My home laptop *never* reboots. Never. It goes to standby, hibernates after an hour, and i wake it back up again. I reboot it maybe once in a month or two.
My work machine is up 24/7, I reboot it about once every two or three weeks.
I support ~200 desktops in my department. XP boxes are by far the easiest to support, rarely do they crash myteriously, Win2k is about the same, NT4, a little worse. All our PC's are on *all the time* for nightly maintenance, inventory, auditing, patching, etcetera. We haven't had any serious blue screening problems since we got rid of legacy 16bit crapware designed for win 3.1/95.
Interesting. My tech staff have been telling me that people who have Palm Pilots must have admin rights, else the sync software won't run correctly. That's hardly ancient software.
I've seen a lot of software similar to this that requires installation as the user, yet requires admin rights. Usually it's something like this, mail-related, browser certificates or something similar, that depends on the users profile to provide authentication. Usually you just need admin rights to install, not to use.
Windows admins hate this. We're not morons, we know it's stupid. This is one reason why Windows admins hate developers. They don't know anything about how the system should work, because of that they fsck up everything they touch, and they just have to have admin rights, because they're "special".
Also, since the editorial already starts us off with an "OS X vs Linux" flamewar, let me add to the discussion... Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!
I've worked in a major Fortune 500 industrial manufacturer, a Fortune 500 financial inatitution and a small biotech startup, and all three of them had Windows admins and Unix admins. Why do you suppose that is?
Oh, yeah, I remember. Because most Unix weenies aren't any good at administering Windows, and they can't see around their gigantic egos to realize that, so they're incapable of improving.
What is important is that these examples show clearly how Microsoft's evaluation of itself comes into being. First, someone who knows nothing about technical matters, and absolutely does not care about technical matters, quickly writes a complete fantasy. Then the fantasy is sent to some people who have a clue, who eventually eliminate the worst of the inventions.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
And this differs from any other marketing department in any other company in the world how?
I don't know, I've been complaining about this for some time now. Have you ever tried to figure out what the best deal is on paper towels? Without a calculator to figure out the cents per quare inch ratio?
Shopped for toothpaste? Chose a natural gas supplier or a long-distance phone company? Been down the bread aisle? There's a dozen and a half different types of kitty litter, for chrissakes.
Paper or plastic? Truth or dare? boxers or briefs? Beavis or Butthead?
It 's not that having any one of these choices is necessarily bad, but altogether, they tend to be overwhelming. I don't have time to stand in the grocery store trying to figure out which is the cheapest, most politically correct, dolphin-safe, rich in fiber choice for each and every item I buy, then go home and do the same with my utilities, cellphone plan, Internet provider, etcetera etcetera.
Which leaves me with the nagging feeling that I made the wrong choice, that I'm wasting money, killing dolphins, raising my cholestorol, whatever. It's stress our parents and grandparents didn't have. It doesn't actually make people happier to have all these choices, is the point.
They published it in QuarkXPress because it was done by the Marketing/Graphic Arts department, who insisted on using Macintoshes, because that's what Marketing/Graphic Arts people do, and not even Bill Gates could convince them otherwise.
Did you think they'd be doing it in Open Office if it was a Linux shop?
If you take it out of the box and put it in a laptop bag, install some software on it, browse a few porn sites, finger the whole thing up with potato chip grease for a few days and hang a luggage tag off it, how are they going to know where/when you bought it?
Seriously, I'm not trolling here. How could they tell by a cursory examination whether you had this with you when you left home?
Everyone tells me it can be done, but show me where on 2000 you can turn off...
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
That gets bound to every interface. With multiple network adapters, you can not tell it to stop binding to one
I don't have 2k up right now, but I'm pretty sure its' under TCP/IP properties advanced, you can allow or deny access by port, I don't remember if it's by adapter, though.
C'mon. It's tasklist (space)/svc. You've never used an optional parameter on a command line before?
So how is the average user to know how to use commands which might not even be present?
Besides, the average user would need someone to kindly explain what a service is and why they would want to look for them. (Or yell at them for not being l337 and call them clueless depending on your inclinations.)
but strangely enough, the answer is Linux. Which apparently doesn't use services, or have any pesky commands to type at the command line.
Uhh, yeah. That's why most of my tickets at work are for developers who had to have admin rights, who hosed up their box by screwing around with things they shouldn't be touching.
Then everyone on/. can start complaining about "paper LCSE's" with no experience being churned out by cut-rate tech schools.
Grizzled old MS vets will pine for the days when people really knew how to get inside the registry, and writing a good VBScript wasn't a foreign concept.
The attempt by Microsoft to cut prices for one customer (preditory pricing against a competitor) is definitely anti-capitalist, since in a free-market situation you have to sell each product for the same price to all customers. Otherwise the system doesn't work efficiently and you end up with market failures such as monopoly.
Apparently you've never shopped for a new or used car.
"including the costs involved in retraining city employees accustomed to working with Windows 98, 95 and 3.1"
They're migrating from early 1990's software. It's not "big bad MS forced migration, blah blah blah".
I wonder what they're running Win 3.1 on? Probably not P4's. Apparently they've been stingy for years and now they need to spend a wad of cash no matter what system they go to. How is this Microsofts fault?
You know, if you Linux fanboys would get your noses out of the air long enough to actually learn something about XP, instead of spewing the same old wive's tales and self-congratulatory bullshit, you might learn that it doesn't suck anywhere near as bad as you'd like to think.
I've been supporting MS since 1993, and although win 3.1 and 95/98 sucked, and NT4 had it's share of issues, I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw a BSOD on Win2k or XP *in the user environment*. Application errors happen, but are usually recoverable without a reboot. My main reason for rebooting is usually a hung app that won't die, or is hogging CPU cycles, but the OS is almost always still usable. BSOD's happen on startup when boot or registry files become corrupt, but rarely from a misbehaving app or driver.
You guys really need to update your shtick, it's not relevant anymore. It's like your still complaining about horse crap on the streets. Look out the window, it's the 21st century.
"First, a question: What's up with all this "Ctrl C" and Ctrl V" copy/paste stuff?... All this Ctrl key action slows me down.
>This is a problem? Only if you need two hands on the mouse. Frankly, the better I get at Windows, the less I use a mouse.
Highlight text with right hand on mouse. Left hand little finger on Ctrl key, index finger taps C Leaving little finger on Ctrl, click insert location with mouse Tap V with index finger.
Apparently Linux users can't use both hands for dissimilar activities. How are they with walking and chewing gum, I wonder?
" The Windows update process told me nothing except that it was happening, and that I needed to reboot when it was over. A Windows-using friend said, "Yes, that's the way it works, and if you don't do the updates your computer keeps annoying you"
Umm, no. If patches were that insistent, everyone would be patched and viruses would not be a problem. Don't like Winodw Update? Turn it off. How? As you Linux geels like to say, RTFM.
"It seems Windows, doesn't come with office and other productivity software. You need to buy or otherwise obtain and install your own."
Any commercially purchased PC offers "Productivity packages" of MSOffice, MSWorks, Corel or some other office suite. You have to work to un-include them from your order. No, they aren't "free-as-in-speech/beer" but don't say they didn't try to sell them to you.
"Once again, the software download and install was as easy as I've come to expect from a modern Linux distribution. Indeed, it was slightly faster since I didn't need to type in my root password to make the installation happen, but I think this lack of security for software installation may be one of the causes of the hidden spyware problems I keep reading about Windows users having, so I'm not sure saving the work of typing "***********" into a little box when you want to install or update a program is worth the security risk it causes. "
I've installed and used Linux, and it has no problem with me running it as root. Follow best practices and create a non-admin account for your day-to-day activities. Need root access? shift-right click and choose "run as" and type in your root id/password. Again, RTFM.
"One program that does come with Windows XP Pro is a Web browser called 'Microsoft Internet Explorer.' I have heard that over 90% of all Web-connected people in the world use this browser, but I find this hard to believe. It doesn't have the tabbed browser feature that makes work-related research (and pleasure reading) such a pleasure in Mozilla, Opera, and other modern browsers."
Never heard of it, can't imagine it being useful, don't miss it. You're so attached to your mouse for cut-and-paste, why is it hard to click "Next" at the bottom of a web page?
"Forget the endless worm and virus problems that plague Outlook and Outlook Express. While they're enough in and of themselves to turn any sane person away from this pair of email programs, the spam thing makes them totally and completely useless. Yes, I know there are lots of server tricks I could use (and lots of proprietary spam blocker programs I could buy), but again the question is, "Why bother when Mozilla is free and does just what I need?" "
I agree, Outlook Express sucks. But it's free and included with the OS/browser. do you use every free applet that comes packaged with your Linux distro? No, that's part of the ooh-ahh factor espounded by Linux zealots, you can pick and choose your apps for free. Don't like OE? Download Eudora, Mulberry or any of the other freeware POP3 or IMAP clients. Personally I think Mulberry is the worst abomination ever foisted on an unsuspecting public, but hey, to each his own, right?
"My copy of Windows XP Pro seems to have a program included with it called 'Windows Messenger' that, as far as I can tell, is some sort of ad delivery mechanism. I haven't figured out how to turn it off. It is very annoying. "
"First, a question: What's up with all this "Ctrl C" and Ctrl V" copy/paste stuff?... All this Ctrl key action slows me down. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I need to work quickly if I want to earn a living, and I don't see why Windows wants me to go through all those extra hand motions just to paste a URL into a story. Geh.
>This is a problem? Only if you need two hands on the mouse. Frankly, the better I get at Windows, the less I use a mouse.
Highlight text with right hand on mouse.
Left hand little finger on Ctrl key, index finger taps C
Leaving little finger on Ctrl, click insert location with mouse
Tap V with index finger.
Apparently Linux users can't use both hands for dissimilar activities. How are they with walking and chewing gum, I wonder?
" The Windows update process told me nothing except that it was happening, and that I needed to reboot when it was over. A Windows-using friend said, "Yes, that's the way it works, and if you don't do the updates your computer keeps annoying you, so you have to do them even if they take hours like they sometimes do."
Umm, no. If patches were that insistent, everyone would be patched and viruses would not be a problem. Don't like Winodw Update? Turn it off. How? As you Linux geels like to say, RTFM.
"It seems Windows, unlike most commercial Linux distributions, doesn't come with office and other productivity software. You need to buy or otherwise obtain and install your own."
Any commercially purchased PC offers "Productivity packages" of MSOffice, MSWorks, Corel or some other office suite. You have to work to un-include them from your order. No, they aren't "free-as-in-speech/beer" but don't say they didn't try to sell them to you.
"Once again, the software download and install was as easy as I've come to expect from a modern Linux distribution. Indeed, it was slightly faster since I didn't need to type in my root password to make the installation happen, but I think this lack of security for software installation may be one of the causes of the hidden spyware problems I keep reading about Windows users having, so I'm not sure saving the work of typing "***********" into a little box when you want to install or update a program is worth the security risk it causes. "
I've installed and used Linux, and it has no problem with me running it as root. Follow best practices and create a non-admin account for your day-to-day activities. Need root access? shift-right click and choose "run as" and type in your root id/password. Again, RTFM.
"One program that does come with Windows XP Pro is a Web browser called 'Microsoft Internet Explorer.' I have heard that over 90% of all Web-connected people in the world use this browser, but I find this hard to believe. It doesn't have the tabbed browser feature that makes work-related research (and pleasure reading) such a pleasure in Mozilla, Opera, and other modern browsers."
Never heard of it, can't imagine it being useful, don't miss it. You're so attached to your mouse for cut-and-paste, why is it hard to click "Next" at the bottom of a web page?
"Forget the endless worm and virus problems that plague Outlook and Outlook Express. While they're enough in and of themselves to turn any sane person away from this pair of email programs, the spam thing makes them totally and completely useless. Yes, I know there are lots of server tricks I could use (and lots of proprietary spam blocker programs I could buy), but again the question is, "Why bother when Mozilla is free and does just what I need?" "
I agree, Outlook Express sucks. But it's free and included with the OS/browser. do you use every free applet that comes packaged with your Linux distro? No, that's part of the ooh-ahh factor espounded by Linux zealots, you can pick and choose your apps for free. Don't like OE? Download Eudora, Mulberry or any of the other freeware POP3 or IMAP clients. Personally I think Mulberry is the worst abomination ever foisted on an unsuspecting public, but hey, to each his own, right?
"My copy of Windows XP Pro seems to have
Slashdot Mirror
But, but, but I thought Linux was perfect in every way!
No, that'd be RED
Yes. Why else do they have Xerox machines in libraries?
My work machine is up 24/7, I reboot it about once every two or three weeks.
I support ~200 desktops in my department. XP boxes are by far the easiest to support, rarely do they crash myteriously, Win2k is about the same, NT4, a little worse. All our PC's are on *all the time* for nightly maintenance, inventory, auditing, patching, etcetera. We haven't had any serious blue screening problems since we got rid of legacy 16bit crapware designed for win 3.1/95.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to post this.
I've seen a lot of software similar to this that requires installation as the user, yet requires admin rights. Usually it's something like this, mail-related, browser certificates or something similar, that depends on the users profile to provide authentication. Usually you just need admin rights to install, not to use.
Windows admins hate this. We're not morons, we know it's stupid. This is one reason why Windows admins hate developers. They don't know anything about how the system should work, because of that they fsck up everything they touch, and they just have to have admin rights, because they're "special".
Hi. My name is Webmin. Have we met?
err, isn't Webmin a GUI? A "graphical user interface" to the text config files?
I've worked in a major Fortune 500 industrial manufacturer, a Fortune 500 financial inatitution and a small biotech startup, and all three of them had Windows admins and Unix admins. Why do you suppose that is?
Oh, yeah, I remember. Because most Unix weenies aren't any good at administering Windows, and they can't see around their gigantic egos to realize that, so they're incapable of improving.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
And this differs from any other marketing department in any other company in the world how?
Shopped for toothpaste? Chose a natural gas supplier or a long-distance phone company? Been down the bread aisle? There's a dozen and a half different types of kitty litter, for chrissakes.
Paper or plastic? Truth or dare? boxers or briefs? Beavis or Butthead?
It 's not that having any one of these choices is necessarily bad, but altogether, they tend to be overwhelming. I don't have time to stand in the grocery store trying to figure out which is the cheapest, most politically correct, dolphin-safe, rich in fiber choice for each and every item I buy, then go home and do the same with my utilities, cellphone plan, Internet provider, etcetera etcetera.
Which leaves me with the nagging feeling that I made the wrong choice, that I'm wasting money, killing dolphins, raising my cholestorol, whatever. It's stress our parents and grandparents didn't have. It doesn't actually make people happier to have all these choices, is the point.
Did you think they'd be doing it in Open Office if it was a Linux shop?
Seriously, I'm not trolling here. How could they tell by a cursory examination whether you had this with you when you left home?
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
That gets bound to every interface. With multiple network adapters, you can not tell it to stop binding to one
I don't have 2k up right now, but I'm pretty sure its' under TCP/IP properties advanced, you can allow or deny access by port, I don't remember if it's by adapter, though.
So how is the average user to know how to use commands which might not even be present?
Besides, the average user would need someone to kindly explain what a service is and why they would want to look for them. (Or yell at them for not being l337 and call them clueless depending on your inclinations.)
but strangely enough, the answer is Linux. Which apparently doesn't use services, or have any pesky commands to type at the command line.
Uhh, yeah. That's why most of my tickets at work are for developers who had to have admin rights, who hosed up their box by screwing around with things they shouldn't be touching.
Grizzled old MS vets will pine for the days when people really knew how to get inside the registry, and writing a good VBScript wasn't a foreign concept.
Apparently you've never shopped for a new or used car.
They're migrating from early 1990's software. It's not "big bad MS forced migration, blah blah blah". I wonder what they're running Win 3.1 on? Probably not P4's. Apparently they've been stingy for years and now they need to spend a wad of cash no matter what system they go to. How is this Microsofts fault?
No more than 10 computers can connect to any one windows worksatation at any time. Has nothing to do with number of PC's in a network.
Inbound Connections Limit in Windows XP
You know, if you Linux fanboys would get your noses out of the air long enough to actually learn something about XP, instead of spewing the same old wive's tales and self-congratulatory bullshit, you might learn that it doesn't suck anywhere near as bad as you'd like to think.
Ok, there WERE carriage returns in this when I previewed it.
I've been supporting MS since 1993, and although win 3.1 and 95/98 sucked, and NT4 had it's share of issues, I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw a BSOD on Win2k or XP *in the user environment*. Application errors happen, but are usually recoverable without a reboot. My main reason for rebooting is usually a hung app that won't die, or is hogging CPU cycles, but the OS is almost always still usable. BSOD's happen on startup when boot or registry files become corrupt, but rarely from a misbehaving app or driver. You guys really need to update your shtick, it's not relevant anymore. It's like your still complaining about horse crap on the streets. Look out the window, it's the 21st century.
"First, a question: What's up with all this "Ctrl C" and Ctrl V" copy/paste stuff?... All this Ctrl key action slows me down.
>This is a problem? Only if you need two hands on the mouse. Frankly, the better I get at Windows, the less I use a mouse.
Highlight text with right hand on mouse.
Left hand little finger on Ctrl key, index finger taps C
Leaving little finger on Ctrl, click insert location with mouse
Tap V with index finger.
Apparently Linux users can't use both hands for dissimilar activities. How are they with walking and chewing gum, I wonder?
" The Windows update process told me nothing except that it was happening, and that I needed to reboot when it was over. A Windows-using friend said, "Yes, that's the way it works, and if you don't do the updates your computer keeps annoying you"
Umm, no. If patches were that insistent, everyone would be patched and viruses would not be a problem. Don't like Winodw Update? Turn it off. How? As you Linux geels like to say, RTFM.
"It seems Windows, doesn't come with office and other productivity software. You need to buy or otherwise obtain and install your own."
Any commercially purchased PC offers "Productivity packages" of MSOffice, MSWorks, Corel or some other office suite. You have to work to un-include them from your order. No, they aren't "free-as-in-speech/beer" but don't say they didn't try to sell them to you.
"Once again, the software download and install was as easy as I've come to expect from a modern Linux distribution. Indeed, it was slightly faster since I didn't need to type in my root password to make the installation happen, but I think this lack of security for software installation may be one of the causes of the hidden spyware problems I keep reading about Windows users having, so I'm not sure saving the work of typing "***********" into a little box when you want to install or update a program is worth the security risk it causes. "
I've installed and used Linux, and it has no problem with me running it as root. Follow best practices and create a non-admin account for your day-to-day activities. Need root access? shift-right click and choose "run as" and type in your root id/password. Again, RTFM.
"One program that does come with Windows XP Pro is a Web browser called 'Microsoft Internet Explorer.' I have heard that over 90% of all Web-connected people in the world use this browser, but I find this hard to believe. It doesn't have the tabbed browser feature that makes work-related research (and pleasure reading) such a pleasure in Mozilla, Opera, and other modern browsers."
Never heard of it, can't imagine it being useful, don't miss it. You're so attached to your mouse for cut-and-paste, why is it hard to click "Next" at the bottom of a web page?
"Forget the endless worm and virus problems that plague Outlook and Outlook Express. While they're enough in and of themselves to turn any sane person away from this pair of email programs, the spam thing makes them totally and completely useless. Yes, I know there are lots of server tricks I could use (and lots of proprietary spam blocker programs I could buy), but again the question is, "Why bother when Mozilla is free and does just what I need?" "
I agree, Outlook Express sucks. But it's free and included with the OS/browser. do you use every free applet that comes packaged with your Linux distro? No, that's part of the ooh-ahh factor espounded by Linux zealots, you can pick and choose your apps for free. Don't like OE? Download Eudora, Mulberry or any of the other freeware POP3 or IMAP clients. Personally I think Mulberry is the worst abomination ever foisted on an unsuspecting public, but hey, to each his own, right?
"My copy of Windows XP Pro seems to have a program included with it called 'Windows Messenger' that, as far as I can tell, is some sort of ad delivery mechanism. I haven't figured out how to turn it off. It is very annoying. "
RTFM, RTFM, RTFM!! Are you a mi
"First, a question: What's up with all this "Ctrl C" and Ctrl V" copy/paste stuff?... All this Ctrl key action slows me down. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I need to work quickly if I want to earn a living, and I don't see why Windows wants me to go through all those extra hand motions just to paste a URL into a story. Geh. >This is a problem? Only if you need two hands on the mouse. Frankly, the better I get at Windows, the less I use a mouse. Highlight text with right hand on mouse. Left hand little finger on Ctrl key, index finger taps C Leaving little finger on Ctrl, click insert location with mouse Tap V with index finger. Apparently Linux users can't use both hands for dissimilar activities. How are they with walking and chewing gum, I wonder? " The Windows update process told me nothing except that it was happening, and that I needed to reboot when it was over. A Windows-using friend said, "Yes, that's the way it works, and if you don't do the updates your computer keeps annoying you, so you have to do them even if they take hours like they sometimes do." Umm, no. If patches were that insistent, everyone would be patched and viruses would not be a problem. Don't like Winodw Update? Turn it off. How? As you Linux geels like to say, RTFM. "It seems Windows, unlike most commercial Linux distributions, doesn't come with office and other productivity software. You need to buy or otherwise obtain and install your own." Any commercially purchased PC offers "Productivity packages" of MSOffice, MSWorks, Corel or some other office suite. You have to work to un-include them from your order. No, they aren't "free-as-in-speech/beer" but don't say they didn't try to sell them to you. "Once again, the software download and install was as easy as I've come to expect from a modern Linux distribution. Indeed, it was slightly faster since I didn't need to type in my root password to make the installation happen, but I think this lack of security for software installation may be one of the causes of the hidden spyware problems I keep reading about Windows users having, so I'm not sure saving the work of typing "***********" into a little box when you want to install or update a program is worth the security risk it causes. " I've installed and used Linux, and it has no problem with me running it as root. Follow best practices and create a non-admin account for your day-to-day activities. Need root access? shift-right click and choose "run as" and type in your root id/password. Again, RTFM. "One program that does come with Windows XP Pro is a Web browser called 'Microsoft Internet Explorer.' I have heard that over 90% of all Web-connected people in the world use this browser, but I find this hard to believe. It doesn't have the tabbed browser feature that makes work-related research (and pleasure reading) such a pleasure in Mozilla, Opera, and other modern browsers." Never heard of it, can't imagine it being useful, don't miss it. You're so attached to your mouse for cut-and-paste, why is it hard to click "Next" at the bottom of a web page? "Forget the endless worm and virus problems that plague Outlook and Outlook Express. While they're enough in and of themselves to turn any sane person away from this pair of email programs, the spam thing makes them totally and completely useless. Yes, I know there are lots of server tricks I could use (and lots of proprietary spam blocker programs I could buy), but again the question is, "Why bother when Mozilla is free and does just what I need?" " I agree, Outlook Express sucks. But it's free and included with the OS/browser. do you use every free applet that comes packaged with your Linux distro? No, that's part of the ooh-ahh factor espounded by Linux zealots, you can pick and choose your apps for free. Don't like OE? Download Eudora, Mulberry or any of the other freeware POP3 or IMAP clients. Personally I think Mulberry is the worst abomination ever foisted on an unsuspecting public, but hey, to each his own, right? "My copy of Windows XP Pro seems to have