You're the only person in this thread to even mention the word "theft." You state again, below, "copyright infringement isn't theft." So what? It is illegal, which is what the GP said.
Not in Vista. That's the entire point of UAC - even an admin account doesn't run as root, it needs user intervention ("Cancel or Allow") to elevate priveleges. Exactly like sudo.
That's where Google Docs came from, too. And Picasa. And Google Earth. It's a pretty Google thing too, which makes all the flak MS catches for it pretty funny.
I'm doing a CS degree at a top university and haven't written a single line of code in the past two semesters. Programming is perhaps the least important part of computer science.
If people thinks it's a critical security update, why would they be surprised that it requires admin privileges? They've already jumped through a dozen hoops to get to the point of running the program, so I don't see why this (a logical requirement) would faze them.
If they're DLing and watching on their computers, they almost certainly already have an HD display. And at the distance people usually sit from their monitors, the extra quality is huge.
Rather than cancel their subscription, embed personally identifying information and/or their credit card # in the watermark. Then release a program that will scan the video and recover the information.
Excel is far more powerful than Calc, and the ribbon interface in Office 2007 (if you've moved to that) knocks the socks off of anything in OOo or 2003. And of course 2003 or 2007 will give you much better compatibility with the rest of the world than OOo as long as you save in.doc.
OOo has save to pdf, but you can get that in 2007 too.
Any realistic DRM scheme for downloads must involve encryption with a customer-specific key. Otherwise I can just copy the file. But that kind of encryption makes it impossible to give everyone the same file.
I take that back; the player could be locked-down and refuse to play things unless it receives authorization from a remote server. That seems like it'd be far easier to break, though.
I've been running Vista for a few weeks now and, on the whole, it's similar to XP but noticeably better. Most of the enhancements I've noticed are little things, mostly interface improvements, that combined just make the system easier to use. A particular example: in XP if you select a file and then click again on the name (or hit F2) it selects the filename and lets you edit it. What's slightly irritating is that it selects the file name *and* extension. In Vista it only highlights the name, so when I'm renaming several.doc files it ends up saving a LOT of clicks or keystrokes. As the auther mentioned, the larger icons are nice for high-resolution screens. Meh. The power management center is a lot better and simpler to use - I unplug my laptop and in two clicks I'm in low power mode. The per-application audio mixer is handy. Indexed search is nice, but you can get the same thing in XP with Google Desktop. Lots and lots of little things that really improve the UI taken together.
Complaints:
For some reason they fucked up the defragmenter and now it's just a big "defrag my hard drive now!" button with no progress indicator or something to show how fragmented your disk is (this *really* pisses me off). Startup/shutdown time is better, but hibernate/sleep is a problem - when I come out of them it doesn't remember I have a second monitor, and I have to reboot to get it back. Thus, they're mostly pointless.
Surprisingly it runs a little faster on my notebook than XP did, I assume because of the caching (2GB RAM) and Aero offloading stuff to the GPU.
All in all, I wouldn't want to go back, but I don't know it's worth the hassle of upgrading for everyone. Especially since not all software works quite right yet. YMMV.
The indexed search kicks ass. No one ever used search in XP because it was useless, but in Vista it's easier and faster to just hit Windows and then type the approximate file name than the actually open explorer, click through to the folder, etc. etc. On the other hand, I used to do the same thing with Google Desktop search in XP, so it's not a huge reason to upgrade.
Parent is full of shit. I'm running Vista and it only pops up UAC when I need an escalation of priveleges (e.g. installing something outside my user directory). It does not come up when changing your background, or when copying text, or pasting text. It may pop up when moving files around on a drive, but only if you've configured that drive to require administrator priveleges to modify. Duh.
Oddly enough, when I upgraded to Vista all I needed were graphics card drivers. I'd expected to spend forever hunting on the web (it's a notebook without a Vista-sticker, so the manufacturer won't provide Vista drivers), but even my wireless card worked out of the box.
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You're the only person in this thread to even mention the word "theft." You state again, below, "copyright infringement isn't theft." So what? It is illegal, which is what the GP said.
Blame the application developer. It only appears when an application tries to do something requiring elevated privileges.
Not in Vista. That's the entire point of UAC - even an admin account doesn't run as root, it needs user intervention ("Cancel or Allow") to elevate priveleges. Exactly like sudo.
If you want a secure Linux, you do need the equivalent of UAC - sudo.
That's where Google Docs came from, too. And Picasa. And Google Earth. It's a pretty Google thing too, which makes all the flak MS catches for it pretty funny.
I'm doing a CS degree at a top university and haven't written a single line of code in the past two semesters. Programming is perhaps the least important part of computer science.
If people thinks it's a critical security update, why would they be surprised that it requires admin privileges? They've already jumped through a dozen hoops to get to the point of running the program, so I don't see why this (a logical requirement) would faze them.
If they're DLing and watching on their computers, they almost certainly already have an HD display. And at the distance people usually sit from their monitors, the extra quality is huge.
Rather, it's a GNU Octave window. Really, what can beat that? And on the occasion that I need to do something symbolic I pull out a TI-89.
Excuse me, Opera is closed-source and sells their browser (on other platforms) for a price. How exactly would you go about merging that with Firefox?
With Blake's http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threa did=159157A Better AI which Firaxis actually included in the latest patch, it's gotten pretty impressive.
Rather than cancel their subscription, embed personally identifying information and/or their credit card # in the watermark. Then release a program that will scan the video and recover the information.
Excel is far more powerful than Calc, and the ribbon interface in Office 2007 (if you've moved to that) knocks the socks off of anything in OOo or 2003. And of course 2003 or 2007 will give you much better compatibility with the rest of the world than OOo as long as you save in .doc.
OOo has save to pdf, but you can get that in 2007 too.
It means that anyone on the wireless at Starbucks, or who plugs a laptop into the network at work, can own your box. That's a security issue.
They do. There's a plugin for reading and writing ODF in Word 2007.
One problem with your amusing story: Microsoft did respond with a patch that closed the hole.
Any realistic DRM scheme for downloads must involve encryption with a customer-specific key. Otherwise I can just copy the file. But that kind of encryption makes it impossible to give everyone the same file. I take that back; the player could be locked-down and refuse to play things unless it receives authorization from a remote server. That seems like it'd be far easier to break, though.
I specifically disabled that because that way if I want to run it in high-power mode on battery, it's faster.
That's in Vista. Windows Search. Windows-"word"-enter starts Word, for example.
Complaints:
For some reason they fucked up the defragmenter and now it's just a big "defrag my hard drive now!" button with no progress indicator or something to show how fragmented your disk is (this *really* pisses me off). Startup/shutdown time is better, but hibernate/sleep is a problem - when I come out of them it doesn't remember I have a second monitor, and I have to reboot to get it back. Thus, they're mostly pointless.
Surprisingly it runs a little faster on my notebook than XP did, I assume because of the caching (2GB RAM) and Aero offloading stuff to the GPU.
All in all, I wouldn't want to go back, but I don't know it's worth the hassle of upgrading for everyone. Especially since not all software works quite right yet. YMMV.
The indexed search kicks ass. No one ever used search in XP because it was useless, but in Vista it's easier and faster to just hit Windows and then type the approximate file name than the actually open explorer, click through to the folder, etc. etc. On the other hand, I used to do the same thing with Google Desktop search in XP, so it's not a huge reason to upgrade.
Parent is full of shit. I'm running Vista and it only pops up UAC when I need an escalation of priveleges (e.g. installing something outside my user directory). It does not come up when changing your background, or when copying text, or pasting text. It may pop up when moving files around on a drive, but only if you've configured that drive to require administrator priveleges to modify. Duh.
Oddly enough, when I upgraded to Vista all I needed were graphics card drivers. I'd expected to spend forever hunting on the web (it's a notebook without a Vista-sticker, so the manufacturer won't provide Vista drivers), but even my wireless card worked out of the box.
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