You guys are all, every single one of you, missing the point of Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Its primary purpose is *not* to prevent pirates from obtaining updates. Individual pirates can use this "crack" if they like, or they can just get their updates from somewhere else. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about individual pirates. Rather, Genuine Advantage is actually a *feature* for honest users whose intentions are not to steal Windows. These users are not going to use a "crack". Through Genuine Advantage, they either learn that their license is legitimate (which they can feel good about), or they learn that their license is bogus and are given an opportunity to make things right at a reduced cost. Microsoft gains because they sell a few more licenses, and more importantly they have a channel through which they can learn of distributors of pirated software.
People who download pornography from websites paid for four and a half times more dirty magazines.
The argument is just plain fallacial. A correlation here does not imply causation. People who are more interested in something -- be in pornography or MP3s -- are obviously going to try to acquire said thing in more ways and in greater quantities than people who have only a passing interest.
Sorry if I came off as elitist. I wasn't trying to. I was merely countering your completey false assertion that:
You have to bootstrap to something in order to download and install SP2. In the time it takes to get Windows Update going, you're too late -- the machine is infected.
I pointed out the safe way to rebuild from an original XP CD. I think that most users *who are competent enough to undertake a rebuild in the first place* would also be knowledgeable enough to grab SP2 ahead of time.
Nowhere in your original post did you mention newbies. If you want to shift your argument to what a newbie is likely to do, then fine, but this is now a whole different issue entirely. I agree with you that newbies need our help; they need to be educated. One would hope that if a newbie not knowledgeable enough to grab SP2 were to undertake a computer rebuild, they would at least have the sense to consult a friend or tech support to help them through it. Then they would find out to get SP2. The steps involved to actually get SP2 are very easy, as I outlined.
On the other hand, if a newbie insists on blowing himself up without consulting anybody, then what can be done? I'm serious. If people won't help themselves, what do you suggest? Should MS just mail out SP2 CDs to every man, woman, and child, a la AOL? Users need to take *some* initiative if they intend to protect themselves. By now almost everyone is aware that there are dangers out there, even if they are not knowledgeable enough to know what those dangers are.
Elitist-sounding or not, my post was more useful to a newbie thinking of rebuilding his machine than your post was. Your post would actually scare him out of doing it. If you truly believe that we should be helping newbies, then maybe you should try to be a little more constructive and not spread FUD.
Because if you bought your PC in 2002 and it came with a bright, shiny XP (no service pack) disk and you're rebuilding it, you use what you have. You have to bootstrap to something in order to download and install SP2. In the time it takes to get Windows Update going, you're too late -- the machine is infected.
You can download the SP2 standalone executable and burn it to a CD. Or, you could order an SP2 CD for free from Microsoft. Or, you could pick up an SP2 CD for free from your local computer store. All of these options are pretty easy, don't you think?
Once you have SP2 on CD, you have a choice. You can either go the complicated route by creating a slipstreamed XP SP2 install CD, and install it. Or, you could simply disconnect yourself from the Internet while you install XP followed by SP2. This is not rocket science.
Oh, and if you happen to have a hardware firewall already (e.g. your typical cable/DSL router) then you're pretty safe even if you don't disconnect yourself while you install.
think about it for a moment. Companies want to grow bigger and enjoy bigger profits. Therefore it would make more sense to employ more people and accomplish more.
Think about it for a moment: If companies could grow bigger and enjoy bigger profits simply by employing more people, they would. This would create an infinite demand for workers, and there would be zero unemployment. Yay!
The truth is, companies are limited by a number of factors and can't simply grow at will. In the short term, they are a certain fixed size and there is only a certain fixed amount of work that needs to be done. The trick is to maximize profit given these constraints. This implies minimizing costs, which in turn implies minimizing labour costs.
MS is trailing in some areas and they admit that. Competition is good for everybody, right?
In a few years Windows will be competitive with Linux for clusters
Linux does seem to cluster well. Hopefully Windows continues to improve in this area.
Longhorn will be "supercocmpetitive" with apache.
IIS already kicks the crap out of Apache in terms of performance. So do most other web servers. Apache still leads in popularity due to its momentum.
One day windows will have a scripting language (msh/monad) as powerful as/bin/sh.
FWIW, msh is definitely real, and has been available for a year in Beta form. It looks far more powerful than sh, and I am a sh (Bash, these days) guru. Expect to see msh in Longhorn.
No kidding! Just how useful has ftp, http, and smtp been? We'd be much better off with proprietary standards!
You seem to have trouble reading. What I said was open standards are fine, but not at the expense of proprietary standards. The two can coexist. Use whatever is the most practical for the job at hand. And by all means, support more than one standard at a time if possible.
Proprietary standards have been useful to us too. Real Media and QuickTime as previously mentioned. Add to that PDF, PostScript, PCL, Word doc, Win32, SMB, AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, Token Ring, Java, Hayes AT command set, PCI, DirectX, BitTorrent, and common CPU architectures (x86, PowerPC, SPARC). A varied list, to be sure. Most of these are "documented", but do not confuse that with "open". They are controlled by companies or individuals.
Robertson didn't know what he was talking about. He'd seen WINE in action, and assumed that it was close to being a complete replacement for Windows. He then went on to include it with Lindows and promised the world that he'd be Windows compatible. Somewhere along the line he learned the horrible truth (Win32 is an ugly, broken, and complex moving target) and backed off his claims.
Well, even if you could mimic all of Win32, that hardly means that you could run all Windows apps. That's like saying that if your OS is POSIX compliant, you can run all UNIX apps. There are other important APIs and defacto standards out there. In particular, to say that you support Windows games broadly, you pretty much have to implement DirectX as well.
this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media
Well, it's not like Real Media format or QuickTime format are open standards. Embracing open standards is fine, but to do so at the expense of proprietary standards is stupid. More broadly, you can't afford to be idealistic in this industry; you have to be practical.
Firesomething was a plugin created (as a joke) after the Firebird -> Firefox name change. It allows you to pick up weird names like firegoat, waterbird, etc.
I think they should rename it to Watergoat. I doubt there would be a scandal over that.
If this is true (or even if it isn't), why the hell would you broadcast that to the planet? I'm sure he wants to keep this discreet. It's nobody else's business.
I'm in pretty much the same boat you are in. After working for 8 years, I decided to go back to university to finish my Bachelor of Computer Science, which I pissed away (read: failed out of) the first time due to laziness and having too much fun. One difference this time around is that I'm more mature, and so I'm doing much better academically. The other major difference is that tuition here costs about 2.5 times as much now as 10 years ago! So I, too, am working at the university in the summers to earn enough dough to pay myself through school. I'm doing coding and research for a CS prof, and enjoying it.
I don't know what you're so hesitant about. Take the job (if they'll give it to you) and have fun with it. Politics? Who cares? Every place of employ has politics. It really shouldn't be too bad for you, because a) you're not very important; and b) it's just a temporary job, not a career.
As for salary, don't expect to make anywhere close to what you would in the real world, despite your qualifications. I'm making about half. If you demand too much, you might be passed over for any one of a hundred eager young students. Go into it thinking of it more like a co-op job than some kind of high-paying consulting job. This is still much better than the alternative, which is a low-paying deadend job like McD's. It's also much more interesting work, and it will look good on a resume. Stop talking about it and just do it. You really have nothing to lose.
Working for a prof is not too bad. My boss is pretty easy going. He's flexible about what I do; I get to lead as much as follow. The pay is not coming out of his pocket, so he does not put too much pressure on me. Also, he's pretty busy, so I only talk to him 1-2 times per week. The rest of the time I'm doing my own thing, working at my own pace.
Oh, one other advantage is that this can give you a taste of what research is like. This will help you decide if you want to go on to post-graduate studies. I know I don't; I'm itching to get back into the workforce. But this has still been a good experience.
Feel free to e-mail me if you have any specific questions.
NTFS has hard links and symlinks. The cmd line tools to do it just aren't provided with the system.
Just to clarify, NTFS has symlinks for *directories* only. They are also called junction points. There is a MS-supplied utility called LINKD.EXE from the Resource Kit that you can use to create them.
I would love it if they added symlinks for regular files.
if Texas were a country, it would be comparable to many European States in terms of economic activities. It's certainly larger!
Hm, I was skeptical about just how big Texas was, but then I looked at a map. My God, it's the size of a meteor! If it ever collided with Earth, we'd be in trouble.
What do you mean, it wouldn't switch to x86? Until IBM's recent sale of their PC business, IBM has *always* sold x86 PCs, from the 8086 all the way up to Pentium 4. IBM's share of the PC market declined because 1) more competitors entered the market; 2) most of these competitors sold for less; 3) IBM's advantage in quality and reliability gradually diminished; and 4) IBM lost momentum by embracing technology (read: MCA) that eventually failed.
So that would mean that if I buy a new computer I am paying for software again that I already have paid for previously.
So that would mean that if I buy a new computer I am paying for software again that I already have paid for previously.
You *might* have to pay for a new version of XP. It depends what version you have now. There is a limited license version that MS sells to manufacturers that is "for distribution with new PCs only". They sell it for very cheap, and the end-user is only licensed to use it on that PC. A lot of people have this version and think that 1) they paid somewhere in the order of $100-$200 for the OS as part of the purchase price of the computer (they didn't; it's more like $18), and 2) they are entitled to install it on different PCs as if it were the full retail version (they aren't). I have to admit that what I've just said though is a bit of heresay, because I've never actually had my hands on this version of XP. It could be that reinstalling it on a different PC works. If so, go for it.
Now, if you have a retail copy of XP (either the $99 US "upgrade" or the $199 US "full" version) then you can definitely install it many times -- an infinite number of times on the same PC, or up to 5 times on totally different PCs, before you even have to call in. If the people on the phone told you differently then it's either because you have a limited license version like I described above, or they were mistaken (since I doubt the license is much different in Australia than in Canada).
So how do I get the old 'Find Dialog' back? You know, then one with three tabs and no annoying questions about what kind of file I want to find.
I honestly don't know what the old Find Dialog looked like, nor do I even know what the new one looks like.:) Searching for files is something I've never had a need to do. I guess I'm just very organized and always know where my files are.
But just fiddling with it now, there do appear to be ways to customize it. Click on "Change preferences" and have a look. One option called "Without an animated character" gets rid of the animated doggy. Another one called "Change files and folders search behaviour" lets you toggle between Standard and Advanced modes. In Advanced mode, it no longer asks you a series of questions, it just presents fields that you can fill in. Hope this helps.
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You guys are all, every single one of you, missing the point of Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Its primary purpose is *not* to prevent pirates from obtaining updates. Individual pirates can use this "crack" if they like, or they can just get their updates from somewhere else. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about individual pirates. Rather, Genuine Advantage is actually a *feature* for honest users whose intentions are not to steal Windows. These users are not going to use a "crack". Through Genuine Advantage, they either learn that their license is legitimate (which they can feel good about), or they learn that their license is bogus and are given an opportunity to make things right at a reduced cost. Microsoft gains because they sell a few more licenses, and more importantly they have a channel through which they can learn of distributors of pirated software.
The argument is just plain fallacial. A correlation here does not imply causation. People who are more interested in something -- be in pornography or MP3s -- are obviously going to try to acquire said thing in more ways and in greater quantities than people who have only a passing interest.
At the cost of ink these days, it just wouldn't be worth it.
Vi!!!!!!
What part of Opera is written in assembly?
You have to bootstrap to something in order to download and install SP2. In the time it takes to get Windows Update going, you're too late -- the machine is infected.
I pointed out the safe way to rebuild from an original XP CD. I think that most users *who are competent enough to undertake a rebuild in the first place* would also be knowledgeable enough to grab SP2 ahead of time.
Nowhere in your original post did you mention newbies. If you want to shift your argument to what a newbie is likely to do, then fine, but this is now a whole different issue entirely. I agree with you that newbies need our help; they need to be educated. One would hope that if a newbie not knowledgeable enough to grab SP2 were to undertake a computer rebuild, they would at least have the sense to consult a friend or tech support to help them through it. Then they would find out to get SP2. The steps involved to actually get SP2 are very easy, as I outlined.
On the other hand, if a newbie insists on blowing himself up without consulting anybody, then what can be done? I'm serious. If people won't help themselves, what do you suggest? Should MS just mail out SP2 CDs to every man, woman, and child, a la AOL? Users need to take *some* initiative if they intend to protect themselves. By now almost everyone is aware that there are dangers out there, even if they are not knowledgeable enough to know what those dangers are.
Elitist-sounding or not, my post was more useful to a newbie thinking of rebuilding his machine than your post was. Your post would actually scare him out of doing it. If you truly believe that we should be helping newbies, then maybe you should try to be a little more constructive and not spread FUD.
You can download the SP2 standalone executable and burn it to a CD. Or, you could order an SP2 CD for free from Microsoft. Or, you could pick up an SP2 CD for free from your local computer store. All of these options are pretty easy, don't you think?
Once you have SP2 on CD, you have a choice. You can either go the complicated route by creating a slipstreamed XP SP2 install CD, and install it. Or, you could simply disconnect yourself from the Internet while you install XP followed by SP2. This is not rocket science.
Oh, and if you happen to have a hardware firewall already (e.g. your typical cable/DSL router) then you're pretty safe even if you don't disconnect yourself while you install.
Think about it for a moment: If companies could grow bigger and enjoy bigger profits simply by employing more people, they would. This would create an infinite demand for workers, and there would be zero unemployment. Yay!
The truth is, companies are limited by a number of factors and can't simply grow at will. In the short term, they are a certain fixed size and there is only a certain fixed amount of work that needs to be done. The trick is to maximize profit given these constraints. This implies minimizing costs, which in turn implies minimizing labour costs.
In a few years Windows will be competitive with Linux for clusters
Linux does seem to cluster well. Hopefully Windows continues to improve in this area.
Longhorn will be "supercocmpetitive" with apache.
IIS already kicks the crap out of Apache in terms of performance. So do most other web servers. Apache still leads in popularity due to its momentum.
One day windows will have a scripting language (msh/monad) as powerful as /bin/sh.
FWIW, msh is definitely real, and has been available for a year in Beta form. It looks far more powerful than sh, and I am a sh (Bash, these days) guru. Expect to see msh in Longhorn.
You seem to have trouble reading. What I said was open standards are fine, but not at the expense of proprietary standards. The two can coexist. Use whatever is the most practical for the job at hand. And by all means, support more than one standard at a time if possible.
Proprietary standards have been useful to us too. Real Media and QuickTime as previously mentioned. Add to that PDF, PostScript, PCL, Word doc, Win32, SMB, AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, Token Ring, Java, Hayes AT command set, PCI, DirectX, BitTorrent, and common CPU architectures (x86, PowerPC, SPARC). A varied list, to be sure. Most of these are "documented", but do not confuse that with "open". They are controlled by companies or individuals.
And if we took your comment at face value, what you're saying is "there's no reason to choose Windows." which is also in fact flamebait.
Well, even if you could mimic all of Win32, that hardly means that you could run all Windows apps. That's like saying that if your OS is POSIX compliant, you can run all UNIX apps. There are other important APIs and defacto standards out there. In particular, to say that you support Windows games broadly, you pretty much have to implement DirectX as well.
Well, it's not like Real Media format or QuickTime format are open standards. Embracing open standards is fine, but to do so at the expense of proprietary standards is stupid. More broadly, you can't afford to be idealistic in this industry; you have to be practical.
I think they should rename it to Watergoat. I doubt there would be a scandal over that.
That's Bram Stoker...
If this is true (or even if it isn't), why the hell would you broadcast that to the planet? I'm sure he wants to keep this discreet. It's nobody else's business.
I'm in pretty much the same boat you are in. After working for 8 years, I decided to go back to university to finish my Bachelor of Computer Science, which I pissed away (read: failed out of) the first time due to laziness and having too much fun. One difference this time around is that I'm more mature, and so I'm doing much better academically. The other major difference is that tuition here costs about 2.5 times as much now as 10 years ago! So I, too, am working at the university in the summers to earn enough dough to pay myself through school. I'm doing coding and research for a CS prof, and enjoying it. I don't know what you're so hesitant about. Take the job (if they'll give it to you) and have fun with it. Politics? Who cares? Every place of employ has politics. It really shouldn't be too bad for you, because a) you're not very important; and b) it's just a temporary job, not a career. As for salary, don't expect to make anywhere close to what you would in the real world, despite your qualifications. I'm making about half. If you demand too much, you might be passed over for any one of a hundred eager young students. Go into it thinking of it more like a co-op job than some kind of high-paying consulting job. This is still much better than the alternative, which is a low-paying deadend job like McD's. It's also much more interesting work, and it will look good on a resume. Stop talking about it and just do it. You really have nothing to lose. Working for a prof is not too bad. My boss is pretty easy going. He's flexible about what I do; I get to lead as much as follow. The pay is not coming out of his pocket, so he does not put too much pressure on me. Also, he's pretty busy, so I only talk to him 1-2 times per week. The rest of the time I'm doing my own thing, working at my own pace. Oh, one other advantage is that this can give you a taste of what research is like. This will help you decide if you want to go on to post-graduate studies. I know I don't; I'm itching to get back into the workforce. But this has still been a good experience. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any specific questions.
NTFS has hard links and symlinks. The cmd line tools to do it just aren't provided with the system.
Just to clarify, NTFS has symlinks for *directories* only. They are also called junction points. There is a MS-supplied utility called LINKD.EXE from the Resource Kit that you can use to create them.
I would love it if they added symlinks for regular files.
At that rate Microsoft will run out of cash in 2037!
Yeah, right. The day Microsoft runs out of cash is the day my UNIX box can no longer remember the time of day!
Oh, they are, are they? Is that why they just finished migrating their entire server lineup over to Itanium, and phasing out the PA-RISC?
http://www.serverpipeline.com/163702707
Hm, I was skeptical about just how big Texas was, but then I looked at a map. My God, it's the size of a meteor! If it ever collided with Earth, we'd be in trouble.
Actually it's small mammals running around But these mammals *are* naked, right?
What do you mean, it wouldn't switch to x86? Until IBM's recent sale of their PC business, IBM has *always* sold x86 PCs, from the 8086 all the way up to Pentium 4. IBM's share of the PC market declined because 1) more competitors entered the market; 2) most of these competitors sold for less; 3) IBM's advantage in quality and reliability gradually diminished; and 4) IBM lost momentum by embracing technology (read: MCA) that eventually failed.
So that would mean that if I buy a new computer I am paying for software again that I already have paid for previously.
You *might* have to pay for a new version of XP. It depends what version you have now. There is a limited license version that MS sells to manufacturers that is "for distribution with new PCs only". They sell it for very cheap, and the end-user is only licensed to use it on that PC. A lot of people have this version and think that 1) they paid somewhere in the order of $100-$200 for the OS as part of the purchase price of the computer (they didn't; it's more like $18), and 2) they are entitled to install it on different PCs as if it were the full retail version (they aren't). I have to admit that what I've just said though is a bit of heresay, because I've never actually had my hands on this version of XP. It could be that reinstalling it on a different PC works. If so, go for it.
Now, if you have a retail copy of XP (either the $99 US "upgrade" or the $199 US "full" version) then you can definitely install it many times -- an infinite number of times on the same PC, or up to 5 times on totally different PCs, before you even have to call in. If the people on the phone told you differently then it's either because you have a limited license version like I described above, or they were mistaken (since I doubt the license is much different in Australia than in Canada).
I honestly don't know what the old Find Dialog looked like, nor do I even know what the new one looks like. :) Searching for files is something I've never had a need to do. I guess I'm just very organized and always know where my files are.
But just fiddling with it now, there do appear to be ways to customize it. Click on "Change preferences" and have a look. One option called "Without an animated character" gets rid of the animated doggy. Another one called "Change files and folders search behaviour" lets you toggle between Standard and Advanced modes. In Advanced mode, it no longer asks you a series of questions, it just presents fields that you can fill in. Hope this helps.