There's a few positive comments in here somewhere, but you really have to dig for them (as you will no doubt have to for this one).
Have any of you ever tried running Windows 95, lately. I did, and noticed there were alot of little things that I could do in 98/2k that were not possible to do in 95 (like right-click interactivity in the start menu), so much so that I cannot effeciently and effectively use Windows 95 today. The same thing also applied to windows 98 and XP for me.
The very same thing applies also to XP and Vista. There are alot of small refinements in Vista that make it difficult to work the way I want in XP. Things that you wouldn't even notice until a few months of using Vista. In brief, here are a few of the things I find invaluable time savers:
Take for example, file renaming in Explorer. When you hit F2 to rename a file, it no longer highlights the extension (when you have the extension visible) and you can press the TAB button to move to rename the next file, etc.
The start button Search Field. I no longer have to go hunting around my start menu if I don't know where something is. And let's be honest, I have tonnes of crap on my start menu that I only need occasionally and never know where it is. Now, instead of wasting a few seconds (and losing my train of thought) searching for the program I need, can just type (a part of) the program name, and windows will load it.
Default Folder names: Gone is the excessively verbose "Documents and Settings" replaced with "Users" and so too is My Documents no longer the root for all your personal files... now your username is the root folder (I just wish more programs realised that and stopped cluttering up my Documents folder with their useless settings.)
Change Explorer Views: This one's a simple one... The view selection (i.e. detail, list, thumbnail) is now a button/dropdown, instead of just a dropdown. I'd much rather click the button 3 times instead of clicking it once, moving the mouse down to the name of the view I want and selecting it. Anything that can shave seconds off an already fairly easy process is awesome.
I like the new insanely large thumbnail sizes when dealing with a pictures folder.
UAC: I bought Vista for both my parents specifically because of UAC. If you're an administrator, UAC behaves stupidly. Granted. It becomes some weird twisted sort of double "Are you *really* sure?" confirmation. Useless. But, when you're not an administrator, it becomes the most obviously useful thing in the world. In XP, if you are a regular user, and you need to run some process as admin, you need to know beforehand. You need to find (sometimes by holding Shift when you right-click) the RunAs command, and use it to run this program as an Admin. In Vista, you can run it normally, and if it then finds out it needs admin rights, it will prompt you then and there to enter an admin user/password. That's the key difference. Needing to have foreknowledge and not.
When I first installed a beta or RC of Vista, I immediately declared it a complete and utter failure and bomb. I proclaimed I would never use it fully, and most certainly not ever let my parents use it, for fear of all the questions I would be bombarded with.
After I used it for a few months though, once things became familiar to me again, I greatly prefered it to XP. And it's a pain having to continue to use old clunky (interface-wise) XP.
I realise that many of the improvements I mentioned can be applied to XP through some means or other, but the point is that by including that improved functionality in the OS, they have raised the baseline. And I do recognise that to use Vista, you'll need a bigger screen resolution (long gone are the days of 1024×768 being enough), and a faster machine. I just take it for granted that as machines become more powerful and have more resources, so too do the software programs use those resources. Anyway, that's just my personal take on Vista, for me and my family.
The DOCTYPE tag was flawed from the beginning. If Microsoft hadn't "corrupted" it, somebody else would have. We are long past the days when computer programmers can rely on other computer programmers to do things "the right way." If you don't believe me, how about A List Apart: http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype.
You mean the kind of large company that would standardize on the software they write and read said documents in?
Or the kind of small company who has *always* had to support multiple document formats (internally and externally) because they couldn't/wouldn't standardize on software?
And if there comes a time where you need to re-save all these "dead" MS-OOXML in a living format, then it's as simple as hiring an intern for 10 minutes to write a vb program that will batch convert them all. Is ALL big enough for you?
We're always going to have "Document-Lock-In" to some degree. No matter how much you try, or how clever you're being, you cannot anticipate every possible future document feature one group or another will want to implement in their programs... it's just like project forking: the whole basis of Open Source. One company gets an idea on how to make the document format better, or how to implement a new feature they thought of, so they create their own verison of OOXML document, which now becomes incompatible with previous versions of that document. Future-proofing a file-format is an uphill battle.
The point is that we're not any worse off now with Word '07.docx files, than we were with Word 97.doc, and we may just be better off. Calling it Dead is a might bit premature.
Just on the surface of things: * A.doc extension could be from any bloody program, in any bloody format;.docx only has the one. * Any other program that currently supports the Word'97 format has has to reverse engineer it; even with half-assed standards documentation, that's a good deal half ass more than we had with Word'97.
Yeah, I shoulda said how does HD-DVD work. I'm well aware of the standard DVD format, and as for Men in Black, I'm 100% positive that the visual commentaries were a separate "subtitle layer", if you will.
I kinda got off on a tangent in the middle there with those exemplary DVDs. Kinda muddied my question.
Of course there are all the obligitory comments above about how commentaries are stupid, and special features are stupid, and interactivity is stupid, but must have missed the thread where people actually discussed how these new features are technically achieved, and I for one would like to know.
I know I've seen some really neat things done in the past that took advantage of the unused capabilities of DVDs, or that used them in new and interesting ways.
Men in Black - my favourite commentary, they had something (I forget what they called it) where you could see the sillouette of Jones and Sonnenberg while they did their commentaries, as well as them drawing on the screen, ALA football postgames. The was far-and-above my favourite example of dvd commentary capabilities. After seeing that, I assumed that all movies would use that in the future, but I never saw another that did.
X-Men 1 - They had an option where you could watch the movie with the deleted scenes thrown in where they belonged. I could never actually get it working on my DVD player, but it seemed like an excellent idea. I assumed because I could never get it working that they did it the smart way and threw in an alternate "playlist" instead of having the movie on there twice.
Final Destination 3 - someone above mentioned that there was some kind of "Choose How They Die" alternate scene ability on that one. That's really cool... reminds me of the ending to Clue, or the "Wayland Smithers" ending to Who Shot Mr. Burns.
Back to the Future - they had this thing where if you hit a "suddenly appearing" on-screen button during certain parts of the movie, it would play a PIP of a Michael J. Fox interview. The only unfortunate thing is that it was most definately not a real-time-PIP, and I seem to remember something distinctly "off" about it, but I don't remember what... probably similar to my X-Men problems.
Momento - The only reason I mention this one is because they have the whole "Chronolgical Edit" version on the 2-disc set, but they really authored it poorly. I mean, it's neat how they start with the credits, played in reverse... but they left out the ability to fast forward or rewind, so you have to literally sit there for 10 minutes before you actually get to the movie... definately a "what-not-to-do" reference disc.
So getting back to my actual point, are any of these new HD-DVD (and I'm assuming BluRay as well?) features truely new to HD-DVD, or is it just because there's now more room to put them on there?
It sounds like now they can do real-time PIPs (see Back to the Future, above), so that's cool, but is it only one audio stream? Does it blend two audio streams, or is it a one or the other kinda deal?
The Insurance/Damage Calculator (see TFA) sounds like it's the same as the Men in Black visual commentary (ahah! that's what it's called!) and the button overlays. But I admit, it does sound like a really neat application... kinda like watching Burnout. I could see an onscreen bodycount in some classic action films some time in the future.
I'm also extremely curious on the technicalities behind the "There's a pretty neat (but again gimmicky) feature when you can change the paint job / tires of a car in a particular scene." quote from the article, too.
So, anybody know how they do that? Or have any other note-worthy DVDs out there, with unique special features?
The only thing I don't know is if it will go from a Professional VLK to a Home OEM. But in all practicallity, I'm sure you can find a Professional OEM key for under $100, at any number of hole-in-the-wall computer places.
As for why they want to do it, who cares. Maybe they have no personal antithapy towards Microsoft. Maybe they want to be able to use Windows Update, or be able to download IE7, or Windows Defender? Maybe they want the warm fuzzies from not stealing? I don't care, I just know it's a dirt-simple thing to accomplish.
I use a few open source windows drivers myself, but even still, I recognise that the majority of crashes in Windows are likely due to buggy drivers and I think locking-down on that is a good step forward. That said, I remember reading a while back on The Old New Thing about how developers would go about defrauding the WHQL driver certification process, and I just cannot see how forcing it to be signed for certification is any different that just certifying it. Developers can still pull the same old tricks to get it certified while still bending the rules.
Still, though... at least it helps against malicious code. Provided they haven't forged a signature. The less zombie-boxes out there the better for all of us. One thing I don't know, though; I saw somewhere that only kernel-level drivers will need to be signed... (I didn't read TFA... only TFC) is it possible to re-write most of those OSS drivers to be user-mode drivers? Is such a thing even possible?
How can you tell a difference between a "public" open AP and one opened by mistake, while trying to browse the web from your laptop on a park bench downtown?
From a downtown park bench? Or parked across the street in your Chevy Blazer, in the middle of a residential area, for what appears to be several hours.
I don't know how the law is in the US, but in Canada, for a crime to be comitted you need two things: an illegal act, and intent.
I could bring up plenty of real world analogies, but none of them really exactly duplicate the scenario. Because this is a new scenario. The internet is not exactly like a lightbulb. Using an open acces point is not like making a sandwich in someone else's kitchen. It's not even like warm apple pie.
It's like using a service that someone else is paying for without their knowledge, or consent, with no intention to reimburse, ("Then the man noticed Dinon and snapped his computer shut.") to do who-knows-what with. He could have been doing anything with that internet connection. Anything.
Should Dinon have secured his wireless router? Absolutely. Should his not securing it be construed as an open invitation to use it? That's the question, now, isn't it? Does I think Benjamin Smith was taking the "moral high ground," parked out front using that private citizen's internet connection? Absolutely not.
I don't mean to sound negative, but... good fucking luck.
Besides, unless I'm horribly misreading the facts, end end of analog doesn't mean the end of free OTA. It just means those without ATSC tuners built into thier TVs would have to buy a $20 - $50 box that *does* decode ATSC. No biggie.
The Inquirer has a story about MS Longhorn and its need for better than entry level graphics cards.
Am I the only one who was disappointed reading this article? I thought a "story" had to be longer than two paragraphs. 'Course, for an Inquirer story, two pargraphs is pretty long; and hey it looks like they got some real facts in there (scant though they may be.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a few positive comments in here somewhere, but you really have to dig for them (as you will no doubt have to for this one).
Have any of you ever tried running Windows 95, lately. I did, and noticed there were alot of little things that I could do in 98/2k that were not possible to do in 95 (like right-click interactivity in the start menu), so much so that I cannot effeciently and effectively use Windows 95 today. The same thing also applied to windows 98 and XP for me.
The very same thing applies also to XP and Vista. There are alot of small refinements in Vista that make it difficult to work the way I want in XP. Things that you wouldn't even notice until a few months of using Vista. In brief, here are a few of the things I find invaluable time savers:
Take for example, file renaming in Explorer. When you hit F2 to rename a file, it no longer highlights the extension (when you have the extension visible) and you can press the TAB button to move to rename the next file, etc.
The start button Search Field. I no longer have to go hunting around my start menu if I don't know where something is. And let's be honest, I have tonnes of crap on my start menu that I only need occasionally and never know where it is. Now, instead of wasting a few seconds (and losing my train of thought) searching for the program I need, can just type (a part of) the program name, and windows will load it.
Default Folder names: Gone is the excessively verbose "Documents and Settings" replaced with "Users" and so too is My Documents no longer the root for all your personal files... now your username is the root folder (I just wish more programs realised that and stopped cluttering up my Documents folder with their useless settings.)
Change Explorer Views: This one's a simple one... The view selection (i.e. detail, list, thumbnail) is now a button/dropdown, instead of just a dropdown. I'd much rather click the button 3 times instead of clicking it once, moving the mouse down to the name of the view I want and selecting it. Anything that can shave seconds off an already fairly easy process is awesome.
I like the new insanely large thumbnail sizes when dealing with a pictures folder.
UAC: I bought Vista for both my parents specifically because of UAC. If you're an administrator, UAC behaves stupidly. Granted. It becomes some weird twisted sort of double "Are you *really* sure?" confirmation. Useless. But, when you're not an administrator, it becomes the most obviously useful thing in the world. In XP, if you are a regular user, and you need to run some process as admin, you need to know beforehand. You need to find (sometimes by holding Shift when you right-click) the RunAs command, and use it to run this program as an Admin. In Vista, you can run it normally, and if it then finds out it needs admin rights, it will prompt you then and there to enter an admin user/password. That's the key difference. Needing to have foreknowledge and not.
When I first installed a beta or RC of Vista, I immediately declared it a complete and utter failure and bomb. I proclaimed I would never use it fully, and most certainly not ever let my parents use it, for fear of all the questions I would be bombarded with.
After I used it for a few months though, once things became familiar to me again, I greatly prefered it to XP. And it's a pain having to continue to use old clunky (interface-wise) XP.
I realise that many of the improvements I mentioned can be applied to XP through some means or other, but the point is that by including that improved functionality in the OS, they have raised the baseline. And I do recognise that to use Vista, you'll need a bigger screen resolution (long gone are the days of 1024×768 being enough), and a faster machine. I just take it for granted that as machines become more powerful and have more resources, so too do the software programs use those resources. Anyway, that's just my personal take on Vista, for me and my family.
Yeah, because I like spending an hour arguing with my boss/client over semantics.
The DOCTYPE tag was flawed from the beginning. If Microsoft hadn't "corrupted" it, somebody else would have. We are long past the days when computer programmers can rely on other computer programmers to do things "the right way." If you don't believe me, how about A List Apart: http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype.
You mean the kind of large company that would standardize on the software they write and read said documents in?
.docx files, than we were with Word 97 .doc, and we may just be better off. Calling it Dead is a might bit premature.
.doc extension could be from any bloody program, in any bloody format; .docx only has the one.
Or the kind of small company who has *always* had to support multiple document formats (internally and externally) because they couldn't/wouldn't standardize on software?
And if there comes a time where you need to re-save all these "dead" MS-OOXML in a living format, then it's as simple as hiring an intern for 10 minutes to write a vb program that will batch convert them all. Is ALL big enough for you?
We're always going to have "Document-Lock-In" to some degree. No matter how much you try, or how clever you're being, you cannot anticipate every possible future document feature one group or another will want to implement in their programs... it's just like project forking: the whole basis of Open Source. One company gets an idea on how to make the document format better, or how to implement a new feature they thought of, so they create their own verison of OOXML document, which now becomes incompatible with previous versions of that document. Future-proofing a file-format is an uphill battle.
The point is that we're not any worse off now with Word '07
Just on the surface of things:
* A
* Any other program that currently supports the Word'97 format has has to reverse engineer it; even with half-assed standards documentation, that's a good deal half ass more than we had with Word'97.
Yeah, I shoulda said how does HD-DVD work. I'm well aware of the standard DVD format, and as for Men in Black, I'm 100% positive that the visual commentaries were a separate "subtitle layer", if you will.
I kinda got off on a tangent in the middle there with those exemplary DVDs. Kinda muddied my question.
Of course there are all the obligitory comments above about how commentaries are stupid, and special features are stupid, and interactivity is stupid, but must have missed the thread where people actually discussed how these new features are technically achieved, and I for one would like to know.
I know I've seen some really neat things done in the past that took advantage of the unused capabilities of DVDs, or that used them in new and interesting ways.
So getting back to my actual point, are any of these new HD-DVD (and I'm assuming BluRay as well?) features truely new to HD-DVD, or is it just because there's now more room to put them on there?
It sounds like now they can do real-time PIPs (see Back to the Future, above), so that's cool, but is it only one audio stream? Does it blend two audio streams, or is it a one or the other kinda deal?
The Insurance/Damage Calculator (see TFA) sounds like it's the same as the Men in Black visual commentary (ahah! that's what it's called!) and the button overlays. But I admit, it does sound like a really neat application... kinda like watching Burnout. I could see an onscreen bodycount in some classic action films some time in the future.
I'm also extremely curious on the technicalities behind the "There's a pretty neat (but again gimmicky) feature when you can change the paint job / tires of a car in a particular scene." quote from the article, too.
So, anybody know how they do that? Or have any other note-worthy DVDs out there, with unique special features?
I'm surprised by the amount of complete misinformation being spread around here.
The above tool: http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/c/e9c73 b60-bff1-4f03-b06f-d3cbe8f8d9f4/KeyUpdateTool.exe
(also found, with instructions:
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/purchase/UpdateIn structions.aspx
)
is all you need to legitimize your copy of windows. I've used it a number of times on a number of machines, and it WILL convert a VLK (volume License Key, or Corporate) to OEM, and I assume it should do the same for a Retail key. No reinstalls, no loss of data, no fuss, no mess. You are Legit.
The only thing I don't know is if it will go from a Professional VLK to a Home OEM. But in all practicallity, I'm sure you can find a Professional OEM key for under $100, at any number of hole-in-the-wall computer places.
As for why they want to do it, who cares. Maybe they have no personal antithapy towards Microsoft. Maybe they want to be able to use Windows Update, or be able to download IE7, or Windows Defender? Maybe they want the warm fuzzies from not stealing? I don't care, I just know it's a dirt-simple thing to accomplish.
I use a few open source windows drivers myself, but even still, I recognise that the majority of crashes in Windows are likely due to buggy drivers and I think locking-down on that is a good step forward. That said, I remember reading a while back on The Old New Thing about how developers would go about defrauding the WHQL driver certification process, and I just cannot see how forcing it to be signed for certification is any different that just certifying it. Developers can still pull the same old tricks to get it certified while still bending the rules.
Still, though... at least it helps against malicious code. Provided they haven't forged a signature. The less zombie-boxes out there the better for all of us. One thing I don't know, though; I saw somewhere that only kernel-level drivers will need to be signed... (I didn't read TFA... only TFC) is it possible to re-write most of those OSS drivers to be user-mode drivers? Is such a thing even possible?
From a downtown park bench? Or parked across the street in your Chevy Blazer, in the middle of a residential area, for what appears to be several hours.
I don't know how the law is in the US, but in Canada, for a crime to be comitted you need two things: an illegal act, and intent.
I could bring up plenty of real world analogies, but none of them really exactly duplicate the scenario. Because this is a new scenario. The internet is not exactly like a lightbulb. Using an open acces point is not like making a sandwich in someone else's kitchen. It's not even like warm apple pie.
It's like using a service that someone else is paying for without their knowledge, or consent, with no intention to reimburse, ("Then the man noticed Dinon and snapped his computer shut.") to do who-knows-what with. He could have been doing anything with that internet connection. Anything.
Should Dinon have secured his wireless router? Absolutely. Should his not securing it be construed as an open invitation to use it? That's the question, now, isn't it? Does I think Benjamin Smith was taking the "moral high ground," parked out front using that private citizen's internet connection? Absolutely not.
I don't mean to sound negative, but
Besides, unless I'm horribly misreading the facts, end end of analog doesn't mean the end of free OTA. It just means those without ATSC tuners built into thier TVs would have to buy a $20 - $50 box that *does* decode ATSC. No biggie.
The Inquirer has a story about MS Longhorn and its need for better than entry level graphics cards. Am I the only one who was disappointed reading this article? I thought a "story" had to be longer than two paragraphs. 'Course, for an Inquirer story, two pargraphs is pretty long; and hey it looks like they got some real facts in there (scant though they may be.)
Pity. I find "Kaite.com" to be a much more compelling title than "A Girl's Life Online." Bravo, slashdot.