I'm willing to guess there was quite a bit of innovation and feature-packing going on in MSO over the last five years. But here's the problem: I don't need most of those features, and neither do my users. Some of the things are counter-intuitive and frustrating to a lot people. I also don't need the MS Office price tag, either. Use only what you need to get the job done and save money. Isn't that what this is all about anyway?
I tried various mispellings, and OO 1.1.4 doesn't seem to have trouble with that word. If you're spelling it 'reticulously', then I don't think MSO or WP is going to have a clue, either.
Otherwise, if it's that off the mark, I'd venture to guess it's a bug that needs correcting.
I've been using it for more than a year now at the office. There's still no way to read MS Access database files, which is a major drawback. Other than that, I prefer Calc over Excel because of features that make data import/export/retouching easier. I also get lots of use out of Draw, something which MSO really should consider. 'Write' gets the work done, but as of 1.1.3, it has problems exporting to Word 97/2000/XP format (their name, not mine), where it dumps something in the file that totally screws up the formatting when MSO tries to read it (all the special mark-up is lost and the file can't be converted to a real MSO format). Reading Word files works fine, but sometimes it does not pick the correct font size and margin sizes.
Thus far, Open Office hasn't crashed on me or mangled any data, unlike Office 95/97/2000. They fixed the annoying hi-lighting bugs from 1.1.0, but it still has an annoying tendency to open up random new, blank documents when you open a document and an OO window is already open.
I have not tested the Word export problem on 1.1.4, so I don't know if it is fixed or not.
On behalf of compulsive readers of information on the Internet, I'd like to say: Thanks a lot, I waste more time on your site than anywhere else! I sit down and read some article, and before I know it, I've got another 8 tabs open with crosslinks to other Wikipedia articles, and another hour has come and gone.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is going to improve the security of their very popular development framework (let's be honest, its primary purpose is not browsing - unless it's still 1999). My question is: Will they continue to maintain it, aside from the major vulnerabilities that can't be ignored? The Mozilla project continues to protect me from security problems and bugs that I wasn't even aware of, and deliver features that I wouldn't have guessed would be so useful. Mozilla.org has it's own set of forums where users can discuss bugs, technical problems, security issues and new features. These forums are actually read by Mozilla developers. Mozilla Project has a much better chance for survival because they have the right process in place to ensure that their product evolves in the right direction.
What is being delivered this summer isn't even IE7, it's only a beta release. I can only assume from your optimism that you've got a strong bias toward Microsoft, because only someone with that attitude could look at the short list you provided, and think that those are the only things wrong with IE, and that those things can be fixed by a single upgrade. Security is a process, not a single patch, and Microsoft actively discourages the finding and reporting of vulnerabilities. Standards-compliance only works if they actually keep up with the standards. Tabbed browsing has been a staple of Mozilla-based browsers for years, users love it, and Microsoft is only considering it now?! Microsoft has yet to admit that some of the persistent security issues with IE are the fault of the underlying operating system design, and has yet to take steps to either correct those flaws or even shield the browser from them. IE is doomed.
I disagree, if we group all types of Voice comm over the Internet, you have more choice than you would with POTS. With Cringley's point-to-point voice app, for example, or any PC-based voice app, the limit to the quality is the codec and the limit of your bandwidth. You can pull down audio streams that the sound quality of a land-line could never hope to match. There's a lot of leeway that the old tech just doesn't have.
And because of this, I don't think it's going to be that easy for the reunified Bells to fight. There could be any number of protocols appearing on any number of ports. They'll have to ruin their service in general to fight back. They are likely going to squander money and make themselves less competitive in the marketplace. Two parties don't necessarily have to buy into some formal contract to enjoy casual use of VoIP. Heck, I fire up Teamspeak and talk to friends in the Southern US, Spain and the Netherlands. It costs me squat, because it's just a drip in the bucket of my bandwidth. It doesn't cost me anything in convenience, either, because I'd have to be sitting at home to use POTS anyway.
Maybe businesses can't get by with this, but since home computers are so commonplace, as are full-duplex sound cards and free voip applications, the casual use is going to continue hurting the Bells, if not crank up the hurt a few notches in the near future.
p.s. It just occured to me how amazing it is for me to be having a "conference" call with people all over the Americas and Europe, and completely taking it for granted. I can still remember getting an earful from the folks back in the day (when AT&T told you what type of phone you could have in your house) when calling my cousin on peak hours was 40 cents a minute!
I don't know if you guys poke around for this kind of info on the web or not, but there are sites (which I will not link to) dedicated to all the kinds of alterations you can do to make XP into something other than the flavor it is currently, including hints on where to get illegal copies of the missing components. I recently read an entertaining thread about turning XP Home into Media Center Ed. I have no doubt that SE is doomed to the same fate.
These guys have already done all kinds of wacky stuff to get around soft limits and product activation. They already get their updates from third-party sources. Microsoft must be aware of this stuff by now. It makes me wonder if the Start Edition is really just a ruse to inflate the seriousness of the illegal copying problem. Don't get me wrong, it's bad overseas, but one can't exactly claim (and retain his credibility) that he is losing sales in a country where he does not sell his product.
...It has nothing to do with IE or Firefox, it's a Java application that's malicious. It has nothing to do with Java being vulnerable, in fact, it's not even a trojan, because the user has to install it in order for it to work. And when the user attempts to do it, he is dutifully warned that it is from an untrusted source.
I was about to go off on a tirade about the editor, but I can see from the TFA that the blame clearly rests on the original authors.
Oh good grief, my head hurts from this one:
Does this mean the Emperor's new clothes syndrome has hit Firefox? Possibly not, though it doesn't take a genius to work out that if "The Browser you Can Trust" now has to keep one eye on its older, slightly clumsier brother as well as watch its own back then there's a very good chance its tail could be getting ready for the mother of all burnings.
It has nothing to do with security problems in either IE, Firefox, or Java. The user is authorizing a foreign, untrusted piece of software to run. It could happen through any browser using Sun's JRE, or an ActiveX control. It could be a script, or a trojan application. Yes, the operating system allows software to do things like this. If you can't trust yourself or your users to read warnings, then use an unprivileged account to do your browsing, and lock down the registry.
Check out this follow-up:
Yes, I am aware that "bad things will happen" when you click "yes" to something - that was kind of the whole point of the test, because most spyware installs occur when someone clicks "yes" to something they shouldn't have. The article is illustrating what happens when an end-user blindly agrees to something, however the point is IE being infected when not in use at the time, not the social engineering aspects of the install.
What's the point? If the user runs malicious software, it can do anything allowed by the user's current OS permissions, including editing parts of the registry that aren't protected. Whether or not IE is the target is irrelevant.
Oh well, that was 20 years ago. Now the US Army just wants bodies...
No, they still want motivated and intelligent volunteers. This is the IDF we're talking about, not the US Army. The last time the Army thought they could save money by sending idiots into battle with full-auto weapons, we lost a war.
In an army you want drones who can think for themselves but will never question orders. Why do you think the great dictators killed teachers???
I think you are misunderstanding what the IDF is saying. In fact, it appears that most of the posters have done the same. A postion for dumb grunts is exactly where the IDF wants these people. TFA says they'll have lower security clearance, likely meaning they'll have jobs where the potentional for exposure to sensitive intelligence is nil. Being cannon fodder doesn't require a high security clearance.
I think their psychological research is refuse. They're intentionally leaving out a segment of the population that likely has higher-than-average intelligence and a willingness to learn new skills. These are exactly the type of people that should occupy posts that require complex skills.
Well, I guess this is good for Corel. Nice to see their past investments in IP may yet pay off. Unfortunately it appears that this decision is driven by cost and backward compatibility. I'm not in the "anything but MS Office" crowd, unless we're only talking about potential security problems. There are some solutions I like better than others.
The primary concern should really be format. If Agency X is smart, they'd pick a standard format for each type of document they need to store. Changing back-up media is one thing, but imagine changing document formats so the data remains usable in the future. Let's say Agency X's document needs are met by Richtext format (just for an example, okay?). The format happens to have broad support, and even if that support evaporates in 10 years, it's still intelligible enough to write a converter without having the format spec spelled out.
Then the choices become: Which word processors a) don't crash all the time, b) run on their computers, c) are affordable, and d) can read/write RTF. In that light, it doesn't matter which they pick. It could be MS Office for all I care, but it gives Agency X, and all the people that correspond with Agency X, a choice they otherwise would not have. Then those connected with Agency X can pick Open Office, Easy Office, Star Office, Corel Office, MS Office, or whatever meets their desired level of comfort.
Honestly, there should be an unencumbered standard. It exists with nearly every other industry, and even some types of data transfers, like those among banks. Considering the retention and security requirments of the DoJ, shouldn't they have farmed to someone to create a published, standard format? Yes, I'm sensitive to this. My employer was forced to buy hundreds of seats of Office 2000 because our oversight agencies refused to take the extra steps to save their documents in a more common format. Basically, they screwed us and our taxpayers.
Now I will pick on TFA, because it deserves picking:
The new purchase agreement, announced Monday, makes the latest version of Corel's WordPerfect Office software available to more than 50,000 lawyers and other Justice employees... illustrates that Microsoft, the world's largest software company, still faces pockets of intense competition in the industry it dominates....Microsoft sold $2.8 billion worth of its Office software programs in the final three months of 2004.
If, for the sake of argument, we say that each of those MSO copies were full retail at $500, that's about 5.6 million copies sold for just three quarters of one fiscal year. So less than one per cent of the sales volume is "intense" competition? That sales volume estimate is very conservative, considering that Microsoft most likely rakes in the bucks from volume license agreements.
Corel is initially charging the government $40 per copy to upgrade from an earlier WordPerfect version to its newest software, the government said.
The author is attempting to create some sort of journalistic drama here, lacing his piece with references to the anti-trust case. Here in the middle we find this gem. Sorry, there's no message being sent to Redmond. The DoJ's choice was obviously influenced by the fact that they have an enormous body of documents that is already stored in WP format.
The Justice Department will make WordPerfect software available to more than 20 organizations inside the agency...
Well, that's a nice gesture. A better decision would allow those 20 organizations to pick their own office suite.
O'Donovan said U.S. courts require all electronic filings to be submitted as WordPerfect documents, and Justice has thousands of programmed shortcuts designed to work with WordPerfect.
I'm not sure what this means. But how is this any different than MS Office? You still have to use a proprietary format
I don't feel that way about it. NASA and all the other government-funded institutions are doing research in more fields than in the 60s. Let me rephrase that: Those institutions have much better tech to support their research than in the 60s. Kennedy wanted to put an astronaut on the moon. It happened. I guess that's sort of amazing considering the amount of funds spent on the Vietnam War, but the point I'm making here is that there was one goal for the space program in the 1960s. Now resources (not just those allocated to NASA) are spread between many more ground-based and unmanned projects.
As great as the moon landings were, we've proven that mankind can do it, and I don't see the point in stressing about that fact that we can't do it right this second. I'm sure we could direct our efforts to put men on the moon again. But why? What's the research value? Would it be worth cancelling all those other unmanned programs? And why does the US in particular have to do it?
First, while XP has a license enforced single-user nature, the server versions are all truly multi-user and can have multiple people logged in through terminal services simultaneously.
It requires that your run TS to get a real multi-user environment? So I'd have to install WServer and TS and loopback the terminal connection on every client to get real multi-user support? I'm talking about a clear division between system, shared user, and user. The last I checked, Windows sticks system and user binaries and libraries in the same folders together. In order to enforce a standard profile, you have to go through some bizarre process with altering a Default User profile. There is no easy way to go back and enforce the default profile without using some custom script or something like Deep Freeze.
Second, NTFS does support arbitrary mount points via junction points. You can mount any volume in a directory anywhere on the system.
Forgive my ignorace, how does one do this from the shell, either with Explorer or a CLI command? Does this function allow me to prevent the mounting of selected volumes? Can I mount network shares on the local filesystem?
Third, the registry can be exported to a human readable file and reimported from the command line. Further, it's not a single file, but broken up into multiple files (about 5 or 6, not counting individual user hives)
You can only do this to the native registry that is currently open on your boot disk. Certain areas are protected by the kernel. You cannot log-on as one user and edit the configuration for another user's profile. This also is in one-direction, I'm not working with "The Registry", I'm working with an text export. I can't successfully make changes or repairs unless I can import it back. In order to do that, the machine has to be functional enough to allow me to do this. I can't edit a foreign registry on a functioning machine.
Fourth, while many of the admin tools are not part of the base install, they are downloadable from MS for free in the form of the resource kit. Further, WSH allows scripting of all that stuff and has for quite a long time.
The server resource kits are not, and have never been free to copy to the best of my knowledge. Yes, I can copy the utilities from warez sites or from another MS product, but according to the EULA, I'm not supposed to do that. While I'm thankful that WSH exists, it isn't nearly as flexible because the internals of Windows aren't nearly as open as GNU/Linux. Therefore, if there isn't an API call to do it, I can't do it.
Sixth, log files can be exported to plain text very easily. You can also use the vbscript Eventquery.vbs to view event log entries.
This script isn't included with NT or 2000. It appears to be included with XP Pro and WS2003, but I can't find the code anywhere. How am I supposed to read the logs on a system without a scripting host?
Why are my points "pedantic?" I didn't sit here and research them. These are a brief list of things that I've had to work around to do regular system administration tasks (dead computer forensics are unfortunately part of my regular duties). They happened to be on my mind.
You used the term "Linux". Hate to beat this dead horse, but that's only the kernel. When you say "Linux" in the context of the whole system, I assume "Linux + GNU System".
Missing stuff? True multi-user support, and separation for system and user binaries/libraries. Arbitrary mount-points. A human-readable registry that is not lumped into a single binary file that requires a special tool to edit (although Microsoft can keep their stuff in it if they want to). A host of command-line utilities that make automation possible (Windows 2000 had AD, but didn't ship the command-line utilities for manipulating AD objects until WS2003, for example). The ability to load multiple sets of kernel drivers so you don't have to wait while Windows redetects everything after being re-imaged. Plain text log files.
Stuff like that. Yes, you can buy third-party utilities, but it's like no one at Microsoft actually uses their operating systems. There are lots of little annoyances that just consume your time as a net admin. The myriad of little utilities in the average GNU/Linux distro appeared to be included by someone who knows what is useful (and probably also some stuff where someone said "this is neat, let's put it in.")
Not that I disagree that [GNU] hasn't, on some levels held technology back, but frankly the [Microsoft] community hasn't done much to push it either, though things are starting to change on that front. [Microsoft] is begining to stop copying everyone else and start doing some of it's own thinking for a change. That's a good thing.
I think it's interesting that we can exchange the two in this paragraph, and it makes just as much sense. There are cases to be made against both. Saying that GNU copies things is sort of a silly accusation to make. No kidding. The GNU system's stated purpose is to make an (improved) workalike of UNIX, without actually copying the code. I likewise don't see the purpose of accusing GNU/Linux of copying and then trying to contrast that with Windows, which is basically the result of ideas copied from MacOS, CP/M, and UNIX.
It seems to me like Microsoft HAS been farther along in many technologies than Linux, such as native language input and localization for years. It seems to me Linux is still playing catchup to many of MS's supposedly inferior technologies.
This is just one example of the many things that will provide us with many hours of debate surrounding the two operating systems. Windows and GNU/Linux development are driven by two entirely different processes; one requires that the product be complete so that it may delivered in a retail package (at the expense of features and with an emphasis on backward compatibility), the other is developed by a loosely connected network of developers that add features they find useful. Chinese localization may be important to one person, but I've no need for it. There are plenty of UNIX-style features that I wish Windows had, the absence of which makes my job as an administrator a lot more difficult than it should be.
Finally, a last note. You note about locking you into a Microsoft paradigm. The people this is targted to are users of MS software already.
Hmmm, I don't agree with this part. If there is demand for "software that can cluster without much modification", then why are they selling it as an entirely new product instead of an add-on? Microsoft's developer base is having a hard time coming to grips with application design that doesn't presume a single-user with full access rights. There's going to be little benefit from installing some application that hasn't been rewritten, or isn't easily parallelized to begin with. My point is that these potential customers are probably going to be starting from square one, so whether or not they're running Windows elsewhere doesn't mean a whole lot.
Other than that, it just looks to me like Microsoft is just keeping up with the industry. Nothing wrong with that, since they've been trying to break out of the low-end Wintel market for a while now.
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I'm willing to guess there was quite a bit of innovation and feature-packing going on in MSO over the last five years. But here's the problem: I don't need most of those features, and neither do my users. Some of the things are counter-intuitive and frustrating to a lot people. I also don't need the MS Office price tag, either. Use only what you need to get the job done and save money. Isn't that what this is all about anyway?
I tried various mispellings, and OO 1.1.4 doesn't seem to have trouble with that word. If you're spelling it 'reticulously', then I don't think MSO or WP is going to have a clue, either.
Otherwise, if it's that off the mark, I'd venture to guess it's a bug that needs correcting.
I've been using it for more than a year now at the office. There's still no way to read MS Access database files, which is a major drawback. Other than that, I prefer Calc over Excel because of features that make data import/export/retouching easier. I also get lots of use out of Draw, something which MSO really should consider. 'Write' gets the work done, but as of 1.1.3, it has problems exporting to Word 97/2000/XP format (their name, not mine), where it dumps something in the file that totally screws up the formatting when MSO tries to read it (all the special mark-up is lost and the file can't be converted to a real MSO format). Reading Word files works fine, but sometimes it does not pick the correct font size and margin sizes.
Thus far, Open Office hasn't crashed on me or mangled any data, unlike Office 95/97/2000. They fixed the annoying hi-lighting bugs from 1.1.0, but it still has an annoying tendency to open up random new, blank documents when you open a document and an OO window is already open.
I have not tested the Word export problem on 1.1.4, so I don't know if it is fixed or not.
On behalf of compulsive readers of information on the Internet, I'd like to say: Thanks a lot, I waste more time on your site than anywhere else! I sit down and read some article, and before I know it, I've got another 8 tabs open with crosslinks to other Wikipedia articles, and another hour has come and gone.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is going to improve the security of their very popular development framework (let's be honest, its primary purpose is not browsing - unless it's still 1999). My question is: Will they continue to maintain it, aside from the major vulnerabilities that can't be ignored? The Mozilla project continues to protect me from security problems and bugs that I wasn't even aware of, and deliver features that I wouldn't have guessed would be so useful. Mozilla.org has it's own set of forums where users can discuss bugs, technical problems, security issues and new features. These forums are actually read by Mozilla developers. Mozilla Project has a much better chance for survival because they have the right process in place to ensure that their product evolves in the right direction.
What is being delivered this summer isn't even IE7, it's only a beta release. I can only assume from your optimism that you've got a strong bias toward Microsoft, because only someone with that attitude could look at the short list you provided, and think that those are the only things wrong with IE, and that those things can be fixed by a single upgrade. Security is a process, not a single patch, and Microsoft actively discourages the finding and reporting of vulnerabilities. Standards-compliance only works if they actually keep up with the standards. Tabbed browsing has been a staple of Mozilla-based browsers for years, users love it, and Microsoft is only considering it now?! Microsoft has yet to admit that some of the persistent security issues with IE are the fault of the underlying operating system design, and has yet to take steps to either correct those flaws or even shield the browser from them. IE is doomed.
I disagree, if we group all types of Voice comm over the Internet, you have more choice than you would with POTS. With Cringley's point-to-point voice app, for example, or any PC-based voice app, the limit to the quality is the codec and the limit of your bandwidth. You can pull down audio streams that the sound quality of a land-line could never hope to match. There's a lot of leeway that the old tech just doesn't have.
And because of this, I don't think it's going to be that easy for the reunified Bells to fight. There could be any number of protocols appearing on any number of ports. They'll have to ruin their service in general to fight back. They are likely going to squander money and make themselves less competitive in the marketplace. Two parties don't necessarily have to buy into some formal contract to enjoy casual use of VoIP. Heck, I fire up Teamspeak and talk to friends in the Southern US, Spain and the Netherlands. It costs me squat, because it's just a drip in the bucket of my bandwidth. It doesn't cost me anything in convenience, either, because I'd have to be sitting at home to use POTS anyway.
Maybe businesses can't get by with this, but since home computers are so commonplace, as are full-duplex sound cards and free voip applications, the casual use is going to continue hurting the Bells, if not crank up the hurt a few notches in the near future.
p.s. It just occured to me how amazing it is for me to be having a "conference" call with people all over the Americas and Europe, and completely taking it for granted. I can still remember getting an earful from the folks back in the day (when AT&T told you what type of phone you could have in your house) when calling my cousin on peak hours was 40 cents a minute!
I don't know if you guys poke around for this kind of info on the web or not, but there are sites (which I will not link to) dedicated to all the kinds of alterations you can do to make XP into something other than the flavor it is currently, including hints on where to get illegal copies of the missing components. I recently read an entertaining thread about turning XP Home into Media Center Ed. I have no doubt that SE is doomed to the same fate.
These guys have already done all kinds of wacky stuff to get around soft limits and product activation. They already get their updates from third-party sources. Microsoft must be aware of this stuff by now. It makes me wonder if the Start Edition is really just a ruse to inflate the seriousness of the illegal copying problem. Don't get me wrong, it's bad overseas, but one can't exactly claim (and retain his credibility) that he is losing sales in a country where he does not sell his product.
Not to mention they're doing regular audits, which is more than I can say for some downstream users of my credit data.
Can't your browser just read the contents of the 'evil' field from the certificate? If it's set to 'true', you don't run it!
I was about to go off on a tirade about the editor, but I can see from the TFA that the blame clearly rests on the original authors.
Oh good grief, my head hurts from this one:
It has nothing to do with security problems in either IE, Firefox, or Java. The user is authorizing a foreign, untrusted piece of software to run. It could happen through any browser using Sun's JRE, or an ActiveX control. It could be a script, or a trojan application. Yes, the operating system allows software to do things like this. If you can't trust yourself or your users to read warnings, then use an unprivileged account to do your browsing, and lock down the registry.
Check out this follow-up:
What's the point? If the user runs malicious software, it can do anything allowed by the user's current OS permissions, including editing parts of the registry that aren't protected. Whether or not IE is the target is irrelevant.
TFA: Troll -1
Oh well, that was 20 years ago. Now the US Army just wants bodies...
No, they still want motivated and intelligent volunteers. This is the IDF we're talking about, not the US Army. The last time the Army thought they could save money by sending idiots into battle with full-auto weapons, we lost a war.
I think their psychological research is refuse. They're intentionally leaving out a segment of the population that likely has higher-than-average intelligence and a willingness to learn new skills. These are exactly the type of people that should occupy posts that require complex skills.
Just for the hell of, I did:
Your search - "why is it called 802.11b" - did not match any documents.
I think that's the first time Google every came up with nothing.
The primary concern should really be format. If Agency X is smart, they'd pick a standard format for each type of document they need to store. Changing back-up media is one thing, but imagine changing document formats so the data remains usable in the future. Let's say Agency X's document needs are met by Richtext format (just for an example, okay?). The format happens to have broad support, and even if that support evaporates in 10 years, it's still intelligible enough to write a converter without having the format spec spelled out.
Then the choices become: Which word processors a) don't crash all the time, b) run on their computers, c) are affordable, and d) can read/write RTF. In that light, it doesn't matter which they pick. It could be MS Office for all I care, but it gives Agency X, and all the people that correspond with Agency X, a choice they otherwise would not have. Then those connected with Agency X can pick Open Office, Easy Office, Star Office, Corel Office, MS Office, or whatever meets their desired level of comfort.
Honestly, there should be an unencumbered standard. It exists with nearly every other industry, and even some types of data transfers, like those among banks. Considering the retention and security requirments of the DoJ, shouldn't they have farmed to someone to create a published, standard format? Yes, I'm sensitive to this. My employer was forced to buy hundreds of seats of Office 2000 because our oversight agencies refused to take the extra steps to save their documents in a more common format. Basically, they screwed us and our taxpayers.
Now I will pick on TFA, because it deserves picking:
If, for the sake of argument, we say that each of those MSO copies were full retail at $500, that's about 5.6 million copies sold for just three quarters of one fiscal year. So less than one per cent of the sales volume is "intense" competition? That sales volume estimate is very conservative, considering that Microsoft most likely rakes in the bucks from volume license agreements.
The author is attempting to create some sort of journalistic drama here, lacing his piece with references to the anti-trust case. Here in the middle we find this gem. Sorry, there's no message being sent to Redmond. The DoJ's choice was obviously influenced by the fact that they have an enormous body of documents that is already stored in WP format.
Well, that's a nice gesture. A better decision would allow those 20 organizations to pick their own office suite.
I'm not sure what this means. But how is this any different than MS Office? You still have to use a proprietary format
I don't feel that way about it. NASA and all the other government-funded institutions are doing research in more fields than in the 60s. Let me rephrase that: Those institutions have much better tech to support their research than in the 60s. Kennedy wanted to put an astronaut on the moon. It happened. I guess that's sort of amazing considering the amount of funds spent on the Vietnam War, but the point I'm making here is that there was one goal for the space program in the 1960s. Now resources (not just those allocated to NASA) are spread between many more ground-based and unmanned projects.
As great as the moon landings were, we've proven that mankind can do it, and I don't see the point in stressing about that fact that we can't do it right this second. I'm sure we could direct our efforts to put men on the moon again. But why? What's the research value? Would it be worth cancelling all those other unmanned programs? And why does the US in particular have to do it?
Forgive my ignorace, how does one do this from the shell, either with Explorer or a CLI command? Does this function allow me to prevent the mounting of selected volumes? Can I mount network shares on the local filesystem?
You can only do this to the native registry that is currently open on your boot disk. Certain areas are protected by the kernel. You cannot log-on as one user and edit the configuration for another user's profile. This also is in one-direction, I'm not working with "The Registry", I'm working with an text export. I can't successfully make changes or repairs unless I can import it back. In order to do that, the machine has to be functional enough to allow me to do this. I can't edit a foreign registry on a functioning machine.
The server resource kits are not, and have never been free to copy to the best of my knowledge. Yes, I can copy the utilities from warez sites or from another MS product, but according to the EULA, I'm not supposed to do that. While I'm thankful that WSH exists, it isn't nearly as flexible because the internals of Windows aren't nearly as open as GNU/Linux. Therefore, if there isn't an API call to do it, I can't do it.
This script isn't included with NT or 2000. It appears to be included with XP Pro and WS2003, but I can't find the code anywhere. How am I supposed to read the logs on a system without a scripting host?
Why are my points "pedantic?" I didn't sit here and research them. These are a brief list of things that I've had to work around to do regular system administration tasks (dead computer forensics are unfortunately part of my regular duties). They happened to be on my mind.
You used the term "Linux". Hate to beat this dead horse, but that's only the kernel. When you say "Linux" in the context of the whole system, I assume "Linux + GNU System".
Missing stuff? True multi-user support, and separation for system and user binaries/libraries. Arbitrary mount-points. A human-readable registry that is not lumped into a single binary file that requires a special tool to edit (although Microsoft can keep their stuff in it if they want to). A host of command-line utilities that make automation possible (Windows 2000 had AD, but didn't ship the command-line utilities for manipulating AD objects until WS2003, for example). The ability to load multiple sets of kernel drivers so you don't have to wait while Windows redetects everything after being re-imaged. Plain text log files.
Stuff like that. Yes, you can buy third-party utilities, but it's like no one at Microsoft actually uses their operating systems. There are lots of little annoyances that just consume your time as a net admin. The myriad of little utilities in the average GNU/Linux distro appeared to be included by someone who knows what is useful (and probably also some stuff where someone said "this is neat, let's put it in.")
Linux desktop environments strive to look more like Windows. There's a huge difference between that, and actually being built like Windows.
This is just one example of the many things that will provide us with many hours of debate surrounding the two operating systems. Windows and GNU/Linux development are driven by two entirely different processes; one requires that the product be complete so that it may delivered in a retail package (at the expense of features and with an emphasis on backward compatibility), the other is developed by a loosely connected network of developers that add features they find useful. Chinese localization may be important to one person, but I've no need for it. There are plenty of UNIX-style features that I wish Windows had, the absence of which makes my job as an administrator a lot more difficult than it should be.
Don't bother. All they fixed were some spelling errors in the comment lines.
Other than that, it just looks to me like Microsoft is just keeping up with the industry. Nothing wrong with that, since they've been trying to break out of the low-end Wintel market for a while now.
I don't have to imagine it. I experienced it this past Monday.
Why don't they require something useful, like a boob-cast flag? Then I could set my DVR to only record shows with the BCF set to 'TRUE'.
Just in case anyone was wondering, this wasn't me posting as AC (and trying to stir up trouble again). ;o)
Chances are that your diary isn't a mom-and-pop operation. Therefore, it's corporate welfare. Why do we subsidize dairy farmers anyway?