I understand the importance of being able to run old programs, but surely Vista could have included a virtual machine or something for XP compatibility - is it really that hard to create a new OS from scratch with proper security etc. as a starting point, not an add-on? Yes it would be a mammoth task, but MS is pretty big, you know.
There was some speculation at the time that this was why they bought VirtualPC from Connectix. i.e. so that they could keep Win32 support via emulation only. Not sure if there was ever any substance to this, but it would be interesting if it happened.
What is to stop a worm from modifying the code that checks the signature so it thinks any code is valid?
Not a lot. But then once someone else's arbitary code is executing on your machine with those kind of priviliges, it's pretty much game over anyway. You can never be sure that you've fully removed it.
The/3GB switch is common to the NT-based desktop and server OSes since Windows 2000.
Uh, ignore that, I can't read and that's wrong:)
But with regard to client apps allocating >2GB RAM, why not if the hardware is there? Things like image/video processing I'm sure could take advantage of that. Seeing as Windows Media Center is based on XP, I can imagine future versions of that could well make use of extra RAM...
If you are running an RDBMS that needs to allocate more than 2GB of memory, you probably aren't using Windows XP. Is there a business requirement to have client apps allocate 64-bit memory addresses?
The/3GB switch is common to the NT-based desktop and server OSes since Windows 2000.
Wait, isn't Microsoft releasing a new version of Internet Explorer? Uh oh. Guess I better buy more RAM.
Tried Firefox 1.0x lately? Huge memory leak issues, much more so than Internet Explorer.
Microsoft can truly remove IE, it just doesn't want to because that would mean an end to proprietary extensions. There is no reason for the file search interface to be so dependent on IE other than anticompetitive practices.
The thing is, IE is just a wrapper on top of a set of COM components that provide the HTML rendering etc. Removing the IE executable itself is (perhaps) not so much of an issue, but remove MSHTML.dll and the rest and you are likely to break a lot of third-party applications that embed it.
As an example of how common this is, the GMail notifier clearly uses some of the IE COM components to communicate with GMail servers. Although I now use Firefox for web browsing, I have hardened the IE security settings the best I can, so it prompts me for most things. When the GMail notifier starts, I get an IE dialog box prompting me for login credentials to GMail...
If you then call one "action" button and the other "menu" button, label them appropriately - how is dealing with two mouse buttons any harder than dealing with 12 buttons on a touch-tone phone?
Reminds me of what Acorn did with Risc OS back in 1987 (or 1988, around then). The machine shipped with a three button mouse, the buttons were documented as Select, Menu and Adjust.
Select did normal selection and clicking duties, Menu brought up the context menu where available, and Adjust did either the inverse of the Select button (e.g. if you're scrolling with the down button of the scrollbar in a window, pressing Adjust would scroll up -- perfect if you'd overshot a bit when scrolling) or "special" selection duties such as multi-select in the filer.
I don't ever recall reading about any confusion regarding which button did what -- it was just accepted, and was pretty intuitive.
Call me picky, but I find even the quietest hard drives (Seagate Barracuda line is the quietest I've found) are unacceptably loud when used in a media PC in my living room.
Have you tried a 2.5" laptop drive instead? They're slower and more expensive, but my PVR uses one of these and it is very quiet indeed -- often I only notice it on spin-up and spin-down. Not sure what it would sound like in a Media PC enclosure but may be worth a try.
Maybe I've just become immune to caffeine, but I do drink a lot of caffeine-containing drinks throughout the day, and I can't say I've ever noticed being hyper from it. More to the point, I've never really noticed anyone else becoming hyper from caffeine either.
So I've been wondering if this is more a cultural expectation thing. In Britain it just doesn't seem to be discussed in the same way -- I've known people (including myself) complain of caffeine withdrawal symptoms -- evil headaches and suchlike -- but almost never about any "hyper" effects of over-consumption of caffeine.
Yet often American sitcoms will refer to coffee in reference to making people hyper, to the point where you'd think that half an espresso is meant to send you crazy. Or maybe it's genetic differences between the populations that mean that caffeine has different effects in the two countries?
I'd be interested to know, do you get the same effects with numbers written out in word form?
e.g. a telephone number of the form: five, five, five, one, two, three, four.
I'm just wondering if it's something that is related to sequences generally -- regardless of how they are presented -- or whether there's something significant about the actual digit representations that makes them difficult for you to interpret reliably.
I'm pretty sure that deployment of that type of copy-protection system would actually result in criminal prosecution and/or jail time in many countries.
[...] setting up win2k for her computer, and after installing isdn drivers couldn't find a way to turn on any sort of filtering/fw for the isdn dialup connection...
But presumably you had to be admin to actually initiate the install of SP2 itself, so the Security Center setup could just be seen as simply being part of the (post-)install procedure itself. There was a reboot in-between, but it's still effectively the same process.
Absolutely -- Alien Resurrection was a terrible movie. Unfortunately I own it on DVD, but only as it's part of the Alien Quadrilogy box set:/
It can stay in the box.
On a side note, if you haven't seen the Alien 3 Special Edition version released last year, it's well worth seeing as it's much closer to the director's original version than the cut the studio orginally released, and really a much better film for it.
Although Microsoft would prefer people that only need to install on a single machine wait for it to be pushed via Windows Update, which will be a considerably smaller download specific for your OS version.
They're going to wait for Longhorn, though, as being able to run other operating systems from within Windows would be a major coup for them. There'd be no reason for people to install over it...People interested in trying other operating systems will simply install inside the VM, and most probably won't get around to wiping off the host OS.
On the other hand, if Microsoft software becomes tied to the hardware tightly enough, the fact that users can run other operating systems from within Windows would be a significant defense for the next time they wind up in court on charges of antitrust or the like.
Not only that, but they can run previous versions of Windows -- or at least some of the sub-systems -- under Longhorn, thereby allowing backwards compatibility without having to design it directly into Longhorn's own APIs. (Like Apple did when they went to OS X, I believe).
They could also the technology for sandboxing "untrusted" applications and isolate them from the main system.
Everyone seems to put all this faith into SP2...but let's face it: a significant portion of the population doesn't install patches to begin with. What makes anyone think they're going to sit through a download 10x bigger...and that's assuming they even know about it
But at least it will be pre-installed on new machines as default by the OEMs.
there is also another bug in XP with a shell script that prints 5 tab spaces that will crash XP every time. maybe another slashdotter can point me in the right direction to a link that explains this/has the code because I'm having trouble locating it on google, but I did run it once and crash my XP Pro box, so its out there somewhere.
The following page contains a pretty comprehensive explanation of the bug:
Paraphrased from the article:
30% of Internet users use a pop-up blocker.
With SP2, that number is going to skyrocket.
Pop-Under ads have the highest click through.
One of the more interesting aspects of IE6 SP2 is that script-initiated windows will be constrained to be immediately above the parent window in Z-order, so it theory it should not be possible to make a window pop-under even as a result of a user-initiated action such as clicking on a hyperlink.
Fairly unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that it usually takes about 10 times longer for an XP service pack or update to install versus win2k?
This is based on observations doing windows updates on similar spec machines, 20+ win2k boxen and a few XP boxen.
I think that's because XP will automatically create a full System Restore Checkpoint before applying the update. Win2K doesn't have System Restore, hence it's quicker. I bet if you disabled System Restore on the XP machines the speed would be comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
But with regard to client apps allocating >2GB RAM, why not if the hardware is there? Things like image/video processing I'm sure could take advantage of that. Seeing as Windows Media Center is based on XP, I can imagine future versions of that could well make use of extra RAM...
Tried Firefox 1.0x lately? Huge memory leak issues, much more so than Internet Explorer.
The thing is, IE is just a wrapper on top of a set of COM components that provide the HTML rendering etc. Removing the IE executable itself is (perhaps) not so much of an issue, but remove MSHTML.dll and the rest and you are likely to break a lot of third-party applications that embed it.
As an example of how common this is, the GMail notifier clearly uses some of the IE COM components to communicate with GMail servers. Although I now use Firefox for web browsing, I have hardened the IE security settings the best I can, so it prompts me for most things. When the GMail notifier starts, I get an IE dialog box prompting me for login credentials to GMail...
Select did normal selection and clicking duties, Menu brought up the context menu where available, and Adjust did either the inverse of the Select button (e.g. if you're scrolling with the down button of the scrollbar in a window, pressing Adjust would scroll up -- perfect if you'd overshot a bit when scrolling) or "special" selection duties such as multi-select in the filer.
I don't ever recall reading about any confusion regarding which button did what -- it was just accepted, and was pretty intuitive.
I have the 60GB version in the Fujitsu range:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/
Maybe I've just become immune to caffeine, but I do drink a lot of caffeine-containing drinks throughout the day, and I can't say I've ever noticed being hyper from it. More to the point, I've never really noticed anyone else becoming hyper from caffeine either.
So I've been wondering if this is more a cultural expectation thing. In Britain it just doesn't seem to be discussed in the same way -- I've known people (including myself) complain of caffeine withdrawal symptoms -- evil headaches and suchlike -- but almost never about any "hyper" effects of over-consumption of caffeine.
Yet often American sitcoms will refer to coffee in reference to making people hyper, to the point where you'd think that half an espresso is meant to send you crazy. Or maybe it's genetic differences between the populations that mean that caffeine has different effects in the two countries?
I'd be interested to know, do you get the same effects with numbers written out in word form?
e.g. a telephone number of the form: five, five, five, one, two, three, four.
I'm just wondering if it's something that is related to sequences generally -- regardless of how they are presented -- or whether there's something significant about the actual digit representations that makes them difficult for you to interpret reliably.
Security Bulletin with links to individual patches: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /ms04-028.mspx
I'm pretty sure that deployment of that type of copy-protection system would actually result in criminal prosecution and/or jail time in many countries.
But presumably you had to be admin to actually initiate the install of SP2 itself, so the Security Center setup could just be seen as simply being part of the (post-)install procedure itself. There was a reboot in-between, but it's still effectively the same process.
http://www.marcusbrigstocke.com/pacman.asp
Absolutely -- Alien Resurrection was a terrible movie. Unfortunately I own it on DVD, but only as it's part of the Alien Quadrilogy box set :/
It can stay in the box.
On a side note, if you haven't seen the Alien 3 Special Edition version released last year, it's well worth seeing as it's much closer to the director's original version than the cut the studio orginally released, and really a much better film for it.
Yes -- it's linked from here:
a milyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displa ylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
Although Microsoft would prefer people that only need to install on a single machine wait for it to be pushed via Windows Update, which will be a considerably smaller download specific for your OS version.
That's partly because they've recompiled many of the core DLLs with the latest version of their compiler.
Not only that, but they can run previous versions of Windows -- or at least some of the sub-systems -- under Longhorn, thereby allowing backwards compatibility without having to design it directly into Longhorn's own APIs. (Like Apple did when they went to OS X, I believe).
They could also the technology for sandboxing "untrusted" applications and isolate them from the main system.
According to this comment in another bug, DOM events can still change the status bar text despite those config changes:
1 #c9
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25281
(you may need to copy & paste the link, as they block slashdot referrer URIs)
Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?
http://pages.prodigy.net/zzxc/ieskin/
The following page contains a pretty comprehensive explanation of the bug:
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/
See here for all the technical details: Internet Explorer Window Restrictions
Unless the trojan silently corrupts your backups, I guess. Unlikely but possible.
</paranoia>