So, you want to be stuck with a $3K Recaro seating system in your next car, just because Recarro (hypothetically) has mananged to gain a monopolistic position in the car seat industry? (I like Recaro seats, BTW.) Is it OK with you if your car dealer specifies what brand of automotive consumables you must use to keep it under warranty?
No. OTOH, I don't want to have to work my way through a multi-page list of tickboxes to choose each and every component that goes into building the car, which is what your "outlaw bundles" position would *require*.
x86/x64 computers can run a wide variety of OSes, most of them non-M$. The hardware vendor should care what OS you use, if the HW is any good.
Why ?
They may or may not support your OS, but that decision should be up to you -- do you want to pay extra for lame tech support?
That decision _is_ up to you. If a vendor won't sell you the hardware and software bundle you want, *use another vendor* - there are lots to choose from.
Now, you still haven't answered the most important question: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "item" vs a "bundle" ?
[...] I don't understand why anyone would choose something like Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Because way back when NT was being designed, they needed to choose a key combination that was both a) on every keyboard and b) not used by anything else. Ctrl+Alt+Del was the only candidate.
And the funny (or sad?) thing is that this is only "necessary" in Windows because of all the crap that Windows can get infected with. Neither Linux nor OSX needed to implement the ctrl-alt-del scheme.
No, it's "necessary" in Windows for the same reason it's "necessary" on all platforms. To ensure no other application is masquerading as a login screen.
My understanding of the reason for using crtl-alt-delete to log in, is because that specific keystroke got passed directly to Windows which then could make sure the official login program was running and accepting all input (or something along those lines).
It's used because back when NT was first designed, they needed some reasonable key combination to use for the Secure Attention Sequence that was not already being used by some other application. The only one that that was (for obvious reasons, in ~1990 or so) was Ctrl+Alt+Del.
[...]
Outlaw "bundling" -- all items should be discretely negotiable!
Yeah. I just can't *wait* to have to buy a car one component at a time, and wear the extra cost the manufacturers and sellers will be passing on to consumers...
Who gets to decide what constitutes an "item" ? On what basis ?
Well actually no. These people are refugees. Under international conventions which australia is signatory to, refugees have the right to seek asylum in Australia.
No, they're illegal immigrants. If they were refugees and had followed the appropriate procedures for that status to be determined before they arrived, they'd be allowed in.
People entering the country *might* be refugees. Then again, they might be criminals, smugglers, or simply individuals who had been denied entry in the past for any number of reasons reasons. The purpose of immigration control is to determine these things and act accordingly.
Australian society clearly doesn't have a major problem with refugees (or, indeed, immigrants in general). We take in a relatively large number of them.
Well not always. There is a reason these people left their country. Often it is because they are a political dissident, and fear for their lives
Often it's because their country just sucks and they don't want to live there.
Do you like being able to travel freely across your own country without having to prove yourself when crossing state lines?. Yes? Apply the same rule here. You're not scared of people from another state are you?
There is a vast gulf of difference between moving between two states in the same country and moving between different countries. You can pretend otherwise as much as you want, stamp your foot and insist it's the same thing until you're blue in the face, but it won't change reality.
On the topic of racism. The Australian government spends millions trying to keep out refugees (which are mostly from middle eastern countries). On the other hand they do fuck all about British tourist who have overstayed their visas.
Illegal immigrants we know nothing about and tourists overstaying their visas are - by definition - two fundamentally different demographics. Conflating them is naive stupidity at best, deceptive propoganda at worst.
I'm still waiting to find out what your address is. You do have the courage of your convictions and happily let anyone who walks in off the street into your home, right ?
We have detention centers in Australia too. They are full of refugees who try to come to australia via boat without permission. I refuse to call these people 'illegals' because no human being is 'illegal', they are fucken human beings.
There are laws defining how non-citizens are allowed to enter the country. These people have broken those laws. They're illegal immigrants.
This does not mean they are "illegal people". They are free to leave - and go back to their point of origin - whenever they want.
Sad thing is, only a minority of people in Australia feel for the plight of these people. Most 'aussies' are racist, even if they don't admit it (or don't realize it).
Believing in immigration control is not racist, it's sensible.
If you're so gung-ho about this, can you give me your address ? I want to come over to your house, eat your food and sleep in your bed for a few weeks. Or are you some racist hypocrite who locks his door at night ?
Whats even sadder is that some refugees have been detained for years on end without being processed. Even sadder still, after years in detention, some get sent back from where they came. There was one case I think where someone was returned to Iran to be subsequently killed by the Iranian government.
Now, here you actually have something approaching a valid point. The time taken to process these people *is* something that needs to be improved. Of course, if they didn't destroy all the documentation proving who they are, that would expedite the process far more than anything that can be done on Australia's end.
Detetntion centers need to be abolished. There is no place for them in a free society.
So how *should* we deal with people who enter the country illegally, that we know nothing about ?
"most" not "all". as the parent said, there are special situations that can ask for huge amounts of ram. Multimedia like video or big databases are examples.
And there are versions of Windows that will cater to that, as I said. However, the fundamental problem here is with the hardware.
(Heck, even my 4 years old Athlon 64 has 3 sockets with 1 GB each, more than what non-server XP can handle).
XP on i386 will support your 3GB of RAM trouble-free, unless your hardware is _very_ broken. Heck, NT 4.0 would probably see it all. XP x64 supports up to 128GB - so install that and you'll be able to use as much RAM as you can stuff into the machine.
- There are user that may need it. And there is widespread abundance of hardware that maxes Windows XP's 2GB/2GB memory address scheme.
Then they should be using a 64 bit OS and software. Trying to use a 32 bit platform with applications that "need" more than around 2GB of address space is an endeavour fraught with problems - regardless of OS.
The additional address space is handled by the memory manager. Application shouldn't have to deal with that. (it's how it works in Linux case. But saddly it's the other way around in the PAE supporting Windowses - back to the old time of DOS-extenders !)
What ?
It's completely arbitrary to restrict high memory addresses to only some variants of windows.
No, it's a perfectly reasonable engineering tradeoff to account for the majority of consumer-level hardware (and drivers) - ie: XP's primary market - that either cannot physically hold, or malfunctions in the presence of, >=4GB RAM.
If you want to use >=4GB RAM with Windows, there are options available - and have been for as long as such large memory amounts have been reasonably workable on x86 hardware. Using low-end (and even a lot of high-end) 32-bit x86 machines with 3GB+ of RAM has _always_ been a crapshoot, regardless of OS - it's simply the nature of the hardware. If you want more than 3GB of RAM, go 64-bit, otherwise you'll be relying on ugly, unreliable-in-real-life-usage, performance-sapping hacks that are required to make it work.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine.
You could actually do this with Windows 2.1/386, ca. 1988 (although, unsurprisingly, not many people are probably aware of that).
My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I think they would have done better to have broken the promise and gone straight to the 386; given deep discounts for a while to their customers to whom they had made the promise or something. Even at the time I thought it was a mistake to keep trying to beat 286 code into something reasonable, while 386-based machines were becoming common.
Basically, IBM had sold a _lot_ of 286-based machines to businesses, who had only bought them on the understanding that IBM guaranteed their fancy new OS - OS/2 - would run on them. Not providing that capability would have had a seriously negative impact on IBM's reputation (remember, this was still back in the days of "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM").
Incorrect, XP can only manage 3 GiB of RAM. You can install 4 GiB, but you'll have one unused. Supposedly Vista supports 4 GiB. 32-bit Linux also appears to be limited to a little less that 4 GiB, unless you build with the HIGHMEM64 option, in which case it will support up to 64 GiB.[*]
This isn't the OS's fault, it's the hardware, which is "stealing" address space for devices. You get the same problem in Linux for the same reason.
I believe you can even load an XP machine up with more than 4GB if you want, boot with the/PAE switch, and XP will see it all fine (although it is completely unsupported by Microsoft and *lots* of consumer-level peripherals won't work with it). Linux has a compile-time flag that does the same thing.
I'm rebuilding with HIGHMEM64G right now, and eventually I'll get around to installing a 64-bit Linux kernel (this is an Athlon 64 X2 machine), but I'm puzzled as to why I can't use my 4GB with 32-bit Linux.
The short version is that a (32 bit) x86 machine with 3GB - 4GB of RAM is a very strange beast and often behaves in strange ways, but this is because of the hardware, not the OS. Some hardware will make almost all 4G available, some will barely make more than 3G available. You will probably find your newly compiled system will see more RAM, but some of your hardware won't work (although if it does, lucky you).
(Of course, if you've got 64 bit hardware and a 64 bit OS, all these weird problems disappear - so if you have that option, take it.)
Windows 2000 and XP (and even NT 4.0, for that matter) all support 4GB of physical RAM. 64 bit versions of XP support 128GB.
With the average person being able to aford 4 gig of ram and graphics people needing all the ram they can get it's bizzare with cheap ram to have such limitations.
Hardly. 4GB is a lot of RAM, even today, and most consumer-level hardware currently out there is physically incapable of having any more than that installed (heck, most machines wouldn't even get past 2GB). Not to mention it's the maximum addressable limit on a 32-bit CPU without resorting to hacks like PAE.
If you have a need for more than 4GB of RAM, there are certainly versions of Windows that support it and have been for years. Most consumers, however, don't even have hardware that is physically capable of having 4GB installed (even a lot of brand new hardware - eg: MacBook Pros - top out at <4GB of physical RAM), let alone a pressing need to be able to use >4GB.
In short, the "memory limits" of consumers version of Windows are neither unreasonable nor particularly arbitrary.
Virtual machines. OS/2 had it. Well sort of. More like their VM/370 or MVS. Multiple independent address spaces, managed by a "hypervisor", that could or nor see each other. On an 80486 PC and not a mainframe.
Windows 2.1/386 was doing it 4 years earlier, in 1988. OS/2 1.x could have been able to as well, except IBM insisted on it (against very strong protests from Microsoft) supporting the 286.
In the future will it take four or eight processors in a box to keep the lag down to 50 seconds? Should we take any delight in the fact that Windows boot will be sped up again only by special code to pre-load parts of the OS into flash ram before shutdown? I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change. Aint gonna happen though. If there are still any really smart people working at MS I'm sure they are working on the next great Google/Sony/IBM/Oracle killer or something. Faster boots would benefit ALL Windows users, not just MS only shops. We can't have that now can we?
The vast majority of bootup time is in hardware initialisation and probes, not OS overheads.
It's a good sign when an OS rarely needs to be booted, which is at least the case with Linux and OS X (can't speak for Vista).
It is also the case for Windows. If your Windows PC needs to be rebooted for any reason other than patching, it's broken and should be fixed.
If people can't find the option, it's not much better.
People shouldn't have to find it, it should be activated on-demand. Vista has improved this situation significantly, although since it is multiuser, the capability has always existed in NT (and some programs do it properly, detecting current privilege levels and prompting for higher ones if necessary, even in Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier ?)).
Specifically having to "Run As" something - in the general case - is broken UI, and most people do not understand the concept of a multiuser OS necessary to make use of it.
As with most "problems" in Windows, this is almost completely the fault of the software developers (although Microsoft must also share some blame for not doing the right thing with OS-included tools, eg: Control Panel applets).
This argument only holds up if you only do one thing at a time. Even on my Athlon XP 2500+ (obviously, a single-core system) I would regularly burn a CD (or a DVD, but only at 2x max) while playing a game. It would work out but the game would sometimes stutter and the burn would sometimes underrun; the underrun protection would work, but it does slow down the burn.
Something is wrong with your PC. Ca. mid-1997 I was burning CDs (at a blistering 4x) and playing Quake at the same time, on a 133Mhz Pentium with 40MB RAM running NT4.
The difference is that Linux does not have fundamentally flawed security because of the limited design decisions that went into the fundamental architecture of Windows.
Like what ?
The "fundamental design" of NT is vastly more secure than the "fundamental design" of Linux was. Subsequent add-on hacks like SELinux have improved the situation markedly, but hardly anyone actually *uses* properly configured SELinux machines.
The "fundamental design" of Linux included a superuser. That alone is a massive security problem not present in Windows.
This means its easier for Linux admins to get it right. A Linux install by default is pretty secure. With Windows you have to find and enable hard-to-find stuff to make it that way.
In any version of Windows NT, Users cannot see the calendar by double clicking the time in the system tray. (so we gave end-users Power user accounts!!)
That's because it's not a "calendar", it's a tool for setting the system time.
There is a specific GPO for allowing users to do so, as well, so there's no need to make them Power Users just to cover that functionality (although then your users will be able to change the system time, which is itself a security hole).
IE is part of the OS and runs funny with a User account
IE is a user space application that works fine in any regular - hell, even 'guest' - user account.
You can't defrag HDs without being an Admin.
Really ? You can't read and write to arbitrary parts of the disk without elevated privileges ? You find this surprising ?
So who decides what goes in the.xxx domain? Who decides what is porn?
The person registering the domain.
"Let's have a.xxx TLD for pornography" and "let's force every pornographic website to use a.xxx TLD" are two very different - and very separate - arguments.
The problem is that there is no way to define what IS and IS NOT porn.
The person building the website (you know, the one who goes "I'd like to register penguinsex.xxx thanks") probably has a fairly good idea whether or not his site is pornographic.
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So, you want to be stuck with a $3K Recaro seating system in your next car, just because Recarro (hypothetically) has mananged to gain a monopolistic position in the car seat industry? (I like Recaro seats, BTW.) Is it OK with you if your car dealer specifies what brand of automotive consumables you must use to keep it under warranty?
No. OTOH, I don't want to have to work my way through a multi-page list of tickboxes to choose each and every component that goes into building the car, which is what your "outlaw bundles" position would *require*.
x86/x64 computers can run a wide variety of OSes, most of them non-M$. The hardware vendor should care what OS you use, if the HW is any good.
Why ?
They may or may not support your OS, but that decision should be up to you -- do you want to pay extra for lame tech support?
That decision _is_ up to you. If a vendor won't sell you the hardware and software bundle you want, *use another vendor* - there are lots to choose from.
Now, you still haven't answered the most important question: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "item" vs a "bundle" ?
[...] I don't understand why anyone would choose something like Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Because way back when NT was being designed, they needed to choose a key combination that was both a) on every keyboard and b) not used by anything else. Ctrl+Alt+Del was the only candidate.
And the funny (or sad?) thing is that this is only "necessary" in Windows because of all the crap that Windows can get infected with. Neither Linux nor OSX needed to implement the ctrl-alt-del scheme.
No, it's "necessary" in Windows for the same reason it's "necessary" on all platforms. To ensure no other application is masquerading as a login screen.
My understanding of the reason for using crtl-alt-delete to log in, is because that specific keystroke got passed directly to Windows which then could make sure the official login program was running and accepting all input (or something along those lines).
It's used because back when NT was first designed, they needed some reasonable key combination to use for the Secure Attention Sequence that was not already being used by some other application. The only one that that was (for obvious reasons, in ~1990 or so) was Ctrl+Alt+Del.
See my .sig line.
[...] Outlaw "bundling" -- all items should be discretely negotiable!
Yeah. I just can't *wait* to have to buy a car one component at a time, and wear the extra cost the manufacturers and sellers will be passing on to consumers...
Who gets to decide what constitutes an "item" ? On what basis ?
Well actually no. These people are refugees. Under international conventions which australia is signatory to, refugees have the right to seek asylum in Australia.
No, they're illegal immigrants. If they were refugees and had followed the appropriate procedures for that status to be determined before they arrived, they'd be allowed in.
People entering the country *might* be refugees. Then again, they might be criminals, smugglers, or simply individuals who had been denied entry in the past for any number of reasons reasons. The purpose of immigration control is to determine these things and act accordingly.
Australian society clearly doesn't have a major problem with refugees (or, indeed, immigrants in general). We take in a relatively large number of them.
Well not always. There is a reason these people left their country. Often it is because they are a political dissident, and fear for their lives
Often it's because their country just sucks and they don't want to live there.
Do you like being able to travel freely across your own country without having to prove yourself when crossing state lines?. Yes? Apply the same rule here. You're not scared of people from another state are you?
There is a vast gulf of difference between moving between two states in the same country and moving between different countries. You can pretend otherwise as much as you want, stamp your foot and insist it's the same thing until you're blue in the face, but it won't change reality.
On the topic of racism. The Australian government spends millions trying to keep out refugees (which are mostly from middle eastern countries). On the other hand they do fuck all about British tourist who have overstayed their visas.
Illegal immigrants we know nothing about and tourists overstaying their visas are - by definition - two fundamentally different demographics. Conflating them is naive stupidity at best, deceptive propoganda at worst.
I'm still waiting to find out what your address is. You do have the courage of your convictions and happily let anyone who walks in off the street into your home, right ?
We have detention centers in Australia too. They are full of refugees who try to come to australia via boat without permission. I refuse to call these people 'illegals' because no human being is 'illegal', they are fucken human beings.
There are laws defining how non-citizens are allowed to enter the country. These people have broken those laws. They're illegal immigrants.
This does not mean they are "illegal people". They are free to leave - and go back to their point of origin - whenever they want.
Sad thing is, only a minority of people in Australia feel for the plight of these people. Most 'aussies' are racist, even if they don't admit it (or don't realize it).
Believing in immigration control is not racist, it's sensible.
If you're so gung-ho about this, can you give me your address ? I want to come over to your house, eat your food and sleep in your bed for a few weeks. Or are you some racist hypocrite who locks his door at night ?
Whats even sadder is that some refugees have been detained for years on end without being processed. Even sadder still, after years in detention, some get sent back from where they came. There was one case I think where someone was returned to Iran to be subsequently killed by the Iranian government.
Now, here you actually have something approaching a valid point. The time taken to process these people *is* something that needs to be improved. Of course, if they didn't destroy all the documentation proving who they are, that would expedite the process far more than anything that can be done on Australia's end.
Detetntion centers need to be abolished. There is no place for them in a free society.
So how *should* we deal with people who enter the country illegally, that we know nothing about ?
"most" not "all". as the parent said, there are special situations that can ask for huge amounts of ram. Multimedia like video or big databases are examples.
And there are versions of Windows that will cater to that, as I said. However, the fundamental problem here is with the hardware.
(Heck, even my 4 years old Athlon 64 has 3 sockets with 1 GB each, more than what non-server XP can handle).
XP on i386 will support your 3GB of RAM trouble-free, unless your hardware is _very_ broken. Heck, NT 4.0 would probably see it all. XP x64 supports up to 128GB - so install that and you'll be able to use as much RAM as you can stuff into the machine.
- There are user that may need it. And there is widespread abundance of hardware that maxes Windows XP's 2GB/2GB memory address scheme.
Then they should be using a 64 bit OS and software. Trying to use a 32 bit platform with applications that "need" more than around 2GB of address space is an endeavour fraught with problems - regardless of OS.
The additional address space is handled by the memory manager. Application shouldn't have to deal with that. (it's how it works in Linux case. But saddly it's the other way around in the PAE supporting Windowses - back to the old time of DOS-extenders !)
What ?
It's completely arbitrary to restrict high memory addresses to only some variants of windows.
No, it's a perfectly reasonable engineering tradeoff to account for the majority of consumer-level hardware (and drivers) - ie: XP's primary market - that either cannot physically hold, or malfunctions in the presence of, >=4GB RAM.
If you want to use >=4GB RAM with Windows, there are options available - and have been for as long as such large memory amounts have been reasonably workable on x86 hardware. Using low-end (and even a lot of high-end) 32-bit x86 machines with 3GB+ of RAM has _always_ been a crapshoot, regardless of OS - it's simply the nature of the hardware. If you want more than 3GB of RAM, go 64-bit, otherwise you'll be relying on ugly, unreliable-in-real-life-usage, performance-sapping hacks that are required to make it work.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine.
You could actually do this with Windows 2.1/386, ca. 1988 (although, unsurprisingly, not many people are probably aware of that).
My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I think they would have done better to have broken the promise and gone straight to the 386; given deep discounts for a while to their customers to whom they had made the promise or something. Even at the time I thought it was a mistake to keep trying to beat 286 code into something reasonable, while 386-based machines were becoming common.
Basically, IBM had sold a _lot_ of 286-based machines to businesses, who had only bought them on the understanding that IBM guaranteed their fancy new OS - OS/2 - would run on them. Not providing that capability would have had a seriously negative impact on IBM's reputation (remember, this was still back in the days of "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM").
Incorrect, XP can only manage 3 GiB of RAM. You can install 4 GiB, but you'll have one unused. Supposedly Vista supports 4 GiB. 32-bit Linux also appears to be limited to a little less that 4 GiB, unless you build with the HIGHMEM64 option, in which case it will support up to 64 GiB.[*]
This isn't the OS's fault, it's the hardware, which is "stealing" address space for devices. You get the same problem in Linux for the same reason.
I believe you can even load an XP machine up with more than 4GB if you want, boot with the /PAE switch, and XP will see it all fine (although it is completely unsupported by Microsoft and *lots* of consumer-level peripherals won't work with it). Linux has a compile-time flag that does the same thing.
I'm rebuilding with HIGHMEM64G right now, and eventually I'll get around to installing a 64-bit Linux kernel (this is an Athlon 64 X2 machine), but I'm puzzled as to why I can't use my 4GB with 32-bit Linux.
The short version is that a (32 bit) x86 machine with 3GB - 4GB of RAM is a very strange beast and often behaves in strange ways, but this is because of the hardware, not the OS. Some hardware will make almost all 4G available, some will barely make more than 3G available. You will probably find your newly compiled system will see more RAM, but some of your hardware won't work (although if it does, lucky you).
(Of course, if you've got 64 bit hardware and a 64 bit OS, all these weird problems disappear - so if you have that option, take it.)
Windows NT 3.1 (Microsoft's first 32-bit offering) wasn't released until some time after OS/2 2.0 (July 1993, over a year later than OS/2 2.0 ).
On the other hand, NT 3.1 was a vastly more complex and capable system than OS/2 2.0 (or any version since, for that matter).
Win 2000 had a 2 gig cap and XP had a 4 gig.
Windows 2000 and XP (and even NT 4.0, for that matter) all support 4GB of physical RAM. 64 bit versions of XP support 128GB.
With the average person being able to aford 4 gig of ram and graphics people needing all the ram they can get it's bizzare with cheap ram to have such limitations.
Hardly. 4GB is a lot of RAM, even today, and most consumer-level hardware currently out there is physically incapable of having any more than that installed (heck, most machines wouldn't even get past 2GB). Not to mention it's the maximum addressable limit on a 32-bit CPU without resorting to hacks like PAE.
If you have a need for more than 4GB of RAM, there are certainly versions of Windows that support it and have been for years. Most consumers, however, don't even have hardware that is physically capable of having 4GB installed (even a lot of brand new hardware - eg: MacBook Pros - top out at <4GB of physical RAM), let alone a pressing need to be able to use >4GB.
In short, the "memory limits" of consumers version of Windows are neither unreasonable nor particularly arbitrary.
Virtual machines. OS/2 had it. Well sort of. More like their VM/370 or MVS. Multiple independent address spaces, managed by a "hypervisor", that could or nor see each other. On an 80486 PC and not a mainframe.
Windows 2.1/386 was doing it 4 years earlier, in 1988. OS/2 1.x could have been able to as well, except IBM insisted on it (against very strong protests from Microsoft) supporting the 286.
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2, [...]
You do know that you're completely wrong ?
In the future will it take four or eight processors in a box to keep the lag down to 50 seconds? Should we take any delight in the fact that Windows boot will be sped up again only by special code to pre-load parts of the OS into flash ram before shutdown? I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change. Aint gonna happen though. If there are still any really smart people working at MS I'm sure they are working on the next great Google/Sony/IBM/Oracle killer or something. Faster boots would benefit ALL Windows users, not just MS only shops. We can't have that now can we?
The vast majority of bootup time is in hardware initialisation and probes, not OS overheads.
It's a good sign when an OS rarely needs to be booted, which is at least the case with Linux and OS X (can't speak for Vista).
It is also the case for Windows. If your Windows PC needs to be rebooted for any reason other than patching, it's broken and should be fixed.
need I go on...?
No. You have demonstrated quite well that you have no clue what you're talking about.
It's built into Windows 2000? Where?
Shift+Right-click something executable.
If people can't find the option, it's not much better.
People shouldn't have to find it, it should be activated on-demand. Vista has improved this situation significantly, although since it is multiuser, the capability has always existed in NT (and some programs do it properly, detecting current privilege levels and prompting for higher ones if necessary, even in Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier ?)).
Specifically having to "Run As" something - in the general case - is broken UI, and most people do not understand the concept of a multiuser OS necessary to make use of it.
As with most "problems" in Windows, this is almost completely the fault of the software developers (although Microsoft must also share some blame for not doing the right thing with OS-included tools, eg: Control Panel applets).
This argument only holds up if you only do one thing at a time. Even on my Athlon XP 2500+ (obviously, a single-core system) I would regularly burn a CD (or a DVD, but only at 2x max) while playing a game. It would work out but the game would sometimes stutter and the burn would sometimes underrun; the underrun protection would work, but it does slow down the burn.
Something is wrong with your PC. Ca. mid-1997 I was burning CDs (at a blistering 4x) and playing Quake at the same time, on a 133Mhz Pentium with 40MB RAM running NT4.
Microsoft, obviously, loved the idea of staying with x86.
Why ?
Intel > AMD at high end, Intel >= AMD at low end, Core 2 > A64, Intel finally has a lead in both architecture design and process (65nm).
Finally ? I think you mean, after AMD's brief lead, the status quo has been returned.
The difference is that Linux does not have fundamentally flawed security because of the limited design decisions that went into the fundamental architecture of Windows.
Like what ?
The "fundamental design" of NT is vastly more secure than the "fundamental design" of Linux was. Subsequent add-on hacks like SELinux have improved the situation markedly, but hardly anyone actually *uses* properly configured SELinux machines.
The "fundamental design" of Linux included a superuser. That alone is a massive security problem not present in Windows.
This means its easier for Linux admins to get it right. A Linux install by default is pretty secure. With Windows you have to find and enable hard-to-find stuff to make it that way.
Rubbish.
The historical lack of a "Run as user..." command is partly responsible for this.
It's been around since *at least* NT4, in 1996 (although prior to Windows 2000, it was added to the shell via a free Powertoy from Microsoft).
No developer has had an excuse for releasing software that needlessly requires elevated privileges since ca. 1998. None.
In any version of Windows NT, Users cannot see the calendar by double clicking the time in the system tray. (so we gave end-users Power user accounts!!)
That's because it's not a "calendar", it's a tool for setting the system time.
There is a specific GPO for allowing users to do so, as well, so there's no need to make them Power Users just to cover that functionality (although then your users will be able to change the system time, which is itself a security hole).
IE is part of the OS and runs funny with a User account
IE is a user space application that works fine in any regular - hell, even 'guest' - user account.
You can't defrag HDs without being an Admin.
Really ? You can't read and write to arbitrary parts of the disk without elevated privileges ? You find this surprising ?
The net result will be identically configured computers with fewer applications, a bot maker's paradise.
The net result will be identically configured computers with fewer applications, a system administrator's paradise.
Fixed that for you.
So who decides what goes in the .xxx domain? Who decides what is porn?
The person registering the domain.
"Let's have a .xxx TLD for pornography" and "let's force every pornographic website to use a .xxx TLD" are two very different - and very separate - arguments.
The problem is that there is no way to define what IS and IS NOT porn.
The person building the website (you know, the one who goes "I'd like to register penguinsex.xxx thanks") probably has a fairly good idea whether or not his site is pornographic.