What's actually happening here is some mis-understanding combined with some slightly inconsistant behavior (by Microsoft). Normally, checking for updates is entirely separate from downloading and installing them. If you have Windows set to only "check for updates" then no updates are automatically installed -- you're just notified that updates are available. But in this case, the update was for the Windows Update program itself, so Microsoft decided that it was important to push this update out to everyone because people would no longer be able to get updates if they didn't have the new updater program.
Contrary to claims, Microsoft *IS NOT* pushing updates out to everyone with no way to stop them. This only affects people who have Windows set to automatically check for updates (which normally would only check and not actually install anything).
All of my computers are set to never check for updates and they have not received the "stealth" updates.
2002 - Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 for Windows XP and announces that it will lock out pirates
2004 - Microsoft releases Service Pack 2 for Windows XP and announces that it will lock out pirates
2005 - Microsoft introduces Windows Genuine Advantage and announces that it will lock out pirates
2006 - Microsoft announces increased tightening of WGA to lock out pirates
2007 - Vista. Lather, Rinse, Repeat
The funniest and most ironic part is that Vista is a huge steaming pile of crap. After nearly 9 months of struggling with Vista (that runs like molasses on a fast dual core machine with lots of ram) I gave up and went back to XP.
Microsoft will be doing people a favor by shutting them down.
"If you RTFA it explains that it isn't DRM causing the problem."
No it doesn't. I did RTFA.
The article gives a good technical explanation of what Microsoft did -- implemented a new Multimedia Scheduler that starves other resources in order to preserve multimedia playback.
What remains unspoken and unexplained is why Microsoft didn't implement the correct and obvious solution -- streamline and optimize multimedia playback in Vista. The only logical explanation is that Vista contains so many new layers of restrictions, constantly checking and rechecking to make sure that you aren't a dirty filthy pirate, that it imposes a tremendous performance penalty on multimedia playback.
Since Microsoft seems more interested in appeasing the *AA mafia, they chose the lowest common denominator solution -- the average clueless user is more likely to complain about stuttering playback of audio than poor network performance.
"People don't want Linux not only because Windows is free, but because Windows is much better."
This is the unpleasant truth that nobody wants to admit. Linux is free and yet every day, millions of people all over the world use pirated Windows instead. On a level playing field (Linux = free, Pirated Windows = free), people overwhelmingly choose Windows. If Linux was anywhere near as good as Windows it would be far more popular than it is today.
You can claim that Linux is better. That's your opinion. Just like people used to swear that Beta was superior to VHS.
The author of the article repeatedly claims that everyone should switch to Linux because it's "almost as good as Windows". Unfortunately it's not. When the best applications aren't available on Linux, that's not "almost as good". When you have to carefully pick and choose your hardware because only a few have Linux drivers, that's not "almost as good".
I've tried to like Linux. I really have. Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu. But it is vastly inferior in all the ways that matter. And the actions of millions of people all over the world shows that they feel the same.
The Answer: Greed Makes You Stupid
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
The entire entertainment industry is so consumed with greed that they are no longer able to think clearly. The failure of DRM is so painfully obvious, but the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. are so blinded by greed that they can't see it. To them, the failure of DRM is proof that they need bigger badder DRM along with bigger badder laws to punish people. This is what greed does to you.
The secret to success is simple: make a good product and sell it at a fair price. But when you are bkinded by greed and convinced that you're losing billions of dollars to "piracy", you think that the secret to success is to control your precious "intellectual property" with the most draconian iron-fisted methods possible.
"At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for."
Well, obviously you weren't looking very hard. All of Mr. Laine's replies are classic hucksterism. In most cases he never actually adresses an issue - just throws out irrelevant nonsense.
Vista is the Bizarro XP
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Security
"....the new security measures, specifically User Account Controls."
UAC is useless and annoying. It might be fine for my Aunt Mildred, who only turns her computer on a couple of times a week to surf the web for a few minutes and send one or two e-mails, but for anyone who actually want to get things done, Vista is virtually unusable unless you turn off UAC. In the long run, UAC will make things worse because clueless users, who have absolutely no idea whether foobar.exe is a legit program or malware, will simply start clicking 'Yes' to everything.
Windows Explorer
"Windows explorer featured several significant upgrades in Vista."
WTF? Numerous features in the XP version of Windows Explorer have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. Customize the toolbar? Gone. In fact the whole Toolbar is gone. Status bar shows total size of all the files in a directory? XP yes. Vista no. The list goes on.
Search
"Windows Vista's integrated desktop search is one of my favourite new features"
Purely a personal preference, Desktop search is meaningless to me. I have thousands of files in dozens of directories and rarely need to use search to find them. In all fairness, XP's search is so horrible and less than useless, that anything will seem better.
Look and feel
Look - don't care.
Feel - Vista feels slow and clunky on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP with 2 gig of RAM. It only feels slightly better on my new dual-core 2.8ghz machine with 4 gig RAM.
Media Center and Games
Vista doesn't really do anything that's better than XP. And that's the real problem with Vista. People have long knocked XP as nothing more than a fancied up Windows 2000. And there's some truth to that. But, everyone forgets that when XP first came out, most people were running Windows 95/98 -- quite possibly the two worst pieces of crap software ever created. XP represented a major improvement. Vista, in many ways, is a giant step backwards.
I"ve spent the past couple of months trying to switch to Vista and I keep going back to Windows XP. There simply is no compelling reason to use Vista. Not only is it noticeably slower than XP, there are dozens of annoying little things that constantly get in my way.
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released) but Vista is a major step backward. Not to mention horrendously bloated and absurdly over-priced.
"MPAA's Dan Glickman announced that the MPAA was fine with consumers ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers."
Really? In order to rip DVDs you must use software that by-passes the DVD copy protection. That is a violation of the DMCA -- a law that was pushed thru by the MPAA -- and anyone who has attempted to sell this sort of software (DVD Xcopy, etc) has been sued into oblivion by the MPAA.
Sorry folks. But the "Brute force" key generator is a hoax. A fraud. Just another attempt to get people to run a virus-infected file. And lots of people are falling for it.
But don't take my word for it. Download is for yourself. Included in the zip file are:
slmgr.vbs - an (allegedly) modified version of the program used to activate Windows. In reality it does nothing. keyfinder.exe - supposedly the "Magic JellyBean" key finder but in reality a trojan.
The whole point of this scam is:
1. run slmgr.vbs (which in reality does nothing) 2. wait a few hours 3. run the keyfinder to see if a new key was generated and when you do -- *BAM* you're infected.
Anyone who claims that they generated a new key with this program is a liar and probably in on the scam.
"The laptop loaded with Windows XP [dell.com] costs $699, while the same laptop and configuration loaded with no operating system [dell.com] costs $747.
So it seems that Windows has a negative price tag as far as Dell is concerned! That's hardy Linux friendly or even consumer friendly. It's downright rotten,"
All major brand-name computers come with a ton of crapware pre-installed. Why do you think they do that? Because they get PAID to put in there. When you eliminate Windows, you also eliminate the extra revenue from pre-installed crapware.
"even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers."
I find this comment quite bizaare. After using Vista for nearly 2 months, my experience is exactly the opposite. I find Vista frustrating because many features from XP have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. There are no major problems with Vista, but dozens of minor annoyances. Each one by itself is no big deal, but together they add up to a major step backward.
Apparently, listing the drivers in alphabetical order is beyond the limited mental capacity of the idiot running that site. So I had to scroll through 6 pages of randomly listed drivers just so I could find out that the one I was looking for isn't there.
Without cable TV I am limited to 4 major network channels, a PBS channel and maybe a crappy independent UHF channel. 5 or 6 channels total.
Without satellite radio, I have a couple dozen AM and FM stations that cover lots of different types of programming.
The only thing satellite has to offer is: Some commercial free channels (many channels have commercial just like regular radio). Some obscure shit you can't hear elsewhere.
This is great but they'll never sign up enough subscribers to make it profitable. Read the financial reports for these 2 companies. Between the two of them they have more than 11 million paying customers, but, they have never been profitable and have both lost hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception.
There's more to this problem than just the issue of time. What if intelligent life exists in another galaxy (We have now identified more than 100,000 other galaxies in the universe.)
According to the calculations in that article, using 1g acceleration someone from Andromeda (2 million light years) could reach us with only 28 years passing on board their ship. Sounds nice. Outside the ship, however, millions of years would have passed, which means that the visiting aliens would have had to leave their home planet before there was any human life on earth in order to arrive today.
Also, the fuel requirement, assuming 100% efficiency, is 4000 tons of fuel for every 1 kilogram of ship weight. And that's only if the visiting aliens want to go sailing past us. If they want to stop and visit, they have to start slowing down at the half-way point of the journey, which means:
1. They have to know exactly where they are going so that they know when to start slowing down. Coming from Andromeda, how would they even know that earth would be a desirable destination?
2. It greatly increases the fuel requirement -- 4 thousand million tons of fuel per kilogram of ship weight.
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
I hate Microsoft as much as anyone else, but this strikes me as be very hypocritical.
"The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system."
So, in other words, Richard Stallman's "Four Freedoms" should be re-written to include "these freedoms do not apply if we don't like you or disagree with you".
"This makes me wonder whether services like these are a good idea."
I've been wondering the same thing ever since the original Napster. "What the heck were they thinking? Did these guys really think that they weren't going to get sued into oblivion?"
Slashdot Mirror
What's actually happening here is some mis-understanding combined with some slightly inconsistant behavior (by Microsoft). Normally, checking for updates is entirely separate from downloading and installing them. If you have Windows set to only "check for updates" then no updates are automatically installed -- you're just notified that updates are available. But in this case, the update was for the Windows Update program itself, so Microsoft decided that it was important to push this update out to everyone because people would no longer be able to get updates if they didn't have the new updater program.
Contrary to claims, Microsoft *IS NOT* pushing updates out to everyone with no way to stop them. This only affects people who have Windows set to automatically check for updates (which normally would only check and not actually install anything).
All of my computers are set to never check for updates and they have not received the "stealth" updates.
"It actually updated no matter if you had the auto-updates on or off."
That's what some people are claiming but I'm suspicious.
My 2 computers are on 24/7 and I have auto updates turned off. Neither one has received the "stealth" update.
This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
2002 - Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 for Windows XP and announces that it will lock out pirates
2004 - Microsoft releases Service Pack 2 for Windows XP and announces that it will lock out pirates
2005 - Microsoft introduces Windows Genuine Advantage and announces that it will lock out pirates
2006 - Microsoft announces increased tightening of WGA to lock out pirates
2007 - Vista. Lather, Rinse, Repeat
The funniest and most ironic part is that Vista is a huge steaming pile of crap. After nearly 9 months of struggling with Vista (that runs like molasses on a fast dual core machine with lots of ram) I gave up and went back to XP.
Microsoft will be doing people a favor by shutting them down.
After reading the "open letter" only one thought comes to mind.
These guys really need to get a life.
"If you RTFA it explains that it isn't DRM causing the problem."
No it doesn't. I did RTFA.
The article gives a good technical explanation of what Microsoft did -- implemented a new Multimedia Scheduler that starves other resources in order to preserve multimedia playback.
What remains unspoken and unexplained is why Microsoft didn't implement the correct and obvious solution -- streamline and optimize multimedia playback in Vista. The only logical explanation is that Vista contains so many new layers of restrictions, constantly checking and rechecking to make sure that you aren't a dirty filthy pirate, that it imposes a tremendous performance penalty on multimedia playback.
Since Microsoft seems more interested in appeasing the *AA mafia, they chose the lowest common denominator solution -- the average clueless user is more likely to complain about stuttering playback of audio than poor network performance.
"MMCSS is the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service, which a new feature in Vista -- it is not in 98/95/2000/ME/XP. That's why."
Winodws XP -- can play an MP3 file and video file at the same time with no reduction in network speed.
Vista -- same computer, same hardware, -- major reduction in network speed.
In other words, Microsoft tried to "fix" something that wasn't broken.
"People don't want Linux not only because Windows is free, but because Windows is much better."
This is the unpleasant truth that nobody wants to admit. Linux is free and yet every day, millions of people all over the world use pirated Windows instead. On a level playing field (Linux = free, Pirated Windows = free), people overwhelmingly choose Windows. If Linux was anywhere near as good as Windows it would be far more popular than it is today.
You can claim that Linux is better. That's your opinion. Just like people used to swear that Beta was superior to VHS.
The author of the article repeatedly claims that everyone should switch to Linux because it's "almost as good as Windows". Unfortunately it's not. When the best applications aren't available on Linux, that's not "almost as good". When you have to carefully pick and choose your hardware because only a few have Linux drivers, that's not "almost as good".
I've tried to like Linux. I really have. Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu. But it is vastly inferior in all the ways that matter. And the actions of millions of people all over the world shows that they feel the same.
"this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
The entire entertainment industry is so consumed with greed that they are no longer able to think clearly. The failure of DRM is so painfully obvious, but the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. are so blinded by greed that they can't see it. To them, the failure of DRM is proof that they need bigger badder DRM along with bigger badder laws to punish people. This is what greed does to you.
The secret to success is simple: make a good product and sell it at a fair price. But when you are bkinded by greed and convinced that you're losing billions of dollars to "piracy", you think that the secret to success is to control your precious "intellectual property" with the most draconian iron-fisted methods possible.
"At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for."
Well, obviously you weren't looking very hard. All of Mr. Laine's replies are classic hucksterism. In most cases he never actually adresses an issue - just throws out irrelevant nonsense.
Security
"....the new security measures, specifically User Account Controls."
UAC is useless and annoying. It might be fine for my Aunt Mildred, who only turns her computer on a couple of times a week to surf the web for a few minutes and send one or two e-mails, but for anyone who actually want to get things done, Vista is virtually unusable unless you turn off UAC. In the long run, UAC will make things worse because clueless users, who have absolutely no idea whether foobar.exe is a legit program or malware, will simply start clicking 'Yes' to everything.
Windows Explorer
"Windows explorer featured several significant upgrades in Vista."
WTF? Numerous features in the XP version of Windows Explorer have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. Customize the toolbar? Gone. In fact the whole Toolbar is gone. Status bar shows total size of all the files in a directory? XP yes. Vista no. The list goes on.
Search
"Windows Vista's integrated desktop search is one of my favourite new features"
Purely a personal preference, Desktop search is meaningless to me. I have thousands of files in dozens of directories and rarely need to use search to find them. In all fairness, XP's search is so horrible and less than useless, that anything will seem better.
Look and feel
Look - don't care.
Feel - Vista feels slow and clunky on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP with 2 gig of RAM. It only feels slightly better on my new dual-core 2.8ghz machine with 4 gig RAM.
Media Center and Games
Vista doesn't really do anything that's better than XP. And that's the real problem with Vista. People have long knocked XP as nothing more than a fancied up Windows 2000. And there's some truth to that. But, everyone forgets that when XP first came out, most people were running Windows 95/98 -- quite possibly the two worst pieces of crap software ever created. XP represented a major improvement. Vista, in many ways, is a giant step backwards.
I"ve spent the past couple of months trying to switch to Vista and I keep going back to Windows XP. There simply is no compelling reason to use Vista. Not only is it noticeably slower than XP, there are dozens of annoying little things that constantly get in my way.
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released) but Vista is a major step backward. Not to mention horrendously bloated and absurdly over-priced.
Another bullshit "study" funded by Microsoft. How is this news?
"MPAA's Dan Glickman announced that the MPAA was fine with consumers ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers."
Really? In order to rip DVDs you must use software that by-passes the DVD copy protection. That is a violation of the DMCA -- a law that was pushed thru by the MPAA -- and anyone who has attempted to sell this sort of software (DVD Xcopy, etc) has been sued into oblivion by the MPAA.
Sorry folks. But the "Brute force" key generator is a hoax. A fraud. Just another attempt to get people to run a virus-infected file. And lots of people are falling for it.
But don't take my word for it. Download is for yourself. Included in the zip file are:
slmgr.vbs - an (allegedly) modified version of the program used to activate Windows. In reality it does nothing.
keyfinder.exe - supposedly the "Magic JellyBean" key finder but in reality a trojan.
The whole point of this scam is:
1. run slmgr.vbs (which in reality does nothing)
2. wait a few hours
3. run the keyfinder to see if a new key was generated and when you do -- *BAM* you're infected.
Anyone who claims that they generated a new key with this program is a liar and probably in on the scam.
"The laptop loaded with Windows XP [dell.com] costs $699, while the same laptop and configuration loaded with no operating system [dell.com] costs $747.
So it seems that Windows has a negative price tag as far as Dell is concerned! That's hardy Linux friendly or even consumer friendly. It's downright rotten,"
All major brand-name computers come with a ton of crapware pre-installed. Why do you think they do that? Because they get PAID to put in there. When you eliminate Windows, you also eliminate the extra revenue from pre-installed crapware.
"even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers."
I find this comment quite bizaare. After using Vista for nearly 2 months, my experience is exactly the opposite. I find Vista frustrating because many features from XP have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. There are no major problems with Vista, but dozens of minor annoyances. Each one by itself is no big deal, but together they add up to a major step backward.
Apparently, listing the drivers in alphabetical order is beyond the limited mental capacity of the idiot running that site. So I had to scroll through 6 pages of randomly listed drivers just so I could find out that the one I was looking for isn't there.
Thanks for nothing.
>
The problem is, it's not really the same.
Without cable TV I am limited to 4 major network channels, a PBS channel and maybe a crappy independent UHF channel. 5 or 6 channels total.
Without satellite radio, I have a couple dozen AM and FM stations that cover lots of different types of programming.
The only thing satellite has to offer is:
Some commercial free channels (many channels have commercial just like regular radio).
Some obscure shit you can't hear elsewhere.
This is great but they'll never sign up enough subscribers to make it profitable. Read the financial reports for these 2 companies. Between the two of them they have more than 11 million paying customers, but, they have never been profitable and have both lost hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception.
XM and Sirius have never been profitable. They have both lost hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception. So what good is a merger?
There's more to this problem than just the issue of time. What if intelligent life exists in another galaxy (We have now identified more than 100,000 other galaxies in the universe.)
S R/rocket.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/
According to the calculations in that article, using 1g acceleration someone from Andromeda (2 million light years) could reach us with only 28 years passing on board their ship. Sounds nice. Outside the ship, however, millions of years would have passed, which means that the visiting aliens would have had to leave their home planet before there was any human life on earth in order to arrive today.
Also, the fuel requirement, assuming 100% efficiency, is 4000 tons of fuel for every 1 kilogram of ship weight. And that's only if the visiting aliens want to go sailing past us. If they want to stop and visit, they have to start slowing down at the half-way point of the journey, which means:
1. They have to know exactly where they are going so that they know when to start slowing down. Coming from Andromeda, how would they even know that earth would be a desirable destination?
2. It greatly increases the fuel requirement -- 4 thousand million tons of fuel per kilogram of ship weight.
Seriously. This is not a troll.
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
I hate Microsoft as much as anyone else, but this strikes me as be very hypocritical.
"The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system."
So, in other words, Richard Stallman's "Four Freedoms" should be re-written to include "these freedoms do not apply if we don't like you or disagree with you".
"This makes me wonder whether services like these are a good idea."
I've been wondering the same thing ever since the original Napster. "What the heck were they thinking? Did these guys really think that they weren't going to get sued into oblivion?"
If good quality content is available at a fair price, people will buy it and there is no need for DRM.