Try looking in Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Local Users and Groups.
I'm well aware that I can create a group, thank-you.
After creating said group, however, you have to adjust ALL system permissions accordingly. Granted, you can inherit permissions across directory trees, but you still have to re-permission your entire system accordingly. So much for a 30 second tweak.
Remember that this is all supposed to be geared towards regular users. You know, the whole point of the discussion? People are supposed to be able to understand Windows so much more easily, but now Microsoft has dumbed down the security options to the point of a binary decision, opposed to the three tiered options that existed in Win2k (User, Power User, Administrator). Why couldn't they stick with what worked?
This goes back, BTW, to my earlier points WRT Microsoft changing fundamental workings of the system from version to version. It's bad enough they've saddled people with that god-awful UI in XP ("The program isn't installed!", "No, sir, there's just no shortcut on the desktop anymore. Click here, here, scroll way over to here, click here. No, don't worry, eventually you'll only have to click two times. Yes, I promise."), but when they fiddle with the back-end functionality it really makes the system a royal PITA.
Don't bother filing bug reports for Mozilla. If, after searching the Bugzilla for a while and failing to find the bug...
I'm not sure about your experience (or query techniques), but I submit bugs to several projects, Mozilla included, and have never had this happen to me.
You might want to consider that it may just be something you're (not) doing that's causing these results before you give such sweeping advice in future.
I do believe XP compatible labeled software MUST be able to operate under User or Power User rights.
"Power User"? What power user? Tell me; how many user types exist in XP without several hours of tweaking? All I see are "Computer Administrator" and "Limited". (Remember how I said "All or nothing"?)
Yes, that's a real os problem there. Good thing Mozilla doesn't put all your information into a randomly named directory. Sheesh.
Are we forgetting that Microsoft, who wrote the OS, wrote Outlook (Express)? Mozilla is a third party app, and is smart enough to store user preferences in the same place as all the other user preferences. Outlook divides no less than three separate preference portions into different filesystem locations.
BTW, Mozilla's naming convention is explained on their website; it's aimed to prevent malicious executables/scripts from manipulating the Mozilla directory. Of course, such an effort would be futile under Windows since every 13 year old c0d3r knows how to call the Outlook APIs and SPAM the address book every time the mouse cursor is moved.
So, have you ever used w2k and xp or have I just been trolled?
Have you ever administered a large network of same, or are you just talking out your ass?
You can always mount an ntfs partition inside a folder in another ntfs partition.
Was I talking to myself when I said;
Is it any wonder NTFS now has the functionality to mount volumes as paths? Why, isn't that just emulating the sensible UNIX method that's been around for years?
Remember how we're talking about how The Microsoft Way is so much better than The UNIX Way?
And under winNT/2k/XP the system folder is RESTRICTED unless you are administrator, most programs install their stuff to program files and common stuff to program files\common files.
Know what nine out of ten application vendors will tell you when you're having trouble with their [hard|soft]ware? "Make the user an Administrator and try again." Have you ever tried to USE an XP machine as a restricted user? How useable was it?
My documents is NOT located in the windows folder. My documents is located in Documents And Settings\username\My Documents. This folder can be made private.
"Can" be made private? That's quite the security model. Oh yeah; Windows XP gives you two choices for security; all or none. Thanks for reminding me!
n.b. the preferences and documents folders have moved several times from Windows to Windows, making it less than simple to know from one version to the next where preferences are stored. It especially adds to the confusion when upgrading from one version of Windows to another (something we always advise strongly against).
Don't speak of an OS you know nothing about.
You tell me about knowing an OS after you've fished customer data from a cesspool of ever more complicated directory structures several hundred times. It used to be safe to not back up the Windows directory because, hey, who'd put user data under an operating system directory? Why, Microsoft, of course! Delete the Windows directory and you might have deleted their address book, some of their application preferences, some of their documents...
Quick; where's the Outlook Express address book? Full pathname, please. No copy'n'paste tricks, either! (Is it stored with the mail folders? Near the mail folders? In the same vicinity as the mail folders? What about the Identity data?)
This is why we have to leave upwards of 30GB available for backing up customer data when a re-install is required, and leave it sit there for a week after they take their computers home in preparation of the inevietable "My ${DATA_TYPE} is gone!" phone call. Where was ${DATA_TYPE}? Somewhere buried eight directories deep, of course! Why, how silly of me for not restoring it in the first place!
sorry, but their file system is ass for anything beyond simple procedures... if you are trying to fix driver installations or uninstallations manually, or find your outlook express settings and address book to back up onto cd, then it sucks
I am glad you said that, sir. A long HEX string to represent an Outlook "identity"? Why not just name it the name of the identity, or the numerical order in which it was created? For that matter; why not put the danmed thing with the rest of the users' "Application Data" for chrissake?
Of course - because the NT filesystem layout is designed for a single user with multiple users kludged on top. Putting people's application settings (/data) as a trailer of the Windows install directory? So now we have to hunt down their individual Application Data as well as the "Identities" for their mail client (Oh, and unless you've backed up their Outlook identities from their original, fully functional copy of Outlook, you can't get them back. Mail folders and address book, fine, but not their account information. What an architecturally advanced system!)
And drive letters? Forget the first three (A, B, C) - they're reserved. Floppies and boot volume. The next one or two are scrapped for removeable media (DVD-R and CD-RW?), then something like Nero creates a virtual CD-ROM image device, let's call it 'F'. Now we're fundamentally limited to 20 additional drives/partitions - including network mounted filesystems - in our "easy to use" filesystem design. Is it any wonder NTFS now has the functionality to mount volumes as paths? Why, isn't that just emulating the sensible UNIX method that's been around for years? What happens in Windows when the, oh, say, \Windows directory gets a tad full? \Program Files perhaps? Well, we'll just remove \Windows\Fonts to a separate volume... Wait! Drive letters don't do that! Let's look to UNIX for answers!
Now we move on to "Program Files". What an oxymoron that is! Half the installed application gets dumped into \Windows\System anyways, which forces you to go through "DLL Hell" trying to uninstall any application. "I don't know, it's shared, but are other programs relying on it? Will my system cease to function if I say 'Yes' to any of these 54 'Shared' DLLs?"
"My Documents"? One folder, stamped on the root of the filesystem? What is it, the computer's documents? But wait - Win2k and XP have moved it to the oh-so-simple to find (not to mention making so much sense) location of "\Windows\Application Data\Username\My Documents". Sure; I'll bet any joe blow can find their documents there! (Doesn't the Windows directory come with a disclaimer that you'll irreparably damage your system if you touch the voodoo within? But how will I ever retreive my "My Documents" shortcut, errantly deleted from my desktop! My documents can harm the system? (Well, macro viruses, but hey... ))
Now then. "Temporary Internet Files". Great idea; now if only they'd stop defaulting the bugger to 10% the total drive space! NO, I would not like to dedicate 12GigaBytes to temp files, thankyouverymuch. Same goes for you, Mr. Recycle Bin! I have to purchase a spare 40GB drive just to give me the 120GB I initially paid for!
Only when we can stop the madness of "well, if its too hard for you then go somewhere else" type mentality will Linux ever be acceptable to the masses.
Nonsense. The more we bow to the userbase, the more the userbase will want us to bow. See below.
Kudos to Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc. for understanding that most of the people in this world are NOT geeks. Microsoft understood this a long time ago.
No, Microsoft lowered the bar so far that now every Windows 95 toting yuppie thinks he's a qualified sysadmin (the 300k MCSEs in its first year of existance is proof plenty), and moreover, users are getting more dumbed down by the day.
You can already witness this happening with the RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE user bases.
I had one RedHat user tell me excitedly that he'd configured his video card in "text mode!". He was so thrilled he wrote a HOWTO.
I think it offends you that the next generation of solitaire players will be doing it on linux. It somehow takes away from your eliteness.
It has nothing to do with my "eliteness", it has to do with the readiness of the general populous for something as architecturally advanced as Linux.
What will (mark my words; will happen is that people will start logging in as root all the time - for ease of use - and Linux on the desktop will come to a screaming halt as trojan after trojan anhialates desktops all over the world.
I work in a retail environment, I've worked in educational settings. I've dealt with consumers, high school students, elementary school students, and people who are qualified to teach same, and I wouldn't trust the majority of them to be functional on a Linux desktop, partly because they can barely figure out a Windows desktop to save their lives.
Linux, by nature, is more complicated (and powerful) than Windows. The learning curve is steeper and the tolerance for errors (and ability to shoot off one's toes individually and with great precision) is much higher. What do you tell people when their system boots to nothing more than a continuous stream of "LILILILILILILILILILILILILILILILILI", for example? How do they switch from an ATI Radeon to an nVidia GeForce?
Better still, do you pawn [Star|Open]Office on them as a Microsoft Office alternative? Will they understand when web pages tell them their browser is too old/incapable because it's not Internet Explorer?
How do they handle local/root kernel exploits? Up2Date their kernel? Will their system boot afterwards?
In that case, how do you expect it to ever make any serious penetration into the desktop market and user environment, where 99% of users are NOT experts??
I don't. In fact, I'd sooner that it didn't. The end-user market is already bad enough in the way of computer illiteracy and user interface frustration without adding Linux to the mix.
As long as there are people out there who believe "Internet Explorer" is "the Internet" and "Outlook Express" is "e-mail", Linux has no place in the desktop market. No matter how user friendly it may/may not become, it will never be enough.
bootstrap doesn't take anywhere near 10 hours on a modern machine
The stage-x tarballs come on the boot CD ISOs. Wget is not required.
If you have to resort to lspci to compile a bootable kernel, Gentoo is not for you (IOW you don't know your hardware well enough). BTW - You could grep the pci.ids datafile that comes with the kernel rather than Googling "obscure" (International standard, unique) PCI IDs.
GRUB is a standard boot loader now. If you don't like it, emerge LILO.
KDE takes nowhere near a week to compile on a modern machine. (If you're that impatient, emerge any of a dozen other window managers/desktop environments)
Processor dies? High electricity bill? What are you, an end-user who boots Windows just long enough to leech a few MP3s and chat on MSN?
Most importantly - Gentoo is not designed to be a point-click-forget install. If you're new to Linux or you're that impatient, install RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, or any other glossy storebought distribution that strikes your fancy.
The trouble with Linux isn't the installation. That procedure should remain somewhat esoteric (else we find ourselves plagued by every Windows user out there who's ever run regedit and thinks he's a sysadmin). The trouble is in package installation, upkeep, and maintainance. With Gentoo, keeping your system up to date with security/critical updates and new features is a breeze. It's so simple and automated, you could set it up as a cron job if it struck your fancy.
I actually caught your post in Meta-Moderation (I agreed that one of your 'Insightful' mods was fair), but decided I'd play devil's advocate for a little while.
Bull****! It's an operating system, not the launch codes for nuclear missiles. An OS should be written so that it has reasonable safeguards. How is rm * so much more "powerful" than del *.*? It's not. The only difference is that the former will delete everything without even asking while the latter has some minimal safeguards built in.
Simple; with an alias setting, I can en/disable the desired functionality. Want confirmation? `alias rm='rm -i'`. Done, done, and done. I believe Mandrake has it in its default/etc/profile. How do I set such an alias for MS-DOS? I believe the remedy was to create a batch file of the same name and place it in a directory somewhere in advance of the executable in the path.
It's not about an OS that doesn't protect you - it's about having an OS that you can tell not to protect you.
In current versions of *n?x software, you can go so far as to "protect" the user from even seeing a console by locking them into their GUI no matter what.
That's one of the reasons why I like OSS. I can set it to do what I tell it to do (not what I want, in all cases, but what I tell it to do!), or I can configure it to protect and coddle me to the point of hysteria, or I can find my own happy medium.
*n?x is powerful. Very powerful. Like all powerful tools, it comes with the capacity to kill, maim, or do untold nasties to all that surround and use it. It also comes with the ability to get the job done better than anything else in the toolbox bar none - but only if used correctly.
Now, if I were to go in the other room and tell my folks that people were ranting and raving on a website about no being allowed to use the heat sink grease of their choice on a computer processor..... Well, regular down to earth real people just wouldn't understand.
That's funny, because myself, being quite the geek, don't understand when my mother talks about the proper methods of filing a T4 or the odd things people do when it comes time for quarterly reports or when people rant and rave about missing lunch hour at month's end. When my brother in law talks about using six-penny nails when a brad nailer is more appropriate, or running the wrong kind of hydraulic fluid in a bailer, or...
To them, it's a big deal. To their colleagues, it's topical and interesting; often even a topic of great heated discourse over a ${BEVERAGE}. Everybody's career / hobby has its own set of idiosyncrasies (and esoteric dialog). In that regard, we're not unique or unusual. Really.
Who cares if he knows or doesn't know something? All you have to do is lok at the article and IGNORE IT. We aren't being plagued with anything at all.
Ok, I'll ignore it. Then I'll get tired of scrolling past it and I'll disable the "Ask Slashdot" section. Then a dozen others will do the same. A few hundred more, a few hundred more, and before you know it the only people left reading Ask Slashdot are the people too simple to memorize more than one URI on the web who need their mothers' help when they find themselves faced with an unconventional button fly.
This isn't a case of "This doesn't interest me, I'll scroll past and find some Anime to drool over", this is a case of "Somebody let the special ed class use the computers and Slashdot went to hell in a handbasket."
While we're at it, let's post some articles detailing how, precisely, to build a Linux kernel - FROM SCRATCH! From there, we'll move onto such enthrallingly informative topics as "Steve Jobs bought a NEWTURTLENECK!" and scrolling down the list we see "Floppy disks for dummies. Why don't they hold as much as CD-Rs?" with the optional follow-up article; "CD-Rs - Why Do They Taste Funny?"
If you think I'm exagerating, read the article summaries for the past few months. Notice a trend? Boy, am I ever ignoring a lot by now. I'm starting to think of CNN as a plausible alternative news medium.
Don't waste everyone's time posting a comment saying that you knew the answer when you were 8 or 18 years old, and Slashdot is lame for posting such a simple question.
Yes, but how far will it go? There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere so that these people will do atleast some legwork before resorting to Ask Slashdot. We're not here to pander to the incapable; this is a news site, not an infant hand-holding rag.
If we lower the bar sufficiently with such basic questions, we'll find ourselves plagued by a continual slew of Computer 101 HOWTO documents that teach everything except how to learn to do things for yourself.
I might add that the question itself was worded in such a way as to indicate that the reader does in fact understand the utility of the messenger service, vis;
The NT Messenger service... is reserved for admins, so they can send messages to the domain or a single workstation for any reason.
So he knows what "Messenger" is and understands that it is a "Service" for "NT" based operating systems. I'll go so far as to Google for NT Messenger Service and see what we get? Messages about the topic at hand. I see no less than six helpful pages listed in the results. Further;
I'm sure you can shut of that service or block that port except from people in your subnet.
"Shut of{sic} that service"? Blocking ports? It sounds to me as if this poster knows exactly what he has to do, he just has to go about actually doing it.
Yes, there is. There's (un)common sense. Disable the Messenger service. If you need it, chances are you're on a computer that shouldn't have broadband directly connected to it anyways (ie; a computer on a domain). If this is the case, install a personal firewall and hope your network admin never finds out.
Which brings me to my second point; hardware and, to my chagrin, even software firewalls. They block such ports, unless you allow them through. Drop $70CDN and pick yourself up a four-port broadband NAT router for chrissakes and quit whining at Slashdot for one of the simplest possible "problems" to solve.
Maybe you need to go on a diet. I don't know many men who could carry your fat ass up the stairs.
Ha! Good one. I'm 6'2" tall with a large, muscular frame. Sure, I've got a bit of a gut happening, but hey, maintaining an Adonnis like figure is hard work sometimes.;)
I think this is just one good example of Darwinism in action: Man gets too fat. Fire starts in house. Firefighters can't save him because he's too damn fat. Man burns to death. Man doesn't father any more fat children.
Spoken like a true anorexic, anti-social geek. Good thing you posted as a coward.;)
Not surprising you don't know many men who can fireman's carry 240lbs. What's it take, four of your friends to make up 240?
That might explain why you were always last to be picked for football teams at school, y'know. Or, did the jocks just use you as the ball?
Laugh now, twiggy, but if you ever venture into the outside world, may you never get caught in a windstorm!;)
Really, the only sane model is to price a bit pipe on bits transported (congestion weighted if they so desire).
Oh, you won't hear me arguing with you on that point. You will, however, hear hordes of broadband users up in arms because it's outrageous that they should be charged extra, simply because they download half a terrabyte every month. I've tried, and failed miserably, to get even some of them to see reason but it was to no avail. "We pay a premium price for an Internet connection, and we expect to get premium service!" was their response, overall.
What should have happened (hindsight and all that) is broadband companies shouldn't have given users unlimited 2Mb/Sec connections right out of the gate. They should have warmed us up with 128Kb/Sec connections ("Twice as fast as dialup, and you can still use the phone!"), then had promotions for their 256Kb and 512Kb deals, eventually rolling out their full megabit service, which would have floored users ("Wow! A whole megabit at home!") who would already be used to a more limited pipe, would be used to paying ~$40 for half a megabit, and who therefore wouldn't blink (or, wouldn't blink quite so audibly) at the notion of $75/month for a megabit.
Broadband companies would have a more even distribution of low versus high bandwidth users, with the low more capable of paying for the high (it's tough to burst a 256Kbit connection to transfer 300MBytes in a month!), and most importantly they wouldn't have massive, spoiled customer bases who expect the world on a platter for a nominal fee.
Me, I'm all for bandwidth caps. I do think they should be a bit higher, however (somewhere to the tune of 20GigaBytes per MegaBit of connection) which would still allow the broadband companies to collect handsome sums from those who like to download 25 DivX movies in a single month et al. and still allow users to have (relatively) heavy traffic months without being penalized for it.
But head into a broadband users group and say that and you're the enemy, and by gum you'd best be wearing your asbestos undies!
Ok, how about this, then? You've got a pipe. It has a certain capacity both up and down stream. What's the difference between one person using maximum available bandwidth on said pipe, and 5 people sharing the same pipe, each using 1/5 of the max bandwidth? Same number of bits transferred for each. Each is paying for the same service.
You're still assuming that people will max out their pipe as a matter of course. The fact is, with five people sharing a connection they're five times as likely to use more bandwidth, and use it more often.
FYI - if a 1MBit broadband user maxed out their connection for a single month, they would be capable of receiving approximately 339.8 GigaBytes worth of data. (Consider that most residential broadband connections are 1.5 or 2Mb/Sec and we start to approach the terrabyte level per customer).
Considering business customers, who are expected to have multiple users, higher technical support demands, and use more bandwidth are paying upwards of $500/month for the same pipe, this means the residential broadband companies are getting a shit-kicking from the selfish few at the top of the chain.
How is that any different than 1 machine doing 24x7 leeching? Plus, the folks most likely to actually DO things like patch their machines, run daily updates, reload/. every 30 seconds, etc, are likely the same folks who'll set up caches, proxies, and local (DNS/mail/web) servers, thereby reducing the load on the network and/or the ISPs' communal servers. (An example: I have anywhere from 3 to 6 machines on my internal network at any one time.
Why the notion that people running lots of heavy traffic are geeks who're even conscious of centralized management of resources?
The vast majority of NAT'ed home networks on broadband are home users who have no concept of the notion of caching or sharing downloaded files. With computers being commodity items nowadays (along with the plug'n'play NAT devices that empower them), purchased for $500 (monitor included) at your friendly neighborhood UberChainDiscountRetail Store, parents are purchasing computers for each of their children and one for themselves. So now we have two children downloading the same music, movies, games,... on top of the bandwidth consumed by parents.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound as if I'm supporting ISPs charging per NAT'ed computer, I just don't like seeing the same strawmen knocked down over and over again.
Patches are usually downloaded with some forethought. I nor any reasonable techie I know constantly downloads patches. This is typically a scheduled process, usually at a time when there is little or no contention for limited residential bandwidth.
Uhm, no.:)
Home machines are relatively expendable, therefore patches can be downloaded almost on a whim. Moreover, Windows XP and recent updates to Windows 98SE and ME perform critical and security updates automatically in the background. This means they do check the windowsupdate server periodically.
I am merely assuming that an ISP that supports larger and more complex setups will face higher costs than an ISP that only supports small and simple setups on the end of their lines.
My sister happens to work technical support for a major US broadband ISP. Do you know what she's been instructed to tell people who call regarding multiple device configurations? Disconnect the NAT device, connect the Internet 'modem' to a single Windows or Macintosh-based computer and call back.
There are no elevated support costs because they don't support it, period. The telcos support their lines as far as the demarc point, the ISP supports it as far as the end of your ethernet cable connected to a single NIC of a single PC running an approved operating system for which they have complete sets of canned support instructions on their websites and in the manuals on the desks of their technical support representitives.
You were right about one thing; you don't have a logical leg to stand on.
No, it's nothing to do with heavy lifting, hard thinking and so on. Surely by now we must understand that there are actually more than a couple of differences between men and women?
Thank-you. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who understands what I'd always thought to be fairly obvious.
When I heard that local fire departments were under pressure to drop the weight lift/carry requirements in order to accept more females, my first reaction was "I live in a basement; affirmative action can finally kill me." If a fire fighter can't haul my 240lb ass up the stairs and out to a waiting ambulance, sorry, but I don't want that person to be a fire fighter. Period.
Here I was under the impression that differences are a good thing, based on all this new PC propaganda we're seeing nowadays. So why is it good to be different, but only if you strive to be the same as everybody else?
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I'm well aware that I can create a group, thank-you.
After creating said group, however, you have to adjust ALL system permissions accordingly. Granted, you can inherit permissions across directory trees, but you still have to re-permission your entire system accordingly. So much for a 30 second tweak.
Remember that this is all supposed to be geared towards regular users. You know, the whole point of the discussion? People are supposed to be able to understand Windows so much more easily, but now Microsoft has dumbed down the security options to the point of a binary decision, opposed to the three tiered options that existed in Win2k (User, Power User, Administrator). Why couldn't they stick with what worked?
This goes back, BTW, to my earlier points WRT Microsoft changing fundamental workings of the system from version to version. It's bad enough they've saddled people with that god-awful UI in XP ("The program isn't installed!", "No, sir, there's just no shortcut on the desktop anymore. Click here, here, scroll way over to here, click here. No, don't worry, eventually you'll only have to click two times. Yes, I promise."), but when they fiddle with the back-end functionality it really makes the system a royal PITA.
I'm not sure about your experience (or query techniques), but I submit bugs to several projects, Mozilla included, and have never had this happen to me.
You might want to consider that it may just be something you're (not) doing that's causing these results before you give such sweeping advice in future.
"Power User"? What power user? Tell me; how many user types exist in XP without several hours of tweaking? All I see are "Computer Administrator" and "Limited". (Remember how I said "All or nothing"?)
Are we forgetting that Microsoft, who wrote the OS, wrote Outlook (Express)? Mozilla is a third party app, and is smart enough to store user preferences in the same place as all the other user preferences. Outlook divides no less than three separate preference portions into different filesystem locations.
BTW, Mozilla's naming convention is explained on their website; it's aimed to prevent malicious executables/scripts from manipulating the Mozilla directory. Of course, such an effort would be futile under Windows since every 13 year old c0d3r knows how to call the Outlook APIs and SPAM the address book every time the mouse cursor is moved.
Have you ever administered a large network of same, or are you just talking out your ass?
Was I talking to myself when I said;
Remember how we're talking about how The Microsoft Way is so much better than The UNIX Way?
Know what nine out of ten application vendors will tell you when you're having trouble with their [hard|soft]ware? "Make the user an Administrator and try again." Have you ever tried to USE an XP machine as a restricted user? How useable was it?
"Can" be made private? That's quite the security model. Oh yeah; Windows XP gives you two choices for security; all or none. Thanks for reminding me!
n.b. the preferences and documents folders have moved several times from Windows to Windows, making it less than simple to know from one version to the next where preferences are stored. It especially adds to the confusion when upgrading from one version of Windows to another (something we always advise strongly against).
You tell me about knowing an OS after you've fished customer data from a cesspool of ever more complicated directory structures several hundred times. It used to be safe to not back up the Windows directory because, hey, who'd put user data under an operating system directory? Why, Microsoft, of course! Delete the Windows directory and you might have deleted their address book, some of their application preferences, some of their documents ...
Quick; where's the Outlook Express address book? Full pathname, please. No copy'n'paste tricks, either! (Is it stored with the mail folders? Near the mail folders? In the same vicinity as the mail folders? What about the Identity data?)
This is why we have to leave upwards of 30GB available for backing up customer data when a re-install is required, and leave it sit there for a week after they take their computers home in preparation of the inevietable "My ${DATA_TYPE} is gone!" phone call. Where was ${DATA_TYPE}? Somewhere buried eight directories deep, of course! Why, how silly of me for not restoring it in the first place!
Don't tell me I don't know Windows, son.
I am glad you said that, sir. A long HEX string to represent an Outlook "identity"? Why not just name it the name of the identity, or the numerical order in which it was created? For that matter; why not put the danmed thing with the rest of the users' "Application Data" for chrissake?
Of course - because the NT filesystem layout is designed for a single user with multiple users kludged on top. Putting people's application settings (/data) as a trailer of the Windows install directory? So now we have to hunt down their individual Application Data as well as the "Identities" for their mail client (Oh, and unless you've backed up their Outlook identities from their original, fully functional copy of Outlook, you can't get them back. Mail folders and address book, fine, but not their account information. What an architecturally advanced system!)
And drive letters? Forget the first three (A, B, C) - they're reserved. Floppies and boot volume. The next one or two are scrapped for removeable media (DVD-R and CD-RW?), then something like Nero creates a virtual CD-ROM image device, let's call it 'F'. Now we're fundamentally limited to 20 additional drives/partitions - including network mounted filesystems - in our "easy to use" filesystem design. Is it any wonder NTFS now has the functionality to mount volumes as paths? Why, isn't that just emulating the sensible UNIX method that's been around for years? What happens in Windows when the, oh, say, \Windows directory gets a tad full? \Program Files perhaps? Well, we'll just remove \Windows\Fonts to a separate volume... Wait! Drive letters don't do that! Let's look to UNIX for answers!
Now we move on to "Program Files". What an oxymoron that is! Half the installed application gets dumped into \Windows\System anyways, which forces you to go through "DLL Hell" trying to uninstall any application. "I don't know, it's shared, but are other programs relying on it? Will my system cease to function if I say 'Yes' to any of these 54 'Shared' DLLs?"
"My Documents"? One folder, stamped on the root of the filesystem? What is it, the computer's documents? But wait - Win2k and XP have moved it to the oh-so-simple to find (not to mention making so much sense) location of "\Windows\Application Data\Username\My Documents". Sure; I'll bet any joe blow can find their documents there! (Doesn't the Windows directory come with a disclaimer that you'll irreparably damage your system if you touch the voodoo within? But how will I ever retreive my "My Documents" shortcut, errantly deleted from my desktop! My documents can harm the system? (Well, macro viruses, but hey ... ))
Now then. "Temporary Internet Files". Great idea; now if only they'd stop defaulting the bugger to 10% the total drive space! NO, I would not like to dedicate 12GigaBytes to temp files, thankyouverymuch. Same goes for you, Mr. Recycle Bin! I have to purchase a spare 40GB drive just to give me the 120GB I initially paid for!
Nonsense. The more we bow to the userbase, the more the userbase will want us to bow. See below.
No, Microsoft lowered the bar so far that now every Windows 95 toting yuppie thinks he's a qualified sysadmin (the 300k MCSEs in its first year of existance is proof plenty), and moreover, users are getting more dumbed down by the day.
You can already witness this happening with the RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE user bases.
I had one RedHat user tell me excitedly that he'd configured his video card in "text mode!". He was so thrilled he wrote a HOWTO.
It has nothing to do with my "eliteness", it has to do with the readiness of the general populous for something as architecturally advanced as Linux.
What will (mark my words; will happen is that people will start logging in as root all the time - for ease of use - and Linux on the desktop will come to a screaming halt as trojan after trojan anhialates desktops all over the world.
I work in a retail environment, I've worked in educational settings. I've dealt with consumers, high school students, elementary school students, and people who are qualified to teach same, and I wouldn't trust the majority of them to be functional on a Linux desktop, partly because they can barely figure out a Windows desktop to save their lives.
Linux, by nature, is more complicated (and powerful) than Windows. The learning curve is steeper and the tolerance for errors (and ability to shoot off one's toes individually and with great precision) is much higher. What do you tell people when their system boots to nothing more than a continuous stream of "LILILILILILILILILILILILILILILILILI", for example? How do they switch from an ATI Radeon to an nVidia GeForce?
Better still, do you pawn [Star|Open]Office on them as a Microsoft Office alternative? Will they understand when web pages tell them their browser is too old/incapable because it's not Internet Explorer?
How do they handle local/root kernel exploits? Up2Date their kernel? Will their system boot afterwards?
I don't. In fact, I'd sooner that it didn't. The end-user market is already bad enough in the way of computer illiteracy and user interface frustration without adding Linux to the mix.
As long as there are people out there who believe "Internet Explorer" is "the Internet" and "Outlook Express" is "e-mail", Linux has no place in the desktop market. No matter how user friendly it may/may not become, it will never be enough.
You mean {gasp} you replaced the compiler - the centre, the core of your source-based installation, and there were PROBLEMS? Y'don't SAY!
Gentoo is not for end-users. Enjoy your alternatives.
The trouble with Linux isn't the installation. That procedure should remain somewhat esoteric (else we find ourselves plagued by every Windows user out there who's ever run regedit and thinks he's a sysadmin). The trouble is in package installation, upkeep, and maintainance. With Gentoo, keeping your system up to date with security/critical updates and new features is a breeze. It's so simple and automated, you could set it up as a cron job if it struck your fancy.
"Insightful" my ass.
Try that analogy when linux.com is the homepage for 90% of the Internet users in a particular geographic area.
I actually caught your post in Meta-Moderation (I agreed that one of your 'Insightful' mods was fair), but decided I'd play devil's advocate for a little while.
Simple; with an alias setting, I can en/disable the desired functionality. Want confirmation? `alias rm='rm -i'`. Done, done, and done. I believe Mandrake has it in its default /etc/profile. How do I set such an alias for MS-DOS? I believe the remedy was to create a batch file of the same name and place it in a directory somewhere in advance of the executable in the path.
It's not about an OS that doesn't protect you - it's about having an OS that you can tell not to protect you.
In current versions of *n?x software, you can go so far as to "protect" the user from even seeing a console by locking them into their GUI no matter what.
That's one of the reasons why I like OSS. I can set it to do what I tell it to do (not what I want, in all cases, but what I tell it to do!), or I can configure it to protect and coddle me to the point of hysteria, or I can find my own happy medium.
*n?x is powerful. Very powerful. Like all powerful tools, it comes with the capacity to kill, maim, or do untold nasties to all that surround and use it. It also comes with the ability to get the job done better than anything else in the toolbox bar none - but only if used correctly.
That's funny, because myself, being quite the geek, don't understand when my mother talks about the proper methods of filing a T4 or the odd things people do when it comes time for quarterly reports or when people rant and rave about missing lunch hour at month's end. When my brother in law talks about using six-penny nails when a brad nailer is more appropriate, or running the wrong kind of hydraulic fluid in a bailer, or ...
To them, it's a big deal. To their colleagues, it's topical and interesting; often even a topic of great heated discourse over a ${BEVERAGE}. Everybody's career / hobby has its own set of idiosyncrasies (and esoteric dialog). In that regard, we're not unique or unusual. Really.
Ok, I'll ignore it. Then I'll get tired of scrolling past it and I'll disable the "Ask Slashdot" section. Then a dozen others will do the same. A few hundred more, a few hundred more, and before you know it the only people left reading Ask Slashdot are the people too simple to memorize more than one URI on the web who need their mothers' help when they find themselves faced with an unconventional button fly.
This isn't a case of "This doesn't interest me, I'll scroll past and find some Anime to drool over", this is a case of "Somebody let the special ed class use the computers and Slashdot went to hell in a handbasket."
While we're at it, let's post some articles detailing how, precisely, to build a Linux kernel - FROM SCRATCH! From there, we'll move onto such enthrallingly informative topics as "Steve Jobs bought a NEW TURTLENECK!" and scrolling down the list we see "Floppy disks for dummies. Why don't they hold as much as CD-Rs?" with the optional follow-up article; "CD-Rs - Why Do They Taste Funny?"
If you think I'm exagerating, read the article summaries for the past few months. Notice a trend? Boy, am I ever ignoring a lot by now. I'm starting to think of CNN as a plausible alternative news medium.
Yes, but how far will it go? There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere so that these people will do atleast some legwork before resorting to Ask Slashdot. We're not here to pander to the incapable; this is a news site, not an infant hand-holding rag.
If we lower the bar sufficiently with such basic questions, we'll find ourselves plagued by a continual slew of Computer 101 HOWTO documents that teach everything except how to learn to do things for yourself.
I might add that the question itself was worded in such a way as to indicate that the reader does in fact understand the utility of the messenger service, vis;
So he knows what "Messenger" is and understands that it is a "Service" for "NT" based operating systems. I'll go so far as to Google for NT Messenger Service and see what we get? Messages about the topic at hand. I see no less than six helpful pages listed in the results. Further;
"Shut of{sic} that service"? Blocking ports? It sounds to me as if this poster knows exactly what he has to do, he just has to go about actually doing it.
Yes, there is. There's (un)common sense. Disable the Messenger service. If you need it, chances are you're on a computer that shouldn't have broadband directly connected to it anyways (ie; a computer on a domain). If this is the case, install a personal firewall and hope your network admin never finds out.
Which brings me to my second point; hardware and, to my chagrin, even software firewalls. They block such ports, unless you allow them through. Drop $70CDN and pick yourself up a four-port broadband NAT router for chrissakes and quit whining at Slashdot for one of the simplest possible "problems" to solve.
And Cliff, c'mon, why? Why? WHY?
Ha! Good one. I'm 6'2" tall with a large, muscular frame. Sure, I've got a bit of a gut happening, but hey, maintaining an Adonnis like figure is hard work sometimes. ;)
Spoken like a true anorexic, anti-social geek. Good thing you posted as a coward. ;)
Not surprising you don't know many men who can fireman's carry 240lbs. What's it take, four of your friends to make up 240?
That might explain why you were always last to be picked for football teams at school, y'know. Or, did the jocks just use you as the ball?
Laugh now, twiggy, but if you ever venture into the outside world, may you never get caught in a windstorm! ;)
Oh, you won't hear me arguing with you on that point. You will, however, hear hordes of broadband users up in arms because it's outrageous that they should be charged extra, simply because they download half a terrabyte every month. I've tried, and failed miserably, to get even some of them to see reason but it was to no avail. "We pay a premium price for an Internet connection, and we expect to get premium service!" was their response, overall.
What should have happened (hindsight and all that) is broadband companies shouldn't have given users unlimited 2Mb/Sec connections right out of the gate. They should have warmed us up with 128Kb/Sec connections ("Twice as fast as dialup, and you can still use the phone!"), then had promotions for their 256Kb and 512Kb deals, eventually rolling out their full megabit service, which would have floored users ("Wow! A whole megabit at home!") who would already be used to a more limited pipe, would be used to paying ~$40 for half a megabit, and who therefore wouldn't blink (or, wouldn't blink quite so audibly) at the notion of $75/month for a megabit.
Broadband companies would have a more even distribution of low versus high bandwidth users, with the low more capable of paying for the high (it's tough to burst a 256Kbit connection to transfer 300MBytes in a month!), and most importantly they wouldn't have massive, spoiled customer bases who expect the world on a platter for a nominal fee.
Me, I'm all for bandwidth caps. I do think they should be a bit higher, however (somewhere to the tune of 20GigaBytes per MegaBit of connection) which would still allow the broadband companies to collect handsome sums from those who like to download 25 DivX movies in a single month et al. and still allow users to have (relatively) heavy traffic months without being penalized for it.
But head into a broadband users group and say that and you're the enemy, and by gum you'd best be wearing your asbestos undies!
You're still assuming that people will max out their pipe as a matter of course. The fact is, with five people sharing a connection they're five times as likely to use more bandwidth, and use it more often.
FYI - if a 1MBit broadband user maxed out their connection for a single month, they would be capable of receiving approximately 339.8 GigaBytes worth of data. (Consider that most residential broadband connections are 1.5 or 2Mb/Sec and we start to approach the terrabyte level per customer).
Considering business customers, who are expected to have multiple users, higher technical support demands, and use more bandwidth are paying upwards of $500/month for the same pipe, this means the residential broadband companies are getting a shit-kicking from the selfish few at the top of the chain.
Why the notion that people running lots of heavy traffic are geeks who're even conscious of centralized management of resources?
The vast majority of NAT'ed home networks on broadband are home users who have no concept of the notion of caching or sharing downloaded files. With computers being commodity items nowadays (along with the plug'n'play NAT devices that empower them), purchased for $500 (monitor included) at your friendly neighborhood UberChainDiscountRetail Store, parents are purchasing computers for each of their children and one for themselves. So now we have two children downloading the same music, movies, games, ... on top of the bandwidth consumed by parents.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound as if I'm supporting ISPs charging per NAT'ed computer, I just don't like seeing the same strawmen knocked down over and over again.
Uhm, no. :)
Home machines are relatively expendable, therefore patches can be downloaded almost on a whim. Moreover, Windows XP and recent updates to Windows 98SE and ME perform critical and security updates automatically in the background. This means they do check the windowsupdate server periodically.
My sister happens to work technical support for a major US broadband ISP. Do you know what she's been instructed to tell people who call regarding multiple device configurations? Disconnect the NAT device, connect the Internet 'modem' to a single Windows or Macintosh-based computer and call back.
There are no elevated support costs because they don't support it, period. The telcos support their lines as far as the demarc point, the ISP supports it as far as the end of your ethernet cable connected to a single NIC of a single PC running an approved operating system for which they have complete sets of canned support instructions on their websites and in the manuals on the desks of their technical support representitives.
You were right about one thing; you don't have a logical leg to stand on.
Thank-you. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who understands what I'd always thought to be fairly obvious.
When I heard that local fire departments were under pressure to drop the weight lift/carry requirements in order to accept more females, my first reaction was "I live in a basement; affirmative action can finally kill me." If a fire fighter can't haul my 240lb ass up the stairs and out to a waiting ambulance, sorry, but I don't want that person to be a fire fighter. Period.
Here I was under the impression that differences are a good thing, based on all this new PC propaganda we're seeing nowadays. So why is it good to be different, but only if you strive to be the same as everybody else?