registry you like.
You cannot log-on as one user and edit the configuration for another user's profile.
If you have administrative permissions, you can. It's very easy to do, either in the GUI or at a command line.
This also is in one-direction, I'm not working with "The Registry", I'm working with an text export. I can't successfully make changes or repairs unless I can import it back. In order to do that, the machine has to be functional enough to allow me to do this. I can't edit a foreign registry on a functioning machine.
Duh! Of course you can re-import. Look up the reg.exe tool.
The server resource kits are not, and have never been free to copy to the best of my knowledge.
Not the written documentation, but you can download the tools. See Resource kit Tools
This script isn't included with NT or 2000. It appears to be included with XP Pro and WS2003, but I can't find the code anywhere. How am I supposed to read the logs on a system without a scripting host?
NT isn't really supported anymore, but you can always install WSH by installing IE4+. The code is in the script, just copy it from an XP or 2003 box.
Yes, there are some things you can only do from within a running system, but then there are not that many of them.
It's not like Linux hasn't had it's major share of problems in this regard either. Hardware 3D support has been a nightmare. Installing nvidia or ati drivers has been a pain until very recently when some distro's have started doing it for you.
People don't just upgrade overnight. It's going to take longhorn several years to become as entrenched as XP now is. In fact, it probably won't be until the next version of Windows is about to be released that Longhorn may become the majority or Windows boxes.
That means, if they want people to develop for WinFS, Avalon, Indigo, etc.. they best make it available for XP and 2003.
My prediction is that Longhorn will be like Windows 2000. It will be adopted by the serious people, but most users will skip it, waiting for the next version.
Actually, there is precedence here. Many years ago, in 1995, MS laid out a plan for new versions of windows. On of those was called Nashville, and was originally dubbed Windows 96.
Nashville became IE4 instead, and was released for NT and Windows as an add-on instead. This seems like more of that.
WinFS was likely taken out of Longhorn because they needed to decouple it from the longhorn ship schedule in order to make it available for XP and Windows 2003 as well.
Yes, I can think of a number of things MS has been ahead of Linux on (though not necessarily ahead of others, such as MacOS and Commercial Unix). And again, Linux is starting to catch up on this stuff.
* Font rendering. This is no surprise since MS and Apple worked together on TrueType.
* Handicapped Accessibility
* Security Infrastructure (Don't laugh, the Windows security infrastructure is very advanced, just that many apps, including many windows supplied ones don't use it they way they should have). I'm talking about things like security descriptors on every kernel object. The original NT infrastructure was very well designed, but MS took a lot of shortcuts and didn't completely utilize it.
Many of the things you see as MS catching up to Linux was largely MS making use of stuff that was already in NT. Multi-user was always there. The Windows subsystem, however, had problems utilizing it effectively. NT also had SMP long before Linux did, and a really long time before it was actually useable and efficient on Linux (though yes, commerical Unix had it a lot longer than either).
It's true that MS had a long way to catch up to mainframe level stuff, like clustering, message queing, etc... But this kind of stuff, though available on Linux for a while, has been largely experimental until the last few years.
Since you want to be pedantic, none of the things you mention are true.
First, while XP has a license enforced single-user nature, the server versions are all truly multi-user and can have multiple people logged in through terminal services simultaneously.
Second, NTFS does support arbitrary mount points via junction points. You can mount any volume in a directory anywhere on the system.
Third, the registry can be exported to a human readable file and reimported from the command line. Further, it's not a single file, but broken up into multiple files (about 5 or 6, not counting individual user hives)
Fourth, while many of the admin tools are not part of the base install, they are downloadable from MS for free in the form of the resource kit. Further, WSH allows scripting of all that stuff and has for quite a long time.
Fifth, I'm not quite sure what you mean about multiple sets of kernel drivers.
Sixth, log files can be exported to plain text very easily. You can also use the vbscript Eventquery.vbs to view event log entries.
While it's true that there are languages that are not supported. It's not true that you can only have a single localized version. There are multiple language versions of windows where you can install the languages you like that are available. It's called MUI, or Multi-language user input. check it out.
I didn't use the word term GNU. I was speaking of things like KDE, and the majority of the 10's of thousands of packages that are available on most distro's.
What features are missing? At least which ones that you can't add on with third party tools?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. There is no VB.NET compiler for Mono, but you can compile on Windows and run a VB.NET app on Mono (with some limitations... VB.NET apps have a minor library dependancy issue which I'm not sure is ported under Mono yet).
I've heard there is a VB.NET compiler in development, but I don't know its status.
When I said OEM agreement, i was talking about MS's agreements with OEM's that the courts ruled illegal. Not EULA's. We're talking physical, signed contracts that lawyers have reviewed.
You are forgetting that agreeing to a license is accepting it. As such, being widely "used" is the same as being widely "accepted".
Not necessarily. Simply being a widely accepted contract doesn't mean the contract is legal. I'm not saying the GPL isn't, just that your argument is faulty.
As an example, Microsoft's OEM contracts were widely accepted. That didn't mean they were legal.
Maybe. But it appears the case was settled, not because of the GPL, but because the SAE couldn't legally lay copyright to code that was already copyrighted, GPL or not. It doesn't seem like it supports the GPL at all.
In any event, the article submitter (and Groklaw) claim this is a test of the GPL in court. It's not. There was no ruling.
I hate to seem inflamatory, but it's pretty clearn from the article text that Flicr is an RSS Feed agragator. Is your inference engine broken?
Well, actually, there are some reasons why MS may not choose to support CSS.
Security seems to be their #1 priority. You're not seeing Gartner and the FBI and others telling people to stop using IE because it doesn't support CSS. You see them saying "don't use IE because it's insecure".
As such, Security is most likely at the very core of what they're doing. Lack of CSS, while MS clearly knows it's shortcomings, isn't going to send users to another platform. (Well, it might, but MS clearly doesn't believe that).
By that argument, Microsoft being in the BSA doesn't mean MS supports raiding corporations based on "tips", or that a "think tank" that is funded by MS isn't a MS mouthpiece.
I completely agree. But that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore who wrote the message. Do you ignore who the author of the book was? Or who wrote the article? I don't lend everyone the same credence. It is very different for the criminal to claim he is innocent than for his supposed victim to claim he is innocent. The author makes all the difference.
In the case of opinion, you're correct that the messenger is important. Deciding whether or not you agree with opinion, is in part a judgement call based on how well you respect or trust the source.
In the case of alleged facts, only the facts are important. Not the messenger. If the facts are bogus, so is the argument. If the facts are true, the argument is true, regardless of the messenger.
Now conclusions, is a little bit of a different story. A conclusion is often times an opinion based on facts, so you get a little of both.
I thought Red Hat had learned their lesson with the RH7/GCC3.96 debacle. I guess not.
While it's true that the GUI shells out to the compiler, there are hooks in the compiler to make certain operations more atomic from the GUI perspective. One really nice feature is the ability to pass multiple source files on the command line so that a new process need not be created for each source file (compile one file, exit, spawn new process cycle).
This makes it really easy for the GUI build system to drastically improve performance of the compile. I wish GCC would develop an option to do something similar.
I guess that depends on how things are configured. While I agree that it's unlikely that data from the specific time period only was missing, there are lots of reasons why emails in general would not be backed up.
1) If emails are deleted as they are read, then during a weekly or daily backup, the emails will not exist to be backed up.
2) If the email is downloaded to the local machines and off the server, no email on the server to back up. Of course there are "agents" and other kinds of ways to insure local backups take place, but in my experience these aren't used all that often.
3) A deliberate data retention policy, where email is not saved longer than x number of days. While this may be shady, it's commonplace in many corporations.
Now, again, I think it's odd that they can recover email from before and after, but not during... but there are legitimate reasons why mail would be missing.
MS's UI isn't designed for you. So yeah, it's lousy. For you.
Winmover, for instance, to answer your other question.
Sometimes, having too many features does cause problems. When users stumble across them by accident, press the wrong key, or whatever. I
Besides, this behavior interferes with all kinds of other behviors. For example, several editors use Alt-Drag to do vertical highlight and select, for example.
The fact of the matter is, this kind of thing is best left to an add-on so that memory and system resources are not wasted by a feature most will not use.
I call strawman.
Your configuration file has lots of "pages" as well, as soon as something scrolls off the screen, how do you remember what was on that previous screen? Same argument.
GUI based configuration is usually more intuitive, all the possible options are listed right there. Text configuration files can also have all the options listed, but it's not very often that this is the case in my experience. GUI's by their very nature require all those options to be listed. Now, knowing what that option does is maybe a little different argument, but at least it's a step up.
My point is not that GUI's are better or worse than text configs, but each has their advantages and disadvantages. For example, with text files, how do you know which text file to edit? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not.
It doesn't even display the freaking start dir of the search! If you have two of them active, which is which?
I'm not sure what copy of XP you're using, by mine shows quite clearly "- Looking in " during the search.
After the search is over, it doesn't, but you can infer that from the search results that show the path of the results.
Guess what: instead of starting your browse from your original start dir, it starts from the top level of "My computer" and your physical drives. Fucking bullshit. Is microsoft paid by the click?
I'm a little confused about your argument. Chances are, you're not going to want to start your new search from somewhere below your current search, because your current search will have already included it. Using your method would be MORE or just as much work for most people in my opinion, because now they have to navigate up the tree instead of down it.
And don't get me started on the decision to by default exclude files from search results based on their extension.
Uh.. it doesn't. It does, by default, exclude hidden and system files (Those with the +H and +S bits set) but it doesn't exclude files by extension. You can tell it to, but by default it's set to "All files and folders".
Apart from the fact that you just contradicted yourself (How can you grab anywhere with the alt key to move the window if grabbing a quadrant resizes it?) This kind of thing is very unintuitive and frankly, most users are not the two fisted power user that you are.
They can't remember when to right click to do things, double click everything (including buttons) because they're not sure when to double and when to single click, can't figure out how to pick up the mouse and move it to gain more mouse room. And don't even get me started on the Mac ctrl-menu's.
Yes, MS's UI's are "dumbed down" for the average user, but that's what makes it possible for the average user to learn them easily. A power user can change the UI to do much of what he wants (including your alt-drag functionality if they want) by any number of third party utilities.
The part most power users seem to forget is that if you don't know what you're doing, it should be easy to use. If you do, you have enough knowledge to change it.
It requires that your run TS to get a real multi-user environment? So I'd have to install WServer and TS and loopback the terminal connection on every client to get real multi-user support?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What does "loop back" supposed to mean in this context? You mean multiple users from the console? Simply use "RunAs". It's the equivelent of Sudo.
I'm talking about a clear division between system, shared user, and user. The last I checked, Windows sticks system and user binaries and libraries in the same folders together. In order to enforce a standard profile, you have to go through some bizarre process with altering a Default User profile. There is no easy way to go back and enforce the default profile without using some custom script or something like Deep Freeze.
Again, i'm not sure what you're geting at. What does "enforce a standard profile" mean in this context? How is a default profile "bizarre" where something like skel is not? You need only copy files to the default user home directory, or load that users registry hive and import the changed settings.
Forgive my ignorace, how does one do this from the shell, either with Explorer or a CLI command? Does this function allow me to prevent the mounting of selected volumes? Can I mount network shares on the local filesystem?
Lookup mountvol.exe
No, you can't mount network shares. that's what Distributed File System is for.
You can only do this to the native registry that is currently open on your boot disk.
No, not true. You can edit any registry you like by opening the hive. You can also export any registry you like.
You cannot log-on as one user and edit the configuration for another user's profile.
If you have administrative permissions, you can. It's very easy to do, either in the GUI or at a command line.
This also is in one-direction, I'm not working with "The Registry", I'm working with an text export. I can't successfully make changes or repairs unless I can import it back. In order to do that, the machine has to be functional enough to allow me to do this. I can't edit a foreign registry on a functioning machine.
Duh! Of course you can re-import. Look up the reg.exe tool.
The server resource kits are not, and have never been free to copy to the best of my knowledge.
Not the written documentation, but you can download the tools. See Resource kit Tools
This script isn't included with NT or 2000. It appears to be included with XP Pro and WS2003, but I can't find the code anywhere. How am I supposed to read the logs on a system without a scripting host?
NT isn't really supported anymore, but you can always install WSH by installing IE4+. The code is in the script, just copy it from an XP or 2003 box.
Yes, there are some things you can only do from within a running system, but then there are not that many of them.
It's not like Linux hasn't had it's major share of problems in this regard either. Hardware 3D support has been a nightmare. Installing nvidia or ati drivers has been a pain until very recently when some distro's have started doing it for you.
People don't just upgrade overnight. It's going to take longhorn several years to become as entrenched as XP now is. In fact, it probably won't be until the next version of Windows is about to be released that Longhorn may become the majority or Windows boxes.
That means, if they want people to develop for WinFS, Avalon, Indigo, etc.. they best make it available for XP and 2003.
My prediction is that Longhorn will be like Windows 2000. It will be adopted by the serious people, but most users will skip it, waiting for the next version.
Actually, there is precedence here. Many years ago, in 1995, MS laid out a plan for new versions of windows. On of those was called Nashville, and was originally dubbed Windows 96.
Nashville became IE4 instead, and was released for NT and Windows as an add-on instead. This seems like more of that.
WinFS was likely taken out of Longhorn because they needed to decouple it from the longhorn ship schedule in order to make it available for XP and Windows 2003 as well.
Yes, I can think of a number of things MS has been ahead of Linux on (though not necessarily ahead of others, such as MacOS and Commercial Unix). And again, Linux is starting to catch up on this stuff.
* Font rendering. This is no surprise since MS and Apple worked together on TrueType.
* Handicapped Accessibility
* Security Infrastructure (Don't laugh, the Windows security infrastructure is very advanced, just that many apps, including many windows supplied ones don't use it they way they should have). I'm talking about things like security descriptors on every kernel object. The original NT infrastructure was very well designed, but MS took a lot of shortcuts and didn't completely utilize it.
Many of the things you see as MS catching up to Linux was largely MS making use of stuff that was already in NT. Multi-user was always there. The Windows subsystem, however, had problems utilizing it effectively. NT also had SMP long before Linux did, and a really long time before it was actually useable and efficient on Linux (though yes, commerical Unix had it a lot longer than either).
It's true that MS had a long way to catch up to mainframe level stuff, like clustering, message queing, etc... But this kind of stuff, though available on Linux for a while, has been largely experimental until the last few years.
Since you want to be pedantic, none of the things you mention are true.
First, while XP has a license enforced single-user nature, the server versions are all truly multi-user and can have multiple people logged in through terminal services simultaneously.
Second, NTFS does support arbitrary mount points via junction points. You can mount any volume in a directory anywhere on the system.
Third, the registry can be exported to a human readable file and reimported from the command line. Further, it's not a single file, but broken up into multiple files (about 5 or 6, not counting individual user hives)
Fourth, while many of the admin tools are not part of the base install, they are downloadable from MS for free in the form of the resource kit. Further, WSH allows scripting of all that stuff and has for quite a long time.
Fifth, I'm not quite sure what you mean about multiple sets of kernel drivers.
Sixth, log files can be exported to plain text very easily. You can also use the vbscript Eventquery.vbs to view event log entries.
While it's true that there are languages that are not supported. It's not true that you can only have a single localized version. There are multiple language versions of windows where you can install the languages you like that are available. It's called MUI, or Multi-language user input. check it out.
I didn't use the word term GNU. I was speaking of things like KDE, and the majority of the 10's of thousands of packages that are available on most distro's.
What features are missing? At least which ones that you can't add on with third party tools?