i just wonder what this increased automation will do to the world economy given time, as with less people working, there is less income to spend on the very products being made.
I've often wondered if the moneyless purported uptopian socialist society depicted in Star Trek was where we are heading, except with a decidedly dystopian air.
Just look at all the regurgitated crap Hollywood's producing these days, although sometimes a remake is better than the original. Many books are almost complete conceptual ripoffs rewritten. I'd list a couple of them, but don't want to admit to having read them....
We've had 3rd parties ascend before, but usually because one of the "two" parties did something to fail miserably, and then got branched off of. The steady-state of "two" is returned to very quickly.
We're seeing that right now - the question is - will the Republican party split or not?
Maybe we can get a party of moderates going?/false hope
Everyone is taxed. Those that have health insurance get a credit, equal to the amount of the tax. Someone has to pay for all those left uninsured.
BTW, not all uninsured cannot afford to pay for health insurance. Some are flat out denied health insurance because of pre-existing medical conditions. There's lots more to this than a simple black and white picture.
The current law says hospitals must provide service at the emergency room, even if you have no money. I think that works just fine. Yes the corporation that owns the hospital will try to collect the money from the patient, but they can't collect what poor people don't have, so eventually it comes out of the corporation's (or CEO's) own pocket.
You really have your own personal reality distortion field.
If patient A can't pay the tab, and no one else does, then patient A's tab gets added to the costs to run the hospital which then raises the costs of all services to cover it. This is one of the major reasons a bed in a hospital now costs almost $2K per day and other services cost far more than they should. Where did you think the money came from?
It's a vicious cycle where costs go up, causing health insurance to go up, causing more people to not be able to afford health insurance, which goes back to causing costs to go up. We've seen this ongoing for a while now and it's nearing the unsustainable breaking point for the whole system.
Change must happen. Since I seriously doubt that refusing to help the injured will ever fly, we're left with alternative 2.
As far as Berkeley goes, in this case I'd say they're out of their minds. Gattaca seems a little closer everyday, hence the reason it's one of my favorite science fiction flicks in a long time.
As for the bill, call it what it is - you're taxed regardless. It's not a fine. They just choose to give you a write-off for $950 if you have health insurance coverage.
I'm actually mixed on this. On the one hand, I think they shouldn't be allowed to force insurance on you. On the other, the current system is a complete and utter travesty. I really only see 2 choices, either hospitals refuse to help patients with no insurance or payment/financing up front (pretty picture with you bleeding out and having lost your insurance card in whatever caused you to come into that state) or all get covered, meaning all have to pay.
What we've got with that bill ISN'T reform. Reform is changing it so that the pricing can come back down out of the clouds. (Wanna know how much Medicare pays, typically, on things? 20% of the billed. Wanna know how much the regular insurance pays for things? ~30% of the billed amount. Want to do REAL reform? FIX THAT FIRST.)
Now this is the real crux of the problem. You could fix a lot of things by stipulating that doctors/hospitals cannot differentiate their billing by more than 5-10% for a particular procedure/visit/whatever.
Why do I say this? Because you are way way off on your numbers, and not even correct in the slant.
Medicare sets a value x for an item, then the charging entity says well, it costs really x * 1.2, so to get the extra 20%, I have to charge the client (x * 1.2 - x) / 0.2 to get the remaining dollars. (So to get $120 for a $100 approved charge, I now make my service cost $200 even though it should only cost $120.)
Once this nonsense started, prices amazingly started going up as the medicare prices also seem to be the base price for all transactions, with varying "discounts" applied depending upon your insurance, your affiliation, or whether you pay cash.
well, if you can self-insure, then you'll never pay the "fine", will you? IIRC, the "fine" only applies to those that opt out during their "healthy years" and then want back in later when they believe it makes sense for them.
Nope. Despite the propaganda put out by certain groups that do think in lock-step, liberals are fairly... liberal in their thinking. Liberals don't tend to hold the view that things are perfect just the way they are.
For an example of this - look at Congress. Dems hold/held a supermajority (60) but appear to have anything but certainty in trying to pass their legislation. The previous 17 years of the other majority had no such qualms and passed many things by party vote.
You weren't affected by the 42 day timer bug? Or the 20/32 bit page counter pointer bug that wasn't fixed until SP1?
Not that I know of, and after some googling around I can't even find anything resembling the bugs you're talking about. Can you link me to a KB article ?
Wish I could, the best I could find was a snippet from a PCWorld article about this. Then again, nothing like the web existed back in those days....
The "fragmentation problem" in NTFS is grossly overstated for all but corner cases....could never detect any meaningful difference in performance between drives purportedly having 50% or more fragmentation, and drives having less than 10% fragmentation.
You and I could not be more diametrically opposed on these topics. First off, OS/2 2.1 onward was never unstable for me and ran on three different architecture/CPUs that I used, flawlessly and reliably, unless I pushed it by running the win32 subsystem.
Second, only with massive tweaking and running only specific software could I ever get a month out of NT 4.0. If I deviated, it would fail faster. Before SP1, you were guaranteed to BSOD in 42 days or whenever your page counter overflowed 20 bits and tried to reference a page above the 20 bits or in the overflow range. The memory there was corrupted.
BTW, MS's recommendation was weekly reboots, circa 97/98.
Where is this recommendation ?
Well, a quick google search indicates that there is no real documentation left on the web before SP4 regarding NT 4.0 if you're looking for specifics such as bug fixes etc. I'm pretty sure I still have an NT 4.0 SP1 disk somewhere around here, but it'll be at the bottom of a box if it hasn't been thrown out already. Otherwise I'd link it for you. NT 4.0 was a massive pile of crap when it came out. SP1 fixed a ton of major issues. SP2 added features and broke everything again. SP3 fixed the breakage. It was the source of the "only apply and run odd service packs" mantra that was around for years. Since there's no easily or even not so easily found data for anything prior to SP6, feel free to either accept these statements or not. It really doesn't matter for something that is more than 10 years in the past. However, a brief brainstorm shows that the memory and stability problems were not rare.
Server 2008R2 is NT 6.1. Server 2003 R2 was a relatively minor update, most of its "improvements" basically just a collection of userspace tools.
Really? So there would be no core changes? Perhaps an almost usable Server Core installation, for starters? And I suppose IIS 7.5 and.NET 3.51 are also minor changes? And we won't get into the innards where all the token manipulation routines have been greatly restricted. I don't recall when they created the 4 base security tokens, maybe they showed up in 2008. They certainly took effect in 2008 R2.
The only real right creators have is to share or not share their idea/creation.
Copyright grants a "limited" time period of distribution control. Right of First Sale takes over after the initial sale. Once a tangible item is sold, it can be resold, passed around, destroyed, or even converted into something else and sold. People can talk about said creation. They can parody it. They can display it with some restrictions dependent upon what, exactly, the creation is under current copyright law.
So these rights you think creators have are much more limited than you appear to state.
What I can't do as a consumer, is buy the item, copy it, and distribute the copies. Note that the only thing I cannot legally do is distribute the copies. At least until that unnecessary travesty known as the DMCA appeared.
Linux and OS/2 both provided far more functionality while requiring fewer resources. Solaris was a different story.
Please. OS/2 was (relatively) unstable, barely supported and not even multiuser, though it did have a nice GUI. Linux was a PITA to setup, use and maintain, and its cutting edge GUI of the time was fvwm95. I switched FROM OS/2 to NT4 in the beta cycle (early 1996) precisely because it was so much better than OS/2 even then.
And your veracity suffers even more. NT 4 was more stable in the beta cycle? Really? You weren't affected by the 42 day timer bug? Or the 20/32 bit page counter pointer bug that wasn't fixed until SP1? Did you even run either of these systems? How about the ever present guaranteed fragmentation problem that MS refused to acknowledge with NTFS until XP?
While Linux did have a painful GUI at the time, it just ran. OS/2 likewise ran and ran - I had a system at work that was used heavily in the processing of large files (at the time files up to 500MB), ran FTP, Gopher, SMTP (yep - back in those days we ran local mail servers if you didn't want to login to the mainframe for mail) etc, and this machine stayed up 6 months at a time. Better yet, when OS/2 finally got a defragger because of all the NT fanboys clamoring that it was a toy os because it didn't even have a defragmentation utility, it turned out that after 4 years of continuous operation with hundreds of thousands of file writes and deletes my system's fragmentation level was.... <4%.
Meanwhile, NT 4.0 on a second system had to be rebooted weekly, and required defragmentation weekly and was used only for the file modeling pieces.
Later on, NT 4.0 became rather solid as far as uptime went, and could be rebooted monthly under the loads we put them under. BTW, MS's recommendation was weekly reboots, circa 97/98.
The original XP release is quite responsive and functional on a P2 class system with 128MB of RAM. 256 and it's flying.
Then we have different definitions of flying.
The short story is that thanks to DLL code injection, you can execute arbitrary code at SYSTEM privs and even the AV won't find it. DLL code injection was actually the one way that a third party can achieve true privilege escalation in Server 2008 R2, as all token manipulation APIs are now "broken".
Oh wow. A local-execution-only privilege escalation bug in third party software. Now there's a fundamental design flaw if ever I've seen one.</SARCASM>
You're not getting the picture. Due to NT's kernel architecture, basically any arbitrary code can be forced to be run by SYSTEM from any process and even AV can't stop it. All your sarcasm can't change the fact that this is a major security hole.
It may be distributed with, but that doesn't make it "part of" Vista. That's like saying iTunes is part of OSX, when it's clearly it's own product.
Actually, no, it's like saying Cocoa is part of OS X, which is pretty much exactly what.NET is to Windows.
I'd argue that it's more like Java being listed as part of the OS. After all, it's an installable component, doesn't come installed by default (at least not on Server 2008 R2), and is not required for operation.
Let me fix that for you and put it in proper perspective regarding major releases as we know them of the core OS:
You left out Windows 2003/XP64/NT 5.2. That's at least as significant a release as XP or Windows 7, and quite arguably more so since it became the base from which Vista was built after the development "reset" in 2004.
I did that on purpose. Almost no one used XP64 which actually was released across 2 years with Server 2003 being released in between. The interesting part is that the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of 2003 were released a year apart. There was also the Server 2003 R2 release which I'm not sure what the status is compared to Server 2008 R2 which is really a new release with a different core than 2008 and requires a license upgrade.
And TBBA (Truth by Blatant Assertion) destroys any credibility you might have. These were Gateway 486DX2-66 EISA systems loaded with 64MB of RAM and 2 1GB SCSI-I disks that came in for about 10K each, I bought 7 of them. You really need to get off your high horse.
I said unlikely, not impossible.
"It's not impossible that you're an ass."
Somehow that just doesn't sound like it's not an insult, does it?
32MB of RAM was quite a usable configuration for NT4, and at 2.5x the minimum (which was actually 12MB) that's to be expected.
Guess it depends on what your needs are. I'm sure some could have run a 12MB system and been happy.
I also ran a Pentium Pro 180 w 128MB RAM with NT 4 in multi-boot mode for 4 years, and it was still the biggest dog out of the OSes I ran on that one. If it hadn't been for work, I doubt I would have run it at all.
Compared to what, providing the same functionality ?
Linux and OS/2 both provided far more functionality while requiring fewer resources. Solaris was a different story.
and your backing data would be?
The millions of people who managed to use Windows XP without having to resort to hacking around disabling services.
Those would be the same millions that are currently part of botnet X, Y, or Z?
Seriously, XP to be semi functional and secure requires serious configuration. MS provided some of this OOB with SP2. If you removed a bunch of the extraneous crap XP runs by default, you can actually get down to a pretty slim system that's quite responsive and functional, albeit not in the "MS way". I got a VM down to 4or 5 processes and less than 50MB RAM. My standard install of XP with SP3 runs about 12 processes and under 70MB RAM IIRC. It's been a while since I loaded either one.
This change did break the security model completely since now a single thread ran all code through a single set of DLLs that was shared by all processes, and hence code here has full privileges.
Can you elaborate on this ?
I did, above, where I stated but did not link to the AV bypass story posted here just a few days ago. The short story is that thanks to DLL code injection, you can execute arbitrary code at SYSTEM privs and even the AV won't find it. DLL code injection was actually the one way that a third party can achieve true privilege escalation in Server 2008 R2, as all token manipulation APIs are now "broken".
There are also other problems with this design. Does opening a 10MB email in Outlook over a slow connection essentially stop all other user interaction with other Office apps until it's completed the task? (I don't know - I don't run MS apps if I can avoid it these days)
No, and I don't recall it ever doing so.
Extremely common issue from NT 4 all the way through XP SP 3. Very noticeable when opening a 10MB attachment through a VPN link that's been choked down to 56Kbps. Once clicked, no Office app will respond in and of those systems. I have not tried this in Vista or Win 7.
And.NET is not part of Vista.
Vista is the first version of Windows to be distributed with.NET.
It may be distributed with, but that doesn't make it "part of" Vista. That's like saying iTunes is part of OSX, when it's clearly it's own product.
It was roughly 2.7 years old when Win 7 replaced it. So yes, older than 2 years, but not 3 when they shoved its still warm carcass out the back door....
Average time between releases is ~20 months, though more importantly, the time between subsequent minor releases after a major one, tends to be <2 years. If anything, at 2.5 years after Vista, Windows 7 was somewhat behind schedule.
Having run NT 4 in beta onward it used about the same resources to run well as 2K or XP. I can say that NT 4.0 running on a 486DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM was barely serviceable.
Sorry, but utter rubbish like this destroys your credibility. Ignoring for a minute how unlikely it would be to find a 486 with 64MB of RAM
And TBBA (Truth by Blatant Assertion) destroys any credibility you might have. These were Gateway 486DX2-66 EISA systems loaded with 64MB of RAM and 2 1GB SCSI-I disks that came in for about 10K each, I bought 7 of them. You really need to get off your high horse.
NT4 was quite usable - and I spent over a year using it - on a Pentium ~75Mhz with 32MB. To say nothing of the 486DX2/66 being a 4-year old, 2 generation old CPU at NT4's release - you wouldn't expect blistering performance out of it in the first place.
I spent about 3 weeks using it on the 486. A 486-33 was the minimum, pentium was recommended. Likewise, 16MB RAM was the minimum, 32MB RAM recommended, 64MB was the minimum usable amount for anything.
I also ran a Pentium Pro 180 w 128MB RAM with NT 4 in multi-boot mode for 4 years, and it was still the biggest dog out of the OSes I ran on that one. If it hadn't been for work, I doubt I would have run it at all.
I should mention that XP out of the box is dog slow. Removing services is required both for performance and some semblance of security.
More rubbish.
and your backing data would be? Or, I could just answer your entire post with "more rubbish". You seem to think it works for you.
This is flat-out false. Moving GDI into kernel space - a change which, incidentally, happened with NT 3.51 to 4.0, not 3.1 to 3.5 - didn't "essentially toss out all separation of the kernel/user space".
You are correct. It was NT 4 that broke the security model entirely. It was started in 3.5, because 3.1 was virtually unusable. But the full out breakage did not occur until 4.0.
This change did break the security model completely since now a single thread ran all code through a single set of DLLs that was shared by all processes, and hence code here has full privileges. There are also other problems with this design. Does opening a 10MB email in Outlook over a slow connection essentially stop all other user interaction with other Office apps until it's completed the task? (I don't know - I don't run MS apps if I can avoid it these days)
WIn 2K added the new modular driver framework, among other things. What exactly did Vista add? (It certainly wasn't the promised rewrite, but it did add the TPM and DRM pieces. Hooray!)
Vista added much more than any revision before it.
As I recall, NT 4.0 added a completely new display system and windows manager, new driver model, new display arhcitecture, new audio stack, new printing stack, and significant overhauls to memory, scheduling and IO. In many way ways far greater compared to the previous systems than Vista to XP.
And.NET is not part of Vista.
Vista was as close to a "rewrite" as NT is likely to get (and probably need) for another 15 years.
Considering the recent validation of the DLL injection problem, I'd say NT required a rewrite about the time it compiled the first time. It's security model is upside down and fundamentally flawed. It cannot be fixed. It's a completely backwards system that requires a highest privs model compared to every other system out there that works off of a lowest privs model. Yes, I'm aware of MS's PR campaign on the 2008 R2 release, but I can assure you it's purely marketing spin and has no basis in reality.
Vista is 3 years old, as of January 2010. Further, if you look back at the history of Windows NT releases, if anythin
They were (one of) the pioneers of graphical interfaces in the 80s, and it took until Windows 95 for Windows to come anywhere near Mac OS (but it was still awful).
Apple still forces you to resize windows from the lower-right corner....In terms of productivity, their interfaces are years behind. They took NeXTStep's dock and ruined its defaults for prettiness instead of muscle memory, for example. And you have to move the mouse farther (and on a large display, actually refocus your eyes) to use the single menu bar. And until OSX, Apple didn't even have minimize/maximize, instead using the same multifinder approach they've been using (annoyingly) for years.
I will agree that this one GUI issue is somewhat annoying. I generally can live with it though, since I generally spend very little time resizing my windows, especially given Spaces. Imagine my surprise and annoyance when the Command Prompt in Vista exhibits the same limitations.
As for the Dock, I rarely use it. I'm a QuickSilver user which pretty much negates the need for the dock for anything but notifications in combination with CMD-Tab and CMD-`. I don't see people's attraction to the dock when with usually 5 keystrokes or less I have any app I want running and never had to leave the keyboard. That includes the hot key sequence for bringing up QS and typing the char(s) needed to get to the app I want launched and the return, which may also be optional.
Honestly, RAID? The OP seems like someone that wants large amounts of archival storage that's ready at hand. This sounds like more a case for large green HDs in a box somewhere. NAS would be fine, or something like it or even just an OS that has "shares" on his network.
Just remember: RAID is for high availability, it is not a backup solution. For that he'll need separate drives that do occasional copies and then go offline/offsite for safe storage. This is more procedural than technical.
FYI: I use just such a system for the 6TB I have on hand currently. Raw video footage eats space. At $110 for a 2TB drive, it's relatively easy to store it offsite now until I no longer need it.
IIRC, they lampooned it for its cartoonish look, and the fact that it was slower than Win98 and Win 2K, depending on where you were coming from.
Yes. Just like Vista.
Not really. While Vista was bad enough to require rebranding and kept everyone on the 10 year old XP, it was never lampooned for being a clown interface. Needled for being slow, bloated, and less capable, yes.
Win XP had a slower uptake than desired, but took off after 2 years as games designed for XP started coming out in large numbers. Vista will die an ignoble death as a footnote in MS's history.
Win 2K was probably the "best" of the NT versions, solid and trim compared to all of its predecessors and descendants.
Compared to NT4, Windows 2000 was "bloated" and slow - the former needing a 33Mhz 486 with 16Mb RAM and the latter a 133Mhz+ Pentium (~8x more) with 64MB RAM (4x more).
Having run NT 4 in beta onward it used about the same resources to run well as 2K or XP. I can say that NT 4.0 running on a 486DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM was barely serviceable. I should mention that XP out of the box is dog slow. Removing services is required both for performance and some semblance of security.
Windows 7 is as much "Vista SP2" as Windows XP was "Windows 2000 SP1". Certainly the changes weren't as large as Vista (probably the single biggest update to NT since its release), but definitely more than just a service pack.
Actually - the biggest update to NT was the 3.1->3.5 release, where biggest change was that the GDI layer was inserted and essentially all separation of the kernel/user space was tossed out the door for the sake of a semi usable UI. WIn 2K added the new modular driver framework, among other things. What exactly did Vista add? (It certainly wasn't the promised rewrite, but it did add the TPM and DRM pieces. Hooray!)
But, I'll agree that Win XP was Win 2K SP 2 plus a lunatic GUI. Note that Win 2K had a total of 4 SPs plus a final rollup SP post SP4. It also had the capability to run all DX iterations that came out up to DX9, which could be hacked as MS tried to kill off Win 2K by denying it the latest DX versions, much like DX 10 and XP.
Windows 7 has some fixes that will never show up in VIsta, primarily to separate the 2 products because Vista is viewed so negatively. Note that Vista is only 2 years old, and already is being shoved out the door.
So yes, there are similarities, but there are also significant differences.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps eatings its own offspring might suffice?
i just wonder what this increased automation will do to the world economy given time, as with less people working, there is less income to spend on the very products being made.
I've often wondered if the moneyless purported uptopian socialist society depicted in Star Trek was where we are heading, except with a decidedly dystopian air.
The same goes for books and movies.
Just look at all the regurgitated crap Hollywood's producing these days, although sometimes a remake is better than the original. Many books are almost complete conceptual ripoffs rewritten. I'd list a couple of them, but don't want to admit to having read them....
Given the current economic and political situation I can see the late 70s/80s look coming back.
Please NO parachute pants! Or those elephant leg bell bottoms!
We've had 3rd parties ascend before, but usually because one of the "two" parties did something to fail miserably, and then got branched off of. The steady-state of "two" is returned to very quickly.
We're seeing that right now - the question is - will the Republican party split or not?
Maybe we can get a party of moderates going? /false hope
For a small fee!
small == bigger than your mortgage payment if they have their way
Everyone is taxed. Those that have health insurance get a credit, equal to the amount of the tax. Someone has to pay for all those left uninsured.
BTW, not all uninsured cannot afford to pay for health insurance. Some are flat out denied health insurance because of pre-existing medical conditions. There's lots more to this than a simple black and white picture.
The current law says hospitals must provide service at the emergency room, even if you have no money. I think that works just fine. Yes the corporation that owns the hospital will try to collect the money from the patient, but they can't collect what poor people don't have, so eventually it comes out of the corporation's (or CEO's) own pocket.
You really have your own personal reality distortion field.
If patient A can't pay the tab, and no one else does, then patient A's tab gets added to the costs to run the hospital which then raises the costs of all services to cover it. This is one of the major reasons a bed in a hospital now costs almost $2K per day and other services cost far more than they should. Where did you think the money came from?
It's a vicious cycle where costs go up, causing health insurance to go up, causing more people to not be able to afford health insurance, which goes back to causing costs to go up. We've seen this ongoing for a while now and it's nearing the unsustainable breaking point for the whole system.
Change must happen. Since I seriously doubt that refusing to help the injured will ever fly, we're left with alternative 2.
As far as Berkeley goes, in this case I'd say they're out of their minds. Gattaca seems a little closer everyday, hence the reason it's one of my favorite science fiction flicks in a long time.
As for the bill, call it what it is - you're taxed regardless. It's not a fine. They just choose to give you a write-off for $950 if you have health insurance coverage.
I'm actually mixed on this. On the one hand, I think they shouldn't be allowed to force insurance on you. On the other, the current system is a complete and utter travesty. I really only see 2 choices, either hospitals refuse to help patients with no insurance or payment/financing up front (pretty picture with you bleeding out and having lost your insurance card in whatever caused you to come into that state) or all get covered, meaning all have to pay.
Please let me know which one you pick.
What we've got with that bill ISN'T reform. Reform is changing it so that the pricing can come back down out of the clouds. (Wanna know how much Medicare pays, typically, on things? 20% of the billed. Wanna know how much the regular insurance pays for things? ~30% of the billed amount. Want to do REAL reform? FIX THAT FIRST.)
Now this is the real crux of the problem. You could fix a lot of things by stipulating that doctors/hospitals cannot differentiate their billing by more than 5-10% for a particular procedure/visit/whatever.
Why do I say this? Because you are way way off on your numbers, and not even correct in the slant.
Medicare sets a value x for an item, then the charging entity says well, it costs really x * 1.2, so to get the extra 20%, I have to charge the client (x * 1.2 - x) / 0.2 to get the remaining dollars. (So to get $120 for a $100 approved charge, I now make my service cost $200 even though it should only cost $120.)
Once this nonsense started, prices amazingly started going up as the medicare prices also seem to be the base price for all transactions, with varying "discounts" applied depending upon your insurance, your affiliation, or whether you pay cash.
well, if you can self-insure, then you'll never pay the "fine", will you? IIRC, the "fine" only applies to those that opt out during their "healthy years" and then want back in later when they believe it makes sense for them.
Then you don't know any Fox News fans.
Nope. Despite the propaganda put out by certain groups that do think in lock-step, liberals are fairly... liberal in their thinking. Liberals don't tend to hold the view that things are perfect just the way they are.
For an example of this - look at Congress. Dems hold/held a supermajority (60) but appear to have anything but certainty in trying to pass their legislation. The previous 17 years of the other majority had no such qualms and passed many things by party vote.
You weren't affected by the 42 day timer bug? Or the 20/32 bit page counter pointer bug that wasn't fixed until SP1?
Not that I know of, and after some googling around I can't even find anything resembling the bugs you're talking about. Can you link me to a KB article ?
Wish I could, the best I could find was a snippet from a PCWorld article about this. Then again, nothing like the web existed back in those days....
The "fragmentation problem" in NTFS is grossly overstated for all but corner cases. ...could never detect any meaningful difference in performance between drives purportedly having 50% or more fragmentation, and drives having less than 10% fragmentation.
You and I could not be more diametrically opposed on these topics. First off, OS/2 2.1 onward was never unstable for me and ran on three different architecture/CPUs that I used, flawlessly and reliably, unless I pushed it by running the win32 subsystem.
Second, only with massive tweaking and running only specific software could I ever get a month out of NT 4.0. If I deviated, it would fail faster. Before SP1, you were guaranteed to BSOD in 42 days or whenever your page counter overflowed 20 bits and tried to reference a page above the 20 bits or in the overflow range. The memory there was corrupted.
BTW, MS's recommendation was weekly reboots, circa 97/98.
Where is this recommendation ?
Well, a quick google search indicates that there is no real documentation left on the web before SP4 regarding NT 4.0 if you're looking for specifics such as bug fixes etc. I'm pretty sure I still have an NT 4.0 SP1 disk somewhere around here, but it'll be at the bottom of a box if it hasn't been thrown out already. Otherwise I'd link it for you. NT 4.0 was a massive pile of crap when it came out. SP1 fixed a ton of major issues. SP2 added features and broke everything again. SP3 fixed the breakage. It was the source of the "only apply and run odd service packs" mantra that was around for years. Since there's no easily or even not so easily found data for anything prior to SP6, feel free to either accept these statements or not. It really doesn't matter for something that is more than 10 years in the past. However, a brief brainstorm shows that the memory and stability problems were not rare.
Server 2008R2 is NT 6.1. Server 2003 R2 was a relatively minor update, most of its "improvements" basically just a collection of userspace tools.
Really? So there would be no core changes? Perhaps an almost usable Server Core installation, for starters? And I suppose IIS 7.5 and .NET 3.51 are also minor changes? And we won't get into the innards where all the token manipulation routines have been greatly restricted. I don't recall when they created the 4 base security tokens, maybe they showed up in 2008. They certainly took effect in 2008 R2.
No fragmentation need occur. Many filesystems are much smarter about their writing algorithms than NTFS, for example, which is one of the worst.
most file systems already use a 4k sector.
Maybe the ones you do. I'd prefer to use a settable one to match what I'm working with. Code: smaller. Video/Audio? Bigger.
You lose more space than what you're suggesting just in the conversion from "vendor measurement" to "OS measurement" of space on the disk.
That's the funniest thing I've read in a long long time. I wish I hadn't posted so I could mod you +10 Funny.
The only real right creators have is to share or not share their idea/creation.
Copyright grants a "limited" time period of distribution control. Right of First Sale takes over after the initial sale. Once a tangible item is sold, it can be resold, passed around, destroyed, or even converted into something else and sold. People can talk about said creation. They can parody it. They can display it with some restrictions dependent upon what, exactly, the creation is under current copyright law.
So these rights you think creators have are much more limited than you appear to state.
What I can't do as a consumer, is buy the item, copy it, and distribute the copies. Note that the only thing I cannot legally do is distribute the copies. At least until that unnecessary travesty known as the DMCA appeared.
Because 512 byte sectors allow for less empty space waste than anything larger.
Imagine wasting 4095 vs 511 bytes for every file on your system (worst case scenario)
Linux and OS/2 both provided far more functionality while requiring fewer resources. Solaris was a different story.
Please. OS/2 was (relatively) unstable, barely supported and not even multiuser, though it did have a nice GUI. Linux was a PITA to setup, use and maintain, and its cutting edge GUI of the time was fvwm95. I switched FROM OS/2 to NT4 in the beta cycle (early 1996) precisely because it was so much better than OS/2 even then.
And your veracity suffers even more. NT 4 was more stable in the beta cycle? Really? You weren't affected by the 42 day timer bug? Or the 20/32 bit page counter pointer bug that wasn't fixed until SP1? Did you even run either of these systems? How about the ever present guaranteed fragmentation problem that MS refused to acknowledge with NTFS until XP?
While Linux did have a painful GUI at the time, it just ran. OS/2 likewise ran and ran - I had a system at work that was used heavily in the processing of large files (at the time files up to 500MB), ran FTP, Gopher, SMTP (yep - back in those days we ran local mail servers if you didn't want to login to the mainframe for mail) etc, and this machine stayed up 6 months at a time. Better yet, when OS/2 finally got a defragger because of all the NT fanboys clamoring that it was a toy os because it didn't even have a defragmentation utility, it turned out that after 4 years of continuous operation with hundreds of thousands of file writes and deletes my system's fragmentation level was .... <4%.
Meanwhile, NT 4.0 on a second system had to be rebooted weekly, and required defragmentation weekly and was used only for the file modeling pieces.
Later on, NT 4.0 became rather solid as far as uptime went, and could be rebooted monthly under the loads we put them under. BTW, MS's recommendation was weekly reboots, circa 97/98.
The original XP release is quite responsive and functional on a P2 class system with 128MB of RAM. 256 and it's flying.
Then we have different definitions of flying.
The short story is that thanks to DLL code injection, you can execute arbitrary code at SYSTEM privs and even the AV won't find it. DLL code injection was actually the one way that a third party can achieve true privilege escalation in Server 2008 R2, as all token manipulation APIs are now "broken".
Oh wow. A local-execution-only privilege escalation bug in third party software. Now there's a fundamental design flaw if ever I've seen one .</SARCASM>
You're not getting the picture. Due to NT's kernel architecture, basically any arbitrary code can be forced to be run by SYSTEM from any process and even AV can't stop it. All your sarcasm can't change the fact that this is a major security hole.
It may be distributed with, but that doesn't make it "part of" Vista. That's like saying iTunes is part of OSX, when it's clearly it's own product.
Actually, no, it's like saying Cocoa is part of OS X, which is pretty much exactly what .NET is to Windows.
I'd argue that it's more like Java being listed as part of the OS. After all, it's an installable component, doesn't come installed by default (at least not on Server 2008 R2), and is not required for operation.
Let me fix that for you and put it in proper perspective regarding major releases as we know them of the core OS:
You left out Windows 2003/XP64/NT 5.2. That's at least as significant a release as XP or Windows 7, and quite arguably more so since it became the base from which Vista was built after the development "reset" in 2004.
I did that on purpose. Almost no one used XP64 which actually was released across 2 years with Server 2003 being released in between. The interesting part is that the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of 2003 were released a year apart. There was also the Server 2003 R2 release which I'm not sure what the status is compared to Server 2008 R2 which is really a new release with a different core than 2008 and requires a license upgrade.
And TBBA (Truth by Blatant Assertion) destroys any credibility you might have. These were Gateway 486DX2-66 EISA systems loaded with 64MB of RAM and 2 1GB SCSI-I disks that came in for about 10K each, I bought 7 of them. You really need to get off your high horse.
I said unlikely, not impossible.
"It's not impossible that you're an ass."
Somehow that just doesn't sound like it's not an insult, does it?
32MB of RAM was quite a usable configuration for NT4, and at 2.5x the minimum (which was actually 12MB) that's to be expected.
Guess it depends on what your needs are. I'm sure some could have run a 12MB system and been happy.
I also ran a Pentium Pro 180 w 128MB RAM with NT 4 in multi-boot mode for 4 years, and it was still the biggest dog out of the OSes I ran on that one. If it hadn't been for work, I doubt I would have run it at all.
Compared to what, providing the same functionality ?
Linux and OS/2 both provided far more functionality while requiring fewer resources. Solaris was a different story.
and your backing data would be?
The millions of people who managed to use Windows XP without having to resort to hacking around disabling services.
Those would be the same millions that are currently part of botnet X, Y, or Z?
Seriously, XP to be semi functional and secure requires serious configuration. MS provided some of this OOB with SP2. If you removed a bunch of the extraneous crap XP runs by default, you can actually get down to a pretty slim system that's quite responsive and functional, albeit not in the "MS way". I got a VM down to 4or 5 processes and less than 50MB RAM. My standard install of XP with SP3 runs about 12 processes and under 70MB RAM IIRC. It's been a while since I loaded either one.
This change did break the security model completely since now a single thread ran all code through a single set of DLLs that was shared by all processes, and hence code here has full privileges.
Can you elaborate on this ?
I did, above, where I stated but did not link to the AV bypass story posted here just a few days ago. The short story is that thanks to DLL code injection, you can execute arbitrary code at SYSTEM privs and even the AV won't find it. DLL code injection was actually the one way that a third party can achieve true privilege escalation in Server 2008 R2, as all token manipulation APIs are now "broken".
There are also other problems with this design. Does opening a 10MB email in Outlook over a slow connection essentially stop all other user interaction with other Office apps until it's completed the task? (I don't know - I don't run MS apps if I can avoid it these days)
No, and I don't recall it ever doing so.
Extremely common issue from NT 4 all the way through XP SP 3. Very noticeable when opening a 10MB attachment through a VPN link that's been choked down to 56Kbps. Once clicked, no Office app will respond in and of those systems. I have not tried this in Vista or Win 7.
And .NET is not part of Vista.
Vista is the first version of Windows to be distributed with .NET.
It may be distributed with, but that doesn't make it "part of" Vista. That's like saying iTunes is part of OSX, when it's clearly it's own product.
It was roughly 2.7 years old when Win 7 replaced it. So yes, older than 2 years, but not 3 when they shoved its still warm carcass out the back door. ...
Average time between releases is ~20 months, though more importantly, the time between subsequent minor releases after a major one, tends to be <2 years. If anything, at 2.5 years after Vista, Windows 7 was somewhat behind schedule.
Let me fix that for you and put i
Having run NT 4 in beta onward it used about the same resources to run well as 2K or XP. I can say that NT 4.0 running on a 486DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM was barely serviceable.
Sorry, but utter rubbish like this destroys your credibility. Ignoring for a minute how unlikely it would be to find a 486 with 64MB of RAM
And TBBA (Truth by Blatant Assertion) destroys any credibility you might have. These were Gateway 486DX2-66 EISA systems loaded with 64MB of RAM and 2 1GB SCSI-I disks that came in for about 10K each, I bought 7 of them. You really need to get off your high horse.
NT4 was quite usable - and I spent over a year using it - on a Pentium ~75Mhz with 32MB. To say nothing of the 486DX2/66 being a 4-year old, 2 generation old CPU at NT4's release - you wouldn't expect blistering performance out of it in the first place.
I spent about 3 weeks using it on the 486. A 486-33 was the minimum, pentium was recommended. Likewise, 16MB RAM was the minimum, 32MB RAM recommended, 64MB was the minimum usable amount for anything.
I also ran a Pentium Pro 180 w 128MB RAM with NT 4 in multi-boot mode for 4 years, and it was still the biggest dog out of the OSes I ran on that one. If it hadn't been for work, I doubt I would have run it at all.
I should mention that XP out of the box is dog slow. Removing services is required both for performance and some semblance of security.
More rubbish.
and your backing data would be?
Or, I could just answer your entire post with "more rubbish". You seem to think it works for you.
This is flat-out false. Moving GDI into kernel space - a change which, incidentally, happened with NT 3.51 to 4.0, not 3.1 to 3.5 - didn't "essentially toss out all separation of the kernel/user space".
You are correct. It was NT 4 that broke the security model entirely. It was started in 3.5, because 3.1 was virtually unusable. But the full out breakage did not occur until 4.0.
This change did break the security model completely since now a single thread ran all code through a single set of DLLs that was shared by all processes, and hence code here has full privileges. There are also other problems with this design. Does opening a 10MB email in Outlook over a slow connection essentially stop all other user interaction with other Office apps until it's completed the task? (I don't know - I don't run MS apps if I can avoid it these days)
WIn 2K added the new modular driver framework, among other things. What exactly did Vista add? (It certainly wasn't the promised rewrite, but it did add the TPM and DRM pieces. Hooray!)
Vista added much more than any revision before it.
As I recall, NT 4.0 added a completely new display system and windows manager, new driver model, new display arhcitecture, new audio stack, new printing stack, and significant overhauls to memory, scheduling and IO. In many way ways far greater compared to the previous systems than Vista to XP.
And .NET is not part of Vista.
Vista was as close to a "rewrite" as NT is likely to get (and probably need) for another 15 years.
Considering the recent validation of the DLL injection problem, I'd say NT required a rewrite about the time it compiled the first time. It's security model is upside down and fundamentally flawed. It cannot be fixed. It's a completely backwards system that requires a highest privs model compared to every other system out there that works off of a lowest privs model. Yes, I'm aware of MS's PR campaign on the 2008 R2 release, but I can assure you it's purely marketing spin and has no basis in reality.
Vista is 3 years old, as of January 2010. Further, if you look back at the history of Windows NT releases, if anythin
They were (one of) the pioneers of graphical interfaces in the 80s, and it took until Windows 95 for Windows to come anywhere near Mac OS (but it was still awful).
Apple still forces you to resize windows from the lower-right corner....In terms of productivity, their interfaces are years behind. They took NeXTStep's dock and ruined its defaults for prettiness instead of muscle memory, for example. And you have to move the mouse farther (and on a large display, actually refocus your eyes) to use the single menu bar. And until OSX, Apple didn't even have minimize/maximize, instead using the same multifinder approach they've been using (annoyingly) for years.
I will agree that this one GUI issue is somewhat annoying. I generally can live with it though, since I generally spend very little time resizing my windows, especially given Spaces. Imagine my surprise and annoyance when the Command Prompt in Vista exhibits the same limitations.
As for the Dock, I rarely use it. I'm a QuickSilver user which pretty much negates the need for the dock for anything but notifications in combination with CMD-Tab and CMD-`. I don't see people's attraction to the dock when with usually 5 keystrokes or less I have any app I want running and never had to leave the keyboard. That includes the hot key sequence for bringing up QS and typing the char(s) needed to get to the app I want launched and the return, which may also be optional.
Honestly, RAID? The OP seems like someone that wants large amounts of archival storage that's ready at hand. This sounds like more a case for large green HDs in a box somewhere. NAS would be fine, or something like it or even just an OS that has "shares" on his network.
Just remember: RAID is for high availability, it is not a backup solution. For that he'll need separate drives that do occasional copies and then go offline/offsite for safe storage. This is more procedural than technical.
FYI: I use just such a system for the 6TB I have on hand currently. Raw video footage eats space. At $110 for a 2TB drive, it's relatively easy to store it offsite now until I no longer need it.
IIRC, they lampooned it for its cartoonish look, and the fact that it was slower than Win98 and Win 2K, depending on where you were coming from.
Yes. Just like Vista.
Not really. While Vista was bad enough to require rebranding and kept everyone on the 10 year old XP, it was never lampooned for being a clown interface. Needled for being slow, bloated, and less capable, yes.
Win XP had a slower uptake than desired, but took off after 2 years as games designed for XP started coming out in large numbers. Vista will die an ignoble death as a footnote in MS's history.
Win 2K was probably the "best" of the NT versions, solid and trim compared to all of its predecessors and descendants.
Compared to NT4, Windows 2000 was "bloated" and slow - the former needing a 33Mhz 486 with 16Mb RAM and the latter a 133Mhz+ Pentium (~8x more) with 64MB RAM (4x more).
Having run NT 4 in beta onward it used about the same resources to run well as 2K or XP. I can say that NT 4.0 running on a 486DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM was barely serviceable. I should mention that XP out of the box is dog slow. Removing services is required both for performance and some semblance of security.
Windows 7 is as much "Vista SP2" as Windows XP was "Windows 2000 SP1". Certainly the changes weren't as large as Vista (probably the single biggest update to NT since its release), but definitely more than just a service pack.
Actually - the biggest update to NT was the 3.1->3.5 release, where biggest change was that the GDI layer was inserted and essentially all separation of the kernel/user space was tossed out the door for the sake of a semi usable UI. WIn 2K added the new modular driver framework, among other things. What exactly did Vista add? (It certainly wasn't the promised rewrite, but it did add the TPM and DRM pieces. Hooray!)
But, I'll agree that Win XP was Win 2K SP 2 plus a lunatic GUI. Note that Win 2K had a total of 4 SPs plus a final rollup SP post SP4. It also had the capability to run all DX iterations that came out up to DX9, which could be hacked as MS tried to kill off Win 2K by denying it the latest DX versions, much like DX 10 and XP.
Windows 7 has some fixes that will never show up in VIsta, primarily to separate the 2 products because Vista is viewed so negatively. Note that Vista is only 2 years old, and already is being shoved out the door.
So yes, there are similarities, but there are also significant differences.