I remember once I had surgery as a kid over 15 years ago. They gave me a small cup with something to drink (some kind of anesthetic I guess) and then sat me down at an NES with Zelda. I was out in a few minutes.
Compatibility. Back in the days of DOS, you got 11 characters per filename. 8 before the dot, 3 after. The 3 determined the file type. It probably seemed reasonable given the limitations of those computers.
Now, one of MS' top goal with each Windows is compatibility with old apps (except for DOS games, pfft). Hence file types remain... not just because DOS used them, but because for this compatibility every Windows OS has used them as well! You can turn off part of this compatibility by stopping the generation of short file names, though this will break 16-bit apps as well as some Windows 9x apps which were poorly coded to use short file names.
Just put a link that opens a Live.com search for "web browser"! Not only is Live.com completely unbiased, but the link will open in the default system web browser!
Oh yeah it looks like they tested it using a site with Flash and then complained when the website performance was horrible. Even the Chrome team said they can't do anything about poor Flash performance (relatively speaking to the rest of Chrome).
Viruses/Virii don't tend to destroy the computer anymore, since that pretty much gives them away AND also makes it difficult for them to propagate or earn money off of you (ad views, purchases) when your computer won't turn on.
* Obviously I mean just this specific folder, when you have other drives this is useful for fixing permissions set in another OS that are not valid in your newly installed OS.
1) If a program stops working when I replace a vital program DLL, I don't blame Windows, I blame whoever made the non-functioning DLL. Especially if it's from a different vendor (IE a hacker) than the original.
Local Settings has been moved to %APPDATA%\Local. The "Local Settings" folder, like the "Documents and Settings" folder, exists for legacy compatibility purposes. This is not new to 7, this was like this back in VISTA.
The volume app has been reworked and much of the previous functionality has been hidden away in dialogs, but it looks like you can still record from "stereo mix"... right click the volume tray icon, click recording devices, select the mic and click properties. Under "Listen" it looks like the "Playback through this device" drop down may allow you access to that functionality.
Any app has been able to insert itself into the Windows Firewall exception list since XP. This allows for apps to open their own ports without the user having to fiddle with the firewall. Even as an experienced programmer I occasionally wrestle with networking problems that turn out to be caused by a router or firewall blocking something. Joe Average wouldn't know what to do! Not to mention this is a complaint about the behavior of a third-party app... if you don't like it, don't use it, find something else. Technically once you have an app running it COULD disable your firewall and anti-virus if it wanted. Perhaps MS foresaw that vendors would hack their own entires into Windows Firewall and also provided them an API so they could do it properly instead of risking breaking Firewall.
Because of these other points I also seriously doubt audio input is degraded when you're playing audio. I find it more likely the app used sucks (Grooveshark, wtf is that?) or that the mic was picking up audio output from the speakers. The "test" isn't exactly well documented so I'm just going to just go and label it "inconclusive".
I begin to see why people block kdawson articles.
Summary: Blaming Microsoft for behavior of third-party code, can't take 5 minutes to figure out where Stereo Mix recording has moved to, and declares that a folder that has been locked since Vista for compatibility reasons newly locked once he did something completely unrelated, without checking to see if it was related. Yup, sounds like fail to me.
That would be complicated as, for example, blocking programs that are games from employee computers.
How do you determine this? Well you can see if it uses DirectX or OpenGL dlls... but some apps that aren't games will use these (and Vista uses DX for everything!) plus plenty of games (pre-Vista Solitaire, Minesweeper) just use plain GDI. It's like playing whack-a-mole, especially since flash movie viewer SWF creators would try and outwit any such tool to keep it from working (especially places like Hulu), although with my example it could get really ugly, such as rootkit techniques to make any program that tries to scan my game redirected to scan notepad.exe.
However there ARE Firefox extensions that try to solve this problem for a list of specific websites (IE if you're on a youtube video page the script will figure out where youtube is holding the FLV file, but it won't actually try to parse the SWF AFAIK). So go to addons.mozilla.org and find one and try it out.:) I believe FlashGot, a pass-downloads-to-an-external-download-manager extension, does this too but I've never used it.
NoScript doesn't pop up annoying "Approve/Decline" dialogs. If I want to approve a site, I have to decide beforehand that I want to (instead of being forced to make a decision by the app) and then I can tell NoScript to approve it via it's statusbar icon.
If you're referring to the sound and notification bar, I turn those off.
I disagree. At first you will have to allow sites all the time, but once you set it up for the sites you commonly visit, you won't have much of a problem. Usually it's just a matter of checking the noscript button when a new site doesn't work, then enabling one or two domains once, and then never again for the site.
Don't enable per-page, that IS more annoying than it's worth. Unless you're on geocities or some other large hosting provider... but AFAIK most of those at least give you a subdomain now (googlepages) or people get their own domain names... so it's not a big problem anymore.
I also disable the notification bar, since I find it annoying, and keep NoScript confined to the status bar.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember once I had surgery as a kid over 15 years ago. They gave me a small cup with something to drink (some kind of anesthetic I guess) and then sat me down at an NES with Zelda. I was out in a few minutes.
This sounds like a step BACK from that.
Acid3 isn't just about speed. In fact slow tests don't detract from the final score, they just show up as warnings in the report, AFAIK.
Because you're afraid they'll say "No" which in this case seems to be well justified.
Double click the ribbon tab to hide the ribbon. You can then single click a tab to temporarily show it at any time.
Compatibility. Back in the days of DOS, you got 11 characters per filename. 8 before the dot, 3 after. The 3 determined the file type. It probably seemed reasonable given the limitations of those computers.
Now, one of MS' top goal with each Windows is compatibility with old apps (except for DOS games, pfft). Hence file types remain... not just because DOS used them, but because for this compatibility every Windows OS has used them as well! You can turn off part of this compatibility by stopping the generation of short file names, though this will break 16-bit apps as well as some Windows 9x apps which were poorly coded to use short file names.
...you should probably be using Iron instead of just Chrome.
We need a +1 Fool for April Fools' articles.
Is it really too much to ask for a SERVER at the other end of that hyperlink?
nyud.net doesn't seem to have it cached, neither does Google. And MirrorDot is no help at all:
Are there any newer slashdot caching tools I don't know about? Specifically one that has this article?
I wish you could "anti-sign" online petitions.
FAT is useful for thumb drives that you want to be able to use in Windows systems.
I COULD use NTFS but my thumb drive is slow enough without the overhead (at least, I assume FAT is faster).
Depends how often you want to deal with the hasle of repairing the cover when some moron shears it off.
Noone goes to microsoft.com to download IE, because they already have it...
Just put a link that opens a Live.com search for "web browser"! Not only is Live.com completely unbiased, but the link will open in the default system web browser!
Oh yeah it looks like they tested it using a site with Flash and then complained when the website performance was horrible. Even the Chrome team said they can't do anything about poor Flash performance (relatively speaking to the rest of Chrome).
Steam (and probably the others too) just uses the drop-in ActiveX Internet Explorer component. It's not mean and it's definitely not lean.
If they used Gecko or Webkit it would be a different matter.
Viruses/Virii don't tend to destroy the computer anymore, since that pretty much gives them away AND also makes it difficult for them to propagate or earn money off of you (ad views, purchases) when your computer won't turn on.
And nothing of value was gained.*
Win+R %APPDATA%\Local
* Obviously I mean just this specific folder, when you have other drives this is useful for fixing permissions set in another OS that are not valid in your newly installed OS.
I'll make a list.
I begin to see why people block kdawson articles.
Summary: Blaming Microsoft for behavior of third-party code, can't take 5 minutes to figure out where Stereo Mix recording has moved to, and declares that a folder that has been locked since Vista for compatibility reasons newly locked once he did something completely unrelated, without checking to see if it was related. Yup, sounds like fail to me.
...they never logged identifying details?
ROT13 won't be good enough, try ROT26.
That would be complicated as, for example, blocking programs that are games from employee computers.
How do you determine this? Well you can see if it uses DirectX or OpenGL dlls... but some apps that aren't games will use these (and Vista uses DX for everything!) plus plenty of games (pre-Vista Solitaire, Minesweeper) just use plain GDI. It's like playing whack-a-mole, especially since flash movie viewer SWF creators would try and outwit any such tool to keep it from working (especially places like Hulu), although with my example it could get really ugly, such as rootkit techniques to make any program that tries to scan my game redirected to scan notepad.exe.
However there ARE Firefox extensions that try to solve this problem for a list of specific websites (IE if you're on a youtube video page the script will figure out where youtube is holding the FLV file, but it won't actually try to parse the SWF AFAIK). So go to addons.mozilla.org and find one and try it out. :) I believe FlashGot, a pass-downloads-to-an-external-download-manager extension, does this too but I've never used it.
NoScript doesn't pop up annoying "Approve/Decline" dialogs. If I want to approve a site, I have to decide beforehand that I want to (instead of being forced to make a decision by the app) and then I can tell NoScript to approve it via it's statusbar icon.
If you're referring to the sound and notification bar, I turn those off.
I disagree. At first you will have to allow sites all the time, but once you set it up for the sites you commonly visit, you won't have much of a problem. Usually it's just a matter of checking the noscript button when a new site doesn't work, then enabling one or two domains once, and then never again for the site.
Don't enable per-page, that IS more annoying than it's worth. Unless you're on geocities or some other large hosting provider... but AFAIK most of those at least give you a subdomain now (googlepages) or people get their own domain names... so it's not a big problem anymore.
I also disable the notification bar, since I find it annoying, and keep NoScript confined to the status bar.
You must be using an adblocker.
Great, now I'm conscious of my breathing, thanks a lot.
On the bright side, now you are, too! >:)