>> and an additional one from Vista for no good reason whatsoever informing you that a program is running another program
Ok, let's put the sarcasm aside. Why does my vista (which has UAC turned on) not giving me this then? Sure, I get the [non-firefox] UAC popup when I run a setup file that is intentionally written so as to ask admin permissions when being run, so as to install properly. Is that the popup you're talking about? Or are you saying your computer exhibits some other kind of behavior?
>> when I've stated explicitly I'm talking about the driver model 1. The driver model in vista is similar in all but graphics to XP. XP non-3D graphics drivers can also be made to work in vista.
2. So the "vast majority" of the business apps you installed on vista, which don't work, don't work because of the drivers?
>> At one of the companies I admin for, their main database app (made by Exact software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) won't run on Vista). Hardly "the vast majority of business software".
>> Every app that installs with an older version of InstallShield (That is a lot of apps) fails to install Try right-clicking the setup file and selecting "Run-as administrator" on any old installer that doesn't support specifically requesting admin rights from windows like new ones do. That sorted it out for all the older setups that I've run on mine that did not install properly if you just ran them. If the Installshield/WISE/MSI is deliberately scripted to not work on absolutely anything except XP, you can also try running it in XP SP2 compatibility mode. Of course, if your software vendor dictates (via scripting a halt to setup on any other OS) the use of XP and nothing but, that's an issue between you and him and hardly a vista issue (if that's a vista issue, then the only "solution" microsoft can put to it is to stop making new OS's that have names other than "Windows XP V. 5 build 2600" so old programs who are scripted to hinge on that stay "compatible". It's hardly a driver issue as well.
Note I wasn't arguing the fact that there are compatibility issues, just that throwing FUD at either the driver model or the security model is dumb.
>> Everybody is having these same problems if they have non-Microsoft business apps. You seem to be letting lots of blogtalk astroturf, much of which is people running home-setups and introduced to/A/ security model of any kind for the first time in their life, dictate a good portion of your professional opinion. That's plain silly. So you've got some compatibility issues with a couple of apps. Woohoo-fucking-hoo.
>> Vista pops up a lot of annoying confirmation dialogs, even when it doesn't need to elevate privileges Why, then, do you think, DOES your vista pop up said dialogs? Just to piss you off? What is the trigger that causes them to pop up? You're an admin. You should be able to tell. If you can't, you may have malware on your machines. Could that trigger somehow involve you requesting to do some kind of action on the machine that you cannot have of the users of that machine doing? Could your action requesting to go somewhere it shouldn't?
How are UAC restrictions (violating which gives UAC popups) different from a stock-standard NT domain deployment, in as far as a business app that needs to write to protected directories is concerned?
You're revoking everything I say, but you're placing zero substance behind your claims.
There's nothing wrong with my logic. It underlies how I manage UNIX systems, how I'd manage NT systems and how I've seen NT systems managed in places I've worked, and it underlies Vista's UAC.
Business applications are the LAST to get broken by a security model like this installed on them, not the first as you imply.
They now have details (IP activated from, registration details etc) of all the 5-yuan DVD-making pirates in china! All they have to do is sue all 244 and pay off some false positives!
On a similar note, we have that here in the rest of the world too. It's called "Vista Paid-For" (sorry, Vista Business), and "Vista Pirated" (ahem, excuse me, Ultimate).
I was once told that diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to go to hell and make him look forward to the trip. Well, Vista Ultimate is the marketing person's ability to make someone plaster a "This copy is pirated" (read: "Windows Vista Ultimate") on one's screen so everyone who has a look at his machine can immediately be made aware it is pirated (or, in some very few cases, a moron who shits bricks of money and can't count, but that's a minority). Then they can just sue anyone who uses it, since that is what "Ultimate" realy means.
I also got the impression that sane people compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges.
If you have 400$ and give them to ATI, you get a 1950XTX. If you have 400$ and give them to nVIDIA you get an 8800, possibly the lower-RAM (320MB) version.
You're much better off with the 8800, it tears the ATI card a new one.
Now if you have 200$ to spend, that's a whole different ballpark there. Giving them to nVidia will net you something that is, in most benchmarks, ALMOST on-par with the 400$ ATI card. *AND* is DX10, for whenever DX10 games come along, months, maybe a year from now. I won't even mention ATI's 200$ card.
This is all, however, very temporary. We're comparing an 8th-gen (geforce-count) nVidia card to a 7th-get ATI one. ATI has an 8th-get card that's going to be announced very-very-soon(tm). THEN we'll perhaps be able to tell which of them better deserves our coin.
On a sidenote, low-end cards are typically announced last. I suspect the 8500 will give performance on-par with 7th-gen midrange cards (read: Still Smokin fast in most available games by most people's standards, even if they have to tone down an eyecandy knob or two). And it's sitting smack at the bottom of the pile, at 90$.
If, say, ATI releases their 600$ 8800-equivalent bunker-buster next week, and takes another 4 months to chug out it's low-end, nVidia is going to be doing a milk-run (as it's been doing since day 1 of the 8X00 card), and again you're best off getting an 8500 for a while.
You can always stick it back out on ebay later, lose (or gain) a whopping 15$ in the deal, and buy ATI's thing if the R600 humanely-priced lines turn out to be so much better. I've just sold off my 8800 (bought it just to complete Gothic III, have no intention on letting it depreciate in price while it's in my computer), and am seriously thinking of getting me one of those 90$ 8500GT's.
You're wrong. Two popups. One from firefox, one from Windows.
So you openly admit your that firefox giving you a popup because you're running an exe file is the reason you hate vista.
Yep, that's definitely vista's fault.
I just did a little experiment. I downloaded two files using firefox. one is the firefox setup, the other one is notepad.exe
UAC asked me for admin access for the first (because it is a setup file), it did not ask me for the second.
Assuming you don't think vista's crap because firefox gives you exe-file related popups, then you think vista's crap because a setup.exe file you downloaded requires root access, i.e. you still do not understand why UAC is a good thing.
you're a moron.
>> Clearly you can read minds and know exactly which apps I run... Not at all. I think I've formulated a very solid basis for why you are talking shit. Here's a repeat: Many, possibly most businesses have NT domains and credential sets set up. They do not allow users to write to c:\program files etc. "business applications" are primarily targeted for such environments. UAC is exactly that environment. If it breaks a business app, running said business app under an NT domain would also break it.
>> The fact of the matter is that applications which install anything that can be considered a driver fail to install. More idiocy?
Mmm. I wonder what this daemontools icon is doing in my system tray. It must have "failed to install".
Dude, you're full of it. I realize some apps have some quirks with vista, but being a driver-installing app does not make you immediately incompatible with it. Vista is an upgraded XP. It accepts XP drivers, which work just fine with it in all but some rare cases.
I find it not at all surprising you have not yet named a single application, in spite of throwing big words like "vast majority of business applications", "application that installs anything that can be considered a driver" and so forth. Implying "the vast majority won't run on vista" is pure bull, as is most of the rest of the FUD that's coming out of your mouth. You're an idiot with an ego, and right now you're more busy feeding that ego than you are with checking why you seem to have all the facts wrong.
Maybe it makes you more poopular with your fudding fanboy microsoft-bashing windows-ultimate-using friends, I don't know. And at least I rely on the facts (real ones, not made-up or overheard ones) rather than dirty language and blind hate towards MS (.. whose OS I'm using..) to substantiate my claims.
Another idiot who's repeating fanboy talk who has no idea what he's talking about (but thinks he does).
>> You still see hundreds of them. No, I don't. And I have several vista machines I work on. I only see them on rare occasions, exactly the same occasions my gentoo/KDE box at work asks me for a root password, or one of the servers I manage requires me to sudo.
>> Any time an application runs another application. No popups, EXCEPT in the special case of Internet Explorer's sandbox mechanism, which is a characteristic of the BROWSER APPLICATION, not the OS, and not to be confused with UAC. Try firefox (which still works under UAC), then come back and tell me I was right. Alternatively, reiterate your position from anti-vista to anti-IE7 against winging about IE7 sucks compared to the IE6 you had under XP, and about the inability to run IE6. I'd be (almost) right there with you, only I think both IE6 and IE7 are steaming shitpiles and use firefox.
UAC is not an application, and is not a characteristic of any particular application (be in IE7 or any other).
>> Like when you open a document from a browser... Document opens. no popups. You're still a clueless idiot who has no idea what he's talking about. Why the bloody fuck would the OS request admin creds to open a document using some application?
Oh, you want to open a document THAT IS NOT ACCESSIBLE TO YOUR USER, or INSTALL EXTRA CODE to handle that type of document. Well, there are two options to that. Either, THERE IS A DAMN GOOD REASON your user (also known to be read: malware that runs under your user's permissions) does not have access to it, Solution: a. BE GRATEFUL, UAC is doing its job b. merrily give it your admin creds (press accept, enter password, whatever) or You are NOT WORKING CORRECTLY (i.e. outside the sections of your filesystem that are meant for routine work). Years of working in a completely-open-access filesystem got many people (and, what's worse, application developers) to develop very wrong habits. Like, say, saving to c:\program files\ during routine work.
Solution: First, realize this is NOT some microsoft quirk. This is a core methodology of every serious OS in the world . It's been in microsoft for years (and thus comes as no surprise to anyone), with UAC it is just made mandatory. If you'd have been working with any business software as you imply you do, you'd have known that most business software has been FORCED TO WORK in just such an environment by most NT DOMAIN corporate setups that have policies disallowing user modifications to places such as c:\windows, c:\ or c:\program files on most corporate machines (where your business apps need to be run and allow users to get work done)
Welcome the new work model. Every single file you need to write to should live under your user's profile. Even if some apps like to plug these in program files, reposition them (or, and I would not do this except in VERY rare situations, change the permissions on the file to allow said user to perform changes to it, thus selectively disabling the benefit of UAC *just for that file* rather than the entire system. Better yet, DO NOT DO THIS). Users should NOT be affecting any global behavior by doing anything in these places. Show me *one* UNIX system where users get to write to/usr.
In the rare cases where you DO need to write there, cope with providing credentials and figure out ways to make your apps avoid going there to store stuff.
>> Maybe this doesn't happen if you use *all* MS software of the latest versions.. Damn, you are clueless. UAC has NOTHING to do with MS software. You're blaming MS instead of what looks from here to be your amateur working habits. Contrary to your perception, MS software HAS NO BACK DOOR. It falls in line with all the rest of the software you run, and must adhere by the same access restrictions. Try modifying c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with MSWORD, w
I'm assuming your sysadmin was not using a Release Candidate version of vista, which popped up sudo popups left and right.
Admittedly, the first contact many techs have with Vista starts with installing a new system. And their bucketload of apps. All of which require, woe and behold, superuser rights to initially install. Since this is REALLY surprising, let's act as if we're surprised.
This has, of course, zero impact on how many popups you will encounter AFTER everything is installed and in place.
Suggestion to your seasoned redhat admin: While installing a new system, disable UAC to make your life easier. Alternatively, enable the admin account and use it to log in. When you install most linux distros (a process that involves, among other things, installing your favourite apps too), you do so logged in as root, and you can do exactly the same on windows, after which you can log on properly as a user in a UAC'd environment and live life wearing a seatbelt.
Personally, I was lazy and just hit ACCEPT as many times as required during the app installs, and find working correctly very rarely pop stuff up in my face.
(UNinformed, I daresay) People here keep saying things along the lines of "The irony is that I'm not even sure why home users would move"
One acronym, three letters.
U.A.C.
Corps (already serious about their desktop security, using access-regulated policies and usually domains) gain almost nothing from the new User Access Control model in Vista. It's all for the home user who doesn't have a sysadmin to disallow him to touch anything in C:\WINDOWS and C:\PROGRAM FILES. The underlying ability to have user access policies on the computer has been there since NT4, effectively since forever.
It's the bolting it into a homeuser-centric UI and turning it into what is, for all intents and purposes, "sudo", integrated into every nook and cranny that requires straying into privileged space that's new.
For an/informed/ (not neccesarily geek, could be joe-average, just informed) home-user, this is a HUGE advantage. Yes, it has a learning curve, yes, he will need to get a simple explanation of what the greyout means and to "Just Say NO" when he's not sure (or ALWAYS SAY NO, if he's a dumbass, and let his neighbourhood tech do the adminning), and it will save him mountains of time, money and pain paying said tech even more to clean out the malware from his computer every 3 months. For all of you who are overfed with FUD, or haven't bothered looking at anything since you've looked an the unfinished (RC) product: NO, YOU DO NOT NEED TO HANDLE ANNOYING POPUPS WHEN BROWSING ALL THE TIME. I keep getting that a lot, and it just doesn't happen anywhere except in people's anti-MS imaginations. You need to handle annoying popups when you go to places you shouldn't be. Routine tasks VERY RARELY involve doing that (and if you're one of the elite few who do need open access to the system, just disable UAC altogether, it's got a big ON/OFF switch).
We've all been beating M$ with a stick for 20 years about the inherent lack of security of all OS's up to XP where the user effectively works as root. IMHO, we were RIGHT. Well, they finally fixed it. I am NOT saying windows and/or UAC is unhackable or unexploitable or mature or some such. IT IS NONE OF THESE. However, they finally introduced a seatbelt, and when lining it up against pre-vista seatbeltless windows where the user belongs to Administrators - just about 99.99999% of the world's home installbase - (in an otherwise seatbelt-equipped world - macos, linux, etc), that's a fundamentally major change WHICH IS A GOOD REASON TO NOT RESIST CHANGING OVER (if, say, you get a new computer, or are reinstalling an old one anyway and don't mind forking out some coin - say, 100$, for some RAM if you're sub-1GB).
UAC is a major homeuser-targeted change that I think non-fanboy professionals should embrace. It'll annoy people at first (seatbelts annoyed people at first too), until they get into the habit of using the system the way it's meant (minimal straying outside userspace), at which point annoyance factor becomes minimal and people accept the extra hassle, because it's a hell of a lot better than what they had before.
In other news, some UI improvements are more than welcome, and as a poweruser, I put value on intuitive UI that makes my work more efficient. Enter Katapult-on-steroids - a SEARCH integrated into the start menu that searches the start menu and the program files. Sidebar is also a welcome UI improvement, as is a revised resource-monitor that breaks down diskIO etc. by process.
In yet other news, compatibility suffers. My vista lappie can't connect to the office Wifi network, something between its 802.11x and the radius goes bust. Same config exactly on XP works like charm.
Still, I run a LOT of stuff on it, including a cygwin environment, retro DOS games, productivity software etc, and this would be the only compatibility issue I've encountered. Had I not, I'd be sitting here saying compatibility at all.
Bottom line: Security-wise, big step up. Maturity-wise, probbably still crap, bu
1. Game balance: PLEASE, oh PRETTY PLEASE, make the game (monsters, items) not level up with the game.
I realize it's a seriously cheaper solution than paying a group of people play the game many times to find the fine line between laughably easy (and thus not fun) and impossibly hard (frustrating and thus not fun), with properly controlling player's access to powerful items and monsters in an open-ended world. It's the ultimate challenge for someone who makes an RPG. Your choice in Oblivion did not sidestep the issue. It FAILED the issue. The game may have been fun to people who play it with a side-quest tick-list, not really caring what comes between tick and tick, but your core crowd, both oblivion-side and fallout-side, will be the people who diligently explore every nook and cranny of the virtual world, expecting to be rewarded by some meaningful (read: NOT scaled and otherwise easily-attainable) item that was scaled to their level anyway and could have thus been found in any easily-accessible container. You have done this in some places in Oblivion, you need to do it MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE. I've reached numerous hard location, and found nothing but items my level would have gotten out of any other, usually easier to come across, chest.
2. Random Treasure - NOT IN HARD-TO-REACH locations. Well-protected or Hard-to-get-to chests, whether in dungeons, some hard-to-find sunken ship, some well-locked-up merchant's house etc should NOT EVER be random. They should have unique and helpful items, to reward diligence in getting to the hard-to-reach location.
3. Your game system, XP (as in experience points, not the OS) and SPECIAL. XP is a WONDERFUL concept. It is the utterly best coin by which you can reward a player. Better than gold, better than items. There is NEVER enough XP (and if there is, bump your level cap). XP should buy levels, and levels should buy abilities that COMPLEMENT those given by items, not require you to displace old items like/additional/ items the player gets given require him to do.
Oblivion had no XP system. (as a side-note, XP and levels were a bit on the uninfluential side, considering you didn't get any edge over anything by leveling up, if anything, even after all the new items that magically appeared around the world, you could still barely keep up with the monsters). It had a leveling system that screamed macroing. If you'd stand in one place and jump 5000 times, you got more bonuses when you leveled up. It was geared towards semi-exploitation, i.e. do something the game allows to get more powerful, but spend a lot of boring game time doing it. So you choose between either boring yourself to death, or throwing powergaming out the window. BAD choice to impose on your clients. powergaming SHOULD NOT be made boring.
Further, if you accidentally level up (by practicing your chosen skills - this might be by running enough for example) before you practiced the skills that would give you the correct attribute bonuses, you MISS OUT on the bonuses. To anyone who is informed of his char sheet and future development plans, Leveling in Oblivion is an annoying minefield to be meticulously planned from day 1 and very carefully treaded throughout the game, instead of the satisfying gameplay perk it should be. I realize you can just play the game and ignore leveling bonuses, but that's no better than playing any RPG without proper/informed/ consideration to the types of bonuses given by leveling, just picking stuff at random like someone who doesn't understand all those long technical words. It's not fun to those of us who ARE trying to achieve their best using your game mechanics (i.e. attempt to obtain the best "numbers" that the game mechanics allow us to). It's our way to try and get ahead, win. Your system encourages game mediocrity, and throws us to hell.
Enter SPECIAL, fallout's levelup/skill system. Like Oblivion, albeit in a very different way, it is classless (as compared to, say, classic AD&D). But it isn't jus
Sure, you can have some small evolutionary deviation in primitive organisms such as bacteria, allowing them to survive maybe a bit more (such as the extremophile vent-dwellers that live in 90C), but you'd need some fundamentally different data-storage-&-access machinery and molecular-assembly machinery to facilitate something that resembles life, if you want to stray further outside that range.
maybe you (or a creative bacterium) can come up with a very small icebox inside a living cell - some way to prevent thermal (kinetic) energy from being transfered inside. And don't forget bacteria don't even have a cell nucleus to protect their beloved data store.
But hey, what do I know. I'm just an undergrad bio student.
>> RAM isn't like hard drive space... you can't just plug it into the USB port when you need more. I don't see why RAM is not upgradeable, or, more to the point, why you can't buy a machine with more. Your argument sounds something along the lines of a 1996 heretic blurbing about why XP using 250MB (when 98 needed just 32!) is absurd. Get over it.
>> Most machines sold in the past five years cannot take more than 4 GB under any circumstances Most machines sold in the NEXT five years will not NEED 4GB in their practical lifetime. Enthusiast gamer/server machines that WILL need more than 4GB already support >4GB. Common misconception you seem to be submitting to is that vista doubles RAM usage. It doesn't. It only doubles the RAM the OS needs. The amount of RAM Firefox, Openoffice, Office 200x and Photoshop use stays the same as it was under XP. Thus, to put things into perspective, if older systems were limited to, say, 2GB for argument's sake, 250 of which was XP's OS and 1750 of which would be app (never mind these systems are rarely seen with more than 1GB and most always have lots of room to expand even at the price of throwing away some 256MB sticks), vista would offer you a 700-OS/1300-App breakdown at best, or a 700/3300MB on a 4GB-capped system. Hardly a problem. You'd be hard-pressed to find that much app to fill those systems, and if you go that far (using Gothic III most likely), you're pro'lly better off with a new system anyway.
Besides, what's so painful about spending a few tens of dollars on a RAM stick? It's the price of a friggin pizza or two for heaven's sake.
Besides, I did the math. The power (electricity) older systems guzzle (compared to a well-chosen new system) costs more than the upgrade. If you're concerned about petty cash, buy a new low-power setup with a mountain of RAM.
That's taking what I've said out of context. I've mentioned maturity in the sense of a natural lifespan of any software product, as one of the ways (an incorrect way in this case) to gauge its security.
I did not imply they were selling a beta product. In fact, having used vista for a while (and I'm ANYTHING BUT ms-biased, I run gentoo at work, manage a debian shop and run linux and BSD on my home servers), It is VERY VERY VERY decently QA'd.
As for paying for it, it's your call if you want to pay it. Home Basic will give you what XP gave you and costs like XP. The big "downside" is that it doesn't have aero, and, like it or not, cool UI and eye-candy is something people WILL want to pay for, so long as you make it cool enough. If that wasn't the case, they'd still be making car insides like they did in the 1970s.
Vista Home Premium and Vista business (what I run) is what was formerly known as XP Professional.
Vista Ultimate is a totally new invention. They didn't like the idea that all the people who bought a stock laptop already had everything MS had to sell and couldn't be milked for more money, so they have a "slightly higher" version for those who just can't live without having the absolute-best, even if it's wildly overpriced for the added value it gives. In short: it's hyperbole (unless you can finger something in there that's worth the hefty price-tag). In any other case, don't touch it.
As for the price of the machine needed to run vista, as I've already stated elsewhere in this thread, ABSOLUTELY ANY new machine you buy will run it (and 95% of them will run aero without trouble), and older machines will run it to a point. I'm currently building a power-efficient no-moving-parts PC that will have a fanless via 1.2GHz CPU (think fast P3), onboard pissy graphics, 200$ 16GB CF (with some extensive OS tweaks to minimize writing to CF). And vista. Yes, I expect it to work (not sure about aero though). Read my user history, I gave a full tech description several days ago.
The whole "new computer"/"ubercomputer" thing is nothing but a bunch of clueless users repeating what they heard in an apple commercial and from their linux zealot friends whom they consider computer gurus.
Vista will happily run on any modern hardware from the last 5 years with 1+ Gig of RAM. And if you don't mind losing aero and having the interface look more or less like XP, it can run on an 1998-era 8MB ATI graphics card just like XP could.
You sound like someone who is very busy spreading FUD about a subject he does not care or couldn't be bothered to look into.
It "seems" to be secure? wtf?! OpenBSD "seems" to be secure too. An exploit was found a couple of weeks ago. So? Vista's been run and tested by many people by now. As I've originally said, it's most definitely *NOT* AIRTIGHT. Bugs will be found and fixed, likely more during initial exposure than in 3 years time, as has been the case in any OS you care to mention.
Nevertheless, I'd rather drive a new type of car with a "version 1.0" seatbelt (that may have imperfections found in it and corrected as they're found) than a seasoned and tested model that has NO seatbelts fitted. Security-wise, they're incomparable.
The first gut instinct people get, especially non-technical people, a VERY WRONG gut instinct, is to judge the OS's security based purely on its maturity and where it stands in terms of a well-known software metric (not neccesarily OS here) of bugs-found-per, say, -month (lots at the beginning of its life, then it decreases with time, nearing zero asymptotically).
This would have been correct to do comparing 95 to 98, or 2000 to XP. The problem with this line of thought is that you're comparing something WITHOUT a security model altogether, something VASTLY inferior even in spite of its maturity - XP - with something that has one in place, but is as of yet immature. Choosing between the two should be a no-brainer.
Larger organizations (that use MS products) have done this transition more than happily 10 years ago, when NT domains, user policies and credentials were invented. When given the choice between NT and 98, security dictated the use of NT.
And if you're a UNIX person, you're scratching your head and trying to figure out why it took a multi-billion company 20 years to figure out something the rest of the computer world had been taking for granted. Still, better late than never.
>> 1) XP installed is ~2GB HD space and Vista is ~11GB so its more than a service pack In an era of 150$ 400GB drives, where 300GB drives cost 10$ less? give me a break. See my remark re RAM above. Yes, it's got beefier reqs than its predecessor, which, as another poster here mentioned, was the case with its predecessor, and its predecessor before it, etc. Disk space, RAM, etc.
I couldn't give a flying fuck a bout 10 gigs on my drive. If you're tight about 10 gigs, you pro'lly shouldn't be installing vista on that machine anyway, much like you shouldn't be installing XP on a P1-166MHz with 64MB RAM and a 500MB hard drive.
>> 3) UAC is NOT palatable to power-users. Those damn stupid pop-ups every time you do anything at all are the most annoying thing I've ever seen. Its so annoying that I turned off UAC to be rid of it. I'm sure most people will turn off UAC as the first thing they do.
Spoken like a true script-kiddie that's used to working "as root" under the assumption he can drop anything he likes in any place in his filesystem whenever, and has no clue what user-permission-model security is for in the first place, but recons himself a poweruser.
If you do not understand why you need to confirm giving admin privileges to your machine every time you stray outside your userspace, you are not a poweruser. As ANYONE who works in any environment with a decent security model will tell you, be it an NT-domain environment, a linux desktop, big unix boxes, etc, when you stray outside your userspace, you need to provide admin credentials. Without such a model, any pissy user running any pissy app (or, more commonly, who is having some pissy app exploited for him) can obliterate the entire system. For a home-box, a user-supplid nod-of-the-head (what you call "popups") is enough to seriously limit what malware can do (without his explicit approval, which, given a neccesary learning curve, he will learn not to grant).
5) Using 700MB IS important as most PCs (especially laptops) still have 1GB of RAM or less. On a 512MB PC that means you're ALREADY paging to disk even before you do anything, which directly translates into really slow application performance.
Don't install XP on machines with 128MB of RAM. Don't install Vista on machines with 512MB of RAM. If you're buying a new machine with 512MB of RAM, you're an idiot. On a 1G machine, that leaves 300MB of app space. Vista does not inflate the amount of RAM apps use, and 300MB-400MB of RAM for apps is at the moment more than enough to run office apps. (I'm writing this from my wife's Thinkpad T42 lappie, running vista, with 1GB, with a shitload of other shit open, and everything runs smooth-as). If you need more, fucking buy more and quite yappin. It's friggin cheap.
Regarding your case in point: I'm (still) screaming "Vista IS shit" and my system has a core2 6800 extreme CPU, 2 watercooled 8800GTX GPU's in SLI, 2GB of 1111Mhz DDR2 and 2 150GB raptors in Raid 0. Hardly a budget PC.
You're a moron. Vista will run as fast as XP on a setup that's one fifth of what you mentioned (pro'lly in anything but RAM). Aero runs smooth on my X60's i945 pissy graphics (which couldn't run a 4-year-old 3D engine if its life depended on it). It runs smoother still on my wife's T42 mobile Radeon 9600 Pro. It ran fine on my old Radeon 9700 Pro. And, sit tight, it will run perfectly fine on an antique 1998-era 8MB PCI ATI card, without Aero (read: the windows will look like they did in Windows XP).
By bringing up that cliche about needing a friggin 10K$ enthusiast gamer PC to run vista, you plugged yourself neatly among the clueless idiot's lot.
I'm currently writing this from my wife's T42 laptop
The amount of unsubstantiated negative hype going around about vista is apalling.
Let's look at the facts:
1. For all intents and purposes it's a Windows XP + stuff. aka a glorified service pack. 2. Quite obviously it will displace XP in corporations, educational institutions and home with time. 3. Unless you're using domain logons, It is MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE SECURE than XP because UAC is on by default, palatable to power users (I've been working with it for several weeks now, it's ok) and teachable to non-tech users. Overall, it's worked out much better than you could have done on XP. It is not OpenBSD and shouldn't be compared to it, it is probably less secure than Gentoo with KDE. Nevertheless, compared with XP's work-as-root model, it's worlds apart. I'm not suggesting it's either bulletproof, bugless, unexploitable or mature. But A security model, ANY security model, is better than XP's *NO* security model. 4. Laugh at UI all you like, but a good UI is something everyone can use to get more done. Both joe averages and powerusers alike. Vista's UI serves as a welcome improvement over XP IMHO. I'm talking about useability improvements ala sidebar, "open containing folder" stuff etc, not eye-candy a-la aero which I frankly couldn't less. 5. It guzzles 700MB RAM on neutral right after loading. Who gives a flying fuck? My kde desktop at work eats 200MB. the number is *meaningless* unless it indicates, say, an excessive overpricing of the machine. is 200MB a lot? 10 years ago, we'd have all said it was. Does that make my gentoo/KDE desktop bloated crap today? no. On the same coin, when 1GB of RAM is next to free, 700MB is just another meaningless number. 1GB of DDR2 lappie ram costs 70US$ on ebay. Sure, if you have a P3, run XP. But if you run any form of hardware bought anywhere in the last 5 years, plug some RAM and you're good to go. 6. Microsoft will stop selling and supporting XP at some point anyway. So it's not like Vista will be some doomed stop-gap measure until something significantly better comes along, like Windows ME was. Vista is here to stay for the next 5 or so years until another "service pack" along the same lines appears. 7. If whatever DRM is built into the system prevents you from doing what you're used to do with a computer, use Linux.
Case in point:
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and have an old computer with XP you don't want to spend more money on, you're likely making the right call, but are an idiot for screaming out the shit bit. I have a 2005 Toyota echo and screaming how the 2007 model is shit because I don't need it (having the 2005 one) would make me the same kind of idiot.
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and you're using Linux/MacOS, you're either a clueless fanboy or someone who's tested both ends and can draw up pros and cons of each and stake a legitimate fact-based preference.
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and thinking you'd rather be getting XP with a new computer, you're a total clueless idiot. Especially if your spiel contains the word "security" in it.
Vista is a welcome improvement on XP. Give it some time to mature, give IT departments time to evaluate and learn to work it, it'll be ok.
Is it worth upgrading from XP? depends. Depends if you value a better security model (and eye candy). I've serviced many people with many malware computer problems who paid me lots of good money to fix said problems. Wild guess says a security model for them will pay for itself, from the money it costs them to periodically fix their shit. Locks tend to be cheaper than periodically re-outfitting a robbed house, and people tend to be able to do math when it's their money.
>> Driving monster cars affects other people in a significant kind of way, eating good food doesn't. Say what? I can't hear you...
Did you ever consider how much greenhouse gas the livestock we breed to feed ourselves generates? Do you think that steak you're eating comes from a happy magic place?
What about all the resources that the food industry takes to manufacture, transport, market, advertise, sell food etc? All for what, when we could all be happily drinking gray goop from the tap?
What about all the social aftershock of America's (and the rest of the world's) obesity epidemic stemming from "eating good"? you think that doesn't eventually affect each and every one of us?
No, I don't think all that should be removed. I suspect doing so with cars (or with other things that are regarded as "fun" in our culture in spite of being "bad" things - think legal drugs such as alcohol or nicotine, or, for that matter, guns in America) is impossible anywhere outside your fantasy lala-land.
You want to treat emissions? get your government to do what our does - pay people (read: charge less tax) for using cleaner alternatives such as LPG, diesel, hybrids, electrics, whatever. Ours - Australia - does that. Silly radical changes like what you propose (EVERYBODY use subway, cars are BANNED) makes a dystopia, not a place I'd want to live.
Well, I just happened to ride to work this morning on a "generic people transporter"
So do I. And when me and all the people who ride with me come off the returning train at 6PM, they get in their cars at the train station and drive home. Those that have "standard human transporter" cars, those that have people-movers because they have family, those that have sports or offroad vehicles, etc.
Use of public transport does not mean all who use it see a car *only* as a means of getting from A to B. Cars have other uses - recreational etc.
Those who have no such uses for a car frequently use public transport where it is available, mostly because it's cheaper.
Those who do will still own cars.
You're ok with nobody having cars but mind eating goop. Would it be possible a personal preference of someone else has it the other way around? and if so, what makes you right?
>>Use two PCs. One small Via Epia 700mhz to do your webserver and bit torrent, and another PC with whatever spec you desire to use when you need to do processor-intensive stuff.
Almost.
For fileserver/bittorrent client, use a NEW via C7 that has ONBOARD GbE and is FANLESS. The J7F4 has two GbE, is fanless, (relatively) fast and ultracheap. The EPIA EN12000 or EX10000 or Jetway J7F2+daughterboard are also good, but are more expensive. The former is CHEAP, and you can use the PCI slot for a 4-port SATA card and plug up to 6 SATA drives on the box altogether (2 onboard ports). That's a helluva home fileserver. I run 4 SATA drives on this board as my fileserver, BT clients run on a VNC server on it.Other than 2x80mm fans cooling the 4 drives and the drives themselves, this machine has no moving parts (OS lives on a IDE CF card, power supply is a brick + DC-DC). The box consumes about 40 watts altogether, fans and drives included.
For your PC box you can run on a via config as well, though it's a bit hairier, especially if you want to go hardcore and drop everything that moves. I've decided to take it all the way and build a no-moving-parts vista box. Just to see if I can. And without using the PCI slot for anything (yet).
I've used a via EN12000 board with an LVDS-DVI converter, so I get 2 VGA outputs for my dualhead setup. It has GbE. It has a 1.2GHz CPU. I'm currently waiting for my 16GB CF card which I got for 200US$ from ebay (8GB should do as well).
I have no clue if the via builtin graphics will run aero. Will know soon though. Another significant compromise is FAT rather than NTFS, as NTFS writes access times to the drive whenever you READ files, so it'll kill my flash card too fast. Yes, vista can be installed on FAT (with a bit of hacking). On the same issue, SWAP needs disabling, and any heavy disk IO tasks will need to be configured to use the NAS.
For power supplies on both PC and fileserver I use PicoPSU-120's with 12V/5A bricks. no moving parts there either. The desktop box is estimated to consume around 20-30W for the entire box and should be more than enough for all except gaming and video editing (for that I have tiny lappies with monstrous multicore CPUs). For that there's the C2D 6300 with the 8800GTS, but it's a killer powerhog and is turned off except when used (The Geforce 8800 alone eats over 200W when it's idle!)
For my 2 firewalls (one of which is an AP) I run WRAP 1-2 boards (Geode SC1100 P1-class x86 CPU, not even a heatsink, 128MB and 3 100M nics soldered onboard, plus CF cards for storage) that consume a whopping 3 Watts each.
And the nice thing, if you're used to running 5-10 machines in your home as I've been for the last several years, the power this rig saves pays for the hardware within a couple years.
>> But the bottom line is that the government remains above reproach or accountability.
Your underlying assumption that this accountability is not only a good thing, but the lack of it is ultimately destructive.
Now, in spite the fact that history tends to agree with this, it is still not a given. It may be circumstantial.
Truth of the matter is that being an unaccountable government has its pros and its cons, which are in themselves, subject to fluctuation depending on the environment they're imposed in.
Yes, given enough time, someone in power in such a system will eventually exploit it and cause a lot of bad. That much is agreeable. But zooming in from the infinite timescale to a reasonably small one, such a government is much less prone to policy manipulation by [a] lobbyists [b] quad-annual administration changes [c] emotionally over-inflated public opinion [d] ethical, environmental, conservational and other concerns. [e] public opinion stemming from downsized commerce stemming from giving the international community the finger (in any matter from IP to nuclear power). etc.
Some of those have lots of negative reprecussions, but this allows for much more freedom that can be used to do considerable good (much more than the average democracy would be able to do) just as it can do considerable bad. Not as safe, but not as tied down either
Play some civilization if you need further convincing.
This is exactly what allowed China and Singapore to end up where they're today. In some countries (Israel comes to mind) you'll hear a lot of street talk about how people sometimes wish they the country were run like a dictatorship, because all administrations in the last 4 decades (left and right wing) were shackled from doing anything drastic that would actually solve things by media and overall public opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't wish such a system on anyone and am not against free forms of government, quite on the contrary. I'm just pointing out non-free forms of government are not inherently doomed or even less advantageous in any results-driven environment such as an economic race, as long as the results (and not the welfare of their citizens) is the metric you use to measure their achievement.
All good, mate. I think opinionated bigot hypocrites whose hobby is trolling public forums and telling others their hobbies suck are idiots, so that feeling is mutual. By your same coin, I'm guessing you have no hobbies, and you do, wear or eat absolutely nothing that is not, strictly speaking, needed.
Close. An Aussie such yourself may be aware that some people (quite a few, in fact, in this country) regard this as a hobby and deliberately buy a 4WD for this purpose.
I need a 4WD so I can go 4WD'ing in Victorian high country, not for work. For work I use a train and a pair of rollerblades, which may be considered 4x4 if you think about it, however their fuel economy is somewhat debatable
Call me up next time you go do the S-track at O'tools flat or Wombat state park during mud season with your ute. I'll bring a few stubbies, sit back and watch.
I can't give you exact numbers, but the most inefficient petrol engine you can imagine dragging 2.3 tonnes of truck (empty) - something that does ~20L per 100K, or 5km per Litre, converted to LPG (which does roughly 25L/100km or 1-to-4), having done 25000km for me since I bought it, has cost about 70 x 40A$ 90Litre LPG tanks and about 10 x 50A$ 70Litre petrol tanks.
That's my 1993 dual-fuel LPG-converted Nissan Patrol GQ (I haven't bought a diesel cuz I didn't know any better at the time).
I won't bother with the service figures because they're as negligible in my example as they are in yours.
That's 3300A$ which is (about 2600US$) for 25000km (~15400 miles).
Which is about 0.17$ per mile.
Consider the following which makes this a moot comparison to begin with [a] A 7-seater that takes me in the bush on weekends. A prius isn't either of these. [b] A Patrol is designed for a longer lifespan - Going on 200K as an AVERAGE lifespan of a prius (basing this off rough average lifespan of a vehicle in its category, not its battery life) two priuses would need to be built and recycled for a single patrol. [c] It's comparing US oil prices to Aussie ones, fuel may cost differently there and here [d] This is an example of an LPG-converted vehicle that is unimaginably fuel-hungry in the first place. A fairer comparison may be a prius-sized Sedan converted to LPG. [e] We haven't touched on price-depreciation, which would be uncomparable anyway because it's two different vehicles depreciating on two different markets, at two very different phases of their life. That has, however, been known to make significant contributions to the TCO of (relatively) expensive new or almost-new cars.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-hybrid, quite on the contrary. I'm just saying that as of today, here in Australia, the fact that the Prius is as expensive as diesel cars - starting at circa 40K$ for new (and I haven't seen any other hybrids around yet, though I may be out of date) make it not the king of the hill, but just one of a few pragmatic ecological-economic options to take, be they (factory- or aftermarket-installed) LPG, Diesel or hybrids, as consuming roughly half of what an equivalent petrol car consumes makes it no more eco-friendly than a diesel, that achieves roughly the same figure.
And since I've mentioned the 40K$ figure for Diesels or the Prius, it may be worth mentioning that cheaper 4WD's (not exactly Land Cruisers but not softroaders either), such as the Hyundai Terracan Diesel, retail for ~30K$ new and can do a hell of a lot more than either a Prius or a VW Golf, and would display the fuel economy of my wife's tiny Echo.
>> And where is the evidence that an American vehicle actually lasts 300K miles vs a Japanese vehicle?
That's putting words in my mouth. I never made it an American vs. Japanese thing. I own two Japanese vehicles - a Nissan Patrol and a Toyota Echo. The former is likely to outlast the latter by a very long shot. Patrols typically do over 400K, I've seen lots going 600,000-1,000,000. Cars from the Toyota Echo category would typically do ~200,000, and would very rarely go over the 300-400K range.
I will admit I am somewhat naive as to the aspects of owning a Prius, as I've never owned one. I was informed by a Prius owner I've known that replacing the battery is a major financial pain. I've also seen this little bit on the "The Age" (major Aussie paper) site yesterday:
"I looked into a Prius when I was buying a car recently, but decided against it after I found out that the battery needs replacing after about 7-8 yrs, and that the replacements cost about $7,000. The battery is rechargeable, making it fuel efficient & low on emissions, however apparently the energy required to create each battery is so great as to negate the savings made during the driving life of the car."
This is a vibe I've been getting from lots of directions ever since the Prius started selling here. I do admit you may be right and it might be FUD. Would you care to refute it?
>> but the vast majority of truck/suv owners don't do so True, and I absolutely agree. Many of which, especially the crossovers/softroaders/whatever-you-call-them, are not diesel and offer no such option. Nevertheless this has no impact on the argument at hand.
>> I'm also not sure where "An average 4WD has a lifespan of 2-3 times that of a small private car" comes from
From the sheer numbers of older 4WD's on our roads as compared to the number of smaller cars of the same age. This is actually an official Aussie statistic I've seen quoted in a newspaper, I couldn't be bothered to dig it up. The gut feel I get by looking at the cars I see around me does confirm this though. This does not, by the way, necessarily have to be the same in the states or anywhere else. A different mentality can easily dictate different consumer behavior.
>> But I have big objections to idiots who live in the suburbs and "need a big SUV" because they go skiing once a year / need to carry stuff back from Home Depot / whatever.
I understand where you're coming from, even agree, but I think your way of going about it is altogether wrong.
Telling people they are idiots and dictating their needs will not make them do what you want (even if they are idiots). Even if it's for a once-a-year ski or family trip.
The constructive way of going about it is offering alternatives, not acting derogatory towards people who do not share your view.
A Prius is NOT an alternative, unless you're an idealist fanatic who is either shitting bricks of money or can't do math.
A car that runs on LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) is. Not a silver bullet, but it is (LPG is a byproduct of making petrol. As long as they'll be making petrol, running a car on it helps dispose of it cleanly, and runs your car cleaner than it would on petrol).
A 4WD, even if you never use it outside the suburbs, that runs Diesel, is an alternative. It offers a big family vehicle, and quite often runs on less fuel than a standard petrol sedan.
A European sedan that runs diesel is an excelent alternative. VERY little fuel consumption, very long mechanical life. As long as you can stomach paying the bigger import costs, more frequent servicing and more expensive parts.
Other alternatives like the Aussie bladerunner initiative (a gutted Toyota Starlet or Daihatsu Charade that runs on battery, charged off the mains, not regenerative breaking ala prius) and can go 60-100km per charge and ~60mph - a glorified golf-cart that can easily do what my second car does) is very promising.
The luxemburg-designed soon-to-be-indian-built compressed-air car all over wired yesterday is also an alternative.
Sorry for being too lazy to bring links, feel free to google. Karma whores welcome to do the work.
At the moment there is no silver bullet here in Australia. There are compromises, and there ARE non-perfect choices that are cleaner than others (and I'm making some such choices, even by owning a large 4WD). Green idealists don't like non-perfect choices, which is why I call them tree-hugging idiots. I much prefer the pragmatic approach of actually making a difference by voting with my consumer dollars for what the best compromise (and hopefully soon a win-win non-compromise product) between environmental and affordable.
The important thing to understand here, if you allow me to make an analogy, is that just because there's a VIA desktop processor that runs windows reasonably at 30Watts, doesn't make it immoral to own a Xeon or a high-end desktop CPU. Rather than point the finger at the consumers, hit your local government representative for government subsidies to encourage low-power alternatives, be they EDEN CPU's, LPG vehicles (installation is subsidized and LPG fuel is not/very-lightly taxed in Australia for this very reason), diesel or mains-powered vehicles.
And never forget, the math counts. As long as Toyota keeps selling the Prius for nearly twice any other compatible car in the same category, I'll be eyeballing a Diesel VW Golf, maybe a diesel Alfa or even a second diesel 4WD, and, quite possibly if the bladerunner goes commercial, one of them.
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>> and an additional one from Vista for no good reason whatsoever informing you that a program is running another program
/A/ security model of any kind for the first time in their life, dictate a good portion of your professional opinion. That's plain silly.
Ok, let's put the sarcasm aside. Why does my vista (which has UAC turned on) not giving me this then?
Sure, I get the [non-firefox] UAC popup when I run a setup file that is intentionally written so as to ask admin permissions when being run, so as to install properly. Is that the popup you're talking about? Or are you saying your computer exhibits some other kind of behavior?
>> when I've stated explicitly I'm talking about the driver model
1. The driver model in vista is similar in all but graphics to XP. XP non-3D graphics drivers can also be made to work in vista.
2. So the "vast majority" of the business apps you installed on vista, which don't work, don't work because of the drivers?
>> At one of the companies I admin for, their main database app (made by Exact software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) won't run on Vista).
Hardly "the vast majority of business software".
>> Every app that installs with an older version of InstallShield (That is a lot of apps) fails to install
Try right-clicking the setup file and selecting "Run-as administrator" on any old installer that doesn't support specifically requesting admin rights from windows like new ones do. That sorted it out for all the older setups that I've run on mine that did not install properly if you just ran them.
If the Installshield/WISE/MSI is deliberately scripted to not work on absolutely anything except XP, you can also try running it in XP SP2 compatibility mode. Of course, if your software vendor dictates (via scripting a halt to setup on any other OS) the use of XP and nothing but, that's an issue between you and him and hardly a vista issue (if that's a vista issue, then the only "solution" microsoft can put to it is to stop making new OS's that have names other than "Windows XP V. 5 build 2600" so old programs who are scripted to hinge on that stay "compatible". It's hardly a driver issue as well.
Note I wasn't arguing the fact that there are compatibility issues, just that throwing FUD at either the driver model or the security model is dumb.
>> Everybody is having these same problems if they have non-Microsoft business apps.
You seem to be letting lots of blogtalk astroturf, much of which is people running home-setups and introduced to
So you've got some compatibility issues with a couple of apps. Woohoo-fucking-hoo.
>> Vista pops up a lot of annoying confirmation dialogs, even when it doesn't need to elevate privileges
Why, then, do you think, DOES your vista pop up said dialogs? Just to piss you off?
What is the trigger that causes them to pop up? You're an admin. You should be able to tell. If you can't, you may have malware on your machines.
Could that trigger somehow involve you requesting to do some kind of action on the machine that you cannot have of the users of that machine doing? Could your action requesting to go somewhere it shouldn't?
Point out why it is absurd then.
How are UAC restrictions (violating which gives UAC popups) different from a stock-standard NT domain deployment, in as far as a business app that needs to write to protected directories is concerned?
You're revoking everything I say, but you're placing zero substance behind your claims.
There's nothing wrong with my logic. It underlies how I manage UNIX systems, how I'd manage NT systems and how I've seen NT systems managed in places I've worked, and it underlies Vista's UAC.
Business applications are the LAST to get broken by a security model like this installed on them, not the first as you imply.
They now have details (IP activated from, registration details etc) of all the 5-yuan DVD-making pirates in china! All they have to do is sue all 244 and pay off some false positives!
On a similar note, we have that here in the rest of the world too.
It's called "Vista Paid-For" (sorry, Vista Business), and "Vista Pirated" (ahem, excuse me, Ultimate).
I was once told that diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to go to hell and make him look forward to the trip. Well, Vista Ultimate is the marketing person's ability to make someone plaster a "This copy is pirated" (read: "Windows Vista Ultimate") on one's screen so everyone who has a look at his machine can immediately be made aware it is pirated (or, in some very few cases, a moron who shits bricks of money and can't count, but that's a minority).
Then they can just sue anyone who uses it, since that is what "Ultimate" realy means.
I also got the impression that sane people compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges.
If you have 400$ and give them to ATI, you get a 1950XTX.
If you have 400$ and give them to nVIDIA you get an 8800, possibly the lower-RAM (320MB) version.
You're much better off with the 8800, it tears the ATI card a new one.
Now if you have 200$ to spend, that's a whole different ballpark there.
Giving them to nVidia will net you something that is, in most benchmarks, ALMOST on-par with the 400$ ATI card. *AND* is DX10, for whenever DX10 games come along, months, maybe a year from now.
I won't even mention ATI's 200$ card.
This is all, however, very temporary. We're comparing an 8th-gen (geforce-count) nVidia card to a 7th-get ATI one. ATI has an 8th-get card that's going to be announced very-very-soon(tm). THEN we'll perhaps be able to tell which of them better deserves our coin.
On a sidenote, low-end cards are typically announced last. I suspect the 8500 will give performance on-par with 7th-gen midrange cards (read: Still Smokin fast in most available games by most people's standards, even if they have to tone down an eyecandy knob or two). And it's sitting smack at the bottom of the pile, at 90$.
If, say, ATI releases their 600$ 8800-equivalent bunker-buster next week, and takes another 4 months to chug out it's low-end, nVidia is going to be doing a milk-run (as it's been doing since day 1 of the 8X00 card), and again you're best off getting an 8500 for a while.
You can always stick it back out on ebay later, lose (or gain) a whopping 15$ in the deal, and buy ATI's thing if the R600 humanely-priced lines turn out to be so much better. I've just sold off my 8800 (bought it just to complete Gothic III, have no intention on letting it depreciate in price while it's in my computer), and am seriously thinking of getting me one of those 90$ 8500GT's.
My 2 cents.
You're wrong. Two popups. One from firefox, one from Windows.
So you openly admit your that firefox giving you a popup because you're running an exe file is the reason you hate vista.
Yep, that's definitely vista's fault.
I just did a little experiment. I downloaded two files using firefox. one is the firefox setup, the other one is notepad.exe
UAC asked me for admin access for the first (because it is a setup file), it did not ask me for the second.
Assuming you don't think vista's crap because firefox gives you exe-file related popups, then you think vista's crap because a setup.exe file you downloaded requires root access, i.e. you still do not understand why UAC is a good thing.
you're a moron.
>> Clearly you can read minds and know exactly which apps I run...
Not at all. I think I've formulated a very solid basis for why you are talking shit.
Here's a repeat:
Many, possibly most businesses have NT domains and credential sets set up. They do not allow users to write to c:\program files etc. "business applications" are primarily targeted for such environments. UAC is exactly that environment. If it breaks a business app, running said business app under an NT domain would also break it.
>> The fact of the matter is that applications which install anything that can be considered a driver fail to install.
More idiocy?
Mmm. I wonder what this daemontools icon is doing in my system tray. It must have "failed to install".
Dude, you're full of it. I realize some apps have some quirks with vista, but being a driver-installing app does not make you immediately incompatible with it. Vista is an upgraded XP. It accepts XP drivers, which work just fine with it in all but some rare cases.
I find it not at all surprising you have not yet named a single application, in spite of throwing big words like "vast majority of business applications", "application that installs anything that can be considered a driver" and so forth.
Implying "the vast majority won't run on vista" is pure bull, as is most of the rest of the FUD that's coming out of your mouth. You're an idiot with an ego, and right now you're more busy feeding that ego than you are with checking why you seem to have all the facts wrong.
Maybe it makes you more poopular with your fudding fanboy microsoft-bashing windows-ultimate-using friends, I don't know.
And at least I rely on the facts (real ones, not made-up or overheard ones) rather than dirty language and blind hate towards MS (.. whose OS I'm using..) to substantiate my claims.
Another idiot who's repeating fanboy talk who has no idea what he's talking about (but thinks he does).
... Document opens. no popups. You're still a clueless idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.
/usr.
>> You still see hundreds of them.
No, I don't. And I have several vista machines I work on. I only see them on rare occasions, exactly the same occasions my gentoo/KDE box at work asks me for a root password, or one of the servers I manage requires me to sudo.
>> Any time an application runs another application.
No popups, EXCEPT in the special case of Internet Explorer's sandbox mechanism, which is a characteristic of the BROWSER APPLICATION, not the OS, and not to be confused with UAC. Try firefox (which still works under UAC), then come back and tell me I was right.
Alternatively, reiterate your position from anti-vista to anti-IE7 against winging about IE7 sucks compared to the IE6 you had under XP, and about the inability to run IE6. I'd be (almost) right there with you, only I think both IE6 and IE7 are steaming shitpiles and use firefox.
UAC is not an application, and is not a characteristic of any particular application (be in IE7 or any other).
>> Like when you open a document from a browser
Why the bloody fuck would the OS request admin creds to open a document using some application?
Oh, you want to open a document THAT IS NOT ACCESSIBLE TO YOUR USER, or INSTALL EXTRA CODE to handle that type of document.
Well, there are two options to that.
Either, THERE IS A DAMN GOOD REASON your user (also known to be read: malware that runs under your user's permissions) does not have access to it,
Solution:
a. BE GRATEFUL, UAC is doing its job
b. merrily give it your admin creds (press accept, enter password, whatever)
or
You are NOT WORKING CORRECTLY (i.e. outside the sections of your filesystem that are meant for routine work). Years of working in a completely-open-access filesystem got many people (and, what's worse, application developers) to develop very wrong habits. Like, say, saving to c:\program files\ during routine work.
Solution:
First, realize this is NOT some microsoft quirk. This is a core methodology of every serious OS in the world . It's been in microsoft for years (and thus comes as no surprise to anyone), with UAC it is just made mandatory. If you'd have been working with any business software as you imply you do, you'd have known that most business software has been FORCED TO WORK in just such an environment by most NT DOMAIN corporate setups that have policies disallowing user modifications to places such as c:\windows, c:\ or c:\program files on most corporate machines (where your business apps need to be run and allow users to get work done)
Welcome the new work model. Every single file you need to write to should live under your user's profile. Even if some apps like to plug these in program files, reposition them (or, and I would not do this except in VERY rare situations, change the permissions on the file to allow said user to perform changes to it, thus selectively disabling the benefit of UAC *just for that file* rather than the entire system. Better yet, DO NOT DO THIS). Users should NOT be affecting any global behavior by doing anything in these places. Show me *one* UNIX system where users get to write to
In the rare cases where you DO need to write there, cope with providing credentials and figure out ways to make your apps avoid going there to store stuff.
>> Maybe this doesn't happen if you use *all* MS software of the latest versions..
Damn, you are clueless. UAC has NOTHING to do with MS software. You're blaming MS instead of what looks from here to be your amateur working habits.
Contrary to your perception, MS software HAS NO BACK DOOR. It falls in line with all the rest of the software you run, and must adhere by the same access restrictions. Try modifying c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with MSWORD, w
I'm assuming your sysadmin was not using a Release Candidate version of vista, which popped up sudo popups left and right.
Admittedly, the first contact many techs have with Vista starts with installing a new system. And their bucketload of apps. All of which require, woe and behold, superuser rights to initially install. Since this is REALLY surprising, let's act as if we're surprised.
This has, of course, zero impact on how many popups you will encounter AFTER everything is installed and in place.
Suggestion to your seasoned redhat admin:
While installing a new system, disable UAC to make your life easier.
Alternatively, enable the admin account and use it to log in.
When you install most linux distros (a process that involves, among other things, installing your favourite apps too), you do so logged in as root, and you can do exactly the same on windows, after which you can log on properly as a user in a UAC'd environment and live life wearing a seatbelt.
Personally, I was lazy and just hit ACCEPT as many times as required during the app installs, and find working correctly very rarely pop stuff up in my face.
(UNinformed, I daresay) People here keep saying things along the lines of "The irony is that I'm not even sure why home users would move"
/informed/ (not neccesarily geek, could be joe-average, just informed) home-user, this is a HUGE advantage. Yes, it has a learning curve, yes, he will need to get a simple explanation of what the greyout means and to "Just Say NO" when he's not sure (or ALWAYS SAY NO, if he's a dumbass, and let his neighbourhood tech do the adminning), and it will save him mountains of time, money and pain paying said tech even more to clean out the malware from his computer every 3 months.
One acronym, three letters.
U.A.C.
Corps (already serious about their desktop security, using access-regulated policies and usually domains) gain almost nothing from the new User Access Control model in Vista. It's all for the home user who doesn't have a sysadmin to disallow him to touch anything in C:\WINDOWS and C:\PROGRAM FILES. The underlying ability to have user access policies on the computer has been there since NT4, effectively since forever.
It's the bolting it into a homeuser-centric UI and turning it into what is, for all intents and purposes, "sudo", integrated into every nook and cranny that requires straying into privileged space that's new.
For an
For all of you who are overfed with FUD, or haven't bothered looking at anything since you've looked an the unfinished (RC) product:
NO, YOU DO NOT NEED TO HANDLE ANNOYING POPUPS WHEN BROWSING ALL THE TIME. I keep getting that a lot, and it just doesn't happen anywhere except in people's anti-MS imaginations.
You need to handle annoying popups when you go to places you shouldn't be. Routine tasks VERY RARELY involve doing that (and if you're one of the elite few who do need open access to the system, just disable UAC altogether, it's got a big ON/OFF switch).
We've all been beating M$ with a stick for 20 years about the inherent lack of security of all OS's up to XP where the user effectively works as root. IMHO, we were RIGHT. Well, they finally fixed it. I am NOT saying windows and/or UAC is unhackable or unexploitable or mature or some such. IT IS NONE OF THESE.
However, they finally introduced a seatbelt, and when lining it up against pre-vista seatbeltless windows where the user belongs to Administrators - just about 99.99999% of the world's home installbase - (in an otherwise seatbelt-equipped world - macos, linux, etc), that's a fundamentally major change WHICH IS A GOOD REASON TO NOT RESIST CHANGING OVER (if, say, you get a new computer, or are reinstalling an old one anyway and don't mind forking out some coin - say, 100$, for some RAM if you're sub-1GB).
UAC is a major homeuser-targeted change that I think non-fanboy professionals should embrace. It'll annoy people at first (seatbelts annoyed people at first too), until they get into the habit of using the system the way it's meant (minimal straying outside userspace), at which point annoyance factor becomes minimal and people accept the extra hassle, because it's a hell of a lot better than what they had before.
In other news, some UI improvements are more than welcome, and as a poweruser, I put value on intuitive UI that makes my work more efficient. Enter Katapult-on-steroids - a SEARCH integrated into the start menu that searches the start menu and the program files. Sidebar is also a welcome UI improvement, as is a revised resource-monitor that breaks down diskIO etc. by process.
In yet other news, compatibility suffers. My vista lappie can't connect to the office Wifi network, something between its 802.11x and the radius goes bust. Same config exactly on XP works like charm.
Still, I run a LOT of stuff on it, including a cygwin environment, retro DOS games, productivity software etc, and this would be the only compatibility issue I've encountered. Had I not, I'd be sitting here saying compatibility at all.
Bottom line: Security-wise, big step up. Maturity-wise, probbably still crap, bu
1. Game balance: PLEASE, oh PRETTY PLEASE, make the game (monsters, items) not level up with the game.
/additional/ items the player gets given require him to do.
/informed/ consideration to the types of bonuses given by leveling, just picking stuff at random like someone who doesn't understand all those long technical words. It's not fun to those of us who ARE trying to achieve their best using your game mechanics (i.e. attempt to obtain the best "numbers" that the game mechanics allow us to). It's our way to try and get ahead, win. Your system encourages game mediocrity, and throws us to hell.
I realize it's a seriously cheaper solution than paying a group of people play the game many times to find the fine line between laughably easy (and thus not fun) and impossibly hard (frustrating and thus not fun), with properly controlling player's access to powerful items and monsters in an open-ended world. It's the ultimate challenge for someone who makes an RPG. Your choice in Oblivion did not sidestep the issue. It FAILED the issue. The game may have been fun to people who play it with a side-quest tick-list, not really caring what comes between tick and tick, but your core crowd, both oblivion-side and fallout-side, will be the people who diligently explore every nook and cranny of the virtual world, expecting to be rewarded by some meaningful (read: NOT scaled and otherwise easily-attainable) item that was scaled to their level anyway and could have thus been found in any easily-accessible container. You have done this in some places in Oblivion, you need to do it MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE. I've reached numerous hard location, and found nothing but items my level would have gotten out of any other, usually easier to come across, chest.
2. Random Treasure - NOT IN HARD-TO-REACH locations. Well-protected or Hard-to-get-to chests, whether in dungeons, some hard-to-find sunken ship, some well-locked-up merchant's house etc should NOT EVER be random. They should have unique and helpful items, to reward diligence in getting to the hard-to-reach location.
3. Your game system, XP (as in experience points, not the OS) and SPECIAL.
XP is a WONDERFUL concept. It is the utterly best coin by which you can reward a player. Better than gold, better than items. There is NEVER enough XP (and if there is, bump your level cap). XP should buy levels, and levels should buy abilities that COMPLEMENT those given by items, not require you to displace old items like
Oblivion had no XP system. (as a side-note, XP and levels were a bit on the uninfluential side, considering you didn't get any edge over anything by leveling up, if anything, even after all the new items that magically appeared around the world, you could still barely keep up with the monsters).
It had a leveling system that screamed macroing. If you'd stand in one place and jump 5000 times, you got more bonuses when you leveled up. It was geared towards semi-exploitation, i.e. do something the game allows to get more powerful, but spend a lot of boring game time doing it. So you choose between either boring yourself to death, or throwing powergaming out the window. BAD choice to impose on your clients. powergaming SHOULD NOT be made boring.
Further, if you accidentally level up (by practicing your chosen skills - this might be by running enough for example) before you practiced the skills that would give you the correct attribute bonuses, you MISS OUT on the bonuses. To anyone who is informed of his char sheet and future development plans, Leveling in Oblivion is an annoying minefield to be meticulously planned from day 1 and very carefully treaded throughout the game, instead of the satisfying gameplay perk it should be. I realize you can just play the game and ignore leveling bonuses, but that's no better than playing any RPG without proper
Enter SPECIAL, fallout's levelup/skill system. Like Oblivion, albeit in a very different way, it is classless (as compared to, say, classic AD&D). But it isn't jus
DNA as we know it melts at about 80 C.
Sure, you can have some small evolutionary deviation in primitive organisms such as bacteria, allowing them to survive maybe a bit more (such as the extremophile vent-dwellers that live in 90C), but you'd need some fundamentally different data-storage-&-access machinery and molecular-assembly machinery to facilitate something that resembles life, if you want to stray further outside that range.
maybe you (or a creative bacterium) can come up with a very small icebox inside a living cell - some way to prevent thermal (kinetic) energy from being transfered inside. And don't forget bacteria don't even have a cell nucleus to protect their beloved data store.
But hey, what do I know. I'm just an undergrad bio student.
So cluelessly throwing harsh language around is okay if it's at a MS product, but having it thrown at you is not?
You truly are a fanboy.
What's your point?
>> RAM isn't like hard drive space... you can't just plug it into the USB port when you need more.
I don't see why RAM is not upgradeable, or, more to the point, why you can't buy a machine with more. Your argument sounds something along the lines of a 1996 heretic blurbing about why XP using 250MB (when 98 needed just 32!) is absurd.
Get over it.
>> Most machines sold in the past five years cannot take more than 4 GB under any circumstances
Most machines sold in the NEXT five years will not NEED 4GB in their practical lifetime. Enthusiast gamer/server machines that WILL need more than 4GB already support >4GB.
Common misconception you seem to be submitting to is that vista doubles RAM usage. It doesn't. It only doubles the RAM the OS needs. The amount of RAM Firefox, Openoffice, Office 200x and Photoshop use stays the same as it was under XP. Thus, to put things into perspective, if older systems were limited to, say, 2GB for argument's sake, 250 of which was XP's OS and 1750 of which would be app (never mind these systems are rarely seen with more than 1GB and most always have lots of room to expand even at the price of throwing away some 256MB sticks), vista would offer you a 700-OS/1300-App breakdown at best, or a 700/3300MB on a 4GB-capped system. Hardly a problem. You'd be hard-pressed to find that much app to fill those systems, and if you go that far (using Gothic III most likely), you're pro'lly better off with a new system anyway.
Besides, what's so painful about spending a few tens of dollars on a RAM stick? It's the price of a friggin pizza or two for heaven's sake.
Besides, I did the math. The power (electricity) older systems guzzle (compared to a well-chosen new system) costs more than the upgrade. If you're concerned about petty cash, buy a new low-power setup with a mountain of RAM.
That's taking what I've said out of context.
I've mentioned maturity in the sense of a natural lifespan of any software product, as one of the ways (an incorrect way in this case) to gauge its security.
I did not imply they were selling a beta product. In fact, having used vista for a while (and I'm ANYTHING BUT ms-biased, I run gentoo at work, manage a debian shop and run linux and BSD on my home servers), It is VERY VERY VERY decently QA'd.
As for paying for it, it's your call if you want to pay it.
Home Basic will give you what XP gave you and costs like XP. The big "downside" is that it doesn't have aero, and, like it or not, cool UI and eye-candy is something people WILL want to pay for, so long as you make it cool enough. If that wasn't the case, they'd still be making car insides like they did in the 1970s.
Vista Home Premium and Vista business (what I run) is what was formerly known as XP Professional.
Vista Ultimate is a totally new invention. They didn't like the idea that all the people who bought a stock laptop already had everything MS had to sell and couldn't be milked for more money, so they have a "slightly higher" version for those who just can't live without having the absolute-best, even if it's wildly overpriced for the added value it gives. In short: it's hyperbole (unless you can finger something in there that's worth the hefty price-tag). In any other case, don't touch it.
As for the price of the machine needed to run vista, as I've already stated elsewhere in this thread, ABSOLUTELY ANY new machine you buy will run it (and 95% of them will run aero without trouble), and older machines will run it to a point. I'm currently building a power-efficient no-moving-parts PC that will have a fanless via 1.2GHz CPU (think fast P3), onboard pissy graphics, 200$ 16GB CF (with some extensive OS tweaks to minimize writing to CF). And vista. Yes, I expect it to work (not sure about aero though). Read my user history, I gave a full tech description several days ago.
The whole "new computer"/"ubercomputer" thing is nothing but a bunch of clueless users repeating what they heard in an apple commercial and from their linux zealot friends whom they consider computer gurus.
Vista will happily run on any modern hardware from the last 5 years with 1+ Gig of RAM. And if you don't mind losing aero and having the interface look more or less like XP, it can run on an 1998-era 8MB ATI graphics card just like XP could.
You sound like someone who is very busy spreading FUD about a subject he does not care or couldn't be bothered to look into.
It "seems" to be secure? wtf?!
OpenBSD "seems" to be secure too. An exploit was found a couple of weeks ago. So?
Vista's been run and tested by many people by now. As I've originally said, it's most definitely *NOT* AIRTIGHT. Bugs will be found and fixed, likely more during initial exposure than in 3 years time, as has been the case in any OS you care to mention.
Nevertheless, I'd rather drive a new type of car with a "version 1.0" seatbelt (that may have imperfections found in it and corrected as they're found) than a seasoned and tested model that has NO seatbelts fitted. Security-wise, they're incomparable.
The first gut instinct people get, especially non-technical people, a VERY WRONG gut instinct, is to judge the OS's security based purely on its maturity and where it stands in terms of a well-known software metric (not neccesarily OS here) of bugs-found-per, say, -month (lots at the beginning of its life, then it decreases with time, nearing zero asymptotically).
This would have been correct to do comparing 95 to 98, or 2000 to XP.
The problem with this line of thought is that you're comparing something WITHOUT a security model altogether, something VASTLY inferior even in spite of its maturity - XP - with something that has one in place, but is as of yet immature. Choosing between the two should be a no-brainer.
Larger organizations (that use MS products) have done this transition more than happily 10 years ago, when NT domains, user policies and credentials were invented. When given the choice between NT and 98, security dictated the use of NT.
And if you're a UNIX person, you're scratching your head and trying to figure out why it took a multi-billion company 20 years to figure out something the rest of the computer world had been taking for granted. Still, better late than never.
You're a fanboy and an idiot.
>> 1) XP installed is ~2GB HD space and Vista is ~11GB so its more than a service pack
In an era of 150$ 400GB drives, where 300GB drives cost 10$ less? give me a break. See my remark re RAM above. Yes, it's got beefier reqs than its predecessor, which, as another poster here mentioned, was the case with its predecessor, and its predecessor before it, etc. Disk space, RAM, etc.
I couldn't give a flying fuck a bout 10 gigs on my drive. If you're tight about 10 gigs, you pro'lly shouldn't be installing vista on that machine anyway, much like you shouldn't be installing XP on a P1-166MHz with 64MB RAM and a 500MB hard drive.
>> 3) UAC is NOT palatable to power-users. Those damn stupid pop-ups every time you do anything at all are the most annoying thing I've ever seen. Its so annoying that I turned off UAC to be rid of it. I'm sure most people will turn off UAC as the first thing they do.
Spoken like a true script-kiddie that's used to working "as root" under the assumption he can drop anything he likes in any place in his filesystem whenever, and has no clue what user-permission-model security is for in the first place, but recons himself a poweruser.
If you do not understand why you need to confirm giving admin privileges to your machine every time you stray outside your userspace, you are not a poweruser.
As ANYONE who works in any environment with a decent security model will tell you, be it an NT-domain environment, a linux desktop, big unix boxes, etc, when you stray outside your userspace, you need to provide admin credentials. Without such a model, any pissy user running any pissy app (or, more commonly, who is having some pissy app exploited for him) can obliterate the entire system. For a home-box, a user-supplid nod-of-the-head (what you call "popups") is enough to seriously limit what malware can do (without his explicit approval, which, given a neccesary learning curve, he will learn not to grant).
5) Using 700MB IS important as most PCs (especially laptops) still have 1GB of RAM or less. On a 512MB PC that means you're ALREADY paging to disk even before you do anything, which directly translates into really slow application performance.
Don't install XP on machines with 128MB of RAM.
Don't install Vista on machines with 512MB of RAM.
If you're buying a new machine with 512MB of RAM, you're an idiot.
On a 1G machine, that leaves 300MB of app space. Vista does not inflate the amount of RAM apps use, and 300MB-400MB of RAM for apps is at the moment more than enough to run office apps. (I'm writing this from my wife's Thinkpad T42 lappie, running vista, with 1GB, with a shitload of other shit open, and everything runs smooth-as).
If you need more, fucking buy more and quite yappin. It's friggin cheap.
Regarding your case in point: I'm (still) screaming "Vista IS shit" and my system has a core2 6800 extreme CPU, 2 watercooled 8800GTX GPU's in SLI, 2GB of 1111Mhz DDR2 and 2 150GB raptors in Raid 0. Hardly a budget PC.
You're a moron.
Vista will run as fast as XP on a setup that's one fifth of what you mentioned (pro'lly in anything but RAM).
Aero runs smooth on my X60's i945 pissy graphics (which couldn't run a 4-year-old 3D engine if its life depended on it). It runs smoother still on my wife's T42 mobile Radeon 9600 Pro. It ran fine on my old Radeon 9700 Pro. And, sit tight, it will run perfectly fine on an antique 1998-era 8MB PCI ATI card, without Aero (read: the windows will look like they did in Windows XP).
By bringing up that cliche about needing a friggin 10K$ enthusiast gamer PC to run vista, you plugged yourself neatly among the clueless idiot's lot.
I'm currently writing this from my wife's T42 laptop
The amount of unsubstantiated negative hype going around about vista is apalling.
Let's look at the facts:
1. For all intents and purposes it's a Windows XP + stuff. aka a glorified service pack.
2. Quite obviously it will displace XP in corporations, educational institutions and home with time.
3. Unless you're using domain logons, It is MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE SECURE than XP because UAC is on by default, palatable to power users (I've been working with it for several weeks now, it's ok) and teachable to non-tech users. Overall, it's worked out much better than you could have done on XP. It is not OpenBSD and shouldn't be compared to it, it is probably less secure than Gentoo with KDE. Nevertheless, compared with XP's work-as-root model, it's worlds apart. I'm not suggesting it's either bulletproof, bugless, unexploitable or mature. But A security model, ANY security model, is better than XP's *NO* security model.
4. Laugh at UI all you like, but a good UI is something everyone can use to get more done. Both joe averages and powerusers alike. Vista's UI serves as a welcome improvement over XP IMHO. I'm talking about useability improvements ala sidebar, "open containing folder" stuff etc, not eye-candy a-la aero which I frankly couldn't less.
5. It guzzles 700MB RAM on neutral right after loading. Who gives a flying fuck? My kde desktop at work eats 200MB. the number is *meaningless* unless it indicates, say, an excessive overpricing of the machine. is 200MB a lot? 10 years ago, we'd have all said it was. Does that make my gentoo/KDE desktop bloated crap today? no. On the same coin, when 1GB of RAM is next to free, 700MB is just another meaningless number.
1GB of DDR2 lappie ram costs 70US$ on ebay. Sure, if you have a P3, run XP. But if you run any form of hardware bought anywhere in the last 5 years, plug some RAM and you're good to go.
6. Microsoft will stop selling and supporting XP at some point anyway. So it's not like Vista will be some doomed stop-gap measure until something significantly better comes along, like Windows ME was. Vista is here to stay for the next 5 or so years until another "service pack" along the same lines appears.
7. If whatever DRM is built into the system prevents you from doing what you're used to do with a computer, use Linux.
Case in point:
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and have an old computer with XP you don't want to spend more money on, you're likely making the right call, but are an idiot for screaming out the shit bit. I have a 2005 Toyota echo and screaming how the 2007 model is shit because I don't need it (having the 2005 one) would make me the same kind of idiot.
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and you're using Linux/MacOS, you're either a clueless fanboy or someone who's tested both ends and can draw up pros and cons of each and stake a legitimate fact-based preference.
If you're screaming "Vista's shit!" and thinking you'd rather be getting XP with a new computer, you're a total clueless idiot. Especially if your spiel contains the word "security" in it.
Vista is a welcome improvement on XP. Give it some time to mature, give IT departments time to evaluate and learn to work it, it'll be ok.
Is it worth upgrading from XP? depends. Depends if you value a better security model (and eye candy). I've serviced many people with many malware computer problems who paid me lots of good money to fix said problems. Wild guess says a security model for them will pay for itself, from the money it costs them to periodically fix their shit. Locks tend to be cheaper than periodically re-outfitting a robbed house, and people tend to be able to do math when it's their money.
>> Driving monster cars affects other people in a significant kind of way, eating good food doesn't.
Say what? I can't hear you...
Did you ever consider how much greenhouse gas the livestock we breed to feed ourselves generates? Do you think that steak you're eating comes from a happy magic place?
What about all the resources that the food industry takes to manufacture, transport, market, advertise, sell food etc? All for what, when we could all be happily drinking gray goop from the tap?
What about all the social aftershock of America's (and the rest of the world's) obesity epidemic stemming from "eating good"? you think that doesn't eventually affect each and every one of us?
No, I don't think all that should be removed.
I suspect doing so with cars (or with other things that are regarded as "fun" in our culture in spite of being "bad" things - think legal drugs such as alcohol or nicotine, or, for that matter, guns in America) is impossible anywhere outside your fantasy lala-land.
You want to treat emissions? get your government to do what our does - pay people (read: charge less tax) for using cleaner alternatives such as LPG, diesel, hybrids, electrics, whatever. Ours - Australia - does that.
Silly radical changes like what you propose (EVERYBODY use subway, cars are BANNED) makes a dystopia, not a place I'd want to live.
Well, I just happened to ride to work this morning on a "generic people transporter"
So do I. And when me and all the people who ride with me come off the returning train at 6PM, they get in their cars at the train station and drive home. Those that have "standard human transporter" cars, those that have people-movers because they have family, those that have sports or offroad vehicles, etc.
Use of public transport does not mean all who use it see a car *only* as a means of getting from A to B. Cars have other uses - recreational etc.
Those who have no such uses for a car frequently use public transport where it is available, mostly because it's cheaper.
Those who do will still own cars.
You're ok with nobody having cars but mind eating goop. Would it be possible a personal preference of someone else has it the other way around? and if so, what makes you right?
>>Use two PCs. One small Via Epia 700mhz to do your webserver and bit torrent, and another PC with whatever spec you desire to use when you need to do processor-intensive stuff.
Almost.
For fileserver/bittorrent client, use a NEW via C7 that has ONBOARD GbE and is FANLESS. The J7F4 has two GbE, is fanless, (relatively) fast and ultracheap. The EPIA EN12000 or EX10000 or Jetway J7F2+daughterboard are also good, but are more expensive. The former is CHEAP, and you can use the PCI slot for a 4-port SATA card and plug up to 6 SATA drives on the box altogether (2 onboard ports). That's a helluva home fileserver. I run 4 SATA drives on this board as my fileserver, BT clients run on a VNC server on it.Other than 2x80mm fans cooling the 4 drives and the drives themselves, this machine has no moving parts (OS lives on a IDE CF card, power supply is a brick + DC-DC). The box consumes about 40 watts altogether, fans and drives included.
For your PC box you can run on a via config as well, though it's a bit hairier, especially if you want to go hardcore and drop everything that moves. I've decided to take it all the way and build a no-moving-parts vista box. Just to see if I can. And without using the PCI slot for anything (yet).
I've used a via EN12000 board with an LVDS-DVI converter, so I get 2 VGA outputs for my dualhead setup.
It has GbE. It has a 1.2GHz CPU. I'm currently waiting for my 16GB CF card which I got for 200US$ from ebay (8GB should do as well).
I have no clue if the via builtin graphics will run aero. Will know soon though.
Another significant compromise is FAT rather than NTFS, as NTFS writes access times to the drive whenever you READ files, so it'll kill my flash card too fast. Yes, vista can be installed on FAT (with a bit of hacking).
On the same issue, SWAP needs disabling, and any heavy disk IO tasks will need to be configured to use the NAS.
For power supplies on both PC and fileserver I use PicoPSU-120's with 12V/5A bricks. no moving parts there either. The desktop box is estimated to consume around 20-30W for the entire box and should be more than enough for all except gaming and video editing (for that I have tiny lappies with monstrous multicore CPUs). For that there's the C2D 6300 with the 8800GTS, but it's a killer powerhog and is turned off except when used (The Geforce 8800 alone eats over 200W when it's idle!)
For my 2 firewalls (one of which is an AP) I run WRAP 1-2 boards (Geode SC1100 P1-class x86 CPU, not even a heatsink, 128MB and 3 100M nics soldered onboard, plus CF cards for storage) that consume a whopping 3 Watts each.
And the nice thing, if you're used to running 5-10 machines in your home as I've been for the last several years, the power this rig saves pays for the hardware within a couple years.
>> But the bottom line is that the government remains above reproach or accountability.
Your underlying assumption that this accountability is not only a good thing, but the lack of it is ultimately destructive.
Now, in spite the fact that history tends to agree with this, it is still not a given. It may be circumstantial.
Truth of the matter is that being an unaccountable government has its pros and its cons, which are in themselves, subject to fluctuation depending on the environment they're imposed in.
Yes, given enough time, someone in power in such a system will eventually exploit it and cause a lot of bad. That much is agreeable. But zooming in from the infinite timescale to a reasonably small one, such a government is much less prone to policy manipulation by
[a] lobbyists
[b] quad-annual administration changes
[c] emotionally over-inflated public opinion
[d] ethical, environmental, conservational and other concerns.
[e] public opinion stemming from downsized commerce stemming from giving the international community the finger (in any matter from IP to nuclear power).
etc.
Some of those have lots of negative reprecussions, but this allows for much more freedom that can be used to do considerable good (much more than the average democracy would be able to do) just as it can do considerable bad. Not as safe, but not as tied down either
Play some civilization if you need further convincing.
This is exactly what allowed China and Singapore to end up where they're today. In some countries (Israel comes to mind) you'll hear a lot of street talk about how people sometimes wish they the country were run like a dictatorship, because all administrations in the last 4 decades (left and right wing) were shackled from doing anything drastic that would actually solve things by media and overall public opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't wish such a system on anyone and am not against free forms of government, quite on the contrary. I'm just pointing out non-free forms of government are not inherently doomed or even less advantageous in any results-driven environment such as an economic race, as long as the results (and not the welfare of their citizens) is the metric you use to measure their achievement.
Troll-feeding time.
All good, mate.
I think opinionated bigot hypocrites whose hobby is trolling public forums and telling others their hobbies suck are idiots, so that feeling is mutual. By your same coin, I'm guessing you have no hobbies, and you do, wear or eat absolutely nothing that is not, strictly speaking, needed.
>> You may well absolutely need you 4x4 for work
Close.
An Aussie such yourself may be aware that some people (quite a few, in fact, in this country) regard this as a hobby and deliberately buy a 4WD for this purpose.
I need a 4WD so I can go 4WD'ing in Victorian high country, not for work. For work I use a train and a pair of rollerblades, which may be considered 4x4 if you think about it, however their fuel economy is somewhat debatable
Call me up next time you go do the S-track at O'tools flat or Wombat state park during mud season with your ute. I'll bring a few stubbies, sit back and watch.
I can't give you exact numbers, but the most inefficient petrol engine you can imagine dragging 2.3 tonnes of truck (empty) - something that does ~20L per 100K, or 5km per Litre, converted to LPG (which does roughly 25L/100km or 1-to-4), having done 25000km for me since I bought it, has cost about 70 x 40A$ 90Litre LPG tanks and about 10 x 50A$ 70Litre petrol tanks.
That's my 1993 dual-fuel LPG-converted Nissan Patrol GQ (I haven't bought a diesel cuz I didn't know any better at the time).
I won't bother with the service figures because they're as negligible in my example as they are in yours.
That's 3300A$ which is (about 2600US$) for 25000km (~15400 miles).
Which is about 0.17$ per mile.
Consider the following which makes this a moot comparison to begin with
[a] A 7-seater that takes me in the bush on weekends. A prius isn't either of these.
[b] A Patrol is designed for a longer lifespan - Going on 200K as an AVERAGE lifespan of a prius (basing this off rough average lifespan of a vehicle in its category, not its battery life) two priuses would need to be built and recycled for a single patrol.
[c] It's comparing US oil prices to Aussie ones, fuel may cost differently there and here
[d] This is an example of an LPG-converted vehicle that is unimaginably fuel-hungry in the first place. A fairer comparison may be a prius-sized Sedan converted to LPG.
[e] We haven't touched on price-depreciation, which would be uncomparable anyway because it's two different vehicles depreciating on two different markets, at two very different phases of their life. That has, however, been known to make significant contributions to the TCO of (relatively) expensive new or almost-new cars.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-hybrid, quite on the contrary.
I'm just saying that as of today, here in Australia, the fact that the Prius is as expensive as diesel cars - starting at circa 40K$ for new (and I haven't seen any other hybrids around yet, though I may be out of date) make it not the king of the hill, but just one of a few pragmatic ecological-economic options to take, be they (factory- or aftermarket-installed) LPG, Diesel or hybrids, as consuming roughly half of what an equivalent petrol car consumes makes it no more eco-friendly than a diesel, that achieves roughly the same figure.
And since I've mentioned the 40K$ figure for Diesels or the Prius, it may be worth mentioning that cheaper 4WD's (not exactly Land Cruisers but not softroaders either), such as the Hyundai Terracan Diesel, retail for ~30K$ new and can do a hell of a lot more than either a Prius or a VW Golf, and would display the fuel economy of my wife's tiny Echo.
>> And where is the evidence that an American vehicle actually lasts 300K miles vs a Japanese vehicle?
That's putting words in my mouth. I never made it an American vs. Japanese thing. I own two Japanese vehicles - a Nissan Patrol and a Toyota Echo. The former is likely to outlast the latter by a very long shot. Patrols typically do over 400K, I've seen lots going 600,000-1,000,000. Cars from the Toyota Echo category would typically do ~200,000, and would very rarely go over the 300-400K range.
I will admit I am somewhat naive as to the aspects of owning a Prius, as I've never owned one. I was informed by a Prius owner I've known that replacing the battery is a major financial pain. I've also seen this little bit on the "The Age" (major Aussie paper) site yesterday:
"I looked into a Prius when I was buying a car recently, but decided against it after I found out that the battery needs replacing after about 7-8 yrs, and that the replacements cost about $7,000. The battery is rechargeable, making it fuel efficient & low on emissions, however apparently the energy required to create each battery is so great as to negate the savings made during the driving life of the car."
This is a vibe I've been getting from lots of directions ever since the Prius started selling here.
I do admit you may be right and it might be FUD. Would you care to refute it?
>> but the vast majority of truck/suv owners don't do so
True, and I absolutely agree. Many of which, especially the crossovers/softroaders/whatever-you-call-them, are not diesel and offer no such option. Nevertheless this has no impact on the argument at hand.
>> I'm also not sure where "An average 4WD has a lifespan of 2-3 times that of a small private car" comes from
From the sheer numbers of older 4WD's on our roads as compared to the number of smaller cars of the same age. This is actually an official Aussie statistic I've seen quoted in a newspaper, I couldn't be bothered to dig it up. The gut feel I get by looking at the cars I see around me does confirm this though.
This does not, by the way, necessarily have to be the same in the states or anywhere else. A different mentality can easily dictate different consumer behavior.
>> But I have big objections to idiots who live in the suburbs and "need a big SUV" because they go skiing once a year / need to carry stuff back from Home Depot / whatever.
I understand where you're coming from, even agree, but I think your way of going about it is altogether wrong.
Telling people they are idiots and dictating their needs will not make them do what you want (even if they are idiots). Even if it's for a once-a-year ski or family trip.
The constructive way of going about it is offering alternatives, not acting derogatory towards people who do not share your view.
A Prius is NOT an alternative, unless you're an idealist fanatic who is either shitting bricks of money or can't do math.
A car that runs on LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) is. Not a silver bullet, but it is (LPG is a byproduct of making petrol. As long as they'll be making petrol, running a car on it helps dispose of it cleanly, and runs your car cleaner than it would on petrol).
A 4WD, even if you never use it outside the suburbs, that runs Diesel, is an alternative. It offers a big family vehicle, and quite often runs on less fuel than a standard petrol sedan.
A European sedan that runs diesel is an excelent alternative. VERY little fuel consumption, very long mechanical life. As long as you can stomach paying the bigger import costs, more frequent servicing and more expensive parts.
Other alternatives like the Aussie bladerunner initiative (a gutted Toyota Starlet or Daihatsu Charade that runs on battery, charged off the mains, not regenerative breaking ala prius) and can go 60-100km per charge and ~60mph - a glorified golf-cart that can easily do what my second car does) is very promising.
The luxemburg-designed soon-to-be-indian-built compressed-air car all over wired yesterday is also an alternative.
Sorry for being too lazy to bring links, feel free to google. Karma whores welcome to do the work.
At the moment there is no silver bullet here in Australia. There are compromises, and there ARE non-perfect choices that are cleaner than others (and I'm making some such choices, even by owning a large 4WD). Green idealists don't like non-perfect choices, which is why I call them tree-hugging idiots. I much prefer the pragmatic approach of actually making a difference by voting with my consumer dollars for what the best compromise (and hopefully soon a win-win non-compromise product) between environmental and affordable.
The important thing to understand here, if you allow me to make an analogy, is that just because there's a VIA desktop processor that runs windows reasonably at 30Watts, doesn't make it immoral to own a Xeon or a high-end desktop CPU. Rather than point the finger at the consumers, hit your local government representative for government subsidies to encourage low-power alternatives, be they EDEN CPU's, LPG vehicles (installation is subsidized and LPG fuel is not/very-lightly taxed in Australia for this very reason), diesel or mains-powered vehicles.
And never forget, the math counts.
As long as Toyota keeps selling the Prius for nearly twice any other compatible car in the same category, I'll be eyeballing a Diesel VW Golf, maybe a diesel Alfa or even a second diesel 4WD, and, quite possibly if the bladerunner goes commercial, one of them.