It makes more sense for Microsoft. Silly me, here I was thinking that companies made decisions for the benefit of their customers.
Exactly. The vast majority of their customers are either newbies or they have been using computers for a while but still don't know what the hell they're doing, and need as much guidance as they can get. The Slashdot crowd is *not* representative of the computing population in general. The small portion who do know what they are doing can turn off all the handholding quite easily.
Forgot to mention that I am in AU. What would you call a 'decent offer'. I value the OS at no more than AUD$60 delivered, which is the OEM price on a new machine.
I probably can't even ship it to Australia for that.:(
The browser got caught in an infinite loop where I could never get the to final page.
I have no idea what you were doing, as activation doesn't even involve a web browser. All I can say is that it's never taken me more than 1 minute to activate XP.
All up ~65 minutes, so lets call it an hour.
Given the description of the problems you were having, this sounds more like a technical support call than an activation call. I have heard reports of activation calls taking a long time, but that was mostly a few years back when they were still learning what the level of demand would be.
Now if I buy a new computer, or upgrade, are you telling me when I install XP I won't have to activate it?
If you get a new computer, or if you upgrade radically enough that XP thinks you have a new computer, you will have to activate it. Although new computers usually come with XP preinstalled and preactivated.
Wrong. Win2k Pro can run for weeks. XP crashes once per day (sometimes twice).
If XP is crashing for you daily, then something is wrong on your end. Probably you have a bad driver, or your hardware is unstable. Others are not suffering as you are. I used W2K for about 2 years, then XP for the last 3 years, and I've *never* had either crash. I've occasionally had applications crash (including IE and OE), but never the OS.
And then what? Spend an hour of my precious time on the phone to 'register' a product I have ALREADY PAID FOR? Do you want to pay me for my time in 'registering' my product? What's that? You want to waste $50 of MY time to solve YOUR piracy problem?
The reason you are so upset about activation is that you have no idea how it works. Have you every actually installed XP??? If you are simply reinstalling on the same machine, you never have to call in. There's another post of mine in this thread that describes activation in more detail. I suggest you read it. Or read about it on MS's site.
Translation: I have no idea if XP uses more resources but I'll say it doesn't anyway.
No, it means that I haven't noticed a significant increase in resource usage, so it can't really be that significant. It might be 30-50% like you estimate, but only if you count extra services that are running (e.g. firewall, themes). Disable those and you get a fairer comparison. Or don't. I'm willing to live with a 30-50% increase in memory usage every few years in exchange for new features, especially given that memory prices are dropping at a faster rate than that.
I had to turn off the Mickey Mouse interface just so I didn't spend all day clicking answers to "helpful questions" on the way to the control panel, or the printer.
The defaults definitely are aimed at newer users, moreso than in W2K. It makes sense to cater to the lowest common denominator, especially since XP is aimed at more of a mass market than W2K. Experienced users can change the defaults to something more to their liking quite easily. BTW, I recommend having both the Control Panel and Printers expanded right in the Start menu.
[Fast user switching.] I don't know what you mean by that.
It's a feature wherein you can effectively suspend your own login session (open apps, etc.) while someone else logs in and does stuff. I guess it's good for families who are contending for computer time. I have no use for it personally.
Unfortunately I am unable to purchase W2k Pro in retail, OEM or otherwise. Can you enlighten me where I can obtain a legal copy for home use?
Understandably, not too many retail stores are selling it anymore, because Windows XP makes it obsolete. But a simple web search turned up all kinds of places where you can buy it. Try Amazon.com. Or make me a decent offer and I'll sell you my copy. I have five licenses of XP, so I don't need W2K anymore.
As for the skinnable interface, that actually makes it slower, even if you adopt the win2k skin it's still slower than real win2k..
The "classic" W2K interface is not a skin, it's a hard-coded interface just like it was in W2K. Skinnability is provided by the Themes service, which can be completely disabled if you aren't using a skin. The classic interface is not slower than W2K's, provided you turn off the extra eye candy (e.g. pointer shadows, fading menus) that XP provides.
and the resource usage is noticeably higher, not just marginally..
Care to substantiate this claim? In my experience it's not noticeably higher. Right now I've got OE, three copies of IE, a CMD prompt, and WMP 10 running, and my total commit charge is about 200MB. That's not too unreasonable, considering that 512MB of RAM is typical for modern PCs. I could reduce this quite a bit if I disabled a lot of the stuff that W2K doesn't have, such as the firewall (which I realistically don't need since I'm behind a cable/DSL router which has its own firewall) and the aforementioned Themes service.
The faster booting is just a cheat too, it may present a login prompt quicker but it's not really booted, it finishes loading in the background.
You're right that it continues to load services in the background, but that's what W2K (and NT before it) did too. With XP, MS has improved the load order a bit so that you can log in sooner and start working sooner. But I don't know how that is considered a "cheat"; it has legitimate value. Additionally, XP has a feature which analyzes the load order of your drivers and places them in an optimal place on the disk, in chronological order. (This feature first appeared in Windows ME.) Thus, even if you look at "complete" boot time, XP is faster than W2K.
This is just a stupid comment. Activation can be a real PITA.
(I'll let the personal insult slide for the moment.) For 99.9% of users, activation is not a PITA; it's a no-brainer. You type in your 25-digit activation code at install time, and you're done. Not too difficult. I've done it a number of times wth XP and never found it much of an inconvenience. Lots of software, including a number of games I have, use the same scheme.
With XP's activation scheme, you can even activate up to 5 *completely* different machines using the same activation code, without any problems. Minor hardware changes like adding RAM or swapping a video card do not even count as different machines for activation purposes.
Activation is 100% anonymous, so even privacy weenies can't complain.
Some few people claim to have a legitimate need to constantly reinstall XP. This is basically a BS argument. Firstly, as implied above, you can reinstall an infinite number of times on the same hardware with no problems. OK, so say you constantly need to install XP onto different machines. Sounds a bit fishy, but fine. You can run XP for up to 30 days without even activating it! Maybe some people didn't know that. OK, so say you constantly need to install XP onto different machines at intervals of just over 30 days. Getting fishier and fishier by the moment, but fine. You have two options: 1) use the corporate version of XP, which doesn't require activation at all (you should have known to do this in the first plcae based on your anticipated odd usage patterns); or 2) once you've hit your 6th activation and XP is complaining (which under the conditions stated above takes half a year) call into the *anonymous*, *toll-free* hotline where they will *with no questions asked* reenable your activation code.
If you have read all of the above carefully, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a legitimate scenario where you are not a pirate and activation is a PITA. I think you're just spouting out that's it's a PITA because you've heard that it's a PITA?
Win2k Pro is stable, and with SP4, relatively secure. As is XP.
Win2k Pro DOES NOT have integrated DRM, and no "activation". How are these even an issue, unless you are a pirate?
Win2k Pro uses less system resources If XP uses more resources, then it's only marginally so. And that's pretty normal; not many OSes use fewer resources as new versions are released.
, does everything XP does better than XP does. It's the exact opposite. XP's feature set is a superset of W2K Pro's. One difference you mentioned already is hyperthreading. That *is* a big deal if you have a hyperthreading CPU; you want to make full use of your hardware, don't you?
Another difference is support for dual monitors. Other posters will note that they have gotten dual monitors to work with W2K. Well, you can do it with certain video cards (mostly dual-head cards), but it is up to the video card driver writer to add support for it. However, in Windows XP, you can simply use any arbitrary combination of video cards; the work of creating the virtual desktop is done in the OS itself.
Fast user switching. A built-in firewall. Sound card emulation in NTVDM (try playing Doom on W2K, then try it on XP); better compatibility with DOS apps in general. A skinnable/themeable GUI (don't like the default? go back to the W2K look and feel). ClearType. Improved power management. Device driver rollback. Network bridging. Faster boot time.
And then there are lots of little improvements here and there, such as new command line options for various commands.
Really, it's pretty sad if you think W2K is better than XP in any way, shape, or form. Maybe you were just trolling. Otherwise feel free to continue to use W2K in blissful ignorance.
What you're telling me is that to get the benefits of pop-up blocking in IE I have to go and buy a whole new operating system and quite possibly a new computer system to boot.No. If you are not using XP (thus can't use XP SP2), all you have to do to get popup blocking is install one of the myriad addons such as the MSN Toolbar or the Google Toolbar that grant you this feature. Some people might even prefer these to IE's builtin popup blocking implementation.
MSN messenger and windows messenger are nothing alike.
Wrong. They are virtually identical. They are instant messaging clients, similar in concept to AIM.
You're thinking of the Messenger service, which should not be confused with Windows Messenger. Open services.msc and look at the description of the Messenger service. "... This service is not related to Windows Messenger."
Safari is KHTML... Safari just adds some extra features
Um, then Safari is not just KHTML. KHTML is just an HTML rendering engine, which is far from being a browser. Konqueror itself is much more than KHTML.
"With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free,"
IE? Free? Since when? Just because it comes with the OS (which, might I add, you pay $$$ for) doesn't mean it's free.
This has long been claimed by MS-bashers, and I won't go into detail about why it is false (there are probably posts in this thread which do a good job). What I find interesting is that you singled out IE, but made no mention of Safari. Safari is available *only* for MacOS X, which is not free.
Interesting that the majority of men who voted chose Bush, but the majority of women who voted chose Kerry. Is this conclusive evidence that women are in fact smarter than men?
Now, this is a little unfair, because my assumption above (that Apache servers run Linux) is wrong. Many Apache servers that Netcraft picks up run BSD and could even run Mac OS X Server, I guess. Even taking this into account, the breach rate would be about the same for the two OSes (probably a little bit better for Linux).
Here's a newsflash for you. Many of those Apache servers are running on WINDOWS. There are actually more Windows machines acting as web servers than Linux machines acting as web servers. What do you think that does to your comparison, given that almost 3 times as many Linux machines were breached?
GCC defaults to 32-bit ints on ALL target platforms. (It defaults to 32-bit longs, too, on most platforms.) Are you sure you weren't using some command-line options to change the default to 64?
On Visual Studio targeting AMD64 is a bit wierd.. ints are 32bit and longs are 32bit.
That's not weird, it's sensible, and as stated above, GCC does the same in most cases. Really, making all your integers larger isn't always desirable. Sometimes you'd rather optimize for space, and so you use the smallest integer size that is large enough for the task at hand. In the few places where your code really could take advantage of very large integers, you can change those to long longs.
This means you're not *really* targetting 64bit.
Yes it does. If the compiler generates 64-bit instructions then it is targetting 64-bit. Integer sizes have nothing at all to do with it. Current 32-bit code uses a combination of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit ints as needed; does that mean that it's not really targetting 32-bit?
you don't get the inherent advantages (64bit time_t for example).
The size of ints and longs has no bearing on the size of a time_t. A time_t could still be a long long, for example. Keep in mind that if you change the size of time_t, you automatically break binary compatibility with any library or system calls that use time_t. A better plan would be to have something like a time64_t and accompanying new library and system calls.
Presumably they did this for backward compatibility, then broke it by making size_t 64bit
This doesn't break anything. There was never any guarantee that a size_t would fit inside a long, so any code that assumed so was nonportable to begin with. If you're storing a size_t, you should use a size_t variable.
this is why you get all the portability warnings
You're getting portability warnings because the code is nonportable.
2) Even in applications that can make use of 64-bit integers, the AMD64 specification defines an "integer" as 32-bits. Software has to expressly use a "long" (or similar) to make use of the other half of the register size, and because on 95% of computers out there (read: vanilla x86 systems) a "long" is the same thing as an "int", this is done rarely at best.
Actually, even longs are 32 bits. Lots of code uses longs, fully expecting them to be 32 bits. The reason code uses longs is they are guaranteed to be at least 32 bits, whereas ints are only guaranteed to be at least 16 bits. You have to expressly use long longs (or a variation such as int64_t) to get 64 bits. Mind you, all of this is from the standpoint of C. Other, less important languages may vary.
Well, Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 (only a few months after the Mac). So the OP is exaggerating or misremembering, but possibly not by very much.
Incidentally, I actually used Windows 1.0 on my 8086-compatible back in the 80s. It came on 360K 5.25" floppies; about 3 of them I think. It was neat, but you couldn't do much because while it came with a few small applications (descendants of which are still in Windows today), but there was no third-party software.
Windows users see no value in running on anything other than the volume-leading processor architecture. There's no value in it.
So... if there's no value in it, would that be why Windows users see no value in it? Got it.
The point is that turning on the MS firewall is the same as turning off those services whether you need them or not. No, it is not the same thing. Like my original post says -- and you even quoted this part -- LOCAL MACHINES can still access those services even as the firewall blocks remote machines from accessing them. Firewalls are useful.
To make a firewall that 'keeps people from breaking into my machine' is asinine.
Um, no. That is the primary purpose of a firewall. It is your first line of defense. It won't necessarily (shouldn't be) your last though.
If you don't want someone accessing a service, you turn it off or change it's configuration to deny specific external hosts. Yes, turning it off is recommended if you don't need it at all, but if you need it (e.g. for local machines) then it's not a solution. Most services aren't configurable enough to allow/deny specific hosts. If they were, they would essentially have their own mini firewalls builtin. You think that's better than having one centrally managed firewall?? Also, denying specific hosts is not the same as dropping packets. It's generally preferable to drop packets so as to appear "invisible" rather than deny connections, which not only confirms your existence but allows for straight denial of service attacks against your machine or even reflexive denial of service attacks against another machine.
If there are holes in the OS that a hacker can exploit, then a firewall is only a band-aid, that may or may not work. The most secure setup involves layers of security, and that is what Microsoft has been preaching recently. It's pretty hard to argue that removing layers of protection is better. Don't you wear your seatbelt even though there's also an airbag?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. The vast majority of their customers are either newbies or they have been using computers for a while but still don't know what the hell they're doing, and need as much guidance as they can get. The Slashdot crowd is *not* representative of the computing population in general. The small portion who do know what they are doing can turn off all the handholding quite easily.
Forgot to mention that I am in AU. What would you call a 'decent offer'. I value the OS at no more than AUD$60 delivered, which is the OEM price on a new machine.
I probably can't even ship it to Australia for that. :(
I have no idea what you were doing, as activation doesn't even involve a web browser. All I can say is that it's never taken me more than 1 minute to activate XP.
All up ~65 minutes, so lets call it an hour.
Given the description of the problems you were having, this sounds more like a technical support call than an activation call. I have heard reports of activation calls taking a long time, but that was mostly a few years back when they were still learning what the level of demand would be.
Now if I buy a new computer, or upgrade, are you telling me when I install XP I won't have to activate it?
If you get a new computer, or if you upgrade radically enough that XP thinks you have a new computer, you will have to activate it. Although new computers usually come with XP preinstalled and preactivated.
If XP is crashing for you daily, then something is wrong on your end. Probably you have a bad driver, or your hardware is unstable. Others are not suffering as you are. I used W2K for about 2 years, then XP for the last 3 years, and I've *never* had either crash. I've occasionally had applications crash (including IE and OE), but never the OS.
And then what? Spend an hour of my precious time on the phone to 'register' a product I have ALREADY PAID FOR? Do you want to pay me for my time in 'registering' my product? What's that? You want to waste $50 of MY time to solve YOUR piracy problem?
The reason you are so upset about activation is that you have no idea how it works. Have you every actually installed XP??? If you are simply reinstalling on the same machine, you never have to call in. There's another post of mine in this thread that describes activation in more detail. I suggest you read it. Or read about it on MS's site.
Translation: I have no idea if XP uses more resources but I'll say it doesn't anyway.
No, it means that I haven't noticed a significant increase in resource usage, so it can't really be that significant. It might be 30-50% like you estimate, but only if you count extra services that are running (e.g. firewall, themes). Disable those and you get a fairer comparison. Or don't. I'm willing to live with a 30-50% increase in memory usage every few years in exchange for new features, especially given that memory prices are dropping at a faster rate than that.
I had to turn off the Mickey Mouse interface just so I didn't spend all day clicking answers to "helpful questions" on the way to the control panel, or the printer.
The defaults definitely are aimed at newer users, moreso than in W2K. It makes sense to cater to the lowest common denominator, especially since XP is aimed at more of a mass market than W2K. Experienced users can change the defaults to something more to their liking quite easily. BTW, I recommend having both the Control Panel and Printers expanded right in the Start menu.
[Fast user switching.] I don't know what you mean by that.
It's a feature wherein you can effectively suspend your own login session (open apps, etc.) while someone else logs in and does stuff. I guess it's good for families who are contending for computer time. I have no use for it personally.
Unfortunately I am unable to purchase W2k Pro in retail, OEM or otherwise. Can you enlighten me where I can obtain a legal copy for home use?
Understandably, not too many retail stores are selling it anymore, because Windows XP makes it obsolete. But a simple web search turned up all kinds of places where you can buy it. Try Amazon.com. Or make me a decent offer and I'll sell you my copy. I have five licenses of XP, so I don't need W2K anymore.
Yep, but I was comparing XP to W2K. XP is the first in the NT series of OSes (NT, W2K, XP) to support dual monitors.
The "classic" W2K interface is not a skin, it's a hard-coded interface just like it was in W2K. Skinnability is provided by the Themes service, which can be completely disabled if you aren't using a skin. The classic interface is not slower than W2K's, provided you turn off the extra eye candy (e.g. pointer shadows, fading menus) that XP provides.
and the resource usage is noticeably higher, not just marginally..
Care to substantiate this claim? In my experience it's not noticeably higher. Right now I've got OE, three copies of IE, a CMD prompt, and WMP 10 running, and my total commit charge is about 200MB. That's not too unreasonable, considering that 512MB of RAM is typical for modern PCs. I could reduce this quite a bit if I disabled a lot of the stuff that W2K doesn't have, such as the firewall (which I realistically don't need since I'm behind a cable/DSL router which has its own firewall) and the aforementioned Themes service.
The faster booting is just a cheat too, it may present a login prompt quicker but it's not really booted, it finishes loading in the background.
You're right that it continues to load services in the background, but that's what W2K (and NT before it) did too. With XP, MS has improved the load order a bit so that you can log in sooner and start working sooner. But I don't know how that is considered a "cheat"; it has legitimate value. Additionally, XP has a feature which analyzes the load order of your drivers and places them in an optimal place on the disk, in chronological order. (This feature first appeared in Windows ME.) Thus, even if you look at "complete" boot time, XP is faster than W2K.
(I'll let the personal insult slide for the moment.) For 99.9% of users, activation is not a PITA; it's a no-brainer. You type in your 25-digit activation code at install time, and you're done. Not too difficult. I've done it a number of times wth XP and never found it much of an inconvenience. Lots of software, including a number of games I have, use the same scheme.
With XP's activation scheme, you can even activate up to 5 *completely* different machines using the same activation code, without any problems. Minor hardware changes like adding RAM or swapping a video card do not even count as different machines for activation purposes.
Activation is 100% anonymous, so even privacy weenies can't complain.
Some few people claim to have a legitimate need to constantly reinstall XP. This is basically a BS argument. Firstly, as implied above, you can reinstall an infinite number of times on the same hardware with no problems. OK, so say you constantly need to install XP onto different machines. Sounds a bit fishy, but fine. You can run XP for up to 30 days without even activating it! Maybe some people didn't know that. OK, so say you constantly need to install XP onto different machines at intervals of just over 30 days. Getting fishier and fishier by the moment, but fine. You have two options: 1) use the corporate version of XP, which doesn't require activation at all (you should have known to do this in the first plcae based on your anticipated odd usage patterns); or 2) once you've hit your 6th activation and XP is complaining (which under the conditions stated above takes half a year) call into the *anonymous*, *toll-free* hotline where they will *with no questions asked* reenable your activation code.
If you have read all of the above carefully, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a legitimate scenario where you are not a pirate and activation is a PITA. I think you're just spouting out that's it's a PITA because you've heard that it's a PITA?
Mm, all this PITA talk, and I'm getting hungry.
As is XP.
Win2k Pro DOES NOT have integrated DRM, and no "activation".
How are these even an issue, unless you are a pirate?
Win2k Pro uses less system resources
If XP uses more resources, then it's only marginally so. And that's pretty normal; not many OSes use fewer resources as new versions are released.
, does everything XP does better than XP does.
It's the exact opposite. XP's feature set is a superset of W2K Pro's. One difference you mentioned already is hyperthreading. That *is* a big deal if you have a hyperthreading CPU; you want to make full use of your hardware, don't you?
Another difference is support for dual monitors. Other posters will note that they have gotten dual monitors to work with W2K. Well, you can do it with certain video cards (mostly dual-head cards), but it is up to the video card driver writer to add support for it. However, in Windows XP, you can simply use any arbitrary combination of video cards; the work of creating the virtual desktop is done in the OS itself.
Fast user switching. A built-in firewall. Sound card emulation in NTVDM (try playing Doom on W2K, then try it on XP); better compatibility with DOS apps in general. A skinnable/themeable GUI (don't like the default? go back to the W2K look and feel). ClearType. Improved power management. Device driver rollback. Network bridging. Faster boot time.
And then there are lots of little improvements here and there, such as new command line options for various commands.
Really, it's pretty sad if you think W2K is better than XP in any way, shape, or form. Maybe you were just trolling. Otherwise feel free to continue to use W2K in blissful ignorance.
What you're telling me is that to get the benefits of pop-up blocking in IE I have to go and buy a whole new operating system and quite possibly a new computer system to boot.No. If you are not using XP (thus can't use XP SP2), all you have to do to get popup blocking is install one of the myriad addons such as the MSN Toolbar or the Google Toolbar that grant you this feature. Some people might even prefer these to IE's builtin popup blocking implementation.
Wrong. They are virtually identical. They are instant messaging clients, similar in concept to AIM.
You're thinking of the Messenger service, which should not be confused with Windows Messenger. Open services.msc and look at the description of the Messenger service. "... This service is not related to Windows Messenger."
Um, then Safari is not just KHTML. KHTML is just an HTML rendering engine, which is far from being a browser. Konqueror itself is much more than KHTML.
Safari is available only for MacOS X.
Wow, what a profound observation.
IE? Free? Since when? Just because it comes with the OS (which, might I add, you pay $$$ for) doesn't mean it's free.
This has long been claimed by MS-bashers, and I won't go into detail about why it is false (there are probably posts in this thread which do a good job). What I find interesting is that you singled out IE, but made no mention of Safari. Safari is available *only* for MacOS X, which is not free.
Interesting that the majority of men who voted chose Bush, but the majority of women who voted chose Kerry. Is this conclusive evidence that women are in fact smarter than men?
Here's a newsflash for you. Many of those Apache servers are running on WINDOWS. There are actually more Windows machines acting as web servers than Linux machines acting as web servers. What do you think that does to your comparison, given that almost 3 times as many Linux machines were breached?
GCC defaults to 32-bit ints on ALL target platforms. (It defaults to 32-bit longs, too, on most platforms.) Are you sure you weren't using some command-line options to change the default to 64?
On Visual Studio targeting AMD64 is a bit wierd.. ints are 32bit and longs are 32bit.
That's not weird, it's sensible, and as stated above, GCC does the same in most cases. Really, making all your integers larger isn't always desirable. Sometimes you'd rather optimize for space, and so you use the smallest integer size that is large enough for the task at hand. In the few places where your code really could take advantage of very large integers, you can change those to long longs.
This means you're not *really* targetting 64bit.
Yes it does. If the compiler generates 64-bit instructions then it is targetting 64-bit. Integer sizes have nothing at all to do with it. Current 32-bit code uses a combination of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit ints as needed; does that mean that it's not really targetting 32-bit?
you don't get the inherent advantages (64bit time_t for example).
The size of ints and longs has no bearing on the size of a time_t. A time_t could still be a long long, for example. Keep in mind that if you change the size of time_t, you automatically break binary compatibility with any library or system calls that use time_t. A better plan would be to have something like a time64_t and accompanying new library and system calls.
Presumably they did this for backward compatibility, then broke it by making size_t 64bit
This doesn't break anything. There was never any guarantee that a size_t would fit inside a long, so any code that assumed so was nonportable to begin with. If you're storing a size_t, you should use a size_t variable.
this is why you get all the portability warnings
You're getting portability warnings because the code is nonportable.
Actually, even longs are 32 bits. Lots of code uses longs, fully expecting them to be 32 bits. The reason code uses longs is they are guaranteed to be at least 32 bits, whereas ints are only guaranteed to be at least 16 bits. You have to expressly use long longs (or a variation such as int64_t) to get 64 bits. Mind you, all of this is from the standpoint of C. Other, less important languages may vary.
Incidentally, I actually used Windows 1.0 on my 8086-compatible back in the 80s. It came on 360K 5.25" floppies; about 3 of them I think. It was neat, but you couldn't do much because while it came with a few small applications (descendants of which are still in Windows today), but there was no third-party software.
No 5MB hard drive has ever been made. The PC/XT, which was indeed the first PC to have a hard drive, actually had a 10MB hard drive.
We used to have "interlaced" and "non-interlaced". So are you saying that we've simply renamed the latter term "progressive scan"? Why?!?
Which buggy kernel were you using?
The Star Wars Nonology? As much as I would love to see more movies, Lucas has stated definitively that there will be only 6.
Windows users see no value in running on anything other than the volume-leading processor architecture. There's no value in it.
So... if there's no value in it, would that be why Windows users see no value in it? Got it.
The point is that turning on the MS firewall is the same as turning off those services whether you need them or not.
No, it is not the same thing. Like my original post says -- and you even quoted this part -- LOCAL MACHINES can still access those services even as the firewall blocks remote machines from accessing them. Firewalls are useful.
Um, no. That is the primary purpose of a firewall. It is your first line of defense. It won't necessarily (shouldn't be) your last though.
If you don't want someone accessing a service, you turn it off or change it's configuration to deny specific external hosts.
Yes, turning it off is recommended if you don't need it at all, but if you need it (e.g. for local machines) then it's not a solution. Most services aren't configurable enough to allow/deny specific hosts. If they were, they would essentially have their own mini firewalls builtin. You think that's better than having one centrally managed firewall?? Also, denying specific hosts is not the same as dropping packets. It's generally preferable to drop packets so as to appear "invisible" rather than deny connections, which not only confirms your existence but allows for straight denial of service attacks against your machine or even reflexive denial of service attacks against another machine.
If there are holes in the OS that a hacker can exploit, then a firewall is only a band-aid, that may or may not work.
The most secure setup involves layers of security, and that is what Microsoft has been preaching recently. It's pretty hard to argue that removing layers of protection is better. Don't you wear your seatbelt even though there's also an airbag?
I think you could watch every episode in one weekend, if you encountered a rift in the time-space continuum. Chances of that are fairly high. :)