Actually, x86 already does, but nobody uses these features. When they fixed segmentation with the 386, segments were now accessed through selectors and offsets.
There are a few reasons, though, why we don't use this system. One is that loading descriptors is slow because it was never optimized in the CPU with the equivalent of a TLB as for paging. The other is that using segmentation requires 48-bit pointers rather than 32-bit pointers, or it requires loading segmentation registers and doing a dance with those. I suppose using longer pointers was a problem back in the days when memory was scarce, but it's hardly a problem now (check out 64-bit).
There are good reasons this facility isn't used for this purpose. Primarily, it was never designed for it. The descriptor tables are really supposed to be modified only by the OS -- allowing the application to modify them can cause severe problems. They're also a very scarce resource (you point out that there are only 8K of each type), and allocation constraints could be a problem. You certainly can't allocate every array in a large program like this, so you need to flag those where a buffer overflow might be a problem... at which point, it would probably be easier just to use something like a C++ object that emulates an array and performs bound checking. It would (in most circumstances) be as efficient, wouldn't require OS support, wouldn't be platform dependent, and would be just as easy for the programmer to do.
The problem is that most programmers believe that their buffers are safe, because they've thought about possible overflow scenarios, and none look like they can work. So nothing would end up being written to use the protection.
The way ahead is simultaneous release in all formats in all territories.
That's only a way ahead if you don't care about theatrical releases. While it is certainly better to see a film on a big screen, not enough people will be willing to pay the extra for it to make theatrical releases on the scale we currently have viable. I'd expect to see many screens closing, fewer showings of each film and more films not being shown at all if simultaneous releases happened.
Frankly, that's not an outcome I want.
Now, shorter delays before home format release, that would be good.
1. Good quality 2. Readily available 3. The price is right
You missed one: it isn't too difficult for them to use. If there's no way to write these films to a disc you can put into a DVD player and play then a lot of people will be put off by it.
Possibly he plea-bargained down to that (or the UK equivalent)
FYI: there is no equivalent in the UK. The closest we have is a system where the judge is supposed to take into account during sentencing the fact that the perpetrator admitted his crime, and reduce the sentence appropriately.
The Crown Prosecution Service is always supposed to prosecute every crime as far as they believe they can prove it.
It's worth noting that chipping (i.e. contributory copyright infringement) isn't a criminal offence but a civil one, so he cannot have been convicted for that -- it *must* have been the direct copyright infringement that got him.
Thing is, now he's ecstatic about Avalon (words like "cool" and "sexy" flow freely) for the exact reason he snubbed OSX.
Is he excited about Avalon (the technology, roughly equivalent to OSX's Quartz) or about Aero (the theme, e.g. OSX's Aqua)?
I think Avalon's going to be interesting. Don't give a shit about Aero, though, and will probably still switch back to 'windows classic', if it's an option.
Virtual Desktop paging is always crappy in Win. Why this is so hard to get right (30 different developers can't ALL be wrong...) I just don't knoe.
As one of those developers, I'll tell you: there's just no good way of doing it with the Windows API, and apps that are written by developers who don't use virtual desktops don't play nice with the hack methods.
There are basically three choices: move the windows off the screen, hide them, or use MS's desktop API. All of these approaches screw up in different ways:
Scrolling:
* a window scrolled off the screen still shows up in the taskbar. This is bad. You can try pissing around with its style bits to prevent this, but it doesn't really work.
* many applications will automatically move themselves back onto the screen if you move them off.
* maximized windows ignore their position and are always displayed.
Hiding:
* When a hidden application displays a dialog, it will be shown. This is not ideal behaviour: it should be associated with its parent and only shown if it is, but that's *very* hard to achieve with the Windows API.
* Some applications misbehave when hidden. For instance, some versions of Photoshop will ignore anything placed on the clipboard while they're hidden. If you hide Excel '97, when you show it again its taskbars will be missing.
Desktop API:
* It's impossible to move windows between desktops.
That's it. As far as I know, there is no other option, so if you want virtual desktop on Windows, you have to live with the downside of one of these. My choice is hiding. It works better in 95% of cases.
No it's not, at least no more so than "Duck!" The subject is implied.
Actually, that's not right. "Duck" is a verb in the imperative, so you're right that the subject is implied. This is the normal form of the English imperative.
"Finally catching up with Apple" is an adjective phrase. Both the subject *and* the verb would have to be implied ("Microsoft is", in this case). The two are very different: one is standard english usage and a complete sentence, the other isn't.
Re:I suppose it's too late, but
on
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don't require users to run as admin. Go after sw companies that put out software such as games that require users to run as root.
There's not much they can do, except withhold the right to use the windows logo on packaging. AFAIK they do this, but it's not particularly effective.
allow users to easily "su to root" for installs, reconfig, etc. Don't require a logoff/logon.
Try "runas/?" for information on how to do this. It isn't perfect, but it's better with XP than it was with 2K, so I suspect it'll be very close in Longhorn.
use the 3d for something useful, like letting users run at 1280x1024 but have everything be sized as if it were 800x600. Try giving a person with bad eyesight an lcd and telling them they should run in 1280x1024. It has to be easy to change.
Yes, this is one of the planned features of this release. I'm waiting to see how easy to use it is.
never let the user lose control. I hate it when the interface hangs up and you can't do anything. This happens when printing, programs screw up, accessing some media, etc. Fix that.
Again, they've been making many improvements. Sometimes things hang while waiting for CDs to be read after loading, but explorer seems to cope pretty well in most circumstances. I've never had any problem with any non-explorer program stopping the rest of the OS from working (at least not with XP).
restore the uninstall information when doing a system restore. I might be wrong on this, as I've only used it on one system, but it seemed to restore uninstalled programs, but they couldn't be uninstalled again. BTW system restore is the main reason I bought xp for home. Improve that.
Yikes. That's a tricky one; because of the way installation on Windows works, I'm not sure if this would be possible. Which is annoying, to say the least. Perhaps they could be smarter about how restore works and not restore settings for programs that have been uninstalled.
a decent command shell. Hey, just port bash over, it'll save both of us some time.
You can download a version of ksh from MS's site, apparently (part of the Services For Unix package), although i haven't tried it. I've never liked ksh, and find cygwin the best option.
--easy to use equivalent to ln -s
It's too late. Add it now, and enough software will be confused by it that people will think the OS is broken.
--easy way to schedule when the computer logs someone off automatically, and is locked from use for certain times of the day. This is for kicking the kids off the computer automatically, and preventing them from getting on in the middle of the night.
An interesting idea. It could be achieved with a 3rd party add-in easily enough, but it would be better if it were integrated with WINLOGON.
XP was supposed to run on a PII 300MHz with 128MB RAM.
I'm currently running it on a P-II 400 with 96Mb RAM. It works fine, and the system applications are even pretty snappy. Boot times and app load times are better than Win98, but I did have to switch off a load of services in order to get any useful memory. 128Mb would probably be comfortable.
The only things I have any trouble with are the third party apps I try to run here: mainly Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice, which all want a lot more memory than I can give them.
Vector based graphics, offloading work to the GPU? Linux has its own implementation of this featureset now. It is called Cairo, and it works right now.
But it doesn't do what the parent wants, which is to take windows from legacy applications and allow them to be arbitrarily scaled. Longhorn will be able to do this because it is integrated into the GUI system. Cairo can't ever do this, because it's a layer on top of the GUI and thus would require every existing application to be redesigned to take advantage of it.
Oh, and Cairo's a stupid name BTW. Makes me think of the version of Windows that had that codename a few years back. Can't remember if it was 98 or 2K; I think it was 2K.
Re:Catching up using eye candy?
on
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Is the idea of a folder is to make the abstraction of a filesystem directory more concrete to the user, or is it just supposed to look "neat"?
No, the idea of a folder is to make it look more like a Mac.
There is a LOT of difference in functionality between [NT4] and an XP box (or, for the most part a 2000 box).
Yeah, but then look back at what MS has said about the features we can expect in these systems: Win2K (or NT5 as they called it at the time) was going to have multiple users and network transparent desktop access... but both of those features got put back to XP (along with, and I'll accept that this is a very personal rant, the GetWriteWatch API that was introduced in Win98).
What features was XP going to have that didn't make it? I'll grant I wasn't paying much attention to the XP prerelease stages, 'cause I was still disappointed at what wasn't in NT5, but I'm sure there are a lot of things that were promised but are missing from it.
However as he as just one week into his employment he is out in the cold.
Not necessarily. There are many things he isn't entitled to because of the length of time he has worked there. For instance, he isn't entitled to a written statement of the reason for his dismissal (however the employer has issued a statement to the press which would be admissable in a tribunal as evidence of why they dismissed him).
The Employment Right Acts 1996:
94. - (1) An employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed by his employer.
That says nothing about time restrictions. With regards to whether or not the dismissal is fair, the act says this:
it is for the employer to show-
(a) the reason (or, if more than one, the principal reason) for the dismissal, and
(b) that it is either a reason falling within subsection (2) or some other substantial reason of a kind such as to justify the dismissal of an employee holding the position which the employee held.
(2) A reason falls within this subsection if it-
(a) relates to the capability or qualifications of the employee for performing work of the kind which he was employed by the employer to do,
(b) relates to the conduct of the employee,
(c) is that the employee was redundant, or
(d) is that the employee could not continue to work in the position which he held without contravention (either on his part or on that of his employer) of a duty or restriction imposed by or under an enactment.
Clearly they would be relying on case (2)(b) here. Also relevant is this:
(4) Where the employer has fulfilled the requirements of subsection (1), the determination of the question whether the dismissal is fair or unfair (having regard to the reason shown by the employer)-
(a) depends on whether in the circumstances (including the size and administrative resources of the employer's undertaking) the employer acted reasonably or unreasonably in treating it as a sufficient reason for dismissing the employee, and
(b) shall be determined in accordance with equity and the substantial merits of the case.
I'd say it isn't really clear from the legislation whether or not he has a case, and we'd have to look at case law to find out. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about such things to find the relevant cases.
The employer's statement for why he was fired is this:
The decision to terminate [Mr Hanff's] employment was made in order to defend our legitimate business interests. Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws. Since much of our business is based around the protection of our copyright and intellectual property, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate.
Interestingly, this isn't for any of the 4 reasons listed as falling under "subsection 2" above. It is for the reason that the employee has shown that he has opinions that suggest he would be opposed to the company performing one of the functions it does in order to make money (i.e. protect its IP rights). I'm not sure, but I think a tribunal will look at that and declare those as unfair grounds for dismissal.
On second thoughts, perhaps if an existing operating system decided to join the Nation of Islam and renounce its slave name, it might get away with it. That too doesn't seem very likely to me.
So 7 year old OSs are too modern for you, and you need something older? It's probably only for Win98 and higher because the Google developers couldn't find a computer that would run anything older any more.
The software is primarily of interest to digital photographers. Almost all digital photographers use cameras with USB interfaces. USB only works properly with Win98 and up.
and that Internet Explorer is needed.
Internet Explorer is included out of the box on every version of Windows since NT4. Since it was integrated into the shell in Win98 it has been almost impossible to remove (you need a shell replacement if you want to, because explorer.exe dynamically links mshtml.dll, which is the same part of Internet Explorer that just about every other 'requires Internet Explorer' app out there links to). This is hardly a restrictive condition.
Wonder who made that bone-headed decision.
Somebody who realised that supporting Win95 or NT4 was probably unnecessary, seeing as the number of people still using those systems (other than NT4 servers) is rapidly approaching zero.
Maybe you need RAM, maybe you've done something really bad to your system, but the dashboard is useable on the machine I'm typing on right now - slot loading iMac G3 500, 384MB RAM.
Whereas a web browser is usable on the machine I'm typing on right now - a Pentium II-400 with 128Mb of RAM.
Yes, but widgets aren't really part of Dashboard -- they're just a feature that is implemented by Dashboard on Macs. On the same basis, the Start Menu is a feature on Windows that is implemented by Explorer. If an application for Macs created a menu and labelled it "Start" and it did a similar thing to the Windows Start Menu, I could say it is available for Macs. That obviously doesn't mean that Explorer is available for Macs, as Explorer is the Windows shell and only runs on Windows. The original poster and I are both talking about features, not programs.
Sorry. I don't like defending MS, but they seem to get a lot of flack they don't deserve:
There was no benefit to making the registry a non-text file, except that MS wanted to make it more difficult for end-users to poke around and understand more clearly what's going on
There was a very clear benefit: operations on the registry are substantially faster than equivalent operations on text files, particularly on the FAT16 partitions that were the standard when the registry was introduced.
If MS didn't want people poking around the registry, why is REGEDIT included as standard with windows? It could have been pushed off to an option pack, so only power users get it.
Applications do have to use the OS to read/write/update (so far so good), but the OS *never tracks what the application puts there*. As a result, every developer puts their copy protection in obscure keys in the registry. Even worse, and unforgiveable, are applications that leave crap behind.
I don't know of any OS that will track exactly what an application does so that it can be removed entirely. This is only a problem because of application developers who don't follow the standards required by microsoft for windows logo compliance. It is less of a problem on other OSs because in general the app developers are more responsible -- it's basically the downside of being the market leader.
Keeping it all in one place (i.e. registry) sounds like a great idea... until you realize you can't readily *do* anything with it from a user's perspective because guess what... the OS won't let you do a simple "c:>copy registry to registry.backup".
There are plenty of things I can do with the registry that I couldn't do with files in a per-application space. The fact that it is standardised means I can use 3rd party tracking applications to watch changes made by apps. There are plenty of registry backup solutions, if you want. XP includes System Restore Points by default, which back up the registry and DLL files, I believe.
) Make it impossible for an application to write to c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 or... you get the idea
This is the default for non-admin users on NT family systems (not sure about XP Home, though). All logo-compliant apps should run as non-admin users, it isn't really MS's fault if the apps are screwed by expecting backwards compatibility with a system that's 10 years old, rather than just 8.
Registry files should be stored locally in the directory the application was stored in, or better yet in "My Directory". The system would have its own registry stored in the system directory.
Registry files are stored in your user profile directory, in the file NTUSER.DAT, and in the windows directory, in SYSTEM.DAT.
They should be text files that can be copied by the user easily using standard tools.
They can be copied easily. If you want a text file to manipulate, you can export them to text using REGEDIT and then import them back again after you've finished.
When a program is uninstalled, the OS would ensure all traces of the registry entry are deleted (this is easy because of #2)
If a program follows MS's published standards for interoperability then all traces of their registry entries will be deleted when the app is uninstalled. It only doesn't work for applications that misbehave. It is as easy for an app to misbehave on other OSs as it is on Windows (see my earlier point).
The only thing allowed to alter a program's registry entry is that program. And every time its altered, a new version is kept. This would allow users to go back to old version if required.
That's an interesting idea, but it would effectively prevent third-party setting tweaking tools, which can be useful sometimes. XP keeps backups with system restore points, although these aren't automatic. There are 3rd party tools that track all changes automatically.
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Actually, x86 already does, but nobody uses these features. When they fixed segmentation with the 386, segments were now accessed through selectors and offsets.
There are a few reasons, though, why we don't use this system. One is that loading descriptors is slow because it was never optimized in the CPU with the equivalent of a TLB as for paging. The other is that using segmentation requires 48-bit pointers rather than 32-bit pointers, or it requires loading segmentation registers and doing a dance with those. I suppose using longer pointers was a problem back in the days when memory was scarce, but it's hardly a problem now (check out 64-bit).
There are good reasons this facility isn't used for this purpose. Primarily, it was never designed for it. The descriptor tables are really supposed to be modified only by the OS -- allowing the application to modify them can cause severe problems. They're also a very scarce resource (you point out that there are only 8K of each type), and allocation constraints could be a problem. You certainly can't allocate every array in a large program like this, so you need to flag those where a buffer overflow might be a problem... at which point, it would probably be easier just to use something like a C++ object that emulates an array and performs bound checking. It would (in most circumstances) be as efficient, wouldn't require OS support, wouldn't be platform dependent, and would be just as easy for the programmer to do.
The problem is that most programmers believe that their buffers are safe, because they've thought about possible overflow scenarios, and none look like they can work. So nothing would end up being written to use the protection.
The way ahead is simultaneous release in all formats in all territories.
That's only a way ahead if you don't care about theatrical releases. While it is certainly better to see a film on a big screen, not enough people will be willing to pay the extra for it to make theatrical releases on the scale we currently have viable. I'd expect to see many screens closing, fewer showings of each film and more films not being shown at all if simultaneous releases happened.
Frankly, that's not an outcome I want.
Now, shorter delays before home format release, that would be good.
The public will buy it before they steal it if:
1. Good quality
2. Readily available
3. The price is right
You missed one: it isn't too difficult for them to use. If there's no way to write these films to a disc you can put into a DVD player and play then a lot of people will be put off by it.
Possibly he plea-bargained down to that (or the UK equivalent)
FYI: there is no equivalent in the UK. The closest we have is a system where the judge is supposed to take into account during sentencing the fact that the perpetrator admitted his crime, and reduce the sentence appropriately.
The Crown Prosecution Service is always supposed to prosecute every crime as far as they believe they can prove it.
It's worth noting that chipping (i.e. contributory copyright infringement) isn't a criminal offence but a civil one, so he cannot have been convicted for that -- it *must* have been the direct copyright infringement that got him.
Thing is, now he's ecstatic about Avalon (words like "cool" and "sexy" flow freely) for the exact reason he snubbed OSX.
Is he excited about Avalon (the technology, roughly equivalent to OSX's Quartz) or about Aero (the theme, e.g. OSX's Aqua)?
I think Avalon's going to be interesting. Don't give a shit about Aero, though, and will probably still switch back to 'windows classic', if it's an option.
Virtual Desktop paging is always crappy in Win. Why this is so hard to get right (30 different developers can't ALL be wrong...) I just don't knoe.
As one of those developers, I'll tell you: there's just no good way of doing it with the Windows API, and apps that are written by developers who don't use virtual desktops don't play nice with the hack methods.
There are basically three choices: move the windows off the screen, hide them, or use MS's desktop API. All of these approaches screw up in different ways:
Scrolling:
* a window scrolled off the screen still shows up in the taskbar. This is bad. You can try pissing around with its style bits to prevent this, but it doesn't really work.
* many applications will automatically move themselves back onto the screen if you move them off.
* maximized windows ignore their position and are always displayed.
Hiding:
* When a hidden application displays a dialog, it will be shown. This is not ideal behaviour: it should be associated with its parent and only shown if it is, but that's *very* hard to achieve with the Windows API.
* Some applications misbehave when hidden. For instance, some versions of Photoshop will ignore anything placed on the clipboard while they're hidden. If you hide Excel '97, when you show it again its taskbars will be missing.
Desktop API:
* It's impossible to move windows between desktops.
That's it. As far as I know, there is no other option, so if you want virtual desktop on Windows, you have to live with the downside of one of these. My choice is hiding. It works better in 95% of cases.
No it's not, at least no more so than "Duck!" The subject is implied.
Actually, that's not right. "Duck" is a verb in the imperative, so you're right that the subject is implied. This is the normal form of the English imperative.
"Finally catching up with Apple" is an adjective phrase. Both the subject *and* the verb would have to be implied ("Microsoft is", in this case). The two are very different: one is standard english usage and a complete sentence, the other isn't.
don't require users to run as admin. Go after sw companies that put out software such as games that require users to run as root.
/?" for information on how to do this. It isn't perfect, but it's better with XP than it was with 2K, so I suspect it'll be very close in Longhorn.
There's not much they can do, except withhold the right to use the windows logo on packaging. AFAIK they do this, but it's not particularly effective.
allow users to easily "su to root" for installs, reconfig, etc. Don't require a logoff/logon.
Try "runas
use the 3d for something useful, like letting users run at 1280x1024 but have everything be sized as if it were 800x600. Try giving a person with bad eyesight an lcd and telling them they should run in 1280x1024. It has to be easy to change.
Yes, this is one of the planned features of this release. I'm waiting to see how easy to use it is.
never let the user lose control. I hate it when the interface hangs up and you can't do anything. This happens when printing, programs screw up, accessing some media, etc. Fix that.
Again, they've been making many improvements. Sometimes things hang while waiting for CDs to be read after loading, but explorer seems to cope pretty well in most circumstances. I've never had any problem with any non-explorer program stopping the rest of the OS from working (at least not with XP).
restore the uninstall information when doing a system restore. I might be wrong on this, as I've only used it on one system, but it seemed to restore uninstalled programs, but they couldn't be uninstalled again. BTW system restore is the main reason I bought xp for home. Improve that.
Yikes. That's a tricky one; because of the way installation on Windows works, I'm not sure if this would be possible. Which is annoying, to say the least. Perhaps they could be smarter about how restore works and not restore settings for programs that have been uninstalled.
a decent command shell. Hey, just port bash over, it'll save both of us some time.
You can download a version of ksh from MS's site, apparently (part of the Services For Unix package), although i haven't tried it. I've never liked ksh, and find cygwin the best option.
--easy to use equivalent to ln -s
It's too late. Add it now, and enough software will be confused by it that people will think the OS is broken.
--easy way to schedule when the computer logs someone off automatically, and is locked from use for certain times of the day. This is for kicking the kids off the computer automatically, and preventing them from getting on in the middle of the night.
An interesting idea. It could be achieved with a 3rd party add-in easily enough, but it would be better if it were integrated with WINLOGON.
--a reasonable price.
*ROTFLMAO*
XP was supposed to run on a PII 300MHz with 128MB RAM.
I'm currently running it on a P-II 400 with 96Mb RAM. It works fine, and the system applications are even pretty snappy. Boot times and app load times are better than Win98, but I did have to switch off a load of services in order to get any useful memory. 128Mb would probably be comfortable.
The only things I have any trouble with are the third party apps I try to run here: mainly Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice, which all want a lot more memory than I can give them.
Vector based graphics, offloading work to the GPU? Linux has its own implementation of this featureset now. It is called Cairo, and it works right now.
But it doesn't do what the parent wants, which is to take windows from legacy applications and allow them to be arbitrarily scaled. Longhorn will be able to do this because it is integrated into the GUI system. Cairo can't ever do this, because it's a layer on top of the GUI and thus would require every existing application to be redesigned to take advantage of it.
Oh, and Cairo's a stupid name BTW. Makes me think of the version of Windows that had that codename a few years back. Can't remember if it was 98 or 2K; I think it was 2K.
Is the idea of a folder is to make the abstraction of a filesystem directory more concrete to the user, or is it just supposed to look "neat"?
No, the idea of a folder is to make it look more like a Mac.
There is a LOT of difference in functionality between [NT4] and an XP box (or, for the most part a 2000 box).
Yeah, but then look back at what MS has said about the features we can expect in these systems: Win2K (or NT5 as they called it at the time) was going to have multiple users and network transparent desktop access... but both of those features got put back to XP (along with, and I'll accept that this is a very personal rant, the GetWriteWatch API that was introduced in Win98).
What features was XP going to have that didn't make it? I'll grant I wasn't paying much attention to the XP prerelease stages, 'cause I was still disappointed at what wasn't in NT5, but I'm sure there are a lot of things that were promised but are missing from it.
However as he as just one week into his employment he is out in the cold.
Not necessarily. There are many things he isn't entitled to because of the length of time he has worked there. For instance, he isn't entitled to a written statement of the reason for his dismissal (however the employer has issued a statement to the press which would be admissable in a tribunal as evidence of why they dismissed him).
The Employment Right Acts 1996:
94. - (1) An employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed by his employer.
That says nothing about time restrictions. With regards to whether or not the dismissal is fair, the act says this:
it is for the employer to show-
(a) the reason (or, if more than one, the principal reason) for the dismissal, and
(b) that it is either a reason falling within subsection (2) or some other substantial reason of a kind such as to justify the dismissal of an employee holding the position which the employee held.
(2) A reason falls within this subsection if it-
(a) relates to the capability or qualifications of the employee for performing work of the kind which he was employed by the employer to do,
(b) relates to the conduct of the employee,
(c) is that the employee was redundant, or
(d) is that the employee could not continue to work in the position which he held without contravention (either on his part or on that of his employer) of a duty or restriction imposed by or under an enactment.
Clearly they would be relying on case (2)(b) here. Also relevant is this:
(4) Where the employer has fulfilled the requirements of subsection (1), the determination of the question whether the dismissal is fair or unfair (having regard to the reason shown by the employer)-
(a) depends on whether in the circumstances (including the size and administrative resources of the employer's undertaking) the employer acted reasonably or unreasonably in treating it as a sufficient reason for dismissing the employee, and
(b) shall be determined in accordance with equity and the substantial merits of the case.
I'd say it isn't really clear from the legislation whether or not he has a case, and we'd have to look at case law to find out. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about such things to find the relevant cases.
The employer's statement for why he was fired is this:
The decision to terminate [Mr Hanff's] employment was made in order to defend our legitimate business interests. Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws. Since much of our business is based around the protection of our copyright and intellectual property, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate.
Interestingly, this isn't for any of the 4 reasons listed as falling under "subsection 2" above. It is for the reason that the employee has shown that he has opinions that suggest he would be opposed to the company performing one of the functions it does in order to make money (i.e. protect its IP rights). I'm not sure, but I think a tribunal will look at that and declare those as unfair grounds for dismissal.
He has a chance, at least.
Ah, right. Strange way of putting it then.
;)
I'd say most versions of most other operating systems are definitely 'higher' than Win98
On second thoughts, perhaps if an existing operating system decided to join the Nation of Islam and renounce its slave name, it might get away with it. That too doesn't seem very likely to me.
Only if he was into operating systems. Which I doubt. ;)
That's probably less trouble than letting him file it, though.
Too bad it's only for Win98 and higher
So 7 year old OSs are too modern for you, and you need something older? It's probably only for Win98 and higher because the Google developers couldn't find a computer that would run anything older any more.
The software is primarily of interest to digital photographers. Almost all digital photographers use cameras with USB interfaces. USB only works properly with Win98 and up.
and that Internet Explorer is needed.
Internet Explorer is included out of the box on every version of Windows since NT4. Since it was integrated into the shell in Win98 it has been almost impossible to remove (you need a shell replacement if you want to, because explorer.exe dynamically links mshtml.dll, which is the same part of Internet Explorer that just about every other 'requires Internet Explorer' app out there links to). This is hardly a restrictive condition.
Wonder who made that bone-headed decision.
Somebody who realised that supporting Win95 or NT4 was probably unnecessary, seeing as the number of people still using those systems (other than NT4 servers) is rapidly approaching zero.
Maybe you need RAM, maybe you've done something really bad to your system, but the dashboard is useable on the machine I'm typing on right now - slot loading iMac G3 500, 384MB RAM.
Whereas a web browser is usable on the machine I'm typing on right now - a Pentium II-400 with 128Mb of RAM.
Yes, but widgets aren't really part of Dashboard -- they're just a feature that is implemented by Dashboard on Macs. On the same basis, the Start Menu is a feature on Windows that is implemented by Explorer. If an application for Macs created a menu and labelled it "Start" and it did a similar thing to the Windows Start Menu, I could say it is available for Macs. That obviously doesn't mean that Explorer is available for Macs, as Explorer is the Windows shell and only runs on Windows. The original poster and I are both talking about features, not programs.
Sorry. I don't like defending MS, but they seem to get a lot of flack they don't deserve:
There was no benefit to making the registry a non-text file, except that MS wanted to make it more difficult for end-users to poke around and understand more clearly what's going on
There was a very clear benefit: operations on the registry are substantially faster than equivalent operations on text files, particularly on the FAT16 partitions that were the standard when the registry was introduced.
If MS didn't want people poking around the registry, why is REGEDIT included as standard with windows? It could have been pushed off to an option pack, so only power users get it.
Applications do have to use the OS to read/write/update (so far so good), but the OS *never tracks what the application puts there*. As a result, every developer puts their copy protection in obscure keys in the registry. Even worse, and unforgiveable, are applications that leave crap behind.
I don't know of any OS that will track exactly what an application does so that it can be removed entirely. This is only a problem because of application developers who don't follow the standards required by microsoft for windows logo compliance. It is less of a problem on other OSs because in general the app developers are more responsible -- it's basically the downside of being the market leader.
Keeping it all in one place (i.e. registry) sounds like a great idea... until you realize you can't readily *do* anything with it from a user's perspective because guess what... the OS won't let you do a simple "c:>copy registry to registry.backup".
There are plenty of things I can do with the registry that I couldn't do with files in a per-application space. The fact that it is standardised means I can use 3rd party tracking applications to watch changes made by apps. There are plenty of registry backup solutions, if you want. XP includes System Restore Points by default, which back up the registry and DLL files, I believe.
) Make it impossible for an application to write to c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 or... you get the idea
This is the default for non-admin users on NT family systems (not sure about XP Home, though). All logo-compliant apps should run as non-admin users, it isn't really MS's fault if the apps are screwed by expecting backwards compatibility with a system that's 10 years old, rather than just 8.
Registry files should be stored locally in the directory the application was stored in, or better yet in "My Directory". The system would have its own registry stored in the system directory.
Registry files are stored in your user profile directory, in the file NTUSER.DAT, and in the windows directory, in SYSTEM.DAT.
They should be text files that can be copied by the user easily using standard tools.
They can be copied easily. If you want a text file to manipulate, you can export them to text using REGEDIT and then import them back again after you've finished.
When a program is uninstalled, the OS would ensure all traces of the registry entry are deleted (this is easy because of #2)
If a program follows MS's published standards for interoperability then all traces of their registry entries will be deleted when the app is uninstalled. It only doesn't work for applications that misbehave. It is as easy for an app to misbehave on other OSs as it is on Windows (see my earlier point).
The only thing allowed to alter a program's registry entry is that program. And every time its altered, a new version is kept. This would allow users to go back to old version if required.
That's an interesting idea, but it would effectively prevent third-party setting tweaking tools, which can be useful sometimes. XP keeps backups with system restore points, although these aren't automatic. There are 3rd party tools that track all changes automatically.
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I don't think they need to. I'm saturating my link directly from the BBC's site.
> Yet somehow "Moonshine Sonata" doesn't convey quite the right idea in the Appalachian and Ozark states.
:)
I did come across a blues version that was called that at some time in the past.
You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases.
Something like 90% of all classical music is now public domain. Why would anyone pay fees to composers' estates?
If you're going to record it onto CD, make sure you get one labelled as "audio". The ones for data just don't sound as good.
This is fun!