Every time I have compared KDE and Gnome on a lowend computer (300-500MHz 128-256MB RAM) the result have been the same. Gnome was way faster than KDE.
Have you tried it on a recent glibc release after running prelink? KDE performance sucks primarily because of slow dynamic linking with its hundreds of libraries. Prelink solves this problem. (Or so I'm told. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.)
There are a number of features of grep that don't work with utf8 encoded files, for instance the '-i' command line option will not correctly detect all case conversions for non-ASCII characters, there are whitespace characters that aren't recognised as such (thus confusing the -w command line option, and potentially -x also). As it has no idea of what constitutes or doesn't constitute a single character, the [^...] regexp pattern does not work correctly. Neither does [x-x] if the second character is not in ASCII. It'll also misinterpret some other similar expressions (eg 'x?') where the character specified is non-ASCII.
Sure, if all you're using it for is matching strings in a file, grep works with utf8. But not all of its features do.
I just had a vision of arriving in a hotel room to find it occupied by a several metre wide cylinder that fills the entire length of the room; I squeeze around it to the phone and call reception. "Oh, that's the complimentary space telescope. We haven't launched it yet."
Which is why it's a good thing that MS firewall doesn't have all of the features of competitive products -- people will still install those if they think they want the additional features.
So are you saying that the only way to turn off the Firewall is AFTER you have malware?
Sorry, but that is complete and utter falsehood. Any user with administrator rights can turn off the SP2 firewall in the control panel. Having or not having malware is irrelevant.
That's hardly a fair complaint. I've never seen any firewall, at all, that can't be switched off by the administrator. This is the way it should be. Do you want software running on your computer, preventing you from performing some actions, where there is nothing you can do to disable it?
Given that MS firewall doesn't block outgoing connections, I sincerely doubt this actually happened like that. Maybe it was some other software doing it?
Or maybe it's genetic differences between the populations that mean that caffeine has different effects in the two countries?
I have a friend (in the UK) who will get extremely agitated on a couple of cups of coffee, and start losing self-control if she has much more. She gets into a lot of arguments, sometimes ends up throwing stuff around... but only if she drinks coffee. Eating chocolate has a similar but less marked effect, presumably from theobromine, which is chemically similar to caffeine.
It could well be a genetic factor that some populations have a higher proportion of people who are sensitive to it like this.
The point of an electrically-assisted bike is so that you both get some of the exercise and improve your top speed so the trip doesn't take as long. I doubt he's just going to sit there and not pedal at all.
I cycle 10 miles to work some days. This isn't actually too bad a problem, provided:
1. You allow yourself enough time. If you don't have to rush, you won't sweat very much on a ride of that length. I like to leave myself an hour so I can take it nice & easy.
2. You live in a relatively flat area. I wouldn't want to do it if the office was halfway up the side of a mountain, for instance...
3. You pack aerosol deodorant and a change of clothes. This will remove the worst of your sweat problems.
Do you really mean 35km/h on average? For how long? That is almost as good as a professional cyclist can get..
I think you're wrong about professional cyclists. On flat terrain (which is probably what they tested on) with a good bike, _I_ can average about 30 km/h, and I'm not exactly the fittest person in the world. Add hills into that equation and I drop to about 20.
Software firewalls can either block outgoing connections from spyware or untrusted apps to keep data leaking out of your machine from within. Just get Zonealarm or equivalent, and your problems are solved. Programs must ask for permission before accessing the network. MS firewall didn't ever seem to do this when I tried it. Software firewalls can also actively filter content coming and going through known connections like HTTP. But this isn't as foolproof.
This kind of filtering is pointless. It is trivially easy for any malware that gets onto your system to work around this kind of protection, usually by subverting an existing application in order to make it happen. E.g., write a suitable piece of javascript to a temporary file, then open it with internet explorer.
Assuming it actually helps is akin to sticking your head in the sand. It only helps you against incompetently written script-kiddie style attacks. And even those, I suspect that there's quite few that ZoneAlarm et al won't pick up.
Microsoft's firewall, in my experience, does nothing except take you machine off the network. Big deal I can get the same effect by unplugging my ethernet cable, thank you.
If you don't actually need your network, I'd recommend taking that route. MS's firewall allows all outgoing access, though, so it isn't equivalent.
To make a firewall that 'keeps people from breaking into my machine' is asinine. If you don't want someone accessing a service, you turn it off or change it's configuration to deny specific external hosts. If there are holes in the OS that a hacker can exploit, then a firewall is only a band-aid, that may or may not work. And it isn't any help if you actually intend to run services on you machine.
Please, tell me how I can configure MS's RPC implementation to only allow connections from localhost without using a firewall? I certainly don't trust that service not to have a large number of unknown holes that any remote host could access to gain local administrative access over my computer if I left it open, yet I need it for local operations on my machine. Oh, and if you can find a way to exploit those holes remotely through MS's firewall, I'll be _very_ impressed. Like I said, it'll stop any remote worm from spreading to me (unless I initiate a connection out to let it in).
For that to happen, you must already have malware on your system. Attempting to do anything with a firewall at this stage is commonly known in security circles as "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted."
I admit I am not a Windows developer, but as I understand it, the programmer can specify his own window classes, so the "Button" class is in no way "The Definitive Button". Borland compilers had their own GUI libraries, Java Swing applications don't look quite like Windows ones, so there is no standard widget set for applications running on the Windows GDI (If I am using the name wrong, though... does it only refer to the C API, or to the window system that provides keyboard/mouse/screen multiplexing?)
Well, of course applications are free to use their own button classes (as Java SWING apps do). It is also possible for applications to use the standard button class but override aspects of its behaviour (such as how it is drawn -- this is what the Borland libraries do). But a very large majority of applications just use the standard Windows button class (buttons are, perhaps, not the best example -- if we were to talk about list boxes instead it would be nearly all).
GDI refers only to the abstraction layer used for drawing (either on the screen or printers). AFAIK there is no specific name for the entire user interface.
Firefox has not used it because it has an interface called XUL that does not necessarily limit itself to features easily mappable to the Microsoft widget set.
The usual way of doing this is to extend the standard widgets to support features you need... they are implemented in a fairly OO fashion which makes this pretty easy for most operations you would want to perform. I don't know enough about the specifics of XUL to know whether it would be feasible with that, I suspect it probably would be.
Until you specifically *prohibit* the development of widget sets other than your personally preferred one true widget set, there will be no standard. That means *every* application developer with spare time *must* agree that your "standard" toolkit is the ideal one, otherwise you'll find another, and another.
Microsoft made no such prohibition, and I would argue that somewhere in the region of 95% of applications running on Windows today use MS's widgets. I think matters are similar with MacOS applications. Sure, the freedom's there, but it's rarely used, usually only by people who want to use a cross platform library for compatibility (and even then most of them use the native widgets when available).
This kind of standardisation is generally good for the user. It means most users can sit down with a new application and don't have to relearn how the scroll bars work, or whatever might have changed because it's using a different toolkit to the last one. And generally, it works. Particularly if you give enough scope for customisation (Windows doesn't, IMO, but most people seem happy with it still).
If X had included a set of standard widgets that were easily extendible, user friendly in their default implementation, and had been kept up-to-date over the years I believe we would have a better desktop than we do now. (I believe Xt fails on all of these three points... I did try using it once, and realised it would take so much work to produce an acceptable quality application it wasn't worth it; I've also played with GTK and QT)
Thanks to SP2 we have a worthless, buggy, problematic firewall which yields no benefit whatsoever, turned on all the time by default! yay.
Are you saying it doesn't work? 'Cause in my tests, it seems to consistently deny connections from externally, which is, after all, the point. It will prevent pretty much any external worm attack, in fact. I think that's hard to describe as "yields no benefit whatsoever".
What? So when I call CreateWindow and specify a window class of "BUTTON", where is the implementation of that if it isn't part of Windows?
that's why you see some older applications look different
No, that's because MS updated the widget set with the introduction of Windows 95, but 16 bit applications still use the old one for the sake of compatibility.
There are also some widgets that are implemented by external libraries, including draggable toolbars and heirarchical list views. These aren't so well standardised. In many ways I wish MS had taken a different approach and incorporated them into the core of Windows.
X doesn't even claim to be a desktop environment, so it doesn't make sense for its specification to declare that a widget set is even needed
I understand perfectly the rationale behind this, and at the time it made sense. But I personally have no use for it, and feel that if some standard way of creating server-implemented widgets had been available from the start we would not now have so many mutually incompatible look & feel standards. Progress has been made toward solving this problem recently; I believe there is now a single theming engine that can be used with both KDE and GNOME. We could have had this from the very beginning, and many non X desktop environments have provided the capability all along. Next was an excellent system. If free software had implemented an equivalent system to that back in the beginning rather than sticking to the outdated X11 specification we would be a lot further on than we are now.
Notably input is handled by Firefox, so while the developers have made an effort to produce a similar look, it has a different feel in places, and if the Microsoft widgets change in feel (or Microsoft makes the feel themeable, or partially as in GTK) it will feel completely different.
OK. I consider this a weakness of Firefox. MS has implemented a system where old applications can inherit new behaviours from the operating system. Firefox has chosen not to use it.
Neither Windows nor Macintosh provide reliable feedback either: some applications start up without feedback, and others provide feedback but don't pop up a window.
The feedback is designed to tell you that the application you have just begun hasn't initialised yet. Windows _always_ provides feedback for applications started from the shell, and stops the feedback when the application processes a GUI event. The app has had a chance to display a window at this point, and presumably not taken it for its own reasons. This is the most sensible way of doing it, and works well for 99% of applications. I don't see what relevance whether the app _will_ display a window has, you still want feedback to tell you that it has started correctly. In fact, I'd say its _more_ important in this case.
If you impose the same restrictions on X11 applications as on Windows and Macintosh, you can provide the same feedback: the launcher can watch the process itself.
There's no way for the launcher to tell when the app has begun processing events. There is also no way to determine what process created a particular window. This has led to the general practice being to stop the feedback whenever a new window is opened. This technique is inherently unreliable, as it cannot cope with multiple instances of an application starting at the same time, or two applications that use the same title bar text.
Those are limitations of those environments: for various historical reasons, they have trouble supporting applications that are both GUI apps and use console interaction. X11 apps frequently combine console interaction with GUI displays, and the fact that neither Macintosh nor Windows can support that easily is a big nuisance.
I've written a number of GUI windows apps that also use the console. It's very simple, in fact. You add "/subsystem:console" (and optionally "/entry:WinMainCRTStartup") to the linker command line.
There is no limitation here. There is an additional ability -- the programmer of a Windows application can easily provide instructions for the operation system that specify whether or not his application needs a console or not, and this instruction is interpreted by the OS in a standardised way.
For example, Macintosh gets its behavior by simply declaring GUI and command line apps to be different and incompatible: you can't double-click on most executables, and you can't (easily) run most GUI apps from a shell.
That's very confusing behaviour. I can't see why that's considered desirable at all. But my total experience with OSX is limited to a single session with it of about 2 hours, so I wouldn't know a lot.
Likewise, it's trivial to emulate Windows behavior.
How? And how come neither KDE nor GNOME have taken this approach, which is clearly superior to their current implementations?
The entire window and event structure of every application is exposed on X11, in a network-transparent and safe way. You can hook in and override in many ways. That's how window managers work, for example.
Is it? I'll admit I've only done a little X11 programming, but I thought window managers were a specific extension, the server only supports one at a time, and that their ability to change application behaviour was limited to drawing borders around top level windows and intercepting input associated with them.
An Operating System without a decent terminal program (e.g. windows) is crippled
Actually, there's not a lot wrong with Windows' terminal. OK, it doesn't come with many useful applications that use it, but these can be easily added afterwards...
No. It's perfectly possible to write applications that will run in text mode for any specific version of Windows. You'd use the DOS APIs for Win95 et al, or the NT Kernel APIs for NT et al.
Note that the Windows NT/2000/XP setup program runs under Windows in text mode.
Single-click driver installation -- just drag and drop
With neither Linux nor Windows XP did I need to click once to install any drivers -- both automatically detected what I needed and installed them for me.
Ultra-easy package installation. No messing about with distro-specific tools, and dependencies, and all the other hassles.
When I want to install a package in my Linux setup, I double-click on a.rpm file; the system displays information about it and I can click on an install button to install it. If there are other things I have to install first, it'll tell me about them.
Major packages have dependencies, this is something you have to get used to. If your installation system can't handle them, that's a problem, not a feature. It is, in fact, one of the biggest problems with Windows at the moment.
Boots in a third of the time of desktop Linux distros, possibly even quicker.
I'm impressed. You have Runs like lightning and as much lower memory requirements -- not stacks upon stacks of inefficient code (see GNOME/KDE + Mozilla + OpenOffice.org, all the separate libraries and levels of abstraction).
How does it compare to ReactOS or Y in this respect?
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I have compared KDE and Gnome on a lowend computer (300-500MHz 128-256MB RAM) the result have been the same. Gnome was way faster than KDE.
Have you tried it on a recent glibc release after running prelink? KDE performance sucks primarily because of slow dynamic linking with its hundreds of libraries. Prelink solves this problem. (Or so I'm told. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.)
With [SuSE] 9.1, it's supposed to be even easier...
Well, I went online, did an update, it downloaded them... then said I didn't have an nVidia graphics card so it wasn't going to install them.
Not sure what went wrong. Some day, perhaps I'll figure it out.
Which would make his answer even more interesting, if you ask me.
There are a number of features of grep that don't work with utf8 encoded files, for instance the '-i' command line option will not correctly detect all case conversions for non-ASCII characters, there are whitespace characters that aren't recognised as such (thus confusing the -w command line option, and potentially -x also). As it has no idea of what constitutes or doesn't constitute a single character, the [^...] regexp pattern does not work correctly. Neither does [x-x] if the second character is not in ASCII. It'll also misinterpret some other similar expressions (eg 'x?') where the character specified is non-ASCII.
Sure, if all you're using it for is matching strings in a file, grep works with utf8. But not all of its features do.
OpenGL and DirectX aren't equivalent anyway, you must be thinking of Direct3D, which is the graphics library.
:)
Direct3D has been renamed "DirectX graphics". Weren't you paying attention to that announcement?
They're complimentary technologies.
I just had a vision of arriving in a hotel room to find it occupied by a several metre wide cylinder that fills the entire length of the room; I squeeze around it to the phone and call reception. "Oh, that's the complimentary space telescope. We haven't launched it yet."
I think you mean complementary.
No, apparently they are in ruins on the surface, and NASA is involved in a cover-up to hide them from us.
Which is why it's a good thing that MS firewall doesn't have all of the features of competitive products -- people will still install those if they think they want the additional features.
If you compromise windows rpc, you compromise the firewall.
How would you compromise Windows RPC while the firewall is preventing external connections to it (as it does by default)?
So are you saying that the only way to turn off the Firewall is AFTER you have malware?
Sorry, but that is complete and utter falsehood.
Any user with administrator rights can turn off the SP2 firewall in the control panel. Having or not having malware is irrelevant.
That's hardly a fair complaint. I've never seen any firewall, at all, that can't be switched off by the administrator. This is the way it should be. Do you want software running on your computer, preventing you from performing some actions, where there is nothing you can do to disable it?
Given that MS firewall doesn't block outgoing connections, I sincerely doubt this actually happened like that. Maybe it was some other software doing it?
Or maybe it's genetic differences between the populations that mean that caffeine has different effects in the two countries?
I have a friend (in the UK) who will get extremely agitated on a couple of cups of coffee, and start losing self-control if she has much more. She gets into a lot of arguments, sometimes ends up throwing stuff around... but only if she drinks coffee. Eating chocolate has a similar but less marked effect, presumably from theobromine, which is chemically similar to caffeine.
It could well be a genetic factor that some populations have a higher proportion of people who are sensitive to it like this.
The point of an electrically-assisted bike is so that you both get some of the exercise and improve your top speed so the trip doesn't take as long. I doubt he's just going to sit there and not pedal at all.
I cycle 10 miles to work some days. This isn't actually too bad a problem, provided:
1. You allow yourself enough time. If you don't have to rush, you won't sweat very much on a ride of that length. I like to leave myself an hour so I can take it nice & easy.
2. You live in a relatively flat area. I wouldn't want to do it if the office was halfway up the side of a mountain, for instance...
3. You pack aerosol deodorant and a change of clothes. This will remove the worst of your sweat problems.
Do you really mean 35km/h on average? For how long? That is almost as good as a professional cyclist can get..
I think you're wrong about professional cyclists. On flat terrain (which is probably what they tested on) with a good bike, _I_ can average about 30 km/h, and I'm not exactly the fittest person in the world. Add hills into that equation and I drop to about 20.
Software firewalls can either block outgoing connections from spyware or untrusted apps to keep data leaking out of your machine from within. Just get Zonealarm or equivalent, and your problems are solved. Programs must ask for permission before accessing the network. MS firewall didn't ever seem to do this when I tried it. Software firewalls can also actively filter content coming and going through known connections like HTTP. But this isn't as foolproof.
This kind of filtering is pointless. It is trivially easy for any malware that gets onto your system to work around this kind of protection, usually by subverting an existing application in order to make it happen. E.g., write a suitable piece of javascript to a temporary file, then open it with internet explorer.
Assuming it actually helps is akin to sticking your head in the sand. It only helps you against incompetently written script-kiddie style attacks. And even those, I suspect that there's quite few that ZoneAlarm et al won't pick up.
Microsoft's firewall, in my experience, does nothing except take you machine off the network. Big deal I can get the same effect by unplugging my ethernet cable, thank you.
If you don't actually need your network, I'd recommend taking that route. MS's firewall allows all outgoing access, though, so it isn't equivalent.
To make a firewall that 'keeps people from breaking into my machine' is asinine. If you don't want someone accessing a service, you turn it off or change it's configuration to deny specific external hosts. If there are holes in the OS that a hacker can exploit, then a firewall is only a band-aid, that may or may not work. And it isn't any help if you actually intend to run services on you machine.
Please, tell me how I can configure MS's RPC implementation to only allow connections from localhost without using a firewall? I certainly don't trust that service not to have a large number of unknown holes that any remote host could access to gain local administrative access over my computer if I left it open, yet I need it for local operations on my machine. Oh, and if you can find a way to exploit those holes remotely through MS's firewall, I'll be _very_ impressed. Like I said, it'll stop any remote worm from spreading to me (unless I initiate a connection out to let it in).
It can be turned off in software quite easily.
For that to happen, you must already have malware on your system. Attempting to do anything with a firewall at this stage is commonly known in security circles as "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted."
I admit I am not a Windows developer, but as I understand it, the programmer can specify his own window classes, so the "Button" class is in no way "The Definitive Button". Borland compilers had their own GUI libraries, Java Swing applications don't look quite like Windows ones, so there is no standard widget set for applications running on the Windows GDI (If I am using the name wrong, though... does it only refer to the C API, or to the window system that provides keyboard/mouse/screen multiplexing?)
Well, of course applications are free to use their own button classes (as Java SWING apps do). It is also possible for applications to use the standard button class but override aspects of its behaviour (such as how it is drawn -- this is what the Borland libraries do). But a very large majority of applications just use the standard Windows button class (buttons are, perhaps, not the best example -- if we were to talk about list boxes instead it would be nearly all).
GDI refers only to the abstraction layer used for drawing (either on the screen or printers). AFAIK there is no specific name for the entire user interface.
Firefox has not used it because it has an interface called XUL that does not necessarily limit itself to features easily mappable to the Microsoft widget set.
The usual way of doing this is to extend the standard widgets to support features you need... they are implemented in a fairly OO fashion which makes this pretty easy for most operations you would want to perform. I don't know enough about the specifics of XUL to know whether it would be feasible with that, I suspect it probably would be.
Until you specifically *prohibit* the development of widget sets other than your personally preferred one true widget set, there will be no standard. That means *every* application developer with spare time *must* agree that your "standard" toolkit is the ideal one, otherwise you'll find another, and another.
Microsoft made no such prohibition, and I would argue that somewhere in the region of 95% of applications running on Windows today use MS's widgets. I think matters are similar with MacOS applications. Sure, the freedom's there, but it's rarely used, usually only by people who want to use a cross platform library for compatibility (and even then most of them use the native widgets when available).
This kind of standardisation is generally good for the user. It means most users can sit down with a new application and don't have to relearn how the scroll bars work, or whatever might have changed because it's using a different toolkit to the last one. And generally, it works. Particularly if you give enough scope for customisation (Windows doesn't, IMO, but most people seem happy with it still).
If X had included a set of standard widgets that were easily extendible, user friendly in their default implementation, and had been kept up-to-date over the years I believe we would have a better desktop than we do now. (I believe Xt fails on all of these three points... I did try using it once, and realised it would take so much work to produce an acceptable quality application it wasn't worth it; I've also played with GTK and QT)
Thanks to SP2 we have a worthless, buggy, problematic firewall which yields no benefit whatsoever, turned on all the time by default! yay.
Are you saying it doesn't work? 'Cause in my tests, it seems to consistently deny connections from externally, which is, after all, the point. It will prevent pretty much any external worm attack, in fact. I think that's hard to describe as "yields no benefit whatsoever".
Windows GDI doesn't have a native widget set,
What? So when I call CreateWindow and specify a window class of "BUTTON", where is the implementation of that if it isn't part of Windows?
that's why you see some older applications look different
No, that's because MS updated the widget set with the introduction of Windows 95, but 16 bit applications still use the old one for the sake of compatibility.
There are also some widgets that are implemented by external libraries, including draggable toolbars and heirarchical list views. These aren't so well standardised. In many ways I wish MS had taken a different approach and incorporated them into the core of Windows.
X doesn't even claim to be a desktop environment, so it doesn't make sense for its specification to declare that a widget set is even needed
I understand perfectly the rationale behind this, and at the time it made sense. But I personally have no use for it, and feel that if some standard way of creating server-implemented widgets had been available from the start we would not now have so many mutually incompatible look & feel standards. Progress has been made toward solving this problem recently; I believe there is now a single theming engine that can be used with both KDE and GNOME. We could have had this from the very beginning, and many non X desktop environments have provided the capability all along. Next was an excellent system. If free software had implemented an equivalent system to that back in the beginning rather than sticking to the outdated X11 specification we would be a lot further on than we are now.
Notably input is handled by Firefox, so while the developers have made an effort to produce a similar look, it has a different feel in places, and if the Microsoft widgets change in feel (or Microsoft makes the feel themeable, or partially as in GTK) it will feel completely different.
OK. I consider this a weakness of Firefox. MS has implemented a system where old applications can inherit new behaviours from the operating system. Firefox has chosen not to use it.
Neither Windows nor Macintosh provide reliable feedback either: some applications start up without feedback, and others provide feedback but don't pop up a window.
The feedback is designed to tell you that the application you have just begun hasn't initialised yet. Windows _always_ provides feedback for applications started from the shell, and stops the feedback when the application processes a GUI event. The app has had a chance to display a window at this point, and presumably not taken it for its own reasons. This is the most sensible way of doing it, and works well for 99% of applications. I don't see what relevance whether the app _will_ display a window has, you still want feedback to tell you that it has started correctly. In fact, I'd say its _more_ important in this case.
If you impose the same restrictions on X11 applications as on Windows and Macintosh, you can provide the same feedback: the launcher can watch the process itself.
There's no way for the launcher to tell when the app has begun processing events. There is also no way to determine what process created a particular window. This has led to the general practice being to stop the feedback whenever a new window is opened. This technique is inherently unreliable, as it cannot cope with multiple instances of an application starting at the same time, or two applications that use the same title bar text.
Those are limitations of those environments: for various historical reasons, they have trouble supporting applications that are both GUI apps and use console interaction. X11 apps frequently combine console interaction with GUI displays, and the fact that neither Macintosh nor Windows can support that easily is a big nuisance.
I've written a number of GUI windows apps that also use the console. It's very simple, in fact. You add "/subsystem:console" (and optionally "/entry:WinMainCRTStartup") to the linker command line.
There is no limitation here. There is an additional ability -- the programmer of a Windows application can easily provide instructions for the operation system that specify whether or not his application needs a console or not, and this instruction is interpreted by the OS in a standardised way.
For example, Macintosh gets its behavior by simply declaring GUI and command line apps to be different and incompatible: you can't double-click on most executables, and you can't (easily) run most GUI apps from a shell.
That's very confusing behaviour. I can't see why that's considered desirable at all. But my total experience with OSX is limited to a single session with it of about 2 hours, so I wouldn't know a lot.
Likewise, it's trivial to emulate Windows behavior.
How? And how come neither KDE nor GNOME have taken this approach, which is clearly superior to their current implementations?
The entire window and event structure of every application is exposed on X11, in a network-transparent and safe way. You can hook in and override in many ways. That's how window managers work, for example.
Is it? I'll admit I've only done a little X11 programming, but I thought window managers were a specific extension, the server only supports one at a time, and that their ability to change application behaviour was limited to drawing borders around top level windows and intercepting input associated with them.
People complained about the firewall not being enabled by default.
So MS enabled it by default.
Now people are complaining about it being enabled by default...
An Operating System without a decent terminal program (e.g. windows) is crippled
Actually, there's not a lot wrong with Windows' terminal. OK, it doesn't come with many useful applications that use it, but these can be easily added afterwards...
No. It's perfectly possible to write applications that will run in text mode for any specific version of Windows. You'd use the DOS APIs for Win95 et al, or the NT Kernel APIs for NT et al.
Note that the Windows NT/2000/XP setup program runs under Windows in text mode.
Single-click driver installation -- just drag and drop
.rpm file; the system displays information about it and I can click on an install button to install it. If there are other things I have to install first, it'll tell me about them.
With neither Linux nor Windows XP did I need to click once to install any drivers -- both automatically detected what I needed and installed them for me.
Ultra-easy package installation. No messing about with distro-specific tools, and dependencies, and all the other hassles.
When I want to install a package in my Linux setup, I double-click on a
Major packages have dependencies, this is something you have to get used to. If your installation system can't handle them, that's a problem, not a feature. It is, in fact, one of the biggest problems with Windows at the moment.
Boots in a third of the time of desktop Linux distros, possibly even quicker.
I'm impressed. You have Runs like lightning and as much lower memory requirements -- not stacks upon stacks of inefficient code (see GNOME/KDE + Mozilla + OpenOffice.org, all the separate libraries and levels of abstraction).
How does it compare to ReactOS or Y in this respect?