It seems that the biggest issue with Vista was compatibility with older software/drivers. A solution may be to include an XP virtual machine which ensures compatibility with said software. Apple did a similar thing when they re-wrote their OS a few years back.
Most of the Vista incompatibilities are with things that wouldn't work in an emulator either. For example, printer drivers: it's great if your printer driver works inside an XP virtual machine, but if you can't print to that from native applications, it doesn't really help you; you need a native driver. Running antivirus software inside a virtual machine isn't very useful either. These are the same kinds of things that didn't work in Apple's Classic environment (which, by the way, is no longer supported at all).
I have a single-core machine with 1GB of RAM. I just timed it; from pushing the power button to everything loaded takes just under three minutes. That's two minutes from power on to the desktop (not skipping the RAM test, and pressing Enter to submit a blank password at the login screen), then another minute to load all the systray stuff and the Sidebar.
Then I removed the 4GB USB flash drive I use for ReadyBoost, and repeated the test. The boot time dropped to a minute 42 seconds. Interesting. ReadyBoost is definitely slowing it down. I wonder why that is.
Windows Update can optionally be set to look for updates to other Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, in addition to Windows. This is great; it gives you a single interface for software updates that's easy to configure and manage. And kudos to Microsoft for making Windows Update its own application (or control panel or whatever it technically is) instead of running it inside a web page that only works with Internet Explorer.
Microsoft should take this a step further. Extend it. Allow third party developers to register their own applications with the Windows Update service, so that when Windows Update checks with Microsoft for new updates to Windows, it also checks with the third party developer for new updates to that application. For example, take Acrobat Reader. When you install Acrobat Reader, the installer would automatically add an entry to Windows Update's database telling it how to query Adobe to check for updates, and how to tell whether the currently installed version of Acrobat Reader is the latest one or not. Then, every night (or every week, or manually, or however you set it up) Windows update would query Microsoft to check for patches to Windows, query Microsoft again to check for patches to Office, then query Adobe to check for patches to Acrobat Reader.
This would of course eliminate the need for Apple Software Update, currently bundled with QuickTime, iTunes, and Safari. And hopefully, Apple would copy Microsoft by making Apple Software Update for Mac OS X work the same way, allowing Mac applications to register themselves with ASU.
Obviously, every single Windows (and hopefully Mac) application would need to be modified to adopt this new standard for updating, and that won't happen overnight. But it doesn't need to. Make it easy for developers to use this feature, and make it clear that this is the direction in which Microsoft wants to go, and one by one they'll flock to it. And applications that don't adopt the new system will continue to work just fine the way they do now - just because there's a new standard way to do it doesn't mean individual applications that do their own checking won't still be able to do so instead.
Linux, of course, already has something a little different: since all applications most people run are Free, the distributor just packages up each application into a central repository and the package management software fetches updates for everything from there; there is no distinction between packages that are part of the operating system and packages that are not (or to put it another way, Firefox, the Gimp and OpenOffice.org are all part of the OS, so they get updated when the OS does). That approach also solves this problem, but that's not what I'm proposing for Windows (and Mac OS X). I am not suggesting that Microsoft should host Firefox updates on update.microsoft.com, or even that Microsoft should maintain a database of available patches to Firefox; rather that the Windows Update application should be expanded to support querying Mozilla for updates if the user has Firefox installed (and if the user wants it to, of course).
2. Customized installs. For example, you should be able to install a ~4 GB full install with everything, or a ~1 GB minimal install with only the GUI and some programs
Let's take this a step further: split things into separate components instead of bundling it all together. There is absolutely no reason why Windows Media Center shouldn't be a separate application that can be installed on any version of Windows, instead of being bundled with certain editions (Home Premium and Ultimate). It should be possible to start with Vista Business edition, and install Media Center later; currently to do the same you'd have to upgrade from Business to Ultimate.
How about the ability to change the highlight color used for selected files in Windows Explorer? The default light blue doesn't show up on my LCD projector, and when I tried to change it, I discovered that it's not possible, unless I switch to the Windows Classic theme (I prefer Aero).
I'm not sure what you mean by the distinction between "America" and "society". The US government should promote things that are in the best interests of both American citizens and the international community when that's practical (i.e. don't prioritize other countries above our own, obviously, but cooperate with foreign governments when it's mutually beneficial). Somehow I have a feeling that's not what you meant. Did you mean the things the government does should only benefit people who are already well off, and ignore the plight of the less fortunate? I'm grasping at straws here, but if that's what you meant, it's a terrible idea.
Letting the market work is not interfering as you describe. Once you start interfering, you have to do it right or you'll screw things up, since you're overriding the market's "intelligence".
When you let the free market work intelligently, all the jobs go to India and China. Also, all the companies merge together to form monopolies, then they raise prices and stop innovating. That's pure capitalism, and it doesn't work.
What I meant was that the government needs to step in to fix this, but that they can do so much more effectively by providing appropriate financial incentives as opposed to making certain things illegal. For example, the government wants us to switch from incandescent bulbs to CFLs; this is a good thing. However, they shouldn't make incandescent bulbs illegal, they should just make sure it's more cost-effective for me to buy CFLs so that I won't want to buy incandescent bulbs. That way it's still my choice.
Don't ban it. Let the market work. Make it expensive, and it will stop. This is something the government should be doing: add taxes and tariffs to things that are harmful and cause problems for society; give tax breaks to things that are helpful and do good things for society. That was the reason they gave the tax breaks in this case, but maybe the government dropped the ball here by not getting a solid agreement in writing (I don't know, maybe they have one, and the poo will hit the fan soon, I didn't RTFA, because I'm not new here).
Unfortunately, the government doesn't step in this way as often as it should, or it interferes in the wrong ways, giving tax breaks to companies that aren't doing anything to benefit the public, because the CEO of the company is good friends with a member of Congress, or whatever. That sucks.
Nothing to do with the actual domain name used; they're obviously pretty random.
Actually I'm not sure what kind of spam they're sending, since I've been rejecting it. I set up a script to check the reverse DNS hostname of the connecting host, and if it matches a particular pattern, send an HTTP query to see if that host has a web site, and if so, whether the web site has an unsubscribe form on the front page. If all these conditions are met, the IP is cached in a database and the message is rejected; otherwise the IP is cached as being OK (the majority of servers connecting to me that match this hostname pattern are spammers, but there are a lot of legit servers too). But with the HTTP test on top of that, I've had no false positives.
Interestingly enough, I've been using this code on two different servers, and since I cleared the database a couple days ago, only one of them has seen this type of spam, and that server only hosts a single domain, while the other server hosts several domains.
SPF won't do anything to stop spam anyway (despite what some of it's proponents say.) It needs to die a quick death.
In case anyone doubts this, here's a brief list of domains that are owned by spammers that actually have SPF configured, as well as forward and reverse DNS for their dedicated IPs. Each of these domains also has a web site with an "unsubscribe" form on the front page. These are just a few of the domains that have tried to send me spam in the last couple of days.
Indeed, my phone (a Nokia N75) has no GPS, but is capable of finding my approximate location on Google Maps about half the time. Why it doesn't work the other half (and once showed a location about 2,000 miles away) I don't know...
I'm confused as to what you're confused about. Somebody got icann.com and iana.com to point to different DNS servers which served A records pointing to third-party IP addresses, so that queries for http://www.icann.com/ and http://www.iana.com/ went to a third-party HTTP server which did not return a redirect to ICANN's official web sites (like ICANN's HTTP server would have), but instead returned something else.
I didn't bother to read the article (I'm not new here), but what about this is unclear to you?
You're being deliberately pedantic. I thought it was perfectly clear exactly what they meant:
Normally, A records for icann.com, www.icann.com, iana.com, www.iana.com and similar FQDNs point to IP addresses of web servers that are configured to send an HTTP redirect (via the Location header) that tells the browser to request e.g. http://www.icann.org/ if http://www.icann.com/ had been originally requested.
While more technically specific, this takes a lot more words to say than "Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization's main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org." But we all know what they meant, and anyone who doesn't know what they meant probably doesn't care. So why explain the details?
Silverlight is supposed to work fine in Firefox on both Windows and Mac OS X. Does Silverlight not work at all for you in Firefox, or is it only mlb.com that's not working? Assuming Silverlight works on other sites, have you contacted mlb.com to make sure they're aware of the problem? Or if Silverlight isn't working for you at all, have you tried to figure out why?
Yes, the company that makes Silverlight is evil and shouldn't be trusted, but the problems you're having definitely weren't intentional. Besides, there are those who would argue that Adobe is just as evil as Microsoft.
You missed the part where eBay doesn't HAVE to pull another stunt like that, because they've already successfully pulled THIS stunt: all eBay sellers MUST accept PayPal, even though (because of the ACCC decision) they are still allowed to accept other forms of payment.
Because I know of approximately two other people who actually use a Jabber account, and since both of them also use AIM, I don't really see a compelling reason to switch.
How good the protocol is is pretty much irrelevant. It's all about user base.
A year or so ago, I saw a presentation on Thread Building Blocks, which is basically an API thingie that Intel created to help with this issue. Their big announcement last year was that they've released it open-source and have committed to making it cross-platform. (It's in Intel's best interest to get people using TBB on Athlon, PPC, and other architectures, because the more software is multi-core aware, the more demand there will be for multi-core CPUs in general, which Intel seems pretty excited about.)
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It seems that the biggest issue with Vista was compatibility with older software/drivers. A solution may be to include an XP virtual machine which ensures compatibility with said software. Apple did a similar thing when they re-wrote their OS a few years back.
Most of the Vista incompatibilities are with things that wouldn't work in an emulator either. For example, printer drivers: it's great if your printer driver works inside an XP virtual machine, but if you can't print to that from native applications, it doesn't really help you; you need a native driver. Running antivirus software inside a virtual machine isn't very useful either. These are the same kinds of things that didn't work in Apple's Classic environment (which, by the way, is no longer supported at all).
I have a single-core machine with 1GB of RAM. I just timed it; from pushing the power button to everything loaded takes just under three minutes. That's two minutes from power on to the desktop (not skipping the RAM test, and pressing Enter to submit a blank password at the login screen), then another minute to load all the systray stuff and the Sidebar.
Then I removed the 4GB USB flash drive I use for ReadyBoost, and repeated the test. The boot time dropped to a minute 42 seconds. Interesting. ReadyBoost is definitely slowing it down. I wonder why that is.
Windows Update can optionally be set to look for updates to other Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, in addition to Windows. This is great; it gives you a single interface for software updates that's easy to configure and manage. And kudos to Microsoft for making Windows Update its own application (or control panel or whatever it technically is) instead of running it inside a web page that only works with Internet Explorer.
Microsoft should take this a step further. Extend it. Allow third party developers to register their own applications with the Windows Update service, so that when Windows Update checks with Microsoft for new updates to Windows, it also checks with the third party developer for new updates to that application. For example, take Acrobat Reader. When you install Acrobat Reader, the installer would automatically add an entry to Windows Update's database telling it how to query Adobe to check for updates, and how to tell whether the currently installed version of Acrobat Reader is the latest one or not. Then, every night (or every week, or manually, or however you set it up) Windows update would query Microsoft to check for patches to Windows, query Microsoft again to check for patches to Office, then query Adobe to check for patches to Acrobat Reader.
This would of course eliminate the need for Apple Software Update, currently bundled with QuickTime, iTunes, and Safari. And hopefully, Apple would copy Microsoft by making Apple Software Update for Mac OS X work the same way, allowing Mac applications to register themselves with ASU.
Obviously, every single Windows (and hopefully Mac) application would need to be modified to adopt this new standard for updating, and that won't happen overnight. But it doesn't need to. Make it easy for developers to use this feature, and make it clear that this is the direction in which Microsoft wants to go, and one by one they'll flock to it. And applications that don't adopt the new system will continue to work just fine the way they do now - just because there's a new standard way to do it doesn't mean individual applications that do their own checking won't still be able to do so instead.
Linux, of course, already has something a little different: since all applications most people run are Free, the distributor just packages up each application into a central repository and the package management software fetches updates for everything from there; there is no distinction between packages that are part of the operating system and packages that are not (or to put it another way, Firefox, the Gimp and OpenOffice.org are all part of the OS, so they get updated when the OS does). That approach also solves this problem, but that's not what I'm proposing for Windows (and Mac OS X). I am not suggesting that Microsoft should host Firefox updates on update.microsoft.com, or even that Microsoft should maintain a database of available patches to Firefox; rather that the Windows Update application should be expanded to support querying Mozilla for updates if the user has Firefox installed (and if the user wants it to, of course).
2. Customized installs. For example, you should be able to install a ~4 GB full install with everything, or a ~1 GB minimal install with only the GUI and some programs
Let's take this a step further: split things into separate components instead of bundling it all together. There is absolutely no reason why Windows Media Center shouldn't be a separate application that can be installed on any version of Windows, instead of being bundled with certain editions (Home Premium and Ultimate). It should be possible to start with Vista Business edition, and install Media Center later; currently to do the same you'd have to upgrade from Business to Ultimate.
How about the ability to change the highlight color used for selected files in Windows Explorer? The default light blue doesn't show up on my LCD projector, and when I tried to change it, I discovered that it's not possible, unless I switch to the Windows Classic theme (I prefer Aero).
Precisely. :-)
I'm not sure what you mean by the distinction between "America" and "society". The US government should promote things that are in the best interests of both American citizens and the international community when that's practical (i.e. don't prioritize other countries above our own, obviously, but cooperate with foreign governments when it's mutually beneficial). Somehow I have a feeling that's not what you meant. Did you mean the things the government does should only benefit people who are already well off, and ignore the plight of the less fortunate? I'm grasping at straws here, but if that's what you meant, it's a terrible idea.
Letting the market work is not interfering as you describe. Once you start interfering, you have to do it right or you'll screw things up, since you're overriding the market's "intelligence".
When you let the free market work intelligently, all the jobs go to India and China. Also, all the companies merge together to form monopolies, then they raise prices and stop innovating. That's pure capitalism, and it doesn't work.
What I meant was that the government needs to step in to fix this, but that they can do so much more effectively by providing appropriate financial incentives as opposed to making certain things illegal. For example, the government wants us to switch from incandescent bulbs to CFLs; this is a good thing. However, they shouldn't make incandescent bulbs illegal, they should just make sure it's more cost-effective for me to buy CFLs so that I won't want to buy incandescent bulbs. That way it's still my choice.
Don't ban it. Let the market work. Make it expensive, and it will stop. This is something the government should be doing: add taxes and tariffs to things that are harmful and cause problems for society; give tax breaks to things that are helpful and do good things for society. That was the reason they gave the tax breaks in this case, but maybe the government dropped the ball here by not getting a solid agreement in writing (I don't know, maybe they have one, and the poo will hit the fan soon, I didn't RTFA, because I'm not new here).
Unfortunately, the government doesn't step in this way as often as it should, or it interferes in the wrong ways, giving tax breaks to companies that aren't doing anything to benefit the public, because the CEO of the company is good friends with a member of Congress, or whatever. That sucks.
Nothing to do with the actual domain name used; they're obviously pretty random.
Actually I'm not sure what kind of spam they're sending, since I've been rejecting it. I set up a script to check the reverse DNS hostname of the connecting host, and if it matches a particular pattern, send an HTTP query to see if that host has a web site, and if so, whether the web site has an unsubscribe form on the front page. If all these conditions are met, the IP is cached in a database and the message is rejected; otherwise the IP is cached as being OK (the majority of servers connecting to me that match this hostname pattern are spammers, but there are a lot of legit servers too). But with the HTTP test on top of that, I've had no false positives.
Interestingly enough, I've been using this code on two different servers, and since I cleared the database a couple days ago, only one of them has seen this type of spam, and that server only hosts a single domain, while the other server hosts several domains.
SPF won't do anything to stop spam anyway (despite what some of it's proponents say.) It needs to die a quick death.
In case anyone doubts this, here's a brief list of domains that are owned by spammers that actually have SPF configured, as well as forward and reverse DNS for their dedicated IPs. Each of these domains also has a web site with an "unsubscribe" form on the front page. These are just a few of the domains that have tried to send me spam in the last couple of days.
amd-computer.com
bionona.com
bounce-spring.com
building-clam.com
building-pearl.com
cartoonchristmasornaments.com
catch-history.com
champion-clam.com
champion-starfish.com
chips-computer.com
classicshoesplus.com
eosubduo.com
fatherandsoncarpeting.com
finaglasses.com
finarunning.com
finasitting.com
gohan-saiyan.com
goku-saiyan.com
goten-saiyan.com
holiday-scallop.com
jekyllnews.com
jekyllreading.com
keeping-holiday.com
madalinesmarketplace.com
miasitting.com
miasliding.com
moniqueshiphopfashions.com
onedayshippingonyourdvdrental.compress-spring.com
rachelbuilding.com
rachelwalking.com
surfingisyourlife.com
talking-scallop.com
tieapple.com
vegeta-saiyan.com
walking-starfish.com
I'm aware of how Apple makes their money. I don't care. I want their software.
Hell yes.
Although, a lot of the hardware's pretty decent too.
Yes, but that costs a lot of money. Rich people can't be terrorists!
Indeed, my phone (a Nokia N75) has no GPS, but is capable of finding my approximate location on Google Maps about half the time. Why it doesn't work the other half (and once showed a location about 2,000 miles away) I don't know...
Just as long as 517 is closed...
I'm confused as to what you're confused about. Somebody got icann.com and iana.com to point to different DNS servers which served A records pointing to third-party IP addresses, so that queries for http://www.icann.com/ and http://www.iana.com/ went to a third-party HTTP server which did not return a redirect to ICANN's official web sites (like ICANN's HTTP server would have), but instead returned something else.
I didn't bother to read the article (I'm not new here), but what about this is unclear to you?
You're being deliberately pedantic. I thought it was perfectly clear exactly what they meant:
Normally, A records for icann.com, www.icann.com, iana.com, www.iana.com and similar FQDNs point to IP addresses of web servers that are configured to send an HTTP redirect (via the Location header) that tells the browser to request e.g. http://www.icann.org/ if http://www.icann.com/ had been originally requested.
While more technically specific, this takes a lot more words to say than "Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization's main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org." But we all know what they meant, and anyone who doesn't know what they meant probably doesn't care. So why explain the details?
Silverlight is supposed to work fine in Firefox on both Windows and Mac OS X. Does Silverlight not work at all for you in Firefox, or is it only mlb.com that's not working? Assuming Silverlight works on other sites, have you contacted mlb.com to make sure they're aware of the problem? Or if Silverlight isn't working for you at all, have you tried to figure out why?
Yes, the company that makes Silverlight is evil and shouldn't be trusted, but the problems you're having definitely weren't intentional. Besides, there are those who would argue that Adobe is just as evil as Microsoft.
You missed the part where eBay doesn't HAVE to pull another stunt like that, because they've already successfully pulled THIS stunt: all eBay sellers MUST accept PayPal, even though (because of the ACCC decision) they are still allowed to accept other forms of payment.
Oh, right, I failed to read the subject line. Never mind. :-)
And if the laptop already has a keylogger installed when you get it?
Because I know of approximately two other people who actually use a Jabber account, and since both of them also use AIM, I don't really see a compelling reason to switch.
How good the protocol is is pretty much irrelevant. It's all about user base.
A year or so ago, I saw a presentation on Thread Building Blocks, which is basically an API thingie that Intel created to help with this issue. Their big announcement last year was that they've released it open-source and have committed to making it cross-platform. (It's in Intel's best interest to get people using TBB on Athlon, PPC, and other architectures, because the more software is multi-core aware, the more demand there will be for multi-core CPUs in general, which Intel seems pretty excited about.)
Jigga please! -- Chris Rock