From my understanding, most hijackers and actual terrorists weren't bothered about themselves getting off the plane...as far as they were concerned they were getting on a plane to be reunited with Allah himself as a martyr, with as many virgin as they could handle for an eternity. So that rules out the no passenger, no bag workaround for me.
A few times now, I've travelled on a plane with heavy computer equipment. Every time, i've checked in the main boxes minus hard-discs which I've taken as hand-luggage. Sometimes in fact, it's been so heavy the baggage at the end it's needed to be checked in via the heavy/awkward baggage drop as it's approached the 40kg mark. The thing is, every time I've done this, I've always made sure they known there's a computer inside my bag because to my mind, solid steel casing encasing circuit boards with wires coming out of it is about as suspicious a package as you can get.
What gets me is that no one seems to give a shit about what's in there - not once have they even looked to check when it goes through the ex-ray machine; lighting it up like a Christmas tree. They just assume that because it's being checked in with me, it's safe? I don't know, this is just my experience. The discs I'm taking on as hand-luggage is a different story. I've had to explain to person after person that they're "hard-discs for a kom-pooo-ta!" not in fact weapons of mas destruction, nor agents of deadly nerve gas.
Now to my mind, if you can get a 40kg bag checked into a plane without any/many checks because it's not hand-luggage, you're just asking for trouble. The bombs that went of in Madrid were mobile detonated....what if after boarding the plane you don't suddenly "get a headache" just before take-off (of course they wont take off with your bag still in the hold), nip outside and blow the lot to kingdom come once at a safe distance? Baggage handlers aren't known for their efficiency, and imagine doing it on a plane with 300 passengers.
My point is, to my mind, this is a huge hole. Most plane hijackers have been willing to sacrifice themselves too, so just getting a "computer" into the hold would be enough...
...that this site will probably convince some people that Vista is, oh I dunno, just as compatible and industry tested as XP. Which it isn't, blatantly (even if it's no where near as terrible in reality as some of the people make out on this site).
Yup, I too nearly hurled when taking "the test", and I work with Microsoft tech every day and quite enjoy it. But, this type of marketing will no doubt end up in the inbox of some CIO followed shortly by an order to "Roll out Vista now, it's ready for prime-time!".
As laughable and lamentable as this is, it will increase Vista sales. Microsoft are a very calculating company, do not underestimate that.
My only suggestion for X
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
is that it know the hardware it's running on better. You shouldn't need a file to say what resolution your monitor can do for instance; it should just know and keep track of preferences of what resolution you'd prefer maybe.
This isn't a troll; monitors and graphics cards have been able for donkeys years to tell the OS what resolutions and refresh-rates they are capable of for years now and X hasn't caught on.
To be fair Vista introduced to an unsuspecting IT world the shocking concept that's been around in *nix that "You don't have root level access as a norm!" (Gasp!). This alone caused issues for the majority of Windows software, and is probably the cause of the majority UAC complaints too. Remember too that, this type of security really isn't appreciated by your average Joe, who honestly couldn't give two shits if someone has rooted his box. He'll care when he can't write documents, send emails and check the football results on-line (even if it does require closing various popups)...but a Windows SUDO was long overdue.
Also, Vista is the first iteration of Windows that's seriously supported 64 bit...XP does I know, but it's something of a stop-gap in my opinion, and very rare to see. The 64-bit shift was too, on it's own, bound to cause upgrade havoc, much like the "good old days" of Win95 not running legacy 16bit apps too well.
There's a tonne of reasons why Vista has been a painful upgrade, but these reasons above I feel are the most prominent, and not so much fault of Microsoft either in my opinion. Yeah, security should've "not sucked", the tech is still very new (many will say 'too' new), and the 64-bit switch-over is unavoidable at some point, but frankly Vista's getting better every day (for instance, just today this was released - http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B943899&x=14&y=11) but much of Vista's problems have been blown up bigger than they are by people that quite frankly, just want to see Microsoft fail, die, whatever...and are willing to "stretch the truth" if it helps that happen....
I've often thought that for Microsoft to significantly damage Linux on the desktop for Windows 7 for instance, all it would need to do is make Windows 7 licensing about as intrusive as the Win2k licensing. I.e enter a serial during setup, and that's it.
Geeks complain about WGA and then crack it anyway, n00bs buys their boxen with it pre-installed and so the audience WGA seems to be the most effective against are the casual upgraders that don't have the cash to shell out, but want the shiniest and latest software regardless.
Another angle; several friends of mine have to my pleasant surprise, asked me before if I knew of a retailer that would sell PCs with Linux on. Upon querying if they're sure they want Linux what with most commercial software being incompatible etc, the answer has always been the same; "no, but I'd save fifty quid (pounds) on Windows and then install it anyway". Invariably, if this process was easy to do, it would beg the question; without the hassle of cracking Windows, would Linux even be considered? I think not, but increasingly it is.
...I have a question for you. I 100% agree this is an advantage of open-source than closed-source software will never have, ever. You've got me on that one, but my immediate thought was "ok, how much would I like to change my own kernel in production systems? About 0% thank-you-very-much".
I mean, hacking stuff in and out of a production system kernel; surely that's a process that would require months of intensive regression testing, etc, etc? I mean, I doubt there are people that know the kernel well enough to do such changes for their own systems, but really, what percentage of you guys honestly and confidently can say "Yeah, let me just fix that for us" knowing your job is on the line if your systems crash around you.
I've never ceased to be amazed about how many people that run Windows deal quite happily with 1000 popups from various spyware that's installed over the years, completely oblivious to the fact that this behaviour is very non-standard. Just as long as they can read their emails, chat to friends, and open Word and Excel they're happy.
This will be just another of those popups that gets closed without a second thought.
...and frankly, designing can be cool with the patience to try it, but in your case I expect that'll be at the expensive of literally everything else. Suggest either very very basic but clean designs that you can do quickly or outsource it to someone else.
Places like http://www.getacoder.com/ are good for outsourcing one-off projects, even for design. If design becomes a constant requirement, get someone full time.
Yeah, fair, i'm not saying binaries are guaranteed to to not work, but you see my point. I still remember seeing some code for Windows 95 that made special memory allocation alterations if it detected sim city was being run in a dos box. Yes, an OS with compiled compatibility statements for sim city installed on 95% of machines worldwide. Incredible.
I must say though,.net does a reasonable job at ensuring library availability and strong-linking; in the global assembly cache anyways - what issue do you have with it?
At the end of the day, Windows bends over backwards to make sure everything runs as smoothly as is possible, sometimes to the point of being less secure and stable in doing so.
Again, I quote games as a fine example; on Vista, I can run the same binaries for games, unpatched, that was compiled years and years ago 100% fine. At most I'd have to tell Windows to pretend it's Windows 98 or something. Name me one binary in Linux that runs today as it did 10 years ago unmodified. In linux, if I update my kernel I have to rebuild my NVidia drivers (yeah I know they're proprietary, but the nv module sucks for performance in comparison).
Also, I've yet to come across anything at all in Linux that resembles the Active Directory services baked into every version of Windows in the last 10 years; client and server. ADS is release on release accelerating further and further away from Linux, which explains it's popularity in the enterprise too.
Linux has it's superior points too; but these reasons I've mentioned here is why Windows is damned popular.
Vista is a failure. Even though people complained non stop when XP came out, the adoption rate was MASSIVE when compared to Vista. Got any sources for that? I've heard the opposite that's all, or at least it's doing not badly - http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/003944.html
Ah slashdot, how wrong you are. It's 100% completely the opposite of "introducing new instabilities", rather, you could say the build 6000 Vista kernel has been a beta test for the new Windows Server 2008 kernel, which people are already proclaiming the leanest, meanest yet, and now after a years solid thrashing on the desktop is ready for the server room and prime-time desktop too. Yes, Vista RTM and indeed the Windows kernel 6.0 has, to all intents and purposes, been a test-bed for the shiny new Windows Server System, and what better way to do it than to install it on 10% of PCs worldwide?!
Think of it this way; which does Windows need more of a foot-holding in; the server market or the desktop market? Let me give you a clue.
Let's see, on my Vista machine now I have the following games, unmodified that still work perfectly well in Vista, even if one or two need running in compatibility Win XP mode. List includes:
I mean, if Vista can run a DirectX 4 game, 6 major DirectX versions later, that can't be bad. All power to wine if it can do it too, but to suggest Vista is awful with games is pushing it.
For things you'd expect to have to su/sudo in Linux, expect to get UAC in Vista.
That said I've noticed bugs with it; specifically deleting entire folder structures of my desktop with files buried in there with non-standard security rights assigned seems to send UAC a bit mad. It's a rare case, but I've seen it.
And acutally, it's nice knowing that UAC is inescapable sometimes. Without disabling it completely, can can never actually be root - just approve root-level actions as they come up.
I don't agree. I don't know any Microsoft product that I could call "very good".
That's a bit harsh. Some products that spring to mind that are very good are IIS6 and SQL Server 2005. Pick an inherent flaw in either product that makes it suck compared to another. And before you jump the gun, remember neither will ever be made open-source nor "free" as such, so that'll be outside the scope of both. They were designed to be solid server products, and both have now a proven track-record in terms of security and reliability.
At the end of the day, the best tech comes from closed and open-source camps; not solely either.
An opinion of Vista that is less than favourable. On Slashdot. Who'd have thunk?
And yet, what I want to know and has yet to be answered by anyone no matter how anti-Microsoft they are is this....
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost? OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all, and it's not like Macs aren't selling either so it's clearly not just a Windows thing.
Well all know that OEMs will be making up the majority of Vista sales, even the most pro-Microsoft people will not deny that, but that begs the question why do OEMs love it so much?
Slashdot Mirror
From my understanding, most hijackers and actual terrorists weren't bothered about themselves getting off the plane...as far as they were concerned they were getting on a plane to be reunited with Allah himself as a martyr, with as many virgin as they could handle for an eternity. So that rules out the no passenger, no bag workaround for me.
A few times now, I've travelled on a plane with heavy computer equipment. Every time, i've checked in the main boxes minus hard-discs which I've taken as hand-luggage. Sometimes in fact, it's been so heavy the baggage at the end it's needed to be checked in via the heavy/awkward baggage drop as it's approached the 40kg mark. The thing is, every time I've done this, I've always made sure they known there's a computer inside my bag because to my mind, solid steel casing encasing circuit boards with wires coming out of it is about as suspicious a package as you can get.
What gets me is that no one seems to give a shit about what's in there - not once have they even looked to check when it goes through the ex-ray machine; lighting it up like a Christmas tree. They just assume that because it's being checked in with me, it's safe? I don't know, this is just my experience.
The discs I'm taking on as hand-luggage is a different story. I've had to explain to person after person that they're "hard-discs for a kom-pooo-ta!" not in fact weapons of mas destruction, nor agents of deadly nerve gas.
Now to my mind, if you can get a 40kg bag checked into a plane without any/many checks because it's not hand-luggage, you're just asking for trouble. The bombs that went of in Madrid were mobile detonated....what if after boarding the plane you don't suddenly "get a headache" just before take-off (of course they wont take off with your bag still in the hold), nip outside and blow the lot to kingdom come once at a safe distance? Baggage handlers aren't known for their efficiency, and imagine doing it on a plane with 300 passengers.
My point is, to my mind, this is a huge hole. Most plane hijackers have been willing to sacrifice themselves too, so just getting a "computer" into the hold would be enough...
Oh slashdot, how you have become the Fox News of the IT world. Fact: SP1 has not been on automatic update yet, and won't be for a couple of weeks yet.
To echo what others have said, let's not let simple things like facts get in the way of good journalism.
...that this site will probably convince some people that Vista is, oh I dunno, just as compatible and industry tested as XP. Which it isn't, blatantly (even if it's no where near as terrible in reality as some of the people make out on this site).
Yup, I too nearly hurled when taking "the test", and I work with Microsoft tech every day and quite enjoy it. But, this type of marketing will no doubt end up in the inbox of some CIO followed shortly by an order to "Roll out Vista now, it's ready for prime-time!".
As laughable and lamentable as this is, it will increase Vista sales. Microsoft are a very calculating company, do not underestimate that.
is that it know the hardware it's running on better. You shouldn't need a file to say what resolution your monitor can do for instance; it should just know and keep track of preferences of what resolution you'd prefer maybe.
This isn't a troll; monitors and graphics cards have been able for donkeys years to tell the OS what resolutions and refresh-rates they are capable of for years now and X hasn't caught on.
And that's pretty much my only complaint.
...otherwise known as early adopters.
To be fair Vista introduced to an unsuspecting IT world the shocking concept that's been around in *nix that "You don't have root level access as a norm!" (Gasp!). This alone caused issues for the majority of Windows software, and is probably the cause of the majority UAC complaints too. Remember too that, this type of security really isn't appreciated by your average Joe, who honestly couldn't give two shits if someone has rooted his box. He'll care when he can't write documents, send emails and check the football results on-line (even if it does require closing various popups)...but a Windows SUDO was long overdue.
Also, Vista is the first iteration of Windows that's seriously supported 64 bit...XP does I know, but it's something of a stop-gap in my opinion, and very rare to see. The 64-bit shift was too, on it's own, bound to cause upgrade havoc, much like the "good old days" of Win95 not running legacy 16bit apps too well.
Finally, Vista does overhaul other areas of Windows that has been for the better in the long-run, but a world of hurts in the short-run. Check out the propaganda here - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/vista/kernel-en.mspx
There's a tonne of reasons why Vista has been a painful upgrade, but these reasons above I feel are the most prominent, and not so much fault of Microsoft either in my opinion. Yeah, security should've "not sucked", the tech is still very new (many will say 'too' new), and the 64-bit switch-over is unavoidable at some point, but frankly Vista's getting better every day (for instance, just today this was released - http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B943899&x=14&y=11) but much of Vista's problems have been blown up bigger than they are by people that quite frankly, just want to see Microsoft fail, die, whatever...and are willing to "stretch the truth" if it helps that happen....
Hang on; I've just realised where I'm posting.
I've often thought that for Microsoft to significantly damage Linux on the desktop for Windows 7 for instance, all it would need to do is make Windows 7 licensing about as intrusive as the Win2k licensing. I.e enter a serial during setup, and that's it.
Geeks complain about WGA and then crack it anyway, n00bs buys their boxen with it pre-installed and so the audience WGA seems to be the most effective against are the casual upgraders that don't have the cash to shell out, but want the shiniest and latest software regardless.
Another angle; several friends of mine have to my pleasant surprise, asked me before if I knew of a retailer that would sell PCs with Linux on. Upon querying if they're sure they want Linux what with most commercial software being incompatible etc, the answer has always been the same; "no, but I'd save fifty quid (pounds) on Windows and then install it anyway".
Invariably, if this process was easy to do, it would beg the question; without the hassle of cracking Windows, would Linux even be considered? I think not, but increasingly it is.
...I have a question for you. I 100% agree this is an advantage of open-source than closed-source software will never have, ever. You've got me on that one, but my immediate thought was "ok, how much would I like to change my own kernel in production systems? About 0% thank-you-very-much".
I mean, hacking stuff in and out of a production system kernel; surely that's a process that would require months of intensive regression testing, etc, etc? I mean, I doubt there are people that know the kernel well enough to do such changes for their own systems, but really, what percentage of you guys honestly and confidently can say "Yeah, let me just fix that for us" knowing your job is on the line if your systems crash around you.
This isn't a troll, this is an honest question.
I've never ceased to be amazed about how many people that run Windows deal quite happily with 1000 popups from various spyware that's installed over the years, completely oblivious to the fact that this behaviour is very non-standard. Just as long as they can read their emails, chat to friends, and open Word and Excel they're happy.
This will be just another of those popups that gets closed without a second thought.
...and frankly, designing can be cool with the patience to try it, but in your case I expect that'll be at the expensive of literally everything else. Suggest either very very basic but clean designs that you can do quickly or outsource it to someone else.
Places like http://www.getacoder.com/ are good for outsourcing one-off projects, even for design. If design becomes a constant requirement, get someone full time.
That's the way forward.
Yeah, fair, i'm not saying binaries are guaranteed to to not work, but you see my point. I still remember seeing some code for Windows 95 that made special memory allocation alterations if it detected sim city was being run in a dos box. Yes, an OS with compiled compatibility statements for sim city installed on 95% of machines worldwide. Incredible.
.net does a reasonable job at ensuring library availability and strong-linking; in the global assembly cache anyways - what issue do you have with it?
I must say though,
At the end of the day, Windows bends over backwards to make sure everything runs as smoothly as is possible, sometimes to the point of being less secure and stable in doing so.
Again, I quote games as a fine example; on Vista, I can run the same binaries for games, unpatched, that was compiled years and years ago 100% fine. At most I'd have to tell Windows to pretend it's Windows 98 or something.
Name me one binary in Linux that runs today as it did 10 years ago unmodified. In linux, if I update my kernel I have to rebuild my NVidia drivers (yeah I know they're proprietary, but the nv module sucks for performance in comparison).
Also, I've yet to come across anything at all in Linux that resembles the Active Directory services baked into every version of Windows in the last 10 years; client and server. ADS is release on release accelerating further and further away from Linux, which explains it's popularity in the enterprise too.
Linux has it's superior points too; but these reasons I've mentioned here is why Windows is damned popular.
Begin the flames if you must.
You can have extremely simple, toddler-complexity structures or hugely massive structures with multiple namespaces, etc, etc,
But what really rocks is the standards and tools FOR xml; XSD, XSLT, XPath, XQuery and so on.
Xml on it's own is nothing to write home about, it's the other XML standards that make it great.
Whoever marked the parent as troll maybe be a no-tail?
/Goes back to IDE
Or whatever they call themselves again.............
WOMEN! That's it.
Think of it this way; which does Windows need more of a foot-holding in; the server market or the desktop market? Let me give you a clue.
Then it sends its data to the Online Crash Analysis Crash Analysis server obviously.
Let's see, on my Vista machine now I have the following games, unmodified that still work perfectly well in Vista, even if one or two need running in compatibility Win XP mode. List includes:
Quake 1-3, Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2, Unreal (classic), C&C95, Red Alert.
I mean, if Vista can run a DirectX 4 game, 6 major DirectX versions later, that can't be bad. All power to wine if it can do it too, but to suggest Vista is awful with games is pushing it.
For things you'd expect to have to su/sudo in Linux, expect to get UAC in Vista.
That said I've noticed bugs with it; specifically deleting entire folder structures of my desktop with files buried in there with non-standard security rights assigned seems to send UAC a bit mad. It's a rare case, but I've seen it.
And acutally, it's nice knowing that UAC is inescapable sometimes. Without disabling it completely, can can never actually be root - just approve root-level actions as they come up.
That's a bit harsh. Some products that spring to mind that are very good are IIS6 and SQL Server 2005. Pick an inherent flaw in either product that makes it suck compared to another. And before you jump the gun, remember neither will ever be made open-source nor "free" as such, so that'll be outside the scope of both. They were designed to be solid server products, and both have now a proven track-record in terms of security and reliability.
At the end of the day, the best tech comes from closed and open-source camps; not solely either.
Interesting points, and I'd agree. Thanks for posting a well thought out reply :)
I would've thought Linux would be even cheaper right? I mean, you've got to support an OS anyway, why Windows?
Ask an unpopular question on slashdot, and get modded into the ground.
Worse yet, there was in fact one response to this parent that I was actually hoping for i.e., a constructive one.
A fuck it, I've got Karma to burn, baby.
Don't sell Windows at all, and make most Linux PCs? That's got to be the best possible license price, right?
An opinion of Vista that is less than favourable. On Slashdot. Who'd have thunk?
And yet, what I want to know and has yet to be answered by anyone no matter how anti-Microsoft they are is this....
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost? OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all, and it's not like Macs aren't selling either so it's clearly not just a Windows thing.
Well all know that OEMs will be making up the majority of Vista sales, even the most pro-Microsoft people will not deny that, but that begs the question why do OEMs love it so much?