If you hadn't been running XP as an Administrator account (which is bad, btw), you'd have known that XP has a "install when I shut down the computer" feature for updates.
I tried running XP as a limited user but it was completely unusable.
Nope, doesn't work! $ NET STOP WUAUSERV ksh: NET: not found [No such file or directory]
If you're smart enough to use a non default shell, I guess you're smart enough to either figure out how to either do it in that shell or switch back to cmd.exe when things don't work.
Then explain why Vista (which is NT based) is so slow
Code bloat?
If I can get a default install in Ubuntu that has more software in 1-2 GB of HD space and I can barely fit an install of Vista on a 5 GB partition. NT might have once been nice, but development either stopped or feature bloat is growing.
If you prefer Ubuntu the use it. But I'd bet Ubuntu is quite a bit bigger than a Linux distribution from around the time NT was launched too.
Erm... no. Microsoft had already finished the NT kernel when they decided to ditch the Win9x/ME "kernel" for the one in NT 4.0 and Win2K (NT came out ages before ME). It wasn't a kernel rewrite at all, just two different kernels running side by side until MS decided to kill the weak one and use the good one.
The plan was to replace Windows 9x/Me from the start. In fact the original plan was that Windows 98 would be the last Windows based on the old kernel mode code and the transition to the NT kernel would be complete by Windows 2000. Windows Me was launched by popular demand. By the time Windows XP was launched the transition finally happened.
So the plan was always to kill off 16 bit Windows and replace it with an NT based OS. This wasn't quite ready as of Windows 2000 so they had to launch on extra 16 bit OS, Windows Me as a stopgap waiting for Windows XP.
Think about it - if you're making a clean break from Windows, would you choose a mature, well established alternative like Linux or MacOSX, or would you choose a completely new, unproven and completely incompatible and unstandardised operating system from Microsoft? Even if the new Microsoft OS is cleaner, being incompatible with EVERY operating system out there would absolutely kill it.
Microsoft have already done one kernel rewrite, going from Windows 9x/Me to Windows NT. They have no need to do another - the NT kernel is already more modern than a Unix style kernel. It's preemptible, reentrant and has fine grained locking, all the things you need for good SMP performance. User mode stuff has been tweaked over the years to add features and has probably been rewritten several times incrementally. But they aren't going to do a big bang rewrite of the user mode stuff or break compatibility because there's nothing to be gained and everything to be lost.
I think in XP SP2 it was meant to be hard to have keep using a machine which wasn't patched. It's an overreaction IMO, but that was the decision. Actually I think you could put it into "Notify me about updates but don't download them" mode in the GUI. But that seems unsafe. What you can't do is to tell it "Sod off, I'm busy, I'll reboot the machine when I go to bed" once you select "Automatic install" using the GUI, you needed to stop the service.
This is better in Vista, it's easy to put it into a mode where it will download updates and install them whenever you reboot. I can see from the taskbar when I need to shutdown rather than suspend at night.
The reason most Firefox users use the most up to date version is that it's the only way to get rid of the annoying pop-ups.
I think the article is trying to imply it was because Firefox users where the 'intelectual and social elite of the Internet' as some irony challenged person once said of his fellow Mac users.
What are you worried about? It's just bits. Information wants to be free. It's not like you own it or anything. Complaining about it being posted on the net will just lead to the Streisand Effect.
Everyone knows that security through obscurity is a bad model. In the Web 2.0 world the only sustainable business model is to make your Social Security number public and sell support on people who want to use it. E.g. if some dude in Nigeria is trying to apply for a credit card in your name he might get asked about your postal address and secret codeword. You could make a few bucks if you gave him the information, more if you applied for the credit card for him yourself.
And don't try to encrypt stuff. Studies show that 95% of Nigerian phishers want DRM free personal information.
I think you're severely misinformed as to what A Linux is. It's not Gnome nor is it KDE.
Wow, really? I've never heard that before;-)
I tell you what Linux isn't. It's not a platform. Windows is - it's easy to build a binary application to run on "Windows" and it will work on Vista, XP and Windows 2000. Very few people do that for Linux, they provide source code and let people port it to Red Hat or Ubuntu or KUbuntu or Gentoo, i.e. half a dozen distributions running half a dozen Window managers.
Plasma is sort of similar (but a lot more elaborate) to Vista's Gadgets in that they can dock on the panel or be dragged out and float around on the desktop. Some of the compositing effects are similar to what Aero do.
Most people turn that stuff off in Vista because it's annoying. Well Aero is ok but the sidebar is the first thing I get rid of. Now most of the annoyance in Vista is subtle stuff like Add Remove Programs having a new icon or not being able to enable/disable network adapters from the start menu - I need this is because our brain damaged corporate VPN software gets confused if I take my laptop home and then connect it to the network. Vista is slightly slower than XP too.
Now if I try to use KDE or Gnome it's basically a disaster. If the differences between Vista and XP are enough to annoy you, the differences between Linux and Windows are going to be make you give up and use a Windows machine after a couple of minutes if you're in a hurry to actually do something. There are lots of other subtle Windowsisms that I miss on Linux too. Like the backspace key deleting characters rather than displaying ^H, or cut and paste working for a variety of formats, or Escape dismissing dialogs and hotkeys in general. Or my graphics card/wifi adapter just working without me having to fiddle around with some dorky package manager and spend ages Googling. Or Photoshop running. Or Visual Studio, Ultraedit, Beyond Compare, The Orange Box, uTorrent and WinDBG.
Saying "it's like Vista because it does compositing and has a start menu" shows a serious ignorance of why people use Windows.
Well, language doesn't parse logically; parsing is a syntactic operation. Logic occurs at the semantic level, and a string that has a valid parse doesn't have to yield a valid semantic interpretation. Such phenomena are quite common in natural language: to take a somewhat famous example, the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is syntactically valid though semantically aberrant.
This task should be quite easy. Frustration and anger are the only two emotions I tend to experience when I get through to an automated help center. It would be a better investment of time to evaluate how long I spend interfacing with the system, how many times I have to re-navigate the menu hierarchy, how many times I have to call back and start over, how many actual people I end up being directed to, how many times I have to restate the same information and how long I spend talking to someone before I solve my problem, if I ever do... but I'm not bitter..
How frustrated with this voicemail system are you on a scale of 0 to 9, where 0 is not at all frustrated and 9 is very frustrated. I'm sorry you pressed the pound key to return to the previous level. The pound key only works for non mandatory poll questions but this poll question is mandatory for users of the complaints line. Please press a number. You pressed 9. Is this correct. Press pound if you are happy with this answer or star to move on to the next question. You pressed star. How frustrated with this voicemail system are you on a scale of 0 to 9, where 0 is not at all angry and 9 is very frustrated.
Raoul Duke: If the pigs were gathering in Vegas, I felt the drug culture should be represented as well. And there was a certain bent appeal in the notion of running a savage burn on one Las Vegas hotel, and then just wheeling across town and checking into another. Me and a thousand ranking cops from all over America. Why not? Move confidently into their midst.
http://www.answers.com/decimation&r=67Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group.
Try living in the 21st century. Stupid language nazis.
Do you defy the mighty Caesar? I'll have you crucified for insolence!
More proof we need to go in there and help them to be more like us. Then they will be happy and free, just like we did in Iraq when we helped them back in 2002.
This was a triumph I'm making a note here HUGE SUCCESS It's hard to overstate my satisfaction Neoconservatism
we do what we must because we can for the good of all of us except for the ones who are dead but there's no sense crying over every mistake you just keep on trying until you run out of oil and the polics gets done and you make a neat Middle East for the people who are still alive
I'm not even angry I'm being so sincere right now even though you broke my heart and voted me out of office
As someone who's spent a lot of time denying the holocaust, I have to say that this rings true. So I'll probably switch to saying things like, "Jews were kept safe in Germany during the second world war."
Yeah, they moved them all to special camps so they could keep an eye on them.
I've always thought "Without Prejudice" would be a good motto for a shady company. You'd put it on your letters under the logo and you'd be protected while you lied your ass off during negotiations.
Some cell phone execs, although I'm sure they have unlimited plans (or simply don't pay phone bills), so they can see the dangers of having to pay for incoming texts with no way to shut them off.
Wouldn't that be a bit like trying to mail bomb a BOFH?
Sorry, most of what you said or suspected is wrong. The system is actually a very clever design which prevents interruption of data/fax calls by the phone and in fact also eavesdropping from another phone inside the house.
The "multi-way phone sockets" are usually of the NFN-Type. Here F means "Fernsprecher" (Phone) while N means "Nicht-Fernsprecher" (Non-Phone). The socket is designed so that the line goes first to the left N socket , then to the right N socket and finally to the F socket. The phone will always be the last in chain. A non-phone device (fax, modem) plugged into one of the N sockets is supposed to have two electronic switches inside which will chain-through the line to the next socket when the device does not use the line. So if you are not sending a fax or surfing the net, you will be able to use the phone normally. However when the fax/modem takes over, the phone will be cut off. This clever trick prevents you from interfering with the transmission by picking up the phone.
As you are not supposed to plug two phones into one box, this also prevents eavesdropping. Overload prevention is not the reason. There were and are devices available which either are put before the NFN-box and allow to wire another NFN-box or contain a F or NFN socket themselves. Both will allow to wire a second phone and of course you could use more than one of these devices. These device however contain a automatic switch will will cut-off the other phone when one is in use. But they will all ring.
Yeah, but why are people trying to prevent eavesdropping from inside the same house? If you really wanted to do it you'd just alter the wiring inside the box.
And what I thought was funny was how all this obfuscation was explained by referencing the Nazis, as if that somehow trumps any argument about the pointlessness of the scheme. If I wanted to eavesdrop on someone inside the same house this scheme won't stop me. In computer terms I have root access to the phone wiring in my house an so I could disable the switches that stop me eavesdropping. Or more likely I'd pop down to the electronics store and buy a slightly different box that allows parallel connections.
And as I pointed out, if a dictatorial government wanted to tap phones they would do it at the exchange. Privacy laws wouldn't stop them either, they have root access to the justice system and so they could change the laws or just ignore them.
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If you hadn't been running XP as an Administrator account (which is bad, btw), you'd have known that XP has a "install when I shut down the computer" feature for updates.
I tried running XP as a limited user but it was completely unusable.
Nope, doesn't work!
$ NET STOP WUAUSERV
ksh: NET: not found [No such file or directory]
If you're smart enough to use a non default shell, I guess you're smart enough to either figure out how to either do it in that shell or switch back to cmd.exe when things don't work.
Then explain why Vista (which is NT based) is so slow
Code bloat?
If I can get a default install in Ubuntu that has more software in 1-2 GB of HD space and I can barely fit an install of Vista on a 5 GB partition. NT might have once been nice, but development either stopped or feature bloat is growing.
If you prefer Ubuntu the use it. But I'd bet Ubuntu is quite a bit bigger than a Linux distribution from around the time NT was launched too.
Erm ... no. Microsoft had already finished the NT kernel when they decided to ditch the Win9x/ME "kernel" for the one in NT 4.0 and Win2K (NT came out ages before ME). It wasn't a kernel rewrite at all, just two different kernels running side by side until MS decided to kill the weak one and use the good one.
The plan was to replace Windows 9x/Me from the start. In fact the original plan was that Windows 98 would be the last Windows based on the old kernel mode code and the transition to the NT kernel would be complete by Windows 2000. Windows Me was launched by popular demand. By the time Windows XP was launched the transition finally happened.
So the plan was always to kill off 16 bit Windows and replace it with an NT based OS. This wasn't quite ready as of Windows 2000 so they had to launch on extra 16 bit OS, Windows Me as a stopgap waiting for Windows XP.
Think about it - if you're making a clean break from Windows, would you choose a mature, well established alternative like Linux or MacOSX, or would you choose a completely new, unproven and completely incompatible and unstandardised operating system from Microsoft? Even if the new Microsoft OS is cleaner, being incompatible with EVERY operating system out there would absolutely kill it.
Microsoft have already done one kernel rewrite, going from Windows 9x/Me to Windows NT. They have no need to do another - the NT kernel is already more modern than a Unix style kernel. It's preemptible, reentrant and has fine grained locking, all the things you need for good SMP performance. User mode stuff has been tweaked over the years to add features and has probably been rewritten several times incrementally. But they aren't going to do a big bang rewrite of the user mode stuff or break compatibility because there's nothing to be gained and everything to be lost.
I think in XP SP2 it was meant to be hard to have keep using a machine which wasn't patched. It's an overreaction IMO, but that was the decision. Actually I think you could put it into "Notify me about updates but don't download them" mode in the GUI. But that seems unsafe. What you can't do is to tell it "Sod off, I'm busy, I'll reboot the machine when I go to bed" once you select "Automatic install" using the GUI, you needed to stop the service.
This is better in Vista, it's easy to put it into a mode where it will download updates and install them whenever you reboot. I can see from the taskbar when I need to shutdown rather than suspend at night.
The reason most Firefox users use the most up to date version is that it's the only way to get rid of the annoying pop-ups.
I think the article is trying to imply it was because Firefox users where the 'intelectual and social elite of the Internet' as some irony challenged person once said of his fellow Mac users.
Frankly, I'm sorry I upgraded to Firefox 3. Had problems with my google homepage and with YouTube since. Good thing there's IE Tab.
Somewhere deep in hell a demon just snorted battery acid and gasoline on the keyboard and then Alt Tabbed back to Visual Studio, project title IE8.
In XP I found out you could type
NET STOP WUAUSERV
That stops the Windows Update service if you're not ready to reboot. When you do reboot the updates will be installed as a side effect.
In Vista you can set it to download the updates automatically and only install them when you reboot - I've never seen a deathclock.
What are you worried about? It's just bits. Information wants to be free. It's not like you own it or anything. Complaining about it being posted on the net will just lead to the Streisand Effect.
Everyone knows that security through obscurity is a bad model. In the Web 2.0 world the only sustainable business model is to make your Social Security number public and sell support on people who want to use it. E.g. if some dude in Nigeria is trying to apply for a credit card in your name he might get asked about your postal address and secret codeword. You could make a few bucks if you gave him the information, more if you applied for the credit card for him yourself.
And don't try to encrypt stuff. Studies show that 95% of Nigerian phishers want DRM free personal information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb
I think you're severely misinformed as to what A Linux is. It's not Gnome nor is it KDE.
Wow, really? I've never heard that before ;-)
I tell you what Linux isn't. It's not a platform. Windows is - it's easy to build a binary application to run on "Windows" and it will work on Vista, XP and Windows 2000. Very few people do that for Linux, they provide source code and let people port it to Red Hat or Ubuntu or KUbuntu or Gentoo, i.e. half a dozen distributions running half a dozen Window managers.
(I can't imagine them accidentally deleting everything with a GUI - there's no one-step rm -rf or del /y C:\* for a GUI).
Windows key+E (open Explorer), Ctrl+A (select all), Shift+Del (permanently delete), Return (Yes I am sure).
Ok it's not single step, but if once you're used to hotkeys you can do things quite quickly.
Actually there's another thing. Even if you're Admin, Vista goes to great lenghths to stop you doing a del /y C:\*.
Plasma is sort of similar (but a lot more elaborate) to Vista's Gadgets in that they can dock on the panel or be dragged out and float around on the desktop. Some of the compositing effects are similar to what Aero do.
Most people turn that stuff off in Vista because it's annoying. Well Aero is ok but the sidebar is the first thing I get rid of. Now most of the annoyance in Vista is subtle stuff like Add Remove Programs having a new icon or not being able to enable/disable network adapters from the start menu - I need this is because our brain damaged corporate VPN software gets confused if I take my laptop home and then connect it to the network. Vista is slightly slower than XP too.
Now if I try to use KDE or Gnome it's basically a disaster. If the differences between Vista and XP are enough to annoy you, the differences between Linux and Windows are going to be make you give up and use a Windows machine after a couple of minutes if you're in a hurry to actually do something. There are lots of other subtle Windowsisms that I miss on Linux too. Like the backspace key deleting characters rather than displaying ^H, or cut and paste working for a variety of formats, or Escape dismissing dialogs and hotkeys in general. Or my graphics card/wifi adapter just working without me having to fiddle around with some dorky package manager and spend ages Googling. Or Photoshop running. Or Visual Studio, Ultraedit, Beyond Compare, The Orange Box, uTorrent and WinDBG.
Saying "it's like Vista because it does compositing and has a start menu" shows a serious ignorance of why people use Windows.
Well, language doesn't parse logically; parsing is a syntactic operation. Logic occurs at the semantic level, and a string that has a valid parse doesn't have to yield a valid semantic interpretation. Such phenomena are quite common in natural language: to take a somewhat famous example, the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is syntactically valid though semantically aberrant.
Ann Hiro-Nao.
This task should be quite easy. Frustration and anger are the only two emotions I tend to experience when I get through to an automated help center. It would be a better investment of time to evaluate how long I spend interfacing with the system, how many times I have to re-navigate the menu hierarchy, how many times I have to call back and start over, how many actual people I end up being directed to, how many times I have to restate the same information and how long I spend talking to someone before I solve my problem, if I ever do. .. but I'm not bitter..
How frustrated with this voicemail system are you on a scale of 0 to 9, where 0 is not at all frustrated and 9 is very frustrated. I'm sorry you pressed the pound key to return to the previous level. The pound key only works for non mandatory poll questions but this poll question is mandatory for users of the complaints line. Please press a number. You pressed 9. Is this correct. Press pound if you are happy with this answer or star to move on to the next question. You pressed star. How frustrated with this voicemail system are you on a scale of 0 to 9, where 0 is not at all angry and 9 is very frustrated.
No he means savage. As in I'm off to pull a savage burn on Dreamworks SKG by downloading Kung Fu Panda off Pirate Bay.
http://www.imdb.co.uk/character/ch0032435/quotes
Raoul Duke: If the pigs were gathering in Vegas, I felt the drug culture should be represented as well. And there was a certain bent appeal in the notion of running a savage burn on one Las Vegas hotel, and then just wheeling across town and checking into another. Me and a thousand ranking cops from all over America. Why not? Move confidently into their midst.
http://www.answers.com/decimation&r=67 Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group.
Try living in the 21st century. Stupid language nazis.
Do you defy the mighty Caesar? I'll have you crucified for insolence!
More proof we need to go in there and help them to be more like us. Then they will be happy and free, just like we did in Iraq when we helped them back in 2002.
This was a triumph
I'm making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Neoconservatism
we do what we must because we can
for the good of all of us except for the ones who are dead
but there's no sense crying over every mistake
you just keep on trying until you run out of oil
and the polics gets done and you make a neat Middle East
for the people who are still alive
I'm not even angry
I'm being so sincere right now
even though you broke my heart and voted me out of office
It's also important in user interface design. One of my pet peeves is seeing something like:
[X] Disable the foo button
Why the hell not just invert the sense of the checkbox?
[ ] Enable the foo button
Ok, you win. How about we add another checkbox to disable negative sense checkboxes
[ ] Don't use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.
When you clicked it it would look like this
[ ] Use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.
All the other ones would toggle their checkedness and lose the Don't's and Disables in their captions.
As someone who's spent a lot of time denying the holocaust, I have to say that this rings true. So I'll probably switch to saying things like, "Jews were kept safe in Germany during the second world war."
Yeah, they moved them all to special camps so they could keep an eye on them.
I've always thought "Without Prejudice" would be a good motto for a shady company. You'd put it on your letters under the logo and you'd be protected while you lied your ass off during negotiations.
Some cell phone execs, although I'm sure they have unlimited plans (or simply don't pay phone bills), so they can see the dangers of having to pay for incoming texts with no way to shut them off.
Wouldn't that be a bit like trying to mail bomb a BOFH?
ICANN needs to be ICANNED?
Thanks! Try the veal and tip your waitress!
Sorry, most of what you said or suspected is wrong. The system is actually a very clever design which prevents interruption of data/fax calls by the phone and in fact also eavesdropping from another phone inside the house.
The "multi-way phone sockets" are usually of the NFN-Type. Here F means "Fernsprecher" (Phone) while N means "Nicht-Fernsprecher" (Non-Phone). The socket is designed so that the line goes first to the left N socket , then to the right N socket and finally to the F socket. The phone will always be the last in chain. A non-phone device (fax, modem) plugged into one of the N sockets is supposed to have two electronic switches inside which will chain-through the line to the next socket when the device does not use the line. So if you are not sending a fax or surfing the net, you will be able to use the phone normally. However when the fax/modem takes over, the phone will be cut off. This clever trick prevents you from interfering with the transmission by picking up the phone.
As you are not supposed to plug two phones into one box, this also prevents eavesdropping. Overload prevention is not the reason. There were and are devices available which either are put before the NFN-box and allow to wire another NFN-box or contain a F or NFN socket themselves. Both will allow to wire a second phone and of course you could use more than one of these devices. These device however contain a automatic switch will will cut-off the other phone when one is in use. But they will all ring.
Yeah, but why are people trying to prevent eavesdropping from inside the same house? If you really wanted to do it you'd just alter the wiring inside the box.
And what I thought was funny was how all this obfuscation was explained by referencing the Nazis, as if that somehow trumps any argument about the pointlessness of the scheme. If I wanted to eavesdrop on someone inside the same house this scheme won't stop me. In computer terms I have root access to the phone wiring in my house an so I could disable the switches that stop me eavesdropping. Or more likely I'd pop down to the electronics store and buy a slightly different box that allows parallel connections.
And as I pointed out, if a dictatorial government wanted to tap phones they would do it at the exchange. Privacy laws wouldn't stop them either, they have root access to the justice system and so they could change the laws or just ignore them.