The Sims, and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing require Admin. There is NO F*CKING REASON that either of these should require it, except for sloppy/lazy coding on Broderbund's part (I suspect that they either write to HKLM or to the program directory)
Other possible places are insided the Windows directory or even in the root of drive C. It tends to come from the programmers assuming a single user, no file protection model. You even see apps which require files on a CDROM to first be copied and permissions set to RW before they can be opened...
OT: I've read somewhere that MS is (finally!) discouraging putting all user settings into the Registry, but is recommending config files (human readability optonal) in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data.
Hopefully using the registry key which points to "Application Data" rather than hardcoding that path in. But no doubt some moron will hardcode the path resulting in things breaking, especially if C:\Documents and Settings dosn't exist... And this after they made so much fuss about the registry being such a good idea because it could hold more than 64k configuration data for each app.
There are VERY few DOS and 9x apps that don't work with XP (Probably less than 1% don't work). It really isn't that large of an issue.
If your business depends on one of those apps then it is a very big issue... A more meaningful figure might be the percentage of apps which are actually used. It's anyone's guess what proportion of the 99% are demos, shareware, programes nobody ever used, etc.
And considering the MS has not, to date, made sweeping changes to the OS that screw backwards compatibility (other than killing off most of DOS in Win98SE),
In general they havn't, but that's not to say they havn't broken a fair few programs on the way...
Though that was the original meaning of the word, carpet bagger has long been used to refer to someone who previously had little ties to a state/city/region/etc and moved there shortly before an election to run there.
Much of the development effort behind Linux now comes from USA
Only in the sense that Linus now lives there.
and code is stored on servers in USA.
Actually it is all over the planet. Quite a bit of OSS is deliberatly developed outside of the US because of the political minefield of "export restrictions" which exist.
The domestic disturbance call didn't identify anyone; all the cops knew was that they were looking for a couple in a pickup. To assume reasonable suspicion from only seeing the vehicle parked and nobody fighting is retarded.
The call identified a man striking a woman. Whereas in this case a woman assaulted a man.
The cop should have simply acquiesced to Dudley's refusal to identify himself and asked about the disturbance, or gone on and talked to the girl. But he apparently was on a power trip and didn't care to actually bloody *think*.
Since there were apparently two cops on the scene it would have made sense for one to interview each of the people in the vehicle.
Also, they DIDN'T question the girl, they simply grabbed her when she started shrieking in terror at the first cop arresting her Dad, pinned her to the ground and arrested her for resisting arrest. But wait.... how can you resist arrest when you haven't been *charged* with anything???
If they'd actually investigated they would most likely have had a reason to arrest her.
Um, yes they did. The police were called out on a report of a domestic disturbance between Hiibel and his daughter.
A report which, for one reason or other, swapped the identities of victim and perpetrator
Hiibel and his daughter were fighting -his daughter admits it when they start to question her- so I would say that the police did have reasonable suspicion to question him.
They appeared far more concerned with him poducing identity documents than finding out what had happened. Producing identity documents was not really highly relevent to investigating the case.
If the police overstep their bounds on this, you can sue them afterwards. Just like if they committed a search of your home because they invented a probable cause after the fact.
Except that you have to pay to do this and it's kind of hard to sue anyone from a jail cell. Being able to sue the psudo-corporate entity the police work for is hardly the same as being able to have the police officers responsible held in custody until a court looks at the case.
Except that the "almost" part that you mentioned is that they have the power to arbitrarily make your life a living hell and have a propensity for skirting the law.
There is the fundermental issue of "who watches the watchers". Or even "who do you call if a cop breaks the law?"
I'm not saying all cops are bad, far from it, but even good cops can bend/ignore the law as they see fit. And everyone including cops can have a bad hair day.
Especially if the cop is likely to be seen as better the more people he or she arrests.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Aircraft manufacturers not only CAN share components, but they INVARIABLY DO share components. There is not an aircraft in the world whose airframe and engines are made by the same company.
Different parts of the airframe may well originate from different companies.
The same goes for avionics. For aircraft with propellers, the propellers are invariably made by speciality companies that make only propellers.
Similarly rotor blades and wings tend to come from specialist companies. (Who might well only sell a matched set of blades, wings, entire tailplane, etc).
No one would ever dream of trying to start an airplane company that made all of the components for an entire aircraft.
Even someone making a "scratch built" aircraft as a hobby might well not make everything themselves.
Even worse, does Airbus (or Boeing for that matter) manufacture every single of a million parts in a plane themselves?
Do Airbus or Boeing even have the ability to manufacture aircraft engines? AFAIK they don't...
Hell no! Certainly not. There's an abundance of suppliers supplying parts for a plane, from the altimeter to the leather chairs in first class.
In man cases there are multiple alternative options, which are sourced from different places. There is no such thing as an "off the shelf" airliner. Buy one from Airbus or Boeing and they will build it with your choice of options. Aircraft are more like bespoke software systems than shrink wrapped software.
What people don't also realize is that song swapping is an old tradition, which helps keep old groups alive and helps new groups become more popular through word of mouth.
A very old, literally, prehistoric tradition. With modern popular music someone even coined the specific term "cover version" to describe one way in which new musicians use old songs.
"Autorun" is one of the most irritating features of Windows. It's easily disabled, but at the cost of losing "notification" when you insert or remove a CD, which means you have to manually prompt for a refresh sometimes.
Yet another example of a Windows "feature" which bundles several things together...
But it's better than some installer taking over every time you insert a program disk to refer to something or copy some files.
The concept to having the installer silently exit if the program is already installed appears to be beyond many Windows programmers:)
I'm actually wondering how hard it would be to get a mailing address for the artists that I want to support...and sending them the $20 directly and downloading the cd from a P2P network.
Their contract with the record company probably forbids them taking your money directly. If they accepted your $20 they could wind up with legal bills of thousands of times that amount.
It's weird, technically, it's a virus. It spreads onto your system without your knowledge and prevents the computer from doing some function.
It isn't quite a virus. But the way these kind of anti-copying techniques work does sound like it could be illegal under anti-hacking laws. Considering the usual double standards if some individual distributed a piece of sharware with such a feature they'd be being carted away by the cops. But when a big corp does it the cops just don't appear to be interested.
Agreed. But cleaning up after a virus / worm / trojan / spyware / adware infection isn't regarded by blinkered bosses as "maintenance", it's "disaster recovery".
Which is rather at odds with the usual meaning of disaster. In most other industries "disasters" which happen frequently are considered "maintenance issues".
They have continually faced these types of onslaughts. From monks handwriting manuscripts to the printing press, to the copy machine. Live performance to wax phonographs to LP's to tapes and now digital. With each change in technology the cost of production changed just as dramatically then as it has now.
What has also been comming down is the cost of distribution combined with the divorce of content from media.
And the fact that you business will go under doesn't matter one little bit. If the RIAA and all of its studios went out of business today there would still be lots of music to listen to tomorrow.
The so called "Music Industry" is simply a bunch of middlemen. If this were to happen then new middlement would appear quickly, if they were useful.
Companies dealing in intellectual property have never before faced this level of onslaught of piracy and infringement.
Their business model only came into existance through the creation of the concept of "copyright". Which was itself an attempt by government to control the printing press.
This isn't something that happened overnight - it's been building up for years (although in recent years, it has accelerated greatly).
It's an effect of the advancement of technology. With the important distinction that whilst a printing press or CD plant only has a low cost per copy if you make a large number of copies a computer can make cheap copies one at a time.
While a lot of people criticise the methods they're employing to try and protect their assets, few can offer insightful solutions that have solid financial reasoning behind them.
Solid financial reasoning is that these companies need to either find a new business model or cease trading.
DRM may be bad for those artists who recycle bits of others' works, but it's not bad for the creators of those original works.
How is the DRM going to "know" what is and isn't original. e.g. could it be used to ensure that the "artist" has control over what a publisher does with their work?
Believe it or not, most serious artists actually want to retain the hope of selling their work and making a living,
The vast majority of those aiming to "make it big" never do so in the first place. There are also plenty of people who don't rely on their music/writing/etc to be their primary/only source of income in the first place.
The fiasco of DVD restrictions runs counter to every single principle of the free-market which these companies supposedly hold dear.
The reality is that free-market is only supported when it benifits the big guys, and in the case of digital media, it dosen't.
The same way certain large corporations are pro "globalization" when it means they can get the cheapest possible raw materials and labour. But get upset when customers and retailers (some of whom are themselves large corporations) try to choose the cheapest sources of goods.
DVD Region locking is stupid, this is just making international trade laws redundant as if you didn't want a DVD to be sold in a country, you could just have its import banned.
Banning the import of a specific title would be a matter for that country's government. The thing is that the DVD region codings don't match up with censorship standards, languages or TV standards.
So, DVD Region Locking is supposed to prevent movie sales to occur while these are stilly played in movie theaters.
Now, if this were true, then most "old" movies would have been released as Region-0.
Even some new movies might never play in mainstream cinemas/movie theaters in some parts of the world.
Actually, you have to have some kind of secure key distribution channel or storage location. Which becomes absolutely and completely impossible as soon as the device lands in the owner's hands.
Since the "device" is a mass market product, probably manufactured as cheaply as possible, cryptoanalysis becomes rather easier. Since you can compare the encryption of multiple devices.
Any fixed keys (or key generation program) can be extracted, any keys transmitted over the network intercepted. What they're trying to do is technically impossible,
Encryption is useful where several parties wish to communicate without third parties knowing what is being communicated. Though the third parties do know that that encrypted communications are going on and can obtain some metadata relating to the communicating parties. (There are other techniques, e.g. steganography which attempt to hide either the identity of the communicating parties or the existance of any communication at all.) With DRM the aim is to be able to send information to parties you don't trust and control what they do with it. Trying to hack encryption to do this is never going to work, since the assumption sending encrypted information is that you do trust the other party.
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The Sims, and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing require Admin. There is NO F*CKING REASON that either of these should require it, except for sloppy/lazy coding on Broderbund's part (I suspect that they either write to HKLM or to the program directory)
Other possible places are insided the Windows directory or even in the root of drive C. It tends to come from the programmers assuming a single user, no file protection model. You even see apps which require files on a CDROM to first be copied and permissions set to RW before they can be opened...
OT: I've read somewhere that MS is (finally!) discouraging putting all user settings into the Registry, but is recommending config files (human readability optonal) in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data.
Hopefully using the registry key which points to "Application Data" rather than hardcoding that path in. But no doubt some moron will hardcode the path resulting in things breaking, especially if C:\Documents and Settings dosn't exist...
And this after they made so much fuss about the registry being such a good idea because it could hold more than 64k configuration data for each app.
There are VERY few DOS and 9x apps that don't work with XP (Probably less than 1% don't work). It really isn't that large of an issue.
If your business depends on one of those apps then it is a very big issue...
A more meaningful figure might be the percentage of apps which are actually used. It's anyone's guess what proportion of the 99% are demos, shareware, programes nobody ever used, etc.
And considering the MS has not, to date, made sweeping changes to the OS that screw backwards compatibility (other than killing off most of DOS in Win98SE),
In general they havn't, but that's not to say they havn't broken a fair few programs on the way...
Though that was the original meaning of the word, carpet bagger has long been used to refer to someone who previously had little ties to a state/city/region/etc and moved there shortly before an election to run there.
Also known as "parachuted in"...
Much of the development effort behind Linux now comes from USA
Only in the sense that Linus now lives there.
and code is stored on servers in USA.
Actually it is all over the planet. Quite a bit of OSS is deliberatly developed outside of the US because of the political minefield of "export restrictions" which exist.
The domestic disturbance call didn't identify anyone; all the cops knew was that they were looking for a couple in a pickup. To assume reasonable suspicion from only seeing the vehicle parked and nobody fighting is retarded.
The call identified a man striking a woman. Whereas in this case a woman assaulted a man.
The cop should have simply acquiesced to Dudley's refusal to identify himself and asked about the disturbance, or gone on and talked to the girl. But he apparently was on a power trip and didn't care to actually bloody *think*.
Since there were apparently two cops on the scene it would have made sense for one to interview each of the people in the vehicle.
Also, they DIDN'T question the girl, they simply grabbed her when she started shrieking in terror at the first cop arresting her Dad, pinned her to the ground and arrested her for resisting arrest. But wait.... how can you resist arrest when you haven't been *charged* with anything???
If they'd actually investigated they would most likely have had a reason to arrest her.
Um, yes they did. The police were called out on a report of a domestic disturbance between Hiibel and his daughter.
A report which, for one reason or other, swapped the identities of victim and perpetrator
Hiibel and his daughter were fighting -his daughter admits it when they start to question her- so I would say that the police did have reasonable suspicion to question him.
They appeared far more concerned with him poducing identity documents than finding out what had happened. Producing identity documents was not really highly relevent to investigating the case.
If the police overstep their bounds on this, you can sue them afterwards. Just like if they committed a search of your home because they invented a probable cause after the fact.
Except that you have to pay to do this and it's kind of hard to sue anyone from a jail cell. Being able to sue the psudo-corporate entity the police work for is hardly the same as being able to have the police officers responsible held in custody until a court looks at the case.
Except that the "almost" part that you mentioned is that they have the power to arbitrarily make your life a living hell and have a propensity for skirting the law.
There is the fundermental issue of "who watches the watchers". Or even "who do you call if a cop breaks the law?"
I'm not saying all cops are bad, far from it, but even good cops can bend/ignore the law as they see fit. And everyone including cops can have a bad hair day.
Especially if the cop is likely to be seen as better the more people he or she arrests.
Your closing line is good fodder for general windows bashing, but what you suggest is based on either ignorance or overzealousness.
/overwrite" too hard a concept? Or how about one which can tell if it has been invoked by "autorun" or explicit user action.
The context here is install programs which "helpfully" run when a disk is inserted.
Sometimes you need to install over the existing installation to correct/modify it.
Is "setup
Actually, it's even worse than that. Aircraft manufacturers not only CAN share components, but they INVARIABLY DO share components. There is not an aircraft in the world whose airframe and engines are made by the same company.
Different parts of the airframe may well originate from different companies.
The same goes for avionics. For aircraft with propellers, the propellers are invariably made by speciality companies that make only propellers.
Similarly rotor blades and wings tend to come from specialist companies. (Who might well only sell a matched set of blades, wings, entire tailplane, etc).
No one would ever dream of trying to start an airplane company that made all of the components for an entire aircraft.
Even someone making a "scratch built" aircraft as a hobby might well not make everything themselves.
Even worse, does Airbus (or Boeing for that matter) manufacture every single of a million parts in a plane themselves?
Do Airbus or Boeing even have the ability to manufacture aircraft engines? AFAIK they don't...
Hell no! Certainly not. There's an abundance of suppliers supplying parts for a plane, from the altimeter to the leather chairs in first class.
In man cases there are multiple alternative options, which are sourced from different places. There is no such thing as an "off the shelf" airliner. Buy one from Airbus or Boeing and they will build it with your choice of options.
Aircraft are more like bespoke software systems than shrink wrapped software.
What people don't also realize is that song swapping is an old tradition, which helps keep old groups alive and helps new groups become more popular through word of mouth.
A very old, literally, prehistoric tradition.
With modern popular music someone even coined the specific term "cover version" to describe one way in which new musicians use old songs.
"Autorun" is one of the most irritating features of Windows. It's easily disabled, but at the cost of losing "notification" when you insert or remove a CD, which means you have to manually prompt for a refresh sometimes.
:)
Yet another example of a Windows "feature" which bundles several things together...
But it's better than some installer taking over every time you insert a program disk to refer to something or copy some files.
The concept to having the installer silently exit if the program is already installed appears to be beyond many Windows programmers
It begs the question, why does a band like the Beastie Boys still play with the big record labels? They have worldwide name recognition.
Most likely because they signed a contract when they were "unknowns".
I'm actually wondering how hard it would be to get a mailing address for the artists that I want to support...and sending them the $20 directly and downloading the cd from a P2P network.
Their contract with the record company probably forbids them taking your money directly. If they accepted your $20 they could wind up with legal bills of thousands of times that amount.
It's weird, technically, it's a virus. It spreads onto your system without your knowledge and prevents the computer from doing some function.
It isn't quite a virus. But the way these kind of anti-copying techniques work does sound like it could be illegal under anti-hacking laws. Considering the usual double standards if some individual distributed a piece of sharware with such a feature they'd be being carted away by the cops. But when a big corp does it the cops just don't appear to be interested.
Agreed. But cleaning up after a virus / worm / trojan / spyware / adware infection isn't regarded by blinkered bosses as "maintenance", it's "disaster recovery".
Which is rather at odds with the usual meaning of disaster. In most other industries "disasters" which happen frequently are considered "maintenance issues".
They have continually faced these types of onslaughts. From monks handwriting manuscripts to the printing press, to the copy machine. Live performance to wax phonographs to LP's to tapes and now digital. With each change in technology the cost of production changed just as dramatically then as it has now.
What has also been comming down is the cost of distribution combined with the divorce of content from media.
And the fact that you business will go under doesn't matter one little bit. If the RIAA and all of its studios went out of business today there would still be lots of music to listen to tomorrow.
The so called "Music Industry" is simply a bunch of middlemen. If this were to happen then new middlement would appear quickly, if they were useful.
Companies dealing in intellectual property have never before faced this level of onslaught of piracy and infringement.
Their business model only came into existance through the creation of the concept of "copyright". Which was itself an attempt by government to control the printing press.
This isn't something that happened overnight - it's been building up for years (although in recent years, it has accelerated greatly).
It's an effect of the advancement of technology.
With the important distinction that whilst a printing press or CD plant only has a low cost per copy if you make a large number of copies a computer can make cheap copies one at a time.
While a lot of people criticise the methods they're employing to try and protect their assets, few can offer insightful solutions that have solid financial reasoning behind them.
Solid financial reasoning is that these companies need to either find a new business model or cease trading.
DRM may be bad for those artists who recycle bits of others' works, but it's not bad for the creators of those original works.
How is the DRM going to "know" what is and isn't original. e.g. could it be used to ensure that the "artist" has control over what a publisher does with their work?
Believe it or not, most serious artists actually want to retain the hope of selling their work and making a living,
The vast majority of those aiming to "make it big" never do so in the first place. There are also plenty of people who don't rely on their music/writing/etc to be their primary/only source of income in the first place.
The fiasco of DVD restrictions runs counter to every single principle of the free-market which these companies supposedly hold dear.
The reality is that free-market is only supported when it benifits the big guys, and in the case of digital media, it dosen't.
The same way certain large corporations are pro "globalization" when it means they can get the cheapest possible raw materials and labour. But get upset when customers and retailers (some of whom are themselves large corporations) try to choose the cheapest sources of goods.
DVD Region locking is stupid, this is just making international trade laws redundant as if you didn't want a DVD to be sold in a country, you could just have its import banned.
Banning the import of a specific title would be a matter for that country's government. The thing is that the DVD region codings don't match up with censorship standards, languages or TV standards.
So, DVD Region Locking is supposed to prevent movie sales to occur while these are stilly played in movie theaters. Now, if this were true, then most "old" movies would have been released as Region-0.
Even some new movies might never play in mainstream cinemas/movie theaters in some parts of the world.
Actually, you have to have some kind of secure key distribution channel or storage location. Which becomes absolutely and completely impossible as soon as the device lands in the owner's hands.
Since the "device" is a mass market product, probably manufactured as cheaply as possible, cryptoanalysis becomes rather easier. Since you can compare the encryption of multiple devices.
Any fixed keys (or key generation program) can be extracted, any keys transmitted over the network intercepted. What they're trying to do is technically impossible,
Encryption is useful where several parties wish to communicate without third parties knowing what is being communicated. Though the third parties do know that that encrypted communications are going on and can obtain some metadata relating to the communicating parties. (There are other techniques, e.g. steganography which attempt to hide either the identity of the communicating parties or the existance of any communication at all.)
With DRM the aim is to be able to send information to parties you don't trust and control what they do with it. Trying to hack encryption to do this is never going to work, since the assumption sending encrypted information is that you do trust the other party.
Conspiracy, is when you really believe the lie or bent truth, and spread it because you are filled with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Conspiracy is when two or more people act together to do something. Typically where that something is of questionable legality.