No, he could have returned the whole computer. He could have noticed that the machine came with windows when he ordered it. You're talking the hypothetical person who has never seen windows, has no idea what might be in the EULA and somehow now decided to actually read the whole EULA. The actual poster who write this most definitely:
- Has used windows - Has previouosly clicked past the windows EULA screen on other machines - Did NOT read the EULA this time around - Knew the PC he was ordering included windows and ordered it anyway
In other words he's just another annoying eccentric slashdot rodent whining because the PC vendor market doesn't agree with his little closed minded view of the technology landscape where everyone must inherently hate Microsoft and Windows and dream of running three different flavors of Linux in their sleep.
If nothing else, swap allows for a rapid transition to hybrid sleep in Vista.
Since most user-data pages have already been written to the swapfile very little needs to be written to the hiberfile to guarantee successful (even if slow) recovery in the case of unexpected power loss during sleep mode.
Are you living in 1980? I don't even know when the last time I saw a windows app that would *only* install to drive C: was. In fact, I don't know when the last time I saw an app that even chose c: by default was - apps chose the system drive by default, whatever letter that happens to be. Since 99% of apps are using one of about 5 different setup wrappers they all get this behavior for free.
Furthermore, it is trivial to open up disk management and map a partition to a path within another partition's namespace (i.e. mount your second drive or partition to c:\mydata.) This happens at a level where no app that isn't explicitly digging for raw disk structure information can tell the difference. (though some poorly written apps may check the freespace at "c:\" before writing data to "c:\mydata" and therefore get the wrong result)
the new strips allow users to see more of the functionality that is available in the various programs
I think this hits the nail on the head. The best thing IMO about the new ribbon is that suddenly I can actually figure out how to do things in office apps that I couldn't figure out before. I am by no means an office expert - if I wanted to do something complex it was going to require a lot of digging in menus and reading help - more often I just didn't try to do anything complicated.
With the ribbon suddently a whole new set of useful functionality is in front of me where I can see it and find it. It's not that many of these things are actually new features, I bet most everything I've done with Office 2007 was already in prior versions, it's that I can actually find and use the features now, which is perhaps more important.
Office is the epitome of feature-bloat - but most of the features are important to *someone* so they can't be dropped - finally the features that are actually useful to most people are being put where most people will find then. If you're an advanced user you can dig and customize, you always had to before anyway, but if you just want to get the basics done it's a heck of a lot easier now.
> We can't predict weather 5 days out with our current computer models, how could they possibly predict these other trends?
For a lot of phenomena it's far easier to predict the longer-term trends than the shorter-term details.
Or, put another way, it's simply harder to disprove long-term claims by the global-warming crowd since their scare tactic is based on something that even they say won't happen for a long time. For now I'll stay firmly in the 'no way we can tell what's going to happen' camp; which is not to say that pollution is acceptable, there are plenty of provable local effects (smog anyone?) which tell us that reducing the crap we spew into the atmosphere is a good idea.
I'm just not buying into the doomsday prohpecy or the draconial measures that the global warming PAC wants to apply to first world nations while completely ignoring the actions of third-world nations (kyoto). These types of things fly directly in the face of any claim that the issue is about global, rather than local, impact.
What's a 'Google'? What does 'Amazon' have to do with books? Do you think most eBay users get the reference (if it even is a reference) to "The Bay" company (few outside of Canada have likely heard of it).
The best names often have little to do with describing the product or company - which is not to say that a unique name guarantees success of course, but Zune is the opposite approach to names like "Windows Media Player" - complaining about both approaches (creative vs. descriptive) doesn't make a lot of sense.
What's ANI going to tell them - google calling? It's not like you ever placed a phone call to the 800 number, there's no info for them to dig up - only google knows who you are.
Re:I'm not sure what you're getting at
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The instructions were rather humorous, because there were two steps for Windows users, and just one for Mac users. I simply plugged in the drive and it worked.
If Microsoft didn't have the backing of idiotic laws like the DCMA (in the US), overextended copyright, overencompassing patents, and overbearing trademark laws, other companies would have had access to compete many, many years ago.
These are not the reasons that Microsoft has such a dominant position:
- The DMCA (not DCMA) came about well after Microsoft became the dominant player they are and it has been used mainly as a protection for Music and Video materials. Microsoft employs technical hurdles and legal means to prevent 'piracy' but this is nothing new since the DMCA came into being.
- Copyright: Little or none of Microsoft's IP has aged beyond the original terms of copyright. The little that has is obsolete and it would harm Microsoft very little if it were to become public domain.
- Patents: Microsoft has used their patents only as a form of defense in virtually all cases. Even on Slashdot this is fairly well accepted as fact. There are patent-crazies out there and they have hindered Microsoft as well as many other companies... but patent-craziness is not what brought Microsoft into its current position.
- Trademark: What, if other companies were able to use the word "Windows" on it's own to describe their product then they could better compete with Microsoft?
There is absolutely no PII on any US election ballot. You have to vote at a specific location and they cross your name off the list before they hand you a blank ballot. For absentee (or it's more complete form, vote-by-mail) there are two envelopes, the outer one has your info for validation that you only vote once, the inner one has no PII, just your ballot. The outer one is seperated from the inner one and they are not supposed to be connected to one another from that point on (all conspiracy theories aside).
The problem with this is that there is little real value to having a hard drive larger than 20GB in a game console (unless you want to make it a PVR, but then you need a way bigger drive than anyone is offering on a console). In fact, for what the xbox/360 (and PS3) will use a hard drive for you don't even need 20GB; drives just don't get cheaper smaller than that so MS chose that size based on the fact that it wouldn't save money to make it smaller.
IMO MS made a pretty smart move by ostensibly appearing to offer the console ("core") for $299 but making it pretty compelling that you should pay $399 for the better version. Sony is trying to do the same in a way, but starting at $499 just won't work the same way - $299 is the original price for last gen's consoles when they came out...$499 is just too much for a console. There are plenty of PCs at that price point.
Because many (mostly TV shows) videos on YouTube are partial snippets at low quality it, in all likelihood, drives new viewers to programs. Despite the fact that the common belief here is that "content owners are completely oblivious" I think they actually realize this. When shows are posted in full, over and over, they are going to complain. When snippets of shows are posted they are basically ads and the content owners, in large part, probably LIKE this.
The difference with the music sharing sites of old was the the content was, at the heyday, complete and good quality. For those willing to wade the waters and fix the metadata it completely replaced any interest in purchasing the material. In some cases it may have made people more aware of bands and resulted in album sales but, honestly, this was NOT how the majority of P2P users viewed the system.
Microsoft is not following the path that McAfee and Symantec have followed. There is no antivirus software built into windows - the whole discussion that "Microsoft is trying to kill A/V venders" seems completely misguided. Yes, they are trying to make the OS more secure, you might argue that they are trying to kill anti-spyware products (since they *are* including this in the OS) but A/V? I don't get how this is 'the next netscape' when there is no A/V software bundled, or even strongly tied - to Vista.
Never mind that Netscape pretty much killed themselves with the abomination that was Communicator. I was a netscape-only user until the disparity in quality between IE4 and Communicator appeared and was so blatant that I couldn't see continuing to use Netscape. IE4's betas were more stable than Communicator's RTM product - I was a die-hard microsoft hater at that time and still this was clear. Of course, we paid for the fact that IE4 sacrificed security in favor of features, performance, etc. in the long run (i.e. they implemented cool features with little regard for the long-term consequences.)
Probably should make the password change prodedure for your organization automatically backup the keys to a server at the same time so that your IT department can recover them for you.
Doesn't Vista have a built-in feature for full disk (or all but system files) encryption? Can't you even just check off the 'encrypt' option on the properties sheet for your my docs folder (even on XP)... or your entire user profile (to cover outlook OST etc, though that is already encrypted I believe, or can be configured to be in outlook).
The article you are talking about refers to a side effect (i.e. bug) from installing a BETA of WMP 11 - yet your previous post says "you can't do auto-update anymore". No beta has ever been posted for automatic windows update. Like I said, just more FUD.
There is, hypothetically, support for a feature like 3-day recordings - but I've *never* seen it used and it's intention is to allow pay-per-view type providers to restrict recording lifespan (*not* HBO).
No, I'm afraid you REALLY do not understand what "DRM" is.
Installing microsoft's DRM does NOT prevent you from playing back DRM'd content. To implement it that way would be absolutely dumb, because then anyone who didn't install the DRM softare (or was, say, using Linux) could play the content. I assure you, you CAN NOT play back the content just because you did not install the "DRM software"
The DRM software *enabled* you to play DRM'd content (if you have a license, if you don't you can't play it back no matter what you install - the occasional cracks in the DRM wall not withstanding)
Backing up DRM licenses has no meaning if you don't have DRM software (and content with licenses). The fact that you CAN back up DRM licenses is a feature of DRM. I believe that there are some cases where you can't back them up - but of course without the DRM software there is nothing TO back up.
Sony's rootkit is only loosley worth calling "DRM" - even the non-rootkit aspect of it is for all intents and purposes a trojan. It installed itself without asking and broke a 'golden rule' so to speak about autoplay behavior (microsoft's fault for making autoplay work that way, addressed in vista - and the sony fiasco is probably part of why they addressed it). Sony's rootkit did not 'manage rights' or 'enable encrypted content to be played back with a license' which is what DRM is all about. Instead it attempted to prevent you from copying in-the-clear content that would normally be free to copy (and also opened up a security hole, that part wasn't intentional). This is not DRM; Sony should have a major class-action lawsuit against them for what they did.
What would it even mean for it to "require DRM"... methinks you don't actually know what DRM is. DRM "support" is like support for opening acrobat documents. If you install it, you can play the content, if you don't then you can't. If you never play the content it makes no difference whether or not you've installed it (ok, Acrobat is probably a bad example...:)
It's not like having the code on your machine to support playing DRM'd WMA files is somehow going to change what happens when you play MP3s or run other applications.
Bah. From a compression point of view the approach to storing well defined waves and relatively random data is very different. If you can effectively subtract out all the well defined waves, store them very effeciently, and then be left with a 'noise' track that is considerably lower in terms of it's dynamic range - you can then effectively compress the noise track and end up using a lot less space. How many of the discrete waveforms you can actually extract and how large the remaining dynamic range of the noise is will affect just how much you can compress the audio before being forced to throw data away.
Picture a noisy sine wave that only deviates from a clean sine wave by 10% in most places. Suntract the sine wave, compress the remaining bits which don't require a full 16 bits to represent them because they never or rarely contain values high enough to need this. Decide how much of the noise you can cut (if it consists of 10 bits of dynamic range can you drop that to 8 bits without noticably losing quality? How many values would this skew and by how much? This can be easily calculated...) Consider making exceptions for the occasional non-regular peak noise values and storing those seperately (if they were regular they could be stored as a wave). Of course it's a lot more complicated than that with actual music.
No, I don't think it would be at all in our best interests as a species for there to be other intelligent species on this planet. We'd kill them or they'd kill us. The odds of us ending up peaceful with one another are about as good as the palastinians and isralies living in harmony.
How on earth is that an invasion of privacy? They want to verify that you have a legitimate product key that is not on a known piracy list before they give you free updates. They still don't know who you are, where you are, what you have installed, or anything else about you.
Ok, so in order to provide you with the list of available updates that are relevant to you the server needs to know what updates you already have... though this has always been the case for windows update and has nothing to do with WGA. The alternative would be to download some huge list to the client and make the client perform the logic to determine which updates are relevant which is a rather painful thing to do just to satisfy some tin-foil hatters.
All of this 'blaming windows security' is absurd. There are a thousand reasons to fault windows security - and this ISN'T one of them. Fault windows for all the remote exploits. Fault windows for autorun. Fault Windows for BSODs if the last version of Windows you ever used was NT4.
This could have happened of the production machine was running Linux, or was a Mac, or anything - no matter what platform they used a virus running on the machine could have listened for device arrival events and planted itself on the drive. Sure, this was a windows virus - sure, there are more windows viruses than there are for every other platform combined. That fact has nothing to do with how secure or insecure windows.
There is a difference between a virus and an exploit. I see absolutely no information here claiming that this was an exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he could have returned the whole computer. He could have noticed that the machine came with windows when he ordered it. You're talking the hypothetical person who has never seen windows, has no idea what might be in the EULA and somehow now decided to actually read the whole EULA. The actual poster who write this most definitely:
- Has used windows
- Has previouosly clicked past the windows EULA screen on other machines
- Did NOT read the EULA this time around
- Knew the PC he was ordering included windows and ordered it anyway
In other words he's just another annoying eccentric slashdot rodent whining because the PC vendor market doesn't agree with his little closed minded view of the technology landscape where everyone must inherently hate Microsoft and Windows and dream of running three different flavors of Linux in their sleep.
If nothing else, swap allows for a rapid transition to hybrid sleep in Vista.
Since most user-data pages have already been written to the swapfile very little needs to be written to the hiberfile to guarantee successful (even if slow) recovery in the case of unexpected power loss during sleep mode.
Are you living in 1980? I don't even know when the last time I saw a windows app that would *only* install to drive C: was. In fact, I don't know when the last time I saw an app that even chose c: by default was - apps chose the system drive by default, whatever letter that happens to be. Since 99% of apps are using one of about 5 different setup wrappers they all get this behavior for free.
Furthermore, it is trivial to open up disk management and map a partition to a path within another partition's namespace (i.e. mount your second drive or partition to c:\mydata.) This happens at a level where no app that isn't explicitly digging for raw disk structure information can tell the difference. (though some poorly written apps may check the freespace at "c:\" before writing data to "c:\mydata" and therefore get the wrong result)
I think this hits the nail on the head. The best thing IMO about the new ribbon is that suddenly I can actually figure out how to do things in office apps that I couldn't figure out before. I am by no means an office expert - if I wanted to do something complex it was going to require a lot of digging in menus and reading help - more often I just didn't try to do anything complicated.
With the ribbon suddently a whole new set of useful functionality is in front of me where I can see it and find it. It's not that many of these things are actually new features, I bet most everything I've done with Office 2007 was already in prior versions, it's that I can actually find and use the features now, which is perhaps more important.
Office is the epitome of feature-bloat - but most of the features are important to *someone* so they can't be dropped - finally the features that are actually useful to most people are being put where most people will find then. If you're an advanced user you can dig and customize, you always had to before anyway, but if you just want to get the basics done it's a heck of a lot easier now.
Or, put another way, it's simply harder to disprove long-term claims by the global-warming crowd since their scare tactic is based on something that even they say won't happen for a long time. For now I'll stay firmly in the 'no way we can tell what's going to happen' camp; which is not to say that pollution is acceptable, there are plenty of provable local effects (smog anyone?) which tell us that reducing the crap we spew into the atmosphere is a good idea.
I'm just not buying into the doomsday prohpecy or the draconial measures that the global warming PAC wants to apply to first world nations while completely ignoring the actions of third-world nations (kyoto). These types of things fly directly in the face of any claim that the issue is about global, rather than local, impact.
* I drive a prius, fwiw.
What's a 'Google'? What does 'Amazon' have to do with books? Do you think most eBay users get the reference (if it even is a reference) to "The Bay" company (few outside of Canada have likely heard of it).
The best names often have little to do with describing the product or company - which is not to say that a unique name guarantees success of course, but Zune is the opposite approach to names like "Windows Media Player" - complaining about both approaches (creative vs. descriptive) doesn't make a lot of sense.
What exactly is gramatically incorrect about the sentence "Welcome to the social"?
Social can be used as a noun. Grab a dictionary if you don't believe me.
What's ANI going to tell them - google calling? It's not like you ever placed a phone call to the 800 number, there's no info for them to dig up - only google knows who you are.
As opposed to doing what on a PC?
Mac:
1) Plug it in and it works
PC:
1) Plug it in
2) It works
These are not the reasons that Microsoft has such a dominant position:
- The DMCA (not DCMA) came about well after Microsoft became the dominant player they are and it has been used mainly as a protection for Music and Video materials. Microsoft employs technical hurdles and legal means to prevent 'piracy' but this is nothing new since the DMCA came into being.
- Copyright: Little or none of Microsoft's IP has aged beyond the original terms of copyright. The little that has is obsolete and it would harm Microsoft very little if it were to become public domain.
- Patents: Microsoft has used their patents only as a form of defense in virtually all cases. Even on Slashdot this is fairly well accepted as fact. There are patent-crazies out there and they have hindered Microsoft as well as many other companies
- Trademark: What, if other companies were able to use the word "Windows" on it's own to describe their product then they could better compete with Microsoft?
There is absolutely no PII on any US election ballot. You have to vote at a specific location and they cross your name off the list before they hand you a blank ballot. For absentee (or it's more complete form, vote-by-mail) there are two envelopes, the outer one has your info for validation that you only vote once, the inner one has no PII, just your ballot. The outer one is seperated from the inner one and they are not supposed to be connected to one another from that point on (all conspiracy theories aside).
Are you referring to Live as an 'unproven online system'? Compared to what?
The problem with this is that there is little real value to having a hard drive larger than 20GB in a game console (unless you want to make it a PVR, but then you need a way bigger drive than anyone is offering on a console). In fact, for what the xbox/360 (and PS3) will use a hard drive for you don't even need 20GB; drives just don't get cheaper smaller than that so MS chose that size based on the fact that it wouldn't save money to make it smaller.
...$499 is just too much for a console. There are plenty of PCs at that price point.
IMO MS made a pretty smart move by ostensibly appearing to offer the console ("core") for $299 but making it pretty compelling that you should pay $399 for the better version. Sony is trying to do the same in a way, but starting at $499 just won't work the same way - $299 is the original price for last gen's consoles when they came out
Because many (mostly TV shows) videos on YouTube are partial snippets at low quality it, in all likelihood, drives new viewers to programs. Despite the fact that the common belief here is that "content owners are completely oblivious" I think they actually realize this. When shows are posted in full, over and over, they are going to complain. When snippets of shows are posted they are basically ads and the content owners, in large part, probably LIKE this.
The difference with the music sharing sites of old was the the content was, at the heyday, complete and good quality. For those willing to wade the waters and fix the metadata it completely replaced any interest in purchasing the material. In some cases it may have made people more aware of bands and resulted in album sales but, honestly, this was NOT how the majority of P2P users viewed the system.
Microsoft is not following the path that McAfee and Symantec have followed. There is no antivirus software built into windows - the whole discussion that "Microsoft is trying to kill A/V venders" seems completely misguided. Yes, they are trying to make the OS more secure, you might argue that they are trying to kill anti-spyware products (since they *are* including this in the OS) but A/V? I don't get how this is 'the next netscape' when there is no A/V software bundled, or even strongly tied - to Vista.
Never mind that Netscape pretty much killed themselves with the abomination that was Communicator. I was a netscape-only user until the disparity in quality between IE4 and Communicator appeared and was so blatant that I couldn't see continuing to use Netscape. IE4's betas were more stable than Communicator's RTM product - I was a die-hard microsoft hater at that time and still this was clear. Of course, we paid for the fact that IE4 sacrificed security in favor of features, performance, etc. in the long run (i.e. they implemented cool features with little regard for the long-term consequences.)
Probably should make the password change prodedure for your organization automatically backup the keys to a server at the same time so that your IT department can recover them for you.
Doesn't Vista have a built-in feature for full disk (or all but system files) encryption? Can't you even just check off the 'encrypt' option on the properties sheet for your my docs folder (even on XP) ... or your entire user profile (to cover outlook OST etc, though that is already encrypted I believe, or can be configured to be in outlook).
The article you are talking about refers to a side effect (i.e. bug) from installing a BETA of WMP 11 - yet your previous post says "you can't do auto-update anymore". No beta has ever been posted for automatic windows update. Like I said, just more FUD.
There is, hypothetically, support for a feature like 3-day recordings - but I've *never* seen it used and it's intention is to allow pay-per-view type providers to restrict recording lifespan (*not* HBO).
No, I'm afraid you REALLY do not understand what "DRM" is.
Installing microsoft's DRM does NOT prevent you from playing back DRM'd content. To implement it that way would be absolutely dumb, because then anyone who didn't install the DRM softare (or was, say, using Linux) could play the content. I assure you, you CAN NOT play back the content just because you did not install the "DRM software"
The DRM software *enabled* you to play DRM'd content (if you have a license, if you don't you can't play it back no matter what you install - the occasional cracks in the DRM wall not withstanding)
Backing up DRM licenses has no meaning if you don't have DRM software (and content with licenses). The fact that you CAN back up DRM licenses is a feature of DRM. I believe that there are some cases where you can't back them up - but of course without the DRM software there is nothing TO back up.
Sony's rootkit is only loosley worth calling "DRM" - even the non-rootkit aspect of it is for all intents and purposes a trojan. It installed itself without asking and broke a 'golden rule' so to speak about autoplay behavior (microsoft's fault for making autoplay work that way, addressed in vista - and the sony fiasco is probably part of why they addressed it). Sony's rootkit did not 'manage rights' or 'enable encrypted content to be played back with a license' which is what DRM is all about. Instead it attempted to prevent you from copying in-the-clear content that would normally be free to copy (and also opened up a security hole, that part wasn't intentional). This is not DRM; Sony should have a major class-action lawsuit against them for what they did.
This is absolutely false. I have used media center for years; I have all the updates. There is no such restriction. Please drop the FUD.
What would it even mean for it to "require DRM" ... methinks you don't actually know what DRM is. DRM "support" is like support for opening acrobat documents. If you install it, you can play the content, if you don't then you can't. If you never play the content it makes no difference whether or not you've installed it (ok, Acrobat is probably a bad example ... :)
It's not like having the code on your machine to support playing DRM'd WMA files is somehow going to change what happens when you play MP3s or run other applications.
Bah. From a compression point of view the approach to storing well defined waves and relatively random data is very different. If you can effectively subtract out all the well defined waves, store them very effeciently, and then be left with a 'noise' track that is considerably lower in terms of it's dynamic range - you can then effectively compress the noise track and end up using a lot less space. How many of the discrete waveforms you can actually extract and how large the remaining dynamic range of the noise is will affect just how much you can compress the audio before being forced to throw data away.
Picture a noisy sine wave that only deviates from a clean sine wave by 10% in most places. Suntract the sine wave, compress the remaining bits which don't require a full 16 bits to represent them because they never or rarely contain values high enough to need this. Decide how much of the noise you can cut (if it consists of 10 bits of dynamic range can you drop that to 8 bits without noticably losing quality? How many values would this skew and by how much? This can be easily calculated...) Consider making exceptions for the occasional non-regular peak noise values and storing those seperately (if they were regular they could be stored as a wave). Of course it's a lot more complicated than that with actual music.
No, I don't think it would be at all in our best interests as a species for there to be other intelligent species on this planet. We'd kill them or they'd kill us. The odds of us ending up peaceful with one another are about as good as the palastinians and isralies living in harmony.
How on earth is that an invasion of privacy? They want to verify that you have a legitimate product key that is not on a known piracy list before they give you free updates. They still don't know who you are, where you are, what you have installed, or anything else about you.
... though this has always been the case for windows update and has nothing to do with WGA. The alternative would be to download some huge list to the client and make the client perform the logic to determine which updates are relevant which is a rather painful thing to do just to satisfy some tin-foil hatters.
Ok, so in order to provide you with the list of available updates that are relevant to you the server needs to know what updates you already have
All of this 'blaming windows security' is absurd. There are a thousand reasons to fault windows security - and this ISN'T one of them. Fault windows for all the remote exploits. Fault windows for autorun. Fault Windows for BSODs if the last version of Windows you ever used was NT4.
This could have happened of the production machine was running Linux, or was a Mac, or anything - no matter what platform they used a virus running on the machine could have listened for device arrival events and planted itself on the drive. Sure, this was a windows virus - sure, there are more windows viruses than there are for every other platform combined. That fact has nothing to do with how secure or insecure windows.
There is a difference between a virus and an exploit. I see absolutely no information here claiming that this was an exploit.