NTFS has file permissions, but they rarely came up in practice because everyone in Windows was doing everything as the Unix equivalent of root. In Unix, the obvious fix is to do a sudo chown -R newuser/mnt/olddrive (or an ultraghetto sudo chmod -R o+rwx/mnt/olddrive) . The user/permission concept is totally foreign to your average windows user though, and hence the problem.
Foreign is the right word, but the problem is more extensive and pervasive than familiarity or experience. First there is that mess called the registry and its tortured permission structure. Then there is an incoherent file system hierarchy where anything can be just about everywhere, except for what's supposted to in SYSTEMROOT or system32, which is where everything gets dumped anyway to avoid creating a path that's a mile long. Then there's Windows bizarre concept of file ownership. I create a file, but some other group owns it instead, but it's almost always executable by everyone, so no worries, right? Executable JPGs and GIFs and text files. LOL. Short of right-clicking one's way through the registry and file system, I doubt anyone knows and or manages anything, Microsoft included. And then, of course, there's all those services...
Sorry, but Microsoft will have to reinvent themselves a few more times before they discover Unix and these problems go away. These perennial discussions of "running as Administrator" vs. "running as a member of the Administrator's Group" vs. "running with limited privileges" obscure the real problems, and New and Improved Changes by Microsoft only mitigate the existing chaos. Get a typical home user to run with low privileges? Woohoo. That takes care of everything, doesn't it?
DOS-style attributes in combination with an overcomplex ACL/policy-based system and a nutty bunch of default user and group acounts (SYSTEM, anyone?) is painful enough without the embarassing lack of tools. I give it a few more years before they get round to giving us a terminal window in which perms and ownership are clear and visible, using chmod and chown become standard practice, and an appropriate umask can be defined. Should I hold my breath, I wonder?
In fact, I love advertisements so much, you can tattoo me and inject electrodes into my head so all I do is think about Microsoft and how badly I want the XBox 360. Yes, I would finally be able to die happy!
Yeah, but how do you *really* feel?
Years ago I stopped listening to commercial radio, stopped watching commercial television, and make it a point to avoid places, people and things that offer up any sort of commercially-inspired stimulus. I'd like to think myself progressive, but since T-shirts and clothing adorned with company logos are now all the rage, I think I must be either ahead of the times, or well behind them. Hell, I wonder if my license plate is too bare without the gratuitous car dealer information.
At any rate, I doubt the average person notices. Or cares. Whether it's the proverbial pebble in the shoe, the 60Hz flicker in the fluorescent lighting, the drone of cheap background music over even cheaper speakers at the supermarket or gas station, or the billboard on the freeway, the effects are too subliminable to raise a fuss. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's the only colour people have in their lives and may welcome it. A content-free web page without a cheerful ad is just too... empty. And in a consumer-oriented culture, not being encouraged buy something takes the fun out of things in much the same way as slows economic growth, the spread of democracy, and hinders the war on terrorism.
Or something like that.
$ ftp ftp.microsoft.com Connected to ftp.microsoft.com. 220 Microsoft FTP Service Name (ftp.microsoft.com:value_added): anonymous 331 Anonymous access allowed, send identity (e-mail name) as password. Password: 230-Welcome to FTP.MICROSOFT.COM. Where do you want to go today? Visit http://www.amazon.com/ 230 Anonymous user logged in. Remote system type is Windows_NT. ftp> quit 221 Thank you for using Microsoft products. Remember, Vons is value. Play hard. Do evil. Tastes great and less filling. This message brought to you by Fox News.
Window's current fdisk limits FAT32 partitions to 32GB... FAT32 allows for volumes up to 2TB. So unless Vista does something that prevents mounting a non-Windows formatted FAT32 drive, we should be fine.
Sure. For what values of fine is putting 32GB of data on a FAT32 file system a good idea?
Next we'll get into how spelling is a key component of communication and whether Times-Roman is far more readable than Courier...
No, that subject would be off-topic. But because you brought it up,;-), an equally important issue is whether one is reading for "readability" or comprehension. Print out a man page some time using a fixed-pitch font, read it aloud and see if you don't parse each word, sentence and punctuation mark in the way a lawyer would when reading or writing a contract. And then compare that experience with the routine skimming over of web-page content. I'll wager you'd do better on the man page pop quiz.
This is Slashdot, not "where to bitch about other people's use of the English language".
You're right, of course, but only to the extent that there exists no obligation for someone communicating in a text-only medium addressing an audience that may run into the tens of thousands to make an effort to be clear and understandable. IMHO, that involves Stuff You Should Have Learned in Grade School.
One service I would love would be a hack to SMB to bypass the idiotic Master Browser peer discovery mechanism in Windows workgroups so it can use ZeroConf instead.
If you're dancing the Samba, you can use the "Preferred Master = Yes" directive in smb.conf to do this. Works like a charm.
I hope most Slashdot readers are using NNTP by now (not NTP) to use their music, movies, software, pr0n, etc. etc.
I've always maintained and happily paid for a USENET subscription (with Easynews), so using a PTP application for binary downloads was a less attractive option. As far speeds go, my ISP (SBC) seems to have recently discovered NNTP, and has started to throttle the connections (by around 60%), which I found really annoying because I'm not in the habit of downloading anything large on a regular basis, and because I pay SBC for a Super Duper Premium plan.
Thinking I was clever, I decided to switch to using their HTTP servers (using wget). Mind you, Easynews does offer alternate NNTP server addresses, alternative ports, etc., but I didn't find any improvement. The switch worked like a charm.
My point, if there is one, is that people will always try to find workarounds to whatever their problem is, but more importantly, the issue of paying for a service marketed and sold as Download Faster With Us and discovering a different reality that may or may not mentioned in the fine print can lead to very unhappy customers. In my case, I really don't think I'm getting what I pay for.
#2, the color rendering sucks. You know how old fluorescents used to made you look undead? LED's suck even more.
Old fluorescents? My neighbour gave me a desk lamp the other day that I thought was kind of interesting looking so I went off to the hardware store to buy a new replacement bulb for it thinking that the new fluorescents were somehow improved over their predecessors. Surprise. Greenish-yellow light, albeit with a less noticeable 60Hz flicker. I didn't notice how bad it was at the time (the lamp was on a table in the corner of my office), but coming home late one night I could see that undead look emanating through the curtains.
It's possible I bought the wrong type (maybe someone clue me in on the subject), but the fluorescent/incandescent debate reminds me of the butter/margarine debate of years ago. I can't believe anyone would prefer margarine to butter any more than someone would want a home environment with all the warmth and charm of a used car dealership in South Central at night.
I'm all for new technologies and energy efficiency, but I don't believe that everything sold as energy-efficient belongs in the home. Unless, of course, your idea of decorating includes suspending up a string of small multi-coloured triangular flags from your ceiling. If there are appropriate uses (car dealerships among them), then it stands to reason there's more to the equation than efficiency and cost.
The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise. Having this will be essential to the success of any OS out there in 2-3 years.
Sounds plausible, but there's a problem in your logic. Money.
How much money is there in enterprise-level security? Now compare that with the balance sheets of the music and the film industry. Seems to me that the weight and influence of the those industries far exceeds the interests or fiduciary responsibilities of security professionals.
Cygwin (Bash, SSH, GCC, and other GNU/Linux tools)
Ok.
WinSCP (SCP client)
Why? If you have Cygwin installed, 'scp' is available.
PuTTY (excellent SSH client with tons of options)
You don't need a client. You already have one, and it has even more options. Or is 'ssh hostname' too much to type?
EmEditor (free version is a great replacement for Notepad)
Notepad is a toy, so I'm not sure why it's even mentioned. But if you're using Cygwin, why not vi? Or vim? Or gvim? Hell, even emacs is available.
CCleaner (cleans up temp files, browser cache, etc. for tons of programs)
So 'find' and/or 'cron' don't work? Or a simple shell script? Or Perl?
Spybot S&D (effective antispyware)
Point and clicky program for people who don't know what they're doing. Cygwin provides access to the registry, so you can parse out the relevant regkeys and clean out any crap that doesn't belong; an automated approach would require little more than a trivial script. For everything else, 'kill' in combination with 'find' and 'rm' work just fine.
PDFCreator (make PDFs by printing)
So all the programs in Cygwin's psutils package don't work?
Nero (CD/DVD burning)
Last I checked, 'cdrecord' compiles just fine under Cygwin.
Windows Desktop Search (corporate edition - without the MSN crap)
And 'find' or 'locate' don't work?
I think the point I'm trying to make here is that most of your Windows-specific suggestions fall into the Goofy(TM) category. Don't feel bad, because most everyone else is repeating this stuff ad nauseum. Put another way, I'd wager my last dollar that most Mac users trying out Windows for the first time will discover that Windows apps are typically ugly, badly designed or their Mac counterpart is superior in every way. And none of them is forced to rely on Cygwin.
And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal. It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.
At one's disposal? LOL. This smells like the access to healthcare canard. Millions of poor folk can't afford health insurance, but the discussion is coined in terms of acesss, the supposition being that the average poor person just needs better access. Like better access to a Mercedes dealership will get that poor person a new car.
Leaders historically have had access to all sorts of powers, both legitimate and otherwise. The issue is whether they would be inclined to make use of them, and if so, how they would go about doing so. And the answers to those questions with regards to the current administration are obvious to everyone.
Incidentally, Kerry, despite having run as a Presidential candidate a few years ago, is and remains a senator, and doesn't belong in the same conversation with Clinton and Gore. Unless you're trolling on the AM side of the radio dial.
RunAs DOES NOT WORK. Oh, it works sometimes, but any process spawned from your installer will run as the user, not the RunAs user as which the installer is running. This is because of a conscious design decision in Windows which is different from every other operating system I've ever used.
IIRC, to the degree runas does work or is useful, it's not scriptable to any useful degree. I'd recommend to everyone to give up on running as a user with limited credentials, messing with default permissions, or resorting to such hacks and use Windows the way it was meant to be used. What I do when I first boot up in the morning is enter
at [time]/interactive cmd
(where 'time' is a minute from the current time in 24hr format) when I boot up, and just run as SYSTEM.
It's just good business sense to know what the competition is doing. I'd be disappointed if they didn't.
Be prepare to be disappointed. Note the choice quote in the summary:
In addition, Port 25 will do video interviews with Microsoft employees with experience in the open-source or Unix world, Hilf said.
My guess is that those employees are few in number, and most work off-site, in the basement, or are otherwise segregated from the rest of the collective, but get to attend weekly meetings with the folks in Marketing.
Do you think they'd be reinventing themselves every few years if they understood the Unix world?
The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?
How about letting those who read the article and wish to post a comment say that?
Between the recent submissions by editors who have trouble fashioning a simple sentence from words containing the requisite letters arranged in the correct order and this lame-assed rhetoric, I'm left wondering whether Slashdot is devolving into something that resembles a grade-school newspaper.
Knowing about these bugs and electing _not_ to fix them expediently, couldn't this be considered a threat to national security?
Sure. But like our Commander in Chief said recently with respect to the ports management fuss, we have to balance the interests of natonal security with those of commerce. Achieving a similar balance with individual rights and freedoms, on the other hand, I guess is out of the question.
The moral of the story is that if you're a big company or a monopoly, your interests count. Unless, of couse, you're a member of that small but increasingly vocal minority that actually bothers to vote and can exert some influence on what your elected representatives do to earn their keep.
Are you kidding? You want me to encourage my congressman to publically fund open source software? You want the state to get involved in software development? Because you do you realize that the government doesn't just write blank checks.
We'll overlook the entire defense contracting industry.
No, sir, you can shove your socialized software up your ass. I want my government staying as far away from OSS as possible.
Your government? LOL. Too much talk radio for you. Last time I checked, it was our government. It's as inevitable as it is sad that such narrow viewpoints align themselves with equally narrow interests.
In the meantime, relax. Stretch. Take the dog for a walk. You might discover this concept called the common good. If not, Google for "publicly funded" and see if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes you on a journey where you discover all sorts of shit that you now get for free. If you're still not convinced, maybe your broker can sell you on some Diebold stock.
Add those entries to a Windows system (c:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc), and you can watch your browsing experience slow to a painful crawl.
The approach may work or work better if the DNS client service is disabled (which, incidentally, can be typically turned off without issue), though I haven't bother to check. Maybe someone else can comment.
Checking if your Windows install was legal used to be entirely voluntary. WGA is voluntary only in the sense of 'you don't need to participate...and we don't need to give you non-critical updates'. This is analogous to say...
IIRC, the WGA program was instituted to mitigate losses from the resellers on eBay and elsewhere who sold systems with a non-licensed install of XP. Given how widespread that practice was/is, the WGA program in conjunction with Microsoft's other efforts seems perfectly fair and consistent. From a consumer's standpoint, buying a used PC with no O/S installed is a deal-breaker, and discovering that their copy of XP isn't legit can be bit of shock, to say nothing of the predicament of no installation or "restore" CD.
As for the updates issue, I'm in agreement that it's problematic and at the very least, questionable on any number of grounds.
Personally, I think it the whole subject stinks. I've stuck with Windows 2000 and have recommend others to do the same (installing it for friends and non-paying clients when possible), but those days are numbered. Similarly, obtaining and maintaining a VLK or otherwised warezed copy is probably more trouble than it's worth, though somebody more knowledgable in that regard can correct me. Looking forward to Vista, it seems to me that the only options that remain are to take it sitting down, or make the break and switch to Linux.
If he didn't want his posts archived, all he had to do was have the following line at the top of his post...
x-noarchive: yes
Sorry, but that's wrong. The number of providers who honour X-noarchive renders that time-worn suggestion the equivalent of adding a legal privacy disclaimer to the end of an email sent to a public mailing list.
BTW has anyone else noticed how unusable slashdot is when the browser window is 300x200? You'd think they'd be more careful to test it on typical configurations like mine.
Actually, Slashdot looks fine in a 300x200 window.
Put another way, the ability to limit text to narrow (immensely readable) margins in combination with the absence of a horizontal scrollbar is what distinguishes Slashdot from most sites that offer news-related material.
That, and the opportunity to inject off-topic comments about one's personal preferences.
Slashdot Mirror
NTFS has file permissions, but they rarely came up in practice because everyone in Windows was doing everything as the Unix equivalent of root. In Unix, the obvious fix is to do a sudo chown -R newuser /mnt/olddrive (or an ultraghetto sudo chmod -R o+rwx /mnt/olddrive) . The user/permission concept is totally foreign to your average windows user though, and hence the problem.
...
Foreign is the right word, but the problem is more extensive and pervasive than familiarity or experience. First there is that mess called the registry and its tortured permission structure. Then there is an incoherent file system hierarchy where anything can be just about everywhere, except for what's supposted to in SYSTEMROOT or system32, which is where everything gets dumped anyway to avoid creating a path that's a mile long. Then there's Windows bizarre concept of file ownership. I create a file, but some other group owns it instead, but it's almost always executable by everyone, so no worries, right? Executable JPGs and GIFs and text files. LOL. Short of right-clicking one's way through the registry and file system, I doubt anyone knows and or manages anything, Microsoft included. And then, of course, there's all those services
Sorry, but Microsoft will have to reinvent themselves a few more times before they discover Unix and these problems go away. These perennial discussions of "running as Administrator" vs. "running as a member of the Administrator's Group" vs. "running with limited privileges" obscure the real problems, and New and Improved Changes by Microsoft only mitigate the existing chaos. Get a typical home user to run with low privileges? Woohoo. That takes care of everything, doesn't it?
DOS-style attributes in combination with an overcomplex ACL/policy-based system and a nutty bunch of default user and group acounts (SYSTEM, anyone?) is painful enough without the embarassing lack of tools. I give it a few more years before they get round to giving us a terminal window in which perms and ownership are clear and visible, using chmod and chown become standard practice, and an appropriate umask can be defined. Should I hold my breath, I wonder?
In fact, I love advertisements so much, you can tattoo me and inject electrodes into my head so all I do is think about Microsoft and how badly I want the XBox 360. Yes, I would finally be able to die happy!
... empty. And in a consumer-oriented culture, not being encouraged buy something takes the fun out of things in much the same way as slows economic growth, the spread of democracy, and hinders the war on terrorism.
Yeah, but how do you *really* feel?
Years ago I stopped listening to commercial radio, stopped watching commercial television, and make it a point to avoid places, people and things that offer up any sort of commercially-inspired stimulus. I'd like to think myself progressive, but since T-shirts and clothing adorned with company logos are now all the rage, I think I must be either ahead of the times, or well behind them. Hell, I wonder if my license plate is too bare without the gratuitous car dealer information.
At any rate, I doubt the average person notices. Or cares. Whether it's the proverbial pebble in the shoe, the 60Hz flicker in the fluorescent lighting, the drone of cheap background music over even cheaper speakers at the supermarket or gas station, or the billboard on the freeway, the effects are too subliminable to raise a fuss. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's the only colour people have in their lives and may welcome it. A content-free web page without a cheerful ad is just too
Or something like that.
$ ftp ftp.microsoft.com
Connected to ftp.microsoft.com.
220 Microsoft FTP Service
Name (ftp.microsoft.com:value_added): anonymous
331 Anonymous access allowed, send identity (e-mail name) as password.
Password:
230-Welcome to FTP.MICROSOFT.COM. Where do you want to go today? Visit http://www.amazon.com/
230 Anonymous user logged in.
Remote system type is Windows_NT.
ftp> quit
221 Thank you for using Microsoft products. Remember, Vons is value. Play hard. Do evil. Tastes great and less filling. This message brought to you by Fox News.
Flash ads in Outlook? No problem.
Window's current fdisk limits FAT32 partitions to 32GB ... FAT32 allows for volumes up to 2TB. So unless Vista does something that prevents mounting a non-Windows formatted FAT32 drive, we should be fine.
Sure. For what values of fine is putting 32GB of data on a FAT32 file system a good idea?
Next we'll get into how spelling is a key component of communication and whether Times-Roman is far more readable than Courier...
;-), an equally important issue is whether one is reading for "readability" or comprehension. Print out a man page some time using a fixed-pitch font, read it aloud and see if you don't parse each word, sentence and punctuation mark in the way a lawyer would when reading or writing a contract. And then compare that experience with the routine skimming over of web-page content. I'll wager you'd do better on the man page pop quiz.
No, that subject would be off-topic. But because you brought it up,
This is Slashdot, not "where to bitch about other people's use of the English language".
You're right, of course, but only to the extent that there exists no obligation for someone communicating in a text-only medium addressing an audience that may run into the tens of thousands to make an effort to be clear and understandable. IMHO, that involves Stuff You Should Have Learned in Grade School.
One service I would love would be a hack to SMB to bypass the idiotic Master Browser peer discovery mechanism in Windows workgroups so it can use ZeroConf instead.
If you're dancing the Samba, you can use the "Preferred Master = Yes" directive in smb.conf to do this. Works like a charm.
I hope most Slashdot readers are using NNTP by now (not NTP) to use their music, movies, software, pr0n, etc. etc.
I've always maintained and happily paid for a USENET subscription (with Easynews), so using a PTP application for binary downloads was a less attractive option. As far speeds go, my ISP (SBC) seems to have recently discovered NNTP, and has started to throttle the connections (by around 60%), which I found really annoying because I'm not in the habit of downloading anything large on a regular basis, and because I pay SBC for a Super Duper Premium plan.
Thinking I was clever, I decided to switch to using their HTTP servers (using wget). Mind you, Easynews does offer alternate NNTP server addresses, alternative ports, etc., but I didn't find any improvement. The switch worked like a charm.
My point, if there is one, is that people will always try to find workarounds to whatever their problem is, but more importantly, the issue of paying for a service marketed and sold as Download Faster With Us and discovering a different reality that may or may not mentioned in the fine print can lead to very unhappy customers. In my case, I really don't think I'm getting what I pay for.
#2, the color rendering sucks. You know how old fluorescents used to made you look undead? LED's suck even more.
Old fluorescents? My neighbour gave me a desk lamp the other day that I thought was kind of interesting looking so I went off to the hardware store to buy a new replacement bulb for it thinking that the new fluorescents were somehow improved over their predecessors. Surprise. Greenish-yellow light, albeit with a less noticeable 60Hz flicker. I didn't notice how bad it was at the time (the lamp was on a table in the corner of my office), but coming home late one night I could see that undead look emanating through the curtains.
It's possible I bought the wrong type (maybe someone clue me in on the subject), but the fluorescent/incandescent debate reminds me of the butter/margarine debate of years ago. I can't believe anyone would prefer margarine to butter any more than someone would want a home environment with all the warmth and charm of a used car dealership in South Central at night.
I'm all for new technologies and energy efficiency, but I don't believe that everything sold as energy-efficient belongs in the home. Unless, of course, your idea of decorating includes suspending up a string of small multi-coloured triangular flags from your ceiling. If there are appropriate uses (car dealerships among them), then it stands to reason there's more to the equation than efficiency and cost.
Hmmm... lets see: Prozac, Ritalin, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, Pexeva, Zoloft, Elavil, Norpramin, Tofranil, Aventyl, Pamelor, Wellbutrin, Cymbalta, Effexor...
LOL. Family hour commercials on network television.
The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise. Having this will be essential to the success of any OS out there in 2-3 years.
Sounds plausible, but there's a problem in your logic. Money.
How much money is there in enterprise-level security? Now compare that with the balance sheets of the music and the film industry. Seems to me that the weight and influence of the those industries far exceeds the interests or fiduciary responsibilities of security professionals.
Hardly a fad.
Cygwin (Bash, SSH, GCC, and other GNU/Linux tools)
Ok.
WinSCP (SCP client)
Why? If you have Cygwin installed, 'scp' is available.
PuTTY (excellent SSH client with tons of options)
You don't need a client. You already have one, and it has even more options. Or is 'ssh hostname' too much to type?
EmEditor (free version is a great replacement for Notepad)
Notepad is a toy, so I'm not sure why it's even mentioned. But if you're using Cygwin, why not vi? Or vim? Or gvim? Hell, even emacs is available.
CCleaner (cleans up temp files, browser cache, etc. for tons of programs)
So 'find' and/or 'cron' don't work? Or a simple shell script? Or Perl?
Spybot S&D (effective antispyware)
Point and clicky program for people who don't know what they're doing. Cygwin provides access to the registry, so you can parse out the relevant regkeys and clean out any crap that doesn't belong; an automated approach would require little more than a trivial script. For everything else, 'kill' in combination with 'find' and 'rm' work just fine.
PDFCreator (make PDFs by printing)
So all the programs in Cygwin's psutils package don't work?
Nero (CD/DVD burning)
Last I checked, 'cdrecord' compiles just fine under Cygwin.
Windows Desktop Search (corporate edition - without the MSN crap)
And 'find' or 'locate' don't work?
I think the point I'm trying to make here is that most of your Windows-specific suggestions fall into the Goofy(TM) category. Don't feel bad, because most everyone else is repeating this stuff ad nauseum. Put another way, I'd wager my last dollar that most Mac users trying out Windows for the first time will discover that Windows apps are typically ugly, badly designed or their Mac counterpart is superior in every way. And none of them is forced to rely on Cygwin.
when someone asked if the internet will fit on a floppy?
Forget the internet. If I win the lottery, I'm planning on buying USENET.
And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal. It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.
At one's disposal? LOL. This smells like the access to healthcare canard. Millions of poor folk can't afford health insurance, but the discussion is coined in terms of acesss, the supposition being that the average poor person just needs better access. Like better access to a Mercedes dealership will get that poor person a new car.
Leaders historically have had access to all sorts of powers, both legitimate and otherwise. The issue is whether they would be inclined to make use of them, and if so, how they would go about doing so. And the answers to those questions with regards to the current administration are obvious to everyone.
Incidentally, Kerry, despite having run as a Presidential candidate a few years ago, is and remains a senator, and doesn't belong in the same conversation with Clinton and Gore. Unless you're trolling on the AM side of the radio dial.
RunAs DOES NOT WORK. Oh, it works sometimes, but any process spawned from your installer will run as the user, not the RunAs user as which the installer is running. This is because of a conscious design decision in Windows which is different from every other operating system I've ever used.
/interactive cmd
IIRC, to the degree runas does work or is useful, it's not scriptable to any useful degree. I'd recommend to everyone to give up on running as a user with limited credentials, messing with default permissions, or resorting to such hacks and use Windows the way it was meant to be used. What I do when I first boot up in the morning is enter
at [time]
(where 'time' is a minute from the current time in 24hr format) when I boot up, and just run as SYSTEM.
That way, everything seems to Just Work(tm).
It's just good business sense to know what the competition is doing. I'd be disappointed if they didn't.
Be prepare to be disappointed. Note the choice quote in the summary:
In addition, Port 25 will do video interviews with Microsoft employees with experience in the open-source or Unix world, Hilf said.
My guess is that those employees are few in number, and most work off-site, in the basement, or are otherwise segregated from the rest of the collective, but get to attend weekly meetings with the folks in Marketing.
Do you think they'd be reinventing themselves every few years if they understood the Unix world?
Eh? Anything with more than 2 components (aka, every electronic consumer product) needs an OS. Devices don't just cooperate on their own.
And if the device is going to have an friendly interface for the point and click crowd, a web server is also needed.
The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?
... get off my lawn.
How about letting those who read the article and wish to post a comment say that?
Between the recent submissions by editors who have trouble fashioning a simple sentence from words containing the requisite letters arranged in the correct order and this lame-assed rhetoric, I'm left wondering whether Slashdot is devolving into something that resembles a grade-school newspaper.
Maybe a Slashdot for Juniors site is in order.
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I guess for this \.user ...
...", but the sublety may go over your head.
/. That's slash dot. Not escape dot.
I'd offer the requisite "You keep using that word
You might not get this either, but I'll try:
It's
Knowing about these bugs and electing _not_ to fix them expediently, couldn't this be considered a threat to national security?
Sure. But like our Commander in Chief said recently with respect to the ports management fuss, we have to balance the interests of natonal security with those of commerce. Achieving a similar balance with individual rights and freedoms, on the other hand, I guess is out of the question.
The moral of the story is that if you're a big company or a monopoly, your interests count. Unless, of couse, you're a member of that small but increasingly vocal minority that actually bothers to vote and can exert some influence on what your elected representatives do to earn their keep.
This just goes to show that if you give MS enough time, they'll eventually be able to reinvent UNIX-like security. That's a relief.
Even funnier is the likelihood that once that file is downloaded to the user's desktop, the permissions are -rwxrwxrwx.
Are you kidding? You want me to encourage my congressman to publically fund open source software? You want the state to get involved in software development? Because you do you realize that the government doesn't just write blank checks.
We'll overlook the entire defense contracting industry.
No, sir, you can shove your socialized software up your ass. I want my government staying as far away from OSS as possible.
Your government? LOL. Too much talk radio for you. Last time I checked, it was our government. It's as inevitable as it is sad that such narrow viewpoints align themselves with equally narrow interests.
In the meantime, relax. Stretch. Take the dog for a walk. You might discover this concept called the common good. If not, Google for "publicly funded" and see if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes you on a journey where you discover all sorts of shit that you now get for free. If you're still not convinced, maybe your broker can sell you on some Diebold stock.
A combination of several hosts files available online:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marschip/hosts
Add those entries to a Windows system (c:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc), and you can watch your browsing experience slow to a painful crawl.
The approach may work or work better if the DNS client service is disabled (which, incidentally, can be typically turned off without issue), though I haven't bother to check. Maybe someone else can comment.
Checking if your Windows install was legal used to be entirely voluntary. WGA is voluntary only in the sense of 'you don't need to participate...and we don't need to give you non-critical updates'. This is analogous to say ...
IIRC, the WGA program was instituted to mitigate losses from the resellers on eBay and elsewhere who sold systems with a non-licensed install of XP. Given how widespread that practice was/is, the WGA program in conjunction with Microsoft's other efforts seems perfectly fair and consistent. From a consumer's standpoint, buying a used PC with no O/S installed is a deal-breaker, and discovering that their copy of XP isn't legit can be bit of shock, to say nothing of the predicament of no installation or "restore" CD.
As for the updates issue, I'm in agreement that it's problematic and at the very least, questionable on any number of grounds.
Personally, I think it the whole subject stinks. I've stuck with Windows 2000 and have recommend others to do the same (installing it for friends and non-paying clients when possible), but those days are numbered. Similarly, obtaining and maintaining a VLK or otherwised warezed copy is probably more trouble than it's worth, though somebody more knowledgable in that regard can correct me. Looking forward to Vista, it seems to me that the only options that remain are to take it sitting down, or make the break and switch to Linux.
If he didn't want his posts archived, all he had to do was have the following line at the top of his post...
x-noarchive: yes
Sorry, but that's wrong. The number of providers who honour X-noarchive renders that time-worn suggestion the equivalent of adding a legal privacy disclaimer to the end of an email sent to a public mailing list.
BTW has anyone else noticed how unusable slashdot is when the browser window is 300x200? You'd think they'd be more careful to test it on typical configurations like mine.
Actually, Slashdot looks fine in a 300x200 window.
Put another way, the ability to limit text to narrow (immensely readable) margins in combination with the absence of a horizontal scrollbar is what distinguishes Slashdot from most sites that offer news-related material.
That, and the opportunity to inject off-topic comments about one's personal preferences.
Why should an employee care about something they don't own?
Self-respect?
Call me old-fashioned.